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https://www.historynet.com/film-recon-operation-finale.htm

FILM RECON: “Operation Finale” review

FILM RECON: “Operation Finale” review SNAPSHOT: Operation Finale portrays Israel’s daring 1960 mission to capture Adolf Eichmann and bring him to justice. It is a good attempt with some effective scenes, but the film itself lacks the tension critical to its retelling. ON TARGET: If forced to choose a single word to describe Israeli operations in the 1960s-1970s, “bold” would be a solid choice. Such was this operation, which is a story that deserves to be told through film. To that end, most audiences are likely to leave the theater with a bit more awareness of the ways the Holocaust haunted the fabric of Israeli society in the immediate postwar era. Trauma, whether individual or shared, is not so easily understood or overcome. The film’s strongest moments occur in the conversations and interactions between Eichmann (Ben Kingsley) and his captors, mainly operative Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac) and Zvi Aharoni (Michael Aronov). MISFIRES: From the onset, Operation Finale seems unable to decide if it wants to be a caper film or a dramatic thriller. From the 1960s-inspired score that is almost playful—most evident over the opening titles and its retro map sequence showing the team members’ paths converging on Buenos Aires—the film never really captures an effective tone. The mission was undoubtedly fraught with tension, but the stakes are insufficiently identified. Yes, the Israeli team is violating Argentina’s sovereignty—but what would happen if they were discovered? Would they be arrested? Unceremoniously booted out of the country? Turned over to the Argentinian Nazis and tortured? It remains unclear. Surprisingly, a short scene in which Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (Simon Russell Beale) implores the team to succeed carries more weight than much of the rest of the film. It also doesn’t help that we only really see a few of the gang; even Malkin’s name is barely spoken aloud until the film’s second half, forcing the audience to rely more on Oscar Isaac than his real-life character. Furthermore—and with a very minor spoiler—there are two instances in which Israeli operatives are unable to extract with the rest of their team. These are moments set up to be suspenseful and carry high stakes—but then are brushed aside. Where did those operatives stay until they could get out of the country? How did they do so? Again, it’s glossed over and we just know that they did get out. Doing so would’ve been no easy feat, but the audience is kept at arm’s length. It can be unfair to judge a film with others about similar subject matter—but comparisons to Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005), John Madden’s The Debt (2010) , and Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012) may be inevitable, as the screenplay seems to effectively feel like a watered-down version of the former that ends with a sequence surprisingly similar to the latter. BOTTOM LINE: The story of Operation Finale is one worth telling, but the film is unlikely to emotionally engage its audiences beyond its runtime, despite its strong concept and underutilized cast. ✯ Film Recon is a web series by Paraag Shukla, Senior Editor of Military History and Vietnam magazines at HistoryNet. Operation Finale opens in theaters on August 29, 2018.

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https://www.historynet.com/finding-shaws-sword.htm

A ‘Once in a Lifetime’ Discovery

A ‘Once in a Lifetime’ Discovery A dusty attic chamber and dogged research yielded a remarkable relic—the long-lost sword carried by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw The Massachusetts Historical Society’s 2017 acquisition of the long-lost sword Colonel Robert Gould Shaw wielded as he led the all-black 54th Massachusetts Infantry’s legendary July 18, 1863, assault on Fort Wagner is one of the most remarkable Civil War relic finds of recent years. Anne Bentley, the society’s curator of art and artifacts, is particularly euphoric. “As a curator,” she enthused, “if you’re lucky, once in a lifetime something this significant crosses your desk. This is my once-in-a-lifetime.” This sword figures prominently in the climactic scene of the 1989 film Glory, which depicted the 54th’s creation in 1863 and its legendary attack on Wagner, the Confederate bastion on the northern tip of Charleston Harbor’s Morris Island. Shaw, as played by actor Matthew Broderick, leads the assault along the island’s sandy terrain, then brandishes the sword on the fort’s parapet before being killed. Nearly 300 of the regiment’s men and officers were killed, wounded, or captured during the unsuccessful attack that morning. The following day, a Confederate stripped Shaw’s body of his weapons, uniform, and personal effects, then threw his remains into the rifle pits at the base of the fort, along with the bodies of a number of black soldiers from his command. The sword’s whereabouts succumbed to war’s fog. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw commanded the 54th Massachusetts from March 1863 until his death at Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863. (Library of Congress) Soon after the war ended, however, Union Brevet Maj. Gen. Charles Paine of Massachusetts, commanding a division of black volunteers, stopped near Goldsboro, N.C., with his soldiers for a “frugal lunch.” The owner of the premises where they stopped soon asked if any of them had been at Fort Wagner, revealing that one of his acquaintances was in possession of a sword that had belonged to a Union officer killed there. Wrote Paine on June 3, 1865: “I heard the other day of the sword of the late Robt. G. Shaw killed at Fort Wagner, in the possession of a rebel officer about sixty miles from here. I sent out and got it; the scabbard was not with it. I am going to send it on as soon as I have an opportunity.” Paine’s assistant adjutant general, Solon Carter, returned the sword to the Shaw family, receiving this acknowledgment from Colonel Shaw’s father, Boston intellectual and abolitionist Francis George Shaw: “So far as such words may be applied to an inanimate thing it is the weapon which has done most for our colored people in this war, and it is to me likewise as well as to you a source of great satisfaction that it was recovered and restored by officers of colored troops.” Robert Gould Shaw’s sister, Susanna, apparently gave the sword to her grandson, who hung it on his bedroom wall. Then it again faded from history’s view. Taken approximately two years before he led the 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner, this image shows Robert Gould Shaw as a 1st lieutenant of Company H, 2nd Massachusetts Infantry. Shaw is holding his Pattern 1850 Foot Officers Sword, which is also in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society. (Heritage Auctions, Dallas) This is the second of Shaw’s Civil War swords the MHS has acquired, along with the one Shaw carried in 1862 as a junior officer in the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry at both Cedar Mountain and Antietam. In January 2017, two Shaw descendants were clearing out their late parents’ home in Hamilton, Mass., to prepare it for sale. From a family with deep patriotic roots, Mary Minturn Wood and Robert Minturn—great-grandchildren of Robert Gould Shaw’s sister, Susanna—contacted Brenda Lawson, the MHS vice president for collections, to inquire about the society’s interest in items they found. Lawson and Bentley went to collect the letters and portraits the siblings had gathered for donation. On leaving, they mentioned that Shaw’s Fort Wagner sword was last seen in the 1800s—and left it at that. The brother and sister returned to the home, this time exploring a blocked off upper attic chamber. “Something made me go in there,” Robbie Minturn said, describing how he crawled into the upper chamber to discover more items. Mary recalled that as she and Robbie looked at the swords among those items, she picked up one that was beginning to rust, had no scabbard, and looked old. Wood e-mailed Lawson: “We just found another sword….We found the initials RGS on it, although it is a bit rusty.” She described the decorative “damanscened” engravings on the sword, which included the American eagle. Lawson forwarded the e-mail to Bentley, who replied, “OMG Brenda—I think that’s the Wagner sword!!!!!!!” On April 17, 2017, the Minturn siblings officially deeded the sword to the MHS as part of its large gift of papers and portraits. Bentley and senior cataloguer Mary Yacovone then searched documents, records, and archives to validate that it was indeed Shaw’s Fort Wagner sword. In Shaw family records, Yacovone found a letter suggesting that, in April 1863, Shaw’s uncle, George Russell, ordered an officer’s sword for his nephew from English master swordsmith Henry Wilkinson to commemorate Shaw’s promotion to colonel of the 54th Massachusetts. On July 1, Shaw wrote his father, “A box of Uncle George’s containing a beautiful English sword came all right.” Colonel Shaw was shot in the chest and killed while mounting the parapet of Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863. The sword that Shaw carried on the day he died was presumed lost until its discovery in 2017. (Stuart C. Mowbray/Massachusetts Historical Society) Bentley asked the Wilkinson archivist in England to send a copy of the weapon’s record. It showed that Wilkinson sword No. 12506 was tested for fitness on May 11, 1863, and picked up by an agent for George Russell. The timing was right. In an internal memo, Bentley concluded, “Clearly, this sword was ordered as soon as possible after RGS received his commission as Colonel of [the] 54th Mass. Regiment.” Bentley then contacted a friend for his authoritative opinion. Erik Goldstein, senior curator of mechanical arts and numismatics at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, is an expert on old weapons. Bentley wrote Goldstein, “We’ve got something really big here, if it is what I think it is. I want to pass my findings by you to see if…it’s the real thing.” After further emails, photos, and phone conversations passed between the two, Goldstein unhesitatingly threw his weight behind the sword’s authenticity. On the 154th anniversary of the Union attack on Fort Wagner, the Massachusetts Historical Society revealed the Shaw sword donation. That day, Steven Smith, past curator of flags at the Massachusetts State House, informed Bentley that he had seen an 1876 letter from abolitionist Lydia Maria Child to poet John Greenleaf Whittier in which she wrote, “I spent last winter with the parents of Colonel Shaw….The flag of the 54th Regiment was in their hall, and the sword of Colonel Shaw….It is very handsome, being richly damascened with the United States coat-of-arms, and the letters R.G.S. beneath. It was a present from a wealthy uncle in England, and he received it a few days before the attack on Fort Wagner….[His mother] said: ‘This is the sword that Robert waved over his followers, as he urged them to the attack.’” With the description cited in the letter, the sword’s provenance is unassailable. “I feel very lucky that we realized what we had in our hands, and I’m happy now that it’s in a good place and can be shared with the world,” Mary Minturn Wood said. Larry C. Kerpelman writes from Acton, Massachusetts about singular moments in American history. His work has appeared in American History, The Boston Globe, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications. More about him on his website www.LCKerpelman.com.

9e0e3f31071d892174959f74f73afee2

https://www.historynet.com/finny-industry-sends-island-up-in-flames.htm

Finny Industry Sends Island Up in Flames

Finny Industry Sends Island Up in Flames Inferno transforms Nantucket from whaling mecca to seaside resort Swabbies in the U.S. Navy of the mid-1800s coveted coastal survey duty. Crews doing this work mapped such details as depths, shallows, obstructions, and tides along the American coasts. Survey duty meant regular shore leave, fresh food, and slim chances of combat. On Monday July 13, 1846, the crews of cutter USS Gallatin and schooner USS Wave completed a day of surveying the waters off Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and Martha’s Vineyard, a large island 13 miles from Cape Cod’s south shore. Sailing east, the warships anchored outside the harbor at Nantucket, the main town on an island of the same name about 35 miles east of the Vineyard. Around midnight, a sailor standing watch noticed a glow over Nantucket. The seaman alerted his superiors that the 48-square-mile island seemed to be on fire. The Wampanoag, Nantucket’s aboriginal natives, had long scavenged the remains of beached whales for oil, meat, and bone to make tools. In the late 1600s, the island began to attract members of the Society of Friends. When Quakers came to New England to escape persecution in England only to encounter persecution by the region’s dominant Puritans, Quaker missionaries encouraged coreligionists to relocate to Nantucket, which was home to no organized sect. Nantucket’s first Quaker meeting established itself in 1708. As more and more Friends  took up residence, the Wampanoag passed along their whale-scrounging skills. The lure of profits from whale oil and other commodities derived from the great cetaceans powered a worldwide industry and made many a fortune. (New York Public Library) Quakers, who lived simply and dressed plainly, opposed war, drink, and, sometimes, slavery. They were industrious, establishing banks, businesses, and philanthropies as well as founding on a Nantucket harbor opening to the northwest a town they initially called Sherburne. Soon rudimentary three-and four-story buildings lined Sherburne’s narrow streets. Other towns and fishing villages, including Siasconset, eight miles east, took root. By 1742, the island’s Quaker population numbered 2,400. From beachside carrion-picking, islanders progressed to sailing the globe in pursuit of live whales, which could weigh 65 tons. Setting off from ocean-going ships in rowboats, whalers ambushed surfaced cetaceans, hurling barbed lances called harpoons and fixed to a whaleboat with a stout line paid out around a hub. A successful strike set off a “Nantucket sleigh ride,” as the wounded animal dove, not infrequently dragging its tormenters to their doom. In 1820, Nantucketer George Pollard was captaining the whaleship Essex when a sperm whale stove in his ship’s bow and sank it. After the whaler Two Brothers wrecked in 1823, killing his seagoing career, Pollard retired to a job as one of his hometown’s night watchmen. Whaleships were floating factories. Upon slaying an animal, a crew, which could number 40, secured the enormous carcass to the hull. Deploying long-handled bladed tools known as flensing knives, men removed blubber, or fat, in strips. Rendered in cauldrons, the whale flesh was boiled into oil prized for use in cooking and illumination. The oil went into barrels, each capable of holding 35 to 40 gallons. An average whaling ship held 1,200 barrels. Stereoscope view of whaling ship docked at Nantucket wharf while workers sliced free blubber and meat, to be cooked down into oil. (New York Public Library) Another byproduct was spermaceti, a waxy product of a cranial organ whales use to control their buoyancy and gauge direction. Spermaceti, an excellent lubricant for fine machinery, made candles that burned brighter, longer, and without smoke. Ambergris, generated by the mammal’s digestive tract, went into perfume. Roaming the globe—a voyage could exceed three years—Nantucket whalers made their home port the prosperous center of a robust industry. Warehouses storing barrels of whale oil became fixtures along the town docks, as did enterprises—coopers, chandlers, sailmakers, provisioners, shipwrights, and rope walks where line was made by workers twisting together strands of hemp as they strode—found in any industrial harbor. In 1795 residents renamed Sherburne for the island. During the American Revolution and again when war with Great Britain erupted in 1812, Nantucket declared itself neutral. One motivation was Quaker pacifism. Another was money, which did not last. Whaling suffered a decline, as did Nantucket’s fortunes (“Boom and Bust,” p. 30). By mid-century, the island, home to 8,000, was a genteel backwater with multiple churches, a nationally acclaimed library called The Atheneum, and three newspapers: The Daily Warder and the weekly Nantucket Inquirer and Nantucket Weekly Mirror. Pacific Bank cashier William Mitchell and his daughter, Maria, were noted amateur astronomers whose celestial observations were critical to coastal surveys. William built an observatory atop the bank. Maria cataloged the Atheneum’s collections. Nantucket still was home to spermaceti candle factories, ropewalks, sailmakers, and blacksmiths. Warehouses along five wharves held thousands of barrels of whale oil. Built mainly of wood, early 19th-century American towns were tinderboxes. Residents feared flames—but they also feared firefighters, given fire squads’ ineptitude and avarice, little changed from the time of Marcus Licinius Crassus. In Rome of the last century B.C.E., Crassus would arrive at a blaze with his 500-man force and offer to buy the property for a pittance. If the owner accepted, the crew doused the flames and Crassus added to his immense holdings on the cheap. If the property owner refused, the building burned. So too with American firefighting units of the early 1800s; after a fire squad’s visit, it was not unusual for possessions to be missing. Firefighters stopped flames by smothering them with earth or spraying water delivered by bucket brigade and later wheeled pumper. Another tool for containing fires was gunpowder, used to blast firebreaks by knocking down flammable buildings. Every residence maintained a leather bucket bearing the name of the property’s owner, whose family was expected to help fight blazes. Flames were a scourge of urban life. On April 10, 1845, a fire consumed a third of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That July, a New York City candle factory caught fire; 345 buildings burned, 30 people died, and looting broke out. Damages nearing $10 million could have been far worse; New York recently had begun requiring new construction to be of brick, masonry, and iron. Nantucket’s No. 6 Cataract fire engine. Captain William Farnham was blamed after the fire for dithering while Nantucket burned. (Nantucket Historical Association) Nantucket was a standard American municipality, with little regulation and minimal public services. Firefighting was largely private and makeshift. An 1836 blaze that started at 4 Main Street consumed the Washington House hotel and neighboring structures but was held to $50,000 in damages because residents pitched in. Seeking a better system, in 1838 the town’s seven-member Committee of Selectmen chartered the Nantucket Fire Department. A board of three, led by the chief director and a clerk, was to oversee the department. The town was divided into 20 fire districts led by officials called wards. Each ward was to identify buildings to demolish with gunpowder in a fire emergency. The charter called for the creation of ten independent fire companies of 45 volunteers apiece led by a captain. Each company was to be outfitted with a hand-pumped wheeled water engine, fed by cisterns strategically located around the harborside business district, like the one in front of the Pacific Bank. Rainwater from building downspouts topped off the cisterns, which had hand-cranked pumps and leather hoses for supplying fire wagons; to reach distant fires, wagons could be linked by hoses. Except for five prominent brick structures—Philip Folger’s house, Jared Coffin’s house, Aaron Mitchell’s mansion, the town offices, and the Pacific Bank—Nantucket’s business district was all wood, and its streets no wider than in Sherburne days—30 to 40 feet across. On June 2, 1838, a ropewalk caught fire. Men rolled barrels of oil into the harbor, only to have flying embers ignite the resulting slick. The blaze destroyed 20 houses and businesses, inflicting more than $100,000 in damages. After the fire department deftly handled an October 1840 candle factory fire, however, minutes taken of a Selectmen’s meeting suggested Nantucket enjoyed sufficient fire protection. In 1846, the selectmen allocated a $2 annual stipend for each fireman, with a 50 percent increase to apply in 1847. The summer of 1846 was very dry. Monday night, July 13, was warm and windy. The moon was full. However, Nantucket was dark. Islanders thought streetlights too costly. The business district was quiet except for late doings at William H. Geary’s hat shop at 4 Main Street. To heat irons for flattening felt brims, Geary kept a coal stove going year-round. The vent pipe pierced his shop’s ceiling. On the second floor, the stovepipe, enclosed in wood, elbowed into a chimney. Finishing work that Monday night, Geary checked his stove for embers and sparks. Finding none, he closed up shop around 9 p.m. Around 11 p.m., a watchman in the south tower of the Unitarian Church on Orange Street spotted smoke over Main Street and shouted “Fire!” Passersby entered the hattery. Finding the wall behind the chimney hot, they soaked it with water. The wall collapsed, revealing flames rising into the adjacent building. The crews of two water engines, the No. 6 Cataract and the No. 8 Fountain, arrived simultaneously. Deciding they needed a double-pumper arrangement, the captains debated whose engine would spray and which would pump from the cistern. While the captains, William H. Farnham of No. 6 and William C. Swain of No. 8, dithered, the blaze spread. By the time Cataract began spraying the hattery, the fire was out of control. “At the outset, a smart stream of water would have quenched the fire in the Geary store,” a witness said later. The fire riveted spectators, many of whom joined the island’s firefighters in trying to quench the blaze. (Nantucket Historical Association) Flames spread east to Union Street, leaped Washington Street, and consumed Joseph Hamblin’s hayloft. A flaming tendril snaked west, nearing Orange Street, where Philip Folger’s brick house momentarily checked the blaze. The fire directors and wards decided to demolish buildings, starting with Dr. Nathaniel Ruggles’s house, just in from the corner of Main and Orange. Gravitating north, the fire immolated every wooden building in its path. The crew of No. 4 engine, the Deluge, could not draw water from a cistern. Flames destroyed the rig. The wind rose. An updraft became a fiery vortex that shot a fireball from the corner of Federal and Main over seven streets to land on North Water. Some Nantucketers bribed firefighters to save possessions, weakening the fire line. Residents hitched cartloads and let their horses gallop. Others draped waterlogged carpets over their houses’ roofs. The improvised defense did not work well. Navy captains Lieutenant Charles H. Davis of Gallatin and Lieutenant John R. Goldsborough of Wave ordered their crews into town. As the fire was nearing The Atheneum on Federal Street, sailors, library workers, and patrons moved the building’s contents three times. The building and the collection within were lost. Sailors wrested the Pacific Bank vault’s contents out of harm’s way. Water from the cistern out front mostly saved the bank’s wooden exterior but its rooftop observatory and astronomy equipment burned. Adjacent to the Pacific Bank, the wooden-pillared facade of the Methodist Church caught fire. The wards decided to sacrifice the chapel. Seamen emplaced kegs of gunpowder. According to island lore, Maria Mitchell argued against demolition; the wind was blowing away, she said. The fuses went unlit. The Methodist Church survived. Trinity Episcopal, just inside the corner of Broad and Centre Streets, did not. Built of wood plastered to suggest stone, Trinity went up quickly, its bell tolling as flames collapsed the belfry. News-minded Martha Washington Jenks ran to the Daily Warder office to set and print an account of the fire, figuring to distribute broadsheets to departing vessels in the morning, if they saw morning, so news of the fire would reach the mainland. The crew of No. 5 water engine, the Nantucket, abandoned their machine at E.W. Gardner’s Candle and Oil Factory. The engine itself went up. Flaming oil badly burned the captain. Along the harbor, barrel after barrel of whale oil exploded. Stored rope, canvas, lumber, and candles fueled the blaze. “One of the peculiar incidents of that wild night was the rare sight of the harbor on fire,” Fred Elijah Coffin recalled. “Many barrels of whale oil on the wharves had burst, and their contents flowed over the water of the harbor and there, taking fire, presented the grand spectacle of a sea of fire.” Nantucket newspaperwoman Martha Jenks hurriedly set an account of the fire in type an distributed it to ships leaving the harbor the next day. Her efforts helped bring aid from towns across the Northeast. (Nantucket Historical Association( Four wharves burned; only Commercial Wharf survived. Coffin said he saw bystanders on Old North Wharf trapped “between the devil and the deep blue sea” until boatmen rescued them. A man in Siasconset reported that around 1 a.m. a cannonade-like boom roused him to see the “heavens were red with fire.” Residents of Falmouth, 32 miles northwest on Cape Cod, could see the flames. The town’s few brick structures and the Atlantic stopped the fire’s spread. As dawn was breaking Tuesday, firefighters and residents, exhausted and grimy, gathered at the Pacific Bank. Where once had stood 33 acres of homes and businesses, nothing blocked the view of the smoking harbor. More than 300 structures had burned. A thousand Nantucketers were homeless but none had died. Martha Jenks distributed her summary of the fire to ships raising sail. Residents assessed the damage at $1 million—today, $31 million. The Selectmen set aside $5,000 in town funds to go to the worst off. The blaze destroyed two engines and hoses and cistern pumps worth $3,000. Demolishing 20 buildings, the town had run out of gunpowder. The Selectmen swore in additional constables to discourage looting and keep the peace, and on July 15 drafted an appeal sent to Boston, New York, and other cities: This map, published after the fire, shows the burned-over district of Nantucket town. (Nantucket Historical Association) “Friends—The undersigned Selectmen of the Town of Nantucket, have been constituted…to ask at your hands such aid as you may feel able to render to our unfortunate and distressed people. One-third of our town is in ashes. A fire broke out on Monday evening last, a few minutes before eleven o’clock and raged almost uncontrolled for about nine hours…We need help—liberal and immediate. Please direct anything which you may send to the Selectmen of the Town of Nantucket, and we pledge ourselves to dispense whatever you may bestow, faithfully, and to the best of our ability, judiciously.” A donation of $330 from church congregations in Charlestown, Massachusetts, arrived on July 21. The city of Troy, New York, sent 21 stoves. Steamship Bradford Durfee sailed from Fall River, Massachusetts, carrying over $1,000 cash and nearly $3,000 worth of food and other essentials. Nantucket received $6,400 in goods and $56,498 in cash. A committee worked up a more fire-resistant street grid that the Selectmen approved on August 14, 1846. The revised city layout eliminated Independent Lane, Coal Lane, Brown’s Lane, and Black Horse Lane. Through purchase of land by eminent domain at $7 to $23 per 16’5” measure, the safer grid doubled the width of the seven major downtown streets. On paper, Federal Street now measured 60 feet across; Broad Street, 55; and Main Street 92 feet, narrowing to 80 feet as the roadbed turned east. The street plan, including plotting, grading, and paving, was implemented within six months, under budget. The Selectmen encouraged residents to rebuild in brick; more than 60 did so. Nantucketers submitted loss claims. Selectman Charles C. Coffin kept the ledger, disbursing donated funds to 533 recipients. George Pollard, the unlucky former whaling captain and night watchman—he had not been on duty the night of the fire—received $50. Most petitioners were disappointed. Peleg West, 75, filed for $3,183; he got $450 in cash and provisions. Only Lydia Ruggles, 13, was paid her entire loss claim; she requested $100. The town officially hailed the U.S. Navy for its sailors’ “unremitting exertions,” as did Navy Secretary George Bancroft. An 1874 photograph of Nantucket shows how rapidly the town was rebuilt (Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) The three papers carried classifieds pleading for the return of property “lost” during the fire. Samuel Jenks complained that many men acted with an “appalling lack of civic responsibility.” Nantucketers spoke ill for years of neighbors who tried to profit from the blaze. A February 8, 1847, analysis criticized the two fire companies whose members lost their engines and the citizens and firefighters who, amid the disaster, sought private enrichment. The report also obliquely blamed the No. 6 engine’s captain for “refusing to obey a fire ward.” The report recommended better training for fire wards and a fire department reorganization. The loss of The Atheneum weighed heavily. “Many were the sighs and heavy hearts, as we gazed on the ruins of that favored institution, as in the general distress, what was there to hope for in the future, as far as the rebuilding of any building was concerned?” William Macy wrote. Rebuilt of wood and rededicated on February 1, 1847, the library received donated books from every state, as well as manuscripts and other curios. Appearances at the new building by star speakers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, and Lucretia Mott helped restore The Atheneum to national prominence. Investigators attributed the Great Fire of Nantucket to that wooden soffit enclosing hatmaker William H. Geary’s stovepipe elbow. Among urban fire scapegoats, the hatter escaped the infamy heaped upon the Emperor Nero for burning Rome in 64 C.E. and Mrs. O’Leary’s cow for starting the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. If there was a villain, he was William H. Farnham, captain of No. 6 engine, the Cataract, and, surprisingly, grand marshal of a commemorative July 13, 1847, Nantucket parade. By 1896, however, Farnham’s star had grown tarnished. “It has always been claimed by many that but for the obstinacy of the Cataract Engine Company, the flames could never have gone beyond that store (Geary’s),” the editors of the merged Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror wrote on the 50th anniversary. In a letter to the editor, Farnham’s son Joseph affirmed his father’s culpability. “The Cataract No. 6 and the Fountain No. 8 reached the cistern about the same time,” the son wrote. “An argument arose between the ‘skippers’ of the two engines as to who should drop the suction hose into the cistern. My father, captain of the No. 6 was…critically blamed for this most unfortunate condition.” Nantucket approached rebuilding as it once had taken to whaling, diligently and methodically. In a 1917 timeline, the Inquirer and Mirror recorded the nadir of the island’s decline as 1870. Still, the isle remains legendary for its whaling past. Although the author Herman Melville never visited Nantucket before publishing Moby-Dick in 1851, he had briefly worked aboard a whaler, and found inspiration in the 1820 sinking of the Essex for his masterpiece, which enjoyed popularity in the early 1900s that continues today. The same is true of the island itself, although traces remain of yesteryear. The island’s fire department, for example, still prohibits open fires anywhere on Nantucket. _____ Boom and Bust Scrimshaw etched on whale’s tooth from the Nantucket Whaling Museum. (Danita Delimont/Alamy Stock Photo) Legend dates the start of modern whaling off Nantucket to 1712, when a gale blew a Captain Hussey and crew out to sea and into a pod of sperm whales, a few of which the men captured. Whaling soon was an island trade. By 1775, Nantucket was the third-largest municipality in Massachusetts, trailing only Salem and Boston. In 1820, Nantucket’s whaling fleet numbered 150 vessels. Owing to the emergence of kerosene as a fuel and to competition from railroad-accessible mainland ports like New Bedford and Sag Harbor, New York, whaling began to pall on the island in the 1830s, a trend worsened by a sandbar that kept larger whalers out of Nantucket Harbor. The Great Fire destroyed the island’s trades necessary for whaling, deflecting immigrants first to mainland ports, then to the California gold fields and Colorado silver mines. By 1853, Nantucket’s fleet comprised 15 whalers. Discovery of petroleum at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859 put Nantucket whaling into a death spiral that the Civil War concluded; 400 Nantucket men joined the Union Army. Confederate commerce raiders left Nantucket’s meager fleet all but inert. The last whaler left Nantucket in 1869; abandoned hulks dotted the harbor.  By the early 1900s, American commercial whaling had petered out. The United States banned the trade in 1971, a stricture eased for the Makah of the Pacific Northwest, for whom whaling remains sacramental, and subsistence whaling by tribes in Alaska. Whaling survives on Nantucket in mementoes such as scrimshaw carvings like the one at left (nha.org/visit/museums-and-tours/whaling-museum). —Paul F. Bradley _____ Pleasure Island The Gilbreth family (“Cheaper by the Dozen”) spent the 1923 summer in an old lighthouse on Nantucket Island. As early as 1828, Nantucket, to some islanders’ disdain, was trying to lure vacationers. As whaling was declining, silk, stove, and straw-hat manufacture and other enterprises proved neither lucrative nor sustainable. The Great Fire sent the population into freefall; the 1870 census counted 4,123 year-round residents; much larger Martha’s Vineyard, 30-some miles west, was home to only 3,787 but doing a robust touristic trade. Nantucketer Frederick Coleman Sanford—merchant, bank president, raconteur—began to promote the island in the press, romanticizing old Nantucket in tales of “Sea King” captains and their brave crews. Emulating purpose-built Vineyard resort town Oak Bluffs, Nantucket began to market itself. When Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Chester A. Arthur visited, Sanford was their guide. Lower income families left the island, but power brokers stayed, putting old money to work building restaurants, hotels, guesthouses, and other attractions. Articles in Harper’s Magazine and Scribner’s touted the Nantucket experience. Celebrities like Frank Gilbreth, efficiency expert and subject of the best-seller Cheaper by the Dozen, at left with his family, began summering on the island. Buildings raised in the town of Nantucket after the blaze aged into a time capsule of small-town life. The seasonal economy galloped into the post-1945 decades through to the present day. Real estate became the new whale oil. As of September 2019, the median home price on Nantucket was $1.7 million. —Paul F. Bradley This story appeared in the February 2021 issue of American History.

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Fire-Eater’s Fantasy

Fire-Eater’s Fantasy Edmund Ruffin’s 1860 book predicted a Civil War from which the South emerged triumphant The irony is rich—avid abolitionist John Brown saved the life of Fire-eater Edmund Ruffin, and gave purpose to the Southerner’s life. Ruffin, a wealthy Virginia planter and slaveowner, was known for his scientific study of soil culture, undertaken to help improve and sustain the plantation economy of the South. He became a leading Fire-eater, as Southerners eager to see a separate nation built upon plantations and slavery were known, and by 1859, after decades of espousing Southern nationalism, he despaired of ever seeing his dream come true. In an October 18, 1859, diary entry, he contemplated suicide. The next day, John Brown saved Ruffin’s life. Newspapers for October 19 reported the abolitionist’s failed attempt to capture the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, orchestrated entirely by Northern men. The news rekindled Ruffin’s hope for a Southern confederacy, and he raced to Charles Town, Va., the site of Brown’s trial, to watch it emerge. Adapted from LOOMING CIVIL WAR: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future by Jason Phillips. Copyright © 2018 by Oxford University Press and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Can be purchase at www.amazon.com

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Fire for Effect: Inertia in the Solomons

Fire for Effect: Inertia in the Solomons SIR ISAAC NEWTON CALLED IT his “first law of motion,” and you’ve all heard some version of it. The colloquial rendition is that “an object in motion tends to remain in motion; an object at rest tends to stay at rest.” It’s true of a lot of things in life, not just physics. In general, we tend to do tomorrow what we did today and the day before. It’s especially true of war. Ponder, for example, the fighting on Bougainville in the Solomon Islands. American forces landed there in November 1943 as part of Operation Cartwheel, General Douglas MacArthur’s multipronged effort to neutralize the big Japanese naval base at Rabaul, on New Britain Island. The combat on Bougainville stretched into an attenuated campaign, however, one that seemed to go on and on. Long after the war had left that area behind, men continued to die in the island’s steaming jungles and foreboding mountains. Bougainville certainly mattered at the start. After U.S. forces had landed on New Georgia and Vella Lavella, Bougainville was the next stepping stone up the Solomons chain. Seizing the island would outflank Rabaul from the southeast. Meanwhile, MacArthur had carried out an intricate series of landings on northern New Guinea to threaten Rabaul from the west. Opportunity beckoned: if U.S. forces could capture or build enough airfields, they could launch devastating air raids on Rabaul from multiple directions, overloading Japanese defenses while making it impossible for the Imperial Japanese Navy to remain at the base. And that’s pretty much how it went. Elements of the U.S. 3rd Marine Division landed at Cape Torokina on Bougainville on November 1. The Marines carved out a small bridgehead, built airstrips in December, and defended the perimeter against counterattack in March 1944. The U.S. formed a new Air Command, Solomons (AirSols) unit and was soon bombing Rabaul. By one reckoning, AirSols bombed Rabaul every good-weather day from February to May, one key factor forcing Japan’s navy to abandon the town for Truk in the Caroline Islands, 800 miles to the north. So far, so good. But even after the reduction of Rabaul, the fighting dragged on. The Japanese withdrew into the island’s interior, where the Americans rooted them out in bloody fighting. They handed off Bougainville to Australian forces in November 1944, and the Aussies kept up the pressure, forcing the Japanese into tiny strongholds in the island’s north and south. By now, however, Bougainville defined the word “sideshow.” The war had moved on and was now more than 1,000 miles away, but Japanese forces were still in the field when Japan surrendered in August 1945. While this later fighting is not easily justifiable, the war contained many other moments when inertia seemed to dominate strategy, when theater commanders doggedly stuck to the script even when situations changed. Think of American insistence on invading Peleliu in fall 1944, a landing whose necessity still generates controversy; or the strategic bombing campaign over Germany, which by 1945 was doing little more than bombing razed cities into smaller pieces of rubble; or perhaps the classic example, the sustained Allied offensive in Italy in 1944-45 after the fall of Rome. The point is not to fault MacArthur or other commanders. It’s just the way war is. Once you start a campaign, you tend to continue it. You’re in contact with the enemy, you keep shooting. Strategic or not, it’s inertia. As the Americans and Australians found out on Bougainville, fighting the Japanese was bad enough, but fighting Newton was even worse. ✯ This column was originally published in the August 2018 issue of World War II magazine. Subscribe here.

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Fire for Effect: Opposition Force

Fire for Effect: Opposition Force Last night, I was talking to my Uncle Carl. Oh, he’s not actually a relative. You probably know him by his last name: Clausewitz, author of the imposing 19th-century tome, On War. It’s just that I turn to him so often that he seems to have become part of my family. When it comes to analyzing World War II—or any war for that matter—Carl von Clausewitz is the master, and he never lets me down. The other day I was pondering Germany’s decisive loss in World War II. The Germans certainly brought some impressive military qualities to the table. Panzers! Stukas! Meticulously crafted operational plans! Their early victories shocked the world: Poland, Norway, France, the Balkans, the airdrop on Crete. The opening months of Operation Barbarossa saw the German Wehrmacht inflict the mind-boggling total of four million casualties on the Soviet Union’s Red Army. You all know the ending: the most smashing defeat in military history. So, as always, I dial up Uncle Carl. He smiles and reminds me of an obvious fact. “War,” he tells me, “is the continuation of politics by other means.” War is a political act, in other words. If your political aims are defective, out of whack with your resources, or unrealizable—or all three—then all the tanks and aircraft you can muster are probably not going to get the job done. This is the Germans’ core problem in World War II. Despite the fighting qualities of the Wehrmacht, its pioneering skill at mechanized warfare, solid generalship, and millions of soldiers willing to die for the cause, the German failure ultimately comes down to politics. Hitler isn’t fighting a “normal” war. He’s not seeking tactical advantage, a favorable treaty, or a greater share of the world’s resources. He says it over and over again: he is fighting a war to annihilate his enemies worldwide. He is willing to starve fifty million civilians in the conquered Eastern territories to achieve his goals. He intends to enslave those whom he despises as “lower races” or “subhumans.” And, of course, he is obsessed with exterminating the Jews altogether, wherever he finds them. What drives him is blind hatred, not a deliberate strategy. A war fought for nothing less than global domination, however, inevitably brings forth global opposition. Soon, Germany is locked in mortal combat with the world’s greatest land power, a resurgent Soviet Union; the world’s greatest empire, Great Britain; and, finally, the world’s financial and industrial giant, the United States. Hitler’s monstrous political aims create the most formidable military coalition in history, an anti-German “Grand Alliance,” as Winston Churchill called it. The coalition isn’t completely cohesive. Churchill doesn’t see eye to eye with Stalin, and Roosevelt has views that sometimes give Churchill heartburn. One thing unites them: their mutual loathing of Hitler. Together, the three powers can generate enormous military power. It’s enough, first, to withstand German attacks, then to create a strategic stalemate, and finally to launch offensives. Hordes of men; mountains of tanks, planes, and shells; and high-volume industrial economies grind the Third Reich into powder. The lesson: violence begets violence, usually more than you bargained for initially. But of course, Uncle Carl knows all about that. He has another classic line in On War: “War is an act of violence to compel our opponent to do our will.” During World War II, Hitler unleashed the violence—but by the end, it was the Allies who were doing the compelling. Need help with a World War II issue? Just dial up Uncle Carl. He’s always happy to help. ✯

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Fire For Effect: Three-Minute Marshall

Fire For Effect: Three-Minute Marshall EVERY MINUTE COUNTS. Just ask General George C. Marshall, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army. On May 13, 1940, he is sitting through a very trying and unproductive meeting with his commander in chief, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. At issue is the army budget. War is raging in Europe—indeed, Hitler’s panzers are in the midst of their great drive to the English Channel. The French are done, the British reeling back to Dunkirk. A world hangs in the balance. Still, not everyone is feeling the urgency. The House Appropriations Committee wants to cut spending for the army. Roosevelt disagrees, but must be careful about coming on too strong: most Americans fear another overseas war, and he doesn’t want to look like a warmonger. He is inclined to go along with Congress—this time—and reduce the army’s budget. Morgenthau and Marshall have come to the Oval Office to argue the point and request that the threatened military funds be restored. But they, too, must be careful: few officials leave an argument with FDR unscathed. Morgenthau begins. The cuts are wrong. The international situation is too grave. The president listens politely at first, then less politely. Finally, he’s had enough and tells Morgenthau to stop: “I am not asking you, I am telling you.” “I still think you’re wrong,” Morgenthau counters. “Well, you filed your protest,” the president answers, coldly. Now it’s Marshall’s turn. The chief of staff has gravitas. He’s a no-nonsense, plain speaker, and he’s spent a career proving it. But even he can’t get any traction. Roosevelt just isn’t listening. “I know exactly what he will say,” the president says to Morgenthau. The meeting is over, and in Washington, when the meeting is over, you go. They rise to leave, when Marshall turns, as if on sudden impulse, and asks a simple question: “Mr. President, may I have three minutes?” Those next three minutes are sure to be fateful. They may decide the state of American readiness in the event of war, they may decide the fate of the Republic, but they will almost certainly decide the fate of General George C. Marshall. Roosevelt seems surprised. He’s already made his intentions clear. But Marshall holds the floor. France is collapsing; the Western world is in peril; Hitler is on the verge of victory. He cites facts and figures. All that stands between the U.S. and Hitler are a handful of weak divisions, a few hundred aircraft, and artillery units whose guns are still on the drawing board. Marshall can field only 15,000 men at a time—hopelessly inferior to Germany’s two million men and 140 divisions. “If you don’t do something, and do it right away, I don’t know what is going to happen to this country,” he concludes. Some historians describe a tirade. They have Marshall “seething,” the words pouring out of him in a “rush of frustrations,” a “machine-gun burst of facts.” Such phrases may be dramatic license, but Marshall’s little speech succeeds in hitting its target—reaching the one man who matters. Roosevelt listens in silence, then invites Marshall back the next day to discuss the army’s needs. Furthermore, Roosevelt himself will go to Congress with an appropriations bill that will eventually top out at $657 million—an extraordinary sum for a country not yet at war—with a de-mand to build 50,000 airplanes, a fantastic number. The arsenal of democracy is open for business. The United States was still more than 18 months from entering the war, and the fight itself would last four long years. But the pendulum might already have been swinging toward victory back in May 1940, when George Marshall made every minute count.✯ This column was originally published in the October 2017 issue of World War II magazine. Subscribe here.

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Firebombers! Flying on the Edge to Fight Fires

Firebombers! Flying on the Edge to Fight Fires As last fall’s California wildfires demonstrated, the demand for aerial firefighters and the dangers they face have never been greater. The world’s first practical firebomber was a Stearman, a 1939 Boeing 75 that had been converted into a cropduster. In 1955 a California agriculture applicator, Willows Flying Service, cut a hole in the airplane’s belly fabric and fitted the chemicals hopper with a flapper hatch that opened when the pilot pulled a rope, releasing 170 gallons of water. That August, the Willows Stearman, flown by ag pilot Vance Nolta, dropped those 170 gallons onto a fire burning in Mendocino National Forest, and then repeated the feat several times. The biplane was “a big assist in knocking down hotspots,” said one forest ranger. Though a few test drops had been made on controlled grassfires, it was the first time that a real forest fire had been at least partially quenched by free-fall water dropped from the air. “Free-fall” water is an important qualifier, for there had been attempts as early as the 1920s to put out fires with airplanes that were literally water bombers. They carried water in wooden kegs, cans, buckets, waxed-paper bags, balloons and other missiles, and they attacked fires with these projectiles. Not surprisingly, the bombs proved to be of greater danger to firefighters on the ground than they were to the fire itself. In 1956 six U.S. Navy surplus biplane trainers much like the Stearman—Naval Aircraft Factory N3Ns—were also turned into firebombers, and Willows had itself a squadron of what the local newspapers called “aerial firewagons.” By the summer of 1957, the Willows fleet was ranging throughout California, answering calls from local fire departments as well as the California Depart­ment of Forestry and the U.S. Forest Service. Willows Flying Service went on to become a pioneer air­tanker operator, but it soon became apparent that dropping just water on a raging fire wasn’t particularly helpful. The hotter the fire, the more water evaporated before reaching the ground. Adding sodium calcium borate to the water created a heavy slurry, a “fire retardant.” Though better compounds were soon developed, airtankers were for a long time lumbered with the generic handle “borate bombers.” In the mid-1950s, everybody involved in California firefighting was aware of serious research into the potential for fighting fires from the air. Operation Firestop, a multi-agency brainstorming session, began in January 1954, after a particularly bad wildfire season in California left 140,000 acres charred and 14 firemen dead. One of the items on Operation Firestop’s agenda was discussion of techniques to drop water or firefighting chemicals from the air. But first, there was a fortuitous event. In the spring of 1953, Douglas was flying the DC-7 prototype out of Palm Springs Airport, east of Los Angeles, with a big water tank mounted as ballast in what would become the passenger cabin. At the end of flight-testing, the four-engine Doug made a low pass over the Palm Springs runway and dumped its ballast through three six-inch valves in the airplane’s belly. The result was a wide, mile-long swath of wetness that quickly caught the attention of the DC-7’s pilots as well as observers on the ground. So the LA County Fire Department and California Division of Forestry set brushfires on Rosamund Dry Lake and got Doug­las to take a run at them with the DC-7. The small valves released an ineffective mist, however, and the fires flared back up soon after the drop. Douglas increased each valve to 18 inches in diameter, and then demonstrated several times that a lot of free-fall water dumped all at once just might work. Cal Forestry was particularly impressed, and with the help of the University of California’s School of Forestry set up some well-instrumented testing to quantify the effectiveness of this new way to fight wildfires. An Eastern Aircraft TBM-1C hired from Paul Mantz’s movieplane fleet flew the tests. Mantz built a plywood tank into the Avenger’s torpedo bay, which not surprisingly leaked like…well, a plywood sieve. So he switched to using a Weather Bureau balloon as a container for the slurry. That worked, leak-wise, and when the torpedo bay doors were toggled open, the rubberized balloon bulged out the hole before bursting and dumping the slurry. Ultimately, Mantz installed a metal tank in the TBM, and in 1958 it became the first of many Avengers to work real wildfires when it dropped slurry on a fire at Lake Elsinore. Mantz and his partner Frank Tallman became pioneer firefighting pilots, and increasing numbers of Avengers would become the first war surplus firefighting workhorses. TBM Avengers were among the first warbirds converted to tankers for firefighting duties. (U.S. Forest Service) But before that happened, Operation Firestop testing began at the U.S. Marine Corps’ Camp Pendleton, north of San Diego, where thousands of acres were put at the disposal of the California firefighting researchers. Mantz flew his TBM over deep Pendleton canyons and made drops during different wind conditions. The canyons were laced with horizontal and vertical steel cables at various heights to hold anemometers and other test instrumentation. Each of the TBM’s dumps was analyzed for dispersal, wind drift, effectiveness and other criteria. Operation Firestop, which ended in the fall of 1954, was responsible for aerial firefighting tools and techniques that, though they have evolved over decades, are still being used today. In the late 1950s, Consolidated PBY-5A amphibians followed the Avengers in the firefighting role, and they starred in Holly­wood’s take on the airtanker world, the 1989 film Always. The opening features a Catalina firebomber in one of the most memorable aviation movie intros ever shot. PBYs were slow, but they carried a substantial load, and their low-speed capability enhanced the accuracy of retardant drops. PBYs pioneered the technique called scooping, in which a seaplane waterbomber rapidly force-fills its tanks while step-taxiing, thus obviating the need to land and refill from a ground supply. To be fair, in 1945 Canadian Noorduyn Norseman pilot Carl Crossley fitted his airplane with a pipe through which he could fill a tank with water after landing on a lake. Crossley made three successful drops on an Ontario fire, though the concept was then abandoned. Today, even single-engine floatplane airtankers scoop to fill their pontoon tanks with water, and in the mid-1960s scooping led to the development of the world’s only purpose-built airtanker, the Canadair CL-215 amphibian, which first flew in 1967 and has since become the Bombardier CL-415 turboprop. The Russians and Japanese have both modified existing flying boats for firefighting duty, and the Chinese have flown a very large four-turboprop amphibian with a firefighting role, but the 215/415 remains the sole production waterbomber. A Canadair CL-215—the world’s only purpose-built airtanker—swoops low over a wildfire in Provence, France. (STOCKFOLIO® / Alamy) The most spectacular scoopers were the four enormous Martin JRM Mars flying boats bought in 1959 by a consortium of Canadian lumber companies. Fitted with 7,200-gallon tanks, the big boats sucked up a load in 25 seconds. Some scoopers were limited to dropping just water, but the Mars had room for large tanks of additives that could be added to the water in flight to create foam and gelled drops. Within less than three years, one Mars had crashed, killing its crew of four, and another was destroyed during a typhoon. Only one, Hawaii Mars, remains flying, though in July 2016 owner Wayne Coulson put it up for sale due to high operating costs and lack of firefighting contracts. Soon after PBYs appeared as airtankers, another Con­solidated Navy bird joined them: the PB4Y-2 Privateer, a single-tail patrol bomber derivative of the B-24. Priva­teers were declared surplus in 1954, and a number of them were snatched up by firebombing operators. So began the warbird years of airtanking, with many military surplus bombers, fighter-bombers and freighters converted to fight fires. Among the earliest were a number of B-17s, 10 Grumman F7F Tigercats, three North American AJ Savages—tubby piston twins with an auxiliary Allison J33 jet engine—and even a few Northrop P-61 Black Widows. Sixteen B-25s were also operating in California by 1960, but that July four crashed within a few days. The remaining Mitchells were forever banned from firebombing in that state. Douglas A-26/B-26s, however, were more successful. During the mid-1960s, there were nearly 60 Invaders opera­ting in California alone, though by 1970 most were gone—scrapped, sent to Canada or bought for restoration by warbirders. After 20 years of service, the TBF/TBM tankers were at the end of their useful lives; many had crashed, and parts were becoming rare. In 1973 three more Avenger tankers crashed (plus three F7Fs in 1974), and the pressure was mounting to find a replacement. The answer: another Grumman, the stubby S-2 antisub twin typically known as the “Stoof,” for its original S-2F designation. By the mid-2000s, most firefighting Stoofs had been converted to turboprop S-2Ts. Another warbird that joined the California firefighting fleet during the 1970s was the “Dollar Nineteen”—the Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar. Some were modified to carry a 3,400-pound-thrust Westinghouse J34 turbojet atop the fuselage, but a combination of structural problems and maintenance-heavy Pratt & Whitney R-4360 Corncob engines grounded the Fairchilds by 1987. Though they aren’t airtankers, the small, maneuverable aircraft that carry air attack officers are an important part of the aerial firefighting fleet. Operating directly above the fire, AAOs control every move that airtankers make. They coordinate with ground firefighters, run multiple radio frequencies to control often-complex air traffic, keep an eye on wind and visibility, warn incoming tankers of specific ground hazards, mark the target with smoke and even lead airdrop runs. Sometimes the AAOs aren’t pilots, since they have enough to do without flying the airplane. Air attack aircraft usually have been general aviation or ex-military small twins and even light jets, ranging over the years from Beech Barons and Cessna O-2s—military Sky­master push-pulls—to Commander turboprops and “Slowtations” (Ces­sna Citations). Today, North American Rockwell OV-10 Broncos have become the gold standard. Airtankers are separated into four categories, depending on the volume of their slurry/water tanks. Smallest are the SEATs (single-engine air tankers), which are typically modified ag planes such as Grumman Ag-Cats, and light helicopters, all with tanks or “Bambi Bucket” slingloads of up to 599 gallons capacity. Next up the spectrum are the Type III medium tankers, 600 to about 2,000 gallons: Grumman S-2s, CL-215/415s, Fokker F-27s and the like. Type II includes everything that was at one time considered to be moderately large, carrying 1,800 to around 3,000 gallons per load: Lockheed S-2s and P2V Neptunes and a variety of other warbirds. Most of these airplanes are gone, mustered out by the mid-2000s through groundings, but a few are still working. Type I firebombers are the big boys—3,000-plus gallons aboard Boeing KC-97s, Lockheed P-3 Orions and C-130s and converted jet airliners. And now there is a subset of the Type Is: megatankers. King of that hill is the Global SuperTankers Boeing 747-400, which can transport almost 20,000 gallons at 520 knots and drop it at 140 knots, creating a swath of retardant three miles long and 100 yards wide. During August 2017, the 747 flew its first domestic sorties, against four California fires, dropping almost 250,000 gallons of retardant. The megatanker had previously flown against fires in Chile and Israel. The only other U.S. megatankers are three converted DC-10s operated by the New Mexico firm 10 Tanker Air Carriers. The trijets have been active since 2006, and though their 11,600-gallon loads can’t match the 747’s tankage, it’s still the equivalent of almost a dozen drops from a Grumman S-2T. A modern Russian four-engine jet airtanker, the Ilyushin Il-76TD, can carry 11,000 gallons, but it has never been brought to the U.S. “We’re not having any Russians coming here and fighting our fires,” said one benighted FEMA executive. Though its 3,000-gallon capacity hardly makes it mega, another effective new airtanker, the four-engine British Aerospace BAe 146/Avro RJ85 regional airliner, has been popular in Europe but until recently never made a major impact on the U.S. market. Eighteen are already at work out West, with more on the way. While tankers get more and more mega, firefighting doctrine is increasingly favoring controlled, accurate, small drops from SEATs rather than the deluges unloaded by big firebombers. The biggest tankers are dangerously unmaneuverable at very low altitudes, and their considerable wingspans have led to higher drop altitudes, making the retardant less effective. Coulson Flying Tankers’ Hawaii Mars makes a demonstration drop at EAA Airventure in 2016. The giant flying boat can scoop up 7,200 gallons of water in just 25 seconds. (Mike Collins/AOPA) Many people don’t understand that airtankers do not “put out fires,” no matter how large they are. Like infantry doing what no air force can, firefighters on the ground beat down wildfires, albeit with the help of air drops. Aerial firefighting is of the greatest use while a fire is young. The tankers can try to contain a new fire with firebreak lines of retardant before ground firefighters can even reach the site. Dropping hundreds of thousands of gallons of retardant on a raging, well-established inferno, however, is about as effective as pissing on a bonfire. Homeowners in the West have been building substantial homes on the edges of magnificent forests filled with tinder, much like people who insist on populating floodplains and barrier islands. This has led to the firefighting phenomenon known as the “CNN drop.” When a wildfire threatens such forestland houses—as was the case last October with the hellacious fires in northern California—those homeowners figure nothing is being done unless they see firebombers in action. They know from cable news that a big white airplane spewing a curtain of red retardant means the cavalry has arrived, so when a state senator demands that the fire boss order up a P2V to make an expensive but meaningless run, the firefighters call it a “CNN drop.” Eventually, most of the warbird airtankers had become from 50 to 60 years old, corroding and inevitably overstressed. Flying firebombers is the most dangerous peacetime occupation an aviator can pick. By 2015, 38 American pilots and crewmembers had died during the preceding dozen years—five percent of the active pilots, proportionally the equivalent of 200 ground firefighters dying every year. At the beginning of the 2000s, the U.S. Forest Service was committed to a lowest-bidder process for choosing the airtanker operators with which it contracted. This forced the companies selling such services to use the cheapest airplanes and helos they could haul out of a boneyard, and to cut corners on mainte-nance wherever possible. In 2002 these practices nearly destroyed the large-airtanker industry. A C-130A crashed when its wings broke cleanly off, and two months later the same thing happened to an ancient PB4Y-2 Privateer operated by the same contractor, its wings collapsing downward. Most of us assume that when the wings come off an airplane, it has been overstressed with positive Gs—either somebody pulled too hard on the yoke or turbulence upset the airplane. But the wings of heavy airtankers can also fail under negative Gs. When an airplane suddenly drops 25 tons of retardant and leaps upward, a compromised spar can fail the wings downward. The 2002 crashes, combined with a 1994 accident that had killed seven, led the National Interagency Fire Center to ground California’s large-airtanker fleet. That fleet declined from 44 aircraft to just nine that were cleared for further flight. What followed has been characterized as a “lost decade” for large tankers. The load was largely shifted to the shoulders of S-2 and S-2T (turbine) Tracker Type III medium airtankers. But in October 2014, all 22 of California’s S-2Ts were grounded when one crashed fatally while fighting a Yosemite National Park fire. Today’s Western airtanker fleet is mainly made up of the surviving P2Vs, recently tankerized BAe 146s and Avro RJ85s, several other large aircraft, including two DC-10s, and lots of relatively modern single-engine SEATs and helicopters. Standing by at eight locations across the United States are Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard MAFFS (Modular Airborne Fire Fighting System) C-130s. They are a court of last resort, only employed when every civilian resource is already in use. These Hercules airtankers discharge their load through two fat pipes that fire out of the opened loading ramp, the retardant forced out by 1,200 psi of compressed air. Some MAFFS Herks have large pintle valves protruding from special replacement units for the jump doors on either side of the aft fuselage. The system is a rapid-response, roll-on/roll-off rig; no airframe mods are needed. Trouble is, the MAFFS C-130s are flown by military crews, and whether they are lifers or part-time airline and corporate pilots, they have little firefighting experience. They can only fly if they’re guided by skilled pilots in lead aircraft, and even then it’s a challenge. Tactics, radio work, air traffic control, coordination with the air-attack officer overseeing the entire operation—there’s more to it than simply pulling a dump-valve handle. In 2004 San Diego County tried to quick-train Navy and Marine helicopter pilots to be firefighters, but it proved to be impossible. One relatively recent development is computerized dump valves that can be set to dispense retardant at different rates and amounts. In some cases, these valves can be controlled by GPS to drop on a precise, preset line. Predator UAVs were also recently used as camera and information-gathering platforms above the northern California wildfires, data-streaming to the ground incident command post. And the most optimistic of aerial firefighters look toward the day when airtankers will be designed from the ground up for firefighting, purpose-built for that one job—the perfect aircraft to wield as-yet unimagined weapons against fire. Will that ever happen? Probably not. But there is no technology in existence—at least not at a reasonable cost—that will allow the continued use of the classic prop-driven heavy tankers. By the middle of the 21st century, U.S. wildfires are expected to double in acreage burned and intensity. As climate change creates warmer and drier conditions, severe wildfire years will probably occur two to four times per decade rather than the current rate of once every 10 years. Whether part of the answer is the increasing use of megatankers or of swarms of SEATs and helicopters—the two currently opposing views of aerial firefighting strategy—firebombers aren’t going away. At least nobody still calls them borate bombers. Contributing editor Stephan Wilkinson suggests for further reading: Aerial Firefighting, by Wolfgang Jendsch; and Young Men and Fire, by Norman MacLean. Firebombers! originally appeared in the March 2018 issue of Aviation History. Subscribe here!

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First In France: The World War II Pathfinder Who Led the Way on D-Day

First In France: The World War II Pathfinder Who Led the Way on D-Day 101st Airborne Division pathfinders and their headstrong leader set foot in a dark Normandy just 15 minutes into D-Day. The shadows were lengthening at England’s North Witham airfield on June 5, 1944, when an officer stepped down from a C-47 transport plane, a small case attached to his right wrist. Armed guards, who usually patrolled the airfield that lay 100 miles north of London, accompanied the officer into a building where he was met by 28-year-old Captain Frank Lillyman, a slightly-built New Yorker who often could be found with a wry smile and impish glint in his eye. Now he was all business. The officer opened the case, pulled out a message, and handed it to Lillyman. Since December 1943 Lillyman had commanded the 101st Airborne Division’s pathfinders—paratroopers who jump in before the main assault force to mark drop zones. At last, after weeks of growing tension and restless anticipation, the top-secret orders from the division commander, Major General Maxwell D. Taylor, had arrived: D-Day was on. The drop was a go. “Get the men ready,” Lillyman told a sergeant; then the message was burned. Out of nowhere, it seemed, there appeared grinning Red Cross girls with hot coffee, a gaggle of cooing press photographers, a Signal Corps cameraman using rare color film, and several members of the 101st Airborne’s top brass, all present to witness the departure of the very first Americans to fight on D-Day—the spearhead of the Allied invasion. There was playacting for the cameras, followed by nonchalant waves and friendly punches to buddies’ shoulders. A paratrooper did circles before a plane on a tiny motorized bike to much laughter. Then a medic gave Lillyman’s chain-smoking pathfinders “puke” pills in small cardboard boxes to combat airsickness, and bags in which to vomit. Some threw the pills away, not trusting them, wanting to be sharp, clearheaded, the moment they touched the ground in France. With a guttural roar of engines, the C-47s that would carry them to the drop zones started warming up and the horsing around came to an end. Lillyman’s men—some carrying their body weight in equipment—clambered or were helped aboard the twin-propped aircraft, hastily daubed with black-and-white invasion stripes to distinguish them from enemy aircraft. Brown masking paper still covered some areas of the fuselage to protect them from the rush paint job. Captain Lillyman, weighing in at all of 140 pounds, took his place beside the door of one of the C-47s, his customary stogie between his lips, wearing white leather gloves and a Tommy gun strapped to his left leg just above the M-3 trench knife, useful for slitting throats, attached to his shin. He would be the first American to leap into the darkness over Normandy—if they made it to the drop zone. None of the pathfinder aircraft were armed, none had any protection against antiaircraft fire, and there would be no escort to defend against enemy fighters. Once airborne, Lillyman and his men would be all on their own. The pathfinders set to accompany Lillyman on the lead plane, their faces camouflaged for the night drop, gather before their C-47. (Courtesy Alex Kershaw) IN THE PLANE’S COCKPIT was lead pilot Lieutenant Colonel Joel Crouch, known to all as “Colonel Joe.” The commander of the IX Troop Carrier Command’s pathfinder unit, Crouch, 33, was considered the best in his business, having previously been the lead pathfinder pilot for the invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and of mainland Italy a few months later. To his right was copilot Captain Vito Pedone, 22, who, like Crouch, had plenty of game. Behind them was navigator Captain William Culp, 25; one report called him “a square-jawed, thoughtful sort of man.” It was 9:50 p.m. and the light was fading fast as Crouch’s C-47 lifted into the air, carrying the 18 men who would be the first Americans to drop into enemy-occupied France. In radio silence and bad weather, Crouch would lead two other planes in his flight in a “V” formation at low level. More flights, carrying 200 additional pathfinders, would follow. They would then set up radar and lights to guide a sky-train delivering an entire division of airborne troops. Any failure would jeopardize the entire invasion. Exactly four minutes after takeoff, Crouch reported to ground control that he was on his way to France, making for the English Channel at 3,000 feet. A former pilot for United Air Lines who’d mostly flown along the West Coast before the war, he would soon be followed by scores of other planes carrying 6,600 men from the soon-to-become-legendary “Screaming Eagles.” He was now what one reporter called “the spearhead of the spearhead of the spearhead” of the D-Day invasion. It was around 11:30 p.m. when Crouch saw the English Channel below—the cue, copilot Pedone recalled, to turn off the plane’s lights; they would stay dark until the pathfinders had hit the drop zones and the C-47 was headed back over England. It was a sobering moment. Crouch knew that he and three-quarters of his fellow flyers could be killed or wounded over the next 60 minutes. That had been the prediction in planning. The C-47 swooped toward the gray waves and leveled out in radio silence below 100 feet, engines throbbing as it flew undetected toward France, soon passing above a vast armada, flying so low it seemed to sailors below that it might actually clip the masts of some ships. Crouch’s only guides were two Royal Navy boats, positioned at prearranged spots in the Channel, shining green lights. After passing the second boat, Crouch turned his C-47 90 degrees to the left. The two other planes in his flight followed. France was now 60 miles away. Crouch spotted German searchlights stabbing the stormy skies from two of the Channel Islands, the sole British territory occupied, since 1940, by the Germans. In the cargo hold behind Crouch, hunched up on folding seats, his passengers began singing, belting out drinking songs. The pathfinders sounded like they were headed to London for a wild weekend with some saucy “Piccadilly commandos,” not toward enemy territory. Bound to be among the loudest was their commanding officer—the fast-talking Captain Lillyman, who hailed from Skaneateles in upstate New York. Once described by a superior as an “arrogant smart-ass,” he was standing with a black cigar still clenched between his teeth in an open door at the rear of the shuddering plane. The cigar was, in his words, a “pet superstition.” Uncle Sam had thoughtfully issued him 12 a week, and he’d never jumped without one stuck between his lips. Tonight, this night of nights, Lillyman and the other pathfinders aboard the C-47 would mark out Drop Zone A—one of six landing zones for American airborne troops—inland of Utah Beach. Seven amber lights, placed in a “T” shape and turned on when Lillyman gave the order, would indicate to later waves of pilots when to turn on the green jump light, in this case for arriving paratroopers of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment. Others in Lillyman’s group carried Eureka radar sets, which would send out signals to be picked up by the aircraft bringing in the main body of 101st Airborne. Lillyman was in pain, having torn leg ligaments in a training jump four days earlier. Not wanting to miss D-Day, he’d tried his best to hide the injury. He looked down again at the whitecapped waves of the English Channel. A coastline appeared, and then the plane entered thick clouds. They were over enemy territory. Before long, Lillyman was staring at a patchwork of Norman fields, hedgerows, and old stone farm buildings bathed in the moonlight. Then Crouch began to follow a narrow road Lillyman could also see below, heading for Drop Zone A. A red light flashed on. Lillyman stood up straight and ordered his men to get to their feet. To shed weight, many had dispensed with their reserve chutes, leaving them stuffed under their seats. “Snap up!” called Lillyman. In the cockpit, navigator Culp told Crouch that they were close to the village of Saint-Germain-de-Varreville. Dark fields rushed past below. Crouch pulled back on the throttle, slowing the plane, cutting prop blast. A green light flashed a few seconds later. “Let’s go!” shouted Lillyman at the open door. He then stepped out into the prop blast, followed by 17 others. Crouch noted the time as he dived low, heading back toward the English Channel. It was 12:15 on the morning of June 6, 1944—the most important day of the 20th century. The first Americans had arrived in France. Paratroopers en route to Normandy shield their eyes from a photographer’s flash; dropping into the dark required acute night vision. (National Archives) UNLIT CIGAR BETWEEN HIS LIPS, Lillyman drifted down from 450 feet at 16 feet per second, trying to spot a clearing as the earth rushed up to meet him. He pulled on his forward risers and a few seconds later touched down in a small field. After freeing himself of his parachute, Lillyman took off across the field. He thought he could see something moving in the shadows cast in the moonlight by tall poplar trees. Germans? He loaded a clip in his Tommy gun. There were shapes moving. Friend or foe? He used his “cricket,” a small metal signaling clacker. Click, clack…. Click, clack…. He was about to open fire when he heard one of the shapes make a sound—a loud “moo.” The shapes were cows, and he laughed to himself and felt a little less nervous. Click, clack.… Click, clack…. Some men replied with their crickets, and within minutes Lillyman had connected with seven of his group. Silently they examined maps and scouted the immediate vicinity in pairs. Lillyman soon realized he had been dropped more than a mile north of where he should be, but there was no time to get to the planned position for setting up lights. They had fewer than 30 minutes before the main body of troops would arrive, so Lillyman decided to use the nearest suitable fields. Machine-gun fire suddenly broke the silence and Lillyman took cover as Germans, hidden in a hedgerow, fired several more bursts. He sent two men to “convince these Krauts of the errors of their ways,” as he put it, and soon heard a grenade go off with a “whumf,” and then everything was “lovely and quiet.” Lillyman could make out a church, less than 100 yards away, at the center of Saint-Germain-de-Varreville, and soon he and his men had gathered in its graveyard. The church steeple would be an excellent spot for a Eureka set. A priest came to the heavy wooden door at the main entrance. He looked afraid. One of Lillyman’s men, a young lieutenant, could speak French. “Bonsoir, padre,” he said. “You’ve just been liberated.” The lieutenant explained what they were doing, and a Eureka set was soon in the steeple, as well as three others along a hedgerow near the church. The pathfinders laid out lights forming the “T” 200 yards to the east of the church, in a field beside a narrow lane. Then two men climbed a tree and put another Eureka set in the branches. All they could do now was wait. But then Lillyman learned from a scout that there was a large farmhouse, seemingly occupied by Germans, close to a 20mm antiaircraft gun position that could wreak considerable havoc. “Two others and myself went to the house where we met a Frenchman smoking a pipe,” Lillyman remembered. “He was standing in the doorway. He jerked his thumb toward the stairs and said, ‘Boche.’ We caught one German, in a nice pair of white pajamas, in bed. We disposed of him and expropriated the bottle of champagne beside the bed.” Lillyman made his way back to the church and waited anxiously for the sounds of engines. Time passed slowly, making for what he called the “longest minutes” of his life. At 12:40 a.m., he finally heard it—the steady drone of hundreds of planes to the north—and ordered his men to turn on the drop zone’s lights. “Those lights never looked so bright in training,” he recalled, “but that night they looked like searchlights. One light went out, and we had to rig an emergency connection. We were silhouetted against it for a few minutes.” The first aircraft flew over the “T” that Lillyman’s men had placed on the ground. It was 12:57 a.m. The main body of American airborne troops had arrived. Lillyman and his men located each other in the darkness; by mid-June, when the photo above was taken, Lillyman (center) was famous. (Michel de Trez/D-Day Publishing) BY 2 A.M. CROUCH AND PEDONE had returned to England, crossing the Channel in darkness, the flame-damper on their C-47’s exhaust helping to conceal their path through the moonlit clouds. They had been ordered, according to one report, to provide a detailed account to D-Day commander in chief General Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower, who had wanted “a first-hand assessment.” Pedone later remembered: “We reported to Eisenhower and told him the pathfinders did their job and explained what we saw.” The pathfinders had indeed done their job, but it could hardly be described as a smashing success. It would later emerge that less than a third of the pathfinders had landed on their drop zones. In some cases, pilots had panicked under heavy flak and dived too low and too fast and released their human cargo too soon. The pathfinder operation had, however, been less chaotic than the main drops that followed. Dozens of men had landed in flooded fields and drowned. Thousands were now enduring a long, lonely night of confusion and sometimes terror, snapping their “crickets,” hearts thumping, wondering if the sudden rustle in a bush had been made by a comrade or a teenage Nazi pumped up on amphetamine with dagger drawn. Lillyman’s own 502nd Regiment had been scattered far and wide, some men landing with a sound, recalled one paratrooper, “like large ripe pumpkins being thrown down to burst.” Among the marshes and hedgerows of Normandy, Ike’s paratroopers were displaying plenty of bravery and devotion to duty. But it would be days before the 101st Airborne Division, or their fellow paratroopers in the 82nd Airborne, gained any semblance of unit cohesion. By the time the shadows were lengthening on June 6, the three 101st Airborne regiments had been in France for more than 18 hours and were in urgent need of resupply. As part of an operation called Keokuk to provide personnel, heavy equipment, and supplies to the 101st, tow-planes lifted 32 British Horsa gliders from an airfield southwest of London. It was up to Lillyman and his pathfinders to mark the gliders’ landing zone. Near a village called Hiesville, south of that morning’s position and still inland of Utah Beach, Lillyman located a field that had been cleared of defensive obstacles and was large enough to fit the gliders. As he and his men positioned Eureka sets, lights, and pots exuding green smoke that would guide the Horsa pilots, heavily camouflaged German troops infiltrated into neighboring fields. At just before 9 p.m. the Horsa gliders crossed Utah Beach, cut loose from their tow-planes, and aimed for Lillyman’s landing zone. The Germans opened fire as the gliders swooped in toward land. Some pilots panicked and crashed into trees. Lillyman was running toward a smashed glider to help men get out when a bullet hit his arm. Someone shouted his name, and he looked at his sleeve and saw blood flowing. Then he collapsed as a piece of mortar shrapnel sliced his face. Operation Keokuk was a success, boosting the morale of the troops on the ground. But Lillyman wasn’t around to see that. A medic treated him, and he was taken to an aid station and, after that, evacuated to a hospital in England. His wounds were far from life- threatening, but for Captain Frank Lillyman, D-Day was finally over. Lillyman, though, wasn’t prepared to wait on the wrong side of the English Channel. A few days later, the captain went absent without permission from the hospital, determined to rejoin his men in Normandy. He wrangled his way onto a supply ship on June 14 and reported for duty back in France. News footage of the 101st Airborne in Normandy showed an ever-cocky Lillyman, already feted by the American press as the first American to land in France on D-Day, surrounded by his fellow Screaming Eagles, Tommy gun in hand, nonchalantly answering questions. The 101st commanding general, Maxwell Taylor, having just encountered savage German resistance at Carentan, was apparently far from pleased to see his wayward, now-famous pathfinder. According to one report he “waved the papers for promotion under Lillyman’s nose and then ripped them up.” A few weeks later Lillyman paid the price for going AWOL and was ordered to change units, moving to the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment’s 3rd Battalion. His days as a swashbuckling pathfinder were over. The 3rd Battalion was the right unit for someone eager to see action. He and his fellow Screaming Eagles in the 502nd Parachute Infantry were in the thick of it at Operation Market Garden—the Allied operation that fall intended to shorten the war by dropping a large force across the lower Rhine in Holland—and again at the Battle of the Bulge. When supplies ran desperately low for the ill-equipped defenders at Bastogne, none other than Lieutenant Colonel Joel Crouch, seated beside Captain Vito Pedone, piloted the lead plane on December 23 carrying pathfinders to mark the drop zones for ammunition and medical supplies. By the end of that bitterly cold January 1945, the Allies had regained lost ground, and the Battle of the Bulge came to an end. As spring beckoned and the winter snows began to melt, advanced Allied armored units rolled toward the banks of Germany’s swollen Rhine River, the last major obstacle on the road to Berlin. On March 24, Colonel Crouch was back at the controls of a C-47, this time as the lead pilot for the 17th Airborne Division during Operation Varsity, an Allied assault across the Rhine—the largest airborne operation in history carried out in one place on one day. Crouch would go on to enjoy a long and successful postwar career in the air, dying in Hawaii in 1997 at age 86. In a photo that originally ran in Life magazine, Lillyman basks in a wish come true. Luxuriating at New York’s Hotel Pennsylvania, he, the caption informs us, “considers getting out of bed.” (Yale Joel/The Life Images Collection/Getty Images) CAPTAIN FRANK LILLYMAN also survived the war and, in true Lillyman fashion, devised a headline-worthy homecoming. When not in combat, he had killed time scribbling letters, sketching, and fantasizing about a dream vacation he would take with his wife and young daughter Susan. After Lillyman returned to Skaneateles in the fall of 1945, he had a few drinks one night and wrote a letter to the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City after reading an advertisement promising special treatment for guests who were veterans. “I’d like a suite that will face east,” jotted Lillyman, “and English-made tea that will be served to me in bed…. For breakfast, a fried egg with yolk pink and the white firm, coffee brewed in the room so I can smell it cooking…. No military title…“Mister” will be music to my ears….” Lillyman also wanted a “grey-haired motherly maid” to look after his daughter while he ate lobster à la Newberg and filet mignon. “Can you do it?” he challenged. They sure could. A few weeks later, in November 1945, a concierge greeted Lillyman and his wife and Susan, then four, and assured them “everything was set.” Lillyman had turned up wearing his 12 wartime decorations—including the Distinguished Service Cross—and was soon enjoying a five-room suite, complete with a sideboard full of booze and a sunken bathtub. He was even photographed by the press lying in bed with a cooked breakfast, feted by Life magazine as the cheeky combat veteran cocky enough to ask for and receive the perfect homecoming. Lillyman would stay in the army, retiring in 1968 as a lieutenant colonel. He died of a stroke in 1971 at Walter Reed Hospital at age 55 and was remembered in a New York Times obituary as a “dreamer” who had been “much honored as the first American paratrooper to drop behind German lines during the Normandy invasion in WWII.” ✯ This story was originally published in the August 2019 issue of World War II magazine. Subscribe here.

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First Italo-Abyssinian War: Battle of Adowa

First Italo-Abyssinian War: Battle of Adowa Of all the African powers, only the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia remained completely free from European domination by the end of the 19th century. This was no accident of history; Ethiopia secured its sovereignty by inflicting a decisive and humiliating defeat upon the Italian invaders at Adowa (or Adwa) on March 1, 1896. The battle at Adowa was, at the time, the greatest defeat inflicted upon a European army by an African army since the time of Hannibal, and its consequences were felt well into the 20th century. As an example of colonial warfare on an epic scale, it cannot be surpassed. As an example of the twin follies of arrogance and underestimation of one’s enemies, it should never be forgotten. Ethiopia has existed as a political entity since biblical times. The ancient Greeks gave the name ‘burnt face’ to the peoples who inhabited the little known regions south of Egypt, and it is from the Greek that the name Ethiopia is derived. Bisected by the great Rift Valley that runs the length of the African continent, Ethiopia encompasses fertile mountainous highlands of moderate climate and unbearably hot lowlands that fall below sea level in some places. Christianity came to the Ethiopians in the 4th century AD and was adopted with a fanatical passion. A rich, sophisticated and thriving culture developed among the Ethiopians, producing among its many treasures beautiful illuminated Bibles in the ancient language of Geez, the only written language native to Africa. The advent and aggressive spread of Islam, however, drove the Ethiopians deeper into their isolated mountainous highlands, and there they remained for the next 1,200 years. In 1868 the outside world encroached upon the mountain kingdom in the form of 5,000 British and Indian troops sent to chastise the negus, or emperor, Tewodros II for his detention of a number of European envoys and missionaries. On April 13, ‘Mad King Theodore,’ as the British press soon dubbed the ill-fated negus, ended the affair by shooting himself, after being abandoned by his own nobles and decisively defeated at Magdala by the superior weaponry of the British. The British then departed, leaving behind a power vacuum that led to a four-year struggle for power among the feudal nobility. The eventual victory went to Kassai, the ras, or lord, of Tigre, who had used his gift of surplus British rifles and ammunition to good effect. Negus Yohannes IV, as he proclaimed himself, next had to contend with growing pressures from a variety of external sources. During the 1870s, Ethiopia repelled repeated attacks from the Egyptian armies of Ismael Pasha, whose dreams of empire had led him to occupy the Red Sea port of Massawa, thus blocking Ethiopia’s only significant access to the outside world. Yohannes’ armies inflicted terrible defeats upon the Egyptians, most notably at Gura on March 7-9, 1876, when 20,000 well-equipped Egyptians, led by European and American mercenaries, were routed. In 1885, another foreign power occupied Massawa. Italy had been trading along the Red Sea coast for some time, but under the government of Prime Minister Francesco Crispi, Italian ambitions turned toward the acquisition of a colonial empire like those of Britain and France. With the consent of the British government, with whom Crispi had fostered friendly relations, Italy garrisoned Massawa. The Ethiopians found this foreign occupation intolerable, and Yohannes encouraged his Tigrean subjects to harass any Italian forces attempting to move out from Massawa into Eritrea. The Italians steadily expanded into the hinterland of Eritrea after occupying Massawa, leading to a number of clashes, some of which verged upon the comic. During a fight at Sabarguma in March 1885, the appearance of balloons released by the Italians was enough to panic the attacking force of Ethiopians. In another incident, electric spotlights so terrified a Tigrean force attacking at night that the men froze, petrified, then fled, while the Italians laughed at their foes. Matters took a more serious turn, however, on January 26, 1887, when a column of 550 Italians, moving to relieve the garrison at Saati, was trapped in a narrow valley and overrun, leaving 430 dead and 82 wounded. That incident was decried in Italy as ‘The Dogali Massacre.’ While fending off Italian incursions, Yohannes also had to deal with his African neighbors. The rise of the Mahdi Mohammed Ahmed in Sudan led to conflict between the Mahdist and Ethiopian forces. On March 12, 1889, they clashed at Gallabat in southern Sudan, both sides invoking their own God to grant them victory. In a battle more reminiscent of the medieval Crusades than the later part of the 19th century, Yohannes was killed and his army fled. Within months, Ras Menelik of Shoa, Yohannes’ great rival, was proclaimed negus. Crowned as Menelik II (the first Menelik had been the son of King Solomon of Israel and the queen of Sheba), Sahle Miriam, Ras Menelik of Shoa, was intelligent, shrewd and ruthless, all virtues which had helped him to prosper in the cutthroat world of Ethiopia’s feudal politics. As a young man, Menelik had been held hostage by Tewodros, and during his captivity he had absorbed a good deal of Tewodros’ fascination with the technology of the outside world. He had also seen with his own eyes the effects of disunity upon the empire and the rout of the negus’ armies by the British. Menelik realized that Ethiopia’s continued sovereignty would rely upon national unity and military strength. Since the most dangerous enemies would more than likely be European, Menelik decided that the procurement of modern weaponry was essential. With funds from the sale of ivory, gold, silver, musk and slaves as well as from taxes, the negus embarked upon a major effort to import modern rifles and artillery via the French-controlled port of Djibouti, along with whatever he could cajole out of the Italians in Massawa. Over the next few years, tens of thousands of magazine-loading rifles, millions of rounds of ammunition and dozens of modern rifled artillery guns were brought by caravan on a tortuous route from the coastal lowlands to Menelik’s new capital at Addis Ababa. By the mid-1890s, Menelik was able to field an army in which the majority of his warriors were armed with the best weapons that Europe and the United States could offer. The Italians had been cultivating friendship with Menelik for years by supplying him with rifles. When he came to the throne, their support seemed to have payed off–surely, Rome reasoned, this new negus would compliantly surrender sovereignty to his former sponsors. On May 2, 1889, Menelik signed the Treaty of Wichale (or Uccialli), in which he ceded to the Italians part of Yohannes’ native province of Tigre and some of the adjacent highlands. In a Machiavellian subterfuge, the Italian government touted the Treaty of Wichale as legal proof that Menelik had ceded sovereignty to Rome. The trick was eminently simple, the kind that had been played on native rulers by European traders and settlers for centuries. As far as Rome was concerned, Menelik was little more than an unsophisticated barbarian. Article XVII of the treaty, concerning Ethiopia’s diplomatic representation outside of Africa, had been presented for signing as two documents, one written in Italian and one written in Amharic. The Italian version of Article XVII stated, ‘The Emperor consents to use the Italian government for all the business he does with all the other Powers or Governments.’ Article XVII of the Amharic version read somewhat differently: ‘The Emperor has the option to communicate with the help of the Italian government for all matters that he wants with the kings of Europe.’ Needless to say, the Italian negotiators failed to inform the Ethiopian court of the none-too-subtle differences between the two versions of the treaty. Menelik, however, was at heart a nationalist, and subservience to any power was anathema to him. When he discovered the subterfuge in the treaty, Menelik rejected it. Despite a belated attempt by the Italians to buy him off with a gift of 2 million cartridges, he continued to characterize the Italians as cheats. The European powers remained deaf to his complaints, however, and all but Turkey, Russia and France accepted the Italian version of affairs. The Italians then began to cultivate Yohannes’ eldest son, Ras Mangasha, as Menelik’s rival to the throne and made moves to assist Mangasha in establishing a base of support in Tigre. But Tigre had been devastated by famine and war, and the promised Italian aid failed to appear. Mangasha made his peace with Menelik in June 1894, and later in the year many other lords followed Mangasha’s lead. Menelik’s power grew until he truly became negusa nagast, the ‘king of kings’–the first such Ethiopian leader in centuries. Menelik now felt that the time had come to confront the Italians directly. ‘God, in his bounty, has struck down my enemies and enlarged my empire and preserved me to this day,’ he declared. ‘I have reigned by the grace of God….Enemies have come who would ruin our country and change our religion. They have passed beyond the sea which God gave us as our frontier….These enemies have advanced, burrowing into the country like moles. With God’s help I will get rid of them.’ Rome, however, was unimpressed. The Italian governor of Eritrea, General Oreste Baratieri, moved quickly to crush a premature uprising in Tigre and pursued Mangasha’s army across the Ethiopian frontier, capturing Adigrat, Adowa and Makalle. Returning to Italy, Baratieri was hailed as a hero and received an ovation from the national parliament. He subsequently secured a substantial increase in the financial subsidy paid by Rome to its colony in Eritrea. Inspired by Crispi’s description of the Ethiopians as ‘barbarians whose material progress and spiritual salvation cried out for the high ministry of Roman civilization,’ Baratieri promised to bring Menelik back in a cage. While Baratieri was basking in the adulation of the Italian government and people, Menelik had summoned his feudal host to gather at Addis Ababa. When the army had assembled, 196,000 men–more than half armed with modern rifles–were available to the negus, including 34,000 absolutely loyal Shoan royal troops. Against that army, Baratieri could bring a force of 25,000 men–a well-equipped but mixed bag of Eritrean askari (native troops), European conscripts and elite bersaglieri and alpini. Baratieri knew nothing of the disparity in numbers until December 7, 1895, when a force of 1,300 askari, under the command of Major Pietro Toselli, was annihilated by some 30,000 Ethiopians in a narrow pass on the mountain of Amba Alagi. Shortly after that, another horde of Ethiopian warriors besieged Makalle. Originally one of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s ‘Thousand Redshirts’ who invaded Sicily in 1860, Baratieri had enough experience in warfare to realize that a dangerous situation was developing. He withdrew his forces to Adigrat and dug in, resolved to watch and wait. Unable to be relieved, the 1,200-man Italian garrison at Makalle endured a 45-day siege until Menelik allowed the garrison safe conduct and offered to negotiate with Rome. Outraged by the perceived insult to the honor of the army and nation, the Crispi government ignored the negus’ entreaties and dispatched reinforcements to Massawa. It also allocated a further 20 million lire to pursue the war against Menelik. In Adigrat, Baratieri still waited. As he saw it, the Ethiopians were little more than an undisciplined horde of savages who were no match for the rifles and artillery he could deploy against them. That would be especially so if the Ethiopians could be lured into an assault upon the strong defensive positions he had constructed. The enemy did not oblige him, however. Instead, Menelik’s army occupied Adowa in a move that threatened to outflank Adigrat. The Italians dug a fresh line of defenses at Sauria and posted 20,000 troops and 56 guns there to block any Ethiopian advance from Adowa. Still, Menelik did not come. The waiting game continued through February 1896. Supplies in both camps began to run short. Menelik had planned his war well and ordered that gibbir, or ‘the king’s feeding of his men,’ depots be established along his route of march. The negus had provided for his army so well that after two months in the field his soldiers had still not touched their sinq, the Ethiopian soldier’s campaign ration, consisting of two weeks’ worth of grain, dried meat and other foods. Yet even Menelik had not anticipated the long months of indecisive activity, and the food supplies for his army were rapidly running out. In late February, the negus reluctantly conceded that if the Italians remained behind their fortifications, he would be obliged to break up his army and retreat. Matters were not much better on the Italian side. Hampered by a lack of transport animals and the poor tracks leading up from Massawa, Baratieri’s men had been reduced to half rations, but even that expedient would not allow them to remain at Sauria past March 2. The stalemate continued until February 25, when Crispi, desperate to secure a military victory for domestic political reasons, cabled a message to Baratieri that came close to accusing the general of cowardice and incompetence. Shaken by the telegram, Baratieri called together the commanders of his four brigades and sought their advice. To a man, they counseled attack. Baratieri was at first reluctant, but was eventually persuaded to go on the offensive. The Italian army prepared to advance from its lines at Sauria on the evening of February 29 (1896 being leap year). Meanwhile, Menelik had seen his proud host dwindling daily as his warriors, ravaged by disease and hunger, slipped away to search for food or return to their homes in the distant mountains to the east. With resignation, the negus decided that he must order the great camp to break up. Thus it was with surprise bordering on disbelief that he received at his tent a frantic rider who brought news that the ferangi, or foreigners, were advancing in strength to attack the camp and were even now engaged in fighting with the negus’ army. Menelik, dressed in the white robes of a common soldier and accompanied by Taitu, his empress, and a procession of richly accoutered priests, spent a moment in prayer. While he did so, the warrior host of Ethiopia roused itself and surged toward the sound of battle. Baratieri knew that the Ethiopians outnumbered his force–even though he still grossly underestimated their real numbers–so he still sought to goad the negus’ army into attacking on his terms. He planned to advance his force, which consisted of 17,700 men and 56 guns, under cover of darkness. By dawn on March 1, Baratieri expected that his troops would be dug in on the high ground overlooking the Ethiopian camp at Adowa. Menelik would be obliged to either attack the Italians frontally–in which case his army would be destroyed–or retreat. In concept it was a sound plan, but unfortunately for Baratieri and his men, it began to go wrong almost from the start. Baratieri planned for each of his four brigades to advance along separate routes and arrive at their objectives before dawn. At 2:30 a.m., the general advance commenced, but it was not long before difficulties occurred. As each of the brigades began to move, the Italians soon found themselves struggling through precipitous passes, across barren hills and around the steep ravines, gorges and treacherous crevasses that cut up the country so badly that one Italian officer described it as ‘a stormy sea moved by the anger of God.’ It hardly helped matters that the only maps the Italians possessed were little more than ambiguous sketches and proved to be of little use. Parts of the 4,000-man askari brigade of Brig. Gen. Matteo Albertone, which formed the left wing of the advance, soon became confused in the darkness and blundered into the path of Brig. Gen. Arimondi’s brigade of European troops, who formed the center of the advance. Arimondi’s troops halted, and the confused formations were not finally untangled until 4 a.m. As the center of Baratieri’s advance came to a halt, the majority of Albertone’s brigade and the right flank brigade of Brig. Gen. Vittorio Dabormida–completely unaware of the confusion in their rear–continued to advance. Albertone soon reached what he thought to be the hill of Kidane Meret, the objective of his advance. The general had just halted when the Ethiopian guide attached to his headquarters informed him that Kidane Meret actually lay another 4 1/2 miles to his front. Not knowing that Arimondi’s brigade was still languishing behind him, Albertone assumed that his colleague’s men were now out to his right front somewhere, their left flank uncovered and drawing farther away. Without further delay, Albertone ordered his brigade forward. By 6 a.m. the askari had covered about 2 1/2 miles when they encountered the Ethiopians. Baratieri, who had been advancing with Brig. Gen. Ellena’s reserve brigade, began to receive reports of some type of action developing to the left of his army and of increasing contacts to Arimondi’s front. Lingering darkness and heavy morning mists obscured much of what was happening, but it was obvious that Albertone was being heavily engaged. At 7:45 a.m. Baratieri issued orders to Dabormida to swing his brigade to the left and move to support the army’s center. For some reason, Dabormida’s brigade moved toward the right flank–directly away from where it was supposed to go–and a gap of about two miles opened between it and the rest of the army. Dabormida’s movement could not have occurred at a worse time for the Italians, for as the gap opened, Ras Makonnen of Harrar and 30,000 warriors arrived and lunged forward into the opening. From the crests of hills and ridges and from out of the narrow passes, Menelik’s warriors came on in waves, a sea of green, orange and red standards, copper and gold crucifixes, burnished metal helmets, dyed-cloth headdresses and lion’s-mane-adorned shields. Menelik’s force consisted of 82,000 rifle- and sword-armed infantry, 20,000 spearmen and 8,000 cavalry–the fierce Oromo horsemen roaring their war cry ‘Ebalgume! Ebalgume!’ (Reap! Reap!). In addition, 40 quick-firing mountain guns were set up on the slopes of Kidane Meret. Although the Ethiopian gunners had been schooled in the use of their weapons by Russian adventurers, they were in no way expert in their use. Even so, the shells they sent forth added to the discomfiture of their enemies. Ras Tekla-Haymanot commanded the right wing, Ras Alula the left. Ras Mangasha and Ras Makonnen jointly commanded the center. Menelik, with 25,000 royal troops and the best of the cavalry, and Empress Taitu, with 3,000 infantry and 600 cavalry, remained in reserve. Well-armed as they were, the Ethiopian army was still the product of a medieval society, and once the enemy was sighted all discipline was forgotten. To European eyes, their attacks resembled ‘a flood of men following a giddy course.’ Impassioned by patriotic zeal and a great deal of religious fervor, the Ethiopian warriors came on, in the words of one Italian officer who had survived the fight at Dogali in 1887, ‘like madmen.’ Traditional tactics revolved around exploiting the enemy’s flank and enveloping him when the opportunity arose. The isolated Italian brigades presented excellent targets for just such tactics. By 8:15 the morning mists had dissipated, exposing a panorama of hills and valleys swarming with Ethiopians and rapidly becoming enshrouded in clouds of black powder smoke. Italian firepower held the warriors at bay; Fitaurari (general) Gagjehu tried to break the stalemate by throwing aside his rifle and shield and leading his men with only a stick–only to be shot down. Losing men and momentum, Menelik was about to order retreat, but Empress Taitu and Ras Maneasha persuaded him to commit the 25,000 men of his imperial guard to a final assault on Kidane Meret. Those last reserves proved to be decisive. At about 8:30, Albertone’s brigade, having fought well for more than two hours but receiving no reply to his plea for reinforcements, began to break up. Most of his officers were already dead, having fallen to Tekla-Haymanot’s gojam cavalry. Albertone was taken prisoner. Then the askari, assailed on all sides by what seemed to be limitless numbers of ferocious enemies, gave up the struggle. Those who could fled toward the positions held by Arimondi’s brigade around Mount Bellah, about two miles to the rear. Arimondi’s artillery held its fire until the askari could reach safety. It was only at the last minute that Arimondi’s soldiers realized that Ethiopians were mixed in among the askari. Too late to fire, the gunners and infantrymen of the central brigade soon found themselves at close quarters with hordes of sword- and rifle-wielding foes. Assailed from the front and both flanks, Arimondi’s men fought back with a courage born of desperation and took a heavy toll on their attackers. At 9:15, Baratieri galloped up from his position with the reserve brigade to see the situation for himself. He still had no idea of Dabormida’s actual location and assumed that the general and his brigade were still complying with the orders he had issued earlier to move to support Arimondi. Meanwhile, growing numbers of Ethiopians charged Arimondi’s brigade in waves, the frontmost warriors armed with rifles while those behind brandished traditional swords and spears. The Italians fired with deadly effect, mowing down hundreds of warriors, but they could not break the Ethiopian attacks. By about 10 o’clock, the high ground on the spur of Mount Bellah had fallen to hordes of Shoan warriors, and the situation for Arimondi’s brigade was becoming critical. Two companies of bersaglieri failed to drive the Shoans off Mount Bellah, and at about 10:15, Lt. Col. Galliano’s 3rd Native Battalion, holding part of the left of the brigade’s line, gave way. Caught amid a sea of screaming enemy warriors and subjected to a storm of shot and occasional shell, the Italians continued to resist for about an hour and a half. Then, with their position becoming more precarious with each passing minute, Baratieri ordered a retreat. Arimondi and Galliano were among the thousands who did not survive. Withdrawal in the face of a relentless enemy is a dangerous maneuver, requiring steady nerves, discipline and, above all, good tactical leadership. In the debacle that followed Baratieri’s order to retire, none of those virtues were obvious. Within minutes the central brigade had dissolved into a rabble that fled back toward Sauria, abandoning its wounded, artillery and most weapons. Shouting ‘Viva l’Italia,’ Baratieri managed to rally a few alpini and bersaglieri behind the protection of a walled enclosure, but he could do nothing to stem the panic. By just after midday, Menelik’s warriors had completely destroyed two of the three Italian brigades that had advanced against him. When General Baratieri had proposed retreating as one option open to his army at the officers’ council on February 28, Dabormida had cried, ‘Retire? Never!’ In the hours that followed the destruction of Albertone’s and Arimondi’s brigades, Dabormida would suffer the bitter consequences of his ill-considered bravado. About two miles to the northwest of Mount Bellah lay the valley of Mariam Shavitu, about 800 yards wide and two miles long. Since about 10 a.m., Dabromida’s brigade had been in the valley, engaged in a firefight with increasing numbers of Ethiopians. By 2 p.m., as the slopes above Miriam Sahvitu seethed with Ethiopians, he began to wonder what had happened to the rest of the army. There had been no word from Baratieri since earlier that morning, and Dabormida paced about, openly commenting on what seemed to be the disappearance of headquarters. As the enemy numbers grew and the pressure on his brigade intensified, Dabormida decided to withdraw along a track leading to the north from Miriam Shavitu. In contrast to the rout at Mount Bellah, Dabormida’s soldiers conducted a well-ordered withdrawal. Fighting from behind rocks and boulders and from trenches they had dug that morning, Dabormida’s soldiers contested every yard of the Ethiopian’s advance. The gunners defended their pieces to the end, falling beneath the hacking swords and stabbing spears of the Ethiopians, and the infantry rear guards stood their ground until annihilated. It was a battle with no quarter. Since time immemorial, the Ethiopian armies had fought war with the object of utterly destroying their enemies. The Oromo horsemen of Ras Mikail swept in and through the ranks of Italians, slashing and stabbing at the soldiers, while wave after wave of foot warriors rushed forward. Dabormida, wounded and by then no doubt realizing the disaster that had befallen his command, dragged himself to a small village and asked a local woman for a drink of water. No record exists of where and how the general met his death, but months later his remains were found lying among those of thousands of his soldiers scattered along the valley. The Battle of Adowa cost the lives of 289 Italian officers, 2,918 European soldiers and about 2,000 askari. A further 954 European troops were missing, while 470 Italians and 958 askari were wounded. Some 700 Italians and 1,800 askari fell into the hands of the Ethiopian troops. About 70 Italians and 230 askari were tortured to death before Menelik discovered it and put a stop to it. After enduring a terrible forced march back to Addis Ababa through the cold and rain of the highlands, the rest of the captives were held for several months until the Europeans were released in exchange for payment of a 10 million lire ‘reparation’ by the Italian government. Some 800 Tigrean askari prisoners did not fare so well; they were subjected to the traditional punishment for disloyalty by having their right hands and left feet amputated. In addition to the human losses, Baratieri’s army lost 11,000 rifles and all of its 56 guns and had to endure attacks by the Tigrean peasantry as it retreated. For Baratieri, who only months earlier had been lauded by the Italian government, his military career was over. Even before Adowa, the government secretly had decided to relieve him of command and dispatched his replacement. The political consequences of the defeat were even greater. After news of the debacle reached Rome, angry crowds filled the streets of most Italian cities. Humiliated by the utter collapse of his colonial policy, Prime Minister Crispi and his cabinet resigned. An estimated 7,000 warriors died at Adowa, and 10,000 were wounded. Ethiopia had never before had to pay such a price for victory, and for a while a note of war weariness echoed through the ranks of Menelik’s host. Yet it had been a victory, and a great one at that. Eritrea was Menelik’s for the taking, and he ordered his army to mass on the border of the Italian colony. But he did not give the order to invade. Historians have long debated why the negus did not exploit his advantage over the Italians at that time–indeed, his nobles were urging him to do so. The thought of further grievous losses, the claimed lack of cavalry horses or the inhospitable wilderness through which his army would have to march to reach the Italians were all factors that may have stayed his hand. Menelik also knew that soon many of his feudal warriors would wish to return to their homes for the annual plowing and sowing of their crops. The actual motivation may have been more subtle, however. Menelik recognized Italy’s craving for a colonial empire, and Eritrea was the young nation’s most valuable colonial possession. Its loss would compel the Italians to reply with all their resources. Such a war would be one that Menelik could not hope to win. Whatever lay behind his decision, Menelik made two simple demands of the new government in Rome–the abolition of the Treaty of Wichale and the unconditional recognition of Ethiopia’s independence. He was, in effect, asking for a return to the status quo of 1889. Within months of the Battle of Adowa, European nations rushed to establish diplomatic representation with the negus. Menelik accepted all comers, including the envoys from Rome, balancing in the Byzantine manner of Ethiopian politics each of the suitors against one another. To the French, he secretly offered support for their claims to the upper Nile in return for part of French Somaliland. To the British, he offered assistance against the Mahdists in the Sudan, receiving an agreement to waive duty on goods imported through British Somaliland as his reward. To the Mahdists, he offered a commercial pact. On October 26, 1896, Rome signed the Treaty of Addis Ababa, sensibly accepting Menelik’s liberal terms to end the war. Thus secure, the negus launched a campaign of conquest against the Kaffa and Galla peoples who lived to the south and, after crushing them, added the looted wealth of those lands to the royal treasury. Throughout the world, the news of Adowa created a surge of racial pride among people of African descent. In places as diverse as Haiti, the Gold Coast, South Africa and the United States, black people hailed Menelik’s victory, and Ethiopia became a place of pilgrimage for black intellectuals and religious leaders. Four decades later, as Benito Mussolini’s legions overran Ethiopia, fascist propaganda justified the aggression as an opportunity to erase the lingering humiliation of Italy’s defeat at Menelik’s hands. The rout of General Baratieri’s army did indeed have far-reaching consequences. Adowa saved Ethiopia from Italian colonization and raised its status from that of an isolated nation whose institutions, heritage and people where held in contempt to that of an equal partner in the world community of nations. March 1 is a national day of celebration in Ethiopia, and the events of 1896 are remembered with pride. Greg Blake teaches history in Darwin, Australia. Further reading: The Campaign of Adowa and the Rise of Menelik, by Sir George F.H. Berkeley; The Life and Times of Menelik II: Ethiopia 18441913, by Harold G. Marcus; Conquest and Resistance to Colonialism in Africa, by G. Maddox; and One House: The Battle of Adwa 1896–100 Years, edited by Pamela S. Brown and Fassil Yirgu. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Military History magazine today!

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https://www.historynet.com/first-jewish-roman-war.htm

First Jewish-Roman War

First Jewish-Roman War In 64 ad, the part of the province of Syria known as Judea came under the rule of a cruel and avaricious Roman procurator who had no respect for Jewish religious traditions. Abuses multiplied, and a reaction from Zealots — Jews long opposed to the Roman presence in their homeland — was not long in coming. Rebels whose patience had run out slaughtered a Roman garrison in Jerusalem. Others seized weapons at Masada, a fortress atop a mesa near the Dead Sea. Those acts brought about the Jewish War, a war that reached its climax in the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem by the Roman legions and ended with the fall of Masada. Roman rule over Judea began in 63 bc, after a centuries-long struggle over the blending of Greek culture and Jewish tradition exploded into civil war. The Roman general Pompey intervened and attacked Jerusalem in 66 bc. After a three-year siege, the city surrendered and Pompey annexed Judea to Roman-ruled Syria. Several rulers favorable to Rome — of whom Herod the Great was the most famous — governed Judea until 6 ad. For most of the next several decades, Roman procurators governed Judea as a part of the province of Syria. The procurators could not comprehend what they regarded as the strange customs of an alien country. Actions that were insignificant in their eyes sometimes caused an uproar. When procurator Pontius Pilate moved his army from Caesarea to Jerusalem, a crowd of Jews walked 70 miles to Caesarea and lay prone around Pilate’s house for five days. They were objecting to the effigies of the emperor Augustus on the standards of his infantry. To the more zealous Jews, such symbols of the emperor as a Roman god violated the Second Commandment ban on ‘graven images. The procurator whose actions ultimately triggered an armed rebellion was Gessius Florus. He released robbers from prison for a price, then allowed them to continue their thefts for a share of the booty. The Jews complained to Cestius Gallus, the legate of Syria and Florus’ immediate superior. Gallus could not or would not control Florus. The procurator next took 17 talents from the treasury of the Temple of Jerusalem. When the people protested, he marched his troops into the city and turned them loose to plunder and kill. The Jewish people disagreed over what they should do. The priestly Sadducees and other leaders wanted to coexist with the occupiers and hope for a gentler successor to Florus. Nationalistic groups such as the Zealots were ready to fight. They had already been waging a guerrilla war of independence for years. One Zealot faction, known as the Sicarii, or knife-wielders, were urban terrorists who murdered people in the streets whom they viewed as Roman collaborators. The captain of the Temple committed the first act of rebellion in July of 66 ad, when he stopped the twice daily offering of a bull and two lambs on behalf of the emperor and the Roman people. That slap in the Roman face alarmed Jerusalem’s leading citizens, who requested troops from both Florus and Agrippa II, grandson of Herod the Great and king of the region north of Galilee known as Chalcis. Agrippa had no political authority in Jerusalem, but he maintained a palace there for himself and his sister Berenice. He was also in charge of the Temple. In September, Agrippa sent 2,000 horsemen. They entered the Upper City and fought a battle of mutual slaughter against Zealots led by Eleazar. After seven days of bloody strife, Sicarii reinforcements helped the Zealots drive Agrippa’s men from the city. At about the same time, the Sicarii leader Menahem and his men took Masada and returned to Jerusalem with a veritable arsenal of weapons. Their blood up, the victors in Jerusalem burned the house of the high priest and the palace of Agrippa and Berenice. They stormed the fortress Antonia, adjacent to the northwest corner of the Temple, and killed its Roman cohort. They laid siege to Herod’s palace, then massacred all but the leader of its Roman garrison after promising a safe exit. Those murders on the Sabbath put the entire city in fear of both human and divine reprisal. During that fighting, a rift developed between the Sicarii and the other zealots. The larger zealot faction drove the Sicarii out and killed Menahem, but the war between the two factions was far from over. Cestius Gallus marched from Antioch, the Syrian capital, with an army of 18,000, destroying some towns in Galilee en route and receiving assurances of loyalty from others. Arriving at Jerusalem in early October, he entered the city through the unfinished third wall, which Agrippa I had begun building years before around the northern half of the city. When the insurgents retreated to the Temple, Gallus’ legionaries undermined the Temple wall and prepared to burn the Temple gate. The legate seemed close to crushing the rebellion when, for some reason, he ordered his forces to withdraw from the city. Gallus may have felt that he could not prevail against such courageous defenders. Instead of staying put, the Jews chased the retreating army, inflicting heavy damage as they went. In the northern suburb of Bezetha, the Jews descended on the column in force, killing 6,000 Romans and forcing Gallus to abandon his baggage and siege train. The rout left the rebels stocked with captured siege engines and swollen with confidence of future victories. Many prominent Jews left Jerusalem to escape the inevitable Roman retaliation, but the leaders who remained there prepared to defend their country. They completed the third wall of the city and appointed men to mobilize resistance in different regions. To Galilee they sent a priest named Joseph ben Mattathias. Posterity would know him as Flavius Josephus, the principal historian of the Jewish War. Josephus had visited Rome a few years earlier and knew the strength and discipline of its legions. He trained an army on the Roman model, which he numbered at 65,000 (though Josephus may have inflated some of his troop counts). He also built walls around several cities. Not everyone in Galilee welcomed Josephus. His most determined opponent there was John of Gischala, who held a monopoly on kosher oil and netted huge profits but wanted political power as well. He resented Josephus’ interference and tried to label him a traitor. He also made repeated attempts on Josephus’ life. The emperor Nero, meanwhile, sent Titus Flavius Vespasianus (Vespasian) to put down the rebellion in Judea. Vespasian had fought 30 battles in Britain and captured more than 20 towns there. Although about 57 years of age, he was a trustworthy and energetic commander. He took his elder son, Titus, along as a staff officer. Vespasian assembled an army of 60,000 at Ptolemais. Preliminary raids by the army on many towns in Galilee regularly defeated the troops Josephus had trained, and by the time Vespasian and Titus began their march in the spring of 67 ad, much of Galilee had already been pacified. The mere sight of that mighty host moving into Galilee put Josephus’ army to flight. Josephus and a few others then took refuge in Jotapata, the most strongly fortified city in Galilee. Vespasian was determined to take it first. Daily battles outside the city walls preceded a 47-day siege, in which a siege platform, three 50-foot armored siege towers and 160 siege engines proved insufficient to breach the walls or overcome Jotapata’s Jewish defenders. Vespasian himself was wounded in the foot by an arrow during one fierce, but nevertheless fruitless, assault. After cutting off the western approaches to Jotapata — and with it, the city’s food and water supply — the Romans finally swarmed over the walls after a Jewish deserter told Vespasian when the sentries would be sleeping. Josephus and 40 compatriots took refuge in a cave. Expecting capture and death, they made a suicide pact, drew lots and began killing one another. Josephus somehow arranged to be one of two men left alive. He then surrendered to a Roman officer, who took him to Vespasian. The fast-talking Josephus convinced Vespasian that he was a prophet. He predicted that both Vespasian and Titus would someday be emperor. In return for these glad tidings, Vespasian spared Josephus’ life but kept him a prisoner. The Romans continued the campaign until late in 67 ad, capturing Joppa, Tiberias, Tarichaeae and Gamala. Gischala surrendered, but John escaped to Jerusalem. With the conquest of Galilee complete, Vespasian wintered his troops in Caesarea and Scythopolis. When John of Gischala reached Jerusalem, the Zealots had already occupied the Temple and elected a rival high priest named Phanias. Coveting the leadership that Josephus had denied him in Galilee, John falsely informed Zealot leaders that the other high priest Ananus and his friends were about to hand the city over to the Romans. The Zealots called for an army from Idumaea, a land to the south, to help prevent the betrayal of the capital. Once inside the city walls, the Idumaeans went out of control. The Temple became a battleground and the city a blood bath. Ananus was killed and denied burial. Ordinary people struggled to stay alive. When the plot to betray the city proved to be a hoax, most of the Idumaeans left in disgust. Judging the moment to be right, John broke with the Zealots and formed his own party. On June 9 in 68 ad, while Vespasian was subduing the area around Jerusalem, Nero, having been declared a public enemy by the Roman senate, committed suicide. When word of the emperor’s death reached him, the general suspended activity and waited for instructions from Nero’s successor. The following year was the year of the four emperors. In rapid succession, Sulpicius Galba, Marcus Salvius Otho and Aulus Vitellius reigned, only to die by assassination or suicide. Some Jews may have interpreted the chaos in Rome as a sign of the end of history as foretold in the apocalyptic literature of the day. If God was destroying the Roman Empire, the Zealots reasoned, no Roman sympathizer deserved to live. Following the death of Vitellius and the victory of pro-Vespasian forces led by the general’s son, Mucianus, Vespasian was acclaimed emperor on December 21 in 69 ad. Impressed that one of Josephus’ prophecies had come true, Vespasian freed his prominent Jewish prisoner, then left for Rome, leaving Titus in command of his forces in Judea. Roman historian Suetonius reported that Titus was skilled with horse and arms. In the final assault on Jerusalem, he personally killed 12 of the city’s defenders with successive arrows. And another Roman historian, Publius Cornelius Tacitus, noted that Titus was ever displaying his gracefulness and his energy in war. By his courtesy and affability he called forth willing obedience, and he often mixed with the common soldiers, while working or marching, without impairing his dignity as a general. The emperor’s son prepared to assault Jerusalem. He placed three of his four legions in a main camp west of the city, while the fourth legion took up position east of the city on the Mount of Olives. Josephus became Titus’ interpreter. During this time, turmoil reined inside the city. A rebel leader named Simon Bar-Giora had entered the city, and he, John and Eleazar were fighting a three-way civil war. The Romans’ year of inactivity had cost them nothing; Jerusalem was destroying itself. The factions made an awkward truce while the Romans were settling in. Rebels then attacked the Roman camp on the Mount of Olives, catching the legionaries by surprise and inflicting heavy casualties until Titus arrived with other forces. Before taking the offensive, Titus sent Josephus to ask the people of Jerusalem to discuss terms of surrender. They responded with the first of several angry refusals. The next day, a number of Jews pretending to be Roman sympathizers came out of the city. Luring several legionaries away from their lines and toward the city gates, the Jews then attacked them. The legionaries panicked and ran. That delighted the Jews, but Titus nearly had the legionaries executed for cowardice. Victories like that raised the Jews’ confidence and reduced the Roman threat in their eyes — which only led the factions to resume their infighting. Simon controlled the Upper City and part of the Lower City with 10,000 adherents and 5,000 Idumaeans. John’s 6,000 followers occupied the Temple and fortress Antonia. Eleazar and his 2,400 Zealots later teamed up with John. Titus and some of his officers, accompanied by Josephus, rode around the city to survey the walls and plan a siege. As they approached the wall to discuss a peace proposal with some of the Jews there, an arrow struck one of the officers in the shoulder. An angry Titus knew it was time to begin his attack in earnest, and his survey provided him with the information he needed to start the assault. He ordered timber gathered to build wood and earthen platforms on which to place siege engines. A battering ram went to work at a point on the western portion of the recently completed third wall. Legionaries hurled stones, spears and arrows from two 75-foot-high towers to prevent the Jews from interfering with the ram. Hearing the frightful din of the ram, the Jewish factions united, but they retreated to the second wall. After 15 days of pounding, the ram did its job. The Romans breached the third wall, demolished much of it, and established a camp in the northern part of the city. By then it was late May in 70 ad. Walls still enclosed the Temple and fortress Antonia, which stood at the highest location in the city and had their own walls. Titus put the ram to work on the second wall. Although the Jews left no method of counterattack untried, the Romans always beat them back. Both sides fought all day and then passed the night in their armor, ready for battle but unable to sleep. The Romans breached the second wall after four days, but Titus still wanted to preserve as much of the city as he could, so he left the wall standing. The rebel leaders took advantage of that situation, attacking the invaders in the narrow, unfamiliar streets and encircling them. Although the Jews wounded many legionaries, Titus and his bowmen checked the rebel advance and enabled the Romans to escape through the narrow breach in the wall. Several days later, the Romans broke through the second wall again, and this time they demolished it. To give the rebels a chance to consider their plight,Titus relaxed the siege for several days. He paraded his entire army in a display of Roman power, while Josephus circled the city delivering emotional appeals to surrender. The rebellious Jews had trusted in arms rather than God, he told them. They had made the Temple a fortress in a senseless battle of Jew against Jew. So, said Josephus, I am sure the Almighty has quitted your holy places and stands now on the side of your enemies. Their only sensible course, exhorted Josephus, was to stop fighting — for their families’ sake if not for their own. Regarding Josephus as a contemptible traitor, the Jews again ignored his plea. Despite their seemingly hopeless predicament, the Jews showed great resourcefulness and courage. The Romans spent 17 days building four platforms, two of them next to the fortress Antonia. John and his men tunneled until they were under those two platforms. Then they dug out cavities and supported the ceilings with wooden beams, which they set afire. The burning beams collapsed, leaving the ceilings unsupported, and the platforms and the siege engines upon them fell into the pits, caught fire, and were destroyed. Two days later, three Jews with torches and swords dashed through a gantlet of missiles and attacked the siege engines on the other two platforms. Their success empowered other rebels to join them, and the engines and platforms eventually went up in flames. Stung by that setback, Titus called a council of war. Some of his officers advised bringing up the entire army, since only a portion of it had fought so far. Others wanted to rebuild the platforms. Still others advised the commander to wait and starve out the inhabitants, since food was already very scarce in the city. The warring factions had burned the granaries some time ago to keep the food supply out of the hands of the opposition. But people were still sneaking out of the city through a network of tunnels. They smuggled in supplies, harassed Roman detachments, and attacked those who carried in the Romans’ water supply. The council decided to build a wall around the entire city to prevent passage in or out. In only three days, the legions completed a 4.5-mile wall and 13 forts to guard it. They also began building four platforms to use against fortress Antonia, as a steppingstone to the Temple. The Temple sat on a hilltop that Herod the Great had extended to accommodate its large outer Court of the Gentiles. That not-quite-rectangular court had an area of about 1.6 million feet, with colonnades along all four sides. In the central region of the outer court was the inner court, which was actually several courts, bounded by porticoes, walls, steps and gates, and having much restricted access. Only the priests could enter the sanctuary and its holy of holies. The sanctuary was 150 feet in height and width, a splendid edifice of gold and white marble. Priests sacrificed animals on the altar of burnt offering in front of the sanctuary as prescribed in the Law, or Torah. Although forbidden to do so by the rebel leaders, some people still managed to leave the city and surrender to the Romans, some swallowing gold coins before they left. After a Syrian auxiliary soldier saw a Jewish refugee picking coins from his excrement, he and other Syrians and Arabs began cutting open the escapees and searching their bellies for coins. Titus learned of this and made further such acts a capital crime. The Romans completed their platforms next to the wall of fortress Antonia, placed their rams upon them and began battering. The rams made little progress, but in the night, a tunnel that John’s men had dug a few weeks earlier collapsed and took a section of the wall with it. Behind the collapsed wall, the defenders had built another. Rather than try to demolish it, Titus asked for volunteers to scale it. Twelve men made a gallant attempt, but all were killed or wounded. Two days later, the Romans quietly climbed the wall at night and cut down the sleeping sentries. Seeing the infidels closing in on the Temple, the rebels became fired with new zeal. The two forces engaged in savage hand-to-hand combat and fought until after noon the next day. At one point, a centurion named Julianus single-handedly drove the Jews into the inner court of the Temple. He seemed invincible until his nail-studded boots slipped on the stone floor and he fell on his back with a great crash of armor. The Jews killed him with repeated blows, and the Romans had to be content with holding fortress Antonia. Titus sent Josephus to implore John to move the field of battle outside the city in order to spare the sanctuary. Once again, Josephus got nowhere. The fighting soon resumed, and another Roman attack on the Temple by way of fortress Antonia failed. The Romans battered on the wall for six days without result. An effort to undermine the wall foundations was also unsuccessful, and the Jews repelled a siege ladder assault, as well. All the while, the Temple was slowly being consumed by fire. The Jews burned the colonnade on the northern perimeter of the outer court adjacent to fortress Antonia. The Romans burned another colonnade. The Jews burned still another, luring Roman legionaries onto its roof and subsequently watching them die in the flames. Finding the Temple impregnable by other means, Titus ordered its gates burned and a road to the gates constructed. According to Josephus, Titus did not want to burn the sanctuary. Nevertheless, during the battle for the sanctuary, a soldier picked up some burning material and threw it through a door or window. Soon the sacred building was in flames. Titus shouted orders to quench the blaze, but in the noise and confusion of battle, no one heard him. The Temple was destroyed, and the victors overran the Lower City, setting it on fire. Embankments and rams on the western wall gave entry to the Upper City. Many rebels tried to hide in the sewers, and those who continued to resist were captured or killed. John surrendered and was sentenced to life in prison, and the Romans razed the city. As Jesus Christ prophesied, according to Matthew 24:2, Mark 13:2, and Luke 21:6, the Romans did not leave one stone upon another that was not thrown down. Titus took the treasures of the Temple to Rome and displayed them in a victory celebration. Seven hundred Jewish prisoners, the golden table of shewbread, and the golden seven-branched candelabrum were part of a grand procession. Commemorative coins were minted. The Sicarii leader Simon was tormented while dragged by a noose, then executed in the Forum. The Arch of Titus stands in the Forum today as a memorial to the Judean campaign. The Jews at Masada held out for three more years in their lofty stronghold. Finally, under the command of Flavius Silva, the Legio X Fratensis (10th Legion) built a huge ramp and mounted a battering ram on a high, wheeled tower. They rolled this engine up the ramp and then battered and broke through the fortress wall. The Jews had built a backup wall of wood and earth, but the Romans set it on fire and destroyed it, too. Rather than face capture, the Masada defenders killed each other (to get around the Jewish law forbidding suicide). Only two women and five children survived. The turncoat Josephus went to Rome, where he was rewarded with Roman citizenship, a pension and an apartment in Vespasian’s private residence. There he began writing The Jewish War, the history for which he is best remembered. The loss of the Temple cut many of the foundations out from under Judaism. Early in the siege of Jerusalem, Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai had some of his pupils smuggle him out of the city in a casket. The Romans took him prisoner and sent him to a detention center at Jamnia (or Jabneh). Nevertheless, he received permission to teach a group of pupils. That circle of scholars evolved into an academy that redefined Judaism in the absence of a Temple. The rabbis designated the 24 books that they regarded as sacred Scripture. Prayer replaced Temple sacrifice, and worship in the synagogue and study of the Torah became the central characteristics of the Jewish faith. In so doing, the scholars re-established Judaism’s original form as a faith of the book, endowing it with a mobility that would become essential to the religion’s survival over the centuries to come. This article was written by Richard L. Mattis and originally appeared in the December 1995 issue of Military History magazine. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Military History magazine today!

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First Shots Fired At Pearl Harbor

First Shots Fired At Pearl Harbor An old vessel and its new captain and crew of reservists encountered the enemy off Oahu in the crucial minutes before the Pearl Harbor attack. With the dawn of December 6, 1941—the 8,426th consecutive day of peace in America—the venerable USS Ward took in its lines and began slipping through the sedate waters of Pearl Harbor, bound for the channel and, unknowingly, history. The ship had been given an unglamorous duty, a destroyer’s lot. It was to carve lazy laps offshore, east to west and back, not even out of sight of Oahu, a sentinel primed to challenge any unknown vessel on or below the surface that inched toward the den of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. However prosaic the mission, the Ward’s leader could hardly have been happier. Stuck as a number two serving a captain he loathed on another destroyer, the Cummings, a week before, Lieutenant William W. Outerbridge had taken command of his new assignment less than a day earlier. “These boys on here don’t know how strange it is to me to be called ‘captain,’” the lieutenant wrote to his wife, Grace, “but it is music to my ears.” Outerbridge’s successor, as executive officer of the Cummings, had not only been named, but reported for his new assignment sooner than expected. Outerbridge was free at last, in time to take the Ward on a scheduled patrol. “December is my lucky month,” he continued. “I got a good ship, and the best wife in the world.” In another letter he said he hoped to measure up as a destroyer captain. He would, very shortly. Just a week prior, Outerbridge’s overriding goal was to find any way to get transferred off the Cummings and be done forever with his captain, the “nasty, suspicious” Lieutenant Commander George Dudley Cooper, or “Dud,” as Outerbridge called him. Dud was “a small person,” he told Grace earlier that month. Dud was “an ass.” Dud was “the devil.” His rules were arbitrary, his paranoia great. Lieutenant William W. Outerbridge (as a Lieutenant Commander in his service record photo) took command of the 1918-vintage destroyer USS Ward on Friday, December 5, 1941. The destroyer was to patrol waters just off Oahu. (U.S. Navy; map by Brian Walker) With a slight build, glasses, and big ears, Outerbridge, 35, was hardly a prepossessing figure. In a photo of a group of officers taken some time later, he appears in the front row, knees and feet jammed together, hands tucked between thighs, shoulders pulled in, the absolute model of diffidence. It is as if a shy history teacher is not sure he belongs in the navy. But Outerbridge had backbone enough to relentlessly argue with Cooper. His contempt for him was so sizable and obvious that Outerbridge was actually looking forward to getting his tonsils out, which had become a medical necessity. “It would tickle me if the ship got under way while I was in the Hosp.,” he wrote his wife. The best solution to the Cooper problem would be a shore assignment, anywhere. And Outerbridge was trying. “Hope someone in the [personnel] bureau decides that we have had enough sea duty and also that we should be promoted,” he wrote on November 18. A billet at a naval base would mean family reunification. Outerbridge missed his three little boys back on Jackdaw Street in San Diego. “I wish I could be there to raise them more personally, as I feel they have the makings of good men,” he wrote. He missed Grace. He felt that the two of them seemed to be entering a good phase of life—older and wiser. “I only wish that we could be together more,” he told her, “but our time will come.” As a military family, they had a military family’s financial worries. Outerbridge made $356 a month, which meant that the recent but necessary purchases of a new car and a washing machine in San Diego had drained so much from their bank account that they would have to hold back on any further large expenditures. He had made sure, however, that Grace and the boys would be all right financially without him, and he explained why. “If I am killed, you will get immediately by wire $1,500 from Navy Mutual Aid and $1,500 from the Treasury Dept. as gratuity, 6 mos. pay,” he told Grace. “I have made provisions for the amount of the policy of Mutual Life, N.Y. ($5,000.00) to be held in reserve for emergency or education of the children. It will be payable on demand.” He outlined some other smaller payments she would get as well. “This is all in case I die this year.” Death was certainly possible. Outerbridge was only a junior officer on a small ship in a fleet that contained more than 100 vessels, and he was not privy to top-level correspondence or included in meetings with the commander in chief. And he was unaware that on November 27 the navy had issued a “war warning,” sparked by knowledge of Japanese forces on the move. But Outerbridge read the newspapers. He listened to local radio. He heard the talk. A clash with Japan seemed so close now, he thought, that it might interfere with his tonsillectomy. That evening, he wrote Grace that if nothing big happened, he would head to the hospital on Monday, December 1. “I wonder what the Japs are going to do now,” he said. Then, soon after—without the slightest hint or hope that he would be free of the detestable Captain Cooper so beautifully soon—Outerbridge’s crusade to get off the Cummings ended in victory. Someone, somewhere, in the navy bureaucracy read his request for a transfer and decided Outerbridge was ready to immediately command a ship, specifically the destroyer Ward. His tonsils had a stay of execution. They would not come out on December 1, as he had planned. There was too much to do. The Ward was hardly a prized stallion. Its hull had first touched the water on June 1, 1918, at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard near San Francisco. Because Outerbridge had served aboard two of its identical four-smokestack sisters, Ward’s silhouette, size, and passageways were as familiar to him as old shoes. “Being on one of these old cans seems like old times,” he said. “I was particularly impressed with the spirit of the crew,” Outerbridge wrote. “They are almost all reserves, but are very much alive and full of pep. They seem to be much above average.” He added: “Hope I can have a happy, hard working, and efficient ship. I can’t tell you much about how it feels to be captain, but so far it is very fine.” His new home was not assigned to the Pacific Fleet but to Oahu’s 14th Naval District, for close-in submarine patrol around the island. His days of extremely long cruises on the rollicking, open seas were over for now, which was fine by him. His stomach never did get used to the choppy waters, which were a part of being a career naval officer. The new job entitled him to quarters ashore. It might even be a brand-new dwelling, given how much building was under way in and around Pearl, he thought. Grace and the three boys could come out. They would be a family again. Outerbridge assured her that any house would be near a school, as well as “near the commissary, near the gas station, near the ships service store, near the hospital and not far from town,” he stated, as if trying to convince his wife that Oahu was modern and American, and not some misty, primitive isle of the sort found in National Geographic. For American servicemen, life in Hawaii before December 7, 1941, was an exotic—but expensive—paradise. A Honolulu street oozes glamour. (Library of Congress/Corbis via Getty Images) “The mess of moving and getting settled is something, but I am sure that you will enjoy living out here,” he told her. “It is expensive but everyone enjoys the climate, and I feel that we will be happy.” If she got lucky with a booking, she and the boys could arrive aboard a Matson liner after Christmas. He had already shipped holiday packages with gifts, he said. “If Japan just stays quiet, we shall have a very happy sojourn on the island.” Twenty-four hours into his first patrol, Outerbridge fell asleep on a cot in the chart room near the Ward’s bridge. The night had been fitful. Shortly before 4:00 a.m., a navy minesweeper, the Condor, had reported a periscope seen off the harbor entrance. The Ward had gone to inspect, but had found nothing and resumed its back-and-forth patrol. Now, at 6:37 a.m., a cry penetrated Outerbridge’s unconsciousness—“Captain, come on the bridge!” It was a summons he knew heralded something out of the ordinary. The sun was 10 minutes up. December 7 was going to be mild and partly cloudy. Slipping on his glasses and robe—a kimono—Outerbridge reached the bridge to find the helmsman and several other men staring at a black object barely poking out of the water, approximately 700 yards ahead. Off to port was a navy cargo ship, the Antares, towing a barge on a long line and headed into the harbor. The moving object appeared to be sneaking between the Antares and its tow, as if hoping to draft in the wake of the hauler. A conning tower. And not shaped like an American one. Outerbridge was new to his job, but he knew exactly what to do. “One look he gave,” the helmsman, H. E. Raenbig, later said, “and [he] called General Quarters.” Gun crews galloped toward their mounts, the crew sealed doors and hatches, a demand for ahead-full descended to the engine room, and the Ward shot forward, climbing from five knots to 25, setting a course to get between the Antares and the intruder—a near ramming speed. The submarine, which bore no markings, was oblivious to the destroyer’s rapid closure. It was a mere 80 feet long, Outerbridge estimated, a miniature version of the norm—a rusted, mossy oval plagued by barnacles, both its bow and stern awash as it plowed ahead. The sub appeared to have no deck guns. The crew of the Ward was unaware they were bearing down on one of a handful of tiny submarines the Imperial Navy hoped to sneak into the harbor. Like the Ward’s prey, this two-man Japanese Ko-hyoteki-class midget submarine was one of five to attempt to enter Pearl Harbor. Instead it rests, beached and captured, in eastern Oahu. (National Archives) A less confident captain would have doubted this really could be the Japanese in the waters near Oahu and the end of peace. Outerbridge told his boys to fire away. At 100 yards, as the Ward cut across the enemy’s path, the forward four-inch gun spit, the shell roaring over the little vessel and into the sea beyond. At 50 yards, with the midget sub directly to starboard, the Ward’s number three four-inch gun amidships fired, punching a hole in the conning tower at the water line. The mini recoiled. As the Ward’s momentum took it past the sub, it “appeared to slow and sink,” Outerbridge said, the Japanese vessel submerging through the destroyer’s wake. Four depth charges rolled off the Ward’s stern were set to explode at 100 feet, and they did. “My opinion is that the submarine waded directly into our first charge,” said W. C. Maskzawilz, the enlisted man who dropped the explosives. The destroyer came about and retraced its path. An oil slick bloomed on the sea. Sound detection equipment heard nothing from below. Only a few minutes had slipped by. The Ward had fired the first shots of the American war in the Pacific. Quickly Outerbridge wrote, encoded, and radioed a message to Pearl: “We have dropped depth charges upon subs operating in defensive sea area.” Then he reconsidered. The phrasing might suggest they had responded only to vague, underwater sound contacts, when they had seen an actual submarine on the surface. They had shelled it and hit it. It was there. There was oil on the water. Two minutes later, Outerbridge sent a second message, more precise and more alarming. “We have attacked, fired upon, and dropped depth charges on a submarine operating in defensive sea area.” Fired upon. Outerbridge wanted to be absolutely certain he was clearly heard and understood. “Did you get that last message?” he radioed. His report left the ship at 6:54 a.m. Outerbridge had been sent out to be on guard, and he had been. The new captain and the old Ward had just provided Pearl with a chance. Outerbridge’s message crawled up the chains of two navy commands, the 14th Naval District and Pacific Fleet. On the District side, to which the Ward belonged, there was skepticism. The chief of staff, Captain John B. Earle, had the impression “it was just another one of these false reports which had been coming in, off and on.” He called Admiral Claude C. Bloch, the District commandant, who asked, “Is it a correct report, or is it another false report? Because we had got them before.” Earle ordered the on-call destroyer, the Monaghan, to head out and join the Ward, just in case. Commander Vincent R. Murphy, the fleet’s duty officer, learned second-hand of the Ward’s report at about 7:20 a.m. as he was getting dressed at home. He wanted details, such as whether there had been some sort of chase before the destroyer fired, but the telephone line to the officer who had taken Outerbridge’s message was busy. Murphy went to fleet headquarters, where his regular job was assistant war plans officer, and where he finally got through to the man who had Outerbridge’s initial report. Murphy then called Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The time was approximately 7:40 a.m., almost 46 minutes after Outerbridge had radioed that the Ward had opened fire. Kimmel told Murphy he was coming to the office, but he issued no orders. “I was not at all certain that this was a real attack,” Kimmel said of Outerbridge’s report. A few minutes later, the duty officer called the admiral back to say the Ward filed a second message about having detained a sampan. Suddenly a yeoman burst into Murphy’s office: “There’s a message from the signal tower saying the Japanese are attacking Pearl Harbor, and this is no drill.” Murphy related this to Kimmel on the phone. It was just before 8:00 a.m. In the days following the attack, perhaps the happiest man on Oahu was Lieutenant William W. Outerbridge. “Joined the ship Friday, got under way Saturday morning, and started the war on Sunday,” he said to his wife, Grace, in a letter that would not reach her in San Diego for days. “The Ward has a fine reputation now.” The destroyer was being called the “Watchdog of Pearl Harbor,” he said, even if its vigilance had turned out to be only another “what if” in the painful saga. “Have had the time of my life,” Outerbridge wrote, somewhat insensitively considering what had happened. “This life has its compensations.” Outerbridge did not realize Grace had no idea whether he was still alive. In the naval community of San Diego, many wives were not immediately made aware of their spouse’s fate. “Really, the atmosphere around here is ghastly,” Grace wrote to her husband, hoping he would receive the letter. The next day, she wrote, “Don’t know how much longer I can stand it.” Shortly after, the casualty lists came out. “I haven’t been notified,” Grace wrote him, “so I’m sure you must be alright.” But even that hard data did not douse her anxiety. “Would give anything to know where you are, and what you’re doing.” Nearly a week after the attack, a telegram finally arrived, and Grace hesitated for several moments before opening it only to find five words. Well and happy, William Outerbridge. “I was so relieved, I sat down and bawled,” Grace wrote back, “and then I fixed myself a drink, and drank it while I sat at the phone and called up all the folks who have been inquiring about you.” Outerbridge and the Ward parted company in 1942, only to be reunited later in the war in surreal fashion. While the Ward was escorting a convoy near the Philippines, Japanese bombers set upon it, one of them crashing into its starboard side at the water line and exploding. With fires raging, and having no water pressure with which to fight them, the crew abandoned ship. Rather than leave a hulk adrift, the nearby destroyer O’Brien was ordered to sink the Ward with gunfire. The old destroyer went down on the morning of December 7, 1944—three years to the day after it had warned Pearl Harbor. The captain of the O’Brien was Commander William W. Outerbridge. ✯ Proof Positive (Hawaii Undersea Research Library) For more than 60 years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the USS Ward’s crew had their doubters. If they had sunk a Japanese sub, where was it? Even famed undersea explorer Robert Ballard came up empty in a 2000 search. Then in 2002 a team of scientists on a routine mission in two submersibles discovered the midget sub 1,200 feet underwater, some three miles south of the harbor. Its hatch was closed, its two torpedoes retained—and its conning tower had a shell hole. Terry Kerby, pilot of one of the submersibles, called it a “sobering moment, realizing that was the shot that started the Pacific War.” ✯ This story was originally published in the November/December 2016 issue of World War II magazine. Subscribe here.

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The Fisherman: Catching Spartacus

The Fisherman: Catching Spartacus A Roman general sets his nets to catch Spartacus at Bruttium. It was a winter morning in the mountains of southern Italy, in early 71 BC. Normally it was silent at this time of year, when even the herdsmen had left for lower ground. On this day, however, on a ridge about half a mile wide and half a mile high, two armies were poised to clash. In one, tens of thousands of rebels, led by Spartacus, stood in their ranks, weapons ready, and, we might imagine, hearts warmed by wine, ears impatient for the command to charge, mouths eager to let loose their roars. The Roman army was not surprised; its scouts had watched the enemy from a series of signal towers. The Romans waited behind a defensive network of deep trenches lined with sharpened poles, wooden palisades, and, as an obstacle in the forefront, an embankment topped by a dry-stone wall at least 25 feet high. Their positions closed off three sides of the ridge, blocking even the mule paths by which the rebels might have outflanked them. The Romans had left only the southern approach open, forcing the attackers to charge at them from that direction. As they advanced, the rebels were funneled into a narrow space. Like a fisherman who drives big fish into his nets, Gen. Marcus Licinius Crassus had set his trap well. Suddenly the Roman counterattack began, a torrent of arrows and acorn-shaped lead missiles, forged in nearby field furnaces by the methodical defenders. The barrage blunted the rebels’ charge. Many of the attackers reached the fortifications and fought ferociously, but they could not break through. Eventually, Spartacus’s men had to run away or die. It was a good day for the Romans and it had just begun. The rebels would attack again in the evening, and once again they would fail. Afterward the Romans claimed an immense body count, saying that 12,000 dead insurgents cost them only three dead and seven wounded. Uncertainty is frustrating to the historian but it is best to be clear: these figures and the very details of the engagement are speculative. Indeed, our knowledge of these events is unusually tentative; the sources contradict each other even more than usual. Perhaps that is not surprising in the case of events that took place in the dead of winter, deep in the mountains of a remote corner of Italy. Still, what is not in doubt is that Spartacus, the mighty rebel who had set Rome in a tizzy with his audacious slave rebellion and frightening forays throughout the Italian peninsula, may have finally met his match. The Spartacus revolt against Rome began in 73 BC in a gladiators’ barrack in southern Italy, near Naples. It grew quickly from 74 men to thousands. Spartacus, a Thracian (from what is now Bulgaria) had been an allied soldier in the Roman army. He had somehow fallen afoul of the law and had been unjustly enslaved and sentenced to life as a gladiator. Then he rebelled. Spartacus’s charismatic leadership and military skill sparked a major slave uprising throughout Italy, especially in the south. Rome stood at a disadvantage. Its veteran legions were abroad fighting in Spain, the Balkans, and Anatolia (modern Turkey). With only inexperienced Roman troops to oppose him, Spartacus won victory after victory. At its height his army consisted of about 60,000 men, most of them rebelling slaves. Spartacus recognized, however, that they could not stay in Italy; Rome would eventually recall its best troops and defeat him. So he marched his army north in 72 BC. He tried to persuade the men to cross the Alps and leave Italy. His hope was probably to return to Thrace and join Rome’s enemies there. His men balked, however. They preferred to stay in Italy and loot its rich territory. A coalition of various ethnic groups, the army enjoyed only a loose and fragile unity. Spartacus was forced to head back south. Meanwhile, Rome gave the command against Spartacus to Marcus Licinius Crassus, an experienced and canny general. Crassus raised a large new army and by employing strict and brutal discipline, made his men more afraid of him than they were of Spartacus. As the hunters became the hunted, Spartacus’s men finally realized that leaving Italy was imperative. This time, they headed south, planning to cross the Strait of Messina from southwestern Italy to Sicily, where a large and rebellious slave population offered potential allies. Spartacus found pirates who said they were willing to ferry his men across; they even took a deposit. But they took the money and sailed, leaving Spartacus and his men unable to find another way to make the crossing in the face of bad weather and Roman shore defenses. Spartacus’s forces turned back north, headed into the mountains in the toe of the Italian boot, in the region called Bruttium in ancient times. The Romans, however, were waiting for them. For Rome the domestic political stakes of the clash with Spartacus were almost as high as the military ones. Crassus had gambled everything on a defensive line in the mountains. The massive fortifications epitomized the man who had made his fortune in real estate. He would defeat Spartacus by outbuilding him. Some said that Crassus gave his men the construction job just to keep them busy during winter, the off-season for warfare. But Crassus cared too much about his command to fill it with make-work projects. He knew that the campaign in Bruttium would make or break him. Crassus wanted to defeat Spartacus, but if he couldn’t, he had to control the way the story would be told to the Roman public. To do so he needed influential friends, and surely he obtained them. A man who could buy armies could also afford the rewards that would cement friendships. We might suspect the hand of his publicists, for example, in the assertion in the sources that the Romans had got their courage back thanks only to Crassus’s policy of decimation. In spite of exaggerated casualty figures, a Roman victory that day is a reasonable assumption. The Romans had earned success. Crassus and his men had spent weeks if not a month or two preparing a killing field. They could have ended the rebellion that very day if they hadn’t been facing a general of the Thracian’s skill. For Spartacus the story began on the day that he marched his men from the Strait of Messina toward the Aspromonte Mountains. He could not take the Via Annia near the Tyrrhenian coast; the Romans surely would have blocked it. Besides, Spartacus had to feed his army. To do that required going inland on raids and finding new supporters. This was herding country, known for its cows, sheep, and swine. It was terrain for hunting hare and boar. As the rebels traveled northeast from the strait over the highland plains of Aspromonte, they probably got some of what they wanted by charming slave herdsmen—and the rest they took, ravaging the countryside. Archaeology may provide evidence of the damage they did. About 25 miles north of Cape Caenys, in an olive grove near the Tyrrhenian Sea, a treasure recently turned up. There, buried and protected by two large slabs of stone, lay a clay lamp and a group of silver objects: pitchers, cups, a ladle, a teaspoon, and a medallion with a bust of Medusa. A graffito may refer to the name of a wealthy Roman landowning family. The objects date to circa 100–75 BC and it is tempting to associate them with Spartacus. They were buried in an isolated spot in ancient times, far from the center of the nearest town. Perhaps a landowner buried them to keep them from the rebels, or a rebel might have buried them himself after looting them. Having turned away from the coastal highway, Spartacus headed for another road located in the center of Bruttium, about equidistant from the Tyrrhenian and Ionian coasts. Migrants over the centuries had traveled down this road from what are now known as the Serre Mountains to the north, and with good reason. The road takes advantage of a remarkable landscape, a ridge high up on the crest of the Aspromonte Mountains. From a distance it looks like a tabletop in the clouds. As a traveler comes onto the plateau, he feels as if he has stepped onto an isthmus. Today called the Dossone della Melìa, that is, the Melìa Ridge, it lies between 3,000 and 4,000 feet above sea level. The city of Locris sat at the eastern end of the lateral road, on the Ionian Sea. A former Greek colony, Locris had long been firmly in the Roman orbit. At the western end of the lateral road the plain of Metauros (modern Gioia Tauro) stretched along the Tyrrhenian Sea. Exceptionally rich, the plain was known for its olives and grapevines. Crassus’s fortifications cut it off from Spartacus and his raiders. Whoever controlled the Melìa Ridge controlled the crossroads of southernmost Italy. No wonder Crassus chose to make his stand here. The sources say that the nature of the terrain suggested to Crassus the plan to block off the peninsula. The Locrians might well have provided detailed intelligence about the terrain. The heart of Crassus’s fortifications stood on the Melìa Ridge near the modern Highway 111, which runs on an east-west line about 50 miles northeast of Regium (by modern roads). Here the Italian peninsula is only about 35 miles wide from sea to sea. Plutarch writes that Crassus built his wall across the peninsula for a length of 300 stades, that is, about 35 modern miles. That is an exaggeration; in fact, the main section of the Romans’ defensive works covered only half a mile. But Plutarch is right in implying that Crassus effectively blocked off the entire 35-mile width of the peninsula. As Spartacus proceeded northward, his scouts warned him of trouble ahead. The Thracian is said to have responded with scorn, no doubt skeptical that the Romans could stop him in what amounted to his natural habitat, the mountains. Many scholars seem to feel about the same way. They doubt that the Romans made their stand here. Great engineers though they were, not even the Romans could have found it easy to build a 35- mile-long walled trench— through the mountains, no less. Besides, if Crassus had cut off Spartacus about 50 miles northeast of Regium, he would have left the rebels in control of a large territory to the south, about a thousand square miles, roughly equivalent to the state of Rhode Island. One might well ask, left to rule such a kingdom, why would Spartacus need to leave? Some historians turn Crassus’s plan into a modest project: no 35-mile-long set of fortifications, no willingness to give up a thousand square miles to the enemy. In their view, Crassus went toe to toe with Spartacus from the outset by marching ever southward, practically up to Spartacus’s camp on the strait. The Romans fortified the ravines in the steep hills above the Tyrrhenian coast to cut the rebels off, no more than a mile or two away. The result was a line of fortifications about a mile long. While his men negotiated with pirates and built rafts, Spartacus could see the Romans nearby. But Spartacus is unlikely to have sat back and let Crassus corner him. In order to build his trap, Crassus would have had to work far from his enemy’s eyes, not under his nose. So, while Spartacus camped on the coast, Crassus’s men were dozens of miles away and 3,000 feet higher up in the hills. Yes, an instant 35-mile-long defensive system strains credulity but only if we fail to take into account the lay of the land. In fact, most of the 35-mile width of the peninsula is impassable, so it required little fortification. The only places that could be easily traveled were the two coastal strips and the Melìa Ridge—the latter, only about a half-mile wide. Since the Romans occupied the coasts and since Spartacus took readily to the mountains, Crassus could reasonably expect to block him on the ridge. The thousand square miles behind Spartacus were no gift. The territory in question is poor, mountainous, and largely infertile, unlike Sicily and its abundance. Nor was it harvest season. The rebels would have found it difficult to live off this land for long. It is not surprising to read in the ancient sources that Spartacus’s men were beginning to run out of food, nor that one reason Crassus decided to build the fortifications was precisely to deprive the enemy of supplies. Archaeological evidence tends to support this scenario, although it doesn’t prove it. On the Melìa Ridge there are a series of old trenches and walls, and in the hills nearby are the ruins of three lead-smelting furnaces whose internal walls are sprinkled with lead oxide. The Romans used furnaces to make sling bullets. Without scientific archaeological excavation, these sites cannot be securely dated. But they do fit the sources’ descriptions of a system of trenches—while also casting well-founded doubt on Plutarch’s claim that the Romans cut a trench from sea to sea. In addition, the ruins have been surveyed by a local historian in southern Italy—an amateur who knows the terrain better than the professionals. The opening paragraphs of this article follow his plausible if still unproven reconstruction. The origin of place names is notoriously difficult to pin down, but even so, several places in and around the Melìa Ridge have evocative names. A section of the ridge is known as the Plains of Marco, leading down into Marco’s Ridge (Marcus Licinius Crassus?); to the west there is a town of Scrofario (Crassus’s lieutenant, Scrofa?); to the east are hamlets of Case Romano (Roman Houses) and Contrada Romano (Roman Neighborhood) and a place called Torre lo Schiavo (The Slave’s Tower). Perhaps the most intriguing place name was given to the heart of the Melìa Ridge, today covered by a huge forest of ferns with scattered groups of beech trees: Tonnara, that is, “tuna trap.” The slopes to the west of Tonnara are called Chiusa (Enclosure) or Chiusa Grande (Great Enclosure). The word tonnara refers to the traditional Mediterranean practice of catching tuna by blocking their migration route with complex systems of fixed nets. Ancient fishermen regularly practiced tuna trap fishing off the coasts of southern Italy and Sicily. Tonnara would make an appropriate name for the place where the insurgents were trapped on their trek northward. Spartacus had failed to break out and he had taken casualties, but he had no reason to despair. Far from being trapped, he might have reasoned that he now had Crassus locked in an encounter that could destroy either one. Help, he knew, was on the way. His cavalry had not reached him yet; no doubt they were still scouring the countryside for food and supporters. Once they arrived, the horses might provide the punch to allow him to break through. Meanwhile, if Spartacus could not survive indefinitely on the Melìa Ridge, neither could Crassus. Spartacus’s main problem was logistical; he needed to feed his army. He would find little food on the ridge. In the summer it was good grazing ground for cattle, and the humidity made it rich in mushrooms. It was winter, however, so the army depended on raids down in the valleys. Crassus’s main problem was political. Rome wanted him to crush the enemy, but Crassus preferred strangulation, and that took time. And Spartacus distracted, exasperated, and delayed the enemy. As the sources say, Spartacus “annoyed the men in the defensive works in many ways from place to place; he constantly fell upon them unawares and threw bundles of wood into the trenches that he had set on fire, which gave the Romans nasty and difficult work” as they hustled to put out the fires. It was effective psychological warfare while Spartacus waited for his cavalry, but the struggle in the mountains took a toll on his own men. It was the crowning misery of months of trouble. Back in the summer, when they had defeated two consuls and the governor of Cisalpine Gaul, the insurgents could never have guessed that it would come to this. Even a few weeks earlier, although things were difficult, at least they faced the possibility of escaping to Sicily. Now they were fighting for their lives in the chilly clouds of Italy’s forgotten mountains. Conditions were miserable, food was in short supply, perhaps some men were deserting. The Thracian decided to shock them out of their funk. “He crucified a Roman prisoner in the space between the two armies,” the sources report, “thereby showing to his own men the sight of what they could expect if they did not win the victory.” There was nothing subtle about this gesture, but it was no exaggeration. The Romans did not plan to issue pardons. They regularly crucified runaway slaves. Besides, it was an age of massacres. The Parthian king Mithridates II massacred tens of thousands of Italian traders and tax collectors in Anatolia in 88 BC, and Lucius Cornelius Sulla brutally executed his wealthy enemies in Rome, as well as thousands of prisoners of war, in the years 82–81 BC. Apparently Spartacus made his point. His men showed no further signs of weakness, at least none that the Romans could see. If we believe one source, the Romans blinked next, but not on the Melìa Ridge. If anything, the sight of a Roman prisoner on the cross might have stiffened their will. Rather, it was back in Rome, in the Forum, where the Roman people let their frustration spill over. Disappointed by the developing stalemate, they voted to recall Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey) from Spain where he was reestablishing order after quashing the revolt led by Quintus Sertorius. Pompey had won the war against Sertorius’s forces in late 73 and early 72 BC. He never managed to defeat Sertorius in the field, but inflicted enough damage to cause a mutiny. Rivals emerged among the rebels and made contacts with the Romans, who encouraged their plans to assassinate their leader. Betrayed by his allies, Sertorius was murdered at a banquet in his own tent in the summer or autumn of 73 BC. The chief turncoat, Marcus Perpenna, tried to continue the war against Rome, but sometime in the winter or spring of 72 BC, Pompey defeated and then executed him. The rebellion in Spain was over. The recall of Pompey was a popular act, voted in the Roman assembly. The Senate was no doubt less enthusiastic, because it meant that Pompey could march into Italy with his army intact, instead of dissolving it at the border, as commanders usually were required to do. Pompey had once marched with the brutal dictator Sulla, which gave a sinister tinge to Pompey’s advance. Spartacus clearly must have worried the senators more. No one, however, could have rued the recall of Pompey more than Crassus. He had wanted the war against Spartacus to build his own career, not Pompey’s. Now he would have to share the credit for victory. Thus Plutarch’s claim that Crassus himself wrote to the Senate and asked that Pompey be recalled sounds preposterous, but it might just be true. Perhaps Crassus’s agents in Rome had sniffed the change in the political winds. Perhaps they recognized the inevitability of the people’s vote, and perhaps they advised Crassus to write to the Senate and thereby seem to be the master of events. Crassus’s letter is supposed to have asked for the recall of another general, Marcus Terentius Varro Lucullus. Marcus Lucullus, governor of Macedonia in 72 BC, had just led a successful campaign against the Bessi, a tough Thracian people once described as “worse than snow.” By asking for two generals to help him, Crassus downgraded Pompey’s importance. It was a Machiavellian plan, but Spartacus’s next move was even more so. Apparently he got wind that Pompey was coming. It is not difficult to imagine Roman soldiers, lining the walls, hurling taunts at the enemy: Pompey was coming and they had better watch out. Pompey had a reputation: his nickname, earned in the Sullan era, was “the teenage butcher.” If Spartacus saw Pompey as a threat, he also recognized an opportunity. Pompey gave Crassus and Spartacus a common enemy. They both wanted to keep him out of the war, which would explain Spartacus’s next move: he offered Crassus a peace treaty. In particular, he offered something very Roman, which was to ask Rome to accept him into its fides. Fides is an important Latin word with a rich set of meanings. It means “faith” or “trust” and, in this case, “protection.” By accepting someone into its fides, Rome accepted a set of mutual obligations. We might call it an alliance but the Romans would not have done so, since there was no legal contract between the two parties. Instead moral ties bound them. The Romans considered the object of their fides to be a client, not an ally; they considered themselves to be his patron. The ties of fides could prove binding indeed. The Second Punic War (218–201 worst war in Rome’s history, began because Hannibal attacked the Spanish city of Saguntum, which had no alliance with Rome, merely a relationship of fides. However seriously Rome took BC), for instance, the a fides relationship, the man who negotiated it, often a general, regarded it with even more importance. If Crassus had accepted Spartacus’s offer, he would have become the Thracian’s patron. Doing so would have been repugnant. Rome regarded a request for fides as a formal act of surrender, but even so, it conferred a “most beautiful dignity” on the client. By accepting the Thracian into his fides, Crassus would have conceded not only Spartacus’s dignity but also Spartacus’s right to settle his men somewhere in safety. That would never do. To grant such honor to runaway slaves and gladiators was out of the question. Rome wanted Spartacus’s head, not his handshake. Crassus disdainfully ignored the offer. Yet, what magnificent gall on Spartacus’s part the proposal was! Far from conceding defeat, he asserted his right to respect. If nothing else, this tactic might have been a great morale booster for his men. If he was stuck in Crassus’s trap, Spartacus did not acknowledge it. In fact, he was about to demonstrate his ability to escape, because his cavalry had finally arrived, giving him new hope. It was now some time in February. Spartacus waited for a storm. He chose a night of snow and wind. An old hand like him would have guessed that in these conditions, the Roman garrison would be “below strength and at that time off its guard,” as one ancient source says. The sources disagree as to just how he made the attack. One writer says that he used the cavalry to spearhead the charge through the ill-maintained defenses. Another says that he filled in a small part of the trenches with earth and branches for his army to cross. A third writer says Spartacus filled in part of the trenches but with the corpses of prisoners and the carcasses of cattle. The sources disagree as well about the level of Spartacus’s success. One writer says that he managed to extricate only one-third of his army before the Romans closed the gap again. Another insists that Spartacus got his entire army through. An ingenious scholar has tried to square the circle by saying that once Spartacus got part of his army through, Crassus had to abandon the fortifications or else he would have been caught between two threats; hence, the other two-thirds of the army was able to escape as well. In any case, the sources cite huge numbers of rebel slaves at large in the next phase of the war; they also mention Crassus’s fear that Spartacus might now march on Rome. This suggests that, one way or another, Spartacus got most of his men out of Crassus’s net. Crassus had gambled and failed. Spartacus had paid a price in blood but he had broken free. It was a tremendous victory for the slaves and a bitter defeat for the Romans. There was nothing for the Romans now but to abandon the defenses they had worked so hard to build and to return to the pursuit. Once again, Spartacus had forced a campaign of maneuver and mobility, at which he excelled. Breaking through fixed defenses is often difficult, particularly against defenders as good at building fortifications as the Romans were. Spartacus, therefore, had reason for pride after his breakout, but not for false hope. With Crassus behind him and Pompey expected to appear, the rebels continued to face poor strategic prospects. Now, as always, Spartacus had only one reasonable goal: leaving Italy. But how? They had refused to cross the Alps and the sea had betrayed them. Spartacus might think of finding new and trustworthy pirates somewhere. He might even contemplate persuading the army to march back north and give the Alpine passes another try. But not now; surely his battered people needed rest. That reasoning, at any rate, might explain the statement in the sources that his goal now was Samnium. Samnium is a region of the south central Apennines, lying north and northeast of Capua. It was famously rugged and antiRoman. Sulla’s army had destroyed Samnium’s elite military manpower at the Battle of the Colline Gate in 82 BC, so Samnium could offer Spartacus little support from its free population. With the help of local slaves, however, the rebels might have carved out a retreat in Samnium’s remote hills. Perhaps they had already found assistance there in their march north in spring 72 BC. Spartacus’s knowledge of Samnium might even have dated back to his days in the gladiatorial school at the House of Vatia in Capua. So Spartacus led his army northward through Bruttium and back into Lucania, heading for Samnium. But it was not to be. The rebel army broke up again. As one source says, “they began to disagree among themselves.” As before, the split had an ethnic component. A large contingent of Celts and Germans decided to go off on their own. Their leaders were named Castus and Cannicus (or Gannicus). The sources put the group at well over 30,000 men but the figures are, at best, educated guesses. It is not clear if all the Celts and Germans in the rebellion joined them, nor do we know if any other nationalities chose the splinter group. In any case, we needn’t conclude that the split was just a matter of tribal politics. A reasonable person could argue that Spartacus had failed and needed to be replaced; his Sicilian strategy, it could be said, had wasted valuable time and lives. If he had saved the army on the Melìa Ridge, he had also brought it there in the first place. According to the sources, before he learned about the breakup, Crassus was afraid that Spartacus was leading his men toward Rome again. This may be just what Castus and Cannicus wanted to do. Dreaming of storming the enemy’s citadel, perhaps they scorned the idea of retreating to Samnium. So, for the second time, the rebel army broke in two. Crassus surely took heart. Spartacus’s divided army stood little chance against Crassus, and the end came swiftly. Not that the rebel army was out of fight. Spartacus still managed to defeat a Roman contingent in the hills of southern Italy and wounded one of Crassus’s lieutenants. The breakaway group of Celts and Germans, however, fell into a Roman trap and suffered large losses. The survivors fled back to Spartacus. Spartacus hoped to march his army to the port of Brundisium (modern Brindisi) on Italy’s southeastern coast on the Adriatic Sea. There they might have been able to buy or fight their way onto ships to safety. But when word came that another Roman army had landed at Brundisium, Spartacus turned back. There was little choice now but to fight a pitched battle against Crassus. It probably took place not far from the modern city of Salerno. There the Romans won a decisive victory that destroyed the rebel army. Contrary to legend, Spartacus was not crucified. Although Crassus hung 6,000 rebel survivors from crosses along a Roman highway, Spartacus was saved that indignity. He died fighting on the battlefield and his body was never found. This article is excerpted from The Spartacus War by Barry Strauss © 2009. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., NY. Originally published in the Summer 2009 issue of Military History Quarterly. To subscribe, click here.

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Five of the ‘Few’ Who Helped to Save Britain

Five of the ‘Few’ Who Helped to Save Britain “Never in the field of human conflict was so much been owed by so many to so few,” Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously declared on August 20, 1940. The pitched battle for control of the British skies that had been raging since July between the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe would soon evolve from the tactical to strategic and then to an all-out attempt by the Germans to produce a quick victory by bombing British cities into submission. However, by September 15, after the Luftwaffe’s final attempt to annihilate the RAF failed, the tide of the battle had turned, culminating in a key defensive victory for Britain. Below are five of the “few” who helped to save Britain. Previous Next After being discharged from the RAF in 1933 after losing both his legs during a crash landing, Douglas Bader sought to re-join the service at the outbreak of the war. Fitted with artificial legs, Bader proved he could still fly operationally and joined No. 19 Squadron at RAF Duxford in 1940. A proponent of the “Big Wing” tactic, Bader was known to be a superb leader and an aggressive pilot during the frenetic days of the Battle of Britain. Shot down over German-occupied France, Bader was taken prisoner and remained a POW until the end of the war. (Getty Images) Brian Lane, remembered as a calm and popular leader of ‘A’ Flight of the No. 19 Squadron, flew operations over Dunkirk in May 1940 and flew countless sorties during the Battle of Britain. Although an officer, Lane “knew everyone under his command by their first name and had time for us all, no matter how lowly their rank,” according to the Imperial War Museums. In December 1942, he was killed in combat over the Dutch coast shortly after being given command of No. 167 Squadron. (Alamy) Witold Urbanowicz, one of the thousands of Polish airmen to fly during the Battle of Britain, distinguished himself as a squadron leader of No. 303 (Polish) Fighter Squadron. Captured by the Soviets in 1939, Urbanowicz managed to escape Poland and ultimately made his way to Great Britain. During months of fierce flying, Urbanowicz shot down at least 15 German aircraft, becoming one of the few “triple aces.” The Polish pilot survived the war and was the recipient of several awards, including the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Silver Cross of the Virtuti Militari, Poland's highest military decoration. (Alamy) William “Billy” Fiske, a former bodsled Olympian, was one of the few Americans to fly during the Battle of Britain. Fiske, who had become an Anglophile while studying at Cambridge prior to the war, pretended to be Canadian in order to join the RAF. From July 20, 1940 until his death on August 17, 1940, Fisk flew 42 sorties and claimed three Messerschmitt Bf 110s. He was one of the first American pilots KIA during World War II and is commemorated on a plaque in St Paul’s Cathedral in London with the words, “An American Citizen, Who Died That England Might Live”. (Getty Images) Adolph “Sailor” Malan, one of Britain’s leading fighter pilots, was known to be an aggressive pilot, a tough leader, and an excellent shot. After serving in operations over Dunkirk, Malan took over command of the 74 Squadron in August 1940. In December of that year, Malan was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his “brilliant leadership, skill and determination.” Under his leadership 74 Squadron had “destroyed at least 84 enemy aircraft and damaged many more,” according to his citation. Malan retired from the RAF in 1946 as one of the leading Allied air aces, according to the Imperial War Museum. (Getty Images)

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Flak-Bait: The Ultimate Survivor

Flak-Bait: The Ultimate Survivor Employees of the Glenn L. Martin Company rolled the B-26B Marauder that would soon be dubbed  Flak-Bait off the Baltimore production line on April 26, 1943. Identified as B-26B-25 MA Bureau No. 41-31173, the twin- ngine medium bomber then took its place in a long line of identical aircraft on the Martin Company’s airfield awaiting transfer into the U.S. Army Air Forces. Its olive-drab fuselage was 58 feet 3 inches long and stood 21 feet 6 inches off the concrete. The wings spanned 71 feet and provided a wing area of 658 square feet. From the wings hung two Pratt & Whitney R-2800-43 18-cylinder, air-cooled radial engines with two-speed superchargers that produced 1,920 hp at takeoff and 1,490 hp at 14,300 feet. Each engine turned a Curtiss 13-foot 6-inch four-blade propeller. After a 3,500-foot takeoff run, the bomber could lift from the runway and climb at 1,200 feet per minute to its service ceiling of 21,700 feet. At 15,000 feet, the Pratt & Whitney engines could take the aircraft to a maximum speed of 282 mph. The B-26B carried a crew of seven. The pilot and copilot sat side by side in armored seats behind an armored bulkhead. The navigator, who also served as the radio operator, worked out of a small compartment behind the pilots. The bombardier sat behind a plexiglass nose cone and—when not preparing to drop the B-26’s bombload—operated a .50-caliber machine gun. Three gunners stationed in the rear of the bomber rounded out the crew. Despite the fact that war raged on two fronts as B-26B-25 MA 41-31173 sat on the Martin airfield, the Army Air Forces had little love for the Marauder. The brass considered the medium bomber an operational dog. The genesis of the B-26 had grown out of an exchange of letters between aviation pioneer Charles A. Lindbergh and General Henry “Hap” Arnold, chief of what was then the U.S. Army Air Corps. While touring Europe in 1938, Lindbergh pointed out Germany’s aeronautical developments in medium bombers and expressed concern over the United States’ lethargy in aircraft development. Lindbergh emphasized the need to increase the top speed of U.S. combat aircraft. Arnold shared Lindbergh’s concerns. In 1939 the Army Air Corps called on the U.S. aircraft industry to design a medium bomber able to operate at high speed and carry a large bombload—essentially a bomber with the speed of a fighter. The Glenn L. Martin Company, which won the contract, delivered the first aircraft in record time. The B-26 first flew on November 29, 1940, and the Army Air Corps accepted it into operational service on February 8, 1941—a feat that led Time magazine to declare the B-26 “Martin’s Miracle.” But the pilots who first flew the B-26 gave the twin-engine, shoulder-wing bomber less flattering names. The high wing loading of the early short-wing model required the pilot to execute immediate and proper responses to an engine loss when flying low, slow and heavy—a situation that often arose during landing or takeoff. The resulting crashes led to the nicknames the Widow-Maker and the Incredible Prostitute (a reference to its wings, which supposedly provided it with no visible means of support). After the United States entered World War II on December 7, 1941, the 22nd Bombardment Group flew the B-26 against the Japanese in New Guinea and Rabaul in 1942. Both the Japanese and Army Air Forces pilots quickly learned that the rugged B-26 could take anti-aircraft fire and stay aloft. It could defend itself as well. The 60 Marauders of the 22nd Group claimed 94 enemy aircraft in the air in their first 10 months of combat. Due to logistical considerations, however, the Fifth Air Force in the Southwest Pacific chose the North American B-25 Mitchell as its sole medium bomber because it needed less maintenance, could operate from unimproved airfields and enjoyed favorable press following the April 18, 1942, Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. Meanwhile, in the European and North African theaters, heavy German anti-aircraft fire had taken a grievous toll on American bombers. Recognizing the B-26’s ability to withstand punishment, the Army Air Forces began transferring B-26s and aircrews to North Africa toward the end of 1942. Even before the B-26 entered combat in North Africa, Material Command personnel began a campaign against the aircraft. The bomber had already survived a special investigation board appointed by General Arnold in March 1942 to determine whether production of the B-26 should continue. Headed by Maj. Gen. Carl Spaatz, the board recommended several changes to the bomber’s design—mainly a larger wing— but stressed continued use of the B-26. Despite the findings of the board, on October 7, 1942, Maj. Gen. Muir S. Fairchild, the director of military requirements, ordered Maj. Gen. O.P. Echols, the commanding general of Material Command, to create plans for “pinching out B-26 production and replacing it with some other type which would be of greater utility.” After the North African campaign, the Twelfth Air Force reported on May 13, 1943, that the B-25 had once again flown more sorties than the B-26, seemingly supporting a decision to terminate B-26 production. War correspondent Lee McCardell came to a different conclusion. He pointed out that the B-26 had a better record of destroying the targets it attacked than any other bomber in the North African theater. The Pacific theater had rejected the B-26, and the commanders in North Africa and the Mediterranean had given it less than glowing reviews. With no other options, the Army Air Forces sent the B-26 into the toughest combat environment of the war— northern Europe. B-26B 41-31173 transferred from Martin to the Army Air Forces on April 26, 1943. Three days later, the B-26 was flown to the Martin Modification Center in Omaha, Neb., for the alterations needed to ready it for war service. After modification, the aircraft flew to New Castle Army Airfield, Md., on May 13, 1943, to begin its operational life. On May 25, 1943, the Marauder took off from Presque Isle Army Airfield, Maine, and started across the Atlantic, headed for the 449th Bombardment Squadron, 322nd Bombardment Group, Eighth Air Force, based in Rougham, England. Lieutenant James J. Farrell, the B-26’s pilot, christened the bomber Flak-Bait. (His brother had nicknamed the family dog Flea Bait.) Flak-Bait’s crew arrived to find that the 322nd had stood down. The group had begun combat operations on May 14, 1943, when it launched 12 B-26s for a low-level attack on a power plant in Holland. Attacking coastal areas with medium bombers at low level had worked well in the Pacific, and the Eighth Air Force wanted to try its luck along the European coast. All 12 B-26s returned from the mission. Just three days later the 322nd dispatched 11 B-26s on a similar mission. One Marauder returned to base because of mechanical problems, and heavy flak and swarms of German fighters brought down all 10 of the remaining planes. As a result, the Eighth Air Force realized that low-level attacks by medium bombers would not work against the heavily defended European coast. The 322nd stood down to retrain for medium-altitude bombing. Flak-Bait flew bombing missions against airfields, fuel depots and other targets in the effort to win air supremacy over France. After a few such missions, Lieutenant Farrell realized he had either aptly named the B-26 or jinxed it—the bomber rarely returned to base without taking hits from flak. Farrell recalled, “It was hit plenty of times; hit all the time.” For example, a Messerschmitt Me-109 approached Flak-Bait out of the sun on September 10, 1943, and sent a 20mm shell through the bomber’s nose. The shell struck the back of Farrell’s instrument panel and exploded, wounding the bombardier and Farrell and knocking out all flight instruments. Farrell managed to bring Flak-Bait back for a textbook landing in England. The Ninth Air Force had transferred to England in October 1943 and assumed the role of providing tactical air support for the Allied invasion of Europe. Flak-Bait and the 322nd became a part of the Ninth Air Force and began to strike tactical targets such as bridges, railroad yards and coastal artillery emplacements. Flak-Bait continued to live both a charmed and jinxed life as D-Day approached. Aircraft and crew reached their 100th mission on June 1, 1944. They flew two missions on June 6 in support of the invasion of Normandy. Farrell and all his crew survived their tour despite many close calls and returned to the United States in July 1944. Lieutenant Graydon K. Eubank of San Antonio, Texas, then took command of Flak-Bait for a short time, but Lieutenant Henry Bozarth of Shreveport, La., soon took the left seat and remained there. As the Allied armies advanced into France, the 449th and Flak-Bait transferred to an airfield at Beauvais-Tille, France. The veteran aircraft continued to live up to its reputation despite the crew change. Flak-Bait flew missions supporting the British forces slugging it out with German armor at Caen, in addition to the Americans fighting their way toward St. Lô—the battle that would prove vital to the Allied breakout from Normandy’s hedgerow country. With the Germans in headlong retreat, Flak-Bait aided Lt. Gen. George Patton’s Third Army as it stormed across France in August and September. From October to December, the group once again bombed bridges, road junctions and ordnance depots in the assault on the Siegfried Line. On December 16, 1944, the Germans struck back, sending 600,000 men into the Ardennes in an effort to capture Antwerp and choke off the Allies’ supply conduit. The Battle of the Bulge, as it became known, raged until January 28, 1945. Flak-Bait played a role in that battle by attacking road and rail bridges used by the Germans during their attack and withdrawal. On its 180th mission, Flak-Bait took 700 hits from flak fragments. McDonal Darnell Jr., Bozarth’s radio operator, remembered, “Everybody was afraid of the damn thing, but she always got back for us.” Advancing to an airfield at Le Culot, Belgium, on March 30, 1945, Flak-Bait completed its 200th mission in style—it led the entire 322nd Bomb Group to Magdeburg, Germany, and back on April 17, 1945. When Germany surrendered on May 8, Flak-Bait had survived 207 missions—more than any other American bomber in World War II. During those harrowing 725 hours of combat time it had returned twice on one engine, survived an engine fire, had its electrical system knocked out twice and lost its hydraulic system once. No longer needed in Europe, Flak-Bait returned to the United States on December 7, 1946. Because of the aircraft’s unique history, the U.S. Army Air Forces transferred the B-26 to museum status on December 21, 1946. Today Flak-Bait is being restored for permanent display at the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center adjacent to Dulles International Airport, a fitting tribute to a much-maligned bomber that played a critical role in winning the war in Europe. Originally published in the March 2006 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here.

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Flaming Flattops: Deadly Fires Struck U.S. Aircraft Carriers

Flaming Flattops: Deadly Fires Struck U.S. Aircraft Carriers To ignore Murphy’s Law—“anything that can go wrong will go wrong”—while conducting flight operations on an aircraft carrier is a capital offense. As 30-ton jets hurtle off the bow, controlled-crash landings are made on the stern and exhausts blaze, the slightest misstep or malfunction can be fatal. In October 1966, the USS Oriskany in the Gulf of Tonkin off the North Vietnamese coast met disaster when a burning magnesium flare was tossed into a locker filled with flares and rocket warheads. Misfortune befell the USS Forrestal, also in the Gulf, in July 1967, when a rocket under the wing of a parked fighter burst on a crowded flight deck. In January 1969, a rocket aboard the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise off the coast of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was subjected to the heat of a jet engine starter, cooked off and sparked a chain reaction of explosions. In those three incidents, 206 American sailors died and 631 others were injured. Government safety engineers had believed that strict safety and storage procedures on U.S. carriers would make explosive accidents merely a remote possibility. However, carelessness combined with unforeseen series of events meant that the possibility still remained. “There are 14 carriers in the fleet and I bet they have several fires a day when at sea,” estimated Lt. Cmdr. John Donnelly, executive officer of the U.S. Navy Damage Control Training Center, in a 1974 Popular Mechanics article. The Philadelphia facility was responsible for training sailors in damage control, including firefighting. “Fires have to be expected on a carrier,” Donnelly continued. “You can’t escape that fact—not with the overwhelming amount of fuel and explosives involved, mixing with carelessness and chance [with] 5,000 people living together in a relatively confined area.” The USS Oriskany en route to Vietnam. / US Navy The Oriskany, dubbed “Mighty O,” was no stranger to accidents at sea. Off the coast of Korea in March 1953, an F4U-4 Corsair fighter landed with a bomb that fell off and exploded on touchdown. Pieces of shrapnel pierced several parked F9F-5 Panther jet fighters, whose punctured wingtip tanks poured burning fuel onto the hangar deck. Two sailors were killed and 15 wounded. However, firefighting crews prevented the flames from reaching any stored ordnance. During the Oriskany’s second cruise off the coast of Vietnam, which began in July 1966, the carrier launched its five combat squadrons on nearly 8,000 sorties over four months. When Defense Secretary Robert McNamara noted after an Oct. 1 visit that crew members were exceeding Pentagon guidelines designed to prevent fatigue, Capt. John Iarrobino replied that mission demands forced him to disregard the guidelines. Just a few weeks later, the ship was about to sail for Hong Kong to give its crew a rest when the effects of overwork caught up with the Oriskany. Smoke pours from Oriskany’s Hangar Bay No. 1 on Oct. 26, 1966, during a fire that killed 44 crewmen off the coast of Vietnam. / US Navy On the morning of Oct. 26, two apprentice airmen—George James, 18, and James Sider, 17—stowed 117 3-foot-long, 25-pound, cylindrical Mark 24 Mod 3 parachute flares. Neither man had been trained in the procedure nor supervised. Suddenly a flare’s safety lanyard snagged and detached, igniting the bright flare. Panicking and blinded by the in-tense, dazzling light of the burning Mark 24, Sider flung the flare into its storage locker, possibly hoping the lack of air in the case would smother the fire. Unfortunately, the locker contained about 650 flares and 2¾-inch air-launched rockets, each containing a warhead of about 6 pounds. Within minutes the locker’s interior blazed at 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Explosions inside caused the steel bulkheads to sag and buckle. The hatch blew off. Sailors fight the fire onboard the Oriskany in 1966 / Alamy Successive explosions scattered burning magnesium everywhere, filling the hangar bay with toxic smoke. Two parked helicopters caught fire as the 20 mm cannon ammunition in a nearby A-4 Skyhawk fighter started to burn. A looming threat was the multitude of bombs staged for loading around the hangar. As the fire intensified, the paint on the bombs blistered and peeled, and their fuze inlets started smoking. Firemen poured water over the bombs until they could be rolled overboard. “If the bombs had gone off,” an officer later told Life magazine, “we would have lost the ship.” Water proved useless against the fire itself. Water breaks down into oxygen and flammable hydrogen in a heat of over 3,000 degrees. Magnesium burns at up to 5,600 degrees. Due to hydrogen in the air, the hoses of firefighters and automatic sprinklers literally fed the flames. Iarrobino headed Oriskany into the wind to blow the smoke clear, while trying not to feed the fire. He flooded the carrier’s magazines to prevent ordnance from exploding. Down in the carrier’s bowels, men fought for their lives against insufferable heat and smoke. Exhausted pilots were asleep in their quarters when the air system pumped toxic fumes inside and asphyxiated them. Others failed in attempts to escape through smoky, flaming passageways. Trapped in his quarters, Lt. Cmdr. Marvin Reynolds wrapped a wet blanket around himself and fumbled in the noxious dark for a wrench to open his porthole. “Now just take it easy,” he said to himself. “If you let this wrench slip and lose it in the smoke, you’ve bought the farm.” He put his head through the porthole for air until a sailor above passed a breathing mask and fire hose to him. Cmdr. Richard Bellinger, top, steps out of the cockpit after a mission in 1966. / Peter B. Mersy Collection Cmdr. Richard Bellinger, leader of fighter squadron VF-162 and survivor of two dogfights with MiG fighters, ripped out his stateroom’s air conditioning unit mounted on the skin of the ship to get outside and escape the inferno, but then discovered that he had to strip naked before he could squeeze through the 18-inch opening onto the catwalk. According to some reports, he borrowed a flight suit or uniform and helped put out the fire. Firemen poured water over the edges of the flames in the flare locker to keep them from spreading until the fire burned out, around mid-morning. Two flares in the locker never lit. Two others, and their wood packing crates, survived intact. So much water had been pumped aboard that scuba teams were required to rescue men trapped in the bottom of the ship. Eight months later in the Gulf of Tonkin, the Forrestal, the first supercarrier designed specifically for jet aircraft, met a similar fate. Its flight crews flew 700 sorties in four days—so many that they ran low on streamlined modern low-drag bombs that packed huge explosive power. Capt. John Beling reluctantly accepted a load of decade-old AN-M65 “fat boy” thousand-pounders, blunt old bombs thin-skinned and rusty with age. They leaked Composition B, an explosive that becomes up to 50 percent more potent with age and is highly sensitive to shock and heat. Devastation and debris are strewn across the deck of the Forrestal in the aftermath of an accidental rocket explosion on the bridge in July 1967. / U.S. Navy The bombs were on the deck July 29, 1967, shortly before 11 a.m., when a faulty launch circuit—which according to the Navy should not have been connected—released a 5-inch Mk-32 Zuni rocket from a F-4B Phantom II fighter parked starboard on the ship’s rear corner. The rocket flew straight through an A-4E Skyhawk without exploding before landing in the ocean, but on its way out the rocket punched open the jet’s fuel tank. In normal circumstances, a lit match will not ignite the Navy’s primary jet fuel, JP-5, basically kerosene with a higher flashpoint than the JP-4 fuel used by the Air Force. Rocket and jet exhaust, however, are hot enough to set off JP-5, and once ignited the fuel can burn at up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. With the carrier headed straight into the wind—standard launch procedure—the flames quickly spread to 10 nearby Skyhawks. Damage-control teams went into action believing they had 10 minutes before the bombs on deck reached detonation temperature. However, the degraded Composition B explosive in the old bombs had become unstable. Only 96 seconds after the misfired rocket drilled the A-4 Skyhawk, one of the plane’s bombs cooked off. Surveying damage aboard the Forrestal, left, on July 30, 1967, is a group of pilots including Lt. Cmdr. John McCain (right) / Getty Future U.S. senator and presidential candidate John McCain was a lieutenant commander aboard the Forrestal in a Skyhawk parked next to the one that had been hit. “As I scrambled out of my aircraft and ran across the burning flight deck,” he recalled, “I watched as sailors carried hoses and extinguishers toward the flames. A moment later, the first bomb exploded, and those brave men were gone.” The blast not only killed most of the lead firefighting crew and spattered blazing fuel across the deck but also blew a hole into the hangar bay. Within five minutes, nine major explosions shook the Forrestal, each spraying rescuers and aircraft with flames and fragments. Rockets and 20 mm cannon shells raked the deck. Ejection seats fired themselves. Skyhawk pilot Lt. Cmdr. Herb Hope escaped his plane and rolled off the flight deck into a safety net, then joined a damage control party below. “The port quarter of the flight deck, where I was,” he told them, “is no longer there.” Some 40,000 gallons of leaked jet fuel poured through the Forrestal’s breached flight deck and filtered down three levels, deep into the ship. Everywhere the fuel went, fire followed. Most of the men in the damage-control parties were dead. Sailors with no firefighting training picked up the hoses because only half the ship’s crew, and none of the air wing, had been trained to fight fires. “I watched them from the island [the structure housing the carrier’s towering command center],” one officer remembered. “They were having trouble. Fire had cut off plugs in the stern. Those amidships had developed pump problems. So the men had to haul hoses from the forward stations.” The remains of servicemen killed during the blast on the carrier are covered in U.S. flags. / Alamy A team spraying a fire-extinguishing foam was followed by men who hauled water hoses and inadvertently washed the foam away. Overzealous use of hoses also destroyed delicate and costly computer gear untouched by fire. The fire suppressant crew laid down a buffer zone of foam to keep flames from spreading to the carrier’s island and rolled some surviving planes forward. Planes below decks were brought up and moved to the bow as well. By noon the fire on the flight deck was under control. Helicopters from the Oriskany, back in service, picked up men who had jumped or fallen overboard. The destroyers USS George K. MacKenzie and Rupertus came alongside to pick up wounded and unleash fresh hoses at the blaze. Divider doors sealed off the lower hangar bays. Eventually, the fire was contained and largely extinguished, but alarms went off for two more days. “I lost track of time,” reported Chief Petty Officer Gerard G. Johnson, “but I do know I was still putting out fires when the ship pulled into Subic Bay in the Philippines.” After the Forrestal disaster, Navy crews were given more thorough damage-control training. When a similar accident struck the Enterprise, 96 percent of the crew and 86 percent of the air wing had attended fire-fighting school. The Navy’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the Enterprise was the world’s largest ship when it was launched in September 1960. The carrier was preparing for a fourth tour of Vietnam when an explosion occurred the morning of the Jan. 14, 1969. The carrier, conducting flight exercises about 70 miles southwest of Pearl Harbor, had a crowded deck of F-4 Phantoms and A-7 Corsair II bombers, each loaded with Zuni rocket pods and 500-pound Mk-82 bombs. At 8:18 a.m. an MD-3A “Huffer” aircraft engine starter was parked with its exhaust outlet only 2 feet from a rocket pod under a Phantom’s wing. At this short distance, the Huffer’s exhaust heat—at least 326 degrees and possibly as high as 590 degrees—was a fire hazard. The 15 pounds of Composition B in a Mk-32 Zuni rocket warhead detonates at 358 degrees. Smoke rises from the Enterprise on Jan. 14, 1969, following an accidental explosion. / US Navy No less than four crewmen recognized the threat but did nothing during the one minute and 18 seconds they had before a Zuni rocket exploded. “We started hearing explosions and we saw the fantail of the ship was black with smoke and orange flames shooting out,” recalled Seaman Apprentice Jim Girafalco, on deck as a lookout. “I thought I was in a vortex of hell.” The exploding rocket ruptured the aluminum external fuel tanks on the Phantom carrying it, along with the tanks on several aircraft parked nearby. With the carrier moving at a speed of 10 knots (about 12 mph) into a 19-knot headwind (22 mph), the spilled JP-5 whisked into vapor and immediately burst into flame. The 15 nearest aircraft had a total fuel load of 15,000 gallons. They had a combined weapons load of 30 500-pound bombs and 40 Zuni rockets, which began heating up as burning fuel flooded the flight deck. Only 20 seconds after the first explosion, three additional rockets in the Phantom’s rocket pod fired into the deck. After three minutes in an open flame, the first bomb exploded and blew an 8-foot hole in the 2½-inch-thick armored flight deck. Worse, the explosion knocked out two pumps supplying a foam extinguishant and cut the hoses. Petty Officer 3rd Class Frank Neumayer of Fighter Squadron VF-96 was knocked unconscious to the deck by the initial blast. He awoke, beat out his blazing clothing, tore off his melted goggles and saw the burning fuel closing in around him. “The roar of the fire was just horrendous,” he said later. “It just blotted out any other sound. The stench… was horrible.” Neumayer dragged himself off the edge of the deck onto the catwalk below just before two 500-pound bombs went off 10 yards away from his previous position. He lost his left leg and was given last rites twice, but survived. The Enterprise was shaken by 18 successive explosions, raking crewmen with shrapnel, raining debris and fire, and ripping eight holes in the flight deck. “It’s hard to explain the power,” recalled fuel-gang leader Airman Mike Carlin. “The power…unbelievable violence just blew everybody like dust.” A 500-pound bomb rolled through a hole in the flight deck, crashed through several decks below and passed out the carrier’s stern without exploding. But it left a hole just 3 feet above the waterline. Three bombs on a single rack went off at once, opening a 22-foot breach in the deck and spattering 6,000 gallons of JP-5 from a parked tanker jet. A pool of burning fuel poured across the aft flight deck and spilled six levels down into the ship. The Enterprise’s crew created a firebreak, rolling undamaged aircraft forward where they were clear of the flames. “We were trying to protect the island,” recalled Warrant Officer Jim Helton, the carrier’s crash salvage officer. “If those [bombs on the planes] had gone, everybody in the island—the captain on the bridge, the air boss, all of those people—would have been trapped, and probably killed.” The flight deck of the USS Enterprise following the 1969 fire. After the water mains were repaired and hose pressure restored, the Enterprise crew was able to fight the flames. The sailors poured foam through the holes in the deck to chase the burning fuel. The destroyer USS Rodgers and nuclear-powered guided missile destroyer USS Bainbridge came alongside to lend their hoses. By 10 a.m., helicopters from Pearl Harbor landed on deck to medevac wounded. By 11:30, just three hours after the fire started, the Enterprise was free of flames. “Big E” put back in to Pearl for 51 days of repairs before returning to duty. The damage, in money and men, sustained by the three carriers was very costly. Repairs to the Oriskany took five months and tallied about $13 million ($103 million today). One crewman died of burns and 43, including 25 pilots, of smoke inhalation. An additional 156 were injured. Two helicopters and an A-4E Skyhawk were destroyed, and three more Skyhawks were badly damaged. The Navy charged five sailors, including James, Sider and their supervisor with manslaughter, but all were acquitted when investigators found that a Mark 24 flare could, if jarred, ignite itself. The Oriskany made three more tours in Vietnam. In May 2006, the carrier was purposely sunk off Florida’s Gulf Coast, becoming the world’s largest artificial reef. The Forrestal lost 21 aircraft destroyed, 134 men dead and 161 injured. Repairs over the winter of 1967-68 cost $72 million ($545 million today). An investigative board stated: “Poor and outdated doctrinal and technical documentation of ordnance and aircraft equipment and procedures, evident at all levels of command, was a contributing cause of the accidental rocket firing.” Beling was absolved of personal responsibility. However, an expected appointment to command a carrier battle group was canceled by incoming Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Elmo Zuwalt. Beling was reassigned to the Iceland Defense Force and retired as a rear admiral. When the Forrestal was decommissioned, there were plans to use it as a floating museum or artificial reef, but nothing came of them. The ship was sold for 1 cent in 2013 and cut for scrap in 2015. The Enterprise fire resulted in 28 deaths and 314 injuries, 17 aircraft damaged and 15 destroyed, along with equipment and weapons. The cost of repairing the ship and replacing the lost equipment and aircraft totaled over $126 million ($912 mil-lion today). Disciplinary measures were moot. The crewmen believed to be responsible for the blaze were all killed in the initial blast. A Huffer redesign and revisions to safety and firefighting procedures were implemented. The Enterprise made six combat deployments to Vietnam. After the war, off the coast of Virginia on Nov. 8, 1998, a Lockheed S-3 Vi-king aircraft, used in anti-submarine warfare, had just come aboard when a trailing Grumman EA-6B Prowler electronic-warfare jet waved off from landing, pulled out too late and clipped the S-3. The Prowler crashed into the sea, killing all four crewmen. The Viking exploded in a huge fireball. The ship’s crew got the fire under control in less than seven minutes. In 2012, after sailing 51 years, the Enterprise was taken out of service and awaits its final fate at Virginia’s Newport News shipyard, where it is scheduled to stay until 2021. Today a Nimitz-class supercarrier has 22 fire hose stations around the perimeter of its flight deck, a firefighting truck with a high-pressure hose turret and a 750-gallon onboard tank, and a wash-down system that can pump up to 27,000 gallons per minute. In May 1981, during night operations off the Florida coast, a Prowler landed on the Nimitz off-center, clipped a parked helicopter and plowed into six other aircraft on the deck, creating a fire. The flames were contained and extinguished in 28 minutes. However, as deck crews moved in to clean up, four air-to-air missiles engulfed in the fire detonated in succession, killing 14 sailors. Total damage amounted over $58 million. In November 1988, a 20 mm cannon in a jet parked on the Nimitz’s flight deck went off, killing one sailor and igniting six other aircraft, including a KA-6 air-to-air refueling tanker. A second sailor died of burns that covered more than 70 percent of his body. The crew extinguished the flames, and the Nimitz did not leave station. There were two collisions involving U.S. destroyers running into civilian ships in June and August 2017, resulting in the deaths of 17 sailors. Those incidents, attributed to fatigue and crew errors, led the Navy to re-examine its safety procedures again. V Don Hollway wrote about Air Force Col. Robin Olds and “Operation Bolo” in the February 2019 issue. For more information on the carrier fires, go to insensitivemunitions.org and the Navy documentary “Trial by Fire” at youtu.be/TGwoHyUvOqI. This article was featured in the August 2020 issue of Vietnam magazine. For more stories from Vietnam magazine, subscribe here:

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Florence Nightingale: Crimean War Heroine

Florence Nightingale: Crimean War Heroine This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale, a revolutionary British nurse and humanitarian credited with establishing the cornerstones of modern nursing practices. Nightingale distinguished herself for bravery and ingenuity while caring for wounded soldiers during the 1853-1856 Crimean War. Her efforts saved countless lives. Her wartime experiences shaped the practices she established as a medical professional. The Crimean War was a bloody and disorganized international conflict involving the militaries of the United Kingdom, France, the Russian and Ottoman Empires, and Sardinia. The war is perhaps most distinguished in modern consciousness by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s stirring poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” recounting a valiant but doomed action by British cavalrymen during the Battle of Balaclava in October 1854: “Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die. Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.” Disease and neglect, however, claimed the lives of British soldiers faster and more relentlessly than enemy guns or sabers. By late 1854, frontline soldiers in Turkey were ravaged by cholera, dysentery and fevers. According to an 1885 naval and military magazine, British troops were deprived of bedding and tents and compelled to lie on cold, wet earth. Ambulances were in disrepair. Injured and ill men often died from lack of food and medicine. Furthermore, healthy soldiers suffered from extreme exhaustion as they attempted to take on the extra duties of their ill or fallen comrades. “In the olden times, the suffering soldier was left to the tender mercies of the hospital dressers and servants, and his recovery was more due to chance than to care,” Joachim Stocqueler wrote in his 1856 book, The British Soldier: An Anecdotal History of the British Army. That dire situation changed radically after the arrival of 34-year-old Florence Nightingale, accompanied by a group of 38 intrepid women, at the British military hospital in Scutari, Turkey. While Nightingale is known for her gentleness, she had a very strong and resolute character. Born in 1820 to wealthy parents in Florence, Italy, she forged a determined path to become a nurse—defying social conventions and her own family, as the nursing profession was then viewed as “not respectable” for genteel women. She trained as a nurse in Kaiserswerth hospital in Germany in 1851 and later cared for cholera patients in London as the superintendent of a hospital in Harley Street. “Her general demeanor is quiet and rather reserved; still I am much mistaken if she is not gifted with a very lively sense of the ridiculous,” wrote Sydney Godolphin Osborne in Scutari and Its Hospitals in 1855. “In conversation, she speaks on matters of business with a grave earnestness that one would not expect from her appearance,” he wrote, adding that Nightingale had “trained herself to command.” Nightingale was appointed by Secretary of State for War Sidney Herbert to lead a “task force” of nurses deployed to the Scutari military hospital to assist with improving conditions there. “Miss Nightingale consented to undertake the management of the expedition, and to place herself at its head. Not a moment was lost in unnecessary delay; she herself had counted the cost, and shrank not from its payment,” according to an 1862 article by Frank Leslie. Nightingale and her stalwart troop of women were not initially welcomed by the hospital’s hard-edged military surgeons. The women, banned from the cholera wards, were literally thrown into action when masses of wounded men arrived from the battlefields of Balaclava and Inkerman. Multitudes of suffering soldiers quickly overwhelmed the hospital. Nightingale swiftly mobilized her group and took charge. “Under her management, the utter confusion reigning in the vast hospitals at Scutari were quietly and rapidly reduced to order, and at last the soldier, when he saw that ladies could leave home to come out there to him in his misery, began to believe that the people at home really cared for him,” said Dr. Charles J.B. Williams in an 1862 lecture to London’s Royal College of Physicians. Miss Mary Stanley, a member of the volunteer nursing task force, described Nightingale’s heroism in an 1856 book, Eastern Hospitals and English Nurses: “Two days after my arrival, Miss Nightingale sent for me to go with her round the hospital (Miss Nightingale generally visited her special cases at night)…It seemed an endless walk, and it was one not easily forgotten,” Stanley wrote. “As we slowly passed along, the silence was profound; very seldom did a moan or cry from those multitudes of deeply suffering ones fall on our ears. A dim light burnt here and there. Miss Nightingale carried her lantern, which she would set down before she bent over any of the patients. I much admired Miss Nightingale’s manner to the men—it was so tender and kind.” The image of Nightingale materializing quietly beside suffering soldiers with kindness and a glowing light has been memorialized in works of art and has led to her to become known as the “Lady with the Lamp.” The soldiers derived both emotional comfort and physical relief from the care of the nurses. Recovery rates improved. “We had, in the first seven months of the Crimean campaign, a mortality of 60 percent per annum from disease alone,” Nightingale wrote, according to an 1858 article published in Dublin University Magazine. “We had during the last seven months of the war, a mortality among our sick greatly less than that among our healthy men at home…Is this not the most complete experiment in army hygiene?” Despite her proven successes during the war, Nightingale and her team of nurses were not without critics and detractors. “Of course, the officials prophesied all sorts of evils from this shocking innovation,” according to Williams. “But instead, there came more nurses…The work of these noble women foreshadowed the Red Cross.” Following her experiences during the war, Nightingale established a first-of-its-kind scientific school of nursing in 1860 and in 1907 became the first woman to receive the Order of Merit. During the Crimean War, she saved the lives of countless soldiers who would otherwise have been written off as casualties. Distinguished by both gentleness and valor, Nightingale was not only a healer, but a soldier in her own right. Williams wrote: “With a vigilance untiring, a rare intelligence, and a memory never failing, this gifted lady saw and comprehended all the multitudinous wants and requirements in the army, in hospital, in camp and in barrack; in war and in peace, in sickness and in health.”

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Flying Blind: The Army Air Corps Delivers the Mail

Flying Blind: The Army Air Corps Delivers the Mail Tasked with carrying the mail when commercial airmail contracts were canceled in early 1934, the army air corps was thoroughly unprepared for the job— resulting in nearly a dozen airman deaths and accusations of ‘legalized murder’. “Foulois!” General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Army chief of staff, barked to his aide, the head of the army air corps. “A newsman just told me that the president has released an executive order giving the Air Corps the job of flying the mail. What do you know about it?” Major General Benjamin D. Foulois had just struck a match to light his pipe. He later recalled that he felt as if he “must have leaped eight feet in the air” before returning “to earth in a shower of sparks and tobacco.” Second Assistant Postmaster General Harllee Branch had called Foulois at about 11 A.M. on February 9, 1934, and the two had met that day to discuss the airmail situation. For months a U.S. Senate committee had investigated commercial airmail contracts for possible fraud, and Branch had told Foulois that “in the event of cancellation…the Army might be called upon to carry the mails.” Foulois, interpreting the meeting as a preliminary discussion, estimated to Branch that preparations would require roughly “a week or ten days.” After the three-hour meeting with Branch, Foulois briefed Major General Hugh A. Drum, deputy chief of staff. Around 4 P.M., while Foulois was still in Drum’s office, MacArthur learned of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s order. Foulois’ off-the-cuff estimate of ten days’ preparation time had become a deadline. The air corps would take over airmail service from private contractors at midnight on February 19. “My first move was to get full control of every aircraft unit of the Army in the United States,” Foulois said. He placed Brigadier General Oscar Westover in charge of the Army Air Corps Mail Operation (AACMO). They divided the country into three zones: an eastern zone with headquarters at Newark, New Jersey, under Major B.Q. Jones; a central zone headquartered at Chicago under Lieutenant Colonel Horace M. Hickam; and a western zone under Lieutenant Colonel Henry H. Arnold, with headquarters at Salt Lake City, Utah. They gave priority to maintaining airmail service among the twelve cities with Federal Reserve banks. Foulois distributed “uniform types of aircraft with uniform speed in each zone” to maintain existing schedules. At the outset, not many of the army’s planes had lights for night flying or equipment to use recently developed radio beams for navigation. Crews stripped planes of armament and added radios and blind-flying instruments. They converted rear cockpits of observation planes to mail compartments and sealed bomb bays of mail-carrying bombers. Further, the army had to arrange for office space and work space all over the nation. General Foulois sent his three zone commanders a radiogram on February 16, ordering them to consider carefully “experience of personnel, suitability of aircraft, night-flying equipment, and blind-flying equipment.” Another message sent the next day told the three commanders to “impress most emphatically upon all pilots” the necessity for extreme care. If weather conditions were uncertain, pilots were to remain on the ground, despite the delay in mail delivery. “Drill these instructions into your pilots daily until they thoroughly understand the safety-first policy of the Air Corps,” Foulois demanded. Foulois told a congressional committee on February 16 that 250 officers, 150 airplanes, and about 350 enlisted men would be involved in the effort. The army air corps was about one-twentieth the size of the independent air force today and had to draw personnel to fly the mail from its thirteen hundred officers and 14,450 enlisted men. “We have assigned to this work the most experienced pilots in the Army Air Corps,” Foulois promised the committee. “We have had a great deal of experience in flying at night, and in flying in fogs and bad weather, in blind flying, and in flying under all other conditions.” He conceded that pilots had not flown over the scheduled lines, but added, “We feel that after three or four days of preliminary flying over those routes we shall experience no difficulty in maintaining the regular schedules.” In fact, he confidently predicted that within a few weeks “after February 19, our personnel and material may be in such shape that we can operate additional lines.” When a congressman asked about flying the mail during winter in open -cockpit planes, Foulois replied, “A great deal of night mail is flown in those types of planes, and our men have been flying in all sorts of weather.” He added, “My thought is that this operation is going to be a great benefit to our pilots and personnel. It is a wonderful opportunity to build a really good organization for an emergency.” Major Jones told the same hearing that air corps pilots had been getting only about four hours of flying time per month and they were eager for the job. On February 15, he had led a formation of five pursuit planes from Langley Field, Virginia, to Newark at an average speed of two hundred mph. When a reporter questioned the army’s ability to fly the mail, Jones replied: “Don’t worry about that—unless an elephant drops on us. If it does, we’ll cut it up and ship it out as mail.” Personnel and planes were already in position. Pilots would be taking trial and route familiarization flights for three days, until operations commenced. Second Lieutenant Beirne Lay Jr., assigned the mail run from Chicago to Nashville, had a different, less optimistic perspective. He had been a flying cadet at Kelly Field, Texas, only eight months earlier. Now his entire class would be among the inexperienced pilots flying for the AACMO. Before operations began, Lay received an hour of instruction in blind flying, in addition to the thirteen he had gotten at the advanced flying school at Kelly. According to Lay, air corps pilots at the time received little practice in radio-beam flying because the service believed such aids were too susceptible to enemy interference in combat situations. A thermometer on the hangar registered minus four degrees when Lay left Chicago on a nighttime familiarization run in a Boeing P-12, an open-cockpit biplane. The regulation strip maps had not arrived, so Lay borrowed a Rand McNally state map from a clerk in the national guard office. While Lay waited in the operations office for a weather report, a teletyped message arrived with the news of the first AACMO fatalities. Second Lieutenants Jean D. Grenier and Edwin D. White Jr. had crashed their sleek, low-winged Curtiss A-12 monoplane into a mountainside. While on a practice run, they failed to find their way through a mountain pass between Rock Springs, Wyoming, and Salt Lake City. Lay knew them both. Lay took off and had just tuned in the Terre Haute, Indiana, radio beam when his receiver suddenly quit. He checked his compass only to find it “revolving like an eggbeater,” presumably because of vibration or electrical interference in the small P-12. He followed the Big Dipper and a line of rotating beacons to an intermediate stop at Terre Haute, where the wind direction forced him to land directly into the field’s floodlights. “I was completely blinded as I settled the last forty feet to the ground in a power stall,” Lay recalled. “When I finished bouncing, I taxied up to the warm-looking glow of the operations office.” That same night, February 16, there was a second fatal crash. Second Lieutenant James Y. Eastman was on a practice run from Salt Lake City to Seattle in a twin-engine gull-wing Douglas B-7 bomber. He was following a line of lighted beacons, spaced at ten-mile intervals. When he could not see the next beacon because of poor visibility, he attempted to land at an emergency field near Jerome, Idaho. His bomber stalled during a turn and crashed. The following day brought two additional incidents. A pilot got lost and ran out of fuel but made a successful dead-stick landing on a farm near Dover, New Jersey. In the same situation near Mansfield, Ohio, another pilot parachuted to safety. The surge in air corps fatalities so enraged World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker that he publicly referred to the deaths as “legalized murder.” Rickenbacker was a vice president of North American Aviation, the parent company of Western Air Express, Transcontinental and Western Air, and Eastern Air Transport, three of the carriers whose mail contracts had been canceled, so he had additional reason to be angry. North American Aviation and Douglas Aircraft had developed a new air transport, the forerunner of the famous Douglas DC-3. Rickenbacker and Jack Frye, vice president of TWA, were planning a record-breaking transcontinental flight and decided to make their attempt just before the contract cancellation took effect. Despite predictions of a large storm in Newark, they figured they could leave Los Angeles, beat the storm, and arrive before the midnight cancellation deadline. The pair succeeded, flying cross country in just over thirteen hours with an average speed of 203 mph. Their flight shattered the existing passenger plane record by five hours and came within three hours of the racing plane record. The trip provides context for the fractious environment in which the air corps worked—and for the scrutiny it would receive. For months the public had followed the numerous twists and turns of the Special Committee on Investigation of the Airmail and Ocean Mail Contracts, chaired by Senator (and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Hugo Black. The explicit policy of President Herbert Hoover’s postmaster general, Walter F. Brown, had been to limit competition and “to subsidize an infant industry until it can become self-sustaining.” Many considered the record-breaking TWA flight proof of that policy’s success. One newspaper editorialized that the trip emphasized “the folly of the Government’s course in breaking faith with the pioneers, whose courage, foresight, and money are building triumphs for this country in aviation.” Other editorials opposed air corps involvement in delivering airmail on less specific grounds. One said cancellation was “just another step for the Government to fasten its tentacles deeper into the vitals of private business and industry.” Another quipped that Roosevelt’s New Deal gave airlines a raw deal. Accusations of corruption and favoritism pitted the new Democratic administration against Hoover’s Republican legacy. The aviation industry itself was sharply divided between large carriers that had airmail contracts and small independents that wanted them. These factors focused public attention on the air corps as it began to fly the mail during a stretch of severe winter weather. Much of the Northeast was snowbound, without train or bus service. New York City put more than twenty thousand jobless men to work clearing its streets. Lieutenant Donald Wackwitz, who brought the first service-flown airmail to Newark, arrived two hours late. He encountered bad weather, and the radio in his Keystone B-6 bomber had gone dead shortly after he left Cleveland. The weather caused problems on southern routes too. After leaving Birmingham, Lieutenant John R. Sutherland flew off course in bad weather and was forced to land his P-12 in a small field at Demopolis, Alabama. Sutherland crossed town on city streets to reach a better field for takeoff, stopping to refuel at a gas station along the way. While landing in Selma, the P-12 nosed over into a ditch. A chain gang helped the pilot right his plane, but he had to wait for a replacement propeller to be brought from Atlanta. There were other narrow escapes before the next fatal accident. On February 22, Second Lieutenant Durward O. Lowry died when his Curtiss O-39 observation biplane crashed near Deshler, Ohio. Lowry used his parachute but got caught in the plane’s tail. His mother, who reportedly learned of his death from a newspaper, told a reporter, “Good as they are, those Selfridge Field fliers shouldn’t have to fly at night through winter storms over unfamiliar courses that it took months for commercial pilots to learn.” That same day another air corps pilot died during a training flight near Denison, Texas. Foulois reported that the death “was in no way connected with airmail operations,” but the connection existed in the public mind anyway. The next afternoon, a Douglas C-29 amphibian piloted by Second Lieutenant James H. Rothrock, with Second Lieutenants William S. Pocock Jr. and George F. McDermott as passengers, left Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field on a ferrying flight. Water in the fuel tanks forced a landing at sea off Rockaway Point, Long Island. “At first we did not think our predicament was serious and just laughed and kidded about it,” Pocock told a newspaper. Rothrock had contacted the field by radio, but high winds and rough seas stymied rescue attempts by small planes and boats. A rescue by the police aviation unit failed when spray froze the controls of their amphibian. The three men waited for five hours, clinging to the C-29’s wing. McDermott lost his grip and slid into the frigid water just minutes before the navy destroyer Bernadou reached them. Soon after McDermott’s death, Foulois recorded in his memoirs, a reporter confessed that he had “orders to ‘get’ [Foulois]. We’re supposed to dig up all we can to prove you’re inefficient and that Army fliers are not equipped to do the job.” Air corps supporters pointed out that the media had paid little attention to commercial carrier accidents since the air corps had been carrying mail. The day of McDermott’s death, a United plane crashed near Salt Lake City, killing three crew members and five passengers. Three days later an Eastern plane made a forced landing near Savannah, though without injury to the pilot or seven passengers. On February 24, Foulois detailed new safety procedures regarding weather and equipment to all control officers and pilots. Officers could not assign pilots more than eight hours’ duty per day, and pilots would have twenty-four hours off every four days. Only pilots with more than two years’ service were to fly at night unless weather conditions were excellent. On the night of February 27, Foulois spoke over the CBS radio network to give the air corps side of the story. He pointed out that in some cases the “poundage has been in excess of 100 percent over the loads normally carried,” necessitating the use of two or three planes instead of one. Foulois explained the difference between “beam-flying” directional radio beams and “blind flying.” A pilot following a radio beam heard a continuous hum in his earphones, which was broken into a series of signals for the letters “A” or “N,” depending on whether the pilot had strayed to the left or right of the beam. Blind flying was much more difficult, Foulois said, and it had been only during “the past year that improved radio and blind-flying instruments had been available in any quantity for general service use.” He pointed out that flying military aircraft designed for combat was “inherently hazardous under all conditions, and accidents increase when flying activities are carried out on a large scale.” Foulois conceded that “insofar as quantity of aircraft is concerned, we are behind at least four foreign air powers. But I will not admit that the normal quality of our material and the general efficiency of our personnel is exceeded by any air power in the world.” Events in the air grabbed the headlines, but the AACMO faced difficulties on the ground as well. Westover inspected operations and found a lack of hangar space at Cheyenne. Planes were staked down in the open, and in cold weather it could take three hours to start the engines. At the beginning of operations, office space at Cheyenne consisted of one ten-square-foot room. For three weeks, the Richmond office space was a women’s restroom in a hangar. Space inside the planes posed other problems. Westover learned that the postal service had to devise smaller airmail pouches to fit in the small space available in a pursuit plane. Some commercial planes could carry up to two thousand pounds of mail. The air corps had few aircraft with that capacity, so “at certain places we had to carry that same amount of load with six planes of smaller capacity,” which required more equipment, organization, and control. He noted, “That actually multiplies the risk.” One of Lay’s criticisms was that existing squadron organization had been destroyed. The volume of mail on each route dictated the number of planes and pilots required. “A hastily conceived peacetime order produced more chaos than war,” he said. Frustration was evident at all levels. The central zone’s commander, Hickam, sent the War Department this telegram message after a discussion of the chain of command for the Chicago air depot: “Who is commanding this thing anyway? Make up your minds. Love and kisses, Horace.” Curtis E. LeMay flew the Richmond to Greensboro, North Carolina, run. Decades later, the general remembered how a group of mechanics had once gathered around a pot of thin stew, cooking it over a plumber’s burner in a corner of a cold hangar. “We were ordered quickly away from our bases, slashed into tiny detachments, and scattered all over the nation.” There was no subsistence allowance, and personnel had to make their own arrangements for food and lodging. A private earned only $21 a month, so enlisted men ran out of money quickly. “They were eating homemade mulligan and they were sleeping on planks laid across sawhorses in cold hangars,” LeMay recalled. “Lucky to be out of the rain.” A captain at Atlanta’s Candler Field lent his men $1,200 out of his own pocket, to keep up morale. Legislation to fund the AACMO included a provision for a $5 per diem allowance, but it had become snarled in the political debate surrounding cancellation of airmail contracts. Representative Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts said the bill “put the stamp of approval on nothing but murder.” Supporters of the operation pointed out that deaths in the air corps, while tragic, were nothing new. Fifty had died in 1932 and forty-six in 1933—all without charges of “legalized murder.” The bill, with its per diem provision, finally passed in late March. After the first few days of the operation, there was a lull in fatal accidents. The corps received two new Martin B-10s each week and quickly pressed them into service. Each twin-engine bomber could carry about two thousand pounds of mail. They soon were making runs between New York and Chicago and from Newark to Miami. On March 9, however, three crashes resulted in four deaths. A B-6 piloted by Lieutenant W.M. Reid, with Private Floyd Marshall as radio operator and Private Ernest B. Sell as crew chief, left Jacksonville for Miami. Shortly after takeoff from an intermediate stop at Daytona Beach, the plane’s two motors began to sputter. Sell moved forward to use a wobble pump to transfer fuel from one tank to another. Reid had to land in a wooded area, and Sell was thrown forward and killed when the plane hit some trees. Marshall suffered a fractured shoulder, but Reid was uninjured. First Lieutenant Otto Wienecke, a veteran with ten years in the air corps, was killed when his O-39 nosed in near Burton, Ohio, while carrying a load of mail from Newark to Cleveland. Wienecke’s hands were still at the controls when he was found. The investigating board noted that the aircraft’s artificial horizon and directional gyrocompass were mounted at knee level, so low that they would have been difficult for the pilot to see, but reported the accident’s probable cause as a combination of darkness and bad weather. Lieutenants F.L. Howard and A.R. Kerwin died in Wyoming on a familiarization run in a Douglas O-38 single-engine, two-seat biplane. Witnesses said the engine sounded “like a Ford car operating on two cylinders.” Pilot Howard had circled Cheyenne to return to the airport when the engine quit completely. Their airplane struck a power line at the edge of the airport, and sparks ignited its fabric covering. The following morning MacArthur called Foulois to accompany him to the White House. “Without a word of greeting,” Foulois recalled, Roosevelt boomed at him, “General, when are these airmail killings going to stop?” “Only when airplanes stop flying, Mr. President,” Foulois replied. “For the next ten minutes MacArthur and I received a tongue-lashing which I put down in my book as the worst I ever received in all my military service,” Foulois wrote in his memoirs. He also believed that he “was to be the ‘heavy’ in the airmail drama.” Roosevelt next sent a letter to Secretary of War George H. Dern demanding, “the continuation of deaths in the Army Air Corps must stop.” He asked Dern to “issue immediate orders to the Army Air Corps stopping all carrying of airmail” except where weather, equipment, and personnel could be relied on to ensure there would be no more fatal accidents. “Because military lessons have been taught us during the past few weeks,” Roosevelt requested that Dern consult with the secretary of commerce, who oversaw civil aviation at the time, and the postmaster general to arrange additional training for army pilots in “night flying, blind flying, and instrument flying.” This publicly released letter reflected a defensive political strategy. Republicans, searching for issues in the election seven months away, were calling for a suspension of the airmail service. The president noted he was writing to House and Senate committee chairmen to urge “speed in the enactment of the legislation” that would allow new contracts to be written and end “the period of emergency.” He also declared that the air corps got the mail job only after “the definite assurance given me that the Army Air Corps could carry the mail.” Speaking from the Senate floor, Arthur R. Robinson of Indiana and Simeon D. Fess of Ohio questioned who had given “definite assurance,” since senior army officials, including Foulois, were on record as being surprised by the order to the air corps. In response to the president’s rebuke, Foulois issued orders to “suspend immediately all carrying of airmail until your personnel and equipment are in position and ready” to operate under a reduced schedule agreed on by the air corps and the postal service. During a ten-day hiatus, he directed the corps to inspect and check all aircraft, radios, and instruments. He also ordered that only pilots with two years of service could fly mail, ruling out most reservists. Foulois personally inspected many facilities and reported, “The morale of the officers and men was the highest of any unit I had ever seen in the service,” but added that “many were gaunt from prolonged physical exhaustion.” On March 17, he shared his new safety precautions over the NBC radio network. Just as he finished the broadcast, however, he learned of another crash near Cheyenne. Lieutenant H.C. Richardson, a laid-off United co-pilot, had been killed on a training flight in an O-38. Nevertheless, operations resumed on eight routes on March 19. The worst of the exceptionally severe winter weather was over, and the air corps was better prepared than it had been a month earlier. There was one more fatal accident before operations ended, when Lieutenant Thurman Wood lost control of his Curtiss A-12 in a thunderstorm and crashed near DeWitt, Iowa. New commercial airmail contracts were announced in May, and AACMO operations wound down. The final air corps transcontinental mail flight was made on May 7. B-10s relayed mail from San Francisco to Cheyenne, A-12s carried it across the central zone to Chicago, and then other B-10s took it from Chicago to Newark. At fourteen hours and eight minutes, the trip lasted an hour and three minutes longer than Rickenbacker and Frye’s TWA flight, but the air corps pointed out that its route was 247 miles longer and that mail was transferred at five intermediate stops. The final AACMO flight was between Chicago and Fargo, North Dakota, on June 1, 1934. The postmaster general reported that since February 19, the air corps had flown 1,719,919 miles in mail service and carried 629,150 pounds of mail. The corps had flown seventy-five percent of scheduled miles (compared with 93 percent of scheduled miles flown during fiscal 1934 as a whole). The Air Corps News Letter claimed that despite the “most unusual and prolonged stretch of bad weather, not a single pound of mail was lost,” compared with the commercial carriers’ average monthly loss of 172 pounds. This may seem a curious statement, given the number of crashes, but not all crashes involved planes with mail aboard. Furthermore, planes with mail did not necessarily lose their mail pouches in an accident. For example, one newspaper story about a crash near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, related that after the pilot reported in, he “walked back into the hills to his plane and returned with his mail to send it on by train.” Beirne Lay Jr., writing in 1937, was cautious in placing blame for the air corps’ unimpressive airmail performance. He cited bad weather, mechanical troubles, unadapted equipment, unfamiliarity with routes, and “the subordination of caution to an almost wartime spirit of over-anxious resolve to make a bold showing.” Lay blamed pilot fatigue, recalling his own experience when “the screech of the slipstream through the wires and the thunder of the engine woke me up one night in time to pull out of a vertical dive.” Of the eleven airmen who died flying mail, he doubted “that there was one who was not dead tired.” Former Brigadier General William Mitchell appeared before a Senate committee, where he was introduced as a farmer “at one time connected with the Army.” He made a point often overlooked by air corps critics who thought that all flying was equal: “The Army has been equipped and the Air Service designed to act near an army on the ground. Airmail has had ships designed to fly across the country.” He stressed the need for increased hours and practice in blind flying. “You have got to fly under all sorts of circumstances to develop it. If you fly all the time in fair weather, anybody could do it.” As public and congressional debate raged over contract annulment and air corps performance, one thing became clear. “At least the cancellation of the airmail contracts has shown the American people the total unpreparedness of the American flying force,” said Wisconsin representative Thomas O’Malley. Representative Carl M. Weideman of Michigan said, “It is about time we awoke to the fact that our air force is not as adequate as that of England, of France, or of Japan.” He said that although accusations of murder had been made, “probably these lives have not been lost in vain,” because of the lessons learned in flying the mail. Air corps appropriations had declined from $37 million in fiscal 1931 to $19 million in 1934. This prompted Oregon representative Charles H. Martin to say: “When it comes to the question of politics, do not say that our Air Service is no good. The Air Service is just as good as Congress has made it. If you will pass the proper laws and the proper appropriations, you will have a proper Air Service.” Speaker of the House Henry T. Rainey was less interested in Congress accepting responsibility and urged an inquiry into War Department procurement methods. “If we are unfortunate enough to be drawn into another war, the Air Corps wouldn’t amount to much,” he said. “If it is not equal to carrying the mails, I would like to know what it would do in carrying bombs.” Aviation reminded its readers that Foulois was “the world’s first military airplane pilot” and said that to make him the scapegoat for “everything that has gone wrong over the last half-dozen years…is so repugnant to every sense of fairness that the blindfolded figure of Justice shrieks in agony.” Foulois weathered the storm and retired on December 31, 1935. Westover succeeded him as chief of the air corps. Despite congressional misgivings, the air corps’ financial situation soon improved. The president released impounded air corps research and development funds, and authorized $7 million in public works funds for new aircraft and other equipment. Air corps expenditures increased from $17 million in fiscal 1934 to $32 million in fiscal 1936. Newton D. Baker formed and chaired a War Department special committee on the army air corps. Baker had been Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of war during World War I. In its July 1934 final report, the committee recommended the formation of a General Headquarters Air Force, which Foulois, a member of the committee, described as “the first giant step toward the creation of an independent Air Force.” This centralized air force consisted of most of the combat elements of the air corps, and was “capable of operating either independently or in cooperation with the ground air forces,” according to Foulois. Three decades later, at General Foulois’ 85th birthday party on December 9, 1964, Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, who had been in charge of the San Diego to Salt Lake City mail route, called the airmail operation “the best possible training for those who were to lead the Air Forces in the Second World War.” Foulois himself said: “If I had it all to do over I would take the same position again. I would hope that I could have the same able commanders and brave pilots with me again, although I would wish for better planes, engines, instruments, and airways aids, and a little more time to get ready.” Originally published in the Spring 2008 issue of Military History Quarterly. To subscribe, click here.

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https://www.historynet.com/for-8-years-former-marine-capt-austin-tice-has-been-held-hostage.htm

For 8 Years Former Marine Capt. Austin Tice Has Been Held Hostage

For 8 Years Former Marine Capt. Austin Tice Has Been Held Hostage On Friday, a “Freedom Clock” is being installed at the National Press Club in Washington. The clock ticks away, adding seconds, minutes, hours to the time that has passed since Marine veteran Capt. Austin Tice was taken hostage while reporting as a freelance journalist in Syria on Aug. 14, 2012. Friday marks 2,923 days. Tice had a birthday only a few days ago. He is now 39. He was taken at age 31. So, nearly all of his 30s have passed in captivity. Close to a decade of life in which some start careers, get married, buy a house, maybe start a family. A virtual counter has ticked away the seconds on the austinticefamily.com website as well, one of many efforts the Tice family has taken to keep their son’s fate in the face of those in power and the wider U.S. public. And somewhere, Tice waits. At the same National Press Club, in November 2018, then-Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Robert O’Brien, told reporters that the government believed Austin was alive. Experts recently interviewed by Marine Corps Times who’ve dealt with the Tice case continue to say there is information to continue to believe Tice is alive. While officials say much has been going on behind the scenes on many levels with many agencies, ultimately it will come down to the United States and Syria talking, and negotiating directly. “The fate of Austin coming home is still in the hands of those holding him. Full stop,” said Kieran Ramsey, director of the Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell. What’s complicated his return are factors that run from the vagaries of world leaders and the muddled nature of Middle East hostages taking at the start to accusations that U.S. government officials stood in the way, deprioritizing hostages over regional policy. “The difficulty in freeing Austin is due to the very complex and dynamic environment in the region over there,” said Robert Saale, the former HRFC director. The team was created following a series of hostage incidents in the Middle East in which U.S. prisoners were executed. Saale worked on Tice’s case while he ran the team before retiring less than two years ago. “It’s almost like a perfect storm of circumstances, sort of inopportune times, where you’ve had chemical strikes by Syrians, followed by retaliatory strikes by the US government. It’s kind of a two steps forward, three steps back process,” he told Marine Corps Times. “For the last 8 years, that’s why we’ve gained no ground. Because for every bit of progress we’ve made there’s been some incident that pushes us back and puts us in a worse position than when we started,” Saale said. “And just when we get out of that hole then another thing happens that starts the whole process over again.” The current director of the fusion cell provided a brief statement to Marine Corps Times. “The Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell continues to advocate, as the voice within the U.S. government for the Tice Family, the pursuit of the expeditious recovery of Austin,” wrote Ramsey, HRFC director. “We remain inspired by the resolute hope of Marc and Debra that we will ultimately prevail over all obstacles and bring Austin safely home.” Debra Tice, Austin’s mother, has spoken on numerous occasions with Marine Corps Times. She and the rest of the family are continually frustrated, to put it mildly, over their son’s plight. They’ve held night out events in D.C. and other cities to raise awareness, campaigns exhorting journalists to include asking about their son in interviews with government officials and even conducted a “storm the Hill” event that got signatures from Congressional representatives to support efforts to bring him home. The Tice family has made TV appearances on nationally televised shows, and recently wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post called for his return. But news of what’s going on to bring him back is guarded for security reasons, officials said. “The audience that really does need to know what’s going on does, and that’s Austin’s family,” Ramsey said. That was until March, when President Donald Trump called on Syria to release Tice and read from a letter he’d sent and made comments at a press briefing about the case: “We have one young gentleman, Austin Tice, and we’re working very hard with Syria to get him out. We hope the Syrian government will do that. We are counting on them to do that. We’ve written a letter just recently, but he’s been there for a long time and was captured long ago. Austin Tice. His mother is probably watching and she’s a great lady. And we’re doing the best we can. So, Syria, please work with us. And we would appreciate you letting him out,” he said. “If you think about what we’ve done, we’ve gotten rid of the ISIS caliphate in Syria. We’ve done a lot for Syria. We have to see if they’re going to do this. So, it would be very much appreciated if they would let Austin Tice out immediately,” Trump said. That was the highest profile mention of her son on such a stage, and Debra Tice noted. “I think the most important thing to notice is the fact that the president is addressing the Syrian government,” she told Marine Corps Times. “I think it’s important to take note of his very diplomatic and respectful tone ― he says, ‘please work with us.’” “I think all of that shows a dignity and a seriousness that’s remarkable. It’s significant and it’s just another marker of how important this is to him,” she said. But, shortly after that event, former National Security Adviser John Bolton published his book about his time in the White House titled, “The Room Where it Happened.” In the book, Bolton claims that though Trump repeatedly had pushed for a hostage exchanges, both Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saw it as “undesirable” for other policy aims. Much of it, according to Bolton, had to do with efforts that he and other government officials were enacting to keep some level of U.S. troops in Syria in early 2019. “All these negotiations about our role in Syria were complicated by Trump’s constant desire to call Assad on U.S. hostages,” Bolton wrote. Debra Tice told Marine Corps Times that she was shocked by what she read. “As Austin’s mother, when I read this quote my heart hears it as the former National Security Advisor gloating that he and the Secretary of State, two Army vets, defied our President and continue to leave my son hostage in Syria,” she said. State department officials did not respond to requests for comment on the allegations involving Pompeo. A department official official told Marine Corps Times that the department provided the following statement in an email: “We are in frequent contact with Mr. Tice’s parents and are deeply saddened as another year goes by without his release,” the official wrote. “We work tirelessly to bring home each and every American hostage and wrongful detainee and will continue to do so until Austin Tice and others are back with their family and loved ones.” A Friday State Department press release attributed to Pompeo said, “The U.S. government has repeatedly attempted to engage Syrian officials to seek Austin’s release. President Trump wrote to Bashar Al-Assad in March to propose direct dialogue. No one should doubt the President’s commitment to bringing home all U.S. citizens held hostage or wrongfully detained overseas. Nowhere is that determination stronger than in Austin Tice’s case.” “Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens single-mindedly and tirelessly pursues his mission and has my unwavering support. He and I, like the President, want there to be no need for another statement like this a year from now. Austin Tice’s release and return home are long, long overdue. We will do our utmost to achieve that goal.” Debra Tice has also been puzzled by what she said is a lack of response or public support from the Marine Corps. Austin Tice had served as an infantaryman in the Marine Corps from 2005 to 2015, getting out as a captain in the reserves. He had two deployments to Iraq and one to Afghanistan, his official Marine Corps service record shows. Tice had completed his service and was finishing law school at Georgetown University at the time of his capture. He had gotten into Syria during the early stages of the war in 2012 to report for outlets such as McClatchy and had done freelance work for other media companies such as The Washington Post. Marine Corps Times reached out to past and current Marine Corps leadership. Most declined to comment on the record, some did not respond. Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger did not facilitate a phone interview request but his staff provided a statement. “Austin Tice served honorably as a Marine officer when his nation needed him,” Berger wrote. “We should all be appreciative for Tice’s service to the Marine Corps. I am hopeful for his safe and timely return home.” Debra Tice offered only a simple question to pose to leadership. “If you were detained would you want your brothers and sisters in arms to be calling for your release?” she said. “Think about what you would want for yourself and get out there and do it.” Article originally published by Marine Corps Times, our sister publication.

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https://www.historynet.com/fort-and-fortitude-pushing-the-confederate-army-to-the-breaking-point.htm

Fort and Fortitude: Pushing the Confederate Army to the Breaking Point

Fort and Fortitude: Pushing the Confederate Army to the Breaking Point Known in official reports as Redoubt H, it was a key part of the Union’s plan to push the Confederate army to the breaking point. On July 6, 1864, a large contingent of Union soldiers, many hefting picks and shovels, marched to a point just west of Jerusalem Plank Road, a mile south of the Confederate earthworks protecting Petersburg, Virginia. Army engineers had been busy laying out what an observer described modestly as “a fortification of some strength.” Now the infantrymen took on a task as familiar to them as marching, camping, and rifle practice: They began to dig. Major General Gouverneur K. Warren, whose V Corps occupied the area, welcomed the chance to apply his considerable engineering skills to the project, happily proclaiming himself “general of trenches.” His near constant presence during the construction of the redoubt led to its informal, if brief, designation as Fort Warren. The fort’s namesake was already a certified hero for his role in defending Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg almost exactly a year earlier. Union major general Gouverneur K. Warren, the self-proclaimed “general of trenches. (Library of Congress) A native of Cold Spring, New York, Warren had graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1850 and served in the peacetime army on the Trans-Mississippi frontier before returning to West Point as a mathematics instructor. After mounting a regiment of New York volunteers at the beginning of the Civil War, he had risen steadily through the ranks of the Army of the Potomac. His quick action in occupying previously undefended Little Round Top on the second day of the battle at Gettysburg had saved the Union army from disastrous defeat and brought Warren a promotion to major general. After further distinguishing himself at the Battle of Bristoe Station in Virginia on October 14, 1863, he was appointed head of V Corps in the Army of the Potomac. The squarish fort that Warren was helping to construct was large enough for a 550-man garrison—400 feet on three of its sides and a little more on the fourth, with parapets 10 feet thick and eight feet tall—and girded by a trench 20 feet wide and 10 feet deep. It was the only fort at Petersburg whose interior was bisected by a large diagonal parados traverse to shield munitions and troops from incoming enemy shells, and it had slots for eight cannons. It also contained two water wells, bombproofs (reinforced shelters), and three encircling lines of abatis (entangled tree branches sharpened on the enemy’s side). The fort was unusual in that it had been built from scratch rather than modified from an existing captured works. “General Warren is now in his element,” Colonel Charles S. Wainwright, Warren’s artillery chief, wrote in his diary on July 14. “So far as I can learn, he is his own officer of the trenches, and commander of the working parties. There is nothing that he likes so much as overseeing work, and is consequently in a most agreeable humor. I spent some hours with him yesterday in the large redoubt, which one might easily believe he had undertaken to build by contract, and certainly has pushed forward with most wonderful rapidity.” The construction of forts outside Petersburg was a critical element in the strategy of Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, the overall Union commander, to defeat General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate forces. Having learned the hard way after nearly two months of intense fighting in the Wilderness region of Virginia that direct attacks against Lee could not succeed, Grant changed his approach. He moved to invest Petersburg, an important supply and communications center 24 miles due south of Richmond on the Appomattox River, where Lee had made a stand after the series of battles known as the Overland Campaign. The new forts would be a major load-bearing component in a network of Union earthworks that would progressively extend Lee’s right flank as Grant sought to cut the railroads linking Petersburg to Richmond and the Lower South. As one of the largest works, in an important hinge position, Warren’s fort would play a key role in future operations. At least 29 regiments and seven batteries would serve at one time or another within its walls, and Union casualties there would eventually number in the hundreds. A scene from the Battle of the Crate. (Don Troiani/Bridgeman Images) At first the construction parties were screened by piles of brush, but by mid-July the works themselves were sufficiently stout to provide cover for four infantry regiments and the guns of the 9th Massachusetts Battery. As the fort was being built, Warren’s men decided to leave a number of tall trees in place, ostensibly to provide shade. In a frontline bastion, however, nothing is entirely without military application, and before long the trees were doubling as signal stations and observation platforms. “The operators were driven out of it twice while we were there by shots from the picket lines,” an infantryman recalled of one of the trees. “They fortified the tree as well as possible, but even then it was too warm for them at times.” All the activity along Jerusalem Plank Road drew enemy attention. On July 12, a Confederate cannonball, arching past the fort toward a distant supply train, deflected off the tree branches and skittered into the camp of the 39th Massachusetts, where it exploded near regimental commander Colonel Phineas Stearns Davis. Davis was killed in the explosion, and the fort was later renamed in his honor. The first direct action involving Redoubt H, as the fort was called in official reports, occurred on July 30 and involved using Warren’s artillery to support a major attack on the enemy works two miles to the northeast. At 4:30 a.m., Union sappers exploded a huge mine beneath the Confederate fortifications at Petersburg. Several units from Major General Ambrose Burnside’s IX Corps rushed into the enormous crater left by the explosion, but they were quickly enfiladed and shot down by counterattacking Confederates under Brigadier General William Mahone. Warren’s gunners fired away for four hours to no avail. The Union forces—those who managed to make it out alive—withdrew in shambles. The Battle of the Crater, as it inevitably came to be known, was “the saddest affair I have witnessed in this war,” Grant would later write. The failure of the assault at the Crater caused Grant to again rethink his plans for taking Petersburg. He was left with three options: find another weak spot in the enemy’s defenses to attack head on, rely on more traditional siege operations to exhaust the Rebels, or strike the enemy’s open flank to interrupt its supply lines. Grant’s least preferred option was the second, but he had many engineers on his staff who advocated it, so he went along with their choice, at least for the time being. Although a flanking move mounted in late June had failed, Grant itched to try it again. What he lacked, however, was sufficient manpower to prosecute the operations. Lee’s decision to dispatch a strong infantry column under Lieutenant General Jubal Early into the Shenandoah Valley to threaten Washington, D.C., forced Grant to detach the VI Corps and divert the just arriving XIX Corps (from Louisiana) to counter the threat. If Grant was going to accomplish anything meaningful at Petersburg, he would have to do it with fewer men. On August 3 the Army of the Potomac’s brain trust gathered to reimagine the tangle of trenches, batteries, and forts. By smoothing it out, they reasoned, fewer men would have to be stationed in the works, thus freeing up units for a mobile reserve. Artillery batteries could hold bastions such as Fort Davis, allowing Grant to pursue his flanking strategy with the infantry. The Union army’s summer quarters during the Siege of Petersburg. (Library of Congress) Grant, as usual, wasted no time. He aimed his initial blow westward at the Petersburg and Weldon Railroad, both to deny it to the Confederates and to punish any force that they might dispatch in response. He picked Warren’s V Corps for the job. The 9th Massachusetts Battery went along with the infantry, with the 1st New Jersey Light Battery B and the 6th Maine Light Artillery taking its place inside Fort Davis. The ensuing Weldon Railroad fight raged from August 18 to 21 accompanied by a general artillery exchange along the entire line, including Redoubt H, where a sutler was killed on August 23. Two days later a pair of II Corps divisions wrecked the railroad tracks around Reams Station, five miles south of Warren’s position, before being driven back by eight Confederate brigades that Lee had dispatched from the Petersburg defenses. Confederate brigadier general William Mahone planned an ambitious attack on Fort Davis. (National Archives) Grant’s next move against Lee’s right flank began on September 30, involving elements of V and IX Corps. Combat roiled at Peebles’s Farm for two days. An urgent call for reinforcements at the battlefront was passed to Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, whose II Corps was then minding the defensive zone that included Fort Davis. (Hancock, who had been a hero at the Battle of Gettysburg the previous year, had been nicknamed “Hancock the Superb” by his army colleagues.) A division was required, plus extra staff for a rear-facing line of forts and batteries to anticipate a possible enemy countermove. To cover all bases, Hancock had to undertake a major redistribution of his forces. The 3rd Division brigade occupying Fort Davis marched out and was replaced by a smaller force belonging to the 2nd Division. Enemy shells continued to fly overhead. The summer’s torments included clouds of dust and swarms of insects, but the fall and winter were wet. Maintaining the forts and earthworks was a constant chore. Fort Davis itself had drainage issues; after a heavy rainstorm, two inches of water was left standing inside the works, requiring an extensive new system to channel the unwanted water into the moat. “I was never in a place where the weather was so fickle; to-day, cold and stormy, next day cold and windy, and the next warm and spring like,” lamented an artillery officer posted to Fort Davis in January. “We are now repairing the damage done to our works by the storm. I have a detail of fifty infantry at work besides our own men.” October brought another of Grant’s flanking operations, involving three army corps and most of his available cavalry. This time the Union spearhead reached Boydton Plank Road and battled along the path of a small watercourse that gave the battle its name: Hatcher’s Run. Once more, the operation fell short of its ambitious goals, and once more the line of Federal earthworks expanded. In late October there was more small-scale action. Two New York regiments bore the brunt of the fighting. Each had already seen hard times in the war. The 111th New York, an upstate unit that Major General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson had captured at Harpers Ferry early in the Antietam campaign. The regiment was duly paroled and returned to service with the Army of the Potomac. It fought well at Gettysburg but had recently taken a beating at Reams Station, 10 miles south of Petersburg. The 69th New York had entered the war as a part of the hard-fighting Irish Brigade. The larger unit had been completely worn down. An influx of replacements drawn from reluctant draftees and bounty men had filled the ranks of the 69th but diluted its combative spirit, so much so that when the regiment initially assumed its share of picket duties at Fort Davis, 10 of the new arrivals promptly deserted. A Union gun crew mans “the Dictator,” a mortar that lobbed 200-pound shells at the lines around Petersburg in the summer of 1864. (National Archives) Two of the deserters proved especially garrulous, passing along to the enemy important details about the time­table by which pickets were rotated. The Confederate commander opposite Fort Davis, Brigadier General William Mahone, planned an ambitious operation for the night of October 30, targeting the New Yorkers. A detail of 150 to 200 men in two columns moved forward elbow to elbow through one of the gaps in the Federal picket line between the New York regiments. Once through the gap, the columns pivoted right and left, paralleling the picket line, to begin rolling it up. The Rebels termed this tactic “seine hauling”—they were the net, the Yankees the fish. The New York pickets heard men approaching from the rear and thought it was their relief. Instead, 30 to 40 Confederate soldiers, armed with cocked rifles and fixed bayonets, assailed them and demanded their unconditional surrender. The attackers formed a hollow square to corral their prisoners and herded them off to nearby Confederate rifle pits before returning to repeat the process until they had gathered all the prisoners they could manage. Along with the deserters, a Union command failure had facilitated the Confederate operation. A lieutenant in the 111th New York, Esek W. Hoff, one of the first to encounter the interlopers, managed to escape. Standing orders were to alert the next picket post of any attack, but instead Hoff raced off to warn the overall sector commander. By the time the alarm had been raised, the Confederates had carried off their prisoners—247 of them in all, including 164 from the 69th and 83 from the 111th. November was the first month of the Petersburg campaign with no Union flanking actions, partly to allow soldiers time to vote in the presidential election that pitted President Abraham Lincoln against his Democratic challenger, former Union general George B. McClellan. The month began with four straight days of rain—a period a Fort Davis soldier declared “cold wet and disagreeable.” The rest of the month was punctuated by artillery exchanges; in one, a New Jersey battery fired 280 rounds at a barn on the Confederate side that had become a favorite perch for enemy sharpshooters. The barn, a Union gunner reported, was subsequently “reduced to splinters.” December brought changes to Fort Davis and the overall campaign. Instead of mounting another flanking maneuver, Grant dispatched much of V Corps on a southward raid. The target, 40 miles distant, was a railroad bridge across the Meherrin River that represented a critical piece in Lee’s tenuous supply line. Warren was in charge, but weather issues and Rebel resistance caused him to turn around before he had completed his mission. Grant took note of his failure. Meanwhile, VI Corps returned from its Shenandoah Valley assignment to take over trenches and forts west of Fort Davis. The infusion of new troops allowed Grant to reapportion his forces in preparation for additional flanking moves once the roads dried. As II Corps joined the movements, responsibility for Fort Davis passed to IX Corps, whose territory now extended north as far as the Appomattox River and west to another fortification, Fort Howard. “We are very fortunate in being out of range of the enemy’s guns,” a newly arrived officer of the 186th New York noted, “although a stray bullet from their pickets does now and then come whistling over our heads.” Occasional entertainment was provided by the 9th New Hampshire band, stationed near Fort Davis. The band also had the distasteful task of accompanying processions in which condemned Union soldiers were marched to a nearby execution site—a duty a musician recalled as “frequent.” The newly constructed U.S. Military Railroad, which a reporter described as “one of the wonders and the triumphs of Yankee ingenuity and energy,” ran a mile east and south of Fort Davis. On calm days the sound of the passing trains carried to the Confederate lines. Hoping to interrupt the rail traffic, the Confederates brought up their most technologically advanced artillery piece: a breech-­loading Whitworth cannon, made in England, that fired an elongated hexagonal shell—called a bolt—up to four miles. Two officers at Fort Davis, thinking themselves reasonably safe from the main Rebel lines, were standing atop the parapet when one of the bolts struck them. One officer lost his left arm, the other his right leg. J. B. Stinson, who during the Siege of Petersburg was a surgeon in the Confederate army’s 23rd Battalion, Alabama Sharpshooters, mapped the positions of the opposing forces in this 1908 diagram. (Library of Congress) Grant’s penultimate flanking operation, which would culminate in the Second Battle of Hatcher’s Run, cranked into gear. As the month of March ran its course, large numbers of troops were on the move, conducting reviews, assembling supplies, and lining up for pay. All signs pointed to a serious renewal of combat. Much to the surprise of all, it was the Confederates who initiated that renewal. On March 25, Lee’s forces launched a predawn attack on Forts Stedman and Haskell, three miles northeast of Fort Davis. The high-risk operation failed, and the overwhelming Federal response resulted in a crushing defeat. Meanwhile, to the west of Fort Davis, Union commanders aggressively probed the thinned-out Confederate positions and, at some points, wrested control of enemy picket lines. Inside Fort Davis, the men of Battery B, 1st Pennsylvania Light Artillery, were little more than bystanders, although gunners in nearby Battery 22 fired two dozen rounds of percussion shells in response to a few long-distance enemy shellings. Grant’s final flanking move came in late March, spearheaded by Major General Phil Sheridan’s veteran cavalry, joined by Warren’s V Corps. After a no-decision engagement at Dinwiddie Courthouse on March 31, Sheridan scored a dramatic victory on April 1 at Five Forks, an important crossroads 10 miles southwest of Petersburg. Grant promptly ordered all his remaining forces to attack the next day, an effort to be preceded by a massive artillery bombardment. Grant aimed to break through the enemy lines stretched across Jerusalem Plank Road. All guns would support the attack, beginning with a predawn barrage. Captain William McClelland, Battery B’s commander, hurried back to Fort Davis and called out, “Cannoneers, to your posts!” Once matters were organized to his satisfaction, McClelland rode off to see how Battery 22 was faring. The bombardment continued for several hours. Around 6 a.m. an order arrived from the headquarters of Major General John G. Parke, the commander of IX Corps, for McClelland to send forward two gun detachments to operate captured enemy cannons. An officer and 13 men were designated for the duty; although Lieutenant Thomas C. Rice was in charge, McClelland chose to tag along. On reaching the captured battery, Rice and McClelland found blue-coated soldiers holding the reverse face of the Rebel earthworks, inside of which were six abandoned guns. The enemy had been driven back, but not far away, and still had lines of sight on its lost cannons. In a quick huddle, Rice and McClelland assigned duties, and then the gunners tumbled over the earthworks in a series of jumps and rolls. The gunners manned the nearest pair of cannons, which proved to be brass 12-pounders. “We were not used to smooth bores, but soon mastered that trouble and began to serve up Confederate shells out of Confederate guns that a few hours before had been directed at us,” one of the Union artillerymen later recalled. This stylized lithograph, produced by the firm of Kurz and Allison in the mid-1880s, shows waves of Union solders attacking the Confederate fortifications at Petersburg on April 2, 1865. (Library of Congress) Enemy fire zipped all around them, but the Union cannoneers bent to their task. At one point they drove off a Confederate battery that had come forward to dislodge them, and at another they switched to shrapnel to help beat back a counterattack. Evening came and the firing subsided. The Fort Davis artillerymen had maintained their post at the cost of two dead and several wounded, including McClelland, who lost two fingers. The next morning revealed that the Confederates had quietly withdrawn all their forces from Petersburg. By the time dawn arrived on April 3, the Union bastions along the Petersburg lines had ceased to be relevant. Troops were urgently needed elsewhere, some to pursue Lee’s retreating army, others to secure the city and its abandoned munitions. Batteries not engaged in the pursuit parked their weapons at City Point. The Fort Davis garrison was reduced to the minimum number of men needed to watch over the supplies cached there until they could be removed. The fort’s final link to war came on April 3, when President Lincoln, on his way from Hancock Station to visit Grant in newly captured Petersburg, passed near Fort Davis as he traversed Jerusalem Plank Road. By then, the fort’s chief architect was long gone. At the Battle of Five Forks, Gouverneur Warren had run afoul of terrible-tempered Phil Sheridan for the last time. The two men had butted heads in the Virginia campaigns, with Warren publicly complaining on at least two occasions that “the damned cavalry” kept getting in his way. Sheridan and his mentor, Grant, considered Warren and other engineer-­generals to be a bit timid in the crunch, as evidenced recently by Warren’s failure to seize the enemy railroad bridge over the Meherrin River. Years later, in his best-selling Personal Memoirs, Grant recalled that Warren had been “a man of fine intelligence, great earnestness [and] quick perception” and that “he could see every danger before it occurred.” At Five Forks, Warren had been slow to arrive on the field, having lost precious hours looking for a missing regiment. Grant had given Sheridan full authority to relieve Warren if and when the time came, and now Sheridan took the initiative. “By God, sir, tell General Warren he was not in that fight!” Sheridan raged to a messenger reporting Warren’s approach. When Warren finally arrived on the scene, Sheridan unceremoniously relieved him of duty. It was an ignominious end for the hero of Little Round Top and the builder of Fort Davis. A decade and a half later, a court of inquiry initiated by President Rutherford B. Hayes, Warren’s friend and former comrade in arms, exonerated Warren of blame at Five Forks and ruled Sheridan’s hasty action unjustified. By then it was too late for Warren, who died before the panel’s findings were made public. At his request, Warren was buried in civilian clothes, without any military honors. According to one biographer, his last words were, “The flag, the flag.” MHQ Noah Andre Trudeau is the author of nine books, including, most recently, Lincoln’s Greatest Journey: Sixteen Days That Changed a Presidency, March 24–April 8, 1865 (Savas Beatie, 2016). This article appears in the Summer 2020 issue (Vol. 32, No. 4) of MHQ—The Quarterly Journal of Military History with the headline: Fort and Fortitude Want to have the lavishly illustrated, premium-quality print edition of MHQ delivered directly to you four times a year? Subscribe now at special savings!

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https://www.historynet.com/fourth-crusade-the-second-siege-of-constantinople.htm

Fourth Crusade: The Second Siege of Constantinople

Fourth Crusade: The Second Siege of Constantinople Early in October 1202, a fleet of 200 ships set sail from the lagoon of Venice. Banners whipped from every masthead, some bearing the lion of Venice, others charged with the coats of arms of the noblest houses of France. Leading the fleet was the state galley of Doge Enrico Dandolo, the elected duke of the Venetian Republic. He was more than 80 years old and nearly blind, but undimmed in vigor and ability. His galley was painted imperial vermilion, and a vermilion silk canopy covered the poop deck on which the doge sat in state. In front of him, four silver trumpets sounded, answered from the other ships by hundreds of trumpets, drums and tabors. The goal of this expedition, this Fourth Crusade, was to win back the holy city of Jerusalem. Conquered by Islamic armies in the 7th century, it had been regained for Christendom by the First Crusade in 1099. In 1187, during the Second Crusade and just 15 years before the doge’s fleet set sail, Jerusalem fell to the Muslim Saladin, who then stalemated a recovery attempt by the Third Crusade (1189-92). The Fourth Crusade was to follow a new strategy: strike at Egypt, the base of Muslim power. But it never reached its goal. Instead, a bizarre twist of fate turned the latest crusaders in a totally unexpected direction—toward the great Christian city, Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine (or Eastern Roman) Empire. The Fourth Crusade was actually conceived in 1199 at a jousting tournament held by Thibaut, Count of Champagne, at Ecry-sur-Aisne in northern France. There, in a sudden wave of mass emotion, the assembled knights and barons fell to their knees weeping for the captive Holy Land. They swore solemn oaths to go as armed pilgrims to wrest it from the infidels. In the months that followed, the crusade took form in a series of feudal assemblies headed by Count Thibaut; Baldwin, count of Flanders; and Louis, count of Blois. Rather than wear out their army by a long land-march through hostile territory, the leaders decided to reach Egypt by sea. A delegation of six trusted knights went to Venice, the leading seafaring city of Western Europe, to arrange for passage. One of those envoys, Geoffrey of Villehardouin, marshal of Champagne, later wrote a chronicle of the expedition. In Venice, Villehardouin and his fellow envoys hammered out an agreement with Doge Dandolo and his council. Venice would provide transport ships, crews and a year’s provisions for 4,500 knights with their mounts, 9,000 squires and sergeants (feudal men-at-arms of less than knightly rank), and 20,000 ordinary footmen, for a total of 33,500 men and 4,500 horses. The price for this armada would be 84,000 marks of silver. And the old doge made Venice not a mere supply contractor, but a full partner in the crusade. In return for a half-share of all conquests, Venice would provide an escort force of 50 fully manned war galleys. The great fleet was to sail in the summer of the next year, 1202. About that time, a teenage boy escaped from captivity in Constantinople. He was Alexius Angelus, son of the deposed Byzantine Emperor Isaac II. Six years earlier, in 1195, Isaac’s brother—also named Alexius—had overthrown and imprisoned him, taking the throne for himself as Emperor Alexius III. Isaac was blinded, the traditional Byzantine way of dealing with rivals, since by custom a blind man could not be emperor. Alexius III’s talents did not match his ambition. He made his brother-in-law admiral of the imperial navy. The brother-in-law stripped the fleet bare, selling off gear and entire ships to line his own pockets. The new emperor was also careless in guarding his captives. The blinded Isaac II was no threat, but his son Alexius was able-bodied enough to escape. Eventually he found his way to the court of German King Philip of Swabia, whose queen was the boy’s sister Irene. In the meantime, there was another fateful event—Thibaut of Champagne died before the crusade could set forth. To take his place as leader, his fellow barons chose a northern Italian nobleman, Count Boniface of Montferrat. Boniface had family ties to the nominal Christian king of Jerusalem, leader of the Christians who still held out in parts of the Holy Land. He also happened to be a vassal of King Philip of Swabia, the same with whom young Prince Alexius had taken refuge. Boniface and the young prince probably met when Boniface visited his liege lord’s court late in 1201. And now came the seeding of a new plan—the crusaders could stop at Constantinople on their way to Egypt, overthrow the usurper Alexius III and put the young Alexius on the imperial throne. For 500 years, it may be recalled, the Byzantine Empire had been Christendom’s chief bulwark against the Islamic challenge. By 1201 the empire, though greatly shrunken and weakened, was still the most powerful and best organized of Christian states. But relations between Byzantines and Western Christians had deteriorated steadily through the century of the crusades, over which they were often at odds. From a Western viewpoint, an emperor who owed his throne to crusaders might be more cooperative. During the late spring of 1202, the crusaders began to gather at Venice. By the intended departure date their host totaled some 10,000 men, far short of the 33,500 planned for—and too few to provide the agreed upon charter fee. The Venetians had suspended their regular commerce to build and equip an immense fleet. Now they demanded that the crusaders hold up their end of the deal: 84,000 marks, or no crusade. The Fourth Crusade seemed on the point of collapse. Then Doge Dandolo made an offer. The Venetians would suspend the unpaid balance of the transport charge in return for a small consideration—the crusaders’ assistance in conquering the city of Zara (later to become Zadar, Yugoslavia), a Hungarian-owned port on the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic. To the more pious crusaders, this was a devil’s bargain, an unholy act of war against fellow Christians. But others, including the leading barons, saw no choice if the crusade was to go forward. With some difficulty, they persuaded the dissidents to go along. At last the fleet could set forth. It included three main ship types. About 40 vessels, called simply ships, were standard Mediterranean heavy cargo ships, two-deckers for the most part, with high fore- and after-castles, twin steering oars and two masts on which triangular lateen sails were hung from long sloping yards. They were slow and unhandy, but their size and height made them effective in defense—or in attack against fixed objectives. Offering mobile support were 60 fighting galleys, rowed not by chained slaves or convicts, but by free and armed Venetian seamen. The remaining 100 or so ships were uissiers (or huissiers), horse transports. These resembled galleys, but were larger and heavier, with fewer oars. An uissier’s hold was divided into stalls for horses, which were firmly strapped into place when the vessel was underway. A door-like hatch over an entry port in the hull aft could be lowered, drawbridge-fashion, to lead the horses in and out of the hold. These medieval counterparts to the LST (landing ship, tank) allowed knights to go ashore ready for immediate action. On November 10, the fleet reached Zara, which surrendered after a 14-day siege. Many knights deserted rather than take part. (One was Simon de Montfort, whose son, also named Simon de Montfort, later won fame in England as the father of Parliament. The elder Simon’s moral scruples about crusading against Christians were short-lived, for it was he who later led the brutal Albigensian crusade, which ravaged much of southern France in the name of stamping out heresy.) After Zara, meanwhile, Pope Innocent III excommunicated the Venetians and threatened to excommunicate the entire crusade. The crusaders set up winter quarters at Zara, as it was too late in the season to go on. There, the leaders met with Prince Alexius and agreed to put him on the Byzantine throne in place of Alexius III. The usurper was hated in Constantinople, Prince Alexius assured them. In return for the crusaders’ aid, he promised to pay off their debt to the Venetians and lead a Byzantine army in the proposed assault on Egypt. In the spring of 1203, the crusade set out from Zara. And then an odd incident took place as the fleet rounded the southern tip of Greece. The crusaders passed passed two ships carrying knights and men-at-arms—who hid their faces in shame when the ships were hailed and boarded. They had never joined the main crusading force at Venice, but had sailed to the Holy Land on their own from another port. The errant knights had accomplished nothing and suffered heavily from the plague before giving up. According to Villehardouin, one now deserted in reverse. Do what you like with anything I’ve left behind, he told his comrades, I’m going with these people, for it certainly seems to me they’ll win some land for themselves! And with that less-than-pious remark, he jumped into the boat with the departing boarding party and joined the fleet. On June 24, 1203, the fleet passed in review beneath the walls of Constantinople. The crusaders landed on the Asian side of the Bosporus and—following a skirmish ashore—set up a base at the city of Scutari, just a mile across the Bosporus from Constantinople. On July 3, at Dandolo’s suggestion, they tried to trigger a popular rising in young Alexius’ favor. Alexius stood dressed in state robes on the poop of a galley that rowed back and forth under the walls of the city to display their rightful emperor to the people. The response was less than overwhelming. When the galley came close to the walls it was met by a hail of arrows, not by the hoped-for cheers. That episode was fair warning for the crusaders’ leaders, who, especially wily old Dandolo, have been accused of cynically plotting the conquest of Constantinople for their own profit. If Dandolo and the other leaders sincerely believed in Prince Alexius as their vehicle, their belief was wrong. A Byzantine emperor was not a dynastic king like those of the feudal West. In the Roman imperial tradition, he was more a president for life with absolute authority. Whoever could take the throne and hold it was accepted as emperor. But young Alexius had no special right to the throne simply because he was the son of a deposed former emperor—and, whatever the Byzantines thought of their present emperor, they would not take a new one at the hands of foreigners. Losing hope of a popular uprising, the crusaders then settled down to the serious matter at hand. The city of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul, Turkey) was roughly triangular, set on a peninsula between the Sea of Marmara on the south and the Golden Horn, the city’s great harbor, on the north. Only to the west could it be attacked by land—and the land walls were one of the world’s greatest fortifications. Built 800 years earlier by the Roman Emperor Theodosius the Great, they consisted of a moat backed up by a parapet, and behind that a double wall. Less elaborate single walls protected the city along the Marmara shore and the Golden Horn harbor front. The Golden Horn was guarded by a chain across the harbor entrance, and the far end of the chain was covered in turn by a fortress called the Tower of Galata. Armies far mightier than the crusaders had dashed themselves to ruin before those defenses. Constantinople withstood two epic sieges by the Muslim Arabs, from 673 to 678 and in 717, and other sieges by Avars, Bulgars and Russian Vikings. Manning its walls were the hard core of the Byzantine army, the feared ax-wielding Varangian Guard. First recruited from Vikings, the Varangian Guard became heavily Anglo-Saxon in the years after the Norman conquest of England. Aiding the defense were Pisans, bitter trading rivals of the Venetians. The city’s first line of defense normally would have been the dromons, Byzantium’s great double-banked galleys. But the graft of the emperor’s brother-in-law had reduced the fleet to 20 old and useless ships. The Byzantines could only take defensive positions and wait for the blow to land. It came on July 5. The crusaders crossed the Bosporus, landing near the Tower of Galata. A few dromons could have intervened with decisive effect at this point, but no Byzantine ships were fit for action. Emperor Alexius III led a large field army out to oppose the landing. Crusader horse-transports ran onto the beach, supported by crossbow and archery fire, and dropped their entry-port covers as ramps. Down rode armored French knights, lances couched. A century earlier, the Byzantine princess and historian Anna Comnena had written that a French knight’s charge would make a hole through the walls of Babylon. The Byzantines retreated, abandoning tents and booty to the crusaders. The Tower of Galata was now open to attack. Its English, Danish and Pisan garrison mounted an active defense, making sallies against the invaders. In one such action the defenders were forced back and could not shut the gates of the tower before the advancing French. It fell by storm. A giant Venetian transport, Aquila (Eagle), charged the harbor chain under full sail and snapped it. Venetian galleys rowed into the harbor, quickly disposing of the weak Byzantine squadron drawn up behind the chain. The crusaders then took up quarters in the unwalled suburbs of Pera and Estanor on the north side of the Golden Horn. Their leaders met to plan their attack on the city itself. Doge Dandolo recommended an attack on the harbor wall. It was less formidable than the land walls, and the big transports could nudge close to serve as floating siege towers. The French, however, wanted to fight ashore, in their own element. The final decision was to mount a double attack, the Venetians against the harbor wall and the French against the north end of the land wall, adjacent to the Palace of Blachernae. This section of wall was a late addition and somewhat weaker than the original Theodosian land walls. After crossing the Golden Horn, the French took up a position opposite the wall, near a fortified monastery they called Bohemond’s Castle after a hero of the First Crusade. The double assault was launched on July 17. The Venetian fleet formed up in line and advanced against the harbor wall. The big transports raised flying assault bridges, fashioned from spars and suspended from their foremasts, an arrangement that allowed men on the bridgeheads to fight, three abreast, from positions equal in height to the tops of the towers they were assaulting. Fire support was provided by mangonels and petraries, catapult-like mechanical artillery set up aboard the ships. Light and speedy by comparison, the maneuverable galleys were ready to throw reinforcements ashore where needed. The attack hung in the balance until Doge Dandolo ordered his own galley to advance and set him ashore. The courage of the old doge fired up the Venetians, and they pressed home the attack. The Venetian banner was hoisted atop a wall tower. Soon 25 towers—about a mile of wall—were taken. Behind the wall, however, the Varangian guardsmen held their ground. Unable to advance, the Venetians set fire to nearby buildings. Driven by the wind, the fire then burned much of the city. The Venetians also captured a few horses on the waterfront, and with some irony, as one naval historian put it, sent them around to the French knights. The French attack on the land wall did not go so well. Scaling ladders were less effective than the Venetians’ floating siege towers, and the assault was thrown back. Emperor Alexius III took to the field in a counterattack, leading an imperial force of nine battles, or massed formations, out the gates. The French met it with seven battles of their own. As often happened with feudal armies, the logic of command and control conflicted with the chivalric impulse to be first in the attack. Count Baldwin, in command of the leading battle, at first held his ground, but other crusaders went brashly forward—forcing Baldwin to follow, to save face—until they all found themselves dangerously exposed to the Byzantine army and out of sight of most of their own force. Word of the French peril reached Doge Dandolo. Saying he would live or die with the crusaders, he ordered his men to abandon their hard-won towers and redeploy in support of their allies. And at the sight of Venetian galleys moving up the harbor to set more troops ashore, the emperor retreated into the city. He had achieved his tactical objective, holding off the French and forcing the Venetians to abandon their gains. But Alexius III also had lost his nerve. That night he fled the city with his mistress and a favorite daughter — leaving his empress behind. Byzantine nobles hastily met and restored blinded old Isaac II, young Alexius’ father, in disregard of the tradition that made blindness a bar to the throne. When the crusaders heard of this, they demanded that young Alexius be crowned alongside his father. They still had a powerful army and fleet, they had nearly taken the city, and there was no real leadership among the defenders. The demand was granted, and young Alexius was escorted into the city in state, along with the doge and the leading French counts and barons. The crusaders’ assault had failed tactically, but it had won its strategic objective. The late emperor, Alexius III, was a fugitive, and young Alexius now sat crowned beside his father as Emperor Alexius IV. And next? It was too late in the season to go on, but the crusaders looked forward to receiving supplies and Byzantine reinforcements. Come spring they could sail on to Egypt and restore the Holy Land to the Cross. Alas, young Alexius could not keep the grand promises he had made. The imperial treasury was empty. Moreover, while the Byzantines and the crusaders were now allies in theory, their relationship was actually poor and grew steadily worse. The Byzantines detested the crudity of the French and the highhandedness of the Venetians. In turn, the Westerners despised the Byzantines as effete cowards. After repeated riots, one of which led to a second disastrous fire, individual crusaders no longer dared show themselves in the city. Moreover, Byzantine hatred of the barbarians extended beyond the crusaders to embrace all the Western Europeans who lived in the city — even the Pisans who had fought recently and well on the Byzantine side. Men, women and children were massacred. The survivors fled to the crusader camp, considerably reinforcing the invaders’ army. Young Alexius IV could not raise enough money to satisfy the crusaders, nor could he force them away. He fell under the influence of a noble adviser, Alexius Ducas, popularly known as Mourtzouphlos, a name that referred to his prominent, bushy eyebrows. Eventually, Mourtzouphlos did a typically Byzantine thing — he lured the young emperor into a trap, kidnapped and imprisoned him, and took the throne for himself. Mourtzouphlos, now Emperor Alexius V (the third Emperor Alexius in one year!), was more of a leader than his recent predecessors. He slammed shut the gates of the city against the crusaders and put the defenses in order. Wooden superstructures were built atop the towers of the harbor wall, raising them two or three stories and reducing the effectiveness of the Venetian ships as floating siege towers. Gates in the wall were bricked up to eliminate weak spots in the defenses. Mourtzouphlos also took active outreach measures. The crusader fleet was moored in the Golden Horn, directly across from the city. One December night when the wind blew from the south, he launched a fireship attack against the Venetian fleet. It was a textbook situation — in the confined anchorage, against a lee shore, the Venetians could not simply drop back and let the fireships burn out. But they were not rattled. They manned their galleys, drove off boatloads of archers covering the fire attack, grappled the fireships and towed them clear of the fleet. According to Villehardouin, No men ever defended themselves more gallantly on the sea than the Venetians did that night. In January, Mourtzouphlos received word that a crusader foraging expedition was raiding the town of Philia, some miles northwest of Constantinople. He ambushed the returning crusaders, but the cornered and outnumbered French knights rallied to the counterattack. They drove off the Byzantines and captured the imperial standard and the holy icon that traditionally accompanied Byzantine emperors into battle. Mourtzouphlos nonetheless returned to Constantinople and proclaimed a victory. Asked about the standard and icon, he claimed that they were put away in safekeeping. Word of this lie quickly reached the crusaders, who did the logical thing: they mounted standard and icon on a Venetian galley and paraded them back and forth under the harbor walls. That affair was fatal to the unfortunate prisoner Alexius IV. Mourtzouphlos, humiliated, feared a palace revolt in the young deposed emperor’s name. After several efforts at poisoning failed, Mourtzouphlos had him strangled. Old Isaac II died about the same time, probably without need of assistance. The crusaders saw they could not hope to have the cooperation of any Byzantine emperor. They resolved instead to conquer the city and take the entire Byzantine Empire for themselves. Six French and six Venetian nobles were to elect a new emperor, who would receive a quarter of the empire in his own name, the rest being divided between French feudal fiefs and Venetian holdings. Doge Dandolo—who had gradually emerged as the real leader of the crusade—saw to it that the Venetians owed no feudal duties for their quarter and a half (that is, three-eighths) of the Empire. In the previous assault, the Venetians had succeeded against the harbor wall, so the French leaders were persuaded to join them in another amphibious attempt. Knights and horses embarked in the horse transports; others boarded the assault ships. As armor protection against Byzantine mechanical artillery, the ships were protected by wooden mantlets, which were covered with vines, to soften impacts, and vinegar-soaked leather as protection against incendiary Greek fire. On the morning of April 9, 1204, the fleet moved forward against the harbor wall to the sound of trumpets, drums and tabors, with flags and pennants flying. But a south wind made it difficult to close with the shore, and only the largest ships carried structures high enough to match Mourtzouphlos’ new defenses. Men on the bridges traded indecisive strokes with the ax-wielding Varangians in the towers. Other crusaders landed below the walls. Under cover of defensive shells called turtles, they attempted to break through the bricked-up gates. To no avail. After several hours and no success, the crusaders were forced back, and the fleet retired. They had lost about 100 dead, while Byzantine losses were few. According to Robert de Clari, a knight who wrote an eyewitness account, some defenders added insult to injury. They dropped their breechclouts and displayed bare buttocks to the retreating crusaders. Mourtzouphlos had personally directed the defense from high ground behind the harbor wall, near the monastery of Christ Pantopoptes, the All-Seeing. Now he proclaimed success to his people. “Am I not a good Emperor?” he asked them, and answered his own question: “I am the best Emperor you have ever had. I will dishonor and hang them all.” A weary and dispirited group of crusading leaders met that evening to plan their next move. Some of the French suggested an attack on the Sea of Marmara side of the city, where the defenses had not been reinforced. Doge Dandolo explained that this was not practical, as the currents and prevailing winds would interfere with an assault there. The final decision was for another attempt on the harbor wall, with one important innovation. The big transports were lashed together in pairs, allowing two ships’ bridges and assault groups to concentrate against each tower. The assault was planned for Monday, April 12. On Sunday, all the crusaders, including the excommunicated Venetians, celebrated Mass. To allow greater concentration on the task at hand, according to Robert de Clari, all the prostitutes accompanying the crusading army were bustled onto a ship and sent far away. On Monday the fleet attacked, aided this time by a favoring wind. But the previous setback had raised the defenders’ spirits, and the walls and towers were heavily manned. For hours the fighting was indecisive. Then a gust of wind pushed two of the largest ships, Peregrino (Pilgrim) and Paradiso, hard up against the foreshore. An assault bridge made contact with the top level of a tower, and a Venetian scrambled onto it, only to be cut down. Then a French knight named André d’Ureboise made it across and stood his ground. (He must have been a man of exceptional skill and valor to be able to fight fully armored high above a swaying ship). Reinforcements joined d’Ureboise, and the Varangian defenders were forced out of the tower. Within minutes, five towers fell to the attackers. The action now turned to the base of the wall. A group of men with picks broke through a bricked-up gate. A warlike priest — Robert de Clari’s brother Aleaumes—crawled through the hole and drove back the defenders on the other side. A handful of knights climbed through after him. That breakthrough took place right below Mourtzouphlos’ command post. The emperor spurred forward to counterattack. The crusaders stood their ground, and he retreated. For him, and for Byzantium, it was a fatal loss of nerve. Other gates were broken open, and war horses swarmed out of the transports and into the city. The crusader knights formed up for a mounted charge. The Byzantine defensive formation broke, and the emperor himself fled into one of his palaces. The corner had been turned, but the crusaders were worn out by the day’s fighting and still outnumbered. They expected weeks of street-by-street fighting to come, and took up a defensive position along the wall, torched nearby buildings—the siege’s third fire—to protect themselves against a counterattack in the night. During the night, Alexius Mourtzouphlos Ducas fled, just as Alexius III had the previous fall. Resistance ceased. For the next three days, this greatest of Christian cities suffered a thorough and ruthless sack. Priceless treasures of antiquity were smashed to pieces or melted down for their precious metals. While the French knights and men-at-arms went on a drunken rampage, the Venetians set to work like seasoned professional thieves, scooping up the best of the fallen city’s treasures. The four great bronze horses that now grace the front of St. Mark’s in Venice are only the most notable monuments to the thoroughness of their rapacity. The Byzantine Empire never recovered. The Latin Empire that the crusaders set up in its place was a shaky affair that never gained control of much former Byzantine territory. Boniface of Montferrat, the crusade’s nominal leader, was pushed aside, and Baldwin of Flanders became Emperor Baldwin I. The next year he was taken prisoner in an ill-advised battle. Soon the Empire was reduced to little more than the city of Constantinople, and in 1262 it was retaken by a Byzantine emperor-in-exile, Michael Paleologus. But the restored Byzantium never regained its former power and was finally and forever extinguished by the Turks in 1453. As a military operation, the Fourth Crusade stands out as one of history’s great amphibious assaults. Twice the harbor wall of Constantinople fell to direct assault from the ships of the Venetian fleet. In most land sieges, deploying just one siege tower was a major effort. The Venetian fleet had deployed an entire line of them! During the later age of men-of-war armed with cannon, this newborn amphibious capability was lost. Successful amphibious assaults were rare during the age of fighting sail. Even in World War I, when the Allies unsuccessfully attacked Gallipoli (prelude to an intended assault on Constantinople), soldiers were condemned to flounder ashore in ships’ boats ineffectually supported by warships. Not until World War II did amphibious warfare again reach the level of sophistication embodied in the Venetian fleet during the Fourth Crusade. This article was written by Richard McCaffery Robinson and originally appeared in the August 1993 issue of Military History magazine. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Military History magazine today!

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Frank D. Baldwin’s service as an Indian fighter

Frank D. Baldwin’s service as an Indian fighter Hardly known today, this soldier not only earned two Medals of Honor, a rare distinction indeed, but also served his country in conflicts stretching from the Civil War through the Indian campaigns of the Old West and even to World War I, albeit by then strictly as an administrator. His enemies during all those years ranged from the Confederate defenders of Atlanta to Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse to Filipino Insurrectos. Responding to President Abraham Lincoln’s call for volunteers in April 1861, Frank Dwight Baldwin soon was serving with the 19th Michigan Infantry as a second lieutenant. There would be many stops along the way, but his career really peaked during his years as an Indian fighter. Even so, he did earn his first Medal of Honor during the Civil War—for leading his men in a countercharge in the Battle of Peachtree Creek on July 12, 1864, a significant moment in Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s Atlanta campaign. And no…not only leading the charge, his citation notes, but actually outstripping his men “under galling fire,” penetrating the enemy line alone, and then “capturing and bringing back 2 commissioned officers, fully armed, besides a guidon of a Georgia regiment.” He had been captured himself more than a year before, held briefly at Libby Prison in Richmond and then exchanged. He had also acquitted himself heroically in the Battle of Stone’s River at Murfreesboro, Tenn., where he again was captured, only to be released later the same day. Those apparently were his first two combat experiences…not an auspicious start, true. Baldwin, however, soon “found his stride as a soldier,” noted Robert C. Carriker in his biographical sketch in the book Soldiers West: Biographies from the Military Frontier. “From May 1864 until April 1865, Baldwin participated in 15 engagements against the Confederates. He distinguished himself in several battles, most especially at Peachtree Creek, near Atlanta.” Soon promoted to captain, Baldwin was a lieutenant colonel of volunteers by war’s end. Like so many other Civil War veterans, he returned to civilian life…but not for long. “A brief fling at farming, even a return to college, could not measure up to the enterprising life he had known in the military,” Carriker noted. In early 1866 Baldwin joined up again, this time as a second lieutenant in the Regular Army. He found a home out West with the 5th U.S. Infantry. There, he would serve under the colorful Colonel Nelson A. Miles—a fellow Civil War veteran, Indian fighter and future Medal of Honor recipient, as well as the future commander in chief of the U.S. Army. With Miles as his mentor, Baldwin became the 5th Infantry’s chief of scouts for the Red River War in the Texas Panhandle in 1874 and 1875. As also noted by biographer Carriker, “The scouts normally operated outside the full command, seeking the best trails, locating water holes and camping spots, and reporting Indian movements.” Thus they were in advance positions that “often put them in direct conflict with hostile warriors.” In the meantime, Baldwin was soon noted for his distinguished conduct in the first Battle of Palo Duro Canyon. He then led three men in such a tough and daring ride carrying dispatches to Camp Supply— 180 miles in 31⁄2 days with Indians in pursuit—that their dash became known as “Baldwin’s Ride.” Just three weeks later, he earned his second Medal of Honor while leading his soldiers in an attack at McClellan’s Creek in Gray County, Texas, that led to the recovery of Julia Arminda and Nancy Adelaide German, two young sisters who had been captured and held as hostages by the Indians. In this affair, surprised to stumble upon the camp of Cheyenne Chief Grey Beard on November 8, 1874, “Baldwin launched an attack using nine wagons and his entire command of scouts, plus a company of infantry at his disposal, about 125 men in all.” Already known for his “Ride,” Baldwin now was famous for his “Charge of the Wagon Train.” For all that, promotions in the Army for young officers like Baldwin were few and far between, but Miles did what he could for his trusted subaltern. Thus it was with Miles’ support that Baldwin was awarded both of his Medals of Honor three years apart in the early 1890s—long after the actions cited. And it came as no surprise when Baldwin was named Miles’ battalion adjutant, as the 5th Infantry took to the field in pursuit of Sitting Bull after the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876. Baldwin and his men dispersed the Sioux chief’s camp at Redwater Creek, although Sitting Bull himself escaped into Canada. Baldwin quickly earned his brevet to major for rallying his troops in an assault against Crazy Horse. Made a permanent major in 1898, a lieutenant colonel in 1900 and a brigadier general in 1902, Baldwin retired after fighting rebel forces in the Philippines in the wake of the Spanish-American War. He went back into service during World War I for a stint as Colorado’s adjutant general before ending his years of service as a retired major general. He may not be all that well remembered today, nor was he even when he died in 1923, but in the settlement of the 19th-century American West, noted his eulogist, General William C. Brown, “few names stand higher than that of Frank D. Baldwin.” Originally published in the April 2006 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here.

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From Anzio’s Beaches to the Burma Jungle

From Anzio’s Beaches to the Burma Jungle After 53 missions on two continents, a B-25 pilot endured months of maltreatment in a Japanese prison camp. John Henry McCloskey Jr.’s fascination with flying began in 1930, when as an 8-year-old he witnessed a neighbor buzzing the skies above Pittsburgh in his plane. From that moment on, McCloskey knew that he wanted to become a pilot. World War II gave him his chance. After completing pilot training in early 1943, McCloskey was told that he would pilot a North American B-25 and attended a transition school at Greenville, S.C. Several months later he joined the 434th Squadron of the 12th Bombardment Group (Medium) just in time to participate in one of the most significant actions of the war—the Anzio campaign. McCloskey was interviewed by Nicholas P. Ciotola for Aviation History in 2003. He died in 2005 at the age of 83. Aviation History: What was it like to go to Europe as a B-25 pilot? McCloskey: We were supposed to fly our own planes over. I was disappointed when we did not, but that particular series of B-25s had some glitches that had to be corrected. We were taken over there by Air Transport Command. My first bombing mission was in Italy, somewhere around Naples. I flew plane No. 80, which had the name Sad Sack on its side. It had a picture of a poor little guy walking along bent way over, with a 500-pound bomb on his back. We did not necessarily fly the same airplane each time. They just assigned you to an airplane. We had our briefing beforehand and were told exactly what the mission was about, where it was and how we were supposed to hit it. AH: Do you remember your first mission where you encountered enemy planes or flak? McCloskey: Yes—the flak more than fighters, because we always flew with high cover, and often the cover came from British Spitfires being flown by Americans. Flak was the big thing we were concerned with. With the night missions, all you could see were flashes, but during the daytime [you would see] the flak bursts. It was a big black burst. Sometimes they would throw in one that would burst red, to keep you aware of the fact that it was there. It was scary stuff because the flak that you would see out in front of you or above you was harmless. What you did not see was down below you. You could hear that hitting the plane, and if that hit the right place it would put an engine out. One piece of flak took the map out of my bombardier’s hands. It came up through the fiberglass nose and took it right out of his hands. Strangely enough, after a while you would just climb in and go—like it was an ordinary practice mission. For me it got to be pretty old after 53 missions. AH: How many bombers would generally go out on a mission, and how would they be guarded? McCloskey: We had four squadrons in our group, the 81st, 82nd, 83rd and 434th. We were the 434th. We did everything the others did and flew the same missions. On a mission there were 12 airplanes from each squadron, 48 planes flying in formation. The air cover would be about 3,000 or 4,000 feet above us, just watching what was going on. If any enemies came along, the fighters engaged them. Otherwise they just flew cover for us. Sometimes if there were no enemy fighters they would come down lower and fly formation with us. We did not have to fight off too many fighters. We had tail gunners, and they were pretty good. We did have lots and lots of flak. We flew over Monte Cassino four times, and every time we got shot up. AH: What role did you play in the attacks at Anzio? McCloskey: I led the opening mission on the Anzio beachhead with B-25s at the crack of dawn [on January 22, 1944]. We were there to try to mess up their transportation: railroad crossings, railroad yards, roads. When we got to the bay around Anzio, our Navy was sitting down there—looked like a hundred ships. As soon as we turned into land, the anti-aircraft guns shot the daylights out of all of us. When we returned, our bomb doors were hanging open, the nose gear was hanging out and we had 119 flak holes in the airplane. But my two engines were running just fine, and nobody in the crew was hit. We were over that target about four times all told before we broke up their defenses and could move on toward Rome. AH: Were you ever the pilot of the lead plane? McCloskey: Well, the first pilot was the captain and the commander of the airplane, and the lead pilot served as the leader of the whole formation. You had to know exactly where your checkpoints were. You are going to fly here, you are going to fly there, then you are going to make your initial point over a certain spot on the ground and fly straight and level from there on in, so that the bombardier can get his sighting down. The first pilot had to be in touch with the navigator-bombardier—it was a combination occupation. If it was a difficult place to find, he would be more of a navigator-bombardier, but if it was a tough target he would be more a bombardier-navigator type of guy. The co-pilot knew what his duties were. He did not have to do much more than pull up the wheels and make adjustments to the power and so forth. These were good, qualified pilots, but some of them never wanted to be a first pilot. They were willing to go ahead and fly as co-pilot. Others were gung-ho. I never wanted to be a co-pilot, and I never was. I just wanted to be the big shot. When you would go out on a long ride and were not on autopilot—which we were not most of the time in the B-25—the co-pilot would do the straight and level flying. When you came to the target area and into the tougher flying, the first pilot always did that. The first pilot usually did the takeoffs and landings. Being the first pilot was more prestigious. AH: Did you and the other members of the crew realize that the first Anzio sortie was an important mission and expect stiff resistance? McCloskey: Beforehand, no. We knew we were going to see our Navy there and that it was a sea landing and a ground force combination. We knew it was an important target, but we did not count on it as a more difficult target because we always got flak. More or less, it was just another mission. But we came off that target pretty well shot up. The nice part was that no crew member was hurt and the engines were still going. As long as I flew, I never lost an engine. Not many people were that lucky. AH: Were there any times when you were attacked by enemy aircraft? McCloskey: When I was in Italy, the German pilots did not make any real concerted attempts to shoot us down. They did not take too many chances on getting shot down themselves. They would make a pass and break it off when they saw we returned fire. I do not know that we ever shot one down, and I do not know if they shot one of us down. The fighters were much more aggressive against the B-17s and B-24s, because they could not maneuver as well as we could. As soon as the flak would start to come up, the fighters would get out of the way anyway. AH: What did you do after Anzio? McCloskey: I flew a total of 48 missions in Europe, and I cannot remember whether Anzio was the 46th, 47th or 48th mission. All of a sudden we were ready to taxi out to our 49th mission, and they called us back. We were told we were standing down. The next day we were on trucks going someplace in the heel of Italy. We were on a boat the next day. We did not know where we were going until we started out into the Mediterranean, and we figured if we turned west we were going to England and if we turned east we were going someplace else. Well, we turned east and went to Egypt. We went to a camp near Cairo and remained there for probably 30 days, for rest and recuperation. From there it was on to Bombay, India. We traveled across India on what they called “40 and 8” cars. They were designed for 40 men or 8 cattle, crude railroad cars. You wonder why, when we had transport airplanes, they did not fly us there. But we went all the way across India on these 40 and 8s. We went to Calcutta up to Kurmitola, and then started flying missions into Burma. AH: How many missions did you fly in that area? McCloskey: I was on my fifth mission when I was shot down. We were flying low-level missions, coming down to 200 or 300 feet and even lower. Transportation was our main target. We were flying over a single-track railroad. The idea was just to blow the railroad off the face of the earth. That would prevent the trains from going on that track for a day or two. We had to keep continuously knocking them out and the roads as well. When we were flying against the railroads, we would fly single passes. I had three airplanes, my plane and the planes of my two wingmen, and there were four flights like that. The object was to hit that railroad and knock out as many sections of it as possible. AH: Why did you fly so close to the ground? Flying that low means you’re more vulnerable to groundfire. McCloskey: That is what got me. Most of the time you could fly through that and get several bullet holes, but this particular time they probably hit a fuel line in the bomb bay, setting the airplane on fire. My waist gunner had the fire extinguisher, and he attempted to put the fire out. His hands and arms were burned. We were over the jungle, so we knew we could not crash land. So in order to save the crew members’ lives I had to get some altitude in order to bail out. The first thing I did was start a climbing turn toward the west, to get as far away from the target as we could and to get to 1,000 feet. Then you have to make the decision. We were on fire and were not going to put the fire out, so we had to bail out. The first pilot does not go until everybody is gone. You know what you have to do, and you do it. I had already achieved 1,000 feet, so I knew that their chutes would open all right—except whatever happened to my co-pilot. He went a little wild in the airplane. He was the first one to go. I said: “You’re first. Go.” He bailed out, and the chute never opened. Either he hit his head on the way out or the chute failed to open. The Japanese later brought me a couple of family pictures that they took from this guy. They said he landed on the ground with his chute unopened. Once my crew got out, it was my turn. The fire had burned out most of the controls. I got up to get my chute pack between the pilot seat and the co-pilot’s seat. The airplane started to pull up like it wanted to stall, and I did not want it to stall with me still in it, so I reached over and pushed the control column forward, and it just flopped up against the firewall. I just got out of there. As I jumped out, the plane pulled up and spun. It crashed and burned, and I found myself in the top of a tree. There was a limb directly under me. There I was about 70 feet in the air, and I had to lower myself out of my chute to get my feet onto that limb and then see to it that I did not fall off of there before I got it straddled. My uniform was soaking wet. I got onto this limb into the tree and got wrapped around the tree. I got my leg off that limb and started to shinny down the tree. About halfway down it got too big for me, so I slid the rest of the way. I hit the ground right on my bum and also sprained both ankles. That fractured the first lumbar vertebrae. I was not in good shape when I got down. AH: What did you do next? McCloskey: I got up and was able to walk a little bit, and walked through the jungle. There was a lot of bamboo about knee-high growing above the underbrush. It was very difficult to get through it. You had to lift it out of the way or try and climb over it. I went back to the plane but could not get near it because it was burning and ammunition inside was going off. I finally came to a prominent path that had a lot of traffic on it. I followed it into a Burmese village. AH: Were the villagers helpful? McCloskey: They did as much for me as they could, but they were behind Japanese lines. If they had got caught trying to help me, the Japanese would have burned them out. The villagers put me in an ox cart that delivered me to a little Japanese outpost. They were making all kinds of signs about what they were going to do to me. They piled me into another ox cart, and it was not long, a half hour at most, when we got to this stockade and went through these big gates. There sitting on the right-hand side was the rest of my crew, except for my co-pilot. AH: What was going through your mind? Did you think that they were going to harm or kill you? McCloskey: Oh boy, I thought both. My crew was there, but they were sitting there all by themselves. They pulled me past them and turned me over to the Japanese officers, who took me into an elevated platform. They interrogated me, and I tried to let on like I did not know who the crew was. The Japanese were not having any of that. Then they put us together, and we compared notes on what we had said. They were trying to compare what I had said to what my crew said. But we were saying very little. Our training was that you do not tell them anything except your name, rank and serial number. Well, after they kick you around awhile and twist your sprained ankles, you tell them something, so I told them about where I lived in Bellevue, Pa. Before they got through interrogating me they told me all the answers to the questions they had asked me. They knew more about my group than I did. They knew the commanding officer and this officer and that officer, how many in a squadron and the whole works. AH: What happened after your interrogation? McCloskey: They finally put me back with my guys, and a few days after that they put us on a railroad car, just an ordinary freight car. We started south and came to the bombed-out railroad tracks. They had to take us back, since they could not take us that way. A day or two after that, they put us in trucks. The idea was to get us to Rangoon; there was a prison camp down there. We were put into this city jail, a building with three huge rooms on the first floor. I guess that is all they had, just three rooms, and a Japanese night guard sat there. We were in our cell with steel bars on the front of it, probably 5 or 6 yards wide and 8 or 10 yards deep. The back of it was a toilet gutter. Up on top of the wall was the water closet. It looked just like our toilet with a rocker on it; if you pulled a string, it would let the water down and wash out the gutter. We got a bar out of that. It was a cast iron bar—the thing that pulled the plunger up—and we were able to break the chain that secured the door. We then had to approach this one guard who we knew went to sleep every night. We had to walk far; Louis Bishop was with me. There were six of us involved in this breakout. Mostly they were my crew, but Bishop was not. He was a fighter pilot. He and I were elected to go and do this first thing, so we tiptoed up to this guard. Bishop had this bar that we had broken the door with, and he came down on that guy’s head. Boy, I thought that he killed him, but this guy came up fighting and making a lot of racket. The noise woke up a Burmese flunky and a Japanese captain, and the next thing you know the place was flooded with armed Japanese. Instead of trying to get out the front gate, we went into a courtyard, and the Japanese were there. I had the guard’s rifle and could not get the bolt home for some reason, so I could not fire the gun. Maybe it was just as well, because if I could have, I would have shot one of them. I got the nozzle end and was going to swing but then I thought, “I’m not going to do any good,” so I just gave up. They took us back inside and beat us all night long. I had a leather belt come around my head and the metal tip hit me in the right eye. It closed that eye just like that. They spent the night and the next several days beating on us. We were sitting on a damp floor in our underpants facing the gate to that big room. At night we lay down, and we hated to see the dawn coming because it would be just another day of bad treatment. They kept us there for about 20 days. I figured the six of us that tried the escape would be singled out. I fully expected to be killed. I really did. You are not really afraid when you know they are going to kill you. You just hope they do a clean job of it. When it looks like you’re not going to get killed, that is when you get scared. They used bamboo sticks to beat us more. They punched and kicked, but they never went after the privates or anything like that. Maybe it was just a matter of principle. We got away a lot better than a lot of other prisoners in Japanese camps. Their guards were much meaner and nastier than the guys we had. AH: What were the rules about talking to your cellmates? And what about food and sanitation? McCloskey: The cells were just bars between cells. There was nothing to block our view of each other. Bishop and I were in the first cell. Lofty Westberg and another fellow who was not one of my crew were in the cell next to us. Right across from us were two more crew members. We were not allowed to talk. But at night we whispered back and forth. As for sanitation, there was an ammunition box in a wooden box with metal lining. One of those with the top cut out and a 6-inch opening was our toilet. We would go out and empty that about every three or four days. The cell was maybe 10 feet deep and 6 or 8 feet wide. We were on a wooden platform. As for food and water, we had tins about 8 inches long, 6 inches wide and 2 inches high. We had two of them, one for the water and one for the rice. We would get rice maybe three times a day, but not enough of it. We would put our tins out through the bars to be filled, and when we were lucky, we could get them in without tipping them over. We would eat with our fingers. They would do that maybe three times a day. Once in awhile we would get a little piece of meat or something. If they killed a pig, we would maybe get the bones. It tasted delicious, but we didn’t get enough that you would call it meat. When I got out, I weighed 114 pounds. We were in that cellblock for about seven months. I think this was when they started to see that they were losing Burma. They pulled us out of the cellblock and moved us into another building shaped like a wheel with the center control place, which was the offices, and around that were the compounds. They were huge rooms again. We were put on top. I guess the commissioned guys were on top and the enlisted on the bottom. Once in there, we could go up these steps and go in our big rooms. They were not crowded by any means. During the daytime we would be down walking around the place. We did our own cooking then. Of course, it was just rice with maybe a little piece of meat or bones to flavor it once in awhile. All we did was walk around during the day and talk. Thank goodness this was a good climate. We did not get any tough winter or anything. We had to go all the way around the building to the latrines. AH: How did your release come about? McCloskey: On April 24, 1945, they came around and wanted to know how many of us could walk. I thought the ones who couldn’t walk were probably going to be left behind, and they might be killed. So I said I could walk. They lined us up on the 25th, and we started walking. We walked at night. During the day we stayed in a grove of trees or in some village so that we would not look like a target for strafing. On April 29, a Sunday morning, we arrived in a pretty good size Burmese village. They had a little meeting of their own and then gave our major, our ranking American officer, a letter of safe conduct. Then they took off at a dead run. We were free. Of course, I was emotional. The men cried, laughed, jumped around, everything. There were about 120 of us. I was a captain, but I did not know it. My captaincy came through very shortly after I was shot down. AH: What happened to your family? Had they been told you were missing in action? McCloskey: They did not know for 11 months and 10 days whether or not I was alive or dead. That was the difficult part for them. I spent all of my time wondering if they knew if I was still alive. They never did. AH: Where did you go after that? McCloskey: We wandered around a couple of other different villages and slept overnight. The next morning we wondered what to do. The next thing you know, here came the Indian troops. Boy, they came rushing in there with bandoliers of ammunition hanging all over. Our major had gotten through our lines and told them we were there. They came down and rescued us. In a very short time we were getting on big GI trucks. I had my pans and my chopsticks and I threw my cans in the ditch when I got in the truck. A lot of people said I should keep them. I did not want those damn things. I just got rid of them. We traveled a very short distance in these trucks to where there were DC-3s at a metal landing strip. With very little delay they had us stripped and deloused, put us in British fatigue uniforms and loaded us on airplanes according to rank. I went up and talked the co-pilot out of his seat, and I flew the plane back to India. The captain said, “I am supposed to take you to a British camp, but I am going to talk to our camp.” I said that was fine with me. We went to his camp. It was just one planeload of us, maybe 15 or 18. They treated us royally—they were so thrilled to have us and talk to us. We just blathered our heads off all night. We had a marvelous meal at dinnertime, and we went to see an outdoor movie. The fellow in front of me turned his seat around; he was not paying attention to the movie, he was talking to me. He said, “After the movie we will go over to my place and have a drink.” I said, “Sounds OK with me.” I came in with this British uniform on, and a bunch of guys who were sitting playing cards looked at me like, “Who the hell is he and what’s he doing here?” It was quickly explained to them that I was an American and a first lieutenant. Before you knew it there was a pile of uniforms on the floor and I was in uniform right down to my wings and everything else. Then we left there to go over to the officers club, and there were the rest of my guys still in British uniforms. AH: Where did you go next? McCloskey: When we returned to Calcutta, there were a bunch of people who knew we were POWs coming back. Here I am standing there with my single bar, my first lieutenant bar, and this guy from my squadron said, “Hey, you’re a captain now.” That got a big laugh. They took us to the 142nd General Hospital, gave us a pretty quick physical and put us in beautiful wards. Nice clean beds and the whole nine yards—which would be pretty crummy to us now but looked like heaven right then. I gained 56 pounds in 28 days. The emotion was unbelievable. We were eating everything we could get our hands on. I had 11 fried eggs, some hotcakes and sausage for breakfast. We would go to the PX and eat our heads off. AH: Did you have any contact with your family at that point? McCloskey: There were no phone calls, but there were wires back and forth. They notified my parents immediately. When they saw the uniform at the front door, they figured, well, it was almost a year and they could expect to be notified that I was assumed to be dead. It read, “The War Department is pleased to inform you….” That was it—that’s when the party started. And boy I tell you, it was really something. The weekend was nothing but phone calls, because my picture was on the front of the Pittsburgh Press. “Flier missing nearly a year and then a telegram.” It was quite a weekend in Pittsburgh. We had quite a weekend, too. We were able to eat everything we wanted, drink whatever we wanted. Nobody was telling us what not to do. A couple days later we were quarantined for obvious reasons, I guess, information-wise and health-wise, too. It turned out about three or four of my squadron people, officers, were there. We were there until May 20—one year to the day from the day I was shot down. Then they put us on a C-47 and we started for the States. We stayed over at Karachi and then flew to the United States. I had orders to go to Washington to be debriefed. I talked to them for a couple days, and then they turned me loose and got me an airplane ride to Pittsburgh. That is when my 60-day delay in rest started. Those were happy days. AH: Tell us about your homecoming. McCloskey: My mother and dad met me at the airport with my sister. It was over a year since I had been shot down. When I got back to Bellevue, the parties were everywhere. It was really something. I still choke up a little bit about it when I talk about it. Like I said, the rest of my life has been spent thanking God for turning me loose. And I tell you it is quite remarkable, after what I went through, the wonderful life that I have had since then. There has been more conversation about it in the last six months than ever. Some people just would not talk about it. I thought, “Well, I’ll talk about it.” I did something pretty good. I flew 53 combat missions as first pilot. I was first pilot, not co-pilot. One of the results is my DFC. People see that for the first time and are impressed. I see it for the 10,000th time and I am impressed. Nicholas P. Ciotola has published numerous books, including Industry and Infantry: The Civil War in Western Pennsylvania (2003). For additional reading, he recommends: North American B-25 Mitchell, by Frederick A. Johnson. Originally published in the November 2006 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here.

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https://www.historynet.com/from-the-grave-miklos-radnotis-last-postcard.htm

From the Grave: Miklós Radnóti’s Last Postcard

From the Grave: Miklós Radnóti’s Last Postcard Miklós Radnóti was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1909. His mother died while giving birth to him and his twin brother, who was stillborn, and his father died when he was 12 years old. Radnóti was taken in by relatives, and he worked for a while in an uncle’s textile business before deciding to pursue a career as a writer. He published his first collection of verse in 1930 and began studying Hungarian and French literature at the University of Szeged, where he formed important friendships with many prominent artists and intellectuals. Radnóti published his second volume of poetry in 1931, but Hungarian authorities banned it, branding it indecent, and he barely escaped imprisonment. Radnóti worked for a number of avant-garde magazines in Budapest, and in 1935 he married Fanni Gyarmati. He would go on to publish seven more collections of poetry and a memoir. With the onset of World War II, Radnóti, a fierce antifascist, was conscripted into a Jewish labor battalion of the Hungarian army but continued to write poems and translate works by others. In 1943, with the political climate in Hungary darkening, Radnóti and his wife converted to Catholicism, but in May 1944 he was drafted into a third term of forced labor and deported to Bor, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), to work in the copper mines that fed the Nazi war machines. In September of that year, as Soviet troops advanced, Radnóti and some 3,600 fellow prisoners were force-marched in retreat from Bor to Szentkirályszabadja, Hungary, where on October 31 he wrote what would be his last poem. Days later, weakened from hunger and torture, Radnóti collapsed and was brutally beaten by a guard who was apparently annoyed by his scribbling in a notebook. Very soon after that, he and 21 other Hungarian Jews who were unable to walk were shot to death and buried in a mass grave. When Radnóti’s body was exhumed from the grave after the end of the war, a small notebook containing his final five poems, written in pencil, was found in the front pocket of his field jacket. The poems, “Forced March” and four short “Postcards,” were included in Tajtékos ég, a collection of Radnóti’s poetry published in Hungary in 1946 and published in English as Clouded Sky in 1986. The poem that follows is reprinted with permission of Sheep Meadow Press, which published a revised edition of Clouded Sky in 2003. Postcard 4 I fell next to him. His body rolled over. It was tight as a string before it snaps. Shot in the back of the head—“This is how you’ll end. Just lie quietly,” I said to myself. Patience flowers into death now. “Der springt noch auf,” I heard above me. Dark filthy blood was drying on my ear. *Translator’s note: “Der springt noch auf” means something like “That one is still twitching.” This article appears in the Autumn 2020 issue (Vol. 33, No. 1) of MHQ—The Quarterly Journal of Military History with the headline: Poetry | The Last Postcard Want to have the lavishly illustrated, premium-quality print edition of MHQ delivered directly to you four times a year? Subscribe now at special savings!

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https://www.historynet.com/gaius-julius-caesars-african-campaign-the-campaign-to-destroy-the-allies-of-gnaeus-pompeius-magnus.htm

Gaius Julius Caesar’s African Campaign: The Campaign to Destroy the Allies of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus

Gaius Julius Caesar’s African Campaign: The Campaign to Destroy the Allies of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus The cause of the Roman Civil War, which spilled over the Mediterranean Sea to North Africa, lay in the deterioration of social order in the later years of the Roman Republic. The class struggle between the Populares (party of the people) and the Optimates (the senatorial aristocracy) resulted in internal revolution and rioting in the streets, which led to the Senate appointing dictators to keep the peace. The political rivalries between such strong men as Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla culminated in a power struggle and outright war prior to the birth of Gaius Julius Caesar in 102 BC. Caesar demonstrated political acumen at a very young age. He seemed to sense opportunity in the disruptive environment of 1st-century BC Roman politics. Although he could boast of a noble heredity, his early political life was tied to the Populares. Starting with a series of minor offices, he consistently rose within the political establishment. He continued to develop his populist image, and he was finally elected pontifex maximus, the head of the state religion, in 63 BC. He also saw a chance to increase his power by supporting bills granting the military leader Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, or Pompey the Great, his important assignments. In 61 BC Caesar got his first overseas command: proconsul in the province of Further Spain, where he carried out a victorious campaign against the Lusitanians. When he returned from Spain early in 60 BC, the staunch Republican Marcus Porcius Cato Minor (Cato the Younger) led the Senate in blocking his request to be allowed to stand for the consulship in absentia, and further acted to discourage his rise. Caesar retaliated by seeking the support of Pompey and Marcus Licinius Crassus, who were also troubled by senatorial power. With their backing, he was elected consul for 59 BC, and the trio’s ensuing partnership was known as the’First Triumvirate.’ Having served as a consul, a leader generally assumed control of a province. Caesar, after some political maneuvering, was granted Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum for five years, with command of three legions and the right to appoint his own officers and establish colonies. When the governor-elect of Transalpine Gaul suddenly died, Caesar added that province to his command. Caesar’s aggressive performance of his duties in Gaul established his military reputation and raised his stature to a level commensurate with that of Pompey. Jealous of Caesar’s and Pompey’s military successes, the rich businessman-turned-general Crassus sought glory to the east by attacking the Parthian kingdom in Persia — only to meet ignominious defeat and death at Carrhae in 53 BC. As the stability of Rome further deteriorated, prominent politicians asked Pompey to assume command of all forces in Italy and save the Republic. When he accepted, Caesar knew that his position was severely threatened. After unsuccessfully attempting to reach a compromise, Caesar crossed the Rubicon River to face Pompey in open civil war. In the summer of 49 BC, Caesar destroyed the Pompeian legions in Spain. He then followed his enemy across the Adriatic Sea into Greece. There, on August 9, 48 BC, he cut Pompey’s army to pieces on the plain of Pharsalus. Pompey fled to Egypt, where he was murdered by his Ptolemaic hosts. In Egypt Caesar also met Queen Cleopatra VII. Caesar has been criticized for lingering along the Nile when he was needed either in Rome or to deal with Pompey’s surviving followers in North Africa. By then, however, his 10-year record of martial success, capped by outgeneraling Pompey at Pharsalus, had made him believe he was invincible. Why not linger in the arms of Cleopatra? After a short campaign in Asia Minor, Caesar did return to Rome, restored order and quelled a mutiny among his troops. He was then ready to deal with the remaining Republican forces in North Africa. This region had long been a problem for Caesar. In 49 BC one of his generals, the former tribune Gaius Curio, had been defeated while trying to placate its inhabitants. In the spring of 48, he sent orders to Quintus Cassius, his general in Spain, to invade Africa. Part of that army mutinied, however, and the campaign was canceled. The main problem in North Africa lay with the Numidian King Juba and his ally Masinissa, who ruled over the part of Numidia that lay between Juba’s kingdom and Mauretania to the west. In contrast, the two kings of Mauretania, Bogud and Bocchus, were Roman allies. Another of Caesar’s friends was an ex-Catilinarian knight from Campania named Publius Sittius, who had fled his Italian creditors and ended up in Mauretania. There, he had recruited armed bands of adventurers, which, to his great profit, he hired out as mercenaries to native princes. Now he put this contingent at Caesar’s disposal and joined the Mauretanians in harassing Juba’s territories. The Roman province of Africa was commanded by Publius Attius Varus, a Pompeian partisan, and both he and Juba built up their defenses. After their defeat at Pharsalus, remnants of Pompey’s forces migrated to North Africa, further complicating the situation for Caesar. Among their leaders were Cato the Younger with 15 cohorts (from 300 to 600 men each); Titus Atius Labienus with Gaelic and German cavalry; Pompey’s son-in-law, Lucius Cornelius Sulla Faustus; and his sons, Sextus Pompeius and Gnaeus Pompeius. Metellus Scipio finally took overall command of the Republican forces opposing Caesar. By far Caesar’s leading adversary in Africa was Cato. An eminent statesman dedicated to the Republic, he had been an opponent of the Triumvirate, opposed Caesar for the consulship in 60 BC and tried unsuccessfully to defend Sicily against Caesar’s forces during the civil war. The relationship between the Pompeians and King Juba was of primary importance. The choice of a commander proved to be an extremely delicate matter. Juba, Scipio and Varus all hungered for the post, while the army favored Cato. Cato, however, wisely deferred leadership to Scipio, who had greater military credentials, and convinced Juba that the Romans were his protectors, not subordinates. Cato confined his efforts to the city of Utica, where he prevented Scipio and Juba from exterminating the pro-Caesarean population. The combined forces poised against Caesar were formidable. Juba’s Numidian horse and infantry numbered about 30,000 men; he also commanded a corps of Gaelic and Spanish cavalry and more than 60 elephants. Masinissa too possessed a considerable force. By the end of 47 BC, the Pompeians themselves had assembled 10 legions (approximately 35,000 men), light-armed troops, archers, javelin men and slingers. Their 15,000 cavalrymen outnumbered any mounted troops with which Caesar could oppose them in Africa. It was not until November 47 BC that Caesar restored order and placated his army. On December 17, he arrived at his port of embarkation, Lilybaeum in Sicily. Although only one legion of recruits and less than 600 cavalry were there, Caesar was as usual hot to engage his enemy with what he had, and was deterred only by unfavorable weather. As it was, he kept his ships at the ready for a favorable change in conditions. Again Caesar would rely on his charmed destiny. With his small force, he would embark for any location offering the opportunity for positive action — this was not to be a bridgehead for troops that would follow, but an offensive operation. Soon after his arrival in Sicily, six legions and some 2,000 cavalry reached Lilybaeum, and most embarked immediately. With Caesar in command, the fleet then assembled at the island of Aponiana, 10 miles south of Lilybaeum, and on December 25 they sailed for the coast of Africa. Storms prevented the enemy’s forces from obstructing their passage, but the storms scattered Caesar’s fleet, and he had only 3,000 infantry and 150 horsemen when he reached Hadrumentum on the 28th. Caesar’s subsequent African War consisted of three operations, centered around Ruspina, Uzita and Thapsus. Initially Caesar took possession of the seaports of Ruspina and Little Leptis, and kept his troops in entrenchments, ready to reembark if attacked by a superior force. Additional ships soon arrived, however, and on the following day he led three legions into the interior to procure supplies. There, he was attacked by Labienus, who had only light troops but nevertheless soon surrounded Caesar’s legions. Other enemy forces under Marcus Petreius and Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso soon joined the battle. In addition, Scipio came from the north, Juba from the west. The African War, written by one of Caesar’s lieutenants, gives a detailed account of the entire campaign. The writer states that’when Caesar had advanced about three miles from the camp, scouts and advance patrols of horsemen brought word that they had seen the enemy’s forces not far away,’ and he ordered his small group of cavalry together with a few archers to follow him slowly in regular order. His total force was 30 cohorts, 400 cavalry and 150 archers. Labienus formed a long, closely packed line of regular cavalry, Numidian light cavalry and archers. Caesar deployed a single line with archers in front and cavalry to cover both wings. In this engagement, he was exposed to a new type of enemy tactics. As The African War points out:'[Caesar’s] infantry, in pursuing the enemy cavalry too far from the standards exposed their flanks and received javelin wounds from the Numidians nearest them, while the speed of the [enemy] cavalry enabled them easily to evade the soldiers’ pikes. He therefore sent the order along the ranks that no soldier was to advance more than four feet ahead of the standards.’ When his troops were again surrounded, Caesar executed a brilliant maneuver, as outlined in The African War:’Ordering his line to be extended as far as possible; then commanding alternate cohorts to face about, so that one was drawn up behind the standards, the next in front. By this ploy, he split the enemy formation in two on the right and left wings. He then cut one-half off from the other by means of his cavalry and proceeded to launch an attack from inside with his infantry, who hurled volleys of missiles and put the enemy to flight.’ After his adversaries had been repulsed with heavy casualties, Caesar fell back within his own defenses. Enemy reinforcements arrived, however, and he again had to rally his forces before retiring at day’s end. Having narrowly escaped annihilation, he realized he would have to exercise more caution in future operations and wait for reinforcements to arrive. Following this encounter, there was a three-week hiatus. Caesar further strengthened his lines on the plateau of Ruspina and trained his recruits, while ships from his first convoy continuously arrived with reinforcements. Juba had been compelled to return to Numidia by the timely intervention of Bocchus of Mauretania and Publius Sittius, but he left some cavalry and 30 elephants with Scipio. Even without Juba’s help, the Pompeians were too strong for Caesar to launch an offensive, but finally the second segment of his expedition arrived, bringing two forces, Legions XIII and XIV, 800 cavalry and 1,000 archers and slingers. Now with eight legions, Caesar could hope for victory in a pitched battle before Juba returned. The terrain around Ruspina did not lend itself to such a battle and was not easy to supply. Caesar’s horses had already begun to suffer from lack of fresh fodder. Therefore, on the night of November 7, he moved his forces to a group of low hills six or seven miles to the south. This helped in gaining provisions, but it did not provoke the confrontation he desired. Scipio encamped so as to be able to use the town of Uzita to strengthen his position, and he could not be induced to fight except in the unlikely event that he possessed the advantage. Caesar, now further re- inforced by the arrival of Legions IX and X, extended his lines so as to threaten Uzita, but again he was foiled by his opponents’ skillful use of the terrain. In addition, even here he was having difficulty supplying his troops with corn and other provisions, so he decided to move on to another, more fertile area. Ten weeks after leaving Ruspina, Caesar set fire to his camp near Uzita and marched about 20 miles southeast to Aggar. Some minor clashes followed. But later, when an additional 4,000 legionaries and 1,000 archers and slingers arrived from Sicily, Caesar decided the time had come to strike a decisive blow. In order to overcome the superior numbers of the enemy and to neutralize the effect of their cavalry in a pitched battle, he required equal ground with a limited front. Only Caesar’s genius and daring could have provided the solutions to this problem. Fifteen miles to his north lay the city of Thapsus on the sea, approached by necks (isthmuses) of land on either side of a wide lagoon. It was held by a strong Pompeian garrison. After a night march, Caesar organized lines of defense and advanced on the city. Scipio then tried to cross the same isthmus. Caesar had anticipated this. On the previous day he had built a fort there and installed a garrison of three cohorts, while he and the rest of his forces invested Thapsus with a line of siege works. Finding the isthmus barred to him, Scipio proceeded to the western side of the lake and built a camp. When Caesar learned that, he abandoned his siege works and moved against Scipio on February 6, 46 BC. This was the moment for which he had yearned: His enemy lay with the sea on one flank and the lagoon on the other; retreat to safety would be very difficult. As described in The African War:’When Caesar arrived and saw that Scipio had his line drawn up in front of the rampart, with elephants stationed on both wings…he himself drew up a three-fold line and posted his Legions X and II on the right wing, the VIII and IX on the left, and five cohorts from Legion V on each wing as a fourth line, opposite the elephants. On both wings he had archers, slingers and cavalry interspersed with light infantry.’ Seeing frenzied activity among the enemy, Caesar’s officers and veterans urged him to attack immediately, but he preferred to organize his forces professionally before advancing. Suddenly a trumpeter on his right wing, yielding to pressure from the troops and without Caesar’s orders, began to sound the charge. This was taken up by all the cohorts, and they began to advance even as the centurions tried to restrain them. Caesar realized that it was impossible to resist his troops’ impetuosity and set his horse at a gallop against the Pompeian front line. The slingers and archers on his right wing hurled missile volleys at the dense mass of enemy elephants, which became terrified and caused havoc. Then the front ranks on the same wing, consisting of Moorish cavalry, fled. Caesar’s legions charged around the elephants and seized the enemy’s rampart, causing a frenzied retreat. Scipio’s forces were routed over the entire field, with Caesar’s legions in hot pursuit. Finally the Pompeians halted on a hill and laid down their arms; the victors, however, could not be restrained. Ten thousand Pompeians were slaughtered and a good many put to flight. The soldiers then turned savagely against Roman senators and knights and even against their own officers, whom they accused of softness toward the enemy. Caesar returned to camp with the loss of 50 of his own men and a few wounded. The city of Thapsus itself was taken without resistance. Some rebel Republican leaders, including Pompey’s two sons, fled to Spain, where a revolt against Caesar’s deputies had already broken out, but many of them perished on the way. Scipio, when cornered by Publius Sittius at sea, stabbed himself. Juba also died by his own hand, and Caesar annexed Numidia as a province after exacting large fines from the individuals and communities that had supported his enemies. According to The Cambridge Ancient History,’The strategy by which Caesar had brought off the battle of Thapsus was his crowning masterpiece.’ But in his work Death of a Republic, John Dickinson writes that’The dramatic climax of the war for Africa was not Caesar’s victory at Thapsus but the death of Marcus Porcius Cato. He was not present at the battle, for he had been left in command of Utica, the republican headquarters….In the end, the Roman residents of Utica told Cato that they wished to submit to Caesar, and he did not oppose them.’ As the Republicans were leaving Utica, Cato invited some prominent Roman residents to supper, where he discussed Stoic philosophy. After the gathering broke up, Cato withdrew to his room and later called for his sword and calmly committed suicide. Cato’s demise was symbolic of Caesar’s victory over the Republicans. Although the civil war continued in Spain, his dominance was assured. Upon his return to Rome, Caesar celebrated his victory at Thapsus. As Plutarch points out:’He did not omit to pronounce before the people a magnificent account of his victory, telling them that he had subdued a country which would supply the public every year with two hundred thousand attic bushels of corn and three million pounds’ weight of oil. He then led three triumphs for Egypt, Pontus, and Africa….After the triumphs, he distributed rewards to his soldiers, and treated the people with feasting and shows.’ The critical victories at Pharsalus and Thapsus ended the joint rule of Pompey and Caesar, and while conspiracies, revolutions and temporary restorations might follow, the Roman Republic, which had spanned 500 years, was terminated. For all intents and purposes, Julius Caesar was the first emperor in all but name — at least until the fateful Ides of March in 44 BC. This article was written by Jonas Goldstein and originally published in the June 2006 issue of Military History magazine. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Military History magazine today!

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Scenes From the Trojan War

Scenes From the Trojan War Paris, prince of Troy and son of King Priam, (with scepter) shakes hands with Hermes, accepting his fate to judge the most beautiful of the goddesses. Aphrodite wins the contest by offering Helen (the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta) to Paris as a bribe, setting off the Trojan War. Amphorae, like this 6th-century-BC example, were used for storing and transporting liquids and grain. Large amphorae filled with olive oil were also given as prizes during games and athletic competitions. (The J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu) Achilles withdrew from battle after his compatriot Agamemnon insisted on claiming Briseis, Achilles’ “prize bride.” Another Greek hero, Odysseus (left), motivated by battlefield losses in Achilles’ absence, tries to convince the sulking hero to fight. This 4th-century-BC fragment of a kylix may have come from a vessel used in a wine-drinking game called kottabos. (Douris, painter/Kleophrades, potter/The J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu) The scene of Achilles (on the left) and Ajax (on the right) playing a board game was popular in 6th-century-BC Athens, even though no such encounter appears in the recorded epic poems. Both men are fully armed, and in this depiction, Athena, goddess of war, stands in the foreground. (Leagros Group, painter/The J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu) This 6th-century-BC amphora shows Odysseus as he slits the throat of a Thracian warrior during a night raid on a Trojan encampment. Odysseus and Diomedes were sent on a mission to steal the horses of Rhesos, the Thracian king. (The Inscription Painter/The J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu) After the death of Achilles, Ajax and Odysseus quarrel for his armor, which is eventually awarded to Odysseus. Shamed by his loss, Ajax commits suicide. This 5th-century-BC kylix shows Tekmessa, Ajax’s lover, rushing to cover his dead body. (Brygos Painter/The J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu) Aeneas, the Trojan hero and legendary founder of Rome, carries his father, Anchises, to safety during the sack of Troy. The goddess Aphrodite, Aeneas’s mother, waves sorrowfully to the group, which is lead by Aeneas’s son Ascanius. The painter of this 6th-century-BC amphora labeled all the people and included commentary on their beauty. (Leagros Group/The J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu)

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WWI Planes: Crews, Cockpits, Crashes, Contraptions

WWI Planes: Crews, Cockpits, Crashes, Contraptions Ready for trouble, pilot Sergeant Georges Brou mans a Browning machine gun and his observer, Sub-Lieutenant Jean Billon de Plan, raises his Hotchkiss to practice dealing with an attack from behind in a newly delivered Maurice Farman MF.11bis of escadrille MF.62 at Breuil-le-Sec aerodrome in September 1915. On April 27, 1916, Billon de Plan shot down an attacking Fokker E.III fighter. His luck ran out on October 10, however, when he was shot in the head by one of three attacking Albatros D.IIs and his wounded pilot, Sergeant Roger Thuau, was forced to land their Nieuport 12bs in German lines. Thuau was later visited by his three assailants and their leader, who was credited with him as his 14th victory, expressed his regrets at Billon de Plan’s death and left him a photograph signed “to my brave enemy,” from Lieutenant Wilhelm Frankl commander of Jagdstaffel 4. (U.S. Air Force) A truck hauls German Lieutenant Emil Thuy’s dismantled Albatros D.V along a country road as Royal Saxon Jagdstaffel 21 moves to a new airfield in July 1917. Thuy claimed a French Spad that month for his fourth victory and raised his score to 13 before transferring to take command of Royal Württemberg Jasta 28, surviving the war with a total of 35 and award of the Orden Pour le Mérite. He was killed in an air accident while clandestinely training German pilots in the Soviet Union on June 11, 1930. (National Archives) First Lieutenant Edward Vernon Rickenbacker smiles for the camera from the cockpit of a Nieuport 28 of the 94th Aero Squadron at Gengoult aerodrome near Toul in northeastern France in May 1918. With the French air service committed to the Spad XIII, Nieuport 28s were bought by the United States to serve in four of its squadrons until more Spads became available. Rickenbacker was credited with five victories in Nieuports and would later command the 94th and score another 21 victories flying Spad XIIIs to become the war’s American ace of aces, as well as receiving the Medal of Honor. (U.S. Air Force) German ground crewmen place 220-lb. bombs under the wings of a Gotha G.V, which also has two 660-lb. bombs in the center rack. Entering service in August 1917, the G.V moved the fuel tanks from the engine nacelles, as on the earlier G.II, G.III and G.IV, to a less hazardous location in the fuselage behind the pilot. In spite of its refinements, however, the G.V was so much heavier than its predecessors that its performance was not better, averaging about 80 mph in the series of bombing raids the Germans launched against London until May 19, 1918. (National Archives) The pilot of a German Gotha G.V demonstrates the use of an oxygen respirator apparatus. As altitudes exceeded 18,000 feet, the thinner atmosphere became detrimental to the airmen’s health, contributing to fatigue and deteriorating alertness. A supplemental oxygen supply, administered through a primitive mouth tube, was among the first attempts to deal with the problem. (National Archives) Two Fokker Dr.Is marked with the yellow cowlings and tails of Royal Prussian Jasta 27 are readied for takeoff at Halluin-Ost aerodrome in May 1918—with rather questionable safety standards suggested by the mechanic lighting another’s cigarette so close to the aircraft in the foreground. In the background is one of the first Fokker D.VII biplane fighters to arrive, to ultimately replace the triplanes as Germany’s premier fighter. (National Archives) Ground crewmen help guide a Jasta 27 Fokker Dr.I into position for takeoff at Halluin-Ost near Flanders in May 1918. The Staffel was then commanded by 1st Lt. Hermann Göring, whose skill and leadership—at squadron level, at least—earned him the Orden Pour le Mérite and, in July 1918, command of Jagdgeschwader I, the late Manfred von Richthofen’s “Flying Circus.” Göring finished the war with 22 victories and went on to infamy as Reichsmarschall in command of Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe. (National Archives) An armorer loads grenades into the rack of a Halberstadt CL.II of Royal Bavarian Schlachtstaffel 27 for a ground support mission in May 1918, during Germany’s last great offensive on the Western Front. Signal flares are placed atop the turtledeck aft of the observer’s position. The Halberstadt CL.II was one of the first aircraft designed for ground attack and close support duties, with the crew close together for maximum cooperation and a section of thin armor plate to help protect them from ground fire. (National Archives) The German air crewman of a Rumpler C.VII puts on his gloves while a ground crewman adds an electrically heated face mask. The Rumpler reconnaissance planes used altitude as their main defense during their missions deep into enemy territory, the C.VII being able to reach 24,000 feet, beyond the capabilities of most Allied fighters. The air was thin and the temperature low at such heights, however, requiring oxygen respirators and electrically heated suits to keep the crew at maximum efficiency. (National Archives) Second Lieutenant Frank Luke of the U.S. 27th Aero Squadron poses over the wreckage of an LVG C.V reconnaissance plane he shot down to top off a mission on September 18, 1918, in which he had previously burned two balloons and downed two Fokker D.VII fighters in half an hour. In spite of his triumph, Luke’s face betrays the anxiety of having lost track of his wingman and best friend, 1st Lt. Joseph Wehner, who in fact had been shot down and killed by Lieutenant Georg von Hantelmann of Jasta 15. Luke himself would be brought down mortally wounded by ground fire after destroying three balloons on September 29, raising his total to 18, and would posthumously become the first member of the U.S. Army Air Service to receive the Medal of Honor. (U.S. Army) Survivors of the original contingent of the U.S. 96th Aero Squadron—2nd Lt. Avrom Hexter, 1st Lt. Samuel Hunt, 1st Lt. David Young and 1st Lt.. Howard Rath—pose before one of their Breguet 14B2 bombers on November 12, 1918, one day after the armistice. With a steel tube fuselage frame, the Breguet 14 was an extraordinarily sturdy plane, but the 96th suffered heavy losses through six months of constant flying into enemy territory, in the face of some of the deadliest fighter opposition the Germans had left to offer. (U.S. Air Force)

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Gen. Lee’s Statue to be Removed from the Capitol—One Historian Argues Gen. Marshall Should Replace Him

Gen. Lee’s Statue to be Removed from the Capitol—One Historian Argues Gen. Marshall Should Replace Him Virginia authorities are expected to announce next week which historical figure is to replace Gen. Robert E. Lee in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol, where the statue of the top Confederate battlefield commander has stood for more than 100 years. Every state is allowed two statues in the hall and Lee’s replacement will join Virginia’s other historic figure, President George Washington. Virginia’s Commission for Historical Statues in the U.S. Capitol voted earlier this year to replace Lee as numerous monuments to Confederate leaders were being taken down nationwide amid growing criticism of efforts to honor men who fought to defend slavery. Public suggestions for Lee’s replacement include civil rights figures and other national leaders, including General George Marshall, a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute who went on to provide critical leadership in the Allied victory in World War II and in the reconstruction of post-war Europe. Marshall’s inclusion in Statuary Hall has been promoted, in large part, by biographer David L. Roll, author of George Marshall: Defender of the Republic and The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler. Roll recently spoke to HistoryNet about his push for the Marshall statue and why “if anyone should be standing at the elbow of George Washington in the United States Capitol Statuary Hall collection, it should be Marshall.” Virginia has two representatives in the Statuary Hall Collection at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. One is of Robert E. Lee, the other statue is of George Washington—which is quite a juxtaposition. Can you tell me about your involvement in advocating for a statue of George Marshall to replace that of Lee? Lee is going to be removed—there’s no question about that. There’s a commission appointed by Governor [Ralph] Northam being run out of Richmond, the state capital. Since I wrote this book, George Marshall: Defender of the Republic, I’m sort of the person who knows a lot about Marshall these days. It took me almost five years to write the book, so I know about Marshall’s background, character, and accomplishments. I just took it upon myself—when I heard about the statue commission—to get involved in that process. So that’s what I’m doing. It’s kind of fun. There is no statue of Marshall in the U.S. Capitol or in the area except for a rather plain grave marker (in Arlington National Cemetery). I just participated in the dedication of the Eisenhower Memorial and Eisenhower wouldn’t have been Eisenhower without Marshall. Marshall was his mentor and allowed him to become supreme commander of Overlord (the Allied invasion of Normandy), which put him on the map and gave him a stepping stone to the presidency. I just decided, well, “I’m going to support him,” so I wrote an op-ed in the Richmond Times Dispatch that kicked it off. I pointed out that Marshall was not a civil rights leader. His mission was to win [World War II] as quickly and efficiently as possible and to help organize and implement the peace as Chief of Staff of the Army. Marshall basically won the war and then fought to win the peace. His accomplishments resonate today in terms of the Western Alliance. Who else has been involved in this process with you? I asked some of my acquaintances like General [David] Petraeus, General Stanley McChrystal, General [Carter] Ham, the head of the American Association of the United States Army, among others, to consider posting a comment recommending Marshall as the quintessential Virginian. That, if anyone should be standing at the elbow of George Washington in the United States Capitol Statuary Hall collection, it should be Marshall. I just got a copy of a comment submitted by Professor Philip Zelikow, a prominent University of Virginia history professor, who submitted quite an elegant comment on Marshall. Is anyone else besides Marshall being considered? As of now, the leading set of comments by Virginians is they don’t really want Lee replaced, or, if he is taken out of there, they do not want anyone to replace him. In second place, in terms of the number of comments, is George Marshall, and then in third place are civil rights advocates, because the governor of Virginia has been on record as saying he would like to have a statue of a person that represents a break with Virginia’s racist and slaveholding past. There are two leading and deserving candidates: One is Oliver W. Hill Sr., an African American lawyer from Richmond who helped argue the Brown v. Board of Education case; the other candidate is a woman named Barbara Johns, who at the age of 16 led a student boycott over a dilapidated African American school back in 1951. That became part of the Brown v. Board of Education case that Oliver Hill, among others, argued before the Supreme Court. There’s going to be a virtual hearing on December 16 with the commission set to make their recommendation. In your book title you describe Marshall as the “Defender of the Republic.” How fitting would it be for him to have a place within Statuary Hall? It’s Virginia’s choice. Does Virginia want to have the most consequential soldier-statesman since George Washington? George Marshall has been one of the few people to be compared favorably to Washington. Do they want somebody that liberated Western Europe? Who helped to destroy the Nazi regime and the Japanese militarists? Do they want somebody like that? Or do they want a civil rights advocate who does represent a break from Virginia’s past, but who is not as well-known and probably doesn’t have anywhere near the record of lifetime accomplishments that Marshall had? It was also his character that makes him so revered today. A lot of people said he always wanted to have that battlefield command, but he wouldn’t express this view. Now that, in terms of character, says a lot about Marshall. Henry Stimson (Secretary of War under presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman) had an apt proverb from the Bible that expressed Marshall’s character, his selflessness, his self-control: “He that ruleth his own spirit is better than he that taketh a city.” That’s from King James. I love that quote. Marshall believed that there was a moral code not to express his desires. He knew that if he’d asked for the command [Supreme Allied Commander]—and I believe this—Roosevelt would have given it to him. But his character was such that there was a moral red line he would not cross.

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General John Stark: A Patriot Who Rose Above Rank

General John Stark: A Patriot Who Rose Above Rank Though passed over for promotion by Congress, New Hampshireman John Stark remained devoted to the Patriot cause. (North Wind Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo) Benedict Arnold and John Stark were among the greatest fighting men of the American Revolution, yet both were passed over by Congress for promotion when less worthy warriors received the ranks they sought. The rancor of the insult turned Benedict Arnold from the hero of Saratoga into the traitor who tried to sell West Point to the British. John Stark may have remained angry, but he never strayed from the Patriot cause. Indeed, he may have saved the members of the Second Continental Congress from traitors’ deaths on the gallows had Britain won the war. Stark, the second-born son of Scotch-Irish immigrants in New Hampshire, seems to have come into the world with a warrior spirit and a deep sense of clan loyalty. Hunting and trapping along the Baker River in the White Mountains in late April 1752 as a young man of 23, he was captured along with friend Amos Eastman by an Abenaki war party. Stark was able to warn older brother William, who escaped, but their friend David Stinson was killed. (Would-be rescuers later found his body stripped and scalped.) When the Abenakis got Stark and Eastman back to their village in Quebec, they forced the two “Yengeese” to run the gauntlet between two lines of club-wielding warriors, each while holding a ceremonial pole adorned with the skin and feathers of a loon. Eastman held his pole aloft and endured the beating, falling exhausted at the far end. Stark followed. But as he made his way down the line, he kept his attackers largely at bay with wide sweeps of the pole. The bemused elders were so impressed they welcomed both young men into the tribe. Adopted into Abenaki families, they were taught the language and the Indian mode of warfare. Within weeks officials from the Province of Massachusetts Bay ransomed Stark and Eastman—for 103 Spanish dollars and 60 Spanish dollars, respectively—but John and his Abenaki family exchanged visits for years after the border fighting ended. Stark’s toughness and knowledge of Indians landed him stints as a British military scout, followed by commission as a second lieutenant in Rogers’ Rangers, the famed reconnaissance and special operations unit raised in New Hampshire by Capt. Robert Rogers at the 1754 outset of the French and Indian War. Stark fought well and was promoted to captain. (Between engagements he even found time to marry local girl Elizabeth “Molly” Page.) But when told in 1759 the Rangers were to raid the Abenaki village at St. Francis, Quebec—the very home of his Indian foster family—he refused to join the expedition. Stark may have been prescient: The vaunted Rangers killed 30 Indians (two-thirds of whom were women and children, according to Indian sources), and on the return march Rogers lost nearly 50 men killed or captured by vengeful Abenakis. At the end of the campaign Stark returned to the quiet life of a New England farmer and sawmill operator. Stark led from the front, inspiring the men he led in battle from the French and Indian War through the American Revolutionary War. (Bridgeman Images) When the American Revolutionary War broke out in earnest around Boston in 1775, Stark, according to his memoir, “mounted a horse and proceeded toward the theater of action.” Appointed colonel of a militia regiment by fellow New Hampshiremen, Stark led the unit to Bunker Hill, where he helped defend the left flank of the Patriot line. His men repulsed three charges by the Royal Welch Fusiliers, handing huge losses to the Redcoats, who never took Stark’s sector. The New Hampshiremen then covered their fellow Americans’ retreat. In the wake of that action Gen. George Washington informally attached Stark’s volunteers to the Continental Army. Returning stateside from an abortive invasion of Quebec, Stark fought in New Jersey at Trenton in 1776—the battle that saved Washington’s army—and at Princeton in the new year. Stark resigned his commission, effective March 22, 1777, though he stood ready to defend his native New Hampshire. His chance came later that year At the end of that campaign Stark again returned to New Hampshire, this time to recruit more men to the Patriot cause. In his absence Congress appointed Enoch Poor a brigadier general of Continentals. Stark had a low opinion of Poor, as the former New Hampshire assemblyman and junior colonel had refused to march to the support of the Massachusetts men at Bunker Hill. Taking Poor’s promotion over his own head as a studied insult, Stark resigned his commission, effective March 22, 1777, though he stood ready to defend his native New Hampshire. His chance came later that year. The British had devised a strategic plan to divide the rebellious New England colonies from the less antagonistic Middle Colonies, like heavily Dutch New Jersey and German pacifist Pennsylvania, by marching down from Canada and up from New York City to close the Hudson River to commerce and communication. The principal British and German mercenary army was that of Maj. Gen. John Burgoyne, a playwright and bon vivant who brought along his portable wine cellar and elegant mistress on campaign. Burgoyne’s Germans—mostly Brunswickers—were led by Maj. Gen. Friedrich Adolf Riedesel, who thought his commander a poor disciplinarian. Yet Burgoyne managed to recapture Fort Ticonderoga on July 6 without a fight, earning a promotion to lieutenant general. In the aftermath he instructed the Germans to drive off the abandoned cattle of “those acting in the service of the Rebels,” though he was merciful enough to spare the Patriot families their milk cows. But allied Indians under Riedesel’s nominal command cut the throats of the cattle to loot their bells. Few cattle reached the British camp. The third and smallest prong of Burgoyne’s invasion broke down on August 6. Surprised in a bloody ambush, Brig. Gen. Nicholas Herkimer’s New York militiamen and allied Oneidas fought the attacking British and Mohawks under brevet Brig. Gen. Barry St. Leger to a grisly stalemate at Oriskany. While the Americans lost more than half their force—upward of 450 men killed, wounded or captured—St. Leger failed to take his objective, Fort Stanwix. Suspecting the war was a plot by whites to have Indians kill each other off, the Mohawks melted away. A British snare drum captured at Bennington, depicting mounted red-coated soldiers, bears the date 1757. (Bennington Museum) Following the fight at Oriskany, Burgoyne let himself be talked into a march against a Patriot supply depot at Bennington in the New Hampshire Grants (present-day Vermont). His local Tory adviser, former British officer Philip Skene, convinced him that four out of five settler families remained loyal to the Crown. In woeful retrospect Burgoyne later wrote of that folly: The great bulk of the country is undoubtedly with the Congress, in principle and in zeal; and their measures are executed with a secrecy and dispatch that are not to be equaled. Wherever the king’s forces point, militia, to the amount of three of four thousand, assemble in 24 hours; they bring with them their subsistence, etc., and, the alarm over, they return to their farms. The Hampshire Grants in particular, a country unpeopled and almost unknown in the last war, now abounds in the most active and most rebellious race of the continent. On August 11 Burgoyne sent out Lt. Col. Friedrich Baum, a Brunswicker who spoke no English, at the head a foraging party to collect cattle, horses, carts and wagons for the army. The Baum detachment comprised 434 German infantrymen and dismounted dragoons, 200 Tories, 60 Canadian Loyalists, 50 British marksmen and 14 artillerymen with two 3-pounder cannons. Sent ahead as scouts were some 150 dubious Indians, who only served to alarm the countryside. The dragoons in their heavy boots clumped along for three days, giving the Americans plenty of time to concentrate their militia and send for reinforcements. On an invitation from provincial authorities, Stark had accepted a commission as brigadier general and assumed overall command of the New Hampshire militia, which included regulars, short-term volunteers and draftees. The draft was not inexorable—those picked could hire a substitute without being defamed. Many were eager to serve under Stark. “I enlisted at Francestown, N.H., as soon as I learned [he] would accept command of the state troops,” militiaman Thomas Mellon noted. “Six or seven others from the same town joined the army at the same time.” Having mustered some 1,500 militiamen, Stark marched from Manchester to Bennington with Lt. Col. Seth Warner of Green Mountain Boys fame as his guide On August 8, having mustered some 1,500 militiamen, Stark marched from Manchester to Bennington with Lt. Col. Seth Warner of Green Mountain Boys fame as his guide. “We heard that the Hessians were on their way to invade Vermont,” Mellon recalled. “Late in the afternoon of [a] rainy Friday we were ordered off for Bennington, in spite of rain, mud and darkness. We pushed on all night, each making the best progress he could.” The rain and mud had also slowed Baum’s expedition. Plagued by Americans who had felled trees across the road to slow the baggage train and artillery, his mixed force never actually reached Bennington. On August 14 they fought with skirmishers from Stark’s forces, who withdrew, but not before destroying a bridge on the approach to the Walloomsac River. Baum’s Brunswickers and Tories fell back on high ground just inside New York and erected two makeshift redoubts of felled trees while awaiting reinforcements. Men on either side of the river struggled to keep their powder dry amid the continuing downpour. A map drawn from a soldier’s memory of the field years after the 1777 Battle of Bennington. (Library of Congress) The next morning Burgoyne dispatched Lt. Col. Heinrich von Breymann with 642 Brunswick grenadiers, who ran into similar difficulties with the muddy roads and felled trees. Stark had also sent for reinforcements. Among those answering the call were Massachusetts militiamen under the Rev. Thomas “Fighting Parson” Allen and Warner’s Green Mountain Boys, borderlands tax resisters who’d become rough-and-tumble militiamen. On the morning of August 16, emboldened by the presence of more than 2,000 fighting men under his command, Stark decided to stir the hornet’s nest across the river. “Stark and Warner rode up near the enemy to reconnoiter, were fired at with the cannon and came galloping back,” Mellon wrote. “Stark rode with shoulders bent forward and cried out to his men: ‘Those rascals know that I am an officer; don’t you see they honor me with a big gun as a salute?’ We were marched round and round a circular hill till we were tired. Stark said it was to amuse the Germans. All the while a cannonade was kept on us from their breastwork. It hurt nobody, and it lessened our fear of the great guns.” Stark had ordered the circular march in hopes of duping Baum into believing he had men enough to overwhelm the Brunswicker’s trained troops. Afterward, Mellon and a dozen other militiamen were sent to ambush any local latecomers trying to join the Tories. They captured six such stragglers and sent them back to camp under guard. Around 3 p.m. they heard shots and watched the opening engagement from concealment. “The Germans fired by platoons and were soon hidden by smoke,” Mellon recalled. “Our men fired each on his own hook, aiming whenever they saw a flash. Few on our side had either bayonets or cartridges. At last I stole away from my post and ran down to the battle. The first time I fired, I put three balls into my gun.” “There, my boys, are your enemies!” Stark cried out, rallying his men to the attack. “They are ours, or this night Molly Stark sleeps a widow!” The precise wording remains in dispute, but the effect was galvanizing. One of four cannons Stark’s troops captured from the Germans, this gun fired a 3-pound ball and was later used against British forces in the War of 1812. (Bennington Museum) “We pressed forward,” militiaman Jesse Field recalled, “and as the Hessians rose above their works, we discharged our pieces at them. We kept advancing, and about the second fire they left their works and ran down the hill to the south or southeast. We followed on over their works and pursued them down the hill.” Baum’s feckless Indians beat a hasty retreat, their purloined cowbells jangling into the distance. The first man to vault Baum’s redoubt was Samuel Safford Jr.—all of 16 years old—whose father was the second-in-command of the Green Mountain Boys and who also had three uncles in the fight that day. Close on Safford’s heels was John Meriam Jr., 20, who took several musket balls through his clothes. Joseph Rudd, 37, aimed his musket at a stoutly built German, but the weapon misfired. As the German raised his own musket to fire, Rudd knocked the muzzle aside, and the two men grappled. When Rudd managed to draw the German’s sword, the panicked man broke and ran. He didn’t get far. Another American clubbed him dead with a musket butt. Rudd regretted the outcome, as he’d wanted a prisoner, not a corpse. “After we passed the redoubt, there was no organized battle,” Field recalled. “All was confusion. A party of our men would attack and kill or take prisoners another party of Hessians.…The pursuit was continued until they were all or nearly all killed or taken.” A statue on the grounds of the New Hampshire State Capitol in Concord honors native son John Stark. (Carol M. Highsmith/Library of Congress) With the German redoubt subdued, the Americans under Warner turned to the Tory redoubt. Massachusetts militia Col. Joab Stafford noticed a slender old man with white hair in the ranks and asked him to stand sentinel rather than take part in the assault. “The old man stepped forward with an unexpected spring,” Stafford’s son recalled. “His face was lighted with a smile, and, pulling off his hat in the excitement of his spirit, half affecting the gaiety of a youth, whilst his loose hair shone as white as silver, he briskly replied, ‘Not until I’ve had a shot at them first, Captain, if you please.’” Inspired by the old man’s gallantry, Stafford personally led his men down a ravine toward the enemy redoubt. To his shock, the ravine emerged within spitting distance of the Tories, one of whom got off a quick shot, hitting Stafford in the foot and dropping him to the ground. Fearing his fall might take the fight out of his men, the wounded colonel sprang to his feet and charged the redoubt. “Clambering to the top of the fort while the enemy were hurrying their powder into the pans and the muzzles of their pieces,” Stafford’s son said, “his men rushed on, shouting and firing, and jumping over the breastworks, and pushing upon the defenders so closely that they threw themselves over the opposite wall and ran down the hill as fast as their legs would carry them.” Breymann arrived within the hour to find the victorious Americans atop the redoubts, stacking the captured arms and rifling through the supplies. Though Baum had been mortally wounded and the Brunswickers and Tories thoroughly routed, Breymann pressed the attack. “I have always thought the second to be much the longest and hardest fought action,” Field recalled of the renewed battle. Outnumbered about 4-to-1, the Brunswickers under Breymann felt the pressure. “Soon the Germans ran,” Mellon recalled. “Many of them threw down their guns on the ground or offered them to us or kneeled, some in puddles of water. One said to me ‘Wir sind ein, Bruder’ [‘We are one, brother’].” The Brunswicker drummers beat a cadence indicating they sought a parley, but Mellon said the Americans didn’t understand. Stark finally called off the pursuit as darkness set in. By then Breymann had been shot in the leg and lost a third of his command dead or wounded. (Faced with another humiliating defeat atop Bemis Heights at Saratoga that October, Breymann resorted to sabering his reluctant men, one of whom shot the obstinate colonel.) Over five hours of stiff fighting Patriot militiamen had killed 207 enemy soldiers and captured another 700 (including 30 officers) for the loss of about 30 killed and 40 wounded. They’d also seized four cannons and a heap of arms and supplies. The enemy survivors limped back to Burgoyne with news of the catastrophic defeat. After serving honorably through war’s end and attaining the rank of major general in the Continental Army, John Stark, the hero of Bennington, slipped back into retirement as a simple farmer. Had Benedict Arnold done likewise after securing another upset victory with his headstrong courage at Saratoga, both he and Stark would be remembered as American heroes. MH John Koster is the author of Hermann Ehrhardt and Operation Snow. For further reading he recommends Memoir and Official Correspondence of Gen. John Stark, as well as The Battle of Bennington, by Michael P. Gabriel, and Battles of the American Revolution, by Curt Johnson.

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https://www.historynet.com/george-h-w-bush-shock-of-combat.htm

Shock of Combat Changed George H.W. Bush’s Life

Shock of Combat Changed George H.W. Bush’s Life In 1944, Japanese fire sent a future president into the Pacific President George H.W. Bush died November 30, 2018 at his home in Houston. He was 94. This story appeared in World War II magazine in May 2007. IN THE OLD MAN GEORGE H.W. BUSH, you can still find shadows of the boy who enlisted on his 18th birthday in 1942 in high hopes of becoming a Navy pilot. The thatch of unruly brown hair. The crooked, ingratiating smile. The clear blue eyes and the long, angular face. The disjointed sentences that don’t always parse. The oddball sense of humor he became known for after he earned his wings and was floating in the Pacific on the carrier USS San Jacinto and flying torpedo bomber runs off its short deck. He reaches into his office desk in Houston and pulls out a copy of one of his favorite cartoons. It’s a man ordering a meal in a fine restaurant at a table across from a giant fly: “I’ll have the gazpacho, leeks vinaigrette with shrimp, marinated zucchini, orange mousse, a bottle of Cotes du Rhone Rouge ’59. And bring some shit for my fly.” We laugh at the joke, but he laughs harder. As his old crewmates on the San Jac might say, “Same old George.” It was so long ago, those three years of war. In the 62 years since, he has been an oil entrepreneur, U.S. congressman, U.S. liaison in China, ambassador to the U.N., head of the CIA, vice president and president of the United States. He presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union. He won Desert Storm, scored among the highest approval rating of any president ever, then lost in his reelection bid. He told me only weeks after his 1992 defeat, “It’s just so embarrassing.” But that’s only his public life. He lost a three-year-old daughter to leukemia, raised five kids, two of whom are, famously, the former governor of Florida and the current president of the United States. And, although it was never in doubt, he stayed forever married to his wartime love, Barbara, the Silver Fox. [Barbara Bush died April 17, 2018 at 92]. That’s a lot of living in 82 years. United States Navy Pilot George H.W. Bush in 1942. (U.S. Navy) But those three years at war, well, as a piece of life experience, they still top it all. Without that war, America no doubt would have heard from George Bush, whose great ability and family wealth assured him great opportunities, but he would have been a far different George Bush. “Was it a shock to go off to war from your background?” I asked him 20 years ago for a Washington Post Magazine article on his life. “It was the shock,” he answered. The former president is just off hip replacement surgery at the Mayo Clinic, and this morning is the first time he has been in the office in two weeks. He has a walker by his desk and his leg propped up on an open drawer. He leans forward in his chair, reaches for his leg around the knee with both hands. “Could you lift my leg a little?” he asks. “It’s kinda personal, I know, but it’d help me out.” I lift and he adjusts. “Thanks.” I call him an old man because, chronologically, he is. But there’s nothing “old” about George Bush. Despite his hip surgery, he went out to the finish line of a marathon race in Houston the other morning and shook hands with the runners. He globe-trotted with former President Bill Clinton to raise money for disaster relief. He’s doing mental exercises to keep his mind and memory sharp. He took up e-mailing a while back and has started bolstering his famous penchant for personal letters with personal e-mails. As they say, young is where you find it. “They were a huge effect on me,” he says of his war years. “I was a kid that came out of a very closed environment, relatively privileged in the sense of growing up. My dad could send us to good schools. He could take care of us if we got sick. Most of the guys that were signing up for World War II couldn’t do that. So it was an eye-opener for one thing, in terms of just interaction of my privileged life with those from all walks of life.” “Showing to myself that I could do it, compete, hold my own…was very, very important in terms of my own being.” Like so many World War II vets, he came home and rarely talked about what he had seen and felt and learned about love, faith, family, fate, bravery, fear, death and grief. Yet even among his naturally reticent generation, he was particularly reticent to talk about himself and his experiences. It was all part of his family’s brand of Eastern, Episcopalian, patrician, puritanical values. It seems too quaint for some to accept as anything but myth today, yet Bush’s parents inculcated in their children an old-fashioned noblesse oblige that encouraged public service, empathy and personal modesty. His mother, Dorothy, the family enforcer on this score, demanded that her children never “blow on” about themselves. “George, nobody likes a braggadocio,” she told him again and again, and George listened well. It wasn’t until he entered politics in the 1960s that he had no choice but to break his mother’s rule and market his war story like a suit off the rack, as did every other politician who could claim the crucible of that war on his resumé—Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Robert Dole, to name a few. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, George Bush was the biggest man on campus at one of America’s great male bastions of private high school privilege, Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., known to the initiated as “Andover.” Captain of the baseball and soccer teams, student council secretary, senior class president. He was a BMOC who, following his mother’s teachings, was kind to everybody, no matter his social pedigree, the kind of kid who helped the fat guy in gym. At Bush’s graduation ceremony that spring, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, himself an Andover graduate, told the boys they should go to college and let the draft do its work. Young George, already accepted at Yale, would hear none of it. His father, Prescott, a partner in the investment firm Brown Brothers Harriman, asked if Stimson had changed his son’s mind. “Not a bit,” said George. Years later, he said simply, “I wanted to serve—duty, honor, country.” Soon after, Prescott Bush put George, who would go on to become the Navy’s youngest pilot, on a train out of New York’s Pennsylvania Station. It was the only time George had seen his stoic father cry. After nearly a year of training, Bush landed on San Jacinto. Then came September 2, 1944. As he and his two-man crew dove their Avenger bomber through anti-aircraft fire toward a Japanese radio tower on the volcanic island of Chichi Jima, 150 miles north of Iwo Jima, his plane was hit at 8,000 feet and caught fire. He finished his dive, dropped his four 500-pound bombs successfully on target and headed out to sea. He could have tried to make a water landing, something he had done once already when another Avenger he was flying lost power. That day, he and his crew got out of the plane and into the life raft before the plane sank. But this time, the burning Avenger could blow up before they got to the water. He ordered his radio operator and gunner, neither of whom he could see from the cockpit, to “hit the silk,” an order heard on the radio by crewmen in other U.S. planes. No response. He remembers banking his plane steeply to the right to lessen the slipstream pressure on the rear door and help his crewmates exit. Then, at about 3,000 feet, Bush bailed out and hit his head on the plane’s tail. He landed in the ocean and freed himself from his chute. Another Avenger dived to signal the location of his life raft, which he swam to and climbed in. His head was bleeding and he was throwing up from having gulped seawater. He secured his revolver and started hand-paddling furiously away from Chichi Jima, where Japanese gunboats had already headed out to get him. Avengers and the Hellcat fighters that protected them strafed the boats but soon had to return to San Jacinto. Young George, who would later be awarded the Navy’s Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions that day, didn’t feel much like a hero. He feared correctly that his crewmates were dead. In that life raft, he began asking himself the question that still haunts him in his Houston office at age 82: “Did I do all I could to save them?” In the raft, he cried. It seemed like a miracle when more than two hours later the periscope of the submarine USS Finback appeared. “Welcome aboard, sir,” a sailor said as Bush was hauled on deck while the sub’s photographic officer recorded the scene on his 8mm camera. Aboard Finback that night, Bush slept fitfully and had the first of many nightmares about his Chichi Jima mission and the fate of his crewmates, John “Del” Delaney, who had been his radio operator the whole time aboard San Jacinto, and William “Ted” White, the son of a Bush family acquaintance and the ship’s ordnance officer, who had repeatedly asked Bush to take him on a bombing run for the experience. That morning, White had won approval from Bush and his squadron leader to replace Bush’s regular gunner, Leo Nadeau, on a single mission. Although Bush didn’t know it just after the crash, one crewman on his plane, according to the squadron commander’s action report, also had bailed out, but his parachute didn’t open and he fell to his death. The bodies of Delaney and White were never found. Remarkably, the letter Bush wrote to his parents the next day from Finback was saved by his mother: “Yesterday was a day which will long stand in my memory….I will have to skip the details of the attack as they would not pass the censorship, but the fact remains that we got hit…There was no sign of Del or Ted anywhere around. I looked as I floated down and afterward kept my eye open from the raft, but to no avail….I’m afraid I was pretty much a sissy about it cause I sat in my raft and sobbed for awhile….I feel so terribly responsible for their fate, Oh so much right now. Perhaps as the days go by it will all change and I will be able to look upon it in a different light…Last night I rolled and tossed. I kept reliving the whole experience. My heart aches for the families of LTJG George Bush is rescued by the Navy submarine USS Finback on September 2, 1944. (Photo ©CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images) those two boys with me.” George lived aboard Finback for a month before being dropped off at Midway. Instead of taking his chance to rotate home, he hitched military rides back to San Jacinto and put in another eight bombing runs, including one he coolly completed even after a steady barrage of anti-aircraft fire tore a gaping hole in the wing of his Avenger. He rotated back to the states after 58 combat missions and 1,228 combat hours over not only Chichi Jima but also Saipan, Rota, Marcus Island, Guam, Manila Bay and Wake Island. While awaiting orders to return to the Pacific to join in the invasion of Japan, he married Barbara and trained for return to combat. Then the Japanese surrendered, and his war was done. Nearly half the men in his squadron didn’t come home. “My life was spared,” Bush once said, ever incredulous. In 1966, when Bush was running for Congress in Texas, Finback’s photographic officer saw Bush on TV and recognized him as having been the skinny kid they’d rescued out of the sea. He sent Bush the film. Eventually the dramatic war story and his grainy, boyish visage wobbling on the deck of Finback would brag itself across the airwaves in campaign after campaign, undoubtedly to the chagrin of his dignified mother. “My problem,” he says with a wry smile, “is that the longer you’re away from World War II, the more convinced you become that you single-handedly won the war in the Pacific, and the danger, being around veterans, the memories are so selective and so heroic that you’ve got to be very careful talking to guys like me.” He has said before that he never understood why he was given a medal because he was shot out of the sky. “When I got down on the submarine, I was just a sick, scared, young kid,” he says. The heroes were the guys shot down and killed or the guys who hit the beaches and were slaughtered, the guys who didn’t come back to families and jobs—and to political campaigns in which they could boast about what they did in the war. The cosmic question George Bush eventually began asking himself had nothing to do with heroism or glory or braggadocio. “Why me?” he still asks six decades later. “Why was I spared?” Despite that question that still tortures him, George Bush is militantly unreflective. He has always bridled at the psychological inquiries of younger generations. Years ago he told me, “I’m not going on the couch for anybody.” I always liked that about him, but he clearly has spent time pondering the meaning of his war years. I ask: “You felt, ‘Why has God spared me?’” “I think that’s there, but I think that’s overly dramatic,” he replies. “Maybe that’s one of the points I was trying to make earlier on, about how history can be distorted by your subjective judgments. As of today, I feel that strongly. Whether I went around talking to the chaplain about it the day after I was picked up on the submarine, I don’t know. I can’t recall.” Yet he does recall his night watch duties on the deck of Finback as an awakening to the grandeur of existence and his place in its web. “You’d get on there at 2 or 4 in the morning to do a couple hours’ watch, and the sky was just lit up,” he says, a tone of wonder still in his voice. “I remember the flying fish. You could see them off the florescent wake of the ship, and the majesty of nature. I do remember that very well. But whether it linked into the Creator, I don’t know.” In the public realm, George Bush’s war years have been telescoped to the tight image of his diving Avenger being hit, his hours in the water, his rescue, and his feelings of grief and responsibility over the deaths of John Delaney and Ted White. Yet those experiences were only a piece of a much larger frame that forever changed his life. “I wasn’t naive enough not to know that going to private schools and all was elite,” he says. Even the Great Depression had little impact on Bush’s boyhood. The rambling house in wealthy Greenwich, Conn. Maids, a cook, a chauffeur named Alec. Christmases at the South Carolina estate, summers at the Kennebunkport, Maine, estate. You would think all that privilege would have made the young George believe he was better than the rest of the rabble when he stepped onto that troop train in Penn Station. That’s not how he remembers feeling. Years ago he said, “I was thinking, ‘Will I be accepted?’” Today he says, “It was, in a sense, kind of scary.” Was he going to be able to hold his own with toughs from the Bronx or farm kids from Alabama or cowboys from Montana? Could he make it in a world outside his insular bubble of pedigree and privilege? I ask if he found himself wondering, “Can I compete when I’m not protected?” “That’s right,” he says. “But I was trying to say, ‘I’m as good as they are in terms of being able to compete and rub elbows with the real problems, get decent marks in squadron or gunnery or whatever it is.’ I mean, I was driven to demonstrate I was as good a pilot as anybody else from whatever background.” It turned out that George Bush did get along with the boys from all different backgrounds—a boy who worked in a mill making pencils before the war, a boy whose father owned a gas station, a boy who never finished high school. Bush didn’t talk much about his background, but word spread, if only because his oddly aristocratic name was just too tempting a target and became his nickname: “GeorgeHerbertWalkerBush,” always said in one breath. “Hey, GeorgeHerbertWalkerBush, good morning.” He gave nicknames back, made up song lyrics to gibe a buddy, played practical jokes. While aboard Finback, he became famous for his drop-dead imitation of a bellowing elephant, which earned him a second nickname, “Ellie.” Officers were discouraged from mingling with crewmen, but George mingled. Against regulations, his gunner, Leo Nadeau, painted “Barbara” on the side of their plane, and GeorgeHerbertWalkerBush left it there. Men noticed that he was, you could say, different. He never told bawdy stories about his sweetheart. He didn’t try to pick up women on nights in town. And quite out of tune with the bravado spirit of young men off at war, he didn’t smoke or drink or cuss. “He was a lot of fun, a live wire,” fellow pilot Jack Guy said of Bush decades later. “I don’t know anyone who didn’t like him for any reason. I don’t know how to say it any other way.” Bush also turned out to be a good pilot, not a natural pilot, as his test records from his training days attest, and probably not the best pilot, but a good pilot. In training, he got average to above-average marks. With often older, huskier boys—Bush was 6-foot-2 but weighed only 160 pounds—he held his own at wrestling and in the grueling physical tests. But he also failed. He tried out to become a squad leader but didn’t make it. “Those things make you try harder,” he says. At war, George Bush may not have been the BMOC he was at Andover, but he managed to hold his own. “Nobody was interested in your background or anything about whether you’d gone to some privileged school or not,” he recalls, adding that the only question asked was, “Can you do your job?” Yet there were other lessons learned. As an officer, Bush was sometimes assigned to censor the outgoing mail of enlisted men. He read letters in which men talked openly about their fears and worries, their loves and heartbreaks, about crop harvests or fishing or a hot spell back in the cities. For a while, Bush censored the mail of the ship’s black stewards. He suddenly stops talking and squints back tears. “Golly,” he says, “I get all choked up thinking about it…‘cold storage boys,’ they called them.” Then, with amazing candor, he says, “You know, they were human beings, and I’m not sure I really knew that or appreciated it or was sensitive to it until I had to do that little experience.” Years later, Bush would adopt as one of his favorite phrases the words of novelist Dan Jenkins—“life its ownself.” Dur­ing his war years, for the first time, George Bush saw “life its ownself.” On board San Jacinto one day, a plane crashed while landing on the carrier’s deck, and a crew mate was neatly cut into pieces. A leg with a shoe still on its foot landed near Bush. “God, it was horrible,” he once said. While he and others stood in shock, a tough chief petty officer growled, “Get this stuff cleaned off!” Bush never forgot that: No matter how bad the situation, someone must stay clear-headed, someone must lead. A portrait of the officers of the USS Finback and some U.S. Navy pilots and crew rescued by the Finback. Kneeling second from the left is Ensign George Bush, whose bomber was shot down by the Japanese near the Bonin Islands. September 1944. | Location: aboard the USS Finback, on the Pacific Ocean. (Photo © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images) One by one, his buddies flew off the deck of San Jac never to return: Dick Houle, Tom Waters, T.E. Hollowell and Jim Wykes, who was Bush’s best friend. When Jim disappeared, Bush went to his bunk and secretly cried. He wrote letters of condolence. He flew bombing cover over Marines as they stormed the beach on Guam, and he came to believe that his work was nothing compared to their bravery. He learned that being heroic didn’t mean a man was without fear. Being heroic meant a man went on despite his fear. In a letter home to his parents, a matured, perhaps even chastened, George Bush wrote, “The glory of being a carrier pilot has certainly worn off.” So many years ago… George Bush has no doubt that his war years helped enable him to strike out from his cloistered world in the East for the rugged oil fields of West Texas after graduating from Yale in 1948. He had already bounced all over the country—Grosse Ile, Mich.; Lewiston, Maine; Fort Lauderdale, Fl.; Chincoteague, Va; Corpus Christi, Texas. He’d worked and played with men of every imaginable social stripe. He’d mastered flying and fear. He’d been shot at, shot up and shot down. He’d proven that he could make it outside the protection of his privileged family, that he could hold his own among the whole array of humanity. His confidence was earned and deep. What was roughneck Texas after that? You think he and Barbara, herself a member of a cloistered Eastern family, would have been comfortable moving into a shotgun apartment on a dirt road in Odessa, Texas, with a hooker living next door, if they hadn’t first lived in that hole-in-the-wall place in Maine with the Murphy bed in a neighborhood George’s mother insisted was a red-light district? Or if they hadn’t first lived in that basement in Virginia Beach and had that crazy red-haired landlady who wandered around in her nightgown all the time? You think they’d have been game for living in a little wood-frame job in Midland, Texas, if they hadn’t learned from George’s war years to roll with the punches in a way that Greenwich just didn’t teach? You think that if George hadn’t met all those characters during the war, the guy who had made pencils in the mill or worked in his dad’s gas station, if he hadn’t read the letters of those “cold storage boys,” that he would have been at ease that time he was out all night rebuilding the clutch in an oil drilling rig in Jal, N.M., and mixing it up with the grease-caked riggers at the derrick? I ask if the war gave him that kind of confidence. “I think it’s true,” he says. “I say it made a man out of me.” Yet, from the vantage of old age, the lesson George Bush most takes from his war years is that the values his parents taught him turned out to be true north: honesty, empathy, kindness, hard work, accomplishment, not blowing on about yourself, giving something back to people and society. These values, he believes, served him well at Andover, at war, and later “when I became president.” Maybe you think it sounds corny or self-serving, maybe you question whether George Bush’s life and accomplishments live up to these values. Question all you want. It is what George Bush believes. In the 1988 presidential race, a crewman in another Avenger over Chichi Jima that long-ago day told reporters that Bush had been the only man to bail out of his plane and it had not been on fire, implying that Bush could have made a water landing, but had panicked and left his crew mates to die. The claims contradicted other eyewitness accounts, the squadron commander’s action report and a later-discovered Japanese document from Chichi Jima reporting that a second man had bailed out of Bush’s plane and his chute hadn’t opened. The accusation, Bush has said, was painful, but that’s rough-and-tumble politics. Today, no doubt offending his mother’s proper sensibilities, he is less discreet. “Well, that’s bullshit,” he says. George Bush still has nightmares occasionally about his plane being shot up, going down, and his crewmen dying. “Every once in a while,” he says with a reflective tone, “I wake up in the middle of some horror. It’s not a pleasant dream. It’s not, ‘There’s the sun­set and everything’s coming nicely.’” “So it is literally you reexperiencing it?” I ask. “Yeah, but not a lot. It doesn’t happen a lot. Once in a while.” “But, sir,” I say, “it has been 60 years.” With that, George Bush’s reflective moment passes, and he says, “I’m not good at dreams, interpreting them, even remembering them.” I think of his dead crew mates and the question Bush still asks himself: “Did I do everything I could to save them?” After so many years, for George Bush, could the war still come down to a few moments over a godforsaken volcanic island when he lived and Del Delaney and Ted White died? “I assume you believe in heaven?” I ask. “Yes, I do.” “Have you ever thought that you will be reunited with those two men?” “I do feel that way.” “How do you think that conversation will go?” “I felt a certain sense of guilt,” he says. Yet he believes that if he ever sees Del and Ted again, they already will know that the burning plane could have blown up at any second, that he gave them the order to “hit the silk” and banked the plane to lessen the slipstream pressure for their exit, that they already will know that he did all he could have done to save their lives. “Would you want to hear them say that?” I ask. “I would,” he answers.

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https://www.historynet.com/george-washingtons-tears.htm

George Washington’s Tears

George Washington’s Tears When General Washington wept while bidding his officers farewell, was it sadness at parting from old comrades or bitterness over having let his men down? General George Washington wept as he said farewell to his officers at Fraunces Tavern in New York in December 1783. He wept even more profusely when he resigned his commission in Annapolis a few weeks later. Those tears were not merely sentimental. There was a lot of private anguish in them—anguish that had to do with Washington’s troubled relationship with his officers, their bitter quarrel with Congress, and the scarifying unpopularity that had engulfed the Continental Army in the months after they disbanded in July 1783. On July 10, 1782, General Washington wrote a letter to one of his favorite aides, Lieutenant Colonel John Laurens, that summed up the hardest truth he had learned from seven exhausting years of war. Laurens was probably the most committed idealist in the American army. After Yorktown he had gone to South Carolina and tried to persuade his native state to approve a plan he had been championing since Valley Forge. He wanted the legislature to free three thousand black slaves and enlist them in the Continental Army. Not only would it help win the war, it would be a body blow to the institution of slavery. After some initial hesitation, Washington strongly supported the idea. The South Carolina legislature buried Laurens’ proposal in an avalanche of nays. The dismayed young colonel reported the result to Washington, who replied: “The spirit of freedom, which at the commencement of this contest would have gladly sacrificed every thing to the attainment of its object, has long since subsided, and every selfish passion has taken its place. It is not the public, but the private interest, which influences the generality of mankind, nor can the Americans any longer boast an exception.” This unblinking realism about human nature began to permeate Washington’s mind at Valley Forge. There he clashed with fellow patriots, especially those from New England, who had proclaimed at the start of the war that America’s public virtue would be the secret weapon that would win a swift victory over the corrupt, power-hungry British. When it did not work out that way and the Americans found themselves fighting what Washington called “a long and bloody war,” some of these public-virtue preachers started blaming other Americans. True patriotism, as they saw it, should not involve a smidgen of self-interest. During the winter of 1777-78 at Valley Forge, when these people, led by Samuel Adams and Richard Henry Lee, were in control of Congress, they almost destroyed the American army. They insisted that Pennsylvania farmers should sell their produce and cattle at rock-bottom prices, ignoring the depreciation of the American dollar. Instead, the farmers hid their wheat and cattle until the half-starved army had to seize it at gunpoint. As the dollar depreciated, officers began resigning by the dozen. More than three hundred went home from Valley Forge alone. Washington decided that the only way to keep good men in the army was to offer them half pay for life. The public-virtue preachers in Congress went berserk. It took weeks of wrangling to get them to agree to a compromise, half pay for seven years after the war. By 1780, America’s economic situation had become truly desperate. Continental dollars were almost worthless. An ordinary horse sold for twenty thousand dollars. Officers earning $150 a month were actually receiving five or six real dollars. In the face of this out-of-control inflation, Washington went back to Congress and again insisted that the lawmakers vote the officers half pay for life. Although the politicians acquiesced, they almost immediately waffled on the promise. They asked the states to undertake the task—tantamount to sentencing it to oblivion. The officers, imbued with the idea that a gentleman’s word is his bond, insisted they still expected their half pay from Congress. Meanwhile, Congress stopped printing money. The states were supposed to supply the army with meat, bread, and rum, which seldom arrived. Most of the time, the soldiers had to go on seizing food from recalcitrant farmers and paying for it in promissory notes, hardly the way to win civilian minds and hearts. When a desperate Congress appointed financier Robert Morris as superintendent of finance in 1781, he announced he could not pay the army. Morris depended on his close friend, General Washington, to mollify the soldiers with a promise of eventual payment. The officers—and the enlisted men—had already gone without pay since 1780, resulting in severe hardships, particularly for men with wives and families. By 1783, Congress owed the soldiers tens of thousands of dollars in back pay. The cost of half pay for life was even more astronomical. Even if the promised pension was “commuted” to five years’ full pay, as several congressmen proposed, the cost would be close to $7 million. This was the situation when Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay signed a provisional peace treaty in Paris on November 30, 1782. Rumors that Britain might sign such a treaty had reached America that fall. The news did not trigger any celebrations in New Windsor, on the Hudson River north of New York, where the Continental Army was camped. Instead, it aroused in the officer corps a surge of sullen fury. That December the officers dispatched a three-man delegation to Congress led by Major General Alexander McDougall of New York to demand their back pay and a renewed pledge of half pay for life. Choosing McDougall as a spokesman was a statement in itself. In the early 1770s, the abrasive Scot had been a leader in staging riots and protests against the British. He had also been a member of the Continental Congress in 1781 and was known to many of the current members. The McDougall delegation got nowhere. Congress appointed a “Grand Committee” of thirteen members to listen to their demands, but the politicians could not agree on how to raise the money, nor could they persuade a majority to approve paying the officers a cent on the promised half pay for life. A disgusted McDougall listened to influential people in Philadelphia who were equally unhappy with the dithering Congress. The three leaders were Robert Morris, the superintendent of finance; his assistant, Gouverneur Morris (no relation); and Congressman Alexander Hamilton. They suggested the army might do more than complain; after all, they had guns in their hands. Why not threaten to use them? They argued that everyone might end up happier if the states were frightened into giving Congress the power to levy federal taxes. All it could do at present was request the states to contribute money. For 1782 Congress had asked for $8 million. On April 1, when the first $2 million was due, Superintendent Morris had collected nothing. A week or so later, $5,572 trickled in from New Jersey—enough to keep the federal government running for a quarter of a day. The year ended with a $6 million shortfall. Only loans from France and Holland enabled Morris to dodge national bankruptcy. As for paying the army, it was beyond the realm of financial possibility. Soon an anonymous broadside began circulating around the army’s New Windsor camp. It exhorted the officers to abandon “the milk-and-water style” of their petition to Congress. If the army did not act now, declared the inflammatory epistle, the officers were condemned to grow old “in poverty, wretchedness and contempt.” Peace would benefit everyone but them. It was time to confront the ingratitude of their fellow citizens, whom the army’s courage had made independent. There was only one option left: their swords. Moreover, they should “suspect the man who would advise [them] to more moderation and longer forbearance.” Those last words were a not very subtle preemptive strike at General Washington. Five days later, on March 15, 1783, Washington confronted several hundred officers in a public building in New Windsor known as The Temple. He made a passionate appeal to them to reject these calls for violence, but his words did not seem to have much impact. The men’s eyes remained cold and angry. In desperation, Washington pulled out a letter from a Virginia delegate who claimed Congress was going to try to meet the officers’ demands. As the general started to read it, he blinked, rubbed his eyes wearily, and drew a pair of eyeglasses from his pocket. It was the first time anyone except a few aides had seen him wearing them. “Gentlemen,” he said. “You will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” A rustle of unease, a murmur of emotion swept through the audience. A few of the officers wept. Others brushed away tears. Washington finished reading the letter and departed. Instantly, Major General Henry Knox, the popular commander of the artillery, was on his feet asking the men to reject the “infamous” anonymous address and affirm with a resolution the army’s unshaken attachment “to the rights and liberties of human nature.” Another resolution asked Washington to become their advocate with Congress. The resolutions were approved unanimously. Only one man rose to object. Lean, acerbic Colonel Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, the army’s quartermaster general, condemned the hypocrisy of heaping infamy on the anonymous publication. He noted that during the four preceding days, almost every officer in the army had read it “with rapture.” Some people later said if one more speaker had followed Pickering with similar sentiments, the officers’ rage might have reignited—with General Washington as well as Congress a target. But no one said a word. The soldiers departed to their quarters, and the most perilous moment in the brief history of the United States of America ended peacefully. However, the crisis was far from over. The officers were still angry men. General Washington had pledged his support to win the money they had been promised and deserved. He warned Congress that if it failed to compensate these men, “then shall I have learned what ingratitude is,” and the memory would “embitter every moment of my future life.” Those are extraordinary words. It is not hard to connect them to Washington’s tears. Congress not only failed to compensate the officers, but it did so in an underhanded way. Instead of discharging them unpaid, which might have been construed as an act of courage or at least candor— by now the country was totally bankrupt—the politicians furloughed four-fifths of the army, the men who had enlisted for the duration of the war. If the British signed a definitive peace treaty, the furloughs would become permanent. On July 5, 1783, a committee of officers told Washington they viewed the furloughs “with a mixture of astonishment and chagrin.” Four-fifths of the army was being disbanded without even one of their demands met. They were being sent home without the means to “support and comfort [their] families,” and liable to arrest for the debts they had contracted in the service. Washington’s reply was labored, polite—and unsatisfactory. He said he was “only a servant of the public” and had no power to alter the furlough policy. There simply was no money to pay for keeping the army together. All he could offer the men were promissory notes, signed and backed by the personal credit of Superintendent of Finance Morris, for three months’ pay. Most officers decided to go home without waiting for these “Morris notes.” They would have to sell them to speculators at half or a third of their face value to get any cash. The departing officers canceled a dinner at which they had planned to make General Washington their guest of honor. The decision, one officer wrote, had troubled “certain characters.” Along with General Knox and a few other officers who had helped to defuse the anonymous address, Washington was almost certainly among the troubled. In fact, he was deeply wounded by this unmistakable evidence that he had lost the admiration and affection of his officers. This experience was the background for Washington’s heartbreaking “Farewell Orders Issued to the Armies of the United States,” which he wrote after the Continental Army furlough. His men had marched off without a victory parade or even a statement of gratitude from Congress. Some biographers have dismissed this message as a collection of platitudes. It is no such thing if read in context, with an awareness that it came from a man who was trying to fend off lifelong embitterment. Washington told his men that their achievement against the most powerful nation on the globe was “little short of a standing Miracle.” Men from all parts of the continent had become “one patriotic band of Brothers”—another miracle. He professed one more time his “inviolable attachment & friendship.” He hoped their country would pay them what they deserved. No one else had secured by their courage and devotion such “innumerable blessings for others.” At West Point, a group of unfurloughed officers decided to write Washington a response to his farewell statement. They appointed Quartermaster General Pickering to prepare a draft—again, not an accidental choice. To no one’s surprise, the New Englander’s praise of Washington was minimal. Pickering spent most of his time indicting Congress and the states for atrocious malfeasance. One historian has described the text as “a snarl of self pity and defiant outrage.” The officers did not bother to present this less than fulsome response to General Washington personally. They mailed it. This is the seldom-told background leading up to Washington’s farewell to his officers at Fraunces Tavern, after the British army had finally evacuated New York on November 25, 1783. Only a handful of officers were present. The army had shrunk to eight hundred men. Alexander Hamilton did not attend. He was brooding over a stern letter that Washington had written to him after the crisis triggered by the anonymous address. The general had warned his former aide that the army was a dangerous instrument to play with. On the tavern’s second floor, Washington picked at the food on the table, but he obviously had no interest in eating. He poured himself a glass of wine and raised it to his lips with a shaking hand. The officers passed decanters and quickly filled their glasses. Washington gazed at the men, his lips trembling. He wanted— even needed—to break through the resentment he knew was infesting the hearts and minds of many. He wanted to speak to this small cluster of guarded faces—and reach the whole officers corps. Slowly, Washington raised his glass and said: “With a heart full of love and gratitude, I now take leave of you. I most devoutly wish that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your former…have been glorious and honorable.” “In almost breathless silence,” one officer recalled, they watched him drink. They raised their glasses in a mostly silent but equally emotional response. A few men mumbled phrases and broken sentences. Tears began to stream down Washington’s cheeks. The officers’ anger at this man—if not at Congress—dissolved in the face of the general’s grief. They understood that parting was only one reason for his tears. A larger reason was regret that he had failed to get them the rewards they needed and deserved: not only the money that was owed to them, but the praise, the appreciation from a grateful country. By this time, the officers had become the target of a furious smear campaign led by some politicians and many newspaper editors. The officers were portrayed as greedy would-be aristocrats who wanted to live off their pensions. The dimensions of this orgy of mudslinging are almost unbelievable. The neighbors of one Connecticut officer told him they hoped he would die so he could not collect his pension. They cheered when he got sick. This low opinion of the officers soon engulfed the rest of the Continental Army. An official in Washington County, Virginia, reported, “Some how there is a general disgust taken place for what bears the name of a regular.” When General Washington proposed a postwar regular army of about three thousand men, Congress ignored him. Even a tiny regular army, many congressmen opined, would threaten America’s liberty. Three weeks after leaving Fraunces Tavern, Washington arrived in Annapolis, where Congress was sitting. The national legislature was a pathetic group, barely twenty in number. They had been chased out of Philadelphia by rioting soldiers from the city’s five-hundred-man garrison, who demanded back pay not in promissory notes but in hard money. The politicians had wandered to Princeton and now to Annapolis, but remained the laughingstock of the country. In full uniform, flanked by two aides, General Washington stood before this collection of political zeros, the men who had defrauded his officers. It is not hard to imagine what he must have felt when he looked at them. Did he owe them any respect? Had any of them earned it? If anyone deserved respect, Washington did; he had saved Congress from its cowardice and ineptitude. If not for him, the politicians would have faced the wrong end of the army’s muskets. Independence, liberty, the pursuit of happiness might have vanished into the cauldron of a civil war. Yet this supreme realist, who had no illusions about human nature, retained a vision of what the Continental Congress meant to the future United States of America. He had somehow kept inviolate his vision of why the American Revolution had been fought and won: to create a nation of free men and women. Instead of giving the congressman a tongue-lashing or a curt statement of why he was there and an abrupt goodbye, the general drew a speech from his coat pocket and unfolded it with hands that again trembled with emotion. “Mr. President,” he began in a low, strained voice. “The great events on which my resignation depended having at length taken place; I have now the honor of offering my sincere Congratulations to Congress & of presenting myself before them to surrender into their hands the trust committed to me, and to claim the indulgence of retiring from the Service of my Country.” This was the greatest moment in American history. Here was a man who could have become president general for life after dispersing the feckless Congress and obtaining for himself and his officers and men riches worthy of their courage. Instead, he resigned his commission, renouncing power to become a private citizen, at the mercy of these and other politicians over whom he had no control. This visible, incontrovertible act did more to affirm America’s faith in the government of the people than a thousand declarations by legislatures and treatises by philosophers. Washington’s emotions grew so intense that he had to grip the pages of his speech with both hands to keep it steady. He continued, “I consider it an indispensable duty to close this last solemn act of my Official life by commending the Interests of our dearest Country to the protection of Almighty God, and those Who have the superintendence of them, to his holy keeping.” Tears streamed down General Washington’s cheeks. These words reflected a vein of religious faith in his inmost soul, born of battlefield experiences in the French and Indian War that had convinced him of the existence of a caring God. This faith in a personal God blended with his faith in America’s future. Without both faiths, it is doubtful he could have dealt with the appalling disappointments he and his officers had suffered over the course of the previous eight months. The deeply moved spectators “all wept,” James McHenry, a Maryland congressman, wrote his bride-to-be. “And there was hardly a member of Congress who did not drop tears.” Some of them sensed and perhaps even understood the deeper meaning behind the general’s tears. McHenry was a former Washington aide. He knew how much the general cared about his army—and his country. He sensed the depth of his sadness and the anguish of his hope. There is no better proof of Washington’s greatness, and of his vision and faith in what America could and would become, than the story behind his farewell tears. And there is no better time than the present to remember them. Originally published in the Spring 2008 issue of Military History Quarterly. To subscribe, click here.

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To Keep Her Family Together, a German Baroness Joined the Lowly Ranks of Army Camp Followers

To Keep Her Family Together, a German Baroness Joined the Lowly Ranks of Army Camp Followers On the eve of Saratoga, a high-born wife takes her youngsters to North America to find her husband, a German mercenary. What could go wrong? Catching sight of Quebec, Baroness Frederika Charlotte Riedesel felt her heart pound. Early on that Wednesday morning—June 11, 1777—the baroness spied from aboard ship a cluster of stone buildings perching on a hilltop between rivers named for Saints Lawrence and Charles, and beyond the little city ranks of forested mountains. It had been nearly a year since Baroness Riedesel, 30, and her small daughters left Brunswick, a German-speaking duchy located in central Europe. They and their servants were to join her husband, an officer whose unit of Brunswickers had been hired to fight with the British Army. As far as Frederika knew, her Friedrich was stationed at Quebec. A trans-Atlantic voyage carried the baroness and her children to the port of Quebec, where her search for her husband began in earnest. (Pierre Charles Canot) In a memoir, the baroness described how, as their vessel entered the harbor, the crews of ships already at anchor fired salutes. A dozen sailors in white wearing green sashes rowed a boat to the ship to escort her to shore—and to deliver bad news. Days before, General Friedrich Adolf Riedesel had left Quebec leading his 3,000 troops as part of a 7,000-man British force marching south to quell a rebellion in the Empire’s other North American colonies. He had left a letter saying where he had gone and explaining that he would send for her and the girls in due time. With her neat coif, pale skin, and elegant dresses, the blue-eyed baroness resembled a porcelain figurine, but she was also strong-willed and determined. Rather than wait for her husband’s summons, she decided to set off into the North American wilds to find her man. Doing so put her in the ranks of camp followers—civilian women with ties personal and practical making them part of 18th century soldiering, even on battlefields. In the 1700s there was no such thing as Blitzkrieg—the Hundred Years’ War was more the model. Accompanying a soldier on campaign was the only way many military families could have lives together. Commanders trying to keep desertions down grudgingly accepted women’s presence in garrison and in the field. Upper-class wives who could afford the outlay kept semblances of households, setting the table as lavishly as possible and hosting their husbands’ fellow officers and their spouses, but most women in this situation had far smaller purses. To pay their and sometimes their offspring’s way, these camp followers—so called because on the march they generally were at the rear, with the baggage train—worked at armies’ fringes, helping with the laundry, cooking, sewing, and tending the wounded. About 300 women accompanied British General John Burgoyne’s army on its push south from Canada on the Northern Campaign of 1777. Baroness Riedesel’s memoir chronicles camp-follower life with a noncombatant’s vivid perspective on important battles and actors of the American Revolution. Baroness Fredericka von Riedesel, wife of General Friedrich Adolf Riedesel, commander of a unit of Brunswicker mercenaries fighting for the British in the American Revolution. Frederika Charlotte von Massow wed Friedrich Adolf Riedesel, baron of Eisenbach, in 1762 in Neuhaus, Brunswick. Frederika was 16, daughter of a general in the army of Prussian King Frederick II, aka Frederick the Great. Friedrich was 24 and the favorite aide-de-camp of Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, one of the 18th century’s nearly 100 German-speaking states. He pronounced his family name “Ree DAY zell.” On young Riedesel’s behalf, Duke Ferdinand asked Frederika’s father if his subaltern could have her hand, a model of proper procedure. Yet the couple also enjoyed a love match, having grown close at her family home in Minden, where Friedrich had been Frederika’s favorite among many young officers to come calling. The Riedesels had been married for 13 years when the duke of Brunswick appointed Friedrich to lead a brigade that England’s King George III had hired to fight in America. With his forces stretched across a global empire and the Americans in revolt, the king needed more troops. German states historically had provided multiple nations with boots on the ground—for a price. When King George advertised for mercenaries, six states jumped at the opportunity. Hesse-Cassel sent the most, about 17,000; German troops came to be known in America as “Hessians.” Brunswick came second with 6,000 soldiers. Other forces hailed from Hesse-Hanau, Anspach-Bayreuth, Waldeck, and Anhalt-Zerbst. When Friedrich announced his impending departure for the New World, Frederika, who had grown up following her father’s armies and was pregnant with their third child, said she would come too and bring along Augusta, 4, and Frederika, 2. Friends’ tales of cannibalistic Indians were no deterrent. She and Friedrich agreed he would go first, and she would follow later. He left on February 22, 1776, frequently exchanging heartfelt letters with her. “Dearest wife: Never have I suffered more than upon my departure this morning,” Friedrich wrote in his first letter home. “My heart was broken.” Within months, in a newly built carriage, the two Frederikas, Augusta, and 10-week-old Caroline were heading west, attended by several servants. Rockel, the forester from Frederika’s father’s estate, packed his firearms and came along as her footman. In one town, residents warned of bandits, some of whom recently had been caught and strung up. Passing through woods in a carriage that twilight, the baroness felt something fuzzy come through a window and strike her in the face. “It was the body of a hanged man with woolen stockings!” she wrote. In England, she visited King George and Queen Charlotte. The queen told the baroness she admired her guest’s courage and would be asking about her progress. Save for the royal audience, the Riedesels’ British interlude was tedious. The baron had arranged for his wife to make the trans-Atlantic crossing with the wife of a British officer he knew; the woman, Hannah Foy, repeatedly delayed their departure until winter shut down the sea lanes. At last putting to sea the following spring, Frederika had new cause to regret her association with Madame Foy. Their ship’s captain was an “old and intimate friend of Madame Foy,” who dared not “refuse to him those liberties to which he had formerly been accustomed.” And Madame Foy’s pretty chambermaid not only caroused at night with the ship’s sailors but pilfered the captain’s wine, then tried, unsuccessfully, to blame Rockel. “I felt deeply for this honest man,” the baroness said. Frederika’s decision to set out after Friedrich arose from fear that once the Northern Campaign had gotten under way, she would never see him again. Lady Mary Carleton, wife of Quebec Governor Guy Carleton, proffered invitations to dine and stay at her official residence. Frederika came for dinner but declined lodging. She instead found a boatman to take her and her party 20 miles up the Saint Lawrence to Point aux Trembles. Landing in the middle of the night, the travelers transferred into a trio of two-wheeled open carriages called calashes. The baroness held her infant on her lap, tied Frederika to the seat beside her, and sat Augusta on the calash floorboards at her feet. The servants and luggage—including cases of Friedrich’s favorite wines—followed in calashes of their own. The baroness promised their drivers a reward for speed. “I knew that if I would reach my husband, I had no time to lose,” she said. At a locale where they had to cross several rivers a storm arose. The only vessel available was an odd contrivance, narrow and made of bark—a canoe. Terrified, the voyagers sat, mother and children at one end, servants at the other, trying to keep an even keel. A cascade of hail set little Frederika to screaming and flailing. The boatman shouted at the baroness to control her child, lest the canoe capsize. On the far bank, they learned two fishermen had drowned that way nearby. “I thanked God that I had accomplished the passage so successfully, and yet it was not pleasing to me to know of my danger,” the baroness said. His wife and daughters caught up with Baron Riedesel at Chambly, near Montreal—but only after mistaking him for a Canadian. Friedrich looked ill and feeble and even in the heat of summer was wearing a long woolen coat with blue and red fringe at the hem. Weeping, little Frederika, who associated her father with portraits of a handsome bewigged man in a brilliant blue and gold uniform, shied away from the seeming stranger. “No, no! This is a nasty papa,” she wailed. “My papa is pretty.” “The very moment, however, that he [Friedrich] threw off his Canadian coat, she tenderly embraced him,” Frederika wrote. Lord George Germain, secretary of state for the colonies. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) The Northern Campaign, as conceived by Burgoyne and Lord George Germain, secretary of state for the colonies, called for a large British force to push south from Quebec to Albany, New York, and meet another marching north from New York City at the order of General William Howe, senior British commander in America. The aim was to control the Lake Champlain and Hudson River waterways, separating and isolating the northern and southern colonies. The British then could focus on reducing New England, in their eyes the wellspring of revolutionary sentiment. At first the plan went smoothly. As the superior British force was nearing American-held Fort Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain, Continental General Arthur St. Clair decided he had no choice but to evacuate that dilapidated bastion to save his 2,500-odd troops. In the following weeks, General Philip Schuyler, senior commander of the Americans’ northern forces, kept up the retreat, abandoning Fort Anne, located about ten miles south of Lake Champlain, Fort George, ten miles west at the southern end of the lake of the same name, and Fort Edward, some 20 miles south of Fort George. Burgoyne reported his triumphs in letters to Lord Germain in London. General John Burgoyne, commander of the British Northern Campaign. (Active Museum) Schuyler felt that he lacked the strength to mount a direct attack, but as he was withdrawing, he undertook a skilled campaign of obstruction, blocking roads, damming streams, and dismantling bridges. Progress across the wet, mountainous terrain grew increasingly difficult for Burgoyne’s troops. At Bennington, Vermont, thousands of militia gathered to repel an eastward British probe. American attacks on Fort George led Burgoyne to abandon that and other rearguard locations, in effect severing his force’s ties to Canada (“Desperate Hours,” August 2019). In August, Burgoyne established a headquarters at Ford Edward. The Riedesels spent three happy weeks there—though food did run short. Baroness Riedesel, happy to have her family together again, felt “beloved by those by whom I was surrounded.” The presence of a handful of other fine ladies, including Lady Harriet Acland, wife of Colonel John Dyke Acland and author of her own memoir of the 1777 campaign, reinforced soldiers’ pride and nostalgia for home. Anglicizing her name’s proper pronunciation. British soldiers fondly bestowed the nickname “Red Hazel” on Baroness Riedesel, The army resumed its march south. The baroness reported morale to be high. Burgoyne proclaimed, “The English never lose ground.” Victory appeared to be certain. The baroness remarked on the beauty of the countryside she was passing through, but also noted its bleak emptiness; many inhabitants had fled to join the rebel army. “In the sequel this cost us dearly, for every one of them was a soldier by nature, and could shoot very well,” she wrote. “Besides, the thought of fighting for their fatherland and their freedom, inspired them with still greater courage.” Compounding the perils facing the British and German column, Howe had not dispatched that promised force to meet Burgoyne at Albany. Lord Germain had failed to give Howe a clear order to do so, and the general decided that that year’s priority would be an attack against the American capital at Philadelphia. By the time Burgoyne severed his army’s ties to Canada, he was on his own, and knew it, with his foe growing stronger every day. Congress had decided to relieve Schuyler, a wealthy landowner many members disliked because of his continual retreats. The politicians replaced Schuyler with General Horatio Gates and instructed neighboring states to send more militia. Buoyed by victory at Bennington and animated by reports of atrocities by Indians attached to Burgoyne’s army, thousands enlisted. When Gates arrived at Van Schaik Island, on the Hudson River, to take command in late August, his army numbered about 10,000. He believed his men ready to do something new: advance on the enemy. Riedesel and his Brunswick troops advance at the Battle of Freeman’s Farm (Troiani, Don (b.1949); Private Collection/Bridgeman Images Gates’s army occupied Bemis Heights, one of several bluffs overlooking the Hudson near the town of Saratoga. On September 19, the British ordered a force to flank the American position to its west. The Americans went out to meet them. The result was a bloody clash in a clearing amid dense forest called Freeman’s Farm. At day’s end the British held the field, though at Pyrrhic cost, having taken heavy and irreplaceable casualties without improving their tactical position. Rations were low. The region’s foliage was starting to turn—a warning of winter. Friedrich Riedesel argued that the British should retreat to a more secure location to await reinforcements, and, should no reinforcements appear, to Canada. Burgoyne, fearing permanent harm to his reputation if he were to withdraw, decided to risk all on another attack. On October 7, he sent a large number of troops in another flanking action. His men encountered more Americans than he had been expecting. Near Freeman’s Farm, rebels mowed down redcoats pouring into a wheat field. Fighting as if possessed, the American General Benedict Arnold drove the British troops back to their own outer works. Burgoyne’s gamble had ended in disaster. All the Riedesels were caught in the gears of October 7 and the days after. The baroness wrote that her husband’s breakfast at the house where they were staying was interrupted by the sounds of his troops mustering for that day’s fateful events: it was time for him to leave. “Our misfortunes may be said to date from this moment,” she wrote. As the day passed, rifle shots built to a murderous crescendo. Feeling “more dead than alive,” she supervised dinner preparations; the evening’s guests were to include General Simon Fraser, commander of the British advance unit. Within hours later, Fraser did arrive—mortally wounded and borne by troops who moved aside the dining table to lay their leader down. Groaning all night, the dying man repeatedly asked the baroness to forgive his intrusion. He sent Burgoyne a message asking that he be buried at 6 the next afternoon on a nearby hill. Fraser died that morning. Burgoyne decided to honor this request, much to the dismay of the baroness, who thought the army should begin its retreat immediately. “This occasioned an unnecessary delay, to which a part of the misfortunes of the army was owing,” she said. The mass of healthy soldiers, wounded men, horses, and baggage train lumbered north by fits and starts. During one pause, Friedrich Riedesel climbed into his wife’s carriage and slept for three hours with his head on her shoulder. Hungry men asked the baroness for food; the commissaries had not distributed any provisions. She reprimanded a Burgoyne aide for the oversight, leading to an appearance 15 minutes later by the commander himself, promising to remedy the situation. “I believe that in his heart, he has never forgiven me this lashing,” the baroness wrote later. As the retreat was ending its second day, the column came under attack. Friedrich Riedesel sent word for his wife to take refuge with the children and servants in a farmhouse that had been housing a British field hospital. As they approached the one-and-a-half story, gambrel-roofed building with a chimney on each end, she spied riflemen across the Hudson aiming at them. She threw the children and herself to the carriage floor. “At the same instant, the churls fired and shattered the arm of a poor English soldier behind us,” Frederika said. Amid a sustained enemy barrage, she and her girls and servants scrambled into the ad hoc Baroness von Riedesel and her children are greeted by General Philip Schuyler at the American camp where her husband was being held prisoner. hospital’s cellar, where they spent a grueling night with other women and children and wounded soldiers. “A horrible stench, the cries of the children, and yet more than this, my own anguish, prevented me from closing my eyes,” the baroness wrote. In the morning, the firing eased. Frederika directed volunteers to sweep the 45’x33’ cellar clean and fumigate the space by sprinkling vinegar on embers. No sooner was the work done than the enemy barrage recommenced, cannon balls crashing through rooms overhead where army surgeons were working. “One poor soldier, whose leg they were about to amputate, having been laid upon a table for this purpose, had the other leg taken off by another cannon ball,” Frederika said. The baroness distracted herself tending to the wounded. An officer in the cellar helped calm the children with his imitations of a cow’s bellow and a calf’s bleat. “If my little daughter Frederika cried during the night, he would mimic these animals, and she would at once become still, at which we all laughed heartily,” she said. The party had sufficient food but soon ran short of water. “In order to quench thirst, I was often obliged to drink wine, and give it also to the children,” the baroness said. The general, who was camped nearby with his troops but frequently checked in on his family, drank so much he alarmed his spouse and the faithful Rockel. “I fear that the general drinks so much wine because he dreads falling into captivity and is therefore weary of life,” Rockel said. Soldiers’ efforts to fetch water from the river drew fire from enemy riflemen, so one of the young wives volunteered to try. “This woman, however, they never molested; and they told us afterward that they spared her on account of her sex,” the baroness said. The Riedesels’ ordeal in the cellar lasted for six days until Burgoyne requested a ceasefire to discuss surrender terms. Saratoga redirected the Revolution, brightening American hopes of prevailing against the world’s leading military power and paving the way for an alliance with France. The British defeat ended the war for the Riedesels. After a long but relatively comfortable captivity at Boston and then Charlottesville, Virginia, during which the baroness helped her husband battle illness and despondency, Friedrich Riedesel was released on parole. His family was allowed to rejoin British forces in New York City. Riedesel later was exchanged for an American. He returned to active duty and was stationed back in Canada. At war’s end in 1783, the family headed for Europe with an additional member: daughter America. In London, the king and queen received the family and thanked them for their service. Back home in Germany, the baroness had two more children and in 1800, with help from daughter Augusta’s husband Count Heinrich von Reuss, brought out a memoir, “The voyage of duty to America; letters of Mrs. General Riedesel, upon her journey and during her six years’ sojourn in America, at the time of war that country, in the years 1776-1783, written to Germany.” Baroness Frederika Charlotte Riedesel died in Berlin in 1808. She was 61. _____ Pitching In Wives following common soldiers in 18th-century armies lived very differently from their aristocratic counterparts with ties to the officer corps. They got army rations, but had to work for them, performing odd jobs. Cooking and sewing was usually a male preserve, but wives would help out. Women commonly handled washing. Assisting in field hospitals, one of the few paid jobs open to camp followers, appears to have been among the most desirable. Women often worked as sutlers, selling commodities—primarily alcohol—to the ranks. Typically, each regiment had one sutler; others sometimes could keep shops in the vicinity of an encampment. The wife of a Brunswicker mercenary endured hunger, fatigue, and endless work as a camp follower in Burgoyne’s army. (Troiani, Don (b.1949); Private Collection; Bridgeman Collection) To a degree, the British army controlled soldiers’ marriages, expecting wives to work hard and not cause trouble. The army tried to prevent the presence of prostitutes but was not always able to keep whores from gathering nearby, especially when it set up camp near urban centers; some commanders required periodic screenings for venereal diseases. Few reports of adultery involving soldiers’ wives are on record, but many officers, rankled by the women’s presence, took a hostile attitude toward them. The Continental Army was more relaxed; many soldiers were married before they enlisted. When troops left garrisons for the field, women’s presence usually was restricted further. The number of women accompanying British regiments during the Revolution varied but averaged roughly one woman for every eight soldiers, or about 6,000 at its peak. Muster rolls suggest about 1,600 on the American side, or about one woman per 30 men. The Americans were fighting much closer to home, many on short-term enlistments, and the army had fewer resources for soldiers’ wives. The numbers of accompanying women and children tended to grow when an army remained awhile at one location and soldiers fraternized with locals. During the Revolution, which had aspects of a civil war, armies moving across the countryside attracted more followers of all sorts as supporters of one side or the other sought protection from the foe. Those 300 women accompanying Burgoyne’s army at the beginning of the 1777 campaign were joined by hundreds of others as Loyalist inhabitants, perceiving the British column as safe, joined the march. En route, women historically clustered at the column’s rear, with the baggage train. Most walked, often carrying belongings and children. During battles, women usually stayed in the rearguard, but sometimes officers directed them to bring water to troops. American Mary Ludwig Hayes came along two years later to join her husband, who was serving with a company of the Pennsylvania Artillery. At the Battle of Monmouth, New Jersey, she supplied men on the line with drinking water, leading soldiers to nickname her “Molly Pitcher.” When her husband collapsed from heatstroke, she took his place at the cannon and kept firing at the enemy. —Jonathan House

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Germans and Russians Work Together to Discover Fates of War Dead

Germans and Russians Work Together to Discover Fates of War Dead German and Russian authorities have achieved a new level of bilateral cooperation to overcome their nations’ bitter World War II history with a new archival sharing agreement launched this year. The two countries will share digital copies of historical records and data to clarify the identities and fates of millions of German and Russian war dead who vanished into obscurity. Beginning the process for the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, German and Russian authorities held a May 6 ceremonial handover in Moscow of a digital drive containing approximately 20,000 copies of records from Germany on Soviet prisoners of war. “We were unanimous that the anniversary of the end of the war was a suitable date for the handover of the first archival documents,” Dr. Heike Winkel, the German War Graves Commission’s project coordinator for the initiative, told Military History magazine in an exclusive interview. She added that the handover was “not a one-time action.” “Further handovers will follow as part of the project.” The documents—including information cards, letters, medical records and burial data—will provide academic institutions in both countries and surviving relatives with details on the identities and fates of wartime prisoners. “Thanks to the many years of painstaking work of historians, archivists and technical experts of the two countries, light will be shed on the fate of about 8 million people,” Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s minister of foreign affairs, said in a written statement released on the occasion. According to Russian news agency TASS, this project was initiated in a joint statement by Lavrov and German Foreign Affairs Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier in June 2016. Winkel, project coordinator for the initiative “Soviet and German Prisoners of War and Detainees,” said Germany’s Federal Archive (Bundesarchiv) hopes to assemble documents on at least 335,000 people in coming years from archives in Russia, Germany and other countries and share findings with Russian counterparts. “The project not only collects data from the [German] Federal Archives, but all data that can help to clarify the fate of Soviet and German prisoners,” Winkel said. “We will open up millions of files in total.” Russian and German mountain troopers on a mission to find war dead in the Caucasus in 2018. Photo by Uwe Zucchi, courtesy of the German War Graves Commission. The May 6 handover ceremony took place at the TASS building in Moscow. Participating dignitaries of both nations included Germany’s ambassador to Russia, the director of the German Historical Institute in Moscow, and the presidents of Germany’s War Graves Commission and Federal Archives, the Russian president’s Special Representative for International Cultural Relations, the assistant to Russia’s deputy minister of defense, directors of Russia’s National Military Archives and the deputy head of Russia’s Federal Archival Agency. Most participants attended the ceremony remotely due to COVID-19 safety restrictions. “It was the result of a long rapprochement and the wish for reconciliation,” Winkel said. The handover marks a notable improvement in the relationship of German and Russian authorities on matters relating to World War II dead. Nazi leaders proclaimed that Germans and Russians could not coexist; Adolf Hitler’s 1941 launch of Operation Barbarossa—Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union—became a war of racial annihilation. The atrocities committed by the Nazi regime left Germany with a huge burden of guilt, according to Winkel. “They [Germans] did not only lose the war. Their planning and structuring of the persecution and extermination of European Jews, those who thought differently and all people who did not fit into the National Socialist image of the world was a breakaway from civilization committed by a people who vaunted themselves as poets and thinkers,” she said. “Germany did not only lose the war, but also overwhelmed the world with suffering and death.” For decades after the war, bitter feelings existed between Germany and Russia. An official in the former Soviet Union vowed that no German military cemeteries would ever exist on Russian soil; Germans were not permitted to visit the resting places of war dead for decades. Surviving families of German soldiers killed in Soviet territory were grieved at being separated from the remains of their relatives. A major breakthrough came with the German-Russian War Graves Agreement of 1992, obliging both countries to maintain and care for each other’s war graves. Thus the German War Graves Commission—nearly 50 years after the war ended—began searching for missing and dead on the former Eastern Front. “This was the first agreement of its kind with the successive government of the former Soviet Union,” said Winkel, who added that the agreement set a precedent for the bilateral progress that has occurred since. In recent years, the cooperation between the two nations regarding war dead has arguably reached its highest level. Germans and Russians have been continuously working together to recover war dead and maintain war graves in both countries. Members of both nation’s military forces engage in joint missions to locate war dead. One special project was a search for German war dead in the Caucasus in the summer of 2018 by German and Russian elite mountain troopers. “Together they [German and Russian soldiers] care for Soviet and German war graves on a rotating basis every year,” said Winkel. “Naturally they not only work together, but also spend their free time together. Friendly relationships have developed from this.” Daniela Schily, general secretary of the German War Graves Commission, described receiving an empathetic hug during the Caucasus expedition from an 88-year-old Russian woman who survived World War II. “There was no harsh word, no grudge. I found only honest sympathy from their side,” she wrote. “On all sides, that was our experience.” In a significant move last year, Russia’s National Military Archive released the records of over 94,000 German prisoners of war, according to TASS. “We know very well that it owes to a great act of generosity and readiness to reconcile on the part of the Russian people that we, as the German War Graves Commission, are permitted to work there and that German soldiers are permitted to find their final rest in Russian soil,” said Winkel. Andrei Yurasov, deputy head of Russia’s Federal Archival Agency, expressed during the May 6 handover ceremony that both countries have a moral responsibility to bury the dead and find out the destinies of both Germans and Russians killed during World War II. “There is a famous phrase attributed to Generalissimo Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov: ‘The war is not over until the last dead soldier is buried,’” he said. Yurasov said when the German-Russian archival sharing initiative began in 2016, the fate of more than 2 million Soviet prisoners of war who did not return home remained unknown in Russia. According to Winkel, about 3 million German soldiers were killed on the Eastern Front and the remains of over 1 million were never recovered. “Even if we can recover over 15,000 dead every year, we will certainly not be able to find them all,” Winkel said. However, the German War Graves Commission is committed to bringing closure to surviving relatives. “So far we have found and buried over 900,000 war deaths in Eastern Europe. In Russia, we have so far exhumed the remains of around 450,000 German soldiers. That is about a third of the possible exhumations in Russia,” Winkel said. The files of Soviet POWS given to Russia on May 6 can help reveal details about the lives and deaths of individual prisoners, which could bring closure to surviving relatives and contribute to research and education. Winkel said both German and Russian authorities who launched their joint project on the anniversary of the end of World War II believe their current good cooperation is in itself an ultimate defeat of the cruel policies of National Socialism. “Reconciliation, as one of our high-ranking partners in the Russian Defense Ministry continually points out, gives us a symbolic recognition of the very special meaning of this day as a day of victory over the criminal National Socialist regime and the liberation of Germany,” said Winkel.

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Germany’s Sixth Army in Stalingrad in World War II

Germany’s Sixth Army in Stalingrad in World War II The arrogance of Adolf Hitler and the German high command was heightened by the enemy’s stupendous losses in Operation Barbarossa. The great offensive of 1941 might not have destroyed the Soviet Union, but more than 3 million Russians were dead. Three million more were in German prison camps. Add to those grim statistics the tens of thousands murdered, or dead from deliberate starvation and mistreatment at the hands of the Wehrmacht and the SS. German flags flew over the Ukraine, Russia’s granary, and over the Donbas, industrial heartland of the Soviet Union. A third of the country’s rail network was in German hands; its heavy industrial production was down by three-fourths. The Red Army had become a blunted instrument, its tanks and aircraft destroyed, its best divisions chewed up and spat out by the blitzkrieg, its winter 1941 counterattack met, then checked, by a German army at the very nadir of its own resources and fortunes. German damage to the Soviets, however, had not been achieved without cost. More than 900,000 Germans were dead, wounded or missing — almost a third of the invasion force. As late as May 1942, some German infantry formations were at little more than a third of their authorized strength. More than 4,200 tanks had been destroyed or damaged, and an overburdened industrial system no longer had any hope of replacing all of them. Roughly 100,000 trucks and other motor vehicles were gone, as were more than 200,000 horses — the latter arguably more important than the lost machines. Since June 1941, Nazi Germany had been at war with both the world’s largest land power, the Soviet Union, and its greatest mercantile empire, Great Britain. In December it added the biggest industrial power, the United States, to its list of enemies. Hitler understood that his Third Reich did not possess anything like the resources to match such a coalition. He did not intend to try. On December 10, 1941, he had assumed personal command of the Eastern Front. Many of the key figures of Operation Barbarossa, such as Heinz Guderian, Gerd von Rundstedt and Fedor von Bock, were relieved of command or transferred. In their places stood new men, with reputations and careers to make. Like Hitler, they viewed the winter setbacks as temporary. And in many ways he was right. A hundred thousand men, cut off in the Demyansk pocket south of Leningrad, had been supplied by air from January to the end of April 1942, and were then relieved. A month later, German and Romanian troops under Erich von Manstein completed the conquest of the Crimea, driving its last Soviet defenders literally into the sea in a series of frontal attacks. Even when they operated on a shoestring, nothing seemed beyond the German Landser — the infantry in worn field-gray uniforms, the men who crewed the tanks and manned the guns, and the junior officers and NCOs who led them. The German army in the spring of 1942 remained a superbly tempered instrument, combining the best features of an ideologically motivated citizen army and a seasoned professionalized force. The months in Russia had pitilessly exposed weak human and materiel links. New tanks and weapons still existed mostly on drawing boards, but officers and men knew how to use what they had to best advantage. The 37mm anti-tank gun, so helpless against Russian armor that it was nicknamed the ‘army door-knocker,’ was giving way to a high-velocity 50mm piece. The Panzerkampfwagen (Pzkw.) Mk. III tank remained the mainstay of the armored divisions, but it too appeared in an upgunned version. Its longtime stablemate, the Pzkw. Mk. IV, was beginning to exchange its short-barreled 75mm gun for a high-velocity version that could match all but the heaviest Soviet armor. Nothing spectacular — but enough to enhance the conviction among the German soldiers that they had the measure of their enemies and were still able to defeat them. From highest to lowest, the German soldiers believed that their mobility, shock power, communications and above all disciplined initiative, resting on the base of comradeship and confidence fostered by the bitter fighting of 1941, would bring victory in 1942. The losses suffered and the lessons learned during the previous year nevertheless structured planning for the next year’s campaign. Instead of three offensives moving in different directions, Hitler’s directive of April 5, 1942, projected only holding actions in the northern and central sectors. The focus for the spring campaign would be in the south, with a major drive toward the Caucasus. The objective would be the destruction of Soviet forces in the region and seizure of oil fields that were vital to the German war effort. A secondary objective was Stalingrad — not for its own sake, but in order to cut the Volga River and isolate the Russians south of the industrial city. Despite its reduced scale, the proposed offensive was risky. It would be launched on a 500-mile front. If it gained the set objectives, it would create a salient of more than 1,300 miles. Hindering the drive was the fact that the road and rail networks would grow thinner the farther the Germans advanced. The main attack was scheduled to begin at the end of June — at best, four to five months before rain and snow would put an end to mobile operations. Even if the offensive succeeded, however, there was no guarantee that the Soviet Union would collapse. It had other major domestic sources of oil — not to mention the promise of support from its new ally, the United States, which was committed to keeping Russia in the fight at all costs. Such wider issues were not raised among German officers, who were focusing their energy on preparations for the upcoming campaign, which was dubbed Operation Blue. German planning staffs focused on the war’s operational and tactical levels. The army’s rapid expansion since Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 had left it so short of qualified staff officers that everybody was too immersed in details to have any energy left for evaluating the big picture. For their part, Soviet concerns in early 1942 primarily involved buying time — time for American assistance to arrive, time to re-establish an industrial base physically transplanted east of the Ural Mountains, and time to reorganize and re-equip an army shaken by disaster. Stavka, the Soviet high command, advocated a defensive strategy. Soviet Premier Josef Stalin wanted to mount local offensives, designed in part to wear down the Germans and keep them off balance, and in part to restore Soviet domestic morale, which was far too low for the dictator’s peace of mind. It was increasingly clear that the security and propaganda apparatus that had intimidated and inspired the Soviet people through the privations and purges of the preceding decades was by itself insufficient to counter the pressures presented by the German invasion. Only the Germans’ bestial behavior in territory they had conquered and their reluctance to consider mobilizing opponents of the Soviet regime under their flag had kept disaffection with the Soviet regime from reaching explosive proportions. Stalin expected the revitalized Red Army to provide a safety valve by winning small-scale victories. Instead, the Germans checked and threw back its ill-prepared efforts. In May, a Soviet attack briefly recaptured the city of Kharkov but collapsed when a German counterstrike surrounded and destroyed four entire armies. Then, on June 28, Germany’s Army Group South tore the Russian front wide open. Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, who had led Army Group Center almost to within artillery range of Moscow before being relieved of command in 1941, was getting a second chance. He had 68 divisions, nine of them panzer and five more motorized. He possessed 750 tanks. The Luftwaffe provided more than 1,200 aircraft, including the close-support specialists of the VIII Air Corps under General Wolfram von Richthofen, a cousin of World War I’s ‘Red Baron.’ Bock’s order of battle included 25 divisions from German allies and client states as well. Mostly Italian and Romanian, those formations were not as well equipped, trained, led or motivated as their German counterparts. Aware of that, Bock intended that they would simply play screening roles, serving as flank guards, and occupy less vulnerable sectors. Nevertheless, their direct participation in the offensive indicated the weakness of the German army in 1942 relative to its responsibilities — and implied a promise of trouble should things not go according to plan. For the first few weeks, the German offensive was a repeat of the lightning advances of Operation Barbarossa. German mechanized spearheads rolled forward across the steppe under an air umbrella impenetrable to a Red air force still woefully short of skilled pilots. But the ground gained was not matched by Soviet losses. Frustrated, Hitler fired Bock and split Army Group South in two. Army Group A, under Field Marshal Wilhelm List, was to turn south, take Rostov and drive into the Caucasus. Army Group B, commanded by Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs, would thrust east and cut the Volga while screening the left wing of the offensive. The new organization gained ground but produced no great tokens of victory. The Red Army’s abortive spring offensives had cost it more than a half-million casualties, which were suffered primarily among its best formations. Stavka’s officers argued that, temporarily at least, space must be exchanged for time. Stalin reluctantly concurred. Even after he authorized a strategic retreat on July 6, some Soviet formations were cut off by the successive German pincers. While some of the trapped Russians fought on, others surrendered with only token resistance. Enraged, Stalin issued Order Number 227 on July 28. Distributed to all fighting units, it called for an end to retreat and demanded that each yard of Soviet territory be defended. The penalty for failure to comply ranged from summary execution to service in a penal unit. During the course of the war, more than 400,000 Russians were sentenced to penal battalions and another 250,000 were sentenced to be shot for failure to obey 227. Frustrated by a perceived lack of progress, Hitler became more deeply involved in the campaign’s operational aspects. On July 16, he diverted the Fourth Panzer Army, and with it the bulk of Army Group B’s mechanized forces, south to Rostov, hoping to encircle Soviet forces there. At the same time, he not only sustained Army Group B’s mission to drive toward the Volga but, on July 20, specifically ordered its Sixth Army to attack Stalingrad. A week earlier, Stavka had established an independent Stalingrad Front, and on July 19 Stalin put the city on a war footing. At the time, both seemed little more than gestures. The Front’s three armies were an uneasy mixture of green troops and formations hammered in the earlier fighting. But Order 227 was more than a set of draconian threats. It was a reminder that there was nowhere else to go. The Russian people realized that not only the Soviet state was at stake. Despite the horrors of Stalin’s regime, the citizens responded, not merely by digging ditches and filling sandbags, but by reporting to work and finishing their shifts. On August 9, German troops captured the oil producing center of Maikop but found it completely wrecked. As supplies ran low and the Red Army’s resistance stiffened, the German advance stalled on August 28 — well short of its objective, the Grozhny oil fields. Hitler dismissed the responsible commander at the end of August and began directing Army Group A himself. Meanwhile, Army Group B found itself locked into increasingly bitter, close-quarters fighting as it clawed its way toward the Volga. Weichs initially intended to use the pincer movements that had served the Germans so well for a year. The Sixth Army from the north and the Fourth Panzer Army from the south were to break through the front and cut off the Soviet forces west of Stalingrad. Both met determined resistance in terrain that handicapped the small-unit tactical maneuvers that often gave the Germans an advantage over their numerically superior foes. When it was man to man and tank against tank, casualties were higher and advances shorter. Nevertheless, the little flags on the map tables of both sides kept moving in the same direction, toward the Volga and Stalingrad. On August 21, the tide seemed suddenly to turn. German infantry crossed the Don River, the first waves in rubber boats. Pioneers built bridges under Luftwaffe air cover. The next day, a panzer corps moved through the breach, and on the 23rd the spearheads of the 16th Panzer Division reached the Volga. As they advanced, however, the Germans found themselves under counterattack by everything the Soviets could throw at them, including civilians with rifles and armbands, and tanks fresh off Stalingrad’s production lines. Most of them were T-34s, whose gunpower and mobility the Germans had learned to respect earlier in the summer. But the German crews were better trained and more experienced, and they picked off the green Russians by the dozens as the Luftwaffe set Stalingrad ablaze and German reinforcements pushed toward the river. Still determined to complete his pincer movement, Weichs ordered both his armies forward, setting their junction point at the town of Pitomnik, 10 miles west of Stalingrad. Instead of staying in place to be destroyed, however, the Russians retreated into the city — whether on their own initiative or under German pressure depends on the nationality of the analyst. Convinced that this movement symbolized the end of significant resistance, Weichs ordered an advance into Stalingrad’s suburbs. The German commander was less inhibited at the prospects of fighting in the streets of Stalingrad than his armor commanders, most of whom were dubious about committing to a fight that denied their panzers freedom of movement. Their opposition ended, however, when one panzer corps commander was relieved for recommending withdrawal in his sector. The man directly responsible for that relief had assumed command of the Sixth Army in January. General Friedrich Paulus had a good record as a staff officer and a corresponding image as a soft-shoe type rather than a muddy-boots commander. Nevertheless, he had taken the Sixth Army across the steppe, and by August 31 most of his divisions were closing on the Volga, clearing what seemed to be Red Army die-hards holding out in Stalingrad’s rubble. At this stage Paulus and Stalin had a common perspective: Both believed Stalingrad was doomed. On August 26, the Soviet leader played his trump card. He appointed Georgi Zhukov his deputy supreme commander in chief. Zhukov typified a new breed of Soviet general: as fearless as they were pitiless, ready to do anything required to crush the Germans and not inhibited by threats, actual or implied. Arriving at Stalingrad on August 29, he insisted that further counterattacks with the available resources were futile. Stalingrad must and would be held — but in the context of a wider strategic plan. Even as the situation around Stalingrad worsened and Zhukov busied himself with putting together a workable defensive plan, Stavka’s strategists insisted that the Red Army must not merely respond to enemy attacks, but concentrate its own strength and seize the initiative. In Zhukov’s absence, staff officers began developing plans for a winter campaign involving two major operations. Uranus involved committing large mobile forces north and south of Stalingrad, then encircling and destroying enemy forces in the resulting pocket. Uranus was to be followed by Saturn, which would cut off and annihilate whatever remained of Army Groups A and B. Mars was the other half of the plan. With all eyes focused on the south, this operation would go in against a seemingly vulnerable sector on the hitherto quiet front of German Army Group Center: a salient around the city of Rzhev. Described for years in Soviet literature as a diversion, Mars now appears to have been instead a complement to Uranus, intended like its counterpart to be followed by a second stage that would shatter Army Group Center and put the Red Army on the high road to Berlin. It was an ambitious strategy for an army still improvising its recovery from the twin shocks of Barbarossa and Blue. Its prospects depended entirely on the ability of Stalingrad’s defenders to hold out. That critical mission was, in turn, the responsibility of Lt. Gen. Vasili Chuikov. On September 12, he was appointed commander of the Sixty-second Army, the city’s principal operational formation. On one level his mission seemed obvious: hold or die, with the threat of army firing squads and the pistols of the secret police keeping his men on the line as long as any remained standing. Chuikov, however, was also a student of tactics. The Germans, he argued, had prevailed through complex combined-arms attacks. The broken terrain of an urban warfare environment like Stalingrad worked against that kind of sophistication. The Soviet commander used that to his advantage. Rather than simply sitting back and waiting for the Germans to batter him, Chuikov ordered his troops to ‘grab them by the belt’ and engage them as closely as possible, to fight not merely street by street and building by building, but floor by floor and room by room. Such tactics would neutralize the Germans’ firepower and would deny them even the limited maneuvering space they needed for tactical initiatives. It would also cost lives, but the Soviet Union had lives to spend. On September 14, the final German drive for the Volga began. By that afternoon Chuikov’s command post had been silenced and the fight was decentralizing to rifle-company level as German spearheads flicked toward the landing areas along the Volga that were Stalingrad’s last hope. With the fate of the city in the balance, a desperate Chuikov secured a single division from Zhukov, Aleksandr Rodimstev’s 13th Guards. That night the division crossed the Volga, clawed out a bridgehead and held it for five days. It was long enough for further reinforcements to reach the city. It was also long enough to create doubts on the German side about the wisdom of clearing the massive factory and warehouse complexes along the river that were becoming the focal points for a defense whose ferocity surpassed anything they had ever experienced. Stalingrad became a city of rubble, smoke and ash, where seeing and breathing became chores and movement invited anything from a sniper’s bullet to an artillery barrage. In one of modern history’s great examples of leadership, Chuikov kept his men fighting by the force of his character. He offered no rhetoric and made no promises. Instead, he projected a dour fatalism that linked the fate of the city and its garrison. German generals and colonels also led from the front, hoping that inspiration would make up for lost mobility. Compelled to substitute courage for skill and lives for maneuver, however, the German army in Stalingrad was ‘demodernizing,’ losing the capacity to fight anything but a close-quarters battle of attrition. German Chief of Staff Franz Halder warned of the risks and was dismissed on September 24. The message was clear. To meet Paulus’ calls for reinforcements in the face of mounting casualties, Weichs began stripping less active sectors north and south of Stalingrad of German formations and replacing them with Romanians and Italians. The gamble might have been justified if the German-tipped spearhead had somehow been able to recapture the initiative. Instead, the most capable German formations were being chewed up in fruitless attacks in Stalingrad. A Luftwaffe never designed for sustained operations was suffering from increasing maintenance problems. Artillery pieces were wearing out. Tanks were breaking down. The Soviets by contrast had succeeded in systematizing their reinforcement and resupply system across the Volga. More and more heavy guns were supporting the infantry. On September 30, Hitler had announced Stalingrad’s imminent capture. Instead, it was the Germans who were pinned in place, able to drive forward only locally and episodically, with losses far out of proportion to either military or propaganda gains. As the October rains heralded winter’s approach, the Fhrer hinted at great rewards for Paulus when the city was finally secured. The Sixth Army launched its final coordinated attack on October 14. It broke into and through Chuikov’s lines, once again driving spearheads to the Volga’s banks, halting the movement of reinforcements across the river. The German plan called for an urban encirclement, a battle of maneuver and annihilation following Stalingrad’s street network. It almost worked. Chuikov, as matter-of-fact a man as ever wore a uniform, talked about an inexplicable force driving the Germans forward. It was, however, merely a last brilliant flash of the fighting power, skill and spirit that had taken the Wehrmacht across Western Europe, North Africa and into the heart of Russia. Pressed against the riverbank, the Soviets rallied and held, fighting the Sixth Army to a standstill. On October 31, Chuikov counterattacked. His force was only a division strong and gained less than 200 yards of polluted rubble, but it thrust at the heart of six weeks’ worth of denial on the part of the Germans. Twenty of the German army’s best divisions were packed at the tip of an immense salient hundreds of miles inside Russia. The salient’s flanks were held by troops for whom ‘dubious’ was a compliment. The main supply route was a railroad that at one point ran barely 60 miles from the front line, and winter was setting in. It was at this moment that Zhukov unleashed Operation Uranus. For a month Stavka had held its hand, building up forces in the face of Stalin’s demands for action, waiting for the rains to end and the ground to freeze. Those forces now numbered a million men, 1,000 modern tanks, 1,400 aircraft and 14,000 guns — all of it undetected by a German intelligence blinded by Soviet deception measures, and by its own conviction that the Soviets were as locked into Stalingrad as were the Germans. On November 19, a new Southwest Front, commanded by one of Zhukov’s protgs, General Nikolai Vatutin, hit the Romanian Third Army. A day later, another tank-tipped sledgehammer struck the Romanian Fourth Army on the Stalingrad salient’s southern flank. Hopelessly outgunned, the Romanians in both sectors collapsed. On November 23 the Soviet spearheads met near the town of Kalach, 50 miles from Stalingrad, in a textbook encirclement. It took a week to complete the encirclement of the 20-odd divisions and 330,000 men caught in what soon became known as the ‘Stalingrad pocket.’ Within days, internal friction among Soviet commanders slowed the advance and stiffened German resistance. Nevertheless, by November 30 a 100-mile gap existed between the Sixth Army and the rest of the Wehrmacht. Professionals at the time and armchair generals since have argued that Paulus erred in not breaking out immediately, with or without orders. His best chance, the argument runs, was before the Soviets could consolidate the envelopment. Weichs ordered him to cease offensive operations the same day that Uranus began. But the Sixth Army was locked in close combat with an opponent determined not to let go. Breaking contact at the front was only the first step in what would have been an incredibly complex maneuver. Even had Paulus acted to break out, there was no guarantee that the army’s fuel and ammunition reserves would be sufficient for a fighting retreat across the steppe in midwinter. The response to the unfolding disaster among the Sixth Army’s command structure was conditioned by the decline of the maneuver-war mentality after two months of static operations. Too many of the German sergeants, captains and colonels who knew how to fight in the open were dead, or had been promoted to replace other casualties. The new hands — so far as replacements had been forthcoming — were conditioned to moving a few yards at a time, and very cautiously. When Hitler proposed to relieve Stalingrad from outside, he reinforced an attitude held by many in the Sixth Army. The Fuhrer’s plans called for Weichs to stabilize the front and to launch the new Army Group Don toward Stalingrad. The new army group’s commander was Erich von Manstein, who since the start of Barbarossa had established a record as the Eastern Front’s specialist in difficult missions. Manstein’s command, however, was scraped together from various bits and pieces. It was not until December 12 that he was able to concentrate a half-dozen divisions for Operation Winter Storm, the projected grand advance to relieve what Hitler now proclaimed Fortress Stalingrad. Meanwhile, the garrison was dependent on supply from the air. There is strong evidence that on November 20, alluding to the earlier success at Demyansk, Luftwaffe Chief of Staff Hans Jeschonnek told Hitler that under the right conditions Stalingrad could be supplied from the air — not Reichsmarshall Hermann Gring, as has so often been asserted. Hitler used that information as a springboard for discussions with Gring, who assured the Fhrer of the Luftwaffe’s ability to successfully conduct the mission. By that time Jeschonnek had investigated further and concluded that the Sixth Army’s bare-minimum requirements of 500 tons of supplies a day could not be met by the available aircraft. Gring ordered him to keep his data to himself. Doomed to failure from the start, hundreds of Luftwaffe pilots and aircrews soon set off on an operation to supply Paulus’ army. In the end nearly 500 aircraft were lost to weather and to a sophisticated Soviet defense system combining rings of guns and ground-controlled fighters. Only a steadily diminishing fraction of the required supplies arrived in a pocket under constantly growing pressure on the ground from increasingly superior Soviet forces. An increasing proportion of the reduced deliveries was necessarily ammunition. When Kurt Zeitzler, Halder’s successor as chief of staff, reduced his food intake to the level of Stalingrad rations as a gesture of solidarity with the besieged troops, he lost more than 25 pounds in two weeks. The situation soon worsened even further. Operation Mars began on November 25, under Zhukov’s personal command. Its initial successes were countered by German armored reserves, and after losses appalling even by Soviet standards, Zhukov broke off the operation in mid-December. That ended Stavka’s original ambitious plan. As Manstein’s forces began assembling and advancing, Operation Saturn was in turn modified to Little Saturn, aimed at checkmating Manstein’s breakthrough by enveloping and crushing its left flank. Little Saturn’s preliminary stages had already absorbed much of Manstein’s projected relief force by the time the main attack began on December 16. Soviet armor destroyed the Italian Eighth Army and temporarily overran the air base at Tatsinkaia, which was vital to the German airlift. Manstein drove forward with a single panzer corps on an ever-narrowing axis of advance in steadily worsening weather. Thirty-five miles from Stalingrad, the attack bogged down against Soviet armor. On December 19, Manstein informed Hitler that it was impossible to break through to Stalingrad and sustain a corridor. He recommended that the Sixth Army break out to meet him. Manstein flew his intelligence officer into the pocket to go over details of the plan and found the Sixth Army staff unwilling to risk such an attack until spring. Whatever Winter Storm’s odds, it was the last chance to salvage the Sixth Army. In refusing to order the breakout, Manstein and Paulus showed an absence of the moral courage that is the principal requirement of high command. Instead they temporized, deferring to Hitler’s well-known and increasingly determined refusal to ‘abandon the Volga.’ For three days the debate among the German commanders continued as the Soviets drove into the German flank and rear. Then, on December 22, the question became moot. The newly arrived Second Guards Army opened an attack that drove Manstein’s slender spearhead back toward its start line. To an officer who subsequently flew into Stalingrad as Hitler’s emissary, Paulus said simply, ‘You are talking to dead men.’ With Soviet tanks and cavalry running wild in its virtually undefended rear areas, Army Group Don fell back and the Germans’ attention focused not on the fate of the Sixth Army but on the survival of their position in southern Russia. Hitler initially refused to make reinforcements available and shorten the front by withdrawing from the increasingly untenable Caucasus salient. Manstein made the best of what he had. In a series of brilliant tactical-level ripostes between January and March 1943, he enabled most of Army Group A to escape. In doing so he confirmed his reputation as a battle captain and blunted an operation already suffering from Stalin’s determination to pursue the offensive beyond the Red Army’s capacity to sustain it. Stalingrad, hopelessly isolated, was now expected to tie down as many Soviet forces as possible — a mission the Soviets initially sought to deny by negotiating a surrender. When Paulus refused, the final offensive began. On January 10, more than 7,000 guns and mortars began firing on every corner of the pocket within range. Tanks and infantry advanced simultaneously in all sectors, against resistance whose initial determination amazed even veterans of the earlier fighting. Even before the few remaining airfields were overrun, the Germans were living on rations measured in ounces, supplemented occasionally by horsemeat and the occasional rat. Conditions in the hospitals were beyond medieval. By January 17, the pocket had been reduced to half its size. Once again Paulus was summoned to surrender; once again he refused. German die-hards fell back into the city’s ruins, using tactics learned from the Russians to prolong the end as ammunition ran out and men sought terms at bayonet point. On January 31, Paulus’ headquarters was overrun. The field marshal, newly promoted by Hitler, was lying on his bed when a Russian lieutenant burst in and captured him. Organized resistance continued until February 2. The Soviets took longer than that to sort out their 90,000 prisoners and start them on their long march into captivity. In Germany, radio stations played the funeral march from Richard Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods. In Russia, the propaganda machine tooled up to publicize the triumph of the Soviet motherland. Stalin and his generals began plans for a new campaign to crush the invaders once and for all. And from Alsace to Vladivostok, families waited for news of their missing men. In June 1942, Nazi Germany was looking forward to victory. Six months and a million casualties later, the Reich had barely averted catastrophe. This article was written by Dennis Showalter and originally appeared in the January 2003 issue of World War II magazine. 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Geronimo’s Last Surrender

Geronimo’s Last Surrender On September 5, 1886, Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles sent a telegram to his superiors in Washington, D.C., announcing that the 16-month war with Geronimo and Naiche was finally over. An era had also ended. Twenty-five years of intermittent warfare between the Chiricahua Apaches and Americans had reached its ultimate and inevitable destiny. At the forefront of the resistance was Geronimo, a Chiricahua shaman who had a hand in virtually every major incident between his people and Americans during the previous quarter-century. He was not a chief in the traditional sense. His tribal authority prevailed over relatives and close friends. Yet most Chiricahuas recognized that he had almost supernatural powers: an unquestioned ability to predict enemy movements and the outcome of battles. During his last flight from the reservation on May 17, 1885, he could convince only 143 followers (41 fighting men) to join him. More than half left only because they had panicked when Geronimo told them a lie, that his men had killed the agent. The balance of the tribe, some 385 individuals, had stayed on the reservation. Hoping to put a quick end to the war, 60 of the 80 Chiricahua men actually enlisted as scouts for the military. They were led by Chatto, a 40-year-old chief, who would perform yeoman’s service during the campaign of 1885. Without Apache scouts (which included Western Apaches), the military would have accomplished little. Today, on the 120th anniversary of Geronimo’s September 3 surrender, Chatto and Geronimo have become the faces of the peace and war factions, the symbolic characters of the nation’s last significant Apache war. Once Geronimo formally capitulated at Skeleton Canyon in Arizona Territory, General Miles sent the hostiles to Florida, where they were kept under military control and classified as prisoners of war. Miles’ decision was just, for over the previous decade Geronimo had left reservations on four occasions (in 1876, 1878, 1881 and 1885), escaping to the Sierra Madre in Mexico. Miles then made a recommendation, this one unjust. He asked his superiors to authorize the removal of the entire Chiricahua tribe to Florida. He did not value the contributions made by Chatto and the 60 Chiricahua scouts. And he purposely ignored the inconvenient fact that 385 Chiricahuas not only had lived peacefully on the reservation but had never provided aid or recruits to the hostiles. He argued that the reservation was a breeding ground for new leaders, implying that malcontents had joined Geronimo. His specious arguments convinced Secretary of War William Endicott and President Grover Cleveland to approve his egregious betrayal. Those who had helped Brig. Gen. George Crook and Miles to end the war suffered the same fate as those who had raided and killed citizens of the United States and Mexico. Miles sent them to Florida, where they, too, were classified as prisoners of war under control of the War Department. Incredibly, this designation continued for 27 years. Though remembered today for their contempt for each other, Geronimo and Chatto had a similar history. Each spent his early years living with Mangas Coloradas, who was Chatto’s uncle. Each vividly remembered the military’s treachery toward Cochise and Mangas Coloradas in the early 1860s, which left the tribe suspicious of Americans and contributed mightily to the strife in the 1870s and 1880s. Each was captured at Ojo Caliente by Indian Agent John Clum, who shackled them before transferring them to San Carlos. Finally, in September 1881, fearing that American soldiers planned to arrest them, each jumped the reservation for Mexico. Chatto explained that talk of troops made [Geronimo] nervous [as] a wild animal. For reasons not entirely clear, once in Mexico their friendship ended. Then tragedy struck Chatto. On the frigid morning of January 24, 1883, Tarahumara Indians from Chihuahua surprised a Chiricahua camp, slaying about 20 and capturing 33, including Chatto’s wife and two children. The loss devastated him, haunting him for the next 50 years. His heart was sick with grief. A few months later Chatto led a famous raid into Arizona and New Mexico territories that captured a young white, Charlie McComas. Soon after, Chatto organized a war party to strike Chihuahua. His objective was captives, whom he planned to trade for his family. While he was absent, however, Captain Emmet Crawford’s Western Apache scouts surprised Chatto’s base camp. Every chief accepted Crook’s offer to return to the San Carlos Reservation. The general took some 300 with him, leaving 200 to come in soon after. Chatto stayed behind, hoping to recover his family. Negotiations with Chihuahua, however, broke down, and he finally returned to San Carlos in February 1884. Chatto explained his delay to Captain Crawford: If you were in my position with your relatives in captivity, I think you would have done the same. Chatto adapted quickly to reservation life, but the thought of his family consumed him. When he met General Crook in May 1884, Chatto asked him for help to free his people held in Mexico. Over the next year the general did all in his power, urging officials in Washington to write Mexican officials about the captives. To show his gratitude, Chatto enlisted as a scout on July 1, 1884. Lieutenant Britton Davis, the Chiricahuas’ agent near Fort Apache, appointed him sergeant. The two developed a strong friendship grounded in trust. Davis would later characterize Chatto as one of the finest men, Red or White, I have ever known. Crook especially felt betrayed by Geronimo’s final uprising. He told Davis to tell the reservation Chiricahuas that he would have to suspend efforts to recover their captives until peaceful times are restored. Chatto took command of the reservation. He organized a war dance for the scouts and then left to pursue the hostiles. Chatto surprised one camp, capturing 15 women and children. Years later he recalled the arduous and dangerous time: I carried a double cartridge belt with 45 to 50 cartridges on each belt. My rifle was loaded and my finger on the trigger following fresh tracks of hostiles, not knowing when a bullet might go through my forehead. Chatto was friendly with the two Chiricahua guides, Martine and Kayitah, who helped the Army locate the elusive leader’s camp in Mexico. In fact, Chatto had recommended Martine, who took Lieutenant Charles Gatewood to meet with Geronimo on August 25. Geronimo and Chatto remain controversial among their own people. To some, Geronimo was the last of the Chiricahua patriots, fighting to preserve his way of life. To others, however, he had outlived his time. Those who remained on the reservation thought Chatto was on the right side. Yet some followers of Geronimo, unable to appreciate the reasons for Chatto’s decision, thought him a traitor. Historians are just beginning to understand why Chatto served so eagerly as a scout for Crook. Personal animosity toward Geronimo was perhaps one reason, but another was gratitude to Crook for trying to recover his family. Unfortunately, without Mexico’s cooperation even the general could not arrange a happy outcome. Geronimo has achieved a notoriety accorded to only a very few American Indians. One could argue that his fame stems from the fact that his surrender in 1886 effectively marked the end of Indian resistance in North America. This once obscure Apache warrior, not even recognized by most Americans until he was in his mid-50s, has today become a legend of mythical proportions, and his fame steadily continues to grow. This article was written by Edwin R. Sweeney and originally published in the October 2006 issue of Wild West Magazine. 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Ghost Town: St. Elmo, Colorado

Ghost Town: St. Elmo, Colorado In 1875 prospector Dr. Abner Ellis Wright struck gold in Colorado’s remote Chalk Creek Canyon, discovering the vein that would yield the Mary Murphy Mine and support St. Elmo for 50 years. In spring 1880, Griffith Evans and several partners surveyed the town in 6 feet of snow and founded a business to grubstake the prospectors. Originally named Forest City in 1878, Evans renamed the town St. Elmo—the title of a popular Victorian romance novel— when the post office objected to the overused earlier name. By 1881 the town, bolstered by the arrival of the Denver, South Park, & Pacific Railroad and the construction of the Alpine Tunnel through the Continental Divide, had 2,000 inhabitants. The settlement had several merchandise stores, three hotels, five restaurants, two sawmills, a smelter and a weekly newspaper called the Mountaineer. Principal mines in the area included the Mary Murphy, Tressa C., Mollie, Pioneer and Alley Belle. The Mary Murphy was on a mountaintop 2,000 feet above the railroad and shipped as much as 75 tons of ore per day to the smelters at nearby Alpine. Altogether, there were 150 patented mine claims in the immediate area, though the number of men who became owners of paying mines was small. The low-grade ore necessitated heavy machinery, and thus large amounts of captial, to extract. The newspapers in the area worked quite hard to promote St. Elmo’s virtues to investors. In April 1888, the Buena Vista Democrat boasted: “From all appearances the Murphy vein extends clean through the globe to the Celestial Empire and the management propose to sink on the vein until the center of the earth is reached, and then negotiate with the Chinese government for sufficient territory and sink shafts.” St. Elmo experienced repeated booms and busts, but U.S. entry into World War I shrunk the labor market and brought prohibitive taxes that convinced mine owners to keep the ore in the ground for good. The Alpine Tunnel had closed in 1910, and with the failure of the mines the Colorado & Southern Railroad decided to abandon the Chalk Creek extension. Though residents of St. Elmo fought the railroad’s decision all the way to the Supreme Court, they lost and in 1926 the diehards rode the last train out of town. Today St. Elmo stands as one of Colorado’s most intact ghost towns. An April 2002 fire destroyed the historic town hall, but a new town hall is currently under construction with funds donated by the Buena Vista Heritage Museum. Originally published in the April 2008 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.

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Giving the Machine Gun Wings

Giving the Machine Gun Wings Air combat came of age during World War I with the invention of devices that allowed fighter pilots to “point and shoot”. On April 1, 1915, Roland Garros took off in a Morane-Saulnier L from an airfield in northern France, planning to play an April Fool’s Day trick on the Germans. The Frenchman soon spotted a two-seater Albatros B.II reconnaissance plane and approached it head-on—no doubt much to the German pilot’s surprise. The Morane-Saulnier challenging him was a single-seater, without an observer in the rear armed with a rifle, as was the German observer. Perhaps the Albatros pilot never even saw the gas-operated Hotchkiss machine gun fitted in front of Garros before the Frenchman opened fire. As the bullets passed through Morane-Saulnier’s propeller arc and into the Albatros, the German pilot slumped dead over the controls and the aircraft dropped out of the sky, the observer helpless in the rear cockpit. On that day, as American World War I pilot Arch Whitehouse later wrote: “Roland Garros had given the machine gun wings. His fantastic device gave birth to a new and most deadly weapon, providing the military forces with a lethal piece of armament. It made the airplane as important a war machine as the naval dreadnought.” Garros was 26 when he became the first pilot to down an enemy airplane with a machine gun firing through the propeller. Described by a contemporary as possessing “a liquid eye and an olive skin,” the young Frenchman had gained his pilot’s licence in 1910 and that year competed in Britain, France and the United States flying a Demoiselle, a bamboo-and-fabric monoplane that aroused much hilarity at exhibitions. The British aviation journal Aero reported that “the whole attitude and jerky action of the machine suggest a grasshopper in a furious rage.” Garros soon graduated to the Morane-Saulnier H, a monoplane designed by Raymond Saulnier and the Morane brothers, Léon and Robert. In September 1913, he flew it across the Mediterranean Sea from France to Tunisia in what The New York Times described as “one of the most notable feats in aviation.” Garros returned to Europe a hero, but already his aerial fame was being overtaken by events. Roland Garros stands in his Morane-Saulnier H, in which he became the first to cross the Mediterranean Sea by airplane on Sept 23, 1913. (National Archives) Earlier in 1913, the First Balkan War had ended with a resounding victory over the Ottoman Empire for the combined forces of Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and Bulgaria. During the conflict Bulgaria used aircraft to conduct reconnaissance missions over enemy lines, also dropping two bombs—by hand—on Odrin, Turkey. Aircraft designers were now awakened to the airplane’s military potential, and the race was on to create a plane capable of more than just scouting. The real challenge was armaments, which would exercise the ingenuity of both Raymond Saulnier and Swiss engineer Franz Schneider in 1913. Schneider had worked for the French manufacturer Nieuport before joining the German Luft-Verkehrs Gesellschaft (LVG) firm. In July 1913, he patented an “interrupter” gear, so named because when the pilot pressed the gun trigger a series of mechanical linkages interrupted firing until the propeller blade was clear. But the German military was unimpressed with Schneider’s work, refusing even to loan him a machine gun for testing. The Germans might have been more receptive had they known that Saulnier was conducting similar experiments in France. He was in fact wrestling with the same problem confronting Schneider: The structural design of front-engine aircraft restricted the use of machine guns to a three-quarter rear field of fire by an observer sitting behind the pilot. Saulnier knew the solution lay in inventing a device that allowed the pilot to operate a forward-firing machine gun. He balked at experimenting on an interrupter gear because with open-bolt machine guns such as the Hotchkiss and Lewis, the ammunition had no “uniform period of ignition.” This unpredictability could lead to hang-fire failures (an unexpected delay between a weapon being triggered and the bullet actually firing) and the possibility of a bullet hitting the propeller. Instead Saulnier fixed wedge-shaped steel deflector plates to the propeller blades where the arc crossed the line of fire of a front-facing gun. The French military loaned him a Hotchkiss machine gun, and initial trials went well, with only superficial damage to the prop. But ultimately Saulnier’s invention also met with disdain. The French, like the Germans, still believed aircraft didn’t require heavy armament. When World War I began in July 1914, neither country was equipped for an offensive aerial war. Nor were the British. Fighter ace James McCudden, who would have 57 victories at the time of his death on July 9, 1918, began the war as a mechanic with No. 3 Squadron. In his memoirs, completed shortly before he was killed in a flying accident, McCudden described the arrival at his squadron of two Bristol Scouts: “These Scouts were far ahead in performance of anything the Germans had in the air at this time, but the trouble was that no one had accurately foreseen developments as regards fitting machine-guns so that they could be used with any effect from single-seater machines. The Bristol in No. 3 Squadron was fitted with two rifles, one on each side of the fuselage, shooting at an angle of about 45 degrees in order to miss the air-screw.” In December 1914, Garros paid a visit to his old friend Saulnier and asked him to fit metal deflector plates to the propeller blades of his Morane so that he could mount a Hotchkiss gun at the front of his cockpit. Garros then spent the first few weeks of 1915 familiarizing himself with his new weapon. But he soon discovered there was a downside to Saulnier’s invention, as described by McCudden after No. 3 Squadron took delivery of a Morane-Saulnier Nm with a front-mounted Lewis gun. “[It] had a piece of steel fixed on each blade directly in front of the muzzle of the Lewis gun,” wrote McCudden. “So that the occasional bullets that hit the propeller were turned off by these hard-steel deflectors—as they were called. The deflectors took off almost thirty percent of the efficiency of the propeller, so that for the smallness of the machine and its ample power (80-hp Le Rhône) it was not very efficient in climb and speed.” By the end of March 1915, however, Garros had gained sufficient confidence in the deflector plates to test them in an operational flight, so he embarked on the April 1 patrol that ended in his victory over the Albatros B.II. The shoot-down made the front page of the Salt Lake Tribune on April 10, when the paper carried an eyewitness account of the encounter from Major Raoul Pontus: “Presently the crackling of a quick-firer showed the Frenchman judged himself sufficiently near to take the offensive. Could the German escape? It seemed difficult, for Garros shot forward in great bounds, getting nearer and nearer, but the German observer used his carbine freely and it seemed that a bullet might strike the Frenchman. Suddenly a long jet of white smoke gushed from the German machine and then a little flame, which, in an instant, enveloped the whole aeroplane. Notwithstanding the extreme peril the pilot took to flight but his effort to escape soon was converted into a horrifying downward plunge.” The day after the Tribune’s report, Garros attacked another two-seater, an Aviatik B.I, whose observer emptied his Mauser pistol at Garros. The Frenchman claimed a victory, but could not get it confirmed. The next day he claimed another unconfirmed success over an LVG Scout, and on April 15 he dispatched another Aviatik. Garros’ lethal stretch continued on the 18th, when he shot down an Albatros as his third confirmed victim—earning him a citation for the Legion of Honor and an invitation to address the Directorate of Military Aeronautics. British Sergeant Tony Bayetto sits in the cockpit of a Morane-Saulnier Type N "Bullet" with deflector wedges fitted to the propeller blades. (IWM Q65882) Suddenly the French authorities were desperate to learn more about Saulnier’s invention. With the benefit of hindsight, one might expect they would have done their best to ensure their new secret weapon didn’t fall into enemy hands. But perhaps their belief in Garros’ invincibility explains why they allowed him to take off alone on April 18 for yet another patrol. Accounts vary as to what exactly happened as Garros approached the Belgian town of Courtrai, four miles from the French border. According to the leader of a detachment of German soldiers guarding the railway line, Garros attacked a southbound train approaching on the line between Ingelmunster and Kortrijk.“Suddenly the plane went into a steep dive of about 60 degrees from a height of about 2,000 meters to about 40 meters from the ground,” wrote the German. “As the plane had swooped down over the train the Bahnschutzwache troops had fired on it following my order to open fire. We shot at him from a distance of only 100 meters as he flew past. After he had thrown his bomb at the train he tried to escape, switching his engine on again and climbing to about 700 meters through the shots fired by our troops. But suddenly the plane began to sway about in the sky, the engine fell silent, and the pilot began to glide the plane down in the direction of Hulste [northeast of Courtrai].” Other reports made no mention of a train, attributing Garros’ problems to engine failure as he was strafing German troops in the trenches. Either way, the Frenchman managed to nurse his Morane-Saulnier away from Courtrai before eventually landing in a field. He leapt out of the plane and tried to destroy it, but the wing fabric and spruce framework were damp and wouldn’t catch fire. Then the pilot spotted an approaching enemy patrol and fled, evading his pursuers but leaving his precious machine in German hands. Garros was soon captured by Württemberger cavalrymen, one of whom told the Schwabishen Merkur newspaper that their prisoner “was a good-looking, dark-haired Frenchman with a high white forehead, a slightly crooked nose and a small black beard. With his lips pressed together he looked at us in wide-eyed amazement.” The capture of the most famous flier of the war made headlines around the world. The French paper Le Temps described how “the news has caused a great emotion in France…because his exploits have made him the terror of the Germans.” When members of the German army air service inspected the Morane-Saulnier, they couldn’t believe their luck. Within days Garros’ airscrew had been transported to the workshop of Dutch aviation engineer Anthony Fokker. Fokker had learned to fly at age 20, and just two years later, in 1912, he started building airplanes. At first business was slow, but then came war. As Fokker wrote in his memoirs: “In the desperate struggle to keep the business afloat I had joyfully sold my planes to the German army…Holland had preferred French aeroplanes; England and Italy hardly responded to my offers; in Russia I was put down by the general corruption, and only Germany seemed to give me a civil reception, albeit not with open arms. As a young man of twenty-four, I wasn’t very interested in German politics and cared not where it would lead. I was Dutch and neutral.” As the money rolled in, Fokker began improving the performance of the monoplane he had first designed in 1912. Unlike the wooden Morane-Saulnier, Fokker’s machine was made of welded steel tubing and powered by an 80-hp Oberursel engine. Armed with a single machine gun mounted on the cowling, Lieutenant Kurt Student taxis for takeoff in a Fokker E.III. Student scored three of his six aerial victories while piloting Eindeckers. (National Archives) Fokker recalled that on April 20, 1915, two days after Garros’ capture, he was summoned to Berlin, where he collected the deflector plates salvaged from the Morane-Saulnier, along with a Parabellum machine gun, then returned to his workshop. He later described the French design as “very cunning,” but he believed it could be improved. Within two days Fokker and his team of engineers had produced a synchronized gear whereby the machine gun’s rate of fire was controlled by the propeller’s revolution, so the bullets avoided hitting the blades. “We placed a cog on the prop, that lifted another rod with a spring that released the firing cock of the machine gun,” Fokker explained. “The prop passed a given point 2400 times a minute, so with this machine gun that fired 600 rounds per minute we needed only one cam on the prop. The pilot had a lever that enabled him to make contact between the cam on the propeller and the firing mechanism. That was all.” On April 22, Fokker took his design to Berlin, and the next day gave a demonstration to a group of air service officers, using a gun fitted to a monoplane pulled by an automobile. All went well, and Fokker assumed he would receive instructions to fit the synchronization gear to all German aircraft. He noted, however, “In my overconfidence I had not taken into account the conservatism of the military mind.” The officers demanded to see the system in action in the air, so Fokker obliged them, but “still they weren’t happy and stated that the only way to test the gun was that I, not a German nor a soldier, would go to the front and shoot down a plane with it myself. Without leaving me any choice I was packed off to the front…[where] I was issued a uniform and an identity card, styling myself Lieutenant Anton Fokker of the German Air Force. In this manner I flew for several days, two or three hours a day, looking for an Allied aeroplane. Then one day I saw a Farman two-seater coming out of a cloud at 800 meters below me. At last I could show off the capabilities of the gun and I dived towards it.” As he closed in for the kill, Fokker later claimed, his conscience got the better of him, and he broke off his attack. He returned to Douai, where he “quit the front line flying business.” Fokker said he had a furious row with Flieger Abteilung 62’s commanding officer, insisting that as a citizen of a neutral country he refused to be responsible for the death of a French pilot. As a compromise, Fokker offered to teach a German pilot how the synchronization gear worked. “Lieutenant Oswald Boelcke, later to become Germany’s first ace, was assigned to the job,” Fokker recalled. “The next morning I showed him how to manipulate the machine gun while flying the plane, watched him take off for the Front, and left for Berlin. The first news which greeted my arrival there was a report from the Front that Boelcke, on his third flight, had brought down an Allied plane. Boelcke’s success, so soon after he had received the new weapon, convinced the entire air corps overnight of the efficiency of my synchronized machine gun. From its early skepticism headquarters shifted to the wildest enthusiasm for the new weapon.” By July 1915, the synchronization gear had been fitted to Fokker’s single-seater M.5K Eindecker. Equipped with its forward-firing Parabellum, the monoplane—known as the Fokker E.I—became the German air service’s first fighter. Flying an E.I on August 1, Max Immelmann shot down a British two-seater, and by the end of that summer Royal Flying Corps pilots were referring to themselves as “Fokker-fodder.” Not only did the Allies have no answer to the front-firing Eindecker, but at that point they had no pilots equal to Boelcke or Immelmann. Both men were brilliant technicians, with Immelmann inventing his famous climbing turn and Boelcke always attacking head-on, out of reach of his opponent’s gun. “To see a Fokker just steadying itself to shoot another machine in the air is, when seen close up, a most impressive sight,” wrote the RFC’s McCudden, who was fortunate to survive several such encounters.“For there is no doubt that the Fokker in the air was an extremely unpleasant-looking beast.” For the rest of 1915, the Germans ruled the skies over the Western Front. French bombing sorties into German territory were halted in the face of the “Fokker scourge,” and British pilots’ morale dipped low, as they lost 49 pilots and observers to Fokker E.Is in the year’s last two months. Had McCudden not been sent back to England for training at the Central Flying School in January 1916, he might have been added to the list. As it was, when he returned to France in July, McCudden found superiority in the air war had shifted back in the Allies’ favor. The French had introduced the Nieuport 11 Bébé sesquiplane (a biplane with the upper wing chord greater than the lower) in early 1916, which soon ended the Fokkers’ dominance. Small and swift with a good rate of climb, it was armed with a Lewis gun on the top wing firing over the propeller arc. The British quickly took delivery of a number of Nieuports, and over a four-day period at the end of May 1916, 19-year-old Albert Ball shot down three German aircraft while flying an up-powered Nieuport 16. A German mechanic examines the above-wing Lewis gun mounting on a Nieuport 16 after the fighter was captured on May 22,1916. (Courtesy Jon Guttman) By this time the British had an impressive airplane of their own, the de Havilland D.H.2. Initially labeled the “spinning incinerator” because of a series of fatal spin accidents during training, the D.H.2 pusher proved agile and maneuverable in the right hands. Since the plane’s engine was in the rear, the Lewis gun in the nose had a clear field of fire for the pilot and, more important, an unlimited rate of fire. Yet it would be another British pusher aircraft, the two-seater Farman Experimental F.E.2b, that was responsible for the death of Immelmann on June 18, 1916. Boelcke, having notched 40 victories, was killed in October of that year, and in November acting command of his Jagdstaffel 2 passed to his protégé, Manfred von Richthofen. Boelcke had schooled Richthofen in his “dicta,” a set of aggressive tactics by which fighter pilots hunted rather than patrolled. The Germans reasserted their dominance in the air in the spring of 1917, but by the end of the year they were struggling to manufacture an adequate number of airplanes due to metal and rubber shortages. Richthofen had raised his score to 80 when he was killed on April 21, 1918, just a couple of weeks after Roland Garros rejoined the air war. The Frenchman had escaped from a German POW camp in February 1918 and made it back to his homeland. Desperate to atone for his failure to set fire to his secret weapon nearly three years earlier, he reenlisted in his old squadron and scored his fourth victory. But on October 5, Garros was shot down and killed while flying a Spad XIII. By war’s end, Fokker was much in demand—except by his own government. Unwanted by the Dutch, he opened a factory in the U.S., and by the end of the 1920s was America’s largest civil aircraft manufacturer. Only the introduction of the all-metal Douglas DC-1 in 1933 ended the Dutchman’s dominance in American aviation. Yet for all his achievements in civil aviation, it was in the military sphere that Anthony Fokker showed his greatest foresight. As James McCudden wrote of the Fokker E.II in 1918, “I must admit that the enemy deserves credit for first realising the possibilities of the scout type of aeroplane firing ahead, and for getting such machines in action before we had any machines ready to counter them.” Gavin Mortimer is the author of Chasing Icarus: The Seventeen Days in 1910 That Forever Changed American Aviation. Recommended reading: The Origin of the Fighter Aircraft, by Jon Guttman; Sharks Among Minnows, by Norman Franks; Early German Aces of World War 1, by Greg VanWyngarden; and Aces High: War in the Air Over the Western Front, 1914-18, by Alan Clark. Originally published in the July 2013 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here.

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Glory Over the Mountains: Simón Bolívar Liberates Venezuela

Glory Over the Mountains: Simón Bolívar Liberates Venezuela Bolívar witnesses one of his men dying from exhaustion as the army crosses the mountain pass of Páramo de Pisba. (Francisco Antonio Cano/Courtesy Casa Museo Quinta de BolIvar, Ministerio de Cultura, Bogota) IT WAS NO SECRET that Bolívar wanted to take his war to the rest of South America. He had said as much in a promise to the New Granadans published months before. But time was slipping away; the rainy season was beginning and the skies were issuing a steady drizzle, miring the plains in mud. If the Spaniards had thought Bolívar would try to fulfill his promise, they certainly did not think he would do it now. Only a fool would attempt that journey when rivers became seas, valleys disappeared under lakes, and the Andes grew slick with ice, impassable. He confided his plan to two of his most trusted generals—those he considered essential to the enterprise—José Antonio Páez and Francisco de Paula Santander. He swore them to secrecy, insisting that the element of surprise was critical. “This is for your eyes and your eyes only,” he wrote Santander. Ascending to 13,000 feet, slipping and sliding over the wet, icy rock, the army kept moving, knowing that to stop and lie down at those bone-chilling heights was to give up and die Bolívar and his infantry were soon making their way west along the Apure River in what is today southwestern Venezuela. On May 23, he called his officers to a council of war. They met in a ramshackle hut in the deserted little village of Setenta. There was no table at which to sit, no chairs. They perched instead on the skulls of cattle—picked over by condors, bleached white by the sun. Although the officers, in fact the entire patriot army, had assumed they would be wintering close by, the Liberator explained that it would be foolish to remain during the rains, when food would be scant, malaria and yellow fever rampant. He confided his plan to take the army over the Andes, surprise the enemy on the New Granadan side, and astound the world by springing his campaign from one theater of war to another. Bolívar started toward the mountains on May 26, just as the rains began to pelt down in earnest. The rank-and-file soldiers had not been told where they were headed—to keep the operation secret but also because Bolívar feared they would desert if they knew the perilous direction of their march. Bolívar’s tight force of 2,100—four infantry battalions and three cavalry squadrons (including a British legion), accompanied by medics, auxiliary forces, women, children, and a herd of cattle—was now poised to undertake one of the most remarkable feats in military history. On June 4, Bolívar’s army crossed the Arauca River and passed into the plains of Casanare (in modern Colombia), where the rains were torrential, savannahs flooded, and creatures were adrift as far as the eye could see. His soldiers constructed boats of cowhide to transport the ordnance and keep it as dry as possible. They marched with mud sucking at their feet and waded, even swam, when floods rose. Men with families used their threadbare blankets to shield women from the cold and damp; others used them to protect guns and ammunition. Hungry, weary, drenched to the skin, they traversed a landscape such as they’d never seen. Men on horseback were no better off than those on the ground. Hooves grew soft in the bog and swamp, rendering animals lame. Feet swelled to such tender misshape that riders could no longer use their stirrups. The army carried on anyway, marching for more than a month, lured by trees that floated like promises of dry earth in those vast inland waterways. The frail were soon sick; the rugged, wounded; the unfortunate, at the mercy of tiny flesh-eating fish that could strip limbs to bone in seconds. Horses and cattle fell into deep water, never to rise again. Cargo became too heavy to carry; reins too shriveled to use. At night, they camped wherever they could—sleeping in standing water, or on their horses—only to be set upon by mosquitoes, sand flies, and stinging gnats. At long last, they reached hard land at Tame, just east of the Andes, where the army of liberation gained a measure of relief in dry beds, salt and bananas, potatoes and barley. In the distance, whenever a wind cleared away the clouds, they could see the tangle of green forest lining the lower cliffs of the towering Andes. After a week’s rest, on July 1, they were off again, headed for that mighty cordillera—a snowbound, airless barrier of rock and cliff. The patriots, bolstered by Bolívar’s enthusiasm, staggered up those slopes, with nothing but dreams of glory. As they rose into thinner air, the icy wind numbed some minds, clarified others: Many of Páez’s horsemen, who had slogged unhesitatingly 20 miles a day through mud and flood, decided the vertiginous heights and unstable rock were too punishing for their horses. Some gave up, deserting the revolution in favor of their afflicted animals. Few beasts would survive the five days’ march over the dizzying mountain pass of Páramo de Pisba. The rain was ceaseless, the cold unrelenting. Within a few days, the remaining livestock were gone; a string of carcasses marked their trail. “The harshness of the peaks we have crossed would be staggering to anyone who hasn’t experienced it,” Bolívar reported to his vice president. “There’s hardly a day or night it doesn’t rain….Our only comfort is the thought that we’ve seen the worst, and that we are nearing the end of the journey.” Often, the streams they crossed were swift and fierce, and the army and its followers had to negotiate them in stolid lines, moving hand in hand, until every last person had been dragged through the white water. To traverse ravines, they lassoed trees on either side, then pulled travelers on leather ropes, over the plummeting abyss, suspended in improvised hammocks. BOLÍVAR HIMSELF sometimes carried soldiers—or women who had dutifully followed them—who were too weak to stand. “He was,” according to one British observer, “invariably humane in his attentions to the sick and wounded.” Slipping and sliding over the wet, icy rock, the army kept moving, ascending to 13,000 feet, knowing that to stop and lie down at those bone-chilling heights was to give up and die. By the time they had scaled the Páramo de Pisba, their shoes had no soles, their clothes were in shreds; hundreds had died of hypothermia. Many of the surviving officers, a witness later wrote, “had no trousers, and were glad to cover themselves with pieces of blanket, or whatever they could procure.” A full quarter of the British contingent perished in that crossing. Yet there were scenes of extraordinary strength and courage. The patriot women, mistresses or wives, were indispensable medics: tending wounds, giving hope to the ill, evincing an admirable fortitude. Some proved even sturdier than the men. On the night of July 3, as the army huddled at the very heights of the crossing, Bolívar’s aide-de-camp was told that a soldier’s wife was there among them, giving birth. The next day he saw her marching along behind her husband’s battalion, a strapping newborn in her arms. On July 6, survivors began to straggle down the other side of the mountain. Weak, famished, in tatters, it was all they could do to pick their way down the steep escarpments. At the town of Socha, jubilant New Granadans rushed out to meet them with food and drink, horses and weapons. The village women, filled with sympathy for the half-naked soldiers, set to work, making them shirts, trousers, underwear, and jackets—sewn from their own clothes. Bolívar had chosen the route well, for there was no one to challenge the patriot presence. The Spaniards had dismissed the Páramo de Pisba as too difficult a crossing: There were no guards in the area, no enemy garrisons for miles. The expedition would have precious time to recover. Over the next few days, while the army rested, Bolívar busied himself organizing supplies, raising troops, making sure the sick were minded and the hungry fed, as well as gathering intelligence on royalist movements. New Granadans, who had suffered three years of harsh rule under their tyrannical viceroy, now rushed to enlist in Bolívar’s effort, as one village after another welcomed him with open arms. The young general Santander later wrote of his efforts: “Here is where this man distinguishes himself above all the rest, exhibiting extraordinary resolve and energy. In three days, he remounts and arms the cavalry, musters ammunition, reassembles the army; then sends out patrols, energizes the citizens, and plans an all-out attack.” The liberation of New Granada came to a head only days after the last of Bolívar’s soldiers descended the snowy heights of Pisba. It was a measure of Bolívar’s genius that his army had met with no resistance; the test now would be to spring that army into a winning war. At dawn on July 25, one day after Bolívar’s 36th birthday, his soldiers met the Spaniards in a battle at Pantano de Vargas, a hill-rimmed swampland about 120 miles northeast of Bogotá. General José María Barreiro and his royalists had all the advantages: higher ground, more troops, better arms and training. But just when all seemed lost for the patriots—a blistering fire on all sides—Bolívar shouted to the horseman Juan José Rondón, “Colonel! Save the republic!” The fearless cowboy led his plainsmen in a furious charge up the hill Barreiro had taken, and, swinging machetes and spears, they managed to drive out the Spaniards. The patriots, elated, now fought with renewed zeal. Rattled by this reversal, the royalists shrank in alarm, then rushed to withdraw as rain began to spill from the darkening heavens. Santander would later say that the battle at Pantano de Vargas was won by the horsemen’s intensity and a British calm, and because Bolívar, like some mythic war god, seemed to appear everywhere at once. In truth, the patriots had more advantages than that: The core of Bolívar’s troops—seasoned, challenged, culled to an able few—were a well-honed fighting force now. The Spaniards, terrified by the Liberator, by his promises of war to the death, by his startling appearance on their side of the Andes, simply lost their nerve. Barreiro’s army may have had the numbers, the equipment, the spangled uniforms, and the training from European wars, but, as Bolívar quickly understood, they had a distinct—and crushing—disadvantage: They were afraid. The determining Battle of Boyacá was fought nearly two weeks later, on August 7, but by then the entire balance of power had shifted. It was no longer the Spaniards who were trying to block Bolívar from marching to the New Granadan capital of Bogotá; it was Bolívar trying to block the Spaniards from reuniting with their viceroy and collecting badly needed reinforcements. BY MIDMORNING, the Liberator’s army had taken a position near the bridge at Boyacá, on a hill that oversaw the road to the capital. At 2 o’clock in the afternoon, the royalist army appeared. General Barreiro sent out a vanguard, assuming that the row of patriots he saw on the far bluff was merely a band of observers. He ordered his second in command, Colonel Francisco Jiménez, to scare them off so that the main body of his troops—3,000 strong—could pass. But Bolívar accelerated the patriot march, and, before long, his entire army coursed over the hill, wave after wave of roaring soldiers. Rondón’s horsemen, in galloping charge, plunged into the royalists’ tidy formation, dispersing them like a flock of sheep. General José Antonio Anzoátegui then fell upon the same soldiers with his hardened veterans; Santander flew after their vanguard and overtook them. By 4 o’clock, it was done. The Spanish general, in desperation, tried to retreat to a hillside to regroup, but by then his army had been devastated—200 lay dead in the open meadow, the rest were in disarray. When Anzoátegui’s cavalry charged up that hill with bloodied lances, the Spaniards quickly laid down their arms. Sixteen hundred royalists were taken prisoner that afternoon. The battle had lasted all of two hours. With the road to the capital completely open now, Bolívar and a small squadron set out for Bogotá. As one of his officers wrote, “A lightning bolt doesn’t fall from the sky as swiftly as General Bolívar descended on the capital.” He rode, ragged and shirtless, his coat fluttering against bare skin, for all 70 miles of the journey. As he raced through the humid countryside—his wild, long hair riding the wind—he hardly looked like a general who had vanquished a king’s army. But it was so. The Spaniards in Bogotá fled with little more than the clothes on their backs, abandoning houses, businesses, and the entire vice-regal treasury to the patriot army. Viceroy Juan José de Sámano, author of so many atrocities against the New Granadans, had no time to worry about the fate of his people now. He saved himself, stealing away in the guise of a lowly Indian. The official celebration of Bolívar’s victory was held on September 18, and all Bogotá turned out for the festivities. Church bells pealed, 20 young beauties in pristine white dresses came forward gamely to bestow crowns of laurels, and Bolívar marched alongside Santander and Anzoátegui in a victory procession. But even with all the joy and high spirits, few New Granadans understood how momentous their victory truly was. In 75 days, in a wholly improvised maneuver, Bolívar had freed New Granada and opened the way for the liberation of much of Spanish America. His march over the cordillera had a great deal in common with Hannibal’s over the Alps, except that terrain and climate were harsher in the Andes, and Hannibal had taken years to prepare for the challenge. Bolívar’s genius was to achieve the feat as an improvisation, fashioning his strategy on the fly. As one historian put it, he had fulfilled all of Napoleon’s maxims—destroy the army, capture the capital, conquer the country—but he had realized them in one sweeping motion. As Bolívar himself had written prophetically four years before: “A weak man requires a long fight in order to win. A strong one delivers a single blow and an empire vanishes.” Marie Arana, a native of Peru, is the author of the acclaimed memoir American Chica. This story is adapted from Bolívar: American Liberator (Simon and Schuster). Copyright © 2013 by Marie Arana. 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The Glory of the Sun King

The Glory of the Sun King Over his lengthy reign Louis XIV defeated successive generations of European royalty—but in so doing he sealed the fate of the absolute monarchy in France. London was still smoldering when France’s King Louis XIV proclaimed his life’s driving force. The year was 1666, and the Great Fire had just reduced the capital of his mortal English enemies to a charred barren. Stirred by an inner flame of his own, Louis proclaimed, “My dominant passion is certainly love of glory.” His thirst for la gloire had already moved him to claim a hefty share of fading Spain’s continental possessions. Yet there was little prestige to be gained from kicking around the bankrupt, overextended Spaniards. The monarch known to history as the “Sun King” cast his gaze elsewhere, and he discerned a quarry with much to offer in his nominal allies the wealthy Dutch. King Louis’ decision to extend his quest for glory to the Netherlands seemed, to him at least, a logical one. Though the forerunner of the Dutch Republic had been a military ally of France for decades, the Hollanders had become major economic rivals. Having largely replaced the Portuguese as masters of commerce between Europe and the wealthy Far East, the ardently capitalistic Dutch grew steadily richer through their domination of the Molucca Islands (in present-day Indonesia) and stranglehold on the lucrative spice trade. To justify his decision to go to war, Louis could point to marked political and religious differences. The Dutch had broken with the Spanish monarchy to form their democratic republic, while France remained the domain of an absolute monarch—the Sun King himself. Moreover, the Dutch dared to challenge his authority, in 1668 forming a diplomatic alliance with England and Sweden that forced Louis to end his ongoing war against the Spanish Netherlands and return conquered territory. Though both the Dutch and French were ostensibly Christian, the Protestant Hollanders forbade Catholicism in the Netherlands, while the hard-core Catholic French king ultimately outlawed Protestantism within his domain. But profit and glory were Louis’ actual motives for wanting to conquer the rich and powerful Hollanders. To humble the men in wooden shoes would not only line Louis’ pockets but also gain him far-reaching acclaim as his nation’s champion in a struggle with a dangerous ideological opponent. Thus in May 1672 he mobilized his armies and launched the Franco-Dutch War. Louis XIV’s 1672 invasion of the Netherlands— depicted in a period painting by Dutch artist Adam Frans van der Meulen—was more about power and profit than it was about religion. (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). Seeking a quick victory, Louis had amassed an impressive force with which to conquer the Dutch. Some 120,000 men in two columns first advanced toward Maastricht in the southeast part of the Netherlands (sandwiched between present-day Germany and Belgium), but then bypassed the fortress city and followed the Rhine River northwest toward Amsterdam. As the French closed within two days’ march of the capital, the Dutch opened their dikes, establishing a defensive water line by flooding the surrounding countryside in 4 feet of excruciatingly cold seawater. But by then the French soldiers were so far inside Holland that the panicked Dutch people revolted, demanding the appointment of William of Orange as stadtholder, or de facto head of state, before lynching the politicians they blamed for leading them to war. The government in waterlocked Amsterdam meanwhile sought a truce to spare both sides a bloodbath in the looming siege of the capital. Louis, however, demanded such harsh concessions that the Dutch rallied around William. A hotheaded, combat-loving firebrand, William proved a largely inept field commander. Yet in defeat he managed to inflict grievous losses on his opponents, and the fervently Protestant stadtholder hated Louis with a passion. Furthermore, he managed to enlist allies with his energetic anti-French exhortations. Frustrated by the swamped countryside and William’s fanatical resistance, Louis turned away from Amsterdam to instead invest the bypassed fortress city of Maastricht. Tasked with the siege was Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, a talented young military engineer with a proven ability to both build and overcome defensive works. Vauban devised an intricate network of trenches that within a few weeks brought about Maastricht’s fall. Under Vauban’s supervision the French captured every Dutch fortress city they encountered, but William kept coaxing a steady stream of new allies onto the battlefield to fight the French. Louis resorted to subterfuge, dispatching regiments of spies and subversives to nurture disaffection and outright revolt among William’s countrymen and newfound allies. In the end, although opposed by strong and capable enemies, the French king manipulated them into impotence and ultimately prevailed. In the subsequent 1678–79 Nijmegen peace treaties, his demoralized and confused adversaries conceded him vast tracts of Europe. The Sun King’s adventure in the Netherlands had helped turn France into the undisputed pre-eminent power on the Continent. Louis oversaw a sprawling domain molded to his will, with few voices of dissent from his subjects of various nationalities. Yet his belief in a divine right to absolute power—and, of course, his unquenchable thirst for glory—inevitably drove him from the comforts of peace to lead his nation back to war. Following his victory in the Franco-Dutch War Louis undertook a series of actions intended to stabilize his nation’s borders and reinforce his various territorial claims. The most momentous of these came in the fall of 1688, when the Sun King crossed the Rhine seeking to coerce Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I into acknowledging France’s hegemony in Western Europe. Louis’ advance did not have the intended result, however, instead driving Leopold to band together with Spain, the Dutch Republic, Savoy, England and other European allies to form the Grand Alliance, which promptly declared war on France. The resulting Nine Years’ War had Louis fighting on two fronts—in the east, where his forces took numerous cities in the Rhineland, and in the west against the English and Dutch. France also supported the ultimately futile efforts of deposed King James II, a fellow Catholic, to reclaim the English throne from William III—Louis’ old nemesis William of Orange. The war also saw extensive fighting in Italy, as well as in Spain’s Catalonia region. Though France generally did well in the conflict, by 1697 the huge drain on Louis’ treasury convinced him to agree to the Treaty of Ryswick and renounce some of his recent gains. Louis had been on the throne ostensibly since age 4, and by the time the Nine Years’ War ended, the 59-year-old Sun King was more than ready to retire, at least as much as a ruling monarch of his stature could. His wife, Maria Theresa of Spain, had died in 1683, after which the aging monarch had shed his many mistresses and married 48-year-old Françoise d’Aubigné, pious onetime governess to one of the king’s former mistresses. As the 17th century waned, Louis surrounded himself with family—including his dozen-plus children, both acknowledged and illegitimate—and sought finally to give over the rigors of campaigning. Louis found it difficult to rest on his considerable laurels, however, for a new generation of enemies was emerging to challenge him. The determined newcomers were confident they could cut down to size the aging monarch who had instilled such fear in their fathers. Yet the Sun King would rouse himself from the comforts of hearth and home to show how powerfully an old lion can bite. As the 18th century dawned, the tangled political machinations in Europe conspired to make Louis XIV appear to ruling contemporaries a greater-than-ever peril. Spain’s frail and sickly Hapsburg king, Charles II, had no direct heir, although Hapsburg Archduke Charles of Austria was a strong claimant. But in the will he dictated just before his death at age 38 on Nov. 1, 1700, Charles II left the throne to grandnephew Philip, Duke of Anjou, who was also Louis’ grandson. The French king was poised to gain unfettered access to the considerable stores of gold and silver Spain had extracted from its New World colonies. The Sun King’s rivals in turn feared such a huge injection of capital would only fuel Louis’ penchant for territorial expansion and lust for glory. The French king’s actions in the two years following Philip’s ascension did little to dispel their fear, as he declined to remove his grandson from the House of Bourbon line of succession, raising the very real possibility Philip might one day rule over both Spain and France. The response to Louis’ actions was swift. England, the Dutch Republic, Austria and other states within the Holy Roman Empire allied themselves against the French king and formally supported Archduke Charles’ claim to the Spanish throne. The reconstituted Grand Alliance declared war on France in May 1702, and Louis once again found himself confronting a formidable array of hostile powers. While the French king remained a political force to be reckoned with, he faced several challenges in the War of the Spanish Succession. Louis’ best field commander in the Franco-Dutch War, Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, vicomte de Turenne, had died in one of the final battles of that fray, and the brilliant Vauban had quibbled with his king and fallen out of royal favor. Moreover, France’s coffers had never recovered from the expenses of the Nine Years’ War, even with the recent infusion of Spanish money. The confederation squaring off against France, meanwhile, had organized a hardy leadership. A disillusioned expatriate Frenchman, Prince Eugene of Savoy, was expertly guiding Austria’s imperial forces. Louis’ nemesis William III of England had died, leaving John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, in charge of that nation’s forces. Churchill, like Eugene, had fought as a young soldier in the previous war with France, and his courage and meticulous study of warfare made him one of his nation’s greatest warriors. Nevertheless, at the Sept. 20, 1703, Battle of Höchstädt, in Bavaria, the French under Marshal Claude-Louis-Hector de Villars managed to trounce the opposing Austrians, inflicting more than 10,000 casualties for the loss of 1,000 men. The situation appeared dire for the coalition. But in 1704 Churchill, after massing a sizable force in Flanders, struck out southwest on a route that made it impossible for the French to ascertain his destination and concentrate their troops accordingly. He finally dug into the French and their Bavarian allies on July 2 at Donauwörth, cutting them to pieces. Churchill shared William III’s love of combat, but was a far more competent field commander known for uncompromising tactics. When assaulting a fortification, for example, he skipped the formality of offering its commander a chance to surrender, instead sending waves of men  against the enemy defenses. Churchill also refused to parole enemy soldiers, thus denying the rank and file an opportunity to bear arms against him a second time. In the wake of his victory at Donauwörth Churchill linked up with Eugene, and on August 13 they destroyed a numerically superior French-Bavarian army on the banks of the Danube near Blenheim, a decisive victory that essentially knocked Bavaria out of the war. The Grand Alliance further rocked the French back on their heels in Italy and the Mediterranean, where the British seized Gibraltar. The victories also crushed Louis’ hopes for a quick war. Things went from bad to worse for the French. In 1706 Churchill trounced Louis’ elderly favorite marshal, François de Neufville, duc de Villeroi, at Ramillies; allied forces drove the French from the Netherlands; Eugene upended Louis’ southern forces outside Turin, Italy; and an allied army reached Madrid, threatening Louis’ grandson. In 1708 Churchill and Eugene again teamed up to defeat the French in Flanders and occupy northern France. Meanwhile, the combined fleets of the newly declared United Kingdom and Holland established firm control of the Mediterranean and North Atlantic, blockading French ports. Imported goods became a rarity, and prices soared. Then nature itself delivered a severe blow. The winter of 1708–09 was the harshest in recorded history. France’s just-planted wheat crop died in the rock-hard soil, while the numbing cold killed half the nation’s livestock. Famine was widespread. Louis’ pious wife told him God was punishing him for inciting the Dutch war. The Sun King believed her and sought peace from his enemies. In the spring of 1709, when French Foreign Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, marquis de Torcy, traveled to Holland for negotiations, the allies hurled a set of brutally humiliating terms at him. Among the 40 articles were demands that the French surrender all their conquests and that Louis not only desist all aid to his grandson in Spain but also force Philip to abdicate in favor of Archduke Charles. Although broken in spirit and sick of the misery constant war was visiting on his country and people, the proud old monarch could not bring himself to bow so low to his foes. “If I must make war,” he replied to the demands, “I would rather fight my enemies than my children.” Backed into a corner with his loved ones behind him, Louis XIV decided on a wholly uncharacteristic course of action—the absolute monarch turned to his people for help. In June 1709 the French king distributed an open letter to his military governors, provincial authorities and bishops, outlining the impossibility of the allied requirements and appealing directly to the citizens to come to their country’s aid: I can say that I have done violence to my character… to procure promptly a peace for my subjects even at the expense of my personal satisfaction, and perhaps even to my honor.…I can no longer see any alternative to take other than to prepare to defend ourselves. To make them see that a united France is greater than all the powers assembled by force and artifice to overwhelm it, at this hour I have put into effect the most extraordinary measures that we have used on similar occasions to procure the money indispensable for the glory and security of the state.…I have come to ask…your aid in this encounter that involves your safety. By the efforts that we shall make together, our foes will understand that we are not to be put upon. Louis’ plea struck a resounding chord with his subjects, who immediately rallied around king and country. Gold cascaded into the coffers, while malnourished men from 16 to 60 rushed to enlist in an army the allies did not notice growing. Fed by little more than patriotism, recruits toiled on fortifications and drilled ceaselessly under the direction of Marshal Villars, who knew the only real advantage they would have over the battle-tested, numerically superior Grand Alliance troops was desperation. Meanwhile, Churchill besieged the fortress city of Tournai, in Flanders, which finally fell in early September, then moved east toward Mons, threatening to outflank the French lines. Recognizing the threat, Louis sent Villars to intercept the allies. Correctly assuming Churchill would never pass up a shot at what appeared an easy victory, Villars conspicuously massed his troops outside the nondescript town of Malplaquet. Sure enough, the pugnacious British commander made straight for them. Villars’ choice of location was a stroke of genius. Dense forests protected his flanks. From their bristling defensive positions the French employed cannons and muskets with greater accuracy than Churchill had anticipated, repulsing successive waves of brightly clad allied attackers. Using enfilading tactics Villars had seen before and was expecting, Churchill wasted thousands of men in advances shattered by withering fire from a far larger French force than he had dreamed of encountering. As Villars and his men were first to leave the field at Malplaquet, Churchill brazenly claimed success, but it was a cripplingly expensive Pyrrhic victory. While the French had sustained some 10,000 casualties, allied losses were nearly double that number. “If it please God to give your majesty’s enemies another such victory,” Villars reported to his sovereign, “they are undone.” The British Parliament, shocked by the bloodbath and impelled by a war-weary public, gradually pulled back from its hawkish stance and sought a separate peace with France, and the Grand Alliance ultimately crumbled. In a series of treaties signed in the Dutch city of Utrecht in 1713 the allies recognized Philip’s claim to the Spanish throne in exchange for his renunciation of any future claim to the French throne. Despite concessions to the British in North America, Louis had consolidated his realm—and just in time. The 76-year-old sovereign died of gangrene on Sept. 1, 1715, after a reign of 72 years—still the longest in European history. Yet the Sun King’s triumph would ultimately prove fatal to the French absolute monarchy. Though Louis XIV had no way of knowing it, the brilliant manner in which he had saved his kingdom—namely, his self-abasing appeal to his subjects—had sown the seeds of an idea that by the end of the century would transform the French system of government. No longer in awe of its ruling elite, the citoyens began to wonder why they should continue to pay obeisance to a throne with life-and-death authority over millions. In 1789 Gallic royal absolutism would die in the French Revolution, as some of the great-great-grandchildren of those who had sacrificially preserved the realm of Louis XIV rose against the House of Bourbon. In rallying his countrymen to topple his foes at Malplaquet, the Sun King had both saved and doomed his way of life. MH Kelly Bell has written for World War II, Vietnam and other magazines. For further reading he recommends The Great Marlborough and His Duchess, by Virginia Cowles; War and Rural Life in the Early Modern Low Countries, by Myron P. Gutmann; and Europe in the Age of Louis XIV, by Ragnhild M. Hatton.

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Glubb Pasha and the Arab Legion

Glubb Pasha and the Arab Legion Two 6-pounder cannons, which had been painfully hauled up to the ramparts of Old Jerusalem, were situated on the imposing Notre Dame Hospice. It was May 23, 1948, and at noon the Arab Legion would launch its long-anticipated attack on the handful of Jewish defenders blocking their entry into West Jerusalem. While the common soldiers and the local civilians may have hailed the endeavor, the Arab Legion’s commander vacillated. John Bagot Glubb–Glubb Pasha to his men and his liege, King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan–believed his small army was better suited for the sands of the desert than the dark passages and densely packed stone buildings of the ancient city. But Abdullah demanded a direct assault on Jerusalem, Old City and New. Ever the soldier, John Glubb knew how to obey orders. Born in Preston, Lancashire, on April 16, 1897, Glubb was the son of an army officer and himself a graduate of the Royal Military Academy. He served in France during World War I. After the war, Glubb became an Arabist. Resigning his British army commission in 1926 to become an administrator for the Iraqi government, he lived among the Bedouins, spoke their language, understood their customs and worked for their greater good. Glubb was a little man with a high-pitched voice, and while he was shy and reserved on most occasions, he was known to have a terrible temper. During the war, a bullet ripped off the tip of his chin, leaving it lopsided and incongruous to his plump cheeks and otherwise rounded face. That injury inspired his nickname among his Arab followers: Abu Hanaik (Father of the Jaw). In 1930, he left Iraq to work for King Abdullah, who contracted with him to help build Trans-Jordan’s Arab Legion, the Al-Jaish Al-Arabi. The legion was originally an internal police force organized in 1921 by another Englishman, Lt. Col. Frederick Peake. In the years following World War I, Trans-Jordan was a British protectorate, and Peake’s job was to keep order among the territory’s various Arab tribes. Stationed on the southeastern frontier near the border with Saudi Arabia, Glubb had to build his contingent from scratch. He was 120 miles away from Trans-Jordan’s capital, Amman, living in an old Buick automobile and facing the Ikhwan (brethren), religious zealots who had rebelled against King Ibn Saud of Arabia. Essentially at war with the Saudis, the Ikhwan had turned to raiding the defenseless villages of both Iraq and Trans-Jordan for supplies and sustenance. Glubb’s orders were direct–stop the raids. To do that, he roamed the villages of the Huwaitat, trying to enlist their aid. Unfortunately, the Huwaitat, like many Arab tribespeople, had known only one government during the past 400-plus years: the Ottomans. They had learned not to trust the Turks, and that mistrust now extended to Glubb and the Arab administrators. Helping him in this nearly thankless endeavor were four trusted men. One was a slave Glubb had acquired from Saudi Arabia. Two were Iraqis who had served at his side over the years, and one was a Shammar tribesman who had joined him when he left Iraq. The five men tried to cajole the Huwaitat into enlisting in Glubb’s small army, praising its accomplishments and warning the tribesmen that if they did not defend their villages other men would do the job–to the Arabs, that would be a loss of face. Finally, a volunteer, Awwadh ibn Hudeiba, stepped forward and, about three days after signing up, was put in the ranks with Glubb’s four assistants. An officer from Peake’s headquarters in Amman arrived to pay the men, and in true military style, he demanded that the soldiers count off. Appalled by such intrusive regularity, the legion’s single volunteer ripped off his uniform and quit. Luckily for Glubb, three more Huwaitat, less intimidated by army formality, soon enlisted, then 17 more. That was the modest start of the Desert Patrol: 20 men and four trucks, with four Vickers machine guns. By the spring of 1931, Glubb had 90 men wearing the legion’s uniform–a long, khaki-colored robe with long white sleeves, a red sash across the chest, a red lanyard to hold a revolver, a bandoleer of ammo, and a belt around the middle from which dangled a silver-handled dagger. Soon, the sons of the sheiks vied for admittance, and though Glubb and his lieutenants welcomed them, anyone who did not measure up to Glubb’s high standards found himself on the receiving end of that ferocious temper and booted out of the legion. Glubb also realized that his Arab troops needed the kind of self-reliance that required more than ability with knife or gun. In addition to combatting the Ikhwan, Glubb went to war against illiteracy, launching a reading and writing campaign among the Huwaitat. By May 1931, the number of raids over the frontier had been cut by half. The Desert Patrol represented about a fifth of the Arab Legion’s 1,200-man fighting force. Officially under Peake in the legion’s hierarchy, Glubb found himself taking on more and more responsibility for King Abdullah’s army until, in March 1939, Peake ended his 17-year Trans-Jordan career to retire in England. Glubb was now commander of the legion’s 2,000 men. In the 1940s, the Desert Patrol discarded the last of its camels and began to travel in open-air Ford trucks with Lewis machine guns mounted on tripods on the roofs of the cabs. At that time, a new war raged in Europe. It soon spilled over into the Middle East, and in February 1941 a pro-German political party took over Baghdad. In April, the Iraqis declared war on Britain and laid siege to a Royal Air Force cantonment at Habbaniya on the Euphrates River, about 75 miles west of Baghdad. In immediate response, the British sent a column of 750 men across the desert to relieve Habbaniya and take back Baghdad. Glubb and a small contingent of his Desert Patrol accompanied the column. His orders were to assist Iraqi elements still loyal to the pro-British Emir Abdul Illah. After a pro-British government was restored in Baghdad, Glubb returned to Trans-Jordan. In May and June 1941, he helped the British fight Vichy French forces in Syria, then spent the balance of World War II keeping the Bedouin tribes at peace on the frontier. By 1945, the Arab Legion boasted 16,000 men, all fiercely loyal to their British leader, whom they called Glubb Pasha (general). Transformed from a small police force of a few hundred, the legion was renowned throughout the Arab world as the most effective fighting force since the days of the caliphs. After World War II, the legion’s size began to diminish. By 1947, it was down to 4,000 men. While most officers were British, a coterie of Arab leaders was being nurtured. Glubb evidently realized what the future would bring. The British government was preparing to evacuate the Middle East. For Glubb and his employer, King Abdullah, a new menace began to loom from west of Amman. It came from what many of the Arabs considered an intrusion: the return of the Jews to Palestine. ‘Once the Jews came to look upon themselves as a race can they be blamed for wanting a country?’ Glubb asked. From his small office on a hilltop in Amman, he strove to lead his legion and, by extension, Abdullah’s country, into a new era. The coming declaration of Israel as an independent state promised to embroil the Arabs in a difficult war. On November 30, 1947, the Arab Legion began operations in support of supply convoys to Arab forces around Jerusalem. Glubb tried to distance his force from direct involvement in the fighting–until May 1948, when the Jews of the Etzion Bloc, a group of settlements on the road north of Hebron, attacked Arab reinforcements and supplies destined for Jerusalem. On May 4, a week before the British Palestine Mandate would expire, Arab tanks, armored cars of the Desert Patrol and riflemen drawn from the Arab locals stormed the four Jewish settlements that comprised the Etzion Bloc. At stake for Glubb, from a military perspective, was a huge British-organized arms convoy bound for Amman. Glubb met with Sheik Mohammed Ali Jabary, the mayor of Hebron, on May 10 and laid plans for a final attack. The call went out for villagers to help in this jihad (holy war). Armed with old rifles and Sten submachine guns, and bearing sacks in which to carry away booty from their looting, the villagers answered the call. On May 12, Glubb’s men stormed the settlements. The 400 or so defenders fought valiantly, stopping Glubb’s much-storied legionaires and giving the irregulars more than they received. Glubb turned from one Arab Legion officer to another, seeking to find a leader capable of delivering victory. After more than 24 hours of continuous fighting, on May 14 the last of the Etzion Bloc’s defenders hoisted a white flag and surrendered to the Arab irregulars, who slaughtered most of them before Glubb’s legion was able to restore order. Meanwhile, Arab leaders conferred about how to deal with Jerusalem. While many of the leaders in Syria and Egypt were sanguine regarding their chances of throwing out the Jews, Glubb expressed doubts. Favoring the internationalization plan put forth by the fledgling United Nations, he sought to keep his desert-trained Arab Legion out of what he foresaw as house-to-house urban warfare. The U.N.’s plan called for East Jerusalem to be an open city and for Haifa to be a Trans-Jordan town. But men such as Fawzi el-Kaoukji, commander of the Arab Liberation Army, and Abdul Rahman Azzam, the secretary general of the Arab League, called for all-out war against the Jews and their tiny sliver of a country. Glubb apparently had few choices. His adopted countrymen demanded glory and victory, and his king, Abdullah, had a throne to protect and loyal subjects to appease. On May 14, Israel declared its indepedence. On May 15, Glubb reluctantly marched his Arab Legion to the Old City of Jerusalem and mounted an attack on the Jewish army, the Haganah, which had taken up defensive positions in the New City and in Jerusalem’s ancient Jewish Quarter. With a tenuous hold on the Old City, Glubb sent two regiments to Latrun, to the open country and rolling hills of Judea. There, he would keep Jerusalem for Trans-Jordan by choking off Jewish reinforcements. The strategy worked. While the Arab armies were beaten back at Haifa, at Tel Aviv and in the desert south of Beersheba, Glubb’s Arab Legion held its own in Jerusalem and at Latrun. On May 23, the Arab Legion attacked the Notre Dame Hospice and stormed into the Old City. As Glubb had feared, it suffered heavy losses, including several armored cars to Molotov cocktails, and he abandoned the assault at 5 p.m. on May 24. Soon, however, the Jews ran out of ammunition and other supplies, just as Glubb had intended. Evidently remembering the fate of their comrades at Etzion, the remnants of the Old City’s Jewish fighters sought out the Arab Legion to surrender on May 28. Glubb’s little army was a professional force; it did not slaughter its prisoners. By mid-June a cease-fire was declared. The legion had little ammunition for its artillery and not much for its small arms and Lewis machine guns. Glubb pleaded with King Abdullah to accept the cease-fire as final. If the war stopped at that point, Trans-Jordan would have the Old City, the Negev Desert and an airport at Lydda. In Cairo, the Arab leaders met to discuss the future. Tawfig Pasha represented Trans-Jordan, but he was unable to carry out Glubb’s and Abdullah’s wishes. Reporting back, he said that he could not vote for peace without being denounced as a traitor to the Arab cause. And so the war went on–with the Israelis not merely holding their own, but going over to the offensive, retaking Ramlah and Lydda (which they called Lod) and routing an Egyptian brigade in the Faluja pocket in October. With an end to the declared war on January 9, 1949, King Abdullah, backed by the legion (now 6,000 men strong), annexed East Jerusalem, Hebron and Nablus, and changed his country’s name to the Arab Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. He also severed his ties with Britain. Glubb turned his attention once more to policing the frontier. Arab irregulars made nightly raids against Jewish settlements, and Glubb fought off Israeli retaliatory attacks. Then in 1953, Abdullah was assassinated, and his grandson, Hussein, came to power. Anti-British sentiment grew, and on March 1, 1956, King Hussein dismissed Glubb as commander of the Arab Legion. Glubb’s protégé and personal adjutant, Ali Abu Nawwar, succeeded him. Later that year, the legion’s elite volunteers were merged with the conscripts of the national guard, and a new Jordanian army emerged. Glubb returned to England, was awarded a knighthood and settled down to a life of scholarship. He died in Mayfield, East Sussex, on March 17, 1986, a month before his 89th birthday–an old soldier whose legacy was something other than enduring peace. This article was written by David M. Castlewitz and originally published in the April 1998 issue of Military History magazine. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Military History magazine today!

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https://www.historynet.com/goebbels-airmen.htm

How Goebbels convinced German civilians to murder Allied airmen

How Goebbels convinced German civilians to murder Allied airmen Hampton manned a B-26 Marauder in the 397th Bombardment Group. Dropping by parachute to escape fiery death in the sky, hundreds of Allied airmen were murdered after touching German soil by frenzied civilians wielding shovels, pitchforks and rocks. “They would spit on us, and stone us,” remembered U.S. Army Air Forces Sgt. Warren Hampton, captured after his B-26 bomber was shot down on his eighth mission on Dec. 23, 1944. He was taken to Nuremberg as a prisoner. “At every railroad station, they would swarm around us and throw stones.” Hampton was lucky to survive. German civilians slaughtered Allied airmen throughout cities and small villages across the whole country, including in Saarbrucken, Solingen, Pforzheim, Ingolstadt, Rostock and Borkum, to name just a few places. Supposedly this was spontaneous violence due to “local anger” about Allied air raids. Yet these killings were not unprompted incidents—they were brought on by a systematic campaign led by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. An Excuse for Violence Goebbels claimed that civilians had a “right” to exact murderous revenge on Allied aircrews because the Allies were bombing German cities. He had double standards. The Germans had started the air war, and invented the incendiary bomb. Under Nazi leadership, the Luftwaffe had egregiously bombed communities in Spain, Poland and Britain, killing thousands of civilians. The German bombing of Coventry in 1940 resulted in a “city of lost souls,” according to the BBC, causing mass hysteria and destroying 41,500 homes in a single night. The local mortuary was overloaded, “seeing 60 bodies in one hour. Some 40 to 50 were unidentifiable, owing to mutilation.” During the London Blitz, German planes strafed civilians in the streets. The Nazis also sought to destroy cultural heritage. After an air raid on Portsmouth in 1941, German radio propaganda boasted of having destroyed HMS Victory, flagship of British war hero Admiral Horatio Nelson (although in reality the ship was not destroyed, but merely damaged). “The Nazi strategy was to make terror,” according to German historian Jens Wehner. Although they were happy to cause destruction for others, Goebbels and fellow Nazi leaders claimed it was “immoral” when the Allies used similar tactics against them. Goebbels (center) and Nazi leaders conspired to incite civilians to commit mass murder of Allied parachutists. / Polish State Archive As early as March 1940, Rudolf Hess issued an order that enemy parachutists were to be immediately arrested or “rendered harmless.” In addition, Nazi Party manufacturers produced toys and games for children and young adults to teach them to hate Allied airmen. These included “air defense” board games as well as card games, in which players were trained to identify and destroy Allied aircraft. However, the drive to kill Allied airmen gained impetus over time. In particular, the execution of the Doolittle Raiders by Imperial Japan in 1942 provided Adolf Hitler’s regime with an excuse to openly justify plans to murder Allied airmen. In July 1943, Germany’s Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (high command of the armed forces) banned military burials for Allied airmen. An order from Heinrich Himmler on Aug. 10, 1943, to SS and police forces forbade them from intervening in any local confrontations with Allied airmen who survived parachute landings. “We would … eventually make it a legal process to condemn shot-down Anglo-American ‘murder pilots’ to death and also enforce the death penalty against them,” Goebbels wrote in his diary on Dec. 22, 1943. “It’s a very far-reaching plan, but under certain circumstances could lead to a noteworthy result.” But Goebbels eventually decided no legal processes were needed. It would be easier for him to use his vast propaganda machine to transform local civilians—ordinary men, women and young adults—into his willing henchmen. To turn German civilians into bloodthirsty executioners, he convinced them they were above the law. Mobilizing the Mob Goebbels launched a plan to convince German workers and civilians to kill Allied airmen on sight. Radicalized civilians often used shovels, like in this photo, to murder British and American parachutists. / Polish State Archive The first thing Goebbels did was change the definition of an Allied airman. He began this process in 1943. Per his orders, radio and print publications eliminated the words “pilot,” “air crew” and “plane” from official vocabulary. Instead, Allied air personnel were referred to by derogatory epithets such as “terror flyer” (Terrorflieger), “murder flyers” (Mordfliegern), “air gangsters” (Luftgangstern), and even “air barbarians” (Lufthunnen). The purpose of this was to demonize the airmen and change civilian feelings about them. Since German culture respects soldiers, Goebbels also took steps to discredit the military status of the airmen. He claimed they were “criminals” and not soldiers. He also initiated false reports that the airmen were “killers for hire” who collected bounties from the Allied governments based on civilians they killed. “While the uniform is a garment of honor for German soldiers, for the ‘Air Gangsters’ it’s a work suit of a criminal,” a June 1943 propaganda article engineered by Goebbels claimed in the Marburger Zeitung newspaper. Goebbels frequently adopted scare tactics in his propaganda. He claimed Allied airmen were hell-bent on destroying everything Germans held dear, invoking images of scenic villages, charming old churches and innocent children in articles and speeches. To suggest violence, Goebbels produced reports to give civilians deadly ideas, suggesting “lynch” justice would be “inevitable.” “Nobody would wonder that our people … should be overwhelmed with raging fury in the face of these cynical crimes,” he wrote in the Volkischer Beobachter on May 29, 1944, in his introduction to a series of articles on “terror pilots.” He suggested civilians should “take a step toward self-help and get even with pilots who spring out of enemy planes.” In addition to print propaganda, Goebbels (center right) incited mobs with inflammatory speeches on broadcast media and at large rallies. / Polish State Archive Goebbels also encouraged any Germans who might be considering murder by saying the government condoned it. He incited civilians in Nuremberg with a graphic and inflammatory speech in May 1944. “You, the people, have beaten them [the airmen] to death or cut their throats—and similar things,” Goebbels announced to a cheering crowd on Nuremberg’s old town square. “We won’t shed any crocodile tears over it, and whoever [among you] who has done this will not be led to the scaffold. We are not so insane [as to punish you]. We can understand this rage of the German people very well.” Hitler lent his full support. On July 5, 1944, the Führer issued a Top Secret order entitled “Concerning ‘Terrorist Airmen,’” in which he decreed that any British and American airman answering to Goebbels’ description of a “terrorist” would not be treated as a POW but “will be killed as soon as he falls into German hands.” The Victims Hate-filled articles by Goebbels, such as this one in the Nazi Party’s leading newspaper, caused the deaths of Allied airmen. Countless men from Allied nations including the U.S, Britain and Australia died as a result of Goebbels’ propaganda campaign and the malice of individual civilians who felt empowered by a “license to kill.” In Borkum, an American B-17 crew who made an emergency landing were shot and beaten to death with shovels by locals. After the war, a U.S. military tribunal at Dachau put 15 Germans on trial for the murders. A 21-year-old British airman, Cyril William Sibley, was murdered in Dirmstein after initially being helped by a kind local woman. Finding Sibley suspended from his parachute on a fruit tree in her garden, Maria Gastner tried to treat his injuries and gave him glasses of wine and cigarettes. Local Nazi officials soon arrived on the scene, took Sibley from her and shot him. Sibley’s remains were buried in the town cemetery, but British authorities relocated them after the war. Sgt. Leo Waldron of the 303rd “Hell’s Angels” Bomb Group was killed by a mob of German farmers after making a safe landing. Norman Rogers, an American bomber pilot, married his teenage sweetheart, Helen, before he got orders in July 1944 to fly to Europe. Rogers had a last opportunity to fly past his home in Savannah, Ga. He performed a wing dip in the B-24 Liberator to say goodbye to his pregnant wife watching him from the porch. That was the last time she ever saw him. A month later, Rogers and his crew in the B-24 named Wham! Bam! Thank You Ma’am were savagely murdered in Rüsselsheim by a mob of more than 100 German civilians wielding stones, iron bars and hammers. The crowd was incited by German housewives: Käthe Reinhardt, her daughter Lilo, and sister Margarete Witzler, who accused the men of being “terror flyers” and screamed: “Kill the dogs! Break them to pieces!” One perpetrator beat the victims so hard that he broke a hammer; another, Johan Opper, injured his hands due to the sheer violence. A Nazi official, Joseph Hartgen, shot the wounded men as townspeople beat them with two-by-fours to ensure they died. However two survived. Sidney “Brownie” Brown, 19, escaped being shot when Hartgen ran out of bullets. His co-pilot, John Sekul, was beaten to death on top of him. Sekul’s last words were: “Brownie, pray!” As if by an act of providence, an air raid signal suddenly sounded and the mob fled, vanishing like a nightmare. Brown and his lone surviving comrade, William Adams, escaped. Not all Germans joined the mobs. A German soldier intervened to save bomber pilot 2Lt. William F. Miller of the Hell’s Angels, shown here, from being murdered by civilians. Rogers’ wife did not learn what had really happened to him until U.S. authorities informed her two years later in September 1946. By then, she was raising his daughter Madeline, who was born six months after her husband’s death. Victims of German mob violence also included men of the 303rd Bomb Group known as the “Hell’s Angels.” On Sept. 28, 1944, during a mission to Magdeburg, the crew of Miss Umbriago were forced to bail out of their aircraft. Sgt. Leo Waldron was “dragged away by a bunch of German farmers” and murdered. In a stroke of irony, a German soldier intervened to rescue 2Lt. William F. Miller from civilians attempting to kill him and thereby saved Miller’s life. There were so many killings of Allied airmen by civilians that a new German word came into existence to describe the phenomenon. This term has nothing to do with Goebbels’ pretenses of honor or entitlement—the word, Fliegermorde, very simply means “flyer murder.” Some of the perpetrators of these “flyer murders” faced justice after the war ended. Yet many cases remain unknown. Locals have in many instances been unwilling to speak about dark deeds they may have witnessed or taken part in. In recent years, more information has been coming to light about these and other Nazi-era crimes in Germany as more German-speaking researchers challenge the postwar culture of silence and investigate the past.  MH

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Goldilocks Fighter: What Made the F6F Hellcat “Just Right”?

Goldilocks Fighter: What Made the F6F Hellcat “Just Right”? Grumman’s F6F Hellcat was perfectly suited to young American naval aviators battling Zeros in the Pacific. Rarely has there been a combat aircraft so perfect for its time and place as the Hellcat. “No more outstanding example of skill and luck joining forces to produce just the right aeroplane is to be found than that provided by the Grumman Hellcat,” wrote legendary British test pilot Eric “Winkle” Brown in his book Wings of the Navy. This bluff, sensible, utterly workmanlike shipboard fighter arrived in the Pacific theater in August 1943 and went to work straight out of the box. The Hellcat immediately challenged what had been the most powerful naval air arm on the planet and beat it like a bongo, racking up by far the highest kill-versus-loss ratio of any airplane in American service during World War II (19-to-1, based on claimed shootdowns). It resoundingly won the most one-sided, humiliating air battle of any war—the Marianas Turkey Shoot. Unlike other fighters that went through lengthy series of engine, airframe and armament changes, the F6F was hardly modified or updated thereafter, and there were only two basic versions of the airplane during its entire lifetime: the F6F-3 and -5. The Hellcat’s initial development proceeded virtually without incident. The fighter proved to be as tough, reliable and durable as a Peterbilt. It was viceless and turned out to be the ideal airplane for young, inexperienced ensigns to operate from aircraft carriers. Grumman claimed it had been “designed to be flown by 200-hour farmboys.” In combat for just under two years, the Hellcat was as unbeatable on the day it stood down as it had been when it arrived for its very first mission. Yet despite—or perhaps because of—such a straightforward, matter-of-fact career, the F6F got far less respect and fandom than did its more stylish rival, the Vought F4U Corsair. The Corsair was an arrogant, long-nosed Shelby Cobra; the Hellcat was a looming Ford F350 dualie pickup. The Hellcat flew in combat for 24 months and then essentially disappeared, never to fight again (other than an odd Korean War experiment and a few minor missions for the French over Indochina). The name of the top Hellcat ace, David McCampbell, is far less familiar than those of Dick Bong, Gabby Gabreski, Pappy Boyington and other pilots of more glamorous fighter types. No Hellcat ever Reno-raced or starred in a TV series. No Hellcat ever had the panache of a Sea Fury, a Hose-Nose, a Tigercat or Bearcat. Three Hellcats (with a fourth as spare) lasted just two months as the first Blue Angels team aircraft before being tossed aside in favor of Bearcats. Oh, the ignominy… The Hellcat began life as a proposal that Grumman build a “Wilder Wildcat.” Clean up the dumpy F4F airframe, add some firepower, get rid of the hand-cranked 1930s landing gear and slap on a bigger engine. Then came reports first from actual air combat over France and Britain, and then input from U.S. Navy and Marine pilots who had flown against the Japanese. Grumman engineer Jake Swirbul flew to Hawaii in 1942, soon after the Battle of Midway, and had a sit-down with Commander John S. “Jimmy” Thach, the Wildcat ace who developed the famous Thach Weave defensive maneuver. After the XF6F-1’s debut in June 1942, the basic design required very few changes. (National Archives) Grumman had already decided that the need for armor plate, additional guns, greater range and a big ammo and fuel load meant they had to deliver more than just a Super Wildcat; after all, the F4F was a mid-1930s design that came close to being built as a biplane. Thach and other pilots told Swirbul they needed a more powerful engine than the 1,700-hp Wright R-2600 with which the prototype XF6F-1 had been fitted. The obvious answer was Pratt & Whitney’s magnificent new 2,000-hp R-2800. A turbocharged R-2800 was mounted on the prototype, which became the XF6F-2, followed by the XF6F-3 with a two-stage supercharged version, and Grumman never looked back. The myth persists that the move to the R-2800 resulted from flight tests of the famous “Akutan Zero,” the intact Mitsubishi A6M2 salvaged from the Aleutians, but it’s not true. The first flight of the production version of the F6F, in October 1942, took place just two weeks after flight-testing of the Akutan Zero began in San Diego. It’s laughable to think that the Navy flew the Zero and instantly decided the F6F needed a bigger engine, acquired the still-rare Pratt & Whitney, had Grumman rework the Hellcat airframe to carry it and then created a production version all within two weeks. The Akutan Zero affected Hellcat air combat tactics, but had nothing to do with its development. More than a thousand F6Fs had been built before the airplane got a name. It was generally referred to in Bethpage during that time as the Super Wildcat. “Tomcat” had been considered, but in the mid-1940s that was considered a bit too risqué. It would take a couple of generations before the concept of a randy animal was considered appropriate. Roy Grumman himself chose the name Hellcat, so profanity trumped sexuality. The Hellcat’s strength, literally, was its simple and straightforward design. In those days, Grumman’s credo was “Make it strong, make it work and make it simple.” The prototype XF6F-3 became the production F6F-3 nearly untouched, and the only other Hellcat upgrade, the F6F-5, mounted an R-2800-10W that had an additional 200 hp. There were night-fighter, photoreconnaissance and export variants, but the basic airframe and engine remained untouched throughout the Hellcat’s combat career. The Hellcat’s patented wing-folding mechanism made for compact stowage. (National Archives) A Hellcat can be drawn with a ruler. Its big wings are simple geometry-class trapezoids, and its fuselage and empennage are all straight lines. The Hellcat’s wings are the largest of any WWII single-engine fighter, Allied or Axis, and it’s often overlooked that the F6F was a huge airplane. The P-47 was larger, but only by inches. The substantial wing area and consequent low wing loading made comparatively slow carrier approach speeds possible—5 mph slower than a Wildcat, in fact—and rendered the Hellcat at least adequately maneuverable for such a big airplane. Armchair aviators often make too much of the importance of maneuverability for a fighter during WWII. Royal Navy test pilot Winkle Brown rates the important elements of a fighter, in descending order, as speed, climb rate, firepower, armor protection, pilot visibility and—last of all—maneuverability. What he means is that if you have the speed and rate of climb to choose when and where to initiate or break off combat, maneuverability can be nullified by two words: “Don’t dogfight.” In fact, if the Hellcat had a flaw, it was excessive longitudinal stability, at least initially. The big bird didn’t want to turn. The F6F-3’s ailerons were unpleasantly heavy and ineffectual at high speeds, though the addition of aileron spring tabs to the F6F-5 cured this affliction. (Spring tabs are a kind of automatic trim tab. As an aileron is deflected down, a small control surface on that aileron’s trailing edge is deflected up, and that movement into the relative wind boosts the aileron’s downward movement. The reverse happens on the up aileron.) The big wing’s ample wetted area also kept the Hellcat comparatively slow. The 386-mph maximum speed of even the late-model F6F-5 was far below the F4U-4 Corsair’s 452 mph, and the P-38L, P-47D and P-51D all had top speeds well into the mid-400s. But the Hellcat’s main opponent was the 331-mph Zero, so this wasn’t much of a problem. It’s worth noting, however, that while the F6F’s claimed shoot-down ratio over the Zero was 13-to-1, it scored a less impressive 3.7-to-1 against the Zero’s successor, the 1,820-hp Mitsubishi J2M Raiden. Flown by pilots of equal skill, the two would have been closely matched. Many aren’t aware that Hellcats also served in the European theater. Both U.S. Navy and British Fleet Air Arm Hellcats flew ground-attack missions during the August 1944 invasion of southern France, a campaign largely forgotten because all eyes were on the far more spectacular breakout from the Normandy beachhead. Carrier-launched FAA Hellcats also flew top cover for a major bombing mission against the battleship Tirpitz on April 3, 1944, when the German supership was preparing to venture out of its Norwegian fjord. British Hellcats supposedly tangled with Luftwaffe Me-109Gs and Fw-190As on May 5, 1944, but after-action reports were typically confused. The Luftwaffe claimed three Hellcats downed for the loss of three Messerschmitts, while the British claimed two F6Fs lost in what might have been a midair collision. The combats were brief and inconsequential, though Hellcats did shoot down several German bombers over France. A Messerschmitt or Focke-Wulf versus Grumman air battle would have been an unfair fight in any case. A WWII carrier-based airplane was a collection of compromises. It was designed to live and be serviced aboard a ship and to use an 800-foot runway—or 500 feet in the case of escort carriers. With folding wings, a tailhook, heavy landing gear and design features optimized for survival over vast ocean distances, an F6F probably would have been no match for a well-flown Fw-190. The Navy’s carrier-borne fighter was the Hellcat, and that was it. In June 1944, Task Force 58, in the Philippine Sea, had 450 fighters, all Hellcats. At the October 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf, Task Force 38 had nearly 550 fighters, and every last one was a Hellcat. Such complete standardization made servicing, arming, maintaining and flying the airplane as easy and seamless as possible. F6F-3s warm up on the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill during the Marianas campaign, which climaxed with the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944. (National Archives) Corsair enthusiasts will of course protest that their favorite Navy fighter was demonstrably the better airplane. Judging by sheer performance numbers, that’s true. The F4U was substantially faster and had a better rate of climb, range and ceiling than the F6F, and of course it went on to do yeoman work in the Korean War while the only Hellcats still flying were advanced trainers and drones. But the Corsair went through a lengthy and troubled development period and ultimately turned out to be a difficult-to-manage carrier plane with some unfortunate stall characteristics (the reason the original Blue Angels chose the F6F over the F4U). In truth, the two airplanes represented two quite different approaches to the challenge of developing a Navy fighter. The Corsair sacrificed cost and certain handling qualities—notably the ability to approach and land successfully on a carrier—in exchange for maximum performance, while the Hellcat was designed to provide economy and manufacturability plus good performance and competent carrier-deck handling. The Corsair was unforgiving to fly, the Hellcat was easy. This was not a trivial consideration at a time when the Navy was welcoming aboard thousands of new young ensigns. Grumman cranked out so many F6Fs that the Navy had to ask the company to slow down. At one point a rumor circulated that Grumman was going to lay off workers because they didn’t need to build so many Hellcats. So the entire factory crew worked harder than ever, each employee trying to prove that he or she didn’t deserve to be cut, and the awkward result was another new monthly production record. Grumman built 12,275 Hellcats in just 30 months. That’s better than 16 airplanes a day for a six-day workweek. At the height of production, Grumman was turning out a Hellcat every hour, a record that has never been equaled. Hellcats were also a bit of a bargain: Despite their near-identical engines, the Navy could buy five F6Fs for the price of three F4Us. In 1944 and ’45, the Japanese faced 14 enormous Essex-class carriers plus 70 light and escort carriers, all of them packed tight from hangar deck to flight deck with Hellcats, endless Hellcats, flown by superbly trained, combat-experienced…well, maybe they were farmboys, but they’d grown up handling John Deere combines and driving Dad’s ’36 Ford. In this gun camera still from another Hellcat, a squadron mate slides in to take the shot at a Japanese Mitsubishi A6M Zero. (National Archives) Grumman had no media-star designer, no Kelly Johnson, Ed Heinemann or Alexander de Seversky. Leroy Grumman himself, an ex-Navy pilot and MIT graduate, did the brilliant conceptual work on the Hellcat. His partner William Schwendler refined it, and much of the real engineering was done by Richard Hutton, widely admired in the industry but hardly a household name. The third founding partner of the company, Leon “Jake” Swirbul, was a manufacturing and production specialist with a remarkable ability to keep the workforce so devoted that Grumman had the lowest personnel turnover rate of any WWII airframer. Unlike many other aeronautical engineers, Roy Grumman was a Pensacola-trained pilot, and he stayed current by flying the company hack, a civil version of Grumman’s short-coupled and demanding F3F biplane fighter. During the Hellcat’s heyday Grumman, then 50, showed up at the production test pilots’ ready room one day and announced that the Old Man wanted to fly an F6F. Nobody was about to say no to the boss, so chief test pilot Connie Converse gave him a thorough cockpit checkout and then sent Roy out to terrorize the skies over Long Island. He returned an hour later, proudly taxied up to the flight line and swung his Hellcat into its parking slot…with the flaps still full down, in their approach and landing position. Careful pilots consider this to be a no-no, because drooping flaps are vulnerable to damage from prop blast or stones thrown back by the wheels while taxiing. Grumman company pilots who committed this minor sin were required to stuff a dollar bill into a petty-cash jar. Somebody pointed out that this applied to the boss as well. Roy Grumman gave the jar $5, saying that should also cover the cock-ups nobody saw him commit while he was flying. Apparently, no Republic or Chance Vought pilots, Grumman’s next-door and across-the-Sound neighbors, spotted Leroy during his F6F joyride. Grumman test pilots often had such a hard time getting their work done while being bounced by Thunderbolts and Corsairs over Long Island that the company took to painting TEST in large letters on the fuselage of F6Fs that were involved in serious flight-test programs. The four letters meant, “Go bother somebody else, we have work to do.” Roy Grumman’s best-known contribution, originally designed for the F4F Wildcat but used nearly unchanged in the F6F, was the patented Sto-Wing folding system. Grumman came up with the concept of the skewed-axis pivoting joint that is at the heart of the wing-folding system by using two partially straightened paperclips stuck like wings into a rubber eraser “fuselage,” which is easier said than done. Grumman’s original eraser and paperclips survives to this day, embedded in a cube of Lucite atop a marble plinth in the main lobby of the Bethpage facility of what is now the Northrop Grumman Corporation. It’s far easier to imitate an F6F’s folding wings by sticking your arms straight out to the sides. When the locking pins are hydraulically retracted, a Hellcat’s wings—your arms—fall down and arc back, nearly brushing the flight deck in their smooth swing. None of their motion is upward like conventional carrier airplane folding wings, and the weight of the wings provides nearly all the momentum needed to complete the fold. This meant two deck crewmen could handle the swing of a Hellcat wing and secure it in place. Early in the design process, Grumman heard from Navy pilots how important good over-the-nose visibility was—one of the Corsair’s failings—so they simply jacked up the Hellcat’s cockpit and carried the forward fuselage and engine cowling up to it at an angle. This was a benefit during any kind of turning fight, when a pursuer might actually be shooting at a target that was slipping below his nose. If a tail-chasing pilot was pulling 5 or 6 Gs and trying to light up a hard-turning target, his machine-gun rounds were actually following a downward parabola. Not being able to see what they might or might not be hitting was a serious disadvantage. Having been a naval aviator, Roy Grumman specified that the absolute last thing to fail on a Hellcat should be the cockpit. He and his engineers protected an F6F pilot with 212 pounds of armor plating plus two more big sheets bracketing the oil tank just ahead of the instrument panel. Typical quotes from pilots who’d brought home battle-damaged Hellcats were: “Mostly holes where the airplane used to be,” and “More air going through it than around it.” One F6F landed with 200 bullet holes. An F6F-5K drone and its Douglas AD-2Q Skyraider controller aircraft move into position on the carrier USS Boxer off the coast of Korea in August 1952. (U.S. Navy) After the war, most F6Fs were quickly relegated to training and Reserve squadrons, though radar-equipped F6F-5Ns were retained as night fighters. The Hellcat’s combat swan song for the U.S. came over Korea, when six radio-controlled F6F drones, each carrying a finless one-ton bomb, were sent one at a time against a North Korean bridge and a railway tunnel in August and September 1952, flown by a controller in an accompanying two-seat AD-2Q Skyraider. These missions were really proof-of-concept tests, demonstrations rather than serious raids, and they did little damage to anything other than the Hellcats. The Navy had substantial experience with remote-control Hellcat drones, having converted a number of the readily available, expendable and dependable fighters soon after the war ended. Most were painted a vivid red or orange, occasionally yellow. Four pilotless F6F-5Ks, as the variant was designated, were used during the first Bikini A-bomb test, in July 1946. They were flown through the blast cloud after the explosion’s shock waves dispersed. One went out of control and crashed, and control airplanes picked up two of the three survivors after they emerged from the roiling column of smoke, dust and superheated air. The third Grumman was eventually spotted by radar cruising happily along some 55 miles from Bikini. It too was intercepted and led back to nearby Roi Island, where the three drones were safely landed. Even today, the contribution of Hellcat drones is felt in air combat: The very first AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles were shot at F6F-5Ks flying above the China Lake Naval Ordnance Test Station during 1952 and ’53. The first 12 Sidewinders scored clean misses, but in September 1953 the 13th came within 2 feet of its Hellcat target, which would have destroyed the airplane had the inert test missile been fitted with its proximity fuze and warhead. Sidewinders remain the air combat weapon of choice for every air force that can get their hands on them, and thanks to the Navy, it’s predicted they will stay in the U.S. inventory through most of the 21st century. Today, five F6F Hellcats are still flying, in the hands of Tom Friedkin, the Commemorative Air Force’s Southern California Wing, Paul Allen’s Flying Heritage Collection, the UK’s Fighter Collection and the Yanks Air Museum. Compared to all the Mustangs, P-40s, Wildcats and Corsairs that show up for airshows and local fly-ins, Hellcats are among the hen’s teeth of U.S. warbirds. They’re rare in part because they had no foreign operators who might have preserved them, beyond the Royal Navy and the French and Uruguayan navies, and because they had no civilian utility as firebombers, aerial sprayers, air racers or executive transports—applications that have saved everything from Bearcats and Tigercats to B-17s and B-26s. Let’s admit it, too, Hellcats just aren’t as colorful and sexy as more frequently restored types. This may change, however. Three more F6Fs are undergoing restoration to flight status (the Yanks Air Museum’s second Hellcat plus airplanes owned by collector Jack Croul and the Collings Foundation). With the flying fleet eventually to grow by more than half, we could be on the cusp of a Hellcat renaissance. For the airplane that won the Pacific air war and was crucial to securing the islands from which B-29s could fly, it’s about time. The Battle of Palmdale On a sunny August day in 1956, an F6F-5K Hellcat took off from Naval Air Station Point Mugu, northwest of Los Angeles. A pilotless drone, painted bright red with big yellow camera pods on the wingtips, the Hellcat was on its way to the test range to be targeted by air-to-air missiles—probably AIM-7 Sparrows, which were then under development. A pilot on the ground controlled it, much as present-day UAVs are flown. The tired old Grumman made a straight-out departure from Runway 21 and climbed out over the Pacific, which lapped nearly at the departure end of 21. It soon became apparent that controller and drone were not communicating. The red Hellcat made a stately turn to the left—southeast—as it continued to climb, despite the controller’s constant turn-right command. To the southeast lay the sprawling LA metropolis, hundreds of square miles of cityscape that now lay directly in the path of a runaway 6-ton pilotless fighter filled with more than 200 gallons of aviation fuel. The Navy needed help, and it lay close at hand. Just five miles north of NAS Point Mugu was Oxnard Air Force Base, home of the “Fighting 437th” Fighter-Interceptor Squadron. The 437th’s rocket-equipped Northrop F-89D all-weather interceptors were tasked with pulverizing any Soviet bombers that might approach the California coast, and they were ready to do it day or night, good weather or bad, anytime, anywhere. Bring it. The Navy enlisted the help of rocket-equipped Northrop F-89D all-weather interceptors (below) from the 437th Fighter Interceptor Squadron stationed at nearby Oxnard Air Force Base in a failed attempt to shoot down a wayward Hellcat drone (above). (U.S. Air Force) A 12-year-old piston-engine fighter cruising at probably 200 mph, unable to even make evasive maneuvers on a California summer day, should be good for a few minutes of live-fire practice, so the Air Force scrambled two F-89Ds loaded with a total of 208 2.75-inch Mighty Mouse air-to-air rockets. The radar-equipped Scorpions caught up with the Hellcat at 30,000 feet, over the fringes of populated LA. The Grumman was maneuvering mindlessly, first turning toward the city, then away, then going deeper into outlying suburban areas. The two F-89D pilots and their back-seat radar operators needed to destroy the Hellcat before it decided to head for Hollywood, and they couldn’t wait too long to do it. Now the Hellcat was veering toward the western end of Antelope Valley, an area as sparsely populated in 1956 as its name suggests. But then it turned southeast toward downtown LA again. Time to lock and load. First one jet and then the other got the Grumman in their windscreens—they had no gunsights, since the Scorpions supposedly had some sort of “automatic fire control” for their unguided rockets—and then the Fighting 437th ripple-fired, loosing intermittent salvos of Mighty Mice. Was ever a weapon so appropriately named? Every rocket missed, though they did set a 150-acre brushfire on the ground. A second firing run did no better, although it too set a string of fires, one between an oil field and an explosives factory. A third try emptied the Scorpions’ big wingtip rocket pods: 208 rockets, zippo hits. The last group of salvos, however, became the talk of Palmdale, Calif., where they riddled houses and cars. There were no injuries, fortunately, but the blazes they set took 500 firefighters two days to extinguish. Meanwhile, the Hellcat declared itself done with this game. Its big R-2800 whickered to a stop, out of fuel, and the old warrior crashed into the empty Mojave Desert east of Palmdale, taking out some power lines as it went down.

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https://www.historynet.com/good-books-wwii-italy.htm

Any Good Books On WWII Italy?

Any Good Books On WWII Italy? Would you have any suggestions for books that talk about Italy’s role in WWII? Thank you, Bob Peters ??? Dear Mr. Peters, Although there is a wealth of books focusing on aspects of Italian participation in World War II, from tanks to ships to aircraft and to the various fronts, there does not seem to be many attempts at a single, comprehensive history. Among the few I found were Italy at War, by Henry Hitch Adams for Time/Life Books, and Italy Betrayed, by Peter Tompkins. Sincerely, Jon Guttman Research Director World History www.historynet.com More Questions at Ask Mr. History Don’t miss the next Ask Mr. History question! To receive notification whenever any new item is published on HistoryNet, just scroll down the column on the right and sign up for our RSS feed.

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Gothic War: Byzantine Count Belisarius Retakes Rome

Gothic War: Byzantine Count Belisarius Retakes Rome On December 9, 536 AD, Byzantine Count Belisarius entered Rome through the Asinarian Gate at the head of 5,000 troops. At the same time, 4,000 Ostrogoths left the city through the Flaminian Gate and headed north to Ravenna, the capital of their Italian kingdom. For the first time since 476, when the Germanic king, Odoacer, had deposed the last Western Roman emperor and crowned himself ‘King of the Romans,’ the city of Rome was once more part of the Roman empire–albeit an empire whose capital had shifted east to Constantinople. Belisarius had taken the city back as part of Emperor Justinian’s grand plan to recover the western provinces from their barbarian rulers. The plan was ambitious, but it was meant to be carried out with an almost ridiculously small expeditionary force. The 5,000 soldiers that General Belisarius led included Hunnish and Moorish auxiliaries, and they were expected to defend circuit walls 12 miles in diameter against an enemy who would soon be back–and who would outnumber them at least 10-to-1. The Roman empire had been permanently divided by Theodoric the Great in the 5th century, making official what had been in the offing for 100 years since Constantine the Great had established his capital of Constantinople on the Golden Horn, where he was closer to the troubled frontier along the Danube River. The capital of the west had been moved to Milan and then to Ravenna, which, being surrounded by swamps, was easier to defend and also closer to the eastern empire. In effect, the Roman empire had been split into two states. Only the eastern half was to survive as a political entity, for another 1,000 years, but in a form quite different from that in the west. The Eastern Romans, or Byzantines, spoke Greek and were Orthodox Christians, but they rightly saw themselves as the direct political descendants of the Western Roman state. By 536, Justinian had ruled for 18 years and regarded himself as the successor of Augustus, Marcus Aurelius and Constantine. As such, he meant to retake the west. The Rome that Belisarius entered reflected the general decline of the western empire. Though still the largest city in the west, its population had shrunk, people drove cattle through the forums, and buildings destroyed by the Visigoths and Vandals in the last century had not been repaired. The armies sent by the emperor Justinian against the Persians, Vandals, Franks and Goths differed radically from the Roman armies of centuries past. The army with which Rome had conquered Europe, the Middle East and North Africa was made up of heavy infantrymen who cast javelins and then rushed in to fight with pilum, sword and shield. They were supported on the flanks by small numbers of cavalrymen recruited from provincials more adept with the horse than the typical Roman. Centuries of warfare against mounted enemies such as the Goths, Huns and Persians, however, had changed the makeup of the Roman army. By the 6th century ad, the army consisted primarily of a cavalry force of armored lancers, or cabalarii, wearing body armor and capable of handling a bow from horseback. Garrison duties and defensive positions were held by two types of infantry: lightly armed archers and heavily armed soldiers in mail jackets who fought with sword, ax and spear. Organizationally, the Roman army had not been divided into legions for a century. Now it was divided into squadrons called banda, a Greek word taken from German and formerly used to designate German allied troops. While many of the soldiers in the Byzantine army were subjects of the empire whether they were Greeks, Thracians, Armenians or Isaurians, many others were mercenaries who swore allegiance only to their commander. This practice was a holdover from hiring entire companies of barbarians, called foederati, to serve under a chief, a measure adopted by the Emperor Theodosius in the late 4th century. This tactic had spread so that by the 6th century, native generals had small private armies. Belisarius himself had a regiment of 7,000 of these household troops. Because such soldiers had their commander’s interests at heart, a successful general could become a potential threat to the government’s stability or even a contender for the throne. A contemporary description of a late-Roman cavalryman was given by Procopius of Caesarea, Belisarius’ personal secretary, who accompanied him on his campaigns and was present during the siege of Rome: ‘[Our] archers are mounted on horses, which they manage with admirable skill; their head and shoulders are protected by a casque or buckler; they wear greaves of iron on their legs and their bodies are guarded by a coat of mail. On their right side hangs a quiver, a sword on their left, and their hand is accustomed to wield a lance or javelin in closer combat. Their bows are strong and weighty; they shoot in every possible direction, advancing, retreating, to the front, to the rear, or to either flank; and as they are taught to draw the bowstring not to the breast, but to the right ear, firm indeed must be the armor that can resist the rapid violence of their shaft.’ The successors of the old legions were highly organized, and their generals were well-trained in both tactics and strategy. The typical Byzantine general adapted his actions to meet his foes–whether Goth, Persian or, later, Arab–such as using horse archers against lancers, or lancers against horse archers where they could be trapped and ridden down. In that respect, at least, the new Romans resembled the earlier legionaries who fought according to plan and understood their enemy before engaging. One critical difference between ancient Rome and Justinian’s Constantinople, however, was in regard to discipline. The mercenaries and foreign auxiliaries were as highly trained as the Roman infantry of old but were more prone to disobedience. Since the most important part of the army was the cavalry, however, which naturally operated more loosely than infantry and depended more upon individual initiative, that vice was not as significant as it would have been to infantry fighting in close formation. The equipment of the new Roman army had changed with a view to meeting the challenges of war with barbarians who had themselves changed over the centuries. The Roman legion had adopted chain mail and the gallic helmet from the Celts and the gladius, or short sword, so deadly in close combat, from the Iberians and Ibero-Celts whom they had fought in the Punic Wars. For Belisarius’ small army, the struggle for Rome required tactics that involved horsemen striking swiftly from walled cities much as the knights of a later age would do. The campaign would amount to a series of sieges against and sorties from fortified places rather than being fought in the field as early Roman wars had been. The man Justinian chose to lead the expedition, Count Belisarius, was about 30 years old and fresh from a stunning victory over the Vandals in North Africa. Coming from a Thracian family, Belisarius had served in the corps of bodyguards of Emperor Justin, Justinian’s uncle and predecessor, before distinguishing himself as a general. Before he could advance on Rome, Belisarius first had to take Naples to the south, which he invested in the summer of 536. After failing to persuade the populace to submit peacefully, he subjected the city to a month-long siege. Naples was so stubbornly defended that Belisarius began to despair of taking the place–until a curious foot soldier discovered that a destroyed aqueduct could be used as a tunnel past the city walls. Soldiers made their way along the aqueduct into the heart of the city, climbed down by means of an overhanging olive tree, made their way quietly through the streets to a tower in the wall and, after surprising and killing its defenders, held the position while their comrades roped together their scaling ladders–which their carpenters had made too short–and ascended the wall. Fighting continued all morning, the fiercest opposition allegedly coming from Naples’ Jewish population, who expected to face persecution under an intolerant Christian regime. In consequence, when resistance broke down, the angry Isaurian troops swept through the city slaughtering civilians. Belisarius had hoped to avoid such a massacre, but it did help him to avoid further bloodshed for some time thereafter. As word of Naples’ fate spread, several other Italian towns opened their gates to the Byzantines, and Pope Silverius sent word to Belisarius that he would be welcomed in Rome. Belisarius’ unexpected progress alarmed the Ostrogoths, most of whom blamed it on the vacillating leadership of their king, Theodatus, a corpulent Goth who had become Romanized and more interested in riches and comfort than in defending his realm. Sensing trouble, Theodatus tried to flee but was attacked and killed by his own people on the road to Ravenna, after which the Ostrogoths elected a warrior named Vittigis as their new king. Vittigis fully realized the Byzantine threat but pulled his troops north to first settle a dispute with the neighboring Franks before dealing with the invader. In doing so he left the Gothic garrison of Rome to its fate. The Ostrogoths had treated the Romans fairly well, but the populace was unwilling to risk incurring the wrath of the imperial soldiers by resisting them as Naples had done. When it became clear to the garrison that the Roman populace would open the gates to the Byzantines, the Goths prepared to abandon the city. Only their commander, Leuderis, felt honor-bound not to leave his post and awaited Belisarius. Upon securing the city, Belisarius sent Leuderis to Constantinople with the keys to the city gates. Criticized for allowing the city to fall into Byzantine hands without a fight, Vittigis pointed out that Rome had never before successfully withstood a siege. Recent history had borne him out. Alaric and his Visigoths had first taken the city in 410, and the shock of that conquest caused Augustine of Hippo to write The City of God as a consolation to Christians everywhere, suggesting that whatever might happen to Rome, the kingdom of heaven, at least, was inviolate. Alaric’s feat was repeated by the Vandals in 455. Furthermore, while Byzantine descriptions of Vittigis’ army as numbering 150,000 are undoubtedly exaggerated, he could sustain a siege force of some 50,000 men at a time against Belisarius’ 5,000 soldiers, 2,000 of whom the imperial general had had to leave to garrison other towns he had taken on the way to Rome. He had hardly enough soldiers to man the walls. If Rome had fallen easily to Belisarius, Vittigis was confident that he would retake it with even greater ease. The Romans themselves shared Vittigis’ view and became dismayed when they realized that the Byzantines meant to withstand a siege. Thus Belisarius faced not only a Gothic military threat but also tepid support from the Romans themselves, who in adversity might turn against him. He quickly wrote to Justinian requesting reinforcements. Vittigis, by contrast, had no problem marshaling his forces, which soon began to move south from Ravenna, ready to lay siege to Rome for a year, if necessary. Belisarius did not wait for their arrival before preparing to defend the city. There were more gates than he could hope to guard successfully, and there was always the danger that the townsmen might open the gates to the Goths as they had done for him, so he walled up several of the gates. Rome was too large for the Goths to encircle. Instead, upon arriving at Rome on March 2, 537, they established a series of six camps facing several of the main gates. The camps were located across from those parts of the city to the east of the Tiber River. The Tiber formed part of Rome’s western defenses, and a wall ran down to the water. Spanning the river stood the Mulvian Bridge, where, 140 years before, the armies of the contending emperors Constantine and Maxentius had fought, and after which the winner Constantine had established Christianity as the state religion. Belisarius saw something more than historical significance in the bridge. Because of the topography, he reckoned that the Goths would need at least an additional 20 days to build another bridge to move their troops across the river. Without a camp there, the city would not be completely ringed by the Goths. Belisarius also wanted a clear avenue of entry for the reinforcements he had requested. Accordingly, he fortified the Mulvian Bridge with a tower and set a small garrison of mercenaries to defend it. Belisarius must have thought that a small force positioned in a fortification could hold off a large number indefinitely, especially since they could be reinforced by nearby troops and the Goths could attack only from the narrow front of the bridge’s roadway. But these barbarian mercenaries proved untrustworthy. Shortly after Vittigis’ huge force arrived, the garrison force became terrified and deserted to the enemy, handing over control of the fortified bridge. The next morning Belisarius went on a reconnaissance into the area with 1,000 horsemen, completely unaware that he no longer held the bridge. A large body of Gothic cavalry surprised him and engaged him at close quarters. The deserters from the bridge recognized the general mounted on a white-faced bay and exhorted everyone to attack him with a view to ending the campaign on the spot. But Belisarius, fighting sword in hand, and his men engaged the Goths in a bloody fight in which they killed 1,000. The Goths broke and fled to their camp, pursued by the Byzantines. Reinforced there, the Goths compelled Belisarius to conduct a fighting retreat back to the city, where, to his anger, he found the gates closed to him. In fact, Belisarius was already falsely rumored to be dead and the Romans, failing to recognize him in the dark, feared the Goths would follow the fugitives into the city and take the town if they opened the gates. As Belisarius and his men gathered beneath the walls, an ever greater number of Goths converged on them to finish the fight. At that point, the general conceived a plan both simple and daring–he ordered a charge. The Goths, surprised and supposing that he was being reinforced by fresh troops coming from another gate, withdrew. Instead of pursuing them, Belisarius turned back to the city and was finally admitted. Despite hours of close combat, the general had not been touched by a single weapon. Belisarius realized that Rome would soon be completely surrounded and there would be no easy path for reinforcements. He was right; the Goths established a seventh camp in the Vatican Field and prepared for an assault. Meanwhile, Belisarius had flanges built onto the left sides of the battlements to shield the defenders, installed catapults on the city walls and ordered a ditch, or fosse, dug beneath the walls. He also drafted townsmen into brigades to defend the walls and interspersed them among his own soldiers to enforce discipline. He thus spread his thin forces farther and involved the Romans in the defense of their own city. He had a chain drawn across the Tiber to prevent the Goths from entering on boats and fortified the tomb of the Emperor Hadrian. The tomb, a fortress known today as the Castel’ Sant’Angelo, jutted out a bit from the city walls at that time to form an unintended bastion. It took the Goths 18 days to prepare their attack. They constructed four siege towers to the height of the city walls, each of which contained a battering ram. The Goths also prepared fascines to toss into the fosse to allow the towers to be drawn over the ditch and to the wall by oxen. Other soldiers stood by with scaling ladders to strike at other places along the walls. On March 21 the Goths began to bring the siege towers forward while the defenders watched in alarm. Belisarius, however, remained cheerful as he surveyed the attacker, then took up his bow and killed a Gothic officer at a great distance. His men hailed him, and he repeated the remarkable feat. Belisarius then commanded the men to shoot–not at the men, but at the oxen pulling the siege towers. The animals died in a hail of arrows, and the towers came to a halt without reaching the walls. Meanwhile, some Goths had broken into the vivarium, an enclosure on the eastern side of the city made by joining two low walls at a right angle against the exterior of the city wall. Romans had penned wild animals there before sending them to the amphitheater for combats with gladiators, but the sport had long been outlawed, and the walls were crumbling. At the same time the Goths launched an assault on Hadrian’s tomb. The Byzantine soldiers placed there were in extreme peril because the rectangular shape of the monument’s base jutted out from the city wall and allowed the Goths to get somewhat behind the defenders. The defenders shot back at the attackers until they ran out of arrows. Then, in desperation, they broke up the statues at the tomb into chunks of rock and tossed them upon the Goths. By doing so, they managed to hold their position. Meanwhile, Belisarius sent troops out of the city to enter the gate of the vivarium and attack the Goths there from the rear. In hard fighting the Byzantines drove them out. Sallies from various city gates then drove off the Goths in disorder and resulted in their siege engines’ being burned to the ground. The Goths admitted to losing 30,000 dead, with an equal number wounded. After that, the city and its besiegers settled down to a war of waiting. This was interrupted by occasional sorties by Byzantine cavalry, which involved essentially the same tactical feat: A troop of horsemen would leave the city by one of the gates, provoking a number of Goths to attack them. The Byzantine horse archers would then shoot their assailants from a distance with their powerful bows. When the Goths retreated in the face of that missile onslaught, the Byzantines would charge the unprotected Gothic infantry with their lances. While the Goths had both armored lancers and foot archers, they never combined the two methods of fighting into a single system as the Byzantines had done, and so the Byzantines’ strategem routinely succeeded. The cumulative successes of those forays had an unwonted effect upon the Roman populace. Dreaming no doubt of their earlier glory, they wished to join the Byzantine soldiers in a grand attack against the Goths. Belisarius explicitly opposed the idea, because the citizens had neither the training nor fighting experience and did not even have enough armor. Still the Romans insisted, and he reluctantly agreed. The sortie, as Belisarius had feared, was a fiasco. Sallying from a number of gates, the regular Byzantine cavalry acquitted itself well and successfully engaged the Goths. The townsmen-cum-foot-soldiers fought as spearmen and were arranged in a phalanx outside of the Flaminian Gate to the north of the city. They were held in reserve until Belisarius was content that they could engage the enemy with the least amount of danger to themselves. They then marched forward against the demoralized Goths and drove them from the Field of Nero into the surrounding hills. At that point, however, the Romans, being mostly an undisciplined rabble, broke ranks and began to loot a Gothic camp, only to be attacked by Goths who could see they were in disarray. The Roman foot soldiers were driven back in flight to the walls of Rome, only to find the populace, again fearful of the pursuing Goths, refusing to open the gates. The Byzantine cavalry intervened and extricated them. Any gain that might have come from the fight was lost. As the siege dragged on, the Goths destroyed the aqueducts that powered the flour mills. Belisarius countered that by setting the mills in boats on the Tiber within the city walls and suspending the mill wheels in the flowing water. Knowing there would be a shortage of food, he dismissed from the city all those he thought unnecessary to its defense. The siege settled into a more complete blockade when the Goths took the port of Rome a few miles from the city itself, where the Tiber flows into the Mediterranean Sea. That impeded Belisarius’ already limited efforts to bring food and supplies into the city. As hunger set in, the populace at first pressed for a decisive battle to resolve the siege but later vacillated when Belisarius assured the people that reinforcements were on the way. None arrived, however, despite his request to Emperor Justinian. Belisarius knew the people were fickle, so he changed the locks on the city gates and rotated the watches over them so the Goths could not strike up friendships–and deals–with the guards. At night, Belisarius’ Moorish auxiliaries, accompanied by dogs, patrolled the trench outside the walls. The wisdom of his prudence was proved when a letter was intercepted from Pope Silverius to Vittigis, offering to betray the city. Belisarius had Silverius clothed as a monk and shipped east into exile while a new pope was elected. The Goths made overtures for peace, and Belisarius agreed to a truce to allow the Goths to send representatives to Emperor Justinian in Constantinople. In the meantime a small number of reinforcements–3,000 Isaurian infantry and 800 Thracian cavalry–finally reached Rome along with supplies that came up the Tiber during the truce. At that point the struggle took another turn as Belisarius decided to go on the offensive. He instructed one of his subordinate officers, John, who bore the Latin nickname Sanguinarius, or ‘Bloody,’ to move north into Tuscany. He told John to observe the truce but to raid whenever he found the Goths had violated it–which, as he had expected, they did. Bloody John led a troop of 2,000 horsemen and encountered little resistance because most of the male Goths of military age were involved in the siege of Rome. Thus he swept across the north in accordance with Belisarius’ orders not to engage enemy troops of any size or to try to take any fortified places. After an encouraging number of successes, however, he advanced against the Gothic capital of Ravenna. When news of John’s raid reached Vittigis at Rome, he decided to make a last effort to take the city, starting with an unsuccessful attempt to slip soldiers into Rome through an aqueduct as Belisarius had done at Naples, only to be foiled by an attentive guard. He then tried to use agents in the city to intoxicate the guards at the Asinarian Gate, but one of them betrayed the plan to Belisarius. A final assault with scaling ladders at the Pincian Gate also failed. At that point, the siege of Rome ended not with a bang but with a whimper. By early 538, the Goths had plundered farms throughout the surrounding countryside and were suffering from hunger and plague. On March 12, Vittigis and his dispirited men burned their camps and withdrew toward Ravenna. Belisarius made a last sally and attacked an enemy band crossing the Mulvian Bridge. The Byzantines killed a few of the enemy soldiers but the retreating Goths’ greatest loss came as many of them panicked and fell from the bridge. For a year and nine days, a small Byzantine army had held Rome against disproportionate numerical odds. It was a remarkable victory for Belisarius, but its significance was limited. Vittigis drove Bloody John’s small force into Rimini, but Belisarius, joined by another Byzantine army commanded by the Armenian eunuch general Narses, compelled the Goths to withdraw to their capital of Ravenna. In late 539, the Goths offered to support Belisarius as emperor of the west, which he pretended to accept until Ravenna surrendered–at which point he sent Vittigis to Constantinople as a prisoner. Justinian learned of the Goths’ offer, and although Belisarius had not accepted it, he began to doubt the general’s loyalty. In 541, he recalled Belisarius to Constantintople–at which point the Ostrogoths, under the leadership of Ildibad and, after his death, Vittigis’ nephew Totila, retook most of what the Byzantines had gained. In 544, Justinian sent Belisarius–again with an inadequate force of 4,000 troops–back to Italy, where Totila took Rome in the following year, only to lose it to Belisarius soon afterward. Belisarius successfully withstood a second siege by Totila in 546, but in 549 the jealous Justinian recalled him to Constantinople once more. The Gothic War dragged on for years, during which Italy subsequently was ravaged by another campaign against the Franks, who invaded from the north to take advantage of the weakened Ostrogoths. In the end, the effort was just too great for Byzantine resources, even though they had destroyed the Ostrogothic kingdom. To defeat the enemy was one thing, to hold the territory quite another. Over time Byzantine control persisted in southern Italy and in Sicily. Other Byzantine enclaves in the west were Sardinia, Corsica and southern Spain, and the Frankish kingdom of Gaul nominally recognized Justinian as its overlord. Whatever the long-term effects of the campaign, however, the defense of Rome remains an amazing feat and an example of what a small, determined and organized force can do against overwhelming odds. This article was written by Erik Hildinger and originally published in the October 1999 issue of Military History. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Military History magazine today!

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Grave of Top SS Official, Reinhard Heydrich, is Opened

Grave of Top SS Official, Reinhard Heydrich, is Opened Berlin police are searching for whomever dug up the grave of the infamous SS officer Reinhard Heydrich. Meanwhile, they report that the bones of “the butcher of Prague” were not removed in the December 12th graveyard opening. Reinhard Heydrich. (National Archives) Just why someone wanted to unearth Heyrich’s burial plot is unclear, as is how they found it – in 1945 the Allies decreed no Nazi gravestone could be marked or identified. In the aftermath of World War II, the fear of Nazi sympathizers creating shrines or pilgrimages was thought of with abhorrence. Since then, Nazi gravestones have remained unmarked and under German law, those found tampering with a grave can be prosecuted. Heydrich, darkly nicknamed by Adolf Hitler as the “man with an iron heart”, was directly responsible for the murder of millions as the key architect to the Final Solution – the Nazi plan for the systematic extermination of Jews. In the 1942 mission named Operation Anthropoid, two British-trained soldiers (one Czech, one Slovak) attacked Heydrich as he rode in his staff car; he died a week later of wounds from grenade shrapnel. A furious Hitler demanded the murder of 10,000 Czechs in retaliation for his death. SS officers stand among the rubble of Lidice. (Library of Congress) Dissuaded by Heydrich’s deputy, Karl Hermann Frank, Hitler nonetheless ordered reprisals. On June 9, the day of Heydrich’s state funeral in Berlin, German police and SS officials entered the village of Lidice, Czechoslovakia on intelligence that the village was harboring the resistance members. In a matter of hours the Germans furiously shot 192 men and boys and deported the women and girls of Lidice to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The village itself was razed to the ground. Of the 203 women deported, 60 died in the Nazi camp. To this day, however, there is no evidence that the village aided Heydrich’s assassins. After a long train procession to Berlin, Heydrich was finally interred at Invalids’ Cemetery, a military burial ground in the heart of what was the capital of Nazi Germany. Hitler planned to order a monumental tomb to memorialize Heydrich, but as German fortunes began to wane, only a temporary wooden marker was left in place. The wooden marker disappeared under Red Army occupation. Whoever dug up his grave, according to the BBC, “is thought to have had inside knowledge of its location.” However, a photograph from the 1942 funeral does indicate that Heydrich was buried somewhere in Section A of the cemetery. Police spokeswoman, Heidi Vogt, told German newspaper B.Z. that there were no immediate suspects.

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The Vietnam Air War’s Great Kill-Ratio Debate

The Vietnam Air War’s Great Kill-Ratio Debate Data shows that American fighter planes performed poorly vs. the enemy early in the war—or does it? In the early years of the Vietnam War, the performance of American fighter pilots in dogfights appeared to lag far behind their counterparts in the Korean War. In Korea, F-86 Sabre pilots swept the skies and ran up amazing kill ratios, ending the war with about 10 victories for every F-86 lost. In contrast, kill ratios in the first half of the Vietnam War barely exceeded a humiliating 2-1. It seemed that American fighter pilots had lost all knowledge of air-to-air combat in the decade between the Korean and Vietnam wars, according to the conventional wisdom. The U.S. Navy, however, was able to rack up better scores after creating the Topgun Fighter Weapons School in March 1969, the theory goes, while the U.S. Air Force eschewed that route and was thoroughly shamed by wily North Vietnamese pilots. That is the view put forward in blockbuster movies such as Tom Cruise’s 1986 Top Gun, History Channel TV programs, and countless books, but is it an accurate account of what happened? The answer is no, not even close. Triple Ace. Capt. Joseph McConnell shot down 16 MiG-15s over Korea in 1953 making him the top American Ace of the War. (U.S. Air Force) The contrast between the Korean War’s kill ratios and those of Vietnam are unfair comparisons for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the Korean War kill ratio was drawn from nearly 900 decisive combats (those resulting in an aircraft loss), a large number that seemed to provide statistical validity to conclusions drawn from that data. The Vietnam kill ratios are compiled from a much smaller data set, which puts conclusions about kill ratios on tenuous ground, especially for the Navy’s air combat. There were a total a 269 American and enemy aircraft shot down in air-to-air combat over Vietnam during the entire war—201 in fights between the U.S. Air Force and North Vietnamese air force and just 68 in the U.S. Navy’s air battles with the North Vietnamese. In those fights, the U.S. Air Force lost 64 aircraft and the Navy lost 12. Second, because of the different methods used to calculate kill ratios in the two wars, any attempt to place those ratios side by side is an invalid “apples to oranges” comparison. The Vietnam War kill ratios were calculated using the total number of U.S. aircraft lost in air-to-air combat, regardless of whether or not they were fighter planes. That meant the count of downed aircraft includes the unarmed RF-101, a reconnaissance jet; the A-1E Skyraider, a piston-engine plane; the EB-66, a bomber converted into a recon plane; the RC-47, a cargo plane converted into recon plane; and that “terror of the skies,” the HH-53 rescue helicopter. The North Vietnamese air force even gave full victory credits to pilots who shot down unarmed American reconnaissance drones. In contrast, the Korean War kill ratio considers only the victories of our best fighter, the F-86, whose pilots were almost exclusively flying aggressive, offensive airsuperiority missions. The Vietnam War equivalent is the MiGCAP mission—“MiG combat air patrols” of F-4 Phantom II fighters, which protected bomb carriers from MiG attacks during strikes on targets in North Vietnam. A fair comparison with Korea would be limited to the Vietnam War’s MiGCAP missions. Geography of the Battlespace Any comparison between Air Force and Navy kill ratios should consider each service’s flight routes, because geography had a significant impact on tactics and outcomes. Unlike Navy aircraft launched from carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin, the great majority of Air Force aircraft on bombing runs took off from bases in Thailand and approached their targets in North Vietnam from the landward side. Enemy radar picked them up while they were still in Thai airspace, and MiGs could maneuver into advantageous positions up to 100 miles from Hanoi. Leading the Target. The MiG-17, left, posed a real threat to strike aircraft like the F-105D Thunderchief, right. (National Archives) While the North Vietnamese air force had excellent ground-controlled intercept radar to direct its planes, U.S. Air Force radar coverage ranged from spotty to nonexistent over assigned strike routes. Aircrews operated with little more than their eyes to guide them. Fighters escorting the bomb-carrying aircraft never knew where the threat would come from and therefore normally stayed close to the planes they were protecting so they wouldn’t be caught out of position during an attack. As a result, U.S. Air Force aircraft usually entered engagements from a defensive and reactive posture. On the other hand, the Navy used its carrier-based operations to maximum advantage. North Vietnamese fighters had less warning time to react to the U.S. strikes and far less opportunity to maneuver behind Navy fighters, whose backs were protected by ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. Additionally, naval air operations over North Vietnam were completely covered by radar-equipped ships operating in the Gulf under the code name “Red Crown.” Navy pilots were mainly assigned targets in coastal areas where they had good radar warning and control from ships patrolling just offshore. Navy fighters were therefore able to take a more aggressive posture than their Air Force counterparts, flying offensively oriented combat sorties instead of defensive close-escort missions. After-action reports found that 65 percent of Air Force losses were suffered by aircraft fighting from a defensive posture, which required a fighter under attack to reverse positions to get a kill, a very difficult maneuver to make. In contrast, only 20 percent of Navy and Marine Corps losses were aircraft in a defensive posture. The air war over North Vietnam can be divided into six distinct periods over the two major bombing campaigns, Operations Rolling Thunder (March 1965-November 1968) and Linebacker I and II (May 1972-January 1973): the buildup of the North Vietnamese air force (1964-1966); going head to head (January-July 1967); ambush tactics (August 1967-October 1968); going head to head again (January-May 1972); back to ambush tactics (June-July 1972); and the Teaball era (August 1972 until American operations in Vietnam ceased in January 1973). The North Vietnamese Buildup During this period, the North Vietnamese air force was building an extensive ground radar network while its pilots slowly acquired experience with their new MiG-17s. Acting cautiously, Hanoi refused to commit its fighters to combat unless the odds were stacked in their favor. Only 28 North Vietnamese planes were lost in combat with U.S. aircraft during the 1964-66 period. The U.S. Air Force’s first kills of the war occurred on July 7, 1965, when two MiG-17s attacked a pair of F-4C Phantom II fighter-bombers, which used their superior speed and rate of climb to reverse position on the MiGs, a tactic incorporated into the Navy’s Topgun program four years later. At the end of this period, the North Vietnamese began flying the improved MiG-21, setting up the next phase of the air war. Going Head to Head By early 1967, North Vietnamese pilots felt confident they could go head-to-head with U.S. airmen in a straight-up fight. They were gravely mistaken. The year started with Operation Bolo, where Col. Robin Olds’ 8th Tactical Fighter Wing, equipped with F-4 Phantoms, set up an ambush by imitating the routes, call signs and even radar-jamming pods that F-105D Thunderchiefs used on their way to bomb targets in North Vietnam. When the North Vietnamese MiG-21s came up to intercept the “Thunderchiefs,” they were surprised to meet Phantoms equipped with missiles for air-to-air combat, instead of the bomb-laden F-105Ds they were expecting. In that engagement, on Jan. 2, Olds’ crews claimed seven MiG-21 kills without a loss. Legendary Leader. Col. Robin Olds and his 8th Tactical Fighter Wing used new tactics to turn the tables on the North Vietnamese. (U.S. Air Force) After licking their wounds, North Vietnamese pilots again began challenging American aviators in late April, but as the fighting intensified in May, it became apparent that they would not succeed. Between January and July, U.S. Air Force fighters flying air-to-air missions shot down 29 MiGs while losing just two of their own—a 14.5-1 kill ratio. It is little wonder that Air Force brass failed to see a problem in the training program for their fighter force. With its air supremacy fully established, the U.S. Air Force implemented an economy of force measure, using Phantoms that could be deployed for both bomb strikes and combat air patrols. These STRIKE/CAP aircraft were sent primarily on missions to drop bombs but could jettison their air-to-ground ordnance and become air-to-air fighters if necessary. While that approach made sense at the time, it proved to be a major mistake. Ambush Tactics The North Vietnamese air force, having lost half of its combat planes in a matter of a few weeks between March and June of 1967, went into a period of self-examination, training and reconstitution. Because the North Vietnamese could not possibly gain control of the skies by directly challenging American aviators, they adopted a different tactic that created headaches for the U.S. Air Force until the end of the war. On Aug. 23, 1967, North Vietnamese ground radar guided a MiG-21 to a position astern of four bomb-laden F-4 Phantoms in close formation to maximize their radar-jamming measures against surface-to-air missiles, called SAMs. The MiG made a supersonic “hit-and-run” pass, launched a Soviet AA-2/Atoll air-to-air missile that shot down Phantom No. 4 and blew past the formation to safety. That incident was grim news to U.S. Air Force tacticians. “The high differential in airspeed between the attacking MiGs and the STRIKE/CAP F-4s made it virtually impossible for the F-4s to accelerate fast enough to offer any serious threat to the MiG-21s,” stated the Air Force’s “Red Baron” study, which was written immediately after the war and examined air combat performance in Southeast Asia. “Because the MiG-21s engaged only when directed by radar—which provided them with both surprise and positional advantage—there was no opportunity for the friendly forces to achieve a lethal firing position on the attacking MiGs. As long as the MiG-21s maintained the high-speed, one-pass tactic and refused all other engagements, the STRIKE/CAP flights could afford no real protection.” The Air Force initially reinstituted its tactic of sending dedicated escort fighters to accompany the bomb carriers, but this also proved ineffective. “To be effective against the hit-and-run tactics of the MiG-21s, MIGCAP flights had to depart the strike force and intercept the attacking MiG-21s before they were able to initiate their high-speed runs,” according to the Red Baron report. Yet, with no effective radar support to properly position the combat planes between the MiGs and bomb carriers that tactic was fraught with risk. Facing both the SAM threat and supersonic MiGs, the Air Force began building larger groups of aircraft for bombing missions. “Strike packages” contained 40 or more aircraft, including bomb carriers, “Wild Weasels” (two-seater F-105F and G Thunderchiefs outfitted with equipment to detect and destroy SAM sites), reconnaissance and radar-jamming aircraft, F-4 Phantom fighter escorts close to the bomb carriers and the MiGCAP F-4s, which were free to make sweeps away from the pack and aggressively go after MiGs. The new formations provided relatively good protection for the bomb carriers at the heart of the formation but left aircraft on the periphery vulnerable. As more U.S. aircraft were downed and kill ratios worsened, frustration among Air Force crews grew. During the final months of Operation Rolling Thunder in late-1968, the enemy shot down 22 Air Force aircraft at a cost of 20 MiGs. In every case, the MiGs’ victories were initiated from astern of an unaware target. This was a dismal turn of events, with the U.S. Air Force’s overall kill ratio dropping from 4.1-1 to 2.3-1. The only bright spot in that period was that MiGCAP aircraft maintained a respectable 3.5-1 kill ratio, despite the North Vietnamese air force’s advantages. However, if the American Air Force could not solve the problem of surprise attacks, the success of future operations would be at risk. Going Head to Head, Again When U.S. forces resumed widespread operations over North Vietnam in spring 1972, the North Vietnamese decided once again to challenge the American strikes head-on. Between February and early March, the U.S. Air Force ran up eight kills without loss. Then on May 10, the Air Force traded the North Vietnamese three for two during the first major battle of Operation Linebacker. The Navy, with several graduates of the new Topgun course in the air, countered the bulk of the North Vietnamese action that day and famously shot down seven MiG-17s and a MiG-21 with no losses. It was the worst single day of the war for the North Vietnamese air force, on par with the shock of Operation Bolo more than five years earlier. Hanoi’s reaction was swift, radical and appropriate. The MiG-17s, now proved obsolete, were largely withdrawn from combat. They would be involved in only seven more decisive battles for the rest of the war. The North Vietnamese air force reverted to its successful supersonic ambush tactics with the MiG-21. Those tactics were extremely difficult to deploy against carrier-based aircraft, however, and consequently the Navy’s role in air-to-air combat over North Vietnam diminished considerably. The Navy tallied just 11 victories and three losses for the balance of the war. (The Navy had only 22 decisive battles with MiG-21s over the course of the entire war.) After May 10, the air-to-air war effectively became an Air Force show. Back to Ambush Tactics North Vietnam’s change in tactics worked. For a brief moment in June 1972, MiG-21s gained ascendancy, shooting down five Air Force Phantoms on air-to-air missions for a loss of only two. Four out of the five losses were the result of supersonic MiG-21s attacking unaware targets from behind, while one of the U.S. victories was made in a reversal over an attacking MiG. The losses were troubling enough to cause the Air Force to re-evaluate its tactics. July proved only marginally better, with Air Force fighters trading six victories for five losses. The MiGCAP force, with its focus on offensive operations, showed its advantages, however, getting four of those six victories with no losses. Once more, all five American losses came from supersonic stern attacks on aircraft unaware they were in the enemy’s sights. But things were about to turn around. The Teaball Era In August 1972, the Air Force finally got its technical answer to the attack warning problem: a control center called Teaball. The center, at Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Base, fused information from available intelligence sources and provided MiG warnings in real time over a complicated set of radio networks. Air Force crews got the situational awareness they had been lacking—and Navy crews had enjoyed—since the beginning of the war. Teaball essentially solved the ambush problem. Only six Air Force planes of all types were lost to MiGs after Teaball went on the air, at least half of which were shot down during a Teaball communications interruption.  During that same period, the Air Force shot down 26 MiGs—23 of them during air-to-air missions with a loss of three  American planes (aircrews on other missions, such as gunners on B-52 bombers, got the other MiG shootdowns). The Air Force’s 26 MiG kills between August 1972 and the withdrawal of all U.S. forces in January 1973 are slightly more than the number of victories the Navy achieved in all of 1972 (25 kills) and nearly half as many as the Navy record over the entire war (56 kills). The Air Force had a Vietnam War total of 137 kills. Air Force planes of all types on air-to-air missions had an overall 3.8-1 kill ratio for the entire war. In an apples-to-apples comparison with the F-86s in Korea, the Air Forces’ MiGCAP F-4s in Vietnam had 5.5-1 kill ratio, with a very strong upward trend toward 15-1 during the the final five months of the war, greatly exceeding the Korean War results of 10-1. The Navy’s kill ratios—involving a much smaller number of engagements—were 4.7-1 for aircraft of all types during the entire war, 6.4-1 for MiGCAP missions during the entire war and 8.7-1 for MiGCAPs in the Topgun era. Freed up by Teaball to be more aggressive without fear of ambush, the MiGCAP force did spectacularly well, shooting down 15 and losing only one. In short, when the Air Force was afforded conditions similar to those that helped the Navy, the results of the two services were very similar. The War’s Air Power Legacy Postwar analysis showed that 81 percent of all U.S. aircraft lost in combat were either unaware of an attack or became aware too late to defend themselves. The primary reason for the unsatisfactory kill ratios was clear: Excellent North Vietnamese tactics exploited the Air Force’s lack of radar warning. While more and better training is always desirable, it is difficult to understand how it would have overcome that disadvantage. Lessons Learned. Experiences in Vietnam spurred the creation of the Navy Fighter Weapons School (Topgun). (U.S. Navy) Four years after the air war over North Vietnam ended, the Air Force got its true solution to the problem of surprise: the E-3 Sentry with Airborne Warning and Control System radar, called AWACS, which can collect information on the position of enemy aircraft and relay it directly to the fighters. Since then, only one U.S. aircraft has been lost in air-to-air combat—Lt. Cmdr. Scott Speicher’s F-18 Hornet, shot down on Jan. 17, 1991, by an Iraqi MiG-25 on the first night of Operation Desert Storm. Today, the F-35 Lightning II carries an onboard sensor suite with the potential to give its pilot situational awareness without off-board assistance like the AWACS provides. The Lightning II integrates the information it has gathered and shares it with other aircraft, compiling a “god’s-eye view” of the battle space that all but eliminates the danger of being caught unaware by an enemy fighter. How different would the war over Vietnam have looked if the U.S. had fielded aircraft that not only were almost impossible to surprise but also could stealthily turn the tables on the enemy attackers? Surely the North Vietnamese would have opted for force preservation and withheld their fighters from combat, just as America’s enemies learned to do three decades later. William A. Sayers received an Air Force commission after graduating from Texas Tech in 1981. He has master’s degrees in military studies and strategic studies from Marine Corps University. He spent 28 years as a military analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, National Counterterrorism Center and CIA. This feature originally appeared in the June 2018 issue of Vietnam Magazine. Subscribe today!

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The Great Transcontinental Air Race

The Great Transcontinental Air Race Belvin Maynard’s 1919 victory inspired aviators across America—and made a hero of the ‘Flying Parson’. Late in the morning on October 16, 1919, a de Havilland DH-4 dropped from the clouds and touched down silently in a pasture near Wahoo, Nebraska. A tall man wearing riding breeches clambered out of its front cockpit, and from the rear a mechanic and a large dog emerged. The two men headed for the biplane’s nose to gaze upward at their crippled engine. A broken crankshaft, unrepairable. Newspapers across America would carry the story that evening: U.S. Army Air Service Lieutenant Belvin W. Maynard, an ordained Baptist minister who had made headlines just two months earlier by besting a gaggle of aces and famous aviators in the International Air Derby, was down. But was the “Flying Parson” out of the Transcontinental Air Race for good? A week before, as he prepared to take off from New York’s Roosevelt Field on October 8, Maynard’s No. 31, Hello Frisco, was one of 48 westbound starters in the 5,402-mile contest. At San Francisco, the far end of the course, 15 more aircraft were preparing to depart at the same time in the opposite direction. Brigadier General William L. “Billy” Mitchell, chief of Army Air Service Training, was the impresario of the race, officially named the First Transcontinental Reliability and Endurance Test. With Congressional Air Service budget hearings imminent, Mitchell planned the contest in hopes that such a widely publicized spectacle would boost interest in aviation throughout the U.S. The race rules specified an out-and-return course, with simultaneous starts from New York and San Francisco; 20 required intermediate stops of no less than 30 minutes nor more than 48 hours at specified airfields separated by a maximum of 180 miles; no night flying; and a required passenger in all multiple-place machines. Awards would be given for the shortest elapsed time across the continent, fastest flying time for each airplane type and a handicap contest based on the cruising speed of various types. Entry was limited to U.S. government aircraft, and any American military pilot could participate. Lieutenant J.B. Machle was the first off at 9:10, followed three minutes later by World War I ace Lt. Col. Harold E. Hartney, piloting one of the 142 Fokker D.VIIs the Germans had shipped to America as war booty. The Canadian-born Hartney, who had gone from piloting British F.E.2d pushers to commanding the American 1st Pursuit Group, was likely seen as the contest’s top contender. But now spectators discovered a new favorite. As Maynard climbed into Hello Frisco, his Belgian shepherd Trixie broke away from his wife and daughters and ran toward the plane. On impulse Maynard got out, picked up Trixie and handed her to Sergeant William E. Kline, his mechanic, in the rear cockpit. Trixie barked, the crowd cheered lustily—and from that moment on it was Maynard against the field. Hello Frisco, like 46 of the official starters, was a “Liberty Plane,” the American-built version of the British D.H.4 day bomber and observation aircraft. An equal-span twobay biplane with a 250-hp Rolls-Royce Eagle III engine that gave it a maximum speed of 143 mph, the original D.H.4 could outpace German fighters when it was introduced in 1916, and earned a reputation as the first effective day bomber. But combat revealed serious drawbacks, principally related to its fuel tank. To give the pilot good forward visibility and the gunner an unobstructed field of fire, the two cockpits were separated by a bulky 66-imperial-gallon tank, making communications between pilot and gunner almost impossible during combat. Moreover, as the 400-pound tank was pressurized but not self-sealing, bullet punctures resulted in jetting gasoline and sometimes explosions. A rubber fuel line that ran beneath the exhaust manifold also resulted in fires. Pilots started calling the D.H.4 the “Flaming Coffin.” Another problem was that the landing gear was positioned too far aft, resulting in frequent noseovers when touching down on soft ground or mud—during which the inadequately secured fuel tank was prone to break loose, crushing the pilot against the engine. When the United States, whose aircraft design and manufacturing establishment was tiny and relatively inexperienced, entered World War I in April 1917, the Army concentrated on producing successful British, French and Italian designs. The D.H.4, one of the few Allied tactical airplanes adaptable to the American-designed and -built 400-hp Liberty V12 engine, was that policy’s lone success. Although the American DH-4 was heavier and slower, 4,846 were eventually produced. Of these 1,885 reached France, to be assembled at the huge American facility at Romorantin before they were test-flown, then delivered to frontline squadrons. Only 199 of the Liberty DH-4s saw combat use, where their top speed of 128 mph made them adequate reconnaissance planes, but their performance fell off disastrously when they were used as bombers. Former divinity student Belvin Maynard, who served as one of the test pilots, once vetted 22 airplanes in a single morning. He accumulated between 700 and 800 hours and honed his cross-country flying skills during the course of his assignment. As a result, Maynard may well have been the Air Service’s most experienced DH-4 pilot. Even before the Transcontinental Air Race got underway, lives were lost in the run-up to the contest. On October 4 and 5, Major Patrick Frissell and Colonel T.F. Dodd died when their DH-4s crashed en route to the start point. Frissell, who apparently landed on rough ground seeking to get his bearings, was killed when his aircraft overturned. Dodd struck a tree while trying to land at Bustletown Field, Philadelphia’s airmail base, and was crushed between the fuel tank and engine. In both wrecks the observers survived. The Army modified a few DHs in time for the race, moving the landing gear forward and the pilot’s cockpit aft to create the DH-4B, also known as the “Bluebird.” Six 4Bs entered the race. Like most of the fliers, however, Maynard was piloting an unmodified DH-4, still sitting ’twixt hammer and anvil. After the contestants took off on October 8, most circled to salute the crowd. But once Hello Frisco lifted off at 9:24:56, Maynard banked sharply left, aiming directly for the first control point—Binghamton, N.Y., 142 miles away. He was third to touch down at Binghamton, almost simultaneously with Captain Harry Smith in a DH and Hartney in his captured Fokker D.VII. Maynard had bettered them both on elapsed time, and his 102.7 mph groundspeed was at least 20 percent faster than the average of the other Liberty Planes. Hello Frisco was no faster than the other DH-4s in the competition. In fact Maynard had spent the night before the race reinstalling cable bracing to replace streamlined “rafwire,” a modification that had helped give him a 12-mph advantage in the Toronto air derby. But Maynard had established a reputation for relying on his compass while others followed roads and rivers—and he simply flew faster. Many of the racers babied their Liberty engines to avoid vibration, a major cause of failure. But Maynard knew the Liberty vibrated at between 1,400 and 1,500 rpm, so he typically cruised at 1,550 rpm, still more than 100 revs below the power plant’s maximum, gaining considerable extra speed with minimal engine strain. At the Binghamton checkpoint Maynard was in third place, but he would soon be in second. Engine trouble delayed Smith for more than two hours, and instead of having a mechanic as his passenger he carried a fellow officer. Maynard had seen to it that he was accompanied by what he described as “the best mechanic in the Air Service.” By the time he reached Rochester, Maynard had overtaken Hartney’s Fokker and was ahead of the pack. Back at Roosevelt Field, meanwhile, Mitchell had arranged for First Assistant Secretary of War Benedict Crowell to have a ride in a Curtiss JN-4. Once he and the pilot were airborne, the engine conked out, leaving the Jenny pointed toward a row of barracks. The pilot banked right, then stalled and crashed. Crawling from the wreckage, Crowell  said: “That’s the shortest flight on record. I’d go up again right now if I didn’t have an appointment which I must keep in the city.” Several westbound fliers force-landed after they got lost or had engine trouble. D.B Gish, flying with the French air attaché as his passenger, had to crash-land his DH to escape the race’s only midair fire. While Maynard was approaching Rochester, Colonel Gerald Brant, flying a Bluebird, became lost and one of his oil lines broke. Brant crashed near the Susquehanna River after misjudging his approach, but he survived because he had been sitting in the rear cockpit, while his passenger, Sergeant W.H. Nevitt, died in the forward cockpit. Maynard and the other westbound racers had set out over reasonably hospitable terrain, but the 16 eastbound competitors were immediately faced with challenging geography and weather—conditions for which they were utterly untrained. Approaching Salt Lake City at the field’s 4,200-foot altitude, Major Dana H. Crissey, who had almost no experience flying the DH, lost speed in his final turn. Neither he nor his passenger, Sergeant Vergil Thomas, survived spinning in from 150 feet. Maynard pressed on, lengthening his lead. He was first at Buffalo, at Cleveland and at Bryan, Ohio. Unknown to the westbound contestants, they were racing not just each other but also the weather. As Maynard, Kline and Trixie slept at Chicago that night, a weather front intervened like a sodden curtain between them and the racers overnighting in Rochester, Buffalo and Cleveland. The next day Maynard would be flying in clear weather while the others bucked storms. Hello Frisco was back in the air at 7:09 the next morning. Between Rock Island and Des Moines they encountered their roughest weather of the trip, and Maynard become airsick for the first time in his life. East met west at North Platte, Neb., when the Flying Parson landed five minutes before Captain Lowell Smith, leader of the eastbound contingent. At that point Maynard had flown 1,491 miles and Smith 1,210. Maynard left for Cheyenne warned that he would likely encounter dangerous weather—which had already claimed a life. Lieutenant E.V. Wales, following the Union Pacific railroad and hugging the ground under a low ceiling, flew into a snowstorm west of Cheyenne and crashed in a canyon near Elk Mountain. Sitting between the engine and fuel tank, Wales died, but his passenger, Lieutenant William Goldsborough, survived with serious injuries. Maynard reached Cheyenne 25 minutes after sunset the second day, bending the rule against night flying. “All I want is sleep and to get started at sunrise tomorrow,” he said. He figured that an early start the next day might conceivably get him to San Francisco by that evening. But the third day of the race brought a fresh challenge. Temperatures had dropped so low overnight that the DH-4’s water overflow pipe froze; when Maynard started the engine, the radiator burst. No one at the airfield could repair it, seemingly necessitating a delay of at least 24 hours. Maynard and Kline removed the radiator, took it into town and found a plumber to repair it, a process that delayed them only seven hours. Then, just as they were taxiing for takeoff, Trixie jumped out and ran around barking until she was put back aboard. Perhaps she sensed that hostile terrain lay ahead. Flying a compass course over the Rocky Mountains, Maynard encountered two snowstorms. When he tried to slip between the clouds and the ground, he barely missed hitting the mountain where Wales had died the day before. Over Salt Lake City, his fuel-starved engine cut out. Two precious gallons in the reserve tank provided four minutes of flying time, just enough to reach the airfield. They landed on the white salt flats at Salduro, Utah, with just 21 minutes of daylight to spare. San Francisco would have to wait until the fourth day. If the day had been disappointing for Maynard, it was disastrous for the other westbound fliers. Wrecked airplanes littered the route, and engine failures forced two crews down in Lake Erie. Rain had turned the Buffalo airfield into a sea of mud. Major A.L. Sneed came in too high to land, but instead of slipping he steepened his glide. Aware of the plane’s tendency to noseover on landing, Sergeant Worth McClure climbed out and slid back along the fuselage to weigh down the tail. When Sneed applied forward stick, hoping to plant the wheels on the ground, the plane briefly hung in the air, then plunged nose-first in the mud, catapulting McClure onto the ground and breaking his neck—the race’s fifth victim. By that time the newspapers were publishing hourly bulletins on the Flying Parson’s progress. As the morning fog cleared over San Francisco Bay on October 11, a crowd watched Maynard land at Presidio Field, greeted by Maj. Gen. Charles T. Menoher, chief of the Air Service, and Colonel Henry H.“Hap” Arnold, who would later head the U.S. Army Air Corps. Maynard’s nearest east-towest rivals were a full day behind him at Salduro. Among them was Captain John O. Donaldson, flying an S.E.5a fighter assembled in America. Donaldson raised his oilsmeared goggles to get a better view as he flared for landing, and a drop of engine oil temporarily blinded him. The fighter slammed down, breaking its right undercarriage leg and cracking the left. Donaldson whittled a new right leg from a pine board and bound up the left one with doped fabric. His resourcefulness would earn him third place on westbound elapsed time and second on round-trip time. Although he flew against prevailing winds, Maynard’s elapsed time bettered that of three eastbound fliers who arrived at Mineola, N.Y., the same day: Major Carl Spatz, Lieutenant Emil Keil and Captain Lowell Smith. Spatz— who later changed his name to Spaatz and commanded the Eighth Air Force in WWII—lost out because he landed at the wrong field. In retrospect it might have made more sense to end the race on October 11. Spatz, while in New York, repeatedly expressed his distaste for racing back across the country, and Maynard got a telegram from his wife pleading with him not to risk a return flight. General Menoher, or more likely Billy Mitchell, decreed otherwise, a decision that would cost two more lives on October 15, when Lieutenants French Kirby and Stanley Miller crashed their DH near Evanston, Wyo. Though the rules gave him two more days to rest, Maynard declined an invitation from the king of Belgium to lunch in San Francisco, and took off at 1:22 p.m. on the 15th. The Flying Parson was only 10 minutes past the minimum rest period of 48 hours, a delay that can probably be attributed to the time it took to get Trixie, now less enthusiastic than ever about flying, stowed away. Their first stop was Sacramento, and by dark they had reached Sidney, Neb. There Maynard learned from the evening papers that the only American-designed and -built plane in the race, a Martin MB-1 bomber powered by two Liberty engines and piloted by Captain Roy N. Francis, had crashed into telegraph wires while trying to land in fog near Yutan, Neb. Around 11 a.m. on October 16, Hello Frisco was flying a direct compass course above the clouds when Maynard reduced power and descended to check his position. As he advanced the throttle to regain altitude, the increased torque broke the Liberty engine’s hollow crankshaft. The engine failure resulted in a dead-stick landing in a Nebraska pasture. Maynard turned to Kline, laughing, and said, “There is not another motor this side of Chicago.” But then they remembered that Francis’ wrecked Martin was only 10 miles away. A phone call later, and the engine and Francis himself were headed to Wahoo.“I am still in the race,” Maynard told reporters. Race officials estimated it would take anywhere from two days to a full week to replace the engine—more of a delay than Maynard could possibly overcome. The replacement arrived late in the day, and the airmen convinced locals to encircle the biplane with their cars and shine their headlights on it. With the help of a farmer who had worked on the Liberty engines of the U.S. Navy’s Curtiss NC-3 flying boat, Maynard and Kline pushed the DH under a tree, rigged a chain from a branch and removed the ruined engine. Kline and his scratch team worked all night while Maynard caught a few hours’ sleep. At 8 a.m. the next day the newly installed Liberty roared to life. The DH-4 crew had lost only 18 hours, and they were still in the lead. While Kline slept in the rear cockpit clutching Trixie, Maynard reached Cleveland before dark. At 1:50 p.m. on October 18—the eleventh day of the race—a large crowd at Roosevelt Field watched Maynard execute his signature landing, a high approach followed by successive controlled, height-killing slips to right and left. His winning elapsed time for the westward passage was three days, six hours, 47 minutes and 11 seconds, and for the round trip nine days, four hours, 25 minutes and 12 seconds. Maynard also won on actual flying time east to west, with 25 hours, 16 minutes and 47 seconds. Only a rule counting time at Wahoo as time in the air cost him the round-trip laurels in the speed and handicap categories. The cost of the race in men and machines had been high. There had been 54 wrecks and forced landings, 42 of them disabling, and nine men had died. The mass flight highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of aircraft of that era. In 1919 the Liberty engine was unreliable, the DH-4 was dangerous and Army pilots lacked rudimentary cross-country skills. For all of that, however, the airmen had proved that the United States could be crossed not just by aces or stunt fliers but by ordinary pilots flying military aircraft. More important to the development of aviation in America, the race had spawned a series of airfields at about 200-mile intervals across the U.S. The Post Office would use those fields to establish airmail service between New York and San Francisco. The competition had also given America a new hero. For a brief period Belvin Maynard was the best-known airman in the country, dubbed by the press “the greatest pilot on earth.” His fame would not last long, however. After alleging that some of the pilots in the Transcontinental Air Race had been drinking before they crashed, he came under Army scrutiny, and was eventually discharged. Maynard started an aerial photography company, and occasionally performed at airshows. On September 7, 1922, he was killed when his plane crashed at a county fair in Rutland, Vt. Herbert M. Friedman is a lawyer and pilot. Ada Kera Friedman is a pilot and retired flight instructor. For additional reading, they suggest: De Havilland DH-4: From Flaming Coffin to Living Legend, by Walter J. Boyne. Originally published in the November 2010 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here.

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‘Greater Love Hath No Man:’ Marines in Congress Request Camp Reasoner Sign Be Sent from Vietnam to the US

‘Greater Love Hath No Man:’ Marines in Congress Request Camp Reasoner Sign Be Sent from Vietnam to the US On a hill near Da Nang, Vietnam, sat Camp Reasoner ― home of the Marine Corps’ 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion and later 1st Reconnaissance Battalion during the Vietnam War. The camp was named after 1st Lt. Frank Reasoner, the second Marine to receive the Medal of Honor during the war, and was marked by a stone that bore a hand-lettered message to the fallen Marine. “’First Lieutenant Reasoner sacrificed his life to save one of his wounded Marines. ‘Greater Love Hath No Man,’” the stone said, according to the Marine Corps University. On Monday 12 Marine veterans and members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling on him to begin negotiations with Vietnam to have the stone sent to the U.S. where the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion will host it on Camp Pendleton, California. On July 12, 1965, Reasoner led 18 Marines with the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion on a patrol near Da Nang, Vietnam, when they ran into a large force of Viet Cong fighters. As the 50–100 Viet Cong fighters opened fire on the Marines from “numerous concealed positions,” Reasoner organized a defense, his Medal of Honor citation said. “Repeatedly exposing himself to the devastating attack he skillfully provided covering fire, killing at least two Viet Cong and effectively silencing an automatic weapons position in a valiant attempt to effect evacuation of a wounded man,” the citation read. “First Lieutenant Reasoner is an American hero whose story deserves to be told for generations to come,” Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wisconsin, said in an emailed statement Monday. “Retrieving this memorial is a way to not only honor his legacy, but to show our undying appreciation to those who served at Camp Reasoner.” The old camp, located roughly three miles from the Da Nang International Airport, is now a stone quarry, but the stone sign still stands at the old entrance. “The hand-lettered stone and concrete sign served as a physical symbol of fallen comrades in arms to all those who entered the camp,” the letter signed by all 12 Marine veterans currently serving in the House of Representatives said. “As our nation continues its commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War, the time is right to bring this important part of Marine Corps history home and help provide closure for the thousands of Marines and Corpsman who served at Camp Reasoner throughout the war,” the letter reads. Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Arizona, called bringing the sign to the U.S., “a striking and tangible memorial to a proud but difficult chapter of Marine history — our service in Vietnam, now almost half a century in the past.” “By bringing the sign home, I would hope that Marine veterans would be comforted by the return of an iconic symbol of their service and that active duty Marines would become more aware of the service and sacrifice of their predecessors in the Corps,” Gallego added in an email. The 1st Recon Battalion Association is willing to pay for any of the expenses associated with the move and hopes the sign will be placed on Camp Pendleton as a memorial to “Lt. Reasoner and the five other Reconnaissance Marines awarded the Medal of Honor during the war,” including Lance Cpl. Richard A. Anderson, 2nd Lt Terrence C. Graves, Gunnery Sgt. Jimmie E. Howard, Pfc. Robert H. Jenkins Jr., and Pfc. Ralph H. Johnson, along with all those who served at the base, the letter said. The battalion was doing everything it could to see the stone sign sent to the unit, 1st Lt. Cameron Edinburgh, a spokesman for the 1st Marine Division confirmed. “If you were a reconnaissance Marine and you served in Vietnam, at one time or another you set foot in Camp Reasoner,” Ed Nevgloski, director of the Marine Corps history division, told Marine Corps Times. It is “just a Marine thing” to bring back important historical items in a unit’s history, he added. “The 1st Reconnaissance Battalion has demonstrated unwavering commitment to getting this sign home, and after learning about their effort, who better to help them complete the mission than the Marines serving in the House,” Gallagher said. “My colleagues and I stand ready to assist Secretary Pompeo in this diplomatic mission and ensure Vietnam veterans get the long overdue recognition they deserve,” he added. Article first published on Military Times, our sister publication.

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The Greatest Ancient Leader

The Greatest Ancient Leader When Theodore Ayrault Dodge, the American Civil War historian known for his love of the ancient generals, dubbed Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar “great captains” in 1889, imperial ambition was some- thing to be admired. Today, after the bloody 20th century, we are less sure of it. The grandeur of these three great generals of antiquity [see mini-bios, page 30] in- spires, but their lethality terrifies. All the more reason  to ask what accounted for the great commanders’ success—their virtues or their vices? In fact, it was a little of both. These commanders shared, to varying degrees, personal qualities and styles of warfare that made them great. Let’s examine their secrets of success and decide which man best exemplified each. To quantify this, we’ll rate the generals on each factor using a five-star scale, with five stars being the epitome. Ambition The Greeks said it best. Their word for “ambition” is philotimia, which literally means “love of honor.” Their word for “drive” is horme, which has overtones of emotion—think of our word “hormone.” Megalopsychia means roughly “greatness of soul,” or a passionate drive to achieve great things and be rewarded with supreme honor. Enter Alexander and Hannibal and Caesar. They were members of what Abraham Lincoln once called “the tribe of the eagle”: men of towering ambition who thirsted for distinction. Nothing less than the conquest of new worlds satisfied them. Alexander wanted to conquer the Persian Empire, Hannibal to break Rome’s power for good, and Caesar to be the first man in Rome even if it took civil war. Judgment Good judgment, guided by education, intuition, and experience, defines all three commanders. They were all immensely intelligent but each had something more: a keen strategic intuition. When faced with a new situation, each could draw from past experience and come up with the right answer. They knew how to operate without perfect information and they were unflappable under pressure. They thought creatively, rapidly, and effectively. And they could read others like a book. They knew war, but they also knew people. They did not need on-the-job training. Before they crossed the Hellespont, the Alps, or the Rubicon, our three leaders had all acquired proficiency in the art of war. Caesar was a consummate politician; Alexander perhaps next best, mastering both court intrigue and Greek political theory. Hannibal stood at a disadvantage. When he attacked Rome, Hannibal had not set foot in his homeland of Carthage since age nine—nearly 20 years before. He was out of touch with its domestic politics, and he would eventually pay for his ignorance. Leadership They had iron in their souls. The great commanders were decisive, forceful, and assured. They consulted their staffs but frequently overruled them. They thrived on giving orders. Men obeyed them, not in deference to rank but because their commanders had earned their respect. The men had learned to trust their leaders with their lives. These commanders breathed dignity. Alexander was a king; Hannibal and Caesar were lordly. Yet all had the common touch, especially that politician Caesar, of whom one officer said, “I didn’t follow the cause. I followed the man—and he was my friend.” All three generals appealed to their followers, not just as conquerors or chiefs but also as men. They didn’t rely on friendship to manage their troops, however. Skilled actors and manipulators, they could fire up an army or douse its passion. They were masters of reward and punishment. They used honors and cash prizes to foster bravery. They paid troops well—or faced mutinies. They were big hearted and wanted everyone to know it. They stoked the fear factor by punishing anyone who crossed them, men and officers alike. Beatings, executions, and even crucifixions— these too were their tools of leadership. Audacity Honor was at the heart of their character. Courage was the blood of their veins. But the warrior virtue that best embodies Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar alike is audacity. Each was, in his own way, scaling Mount Everest. The king of little Macedon was not meant to conquer Persia’s vast empire. The governor of Gaul was not supposed to topple the Roman senate and its armies. And it was unimaginable that the Carthaginian commander of southern Spain should cross both river and mountain and invade Italy. But they dared to do what couldn’t be done. “Because he loved honor, he loved danger”—what Plutarch said of Caesar in battle—applies to Alexander and Hannibal as well. They fought in the thick of things. They designed their military campaigns with boldness. Although generals are often risk averse, these three were risk takers. Still, while Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar each occasionally took a wild gamble, they usually calculated the odds. They raced out in front but rarely without first securing their base. And their audacity had limits, most notably in the case of Hannibal: He did not march on Rome after Cannae; Caesar would have. Agility They were soldiers for all seasons. When the conditions of combat changed, they retooled. Having excelled at conventional warfare, Alexander switched to counterinsurgency when faced with guerrilla war. Hannibal shifted effortlessly between set battles and ambushes. Caesar was at home on the open battlefield, but he threw himself successfully into urban warfare. Speed was their watchword, mobility their hallmark. Alexander’s thundering heavy cavalry, Hannibal’s nimble light horsemen, and Caesar’s swift infantry thrusts—these were the agents of success. They traveled light, with little in the way of a supply train. Their men lived off the land. But agility had its limits: Each of these leaders suffered serious military defeats. Infrastructure To win a war takes certain material things: arms and armor, ships, food—the infrastructure of war. With enough money, of course, you can buy the rest. You can even acquire manpower—disciplined and veteran mercenaries. The one thing that money can’t buy is synergy. It can’t buy a combined-arms force (light and heavy infantry and cavalry as well as engineers) that is trained to fight together as a coherent whole—and welded to its leader. You have to build that on your own. And build it our three generals did. They each inherited a dazzling instrument and honed it into something even sharper and more deadly. Yet none of them achieved perfect synergy. Caesar suffered from poor logistics and cavalry. Alexander didn’t have a strong navy. Hannibal struggled most of all because he lacked money, manpower, and the ability to conduct sieges. Strategy In its original, ancient Greek sense, strategy refers to generalship overall, from battle tactics to the art of operations (weaving battles together in pursuit of a larger goal) to war strategy. Add to these what we now call grand strategy—the broader political goal that a war serves. Great commanders must understand them all. Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal all had an instinctive grasp of operations. However, Caesar’s tactical proficiency did not match Alexander’s or Hannibal’s. Hannibal, in particular, was the master of surprise. Though neither Alexander nor Caesar was in Hannibal’s league, they had a few surprises of their own. But when it came to war strategy, Alexander and Caesar far outclassed Hannibal. They thought ahead and they were dogged. Hannibal, for all his success, failed at long-term thinking. His battlefield triumphs stunned but did not subdue Rome. When the enemy bounced back, Hannibal had no Plan B. We don’t know who was more to blame, Hannibal or his home government, but we do know who had the last laugh—Rome. Terror Our three generals were willing to kill innocents, and everyone knew it. That too was a secret of their success. Scene from a civil war: When a young official tried to stop Caesar from breaking into the treasury in Rome, Caesar raised his voice and threatened to kill him. “And young man,” he said, “you have to know that it was harder for me to say this than it would be to do it.” The terrified official left. But threatening a government official’s life was nothing compared to massacring entire cities, as the great commanders did. Caesar and Alexander each sacked—raped, pillaged, the works—a Greek city. Alexander would ravage Central and South Asia, his angry Macedonians massacring town after town. Caesar did the same in Gaul, where the ancient biographer Plutarch says he killed a million people and enslaved a million more. Exaggerations—but close enough to the truth that most Italians were quick to surrender when he crossed the Rubicon. Caesar then cleverly played against type and pardoned his enemies, which won the applause of a relieved public. The first thing Hannibal did when he reached Italy in 218 BC was massacre the people of Turin—a small place in those days— in order to break resistance in the surrounding area. When he left Italy 15 years later, Hannibal slaughtered the Italians who refused to go with him—and he didn’t hesitate to chase them into the grounds of a temple to do so. Or so the Romans claimed. Branding Men with imperial ambitions don’t go to war over little things like border disputes. They need grand causes. And to rally people behind them, they need clear symbols, a distinct image. None of these generals was a man of the people but—chameleons all— each billed himself as a populist. Alexander began as an avenger and a liberator and he ended up as a demigod. He promised payback for Persia’s invasion of Greece 150 years earlier, proclaimed the liberation of the Greek cities that he conquered, and made them democracies, whether they liked it or not. Once he reached Iran, he put on selected items of Persian dress and insisted that his men now bow low in his presence, Persian style, in a nod to his new Eastern subjects. Meanwhile, he told his Greek allies to worship him as the son of the god Zeus. Hannibal too stood for retribution and liberation, and he walked his own path to the gods. To Carthage, he promised vengeance for its earlier defeat by Rome; to Italians, he promised freedom from Roman domination. He claimed the support of the Carthaginian god Melqart—our Hercules. And he encouraged his Celtic followers to consider him a hero out of their myths. Caesar went to great pains to show that he was no mere provincial governor in revolt. He said that he was fighting for the rights of the Roman people and for his own good name—the latter a moral issue dear to Roman hearts. As for Caesar’s divine heritage, his family traced its ancestry back to Venus. And Caesar acquired something else—celebrity. His Commentaries on the Gallic War made him a symbol of military prowess. By the time he crossed the Rubicon a year after conquering Gaul, Caesar’s reputation served as a force multiplier. Divine Providence Napoleon asked for generals who were not only good but also lucky. He would have been pleased with Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar. But only the guidance and protection of Divine Providence, and not mere luck, can explain how they reached the heights they did. Although our previous nine secrets of success were important, Divine Providence was essential. Caesar was a daredevil; he took many big risks that should have failed. And just as Alexander assumed the throne, the only Persian general that could have defeated him died suddenly, opening the way for him. The Romans played into Hannibal’s hands by launching their biggest army against him. He was waiting at Cannae. There, Hannibal achieved one of the world’s greatest battlefield victories, although he did fail to follow up Cannae with a march on Rome—and that cost him the war. So who was the greatest general? The final tally, out of a possible 50: Caesar 48 • Alexander 45 • Hannibal 40 All hail Caesar! MHQ contributing editor Barry Strauss is a professor of history and classics at Cornell University. This article was adapted from Masters of Command © 2012 by Barry Strauss, published by arrangement with Simon & Schuster, Inc. Originally published in the Summer 2012 issue of Military History Quarterly. To subscribe, click here.

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Greco-Persian Wars: Xerxes’ Invasion

Greco-Persian Wars: Xerxes’ Invasion The flower of western civilization burst into full bloom five centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ. Never before or since has an outpouring of cultural development on such a grand and far-reaching scale been realized on earth. It was, however, just as Charles Dickens said of Revolutionary France, the best of times and also the worst. On the eve of its golden age, Greece was in peril. Xerxes, king of kings and ruler of the Persian Empire, which stretched from the Indus River to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and from the Caucasus to the Indian Ocean, had turned his attention toward the Europeans who dared to resist his will. Persia was, in the truest sense, the greatest superpower of its day. Cyrus the Great launched the era of Persian expansion in the 6th century BC, and his successors held dominion of much of the known world for nearly three centuries. With Persia at the height of its glory, Xerxes ruled peoples of great diversity. Phoenicians, Egyptians, Medes, Cypriotes, Syrians, Levantines and Ethiopians were his subjects, as were those Greeks who had ventured forth from their mainland and established cities on the islands of the Aegean Sea, along the coasts of the Black Sea and Asia Minor. The Greek city-states, foremost of which were Sparta and Athens, maintained curious relationships with one another. Strained those these relations were from time to time, the Greeks recognized their ancestral ties, and that mutual defense was their best and only hope against outside aggression from such an overwhelming force as Xerxes could place in the field and on the sea. At the time of the Persian threat, that tenuous alliance was all that stood against Persia’s domination of Greece and thereby all of Europe. To place the situation in perspective, consider that during an average lifetime a citizen of Athens might have known Socrates, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Themistocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. The heirs of western culture in philosophy, medicine, mathematics, drama and democracy owe their existence to such men. Therefore, the names of Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis are remembered with reverence. Ten years separated Marathon, where the first Persian invasion force was decisively defeated, from Thermopylae, where the sacrifice of a relative few made ultimate victory possible, and Salamis, the greatest sea fight the world had yet known.It was those battles, fought more than two millennia ago, that preserved a way of life and shaped the future of mankind. In 500 BC the Ionian Greeks, who had settled in the western coast of Asia Minor, rose up against Persia’s King Darius I. In support of their Greek brethren the Athenians, along with a contingent from Eretria, raided and burned the Persian city of Sardis. After six years of fighting, the Ionian insurrection was finally put down. Darius vowed to punish the upstart Athenians for their transgression into what he regarded as a domestic affair. Persian forces on land and sea advanced toward Greece in 491 BC, but the fleet was mauled in a storm off Mount Athos and the expedition was called off. The next year, 490 BC, the Persians once again sallied forth to punish Athens. This force, commanded by Datis and Artaphernes, captured the island of Euboea and used it as a staging area for the invasion of the Greek mainland. In full view of the Athenians and their allies, the Plataeans, the Persians landed on the plain of Marathon and proceeded to divide their forces a few days later. Datis and Artaphernes intended to fight the Greeks at Marathon with 20,000 men while the city of Athens, only lightly defended, would fall easy prey to the second Persian army. The fact that the Athenians chose to meet their enemy at the point of its entry into their country rather than defending the gates of their city is in itself remarkable. First, the Athenians and Plataeans were overwhelmingly outnumbered, mustering only 11,000 citizen soldiers. Second, the famed historian Herodotus states, the Greeks had never even been able to hold their own in battle against the Persians before. Third, throughout the rebellion in Ionia and the Persian advance toward Athens, the Greeks had repeatedly chosen to defend their cities rather than risk battle in the open. Finally, the Greek penchant for innovation provably had not been extended tot eh battlefield, especially against a numerically superior and battle-hardened foe. In their hour of crisis the Athenians appealed to their Spartan rivals for military aid, since it should have been obvious that if the Persians were victorious at Marathon all Greece would soon fall before them. Miltiades, the senior Athenian commander, dispatched his swiftest runner, Pheidippides, to Sparta 150 miles away. ‘Men of Sparta,’ read the plea, ‘the Athenians ask you to help them and not stand by while the most ancient city of Greece is crushed and enslaved by a foreign invader. Already Eretria is destroyed and her people in chains, and Greece is weaker by the loss of one fine city.’ Herodotus reports that the Spartans were sympathetic but, because of a religious observance, could not march until the moon was full. At the same time, Hippias-the son of Pisistratus, who had been deposed when Athens adopted democracy-guided the Persians to the plain of Marathon, a scant 25 miles from Athens. The strategy upon which Miltiades and the Greek commanders settled at Marathon was to close rapidly with the enemy, nullifying the effectiveness of the Persian archers, who on so many occasions had decimated their opponent’s ranks under a torrent of arrows. Once at close quarters, the heavily armed Athenian infantrymen would be on a more than equal footing with their Persian counterparts. Darius’ generals had made good use of cavalry in other engagements, but their numbers were probably quite limited at Marathon because of the logistical difficulty in transporting large numbers of horses by sea. Athens’ citizen army was made up entirely of infantrymen called hoplites, who wore leather breastplates covered with bronze, as well as skirts of leather strips and thick belts. Crested bronze helmets covered the cheeks and nose. The hoplite was equipped with a steel-tipped spear, a short sword worn on the left side, and a round or oval shield of bronze. While the Persians had depended heavily on the strength of the bow and arrow, the vast majority of their foot soldiers wore no armor. For close combat the Persian infantry carried daggers or short spears; their horsemen used swords or axes.When the clash of arms began, it was the speed with which the Greeks closed with the Persians and the superiority of their weapons and armor that carried the day. The Greeks attacked in their traditional phalanx formation with two very important modifications. The formation was widened in order to minimize the risk of being outflanked, and as the phalanx reached a distance of about 100 yards from the Persian line, the hoplites broke into a double-quick pace that took the enemy archers by surprise. Although lengthening the flanks served its purpose, it also weakened the Greek center where, according to Herodotus, the invaders held the upper hand and actually broke the Greek line, chasing the survivors inland from the shore. The Athenians and Plataeans on the flanks fared batter and put their opponents to flight before joining forces in the center and turning on those Persians who had broken through. ‘Here again they were triumphant,’ Herodotus recorded, ‘chasing the routed enemy and cutting them down as they ran to the edge of the sea. Then, plunging into the water, they laid hold of the ships, calling for fire.’ During this stage of the fight, and Athenian named Cynegirus lost his hand to a Persian ax as he held the stern of one of the ships; he later died. As the remaining vessels withdrew, they set a course for Athens, hoping to reach the city ahead of the defending army. The Greeks realized that the sight of the still-powerful Persian fleet off its coast in the absence of its army might be enough to induce Athens to surrender. Legend has it that Pheidippides, still thoroughly exhausted by his mission to Sparta, was ordered to run the 26 miles from Marathon to Athens with news of the victory. He reached the city and gasped, ‘Rejoice, we conquer!’ Then he collapsed and died. By the time Datis and the Persian host sighted Athens and the gleaming Acropolis, it was too late. The Athenian army had crowned its battlefield triumph at Marathon by arriving in time to stand off the would-be conquerors, who had no choice now but to turn for home in failure. Herodotus placed the number of Greek casualties at Marathon at 192 and those of the Persians at a relatively staggering 6,400. When the late-mobilizing Spartans received word that victory had been won without them, they continued onto the battlefield to view the corpses of the fallen Persians. The Greeks buried their dead in a mound that is still visible on the battlefield. When the news of Marathon reaches Darius’ court, the king’s anger reached new heights and he was more determined than ever to conquer all of Greece. Preparations were made and orders issued to raise an even greater army. The renewed campaign was several years in the making, however, and having reigned for 36 years, Darius died before he was able to exact his revenge. The burden of rule and military judgment passed to his son Xerxes. Originally, Xerxes was not bent on war with Greece. He crushed a revolt in Egypt and called together a council of war to determine whether he should undertake an expedition against Athens. ‘As you saw Darius himself was making preparations for war against these men; but death prevented him from carrying out his purpose,’ Xerxes concluded. ‘I therefore on his behalf, and for the benefit of all my subjects, will not rest until I have taken Athens and burnt it to the ground, in revenge for the injury which the Athenians without provocation once did to me and my father….If we crush the Athenians and their neighbors in the Peloponnese, we shall so extend the empire of Persia that its boundaries will be God’s own sky.’ According to Herodotus, when the opportunity came to discuss the situation, only Artabanus, Xerxes’ uncle, offered a dissenting opinion. ‘I warned your father-Darius my own brother-not to attack the Scythians, those wanderers who live in a cityless land,’ Artabanus warned. ‘But he would not listen to me. Confident in his power to subdue them he invaded their countryk and before he came home again many fine soldiers who marched with him were dead. But you, my lord, mean to attack a nation greatly superior to the Scythians: a nation with the highest reputation for valor both on land and at sea. It is my duty to tell you that you have to fear from them: you have said you mean to bridge the Hellespont and march through Europe to Greece. Now suppose-and it is not impossible-that you were to suffer a reverse by sea or land, or even both. These Greeks are said to be great fighters-and indeed one might well guess as much from the fact that the Athenians alone destroyed the great army we sent to attack them under Datis and Artaphernes. Or, if you will, suppose they were to succeed upon one element only-suppose they fell upon our fleet and defeated it, and then sailed to the Hellespont and destroyed the bridge; then my lord you would indeed be in peril.’ Xerxes and the rest of the assembly ridiculed Artabanus, and the conference was adjourned. Later that night, Xerxes began taking his uncle’s word to heart and in fact decided that an invasion of Greece would not be wise after all. But as he slept, Xerxes was supposedly visited by a phantom that urged him to proceed with the invasion. With the dawn, however, the king put the apparition out of his mind and canceled the operation. Again the next night the spirit is said to have appeared and promised doom if Xerxes did not attack the Greeks. This time the king was unnerved by the dream and summoned Artabanus, insisting that his uncle wear the king’s clothes, sit upon his throne and sleep in Xerxes’ bed. If the phantom appeared to Artabanus, then surely it was sent by God. Legend says that indeed the spirit came to Artabanus, threatened to destroy him for interfering and was on the verge of putting out his eyes with hot irons when Artabanus awoke and ran to Xerxes. Xerxes, now with his uncle’s approval, decided that the invasion would go forward. The Greek belief that the proud are destined to be humbled, that their pantheon of gods did play an active role in the everyday lives of men, and that oracles offered a glimpse of events yet to take place might lead a skeptic to label this episode as more of a Greek invention than an actual fact. Herodotus undoubtedly embellished his account of the incident to suit his audience, but the fact remains that the Greeks were influenced by omens and soothsayers and their actions reflected their beliefs. While Xerxes prepared to march, his subjects accomplished two major engineering feats. They did bridge the Hellespont, the present-day Dardanelles, with two spans approximately 1,400 yards in length. The bridges were supported by 674 biremes and triremes (ships named for the number of rows of oars each carried) as pontoons, across which the causeway was laid. A great storm wrecked the first bridges, causing Xerxes to fly into a rage. He ordered the designers of those bridges executed and that the Hellespont itself be given 300 lashes as punishment. Two replacement bridges were subsequently constructed. Meanwhile, three years were spent digging a canal across and isthmus 1 1/2 miles wide near Mount Athos, bypassing the treacherous waters where Darius’ fleet had come to grief years before. Finally, a decade after the embarrassment at Marathon, the great, nay, invincible army of the East was moving inexorably toward its destiny. King Xerxes was 38 years old. Herodotus states that the Persian army numbered 5 million men and drank rivers dry as it passed. More realistic estimates place its strength at 500,000-more than adequate to do the job. The Persian fleet was said to consist of 1,207 triremes. While Xerxes assembled the Persian juggernaut, the Athenians prepared to fight a decisive battle at sea. A rich vein of silver had been found in the mines at Laurium, and in 482 BC a great debate had raged over the best use of that wealth. The city’s leading politician was Aristeides, but now another voice was heard-that of Themistocles. He argued successfully that the treasure should be used to expand the Athenian navy. As Xerxes swept irresistibly forward during the summer of 480 BC, opposition melted away. Many Greek cities offered tokens of earth and water in an act of submission. Athens and Sparta, however, remained defianct. In August, Spartan King Leonidas led 6,000 men to hold the pass at Thermopylae, through which the Persian army had to advance in order to reach Athens. At the same time, the Greek fleet advanced to Artemisium to keep the Persian naval forces busy. Thermopylae, which in Greek means ‘pass of the hot springs,’ provided to setting for one of military history’s great stands. The Persian host drew up before the pass, which was barely 50 feet wide. On August 18, Xerxes ordered a frontal assault. The first troops sent forward against the pass were Medes and Cissians, who attacked repeatedly but were driven back each time with heavy losses. The dead began to pile up in front the line occupied by Leonidas’ core of 300 elite Spartan hoplites, as well as small contingents from several other city-states. Late in the afternoon, the ‘Immortals,’ the elite Persian division whose dash, esprit de corps and combat experience made them the envy of the army, moved forward under their commander, Hydarnes. ‘But, once again engaged, they were no more successful than the Medes had been,’ Herodotus wrote. ‘All went as before, the two armies fighting in a confined space, the Persians using shorter spears than the Greeks and having no advantage from their numbers.’ One Spartan ploy worked spectacularly well. When the opportunity presented itself, the hoplites would turn their backs on their attackers and pretend to flee in confusion. Bolstered by their apparent victory, the Persians would charge forward to complete the rout-only to see the Spartans execute a quick about-face at the least possible moment to bring their heavy arms and long spears to bear, slaughtering scores more duped Persians in the pass. Xerxes, who watched the battle form a nearby vantage point, finally withdrew his battered troops. For another full day Leonidas and his tiring warriors held their ground. Perhaps a slight doubt now crept into Zerxes’ mind. At that point, however, a Greek traitor named Ephialtes gained an audience with the great king and offered to show his soldiers an alternate route over the mountains that would allow them to attack the Spartans form the rear. Leonidas had detached about 1,000 men from Pohocia to hard his back door, but when the Phocians saw the Persian legion advancing upon them in the gathering light they took to their heels. The Spartans’ fate was sealed. The Greeks were well aware that the game was near its end. Their soothsayer spoke of death coming with the dawn. Some of the troops at Thermopylae left the scene, and controversy persists to this day as to whether the Spartan king dismissed them to fight another day or sent them home in contempt. Herodotus wrote that he committed to memory the names of all 300 Spartans who remained, ‘because they deserve to be remembered.’ Squeezed into the narrow pass and assailed from two sides, those Spartans who lost their weapons fought on with their hands and teeth. Their courage is best revealed in the words of Dieneces. When told that the Persians would loose so many arrows that their flight would darken the sky, he remarked: ‘This is pleasant news…for if the Persians hide the sun we shall have our battle in the shade.’ Among the Persian dead were two of Xerxes’ brothers. After the war, a plaque was erected to commemorate the stand of Leonidas and his men. It read: ‘Go tell the Spartans, you who read: We took their orders and are dead.’ The Spartan sacrifice at Thermopylae was not in vain. While they held the pass, a pair of violent storms ravaged the Persian fleet. The second gale completely destroyed a squadron of 200 vessels that Xerxes had sent to sail around Euboea to attack the Greeks from behind. In addition, Themistocles led the Greek navy in two victories, at the Gulf of Pagasae and Artemisum. Both sides, roughly handled, were pleased to break off the engagement at Artemisium as darkness fell. When Themistocles received the news that the Persians had taken Thermopylae, he executed a tactical withdrawal to the island of Salamis. As he had said several years before, the decisive battle in the life of Athens, and indeed the whole of Greece, would take place at sea. After clearing Thermopylae, the Persians made haste for Athens, which was now almost abandoned. Themistocles had convinced most of his countrymen that their best chance for survival lay in moving to Salamis. All of northern Greece was defenseless against the Persian onslaught, which culminated with the burning of Athens and the Acropolis and the slaughter of the few Athenians who had refused to evacuate. Xerxes was not satisfied simply with the burning of Athens. His army was already on the march toward the isthmus that connected the Peleponnese with northern Greece. The Spartans and other Peleponnesians had built a wall across the isthmus and placed troops there to defend their homes, but their naval contingents were with Themistocles at Salamis preparing to fight for Athenian territory. The true military genius of Themistocles now proved critical. Herodotus says that Xerxes acted upon false information that Themistocles deliberately sent to him by way of a slave. ‘I am the bearer of a secret communication from the Athenian commander, who is a well-wisher to your king and hopes for a Persian victory, said the slave Sicinnus. ‘He had told me to report to you that the Greeks have no confidence in themselves and are planning the save their skins by a hasty withdrawal. Only prevent them from slip[ping through your fingers and you have at this moment and opportunity for unparalleled success. They are at daggers drawn with each other, and will offer no opposition-on the contrary, you will se the pro-Persians amongst them fighting the rest.’ Xerxes took the bait and weakened his force by sending an Egyptian squadron west to block a possible escape route; the squadron would not be available during the coming battle. He also ordered that ships cover the channel near Cape Cynosura. Once those movements were completed, he intended to annihilate the Greeks in the narrow waters off Salamis. On the morning of September 20, 480 BC, the main body of the Persian armada, about 400 triremes, moved toward the showdown. Xerxes sat on his golden throne high atop the contested area and watched the battle develop. The Greek fleet was arranged from the Athenians on the left of the line to the Corinthians to the north, covering the Bay of Eleusis, the Pelopponesians on the right and the ships of Megara and Aegina in nearby Ambelaki Bay. The majority of the Greeks’ 300 triremes were hidden from the approaching Persians’ view by St. George’s Island. To draw the enemy well into the shallow water and narrow confined around Salamis, Themistocles ordered the 50-ship Corinthian contingent to hoist its square sails and feign retreat. Once the Persians were drawn in, the Greeks, in ordered line, would surround them. The Persians’ greater numbers would be no advantage in the narrows. Even worse, they would have no room to maneuver.The Greeks began to sing a hymn to the god Apollo as they struck the Persian vanguard in its exposed left flank. When the commanders of the leading Persian ships realized that they were trapped and began to backwater, the caused a tremendous crush of confusion, because those ships coming behind them had nowhere to go. Aeschylus, remembered as the father of literary tragedy, fought both at Marathon and Salamis. He later described the scene as similar to the mass netting and killing of fish on the shores of the Mediterranean: ‘At first the torrent of the Persians’ fleet bore up: but then the press of shipping hammed there in the narrows, none could help another.’ The Greeks kept outside of the tangled Persian mass and struck virtually at will. The Persian ships seemed more suited for action in the open sea-they were larger, sat higher in the water and were loaded with approximately 30 marine infantry or archers, as opposed to 14 aboard each Greek ship. Therefore, the top-heavy vessels fell easy prey to the bronze rams of the Greek triremes in those confining waters. The Phoenicians in Xerxes’ fleet broke under the relentless Greek pressure and many of them ran their ships aground. Several of those Phoenicians hurried to the great king and said that the Ionians were the cause of their defeat. Xerxes had watched the Ionians perform well and ordered the Phoenicians beheaded for lying about their allies. Aeschylus chose to tell the story from the Persian viewpoint and said: ‘The hulls of our vessels rolled over and the sea was hidden from our sight, choked with wrecks and slaughtered men. The shores and reefs were strewn with corpses. In wild disorder every ship remaining in our fleet turned tail and fled. But the Greeks pursued us, and with oars or broken fragments of wreckage struck the survivors’ heads as though they were tunneys and a haul of fish. Shrieks and groans rang across the water until nightfall hid us from them.’ The Persians lost 200 triremes on that momentous day, the Greeks 40. With the crushing defeat at Salamis, Xerxes had little choice but to consider withdrawal. The Greeks might sail northward and destroy the bridges across the Hellespont, severing communication and supply lines. The weather might also worsen and take an even greater toll of what was left of his once-proud navy. Above all, the king of Persia belonged in his capital of Susa, where he could continue to rule. The Greeks did not realize the full extent of their victory immediately, and they did have one more battle to fight. When Xerxes returned to Susa he left a hand-picked force of 300,000 soldiers in Thassaly under the command of Mardonius, the highest-ranking Persian general. The following spring, Mardonius led his army south and captured Athens once more. In the summer of 479 BC the combined armies of Athens and Sparta forced him northward toward Thebes and decisively defeated the Persian army at Plataea in September. In that same month, the Greek fleet, led by Xanthippus, scored one more victory over the Persian navy at Mycale, off the coast of Asia Minor. Greece was at last free from the threat of eastern domination. Over the next half-century Athens remained the strongest naval power in the world, while Sparta maintained the finest army. The differences between them, however, increased the rivalry and distrust that for a time had simmered just below the surface. The next great threat to the future of Greece was to come from within. For further reading, Michael E. Haskew recommends The Greek Way, by Edith Hamilton; The Histories, by Herodotus; Marathon: The Story of Civilization on a Collision Course, by Alan Lloyd; and The Battle for the West: Thermopylae, by Ernie Bradford. This article was originally published in Great Battles, May 1994. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Military History magazine today!

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Grumman F4F Wildcat: U.S. Navy Fighter in World War II

Grumman F4F Wildcat: U.S. Navy Fighter in World War II ‘It was not as you remember it, Saburo. I don’t know how many Wildcats there were, but they seemed to come out of the sun in an endless stream. We never had a chance….Every time we went out we lost more and more planes. Guadalcanal was completely under the enemy’s control….Of all the men who returned with me, only Captain Aito, [Lt. Cmdr. Tadashi] Nakajima and less than six of the other pilots who were in our original group of 80 men survived.’ Those words of top Japanese ace Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, part of a November 1942 conversation that was reported in fighter pilot Saburo Sakai’s autobiography, Samurai, might be the best tribute ever paid to the Grumman F4F Wildcat. While the newer Vought F4U Corsairs and F6F Hellcats grabbed the spotlight, it was the Wildcat that served as the U.S. Navy’s front-line fighter throughout the early World War II crises of 1942 and early 1943. The Wildcat is unique among World War II aircraft in that it was originally conceived as a biplane. By 1936, the Navy had drawn up specifications for its next generation of shipboard fighters. Although presented with ample evidence that the era of the biplane was over, a strong traditionalist faction within the Navy still felt the monoplane was unsuitable for aircraft carrier use. XF4F-2, the first Wildcat prototype. As a result, on March 2, 1936, Grumman was ordered to develop yet another single-seat biplane, the G-16, to replace the successful F3F biplane series. The design, the XF4F-1, was ordered both to placate the traditionalists and to be a backup for the Navy’s first monoplane, the Brewster F2A Buffalo. Grumman engineers, however, showed that the installation of a larger engine in the F3F would result in performance comparable to that expected from the new design, and began work on a parallel monoplane project, the G-18 (or XF4F-2). The Navy finally saw the logic of Grumman’s actions and officially sanctioned them. Although redesigned as a monoplane, the XF4F-2 that rolled out of Grumman’s Bethpage, Long Island, assembly shed on September 2, 1937, showed a strong family resemblance to the F3F family with narrow-track landing gear that retracted upward and inward into the barrel-shaped fuselage. That, in combination with the placement of the cockpit high on the fuselage to give good vision, helped give the Wildcat its distinctive, pugnacious appearance. Although the new ship was not a true ‘aerobatic’ performer, it was stable and easy to fly and displayed excellent deck-handling qualities. One problem that would remain with the F4F throughout its life, however, was its manual landing gear retraction mechanism. The gear required 30 turns with a hand crank to retract, and a slip of the hand off the crank could result in a serious wrist injury. The prototype F4F had to best two competitors during spring 1938 trials before its acceptance by the U.S. Navy–the prototype F2A and a naval version of the Seversky P-35. Although the F2A was judged the winner because of teething problems encountered with the F4F, the Navy saw enough potential in the design to order continued development incorporating a newly designed Pratt & Whitney R-1830 radial engine with a two-speed supercharger. The resulting redesign, the XF4F-3, differed from the original in several respects. Longer-span wings with squared tips–later a Grumman trademark–were added, and the armament of four .50-caliber machine guns was concentrated in the wings. Weight, however, had crept up to 3 tons. First flight for the new machine was February 1939, about two months after the first flight of the Mitsubishi A6M1 Zero prototype in Japan. International tensions were rising, and the Navy awarded Grumman a contract for 600 Wildcats by the close of 1940. Enough of them were received to begin operations from the carriers Ranger and Wasp by February 1941. First combat for the F4F was not with the U.S. Navy but with Britain’s Royal Navy, and its first victim was German. The British had shown great interest in the Wildcat as a replacement for the Gloster Sea Gladiator, and the first were delivered in late 1940. On Christmas Day 1940, one of them intercepted and shot down a Junkers Ju-88 bomber over the big Scapa Flow naval base. The Martlet, as the British also called it, saw further action when 30 originally bound for Greece were diverted to the Royal Navy following the collapse of Greece and were used in a ground attack role in the North African Desert throughout 1941. The Wildcat’s American combat career got off to a more inauspicious start. Eleven of them were caught on the ground during the December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor attack, and nearly all were destroyed. It was with Marine squadron VMF-211 at Wake Island that the Wildcat first displayed the tenacity that would bedevil the Japanese again and again. As at Pearl Harbor, the initial Japanese attacks left seven of 12 F4F3s wrecked on the field. But the survivors fought on for nearly two weeks, and on December 11, Captain Henry Elrod bombed and sank the destroyer Kisaragi and helped repel the Japanese invasion force. Only two Wildcats were left on December 23, but the pair managed to shoot down a Zero and a bomber before being overwhelmed. Carrier-based F4F3s engaged the enemy soon after. On February 20, 1942, Lexington came under attack from a large force of Mitsubishi G4M1 Betty bombers while approaching the Japanese base at Rabaul. The F4F fighter screen swarmed over the unescorted bombers, and Lieutenant Edward H. ‘Butch’ O’Hare shot down five of them. He was awarded the Medal of Honor and became the first Wildcat ace. During the Coral Sea battle in May, F4Fs from the carriers Lexington and Yorktown inflicted heavy losses on the air groups from Shokaku, Zuikaku and Shoho but could not prevent the sinking of Lexington. While the air battles were by no means one-sided, they were clearly a shock to many Zero pilots, who had faced little serious opposition up to that time. By the time of the Midway engagement in June, the fixed-wing F4F-3 had been replaced by the folding-wing F4F-4. Although the new wings enabled the carriers to increase their fighter complement from 18 to 27, the F4F-4’s folding mechanism, coupled with the addition of two more machine guns, raised its weight by nearly 800 pounds and caused a falloff in climb and maneuverability. Nearly 85 Wildcats flew from Yorktown, Enterprise and Hornet during Midway, but it was the Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber that was destined to be the hero of the battle, sinking the carriers Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu and Soryu, and dealing the Imperial Navy a disastrous defeat. When news of the U.S. invasion of Guadalcanal reached the Japanese on August 7, 1942, they launched airstrikes from Rabaul. Flying escort was the elite Tainan Kokutai (air group), which counted among its pilots Sakai (64 victories), Nishizawa (credited with 87 before his death in October 1944) and other leading aces. But over Guadalcanal, the Zeros were off-balance from the start. Their first glimpse of the new enemy came when Wildcats of Saratoga‘s VF-5 dived into their formation and scattered it. Sakai and Nishizawa recovered and claimed eight Wildcats and a Dauntless between them, but they were the only pilots to score. The Navy F4Fs, in return, brought down 14 bombers and two Zeros. Although exact Japanese losses over Guadalcanal are not known, they lost approximately 650 aircraft between August and November 1942–and an irreplaceable number of trained, veteran airmen. It is certain that the F4Fs were responsible for most of those losses. During the Battle of Santa Cruz on October 26, 1942, Stanley W. ‘Swede’ Vejtasa of VF-10 from the carrier Enterprise downed seven Japanese planes in one fight. Marine pilot Joe Foss racked up 23 of his 26 kills over Guadalcanal; John L. Smith was close behind with 19; and Marion Carl, Richard Galer and Joe Bauer were among other top Marine aces. A large part of the Wildcat success was tactics. The agile Zero, like most Japanese army and navy fighter craft, had been designed to excel in slow-speed maneuvers. U.S. Navy aviators realized early on that the Zero’s controls became heavy at high speeds and were less effective in high-speed rolls and dives. Navy tacticians like James Flatley and James Thach preached that the important thing was to maintain speed–whenever possible–no matter what the Zero did. Although the Wildcat was not especially fast, its two-speed supercharger enabled it to perform well at high altitudes, something that the Bell P-39 and Curtiss P-40 could not do. The F4F was so rugged that terminal dive airspeed was not redlined. The A6M2’s 7.7mm cowl guns and slow-firing 20mm cannons were effective against an F4F only at point-blank range. But F4F pilots reported that hits from their .50-caliber wing guns usually caused complete disintegration of a Zero. The Zero and Wildcat shared one serious liability, though. Neither could be modified successfully to keep pace with wartime fighter development. It was determined that the F4F airframe could not accommodate a larger engine without an almost complete redesign, which ultimately did take shape as the new 2,000-hp F6F Hellcat. The Wildcat’s air combat role began to wane when the Chance-Vought F4U Corsair arrived at Guadalcanal in February 1943. Nevertheless, the stalwart F4F was still the front-line fighter when Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto launched Operation I-Go against Allied forces in the Solomons in April, and Marine Lieutenant James Swett shot down seven (and possibly eight) Aichi D3A1 Val dive bombers in a single combat. As 1943 wore on, the Wildcat gradually was relegated to a support role as the F6F replaced it aboard fleet carriers. The F4F’s small size, ruggedness and range–enhanced by two 58-gallon drop tanks–continued to make it ideal for use off small escort carrier decks. The little warrior–in both U.S. and Royal Navy markings–contributed to eliminating the U-boat menace in the Atlantic. General Motors/Eastern Aircraft produced 5,280 Wildcats like this FM-2. The fighter was optimized for smaller escort carriers, with a more powerful engine, and a taller tail to cope with the torque. A General Motors­built version of the F4F received a marginal boost when a Wright 1,350-hp single-row radial was installed in place of the 1,200-hp Pratt & Whitney. The first production models of the new variant, designated the FM-2, arrived in late 1943. The FM-2’s new engine, coupled with a 350-pound weight reduction, produced improvements in performance over the F4F. In fact, postwar tests revealed the late-model A6M5 Zero to be only 13 mph faster. FM-2s were normally teamed with TBF Avengers in so-called VC ‘composite’ squadrons on small escort carriers. During the Battle of Samar on October 25, 1944, FM-2s and Avengers from several ‘baby flattops’ aided destroyers in disrupting an overwhelming Japanese battleship task force that surprised the American invasion fleet off the Philippines. The aircraft, although handicapped by a lack of anti-shipping ordnance, so demoralized the Japanese that a potential American disaster was averted. Although opportunities for air combat were few, FM-2s notched a respectable 422 kills–many of them kamikaze aircraft–by the end of the war. On August 5, 1945, a VC-98 FM-2 from USS Lunga Point shot down a Yokosuka P1Y1 Frances recon bomber to score the last Wildcat kill of the war. In terms of sheer numbers, the F4F’s kill tally was less than the Corsair and much less than the Hellcat. But the Hellcat did not appear until the really critical combats were long over; it was the underdog F4F, flown by highly skilled U.S. Navy and Marine pilots, that provided the few sparks of victory early in the war, when the Japanese onslaught in the Pacific seemed overwhelming. Many aircraft achieved greatness during World War II, but few could be called heroic. The F4F Wildcat, usually outnumbered and outclassed by its opponents, was a heroic airplane. This article was written by Bruce L. Crawford and originally published in Aviation History. 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Guadalcanal’s Strategic Value Played an Outsize Role in World War II

Guadalcanal’s Strategic Value Played an Outsize Role in World War II Walk Bloody Ridge, and it becomes clear why a swathe of otherwise unremarkable ground was so important to the Allies. It’s awfully far away for most and pretty remote, but I can think of few World War II battlegrounds that are better to visit than Guadalcanal in the South Pacific—a place that really got me thinking about the nature of strategic importance. We’re often reminded of the vast numbers involved in the fighting on the Eastern Front, and many historians have claimed this was why it was there that the war against Nazi Germany was won, rather than in the West, where the numbers were comparatively lower. Visiting Guadalcanal, however, led my thoughts to the relationship between boots on the ground and strategic importance. I’ve always believed that to really understand how a battle unfolded, you need to walk the ground; suddenly, what had seemed a two-dimensional and mostly monochromatic place becomes three-dimensional and thrust into vivid Technicolor. You can see how landscapes interconnect, and that, in turn, makes you understand what really happened with greater clarity. On Guadalcanal, this is especially rewarding because much of the areas of fighting on this remote island have changed little in the intervening years. It was blisteringly hot and humid when I went there last May. As I tramped up to Galloping Horse, a key feature in the hills and the scene of some of the fiercest fighting, my shirt became drenched within minutes while my admiration for those who fought here rose another notch as I considered what was involved in simply existing—let alone fighting—in this inhospitable place. Battle debris was everywhere: bullets, shell cases, magazines—I couldn’t walk a few yards without spotting something. Then, on Bloody Ridge, we found the position from where Sergeant John Basilone of the 7th Marines famously fought his Medal of Honor action. Remains of American foxholes abounded along that position, but right at the spur’s end, as it sloped into dense jungle, the strength of the defensive position quickly became crystal-clear. So, too, did the fighting’s desperate nature. Remains of the perimeter barbed wire were still in place. When I crouched in one hole, I found myself looking down the slope and imagining the Japanese emerging through the trees and charging. Moments later, I noticed a round tin lid; then, having cleared away some dead leaves, six more. Examining them, I realized they were from hand-grenade tubes—the cardboard had long since rotted away, but the lids remained. They must have been dropped there back in October 1942 as the Marines hurled the grenades toward the advancing enemy. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and was a reminder that in jungle warfare, the fighting was often very close-quartered indeed. From Bloody Ridge, it became clear why this bit of otherwise unremarkable ground was so important: only a mile or so away was the airfield, vital for supply, defense, and as a bomber base—the one airfield that could be carved out of the almost totally mountainous Solomon Islands. In fact, it’s only this stretch of northern coastline that is really habitable. The island is also small in scale. You could almost reach out and touch the airfield from Bloody Ridge. Suddenly it became obvious why so comparatively few fought here; its remoteness, size, and geography limited the numbers that could be brought to bear. There simply wasn’t room for more. Nonetheless it was here, on Guadalcanal, that the Americans stopped the advancing Japanese tide in World War II. Between July 1942 and February 1943, the U.S. won the naval battle, the air battle, and the land battle—initially with barefaced courage, but then by grinding down the enemy with increasingly superior lines of supply. It meant this tiny island was a place of vital importance in the war, and yet compared with the numbers involved on the Eastern Front, it was a pinprick. It reminded me that numbers of men involved and strategic importance do not necessarily go hand in hand and are not the best metric by which we should judge the impact of the war’s battles.  ✯ This article was published in the October 2020 issue of World War II.

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Gulf War: The Corsair’s Last Hurrah

Gulf War: The Corsair’s Last Hurrah Nearly 25 years after it first saw combat in Vietnam, the LTV A-7E Corsair II was headed for retirement when it was recalled for duty in one last war. During Operation Desert Storm, launched early in the morning of January 17, 1991, the United States deployed a variety of cutting-edge military aircraft as main actors in the air stage, including the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter. Among the lesser lights in the arena, however, was a small attack aircraft that had left the scene shortly before the beginning of the Gulf War’s initial phase but then had to be hastily returned to service for a curtain call: the Ling-Temco-Vought A-7E Corsair II. When Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, two of the last operational U.S. Navy A-7E squadrons—the VA-46 “Clansmen” and VA-72 “Blue Hawks”—had just returned from a tour aboard the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy and were transitioning to the more advanced McDonnell Douglas F/A-18C Hornet. But on August 3, both squadrons received an inquiry about a possible new deployment to take part in Operation Desert Shield, the regional reinforcement and preparation for a potential military conflict with Iraq. The Corsair II’s retirement would have to wait. “There was no deploy order at that point, but we went into overdrive to be ready to answer the call as soon as it occurred,” said now-Admiral Mark Fitzgerald, the last commanding officer of VA-46. The official order came on August 6, with a departure date of the 10th. Corsair II pilots of VA-46 and VA-72 await takeoff as flight operations commence aboard USS John F. Kennedy during Operation Desert Shield, the Gulf War’s preliminary phase. (Lt. Cmdr. Dave Parsons/U.S. Navy) At that time the U.S. had two carriers in the Gulf region: Independence and Midway. Independence was well past its scheduled return to America, so it was decided that John F. Kennedy would replace it on station. Six U.S. carriers would eventually serve in the region during the conflict. When they arrived in the Red Sea, the air wing’s pilots honed their skills during practice missions. “The training flights were amazing,” recalled Fitzgerald. “We flew in northern Saudi Arabia’s famous ‘Star Wars’ canyons on great low-levels.” Throughout October, with Iraqi president Saddam Hussein showing no signs of retreat, the coalition increased its presence in the region. As the diplomatic situation worsened in December, war seemed inevitable. The A-7E’s main mission at the start of the campaign would be suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD). The Corsair II pilots were charged with destroying command-and-control bunkers, air bases, radar systems and anti-aircraft missiles, and they knew how to do it. On January 14, 1991, VA-46 and VA-72 were told to prepare for action. Saddam had been issued an ultimatum that he had failed to respect, so Iraq’s military forces would feel the full strength of the coalition’s might. “I was the leader of the Navy flight heading north from the Red Sea and the first aircraft to be launched off the catapult at 0:30 a.m.,” said Fitzgerald. “We went through refueling with USAF tankers and after that we followed to Baghdad. All the anxiety and the adrenaline of the previous days left me on takeoff. All the training and discipline learned from day one of flight school was finally at work.” The green light for the assault on the Iraqi capital came after initial attacks with F-117s and Tomahawk missiles, which filled the skies with Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery. The A-7 Corsairs were among 84 American and British aircraft that led the initial attacks on Saddam’s infrastructure. The A-7 mission on that first night would last about five hours. From the Red Sea the Corsairs crossed some 750 miles of Saudi Arabian desert to Arar, on the Saudi–Iraqi border. From there, VA-46 headed on to Baghdad and VA-72 undertook its SEAD mission over H-2 and H-3 airfields in western Iraq. Clouds covered the route to Baghdad, but as the Clansmen approached the capital the weather cleared and the attack was totally visual. “Near Baghdad, about 70 miles, the weather got clean and the sight was impressive and surreal,” remembered Fitzgerald. “There was literally a dome of lead over the city with missiles crossing the top. The TALD [tactical air-launched decoys], the bombs and Tomahawk missiles had brought every SAM system alive.” Lieutenant Jeffrey Greer of VA-46 stands with the tactical air-launched decoys he used to bait Iraq’s air defenses on night one of Desert Storm. (Courtesy of Jeff Greer) It was the job of a VA-46 junior officer on his first combat mission to serve as radar “bait.” Lieu­tenant Jeffrey “Spock” Greer, who headed the flight of nine Clansmen A-7Es, would release the decoys that exposed the Iraqi air defenses to the AGM-88 HARMs (high-speed anti-radiation missiles) carried by the other Corsairs. Greer flew the A-7E “Tartan 310,” with his name written below the cockpit, and carried four ADM-141A TALDs. “The theory was my four TALD would make me look like a flight of five,” explained Greer. “Seeing me coming, the Iraqis would light me up with their radar and start shooting, allowing those behind me to launch HARM missiles up and over me to take out their radars and give the main strike package a clearer route to Baghdad. “I was the third plane launched off the Kennedy. Planes from all three carriers in the Red Sea rendezvoused on the three KC-135 tankers. Having roughly 36 planes coming from different directions and trying to rendezvous on the three tankers at night was just the first step. After I got my fuel, I proceeded alone on my planned mission route. To make it more difficult to be seen at night, we turned off all of our exterior lights and went in alone. Why alone at night? You can’t fly formation off of a plane you can’t see. “Each time we rehearsed our night-one mission, we went right up to the Iraqi border and turned around,” said Greer. “On night one, we continued.” This was the main strategy used by the coalition to carry out the first attacks on Baghdad and other locations in the early hours of January 17. Several dozen aircraft took off daily from various locations and simulated the route they would take without actually entering Iraq. For the Iraqis, the 17th was like any other day except that the aircraft kept coming. After Greer launched the decoys, the following Corsairs fired their anti-radar missiles. “Each HARM-equipped aircraft would fire two missiles from predefined launch positions and the third HARM could be used on targets of opportunity [TOO]—that meant any emitting sites that were still active,” said Fitzgerald. “The prebriefed shots could be fired outside missile range, but TOO range should be much closer. I fired my first missile. I remember that we were warned not to look as the missiles were being released due to the strong bright light of its engine. Of course I looked and had twinkling eyes for a while. On the next missile I didn’t look until it had climbed to its perch at 80,000 feet.” Soldiers examine an SA-2 missile site that was destroyed during Desert Storm. (U.S. Air Force) With two HARMs fired, the missile alert systems in Fitzgerald’s A-7E, “Tartan 312,” came on and blinked. “My scope started showing a symbol totally new for me: a flashing 6 inside a blinking box,” he said. “I studied it a bit too long only to look up and see an SA-6 missile heading in my direction. I quickly shot my last HARM and hit my chaff button. I also made a very hard break turn to get out of its path. In seconds I saw an explosion of the HARM and the SAM warning disappeared, indicating that the missile had done its job.” Lieutenant Commander Willard R. “Budman” Warfield of the VA-72 Blue Hawks did not participate in the night attacks early on the 17th, but recounted how he waited for his squadron mates to return: “We were told on January 15 that the three-day plan we had been practicing was a go, so there was plenty of time to get the adrenaline flowing. I didn’t get much sleep on the night of the 17th. I attended the night-one briefing, then tried to get some rest prior to the early day-one launch. It was quite a relief to see all our jets come back from night one, but there was no time to spare getting the aircraft turned around for day one. Our ordnance troops did a fantastic job reconfiguring the jets for day-one load out.” According to Jeff Greer, they expected much more resistance the first night. “It wasn’t too long before we didn’t even see them,” he recalled. “And when we bombed targets, they didn’t know we were there until the first bomb went off. When it did, they started shooting back.” This was standard procedure for Iraqi triple-A and would be seen throughout the campaign. Six additional VA-46 Corsairs took off shortly before noon on January 17. Four of them each carried three AGM-88 HARMs, destined for further destruction of radars, as well as AIM-9L Sidewinder missiles. Two other A-7Es were armed with AGM-62 Walleye I glider bombs. The Blue Hawks continued to target the H-2 and H-3 air bases in western Iraq on day one. The daytime actions were a joint effort by aircraft from John F. Kennedy and Saratoga aimed at destroying the operational capabilities of the two bases. Commander John R. Leenhouts, executive officer of the VA-72 "Blue Hawks," returns to Kennedy after a strike. (Dave Parsons/U.S. Navy) After day one, since Iraqi radars no longer posed a threat to coalition flights, the Corsairs of both squadrons gradually started attack missions using Mk-82, -83 and -84 conventional bombs and Mk-20 Rockeye cluster bombs, as well as the video-guided Walleye I/II bombs and SUU-25 flare launchers (illuminators). Some sorties also featured one or more AN/AWW-9 datalink pods, which were useful for transmitting video camera images from the Walleyes. Although Desert Storm was the A-7’s last combat operation, it scored a “first” during the campaign. The third night saw the unprecedented use of the AGM-84E SLAM (standoff land attack missile) against high-value strategic targets. On that night VA-46’s A-7s fired two SLAMs at Al-Qa’im, where there were important uranium extraction and refining complexes. Among the biggest challenges the Corsair pilots faced was inflight refueling. “The KC-135’s refueling process was always a challenge,” noted Fitzgerald. “We had to tank four to five times during a mission and the drogue was just an iron basket with no takeup reel. We got used to and good at doing that on them, but it was always an exciting exercise.” While the two Corsair squadrons experienced no losses on the first night of attacks, the air battle was not a strictly one-sided affair. During the flight to Baghdad, the fighters, bombers and electronic interference aircraft received information that MiG-25 Foxbats were taking off from Al-Taqaddum Air Base west of the capital. No AWACS (airborne warning and control system) aircraft flying over the region had radar contact with the enemy MiGs thus far, so the F/A-18C Hornets already chasing the threat to the west were not allowed to fire. After the denial to engage, the Hornets returned eastward and the leader fired his HARM as planned. The second F/A-18C, piloted by Lieutenant Scott “Spike” Speicher of the VFA-81 “Sunliners,” was just behind and would be the next to shoot at Iraqi radar. But before he could loose his missile, one of the MiG-25s also turned eastward and fired a Vympel R-40 missile that swallowed Speicher’s Hornet in an explosion. “The fireball was visible to the north thru the haze,” recalled Fitzgerald. “Hornets were 5,000 feet higher than us so I could see looking up.” Speicher was the first American casualty of the conflict. Over the ensuing days the campaign followed a rhythm of alternating between SEAD and attack missions. The A-7s participated in a number of important operations, such as the day-three attack on the Al Musayyib rocket test unit, south of the Iraqi capital, using Walleye bombs. On February 26, two days before the end of the war, a routine mission to H-2 airfield nearly resulted in major losses for VA-72. Bud Warfield recounted the details of that night: “The original mission was to go to the KTO [Kuwait Theater of Operations] and support advancing coalition troops. They were doing fine without massive airpower, so we were sent to a new target out at H-2—a place we had been before and thought was completely destroyed. [VA-72 executive officer John] ‘Lites’ [Leenhouts] was the strike leader, but his mission was to drop the LUU-2 illumination flares before roll-in. Another officer in VA-72 was to lead the strike element. I was assigned to the spare aircraft on deck. After the strike group launched, I was on my way back to the ready room when I heard “Launch the spare!” over the fight deck loudspeaker. One of the mission aircraft had a hydraulic failure. “I hauled back to my jet, armed with seven Mk-20 Rockeyes, and did a quick align and launched. I found the rest of the group at the tanker track and refueled. During this time, I found out that the bomber lead had problems with his radios and INS [inertial navigation system]. I was the only ‘adult supervision’ airborne, so he gave me the lead and stayed on my wing the rest of the flight. “We got up to the target, which we thought was a derelict airfield with no defenses. I rolled in with original strike lead on my wing and searched for a target. We were the first aircraft to attack. I saw some airplanes behind the hangar that had appeared in satellite imagery, and tossed our Rockeyes at them. “By this time in the conflict, we had noticed that the gunners didn’t start shooting until after first bomb impact. That was true that night. As soon as my bombs impacted, they put up the best AAA show I had seen since then. Flak bursts were going off all around. I started jinking and wanted to get out of there real bad, but was thinking of the 10 guys behind us. I heard Lieutenant [Dan] Wise tell his group to target the muzzle flashes and they did some impressive work. I hit 600 knots at the bottom of the dive run, and pulled up to egress the area at speed. About that time I got a missile warning. I checked our six, and yes, there were missiles in the air. Quite the impressive fireworks show going on over my left shoulder! I expended all the contents of my chaff and flare buckets, while executing 7G break turns in both directions. “We cleared the area and all aircraft were told to find a wingman of opportunity as all formation integrity was lost. We met up on the tanker, and Lites did a roll call. Somehow, we had all escaped from the hellhole intact. I thought it was a miracle of bad gunnery that no one got hit. “All that fun was followed with a night trap at 3:30 a.m.,” concluded Warfield. “We debriefed and shuffled off to bed, but there was no sleep to be had.” The aging A-7s of the two squadrons maintained an impressive operational capability, with very few aircraft unable to fly when required. An episode involving one VA-72 Corsair, though, deserves a special highlight. A-7E “403” took off for a mission on January 24, damaging its front wheel at the catapult. Unable to complete the mission, the pilot returned to Kennedy and had to land with the aid of the barrier system. All the important equipment was subsequently removed from 403 and the airplane was pushed overboard. Kennedy flight deck crewmen secure A-7E “403” after it made an emergency barricade landing on January 24, 1991. The damaged Blue Hawk aircraft was stripped of equipment and pushed overboard. (PJF Military Collection/Alamy) Throughout the Gulf War, not a single A-7 was shot down or even hit by enemy fire, despite expectations of three to five percent casualties. The end of Desert Storm also marked the final act of the A-7E Corsair II’s operational career as a frontline Navy aircraft. On the morning of March 27, 1991, VA-72’s A-7E “412” was the last Corsair to be launched from an aircraft carrier. The legacy left by the A-7Es during the Gulf campaign is undeniable. According to the 1993 Gulf War Air Power Survey, they dropped approximately 1,000 tons of bombs in 737 combat missions over Kuwait and Iraq, totaling 3,100 combat hours during the 43 days of conflict. VA-46 and VA-72 were officially deactivated on June 30, 1991, closing the 25-year legacy of a little aircraft that had played an outsized role in the Gulf War victory. Marcelo Ribeiro da Silva is a Brazilian journalist, military aviation researcher and aviation artist. Further reading: Desert Warpaint, by Peter R. March, and U.S. Aircraft & Armament of Operation Desert Storm in Detail & Scale, by Bert Kinzey. This feature originally appeared in the November 2020 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here!

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Guy Stern: War of Words

Guy Stern: War of Words Stern recently published his wartime memoir, Invisible Ink. (Randy Glass Studio) Early in World War II the U.S. Army recognized its need for skilled linguists to interrogate captured enemy troops or conduct covert operations in Axis-controlled areas. Recruits included both Americans possessing German, Italian and Japanese language skills and immigrants who had fled Europe and Asia for the United States. Among them were the “Ritchie Boys,” some 15,200 men who attended the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie, Md. Many were German- and Austrian-born Jews who had fled Adolf Hitler’s genocidal Nazi regime—making them most determined enemies of the Third Reich. Military History recently spoke with Guy Stern, a “Ritchie Boy” and Bronze Star recipient. Stern, 98, is a former professor of German literature and cultural history at Wayne State University, which recently published his memoir, Invisible Ink. He remains director of the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Mich. Tell us about your early years. My parents and generations of us were born in Germany. I grew up in a town called Hildesheim, near Hanover. I was the only one to get out of Germany. My entire family—my brother, my sister, my parents—all of them perished in the Holocaust. Before that happened, my parents made an appeal to my mother’s brother, who lived in St. Louis. He said he could vouch for one person to get out of Germany, so I went to St. Louis. I graduated high school in 1939, but I could not afford college. I got a job and worked as a busboy for a year so I could enroll at St. Louis University. Then Pearl Harbor happened. There were recruiting posters all over town, and I saw one and thought, That is my war. The poster was asking for anybody who had language skills in German to report to the Marine station in downtown St. Louis. The ensign there found that I had all the qualifications, but then he said, “I detect an accent.” He asked if I was born in the United States, and I said, “No.” He told me, “We can’t use you. We only take native Americans.” However, the draft happened a year later, and Army intelligence had no such qualms. After my basic training in Texas I was sent to Camp Ritchie. What sort of specialized training did you all undergo? You had to remember a whole set of new knowledge. In [interrogations] the trick was finding common interest. For example, one time I was supposed to get information about industrial planning in the city of Düsseldorf. I told the POW, “Oh, I’m glad I get to talk to somebody from Düsseldorf. Your [soccer] team was at the top of the league midseason. What happened?” Because I was a football fan, he started talking. You practiced on actual German POWs? At first we interrogated each other, but then we got a contingent of POWs from the Afrika Korps [on which to practice]. They were briefed on what their fictitious past was, and they were instructed to be deceptive or clam up if the interrogator was clumsy. They became our guinea pigs. [In learning to recognize enemy gear], memorization was key. We had a final exam where they spread 50 items of equipment, uniform parts and the like in front of us. We were given a clipboard numbered 1 through 50 and we had to enter in where each one went. I don’t think anyone got all of them. It was an impossible test [laughs]. Was Normandy your first time in combat? Yes. It was my first real interrogation experience. After Normandy I joined what we called the survey section. The medics at that point wanted to know whether there were any [communicable] diseases spreading in the German army, because we were in contact with them. The engineers wanted to know how well the Germans had managed to repair their railways and their factories after we bombed them. We [in the survey section] got all that information. We were also afraid of the Germans launching a desperate last stand using chemical weapons. So, as prisoners came off a truck, I immediately asked them, “How many of you are carrying gas masks and how many of you are wearing protective clothes?” My figures turned out to be entirely accurate. I concluded the Germans were not prepared [to launch a gas attack], because they were not defensive. That was when I got my decoration. And that’s my story on how I made the world safe for democracy—I did my job [laughs]. ‘After Normandy I joined what we called the survey section. The medics at that point wanted to know whether there were any diseases spreading in the German army, because we were in contact with them. The engineers wanted to know how well the Germans had managed to repair their railways and their factories after we bombed them’ How is it you were chosen to interrogate war criminal Dr. Gustav Wilhelm Schuebbe? It was actually my pal Fred Howard’s interrogation, and by happenstance we found out who [Schuebbe] was. Fred had a prisoner earlier that day [in April 1945] who was the nephew of Heinrich Himmler. The nephew carried a picture of his uncle in his wallet. Our MPs called our attention to it, and we took it. So that was circumstance one. Second, it was the day [President Franklin] Roosevelt died. Fred had turned on his radio, because he wanted to find out how the Germans would react. Around midnight the German POW––a medical officer––comes into the tent and sees the photograph of Himmler hanging and hears the German propagandist radio station playing. He deceives himself he is at German headquarters. Fred was in civvies, and so the German says, “Oh, I am among friends.” We asked what he meant, and he said, “Well, you must have heard of me in this report. I am Dr. Schuebbe. I’m with the euthanasia program.” Fred’s interrogation partner got a slip of paper and wrote: Opium. The guy was an addict. The confession, so to speak, was involuntary. But then two mistakes happened. Number one: Fred gave him a cup of coffee, which woke him up. Second, I made a mistake. One method of interrogation, which we rarely used, was fear. And what were the Germans most afraid of? Being in Russian captivity. So sometimes I would pretend to be a Russian liaison officer who spoke German with a Russian accent. That night I walked in dressed as a Soviet commissar. [Schuebbe] looked at the “Russian” and clammed up. However, by then we had enough of a lead that by the following day we could unmask the truth that he was responsible for thousands of “mercy” deaths. Were there any light moments in your work? One day my captain called me and this other guy in and said, “I have something funny to show you.” It was a Canadian publication that made fun of us as interrogators. They created a fake report in German describing the effect of a bombing attack on a town and wrote that headless people were running around the market. It was a straight translation from German, but in English it means people who have lost their minds, not their heads. Our captain said, “Why don’t you do something similar?” We ended up writing all sorts of things. For example, we wrote that Hitler had a shriveled scrotum. We made a big story out of it. That was our contribution to Army humor. We attached it to all the reports we made that day. Years later my wife sees me rolling on the floor next to a book, laughing. It turns out two British military history scholars had found our reports with our notes on Hitler in the National Archives. They had fallen for it. It was an actual footnote in their book. Would you say the “Ritchie Boys” were more motivated than most? Yes. This was our war. Many of us were Jewish refugees, so we worked harder than anyone could have driven us. MH

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https://www.historynet.com/h-l-menckens-cynical-commentary-made-americans-laugh.htm

H.L. Mencken’s Cynical Commentary Made Americans Laugh—Little Did They Know

H.L. Mencken’s Cynical Commentary Made Americans Laugh—Little Did They Know An American History Online Exclusive The Sage of Baltimore thought his countrymen’s beliefs were worthy of a less-evolved species, and told them so Exactly 100 years ago, in 1920, the most famous and controversial American journalist of his day published a book containing 869 examples of “wisdom” he claimed were the beliefs held by the average American. Henry Louis Mencken touted The American Credo as a portrait of the “National Mind.” Credo wasn’t flattering to fellow citizens, which surprised no one familiar with the author’s writing. H.L. Mencken had made his name satirizing “boobus Americanus” and trumpeting his belief that the average American was an “ignoramus and poltroon.” The 1921 edition of the American Credo was Mencken’s compilation of 869 mortifyingly unsophisticated convictions deeply held by his fellow Americans. Mencken redeemed his snide cynicism about his countrymen with his writing style, which was outrageous, exuberant, and hilarious. “We live in a land of abounding quackeries,” he explained, “and if we do not learn how to laugh, we succumb to the melancholy disease which afflicts the race of viewers-with-alarm.” Mencken never succumbed to that syndrome. During a career spanning the first half of the 20th century, he wrote thousands of newspaper and magazine articles and more than a dozen books—every one suffused with his uniquely gleeful grouchiness. In 1920, Mencken was 39, and feeling grouchier than usual.  World War I had left him disillusioned. He opposed American entry into the European slaughterfest and he was angered by the federal government’s wartime censorship of the press and prosecution of anti-war dissidents. His spirits did not improve in 1919, when that same government, in a flourish of sanctimony, outlawed the balm that soothed his sorrows—booze. In this mood, he practically gagged when he read patriotic essays—or, as he called them, “rhetorical gas-bombs upon the subject of American ideals.” Americans don’t really believe in the lofty ideals of liberty and justice proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, Mencken wrote. What the average American really believes is a mishmash of ancient superstitions, spurious pseudo-science, racist tripe, ethnic stereotypes, dunderheaded clichés, and crackpot theories. So he gleefully compiled a comic list of ludicrous notions Americans really believe. He claimed his list to be “very serious”—the birth of “an entirely new science” he dubbed “descriptive sociological psychology.” Of course, he was kidding. The American Credo came straight out of his head—with some suggestions from cronies. But Mencken knew Americans, having worked for 20 years as a reporter covering cops, courts, and City Hall in his hometown, Baltimore, before moving on to the gaudier spectacles of national politics. His job was, he wrote, an education in “the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer and a midwife.” He laid out 488 examples of that worldly wisdom in the 1920 edition of American Credo, then added 381 more in a revised edition published in 1921. A century later, these “beliefs” seem amusingly ridiculous, yet disturbingly familiar. 180: That children were much better behaved 20 years ago than they are today. 774: That people who offer one a firm handclasp are very upright and honest. 414: That politics in America would be improved by turning all the public offices over to businessmen. 230: That many soldiers’ lives have been saved in battle by bullets lodging in Bibles which they carried in their breast pockets. 783: That the chief pastime of young medical students is hurling human arms and legs at each other in the dissecting room. The May 1922 cover of Smart Set, a magazine Mencken edited, depicting a satyr lighting a cigarette with the flaming hair of a woman,(Photo by JHU Sheridan Libraries/Gado/Getty Images) In 1920, as in 2020, Americans harbored some odd ideas about health: 56: That whiskey is good for a snake-bite. 287: That fish is a brain food. 360: That oysters are a great aphrodisiac. 198: That if a cat gets into a room where a baby is sleeping, the cat will suck the baby’s breath and kill it. 489: That monkey-glands will restore a man of 85 to the vigor of 21, and cause him to elope with a Swedish servant girl and become the father of twins. The average American of 1920 held strange notions about sex: 144: That every country girl who falls has been seduced by a man from the city. 669: That many women who live in fashionable apartment houses have liaisons with the elevator boys. 671: That most women begin street flirtations by dropping their handkerchiefs. 77: That a Sunday School superintendent is always carrying on an intrigue with one of the girls in the choir. 653: That the first thing the Bolsheviks did in Russia was to nationalize all the women, and the all the most toothsome cuties were reserved for Trotsky and Lenin. 229: That chorus girls spend the time during the entr’actes sitting around naked in their dressing rooms telling naughty stories. 239: That all the girls in Mr. Ziegfeld’s “Follies” are extraordinarily seductive and that at least 40 head of bank cashiers are annually guilty of tapping the till in order to buy them diamonds and Russian sables. Mencken painted Americans as tormented by fears of being duped: 30: That ginger snaps are made of the sweepings off the floor in the bakery. 181: That the cashier of a restaurant, in adding up a customer’s check, always adds a dollar, which is subsequently split between himself and the waiter. 513: That jewelers, in cleaning or repairing costly baubles, invariably remove the original stones and insert others made of paste. 556: That the woman writer on an evening newspaper who gives advice to the lovelorn is invariably a man with a flowing beard. 514: That all moving pictures of English country life are staged in Fort Lee, New Jersey. 302: That whenever a will case gets into the courts, the lawyers gobble up all the money and the heirs come out penniless. 347: That the licorice candy sold in cheap candy stories is made of old rubber boots. 15: That something mysterious goes on in the back rooms of chop suey houses. Americans in 1920, like Americans in 2020, believed all kinds of nasty ethnic stereotypes: A portrait of Mencken as a young newspaperman. He worked for the Baltimore Morning Herald before moving on the Sun.(Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images) 63: That French women use great quantities of perfume in lieu of taking a bath. 101: That German babies are brought up on beer in place of milk. 466: That English women are very cold. 741: That a Jew always outwits a Christian in a business deal. 399: That all negroes who show any intelligence whatever are actually two-thirds white and the sons of United States senators. 313: That whenever there is a funeral in an Irish family, the mourners all get drunk and assault each other with clubs. 375: That when a Chinese laundryman hands one a slip for one’s laundry, the Chinese letters which he writes on the slip have nothing to do with the laundry but are in reality a derogatory description of the owner. Mencken claimed men and women have weird theories about women and men: 160: That there is something slightly peculiar about a man who wears spats. 787: That women with red hair or wide nostrils are possessed of especially passionate natures. 452: That no man who is not a sissy can ever learn to thread a needle or darn a sock. 114: That the editor of a woman’s magazine is always a lizzie. 479: That a man always dislikes his mother-in-law, and goes half-crazy every time she visits him. 283: That a woman can’t sharpen a lead pencil. 134: That if a dog is fond of a man, it is an infallible sign that the man is a good sort, and one to be trusted. 135: That blondes are flightier than brunettes. 256: That brunettes are more likely to grow stout in later years than blondes. The average American of 1920 daydreamed about the lives of plutocrats: 216: That all millionaires are born in small ramshackle houses situated near railroad tracks. 125: That millionaires always go to sleep at the opera. 267: That women who are in society never pay any attention to their children, and wish they would die. 247: That all the millionaires of Pittsburgh are very loud fellows, and raise merry hell with the chorus girls every time they go to New York. 547: That women who are able to afford servants wear kimonos during the greater part of the day and read best sellers. 262: That John D. Rockefeller would give his whole fortune for a digestion good enough to digest a cruller. 759: That in the old days whenever a millionaire gave a midnight supper party, a semi-clad chorus girl would dance on the table, and the guests would drink champagne out of her slipper. A 1925 caricature of Mencken by artist Miguel Covarrubias. In it, the Sage of Baltimore looks remarkably like boobus Americanus, the character he invented to poke fun at his countrymen. (National Portrait Gallery) Mencken happily catalogued American superstitions: 48: That it is bad luck to kill a spider. 60: That if one’s nose tickles, it is a sign that one is going to meet a stranger or kiss a fool. 61: That if one’s right ear burns, it is a sign that someone is saying nice things about one. 62: That if one’s left ear burns, it is a sign that someone is saying mean things about one. 138: That if one touches a hop-toad, one will get warts. 615: That a piece of bread and butter, if dropped, will always fall butter side down. 376: That an old woman with rheumatism in her leg can infallibly predict when it is going to rain. 102: That a man with two shots of cocaine in him could lick Jack Dempsey. Mencken reported that the average American had odd notions about American history: 218: That George Washington never told a lie. 398: That George Washington died of a heavy cold brought on by swimming the Potomac in the heart of winter to visit a yellow girl on the Maryland shore. 422: That General Grant was always soused during a battle, and that on the few occasions when he was sober he got licked. 492: That Aaron Burr possessed an irresistible charm for all the women with whom he came in contact, and that the virtue of even the most strait-laced was a very poor risk if left in a room alone with him as long as ten minutes. 691: That Daniel Webster delivered his greatest orations when he was so drunk that he had to hold on to a table to stand up. 711: That Edgar Allan Poe wrote all his stuff while sobering up after sprees. 839: That the late J. Pierpont Morgan was the easiest mark the fake antique dealers of Europe had discovered in 250 years, and that a syndicate of Italians actually built five factories in Italy for the sole purpose of manufacturing fake Rembrandts to sell to him. 604: That both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were the illegitimate sons of Henry Clay. Some wisdom Mencken recounted fit no known category except amusement: 116: That all senators from Texas wear sombreros, chew tobacco, expectorate profusely, and frequently employ the word “maverick.” 756: That at every girls’ boarding school there are several female rakes who do nothing but smoke cigarettes, tell risqué stories, and put the other girls hep to a lot of things they should not know. 855: That if all the money in the world were to be divided, within a year the same men would have it again. 679: That the Indians in wild west shows are in reality not Indians at all but painted Chinamen. 607: That when one asks a bell-boy in a hotel in Budapest to get one’s suit pressed, he reappears in a few minutes with a large blonde. An undated photo of the Sage of Baltimore in his later years, still tethered to his typewriter. (Bettmann/Getty Images) A hundred years after Mencken published his list, it is impossible to determine which items Americans actually believed and which sprang from Mencken’s mischievous mind. It seems quite possible that he came up with a few of the more bizarre items while quaffing illegal tankards of his favorite beverage, beer, with convivial cronies. The lines about the Budapest bellboy and George Washington’s “yellow girl” practically reek of malt and hops. If Mencken, who died in 1956 in his beloved Baltimore, somehow were to revisit the land he loved to mock, what would he say that today’s average American believes? We’ll never know. But he might reuse at least one item from his 1920 list: 245: That there is something peculiar about a man who wears a red tie.

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https://www.historynet.com/half-cocked-cossack.htm

The Half-Cocked Cossack

The Half-Cocked Cossack Freebooter Nikolai Ashinov sought a foothold for Mother Russia in the Red Sea—but his African misadventure only caused embarrassment Its 19th century struggle with the British empire for control of Central Asia left imperial Russia out of the European division of Africa and its resources. But with the 1869 opening of the Suez Canal, some in Russia floated the possibility of establishing a warm-water port that would also control access to the Red Sea’s southern entrance. However, Russia’s Foreign Ministry had little interest in expansion to Africa, leaving execution of the scheme to a roguish adventurer named Nikolai Ivanovich Ashinov, a Terek Cossack from the Chechen lowlands. Though poorly educated, the charismatic Ashinov displayed sufficient resolve to attract support. Such a base, he explained, would both offer an entry point to Christian Ethiopia and govern the shipping lanes that transported India’s wealth to Britain. Ashinov, however, left out one vital detail—his target port, Tadjoura, lay within French Somaliland (present-day Djibouti). Carried out by an unlikely cadre of Cossack warriors and Russian Orthodox priests, Ashinov’s attempted occupation of an abandoned Egyptian fort there in 1889 sparked an international crisis and led to what Czar Alexander III deemed “a sad and stupid comedy.” Ethiopia barely registered on the Russian consciousness until 1847, when Lt. Col. Egor Petrovich Kovalevsky led a two-year Russian expedition from Alexandria to Cairo, up the Nile and Blue Nile into Sudan, then followed a tributary into Gojjam (northwest Ethiopia) in search of gold deposits. A year later Russian monk Porfiry Uspensky, having met with Ethiopian monks in Jerusalem, claimed (incorrectly) the rites of the Russian and Ethiopian Orthodox churches were nearly identical and suggested sending a religious mission to the Ethiopian emperor. The end goal, the politically minded monk proposed, was to send Orthodox missionaries to the region, thus spreading Russian influence. Nothing came of the plan, but in 1855 Ethiopian Emperor Tewodros II sent a letter to the czar suggesting a joint effort to wrest Jerusalem from Ottoman control. The timing was bad, however, as Russia was reeling from its losses in the Crimean War. Meanwhile, the French were taking an interest in the challenging Gulf of Tadjoura region. In 1856, Henri Lambert, the French consul in Aden, became the first European to visit the port of Obock, where he negotiated trading rights with the local sultan. Lambert was murdered three years later after inserting himself into a local political dispute, but in 1862 the French signed a treaty of alliance with the regional Afar sultan and purchased Obock. The French initially found little use for the port and considered selling it to the Egyptians, who were expanding their African empire with a modernized military heavily reliant on Western mercenaries, including veterans of the American Civil War. In 1874 Egyptian troops began occupying the coast southward from Tadjoura. By 1882 passing French ships were reporting the presence of Egyptian forces at colonial holdings in the Gulf of Aden. French interest in the area picked up the next year after authorities in the British-held port of Aden refused to recoal French naval ships. By then the Egyptian military presence was pervasive in Obock, which France had still made no effort to occupy. Ethiopia’s destruction of the Egyptian army at the Battle of Gura in March 1876 was the beginning of the end of Egypt’s efforts to expand its influence in the Horn of Africa. By 1884 Cairo had agreed to abandon its bases along the Ethiopian and Somali coasts, a withdrawal the European powers were ready to exploit. That year France dispatched statesman-ambassador Léonce Lagarde, Count of Rouffeyroux, to oversee its interests as military governor of the region. Fresh from colonial service in Cochin China and Senegal, Governor Lagarde established himself on the south side of the Tadjoura Gulf and gradually expanded French rule into the rest of the region, sowing the seeds for a French colony. Though the Italians and British managed to occupy some of the abandoned Egyptian ports, Lagarde beat Royal Navy warships to Tadjoura by only a few hours, adding it to the newly established French protectorate by agreement with the local sultan. Weeks later, as the last Egyptian forces withdrew from the timeworn bastion of Sagallo, French troops from the cruiser Seignelay occupied the decaying fort over British protests. Russian adventurism in Africa was not limited to Ashinov’s scheme; Russian-supplied artillery helped the Ethiopians defeat Italian forces at the 1896 Battle of Adwa. (Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo) Nikolai Ashinov had begun his career as an adventurer in the caravan trade to Persia and Turkey before volunteering for service in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. Though he claimed to be an ataman, or Cossack leader, others denounced him as an imposter. During a visit to Constantinople, Ashinov encountered two Circassian Muslims returning to the northwestern Caucasus from Cairo who told him of a fertile land to the south of Egypt whose inhabitants practiced an ancient form of Christianity. Ashinov’s first trip to Africa came in 1885, when he landed at the Red Sea port of Massawa, which Italy had just occupied as Egypt’s rule in the region collapsed. The Cossack quarreled with the Italians (who were also eyeing Ethiopia) before heading inland. Though accounts differ on whether Ethiopian Emperor Yohannes IV met with Ashinov, the latter claimed to have obtained a vague permit to establish a Cossack settlement on the Gulf of Tadjoura. Ashinov did meet with the influential Ethiopian Gen. Ras Alula and made a reconnaissance of Tadjoura. Ashinov’s motivation was grounded in Slavophilism, a 19th century intellectual movement focused on preserving traditional Russian culture. It emphasized the primacy of the Russian Orthodox Church, rejected Westernism and sought continual expansion of the empire. The expansionists were particularly drawn to the Red Sea coast and Ethiopia, given the region’s strategic value and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which seemed to offer common ground between the two nations. The preferred base for such efforts, the Gulf of Tadjoura, had been claimed but was not yet fully consolidated by the French. Regardless, leading merchants and administrators (including Alexander III’s brother) began to line up behind Ashinov in hopes that were he able to establish a Cossack colony, the czar would step in and proclaim it an official Russian overseas territory. Despite misgivings about Ashinov’s character, Alexander appears to have toyed with the idea in the face of protests from the Foreign Ministry, which sought to cultivate France as an ally. In the end the czar neither supported nor prevented the African initiative, preferring to fall back on plausible denial and see how events unfolded. Ashinov failed to raise support during a visit to Paris in 1887, despite pitching his idea as a joint Russo-French venture. But the lack of overt opposition likely assured him he had the tacit support of both France and Russia. In 1888 he returned to Tadjoura, where he collected two Ethiopian priests selected by Yohannes to attend the 900th anniversary of the Russian Orthodox Church. Ashinov took the priests to celebrations in Kiev and then St. Petersburg. They met the czar at the insistence of Alexander’s closest adviser, who plainly laid out the case for the emperor: “In such enterprises the most convenient tools are cutthroats of the likes of Ashinov.” Depending on whose backing he sought, Ashinov represented his proposed Cossack mission to Tadjoura as either strategic, commercial or religious in intent. The Foreign Ministry, loath to place international relations in the hands of a rogue Cossack, remained vigorously opposed to Ashinov’s scheme. Others were more forthcoming. As Russian scholars worked up detailed analyses of the Tadjoura region, Minister of the Navy Adm.Ivan Alexeyevich Shestakov sent the Russian gunboat Mandjur ahead to Aden to support the Cossacks. To bolster Ashinov’s religious cover, Alexander’s adviser assigned Father Paissi, a Russian Orthodox archimandrite, to ostensibly lead the mission. Paissi was also an Orenburg Cossack with military experience in Central Asia. A party of Russian monks lent further credence to the venture. The Ashinov mission—comprising some 150 armed Terek Cossacks, Paissi’s monks and a number of women and children—left Odessa on Dec. 10, 1888, and landed at Tadjoura on Jan. 18, 1889, after taking a circuitous route on three different ships to avoid detection. As the last ship, the Austrian steamer Amphitrite, made its way down the Suez Canal, the Italian gunboat Agostino Barbarigo, suspicious of the foreign-flagged ship, gave chase. As Amphitrite neared its destination, it managed to slip the Cossacks past the patrolling French sloop Météore. Once ashore, Ashinov abandoned the pretense of a religious mission to Ethiopia and revealed his intention to establish a permanent Russian settlement. Informed of the landing party, Lagarde dispatched an officer from Météore to warn the Cossacks that any abuse of the local Afar population would be met with a harsh response. But when his men asked permission to raid the Afar herds for meat, Ashinov foolishly acquiesced. During the raid, his men raped an Afar girl. Ashinov paid off the local sultan, and as the French expressed no interest in removing the Cossacks, he resumed the search for an appropriate site to settle. By month’s end the mission had occupied the abandoned Egyptian fort at Sagallo. Renaming it New Moscow, the Russians erected a makeshift chapel and raised a specially designed flag—their nation’s white, blue and red tricolor overlaid with a yellow saltire cross. Ashinov, Paissi and the handful of Cossack families took refuge in the fort’s blockhouse, while the rest sheltered outdoors in tents. Though it was winter, the daily average high temperature of 80 degrees under a relentless tropical sun made the work of repairing the fort a taxing effort for the northern intruders. Discipline quickly dissolved, and Ashinov was forced to distribute cash to his followers to dissuade them from further raiding. The Cossack reputation for horsemanship aided Ashinov’s dismounted men little. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images) On a regional scope the settlement posed a direct threat to the colonial ambitions of Italy and Britain, who particularly feared the possibility of Russian arms winding up in the hands of indigenous tribes. Through diplomatic channels, they urged France to assert its claims in Tadjoura and bring a quick end to the Cossack occupation. However, France itself was not necessarily hostile to the Russian incursion. Indeed, it may have welcomed cooperative efforts in the region to challenge Britain’s dominance of the approaches to the Suez Canal, which itself had come under British control. The French and Cossacks engaged in a brief propaganda war—Ashinov trying to convince the Afar tribesmen the French were but a minor power, while Lagarde gave them the impression the Russians were only there with French permission. The governor sent emissaries to Ashinov to demand he turn over his group’s “excess weapons,” lower his flag and raise the French flag. Ashinov demurred, claiming he could do nothing without the permission of the local Afar sultan, Muhammad Leita, who was conveniently away fighting the Somalis. Never a diplomat, Ashinov failed to recognize he was being offered an opportunity to remain so long as he observed certain formalities. Meanwhile, his unruly Cossacks continued their depredations, and all the noble religious rhetoric surrounding the purpose of the expedition came crashing down. Not all the Cossacks were pleased with the chaotic conditions and lack of leadership. The Afar tribesmen had turned over several Russian deserters to the French in Obock, and these disaffected settlers shared a true picture of the disorder prevailing in New Moscow. When the French Foreign Office lodged a formal complaint, a furious Czar Alexander sent word through the Russian envoy in Paris, disavowing any involvement with Ashinov’s mission. The Cossacks were on their own. Satisfied Ashinov’s expedition had no official backing in Russia, the French government ordered Rear Adm. Jean-Baptiste Léon Olry, commander of the Levant Naval Division, to expel the intruders. With Olry at the helm, the cruisers Seignelay and Primauguet steamed for Obock, where they picked up Lagarde and were joined by the gunboats Météore and Pingouin. At that stage of the fiasco the czar was heeding the counsel of the Foreign Ministry and demanded “this beast Ashinov” be removed from Tadjoura as soon as possible. After Paris received notice the Russians had decided to send the gunboat Mandjur from Aden to deal with the contentious Cossack themselves, the French government sent orders to Olry’s squadron to stand down. Due to the poor communications of the day, the orders didn’t arrive in time. On February 17 the French flotilla arrived off Tadjoura and assembled in front of Sagallo. Olry promptly sent a courier ashore from Seignelay with a written demand that Ashinov lower the Russian flag, evacuate the fort and stack the Cossack weapons. He was granted a half-hour to comply—had the sight of the warships lining up in battle formation not already brought him to his senses. Some 20 Cossacks understood the implications and swam out to the French ships to surrender. Meanwhile, the deadline slipped by with no sign of compliance from the fort. Olry waited an additional half-hour before having gunners fire a warning shot well over the blockhouse. Another five minutes passed in dreadful silence. Panic gripped the Russians when the French naval guns opened a 15-minute barrage. As the shells exploded around them, Ashinov reportedly ordered the Cossacks to create a line of defense on the beach, a suicidal command they wisely ignored. Though the French fired 11 large projectiles, most of their fire came from the newly introduced 47 mm naval version of the Hotchkiss revolving cannon. Cossack skill in arms and horsemanship provided no defense against naval guns, and the Russian holdouts had little alternative but to run for the surrounding brush or cower within the fort’s ruined walls and pray. By the time the shelling was over, one man, two women and three children were dead, with 20 more wounded. The bombardment had pounded the fight out of the Russians, and Ashinov’s confidence had taken a shocking beating. He left it to Father Paissi to deal with the French, with Ashinov’s wife serving as interpreter. Paissi angrily protested the action but found little sympathy. French opinion was the Cossacks had brought it on themselves after passing up numerous opportunities to stand down. Over the coming days French troops collected the garrison’s weapons and oversaw the embarkation of the Russians to Obock. To prevent a reoccupation of Sagallo, Olry ordered the remaining fortifications destroyed with explosives. Paissi and his monks were allowed to proceed on a religious mission to the Ethiopian court. After transport to Suez, the surviving Cossacks were placed under arrest by Russian authorities and on March 4 put aboard the cruiser Zabiyaka for a humiliating return trip to Odessa. Ashinov was received like a bad odor back in Russia. Given the czar’s anger with him, the Cossack freebooter was perhaps lucky to have received only three years exile in the Volga River region; the Foreign Ministry had recommended five years in Siberia. In 1890 Ashinov fled, first to Paris and then London. Ordered home by Alexander III in 1891, he was resentenced to 10 years’ exile on his wife’s estates in Chernigov in northern Ukraine. Ashinov’s adversary Lagarde went on to become French ambassador to Ethiopia and in 1897 was granted the honorific Duke of Entoto by Emperor Menelik II. Even as Ashinov was embroiled in his failed effort to create an African New Moscow, the Russian minister of war was organizing his own Ethiopian mission using a trusted and far less erratic officer, Lt. Vasiliev Federovich Mashkov, an Anglophobe and strategic thinker. In October 1889 Mashkov arrived in Menelik’s court with the apparent support of Lagarde. French and Russian interests were converging over a mutual desire to wrest control from the British of the sea routes passing the Horn of Africa. Mashkov’s follow-up visit in 1891 led to the eventual formation of a Russian military advisory mission and the delivery of Russian mountain guns the Ethiopians used to defeat the Italian army at Adwa in 1896. France and Russia viewed Italy as an ally of the British in the contest for the Horn. Capt. Aleksandr Vasilevich Eliseev visited Tadjoura and the nearby Sultanate of Rahayta in 1895 with an eye to establishing relations. He, too, was accompanied by a Russian Orthodox archimandrite, as the idea of uniting the Russian and Ethiopian churches persisted through the end of the century. Eliseev died that same year of an illness he contracted abroad, but the Cossack connection continued as Eliseev’s protégé Capt. Nicolay Leontiev, a Kuban Cossack, saw that mission through—alarming the British with stated plans to contact the Mahdist regime in Omdurman. Following up a few years later was Col.Leonid Konstantinovich Artamonov, who served Menelik as a trusted military aide. Artamonov and two Cossack soldiers accompanied the military expedition of Ethiopian commander Tessema Nadew to the White Nile in 1898 in advance of both Horatio Kitchener’s British forces and the French mission led by Jean-Baptiste Marchand, but the diseased and exhausted Ethiopians were compelled to withdraw after raising the Ethiopian flag near Fashoda. That same year Russia established formal relations with Ethiopia and built an impressive embassy in Addis Ababa, guarded by 40 Cossacks. France meanwhile consolidated its territories and protectorates in the Tadjoura Gulf region in 1896 as French Somaliland. In the end the Ashinov misadventure had little effect on warming Franco-Russian relations. In the face of growing British might no mere Cossack could significantly influence geopolitical imperatives. Russia had suffered an embarrassment, but France had suffered little—if anything, the resolve it demonstrated in its dealings with both Ashinov and Moscow had elevated its prestige in the Horn. Despite Russian attempts to become a player in the Horn of Africa, its inability to establish a permanent presence on the coast was to have devastating consequences. In 1905, during the Russo-Japanese War, Japan’s destruction of Russia’s Pacific Squadron at Port Arthur, Manchuria, forced Moscow to send its outdated Baltic Fleet to tackle Adm. Heihachiro Togo’s British-built battleships. A year earlier London had denied the Russians use of the Suez Canal after they had fired on British fishing vessels in the North Sea, having mistaken them for Japanese torpedo boats. After an 18,000-mile journey around the Cape of Good Hope, the exhausted Russian fleet fell easy prey to the Japanese at the Battle of Tsushima. Ashinov and his backers had grasped the strategic importance of a Russian base in the Horn of Africa, but the Cossack adventurer’s erratic behavior had instead unwittingly contributed to imperial Russia’s military decline. Andrew McGregor is director of Toronto-based Aberfoyle International Security. For further reading he recommends The Russians in Ethiopia: An Essay in Futility, by Czeslaw Jesman, and Russia and Black Africa before World War II, by Edward Thomas Wilson.

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Hallowed Ground: Field of Blackbirds, Kosovo

Hallowed Ground: Field of Blackbirds, Kosovo The Balkans remain a ground of contention where the past is never dead. As the Cold War ended in the late 1980s, the Yugoslavia of the late Communist strongman Josip Broz Tito descended into a series of civil wars and then finally broke apart. Conflict started in the former province of Slovenia in 1991, spreading to Croatia later that year and Bosnia in 1992. NATO finally intervened in Bosnia and Croatia in 1994–95. Then in 1998 the province of Kosovo tried to break away from Serbia, the heartland of the former Yugoslavia. Most Serbs considered Kosovo the birthplace of their nation, although by the end of the 20th century Orthodox Christian ethnic Serbs were a minority in the province. Muslim ethnic Albanians comprised the majority of Kosovars. Serbia tried to hold on to Kosovo by force. In 1999 NATO again intervened, carrying out a bombing campaign against Serbia. Moving forces into Kosovo, the alliance also threatened a ground invasion of Serbia unless it stopped its attacks on Kosovo. Once the shooting stopped, NATO troops remained in Kosovo as peacekeepers, maintaining an edgy ceasefire between the hostile factions, each strongly supported from outside the province by Serbia and Albania, respectively. Among the most fiercely contested pieces of ground in Kosovo was a 14th century battlefield, marked by a central 100-foot stone monument, just a few miles northwest of Kosovo’s present-day capital, Pristina. To the Serbs the Field of Blackbirds (Kosovo Polje) was sacred ground—like Valley Forge to Americans or Verdun to the French. To the Albanians the battlefield and its monument were ugly reminders of Serbian repression and the sectarian strife that have dominated the Balkans for the last 700 years. Thus, NATO troops found themselves standing round-the-clock guard over the site of a 600- year-old battle of which most of them had never heard. But for many local residents the battle might have been fought yesterday. The Ottoman wars in Europe lasted 400 years. After defeating the Byzantine empire in what is now Turkey, the Ottomans pushed into Byzantine Europe in 1299. Bypassing the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, they took much of present-day Albania by 1385. Ottoman forces converted the local population to Islam by force, and it remains largely Muslim. Continuing their push up through the Balkans, the Ottomans found themselves checked temporarily by the Serbs at Ploc˘nik in 1386 and by the Bosnians at Bile´ca in 1388. Then they moved into Kosovo, one of the key crossroads of the Balkans. The Battle of the Field of Blackbirds was fought on St. Vitus’ Day, June 15, 1389. Some 12,000 to 30,000 troops of the Serbian Principality under Prince Lazar Hrebeljanovi´c faced an estimated 27,000 to 40,000 troops of the invading Ottoman army under the personal command of Murad I, the reigning sultan. Murad’s older son, Bayezid, commanded the right wing, and his younger son, Yakub, commanded the left. The battle started with Ottoman archers shooting at the heavy cavalry deployed across the Serbian front. The Serb cavalry then charged and rolled up the Ottoman left flank, but the center and right held. The Ottomans launched a ferocious counterattack in the center, driving back the Serbs. The Serb flanks held, however, until Kosovar warlord Vuk Brankovi´c withdrew from the fight with his 5,000 troops after concluding victory was hopeless. At that point the battle turned decisively against the Serbs. Prince Lazar and most of his troops were killed. Though a tactical victory, it was a Pyrrhic one for the Ottomans, as they too suffered devastating losses, which temporarily halted their conquest of Kosovo. Murad himself was killed. But while Serb military manpower was virtually wiped out, the Ottomans had many more troops in Turkey from which to draw. The check at the Field of Blackbirds only occasioned a strategic pause. Serbia finally fell to the Ottomans in 1459. Hungary reconquered part of Serbia in 1480 but lost it again in 1489. The Ottomans, meanwhile, finally defeated the Byzantine empire in 1453 by capturing Constantinople. They then continued their long advance into southeastern Europe until stopped at thegatesofViennain1529, and again for the last time in1683. On the 600th anniversary of the battle, Serbia’s then strongman Slobodan Miloševi´c invoked the Field of Blackbirds as one of the reasons his nation would never relinquish Kosovo. Serbia still refuses to acknowledge the 2008 self-declared independence of Kosovo. Meanwhile, a NATO-led international peacekeeping force continues to protect the battlefield and its monument, while the descendents of both sides of that battle inhabit the surrounding countryside in a very fragile state of peace, the centuries-old grievances lurking just below the surface. Originally published in the May 2013 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here.

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Hallowed Ground | Narvik and the Ofoten Line, Norway

Hallowed Ground | Narvik and the Ofoten Line, Norway Norway was a key target for Adolf Hitler. The westernmost and northernmost country on the Scandinavian Peninsula offered three important objectives at the outset of World War II: its naval bases (the acquisition of which would prevent Germany’s navy from being blockaded in harbor), its coastal fisheries, Narvik’s ice-free harbor and, by extension, the Ofoten Line railway, which linked the city to one of Europe’s richest deposits of iron ore (used to manufacture steel for military applications), just over the border in northern Sweden. On the morning of April 9, 1940, as Hitler prepared for the invasion of France, a fleet of 10 German destroyers under cover of a blizzard and thick fog nosed into the rugged Ofotfjord leading to Narvik. They soon captured three Norwegian patrol boats and, after a perfunctory parley, sank two outdated and outgunned coastal defense ships in port. The Norwegian regional commander surrendered the city to the Nazis without firing a shot. The Allies reacted quickly. In the early hours of April 10 the Royal Navy redirected five British escort destroyers (part of a force that had been laying mines along the Norwegian coast to thwart ore transports from Sweden) to Narvik and caught their opponents napping. The British destroyers opened the first naval Battle of Narvik at 4:30 a.m., sinking two German destroyers and 11 merchant ships and damaging a third warship before crossfire from an adjoining fjord claimed two British destroyers and forced the others to withdraw. Three days later the British returned to finish the job with a fleet of nine destroyers led by the battleship Warspite, the carrier Furious providing air support. A pitched sea battle commenced in the middle of the Ofotfjord. The Germans, low on fuel and ammunition, lost a U-boat and eight destroyers—three sunk by Warspite, five others scuttled to prevent their capture. But they were far from beaten. Some 2,600 German sailors made it safely to land. Overrunning the local Norwegian army base, the improvised force acquired supplies and arms, then occupied the high ground surrounding German-held Narvik. With the fjord under British naval control, the battle moved ashore. In the days that followed, ahead of a planned mid-May invasion, the Allies (comprising Norwegian, British, French and Polish troops) frustrated the plans of the outnumbered Germans. Norwegian soldiers familiar with the rugged terrain notched their country’s first victories against the aggressors, as did the exiled Poles (for whom such successes were particularly sweet). May 10 heralded the British handover of power from Neville Chamberlain to Winston Churchill. The new prime minister, determined to secure iron ore for the Allied cause, went ahead with the planned invasion. It was a drawn-out affair, reflecting the difficulty of coordination among Allied forces, but by May 28 they had recaptured Narvik. The German commander in Narvik, Maj. Gen. Eduard Dietl, was so certain his forces’ would meet defeat that he had arranged to have troop trains waiting just over the border in neutral Sweden. Unfortunately for the Allies, their first major victory on land proved hollow. The rapid advance of the Germans across Europe in the following weeks convinced the Allied command their troops were more urgently required in France. Thus the Allies withdrew from Narvik and the Ofotfjord. The Allied decision embittered the Norwegians. With Narvik’s southern front exposed, the Germans surged back, and by June 8 Dietl’s forces had retaken the port. Two days later Norway itself capitulated. Combined losses in the struggle for Narvik were a staggering 64 ships and nearly 9,000 lives. But the stakes were high, as the Swedish deposits supplied nearly a third of Germany’s wartime supply of iron ore—even though the heavily damaged port remained closed for many months. Owned and operated by the Norwegian State Railways [nsb.no/en], the Ofoten Line—among the world’s northernmost railways—still traverses the stark and beautiful countryside of Narvik’s hinterland, bearing tourists as well as iron ore. War memorials dot the snow-covered landscape around Narvik. Perhaps most striking of all sights, visible from the train along the inland route, is the rusted bow of the scuttled German destroyer Georg Thiele, which juts like a tombstone from the iron-gray inshore waters of the Rombaksfjord.

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Hallowed Ground: Port Chicago, California

Hallowed Ground: Port Chicago, California If you believe that spirits linger in locations where large numbers of men have perished suddenly—not all of them battlefields—then Port Chicago, Calif., qualifies as haunted ground. It’s not much today, an industrial community on Suisun Bay, where the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta meets San Francisco Bay, much of it gathered along either side of the fences that enclose Military Ocean Terminal Concord. Between the bare brown hills and the bleak waterfront, it never was much—though a local booster optimistically changed its name during the Great Depression from Bay Point to Port Chicago. It came to life—and death—during World War II, as it became an important port for the shipment of munitions to support the island-slogging combat across the Pacific. Handling explosives in bulk was a job that ranked high on no one’s list of contributions to the war effort. Accordingly, the task fell to servicemen the U.S. Navy had only grudgingly admitted to its ranks: black sailors. The men who worked around the clock to load the Liberty freighters—manhandling the incendiary clusters, depth charges, 500- and 1,000-pound bombs, fragmentation clusters, 40mm antiaircraft projectiles and many tons of smokeless powder into the dark holds with creaky winches and cargo nets—knew it was important to hurry the ammo and explosives to troops in the Pacific. They also knew theirs was dirty, tedious and mortally dangerous work. The munitions rolled into Port Chicago in railroad boxcars, mostly from a naval weapons depot in Nevada. Three tracks extended onto the 1,200-foot pier, and the men loaded munitions directly from the boxcars into the ships’ holds. Working in eight-hour shifts, “divisions” of some 100 men were assigned to load each of the freighters tied to the pier, at a rate of about 8 tons of munitions per hatch per hour. Their white officers reportedly placed bets on which crews could load the explosives fastest. The crews were ordinary enlisted men, hastily trained, and minor mishaps were not unusual. On the cool dark night of July 17, 1944, though, something major went wrong. Sixteen freight cars containing 429 tons of cargo sat on the pier, which was flanked by two new Liberty ships, E.A. Bryan and Quinault Victory (which just hours earlier had taken on fuel oil). Ninety-eight enlisted men of Port Chicago’s 3rd Division were loading the former, while 102 enlisted men of the 6th Division were rigging the latter for loading. Various others were present during the loading procedure, including the division officers, 29 armed guards, a Marine sentry and a train crew, along with 67 officers and crewmen aboard the two freighters. The men had already stowed some 4,600 tons of munitions aboard E.A. Bryan when, at 2218 hours, witnesses reported hearing “a metallic sound and rending timbers.” Seconds later a major explosion sent a pillar of fiery gases skyward. Following that were a few seconds of minor explosions and flames. Then the entire loading area went up in one massive blast: The pier, both ships, the locomotive and railcars, a nearby Coast Guard fireboat, all the cargo and 320 men all but vanished. Some 390 others, servicemen and civilians alike, were injured, mostly by flying glass shards and other debris as the blast wrecked nearly every building in Port Chicago. Smoke, gases and debris rose above 12,000 feet. The crew of an Army Air Forces plane cruising at 9,000 feet reported seeing pieces of glowing metal, some as large as a house, fly up past them. The blast was heard for 200 miles. The shock wave was felt in Nevada. Unexploded shells landed miles away. Of the 320 people killed instantly, 202 were black sailors. Only 51 of the known dead were identifiable; the rest were classified as missing. Weeks after the explosion 258 enlisted men at the nearby Mare Island Naval Shipyard refused orders to resume loading munitions aboard ships. Most were fined and, at war’s end, given bad-conduct discharges. But 50 sailors, deemed the ringleaders, were charged with mutiny, court-martialed, found guilty and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in prison. After the war the Navy granted the men clemency and released them. The National Park Service maintains a tidy half-acre memorial [www.nps.gov/poch] on the site of the Port Chicago disaster, with explanatory plaques and some mocked-up 500-pound bombs. But the memorial lies inside the perimeter of Military Ocean Terminal Concord, an active base, and is accessible only through advance reservation. The town of Port Chicago is a phantom; what remained and was rebuilt after the explosion the Navy purchased and leveled in 1968. The 1940s Port Chicago highway, a narrow concrete-slab two-laner, still runs along the water east and west of the site, but it stops abruptly at the terminal’s perimeter fences. Just offshore, breaking the surface of Suisun Bay, are the blackened stubs of pier pilings—perches for gulls and the only tangible remains from that suddenly fatal summer night. Originally published in the November 2013 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here.

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Hallowed Ground | Poznan, Poland

Hallowed Ground | Poznan, Poland Poznan was not the only Nazi-occupied city to hold out behind Soviet lines in the closing days of World War II, but it was arguably the most important, its fall paving the way for the final Russian drive into the very heart of Germany. The 1939 German invasion of Poland didn’t mark the first time the city had been under Teutonic rule. Prussia took Poznan in 1793, expanded the city and ringed it with a network of fortifications. The centerpiece was Fort Winiary, a massive redbrick and concrete garrison on high ground north of town, which locals dubbed the Citadel. German unification in 1871 brought Poznan under Kaiser Wilhelm I’s thumb, until Poland regained its independence after World War I. When the Germans returned in 1939, Nazi administrators moved to Germanize the city. First, they herded most of Poznan’s intelligentsia into Fort VII, an old Prussian installation near the airport, where torture and murder were the rule. Then, to make room for German settlers, they deported thousands of ordinary Poles and exterminated the Jewish population. The Imperial Castle, once the Kaiser’s residence, became the Nazi administrative center. The Germans didn’t stay long, though. On Jan. 12, 1945, the Soviets launched the Vistula-Oder Offensive, a major push across western Poland. A key rail and road junction en route to Berlin, Poznan was a crucial Soviet objective—and the Nazis knew it. Declaring it a “fortress city,” Adolf Hitler ordered it to be held at all costs. As the Red Army approached, some 60,000 German troops took up positions around the city. Soviet armored spearheads bypassed Poznan on January 24, but the following day General Vasily Chuikov and his Eighth Guards Army—100,000 hardened veterans of Stalingrad—arrived. As Chuikov encircled Poznan, Hitler replaced garrison commander Maj. Gen. Ernst Mattern with Maj. Gen. Ernst Gonell, a fervent Nazi who believed the Führer would break through and rescue him. For two weeks the snowy streets of Poznan witnessed bitter street fighting. German troops fought stoutly, hindering the crucial flow of supplies westward and tying up six Soviet divisions and hundreds of Polish fighters. But Chuikov methodically reduced the defenses, and by February 12 he had the Germans confined to the Citadel. Chuikov besieged the fortress on February 18, his troops attempting to scale its ramparts using assault ladders. For several days German crossfire kept the Red Army at bay, but the Soviets relentlessly hammered away with aircraft, tanks and flamethrowers. In the early morning hours of February 22 Soviet tanks finally penetrated the Citadel walls. A despairing Gonell shot himself, and command reverted to Mattern, who capitulated. The Germans were beaten, but Poznan lay largely in ruins, and tens of thousands of people lay dead. Today Poznan is a vibrant business and educational center, but it retains traces of its wartime past. The Imperial Castle houses the Zamek Culture Center [ckzamek.pl]. Outside stands a monument to a trio of University of Poznan mathematicians whose work decrypting Germany’s Enigma cipher machine paved the way for Anglo-American codebreaking operations. Housed in an adjacent structure resembling an Enigma machine is the exhibition “The Enigma Codebreakers” [enigmacentrum.pl], highlighting that Polish contribution to the Allied victory. The 1945 battle destroyed the bulk of the Citadel, and most of what remained was torn down in the 1960s to create Citadel Park, with gardens and groves of trees, walking paths and playgrounds. Fragments of bastions and redoubts remain. The Soviet-built Monument to the Heroes of the Poznan Citadel, a 75-foot obelisk, dominates the south end of the park, nearly 6,000 Soviet dead lying in an adjacent cemetery. Polish dead rest nearby, while a British cemetery holds fallen airmen and prisoners of war who died in captivity. Dotting the green space are several war memorials, including one honoring Chuikov. The city’s Wielkopolska Independence Museum [wmn.poznan.pl] features five museums in one. Neither the Poznan Army Museum (honoring a local military unit) nor the Armaments Museum is devoted specifically to the 1945 battle, but both are housed in restored period buildings. Also part of the network is the Wielkopolska Martyrs Museum, on the grounds of the Fort VII concentration camp, lest Poles forget.

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Hard Luck Island: The Battle of Wake

Hard Luck Island: The Battle of Wake An experienced aviator, Putnam led his Marines to Wake Island, where his leadership and their courage would be tested under fire. (U.S. Marine Corps via Joshua Donohue) As Major Paul A. Putnam landed his F4F-3 Wildcat fighter on Wake Island, a small horseshoe-shaped atoll 2,000 miles west of Pearl Harbor, he was surprised to see dozens of cheering Marines and civilians lining the runway. The commander of Marine fighter squadron VMF-211, Putnam had arrived with 11 other Wildcats—rugged aircraft armed with four .50-caliber machine guns and capable of carrying a pair of 100-pound bombs. They were Wake Island’s first fighters, and personnel on the island were overjoyed to finally have some aerial protection. “Nothing much was lacking but the strip of red carpet,” recalled Major Walter L. J. Bayler, a Marine communications officer. If the lively reception instilled any optimism in Putnam’s mind, it quickly faded when he climbed out of the cockpit and looked around. His new home was “far less advanced in construction than had been anticipated,” he wrote—a relatively kind description for what lay before him. As of December 4, 1941, the day VMF-211 arrived, Wake Island was a work in progress. It lacked radar to warn of approaching planes, relying instead on a lookout with binoculars atop a 50-foot-high water tower. The island’s crushed-coral airstrip was too narrow to allow more than one plane at a time to take off—a major problem if Putnam’s squadron had to get aloft in a hurry. There were no bunkers to camouflage and protect planes on the ground, and most of the aviation fuel was stored above ground, vulnerable to attack. It would take lots of hard work, plenty of time, and a bit of luck to whip the island’s air defenses into shape. Putnam was a good man for the job. Born in Michigan in 1903, he had joined the Marine Corps in 1923 after dropping out of Iowa State University. He was commissioned in 1926 and became a fighter pilot in 1928. At five foot nine, he fit comfortably in the cramped cockpit of a fighter plane, flying combat missions in Nicaragua in 1931-32. Longtime colleagues described the married father of three as “able, level-headed, cooperative.” Patient demeanor or no, time was not on Putnam’s side. A week earlier, Washington had warned that “an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days”; Putnam knew Wake was sure to be high on Japan’s target list. Closer to the Japanese-held Marshall Islands than to the American bases on Guam and Midway, Wake Island was barely a speck in the western Pacific. But from its shores, American long-range patrol planes could monitor enemy bases, while fighters and bombers would threaten Japanese advances in the region. In 1941 Wake Island was a work in progress; its location made it a good base for long-range aircraft but left it vulnerable to attacks.  (Map by Brian Walker with 1941 U.S. Navy photo) In 1940 Congress accordingly appropriated $7.5 million to convert Wake Island into a modern naval air station. By late 1941, more than 1,100 civilian construction workers were on the island, laying roads, dredging the lagoon and channel, erecting barracks and other buildings—but their work was far from being finished. Navy Commander Winfield S. Cunningham, in charge of all naval activity on the island, eagerly awaited the completion of facilities for ships and aircraft. Otherwise, he only had a force of 378 Marines—less than half a normal defense battalion, led by Marine Major James P. S. Devereux—to cover and protect 20 miles of shoreline. So on November 27, 1941, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, ordered Major Putnam to pick his 11 best pilots and 12 of his unit’s new Wildcats for an urgent mission. Putnam had to keep their destination secret, so he told his men it was a routine training exercise. Taking only their razors, toothbrushes, and the clothes on their backs, the 11 pilots left Hawaii and flew to the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, already at sea, for the trip. Since Kimmel’s orders were vague, Putnam sought clarification from Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, head of the Enterprise and the task force. “I’m completely in the dark,” Putnam said. “I’m on my way to Wake. What in hell am I supposed to do when I get there?” “Do what seems appropriate” was Halsey’s zen-like answer. The Enterprise’s sailors treated the Marine fliers like gold, and navy mechanics made sure the Wildcats were in tip-top shape. “I feel a bit like the fatted calf being groomed for whatever it is that happens to fatted calves,” Putnam wrote to a friend, “but it surely is nice while it lasts.” Navy fliers aboard ship even gave Marine pilot Lieutenant John F. Kinney a bottle of scotch as a parting gift, saying he would need it more than they would. For more great stories on World War II, subscribe here. On December 4, 1941, VMF-211 took off from Enterprise and landed on Wake to the cheering reception. Once settled in, Putnam worried about what he could offer beyond the Wildcats. None of his pilots had more than 20 hours of flying time in the new fighters. His ground crew of about 40 Marines had arrived two weeks earlier, but unlike the navy mechanics aboard Enterprise, none had worked on a Wildcat. They had no spare parts—not a tire, spark plug, nor even a manual. Out of necessity, Putnam and his men became masters of improvisation. Although the Wildcat could carry ordnance, the bombs on Wake were configured for Army Air Forces aircraft and did not fit the navy fighter. Putnam’s men therefore rigged their planes with a “lash-up” system; it was not the safest method, but it seemed to work. There was also a short supply of oxygen tanks that were vital for high-altitude flying. So they engineered a dangerous but effective way to transfer pressurized oxygen from the contractors’ welding tanks to smaller tanks carried in the aircraft. Putnam named Lieutenant Kinney his engineering officer, promising him “a medal as big as a pie” if he kept the planes flying. Privately, Putnam doubted that Wake could ever be a viable air base. “It was not worth its weight in sand,” he said. “It was too doggone small; it wasn’t big enough to operate off of.” Putnam’s most pressing need was bunkers to shelter his planes. Told the job would take weeks, he exploded: “I want things now!” He stressed “speed, rather than neatly finished work,” so he was shocked that afternoon to spot a civil engineer and surveyors deliberately plotting sites with peacetime precision. “It required an hour of frantic rushing about and some very strong language,” Putnam said, to replace the young civil engineer with contractors and bulldozers. They promised to finish the bunkers by  2 p.m. on December 8. Major Bayler, who had known Putnam for years, was stunned by the commander’s reaction. “I’ve never in my life seen a man change so completely,” Bayler said. “He acquired a new personality overnight.” The reserved, soft-spoken peacetime officer gave way to an “iron-jawed commander of a hard-fighting outfit, forceful, energetic, and resourceful” and “beautifully articulate in any situation that called for strong language,” Bayler said. AT 6:50 A.M. ON DECEMBER 8—December 7 in Hawaii—their time and luck ran out. Wake Island’s denizens heard the frantic radio message that Pearl Harbor was under attack. Putnam ordered four Wildcats to be in the air at all times, with the other eight fighters ready to take off at a moment’s notice. With the bunkers still unfinished, the Wildcats, as usual, sat in the open about 100 yards apart. At 11:58 a.m., Putnam, who had flown the dawn patrol, stepped out of his command tent, looked up, and felt his blood run cold. Bombers were approaching from the south—and they were not American. Putnam yelled a warning and sprinted toward the nearest foxhole. In high school, he had run the 100-yard dash in 10.2 seconds—but he swore he broke 10.0 that day. He watched as 18 G4M Betty bombers came in at 2,000 feet and in only 10 minutes turned the airstrip into “a slab of hell” with bombs and gunfire. Frustratingly, VMF-211’s four-Wildcat patrol was north of the island at 12,000 feet; the pilots were not even aware of the low-level Japanese attack to the south. Grazed by a bullet and dazed by blast concussion, Putnam moved around—looking like “a man walking aimlessly in his sleep,” Major Bayler recalled—to assess the damage as soon as the attack was over. Seven of the eight Wildcats on the ground were blazing wrecks, reduced to only spare parts; the eighth was badly damaged. Of his 55 pilots and ground personnel, 23 were dead and 11 wounded. The island’s above-ground fuel tanks were a raging inferno. The airstrip itself, however, was untouched: the confident Japanese had spared it for their own use. Major Devereux cursed the lack of radar, which had been promised to him weeks earlier. With it, he felt that Putnam might have gotten all 12 of his fighters in the air to meet the attack. Putnam himself, however, did not make any excuses, saying that his squadron had been “unprepared in every particular.” Henry T. Elrod shot down two aircraft, sank a destroyer, and kept ferociously fighting on foot. He became the first Marine airman to be awarded the Medal of Honor. (U.S. Marine Corps) Commanders on Wake knew the enemy would attack again, but without radar, they could only guess when the next raids would occur. Putnam calculated that the Japanese planes taking off from the Marshall Islands at dawn would arrive over Wake at around 11 a.m., so for the next two days, VMF-211’s four fighters were already aloft and waiting. On December 9, 27 Mitsubishi G3M Nell bombers attacked; Putnam’s men shot down one of them. The next day, Captain Henry T. Elrod shot down two, earning the nickname “Hammering Hank”—but the squadron’s best was yet to come. Shortly after midnight on December 11, Marine lookouts spotted Japanese ships on the horizon: a flotilla of cruisers, destroyers, and transports set to land troops. Though battered, Wake still had formidable firepower: three batteries of five-inch artillery guns, salvaged from old battleships. Devereux held their fire until the Japanese ships came well within range, while Putnam’s Wildcats circled above at 15,000 feet, ready to attack. At 6:15 a.m., when the ships were only 4,500 yards away, the Marines opened fire. Shells tore into the light cruiser Yubari, sank a destroyer, and damaged two others. Realizing the Japanese warships had no air cover, Putnam radioed his wingmen: “Let’s go down and join the party,” and they streaked through thick antiaircraft fire. Putnam dropped two bombs, narrowly missing a destroyer, and fired his four machine guns at another, seeing a “rainbow from shattered glass” as his .50-caliber bullets raked its bridge. One of Captain Elrod’s bombs hit the destroyer Kisaragi’s stern, where its depth charges were stored; the resulting series of explosions sank the ship. The Marine fliers landed several times to refuel and rearm before going back for more. In all, they dropped 20 bombs and fired 20,000 bullets. The Wildcats and the island’s shore batteries sank or damaged nearly every Japanese ship in the flotilla. The invasion armada fled—but the squadron had paid a heavy price. One of the four remaining Wildcats barely made it back, its engine a total loss, and Elrod’s fighter crashed on the beach. As Putnam ran to pull what was left of his buddy from the wreckage, an uninjured Elrod hopped out. “Honest,” he said with tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry as hell about the plane.” Marine fighter squadron VMF-211 was down to only two airworthy Wildcats. TO KEEP THE VMF-211 IN ACTION against future Japanese attacks, Putnam needed a sheltered hangar for repair work, an underground bunker for radio equipment, and help with aircraft maintenance. He sought out the civilian workers on the island for assistance; some volunteered, but most hid. Putnam fumed. He asked Cunningham, the island commander, for permission to use “armed force in rounding up labor and seeing to it that they remained on the job.” Cunningham refused, saying with some hyperbole that he didn’t believe their objectives “warranted him authorizing the execution of any civilian whose work might not measure up” to Putnam’s requirements. Without enough serviceable planes, Putnam thought of other ways to hinder the enemy. Tiny Wake Island was a navigational nightmare to locate from the air, but the Japanese did not seem to have trouble finding it. Putnam and Major Bayler deduced the Japanese had a submarine nearby, broadcasting a homing signal. Putnam told his pilots to watch out for it. During the evening patrol on December 12, Lieutenant David D. Kliewer spotted a submarine. He dove to attack, dropping his bombs and strafing the sub. Putnam took off in the other Wildcat to finish the job, but found only an oil slick in the water where the vessel had been. Three days later, Putnam spotted another sub, but confusion reigned. Noting strange markings on the conning tower, he could not positively identify the vessel as Japanese. Cunningham, fearing the sub might be American or Dutch, ordered the Wildcat pilot to hold off. Meanwhile, Japanese planes continued to attack nearly every day, reaching Wake Island around noon—which Putnam called a “stupid” routine. The predictability enabled VMF-211’s two flyable Wildcats to be aloft and intercept them. Putnam was proud of his men’s resilience in fighting despite the tough odds. “It wasn’t any fun,” he said, “but it was satisfying to find out just how good my boys were.” But then the Japanese changed the game. Wake’s artillery batteries fought day and night to keep at bay a flotilla of enemy cruisers, destroyers, and transports. (U.S. Marine Corps) ON DECEMBER 21, 47 enemy planes reached Wake Island three hours earlier than usual, around 9:00 a.m. VMF-211 had only one operable Wildcat that day, gassed, armed, and sitting on the runway—a fat target. Putnam was two miles away, conferring with another pilot before the midday patrol. He grabbed the nearest truck and made a mad dash to the airstrip. Japanese A6M Zero fighters made low passes, shooting at Putnam’s racing truck. He zigzagged wildly to avoid the strafing aircraft, twice leaping from the truck to take cover in a ditch. After reaching the airfield unscathed, Putnam jumped into the Wildcat’s cockpit, but at first its balky engine wouldn’t start. It finally fired up—as the attackers departed. Putnam took off and gave chase for 40 miles before giving up. His actions that day earned him the Navy Cross. As the Japanese continued their raids, Putnam flew as many missions as he could. However, he felt increasingly frustrated by command duties that kept him on the ground, as well as the dearth of airworthy fighters. “He might be outwardly composed,” Bayler said, “but inside he was biting his nails, tearing his hair, and throwing his shoes at the cat.” By December 22, Lieutenant Kinney and his mechanics patched up another Wildcat, giving the squadron two fighters for what proved to be its last hurrah. At 10 a.m., Captain Herbert C. Freuler and Lieutenant Carl R. Davidson took off to meet the regular midday raid, and 33 B5N Kate bombers along with six Zero fighters arrived on schedule. Freuler and Davidson dove into the Japanese formation despite the desperate odds. Davidson was shot down and killed, but Freuler managed to down two Japanese planes before enemy fire irreparably damaged his Wildcat. He barely made it back to Wake and crash-landed on the beach. Unknown to him, however, Freuler had exacted some revenge—a Kate bomber he shot down in flames carried Noboru Kanai, the bombardier credited with dropping the fatal bomb on the USS Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor. With VMF-211’s last two Wildcats out of action, Putnam and his two dozen pilots and ground crew reported to Major Devereux as infantrymen—and just in time. Despite a fierce defense, the island could not hold off the Japanese, and all of VMF-211’s Wildcats were eventually put out of action. (U.S. Marine Corps) Shortly after midnight on December 23, more than 1,000 Japanese troops landed at several points across the island, and the final fight for Wake Island was on. It was less an organized battle than a fierce melee between small groups of men. At 3 a.m., Devereux deployed Putnam’s small force to protect a three-inch artillery gun near the beach that was raising hell with the incoming Japanese landing barges. Upon hearing Devereux’s orders, John “Pete” Sorenson, a muscular 42-year-old pile driver, led a group of about a dozen civilians to Putnam. “We’re going with you,” Sorenson told him. A civilian labor force was one thing—but Putnam felt the Japanese were likely to execute any civilians fighting alongside uniformed American troops. “You can’t go with us,” he told the volunteers. “Do you think you’re really big enough to make us stay behind?” Sorenson asked. “I’m proud of you,” Putnam replied. “I’d be glad to have you as Marines, but take off.” As he led his men forward, the unarmed civilians nevertheless followed along in what Putnam called “humorous defiance” of his orders, appointing themselves ammunition carriers for the Marines. At dawn, not long after Putnam’s makeshift group set up a position near the artillery gun, Japanese soldiers approached them. Armed with only a .45-caliber pistol, Putnam shot two of them at such close range that one’s helmet clanged against his own. More enemy soldiers attacked. Sorenson rose to meet them, throwing rocks until he was cut down. Elrod managed to momentarily stop the enemy charge, blasting away with his Thompson submachine gun while screaming, “kill the sons of bitches!” Moments later, as he prepared to throw a grenade, he was shot several times and killed. Putnam’s men fell back to the artillery gun, firing as they went. “This is as far as we go!” he told them. And it was. The Japanese continued their ferocious attacks. As Putnam took cover under the artillery piece’s steel platform, a bullet struck him, passing through his cheek and neck. In the ear-splitting chaos, he did not realize he was hit. He suddenly felt drowsy and did not know why. Then a Marine asked if “it hurt much,” and Putnam discovered his wound. The chin strap of his old M1917 helmet, cinched tight under his jaw, had staunched the blood flow and prevented him from going into shock. By 7:30 a.m., the island’s commanders, Cunningham and Devereux, knew their battle was hopeless and raised the white flag. A Japanese officer led Devereux around the island, ordering each pocket of resistance to surrender. Putnam’s men were still holding out when Devereux reached them three hours later. Putnam “looked like hell itself,” Devereux recalled, his face “a red smear.” “Jimmy, I’m sorry,” was all Putnam could mutter, but he was relieved that his “boys didn’t have to shoot anymore.” Nearby lay Elrod’s body, an unprimed grenade still clutched in his fist. For his repeated valor, he posthumously received the Medal of Honor. Putnam’s small band had fought as fiercely on the ground as they had in the air, holding off 200 Japanese soldiers until the surrender. The cost, however, was great. Of the 26 Marines defending the position, 16 were dead and nine were wounded. Of the 14 civilians with them, eight lay dead. While Putnam had complained earlier of civilians shirking their responsibilities on the island, those who fought alongside his Marines earned his undying gratitude. “No mere words can ever express what is owed,” he said. After capturing Wake Island, Japanese troops tell air combat stories following a month of successive victories. (U.S. Marine Corps) Putnam and VMF-211 had more than earned their pay. “The performance of these pilots is deserving of all praise,” Cunningham said. “They have attacked air and surface targets alike with equal abandon.” Always facing overwhelming odds with no more than four patched-up and sometimes barely-airworthy fighters, the squadron nevertheless claimed eight Japanese bombers, three fighters, one seaplane, a destroyer, and a submarine. Cunningham singled out Putnam for additional praise, writing that his conduct “was of the highest order of courage and resolution.” Putnam’s men agreed. His “cool judgment, his courage, and his consideration for everyone,” Kliewer asserted, “forged an aviation unit that fought behind him to the end.” Along with the rest of the Wake Island Marines, Putnam spent the remainder of the war in POW camps in China and Japan. Like many underfed and malnourished POWs, he dreamt of food. While in the camps, he handwrote a 75-page cookbook of his favorite recipes, called Glimpses of Heaven as Seen from Zentsuji (Prison Camp). He took great pride in the good morale of his Marines. “They were sorry to be there but they weren’t ashamed of being there. I wasn’t, either,” he said. He was liberated in September 1945 and stayed in the Marine Corps, retiring as a brigadier general in 1956. He died in 1982 at age 78. ✯ A Most Unlucky Man

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Harlem Hellfighter Honored in Graphic Novel

Harlem Hellfighter Honored in Graphic Novel Once-forgotten African American war hero Army Sgt. Henry Johnson is the latest soldier to be featured in a graphic novel series honoring Medal of Honor recipients. Scripted by Chuck Dixon, who’s written for titles like the “Punisher” and “Batman,” “Medal of Honor: Henry Johnson” tells the story of how Johnson earned both the Medal of Honor and French Croix de Guerre during World War I. Part of AUSA's newest edition of "Medal of Honor." (AUSA) Johnson did not escape unharmed, however. He sustained 21 injuries in total, including three gunshot wounds, the French official journal reported. Unable to resume work as a railway porter upon his discharge, Johnson’s health declined until he died destitute at the age of 36. Historians later located his grave at Arlington and petitioned for Johnson to be awarded for his service. President Bill Clinton posthumously awarded Johnson the Purple Heart in 1996, and President Barack Obama gave him the Medal of Honor in 2015. The novel, part of a series honoring Medal of Honor recipients, can be read for free as part of the Association of the U.S. Army’s Book Program. “It has been especially exciting to highlight figures like Henry Johnson, who were famous in their own day but need an introduction to a new generation of readers,” Joseph Craig, director of the AUSA Book Program, said in a statement to Just the News. The collaborative team included script-writing by Chuck Dixon (Marvel’s “Punisher”), drawings by PJ Holden (”Judge Dredd,” “World of Tanks”), color work by Peter Pantazis (“Justice League,” “Superman,” “Wolverine”) and lettering by Troy Peteri (“Spiderman,” “Iron Man,” “X-Men”). Upcoming editions of the series include spotlights on Civil War surgeon Dr. Mary Walker and Holocaust survivor and Korean War veteran Cpl. Tibor Rubin. Readers can view the full graphic story here. Originally featured on Military Times, our sister publication.

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Hate Turns to Love

Hate Turns to Love How 158 remarkable letters between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams slowly dissolved the hard grudges between two great presidents. When John Adams was ousted from the presidency in the 1800 election by Thomas Jefferson, he expressed no public bitterness about his defeat: “I am not about to write lamentations or jeremiads over my fate nor panegyrics upon my life and conduct,” Adams told a friend. “You may think me disappointed. I am not. All my life I expected it.” He knew that he was supposed to affect the posture of a world-weary pilgrim who had at last reached the Promised Land that was his Quincy, Mass., farm, where blessedly bucolic rhythms would replace the frenzied and often frantic pace of political life. But he preferred to sound a more irreverent note. He announced that his Quincy estate, initially named Peacefield but now referred to more simply as the Old House, needed a grander title in order to do justice to his new status as an elder statesman. Jefferson had his Monticello, so he must have his “Montezillo,” which he said meant “little mountain,” apparently not realizing that Monticello meant the same thing. Nonetheless, there were obviously still demons darting about Adams’ bruised psyche, lingering resentments that resisted his best efforts to make them the butt of self-deprecating jokes. His wife, Abigail, spied him working in the fields alongside the hired help one summer day, swinging his scythe in rhythmic strokes, looking like the epitome of the retired statesman in his agrarian paradise. She also reported that he appeared to be talking or mumbling to himself with each swing, though she could not make out the words. If his correspondence at that time is any indication, he was probably cursing Jefferson. Adams had begun his career as a young lawyer aiming for fame more than fortune. And then history had presented him with the chance to play a major role in leading a revolution and establishing a new nation, a truly remarkable opportunity that came around only once every few centuries. But now, with his work done, he felt that others were being accorded prominent places in the American pantheon while he was dismissed as an erratic, slightly deranged curmudgeon who did not fit comfortably into the proper heroic mold. “How is it that I, poor, ignorant I, must stand before Posterity as differing from all the other great Men of the Age?” he asked. In the early years of his retirement Adams spent a portion of most days seated at the parlor table amid the buzz of grandchildren, and most nights by the fire alongside Abigail, who was often reading a book while he did battle with his emotions. He released the pent up energies of his tortured soul first in a somewhat pathetic attempt at an autobiography, then in a caustic exchange with his onetime friend Mercy Otis Warren over her less than laudatory depiction of him in her three-volume History of the American Revolution, then in a nearly interminable series of weekly essays for the Boston Patriot. These separate venues were really parts of a single project, namely, to claim his proper place in American history, or, if that proved problematic, to smash other statues currently being enshrined in the American pantheon—especially Thomas Jefferson. He was, to put it charitably, slightly out of control. Eventually the cloud of despair hanging over Adams began to lift and his letters reflected an emerging recognition of his own foibles and follies and a capacity to laugh at his own eccentricities. The clinching evidence came in 1812, when the patriot and physician Benjamin Rush managed to manipulate him into a correspondence with Jefferson. “I consider you and him,” Rush told Adams, “as the North and South Poles of the American Revolution. Some talked, some wrote, and some fought to promote and establish it, but you and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all.” Moreover, Rush reported that he had a dream in which the two great patriarchs resolved their differences, restored their famous friendship and then “sunk into the grave nearly at the same time.” As it turned out Rush’s dream proved eerily prophetic. Over the course of 14 years, from 1812 to 1826, Adams and Jefferson exchanged 158 letters, with the flow from Quincy more than double the output from Monticello. Since Adams had made no secret of his animus against Jefferson during the past decade, several friends expressed surprise that he would agree to a reconciliation. But Adams claimed that he could not remember what disagreements he had with Jefferson, except that they had once argued about the proper length of a man’s hair: “It was only as if one sailor had met a brother sailor after twenty-five years absence,” he joked, “and had accosted him, ‘how fare you, Jack?’” In Adams’ correspondence with Jefferson, especially at the beginning, each man self-consciously assumed the role of philosopher-king: “But wither is senile garrulity leading me?” Jefferson asked rhetorically. “Into politics, of which I have taken final leave. I think little of them and say less. I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself much happier.” Adams responded in the same elegiac manner: “I have read Thucydides and Tacitus, so often, and at such distant periods of my life,” he observed, “that elegant, profound and enchanting is their style, I am weary of them.” Fully aware that their letters would eventually become part of the historical record, both men were posing for posterity. Posing was a natural act for Jefferson, who regarded argument as a dissonant noise that created static instead of his preferred harmonies. For Adams, on the other hand, argument was the ideal conversation. “You and I ought not to die,” he proposed to Jefferson, “before We have explained ourselves to each other.” A graphic depiction of the correspondence, then, would have Jefferson standing erectly in a stately pose with arms folded across his chest while Adams paced back and forth, periodically pausing to pull on Jefferson’s lapels or poke a finger into his chest. It was the closest thing that history allowed for the two sides of the American Revolution to engage in a dialogue. After a year of polite foreplay, Adams began to raise more controversial issues. He chided Jefferson for failing to prepare the nation for the War of 1812, most especially in dismantling the American navy, which had always been Adams’ hobbyhorse. Jefferson never responded directly but instead parried the thrust by noting recent American victories against the British fleet on the Great Lakes, graciously observing that “these must be more gratifying to you than most men, as having been an early and constant advocate of wooden walls.” Jefferson was even more conciliatory when it came to their differences over the French Revolution: “Your prophecies…proved truer than mine,” he acknowledged, “and yet fell short of the fact, for instead of a million, the destruction of 8 or 10 millions of human beings has probably been the effect of the convulsions. I did not, in 89 believe they would have lasted so long, nor have cost so much blood.” What’s more, Adams had predicted that Great Britain would win the competition for European supremacy with France, and the recent defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo had proved him right. This was a huge concession. For Jefferson was not only admitting that his optimistic estimate of events in revolutionary France had proved misguided. He was also acknowledging that on the dominant foreign policy issue of Adams’ presidency, the insistence on neutrality toward France, which Jefferson and the Republicans had used as a political club to beat him out of office, history had vindicated Adams’ policy. Adams recognized the implications of Jefferson’s admission immediately: “I know not what to say of your Letter,” he wrote, “but that is one of the most consolatory I have ever received.” On two other seminal disagreements, however, Jefferson stood his ground, and the exchange exposed the underlying reasons for the political chasm that had opened  between them in the 1790s. Because the correspondence was more like a conversation that bounced off one topic after another without a moderator to reel in extraneous diversions, core differences between the two patriarchs remained somewhat blurry and elliptical. However, with the advantage of hindsight (the historian’s only advantage), two elemental differences emerged more clearly than ever before. First, in an exchange in the summer of 1813 prompted by Jefferson’s insistence that the distinction between “the few and the many” was an eternal political division, it became clear that the two Founders disagreed about what had, in fact, been founded. Adams believed that the creation of a nation-state at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 was the culmination and political fulfillment of “the spirit of ’76.” Jefferson believed that it was a betrayal of that spirit and had created a central government with powers akin to the despotic Parliament and king that he and Adams together had so eloquently and effectively opposed. There were, in effect, two founding moments, one in 1776 and the other in 1787. Adams regarded both as essential; Jefferson regarded only the first as legitimate. Second, in a nearly simultaneous exchange over the role of “the aristoi” (aristocracies or elites) throughout history, Jefferson argued that the American Revolution had “laid the axe to the root of the Pseudo-aristocracy…founded on wealth and birth without either virtue or talents.” In that sense, the American Revolution represented a clean break with the vestiges of European feudalism and had thereby cleared the ground for a new kind of egalitarian society in the United States based on merit and equality of opportunity. Adams disagreed, arguing that the problem was not European feudalism but human nature itself, which had not undergone any magical transformation in crossing the Atlantic. Jefferson’s vision of a classless American society was, therefore, a romantic pipe dream. “After all,” Adams observed, “as long as property exists, it will accumulate in Individuals and Families and…the Snow ball will grow as it rolls.” Pretending that the new American republic would be immune to the social inequalities of Europe was Jefferson’s seductive version of the grand illusion. And at the political level, elites would always exist here as well as in Europe, and exercise disproportionate influence unless managed by government. Again, with hindsight as the guide, one could argue that Adams’ position on the first disagreement was vindicated by the Civil War; his position on the second, by the New Deal. But in the crucible of the moment, such prescience was unavailable, and Jefferson’s more optimistic forecast enjoyed a decided rhetorical advantage. The more historically correct conclusion would be that the Adams-Jefferson correspondence had exposed the two conflicting versions of America’s original intentions, each passionately embraced by Founders with unmatched revolutionary credentials. Although Adams’ recovered friendship with Jefferson eventually became legendary for its symbolic significance, his all-time dearest friend—no one else came close— was Abigail. As their friends, close relatives, even their own children died around them, as the irrevocable aging process and accompanying physical failures made each look into the mirror a moment of horror, as the extended family that surrounded them at Quincy came to resemble a menagerie of wounded animals, Abigail and John remained resolute, infinitely resilient, the invulnerable center that would always hold. If love, like leadership, could never be defined, only recognized when it presented itself in its most ideal form, they embodied it. The long melody played on. In October 1818, Abigail collapsed with typhoid and probably suffered an accompanying stroke that made it difficult for her to speak. Interestingly, John first reached out to Jefferson, who had lost his own wife many years earlier: “The dear partner of my life for fifty-four years and for many years more as a lover, now lies in extremis, forbidden to speak or be spoken to.” With John at her bedside, Abigail died on October 28. She was 74. The music they had made together for so long finally stopped. With his lifelong partner gone, Adams waited for the summons to join her and resume their conversation in the hereafter. He had always worried about losing his mind and “dying at the top,” but just the opposite aging process was happening to him: Most of his teeth were now gone, and his “quiverations” made it impossible to hold a pen, so he had to dictate all letters to different grandchildren. He could ride a horse three miles but could not walk without a cane, and stairs had become insurmountable mountains. On the other hand, his mind remained hyperactive, at times almost childlike in its reckless release of innocent energy and endless curiosity. When rereading Cicero’s De Senectute, the classical handbook for retired statesmen, his mind took flight while contemplating the punctuation: “I have never delighted much in contemplating commas or colons,” he observed, “or in spelling or measuring syllables, but now, while reading Cato, if I look at these little objects, I find my imagination…roaming in the Milky Way.” As his body shriveled, his mind soared. It was not clear whether Adams ever conquered his demons or simply outlived them. Clinching evidence that all had either been forgiven or forgotten with Jefferson came in 1823. One of Adams’ old letters to a friend, castigating Jefferson for his multiple duplicities, had found its way into print, threatening the recovered friendship with an explosive blast from the past. Jefferson’s response was Monticellian gallantry in its most lyrical form: “Be assured, my dear Sir,” he wrote Adams, “that I am incapable of receiving the slightest impression from the effort now made to plant thorns on the pillow of age, worth, and wisdom, and to sow tares between friends who have been such for nearly half a century. Beseeching you then not to suffer your mind to be disquieted by this wicked attempt to poison its peace, and praying you to throw it by.” Adams was overjoyed and insisted that the letter be read aloud to the entire extended family at the breakfast table, calling it “the best letter that ever was written.” He promised Jefferson that he would join him in all-out war against “the peevish and fretful effusions of politicians,” then signed off as “J.A. In the 89 year of his age, still too fat to last much longer.” Both men were also able to share the sense that they had become living statues. Jefferson, for example, entrusted his last letter to his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who was traveling to Boston and planned a visit with the Sage of Quincy: “Like other young people,” Jefferson explained, “he wishes to be able, in the winter nights of old age, to recount to those around him what he has learnt of the Heroic age preceding his birth, and which of the Argonauts particularly he was in time to have seen.” In 1825 the American sculptor John Henri Isaac Browere visited both sages with a proposal to produce “life masks” designed to yield realistic likenesses of their faces and heads, so that subsequent generations could see an accurate rendering of the American icons. The process required pouring several coats of a hot, plasterlike liquid over the head, allowing it to harden, then breaking it off in chunks. “He did not tear my face to pieces,” Adams explained, “though I sometimes thought that he would beat my brains out with a hammer.” The bronze casting that resulted made Adams look like a metallic cadaver clad in a Roman toga, what he himself described as the “life mask” for a corpse. In June 1823, despite a bad gash on his ankle, Adams walked over a mile to his neighbor Josiah Quincy’s house in order to share company and conversation. He held forth for more than two hours, recalling his negotiation with the ambassador from Tripoli, when he blew smoke rings in a competition to reduce the size of the required ransom of American prisoners, and then proceeded to demonstrate his proficiency by duplicating the feat for Quincy’s guests. He speculated, incorrectly, that John Jay had actually written Washington’s Farewell Address. (It was Hamilton, still the last person that Adams could stoop to honor.) He also surmised that John Dickinson’s opposition to American independence in the Continental Congress was due to the influence of his wife and mother, both devout Quakers and resolute pacifists. “If I had such a mother and such a wife,” Adams concluded, “I believe I should have shot myself.” His last story was about Judge Edmund Quincy, Josiah’s grandfather, who had once beaten off a robber with his cane. When Adams lifted up his own cane to demonstrate how the old judge defended himself, he accidentally struck and demolished a picture hanging on the wall. Adams began to laugh uncontrollably at his blunder, announcing that he had not had such a good time in months: “If I was to come here once a day,” he declared, “I should live half a year longer.” One of the guests responded that Adams might consider coming “twice in a day, and live a year longer.” By the summer of 1826, Adams’ physical condition had declined beyond the point where another surge of his indomitable spirit could rescue it. He had already apprised Jefferson that the end was near: “The little strength of mind…that I once possessed appears to be all gone,” he acknowledged, “but while I breathe I shall be your friend. We shall meet again, so wishes and so believes your friend, but if we are disappointed we shall never know it.” He was still hedging his bets on the hereafter, and had come to regard heaven as a putative place where Abigail was waiting. The Christian doctrine of the Beatific Vision struck him as insipid. Gazing upon God was less interesting than embracing Abigail and resuming his arguments with Franklin and Jefferson. That for him was the true paradise. He knew that his powers of thought and speech were diminished, so when a delegation from Quincy visited him on June 30, requesting some statement from the patriarch for the looming Independence Day celebration, he refused to cooperate: “I will give you ‘Independence forever,’” he declared. Asked if he might like to elaborate, he declined: “Not a word.” He had finally learned, at the very end, the gift of silence. On the morning of July 4, Adams lay in his bed, breathing with difficulty, apparently unable to speak. But when apprised that it was the Fourth, and the 50th anniversary of Independence Day, he lifted his head and, with obvious effort, declared: “It is a great day. It is a good day.” Late in the afternoon he stirred in response to a severe thunderstorm—subsequently described in eulogies as “the artillery of Heaven”—and was heard to whisper, “Thomas Jefferson survives,” by several bedside observers. But by a coincidence that defied the probabilities of history and even the parameters of fiction, Jefferson had died earlier that afternoon. Both patriarchs, each possessed of indomitable willpower, seemed determined to die on schedule. Adams drew his last breath shortly after 6 o’clock. Witnesses reported that a final clap of thunder sounded at his passing, and then a bright sun broke through the clouds.   Joseph Ellis won a Pulitzer Prize for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (2000). Originally published in the October 2010 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.

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Have You Always Wanted to Drive a WWII-Era Tank? Here’s Your Chance

Have You Always Wanted to Drive a WWII-Era Tank? Here’s Your Chance Christmas has come early for WWII equipment aficionados. With the American Heritage Museum’s introduction of its new “Icons of Armor: The Ultimate WWII Tank Experience,” visitors will have the opportunity — with a cost of $995 to $1,495 — to operate an M4A3 Sherman medium tank, a M24 Chaffee light tank, and a M26 Pershing tank. Some may certainly be disappointed to learn that all the tanks have been “de-milled,” meaning the entirety of their armament have been rendered useless, but it’s safety first for the museum. Despite not being able to pull a James Franco-esque scene à la in “The Interview,” tank enthusiasts will be able to “make turns at various speeds, climb a hill, and cross obstacles” while rocking a provided pair of tanker overalls, free of charge. “Icons of Armor” is touted as a fundraising sweepstake to help “support the living history mission,” but in case dropping nearly a grand on this experience seems steep, the museum is also offering a sweepstakes for one lucky winner to drive all three tanks. In addition to the thrill of getting in the driver’s seat of these icons, the “two-day adventure” will include an “Inside the Hatch” tour of five rare British, Russian, German, and American tanks, the museum announced. Of the included vehicles, the M4 Sherman medium tank gained significant notoriety when it successfully dueled the Panzer IV’s in the North Africa campaign and handled the Japanese Type 97 in the Pacific. Still, it was easily bested by the much bigger, more powerful German Panthers, Tigers, and King Tiger tanks later in the war. But as one German tanker joked, “One of ours is better than 10 of yours, but you always have 11!” The Arsenal of Democracy in action. Similarly, the M24 Chaffee was equipped with inadequate armor and armament to deal with any larger tank it encountered before finding new life during the Korean War as the principle tank used by U.N. forces. The heavier M26 Pershing, meant to replace the lighter M4 Sherman, was designed to take on German Panthers and Tigers. Though it arrived too late in the war to make an appreciable difference, the M26 did see combat while famously assisting in the capture of the bridge over the Rhine River at Remagen. Those interested in entering the sweepstakes have between now and March 31 of next year to do so, with the winner receiving an invitation to drive all three vehicles. Good luck and happy driving!

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https://www.historynet.com/hawker-hurricane-mark-i.htm

Hawker Hurricane Mark I

Hawker Hurricane Mark I Hurricane Mark IC Wingspan: 40 feet Wing area: 258 square feet Length: 31 feet 4 inches Height: 13 feet 2 inches Tare weight: 4,743 pounds Normal loaded weight: 6,218 pounds Engine: Rolls-Royce Merlin III 1,030-hp V-12 engine Designed by British aeronautical engineer Sydney Camm as a monoplane successor to his Hawker Fury biplane fighter, the Hawker Hurricane was initially pursued as a private venture, as the prewar Air Ministry was slow to approve the project. Thus subject to budget considerations, the prototype’s tubular metal airframe included wooden components and a fabric skin when it first flew on Nov. 6, 1935. Entering service in December 1937, it lacked the sophistication and development potential of its future stablemate, the Supermarine Spitfire, but was much easier to mass produce and repair. Consequently, when the Battle of Britain broke out in 1940, the Royal Air Force was flying twice as many Hurricanes as Spitfires. Although outperformed by the Messerschmitt Me 109E in all respects except maneuverability, the Hurricane was well able to face everything else the Luftwaffe flew, from bombers to the Messerschmitt Me 110s intended to escort them. Of the 2,741 aerial victories claimed by RAF Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain, 55 percent were credited to Hurricanes, 42 percent to Spitfires. The most successful unit, No. 303 (Polish) Squadron, flew Hurricanes. Its Czech member, Josef František, claimed 17 victories before his tragic death in a crash. The RAF’s leading ace, South African Marmaduke Thomas St. John Pattle, scored 35 of his 50-odd victories in the nimble monoplane. More than 14,500 Hurricanes took to the air by war’s end. The type participated in every British campaign of the war, also serving as a carrier fighter, night intruder, attack plane and antitank aircraft. Hurricanes also saw use in Belgium, Finland and the Soviet Union. Not a bad record for the product of a transitional structural compromise. MH This article was published in the September 2020 issue of Military History.

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Heinecke Parachute: A Leap of Faith for WWI German Airmen

Heinecke Parachute: A Leap of Faith for WWI German Airmen A full third of the first 70 airmen to bail out died, in some instances due to tangled lines, the canopy fouling on the fuselage or the harness breaking free. But it sure beat the alternative. (Illustration by Gregory Proch) The concept of the parachute dates back to the 15th century sketches of Leonardo da Vinci. By the early 20th century balloonists had successfully used parachutes, while designers had tested other types in experimental jumps from airplanes and stationary towers, including one failed 1912 attempt from the Eiffel Tower caught on an early newsreel. In 1918 Germany issued its airmen a compact parachute pack designed by Unteroffizier Otto Heinecke, a ground crewman in Feldluftschiffer Abteilung 23. Similar parachutes were available as early as 1916, but high-ranking officers on both sides of the war had debated whether their issuance would undermine aircrews’ determination to fight or encourage them to abandon planes that could be ridden to the ground. Some airmen grumbled about the 30-odd pounds Heinecke’s parachute added to their weight and initially doubted its reliability—a full third of the first 70 airmen to bail out died, in some instances because the static line tangled, the chute caught on the fuselage or the harness broke free. Reinforced harnesses with wider leg straps addressed the latter problem. The first reported successful bailout in combat came on April 1, 1918, when a Vizefeldwebel Weimar jumped clear of his stricken Albatros DVa. In late June Leutnants Helmut Steinbrecher and Ernst Udet likewise floated safely to the ground beneath their Heinecke chutes. While parachutes improved pilots’ odds of survival if forced to bail out, the British did not issue them to Royal Air Force squadrons until September 1918. France and America did not allow their pilots to use them during the war.

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Helen Jackson, the Last Surviving Civil War Bride, Dies at 101

Helen Jackson, the Last Surviving Civil War Bride, Dies at 101 Helen Viola Jackson, the last known widow of a Civil War soldier, has died. She was 101 years old and had been living in Webco Manor Nursing Home in Marshfield, Mo. She passed away on Dec. 16, according to a statement by the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War. Jackson had been married to James Bolin, a Civil War veteran who served as a private in the 14th Regiment, Missouri Cavalry. Jackson never remarried nor had children and kept her association with Bolin largely under wraps. It was not until 2017 that she chose to share her life story with her minister. Just 17 at the time of her marriage to 93-year-old Bolin in 1936, Jackson had been providing daily care for the aging veteran. Her father volunteered to have Jackson stop by Bolin’s house each day on her way to school and assist him with chores, according to a post by the Missouri Cherry Blossom Festival in Marshfield, Mo. Unable to pay her for her assistance, Bolin, who “did not believe in accepting charity,” asked Jackson “for her hand in marriage as a way to provide for her future,” according to the statement. Despite the large age gap, such marriages weren’t uncommon in the 20th century, with young women seeking financial protection and aging veterans seeking care. And while the Civil War may feel like a bygone era, it was only last May that Irene Triplett, the last person receiving a pension from the Civil War, died. Jackson, however, is believed to be the last surviving Civil War bride. The pair wed with little fanfare and in front of few witnesses on September 4, 1936, at Bolin’s Niangua, Mo., home. The Daughters of the Union Veterans recently confirmed Jackson’s marriage using historical documents including a signed affidavit from the last living witness to the nuptials, according to Missouri Cherry Blossom post. “He said that he would leave me his Union pension,” Jackson later explained in an interview with Historian Hamilton C. Clark. “It was during the depression and times were hard. He said that it might be my only way of leaving the farm.” Although entitled to Bolin’s pension after he died on June 18, 1939, Jackson never applied for the government assistance. One of Bolin’s daughters from his previous marriage to Elizabeth Davenport Bolin (1842-1922) threatened to have Jackson’s reputation ruined by portraying her as a schemer who married the infirm Bolin for financial gain. As a result, Jackson never claimed her status as a war bride. “All a woman had in 1939 was her reputation,” Jackson recounted, according to the Missouri Cherry Blossom Festival post. “I didn’t want them all to think that I was a young woman who had married an old man to take advantage of him.” Despite the marriage, Jackson continued work on her family farm and never changed her last name. She lived out the rest of her life quietly but never forget Bolin’s generous act. “Mr. Bolin really cared for me,” Jackson told Our America Magazine last October. “He wanted me to have a future and he was so kind.”

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Hell and High Water: The USS Barb

Hell and High Water: The USS Barb In May 1944, Lt. Comdr. Eugene Fluckey, seeking his own submarine command, promised the Pacific Fleet sub commander at Midway Island that he would sink five Japanese ships on his first patrol. It was a bold gamble; the ship Fluckey had been eyeing, the USS Barb, had sunk only a single ship in six patrols under its previous commander. But with Fluckey placed in temporary command, the Barb got five freighters and two trawlers with the Barb’s guns its next time out—and Fluckey got the Barb. Indeed, his report on the patrol was so full of new ideas, so gung ho, positive, and entertaining, that the commander, Adm. Charles Lockwood, gave it to President Roosevelt, who happened to be at Pearl Harbor on the Barb’s return. FDR enjoyed it so much he asked that all of Fluckey’s future patrol reports be sent along to him—and then demanded a bit more. “He wanted the Barb to reenact her return to Pearl with battle flags flying as he filmed some home movies,” wrote Fluckey in his action-packed memoir, Thunder Below! The first pass wasn’t fast enough for FDR. They tried again at two-thirds speed: still too slow for the president, who wanted the Barb’s battle flag and five pennants streaming. So Fluckey brought it in a third time at high speed, skidding sideways to a stop—“All back emergency! Left full rudder!”—not ten yards from an ammunition ship he had been warned about. It was a total hot-dog maneuver, causing Lockwood to blanch, but the president loved every churning, foaming, spectacular second of it. Fluckey leaped out like a daredevil stunt driver at the state fair, strode over, and shook the hand of a hugely grinning FDR. It was classic Fluckey, mixing a perverse sense of fun with a healthy tolerance for danger, a calculating mind, and a drive to get the best possible outcome. Throw in his gift for inventing tactics to match every situation he faced, and an icy killing instinct, and you had one of the deadliest submariners of World War II. In five war patrols between May 1944 and August 1945, the 1,500-ton Barb sank twenty-nine ships and destroyed numerous factories using shore bombardment and rockets launched from the foredeck, a tactic invented by Fluckey. The sub’s crew even—improbably—blew up a train on a stealth mission by sending saboteurs to shore in a rubber raft. Fluckey not only made his mark on the record books, he rewrote the American submarine warfare manual. While traditional tactics counseled subs to lie submerged in wait, Fluckey believed—taking a page from Germany’s most successful U-boat skipper, Otto Kretschmer—that a sub should be used like a motor torpedo boat that pursues the enemy on the surface. On his first patrol, which went fifty-two days, Fluckey only submerged the Barb for one day. He would prove his point, time and again. Lt. Comdr. Eugene Fluckey His exploits earned Fluckey an astonishing four Navy Crosses and a Medal of Honor. The Barb’s final battle flag shows twenty-three Silver Stars, twenty-three Bronze Stars, two more Navy Crosses, a Presidential Unit Citation for four of his patrols, a Navy Unit Commendation for the fifth, four navy and Marine Corps medals, and eighty-two Letter-of-Commendation Ribbons. As important, in those five daring patrols there was no loss of life or significant injury to any of his crewmembers. Fluckey often said he was most proud of that, bringing his men home without a scratch, and they in turn dubbed him “Lucky Fluckey” for his ability to do so. But luck, he always insisted, had very little to do with it: he prepared obsessively for his missions and applied logic and experience to the calculation of risk. “I’ve always believed luck is where you find it, but by God, you’ve got to go out there and find it.” The son of a government lawyer, Fluckey was raised in Washington, D.C., and was set to attend Princeton at age sixteen when, inspired by a war hero neighbor, he changed his plans and enrolled in the U.S. Naval Academy instead. Fluckey, a former Boy Scout, was all-American down to his lanky frame, red hair, and freckles, and his persistence and ingenuity were apparent at every turn. He proposed the concept of an electric torpedo (which, rather than steam, became the norm) in a class at the Naval Academy, but the teacher threw his illustration in the wastebasket. At twenty, he figured out how to cure himself of nearsightedness by working his eye muscles, an unheard-of medical feat that enabled him to stay in Annapolis. Fluckey signed up for submarines partly to get out of the sun, but also for the hazardous-duty pay. A lieutenant’s pay in 1937 didn’t go far, and he had a wife and baby to support. Even after he made commander, his family still lived in half a Quonset hut, which measured 15 x 30 feet and cost $30 per month. When war broke out in 1941 Lieutenant Fluckey was an engineering and diving officer on the V-class submarine USS Bonita, after having served on the battleship Nevada, the destroyer McCormick, and another sub, the S-42. The Bonita was a 2,000-ton relic that could only dive at two degrees and took five minutes and forty-five seconds to do so, according to its own manual. With the inventiveness that would become his signature, Fluckey examined the boat and figured out how to make it dive at twenty degrees and get down in less than a minute. The Bonita saw no action, however, and it was aboard the Barb that he would make his lasting mark. In May 1944, on that first patrol as co-commander, Fluckey, then thirty, took his boat into the treacherous Sea of Okhotsk, off the Russian coast. The Barb left Midway with two wolf-pack mates, the Herring and the Golet. On May 30, 1944—Memorial Day evening—they found a convoy of four freighters with one destroyer escort; the Herring sank the destroyer with one torpedo, scattering the convoy. The next day the Barb picked off two freighters (one carrying troops) at 1:20 p.m. and 5:45 p.m. Six torpedoes fired, six hits—Fluckey’s first shots as captain. The detonator firing pins on the torpedoes had been failing, so before the patrol Fluckey and his men had fixed them all with stronger springs. He had put his motto to work: not problems, solutions. The Herring sank another freighter, and then stole into the harbor of Matsuwa Island, where it sank two more freighters at anchor. Shore batteries retaliated, and the Herring went down with eighty-three men lost. The Golet, which had never fired a torpedo, was never heard from and was later presumed sunk, based on Japanese records. Eighty-two men were lost. The Herring appeared to have been too daring—the Golet possibly not daring enough. For a sub captain operating in the Sea of Okhotsk, it was a question of finding a happy medium. For the next five weeks, the Barb would be alone, and Fluckey would zero in on that state of balance. For starters, after the first kills, Fluckey trolled the flotsam of the sunken freighter Koto Maru looking for a prisoner: the sea charts supplied by the navy were fifty years old, and he needed more information. The carnage gave him pause. “This was the first time I’d ever returned to the scene of a sinking and it was a rather unholy sight,” he later recalled. Nonetheless, he only needed one sailor to interrogate, so he picked up one survivor clinging to a wooden hatch cover in the freezing water. The other unlucky survivors were left to drown or die of exposure. Armed with a one-page phonetic dictionary of Japanese words, his fabulous smile, and a .45-caliber pistol, Fluckey charmed his way into the brain of Kitojima Sanji, who would become “Kito” to the crew. Fluckey treated him kindly, made him understand that saving the Barb was saving himself, and the crew virtually adopted him as their mascot. Meanwhile, Fluckey obtained from him the location of Japanese minefields and air bases. The Barb moved on to sink two more ships with six hits. Fluckey needed just one more to satisfy Admiral Lockwood. Two days later Fluckey came upon a convoy and the 5,633-ton Takashima Maru, an icebreaker/freighter/troop transport. Fluckey camouflaged the Barb by wrapping white bed sheets around its conning tower, then tracked the ship for five tense hours. Finally, he circled halfway around the convoy and fired two stern torpedoes at the Takashima, blowing off the fantail and sending the ship to its grave. Escorts came after the Barb and fired 38 depth charges, but Fluckey fooled them by filling a five-gallon milk can with oil and releasing it to create an oil slick, suggesting that one of the depth charges had hit home. On his second patrol, in the South China Sea, Fluckey followed up on the accolades he had earned, proving he was not a one-trick pony. He came upon a nine-ship convoy running in three columns. In a daring and unorthodox move, Fluckey fired three torpedoes from directly ahead of the convoy, nearly getting rammed by the leading minesweeper. The risk paid off: the single salvo sank a freighter and a tanker. The Barb was vigorously pursued, and dodged at least ninety-six bombs or depth charges from the convoy’s escorts and airplanes. Undaunted, the Barb fired three torpedoes at the minesweeper twelve hours later, at dusk. “I can’t miss this,” said Fluckey, as he ordered the scopes raised with fifteen seconds to impact. He didn’t. “His guns are manned fore and aft!” he narrated to the men in the conning tower with him. “There are about fifteen lookouts, dressed in white, on a catwalk above the bridge. An officer is looking….” Wham! “My God! Right under the bridge; bodies are flying through the air.” Wham! “Waterspout at the well deck!” Wham! “Under the forecastle. The gun crew’s been blown overboard. The ship’s breaking into a V!” Another one hundred or so bombs or depth charges were dropped at the Barb as it dove at twenty-five degrees to a depth of 340 feet—the boat’s maximum-rated test depth was 312. Later the Barb dropped to 375, its thin skin nearly buckling. The danger passed, the Barb resurfaced, and the hunt began anew. Fluckey was promoted to full commander before his third patrol, the Barb’s tenth, into the East China Sea. On November 10, 1944, after stalking a light cruiser, he sank it with three torpedoes, killing 326 men. More than three hundred explosions chased after the submerged Barb, “as annoying as a Tin Pan band in a small room,” said Fluckey. Two days later, the Barb fired eight torpedoes at two freighters in a convoy and sank them both. Said Admiral Lockwood, “This attack against a large convoy of 11 ships and four escorts demonstrates in a most brilliant manner how night radar and periscope attacks should be made. A determined and beautiful battle.” For all his lethal intent at sea, it seems Commander Fluckey did have a softer side. Resting on Midway Island between patrols, he opened a letter from his wife, Marjorie, that began, Dearest Gene, I feel like a perfect fool. How could you do this to me? I have never been so embarrassed in my life. Forty-four subs, including half of Fluckey’s submarine school classmates, had been lost in the Pacific so far. Fluckey hadn’t wanted Marjorie to worry, so he had written a stack of letters from Midway—a pack of lies about repairs in port and training missions. He had postdated them, and an accomplice mailed them at the correct time. Marjorie hadn’t even known he was fighting. She only found out when other navy wives told her that her husband was winning Navy Crosses and that the Barb had sunk an aircraft carrier (the Unyo, in September 1944). “Honey, you’ve been had,” her girlfriends said. Still, patrol records and his own commentary suggest Fluckey was as determined a killer as any in the sub fleet. Back in the East China Sea on January 1, 1945, on what would become his storied fourth patrol, the Barb came across a smoking naval weather ship that two other subs had shot up before a plane chased them away. The crew had put out fires and hid as a boarding party from the Barb looted it, looking mostly for charts. Because the ship was armed with machine guns, and was presumed to have radioed for help on seeing the Barb, Fluckey took no prisoners. Thirteen shots from the four-inch gun turned the weather ship with its hiding crew into a blazing inferno. “We took Kodachrome movies of the event,” said Fluckey. No regrets, no mercy. The war, he wrote home to his wife, had changed him: “What a pleasure it is to eliminate Japs. Funny thing, I seem to be the most bloodthirsty of the bunch, and I could never steel my heart enough to kill a rabbit.” January 8, 1945, was another record-breaking day, as the Barb sank six ships. First the ship raced a convoy of eight freighters and transports and eight escorts all afternoon, running at flank speed in order to get into firing position. Then it fired six torpedoes in a fan pattern. The patrol report from that day reads: Up scope. Stern of the transport is sticking up at a 30 [degree] angle with two escorts alongside taking off survivors. The bow is in the bottom mud. The brand-new engines-aft freighter exploded. There is nothing left but an enormous smoke cloud and flat flotsam; no lifeboats, nothing alive, nothing. The large freighter leading the port column is on fire amidships just above the waterline. The Barb’s wolf-pack sisters, Queenfish and Picuda, attacked from the front, which allowed the Barb to come from the starboard flank and get into the middle of the convoy, where it fired three torpedoes and watched another ship nosedive. Fluckey retreated until things cooled down; when he came back an hour later, he sank a tanker at 1,500 yards. But January 8 was just a warm-up for January 23, the night Fluckey earned the nickname “the Galloping Ghost of the China Coast,” as well as the Medal of Honor. He put all his ideas together that night: good intelligence, knowledge of his enemies’ mindset, the element of surprise, a dash of courage, and skillful use of his weaponry and ship. At the time, targets had vanished, and he was frustrated by reports that all traffic had holed up. He didn’t believe it. He suspected the ships were somehow getting past the wolf pack. He studied every chart and war report he could. “I was brought to a shuddering halt,” he wrote in Thunder Below! “I realized that the mile-wide channel between Hai-tan Island and the mainland is 10 miles long and only six feet deep. Could they possibly have dredged it? If such a dredging had been done, it would have enabled convoys to escape submarine surveillance.” Fluckey finally tracked a convoy until it anchored in the dredged Namkwan Harbor. He invited the Picuda to join the Barb in sneaking into the harbor and blowing up ships. “Drop dead!” the Picuda’s skipper was said to have replied. It’s easy to imagine Fluckey rubbing his hands together in glee at that response: all the more for the Barb. At 3:20 a.m., the Barb’s radar picked up thirty ships in the harbor. “Fantastic! All ahead standard.” At 3:52 a.m., Fluckey saw the ships through binoculars from three thousand yards. The ships were in three lines, “a complete overlap from end to end. Even an erratic torpedo couldn’t miss. No one had ever had such a perfect target.” The Barb crept into the harbor, only five fathoms deep. Four torpedoes were fired at 4:03 a.m., and four more at 4:05. “Two hits main target! She’s settling to the bottom. Hit in the second line behind the main target! “Hit large freighter, third line! She’s on fire! “Hit first line! What a geyser! Another hit in the first line! A large freighter. Good Lord! She’s belching out a huge cloud of smoke. “Hit second line! My God, the whole side of the ship blew out toward us! She sank! “Take cover! Far ship in third line hit and exploded! Munitions! Projectiles 6 to 12 inches are flying all over! Searchlights are sweeping! Let’s get out of here!” Running from patrol boats, Fluckey ordered the engines’ governors tied down and put 150 percent overload on the power plants, cranking his sub to a world record 23.5 knots. “Captain, the bearings are getting hot,” said the engine room. “Let them melt,” replied Lucky Fluckey. Still, a pursuing frigate closed the distance to 2,700 yards. But the Barb pulled into a fleet of fishing junks that Fluckey had been counting on for cover. He maneuvered wildly between them; the frigate stopped chasing and opened fire on the junks, as its radar couldn’t tell the difference between a sub and a junk. The Barb slowed to flank speed to cool down the bearings, then ran unscathed into the night. “Now hear this. Well done to each and every one! Eight hits, no errors. Be proud of a night none of us will ever forget.” At the time, it was believed that the Barb sank ninety thousand tons of Japanese shipping, more than any single submarine attack in the war. Japanese records of ships sunk or damaged in the harbor remain incomplete, but postwar Allied analysis could confirm only that amid the general damage it had inflicted, the Barb had permanently stricken the 5,224-ton freighter Taikyo Maru from the enemy’s maritime inventory. More important, the Japanese believed the attack had been from the air and moved their air defenses to Namkwan, where they were wasted. Fluckey leveraged that success into a fifth war patrol. Submarine captains were usually allowed only four—statistics showed that on the fifth patrol the captain was likely to become either overconfident or overcautious. But Fluckey convinced the admirals that he would be neither. He had unfinished business in the Sea of Okhotsk, as well as a few parting shots in mind. Commander Fluckey wanted to mount a rocket launcher on the Barb and fire the rockets at factories. He also wanted to blow up a train. Furthermore, Fluckey bet another officer a quart of whiskey that on its twelfth patrol the Barb would sink fifteen vessels—trawlers, luggers, schooners, and sampans included. Not your usual goals for a submarine captain, but Fluckey had proven to be anything but usual. With fewer Japanese convoys in the area to supply targets, the Barb’s main mission when it departed on June 8, 1945, was to “raise a rumpus,” recalled Admiral Lockwood. Three wolf packs were sent to hunt ships that planes and destroyers now guarded some distance away. At 1:50 a.m. on June 22, the day after Okinawa fell, history was made when Fluckey gave the command, “Man battle stations rockets!” Twelve rockets whooshed out of the pipe-rack launcher, and thirty seconds later they hit their target 5,250 yards away as chunks of buildings flew into the night. The Barb took off at flank speed to raise more of a rumpus farther north. At dawn on July 2, the Barb approached the port of Kaihyo To, inside Patience Bay at Shikuka. Peering through the mist with binoculars, the crew counted twenty-three barracks, warehouses, factories, shops, and mills. At eight hundred yards the Barb commenced firing. Fluckey called the assault “Little Iwo Jima.” The barrage of bullets continued for thirty-three minutes. The 40mm antiaircraft cannon destroyed a pillbox, an observation post, three sampans, and an oil dump. The five-inch gun destroyed a radar and radio station, blasted buildings, and set fires that raged under an immense black cloud. “The island is out of commission,” he said. “No communications, no radar, no power, no buildings, no boats exist.” Radio Tokyo said Kaihyo To had been bombarded by six warships and a submarine. Fluckey was pleased because it described his objective: maximum harassment with minimum force. That afternoon they fired a smaller Mark 27 torpedo at a freighter that was nearly overhead, and the torpedo found its way to the ship’s propeller. It was the first time a freighter had ever been sunk by a Mark 27, let alone from the allegedly suicidal range of seventy-five yards. Four down, eleven to go for Fluckey to win his whiskey. On July 5 they sank another small freighter, and on July 11 they got their seventh vessel, a large diesel sampan, with the five-inch gun. On July 18, using the last of the unreliable Mark 28 torpedoes, the Barb got a frigate, Kaikoban No. 112. Now it was time for some derring-do that would bring the Barb as much fame as any of its previous kills. On July 20 Fluckey pulled to within one thousand yards of shore in Patience Bay and watched trains all day. He waited for an overcast night, which came on July 23. At midnight, eight saboteurs in two rubber rafts paddled six hundred yards to shore (every single crewman had volunteered) and buried fifty-five pounds of explosives under the track. It was detonated two hours later by a switch triggered by the weight of the train. “Boom! Wham! What a thrill!” recalled Fluckey in Thunder Below! “The boilers of the engine blew. Engine wreckage flying, flying, flying up some 200 feet, racing ahead of a mushroom of smoke, now white, now black. Sixteen cars piling up, into and over the wall of wreckage in front, rolling off the track in a writhing, twisting maelstrom of Gordian knots.” Commander Fluckey now had to sink seven vessels in just three days in order to win the whiskey. The torpedoes were gone, but there were some five-inch shells left—and forty-eight rockets. “Our priority now is Shiritori, where we’ll reconnoiter for a triple rocket massage,” he told his officers. “We’ll rocket Shiritori just after dark, then proceed at flank speed down the coast and rocket Kashiho before dawn. From there we skid across the bay to bombard Chiri. After that I’d like one more crack at luring a single minefield frigate into deep water.” “Rockets away!” Thirty-six rockets flew toward two factories and Shiritori’s city hall, striking gasoline drums. Fires lit up the night sky. Fluckey invited all hands on deck to enjoy the fireworks before they raced off to their final stop that night. Two hours later the last dozen rockets blew up more buildings at Kashiho. Later in the morning they got another sampan, taking a prisoner to obtain information about defenses at their next target, Chiri. On the way into Chiri they got another sampan. They unloaded on Chiri with forty-three five-inch shells; on the way out they got another sampan with the last of the five-inch shells. All that remained were three star shells, which weren’t explosive, but no matter. They fired two into a sampan at the waterline, holing the hull, sinking it, and bringing the tally to six sampans for the day. Fourteen vessels down, one to go. The Barb received a message from Admiral Lockwood: fluckey you come home x acknowledge x. There was no ammunition left except for the 40mm gun and 20mm Oerlikon machine gun. They used the last of the 40mm shells to blow up a lumber mill at Shibetoro, again hitting a fuel tank and causing an inferno. The wind blew the fire onto seventeen sampans, which didn’t count for the bet because they were collateral damage. Four miles later they came across a trawler. Looking around for something to throw at the trawler, they came up with a crate of rifle grenades. After eighteen lobs, the trawler caught fire but wouldn’t sink. So, finally, Fluckey rammed it with the Barb. “It seemed like driving a car into a burning garage,” he said. The trawler went down. Some might argue that sinking sampans and trawlers is hardly a challenge, or even a very good use of a well-armed American submarine. But to Fluckey, a bet was a bet, and the trawler was his fifteenth and final kill. Fluckey used every trick in the book, including ramming trawlers (left) and torpedoing tankers (center) and freighters like the Koto Maru (right). So ended Eugene Fluckey’s combat career. He would go on to become an aide to Adm. Chester W. Nimitz after the war, and later, as a rear admiral, was named director of naval intelligence. He finally retired from the service in 1972. But he always fondly recalled the ship and crew that brought him such acclaim early in his navy service, and his parting from the Barb reminds us that even the Galloping Ghost had human dimensions: “I didn’t have the courage to have a formal relieving aboard ship with the crew at quarters,” he wrote his wife at the time. “I would have blubbered.”

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https://www.historynet.com/heros-welcome-at-gettysburg.htm

Hero’s Welcome at Gettysburg

Hero’s Welcome at Gettysburg At Gettysburg’s 1888 grand reunion, Confederate outcast James Longstreet turned man of the hour. but his memory tour was nearly fatal For sheer star power, no gathering of Union and Confederate veterans rivaled the Grand Reunion at Gettysburg in 1888. “There are so many Generals and other chieftains here,” a newspaper marveled, “that a catalogue of them would be as long as Homer’s list of ships.” Former Army of the Potomac commanders Daniel Sickles, Fitz John Porter, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Henry Slocum, Abner Doubleday, and Francis C. Barlow, among other Union luminaries, were joined in Pennsylvania by ex-Army of Northern Virginia generals Wade Hampton, Fitzhugh Lee, and John B. Gordon. But the biggest celebrity at the event clearly was the man sporting massive, white whiskers and a cleanly shaven chin: James Longstreet, who commanded the Confederates’ First Corps at Gettysburg on July 1-3, 1863. Nearly everywhere Robert E. Lee’s “Old War Horse” went he drew appreciative, and often awestruck, crowds. “No man now in Gettysburg,” a New York newspaper reported, “is more honored nor more sought than he.” For Longstreet, the visit to Gettysburg—his first since he commanded troops there—stirred a wide range of emotions. And led to the shedding of many tears. By 1888, James Longstreet was more popular with Northerners than with White Southerners. After the war, he aligned himself with the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln, and supported his friend and former military rival, Ulysses S. Grant, as president. “Old Pete” also served in the Republican administration of President Rutherford B. Hayes, another Union veteran. And, of course, his postwar criticism of Lee’s soldiering at Gettysburg was an unforgivable sin for many Confederate devotees. Longstreet, who lived in semi-retirement on his farm in Gainesville, Ga., arrived in Pennsylvania on June 30. On the train ride to Gettysburg, he sat near General Hiram Berdan, whose two regiments of sharpshooters slowed the Confederates’ advance at Devil’s Den and the Peach Orchard on the battle’s second day. The men eagerly discussed the fighting during their journey. The 67-year-old Longstreet, who stood about 6-foot-2 and weighed more than 200 pounds, looked “enfeebled,” according to The New York Times. But another account called the broad-chested general “vigorous” despite his age. In late June and the first days of July 1888, dozens of other trains packed with veterans unloaded at Gettysburg’s lone railroad depot for the Grand Reunion. “Most of the old soldiers went accompanied only by their memories,” according to an account, “but some took their wives and children with the intention of showing them the places in defense of which they fought so bravely.” The few hotels in town were booked, so tents were erected for veterans on East Cemetery Hill and elsewhere. At least 30,000 people—White veterans and civilians alike—attended each day of the three-day event organized by the Society of the Army of the Potomac, a Union veterans’ organization. One newspaper even estimated attendance as high as 70,000 for a day. “Such crowds,” the New York Evening World declared, “have not been seen here since the battle was fought.” (Black veterans did not officially serve in the Army of the Potomac as soldiers in 1863, and thus few, if any, African Americans are believed to have attended.) With no hotel space available, tents for attendees were erected on East Cemetery Hill. The photo below was taken during the 1913 Grand Reunion. (Library of Congress) Unsurprisingly, the massive gathering—which included about 300 Confederate veterans—severely taxed resources in Gettysburg, population roughly 3,100. “The want of a head” in town, the Evening World reported, “has seriously interfered with the success of the reunion,” while the New York Sun published a much more scathing Gettysburg critique: The town is indeed a poor place for the accommodation of such crowds of visitors as come here. There is not a really good hotel in the village….Carriages are needed to go from point to point, for the battlefield covers an area of twenty-five miles, and the people take full advantage of the crowds and gouge everyone who hires a buggy or a hack. The extortion is worse than that practiced by the St. Louis hotel people during the Democratic Convention. And yet, in spite of all these unpleasant things, the people come, for the sentiment which attracts is more powerful than the feeling of disgust created at the meanness of the people of the place. Despite less-than-ideal conditions, veterans—most in their early 50s—eagerly reconnected with former comrades. “The meeting of the survivors of the armies of Meade and Lee on the field of Gettysburg,” a Pennsylvania newspaper proclaimed, “is the greatest occasion of the kind known in our history, if not in the annals of nations.” Many veterans went souvenir-hunting for battle relics in fields and woodlots. Scores attended the dedication of more than two dozen battlefield monuments. At one of those events, a New Jersey veteran claimed he found in a rock crevice the cartridge box he had hidden during a retreat in July 1863. Two bullets remained in the bent and rusty relic, which he proudly took home. On East Cemetery Hill, where they were part of a desperate attack 25 years earlier, four veterans of the Louisiana Tigers Brigade from New Orleans became the center of attention. Pennsylvania veterans eagerly greeted the men, who wore blue, silk badges adorned with the letters “A.N.V.” for Army of Northern Virginia. “…such a shaking of hands,” The New York Times reported, “was never before seen on East Cemetery Hill.” In town, residents and others hawked everything from lemonade and badges to horse-and-buggy rides, which were available from 50 cents to $2.50 an hour. At the Catholic church in Gettysburg, a special mass was held for members of the Irish Brigade who fell in battle. Bands played “Marching Through Georgia,” “John Brown’s Body,” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Electric lights mounted on a tall mast lit up Cemetery Hill at night, creating a dazzling scene. Many found time for carousing, too. At Spangler’s Spring, near Culp’s Hill, veterans partied hard after the reunion’s official end, drinking beer in “huge quantities,” the Harrisburg (Pa.) Daily Independent reported. Veterans of the 121st Pennsylvania pose on Cemetery Ridge with their families during the dedication of the regiment’s memorial in 1888. The monument was erected on Seminary Ridge in 1886 before being moved. (NPS Photo) Former enemies mostly were cordial with each other, although a number of Union men groused about Confederate veterans who wore lapel pins adorned with a Rebel flag. “That was the flag of treason and rebellion in 1861,” Union veteran John Gobin said in an impromptu speech at a morning campfire gathering on the battlefield, “and it is the flag of treason and rebellion in 1888.” Gobin, who did not fight at Gettysburg, served as an officer in the 11th and 47th Pennsylvania during the war. In 1888, he was a state senator, a general in the Pennsylvania National Guard and active in the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans organization. He also served as lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania. He and fellow Union veteran John Taylor offered scathing criticism of Confederate veterans who had the audacity to wear badges adorned with a Rebel flag. In his campfire address, Gobin said he was tired of hearing about Pickett’s Charge, the subject of many speeches throughout the three-day reunion. Why, he scoffed, some of the Confederates simply charged across a field and surrendered weaponless, with their hands up, further fuming that nearly every division in the Army of the Potomac showed more valor at Gettysburg. “I want it distinctly understood now and for all time,” the 51-year-old veteran continued, “that at these reunions it should be remembered and put forth that the men who wore the blue and fought on this field were lastingly and eternally right and the men who wore the gray were lastingly and eternally wrong.” His audience hollered its approval. (HNA) “The General said that the Grand Army of the Republic and the men who wore the blue were disposed to display all kindly feeling and extend the hand of friendship and of assistance to their late antagonists,” the Reading (Pa.) Times wrote of the reunion, “but this ‘gush’ and glorification of a rebel was not elevating in its effects on the youths of the country.” Concluded the newspaper about Gobin’s speech: “Right, every time, General. Brave words fitly spoken.” Taylor, who did fight at Gettysburg, also blasted “glorification” of his former enemies. As an officer in the 2nd Pennsylvania Reserves, he was captured at the Wilderness in May 1864 and spent 10 months as a prisoner. In 1888, he was quartermaster general of the Grand Army of the Republic. “I want no part or lot in this intolerable slobber and gush,” the 48-year-old veteran said at the campfire, “and if I did take part in these reunions with men who are wearing rebel badges, I would be untrue to the comrades of my old company who fell on this field and some of whom are now resting in this beautiful cemetery.” Word of the Pennsylvania veterans’ disdain soon filtered south. “Lurid” and “sulphurous,” the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph called Gobin’s oratory. “The people of the South will not be disturbed by these words of bitterness,” the newspaper wrote. “They do not come from men who represent any respectable element at the North. If Gobin and Taylor want to keep up the war feeling they and their little gang can do so.” Nearly eight years later, though, it remained clear how Gobin felt about the vanquished Confederacy. “Lee intended that Gettysburg should be his Austerlitz,” he said in an address in Gettysburg for the dedication of a monument to George Gordon Meade, “but it was his Waterloo, and more than that, the Waterloo of human slavery in the greatest country on earth.” Almost from the beginning, James Longstreet’s Gettysburg visit was eventful; often, it was even surreal. When word spread on June 30 that Longstreet was staying at the popular Springs Hotel, about two miles from town, hundreds headed in that direction. But the general was already gone, having departed earlier for the dedication of Wisconsin Iron Brigade monuments in Herbst Woods (Reynolds Woods today). There, “Old Pete” briefly met with Brevet Brig. Gen. Rufus Dawes, the Iron Brigade officer whose soldiers famously captured 200 Confederates nearby in the Unfinished Railroad Cut west of town on July 1, 1863. “General,” Dawes said as he surveyed the area near the Chambersburg Pike, “it looks very different from the scene of 25 years ago.” “Yes,” Longstreet said, according to a New York Times reporter, “it reminds me of a camp meeting.” Another U.S. Army veteran remarked to Longstreet that the battle might have ended quite differently had the Confederate command listened to his advice. Then he asked the general if he was dead against Pickett’s Charge. “Yes, sah,” he replied. Asked if Confederate Lt. Gen. Jubal Early might attend the Grand Reunion, Longstreet expressed his doubts. The commander who ordered the sacking of nearby Chambersburg, Pa., in 1864 probably would not have been well received. Longstreet, on the other hand, rarely had a free moment at the reunion. Veterans of all stripes were eager to exchange pleasantries and shake the hand of “Old Pete.” Veterans of the 40th New York pose in Devil’s Den. The 40th, known as the “Mozart Regiment,” was part of Daniel Sickles’ 3rd Corps and fought at the base of Little Round Top. The regiment’s monument stands nearby at the intersection of Crawford and Warren Avenues. (Library of Congress) Later that day, Longstreet had a private meal at his hotel with 68-year-old Dan Sickles—the first meeting of the former enemies. As commander of the 3rd Corps at Gettysburg, the controversial Sickles lost his right leg to enemy artillery on the battle’s second day. “They were friends in a moment,” according to an account of their meeting, “and there was very little eaten at that table for 30 minutes as they talked about events a quarter century old.” While the old foes dined, others in the room gawked and “let their dinner go almost untouched.” The pairing of Sickles, a cigar-smoking New Yorker, and Longstreet, a South Carolina-born part-time farmer, was a hit. As a group of New York veterans marched through Gettysburg one morning, the two rode in a carriage behind them. “This was a meeting of blue and gray worth recording,” a Philadelphia newspaper correspondent wrote, “and as they passed along the street that led to Seminary Hill and Seminary Ridge the enthusiasm of the crowd who recognized them was something beyond description.” With Sickles and other former Union bigwigs, Longstreet visited the notable battlefield sites—the Peach Orchard, Wheatfield, Devil’s Den and Little Round Top, the “apple of Longstreet’s eye.” Little had changed, the general observed, since his soldiers had made desperate assaults on the Round Tops on July 2, 1863, and, a day later, at the “Bloody Angle” during Pickett’s Charge. The attack was “a great mistake,” said Longstreet, who discussed battle strategy and tactics with former Union commanders as he toured the field. When the general began a tour on horseback with Generals Hiram Berdan and Daniel Butterfield, among others, a large crowd gave the group three cheers. After they reached the summit of Little Round Top, word quickly traveled of Longstreet’s presence there. Union veterans gathered nearby for a monument dedication rushed toward their former adversary. John Gobin (above left) and John Taylor (left) were part of a relatively small but vocal group of Reunion attendees: Union veterans not yet ready to forgive their former enemies. (Reading Room 2020/Alamy Stock Photo (2); 507 Collection/Alamy Stock Photo) “Boys, here’s Longstreet,” shouted the one-legged Sickles as he sat at the foot of a tree, “and he meets us once more on Round Top.” Three rousing cheers from the crowd of about 100 “went surging through the shimmering air to the plain below.” On July 1, Longstreet nearly broke down during a speech before an estimated 10,000 Union 1st Corps veterans in Reynolds Grove, near the monument to Union Maj. Gen. John Reynolds, who was killed on the first day of the battle. As he walked to the massive speakers’ stand, Longstreet was greeted by a Rebel Yell, the Gettysburg Cornet Band played “Dixie” and veterans crowded around the commander. “General,” a one-legged Federal veteran told Longstreet, “I fought against you at Round Top. I lost a wing there, but I am proud to meet you here.” The “Granite Tree Monument,” dedicated on Oak Ridge in 1888, is one of three 90th Pennsylvania monuments at Gettysburg. (Library of Congress) “Yes,” Longstreet replied as he grasped the man’s hand, “those were hot times then. But I’m all right now.” After Longstreet took his place on the stand, a former Federal officer shouted, “Comrades, you see on this platform one of the hardest hitters whoever fought against us. I propose we give three times three for General Longstreet, one of the best Union men now in the country!” The crowd erupted, surging toward the wooden stand and “showering God bless you’s” on the teary-eyed general. Moments later, though, the platform collapsed amid shrieks, falling two feet. But no one was seriously hurt. Smiling, Longstreet bowed left and right. Then “Old Pete,” his voice shaking as he began his speech, told the veterans how proud he was to commemorate the battle and, according to a newspaper report, “to mingle with those brave men who know how to appreciate heroism which will give up life for country’s sake.” Longstreet called the third day at Gettysburg the greatest battle ever fought. “But times have changed,” he said, according to the Times. “Twenty-five years have softened the usages of war. Those frowning heights have given over their savage tone, and our meetings for the exchange of blows and broken bones are left for more congenial days, for friendly greetings, and for covenants tranquil repose. “The ladies are here to grace the serene occasion and quicken the sentiment that draws us nearer together,” he continued. “God bless them and help that they may dispel the delusions that come between the people and make the land as blithe as bride at the coming of the bridegroom.” On July 2 at Gettysburg’s National Cemetery, the final resting place for more than 3,500 Federal soldiers, Longstreet shared the speaker’s rostrum with Dan Sickles, John Gordon, Francis Barlow, and others. Nearly 5,000 people crowded onto the hallowed ground where Lincoln had delivered the Gettysburg Address in November 1863. A New York Times reporter was there to capture the most momentous scene of Longstreet’s remarkable visit: The actors were the very men who defended the ridge on whose slopes the cemetery lies against the repeated assaults led by the very men 25 years ago this very day who joined them here now in pledges of friendship, loyalty to a common flag and unity of devotion to a common country. All—place, scene, and the living figures of the men themselves—were inspiring. Gettysburg veterans, including Longstreet, pose on Little Round Top next to the 155th Pennsylvania monument, which had been dedicated in September 1886. A statue of a Zouave soldier was added in 1889, even though 155th soldiers were not dressed in those colorful uniforms during the battle. (NPS Photo) Shortly after 5 p.m., Sickles delivered a short speech. “As Americans,” said the general, who became instrumental in preserving the battleground, “we may all claim a common share in the glories of this battlefield, memorable for so many brilliant feats of arms.” He later read a telegram from George Pickett’s widow, LaSalle, who offered “God’s blessing” to the throng. When John Gordon, a brigade commander at Gettysburg but now governor of Georgia, appeared, he was greeted by a deafening roar, and his speech was interrupted by shouts of “Hurrah!” and “Good!” Longstreet spoke only a few sentences. “I changed my suit of gray for a suit of blue so many years ago,” he said, further endearing himself to the Union veterans, “that I have grown myself in my reconstructed suit of blue.” At the 95th Pennsylvania monument dedication that day in the Wheatfield, Longstreet’s actions spoke louder than words. The general held the regiment’s tattered battle flag, which had been pierced by 81 holes in fighting at Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Malvern Hill and elsewhere. Gently, he pressed the flag to his lips…and wept. “The Piedmont Airline” train crashed crossing a wooden trestle like this postwar one used by the Union Pacific Railroad. (Alamy Stock Photo) Dragged Into the Vortex Longstreet finds a way to escape death in central Virginia yet again Nearly a quarter-century after he was severely wounded at the May 1864 Battle of the Wilderness, James Longstreet had another brush with death in the heart of Virginia. Early on the morning of July 12, 1888, the former Confederate lieutenant general survived a deadly train accident at a rickety railroad trestle known as “Fat Nancy”—20 miles southwest of the famous Wilderness battleground in Spotsylvania County. Die in a mere train wreck? Fat chance for Robert E. Lee’s “Old War Horse.” En route from the Grand Reunion to his home in Gainesville, Ga., the 67-year-old Longstreet was aboard the southbound Virginia Midland Railroad’s No. 52 train, “The Piedmont Airline.” At least two other Confederate veterans were heading home as well, including New Orleans-bound Louis G. Cortes—a “whole-souled, open-hearted, compassionate man” who, as a 19-year-old private in the 7th Louisiana, lost his left leg at Gettysburg. Fighting for Brig. Gen. Harry T. Hays’ famed “Louisiana Tigers,” he was taken prisoner in Pennsylvania and not exchanged until early 1864. Cortes (spelled Cortez in some accounts) lived in a soldiers’ home in New Orleans. He had saved up for years to attend the reunion in Gettysburg. The train, scheduled to make stops in Augusta, Ga., Atlanta, and New Orleans, typically carried between 150 and 200 passengers. No. 52 consisted of mail, baggage, smoking and ladies’ cars, three sleepers, the locomotive (Engine 694), and a tender. Longstreet was in a sleeper car as the train snaked its way through countryside ravaged by warfare decades earlier. At roughly 2 a.m., “The Piedmont Airline” arrived with sleeping and groggy passengers at Orange Court House. A short time later, the train eased out of the station on the Virginia Midland Railroad line. Twenty minutes later, two miles south of Orange Court House, the train slowed to about 5 mph as it approached a 44-foot-high, 487-foot-long wooden trestle spanning rain-swollen Two Runs Creek. To locals, the trestle was known as “Fat Nancy,” after a plus-sized African American named Emily Jackson who lived near its western approach. Jackson liked to wave her green-checkered, gingham apron at railroad workers as she stood near the doorway of her house. Occasionally, the workers tossed her apples and oranges from their lunch baskets. That July 12, the trestle was in the process of being repaired—it would eventually be replaced with a culvert and dirt fill. Apparently, after the locomotive and tender made it across the bridge, the smoking car in the center of the trestle plunged through the wooden beams and into the creek. It dragged four cars, followed by the tender and locomotive, into the vortex. Two sleepers remained on the track above; the other sleeper, which also fell, rested precariously atop the crumpled wreckage. Frightened passengers—adults and children alike—moaned and cried. Steam hissed from the crippled locomotive. All lights on the train were extinguished after it plunged. In the inky blackness, passengers frantically worked to free themselves from the wreckage or aid the injured. Longstreet, a large man, somehow squeezed to safety through the bottom of the sleeper car on the tracks. (Another account said it was a window.) “He afterwards looked at the hole through which he had emerged,” a newspaper reported, “and wondered how he had ever got through it.” The general, apparently unscathed physically, assisted survivors until daylight and then lay down to rest. Dozens were injured—or worse. “The train was piled in such an inextricable mass of debris that it was difficult to discover the outlines of human forms,” the Baltimore Sun reported. “Through the interstices of the wreck arms and legs protruded in every direction.” A woman in her 20s in one of the first-class cars was traveling with at least two bantam chickens, but when there was a complaint about the noisy birds, she moved forward into a smoking car. She would be one of eight passengers who died at the scene, “her head mashed beyond recognition.” Cortes was among the dead. He was initially discovered carrying only $4.. But as he was being prepared for burial in the Confederate Cemetery a mile or so away in Orange, Va., a policeman examined the man’s cast-off shoe. In it, he discovered $82 in bank notes. Cortes’ death rocked some of his former enemies. After the reunion, he was invited by Union veterans of the George Meade Grand Army of the Republic Post to be their guest in Philadelphia. When he said goodbye to his new friends at the train station about a week later, “the brave old rebel shed tears of gratitude,” the Boston Globe reported. A month after the death of Cortes, the Louisiana Division of the Army of Northern Virginia passed a resolution in the veteran’s honor. “He sleeps…in the sacred soil of Virginia made precious by the best blood of the south,” it read. “Flowers will bloom upon his grave, the birds make melody above him, and at night the stars will watch as sentinels…” Another New Orleans-bound passenger, an “unknown Italian” who was killed, was found with a railroad ticket, a poker chip, and three cents. Cornelius Cox, a civilian engineer who had been directing repairs on the trestle, also died in the wreck. A severely injured mail agent died in a nearby Charlottesville hospital just before his wife and brother arrived from Prosper, Va. Miraculously, the train’s crew survived. William N. Parrott, a postal clerk in Piedmont, Va., was aboard the mail car. The Confederate veteran lived a charmed life apparently. When he was 6, he survived a blow from a large, fallen tree limb sawed from an oak by workmen, and as a private in the 7th Virginia, he was wounded at Second Manassas, Gettysburg, and Dinwiddie Court House. A passenger from Baltimore said it was a miracle how anyone survived the plunge from the trestle. To free the baggage master, who was found under an iron safe and several trunks, rescuers had to cut away the top of a car. A couple living nearby in the rural area apparently was first to assist. The train’s slightly injured engineer escaped from the wreckage, walked two miles to Orange, and telegraphed for help. At about 7 a.m., physicians from Charlottesville arrived on the scene. Among the first responders was Dr. Elhanon Winchester Row, who had been 14th Virginia Cavalry’s regimental surgeon during the war. A local woman did such a fabulous job aiding and comforting the wounded that the railroad company later awarded her $250. The supremely efficient U.S. Post Office Department sent special agents to collect mail that littered the accident scene. In Charlottesville, anxiety was high. “As the hours went by the excitement grew very intense,” according to a report, “so much so that when a special train from Orange arrived bearing the wounded the depot and platforms were literally packed, and it was as much as the police could do to keep a passageway clear.” A reporter quizzed one of the survivors from the sleeper car about the cause of the accident. “Why, sir,” he said excitedly, “there were rotten timbers in the trestle and the rotten wood bulged out where the timbers broke. I made careful examination of the structure and am willing to make oath as to its condition.” A coroner’s investigation quickly confirmed the obvious: Rotten timbers were indeed the culprit. In the investigation’s aftermath, the Virginia Midland Railroad’s chief engineer was fired. In newspaper accounts, Longstreet—the most prominent passenger on the train—was barely mentioned, if at all. Days later, the general was spotted in Washington, D.C., reportedly seeking a pension for his service in the U.S. Army during the Mexican War. Years after the accident, Longstreet served in another role for the American government: U.S. commissioner of railroads under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt from 1897 through 1904. Nashville-based John Banks, a regular America’s Civil War contributor, is the author of two Civil War books and the blog john-banks.blogspot.com.

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https://www.historynet.com/hessian-troopers-myth-and-reality.htm

Hessian Troopers: Myth and Reality

Hessian Troopers: Myth and Reality During the Revolutionary War, Americans had a profound dread of Hessian mercenaries hired by King George III to fight in the battle for the Colonies. Patriot sources produced exaggerated rumors and newspaper accounts which made the term “Hessian” a byword for “marauder” months before German boots touched North American soil. This fearsome perception continued as time passed. The word “Hessian” might recall in modern American consciousness the Hessian “Headless Horseman” in Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow—perhaps conjuring imaginings of a maleficent, cloaked rider brandishing a saber. Even the U.S. Declaration of Independence contains an ominous reference to German troops: “He [King George III] is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy of the head of a civilized nation.” When the first division of Hessians arrived at Staten Island, N.Y. in August 1776, they discovered that a harrowing reputation preceded them. “The Americans had been informed by their agents and British sympathizers of the Hessians’ impending arrival. As early as Sept. 30, 1775, the Constitutional Gazette reported that 10,000 Hannoverians were to be recruited to repress the Colonists,” according to historian Rodney Atwood. Scholars Atwood and Edward J. Lowell write that Americans regarded the German troops “with nothing less than sheer horror” and that “the popular imagination had made fiends of the Hessians.” American newspapers portrayed them as vicious raiders “‘whose native ferocity, when heightened and whetted, by the influence and malice of the sceptered savage of Great-Britain, thirsting for the blood of his faithful American subjects, will exhibit such a scene of cruelty, death and devastation as will fill those of us who survive the carnage, with indignation and horror, attended with poverty and wretchedness,” according to The Norwich Packet of July 8, 1776 quoted by Atwood. Staten Island citizens panicked. “The arrival of the German allies had spread no little alarm among the Americans…many of the inhabitants had abandoned their homes, flying to New York and leaving in their houses many articles of value,” according an 1893 German history by Max von Eelking. The Hessians were unaware of the myths surrounding them and were astonished when American patriots they encountered in battle reacted to them with frantic despair. “’Their fear of the Hessian troops was…indescribable,’ reported [Lieut-Gen. Philip von] Heister, quoted by Atwood, ‘in contrast, they offered the British much more opposition, but when they caught only a glimpse of a blue coat, they surrendered immediately and begged on their knees for their lives.” Other Americans responded with desperate violence. Many had such dread and mistrust of Hessians that they attempted to kill them after surrendering – an action which outraged the Germans, whose code of soldierly honor condemned such behavior as treachery. One such incident was related by German mercenary Col. von Heeringen, quoted by Lowell: “ ‘Colonel John, of the rebels, is dead. A grenadier took him prisoner and generously gave him his life…The colonel wanted to murder him, slyly, from behind; secretly drew out a pistol, but only hit the grenadier in the arm, whereupon the latter treated him to three or four bayonet strokes.’ ” Fear and confusion became very apparent when the Hessians obtained the American surrender of Fort Washington in New York on Nov. 16, 1776. “Colonel Rall called to one of his captains. ‘Hohenstein…you speak English and French; take a drummer with you, tie a white cloth on a gun-barrel, go to the fort and call for a surrender,”  he ordered, according to Lowell. Hohenstein and the drummer were continually fired upon until they reached the slope of the fort despite obvious calls for peace. Lowell describes that when the Continental Army finally relinquished, the Hessians witnessed how Americans perceived them: “Captain von Malsburg relates that when he came into the fortress he found himself surrounded by [American] officers with fear and anxiety in their faces. They invited him into their barracks, pressed punch, wine, and cold cakes upon him, complimented him on his affability, which seemed to astonish them, and told him they had not been led to expect such from a Hessian officer.” Although the German mercenaries came from diverse regions, most were from the Landgraviate of Hesse-Cassel, which gave rise to all German troops in America being referred to indiscriminately as “Hessians.” Hesse-Cassel was a poor state that, at that time, had still not recovered from the Thirty Years’ War. It had also fought as Britain’s ally against France during the Seven Years’ War and had been further devastated. Densely populated and threatened with starvation, Hesse hired out its military to earn revenue. According to Charles Ingrao of The American Historical Review: “Hessian society in general valued the Soldatenhandel [lit. ‘soldier trade’] for its role in stimulating the economy, keeping taxes low, and providing attractive career alternatives for all social groups.” Hesse-Cassel was not alone in its “soldiers for hire” scheme. During the Revolutionary War, six German princes “rented” their armies to Britain, including rulers in Bavaria, Upper and Lower Saxony, Hesse and Waldeck. Of these, the Hessian regions were most prepared for war. “The Elector of Hesse, Frederic II., whose arsenals were well filled, and whose troops were always ready, was the most active, and by the end of February his Regiments were in Cassel, prepared to start,” according to Eelking. The forces consisted of a mix of aristocratic officers, professional soldiers, volunteers, and conscripts. While awaiting British transport ships, they performed battle exercises and drills daily, even in deep winter snow. The enlisted men were a diverse bunch. Many were volunteers who saw service as a chance to earn respect while others just wanted to escape poverty. Others were forced. The prince of Hesse-Cassel had a quota of regiments with which he had agreed to supply Britain—his recruiting officers resorted to oppressive tactics to meet the demands of their sovereign. They seized men and compelled them into the ranks—these victims included political dissidents, drunkards, peasant workers, debtors and others in unfortunate circumstances. Some conscripts found themselves packed off to America after simply being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Johann Gottfried Seume, a runaway theology student en route to Paris, was captured by Hessian recruiters after a chance roadside meeting. “‘I was brought under arrest to Ziegenhayn, where I found many companions in misfortune from all parts of the country,” according to quotations from Seume’s 1835 autobiography in Lowell’s book The Hessians and other German Auxiliaries of Great Britain in the Revolutionary War. “There we waited to be sent to America in the spring, after Faucitt [the British Colonel who had negotiated the treaties] should have inspected us. We stayed a long time at Ziegenhayn before the necessary number of recruits was brought together from the plough, the highways, and the recruiting stations. The story of those times is well known. No one was safe from the grip of the seller of souls.’” Higher-ranking officers looked forward to battling in foreign countries to win honor. Most were noblemen, since in those days—and indeed up until the early 20th century—it was generally impossible for a German officer of common birth to advance beyond the rank of Sergeant Major. German researcher Hans Huth, in Letters from A Hessian Mercenary, writes: “Since it was generally impossible for the German officer to advance his career at home, he took service wherever a better future seemed to beckon him; but that did not at all signify the complete abandonment of his ‘fatherland.’ ” The soldiers were given heroic sendoffs. In Hesse-Cassel, the troops marched off to the applause of a cheering multitude. In the state of Waldeck, the prince gave each man a hymnbook. The prince’s mother was also generous, providing the troops with lavish entertainment and promising all returning soldiers that they would be taken home in carriages. The first time Hessians saw the Americans was on the shores of Staten Island in 1776. “The width of the water was a little over three hundred paces, and the Americans gathered on their side to watch the German soldiers, who were now for the first time in sight,” according to Eelking. One of the Hessians noted that few rebels were in uniform and though they resembled a hastily assembled mob. The “rebels” made a poor impression on their Hessian enemies and the concept of a disorganized American “mob” remained with the Germans throughout the conflict. Much to the surprise and contempt of the Hessians, captured American officers (and even generals) turned out to be craftsmen, farmers, or merchants. The Hessian Col. Heeringen expressed sentiments of contempt. “Among the so-called Colonels and other officers, many were tailors, shoemakers, barbers…My men would not let them pass as officers,” dismissed Heeringen, according to Eelking. This attitude filtered down to the lower ranks and produced a spirit of overconfidence in the Hessian army. “‘The rebels looked ragged, and had no shirts on,” according to an excerpt from a Hessian officer’s diary quoted by Lowell. “’Our Hessians marched like Hessians; they marched incorrigibly, and the English like the bravest and best of soldiers. They, therefore, lost more men than we.’ ” The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton, December 26, 1776 by John Trumbull Yet it proved a costly mistake to underestimate the Americans. During the calm before the stormy Battle of Trenton, Col. Johann Rall ignored the advice of other German officers and refused to fortify his position across the Delaware River. “Let them come. What, outworks! We’ll meet them with the bayonet,” Rall boasted, according to Eelking. Rall’s arrogance led to disaster when Washington’s army launched a surprise attack on Christmas Day. Rall, severely wounded and covered with blood, surrendered his sword to Gen. Washington and died later that night in the home of a Quaker family. His men were taken prisoner and escorted to Virginia. When Hessians were taken captive, they and their American enemies had a chance to see eye-to-eye without vision blurred by gun smoke and rumors. A German soldier’s letter indicates some Hessians repented of their hubris. “In serious earnest, this whole nation has much natural talent for war and for a soldier’s life,” according to material quoted by Lowell. The Americans, however, were not so forbearing. “ ‘Big and little, young and old, looked at us sharply. The old women cried out that we ought to be hanged for coming to America to rob them of their freedom; others brought us bread and wine,’” according to the diary of Cpl. Reuber, quoted in Eelking. Due to the wild myths and exaggerated newspaper reports, most Americans expected to see bloodthirsty barbarians and were rather surprised by what they found instead. “Great crowds gathered at every place to see the dreaded Hessians, whose reputation had spread far and wide. Many expected to see wild robbers and murderers, with terrible angry faces––devils in human form—and beheld only neat soldiers, preserving, even in their misfortune, cleanliness, order and discipline. They were looked upon with astonishment, and sometimes with real or affected anger, and then they were abused and even stones were thrown at them,” according to Eelking. George Washington was quick to cure this ill feeling by issuing a proclamation. Washington declared that the British had forced the Hessians to fight and that the Germans should be treated as friends instead of enemies. This changed American attitudes and the Hessian POWs soon found themselves showered with food and kind treatment. The German prisoners also were favored with the attention of American women. A German soldier quoted by Lowell wrote that “women stood by dozens all along our road, passed us in review, laughed mockingly at us, or from time to time dropped us a mischievous courtesy and handed us an apple.” Other Hessians quartered in Maryland were glad to find fellow Germans. Many South German settlers there, particularly Swabians, ransomed their compatriots and welcome them to live in their communities. A large majority of German mercenaries refused to desert. Despite attempts by Congress to recruit them into the Continental Army, most remained steadfast in performing their military duty. Some waited until the end of the war to ask permission to stay in America. At the end of the war, German mercenaries once feared as barbarous raiders made their home in America. Those who returned to Germany numbered about 17,313 (about 58% of those deployed, according to Lowell). Returning to their native land, many received heroes’ welcomes. Whether or not the Waldeck troops were actually conveyed to their homes in carriages remains to be discovered, but Eelking tells us that the Hessians’ story in America became the subject of German folk songs and sayings. In America, the Hessians have been largely forgotten over the years. Many fought and died here, while others stayed and vanished into American society. If he is fortunate enough to cross the mind of an American today, the nameless Hessian soldier might find himself conjured by imagination into the formidable specter in Washington Irving’s legend: “The dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region, and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air…is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War; and who is ever and anon seen by the country folk, hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind.”

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The Impending Crisis Of The South By Hinton R. Helper

The Impending Crisis Of The South By Hinton R. Helper Thoughts On Hinton Rowan Helper’s Book “The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It” Hinton Rowan Helper claimed that “an irrepressibly active desire to do something to elevate the South to an honorable and powerful position among the enlightened quarters of the globe” drove him to publish The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It. The peculiar 1857 treatise warned that Northerners were taking advantage of the slave system to make economic pawns out of their Southern brethren. Hinton R. HelperHelper was no moralizing Yankee; he was a native Southern, born into a slave-holding family in North Carolina in 1829. An adventurer and a writer, Helper had already traveled to the California gold fields and written about those experiences when he tackled Impending Crisis. He used his new book to champion the interests of the non-slaveholding Southerners who made up the majority of the region’s population. He contended that wealthy planters, whom he provocatively described as “the slave-driving oligarchy” and “chevaliers of the lash” who spent their time “lolling in…piazzas,” used the slave system to maintain power—thereby stagnating the South’s cultural and industrial evolution and hindering the fortunes of middle-class Southern farmers and businessmen. Helper did not think slavery was morally wrong—he in fact became a rabid white supremacist after the war—but he believed it did not provide a proper economic model to advance the South. In 12 chapters, Helper used tables and charts to compare Southern industrial and agricultural production and wealth with the North’s, debunked the perception that the Bible sanctioned slavery and weighed literacy and educational rates of the regions. In all comparisons, the North came out on top. Though he wrote most of the book in Baltimore, Helper had to have it printed farther North, as Maryland law forbade the printing of any tract that could entice “people of color” to aggressive action against their masters. That, he claimed, indicated slave-owners had successfully infringed on freedom of speech. To end slavery, Helper backed re-colonization of slaves to Africa, but even advocated slave-against-master violence if necessary. Although Helper hoped his Dixie comrades would accept Impending Crisis “in a reasonable and friendly spirit” and “as an honest and faithful endeavor to treat a subject of enormous import,” he quickly became persona non grata in the South. The “free soil” Republican Party, however, quickly saw an advantage in the book and used it as campaign propaganda for the 1860 presidential election. Abraham Lincoln rewarded Helper by appointing him U.S. consul in Buenos Aries, a post he held from 1861 to 1866. Helper struggled after returning from Argentina, diving deeply into racial prejudice, perhaps in an effort to regain the graces of some Southerners, and concocting a failed trans-Americas railroad scheme before committing suicide in Washington, D.C., in 1909. “The world had wrestled with him and thrown him,” the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal observed in his obituary. “His mind was shattered and his heart broken. Friendless, penniless, and alone, he took his own life, and died at the age of eighty—this man who had shaken the Republic from center to circumference and who at a critical period had held and filled the center of the stage.” Often overshadowed by Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Helper’s Impending Crisis is nonetheless one of the most interesting and influential books relating to the sectional crisis—yet most people have never heard about it. The book combines sound history and reasoning with whim, and screed against the slave-owning class—“Down with the Oligarchy!”—with pleas for the Southern middle class to accept his theory. Despite its unevenness, the volume comes off as prescient. Helper predicted nothing would really be settled until the “Flag of Freedom shall wave triumphantly alike over the valleys of Vir­ginia and the mounds of Mississippi.”

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Museum Purchases Artifact that Rewrites British Army’s Racial History

Museum Purchases Artifact that Rewrites British Army’s Racial History The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers Museum (Royal Warwickshire Regiment) in Warwick, England has acquired a World War I-era memorial plaque commemorating the first commissioned officer from an ethnic minority background in the British Army. Lt. Euan Lucie-Smith, born in Jamaica on Dec. 14, 1889, was of multiracial heritage. His parents were John Barkley Lucie-Smith, a descendant of white civil servants, and Catherine “Katie” Lucie-Smith, whose father Samuel Constantine Burke was a distinguished Jamaican politician of black heritage who advocated for social justice and civil rights. Commissioned into the British Army on Sept. 17, 1914, Lucie-Smith was killed in action on April 25, 1915 during the Second Battle of Ypres—nearly three years before Walter Tull, who previously was thought to be the British Army’s first commissioned multiracial officer. This discovery makes Lucie-Smith’s bronze memorial plaque an artifact of great historic significance. “It represents a first. The first officer from an ethnic background to be commissioned into the British Army, to be commissioned into a British regiment, and sadly to die on the battlefield,” Lt. Col. (Ret’d) John Rice, Chair of Trustees of the museum, told the BBC. Now Lucie-Smith will be among those honored in the museum’s collection. The museum tells the history of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, which later became the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. The regiment counts many British military heroes among its sons, most notably Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery and Field Marshal William Slim, and including soldiers killed by the S.S. while defending Wormhoudt, France in 1940 and others who fought at Sword Beach on D-Day in 1944. “He [Lucie-Smith] shows the contribution of the Commonwealth countries in the Great War,” curator Stephanie Bennett told Military History in an interview. “He is a link between the past and the present as soldiers from the Commonwealth countries continue to play an important part in the British Army today,” said Bennett. “It is an important story because it also shows the diversity of the British Army.” Lucie-Smith’s story, largely forgotten, came to light with the auction of a memorial plaque by Dix Noonan Webb. Auctioneers had estimated the so-called “dead man’s penny” memorial—a bronze plaque given by the King to the nearest next of kin of men and women who died during World War I—would be sold for between £600 to £800. However, the museum won a fierce competition to obtain the plaque at auction and, thanks to community effort, managed to get the plaque at a hammer price of £8,500. With added commission and VAT, the total amounted to £10,540—which was 13 times the original estimate. “Indeed, this was an exceptional sum for a World War I memorial plaque; it was certainly a lot of money,” said Bennett, expressing gratitude to museum trustees, grant providers and individual donors for their assistance. “It was very much a team effort and acquiring the plaque would not have been possible without everybody.” Lucie-Smith, who served in the 1st Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, came from what would be called a “traditional officer class,” according to Bennett. He attended two public schools in England. In a strange coincidence, Lucie-Smith was a boarding student in 1904 at St. John’s House in Warwick, where the museum is currently located. The youngest of three children, he was commissioned into the Jamaica Artillery Militia on Nov. 10, 1911. He was killed at St. Julien on April 25, 1915 during the Second Battle of Ypres. An eyewitness reported that he sustained a shot wound to the head. “Casualties were heavy that day,” according to Bennett. “He was one of 12 officers who were killed at that action and six were wounded. Five hundred other ranks were also killed, wounded or missing.” Lucie-Smith was unmarried and left behind no direct descendants, although he has living relatives. He has no known grave. His memory is preserved on the second and third panels of the Ploegsteert Memorial in Belgium. “Euan sadly died three days after his father, so his mother was grieving for both loved ones at the same time,” said Bennett. His memorial plaque, inscribed with the words, “He died for freedom and honour,” is planned to be displayed at the museum at St John’s House in Warwick in spring next year. “We hope to display the plaque in the Easter school holidays when visitors, especially people from Warwickshire will be able to see it for the first time,” Bennett said. “We can carry out more research, display it in a case on its own and publicize the occasion. I am sure that we will plan a ceremony for the re-opening of the museum at a later date at Pageant House in Warwick which will hopefully either be at the end of 2021 or early in 2022.” Afterwards the historic plaque will be on loan next year to the National Army Museum in London as part of a temporary display from after Easter to the end of September 2021.

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History with a Twist: an Interview with Sarah Vowell

History with a Twist: an Interview with Sarah Vowell SARAH VOWELL IS a social commentator and author of unconventional books on American history, including Assassination Vacation (a travelogue of political violence in America), The Wordy Shipmates (limning the travails of New England’s Puritans) and, most recently, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States (an explanation of how a young French aristocrat came to play a significant role in the American Revolution). The Oklahoma native has also been a contributor to the public radio program This American Life. Your background is in language and art history, and your first book was about the experience of listening to the radio for a year. Why write about American history? I’m no math whiz but isn’t history half of art history? Try describing Guernica without getting into what happened in Guernica. Come to think of it, my books do have an inordinate amount of statuary. Professionally, I dabbled in various topics and formats my first decade as a writer by necessity to pay the bills. Luckily, I fell in love with historical research and writing right around the time I realized I was a terrible reporter because I don’t like to pry. I’m really not so good with the living. But a refrigerated archive full of brittle missionary letters? I’m home. You’ve been praised and criticized for your approach. Are you trying to make history fun? Not necessarily, or at least not always, considering history includes the Black Death and Wounded Knee. Does your serious research get overlooked amid the talk about your breezy style? I am sort of confused by this, what with my books being full of wars, Indian massacres, racism, murder, epidemics, handwringing about imperialism in general and how the Native Hawaiians lost control of their country in particular. Then I realized most people don’t actually read the books. They just know me for joshing around about them for five minutes every now and then on The Daily Show. I remember once showing up to do a reading at the Brooklyn Public Library and the poster for my talk had my picture and my name followed by the title “Funny Women.” I was there to talk about my book on the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony! Which isn’t a total drag, but I wouldn’t call Puritan Massachusetts entirely hardy-har-har. There was this whole haunting section on the Boston woman who was so driven mad by the theology of predestination she threw her baby down a well so that she could know for sure she wasn’t a member of the Elect and was definitely going to hell. I guess, though, that there are worse things than strangers thinking I’m more pleasant than I actually am. Is there research you’re particularly proud of? When I was researching the aftermath of the Lincoln assassination I braved a boat to Dry Tortugas during hurricane season to see the prison fort where a couple of the conspirators were locked up. Everyone else on the boat was going there to snorkel. I get seasick. Maybe I should italicize that and add an adjective: I get exceedingly seasick. I vomited for three hours there, spent a couple of hours chatting up a park ranger and I vomited for three hours all the way back to Key West. I did feel like a little champ for braving that day. I like telling that story to college students who are fed a bunch of romantic claptrap about finding their bliss. I want them to know that even if they’re lucky to get a job they like, that job will require performing a lot of tasks they will not like in any way whatsoever, so they should start steeling themselves. Have you gotten any negative reactions from scholars who deem your books too glib? I don’t read my reviews. I do die inside when readers at book signings say they do not read history books but they like to read mine. Who brags about a lack of intellectual curiosity? It’s nice if someone reads my book about Puritans, but I would hope they would also crack open John Winthrop and William Bradford’s primary accounts, Anne Bradstreet’s poems, Edmund Morgan and Perry Miller’s scholarly works and—only if they are very, very patient—the letters of Roger Williams. Did you like history class? I always found textbooks pretty ineffective. I was the sort of high school student who skipped school to hang out at the public library. I’ve only ever learned things through experience, reading real books or talking to old people. I did help my sister with my nephew’s eighth grade American history curriculum because she was homeschooling him that year. When we did a unit on immigration he read Vilhelm Moberg’s novels about Swedish immigrants to the United States. He interviewed his grandmother about her family history and the whole family took DNA tests, which, like all fruitful educational endeavors, only asked more questions than were answered. As part of the unit on the Revolution, he and his mom came with me while I was researching the Lafayette book to Monticello, Colonial Williamsburg and Yorktown. We also stopped at Jamestown and the homes of Madison and Monroe. He learned enough that he started saying things at dinner like, “I’ve decided that my favorite general is Nathanael Greene.” He’s a theater guy so at Colonial Williamsburg I rented him a costume and bought him a tri-cornered hat and he tried to blend in with the reenactors. Of the early American topics you’ve written about, which do you find most fascinating? Ours is such a disconcertingly visual culture I do love the resolute literary bent of the New England Puritans. They cared about words and learning and books (admittedly mostly one book) more than just about anything. They built Harvard because they were used to Cambridge-trained theologians interpreting the word of their god and they wanted their New World clergymen to know Latin, Hebrew and Greek. It’s this legacy that led one of their descendants to include a section on “the encouragement of literature” in the constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. What’s your take on the concept of “American exceptionalism”? Whether one believes that America is a destined force for good or a deluded bully harming the world (or, at times, both), I think we can all agree that our purported exceptionalism does not apply to public transportation. Anyone who thinks the United States is the greatest nation on earth has never changed planes at LaGuardia. Originally published in the February 2016 issue of American History magazine.

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HistoryNet Tour 2008

HistoryNet Tour 2008 Welcome to the new and improved Historynet.com!  Let me be the first to thank you for checking out our new site and looking in at this tour to see what is new, what has stayed the same, and what is coming down the pipeline.  So, let’s jump right in! Daily Quiz: One of our most popular and long time features, the Daily Quiz will definitely be on the new site.  However, we are currently revamping how we present the questions which will take us a little time to complete.  You can find it in the middle of the front page (see image below). HistoryNet Daily Quiz Location Today in History: The Today in History (TDIH) is still alive and well.  We are going to be expanding the amount of content we have for each day, but that will take some time to develop with our writers.  It is currently located in the bottom right of the front page (see image below); HistoryNet Today in History graphic Picture of the Day: This feature has been recently restored.  It can be found in the same box as Today in History (see image above). Magazine Issue Landing Pages: We are working on putting these back online.  The latest articles from all the issues are found in the respective magazine categories (see image below, left).  The very latest articles will be placed in the large marquee (see below, right) and the section just below it. HistoryNet Features and Articles News: Our history news is currently being developed to bring you more interesting and timely news. We want to pull from a variety of sources to provide a diverse mix of interesting history related news. Currently the news is set to bring in the latest news from the History News Network, though we hope to add other sites to broaden our news sources.  News is our first feature box (see image below). HistoryNet News Armchair General Features: Our partner site for Armchair General magazine publishes unique online articles which we like to highlight here.  These articles are generally related to military history, and often ask one of the most important questions for a historian — "What if?"   We hope you enjoy these features!  They can be found in the 4th box of our features (see image below). Monthly Spotlight and Recent Issues: With 10 magazines devoted to history, it is difficult to give them each the limelight they deserve.  Each month we will give one magazine extra attention by shouting to the world what makes each one so special.  This will display the latest feature articles from the chosen title (see image on left, below).  Similarly, the next feature box shows the latest issues as they come out and displays the Table of Contents, the letters from readers, and any related editorial. (see image on right, below) Historynet Recent Issues More forthcoming!

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Hitler Hoped to Destroy London With His V3 Supergun

Hitler Hoped to Destroy London With His V3 Supergun Germany built a vast subterranean complex in Mimoyecques, France, to house their secret weapon. Students of World War II are familiar with Nazi Germany’s V1 and V2 weapons that brought terror to southern England in the last year of the war. Less known is the V3—which the Nazis also called the “London Cannon”—a massive, multi-charge gun designed to shoot a 215-pound shell nearly 100 miles. Adolf Hitler hoped it would blast the British capital to smithereens. A ballistics engineer named August Coenders sold the concept of a super cannon to the Führer in 1942. Coenders’s design called for an initial charge in the gun’s breechblock that would propel a 150mm shell into a huge, 139-yard-long barrel. The shell would then be accelerated through the barrel by successive detonations of 32 additional charges, creating a muzzle velocity of 1,640 yards per second. According to Coenders’s calculations, a deployment of 50 guns launching 3,000 rounds a day would saturate London with shells over a 15-square-mile area. But the practicalities of designing such a weapon and keeping it secret from the enemy would soon cause Coenders no end of problems. Those problems have been preserved for posterity in the Mimoyecques (pronounced “me-mo-e’-eck”) museum in northern France, 12 miles southwest of Calais, the nearest port to England across the English Channel. It’s deep in the countryside and not a particularly accessible site, but then that’s why the Germans chose this place to install its V3 cannon. The V3’s design called for groups of five guns—arrayed within chambers carved from solid chalk—with 150mm shells accelerating through the 139- yard-long barrels via 32 successive booster charges. (National Archives) Hitler entrusted the V3 project to Armaments Minister Albert Speer. Speer’s first task was to select a suitable location in which to construct the necessary cavernous bunkers. Of paramount importance for any potential gun site was its proximity to London, but the Germans chose Mimoyecques in June 1943 for several additional reasons. Six miles from the coast, it was too far inland to be targeted by Royal Navy guns or a commando raid. It was also close to a railway line, along which munitions, materials, and workers could be transported. Finally, the geological structure of Mimoyecques was ideal—the hill of solid chalk reached a depth of 110 yards, ensuring stability for the weapon’s foundations. It’s easy to miss the Mimoyecques museum from the roadside. Were it not for half a dozen flags fluttering on their poles, I might have driven past the site. Walking the short distance from the car park to the reception center, I pass a concrete slab set in the ground, which, I learn later, was built to a thickness of 16 feet to protect the muzzles of five guns beneath. Inside the reception center, one staff member raises an eyebrow at my attire and advises me that shorts and a T-shirt might not be adequate 100 feet below ground at a temperature of 50 degrees. I pull a sweater from my backpack that I’d packed at the last moment, and boy was I glad. Within Mimoyecques’ labyrinth of tunnels (above) is a replica 6-inch-diameter V3 gun barrel (below). (David Crossland/Alamy) (Danita Delimont/Alamy) Workers, numbering between 1,200 and 1,500 in total, began arriving in June 1943. Some were skilled engineers from Schachtbau und Tiefbohr, a German company that specialized in underground construction, but the backbreaking excavation work was done by the Reich’s Organisation Todt, which undertook a vast array of engineering projects in Germany and its conquered nations. At Mimoyecques, Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and Poles were bused in from their spartan camps a few miles west to slave for 12 hours at a time. Their job was to build two identical bunkers, 3,000 feet apart. In all, the intention was to have 10 inclined weapons chambers, 138 yards long, dug into the earth at an angle of 50 degrees, with each chamber housing five guns—50 in total. The Germans also built two railway tunnels 100 feet underground and 650 yards long in order to bring supplies and ordnance for the planned garrison of 1,200 men. This material would be stored in a large network of galleries carved off the railway tunnels. I exit the reception center and descend down a concrete walkway, leaving behind me the light and warmth of the surface. I feel both nervous and excited as I listen to the echo of my footsteps. The network of tunnels is well-lit but nonetheless I shiver, and not just because of the temperature. In the human psyche the subterranean has sepulchral connotations, and this sense is reinforced in Mimoyecques: the museum, open to the public from April to October, closes for six months in fall and winter and becomes one of the biggest bat sanctuaries in France. If bats give you the creeps, don’t worry; they make themselves scarce during the summer months. It was not bats but the British who made life disagreeable for the engineers and laborers. In September 1943, as construction was ongoing, Allied reconnaissance photographs detected abnormal activity at Mimoyecques. In November the Royal Air Force bombed the site, and although the damage was minimal, the Germans now knew the British were onto them. Allied bombers pockmarked the site in a sustained air campaign in 1943-44. (National Archives) All this is explained in 15 billboards in English located throughout the 650 yards of chambers. A brief video playing on one of the walls shows a virtual reconstruction of how the Germans expected the cannon to wreak havoc on London. Then there are the relics: the rotting husk of an excavator once used for tunneling and a small wagon that carried the chalk rubble to the surface. As the workers toiled underground, Coenders continued to test his design, but the results weren’t good. The barrel was constructed in numerous sections, each one about 10 feet in length, but trials found that this produced a brittleness that didn’t allow sufficient muzzle velocity for the shells to reach London, about 93 miles northwest. In November 1943 Speer reduced the planned number of V3 guns from 50 to 25, and in April 1944 cut the number again to three batteries of five guns each. Of course, the British knew none of this; they were aware only that something big was being constructed at a site near the Channel coast with openings on the surface facing London. When the first V1 rockets—the “doodlebugs” that my father still remembers watching flying overhead toward London as a six-year-old—began hitting southern England in mid-June, the Allies intensified their bombing campaign against Mimoyecques. In total, between November 1943 and August 1944, British and American aircraft dropped 4,102 tons of bombs on Mimoyecques. The nearby village of Landrethun-le-Nord was flattened and had to be rebuilt after the war, but because of the depth of the chambers and the 157,000 cubic yards of concrete that had been cast inside, only 11 workers were killed in the raids. There is a memorial to these workers inside one of the side chambers, as there is to the most famous Allied airman killed while raiding Mimoyecques, U.S. Navy lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy and copilot Lieutenant Wilford J. Willy were flying a converted B-24 Liberator packed with explosives toward the site as part of Operation Aphrodite. This ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful initiative envisaged destroying important Nazi targets such as V-weapon sites and U-boat pens by converting B-24s into precision-guided missiles. The aircraft would be piloted into the air by a skeleton crew, who would bale out once airborne, leaving the flying bomb to be directed to the target by radio control from an accompanying “mother” plane. Kennedy and Willy took off on August 12, 1944, but as the aircraft climbed over eastern England, it exploded. The memorial deservedly honors the courage of Kennedy, but unfortunately Willy’s name is omitted. Though the technology for what today are called drones was still dangerously primitive, another military innovation had already derailed Mimoyecques’ V3 program prior to Kennedy’s ill-fated mission. On July 6, 16 RAF Lancasters each released a 12,000-pound “Tallboy” bomb over the V3 site from a height of 25,000 feet. Packed with 5,500 pounds of powerful explosives, these 21-foot-long steel bombs hit Mimoyecques at supersonic speed, generating shock waves below ground similar to a small earthquake. Several of the gallery arches collapsed as the bombs struck, bringing down tons of rubble that blocked the gun chambers. While the Germans abandoned the site in August 1944, there was one last big explosion to rock Mimoyecques when, on May 14, 1945, the British Army destroyed the two bunkers with 36 tons of TNT to ensure the site could never be used to bring terror to Britain. As Winston Churchill said in a speech that same week, the discovery of “multiple long range artillery which was being prepared against London…might well have seen London as shattered as Berlin.” One end of the tunnel system was partially reopened in the 1980s, and it’s here that the museum has been situated since 2010. There are half a dozen guided tours annually to parts of the site that are normally out-of-bounds, including the surface area turned into a lunar landscape by the devastating Allied bombing. It takes me an hour and a half to tour the tunnels and read all the billboards. I emerge blinking into the bright, warm sunlight. It had been an informative visit, but I’m glad to be back on the surface—and, as a Londoner, I’m relieved that Hitler never saw his V3 in action. ✯ WHEN YOU GO  The Mimoyecques complex, on the outskirts of the village of Landrethun-le- Nord, is seven miles from the rail station of Calais- Fréthun, which is serviced by regular high-speed trains from Paris (approximately two hours) as well as three daily Eurostar trains from London. Renting a car at Calais-Fréthun will allow you to explore the region fully, though there is also a taxi stand at the station; a round trip to the complex is approximately $50. WHERE TO STAY AND EAT The nearest decent hotel is the Hôtel de la Baie de Wissant, six miles west on the Atlantic coast. Wissant was a popular resort in the interwar years, and its golden beach is a reminder of why. Less tranquil is the port city of Calais, which has numerous hotels and restaurants. The museum’s reception center sells a small range of soft drinks and snacks. WHAT ELSE TO SEE AND DO Ten miles west of Mimoyecques is the Museum of the Atlantic Wall at Audinghen, housed in one of four casemates that composed a battery of German coastal artillery. La Coupole, a World War II museum inside one of the launching bases of the V2 rocket, is 30 miles southeast of Mimoyecques and also boasts a 3D planetarium. ✯ This article was published in World War II’s October 2020 issue.

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https://www.historynet.com/hitlers-secret-attack-on-the-worlds-largest-fort.htm

Hitler’s Secret Attack on the World’s Largest Fort

Hitler’s Secret Attack on the World’s Largest Fort German paratroopers face heavy fire during their 1940 attack on Belgium's Fort Eben Emael. (akg-images) JUST BEFORE DAWN, more than 80 elite German paratroopers gathered in an airfield hangar to listen to final instructions from their commander. Their mission? A bold attack on the world’s strongest fortress and an enemy that outnumbered them nearly 10 to 1. ‘Airplanes are overhead,’ one Belgian soldier reported. ‘Their engines have stopped! They stand motionless in the air’ It was May 10, 1940, and all across Germany thousands of troops were preparing to invade Belgium and the Netherlands, the first strike of Adolf Hitler’s blitzkrieg into the west. Yet the campaign’s success hinged in large part on this small unit. At 3 a.m., the hangar’s lights were extinguished, its doors rolled open, and the troops marched onto the tarmac. Loudspeakers filled the air with the stirring tones of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” and the men climbed into gliders. Eleven planes stood ready, packed with guns, ammunition, grenades, and five tons of a new, powerful explosive. The glider had never been used in combat; indeed, the Germans had cloaked their new weapon in great secrecy. Now they were about to unleash it with devastating effect. Hitler and the German High Command began to plan an invasion of Belgium, the Netherlands, and France soon after taking Poland in September 1939. The main thrust was to go through the Ardennes region that stretches into Luxembourg, southern Belgium, and northern France. But the attack was to start farther north, in northeast Belgium. Tactically, one of Hitler’s biggest obstacles was Fort Eben Emael. Looming over Belgium’s border with the Netherlands, Eben Emael sat astride the planned invasion route. Its guns protected the city of Maastricht to the north, the roads leading west from Maastricht, and, most important, three bridges over the Albert Canal. Hitler’s tanks and armies would have to cross those bridges to strike the heart of Belgium. Located just miles from Germany and designed specifically to defend against that menacing neighbor, Eben Emael seemed impregnable. It was the world’s biggest and strongest fortress, covering more than 175 acres and housing some 1,200 men. Built into a ridge, it had nearly five miles of underground tunnels, reinforced-concrete walls, and an earthen roof almost impervious to artillery fire or aerial bombing. The east wall of the triangular fort ran atop the Albert Canal and soared 200 feet above the water level, making a tank assault impossible. A 450-yard antitank ditch offered similar protection along the west wall. Barbed wire, hedgehogs, and minefields defended the remaining approaches. The fort also bristled with steel-­reinforced casements and armor-reinforced cupolas; its armament included 120mm and 75mm artillery pieces, 60mm antitank guns, antiaircraft guns, and mounted machine guns, all coordinated to provide mutual cover. According to glider historian Robert Mrazek, the Germans had concluded that a conventional assault on Eben Emael would cost thousands of lives and take months—too long for a blitzkrieg. Hitler is said to have come up with the idea of landing a commando force of paratroopers on the fort’s earthen roof to take out the enemy guns and trap the Belgian soldiers inside, ensuring a safe crossing of the Albert Canal for the Wehrmacht tanks and troops. General Kurt Student, commander of Germany’s airborne forces, decided to use gliders, which could approach the fort silently. At Hitler’s urging, Student devised a four-pronged surprise attack that would simultaneously target the three vital bridges and Eben Emael. TRAINING BEGAN IN NOVEMBER 1939 in a large, remote area at Hildesheim, near Hanover in north Germany. Student chose Captain Walter Koch, an experienced paratrooper and commander of 1st Company, Parachute Regiment 1, to lead the 480-man mission. Koch created four assault groups—one to take each of the three bridges, and a fourth to capture Eben Emael. This last detachment, given the code name Granite, was led by 23-year-old First Lieutenant Rudolf Witzig—an unusual assignment for such a junior officer. Preparations began under tight security. The men did not wear air force insignia. No leave was granted, and calls and mail were screened. “Once we ran into some girls we knew and the whole unit had to be transferred,” recalled Sergeant Major Helmut Wenzel, Granite’s senior enlisted officer. Any man who leaked word would be executed. Witzig had 85 men in his command—11 glider pilots and 74 veteran combat engineers qualified as paratroopers. Yet everyone had to be trained on the DFS 230 glider, which had been specifically built for the Luftwaffe. With a steel-tube fuselage nearly 40 feet long and a 72-foot wingspan, the DFS 230 had a maximum gliding speed of 180 miles an hour. The roof of Eben Emael afforded only a short landing space, so the gliders’ wheels were dropped after takeoff and the nose skid was wrapped with barbed wire and metal strips. In training, the pilots found they could land in just over 20 yards. Each glider would carry a squad of seven or eight men armed with weapons and equipment that included 9mm MP 38 submachine guns, 7.9mm MG 34 light machine guns (most with bipods and 75-round saddle drum magazines), 7.9mm Kar 98k rifles with detachable grenade launchers, and M35 flamethrowers. The men would also have a new weapon: the hollow charge, a dome-shaped explosive with a concave bottom that focused the blast in a single direction. The biggest of these charges weighed 110 pounds and had to be carried by two men; there was also a 27.5-pound version. Rehearsals for the raid were meticulous. The men studied aerial photos of the fort as well as a large sand-table model. A German contractor who helped build the fort provided blueprints that were used to construct a scale mockup, complete with large guns and fields of fire. Witzig’s men ran through their assignments there, and at the lieutenant’s urging, they were quietly taken to the Sudetenland to practice on former Czech fortifications. BY MARCH 1940, Koch’s detachments were ready. The gliders had been secretly moved west in furniture vans to heavily guarded hangars at the departure airfields, near Cologne. Tension was high; the men knew that the time for attack was near and much depended on them. They would land at their targets only minutes before the army stormed across the Dutch-Belgian frontier. Finally, on the evening of May 9, the men received the fateful command: Tomorrow at dawn. They had a final hot meal of sausages, potatoes, and coffee. Ju-52/3m aircraft that would tow the gliders to their target began to arrive and taxi up to the hangars. Ground crews pushed the gliders out to the runway, where they were hooked up to the Junkers. As they waited, the men drank coffee, smoking and talking nervously. Sergeant Wenzel distributed energy pills and made sure each man completed his will. Finally, Witzig ordered them to fall in and head to their gliders. The Junkers sputtered and roared to life, taxied out, struggled down the runway, and took off into the dark sky. EBEN EMAEL WASN’T TOTALLY UNPREPARED for the attack. Engine noise from the Ju-52s had roused Dutch antiaircraft guns around Maastricht, and their blasts were heard at the fort. But the Belgians were startled by these strange, silent apparitions emerging from the darkness. “Airplanes are overhead,” one reported. “Their engines have stopped! They stand motionless in the air. An antiaircraft gunner on the roof began firing. Tracers and bullets tore through the fabric covering of the gliders. The first plane to land leveled off in a flat glide and put down at 4:25 a.m. on top of an antiaircraft machine gun pit. The startled Belgians threw up their hands in surrender, but the Germans came under fire from another gun and scrambled to silence it with grenades and submachine gun fire. Within minutes, eight other gliders swooped in and landed; two were missing, including Lieutenant Witzig’s plane. Sergeant Wenzel took command, but the squads needed little direction. Each had been assigned casements or cupolas to neutralize. The first target for the squad led by Sergeant Hans Niedermeier was the fort’s observation cupola, from which spotters would direct artillery fire. Niedermeier ran to it carrying the top section of a 110-pound hollow charge; another man followed carrying the bottom part. They centered the charge on the steel dome, set the fuse, ran down the slope, and threw themselves on the ground. The charge punched through, killing the men inside and wrecking the equipment. Niedermeier’s squad next attacked a 75mm gun in a casemate, this time placing a 27.5-pound hollow charge under the gun’s barrel. The explosion blew the Belgian gunners from their seats and against the wall, killing two. The Germans entered through the breach, ran through the smoke to the casement’s stairwell leading inside the fort, then sent long bursts of submachine gun fire down into the interior. Clearly, the hollow charge was a devastating weapon. During the first 10 minutes of the assault, the men successfully attacked nine positions. The hollow charges destroyed nine 75mm cannons. Despite heavy fire from the Belgians, the men carried out their mission bravely and with great skill. When one of the hollow charges failed to penetrate an armored dome housing twin 120mm cannons, they dropped small charges down the barrels, destroying the guns. When machine guns opened up from an embrasure in the fort’s southern corner, they cut through the barbed wire and silenced the gunfire with a flamethrower. Within 15 minutes, Sergeant Wenzel later recalled, the Germans had disabled all of the guns that threatened the canals and the roads leading from Maastricht. At 5:40, he radioed Koch: “Object reached; everything in order. THE GARRISON ITSELF, meanwhile, was in chaos. When the attack began, only about 750 soldiers were in the fort; most of the others were on leave or quartered in nearby villages. The besieged soldiers tumbled into the fort from the roof and told of planes with no engines appearing silently out of the night sky. “What is going on above us?” wrote a Belgian chaplain in his diary. Adding to the confusion, the Germans had dropped explosive charges and smoke bombs down ventilation shafts into the fort’s interior. The Belgian fortress commander, Major Jean F. L. Jottrand, ordered artillery in the area to fire onto the top of the fortress. Wenzel in turn radioed for air support, and in 20 minutes Ju-87B Stukas were screaming down on enemy artillery. At about 6:30, two hours after the assault began, another glider swept in and landed on the fort. Out leaped Lieutenant Witzig. According to the Granite leader’s postwar account, the tow rope on his plane had broken shortly after takeoff. After landing in an open field, Witzig seized a car, drove to a village, and contacted base. A Ju-52 soon arrived, hooked up Witzig’s glider, and towed it into the air to complete the mission. Together, Witzig and Wenzel determined that the squad had achieved most of the mission’s objectives. Now, they had to keep the Belgian defenders bottled up until German ground forces arrived. The paratroopers fought alone through the morning and into the afternoon and night, sheltering in the destroyed casements and cupolas as the Belgian artillery continued to lob shells on the roof. To block the Belgians’ exits, they exploded the 110-pound hollow charges at stairways leading into the fort. Sparks flew as bullets and grenade fragments ricocheted off the fort’s interior walls, and men fought hand to hand in the dark, smoky tunnels. The Belgians launched counterattacks, only to be beaten back. Between midnight and 2 a.m. the next day, May 11, advance elements of the German army reached the fort. But it wasn’t until 8:30 a.m.—28 hours after the assault began—that the 51st Engineer Battalion arrived and relieved Witzig’s unit. The fight for Eben Emael was all but over. Around noon the Belgian commander Jottrand opened surrender talks with the Germans. Not willing to wait for the result, his troops began filing out of the fort under a white flag to lay down their weapons. The success of the mission was breathtaking. The other glider assault detachments had captured two of the three vital bridges over the Albert Canal, giving the German army’s motorized units access into Belgium. The Belgians had blown up the third bridge, at Kanne, but German engineers repaired it. At the fort, the Granite detachment had destroyed most of the casements and cupolas; Belgian casualties were 25 dead and 63 wounded. Witzig, meanwhile, counted 6 Germans dead and 15 wounded. Perhaps the only glitches in the operation came early, with Witzig’s late arrival and the absence of a second glider. But like Witzig, the troopers on the second glider had improvised. Released from its tow early, their plane had landed in Germany, well short of the fort. The men commandeered a truck and drove to one of the three targeted bridges, where they captured 121 Belgians. Several days after the assault, Hitler met Koch’s officers and presented each with the Ritterkreuz, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, then Germany’s highest award for valor. Each enlisted man received the Iron Cross 2nd Class; some men and NCOs, including Sergeant Wenzel, were awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class. While Hitler’s passion for paratroopers would cool a year later with the costly airborne attack on Crete [see “Dead on Arrival,” Winter 2010], he was buoyed by this success. The Allies, meanwhile, were shocked by the fall of the mighty Eben Emael. They were also mystified. Publicly, the Germans said nothing of the gliders or the hollow charges, announcing only that they had deployed a “new method of attack.” Rumors swirled suggesting Hitler had developed a paralyzing nerve gas. Life magazine gave readers a fanciful account by a Dutch officer that claimed German endive farmers married to Belgian women had planted explosives, having built tunnels beneath the fort under the guise of fertilizing their crops. “At the push of a plunger,” the soldier wrote, “the ‘fertilizer’ was detonated and whole sections of the fort were flung skyward.” Few would know the truth until years after the war. C. G. Sweeting is the author of several books, including Hitler’s Personal Pilot: The Life and Times of Hans Bauer. SIDEBAR 1940: Blueprint for the Osama bin Laden Mission? ADMIRAL WILLIAM MCRAVEN is America’s top special op- erations officer, the mastermind of last year’s assault on Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. And he’s drawn more than a few lessons from the Germans’ work at Fort Eben Emael. Nearly 20 years ago, McRaven, then a young Navy Seal officer, wrote Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: Theory and Practice, which digs deeply into the details of eight successful commando raids, including such gems as the 1942 British raid on docks in German-occupied Saint-Nazaire, France; the 1945 U.S. Ranger rescue of POWs from the Japanese camp at Cabanatuan in the Philippines; and the 1976 Israeli raid on Entebbe. McRaven singles out the German attack on Eben Emael as “one of the most decisive victories in the history of spe- cial operations.” The attack plan, he adds, “was brilliant both in its strategic vision and in its tactical simplicity.” He was enamored enough of the operation that he even tracked down and interviewed Rudolf Witzig and Helmut Wenzel, two key leaders of the raid. McRaven, who now heads the U.S. Special Operations Command, in Florida, has not publicly suggested that his bin Laden plan was influenced directly by any of these case studies. But as one commentator put it shortly after the raid, the book’s “Cliff ’s Notes were on display in Abbottabad.” Click For More From MHQ!

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https://www.historynet.com/hnefatafl-vikings.htm

Game of Kings: Was Hnefatafl the Vikings’ Best-Kept Strategic Secret?

Game of Kings: Was Hnefatafl the Vikings’ Best-Kept Strategic Secret? While romanticized portrayals of Vikings might suggest they charged recklessly into battle, archaeology suggests the ancient raiders were slightly more scientific in their approach to warfare—for example, honing their tactical skills with board games such as hnefatafl. Known as “the King’s Table,” hnefatafl was played on a checkered board or cloth that has similarities to chess—yet it encompasses a more aggressive and versatile style of gameplay. “In hnefatafl one player had a king, centrally placed on the board, defended by warriors. The other player had pawns positioned around the edges of the board. The first player won if he got his king to one of the four corner squares,” explained Dr. David Caldwell, president of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, in an interview with Military History. One unique feature about hnefatafl is that—as in wartime—attack and defense alternates between players. During each game, one player defends a centrally located position, while the other player attacks. Thus the game experience is completely different depending on which role a player takes. Roles can be reversed to give players a greater breadth of experience, allowing one to think from an opponent’s point of view and practice offense and defense. “People think that games were for leisure, but they were not. They were a way of practicing strategical and tactical warfare,” according to Viking expert Dr. Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson of Uppsala University in a March 2019 lecture. “There is a very important connection between martial life and gaming.” The Viking game of hnefatafl could be played using a board or cloth. Traces of the board game have often been found in Viking burial sites, including ships. The game has usually appeared in the graves of men with other evidence suggesting their identities as warriors or leaders. In the early 2000s, the game pieces were found among 40 male Viking warriors from Sweden buried in Estonia; the leader of the group, signified by his “ring sword,” had been buried with hnefatafl “king” piece placed ceremonially in his mouth. The game’s presence in male graves “suggests that there was a recognized connection between [board games] and the warrior ideology of elite men,’” according to historian Helene Whittaker in Atlas Obscura. Yet the Vikings did not attribute a grasp of military strategy to men only, according to archaeological evidence. A famed tomb called Bj 581, excavated at Birka, Sweden, contained the remains of an especially “mighty warrior”—interred on a lofty height next to a military garrison and marked with a boulder, the tomb of the deceased was filled with a rich array of battle gear, including a double-handed axe, fighting knife, lances, a sword, two shields and two bridled horses. Clearly the grave belonged to someone whom the Vikings felt deserved recognition in the art of warfare. Historians had always presumed this “professional warrior” was male—however, thorough forensic examinations confirmed it was actually a woman. The woman, like other Viking war chiefs, was buried with a hnefatafl game. The game included 28 pieces, among them a “king” and three dice. The corpse appears to have been entombed in a sitting position. The strategy game had been placed on her lap. The inclusion of the game in her grave suggests that, like many of her male contemporaries, she had made “strategic decisions, that she was in command,” Hedenstierna-Jonson, leader of the research team investigating Bj 581, told The New York Times in 2017. Game pieces were often made of expensive and fine materials, including whale bone, glass and amber. Despite this opulence, Caldwell suggests the game was more common than one might imagine. “Games like hnefatafl and chess may have been introduced amongst the elite but there is a plenty of evidence that they ended up being played by all ranks in society,” he said. Caldwell estimates that hnefatafl probably first appeared in Scotland during the Iron Age. A double-sided game board, scratched on slate, was found at Jarlshof in Shetland at the site of a former Viking settlement. Scandinavian influence found its way into Scotland’s culture through settlements in the Orkney, Shetland, Caithness and Sutherland regions, as well as the Western Isles. The famous Lewis chessmen discovered in Scotland may have been used to play hnefatafl. “We reckon that many of the Lewis pieces were used for hnefatafl as well as chess,” said Caldwell. “In hnefatafl there was a need for a king, pawns and other warriors to defend the king.” The Vikings also left a strong military mark on Scotland—including a warrior ethos and approaches to battle. “Much of the equipment, including ships, and weaponry used by medieval Scots, especially in the Western Isles and West Highlands, derived from Viking prototypes,” Caldwell told Military History. “Medieval society in those parts of Scotland was heavily militarized, and that was probably a way of life ultimately derived from Viking times.” Anyone curious to try hnefatafl will be relieved to know that the game still exists in replica form and is available to purchase. Rules come with game sets and are also available online. MH

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https://www.historynet.com/holding-the-farm-at-waterloo.htm

Holding the Farm at Waterloo

Holding the Farm at Waterloo In what author Brendan Simms rightly calls “an epic defence,” the 400-odd Hanoverian riflemen of the 2nd Light Battalion of the veteran King’s German Legion withstood French artillery barrages, repeated mass charges, cavalry attacks, and relentless sniping to hold the fortified farm at La Haye Sainte. The farm stood at the center of the allied line, at a crucial intersection on the road to Brussels. Taking it was essential to the French effort to crack the line and drive a wedge between the enemy armies. But for the long bloody afternoon of June 18, 1815, the vastly outnumbered Germans defeated all attempts to take their position. Simms’s meticulous research enabled him to deliver an hour-by-hour, yard-by-yard story of the officers and soldiers whose names and backgrounds personalize his account of a do-or-die stand that gives vivid meaning to the old command, “Hold this position.” BY EARLY AFTERNOON NAPOLEON KNEW that he had a major problem on his hands. First he saw that the smoke was not moving forward around La Haye Sainte, but hung tenaciously like a cloud over the buildings. Then he observed the pell-mell flight of most of General Jean-Baptiste Drout, compte d’ Erlon’s I Corps. To make matters worse, Napoleon knew that there were Prussians approaching from the northeast. He therefore dispatched a strong cavalry screen to shield the right flank until Marshal Emmanuel de Grouchy, who was now recalled from pursuing the Prussians, arrived. The emperor sent substantial infantry forces to keep the Prussians out of the village of Plancenoit on the eastern edge of the battlefield. His main headache, however, remained the stiff resistance put up by the Germans in La Haye Sainte—Napoleon later estimated their numbers at an entire division, that is, many thousands of men. The buildings formed a breakwater which shattered the cohesion of the French advance, and a bulwark which prevented him from bringing artillery up to blast the allied line at close range. Hippolyte Mauduit, who served as a grenadier in the Old Guard at Waterloo, recalls that it constituted a “veritable outworks.” The emperor needed more information. Perhaps for this reason, a daring lone cuirassier rode up to the barricade across the road which the riflemen had reassembled and reoccupied, peered over it and galloped off before the men manning it—who had assumed they were dealing with a deserter—had time to react effectively. Dodging the bullets they sent after him, the horseman must have reported that the position was still strongly held by the enemy. The emperor’s options were limited. Shelling the garrison into oblivion would take too long, at least with the caliber of guns—6- and 12-pounders and 5.5-inch howitzers—available to him. The sturdy masonry of the farm could withstand most of what the grand battery could throw at it, at least for quite some time. Its walls are so thick that even today a cordless landline phone cannot be used in it. His siege train of larger guns was too far away. Bringing up some light artillery pieces to break down the gate might theoretically have been possible, but would have been extremely risky in the face of unsuppressed rifle fire from the defenders; a similar deployment later in the battle led to the swift death of the gun crews at the hands of marksmen from the main allied line. There was nothing for it. The Germans would have to be dislodged by a direct infantry assault. There was a problem, however. Most of General Honoré Charles, comte Reille’s II Corps was embroiled at Hougoumont; Napoleon could not commit General Jean Mouton, comte de Lobau’s VI Corps or the guard until he was sure of the Prussians, and much of d’Erlon’s corps would remain a shambles for some time yet. Until they had been rallied, Napoleon could call only on Brigadier General Nicolas, baron Schmitz’s men around the orchard, and bring across some of Major General Pierre François Joseph Durutte’s 4th Division from the right flank. Oddly, the as yet uncommitted division of Reille’s II Corps on the left, Major General Baon Gilbert-Desiré-Joseph Bachelu’s 5th Division, remained, as its chief of staff, Colonel Trefcon, recalls, “l’arme à bras [with ordered arms] in the same position. We were given no orders.” Meanwhile, the French grand battery resumed its cannonade. Wellington, for his part, now focused almost exclusively on his center. He did not neglect Hougoumont, which was again reinforced, but he spent the rest of the battle close to the crossroads. Major General Sir John Lambert’s brigade was now moved up to behind the farm. The Prussians, too, could see the importance of the farmhouse. Count August von Thurn und Taxis, who was serving as the Bavarian liaison officer with Prussian General Field Marshall August Leberecht von Blücher, had a good view from the Prussian advance guard at Fichermont wood. The attack, he writes, “was being made with great violence at La Haye Sainte in an attempt to force the English out by bursting through their center. This would probably make a union of communication between our two armies impossible.” For this reason, Thurn und Taxis recalls, Wellington began to send ever more urgent pleas to Blücher for help. Some of the riflemen now took it in turns to fire from the loopholes, stepping back quickly after each round to reload and enable another marksman to take aim THE RESPITE IN LA HAYE SAINTE did not last long. Ney ordered another attack on the farm with 3,000 men. At around 3 p.m., two French columns appeared and assaulted both sides of the farm buildings at once. As before, the attackers raised a great din, yelling “Vive l’empereur,” “Avant mes enfants,” and other familiar cries. This time, though, they advanced with some hesitation, perhaps unsurprisingly given their previous reception. Observing this, an infuriated Ney sent his aide-de-camp, Octave Levavasseur, forward with orders to tell them to get a move on. He found two companies of sappers taking cover behind a bank. Their captain—who clearly did not expect to survive the assault—handed Levavasseur his card, saying “Monsieur aide de camp, take it, here is my name.” He then ordered the drummer to beat the charge, and the engineers surged forward to shouts of “En avant,” followed by the waiting infantry. Lieutenant Colonel Georg von Baring, commanding the 2nd Light Battalion, recalls that he had never seen such desperate courage and ferocity in the enemy. The Germans behind the barricade kept the enemy skirmishers at bay for a while, but when the French main force appeared they risked being overwhelmed. Graeme once again led his men back to the farm, telling Private Lindau to close and bar the gate. Some of the riflemen now took it in turns to fire from the loopholes, stepping back quickly after each round to reload and enable another marksman to take aim. Others lined the stand on the courtyard walls and fired on to the road below and into the orchard. Once again, the massed French suffered terribly, but some of them managed to seize hold of the protruding rifles, or to shoot through the gaps in the wall themselves. A number of defenders at the loopholes and in the courtyard were felled this way; more tumbled from the courtyard firing steps above them. At one point, the French temporarily gained control of the loopholes. Five legionnaires drove them off: Corporal Riemstedt and Riflemen Lindhorst and Lindenau were injured in the charge, for which they were later decorated. All the while, the enemy battered their axes furiously at the main gate, but they were unable to penetrate the stout oak. Baring’s weakest point was on the other side, where the missing door left the barn wide open to the field. Here the French piled in relentlessly, and were repeatedly shot down. Rifleman Ludwig Dahrendorf was one of those defending the barn; despite considerable loss of blood from three bayonet wounds, he refused to leave his post. Riflemen Christoph Beneke, a straggler from the 1st Light Battalion, and Fried­rich Hegener tried frantically to maintain the improvised barricade where the barn door had been; the latter suffered a bayonet wound to the leg in the process. He too refused his officers’ entreaties to retire from the fray in order to have his wounds seen to. Baring counted 17 dead enemy bodies, which soon provided a low wall behind which their comrades could shelter from the deadly German rifle fire. Once again, Baring directed operations from horseback, despite the fact that he presented an inviting target in the cramped courtyard. Another horse was shot beneath him, and his orderly—convinced that his master was dead—rode off with the spare horses. Baring simply grabbed one of the many riderless beasts milling around. These struggles along the perimeter lasted about an hour. The Germans held firm, for now, but as the pressure mounted it seemed only a matter of time before the French burst through the gate, or the barn, or surged over the courtyard walls. ‘The whole space between La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont appeared one moving glittering mass’ Once more, it was a cavalry attack which came to the aid of the garrison, this time a French one. At around 4 p.m. Marshal Michel Ney, mistaking the redeployment of the allied main line to escape artillery bombardment as a sign of a general retreat, ordered successive cavalry charges on the allied line between Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte to attack the squares on the reverse slopes. Observers describe a “boiling surf” of riders which swirled up the side and around the back of the farmhouse. As Captain William Siborne wrote, “the whole space between La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont appeared one moving glittering mass.” Behind La Haye Sainte, the men of the King’s German Legion line battalions were in the thick of it, forming “squares” of about 300 men each. Conditions in these formations—which could be a more or less perfect square of equal sides, or an oblong, or something altogether more ragged—were grim. The sergeants and officers shoved or cuffed the men, some of them mere frightened boys, back into formation each time musket or gunfire had opened the ranks, pausing only to check “deception” or “subterfuge” among those who had fallen to the ground. The dead were thrown out in front, the injured cowered in the center. In the middle of the square of the 5th Line Battalion, surgeon Georg Gerson patiently tended to the wounded, including those of neighboring Hanoverian formations, without regard to his own safety. His dedication and courage drew the admiration of the brigade commander, Colonel Christian Friedrich Wilhelm von Ompteda. Ney’s thousands of cavalrymen never broke any of the allied squares, but the popular image of a futile tide of riders ineffectually lapping at the edge of a solid rock of infantry is misleading. Some of the French cavalrymen tormented the squares by firing pistols into them at close range, while skirmishers on horseback played on them with carbines, trying to tempt them into pointless volleys beyond effective range. The Germans responded by posting sharpshooters to drive them off. In between attacks, Ney’s riders took cover in the many folds in the ground, where they were often invisible from the main allied line. Meanwhile, their commanders took up positions on nearby hillocks in order to observe the enemy and to seize the moment when they could be caught on the move. The result was a deadly game of rock, paper, and scissors played out around the farmhouse throughout the afternoon and early evening. Ompteda’s brigade had to disperse so as to escape the heavy artillery fire. “In order to destroy our squares,” Lieutenant Wheatley of the 5th Line Battalion recalled, “the enemy filled the air with shells, howitzers and bombs, so that every five or six minutes the whole battalion lay on its face, then sprang up again” when the danger had passed. In order to confront d’Erlon’s reformed infantry, however, it had to deploy in line. And in order to repel Ney’s cavalry, they had to form square, which in turn rendered them very vulnerable to shelling. Here timing and judgment meant the difference between survival and disaster. Around 3 p.m., as the second French attack began, the 5th King’s German Legion Line Battalion was once again ordered forward to assist the defenders. Once again it was menaced by French cavalry, and it was only with some help from nearby British horsemen that the Germans were able to form square and avoid the fate of the 8th Line Battalion and Lieutenant Colonel August von Klenke’s Lüneburgers. On another occasion, they were rescued by the King’s German Legion hussars. In theory, this pattern could repeat itself indefinitely, but, whereas the Germans had to be lucky all the time, the French cavalry needed to be lucky only once. As the cavalry storm raged around them, the farmhouse and its environs briefly became a little oasis of calm. Horsemen found it difficult to operate in the quadrilateral bounded by the barricade, sandpit, sunken road and the farm itself. The infantry assaults slackened a little during the charges, as the French foot soldiers made way for the horsemen to deploy. After the first failed assault, they withdrew disheartened along with the returning cavalry, the huzzas and jeers of the Germans ringing in their ears. For some vivid moments, Baring and his men had a ringside seat during the most dramatic events of the battle. He observed four lines of cavalry forming to the right in front of the farm: cuirassiers (heavy cavalry), followed by lancers (armed with long lances, as their name implies), then dragoons (technically mounted infantry but in practice heavy cavalry) and finally hussars (light cavalry). The defenders were not idle spectators, though. They knew that the riders were attacking their own divisional comrades on the reverse slopes, and that if they succeeded in that mission, another attack on the farm would not be long in coming. As the French cavalry passed the buildings, Baring ordered his men to concentrate all their fire on their exposed right flank. They raced out of the farm buildings to the west and poured fire into the enemy, presumably dodging back inside when any of them came too close. Numerous horses and riders were shot down, but “without paying the least heed,” the survivors pressed on towards the allied squares. Sergeant Georg Stockmann distinguished himself by not only shooting a cuirassier officer’s horse from under him, but also vaulting over the courtyard wall and taking the Frenchman prisoner under the fire and the eyes of the advancing enemy cavalry. One eyewitness was ‘shocked at the sight of broken armour, lifeless horses, shattered wheels, caps, helmets, swords, muskets, pistols’ scattered about, ‘still and silent’ It was not long, however, before the French renewed their infantry attacks. The German marksmen on the piggery and the courtyard walls blazed at them to terrible effect, particularly against their conspicuous officers. Private Lindau waged a personal vendetta against one commander, who had been directing the advancing columns. He had the Frenchman in his sights for some time, and eventually felled his horse, burying its rider under it. Not long after, the riflemen made another sally. The enemy nearest to hand were bayoneted; the rest fled. Lindau pursued them for some distance, until he saw the French officer, still pinned beneath his dead horse. The German grabbed his gold watch chain and when the officer raised his sabre to stop him, Lindau brained him with a rifle butt to the middle of his forehead. Swiftly, he cut loose the saddlebag, but when he turned to take his victim’s gold ring events intervened. “Get a move on,” his comrades called, “the cavalry are making a fresh charge.” Lindau ran to the rest of the men, who drove off the enemy with a volley. Looking around the highway, he noticed to his satisfaction that the French dead were piled up “more than a foot high” close to the barricade. In a gesture of mercy he paused to help a wounded man lying in a pool of water, crying out in pain with a bullet in his leg. Lindau grabbed his arms, while another rifleman took his legs, and together the two Germans carried the unfortunate to the courtyard wall, resting his head on the body of a dead comrade. Lindau also managed to relieve an enemy of a purse stuffed with gold coins. When he offered his haul to Baring for safekeeping, however, his commander refused. “Who knows what lies before us today,” he replied. “You must look after the money the best way yourself.” Shortly after, Lindau was shot in the back of the head. He refused Lieutenant Graeme’s order to go back for medical attention. “No,” he answered, “so long as I can stand I stay at my post.” The rifleman soaked his scarf with rum and asked a comrade to pour rum into the wound and tie the scarf around his head. Lindau then attached his cap to his pack, reloaded his rifle and returned to the fray. Despite his injuries, he joshed with Lieutenant Graeme on the platform above, warning him not to expose himself too much. “That doesn’t matter,” Graeme responded, “let the dogs fire.” Not long after, the lieutenant was wounded in the hand, which he bound up with a handkerchief. Lindau called out: “Now Captain [sic] you can go back.” “Nonsense,” Graeme replied, “no going back, that won’t do.” That officer was a mere 18 years of age. In the kitchen garden, the reinforcements from the 1st Light Battalion saw off all French attacks. At the far end, Corporal Diedrich Schlemm kept up a steady fire until a bullet in the lungs forced him to quit the fight. Corporal Henry Müller, one of the best marksmen in the battalion, continued his struggle against individual French officers, with the help of the two riflemen who reloaded his weapons between shots. This time he took aim at the commander of a column who approached waving his sabre and shouting, “Avancez!” When Müller killed the officer, his men immediately retired in disorder. Yet another corporal, Friedrich Reinecke, was posted with 10 men in a gap in the hedge from which he repelled repeated enemy attacks. Though heavily outnumbered, the riflemen had the advantage that the French line infantry found it difficult to bring their full volley fire to bear on a largely concealed and often prone enemy. They could often not even shoot unless the men in front of them stepped aside or were killed. Moreover, as light infantry, the men of Baring’s battalion were in their element at La Haye Sainte, often working in pairs as skirmishers had been trained to do. In relatively open ground, such as in the gardens, the man in front took aim and fired, while his partner reloaded, or covered him with a loaded weapon, before either moving forward, past his partner, or else waiting for his partner to fall back behind him, if the pressure up front was too great. This often created a bond between men, which became irrefragable over time, and contributed greatly to the cohesion and fighting power of light infantrymen. Baring was deeply touched by the courage of his men. “Nothing,” he recalled, “could curb the valour of our people,” who “laughed” in the face of danger. “These are the moments,” he wrote, “where one learns to sense what one soldier means to another and what the word comrade actually entails.” When the fighting subsided a little around 5 p.m., however, it became clear that the garrison was in a parlous situation. Baring frantically set the men to work repairing the damage wrought by French artillery and infantry. More critical still was the fact that the intense fighting had consumed most of the ammunition with which the Germans had begun the struggle. Baring therefore dispatched an officer back to his brigade commander urgently requesting a fresh supply of rifle rounds. Ompteda had none to give him, however. The wagon with the battalion reserve had overturned during the retreat the day before, and the field depots had run short of rifle ammunition. Besides, it was impracticable to move large quantities of cartridges into the farm as long as the main gate was exposed to direct French fire. Access via the back entrance was also problematic. “Swarms” of enemy skirmishers, Sergeant Major Edward Cotton of the 7th Hussars recalls, had “established themselves immediately under the crest of our position,” where they “cut off the communication between the farm and our main line.” The British riflemen in the sandpit nearby had plenty of cartridges, and could literally have thrown them into the courtyard, but as they belonged to another brigade, Baring probably didn’t ask them for any, and it is most unlikely that they were even aware of the shortage of bullets in the farmhouse. By now, in any case, Baring faced a new problem. Shortly after Graeme was wounded, Lindau heard a cry from the barn: “The enemy mean to get through here.” He took up position at the door, but Lindau had fired no more than a few shots when he suddenly noticed thick smoke under the beam. Despairing of penetrating, the attackers had set fire to the whole edifice. Luckily most of the straw had been removed for bedding the night before, but the blaze still spread rapidly. There was no shortage of water in the courtyard pond; the problem was that the Germans had nothing to carry it in. All the vessels and containers had been either burned overnight or ended up in one of the various barricades. Riflemen Wilhelm Wiese and Ludwig Dahrendorf immediately tore their caps off their heads, filled them with water and attempted to put out the fire, but to little avail. If the flames spread to the rest of the buildings, Baring would have to withdraw before his men were burned alive or asphyxiated by smoke. BY AROUND 5 P.M., LA HAYE SAINTE was the cause of intense concern. Napoleon was determined to take the farmhouse and blast his way through the allied center before the Prussians arrived. It must have been around this time that he ordered Brigadier General Jean Pegot’s brigade across from Durutte’s division on his right flank to launch another attack on the buildings. He also sent the Young Guard to throw the Prussians out of Plancenoit. Wellington, too, must have been concerned. Instead of a cascade of Prussians coming to his aid on the allied left wing, he now risked losing the battle in the center while Blücher’s men won it to the east. Conditions within the farm were growing critical. Quite apart from the burning barn, the constant shelling grated on the nerves of the garrison. The smoke, heat, dust, and the constant biting of cartridges must also have made the men very thirsty. For the seriously wounded, the situation must have been little short of hellish, though slightly better than for the enemy casualties crawling or lying outside the farm. Things were no better in the rest of the brigade. The 5th King’s German Legion Line were still formed in square close to the farm, beset alternately by artillery, infantry and cavalry, their situation growing ever more desperate. Ammunition carts blew up nearby, maiming men and beasts. One eyewitness was “shocked at the sight of broken armour, lifeless horses, shattered wheels, caps, helmets, swords, muskets, pistols” scattered about, “still and silent.” Here and there, frightened riderless mounts would rush back and forth, trampling on the dead and dying; some of them stood on only three legs, their shattered limb dangling uselessly. Several of these were shot to put them out of their misery, and Lieutenant Wheatley observed that “it would have been an equal charity to have performed the same operation on the wriggling, feverish, mortally lacerated soldiers as they rolled on the ground.” “Because of the nature of the terrain,” and because it was exposed to diverse threats, the battalion journal records, the 5th Line Battalion “was forced to remain mobile, sometimes forming square and sometimes deploying [in line].” French cavalry charged no fewer than five times, on occasion retiring out of range into a fold in the ground in front of the Germans. Their commander would then take up position on a nearby elevation and order his men forward again whenever he spotted an opportunity to catch the enemy unawares. Ompteda, who had taken refuge with the 5th Line Battalion after his horse was killed, asked several of his men to shoot down the French commander, but none was able to do so. After the fifth charge, he finally turned to Rifleman Johan Milius, a straggler from the 1st Light Battalion, who lay injured in the square, having been hit in the leg by grapeshot. He volunteered to have a crack, and after being carried to a firing position by several comrades, Milius blasted the unfortunate French colonel off his horse with his second shot. MHQ Excerpted from The Longest Afternoon: The 400 Men Who Decided the Battle of Waterloo, by Brendan Simms. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2015. This article originally appeared in the Summer 2015 issue (Vol. 27, No. 4) of MHQ—The Quarterly Journal of Military History with the headline: Holding the Farm at Waterloo Want to have the lavishly illustrated, premium-quality print edition of MHQ delivered directly to you four times a year? Subscribe now at special savings!

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Holiday Gift Guide 2012: Recommendations from World History Group’s Editors

Holiday Gift Guide 2012: Recommendations from World History Group’s Editors Looking for a gift for a history enthusiast? Try this list of suggested books, DVDs and other items, provided by the editors of World History Group’s magazines—and remember, a magazine subscription is a gift that lasts all year! To learn more about gift subscriptions to one of our magazines, just click on its name. American History The Day in Its Color: Charles Cushman’s Photographic Journey Through a Vanishing America, by Eric Sandweiss The Great American Hall of Wonders: Art, Science, and Invention in the Nineteenth Century, by Claire Perry George Rogers Clark: “I Glory in War,” by William R. Nester Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man, by Walter Stahr A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters, by Scott Reynolds Nelson America’s Civil War Shiloh 1862, by Winston Groom September Suspense: Lincoln’s Union in Peril, by Dennis Frye The Illustrated Battle Cry of Freedom, by James McPherson American Experience: Death and the Civil War, PBS, DVD Annals of the War Aviation History Bombs Away! The World War II Bombing Campaigns Over Europe, by John R. Bruning Airlines of the Jet Age: A History, by R.E. Davies The German Aces Speak: World War II Through the Eyes of Four of the Luftwaffe’s Most Important Commanders, by Colin Heaton and Anne Marie Lewis Into the Blue: American Writing on Aviation and Spaceflight, edited by Joseph Corn Skygirls: A Photographic History of the Airline Stewardess, by Bruce McAllister and Stephan Wilkinson British Heritage Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War, by John Stubbs Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable life of Katherine Parr, the Last Wife of Henry VIII, by Linda Porter The Ploughman’s Lunch and the Miser’s Feast: Authentic Pub Food, Restaurant Fare, and Home Cooking from Small Towns, Big Cities and Country Villages Across the British Isles, by Brian Yarvin Queen Elizabeth II: A Diamond Jubilee Souvenir Album, by Jane Roberts London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550–1750, by Robert O. Bucholz and Joseph P. Ward Civil War Times Terrible Swift Sword: The Life of General Philip H. Sheridan, by Joseph Wheelan Corinth 1862: Siege, Battle, Occupation, by Timothy H. Smith Freedom’s Cap: The United States Capitol and the Coming of the Civil War, by Guy Gugliotta The Union Forever: Lincoln, Grant, and the Civil War, edited by Glenn W. LaFantasie The Maps of Antietam, by Bradley Gottfried This Great Struggle, by Steven E. Woodworth Tarnished Victory: Finishing Lincoln’s War, by William Marvel War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861–1865, by James McPherson Military History The Generals, by Thomas E. Ricks Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year, by David Von Drehle Shattered Genius: The Decline and Fall of the German General Staff in World War II, by David Stone Military History: The Definitive Visual Guide to Objects of Warfare, Gareth Jones, senior editor The Lost History of 1914: Reconsidering the Year the Great War Began, by Jack Beatty MHQ Nonfiction The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo—and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation, by James Donovan The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943, by Robert M. Citino Shiloh 1862, by Winston Groom Masters of Command: Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, and the Genius of Leadership, by Barry Strauss Geronimo, by Robert M. Utley Fiction Waiting for Sunrise, by William Boyd 1356, by Bernard Cornwell See a more complete list at MHQ’s Reviews: Gift Books for the 2012 Holiday Season Vietnam The Boys of ’67: Charlie Company’s War in Vietnam, by Andrew Wiest Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam, by Lien-Hang T. Nguyen What it is Like to Go to War, by Karl Marlantes Agent Orange: History, Science and the Politics of Uncertainty, by Edwin A. Martini Soldiering on in a Dying War: The True Story of the Firebase Pace Incidents and the Vietnam Drawdown, by William J. Shkurti Wild West Geronimo, by Robert M. Utley Ned Wynkoop and the Lonely Road to Sand Creek, by Louis Kraft The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo—and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation, by James Donovan After Custer: Loss and Transformation in Sioux Country, by Paul L. Hedren So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812–1848, Vol. 1 in the Overland West series, by Will Bagley Maverick: The Complete First Season (1957) DVD. The long awaited first season of Maverick, the best TV Western of all time. World War II The War, directed by Ken Burns, on Blu-ray Always Faithful: US Marines in World War II Combat, the 100 Best Photos, by Eric Hammel Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, by Ben Macintyre Mission to Paris, a novel by Alan Furst Patton men’s cologne MONOPOLY – America’s World War II: We’re All in this Together edition

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Holiday Shopping Guide 2011: Recommended Books and More

Holiday Shopping Guide 2011: Recommended Books and More Looking for a gift for a history enthusiast? Try this list of suggestions provided by the editors of World History Group’s magazines. American History Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation, ed. by Alfred Young, Gary Nash and Ray Raphael The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies, by Alan Taylor David Crockett: The Lion of the West, by Michael Wallis Grant’s Final Victory: Ulysses S. Grant’s Heroic Last Year, by Charles Bracelen Flood American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900, by H.W. Brands America’s Civil War America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, by David R. Goldfield 1861: The Civil War Awakening, by Adam Goodheart Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz Lincoln on War: Our Greatest Commander-in-Chief Speaks to America, edited by Harold Holzer A Glorious Army: Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia From the Seven Days to Gettysburg, by Jeffry Wert Aviation History Bombs Away! The World War II Bombing Campaigns Over Europe, by John R. Bruning Come Up And Get Me: The Autobiography of Colonel Joe Kittinger, by Joe Kittinger and Craig Ryan How the Helicopter Changed Modern Warfare, by Walter J. Boyne Mission to Berlin: The American Airmen Who Struck the Heart of Hitler’s Reich, by Robert F. Dorr The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of American Aviation, by Thomas Kessner British Heritage Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070, by Robin Fleming London’s Classic Restaurants: A Guide to London’s Iconic Restaurants and Eateries, by Cara Frost-Sharratt The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century, by Ian Mortimer Civil War Times The Siege of Washington: the Untold Story of the Twelve Days That Shook the Union, by John Lockwood and Charles Lockwood The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, by Eric Foner Stuart’s Tarheels: James B. Gordon and His North Carolina Cavalry in the Civil War, 2nd Edition, by Chris J. Hartley Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia: A Statistical Portrait of the Troops Who Served under Robert E. Lee, by Joseph T. Glatthaar Decisions at Gettysburg: The Nineteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Campaign, by Matt Spruill Military History Give Me Tomorrow: The Korean War’s Greatest Untold Story, by Patrick K. O’Donnell What It Is Like to Go to War, by Karl Marlantes A History of the World in 100 Weapons, by Chris McNab Mr. and Mrs. Madison’s War, by Hugh Howard MHQ Neptune’s Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal, by James D. Hornfischer The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies, by Alan Taylor The First Clash: The Miraculous Greek Victory at Marathon and Its Impact on Western Civilization, by Jim Lacey See a more complete list at MHQ’s Reviews: Best Books of 2011. Vietnam Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency From Ford to Obama, by Marvin and Deborah Kalb No Sure Victory, by Gregory A. Daddis The Vietnam War: An Assessment by South Vietnam’s Generals, ed. with essays by Lewis Sorley The Vietnam War—A Chronology of War, ed. by Col. Raymond Bluhm Jr. Wild West Kit Carson: The Life of an American Border Man, by David A. Remley Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands, by Roger L. Di Silvestro Buffalo Bill: Scout, Showman, Visionary, by Steve Friesen Bandido: The Life and Times of Tiburcio Vasquez, by John Boessenecker The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral—And How it Changed the American West, by Jeff Guinn World War II Combat! The complete series on DVD Brothers, Rivals,Victors: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, and the Partnership that Drove the Allied Conquest in Europe,  by Jonathan W. Jordan Black Sheep: The Life of Pappy Boyington, By John F. Wukovits Always Faithful: U.S. Marines in World War II Combat, by Eric Hammel Dino D-Day: A frantic, team-based, first-person shooter about … Nazi dinosaurs

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Homesick Angel: Last Flight From Da Nang

Homesick Angel: Last Flight From Da Nang World Airways CEO Ed Daly defied U.S. authorities and led a daring mission to rescue women and children as the South Vietnamese army collapsed in 1975. A tsunami of more than a million refugees swept over the coastal city of Da Nang in early March 1975, desperately fleeing the rapidly advancing North Vietnamese Army as South Vietnam’s crumbling armed forces fell back. With chaos looming, the U.S. Embassy stepped in to coordinate the evacuation, asking civilian-owned airlines to join an around-the-clock ferrying operation to move refugees to Saigon, about 500 miles away. American civilians, consulate staff, contractors, businessmen and their families and employees of civilian airlines were the first priority. Edward J. Daly, the owner and CEO of World Airways, Inc., put the company’s three Boeing 727-100s at the government’s disposal. Aboard World’s first rescue flight to Da Nang on the morning of March 26, Daly, accompanied by two U.S. Embassy security guards, found the situation nearly out of control. As the plane dropped its rear air stair and security guards went down to supervise an orderly boarding, people rushed and quickly filled the aircraft. When hundreds more pushed to get aboard, the guards used mace to turn them back. Though dangerously overcrowded beyond its 131-passenger capacity, the 727 made it back to Saigon. Later flights that day experienced little disorder or panic. Again the next morning, Daly flew on World’s first flight, and again it was mobbed. But the flights continued. After two days, World Airways had evacuated nearly 2,000 civilians from Da Nang. Hundreds of thousands still awaited rescue. On March 28, citing the increasing danger, the embassy suspended flights in favor of an international seaborne rescue operation. Daly objected. He met with South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu, who convinced him that the South Vietnamese forces at Da Nang would fight to the last if they were certain their families and relatives were safe. Daly appealed to the embassy to reinstate the air rescue but was turned down. Daly decided to continue the flights without embassy authorization. He gathered his flight crews and staff at Saigon’s Caravelle Hotel that night, telling them all three 727s were going to Da Nang the next morning. Daly intended this flight for women and children only, leaving the South Vietnamese Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) to fight against the enemy. Once the flight succeeded, Daly assured his people, the embassy would send other aircraft to help. The often-flamboyant Daly wanted his heroic efforts to be publicized, so he invited the press along, including Tom Aspell of Visnews, Paul Vogle of UPI and a film crew headed by Bruce Dunning and Mike Marriott from CBS. The crew included pilot Ken Healy, co-pilot Glen Flansaas and flight engineer Charles Stewart. Three flight attendants were on board: Jan Wollett, Valerie Witherspoon and, on her first flight for World, 21-year-old Atsako Okuba. As Healy guided the aircraft to the end of the runway in Saigon, an air traffic controller ordered the pilot to stop and return to the hangar. But Daly told his pilot to “experience radio failure,” and Healy sped past the main terminal and lifted off. After 50 minutes, the 727 approached Da Nang and made its descent. Two Air America helicopters were flying low searching for stranded Western diplomats who had radioed for help. Both chopper pilots knew that the situation at the airport was completely out of hand. One of them, Marius Burke, saw the 727 descending and radioed to warn it away, but there was no response. North Vietnamese troops who occupied part of Da Nang had been firing rockets and artillery shells on the airport, and the second chopper pilot, Tony Coalson, could see clouds of black smoke rising from burning vehicles and buildings. As he flew over the beach near the airport, Coalson thought there was a bug on the inside of his windscreen. “I reached out to swat it, but it was not a bug; it was an aircraft in the distance,” he said. “My first thought was that it was a MiG coming down from Hanoi. But as the spot grew larger I could see it was a 727, which was a real surprise, consider ing that Da Nang was already lost.” Like Burke, Coalson radioed the aircraft, warning that the airport was under attack and the runways were littered with debris and vehicles damaged by mortar and rocket fire. “But they paid no attention to me,” he recalled. In disbelief, Coalson watched the plane land, turn off the runway and taxi to about midfield near the tower. When it proceeded onto the taxiway, it was pursued by a mob of soldiers and civilians on foot, in cars and trucks and astride motorbikes. The 727 slowed almost to a stop, and the rear air stair came down. Tom Aspell, with a 16mm camera on his shoulder, stepped to the ground, followed by Joe Hrezo, one of World’s station managers. Aspell and Hrezo were enveloped by the crowd and pulled away from the 727 as it continued to roll down the runway. Hundreds of South Vietnamese soldiers— some shooting at the aircraft—surged toward the air stair. Daly’s plan called for Hrezo to get off the aircraft first, go to the control tower and have his employees escort passengers, primarily and perhaps exclusively women and children, to the plane. He would also take over the air traffic control for Healy and the other jets as they landed, loaded and took off. The TV crews were to disembark and film the loading. Once Marriott and Dunning saw how Hrezo and Aspell were mobbed, however, they decided to film from inside the plane. In the cockpit doorway, senior flight attendant Wollett watched in horror as thousands of people, pouring from the hangars and other buildings, chased the aircraft. A shiny sports car bounced across the infield, pulled into the path of the 727 and stopped. A soldier jumped out, drew a pistol and aimed it directly at the cockpit. Nobody said a word as the plane steadily bore down on the man and the car. Healy glared into the eyes of the soldier holding the pistol. “I wasn’t worried,” he recalled, “because that windshield was bulletproof.” The soldier with the pistol was 19-year-old Tran Dinh Truc, a Vietnamese Air Force military policeman from Saigon who had been assigned to the airport’s main gate that morning. Left alone there, deserted by his commanding officer and fellow MPs, he stopped some friends passing through in a new Ford Mustang they were to deliver to the military police’s chief commander. At the wheel was 19-year-old Nguyen Tuan, who had his 16-year-old girlfriend, Tam, with him. Also in the car was a male student Truc knew only as Long. Truc’s friends told him that the roads to the port were blocked and the North Vietnamese occupied much of Da Nang. Truc climbed into the car and told Tuan to drive to the Air America terminal. When they spotted the World Airways 727, Truc recalled, “We were like drowning people suddenly sighting a nearby lifeboat.” As Tuan raced the Mustang down the runway, Truc could see in the rearview mirror thousands of people pursuing the plane while mortar shells were falling on the infield. When the aircraft slowed, Truc told Tuan to block the runway. “We drove across the infield—swerving to miss people and motorbikes—and pulled up onto the runway and used the car as a barricade,” Truc said. “I jumped out and raised my pistol and fired several times into the air just above the cockpit. I did not intend to harm anyone. I wanted the pilot to stop. I remember looking directly into his eyes and also seeing the flight attendant standing behind him looking down at me.” But the plane did not stop. Truc screamed at Tuan to get the car out of the way fast. Tires spinning and smoking, the Mustang sped back into the infield. “The plane passed us, followed by all of those desperate people,” Truc recalled. Tuan pulled the Mustang back on the runway, chasing the 727 until it slowed to turn onto the taxiway, where he stopped the car and all four passengers jumped out and ran to the air stair. “We were in the middle of the mob,” Truc remembered. “Sometimes I was carried along and my feet were not even touching the ground.” Pushed away from the air stair, he spotted people climbing into an open slit in the body of the plane. Thinking it was a “secret entrance” into the passenger cabin, Truc pulled himself up inside and helped pull Tuan and Tam in after him. “It was pitch black inside,” he remembered, “and there were a dozen people in there. They were screaming and crying and feeling around in the darkness for the doorway to the main cabin.” An explosion shook the compartment as a grenade detonated under the plane. Wollett remembers a rush of hysterical people at the rear air star. “They were just wild-eyed. And they were all soldiers,” armed and desperate. As flight engineer Stewart and attendant Witherspoon were pulling people through the entrance, they kept screaming, “Where are the women and children?” Wollett saw Daly “at the bottom of the air stair being mauled by soldiers trying to get onto the plane. His clothes were in tatters and his trousers had been pulled down around his knees. He was waving his pistol in the air with his left hand, now and then bringing it down on the heads or arms of men pulling at him, and swinging his right hand wildly to knock men off the stairs.” Marriott, the CBS cameraman, stood just behind Stewart at the top of the stairs. “As I was filming, [people] started shooting each other,” he recalls. “They were shooting each other in the back to get closer to the aircraft.” Wollett tried to help Witherspoon pull a woman over the side of the air stair. “But the man behind her grabbed her and jerked her out of my arms, and as she fell away he stepped on her back and on her head to get up over the railing,” Wollett said. “Mr. Daly saw that happen and just as the man swung his leg over the railing, Mr. Daly smashed him in the head with his pistol.” Wollett watched the man fall off and disappear under the feet of the mob. In his helicopter above, Burke heard a panicked American voice over the radio. It was Hrezo, pleading from the tower for someone to save Aspell and him. Healy called back from the 727, “I’ll swing by and pick you up, but I won’t be stopping.” The two bolted down the stairs and sprinted to the taxiway as Healy rolled toward the tower. Running behind the plane and attempting to jump onto it, Hrezo made it aboard, but Aspell lost his grip and fell. Burke recalled, “About 20 to 30 seconds passed at which time I informed them that both runways were now unusable and their only chance was to take off on the taxiway from where they were.” Burke asked Healy if he could take off from the taxiway. “Hell yes I can,” Healy responded, but he recalled later, “I was not at all sure that our airplane was going to fly. I figured if I try to take off and fail, I’ll live for approximately 30 seconds longer than if I stay here on the ground.” In the 727, UPI reporter Vogle shouted into his recorder: “The crew is scared. The mob is panic-stricken. There’s a man with an M-16 pointed at us, trying to get us to stop…. A jeep, a pick-up truck, just crumbled under an engine.” As Healy began to pick up speed, Vogle roared, “People are storming aboard, shouting, pushing, soldiers, civilians. People are climbing up on the wings now…they’re falling off. Soldiers are firing into the air to scare others away…women and children are lying on the ground. Some are trying to lie in front of the wheels.” Still on the taxiway, Healy saw a flash of light and heard an explosion under his left wing. A grenade had gone off and destroyed the aileron controls on that side. Burke watched the aircraft as a half-dozen mortar rounds exploded in rapid succession along the infield. “About this time,” he remembers, “I really didn’t think they had a chance of getting off the ground.” Healy knew the taxiway was as long as the runway and there was a chance he could gain enough speed to take off. “For a 727 that’s normally plenty of room, but we didn’t know that we were grossly overloaded by about 20,000 pounds.” He also misjudged the distance between the taxiway and several small communications sheds alongside it. His left wing hit one, two, three sheds, each exploding as the wing sliced through it. Healy ignored the wildly flashing control panel. “I was too busy looking outside trying to miss things,” he said. “I was committed to the takeoff. Everything forward!” As he struggled to point the nose up, Healy discovered something deeply disconcerting—when he pulled on the controls, they pulled back. He figured the hydraulic system had been damaged and he would probably have to make a water landing in Da Nang Bay. Healy was unaware that the wheel wells were filled with people, clinging to the cables. It was the pull of those people he was feeling. Burke and Coalson watched anxiously as the 727 neared the end of the taxiway. Burke warned Healy about a 6-foot rock pile just beyond the tarmac. If Healy could get over the rocks, he might be able to make a water landing in the bay. He knew the taxiway was 20 feet above sea level, and beyond the rock pile it was 150 yards to the sea. The plane slowly lifted off and made it just over the rock pile. But as it did, Healy felt the stick shake—an indication the plane was in a stall. “I held it steady,” he said, “and we dropped a few feet toward the water.” But a moment later he was able to tease the nose up a bit and the 727 started to climb. “All of a sudden there we were,” Healy remembered, “coming up out of Da Nang like a homesick angel!” For a moment Coalson lost sight of the 727 because of the smoke and debris from the exploding communications sheds and from artillery rounds that appeared to be chasing the 727 down the taxiway. He thought that Healy had hit the rock pile. “Then I saw them over Da Nang Bay climbing out with the landing gear down and the air stair extended, with several people still clinging to it.” He heard Healy call over the radio, “See you in Saigon!’” As his eyes adjusted to the darkness inside the aircraft, Truc realized he was not in an entryway to the main cabin. The space, full of mostly women and children, seemed to be a cube of no more than 6 feet on each side. He and the others were in the 727 wheel well. As the sound of the engines changed and they sensed the acceleration of the aircraft, people were screaming. “I knew that when this plane took off and the wheels retracted they would come into this space and all of us would be crushed to death,” Truc recalled. He looked down through the slit beside the door and saw the tarmac rushing by. He also saw men, women and children for a few seconds as they were run over by the aircraft’s tires. As the plane lifted off he saw water below. “The cold wind became very powerful,” he recalled. “I felt that everybody with me in the wheel well was so lucky to be leaving on this plane. But our luck did not last for long. People tried to grasp the cables and pipes in the wheel well in the dark, and children hugged their parents’ legs in the roaring wind. Suddenly the bottom of the wheel well opened and people dropped out, like little bombs falling from a plane, and disappeared.” When the wheels began to retract toward the well, one of the soldiers slipped and got caught in the hydraulic mechanism. His body, squeezed tightly around the waist, ended up half in the wheel well and half out. Only Truc, Tuan and his girlfriend Tam and a soldier remained in the well, unable to communicate, with the roar of the air around them. Truc stood clinging to the cables at the front side of the wheel well next to the trapped soldier while Tuan and Tam were perched on the thin lip of the well across from him. Truc saw his friends weakening after 30 minutes in the cold wind. “Tam looked at me for a long time,” he recalled. “I could see in her eyes that she was trying to tell me something….I tried to tell her to hang on, just hang on.” Tuan’s back was to Truc as he pressed tightly against Tam to hold her to the wall of the wheel well. The wind was slowly sucking Tuan down. Tam hooked one arm around the cables and held her other arm around Tuan’s neck. “They kept trying to help each other struggle to get a footing in the wind,” Truc recalled. Tam whispered something into Tuan’s ear and kissed the side of his face. She released her grip from the cable and put her other arm around Tuan’s neck, and Tuan let go of the cable. “I closed my eyes, turned my face to the wall. It was too painful,” Truc remembered. “I never knew that Tam’s gentle glance at me was her way of saying goodbye.” As Tran Dinh Truc’s grip weakened, he began to pray: “I put all my faith in God. May God save me, I prayed.” Healy cautiously climbed to 10,000 feet over the Gulf of Tonkin. Unable to pressurize the main cabin, he could go no higher. He radioed the other two World 727s. Pilot Dave Wainio, who had just taken off from Saigon in the third 727 of Daly’s operation, was ordered to return to Saigon and supervise preparations for a crash landing or a water landing in the Saigon River. The second 727, piloted by Don McDaniel, was nearing Nha Trang, about 300 miles south of Da Nang. Healy told him to hold over the city, wait for his damaged 727 and give him a report on the outside condition of the aircraft. Healy needed to know why the wheels would not retract and if the nose wheel was still down. McDaniel circled over Nha Trang at 30,000 feet until he finally noticed a speck far below and dropped. Peering out a window, Wollett spotted “one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my life— another World 727 flying next to us.” McDaniel assessed the damaged 727 and gave Healy a running report. The left wing was very badly damaged. The nose wheel had retracted, but the hydraulic sequencing system for retracting the other wheels had stopped working. McDaniel reported the reason: “There is a body hanging out of the wheel well.” He also said the cargo hold door was open and the hold was filled with people. The plane was leaking fuel badly, and Healy did not know if he could make it all the way to Saigon. If he got to Saigon and the nose wheel did not come down, he planned to land in the Saigon River. McDaniel guided Healy by radio as the 727 descended into Saigon airspace. In his final communication to Healy, he said that the nose gear had come down. Healy was not sure if it or the other wheels would hold, but he decided to try to land on the runway. Truc saw that the floor of the wheel well was starting to close again. But the body of the soldier prevented it from closing completely. Truc watched as the hydraulic system crushed the man’s chest and blood began pouring from his mouth and nose. Staring helplessly down at the man, Truc noticed that the aircraft was descending over green land. “I am still alive,” he whispered to himself. “Thank you, God!” Tension in the cabin grew as the aircraft descended. Daly remained in the jump seat in the cockpit. “We were coming in much faster than we should have,” Wollett said, “because Healy could not adjust the flaps or anything.” Her jump seat was directly over the nose gear. “I kept waiting for that nose gear to touch down,” she said, “and then all of a sudden I looked at the buildings flying by outside and we were running level and I knew that the nose gear was down and it was holding.” Healy said: “We raced along the runway because we could not stop real well. Thank God they had a 14,000- foot runway. Wainio had done his job well—there were fire trucks racing right along beside us. We stopped and had no visible sign of an emergency.” As the plane rolled to a stop, Truc could hear the sirens of the ambulances and fire trucks. He slowly lowered his body past the dead man in the hydraulic system and touched the ground and collapsed. “For a moment everything went black,” he said. “I was in a dazed state and I heard many voices around me. When I opened my eyes, finally, two medics were helping me stand and there were many journalists watching me. I was still not sure if I was alive or dead.” Getting to his feet, he assured the medics that he was all right and walked away from the aircraft, across the taxiway and through the terminal. Outside, he hitched a ride into Saigon from a boy on a motorbike. The flight attendants tried to tally those who had been on the flight. They counted 250 in the main cabin, estimated that 80 people had packed themselves into the baggage compartment and an additional 24 people had been in the two wheel wells (although all but seven had fallen out when the bottom of the wheel wells opened after takeoff). There were four men in the cockpit, including Daly, three flight attendants, five journalists and Hrezo, for a total of 367 people on board—nearly three times the capacity. When Healy later gave Boeing his estimated weight and number of passengers, a group of engineers assured him it was impossible for a 727 so overloaded to take off. He didn’t argue with them. He merely replied, “You build one hell of an airplane!” Back in Da Nang, Burke contacted lost journalist Aspell in the tower of the airport. Burke told Aspell to make his way to the end of the runway, where he would land and pick him up. Aspell was pursued by half a dozen armed South Vietnamese soldiers who insisted on getting on the helicopter with him. Burke flew them all to Nha Trang. Aspell’s film of the last flight was lost. Tony Coalson landed near the runway and picked up the wife and children of the Vietnamese air traffic controller and transported them to Nha Trang. Marriott’s film with Dunning’s narration was broadcast Easter Sunday on the CBS Evening News. “As calm fell on the smug men who had managed to fight off their friends and relatives to get on, the hardworking cabin crew took a count,” Dunning says. “Among [the people on board were] five women and two or three children. The rest were some of the men whom President Thieu said would defend Da Nang. They had no apparent feelings about leaving others behind; only gratitude that World Airways had saved their lives with a flight that Ed Daly intended for refugee women and children.” On April 2, Healy piloted a DC-8 Daly had transformed into a “flying crib” to bring 57 orphans from Saigon to Oakland, Calif. Healy mysteriously experienced radio failure again before flying out of Saigon and could not respond to orders from the tower, which had turned off the runway lights and ordered him to abort his takeoff. Truc was reunited with his parents in Saigon after the World flight landed. When the city fell to the North Vietnamese, he was sent to a reeducation camp and then returned to Saigon. Truc left Vietnam in 1982 aboard a refugee-packed boat and fell in love with a young fellow refugee. After five days at sea, the boat came ashore in Galang, Indonesia, where the couple married before eventually settling in Australia. Daly ordered and supervised the evacuation of orphans from Saigon in April 1975, subsidizing the mission with some $2 million out of his own pocket. He also paid $243,000 in fines to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service for bringing his first group of orphans to Oakland. “I’m not a hero,” Daly said of his activities in Vietnam in 1975. “I’m a catalyst. None of those bureaucratic bums in Saigon or Washington would have gotten off their butts if someone hadn’t defied them and gone in after the refugees and orphans.” Larry Engelmann is the author of Tears Before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam. He is at work on his seventh nonfiction book. Originally published in the June 2014 issue of Vietnam. To subscribe, click here.

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https://www.historynet.com/horten-brothers-jet-flying-wing.htm

The Horten Brothers’ Jet Flying Wing

The Horten Brothers’ Jet Flying Wing The never-built Horten Ho-229 has been the subject of more speculation and myths than any other World War II airplane Reimar Horten and his older brother Walter were German aircraft homebuilders. Their relatively short aircraft-building careers extended from 1933 until the end of World War II, though they did some minor work in Argentina after the war as expatriate Nazis. Had they lived 40 years later, chances are they would have been busy members of an EAA chapter in Germany, making a living selling kits for their high-performance flying-wing sailplanes. The first of two H IILs built in Lippstadt in 1937 was flown by Reimar Horten at a glider contest. (Courtesy of Wolfgang Muehlbauer) The Hortens weren’t Burt Rutans. Talented, yes, but not the aeronautical geniuses they’ve been called by some. They built a series of increasingly sophisticated iterations of the same basic design—graceful sweptwing, tailless gliders, though several of their wings were powered. The Hortens produced a grand total of 44 airframes of their dozen basic designs. History has portrayed them as aeronautical visionaries, for in 1940 Messer­schmitt Me-109 pilot Walter Horten, who scored seven Battle of Britain victories as Adolf Galland’s wingman, proposed putting a pair of Germany’s new axial-flow jet engines into a Horten glider. The result was the Ho IX. (Brother Reimar was the aero­dynami­cist and designer; Walter was the facilitator, eventually holding an important Luftwaffe position that allowed him to divert government supplies, staff and facilities for his brother.) The jets were first going to be two BMW 003s, but when they underperformed the Hortens switched to Junkers Jumo 004Bs. The Ho IX V2 (Versuch 2, or Test 2—the V1 was an unpowered research glider) officially flew three times, crashing fatally at the end of the third flight when one of its two Jumos failed. No Horten IX ever flew again, but the brothers had undeniably built and tested the world’s first turbojet flying wing. The Ho IX V2 first flew in March 1945, more than three and a half years before Northrop’s eight-jet YB-49 flying-wing bomber took off. In a number of ways, the Hortens were well ahead of Jack Northrop and his engineers, though Northrop never admitted that. After the war, it was suggested to Northrop that he hire the brothers. “Forget it, they’re just glider designers,” he said condescendingly. The success of the Ho IX was pointed out to him, but Northrop dismissed it as a Gotha design, not a Horten. Northrop was wrong, but the source of his confusion was the fact that the Luft­waffe, knowing the tiny Horten garage operation could never mass-produce twin-engine jet fighter-bombers, turned the project over to Gotha, a large railroad car manufacturing company with aircraft-building experience. As a result, the Horten jet has come down to us with a confusing suite of names. The actual sole jet-powered wing that flew was the Ho IX V2. The German air ministry (Reichsluftfahrtministerium, or RLM) gave the project an official make and model designation—Ho-229. Because production was assigned to Gotha, some sources still refer to the airplane as a Go-229. Many Luftwaffe aircraft were built by a variety of manufacturers, but a Junkers remained a Ju, a Heinkel an He, a Dornier a Do no matter who actually manufactured it, so “Go-229” is a misnomer. The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, citing the RLM designation, calls a major artifact in its collection that is about to undergo serious conservation a Horten 229. This despite the fact that no production Horten 229 ever existed; what the Smithsonian has is the never-completed Ho IX V3 built by Gotha. It bears mentioning that neither Northrop nor the Hortens invented flying wings. Both the concept and actual flying wings have been around since the 1910s. In fact, by the late 1920s there had been enough experiments with flying wings that the configu­ration was considered passé, and both Jack Northrop and the Hortens were late to the party. The Hortens have also been credited with designing and building the world’s first stealth fighter. That is a more difficult claim to support. It’s a popular fiction in the “Hitler’s wonder weapons” community, and it got a boost in a 2009 Northrop Grumman–sponsored film, Hitler’s Stealth Fighter, a National Geographic documentary. The doc tried to show that a modern replica of the National Air and Space Museum’s Ho IX V3 bombarded by microwaves revealed moderate radar-deflecting properties. Northrop Grumman’s prototyping shop built the replica for $250,000. That’s a bargain for an hour-long video broadcast on the History Channel that is still being discussed by what some call the “Napkinwaffe”—a dig at where the plans for some of the Luftwaffe’s fantasy fighters were first sketched. (Engineering drawings for the Horten jet reveal this to be not far from the truth.) Test pilot Erwin Ziller starts the Ho IX V2’s engines at Oranienburg in February 1945. Ziller was killed when the V2 lost an engine and crashed during its third test flight. (National Air and Space Museum) Northrop Grumman built the Horten replica entirely of wood, its plywood skins layered with radar-absorbent carbon-­impregnated glue. Only the externally radar-visible instrument panel backing and first-stage compressor disks were metal. Yet the Horten brothers’ original airplane also had an 11-foot-wide center section made of welded steel tubing, and it carried two turbojet engines. Neither of these were part of the Northrop Grumman replica. It could be argued that all this metal might have reflected at least some microwave energy that penetrated the plywood. But Northrop Grumman felt that their special glue made the replica totally opaque to radar. The replicators also left out the original Ho IX V3’s eight large aluminum fuel tanks. Nor did Northrop Grumman include the underwing bombs that would have been necessary for any attack on a radar-defended target. Externally racked ordnance destroys any semblance of stealth. The Nat Geo film ended up suggesting that an all-wood Horten might have been able to do a fly-by of Britain’s by then obsolete Chain Home low-frequency radar array, but it wouldn’t have been able to bomb anything. Narration over the film says that it reveals “just how close Nazi engineers were to unleashing a jet that some say could have changed the course of the war.” Not bloody likely, if only because by that time, the Germans were literally out of gas. The heart of the Horten stealth assertion is a claim by the brothers, made long after the war ended, that they indeed had intended to fasten the layers of the Ho-229’s plywood sheathing with glue mixed with radar-absorbing charcoal. Perhaps they did mean to do that, but the first mention of this plan came in a 1983 book written by Reimar, at a time when the basics of U.S. stealth technology were becoming public knowledge. There is no mention of any attempt to achieve stealthy properties for the Ho-229 by anybody involved in the actual fabrication of the prototypes. Illustration by Steve Karp NASM’s restoration facility ran extensive digital-microscopy, X-ray diffraction and Fourier-transfer spectroscopy tests on the wooden structure of their Horten aircraft’s wing and found no evidence of any carbon or charcoal impregnation of the glue. The black specks that Northrop Grumman had assumed were evidence of the Hortens’ attempt to create a radar blanket were found to be simply oxidized wood. Reimar Horten originally planned to sheathe the Ho IX in aluminum, which hardly suggests that he had stealth as an objective. It was only when he discovered to his surprise that the Messerschmitt Me-163 rocket plane was covered in plywood that he realized high speed didn’t rule out using wood. He then switched to more easily obtainable plywood veneer, but for reasons that had nothing to do with its radar attenuation and everything to do with its availability. It’s also worth noting that the Ho-229 was intended to be a day fighter, a bomber interceptor, though eventually, as was true of so many Luftwaffe fantasy fighters, it was to undertake a variety of other roles. Walter Horten had originally advocated jet power because, as a fighter pilot himself, he wanted to build a better airplane than the Focke Wulf Fw-190, which he considered to be an inferior, spin-prone design. So why would stealth have been a criterion, if an Ho-229 would never confront radar? It wasn’t. Hitler’s “stealth fighter” was simply intended to be Hitler’s aerodynamically efficient, fast, maneuverable fighter. How did the Hitler’s stealth fighter myth take root? Certainly there’s fertile ground upon which such legends can be sown among the model builders and war gamers who love nothing more than mysterious Luftwaffe wonder weapons that would have reversed the course of the war had it only lasted another month. But none seem to understand the years-long prototyping/testing/production process that is a necessary part of bringing a sophisticated aircraft from napkin sketch to combat. Exactly three years and a day passed between the Messerschmitt Me-262 twin-jet’s first flight and the beginning of its operational readiness. Following such a schedule, the Ho-229 would have been ready for combat in early 1948. The Ho IX, precursor of the 229, was the work of a garage shop. The V1 and V2 versions were built in what was essentially a three-car workshop, out of largely unairworthy structural material. The center section steel tubing was much like what today suffices for building trade electrical conduit, and the Hortens were notorious for using household-grade ply­wood veneer for their airplanes’ external sheathing. How professional were the Hortens? Some of their work raises questions. Walter Horten was assigned the job of calculating the V2’s center of gravity, for example, which he did using a steel measuring tape. Unfortunately, he never noticed that the first 10 centimeters of the tape had broken off, so his false measurements determined that the airplane needed substantial ballast in the nose. Since the CG was 10 centimeters off, the test pilot assigned to the first flight found that he could barely keep the airplane aloft with full back stick, and when he tried to flare for landing the airplane hit so hard that it badly damaged the gear. And the Hortens’ fabricators welded and rewelded the V2’s center section as the engine choice flip-flopped between BMW and Junkers, which created heat stresses that no experienced aircraft builder would have allowed. Skilled welders would have cut out and rebuilt entire sections of the structure. The uncompleted Ho IX V3 at war’s end. (National Archives) The Hortens also needed to adapt cast-off components to their Ho IX airframe, which led to its ungainly nosewheel. The airplane’s main gear is fashioned from Me-109 parts, and the enormous nosewheel, almost 5 feet in diameter, is the tailwheel, tire and retraction mechanism from a Heinkel He-177 Greif, a benighted heavy bomber. It was a fortui­tous choice nonetheless. The oversize nosewheel put the Ho IX at a 7-degree angle of incidence at rest, which facilitated takeoff without requiring the forceful rotation other Horten designs had needed. After the war, a number of Horten designs were examined by the Allies, initially the British. If any conspiracy theorists noticed the byline at the beginning of this article, they’ll by now be hyperventilating, for the “Wilkinson Report,” written by a committee of British aviation authorities headed by soaring expert Kenneth Wilkinson, was supposedly highly critical of the Hortens. (If Kenneth and I are related, it is to the same degree that Henry and Harrison Ford are.) British aviation writer Lance Cole, apparently a serious Horten conspira­cist, wrote that the Wilkinson Report was “a way of helping to shield the reality of the Horten achievement so that greater powers could seize the ideas and keep them unseen for decades…[it] dismissed their ideas and works as apparent flights of fancy; stemming, it seemed, from what felt like a British attitude of the Hortens being men ‘without the proper background.'” I can find none of this in the evenhanded, rigorous, authori­tative, technical 60-page Wilkinson Report. The paper does point out that British engineers tended to trust wind-tunnel data more than they did inflight assessments, but admits the Hortens had no access to such a tunnel. It calls the Hortens’ careers “a remarkable record of progress in spite of [such] obstacles.” One thing that did baffle Wilkinson’s committee was that so little of Reimar Horten’s work was of the slightest use to the German war effort. Reimar was far more interested in record-­setting and competition gliders, and he continued to design and build them throughout the war. Some historians, in fact, think that he viewed the jet wing as a “flying résumé” that would help him get a job in the U.S. or Britain after the war. Reimar would have loved to carry on his career in the States. Despite membership in the Nazi Party and his work as a Luftwaffe assault-glider instructor, he had first tried to emigrate to America in 1938 but had been refused an exit visa since he was thought to have had access to classified information. Why a flying wing? What’s wrong with the conventional designs that have served so well since the early 1900s? Certainly there have been some useful variations—canards, pushers, semi-tailless deltas, blended wing/body proposals, even Vin­cent Burnelli’s perennial lifting-fuselage concept—but the pure flying wing has always been an outlier. What is its appeal? Theoretically, the advantages of a flying wing are sub­stantial. A conventional design—a Boeing 777, a Cess­­na Skyhawk, an F-22 Raptor, you name it—has wings that contribute lift despite inevitable induced and parasitic drag…plus a fuselage, engine nacelle(s) and an empennage that contribute nothing but drag. Zero lift. Indeed a conventional horizontal stabilizer often adds negative lift—down­force—to an airplane. Yes, the fuselage can carry passengers, cargo or ordnance, but so can a flying wing. One of the major functions of a fuselage is to support the empennage that provides pitch and yaw control for a conventional airplane. A flying wing totally eliminates the drag of an aft fuselage and empennage. In fact, every part of a flying wing is a lifting surface. An all-wing aircraft also allows for the efficiency of span-loading. Much of a conventional airplane’s weight is concentrated near its centerline, hence the videos of bendy-­wing Boeing Dream­liners looking as though they’re trying to clap hands above their fuselages. The forces concentrated at the wing/fuselage juncture of a conventional airplane are enormous, while a flying wing can spread the entire load from wingtip to wingtip, thus allowing for a lighter and more efficient structure. The weight is spread out where the lift is, so a flying wing can have a large, efficient, high-­aspect-ratio span without requiring a heavy framework to support it. For a stealthy airplane, a true flying wing has a distinct advantage: It does away with all radar-reflective vertical surfaces, particularly stabilizers and rudders. This, plus its wooden construction and lack of radar-reflecting prop discs, is what gave Northrop Grum­man’s Ho IX replica its comparatively small radar cross-­section, not a miracle glue. The disadvantage of a flying wing is its natural instability, with no tail to provide counterbalance in pitch and yaw. The Hortens overcame much of this with enlightened wing, airfoil and control-­surface design, but their airplanes still exhibited the classic flying-­wing waddle, semi-technically termed Dutch roll. The Ho IX V2’s flights had already revealed moderate lateral instability. It would have made the Ho-229 a dreadful gun platform as a fighter and a handful as a bomber. (This was the characteristic that doomed the North­rop YB-49 flying wing in its competition with what became the Convair B-36; bomb-run accuracy was impossible to achieve when yaw/roll coupling determined the meandering flight path. Nor did it help that one YB-49 went out of control and crashed fatally during stall testing in June 1948.) By the time Gotha took over the Ho-229 project, the Hor­ten brothers had lost interest and moved on to their planned masterpiece—a six-turbojet flying wing “Amerika Bomber.” The Ho XVIII never was built, but it filled another niche in the Napkinwaffe. Some still say the Amerika Bomber (several German airframers were racing to build one) was intended to drop an atomic bomb on New York. Fortunately, the Germans would never have been able to build such a weapon, having lost their Norwegian deuterium source, but they did have the capability to put together a dirty bomb—a large conventional bomb encased in strongly radioactive materi­al that would have polluted a wide area with radiation. Though Northrop wanted nothing to do with the Horten brothers, the company did acquire several of their gliders for research after WWII, leading conspiracists to claim that Northrop stole the Hortens’ secrets for its own flying wings. Actually, Northrop depicted an Ho VI glider in postwar avia­tion magazine ads as an example of “one of the Nazi attempts to adapt U.S. flying-wing design for eventual mili­tary use.” The Smithsonian’s Ho IX V3 was brought to America as part of Operation Seahorse, a U.S. Navy counterpart to the better-known Operation Paperclip campaign to acquire as many interesting Luftwaffe aircraft as possible. But it was never flown and in fact was only half-­completed. It was first assessed at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, in Britain—the source of the Wilkinson Report data—and was then sent to both Wright and Freeman fields for Army Air Forces scrutiny. The jet wing ended up stored outdoors in Chicago at a facility that was intended to become a national air museum. In 1952 the Smithsonian acquired the airplane, though it was by then badly beaten up by numerous moves and exposure to the weather. It was moved once more to “a secret government warehouse,” according to published reports. That warehouse was actually the Smithsonian’s quite unsecret Suit­land, Md., restoration facility, where it stayed for 60-plus years, part of that time stored in an open wooden shed. The V3’s center section is currently undergoing preservation at the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center. (National Air and Space Museum) The artifact is in sad shape today, much of its plywood sheathing delaminated and rotting, its metal frame and landing gear corroded, and parts missing. NASM has it on the short list for major work, and the V3 can currently be seen at the museum’s restoration facility in the Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport. That work will not be restoration but conservation: stopping the rot and corrosion, cleaning up the airframe and assembling the center section and outer wings into a single unit. Those wings may or may not have been part of the V3. Only one wing came to the U.S. with the center section, and another was later found some distance from the Gotha shop. The Hortens’ last hurrah took place without their participation. In July 1947, there was a notorious occurrence at Roswell, N.M, known forever after as the “Roswell Inci­dent.” It allegedly involved the crash of a flying saucer and the snatching by the Army Air Forces of the bodies of three aliens aboard it. The Roswell Incident engendered decades’ worth of tabloids portraying the gourd-headed ETs perhaps still stored in freezers in a heavily guarded Area 51 hangar. The government tried to explain away the crash by saying it had been a high-­altitude weather balloon; it was actually a secret surveillance balloon intended to keep track of Soviet atomic bomb testing. But some observers with more specialized knowledge had an intriguing theory. In 1937 Reimar Horten decided that the ultimate flying-wing shape would be a parabola—a wing with a near-circular leading edge planform, which would provide the minimum induced drag and maximum lift. The Hortens built just one parabola-­wing glider but never flew it; the airplane was torched after warping and becoming unglued during winter storage. But wait, there’s more…supposedly the AAF found out about the Horten parabola wing and decided to build a powered version to secretly test Reimar’s theory. It was this airplane, looking uncannily like two-thirds of a flying saucer, that crashed in New Mexico in 1947. Nobody has yet explained the aliens, however. For further reading, contributing editor Stephan Wilkinson recommends: The Horten Brothers and Their All-Wing Aircraft, by David Myhra; and Horten Ho 229 Spirit of Thuringia: The Horten All-Wing Jet Fighter, by Andrei Shepelev and Huib Ottens. This feature originally appeared in the November 2016 issue of Aviation History Magazine. Subscribe today!

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How a Company Made A Bra for Every Type of Figure, Including WWII Carrier Pigeons

How a Company Made A Bra for Every Type of Figure, Including WWII Carrier Pigeons Not even Alfred Hitchcock could have concocted the avian idea — carrier pigeons in bras. Or, at the very least, carrier pigeons in vests made by a brassiere company. In December 1944, undergarment manufacturer Maidenform ditched peddling their usual wares in favor of a government contract to make 28,500 pigeon vests, according to the National Museum of American History. Choose Maidenform for all your brassiere needs. (National Museum of American History, Archives Center) The vests themselves could be attached to American paratroopers and were made out “of porous materials, with a tighter woven fabric underneath so the pigeon’s claws would not damage the mesh,” the NMAH wrote. “The vest was shaped to the body of the pigeon, leaving their head, neck, wing tips, tail, and feet exposed.” Carrier pigeons, or homing pigeons, were employed by various nations throughout World War II and, despite the seemingly antiquated method, were among the most secure and reliable forms of communication. Rarely intercepted, the Army Signal Corps sent an estimated 30,000 messages via pigeon, with 96 percent reaching their assigned destination. Luddites everywhere, rejoice! As to the age-old question regarding the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, homing pigeons were able to fly at a speed of roughly 50 miles per hour and could travel an average of 25 miles for a mission, although they were capable of traveling up to 600 miles if needed. Originally toting messages in a tiny capsule fastened to the pigeons’ legs, the advent of Maidenform’s pigeon bra/vest allowed handlers and service members to attach larger message items to the birds, including maps, photos, reports, and even tiny cameras. If you follow us on Facebook or Instagram view our "stories" of items made by industries that converted during wartime production. Below is one of our favorites – the @Maidenform-brand airborne pigeon vest tethered the bird to their paratrooper. #industrialmobilization pic.twitter.com/SRuyqg8Os1 — George C. Marshall Museum & Library (@georgecmarshall) March 23, 2020 Approximately 55,000 pigeons were deployed by the Americans throughout the war. The British, meanwhile, used upwards of 200,000. Thirty-two of those pigeons were presented the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) Dickin Medal, the highest honor awarded to animals in combat. One service pigeon, the Duke of Normandy, flew almost 27 hours through “bullets, bombs, and driving rain,” according to the PDSA website, to deliver the message that paratroopers from the 21st Army Group were able to neutralize the Merville Gun Battery in one of the first Allied attacks during the Normandy invasion. The first bird to arrive with a message from behind enemy lines, the Duke’s “heroics delivered critical intelligence to the Allied Command — and saved many lives. Had the mission failed … [the] HMS Arethusa [was] to launch an artillery attack on the Battery that would undoubtedly have caused significant Allied casualties,” the PDSA website says. While ever-evolving technology eventually rendered such communication methods obsolete, the pigeon service is credited with saving the lives of thousands of Allied service members. And thankfully for soldiers, the bra-burning movement had yet to take off.

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How a Convicted Nazi War Criminal and 72 of His Men Walked Free

How a Convicted Nazi War Criminal and 72 of His Men Walked Free Was justice denied? FOR THE AMERICAN SOLDIERS who had suffered and bled in the fight against Nazi Germany, it was a day they never wanted to see. At 2 p.m. on December 22, 1956, former SS colonel Joachim Peiper, whom the Associated Press called the GIs’ “personal No. 1 war criminal,” walked out of Landsberg prison in West Germany a free man. A decade before, Peiper had been sentenced to be hanged for orchestrating the slaughter of 84 American prisoners near the Belgian village of Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge. Since then, however, U.S. Army missteps, the Cold War, and international political intrigue had converged in unexpected ways to help Peiper dodge the hangman and gain his freedom. Joachim Peiper's mugshot. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Joseph H. Williams) THE MASSACRE that had set these events in motion occurred in another December—12 years before Peiper strode out of prison. In December 1944, Germany planned a surprise offensive to win a war that already seemed lost: a lightning thrust through the Ardennes to split the British and American armies and seize the Allied supply port of Antwerp. Americans would call it the Battle of the Bulge. Peiper’s command, the 1st SS Panzer Regiment, was assigned to lead the Sixth Panzer Army’s assault and capture the bridges over Belgium’s Meuse River. At 29, Peiper was the Waffen SS’s youngest regimental commander. From 1938 to 1941, he had served as an aide to SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Transferred to the Eastern Front in 1941, Peiper had earned fame as a daring combat commander, and his men had gained notoriety for their brutality. On December 15, 1944, Peiper briefed his officers on the upcoming attack into Belgium. He relayed an order from Sixth Panzer Army headquarters, signed by its commanding officer, SS general Josef “Sepp” Dietrich. The order instructed German troops to fight “with no regard for Allied prisoners of war who will have to be shot if the situation makes it necessary and compels it.” Peiper instructed his men to “fight in the same manner as we did in Russia…. The certain rules which have applied in the West until now will be omitted.” Speed was crucial, he stressed, and they shouldn’t “pay any attention to unimportant enemy goals nor booty nor prisoners of war.” Before dawn on December 16, the Germans launched their offensive on an 80-mile front. Although poor roads slowed Peiper’s drive and he had to push his men for increased speed, the assault came out of the blue for the Americans and confusion reigned as many outfits were overrun or retreated. At 1 p.m. the next day, Battery B of the U.S. Ninth Army’s 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion was making a 50-mile road march south from Schevenhütte, Germany, to reinforce U.S. First Army troops in Belgium when a superior force of German tanks and grenadiers brought them to a halt at a remote crossroads two miles south of Malmedy. Riding in 26 jeeps and trucks, the Americans were lightly armed, mostly with carbines, and knew they had no choice but to surrender. The Germans—Peiper’s men—herded the prisoners together and marched them toward an open field near the crossroads. “Young guys they were mostly, but big and arrogant as hell,” Sergeant Kenneth Ahrens recalled of the SS men. Peiper (far left) was an aide to SS chief Heinrich Himmler (right) earlier in the war. Between them, here in September 1940, is SS general Josef “Sepp” Dietrich. (Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock Photo) The Germans gathered the 100-plus prisoners and lined them up in the field. The GIs stood 20 abreast and several rows deep, unarmed and with their hands raised. Peiper was not present; he had advanced past the crossroads minutes earlier. Two half-tracks pulled up to the front corners of the field, and another armored vehicle parked between them. A German soldier in the middle vehicle fired two pistol shots, and two Americans fell. As if on cue, the machine guns on the flanks opened up, raking the field from left to right. GIs fell to the ground, some dead, some wounded, and some trying to escape the murderous fire, as agonized screams pierced the air. After about three minutes, the machine gun fire stopped, but Peiper’s men weren’t done. They walked through the field, finishing off with pistol shots or rifle butts anyone who showed signs of life. “They were having a hell of a good time laughing and joking while the [American] boys were praying,” Ahrens said. Those still alive played dead and waited. As German vehicles passed the field, they fired again at the prone Americans. Private Homer D. Ford heard the thud of bullets hitting the men and cries of pain. After about 90 minutes lying motionless, those still alive knew it was now or never. “Let’s go,” one shouted, and whoever could do so ran or stumbled from the field. Some were shot by Germans still at the crossroads. Others sought shelter in a nearby café, but the SS men set the building on fire and killed the GIs as they fled the flames. Thirty-five GIs, however, got away and reached American lines, bringing the first reports of the massacre. The news spread quickly among American troops. Stars and Stripes, the GI newspaper, told of “muddy, shivering survivors, weeping with rage” as they described how “German tank men tried with machine guns to massacre 150 American prisoners standing in an open field.” Enraged soldiers wanted revenge. “If that is the way they want to fight—then that’s all right with us. But let’s us fight that way, too,” Private Herschel Nolan told a reporter. One U.S. infantry regiment even issued an order of dubious legality that “no SS troops or paratroopers will be taken prisoner but will be shot on sight.” GIs surrender at the Bulge; Dietrich’s order to shoot POWs “if the situation makes it necessary” set the stage for the massacre. (Bundesarchiv, Wild 183-J28589/Photo: Büschel) The Malmedy massacre was a shock to both GIs in the field and Americans at home because the Germans typically took prisoners when fighting on the Western Front. Peiper’s men were an exception. The U.S. Army blamed them for murdering more than 360 American prisoners and over 100 unarmed Belgian civilians during the Ardennes offensive—the only organized atrocities of that campaign. Under both the 1929 Geneva Convention and the 1907 Hague Convention, the killing of prisoners constituted a war crime. American troops did not retake the fatal crossroads until a month later, on January 14, 1945. Battery B’s abandoned vehicles still littered the roadway, and the bodies of the prisoners lay in the field as they had fallen, frozen solid by the cold Belgian winter and covered with snow. Investigators placed a numbered placard on each body for identification, and army doctors conducted autopsies. Nearly all of the 84 victims had been killed by small-arms fire. Twenty had been slain execution-style, shot in the head at such close range that their bodies bore powder burns; three had their skulls caved in by rifle butts. Several had their eyeballs gouged out by a sharp object—probably while they were still alive, an army doctor concluded. From questioning German prisoners, the army knew the massacre was the work of Peiper’s 1st SS Panzer Regiment. Still, identification of the shooters would have to await the end of the war. Men and halftracks of Peiper’s 1st SS Panzer Regiment advance toward Malmedy, Belgium, the day of the massacre. (Interfoto/Alamy Stock Photo) BY THE SUMMER OF 1945, with the war in Europe over, the army War Crimes Branch shifted into high gear. More than 500 SS soldiers suspected of war crimes, including Peiper and his men, were rounded up from scattered prison camps and hospitals throughout Europe and the United States and brought to an Allied internment camp in Zuffenhausen, Germany. Any hope of building an easy case against the men of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment dissolved in October 1945, however, when 15 Malmedy survivors viewed Peiper’s men but couldn’t identify any shooters. For a successful prosecution, the War Crimes Branch realized, “the Germans would have to convict themselves” by confessing and implicating their comrades. With hard-bitten SS veterans, that would be no easy task, as the first interviews showed. Each German told a convenient story: he had passed the crossroads just before or just after the massacre. They said the order to shoot prisoners had come from an officer known to have been killed in the war’s closing days. In December 1945, the prisoners were moved to a civilian jail in the southern German town of Schwäbisch Hall for interrogation. Twelve investigators were assigned to question the prisoners. Few, though, had experience with criminal cases; the rapid postwar demobilization meant experienced personnel were in short supply, and “we were obliged to use the people we had,” said Colonel Claude B. Mickelwaite, commander of the War Crimes Branch. Some of the investigators were ’39ers—army slang for men who had fled Europe shortly before the war. One such man was Lieutenant William R. Perl. Born in Prague, Perl, 39, had practiced law in Vienna. When the Nazis began disbarring Jewish lawyers, he emigrated to the United States. Before leaving, Perl had helped several thousand Jews escape to Palestine. He had a personal reason to despise the Nazis: they had held his wife for two years in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Perl was an “eager beaver,” a colleague noted, “very much interested in the case, more so than anybody else.” Army investigators numbered the bodies for identification; some showed signs the men had been tortured before their deaths. (U.S. Army/National Archives) The interrogators questioned Peiper’s men aggressively. They used tricks, deception, and ruses—many suggested by Perl—to extract confessions. “Bill was always thinking of some trick or some new angle…it was always a matter of cleverness, the use of some psychological trick,” Captain Ralph Shumacker, a war-crimes prosecutor, later recalled. The investigators started with the enlisted men, telling them falsely that they were interested in prosecuting only those who had ordered the killings and that the SS men had nothing to lose by confessing since obedience to orders was a defense to a war crime. These techniques worked. “The SS soldier was so completely indoctrinated with the Fuehrer concept that he apparently considered murdering prisoners of no consequence if a corporal, sergeant, or anyone of higher rank ordered it done,” Shumacker said. Once an enlisted man had confessed, the investigators used his statement against him and those he had implicated. Cooperating German soldiers at Schwäbisch Hall pumped fellow prisoners for incriminating information. Following the instructions of the American investigators, they lied to their comrades, saying they had gotten off with light sentences because they had confessed. Investigators also bluffed, telling suspects they had bugged their cells and overheard incriminating conversations. They even fabricated a story that the United States was out for blood because the son of a senator was one of the Malmedy victims. With officers, they used a different approach: Peiper said Perl had assured him that if he took responsibility for the massacre, his men would go free. Mock trials were the most controversial technique. A suspect was brought into a room containing a table draped with a black cloth, a candle at each end, and a crucifix in the middle. Several uniformed Americans sat behind the table, pretending to be judges. On the other side of the table were two other Americans—one acting as a hostile prosecutor, the other a sympathetic defense attorney. The prosecutor harangued the suspect, sometimes bringing in a cooperating German soldier to hurl accusations at the prisoner. By the end of the encounter, the suspect believed he had been convicted of a war crime. After the prisoner went back to his cell, the sympathetic defense attorney visited him, telling him he had been sentenced to death but could still save himself by confessing and implicating others. Investigators had still heavier-handed tactics. They threatened to take away ration cards from the families of uncooperative suspects—a serious matter since food was in short supply in postwar Germany. At times, things may have gotten physical. Herbert K. Sloane of the War Crimes Branch recalled bringing a prisoner, Heinz Stickel, to Schwäbisch Hall in April 1946 and turning him over to investigator Harry W. Thon, a 36-year-old former GI raised in Germany. “I bet I can get a confession before you take off your raincoat,” Thon boasted. He ordered Stickel to remove his shirt to see if his arm bore an SS tattoo. When Stickel didn’t obey quickly enough, Sloane said Thon punched him and then grilled Stickel, who admitted firing a machine gun at the American prisoners. “See, there is your confession,” Thon told Sloane. Within four months, the War Crimes Branch had put the case together. The investigators had gotten statements from more than 70 of Peiper’s men, confessing or implicating others. In April 1946, prosecutors charged Peiper and 72 of his men as war criminals. The complaint alleged that the defendants—both officers and enlisted men—did “willfully, deliberately and wrongfully permit, encourage, aid, abet and participate in the killing, shooting, ill-treatment, abuse and torture” of the American prisoners at Malmedy. Because Peiper was not present at the massacre, he was charged as an accessory before the fact. His pre-battle orders had authorized and encouraged his troops to murder prisoners, prosecutors alleged, making him as culpable as if he had pulled the trigger himself. SS troops suspected of the massacre line up at a U.S. Army prison camp in Passau, Germany, just after the war. (Interfoto/Alamy Stock Photo) The charges involved a violation of conventional rules of war, and the trial was assigned to a U.S. Army tribunal. Colonel Willis M. Everett Jr., 46, was appointed lead defense counsel. A reserve army officer since 1923 and an attorney since 1924, Everett had spent the war ferreting out Communists and Axis sympathizers near the Manhattan Project’s production facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Assisting him were five other American attorneys and six German lawyers. The chief prosecutor was Lieutenant Colonel Burton F. Ellis, 42; neither Everett nor Ellis had ever tried a criminal case. Six Malmedy survivors traveled to Germany for the trial. Kenneth Ahrens said he was there “for the poor guys who weren’t as lucky as me. For them and their families back in the States.” Former Lieutenant Virgil P. Lary Jr. said he would have come on his “hands and knees” to bring the killers to justice. Before the trial, Lary confronted Peiper in his cell, demanding to know “why your outfit committed such a crime.” He said Peiper told him: “We had orders to do so…. I take full responsibility.” Lary also had a surprise for prosecutors. He thought he could pick out the soldier whose pistol shots had started the massacre. The SS men were paraded past him, and Lary identified a 23-year-old private, Georg Fleps, as the shooter. The trial of the 73 defendants began on May 16, 1946. The defendants sat together, about a dozen abreast and several rows deep, wearing uniforms stripped of rank, insignia, and decorations. Each wore a numbered placard for identification. Peiper was number 42. Only nine defendants took the stand, and they didn’t help themselves. “Like a bunch of drowning rats, they were turning on each other,” one of the defense attorneys recalled. Although fluent in English, Peiper testified in German. Prosecutors introduced a damning statement the SS man had given two months earlier; he hadn’t needed to order his subordinates to shoot prisoners, he had said then, because they were all “experienced officers” to whom it was “obvious” that prisoners would have to be shot. The trial ended on July 11, 1946, and the seven military judges convicted all 73 defendants. Five days later, the court sentenced 43, including Peiper, to death by hanging; 22 to life imprisonment; and eight to jail terms of 10 to 20 years. Peiper and his men would serve their sentences or await execution at Landsberg prison in Bavaria, the site of Adolf Hitler’s incarceration after his failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Their sentences would stand unless modified by the U.S. European Theater commander, General Lucius D. Clay. Malmedy survivors brought to Germany to testify visit the field where their comrades were gunned down. (Interfoto/Alamy Stock Photo) THE METHODS Perl and his colleagues had used had been brought out at trial and formed the basis of the SS men’s defense. These methods troubled General Clay, and he questioned the reliability of the statements Perl and his men had obtained. Army regulations prohibited “threats, duress in any form, physical violence, or promises of immunity or mitigation of punishment” during questioning. On March 20, 1948, Clay commuted 31 of the 43 death sentences to prison terms, leaving only Peiper and 11 others on death row. “If there was any doubt, any doubt, I commuted the sentence,” Clay said. He also freed 13 other defendants because of insufficient evidence. Defense counsel Everett believed all the convictions were fatally flawed because of how the confessions had been secured. Now a civilian, he wanted to bring the case before American courts because U.S. law treated coerced confessions as inherently unreliable. In May 1948, he filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court; the threshold question was whether an American court had jurisdiction of a case tried in Germany for war crimes committed in Belgium. Four justices found a lack of jurisdiction; four others wanted to hear more. The deciding ninth vote belonged to Justice Robert H. Jackson, who disqualified himself because he had served as the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials. The tie vote meant the Supreme Court would not hear the case. German attorneys obtained affidavits from Peiper’s men repudiating their earlier confessions because of alleged coercion and physical abuse. SS sergeant Otto Eble, for example, claimed investigators had put lit matches under his fingernails to make him talk. Edouard Knorr, a German dentist who had treated prisoners at Schwäbisch Hall, insisted that more than a dozen men had had teeth knocked out by American fists. U.S. officials were skeptical because they knew the prisoners had much to gain by recanting. Still, the deceptive tactics the interrogators had used—confirmed on September 14, 1948, by an army commission chaired by former Texas judge Gordon Simpson—gave them pause. In Germany, the prisoners’ claims were accepted as true, sparking anger among the general population who saw the war-crimes trials as victor’s justice—a penalty for losing the war. German veterans felt the prisoners were simply soldiers who had fought for their country. A German revisionist even claimed Malmedy was not a war crime at all because Peiper’s men had mistaken the Americans in the field—their arms raised in surrender—for combatants. German public opinion mattered. The Iron Curtain had descended on Europe and Germany was partitioned, with the Soviet Union controlling the eastern section and the United States, France, and Britain occupying the western part. The U.S. needed West Germany as a strong ally and a buffer against Communist expansion and would do “almost anything to soothe and cajole German opinion,” the New York Times reported in 1952. With the imprisonment of Peiper and his men a source of friction, the U.S. Senate wanted to get to the bottom of what had happened at Schwäbisch Hall. Former U.S. Army sergeant Keneth Ahrens demonstrates how he surrendered to the SS. (Ullstein Bild/Getty Images) IN 1949, THE SENATE Armed Services Committee held hearings, calling 108 witnesses over five months. Freshman Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, grabbed the spotlight early on, badgering witnesses and expressing sympathy for Peiper’s men. McCarthy stormed out of the hearings when the panel refused to give army investigators lie-detector tests. As a parting shot, he accused William Perl and his colleagues of “Hitlerian tactics, Fascist interrogation, and the communistic brand of justice.” Less than a year later, McCarthy would find his ticket to fame when he claimed Communists had infiltrated the State Department. The Senate committee report, issued on October 13, 1949, found no army-sanctioned physical mistreatment and rejected the most lurid abuse claims. The committee disbelieved Otto Eble because he had used a false name, his fingers showed no scars from the torture he claimed, and he had several fraud-related convictions before the war. It doubted the veracity of Dr. Knorr, who had died before the hearings, because he had conveniently destroyed all dental records for the German prisoners despite his standard practice of keeping patient records for 10 years. Nevertheless, the committee suspected some physical abuse: “in individual and isolated cases there may have been instances where individuals were slapped, shoved around, or possibly struck,” likely “the irresponsible act of an individual in the heat of anger.” It called the interrogation trickery “a grave mistake,” faulting the army for using untrained criminal investigators whose hatred for the Nazis may have convinced them that the end justified the means. Germans continued to agitate on behalf of war criminals held by the United States, Britain, and France. German religious leaders pushed for their freedom; an organization of two million German veterans adopted a resolution demanding the war-criminal issue be, in their words, “satisfactorily settled”; and a West German parliamentary committee pressed American officials for clemency. In March 1949, General Clay commuted seven more Malmedy death sentences. On January 31, 1951, his successor, General Thomas T. Handy, reduced the remaining five death sentences, including Peiper’s, to life imprisonment and freed other Malmedy prisoners. On May 12, 1954, General William M. Hoge, Handy’s successor, reduced Peiper’s life sentence to 35 years. The Germans were not satisfied. They saw the sentence reductions and the release of some prisoners as political opportunism designed to placate them and pushed for more. Behind the scenes, West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer demanded “immediate machinery for clemency” for war criminals. He warned the State Department of the “considerable psychological and public opinion problems in Germany” caused by “the agitation of various soldiers and veterans organizations.” In 1955, the Paris-Bonn conventions restored West German sovereignty and ended Allied military occupation. The treaty took the war-criminals issue out of American hands and gave it to a Mixed Parole and Clemency Board, made up of three West German representatives and one each from the United States, Britain, and France. The treaty decreed that the board’s members were not “subject to instructions from the appointing governments,” and a unanimous board decision was unreviewable—both of which would allow the U.S. government to wash its hands of any unpopular parole decision. The State Department appointed a career diplomat, Edwin A. Plitt, to the board. The board quickly drew fire when it released General Sepp Dietrich, whose orders had discouraged the taking of prisoners during the Ardennes offensive. American veterans protested, but U.S. officials noted the board did not answer to them and that they had no say in Plitt’s vote. The American Legion demanded Plitt’s removal, and on January 25, 1956, the State Department replaced him with former senator Robert W. Upton of New Hampshire. Even more alarming to veterans were reports that Peiper would soon go free, but the State Department dismissed those rumors, saying it had no information “to substantiate news report that Mixed Board of Clemency and Parole is about to release Col. Peiper.” Senator Estes Kefauver, a Democrat from Tennessee, urged that Peiper be kept behind bars, calling Peiper and his men “the worst kind of sadistic murderers.” When Upton arrived in West Germany in March 1956 to join the Mixed Board, he received a shock. Five months earlier, on October 5, 1955, the board had secretly and unanimously voted to free Peiper. It was a fait accompli, and Peiper would be released as soon as his parole conditions were finalized. When the 41-year-old Peiper walked through the gates of Landsberg prison on December 22, 1956, reactions in the United States were surprisingly mild. Only survivors and veterans’ groups objected strongly. For the survivors, said Virgil Lary, “our hearts are sick after each release.” The American Legion called Peiper’s parole “a callous, criminal betrayal of trust”; the Veterans’ Civic League of New Jersey asked the government to “place the barbaric Colonel Peiper back in jail where he belongs.” The U.S. government, however, was powerless. The Paris-Bonn treaty had seen to that. Peiper went to work for Porsche and later Volkswagen in Germany. He lamented his years in prison. “I have paid. I have paid dearly,” he said. In 1972, he moved to the small French village of Traves, 80 miles from the German border, and worked as a translator. Four years later, a reporter discovered his whereabouts after Peiper used his real name to order chicken wire at a local hardware store. The French Communist newspaper, L’Humanité, published an exposé of the notorious war criminal living quietly among the French, and the former colonel was defiant. “If I am here,” he told reporters, “it is because in 1940 the French were without courage.” On the night of July 13, 1976, unknown individuals firebombed Peiper’s house; he died in the blaze, his body burned beyond recognition. His killers were never found. In the end, the man who had survived the brutal fighting of the Eastern and Western fronts and evaded the U.S. military justice system could not escape his past. To the now middle-aged American veterans of the European Theater, justice had finally been served. ✯ Peiper was 61 and living in France in 1976 (below) when unknown arsonists dealt their own form of justice, firebombing his house (above); Peiper died in the blaze. (Keystone Press/Alamy Stock Photo) (Keystone Press/Alamy Stock Photo) This article was published in the April 2020 issue of World War II.

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How a Dentist Developed a Clever, but Flawed, System for Discharging Firearms

How a Dentist Developed a Clever, but Flawed, System for Discharging Firearms In the decades leading up to the Civil War, Minié balls and rifling began to replace round balls and smoothbore barrels in U.S. Army arsenals. Percussion caps had come into use on Model 1842 smoothbore muskets, but it was hoped an even more rapid means of ignition could be developed. A temporary solution to that problem came from an unorthodox source, a New York dentist named Edward Maynard, who had dropped out of West Point due to ill health. In 1845, Maynard patented a tape priming system that used a paper roll of caps he described as such: “A strip of paper, either in a moist or dry state is, by means of appropriate instruments and by the application of pressure, forced out into cup forms…the spaces between the cups being sufficient to prevent the communication of fire from one to the other. These cups are filled with the percussion or fulminating mixture, even with the original surface of the strip, it is then coated with a varnish…dissolved in alcohol, and covered with a thin strip of paper, and the whole is then varnished over.” Maynard also invented the spring-loaded system that would feed the caps into firing position. Confused? Think of the caps you loaded in your cap gun, it’s about the same thing. Jefferson Davis, who served as secretary of war from 1853 to 1857, took an interest in Maynard’s invention and initially paid him $1 for every musket made that used a tape primer. In 1854, the government gave the dentist a lump sum of $50,000 for unlimited use of the system. The washed-out cadet was getting rich, and his system was at the core of the U.S. Army’s first percussion rifle musket, the handsome Model 1855, of which 50,000 were made at the Springfield, Mass., and Harpers Ferry, Va., government arsenals. In addition, tape primers were used on government-made pistols and shorter Model 1855 rifles. Maynard claimed that the varnish on the paper and the protection of the magazine door would prevent dampness from affecting the primers, but that proved false. The paper strips were also prone to “chain fires,” where the spark from one cap would set off others in the roll. Due to those and other problems, the Maynard primer was abandoned by the U.S. Army in favor of the percussion cap. Model 1855s saw Civil War service using common percussion caps. Previous Next A well-turned-out corporal of Company A, 14th U.S. Regular Infantry poses with his tape-primer- powered Model 1855 rifle musket. Such muskets manufactured from 1859 to 1861 also had a patch box inlet into the butt to hold cleaning supplies. (Courtesy of Rick Carlile) Soldiers were issued tin tubes that held nine Maynard priming tapes. (Heritage Auctions, Dallas) Maynard, who lived from 1813 to 1891, continued to tinker with military inventions throughout his life, and held 23 patents related to weaponry, including the Maynard carbine. (Library of Congress) When Virginia troops captured Harpers Ferry in April 1861, they sent machinery and dies from the U.S. armory to Richmond for weapons production. The Rebels used the Model 1855 lockplate dies that were made to accommodate tape primers, and so the reliable Richmond rifle musket had a distinctive “hump” but no tape priming system. (Heritage Auctions, Dallas) The Maynard system was also used in civilian firearms and pistols, like this small “vest revolver.” Abolitionist John Brown bought 2,000 .31-caliber Massachusetts Arms revolvers that used the Maynard system to arm his “Free Soil” followers fighting against slavery in the undeclared civil war that ravaged Kansas after the passage of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act. (A&S Auction)

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How a French Mime Ran Covert Missions During WWII to Save the Lives of Jewish Children

How a French Mime Ran Covert Missions During WWII to Save the Lives of Jewish Children “Vanity, vanity. Everything is vanity, but you need to know that you have to go toward the light even if you know that one day we shall be dust,” recalled famed mime Marcel Marceau in 2001. “What is important are our deeds during our lifetime.” And indeed, Marceau lived and died by those words. Known as a master mime throughout the world post World War II, it was partly Marceau’s silence that helped save the lives of at least 70 Jewish children during the Holocaust. In 1939 — after French authorities declared that Jewish families within the city of Strasbourg had two hours to pack and join a transport train bound for southwest France — the 15-year-old Marceau and his older brother Alain fled their birthplace. Marceau’s mother survived the war. His father, however, was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. Escaping to the city of Limoges, Marceau entered art school at the same time as he entered the French Resistance. When France quickly fell to Nazi Germany that following spring, the budding performer used his training to forge new identity cards for French youth to make them appear too young to be conscripted into German labor camps. In 1944 Marceau was recruited by his cousin, Georges Loinger, to join Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, a secret Jewish unit of the French Resistance that smuggled Jewish children from occupied France into neutral nations. “Their mission,” writes History.com, “was to evacuate Jewish children who had been hiding in a French orphanage and get them to the Swiss border, where they would sneak to safety.” Marceau’s training as an actor and mime was no longer for show — it became the difference between life and death. According to Loinger, the children adored Marceau and trusted him implicitly. “The kids had to appear like they were simply going on vacation to a home near the Swiss border, and Marcel really put them at ease.” Often taking on different disguises, Marceau recalled that he once went “as a Boy Scout leader and took 24 Jewish kids, also in scout uniforms, through the forests to the border, where someone else would take them into Switzerland.” He shepherded children on the perilous journey three times before joining the Free French Forces of Charles de Gaulle in 1945. However, by war’s end, Marceau returned to his first love — the arts — using pantomiming as an outlet for his grief. “You see the pain and the sadness in his mime skits,” Loinger said. “The origin of that pain was his father’s deportation.” In 1947 Marceau created the character Bip and incorporated his war experiences into what was to become his alter ego. His audiences eagerly identified with Bip and Marceau became world-renowned, frequently performing in the United States and even Israel. Despite his later successes as Bip, the mime’s earlier, perhaps most important act, was not forgotten. On April 30, 2001, Marceau received the Raoul Wallenberg Medal from the University of Michigan — named after the Swedish architect and humanitarian credited with saving the lives of tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. “I cried for my father,” recalled Marceau while receiving the medal in 2001, “but I also cried for the millions of people who died….Destiny permitted me to live. This is why I have to bring hope to people who struggle in the world.” “I create metaphors with the hands,” he concluded. “A struggle between good and evil.”

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How a U-Boat Captain’s Criticism of the Nazi Regime Sealed His Fate at the Hands of a Firing Squad

How a U-Boat Captain’s Criticism of the Nazi Regime Sealed His Fate at the Hands of a Firing Squad The navy was considered a place of political independence—but that didn’t keep Nazi ideologues and spies from joining its ranks PICTURE THE LAST AGONIZING HOURS of a man wrongly condemned. The painful regrets over a promising career cut short; a final appeal for pardon, denied; the heart-wrenching letters to loved ones and friends, never to be seen again. From his solitary cell, a decorated U-boat captain pours the final expression of his torment into sketches of his impending death. How could it come to this—that a talented and committed U-boat captain, having survived the horrors of submarine warfare, would meet an ignominious end at the hands of fellow men in uniform? The scapegoat of a perverted justice system, Oskar Kusch would go down in history as the only German U-boat captain to be executed for daring to speak out against Hitler and his regime. Kusch served Germany well, earning the Iron Cross by age 23. (Courtesy of the German U-boat Museum, Cuxhaven-Altenbruch, http://dubm.de/en) Oskar-Heinz August Wilhelm Kusch, born on April 6, 1918, was the gifted only child of a wealthy family in Schöneberg, an upper-class neighborhood in southwestern Berlin. His father, Heinz—the director of a large insurance company—was a World War I veteran, but also a member of the Freemasons, whose secret rituals and freethinking traditions later drew reprisals from the Third Reich. An intelligent, sensitive youth with an athletic physique and a flair for water sports, Oskar enjoyed a liberal upbringing that shielded him from the worst excesses of Nazification after 1933. As a boy, Kusch joined the Bündische Jugend, an alliance of youth groups inspired by the International Boy Scouts. His club embraced the teachings of classical art, literature, and philosophy, planting the seeds that would inform his refined views as an adult. In his teens, Kusch started showing what would become a lifelong tendency to thumb his nose at Nazi orthodoxy: after the Hitler Youth absorbed the Bündische Jugend in 1935, Kusch quit but continued to attend clandestine meetings of his old organization. This landed him on a register of “politically unreliable individuals” with the Gestapo, Germany’s notorious secret police. As a result, although he had graduated high school with honors in autumn 1936, Kusch failed to obtain a police certificate of good political standing and proof of “desirable personal conduct” from the Gestapo—a criterium for entering higher education and many civil professions. This problem evaporated when the 18-year-old was drafted for military service in April 1937. Thanks to his experience as a sailor in civilian regattas, Kusch was advised to join the Kriegsmarine, the German navy. To his great relief, he discovered that the navy, in particular among the branches of the German armed forces, was considered a place of political independence, where liberal ideas were tolerated and one could escape persecution from the “Brown Shirts” (Hitler’s stormtroopers, whose uniforms became synonymous with the regime’s brutality). As Kusch would soon discover, that didn’t keep Nazi ideologues and spies from joining the navy’s ranks, U-boat forces included. As a young teen, Kusch enjoyed water sports and joined the Bündische Jugend (below), a group that promoted many democratic principles. (Courtesy of the von Luttitz family) (© SZ Photo/Scherl/Bridgeman Images) AFTER TWO YEARS of naval instruction, Kusch served on the light cruiser Emden, but he soon grew bored with his duties and applied for a transfer to train as a submarine watch officer—a post he regarded as far more exciting. In June 1941, he was appointed junior watch officer on U-103, which went on to become the U-boat with the third-highest tonnage sunk in World War II. There his commanders showered him with praise. Although he was only 23, Kusch’s ensuing swift rise through the ranks was not unusual at the time, amid the German military’s growing appetite for officer material as the war intensified. He was promoted to sub-lieutenant and awarded the Iron Cross, concluding his training and returning to U–103 as senior watch officer in August 1942. Onboard U-103, Kusch and his crewmates felt free to criticize the government in informal discussions, a U-boat tradition promoted by the boat’s captains—first Werner Winter and later Gustav-Adolf Janssen, whose own comments often suggested that both had reservations about the Nazi Party line. Kusch’s first U-boat command was from the French port of Lorient in February 1943 on the aging U-154. Lorient was the Germans’ largest and most active U-boat base, the hub of its Western command, directing hundreds of craft in the Atlantic and beyond. Though skeptical of what he saw as Germany’s outmoded submarine technology and the shrinking chances of the Axis powers winning the war, Kusch rose to the challenge; his first combat tour enjoyed moderate success, sinking one ship and damaging two others. Kusch’s first commission was on U-103, where he and his fellow officers felt free to openly criticize the German government and its policies. (Ullstein Bild via Getty Images) That same year marked the turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic. In May 1943 alone—soon to be called “Black May” by U-boat men—41 German subs would be lost at sea, compared to 85 in the whole of the previous year. As the Allies began asserting their supremacy over the ocean, Karl Dönitz, the grand admiral of the German navy, reluctantly ordered an end to U-boat attacks on convoys in the North Atlantic, gradually discontinuing his wolf pack operations. The halcyon days of the “Happy Time,” when marauding German subs could sink vast tonnage of enemy ships almost at will, would be gone forever. When Kusch took the helm of U–154, he meant to run his boat like U–103: a well-oiled fighting machine whose highly professional crew bandied about political views within the bounds of traditional comradeship—that is, with relative impunity. He would strive to promote a critical assessment of Nazi myths among his officers, assuming that truth and logic carried more weight than party lies. That assumption proved to be terribly wrong. Kusch’s first task as captain was to give an introductory speech to his crew and meet with the officers of U–154 individually. Among them, Ulrich Abel, a 31-year-old lieutenant of the naval reserve, was the new senior watch officer. A trained lawyer and former lower court judge, Abel had been a Nazi Party functionary in Hamburg before joining the merchant marine. He had considerable experience as a seaman and had skillfully commanded a minesweeper in the North Sea, but he had never served on a U-boat. To Kusch’s dismay, when he sat down with Abel, the lieutenant dispensed with a rundown of his naval qualifications and instead gushed that final victory was near, thanks to the Führer’s military genius. Next, engineer Kurt Druschel made a point of highlighting what a wonderful job he had done as a Hitler Youth group leader. The ideological lines were being drawn. Just before his U-boat set off in March 1943, Kusch issued a controversial order: that the Führer’s portrait in the officer’s mess be removed and displayed in a less prominent spot. “Take that away, we’re not in the business of idolatry here,” the new captain said. In its place, Kusch, a talented artist, hung a drawing he had made of a schooner at sea, probably the training ship Gorch Fock on which he had served. One of Kusch’s most incendiary moves as commander of U-154 was to replace a portrait of Hitler with a drawing he had made of a schooner. (Courtesy of the von Luttitz family) Kusch made no secret of his anti-Nazi stance, and his attitude quickly became known to everyone on the cramped sub despite the repeated urgings of his friends to watch his tongue. “What do the German people and a tapeworm have in common?,” he quipped to his crew. “They are both surrounded by a brown mass [a reference to the brown shirts] and in constant danger of being evacuated.” The German term for “evacuated,” abgeführt, also means “arrested and taken away.” But the decisive break between Kusch and his pro-Nazi officers arguably occurred in the early hours of July 3, 1943. As U–154 was returning from a combat tour in the Caribbean, it joined up with U–126, also headed back to France. In the Bay of Biscay—by this time a perilous patch for German U-boats—an enemy plane suddenly appeared and dropped depth charges, prompting both subs to crash-dive. U–154 escaped unscathed, but its compatriot wasn’t as fortunate. Ominous cracking noises soon reverberated in the depths, suggesting U–126 had been hit and was being crushed by rising water pressure as it sank. Kusch surfaced several miles from the attack site to look for survivors, but the risk of a new air raid prompted U–154 to break off and dive again. It arrived in Lorient alone three days later. Although flotilla command later deemed Kusch’s actions correct during and after the attack, Abel, who had a close friend on U–126, reproached the captain to his face for not stepping up a rescue attempt. From that moment on, the senior watch officer was “filled with hatred” for his superior, according to Arno Funke, the new junior watch officer and another committed Nazi who had joined U-154 in the mid-Atlantic to replace an outgoing crewman. In September 1943 Kusch set sail on what would be his final patrol, again to the Caribbean. He was joined by Hans Nothdurft, the boat’s new surgeon, who also took a dim view of Kusch’s anti-Nazi tendencies. U-154 did not manage to approach a single convoy and was targeted in numerous air raids. On the return journey to Lorient, heated arguments ensued between Kusch on one side and Abel, Druschel, and Funke on the other. When U-154 arrived back at Lorient before Christmas 1943, all officers were invited to a gathering with flotilla commander Ernst Kals, who would pass on holiday greetings from Dönitz. Issued months earlier, but held back by Kals for reasons of morale, the “greetings” contained an ominous message: Complainers who voice their own personal wretched and miserable opinions and force them openly on their comrades…must be held accountable unmercifully and relentlessly by the military courts for criminally undermining our fighting abilities. Since the Battle of the Atlantic had turned against the Germans, reports of sagging morale among navy personnel had trickled back to Dönitz. He remembered an armed rebellion that sailors in the German port of Kiel led during the final days of World War I; his tough message was designed, in part, to quash any threat of a revolt. Furthermore, the naval commander in chief had moved closer to the Nazi Party line calling for a total and unquestioning commitment from all servicemen—eroding the very independence the navy prided itself on. ON CHRISTMAS EVE, as his last task before going on leave, Kusch prepared an evaluation of Abel, who was being transferred to Germany to train as a U-boat commander. Abel’s “thinking and acting are somewhat rigid, inflexible, and often rather one-sided,” the captain wrote, but he added that his officer was nonetheless suitable for U-boat command. Abel was “an average officer with good abilities to get his way,” Kusch concluded, damning his underling with faint praise. Abel received the captain’s evaluation on January 15, 1944. Long indignant at being subordinate to a “less educated” officer more than six years his junior, Abel seethed when he read the document and quickly wrote a report denouncing Kusch, presenting it the same day to the commander of his U-boat school, Heinrich Schmidt. Schmidt skimmed over Abel’s 11-point attack, which included the Hitler portrait incident, Kusch’s “anti-National Socialist” attitude, and the captain’s descriptions of the Führer as “insane, megalomaniacal, and pathologically ambitious.” Abel said Kusch claimed he had it from a reliable source that “the Führer often has fits, rants and raves, pulls the curtains down and rolls around on the floor.” Among the most serious charges, Abel quoted Kusch as saying “Germany’s defeat will in no way be a disaster” and also shared that the captain had warned sailors against government propaganda, claiming it was a Nazi lie that world Jewry aimed to destroy Germany. Furthermore, Abel said Kusch had poisoned the crew’s political views by passing on dangerous ideas from enemy radio broadcasts; for instance, he said the captain had been duped into thinking Allied raids on German cities were primarily against military targets—the Allies’ stated policy—rather than on the civilian population, Berlin’s official version of the truth. Schmidt urged Abel to reconsider, as a denunciation against a fellow officer could leave a black mark on his own record and, in the wake of Kusch’s evaluation, be construed as spite. Abel, however, was resolute. The case was swiftly passed to flotilla command and declared a “super-secret command file,” a top-level classification that allowed the judges to employ extraordinary means to hurry it along—a rare action. Upon returning from leave on January 20, 1944, a surprised Kusch was handcuffed at Lorient station and transferred to the armed forces’ jail in Angers, France. As most of the witnesses had already returned to Germany, officials decided to try the case in Kiel, at the upper court of U-boat training command. Kusch arrived in Kiel on January 25 and was placed in solitary confinement. A friend quickly found a defense lawyer, Gerhard Meyer-Grieben, who was willing to take on the case at extremely short notice. He and Kusch were told that the court-martial would take place the next morning, January 26. THE COURT-MARTIAL, attended by several officers of U-boat admiralty, was a subdued affair. Kusch is said to have been calm and self-assured, and he made no inflammatory statements against the Nazi regime. Several enlisted men of U–154 gave sterling accounts of their captain’s conduct, while officers of U–103, including Kusch’s former captains, Winter and Janssen, stood up for their former officer but could not comment on the matter at hand. It was the damaging testimony and reports of U–154 hardliners Ulrich Abel, Arno Funke, and Kurt Druschel, along with that of the surgeon, Hans Nothdurft, that decided the case—that Kusch had “undermined the fighting spirit” of his command by spreading a sense of defeatism through his political discussions and by illicitly monitoring enemy radio stations. “I never talked about the Reich’s defeat in these terms,” Kusch contended. “I also never claimed a defeat was certain.” He added that he only listened to foreign radio stations when the reception of German stations was poor. “I wanted to hear about Berlin,” the young captain said. “Mostly I just listened to music. I discussed the news with the officers.” It came as little consolation that Abel’s charge of cowardice in combat, based on Kusch’s failed pursuit of a convoy in the spring of 1943, could not be proved and was summarily dismissed. Oddly, Kusch appeared to do little to defend himself during the proceedings. He rejected his counsel’s suggestion to plead for clemency, believing he could beat the charges. Kusch did not deny his conduct or the statements of which he was accused of making, trying instead to modify them in a way that no longer incriminated him. “My comments about the Führer have been misinterpreted by the witnesses,” Kusch coolly told the court. “We were generally discussing the boundaries between madness and genius. In any case I did not say the Führer was a megalomaniac.” But Abel and Druschel vehemently opposed Kusch’s attempts to downplay his remarks about Hitler. Even a junior crewman who claimed to have heard nothing of Kusch’s remarks against the Nazi regime still had to admit the accused seemed to reject the Third Reich and its institutions. By the end of the afternoon, the court had heard enough. Kusch, the prosecution asserted, had greatly endangered the operational capability of his vessel through his treasonous conduct, thus jeopardizing the lives of its crew. The prosecutor recommended he be jailed for 10-and-a-half years, plus one year for spreading malicious content from foreign radio broadcasts, and that he lose all military and civilian rights. After just 43 minutes of deliberations, Chief Judge Karl-Heinrich Hagemann and two military assessors emerged with an astonishing sentence: death by firing squad, based largely on Kusch’s remarks about the Führer and the perceived endangerment of Germany’s war effort. The ruling set in motion the only execution of a U-boat captain in the history of the German navy. (Another U-boat commander, the hapless Heinz Hirsacker, had been convicted of cowardice in 1943, but took his own life before the execution could be carried out.) Kusch showed little emotion upon hearing the verdict. Dressed in full uniform, the condemned man rose and saluted the court, barely having time to shake the hands of two U-154 crewmen before being yanked away by military police. After the court-martial, Winter, Kusch’s first commander on U-103, wrote a long personal letter to Dönitz pointing out that Abel’s charges relied heavily on hearsay and rumors, and that the case should be retried. Dönitz replied that he could not change regulations and that the matter, in any case, had been taken out of his hands—Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring would have the final say on Kusch’s punishment. A pardon seemed increasingly unlikely. Janssen, who had been Winter’s successor and a one-time personal aide of Dönitz, even traveled to France in a last-ditch attempt to convince his former boss to appeal to Göring to overturn the ruling. The grand admiral reluctantly agreed to review the matter, saying he would speak to Kusch and “look deep into his heart and test him thoroughly.” Evidently, Dönitz forgot all about his promise after returning to Germany, as he never contacted Kusch and made no effort to review the case. As Kusch meanwhile languished in prison, everyone but his family and closest friends abandoned him. From his letters, some of which were intercepted by naval command and never delivered, it was clear Kusch believed he would be spared—but the death sentence was confirmed by Göring and the head of Wehrmacht high command, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, on April 10, 1944. On May 11, Kusch was informed that he would be shot the next morning. To the very end, he proclaimed his innocence. In one last letter to his father, a desperate Kusch wrote: “Life could have been so beautiful, but a senseless fate has destroyed everything.” Kusch expressed these last dark hours in stunningly evocative artwork that would be published after the war, including his nightmare of the firing squad that awaited him. As Germany’s naval apparatus buckled to the will of the Nazi regime, Kusch, an opponent of Hitler but a self-proclaimed defender of the fatherland, was led from his prison cell and shot at a canalside firing range at 6:32 a.m. on May 12, 1944. He was 26. His chief nemesis, Abel, would briefly fulfill his dream of commanding his own sub, U–193. Ironically, it was lost with all hands in April 1944, three weeks before Kusch’s execution. Kusch plays chess with a deathlike figure in another haunting drawing he made just before his execution in Kiel, Germany. (Courtesy of the von Luttitz family) AFTER THE WAR, Kusch’s father set about trying to clear his son’s name. In 1949–50, Karl-Heinrich Hagemann, the judge who had convicted Kusch, was tried in Kiel alongside the two military assessors who had approved the execution. The sentence was deemed to have been lawful under the code of justice of Nazi Germany, and Hagemann and his cohorts were acquitted. “Just following orders” was still a good-enough defense. Erich Topp, a celebrated U-boat ace who served as an admiral in postwar Germany, was among those who tried to reverse Kusch’s wartime conviction, but he ran up against diehard elements in the naval veterans’ movement. Other officers noted that earlier in the war, Kusch’s remarks and any Allied radio monitoring by a U-boat captain would have been considered nothing more than minor irritants and dismissed. For instance, Jürgen Oesten, a U-boat commander and Knight’s Cross recipient, admitted that in 1941 he, too, had listened to enemy radio broadcasts while at sea. Word had made it to Kriegsmarine brass, but Dönitz had buried the issue. In 1996, Kusch’s case returned to the public eye thanks to the painstaking work of historian Heinrich Walle, who had evaluated the wartime files and published a seminal book on the U-boat captain. Two years later—more than half a century after the end of hostilities—the German national parliament, the Bundestag, annulled all Nazi criminal rulings that had violated basic principles of justice in order to maintain the Third Reich. Much of the prosecution’s attack on Kusch, for instance, relied on hearsay from members of the U-boat crew, strongly suggesting the case would have never gone to trial had the draconian Nazi legal system not been in place. Oskar Kusch was finally exonerated. In 1998, the street leading to the canalside firing range in Kiel was renamed in Kusch’s honor, with a memorial dedicated to the enlightened U-boat captain who had dared to openly resist Hitler. The inscription reads: His name stands for the many victims of the unjust National Socialist state who lost their lives here and elsewhere. Their deaths are a warning to us all. ✯ This story was originally published in the December 2019 issue of World War II magazine. Subscribe here.

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How Allied Air Attacks Evolved During World War II

How Allied Air Attacks Evolved During World War II In October 1943, the U.S. Eighth Air Force’s losses became critical, forcing a reappraisal of the American daylight bombing Strategy. On October 14, 1943, the air war over Europe reached a critical turning point. On that Thursday, the United States Eighth Air Force mounted Mission No. 115 against the city of Schweinfurt, the center of the German ball bearing industry. Sixteen bomber groups from the 1st and 3rd Air divisions would participate in the strike. In all, 291 Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses took off from bases in England and headed east toward the German border. As the bombers formed up over the Channel, short-range British Supermarine Spitfire fighters climbed to escort the heavies to the Continent. There, Republic P-47 Thunderbolts took over, escorting the flying armada to the German border. But insufficient range prevented the Thunderbolts from keeping the bombers company all the way to the target. Turning back somewhere around Aachen, just inside the German border, the P-47s left the unescorted bombers to a catastrophic fate. Out of 291 bombers dispatched, 257 actually entered German airspace. Sixty were shot down, just over 20 percent of the total number. Two hundred twenty-nine B-17s reached Schweinfurt and dropped their bombs. Only 197 returned to England. Of those, five planes were abandoned or crashed on landing, while 17 others landed so damaged that they had to be written off. Altogether, 82 of the 291 original bombers that left England were lost, more than 28 percent of the entire force assigned to the raid. Moreover, the Schweinfurt Raid was the climax of a week of strikes against German industrial targets. Between October 8 and 14, 1943, the Eighth Air Force flew 1,342 heavy bomber sorties, losing a total of 152 bombers (11.3 percent), with another 6 percent receiving heavy damage. During the entire month of October, the Eighth lost a total of 214 heavy bombers, almost 10 percent of the total number dispatched. Lost and damaged planes constituted more than half the sorties flown during the month. At that rate of attrition, an entirely new bomber force would be required every three months in order to maintain the Allied bomber offensive. After the prohibitive losses sustained in October 1943, the Eighth Air Force suspended deep bomber strikes into German territory. Two premises of daylight strategic bombing—that bombers would be able to get through enemy defenses and back without escorts, and that destroying the enemy’s industrial base would cripple its war effort—appeared to be greatly mistaken. American air leaders, recognizing the inability of unescorted heavy bombers to get through and bomb German industry without excessive losses, questioned the very foundation of American air strategy. But why did American air leaders initially believe their heavy bombers would always get through, and what were the consequences of the American strategic doctrine when applied in the skies over the Third Reich? How has American air doctrine changed as a result? The airplane, initially used during World War I in a reconnaissance role to locate enemy troop and artillery movements and concentrations, evolved throughout the conflict to perform all of the roles identified with modern air power—including strategic bombing. Although it was an immature weapons system during the Great War, the airplane’s enormous potential fueled the imaginations of interwar air theorists, foremost among them Italy’s Giulio Douhet. Assuming that population and industrial centers would be vulnerable to fleets of heavy bombers, Douhet advocated attacking an enemy nation’s urban areas and factories with explosives, incendiaries and poisonous gas—with no distinction being made between combatant and noncombatant. Douhet believed that the impact of strategic bombing would simultaneously demoralize an enemy’s civilian population and destroy its capacity to wage war. During the 1920s, Douhet’s theories and those of air power advocate Brig. Gen. William “Billy” Mitchell gained champions within the U.S. Army Air Corps, and strategic bombing doctrine began to be reflected in its field manuals. Chief among this new generation of bomber advocates in the late 1930s was the leader of the Army Air Corps, General Henry “Hap” Arnold. As the commander in chief of the American air service, General Arnold surrounded himself with “bomber men,” disciples of daylight strategic precision bombing. According to Arnold and his top commanders, the primary purpose of air power in Europe during the coming conflicts would be strategic bombing. Strategic bombing was the only major contribution the airmen could make to the war effort that was largely independent of the Army and Navy. If air power was to show its capabilities as an equal partner to ground and naval forces, it would be done through the successes of strategic bombing. Because of the prohibitive cost of creating a bomber fleet on a “Douhetian” scale in the interwar fiscal environment, the U.S. Army Air Corps Tactical School advocated only the precision bombing of an enemy nation’s vital centers–its factories, power sources, transportation and raw materials. Advocates believed this goal could be achieved through the use of the new, fast, long-range “precision bombers” coming into service late in the 1930s, the B-17 Flying Fortress and the Consolidated B-24 Liberator. Powered by four turbocharged engines, the B-17s and B-24s were, at the time of their test flights in the mid-1930s, faster than most of the world’s operational interceptors. ‘If the superior speed of the bomber was such to make interception improbable, or at worst, infrequent, then no provision need be made for escort fighters to accompany the bombers on their long range missions,’ said one modern analyst of the 1930s air doctrine. Moreover, the new heavy bombers flew above 20,000 feet, too high to be reached by most ground-based antiaircraft. The Air Corps bomber men believed the American heavy bombers would fly high and fast into enemy territory, eluding interceptors and antiaircraft defenses. Once above the target area, these “self-defending” American bombers would utilize the world’s most sophisticated bombsight—the Norden—which allowed for such factors as speed, course, wind direction and distance to target. Under favorable conditions, trained aircrews were able to place their payloads within a few hundred feet of their target from over 15,000 feet, prompting an Army Air Forces spokesman to boast that the aircrews could “drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 25,000 feet.” But for the Norden bombsight to work well, American pilots had to deliver their payloads during daylight hours, in good weather and in level flight. By 1940, with U.S. involvement in the European war imminent, American air commanders put their faith in the heavy bombers’ ability to get through to bomb Adolf Hitler’s Germany into submission. These leaders built an air doctrine around untested assumptions—that their bomber armadas could penetrate enemy territory without the aid of fighter escort and accurately strike German industrial targets. In June 1941, the U.S. Army Air Corps was redesignated the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) and submitted a blueprint for the defeat of the Axis powers should the United States be drawn into the war. Convinced of the effectiveness of strategic bombing, the Army Air Forces asked for and received permission to build a huge bomber force on truly a Douhetian scale. But building such an armada would take time; planes needed to be assembled, air and ground crews trained, and an air force, the Eighth, had to be positioned in England. The British initiated their own strategic bombing campaign against Germany in late 1939. Initially, the Royal Air Force’s (RAF’s) Bomber Command attempted daylight strikes against the Reich, but those strikes proved disastrous, and the British soon turned to night attacks against urban centers. Throughout 1940 and 1941, the RAF continued to build up its small bomber force, and in May 1942, it conducted the first of many “thousand bomber raids” against German military, industrial and civilian targets. British Handley Page Halifax, Avro Lancaster, and Vickers Wellington bombers waded through the night skies to burn Germany’s cities with incendiary payloads. British bomber raids were conducted at night to minimize aircraft losses, but the accuracy of the nocturnal strikes left much to be desired. Bomber Command was forced to carpet-bomb urban areas, a strategy that razed parts of German cities but did not effectively target Hitler’s industrial complex. The British reasoned that carpet-bombing would destroy civilian morale. These night attacks continued for the remainder of the war, complementing the USAAF’s daylight precision-bombing campaign by forcing Hitler to use essential resources in an attempt to save German cities from firebombing. The newly formed Eighth Air Force, under the command of one of Arnold’s premier bomber men, Maj. Gen. Ira C. Eaker, joined the RAF Bomber Command in England in the summer of 1942. When Eaker joined the Eighth Air Force, he had only a handful of B-17s in the European theater. Over the next year, the Eighth Air Force leadership struggled to build a bomber force capable of inflicting serious damage on the Germans. Once in place, the Eighth Air Force pursued a policy of high-altitude daylight precision bombing against specific target systems—aircraft factories, electric power, transportation and oil supplies—in an attempt to destroy Germany’s ability to wage war. The Allied strategic campaign in 1942 was very limited and too modest to produce conclusive evidence on its effectiveness. This was a period of apprenticeship, as bomber commanders learned tactics, trained crews and built up a ground organization. In anticipation of the invasion of North Africa—Operation Torch—units originally assigned to the Eighth Air Force were instead sent to the Mediterranean. In addition, the Eighth Air Force changed target priorities because the Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff demanded that it bomb U-boat pens and construction yards. Since most of their early targets were in France and within U.S. fighter range, the Eighth Air Force bombers had fighter support on many of their raids, and the Luftwaffe had not yet been trained to attack mass formations of B-17s. Yet even in its limited early operations in 1942, the Eighth Air Force lost up to seven percent of its bombers on some unescorted raids, a rate of loss that previously had led the RAF to abandon daylight operations. Such high attrition rates meant the average bomber crew could expect to survive only 14 or 15 unescorted missions. The standard tour at that time was 25 missions. If more than half the missions turned out to be unescorted, the chances of surviving an entire tour were slim. Still, German fighters and flak continued to decimate American heavy bombers during daylight raids. General Eaker continued to believe in his bombers’ ability to get through without fighter escort and bomb the Third Reich into submission. Eaker’s optimism was based in part on the outrageous claims made by his aerial gunners and poor intelligence concerning the makeup of the Luftwaffe’s defenses. The Eighth Air Force gunners claimed a 6-to-1 kill ratio against enemy fighters over France and the Low Countries, a vastly exaggerated figure. Moreover, Eaker believed erroneously that the Germans had created a relatively narrow coastal fighter belt from Hamburg to Brittany. Once the bombers had punched through this fighter belt, he reasoned, there would be clear airspace the rest of the way to and from the targets. With American bomber strength continuously growing, Eaker believed his bombers would be able to get through without long-range escort. But the Germans had not created a coastal fighter belt. Instead, the Luftwaffe had established five defensive zones, each roughly 25 miles deep, providing fighter coverage more than 100 miles inland from the coast. Instead of punching their way through a single linear defense, Allied bombers had to contend with a sophisticated defense-in-depth, which provided constant attacks against bombers going to and from their targets. The integration of American and British bombing strategies was formalized in January 1943 at the Casablanca Conference in a directive that laid the basis for a “combined bomber offensive” in preparation for the invasion of Europe and the opening of the second front. Put into effect in June 1943, Operation Pointblank, as the combined bomber offensive was eventually called, appeared critical to any successful invasion and ground campaign, since the limited Allied ground forces would require clear air superiority and would benefit from a weakened Wehrmacht. Operation Pointblank put German fighter strength at the top of the target list, in a category all its own. This directive, in effect, ordered the Eighth Air Force to destroy the German aviation industry and secure air superiority over the continent, but how air superiority was to be achieved was debatable. With every passing month, more Flying Fortresses and Liberators entered the pipeline, and General Eaker continued to believe his rapidly increasing flock of “self-protecting” bombers would be able to successfully reach, bomb and return from targets over the Reich itself. Stripped of some of its bombers and fighters due to the North African Campaign, Operation Pointblank opened with attacks on targets in Western Europe. Eaker placed highest priority on attacks on the German aircraft industry, especially fighter assembly plants, engine factories, and ball bearing manufacturers. Petroleum targets and transportation systems dropped down the priority list, while submarine targets remained close to the top. Frustrated by erratic weather (which limited daylight raids to about 10 a month) and crew and aircraft shortages, the Eighth Air Force did not mount a very impressive effort until the summer of 1943. The ever intensifying campaign did, however, help divert about half the Luftwaffe’s fighter force to anti-bomber operations. When Eaker received additional B-17 groups, he ordered major missions deep into Germany against important industrial targets, since the airfield bombings were not appreciably reducing German fighter strength. On August 17, 1943, the Eighth Air Force launched its deepest raid against the ball bearing factories at Schweinfurt and aircraft production factories at Regensburg. The bombs destroyed some of the factory complexes, but the Luftwaffe destroyed or damaged much of the bomber force. The raids cost the Eighth Air Force 60 out of 315 bombers and usually the 10 crewmen in each bomber. After more raids against Luftwaffe airfields, the Eighth Air Force made another massive effort the next month. On September 6, Eaker sent 262 bombers against Stuttgart. Of those, 45 fell to fighters and flak. Although the Americans had proved that, weather permitting, they could put some of their bombs on target, their losses in unescorted raids suggested that the Eighth Air Force might not find planes and crews to replace its losses and maintain efficiency and morale. Undaunted, Eaker reorganized his bomber force for another maximum effort into Germany in October 1943. Reinforced with bombers redeployed from North Africa, the Eighth Air Force once again flew unescorted into the heart of industrial Germany. The results were again disastrous. Losses in the second week of “Black October” climbed until the second major strike against the ball bearing factories at Schweinfurt capped the slaughter. On October 14, “Black Thursday,” a force of 291 B-17s flew into Germany and lost 60 aircraft. Of the survivors, another 138 bombers suffered damage or casualties. Throughout the summer and fall, Eighth Air Force bomber crews were experiencing a monthly attrition rate of 30 percent, while Luftwaffe pilots died at a rate less than half that of the Americans. Of the 35 aircrews that arrived in England with the 100th Bomb Group at the end of May 1943, only 14 percent of the men made it through the 25 missions required for rotation. The rest were dead, wounded, missing, psychological cases or prisoners of war. The message was clear: Bombers could not survive beyond the range of fighter escort. After Black Week, Eaker called off further penetrations and pondered his dilemma. The American daylight bombing campaign against Germany had reached a crisis point. The changes eventually made to Operation Pointblank in 1944 came from several sources. Major General James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle replaced Eaker as the Eighth Air Force commander on January 6, 1944. Doolittle’s experience as commander of the Northwest African Strategic Air Force during Operation Torch had convinced him of the critical importance of fighter escorts to the success of bombardment. With a fighter-escort advocate at the helm of the Eighth Air Force, the doctrine of air superiority took on greater importance. Not only would bombers continue to strike key aircraft industries, but increasing numbers of American fighter escorts would aggressively attack the Luftwaffe as the Germans rose to attack heavy bomber formations. The American fighters would also dive below 20,000 feet in search of enemy aircraft in the air and on the ground. Building on engineering projects in 1943, the Eighth Air Force mounted wing and belly tanks on its Lockheed P-38 Lightning and Republic P-47 Thunderbolt fighters. The USAAF also discovered that by placing a British Rolls Royce Merlin engine in the North American P-51 Mustang, originally designed as a ground attack fighter-bomber, they could create the optimal long-range escort fighter for air-to-air duels with the Luftwaffe over German territory. In the meantime, the Eighth Air Force had redesigned its bomber formations for more accurate bombing and mutual self-protection. Perhaps most significantly, Doolittle instituted a phased escort system that provided fighter coverage in relays. No longer tied to the bomber formations in fuel-wasting close support, Allied fighters were allowed by the relay system to push into enemy airspace at speed and rendezvous with bombers. Using this system, RAF Spitfires were responsible for areas over the English Channel and the North Sea to a distance of about 100 miles. American P-47 Thunderbolts then took over, providing escort for the next 150 to 200 miles. Then P-38 Lightnings took responsibility for another 100 to 150 miles, extending fighter coverage to about 450 miles. With the arrival of the first P-51Bs in England in the late fall of 1943 and the rapid development and refitting of wing and belly tanks, American bombers would enjoy escort cover to 600 miles, a range sufficient to reach Berlin. In October 1943, the USAAF activated the Fifteenth Air Force, a strategic bomber force flying from Italy that could reach targets in south-central Germany and oil-refining targets in Eastern Europe. The activation of the Fifteenth forced the Germans to defend against two major bomber threats during daylight. Moreover, American aircraft production was finally meeting USAAF needs, and the USAAF training establishment was producing increasing numbers of bomber crews and fighter pilots. In December 1943, the Eighth Air Force mounted its first 600-plane raid. On January 1, 1944, the U.S. Strategic Air Forces, under the command of Lt. Gen. Carl A. Spaatz, came into existence to coordinate the Eighth and Fifteenth air forces’ raids. By early 1944, the newly formed U.S. Strategic Air Forces was hastening the destruction of the Luftwaffe in the air and on the ground, as well as carrying out the selective destruction of German industrial power. Spaatz abandoned his predecessor’s belief that the heavy bombers would always get through and championed the use of fighter escorts for bombers attacking deep into German territory. The U.S. Strategic Air Forces, coordinating Eighth and Fifteenth air forces’ raids, resulted in a new peak in the American bombing effort. Testing all its reforms in early February 1944, the Eighth Air Force mounted a third Schweinfurt raid and lost only 11 out of 231 bombers, while three other raids sent 600 bombers against Germany with minimal losses. The USAAF mounted some 3,800 daylight sorties over the Reich during the so-called “Big Week” of February 22-25, while more than 2,300 night sorties were flown by RAF Bomber Command. Although Big Week cost the Eighth 300 planes (mostly bombers) lost or written off, nearly 10,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the German aircraft industry and ball bearing plants, a greater tonnage than the Eighth had dropped on all targets in 1943. As many as 1,000 complete or nearly complete German aircraft had been destroyed. With fighters that could fly beyond the Rhine, protect bomber formations and sweep ahead to engage the Luftwaffe interceptors, the Eighth Air Force formations reversed the loss ratio with the German fighter force. American bomber losses fell below 10 percent of each raiding force, while German pilot losses mounted. In February 1944 alone, the Luftwaffe lost 33 percent of its single-engine fighters and 20 percent of its fighter pilots, including several fliers who were credited with more than 100 victories. In the first four months of 1944 it had lost 1,684 fighter pilots. Their replacements would be unskilled youths thrust into combat against experienced American pilots. Compounding Germany’s troubles, the Americans had begun to introduce new fighters into the European theater in the fall of 1943, which continued throughout the war. They included Thunderbolts, Mustangs and Lightnings, which were joined by British Spitfires and Hawker Tempests. During the first six months of 1944, the air battle over occupied Europe continued with unabated ferocity. A primary goal of Operation Pointblank was fulfilled when, on June 6, 1944, the Luftwaffe failed to menace Operation Overlord, the Normandy invasion, and the Allies enjoyed air superiority over the battlefield for the rest of the war. The success of Operation Overlord was in no small part due to the air war waged over the Continent between January and June 1944. Meanwhile, the remnants of the Luftwaffe battled the RAF and USAAF as the round-the-clock pounding of German cities and industry continued. Allied heavy bombers over the Reich now served as both bait and hunter, compelling the Luftwaffe to climb above 20,000 feet to meet the oncoming bombers and their deadly escorts in order to defend important industrial and population centers. The German planes then became targets for the well-trained Mustang and Thunderbolt pilots. By the time Operation Pointblank ended, it had achieved its primary objective, securing air superiority over the cities, factories and battlefields of Western Europe in preparation for Overlord. Operation Pointblank had succeeded, but not in the way Allied planners had initially intended or expected. Round-the-clock bombing had not smashed the Luftwaffe into oblivion, nor had it destroyed German aircraft production. Instead, by simultaneously striking at aircraft factories and bombing industrial and military targets deep inside Germany, the combined bomber offensive forced the Luftwaffe to send its fighters to meet the ever-increasing flow of bombers over the Reich. Once in the air, they were assailed by Allied fighter escorts. In this war of attrition, the Luftwaffe lost its greatest asset—its experienced pilots. Without skilled pilots to meet the Allied threat, the rise in German aircraft production meant nothing. The American doctrine of strategic daylight precision bombing failed because it rested on three premises that would be tested in World War II. The first premise centered on a belief of Arnold and his bomber disciples that their heavy bombers would ‘always get through’ without escort and destroy or neutralize enemy industry. The B-17s and B-24s were not able to adequately fight their way in and establish local command of the air. Instead, the Luftwaffe exploited the weaknesses of the flying armadas, inflicting heavy losses on the bombers—losses so extreme that, after Black Week, strategic bombing was suspended until the emergence of a new air strategy. Second, supporters of strategic daylight precision bombing believed erroneously that the civilian population was the weak link in a nation’s defense. It was thought that bringing the horrors of war directly to the factories, power plants and railroads in the cities would cause the citizens of an enemy nation to compel their government to sue for peace. In practice, neither the morale nor the will of the bombed populations approached collapse. The third premise was the belief that strategic bombing could eliminate an enemy’s ability to wage war by destroying its industrial base. German industrial output was not stopped by Allied strategic bombing. Legions of laborers ensured adequate manpower, while the largest machine-tool industry in the world compensated for the damage done to machinery. Germany had sufficient industrial capacity to absorb the first years of Allied strategic bombing. Dispersal of industry, ongoing repair and expansion compensated for additional bombing losses. In spite of the Allied strategic bombing campaign, the German economy continued to expand until late in the war. As the American strategic campaign entered its second year, it faced an experienced and determined foe in the Luftwaffe. By 1943, when American bombers began to invade the airspace of the Reich proper, the Luftwaffe fighter command began to make a major effort against them. American losses from both England and North Africa mounted inexorably from August to October, culminating in the Eighth Air Force’s so-called “Black Week.” The week as a whole cost the Eighth Air Force a quarter of its airmen in England. After Black Week, the Americans effectively suspended daylight raids over the Reich until February 1944. With U.S. bombers experiencing greater and greater attrition rates, American air commanders desperately sought a solution to their failing strategic-bombing campaign. A solution came with a change of emphasis in air doctrine. The changes produced a revision of Operation Pointblank and a doctrine that emphasized destroying the Luftwaffe in a war of attrition in order to gain air superiority for the coming D-Day invasion in the summer of 1944. The revised Operation Pointblank gave the Allies air superiority for D-Day and virtual command of the air for the push toward Berlin. Operation Pointblank was a success. Local air superiority belonged to the Allies for the opening of the second front. The war for air superiority over Western Europe had been won, but not by “self-defending” heavy bombers. It had been won by a combination of fighters actively hunting down and killing Germany’s air force and Allied bombers damaging the industrial and logistical infrastructure that supported the German military machine’s ability to make war. In this two-pronged strategy, both bombers and fighters had a crucial, symbiotic role. American air commanders, like their ground counterparts before them, finally realized the truth of German strategist Carl von Clausewitz’s statement—that victory in war comes, first and foremost, through the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces. Operation Pointblank proved that American air power’s first mission should always be the establishment of air superiority through the destruction of the enemy’s air force. Brian Todd Carey is an assistant professor at the American Military University of Virginia. This feature originally appeared in the November 1998 issue of World War II. For more great articles be sure to pick up your copy of World War II.

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Online Exclusive: How Collectivism Nearly Sunk Early Colonies

Online Exclusive: How Collectivism Nearly Sunk Early Colonies Only when settlers instituted private property rights did the New World thrive Americans have long enshrined individualism. Colonial experiments helped shape that perspective by illustrating in practical terms the flaws of social collectivism. The colonies of Virginia, Massachusetts, and Georgia are examples. In 1605, King James I licensed two groups of merchants operating as The London (Virginia) Company to establish a profit-making colony in North America. The colony was to take form north of Spanish-controlled Florida in a mid-Atlantic region Britain had named Virginia in honor of Queen Elizabeth I. According to the charter, Virginia’s colonists were to spread Christianity, bring “the infidel and savage, living in those parts, to human civility,” and enrich the sponsoring company by seeking and finding “all manner of mines of gold, silver, and copper.” The London Company claimed all the colony’s land and all its profits. Whatever colonists might produce was to go into the common stores, in the main a company holding. During Jamestown’s “Starving Time,” some settlers distributed some of their meager corn supply to others who had failed to plant crops. (Photo by MPI/Getty Images) Few would-be colonists could afford an ocean passage and the cost of starting a new life. In England, a law known as the Statute of Artificers required adults under age 60 with no skilled trade to indenture themselves—that is, agree to a period of service at no pay but receiving room and board—to anyone demanding their labor. More than half the original Virginia complement signed indenture contracts, agreeing to work off their passage, residence, and board by toiling for the company as long as seven years. An indentured servant completing his contract stood to receive freedom dues, a settlement that could include the use of 50 acres or so of land. But that was stewardship, not ownership. The company perpetually controlled the property’s use and granted no inheritance rights. Some Virginia indentures were only 13 years old. Others were ambitious young gentlemen, like Captain John Smith, a former mercenary. Few had practical experience at the activities required to establish a community. The London Company described its initial roster of colonizers as “unruly gallants, criminals, and loafers.” In December 1606, the ships Susan Constant, Discovery, and Godspeed set sail from London carrying as passengers 105 men and boys chosen by the company to make the Virginia colony a reality. After nearly five months at sea, the ships sailed into a large bay about 35 miles up a river. On May 14, 1607, after forming a governing council whose members included Smith and expedition commander Christopher Newport, the group landed on a peninsula in the river and erected a cross to claim the region in the name of King James I. The colonists called their putative settlement Jamestown and named the river the James. As a starting place, the peninsula seemed ideal: easily defended, with lines of sight to watch for approaching vessels or strangers on foot. According to colonist and diarist George Percy the spit and adjoining land had “faire meadows,” abundant game, “good and fruitful soil,” and stands of nut trees as well as wild strawberries, raspberries, and other unfamiliar fruits. The Powhatan, an Indian tribe whose chief’s name was also Powhatan, seemed friendly. “Heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man’s habitation,” Smith wrote later. The newcomers felled trees and set to building a triangular log fort. Within two weeks, however, Powhatan and his warriors were besieging the immigrants. The Indians wounded 11 Englishmen, killing two—the start of a campaign of harassment that kept the colonists from foraging for food and planting crops. Summer’s arrival made clear that the peninsula lacked potable water, and that nearby lowlands were thick with mosquitoes whose bite brought on a debilitating fever. And without knowing it, the expedition had arrived during what may have been the mid-Atlantic’s worst dry spell in eight centuries. Nature and inertia were working against the Virginia colony, as was the enterprise’s organizing principle. Having no stake in their efforts, most indentures and free men lapsed into indolence and fell to bickering. A fifth of the party’s members did most of the work; the rest leeched off the common stores. By mid-June, Jamestowners had gotten only two small fields of grain growing. On June 22, the three supply ships left for England to fetch more goods and colonists. Summer passed in a malarial haze. The corn harvest was scant. Food ran short. Besides malaria, residents fell prey to pneumonia, dysentery, and malnutrition, as well as Indian attacks. In December the Powhatan took Smith prisoner. Huddling all winter in their tricornered bastion, settlers at Jamestown died at the rate of three or four a day. Survivors ate dogs, cats, rats, snakes, roots, boots, shoes—even going so far, colonist George Percy noted, “to digge up deade corpses out of graves and to eate them.” Percy, who kept a journal of what colonists called “the Starving Time,” wrote, “There was never Englishman left in a foreign country in such miserie as we were in that new discovered Virginia.” The next spring only 38 settlers remained alive. Miraculously, Smith had survived, saved by the Indian chief’s daughter and embraced by the tribe. He persuaded the Indians to trade food to the colonists in exchange for glass beads, copper, and iron tools. That spring the tribe taught the newcomers how to forage in the forest and how to grow corn, yams, and other native crops. In September the colonists elected Smith president. Reversing official policy, the former mercenary declared Virginia’s days of easy riding over. “He who will not work will not eat,” Smith declared. He forced slackers and layabouts to fell and lumber trees, erect buildings, work fields, and do whatever else was necessary to keep all the settlers alive. “A plain soldier that can use a pickaxe and spade,” he said, “is better than five knights.” In October 1608 a supply ship brought supplies and another 100 immigrants, including two women. Smith’s tenure as president and its rigorous discipline began too late to have much effect on farming going into the winter of 1608-09, but that year’s meager crop, supplemented by provisions from home, saw the Jamestown settlers through with minimal suffering. The 1609 supply fleet to Jamestown, carrying food and 350 new colonists, broke up in a storm. The lead ship, Sea Venture, beached in Bermuda in need of repairs. Eventually the other eight ships arrived in Jamestown, where they ate up the corn supply and undercut the leadership of John Smith, who left for England after being injured in a mysterious explosion. In June 1609, a nine-ship London Company fleet led by Venture, carrying new Virginia colonial governor Sir Thomas Gates, departed England with some 500 emigres, including 25 women and a number of children, on board. Halfway to America, a hurricane scattered the fleet. Venture wound up beached off Bermuda needing repairs. That work took many months, during which time the flagship’s sailors also built two smaller vessels. In August the other eight ships, low on stores and full of sick passengers and crewmen, docked at Jamestown. In three days the 350 starving newcomers consumed that season’s entire corn harvest. Malaise and fear gripped the crowded, filthy town. Smith’s rigorous leadership had united the colony, but some settlers resented him. A suspicious explosion badly injured the former mercenary, and in October, Smith departed aboard a supply ship for England, replaced as colony president by George Percy. Powhatan again began attacking; Indian raids went on all winter. At least some starving settlers resorted to what Percy called “those things which seem incredible”—cannibalism. When Venture finally arrived from Bermuda on May 10, 1610, that ship’s passengers, crew, and Governor Gates found Jamestown down to 100 souls, the town palisades in disrepair, the church in ruins, the houses empty, “rent up and burnt.” Survivors were “lamentable and behowlde,” so weakened they could barely rise. “We are starved!” they cried. “We are starved.” Horrified, Gates decided to abandon the colony. Venture had sailed from Bermuda with the two smaller vessels build during the forced layover. Onto these craft and Venture the able helped the debilitated stagger aboard. On June 7, the ships sailed for England. At the confluence of the James and Chesapeake Bay, the little armada encountered three arriving ships. These vessels, also from the London Company, carried 150 colonists and plenty of provisions. All hands made for Jamestown, where the struggle to survive and to expand the colony resumed. In May 1611, the latest Jamestown provisioning expedition delivered men, cattle, provisions, and lieutenant governor Sir Thomas Dale. A hard charger, Dale bristled at the sight of “idell” colonists, some using the fort’s streets for bowling. Dale cracked down, issuing prescriptive edicts. Dale’s Code: Lawes, Divine, Morall and Martial threatened death for desertion, embezzlement, stealing from the public stores, and other crimes. Percy described how Dale named parties “to be hanged, some burned, some to be broken upon wheeles, others to be staked, and some to be shot to deathe, all this extreme and cruewel torture he used and inflicted upon them to terrify the rest from attempteinge the lyke.” Dale got Jamestown on a firmer footing but came to see that bullying and terror were not efficient tools for maintaining a community, breeding as they did reduced productivity, never mind resentment and talk of rebellion. The same was true of collective agriculture. Discarding collectivism, Dale assigned each adult male three acres of land; landholders were to work their parcels for themselves and their families. Embracing the idea of private property, stakeholders engaged in “gathering and reaping the fruit of their labor with much joy and comfort,” colonist John Rolf said. Food production blossomed. Jamestown thrived and became the first permanent colony in North America. Fleeing religious persecution in Britain, the fundamentalist Pilgrims, after nesting temporarily in the Netherlands, contracted with a joint-stake company in England. The investors agreed to finance a settlement in Virginia provided the faithful indentured themselves for seven ­­­years, during which they could not own real estate or work for themselves. Except for a few personal belongings, everything else, including labor, belonged to the company. Revenues were to fund the necessities of life, each person receiving an equal share of whatever the group produced without regard to individual contribution. Profits would go to the company. The Pilgrims arrive at Plymouth, Massachusetts on board the Mayflower, November 1620. Painting by W.J. Aylward, (Photo by Harold M. Lambert/Kean Collection/Archive Photos/Getty Images) On September 6, 1620, Mayflower, with a crew of 30, departed Plymouth, England, carrying 102 Pilgrims. Adverse conditions and navigational errors drove the ship far off course to the north, near a peninsula extending from the mainland and curling to enclose a bay. Rather than risk icy seas and winter storms to try to reach Virginia, the Pilgrims decided to settle where they were, selecting a site on the bay in which their ship had anchored. Plimoth Plantation—named for the port across the Atlantic, as was the colony—had been a Patuxet Indian village until smallpox years before wiped out the native inhabitants. The vicinity had been cleared for planting and was dotted with caches of dried beans and corn. The Pilgrims junked their contract with the joint-stake company and wrote a new contract among themselves. The Mayflower Compact is often described as America’s first example of self-government. Drafted by William Bradford and signed by 41 male passengers, the compact stated simply that for the good of the colony and to encourage better order and preservation, a “civill body politick” would enact “just & equall lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices” as required. No democratic instrument, the Mayflower Compact reflected economic, philosophical, and religious thinking of the era and was based on the works of Plato, who believed in central planning in the context of communal priority. The first winter was harsh. “In two or three months’ time, half their company had died, especially in January and February, being the depth of winter, and wanting houses and other comforts; being inflicted with scurvy and other disease which the long voyage and their inaccomodate condition had brought upon them,” Bradford wrote in his journal. “So as they died sometimes two or three a day during those months, that of the 100 odd persons from the Mayflower, scarcely fifty remained.” Governor John Garner collapsed in the fields and died in April 1621. The colonists elected Bradford to replace him. Friendly Pokanoket Indians helped the colonists grow enough crops that summer to survive the winter, whose start all hands marked with a celebratory dinner. The Plimoth colony’s elation proved premature. That year’s collectively managed growing season had shambled unproductively, with crops rotting in the ground, resources squandered, and the tragedy of the commons rampant, a prelude to another hungry winter. In spring 1622, Bradford and the colony’s council voted out collectivism in favor of private property. “The failure of that experiment of communal system, the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community by commonwealth, was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit,” Bradford wrote in his journal. “At length after much debate of things, I…gave way that they should eat corn every man for his own particular, and in this regard trust to themselves. And so assigned every family a parcel of land.” The dramatic change of heart at Plimoth Plantation, Bradford said, “had very good success, for it made all hands industrious, so as much corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any other means. . . Any general want or famine hath not been amongst them to this day.” Subsequent American colonies generally adopted an individualist model. But beginning in 1717 a southern colony proposed to establish a bureaucratic collective that would govern every aspect of community life according to a plan concocted that year by William Montgomery, baronet of Skelmorlie. Montgomery, his family, and his friends had been planting colonies in the Western Hemisphere for a century. In June 1717 the lord proprietors of Carolina granted Montgomery a parcel of land between the Allatamaha and Savanna rivers upon which to establish a colony. Montgomery published the margravate of Azilia, a tract specifying in detail how the colony was to function and be governed, down to the siting of residences and farms. The overseer would live in the middle of the settlement so he could oversee every aspect of public and private life. Pilgrims signing the Mayflower Compact,, considered the New World’s first example of self-government. (Matteson, Tompkins H., 1853.) Montgomery died in 1731, his plans unrealized. The following year, Sir James Edward Oglethorpe, a British soldier, member of Parliament, and philanthropist, obtained a charter through his Bray Associates from King George II to establish in the New World a charitable colony for debtors and victims of religious persecution. The King granted the request on  Oglethorpe’s promise that colonists would produce silk, capitalizing on a mulberry tree native to the region but similar to a species of tree in Asia upon whose leaves silkworms fed. Georgia’s first British residents, led by Oglethorpe, landed in early 1733. The new arrivals established Savannah, a town that the trustees in Britain organized and governed almost precisely according to Montgomery’s plan. A rigid land control system limited parcels to 500 acres. Workers too poor to pay their way from England and who would be supported “on the charity” for a year received 50 acres. Individuals assigned parcels could not divide, sell, rent, trade, mortgage or will the land they worked. Thomas Causton, whom Oglethorpe chose as “storekeeper”—agent in charge of doling out provisions to the colony—said colonists “had neither land, rights or possessions, that the Trustees gave and that the Trustees could freely take away.” The colony banned alcohol and in detail prescribed how settlers were to live and work. A 1717 pamphlet promoting the orderly settlement of Savannah, later part of the colony of Georgia. (Granger) Georgians imported silkworms, set the caterpillars to feeding, and prepared to prosper. The worms, unable to live on American mulberry leaves, died, and with them perished hopes for profits on silk. Settlers began to flee. The system Montgomery had designed, with its onerous and minute regulations, disintegrated. By 1740, more than five-sixths of Georgia’s population was gone. “The poor inhabitants of Georgia,” a settler lamented, “are scattered over the face of the earth, her plantations a wild, her towns a desert, her villages in rubbish. . .her liberties a jest, an object of pity.” Under intense pressure, the colony’s trustees began to loosen their control, beginning with economic planning. Starting in 1738, remaining settlers gradually were granted ownership of their property and its production. The colony scrapped most rules governing day-to-day life. Finally, in 1752, the trustees gave up entirely, surrendering their charter to the Crown. Georgia became a Royal Colony in 1754. Woodcut of early Savannah as established by James Oglethorpe in 1741. (North Wind Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo) Now endowed with rights to production and ownership and the economic liberty to use them, Georgians began to experiment. Some farmers converted marshes into wild rice fields. Others planted cotton. Introduced in Georgia in 1734, that crop would revolutionize that colony and its economy and, especially after the introduction of the mechanical cotton gin in the early 19th century, other southern states as well. By 1775, Georgia’s prosperity had rebounded. The population was eight times what it had been under the old system. Imports were on the rise, as were exports of indigo, rice, sugar, cotton products, clay pottery and other goods. The overall effect was to transform Georgia into one of the more attractive English settlements. In attempting initially to hold property and labor in common and on collective terms, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Virginia provided cautionary examples. Fettered by their governing systems, Jamestown and Plymouth lapsed into starvation and disease that were defeated only when residents took on individual responsibility. In Georgia, tight controls on life drove settlers away until colonists there obtained the liberty to control their economic destinies. Embracing individual autonomy helped English colonies in the New World survive, thrive, and become the basis for a new system of government. This American History story was posted on Historynet.com on April 25, 2020.

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How effective was the American brown-water navy during the Civil War?

How effective was the American brown-water navy during the Civil War? How effective was the American brown-water navy during the Civil War?

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https://www.historynet.com/how-freddie-laker-took-on-the-big-airlines-and-won.htm

How Freddie Laker Took On the Big Airlines and Won

How Freddie Laker Took On the Big Airlines and Won The maverick British entrepreneur rocked the airline industry with his no-frills approach and low-cost transatlantic flights. To the aviation world Sir Freddie Laker was truly a legend in his own time. A tycoon of working-class origins who built up his business empire from nothing, Laker makes the entrepreneurs on “Dragons’ Den” and “Shark Tank” seem like amateurs. Competing directly against the world’s major airlines, the low-fare carrier that the freewheeling British businessman founded in 1966 shook the commercial aviation industry to its foundations in a manner that few have accomplished before or since. In the end it took the combined efforts of all the airlines against which Laker was in competition to drive his company out of business in 1982. Since then, however, a number of budget airlines have emulated his business model. Virgin Atlan­tic founder Richard Branson acknowledged Laker as his role model and mentor. While not all of Laker’s business decisions turned out well, his rollercoaster career will be long remembered. Born in Canterbury, England, in 1922, Fred­erick A. Laker briefly attended the Simon Lang­ton Grammar School, which proudly numbers him as one of its illustrious alumni in spite of the fact that he was expelled for poor academic performance. Laker began his aviation career as an apprentice at Short Brothers and then flew for the Air Transport Auxiliary from 1941 until 1946. After World War II he was briefly employed by British European Airways. Impatient with working for others, Laker borrowed £38,000 and went into business for himself, buying and selling war surplus aircraft that his company, Aviation Traders Ltd., would refurbish or modify into cargo carriers. As luck would have it, ATL was in exactly the right place and at the right time to cash in on the 1948-49 Berlin Airlift. Every airworthy plane that could carry cargo was suddenly in demand, and Laker’s fledgling company did very well delivering some of the goods. The prototype ATL-90 Accountant, an original Laker design that could be configured as either a passenger aircraft or cargo plane, failed to attract buyers. (aviation-images.com/Mary Evans Picture Library) In 1952, not content with converting and selling surplus cargo planes, Laker initiated an ambitious plan to produce an original airliner of his own to replace the aging Douglas DC-3, hundreds of which were still flying all over the world. Powered by two Rolls-Royce Dart turboprops, Laker’s ATL-90 featured modern tricycle landing gear and could be configured either as a passenger airliner or an end-loading cargo plane with a hinged nose section. The ATL-90 was marketed as the Accountant, apparently in an effort to stress its economy of operation to the airline bean-counters. First flown on July 8, 1957, the Accountant was displayed at the Farnborough Airshow two months later, but it attracted little enthusiasm from prospective buyers. Apart from the airplane’s unfortunate name, the biggest problem was that Laker was not the only one to recognize a potential market for a DC-3 replacement. By the time the Accountant was flying, two rivals were already airborne: Handley Page’s Dart Herald and Fokker’s F27 Friendship. In addition, Hawker Siddeley was working on the similarly sized HS-748. Like the ATL-90, all of those airliners were powered by a pair of Darts, but all of them were larger and had room for far more passengers than the 28-seat Accountant. Moreover, they were all built by companies that possessed extensive production facilities, which ATL lacked. At least Laker had the sense not to throw good money after bad and abandoned development of the airliner. In January 1959 the Accountant was grounded and the following year it was scrapped. ATL’s next aircraft, the ATL-98 Carvair, proved both a technological and financial success. It succeeded because this time Laker aimed at a specialized niche market that the large manufacturers had either neglected or were not interested in pursuing. Furthermore, rather than create the aircraft from scratch, Laker converted the Carvair from existing aircraft, which was already ATL’s specialty. Laker’s improvised ATL-98 Carvair, based on the Douglas DC-4, proved a big success as a car ferry across the English Channel. (The Royal Aeronautical Society [National Aerospace Library]/Mary Evans Picture Library) In 1954 Laker had founded a provisional airline, Channel Air Bridge, which flew people and their cars across the English Channel using the Bristol 170 Freighter, a twin-engine aircraft that could only accommodate three autos at a time. By the end of 1958, it was clear that for the company to survive it needed a bigger airplane. A survey undertaken in 1959 indicated that it would be financially unfeasible to develop a new car ferry from scratch, and that any of the ultra-large cargo aircraft currently in production would be too expensive to buy. Laker came up with the answer: Contract ATL to convert WWII-surplus cargo planes into specialized ferries. The Douglas DC-4 was selected for conversion into the ATL-98 Carvair. Originally developed as a four-engine transcontinental airliner, the DC-4 entered production for the U.S. Army Air Forces during the war as the C-54 long-range transport. A total of 1,170 C-54s were delivered to the military, while others were built after the war as DC-4 airliners. By the late 1950s those aircraft had been superseded, both in military and airline service, by larger and more powerful transports. As a result, ATL was able to obtain perfectly good C-54s and DC-4s on the secondhand market for very reasonable prices. The largest part of the conversion involved replacing the entire fuselage forward of the wings with a new nose section. The new structure added 8 feet 8 inches to the overall length and included a large side-opening door in the nose to enable end-on loading and discharging. It also incorporated a completely new flight deck, raised above the level of the fuselage, resulting in an unobstructed cargo space from nose to tail. The raised flight deck gave the Carvair a curious resemblance to the later Boeing 747 jumbo jet. Other less obvious changes included a taller vertical stabilizer and the complete rerouting of all the controls from the cargo space. First flown on June 21, 1961, the Carvair could accommodate five autos along with 22 passengers. It quickly attracted a great deal of interest. While the Carvair couldn’t compete for sales to the major airlines against advanced new jets, it was perfectly suited to the specialized market sector for which it was intended. It even achieved the ultimate in high-tech product placement when it was featured in the 1964 James Bond film, Goldfinger. ATL built and sold a total of 21 Carvairs, including three to Ireland’s Aer Lingus and two for use by U.N. peacekeeping forces in the Congo. Once they were retired from use by their original operators, the surviving Carvairs enjoyed long and successful careers with new owners, moving oversized cargo all over the world. At least one Carvair, operated by Gator Global Flying Services and based at Gainesville Municipal Airport in Texas, is reportedly still airworthy. Not content to rest on the Carvair’s laurels, in 1965 Freddie Laker sold off the interests he had acquired in ATL and British United Airways (for whom he had served as managing director since the company’s inception in 1960) in order to start an entirely new airline. Established in 1966, Laker Airways began as a charter airline that initially concentrated on popular British resort destinations in the Mediterranean region and the Canary Islands. Due largely to Laker’s marketing and operational innovations, it quickly became one of the most profitable charter airlines in the world. Laker offered lower charter rates during the off seasons, as well as reasonable time-charter rates, ensuring that his airliners flew year-round. He also introduced new low-thrust takeoff procedures that saved fuel, thereby extending the distances his aircraft could fly and simultaneously reducing maintenance costs. Still, Laker had much more ambitious plans, which finally came to fruition with the 1977 launch of his budget Skytrain service. Laker toasts Skytrain’s debut with its first passenger, Sarah Jane King, a 29-year-old mother of three from Surrey. (PA Images via Getty Images) The state of aviation technology had been steadily improving for decades. Yet air travel remained a high-cost luxury, available only to the so-called jet-setters who could afford it. In order to compete against the major airlines, Laker planned to offer prospective passengers transatlantic service at a fraction of the going rates. In 1971 Laker applied to Britain’s Air Transport Licensing Board for permission to establish a budget transatlantic airline service with tickets priced at roughly one-third of what the established carriers were charging. Needless to say, his proposal incurred a great deal of resistance from the airline industry. After six years of legal battling, however, he was finally able to initiate scheduled air service. To a large extent airline ticket prices were controlled by the International Air Transport Association, a cartel system established by the carriers. Laker Airways, however, was a wholly private, independent British airline outside of the cartel. In any case, Laker was not interested in competing for the luxury air travel market. Instead, his no-frills transatlantic passenger service was akin to a flying bus. Seats were sold on a first-come, first-served basis. Laker cut out many of the amenities to which airline passengers had become accustomed, with no inflight meals and baggage limited to 30 pounds. As it turned out, plenty of passengers were willing to put up with those inconveniences for tickets priced at less than half the rates charged by major airlines. Laker had no trouble filling his flights to capacity, and his budget airline made a handsome profit. Equally embarrassing to the major airlines was Laker’s personal marketing style. Absent were the usual images of airborne grace and elegance that normally adorned airline advertising. In their place was Freddie Laker himself, with tousled hair and working-class accent, grinning like a used-car salesman as he touted his budget airline. Laker proudly boasted that Skytrain represented “the end of skyway robbery.” In 1978 he was even granted a knighthood. While Laker’s style may have seemed undignified to his competitors, what they really found unforgivable was the fact that his new business model was actually working. As a result, all the major airlines against which Laker was competing lowered their fares to the level he was charging. Although they were losing money, they agreed among themselves to maintain those low fares until they had driven Laker out of business. It was a deliberate effort by the cartel to drive out a brash interloper. The economic recession that occurred during the late 1970s didn’t help Laker’s financial situation. In 1981 the final nail in his airline’s coffin was the revelation that the company was undercapitalized and overextended. Encumbered with debts of £270 million, Laker Airways went bankrupt on February 5, 1982. Laker filed an antitrust lawsuit against a number of the carriers that had colluded to bring his airline down. In 1985 they agreed to settle, and Laker received payments amounting to £93 million, including £43 million from British Airways alone. That victory enabled him to pay off his creditors, but since his airline was defunct it was at best a pyrrhic victory. In 1992 Laker reentered the airline business, but things were never the same. In partnership with Texas entrepreneur Oscar Wyatt, he established a twice-weekly service between Florida and the Bahamas. In 1997 the service expanded with weekly flights between Miami and London. Laker’s new transatlantic enterprise proved short-lived, however, folding in 1998. Laker died in 2006, at the age of 83. Sir Freddie Laker was an entrepreneurial swashbuckler who cut a swath through the airline industry. Many other budget airlines, such as People Express, Ryanair, Virgin Atlantic, Southwest and JetBlue, have emulated his business model, with varying degrees of success. Although the major airlines succeeded in putting him out of business, Laker’s influence continues to reverberate within the industry today. Frequent contributor Robert Guttman writes from Tappan, N.Y. Additional reading: Fly Me, I’m Freddie!, by Roger Eglin and Berry Ritchie; and  The ATL-98 Carvair: A Comprehensive History of the Aircraft and All 21 Airframes, by William Patrick Dean. This feature originally appeared in the November 2020 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here!

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How Great Britain’s Secret Disinformation Campaign Paid Off In World War I

How Great Britain’s Secret Disinformation Campaign Paid Off In World War I In 1914, days after it declared war on Germany, Great Britain set up a secret propaganda bureau to help defeat the enemy. Charles C. G. Masterman was tapped to set up Britain’s War Propaganda Bureau. (Imperial War Museums) IN 1917 BRITISH AND AMERICAN PUBLISHERS RELEASED what they said was a nonfiction book titled Christine, by Alice Cholmondeley. The book’s protagonist is a young English woman living in Berlin just before the outbreak of the World War I. She’s a violin student, and she frequently writes her widowed mother about her life in the German capital. At first she is happy and captivated by her experiences in Berlin, which a romance with a handsome German military officer. But as war approaches, Christine’s portrayal of the German people turns dark. They gradually reveal themselves to be not gracious but sour, conformist, and callous. The government announces harsh new regulations for civilians, the police become cruel, and Christine gets elbowed as she walks in the street. The Germans develop a bloodlust for the spoils of military victory. “The Germans have gone mad,” Christine writes. “The streets seem full of drunken people, shouting up and down with red faces all swollen with excitement.” Her impending marriage to the German officer is blocked, and when she tries to leave Germany she is stopped and held for hours. She develops pneumonia and dies in Stuttgart on August 8, 1914—just four days after Britain enters the war. Readers in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere were moved by the woman’s tragic story—and appalled by the brutish behavior of the Germans. As was later learned, however, the book was a hoax. There was no young girl named Christine, and no author named Alice Cholmondeley. The real author was Countess Mary Annette (Elizabeth) Russell, a novelist who was married to the elder brother of English philospher Bertrand Russell. Her knowledge of Germany gave credibility to a clever work of propaganda, created by the British government to arouse international antipathy toward Germany. It succeeded brilliantly. THE USE OF PROPAGANDA–THE SHAPING OF OPINION BY SYMBOLS, STORIES, RUMORS, reports, films, and other forms of communication—goes back at least to the 16th century, when Thomas More’s Utopians employed it to avoid war. Propaganda figured in the early 17th-century struggle between Catholicism and emerging Protestantism. But it wasn’t until the Great War that the concept of psychological warfare became a bona fide tactic to be used alongside the more conventional military and economic pressure. By most accounts, Germany was the first of the combatant nations to use propaganda, but it was Great Britain that proved the more cunning manipulator of hearts and minds around the world. That was true for a couple of reasons: first, because Germany was the aggressor and therefore naturally on the back foot when it came to making its case for international support; and second, because the British government had created—in complete secrecy—a War Propaganda Bureau. From the Wellington House headquarters of the National Insurance Commission, it churned out books, pamphlets, illustrated magazines, cartoons, and movies, in many languages, that with sophistication and sometimes subtlety advanced the war aims of the British and their allies. The idea was to publish credible pro-­Entente material and distribute it through intermediaries to opinion leaders in neutral countries. That way the material would not be perceived as government propaganda. Britain’s Wellington House operation helped to rally support for the war at home and in its Dominions and, more important, played a role in the decisions of neutral countries such as Italy, China, Greece, Romania, and especially the United States to throw in with the Allies. (Turkey and Bulgaria chose to fight with Germany.) It also undercut the morale of the German people. The British propaganda effort was unprecedented, improvised, and effective. And it was so secret that the British public didn’t learn of it until 1935. Historian M. L. Sanders judged the psychological campaign to be “vital to the war effort,” adding that British propaganda “proved far more effective in the United States than the crude, clumsy German propaganda at the beginning of the war.” In his War Memoirs, 1914–1918, German general Erich Ludendorff wrote that Germans were hypnotized by enemy propaganda “as a rabbit is by a snake.” It was, he added, an unobtrusive “onslaught of amazing force.” THE WAR PROPAGANDA BUREAU WAS ORGANIZED AND RUN by Charles C. G. Masterman, a journalist, author, and once promising Liberal politician. A graduate of Christ College, Cambridge, Masterman was smart, jovial, and quick witted but also high strung and prone to depression. He had been elected to Parliament in 1906 and, soon after, married Lucy Lyttelton, whose family was politically well connected. Masterman impressed his colleagues in the House of Commons and got a series of plum appointments, including undersecretary of state of the Home Office and then financial secretary to the Treasury. In the latter post he proved of enormous help to David Lloyd George, the chancellor of the Exchequer. Masterman was influential in the passage of important legislation, especially the National Insurance Act of 1911, which controversially created what is today Britain’s national health system. In 1914 Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith promoted Masterman to a cabinet position as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. In order to accept the promotion, Masterman was obliged to resign his seat in Parliament and run again in a special election. He lost, and then lost again in a different district. When Masterman waved off another election opportunity that Lloyd George proposed to him, he lost the support and friendship of a powerful colleague soon to be prime minister. That effectively ended his political career. In August 1914 Asquith asked Masterman to take charge of a new War Propaganda Bureau. Masterman at first demurred—he was the chairman of the National Insurance Commission, based at Wellington House, and still had his cabinet position. But Asquith insisted, and Masterman took the job. Masterman didn’t know much about the dark art, but he was clever enough to see the potential value in duplicity, in contrast to the heavy-handed war messages coming from Berlin. He aimed to be the “unseen engineer”—to borrow a phrase from French writer Anatole France—of Britain’s wartime communications. One of Masterman’s first moves was to invite England’s literary elite to a meeting at Wellington House—Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, John Galsworthy, and G. K. Chesterton, among others. Masterman asked for their help, and several agreed to write essays promoting the government’s point of view. At the same time, he persuaded England’s leading book publishers, including Thomas Nelson, Oxford University Press, and Macmillan, to publish the War Propaganda Bureau’s material. Together, the authors and publishers were useful cover, as was the National Insurance Commission behind whose walls the bureau operated. Masterman hired an impressive array of academics, along with some 200 clerks. Oxford dons Arnold Toynbee and Edwyn Bevan were department officials. Most of the clerks were women or older men not fit to fight. Work was segregated into “national” sections—for Scandinavia, for Spain and Portugal, for South America, for Italy and Switzerland, and what Masterman called “a most important, special branch” for the United States. There were departments for Muslim countries, and the Holland section was charged with funneling propaganda into Germany. Analysts in each section not only studied press accounts and assessed public opinion in their assigned countries but also cultivated journalists and writers. The bureau also translated hundreds of speeches, newspaper articles, and official documents from various countries and had them distributed internationally. (Imperial War Museums) Masterman favored “serious works, academic in tone and content, rather than political diatribes,” M. L. Sanders wrote, his aim being for readers to reach their own conclusions. Foreign Office representatives recommended distribution agents in target nations. According to Ian Cooke, curator of propaganda at the British Library, Masterman wanted to make the case for support of the Allied powers in a “sober” way. He did not like jingoism or expert speakers who, according to one Wellington House report, “rushed impulsively to lecture the United States on her duty in the war.” Wellington House wasn’t the government’s only information operation. The Foreign Office News Department was the official source of war news for the foreign press in England, and the so-called Neutral Press Committee performed the same function in neutral countries. A National War Aims Committee was charged with producing domestic propaganda. Wellington House did nearly everything else, at least in the first two and a half years of the war. Its output was prodigious: By June 1915 Wellington House had published and distributed some two and a half million pamphlets and other documentary propaganda in 17 languages. By February 1916 the total had risen to some seven million. It also used the telegraph and Reuters News Service to reach readers in such countries as Egypt, Persia, and Argentina. The bureau’s biggest coup was a publication titled Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages. Also known as the Bryce Report, for Lord James Bryce, an academic, politician, and former ambassador to the United States who headed the committee that produced it, this piece of atrocity propaganda purported to document crimes against Belgians by German troops occupying their country—including murder and rape. It featured some 1,200 depositions of witnesses to German atrocities in Belgium. Dutch illustrator Louis Raemaekers provided drawings to accompany the text. One case involved the execution of British nurse Edith Cavell, whom the Germans accused of helping Allied prisoners and Belgian citizens flee the country. The Bryce Report triggered international outrage. Many of the eyewitness accounts were later discredited, but as Randal Marlin, a professor at Carleton University who specializes in the study of propaganda, has written, “they were sensational…and very effective in producing the desired result, namely, a sense of revulsion against Germany that strengthened the resolve of the Allies and helped to bring about the support of neutral nations.” Jo Fox, a professor at Durham University who specializes in the history of propaganda, has noted that German atrocities were a “master narrative” of Allied propaganda. Among the many posters graphically depicting German brutishness was one showing a ghastly figure holding Cavell’s head on a salver; another showed a Belgian child impaled by a German bayonet. The sinking of the British passenger liner Lusitania, the German use of poison gas, the Zeppelin raids on London—all were exploited by Wellington House to confirm the notion of German barbarism. CULTIVATING AMERICAN JOURNALISTS AND OPINIONS LEADERS WAS A WELLINGTON HOUSE PRIORITY. Both Britain and Germany, desperate to find favor with President Woodrow Wilson’s government, were bombarding America with self-serving information. Given that Germans were the largest ethnic group in the United States (at nearly a tenth of its population in 1914), American support for the Allied war effort was anything but a sure thing. Britain (and France) needed U.S. financial aid and matériel, and, later, soldiers. Germany’s objective was to keep the United States out of the war. Berlin used posters, flyers, and German-­language newspapers in the United States to recruit German-­Americans for its army, to rally support for Kaiser Wilhelm II, and to promote its propaganda themes. Masterman, according to M. L. Sanders, insisted that foreign reporters be supplied with “full and accurate information concerning the war, and…encouraged to write their own articles based on information supplied [by Wellington House].” Given the importance of winning U.S. support, he didn’t want to alienate American journalists by giving them reports that could be found to be false or only half true. Sir Gilbert Parker, a Canadian novelist and politician, led the War Propaganda Bureau’s campaign in the United States. He established a mailing list of some 250,000 influential individuals and organizations and began sending them Wellington House pamphlets—including essays written by Galsworthy, Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Arnold Bennett. He distributed material to more than 500 U.S. newspapers. His approach, Parker later said, was “gentle and modest courtship.” China and other countries got much the same treatment, though on a smaller scale. The British avoided buying or starting newspapers, but the Foreign Office agreed to finance the new Anglo-Japanese Review and subsidized a few papers in South America and Greece. Britain’s top writers certainly did their bit. Some extolled the virtues of British courage and the necessity to fight; others excoriated the Prussian mindset. Conan Doyle wrote a 1914 recruiting pamphlet titled To Arms! Masterman later sent him to tour the front, after which he wrote the 1916 pamphlet A Visit to the Three Fronts. Conan Doyle would go on to write several books on the war for the government. Chesterton wrote an essay, “The Barbarism of Berlin,” that impugned the Teutonic worldview. Ford wrote When Blood is Their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture, in which he lamented Prussian militarism and its political point of view. Kipling, an ardent nationalist, wrote six articles for the Daily Telegraph on the training of British volunteer soldiers. The War Propaganda Bureau compiled the stories in a 1915 book The New Army in Training, published in both Britain and the United States. “However the world pretends to divide itself,” Kipling wrote in the June 22, 1915, edition of the London Morning Post, “there are only two divisions in the world today—human beings and Germans.” Kipling lost his only son in the war, Conan Doyle his first son. John Buchan, one of five journalists attached to the British Army, produced an ongoing history of the war for Wellington House in the form of a monthly magazine. The first issue of Nelson’s History of the War appeared in February 1915, when the Battle of the Somme commenced. In all, 24 issues were published. But despite Masterman’s emphasis on accuracy, much of the information in History of the War was slanted, if not false. OFFICIALS OF THE WAR PROPAGANDA BUREAU SOON CAME TO SEE the strong appeal of photographs and motion pictures, the latter a new medium. Wellington House produced The War Pictorial, a news magazine modeled on Illustrated London News; its circulation soared from 500,000 in December 1916 to one million a year later. Wellington House went on to create facsimiles of War Pictorial for other countries. At one point it was also distributing 4,000 photographs a week. “The effect that actual war scenes could add to the printed word was unlimited,” M. L. Sanders wrote. “It was a prevailing assumption that the camera could not lie.” The War Propaganda Bureau started a cinema department in August 1915. A Wellington House report called cinema the “bible” of working-class people who, it said, didn’t bother to read. Germany and France had already been using movie crews to dramatize the war when Britain sent two camera operators to the front to shoot war footage, which Wellington House used to produce the documentary Britain Prepared. The premiere was a success, and Britain Prepared was then distributed in other countries. Demand for it was widespread. The Japanese imperial family and its guests were impressed by the footage of the British fleet firing its 15-inch guns and by the king walking among the troops. The War Propaganda Bureau made a point of showing the documentary in Russia, hoping to counter feelings there that Britain had allowed France and Russia to bear the brunt of the war effort. The British gave the film Russian subtitles and hired a Russian captain to promote it. He organized a showing in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) in April 1916 for the tsar, top military officials, and the press. The captain’s association with the British was kept secret. The movie was well received, and the captain then arranged to show the movie to General Aleksei Brusilov’s armies on the southern front, using lorries to transport a screen, projector, and generators. By May 17 some 100,000 Russian soldiers and 3,000 officers had seen the movie, thanks to 44 showings. (The Russian troops always cheered at the end.) The captain next took Britain Prepared to the northern front and Finland. The War Propaganda Bureau was not averse to any pictorial material that might have influence—postcards, cigarette cards, even fine art. In 1916 Masterman recruited Scottish artist Muirhead Bone and sent him to France, with an honorary rank and a salary, as Britain’s first official wartime artist. Bone returned in six months with some 150 sketches. The British government later printed and sold two volumes of Bone’s wartime drawings: The Western Front and With the Grand Fleet. Six of Bone’s lithographs of British naval shipyards were included in a government-funded art book titled Britain’s Efforts and Ideals. Its works were exhibited in Britain and abroad and sold as prints. Masterman hired many more artists—among them Sir William Orpen, Francis Dodd, Paul Nash, and William Rothenstein—and the bureau’s use of wartime paintings and drawings steadily expanded. Nash, for one, complained about the War Propaganda Bureau’s control of his subject matter. “I am no longer an artist,” he wrote. “I am an artist who will bring back word from men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever.” THE WAR PROPAGANDA BUREAU WAS SUBJECTED TO REGULAR MEDDLING at the hands of officials in the War Cabinet. In 1916 it was put under the control of the Foreign Office, and in January 1917 new prime minister Lloyd George asked Robert Donald—a Liberal press ally—to join the operation at Wellington House and to review its work from the inside. Donald praised its programs in the United States, writing that they “could not have been handled more successfully or with more tact.” But he was critical of the overall operation, which he asserted was “drifting due to the casual way in which propaganda is originated and to the promiscuous way it has expanded.” Donald’s report resulted in a major reorganization of Britain’s propaganda effort. Lloyd George named Buchan, who was then in the Foreign Office’s propaganda department, to head a new Department of Information. Masterman stayed at Wellington House, but in a subordinate position overseeing only books and pamphlets. It was one of four departments within the new structure, the others being cinema, political intelligence, and news. Buchan streamlined the operation but had little or no access to the prime minister. Unhappy, he suggested that a new director with more political clout be chosen, and in September 1917 the War Cabinet named Sir Edward Carson as minister in charge of all propaganda. At the end of that year two additional evaluations of Wellington House were commissioned. The first, by editor and publisher Arthur Spurgeon, praised Masterman’s “extraordinarily good work.” The second, by Donald, contained more complaints than compliments. Donald asserted that the bureau was spending too much money and had become inefficient. “Piles of propaganda material,” he wrote, “were wasting away in embassies and distribution agencies.” And Wellington House, he added, was “wasting” huge quantities of paper—despite a paper shortage in Britain. Buchan,  according to historian M. L. Sanders, countered that Donald’s evaluation was “singularly incompetent and superficial.” A committee of London press barons decided that another reorganization was needed. Lloyd George dismissed Carson and in March 1918 created a new Ministry of Information. Max Aitken, the editor of the Daily Express and soon to become Lord Beaverbrook, was named its chief. He was another political ally of the prime minister. The Wellington House operation was dismantled. Politicians complained that psychological operations were now being run by a “press gang.” Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe, the editor of The Times, was put in charge of propaganda in enemy countries but reported to the War Cabinet, not Beaverbrook. The National War Aims Committee retained control of home propaganda; Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount  Rothermere, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, was made director of propaganda in neutral countries, but the production of books and pamphlets had been cut dramatically. The new emphasis was on film, cable, and wireless, and general press messaging. Whereas Wellington House focused on indirect appeals to intellectual elites, the new Ministry of Information sought to reach the masses directly. “The approach became more proactive rather than reactive,” according to a confidential report on Wellington House produced in the summer of 1918. Having been dislodged from overall control of propaganda, Masterman lost his enthusiasm. Meanwhile, he had become chairman of the British War Memorials Committee. The new ministry, however, wasn’t a success. Parliament was suspicious of its role and the growing power of the press. Established ministries saw it as a further encroachment on powers already steadily eroded by the War Cabinet. Through it all the Germans had themselves been busy pushing propaganda, just not as effectively as the British. They tried to persuade Americans that Britain was a leech; they tried to dissuade Indian and other colonial troops from fighting for Britain; and they tried to convince the Allies that the United States aimed for global commercial supremacy. In 1918 the Germans dropped leaflets on the American sector urging U.S. troops not to die for England and France. GERMANY, HOWEVER, WAS LOSING THE WAR ON ALL FRONTS. The Allies continued to shower German troops and German citizens with propaganda leaflets—millions of them. “In the sphere of leaflet propaganda,” a German army message bluntly said, “the enemy has defeated us.” In his book Allied Propaganda and the Collapse of the German Empire in 1918, George Bruntz notes that the German Imperial Command that year began offering rewards for enemy leaflets—at one point paying more than 250,000 marks for about 800,000 leaflets. Some generals and right-wing politicians even blamed Germany’s defeat on Allied propaganda and disloyal elements in German society. In August 1918, just before the war ended, a Conservative British MP started a parliamentary discussion about the mysterious new Ministry of Information. During the exchange he paid tribute to the “exceedingly good work” done by Masterman and the “small body of men working in private” at Wellington House in the early years of the war. After the armistice, the Ministry of Information was disbanded. Meanwhile, Masterman’s life began to spiral downward. He spent long periods away from home and became dependent on alcohol and paraldehyde, a sedative. He had financial difficulties. He managed to write one more book and was elected again to the House of Commons in 1923. But the Liberal Party was in decline and Masterman lost his seat a year later. Masterman, whom his wife described as “the vivid, tormented man I loved,” died in a clinic in 1927 at age 54. He’d not fulfilled his considerable political promise, but he had conceived and managed a singularly successful war propaganda operation, whatever its blemishes. As Buchan had told him in a letter a few years before his death, “You were the pioneer of the whole business.” MHQ Richard Ernsberger Jr. has been a writer, senior editor, and foreign correspondent for Newsweek magazine and a senior editor of American History magazine. This article appears in the Spring 2019 issue (Vol. 31, No. 3) of MHQ—The Quarterly Journal of Military History with the headline: The Fog Factory Want to have the lavishly illustrated, premium-quality print edition of MHQ delivered directly to you four times a year? Subscribe now at special savings!

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https://www.historynet.com/how-in-the-world-did-they-shoot-stonewall-jackson.htm

How in the world did they shoot Stonewall Jackson?

How in the world did they shoot Stonewall Jackson? It’s one of the best-known stories of the Civil War: Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson is accidentally shot by his own men during the Battle of Chancellorsville and then dies a few days later. His death, perhaps, alters the course of the war itself. Today, visitors to the Chancellorsville battlefield can walk the ground where Jackson’s story unfolded—but appearances can be deceiving. The land has changed. The environment has changed. The ambience has changed. The ground does not tell the story as clearly as it once did, and even Jackson’s own legacy has added to the difficulty of appreciating the extent to which darkness and confusion reigned on the night of May 2, 1863—and what an unlikely accident Jackson’s wounding really was. After fighting on May 1, Union Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker had placed his Army of the Potomac in a defensive position around the crossroads of Chancellorsville, Va. Hooker anchored his army’s left flank on the Rappahannock River, 2.5 miles northeast of the crossroads; to the west of Chancellorsville, however, the army’s right flank hung in the air along the Plank Road, also known as the Orange Plank Road. The Federal right flank was nearly two miles from Hooker’s headquarters at the Chancellor House. For his part, General Robert E. Lee realized he faced far superior numbers—Hooker still had about 70,000 troops—so he sent scouts to look for a weak point in the Union line. The scouts soon discovered the unprotected Union right flank. That night, seated on a pair of cracker boxes by a campfire, Lee and Jackson hatched a plan. Lee, with 14,000 men, would hold Hooker’s attention. At the same time Jackson, with more than 28,000 men, would slip around the front of the Union army and hit its vulnerable right flank. The resulting march lasted nearly all of May 2. By 5 p.m., only two of Jackson’s three divisions were in position. Jackson couldn’t afford to wait for Maj. Gen. A.P. Hill’s division, still coming up. He had only a few hours of daylight to make his assault. Jackson’s battle line centered on the Plank Road and stretched past each side of the road for half a mile. When the line swept forward, it caught the Union army’s XI Corps, under the command of Maj. Gen. Oliver Otis Howard, completely by surprise. While some Federal units stubbornly resisted the attack, the Confederate advance inexorably rolled forward some 1.5 miles. “So complete was the success of the whole maneuver, and such surprise of the enemy, that scarcely any organized resistance was met with after the first volley fired,” Brig. Gen. Robert Rodes recalled. “They fled in the wildest confusion.” Union battery commander Hubert Dilger did his best to slow the Confederate advance, as did XI Corps brigade commander Colonel Adolphus Buschbeck, who threw up a west-facing line of infantry and artillery near the Wilderness Church to meet the Confederate threat. But it was the terrain more than anything that slowed the Confederates. This area was known as “the Wilderness”—70 square miles of dense, tangled forest. Iron furnaces had been processing the area’s rich iron ore reserves since the mid-1700s. To fire the furnace boilers, owners had clear-cut the surrounding forests and used the timber for fuel. By the 1860s, though, a thriving second-growth forest of pucker brush, thick bushes, thorn-covered vines and plenty of scrub had sprung up. The trees, on average, were 30 feet high. Union soldiers said sunlight would not penetrate to the forest floor, even at the brightest point of the day. This forest absorbed much of the sound of the Confederate advance. While many Union soldiers heard the Rebel Yell that accompanied the initial attack, not one mentioned hearing the bugle calls that signaled it. Likewise, Union commanders farther down the line didn’t hear the attack on the XI Corps and didn’t know about it until Howard’s soldiers began retreating past them, nearly a half hour after the assaults began. If noise couldn’t penetrate the dense vegetation, humans didn’t fare much better. Trying to stay in battle formation was nearly impossible. Some units advanced faster than others as soldiers got caught in the tangles and tripped on the vines. The uneven terrain compounded the difficulties. Hills and gullies, knolls and swales, all hidden by the brush, further impeded their progress. “We could see absolutely nothing of the enemy, nor of any other part of our own lines,” recalled Confederate Major Robert Stiles; “indeed the entire region was a gloomy thicket and our infantry line so stretched and attenuated that the men were scarcely in sight of each other.” “We could not see what was going on around us for the brush,” wrote Private David Holt of the 16th Mississippi. “[T]he fighting was hot and close” because of “the thick underbrush.” In an attempt to rally the men of the broken XI Corps, the 8th Pennsylvania Cavalry rode into the fray—west along the Plank Road and running headlong into Jackson’s men. The 8th was thrown into disarray, losing three officers, 30 men and 80 horses before cutting their way out. The presence of those horsemen on the battlefield would have indirect but nonetheless important repercussions later in the evening. By 8 p.m., the last traces of sunlight vanished. Although a full moon soon rose in the clear sky, the Wilderness, with its thick foliage, was a place of shadows. The one exception was the Plank Road, which came west from Fredericksburg as the main thoroughfare and along which the Union line had originally been formed. Part of the road was macadamized with crushed gravel, which shone white in the moonlight. The Confederate advance had, by this point, reached the Plank Road’s intersection with a country lane called the Bullock Road. Here, the 18th and 28th North Carolina regiments, supported by the 50th Virginia, extended the Confederate line northeast, with the right flank of the 18th North Carolina resting on the Plank Road itself. On the south side and a few hundred feet to the right rear, the 37th and 7th North Carolina regiments extended the Confederate line south. The 33rd North Carolina, thrown out in a wide arc in front of the entire formation, served as skirmishers. Jackson’s keen eyes saw an opportunity in the midst of the tangled forest. He could continue pressing the attack forward along the Plank Road, or he could veer to the northeast along the path of the Bullock Road, allowing him to cut off the Federals’ escape back to U.S. and Ely’s fords. With the Union army then trapped between Jackson and Lee, Jackson’s men could serve as the hammer to crush the Federals against the anvil of Lee’s forces. Regardless of which option he chose, Jackson knew he had to maintain the initiative. If he halted his attack until dawn, Union infantry could dig in overnight. Jackson did not want to attack fortified positions in the morning. As he weighed his options, Jackson decided to get a first-hand look at the situation. But the impenetrable darkness of the Wilderness presented a challenge. The Plank Road offered the only clear path for travel. Jackson soon learned of an alternative, however. His guide, Private David Joseph Kyle of the 9th Virginia Cavalry, told him of a road that “ran sorter parallel with the plank road and came out on it about a half a mile below.” The Mountain Road was an old logging road less than two miles long. It didn’t show up on maps, but Kyle knew the road well; he and his family lived on the Oscar Bullock Farm, which sat at the far end of Bullock Road. Jackson, Kyle and seven others rode forward on the Mountain Road, passing through the line of the 18th North Carolina. Jackson’s party rode about 200 yards forward, not quite reaching the 33rd North Carolinians in their skirmish line. Jackson could hear the Federals, not far to the east, digging in. It was all he needed to know. As Jackson turned back toward his line, several important things were happening almost simultaneously. Not far away, Hill was doing some reconnaissance of his own. He did not have a local guide, however, and did not know about the Mountain Road, so he and his nine- member party took the more exposed route along the Plank Road, almost parallel with Jackson. Farther down the Confederate line toward the south, a lost Federal unit, the 128th Pennsylvania Infantry, wandered into the no-man’s land between the skirmishers of the 33rd North Carolina and the main Confederate line. The Pennsylvanians were quickly captured, but their presence, which had been undetected by the skirmishers, left the Confederates on edge. Soon a Federal horseman showed up, sparking a firefight. Spooked, the far right of the Confederate line opened up, firing mostly at nothing—and like a contagion, more and more Confederates joined in the shooting. The wave of musket fire rolled north along the Confederate line. The rolling thunder first caught Hill’s party, exposed in the moonlight out on the Plank Road. Only Hill himself was unscathed; everyone else in his party was killed, wounded or carried toward enemy lines on the back of a bolting horse. The fire also ripped across Jackson’s front. “Cease firing! You are firing into your own men!” yelled Lieutenant Joseph G. Morrison, Jackson’s brother-in-law and staff member, whose horse was shot in the initial volley. The North Carolinians were veterans who’d seen every trick—and besides, hadn’t Federal cavalry been caught behind the lines just hours before? There were dead horses and horsemen near the road and in the woods. And weren’t these horsemen coming from the direction of the Union lines? “It’s a lie,” the North Carolinians responded. Another volley erupted. Jackson was around 90 yards from the front line. At that range, a smoothbore musket has about a 1-in-16 chance of hitting its target—and that’s if the shooter has a clear range of fire. Jackson’s party was riding through a thick forest, in the dark. Jackson would have cut an especially dark figure because he was wearing a long, black India-rubber raincoat. The roadbed had, over the years, cut into the earth so that it ran a few yards below the level of the surrounding terrain; that road embankment essentially served as additional protection. “[T]he thickness of the woods afforded some shield,” too, one of Jackson’s staffers later said. Still, one staffer was killed and another wounded; the others escaped untouched—except, of course, for Jackson. The circumstances had been ripe for disaster: a corps commander scouting in front of his lines; soldiers deploying in the forest, in the dark, in a pitched battle; lost infantrymen and horsemen wandering through the woods; the threat of a Union counterattack at any moment. Still, the chances of Jackson getting shot were incredibly small. So how and why did it happen? Those questions have been debated and discussed for 150 years. The story has been recounted and analyzed in letters, books and scholarly articles—some of them more reliable than others. But fewer things can shed light on the story like walking the ground. Years later, as the legend of Stonewall Jackson grew, people wanted to track down the exact location where Jackson was wounded. But there was considerable disagreement and uncertainty. Eyewitness and second-hand accounts varied. To some of Jackson’s admirers, marking the exact spot wasn’t as important as marking the general area. Sometime between 1876 and 1883, those admirers placed a granite boulder—the “Jackson Rock”—along the Plank Road, not the Mountain Road, so it would be visible to tourists and travelers. In June 1888, admirers erected a more formal monument just 20 feet away. James Power Smith, one of Jackson’s former staff officers, helped choose the spot. “When we were selecting a location for the monument,” he wrote, “the present site was selected, as being on the [Plank] road—somewhat elevated—and as being a fair compromise…. It is only a few rods from the exact spot wherever that was.” Today, a large hedge blocks a traveler’s view of all but the very top the monument. But its presence behind the Chancellorsville Battlefield Visitor Center—and the original granite bolder 20 feet away, placed after the war to mark the vicinity of Jackson’s wounding—can serve as a source of confusion to uninformed visitors. Eventually, the Mountain Road vanished. At least one account from 1903—only 40 years after the battle—suggests the ever-encroaching forest had swallowed the road by then. Traces of the road were further obscured when the visitor center was built in 1963. The National Park Service’s philosophy then was to put visitor centers as close as possible to the most pivotal portion of the battlefield. The Chancellorsville Battle­field Visitor Center sits astride the original path of the Mountain Road, and only by luck did the building not obscure the spot where Jackson was wounded—although for years, Park Service historians were convinced Jackson had been shot in the corner of the visitor center’s auditorium. As recently as the mid-1990s, historians differed on the exact place where Jackson was shot. The issue was finally put to rest when a team of historians, led by Robert K. Krick and armed with dozens of pieces of documentary evidence, mapped and measured the entire area. They found, nearly lost among the trees, the old roadbed of the Mountain Road, and they were able to pinpoint Jackson’s location—some 15 yards off the northeast corner of the visitor center. Today, a newly installed wayside sign stands across the road from the spot. The Mountain Road underwent restoration in 2007, making it more visible to visitors who can now walk part of its length. At the far end, another wayside marks the farthest point of Jackson’s reconnaissance trip. Another 50 yards through the woods beyond that, about where the visitor center’s driveway comes into the parking lot from Virginia Route 3, is where the skirmish line of the 33rd North Carolina had been positioned. Battlefield visitors can retrace Jackson’s last ride—from that farthest point of his reconnaissance, then back along the Mountain Road toward where the visitor center now stands. And when visitors emerge from the canopy of trees that arches over the road, they will stand on the spot where Jackson was mortally wounded. Even so, what they see provides an incomplete picture of what really happened. First of all, modern visitors cannot truly appreciate the nature of the Wilderness. Recent development has cleared away most of the forest, creating the impression of far more open space than actually existed in 1863. Housing developments, gas stations and shopping centers—not to mention the widened Route 3—belie the once-wild nature of the area and obscure some of the key areas on the battlefield. The site of the 8th Pennsylvania cavalry charge, for instance, is now a private resort just down the road from the park’s visitor center. What forest remains has had 150 years to mature. The trees are much taller, and the high canopy casts heavy shadows, choking out all but the most shade-loving plants. There are fewer ground-level plants than in 1863, so the brush is far less dense. Trees and brush have been thinned in the area around the battlefield visitor center so that there’s considerable open space. In some places, there’s even well-trimmed lawn punctuated by a few tall maples. Standing at the spot where Jackson was wounded, one might think he was exposed and vulnerable. Bullock Road—the location of the Confederate line—is clearly visible fewer than 100 yards away, and aside from the visitor center itself, there’s not much in between. From the Bullock Road, it would seem Jackson and his party were emerging from a tunnel of trees into an open area. In the moonlight, the horsemen would still be little more than silhouettes—easily mistaken for Federal cavalry. But in May 1863, the line of sight from Bullock Road to Jackson was impenetrable. The only open view was directly down the Mountain Road itself. That means six to eight men at most—the men standing at the intersection of the Mountain Road and the Bullock Road—had a clear shot at the approaching horsemen. The other 290 or so men of the regiment would’ve been shooting through dense thickets. The ground around the visitor center muddles the story of Jackson’s wounding in another important way. The building itself sits on a hillock, which may suggest to some visitors that Jackson had a degree of cover or, conversely, that he “sprang up” from behind the hill as he crested it. Mountain Road did rise slightly as it neared the Bullock Road from the spot where Jackson was wounded, but postwar photographs indicate that, overall, the ground was fairly level. That means the North Carolinians would have been looking slightly downhill into the cut of Mountain Road with no intervening mound of dirt. But Mountain Road itself poses the greatest challenge to trying to imagine the events of that night. It is nearly impossible to get a clear sense of road conditions when Jackson was wounded—for starters, the battlefield closes at dusk and hiking after dark is prohibited. The high canopy of the modern forest does blot out most of the light from even a full moon, but the openness underneath belies the claustrophobic thickness that pressed in on Jackson and his men from the roadsides. Given the four lanes of traffic on Virginia Route 3, there’s never a shortage of noise on the battlefield, which, again, affects our ability to understand the environment of 1863. The traffic makes it impossible to appreciate the acoustical shadows—the places where the sounds of battle couldn’t carry—that plagued the Union army. As the Confederate wave advanced and battle raged nearby, areas of the battlefield remained silent. Such silence is impossible to find today. With any battle, walking the ground can help to better understand what happened and why—and Chancellorsville offers many such opportunities. But Jackson’s story has been confounded by changes to the site. Those changes have allowed visitors easier access to one of the war’s most famous spots—and if the landscape isn’t exactly what witnesses saw in May 1863, at least the story is still there. It just needs to be coaxed out. Kristopher D. White, former Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park staff historian, is an instructor at the Community College of Allegheny County, Pa. Dr. Chris Mackowski, a professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at St. Bonaventure University, is author of Chancellorsville: Crossroads of Fire. They are co-founders of Emerging Civil War, a website for the next generation of Civil War historians, and co-authors of several books.

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https://www.historynet.com/how-the-buffalo-soldiers-helped-turn-the-tide-in-italy-during-world-war-ii.htm

How the ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ Helped Break Through the Gothic Line

How the ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ Helped Break Through the Gothic Line African Americans have fought in every major conflict in which the United States has been involved, from the Revolutionary War on. They frequently served with distinction—the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry during the American Civil War, the 9th and 10th U.S. Colored Cavalry regiments during the Indian wars and the Spanish-American War, and the 369th Infantry Regiment during World War I all established outstanding fighting records. Yet with each new war in which the United States became embroiled, the white American establishment tended to forget the contribution made by black servicemen in previous conflicts. Each time, black soldiers were committed to combat in racially segregated units and had to prove themselves all over again. Of the 909,000 black Americans selected for duty in the Army during World War II, only one black division saw infantry combat in Europe—the 92nd Infantry Division. The vast majority of African Americans in uniform were assigned to segregated construction or supply units or placed in units that performed unpleasant duties such as graves registration. The government’s view was that blacks were not motivated enough or aggressive enough to fight. While the 92nd was referred to as a black unit, and its enlisted men and most of its junior officers were black, its higher officers were white. The 92nd, which had fought in France during World War I, was once again activated in 1942. Under the command of Major General Edward M. Almond, the 92nd began combat training in October 1942 and went into action in Italy in the summer of 1944. The unit continued a long and proud tradition by retaining the buffalo as its divisional symbol. Its circular shoulder patch, which featured a black buffalo on an olive drab background, was called The Buffalo—as was the division’s official publication. The 92nd even kept a live buffalo as a mascot. The 92nd Infantry patch kept the symbolic image of the buffalo, invoking the 19th-century black soldiers of America’s Old West. (HistoryNet Archives) The nickname “Buffalo Soldier” dates back to the late 1860s, when black soldiers volunteered for duty in the American West. The American Indians, who regarded the new threat as “black white men,” coined the term “Buffalo Soldier” out of respect for a worthy enemy. According to one story, the Indians thought that the black soldiers, with their dark skin and curly hair, resembled buffaloes. Another story attributes the name to the buffalo hides that many black soldiers wore during the harsh winters out West, as a supplement to their inadequate government uniforms. In the spring of 1944, after years of pressure from the black community, the government grudgingly rescinded its policy excluding African American soldiers from combat. On July 30, 1944, the first wave of Buffalo Soldiers—the 370th Regimental Combat Team—disembarked at Naples, Italy, where they were greeted by a jubilant crowd of black American soldiers from other service units. The rest of the division would arrive a few months later. American troops were facing an uphill battle in Italy, and at that point the Allies were desperately short of infantry troops. After months of hard fighting, the Allies had managed to push German forces under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring almost 500 bloody miles up the Italian peninsula. But even after the fall of Rome on June 4, 1944, the Germans had simply retreated in an orderly fashion from one line of defense to another rather than acknowledge defeat. On D-Day, two days after the victory at Rome, Allied soldiers swarmed across the beaches of Normandy. For the duration of the war, the American Fifth Army and the British Eighth Army, under the overall command of British General Sir Harold Alexander, would play second fiddle to the Allied push in France. During the summer of 1944, nearly 100,000 men of the Fifth Army, out of a total strength of 249,000, were transferred to the fighting in France. As the Allies stood at the south bank of the Arno River in July, preparing to assault Kesselring’s most formidable barrier yet—the infamous Gothic Line—the Americans clearly had too many tanks and not enough infantrymen. Kesselring had built the line on the slopes of the Apennine Mountains, the 50-mile-deep range that, in northern Italy, runs diagonally from coast to coast and affords natural protection for northern industrial and agricultural centers. In addition to the 370th, at that point the 92nd consisted of two other infantry regiments, the 365th and the 371st; four field artillery battalions, the 597th, 598th, 599th and 600th; plus headquarters battery, the 92nd Reconnaissance Troop, the 317th Engineer Combat Battalion and 317th Medical Battalion, as well as a medical battalion, signal company, quartermaster company, maintenance personnel and military police. The Buffalo Soldiers were assigned to the IV Corps of the U.S. Fifth Army in two primary areas of operation, the Serchio Valley and the coastal sector along the Ligurian Sea. They occupied the westernmost end of the Allied front, while the Eighth Army attacked across the eastern portion of the Italian peninsula. The 92nd would face not only mountainous terrain and tremendous resistance—including the German Fourteenth Army and its Italian Fascist soldiers, the 90th Panzergrenadier Division and the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division—but also an array of man-made defensive works. By fighting an impressive defensive campaign, Kesselring had gained time to build up his Gothic Line. Using 15,000 Italian laborers and 2,000 Slovaks, the Germans constructed bunkers, tank emplacements, tunnels and anti-tank ditches; reinforced existing Italian castles; and laid carefully designed minefields intended to herd enemy troops into interlocking fields of fire. At this stage in the Italian campaign the Allies did have one advantage. Italy was in a state of civil war, and the Italian partisan forces were proving more than a nuisance to the German cause. Guerrillas had even managed to kill one Luftwaffe division commander. As a result, one German commander, General Fridolin von Senger, discarded his general’s insignia and rode in an unmarked Volkswagen. When the Buffalo Soldiers deployed along the front, they began to work together with the tankers of the U.S. 1st Armored Division. In addition to this division, the IV Corps consisted of the 6th South African Armored Division, the Brazilian Expeditionary Force and Task Force 45, composed of British and American anti-aircraft gunners who had been retrained and re-equipped for combat infantry duty. After landing on the Italian mainland at Salerno on September 9, 1943, the Allies had unsuccessfully attempted to destroy Kesselring before January 1944. Now they once again hoped to make significant advances before the snows came in the winter of 1944. The Fifth and Eighth armies planned an all-out attack on the Gothic Line in August, with the Eighth Army positioned along the Adriatic Coast and the Fifth Army directing its efforts against the center of Italy, toward Bologna. The IV Corps would cross the Arno River, take Mount Albano and Mount Pisano on the plain, extend their front and draw the enemy’s attention. Meanwhile, the Fifth Army’s II Corps, to the right along with the British XIII Corps, would drive the main assault into the center of the Gothic Line. The thinly spread IV Corps also had the task of guarding the Allied west flank against a German counterattack and protecting the crucial Allied port of Leghorn, or Livorno, on the coast. On September 1, the three battalions of the 370th Regiment, along with elements of the 1st Armored Division, crossed the Arno River and advanced north for two to three miles. By the early morning hours of September 2, the 370th Engineers and 1st Armored Engineers had cleared minefields, worked on fords and placed a treadway bridge across the Arno for the upcoming armored infantry assault. Task Force 45 was bogged down by heavy minefields, but the 370th pushed on. The 3rd Battalion of the 370th moved to the west of Mount Pisano, while the 1st Battalion advanced east of the mountain. Using mule trails, the 2nd Battalion advanced straight over the mountain. Officers of the 92nd Infantry Division, Company F, 370th Combat Team, look at maps and orders at a farmhouse one-fourth of a mile from the Arno River, Ponsacco Area in Italy. A half hour later these troops successfully crossed the river in the push toward the Gothic Line on Sep. 1, 1944. (U.S. Army) The Germans retaliated with small-arms, machine-gun and artillery fire while their forward elements began to pull back behind the Gothic Line. The Buffalo Soldiers advanced north beyond Mount Pisano and attacked the city of Lucca. They eliminated remaining enemy resistance around the road connecting Pisa to Lucca and spent the next several days patrolling and waiting for the rest of the Fifth Army to move up. The main attack started on September 10, and three days later the Buffalo Soldiers and 1st Armored tankers stood at the base of the northern Apennines. By September 18, the II Corps had breached the Gothic Line at Il Giogo Pass, and many of the 1st Armored tanks were shifted to that area. The IV Corps consolidated its units while holding its section of the line until late in the month, when patrols of Buffalo Soldiers entered the Serchio Valley. The men of the 370th had also penetrated the Gothic Line in their sector and now controlled Highway 12, which served as a crucial east-west communications artery for the Germans. In early October, they were ordered to take the city of Massa, near the coast, which was the first step in capturing the naval base at La Spezia. Although the Germans had been in continuous retreat in Italy, they resisted fiercely at Massa. They were determined to protect the western edge of the Gothic Line, especially because La Spezia’s naval base was nearby. Beset by cold autumn rains, the Buffalo Soldiers found themselves fighting a new enemy–mud–in addition to dug-in enemy troops. They did not take Massa at that point, and all across the Gothic Line, Kesselring’s forces held on. Meanwhile, though the II Corps made some impressive headway, it failed to reach Bologna before the snows set in. After a six-day battle for control of Massa, the Buffalo Soldiers pulled back and regrouped. As the rest of the 92nd Infantry Division began to land in Italy, the Buffalo Soldiers of the 370th kept up the offensive on a smaller scale with power patrols consisting of between 35 and 75 men and at times machine-gun and mortar crews. The Fifth Army spent most of November conducting defensive actions in preparation for a renewed offensive in December. By late November, the last elements of the remaining two 92nd Division regiments, the 371st and 365th, had arrived. In addition to the 92nd’s own regiments, a fourth regiment came under the division’s control–the 366th Infantry Regiment, with black officers and men. The 366th had originally trained for combat but had been initially assigned to guard duty on Allied air bases throughout Italy. The men of the 366th had performed so well in their former assignment that their commanding general did not want to give them up. As the 370th moved deeper into the Serchio Valley—later with elements of the 371st–resupply became a logistical nightmare. No vehicles could reach the Buffalo Soldiers as they fought their way to the high ground of the 35-mile-long valley. Despite a wealth of technology and industrial might at their command, the Americans found themselves dependent upon pack animals, the same mode of transport employed by Hannibal Barca when he had invaded Italy more than 2,100 years earlier. One officer and 15 enlisted men formed the nucleus of the 92nd Division Mule Pack Battalion, which included an Italian veterinarian, two blacksmiths and 600 Italian volunteers who were given American uniforms and even wore the Buffalo insignia. The Americans scoured the countryside for mules and horses, which the U.S. government then purchased from locals. They eventually procured a total of 372 mules and 173 horses. Because the U.S. Army lacked the necessary equipment for pack animals, the blacksmiths had to hammer out their own horseshoes from German barbed-wire pickets. The animals brought up water, ammunition, antitank guns and other crucial materiel and transported the wounded to where they could receive treatment. As it turned out, however, the mules were apparently spooked by the smell of dead men and balked at carrying corpses. The 92nd was expected to launch a major offensive on December 1 in support of the II Corps’ renewed attack on Bologna. The attack was rescheduled for Christmas Day due to a predicted German counterattack. When intelligence reports indicated a large German build-up in the northern region of the Serchio Valley, the men of the 371st were transferred to the coastal sector, and elements of the 366th were sent to the valley to support the 370th. Although the Fifth Army never launched its early December assault, it was not a quiet month in the Serchio Valley. The Buffalo Soldiers continued to advance, town by town, against German artillery, mortar and small-arms fire. American engineers at first repaired bridges and roads for the advance, but soon shifted to defensive work, laying minefields, rigging bridges for demolition, and helping to evacuate civilians in anticipation of the German counterattack. On Christmas Eve the Fifth Army called off its Christmas Day assault, but the Buffalo Soldiers, who were deployed on both sides of the Serchio River, continued to advance, facing German mortar and artillery rounds as they moved through more of northern Italy’s mountain towns. The 366th’s 2nd Battalion held the town of Barga on the American right flank, while the 370th held Gallicano, west of the Serchio River. On Christmas Eve, the 370th sent its 2nd Battalion east of the river into the little village of Sommocolonia, the northernmost edge of the American line. Light artillery and mortar rounds hit Sommocolonia but there seemed to be little enemy activity, so most of the 2nd Battalion moved out for duty elsewhere, leaving behind only two platoons. On the extreme right, just east of Sommocolonia, lay the villages of Bebbio and Scarpello, occupied by two platoons of the 92nd Division Reconnaissance Troop. Before sunrise on the day after Christmas, the Germans attacked the villages just north and east of Gallicano. Although the primary German assault seemed to come from west of the river, toward Gallicano, partisans were also battling enemy soldiers north of Sommocolonia later in the morning. Within two hours, Sommocolonia and the two American platoons there were surrounded. A third platoon moved up to reinforce the embattled Sommocolonia troops. Lieutenant John Fox, an artillery forward observer for the 366th, exemplified the impressive fighting spirit of the black soldiers. When enemy troops surrounded the lieutenant’s position inside a house and were about to overrun him, he ordered artillery fire directly on his own position, sacrificing his life. Fox’s heroic action bought valuable time that helped save other troops, and he was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. The two platoons of the 370th, along with a group of partisans, engaged in house-to-house fighting with the enemy during that battle. Many of the Germans were dressed as partisans, making the situation even more confusing and dangerous. Just before noon, the platoons were ordered to evacuate the village, but they were trapped. They managed to hold out until nightfall, but of the 70 Americans involved, only one officer and 17 men managed to fight their way out of the village that night as ordered. Meanwhile, the two reconnaissance platoons at Bebbio and Scarpello were overrun by enemy troops and ordered to fall back. Despite heavy fighting, they managed to withdraw to their command post at Coreglia. German artillery fire began to cut deeper into American lines, and the 370th ordered its troops to quit Gallicano and secure the high ground nearby. With the Allied port of Leghorn threatened, the Fifth Army called back the 1st Armored Division from II Corps control, and the 8th Indian Division, a British unit, moved to the area as reinforcements. On December 27, American fighter-bombers roared into the valley and hammered Sommocolonia, Gallicano and other front-line areas. By January 1, the Allies had more or less re-established their original positions. With the Germans less of an imminent threat, the 8th Indian Division pulled out, leaving the valley to the Buffalo Soldiers. The Fifth Army postponed its major offensive until April, but General Almond decided that his division would launch its own attack in February. Almond devised his operation not as a breakthrough assault but as a division-strength “feeler movement” intended to determine enemy strength and deployment, draw more enemy troops to the area and enhance the division’s own positions. Troops in the Serchio Valley were to seize the Lama di Sotto Ridge, overlooking the German supply center at Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, and create a diversion while the main assault concentrated on the coastal sector. Almond hoped to reach the Strettoia hill mass on the coast, just north of the Cinquale Canal, and then take Massa. Once in Massa, American artillery would come within firing range of La Spezia. Units were moved around again so that the 370th and 371st occupied the Coastal Sector while the 365th went to the Serchio Valley. The 366th was divided between both areas. On February 4, the 366th held Gallicano, and the next day it pushed its lines into the outlying villages. The 365th, to the east of the Serchio River, took the town of Lama, just north of Sommocolonia, and occupied Mount Della Stella at the foot of the Lama di Sotto Ridge. The 365th held out against numerous counterattacks until February 8, when a full battalion of Germans pushed the Americans off the hill and out of Lama. At nightfall on the 10th, after encountering grueling enemy artillery fire and grenadier counterattacks, the Buffalo Soldiers retook Lama. The Buffalo Soldiers on the coast were hit just as hard as their comrades in the valley. The Germans had tanks, field artillery and thousands of ground troops to protect La Spezia, and they could call on a weapon unavailable to the Americans—heavy coastal guns. Emplaced at Punta Bianca, just southeast of La Spezia, the German coastal guns could not only lob shells into Massa but also reach all the way to Forte dei Marmi, which lay south of the Cinquale Canal. Fire from the powerful coastal guns left craters so large that Allied tanks literally fell into them. The remainder of the 366th and its supporting armor–including another black unit, the 758th Tank Battalion–advanced along the coast. The 371st attacked on the far right through the coastal hill masses but ran into extensive minefields. The 370th advanced in column with its left flank on Highway 1 and its right flank in the hills. As they advanced, each battalion of the 370th leapfrogged the battalion directly to its front in order to keep up a continuous attack. Riding on the tanks, the 366th rolled into the sea to avoid mines, then came back onto dry land north of the Cinquale Canal. The first two tanks to hit the beach were knocked out by mines and blocked the way. Before long, four more tanks were destroyed by mines, but the 370th reached the canal and started to cross, taking a pounding from local mortar and machine-gun positions as well as from the coastal guns. The artillery fire prevented engineers from laying a bridge, and foul weather meant no air support for the Buffalo Soldiers that day. Three tanks were lost when they fell into underwater craters while crossing the canal. Despite numerous German counterattacks, the Buffalo Soldiers did manage to establish a line of defense north of the canal. Without a bridge, they had to hand-carry supplies across the water. Casualties were mounting, and the coastal guns kept pounding away. On the night of February 10, Almond called off the attack and ordered his troops back across the canal. The February operation cost 22 tanks and more than 1,100 casualties, including 56 officers. The 92nd underwent drastic changes before its involvement in an offensive in the spring of 1945. The Allies considered it absolutely crucial that the 92nd seize La Spezia during the April attack, but the previous months of fighting had depleted the division’s strength. Although the U.S. Army had hundreds of thousands of black troops, it could not find enough combat-trained replacements for the 92nd, so the 371st went to the Serchio Valley under IV Corps control while the 366th and 365th were sent elsewhere. The 92nd built up the strength of the 370th, the only black regiment left in the division, while it gained two new regiments. In addition to the 473rd, made up of white anti-aircraft gunners turned infantrymen, the division received a ferocious fighting unit composed of Nisei soldiers–the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team. These descendants of Japanese immigrants served in one of the most highly decorated American regiments of the entire war. The 370th formed the left flank, with the 442nd on the right and the 473rd in reserve in the nearby Serchio Valley. In order to avoid the relentless barrage from the coastal guns, the 92nd Division, now jokingly referred to as the ‘Rainbow Division,’ advanced toward Massa through the hills east of Highway 1. Even though fighter-bombers flew sorties over Punta Bianca and British destroyers shelled the German positions, the coastal guns continued firing. In less than two hours on April 5, 1945, the 370th’s lead element, Company C, reached its initial objective—Castle Aghinolfi. The company’s artillery forward observer had to convince the artillery twice to give him fire support. Artillerymen could not believe that the riflemen had advanced so far. The Germans were surprised, too—in fact, many were still eating breakfast when the Buffalo Soldiers arrived. Company C radioed for reinforcements, but the regiment had problems of its own, with two company commanders already killed. No help arrived. The Germans within the castle fired on the lone company with machine guns and mortars. Before long, the company had suffered 60 percent casualties. The forward observer and radioman were both hit and the radio was destroyed, cutting off all contact with the outside. The company had no choice but to pull back. Lieutenant Vernon J. Baker, the company’s only black officer, volunteered to harass the enemy so that the wounded could escape. Armed with hand grenades, and on two occasions supported by Private James Thomas’ automatic-rifle fire, Baker personally destroyed three machine-gun nests and an observation post. Baker, who had already received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, would receive the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions that day. Meanwhile, the 442nd fought the enemy ridge by ridge and systematically blew up German bunkers with bazookas. By April 6, the Nisei had control of Mount Belvedere. The 370th, Company C included, made another assault against the same hills but needed more troops to succeed. The 473rd moved up, and the hard-hit 1st Battalion of the 370th, which had had three company commanders killed in the first two days, went to the Serchio Valley to protect the American flank against a German counterattack. The 370th and 473rd, along with their supporting armored battalions, pushed through the hills and also advanced along Highway 1, although the German guns at Punta Bianca continued to pound away. On April 9, American tankers rolled into Massa but were driven back by staunch enemy resistance. In a supporting maneuver, the 442nd pushed forward through the mountains and flanked the city’s eastern side. Finally, the Germans withdrew, and on April 10 the Americans controlled the city. The 92nd Infantry Division continued to press forward, though the bitter fighting continued as the Germans moved their reserve men and panzers into position. With the German lines receding, a full battalion of tank destroyers finally came within range of the coastal guns and over a six-day period sent more than 11,000 rounds into Punta Bianca. By April 20 the big guns were silent and the Germans were retreating. The Buffalo Soldiers fighting in the Serchio Valley had also been busy. The 370th had taken Castelnuovo on April 20 and pressed forward. They planned to meet up with the 442nd at Aulla, northeast of La Spezia, and cut off the German retreat. The fighting had left so much destruction that the Americans could not even use their mules, and the division was accumulating more prisoners than it had time to deal with. Partisans had been fighting at La Spezia, and on April 24 the 473rd moved into the city. Three days later, the 473rd and its supporting armor crushed the German resistance at Genoa. The 370th and 442nd in their sector helped prevent two enemy divisions from escaping through the Cisa Pass before the May 2 cease-fire officially ended the hostilities in Italy. Although Allied forces were ecstatic over their success in Italy, for the Buffalo Soldiers, it was a bittersweet victory. The military establishment considered the 92nd, which comprised less than 2 percent of all black Americans in the army, a failure. Regarded as an experiment from the outset, the division had been closely watched and roundly criticized. Much of the blame for the setbacks in February 1945 and other similar occurrences was attributed to confusion between the junior officers and enlisted personnel. However, their officers were rotated so often that the men sometimes had no idea who their commanders were, and in many cases the most outstanding officers and NCOs were killed in action. In defense of the black junior officers, Lt. Col. Markus H. Ray, commander of the division’s 600th Field Artillery Battalion (which had all black officers and men) wrote on May 14, 1945: “I believe that the young Negro officer represents the best we have to offer and under proper, sympathetic and capable leadership would have developed and performed equally with any other racial group….They were Americans before all else.” The numbers alone tell an impressive story. Of 12,846 Buffalo Soldiers who saw action, 2,848 were killed, captured or wounded. The Buffalo Soldiers did, in fact, break through the Gothic Line. They reached their objective, captured or helped to capture nearly 24,000 prisoners and received more than 12,000 decorations and citations for their gallantry in combat. The soldiers of the 92nd Division had proved their worth to America once again through months of bitter combat in the Italian Campaign. Slow Progress Toward Desegregation During World War II

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American History Review: How the Colonists Beat Britain’s Best Generals

American History Review: How the Colonists Beat Britain’s Best Generals An American History Online Exclusive How an ‘ill-armed peasantry’ crushed Clinton, Cornwallis, and a raft of professional soldiers Great Britain has “conquered the two Carolinas in Charleston,” Sir Henry Clinton, commander of the British army in North America, giddily remarked the moment that city fell to the king’s troops in May 1780. Clinton had reason to exult. He had just scored Britain’s greatest triumph in a six-year-old rebellion, capturing an important American city and taking more than 5,000 prisoners. His victory, Clinton believed, assured that Britain would emerge from this war again in control of several of its southern colonies.  The British government had reconsidered its strategy following General John Burgoyne’s surrender of his army at Saratoga in October 1777. That calamity had sparked a debate within Whitehall over whether to continue the war and, if so, how to wage it. During the intervening three years Britain had failed to crush the rebels in the northern colonies, and now France was entering the war as an ally of the insurrectionists. Deliberating for weeks in the wake of Saratoga, British officialdom reached several crucial decisions. The empire would remain at war, but with a new approach. Formulated principally by Lord George Germain, secretary of state for America, what came to be known as the “southern strategy” posited that large numbers of southerners were eager “to return to their allegiance” to the Crown. The strategy assumed some would enlist in provincial regiments to be incorporated in the British army, while General John Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga spelled the end of the British strategy to separate New England from the other colonies. Painting by Joshua Reynolds. (Peter Newark American Pictures/Bridgeman Images) others would serve in Loyalist militias. Germain spoke of reclaiming Georgia, South Carolina, and possibly North Carolina. Success would leave Great Britain with an extensive American empire that included Canada, all territory west of the Appalachians to the Mississippi River, everything south of Virginia—including Florida—and several Caribbean colonies. However the war might end, the subsequent ten or 11 united states, so encircled, would be fatally weak. To pursue this goal, Britain not only changed commanders—Clinton replaced General William Howe in May 1778—but Germain, anticipating the French threat, ordered 8,000 men redeployed to other theaters. Clinton’s army would be 40 percent smaller than the force which had campaigned in America a year earlier, but his superiors expected him to keep holding New York and Newport, Rhode Island, to bring General Washington to battle, and to launch the southern strategy. “My fate is hard,” Clinton sighed on reading his orders. Clinton was 48, softly handsome, and of average height. The son of an aristocrat and royal governor of New York, he had spent half of his youth in Manhattan before entering the army at 15. He had fought in two wars before the War of Independence, displaying legendary courage under fire and suffering a serious wound in an engagement in Germany in 1762. He exhibited an almost scholarly interest in the art of war, reading deeply on the subject and even traveling to observe hostilities between Russia and the Turks. Clinton wed at 37, but the marriage ended after five years when his wife, 26, perished delivering their fifth child. That same year, 1772, Clinton achieved the rank of major general. In early 1775 he was deployed to America. By the time he arrived, war had erupted between Britain and its American colonists, and before long Clinton was in the thick of the fighting, adding to his reputation for bravery and earning repute as a masterful strategist. Clinton once bizarrely described himself as “a shy bitch.” He had close friends, but was introverted, liking nothing better than to withdraw to read, practice his beloved violin, or study nature. He disliked confrontation and appears to have felt most comfortable with younger officers unlikely to take issue with him. A devotee of exercise, he rode regularly and enjoyed spurring his mount to a gallop to leap fences. Homesick and aching to see his children, Clinton after 1778 knew all too well the loneliness of commanding an army at war. Sir Henry Clinton, commander in chief of British forces during the American Revolution, believed his 1780 takeover of Charleston, South Carolina, would be the end of the rebellion. (The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photos) Much of Clinton’s first two years in command involved real or potential French and American threats to British garrisons at Manhattan and Newport. Late in 1778 he initiated the southern strategy by capturing Savannah, Georgia. In 1780, at last able to apply the new strategy in earnest, he personally led 8,700 men to take Charleston. The undertaking was, he said, “the most important hour Britain ever knew.” Accompanying him to Charleston was his second in command, Charles, Earl Cornwallis. Cornwallis, 41, was the most aristocratic British general in America, not jumped up but born into the nobility. He had studied at Eton and Cambridge, as well as at a military academy on the Continent. He entered the army at 18 and, like Clinton, served gallantly in the Seven Years’ War. Cornwallis arrived in America a year later than Clinton, and repeatedly saw action in 1776 and 1777. The eve of the Charleston campaign found him freshly returned to America, having attended to his dying wife. A bold and fearless leader given to aggressive action, he was known for personally leading assaults that he ordered. Clinton sailed for South Carolina hoping the foe would defend Charleston rather than retreat into the backcountry. He got his wish. Following a month-long siege, the American army capitulated, a calamity nearly on par with the British debacle at Saratoga. The victory provoked celebrations throughout England. For a time, Clinton was thought to be the most popular man in the country. Assigning Cornwallis to pacify interior South Carolina, Clinton left his subordinate with 6,753 troops, a number expected to grow as Loyalists rallied to arms. At the outset, things could hardly have gone better. Large numbers of Loyalists did agree to serve, the British army established outposts dotting the backcountry, and in August at Camden, South Carolina, north of Charleston, Cornwallis scored a sensational victory over an American army under General Horatio Gates. An ebullient Cornwallis notified Clinton that there was “an end to all resistance in South Carolina.” Clinton, equally buoyant and confident, reported to London that there was “little resource for domestic insurrection.” The jubilation was premature. Bands of rebels soon formed under Thomas Sumter, Francis Marion, Andrew Pickens, and other partisan leaders. These units plundered Loyalist properties, attacked royal militias, and on occasion harried isolated elements of Cornwallis’s army. Before summer ended, Cornwallis informed Clinton that “[a]ffairs . . . do not look so peaceful as they did.” Indeed, parts of the backcountry were “in an absolute state of rebellion.” The best chance of suppressing the lowcountry insurgency, Cornwallis concluded, was to lead his army into North Carolina, there to recruit Loyalists, destroy the tattered remnants of Gates’s army, and above all else close routes through which supplies from the northern states were flowing to rebel forces in Georgia and South Carolina. Disaster followed. Within 30 days of entering North Carolina, a division of Cornwallis’s army was trapped at King’s Mountain. Nearly 1,000 men were lost—according to Clinton, the defeat was Cornwallis’s Trenton, in the mode of Washington’s Christmas 1776 victory over the Hessians. In December, General Nathanael Greene arrived in North Carolina and took command of the 2,600-man American army in the South. Greene was not optimistic. “I think the American cause is at deaths door,” he told a friend, and perhaps because of those apparently dire prospects he pursued a risky strategy, dividing his army in the face of a superior adversary. Greene sent General Daniel Morgan with 600 men—Continental regulars and militiamen from Virginia and North Carolina—into western North Carolina. Greene took the remaining 2,000 men into eastern South Carolina. He reasoned that, should Cornwallis pursue him, Morgan would find Britain’s backcountry posts easy targets. If Cornwallis pursued Morgan, Greene planned to move against weakly defended posts above Charleston. Charles, Earl Cornwallis, rallied Loyalists and defeated the Continentals at Camden, South Carolina, in August 1780. (Painting by John Singleton Copley) Cornwallis did come after Morgan, again taking his army into North Carolina. A division of 1,200 men under Colonel Banastre Tarleton crossed to the west shore of the Broad River in search of Morgan. The main force under Cornwallis stayed on the east bank. Cornwallis was hoping to intercept Greene if he hurried to Morgan’s rescue or to cut off Morgan if he retreated east to reunite with Greene. It was a propitious but doomed plan. Morgan whipped Tarleton in a January 1781 clash at Cowpens in northwestern South Carolina, then outran Cornwallis and linked up with Greene and the main army near Salisbury. Cornwallis refused to give in. His stripped-down army pursued Greene in a grueling two-week, 100-mile chase that only ended when the Americans crossed the Dan River into safety in Virginia. Both commanders still longed for a fight. Once Virginia militiamen joined him, Greene returned to North Carolina. Cornwallis came after him. The clash came on March 15 at Guilford Courthouse, a savage and bloody brawl with profound implications. At day’s end, Cornwallis controlled the battlefield—at brutal cost. His losses since January had exceeded 1,600, a quarter of those who had marched into North Carolina seventy-five days earlier. Long before learning of Guilford Courthouse, Clinton—shaken by news of partisan activities and Cornwallis’s previous setbacks—had begun formulating and implementing a new southern strategy. In December, he committed to Virginia an army of 1,800 men under his new general, Benedict Arnold (“Chasing Benedict Arnold,” October 2017). Arnold’s force was to raid at will, destroy rebel magazines, close supply routes, recruit Loyalists, and establish a fortified base on the Chesapeake. Arnold’s presence, Clinton hoped, would compel Virginia Governor Thomas Jefferson to keep his militia at home and out of the Carolinas. When Washington countered the Arnold gambit by sending the Marquis de Lafayette to Virginia with an army of roughly equal size, Clinton in March sent General William Phillips with 2,000 men to take command of Arnold’s force. Upon receiving reinforcements from England, Clinton sent more troops to Phillips; the army in Virginia eventually totaled 6,000. Phillips was to carry on Arnold’s tactics with, Clinton hoped, an additional gain. Greene, he anticipated, would feel duty bound to link up with Lafayette and so abandon the Carolinas. Clinton had always made clear to Cornwallis that he was to pacify South Carolina. Cornwallis had leave to “recover North Carolina,” but only in a manner “consistent with the security” of the region. Clinton had never wavered from his initial orders, and the fulcrum of his strategy in 1781 was that Phillips’s large army in Virginia would be facilitating Cornwallis’s suppression of the insurgency in South Carolina and Georgia. General Daniel Morgan was credited with the Americans’ brilliant cavalry victory over Colonel Banastre Tarleton at Cowpens, South Carolina, January 17, 1781. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images) The South was only one thread in the knot Clinton was attempting to unsnarl.  A French army of some 4,000 men under Comte de Rochambeau had landed in New England in July 1780; a large French naval squadron under Comte de Grasse was expected late in the summer of 1781. Foreseeing a Franco-American campaign to retake New York, Clinton planned to recall most of Phillips’s army to New York during the summer, leaving around 2,000 men in the Old Dominion—sufficient, he thought, to parry Lafayette’s small force and the “ill armed peasantry” in the rebel militia. With a garrison of roughly 16,000 in Manhattan, Clinton felt, he could prevail, provided the Royal Navy maintained its supremacy. If his strategy succeeded, by year’s end New York would have repulsed an Allied attack and Cornwallis would have crushed the lowcountry rebellion. Clinton saw out 1780 thinking 1781 was likely the war’s final year, as the rebellion “was at its last gasp.” America’s economy had collapsed. Morale among troops and civilians was waning. Credible rumors had it that if the Allies failed to score a decisive victory in ’81 France would drop out of the fray. Clinton doubted the rebels could persevere beyond a year and believed they could not continue without French assistance. He seems to have been picturing a negotiated peace in 1782, a settlement that would restore Georgia and South Carolina, and conceivably North Carolina, to the Empire. Everything hinged on an Allied defeat at New York and victory for Cornwallis in South Carolina. In April, Clinton learned that Cornwallis’s army, battered at Guilford Courthouse, was in Wilmington, North Carolina, for reconditioning. Clinton immediately wrote his subordinate reiterating that Cornwallis’s “presence in [South] Carolina” was imperative. By the time that communique arrived, Cornwallis’s army was marching not south but north, to Virginia. For weeks Cornwallis had been wrestling with his next move. He vowed that should Greene enter South Carolina, he would “run all hazards” to find and destroy him. As time passed, Cornwallis waffled. “I am quite tired of marching about the country in quest of adventures,” he declared, an expression of relent. The offensive-oriented Cornwallis abhorred the thought of returning to South Carolina to assume a defensive crouch and await Greene’s attack. Something else was gnawing at Cornwallis. He longed to restore a reputation tarnished by defeat at King’s Mountain and Cowpens and by his Pyrrhic victory at Guilford Courthouse. He saw little hope of achieving that end by chasing Greene around South Carolina. Cornwallis, like Clinton—and Washington—thought 1781 was to be the conflict’s decisive year. Cornwallis saw little to achieve in South Carolina that would assure a glorious end to this war for Great Britain. Learning that Phillips was in Virginia with a large army, Cornwallis made up his mind to take his 1,435 men there and assume command of Phillips’s force. On the eve of his departure, he urged Clinton to abandon New York and bring most of his troops to Virginia. The insurgency in South Carolina could not be crushed, he claimed, until “Virginia is in a manner subdued.” By the time Cornwallis set off, he knew that Greene had entered South Carolina. Although he told Germain that the British troops in South Carolina were capable of defending what Britain possessed, Cornwallis, in his more candid moments, acknowledged that the “worst of consequences” was bound to happen.  He was prescient. Within weeks Greene had captured nearly every British installation outside of Charleston. Bastions “were daily dropping into the enemy’s hands,” was how a distraught Clinton put it. Clinton never considered bringing his army to Virginia. He was not about to abandon New York and he knew that he lacked the resources to conquer Virginia. He believed his strategy offered the best chance for suppressing the rebellion in South Carolina before year’s end, but upon hearing that Cornwallis had gone to Virginia, he knew in an instant that his subordinate had taken a wrecking ball to his intricate construct. General Nathanael Greene’s tactics at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse cost the British 25 percent of their forces. (Photo by MPI/Getty Images) Although Clinton expected “implicit obedience” from his officers, he did not order Cornwallis to return to South Carolina. Clinton had recently received several letters in which Germain lavished praise on Cornwallis’s “decisive” manner and “vigorous exertions.” Germain further stated that he and the king earnestly favored “pushing our conquests” in Virginia, adding that retaking all the southern colonies—including Virginia—“is to be considered as the chief and principal object” of Clinton’s army. In this context, Clinton dared not order Cornwallis back to South Carolina. Reaching Virginia in mid-May, Cornwallis tried and failed to bring Lafayette to battle. Tarleton came up mostly empty-handed when he raided Charlottesville intent on capturing Virginia’s legislature and Governor Jefferson. The lone feather in Cornwallis’s cap was a foray against a supply depot west of Richmond. Meanwhile, Clinton improvised. He conceived a surprise raid on Philadelphia, a principal rebel provision depot and the conduit through which the rebel supply chain ran from ew England down to the Carolinas. His plan was for Cornwallis to bring 3,000 men from Virginia and rendezvous with 3,000 troops and a naval task force sent from New York. With Washington’s army an estimated 10 days away, Clinton believed a lightning raid would sow widespread destruction, further erode American morale, and obliterate precious rebel stores “before they could be put into motion against me” in the coming Allied campaign for New York. The action might have changed the course of the war, but in June Cornwallis—whether from sincere doubt of the sally’s prospects or from stubborn commitment to conquering Virginia—responded negatively. Again, Clinton chose not to overrule his subordinate. Late in June, mindful that the expected Allied campaign for New York was likely only weeks away, Clinton ordered Cornwallis to send 3,000 men and “a proportion of artillery” to New York. Cornwallis complied, sending the men and equipment to Portsmouth, Virginia, where transports waited. Loading for the voyage to New York was in progress when new orders arrived from Clinton canceling the “sailing of the expedition” to New York. Instead, Cornwallis’s army was to remain in Virginia and “maintain…a respectable defensive” installation on the York River, perhaps at Yorktown, a locale Phillips and the Admiralty thought serviceable for protecting British interests on Chesapeake Bay. Clinton had about-faced after receiving another letter from Germain. The secretary of state had expressed his “great mortification” at the removal of any troops from Virginia and iterated the king’s “unalterable” conviction that Virginia was be retaken. Clinton was furious. Germain’s latest communique followed one written 60 days earlier in which he had ludicrously asserted that the enemy was so weak as to be unable to prevent “the speedy suppression of the rebellion.” Clinton knew better. He feared, too, that London’s meddling would deny him resources he needed to defend New York against a looming Allied onslaught. A dutiful soldier, he did as ordered. On August 1, Cornwallis’s army arrived in Yorktown. When Washington learned that a French fleet had arrived in the Chesapeake Bay and was keeping the British bottled in in Yorktown, he concocted a plan to make it appear the Continental Army was going to besiege the British in New York and instead marched south. After surrounding the British lines and inflicting a month-long artillery barrage, Washington accepted Cornwallis’s surrender. (Painting by Rembrandt Peale) Britain’s fate in this war was now all but sealed. Since the spring, Allied leaders had been contemplating either an attack on New York or an assault on the British army in Virginia. Washington advocated retaking Manhattan while Rochambeau—seeming to doubt that the British in New York could be defeated—leaned toward assailing the enemy in the Old Dominion. Three weeks after Cornwallis occupied Yorktown, Washington and Rochambeau learned that Admiral de Grasse’s task force had sailed for the Chesapeake. In a flash, their armies began their descent toward Yorktown. On assuming command in 1778, Clinton had lamented that he was doomed to fail, but his circumstance was not inevitable. An accomplished strategist, he had fashioned a solid plan for 1781 to bring off Britain’s original southern strategy. Had what he imagined been implemented, not only might the rebellion been crushed in South Carolina and Georgia, but by late summer Virginia would have been home to so tiny a British army that the Allies might have sought a decisive victory in New York rather than at Yorktown. Clinton’s plan perished on the horns of two fatal choices: Cornwallis’s disobedience in abandoning South Carolina and misguided intrusion by officials in faraway London. Against his better judgment, Clinton was obliged to leave a large army on Virginia’s peninsula. Unbeknown to him in late August 1781, the pivotal moment of this long war, the British army in Virginia was in the bulls-eye of a gathering and superior Allied force. _____ John Ferling taught for forty years, mostly at the University of West Georgia. His fifteenth book,  Winning Independence: The Decisive Years of the Revolutionary War, 1778-1781, is due out in May 2021. He lives near Atlanta.

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How the German Air Force Rebuilt After World War II

How the German Air Force Rebuilt After World War II In the aftermath of WWII, Germany turned to former Luftwaffe officers to rebuild its air force under NATO and help counter the Soviet threat. When the Wehrmacht surrendered unconditionally to the Western Allies on May 7, 1945, World War II was over for Germany, but the situation was vastly different than it had been 27 years earlier at the end of World War I. The Versailles Treaty ending that war was draconian enough, but it allowed Germany to retain a rump 100,000-man military. The Germans kept the best and brightest in the new Reichswehr, and turned it into a cadre army from which the Wehrmacht, and as part of it, the Luftwaffe, was later built. This time around the victorious Allies were determined not to make the same mistake. Germany was completely disarmed and the Wehrmacht was formally dissolved by the Allied Control Council on August 20, 1946. Just nine years later, the world looked considerably different. At war’s end the Soviet Union occupied the Eastern European countries it had “liberated” from the Germans, imposing Com­munist governments on them. In defense, the Western Allies in 1949 formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with a unified military command structure. The Soviets countered in 1955 by signing the Warsaw Pact defense treaty with seven of its satellite states. By then, NATO forces were vastly outnumbered in the heart of Europe. The United States, France and Britain were forced to conclude that the only way they could maintain a semblance of a military balance was to rearm their former German enemy, albeit under firm NATO operational control. The May 1955 Paris Accords authorized the establishment of the Bundeswehr, the new armed forces of the Federal Republic of Germany. Making it so on paper was one thing, but operational armies and air forces cannot be created overnight. The rank-and-file soldiers and airmen can be enlisted from the general population and trained to a minimum level of effectiveness in about six months. But what about the leadership? Where do you find officers with the background and experience to train, organize and lead a new military force built from scratch? How long does it take to train a modern fighter pilot? And more importantly, who is going to train him? In West Germany’s case, the answer was obvious but far from simple. Little more than a decade earlier Germany had possessed one of history’s best armies and air forces. Yet the Wehrmacht had been corrupted into the service of the odious and criminal Third Reich. Germany produced many great generals and even more great combat pilots between 1933 and 1945, but by 1955 most of them were dead, too old or compromised by their complicity in the Third Reich’s war crimes. The challenge, then, was finding enough former Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe senior officers who had relatively unblemished records and who were willing to go back into uniform late in their lives. In the case of the airmen, there was the special problem of the taint of the corrupt narcissist Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, who had regarded the Luft­waffe as his personal fiefdom. World War II aces who got a second chance in Bundesluftwaffe service included (from left) Gerhard Barkhorn, Erich Hartmann, Johannes Steinhoff and Günther Rall. (Courtesy of Wolfgang Meuhlbauer) All former Wehrmacht soldiers who volunteered for the new Bundeswehr were subjected to the West German government’s rigorous Per­sonnel Screening Board. Ultimately only 42 former general officers were cleared to join the Bundeswehr by the autumn of 1957. Adolf Galland, the Luftwaffe’s former general of fighters, was not among them. Although the West German government initially extended tentative feelers to him about coming back as chief of the new Bundesluftwaffe, General Nathan Twining, the U.S. Air Force chief of staff, strongly opposed the idea. What probably worked against Galland more than anything else was the fact that he had spent several years after the war as an adviser to the Argentine air force, and relations between the U.S. and Juan Perón’s government were hostile at best. Among the surviving combat pilots, Stuka ace Hans-Ulrich Rudel was not even considered. He was the Werhmacht’s most highly decorated officer but also was an unrepentant Nazi and a leading figure in German right-wing extremist politics. Among the former pilots who were cleared and willing to go back into uniform were the first, second, third and 23rd highest-scoring aces of all time. The Bundeswehr also managed to find one acceptable former senior Luftwaffe general to lead the new Bundesluftwaffe. Germany’s former General of Aviation Josef Kammhuber was sworn in as the first Bundes­luftwaffe chief on June 1, 1957. In an effort to shed some of the political baggage associated with the German chief of the general staff title, the title “inspector” was given to the new heads of the three services. The senior military officer in the entire Bundeswehr was titled “general inspector.” The inspector of the Bundesluftwaffe was essentially the chief of staff of the German air force, and the general inspector of the Bundeswehr was equivalent to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the United States. Kammhuber fought as an infantry officer during World War I. Retained in the post-war Reichswehr, he qualified as a pilot in 1919. He became a general staff officer in 1929, and the following year assumed command of the clandestine Luftwaffe training facility at Lipetsk, in the Soviet Union. During the 1940 Battle for France, he commanded Kampfgeschwader (Bomber Wing) 51, but was shot down and taken prisoner. Following his release after France’s surrender, Kammhuber organized and took command of Germany’s aerial night defenses. His highly efficient system—an interlocking chain of radar, night fighters and ground controllers covering from southern France to the North Sea—came to be known as the “Kam­mhuber Line.” British and American electronic warfare technology eventually gained the upper hand, however, and following several devastating Allied air raids in the autumn of 1943, Kammhuber was relieved as general of night fighters and sent to Norway to command the Fifth Air Fleet. After Germany’s surrender, the U.S. held Kammhuber as a POW, but he was released in April 1948 with no charges against him. He wrote a series of monographs for the U.S. Army Historical Division on the conduct of the German aerial defenses against the Royal Air Force and U.S. Army Air Forces. Upon becoming the first inspector of the new Bundesluftwaffe, Lt. Gen. Kammhuber built the force up from scratch, modeling it after the U.S. Air Force. In May 1961 he became the only single-service chief in the Bundeswehr’s history to be promoted to full general while still holding that office. Kammhuber retired from the Bundeswehr in September 1962. Of NATO’s “nuclear shield” and the reasons for establishing the Bundesluftwaffe, Kammhu­ber wrote: “I am not very sure that the two great atomic powers of the West, the United States and Great Britain, would be ready to employ their strategic forces—with the possible consequence of the destruction of mankind—solely to defend the German Federal Republic in the case of a small or limited war. In such a case, the smaller European powers, such as the Federal Republic, ought to be capable of dealing with such a potential event themselves.” Werner Panitzki was sworn in as the second inspector of the Bundesluftwaffe in October 1962. During WWII Panitzki served as a fighter pilot in the Polish and French campaigns and in the Battle of Britain. When a mechanical failure caused him to crash-land in the Balkans in 1940, he suffered a spinal injury that grounded him for the remainder of the war. From 1945 to 1947 he was a prisoner of the British and Americans. In 1955 he joined the Bundesluftwaffe as a colonel, serving in a series of increasingly senior staff positions. Panitzki’s tenure as Bundesluftwaffe inspector was controversial at best, overshadowed by what came to be known as the “Starfighter Affair.” In 1960 Germany purchased the American-built Lockheed F-104G Starfighter. Although it was designed as an interceptor, the Bundesluftwaffe deployed it as a multirole combat aircraft. Of the 916 Starfighters purchased, 292 crashed, resulting in the loss of 116 pilots and earning the F-104 the nickname “Witwenmacher”—Widowmaker. As public criticism increased and morale in the Bundesluftwaffe plummeted, Panitzki in August 1966 criticized the procurement of the fighter as a “purely political decision.” Shortly thereafter, German Defense Minister Kai-Uwe von Hassel dismissed him, although he was allowed to retire in-grade as a lieutenant general. Johannes “Macky” Steinhoff, recipient of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, was one of greatest combat pilots of all time. With 176 victories, he was history’s 23rd highest-scoring ace and one of the first jet aces. In early 1945 he was among the leaders of the “Fighter Pilots’ Revolt” against the incompetence of Luftwaffe high command and Reichs­marschall Göring in particular. Steinhoff was assigned during the final desperate weeks of the war to fly the Messerschmitt Me-262 jet with Jagdverband 44 (JV.44), Adolf Galland’s “Squad­ron of Experts.” On April 18, 1945, Steinhoff’s Me-262 crashed on takeoff, and the resulting fire left his face horribly disfigured. He spent two years after the war recovering in hospitals and undergoing reconstructive surgery. Johannes “Macky” Steinhoff (left) and American General William W. Momyer attend a joint NATO maneuver in 1969. (Photo by Karl Schnörrer/picture alliance via Getty Images) In 1955 Steinhoff joined the Bundesluftwaffe as a colonel. A skillful leader as well as an expert pilot, he rapidly rose in rank, commanding NATO’s Allied Air Forces Central Europe in 1965-66. Later in 1966, as a lieutenant general, he became the third inspector of the Bundesluft­waffe. His major challenge in his new assignment was dealing with the Starfighter crisis. Upon analyzing the problem, Steinhoff concluded that it was mainly due to inadequately focused pilot training on the F-104. He initiated an intensive training regime that dramatically reduced the accident rate. In 1971 Steinhoff was promoted to full general and appointed chairman of the NATO Military Committee, the organization’s senior military position. He was the second former Wehrmacht officer (after army general Adolf Heusinger) to hold that position. Major Günther Rall was the third highest-scoring ace of all time. Rall served primarily with the famous Jagdgeschwader (Fighter Wing) 52 (JG.52) on the Eastern Front, achieving all but three of his 275 victories against the Red Air Force. Rall himself was shot down eight times during 621 combat missions. In the autumn of 1944, he was assigned as an instructor at the Luftwaffe training school for unit leaders. The program included flying captured Allied aircraft to learn their capabilities and deficiencies. In mock combat with Messerschmitt Me-109s, Rall flew the Supermarine Spitfire, Lockheed P-38 Lightning, Republic P-47 Thunderbolt and North American P-51 Mustang. “I could really detect the tactical differences between the German, British and American planes,” he noted in Günther Rall: A Memoir. “This gave me the greatest respect for the P-51 Mustang and its extremely comfortable cockpit, good rear visibility, long range, maneuverability and electrical starting system. “The P-38 was a little strange because the control column was yoke-shaped instead of a stick. One very fascinating characteristic was the power ailerons that controlled the rolling movement of the aircraft. If you flicked a switch you could bank the plane with just one finger. “The Spitfire, too, was a very maneuverable aircraft, very good in the cockpit.” Rall joined the Bundesluftwaffe in 1956 and was sent to the U.S. for advanced training on the most current high-performance aircraft. Promoted to brigadier general in the early 1960s, he worked with his close friend Steinhoff to develop the training program that resolved the difficulties with the F-104. Assigned command of Jagdbombergeschwader (Fighter-Bomber Wing) 34, he said, “Those were difficult first days because I had to motivate the pilots, try to figure out what was technically wrong with the planes, and keep peace among NATO members who were involved in the project.” In 1971 Rall succeeded Steinhoff as inspector of the Bundesluftwaffe. In 1974 he became the German representative on the NATO Military Committee. The following year, however, he was forced to retire as a lieutenant general after he made a controversial visit to apartheid-governed South Africa. Luftwaffe fighter pilot Captain Friedrich-Erich Obleser ended WWII with 117 confirmed victories, all scored in a 20-month period on the Eastern Front with JG.52. In November 1944 he was wounded when a Panzerfaust anti-tank rocket exploded in his hand, putting him out of combat for the rest of the war. After his release from American captivity he worked for a recycl­ing company scrapping German bombers. Obleser joined the Bundesluftwaffe in 1956, and during the 1960s commanded both Jagd­bomber­geschwader 43 and 31. He later served on the air staff as systems officer for multirole combat aircraft. In 1978 he was appointed the sixth inspector of the Bundesluftwaffe, retiring in 1983 as a lieutenant general. Two years earlier, Obleser’s testimony before the German Bundestag’s Defense Committee had caused a stir and nearly resulted in his early retirement when he reported that projected defense budget cuts would leave the Bundesluftwaffe incapable of completely performing its assigned missions. Major Gerhard Barkhorn was history’s second highest-scoring ace, with 301 victories in 1,104 combat missions. He spent most of the war on the Eastern Front, flying alongside Rall and Erich Hartmann in JG.52. Barkhorn was well on his way to becoming the Luftwaffe’s leading ace when he was severely wounded in a May 1944 dogfight. During the four months he spent in the hospital, Hartmann surpassed his score. Barkhorn spent the final weeks of the war on the Western Front, flying an Me-262 in Galland’s JV.44. He crash-landed on April 21 while returning from his final mission. Taken prisoner by the Americans while still in the hospital, he was released in September 1945. Barkhorn joined the Bundesluftwaffe in 1956, and initially commanded Jagdbombergeschwader 31. In 1963 he was posted to the Air Force Test Command. His final assignment was as chief of staff of NATO’s Second Allied Tactical Air Force. He retired in 1975 as a major general. Eight years later, one of history’s greatest fighter pilots was killed along with his wife in an automobile accident near Cologne. Given today’s faster, more complex and far more lethal air-to-air combat environment, Major Erich Hartmann’s record of 352 victories during WWII will never be surpassed. In October 1942 the 20-year-old Hartmann was assigned to JG.52 on the Eastern Front, where he quickly started to run up his score. Flying an Me-109 with a distinctive “black tulip” paint scheme on its nose, he earned a reputation among the Soviets as the “Black Devil of the Ukraine.” On 15 different occasions he downed five or more opponents in a single day. On August 25, 1944, after his 300th and 301st victories, be became the 18th recipient (of only 27 total) of the Knight’s Cross with Diamonds. As commander of I Gruppe of JG.52, Hartmann surrendered his unit to the U.S. 90th Infantry Division, but the Americans later turned him over to the Soviets. Hartmann was not a model prisoner. Refusing to cooperate with the Soviets, he was repeatedly placed in solitary confinement. At various times he went on hunger strikes and had to be force-fed. Charged as a war criminal, he was convicted in a classic Soviet show trial and sentenced to 25 years’ hard labor. In late 1955, still defiant, he was among the last of the surviving POWs released by the Soviet Union and allowed to return to Germany. A German Tornado sees coalition action over Iraq in 2017. (U.S. Air Force) Hartmann joined the Bundesluftwaffe in 1956 and was appointed commander of the newly formed JG.71. Initially he flew the North American F-86 Sabre, its nose painted with his distinctive black tulip scheme. But Hartmann quickly acquired a reputation as a hothead among his peers. The 10 harsh years he spent in Soviet captivity could not have helped his general outlook. During that time Hartmann’s only son, whom he had never seen, died in early childhood. He was one of the very few Bundesluftwaffe senior leaders who had been handed over to the Soviets. Commenting on Hartmann’s attitude toward the Bundeswehr’s political generals, a former Luftwaffe officer who had been a POW with him in Russia said, “He doesn’t understand tact. He talks to them as if they were NKVD [Soviet interior ministry] officers, whose thinking processes have been addled by politics.” During the Starfighter Affair, Hartmann broke ranks with many of his old comrades. While Stein­hoff, Rall, Barkhorn and others were arguing that better pilot training was the solution to the problem, Hartmann sided with Panitzki and condemned the aircraft as a poor design. As early as 1957 he had advised Kammhuber against acquiring the F-104 in the first place, urging, “We should not buy an aircraft we cannot handle.” After getting a chance to fly it in the U.S., however, he evidently had a change of heart. “I did not believe that the F-104 was a bad weapons system,” he said, “but rather that a human problem on our side would cause us grave troubles.” He thought “that our young pilots did not have the experience to change to such a complex weapons system.” Eventually, Hartmann was branded as “a good pilot, but not a good officer.” He never reached the general officer ranks. The world’s leading fighter ace was forced into early retirement in 1970 as a colonel. In January 1997, more than three years after his death, the Russian Federation overturned his war crimes convictions and acquitted him of all charges. Maj. Gen. David T. Zabecki (U.S. Army, ret.) is HistoryNet’s chief military historian. For additional reading, see: Rearming Germany, edited by James S. Corum, and Wehrmacht Generals, West German Society, and the Debate on Rearmament, 1949-1959, by Alaric Searle. This feature originally appeared in the March 2020 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe click here!

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American History Review: The Lady, the Legends, and a Letter to Lincoln: How Thanksgiving Evolved

American History Review: The Lady, the Legends, and a Letter to Lincoln: How Thanksgiving Evolved Give credit for the national holiday to a woman who wouldn’t give up As legend that passes for history has it, in the fall of 1621 the settlers of Plymouth Colony in what is now Massachusetts, grateful for a fruitful harvest, held a community-wide feast to express gratitude, inviting to join their table local native people who had given critically useful agricultural advice. And thus, the American tradition of the Thanksgiving holiday was born. Good documentary evidence suggests that the 1621 feast did take place, pretty well as described.  But that gustatory event’s link to the modern American holiday is so tenuous that it can fairly be called myth. In We Gather Together: A Nation Divided, a President in Turmoil, and a Historic Campaign to Embrace Gratitude and Grace, Denise Kiernan sets out to tell the true story of how Thanksgiving became an entrenched national holiday—for many, the year’s the most stress-free and happy one. Both the existence and “traditions” of Thanksgiving as Americans know it are the work of one woman: Sarah Josepha Hale, best remembered, if at all, as the author of the poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” We Gather Together: A Nation Divided, a President in Turmoil, and a Historic Campaign to Embrace Gratitude and GraceBy Denise KiernanDutton, 2020; $25 Historically, days of thanksgiving decreed by local and even national authorities in the New World were a commonplace. Among early examples, Kiernan points to one called for by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado in 1541 in what is now the Texas panhandle; a similar convening at St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565; one in a settlement on the Kennebec River in what is now Maine in 1607. In 1789, his first year as President, George Washington issued a proclamation calling for a day of thanksgiving to be celebrated throughout the 13 states. Thereafter local and national executives established days of thanksgiving, frequently honoring military actions, that dotted the calendar. Hale wanted something else: a fixed holiday, occurring annually at the same time, on which the entire country celebrated together. She had access to a bully pulpit as editor of Louis Godey’s Ladies Book, one of the country’s most influential magazines.  Moreover, by buying their work, she had given an early boost to—and won the friendship of—such popular writers as Washington Irving, Nathanial Hawthorne, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In other words, she had clout. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the Ladies Book magazine, began campaigning for a national Thanksgiving holiday in 1837. In 1863, she finally persuaded Secretary of State William Seward to buttonhole President Abraham Lincoln about her idea. Lincoln got on board. (Library of Congress) In 1837, her first year as Ladies Book editor, Hale began writing about Thanksgiving as a shared American experience, even though Americans only fitfully celebrated it. She kept up the editorial drumbeat, meanwhile moving to get the holiday recognized nationally and with uniformity. Starting with Zachary Taylor in 1849, she petitioned president after president for a national proclamation. Finally, in 1863 the dogged Hale persuaded Secretary of State William H. Seward to draft a proclamation and talk President Abraham Lincoln into signing it. Every subsequent president followed with Thanksgiving Day proclamations, notwithstanding additional thanksgiving days proclaimed to mark particular 19th century milestones. In 1876 Yale played Princeton on Thanksgiving Day, beginning the tradition of top-tier gridiron battles on the holiday. In 1920, invoking an imminent holiday of much longer standing, 50 employees of the Gimbel department store marched along Philadelphia streets dressed as elves escorting Santa Claus, beginning the tradition of Thanksgiving Day parades. Not until 1941 did a congressional resolution make Thanksgiving a legal, permanent national holiday, changing the moveable feast’s date from the final Thursday in November to the fourth, bowing to merchants wanting what would in some years provide an earlier kickoff to the Christmas shopping season. And the “traditional” Thanksgiving Day meal? Another Hale invention. Back in 1827, she had published a novel in which she described a New England “Thanksgiving entertainment” featuring a table laden with, among a cornucopia of treats, a roast turkey, stuffing, cranberries, and pumpkin pie. And those Puritans said to have begun it all in 1621? A late addition to the tale. Writes Kiernan, “In all of Sarah Josepha Hale’s letters to the presidents—including the one sent to Lincoln—not once did she mention the Pilgrims or 1621.” The first Presidential Thanksgiving proclamation to mention them was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s in 1939. Truth to tell, Kiernan doesn’t have much more to say about Hale and her campaign than would fill a respectable magazine article.  But she’s done prodigious research and wants to share its fruit. So she pads Gather with details only vaguely related, such as that poet Walt Whitman and illustrator Thomas Nast frequented the same New York City bar or that Dick Hagleberg is the name of the former bombardier who posed for Norman Rockwell’s 1945 Thanksgiving cover for the Saturday Evening Post. Irrelevant, but often mildly amusing. The history Kiernan has uncovered is not a particularly important one nor does it provide much insight into the nation’s development. But she’s a good storyteller, We Gather Together is pleasant to read, and on a chilly November evening, that may well be enough. —Sauerkraut, lingonberries, butternut squash patties, and chocolate cake are among the traditional Thanksgiving dishes at the home of SCOTUS 101 columnist Daniel B. Moskowitz.

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World War I Marine Aircrew Both Awarded the Medal of Honor

World War I Marine Aircrew Both Awarded the Medal of Honor In the annals of aviation history, the aerial dogfights of World War I stand out for the sheer brutality, tenacity, and possible insanity of the combatants. And while names like Raoul Lufbery, Eddie Rickenbacker, and the “Red Baron” Manfred von Richthofen are noteworthy, there were many other heroes of the air. Two of those men, Ralph Talbot and Robert Robinson, certainly made their case. Talbot and Robinson made up the crew of a Marine Corps Airco DH-4 serving with the 1st Marine Aviation Force in late 1918. Talbot, the pilot of the aircraft, first began flying while a member of Yale’s Artillery Training Corps. In October 1917 Talbot enlisted in the Navy with the hopes of becoming a Naval Aviator. Upon completion of his training however it became apparent that serving in the Navy was no way to get into active combat in Europe. Talbot decided to resign his Navy commission in order to join the Marines heading for France. Talbot was assigned to Squadron C, 1st Marine Aviation Force and shipped out to France in July 1918. Robinson, the observer and rear-gunner of the airplane, was what was known then as a “flying sergeant” – maintaining the airplane on the ground before climbing aboard to do battle in the air. Having enlisted in May 1917, Robinson quickly ascended to the rank of gunnery sergeant. By October 1918, the two men found themselves flying bombing and observation missions over German lines. And on October 8, while conducting an air raid alongside the Royal Air Force’s Squadron 218, they got into their first serious scuffle. Their plane was singled out by nine German scout planes and relentlessly attacked. Robinson, manning a Lewis gun in the rear position, sent one of the attackers earthward. Talbot fired the forward-facing guns as the pilot downed another of their attackers before making good on their escape. Six days later Talbot and Robinson joined an air raid over Pittham, Belgium. Their plane, along with another, experienced engine trouble and dropped out of formation. Almost instantly they were pounced on once again by German fighters. Twelve enemy aircraft swarmed the sky around them. They quickly lost contact with the other aircraft. The two men were all alone and severely outnumbered. Undaunted, Robinson swung his Lewis gun into action and shot one of the German attackers out of the sky. As the rest of the Germans pressed the attack his gun jammed. Before he could clear the jam, a bullet tore through the elbow of his left arm nearly severing it. Talbot then, according to his Medal of Honor citation, “maneuvered to gain time for [Robinson] to clear the jam with one hand, and then [return] to the flight.” With his one good arm, Robinson cleared the jam in his weapon and began firing at the Germans once again – keeping them at bay – while Talbot searched for a way out of their predicament. But before they could escape, two more bullets slammed into Robinson hitting him in the stomach and hip, rendering him unconscious. With his tail now dangerously exposed Talbot was running out of options. One German plane stood between Talbot and friendly lines. With a burst from his machine gun, in a fortuitous mix of skill and luck, he sent the German down in flames before diving to 50 feet and flying as fast and low as his failing engine would carry him. Talbot landed at the nearest hospital so Robinson could be treated before returning to his aerodrome. After numerous and extensive surgeries Robinson would recover from his wounds. Talbot, however, was tragically killed a few days later, on October 25, when his plane crashed on take-off during a test flight. In two separate engagements the two men had faced over 20 German adversaries, shot down four of them, and lived to tell the tale. For their actions both men were awarded the Medal of Honor.

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How Woodrow Wilson’s Hidden Illness Left America with no President for Over a Year

How Woodrow Wilson’s Hidden Illness Left America with no President for Over a Year Months after contracting the Spanish flu, Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke, leaving his wife and doctor to run the country AT 11 A.M. ON MONDAY, October 6, 1919, a grim Secretary of State Robert Lansing gazed across the table at nine men seated in the White House Cabinet Room. The members of President Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet had come, at Lansing’s call, to an unprecedented meeting. Historically, the cabinet did not convene without the president’s approval. However, circumstances demanded action, and no department head had balked. The president’s chair, at the head of the table, remained empty. Wilson in 1924 after falling ill. (Library of Congress) Four days earlier, Wilson had “taken ill,” as the newspapers were phrasing it, and since then had been incommunicado. Washington is a rumor factory, and the capital was jittering with dark talk. No one knew if Woodrow Wilson ever again could do the job voters twice had elected him to do. Lansing, who had not seen his boss since early September, suspected the worst about the president’s condition. Lansing thought the cabinet should squarely face a topic that days earlier would have been unthinkable—transferring power from a disabled president. For the cabinet, Lansing, 54, had two questions: who was to decide if the president was disabled, and, if so, should the cabinet, which so far had done nothing, run the executive branch in Wilson’s absence? Lansing suggested that Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, who was elsewhere in Washington that day, might have to fill the void. The official cabinet meeting answered neither question. Ending the session but requesting that his fellow secretaries remain, Lansing summoned Dr. Cary T. Grayson, the president’s personal physician. Lansing and colleagues pressed Grayson for details on his patient’s condition. Genially sidestepping, the doctor painted Wilson in rosy tones. The president’s mind was “not only clear but very active,” the doctor declared. All that was afflicting Woodrow Wilson, Grayson claimed, was a touch of indigestion and “a depleted nervous system.” Lansing, an attorney who had served Wilson through the recent world war and during the peace talks at Versailles, knew when he was being snowed. Grayson, 40, had made Lansing’s antennae vibrate by “carefully avoiding giving any definite information,” Lansing wrote later. However, the secretary of state had no concrete information with which to challenge the medical practitioner, who protested that Lansing lacked authority to call a cabinet meeting without the chief executive’s knowledge. The awkward two-hour meeting ended in a whimper, with Secretary of War Newton D. Baker assuring Grayson that the cabinet had been meeting innocently to address unfinished business. Baker asked the physician to convey the cabinet’s best wishes to Wilson. Not knowing Wilson’s condition or prognosis, the cabinet—and the entire nation—spent the next 17 months paddling in a sea of hearsay, whispers, and speculation. Only Grayson and, more importantly, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, the president’s second wife, were regularly in the ailing Woodrow Wilson’s company and privy to his true condition, but neither was forthcoming. For a year and a half, the United States of America operated under an unelected shadow government of two. Born in Virginia in 1856, Thomas Woodrow Wilson rose to prominence first as president of Princeton University and then as New Jersey’s governor. A Democrat, he wore the cloak of progressive reform when he campaigned for the presidency in 1912, defeating Republican William Howard Taft and Bull-Moose candidate Theodore Roosevelt. Standing 5’11” at 170 pounds, Wilson, 62, looked statesmanly and fit, but his health was far from robust. He had suffered strokes in 1896 and 1906, and endured bouts with chronic headaches and hypertension. Wheel Woman: Washington, DC, native Edith Bolling Galt, here in the 1890s, drove her own car and owned a jewelry store bearing her name. In his first term, Wilson helped create the federal reserve banking system and sent the U.S. Army to chase Mexican outlaw Pancho Villa. His wife, Ellen, died on August 6, 1914, leaving him despondent. Within a year, however, the president fell head over heels for Edith Bolling Galt, a well-to-do 42-year-old widow and the first woman in the capital to drive her own car. A whirlwind courtship ensued, and on December 18, 1915, the couple wed. The two doted on each other for the rest of Wilson’s life. In August 1914, Europe went to war. Amid debate over whether the United States should join the fight, Wilson firmly advocated that the country be “neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men’s souls.” In 1916, running for reelection on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” Wilson narrowly defeated Republican challenger Charles Evans Hughes. Neutrality became untenable in 1917, as Germany waged unrestricted submarine warfare and sought to egg Mexico on to attack the southwestern United States. On April 2, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. “Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples…” Wilson told Congress. The nation mobilized and sent two million doughboys and Marines to France to join French and British forces in a final push that defeated the Kaiser. A November 11, 1918, armistice ended the fighting, but Wilson had a new cause. He envisioned an international body empowered to resolve multinational disputes peacefully. Wilson saw the proposed League of Nations “as the organized moral force of men throughout the world, and that whenever or wherever wrong and aggression are planned or contemplated, this searching light of conscience will be turned upon them…” The vehicle for creating the League, the Treaty of Versailles, faced formidable opposition in the United States, which would join the League only if the Senate ratified the treaty with a two-thirds vote. Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge (R-Massachusetts) was leading the opposition, whose main objection to the treaty was a provision stipulating that an attack on any League member would, Lodge said, bring a military response from member nations. “I must think of the United States first,” Lodge said, characterizing the League as a threat to American sovereignty that would dilute the express power assigned Congress to declare war. The mutual-aid provision risked “plunging the United States into every controversy and conflict on the face of the globe,” Lodge feared. Wilson made the League a personal crusade. Despite headaches and high blood pressure, he decided that he would take his case to the people. On September 3, 1919, a determined but weary Wilson embarked on a four-week tour of western states with speeches scheduled in 29 cities. “I know that I am at the end of my tether,” he told Joseph P. Tumulty, his secretary—a position analogous to today’s presidential chief of staff. “Even though, in my condition, it might mean the giving up of my life, I will gladly make the sacrifice to save the treaty.” Train travel was punishing and speeches taxing—in those sketchily electrified days, orators often had only their lungs for amplification. On Thursday, September 25, Wilson was addressing a crowd in Pueblo, Colorado, when he began having difficulty speaking and maintaining his train of thought. Alarmed, his wife and Grayson persuaded him to cancel his grueling tour and return to Washington. At the White House the following Thursday morning, October 2, Wilson was sitting on the toilet when he tumbled to the floor, striking his head on the bathtub. A blocked cerebral artery had caused a stroke. The clot paralyzed Wilson’s left side, diminished his vision, restricted his speech, and impaired his judgment. The White House staff lifted him into bed. Later that day, to White House usher Ike Hoover the president “looked as if he were dead,” Hoover wrote in a later memoir. “There was not a sign of life.” On October 3, newspapers reported that Wilson was ill and, while recovering, had to “divorce his mind from his executive duties,” but offered few details. The same day, Lansing braced Tumulty, demanding information. The president’s secretary admitted that Wilson was in bad shape; Tumulty pointed ominously to his own left side, suggesting that Wilson had suffered a paralyzing stroke. Lansing told Tumulty and Grayson that if Wilson was disabled, the president must step aside and hand responsibility to Vice President Marshall. The other two men erupted. “You may rest assured that while Woodrow Wilson is lying in the White House on the broad of his back,” Tumulty roared, “I will not be a party to ousting him!” Tumulty and Grayson vowed to deny that the president was disabled. Lansing called a cabinet meeting for October 6. Edith Wilson raised the topic of her husband resigning with Dr. Francis X. Dercum, another of Wilson’s doctors. Dercum advised her, she later claimed, that, were the president to resign, he would lose “the greatest incentive to recovery.” A reduced Wilson could do more good “with even a maimed body than anyone else,” Dercum said. Marshall, 65, had been Indiana’s governor; his folksy style hid a shrewd political mind, and through the crisis he stayed out of sight. Best known for quipping that “what this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar,” Marshall, fearing to show the ambitions of a “usurper,” decided the only way he would step in would be if Congress were to declare Wilson incapacitated and then only if Edith Wilson and Grayson went along. Privately, Marshall complained that Wilson’s caregivers were keeping him in the dark. The Constitution prescribed no method for removing a disabled president. The decision rested with the incumbent, and the incumbent Wilson showed no desire to step aside. Collaborating with Grayson to hide how low the stroke had laid her husband, Edith Wilson interposed an invisible but impenetrable barrier between the world and the president. All business that was intended for Woodrow Wilson went through his wife, who withheld anything, even the daily papers, that she feared might trouble him. The doctors had warned Edith Wilson that agitating her husband with upsetting information would be like “turning a knife in an open wound.” Standing by her man, Edith Wilson fended off Lansing and other cabinet members. Even when Marshall paid a get-well call, she turned him away. The president could not be kept out of sight. By chance, Belgium’s King Albert I and Queen Elisabeth were traveling in the United States. Customarily, visiting heads of state called at the White House. Edith Wilson and Dr. Grayson carefully orchestrated an October 30 audience. A bearded Wilson—he had not shaved for four weeks—received the royals propped up in bed, curtains drawn and room dim. A blanket covered the president’s useless left arm, and staff seated the Belgians to his right, within his limited field of vision. Grayson and Edith Wilson stood by, ready to intervene, but for the duration of the 15-minute encounter Wilson was able to converse. The press reported the visit in a positive light, and the story made the front pages. Obtaining any presidential action became a chore. Tumulty proved a bottleneck, prompting Wilson’s aides to inundate Grayson with memoranda and requests for action. The physician dutifully relayed these to Edith Wilson, but no one was ever sure if a response would follow. Dr. Feelgood: Cary Grayson MD, Wilson’s personal physician. (PhotoQuest/Getty Images) Grayson flooded the press with Pollyannaish effusions regarding the president’s condition and “recovery.” He knew he was lying, he said later, blaming Edith Wilson’s powerful desire to hide the truth about her husband. Grayson’s bulletins met with skepticism, and Americans sensed something seriously amiss. Rumors multiplied that the president had gone insane, had contracted syphilis, was running naked through the Executive Mansion. Well-meaning citizens bombarded the White House by letter to suggest cures ranging from dandelion wine to Racahant, a concoction of arrowroot and cocoa, to a regime called the Bio-Dynamo-Chromatic System of Diagnosis. Nearly a century later, it still is not clear how much power Edith Wilson wielded during the 17 months that she referred to as “my stewardship.” Wilson’s wife said she tried only “to digest and present in tabloid form” the matters she thought important enough go to the president and denied making “a single decision regarding the disposition of public affairs,” but admitted that she—and she alone—judged what the president would see. How did she do that? “I just decided,” Edith Wilson said later. “I had talked to him so much that I knew pretty well what he thought of things.” Her agenda was personal, not political. “I am not thinking of the country now,” she told one group of would-be visitors as she rebuffed them. “I am thinking of my husband.” Instructions and orders to cabinet members came from the president’s wife, no one knowing whether they had originated with her or with the president himself. When David F. Houston was named secretary of the Treasury, Edith Wilson, not the president, interviewed Houston and gave him the good news. Memoranda to the president were returned with notes in Edith Wilson’s handwriting, and messages to the State Department were sent under her name. Man in the Middle: Secretary of State Robert Lansing had doubts about the Versailles Treaty and his boss’s health. (© Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images) Matters grew embarrassing on December 5, 1919, when Secretary of State Lansing was forced to admit before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he had neither seen nor spoken to the president since September. To head off a congressional inquiry into Wilson’s capacity to govern, presidential aides arranged a meeting between their boss and Sen. Albert B. Fall (R-New Mexico), with whom Wilson frequently sparred, and Sen. Gilbert M. Hitchcock (D-Nebraska). A now clean-shaven Wilson received the Foreign Relations Committee members propped up in bed and flashing signs of his characteristic wit. When Fall told the president he was praying for him, Wilson asked, “Which way, Senator?” However, the visit may not have been a true test of Wilson; during the 40-minute interaction, Fall did most of the talking. The meeting made the front pages. The entire situation disgusted Lansing. “It is not Woodrow Wilson but the president of the United States who is ill,” he wrote at the time. “His family and his physicians have no right to shroud the whole affair in mystery as they have done.” In February 1920, Lansing was forced to resign because of the cabinet meeting he had called four months earlier. By letter, Wilson belatedly but sternly rebuked Lansing. “[N]o one but the president has the right to summon the heads of the executive departments into conference,” Woodrow Wilson declared, accusing Lansing of the “assumption of presidential authority.” The extent of Wilson’s disability will never be known, but there is little doubt that he was severely compromised. Sen. George H. Moses (R-New Hampshire) wrote to a friend that the president was “absolutely unable to undergo any experience which requires concentration of mind” and predicted that Wilson would never again be a “material force or factor in anything.” White House usher Ike Hoover, who had seen Wilson nearly every day for eight years, noted that the president “did grow better, but that is not saying much…There was never a moment during all that time when he was more than a shadow of his former self.” Wilson could “articulate but indistinctly and think but feebly,” Hoover said. Not until March 3, 1920, was the president able to ride in an auto, even as a passenger—and minders shooed photographers before they were able to take pictures of Wilson. On April 14, 1920, a post-stroke Wilson met with his cabinet. The sight of him shocked Treasury Secretary Houston, who had had last seen Wilson in September. The president “looked old, worn, and haggard. It was enough to make one weep to look at him.” During the cabinet meeting, Houston said, Wilson had “difficulty in fixing his mind on what we were discussing.” Wilson never believed himself disabled, and even after his stroke toyed with the idea of a third term. The lack of a fully functioning president became more and more noticeable. In November 1919, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and sidekick J. Edgar Hoover began rounding up suspected communists on shaky evidence, but there is no indication that Wilson knew of or approved the so-called Palmer raids. On December 2, 1919, the date set for Wilson’s annual message to Congress, the president did not appear, a first. Instead, he sent lackluster remarks Tumulty had written. “I confess I didn’t see any trace of the president in the message,” said House Speaker Frederick H. Gillett (R-Massachusetts), “and I think that is a compliment to the president.” Twenty-eight bills became law without Wilson’s signature or even his attention, and he did not address Congress in December 1920, either. Private Citizen: Retiring in 1921, Wilson lived his last years in Washington, DC. (Library Of Congress) The biggest impact was on United States entry into the League of Nations. Compromise seemed possible by amending the Versailles Treaty to emphasize that war powers rested with Congress, not the League. Wilson’s supporters tried for a deal; even his wife begged him to compromise and “get this awful thing settled.” The president wouldn’t budge. On March 19, 1920, the treaty—and American entry into the League of Nations—went down to defeat in the Senate. The blow staggered Wilson. He went into a depression, Grayson said, claiming the president complained of feeling “so weak and useless.” However, after Wilson left office he did come to grips with the defeat of the League. “Do not fear about the things we have fought for,” he told a friend. “They are sure to prevail. They are only delayed.” Dr. Edwin A. Weinstein, a neuropsychiatrist and Wilson biographer, believed Wilson’s stroke was directly responsible for the treaty’s defeat. “It is almost certain that had Wilson not been so afflicted, his political skills and his facility with language would have bridged the gap” to a compromise, Weinstein said. While never recognizing the degree of his impairment, Wilson seemed to agree, musing to Tumulty, “If I only could have remained well long enough to have convinced the people that the League of Nations was their real hope…” Wilson completed his term, leaving office on March 4, 1921, and three years later dying of heart disease with his wife and the faithful Grayson at his side. Wilson’s last 17 months in office echoed for years. His cherished League  could not prevent a second, epochal world war—though at conflict’s end his dreamed-of entity to mediate international disputes took concrete form as the United Nations, with the United States a charter member. The UN stood, said the late president’s friend and advisor Bernard Baruch, on “the foundations laid with pain and sacrifice by Wilson.” ✯ This story was originally published in the June 2017 issue of American History magazine. Subscribe here. For more on the 25th Amendment check out Joseph Connor’s article, “The Hardest Call: What Happens When the President Can’t Govern” in our American History web exclusive. To subscribe to American History, click here.

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‘I Was a Dental Assistant to Japanese War Criminals’

‘I Was a Dental Assistant to Japanese War Criminals’ Working in Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison, dental assistant Ed Case got up close and personal with some of World War II’s most infamous figures. HOW DID IT HAPPEN that an 18-year-old kid from Vallejo, California, found himself at Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison, working inside the mouths of some of the world’s most notorious war criminals? In 1946, just a few months out of high school, Ed Case enlisted in the U.S. Army to take advantage of the G.I. Bill and—because he had worked part-time in a dental lab while in school—landed a job as a dental assistant. Upon reaching Sugamo in January 1947, Case was assigned to the prison wing containing the Class A war criminals—once exalted leaders, now humbled prison inmates facing charges of war crimes, conspiracy to wage war, and crimes against humanity at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. There, Case would become intimately involved in the dental needs of some of the most infamous men in the world, while at the same time gathering their autographs. He collected the signatures of 25 prisoners on slips of paper he handed out, including those of all seven war criminals executed in Tokyo on December 23, 1948. Among them were the likes of General Iwane Matsui and former prime minister Kōki Hirota, who would both be executed for their roles in the Rape of Nanking, as well as General Hideki Tojo, Japan’s wartime prime minister and the man considered to be the archvillain of the Japanese war machine. Case would also be on hand as an American dentist carried out a notorious prank involving Tojo’s dentures before returning home in time for Christmas 1947. Ed Case as a young man 73 years ago at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo. A dental assistant there, Case tended to prisoners charged with war crimes, while also collecting their autographs. (Courtesy of Edgar W. Case) When you reached Japan, how did you land at Sugamo Prison? There were around 300 of us in a replacement pool. It was about six o’clock in the morning, and there was snow on the ground. The first 50 men they called were assigned to the 1st Cavalry Division, and so on. This went on and on until there were two guys left. Me and one other guy. He was two years into engineering school, and I had worked in a dental lab. We both ended up in Sugamo—he in the engineering platoon that took care of the buildings and me as a dental tech medic. What were your first impressions? One of the first things they did when new people arrived at the prison was to take you down and show you the execution chamber. This was done so that you wouldn’t get curious and try to figure out how to get down there on your own. Hanging was the way of execution, and they showed us how it all worked. They had a log [about the same weight as a prisoner] on the end of the noose, and they’d set it on the trapdoor. They’d open the trapdoor to make sure that when the log dropped, the rope didn’t break. What did you do at the prison? I spent about a month as a jailer before my job as a dental tech opened up. I worked for Dr. George Foster, who was the prison staff dentist. He was at the prison three days a week and two days at the 361st Station Hospital in downtown Tokyo. They had to have something for me to do when he wasn’t there, so he gave me two hours of instruction on how to be a dental hygienist. Every Tuesday and Thursday I had people come in so I could clean their teeth. In a surreptitious photo taken by Case, guards escort General Hideki Tojo from his cell; he would be executed in late 1948. (Courtesy of Edgar W. Case) What other dental work went on there? We had an old field x-ray machine, but the only thing we did on prisoners was pull teeth. We didn’t fill any cavities. The people in charge thought it would be too much trouble to carry on that kind of dentistry. We would have needed a dentist there five days a week. Pulling a tooth was quick and easy. Knowing the prisoners potentially faced execution was probably part of it. No fillings at all? One day a prisoner came in with a toothache. I don’t remember who. The dentist told me to find out which tooth it was so we could pull it, but I told him, “You can’t pull the tooth; he’s got just one little cavity.” He had the most beautiful set of teeth. Everything was straight and perfect. The dentist told me, “If you don’t want it pulled, you fix the cavity.” That was the only time I ever filled a cavity. Were there any amusing times at Sugamo? There was one Japanese American soldier there, Dick Koyama, who could speak Japanese. Dick was kind of a character. We had a lot of fun. He was an interpreter-medic combination. When a prisoner went on sick call, Dick could ask him what was wrong. The Japanese had a totally different approach to dealing with medical conditions than we did. Dick would ask a prisoner what the matter was and why he was on sick call, and the guy would recite his whole medical history going back to when he was two years old, and Dick would have to tell him “No. Today.” I thought this was funny. What was it like for the prisoners at Sugamo? The Class A war criminals in our cellblock got special attention from the guards. My recollection was that the cell doors were kept open. Maybe at night they closed them. A guard had to cross in front of each cell every five minutes to make sure nothing adverse was happening. How they would have committed suicide at that stage, I don’t know. Every day during the week, they’d get on a bus and be taken to [the Ichigaya court building in] downtown Tokyo and put on trial. I’d wonder how the trials were going and what was going to happen to them. What made you want to collect their autographs? I don’t know why I took the time to go up there and get signatures from everybody—but I did. I stopped at every cell along the way, asked if they would do it, and they all agreed to sign their names—in Japanese and English both. How did you get along with them personally? Some were very open about talking and carrying on a conversation. Those on our wing all spoke quite good English. It was interesting for me to go through that—but an 18-year-old kid doesn’t try to find out what was inside their minds, why they did it, or ask if they’d ever do it again if they had a chance. Tojo was the only one I can remember who didn’t have much interest in carrying on a conversation. He seemed more quiet and unassuming than the rest. Was there anyone you got to know especially well? I probably talked to [Foreign Minister Mamoru] Shigemitsu more than any of the others. He really didn’t have anything to do with the war effort, so that’s why they released him quite early [in 1950]. I wanted to know why he was picked to represent the Japanese government at the surrender [on September 2, 1945]. The story was that a six-foot-six Imperial marine wouldn’t have been a good representative of a defeated nation, but Shigemitsu was small; he had a limp and walked with a cane, so that’s why he got the job. How did you get along with the Japanese people? When we first arrived, we worried about whether they would be upset about the Americans taking over their country, but never once did I ever run into anything resembling any resentment. They were amazingly friendly. We thought everybody would be really angry, but that was not the case. It was just the opposite. I got invited to homes to have dinner. What’s the story about Tojo’s dentures? The prison guards brought Tojo to see us about once a month. When I first saw him, he had recently gotten false teeth. They brought him down for Dr. Foster to work on the dentures. That’s when Foster had the idea to write “Remember Pearl Harbor” on them in Morse code with a dental drill. What was the reaction? Nobody knew. I may have seen the dentures, but I never realized that there was anything different about them. Foster told his wife back in the states, and she told a friend, and the word got back to Tokyo. I heard there was talk of a court-martial. He obviously wasn’t supposed to be writing something like that on a denture, so that was the reason behind the court-martial talk. But if they had a court-martial it would have meant exposing a lot more information than the armed forces wanted out, so I’m sure that’s why there was a decision not to court-martial him. I think they were just glad when the whole thing was over. A 1995 Associated Press story said that it was a U.S. Navy dentist, E. J. Mallory, who carved the phrase. I remember that it was Foster. Mallory was his buddy. They worked together at the 361st. How did you find out about it once word got out? Foster told us what had happened. I heard they brought Tojo down at midnight to look at his dentures so that the words could be scratched out before the colonel and the general found out that they had done it. I was in bed, sleeping. They weren’t about to bring me down at midnight to help with that duty. I wasn’t there, but I knew it happened. The story went around really quick. Once the word starts to spread, it goes fast. What was your reaction to this? As an 18-year-old kid, I thought it was kinda neat. Everybody in the dental office laughed when they heard about it. I can remember exactly where I was on December 7, 1941. My dad and I were on the roof of the house, cleaning out the gutters. We had 10 feet to go, and we never finished. Then I ended up in Japan, thinking about “Remember Pearl Harbor.” Crazy how life affects you. ✯ This article was published in the August 2020 issue of World War II.