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https://www.historynet.com/iar-80-romanias-indigenous-fighter-plane.htm

IAR 80: Romania’s Indigenous Fighter Plane

IAR 80: Romania’s Indigenous Fighter Plane The Romanian aircraft industry was created in the early 1920s because that country’s government did not want to rely on other nations to provide its aircraft and components. The delivery of foreign aircraft and parts was subject to the winds of political turmoil and often delayed. Also, many of the best foreign aircraft types were simply not for sale. In order to overcome these problems and ensure that the Royal Romanian Air Force (Fortele Aeriene Regale ale Romaniei, or FARR) was capable of protecting the nation’s airspace, the government subsidized the creation of three major aircraft manufacturers. The Societatii pentru Exploatari Tehnice (SET) factory was established in Bucharest in 1923, the Industria Aeronautica Romana (IAR) built its factory in Brasov in 1925, and the Intreprinderea de Constructii Aeronautice Romanesti (ICAR) company was founded at Bucharest in 1932. Unfortunately, the sudden growth of the aircraft industry and large government subsidies resulted in more graft and corruption than actual aircraft construction. In order to rectify the situation, the government nationalized IAR in 1935 and made it the primary supplier of warplanes while SET and ICAR were left to compete for limited government and civilian contracts. IAR was chosen to supply the Romanian armed forces with warplanes because it had already demonstrated its ability and desire to build fighter aircraft. In 1930 the Romanian government issued specifications for a new fighter. Although the government did not expect much from its own infant aircraft industry, IAR nevertheless produced several prototype fighters in response to the specifications. Although the prototypes held great promise, none was ready for mass production, and the government decided to purchase the Polish Panstwowe Zaclady Lotnicze (PZL) P-11B for its new fighter. The IAR engineers were dismayed at losing the contract but realized that the Polish design had many advantages over their own. They carefully analyzed the aircraft and incorporated many of its strengths into their future designs. In 1934, IAR introduced two prototypes to challenge the PZL P-11B. The IARs 15 and 16 were both low-wing, single-seat monoplane fighters powered by 600-hp in-line and 560-hp radial engines, respectively. Many of the fighter’s features came from the original PZL P-11B. While both prototypes were faster than the Polish fighter, the Romanian government opted to simply upgrade the powerplant of the PZL P-11B. Mating it with the Romanian 640-hp IAR K9 engine produced an aircraft that was faster than both prototypes and saved the cost of building a completely new airplane. The new version was christened the PZL P-11F, and since it used an IAR engine, the company was awarded a contract to build PZL P-11Fs under license. Undaunted by the setback of having its own design turned down, IAR continued design work on its next generation of fighters. Building on their experience, IAR engineers constructed a single example of a low-wing monoplane in 1935 that was christened the IAR 24. The aircraft was powered by a 350-hp Gnome-Rhone 7Kd engine, and because of its low power it was classified as a civilian touring aircraft. However, it contained many advanced features, including uniquely designed wings. War clouds were already gathering in Europe, and Hungary, Romania’s old enemy, was rearming. Faced with the prospect of defending its airspace against any of several possible aggressors, the Romanian government decided to purchase a new fighter in 1936. The ideal choice was a Romanian-built fighter, since the growing political turmoil in Europe was certain to interrupt the delivery of aircraft from foreign sources. IAR was more than ready to build the new fighter. The company had been working for several months on an improved design for a low-wing, single-seat monoplane fighter with a retractable undercarriage. Many of the design features, such as the special wings, had been successfully tested on the IAR 24, and the engineers believed that they had an outstanding aircraft in the making. Unfortunately, Polish designers had beaten them to the punch again. PZL had been refining the design of its P-11B for several years and had introduced the PZL P-24 in May 1933. The P-24 was the ultimate progression of the earlier P-11 design. Although the aircraft were similar in appearance, the PZL P-24 was more heavily armed and had a more powerful engine, an enclosed canopy and several other refinements. Work on the PZL P-24 had continued throughout 1933 and 1934, and the second prototype was demonstrated at the Paris Air Show in 1934. Its performance was stunning, and the aircraft was labeled the fastest and best-armed interceptor in the world. The Romanian government was also impressed by the new Polish aircraft. Although the government would have liked to buy IAR’s design, the Polish fighter was a better aircraft. The PZL P-24 was the refinement of a proven design the Romanian Air Force was already operating. The Romanians purchased a license to build the P-24 equipped with the IAR-built 930-hp Gnome-Rhone 14 Kmc/36 engine. Despite disappointment at the government’s choice of the Polish design, a team of IAR engineers led by Dr. Ion Grosu was convinced that its design was superior to the high-gull-wing configuration of the PZL P-24. The team studied the new Polish aircraft and combined its best features with those of the latest IAR design. The resulting aircraft was unique in many respects. It was a low-wing, single-seat monoplane fighter with an open cockpit and retractable landing gear. It had a wingspan of 32 feet 10 inches, was 26 feet 91Ž2 inches long and stood 11 feet 10 inches high. It weighed 3,930 pounds empty and 5,040 with a normal fuel and ordnance load. The aircraft was powered by the 14-cylinder radial air-cooled IAR-built Gnome-Rhone 14K II C 32 engine, which generated 870 hp, resulting in a top speed of 317 mph at 13,000 feet and a maximum range of 590 miles. The prototype was armed with two FN Browning 7.92mm machine guns, but heavier armament was planned. The simple statistics do not do justice to the brilliant design that combined the best features of a Polish and a Romanian aircraft. The fuselage forward of the tail was from the IAR design, while the entire tail section was taken from the PZL P-24. The wings were designed by IAR and had been tested on the IAR 24. The engine, engine mount and engine cowling were all from the PZL P-24. The cockpit instruments, internal cockpit components and gunsight were either Romanian or imported from foreign suppliers. The Romanian government was duly impressed with the new aircraft, which was officially christened the IAR 80, and ordered 100 of the new fighters on December 18, 1939. The new fighters required 600 Belgian-made FN Browning machine guns, and the supply of them was disrupted by the German conquest of the Low Countries. The Germans eventually allowed the production of the machine guns to resume, but it took until November 1940 for the order to be released. The first 20 production IAR 80s rolled off the assembly line between January and February 1941. Several minor modifications differentiated them from the prototype. The production versions had the more powerful IAR 14K III C 36 engine installed. The cockpit was fully enclosed, and the pilot was provided with oxygen for high-altitude flight. The initial batch of fighters was well received by the Romanian pilots, but they made several recommendations that the IAR engineers quickly adopted. The pilots considered the aircraft underpowered and lacking sufficient firepower for modern air-to-air combat. The IAR engineers interrupted series production to add the more powerful 960-hp IAR 14K IV C 32 engine to airplanes 21 through 50 on the assembly line. They were unable, however, to upgrade the armament package. The Romanians, now firmly in the Axis camp, were set to participate in the invasion of Russia along with the Germans. The Romanian air force benefited from the new alliance, as Germany, in late April 1941, allowed the delivery of sufficient Browning FN machine guns for the IAR engineers to build the IAR 80A. The new version was given the 1,025-hp IAR 14K 1000A engine and equipped with six Browning FN machine guns. An armored windscreen and seatback were added for the pilot’s protection, and a new Goerz gunsight was installed. Although the IAR 80A had a more powerful engine, the added weight of the guns, ammunition and armor plating actually reduced the top speed to 316 mph. Only eight IAR 80As had been completed when the invasion of Russia began, but the version proved quite satisfactory in combat, and by the end of 1941 three squadrons in Grupul 8 Vinatoare flew the IAR 80A in the skies over Russia. The Royal Romanian Air Force served throughout southern Russia, supporting both the Romanian and the German forces of Army Group South as they advanced through the Ukraine. The Romanians continued to operate the IAR 80s and 80As in Russia throughout 1942, and the air-to-air victory scores of the Romanian pilots continued to climb. Lieutenant Dan Vizante scored most of his 32 credited kills flying the IAR 80. However, the Russians were introducing new and better types of fighters, and the IAR 80s and 80As were soon outclassed on the Russian front. The IAR engineers tried several different modifications to improve performance. They tried to mate the Focke-Wulf FW-190’s BMW 801 radial engine and the Junkers Jumo 211 Da engine to the IAR 80 airframe. However, neither adaptation was successful, and the Germans found it more beneficial to outfit the Romanian air force with standard Luftwaffe aircraft. Although the IAR 80 and 80A were eventually withdrawn from service on the Russian front, they continued to serve in Romania, protecting vital oil fields and ports from both Russian and American attack. A total of 236 IAR 80 and 80A fighters were built during World War II, and the planes served the Romanians well. The IAR 80 and 80A provided protection for Romanian troops during their many battles in Russia and protected vital installations in Romania until the end of the war. This article was written by Timothy J. Kutta and originally appeared in the May 1996 issue of World War II magazine. For more great articles subscribe to World War II magazine today!

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https://www.historynet.com/in-alsace-peaceful-vineyards-belie-a-traumatic-past.htm

In Alsace, Peaceful Vineyards Belie a Traumatic Past

In Alsace, Peaceful Vineyards Belie a Traumatic Past On a bitterly cold January dawn in 1945, the residents of a tranquil, picturesque area on the eastern border of France woke to the sound of artillery. Unbeknownst to them, the Germans had chosen their region of fairy-tale villages and rolling green vineyards—Alsace—as the epicenter of their last major offensive of World War II. In December 1944 Hitler had ordered a last-ditch operation, code-named Nordwind, against the thinly stretched lines of the U.S. Seventh Army and the French First Army in the Vosges Mountains, in the west of the region. The Alsatian people, their homes, and their land were now in the middle of the Nazis’ final, desperate attempt to stave off the Allies. Alsace and its people were accustomed to conflict; possession of the prosperous wine region had been contested for centuries. Once part of the Holy Roman Empire, the region became part of France in the 17th century, after the Thirty Years’ War. But France and Germany continued to dispute Alsace’s natural border. Germany claimed that France’s territory should end at the Vosges, entitling them to control, while France insisted that German territory should stop at the Rhine. So the small but densely populated Alsace region found itself at the heart of a political and military tug-of-war, during which it would change hands four times in 75 years: Germany acquired Alsace after the Franco-Prussian War, but was forced to return it to France after World War I. In 1940, the Nazis invaded, and became the Alsatians’ harshest overlords yet. Today Alsace belongs to France, and tourism in the area trades on its vineyards and photogenic villages, not its complicated past. Reminders of the German occupation and the savage fighting of January 1945 are few, and they are rarely obvious, but they are here—and can take surprising forms. The best way to see Alsace is via the Route du Vin, the popular 75-mile drive that winds north–south through the region’s villages and vineyards. Besides being movie-set beautiful, towns like Hunawihr, Riquewihr, and Eguisheim vividly express the French and German influences that make Alsace so unique. The winding rows of medieval houses, for example, are half-timbered in the Germanic tradition, but accented with French details, like the colorful window shutters. Merchant signs and street markers often feature both French and German, because the residents never knew which would be required on short notice. More significant than street signs and architecture, however, is the singular identity of the Alsatian people. The names on the mailboxes are hybridized—don’t be surprised if you meet a Jacques Schultz or Marie Vogel while enjoying some wine in a café—but Alsace has a culture all its own. Part of that culture is the regional dialect, Alsatian. In Riquewihr an older local, dressed in the overalls and tall, green rubber boots typically worn by area winemakers, demonstrated it for me. To my untrained ear, what he said sounded quite similar to German; he took offense to this and assured me, “It is not anything like German. During the war, the Germans mandated the use of their own language, but we kept on speaking our language.” He smiled, clearly proud that the men and women of Alsace did not let the Nazis strip away this vital piece of their identity. Alsatians are known to be fiercely patriotic and stubbornly defensive of their distinctive traditions—no doubt a result of being traded like chattel between rival neighbors for centuries. A more tragic aspect of the occupation was the conscription of Alsatian men into the German army. Jean-Claude Werner (notice the hybrid name), a tour guide based in Colmar, is a lifelong resident of the region who experienced the occupation firsthand. Though he was too young for military service at the time, his brother was not. On a warm September day, between giving minivan tours of the Route du Vin, Jean-Claude told me a story that illustrated the harshness of the occupation. His brother refused to serve with the Nazis and, facing arrest, went into hiding. Then an SS officer paid the family a visit. He informed them that they would be sent to a concentration camp because of their son’s disobedience. Only a family friend’s last-minute intervention saved the Werners from certain death and Jean-Claude’s brother from military service. He was lucky: nearly all of the region’s draftees became cannon fodder on the Eastern Front; over 20,000 of them are still missing. By mid-January 1945, the fighting in Alsace had reached a climax. The Germans were fighting desperately to expand their foothold in the area, a bridgehead pushing west that had become known as the Colmar Pocket. Elements of the U.S. Seventh Army and the French First Army pushed back; savage mountain combat in subzero temperatures ensued. Hiking through the Vosges, where the terrain is steep and densely wooded, I thought about how difficult reconnaissance, maintaining supply lines, and maneuvering artillery must have been for those men, particularly in the icy conditions: the winter of 1944–1945 is legendary for its arctic harshness. Because most of the fighting took place in the mountains and vineyards, Alsace’s quaint, cheerful villages were left largely intact. A notable exception is the decidedly unquaint town of Bennwihr. There are no tourists here, no cute cafés or medieval churches. The town, a collection of gray, blocky buildings, was obliterated in the fierce fighting—it was taken and lost by the Allies more than a dozen times—then hastily rebuilt to house the surviving residents. Near Bennwihr is a hill where a group of SS troops made their last stand toward the end of the campaign. The grassy mound is now known as Bloody Hill. There is a small monument off the side of the road. It’s easy to miss. Also easy to miss, though definitely worth a visit, is the Colmar Pocket Museum in Turckheim, about five miles south of Bennwihr. Tucked away from Turckheim’s picturesque town center, the tiny museum is packed with uniforms, artillery, and photos from the campaign. The Allies thwarted Operation Nordwind in late January 1945—saving Alsace’s capital, Strasbourg—and collapsed the Colmar Pocket two weeks later. In doing so, they methodically demolished the remaining German forces in the area. Though the Ardennes offensive generally receives more attention than what happened in Alsace, it was here that Hitler spent his last reserves, and in doing so, lost even the ability to defend his country. Once Alsace had been liberated, the Allies could concentrate on charging into Germany for the European war’s final act: driving a stake through the heart of the Third Reich. Walking the peaceful cobbled streets of Hunawihr, a tiny village north of Colmar, it was hard to believe the magnitude of what happened in this tranquil, sunny place—the centuries-long struggle for control of the area, the unrest of the Nazi occupation, and the mountain combat that followed. I thought about the fortitude of the people here, how they refused to surrender their provincial identity. Passing a park, I heard a strange language coming from some children at play. At first I was baffled; then I recognized the dialect. They were speaking Alsatian. When You Go Fall is a great time to visit Alsace: there are plenty of sunny days and good wine festivals, but fewer tourists. Strasbourg is the region’s main transportation hub, with several trains a day making the 30-minute trip to Colmar. The Gare de l’Est in Paris also runs several trains to both cities each day. Rent a car to tour the villages along the Route du Vin. Don’t worry; the roads and signage are good. Where to Stay and Eat Strasbourg’s Hôtel Cardinal de Rohan is located near the magnificent Strasbourg Cathedral, and offers a classy, Old-World setting in which to relax after a long day of sightseeing (17 rue du Maroquin; hotel-rohan.com). Great food options for every budget abound in the old city center. The historic Hotel le Rapp, in the center of Colmar, has a basement sauna and pool, as well as a café that offers tasty traditional fare (1 rue Weinemer; rapp-hotel.com). What Else to See There’s plenty: No trip to Strasbourg is complete without visiting its gorgeous cathedral or the Alsatian Museum (musees-strasbourg.org). About 30 miles southwest of Strasbourg is the main camp of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp network (struthof.fr/en). A museum and memorial, renovated in 2005, pay tribute to the 17,000 prisoners—many of them Resistance fighters—who died in the camps between May 1941 and March 1945. Colmar, Alsace’s most likable city, represents all that is best about the region: world-class museums, cobbled streets, and historic half-timbers. The Unterlinden Museum is a particular treasure, with exhibits and paintings that span Alsace’s history (musee-unterlinden.com). It houses the famed Isenheim Altarpiece, a medieval marvel. This article originally appeared in the May/June 2010 issue of World War II. Click here to read more Time Travel articles.

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https://www.historynet.com/in-the-confederacys-last-days-two-texans-face-off-in-futile-feud.htm

In the Confederacy’s Last Days, Two Texans Face Off in Futile Feud

In the Confederacy’s Last Days, Two Texans Face Off in Futile Feud Confederate officers’ wounded pride leads to fury, insults, and senseless murder On April 6, 1865, the Confederacy was in its death throes. Robert E. Lee’s defeat at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek, Va., had all but ended the fighting in the Eastern Theater. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Rebels were doing all they could to hold back James Wilson’s cavalry in northern Alabama, and in North Carolina, William T. Sherman continued to close in on Joe Johnston’s depleted army. Meanwhile, far away from the battlefield, two high-ranking Confederate officers in Texas were waging their own private war. Colonel George Wythe Baylor and Maj. Gen. John A. Wharton did not start out as enemies. After all, they were both Texans, fighting under the same banner and fiercely devoted to the Southern cause. Baylor, in fact, reportedly had raised the first Confederate flag in Austin during the Lone Star State’s secession debates in 1861. Both men had distinguished themselves on multiple battlefields and should have been brothers in arms. But they also came from very different backgrounds—one to the manor born, the other having to fight for everything he ever got. Baylor was from simple stock, but rose through the Confederate ranks through brains, courage, and pure ability. He served on General Albert Sidney Johnston’s staff until Johnston was mortally wounded at Shiloh on April 6, 1862, and won commendations for gallantry while commanding a regiment during the April 8-9, 1864, fighting at Mansfield and Pleasant Hill in Louisiana. The brother of Colonel John Baylor (see “No Mere Sideshow”), he undeniably had the heart of a lion but was also a bantam rooster of a man. After four years of fighting, he was in “exceedingly delicate health,” suffering from chronic dysentery that had reduced him to a gaunt 135 pounds. John Wharton, on the other hand, hailed from a privileged family, which allowed him to attend South Carolina College and marry the South Carolina governor’s daughter. Wharton took up law and was serving as district attorney of Brazoria County, Texas, in February 1861 when he attended the Secession Convention as a delegate. He voted in favor of Texas leaving the union, and when war followed, he raised a company of cavalry that was mustered into Confederate service with Benjamin Franklin Terry’s 8th Texas Cavalry. When Terry was killed at the Battle of Rowlett’s Station, Ky., in December 1861, Wharton took command of Terry’s renowned Texas Rangers. His performance at Shiloh in April 1862 brought him a promotion to brigadier general and a request from friends back home to run for a seat in the Confederate Congress. His mother turned down the offer for him, however, insisting that her son would rather fight than legislate. Wharton remained in the cavalry, fighting under both Forrest and Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler over the next two years. He was promoted to major general after the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863, and fought capably during the Red River Campaign the following spring. By 1865, he was part of Maj. Gen. John Bankhead Magruder’s crumbling Trans-Mississippi Department. When Magruder reorganized the department in late 1864, he placed Baylor’s regiment under Wharton’s command. Wharton had a reputation for taking care of friends and family first—and George Baylor was neither. So, when dismounted troopers were needed to form an infantry division, Wharton tapped Baylor’s men, much to the colonel’s chagrin. This put Baylor and his troops under the doddering, 66-year-old Colonel Nathaniel Terry, whose rank dated back to the days of the Republic of Texas and whose Civil War commission had been bestowed by Governor Pendleton Murrah. Although Terry had no combat experience during the Civil War, and his appointment in state forces made his rank inferior to Baylor’s rank in the Provisional Army, CSA, Wharton and his staff believed that wouldn’t be a problem: Because Terry would not be able to take the field, it made Baylor the brigade’s effective commander. That, however, mattered little to Baylor, who was driven by the principle of the matter. Colonel George Wythe Baylor rose through the ranks with brains, courage, and ability. He won a commendation for gallantry at the April 8-9, 1864, fighting at Mansfield and Pleasant Hill, La. (HN Archive) Maj. Gen. John Wharton was from a wealthy family and married the daughter of South Carolina’s governor. He had a reputation for high-handedness. (HN Archives) Wharton’s personality did not help the situation. He had a deserved reputation of being “exceedingly dictatorial” in his relations with subordinates and swore without regard for the rank or position of those to whom he was speaking. Those who knew him best said he was “in the habit of accompanying every sentence with a ‘damn.’” While they served in the same army and the same theater, Wharton and Baylor scarcely knew each other. But on April 6, both were in Houston. Baylor continued to seethe at having to serve under Nathaniel Terry. He took it as a personal insult and wanted his command reassigned anywhere but with Terry, and he was willing to voice that desire to anyone who would listen. That morning he buttonholed Brig. Gen. Walter P. Lane at the railroad depot, hoping to get Wharton’s orders countermanded. Lane refused to intervene. Afterward, as Baylor and Captain R.H.E. Sorrel (or Sorrelle) were walking through town, they spied Wharton and Brig. Gen. James E. Harrison in a buggy. The pair had come in from Wharton’s camp at Hempstead, 50 miles northwest of Houston. Wharton confronted Baylor, upbraiding him for not being with his command. Baylor replied that his services were “needed here” to keep his unhappy men from deserting rather than serve under Colonel Terry. “I have been imposed upon by you, Gen. Wharton, and I am determined to see Gen. Magruder about the matter.” As Baylor kept talking, his voice rose: “This thing has been going on for some time, and I don’t think that my right has been awarded to me….The only time that I ever asked a favor of you was when my wife was sick, and I asked an extension of leave….” The implications were clear: Baylor was asking to be reassigned now as another favor. Responded Wharton: “Who has done you injustice?” “You, sir,” Baylor shot back; “You have always borne upon me,” and he ticked off several instances as evidence. Both men had their dander up now. After hearing Baylor out, Wharton called him a “damned liar,” to which Baylor fired back: “You’re a demagogue! You rank me now, but the day is coming when we will be on equal grounds.” Wharton snorted, dismissing Baylor’s accusations as “false or a lie.” Repeated Baylor, “You are a liar and a demagogue,” and he stepped forward with raised hand as if to strike Wharton. Before he could do anything, however, an alarmed Harrison urged the horse forward. “Stop the buggy, sir!” Wharton cried, informing Baylor he was under arrest and ordering the colonel to report to his Hempstead headquarters immediately—by the next train. Replied Baylor: “General, I will go to see Gen. Magruder before I leave to have justice done me.” Wharton and Harrison then drove off, ending the immediate confrontation, but neither man was satisfied with how things had ended. Raw feelings like these could be assuaged only by a public apology, yet neither man was about to do that. Baylor and Sorrel went directly to Magruder’s headquarters on the second floor of Fannin House. Informed the general was not there, Baylor told Magruder’s adjutant, Colonel Edward P. Turner, “I have been called a liar and placed under arrest.” He then stalked out of the room to go find the department commander. After stewing over the morning’s events, Wharton, still accompanied by Harrison, also headed to Fannin House to see Magruder and “settle things.” Upon entering the hotel, Wharton inquired whether Baylor was upstairs. When the answer came back in the affirmative, he proceeded up the stairs. Wharton and Harrison went to Magruder’s private rooms and entered. Magruder was not there, but Baylor was, sitting on the side of the bed. Wharton, a cigar clenched in his teeth, advanced, roaring, “Colonel Baylor, you have insulted me most grossly this morning.” Harrison tried to interpose himself between the two angry men, but it was too late. Wharton, who wasn’t armed, struck Baylor in the face with a clenched fist. Outraged, Baylor responded with a roar of his own, drawing his Navy revolver and pointing it at Wharton. Again, Harrison desperately tried to get between the two men, but Baylor fired under Harrison’s arm at point-blank range, striking Wharton in the heart and killing him instantly. Baylor then simply walked out of Fannin House and surrendered to military authorities. Contrary to some reports, Magruder wasn’t in the building at the time and probably couldn’t have stopped the confrontation even if he had been. Subsequently, Baylor was returned to duty. He never attempted to flee, seeing no need to since he felt entirely justified. Ordinarily an episode such as this would be filed under “affairs of honor” between gentlemen—in other words, a duel—except that none of the ritualized rules of dueling had been observed. This had been an execution of an unarmed man. Charges should have been filed, but Confederate authorities, understandably, were preoccupied with the war. Justice would have to wait. Wharton’s body was transported to Austin for burial, with full military honors. Magruder himself led the procession through Houston to the train depot. When the war ended, George Baylor went back to civilian life. James Henderson, the interim governor of Texas in 1853, helped defend Baylor (State Preservation Board, Austin, TX) The legal repercussions of the shooting did not play out for another three years. The delay can be explained in part due to the unabated turmoil across the South at the end of the war and the beginning of Reconstruction. But there was also a question of jurisdiction. This was a case of one officer killing another, which should have been tried under the military justice system. But the Confederate States no longer existed. If there was to be justice, it would have to be in a civil court. Thus, the case of State of Texas v. George W. Baylor opened in Houston’s Harris County District Court on May 16, 1868—Judge C.B. Sabine presiding. Previously, the details of the case have never come out, and most of what has been written in the history books is incorrect because accounts of the affair depended on sketchy newspaper reports of 1865 rather than testimony under oath. No one, apparently, thought to look for the story three years after the event. Fortunately, the trial proceedings have recently come to light, so we have the testimony of witnesses taken under oath. The prosecution of George Baylor was led by district attorney Jack Harris, who claimed to be a former Rebel general. (HN Archives) When both sides took their place, the courtroom looked like a soldiers’ reunion of the old Confederate Army, with men still wearing their uniforms and using their wartime military titles. For the prosecution were “General” D.A. “Jack” Harris, whose rank as given is suspect because no such general appears in any listing of Confederate or state officers; Colonel Hiram B. Waller, who was better known as a criminal prosecutor after the war than a Confederate veteran; and Captain T.W. Masterson, who had been an assistant adjutant general on Wharton’s staff. The defense was led by George Mason, Esq., a Galveston County justice of the peace who went on to defend KKK defendants against federal prosecution a couple of years later; Judge George Goldthwaite, Esq., a district court judge in Austin at the time of the trial who may or may not have served in the Confederate Army during the war; and James Wilson Henderson, Esq., interim governor of Texas (1853) who was serving as a captain under General Magruder at the end of the war. What all these men had in common, on both sides of the case, was they had all been true believers in the Confederacy and staunch Democrats who believed in the so-called “Lost Cause.” Tacking “Esquire” onto the end of their names in some ways helped assuage the pain of losing their rank when the Confederate Army was no more. The prosecution presented its case first, calling as witnesses Colonel Waller, Isaac V. Jones, and General Harrison, all of whom went easy on the accused because he also happened to be a former comrade in arms. When it came their turn, the defense called Major Jared E. Grace, who had been assistant inspector general on Wharton’s staff; T.T. Hailey [or T.J. Haley]; Major Sorrel; John S. Sydnor, a former mayor of Galveston (1846-47) as well as a slave trader who rose to the rank of colonel in the Confederate Army before resigning to return to business; and Major Michael Looscan, who ultimately became the most distinguished veteran of them all as a member of the board of managers of the Texas Confederate Home (1892-97). “Lost Cause” loyalty ran deep, and these proud Southerners all testified to the defendant’s sterling character, kindly disposition, and military record. It was established early that even before the fatal day there had been hard feelings between Baylor and Wharton. Isaac Jones testified that two weeks earlier he had been part of a dinner conversation in which an unnamed colonel whose troops had been reassigned by Wharton said he wanted to kill the general. When Baylor chimed, “Give me half a chance, and I’ll kill him myself,” Baylor’s wife reproved her husband: “Why George, you shouldn’t talk so.” The defense dismissed the statement as a “careless, idle remark calculated to injure no one.” It was important to establish for the record whether Wharton had struck Baylor with his fist or merely slapped him. To most of those present, it didn’t matter, claiming that no Southern gentleman would meekly accept being physically assaulted. The prosecution sought to establish that Baylor was “not in any danger of any serious injury” at the time he shot Wharton, and that though Wharton was physically larger, he was neither “a strong nor athletic man.” The defense stressed that both men had sworn at each other, also emphasizing that Wharton was much larger physically than Baylor. The defense also showed that it was customary for Confederate officers to be armed, clearly implying that Baylor had every right to expect that the man who had struck him was likewise armed and prepared to answer for his actions. In addition, the defense presented a seniority list of Confederate officers according to general orders  issued by Magruder on February 21, 1863. The list clearly showed that Baylor was of superior rank to Nathaniel Terry. All these facts weighed heavily in favor of the defendant when the jury retired to begin deliberating. They also must have been cognizant of the fact that the affair had occurred at the end of the war, at which time many Southerners were trying to get on with their lives. Finally, there was no denying that George Baylor was a living Confederate hero, and those could be forgiven almost anything. During the testimony, several eye-opening revelations provided a peek inside the Confederate command structure as well as frontier justice in Texas. Several defense witnesses expressed surprise that Wharton had carried no weapon, insisting it was Southern custom, especially in the cavalry, for officers to go about armed at all times. Interestingly, the prosecution did not challenge that testimony. Defense witnesses also testified that it was “against etiquette” for a superior officer to directly address a subordinate whom he had placed under arrest. The implication was obvious that Wharton had no business addressing Baylor after he placed him under arrest and ordered him to report to his headquarters. And during the same dinner conversation noted above, the gentlemen present discussed the “merits” of Nathaniel Terry and Wharton and had “nothing complimentary to say about either.” That underscores Terry’s lack of experience and raises questions about Wharton’s reputation in history. On May 18, in closing arguments, the prosecution went first, with Waller arguing that it was well known that ex-Governor Henderson was “the best man in the state to stock a jury,” thus suggesting that if a verdict came back other than “guilty,” it was because the jury had been paid off. Henderson leaped up to protest, and Judge Sabine warned Waller to “cease such remarks.” Henderson and George Mason then followed, splitting the time for the defense’s closing argument. Both delivered “forcible and convincing” speeches, sprinkling their remarks with quotations from relevant legal authorities. Harris wrapped up the prosecution’s case, speaking until 9:15 p.m., when the case went to the jury. The fiery Baylor, later enshrined in the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame, died in March 1916 at the age of 83. (Virginia Museum of History and Culture) he following afternoon, the jury reported it was unable to reach a decision and was therefore discharged, with Sabine continuing the case until the next court term. Posting $25,000 bail, Baylor remained free. The case returned to trial in December 1868 with the same legal teams in place. But a new question needed to be resolved: Had the original charge been murder or manslaughter? The judge decided murder and so instructed the jury, which needed only half an hour to deliver a “not guilty” verdict. When it was over, Baylor had suffered no loss of reputation or diminution of status for his actions. On the contrary, he went on to live a very public life, becoming a distinguished Texas Ranger and being elected to several terms in state office before his death in 1916. The Houston Telegraph put the best possible spin on the case: “The high-souled Wharton lost his life at the hands of the noble-spirited Baylor. It was a public misfortune and a public grief.” Dr. Richard Selcer, a frequent contributor to America’s Civil War, is a professor of history and author based in Fort Worth, Texas. This story appeared in the March 2020 issue of America’s Civil War.

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Insidious Inspiration: How Jim Crow Inspired the Nazis

Insidious Inspiration: How Jim Crow Inspired the Nazis American laws barring interracial sex and marriage were model for the anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws INTERVIEW James Whitman is a historian and professor at Yale Law School. His 2017 book, Hitler’s American Model, explores how racist legislation enacted by the United States influenced development of the Nazi-era statutes on race and citizenship in Germany that came to be known as the Nuremberg Laws. How did you come to this topic? I’m not the first to wonder if the Jim Crow era influenced the Nazis, but I looked a little harder than Yale historian James Whitman documents how Nazi Germany modeled its racial laws on the American legal system. other people had and found what I think was real influence. I began by pulling Mein Kampf off the shelf; I found a passage in which Hitler describes America as the one state that is making progress toward creation of a healthy racial order. And I thought there must be more. Explain this startling link. Upon taking power in 1933, the Nazis wanted to establish a race-based legal regime that in essence would reduce Jews to second-class citizens and ban, indeed criminalize, sex and marriage between Jews and Germans. This led to the Nuremberg Laws, enacted in 1935 and informed by what the Nazis termed “material of interest” in American law. Nazis saw the United States as a pioneer? In regard to citizenship, the first Nuremberg laws, as they are usually described, related to the de facto second-class citizenship accorded African Americans. Technically, the United States could not deny African Americans citizenship. However, in practice, especially but not exclusively through the deprivation of voting rights in the latter 19th century, blacks in America were subjected to forms of second-class citizenship that were of real interest to Nazi lawyers. Far right-wingers in Germany had been interested in this for a long time. After the Spanish-American War, the United States also created a legal form of second-class citizenship for the people of the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and other conquered territories. These populations couldn’t be granted citizenship, but constitutional law had no provision under which to designate second-class citizenship. In decisions called the Insular Cases, the Supreme Court created a new status—“non-citizen national”—which still exists. Nazi lawyers were very interested in these American innovations. What else did the United States pioneer? In the early 20th century, the idea that interracial marriage was morally objectionable or dangerous was very widespread in the world. But the United States stood out as the creator of laws cracking down on interracial sex, interracial marriage, and their perceived danger. American willingness to come up with these legislative schemes reflected something that we still see in the USA today—an innovative legislative energy rarely found elsewhere. To the Nazis, this approach was intriguing, even exciting. How did they learn about American race law? In 1935, 45 Nazi lawyers came to America on a “study trip.” One man in particular was instrumental in collecting knowledge about American race law. In 1933-34, Heinrich Krieger was an exchange student at the University of Arkansas Law School. On his return to Germany, Krieger became the main source informing the Nazi investigation that produced the Nuremburg Laws. In 1936, Junker & Dünnhaupt, a Berlin publisher sympathetic to the Nazis, brought out Krieger’s Das Rassenrecht in den vereinigten Staaten—Race Law in the United States. It’s quite an interesting book. Nazi studies went beyond Jim Crow. Our memory of race law in America is mostly of the South and the treatment of American blacks there. But American racial law involved a much broader swath of the country, and affected many populations beyond the black population. Thirty states had anti-miscegenation statutes banning interracial marriage, targeting not only blacks but Asians and to some extent Native Americans. These laws interested the Nazis, who also were intrigued by American immigration law. In the late 19th century, the United The author’s search began with a close reading of Hitler’s 1925 manifesto. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images) States restricted immigration, particularly from China and Japan, and in the 1920s imposed national immigration quotas that Hitler praised in Mein Kampf. Those immigration laws, like anti-miscegenation laws, belonged to a national pattern of effort aimed at maintaining the white Anglo-Saxon character of the United States that went well beyond anything going on in the South. Yet the Nazis officially opposed lynching. That is one of the most dramatic and frightening observations. After Hitler took power, lynchings occurred in Germany, but the Nazi Party leadership was not in favor of lynching. They favored control of institutions and state-managed action—hence the Nuremberg Laws and the Final Solution. What is the takeaway? America was so much the leading racist jurisdiction that even Nazis looked here for inspiration. They wanted nothing to do with American liberal and humanitarian currents, but when it came to race law, they saw the United States as a country that had started down a path that they wanted to walk to the final destination. That’s important for Americans to understand: we cannot wish away the fact that Nazis could see aspects of American law as pioneering—and in some measure inspiring. What was so inspiring? Nazis liked the relatively politicized character of American law. What’s an example? America’s openness to imposing relatively harsh measures on interracial marriage, and the broader theme of American criminal justice. Before coming to power the Nazi party and other far right groups in Germany had very little success shaping legislation there, especially criminal legislation. The Nazis didn’t want an American-style democracy, but they liked laws that the American legislative process produced. We have a long tradition, in many aspects of society, of deferring to the political process. American racists had much more success in shaping legislation here because the American process is more open to democratic political influence. American criminal law is the product of tough-on-crime politics. Elected officials here made and make criminal law policy with remarkable little regard for what trained criminal lawyers and criminologists believe would be the sound approach. And that’s part of what appealed to the Nazis, who eventually overruled the moderate approach advocated by trained German lawyers, who supported basic doctrines like the presumption of innocence. White supremacy and court battles over executive actions are front and center. Did you expect this? What I learned makes me more uneasy about American institutions than I used to be. I finished the proofs of the book the day before the 2016 election, having no idea how much these questions would remain on the menu. The institutions that we hope will hold up are the institutions that produced the laws that the Nazis found so interesting.

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https://www.historynet.com/insight-gary-gallagher-war-west.htm

Insight: Gary Gallagher on the War in the West

Insight: Gary Gallagher on the War in the West To read Gary Gallagher’s columns about the Civil War in the West that have appeared in Civil War Times magazine, follow the links below: Bold Rebel Venture in the Desert Insight: A Conflict Apart Out West Insight: Army in the Shadows

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Intercepted Communications for Field Marshal Erwin Rommel

Intercepted Communications for Field Marshal Erwin Rommel During the 1941-1942 tug of war for North Africa, the British benefited from radio-intercept-derived Ultra information. Despite that Allied advantage, however, for six months and 11 days the Germans enjoyed an even speedier, more across-the-board intelligence source. It was what Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the legendary Desert Fox, called die gute Quelle (the good source). It also was known as ‘the little fellows’ or ‘the little fellers,’ a play on the name of its unwitting provider, Brevet Colonel Bonner Frank Fellers. Fellers, a 1918 West Point graduate who previously had served in America’s embassy in Madrid, Spain, was the U.S. military attaché in the Egyptian capital of Cairo. General Cesare Amè, head of the Servizio Informazione Militari (SIM, Italy’s military intelligence), approved a break-in of the still neutral American embassy in Rome in September 1941. Since Amè had keys to all the embassies in Rome, except for the Russian, it was a simple matter to gain entry at night. The burglary team consisted of two Carabinieri (national paramilitary police) specialists and two Italians employed by the embassy. One of the latter, messenger Loris Gherardi, opened the safe in the military attaché’s office. Among the items inside were the Black Code (named after the color of its binding) and its super-encipherment tables. The material, used by U.S. military attachés and ambassadors worldwide, was taken to SIM headquarters, photographed and returned. The Italians now could read everything that the U.S. Ambassador telegraphed. Although they were allied with Germany, the Italians only gave their Axis partner sanitized versions of the American messages, not the code. While the Nazis appreciated the Italian largess, they did not tell their ally that they had cracked the Black Code in the meantime. By the fall of 1941, the German Chiffrierabteilung (military cipher branch) intercept stations were snatching the dots and dashes of the Black Code from the airwaves. The intercept station specifically assigned to cover Egypt (Britain’s North African headquarters) and the United States, among others, was situated in medieval Lauf, just northeast of the Bavarian city of Nuremburg. There, on a 24-hour basis, 150 radiomen tuned receivers linked to six tall towers. The Lauf facility was backed up by a listening post near Berlin. Since the Mediterranean theater was then the war’s most active battleground, it was only natural that Lauf concentrated on Cairo. It was just as natural that attention focused on the American military attaché there. His reports were the most thorough. Fellers was as dedicated as he was ambitious. Although it soon became apparent that he disliked the British, they needed American support and went out of their way to give Fellers what he wanted. As Fellers said, he knew that ‘if I was going to be a good observer and write good reports I’d better report what I saw myself.’ He talked to British military and civilian headquarters officials, read documents and visited the battlefront, where ‘it wasn’t difficult to learn a great deal.’ Fellers composed long, usually pessimistic radiograms describing virtually everything he learned, encoded them and filed them with the Egyptian Telegraph Company for transmission across the Atlantic to Washington. Within an hour of their transmission from Cairo, the colonel’s Black Code messages found their way to German cryptanalysts’ desks. Another hour or two and they would be broken into readable text, ready to be retransmitted in a German code. Thus, a few hours after Fellers’ messages were sent, the data would be in Rommel’s hands. Chiffrierabteilung archivist Dr. Herbert Schaedel said that military headquarters ‘went crazy…to get all the telegrams from Cairo.’ He pointed out that the most revealing, Fellers’ reports, were easily pulled from the hundreds of coded intercepts received daily. They were flagged MILID WASH (Military Intelligence Division, Washington) or AGWAR WASH (Adjutant General, War Department, Washington), and signed FELLERS. Schaedel recalled that the Desert Fox ‘each day at lunch, knew exactly where the Allied troops were standing the evening before.’ On December 7, 1941, Rommel’s Panzergruppe Afrika followed initial successes with a long retreat from near Tobruk west and south across Libya’s Cyrenaica to Tripolitania. There, the German and Italian units regrouped. There, also, beginning on December 18, the Desert Fox studied Fellers’ detailed reports, along with local intercepts. The latter came from his second secret ear in the enemy’s communications, his own 621st Signals Battalion mobile monitoring element commanded by Hauptmann Alfred Seeböhm. The British not only failed to frequently change their codes during this period but also displayed an unbelievable lack of battlefield radio discipline. According to Rommel’s chief of staff, they ‘were quite broad-minded in making speeches during combat, and we had the possibility of making important conclusions from their speeches.’ On January 21, 1942, aided by intercepts telling him he had temporary front-line armored superiority, the Desert Fox launched an offensive–advancing an impressive 300 miles in just 17 days. Die gute Quelle kept pace with the advance of Rommel’s forces, now elevated to Panzerarmee status, along Libya’s northeastern shore. On January 29, for example, Rommel received a full summary of British armored strength. Then he learned that more effective American-made M3 medium tanks would enter combat after mid-February. On February 6 the intercepts detailed, in addition to unit locations, the establishment of a heavily mined British defense line stretching from Gazala on the sea to the oasis at Bir Hacheim. From that line, the British intended to launch a decisive counteroffensive. With his 560 tanks (including 240 obsolete Italian ones) against his opponent’s 700, Rommel pre-empted the Allies by unleashing a daring assault on May 26. His main force swept south parallel to the defense line, swung east around its Free French­held anchor at Bir Hacheim and then pivoted back north against the British positions. Axis momentum slowed as supplies dwindled, due mainly to an overextended and inadequate logistical system. The key to British success in interdicting the Axis’ Mediterranean convoys was the island of Malta, situated just west of the principal Axis sea lane. German and Italian aircraft pounded the little island, dropping some 9,000 tons of bombs during a two-month period. Fellers’ cables made only too clear the island’s perilous position and predicted its surrender if the bombardment continued and supply convoys failed to reach it. In June, the British decided to sail two convoys simultaneously from Alexandria in the east and Gibraltar in the west, respectively code-named Vigorious and Harpoon, in a full-scale attempt to relieve Malta. A vital part of the operation was the neutralization of Axis ships and aircraft. Toward this end, air raids were scheduled against key enemy bases. In addition, numerous airfields would be attacked by parachute and ground elements to destroy bombers before they could be flown against the convoys. Fellers efficiently reported this. His cable, No. 11119 dated June 11, was intercepted in both Rome and Lauf. It read, in part: ‘NIGHTS OF JUNE 12TH JUNE 13TH BRITISH SABOTAGE UNITS PLAN SIMULTANEOUS STICKER BOMB ATTACKS AGAINST AIRCRAFT ON 9 AXIS AIRDROMES. PLANS TO REACH OBJECTIVES BY PARACHUTES AND LONG RANGE DESERT PATROL.’ British and Free French raiders went into action behind the lines in Libya and on the island of Crete. At most bases, they were slaughtered. There was success only where Fellers’ unwitting early warning was not received, was ignored or was ineptly handled. Operation Harpoon’s six merchantmen and their escorts were continually beset by Axis air and surface attacks between June 14 and 16. Only two cargo ships reached Malta. Vigorous, the larger eastern convoy, including 11 merchant ships, incurred serious losses before turning back to Egypt. On land, meanwhile, superior leadership, communication and use of intelligence enabled Rommel’s Afrika Korps to drive the British Eighth Army out of Libya into Egypt. By the end of June, Rommel’s juggernaut was about 90 miles from Alexandria. Just beyond lay Cairo, the Suez Canal and Palestine. The opposing war machines, like boxers pausing for a breath, stopped to face each other along parallel lines running southwestward just outside the town of El Alamein. Adolf Hitler, optimistically discussing the expected capture of Alexandria, said, ‘It is only to be hoped that the American [Fellers] in Cairo continues to inform us so well over the English military planning through his badly enciphered cables.’ Inevitably, the British came to realize that sensitive information was leaking to the enemy. The Afrika Korps was still blitzkrieging the Cyrenaican coastline when security officers approached Fellers to, in his words,’see my security measures for the [Black] code.’ Fellers, however, apparently allayed any suspicions the British might have had about his being the source of the suspected leaks because they directed their investigation elsewhere. At least five suspicious-looking Axis signals had been picked up by Allied stations beginning on January 25. One actually cited ‘a source in Egypt.’ Then, on June 26, a German radio station broadcast an evening drama offering’scenes from the British or American information bureau.’ Nazis listened aghast as the radio play featured an actor portraying the U.S. military attaché in Cairo and described his gathering of information to relay to Washington. Thirty-six hours later, on June 29, Rommel lost his ‘gute Quelle.’ Whether or not the incredible radio broadcast alone had allowed the Allies to pinpoint the cause of the leak, Colonel Fellers left Cairo in July after a tour of nearly 21 months. Assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Washington, he was, recalled a colleague, ‘the most violent Anglophobe I have encountered.’ Fellers was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, the citation recognizing his reports as ‘models of clarity and accuracy.’ Given the temporary rank of brigadier general, he next was assigned to the Southwest Pacific theater. After V-J Day, Fellers became military secretary to General Douglas MacArthur, with whom he had been friends since serving under him in the prewar Philippines. Fellers died of a heart attack in Washington, D.C., in 1973 at the age of 77. Fellers’ successor at the Cairo embassy encoded reports to Washington in the M-138 strip cipher, which Axis cryptanalysts had not broken. Rommel nevertheless could take heart from one of Fellers’ last radiograms. It described ‘considerable British panic’ in Cairo because of the Axis presence at the capital’s doorstep. On July 10, however, with Rommel’s main forces lured well inland in the ninth day of a new offensive, the Australian 9th Division charged his Tel el Eisa salient overlooking the sea.The defending Italian Sabratha Division was mauled in the attack, and the 621st Signal Battalion’s tents, radio vans and antennas were overrun. Seeböhm was mortally wounded in the fighting. The papers in his camp told the Allies just how much tactical information they had lost due to poor radio security since early 1941. Captured documents also confirmed the part played by Fellers’ reports in the Axis strategy. As a sidebar to the North African intelligence war, controversy still exists over whether or not intercepted communications resulted in the death of the officer Winston Churchill selected to head the Eighth Army’s forthcoming counteroffensive against Rommel. On August 7, Lt. Gen. William Gott, who had been involved in the earlier Gazala defeat, was flying in a Bristol Bombay aircraft to take up his new command. As it prepared to land at El Alamein, the unescorted transport was ambushed and destroyed by six Messerschmitt Bf-109Fs. Gott’s place was taken by General Bernard Montgomery, who, though controversial, was considered a far abler officer. The Desert Fox’s change of fortune came with the double loss of Fellers’ cables and Seeböhm’s expertise. The Axis divisions, virtually ignorant of what was transpiring on the other side of the lines, threw themselves against the Allied defenses from July to early September without success. Then on October 23, 1942, to the thunder of a thousand cannons, Montgomery, aided by information from an improved and more efficient Ultra staff, began the offensive that pushed the surprised Afrika Korps back for the last time. As one historian noted, the Fellers intercepts had ‘provided Rommel with undoubtedly the broadest and clearest picture of enemy forces and intentions available to any Axis commander throughout the war.’ This article was written by Wil Deac and originally appeared World War II magazine. For more great articles subscribe to World War II magazine today!

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https://www.historynet.com/interview-30-years-above-and-beneath-the-sea.htm

Interview: 30 Years Above and Beneath the Sea

Interview: 30 Years Above and Beneath the Sea Captain Kenneth Ruiz calls surviving three wars just ‘the luck of the draw.’ On August 8, 1942, newly commissioned Ensign Kenneth Ruiz drew cards with a fellow officer to determine who would have the privilege of manning a battle station on the captain’s bridge of the U.S. Navy heavy cruiser Vincennes off the coast of Guadalcanal. Ruiz drew high card and won. That night Vincennes was sunk in the Battle of Savo Island. Ruiz survived. His friend did not. From that fateful night to the moment he retired 30 years and three wars later, Ruiz felt he lived with the luck of the draw. One of the very few Navy men who served on, below and above the sea on warships, a submarine and aircraft, Ruiz told his remarkable story when Doug Pricer interviewed him at his home in Las Vegas. Military History: Where were you when the United States entered World War II in December 1941, and how did you come to be on Vincennes? Ruiz: I was still at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. We were scheduled to graduate in 1943, but they let us out a year early, in 1942. I was only 20 years old. We were given our assignments in June before graduation. That’s when I found out I was going to Vincennes. Vincennes had been one of the escorts for Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle’s Tokyo raiders aboard the aircraft carrier Hornet in April 1942. They were in a real hurry to get us out there of course, so we went on a transport to Pearl Harbor and then out to Fiji. I’d just turned 21 on July 11 when we hit Fiji. It was the first time I was legally able to buy a bottle of beer. I was pretty impressed. I’d never been outside of the United States except for Mexico, and there were the Fijian policemen in their lava-lavas with their red hair sticking straight up. It was very impressive. We left Suva on transports with the Marines and rendezvoused in the Koro Sea. That was the biggest group of ships I’d ever seen and probably the biggest task force the United States had ever put together. Ships came from all over, battleships, cruisers—and they all met in the middle of the ocean. It was just amazing. I went aboard Vincennes. MH: The Marines landed on Guadalcanal on August 7, 1942. What was your role after that? Ruiz: It was really something. We had gotten aboard the ship and were given our assignments. One battle station was on the captain’s bridge, and one was on the signal bridge. The other ensign—a guy named Art Kiirck—and I both wanted to be on the captain’s bridge—Vincennes was the flagship, and we knew that all the action would be on the captain’s bridge. We decided to draw cards—high card got the captain’s bridge—and I won. The irony was that Art was dead within 48 hours. The entire signal bridge was wiped out, and he was killed. It was the second night after the Marines had landed. We were expecting the battle to take place the next morning, and were surprised that the General Quarters went off at 1 a.m. We all headed for our battle stations. No one could see anything in the dark, and didn’t really know who was shooting at us. I got on the radio to report to the captain the situation from all parts of the ship, so I knew they were shooting at us. MH: Japanese Vice Adm. Gunichi Mikawa had managed to slip through with a cruiser force that night and caught the Allied cruisers completely by surprise. He managed to do a lot of damage. Ruiz: It was very frightening. Vincennes probably took more hits from heavy shells than any other cruiser in the history of warfare. She was hit by hundreds of shells. But the captain was just absolutely convinced that we were being fired on by our own ships and would not open fire. I’ve never understood why that happened. We took a hit from a main battery salvo on our No. 2 turret, which was right in front of the bridge. When the shells hit that turret they knocked it right off the barbette, and we all got knocked off our feet. It killed a number of people on the bridge. I was lucky the lee helmsman happened to step in front of me just as the shell hit, and he took all the shrapnel that was coming my way. He was knocked up against me, and I grabbed him. I could feel him go limp and eased him down to the deck. Then I realized he was almost cut in half. He was dead. MH: Was there any semblance of order? Ruiz: Oh, yes. The men on the bridge were very professional and just kept doing their jobs. They just did the best they could, but our communications were disintegrating pretty fast. Those phones worked great, but when they were damaged and the men using them were dying, it was not so good. As a matter of fact I recall my friend, a guy named Atwell, coming up to me. He said, “Hey Ken, check this.” He’d caught a piece of shrapnel in his shoulder about the size of a tennis ball. He’d stuffed a handkerchief in it, and when he pulled out the handkerchief the blood spurted out all over. I thought he’d never make [it] in the water, but he made it. I asked him the next day how the hell he swam all night with that wound. Turns out he’d been on the swimming team at Yale. MH: Were you one of the last to abandon ship? Ruiz: Yes. I knew she was sinking, and I wanted to stay aboard as long as I could—especially since I didn’t have a life jacket. So I stayed until the water was waist deep on the main deck, then just took off my shoes and swam off. That was almost a mistake, because I stepped off on the low side where she was turning. When I got off she turned completely, and the mast came crashing down right next to me and almost killed me. I was so scared it was unbelievable, but the survival instinct was so strong it just took over. I was just looking for a way to live. I swam away from the ship as fast as I could because I was afraid of the suction when she went down. I wasn’t too far from the ship when she went down, but I did not see or feel any suction at all. I was very happy about that! MH: So you were in the dark water with no flotation. What was your biggest concern? Ruiz: The NSFO [Navy standard fuel oil] in the water. I’d heard of so many men burning to death at Pearl Harbor when the oil caught fire. I couldn’t think of a worse way to die. There was about a quarter inch floating on the surface. It gagged me and burned my eyes, but for some reason—again, the luck of the draw—it never caught fire. MH: Could you tread water in that oil? Ruiz: A little. But after awhile I found a shell casing and hung on to that for a while until that sank. Then I saw a raft with many men on it. The captain was on it, trying to help the most severely wounded. One guy swam up to it and was in real trouble. I offered to help him onto the raft, but he told me his legs were blown off and that he was bleeding to death. I swam away from that raft. There was so much blood in the water I was afraid of sharks. I eventually found a boat boom. A boat boom is like a telephone pole about 40 feet long—and there were at least 100 men hanging onto it. It was so crowded that all I could do was get a hand on it— it was very slippery due to the oil in the water, and men kept slipping off. It was really tough. We hung on all night. MH: How were you rescued? Ruiz: In the morning we saw a ship in the distance. We couldn’t tell who it was, and everyone thought it was a Jap because they would have naturally been patrolling the area. We knew that if it was a Jap ship we were going to be killed or spend the rest of the war in a prison camp. The anxiety was very, very high among everybody there. It gradually came closer, and we could see it was a destroyer—then finally we could see that it was an American destroyer. It was the happiest moment of my life—even though it left for a while to depth charge a Jap sub and then came back to pick us up. It was Mugford. MH: When did you get back to Pearl Harbor? Ruiz: Within about two weeks. When we got to Pearl they told all of us to assemble in ranks on the starboard deck. We heard the admiral piped aboard, and it was Chester W. Nimitz. He gave us a speech. He told us that we were not to talk about what had happened. He also told us that we’d taken some damage but that one of our submarines had sunk the Jap cruiser that had hit us [S-44 had, in fact, sunk Kako as it returned to its base at Kavieng]. He really dangled the bait. He told us our subs were really doing a great job against the Japs and that if anyone there wanted to get back at the Japs there were positions available in the submarine service. “My staff officer is right here,” he said. “Just let him know, and he’ll sign you up.” MH: How many of you volunteered? Ruiz: Three. We had a choice. The other two guys were senior to me and had first choice. Sometimes when you win you lose. The guy who had first choice picked a sub that was hit. He was dead in six months. Again, the luck of the draw. I had never been to the sub school, so I was trained at sea. I finally qualified for my gold dolphins right before my fourth patrol. MH: How many war patrols did you go on? Ruiz: Eight. By the end of my last patrol, I’d served under three captains, we’d participated in 30 engagements, and I’d aimed and fired more than 40 torpedoes. We’d damaged more than 50,000 tons of Japanese shipping. The men I served with were extraordinary. MH: Didn’t the stress of eight undersea patrols get to you? Ruiz: Well, stress is cumulative. It had started to build after Vincennes. I’d built up quite a bit of stress. They didn’t treat it in those days. They hardly knew what it was. I’d have stayed out as long as they told me to, but by the time they sent me home MH: What happened after Korea? Ruiz: From 1958 to 1959 I took the toughest job I ever had in the Navy. I became the executive officer on the carrier Constellation. I had to take 5,000 men and train them on a rusting hulk and make it run like a carrier. MH: What were your goals after that assignment? Ruiz: I wanted to command a carrier, but the Navy has a very tough selection process. There are only 12 carriers in the Navy. A candidate has to know how to run a deep-draft ship. So they gave me command of an ammunition ship to train me on how to run a deep-draft ship. I spent two years doing that. Then they told me I was up for a carrier but that they didn’t have one ready yet. They told me I needed more schooling and asked me if I wanted to go to the National War College. That was a ticket to flag rank, so I took it. After I finished in 1966, they said a carrier would be ready in six months. I had two choices while I was waiting: a study group at the Pentagon, or the Harvard Business School. It took about a microsecond to make that call—I took Harvard. After I finished there, I went directly to command Bon Homme Richard for two deployments in Vietnam—a little over two years. We worked off North Vietnam the whole time. That tour in 1967 was probably the best tour that Bon Homme Richard ever had—maybe even the best of any carrier in the Vietnam War. MH: Why? Ruiz: We shot down more MiGs with my Air Wing 21 than all the other carriers in the entire war up to that date. But there was also a price for it. In May and June I lost 21 aircraft and left 10 guys up in the Hanoi Hilton as POWs. Every squadron commander and every executive officer was shot down. So it was tough. You have to understand the North Vietnamese were pretty good. They were tough. MH: What kinds of weapons did you use? Ruiz: We flew Vought F-8 Crusaders and Douglas A-4 Skyhawks. We also introduced the Walleye missile into combat. We were the first wing to go “downtown.” We went in with the Walleye missile and attacked the thermal power plant in downtown Hanoi. I wanted to go in with six missiles, but they only let me use two. But we still flew one through a window in that power plant and knocked it out. We had to fight our way downtown and shot down four MiGs on the way in. We lost three airplanes going in. One of those that hit the plant came off the attack with fires burning in three places on the plane—we got him back aboard, but the plane never flew again. MH: It was a tough war politically. Ruiz: Yes it was. One of the toughest parts was the rules of engagement. I remember we’d see the Russian ships go right by us on their way to Hanoi with trucks lashed to the deck and missiles in the holds. We knew that we’d be chasing those trucks and dodging those missiles in a few weeks. It was tough to have to explain that to my commanders why we couldn’t attack those bastards and equally tough for them to have to explain it to their junior officers. MH: So all in all you went from Guadalcanal to the submarine Pollack, to Korea to two carrier deployments in Vietnam. Looking back on all of that, do you have any regrets? Ruiz: No. I think I pretty much did what I wanted to do. I had trained my whole life to command a carrier, and I did it. That was the high point for me. I consider myself very lucky to be alive and very privileged to have served my country. For further reading, Huntington Beach, Calif.–based contributor Doug Pricer recommends The Luck of the Draw, by U.S. Navy Captain Kenneth Ruiz (ret.). Originally published in the October 2006 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here.

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Interview: An Adviser Takes Command

Interview: An Adviser Takes Command During the fight for Landing Zone Pat in August 1967, Colonel Raymond Bluhm’s company earned the Valorous Unit Citation. Raymond K. Bluhm Jr. extended his tour of duty in Vietnam once, and would have done so again if not for a very close call in 1967. Four decades later, as a retired U.S. Army colonel, he remains impressed not only with the different culture shared by the South Vietnamese soldiers he advised, but also with the very long war each of them faced compared to most American servicemen. Bluhm had completed ROTC at the University of Illinois, and was commissioned in 1963 as a Distinguished Military Graduate. He initially trained in the Ordnance Corps, then transferred to the infantry and attended the Officer Basic, Airborne and Ranger courses at Fort Benning, Ga. His first overseas duty (1964-65) was in Korea as platoon leader and commander of an infantry company. In the spring of 1965, he volunteered for Vietnam. The Army needed him as an adviser, so he was sent to Fort Bragg to take the Military Assistance Training Advisory course, and then to Monterey, Calif., for Vietnamese language training. First as an adviser to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and then as a company commander in the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), he served in Vietnam from May 1966 to November 1967, receiving the Combat Infantryman Badge, Silver Star, three Bronze Star Medals and two Air Medals. Colonel Bluhm, who retired in 1993 after 30 years service, recently spoke with Vietnam Magazine about his experiences. VN: Where did your Vietnam duty start? Bluhm: Initially, it was to a Special Tactical Zone, but that was canceled and I went north to II Corps to join the advisory team of the 47th Regiment,ARVN 22nd Division, at Tuy Hoa. I was assigned to the 1st Battalion. A major or lieutenant colonel was usually the regimental adviser, and each of the three battalions had a team of a captain as senior adviser and a lieutenant and two NCOs. This number permitted us to split the advisory team so that an NCO and I could go out with an ARVN company, normally the lead or the weakest company, whichever was most likely to get involved with something. The senior adviser would stay with the ARVN battalion commander and maintain contact with the regimental team. My battalion of the 47th was in the field when I arrived. As soon as I processed in, [I was told] to join them out there. I was assigned a room in the American compound, threw my few belongings into the room, took what gear I thought I needed and off we went. When I got into the jeep, I noted the sandbags on the floor. We drove into the countryside, off a paved road onto a dirt road that meandered through the tiny villages. I had been issued a carbine in Saigon and had that ready on my lap. VN: An M-16? Bluhm: Absolutely not. I had seen the M-16s and the first versions of the shortened AR-15 carbine version at Bragg. But I had a .30- caliber M-2 carbine with two [magazines]. It had a selector to switch from semiautomatic to automatic fire. I think it was older than I was. The barrel was so loose in the stock that when you fired it, the barrel and the mechanism jittered in the stock. VN: How were you received when you linked up with your battalion? Bluhm: Great by the Americans. It meant that there were now two officers to divide up the duties. They were always happy to see a new face, and I brought the mail. The Vietnamese were friendly, curious about me, and polite. I eventually made good friends with some of the officers. My arrival meant that the senior adviser could go back and get a shower, so he left. The next day we moved to a village where the VC had captured a couple of ARVN soldiers a week before. The soldiers had gone into the village to buy food or see a girlfriend and had been decapitated, their heads stuck on poles over the village entrance. We thought the VC had left but were wrong. When you made enemy contact there was an immediate sitrep [situation report] called in by radio with the coordinates, the estimated size of enemy force and direction the fire is coming from. There was always somebody back at the regimental team monitoring your radio net. As we were arriving for the evening at this house—most Vietnamese houses had a cement area out in front that was used for a well and to lay out rice to dry—we were out in this open cement getting water when a burst of rounds started snapping over. And out 150 yards or so, four or five VC jumped up and started pumping rounds at us. Well, I was so excited that I just picked up the radio handset and said very loudly: “This is Bluhm, we’re receiving fire. Out.” And I got this calm voice back that said: “All right, slow down. You’re receiving fire. Where are you, fire from where, and how many VC?” Boy, was I embarrassed. Of course, I was the one being shot at, not him. Anyway, I tried to remember the correct sitrep protocol and get my act together for a good report as we were lying there with the ARVN exchanging small-arms fire with those VC. So the first time I was shot at, I was out there by myself with just one NCO. VN: What did you think of the adviser position? Bluhm: It was very difficult and required a certain personality to be successful. You lived and ate exactly as the ARVN did. And there were many cultural differences. It was often frustrating because an American officer is taught to take charge, to do something even if it’s wrong, to seize control of the situation and take action. The Vietnamese, particularly at the lower levels, would wait for instructions from the top. There were many good and brave ARVN officers, but remember, these guys had been in combat for a long time; they were not on a one-year tour. They had to survive the next year, and the next and the next. They saw too many people being carted away, wrapped up in a poncho. So while the good ones had courage and personal initiative, they were also prudent. Often that prudence was interpreted by Americans as cowardice. That doesn’t mean that there were not problems. But an American, who came out and was looking at 365 days and then home, had a very different attitude than the ARVN who already had 10, maybe 15 years of combat. VN: Did the ARVN have the same requirements for body counts? Bluhm: I don’t know exactly what requirements they had to report back to their command, other than, of course, they had to show success. So the best face was always put on whatever happened. We had no body count, but we did have the Hamlet Evaluation System. This was an effort by MACV to quantify progress by statistics and to bring together from all advisers our judgment as to the security of our area. There was a multiple form with different blocks to check and you submitted it monthly. It was an illusion, because one never knew for sure other than where you were standing. With so much uncertainty, one always tended to give the best report. If there was not a positive trend, higher headquarters would come down to find out why things weren’t going as they thought they should be. VN: What did you do when you reached the end of your advisory tour? Bluhm: I extended. In early 1967 the battalion was sent from Cheo Reo in the highlands to secure a section of Highway 1 under reconstruction. When the advisory team of the 40th Regiment, a sister regiment north of us at Bong Son, suffered some casualties, the word came asking for volunteers to help as they were in heavy contact. I was bored just sitting around the road, so I said, “Sure.” I was picked up by helicopter and flown straight to the team headquarters, given a quick briefing and flown out to the beach where I was dropped in under fire as an assistant adviser. It was a good team, and I stayed with the 40th for the rest of my tour. The regiment worked out of Bong Son, patrolling the coast north up to Tam Quan and the I Corps border, which was exactly where the 1st Cavalry was also operating. The 1st Cav had its forward base at LZ [landing zone] English outside Bong Son, and we did some joint operations with them. One day while I was at English, trying to beg C rations, I discovered that the division engineer was a former ROTC instructor of mine. So I went in and talked with him about extending, and he arranged for me to have command of a company in the 1st Cav. VN: Tell me about taking command. Bluhm: In May 1967, I took command of A Company, 2nd Battalion (Airborne), 8th Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). As part of the 1st Brigade, the division’s only airborne brigade, we considered ourselves the elite of the elite. The 1st Cav was an elite unit, but the 1st Brigade was the top. Most people don’t realize that for the first several years in Vietnam, there was an airborne brigade within the 1st Cav. And so the 1st Brigade was the only brigade whose men could wear the airborne tab over their cav shoulder patches. VN: What was your experience with the 1st Cav like? Bluhm: There was a whole different feeling with the 1st Cavalry than I had with any other unit, before or since. And I had a great group of tremendous and brave soldiers in my company. There was a deep team spirit and devotion to each other, and the willingness to do anything for anybody. I remember I was getting ready to leave in November from Dak To, where we were in a tremendous fight up in the mountains to help out the 173rd Airborne Brigade. I had turned over command and was working as assistant S-3 [operations officer]. All the companies were in tremendous firefights and I would see the choppers returning with holes. They would refuel hot—keeping the engines running, while the crew chief would jump out to pump fuel in—to save time while other crew threw in boxes of grenades and ammunition. In minutes they would be back out supporting the troops, in some cases dropping grenades as bombs. The stories that you hear about helicopters refusing to touch down or refusing to go into a hot LZ—never did you hear that in the 1st Cav. Just the opposite. Pilots would go in…and cut openings in the foliage using their rotor blades to pick up wounded. I have nothing but pure admiration for those aviators who flew those choppers. VN: How many assaults did you make with the Cav? Bluhm: I probably did 60 or 70 combat air assaults, plus many administrative moves into secured LZs. One reason there were so many combat assaults is that the 1st Cav had “Eagle Flights,” quick reaction forces where you would just form up in a company or platoon, drop down, sweep the area, be picked up right away and drop into another area. You could do three or four a day. On any operation I always had a potential pickup zone in mind. VN: Was the tour with the 1st Cav more combat-intensive than your time as an adviser to the ARVN? Bluhm: Oh, absolutely. The 1st Cav was out there looking for trouble. That was our mission, to go out and to develop a situation based on intelligence, or in some cases best guess. It was a pure cavalry mission, to go out as a reconnaissance looking for trouble, to start a fight, and then surround the area and pile on by air assault and clean out the area. VN: Tell us about LZ Pat. Bluhm: The fight on LZ Pat occurred August 9, 1967. The battle was about 41⁄hours long, but we stayed in the Song Re area another five days. VN: Did you land in an LZ already prepared by artillery? Bluhm: No, artillery was planned as usual, but this time it wasn’t ready. I can’t remember exactly why. Company A’s assault was part of an operation by the whole battalion. The battalion headquarters went into its location; another company and the artillery went ahead to their LZs while we were being picked up. The artillery was supposed to fire LZ prep for us as we went in, but something delayed them. In an air assault, everything is to the second, a very carefully synchronized ballet of air assault and fire support. No one expected trouble on this LZ located on a high ridge. The enemy was supposed to be in the valley when I was to set up a blocking position. When the artillery battery was still trying to set up, we were in the air. We did have ARA [aerial rocket artillery], Hueys armed with rockets and miniguns, with us. They would lay down a wall of fire to seal off the LZ as you landed. Then they flared off and provided suppressive fire. It was very noisy when you landed, and it took a few seconds to know if your LZ was “red” or not. When you heard fire you didn’t know if it was incoming or outgoing. I was in the second lift or wave. I remember seeing some craters around the LZ that I thought were artillery, but now I realize they were from rockets. And quite frankly, within 90 seconds of being on the LZ, I was too busy to worry about it. You work with what you have. VN: What was your strategy? Bluhm: My scheme of maneuver was to secure the LZ, which was located on a narrow fingerlike ridge about 1,000 feet high, then move down to set up my blocking position on the valley floor. A higher ridge and mountain overlooked the LZ, but I was most concerned about a small valley north of the LZ. Some huts were seen there and it was perfect for a VC base camp. I was going to move my platoons above that area and secure it as we went to the low ground. On landing, the platoons were to deploy in a circle around the small LZ, one north, one holding the center and one to the south. We were then to go off to the northeast, swing almost 180 degrees around the bowl, and sweep into the valley. Unbeknownst to us, the mountain and ridge above us were heavily fortified with an NVA heavy weapons regiment reinforced by a VC infantry unit. There were also bunkers on the LZ. We came in right on top of them. The 1st Platoon was on the first lift of six ships and got into position, but the surprise of our attack wore off and the others got pinned down as soon as they landed. The time between the four lifts was about 30 seconds. As each following lift came in, the later platoons became mixed. The men on the far right nearest the enemy-held ridge were pinned. Rather than the platoon integrity I had planned, my men had to fight from anywhere they could. Anyone trying to move up was exposed and hit. The only cover on that ridge was about 12 inches of grass. VN: When you were flying in, could you hear the small-arms fire? Bluhm: Sure, but there was always heavy firing by the gunships and slick door gunners, so it was impossible to tell if there was enemy fire. We were seconds behind the first guys who got off, so to get information and control of the situation was the first priority. I had one RTO [radio telephone operator] on the company net, one RTO on the battalion net and an artillery forward observer on the artillery net. As I moved over the crest, I got a call from 1st Platoon: “We think it’s a hot LZ, but we don’t know.” I looked up, and coming in was the next lift of six helicopters with machine guns blazing. It became obvious, as we began taking casualties, that it was not just helicopters firing. The enemy had earth-covered bunkers right in the middle of the LZ, and we didn’t realize it. I started getting calls from the guys on the far side of the LZ: “We’re getting casualties and we’re getting hit in the back.” My 2nd Platoon leader, Bob Wilkerson, called and said, “My RTO just took a round in the back and is dying, we’re taking fire from you.” I told him, “No, we’re firing in another direction.” I could see flashes of weapon firing from the higher ridge, but that didn’t explain the direction of all of the fire we were getting. VN: When did you become sure you were not alone? Bluhm: I noticed some human feces that were fresh and watery, as if someone had been eating rice, and I knew right away that we had bad guys nearby. I called for my 1st Platoon leader, Dick Hostikka, whose platoon was the least engaged. When Dick crawled up, he showed me a hole through his helmet. I told him to form a killer team and sweep the LZ as best he could. I then moved to the center of the LZ and laid on what I thought was a little mound. We were taking fire from the far ridge, but we were at the extreme effective range of our M-16s. If you rose up to fire, you were immediately targeted. We did have a 90mm recoilless rifle with four HE [high explosive] rounds that we fired at the ridge. I wanted to get my M-60 machine guns forward where they could give suppressive fire so I could begin to maneuver people against those bunkers. I finally got a machine gunner and ammunition, and helped him set up; then I moved on. I didn’t realize I had been lying on top of an enemy bunker until some of my men spotted these guys popping up. Some of the wounded pointed out where it was. There were five VC with automatic weapons, light machine guns and SKSs. I turned around and Dick yelled at me, “We got ’em!” And I said, “Kill the sons of bitches!” They then threw in two grenades, which were thrown back out and exploded. The bunker was dug down with a room underneath where they were hiding. So Dick’s men got four grenades and dropped them in simultaneously and that cleared that hole. We had the problem of the bunkers on the other ridge and mortar and heavy machine gun fire from the mountain. Just about that time an F-4 Phantom came in and dropped a 500- pound bomb on a bunker on the ridge and blew it away. That eased the pressure on us and we started up the closest enemy ridge. VN: Were you able to call in Medevacs? Bluhm: I made the very hard decision not to bring the Medevac helicopters in right away. If I did, I’d have crashed helicopters on top of my guys. Both the helicopter and the Air Force pilots were reporting hits by heavy antiaircraft guns. One helicopter came in below our ridge and then came up the side like an escalator—I’ll never forget that pilot’s skill. He came up sideways until his rotors were just above the edge of the ridge and his skid was touching the slope. The crew threw off the ammunition and we lifted up the wounded. And then he’d drop back down and take off. My guys would volunteer to stand up to help every time he came in. The company itself was awarded the Valorous Unit Citation [the unit equivalent of a Silver Star]. A streamer is carried on the company guidon, and everybody assigned to the company in the future is permitted to wear the ribbon. VN: Were any helicopters hit? Bluhm: At least three helicopters were hit seriously. One was a command-and-control bird for the aviators; the others were slicks. Several took crew casualties as they pulled away from the LZ. The supporting Air Force Skyraiders were also hit. VN: What was the performance of your company in this action? Bluhm: Superb. They fought tooth and nail. Five Silver Stars were awarded plus a number of Bronze Star Medals with V device. One of my lieutenants, Pete Petrovich, received a Silver Star for engaging in a hand grenade duel with a bunker. He was throwing grenades back and forth with the VC until he finally wiped it out. The 3rd Platoon sergeant, Frank Theberge, jumped out of the helicopter and broke his ankle. He was in the last lift coming and so they were hit by the hottest fire. They knew it was a hot LZ, but they were committed and were coming in. I crawled over to him to tell him to get his troops forward. He was sitting there with his boot in his mouth and I couldn’t figure out why. He was trying to bandage his foot because of the fracture, and I asked him, “What are you doing?” He said, “Sir, I’ve hurt my ankle.” Then I explained the situation to him and he said, “Yes sir, we’ll take care of it.” He just put his boot back in his mouth and crawled off to direct his men. He later took a round through the head. I visited him in the hospital and put him in for the Distinguished Service Cross but heard later that he died of complications from his wounds and did not get the award. I lost six killed and 20 wounded out of 120 men that day. After the battle, we stayed in the Song Re River area for about a week. Major General John J. Tolson III, the division commander, flew in and awarded a number of medals. VN: How was the awards ceremony? Bluhm: I almost didn’t survive to be there. Before he arrived, I was doing a recon of the area. There were old punji sticks in the ground, and because of the high grass, helicopters couldn’t tell where the ground began. We had several men jump off the helicopters and onto the punji sticks. So I went on a little scout of the trail we were going to take. I walked about 100 meters and then as I walked back I triggered a booby trap. I felt a light tug on my foot and froze. I looked down and saw a wire was caught on my boot. Lieutenant Hostikka was about 20 yards behind me. I said, “Freeze, booby trap.” I was expecting to feel the explosion and waiting to lose my legs. Nothing happened. I looked down again and saw that the stake holding the Chicom antipersonnel mine had broken. The mine had been there so long that when I pulled the wire, the stake broke instead of igniting the fuse. I waited 30 seconds, then carefully released the tension on the fuse, took the wire off my boot, laid the mine on the ground and marked it with some white paper. Later, one of my men went back and defused it. About an hour later, General Tolson came in and pinned the medals on us. I had been thinking of another extension, but that incident caused me to decide it was time for a break from the war for a while. Roger Cirillo is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel. He holds a Ph.D. in military history and served in armored cavalry assignments in the United States, Germany and Korea. He is the director of the Book Program for the Association of the United States Army. For additional reading, see: Lost in Translation: Vietnam: A Combat Advisor’s Story, by Martin Dockery; and Covan My: An American Advisor in Vietnam, by Steve E. Armstrong. Originally published in the April 2007 issue of Vietnam Magazine. To subscribe, click here.

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Interview with Allen Guelzo: Reconstruction’s Lost Cause

Interview with Allen Guelzo: Reconstruction’s Lost Cause (Courtesy of Allen Guelzo) Allen Guelzo, Director of the Civil War Era Studies Program at Gettysburg College (allenguelzo.com), is the author of six Civil War histories and his most recent book, Reconstruction: A Concise History, details the problems afflicting the reintegration of the Confederacy into the Union. Optimism in the North was strong at first, he says. While reading John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1866 narrative poem Snowbound, he realized that the poet’s celebrated New England rural life was a template for Reconstruction. Many Northerners believed that creating a capitalist economy in the South was the first priority and felt, naively, that racial and political problems arising from emancipation would solve themselves. CWT: What was the goal of Reconstruction? AG: There are four options: 1) Occupy large portions of the South, and wipe out whatever was there. The problem is there is absolutely no constitutional authority for that. 2) Territorialization: Reduce the former states of the Confederacy to the level of federal territories, supervise the creation of their new regimes, and then readmit them to the Union. That would have conceded the legitimacy of secession, which Abraham Lincoln opposed until the day he died. 3) Seize the land of those involved in the rebellion and redistribute it to the freed slaves. The Constitution stands in the way of that, and all the legislation and all the jurisprudence after the war marches in the opposite direction. 4) Resettle the freed slaves in the West. The difficulty is that not everybody who was a freed slave wanted to be relocated to the West, and Southern whites wanted the black labor force to stay where it was. CWT: Even the North was divided. AG: The Northern Democratic Party is dead set against any of these notions because they are thirsting for the return to power and that won’t happen until their Southern Democratic brethren are fully restored to Congress. They’re not going to go along, and they will fight it tooth and nail, which they do. CWT: What are the Democrats’ tools? AG: After secession, you have a hiatus where Republicans find themselves the majority. They pass all kinds of legislation during the war years—national banking, tariff legislation, and put in place the old American system Henry Clay had been promoting 20 years before as leader of the Whig Party. After the war, the Southern states can come back into the Union, and you have the possibility of a Democratic majority that can repeal all that wartime legislation. Now the war is over, slavery has been abolished and each black is now going to be counted as 5/5ths, not 3/5ths, of a person for the purpose of representation in Congress, without a single one of those Southern states conceding the vote to the freed slaves. So you have the prospect of Southern Democrats coming back more powerful than ever on the basis of a black population—because none of the Southern states will permit them to vote. CWT: What happens then? AG: When the roll is called in the opening session in December 1865, the clerks of the House and Senate exercise Congress’ right to decide who to seat and omit the names of those who have been elected from Southern states. Lyman Trumbull from Illinois develops a civil rights bill to recognize citizenship and voting rights for freed slaves. You have an attempt to invert the situation. Disenfranchise the ex-Confederate leadership and enfranchise the newly freed slaves. That will be the beginning of a completely new political world. Now does it work? That is what becomes the story of Reconstruction. CWT: Rebuild the South without reinvigorating the Confederacy? AG: Trumbull’s civil rights bill passes, and a Freedmen’s Bureau is created to give immediate assistance to freed slaves. But something more permanent is needed. That’s when the movement takes place for the 14th and 15th amendments. Together the two amendments establish the definition of citizenship that includes the freed slaves and secures federal voting rights for them. Then there are four Reconstruction Acts in 1867 that Congress passes with new provisions for electing state governments, the first time we create voter registration lists. They exist in the Reconstruction South to identify black slaves who can vote and to bar former Confederates. CWT: Does it have a chance to work? AG: At first. The optimism in the first several years of Reconstruction is almost palpable, not only political optimism but economic optimism. Here’s a story that has really been missed in Reconstruction. Northerners, these carpetbaggers as they were known by a snarky epithet, really came as investors to re-create capitalism in the South. These bourgeois virtues of competition, of meritocracy, are what the Northerners want to transplant. The war’s impact on the south is three or four great depressions put together CWT: What happened? AG: It doesn’t work because of the physical destruction and the elimination of capital. The impact of the Civil War on the South is like three or four Great Depressions put together. But you find that the people who owned property in the South at the beginning of the war own the same amounts of property in the 1870 census. If you can’t budge the economic order, you’re not going to be able to budge the political order. CWT: But there was education reform? AG: The new Southern regimes formed under the Reconstruction Acts move to create large systems of public education, but unfortunately that requires tax rates that those states have never experienced before and the tax burden falls most heavily on poor whites. The old landowners come to the poor whites and say, ‘See these new regimes are taxing your life away and all for the benefit of blacks.’ That’s what recruits the poor whites to the KKK and the Knights of the White Camelia and the side of the landowners. Otherwise they have everything in common with the poor blacks. CWT: You write that Reconstruction was overthrown. How? AG: The oligarchs pull the strings, but the poor whites, who see themselves as victims of the taxation needed for schools and public works projects, perform the actual work of terror. Reconstruction doesn’t fail, it is an attempt at a capitalist democratic order overthrown by a oligarchy that consigns the South to yet another 80 years of what amounts to feudal economics. I don’t think abolitionist Wendell Phillips was exaggerating when he said to make Reconstruction work we needed a 40-year military occupation. Ulysses Grant reaches something of the same conclusion. ✯ Interview conducted by Senior Editor Sarah Richardson

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Interview: Author Dorothy Love

Interview: Author Dorothy Love In this interview, HistoryNet reporter Rebecca Miller interviews historical author Dorothy Love. Love is an award-winning writer known for her ability to bring historical color and refinement to historical fiction. Her latest novel, Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Gray, illuminates the remarkable friendship between Mrs. Robert E Lee and Selina Norris Gray, a servant born into slavery at Arlington. The discovery of an 1872 letter from Mrs. Gray to Mrs. Lee became the catalyst for this compelling story of loyalty and courage that defied personal tragedies and the tumult of the Civil War. After watching the interview, you can read more about the history in an exclusive article here: http://historynet.wpengine.com/painting-by-mrs-robert-e-lee-presents-an-intriguing-mystery.htm.

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Interview: Belgian Volunteer in the Waffen SS

Interview: Belgian Volunteer in the Waffen SS Léon Degrelle was willing to put his convictions on the line on the Russian Front. Of the many European Fascist leaders who collaborated with the German forces that occupied their countries during World War II, Léon Joseph Marie Ignace Degrelle was unique in that he put his convictions on the line—the front line, in combat. Earning a doctorate in law at the University of Louvain, he also studied political science, art, archaeology and philosophy, and had written five books by the time he was 20. Disillusioned with what he perceived as corruption in Belgium’s government, he joined the Catholic Action Movement and subsequently founded the Socialist Rex Party, whose early populist appeal gained him a seat in the House of Deputies at age 25 (the youngest statesman in Europe at the time). By May 24, 1936, 34 Rexists had been elected to the Belgian House or Senate, but the party declined soon afterward. Degrelle openly consorted with and took inspiration from Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, so when Germany invaded Belgium, its government arrested him as an enemy agent. He spent several weeks in a prison camp in southern France. After Germany overran France and the Low Countries, Degrelle sided with his Nazi occupiers and endorsed Hitler’s “anti-Bolshevik crusade” against the Soviet Union. When Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, he joined the French-speaking Belgian Walloons who volunteered to fight there. Until age 35 he had never held a firearm in his life, but Degrelle proved a quick study. Wounded seven times, he rose from private to brigadier general in command of the 28th SS Panzergrenadier Division Wallonien. He was awarded the Knight’s Cross and Oak Leaves, among other decorations, becoming the most decorated non-German soldier in Nazi service. With the fall of Nazi Germany, Degrelle spent the rest of his life in Spain. Belgium sentenced him to death in absentia three times. He wrote three more books and numerous essays, including Campaign in Russia, which, though banned in Belgium, is widely regarded as a classic firsthand depiction of the savagery of combat on the Eastern Front. Asked for an opinion of Degrelle, one Belgian military attaché said, “As a soldier, I salute him for his courage on the battlefield; as a Belgian, if we could get our hands on him, I would gladly see him hang for the traitor he is.” Léon Degrelle, the last surviving European Fascist leader, died at age 87 in Málaga, Spain, on April 1, 1994, unrepentant to the last. In two telephone interviews conducted in March 1984 and April 1993, Colin Heaton asked Degrelle for his retrospective on his role during World War II. Military History: When and where were you born? Degrelle: I was born in Bouillon, Belgium, on June 15, 1906. My father was a brewer, a good Catholic man, and my mother was the most wonderful woman in the world. MH: What was your education like? Degrelle: My family had been Jesuit educated for many generations, and I went to the College of Notre Dame de la Paix. I studied the classics and theology, but was seriously drawn to politics. I studied law, passed the exams. The Jesuits taught us to expand our mind and pursue knowledge, which I did. Unfortunately some of my fellow countrymen took a dim view of my independent writing and publishing on certain political thoughts. I had a tough time. MH: You were arrested, were you not? Degrelle: Yes, I was arrested in 1940 by French troops, beaten and moved around damp jail cells, where I was tortured, until I was finally freed by German troops. They knew who I was, since I was a leader of the Rexist Party, which was a Socialist anti-Communist political party. Seeing that I would not receive any help, let alone justice from the authorities in Belgium, I knew that that government was illegitimate, and I decided that the corruption must be challenged. MH: How did you come to join the German army? Degrelle: My brother had been murdered, my parents and wife were killed after being tortured, and my children were taken away and scattered to the winds, a situation that would not be resolved for many years. I basically had some additional political problems, and until the Germans invaded and captured the country I was not safe. I felt that Belgium would only be a great and sovereign nation again once Germany won the war and eliminated the dangers of communism. I formed the first group of volunteers from the Flemish and Walloons, and we were formed in our own battalion. Later we were assigned to the training centers, and then deployed to Army Group Center. MH: When did you first arrive in Russia? Degrelle: We entered the Ukraine in October 1941, after finishing basic training and mountain warfare school, although some of our troops had been diverted to the Demyansk region under Olivier Thoring, a [Nazi] Knight’s Cross winner who was later killed. They were assigned to the Ninth Army, then later joined us in the south the next year. It was his detachment that captured [Soviet general] Andrei Vlasov in July 1942. [Vlasov later commanded an army of anti-Communist Russians as a German ally.] Many of our men were sent to the Demyansk region as support in late 1941 to early 1942, but were then recalled and joined 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking in the Ukraine later. We later became our own independent unit, the 28th Waffen SS Panzergrenadier Division Wallonien in April 1944, at a ceremony in Brussels. General Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, Max Wünsche and other notables were there for the induction ceremony. We started with 400 men in 1940, later growing to about 15,000, but only about 400 would be around after the war, including myself and two other original members. Of the original 6,000 men in the regiment before it became a division, 2,500 were killed. We had a great combat record, and Hitler personally congratulated me and gave me the Oak Leaves. I believe that we had the greatest number of Knight’s Crosses of any foreign unit, but I am not sure. MH: What was it like for you, fighting on the Russian Front? Degrelle: Well, that was where the real war was. The greatest threat was from Communist Russia, and the Western Allies discovered this only too late—we live in the world created by this today. As far as my memories of Russia go, it must be the weather, especially the bitter winters, and the endless steppe that goes forever. We were not prepared for this environment. The Russians were used to it and were well clothed to resist the cold. The greatest assets we had were the opportunity to strip Russian dead and take their padded clothing and felt boots, as well as those marvelous fur hats. They were very adapted to ski warfare, which we also used, and were perhaps even better at it, since we were “Edelweiss” [Alpenjäger] trained as well. MH: What was the worst aspect of fighting on the Russian Front? Degrelle: The partisan war was the worst. We had to adapt immediately to every situation, and the situation always changed. This was especially bad, since they did not wear uniforms and could blend into any village. A typical day was when we moved all night on foot, sometimes with trucks and always looking for the next ambush. The Soviets sent artillery in to try and channel us into their killing zones, but we hit the earth and pushed through, taking casualties every time. The largest partisan fighting I was involved in was near the road at Cherkassy, where the partisan cavalry attacked and withdrew quickly. I ordered my men not to pursue, as it was not our mission. When we linked up with members of the Fourth Panzer Army, we felt safer. But that was just the beginning. MH: You wrote about Soviet atrocities in your book Campaign in Russia. Would you describe some of the things you witnessed during the war on both sides? Degrelle: The partisans were usually the worst group to be captured by; they gouged out eyes, cut off fingers, genitalia, toes, and would butcher a man in front of his comrades before beginning their field interrogation. This was confirmed both by soldiers who escaped captivity and defecting partisans who were sickened by the sight and later joined the anti-Stalinist cause. One even had photographs that were turned over to the intelligence section of the Second SS Panzer Army. I saw them. I saw a young German soldier, part of a reconnaissance patrol that had disappeared, who had his legs crudely amputated at the knees with a saw or knife. We could see that even dying after this procedure he had managed to crawl several meters with his fingers. Another SS man had been crucified alive and his genitals removed and stuffed in his mouth. Several times we witnessed the Soviets and partisans retreating after a battle, stopping long enough to kill our wounded, usually by smashing their heads with their weapons or using a bayonet, shovel, ax handle or knife. This did nothing to engender a more humane attitude toward the partisans when they were captured. MH: What was the atmosphere like fighting next to the other European volunteers? Degrelle: Well, the Russians certainly hated the Italians, I think even more than they hated the Germans, which I wrote about. I remember Italians being killed and tortured in horrible ways. Once a group of prisoners was stripped of their clothes and dowsed in ice water and allowed to freeze to death. This was during the winter, and they died by being frozen alive. They even killed doctors and the chaplain. We discovered these events after recapturing a couple of villages. It was absolutely horrible. MH: How were the peasants’ attitudes toward your unit and the Germans? Degrelle: The peasants were just simple people who had suffered under Josef Stalin and the great promises of communism, and they were for the most part very supportive of us. This was most evident when we attended their religious services. I attended regularly whenever possible, although I am a Catholic. The Russian Orthodox services were handled by priests who had either been in prison, sent to Siberia or living in hiding for many years. We supported their religious freedom, and they responded very well. It was very moving to see parents bring their young children for baptisms and christenings, and the old people holding their icons and crucifixes. They prayed for an end to Stalin and his measures; they also prayed for us to win. Another thing that must be remembered is that we also assisted the peasants in bringing in their crops, protected them from partisan reprisals and gave them jobs. They lived a better life under us for three years than under the Communists during their entire lives. They also gave us great intelligence on partisan and Red Army activity, and worked as translators and scouts. This was especially true in the Ukraine, although sometimes the Germans in charge would do stupid things and destroy the support we had gained. One village I remember was called Baibusy; we had a great relationship with these Ukrainians and others who fled there. They were marvelous. In the Caucasus the anti-Soviet feeling was incredible, especially among the Kalmuks and Armenians, and they fought with us and for us in a fanatical way. Another great memory was an entire village turning out to welcome us as we entered. The people brought out their religious icons and gave us information and valuable intelligence, food, places to stay, everything. The orders from the upper command were to treat the locals humanely; they were our allies. These people became a second family for many of us, and when we left there was a great deal of sadness. Once when Paul Hausser and I attended a religious mass, the people knelt before him as if he were a patriarch, blessing him for his presence and for restoring their religious freedom. With the candles and gilt images it was quite an impressive scene. MH: You fought the partisans. What was this type of warfare like? Degrelle: Well, it was the worst. First, there were many different types of partisans. There were the Communist fanatics who were the most dangerous and could not be bargained with. Then there were the peasants, conscripts who had little choice in the matter, and then there were the former Red Army men who joined the partisans due to their units’ having been cut off and destroyed, although many of the last two groups defected to us at some point. They moved quickly in their pigskin sandals as light infantry and in small groups, usually at night, using hit-and-run tactics and creating turmoil in general. They placed mines in roads, killed sentries, kidnapped officials and forcibly conscripted recruits, and they were very difficult to catch. In the Caucasus the terrain was a jungle, very thick with valleys and great forests where we had a very difficult time against the partisans; snipers climbed trees in the very dense forests, they had bunker complexes, underground hospitals, weapons manufacturing centers, everything. They had dug live graves—holes in the ground where they shared body heat and were well camouflaged. They lived like animals and fought the same way. Many were freed criminals, even murderers who were brought from jails and placed into units. Their snipers were very deadly and were difficult to locate, let alone capture or kill. This type of fighting was the worst. It wore on the nerves of the men and reduced humanity to the lowest level. I would rather face the Red Army than these people. The one thing my men and I knew was that however large and present the threat presented by the Red Army, the partisans were the worst enemy to fight. MH: How did you and your troops fight the partisans? Degrelle: They did not wear uniforms unless they were in German clothing sometimes, and they blended well with the local population, which created a problem in choosing who was and was not a partisan. Unless you caught one with a weapon or were actively engaged against them, it was impossible. Later during the war they were absorbed into Red Army infantry and tank units, and sometimes they were given uniforms. I would say the most disturbing aspect of fighting the partisans was that, unlike the Soviet military, the partisans adhered to no set doctrine, used no set order of battle that we could study, and basically struck where it was the most opportune. If we caught and cornered them they were dead, and they knew it. That was why they fought like fanatics. MH: What was your impression of the Red Army soldiers? Degrelle: Very undisciplined and suicidal in their tactics, but very determined in the fight. They had men and women of all ages and racial backgrounds, teenagers to pensioners. It was incredible. I once saw a boy no older than 9 years old who had been killed in action, and it made me hate the Communists even more for their disregard for human life. It was also difficult for our men, Walloons, to shoot women and children. We were not accustomed to this, but it became necessary, since they fought just as hard as the men. MH: What were your general impressions of the prisoners you captured? Degrelle: Most Russians only wanted to surrender. These were usually peasants who had been caught up in the war and were hoping for something better. Many carried the safe conduct passes [the Germans] distributed along the front, guaranteeing safe passage to anyone surrendering. Thousands deserted carrying these passes. MH: What was the typical condition of your own troops, and how did they cope with fighting on the Eastern Front? Degrelle: We had a few suicides, and some went mad. It was a type of war that cannot be described—it must be experienced, but once experienced, it still cannot be described. Does this make sense? I know it seems vague, but that is the best I can do. The exhaustion, hunger, fear and pain, not to mention the cold of the winter all played their part. Seeing the brutality only made the situation worse. The men were walking ghosts, skeletons that had not eaten a hot meal in weeks, or even a solid meal unless we came across a dead horse or a village that offered us assistance. The orders were that no one would steal or commit any crime against the people. We needed their support, and anything that reduced that support would return to haunt us tenfold. Unfortunately, many German units did not observe this reality. We served with the 5th SS Wiking Division during this period [1943], and they generally observed the rules. However, there were exceptions. MH: How did the authorities handle desertions? Degrelle: Those who were caught—and bear in mind that nearly everyone deserting was caught—were hanged, shot or executed in some fashion and displayed for public viewing. Many were just children who had been sent into a war that was too much for them. They broke down, and they were killed by their own men for it. It was better to stay and face the enemy with the chance of surviving than to desert and definitely be caught by the German Field Police, who were a judge and jury of their own. It was very sad. MH: Did you ever work with the Russian Freiwilligen, ex-Soviet troops who volunteered to fight on the German side? Degrelle: Yes, many times, and it was both a success and a failure. There were some former Communists who redefected to the Soviets, but I think most stayed and fought until the end. They knew what their fate would be if captured by the Communists, and many were anti-communists who were loyal to us. The best volunteers were generally the Western European units, such as our own Walloons, the French Charlemagne Division and the Dutch and Norwegian units. The Wiking was perhaps the most notable, and we served with them. They were perhaps the best of all, and were actually the only foreign unit to be designated as an actual SS division, not an auxiliary unit, and they were also made a full panzer division as well. MH: Were you ever exposed to Soviet propaganda? Degrelle: Yes, quite often. The Reds knew who we were, and they would broadcast in French to us, asking us to come over and fight for Charles de Gaulle. This did not work, of course. We actually found it quite amusing. MH: Tell us about your meetings with the Nazi elite, such as Hitler and SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, and what you thought of them. Degrelle: I met Himmler only four times during the war, if my memory is correct, and Hitler I met several times, besides the Knight’s Cross and Oak Leaves awards. I once had a meeting with both of them at one time when I made a request in 1943 that my men be allowed to have Catholic chaplains, and they agreed. I also refused to have my men partake in anything that we deemed unsoldierly, and Paul Hausser, Sepp Dietrich and others supported me. Hitler once told me that if he had ever had a son, he wished that he would have been like me. I am not exactly sure why he said this, but I know he respected me, and I think Himmler did as well, although I never trusted him and I was not quite comfortable with him as the supreme commander of the SS, including the Waffen SS, which we had joined in 1944. I believed that Germany could have won the war even after the Americans came into it if the mass of the Eastern peoples had been rallied to our cause. MH: Hitler personally decorated you with the Knight’s Cross, didn’t he? Degrelle: Yes, in February 1944, following the Cherkassy battle, which was quite rare. I think only perhaps 20 or 30 men received the Knight’s Cross from Hitler personally, and 12 of those were for the Eban Emael airborne operation in May 1940. I received my Knight’s Cross at the same ceremony where General Herbert Gille received the Oak Leaves, as both of us were at Cherkassy [at the same time], and General Hermann Fegelein and Himmler were in attendance as well. Josef Goebbels made a great propaganda exploit out of the situation, which was meant to assist the foreign recruiting effort. Gille would later be awarded the Diamonds, while Fegelein would be shot on Hitler’s orders. MH: What was your final rank when Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945? Degrelle: My rank was SS Oberführer, which is one rank above full colonel and just below a brigadier general, so there is no Allied equivalent. I was promoted to general in the last week of the war, but I never received the promotion to SS Brigadeführer. MH: How did you escape arrest by the Allies and extradition to Belgium or the Soviet Union? Degrelle: This was an interesting situation. After a crazy course through Germany, Belgium and Denmark, where I met with Himmler in Kiel, Germany, for the last time, we ended up in Oslo, Norway, by ship, and we knew that this situation would not last after my meeting with [Norwegian Fascist leader Vidkun] Quisling. We fueled an aircraft and took off. We ran out of fuel and crashed on a beach in Spain, and I have been here ever since. My own government condemned me to death, but they have not pursued those who murdered my family and killed in the name of their own causes. Justice is determined by those in power, nothing else. MH: How has your life been since the war? Degrelle: I spend my time writing about the war and meeting old friends, and now making new ones. I think that people need to understand that there is always another side to a story. If people in your country had suffered the loss of their families due to a political party that was in conflict with your beliefs, then many of your countrymen may find themselves on the other side. Your American Civil War is a prime example. MH: What do you see yourself doing for the rest of your life? Degrelle: Hopefully still writing, as long as my mind is sharp and I can see; always reading books, and wondering at the great changes that have taken place in my lifetime. The collapse of communism in Europe has proved that we were right. We just needed validation, and now we have it. I think that what we may write is important, but history as it unfolds will prove who was right, and who was wrong. I never believed in the purging of Jews and civilians in general, and that was not my war. My war was to fight for my country, which would have been an independent partner of Germany in a Communist-free Europe. This is only now a reality, but we fought for it 50 years ago all the same. MH: Do you feel that communism will eventually die in the rest of the world as well? Degrelle: Yes, it will fall. Governments are the most intangible structures made by man; they change shapes, and are altered by the forces of time and nature. However, I am an optimist. I am hopeful that we as a species will learn from our mistakes, and perhaps there will be hope for us all. But then again, I could be wrong.   For further reading, Colin D. Heaton recommends Léon Degrelle’s book Campaign in Russia. Originally published in the November 2006 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here.

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Interview with Edward L. Ayers, Civil War Historian

Interview with Edward L. Ayers, Civil War Historian Edward L. Ayers, the president of the University of Richmond, has written 10 books about the Civil War, the South and American history. He also co-hosts the public radio program Backstory. Ayers advocates linking commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War to the end of slavery and argues that America should acknowledge the importance of emancipation with a national holiday. Why does the country need a national holiday to celebrate the end of slavery? The end of perpetual bondage for 4 million people is arguably the most important thing that’s ever happened in this country. It’s hard to see how any country can claim to have the ideals and standards of the United States and have perpetual bondage, and it’s hard to see why the end of that system is not the real beginning of this country. The real beginning of this country? The United States Constitution is a deeply compromised document because it allows slavery. It’s not just the South that bears guilt for slavery. All of the states had a role to play in institutionalizing it, acknowledging it, sustaining and benefiting from it and then, frankly, for allowing segregation in the South to flourish for another 100 years. I think we realize that this is the great American failing. This is a violation of our own ideals. Isn’t that a revisionist view? There were plenty of people from the time of the Revolution to the Civil War and then from the Civil War to the end of segregation who pointed out that the prolonged failure to confront the issue of slavery was wrong. Wouldn’t a holiday just remind us how that failing resulted in the Civil War? As we begin to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, I’ve been asked to give quite a few talks around Richmond, including at the Islamic Cultural Center, and the Virginia Asian Chamber of Commerce on the topic of why they should care about the Civil War. And I point out that if you have children who were born here and they are therefore American citizens, thank emancipation and thank the 14th Amendment. That right wasn’t in the Constitution. That came as a result of emancipation. That is why it’s the most important event in American history. Why hasn’t an Emancipation Day holiday been proposed before? It has. In fact, it is celebrated in some 36 states and 150 cities as “Juneteenth” and is often also called “Freedom Day” or “Emancipation Day.” Juneteenth recognizes a date in June 1865, the 13th, when enslaved people in Texas first heard they were free. The end of the Civil War came in April, but the word didn’t get to them until June. There were advocates for Emancipation Day in the African-American community in the late 1800s. And there has been a resurgence of interest in the idea around the country in recent decades. I think Juneteenth could well be the foundation for a nationally recognized holiday, building on generations of tradition. There is already a national organization working toward that end and the Juneteenth sesquicentennial would be a perfect time to make it come to pass. Why doesn’t celebrating Martin Luther King Day suffice? Emancipation is what made Martin Luther King’s work possible. Without the gains of Reconstruction and the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, the civil rights movement would not have had the same legal basis. The civil rights movement worked to ensure that we lived up to the letter of the American Constitution as amended 100 years previously. But emancipation was awfully messy. What makes it so pivotal? Yes, emancipation was messy. For more than 100 years there was poverty, violence and injustice, but that’s not the same thing as slavery. People were not bought and sold as property; children were not taken from their parents. Emancipation marked an enormous change and laid the foundation for other crucial changes. Such as? Within years you had black men voting—rare in other nations that abolished slavery. You had black people building their own businesses and vibrant business districts. You had black churches created from nothing, black families, black literacy, black fraternal organizations. If you diminish emancipation by seeing it as an unfulfilled mandate, you diminish all those accomplishments of African Americans in the first five generations of freedom. Where did the civil rights movement come from? Black Southerners. Where do they get the cultural capital to do that? They built it themselves in their churches and their schools and their families. Where did Martin Luther King come from? It all began with freedom. If you believe in this country, you should believe that the end of slavery was a belated fulfillment of what should have been there in the beginning, of a process that has taken too long but is unfolding. Emancipation is a social transformation that is much larger and deeper than the civil rights movement. But I don’t see us getting rid of Martin Luther King Day, nor should we. Who would a new holiday impact? Blacks? Whites? Immigrants? It would impact all of them, but this is mainly an affirmation of black progress. African Americans are the most successful post-emancipation population in the world. Think about what they’ve accomplished compared to Haiti or Brazil. All Americans should celebrate that success with them because their success is everyone’s. As far as white Northerners, I worry that they could be a bit too self-congratulatory on this holiday. For white Southerners, I think it would be uncomfortable, but it would be good for them to think about it. Immigrants have something to gain because it’s the beginning of a framework of legal equality and opportunity that generations ever since 1865 have benefited from. Might Emancipation Day turn into a celebration of Lincoln instead? No, because historians have discovered through hard research what emancipation really was. Lincoln acted partly because black soldiers in the North demanded to fight and he needed them—200,000 of them, more than all the soldiers at Gettysburg. Lincoln was pragmatic: He wrote the Emancipation Proclamation because he saw that the Union could not defeat the South unless the institution of slavery was destroyed. By declaring war on the North did the South hasten the end of slavery? Yes, and by fighting too long. In some ways Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee ended slavery by refusing to let Richmond be taken in 1862. If Richmond had fallen then, ending the Civil War early, slavery might have lived on for generations. How can emancipation be highlighted in the sesquicentennial? Here in Richmond we’ve re-imagined our 150th anniversary activities as a commemoration of both the Civil War and emancipation. That changes the whole moral geometry of things. Putting the two together makes the Civil War of enduring importance in the eyes of black people as well as white skeptics. It also should increase the recognition among black people that their freedom came in part because some 350,000 white Northerners died for it. But they didn’t think they were fighting to abolish slavery, did they? The North fought for Union, start to finish. But the letters, newspapers and magazines of the era show there was a moral awakening in the second half of the Civil War among hundreds of thousands of white Northerners. Many opposed black freedom and progress, but others saw things very differently in 1865 than they had in 1861. Originally published in the April 2011 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.

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Interview With Joseph McGill: An Uneasy Night’s Sleep

Interview With Joseph McGill: An Uneasy Night’s Sleep Joseph McGill began sleeping in slave cabins in 2010 while working for the National Trust for Historic Preservation to draw attention to endangered buildings, and his efforts have evolved into a platform for dialogue about the consequences of slavery. McGill has reenacted as a USCT soldier since 1989 and was featured in Tony Horwitz’s 1998 Confederates in the Attic. His Slave Dwelling Project, founded in 2010, now holds an annual conference: see slavedwellingproject.org. CWT: How did you become a Civil War reenactor? JM: I am from Kingstree, S.C. My relatives were enslaved there in Williamsburg County. I became a Civil War reenactor because I was once a park ranger at Fort Sumter National Monument. I would sometimes encounter Confederate reenactors who had the courage to ask me to be a reenactor, but they wanted me to reenact an enslaved person who would have served the Confederacy. Then came the movie Glory, and that’s when I started delving into the African Americans who served in the Union. That encouraged me to start a unit of 54th Massachusetts reenactors. The movie Glory was that inspiration for me. CWT: Why did you start spending the night in slave cabins? JM: The Slave Dwelling Project started as a very simple idea of spending nights in slave dwellings because of what I did not see. We tend to tell the history of this nation through the buildings we preserve, and the buildings we preserve tend to tell the stories of the people who lived in those beautiful, architecturally significant big houses and mansions. But what it leaves out are the stories of the enslaved, and those buildings still exist. Eight years ago, I intended to sleep in slave dwellings in South Carolina for one year and then be done with it. As soon as I started, it was evident that this was a project a lot bigger than myself. News outlets started to cover it—and the genie was out of the bottle. Joseph McGill, who works with the National Trust For Historic Preservation, sits outside one of the slave cabins at McLeod Plantation in Charleston, S.C. (Bruce Smith/Associated Press) CWT: Where was your first sleepover? JM: Magnolia Plantation and Gardens in Charleston, where I am currently employed on a part-time basis. At that time I slept alone. It took about four nights of sleeping alone at sites before others started joining me. I remember that first night alone, and getting up a few times to make sure that what I heard was wind. That stands out. CWT: Describe an overnight. JM: The sleeping portion is the simple part, anybody can sleep. The most powerful part of the program is the conversation that will happen around the campfire. We discuss slavery and the legacy it has left on this nation. CWT: Are slave dwellings endangered? JM: They will always be endangered. We don’t have all the answers; and we don’t have the resources to restore these buildings. But at least people are contacting us about what to do. We can point them in the right direction—where to restore these buildings, or at least how to arrest the deterioration by stabilizing them so they can come up with a plan to save them. CWT: You have also started an annual conference. What is it? JM: Our fifth annual conference will be in Murfreesboro, Tenn. The conference brings together different players—owners, historians, genealogists, the general public, etc.—interested in preservation and interpreting the property. We meet for three days of conversation about slavery’s legacy, but more important, about preserving, interpreting, and maintaining these buildings. CWT: What’s been the reaction to your project overall? JM: I had to convince the stewards of these properties that I came in peace and meant no harm. I was not ghost hunting, I was not treasure hunting, nor was this a call for reparations. That would steer people away from me. I had to convince them this was all about the preservation of the buildings. I got enough people to agree to take me through the first year. The publicity it garnered got others wanting to be a part of it. CWT: What do you want venues to know about what you do? JM: We want to engage the public, and we hope descendants of the enslaved community attend and engage them in that uncomfortable conversation about slavery and the legacy it has left on this nation. These sites allow that to happen because these are conversations that one would not normally engage in during everyday conversation with a circle of friends. We want these folks to be ambassadors not only for the Slave Dwelling Project, but for solving the problems of this nation. We are a great nation, no doubt, but we are a nation that committed some atrocities along the way and we’ve got to deal with that and this project helps folks do that. People are surprised at some of the places where slavery existed. CWT: What sites are you still hoping to get to? JM: People are surprised at some of the places where slavery existed. When I start talking about slavery in the Northern states I get pushback because people think the Northern states had the Underground Railroad and sent the Union army down South to get rid of slavery. I have to take people further back to know that those states engaged in the practice of slavery also. And this year I will be adding Florida—and I haven’t been to Kansas, Kentucky, West Virginia. This year we will be adding Minnesota because of Fort Snelling, where Dred Scott was taken into the free state by the Army officer who owned him. Scott used his residence in that state to petition the Supreme Court for his freedom. CWT: Have you considered sleepovers in the Caribbean? JM: I certainly have considered that. I want to complete that triangle of trade that brought the 12 million enslaved Africans to this New World. Only 500,000 were brought to the United States. The majority were taken to South America and Caribbean islands. I want to expand to those places, and I want to go to Africa. I really want to go to Africa some day. CWT: What are other goals? JM: Our conference next year will also be commemorating the first documented Africans that came into this nation at Jamestown, Va. My ultimate goal is to make this not only what I love to do but also make it a fulltime profession. We are seeking funding to make that happen. CWT: What’s the most surprising thing about your experience? JM: In Brenham, Texas, I stood on an actual auction block, and I thought about enslaved people baring their backs to a potential buyer to look for marks—a sign of an enslaved person who is defiant. You don’t want to buy a defiant enslaved person to insert among your already docile and broken enslaved people and give them ideas of freedom. That’s probably the most profound moment. ✯ Interview conducted by Senior Editor Sarah Richardson

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Interview: One Tough Screaming Eagle

Interview: One Tough Screaming Eagle Edward Shames parachuted into Normandy and the Netherlands, joining the ‘Band of Brothers’ in Bastogne. On December 16, 1944, German Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s forces launched a surprise counter- offensive in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium. On Adolf Hitler’s orders, the Germans punched through outposts where U.S. Army troops, believing that World War II in Europe was just about over, had been resting. The ferocious assault sent Americans scurrying to mount a desperate defense, and additional U.S. troops racing to the front. One of the latter was then–2nd Lt. Edward Shames, who had already racked up experience in Normandy and Holland, serving in I Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR), 101st Airborne Division. When Shames joined Easy Company of the 506th—the famous “Band of Brothers”—in Bastogne, his new comrades in arms learned why he had a reputation as a disciplinarian who sternly enforced procedure. Like some leaders in today’s war on terror, Shames insisted on using ground-level intelligence against the enemy, and he was a fastidious planner. Having grown up in Norfolk, Va., Shames enlisted in the 506th in September 1942 at age 19. He has been active in the regiment’s affairs ever since, and he helped set up a reunion in Norfolk in October 2004. In a recent interview with Michael Washburn, he cast light on his fascinating—and controversial—record. Military History: Where did you join the Army? Shames: Right here in Petersburg, Va.—at what’s called Fort Lee now. It was Camp Lee then. MH: Did you expect to become an officer? Shames: I always wanted to be an officer. Of course, I enlisted as a buck private. The call for recruits came out from Army headquarters at Fort Monroe, Va., where the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment was conceived. They put the word out that they wanted volunteers, but volunteers with special characteristics. The country, at that time, needed a shock force, something to get us out of the doldrums, because we had taken such a beating at Pearl Harbor and Corregidor. They decided they would recruit the very best, physically and mentally, form an elite unit and show the public what they had. MH: Did nothing of the sort exist, in peoples’ minds? Shames: Before World War II, many military people were regarded as the lowest of the low. It was the Depression, many were in the Army because they couldn’t get a job; some couldn’t even read and write. Here in Norfolk, a “good” girl wouldn’t be seen with a sailor or a soldier. A guy enlisted in the Army as a private, and he might stay there 20 years and retire as a private first class, or at most a corporal. The Army picked the best they could find from the existing units to form our cadres, teaching us how to salute, how to wear our uniforms, etc. MH: What was your training like? Shames: We went right from Fort Lee to training down in Toccoa, Ga. I believe, and people in the know have told me, that the reason they chose Toccoa was not because it had good training grounds and so forth—it had nothing! The site was an old Civilian Conservation Corps camp that had gone unused for a while, and at that time it was named Camp Toombs, after the segregationist senator from Georgia, Robert Toombs. It was in this remote area that no one had heard of, beyond the fact that Toccoa was the “coffin capital” of the world. We were there because if this experiment, this effort to craft a unit of “supermen,” didn’t work out, they could just abandon it right there, and at least avoid some of the embarrassment. MH: What kinds of rigors did you face? Shames: The training in Toccoa aimed at being the most severe undergone by any unit in the history of our armed forces. They had 7,000 recruits, and they had to cut that number down to regiment size, 2,500 to 2,700. They said, “We’ve got so many people, by God, we have a chance to get the very cream of the crop.” The first thing we faced was Currahee Mountain, outside of Toccoa. Every morning we had to run 3l⁄2 miles up and then back down. That weeded a whole lot of us out. There, they had the toughest obstacle course ever devised. When we left Toccoa after 16 weeks, the medics had it closed down, because so many people got hurt on that mountain. And we had to walk 10 or 15 miles out from camp, then back, until it was nothing to us, just routine. They took any excuse to kick people out. If your rifle wasn’t clean, if you couldn’t do 100 push-ups, if you were a mediocre marksman, out! And at the end, they still had too many. MH: Did the hardships intensify? Shames: We had to march down to Fort Benning, about 200 miles away. Another morning, toward the end of our training, they called us out with full field packs on and said we were going to a rifle range— not the one here in Toccoa, but another one. It was at Clemson College [now Clemson University], in Clemson, S.C., 49 miles away, and we had full equipment, weapons, everything—and they forgot to tell us there was a mountain between our destination and us. Some got lost on the way, and they were out. MH: Did they expel those young men from the Army? Shames: From the 506th, but not from the service. Those who didn’t make the cut went to other branches. In fact, some of the people who didn’t make it at Toccoa came back to us later as replacements, after the ordeals of Normandy and Holland and Bastogne. MH: Did you train on the machine gun at Toccoa? Shames: They had ranges for everything— rifles, machine guns, pistols, M1 carbines, grenades, land mines, you name it. MH: What was the next phase like, jumping from airplanes? Shames: When we got to Fort Benning for jump training, we were in top shape. The Fort Benning people, at the jump school, were supposed to be the elite of the Army, and boy, were they waiting for us! They had a nickname for our unit—the “Big Talky, No Jumpy.” One of the first things they did was have us run around with our full field equipment. They had us go for three hours, then we said, “Oh no, we don’t want to stop, let’s continue!” Soon they were begging us to stop. Then they devised the shock harness and all kinds of foolish things—to scare the hell out of us—but we survived. MH: What was the toughest part of jump training? Shames: They had jump towers at Fort Benning about 200 feet high, like a 20-story building. They pulled you up and released your parachute, and you floated down. We used to fight to get ahead in line. It was like going to Disney World; it really was fun. But then they had this shock harness, which was a steel beam, 10 feet long, with a rope on each end going to a center rope that they pulled from atop the tower. We were strapped underneath the beam, and they pulled us up. You got up about 150 feet, then the microphone told you to count one, two, three and pull the ripcord, and you dropped a sheer 50 or 60 feet before rubber bands—what we now call bungees—grabbed you. MH: What about the actual jump? Shames: Ninety-eight percent of all these guys had never landed in an airplane. Ninety-eight percent had never been in an airplane. Some of them refused to jump. Now, there was a deal about jumping. If you refused the first jump when you got on a plane, they just booted you out of the unit. Naturally— you can’t be a paratrooper if you can’t jump out of airplanes. Now, if you made the first jump, but then got on a plane and refused the second jump, you got six months in the guardhouse because you wasted government money. They thought, first jump, you don’t know what’s going to happen to you, so you jump. Second jump, you do know what’s going to happen to you, so you refuse to jump. It didn’t work that way in practice. Most of us made two jumps the first day and three jumps the second day. That was qualifying, five jumps. You got your wings. MH: Where did you go after Fort Benning? Shames: Advanced infantry training in Camp Mackall, N.C. MH: What came after that training? Shames: We shipped out to England in early September 1943. MH: What was it like waiting for the Allies to launch the invasion of occupied France? Shames: Never a dull moment. We had practice jumps, navigation, field operations, weapons training, everything. I had become the operations officer for the battalion, and I made the sand tables for our jump into Normandy. The tables showed exactly where we were supposed to jump and where we would get together on the ground. I had to brief every platoon, every squad and every company. It went on like this from the end of September to June 5, 1944, the night before D-Day. MH: After all the preparation, did things go as planned? Shames: It didn’t work out that way. The guy in front of me on the Douglas C-47 fell down at the door, and I had to help him get up and get out the door. They scattered us all over the place. I jumped seven miles from where I was supposed to land, and I ended up in the barn of the Carnation milk factory, with the cows. I didn’t know where I was, and I was supposed to know everything! Fortunately, we had a tracer plane going over us every few minutes, north and south, sending signals to tell us where to go. So I picked up 18 men on the way to our objective, which was two bridges at Brévands, a few miles from Carentan, leading inland from the beaches. We had to hold onto those bridges so that the Germans could not bring reinforcements against the men landing on the beaches. MH: Did you come under German fire on those bridges? Shames: Not just German fire! The Germans were intent on getting us out of there, and I got shot across the bridge of the nose. There were many firefights. But the American air forces didn’t know we were there, and because of the snafu, they sent planes out to bomb the bridges. They didn’t hit them, and we blew the bridges ourselves. We accomplished our mission with only a handful of people. MH: How did you get your commission as a second lieutenant? Shames: We were in an area outside of Carentan, and I was operations sergeant. Many of the officers had been killed in the jump, and actually I was doing the job of a high-ranking officer. Our commanders decided we needed to find out what was around us, and I got the order to take my men and radio and look around. Did we have another American unit to our right? We had lost a lot of people, cleaning up this hedgerow area. The artillery was going all around us—it was really fierce—until finally there came a lull in the shelling. MH: And then? Shames: I looked over to my left, and there were people on my left, I think it was H Company. I scanned the area to my right, and there was a road over there. You couldn’t sit around and try to scan the area on the far side of the road, because of the hedgerows—you had to go all the way over there. I flew across that road—it was blazing hot, the sun was high—and looked for the other company that was supposed to be there. I saw that there was no one, that we had an exposed flank. This was on my birthday, and all I could see were the words, “Born June 13—Died June 13.” I flew back over and got on the radio and called the battalion headquarters. I said, “Put an officer on!” I spoke to [regimental commander] Colonel Robert Sink. “Sir, this is Sergeant Shames, there’s nobody on our right flank,” I said. Sink was a tough cookie who didn’t mince words. He said, “Shames, do you know what the hell you’re talking about?” So I got on my bicycle, and I double-timed it back [to headquarters]. I showed him [on a map]. He had me go back to the hedgerow area with Colonel Charlie Chase, and we crossed the road again. You could see the machine gun bullets kicking up dust in front of us on that hot road. We got over the road, and I said, “Here’s where I was before.” He was surprised because he thought F Company was there. MH: So what was the upshot? Shames: Colonel Sink pulled a company out of the reserves and sent it right up there. That night, I got a call to come to Colonel Sink’s headquarters right away. So I ran over there, and they said, “Colonel Sink wants to see you.” I went to him and said, “Colonel Sink, Sergeant Shames reporting as ordered, sir.” He told me, “Shames, you are now a lieutenant.” I thought I was hearing things. He said, “Goddamn it, Shames, can’t you hear?” “Yes, sir!” I replied. Sink said, “You are now a lieutenant. I’ve already cleared it with the 101st headquarters.” He added, “Now, we can’t formally commission you; we have to go through all the paperwork—it’s a formality that has to wait until we get back to England. When we get back to England, everyone is going to know you are now a lieutenant.” MH: How did your day-to-day role change? Shames: I went from a staff sergeant to a second lieutenant, and I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to do. So I reported back to my people and spoke to Lieutenant John Martin. He said, “I don’t know if you know it, but I’ve been named company commander.” I said, “Yes, sir, I heard about that.” He said: “I need some help. I know nothing about being a company commander. You’re pretty sharp, you know what’s going on, and I need a first sergeant.” I asked if he knew about my commission. He said, “You’re not formally a lieutenant until you get all the paperwork done.” He had spoken to Colonels Sink and Chase, and they were in agreement. So I was a first sergeant for a week or so, until we got back to England, and I got my formal commission. I was a buck private, private first class, sergeant, staff sergeant, first sergeant, and then I became a second lieutenant. MH: Your next major operation was Market Garden, the jump into the Netherlands on September 17, 1944. Shames: Yes, and it was a fiasco. That fiasco in Holland was due to the very setup of the operation. We captured all the bridges, we opened up the roads, but then the British didn’t come through them! They misread the intelligence, and when they got to Arnhem, they ran into German forces that were not supposed to be there—at least according to the British, but not according to the Dutch people, who had tried to warn them. It’s a matter of record now. But at least the 506th did what we were supposed to do: opened up the corridors and kept them open. MH: What else did you do in the Netherlands? Shames: Did you know that I took part in the rescue mission on October 22-23, 1944? MH: Stephen Ambrose did not give you much credit in Band of Brothers. But he at least mentioned your name in connection with the rescue mission in which you and British troops crossed the Rhine to save 125 trapped British troops, along with a handful of Dutch resistance fighters and Americans. Shames: It was one of the more important actions in Holland. MH: After Arnhem, you were rushed to Bastogne to join up with Easy Company in response to the German counterattack. Shames: I think of the first mission that I went out on, with Earl McClung and Rod Strohl. When we first got into Bastogne, Colonel Sink came up to me and said, “Shames, you go up the road and make contact and find out where the enemy is.” Strohl and McClung and I went down this road, and we saw vague shapes way off in the distance that looked kind of like haystacks, and we also heard this noise far off, and I told Strohl that it sounded like tanks to me, and that’s what it sounded like to him, too. We stayed there and waited until the fog lifted a little, and I then asked Strohl if the shapes still looked like haystacks to him, and he said no—they were tanks! We counted 19 tanks that the fog had camouflaged. We went back to report what we had seen. MH: What do you remember of the battle for Bastogne? Shames: I was out on an observation patrol one night with this guy, Edward Stein. We were standing near this field, and I was miserably cold. It was the coldest day I ever remember in my life. I was so cold, I was thinking of taking one of our morphine syrettes and sticking it in my leg, to kill the pain. Then a tree burst came from out of nowhere. It must have been a mortar. We got down on the ground and huddled under a blanket, and I asked Stein if he was hit. He said no, but then I looked and saw blood coming from Stein’s leg. It was so cold that he didn’t even feel it—a piece of shrapnel from the tree burst had sliced through one of the veins in his leg. MH: Did you run into problems with morale? Shames: Not in my outfit. I think of one soldier, Private Joseph Lesniewski—the biggest job I had was to keep him quiet! He talked his head off about everything, even when he went out on patrol. But he was a hell of a good soldier. MH: During Operation Greif, the Germans dropped men behind your lines in captured American uniforms, to commit sabotage. When did you first learn of this? Shames: I think we first heard about it on the radio the night before we left Mourmelon. It was a topic of conversation on the way to Bastogne. So we knew about it. MH: Did some of the “American” troops look suspicious? Shames: When we infiltrated the Germans’ areas while on observation patrols, we saw guys in American uniforms walking around with a bunch of Krauts—it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what was going on. So we decided to wait and see where those “Americans” went, and then we nailed four of them in the woods outside of Foy. We made them reveal the location of other infiltrators to us. MH: It’s clear that observation and accurate intelligence were things you insisted on as an officer. Shames: When you went out on a patrol, you had to watch for observation posts and check for any wires on the ground, so you would know if others had been that way and if they were looking out for you. It’s simple, yet it takes time to learn how to do these things. You have to be fairly intelligent to become a leader and if you are, you can impart this intelligence to others. MH: The writer and veteran Paul Fussell, in his book Wartime, says that replacements were like “unread books on a shelf”— they got killed off so fast, you never got to know them as people. Shames: When you got into combat, it was a bit too late to get on the learning curve! Everyone who went into my unit, from the ground up, I made damn sure that he was well-versed, he knew what was going on beforehand. We had meetings constantly, we had map orientations constantly, we had layouts constantly, we had overlays constantly—we knew what we were supposed to do, when we were supposed to do it. MH: Ambrose and the writers of the Band of Brothers television miniseries portrayed you as an overly severe commander with a very short fuse. Do you agree with that portrayal? Shames: I had a serious argument with the author of Band of Brothers, and that’s why he almost cut me out completely. When I got the pilot book [a set of advance galleys], I went straight through the roof! When I called him and raised factual points, he told me, “Look—I’m here to sell books.” He added things, he left things out. Take Rod Strohl, who is hardly mentioned. Paul Rogers—how could you write a book about these people and hardly have Rogers in there? MH: In some editions of the book, there’s a passage where Darrell Powers seems to break down under the demands you put on him, and he doesn’t want to go on a mission. Shames: That’s not true at all. Once when Ambrose called me, one of the first things he asked had to do with this. I said that Darrell “Shifty” Powers was a guy who would go on any patrol, anywhere, anytime. So don’t print that, because it’s not so. Ambrose replied, “Oh, no, I won’t dare print that.” When I got that pilot book, it was in there. When I called him, he said, “Oh, I’m going to take it out, it’s just a pilot book.” But when the book came out, it was in there. They also started this thing about me yelling at the men and the other officers. Of course I yelled at them! I meant business. This is why I brought more men home than most of the officers in the 506th. I was the only second lieutenant in the regiment who was a platoon leader, and in contrast to the other officers in the 506th, they didn’t even relieve me once. I must have been doing something right. MH: You’re referring to a scene that made it into the miniseries, where they don’t pick you to lead the company because you yell at the men for interrupting briefings. Shames: Well, in the first place, I was a brand new officer in Easy Company. They wouldn’t have considered me as a company commander; I wouldn’t have expected them to. So that’s a lot of garbage. And then they portrayed Lewis Nixon as a hero. His father was the owner of Nixon Industries in New Jersey, so no one could touch him. In any event, I’m sure that the men didn’t love me. I didn’t want them to love me; I wanted them to respect me. MH: What was your impression of Lieutenant Norman Dike, whom some see as a weak and indecisive commander, and who is scathingly portrayed in the miniseries? Shames: I can’t say I really knew him. He didn’t strike me one way or another. MH: Which of your men really stood out? Shames: I had four damn fine soldiers: Paul Rogers, Earl McClung, Shifty Powers and Roderick Strohl. They distinguished themselves constantly. I never said to my men, “You, you and you, go out on a patrol.” I said, “All of you come with me on patrol.” MH: You were tough at times, but did some of your men understand where you were coming from? Shames: At the Easy Company reunion in Phoenix in 2002, one of the four men I’ve named came up to me. He said, “Shames, you are the meanest, roughest son of a bitch I’ve ever had to deal with. But you brought us home.” MH: You understood the need for discipline. Shames: Not just discipline. Perfection. Michael Washburn is a New York–based writer and editor specializing in historical and literary subjects. For further reading, he recommends: Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, by Paul Fussell; and Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy From Napoleon to Al-Quaeda, by John Keegan. Originally published in the June 2006 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here.

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Interview: Polish Home Army Fighter

Interview: Polish Home Army Fighter In World War II Jerzy Krzyzanowski resisted the Nazi occupation, only to be arrested by the Soviets. Germany invaded and quickly defeated Poland in 1939, but Polish units—including the clandestine or Home Army—continued to fight until Armija Krajowa (AK), Germany’s defeat in 1945. While the service of Polish units in the Battle of Britain and the campaigns for Africa, Italy and Western Europe has been covered in various histories, little has been published in English on the struggles of Poland’s Home Army outside of its role in the Warsaw uprising of 1944. At the end of the war, Poland’s absorption into the Soviet Union, as well as the Cold War, obscured the Home Army’s achievements. Its contributions to the Allied cause should be remembered because the Home Army tied down German units that would have been used elsewhere, disrupted German supply lines and provided the Allies with vital intelligence. Jerzy Krzyzanowski, born in 1922 in Lublin, fought as a volunteer in 1939 and later became a member of Poland’s Home Army, receiving the Polish Cross of Valor. He was interviewed in 2005 for Military History by Ed McCaul. Military History: Where were you when the war started? Krzyzanowski: I was 16 years old, had graduated from high school and still in Lublin. I was in the Boy Scouts and volunteered to defend the city. MH: Did all of the Boy Scouts volunteer? Were you trained to fight? Krzyzanowski: Not everyone volunteered, but we had been given some military training in high school. So we knew how to shoot and to live in the field. Many people moved out of Lublin to the east because they feared the Germans. The fight for the city only lasted two days, September 16 and 17. MH: What type of unit were you assigned to? Krzyzanowski: There was a mixed battalion defending Lublin. It consisted of some regular army units that had retreated to Lublin and some volunteers from the city. All of the volunteers were kept together, but we were commanded by regular army officers. It was an on-the-spot organization, and most of us hardly knew one another. I was with a young man from another school. I knew him by sight but not by name. MH: What type of weaponry did you have? Krzyzanowski: I was armed with an old French bolt-action rifle and only had five cartridges for it. Some of the regular soldiers had hand grenades, but none of the volunteers did. We were able to stop the initial German attack at the outskirts of the city. I did some shooting, but I do not know if I hit anyone. After we stopped the Germans, they brought in heavy artillery and bombers. When the bombardment started, we were ordered to march out of the city. We were no match for the German army with their heavy armor, artillery and bombers. Our losses were not very heavy. We were in the city, and the Germans were in the open. However, some of my schoolmates were either killed or wounded, and some of the regular officers who were leading us were killed. MH: What happened after the battle? Krzyzanowski: Most of the men moved to the east without knowing that it was the same day that the Soviets invaded Poland. Many of them ended up in Soviet captivity. I decided to stay, as I thought that it was foolish to go who knew where. MH: What happened after the Germans occupied the city? Krzyzanowski: The first thing they did was close the schools. The Germans felt that the Poles did not need any education. With the schools closed, I did not know what to do with myself. Since I was interested in mechanics, I started working in a large garage that had about 60 to 70 people working in it. It was a very interesting job because very soon the German army took control of the garage, and after that it only serviced German cars. It became a perfect spot to gather intelligence on the movements of the German army. MH: How did you become part of the Home Army? Krzyzanowski: Through my Boy Scout connections. I was approached by my troop leader, who asked me if I was interested in gathering information, and I agreed. It was mostly information about what units were moving through Lublin, what their strength was and the type of equipment they had. MH: Did you do any sabotage? Krzyzanowski: No, because it would be too easy for the Germans to discover who had done it. We tried to maintain a low profile, pretend that everything was all right and that we were good, obedient citizens. The intelligence we were gathering was more important than any sabotage we could do. MH: Where did you live during this time period? Krzyzanowski: I lived with my mother and sisters. My father was in Warsaw. My father was a university professor before the war, and during the war he was in an underground university teaching Polish literature. During the Warsaw uprising he was wounded twice, but he survived the war. MH: Did you know much about what was going on outside of Lublin? Krzyzanowski: Not initially, as the Germans confiscated most of the radios, but the Home Army started publishing a clandestine newspaper, and it provided us with some information. The people who cooperated with the Germans were allowed to keep their radios. I happened to live in an apartment across the hallway from a Polish policeman, and he had a radio. Every night at 9 I would go and put my ear on his door, as he would listen to the BBC and I would be able to hear the broadcast. Later the clandestine newspaper became more regular, and we were able to keep up with what was going on. MH: Who did you pass your information on to? Krzyzanowski: I would pass it on to my group leader. I was not the only member of the Home Army working in the garage, but the only person I passed information to was my group leader. I would write the information down and pass it on to him. We would meet in a café or a restaurant, and I would give him my notes. Sometimes my information was very important, as every so often the Germans would be careless and leave all sorts of notes and papers in their cars. Since I had learned German in school, I was able to read what was on the notes and papers quite easily. I did not know at the time where the information went, but later I learned that all of it was going to the Polish government in exile in London. MH: What was the most important information that you passed on while working in the garage? Krzyzanowski: Probably the movement of the German units. I was able to pass on information on what divisions and the type of equipment that was moving through Lublin. The other information that I thought was important was the opinions of the German soldiers, especially what their morale was like. I was able to find this out, as I could talk with them. MH: Did you know who else in the garage was working for the underground? Krzyzanowski: I knew some of the other people working in the garage who were in the underground but not all of them. We formed a group, you could call it a squad, and we had regular meetings and briefings. We would meet in private apartments after work or on Sunday after church. It was difficult to meet, as the workday lasted 12 hours. We would start work at 6 in the morning and go until 6 in the evening six days a week, with only Sunday off. Sometimes on Sunday there would be an alert when a large German unit was moving, and we had to be ready to work on their vehicles. Also there was a 9 o’clock curfew in the evening, and we were not permitted to be on the streets after that. I worked in the garage until early in 1944, I believe January, when I was ordered to move to a special guerrilla unit operating around Lublin. It was a very special unit, as its assignment was to receive airdrops from the Polish planes flying from Italy with supplies. Apparently they decided that I was good enough for this sort of assignment. They asked me if I would like to go, and I said yes. To be in the regular army was quite an honor, as we received English uniforms and weapons. MH: Did you receive pay for being in this unit? Krzyzanowski: No, it was strictly volunteer. MH: Your pictures show your officers riding horses. How did you hide the horses from the Germans? Krzyzanowski: All of our officers liked to ride horses. We hid the horses just like we hid, in the villages. One time we attacked a German stable in Lublin in the spring of 1944 because we needed a good carriage and some good horses. Our commander said that he was tired of riding a horse and wanted a carriage. So he ordered six of us to go into Lublin and get a carriage for him. We were able to do a raid in the middle of an occupied city during the day because we wore civilian clothes and had our pistols hidden. We made the raid about 8 in the evening, just before the curfew. We knocked on the door. They asked who we were, and we told them that we had special request from the German commander. When they opened up, we tied them up. We did not shoot at them or kill them, as they were Polish. We told them what we wanted, and they sat quietly in a corner. We took two carriages and drove them out of town. I had never had anything to do with horses before this raid and had to drive one of the carriages out of the city. It was a very cold and dark night, and I was very nervous driving the carriage through the woods, but we were young and considered it a great adventure. We later used the carriages to pick up people who parachuted in to meet us. They were surprised and pleased when they were given a carriage ride, as they were expecting to have to fight Germans right after they landed. We would take them to a large country estate that was owned by one of our colleagues and let them have a hot bath. MH: Did the planes only do airdrops, or did they ever land? Krzyzanowski: We only had one landing in our area, on April 15, 1944. The plane, an American Dakota, landed about 30 or 40 miles south of Lublin. The airfield was a pasture that we lined with kerosene lamps. The plane brought in two commandos from the Polish army in Italy and left with emissaries from the Home Army. One of men who left, Andrzej Pomian, is living in Washington, D.C., today. Normally we had airdrops, though. In all we had 16 airdrops. They dropped weapons, ammunition, uniforms and occasionally people. Food was not usually included in the drops, but one time we were dropped some tea bags that had a little picture of President Franklin D. Roosevelt shaking hands with the Polish leader General Wladislow Sikorski. The tea bags were also inscribed in Polish “Fighting America for fighting Poland.” Little things like this let us know that we were not alone and that someone was taking care of us. We even used the parachutes, as the ladies in the villages would make shirts out of them for us. We conducted these activities until July 1944. I am very happy to say that we did not lose any of our airdrops. We were able to get all of the equipment and successfully hide it. The idea was that when the German army withdrew, there would be a general uprising, and the weapons that were airdropped to us were to be used then. MH: How did you train and practice firing your weapons without the Germans hearing you? Krzyzanowski: Lublin had a few forests around it, and at night we could train and practice firing our weapons. In fact, I have a photograph of us on a training exercise. MH: Didn’t you worry about the Germans hearing you? Krzyzanowski: During the daytime the Germans were the lords of the country, but at night they were afraid to move. It was an interesting situation, as during the day we were hiding in the villages and at night it was the Germans who were hiding. MH: How would you get food? Did you have a regular supply system? Krzyzanowski: The people would feed us, and we would pay them in Polish money, as we were sent plenty of money from England. While the food in the villages was better than it was in the cities, food was still scarce, as the Germans confiscated a lot, but we had enough. The people in the countryside were very supportive. MH: Did your unit ever have any combat with the Germans? Krzyzanowski: Oh yes, even though we were not a fighting unit and were given orders to avoid the Germans. Still, we were ambushed in the villages when someone would tell the Germans that we were there. In some cases we suffered heavy casualties. The Germans would surround the village and then attack us. We were always able to escape, as they would never completely surround the village. Quite a few of my very close friends were killed in action. It was very hard. MH: Did your unit ever set up ambushes for the Germans? Krzyzanowski: Our main job was to take care of the airdrops, but if we were waiting at a highway and one German car came by, we would stop it by shooting at it. If the Germans survived the ambush, we would release them after we had disarmed them. We would tell them to report that they had been attacked by the Polish army. If the men in the car were SS or Gestapo, they would be killed. There was no question about that. However, most of the men we captured were in the Wehrmacht. It was dangerous work, as one Polish unit near us was attacked and destroyed by a SS unit. MH: What happened in July 1944 that caused your unit to stop receiving airdrops? Krzyzanowski: The Russians started a big offensive, and we received orders to fight the withdrawing German units. It was very hard on us, as we only had light weapons and the Germans had artillery and armored vehicles. We used Gammon grenades. We would put the Gammons in their path when we saw them coming, but it never worked. A friend of mine did destroy one armored car with a PIAT, the British bazooka. The armored car was one of two armored cars that were escorting a convoy. After the first armored car was destroyed, the convoy retreated. We fought, I would say, bravely, and we lost a lot of men. Sometime around the end of July the Germans left our area and the Russians moved in. MH: What happened after the Russians arrived? Krzyzanowski: The first thing they did was to order us to disarm. They also told us that we had to enlist in the Polish army that they had with them, and of course that army was controlled by Communists. Anyone who disobeyed was arrested and deported to the Soviet Union. We had a long and very serious meeting with our commander. He said that we could either disperse and go home, with the probability that we would be picked up one by one, or we could stay together and at least could support one another if we stayed together. We decided to join the Communist Polish army. I was made a second lieutenant along with many of my comrades. We were put into different regiments, well treated, given weapons and allowed to command units. Everything seemed normal as we were preparing for combat. However, in November 1944 we were picked up one at a time by the Russian secret police. I was taken when the commander of the regiment sent a message to me to report to him at his headquarters. When I entered his headquarters, he was sitting at his table, and I saluted him. Right then two Russians grabbed me from behind, took my pistol, tied my hands and put me in a truck with some of the other men from my Home Army unit. It was very well organized. They put us in a special detention camp near Lublin for former soldiers of the Polish Home Army. We were lucky, as some men were executed by the Russians. They kept us in the camp until April 1945. We woke up one morning at 6 and the entire camp was surrounded by Russian troops. We were then loaded on trucks, taken to a railroad station and then taken to Russia. We were kept in Russia near Moscow in special camps for Polish soldiers for almost three years. There were about 3,000 men in our camp. MH: What was the camp like? Krzyzanowski: The camp was a regular POW camp mainly for officers and not a labor camp. In fact, as officers, we were not permitted to work. There were a few enlisted men in the camp, and they were forced to go out and work. We were fairly well fed. We were questioned but not regularly. They had very good files and knew everything about us. We had our own internal organization and had a number of high-ranking generals from the Home Army in the camp. There were escape attempts. Most of those attempts took place through the barbed wire. Some of the men did escape and were not recaptured. The ones who were caught were beaten mercilessly by the Russians. Some of the men who made it all the way to Poland were arrested in Poland and brought back to the camp. The ones who remained free had to go underground when they got back to Poland. MH: Why did the Russians decide to release you? Krzyzanowski: In 1947 we decided, since the war was over and Poland was seemingly independent, to stage one protest after another to force them to send us back to Poland. Eventually we had to go on a hunger strike. After the hunger strike the Russians dismantled the camp and divided us into three groups. In November 1947, they started taking us back to Poland. I was wearing my Polish army uniform when I was released, so when I got to Warsaw I reported to the Ministry of Defense and asked them what I should do, as I was officially still in the army. They told me that I could go home and resume my civilian life. One of the officials asked me if I knew why they had deported us to the Soviet Union. I told him that I had no idea. He told me that in 1944 the members of the Home Army were a danger to them and that they were afraid that the Home Army might fight them like we had fought the Germans. So they felt that it was safer for them to send all of us to Russia. Now that they were in complete control, they were no longer afraid of what we could do. After I returned home I entered the University of Warsaw and got married. In 1959 I received an invitation to teach Polish literature at the University of California at Berkeley. After a year I was able to get my wife to join me and received a similar invitation from the University of Michigan. We went to Michigan, and the university wanted me to stay beyond the one year. I told them that we would be glad to stay, but they had to help me get our children to the United States. They wrote to the Polish government asking them to release the children, and for some reason the children were sent to us. After three years at Michigan I completed my Ph.D. and received an offer from the University of Colorado, where I taught for one year. Then we moved to the University of Kansas for three years. In 1966 I was invited to Ohio State, where I taught until I retired in 1991. MH: What did you do to receive the Polish Cross of Valor? Krzyzanowski: I received it for guiding an officer and his two assistants through the German and Russian lines twice. The officer was a major and a specialist in military airplanes. We expected at the time that the Allies would send a large group of airplanes and troops to help us. The major had received an order to secure the airport near Lublin with our unit. He was on the German side and thought that the airport was controlled by the Russians. However, once we got to the Russian side, he realized that the airport was still occupied by the Germans. It was pretty hard, as the lines were continually moving. Plus there were plenty of Germans and Russians shooting at each other. We had a horse drawn carriage. We stayed off the major highways, as the Germans were using them to retreat and the Russians were using them to advance. So we used side roads and forest paths, traveling at night and during the day. By this time I knew the area very well, as I had driven the carriage at night many times in this same area. At one time during the trip the Russians came into the village that we were in. They told us that the war was over for us and to hand our weapons over. We told them no, as we did not have any orders. They said OK and that the NKVD [the Narodny, Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, or People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs] would come after us and take care of us. The Russian frontline troops were pretty nice and were more interested in fighting the Germans than arresting people. MH: How did you get all of the photographs? Krzyzanowski: All of the survivors from our unit get together twice a year. When I was over there they asked me to write a book about our unit and gave me the pictures to include in it. MH: Any final thoughts? Krzyzanowski: I am glad that I did what I did and that I was a part of it. No regrets in spite of the years in the Russian camp. Ed McCaul is a frequent contributor to Military History. For further reading, try: By Devil’s Luck, by Stanislaw Likiernik; or The Secret Army, by T. Bor-Komorowski Originally published in the December 2006 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here.

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Interview with Ronald Spector: On Reshaping Postwar Asia

Interview with Ronald Spector: On Reshaping Postwar Asia In a new book, author and historian Ronald H. Spector (author of the 1985 classic In the Ruins of Empire Eagle , Against the Sun: The American War with Japan) focuses on a blind spot in military history: the bitter, multifaceted struggles that broke out when the Japanese empire collapsed after World War II. Four million Japanese were caught by surprise in the vast arc of countries from Manchuria to Burma, Many of them were armed, including military units that had never been defeated. Within months of Emperor Hirohito’s surrender, simmering power struggles came to a boil in China, Manchuria, Korea, Indochina, Malaya and Indonesia—conflicts that would reshape postwar Asia. Why was there so much fighting after the Japanese surrender in 1945? World War II in the Pacific had not settled everything. The one thing it settled was the quarrel between the United States and Japan. But the collapse of the Japanese empire opened up all kinds of possibilities for national movements and ethnic groups to assert themselves, to dust off their old struggles for power and go at it again. What got you interested in this moment in history? I discovered that there were hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers and technicians who had stayed on in China and participated in the Chinese civil war. There were other Japanese who stayed behind and helped the Vietminh fight the French, and still other Japanese whom the British and French had obliged to fight the Vietnamese. Were those individual or unit choices? In the case of China, you had whole units just switching sides, going over to the Nationalists, and there were individuals in China who went over to the Communists. In other countries it was almost always individuals who decided to help one side or the other. Were there any successful occupations in Asia after the war? One that was closest to being a success was in Malaya, which is now Malaysia and Singapore. Almost all the people there wanted to see the British come back, as they had not been real happy with the Japanese. Most of the other occupations were failures? You could say from the Soviet point of view that if their main objective was to steal everything movable in Manchuria and Northern Korea, they did pretty well. In Manchuria they alienated even the Chinese Communists, who complained that the Russians were making it much harder for them and were behaving in a disgraceful way. Did that have anything to do with why the Soviets agreed to enter the war? They wanted to establish their influence in Manchuria and to be players in East Asia. They also wanted to become the dominant power in China—not actually to take over China, but they wanted China to be dependent on them, and they wanted a friendly China. They also wanted to forestall any American or British influence in East Asia. So the Cold War in Asia began in 1945? That is certainly true of China to some extent. The Russians wanted to move in and replace the Japanese in Northern Korea and in China. They were very worried about the Japanese. There was one document from the Russian foreign office that basically says, “We should ensure that the Japanese never ever have any presence in Korea.” Why were the Soviets allied with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists rather than Mao’s Communists? The Soviet reading of the situation was that Chiang was going to be in power for years and years if he did win the civil war. Also, in the Yalta agreements at the very end of the war and in their own negotiations with China, the Soviets secured very favorable terms for themselves. The Chinese basically gave them back all the privileges they had in 1905. In return, the Chinese government said, “Well, if we’re going to recognize all your legitimate rights, then you have to recognize us, because we are the ones making this agreement with you.” The treaty meant, de facto, that Chiang was the legitimate government. Did that have an effect on the Cold War in Asia? The Russians were disappointed because they didn’t get the influence in the Nationalist government that they had hoped for, because of their heavy-handed behavior. But it didn’t really matter, because then the Chinese Communists came to power. Are there lessons here to be learned about occupations? Yes, occupying a country is much more complicated than people think. There are cultural and political factors that are not usually visible at the outset. In South Korea the reason that the United States was able to do as well as it did was that a group of South Korean leaders was willing to throw in their lot with the Americans, because that helped them achieve their own political aims. At the same time in North Korea, you had North Koreans throwing in with the Soviets because the Soviets were willing to back them. Sometimes you can make these deals, but a lot of times you can’t, and the presence of the occupying force just makes things worse. Why did the United States stay in China so long after the war? The basic U.S. aim was to prevent a civil war in China, because we didn’t believe that Chiang Kai-shek could really win. American generals knew a lot about the character of Chiang’s government and his generals. They didn’t think that they were going to win a protracted civil war. On the other hand, they didn’t think the Communists were going to win as quickly as they did. What the United States was concerned about was that a long civil war would wreck China and destabilize Asia for years. In the 1950s people moaned, “Who lost China?” Was that a real issue? The argument was that if the United States had not tried to settle the civil war and had just let Chiang Kai-shek alone, he would have crushed the Communists. I think that’s extremely unlikely. Chiang was getting all the assistance he needed from the United States. He had enormous superiority in weapons and equipment over the Communists. The Americans were his transportation core, his intelligence, his maintenance shop. Americans basically provided all that to the Chinese Nationalists. But it still didn’t help? It didn’t, and a lot of the equipment and weapons ended up with the Chinese Communists, who used them against the United States in Korea. When the U.S. left Korea in 1949, it didn’t expect to be back there in a year. Was the war that broke out in 1950 something new? Some people have argued, “Well they had this big series of guerrilla wars going on in South Korea, and some of them were quite bloody, so the 1950 invasion is another phase of this long civil war.” But most people would argue that this was a whole new development: A conventional invasion using a large army with conventional troops right across an internationally recognized boundary is a lot different from having a guerrilla outbreak in two or three provinces. Did the postwar conflicts in Indochina foreshadow the Vietnam War? Yes. First of all, the Vietminh—the ancestors, so to speak, of the Viet Cong— learned about organization and tactics and strategy from their experience in that first war. Also, that first war gave them confidence that they could prevail against a far stronger military power. It also left this feeling of bitterness on the part the North Vietnamese, because they felt they had won the war against the French, liberated the whole country, and they deserved to have a united, independent Vietnam under their leadership. They felt that nearly half of it was tricked away from them by the great powers at Geneva in 1954. So they were much less willing to make any deals afterward. Did these postwar conflicts represent the end of colonialism? In a sense it’s the death throes of colonialism, but more important, it’s the birth of modern East and Southeast Asia. The lines that were drawn and the sides that people took continue into the present. Are any of the old conflicts still unresolved? There are unresolved issues in some countries that remain so bitter that you don’t want to bring them up with anybody from that country. There’s a question of Korean collaboration with the Japanese during the war. Who was a collaborator? Who wasn’t? Many Koreans who worked for the Japanese later became important officials in South Korea, and some in North Korea, too. In Indonesia there was a great deal of bloodletting that went on for years among different ethnic groups. A lot of Chinese were murdered or persecuted or driven off. There’s a lot of this kind of legacy of bloodshed that was swept under the carpet. There are all sorts of things still simmering. Originally published in the June 2007 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here.

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Interview with Rupert Smith: Why we can’t win a ‘war on terror’

Interview with Rupert Smith: Why we can’t win a ‘war on terror’ General Sir Rupert Smith’s new book The Utility of Force draws upon his command and combat experiences and broad understanding of military history. Smith spent 40 years in the British army, serving as a commander during the 1991 Gulf War and in Bosnia and Kosovo. While posted in Northern Ireland, he was once “blown up.” He later served three years as NATO deputy supreme allied commander Europe. In his analysis of modern warfare, Smith concludes that while confrontations and conflicts “exist all around the world, and states still have armed forces, which they use as symbols of power…war as cognitively known to most noncombatants, war as battle in a field between men and machinery, war as a massive deciding event in a dispute in international affairs, industrial war— such war no longer exists. We now are engaged, constantly and in many permutations, in war amongst the people. We must adapt our approach and organize our institutions to this overwhelming reality.” You call for a radical change in the traditional use of force. Is that possible? I’m not that pessimistic. Our armies adapt at enormous speed because battle requires it. I think our capacity to change is evident in our societies— though not so much in our administrative and governmental structures, I’d admit. With a big enough fright, we will change. I’ve got great faith that the United States is, of all the democracies, the one most capable of such change because you have less historical baggage, and you don’t examine it very much. Was 9/11 our big fright? No, I think what’s going on today, the war in Iraq, is the big fright. Will nations continue to fight traditional “industrial wars”? No, I don’t think it’s conceivable as I’ve described industrial wars, because we now have weapons that can destroy the industrial capacity to make war in that way. I am not saying that we’re not going to have any more big fights. What I am saying is that we will be having them for different purposes than in the past. One of those purposes will be to establish a condition, a fact on the ground that improves your position in the overall confrontation. How would that work? A historical example is Egypt’s conduct in initiating the 1973 Yom Kippur War with an attack across the Suez Canal. Israeli intelligence could see all these preparations, but they decided they were not going to be attacked, because they could not see why this was happening and how Egypt was going to recapture the Sinai. They assumed that Sadat wanted to fight to recapture territory. But Sadat was not doing that. He was seeking to alter the conditions of the relationship so that in any postwar negotiation he gets the Sinai. And that’s what happened. Why in recent industrial wars is a “win” so elusive? I have described how the generic tactical acts of the guerrilla are married to a three-stranded strategy of provocation, propagandistic deeds and the erosion of the will. The objective of that strategy is to dislocate your military act from its political purpose. It is the action of the weak against the strong. It is the action of the judo fighter, as opposed to the boxer, to use your opponent’s strength against them. In what I call “wars amongst the people,” our opponents won’t let us use force strategically. They’re deliberately operating below the utility of the forces we have as we would wish to use them. Because we are still thinking in the industrial-war paradigm, we don’t understand that. What you have to have in war amongst the people is a very strong and logical link between your anticipated political outcome and the military acts that you’re carrying out. If you don’t have that, you will do all sorts of things in battle that have no advantage. You have the phenomenon where you win every fight and lose the war because there isn’t a logical, coherent linkage between the actual conflict and the larger confrontation. Why do Western political and military leaders continue to use the rhetoric of industrial war? Partly because they think it’s “hearts and minds.” That saying originated with the British army in either the Borneo or Malayan campaign, as capturing the minds of the people. But it was a supporting activity, not the objective. I try not to use those old phrases because with them comes all the baggage of our previous experiences. The media is bedeviled by this as well. In their three minutes or three column inches, journalists have to draw on the word pictures of the society they’re talking to. So they are constantly recalling events from the Second World War or Vietnam to illustrate what’s happening. And yet these are utterly false pictures. Have any modern armed conflicts been successfully resolved by political, as opposed to military, means? I think that in Northern Ireland we have not made the mistake of trying to solve that affair militarily. Very early in the campaign we made it clear that we would operate within the law, and therefore almost all military activity was reactive. In no way am I saying that you can just copy that, and nobody should. We’re at a point where we’ve gotten it back to a manageable political confrontation. It’s also taken 30 years. How can we win the war on terror? You can’t. That’s because terror is a method. That’s like saying “I’m going to win the war on yoga.” I think “war on terror” is a confusing misnomer, and it has made something global of something that is essentially local. So a whole mess of things have been blocked up together and become a bigger problem than if we had kept them in fragments and dealt with them in each case. When Hezbollah attacked Israel last July and August, quite early in the piece the president of the United States was declaring Hezbollah as terrorists and “we are against terror,” etc. Suddenly, what was essentially a different confrontation became wrapped up in the war on terror. This gives legitimacy to our opponents, because they start to make common cause. The phrase “war on terror” obscures our understanding of the problems? Yes, you are not understanding the confrontation as a result of your rhetoric. Your language is obscuring your thinking. What is a meaningful way to rephrase the question? Ask who we are fighting. Don’t make it bigger than it need be. In the conflicts we now face, what do our nonstate opponents want? How do we determine that? With difficulty. Part of your operation should be to learn what they are fighting for, because often it isn’t well understood in their minds either. If you look at al-Qaeda, their rhetoric is all about things that aren’t measurable: to rid the Islamic homelands of the Great Satan, America. What do they mean by that? Do they mean get rid of soldiers in camouflage uniforms? Or get rid of Coca-Cola, FOX News and Western-style advertising? There’s a whole range of things there that you actually don’t have to have a fight about. The essential thing is to narrow down the confrontation. And you can shape the confrontation. Here is an example from Northern Ireland: If you put soldiers on the ground with blackened faces and helmets, they raise the atmosphere of tension, because people think this looks dangerous— and so it is dangerous, and they behave as though there’s a knife around the corner. Is there any particular military thinker who has influenced your thinking on the new uses of force more than any another? I would commend Sun Tzu as well as [Karl von] Clausewitz. Clausewitz is often misquoted as saying that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” It always seems to be understood as serial activity, that you’ve gone from politics to war. If you read the whole of that bit, he’s saying these things are happening in parallel. There’s always a political and military objective running side by side. Originally published in the May 2007 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here.

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Interview: Shot Down in the Night

Interview: Shot Down in the Night Kevin Patrick Muncer flew nocturnal bombing missions in Avro Lancasters until a Junkers Ju-88G made him a German prisoner. Born in London and raised in Kent, Kevin Patrick Muncer was working as an analytical chemist when World War II broke out on September 1, 1939. On September 11, he joined the Royal Air Force and served as an engine fitter before he got to train as a pilot. After some time as a flight instructor, Flying Officer Muncer flew bombing missions in Avro Lancasters with No. 166 Squadron, in which he became the human equivalent of the proverbial cat with nine lives. In an interview with English writer John McAdams, he shared a story of survival tempered with resilience and compassion. Military History: What was your first combat mission like? Muncer: I suppose my very first operational flight was from RAF Breighton, Yorkshire, to Frankfurt am Main, Germany, as second pilot in a Handley Page Halifax. Although I had already converted to Lancasters, because they didn’t carry a second pilot, we had to gain our operational experience in Halifaxes. MH: How did the Lancasters compare with the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses that the U.S. Army Air Forces was operating at that time? Muncer: When we met back at our base and the USAAF boys came to visit us, the first thing we did was to open our bomb bay to let them have a look inside. The Flying Fortress was designed in 1933, and its bomb bay was therefore comparatively small. The maximum size bomb it could carry was a 500- pounder, usually about six in total, but it was bristling with protective guns. The Lancaster on the other hand could carry a 4,000-pound “Cookie” plus many incendiaries. Basically the USAAF flew daylight missions, and the RAF flew night missions, but after D-Day our squadron started flying daylight missions, mainly in support of ground troops. We crossed over France into Germany at 20,000 feet and were therefore relatively safe from flak. Also the Luftwaffe fighters were nowhere to be seen. They were very short of petrol. MH: Were you happy with your fighter cover? Muncer: Yes, we had Supermarine Spitfires and North American P-51 Mustangs based in France, so we were very well protected. Those Mustangs of the USAAF could escort our bombers all the way to Berlin, but they only flew on daylight raids. MH: Were you involved in the bombing of Dresden in February 1945? Muncer: Yes. I was on the night raid, and I had to go around twice because the 4,000-pound bomb I was carrying got stuck in its rack. My flight engineer had to go down a little trap door into the bomb bay, and when my bomb aimer said, “Pull,” he pulled a small lever that physically released the bomb. My incendiaries had already gone, so when I got rid of the big one, we set course for home. I still remember seeing the streets all patterned and burning furiously. They said Dresden was a supply depot for the frontline troops and a communications center with German panzers coming back over the bridges. In fact bombing it was a request from the Russians—they told us German troops were retreating and assembling in Dresden. I must add that this saturation bombing policy was advocated by Sir Winston Churchill on the advice of his special scientific adviser, Frederick Lindemann. In 1942 King George VI elevated Lindemann to the peerage, and he became Lord Cherwell. Although Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, our boss, openly agreed with this policy, he was merely following orders from above. MH: There has been much criticism both during and after the war of Bomber Command and its “creep back” area bombing policy—sometimes as much as 10 miles short of the target. Would you like to comment on that? Muncer: This possibly did happen during the early stages of the war, when aircraft had a very limited instrument panel and virtually no navigational aids. When I was operational in 1943- 44, we had all the latest navigational aids to assist us, like Gee, Oboe and H2S, which made our navigation and target identification much more accurate. We also had de Havilland Mosquito bombers piloted by experienced people such as Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, dropping their colored flares as target markers on the designated target. When I was bombing, we would be told by the pathfinder Mustangs or Mosquitoes, who were at a lower altitude and naturally slightly ahead, to bomb, say, five seconds after the particular colored marker flare. I flew lots of missions with Cheshire as a pathfinder. As a ruse, the Germans would light similar colored flares out in the countryside before the target to confuse us into releasing our bombload early and away from those strategic targets like munitions factories and marshalling yards. Also, I heard much later that Bomber Command was aware of this creep back problem and secretly asked the pathfinder pilots to overfly the target area and drop their marker flares on the far side of the target to compensate. At times it was all very confusing. MH: Just how accurate were your navigational aids? Muncer: Gee was the first of the radio/navigational aids we used, and the receiver recorded the different frequencies from three transmitters about 100 miles apart, all based in England. The beams had a range of about 400 miles and made it possible for us to fix our location to within five miles, but this was easily jammed by the Germans. I remember in August 1942 about 150 heavy bombers raided Osnabrück, and all their 150 Gees were rendered useless. The Germans had rescued a Gee set from a crashed British bomber, and their boffins had worked out a simple countermeasure. They called it “Heinrich,” and they set up a large arc of jamming stations across occupied Europe—one was positioned on top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Our boffins had to counter that with our own development, which they called Oboe—observer bombing over enemy—using two transmitters, one at Dover transmitting Morse code dots, which we called Cat, and the other at Cromer in Norfolk, transmitting dashes, which we called Mouse. Where they intersected was our target, and this enabled us to drop our bombs blind. If I stayed on course, I received a continuous tone, but if I deviated off course toward Cat, I received dots, or toward Mouse I received dashes. I could then fly back to my mean course. When I got close to our target, Mouse would give me a definite warning signal. The downside was that because the signal was on the ground wave, the curvature of the earth restricted the range of operation. Oboe was really a further development of the German Knickebein system, which they used to bomb our radar and fighter stations during the Battle of Britain. MH: Did RAF Bomber Command develop any further navigational aids? Muncer: Yes, H2S was the first airborne radar where a navigator could see an image of the ground below. H2S was an abbreviation of its British code name “Home Sweet Home.” Even though we were flying above or through 8/8 cloud, it meant we could still accurately bomb the target blind from 20,000 feet. H2S was initially issued to pathfinder crews in January 1943 and had lots of teething problems, but gradually our boffins sorted them out, and they came into our bombers in mid-1944. My navigator, Flying Officer Gerry Gerrard, could see all the German cities displayed on his H2S cathode ray tube as bright silhouettes, and water such as lakes and rivers as much darker patches. MH: What problems did the German defenses create? Muncer: The Germans had their own radar stations, which they positioned in a great arc across occupied Europe that they called the Kammhuber Line. They first developed their Himmelbett radar ground stations and progressed to their Würzburg system with a maximum range of 50 miles, and then to their famous Freya system with a range of 80 miles. They also developed radar-controlled searchlight batteries and large arcs of flak batteries. Their signals intelligence units could detect when our wireless operators switched on their 1155/56 radio sets for testing. They then knew that a raid was imminent and from which bomber group, the types of bombers being deployed and their maximum range. They could then deduce possible targets and of course our routes. MH: What did you use against that? Muncer: Our boffins developed Window, a load of tinfoil strips that we dropped at specific intervals. This would reflect spurious electromagnetic impulses onto the German radar screens. Window was a great advance in radar countermeasures, which, oddly enough, the Germans also developed simultaneously— they called their system Düppel, or radar chaff. MH: When did you join your Lancaster unit? Muncer: I joined No. 166 Squadron in 1944. The squadron’s motto was “Tenacity.” MH: Did you have a regular crew? Muncer: My crew was of mixed rank, and we were very closeknit—rank didn’t enter into that equation. We had a crew of seven; I was the pilot, my navigator was Gerry Gerrard and the bomb aimer was Flight Sgt. James Patterson, a personal friend. Flying Officer Ronald George Buckland was my wireless operator, Sergeant Vic Jones my flight engineer, Flying Officer John Vincent Gardner was the rear gunner and Flight Sgt. William Cyril Reynolds, Royal Canadian Air Force, was my mid-upper turret gunner. MH: Did you consider your defenses adequate? Muncer: The Lancaster had three machine gun turrets, all of which sported .303-caliber machine guns. Vince Gardner, my rear gunner, had a pair of the heavier .50-caliber Brownings. MH: What was the average age of your crew? Muncer: The average age must have been early 20s. I was 23 years old at the time of my 23rd mission. MH: When did you fly your last sortie? Muncer: It was Friday, March 16, 1945— Saint Patrick’s Day. I took off at 1715 hours from RAF Kirminton, Lincolnshire, which today is Humberside Airport, flying my own Lancaster, M-Mike [Squadron Code AS-M]. Our target was Nürnberg, and we were not at all happy because it was heavily defended with ack-ack and surrounded by at least three known night fighter airfields—one to the north and another two between Nürnberg and Munich. Our mission was to bomb the railway junction. The Americans were trying to cross the Rhine River, the British Second Army was advancing toward Hamburg, and we were supporting all the invading ground forces. The Lancaster gained height very slowly with our big bombload and fuel tanks brim full. To arrive at 20,000 feet over the Ruhr I had to reach at least 10,000 feet before I crossed the Channel, which is why collisions occurred over assembly points around the Norfolk and Suffolk coastal towns, especially in heavy cloud. MH: How many “heavies” took part in that mission? Muncer: On that night raid 350 took off, and 36 didn’t come back. We flew southeast across Lincolnshire and Essex, crossing the Channel at Dover, where I positioned my Lancaster near the head of the main stream. It was a brilliant moonlit night, and as I crossed the Franco-German frontier I had that uncomfortable feeling that there were German night fighters around. It was a sort of sixth sense that aircrews acquire with experience. Their fighters had obviously infiltrated our bomber stream, because I saw three bombers in front of me shot out of the sky, burning fiercely as they fell to earth. I still remember following those three Lancasters in our bomber stream and looking at their four brightly burning exhausts and thinking: “God, does my Lancaster, M-Mike, look like that from behind? If so, then I’m a sitting duck!” We were all very experienced, but I still gave my crew a strict and timely reminder to keep even greater vigilance. The Luftwaffe night fighters were twin-engine Junkers Ju-88Gs with a ceiling of 32,500 feet and a maximum speed of 310 mph. They would enter our bomber stream from behind and below, trying to hide in our blind spot. They had three forward and upward-firing 20mm cannons and three 7.9mm machine guns in the nose, and they would position themselves so they could fire at the underside wing area between the two port or two starboard engines, where the fuel tanks were positioned. It was 2115 on a clear, cloudless night when we reached the target area, and I could clearly see the pathfinder flares, all different colors that we had to recognize, burning brightly. The flak was heavy—an almost impenetrable wall of bursting anti-aircraft shells that I had to fly through with my bomb doors open. Flying such a straight and level course gave searchlights and therefore ack-ack plenty of time to lock onto a bomber and set their fuzes for our correct altitude. I still had my incendiaries and my 4,000-pound Cookie, fuzed and primed in the bomb-bay rack just waiting for the word. James Patterson was lining me up on the target, giving me the “Left, left…steady, steady…right, right.” The bomb aimer always repeated his direction request because of the noise and confusion over the target area. Just then a Ju-88 came in from below and on the port side, raking us with 20mm tracers that I remember coming up at me from the floor. I felt a thud as cannon shells severed my left arm and blew the cockpit roof canopy into a thousand pieces. I instinctively rammed the control column forward and kicked the rudder bar, putting M-Mike into a screaming corkscrew dive to escape the Ju-88. The wind was cold and fierce, but I still noted that both starboard engines were shot to pieces and on fire. From a distance I heard Gardner, my rear gunner, calling out, “We’re on fire back here,” and those were the last words I ever heard him speak. I know it was dark with bad visibility, but I can’t understand how John failed to spot that Ju-88—that Luftwaffe pilot must have been a very experienced night fighter to get within range unobserved. I heaved back on the control column to recover from that dive and heard a loud crack as all the control wires severed, relieving me of all control. Losing blood from my arm, I was drifting in and out of consciousness, but I still remember that our Lancaster, with its starboard inner engine dead and starboard outer still turning, suddenly flicked over on its back. I was catapulted out of the hole where the canopy had been. I instinctively fumbled with my good right hand to pull the ripcord on my release straps, but I didn’t realize that my right thumb was broken. Eventually I got my fingers through the D-ring, pulled and mercifully my parachute opened with a loud crack as my left flying boot fell off. I floated down to earth, losing consciousness. MH: What do you remember next? Muncer: I regained consciousness just as I crashed through tree branches and hit the ground with a loud thump. As pleased as I was to be alive on mother earth, I realized that I was not at all in good shape. Sitting at the base of a tree, I eventually found my whistle still attached to my battle dress blouse and blew it as loud as I could. My whistle was an RAF issue Thunderer and contributed to saving my life, as no doubt it did for many other aircrews in similar situations. My whistle for help was answered by a local German farmer and a French soldier POW requisitioned to help on a farm. They could see immediately I was in serious trouble and gently carried me inside their farmhouse. The farmer’s wife removed my bloodied battledress and examined the remains of my left arm. She immediately got some farmer’s bailing twine and wrapped it around my stump like a tourniquet to stem the flow of blood. That dear German lady whom we had just been bombing truly saved my life. I vaguely heard the farmer telephoning someone. MH: Who responded to that call? Muncer: After the air raid was over and the all-clear sounded, I heard a car pull up outside, and a Luftwaffe officer with a medical orderly entered the farmhouse. The medic examined the stump of my left arm while the officer asked me some questions. I was so groggy that my answers must have been incomprehensible. Like all downed aircrew men, I only told him my number, rank and name, which was all we were required to say under the terms of the Geneva Convention. They then took me to their hospital in nearby Brückburg. MH: Was this a civilian or military hospital? Muncer: I believe it was a civilian hospital commandeered by the German military, with around 600 beds, mostly orthopedic cases. I suppose I was really lucky coming down so close to a specialist hospital. Most of the patients were German soldiers, injured on the Russian Front. I was really well looked after by the surgical team. As soon as I arrived, they took me to the operating theater, stripped me down, dressed me in a hospital gown and gave me a general anesthetic. The surgeon then set about cleaning up what remained of my left arm, which again really saved my life, because there was a great danger of gangrene setting in. They also put on a splint and bandaged my broken right thumb. I awoke around midday, and a doctor came, addressed me by my rank and name and started asking me questions about my squadron, aircraft type and details of my mission. He said, “You were bombing Nürnberg, weren’t you?” and I replied, “If you know that, why are you asking me that question?” With that he turned on his heel and left me alone—that was the only interrogation I was subjected to. MH: So the Germans looked after you in a very humane way? Muncer: Inside the hospital, yes. One of the nursing nuns told me that the following day members of the local Volkssturm, armed with axes and hammers, turned up at the hospital gates saying: “We understand you have an English ‘terror flier’ inside. We want him.” The chief surgeon told them politely that they weren’t going to get any one of his patients and to go away. That was another lucky escape. A senior surgeon told me they had found the bodies of RAF aircrew men in the area where I was found, and I was convinced I was the only survivor of M-Mike. MH: Did you get to meet any of your fellow patients? Muncer: It’s very strange, really. For the first three weeks I had my own room, but when I could move around they transferred me to a general ward. I’d been in that ward for only a few days when the nursing nuns took me down the corridor to meet another flier. He turned out to be the Ju-88 pilot who had shot me down. Apparently he was spotted by one of our escorting Mosquitoes. He was all burned down one side. I really felt sorry for him—and I’d lost my left arm. But we were both alive, which is a sort of blessing. I used to go down to the ward to see him, and we used to chat away—and when I was eventually liberated I gave him packs of American cigarettes as a farewell gift. MH: How did the other patients feel about having the enemy in their midst? Muncer: I remember one incident. I was walking in the hospital grounds when a squadron of B-17s flew overhead at 20,000 feet, heading for Nürnberg. Visibility was so good I could see the sticks begin to fall. The nursing nuns fell on their knees and began to pray, and many of the German military patients began to shout at me, as though it was my fault. The senior German doctor advised me to make myself scarce, which I did. The incident was never mentioned again. MH: How much longer did you stay in that hospital? Muncer: After another couple of weeks, liberation arrived in the shape of a German-speaking American doctor with a load of wounded German soldiers. This American caused quite a stir because he wore a cowboy gun belt with a Colt .45, low slung in a holster, just like General George Patton. German medical personnel never carried arms. He was very surprised to see me in my cleaned and pressed RAF uniform as he checked the stump of my left arm. He explained he was really pushed for time, but gave me some cigarettes and promised he would report my presence. True to his word, two American officers turned up the following day in an armed jeep and took me off to Ansbach. I was then transferred to a U.S. Army ambulance with wounded American personnel and driven to Würzburg, which had an airfield of sorts. Würzburg was like a ghost town—not a civilian in sight. All the buildings were reduced to rubble, and the Americans had bulldozed the only road through. The other memory I have is of the advancing U.S. Army—not one soldier was on foot. They had all commandeered some form of wheeled transport—abandoned German military vehicles, Mercedes Benz saloon cars, and we even passed a funeral hearse crammed full of live GIs. MH: What happened at Würzburg airfield? Muncer: The first thing I remember was having a shower and change of underwear—the first in many, many weeks. This was followed by the kind of wartime meal that only the Americans could provide. I was allowed to relax for a couple of days and debriefed by American intelligence officers, then I was piled into a Douglas Dakota Mark III and flown back to “Blighty.” As soon as I landed at RAF Lynham in Wiltshire, I was taken to the American hospital down the road at Wroughton, just outside Swindon. MH: What did you do with your newfound freedom? Muncer: The first thing on my mind was to contact my wife. The problem was that I was confined to the hospital and denied access to any means of outside communication until I had been debriefed. What made matters worse was that my mother-in-law lived in Swindon, just down the road—so close yet so far! Luckily for me, one of the nurses lived in Swindon, and she promised to drop her a note. Gwen’s mother was so overcome with the good news that she couldn’t remember Gwen’s telephone number. She went straight down to the local police station and explained the situation, and they took matters in hand—contacted the RAF, gave them Gwen’s present posting and got the message through. MH: Was that the end of your adventures? Muncer: No, not at all. Sometime later I received a letter, and it said quite simply, “Navigator to Pilot—see you at 166 squadron reunion dinner RAF Kirmington, Saturday.” It was from Gerry Gerrard. He told me at the dinner that when the first cannon shells hit our Lancaster, he clipped on his parachute. His navigator’s table was just behind my pilot’s seat, and when M-Mike flipped over onto its back, he fell out after me. He landed in woodland and spent the rest of the night wandering around in a daze. In the morning he was confronted by two German pensioners wielding shotguns as he sat on a fallen tree trunk in his underpants, quietly repairing a tear in his trousers. As they walked back toward the police station, they passed the body of Vic Reynolds, who was completely unmarked. MH: Did you learn of anything further? Muncer: In October 1945, I received a letter from the International Red Cross in Geneva, in which they said that they had been contacted by a Monsieur Léon Planade. Léon had been a French POW working on a farm and had helped the German farmer, Hermann Wimmer, to carry me into his farmhouse at Winsor, where I had been shot down. Leon went on to explain that he had found a left arm close by with a wristwatch strapped around the wrist, and he wished to return the watch to me. He assured me that he gave my arm a good, reverent, Christian burial. There was no doubt that the watch was mine, because it was a “Services” watch given to me by my sister Doreen for Christmas in 1940. She had it engraved with my then rank and name. MH: On October 1, 1945, you were also gazetted for the Distinguished Flying Cross. What did you do after the war? Muncer: I was recruited into the RAF for hostilities only and returned to civilian life with the Prudential Insurance Co., where I worked for a further 35 years. But in early 1947, I received a letter in German (with translation into English) from Herr Wimmer via the International Red Cross. He explained that he was suffering from severe arthritis and could no longer work the farm alone. His eldest son was killed on the Russian Front; his second son, Hans was still a POW in Scotland and badly needed on the farm. I immediately wrote to the War Office, sending a copy of his letter and explaining the full details and how Hermann Wimmer and his wife had saved my life. On June 20, 1947, I received the following letter from the International Red Cross in Oxford: “I have today heard from the War Office that, thanks to you, Hans Wimmer will be returning to his home in Bavaria this July. I can imagine the joy of reunion in that family. Heaven bless you. For some obscure reason it will please me to associate you and your future with something of the sublimity of the Wingless Victory. You with your lost arm but…not moaning….Forgive this intrusion, but my work brings me in contact with so many broken and often embittered lives, that the joys and evidence of appreciated services become heightened a thousand-fold and to give expression to such, is just a little indulgence further. Yours sincerely, Dorothy F. Fray.” MH: That is a wonderful ending to a remarkable story. Muncer: Yes, I suppose it is really—but that’s not the end. In 1982—nearly 40 years later—Gwen and I had a holiday in Germany, and decided to visit Winsor. We went to the local post office to make enquiries, and we found that the Wimmer family still worked the farm. Neither Gwen nor I spoke German, and the old man couldn’t speak English, but I got a pencil and paper out of the car and drew a picture of a man hanging on a parachute out of a tree. The old man’s eyes lit up in recognition. He introduced us to his family, including his son, and took Gwen and me outside to show me the tree I had come down in, only 20 yards from the farmhouse. John McAdams is a former Royal Air Force signals officer and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. For further reading, try: Battle Over the Reich, by Alfred Price; Bomber Command 1939- 1945, by Ian Carter; and Footprints on the Sand: RAF Bomber Command Prisoners-of-War in Germany, 1939-1945, by Oliver Clutton-Brock. Originally published in the September 2006 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here.

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Interview with Steven Hahn

Interview with Steven Hahn Steven Hahn contends that blacks played a more active role in bringing an end to slavery than historians generally recognize. Indeed, in his latest book, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, he characterizes the Civil War as “the greatest slave rebellion in modern history.” He argues that some Northern black communities may have functioned like Haitian or Brazilian “maroons”—independent sites peopled and governed by runaway slaves that were vital to sustaining black political and military struggles for emancipation. Why do you call the civil war a slave rebellion? It’s true that there was no big bloody uprising, like in Haiti. But the Confederates had no confusion about what the slaves were doing—fleeing north, refusing to work, demanding wages and so on. It was rebellious behavior, and they wanted government intervention to put it down. In Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois writes about the “general strike” among slaves. You don’t have to be a Marxist like him to see that he was really saying slaves were important political actors in the Civil War. What about the abolitionist movement? The public still has this idea that, with the exception of Harriet Tubman, white people are rescuing black people. But historians have learned that the abolitionist movement was made chiefly of people of African descent. In the 1830s and 1840s in the Northern states, blacks had access to a public sphere of politics, and held conventions to press against discrimination and for political rights, which carried through the Civil War. They’re the ones who subscribed to abolitionist newspapers. They set up and staffed the Underground Railroad. They knew where to go in order to be hidden and protected, or get employment. What made you think runaway slaves had a key role in all this? In other slave societies, maroons, or runaway slave communities, establish independence, support revolts and become important politically. In the United States, it appeared that outside of Spanish Florida, the lower Mississippi and a few swamps, not much was going on that way. But then I started thinking about slavery and emancipation as a long national experience, not a sectional one, and I started to speculate. How? There were still slaves in the North at the time of the Civil War, even though they lived in states where theoretically slavery wasn’t legal. Free blacks’ status in the North could be contested; they could be kidnapped. Most people in the North, including Lincoln, supported the Fugitive Slave Law. So slavery was effectively legal everywhere. Then how do you think about the communities of African Americans in the Northern states? Historians write as if Northern and Southern blacks had little to do with each other, yet we know by the end of the antebellum period a lot of African Americans in the North were born in the South. What if some of these communities were like maroons? The people in them were fugitives from slavery who had to arm and defend themselves against paramilitary invasions, just as maroon communities elsewhere did. For example? In Lancaster County, Pa., in 1851, there was a shootout between around 100 blacks and a Maryland slaveowner who was looking for four runaway slaves with his son and friends and a U.S. marshal. This is the kind of situation where the maroon analogy makes sense. Here are black people across the Mason-Dixon line in Pennsylvania, collected among themselves out in a rural area. Many of them are fugitives from slavery. They are armed. They have networks of communication designed to alert them to trouble. The slaveowners get deputized by the federal government. How did slaves push emancipation? When the war starts, the federal government doesn’t really have a policy about slavery. Lincoln goes out of his way to assure Southern slaveholders that he will not tamper with, as he puts it, a “domestic institution.” He tells Southerners that as the Union Army is marching through, if they need help putting down slave rebellions, the army will do that. Now, part of the reason is that he knows Northern sentiment is divided and he doesn’t want to be distracted from saving the Union. But slaves have their own ideas about what’s going on, and they act by running away to Union camps. They have local intelligence: Where’s the Union Army? What’s going on? Initially, the Union side doesn’t want them and sends them back, so it’s a risky undertaking. What changes the situation? Fairly early on, the Union side learns that the Confederacy is using slave labor to build fortifications. So the logic becomes, if we send them back, they’ll be used against us. All of a sudden they’re declared contraband of war, which still acknowledges they’re property. But little by little, as the Union Army moves into the deeper South, slaves come in the hundreds and thousands. As the war drags on, they realize that black labor and, eventually, 200,000 black Union soldiers, will be important in saving the Union. So slavery becomes destabilized by what the slaves did. How does this shape the Emancipation Proclamation? Most people think it just establishes the idea of freedom and frees slaves in areas where the Union Army isn’t. But they forget about the provision allowing blacks to enlist. This is a huge and amazing move, very different from the preliminary proclamation Lincoln issued in September 1862. Because of African-American participation in the war, they were in a position to make claims afterward about citizenship and equality. How did all this change America? The Civil War completed the Revolutionary period’s nation-building process. Look at the world of the 1850s. The sovereignty of the federal government was in dispute and local sovereignties were emphasized. There was a nativist movement looking to deprive growing numbers of immigrants of any political rights. Then look at the country in the late 1860s and 1870s, where you have the Reconstruction amendments, when the idea of national citizenship for the first time comes into being, when you begin a massive process of enfranchisement after a decade and a half of disfranchisement, including women’s suffrage. Obviously this process was painfully slow, and met with serious pushbacks all along the way. But if the war had ended in an armistice instead of unconditional surrender, none of this would have happened for much longer. Slavery might have continued deep into the 20th century. How does Barack Obama fit into this picture? Obama is clearly part of a new segment of African descent in the United States. As immigration laws changed in the 1960s and 1970s, more people from Africa and the Caribbean came here, some with a good deal of education and resources. He’s also the product of the civil rights movement and affirmative action, which really contributed to the growth of a black middle class. That segment of the black population is much more integrated with other groups. So his election is a tribute to what the struggle for civil rights accomplished, but it could also reemphasize class distinctions. He is going to run into problems with African Americans who expect a lot of things from him, which as president of the entire country, he won’t be able to deliver. Originally published in the June 2009 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.

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Interview: U-Boat Survivor’s Story

Interview: U-Boat Survivor’s Story German submariner Peter Petersen survived three patrols aboard U-518. He missed the fourth—during which it was lost with all hands. The tide of war turned in the Atlantic Ocean during the summer of 1943. For three years, Germany’s ping as the hunters. Now the U-boats and their crews became the hunted, as Allied warships and air power gained the upper hand. Making his first of three patrols aboard Unterseeboote had ravaged Allied ship- U-518 during that fateful summer was 20-year-old sailor Peter Petersen. “We were caught by six American destroyers after an unsuccessful attack on a baby escort carrier; our boat went deep as the destroyers made run after run on us with depth charges. That was an awful time. They were throwing tons of depth charges at us. Explosions all around us, and there was nothing we could do about it. We had to take it.” Petersen shared his recollections with Roger Steinway in July 2001. Military History: Where were you born? Petersen: I was born in 1923 in a little town called Husum on the North Sea. This is in Schleswig-Holstein, south of Denmark. MH: Do you have any early memories of Germany’s troubles during the 1920s and ’30s? Petersen: I remember the elections in 1932 and the great change in 1933. There were placards with campaign slogans being put up by the many political parties. The election was really between the National Socialists and the Communists. I do recall some fistfights during the campaign, but no shooting. That might have happened in other parts of Germany—not where I lived. MH: What changes did the Nazi government bring to your life? Petersen: I joined the Hitlerjugend. Actually, there was a group before you joined the Hitler Youth called the Jungvolk, for 10- to 14-yearolds. I belonged to both these groups. We met every Saturday morning and had plays, hikes and war games. We would divide into two groups and put different colored thread around our arms. The goal was to attack the other guy and tear the thread off his arm. If you did this, he was out of the game. My life was like any other child’s—happy as a lark and not worried about things that didn’t concern me. I went to school and worked on the farm. I was 16 years old when World War II started and had begun my apprenticeship to be a mechanic. I worked on farm machinery and diesel engines. MH: What did you do when war broke out in 1939? Petersen: The policy was for students to complete their education before military service. I went to school a couple of times a week and worked as an apprentice in a repair shop. There was also work on the farm because my father had been recalled to service. He had served with the infantry during World War I in France. He was a reservist in September 1939. I vividly remember the start of the war. There was a knock on the door in the middle of the night, and a messenger told him to report for duty at once. In a few weeks he was in Poland. My mother, brother and I ran the farm. My father was discharged after Poland. He was 40, and food production was important. MH: Did your father later return to military service? Petersen: No. My brother Max was drafted and served in the Russian campaign with the infantry. He was shot in the head, which took out a chunk of his skull. They fixed him up with a steel plate, and he is still alive. MH: Any special reason you decide to join the Kriegsmarine? Petersen: You bet—good ones! The sea is in my blood. I was born next to the sea. I still can enjoy every rivet and corner of a ship. I did consider the Luftwaffe because I would have liked to fly a Messerschmitt Me-109 fighter, but I was probably too tall to be a pilot. As a mechanic, I thought they would let me fix fighters, not fly one. The final reason for joining the navy was that I did not want to get drafted into the infantry, go to Russia and freeze in a foxhole at 30 degrees below zero with nothing to eat while being shot at. MH: When did you enlist in the navy? Petersen: It was in 1942. Boot camp was at Zwolle in Holland. That is where I volunteered for submarines. A lot of people did, but many were not accepted because they were not in good physical shape. My trade was in demand. The U-boats needed men with mechanical backgrounds. Submarine school was in Pillau on the Baltic Sea. Most of the training involved classroom work learning about the engines and the different systems. It took about three months, and it was very hard work. The commander of the training flotilla was a total idiot—a martinet. His name was Captain Zerpka. He demanded everything be done on the run. He was very picky about the way one should report to him. The officers and men disliked him intensely. Of course, there was a hidden benefit. Everyone, including the officers, was so damn scared of him that they did their duty. There were also good things. We lived on the cruise liner Robert Ley. It was nice, gracious living—very clean. Four students shared a cabin. As part of the Nazi “Strength Through Joy” program, the ship had made prewar cruises as a reward system for factory workers and party members who did well at their jobs. It was used as an accommodation ship for a good part of the war. MH: How did you do in training? Petersen: I always did well at school. One of the rewards for the top students was to go out in one of the training submarines. These were small Type IIC 250-ton “school boats.” As we sailed out into the Baltic Sea, the petty officer asked me, “Is this your first time going underwater?” I said, “Yes, sir.” He replied, “Remember this time when you go down for the last time!” MH: Did that first dive bother you? Petersen: No, it was rather unsensational. The boat tilts a little bit, and you don’t know if you are 10 feet or 100 feet underwater unless you know what gauges to look at. One of the first things you get through your head in submarines is that the deeper you get, the safer you are—hide and become invisible! MH: Were you chosen for your expertise with engines? Petersen: Yes. The German navy was a little different from the U.S. Navy. We picked careers because most of us would be career sailors. The navy looks at your background, and you choose a career based on your education. I have regretted since choosing what I did. If I had to do it over again I would choose a career on deck. However, I picked engines, so that was my navy career. MH: Was your intention to be a career sailor? Petersen: It would have worked out that way. The first enlistment was for 41⁄2 years. If you made petty officer by that time, you could sign on for 12 years. I was eventually sent to officer’s school, so I had to sign up for 24 years. This was not a problem. I liked the navy and military life. Let’s assume that I stayed in for 24 years. There were many government jobs open for the retired military man. I would have been set for life. MH: Where did you go after the basic submarine course? Petersen: Some of the men went on to other training. I was sent to the personnel pool at St. Nazaire in France and was promoted to the next grade—a Gefreiter with one chevron on my sleeve. After returning from a furlough at home, I went to a personnel pool at Bordeaux. St. Nazaire and Bordeaux were on the Bay of Biscay, where we had submarine bases. The men [sent to] the personnel pool helped around the shipyard while waiting for an assignment. We would stow provisions on a U-boat that was getting ready to go to sea, also stand guard, do further training and go on military exercises. MH: When did you get assigned to a boat? Petersen: It was on August 17, 1943. A messenger came to my room at 7 p.m. and said that I was sailing on U-518 the next morning. U-518 was based at Lorient, farther up the French coast in Brittany. It was undergoing repairs at Bordeaux after an air attack in the Bay of Biscay. It needed a man with my training to replace a sailor who had come down with appendicitis. The chief engineer had gone to the personnel office and flipped through some records and said, “I want this guy.” It took me all night to get ready. I had to get my gear, make a will, write to my parents and do all the paperwork. We sailed the next morning. I was badly seasick on the surface of the Bay of Biscay. I got it out of my system the first day and have never been seasick since. Of course, the ride is much smoother when submerged. MH: What was life like for the new guy on a U-boat? Petersen: I suppose it is like in any unit. I was a complete unknown, but you get into the routine. I was assigned my bunk and my watch station. I started to grow a beard just like everybody else. The patrol lasted four months, so we all had big beards when we returned. It made us look older than our 20s. A funny thing happened after the patrol. I kept the beard for a few days, then shaved it off. My shipmates didn’t recognize me without my beard and refused to let me board the boat. MH: What was life like in a U-boat? Petersen: The inside of a submarine can get very hot. We used our diesel engines running on the surface. Then we would crash dive and switch to the electric motors, but all the heat from the diesels stayed. The men usually wore shorts and sandals or deck shoes. The space inside the boat was very small. Supplies are stowed in every possible place. The smell was also bad. We were given cologne called “4711,” but we rarely used it. Better to give it to your girlfriend ashore. It might get you some favors. MH: What happened on your first patrol? Petersen: The first patrol took us down through the Florida Straits into the Gulf of Mexico. Things were getting tough for U-boats in 1943. There was a great increase in enemy air and naval antisubmarine forces. Many U-boats were not returning. Our skipper was Kapitänleutnant Friedrich-Wilhelm Wissmann, and he was aware of the danger. We ran into aircraft off Miami and patrol ships in the Florida Straits. We had to crash dive, but were not detected. Fortunately, we had excellent listening devices. Under the best conditions, we could pick up a ship’s propeller noise up to 30 miles away. We also had electronic equipment called Wanze [bedbug] that let us know if we were being tracked on the surface by radar. MH: What happened in the Gulf of Mexico? Petersen: There were targets, but no success attacking ships. Torpedoes didn’t explode or went off course. The changes in the temperature of different layers of water prevented us from hearing ships. Other times we would hear them but the boat was not in a good position to fire. We fired on several ships without result. Wissmann fired four torpedoes at one freighter, and they all missed. He thought that the torpedoes were running too deep. The good part was that the enemy still did not know that U-518 was there. If a ship were sunk, the American antisubmarine forces would have been after us. MH: What were the results of your first patrol? Petersen: There were no ships sunk. We came across a baby escort carrier in the Atlantic on the return trip, and Wissmann must have fired eight torpedoes at it. None of them hit. Some of the torpedoes had to be defective. Wissmann was not a bad shot. He couldn’t have missed with all of them. The next day an American destroyer found us and summoned five more. They attacked us with depth charges. The ship would shake, the lights would flicker and small leaks might develop. The leaks were dangerous because the boat would take on more water, forcing it deeper. There is a point of no return. The gauges went to 230 meters—about 700 feet. We went past 230 meters—close to 800 feet. There was a lot of water pressure on the hull. Maybe another 10 feet, and we would have gone down. During a depth charge attack everyone is quiet and looks up because that is the direction that the noises are coming from. We were not supposed to use up oxygen moving around and talking. Some people were chalk white. Others would bounce their legs up and down, or pull on their beards. We were encouraged to sleep, but you only pretended to be asleep. U-518 was attacked with depth charges several times during my three patrols, and it was a great strain, but I never saw a man go over the edge. MH: How did U-518 escape? Petersen: We were down for 36 hours. Finally, we had no more air to breathe and the electric batteries were run down. The captain said to abandon ship. We put on life preservers, and each man had a one-man dinghy. If you had something you wanted to save, a wristwatch or a letter from a sweetheart, you put it into a condom. The plan was for the boat to surface, and we would go overboard. The boat would be scuttled. Hopefully the destroyers would pick us up. The captain told us later that after surfacing he saw the destroyers on the horizon. Wissmann ordered one diesel to be started and turned our stern to the destroyers. They didn’t see us. He ordered the other diesel started, and we hauled ass out of there. We ran on the surface for a few hours to load the batteries and air out the ship. MH: What happened after your return to Lorient? Petersen: Wissmann was relieved. I think the problem with the torpedoes caused his transfer to the training flotilla. Our new commander was Oberleutnant Hans-Werner Offermann—a 23-year-old. I worked in the control room with him. The control room is a great place because that is where the action is. The captain and chief engineer spend a lot of time there. The navigator has his corner where he works. The planesmen and the diving officer were there. The control room is a very sought-after position. I got my chance to work there as a mechanic before my first patrol under Wissmann had finished. Only the best crewmen worked in the control room. The climate is usually pretty good because of the fresh air coming in through the conning tower when we were surfaced. MH: What was your job? Petersen: One of my jobs was to work the valves that trimmed the balance of the boat. Every day we had to make a mathematical calculation of the weight of the ship. Let’s say that the cook took 100 pounds of potatoes from storage in the bow of the ship. He would report that and we would enter the information in a log as “100 pounds light on the bow.” Theoretically we should take in 100 pounds of water to compensate. It gets more complicated figuring in fuel oil usage. The engineer would report that we used 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on that day. But if you use diesel oil, you don’t get lighter. Fuel and seawater are kept in the same tank. As the fuel is used, seawater comes in to replace it. Since the oil is lighter, it floats on top of the water in the tank. Water is heavier, so the boat gets heavier as we use more oil. You have to know if the fuel came from the tank amidships or astern to keep the boat in trim. Another part of my job was communications. We used the microphone, the telephone and speaking tubes to stay in contact within the ship. MH: Can you describe a memorable control room incident? Petersen: Sometimes excitement happens when it isn’t expected. We were headed to the Caribbean on my second patrol in January 1944. U-518 was underwater, and we were cruising at slow speed. The helmsman who steered the directional course was sitting by himself in the tower right above us. All he had to do was look at the compass every now and then and correct the course by pushing a couple of buttons. It was all done electrically. He got bored and took the signal pistol off the wall. He played around with it and accidentally fired both barrels down into the control room. All these little blue and red fireballs are zipping around, bouncing off the walls. Scared the crap out of us! The reaction of the control room crew was fantastic. The doors were slammed shut to keep the balls from reaching the batteries and starting a fire. We grabbed fire extinguishers and chased down the fireballs. By that time the skipper was out of his bunk and in the control room. MH: Is it safe to say that Offermann wasn’t happy? Petersen: Oh, yes. Our helmsman explained what he had done. He was relieved from duty and was supposed to be courtmartialed, but he was a good man, our battle station helmsman. He ended up being the mess boy for the petty officers for the rest of the trip…and we still had three months on patrol. This was an interesting trip because we met with a Japanese submarine, I-29, in the Atlantic and transferred Naxos radio equipment and three Germans—two technicians and a navigator. Their job was to guide the Japanese into Lorient. We heard the Japanese coming and surfaced at the arranged spot. We got close, and the Japanese sailors tried to throw us a line but couldn’t reach us. We had a line-throwing gun, so we loaded it and fired a line over. The Japanese damn near fell overboard. They thought we were shooting at them. Their sailors wore funny three-quarter-length pants that came down just below their knees. After our return to Lorient, we ran into the men we had put on the Japanese submarine and asked them how they enjoyed serving with our ally. They hated the food. MH: Did you make it into the Caribbean? Petersen: Yes. I know we attacked several ships and sank a Panamanian tanker, Valeria, on March 7, 1944, off Colombia. Allied planes were on patrol. Aircraft with radar equipment were our worst enemy because they had the ability to surprise us. One time we were cruising on the surface. Everything was quiet, and suddenly, bang, bang, bang—bombs had been dropped by an airplane that snuck up on us. Fortunately, they missed. We rarely had time to identify the types of planes attacking before crash-diving. If we were far out to sea, they were usually long-range, four-engine aircraft like the British Short Sunderland flying boat and the American Consolidated B-24 Liberator. MH: When did you return to Lorient? Petersen: We returned from patrol before the invasion of France, on May 7. We left on what was my final patrol after the invasion started—July 15, 1944. We did not return to Lorient after that patrol. As a result of the Allied invasion, the crew lost all personal belongings in storage at the base—shoes, tailored uniforms, books and pictures. MH: Did you have any trouble in France at that time? Petersen: By 1944, the French partisans were very active. You had to be armed if you went off base. After one patrol, several of our crew members were going back to Germany. We had a going away party, and about half the crew—25 of us—decided to escort our friends to the railroad station. We had armed ourselves with rifles, pistols and daggers, any weapon that was handy. A few guys picked flowers along the way and put them into their rifle barrels. When the train was leaving, somebody suggested we send our shipmates off with a salute. He fired his rifle into the air. Then the other guys started shooting. I remember seeing a red rose that was stuck in a rifle disintegrate as the trigger was pulled. As we walked back to the base, we ran into a unit of German soldiers ready for a fight. They naturally thought the shooting came from French partisans attacking the railroad train. Our chief petty officer quickly got us into formation, and we tried to march by singing. We were almost past the soldiers when one of their officers grabbed the barrel of a sailor’s rifle. It was warm, and we were caught. The skipper gave us hell, but he knew we were just blowing off steam. It was also fortunate that we were to sail the next day. Our punishment was supposed to be to drill all night in an open field, but the petty officer told us to lie down and try to get some rest. MH: Where did your final patrol in U-518 take you? Petersen: We sailed to the East Coast of the United States. American warships and planes were patrolling, and destroyers attacked us. We did sink a freighter—the Liberty Ship George Ade, torpedoed on September 12, 1944, off Cape Fear, N.C., was towed to port, but sank several days later in a hurricane. As I mentioned earlier, we could not return to Lorient. We were ordered to Kristiansand, Norway, and arrived in late October. From there we sailed into the Baltic to Stettin. MH: Why did you leave U-518? Petersen: A communiqué went to all chief engineers asking them to recommend people suitable for officer training. Our chief engineer recommended me, since I had experience and good grades. I was in officer’s school during the winter and spring of 1945. U-518 was lost on its next patrol. American destroyers sank it with all hands on April 22, 1945, in the North Atlantic. MH: Where was officer’s school? Petersen: We started in the town of Stzeho, but soon transferred to Wesermünde. We took pre-engineering courses preparatory to being sent to the academy at Flensburg-Murwig. MH: What happened in May 1945? Petersen: The British came, and we surrendered. They didn’t abuse us, but they didn’t feed us much either. We were very hungry and scrounged for food. The British told us to get out of the school, so we lived on a luxury liner that was in port, Europa, for a couple of weeks. Then the British said: “Get the hell out. We are giving this ship to the French.” It became Liberté and sailed another 15 years. We were then marched to a camp in a farm area—just an open field surrounded by barbed wire. We stayed for three days while the British registered us. We went to a circle of farmhouses, where we had to fend for ourselves. The farmer helped us butcher horses. The British came along and asked for farmers among the prisoners. I said, “I am,” which was half-true. My father was a farmer. Crops were needed, so the Tommies took us to the nearest city. We were given new papers and told to go home. I was about 10 miles from home, so I walked. I was lucky when you think about the poor fellows out in Russia who spent 10 years in captivity. It even took some of the German prisoners in England several years to be released. MH: When did you come to the United States? Petersen: It took two years for my paperwork. I came on the immigration quota in 1950. I had sponsors here in Toledo, Ohio. I got a job at 90 cents an hour making window frames. I also got some education and looked for better jobs. I ended up staying with a company for 29 years. Things have gone well for me in America. MH: Were you aware that U-505 went on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago in 1954? Petersen: My wife and I visited Chicago in the early 1960s and toured U-505. I was showing friends some of the machinery and where my bunk was. The tour guide asked me how I knew so much. I said I had served on a Type IX U-boat just like this one. After the tour, the guide introduced me to the director of the museum, Major Lenox Lohr. He asked me to help identify parts from the boat in storage. I spent two days identifying parts and explaining where they went on the boat. Major Lohr gave me a piece of the pressurized hull that had been cut out to make the tour entrance. Years later, Keith Gill at the museum contacted me and asked if I would like to help again. I have visited Chicago several times for special events. The museum is trying to raise funds to refurbish U-505. The boat was not designed to spend nearly 50 years outside in Chicago’s weather. MH: Your interest in ships has opened a few doors for you. Petersen: I have sailed aboard the nuclear submarine Tautog and a U.S. Navy destroyer. I have also been aboard the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis. The most interesting opportunity came from the Russian navy for their 350th anniversary. I was one of a group of Americans invited to Russia. I suspected that they knew about my German navy service. A Russian officer confirmed this when he said, “So Mr. Petersen, I understand that you were in the engineering branch of submarines.” We went aboard a Russian submarine and inspected an active missile cruiser at Sevastopol, on the Black Sea. There was a dinner on the cruiser with Russian admirals, and the vodka started flowing. I filled my glass with water. I never missed a toast and could still stand up straight. After the toasts, a Russian admiral said, “Let’s go for a ride.” We cruised around this top-secret base in small boats with the admiral as our tour guide: “You see that boat over there? That’s Mussolini’s yacht, and now we have it!” He pointed out a hill that had been hollowed out for a submarine base. I thought to myself that if we had seen this two years earlier, the Russians would have had to shoot us. MH: Many veterans say the most important lessons of their lives were learned during military service. How about you? Petersen: During the 36 hours under depth charge attack, I swore to myself that if I ever got out of this mess I would never let small things bother me again. There are very few helpless situations in life. You must go out and find the solutions to the problems that confront you. Regular contributor Roger Steinway teaches history in Houston, Texas. For further reading, see: Hitler’s U-boat War, Vols. 1 & 2, by Clay Blair; and Torpedoes in the Gulf, by Melanie Wiggins. Originally published in the May 2006 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here.

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https://www.historynet.com/interview-with-sergeant-terry-buckler-about-the-son-tay-prison-camp-raid-during-the-vietnam-war.htm/2

Interview with Sergeant Terry Buckler About the Son Tay Prison Camp Raid During the Vietnam War

Interview with Sergeant Terry Buckler About the Son Tay Prison Camp Raid During the Vietnam War On November 21, 1970, at the U.S. Air Force base at Udorn, Thailand, helicopters carrying U.S Army Special Forces personnel took off into the inky blackness of the night sky. Those aboard had been training secretly for months and were ready to execute Operation Kingpin, the final phase of a daring plan–the rescue of American prisoners of war from the North Vietnamese prison camp at Son Tay. The Son Tay prison camp was located approximately 23 miles west of Hanoi. The camp was small, the courtyard a mere 140 by 125 feet, and it was surrounded by rice paddies and 40-foot trees. In addition, a 7-foot wall encircled the prison, and three observation towers were strategically placed to observe the POWs, who were housed in four large buildings in the main compound. Son Tay and Ap Lo, another POW camp 30 miles from Hanoi, were first identified by the Interagency Prisoner of War Intelligence Committee in May 1970. The committee, established in 1967, was responsible for identifying POWs and the camps where they were interned and for diverting U.S. bombing missions away from those areas. The committee determined that the Son Tay camp was being enlarged to handle additional prisoners and confirmed that 55 American POWs were imprisoned there. Reconnaissance photographs also revealed the letters SAR (search and rescue), spelled out by what appeared to be the prisoners’ laundry, and an arrow with the number 8 next to it, indicating the distance the POWs had to travel to the fields where they worked. Army General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), approved a plan to rescue the POWs at Son Tay. On June 10, 1970 a 15-man group led by 53-year-old Army Brig. Gen. Donald D. Blackburn, the special assistant to General Wheeler for counterinsurgency and special activities, began the planning stage of the operation. This initial phase of the rescue attempt was dubbed ‘Polar Circle. Further reconnaissance of the area around Son Tay revealed some troublesome aspects of the proposed raid. First, the headquarters of the Twelfth North Vietnamese Army (NVA), totaling 12,000 troops, was located close by. Second, an artillery training school, a supply depot and an air defense installation were also in close proximity to the prison. Third, about 500 yards south of Son Tay was a compound known as the secondary school, which was used as an administrative center for the guards. Lastly, the Phuc Yen Air Base was only 20 miles northeast of the compound. It was clear that a raid would have to be accomplished very quickly because the enemy could muster reinforcements to Son Tay in a matter of minutes. Ivory Coast, the second phase of the rescue operation, swung into action as soon as Polar Circle was complete. Air Force Brig. Gen. Leroy J. Roy Manor, a stickler for organization, headed up the group. This part of the operation kept constant surveillance on Son Tay, using Lockheed SR-71 Blackbirds and unmanned Buffalo Hunter drones. By the summer of 1970, photos showed Son Tay to be less active than usual, and by autumn the camp had very few signs of life. However, Dong Hoi, another POW camp 15 miles to the east of Son Tay, had increased in activity. Why had the POWs been relocated? Had the North Vietnamese learned about the rescue attempt? Unknown to the planners, the POWs had been moved for a simple reason: Son Tay was located on the Song Con River, which had overflowed its banks. Because of the flooding, the POWs had been transported to Dong Hoi. Operation Kingpin, the final phase of the rescue of the POWs at Son Tay, was approved on November 18. The following day Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, the new chairman of the JCS, received information that the POWs had definitely been moved to Dong Hoi. Unfortunately, the planners nixed the idea of moving on Dong Hoi. They felt that the raiders had rehearsed for months for a raid on Son Tay and that shifting camps at the last minute might prove to be disastrous. The result of the raid is now well known–the raiding group found no live American POWs at Son Tay. However, that does not detract from the dedication and bravery demonstrated by the men who were willing to risk their lives to save their fellow countrymen. Sergeant Terry Buckler, then 20 years old, was the youngest member of the raiding force to enter Son Tay and was the only team member who had not had a tour of duty in Vietnam. He also holds another unique distinction: His entire time in-country was only 27 minutes–all of it in North Vietnam. He could very well be the only Vietnam veteran to make that claim. Vietnam‘s contributing editor Al Hemingway talked to Terry Buckler about his experience in the Son Tay raid. Vietnam: When you joined the Army did you want to be a member of Special Forces? Buckler: I was drafted on March 18, 1969. Three or four days later I did extend my enlistment to enter Special Forces. After jump school at Fort Benning, Ga., and training at Fort Bragg, N.C., I was assigned to the 7th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg. Vietnam: How were you selected to be a part of the Son Tay rescue team? Buckler: That is an interesting story. First, at 20 years of age, I was the youngest man on the mission, and Bull Simons (Colonel Arthur Simons, leader of the Son Tay group) was the oldest. I was in the field, at a place called Smoke Bomb Hill, when the call for volunteers was announced. All they said was that it was a secret mission that Bull Simons was heading up. We were to report to the Little White House, the headquarters of Special Forces at Fort Bragg. There were about 500 of us at the first meeting. After that, they started holding interviews. Vietnam: What kind of man was Colonel Bull Simons? Buckler: Simons looked as if his face had been chiseled out of stone. He was the type of soldier you would follow to hell and back. He took care of his men. He always scared the hell out of me. When he talked, you snapped to. He always had an old half-chewed stogie hanging from his mouth. In fact, I don’t think he bought new cigars, he bought used ones. He also had a great sense of humor, and he most certainly had everyone’s respect. Vietnam: Did Simons conduct the interviews himself? Buckler: No, there were two sergeant majors that did them. My paperwork got lost somehow, and it was about 7:30 in the evening and I was the only one left standing outside. I grew impatient and began to holler at the two sergeant majors. Looking back, that was a stupid move on my part because they could have killed me. But they instructed me to report back to them the following morning. The next day I was the first one to be interviewed, and then I went back to my unit to await their decision. We were at a state forest, practicing mountain climbing, when I received the word to pack my bags because I had been selected for the mission. Vietnam: What other officers were part of the team? Buckler: Our commanding officer was Lt. Col. Elliot P. Sydnor, who was second-in-command. Sydnor was a Ranger and there was some animosity between the Rangers and Special Forces. He was more military than us. I think the Special Forces attitude was more unorthodox. Lieutenant Colonel Bill Robinson was in charge of the administrative end. Some of the others who stand out in my mind are Sgt. Maj. Vladimir Jakovenko, who was definitely a hell-raiser and a real inspiration. Also, Pappy Kittleson, a real good soldier. Pappy was a three-war veteran and had a calming effect on everyone. He was in his 50s but was in real good physical condition. I wouldn’t want to mess with him. Then there was Master Sgt. Herman Spencer, who was in a class all by himself. And Sgt. 1st Class Tryone Adderly, who would win a Distinguished Service Cross for his part in the raid. Vietnam: It seems you had experienced senior NCOs. Where did your group go from there? Buckler: They sent us to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. We had a building that had been used by the Central Intelligence Agency near Airfield No. 3. Concertina wire was strung around it, and we posted a 24-hour guard. Between guarding that building and training, we had time for little else. After about a month of this, I stopped Bull Simons one morning and told him that I could have remained at Fort Bragg if I wanted to pull guard duty. I asked what my chances of making the mission were. Vietnam: Another brash move! What did Simons say? Buckler: He told me to be patient. A couple of days later they came out with cuts. From then on, I didn’t have to pull guard duty. Vietnam: What was your training like? Buckler: We had a mockup of Son Tay. However, we didn’t know it was Son Tay at the time. Some people have said that it was dismantled every night and reassembled in the morning, which isn’t true. We started training in the daytime, going through dry runs. We practiced our positioning and what to do when our choppers hit the ground. There were three ships (one Sikorsky HH-3 Jolly Green Giant and two HH-53 Super Jollies) going in; Greenleaf, Blueboy and Redwine were their radio call signs. Then we began doing night training. There was a flare ship above us that lit up the compound. We used live ammunition the entire time as well. Vietnam: You knew it was serious business then. Buckler: Oh, yes. Even the old-timers were impressed. They had never used live ammo during training either, so it was all new to them as well. They wanted the training to be as realistic as possible. We also used several old buildings on the base and had some of our people who were not going on the raid act as prisoners. We would find them and take them out. Again, they included certain situations to add realism to the scenario. For example, when we brought the prisoners out to safety, one would accuse another of collaboration and want to kill him on the spot. Vietnam: So how did you diffuse the situation? Buckler: First, we would take a head count of the prisoners and determine who was in charge (usually the ranking officer) and then separate people who were arguing. Our primary concern was getting out of there and then sorting everything else out later. Vietnam: By this time, did you know you were going after American POWs at Son Tay? Buckler: No. We thought we were going to rescue people who were being held hostage aboard a hijacked plane. At that time, quite a few hijackings were taking place. They kept us pretty much in the dark. Vietnam: What else was involved in your training? Buckler: Quite a bit of physical training. One of our officers, Captain Dick (Richard) Meadows, had what he referred to as the Meadows Mile. It was a 4-mile run in the beach sand that he liked to lead. Vietnam: Meadows was an extraordinary soldier. He was one of only two, to the best of my knowledge, who received a battlefield commission from General William Westmoreland during the Vietnam War. Buckler: That’s right. Quite a guy. Getting back to the training, it was very physical. We fought a lot. As a matter of fact, it was listed on the training schedule as the Friday Night Fights. Once training commenced, we were all restricted to base. As a result of being cooped up, one tends to get restless. I recall one night Master Sgt. Herman Spencer had a few too many. He returned to the barracks to get his weapon and kill Bull Simons. I guess he had a disagreement with him on how the mission should be run. Well, we took the weapon away from him. The next morning Simons had him locked at attention and went up one side of him and down the other. Vietnam: Simons was certainly no one to fool with. Buckler: Well, he had remarked that he didn’t want a bunch of Boy Scouts, and he didn’t get them. Vietnam: How long did this training last? Buckler: Three months. One night they told us to pack our bags and loaded us on a Lockheed C-141 transport plane. From that point on we were not allowed to wear any military uniforms or insignia of any kind. We were what they called sterile. We were flown to Takhli Air Force Base in Thailand and huddled into the special operations area. I felt like I was in prison. There was a big fence around the compound, and there were also guard dogs. After three or four days, we were ushered into a large auditorium. Simons addressed the group and said that Lt. Col. Bud (Elliott P.) Sydnor, in charge of the security command group, had something to tell us. Sydnor stood up and pulled down a huge map of Hanoi, and there was a big red circle around Son Tay. He turned and said, Gentleman, this is where we’re going in. Just then everybody busted out laughing. I guess it was from all the fear and anxiety that we felt inside. Vietnam: It must have been a great feeling when you first realized you were going to rescue American POWs. Buckler: Absolutely. It was a real high knowing that. The CIA had made a miniature model of the Son Tay prison. We went in and studied it so we would know what to expect when we hit the ground. It was very accurate. So accurate, in fact, they had a little bicycle parked in the prison compound. Vietnam: That’s real attention to detail! Buckler: The night before the mission they gave us sleeping pills so we could get a good night’s rest. After we awoke and got ready, they flew us to Udorn, Thailand. From there, we boarded our choppers for the mission. Vietnam: There were three assault groups? Buckler: Yes. The groups were code-named Blueboy, Redwine and Greenleaf. Vietnam: That was so your group code names would not be confused with the call signs of the choppers, which were Apple 1, Apple 2, Apple 3, Apple 4 and Apple 5. In fact, Apple 4 and Apple 5 hovered 1,500 feet above the Son Tay camp to act as flare ships in the event the other flare ships, the Lockheed C-130E Combat Talons, malfunctioned. Buckler: That’s probably true. However, I didn’t see any of that. Vietnam: There was a mix-up with Bull Simons when the groups first entered Son Tay, right? Buckler: Yes, Simons’ group, Greenleaf, went into the wrong area. They landed at the secondary school. Unfortunately, it was no school at all–it was a barracks filled with NVA soldiers. They had a firefight, killing a lot of NVA before the chopper pilot realized his mistake. Fortunately, there were no American casualties, and they were choppered back to Son Tay. Vietnam: Who entered the prison camp first? Buckler: Dick Meadows’ group, Blueboy. The chopper crashed inside the compound after it hit a tree. Luckily, no one was seriously injured. My group, Redwine, landed outside the compound, blew a hole in the south wall and ran in and took up positions. Of course, Meadows thought it was Simons’ group, which was still back at the secondary school. What was really embarrassing was the firefight we got into with Simons’ men when they arrived at Son Tay. Vietnam: So your group, Redwine, was actually supposed to be following Simons’ group, Greenleaf. Buckler: Yes. If you look at the initial plan, Greenleaf’s touchdown was to take place 30 seconds before ours. We were only 60 to 80 feet apart. It was dark, and we thought they were the enemy. Simons figured out what was going on and put a stop to it immediately. It was tense there for a while. Vietnam: Were you scared? Buckler: Not until we boarded the chopper after the raid. Captain Dan Turner and I were sitting in the tail of the helicopter with a minigun between us, and we could see Hanoi all lit up. About that time what looked like orange telephone poles started coming up at us. Vietnam: Surface-to-air missiles! Buckler: That’s right. Our pilot was doing everything he could to dodge them. That’s when it really got tense. Vietnam: You never entered the compound? Buckler: No. The only people that went in were the Blueboy group and Bull Simons. He searched every room looking for those POWs. Vietnam: Of course, they had been relocated. Buckler: Yes, but we didn’t know that at the time. Boy, Simons was mad. Vietnam: When you heard the report of negative items, meaning no POWs had been found, what was your reaction? Buckler: I thought my headset was screwed up. I told Captain Turner, and he didn’t believe me. Vietnam: The raid lasted only 27 minutes. Buckler: That’s correct. It wasn’t long at all. Vietnam: Luckily, with the exception of Bull Simons landing in the wrong place, things went pretty much according to plan. Buckler: They did. However, Sergeant Noe Quezada was shot in the back of the leg. Also, the crew chief aboard Blueboy suffered a broken ankle. Those are some of the risks you take when you’re part of special operations. When we were first told where we were going, we all had an opportunity to withdraw from the mission. Nobody did. Our plan of escape, if things did not go right, was to pull back with our backs to the river and take out as many of them as we could. Simons told us: There’s a 50-50 chance of us not coming back, guys. If the mission is compromised, we’ll make them pay for every inch of ground we occupy. Vietnam: You had no prior tour in Vietnam? Buckler: There were only two of us who had not been in combat before: Sergeant Keith Medenski and I. Vietnam: What happened when you returned to the United States? Buckler: They turned it into a media event, trying to get as much publicity out of the raid as they could. In retrospect, it was a good thing to do. It proved that we could get into the enemy’s backyard undetected and get out without losing anyone. Vietnam: How did you deal with the publicity? Buckler: Well, I tried to keep a low profile. Besides, in Special Forces there were so many guys who had gone on similar missions, it didn’t matter. Some years later, after I got out of the service, Ross Perot held a big party in San Francisco, for the Son Tay prisoners and the raiders. Vietnam: Did you talk to any of the former POWs? Buckler: Oh, yes. It was very emotional. We were quite upset that we did not succeed in bringing them home. One of the most interesting comments I heard was they started receiving better treatment after the raid. The raid proved to the NVA that we meant business. Vietnam: At least it wasn’t a total loss. Buckler: Another thing that really impressed me was the dedication the guys on the raid had. I was the youngest person there, so I felt my life was unimportant. But the others had families. They could have gotten off the mission at any time, but they stayed. Those guys were willing to lay down their lives for their comrades. They were true professionals. This article was originally published in the June 1997 issue of Vietnam Magazine. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Vietnam Magazine today!

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Iron Will: Scrapping History

Iron Will: Scrapping History Americans at times went too far in their nearly unstoppable drive to collect scrap metal for the war effort. Every store, farm, and business in Comanche County shut down for the day on Friday, August 28, 1942. This was no traditional holiday for the people in this southwestern Kansas county. This was Scrap Harvest Day. All over the county people were scouring yards, farm fields, basements, and attics for every scrap of unused iron and steel that could be recycled into tanks, guns, shells, and other armaments. The local weekly newspaper, the Western Star, called it “the greatest demonstration of the people of this county uniting in a common cause that has ever been witnessed.” In Coldwater, the county seat, the old veterans at the American Legion post contributed a souvenir from the first war—a 37mm howitzer captured from the Germans. Out at Jack Helton’s farm, volunteers armed with cutting torches, wrenches, and sledgehammers ripped apart a tractor, a combine, an old Ford truck, and other machinery. Then they loaded all the scrap onto trucks and hauled it to junkyards, where it would be paid for, sorted, and shipped off by rail to be melted down in open-hearth furnaces and eventually forged into instruments of war. During that single week the people of Comanche County (population 4,700) collected more than 400 tons of iron— “enough,” reported the Western Star, “to build a big battleship or 80 large tanks.” The paper concluded proudly, “Uncle Sam, if you want to see how to get a difficult job done, send some of your easterners to Comanche County to show them that the mid-west is 100% behind the war-effort.” Such hard work, competitive zeal, and patriotic pride were typical of the American home front during the war years. At the behest of Washington, the folks at home conducted periodic drives to collect not only metals but paper, old rubber, silk and nylon stockings, and even used kitchen fat to help make up for shortages in strategic raw materials. For those too young or too old or otherwise unable to serve in the armed forces, it was a way to do their part in the war against the Axis. “Get into the scrap!” exhorted a slogan popular on the radio and on posters. “Junk,” crooned Bing Crosby reassuringly, “will win the war.” The most pressing need from the beginning of the war was scrap metal. Salvaged iron and steel were essential to the open-hearth method of steel production. Only a five- or six-week supply was on hand when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor— largely because the United States had sold to Japan a total of 200 million tons of scrap between 1935 and 1940. Furthermore, it was a need Americans could readily perceive. Unlike paper and waste fat, for example, the relationship of metal to armaments seemed dramatically clear. They believed it when the government said 30,000 razor blades contained enough steel to make fifty .30-caliber machine guns, or that the iron in a shovel was sufficient to manufacture four hand grenades. The opportunity to make a measurable contribution to the war effort appealed deeply to Americans, and they plunged into the search for scrap with such enthusiasm that they sometimes sacrificed objects of historical or artistic value—and later regretted their haste. The first nationwide scrap metal drive was launched by the War Production Board in the summer of 1942. The state of Nebraska set the pace under the leadership of the Omaha World-Herald, the state’s largest newspaper, which won a Pulitzer Prize for public service. The drive exploited the American love of competition by offering financial incentives, such as the $2,000 in war bonds the newspaper awarded to the individuals and organizations that turned in the most scrap. Out in the countryside, used bridges and abandoned railroad track were among the bounty, and ranchers had to keep a careful eye on their windmills. High school football players in Norfolk heard on the radio that residents of a nearby town were leaving scrap on their curbs for morning pickup. They swooped down that night for unsanctioned pickups that helped them win a prize. Nebraska netted 135 million tons—103 pounds for every resident—and its campaign was widely copied. Unfortunately, in their patriotic fervor, Nebraskans sent to the scrap heap cannons, monuments, and other historical objects that would later be missed. James Denney, a reporter for the Omaha World-Herald who later served in the Army Air Forces, zealously joined the campaign in Fairbury, a town in the southern part of the state, where he was based. “The state editor…called me and said, ‘We’re really looking for pictures, any kind of feature you can come up with, that deals with scrap that could be converted into metal so they can make bombs. We’ll do it because the paper is really getting all behind this.’” So Denney scoured the town. “Unfortunately—I’ve always kicked myself a little bit about this—one of the things that I proposed as part of our scrap was a cannon we had in the city park that had been used in the Spanish-American War, and sure enough Fairbury gave it up for scrap after I did my story. After the war was over, and I came back, I always had a feeling in my heart, ‘What a dumb thing it was for me to do.’” Indeed, everything was fair game. People started with the obvious—old license plates, bicycles, and junked cars—and then got more imaginative. In Dayton, Ohio, the municipal court yielded articles used in evidence in criminal cases over the years, including slot machines, hammers, daggers, and a varying assortment of revolvers. In Maryville, Missouri, the Nodaway Valley Bank offered up the armor steel-plate and the six-inch-thick door that had lined the safe-deposit vault. In rural Wyoming, citizens took apart an old 20-ton steam engine, and then constructed several miles of new road to get this scrap to the collection center. In Hollywood, actress Rita Hayworth, one of the GIs’ favorite pinups, donated the bumpers of her automobile and then posed fetchingly on the back of it with her famous legs showing. Schemes for getting scrap proliferated. Movie theaters held special matinees at which the price of admission was a few pounds of metal. A black-tie benefit in Boston brought in a Civil War Gatling gun and the governor’s rowing exercise machine. San Francisco courts agreed to take a traffic violator’s car bumper in lieu of a cash fine. On a farm near West Carrollton, Ohio, federal agents acting on a tip confiscated hundreds of scrap refrigerator cabinets, weighing more than 10,000 tons—said to be enough for “a medium-sized battleship or ten tanks.” The owners had refused to sell the lot to scrap dealers because the refrigerators had been placed in a deep ravine to prevent soil erosion. “We’ll just have to let the farm wash away now,” said one of the owners. “I don’t know why the big shots in Washington didn’t think of this five years ago instead of selling our scrap metal to the Japs to kill those poor Chinese.” In most instances, zeal to contribute to the war effort overshadowed the historical or ornamental value of objects consigned to the scrap heap. In Belleville, Illinois, and Wilmington, North Carolina, old cemetery lots lost their wrought iron fences. In New York City, 100-pound metal cornices were removed from atop the Ansonia Hotel, which was renowned for its ornamentation. The men and women of Easton, Pennsylvania, sacrificed the town’s cast-iron “Horse Fountain,” modeled in the 19th century after the Hippocrene fountain of Greek mythology, whose waters were supposed to summon forth poetic inspiration when imbibed. Artifacts such as the autogiro employed by Adm. Richard Byrd on his trip to Antarctica in 1936 and a pair of horseshoes said to be from Robert E. Lee’s Civil War mount were donated. A similar fate befell a massive typesetting machine called the Paige Compositor once owned by Mark Twain, who had nearly gone bankrupt investing in this commercial failure. Hikers and climbers in Montana’s Glacier National Park could no longer look forward to hearing the clear ringing of locomotive bells atop four mountain passes; they were removed in 1943 and melted down. Appropriately enough, guns that had been fired in previous wars attracted the attention of scrap metal drives. The U.S. Military Academy at West Point donated a dozen cannons. The American Legion post in Savannah, Georgia, contributed 7 cannons and 10 machine guns captured from the Germans in World War I. Two 10-inch mortars from the Civil War gave up their posts as guardians of the main entrance to Madison, Connecticut. From Wheeling, West Virginia, Devils Lake, North Dakota, and Marshalltown, Iowa, came Civil War cannons that had long graced these communities. Out west, even a little iron cannonball—fired from the USS Decatur when Native Americans attacked Seattle in 1856—went to the war effort. To collect cannons, someone had the bright idea to reenact Gen. Henry Knox’s legendary march hauling big guns from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston during the American Revolution. “A lot of the towns donated cannons, scrap iron that had been in front of town halls and places like that for years, practically back to the Civil War,” recalled Ted Giddings, who was city editor of the Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, at the time of the reenactment. “Those were all lugged off to Boston and shipped out to be used for scrap iron, to some ordinance factory somewhere.” Stripping communities of long-standing artifacts and memorials typically occurred with the full consent of elected officials and the citizenry in general. After all, as the exhortation went, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” In addition to patriotism and the desire to keep up with neighboring communities, there was also pressure from Washington. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered state and federal departments to scrap monuments and other ornamental metal not absolutely indispensable to the public well-being. Occasionally, the pressure to give up a beloved memorial provoked controversy. The largest old weapon singled out by the federal authorities was the battleship Oregon, a relic of the Spanish-American War. The Oregon, more than a football field in length, was moored at Portland in its namesake state, where it served as a monument and museum. In the fall of 1942, despite widespread protests, Roosevelt authorized its salvage while preserving for history another survivor of the Spanish-American War, the battleship Olympia. Formal protests to the U.S. Navy were filed by the Battleship Oregon Commission and a local Veterans of Foreign Wars post. There were also letters to the editor. Marjorie W. Hennessey of Hillsboro wrote the editor of the Oregonian, “If we in future years must contemplate a yawning vacancy where now the grand old Oregon lies in her carefully prepared moorage basin, let us be extremely sure that we can say ‘It had to go, so we gritted our teeth and gave it’ rather than ‘The Oregon went for nothing and need not have gone at all.’” Resentment grew when the latter turned out to be true. At a parade commemorating the ship’s departure, a 15-stanza ode to the Oregon was read and a young congressman and U.S. Navy reservist named Lyndon Baines Johnson delivered the keynote speech. The ship was towed on the Columbia River to Kalama, Washington, where the superstructure was dismantled. But as the months wore on, the need for scrap metal lessened. The navy ordered the scrapping to stop and then, embarrassed by public criticism of the entire process, reinstated the vessel and sent it to the Pacific for use as a munitions barge during the battle of Guam. Many years later, the hulk of the Oregon was towed to Japan, where former enemies of the United States finally reduced it to scrap. Unlike the citizens of Oregon, some Americans proved to be successful in their attempts to retain relics of previous wars. The capital city of North Carolina, Raleigh, even tore up their old streetcar rails. “However,” wrote Jo Ann Willford, a local historian, “when someone suggested that the state should melt down the Revolutionary War cannons standing at the Capitol, there was an outcry of protest. There were limits to the sacrifices the public felt willing to make.” The cannons stayed on Capitol Square, where they remain to this day. In Dayton, Ohio, some 22 tons of cannons and other artillery pieces were scrapped, but the members of the local Earnshaw Camp of the Sons of the Union Veterans stood fast. Members voted unanimously to hold on to their eight cannons scattered as memorials around the city, as a spokesman put it, “until the country is invaded.” But in Pocatello, at the college that eventually became Idaho State University, protests failed to prevent the scrapping of a revered old locomotive that stood on campus. A number of individuals and groups concerned about preserving the history of the city of Pocatello complained loudly about losing the landmark. One of the protesters was a faculty member named Abe Lincoln Lillibridge, whose father had been a locomotive engineer. Before the old locomotive was taken away, Lillibridge, a professional engineer who later helped assemble the university’s circular particle accelerator, was able at least to detach and save the locomotive’s whistle. He hid it away until the controversy over the old engine died down. The whistle was later installed atop the college’s heating plant, to be blown whenever the football team, the Bengals, scored a touchdown in the nearby stadium. The people of Fort Missoula, Montana, gave up their prized Civil War gun in 1942—and got it back more than six decades later. A muzzle loader during that war, the cannon had been converted afterward to a breechloader. The resulting reduced bore size made it suitable to shoot only blank rounds. Every day since 1883, when it arrived via the newly built Northern Pacific Railway, the cannon had sounded at reveille in the morning and retreat in the evening. Then it was hauled away to the scrap yard. There, before it could be scrapped, a history buff named Walter Custer bought the gun for his trading post. The gun stood outside the trading post until 1964 when Hayes Otoupalik, only 16 years old but already a collector of military artifacts, offered to buy it for the asking price of $600. He put down $60 and earned the rest by salvaging bottles and junk metal for a year. He kept the gun at the family home until 2008. Then, having reached the age of 60, he hauled it to its old post, and donated it to stand guard at the Fort Missoula Historical Museum. Many years after the war, communities sought to replace monuments, statues, and other artifacts sacrificed in the name of victory. The pedestal in Ossining, New York’s Nelson Park had remained empty for more than four decades after the World War I cannon that stood atop it was sent off for salvage. Part of a memorial to Ossining servicemen, it had been the largest prize in the 800 tons of scrap gathered by local Boy Scouts back in 1942. Then, in 1986, a 15-year-old Scout named Peter Carpenter began looking around for a community service project to help him achieve Star rank. Searching for ideas, he consulted the director of the Ossining Historical Society, Roberta Arminio. Arminio pointed to the problem of the missing cannon, an artifact she had a personal interest in replacing. Her father, Austin J. Yerks, was a patriotic veteran who had served in the U.S. Army during World War I and sired two sons who would attend West Point and attain high rank in the army. Yerks had been instrumental in acquiring the old cannon back in 1925; he also had persuaded village officials to contribute it to the Scout scrap drive 17 years later— an action, Arminio remembered, that made some residents “want to run him out of town.” Following through on her suggestion, Carpenter wrote letters to his congressman, state officials, veterans’ organizations, and even West Point, without success. The West Point Museum wrote back sympathizing with Ossining’s problem: the museum had been unable to find replacements for the dozen cannons it had donated to the war effort. Finally, when the youth was about to write to president Ronald Reagan for help, the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation offered to lend the village a Civil War Parrott rifle. Now owned by Ossining, this imposing weapon stands in Nelson Park as a monument not only to those who served, but also to Roberta Arminio’s family pride and Peter Carpenter’s persistence. Efforts to replace what was collected for the drives continue today. In 2009, the Vicksburg National Park in Mississippi, which contains more than 1,330 monuments, tablets, and plaques, began replacing 144 historical markers removed in 1942 for scrap. In Hartford, at a cost of more than $300,000, an 18-foot-tall bronze statue of a winged female, The Genius of Connecticut, was recast for the state capitol to replace the original, which had been melted down and made into bullet casings. And the Kansas state legislature, as part of a restoration of their statehouse in Topeka, hopes by 2012 to recreate an elaborate chandelier that, when removed from its rotunda dome in 1942, netted between 300 and 800 pounds of steel and bronze for the war effort. After the war, the issue of just how vital a role scrap drives had played in wartime production became a subject of academic debate. A 2000 study by Hugh Rockoff, an economist at Rutgers University, questioned the extent of their impact on the economy. “At most,” he concluded, “the drives increased scrap collections by relatively small margins above what would have been collected during a prosperous peacetime period. The amount of iron and steel salvaged in 1942 was only 9 percent above the amount salvaged in 1937, the prewar peak.” The total salvaged in 1942 was more than 24 million tons, and though the need for scrap waxed and waned as the war continued, scrap tonnage declined only slightly. But no one questioned the impact on civilian morale. Scrap collection gave Americans on the home front the sense that they were an important part of the national effort, which strengthened morale and support for the war. For young people who might have felt isolated at home, with their fathers fighting overseas and their mothers working in defense industries, participation in the scrap drives kept them out of trouble and encouraged a sense of common purpose. James Covert was nine years old when the war started. His father was in the navy and his brother in the Army Air Forces. But he recalled how the discipline on the home front kept him preoccupied. “Saturdays and after school were always taken up with activities for the war effort—like scrap drives and collecting tin and tinfoil,” he said. “The whole idea of saving and rationing was drilled into us, that our doing without was saving lives overseas.” What Americans gained by that spirit of sacrifice and patriotism far outweighed the objects they lost. Originally published in the August 2010 issue of World War II Magazine. To subscribe, click here.

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Is It Mosby

Is It Mosby Reader James T. Johnson bought this image at a Gettysburg antique shop in 2010. He believes it is a previously unknown image of John S. Mosby. What do you think?

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Italy’s African Eagle

Italy’s African Eagle During World War I at least five black airmen overcame both the technological challenges of early aviation and the prejudice of peers to enter various wartime air arms. On Nov. 11, 1916, Ottoman navy 1st Lt. Ahmet Ali Celikten, the grandson of a Nigerian Yoruba slave, qualified to fly reconnaissance missions and went on to a career in the Turkish air force. Sgt. William Robinson Clarke, from Kingston, Jamaica, earned his Royal Flying Corps wings on April 26, 1917. In August 1917 Georgia-born Lafayette Flying Corps member Eugene Jacques Bullard entered French service as a fighter pilot, only to be returned to the infantry months later after an altercation with an officer. In 1918 Pierre Réjon of Martinique also flew fighters for the French. He was killed in a postwar crash. Beating all four of these intrepid pioneers into the air, however, was an East African orphan. Born in Asmara, Eritrea, on June 30, 1886, Wolde Selassie was a Christian Tigre whose homeland was forcibly colonized by the Italians in 1890. A year later Italian army Col. Attilio Mondelli adopted the 5-year-old orphan. Taken to Italy, the rechristened Domenico followed in his adoptive father’s bootsteps, studying at military colleges in Rome and Modena. Graduating in 1905 as a second lieutenant, he commanded a succession of companies in the elite Bersaglieri infantry. Developing an interest in aviation, Mondelli qualified on Feb. 20, 1914, for a certificate from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. When Italy entered World War I on the Allied side on May 24, 1915, Capt. Mondelli was assigned to the 7th Reconnaissance and Combat Squadron and flew numerous reconnaissance missions in Nieuport IVMs. Amid the First and Second Battles of the Isonzo, between May and August 1915, Mondelli was cited for zeal in seeking out Austro-Hungarian artillery. On Feb. 18, 1916, he took command of the newly formed 7th Bombardment Squadron. In this role he led raids on the Austro-Hungarian–held regions of Slovenia and Venezia Giulia using Caproni Ca.33 trimotor bombers. From July 14 to 25, 1917, he commanded the XI Bombardment Group, comprising the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th and 15th Squadrons. At that point Mondelli returned to an infantry role. On October 10 he was promoted to major and assumed command of the XXXIII “Crimson Flames,” a newly formed unit of special assault troops dubbed arditi (“the daring”). On May 1, 1918, Mondelli took command of the 1st Battalion, 242nd Infantry Reg-iment and led it during the June 15–24 Battle of the Solstice along the Piave River. On August 19 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. By war’s end his battlefield leadership earned him two Silver Medals for Military Valor, another Bronze Medal and the title of Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy. Mondelli led an assault battalion in Albania when Italy tried to assert control over that country through a June 1917 mandate, provoking the Albanians to armed resistance on June 4, 1920. After two months of fighting the Italians abandoned their claims with a protocol signed on August 2. During that time Mondelli was awarded another Bronze Medal for Military Valor. When the Fascists under Benito Mussolini came to power, Mondelli’s ambitions met a brick wall of racial discrimination. In 1925 his imminent promotion to colonel was blocked by an army that would not permit a black officer to command white soldiers. He spent World War II sidelined and simply trying to survive until Rome fell to Allied forces in June 1944. Afterward he rejoined the army, rising in rank to lieutenant general in 1968. On June 10, 1970, he was given the title of Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, his adoptive nation’s highest order. Mondelli died in Rome on Dec. 13, 1974, leaving behind a remarkable legacy in aviation and military achievements. MH This article appeared in the November 2020 issue of Military History magazine. For more stories, subscribe here and visit us on Facebook:

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James Fenelon: Four Hours of Fury

James Fenelon: Four Hours of Fury James Fenelon (Randy Glass Studio) By March 1945 the Allies were closing in around Germany, but the 400-yard-wide Rhine River remained a significant natural obstacle to their progress. Although Americans had crossed the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, the main Allied thrust would be led by British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery farther north, near Wesel. James Fenelon’s new book, Four Hours of Fury, relates the firsthand experiences of the U.S. 17th Airborne Division during Operation Varsity, the subsequent combat jump during which 17,000 troops were inserted by parachute and glider on the far banks of the Rhine. Fenelon is himself a veteran and a graduate of the U.S. Army’s Airborne, Jumpmaster and Pathfinder schools. His hands-on experience, diligent research and interviews with veterans combine in a gripping, action-packed narrative of one of the most dangerous yet overlooked operations of the war. Describe your military service. I enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve right out of high school. I eventually did go to the University of Texas, but I first wanted to serve my country. So I enlisted and ended up going to Airborne School at Fort Benning in 1988. That was really when I first learned about Operation Varsity. In high school I had learned about D-Day, and on my own about Market Garden—but I had never heard of the jump across the Rhine. It always just stuck with me. After I got out of the service, I started doing research on my own and going to veterans’ reunions, where I met the actual guys who had participated in the operation. What encouraged you to write about Operation Varsity? I have to thank my wife for that. I was complaining one night about not being able to find what I was looking for. All these other books had been written about D-Day and Market Garden—as well they should, not to take anything from those operations. She just looked at me and said, “Why don’t you just write the book that you’re trying to find?” ‘Gliders did have their disadvantages. It was a one-way trip, and as an engineless aircraft it had to land on the terrain available. Not very many of them were recoverable after the landing’ Most histories focus on parachute infantry. What are the advantages and disadvantages of glider infantry operations? The advantage of gliders was similar to UH-60 Black Hawk and CH-47 Chinook helicopters doing air assault operations today. You could bring in heavier equipment, such as jeeps and artillery pieces, which you really couldn’t airdrop at the time. They did drop artillery pieces but had to first disassemble them into several pieces. The Waco CG-4 glider could bring them in intact. It also had the advantage of landing squads of troops in the same place in fighting order. Glider infantry had to know all of their tie-down knots and other things that are similar to the sling-load operations that go on today with air assault. Gliders did have their disadvantages. It was a one-way trip, and as an engineless aircraft it had to land on the terrain available. Not very many of them were recoverable after the landing. Also, the guys were a little disgruntled—they weren’t volunteers, they were assigned to ride into combat in a glider, and they didn’t get parachutes. Initially they didn’t even get flight or jump pay; that was only addressed later in the war. Gliders had been used in Normandy and Market Garden. Had the technology adapted or improved as a result? The basic model itself didn’t change, but what did change were some of the safety features. Before Varsity they were trying to scramble and install modifications to the cockpit to protect the pilots. They added a “Corey skid,” which looks like a giant wooden water ski, on the bottom of the glider’s nose. It was designed to help keep up the nose when landing and deal with smaller obstacles like wire fences. Then they had this other big contraption called a Griswold nose that they bolted to the front of the Waco. It was basically a big metal cage designed to bulldoze through anything, trees and whatnot, that would have otherwise ripped into the cockpit. What accounts for the large numbers of aircraft downed and heavy casualties incurred during Varsity? That April, the last full month of the war in Europe, Americans suffered as many casualties as they had in June 1944—a little under 11,000 killed in action. As the Germans fell back into Germany, their supply lines got shorter and logistics became easier. In the case of Varsity, the Germans knew the Allies were coming and had a pretty good idea, based on Montgomery’s previous tactics, he would use airborne troops. So they started stripping antiaircraft weapons from other areas and bringing them to where they suspected the drop would occur. The Allies even intercepted Enigma transmissions telling German crews to sleep at their guns and expect the airborne operation at any time. From a paratrooper’s perspective, was it foolish of Montgomery to order men to jump in daylight directly atop German forces? It’s an interesting debate. I think if the paratroopers had had their way, they would have preferred to do it at night. Major General William M. Miley, commander of the 17th Airborne Division, wanted to go at night. Major General Matthew Ridgway, commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps at the time, advocated a daylight drop. Even though the Allies enjoyed air supremacy during the day, there was still a lot of concern about Luftwaffe night fighters, and if they got into these lumbering transport armadas, they would wreak havoc. I also think there was a bit of a psychological game there, as they changed the traditional sequence and dropped the airborne troops after the initial assault on the Rhine started—an attempt to confuse the Germans into thinking maybe they wouldn’t use airborne troops. Given the Americans had already crossed the Rhine at Remagen, were the airdrops effective, or would a strictly ground operation have sufficed? The crossing at Remagen was in terrain not conducive to the breakout and encirclement of the Ruhr Valley. Even before they landed in Normandy, the Allies had a broad-stroke plan as to how they were going to enter Germany and finish the war. Part of that plan relied on crossing an area where Montgomery did, because it allowed them to cut off the industrial capability of the Reich. When the Americans got across at Remagen, it did help Montgomery’s operation, because the Germans had to send reinforcements there to try to stop them. So while Varsity ended up being beneficial to the Rhine crossing, it wasn’t intended to replace it. In what ways have airborne operations changed since those early drops? The fundamentals haven’t changed. They’re still using the same 250-foot towers at Fort Benning for jump school that they used during the war. I think the biggest changes were in the aircraft and the accuracy of the drops. Nighttime navigation in a C-47 was extremely difficult, and whenever the Allies tried it, in Italy and in Normandy, it was a borderline disaster. Compare that technology to today—we have GPS and can bring those guys from anywhere in the world and drop them on top of a tennis court if we need to. MH

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https://www.historynet.com/james-garfields-greatest-fear-credit-mobilier-corruption-scandal.htm

James Garfield’s Greatest Fear: Being Stained by the Credit Mobilier Corruption Scandal

James Garfield’s Greatest Fear: Being Stained by the Credit Mobilier Corruption Scandal The ambitious Ohio Republican dreaded being caught up with congressmen in complicated railroad scheme Wracked with dread on a wintry Tuesday evening in 1873, U.S. Representative James A. Garfield retreated to the pages of his diary. “At 11 o’clock went before the Credit Mobilier Investigating Committee and made a statement of what I know concerning the Company,” Garfield, 41, wrote. “I am too proud to confess to any but my most intimate friends how deeply this whole matter has grieved me. While I did nothing in regard to it that can be construed into any act even of impropriety much less than corruption, I have still said from the start that the shadow of the cursed thing would cling to my name for many years. I believe my statement was regarded as clear and conclusive.” American financier and vice president of the Union Pacific Railroad Thomas C. Durant, mastermind of the Credit Mobilier scheme. Garfield had appeared earlier on January 14 before a House committee investigating sweetheart stock sales by a congressman to colleagues. In the years after the Civil War, Washington was awash in sleazy deals, but Garfield had avoided the mire—until now. In sworn testimony, the Ohioan insisted he “never owned, received, or agreed to take any stock of the Credit Mobilier or of the Union Pacific Railroad, nor any dividends or profits arising from either of them.” That night, as Garfield was scribbling in his diary, he feared permanent stain from the scandal consuming the capital. Garfield’s anxiety had its origins in the effort to construct a transcontinental railroad linking the country’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The visionary scheme aimed at establishing not only a passenger and freight transportation network but a grid of communities around which the nation could grow. Knowing the stakes and wanting to speed the project, Congress in 1862 passed the Pacific Railroad Act, authorizing issuance of generous land grants and government-backed bonds to the railroads. The companies building the rails, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, incurred huge expenses and took giant risks, hoping for enormous returns. No project in America’s preceding 90 years had been of remotely similar scope or significance. Nonetheless, the Union Pacific was having trouble drawing investors. Congress priced stocks and bonds such that it made the securities extremely tough to sell to Eastern speculators—until Union Pacific Vice President Thomas C. Durant devised a clever solution. Durant, who understood that the big money would come from building—not running—railroads, bought a dormant railroad finance company in 1864 and renamed it Credit Mobilier. Durant used Credit Mobilier to soak the government-backed Union Pacific by overcharging the railroad for construction contracts. The company made millions of dollars in profits for its investors, a number of whom also sat on the Union Pacific board. A congressional committee that investigated the operations of Credit Mobilier concluded in 1873 that the company’s most lucrative contract with the Union Pacific produced almost $30 million in profits. The original wooden viaduct at Dale Creek, Wyoming, built for the Union Pacific railroad. (Photo by Henry Guttmann Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) One of the most enthusiastic investors in the Union Pacific and in Credit Mobilier was U.S. Representative Oakes Ames (R-Massachusetts), whose family-owned shovel-making business had earned him the sobriquet “King of Spades.” After Ames and Durant—both Credit Mobilier board members—patched up a bitter feud over control of the railroad in the fall of 1867, they divided control of unallocated Credit Mobilier shares between them. But another investor, Henry S. McComb, a railroad speculator and Durant ally, insisted that he should have received some of the extra stock as well. McComb pressed Ames to accommodate him. The King of Spades refused. Ames told McComb by letter that he was offering the shares in question to members of Congress as a way to win the Union Pacific support on Capitol Hill. “I have used this,” Ames said of the Credit Mobilier stock, “where it will produce most  good for us, I think.” McComb was unconvinced. In November 1868, he sued Ames and Credit Mobilier demanding more shares. Ames’s dual role as a member of Congress and major investor in the Union Pacific troubled some. “This man, worth millions, takes the position of Representative—seeks and gets it—for the purpose of promoting his private interest,” Navy Secretary Gideon Welles raged in his diary. But many in Congress were eager to do business with the King of Spades. As the feud with McComb was simmering during the winter of 1867-68, Ames was flogging the valuable Credit Mobilier shares to Capitol Hill colleagues wherever he caught them—on the floors of the House and the Senate, over dinner, and on the streets of the capital. Ames buttonholed Representative William “Pig Iron” Kelley (R-Pennsylvania) at a corner a few blocks from the White House. Kelley recalled Ames offering shares on terms so generous “I did not see how I could lose anything.” Garfield hesitated, but Ames kept pressing him. “He said if I was not able to pay for it, he would hold it for me `til I could pay, or until some of the dividends were payable,” Garfield testified. Ames eventually persuaded Garfield to accept 10 shares on those terms, investigators concluded, and recruited at least 10 other Hill colleagues willing to invest. At least one went to bat for Ames. Representative Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts bought 10 Credit Mobilier shares for $1,000 in December 1867. Dawes then shepherded into law a bill authorizing the Union Pacific to move its headquarters away from New York—and beyond the reach of judges allied with Durant. Although the railroad failed to take advantage of the opportunity to relocate, the measure illustrates what Ames was hoping to get for his stock. Credit Mobilier’s reach into Congress did not go unnoticed. In 1869, railroad finance expert Charles Francis Adams Jr., descended from two presidents, warned in an article in the North American Review that Credit Mobilier represented “a source of corruption in the politics of the land, and a resistless power in its legislature.” Americans paid little heed until September 4, 1872, when the muckraking New York Sun devoted most of its four broadsheet pages to an article headlined “The King of Frauds” detailing what McComb had said when testifying against Ames in his suit. Error-ridden and slanted—one subtitle read “Congressmen Who Have Robbed the People, and Who Now Support the National Robber”—the newspaper’s exposé nonetheless spelled out the fundamental facts. In his lawsuit, McComb named 11 congressmen Ames had identified to him as recipients of Credit Mobilier shares in 1867-68. Along with Garfield, McComb listed former House speaker Schuyler Colfax, now vice president, and Senator Henry Wilson (R-Massachusetts), picked by  President Ulysses S. Grant to replace Colfax on the ticket for his 1872 re-election run. Lesser figures named by the Sun included Senator James Patterson (R-New Hampshire) and U.S. Representative James Brooks (D-New York), who had bought Credit Mobilier stock independently of Ames. The Sun also presented damning transcripts of letters that Ames had written to McComb in early 1868. In those missives, Ames confided that his decision to place the Credit Mobilier stock with congressional colleagues was an effort to amplify the Union Pacific’s sway on Capitol Hill. “We want more friends in this Congress,” Ames told McComb, “& if a man will look into the law, (& it is difficult to get them to do so unless they have an interest to do so,) he cannot help being convinced that we should not be interfered with.” The sensational reporting galvanized readers. Southern and Northern Democrats, who were eager to undo Reconstruction, cited the stories as evidence of Republican corruption. Conservative critics believed Credit Mobilier exemplified the dangers of government involvement in business. The exposé also spoke to growing concern about the way railroads were transforming the nation’s economy. 1873 Grange cartoon inspired by the Vanderbilt system of secret rebates, showing a farmer trying to rouse the country to the railroad menace. Americans celebrated the completion of the transcontinental connection in 1869, but their enthusiasm curdled as railroads flaunted their domination of state legislatures from Albany to Sacramento. Farmers in the Mississippi Valley and the South, angry about extortionate freight rates and monopoly power, flocked to the nominally apolitical Patrons of Husbandry—also known as the Grange—to counter railroad influence. Newspapers nationwide ran stories inspired by the Sun scoop. The once obscure phrase “Credit Mobilier” quickly became shorthand for the assumption that railroads were corrupting American politics. The Sun blockbuster exploded as Garfield was out in the Montana Territory, concluding a visit with the Flathead Indians. The Ohioan devoted September 8 to catching up with his mail and the news. Garfield had every reason to look forward to his return to Washington. With Grant poised to crush the quixotic editor-turned-politician Horace Greeley in the November election, many more years of Republican dominance seemed assured. Garfield’s political ascent, which had begun with his 1859 election to the State Senate and to Congress in 1862—with time off during the Civil War to lead Ohio troops as a Union general—showed no signs of slowing. Back East, he would be resuming his duties as chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee and a political partnership with House Speaker James G. Blaine. A rude shock greeted him, however, in the form of newspaper stories and headlines screaming about Credit Mobilier. As he was on his way home, Garfield struggled to grasp his circumstances. “I find my own name dragged into some story which I do not understand but see only referred to in the newspapers,” he confided in his diary on September 9. As his train was nearing Ohio, Garfield dashed off a note to Colfax inquiring “about the nature of the slander against him and me and others.” Responding by mail, Colfax professed indifference to the revelations, but the vice president later made an emotional denial before a hometown crowd in South Bend, Indiana, that would be proven false. Back in Washington, Garfield turned for additional advice to a high-powered capital attorney. Pennsylvanian Jeremiah Sullivan Black, a Democrat, had been a state judge and attorney general and secretary of state during the Buchanan administration. If anyone could erase Garfield’s uncertainties, it was this consummate Washington insider, to whom Garfield referred as “a great and delightful friend.” Black may have been a treasured confidant, but he was not a disinterested observer. He had represented McComb in his suit against Ames and had tipped a Washington correspondent for the Sun to McComb’s testimony. Seeking counsel on how best to respond to the Credit Mobilier revelations, Garfield was relying on the man responsible for leaking them. 1873 cartoon showing the dead, dying, and crippled in the Credit Mobilier ward, with Vice President Schuyler Colfax at center in coffin. Black assured Garfield that all was well. Ames was guilty of offering a bribe, Black advised, but because Garfield had not known bribery to be Ames’s purpose, Garfield was not guilty of accepting a payoff. Garfield should remain calm and profess ignorance about Ames’s intentions, Black said, adding that this stance “shows that you were not the instrument of his corruption, but the victim of his deception.” Placated, Garfield met with Blaine in early December to plan an investigation into the Sun allegations. The next day, the House formed a committee of two regular Republicans, one Liberal Republican, and two Democrats, to look into the charges. U.S. Representative Luke Potter Poland (R-Vermont), headed the panel. At first meeting in secret, the committee took testimony from Ames and McComb. When protests by the press and the public forced the proceedings into the open, members and former members of Congress trooped into the committee room to tell their sides. Most denied buying shares or claimed to have backed out of deals shortly after purchasing shares. Ames insisted that there was nothing wrong with a member of Congress holding stock in a corporation that could be affected by the legislation of Congress. The Sun wryly headlined a series of stories on the hearings “Trial of the Innocents.” With the press and Capitol Hill fixated on the scandal, Garfield found staying as cool as Black had advised easier said than done. As the day of his testimony was approaching, Garfield battled a nausea-inducing bout with nerves. The House floor, usually a refuge where lawmakers could immerse themselves in legislative debate or gossip, offered no relief. Garfield felt the House to be consumed by a “feeling of panic” caused by the continuing “discussion of the Credit Mobilier and the Pacific R.R,” he wrote in his diary. On January 14, Garfield testified as Black had counseled. He admitted under oath that he had discussed purchasing Credit Mobilier stock with Ames but said he never actually agreed to buy shares—and claimed not to have known at the time what exactly Credit Mobilier did. “You never examined the charter of the Credit Mobilier to see what were its objects?” committee member George McCrary (R-Iowa) asked. “No sir,” Garfield replied. “I never saw it.” He was under the impression, Garfield maintained, that the company built housing. “You did not know that the object was to build the Union Pacific Railroad?” “No sir,” Garfield said. “I did not.” Garfield’s denial echoed similar dodges by Colfax, Kelley, Patterson, Wilson, and others. The evasions infuriated the King of Spades. As congressmen who had bought stock from Ames were trying to put as much distance between themselves and Credit Mobilier as possible, the Massachusetts Republican again addressed the investigative committee. He explained in detail his transactions with members of the House and Senate. Patterson, the Republican senator from New Hampshire, was Ames’s first target. Having once denied to the committee that he had bought Credit Mobilier shares from Ames, former schoolteacher Patterson returned to admit under oath that he had bought the shares. Ames looked on as Patterson squirmed “like one of the poor delinquents he used to torture” in the classroom, the Sun reported. The next day, Ames elaborated, testifying that many lawmakers had held shares far longer than claimed and as a result had reaped substantial dividends. Ames’s revelations enraged James Garfield. The King of Spades “is evidently determined to drag down as many men with him as possible,” Garfield steamed in his diary on January 22. “How far he will be successful it remains to be seen. But in the present condition of the public mind, he will probably succeed in throwing a cloud over the good name of many people. He seems to me as bad a man as can well be.” As fellow lawmakers were trying without success to clear their names, Garfield swung between optimism and despair. On February 8, he wrote a friend in Ohio that “men here are recovering their balance a little and begin to think with more calmness on the merits of the case” but stopped short of forecasting an end to his troubles. It was “too early,” Garfield cautioned his correspondent, “to tell into what conclusions the public judgment” would be. Writing in his diary a day later after dining with Black, he struck a gloomier note, dismissing the other man’s sunny predictions. Garfield said he doubted Black saw “all the forces that are now at work to injure and defame.” Weeks of tension climaxed on February 18, 1873, with release of the Poland committee report. That body’s findings and recommendations resounded through the House chamber for about an hour as the House clerk read the document aloud and implicated lawmakers grimaced and glared. “The report produced a profound sensation and was listened to with silence and painful interest,” Garfield wrote in his diary. Garfield pursed his lips and avoided eye contact as the clerk read a committee finding that he had bought 10 shares from Ames and received $329—$8,060 today—in dividends. The committee concluded that virtually every individual on the roster McComb’s provided had made money on Credit Mobilier shares sold by Ames. Poland demanded that the House expel Ames and Brooks. Despite the committee’s findings, Garfield felt vindicated. In an outcome that infuriated Democrats and the public, the committee concluded that Ames had been attempting to use Credit Mobilier stock to sway lawmakers’ votes—but also that Garfield and others who bought the stock were innocent of wrongdoing. The Poland committee could not “find that any of these members of Congress have been affected in their official action in consequence of their interest in Credit Mobilier stock.” Black, the influential capital insider who distinguished between offering and receiving a bribe, had been right. But if Garfield thought the worst was past, he was badly mistaken. The Senate failed to vote on the expulsion of Patterson recommended by the Senate committee examining the scandal. Public fury intensified when, just before leaving town, Congress voted itself a retroactive pay increase—accomplished by attaching the bump up to an appropriations bill that Garfield had managed. On top of everything else, the aftershocks of the Panic of 1873, an economic plunge which triggered the worst economic crisis in American history until the Great Depression of the 1930s, intensified the ensuing political crisis. Woodcut depicts the 1881 attack on President Garfield at Washington, DC’s Union Station. Garfield’s death apparently was caused by doctors’ unsanitary handling of his wound. (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper) Garfield responded with dispatch. He quickly refunded his own raise, a gesture that the local press applauded. He published a paper defending himself against the Credit Mobilier allegations and he campaigned energetically across his district. These efforts helped fend off disaster, but Garfield also benefited from a divided opposition that fielded two candidates—a Democrat and an Independent who had been nominated by Garfield’s Republican foes. Democratic attempts to link Garfield to a paving contract scandal in Washington, DC, went nowhere. Garfield hung on to win re-election in 1874 even as Republicans lost dominance of the House for the first time since 1858. His escape accelerated Garfield’s rise through Republican ranks. When Blaine went to the Senate in 1876, Garfield became House Republican leader. In 1880, divided Republicans turned to Garfield over Grant and Blaine as their presidential nominee (“Porch Politics,” August 2016). Tintype badge distributed to Garfield supporters during the 1880 presidential election campaign. (Heritage Auctions) As Garfield had feared, the specter of Credit Mobilier lingered. During the 1880 campaign Democrats made the scandalous affair a rallying cry. “Are honest men willing to put at the head of the most important nation on the globe a man whose oath has been squarely contradicted as was Gen. Garfield’s oath in the Credit Mobilier report?” the Democratic Washington Post asked. The answer was yes—barely. Garfield’s 59-vote Electoral College win masked a razor-thin 8,355-vote popular margin over Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock. On July 2, 1881, the president was waiting to board a train in Washington when a delusional man ritually characterized as a “disgruntled officer-seeker” shot and badly wounded him. Garfield died September 19 from infections caused by doctors’ unsanitary handling of his injuries. Historians convinced that intraparty feuding consumed Garfield’s presidency damn him with faint praise. “His stormy presidency was brief, and in some respects unfortunate, but he did leave the office stronger than when he found it,” biographer Allan Peskin wrote in 1978.  Just after his death, though, the once-jaundiced Post was more effusive. “The events of his wonderful life, supplemented by the sad dramatic incidents of the past two and half months, will make such chapters of history as will be read with ever-increasing interest for centuries to come.” The paper made no mention of Credit Mobilier or Garfield’s hand in the scandal that less than a decade earlier rocked the capital. The “shadow of the cursed thing” had lifted, at last. ______ A Credit Mobilier Primer In passing the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, Congress intended to promote construction of the transcontinental railroad with $48,000 in governmentbacked bonds and 6,400 acres in land grants for every mile of track laid. Despite the proffered federal largesse, investors stayed away because the law barred the railroad from selling its securities at less than face value and put investors on the hook should the venture fail. In addition, the railroad was to be built across the vast expanse of the West to serve markets and communities that did not yet exist. By 1864, the Union Pacific needed to raise capital—and fast—or construction of the transcontinental line would stall. Swashbuckling Union Pacific Vice President Thomas C. Durant, nicknamed “the Napoleon of Railways,” improvised a solution. Durant bought a Pennsylvania-chartered construction company he rechristened “Credit Mobilier,” borrowing a prominent French bank’s glamorous name. Durant used Credit Mobilier to build his railroad. More importantly, Credit Mobilier could generate profits for itself and dividends for Union Pacific stockholders by inflating construction costs and taking payment in Union Pacific securities. Unlike the railroad, Credit Mobilier, upon receiving Union Pacific shares in payment, could resell those shares at the market price rather than the rate Congresshad set. And customers who obtained Union Pacific stock through Credit Mobilier avoided the liability hanging over those who invested directly in the railroad. Durant’s arrangement allowed investors to pay themselves to build the Union Pacific, an arrangement commonly used by other railroads that in this instance raised questions about whether the government was being fleeced. Representative Oakes Ames (R-Massachusetts), an avid railroad investor, believed Credit Mobilier offered a “practical scheme” for profitably investing in the Union Pacific. He poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the venture and recruited fellow New Englanders to invest before falling out with Durant in a battle for control of the Union Pacific and its lucrative construction subsidiary. In autumn 1867, as Ames and Durant resolved their differences, they divided unallocated Credit Mobilier shares and formalized a $48 million construction contract with the railroad. A congressional committee found that Credit Mobilier billed the railroad $57.1 million for construction when the actual cost was $27.1 million, producing a profit of almost $30 million—$513 million today. The lucrative pact made Credit Mobilier shares much more valuable—one investor estimated that the stock doubled in value as a result—just as Ames began to peddle them on Capitol Hill. —Robert B. Mitchell Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age by Robert B Mitchell, Edinborough Press, 2017; $22.95

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https://www.historynet.com/james-marshall-californias-gold-discoverer.htm

James Marshall: California’s Gold Discoverer

James Marshall: California’s Gold Discoverer If luck were a critical factor in the discovery of gold that initiated the California Gold Rush, probably the unluckiest man of that period was no other than the original discoverer himself, James Wilson Marshall. Few people know about Marshall’s ironically tragic life after he made his great discovery, from which he did not profit; he died with assets barely sufficient to cover his funeral expenses. Marshall’s gold discovery more than 150 years ago arguably began the modernization of California. The events that set the world in motion to the new El Dorado began almost by accident–John Sutter decided to build a sawmill in partnership with his employee, James Marshall, in 1847. Born on October 8, 1810, in New Jersey, where his great-grandfather had served as a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the young Marshall received an adequate education for that era. He also was taught his father’s trade as a carpenter and wheelwright. His early years were marked by conflicts with his stern Baptist father and rejection by two young women, each of whom he had hoped to marry. Marshall never did marry. Hoping to get on with his life under better circumstances, young James headed west, drifting into the Ohio Valley during the 1830s and for a while settling in Missouri. In 1844, he arrived in Oregon by wagon train. After spending a long, wet winter doing carpentry in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, Marshall soon wandered south to California where he worked for Sutter, making tools, furniture, spinning wheels, looms and virtually anything else that could be made from wood. In 1846, the restless Marshall joined the Bear Flag Rebellion and served under John C. Frémont as the Mexican War spread into California. In 1847, having been discharged, he returned to Sutter’s employ. Marshall convinced Sutter that a partnership in a sawmill in the Sierra Nevada foothills would be a profitable venture, and he set out to find a suitable location. On the south fork of the American River, 45 miles northeast of Sutter’s Fort, near a Maidu Indian village called Cullumah (Coloma), Marshall began construction. He enlisted the services of local Indians and Mormon veterans of the Mexican War to build the mill, which was nearly complete by late 1847. Each night Marshall directed the river’s flow through the millrace to allow erosion to deepen the channel and carry away the debris from the previous day’s work. On January 24, 1848, during his regular morning inspection, he made the discovery that would change the course of California and even American history. He spotted a gleam in the bottom of the ditch, scooped up a handful of gravel, examined it closely and concluded that he had found what appeared to be gold. Before taking samples to Sutter, who had financed the building of the mill, Marshall conducted crude tests to better determine the authenticity of his find by comparing flakes with a $5 gold piece and pounding a nugget on an anvil. He knew that real gold was soft and malleable and would not shatter like fool’s gold–iron pyrite or mica. Additional tests at Sutter’s Mill convinced the partners that Marshall indeed had found gold. They decided to keep the discovery as secret as possible. Surprisingly, their orders to remain silent generally were followed. For the time being at least, workers at the mill continued to perform their usual tasks, remained reasonably silent and prospected individually on their own time. Although most Californians who heard of the strike doubted its significance, by May 1848 word had reached San Francisco when a Mormon merchant, Sam Brannan, waved a quinine bottle filled with glittering dust at San Franciscans. ‘Gold,’ he shouted, ‘Gold, gold from the American River!’ Within days, half of the city’s population had departed, and within weeks, the news had spread as far south as distant, sleepy San Diego. During 1848, Marshall and Sutter tried in vain to claim ownership of the Coloma property and charge a commission for any gold found by other miners. Only a few of the most naive newcomers paid Marshall any money or respected his self-proclaimed property rights. By the end of 1848, he was forced to sell one third of his timber and mill rights to raise money. He haggled with the eager prospectors so forcefully that they became enraged to the point of finally attacking the millhands and driving Marshall from the site of his discovery. Despite prior appropriation, the greedy miners in their furious rush to get rich quick showed Marshall and Sutter no respect or restraint. At that point, the bewildered, depressed Marshall seriously undermined his own future. For whatever reasons, he began to claim supernatural, mystical powers that allegedly allowed him to locate the richest gold deposits. His refusal to reveal the location of these so-called rich diggings only angered resentful miners, who even threatened to lynch him if he did not lead them to new sources of treasure. Marshall was forced to flee for his life and try to start over as just another prospector. However, his identity was so widely and well known that miners hounded him wherever he went. By 1853, Marshall could stomach no more. He packed a few supplies on his back and sought to hide out in the hills. A quotation from his memoirs suggests his plight at the time: ‘I was soon forced to again leave Coloma for want of food. My property was swept from me, and no one would give me employment. I have had to carry my pack of thirty or forty pounds over the mountains, living on China rice alone. If I sought employment, I was refused on the reasoning that I had discovered the goldmines, and should be the one to employ them; they did not wish the man that made the discovery under their control….Thus I wandered for more than four years.’ In time, failed mining and other business ventures deeply embittered Marshall. He believed that the world–or at least the state–owed him something for his remarkable discovery. Every financial setback he suffered he interpreted as a conscious effort by somebody to deprive him of what he considered to be his divine rights. His eccentric behavior alienated all but a few friends, leaving him a virtual recluse. This was an ironic turn of events, since at one time large numbers of miners had been willing to follow him anywhere in search of gold. In 1872, he received some compensation for his contribution to California’s gold-crazed growth. The state Legislature awarded him a $200-per-month pension. Marshall was 62 years old at the time. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Kelsey, a few miles east of Coloma, where he used the money to open a blacksmith shop. He worked there and lived in the Union Hotel until his death on August 10, 1885. In the meantime, his state pension had been cut in half after 1874 and eliminated entirely in 1876. During his last years, Marshall, who had become an obvious alcoholic, was forced to live by handyman jobs, handouts and the sale of his autograph on special cards for 50 cents each. An attempted lecture tour failed to sustain a profit, in part because Marshall was a poor speaker. Margaret A. Kelly, Marshall’s friend during his embittered old age, wrote that ‘probably no man ever went to his grave so misunderstood, so misjudged, so misrepresented, so altogether slandered as James W. Marshall.’ Although possibly true, it should be noted that Marshall’s self-destructive, often bizarre behavior contributed to his misfortune. Even before his famous discovery, he was known as a person who told tales about spiritual visions and claimed to have heard strange voices. On May 3, 1890, a monument of the man whose discovery unleashed the force and fury of the California Gold Rush was officially dedicated with an elaborate program attended by thousands. The statue shows the former carpenter pointing at the spot where he allegedly found the first flakes of gold. It was financed by the Native Sons of the Golden West and an appropriation by the state legislature. Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park in Coloma also commemorates the gold discovery and contains artifacts and memorabilia regarding the man himself. An authentic replica of the sawmill still operates, and a few old gold rush buildings remain intact from Coloma’s glory days. Harassed and unappreciated throughout much of his adult life, Marshall was a tragic victim of nature’s great lottery. Ironically, he has been remembered in death as one of California’s more influential–though accidental–history-makers. The original nugget he found, which has long belonged to the Bancroft Library at the University of California in Berkeley, is called the Wimmer Nugget after Peter L. Wimmer, Marshall’s assistant in supervising the Indians and others who dug the tailrace of Sutter’s Mill. Wimmer’s wife tested the metal by boiling it with homemade soap to assure that it would emerge untarnished. Despite the involvement of others in determining that Marshall indeed had discovered gold, one would think that the nugget should have been named in his honor–the oversight being just one more of the many ironic twists of fate that plagued Marshall’s troubled life. A final irony is that Marshall was not, as is generally assumed, the original discoverer of gold in California. The metal was mined at least as early as the beginning of the 19th century, if not before. California Indians gave gold to the mission padres in return for trading goods. According to the late California historian W. H. Hutchinson,’such minor amounts…did not stimulate any gold seeking expeditions of consequence…because the Franciscans had seen the evils wrought by mining upon the native population of Mexico and did not wish to see such havoc repeated in California.’ Padre Luis Antonio Martinez of Mission San Luis Obispo did, however, operate a modest gold mine in his district in 1829. And in 1841, Baptiste Ruelle, a French Canadian fur trapper who had worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company, uncovered a gold deposit near Los Angeles, according to John Bidwell, organizer of the first emigrant wagon train from Missouri to California. Early gold discoveries such as these generally were unpublicized and were of only local interest. Still, small shipments of gold dust turned up in the trade between merchants in New England and missionaries and rancheros in California. A vaquero named Francisco Lopez is credited with making the first commercially significant, well-documented gold discovery on March 9, 1842, in Placerita Canyon about 35 miles northwest of Los Angeles. According to legend, Lopez fell asleep under an old oak tree after tending cattle on a nearby rancho. When he awoke, he unearthed some wild onions–with which to season his lunch of dried beef or jerky–and found glittering gold flakes clinging to the roots. Within two months, about 100 miners, mostly Mexican, were working the diggings, which produced gold for several years. It is estimated about $80,000 in gold was taken from the canyon before the shallow deposits played out. Oddly enough, the first gold sent from California to the U.S. mint in Philadelphia did not come from James Marshall or Coloma but from Placerita Canyon. Don Abel Stearns, a native of Massachusetts who became a naturalized Mexican citizen and large landowner in California, shipped 20 ounces of gold to the East. It was another six years before James Marshall made the discovery that created his reputation, mistakenly, as the original discoverer of California gold. Unlike the earlier discoveries, however, his find was like a shot heard around the world. This article was written by Richard H. Peterson, Ph.D. and originally appeared in the December 1997 issue of Wild West. Peterson has published extensively in the mining history of California and the West, including numerous book reviews, articles and three books. The best-known of the latter is The Bonanza Kings: The Social Origins and Business Behavior of Western Mining Entrepreneurs, 1879-1900. Suggested for further reading: James Marshall, a Biography, by Theressa Gay; Sutter’s Fort, Gateway to the Goldfields, by Oscar Lewis; The California Gold Discovery, by Rodman Paul; and The Gold Discovery Journal, by Azariah Smith. Note: An abbreviated version of this article was published in the January 1997 issue of the International California Mining Journal, and this version appears here with the permission of that publication’s publisher/editor. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Wild West magazine today!

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January 2020 Readers’ Letters

January 2020 Readers’ Letters On the Bottle I noticed on P. 24 of the September 2019 issue of Military History (“Medusa’s Curse,” by Bob Gordon) that on the Canadians’ vehicle antennae there appear to be plastic bottles taped on upside down [see above]. Can you advise what is the purpose of this attachment? Bruce Baker Roseville, Calif. Editor responds: Canadian units employ such antenna-mounted water bottles to hold infrared chemlights (glow sticks). When maintaining order after dark, a quick glance through night-vision goggles would quickly reveal the organization of the vehicles around you. Depending on the unit and the operating environment, the color and/or number of chemlights would represent the sub-unit. Ukraine For many years I have enjoyed your magazine, and I continue to subscribe and read through the many diverse topics. They are thorough and entertaining. One question: I traveled through Ukraine three times in the last three years and observed firsthand a country on a war footing, single-handedly holding back the threat of Russia and subsequent desire for empire and domination of Eastern Europe. Some 15,000 civilians and nearly 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. I observed and attended a half-dozen military funerals during my visits. I also learned that for all practical purposes the country was the actual “Russian front” during World War II, and the sheer numbers of civilian dead and soldiery were far in advance of many other countries. I have always heard “20 million killed” during World War II but did not realize the majority were Ukrainians. Now, I read bits and pieces of battles and strategies here and there and catch a few YouTube videos, but this very dramatic standoff between these two countries and the implications of seeing the first major European war since World War II lends me to ask if this conflict is on your editorial radar. Victor Czerkasij Cleveland, Tenn. Editor responds: The ongoing confrontation between Ukraine and Russia—and their respective proxies—could indeed spark a wider war in Europe. That said, our general rule of thumb is to cover conflicts that occurred 15 or more years ago, simply because anything more recent is more properly considered to be current events rather than military history. Remote Control Your November 2019 issue featured superb stories of lesser known military history. Never knew the details on the Breaker Morant case. Thought he was the hero depicted in the Australian movie until your revelation [“The Breaking of Harry Morant,” by Ron Soodalter]. A small correction to your article about airborne turrets [“Aim for the Sky,” by Jon Guttman]: The chin turret of the Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress was not technically manned. It was controlled by the bombardier from a remote aiming and firing device mounted above his Norden bombsight position, with the turret guns themselves mounted below his deck floor position. This remote aiming system and associated firing device would later be employed by Boeing on all defensive turrets in the B-29 Superfortress. Col. Wayne Long U.S. Army (Ret.) Haverford, Pa. WWI Relics Regarding your World War I portfolio [“World War Relics,” November 2018]: I’ve dabbled in militaria and collecting since I was in the service. A couple of points I noticed: Under caption G the Springfield bayonet scabbard is missing the canvas cover with the leather tip, and under caption K the trench knives are not “custom.” The wooden-handled knife was found to be unsatisfactory. After just thousands of them were produced, the brass-handled (Mark I) trench knife was produced in numbers exceeding 100,000, mostly at Landers, Frary & Clark [in New Britain, Conn.]. A cruder version was produced at a French firm, Au Lion. While not “custom,” they were specific to the task of hand-to-hand combat. The brass-handled knife stayed in service in various forms through World War II. Denny Andrews Bellevue, Wash. Send letters to Editor, Military History, HistoryNet, 1919 Gallows Road, Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182-4038 or via email. Please include name, address and phone number.

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What if Japan Hadn’t Attacked Pearl Harbor?

What if Japan Hadn’t Attacked Pearl Harbor? Japan never seriously considered the following scenario—but might have been wise to do so. On December 15, 1941, naval and air units of the empire of Japan suddenly and deliberately attack the Dutch naval squadron at Batavia in the Netherlands East Indies (present-day Indonesia). They destroy or damage all five cruisers and eight destroyers, leaving fifty-five-year-old Vice Adm. Conrad Emil Lambert Helfrich with only twenty submarines and numerous but frail torpedo boats with which to retaliate. Shortly thereafter the Japanese Sixteenth Army invades the Dutch portion of the island of Borneo—scrupulously avoiding portions administered by Great Britain— then rapidly follows up with attacks on Java, Sumatra, Sulawesi, and other major islands in the East Indies archipelago. The puny Dutch garrisons are swiftly overrun, the Dutch naval bases at Batavia and Surabaya quickly fall, and by the end of February 1942, Japan has secured the Netherlands East Indies’ cornucopia of petroleum, natural gas, tin, manganese, copper, nickel, bauxite, and coal. The Japanese government had taken the first step toward an attack on the East Indies in July 1941, when it demanded and received from Vichy France the right to station troops, construct airfields, and base warships in southern Indochina. The German invasion of the Soviet Union the previous month had removed any threat from that direction and cleared the way for a thrust southward. The southward move, in turn, was predicated on Japan’s desire to secure enough natural resources to become self-sufficient. It was dangerously dependent on America for scrap iron, steel, and above all oil: 80 percent of its petroleum came from the United States. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration had been attempting for years to use economic sanctions as lever age to force Japan to abandon its invasion of China. As expected, the move into southern Indochina triggered a total freeze of Japanese assets in the United States and a complete oil embargo. Japanese leaders initially assume that if they proceed with their intention to grab the Dutch East Indies, the inevitable con sequence will be war with both the British Commonwealth and the United States. Consequently, plans also include attacks on British bases at Singapore and Hong Kong, American bases in the Philippine Islands, and even the forward base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Careful review of the British and American situations, however, prompts a reconsideration by Japan’s planners. They conclude that the beleaguered British cannot afford to add Japan to their existing adversaries, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Britain especially cannot do so without a guarantee that the United States will enter a war with Japan. And although the Roosevelt administration might engage in threats, American public opinion is so averse to war that the president has been unable to persuade the country to enter the fight against the Nazis despite their conquest of most of Europe. Indeed, a July 1941 bill to extend the nation’s peacetime draft—which the Roosevelt administration deemed fundamental to U.S. national security—passed by a single vote. The revised Japanese plan therefore contemplates an attack on the Dutch East Indies alone, albeit with most of the Imperial Japanese Navy held in reserve should either Great Britain or the United States declare war. Events completely vindicate Japan’s gamble. British prime minister Winston Churchill reinforces Singapore but otherwise adopts a defensive posture in Southeast Asia. Already thwarted in his efforts to make the case for war against Hitler’s Germany, neither Roosevelt nor his advisers can think of a rationale persuasive enough to convince the public that American boys should fight and die because the Japanese have overrun an obscure European colony. How plausible is this scenario? There is little doubt that Japan could have swiftly defeated the Dutch and seized the East Indies in mid December 1941. Even when (as occurred historically) the Americans, British, and Australians added their available warships to the defense of the Dutch colony, the Japanese had little trouble overrunning the entire archipelago by March 1942. The harder question to answer definitively is what course Britain and America actually would have pursued if Japan had bypassed their Pacific possessions and also, of course, refrained from an air strike against Pearl Harbor. The British plainly could not have sustained such a war without American help. True, Great Britain and the United States had been steadily making common cause against Nazi Germany. The U.S. Congress had passed the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, and U.S. destroyers had begun escorting convoys bound for Great Britain to the mid-Atlantic before handing them off to their British counterparts. In August, Churchill and Roosevelt had met for a secret conference in the waters off Newfoundland, a summit that had included military as well as diplomatic discussions. And by the autumn of 1941, the U.S. Navy was engaged in an undeclared but lethal war with German U-boats. Cooperation to prepare for a conflict with Japan, however, was considerably less advanced. At the Atlantic Conference, the British had given the Americans text for a proposed warning to Japan to be sent jointly by Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States, stating that if Japan pursued further aggression in Southeast Asia, the three countries “would be compelled to take counter measures even though these might lead to war.” Roosevelt agreed to make such a stern statement— but unilaterally, not jointly—and as matters turned out, the president told the Japanese ambassador merely that if Japan struck southward, he would take steps “toward insuring the safety and security of the United States.” As the crisis with Japan deepened, Roosevelt’s top military advisers told him that while they preferred a less provocative diplomatic line toward Japan, the United States could not stand by if the Japanese struck American, British, or Dutch possessions and would have no choice but to take military action in that case. Privately Roosevelt agreed, and on December 1 he told the British ambassador that in the event Japan attacked the Dutch East Indies or British possessions in Southeast Asia, “we should all be in this together.” When the ambassador pressed him to be specific, Roosevelt replied that the British could count on “armed support” from the United States. But the president also worried about his ability to do so if American possessions continued to be spared by the Japanese. As historian David Reynolds points out, “Roosevelt could only propose war; Congress had to declare it. From a purely diplomatic point of view, Pearl Harbor was therefore a godsend.” It would have been difficult to persuade Congress that an attack upon the Dutch East Indies alone demanded a military response; it might well have proved impossible. In the end the dilemma never arose because the Japanese never considered such an alternative strategy. Once the Japanese government decided that it must seize the natural resources of the Dutch East Indies, it never seriously considered any plan but a simultaneous attack against the British and the United States in the Pacific. This decision was driven overwhelmingly by operational considerations: Japan’s military planners believed they could not run the risk of leaving the American air and naval bases in the Philippines athwart their line of communications with the East Indies. For that reason they concluded the Philippines must be captured as well. Ironically, by refusing to run such an operational risk, they wound up taking an even larger strategic risk, for the attack on Pearl Harbor was premised on the highly tenuous assumption of a short war with the United States followed by a negotiated peace that would allow Japan to keep its territorial gains. Japan bet that American public opinion would never countenance a prolonged and bloody Pacific war and that the combination of the blow to the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor and Japan’s erection of a hermetic defensive perimeter in the Central and South Pacific would convince America to throw in the towel. As actual events subsequently showed, that was a poor bet. Originally published in the September 2007 issue of World War II Magazine. To subscribe, click here.

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How Japanese American Linguists helped the U.S. Army fight Japan

How Japanese American Linguists helped the U.S. Army fight Japan With their loyalty to the U.S. in question, Japanese American soldiers wielded the native language of their parents to save American lives and shorten the Pacific War On a ridgetop near Nhpum Ga, Burma, the stench of animals rotting in the oppressive jungle heat was so strong, soldiers of the second battalion, 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional) dubbed the place “Maggot Hill.” Stranded there as their provisions, ammunition, and hope dwindled, most of the men masked their terror with foxhole-talk of the girls and families waiting for them back home. But Sergeant Roy Matsumoto kept silent, one ear tuned to his fellow Americans, the other to the familiar rhythms of muffled enemy voices rising from the entrenchments at the base of the hill. It was April 1944, nearly 14 years since the short, bespectacled sergeant had last seen his parents. Matsumoto, 30, had been born in Los Angeles in May 1913, the eldest son of first-generation Japanese immigrants. At age 8, his parents had sent him to their native Hiroshima to be brought up in Japan’s rigorous school system. The rest of the family soon followed, but when Matsumoto became too friendly with a girl at 17, his parents sent him back to California to finish his education and work in a family friend’s Japanese grocery store. In parting, his mother told him to always remain true to his country of birth. Army linguist Roy Matsumoto (here in 1947) was born in Los Angeles but spent much of his childhood in Hiroshima, Japan, with his parents and siblings. His knowledge of Japanese language and culture proved invaluable to the army during the war. (Courtesy of Karen Matsumoto) In spring 1942 that loyalty was tested when Matsumoto and 120,000 other Americans of Japanese descent living on the West Coast were confined to inland internment camps. The outbreak of war with Japan had made their ethnic ties and understanding of the Japanese language subject to mistrust by the U.S. government. Yet those were the very characteristics that led the army to recruit Matsumoto for its top-secret Military Intelligence Service (MIS). Throughout the war, more than 6,000 Japanese Americans would serve in the MIS as translators and interrogators—often at great risk—for 130 units across the Pacific, including the famed Merrill’s Marauders of the 5307th, a precursor to today’s Army Rangers. (See “Conversation with Sam Wilson.”) In February 1944 Matsumoto and 13 other Japanese American linguists followed Brigadier General Frank Merrill into northern Burma. The linguists’ mission was to interpret captured documents and interrogate prisoners as the 5307th fought against the Japanese 18th Division to retake the Burma Road, a critical Allied supply line connecting Burmese seaports to southwest China. Two months in, Matsumoto found himself isolated with the second battalion at Nhpum Ga, desperate for intelligence that might end the Japanese siege. As had become his nightly custom, Matsumoto shed his jingling pistol belt and helmet and crawled silently to within 15 muddy yards of the Japanese camp, close enough to make out the enemy chatter. His risky exploits paid off just before midnight, when an officer speaking a dialect Matsumoto had picked up during his grocery store days briefed his men for a predawn assault on Maggot Hill. Matsumoto reported his news to the American lieutenant in charge of the targeted platoon, and the ready Marauders annihilated the first enemy wave to charge the hill at 4 a.m. Stunned by the counterattack, a second wave of Japanese soldiers following close behind began to retreat in the breaking darkness. But Matsumoto leapt from his foxhole, stood between the two lines of fire and—in his best impression of a Japanese commander—shouted “Totsugeki! Susume!” ordering the enemy to advance. The ruse worked; the remaining soldiers rushed straight into an American ambush. Matsumoto’s actions would add another accolade to the trove Japanese American MIS soldiers would earn in a decade of exemplary service to a nation that had questioned their allegiance. IN SPRING 1941, as Japan’s actions in the Pacific made war with the U.S. increasingly likely, U.S. Army intelligence officers Major John Weckerling and Captain Kai Rasmussen predicted the need for skilled linguists to support military operations abroad. Granted a $2,000 budget by the War Department to open the Fourth Army Intelligence School, under the Western Defense Command, Weckerling and Rasmussen began recruiting soldiers with an aptitude for the complex Japanese language. Before the war, Kai E. Rasmussen (here as a colonel) anticipated the need for soldiers familiar with Japanese and helped establish an army language school. (Defense Language Institute Archives) The best candidates were Nisei, American-born progeny of parents who had come to the United States from Japan before immigration was banned in 1924. Most Nisei had a working knowledge of spoken Japanese and exposure to its writing system known as kanji, which gave them an edge in tackling the school’s accelerated curriculum. Weckerling and Rasmussen interviewed hundreds of Nisei soldiers and selected 58 of the most advanced linguists to begin lessons in an abandoned air hangar at the Fourth Army headquarters at the Presidio of San Francisco in November 1941. After the attack on Pearl Harbor raised skepticism of Japanese American loyalty, they added about a dozen white recruits to the class roster, hoping to cultivate them into officers who could lead the Nisei in the field. Using photocopies of Japanese military handbooks Rasmussen had picked up as an attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, and Japanese dictionaries purchased from bookstores in San Francisco, instructors coached students through intensive study of Japanese military lexicon and customs, including identification of uniforms and insignia. With the February 1942 issuance of Executive Order 9066, the U.S. military barred Japanese Americans from the West Coast, ordered them to internment camps, and classified them as ineligible for service. Most Nisei already in the military were transferred to inland bases with no prospect of deployment. The school, too, had to move. Before doing so, the program commenced its first graduates: 40 Nisei students and two white reserve officers—both born to English-teaching parents in Tokyo. The remaining 28-some students had failed to meet the school’s high standards. Shortly after the May ceremony, the school relocated to a rundown former Civilian Conservation Corps facility in Saint Paul, Minnesota, aptly named Camp Savage. Now named the Military Intelligence Service Language School, after the War Department had consolidated the army’s intelligence functions into the new Military Intelligence Service, the school was placed under Rasmussen’s command. A new class of 200 students began lessons there on June 1, 1942. The first graduates, meanwhile, received their initial assignments. Ten Nisei went to Camp Savage as instructors. Five were sent to Alaska to help monitor Japanese radio traffic in the Aleutian Islands. Major David W. Swift, one of the two white graduates, led a team of eight Nisei to General Douglas MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific headquarters in Australia to establish what would soon become the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section. The remaining graduates, including Captain John Burden, the other white officer, were assigned in small groups to units throughout the South Pacific. Students at the MIS school’s original location in San Francisco. (National Archives) Field commanders at this stage knew little of the linguist program and were leery of the Nisei soldiers. The first group to reach South Pacific headquarters in New Caledonia pulled driving or guard duty for weeks before being given the opportunity to scrutinize enemy communications in preparation for ground offensives in the Solomon Islands. “There was this innate distrust or fear of us that we had to overcome,” Jim Masaru Ariyasu, an MIS linguist, recalled in a 2006 interview. “We were in the midst of white officers, even generals, who were not in total confidence of us, and other GIs would look suspiciously at us and wonder what we were doing.” After Burden arrived in Guadalcanal in October 1942, he convinced his superiors to deploy MIS teams to forward areas where they would have their first opportunity to interpret real-time intelligence. These Nisei linguists translated a captured Japanese operations plan that revealed locations of key armaments and ammunition, helping Allied forces anticipate enemy movements and secure Guadalcanal by February 1943. The Niseis’ performance proved invaluable to their fellow soldiers on the frontlines. “I am glad to say that those who opposed the use of Nisei the most are now their most enthusiastic advocates,” Burden would write to the school that March. WECKERLING AND RASMUSSEN had been right in their predictions; commanders across the Pacific were soon begging for Japanese linguists. The army filled the order by combing through the ranks of Japanese Americans already in uniform. Hiroyuki Nishimura, 24, was one such recruit. He had been drafted in February 1942 during his freshman year at the University of Washington and was stationed at Camp Crowder, Missouri, when MIS recruiters came calling. As a boy in Seattle, Nishimura had grudgingly clocked hundreds of after school hours hunched over textbooks in Japanese language classes while his white peers rounded the bases of nearby ballfields. He half-heartedly completed the recruiters’ tests but protested, “I have no appreciation for Japanese—too hard.” A week later, the army ordered him to Camp Savage. About one in eight Nisei born on the mainland United States had been sent to Japan for part of their education by parents who favored their homeland’s school system. Although the U.S. government was particularly distrustful of these individuals, known as Kibei, they were highly prized recruits for the MIS. While stationed at Fort Warren, Wyoming, in July 1942, Oregon-born Takashi Matsui, a Kibei educated in Fukuoka, Japan, was overheard poking fun at the poor translations in a Japanese pamphlet in the library. He was soon sent to Camp Savage, where Rasmussen tested his language skills and put him on a fast-track to graduate with its first class in December. Shortly after, Matsui was appointed an instructor. By then the school had plucked most suitable candidates from the existing army ranks and received permission from the War Department to dispatch Matsui and other instructors to administer language tests at internment camps, offering high-scoring Nisei the chance to trade their barbed-wire confines for khaki uniforms. Nearly 2,000 internees volunteered for army service—among them Roy Matsumoto. Many Nisei joined the MIS because it gave them the opportunity to serve and to prove their allegiance to the United States. But some who volunteered from the camps faced opposition from peers and family who believed Nisei should not aid the army that had incarcerated them. Daisuke Kitagawa, a minister interned at the Tule Lake War Relocation Center in northeast California, recalled the tense atmosphere in which many of the camp’s Nisei volunteered despite the objections of their Issei, or first-generation immigrant parents. As he wrote in his memoirs, “Some acted secretly; some after several days and nights of bitter argument with their parents.” RASMUSSEN TRUSTED THE task of preparing the MIS linguists for the field to John F. Aiso, a prominent Harvard-educated Nisei attorney. As director of academic training, Aiso set extremely high standards for the Nisei, who made up 85 percent of the student population. He constantly reminded them that their performance would have a direct impact on Japanese Americans’ future in the United States. Most recruits rose to the challenge. At Camp Savage, students attended seven-hour classes each day, mastering not only the language and military customs, but Japanese history and culture, document analysis, and interrogation techniques. After two more hours of compulsory evening study, many stayed up late into the night, poring over their books in the ever-lit latrines. Medical staff would note a dramatic rise in the number of eyeglass prescriptions due to eye strain. As Rasmussen received dispatches from the front about the effectiveness of the training program, Aiso adjusted the curriculum. He incorporated Japanese films into culture classes and recruited veteran linguists to visit as guest lecturers while home on leave. Initially the school had taught harsh interrogation techniques. Instructors played the role of prisoner while students relished the opportunity to shout and threaten them with violence when they resisted cooperation. But as early as the Guadalcanal Campaign, linguists in theater reported that such measures were unnecessary. Since Japan’s “code of honor” called for suicide above surrender, its soldiers were ill-prepared for capture. Prisoners who had expected to be tortured and killed were stunned by the humane treatment they received and often answered their captors’ questions without hesitation, relieved to learn that the Nisei were Americans rather than disguised Japanese officers sent to punish them for being captured. On rare occasions when prisoners resisted questioning, linguists could usually secure their cooperation by simply stating that the Red Cross would notify the prisoner’s spouse or parents that he had been captured alive—an act that would bring shame to the family. The school accordingly began teaching more compassionate interrogation methods. Despite the Nisei students’ exceptional academic performance, they remained under constant Counter Intelligence Corps surveillance for any signs of possible disloyalty. With few exceptions, the War Department refused to commission them. To cultivate leaders for the linguists, the MIS Language School continued to recruit white soldiers with knowledge of Japanese language and customs or with high intelligence test scores. When the War Department requested language personnel, Aiso and a group of advisers handpicked students for assignments. Typically, a white officer was matched with a team of Nisei soldiers trained as interrogators, interpreters, and translators. Although the teams wore U.S. Army uniforms, they could be attached to the Marines, U.S. Navy, or allied militaries. The increasing demand for linguists led the MIS Language School to relocate to larger facilities at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, in August 1944 and expand its admissions to include 50 Nisei members of the Women’s Army Corps and linguists of other races. But the majority of MIS linguists remained Nisei men, who served in the field at great personal risk. If captured, they could be tortured or executed as traitors, and any family still in Japan might face reprisal. Interaction with friendly troops also posed dangers, as Nisei were sometimes mistaken for the enemy. So when Nisei reported for field assignments, they were typically paraded before their new units to reduce the risk of friendly fire. The strategy was not foolproof, however, as Hiroyuki Nishimura learned while serving with the 26th British Indian Infantry Division in Burma in late 1944. When Japanese Americans on the West Coast were interned in 1942, the MIS school had to relocate, too: first to Camp Savage, Minnesota. The growing school moved again, in August 1944, to Fort Snelling, Minnesota (above). (Courtesy of the National Japanese Historical Society) One evening, while Nishimura was staking a bivouac in the dense jungles north of Rangoon, a group of British soldiers from a neighboring camp detained him, suspecting he was a defecting Japanese fighter disguised in a U.S. Army uniform. By the glow of a kerosene lantern, a British commander studied Nishimura’s face while the Indian sergeant assigned as his bodyguard nervously vouched for his identity. After confirming the story with headquarters, the British officer dismissed the rattled pair back into the night. California-born Harry Akune, a Kibei who had volunteered for the MIS from a Colorado internment camp, had a close call in the Philippines. In February 1945 the commander of the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regimental Combat Team asked Akune to accompany his men as the single linguist on an airborne attempt to retake Corregidor, the small Japanese-held island fortress guarding the entrance to Manila Bay. Akune agreed and on February 16, made his virgin parachute jump onto the island with a borrowed rifle and no helmet. After missing the landing zone, Akune scrambled up an embankment to find half a dozen American rifles pointed at him. “I thought, ‘Oh my God. If one of them let go, all of them’s gonna let go. I’m gonna be full of holes,’” Akune recalled in a 2003 interview for Densho, an online digital repository of Japanese American history. He threw down his rifle and raised his hands just in time for one of the men to recognize him and order the others not to fire. As the 503rd established a perimeter on the island, Akune sifted through captured documents as quickly as he received them and soon discovered that the 850 enemy troops they had expected to find on the island actually numbered more than 5,000. The intelligence allowed the 503rd to plan an effective attack and within two weeks Corregidor was in American hands. These and other MIS missions were top-secret, as MacArthur and fellow commanders were adamant that the Japanese not discover one of their most valuable intelligence assets. The Nisei soldiers of the MIS achieved some of the greatest intelligence feats of the Pacific War, interpreting the information that led to the April 1943 assassination of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto and translating the captured Z Plan, which exposed Japan’s 1944 South Pacific defense strategy. Their operations stretched from Washington, DC, to Delhi, and ranged in scope from translating progress reports on Japan’s atomic weapons program for the Manhattan Project to questioning prisoners taken during hostile beach landings. Years later, MacArthur’s chief of intelligence, Major General Charles Willoughby, would say the Nisei “shortened the Pacific War by two years and saved possibly a million American lives and saved probably billions of dollars.” THE JAPANESE SURRENDER signaled a new era for the MIS. With the lifting of Executive Order 9066, the MIS Language School moved to the Presidio of Monterey, California, in June 1946. Over the next seven years, some 3,000 Nisei linguists would use their translation skills in occupied Japan, drafting the new constitution, liaising between U.S. authorities and local populations, and repatriating Japanese citizens from former territories. Nisei soldiers arriving in Japan for the first time were often eager to explore their heritage. For Kibei, occupation assignments often prompted family reunions. After four years as an MIS instructor, in 1946 Takashi Matsui was reassigned to lead an interrogation unit in Japan. Before taking his new post, the army offered him leave to visit his parents in Fukuoka. Matsui was later among about 70 Nisei linguists who assisted with Japanese war crimes tribunals. Occupation duties also provided an unexpected reunion for Roy Matsumoto, who had assumed that his parents and five siblings were killed when the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. While interrogating Japanese POWs in China in 1946, Matsumoto recognized a cousin’s name on a prison roster. His cousin informed him that his parents had moved from Hiroshima to the countryside before the bombing. Eventually, Matsumoto would be reunited with his entire family—including two brothers who had served in the Japanese military. IN 1963 THE MIS Language School became the Defense Language Institute, which today trains U.S. and foreign linguists in more than two dozen languages. The Nisei MIS achievements remained classified until 1972 but, as John Aiso had predicted, their outstanding performance—along with the distinguished service of the Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team and 100th Infantry Battalion in Europe—helped stem the tides of racism and create new opportunities for Japanese Americans in the United States. In 1981 Hiroyuki Nishimura was one of hundreds of Nisei who provided testimony to the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which would eventually offer apologies and reparations to the internees. Roy Matsumoto served in the army for 20 years, where he received the Legion of Merit and was inducted into the Army Ranger Hall of Fame. He lived to celebrate his 100th birthday. (Courtesy of Karen Matsumoto) The MIS linguists received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2010, adding to a long list of individual valor decorations. Aiso and Harry Akune were both inducted to the Mili-tary Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame, along with Roy Matsumoto, who also received the Legion of Merit and was named to the Army Ranger Hall of Fame. With the signature humility of his generation, Matsumoto dismissed the accolades in a 2003 interview for Densho. “I have the knowledge that we survived, and that’s the most important thing for me,” he said. ✯ This story was originally published in the August 2018 issue of World War II magazine. Subscribe here.

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Japan’s Fatally Flawed Air Forces in World War II

Japan’s Fatally Flawed Air Forces in World War II World War II in the Pacific was a fight to seize and defend airfields. The Japanese made gaining and maintaining control of the air as much a requirement in their basic war strategy as they did the destruction of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. But as Commander Masatake Okumiya charged, “The Pacific War was started by men who did not understand the sea, and fought by men who did not understand the air.” He might well have added that the war was planned by men who did not understand industry, manpower and logistics. To say that the Japanese army and navy did not cooperate on aerial matters would be a serious understatement. “They hated each other,” Lt. Cmdr. Masataka Chihaya recalled, “[they] almost fought. Exchange of secrets and experiences, the common use of airplanes and other instruments, could not even be thought of.” Japan, although seemingly advanced in aerial tactics, entered the war with a narrow aerial doctrine, insufficient numbers of aircraft and those of generally poor design (excluding the Mitsubishi A6M2 Zero, of course), too few aircrews and inadequate logistics for a war of attrition. Neither its army nor its naval air arm was prepared for the duration, violence or sophistication of the war to come. Even its short-lived lead in aerial tactics collapsed once the Guadalcanal campaign began. Completely aside from having an industrial base able to produce enough aircraft, a nation’s air force needs to be balanced between aircraft, combat and maintenance crews, and air bases. If Japan was to seize an empire, its airfield builders would have to accompany the fighting forces every step of the way. Absent such construction units, the air force would have to use captured bases. Army air forces were doctrinally anachronistic. Air units were subordinate to ground force commanders, not independent entities on a footing equal to ground and naval commanders. Japan’s army had developed its air forces for continental warfare with the Soviets. Naval air, on the other hand, was tied to operations of the Combined Fleet, with naval officers, rather than air officers, making major air decisions. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had given some thought to a land-based air war, stating in 1936 that naval operations in the next war would consist of capturing an island, building an airfield and using that base to gain control over the surrounding waters. His ideas, however, did not take hold. The Japanese studied and trained hard at aerial tactics, but they failed to develop the airfield construction techniques and equipment, as well as the units, necessary to build air bases, maintenance, supply and dispersal facilities. Japan launched its December 1941 attacks from well-developed bases. During the southern advance, the navy’s 22nd Air Flotilla supported the attack into Malaya from three airfields in and around Saigon. Units were at full strength in aircraft and crews. Plentiful quantities of fuel and spare parts were available. The aircraft received excellent maintenance. Zeroes, for example, underwent a thorough overhaul every 150 hours of flight. As Japanese forces moved south, air units occupied, repaired and exploited captured enemy bases. Real problems developed, however, when those units reached undeveloped territories. Getting fuel, food and materiel to those bases determined whether the aircraft flew. Whether a base had been captured or built, however, it was nearly useless if seaborne supplies could not reach it. Mechanical complexity, battle damage and environmental stresses meant that maintenance was key to an aircraft’s availability, its performance and whether the crew survived. Considering Japan’s stressed economy, it should have been intolerable in terms of production and transportation to accept the loss of equipment that could have been repaired. Amazingly, the Japanese tolerated those losses. Although a nucleus of well-trained army and navy maintenance men and armorers followed their aircraft south, maintenance units lagged behind during the early advances and were too few even when they caught up with the flying units. The army responded by sending forward individual maintenance units to plug gaps in maintenance coverage. The navy reduced support of homeland air bases to a minimum, so as to reinforce forward bases. Because service personnel arrived late or were too few, maintenance — and even the building of quarters and other facilities — fell to the aircrews themselves. Those tasks sapped the energy of men whose principal duty was flying. The more mobile a maintenance unit is, the less it can do without heavy equipment. The better a unit is at fixing things, however, the harder it may be to get where it needs to go. The Japanese were chronically short of shipping. Moving heavy maintenance units forward was always a problem. Unloading heavy equipment in locations where there were no piers, docks and roadways made air base maintenance all that much more difficult. The army’s piecemeal commitment of aviation maintenance units was due to the original absence of any strategic plans to put large army forces into the Southwest Pacific. Rising air losses in the Solomons, however, led the navy to request that the army bring in aircraft. But without a clear long-range plan or doctrine of what to do, no one could arrange the necessary logistical support. Depots where engines could be changed and major repairs made were few and scattered. The Fourth Air Army’s heavy equipment for engine changes and major structural repair on New Guinea, for instance, was poor. Periodic inspections, repairs, overhauls and even routine servicing fell off because of maintenance shortfalls. The Japanese had to abandon many aircraft during advances or retreats that easily could have been repaired at rear areas. Poor repair also denied them the opportunity to use worn-out aircraft in a training role. Aviation fuel in New Guinea was of poor quality and resulted in engine problems. The army’s main aircraft repair base at Halmahera, 1,000 miles from the front lines, never functioned adequately because it lacked equipment and mechanics. High humidity and rains corroded metal parts and wires. Electrical equipment grew fungus. Lubricating oils evaporated or ran off equipment. Allied bombings killed skilled mechanics and delayed aircraft maintenance. Ground crews suffered attrition from out-of-control aircraft, spinning propellers and from working around heavy objects. Because the army and navy did not cooperate, army aircraft on New Guinea had to fly 1,500 miles to Manila for engine changes even though the navy had major maintenance assets as close as Rabaul. Even at Rabaul, aircraft maintenance was so limited that of 60 fighters and 40 bombers that might be on hand, only a mix of 30 typically could fly on a given date. During the advance southward, Japanese pilots fought from unimproved airstrips, most of them small and unpaved. Although Japanese aircraft generally were lighter than Western counterparts and not so much in need of paved strips, occupying enemy airfields was never easy. Gasoline trucks were scarce and could be found at only a few of the large fields. Ground crews ordinarily had to refuel aircraft with hand pumps and barrels — a tedious process that slowed aircraft turnaround and consumed manpower. Even Rabaul’s aircraft were refueled from 200-liter drums rather than from gasoline trucks. When the Japanese navy flew its first nine fighters into the Philippine airport of Legaspi in December 1941, two of them were totally wrecked upon landing. The army flew two squadrons of Nakajima Ki-27s onto recently captured Singora Field in Malaya, and wrecked nine aircraft on the poor ground. When 27 Zeroes of the Tainan Kokutai (air group) flew into Tarakan Field — one of the worst in the East Indies — on Borneo in January 1942, two aircraft overshot the runway and were demolished. Slippery mud at that field made simple takeoffs and landings dangerous. Half the aircraft of the 23rd Air Flotilla lost in the first three months of the war were casualties of crackups on bad runways — partially due to weak landing gear and poor brakes, but mainly from bad terrain. Another 30 percent of the flotilla’s aircraft wore out and had to be scrapped. Only 18 of the 88 aircraft it wrote off went down in combat. Japanese naval aircraft flew into Lae on New Guinea in early April 1942. Zero ace Saburo Sakai described the strip, built by the Australians before the war to airlift supplies into, and gold out of, the Kokoda mine, as a “forsaken mudhole.” Although Japanese authorities considered it an improved airfield, it was so small that Japanese pilots compared it to landing on an aircraft carrier. Three decrepit trucks provided support there. Japanese navy tables of organization and equipment specified that each air unit was to have extra aircraft in its organization equal to one-third the operational complement. Yet by early April 1942, naval air units had no extras and were below their authorized operating strength. The navy general staff refused urgent requests from the shore-based 11th Air Fleet for replacement aircraft because not even the higher-priority carriers were up to strength. The navy general staff had been equally shortsighted in planning for mutually supporting air bases. Japanese officers who could see the big picture had no solution. “Nothing is more urgently needed than new ideas and devices,” Rear Adm. Matome Ugaki, chief of staff of the Combined Fleet, wrote in July 1942. “Something must be done by all means.” No one on either side of the Pacific had foreseen serious campaigns in the Solomons and on New Guinea. In the first 10 months of war, the Japanese navy managed to complete only one new air base, at Buin on Bougainville, and it had only one runway. Important though that base was, it was a rough field, and seven of 15 Zeroes were badly damaged when they landed there on October 8, 1942. Heavy rains delayed construction, and even significant additions to the construction troops did not help much. The runway continued to be soft and slippery during rains. When flying unit ground crews arrived and reported that Buin was unfit for operations, Admiral Ugaki, rather than arranging for construction assets to properly complete the field, groused to his diary: “How weak-minded they are! This is the time when every difficulty should be overcome. Don’t grumble, but try to use it by all means!” Fliers did try — and damaged about 10 aircraft a day when the runway was wet. The airfield at Guadalcanal bore bitter fruit when the Americans seized it just before the Japanese brought in their own aircraft. The Japanese failed to construct ferry sites and auxiliary airfields between Rabaul and Guadalcanal, 675 miles away, when they had the time. Lack of shipping to carry men and equipment for that task was the main problem, but their near total disregard of an aircraft’s combat radius was also at fault. For example, 18 Aichi D3A1 dive bombers were ditched into the sea in the first two days of the campaign when they ran out of gas. Japan had not developed a robust civil engineering infrastructure. It did have power rock crushers, concrete mixers, mobile power saws and mobile well-drilling equipment, but bulldozers, power shovels and other earthmoving machinery were in short supply. Picks, shovels, manpower and horsepower provided the backbone of Japanese engineering activities. Japan’s prewar military budgets had gone to warships, infantry divisions and aircraft, not to construction equipment. When war came, the hitherto-ignored lack of construction assets affected tactics. For instance, without mechanized equipment to cut dispersal areas, frontline aircraft were vulnerable to attack on the ground. Japanese planners did have one good reason for skimping on airfield construction units. The normal bearing capacity of most soil was good enough to handle lightweight Japanese aircraft. But Japan lacked sufficient steel to turn out large quantities of steel planking while it concentrated on aircraft, warships and merchantmen, and it was short of shipping to transport it. This meant that Japan depended on manpower to construct airfields. The military used native laborers wherever it could, paid them poorly and fed them little or nothing. They worked more than 2,500 Javanese to death while building a field on Noemfoor Island. The Japanese army had to use infantrymen to help build airfields. In December 1942, for example, the engineer regiment and three rifle battalions of the 5th Division were detailed to build airfields in the Solomons. “When we compare [our] clumsy result with what our enemy accomplished,” recalled Commander Chihaya, “building huge airfields in good numbers with inconceivable speed, we ceased to wonder why we were utterly beaten. Our enemy was superior in every respect.” Food at Japanese airfields was bad. Barracks were jungle slums. There were no laundry facilities, and men washed themselves in rivers, or under water-filled cans. Disease felled pilots and left serviceable aircraft grounded. Physical exhaustion lowered pilot performance, so that lesser-skilled opponents sometimes shot down veteran but feverish Japanese pilots. Manpower became critical with no tractors, and ground crews wore themselves out pushing aircraft around fields. They worked at night to avoid Allied air attacks, only to fall victim to the malaria mosquito, which was most active at night. Men worked seven days a week in wretched weather at exhausting and mind-numbing tasks. Ground crews became nervous and irritable from lack of sleep. It took longer and longer to accomplish a given assignment. Minor as well as major accidents increased. Raw human muscle wrestled bombs, cannon shells and machine gun rounds onto aircraft. Mechanics pulled maintenance on baking hot fields in direct tropical sunlight, for there were no hangars. When flooded airstrips dried after rains, dust billowed up in the wake of each aircraft, choking cockpit interiors and eroding engines. “The maintenance crews are exhausted, but they drag their weary bodies about the field, heaving and tugging to move the planes back into the jungle,” a navy pilot at Buin wrote in July 1943. “They pray for tractors such as the Americans have in abundance, but they know their dream of such “luxuries’ will not be fulfilled.” Commanders and planners lacked any understanding of the vast numbers of technicians required to support a modern army. Although there had always been shortages of trained mechanics, commanders showed little interest in sending their men to the ordnance school in Japan. The service schools themselves paid little attention to logistics and engineering support of combat forces. Nor did commanders establish schools or training programs at tactical units or in geographic army areas. Japan’s absence of standardization in weapons and equipment ranged from aircraft types to different engines, down to instruments and the smallest accessories. The army used a 24-volt electrical system, whereas the navy used a different voltage. Mounts to hold guns, cannons and rocket launchers varied between the two services. By the end of the war, Japan produced at least 90 basic aircraft types (53 navy and 37 army) and 164 variations on basic types (112 navy and 52 army), making the logisticians’ jobs that much harder. Japanese technicians and repairmen, already too few in number to handle even a well-managed maintenance system, were scattered in weak groups so as to cover the wide variety of equipment. Identifying, segregating and issuing the multitude of parts on a timely basis to the correct user was beyond their ability. The Japanese were hard-pressed to manage normal maintenance, let alone spare men and equipment for unauthorized field expedient modifications. Mechanics at forward airfields were not trained well enough to correct many of the factory faults that were discovered when new aircraft arrived on station. The Japanese military also failed to master the supply, maintenance and medical problems that arose once their aerial units reached tropical zones far from their main depots. Communications were a problem as well. The navy had great difficulty in controlling its combat air patrols because of bad radios. “It seemed to us,” recalled Rear Adm. Raizo Tanaka, “…that every time a battle situation became critical our radio communications would hit a snag, causing delay in important dispatches…but it seemed to hold no lesson for us since communication failures continued to plague us throughout the war.” Maintenance of aircraft radios was so difficult, spare parts so few and reliability so bad that many frustrated pilots actually removed them from their planes to save weight. Another limitation was that Home Island flight instructors were faced with too many students to train them effectively. The urgency of training pilots overwhelmed the curriculum. “We couldn’t watch for individual errors and take the long hours necessary to weed the faults out of a trainee,” Sakai recalled in 1943. “Hardly a day passed when fire engines and ambulances did not race down the runways, sirens shrieking, to dig one or more pilots out of the plane they had wrecked on a clumsy takeoff or landing.” The decision to press for quantity over quality meant that poorly trained fliers graduated to combat units. “We were told to rush men through,” Sakai said, “to forget the fine points, just teach them how to fly and shoot.” By the end of 1943, the army and navy had lost about 10,000 pilots. As American Lt. Gen. George C. Kenney reported to Washington, “Japan’s originally highly trained crews were superb but they are dead.” When matched to pilot production of 5,400 army and 5,000 navy in the same period, and when one considers the expansion in units, missions, tempo and geographical separation, it is clear that Japan’s pilot strength had not increased at all. Worse, the vast majority of prewar and even 1942-43 veterans were dead or wounded, and their replacements had none of the veterans’ experience. As the Japanese empire shrank, its air forces fell back on the logistics base. The aircraft repair system became less extended. Even so, by 1944 a growing shortage of spare parts for the older aircraft began to ground fighters and bombers. Minor battle damage to structurally weak aircraft, although repairable under better conditions, often meant that the plane never flew again. Aviation fuel existed in sufficient quantities throughout the Japanese military into mid-1944. As early as late 1943, however, commanders began teaching pilots how to conserve fuel. When the fuel shortage finally hit, it generally had no immediate or widespread effect on combat operations, but it had an adverse effect on training programs. When aviation gasoline became scarce, army trainees flew gliders during the first month of training to save fuel. Fuel shortages started affecting combat operations in mid-1944, just when American air activity was reaching its peak. Veteran instructors, including others on permanent limited duty and those recovering from wounds, began to leave their training duties to rejoin combat units. Many frontline pilots hated teaching anyway, especially as the number of training hours dropped and the quality of students declined. Men who had been rejected for pilot training over the previous two years were now accepted. By 1945 Japanese planes at Clark Field on Luzon were scattered far and wide in a dispersal effort. The field’s maintenance effort had collapsed. Hundreds of aircraft sat grounded with only minor problems. For example, one aircraft might be missing a carburetor, but since no one had arranged for the salvage of a good carburetor from an aircraft missing its landing gear, both aircraft were as good as shot down. An American intelligence officer who examined Clark after its capture reported, “It is impossible to describe the situation as a whole beyond saying that everywhere is evidence of disorganization and general shambles.” The Americans found 200 new aircraft engines at a village near Clark, most still in shipping crates. Ground crews had dispersed them far and wide in little dumps of three and four. They were hidden underneath houses, rice mills, shacks and public buildings. Huge numbers of parts such as carburetors, fuel pumps, generators and propellers were likewise scattered in fields and under houses, and also buried. Mechanics buried tools in no discernable pattern. Initial counts of aircraft in and around Clark topped 500, many of them obviously burned out, but many seemingly ready to fly. The Japanese had not experienced the logistical challenges that the Western powers had addressed during World War I and later relearned. Japan’s politicians, generals and admirals completely misjudged the character and the duration of the war they launched in 1941. Poor aerial logistics planning, lack of foresight, a racist contempt for their enemies, a weak, shallow, narrow industrial base and an inability to appreciate supply requirements or to learn from their failures characterized their aviation effort throughout the entire war. John W. Whitman, a retired infantry lieutenant colonel, is the author of Bataan: Our Last Ditch, The Bataan Campaign 1942. For further reading, he recommends: The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. 7: Services Around the World, edited by Wesley F. Craven and James E. Cate; and Samurai! by Saburo Sakai. This feature was originally published in the September 2006 issue of Aviation History. For more great articles subscribe to Aviation History magazine today!

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J.E.B. Stuart’s Revenge

J.E.B. Stuart’s Revenge A battlefield was a strange place for the reunion of old friends. The contorted bodies of men who had fallen in combat two days earlier littered the ground around the small group of picnickers who, being soldiers, were able to enjoy their outing despite its macabre setting. The last time any of the men in the circle of friends had seen each other in peacetime, they had all been obscure, middling officers in the U.S. Army. Now, all wore stars–some on gray uniforms, others on blue. The most famous among them by far was James Ewell Brown Stuart, who little more than a year earlier had been a U.S. Army lieutenant. By the time of the meeting he was a Confederate major general and the most renowned cavalryman on American soil. With Stuart that blistering afternoon were three Union brigadier generals: George Hartsuff, George Bayard, and Samuel Crawford. Availing themselves of the burial truce after the August 9, 1862, Battle of Cedar Mountain, they had crossed the battlefield to seek out their old army chum. Crawford and Bayard brought a basketful of lunch, a surgeon offered a bottle, and all the officers offered exaggerated descriptions of their wartime exploits (which for Stuart had been considerable, for the Yankees decidedly slim). Stuart proposed a toast to Hartsuff: ‘Here’s hoping you may fall into our hands; we’ll treat you well at Richmond!’ Hartsuff laughed, ‘The same to you.’ Inevitably talk turned to the late battle, in which the Federals had suffered a bloody defeat. Stuart suggested the incorrigible Northern press would find a way to contort Union defeat into glorious victory. Crawford exclaimed that not even the reckless New York Herald could find a way to construe this battle as a victory. Stuart offered a bet: Crawford would owe him a new hat if the Northern press proclaimed the Battle of Cedar Mountain a Union triumph. A few days later a parcel arrived in Stuart’s camp. It was from Crawford. In it were a copy of the New York Herald and a new plumed hat. Stuart instantly incorporated the new hat into the rakish wardrobe that had become his trademark and rode off with the rest of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to confront Union Major General John Pope. Only eight weeks had passed since Pope arrived in Virginia to take command of a new Union host, the curiously named Army of Virginia. Pope had so far accomplished little in his new role, except to instill rage in the people of the Old Dominion. Under his hand, Federal troops looted central Virginia farms and arrested civilians; for the first time, the hardships of war invaded Southern parlors. Richmond newspapers labeled Pope ‘an enemy of humanity.’ Robert E. Lee had vowed to’suppress’ the ‘miscreant’ Union general–strong rhetoric from the usually reserved Lee. He aimed not only to rid Virginia of Pope’s noxious policies, but to eliminate the military threat posed by his ever-growing army. Major General George B. McClellan’s Union Army of the Potomac was evacuating the Virginia Peninsula. If McClellan’s brigades and batteries managed to join with Pope’s in northern or central Virginia, the Confederates would face daunting, perhaps unbeatable odds. Lee needed to beat Pope before the junction of the two Union armies occurred. On August 17, 1862, just a week after the Battle of Cedar Mountain, Lee believed he had Pope just where he wanted him. Lee discovered Pope’s army wedged into the ‘V’ formed by the convergence of the Rapidan and Rappahannock Rivers, the Rapidan in his front, the Rappahannock to his rear. Lee proposed a plan that had potential to destroy the Union army: Stuart’s cavalry would lead the advance across the Rapidan below Pope’s left on the morning of the 18th and ride hard for the bridge at Rappahannock Station, Pope’s main retreat route. Jackson and Long-street would follow and assail Pope’s left flank. With Stuart astride his escape route, Pope would have no choice but to fight at great disadvantage or watch his army scatter. After receiving his instructions on the evening of the 17th, Stuart rode a few miles with his staff to Verdiersville, a lonely crossroads populated only by a ramshackle hotel and a house owned by a family named Rhodes. At the Rhodes house, Stuart hitched his horse and waited for Brigadier General Fitzhugh Lee’s brigade of cavalry to arrive from Beaver Dam Station on the Virginia Central Railroad, about 30 miles east. Fitzhugh Lee’s troopers were already hours late, and Stuart considered their presence critical to the next morning’s advance. So anxious was he to hear from them that he dispatched a staff member, Major Norman Fitzhugh, down the road to give early word of their approach. With that, Stuart carefully arranged his new hat, cloak, and other accouterments on the porch of the house and went to sleep. He slept soundly, unaware that Union cavalry was at that moment riding toward the Verdiersville crossroads. By sheer chance, two regiments of Union horsemen on reconnaissance had struck Raccoon Ford on the Rapidan during a brief lapse in Confederate coverage that evening. Shielded by darkness, they advanced undiscovered into Confederate lines south of the river. During their ride so far, the Yankees had encountered only two Confederates, but one of them proved to be an important catch: Major Fitzhugh, Stuart’s lookout. Major Fitzhugh was an important prize for the Federals; in his satchels were General Lee’s orders for the destruction of Pope’s army the next day. With Major Fitzhugh tucked in the rear of their column, the Federals kept riding. In the dim predawn light they neared Verdiersville along the Orange Plank Road–the very road by which Stuart expected Fitzhugh Lee to arrive that morning. At the Rhodes house, the rumble of horses’ hooves awoke newly paroled Lieutenant Samuel Gibson. Gibson rushed to awaken a young captain named John Singleton Mosby, who, like Stuart, lay sleeping on the porch. It was probably Lee’s troopers, said Gibson. Mosby roused Stuart, then rode with Gibson down the Orange Plank Road to meet the approaching column. Stuart, bareheaded and anxious to see the wayward Fitzhugh Lee, followed to the Rhodes’s gate. ‘There comes Lee now!’ he exclaimed. Behind him, his Prussian orderly, Heros von Borcke, puttered around the yard. In the house lay a teenage aide, Lieutenant Chiswell Dabney, still reposing. Unwarily, Mosby and Gibson rode through the misty morning until they could see the shadowy figures of cavalrymen a few hundred yards away. But the distant cavalrymen spotted Mosby and Gibson first, approached quickly to within pistol range, then fired. ‘We knew they were not our friends,’ wrote Mosby. Yankees! Mosby later recorded that neither he nor Gibson had their weapons, so ‘there was nothing for us to do but wheel and run–which we did–and used our spurs freely.’ The Federals charged behind them. The commotion alerted Stuart, von Borcke, and Dabney. Stuart mounted his horse (leaving his cloak and new hat on the porch), bolted across the yard and leaped the rear fence. Without so much as a glance backward, he galloped toward some nearby woods. Von Borcke mounted and rode in the opposite direction, through the front gate (which Mrs. Rhodes held open for him), and into the road among the rampaging Yankees. ‘I came directly upon the major commanding the enemy detachment, who placed his pistol at my breast and ordered me to surrender,’ von Borcke remembered. The Prussian slapped his own horse’s head to change his direction and spurred away. The sudden movement startled the Yankee major, who flinched, giving von Borcke the wrinkle of time he needed to escape. At least a few Federals thought von Borcke was Stuart. One Union officer lamented, ‘The Gen. himself [Stuart] escaped through the stupidity of a Major, he being afraid to shoot him.’ Stuart, however, was already in the woods. Mosby, Gibson, and von Borcke were leading the Federals on a wild, mile-long chase westward on the Plank Road. Only one Confederate had yet to make his escape: 18-year-old Chiswell Dabney. Dabney had rushed out of bed with the first shots; like the others he left all his belongings behind. Then his unique problems began. The night before he had tied his horse to the Rhodes’s fence with a hard knot. Now, with Yankees closing on him, he struggled to free his horse–probably with a good deal of muttered swearing, and surely with the vow he would never again tie his horse so. Precious seconds passed. Federals swirled past on the road and through the yard. The knot finally yielded. Dabney leapt onto his unbridled horse and followed Stuart’s course over the back fence and into the woods. From the timber he and the general watched as the Federals milled about the Rhodes house. The Yankees seized Dabney’s pistols, bridle, and saber. Mosby, von Borcke, and Gibson lost similar caches. But Stuart lost most painfully of all. Lying on the porch–easy prey for the Yankees–were his cloak, haversack, and, most notably, his new plumed hat. Few scenes of the war so humiliated Stuart: the Yankees made off with the very symbol of the Confederacy’s ‘Bold Dragoon.’ The rest of that day Stuart rode with his head wrapped in a bandanna–perfectly stylish for most cavalrymen, but too common for Stuart. From the ranks came anonymous, jocular, but stinging inquiries: ‘Where’s your hat?’ Von Borcke later confessed, ‘We could not look at each other without laughing, despite our inner rage.’ The jibes were more than Stuart could bear. To his wife he declared, ‘I intend to make the Yankees pay for that hat.’ Four days later he would get the chance. By far the most important outcome of the adventure at Verdiersville was the Federals’ capture of Major Fitzhugh and the orders from Robert E. Lee. Thus forewarned of the Confederates’ plan for him, Pope chose discretion and retreated behind the Rappahannock, where he could operate with a formidable river in his front and without one at his back. Lee followed and on August 20 commenced a dangerous dance with Pope, searching for a way to get at the troublesome Yankee across the river or at least trap him on the open ground to the east. On the evening of August 21, Stuart suggested a plan that might give Lee the opportunity he sought. The cavalier would take 1,500 men, cross the Rappahannock above Pope’s right, ride to the Union rear, and cut the main Union supply line along the Orange and Alexandria Railroad. Stuart had built his reputation on such operations, and this one seemed to offer especial pro-mise. Such a raid, if successful, could force Pope to retreat from the river; it would also give Stuart an opportunity to avenge the loss of his trappings at Verdiersville. Lee approved Stuart’s proposal the morning of the 22d. At 10:00 a.m., adorned in a hat given him by a sutler from Georgia, Stuart led his column north. His first stop: Warrenton. Since spring the people of Warrenton had suffered the presence of the ‘vile Yankees’ in their town. Just how obnoxious the Yankee presence had been could be measured by the delirium with which the residents greeted their Confederate liberators. ‘We were received most enthusiastically,’ wrote the young Dabney, ‘the ladies nearly going into hysterics with joy & telling us never to take a prisoner.’ The women’showered us with flowers and refreshments of all kinds,’ recorded von Borcke. A memorable afternoon it was for Stuart’s troopers. At Warrenton, Stuart chose the next and climactic stop on his tour to the rear of Pope’s army: Catlett’s Station. There he would burn the railroad bridge over Cedar Run. This bridge was an important link in Pope’s supply line. Its destruction would disrupt the flow of supplies for days–perhaps long enough to force Pope to yield his position on the river. As Stuart’s men rode out of Warrenton at about 5:00 p.m., bad luck descended on them in the form of torrential rains. ‘It seemed like a solid mass of water,’ wrote one man. Another remembered that the men were soon ‘as wet as water could make us.’ With sunset, the rains descended even harder, and thunder rolled across the landscape. Stuart called it ‘the darkest night I ever knew.’ About 8:00 p.m. the column approached Catlett’s Station. Stuart sent Captain William Blackford of his staff to have a look. ‘I rode all around the outskirts of their encampment,’ remembered Blackford, ‘and found a vast assemblage of wagons and a city of tents, laid out in regular order and occupied by the luxuriously equipped quartermasters and commissaries….’ More importantly, Blackford found ‘no appearance of any large organized body of troops.’ (His assessment was right. Of the perhaps 500 Yankees at Catlett’s Station, fewer than 200 were armed.) Neither did the Yankees have pickets around the camp’s perimeter. Still better news came from a servant who had mindlessly wandered into Stuart’s lines. According to a witness, the man than told Stuart that ‘General Pope’s headquarters train was there with all of his official papers, the army treasure chest, and all the personal baggage of the General and his staff.’ (Pope himself was at his headquarters several miles away.) ‘Here was a chance for revenge for the loss of the hat and haversack at Verdiersville,’ Blackford concluded. The captured servant even offered to guide Stuart’s troops to the booty. Stuart accepted his tender, but put him under guard nonetheless, with the promise of ‘kind treatment if faithful, and instant extermination if traitorous.’ The Confederates quietly subdued the few pickets who guarded the camp. Then Stuart unveiled his plan. The 9th Virginia Cavalry under Colonel W.H.F. ‘Rooney’ Lee (Robert E. Lee’s son) would lead the assault into the main camp north of the railroad; another column would ravage the camp south of the tracks. To the men of the 4th Virginia Cavalry, under Colonel Williams C. Wickham, would go the most important task. They would burn the bridge over Cedar Run. The Confederates took a few minutes to arrange themselves on the edge of the Union camp, their rustling obscured by falling rain and rolling thunder. Stuart rode the line, telling his men to give ‘their wildest ‘Rebel Yell.” Then he turned to his bugler: ‘Sound the charge, Fred.’ The bugler managed barely a note before the dreaded ‘yell’ and the beat of hooves obscured his call. In the Union camp a few Federals reacted to the yell with glee, or only slight annoyance. One Yankee exclaimed, ‘There must be reinforcements coming on the Railroad.’ Another yelled, ‘There must be good news!’ And yet another poked his head out of his tent and yelled, ‘Hold on you —- —-, you are shooting this way!’ The Confederates of course ignored such entreaties. They careered through the camp’scattering out pistol balls promiscuously right and left,’ recorded a jolly staff officer. ‘Supper tables were kicked over and tents broken down in the [Federals’] rush to get out, the tents catching them sometimes in their fall like fish in a net.’ Yankees scattered from their tents toward the woods, some barely dressed, and all thoroughly scared. Chiswell Dabney claimed, ‘Never have I seen any thing like it[;] men were perfectly frantic with fear.’ The scene made veteran Confederates ‘laugh until they could scarcely keep their saddles,’ remembered Blackford. But there was more than merriment to Stuart’s mission. As the Confederates moved through the first camp, each column broke off for its assigned mission. Rooney Lee’s 9th Virginia received a ‘withering’ volley from a handful of Yankees on the platform at the depot, but it stayed the gray horsemen only briefly. The band of Federals quickly disappeared into the darkness. Rounding the corner of the depot, Blackford heard ‘the labored puffing’ of a Yankee locomotive trying to escape. ‘I rode up alongside of the locomotive and ordered the engineer to shut off the steam,’ Blackford recorded, ‘but he would not.’ Blackford fired into the engine and threw his leg over the pommel of his saddle to jump aboard. But before he could leap, his horse plunged into a ditch, throwing him hat over boots. The train escaped to spread word of the Rebel raid. Not far from Blackford, the Prussian aide von Borcke endeavored to cut the telegraph. Unable to climb the pole himself (von Borcke was widely noted for his size), he asked for a volunteer. A slim teenager stepped forward. Despite a steady patter of enemy bullets, von Borcke hoisted the boy onto his shoulders and watched as ‘he scooted up the pole with the agility of a squirrel and cut the wire amid the jubilant cheers of my men.’ Elsewhere, Colonel Thomas Rosser led a column toward the Union camp south of the tracks, but the commotion north of the station had alerted the Yankees south of it, and they had extinguished their lights. Pelted by rain, surrounded by pitchy blackness, and obstructed by the rail sidings and invisible ditches, Rosser’s men lost order. Confused, wet, and attracted by the sure booty they had just left behind in the main Union camp, they gave up the effort. A quarter-mile west of the Union camps, Colonel Wickham and his 4th Virginia Cavalry attempted what Stuart called ‘the great object of the expedition.’ By now the rain had returned to its former condition; it fell, remembered Blackford, ‘not in drops but in streams, as if poured from buckets.’ Still, Wickham’s Virginians swarmed over the bridge in a futile effort to ignite the wooden supports. That failing, they tried to cut the bridge down, but the Yankees intervened. A ragged line of Pennsylvania troops formed on high ground west of the stream and distracted the bridge-breakers with a steady supply of bullets. With the waters of the creek rising fast and the demolition of the bridge both unlikely and dangerous, Stuart reluctantly called off the mission. For a few more precious minutes the Confederates plundered the station, while frightened Yankee teamsters and staff officers watched from the surrounding woods. ‘I was so frightened,’ admitted one Federal, ‘I could not have spoken if I tried.’ Another wrote, ‘We laid in the woods and could hear all that was going on, the cursing and swearing, the breaking open of trunks, boxes, desks & safes.’ Confederate privates filled their haversacks with booty of all sorts, including canned lobster and whiskey. The presence of spirits worried many officers, but, as Blackford wryly recalled, ‘the importance of restraint was appreciated, and none took more than they could carry.’ By 3:00 a.m. the Union camp had been thoroughly rifled, and Stuart ordered his command to reform and start back toward the Rappahannock. It did so with an impressive haul of booty: 300 prisoners, 500 horses and mules (most of which escaped before the Confederates reached the Rappahannock), and more clothes than horsemen could reasonably expect to carry. Stuart’s captures went beyond supplies and prisoners, though. His troopers had also found the Yankee army’s payroll safe, which contained a half-million dollars in greenbacks and $20,000 in gold to fund the Confederate war effort. Most important of all, however, were the papers from Pope’s headquarters wagons. They would tell Robert E. Lee much about the condition of the Union army and Pope’s intentions, and would confirm Lee’s suspicion that McClellan’s army would soon arrive at Pope’s side. The information helped spur Lee to action and influenced his planning of what would become the Second Manassas Campaign. Despite the valuable prizes it netted, when the Catlett’s Station raid is measured against what Stuart hoped to achieve at the outset, it must be judged at least a partial failure. The bridge over Cedar Run stood intact, and Pope’s supplies continued to flow unhindered. Indeed, though embarrassing to the Yankees, the raid did not affect their operations at all. It would take efforts far grander than Stuart’s to force Pope off the Rappahannock. If Stuart felt disappointment over the raid, his spirits were lifted by one final discovery that emerged from the take at Catlett’s Station. Amid the Union headquarters baggage was a fancy hat and dress uniform coat. Inside the coat was the owner’s tag: ‘John Pope, Major General.’ During the raid, the coat had rapidly made the rounds of the Confederate cavalrymen, who derived great amusement from their find. On the ride back to camp, Fitzhugh Lee came across some friends and bade them to wait a moment–he had something to show them. He disappeared behind a tree and soon emerged wearing both the hat and coat, ‘which reached nearly to his feet…. This masquerade was accompanied by a burst of jolly laughter that might have been heard for a hundred yards.’ Soon the coat made it to Stuart’s hands. Here, at last, was payback for the humiliating loss of his hat and cloak to Pope’s marauders at Verdiersville. Stuart promptly sent it off to Governor John Letcher in Richmond as a prize of war. For the next several weeks it would be one of the Confederate capital’s great attractions, for Letcher hung it in the state library for all to see. Before sending the coat away, Stuart could not resist one last bit of merriment. To John Pope he wrote a message and sent it through the lines: General. You have my hat and plume. I have your best coat. I have the honor to propose a cartel for the fair exchange of the prisoners. Very Respectfully J.E.B. Stuart Maj. Genl. C.S.A. John Pope never responded, but J.E.B. Stuart had his revenge. This article was written by John Hennessy and originally published in the June 1995 issue of Civil War Times Magazine. For more great articles, be sure to subscribe to Civil War Times magazine today!

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https://www.historynet.com/jefferson-davis-commander-chief.htm

Jefferson Davis: Commander In Chief

Jefferson Davis: Commander In Chief During his presidency, he spent most of his waking hours directing the Confederate war effort. As president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis was in charge of policy, national strategy, and military strategy and operations during the four and a half years of the Civil War. As commander in chief of the newly formed Confederate army and navy, his workaholic devotion to detail led him to spend most of his time on military matters. Indeed, given his West Point training (1824–1828) and his field experience in the Mexican War, many expected him to take personal command of the CSA forces—and starting with his surprise appearance at the first Battle of Manassas in July 1861, he very nearly did just that. In Embattled Rebel, his new biography of Davis, James McPherson says that as the fighting approached the new Confederate capital in Richmond, Virginia, the president “left his office, mounted his horse and rode toward the sound of the guns.” “Events have cast on our arms and our hopes the gloomiest shadows,” Davis lamented to General Joseph E. Johnston in February 1862. The president summoned Johnston to a strategy conference with cabinet members on February 19 and 20. For many hours they discussed the vulnerability of Johnston’s army at Centreville to a flanking movement by McClellan’s large force via the Occoquan or Rappahannock River. They agreed that Johnston should pull back to a more defensible position south of the Rappahannock. But the wretched condition of roads caused by winter rains and the chaotic state of the railroads made a quick withdrawal impossible. Davis ordered Johnston to send his large guns, camp equipage, and huge stockpiles of meat and other supplies southward as transportation became available, and to prepare to retreat with the army when he received definite orders. In early March, however, Johnston began a precipitate withdrawal when his scouts detected Federal activity that he thought was the beginning of McClellan’s flanking movement. Without informing Richmond (he feared a leak), Johnston fell back so quickly that he was compelled to leave behind or destroy his heavy guns, ammunition, and mounds of supplies, including 750 tons of meat and other foodstuffs. In Richmond Davis heard rumors of this destruction and retreat, but as he later told the general, “I was at a loss to believe it.” When he finally heard the truth from Johnston on March 15, the president’s distress at the losses the Confederacy could ill afford was acute. Davis’s confidence in Johnston had been waning for some time. As things went from bad to worse during February and March, the president decided to recall Robert E. Lee from the southern Atlantic coast to become general in chief of all armies. Davis and Lee had known each other since their days at West Point (Davis graduated one year ahead of Lee). They had worked together cordially in the early months of the war when Lee served as a military adviser to the president after the government moved to Richmond. Davis used Lee as a sort of troubleshooter, sending him in July 1861 to western Virginia to regain control of the region from Union forces, and to South Carolina in November to reorganize coastal defense. For reasons largely beyond his control, Lee had failed to accomplish much in what became West Virginia and had met with partial success along the southern Atlantic coast only by withdrawing Confederate defenses inland beyond reach of Union gunboats. Despite this mixed record, Davis retained his faith in Lee’s abilities and wanted him by his side. The president had his congressional allies introduce a bill to create the position of “Commanding General of the Armies of the Confederate States,” intending to name Lee to the post. But Davis’s critics in Congress, who blamed him for Confederate reverses, amended the bill to enable the “commanding general” to take direct control of any army in the field without authorization from the president. Davis believed that this provision would usurp his constitutional powers as commander in chief, and he vetoed the bill on March 14. A day earlier he had issued an order assigning Lee to duty in Richmond and charging him “with the conduct of military operations…under the direction of the President.” Lee’s first task was to help Davis decide what to do about the situation in Virginia. From his desk in Richmond, Lee instructed Major General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson to make diversionary attacks with his small army in the Shenandoah Valley to prevent the Federals from concentrating all of their troops against Richmond. During the next two months Jackson carried out these orders in spectacular fashion. Meanwhile, McClellan’s army began landing near Fort Monroe at the tip of the peninsula in Virginia formed by the James and York Rivers, 70 miles southeast of Richmond. When the Federals advanced toward the Confederate defenses held by Major General John B. Magruder’s 12,000 troops, Davis and Lee ordered Johnston to send part of his army from the Rappahannock to Magruder. As the Union buildup continued, they instructed him to bring his whole army to the peninsula. Johnston proceeded to do so, but after inspecting Magruder’s line at Yorktown, he recommended that the Confederates withdraw all the way back to Richmond, concentrate the Virginia forces there, and strip the Carolinas and Georgia of troops to fight the decisive battle of the war at Richmond. Winning there, they could then reoccupy the regions temporarily yielded to the enemy. Here was a bold suggestion for a high-risk strategy of concentration for an offensive-defensive of the kind later associated with Lee. But on this occasion Lee opposed the idea. In an all-day meeting of Davis, Lee, Johnston, and Secretary of War Randolph on April 14, Lee and Johnston discussed the matter at great length. Lee argued for making the fight at Yorktown, where the big guns at the Gloucester Narrows on the York River and the CSS Virginia on the James River would protect the army’s flanks. An old navy man, Randolph pointed out that pulling back from Yorktown would mean abandoning Norfolk with its Gosport Navy Yard, where the Virginia had been rebuilt from the captured USS Merrimack. Davis listened carefully to the arguments, took an active part in the discussion, and finally decided in Lee’s and Randolph’s favor. The Confederates would make their stand at Yorktown, where Johnston took command of 60,000 troops facing McClellan with 110,000. Instead of attacking, McClellan dug in his siege artillery and prepared to pulverize the Confederate defenses. This preparation continued for several weeks while the armies skirmished but did little damage to each other. Despite having been overruled by Davis, Johnston still intended to evacuate the Yorktown line without a fight. He delayed that move until McClellan was ready to open with his heavy artillery. Johnston failed to keep Davis and Lee informed of his intention until the last minute on May 1, when he told the president that he must pull out the next night. Davis was shocked. He replied that such a sudden retreat would mean the loss of Norfolk and possibly of the Virginia and other ships under construction there. Johnston consented to wait—for one more day. On the night of May 3–4 his army stealthily left the Yorktown line and began a retreat toward Richmond. The Confederates fought a rearguard battle with the cautiously pursuing Federals at Williamsburg, and continued to a new line behind the Chickahominy River 20 miles from Richmond. Norfolk fell to the enemy, and the Virginia’s crew had to blow her up because her draft was too great to get up the James River. Davis was dismayed by these developments. A congressman reported that he found the president “greatly depressed in spirits.” Davis’s niece from Mississippi was visiting the Confederate White House at the time. She wrote to her mother that “Uncle Jeff. is miserable.…Our reverses distressed him so much.… Everybody looks drooping and sinking.…I am ready to sink with despair.” Davis and several cabinet members sent their families away from Richmond for safety. The secretary of war boxed up his archives ready for shipment before the capital fell. The Treasury Department loaded its specie reserves on a special train that kept steam up for an immediate departure. Davis allowed his anguish to leak into a letter to Johnston lamenting “the drooping cause of our country.” The ostensible purpose of the letter was to prod Johnston into carrying out Davis’s orders to group regiments from the same state together in brigades as a boost to morale. “Some have expressed surprise at my patience with you when orders to you were not observed,” the president told his general. Johnston recognized this rebuke for what it was, an expression of exasperation with Johnston’s conduct of the campaign. If he had received such a letter from someone who could be “held to personal accountability,” Johnston told his wife, he would have challenged him to a duel. In this time of troubles, Davis turned to religion. He had been attending St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond and had grown friendly with its rector, the Reverend Charles Minnigerode. Davis could not remember whether he had been baptized as a child, so he asked Minnigerode to baptize him and confirm him as a member of the church on May 6. One of Davis’s newspaper tormentors, the Richmond Examiner, waxed sarcastic about this event: “When we find the President standing in a corner telling his beads, and relying on a miracle to save the country, instead of mounting his horse and putting forth every power of the Government to defeat the enemy, the effect is depressing in the extreme.” But Davis was in fact mounting his horse and exerting all of his energy to try to defeat the enemy. A fine horseman, Davis was in the habit of riding out in the afternoon for exercise and diversion. He used these occasions to visit army headquarters on the Chickahominy and the batteries placed at Drewry’s Bluff on the James River seven miles from Richmond to stop the Union navy. Those guns did indeed drive back Northern warships, including the Monitor, on May 15, saving Richmond from the fate of New Orleans three weeks earlier, when the city had surrendered with naval guns trained on its streets. But Richmond still seemed in great danger from General McClellan’s large army approaching the capital at a snail’s pace. Although Johnston chose not to reveal his plans to Davis (or Lee), the president expected him to defend the line of the Chickahominy and even to launch a counterattack if he stopped McClellan along that sluggish stream. Davis still had not lost entire faith in Johnston, despite his previous disappointments. “As on all former occasions,” he told the general on May 17, “my design is to suggest not to direct, recognizing the impossibility of any one to decide in advance and reposing confidently as well on your ability as your zeal it is my wish to leave you with the fullest powers to exercise your judgment.” Unknown to Davis, Johnston had already decided to withdraw to a new position just three or four miles east of Richmond. When the president rode out the next day to visit Johnston on the Chickahominy, he was taken aback when he encountered the army before he had ridden more than a few miles. Davis confronted Johnston and asked why he had pulled back so close to the capital. The general replied that the ground was so swampy and the drinking water so bad in the Chickahominy lowlands that he had moved to better ground and a safer supply of water. Davis was unnerved. Do you intend to give up Richmond without a battle? he asked. Johnston’s reply was equivocal. The president responded with asperity. He told Johnston, according to one of Davis’s aides who was present, “that if he was not going to give battle, he would appoint someone to the command who would.” Davis rode back to Richmond and summoned his cabinet and General Lee to a meeting the following day. He also asked Johnston to attend, so that everyone could learn his intentions. The afternoon of the meeting, Davis wrote to his wife: “I have been waiting all day for [Johnston] to communicate his plans.… We are uncertain of everything except that a battle must be near at hand.” Johnston never showed up, but Davis went ahead with the conference, where he expressed his anxiety about the fate of Richmond. According to Postmaster General John Reagan, Lee became emotional. “Richmond must not be given up,” he declared. “It shall not be given up.” As Lee spoke, Reagan recalled, “tears ran down his cheeks. I have seen him on many occasions and at times when the very fate of the Confederacy hung in the balance, but I never saw him show equally deep emotion.” The next day Davis assured a delegation from the Virginia legislature that Richmond would indeed be defended. “A thrill of joy electrifies every heart,” wrote the diary-keeping War Department clerk John B. Jones. “A smile of triumph is on every lip.” Johnston finally seemed to get the message. He discovered that McClellan had crossed to the southwest bank of the Chickahominy with part of his army, leaving the rest on the other side. Johnston informed Lee that he intended to cross the stream with three divisions and attack the force on the northeast bank on May 22. Davis had earlier discussed precisely such a tactical operation with Lee, so he approved Johnston’s plan. On the 22nd the president rode out to the bluff overlooking the Chickahominy, then down to the river itself, to “see the action commence,” as he wrote to his wife. But he found nothing happening and no one to tell him why the attack had been called off. Only later did General Gustavus Smith, whose division was to lead the attack, tell Davis that a local citizen had informed him that the enemy was strongly posted behind Beaver Dam Creek, so he had decided not to attack. This was not the first time that Smith had frozen under pressure. Davis was disconsolate. “Thus ended the offensive-defensive programme,” he wrote, “from which Lee expected much, and of which I was hopeful.” Almost the same scenario repeated itself exactly a week later, on May 29. Once again Johnston planned to attack McClellan’s right flank north of the Chickahominy, and once again he called it off without informing Davis. The president discovered the cancellation only after riding out to the river on another futile mission. Johnston had changed his mind and decided to assault the two corps south of the Chickahominy and nearest Richmond. The general later explained that he did not tell Davis of this change “because it seemed to me that to do so would be to transfer my responsibilities to his shoulders. I could not consult him without adopting the course he might advise, so that to ask his advice would have been, in my opinion, to ask him to command for me.” Johnston’s peculiar notion of the correct relationship with his commander in chief meant that Davis first learned of the general’s changed plan of attack when he heard artillery firing on the afternoon of May 31. He quickly left his office, mounted his horse, and rode toward the sound of the guns. When he arrived near the village of Seven Pines (which gave its name to the battle), he saw Johnston riding away toward the front. Davis’s aides were convinced that the general left to avoid the president. The battle was going badly for the Confederates. Major General James Longstreet’s division had taken the wrong road and blocked the advance of other divisions. The attack started late, and although it initially succeeded in routing one Union corps, reinforcements streamed across an almost flooded bridge over the Chickahominy and drove the Confederates back. Davis came under artillery and musket fire as he and his aides tried to rally retreating soldiers. A reporter for a Memphis newspaper described the president “sitting on his ‘battle horse’ immediately behind our line of battle.…I was much struck with the calm, impassive expression of his countenance and his proud bearing as he sat erect and motionless, intently gazing at the enemy.…Bullets whistled plentifully around, but he never bootled his eye for them.” Davis issued orders and sent couriers for reinforcements, but as dusk approached it was clear that the Confederate attack had ground to a halt. At that moment, stretcher bearers passed the president’s party carrying a seriously wounded Johnston to the rear. All animosity forgotten, Davis rushed to Johnston’s side and spoke to him with genuine concern. “The old fellow bore his suffering most heroically,” Davis wrote to his wife. It was obvious that Johnston would be out of action for several months. As Davis and Lee rode together back to Richmond that night, the president told him that he was now the commander of what Lee would soon designate the Army of Northern Virginia. A new era would dawn with that army’s new name and new commander. “God will I trust give us wisdom to see and valor to execute the measures necessary to vindicate the just cause,” wrote Davis as he entered into his new command relationship with Lee. James M. McPherson is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom. This is excerpted from Embattled Rebel, by James M. McPherson, published by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, October 2014. Copyright © by James McPherson. Originally published in the January 2015 issue of Military History Quarterly. To subscribe, click here.

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https://www.historynet.com/jerrys-last-mission-how-wwiis-last-combat-pilot-became-a-lifelong-testament-of-the-human-spirit.htm

‘Jerry’s Last Mission’: How a Veteran of WWII’s Last Air Battle Became a Lifelong Testament of the Human Spirit

‘Jerry’s Last Mission’: How a Veteran of WWII’s Last Air Battle Became a Lifelong Testament of the Human Spirit “I look out there now and can’t believe we were enemies,” Jerry Yellin muses in the aptly named documentary “Jerry’s Last Mission,” the veteran’s admiring eyes looking out from the window of the train as the Japanese countryside races by. Nearly 70 years earlier, Yellin, then a captain of the Army’s 78th Fighter Squadron, was embarking on one of the last combat missions of World War II in the skies over that same countryside. On August 14, 1945, Yellin took off from Iwo Jima to attack airfields near Nagoya, Japan, carrying with him instructions to continue the assault unless he heard the word “Utah,” a code signaling the Japanese surrender. It was Yellin’s 19th mission over Japan. Despite that day’s message of capitulation from Emperor Hirohito, Yellin and his 19-year-old wingman, Philip Schlamberg, never received the news. The two P-51 Mustang pilots were heading back toward Iwo after completing their strafing run when they encountered heavy antiaircraft fire. Yellin banked into a formation of thick clouds, hiding himself long enough to get out of the range of the guns and make it home in one piece. Schlamberg did not. For nearly 20 years following the war, Yellin was tormented with survivor’s guilt and post-traumatic stress disorder emanating from his final mission. He struggled to hold down a job and moved his wife and four sons more than a dozen times around the U.S. and Israel. Decades elapsed until finally, in 1975, he found solace through the practice of Transcendental Meditation, or TM. By the time of his death in 2017, Yellin had become an outspoken advocate for veteran mental health. In 2010 he co-founded Operation Warrior Wellness, a division of the David Lynch Foundation that teaches veterans TM to better cope with the effects of PTSD. Now, Yellin’s story is the subject of this 58-minute documentary — written and directed by Louisa Merino and produced by Melissa Hibbard and Oscar-winner Ed Cunningham (“Undefeated”) — that chronicles Yellin’s final mission in life and stands as a testament to human resiliency and kindness. Merino, along with Yellin’s sons Michael and Steven, spoke to HistoryNet about the fighter pilot’s transformation and his lasting legacy. Your father spoke quite candidly about his relationship with you and your brothers and how, at times, he was emotionally absent as a result of PTSD. What was that like for you growing up? How did Transcendental Meditation help bridge that gap? SY: I always felt there was something wrong, something missing, even though on many levels, he was a very good father. He had many admirable qualities as a father, but it just felt like there was something hollow inside. He wasn’t connected on a deep level. I felt he wasn’t sure of himself and the direction that he was taking in his life. We had no idea about how his experiences from the war had affected him. It was the farthest thing from our minds because he never talked about it. The first time I heard that he had thought about suicide every week for 30 years, believe it or not, was on film. I could have been knocked over with a feather. I was shocked because he never really felt suicidal to me. I’ll say the contrast between how he lived the last 55 years of his life … it’s almost the most tremendous contrast you can imagine. He died a very happy, fulfilled man. He went through a complete transformation — got rid of the demons inside, got rid of the Iwo Jima memories. It was a remarkable transformation of a man. As remarkable as you could possibly imagine. Jerry Yellin in uniform. (Courtesy "Jerry's Last Mission"/Facebook) Many veterans who came home from the Pacific refused to engage with anything Japanese-related. Your brother Robert not only married a Japanese woman, but her father was trained as a kamikaze pilot during the war. What was that like for your father? Do you think that aided in his healing process? SY: You have to have, which he did, an inborn flexibility for change for that to take place. A lot of people don’t have that flexibility. They aren’t pre-wired for it. Within him there was a tremendous amount of compassion — even with his PTSD — and a tremendous amount flexibility. Of course, that was cultured by his practice of TM. He told me many times, “If I hadn’t started meditating, I would have died a long time ago because the memories would have just been … I would have imploded.” Initially it was a little challenging, but he always had this universal spirit about him. MY: He just had this warmth for other people. We lived in Florida and in those days, in the 60s and 70s, people would hitchhike. He would pick up hitchhikers and bring them home. He just had this ability to connect with people, which was really special. LM: I remember talking to him about how he was able to embrace the Japanese. What he shared was that because he had learned Transcendental Meditation beforehand, before Robert even moved to Japan, that visiting there wasn’t as intense as it would have been without TM. I think at that point his heart was already opening and softening from the impact of PTSD. Yellin trying on a Japanese uniform, while visiting Japan in 2016. It fit him perfectly. (Courtesy "Jerry's Last Mission"/Facebook) Jerry co-founded Operation Warrior Wellness, which helps veterans learn Transcendental Meditation. What would you say was his key message to veterans struggling with depression and PTSD? SY: It’s very simple: Learn TM. I lived with him for two or three years and I remember him getting so intense about veterans learning TM. He would tell me, “There’s 21 suicides that are going to happen today and we can prevent it. It’s our responsibility.” He felt really strongly that he wanted to help in any way he could, particularly by using his own experience with overcoming PTSD. Louisa, how did you come to meet Jerry? LM: I met Jerry in the swimming pool [laughs]. I was living in the Midwest at the time, in Fairfield, Iowa, which is a town that is like the Mecca of Transcendental Meditation. I was finishing my laps and I saw him running — in fact, he would run in the water for a half an hour every day — and I just felt like going over and talking to him. He told me the summary of his story and it was two things: One, I was so inspired by the beautiful story of transformation he had. But on top of that was his joy for life. He really inspired me. From there we became good friends and we started filming almost right away. And for me, there was always this inspiration about humanity and his approach to life, but also for people to hear his message. I think that’s really what drove me from the beginning. Then it became, “How can we piece it together?” (Courtesy "Jerry's Last Mission"/Facebook) Michael and Steven, how was it to finally see your father on-screen? MY: Unbelievable admiration. Just a state of awe of what World War II veterans did. Every time I think of my dad sitting in a fighter plane, doing what he did, being on Iwo Jima, it just shakes me. And to know that he did have a real message of hope after all that — after going through hell, seeing what war is like, and surviving it. Having a message of hope, peace, and reconciliation means the world to me because it meant the world to him. SY: I realized that this was a very great man. I’m not just saying this because he was my father. I’m saying it because he had this universality about him, this greatness about him. He wanted to affect people’s hearts and wanted to affect people’s minds to expand their boundaries, so they weren’t prisoner of their boundaries. For that we’re so deeply indebted and grateful to Louisa for doing this. Thank you Steve, Michael, and Louisa for taking the time to discuss Jerry Yellin’s story. You can learn more about “Jerry’s Last Mission” at https://jerryslastmission.com/.

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https://www.historynet.com/jihad-by-sea.htm

Jihad By Sea

Jihad By Sea At the Battle of the Masts in 655, a fledgling Arab fleet from the Levant crushed the mighty Byzantine navy (Cyclopedia of Universal History, 1885). Seventh-century Muslim desert warriors built powerful new fleets and set out to conquer Europe – and destroy Christianity In ad 655 the emperor Constans II confronted a new and surprising threat to his Byzantine Empire. For years, armies of Arabs had overrun the empire’s southern provinces in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. Having defeated the Sassanid Empire, they dominated the Middle East and had even reached the gates of Constantinople before being driven back. But now these desert warriors had taken to the sea. Word reached Constans that Arab ships had attacked the islands of Rhodes, Kos, and Crete in the southern Aegean. Clearly, they meant to sail up the Aegean, through the Dardanelles, and into the Sea of Marmara. Constantinople, Constans’s home and the Byzantine capital, was being threatened again, this time from the sea. The emperor set out to destroy these upstarts once and for all. His navy of 500 ships was the greatest in the Mediterranean, its galleys crewed by the finest sailors and marines in the empire. When it caught the Arab fleet of 200 ships north of Cyprus, near the modern Turkish port of Finike, Constans attacked without hesitation. The emperor did not bother to bring his ships into formation. The Arabs knew nothing of naval warfare, and he expected to crush them in a single assault. Sailing straight into the Arabs, the Byzantines engaged so closely the clash was called the Battle of the Masts. The fighting lasted more than a day; according to one account, “the sea ran with blood and the waves piled up the bodies on the shore. Though outnumbered, the Arabs cut the Byzantines to pieces. Constans escaped only by putting on the garb of an ordinary seaman and having himself thrown bodily onto another ship. As the Byzantines fled, a storm decimated what remained of their shattered fleet. It was a major victory for the fledgling Arab navy, and not the last. The followers of Muhammad were just beginning what would be a centuries-long assault on Christendom. While their notoriously fierce armies carried out jihad on the ground, the new fleets would take the battle to Constantinople, Rome, Seville, and other great Mediterranean cities. If these strongholds fell, nothing would stand between the fanatic warriors of Islam and the heart of Europe. The Prophet Muhammad died in 632, and within 20 years, armies of Bedouins stormed across the lowlands of the Middle East, blowing down age-old empires in the name of Allah and Islam. They believed their sacred mission was to subjugate the world to their God. The first Muslim armies found success in Asia and Africa. But Christian Europe lay behind the barricade of the Mediterranean Sea, with only two points of land where armies could cross: Constantinople, and the short hop across the Strait of Gibraltar. To the Arabs, this proved a formidable obstacle. The first caliphs—Abu Bakr, Umar ibn al Khattab, and Uthman iba Affan—were desert tribesmen with a “natural horror” of the sea, according to historian Aly Mohamed Fahmy. The Arabs, wrote Fahmy, were known to say: “The flatulence of camels is more pleasing than the prayers of the fishes. Yet to one man, Mu’awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan, the Mediterranean offered an ideal way to attack Christian Europe. Selected in 640 by Umar as governor of the newly ?conquered province of Syria, Mu’awiyah reasoned that if the Arabs controlled the sea, they could turn the water into a highway to Europe. Mu’awiyah (pronounced moo-AH-we-yuh) was the son of one of Muhammad’s first and worst enemies. His father had submitted to Islam only when he had no other choice. Mu’awiyah, although opposed to the faith initially, became a passionate Muslim committed to jihad. During Umar’s caliphate, Mu’awiyah looked for new opportunities to expand the reach of Islam. His gaze fell on the Byzantine islands of Cyprus and Rhodes, which he said were so close to the Syrian shore that “you might almost hear the barking of the dogs and the cackling of hens.” He asked the caliph for permission to build a fleet. Umar turned him down. Mu’awiyah persisted. He understood military power and recognized that as master of Syria, he controlled a key war-making industry: the shipbuilders of the Levant. Since men first pushed logs into the water and tried to ride them, the people living along the coast of the Levant had built boats, a craft to which they brought considerable ingenuity. They lived at a hub of world trade routes that both inspired and financed their work. The design of warships was evolving in the seventh century. The swift, agile dromon was replacing plodding, heavily armored galleys. [See “Ships of Speed,” p. 75] Naval tactics changed as well. Instead of ramming enemy boats, galleys now jockeyed for position at a distance until they could close and board. Engagements began as soon as the ships moved within range of the archers and slingers. Dromons featured tall wooden castles high above their water line, an ideal perch from which to rain arrows down onto the enemy and ?pelt his decks with caltrops, rocks, pottery jars full of scorpions and snakes, and incendiary bombs. Once the crew was sufficiently disabled, the galley could close, grapple on, and fight hand to hand. The new style of sea warfare helped offset the Arabs’ inexperience as sailors. Their warriors were bred for battle. Mu’awiyah believed that once a sea battle moved to hand-to-hand combat, his men would win. The emir again asked to take the jihad to the water. Eventually Uthman, who succeeded Umar as caliph, agreed, possibly because the Byzantine fleet retook Alexandria for a while in 646 and pillaged much of the Nile delta. Given permission, Mu’awiyah began building ships in Tripoli, Sidon, and Acre on the Levantine coast. In 648, seven years before the Battle of the Masts, Mu’awiyah sailed from Acre with his first fleet, his wife, and several Companions of the Prophet, men who had known Muhammad. Ships joined him from Egypt, where the Byzantines had persecuted Coptics, the native Christians. Together, they overran and looted Cyprus. Mu’awiyah exacted a tribute, made the Cypriots promise to support him against the Byzantines, and left. In 653 he returned with 500 ships. The Cypriots fled into the hills, and the Arabs plundered the island, built a fortified city with a mosque, and left a garrison of 12,000 men. Cyprus now belonged to Islam. The next year, the Arab fleets attacked Crete, Kos, and Rhodes, assaults that drew Constans out of Constantinople and led to his humiliating defeat in 655 in the Battle of the Masts. Afterward, there was no doubt that the Muslim navy was heading up the Aegean toward the riches of Thessaloníki on the western coast, then on to Constans’s golden-domed capital city on the Bosporus. If Constantinople fell, the caliph and his armies would invade Europe from the east, and in the seventh century there was no force in Christendom capable of stopping them. It would be years, however, before Mu’awiyah could take advantage of his victory in the Battle of the Masts. The caliph Uthman was murdered in 656, and Islam fell into turmoil. Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali claimed the caliphate, but Mu’awiyah, boosted by his naval victories, challenged him. Their armies fought to a draw in the battles of Siffin in 657. When Ali agreed to negotiations, many of his followers turned against him and began a rebellion. In 661, he was assassinated by one of the rebels. After paying Ali’s son to abandon his claim to the throne, Mu’awiyah became caliph. This crisis split Islam in two—the Shia, who remained loyal to Ali, and the Sunni, who accepted Mu’awiyah as the caliph. It foretold the dissolution of the caliphate and has divided Islam ever since. Mu’awiyah could not have foreseen this. Capable and determined, he greatly expanded the caliphate in Asia and Africa. He preferred diplomacy to blunt force, and his generosity and broad-mindedness won over even his enemies. Once he asked a friend, “How great is your cunning?” The friend replied, “I have never entered into anything but that I got out of it.” Mu’awiyah said, “And I have never entered into anything that I wanted to get out of!” He was the last caliph to rule over the whole of Islam; he had no rival. Certainly Mu’awiyah was committed to jihad. Though it took him years to consolidate his power and build his great fleets, he never took his eyes off the prize: the conquest of Christendom. In 667, 12 years after the Battle of the Masts, the Levantine fleet attacked Rhodes again to bring the island under Muslim control. Five years later two Arab fleets entered the Aegean and raided as far as Izmir, halfway up the coast of Asia Minor, where they wintered. In 670 they sailed through the Dardanelles and took the coastal island Cyzicus, in the southern Sea of Marmara, and connected it by a mole to the mainland. Mu’awiyah’s son Yazid brought up an army by land and occupied Chalcedon, across the Marmara from Constantinople. For the next several years the Arab fleets tried to close the siege on the imperial city. But with Constans’s son Constantine IV to lead them, the Byzantines rose to the challenge. The city’s gigantic double walls, built by Emperor Theodosius, protected the landward side. Although the seawalls facing the Golden Horn were vulnerable, the furious currents of the Bosporus kept the Arab fleets at bay. Every winter the Arab fleets retired as far south as Rhodes to rest and resupply. Every spring they hurled themselves again at Constantinople. Finally, the Byzantines surprised them with a relatively new weapon. Among the usual forecastles packed with marines, some of the Byzantine dromons carried brass tubes that jutted well forward of their prows. When the Arab ships attacked, these long pipes fired a gelatinous substance that caught fire when it left the nozzle or burst into flame when it made contact with the enemy boats. Near Eastern armies had long used “Greek fire”—combustibles soaked with petroleum—but the Byzantines had come up with a device that could, much like a siphon, propel the liquid fire over short distances. This proved lethal for wooden ships. Water did not extinguish the fire; it burned even under the waves. Men who leapt overboard were consumed in the sea’s flames. Three of the four Muslim fleets were destroyed. The fourth, limping back down the Aegean, sank in a storm. Yazid’s army, meanwhile, retreated across Anatolia. In 678 Mu’awiyah was forced to agree to peace and a humiliating tribute. He died two years later at the age of 78, his work undone. His dynasty would strike Constantinople once more in 717. An Arab land army managed to cross into Europe, but the soldiers got no farther than the Theodosian Walls, where they dug in and suffered through the worst winter in decades, starving, freezing, and dying. Once again, Greek fire destroyed the Muslim fleet. That failure shattered the caliphate. The Muslim community, never wholly unified, disintegrated into rivalry and rebellion. Within a century, rival caliphs divided the Muslim world into warring splinters. Jihad itself continued, however, with the Islamic navy controlling the eastern Mediterranean. Mu’awiyah’s Arab armies had been campaigning in Africa for decades, meeting their match in the Berbers of the Mahgreb. But in 698, just before the fall of the caliph, the armies of Musa ibn Nusair, an Arab governor representing Mu’awiyah in Egypt and later Tunisia, took the ancient city of Carthage. Across a lagoon from Carthage was the village of Tunis, which was more sheltered from the sea. Musa, a former slave, lame in one leg, who had risen to power by wits and warfare, saw possibilities here. He ordered Carthage razed, a new city built where Tunis stood, and a canal dug joining it to the sea. To this new harbor the governor of Egypt sent a thousand Coptic shipwrights. There they built the first of the fleets that would challenge for dominion over all four parts of the Mediterranean: the Aegean; the eastern Mediterranean south of Crete between the Levantine coast and Sicily; the Adriatic; and the western Mediterranean. Until the rise of the Arab navies, the Byzantines had ruled this blue expanse. But after the disaster of the Battle of the Masts and as their holdings in western Europe dwindled, they chiefly concentrated on defending the Aegean. In 904, Leo of Tripoli, a pirate in the service of the caliph, briefly challenged Byzantine supremacy there. Born a Christian but a convert to Islam, Leo was a brilliant seaman who raided city after city in the Aegean and battered a Byzantine fleet sent to destroy him. Capturing Thessaloníki and enslaving most of its residents, he seemed for a time to flaunt Muslim power in the heart of Christendom. But without land forces to complement the terror he brought by sea, the Aegean remained under Byzantine control until the 13th century and was the epicenter of the recovery under the Macedonian dynasty (867–1081), when the Byzantines were at their peak in power, influence, and culture. Along the southern Mediterranean, Arabs held the coast and the deserts inland. While the Byzantines mounted occasional raids on Alexandria and Damietta in Egypt, they never again established a permanent presence there. In the Adriatic and Ionian seas, the Arabs made a few memorable attacks, but most of their forays were stymied by the various Christian princes, republics, and pirates, many of whom could match the Muslims’ seafaring skills. It was the western Mediterranean that the Arabs came to dominate. The last few Byzantine strongholds in Africa were dependent on the sea, but those cities withered as the new Arab fleets built at Tunis drove back imperial ships that dared venture past Malta. Arab control in the region expanded in the first half of the eighth century when Visigothic Spain fell to the Muslims. The caliphate in Baghdad was just disintegrating and across the conquered lands power was up for grabs. Abd al-Rahman, a scion of Mu’awiyah’s house, fled west and made himself emir in Spain. His Umayyad dynasty ruled memorably for three centuries, its kingdom a pinnacle of Islamic civilization. Under its young, shrewd, and ambitious new ruler, the city of Seville on the Guadalquivir River became an Arab naval center, churning out dromons and jihadi sailors. Flowing into the Gulf of Cadiz just beyond Gibraltar, the river gave access to both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Establishing strongholds on the shorelines and islands was key to controlling the Mediterranean. Fleets had to travel along coasts or hop between islands and put into harbor every few nights to take in fresh water. A single ship required hundreds of gallons for its crew. With small drafts, the light galleys also could not tolerate adverse weather and ran for cover whenever a storm brewed. As a result, whoever held the coastlines, the important islands, and the good harbors could dominate huge swaths of the sea. By 798 an Arab fleet from Andalusia was attacking the Balearic Islands (and may have gone on to sack Sardinia). When the Balearics were brought under control of the new Iberian caliphate, assault on the islands and shores of the western Mediterranean became relentless. Arab fleets from Spain and Africa pillaged Corsica and Sardinia almost yearly. Palermo fell in 831, and Arab colonists poured onto the great island of Sicily. By midcentury the Arabs controlled the Strait of Messina between Sicily and southern Italy, and fleets were raiding up the Adriatic, attacking the Byzantine port cities of Brindisi, Taranto, and Bari on Italy’s western coast as well as threatening Dubrovnik and Dyrrachium (modern-day Durrës in Albania). In 846, a Muslim fleet sailed into the Tiber and pillaged Rome. A little later the Arabs sacked the great Benedictine monastery at Montecassino, about 80 miles southeast of Rome. France—which Muslim armies had threatened to conquer until Franks under Charles Martel turned them back at the Battle of Tours in 732—was also a target. How much systematic planning went into this is anyone’s guess. Mostly the Arab fleets behaved like hunting packs. In 838 Muslim ships raided Marseilles, then ruled by the Franks. Four years later, they hit Arles. Around midcentury, Islamic pirates from Spain established a base in the Camargue, the marshy delta of the Rhône. From there they ranged up and down the French coast, burning villages and carrying people off into slavery. Taking Muhammad’s message to the world seems to have become secondary to the lure of booty. In 890 a band of Andalusian pirates landed in the bay of Saint Tropez and built a fortified camp on a hilltop midway between Marseilles and Monaco called Fraxinetum (modern Freinet). The pirates and their heirs stayed for a century, staging raids by sea on Marseilles and the northwest coast of Italy. They settled areas of modern Switzerland and raided as far north as Vienna. Two attempts by locals to dislodge them failed, but when the pirates attacked the caravan of the abbot Majolus of Cluny, one of the greatest churchmen in Christendom, they met their match. The monks paid a huge ransom to get Majolus back, but he then put together a grand alliance of forces from Turin, Provence, and the Byzantine Empire and drove the pirates out. For nearly 300 years, from the early 8th century to the dawn of the 11th, Arab fleets moved largely at will on the western Mediterranean, hopscotching along their network of harbors and strongholds. Their control was not limitless. In 844 a Viking fleet attacked down the Atlantic coast of Iberia, reaching Seville. Another Viking raid ventured into the Mediterranean, where it rampaged for some time, at one point looting a city on the Italian coast thought to be Rome. The Arabs defended against these interlopers but could not destroy them or run them off. Nor could they could maintain such strongholds as Fraxinetum or their Camargue base without land forces to conquer the country behind them. And Islam was no longer unified enough to field such armies. As the caliphate fragmented, the splinter groups fought each other with as much hatred as they showed the unbelievers. Meanwhile the Byzantines and the semi-­barbarian princes of Europe grew better equipped to fight the Muslim threat. The rise of the feudal system and the mailed knight gave Europe new strength, and the Byzantines reorganized their tax structure, made their armies more efficient, and found allies. The Arab window of opportunity against Christendom was closing. The Byzantines recaptured Rhodes in 944 and 945, then took Crete again, plus the Levantine coast as far south as Beirut, which fell in 975. Arabs in Egypt, meanwhile, were locked in a savage interdynastic rivalry. They managed to stop the Byzantine advance at Jerusalem and Tripoli, but the empire was expanding on all fronts. Imperial dromons, allegedly armed with Greek fire, joined the assault that uprooted the pirates at Fraxinetum in 972. The appearance of imperial ships in the far west showed both the new strength of Constantinople and the waning of Islam. In 1085 Alphonso of Castile captured the city of Toledo, ancient capital of Spain, and the realm of Abd al-Rahman began to disintegrate. While the Christians retook ever-larger areas of Spain, the Byzantines made a bloody and costly effort to recapture Sicily. They failed, but the island later fell to a pack of Norman adventurers who would establish there the most brilliant court of the 12th and 13th centuries. The tide of jihad was receding. The dromon itself was giving way to a faster, more powerful galley that fueled the rise of Venice, Pisa, and Genoa as sea powers. As Europeans reclaimed their coasts, their princes developed strong patterns of governance. At the end of the 11th century, the first Christian crusaders conquered the Levant and held parts of it for 200 years, making the Mediterranean so safe that Eleanor of Aquitaine could sail home from the Second Crusade with little fear of Arab attack. The struggle for the Mediterranean would continue for hundreds of years, with more Muslim assaults on Rhodes and Malta and the great confrontation at Lepanto in 1571, the last battle fought entirely between rowed galleys. But the moment had passed when the warriors from the desert could successfully carry their jihad onto the sea against an infant Europe. Click For More From MHQ!

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https://www.historynet.com/john-byng-the-scapegoating-of-an-admiral.htm

John Byng: The Scapegoating of an Admiral

John Byng: The Scapegoating of an Admiral In 1756 British admiral John Byng failed “to use all possible means” to stop the French from taking Minorca. He paid for it with his life. On March 14, 1757, Admiral John Byng was shot by a firing squad of Royal Marines on the quarterdeck of HMS Monarch, then lying at anchor in Spithead, England. Byng was the last British admiral executed by sentence of court-­martial, and his case has influenced military law, naval com­mand doctrine, and even literary satire. He was shot not for what he had done but for what he had failed to do. At the time of his death Byng was a naval officer of nearly 40 years’ service, with 12 years’ experience at flag rank. He was a capable administrator, having held such posts as governor general of Newfoundland and commander in chief of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet. He was not, however, a dynamic combat commander—in fact, his career up to the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756 was noteworthy for the relatively few combat actions he had seen. Byng was probably not the ideal commander for the events that unfolded in the opening weeks of the Seven Years’ War. The Balearic Island of Minorca in the Mediterranean had been an important British military outpost since its capture in 1708 during the War of the Spanish Succession, and when diplomatic hostilities between France and Britain erupted into yet another war between the two hereditary enemies, the French sent a naval invasion force to take the island from the British. Byng’s fleet represented the largest British naval force in the vicinity, and in May 1756 the Admiralty ordered Byng to proceed to Minorca’s relief. His instructions included a phrase that would be used against him with fatal effect in the subsequent court-martial: “If you find any attack upon that island by the French, you are to use all possible means in your power for its relief.” From the outset, Byng was pessimistic about his mission. He argued that the military resources available to him were inadequate if the French were to appear in strength, and he believed that the fortress at Gibraltar was the more important strategic position. With that outlook, he made his first misstep by refusing to reduce Gibraltar’s garrison to augment the main Minorca stronghold of Fort St. Philip. His rationale was that the 700 soldiers he was directed to take to Fort St. Philip’s defense were too few to change the inevitable outcome and that carrying out the order would only result in a needless loss of men and resources. Arriving at Minorca and finding it menaced by the French fleet, Byng made a half-hearted attempt to communicate with Fort St. Philip’s commander, but he recalled his ships before they had even reached the island. The following day, May 20, Byng engaged the French. Although the two fleets were almost evenly matched numerically, the French had a slight advantage in guns, and in a critical maneuvering decision that would later be called an error, Byng never fully engaged his fleet. In a short and inconclusive sea battle, the French lost 38 killed and 184 wounded, while British casualties came to 45 killed and 162 wounded. The lead vessels of the British fleet were battered and several capital ships heavily damaged, but others, including Byng’s flagship, never closed to within effective range. After consulting with his senior captains, Byng decided there was nothing to be gained from continuing the fight and sailed back to Gibraltar, leaving Minorca to the French. Fort St. Philip held out against the besieging French for another month before finally capitulating when no other British force came to its aid. As he faced a six-man firing squad aboard HMS Monarch on March 14, 1757, Byng at first refused a blindfold. (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London) Both the Admiralty and Prime Minister Thomas Pelham-­Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle, were furious when they learned that Byng had essentially abandoned Minorca. Byng was immediately recalled to Britain to face a court-martial. Newcastle seemed determined to scapegoat Byng even before the court-martial convened, telling Parliament that the admiral “shall be tried immediately; he shall be hanged directly.” If Newcastle hoped to distract public opinion from his administration’s inadequate preparations for war by focusing the nation’s outrage on Byng’s conduct, his effort failed. His government fell in November 1756, and he was replaced by William Pitt the Elder. Byng’s court-martial convened in December 1756, with four admirals and nine senior captains as judges. Charges were proffered against him under the 12th Article of War. If Byng’s bad luck had begun with a mission that sent him out inadequately equipped and insufficiently armed, as he insisted in his defense, he was even unluckier to face a court-martial at this time in the history of British naval law. Eleven years earlier the Articles of War had been revised to stipulate that capital punishment was the only penalty for a commander who was found guilty of having “failed to do his utmost against the enemy” in battle or pursuit. The words that had until then allowed for lesser punishments—“such other punishment as the circumstances of the offence shall deserve and the court-martial shall judge fit”—had been struck from the article. The 12th Article’s somewhat open-ended phrase—“failed to do his utmost”—proved to be Byng’s undoing. That was the specific wording on which the court found him guilty, though it acquitted him on the charges of “personal cowardice and disaffection.” Even so, the court­-martial board reached its verdict with great reluctance because it had no latitude in determining the sentence. Death was the only sentence the law allowed. The court-martial officers un­animously wrote a decision that asked the Lords of the Admiralty to petition the king for mercy. After all, no British admiral had ever been executed on such a charge before. As prime minister, Pitt did not share his predecessor Newcastle’s personal animosity toward Byng, and he petitioned King George II on the admiral’s behalf, telling the monarch that the House of Commons favored clemency. The king declined to exercise the royal prerogative for mercy, telling his prime minister, “You have taught me to look for the sense of my people elsewhere than in the House of Commons.” The king may have been less concerned with the merits of the appeal than the identity of the politician who was requesting it; considerable political enmity existed between Pitt and the king at that time. The king rejected appeals from other sources as well, including several from the court-martial judges themselves. Two vice admirals of the board of 12 who had convicted Byng flatly refused to sign the death sentence, as did the lord commissioner of the Admiralty, and the entire court recommended that his sentence be commuted. Nonetheless, the king allowed the execution to proceed. Byng went to his death on a cold, stormy March morning. His coffin was brought aboard HMS Monarch, already inscribed with the words, “The Hon. John Byng, died March 14th 1757.” If Byng had lacked aggressiveness as a combat commander, he certainly did not lack personal composure or courage as he went to his fate. He refused a blindfold but was finally, reluctantly, convinced to accept it on the grounds that it would unnerve the firing squad to see his face as they aimed at him. Byng knelt on a cushion on the quarterdeck, tied the blindfold himself, and held up his handkerchief. He remained in that posture, motionless, for a long, silent moment and then dropped the handkerchief. At that signal, the firing party of six marines fired, killing him instantly. In the years that followed, Byng was both pilloried and praised in the courts of public opinion and historical memory, with competing epitaphs dedicated to his disputed memory. Byng’s supporters characterized his execution as a judicial murder, and his burial marker declared him to be “a martyr to political persecution.” His case gained lasting recognition when Voltaire, the French author François-Marie Arouet, satirically referred to him in Candide (1759) with the line “Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres” (In this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.) Voltaire’s snide remark was surely far more accurate than many in the Admiralty would have wanted to admit. In fact, the Royal Navy had stiffened the penalties of the Articles of War in direct reaction to a perceived lack of dedication to duty on the part of officers in several incidents during the War of the Austrian Succession a decade before Byng’s disgrace. The concept of the “Byng Principle” became an entrenched part of the Royal Navy’s culture for years as a damning phrase that meant “nothing is to be undertaken where there is risk or danger.” British naval commanders were so concerned with this slander that they frequently undertook incredible risks in situations that had little apparent chance of military success, just to prevent the slur being leveled against them, and in so doing achieved amazing victories against very long odds. In 1759 in the Battle of Quiberon Bay, Vice Admiral Edward Hawke imperiled his entire fleet to engage the enemy despite weather conditions so severe that conventional naval doctrine would have avoided battle. Emerging victorious against both the French and the weather, Hawke wrote, “I can boldly affirm that all that could possibly be done had been done.” It was a mentality that instilled an almost hyperaggressiveness in Royal Navy commanders through the period of the Napoleonic Wars, and from 1757 to 1815 at least half a dozen British naval officers demanded trial by court-martial to clear their reputations of any suggestion that they had failed “to do their utmost” against the enemy. If, as some critics said, John Byng was shot as a grim warning to other officers, the warning seemed to have had its effect. The legal rigidity that had forced the 1756 court-martial to sentence Byng to death did not long survive him. At the height of the war with the American colonies in 1779, the Royal Navy’s Articles of War were amended to restore to the 12th Article the life-saving words that would thereafter allow military judges to select “such other punishment as the nature and degree of the offense shall be found to deserve.” MHQ John A. Haymond is the author of Soldiers: A Global History of the Fighting Man, 1800–1945 (Stackpole Books, 2018) and The Infamous Dakota War Trials of 1862: Revenge, Military Law, and the Judgment of History (McFarland, 2016). This article appears in the Autumn 2020 issue (Vol. 33, No. 1) of MHQ—The Quarterly Journal of Military History with the headline: Laws of War | The Scapegoating of an Admiral 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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John Marshall: Facilitating Federalist

John Marshall: Facilitating Federalist Chief justice’s legacy of landmark decisions is still with us today AMERICAN HISTORY “Déjà Vu” columnist Richard Brookhiser, left, is a journalist, historian, documentary filmmaker, and author. His latest book, John Marshall: The Man Who Made the Supreme Court (Basic, 2018) is a biography of a titan of American jurisprudence. What about Marshall surprised you most? His humor. Judging is an inherently serious matter, on top of which Marshall found himself in some tight spots thanks to the partisanship that marked his years on the bench (1801-35). Yet he was always up for a good story and a good drink. “I love his laugh,” wrote future associate justice Joseph Story after they first met. I’m glad my John Marshall: The Man Who Made the Supreme Court by Richard Brookhiser, Basic Books, 2018; $30 publisher put a smiling picture of him on the cover. You term him “the last Federalist.” Why? Marshall was a deep-dyed Federalist. He called George Washington “the greatest Man on earth,” he owed his chief justiceship to John Adams, and he described Alexander Hamilton as a “genius.” Although the party collapsed after the War of 1812, Marshall as chief justice had lifetime tenure. So many of his landmark decisions—protecting contracts and corporations, enforcing federal supremacy over state courts, fostering commerce—reflected Federalist policies. And he kept it up into the Age of Jackson. What was his most formative experience? He had two, one from each of his fathers. His actual father, Thomas Marshall—frontiersman, surveyor, and real estate speculator—raised him to be a lawyer, homeschooling him with Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. His symbolic father, George Washington, commanded him during the Revolution at Brandywine, Germantown, and Valley Forge. His profession was the law; his goal in life was to be as dutiful and as patriotic as Washington. How did the Revolution resonate in his life? Fighting in common cause beside comrades from many states made him a nationalist. Suffering alongside them showed him the consequences of ineffectual government: meager supplies, pay ever in arrears. The war showed him the need of a new Constitution and inspired him to be its lifelong defender. Historian, author, and journalist Richard Brookhiser. Explain the Quoits Club. Quoits was a game, like horseshoes, played with iron rings. The Club was a group of Richmond gentlemen who met weekly May to October to play, eat, drink, and give comic speeches. Membership was capped at 30, but open to all political persuasions. The club fostered trans-partisan friendships: good training for a justice whose high court colleagues increasingly came from the other political party, the Republicans. Thanks to his Quoits Club experience, and his own splendid temper, Marshall befriended them—the first step to converting them to his views. Marshall owned slaves. What does the record say about him? Paul Finkelman has shown that Marshall owned 130 to 150 slaves, rather than the dozen or so older biographies assigned him. Marshall extended himself for Indians, going to the mat with Andrew Jackson over his policy of ejecting them beyond the Mississippi. But he lived with slavery and took no serious steps to curtail it. He fell short of his Federalist idols—Washington, who freed all his slaves in his will, and Hamilton, who helped found the New-York Manumission Society. Explain the “Marshall Court.” We are talking about two things: decisions, and attitude. The Marshall Court’s decisions created a national economic market (Gibbons v. Ogden) in which individuals and corporations (Dartmouth v. Woodward) could contract to do business (Fletcher v. Peck), free from state-level interference. The Marshall Court behaved as a peer of the other branches of government, rebuking states (McCulloch v. Maryland, Cohens v. Virginia) and Congress (Marbury v. Madison) and scolding presidents (Marbury again). Both facets of the Marshall Court are with us today. Characterize Marshall as High Court member and manager. First, he was fun to be with. Only two people ever hated him: his cousin Thomas Jefferson, and former William and Mary classmate and Virginia judge Spencer Roane. Second, he was politic. He deferred to fellow judges in areas of law in which he was not expert—and got deference in return. Third, he was shrewd. He picked his battles (“I am not fond,” he told Story, “of butting my head against a wall in sport”). Fourth, he was smart. When he bore down, he was overpowering. His mind, said Attorney General William Wirt, was like the Atlantic Ocean, while everybody else’s were mere ponds. Fifth, he endured: 34 years as chief justice, still a record. For much of Marshall’s SCOTUS tenure, justices roomed together. What impact did this have? We know from a sometimes-restive justice, William Johnson, that there was explicit pressure to conform. Early in his Court days Johnson was warned by his brethren—he never said who—that his dissents would lower their collective prestige. But eating and drinking together is a potent form of bonding. Marshall’s SCOTUS was like the Quoits Club, DC chapter. What are the hallmarks of a “Marshall decision”? It often begins with an ironic tic: Marshall will say the question before the Court was one of great “delicacy.” When he says that, expect a roundhouse. And it comes: well-organized, measured in tone, implacable. He had a knack, which I think he picked up from Alexander Pope, for making his judgments seem obvious. You would as soon argue with Mount Sinai. How does Marshall’s presence still echo in the court’s workings? Besides the economic and structural legacies I mentioned earlier, he can appear without warning. When pundits and Tweeters throw around the word treason, I think how carefully Marshall weighed it in the treason trial of Aaron Burr. Stick around, and Marshall is liable to pop up. What about his private life? I’m more interested in John’s public career, but there is something both sweet and painful about the Marshall marriage. His wife Mary, known as Polly, was a bold young girl who wanted him and got him, but she soon became a depressed recluse. His zest for politics and socializing probably encouraged her depression. Yet he loved her, admired her taste—I think she introduced him to Jane Austen—and wept often after she died. The three dates he picked for his epitaph were his birth, his wedding, and his death. He wrote that epitaph, by the way, on the Fourth of July. Patriot to the end. H

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John Singleton Mosby’s Accidental Courage

John Singleton Mosby’s Accidental Courage In Loudoun County, Virginia, an old brick gristmill that still straddles a millrace along the Little River Turnpike served as the backdrop for one of John Singleton Mosby’s most breathtaking exploits in March 1863. Even if Civil War students and buffs don’t know much about the mill and its history, they most certainly know a little about Aldie and its significance in the annals of the war. After all, there are countless references to Aldie in the Official Records—the 128-volume compendium of the Union and Confederate armies’ after-action reports, published by the federal government in the late 19th century—and in other primary sources, since officers on both sides often took note of the village as their troops passed through it during campaign marches or while on patrol. The small town also gained fame for the events of June 17, 1863, when Confederate and Union cavalry clashed early in the Gettysburg Campaign. The Confederates that day, under the command of Colonel Thomas T. Munford, kept up a spirited defense against repeated assaults by Union infantry and horsemen until dusk, when they were ordered to withdraw from the field. It is said that a soon-to-be-famous Yankee cavalry captain named George Armstrong Custer, who fought at Aldie that day, got dunked in Little River while trying to water his horse not far from Aldie Mill. But Mosby, the daring Confederate partisan warrior, is the man most often associated with Aldie. His name is in fact legendary in northwestern Virginia. During the war, the raids his partisans conducted against Union patrols, supply trains and sometimes even Federal headquarters led locals to nickname the region “Mosby’s Confederacy,” a sobriquet that today is echoed in the designation of much of Prince William and Loudoun counties as the “Mosby Heritage Area.” For many residents of that region during the Civil War, including those who supported the Union and those who swore loyalty to the Confederacy, the activities of Mosby’s band of marauders revealed in stark and dramatic ways how the war was also an internecine conflict for neighbors who became victims or who chose different sides during the conflagration between North and South. For much of the lengthy conflict, residents of Loudoun County found themselves inadvertently caught in the grip of a destructive tug of war, as opposing armies tramped over their roads, camped in their fields, and fought battles and skirmishes across the lush landscape surrounding small farms and sprawling plantations. Located in the northern Piedmont, with the Potomac River as its northern border and Prince William County (where the First and Second Battles of Manassas were fought) to the south, Loudoun County was strategically important because of its many primary highways. But the residents were divided in their allegiances. Many supported secession and favored the Confederate cause. Others, including the largely Quaker community of Waterford and a good number of German-Americans who had settled elsewhere in the county, held strong Unionist sentiments. Both Confederate and Union sympathizers discovered that war could come crashing down on them at any moment, and that their farms could be repeatedly looted without regard to loyalties. Loudoun County got its first real taste of war on October 21, 1861, when the Battle of Ball’s Bluff—a Rebel victory—was fought just outside the county seat of Leesburg. Just six months later, in March 1862, Union forces successfully occupied the entire county. Enter John S. Mosby. The dashing Confederate cavalryman was not a native of Loudoun County and had shown no interest in the military prior to the war’s outbreak. But his early history shows an interesting mix of characteristics. Born outside of Richmond, Va., in 1833, he later attended the University of Virginia, where his violent streak—despite his diminutive stature (5-feet-7) and size (128 pounds)—landed him in real trouble. In a dispute with a town bully, Mosby shot and seriously wounded the young man. Found guilty of “malicious shooting,” he had served seven months of a one-year jail sentence when Virginia’s governor, Joseph Johnson, pardoned him just two weeks before Mosby’s 20th birthday. That unfortunate episode sparked Mosby’s interest in the law. While incarcerated he studied law books, and continued his apprenticeship after his release, passing the bar several months later and opening his own practice in Howardsville, in Albermarle County. In 1857 he married Pauline Clarke, the daughter of a congressman and diplomat from Kentucky. Mosby and his bride relocated to Bristol, Va., where he was practicing law when the Civil War broke out. He served with distinction in the Virginia cavalry under J.E.B. Stuart until January 1863, when he received permission to organize a unit of partisan rangers, which soon enough was mustered into General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia as the 43rd Battalion of Virginia Cavalry. Mosby and his men engaged in guerrilla warfare, attacking Union patrols and supply trains throughout the northern Piedmont, including Federally occupied Loudoun County. For the rest of the conflict, Mosby’s Rangers would disrupt Union communications, keep Federal patrols occupied in fruitless chases, and frustrate Union commanders with his bold tactics, his wild raids and his amazing ability to avoid capture. When his raids ended, Mosby would disband his Rangers and they would return to their homes or to shelter given by relatives and friends. The support he and his men received from Confederate sympathizers put all civilians, including Loudoun County residents, at risk, since Union officers suspected that local men were farmers by day and raiders by night. The bluecoats often tried to extricate intelligence by force from the citizenry. The climate of terror grew worse as the war continued. If Mosby’s adventures increased morale among his Rangers and civilian supporters, it also created a culture of suspicion throughout Mosby’s Confederacy. His supporters were seen more and more by Federal officers and troops as accomplices, co-conspirators and insurgents. Meanwhile, Mosby continued to carry out his plans and avoid his Yankee pursuers. As his exploits multiplied and his fame spread, he earned the romantic moniker “The Gray Ghost.” Aldie Mill, the site of one of Mosby’s more memorable triumphs, was constructed in 1807—the brainchild of Charles Fenton Mercer, a prominent member of the Federalist Party from Loudoun County and an entrepreneur of considerable talent. At Aldie, named after Mercer’s ancestral estate in Scotland, he established a small but important industrial center, consisting of a merchant mill, a country mill, sawmill, distillery and blacksmith’s forge— all clustered in close proximity to the most prominent building, the four-story brick mill that still stands in Aldie. On the morning of March 2, 1863, Captain John Moore, who had bought Aldie Mill from Mercer in 1835, had no hint that the war was about to arrive on his doorstep. The day had begun like any other for Moore and his workers, who were busy storing flour in the huge wooden bins on the mill’s second floor. Moore kept the dual wooden water wheels turning as the mill’s stones worked to grind the grain. Outside a Union cavalry patrol soon appeared, a frequent occurrence in recent weeks. This wouldn’t be last time that Union horsemen would ride the Little River Turnpike past the mill en route to Middleburg, five miles to the west. Today the blue-coated soldiers belonged to the 18th Pennsylvania Cavalry, under the command of Major Joseph Gilmore, which along with the 5th New York Cavalry was on an expedition to Middleburg with orders to capture the Gray Ghost. By raiding Yankee wagon trains and disrupting Northern patrols, Mosby was generally making life miserable for Union troops from Fairfax all the way to Front Royal. Gilmore hoped to find Mosby in Middleburg, since rumors had it that his headquarters were located somewhere in the town. Mosby, who in fact had no real headquarters site, was recognized as a natural-born leader. His piercing blue eyes revealed steely determination. Whenever he spoke, one of his men remembered, his eyes “flashed the punctuations of his sentence.” When he was angry, his glare tended to chill everyone around him. Often ill-tempered and stubborn, he was notoriously restless. One acquaintance recalled that he could barely sit still for 10 minutes. Yet he was a superb horseman who could spend hours in the saddle. He also had a rich sense of humor, and around the campfire would laugh boisterously at his men’s jokes and stories. Beneath his changeable exterior, however, lay a keen intellect and the mind of a planner and schemer. Mosby was born to fight. He improvised on the tactics of traditional warfare by striking boldly and then disappearing into the fog-covered plains and hills of Loudoun and Fauquier counties. When Gilmore and his Union troopers rode into Middleburg that morning, they found no sign of the Gray Ghost, but they quickly captured a few of his Rangers, some unruly civilians and several barrels of whiskey, which they promptly consumed. Now reeling in the saddle, the Yankees retreated from Middleburg and passed once again through Aldie, where Moore continued with his work inside the mill. Gilmore, apparently feeling uneasy and definitely feeling his liquor, decided to leave a regiment of Vermont cavalry at the mill, just in case Mosby and his men should materialize somewhere along the Little River Turnpike. Fifty men of the 1st Vermont Cavalry, under the command of Captain F.T. Huntoon, dismounted and lounged around the mill yard, watering and resting their horses, as so many cavalry patrols had done before when they passed through. Meanwhile Mosby and his men were gathering at Rector’s Crossroads (modern-day Atoka). When Mosby had collected 17 of his Rangers, they rode off to Middleburg, where the citizens informed them of the Yankee incursion that morning, and then headed farther east, toward Aldie. As Mosby entered the tiny village from the west, with his Rangers strung out behind him along the dusty turnpike, he could see from a hilltop a few dawdling Yankee cavalrymen in the roadway, not paying much attention to the approach to the village. Mosby quickly spied an advantage and decided to take it. He called out “Charge!” to his Rangers behind him, spurred his horse and galloped off in a blur of dust toward the surprised Union troopers. The Rangers riding behind him were just as astonished by his order as the Yankees would soon be, but when the partisans finally realized what Mosby had said—and that their commander was now several horse-lengths ahead of them, rushing into a bewildered cluster of Yankees—the Rangers took off after him. When the cavalrymen in the road looked up and saw the notorious Gray Ghost pounding down the turnpike in their direction, they quickly scattered. In the mill yard, the rest of the Vermont horsemen—also caught off guard—desperately rushed to their horses and swung themselves into their saddles, hoping to get across the stone bridge that crossed the nearby Little River as quickly as possible. Other troopers, perhaps seeing their lives pass before their eyes, simply dashed pell-mell inside the mill, where Moore couldn’t have been happy to see them. Mosby continued to gallop down the pike toward the stone bridge but soon discovered that he was now riding a runaway horse. As he later wrote: Just as we were ascending to the top of a hill on the outskirts of the village, two [Federal] cavalrymen suddenly met us. We captured them and sent them to the rear, supposing they were videttes of Gilmer’s [sic] command. Orders were sent to the men behind to hurry up. Just then I saw two cavalrymen in blue on the pike. No others were visible, so with my squad I started at a gallop to capture them. But when we got halfway down the hill we discovered a considerable body—it turned out to be a squadron of cavalry that had dismounted. Their horses were hitched to a fence, and they were feeding at a mill. I tried to stop, but my horse…ran at full speed, entirely beyond my control. But the [Union] cavalry at the mill were taken absolutely by surprise by the irruption; their videttes had not fired, and they were as much shocked as if we had dropped from the sky. They never waited to see how many of us there were. A panic seized them. Without stopping to bridle their horses or to fight on foot, they scattered in all directions. Some hid in the mill; others ran to Bull Run Mountain near by. Just as we got to the mill, I saw another body of cavalry ahead of me on the pike, gazing in bewildered astonishment at the sight. To save myself, I jumped off my horse and my men stopped, but fortunately the mounted party in front of me saw those I had left behind coming to my relief, so they wheeled and started full speed down the pike. Meanwhile, Mosby’s men were chasing down the Vermonters who had remained at the mill. Some of the Union cavalrymen attempted to hide in the flour bins on the second floor; others jumped into the grain hoppers and came close, as Mosby later wrote, to “being ground up into flour.” His men, he reported, had “a great deal of fun pulling the Vermont boys out of flour bins.” When the Rangers got them out of the bins, said Mosby, “there was nothing blue about them.” The first Yankee prisoner his men brought out of the mill “was so caked in flour” that Mosby thought his Rangers had inadvertently captured Captain Moore, the miller. Now horseless, Mosby started walking toward the mill, and was met near the bridge by a particularly courageous Vermont officer, a Captain Worthington. The Yankee was in turn confronted by one of Mosby’s men, a Marylander named Tom Turner, who fired at Worthington. The bullet wounded the captain’s horse, pinning the Yankee to the ground. Worthington managed to return fire, severely wounding Turner, who later claimed he had been shot after his opponent had surrendered. A contingent of Rangers called for the Yankee’s execution, but Worthington denied he had committed such a breach of military protocol—that he had fired in a fair fight. Mosby sided with Worthington. He instructed his men to remove the Vermonter from under his horse rather than take him into custody. Too badly injured to return to his lines, however, Worthington remained with a family in Aldie to be cared for and reclaimed by the next Union patrol passing through the village. All in all, Mosby and his men captured 20 prisoners that day, including Captain Huntoon, the 1st Vermont’s commanding officer, and 23 horses. After Mosby sent his men off to Middleburg with their prisoners, he lingered for a while at the mill. As he rested, three more Vermonters emerged from the flour bins and were captured. No more than half a dozen shots had been fired during the whole episode in front of Aldie Mill, Mosby later claimed. Only two of his men were wounded: Turner and an unnamed raider. As the Rangers returned to Middleburg with their prisoners, the local citizens at first saw only a column of blue-coated men coming down the road and feared that meant Mosby and his men had been captured. A Ranger, however, quickly galloped out of the pack and dashed forward to trumpet the Confederate victory, prompting a loud cheer from the residents. By that time they could see that the bluecoats were prisoners being escorted by Mosby’s proud Rangers. “There was rejoicing in Middleburg that night,” Mosby wrote years later. “At night, with song and dance, we celebrated the events, and forgot the dangers of the day.” Mosby also made sure to note that Captain Moore, the Aldie miller, was relieved by the Rangers’ intervention. It turned out they had arrived just in time to save his corn and flour from being purloined by the Vermont troopers. With modesty, Mosby wrote in his memoirs: “In this affair I got the reputation of a hero; really I never claimed it, but gave my horse all the credit.” As for the horse, Mosby never recovered it—and given that particular mount’s behavior in combat, he probably figured that was for the best. But what Mosby seemed to be saying, in his own self-effacing way, was that his courage that day in front of Aldie Mill had not been all that commendable, and that the bravery he was credited with as he charged down the roadway toward the Yankee cavalrymen was to a certain extent accidental and completely reflexive—automatic, instinctive, involuntary courage. There would be other occasions when Mosby and his men again found themselves fighting near Aldie Mill. Nearly a year later, his Rangers engaged in a hot skirmish with Union cavalry along the five-mile stretch of road linking Middleburg and Aldie. On July 6, 1864, he and his men fought a more heated battle with the enemy near Mount Zion Church, less than a mile east of the mill. And on September 15, 1864, Mosby himself was badly wounded when a bullet hit the grip of his pistol during a skirmish with the 13th New York Cavalry nearby. In April 1865, after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Mosby and his Rangers refused to capitulate. Instead, they headed back in the direction of his old stomping grounds, and on April 21 Mosby disbanded his partisans in Salem, Va. (modern-day Marshall). Once the war was over, the Gray Ghost accepted defeat and became a reconciliationist. He ended up campaigning for Grant in the presidential election of 1868 and later served as his consul to Hong Kong. Many of Mosby’s fellow Virginians could never forgive him for becoming a Republican in the postwar era, but the former Gray Ghost shrugged off their disdain and ignored the many death threats he received. In standing firm for his principles during and after the war, Mosby proved that his courage was by no means accidental, but deliberate, steady and sure. Glenn W. LaFantasie, a frequent contributor, is the Richard Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History and Director of the Institute for Civil War Studies at Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green. Originally published in the April 2012 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.

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John Wilkes Booth: An Oily Character

John Wilkes Booth: An Oily Character CAMEO Before plotting murder, the actor tried his hand at oil JOHN WILKES BOOTH at 24 had the charisma of a young Johnny Depp. Graceful, daring, and handsome, with flashing dark eyes, he was the youngest son of a prominent theatrical family. Father Junius Brutus Booth had emigrated from England to make his name as a Shakespearean and succeeded. Older brothers Edwin and Junius Jr. already were established thespians in 1845 when John, 17, first trod the boards. Physical vitality alone made the youngest Booth memorable, and by 1858 he was a star and a celebrity. However, in January 1864, John Wilkes Booth quit theater to seek his fortune in Franklin, Pennsylvania. In that boomtown, he strutted his hour as an oil well speculator before coming to a different notoriety for assassinating President Abraham Lincoln. Long after Booth’s death by gunshot after being cornered in a burning barn in Port Royal, Virginia, rumors swirled that Lincoln’s killer had made a fortune as a wildcatter. The truth is far different. Raised in rural Bel Air, Maryland, John Wilkes Booth so ardently embraced the white supremacist cause that he attended the 1859 hanging of abolitionist insurrectionary John Brown at Charles Town, Virginia. In 1863, Booth was performing in theaters up and down the Eastern Seaboard when a mysterious hoarseness took over his throat and threatened his livelihood. Whether caused by poor vocal technique or bronchitis, the condition caused Booth to book fewer appearances. After starring as Richard III in St. Louis in January 1864, he shucked theater hoping to strike it rich in oil. Booth’s Pennsylvania well went bust and he returned to DC and his fellow conspirators.(Library of Congress) In seeking another career, Booth also was joining a wave of Americans looking to prosper on the new frontier of energy. To light their lamps, American households needed liquid fuel. To lubricate machinery, American factories needed oil. Oil came mainly from sperm whales, killed and rendered at sea. Whaling had so depleted that species that sperm oil had become costly. An alternative was a flammable glop oozing to the surface around western Pennsylvania in patches called oil seeps. Native Americans had long burned the stuff, sopping it up in blankets wrung into containers. Speculators were eyeing coal gas, camphine, a byproduct of turpentine distillation, and other fuels. However, “rock oil” not only burned well—emitting “a dainty light; the brightest and yet the cheapest in the world,” a booster said—but also was a swell lubricant. Oil, which often seeped near salt deposits, went unexploited for lack of a practicable way to extract it until 1859, when the tenacious Edwin Drake, 59, drilled the first commercial oil well. Investors had brought the former railroad worker in on a well at Titusville, Pennsylvania. His first hole, drilled with a bare shaft, caved in, trapping the mechanism. Drake encased the shaft in a protective metal sheath. His design succeeded, proving deep drilling could work. Within a year of Drake’s strike, 500 drilling rigs were lining the 16 miles of Oil Creek between Titusville and Oil City. “The whole population are crazy almost,” investor George Bissell wrote. “I never saw such excitement. The whole western country are thronging here and fabulous prices are offered for lands in the vicinity where there was a prospect of getting oil.” Booth joined the oil rush, convincing two theatrical pals from Cleveland to come in as well. Their Dramatic Oil Company leased 3.5 acres outside Franklin. The wildcatters called their would-be gusher “Wilhelmina” after one partner’s wife. After a brief sojourn onstage, Booth returned to Franklin in May 1864 with banker Joseph Simonds, an acquaintance from Boston. Workers, speculators, and teamsters hired to haul oil so crowded Franklin that the two had to room with others. Booth swanned around town, Confederate zealotry on full display; in a barbershop he upbraided a black man for wearing a hat. The man retorted that he bared his head for ladies, so outraging Booth that a companion said he was sure that if the actor had had a weapon he would have killed the fellow. The Wilhelmina scarcely delivered, though Booth spent another couple of thousand dollars trying to improve extraction. The preferred method, a precursor to fracking, involved detonating explosives in a laggard well in hopes of dislodging oil. At Wilhelmina the tactic failed and ruined the well. In September, Booth gave his stakes to family and to Simonds. Booth headed to Baltimore, then to Montreal, where he mingled with fellow Confederate sympathizers before relocating to a frequent stop, Washington, DC. In February 1865 the actor sent Simonds a note the banker found disturbing. “I hardly know what to make of you this winter—so different from your usual self,” Simonds replied. “Have you lost all your ambition or what is the matter. Don’t get offended with me John but I cannot but think you are wasting your time spending the entire season in Washington doing nothing where it must be expensive to live and all for no other purpose beyond pleasure. If you had taken 5 or 10,000 dollars and come out here and spent the season living here with us, traveling off over the country hunting up property I believe we both could have made considerable money by it. It is not too late yet for I believe the great rush for property is to be this Spring ….” Simonds was right. Lack of efficient transport was bottlenecking the oil flow. In less than a year the industry began building pipelines, dramatically widening markets but also stirring unrest as sidelined teamsters fought the new technology. Thanks to pipelines many entrepreneurs in what came to be called Petrolia did very well. One was Franklin Tarbell, closely connected to the Drake Well, who sold tanks and storage. His daughter, Ida, became a muckraking journalist. She wrote The History of the Standard Oil Company, a 1904 book cited in the Supreme Court’s 1911 antitrust ruling that ended Standard’s monopoly. However, Booth quit wildcatting. In the capital he and co-conspirators hatched the plan that ended Abraham Lincoln’s life on April 14, 1865. Two weeks later, pursuers confirmed Booth’s demise by noting the JWB tattoo on his dead wrist. Soldiers buried him in Washington at what is now Fort Lesley J. McNair. In 1869, his family re-interred the remains, unmarked, in a family plot in Baltimore’s Green Mount Cemetery. For decades, newspapers claimed Booth made a bundle in oil. In truth, Booth the wildcatter lost $6,000—today, nearly $98,000—that Booth the actor, perhaps about to lose his voice and therefore his career, badly needed. In an irony, John Booth gave sister Rosalie a $1,000 stake in the Homestead Well, 17 miles from Franklin. In February 1865, the Homestead came in and for a brief while was outproducing anything in the vicinity, yielding some 28,000 barrels. The Booths never pursued revenue from the shortlived gusher. “The stock must have been in Rosalie’s hands following the assassination, but it was never sold or transferred, “ Ernest Miller wrote in a 1912 study of Booth’s turn as a wildcatter. “Following the disaster, the Booth family washed their hands of everything and anything John Wilkes had touched.”

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Johnny D. Boggs: He’s Earned His Spurs

Johnny D. Boggs: He’s Earned His Spurs Western Writers of America (WWA) has chosen Santa Fe–based Johnny D. Boggs as the 2020 recipient of its Owen Wister Award for lifetime contributions to Western literature. His dozens of published books and hundreds of articles, essays, columns and short stories certainly establish his claim on the award, and no one can argue with his status as the most recognized Western writer among his peers. WWA has bestowed on Boggs eight Spur Awards and named him a finalist 14 times for his novels and short stories. He also boasts a Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City as well as recognition from several other organizations and institutions. Boggs, who was raised in South Carolina and worked as a sportswriter in Texas before turning freelancer, publishes three to four books a year (novels and nonfiction), is a Wild West special contributor and edits the WWA journal, Roundup. His new novel Buckskin, Bloomers and Meblends a historical story of women’s baseball in the early 20th century with the coming-of-age story of a teenage boy. He centers another novel, The Raven’s Honor, on iconic Texas leader Sam Houston and analyses the best in Western film in the nonfiction reference book The American West on Film. Why do film, baseball and outlaws recur as themes in your writing? Television and film drew me out West. I’m not where I am today without Gunsmoke and The Dakotas, Rio Bravo and Ride the High Country. What they showed me—and took me to—was vastly different than the swamps, tobacco fields and pine forests I knew. Film courses in college fueled my thirst for knowing more about filmmaking. My hometown was a baseball town, and as a sportswriter I covered plenty of baseball games—high school, American Legion, college and minor leagues. Even if I am the worst ballplayer to come out of Florence County, I turned into a pretty good kids’ coach and umpire. There are some great stories to be found on baseball fields. Outlaws? Well, that’s mostly the James-Younger Gang and the Kansas-Missouri border wars, and that’s probably because those are as much Southern stories as they are Western stories. I don’t like “the boys,” but they fascinate me. How do settle on a topic to write about? It has to be a subject I’m in the mood to tackle, something that I want to delve into, and I have to figure out how I can stamp it as my own. Or, this being a business, it’s when an editor says I’ll get paid to write about a particular subject. Is it easier to conceive a plot or create characters? Nothing’s easy in this line of work, but the characters interest me. My late literary agent told me early on he wanted character-driven fiction, not plot-driven. I don’t think I know how to write a plot-driven story. Through their decisions, right or wrong, characters drive the plot. Without characters there’s no story. So, my focus is always on the character. People tuned into Gunsmoke for 20 years because of the characters. John Wayne is an unlikable SOB in The Searchers, but he’s mesmerizing. And while the original 3:10 to Yuma (the remake has the mentality of a video game) is basically about two men sitting in a hotel room talking, you can’t stop watching, because those characters—and the choices they’ll have to make—are utterly compelling. In your historical fiction, how much is historical? It depends on the novel and the character and what I’m trying to create, but I try to stay relatively true to what we know about the historical people. I’ll often use their actual words, or something close to their actual words, in dialogue and stay as close to the historical record as possible. So, for example, Billy the Kid isn’t going to be a hero saving the girl from Dracula, and Jesse James isn’t going to be Tyrone Power fighting for the common man. In The Raven’s Honor, about the last years of Sam Houston’s life, I wasn’t thinking about Sam; I was writing about my father. Both Sam and Daddy had their own demons and their own honor—and strong wives who weren’t afraid to stand up to them. But, as I always say, “Don’t quote me in your term paper.” How do you write for young people vs. adult readers? Just because your hero is a kid doesn’t make it YA [young adult] fiction. That’s a mistake many writers make. There are rules. You generally want to make your central figure about two or three years older than your reading audience. Boys want to read about boys, whereas girls will read anything. Another common mistake is writing “down” to kids. Kids are smart, and those today grew up in a post-9/11 world. You want to put your hero in a situation that he or she doesn’t really want to be in but has to get through it…or else. While J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Collins changed what children’s and young adult fiction can and should be, Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet still resonates. When I started writing YA Westerns, my agent told me it was a terrible mistake, but I said if we don’t get our kids interested in the American West, we won’t have readers 20 or 30 years from now. He eventually told me I was right—and he’s never, ever said that. Which writers have influenced your writing? When I was 12 Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers showed me how literature could take you out of humid South Carolina and into 1600s France. Mark Twain, Jack London, Charles Dickens and Raymond Chandler are my favorite writers. Dorothy M. Johnson, Jack Schaefer and A.B. Guthrie Jr. were the Western writers who captured me with their prose, that sense of place and their strong, believable characters. Max Evans and the late Claire Huffaker, Fred Grove and Elmer Kelton did the same. In nonfiction, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee moved me like it did millions of readers. I’ve always admired Michael Wallis’ and Hampton Sides’ ability to make an often-told story seem fresh and vibrant. Jim Donovan…Bob Utley…There are far too many to list. And I can’t omit Jeff Guinn. We both came out of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram; Jeff was in features, and I was assistant sports editor. At a Spur Awards banquet a few years back Jeff said, “Think about it, Johnny. Maybe 300 journalists were working at the paper when we were there, every one of them dreaming of writing books or novels full time. And who wound up doing it? You and me – the two biggest slackers in the newsroom.” If you read Jeff’s The Last Gunfight or his Bonnie and Clyde biography, you know why he’s up there with the best. What type of character do you enjoy creating?  Complicated. Confused. Trying to figure out his or her place, who he or she is. Someone on a journey, physically and mentally. And not the narrow-hipped, broad-shouldered, 6-foot-2 super hero who can take a .45-caliber slug through the shoulder and not flinch and never misses a shot or makes a dumbass decision. Why so few books about cowboys? Hey, I write about cowboys—Return to Red River, The Lonesome Chisholm Trail, Hard Winter, Summer of the Star, while A Thousand Texas Longhorns, about Nelson Story’s 1866 cattle drive from Texas to Montana, is due out in December 2020 from Kensington’s Pinnacle imprint. But, yeah, I probably write more about ne’er-do-wells. Why not more nonfiction? Actually, the three contracts I have right now are all nonfiction: Sports on Film and books on movies about American newspaper journalism and the making and legacy of Red River. And I’ve been talking with a publisher about a biography of a Western figure. That said, I’m talking to editors about novels, too, but the Western nonfiction market is strong right now, especially in film, and I write for a living. What’s your favorite aspect of writing? I like the research. Whether it’s hiking to a mountain stream, poring over microfilm in a library, searching for information on Newspapers.com or NewspaperArchive.com, or interviewing Mickey Kuhn about his work on Red River. The writing? Not so much. I’m always looking for an excuse not to write. The writing is hard. The research is fun. Short fiction is the hardest form of prose to write, so I guess I find it the most rewarding when I finish something that’s halfway decent. And my first Spur was for a short story, “A Piano at Dead Man’s Crossing.” Years ago screenwriter Burt Kennedy told me, ‘Always make your villain stronger than your hero. That way, when the hero defeats the villain at the end, it’s a bigger accomplishment’ What challenges did you face writing The American West on Film? That was one of the first books in ABC-CLIO’s new Hollywood History series, so I was sort of a guinea pig. It’s one thing to compare Hollywood history to actual history in a film based on real people or real events, like Young Guns or Tombstone, but trying to find a historical focus on purely fictional films like High Noon or The Ox-Bow Incident strained the mind. The hardest part was picking the movies. My editor and I went through multiple rounds trying to figure that out. It proved even harder with the book I’m working on now, Sports on Film. And I asked my wife, Lisa, and son, Jack, often if they’d like to watch a movie with me. Nine times out of 10 they had something better to do, while I had to sit through those movies at least twice. The good part about The American West on Film was that, compared to the Jesse James and Billy the Kid movie books, I got to watch mostly good films. How difficult was it to write Return to Red River, given that the characters weren’t from your own imagination?  You have to be faithful to the original author’s vision and his interpretations of the characters he created. Borden Chase was writing in the 1940s, and visions of the West have changed substantially in the 21st century. Chase was also writing escapism literature, and I’m more grounded in historical fiction. Finally, I went into the project knowing that while many people know the movie Red River, few today are familiar with Chase’s original novel. As in most films, there are significant differences between the novel and the movie, including the fates of more than one character. I read Chase’s novel several times while writing Return to Red River but purposely did not look at the movie. That was hard, too, because Red River is among my favorites. Which Western films feature the best characters? Years ago screenwriter Burt Kennedy told me, “Always make your villain stronger than your hero. That way, when the hero defeats the villain at the end, it’s a bigger accomplishment.” So I’m drawn to those Westerns Burt wrote for actor Randolph Scott and director Budd Boetticher, particularly Seven Men From Now, Comanche Station, The Tall T and Ride Lonesome. You can see the mutual respect the hero and bad guy have for each other, and you can also see that, except for fate or luck, those roles could’ve been reversed. I’m not a huge fan of the original The Magnificent Seven, but it amazes me how in just one or two scenes you learn everything you need to know about those seven gunmen. Which boast the best plots? I like a plot when you can’t figure out where it’s headed—for example, Bite the Bullet, Blood on the Moon, Ulzana’s Raid or spaghettis like A Bullet for the General and The Great Silence. And I like Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73 and The Naked Spur because you’re emotionally and physically exhausted—just like the Jimmy Stewart character—at the end. I also like plots taken from non-Western sources: King of Texas, from King Lear; The Claim, from a Thomas Hardy novel; Colorado Territory, a remake of the crime movie High Sierra. Even Reprisal!, a crappy Guy Madison “B” from 1956, is intriguing, only because it’s based on a novel about a Georgia lynching. Those films show just how adaptable the Western truly is. I’d like to see a Western version of The Big Sleep. Maybe that screenwriter could figure out the plot. Are you game for exploring a new genre? I’ve toyed with the idea of a contemporary mystery, or a Western-set contemporary thriller, and I’ve thought returning to those Southern roots. But I’ve been making a living writing about the West full time for 21 years and living here for 36 years. That’s longer than I lived and wrote in the South. This is home. What’s next? The three nonfiction movie books, and we’ll see what happens with that biography project. I still have that list of ideas for novels and nonfiction projects, and that list keeps growing. There’s magazine work, and I hope a novel down the pike. Hey, I have a son entering college so… WW

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https://www.historynet.com/johnson.htm

Tank Driver Braved Flames, Bullets to Save Friends in Vietnam

Tank Driver Braved Flames, Bullets to Save Friends in Vietnam Dwight Hal Johnson had no dreams of being a hero. In his youth, the large, strapping boy had a fighter’s body but a peaceful spirit. Johnson grew up in the deteriorating Corktown neighborhood of Detroit with his single mother and younger brother. Bullies often chased him home. “Don’t you fight, honey,” his mother told him, “and don’t let them catch you.” He didn’t. Drafted at age 19, Johnson arrived in Vietnam in February 1967. He was a tank driver in Company B, 1st Battalion, 69th Armor Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. By January, Johnson, a specialist 5, had orders to return home in two weeks. He had never seen combat and was content with that. Johnson’s destiny changed on Jan. 14, 1968, when he was transferred from his usual tank to one whose driver was sick. The next day, four M48 Patton tanks of Johnson’s company raced down a road toward Dak To in the Central Highlands. Suddenly enemy rockets slammed into two tanks. Johnson raised himself from the hatch of his M48 to return fire with its .50-caliber machine gun as waves of enemy infantry swarmed the remaining tanks. He saw his former tank about 60 feet away—and his buddies for the past 11 months trapped inside the burning hulk. Leaping from his tank, Johnson ran through gunfire to save their lives, ignoring the pleas of Stan Enders, a gunner in his new crew, who shouted, “Don’t go!” Johnson pulled out one man, who was burning but still alive, and dragged him to safety before the tank exploded, killing the rest of the crew. When Johnson saw the burning bodies, something inside snapped. Rushing back to his tank, he seized a submachine gun and charged into the ambush, attacking first with automatic fire, then with his pistol. Coming face to face with an enemy soldier wielding an AK-47 rifle, Johnson pulled the trigger only to find his pistol empty, so he killed the man with the stock of his empty submachine gun. Returning to his tank, Johnson manned the externally mounted .50-caliber machine gun and remained there until his adversaries withdrew. Johnson had fought ferociously for about 30 minutes, and his comrades estimated he had taken out as many as 20 enemy soldiers. Although the battle ended, an enraged Johnson had to be restrained to prevent him from attacking captured troops. Three doses of morphine were needed to calm him. Placed under restraint, he was evacuated to the hospital in Pleiku. After the soldier returned home, his friends assumed Johnson had never seen combat. He did not correct them. Johnson’s day of heroism was a dark, haunting experience he wished he could forget. Constant nightmares were filled with the burned bodies of his dead friends and the face of the enemy soldier he killed at close range. One bright spot in Johnson’s life was his marriage to his sweetheart and the birth of their son. But he couldn’t find work to help them. One day, a colonel called from Washington to tell Johnson that he and his family should come to the capital. On Nov. 19, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson presented Dwight Hal Johnson with the Medal of Honor. Johnson became a local celebrity and received job offers. Eventually, he returned to the Army and worked as a recruiter in Detroit. Constant nightmares and cold sweats still tormented him, however, and he suffered from severe survivor’s guilt—his tank transfer had saved him from the explosion that killed his former crew members. Back in Detroit, on the night of April 30, 1971, Johnson walked into a store with a pistol and demanded cash from the register. He fired a round that struck the arm of the store owner, who shot the 23-year-old Medal of Honor recipient four times. Johnson died at the hospital. Later his mother told a New York Times reporter that she wondered if her son was having suicidal thoughts. The hero of Dak To, who struggled in his battle with post-traumatic stress disorder, was buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery. V Doug Sterner, an Army veteran who served two tours in Vietnam, is curator of the Military Times Hall of Valor database of U.S. valor awards. This article appeared in the October 2020 issue of Vietnam magazine. For more stories from Vietnam magazine, subscribe here:

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https://www.historynet.com/jonas-salk-and-the-advent-of-the-polio-vaccine.htm

Jonas Salk and the Advent of the Polio Vaccine

Jonas Salk and the Advent of the Polio Vaccine “Polio was never the raging epidemic portrayed in the media, not even at its height in the 1940s and 1950s,” David M. Oshinsky writes in Polio: An American Story. Yet at the turn of the 20th century, the public fear of polio reached a fever pitch. The virus struck seemingly without warning, leaving children, mostly young boys, with varying degrees of paralysis and in some circumstances, death. The first recordings of poliomyelitis, shortened to “polio” by American journalists who balked at using the 13-letter word in their margins, was in Egypt in 1500 BC. However, when polio did strike, for almost everyone the result was usually a mild infection followed by a lifetime of immunity, according to Oshinsky. In later years, little attention was given to it in the press. Indeed, the first recorded polio epidemic in the United States, which occurred in Otter Valley, Vermont in 1894, would have gone largely unnoticed without the tireless efforts of Charles Caverly, a young country doctor. Tracking down the 123 struck down by the virus, Caverly found that 84 cases were under the age of six, 50 were permanently paralyzed from polio, and 18 died. Most notably, Caverly discovered that a majority of the victims were male. By the 1930s, polio received significant attention from both the press and the medical community. In 1938, with the backing of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was famously diagnosed with polio in 1921 at the age of 39, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis was founded. Within that foundation––later renamed the March of Dimes—a fierce competition to find the cure emerged between three men: Albert Sabin, Jonas Salk, and Hilary Koprowski. A little girl awaiting her polio vaccine during the 1950s. (H. Armstrong Roberts/Getty Images) Sabin and Koprowski backed the live-virus vaccine which is designed to trigger a natural, weak, infection to generate antibodies. But unlike his peers, Salk favored a killed-virus version “intended to stimulate the immune system to produce the desired antibodies without creating a natural infection,” writes Oshinsky. While most polio researchers backed Sabin and Koprowski’s approach, the foundation privately deemed that Salk’s method might be quicker and more marketable. Salk had the edge. In 1951 Salk and his team had successfully developed a method which cultivated the poliovirus in the kidney tissue of monkeys, giving Salk the ability to produce large quantities of the virus. The following year he rapidly began conducting the first human trials on children at two Pittsburgh institutions for the physically and intellectually disabled. Salk even went as far as injecting his own wife and three sons with his vaccine. Time was of the essence, as that year alone saw 58,000 new cases of polio, with more than 3,000 Americans dying from the disease. Peter Salk receiving the polio vaccine from his father, Jonas Salk, in 1953. (March of Dimes Foundation) By March of 1953, Salk was ready to announce that he had successfully created a vaccine. Salk insisted that “progress has been more rapid than we had any right to expect” but cautioned the public that “no vaccine [was] available for widespread use for the next polio season,” Despite this, the radio announcement was met with widespread jubilation and the scientist became an instant hero to the American public. The Vaccine Advisory Committee approved a field test of Salk’s polio vaccine, which commenced the largest medical experiment in American history. The so-called Salk Vaccine Field Trials of 1954 involved almost two million elementary school children, writes Oshinsky. After a year, at a press conference at the University of Michigan, the results of the trial were announced. They vaccine, they said, was 80 to 90 percent effective against the polio virus. That same day the U.S. government licensed Salk’s vaccine for widespread distribution. The vaccine did not come without cost, however. Just weeks after the landmark conference, 11 children who were recently vaccinated died and hundreds of others were left paralyzed. The defective vaccine was traced back to Cutter Laboratories in California, and although unproven, it “is likely that certain production methods (which, it turns out, did not follow Salk’s instructions) resulted in a failure to completely kill the Type 1 (Mahoney) poliovirus in the vaccine,” according to the Historyofvaccines.org. Others within the scientific community argued that Salk’s vaccine was unsafe and ineffective. Among the loudest of the voices was Sabin, Salk’s fiercest rival. Yet despite the Cutter incident and initial delays in production, by 1957 new polio cases had dropped to under 6,000 in the U.S. And, according to the CDC, since 1979 no cases of polio have originated in the U.S. For his work Salk was awarded the two highest civilian honors—the Congressional Gold Medal in 1955 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. Salk, however, was notably denied admission to the National Academy of Sciences, with his longtime rival Sabin sneering, “You could go into the kitchen and do what he did.” Salk is credited with saving the lives of millions and providing all Americans with relatively cheap and widespread access to his vaccine. The scientist never patented his polio vaccine and lost out on an estimated seven billion dollars in revenue. In later years, when asked by Edward R. Murrow why he never sought a patent Salk responded, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

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https://www.historynet.com/khe-sanh-and-beyond-col-ret-joseph-abodeely-interview.htm

Khe Sanh and Beyond: Col. (ret) Joseph Abodeely Interview

Khe Sanh and Beyond: Col. (ret) Joseph Abodeely Interview At Col. Joe Abodeely's Base Camp near Maricopa, Arizona, each year the flag of South Vietnam is raised along with the U.S. flag. 'We forget that we went to South Vietnam to help the Vietnamese people,' Abodeely says. Courtesy Base Camp Website. Retired Army Colonel Joseph Abodeely’s Website, Straight Talk with Joe, describes him as “a native Arizonan who has some strong opinions and ideas about his state, the nation, and the world.” Many of those opinions were forged in combat, both in the military and in the courtroom. During Operation Pegasus, the April 1968 airmobile operation to relieve the besieged U.S. Marine firebase at Khe Sanh, South Vietnam, he led the first Air Cavalry platoon that reached the firebase, after seven days fighting its way through. Col. (ret) Joseph Abodeely, 2000. Courtesy Joseph Abodeely.Since that time he’s served in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and written policy papers that provided guidelines for U.S. military police worldwide. As a civilian, he’s been a prosecuting attorney and a defense attorney. In addition to his Website, he had a radio talk show and a program on Phoenix Public Access Channel 98 for over 10 years. Of Lebanese descent, he’s a past president of the Arab American Cultural Association in Phoenix. For many years, he’s served as president of the board for the Arizona Military Museum, an all-volunteer group dedicated to preserving the area’s military heritage from the days of the Spanish Conquistadores to the present-day wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On August 19, 2010, the retired colonel spoke with HistoryNet in an exclusive interview. HistoryNet: You led an Air Cavalry platoon that was the first relief unit to reach the besieged Khe Sanh firebase in 1968. As you entered the firebase, you blew “Charge” on an old bugle. Tell us a little about your role in Operation Pegasus, and why you decided to sound “Charge.” (Col. Abodeely’s personal account, Breaking the Siege at Khe Sanh, appeared in the October 2010 Vietnam magazine. Click the link to read the article online.) Col. (ret) Joseph Abodeely: I was the leader of 2nd Platoon, D Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, 3rd Brigade, 1st Air Cav. Our job was to do infantry missions—patrols, ambushes, kill the enemy by fire and movement. We worked south of Hue while the battle was going on there (during the 1968 Tet Offensive). When we got word we were going to Khe Sanh I was worried because I’d been reading about what was going on there, and I thought it must be hell on earth. We landed at LZ Stud, on a mountaintop. We could see a river below and Arc Lights in the distance. (Arc Light refers to bombing strikes by B-52 Stratofortresses.) I was senior platoon leader in the company, so our platoon frequently got tasked with some of the more difficult missions, but that day we were the last platoon in the order of movement. When the lead elements encountered heavy resistance, however, the order of march was reversed and we were airlifted to become the lead platoon in clearing the road to the firebase at Khe Sanh. Joseph Abodeely with captured AK-47 near Khe Sanh, 1968. Courtesy Joseph Abodeely.Earlier we had found what was probably a regimental-sized bunker complex, but the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) had cleared out. There were lot of craters from the B-52s’ bombs, and several bodies with blood coming from ears and noses (from the concussions). We found stockpiles of weapons and equipment and an AK-47 rifle and this old bugle the NVA had used, which I took with me. All the way in from that campsite to Khe Sanh was lined with bunkers. Now we were heading for the goal line—were they going to do a goal-line stance? But the last two miles we had no contact. When we reached the firebase, one of the Marines came out to shake our hands. We had been ordered not to go inside the wire yet, so we set up camp outside. When we started into the firebase the next day, my company commander said, “Hey, 2–6 (2 = 2nd Platoon, 6 = leader), can you play ‘Charge’ on that?” I said, “Well, I played trumpet in high school. I can probably play it.” So I played “Charge” as we walked through the gate. HN: You remained involved with the military until 1995. After earning a law degree from the University of Arizona in 1971, you were part of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Didn’t you write some policy papers for JAG? JA: When I came back from Vietnam, I thought I was done, but I got a letter from my “uncle” (Uncle Sam), saying, Boy, you still owe me some time. So I joined the National Guard. I was in the military police in the Guard and became a reserve officer Judge Advocate of 11th Air Defense Artillery Brigade under the 82nd Airborne Corps, a rapid deployment force. Later in my Reserve career, I became Chief of the Law Branch of the Military Police Operations Agency at the Pentagon, a policy group for military police operations around world, under the G-3 (Operations) for the Army at the Pentagon. I wrote a paper for the NCIC (National Crime Information Center) to make sure the Army had a policy for dealing with local police. During Desert Storm I was on active duty, and I did research and wrote an informational paper clarifying the role of the Army in prosecuting war crimes. [continued on next page] HN: An event called Colonel Joe Abodeely’s Maricopa Arizona Base Camp is held on the first weekend in April every year. Explain to us what that is, and how you came to start it, please. JA: It started long before I got involved. A medic from the 101st Airborne bought some property outside Maricopa, a small town between Phoenix and Tucson. It’s a rural area, out in the desert. “Doc,” as the medic was called, lived out there and had a kind of rally once a year in which he’d invite vets, mostly Vietnam vets and their families. They’d sit around telling war stories, drinking beer and swapping lies. Joseph Aboldeely next to former ARVN Ranger Lam Bui during 2009 Base Camp. Click for larger image. Courtesy Base Camp Website.After Doc passed away some others picked up the idea and moved the rally to a place a few miles from where I live now, to keep it going. They eventually lost the property in foreclosure. I called owners in California—this was when real estate was still cheap—and bought it, partly as an investment but also because I wanted to keep Base Camp going. There was already electricity at the place. We put in a Vietnam bar, built a guard tower, and a stage with electricity. A vet with a backhoe dug out a place at the base of the mountain and we put in a shooting range. Each year in April, we have Base Camp and invite veterans from all wars. We get some of the younger guys, but vets of any war are kind of parochial. The World War II vets didn’t really associate with us Vietnam guys, either. HN: Looking at some pictures on the Base Camp Website, it appears you draw more than just American vets. JA: I’m involved with the Vietnamese community here. We forget that we went to South Vietnam to help the Vietnamese people; I know that’s why I went in. We bring these Vietnamese to the Base Camp, and when we run the American flag up the pole we also run up the flag of South Vietnam. They can’t fly that Vietnam flag anywhere anymore. It doesn’t exist. They lost their country. In October, a Vietnamese Buddhist youth group comes out and camps here. It’s just part of my way of giving back. I try to help people that our government left in the lurch. HN: Tell us a bit about your work with the Arizona Military Museum. What is the origin and mission of that museum? JA: We’re an official Army Museum of History and are certified by the Arizona Historical Society. We’re open every Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 4, September through May. The Arizona National Guard had set aside an old WPA adobe building, the largest adobe building still in continuous use in Arizona. We have a portion of it for the museum. When I was in the Guard as a young officer, back in 1975, I went to a state Guard convention. Some senior officers were promoting the idea of having a historical society to collect memorabilia of the Arizona National Guard and Arizona military history. I joined and gave them some money, but didn’t think much more about it until I got a call in 1980 asking me to serve on the board. They screwed me—they made me president and they keep re-electing me. I told the board—I was a major, and I had colonels and generals on that board—”We’re going to be a working board.” We tore out old bins, built this big room, brought in display cases. None of us get paid. We’re all volunteers. Displays from Conquistadores to modern wars. Courtesy Arizona Military Museum.The museum’s displays start with the era of the Conquistadores, then the Spanish Colonial Period, the U.S. war with Mexico (1846–1848), and the California Column in the Civil War. During the Civil War, the governor got permission from the U.S. government to raise five companies to protect against Apaches. The 1st Arizona Regiment was made up mostly of Mexican and Maricopa and Pima Indian volunteers. It only lasted one year, and then the U.S. Army came out and fought the Indian Wars. We cover the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, “On the Border” (Mexican Revolution of 1910)—my grandpa was in the 1st Cavalry during that border action. I have his helmet on one of the mannequins. We may have one of largest Vietnam displays in country. There’s a Huey in the middle of it, and we’re working on a Khe Sanh diorama. When I started as president in 1980, Vietnam was as far as we could go. Since then we’ve added Desert Storm and other recent wars. I think Iraq and Afghanistan are going to make Vietnam look like the Quest for the Holy Grail, but I don’t put my opinions into those displays. You can damn the war but don’t damn the warrior. (To view a slideshow of displays at the Arizona Military Museum, see the article by Peter Suciu on our partner site, ArmchairGeneral.com.) HN: You have a Website and had a talk show and a TV program. What motivates you so strongly to share your information and opinions with the public? JA: I have a high opinion of my opinion. (Laughs.) I’ve just been lucky to have a great deal of experience. When people talk about the military, saying we should do this, we should do that—well, I led troops in combat. I served as a JAG officer. I’m better equipped to talk about it than some professor or media personality. [continued on next page] HN: Unlike most bloggers and talk show hosts, you’re not easy to pigeonhole. In one blog on your Website you say, “Our World War II veterans are heroes, but our Vietnam Veterans are our heroes, too, and our country needs to say so, often.” In another, written during the last presidential election, you wrote, “George W. Bush and his co-conspirators must be held accountable for their crimes in either a U.S. tribunal or an international tribunal or both.” You express strong opinions, but they don’t seem to toe any ideological line. Comments? JA: I don’t even know what liberal and conservative mean anymore. I’m pragmatic. Some people would think I’m a bleeding-heart liberal and others think I’m a right-wing nut case. I believe in war but pick and choose your wars. Do it when you really need to do it. HN: Given your background in law and law enforcement—you were a state prosecuting attorney in Arizona for 15 years and later a defense attorney—we have to ask: What’s your take on the current immigration law controversy in Arizona? JA: I think it’s purely political. There is no immigration problem. I live in a rural area where there used to be a jalapeno field. I used to see trucks going out there, immigrants picking jalapenos in 120-degree heat. Our people aren’t going to do that. Our crime rate (in Arizona) is going down. Yes, there are immigration violations, but that is an administrative, not criminal, violation. HN: Colonel, thanks for talking with HistoryNet. Anything you’d like to add in closing? JA: I love this country and I’m concerned about where it’s going because a lot of people are uninformed. They can’t think critically. They often vote against their best interests. They need to put their religious and ethnic differences aside. My religion is the Constitution. That’s what I believe in, and a lot of people are trying to take it apart. Click here to read Col. Abodeely’s personal account of the week his platoon spent fighting their way through to Khe Sanh, Breaking the Siege at Khe Sanh, from the October 2010 Vietnam magazine. To see a slideshow of displays in the Arizona Military Museum, see Peter Suciu’s article, “Arizona Military Museum: More Than Cowboys in the Military History of the South West,” on our partner site, ArmchairGeneral.com. Gerald D. Swick is senior Web editor for HistoryNet.com, ArmchairGeneral.com, and GreatHistory.com.

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Killer Instinct: How One Man Taught U.S. Rangers to Fight Dirty in WWII

Killer Instinct: How One Man Taught U.S. Rangers to Fight Dirty in WWII Francois d’Eliscu taught thousands of U.S. Army Rangers how to fight down and dirty in World War II. Lecturing to a group of young U.S. Army Rangers on a field at Fort Meade, Maryland, in May 1942, U.S. Army lieutenant colonel Francois d’Eliscu ordered a trainee to level his rifle and bayonet and charge at him, full bore. “Come on, boy, like you mean business!” d’Eliscu shouted. His voice was startlingly loud and sharp, especially considering that it came from such an elfin, exotic-­looking figure. Just 5 feet 5 and weighing 136 pounds, d’Eliscu was in his mid-40s and had a shiny balding head and finely chiseled features. The “Little Professor,” as some called him, had an intense glare and animated gestures—almost like a French intellectual debating over coffee in a Left Bank cafe. He had several graduate degrees and had taught at prestigious American universities. But d’Eliscu’s confident stance, with his sinewy arms and shoulders poking out of his shirt, gave a hint that the man of letters was also well-schooled in violent confrontations. His own weapon was a 6-foot length of sash cord. The trainee lunged at his small target, the bare blade of his bayonet flashing. But d’Eliscu was a blur. Seconds later, the soldier lay flat on this back, trussed and unable to move for fear of strangling himself. D’Eliscu was unharmed, except for a patch of skin that the bayonet had shaved off his elbow as he’d disarmed his assailant. After releasing the trainee, d’Eliscu continued his lecture. He proceeded to deride American-style boxing, with its rules barring foul blows and breaking clean from a clinch and its technique of striking with the fists. “Sportsmanship!” he snarled. If the men ever faced off against German or Japanese soldiers in close-quarters hand-to-hand combat, he told them, there were no rules, and other parts of the body—open palms, elbows, feet—were more effective for striking the vulnerable spots on an enemy’s body. “This—this—this,” d’Eliscu explained, demonstrating a series of strikes. “And he’s ruined.” D’Eliscu’s deadly moves (clockwise from upper left): pinching windpipe while pulling hair; using rifle sling as garrote; neck-breaking tree tie; combined leg break and stranglehold.(A. Aubrey Bodine) And then there was the sash cord, a seemingly innocuous everyday object that in d’Eliscu’s hands could disable or even kill. “His speed and skill seem magical,” wrote R. P. Harriss, a columnist for the Baltimore Evening Sun who was on hand to observe the demonstration. “This to make the victim speechless, this to blind…this to break the neck.” It was a type of fighting that Harriss and most other Americans had probably never seen before. “Most of us still think of the American soldier as a two-fisted man who wouldn’t think of hitting below the belt,” Harriss wrote, “much less letting fly a kick to the crotch.” D’Eliscu’s training was intended to provide American soldiers with the skills to counter the mysterious martial arts expertise that many believed Japanese troops possessed. By one account, d’Eliscu had actually purloined the fighting secrets of the Japanese when he attended a jujitsu demonstration while visiting Japan and had sneakily committed the intricate techniques to memory. D’Eliscu was just one of the many martial artists the United States had pressed into service during World War II to hone the hand-to-hand combat abilities of American soldiers. According to Thomas A. Green and Joseph R. Svinth’s Martial Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia of History and Innovation, various service branches turned to experts ranging from boxing champion Jack Dempsey, who trained Coast Guard cadets, to Marine Corps knife-fighting expert J. Drexel Biddle, who popularized the Ka-Bar knife, and even professional wrestlers such as Charles “Dirty Dick” Raines and “Man Mountain Dean” (the ring name of Frank Simmons Leavitt), who taught their holds to army soldiers. The U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA, had its own hand-to-hand fighting system, designed by British expert William E. Fairbairn, which emphasized techniques such as palm strikes and knee-to-groin attacks. But even among that group, d’Eliscu stood out, with his colorful, slightly eccentric, intellectual persona and his unorthodox fighting system, a mix of dirty wrestling holds and Japanese jujitsu that eschewed techniques popular in boxing or wrestling competitions that had sporting rules. He also developed an extreme fitness regimen for his fighters that was brutal enough to make today’s CrossFit workouts look slothful by comparison. In the process, he became a sought-after subject for feature writers and military propagandists, who portrayed him as a sort of World War II Bruce Lee—a martial arts genius who could train American soldiers to give the Japanese a taste of their own medicine. Few knew that d’Eliscu’s exotic persona was something he’d carefully constructed, down to adding a “d” and an apostrophe to his surname, in the fashion of French nobility. But his fighting prowess wasn’t all hype. In the course of the war, d’Eliscu would demonstrate his skills in real combat, with lives on the line. The U.S. Army Signal Corps produced a 35-minute film in 1942 about d’Eliscu’s combat training school for Rangers at Fort Shafter, Honolulu. “There are no posed scenes in this picture,” an opening title says. (U.S. Army/National Archives) “He can kill with a flick of his elbow—maim with a pinch of his fingers,” explained a 1942 profile of d’Eliscu in Yank magazine, which described him as one of the toughest men alive. It helped that d’Eliscu evidently liked to demonstrate his techniques by taking on much larger opponents. One of his favorite partners was army major Tod Goodwin, a former New York Giants football player, who stood 6-foot-6 and outweighed d’Eliscu by 50 pounds. Yank noted that it was so dangerous to tangle with d’Eliscu that “an ambulance with three Medical Corps doctors was in attendance at all sessions.” Harriss, who observed d’Eliscu in action, noted that nobody at Fort Meade who’d seen the Little Professor render opponents helpless ever expressed any doubts about the effectiveness of his techniques. For Harriss, the big question was whether enough soldiers would be capable of learning them. “It is plain that he is far above normal in speed, skill, aptitude, and coordination,” he wrote. But Harris observed that a few carefully picked men, “intensely trained in this fashion,” might be valuable as hit-and-run raiders. Some of d’Eliscu’s sash cord techniques were designed for precisely that purpose—sneaking up behind an enemy sentry and rendering him “helpless and terrified.” The press accounts of d’Eliscu’s techniques must certainly have reassured Americans who feared the brutal tactics of the Japanese. According to a 1943 article on d’Eliscu in Popular Science, the enemy soldiers knew “all the bone-breaking tricks of judo” and even supposedly carried small knives that, in the event of capture, they could use to slit the throats of unwary American guards. But thanks to d’Eliscu’s instruction, the profile in Yank magazine had pointed out, “the Rangers…actually know more about judo than the average Japanese.” D’Eliscu’s past was in some ways as mysterious as his martial arts techniques. He apparently told Harriss that he spent some of his early years in France as well as in Japan, and an Associated Press profile once described him as having inherited his fighting prowess from a father who was an expert swordsman. In reality, he was born on November 10, 1895 in New York City, the son of a French businessman, Frank Eliscu, and his Romanian wife, Sophia, who had emigrated to the United States seven years earlier. His younger brother, Edward, would go on to become a famous Hollywood songwriter. In his 2001 autobiography With or Without a Song, Edward Eliscu recalled his teenage brother as “an introverted, buck-toothed loner” who went by the name Milton Eliscu. D’Eliscu, bayonet in hand, runs over trainees in one of his unconventional drills at Fort Meade, Maryland, in 1942. (MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History) At one point the future martial arts expert and military officer got a job stacking books at the 135th Street public library in Harlem, according to Edward. But after Milton returned home one evening with torn clothes and a bloody forehead, which he claimed he had received after being beaten by a mob in a racial confrontation, he began to change. Though he’d never had much interest in exercise or sports, as a senior at DeWitt Clinton High School, he entered a cross country race and, surprisingly, finished first. After graduation he entered the Savage School for Physical Education, a teachers college off Columbus Circle, and gradually withdrew from his family, keeping them in the dark about the new identity he was forging as a physical fitness buff and coach for local high school football teams. Around that time, items in the sports pages of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle show that he had Frenchified his last name with the “d” and apostrophe. When d’Eliscu graduated from Savage in 1917, Edward and his mother attended the event and were startled to see him give an exhibition of his gymnastic skills. “Milton’s skill and grace left me breathless,” Edward later wrote. “A gymnastic Nijinsky, he outclassed his peers.” Soon after that, Edward Eliscu recalled, d’Eliscu gathered a few belongings and told his family that he was off to join the U.S. Army. His mother, lamenting that Milton would never return, explained that he had converted to Christianity. Edward got another fleeting glimpse of his brother a month or so later, when he noticed him in a military parade, wearing a mock bandage on his head as he bore a stretcher in a medical unit and “marching as though the war depended upon him alone.” But d’Eliscu didn’t see combat in World War I. Instead he served at Fort Gordon in Georgia, where, according to local newspaper accounts, he supervised sporting activities and organized boxing and wrestling competitions for the soldiers. According to an Associated Press profile published decades later, he also worked as a bayonet instructor. D’Eliscu’s training methods were sufficiently unorthodox for Life magazine to send a photographer to Fort Meade for a feature on what it called his “dirty fighting” system. (Everett Collection Inc./Alamy Stock Photo) After the war d’Eliscu earned a bachelor’s degree in education, a master’s in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, a second master’s in science from Columbia University, and later a doctorate from New York University. He also coached various collegiate sports, including varsity wrestling at New York University. While he taught physical education and coached, d’Eliscu had a side career as a radio personality. He hosted a pair of early morning daily exercise programs on radio station WIP in Philadelphia, and he once donned a deep-sea diving suit to broadcast a show from the bottom of the ocean off Atlantic City—a stunt that nearly ended in disaster when one of his weighted shoes came off during the broadcast and he had to hang on for dear life in the strong current. “When I came up, I found out that everybody thought I was dead,” he recalled with amusement. “It seems that the main tube from the microphone broke, and I was there talking away, and all that came out for the broadcast was glug-glug-glug-glug.” He also dabbled in sportscasting, working the first Gene Tunney–Jack Dempsey fight in Philadelphia in 1926. In his spare time, he taught fly-fishing techniques at Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. In the late 1920s d’Eliscu moved to Honolulu, where he became a newspaper sports columnist and organized amateur boxing competitions. He also helped to manage the U.S. Olympic swim team that featured Johnny Weissmuller in his premovie days. For a time, d’Eliscu also reportedly acted as the star swimmer’s personal manager, turning down early movie offers that didn’t seem sufficiently lucrative. “Even granting that he would aggregate more than $25,000 the first year, which I know he would, there is no surety that he would go over in the movies or on the stage,” d’Eliscu told a newspaper interviewer. He preferred instead to see Weissmuller become a professional swimming teacher and earn a living giving demonstrations and lectures, though Weissmuller did end up going into the movies and becoming an overnight star with the 1932 film Tarzan the Ape-Man. In 1943 d’Eliscu went ashore with U.S. forces at Makin Atoll in the Pacific. (U.S. Army/National Archives) D’Eliscu returned to Philadelphia in the early 1930s to serve as an athletic director, a track coach, and an instructor in public health at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. It’s not clear where d’Eliscu acquired his apparent expertise at jujitsu. A 1919 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer mentions his participating in a jujitsu exhibition with Leo Pardello, an Italian heavyweight, to raise money for erecting a building for the American Legion. Many articles about d’Eliscu and other military martial artists portrayed Japanese hand-to-hand fighting techniques as a closely guarded cultural secret and inherently underhanded. In reality, according to Green and Svinth’s history of martial arts, Westerners began going to Japan to study jujitsu in the late 1800s. After that, Japanese immigrants in the early 1900s spread judo—the modern martial art that evolved from jujitsu—throughout Europe and the United States. In the 1920s, one judo master, Taguchi Ryoichi, taught the art at Columbia University, one of the institutions that d’Eliscu attended. The 1942 profile of d’Eliscu in Yank magazine offers a more colorful account. While on a trip to Tokyo with the U.S. swimming team in 1928, the story goes, d’Eliscu was invited to attend exhibitions at two judo schools, where he was invited to give a demonstration of Western wrestling techniques. The Japanese photographed his moves so that they could study them later. After d’Eliscu finished, he bowed to the head of the school. “I have heard so much about your own form of wrestling,” he told the Japanese instructor. “Would you honor me by demonstrating some of your more complicated holds in return?” At first the instructor was reluctant, but d’Eliscu’s flattery eventually won him over, and he demonstrated “his complete bag of tricks,” as the article put it. When it was over, d’Eliscu thanked him, bowed, and left. Fourteen years later, he supposedly taught some of the same Japanese techniques to American soldiers. After World War II broke out, d’Eliscu—by then in his late 40s—rejoined the military. In early 1942 he was sent to Fort Meade, Maryland, to train elite Army Rangers. To that end, d’Eliscu devised an almost inhuman training routine. Each day began with a two-mile run, followed by a 600-yard obstacle course, featuring a 15-foot-deep trap with smooth sides, from which the trainees had to find a way to get out. “If they can’t get out, let ’em stay there,” d’Eliscu explained to a reporter. One officer stayed in the trap for five hours before he finally managed to escape. But that was just the warm-up. D’Eliscu put the men through unconventional drills in which they had to freeze in position on his command or hang from tree limbs. Then came pull-ups and other strength exercises. He also devised strange torments designed to boost soldiers’ fortitude. A photograph from Fort Meade shows d’Eliscu running over the supine bodies of his trainees, stepping on their abdomens as he makes his way across the field. Then it was time for fighting, which included anything-­goes grappling and bare-knuckle boxing, with Medical Corps personnel on hand to tend injuries. To get his men accustomed to all-out, no-rules fighting, one of d’Eliscu’s tricks was to have trainees put on fatigues without rank insignias. Then he’d order them to get into a low crouch and at his command begin fighting each other from that position. After they pushed, pulled, and threw a few punches, the trainees usually ended up falling together in a chaotic heap; they had to roll to get clear of one another’s bodies and avoid injury. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and General Robert C. Richardson Jr. visit d’Eliscu at his school in Hawaii in 1943. (U.S. Army Signal Corps/University of Hawaii Archives) While d’Eliscu included Western-style boxing in the troops’ training regimen, he wasn’t keen on it as a fighting technique in the field. Instead, he wanted his fighters to employ more of their bodies and use a wider range of disabling techniques. “Boxing—bah!” he once told his students. “Swing your right elbow like this, to crush his windpipe. Slap him with your other hand. Then follow through with the knee or abdomen.” His methods were sufficiently unorthodox for Life magazine to send a photographer to shoot a June 1942 spread on what it labeled his “dirty fighting” system. But for all his intensity about teaching lethal techniques, d’Eliscu also sometimes displayed a quirky sense of humor. As Harriss witnessed, he once stopped suddenly in the middle of a demonstration and segued into an unsettling monologue. “Civilization! Christian ethics! Human progress!” d’Eliscu exclaimed. “All our studies in sociology, education, the humanities—and then we’re right back to the beast. What a world!” On another occasion, d’Eliscu paused the training for some self-contemplation. “The killer. That’s what they call me here, and I’d rather go trout fishing any day,” he told Harriss. “Kiddies, doggies, I love them. But c’est la guerre!” U.S. Army leaders were sufficiently impressed with d’Eliscu’s fighting and fitness program that in early 1943 they sent him back to Hawaii to set up another school to prepare Rangers for jungle warfare in the brutal island campaign in the Pacific. D’Eliscu set up a secret training site in the mountains that became known as the Mayhem Bowl, replete with ravines and dense brush. According to a United Press account that concealed the school’s exact location, a three-mile course there had trainees running up and down hillsides, navigating water hazards, scaling a wall, and running up a metal slide that was greased to make the going more difficult. For a section of the course, trainees had to crawl a half mile with no part of their bodies more than 24 inches off the ground, an effort that typically took an hour. A reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser described the training course as “sort of a mountain goat’s nightmare, covered with the three feet of mud and water.” To make the battlefield frighteningly realistic, d’Eliscu used actual flamethrowers and tear gas as hazards. “Fire and gas are a little unorthodox,” he explained. “But then, so is war.” “My job was to make worms and turtles out of the men,” he later told a newspaper interviewer. The training in Hawaii was even more grueling than that at Fort Meade. Among other ordeals, d’Eliscu put trainees through a particularly brutal exercise that required teams of men to lift and carry a 1,000-pound log up a steep hill multiple times—and then proceed to hand-to-hand fighting drills. He also subjected them to life-threatening dangers, planting fields with explosives and using live ammunition, flamethrowers, and bare bayonets in training, to instill in them what he called “sane appreciation of a knife and a bullet.” The regimen was so hazardous that by March 1943 trainees in the program had already suffered 1,600 injuries. But d’Eliscu didn’t seem concerned. “Better to have a few men hurt now,” he said, “than to have them killed needlessly later.” D’Eliscu even went through the workouts alongside his trainees. “I went through every test with the men,” he said, “never asking them to do a thing I wouldn’t or couldn’t do.” Many prominent people visited the Hawaii training school. One archival photo shows a smiling First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in an American Red Cross uniform, towering over a stern-looking d’Eliscu in a sleeveless white undershirt. He also apparently taught a few judo techniques to Senator Albert B. Chandler of Kentucky, who appears in another photo throwing d’Eliscu over his shoulder. While he led the training, d’Eliscu somehow also found time to write the instructional book How to Prepare for Military Fitness, published in 1943 by W. W. Norton & Co. A page from Hand to Hand Combat. (HistoryNet Archives) And of course, the Rangers learned d’Eliscu’s sash cord techniques. A story in Popular Mechanics described one of his favorite moves. After front-kicking an enemy soldier in the stomach to knock him to the ground, the American soldier was to quickly loop the rope around his adversary’s knees and draw the loose ends around his neck. “If the victim doesn’t strangle himself with his own struggles, the process is hastened by sitting on his face and pushing forward on his knees,” the magazine explained. D’Eliscu believed that the sash cord was such an effective weapon that he predicted it would eventually become a standard part of every soldier’s equipment. By one account, he developed more than two dozen different techniques for strangulation. “Our attitude and personal feelings in regards to sportsmanship and fair play must be changed,” d’Eliscu wrote after the war. “Strangling and killing are remote from our American Teachings, but not to our enemies.” But teaching fighting techniques wasn’t enough for d’Eliscu. To him, it was important to see whether they actually worked in life-and-death situations. Despite his importance as a trainer for the U.S. war effort, he got his superiors to send him briefly into combat. In November 1943 d’Eliscu went ashore with landing forces at Makin Atoll in the Gilbert Islands. As the men in his patrol made their way inland, they were pinned down by sniper fire and had to take cover. D’Eliscu was walking behind a tall lieutenant who was suddenly hit in the arm by a sniper in a tree, according to a reconstruction of the incident by Ray Coll Jr., a correspondent for the Honolulu Advertiser, who interviewed woun­ded soldiers evacuated to Oahu. D’Eliscu fired on the sniper and hit him, causing him to fall to the ground. According to Coll’s account, d’Eliscu rushed to the Japanese soldier, used the disarming techniques he’d taught at Fort Meade and in Hawaii to take the man’s rifle and knife away, and quickly killed him. That heroic act led to d’Eliscu being awarded the Silver Star three months later. By July 1944, d’Eliscu was back in New York, where some of Edward Eliscu’s friends who worked for the Office of War Information were startled to spot a bald, wiry army officer with a familiar last name, giving a speech at an armory in which he castigated black marketeers and criticized unions for making trouble during the war. “So Milton Eliscu, born in Brooklyn, raised on the Lower East Side and Harlem, had become Lt. Col. M. Francois d’Eliscu, leader of the rough Rangers,” Edward Eliscu wrote in his memoir, with more than a trace of bitterness. D’Eliscu was sent to France to organize training at the officers’ candidate school at Fontainebleau. He was made a member of the Legion of Honor and awarded the Croix de Guerre. He also wrote a manual, Hand to Hand Combat (1945), that outlined his techniques for hip throws, joint locks, eye-gouging finger strikes, shin kicks, grappling on the ground, and defensive tactics against knife attacks. (A reprint eventually became available on the civilian market.) “Practice for speed and perfection,” d’Eliscu admonishes in it. “Be cautious. Do not take advantage of your partner in practice. Save your own personal techniques for the enemy!” After the war d’Eliscu became athletic director at the University of Hawaii. But the United States soon needed him again. He served in the Korean War and was then sent to Ankara, Turkey, to train the nation’s infantry and paratroops as part of a foreign aid program. While there, he and his wife got a chance to tour Europe, and near the end of his tour they spent some time living in the Turkish seaside town of Izmir before they returned to the United States in 1953. D’Eliscu then headed to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he helped train U.S. troops, including commanding a force of paratroops who used guerrilla tactics against a National Guard battalion in a simulated battle on a mountainside in the middle of a blizzard. D’Eliscu’s fighting techniques were eventually supplanted by even more sophisticated ones. Today, for example, Army Rangers learn a fighting system that blends techniques from wrestling, boxing, Muay Thai, and judo with weapons skills from Kali, a Filipino martial art. The change in mindset that d’Eliscu brought to hand-to-hand combat, which may have been his biggest contribution to the military, endures. After his retirement from the army in 1954, d’Eliscu and his wife resettled in Siesta Key, Florida, near Sarasota. He spent his last years teaching power boating safety courses. He died in 1972, at age 76. His brother Edward learned of his death when someone mailed him a newspaper obituary. Edward wrote in his memoir that he didn’t grieve for d’Eliscu, whom he felt had turned his back on his family, but acknowledged that his brother had accomplished his life’s objectives. He had become “the leading authority on military fitness, a triple Rambo—with a life like a jigsaw puzzle only he could have put together.” MHQ Patrick J. Kiger is an award-winning journalist who has written for GQ, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Urban Land, and other publications. This article appears in the Summer 2020 issue (Vol. 32, No. 4) of MHQ—The Quarterly Journal of Military History with the headline: Killer Instinct 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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Killing the Yamato

Killing the Yamato The air raid sirens were wailing. Ignoring them, Emperor Hirohito seated himself at the conference table in the shelter adjoining the Imperial Library. The sirens had become a fixture of life in Tokyo. Nearly three weeks ago, on the night of March 10, 1945, American B-29s dropped incendiary bombs on the city. Over 100,000 Japanese perished in the fires, which turned 16 square miles of Japan’s capital into charred rubble. The smoke and stench of the blazes still wafted through the Imperial Palace. How much longer the reign of Hirohito—or the Empire of Japan—might last was very much on the emperor’s mind. In the past few months Japan had suffered calamitous setbacks at the Battles of the Philippine Sea, Leyte Gulf, and Iwo Jima. Now the Americans were about to invade Okinawa. At the conference table were the emperor’s military advisors, the chiefs of staff of the army and the navy, and their immediate subordinates. The chiefs had presented to Hirohito the plan for the coming counteroffensive at Okinawa. Occasionally the emperor stopped, squinting through his wire framed spectacles, to ask questions. How many aircraft would be used in the attacks? Two thousand, an admiral told him. Was that enough? the emperor asked. The admiral explained that an additional 1,500 army aircraft would be available. Hirohito seemed perplexed. Over 100,000 army troops were prepared to die to defend Okinawa, and several thousand kamikaze pilots would be sacrificed. He turned to Admiral Koshiro Oikawa, the navy chief of staff. “And where is the navy?” Oikawa glanced around him. None of the officers was sure how to answer. Did the emperor understand that the navy had been reduced to a handful of ships? Did he know there was nothing the navy could do to alter the situation at Okinawa? Perhaps, but it didn’t matter. The emperor’s meaning was clear. It was not acceptable that the army should make so great a sacrifice while the navy’s ships remained clear of the battle for Okinawa. With a single question, the fate of Japan’s greatest warship—and the Imperial Japanese Navy—had been decided. Its name was Yamato, the mightiest warship yet constructed. Displacing 71,659 tons and capable of 27 knots, the Yamato possessed the greatest firepower ever mounted on a vessel—more than 150 guns, including nine 18.1-inchers that could hurl 3,200-pound armor-piercing shells on a trajectory of 22.5 miles. Its massive armor was the heaviest ever installed on a dreadnought-class battleship, making it virtually impregnable to the guns of any ship in the world. The very name Yamato was a poetic and spiritual term for Japan itself. In its gray, armored magnificence, the great ship symbolized Japan’s dreams of conquest. On the morning of April 7, 1945, in response to the emperor’s question—and where is the navy?—the Yamato embarked on its last mission. As the flagship of a force of 10 warships, it would head into the East China Sea in an assault against the American fleet off Okinawa. Codenamed Ten-Go, the operation would coincide with a massive aerial kamikaze assault while the Japanese 32nd Army on Okinawa launched a counterattack on the ground. After inflicting maximum damage on the American ships, Yamato would be run aground and serve as a stationary artillery platform until destroyed. Any remaining crew would join the garrison defending Okinawa. Almost no one aboard the Yamato, including the officer commanding the operation, Vice Admiral Seiichi Ito, believed it would succeed. Ito at first flatly refused to carry out the order. Not until he was informed that the emperor himself expected him to execute the mission did he accept his fate. A buzz of excitement crackled through the flag bridges of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. Aboard the battleship New Mexico, Admiral Raymond Spruance studied the newly received surveillance reports. The Yamato, the last of Japan’s great battleships, was coming out to fight. Seldom had Spruance’s staff seen their boss’s cold, gimlet-like eyes flash with such emotion. In the U.S. Navy of 1945, Raymond Spruance was something of an oddity—a nonaviator whose command included the greatest naval air force ever deployed. But Spruance also commanded a task force of battleships and cruisers whose only duty so far had been the bombardment of enemy shore positions on Okinawa. Now Spruance, a normally cool and analytical old battleship sailor, was drawn by the siren song of a last epic surface battle. He signaled Rear Admiral Mort Deyo, who commanded Task Force 54, to prepare his battle line to meet the Yamato task force. If things went according to plan, the prize of sinking the world’s greatest dreadnought would go to the battleship admirals. But on the eastern side of Okinawa, aboard the carrier Bunker Hill, the commander of Task Force 58—the fast carrier task force—was eyeing the same prize. Vice Admiral Marc “Pete” Mitscher had the gaunt, wizened face of a bird of prey; fittingly, his call sign was “Bald Eagle.” Like most senior naval aviation officers, Mitscher had spent a career fighting the battleship admirals who had steered the navy’s thinking for most of the current century. One of those was his immediate superior, Raymond Spruance. Mitscher felt a stirring of battleship versus aircraft carrier rivalry. Though the carriers had mostly fought the great battles of the Pacific, whether air power alone could prevail over a surface force had not been proven beyond all doubt. Here was an opportunity to end the debate forever. Now Mitscher had a problem. Spruance had just transmitted an all-fleet order to allow the enemy task force to proceed southward, where Admiral Deyo’s surface task force would engage it. In the meantime, Mitscher’s orders were “to concentrate the offensive effort of Task Force 58 in combat air patrols to meet enemy air attacks.” Like a team of sharp-eyed contract lawyers, Mitscher and his staff pored over the order, looking for slack. Mitscher had served under Spruance long enough to know his style, and Spruance’s order had not specifically forbidden Mitscher to go after the enemy. It was as much slack as the Bald Eagle needed. The trick was in knowing where the enemy fleet was headed and what its objective was. Admiral Deyo’s 6 battleships, 7 cruisers, and 21 destroyers were already headed north to intercept the Japanese force. Mitscher acted on a hunch that the Yamato was feinting northwestward. If he was right, the Japanese would soon make a hard turn south toward Okinawa. He signaled his carrier task groups to prepare for action. The race to get the Yamato was on. Through the breaks in the low overcast, Admiral Ito caught glimpses of the enemy. He could see the American reconnaissance planes flitting in and out of the clouds, tracking his task force. As Ito turned the Yamato task force southwestward, racing toward Okinawa, the weather turned increasingly sour. Veils of light rain were descending like curtains from the clouds to the sea. At 20 minutes past noon on April 7, the first wave appeared on the radar. Hunched over his scope, the young radar officer Mitsuru Yoshida tried to sort them out. On his screen they appeared as three large blobs, one for each formation. Gradually they resolved into groups, then flights, then individual airplanes. From the bridge came a flurry of orders. Each ship in the task force increased its speed to 25 knots. The entire formation swung together to an easterly heading. The waiting was over; Yamato’s last fight would be a sea-air engagement, not a surface action against other ships. An entire formation of warplanes emerged from a gap in the clouds. One after another they peeled off in a dive. Yamato’s captain, Rear Admiral Kosaku Ariga, barked “Commence firing!” from his command post atop the bridge tower. In the next instant, 24 antiaircraft guns and 120 machine guns opened fire. Thunder reverberated through the steel decks. From across the water came the echoing gunfire of the screening ships. The gloomy sky turned crimson with the explosions of a thousand shells. Ariga was standing out in the open, shouting commands as the first bombs and machine gun bullets rained down on the Yamato. The battleship’s thick armor plate resisted most of the bombs, but shrapnel and bullets sliced through the gun crews like a scythe. The dive bombers were the hardest to defend against because they were attacking from almost straight overhead. The gunners were having trouble tracking them until the enemy planes had already released their bombs and were pulling out of their dives. A bomb from an SB2C Helldiver wiped out a five-inch gun turret, shredding the bodies of all the gunners. Another bomb exploded into the radar room, killing everyone inside. The fighters—F4U Corsairs and F6F Hellcats—were attacking in shallow dives, mainly dropping lighter bombs, but their machine guns were raking the ship with deadly precision. The hellish concussion of gunfire, roaring engines, and rattling machine guns beat like a hammer on the flesh of every man aboard the ships. Off Yamato’s port beam appeared the torpedo planes, looking dark and ominous in the gray murk. As the TBM Avengers swooped in closer, the smaller guns on Yamato joined in the collective defense. One of the torpedo planes took a hit in the wing, pulled up in flames, then plunged into the sea. The others kept coming. Torpedoes dropped from their bellies, slashing through the water toward Yamato. Admiral Deyo had just received a cheery send-off from his immediate boss: “We hope you will bring back a nice fish for breakfast.” Deyo was in the act of scribbling his reply when he was interrupted by an incoming report. Mitscher’s planes had just found the Japanese fleet. Deyo tried to swallow his disappointment. He finished the message with, “…if the pelicans haven’t caught them all.” Deyo had been around the navy long enough to know that some things never changed; given the chance, the damned “airedales” would steal the glory. Pelicans or not, Deyo was sticking to his orders, taking his battlewagons north. If nothing else, he was going to earn himself a footnote in military history. Morton Deyo would be the last naval commander in World War II—perhaps history—to form a battle line against an enemy fleet. From the cockpit of his F6F-5 Hellcat fighter, Yorktown air group commander Herb Houck was directing the planes of his group. It was 1:14 p.m., over an hour since the first wave located the Japanese force. Houck’s group was in the third wave. The operation was supposed to be a coordinated strike, with Task Force 58’s task groups supporting each other. The tactic had been used and refined since the first air battles of the South Pacific. In successive waves, strike groups from each carrier would bear down on the Japanese task force. The fighters were supposed to go first, strafing, rocketing, dropping light ordnance, distracting the enemy gunners while the SB2C Helldivers plunged almost straight down with their heavy bombs. They would be closely followed by the TBM Avenger torpedo planes, which needed all the distraction and diversion they could get when they made their dangerous low altitude runs straight at the enemy ships. At least that was the plan. There was nothing coordinated about the frenzied, disjointed air strike on the Yamato force. Each task group had launched its aircraft without waiting its turn. Each strike leader was trying to be the first to hit the target. The first to locate the Yamato’s task force had been the planes of Task Group 58.1, from the carriers San Jacinto, Bennington, Hornet, and Belleau Wood. Right behind them came the units from Task Group 58.3 and the carriers Essex, Bunker Hill, Bataan, and Cabot. In the third wave, nearly an hour later, appeared the 106 planes of Task Group 58.4 launched from Intrepid, Yorktown, and Langley. (The only group to miss the show was Task Group 58.2, which Mitscher had detached to protect the kamikaze-damaged carriers Franklin, Enterprise, and Yorktown as they limped to a repair facility at Ulithi.) As each group arrived over the target, the planes had to jockey for position in the narrow band of sky between the ocean and the lowest deck of clouds at about 1,500 feet. The risk of a midair collision was almost as great as the chance of being hit by the enemy. SB2C Helldivers plummeted through any hole they could find in the overcast, sometimes sharing the space with other planes. Some lost sight of their targets in the clouds, then had to make frantic corrections as they broke clear. Radio discipline had vanished, the tactical frequency was a bedlam of excited chatter, pilots yelling out target locations, calling bomb hits, reporting planes going down. The Japanese ships were zigzagging across the water like rabbits evading hounds. The destroyers, more nimble than the light cruiser Yahagi and the dreadnought Yamato, were the hardest to hit. They were also the most vulnerable, sinking quickly when they took a bomb or torpedo. The destroyer Hamakaze went down within minutes of the first attack. Two more destroyers were trailing black smoke, moving at only half speed. They were maneuvering in a counterclockwise circle around Yamato, adding their guns to the collective fire. For most pilots, it was their first look at the San Shiki (“Type three”) shells fired from the massive 18.1-inch guns. They were monsters, each weighing as much as an automobile and filled with incendiary tubes that burst in a cone toward incoming airplanes. And then the pilots noticed something else peculiar: the antiaircraft fire was exploding in multiple colors. It was a Japanese tactic they had heard about but not seen—each ship’s guns fired a different color to assist the gun directors in spotting their fire. The use of San Shiki and colored gunfire was a good sign: it meant the enemy guns were probably not radar directed. They were using visual aiming and ranging, and doing a bad job of it. Though they were putting up a storm of antiaircraft fire, the gunners were missing with great consistency. A few unlucky planes were hit, but most eluded the gunfire. The best news for the American airmen was the absence of enemy fighters. For some unfathomable reason, the Japanese had deployed the task force with no air cover; the Americans could concentrate on the targets without constantly checking their six o’clock for enemy fighters. Air group commander Houck had already assigned his 12 Avenger torpedo planes, led by Lieutenant Commander Tom Stetson, to finish off the Yahagi. But Stetson had just gotten a good look at the Yamato. The ship appeared to be listing badly. He radioed Houck that he wanted to split his group and go after the battleship with six of his Avengers. Houck concurred, ordering Stetson to change the torpedo running depth from 10 feet to 20. The 10-foot depth had been preset to hit cruisers. Going to 20 feet would put the fish below Yamato’s thicker armor plate, right into its exposed lower hull. One of the pilots, Lieutenant (junior grade) John Carter, was in the last two-plane section. He watched the first four Avengers go in low and fast, dropping their torpedoes in a spread on Yamato’s beam. “As luck would have it,” he recalled, “the big ship was turning to port, thereby exposing the full broadside expanse of her enormous hull to the converging torpedoes.” Carter saw at least three of the torpedoes explode into Yamato’s hull from amidships to the bow. Two hit so close they looked like a single huge explosion. As Carter began his own run from aft of the battleship, he could see tracers arcing toward his Avenger. He launched his torpedo across Yamato’s curving wake. Pulling away from the target, he tried to shrink into the metal frame of his seat as the ping and clatter of shrapnel hit the Avenger’s skin. But his torpedo had run true, exploding into Yamato’s port quarter. Watching the inclinometer at his command post tilting past 20 degrees, Yamato’s captain Ariga reached an agonizing decision. The battleship’s list to port had become critical. The system of pumps and valves that had flooded the stabilizing compartments and corrected the earlier list was no longer working. The all-important aft water control center had taken a torpedo strike and a direct bomb hit. He would have to flood the starboard outer engine room. Flooding the space would help correct the list, but it would reduce Yamato’s available power. It would also mean certain death for the 300 men in the starboard engine compartments. In a choking voice, Ariga gave the order. The valves were opened. Seconds later the violent implosion of sea water snuffed out the life of every man in the flooded engineering rooms. The desperate tactic worked, but only for a while. At 2:10, Ariga felt another torpedo slam into Yamato’s stern, jamming its big main rudder hard to port. Yamato’s death was now certain. The ship could not be steered. The list to port quickly worsened, rolling toward 35 degrees. With its port rail nearly submerged, the ship was locked in a counterclockwise turn. The lofty bridge tower was leaning so steeply that the men in the uppermost decks had to cling to rails and stanchions for support. Reluctantly, Ariga gave the order: “Abandon ship!” On the sixth deck of the bridge tower, the task force commander, Admiral Ito, had already reached the same conclusion. Ito braced himself against the binocular stand and issued his one and only direct command since the battle began: “Stop the operation. Turn back after rescuing the men.” From the beginning Ito had been opposed to what he thought was a senseless sacrifice. Now it was coming to the very end he had predicted. The admiral shook hands with his surviving staff officers, then descended the ladder to his sea cabin one deck below. It was the last anyone saw of Seiichi Ito. At the captain’s command station, a messenger was helping Ariga tie himself to the compass binnacle. Yamato’s captain intended to go down with his ship, and he was taking no chances that his body would wash to the surface. Meanwhile, the most junior officer on the bridge tower, Ensign Mitsuru Yoshida, was wriggling up through the lookout port toward the top deck. By the time he reached the top, Yamato’s captain had already vanished beneath the water. So had the navigation officer and his assistant, who also tied themselves to their stations. Yoshida could see dozens of crewmen perched like stranded rats on the rust brown belly of the battleship. The sea rose from beneath them. As water engulfed the ship, men disappeared into the yawning eddies and whirlpools around the sinking hull. Yoshida drew a deep breath and rolled himself up in a ball. For what seemed an eternity, he churned inside the whirlpool, unable to escape, feeling that each of his limbs was being torn from his body. At that moment—2:23 in the afternoon—the Yamato exploded. The blast rose like a volcanic eruption. As the fireball dissipated, a black mushroom cloud took its place, billowing a mile into the sky. The smoke was seen by coast watchers over a hundred miles away on the shore of Kyushu. It was later theorized that Yamato’s 90-degree list caused the shells for its main batteries to slide in their magazine, hitting their fuses and exploding. The eruption sent thousands of pieces of shrapnel into the air, and the rain of debris killed most of the unlucky sailors swimming on the surface. The underwater concussion killed those near the submerged main deck. Swimmers unfortunate enough to be near Yamato’s raked smokestack were caught in the massive suction created by the huge open funnel as the ship went under. Of the ten warships that had set out with the task force, six were still afloat, but barely. The destroyers Isokaze and Kasumi were shattered hulks, adrift in the East China Sea. Over 4,000 men who had sailed aboard Yamato and its escorts were dead. Of Yamato’s 3,000-man crew, only 269 had been saved. One of them was Ensign Yoshida, somehow thrown from the whirlpool. He would spend the rest of his life wondering why. With an ever-present cigarette dangling from his mouth, Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher peered at the still-wet photographs from the strike. Killing Yamato and five of its screening ships had not come without a price. Ten warplanes—four Helldivers, three Avengers, and three Hellcats—had been lost. Four pilots and eight aircrewmen were missing and presumed dead. Several had been snatched from the sea by daring search and rescue crews. Still, the losses were miniscule when measured against those of the previous great air-sea battles. The Bald Eagle’s gamble had paid off. It was all there in the grainy photos—conclusive proof of the warplane’s dominance not only of the sky, but of the sea. The age of the battleship was officially over. The next day Deyo and his beloved battlewagons would go back to their shore bombardment duties off Okinawa, and Spruance would return his attention to the bigger picture. The Yamato encounter was dramatic, satisfying, perhaps even historically significant. But the pragmatic admiral knew the truth: the real battle for Okinawa was just beginning. In Japan, news of the Yamato disaster was withheld from the public. It fell to Navy Minister Mitsumasa Yonai to inform the emperor. With downcast eyes, Yonai stood before Hirohito and reported that Operation Ten-Go had failed. The emperor seemed not to understand. He peered at Yonai through his spectacles. What about the navy? he asked. What was the status of the fleet? The minister spoke the truth. There was no fleet, he told the emperor. The Imperial Japanese Navy had ceased to exist. Robert Gandt is a former naval officer and aviator. His latest book, The Twilight Warriors (Broadway Books, 2010), covers the Battle of Okinawa, the Pacific War’s deadliest air and sea engagement. Gandt lives with his wife in Daytona Beach, Florida. Visit gandt.com.

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Korean ‘Comfort Women’: Japan’s World War II Sex Slaves

Korean ‘Comfort Women’: Japan’s World War II Sex Slaves Four Korean comfort women, one pregnant, pose with a Chinese soldier who apparently helped free them from the Japanese in 1944. (Pvt. Hatfield/U.S. Army/National Archives) HWANG KEUM-JU, A KOREAN GIRL, was 18 when she was “drafted” by the Japanese to work in a factory. Trucked off to Manchuria, she was billeted in a freezing barrack and assigned a Japanese name. The day after her arrival, an officer ordered her into a small room and told her to do as he said or be killed. He then ordered her to remove her clothes. “It was like a bolt from the sky,” she later said. “My long braid clearly showed I was a virgin….I told him no.” When she continued to resist, he ripped and cut her clothes off. She fainted, only to wake up in a pool of blood. That was just the beginning of the horrors she would experience as a sex slave for Japanese troops. War creates strange euphemisms, but one of the most twisted has to be “comfort women.” These women—an estimated 50,000 to 200,000—were held as slaves to sexually service Japanese soldiers in the 1937–1945 Sino-Japanese War and World War II. For almost 50 years afterward, their story was virtually unknown. Even now the tragedy of the comfort women is shrouded in controversy, particularly over what these women are owed for their suffering. Promised legitimate work, they left behind lives of hardship and took a chance for a better future. Despite their terrible wartime experiences, several not only survived the war but overcame their deep emotional scars and found the courage to tell their stories. THE VAST MAJORITY of comfort women were uneducated rural Koreans between 14 and 18 years old, whose poverty and circumstances left them vulnerable to exploitation. Throughout the women’s short lives, the Japanese had been their colonial overlords and the yangban, the Korean gentry—and for that matter, any man in that patriarchal society—their superiors. The future held little more than destitution. So when men showed up in their villages offering good work in Japanese factories or front-line hospitals, along with a chance to learn and lead a better life, the more courageous girls signed on. Their recruiters became captors, shipping the girls off to far-away places in Japanese-held territory. They were confused by their rough treatment and neglect, but most seemed to believe they’d be given the work promised—until the appalling reality became clear: They were soon placed hard up against the front lines to provide “comfort” to young Japanese soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Like all men in war, the Japanese soldiers lived with the specter of death. Though not excusing their abuse of the girls, Korean writer Kim Il Myon explains it this way: “To soldiers in the frontline, ever surrounded by the sound of guns, wrapped in smoke stinking of death and not knowing when death would come…a visit to a comfort station was no doubt the only form of relief…the only kind of individual act in which one was ‘liberated.’” But that liberation cost these women their dignity, their sense of self, and much more. Many attempted suicide or escape, with some succeeding. The remaining tens of thousands could never predict what fresh horror lay ahead. They lived with the same smoke and gunfire and bombings that the men did, but they also suffered humiliation, infection, pregnancy, and disease. The standard treatment for syphilis was a shot of the dread No. 606, or Salvarsan, an arsenic-based drug that could cause infertility—if all the other abuse had failed to. The men were ordered to wear condoms but some refused; with death a daily companion, why bother? The women were virtually powerless to enforce the rule, though they tried. When condoms were in short supply, they saved used ones, washed them, and redistributed them, an almost useless precaution. IRONICALLY, FEAR OF VENEREAL DISEASE and the desire to maintain order compelled the Imperial military to establish the first comfort stations, after the 1932 invasion of Shanghai. Widespread rape by their occupying forces had angered the locals and made them hard to control. And brothels were risky: Spies would likely abound among prostitutes, and VD weakened the fighting force and might spread through Japan after the war. By the end of World War II, the Japanese military had comfort stations in all their occupied territories, “manned” by women abducted or recruited under false pretenses. Some were prepubescent. The women’s living arrangements varied, depending on who ran their station and the soldiers who came through. Most worked in cubicles that had curtains for doors and were just big enough for two people to lie down. One woman in a Taiwan station reported that on Saturdays, so many soldiers came that “the ends of the queues were sometimes invisible….Each woman had to serve 20 to 30 soldiers a day. We were already very weak, but going without good food and being forced to serve so many men left some of us half dead.” Officially, the women were to receive part of what soldiers paid, but that too varied. Regardless, the cost of clothes and toiletries came out of their meager earnings. Indeed, the women were treated as prisoners. They were rarely allowed out of their stations, and then only under guard. Sometimes a crazed or drunk soldier beat or tortured them, even hacking off a breast or burning their genitals. In the best circumstances, officers took comfort women as mistresses and treated them far more humanely. In rare cases, a kind of affection developed, either between a couple or among a group of soldiers and the women in a particular station. As scholar and activist Yun Chung-Ok explains, “Even amid such a terrible life, Korean comfort women and young airmen, at a time when a mission meant death, seem to have experienced something like a raw encounter between fellow human beings.” Nonetheless, all the women were permanently wounded—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. At war’s end, many were abandoned. They simply woke one day to find that the Japanese had deserted their stations. In some cases when the soldiers did not leave, the women and troops were expected to commit suicide, an expression of loyalty to the emperor. But thousands persevered, somehow making their way to safety, usually on their own, sometimes via Allied or Japanese transport. Even those journeys were fraught. Several transport ships were torpedoed, and the women who made it back to Korea had to endure another war there five years later. MOST OF THE SURVIVORS lived as virtual ghosts, haunted and humiliated by their ordeal, too ashamed to speak of it in a society where female chastity was prized. It was not until the early 1990s that the tragedy came to light. Several women’s groups and scholars pursued the issue of wartime sex slaves, and in 1991 former comfort women sued the Japanese government. Kim Haksun, who was one of the first to reveal her story, echoed the sentiments of many of the women who have since spoken out: “Why haven’t I been able to lead a normal life, free from shame, like other people? I feel I could tear apart, limb by limb, those who took away my innocence and made me as I am. Yet how can I appease my bitterness? Now I don’t want to disturb my memories further. Once I am dead and gone, I wonder whether the Korean or Japanese governments will pay any attention to the miserable life of a woman like me.” The lawsuits have yet to be resolved: the Japanese government has vacillated over the past decade, sometimes apologizing for the comfort stations and other times claiming they were brothels run by private agents and that the women were either prostitutes or volunteers. The controversy continues to smolder, even in the United States. This past spring, two separate Japanese delegations visited the town of Palisades Park, New Jersey, where Korean Americans, who compose more than half the population there, had erected a small plaque in 2010 to the comfort women. Uncomfortable with the plaque’s wording, the Japanese wanted it removed. Their request was denied, and the memorial still quietly proclaims: “In honor of the more than 200,000 women and girls who were abducted by the Armed Forces of the government of Imperial Japan 1930s–1945. Known as ‘comfort women,’ they endured human rights violations that no peoples should leave unrecognized. Let us never forget the horrors of crimes against humanity.” K. M. Kostyal, formerly a senior editor for National Geographic books and the magazine, writes frequently about history. Click For More From MHQ!

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Korean War: Forgotten 24th and 34th Infantry Regiments

Korean War: Forgotten 24th and 34th Infantry Regiments American military history records the feats of many famous commands, such as the ‘Big Red One’ (1st Infantry Division), the 7th Cavalry and the 27th (‘Wolfhound’) Infantry regiments. But accounts of the Korean War scarcely mention the 24th and 34th Infantry regiments. Both gave distinguished service, yet both were disbanded in Korea and their men used to form battalions in other regiments. Some veterans of the two commands remain bitter over what they consider unnecessary and vindictive action on the U.S. Army’s part. The 24th Infantry Regiment was formed a few years after the end of the Civil War, when the Army organized the 9th and 10th U.S. Cavalry regiments and 24th and 25th U.S. Infantry regiments, each comprised of black soldiers led by white officers. Those four regiments served for some 20 years on the Western frontier. Later, during the Spanish-American War, the 24th Infantry participated in the July 1, 1898, assault on San Juan Hill and suffered 40 percent casualties. The 24th Regiment saw little combat during World War II, but in December 1944 it was sent to garrison the supposedly secure islands of Saipan and Tinian. As late as April 1945, troops of the 24th found and destroyed residual pockets of resistance on both islands. In July, it was sent to mop up the remaining Japanese in Kerama Retto, west of Okinawa. On August 22, the regimental commander accepted the surrender of Japanese forces on Aka Island, in the Kerama Island group. The 24th was assigned to the 25th Infantry Division on February 1, 1946. It was the only one of the 12 U.S. Army infantry regiments of the four divisions occupying Japan that had all three of its authorized battalions. The other 11 had only two battalions each. The 34th U.S. Infantry Regiment was formed on June 3, 1916. During World War I, it fought in France with the 7th Infantry Division from August to November 11, 1918, and was awarded the French Battle Honors of Lorraine. In 1941, the 34th was named outstanding regiment during the Army’s Carolina maneuvers. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, it was sent to Hawaii and, on June 12, 1943, became part of the recently formed 24th Infantry Division, participating in operations at Tanahmerah and Hollandia, New Guinea, in 1944. Subsequently attached to the 41st Infantry Division, the 34th seized the Sorido and Boroke airbases on Biak Island, and spearheaded the division’s drive across Leyte in the Philippine Islands, remaining in constant contact with Japanese forces for 75 consecutive days. The 1st Battalion of the 34th (1/34th) earned a Distinguished Unit Citation. Attached to the 38th Infantry Division in January 1945, the 34th Infantry fought at Subic Bay and Bataan (where its Company F suffered 90-percent casualties in one day), at Zig Zag Pass and at Corregidor, rejoining the 24th Division for the Mindanao campaign. The 34th earned four battle streamers during World War II. It then joined with the 24th Division to occupy the island of Kyushu, Japan. After North Korea invaded the South on June 25, 1950, the U.S. Army committed its first divisions to battle by battalion. Their mission was to delay the enemy advance. The battalions usually fought alone, often without much artillery, heavy mortar or air support. Troops of the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) easily flanked each American unit out of position within hours of contact. The 34th Infantry, as part of the 24th Division, arrived in Korea on July 3 with 1,898 officers and enlisted men. The 1st Battalion numbered just over 600 men, and the 3rd (there was no 2nd) had about 640. A full U.S. Army battalion normally numbered 900 troops. On July 5, Lt. Col. Harold ‘Red’ Ayres, a World War II infantry battalion commander, took command of the 1/34th. Major General William F. Dean, the 24th Division’s commander, ordered Ayres’ battalion to a blocking position near Pyongtaek and Asan Bay on South Korea’s west coast, and Lt. Col. David H. Smith’s 3rd Battalion to a similar position at Ansong, about 10 miles east of Pyongtaek. Brigadier General George B. Barth informed Ayres that Task Force Smith–a half-battalion force from the 21st Infantry–had been defeated earlier in the day and admonished Ayres to delay the enemy but not allow his battalion to’suffer the same fate as…Smith’s.’ The North Korean 4th Infantry Division, commanded by Maj. Gen. Lee Kwon Mu, attacked the 1/34th around 5 a.m. on the 6th. The American battalion had no artillery support, and the few rounds available for its 4.2-inch mortars were soon expended. Although the Americans had a few recoilless rifles, there was no ammunition for them. Meantime, the regimental commander, Colonel Jay Lovless, sent Major John J. Dunn, his regimental S3 (operations officer), to Ayres with orders to hold as long as possible, ‘and then fall back to a position in the vicinity of Chonan….’ The battalion held for about five hours, with a loss of 18 troops wounded and 33 missing. Then, as North Korean infantry flowed around the 1/34th’s flank, Ayres decided to withdraw. Barth later wrote that he had instructed Ayres to delay in successive positions, not move south directly to Chonan. Ayres, however, believed the new orders from the commander of the 34th, Lovless, superseded Barth’s, since an artillery commander is not ordinarily in an infantry chain of command. Unknown to Lovless and Ayres, however, Dean had appointed Barth to head a task force consisting of the 34th Infantry and two artillery battalions. That arrangement resulted in confusion as to whose order to obey. Barth, at some point, also ordered the 3/34th to withdraw from Ansong. Dean was furious when he learned that the 34th had not delayed in successive positions but pulled back some 13 miles to Chonan. He blamed Lovless for the rapid fallback and called Colonel Robert R. Martin, who had served alongside Dean in the 44th Division during World War II, to his headquarters. Martin arrived in the 34th Regiment’s command post (CP) at Chonan around 7 a.m. on the 7th and stayed with Lovless the rest of the day. Lovless had sent a reinforced rifle company from the 3/34th forward on reconnaissance early that morning, following it with the remainder of the battalion, as Dean had ordered. At about 4 p.m., an air-dropped message from Dean advised him to ‘proceed with greatest caution,’ and that large numbers of enemy troops were on his flanks. Lovless immediately ordered the 3rd Battalion to withdraw, then went to inform Ayres of the situation. At Ayres’ CP, Lovless was given written orders by the assistant division commander relieving him of his command, which was given to Martin. As the 3/34th dug in at new positions, Company L was sent forward to rescue some troops of the regimental Intelligence and Reconnaissance (I&R) platoon who had been left behind when that unit had fought its way out of an ambush. Then the 3/34th began withdrawing, as Lovless had ordered. Major Dunn, who had been with Company L, was surprised at the withdrawal. He came into the regimental CP and said that the battalion was leaving one of the best defensive positions he had seen. Martin directed Dunn to ‘put them back on that position,’ but he failed to tell him that the 3/34th had been withdrawn on regimental orders, because NKPA troops had been spotted on both of its flanks. A confused 3/34th was turned around again and began moving north out of Chonan. Suddenly, the lead elements were fired upon, to which they reacted by deploying and returning fire. Then the battalion suddenly began to withdraw through the town. Martin ordered it back in to defend Chonan, but by then Dunn had been wounded and taken prisoner, while the battalion S3, Major Boone Seegers, who was also hit, had bled to death. On the following day, July 8, the 34th fought advancing troops of the NKPA 4th Division’s 16th and 18th Infantry regiments, backed by T-34/85 tanks of the 105th Armored Brigade. During the fight for Chonan, the Americans set one T-34 tank afire with five grenades and used rocket launchers to destroy two others. Colonel Martin joined a tank-hunter team, but he was killed by the tank they were hunting. The executive officer, Lt. Col. Robert L. ‘Pappy’ Wadlington, assumed command of the 34th. The regiment had lost two commanders in two days, along with the operations officers of the regiment and of the 3rd Battalion. A number of other senior officers were also gone. Moreover, the two battalions of the 34th had been placed in no-win situations, as at Pyongtaek and Chonan. At about 5 p.m. on July 12, the NKPA attacked the 1/34th near Kongju. The battalion held until about 2:30 a.m. on the 13th, then silently withdrew, concealed in the shadow of a hill. On July 13, the 34th and 19th Infantry regiments, plus the divisional recon company and the I&R platoon, defended a 34-mile-long line on the Kum River, the first major obstacle to the NKPA’s advance since they had crossed the Han River farther north. The 34th’s 3rd Battalion was on the river, and the 1st was at Yongsong, about two miles to the south. An estimated 5,000 to 6,000 troops of the NKPA 4th Division, backed by 20 tanks of the 105th Brigade’s 793rd Tank Battalion, were poised to attack the 34th Regiment at Kongju, while roughly the same number of men from the NKPA 3rd Infantry Division prepared to take on the 19th. American front-line strength along the Kum was not more than 2,000 men. Communications within the 3/34th were poor. Telephone wire was almost unobtainable, and most radios lacked replacement batteries. All three rifle companies of the battalion were distributed along a two-mile river front. That night the 40 exhausted men of Company K were evacuated to Taejon, leaving about 104 men in the remaining two units to carry on the defense. On the 14th, while North Korean mortar and artillery fire fell on the battalion, an estimated 500 soldiers of the NKPA 16th Regiment crossed the Kum River about two miles to the south. Believing his position untenable, the Company L commander, 1st Lt. Archie L. Stith, withdrew his unit around 11 a.m. Stith then left to find the battalion CP, which he finally located 20 miles south of Konju, and reported his decision to the new battalion commander, Major Newton W. Lantron–who summarily relieved him of command and threatened to court-martial him. The NKPA 16th Infantry also attacked the 63rd Field Artillery Battalion (FAB). At least two of the battalion’s howitzers were destroyed by North Korean mortar fire. The men were unable to get the other eight guns out, so they disabled them. Ayres’ 1/34th was ordered to the 63rd FAB positions to’save any men or equipment in the area,’ but was told to return at dark. His men met intense small-arms and machine-gun fire from high ground overlooking the artillery position. After locating a few wounded men and some jeeps in operating condition, he withdrew the battalion to Nonsan at nightfall. Company I had stayed in its Kum River position. Except for shelling, the NKPA left the unit alone. It was withdrawn at 9:30 p.m. On July 19, the 1/34th Infantry was positioned along the Kapchon River west of Taejon, astride the Kongju Road. The 2/19th Infantry, south of the 1/34th, was also on the Kapchon, defending the Nonsan Road. At daylight on July 20, the NKPA 4th Division’s 5th Infantry Regiment struck the 1/34th with infantry and six to eight tanks, forcing Company B northward. Company A held until about 11 a.m., when it withdrew toward Taejon. The battalion CP was attacked at 4 a.m. and forced to displace an hour later. The 2/19th Infantry was also attacked. Since the 1/34th had apparently withdrawn, the 2/19th commander began withdrawing his battalion. By 10 a.m., both battalions had pulled out, opening the way to Taejon. In the battle for Taejon, rocket-launcher teams from several units including the 3/34th (which had been deployed to the rear of the 1st Battalion and on the northern road into Taejon) knocked out eight T-34 tanks. However, a counterattack into the gap between the 1st Battalion and 2/19th Infantry by elements of the 3/34th Infantry shortly after daylight was thwarted by six North Korean tanks and a battalion of the 5th Infantry. Elements of the 34th Infantry, remnants of the division’s artillery battalions, the division recon company, engineer battalion and part of the 19th Infantry tried to defend Taejon, but they were overwhelmed and forced to withdraw through enemy fire. It was a rout. Company L, 34th Infantry, which remained in the city as a rear guard, lost 107 out of 153 men. The 34th lost at least 530 men out of its total strength of 1,549 present at Taejon. Leadership losses in the regiment since entering combat included four regimental commanders and two operations officers in just over two weeks. The 1st Battalion lost its executive officer on July 20, and the 3/34th lost two battalion commanders (Lantron was taken prisoner on July 20) and its operations officer. The division commander, General Dean, was also missing in action. It was later learned that he, too, had been taken prisoner. On July 29, the 34th was dug in near Kochang. The regiment had no switchboard and was short of mortars, rocket launchers and machine guns. Its commander, Colonel Charles E. Beauchamp (appointed just before the struggle for Taejon), wanted to pull his regiment back three miles, but the new division commander, Brig. Gen. John H. Church, ordered him to stand fast. Two NKPA attacks at 5 a.m. cut off Company I of the 3/34th and pushed the 1/34th out of position. Beauchamp halted the battalion on the road. The 1st Battalion later rescued all but one platoon of the cut-off unit. That same afternoon the 34th withdrew some 15 miles to the east. At the beginning of August, the 24th Division deployed behind the Naktong River on a 40-mile front, with the 34th, 21st and ROK (Republic of Korea) 17th Infantry regiments on line from south to north. The 34th’s sector was some 34,000 yards, along which were deployed the 493 remaining troops of the 3rd Battalion. The 515 troops of the 1/34th waited in reserve at Kang-ni, about two miles from the river. The 34th numbered 1,402 men, less than half the authorized regimental strength. All three rifle companies of the 3/34th were scattered in small enclaves and outposts along the river. The regiment was critically short of vehicles, 4.2-inch mortars and Browning automatic rifles, the mainstays of Korean War­era rifle squads. On August 4, elements of the North Korean 16th Infantry Regiment staged an assault across the Naktong between Companies I and L, 3/34 Infantry, and overwhelmed most of their positions. NKPA troops drove about five miles into the 24th Division sector, precipitating the First Battle of the Naktong Bulge, which eventually involved the entire 24th Division, the U.S. 1st Provisional Marine Brigade, the newly arrived 9th Infantry Regiment and 1/23rd Infantry (both from the 2nd Infantry Division) and the 2/27th Infantry. The struggle lasted until August 19. The 34th Infantry gave its all. Company K stayed on its 7,500-yard front along the Naktong alone until ordered out on about August 14. At the outset, the 1/34th launched a counterattack, but part of Company C was trapped in a grist mill, where the men valiantly held out until rescued. Captain Albert F. Alfonso, with remnants of Companies A, C and L, held a small perimeter at the nose of the bulge until ordered out on the night of August 8-9. Elements of the regiment took part in a number of counterattacks between August 6 and 18. The 34th made its last attack on the 18th, during which Company C was reduced to 37 men and Company A to 61. Company L lost more than 20 men in a few minutes to a counterattack. When it was relieved by the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division on August 25, the 24th Division numbered 10,600 men–8,000 short of full strength. Only 184 of the original regimental strength of 1,898 men remained in the 34th Infantry. On August 27, Lt. Gen. Walton Walker, U.S. Eighth Army commander in Korea, dissolved the 34th, converting the 1/34th into the 3rd Battalion, 19th Infantry, and the 3/34th into the 2nd Battalion, 21st Infantry. The 5th Regimental Combat Team (RCT) became the 2nd Division’s third regiment. General Church preferred having the 5th fully manned to rebuilding the 34th. He then reassigned the men of the 34th to give his other two regiments their authorized third battalions. The 34th was reconstituted in Japan and later served again in Korea. While confusion in its command structure bedeviled the 34th Infantry, the 24th, commanded by Colonel Horton V. White, suffered because of an additional factor–segregation. Many of the black regiment’s white officers held prejudices that affected both their leadership and their later evaluations of the 24th’s troops. The regiment experienced its first significant action in Korea when its 3rd Battalion, under Lt. Col. Samuel Pierce, Jr., tried to retake the town of Yechon on July 19, 1950. Darkness intervened in the attack, but the 3rd seized the town on the following day with little trouble. Taking Yechon was unimportant in itself, but it greatly boosted regimental morale, since that was the first town retaken by U.S. troops since the war began. Yechon was turned over to troops of the ROK Capital Division’s 28th Regiment, who later lost it during an enemy counterattack. On August 6, Company L was ambushed near the town of Sobuk with a fury and suddenness that left the unit in disarray. Company M was struck that night. During that fight, machine-gunner Pfc William Thompson gave his life to stop the enemy and save many of his comrades, for which he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. Meanwhile, a task force built around Company I and a platoon of another segregated unit, the black 77th Engineer Combat Company (ECC), was ambushed on its way to contact U.S. forces near Chindong-ni. At least 12 men were killed and an unknown number wounded, and seven or eight members of the 77th ECC were missing. The unit’s commander, Captain Charles M. Bussey, later rescued those men in a daring foray. That day, too, a sick Colonel White was relieved of command by 57-year-old Colonel Arthur S. Champeny, and Colonel Pierce of the 3/24th was wounded in action. Lt. Col. John T. Corley, a highly respected officer, took command of the 3/24th on August 9. On the 12th, his battalion attacked through the rugged mountains just south of Sobuk-san (Hill 738), an area of high, very steep, narrow-topped ridges and deep valleys. By the 13th, it was stalled by terrain and a stubborn enemy. A long, bloody struggle for control of some of those ridges went on from mid-August until the breakout from the perimeter in late September. On August 15, the 24th Infantry held the center of the 25th Division’s Pusan perimeter line. In the north, its positions were on relatively low ground, but as they went south, the line extended along ever steeper and more rugged ridges. The line included Battle Mountain (also known as Hill 665, Old Baldy, Napalm Hill or Bloody Knob), the Rocky Crags and Pil-bong (Hill 743) and extended to a point about 4,000 yards short of Sobuk-san (a k a Bloody Sobuk). A force of ROK troops was placed on Sobuk. From Sobuk, the ridges gradually became smaller as they neared Korea’s southern coast, where the 5th RCT was located. There were no trails or roads up either Battle Mountain or Pil-bong. It took climbers in good condition two to three hours to ascend Pil-bong, and three or four hours to climb Battle Mountain. Supply bearers needed six hours for a Battle Mountain round trip. Maintaining wire communications was a nightmare. North Korean patrols constantly cut the wire, then ambushed wiremen trying to find the break. Evacuation of the wounded was even more difficult. It took six men to carry a stretcher off the mountain, often accompanied by an aid man and escorted by riflemen for protection. When it rained, the terrain was almost impossible to negotiate. That demoralizing situation would improve later in the war, when helicopters were introduced to evacuate the wounded. On August 18, elements of the NKPA 6th Division attacked the 2/24th on Battle Mountain, overrunning Company E, and on the 19th they attacked the 1/24th, driving Company C from its position. Company A held on. According to Lt. Col. Roy Appleman, author of the Army’s official history, the attack on the 18th tore a hole ‘nearly a mile wide in the line north of Pilbong,’ which the enemy could exploit. The NKPA did not exploit the gap, but they attacked the 1/24th on the 20th, again driving Company C from its position. The 3rd Battalion counterattacked, regaining most of the lost ground. In that assault, 2nd Lt. Ted Swett served as the ninth platoon leader that the 3rd Platoon of Company L had had so far in the war. He was wounded on the 21st, and it took six hours to carry him down the mountain. That same morning, Companies I and L retook lost ground but were again driven off by an estimated two-battalion NKPA assault. The struggle for Battle Mountain went on through the rest of August. At times, according to an Army historian, individuals in the front-line units of the 24th pulled out of position without orders, or ‘bugged out’ in Korean War terminology. No doubt some men did bug out, but most of the troops stayed, fought and died, inflicting heavy casualties on the North Koreans. The 24th’s own battle losses were severe, and division reserves were scarce. At one point, the 77th ECC and ROK troops were committed to the bloody defensive battle. The summit of Battle Mountain changed hands 19 times between August 15 and August 31, according to calculations of the Intelligence sergeant of 1st Battalion. The 24th regiment suffered 500 battle casualties in August. In that month, too, the 3/34th had three different battalion commanders. The 2nd Battalion held 6,000 yards of the regiment’s right on hills west and southwest of Haman. Company F held 1,300 yards on the right. Next was Company G, also on a 1,300-yard frontage. Company E, to the left of G, held twice the frontage of either of the other two units, but one platoon was positioned by itself 1,300 to 1,400 yards south of the bulk of Company E. On August 31, the NKPA launched a general offensive against the 24th and the neighboring 35th Infantry regiments of the 25th Division. Clay Blair, in The Forgotten War, writes that the enemy attacked the 24th and 35th with two regiments each. The main thrust at the 24th, by elements of the North Korean 6th and 7th Infantry divisions, came against the 2nd Battalion. The battalion line was soon penetrated. Remnants of Company F pulled back, while Company G was fragmented early on, and the bulk of Company E was also displaced. According to the Army’s official history, there were several instances of 24th soldiers’ bugging out during that action. Some were later substantiated, but others proved to be false. The 2nd Battalion rear area was chaotic, teeming with North Korean soldiers as well as men from the overrun units, mortarmen, medics, engineers, headquarters personnel, military policemen, vehicles from those units, the artillery, etc. Because of the chaos in the battalion’s rear, including at the battalion CP, it seemed that no one was in charge. The entire 24th Regiment has been condemned ever since for its perfomance at that time, but two factors contributed to the situation. First, less than three rifle companies of the battalion were struck by overwhelming numbers of North Korean troops. Second, as was the case with the 34th Infantry, some unit leadership in the 2/24th failed. The battalion CP was destroyed, and the battalion commander lost control almost from the beginning. The regimental CP also was forced to displace, contributing significantly to the loss of command and control. With the breakdown in leadership came a breakdown among the troops. The NKPA attack on the 35th Infantry, on a broader front, penetrated the center of its line, held by 300 ROK policemen. Soon hundreds of North Koreans were also in the 35th’s rear areas. The 27th Infantry counterattacked and with elements of the 24th and 35th battled NKPA troops in the rear areas for more than a week, finally wiping them out. More than 2,000 North Korean dead were buried behind the lines. On September 6, Colonel Champeny was wounded and replaced by Colonel Corley. On September 14, an estimated 400 to 500 North Koreans stormed Companies I and L of the 24th Infantry on Pil-bong. The companies repulsed several attacks, but finally control broke down. Company L was reduced to about 40 men. The other members of the company had either been wounded or killed or had left without orders. Major Melvin R. Blair, the new battalion commander, took charge, but he was wounded in the leg by a North Korean sniper while trying to hold the summit. An American attempt to retake Pil-bong on the 16th failed. A task force of two infantry companies and more than a company of engineers, supported by the recon company and the 3/24’s heavy weapons company, launched another counterassault, but that also failed. The landing at Inchon by U.S. and ROK forces on September 15 finally compelled the North Koreans to withdraw from the Pusan perimeter. The 24th Infantry was divided into Task Forces Blair and Corley (named for their commanders), and they, along with several from other commands, began pursuing the enemy on September 27. By October 1, 1950, the NKPA troops were fleeing back across the 38th parallel. The 25th Division remained in South Korea until ordered north in late November to participate in the Chongchon operation. Later in November, overwhelming assaults by Chinese troops forced the U.S. Eighth Army to withdraw. On November 29, the Chinese 40th Army flanked the 24th Infantry’s line north of the Chongchon River in North Korea, forcing the neighboring 9th Regiment of the 2nd Division to withdraw. On November 30, the 3/24th was at Kunu-ri, on the division’s open right flank, with Chinese troops behind it. With the help of air support, the battalion extricated itself, losing one soldier killed, 30 wounded and 109 missing. Overall, the 24th Infantry lost one-fifth of its officers and one-third of its enlisted men in the withdrawal across the Chongchon. Colonel Corley blamed the disarray of the 3rd Battalion on its commander, Lt. Col. Melvin E. Blair, whom he summarily relieved. The Eighth Army’s withdrawal did not cease until the force was well below the 39th parallel. But by early March 1951, the American and ROK troops were again ready for a full-scale offensive. On March 6, the 25th Division advanced across the Han River. The 1/24th did well, moving over difficult terrain against an entrenched enemy. The 3rd Battalion initially also performed well, executing a hastily devised river crossing and advancing through rough country against well dug-in Chinese troops, far from the 1st Battalion. While climbing up steep terrain, however, the 1/24th reportedly collapsed under Chinese fire and withdrew in disorder. When the division commander learned of that action, his confidence in the 24th plummeted. Although the 24th performed well in the attack north of the Han and the subsequent general withdrawal of the Eighth Army after the Chinese spring offensive of 1951, its reputation was somewhat tarnished. But it again performed well in the Army’s drive back north in May and June 1951. In August, the regiment’s new commander, Colonel William D. Gillis, prodded by the division commander, closely examined the 24th’s record in Korea. Determining that leadership had been the problem, he relieved a number of officers. After the change in command, Company F conducted a valiant bayonet and grenade charge on September 15. However, the positive performance of Company F was ignored by higher commands and the news media. By October 1, 1951, the 24th had passed into history. The 24th and its black members were tagged with every stereotypical racial slur possible–blacks were afraid of the dark, wouldn’t fight, were undependable, hated whites, resented white leadership, were disloyal, etc. Racial prejudice and stereotypical notions also affected how some white officers in the regiment handled their charges. The 24th had an inordinately high turnover of senior NCO and officer leadership at the company level, and had seven regimental commanders in 14 months, when other regiments in Korea had two to four. Three changes were made in the first two months. The 1st Battalion saw three different commanders in the first three months, while the 2nd and 3rd battalions had five each in the same period. Continuity of leadership, purpose and command cannot be attained when commanders change so rapidly. The 34th had also suffered from a rapid turnover of senior leadership–four different regimental commanders within two weeks. Its 1st Battalion also had three commanders in the same period. The long withdrawals from Pyongtaek and Ansong, the confusion at Chonan, the disaster on the Kum River and the debacle at Taejon–all were blamed in varying degrees on the 34th Infantry and its leadership. Colonel Beauchamp of the 34th was in overall command at Taejon, yet he and his executive officer, Colonel Wadlington–along with General Dean, who was also there and not in command–were all out of Beauchamp’s CP at the same time, but none of them told anyone there where they were going, how long they expected to be absent or how to handle an emergency. The 24th and 34th Infantry regiments acquired bad reputations in Korea, but to a large extent both units were victims of the perceptions, prejudices and expedients of the time. They were also fighting against a tough, well-trained enemy that the U.S. military had seriously underestimated at the time they were committed to the fighting. Besides hard lessons in leadership learned by both regiments, the 24th’s experience demonstrated that integration within the U.S. Army was long overdue. Retired Brigadier General Uzal W. Ent served in Korea with the 27th Infantry Regiment and later in the 28th Infantry Division, Pennsylvania Army National Guard. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Military History magazine today!

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Looking at the Korean War, 70 Years On

Looking at the Korean War, 70 Years On When North Korea sought to reunify with South Korea by force on June 25, 1950, a small peninsula in East Asia turned into an international hot spot amid the steadily intensifying Cold War. The United Nations Security Council roundly condemned the invasion (while the Soviet Union was boycotting the council and thus in no position to veto it). Military contingents from the United States and 20 other nations joined forces with the Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) in what President Harry S. Truman termed a “police action.” View striking images from the conflict from our November 2020 issue: Previous Next Marines climb scaling ladders to secure a beachhead at Inchon, South Korea, on Sept. 15, 1950. / National Archives Backed by an M26 Pershing tank, Marines advance into North Korea in 1950. / David Douglas Duncan Collection, University of Texas at Austin American airborne troops and supplies parachute to frozen ground during a 1951 U.N. operation. / National Archives Australian soldiers ride an M4A3E8 Sherman tank 50 miles north of the North Korean capital of Pyongyang during the U.N. advance in 1950. / Hulton Deutsch, Getty Images Chinese and North Korean soldiers celebrate what they regard as a victory on learning of the armistice in July 1953. / Hulton Deutsch, Getty Images A South Korean refugee carrying her brother pauses in front of a stalled M48 Patton tank in June 1951. / Hulton Deutsch, Getty Images Confronting the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army, on the offensive since late November 1950, a flamethrower team of the 1st Marine Division flushes enemy troops from hiding on May 5, 1951. / U.S. Marine Corps History Division Marines withdrawing from North Korea’s Chosin Reservoir on Dec. 26, 1950, attack a Chinese position just hit by a U.S. Navy F4U-5 Corsair fighter-bomber. / U.S. Marine Corps History Division A U.S. soldier comforts another whose buddy was killed, as a medic fills out casualty tags, on North Korea’s Haktang-ni high ground in 1950. / National Archives The communist Korean People’s Army (KPA) overran the South Korean capital of Seoul on June 28, and by August the ROKA and the U.S. Eighth Army held one-tenth of the country with the city of Pusan at their backs. There, however, they regained the initiative. On September 15 General of the Army Douglas MacArthur made an end run to land American and South Korean troops at Inchon. The next day U.N. forces broke out of the Pusan Perimeter, and the KPA began disintegrating. Seoul was retaken within 10 days, and MacArthur pushed on into North Korea. However, on October 19 the nascent People’s Republic of China, perceiving the imminent collapse of North Korea as an existential threat, intervened with its 250,000-strong People’s Volunteer Army, which by December drove back U.N. forces. Seoul fell again on Jan. 4, 1951, but U.N. firepower took a heavy toll on the Chinese. On May 20 U.S. forces under Gen. Matthew Ridgway launched a counteroffensive that retook Seoul by mid-June and drove communist forces back north of the 38th parallel. The war continued there in a bloody stalemate until all sides agreed to an armistice and cease-fire on July 27, 1953. The participants have yet to sign a treaty ending the Korean War. While some Americans regard Korea as “the first war we lost,” the thriving Republic of Korea suggests the United States and the U.N. achieved their objectives. China also got what it wanted by preserving North Korea as a buffer zone, leaving the latter nation as the conflict’s only outright loser, having failed in its goal to reunify the peninsula. MH This article appeared in the November 2020 issue of Military History magazine. For more stories, subscribe here and visit us on Facebook:

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Kuno, a British Military Working Dog, Awarded Highest Honor for Service Animals

Kuno, a British Military Working Dog, Awarded Highest Honor for Service Animals Kuno, a British military working dog who risked his life during a night raid in the mountains of Afghanistan, has been awarded the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) Dickin Medal, the highest honor an animal can receive in combat. Instituted during World War II, the Dickin Medal is the animal equivalent of Great Britain’s highest and most prestigious award for valor, the Victoria Cross. Trained to detect explosives, find weapon caches, and incapacitate the enemy if ordered, the then four-year-old Belgian Shepherd Malinois had conducted 16 operations over a five-month period in Afghanistan with his handler. In 2019, Kuno and his team were tasked to raid a heavily fortified Al Qaeda compound. Among the first off the helicopter and racing across open ground, Kuno and his handler were met with a fierce wave of machine gun fire from insurgents. (PDSA) “Miraculously,” according to a PDSA release, “no one was injured and they made it safely to the compound with the rest of the assault team.” As the fighting within the compound continued, the team became pinned down as another insurgent concealed in a doorway assaulted the British with grenades and withering machine gun fire. “Unable to move without potentially taking casualties, Kuno’s handler turned to him. The dog took off at the gunman, who fired wildly into the night at the animal running full speed toward him,” writes Ryan Pickrell for Business Insider. As the 67-pound Kuno fearlessly rushed the insurgent, he was shot twice in his hind legs, with one bullet narrowly missing his femoral artery. Despite being severely injured, Kuno “barely [broke his] stride” and continued his assault, biting the insurgent’s arm and wrestling him to the ground. There, Kuno remained on top of the enemy, incapacitating him. Kuno’s actions “altered the course of the battle,” according to the PDSA release. “The assault force swiftly entered the courtyard, neutralized the insurgent and cleared the remainder of the building.” As Kuno’s team desperately fought to keep him alive, the canine was transported to the rear and then evacuated to the U.S. Army Veterinary Treatment Facility in Afghanistan. In addition to wounds on both of his hind legs, a bullet had shredded Kuno’s rear left paw. “The term amputation actually means cutting through bone, but the bone in this case was already shredded,” Army Reserve Lt. Col. Leah Smith, commander of the U.S. Army Reserve’s 149th Veterinary Detachment, explained. “It was a joint operation and a great advantage to have orthopedics specialists there.” After a week in American care, Kuno was flown back to the U.K. While in transport, the dog’s temperature began to spike, prompting the crew to blast the air conditioning in the cabin. “This meant that all of the soldiers had to have a chilly ride home, but there were absolutely no complaints,” said Cpl. Leah Walters, Royal Army Veterinary Corps. Following multiple life-saving operations, it was determined that one of Kuno’s hind legs and part of his other rear paw required amputation. The canine was subsequently fitted with a prosthetic paw on his left hind leg and a brace on his right. “It took a little bit of time for him to get used to but then he just got on with it,” according to Walters. Now retired from service, Kuno is the 72nd recipient of the Dickins medal—joining the ranks of 35 dogs, 32 messenger pigeons, four horses, and a cat. Kuno enjoying retirement. (PDSA) “I’m delighted that Kuno will receive the PDSA Dickin Medal,” British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said in a statement. “It is a testament to his training, tireless bravery, and devotion to duty which undoubtedly saved lives that day.” “I am very proud of the role our military working dogs play on operations at home and abroad,” he added. “Kuno’s story reminds us of the lengths these animals go to keep us all safe.”

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Kurt Tank’s Indian Storm

Kurt Tank’s Indian Storm India’s HAL HF-24 Marut confounded detractors with its respectable combat record. The 1971 air war between India and Pakistan was of interest to foreign observers as a testing ground for such diverse Eastern and Western aircraft as the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21, Sukhoi Su-7, Lockheed F-104, Mirage III, Folland Gnat and Hawker Hunter. For example, the two-week conflict marked the only occasion on which two much-vaunted Mach 2 fighters, the MiG-21 and F-104, engaged in one-on-one combat (the MiG won). The 1971 war also included another aeronautical event that was of great local significance: the combat debut of the Indian subcontinent’s first indigenous jet fighter, the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) HF-24 Marut (Storm Spirit). The Marut had been criticized in India because of its protracted development, and it had been derided by foreign observers for being outdated before it ever entered service. Without doubt there was some degree of validity to both charges. Nevertheless, the Indian fighter gave a good account of itself in both ground attack and air-to-air combat. Even the Pakistani Air Force (PAF), whose combat reports differed radically from those of the Indian Air Force (IAF), claimed that no Maruts had been shot down in aerial combat. The original requirement for which the Marut was developed dated from 1956, at which time HAL took on three major new projects on behalf of the IAF. One was the license production of the British Folland Gnat lightweight jet fighter, for which a new assembly line was to be set up in Bangalore. The second project was for a new basic trainer, which would eventually enter production as the HJT-16 Kiran (Ray of Light). The third and most ambitious project was for the development of a Mach 2 multirole fighter, which would eventually emerge as the HF-24. The requirement for the Mach 2 fighter was extremely specific. The Indian Air Staff wanted a multirole fighter capable of operating both as a high-altitude interceptor and as a low-level ground attack aircraft. It was to have a speed of Mach 2, a ceiling of 60,000 feet and a 500-mile radius of action. The plane was expected to be adaptable for operation as an all-weather interceptor, as an advanced trainer and as a naval fighter for use aboard the aircraft carrier Vikrant. The Indian government also wanted the aircraft to be built in India, if possible. The development of such an aircraft would have presented a considerable challenge in any of the major industrial nations during the mid-1950s, but in a Third World country like India it seemed almost beyond the realm of possibility. HAL, the sole aeronautical company in India at that time, had only existed since 1941. HAL had originally been established for the assembly of foreign-built aircraft destined for India and nationalist China, and for the repair and overhaul of aircraft for the U.S. Army Air Forces. In 1942 the Indian government gained a controlling interest in the firm by purchasing three-quarters of the stock. Although India had built a few light aircraft of its own design since World War II, by the mid-1950s its only experience with modern, jet engine combat aircraft had been the construction of de Havilland Vampires under license. It was a big jump from building a first-generation jet fighter of mid-1940s vintage, based on somebody else’s design, to developing an indigenous Mach 2 fighter from scratch. The development of such an aircraft admittedly was, to a certain degree, a matter of prestige. The production of a Mach 2 fighter plane would have enhanced the status of India and HAL in the eyes of the world. Yet the military requirement was equally real. India and Pakistan had been at odds ever since 1947, when the two independent countries were originally established. India’s military also had to be prepared to contend on the northern and eastern borders with the Chinese. Armed conflict had actually broken out in 1962. The Indian government was willing to back the Mach 2 fighter project, and HAL’s small but enthusiastic staff was equally eager to go ahead with it. However, the staff was spread far too thin to handle the three new major projects at once. What the firm needed was an ex­perienced aviation engineer to head the Mach 2 fighter project, someone familiar with the intricacies of developing advanced combat aircraft. Naturally enough, they looked to Europe for such an individual. Eleven years after the end of World War II, the aerospace industry was firmly under the domination of the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Europe, still recovering from the ravages of war, was chock-full of unemployed aircraft engineers. HAL managed to engage the services of a German named Kurt Tank, whose qualifications for the job were impeccable. He had previously designed one of the finest fighter planes of WWII, the Focke Wulf Fw-190. Tank’s task went far beyond merely designing a jet fighter, however. Upon arrival in Bangalore in August 1956, Tank—along with a German assistant named Mittelhuber—found that HAL was woefully inadequate in both personnel and infrastructure to take on such a complex project. Among other deficiencies, the firm lacked a machine shop suitable for prototype engineering, adequate test equipment, static test rigs and a flight test laboratory. The firm’s entire design department consisted of only 54 Indian personnel, including three senior design engineers, two of whom were assigned to the jet trainer project. Tank found that he had not only to design an original jet aircraft but also help establish a modern industrial complex capable of developing one. Unlike his Indian employers, Tank knew exactly what was involved in designing, building, testing, refining and mass-producing aircraft from his days at Focke Wulf. In addition to the Fw-190 fighter, he had designed the Fw-200 Condor four-engine commercial transport for Lufthansa. It first flew in 1937. When WWII began, the Condor design was modified into a highly successful maritime patrol bomber. Tank was also responsible for the Ta-154 Moskito, a high-performance, twin-engine, multirole combat aircraft built entirely of wood. Production of the Ta-154 was canceled when the factory that had been producing the special glue required for bonding the wooden airframe was bombed, cutting off the supply. Despite the rudimentary nature of HAL’s facilities, work on the Mach 2 fighter—by then designated HF-24 and given the name Marut—went ahead at a relatively brisk pace. A full-scale wooden glider version of the HF-24 began aerodynamic flight trials, towed into the air by a Douglas DC-3, on April 1, 1959. Assembly of the first prototype commenced in April 1960. It was flown for the first time on June 17, 1961, by Wing Cmdr. Suranjan Das. A little more than a week later it was demonstrated for the minister of defense, V.K. Krishna Menon. A structural test airframe was completed in November, and a second flying prototype took to the air in October 1962. On June 27, 1961 the prototype Marut is towed out for its first public test flight with Prime Minister Nehru in attendance. (HAL) The performance of the Marut did not live up to HAL’s ambitious promises, however. Its projected performance had been predicated upon the availability of the Rolls-Royce Bristol Orpheus BOr-12, a British-designed afterburning turbojet engine. The Marut was to have been powered by a pair of those engines, each delivering 8,170 pounds of thrust. The British government canceled its financial support for the development of the Orpheus BOr-12, however, and when the Indian government was not prepared to step in and foot the bills, the project was terminated. Consequently, the Marut had to be fitted with a pair of nonafterburning Orpheus 703s, the engines that HAL was currently building under license for its Gnat lightweight fighters. However, the Orpheus 703 produced only 4,850 pounds of thrust, 44 percent less than the engine for which the Marut had been designed. As a result, the Marut was underpowered and was never able to fulfill its performance potential. Throughout the 1960s, HAL directed a great deal of effort toward acquiring more powerful engines for the Marut from various foreign sources. However, the engines under consideration either could not provide a sufficient increase in performance, required too great a structural redesign of the airframe or became unavailable due to political or economic reasons. The most unusual and unlikely of those foreign sources was Egypt. For a while during the 1960s, India collaborated with Egypt’s efforts to develop its own turbojet engine, called the E-300. India even donated a preproduction Marut airframe to Egypt in which to flight-test the E-300. Egypt canceled the E-300 project in 1967, however, after the Six-Day War. The IAF’s requirement for a Mach 2 interceptor was met when an agreement was struck with the Soviet Union in August 1962 for the acquisition of the MiG-21 interceptor. The availability of that formidable Soviet fighter, which HAL eventually produced under license, rendered the Marut’s lack of Mach 2 performance a moot point. The Indian jet’s development as an interceptor was no longer seriously pursued. Instead, HAL concentrated on developing the Marut as a low-level, single-seat strike fighter and a two-seat advanced trainer. Two preproduction Marut strike fighters were handed over to the IAF for service trials on May 10, 1964. After three more years of development, the first Marut-equipped combat unit, No. 10 “Dagger” Squadron, was established on April 1, 1967. Kurt Tank was back in Germany by that time, working for the Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm (MBB) aerospace consortium, although he continued to take an interest in the Marut and maintained close ties with his former employers. The Marut Mk 1, as the production version was called, was a twin-engine, single-seat fighter with swept wings and tail surfaces. It was 52 feet long and had a wingspan of 29 feet 6 inches. The fighter weighed 13,658 pounds empty and had a maximum takeoff weight of 24,048 pounds. The aircraft boasted many of the design features used on late 1950s aircraft to reduce supersonic drag, including an area-ruled fuselage and engine air intakes incorporating shock cones. Nevertheless, the lack of power available from the plane’s engines limited its top speed to Mach 1.02 at 40,000 feet. The Marut’s principal armament consisted of four 30mm Aden cannons with 130 rounds per gun, the same armament used on the British Hawker Hunter, which the IAF was also operating at that time. The Aden cannon was a five-chambered revolving gun weighing 92 pounds that could fire 1,400 rounds per minute. The Marut was also armed with a retractable MATRA type 103 launching pack for 50 68mm unguided rockets, located in the fuselage just aft of the cannon bay. In addition, four underwing hardpoints could carry extra fuel tanks, air-to-ground rockets or up to 4,000 pounds of bombs. Despite the Marut’s protracted development period of 11 years and its failure to achieve Mach 2 performance, the IAF was apparently satisfied with its new strike fighter. According to correspondent Pushpindar Chopra, IAF pilots affectionately described the Marut as a “Hunter Mk 2.” Although they criticized the Marut’s shortage of engine power, they praised the Indian jet’s control response and aerobatic ability. They also regarded it as a stable gun platform, possessing formidable firepower. By the time hostilities broke out between India and Pakistan in December 1971, the IAF had two squadrons of Maruts in service, No. 10 Dagger Squad­ron and No. 220 “Tiger’s Head” Squadron. During that conflict, the Marut served with considerable success in the ground attack and interdiction role against targets in west Pakistan. In combat the Indian fighter proved to be quite resilient. On at least three occasions, Maruts returned to base on one engine after the other had been damaged by groundfire. The jet’s flight controls were also designed to revert to manual control automatically if the hydraulic system failed, and at least one Indian pilot flew home on manual after his hydraulics were shot out. Although no encounters ever took place between Maruts and the supersonic fighters then in service with the PAF—the MiG-19, Mirage III and F-104—they did occasionally engage in air combat with PAF Canadair Sabre VIs. No Maruts were lost to air combat, but on at least one occasion a Marut reportedly shot down a Sabre with cannon fire. Even the PAF, whose records are at variance with those of the IAF, claims that only five Maruts were destroyed during the course of the two-week war, three by small-arms fire and two strafed on the ground by PAF aircraft. That record stands in marked contrast to that of the foreign-built ground-attack fighters the IAF was using at that time. Pakistan claimed to have destroyed 31 Soviet-built Su-7 strike fighters and 17 British-built Hawker Hunters. HAL continued producing the Marut Mk 1 for the IAF until 1974. Total production eventually reached 145 aircraft, including 16 two-seat Mk 1T conversion trainers. The trainers were similar to the standard Mk 1, with the addition of an instructor’s cockpit behind the pilot. Both aircraft types remained in IAF service until 1990, when the Maruts were replaced by MiG-23s. Kurt Tank, the German aeronautical engineer who had designed the Marut, retained his close ties with HAL into the 1970s. He designed a successor to the Marut in 1973, designated the HF-73. The new fighter was to be powered by a pair of Rolls-Royce RB-199 turbofan engines and was intended to have true Mach 2 capability. It was also designed to carry twice the weapons load of the Marut. Negotiations with Rolls-Royce broke down, however. With the RB-199 engines no longer available, the HF-73 program was canceled. The Marut was far from the best fighter in the world at the time it entered service. Both HAL and the IAF freely admitted that the aircraft was under­powered and never lived up to its full potential. It was certainly not in the same league as contemporary U.S., Soviet and Western European jets. Yet the development of such an aircraft was a significant achievement for a Third World country that, at the time, possessed only an embryonic aerospace industry. Regardless of Tank’s contribution, it was a great tribute to the ambition and perseverance of the people at HAL that the aircraft was ever produced at all. This feature first appeared in the May 2002 issue of Aviation History. Subscribe here!

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Kyle Carpenter: Worth It

Kyle Carpenter: Worth It Kyle Carpenter (Illustration by Randy Glass Studio) Lance Cpl. William Kyle Carpenter doesn’t remember throwing himself between a buddy and a hand grenade on a village rooftop in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province on Nov. 21, 2010. Yet two military forensic teams determined that’s exactly what he did. Carpenter was on lookout duty with Lance Cpl. Nick Eufrazio when the grenade landed beside them. Kyle’s efforts to shield Eufrazio, say investigators, saved his friend’s life, though both suffered life-threatening injuries. Carpenter’s courage earned him the Medal of Honor, which President Barack Obama presented him in 2014. He is the youngest living recipient of the award. Carpenter has published a book about his experiences. You Are Worth It: Building a Life Worth Fighting For, co-written by Don Yaeger, relates Kyle’s recovery and his positive outlook on life. Carpenter has become a popular speaker dedicated to helping others overcome the challenges in their lives. What made you enlist in the Marines? I decided to enlist because I wanted to commit my life to a greater purpose. Specifically, I chose the Marine Corps because I’ve always thrived on challenge. I wanted something that would push me to my physical, mental and emotional limits. I wanted something that would push me to the point of having to look deep down inside myself so I could get through hard times whenever they came. After going to multiple recruiters and multiple branches, I knew the Marine Corps was the path for me. You wanted to experience combat. Why? I didn’t really want to go into combat, but I knew that path would give me the challenge I believed I was searching for. The thought of combat, getting hurt or killed, were such surreal ideas. Based on what 19-year-old Kyle knew back then, I felt like that path was also a way to be close to where I could truly help someone who was suffering. What was it like serving in Helmand Province? From a combat perspective, every single day was a constant and vicious fight for survival. We had no showers for seven months. Any supplies we needed—bottles of water, food and ammo—had to be dropped to us by helicopter because we were so far in enemy territory. There was no infrastructure and no roads, so nothing could get to us except by air, including medevacs. Unfortunately, we suffered a lot of casualties. But it wasn’t all combat, combat, combat. Something that was equally as difficult for me to comprehend was seeing how the people were extremely oppressed. They feared for their lives because their kids wanted to learn how to read. They worked in their fields all day afraid to come home to find their family killed—beheaded or thrown from the tallest building in the city. That was extremely difficult and challenging to see. I continue to struggle with it. Every single day we engaged in firefights. At times it was for many hours. It was never a question of if we were going to get shot at, it was just a matter of when. If we got into trouble, we had to rely on two mortarmen at the patrol base or air support. That was it. We were one of the first units in Marjah at Helmand. We were laying the foundation and hopefully stability for future deployments. It was very primitive, going village to village and pushing the bad guys out. Above everything, I thought, ‘Wow, I’m still here,’ after I believed the lights were about to go out What do you remember about Nov. 21, 2010? Nick Eufrazio and I were on top of a roof on a post position. We were standing guard for all the Marines inside the compound of a village we had moved into two days before. We were near the end of our four-hour shift. I don’t really remember anything from that day. All I really recall is how my body felt after the grenade detonated. There were extensive and thorough investigations—two years and 250 pages of testimony—by the Marine Corps and Department of Defense. A grenade was thrown on the roof in close proximity to Nick and me, who were laying down behind a barrier of sandbags. After the grenade detonated, I was very confused. I tried to put the pieces together about what happened. Those thoughts were interrupted by what I thought was warm water being poured all over me. Then I realized it wasn’t water but blood: I was bleeding out. I realized my time was limited. I thought about my family, specifically my mother and how devastated she would be that I didn’t come home. I said a quick prayer for forgiveness for anything I had done wrong in my life. Then I felt a tiredness that is impossible to recount or convey. At that moment I faded from consciousness and the world on a hot, dusty rooftop in Afghanistan. I woke up roughly five weeks later at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. My first sight, as I opened the only eye I had left, was Christmas stockings my mom had hung in my room. That started my three-year and roughly 40-operation recovery period. What were your first thoughts on waking up in the hospital? I was extremely disoriented from my injuries and medication. Even though I couldn’t remember what happened, I realized my life and body had been drastically altered. Above everything, I thought, Wow, I’m still here, after I believed the lights were about to go out. How extensive were your injuries? Like Nick, I had a traumatic brain injury. I had shrapnel in my brain. The doctors surgically removed what they could. Some pieces were left in there. Both eardrums were ruptured. I lost my right eye. Much of my face was fractured. My jaw was almost completely blown off. Most of my teeth were blown out. I had a hole blown in my carotid artery, in my neck. I had extensive bone and tissue damage on both arms. I had a fully collapsed right lung. And I had tissue damage to both of my legs. I received 12 units of blood. I died three times but was revived each time. Were you surprised to learn you would receive the Medal of Honor? Because I was facing such a daunting and unfathomable road ahead of me, my brain compartmentalized things. I was living minute to minute, day to day, surgery to surgery. I started getting calls telling me about the official investigations. A buddy told me what the Marines saw, what they believed happened, and that I should be put up for the Medal of Honor. When I got that call, I was still extremely fragile and banged up. It was kind of like, OK, I know this is going to go nowhere. I knew how much it takes to just get a Navy Commendation Medal in combat. I was honored, humbled and flattered they thought that much of me. But it was like, Thank you, I really appreciate it, but I have a recovery to get back to. It was also very strange to have that told to me and not have any recollection of that moment. How did you feel when the medal was placed around your neck? I’ve always known the medal wasn’t mine. By that time I was a sophomore in college. I was still emotionally and mentally healing and figuring out what this new body and life mean to me. Everything was so chaotic. After the ceremony I realized it represents not only my journey, but also my family’s journey. It represents the Marines that were there with me, serving and sacrificing. It represents the people of Afghanistan and all people around the world who live in fear and hope to taste freedom. It represents our military, our country and all the generations of service members who raised their right hand and offered to give up their lives. It represents all Marines who covered grenades in Vietnam, or those Marines in World War II who were told they probably wouldn’t make it off their landing craft. They charged forward and did it anyway, because they knew there was a cause bigger than any one individual. It represents those who gave the last full measure for their country and are still missing in action. I’m so honored and humbled my country has recognized me. This medal is a heavy and beautiful burden. What do you mean when you say you’re living on “bonus time”? It has been a journey. Much of my outlook on life comes from the perspective I was forced to find while searching through darkness and pain. At the time they were just experiences, but then healing turned them into life lessons. Now I’m thankful those hard times taught me something. This experience has taught me that the smallest of steps completes the grandest of journeys. My ears might still ring, I might be blind in one eye, I might wake up with pain every day for the rest of my life, but I am here, and I am alive. Every day is an opportunity. To be thinking I was taking my last breath at 21 and then to wake up and find I’m still here, it’s almost hard for me not to be positive. I tell people, “You might be different physically, mentally and emotionally, but you can come back better and stronger than before.” What’s next for you? My greatest fear in life has always been regret. But now, as I look back, knowing what it felt like to think I was taking my last breath, I can add a second fear to that list: unfulfilled potential. It’s an amazing bonus to be able to help people through my life. Not everyone has been in combat, but everyone struggles. In addition to helping people, I just want to live a life well lived. I want to do things that help me reclaim my life and help me realize I am living a bonus round right now. What message do you have for fellow Americans? For all those people who supported me and picked me up along the way, I am forever grateful. I will spend the rest of my life saying thanks, but I know that will never be enough. It’s a journey of the human spirit. You never know what you can go through as a person. You never know when you are going to be a hero for someone else. People say to me, “I could never do what you did.” You don’t know that. I didn’t know that. That’s the beautiful thing about people. You don’t have to jump on a grenade to be an amazing person to someone else. You just have to take that small step forward. If you’re going through something, know that you can make it through by taking small steps. Try to see the positive in things and the good in people, and it will take you somewhere good. The tough times teach us beautiful lessons. MH

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For the Lack of Horses, the War Was Nearly Lost

For the Lack of Horses, the War Was Nearly Lost Union cavalry’s fate hung on the health of its four-legged warriors Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs had one of the hardest jobs in the Union Army. (Library of Congress) Brigadier General Montgomery Meigs, quartermaster general of the Union Army, walked into his office in Washington, D.C., every day never knowing what new challenges awaited him.  The two main theaters of the war dominated his daily workload, but on any given day Meigs responded to dozens of requests from every corner of the country asking for matériel: barracks and hospitals, clothing, coal, construction lumber, firewood, laborers, railcars, shipping, wagons, and ambulances. Over the course of the war, Meigs disbursed $2 billion (nearly $70 billion today), supplying the needs of the soldiers. He felt keenly the responsibility to spend the nation’s money wisely and waged a constant war within the war against fraud and corruption. Maj. Gen. Joe Hooker sent Brig. Gen. George Stoneman with thousands of calvary horses to raid Richmond. The raid was a disaster and Stoneman lost many horses and left many thousands of injured beasts behind, exacerbating a shortage of horses for future Calvary Corps operations. (Library of Congress) Arguably, however, none of his daily trials surpassed the challenge of supplying the thousands of horses and mules required by the ever-expanding army. By January 1863, little could have surprised Meigs, until, on January 15, he read a request for 8,000 horses from Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, commanding the Army of the Cumberland. Wintering in Tennessee after his battle at Stones River, Rosecrans had decided to expand his cavalry force by mounting 8,000 of his infantrymen. The request must have staggered Meigs. “It will take some time to get 8000 horses unless you can seize them in the field,” Meigs replied. More than anyone, Meigs understood the big picture, as he provided matériel to every army and outpost in the country. He could not foresee the course of future events, but he appreciated how events and demands for supplies in one theater of the war affected his ability to provide similar items to other areas of the country or to other armies. Thus, Meigs knew the degree to which “Old Rosy’s” request would affect the supply of horses nationally. He may not have realized, however, that he would still be struggling to meet the general’s request five months later or the extent to which the request continued to affect his ability to acquire and deliver horses to the Army of the Potomac in May and June, during the Chancellorsville campaign and the beginning of Robert E. Lee’s drive into Pennsylvania. In April 1863, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, commanding the Army of the Potomac, devised what seemed to be a brilliant plant to break the stalemate along the Rappahannock River and defeat Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia. In February, Hooker had, at President Abraham Lincoln’s suggestion, organized his cavalry into a separate entity, the Cavalry Corps, and, at Lincoln’s suggestion, Hooker had designated Maj. Gen. George Stoneman to command the corps. Over the next few months, Meigs supplied Stoneman with thousands of fresh horses, as the cavalryman prepared his command to conduct a raid against Lee’s supply lines as a key part of Hooker’s ambitious plan. When Stoneman finally set out in mid-April toward Richmond, Va., he encountered incessant storms, flooded rivers, and roads swimming in mud. Returning nearly a month later, his men and animals exhausted, Stoneman immediately came under fire from Hooker for what the army commander deemed an underwhelming effort. As a means of assessing the raid, participants counted, among other things, the number of horses captured from the enemy and the condition of their own animals upon their return. Colonel Judson Kilpatrick tallied “over 400 splendid horses,” seized on his march from Richmond to Yorktown, while Stoneman’s main force supposedly seized “1000 or 1500 horses [and] 500 mules.” Major General Daniel Butterfield, Hooker’s chief of staff, confidently told Meigs that Stoneman’s troopers had “captured a sufficient number of horses to remount all that gave out or were broken down en route, and only complain of their horses being leg-weary and wanting shoes on their return.” Suspicious of such reports, Hooker on May 12 demanded to know the number of Stoneman’s men ready “for immediate duty in the field.” After a hasty appraisal of the 12,000 animals with the command at the outset of the raid, Stoneman now counted just “2,000 horses” available, “provided but little marching is required.” Nearly 1,000 animals had been abandoned on the march, most of the horses seized were unsuitable for cavalry service and the captured mules needed immediate rest and rehabilitation. One brigade counted a mere 346 men and horses available for duty. The early returns had either been hopelessly optimistic or intentionally deceptive. Alfred Pleasonton replaced Stoneman as chief of the Cavalry Corp on the eve of the Battle of Brandy Station. This force lost thousands of horses, but they succeeded in pushing the Confederate horsemen back. (Library of Congress) The Cavalry Corps needed to be remounted, but in a tight market the cost would be exorbitant. In early May, prior to Stoneman’s return, horses averaged about $125 per head but the price rose with demand; by the end of the month the average price had increased 20%. As Meigs explained to a subordinate on May 25, Rosecrans’s earlier request for 8,000 horses continued to affect both market price and availability. “The enormous demand from Gen. Rosecrans, a sudden demand for 4000 horses for Western Virginia, and for 5 or 6,000 for the army in Eastern Virginia…[has] affected the market, and prices are inflated, but still the supply here is short. It is hoped that this increase in price will bring out the stock and that prices will fall again soon.” Instead, the demands of the coming campaign drove prices ever higher. Seeking to placate Hooker, Meigs explained on May 28, “I am using every exertion to procure [horses] and after a check due to a sudden increase in prices and the large demand for Gen. Rosecrans…they are beginning to come in rapidly.” Horses arrived a few hundred at a time, however, and Meigs needed 10,000 just to meet his current needs in the East, to say nothing of orders from other commands scattered around the country, including Rosecrans’. Meanwhile, escalating conflicts with Native Americans led to the formation of several new mounted regiments. The quartermaster general tallied the incoming requisitions even as he read the newspaper accounts of Stoneman’s raid and he grew increasingly suspicious. The “cavalry, notwithstanding the fine statements of our own special correspondents, is in a sad state,” Meigs told a subordinate.  “They call for six thousand horses. Compare this with newspaper accounts. Gen. Hooker is as much disappointed as [I am] at this.” Kilpatrick, on the Virginia Peninsula, also needed horses but Meigs, who had read the young cavalry colonel’s boasts in the papers, refused to send any until the more “urgent requisitions now on file can be filled.” With the furor over the cost and value of the raid mounting, Hooker replaced the ailing Stoneman with Maj. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton on the same day a Union spy walked into Maj. Gen. Samuel Heintzelman’s office in Washington and warned of a planned Southern cavalry raid against the city. The spy had just left Richmond where he had seen Union uniforms being prepared to disguise the raiders, who intended to enter the capital to kidnap Lincoln and members of his cabinet. No evidence has been found in surviving Southern records confirming the spy’s report, but Northern officials could not ignore the possibility and risk Lincoln’s life. The notion of a raid soon dominated the minds of military officials in Washington, as well as in Hooker’s army, who saw every shred of intelligence regarding Lee’s cavalry, then gathering in Culpeper County, Va., as further proof of the alleged raid. As Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck told Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton just three days after the spy made his report, “It is rumored that Stuart and Lee are collecting a cavalry force at Culpeper…probably for a cavalry raid.” The timing could not have been worse for Pleasonton’s rebuilding efforts. The task of preventing Southern raiders from entering Washington fell to Maj. Gen. Julius Stahel, commanding the cavalry division assigned to the Defenses of Washington. Thus, for the next several weeks Stahel, rather than Pleasonton, received the lion’s share of the remounts coming into the Washington depots. Pleasonton’s men also relieved Stahel’s troopers of picket duty, allowing Stahel, rather than Pleasonton, to rest and refit his command. On May 24, Brig. Gen. Rufus Ingalls, Hooker’s quartermaster, asked Meigs for 2,500 remounts, reminding him, the need for “cavalry horses with this army has never been so severely felt as at this moment,” but Meigs had no horses to spare. “I have just furnished Gen. Stahel’s command with 1,000 [horses],” one of Meigs’s subordinates told Ingalls the next day, “and…have exhausted the supply of horses [in Washington] and Alexandria, having taken all serviceable horses from the wagon masters, teams [etc.]” On May 27 Pleasonton reported his effective strength at less than 4,700 men. Hooker fumed, complaining to Stanton, “I would pitch into [Stuart] in his camps…if General Stahel’s cavalry were with me for a few days.” Hooker viewed Stahel’s remounted division as an immediate means of rebuilding his Cavalry Corps; he made the statement as a ploy to have Stahel’s division transferred to the Cavalry Corps, rather than as a reflection of his willingness to share any future battlefield glory. The scheme failed, and when Pleasonton finally did “pitch into Stuart” on June 9 at Brandy Station, he did so at a numerical disadvantage. Stahel had moved into position to aid Pleasonton, but Hooker sent two infantry brigades to bolster Pleasonton’s strength rather than call upon Stahel for assistance. Though Pleasanton surrendered the battlefield at Brandy Station, leaving behind thousands of dead horses, the engagement was seen as a turning point for the Union calvary. (Library of Congress) On the eve of the great clash at Brandy Station, Ingalls asked his subordinates to cull horses “suitable for cavalry” from their teams, explaining, “Cavalry horses are scarce, and in great demand.” On the same day, Meigs told Brig. Gen Daniel Rucker, commanding the Washington Depot, “General Stahel…still needs…1,500 horses.” When Pleasonton surrendered the battlefield on the evening of June 9, he left an unknown number of dead and wounded horses on the field.  Many others carried their riders off the field only to fall victim to wounds or other injuries over the coming days. Two regiments, the 5th and 6th U.S. Cavalry, lost more than 100 horses between them. If their loss is any kind of an accurate measuring stick, then Pleasonton might have lost 1,000 cavalry horses, to say nothing of artillery horses. The day-long clash at Brandy Station bolstered the confidence of Pleasonton’s troopers. They began to believe they could now stand against Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart’s horsemen on any field. On June 10, Lee’s army resumed its march, heading toward the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley. As Lee’s infantry began the long trek toward Maryland and Pennsylvania, Stuart moved his cavalry into the Loudoun Valley of Northern Virginia. His efforts to screen the infantry resulted in a series of cavalry clashes along the Ashby’s Gap and Snickersville Turnpikes at Aldie, Middleburg and Upperville a week later. On June 20, the day before the grueling all-day battle of Upperville, Ingalls asked to have horses at the Washington Depot “shod and ready for instant issue and service. The losses by scouting and in battle are huge.” At the same time, Meigs told a subordinate purchasing horses in Indianapolis, “Destruction of horses here by hard service is great.” During the nine-hour battle the next day, Pleasonton, aided for part of the day by a brigade of infantry, drove Stuart ten miles into Ashby’s Gap. Reaching the base of the mountains, the Federals found their way blocked by Southern infantry and artillery. Only one small Union patrol reached the crest and observed part of Lee’s great army below. Quartermaster Meigs put enormous effort into procuring horses and shipping them to the army. These beasts are lined at the Alexandria docks to be shipped to a combat command. (Library of Congress) Determining accurate numbers for horses lost in a given battle is difficult at best, but when Hooker abandoned his lines around Falmouth on June 13, Capt. Samuel McKee headed north with about 1,000 men who either needed horses or who rode animals needing to be shod. McKee’s caravan included men still waiting to be remounted following the Stoneman Raid and others who lost their mounts at Brandy Station. Another 350 dismounted men reached Alexandria on June 14. They would also have been men who lost their horses at Brandy Station or as a result thereof. Stuart’s rumored raid continued to affect Pleasonton’s strength, however, as Stahel, rather than Pleasonton, received 700 horses on June 15. Taken together, these figures represent nearly a division of men who might have given Pleasonton the strength he needed to push Stuart through Ashby’s Gap before Southern infantry arrived to plug the breech on June 21. As a New York Times reporter noted the same day, “fully half of some of our horse regiments are now ineffective for want of horses. Union artillery horses suffered as much as they calvary mounts, losing shoes and going lame from long hours of travel. (Library of Congress) By June 22 Pleasonton’s need for horses had become especially acute, and thousands of his animals needed to be reshod before they went lame. The turnpikes, surfaced with layers of stone, tore off or wore out horseshoes at an alarming rate, as General Stuart mentioned in his campaign report. Speaking of the fighting at Middleburg on June 19, Stuart explained, the Union attack “was met…by…two brigades, which rough roads had already decimated for want of adequate shoeing facilities.” Concluding his long report, Stuart returned to the effect of the roads in the Loudoun Valley on his horses, stating, “the rough character of the roads and lack of facilities for shoeing added to the casualties of every day’s battle…in this way some regiments were reduced to less than 100 men.” Pleasonton concurred, telling Hooker, “the turnpike cripples up our horses when they are unshod,” but while Stuart had to disperse his men to local blacksmith shops, Pleasonton had other options. On June 19, he ordered ten portable forges, along with blacksmiths and 10,000 shoes sent out from Washington, though only six forges arrived. He split these evenly between the two divisions, but with thousands of his men stuck on picket lines or escorting supply trains against attacks from Maj. John Mosby and his partisans, the number of animals reshod in Pleasonton’s command is impossible to assess. Beyond the concern of his animals going lame, Pleasonton had lost nearly 1,000 men killed, wounded, or captured at Aldie, Middleburg and Upperville. Horse casualties are impossible to determine but hundreds had been captured by Stuart’s cavaliers, in addition to those killed or wounded. Three cavalry regiments, the 1st Massachusetts, 1st Rhode Island and 4th New York, nearly a brigade of men, had been rendered combat ineffective. Of the three regiments, only the 1st Massachusetts followed the army into Pennsylvania, but it remained out of action at Gettysburg as a headquarters escort for the Sixth Corps. All three regiments had been Kilpatrick’s brigade in the Loudoun Valley, the only brigade to participate in all three battles. The other two regiments, the 2nd New York and 6th Ohio, had also been decimated in the fighting. By the end of the battle at Upperville, the Ohio companies may have averaged but ten men or, more accurately, ten horses per company. Though they crossed the Potomac, these two regiments remained in Maryland, guarding the Union supply base at Westminster. Horses lost on the battlefield, either to death or capture, meant lost equipment, including saddles, saddlebags, blankets, bridles and halters, bits, brushes, curry combs, picket pins, feedbags and spare ammunition, as well as the rider’s personal items and spare clothing. When a horse crashed to the ground from a bullet, collision or shell wound, the impact could easily damage or destroy the trooper’s carbine, which he carried on a sling across his shoulder. The man’s saber might also be lost or damaged by the impact. Contrary to persistent myths about Federal depots and arsenals overflowing with the best equipment and the latest weapons, many of the facilities had been emptied by late June, as militia units raised for the emergency in Pennsylvania requisitioned the same equipment and weapons required by Pleasonton. An entire regiment had missed the fight at Brandy Station for want of 727 saddles which did not reach the men until June 18. Hinting at horse casualties within his command, a division commander requested another 600 saddles two days after the fight at Brandy Station. When they arrived, many proved defective. As Pleasonton told Meigs on June 26, “The saddles of the McClellan pattern furnished from Troy N.Y. are unfit for use. They ruin the backs of the horses. Please have saddles from other makers supplied, as it will save us many horses. By 1864, the Union army was reduced to advertising for horses. offering exorbitant prices. (Library of Congress) The most enduring myth concerns Brig. Gen. John Buford’s men and the famed Spencer carbines which allowed mere cavalrymen to hold Lee’s vaunted infantry at bay on July 1. The truth is vastly different, as army officials did not sign the first contract for the carbine until mid-July and the first weapons did not reach the army until October. Only two regiments in Brig. Gen. George Custer’s Michigan Brigade carried the Spencer rifle at Gettysburg. Rather than carrying repeating weapons, the cavalry struggled to receive any weapons to replace those lost in battle. When a regimental commander called for new carbines to replace those lost at Brandy Station, he received 16 crates of repaired weapons instead. When Buford called for Sharps carbines after the battle, he received “the best on hand,” including 50 French rifles. When Pleasonton asked for Sharps carbines, he received the less popular Burnside model. By June 19, only 500 Burnside carbines remained in the Washington Arsenal. Three days later the arsenal had no carbines to distribute, and “I cannot tell when there will be any,” the officer in charge told a subordinate. And, with no new saddles on hand, the officer resorted to repairing old equipment or forwarding unrepaired “saddles, bridles & halters.” Remounted men began returning to the army as horses reached Washington and Alexandria, 25 men in one detachment, 125 men in another. On June 27 more than 500 left Washington but nearly 1,000 men remained in one depot two days later. As soon as the men returned, however, other problems became apparent; many of the newly issued horses were too young to withstand the rigors of cavalry service. When advertising for horses, the military clearly stated what animals would be accepted in terms of age, sex, size, and color; honest quartermasters did not accept mares or horses younger than six years of age. Then, on June 1, Meigs relaxed the prohibition on animals under six years old. “I am [aware],” he explained, “that a five year old horse is not as fit for cavalry service as one six years old, but it is a choice between five years old and a deficient supply.” These young animals saw their first combat at Aldie on June 17 and many “gave out,” as Pleasonton later complained. “I shall have many more dismounted men in a short time, from the hard service required of the horses and their unfitness to stand it,” he told Hooker. As demand and prices skyrocketed and pressure to obtain large quantities of animals grew, some quartermasters gave in to unscrupulous contractors. Many of the men in the purchasing chain had no cavalry background and thus no understanding of the demands of mounted service. Farmers and contractors forced them to accept mares or lose an entire lot of animals. Others tried to slip all manner of old, sick, or otherwise unacceptable horses past beleaguered inspectors. On June 21, officers in Washington accepted only 19 of 300 animals in one lot. In Michigan, an inspector rejected 211 of 315 horses for a variety of reasons, including those blind in one or both eyes and others with breathing problems. The animals reached Washington from cities such as Chicago, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, and Boston. They had been cooped up in unventilated boxcars for days, and though regulations prescribed adequate food, water, and exercise every 8 to 12 hours, these rules often proved impracticable or were simply ignored. The animals reached Washington stressed, aggressive and hungry. Quickly herded into large corrals, they often “lashed out, kicking and biting at neighbors, inflicting cuts and broken bones, and giving every indication of their distress.” Most arrived unbroken. Without any chance to rest or recover weight lost on their journey, the animals quickly made another trip out to the army, where they soon found themselves on a picket rope alongside other horses intent on maintaining their dominance. Soldiers who received them had no idea what they might expect when they rode into battle for the first time and their new mount experienced the terrors of combat. As one historian explained, “For a herd animal, with a strong preference for close social relationships, the camps, and corrals…may not only have been profoundly frightening places, they may…have been very lonely ones too.” Trying to determine the effectiveness of the remount system or the actual strength for any given regiment on a given day at Gettysburg or in a particular engagement, such as East Cavalry Field, is impossible. Every company sergeant or officer completed their muster rolls a little differently and some gathered information others did not. The June 30 muster rolls offer the best snapshot of regimental strength at Gettysburg, but the Cavalry Corps had been on the move for days and commands remained scattered. Elements of the corps fought skirmishes or battles on the 30th, immediately altering numbers which may have been gathered at morning roll calls. Determining the true strength of any one company, regiment, or brigade, meant counting both men and horses, but not every record keeper did so. Still, some rolls are more helpful than others. One company of the 8th New York, which fought with Buford on July 1, had 56 men but only 43 horses, so the company had an effective strength of 43 men. Some of the reporting companies from the 8th Illinois reported similar deficits, while others had a surplus of animals. The 10th New York, which fought at Brinkerhoff’s Ridge on July 2, counted 460 officers and men on June 30, with 303 serviceable horses and 191 unserviceable animals. Thus, the regiment’s effective strength was significantly less than might be assumed at first glance. Only one company from the 3rd Pennsylvania, which fought at East Cavalry Field, counted serviceable horses on the June 30 roll, with just 30 horses for 41 officers and men. The 1st Pennsylvania counted 301 officers and men, but nearly 50 unserviceable horses in an incomplete tally. One company of the 1st U.S., which fought on South Cavalry Field, counted 61 men but only 33 horses, while a company from the 2nd U.S., which fought alongside the 1st, counted 57 men and just 45 horses with 8 unserviceable. Other companies recorded a surplus of horses. Fifty-nine horses attached to Bigelow’s Battery (9th Massachusetts) were killed in action at the Wheatfield in Gettysburg on July 2, 1863. (Photo by Timothy O’Sullivan) The punishing pace of battle, combined with summer heat and long marches over the first two weeks of July, meant an ever more critical need for fresh horses. For the period of May to July 1863, the Cavalry Corps received, by one accounting, nearly 17,000 remounts at an estimated purchase price of $2.3 million  (nearly $80 million today). Feeding, transporting, housing, equipping and other ancillary costs sent the final price higher. On July 4, Ingalls told Meigs, “The loss of horses in these severe battles has been great in killed, wounded and worn down by excessive work…I think we shall require 2000 cavalry and 1500 artillery horses as soon as possible. Two days later, Ingalls upped the number to 5,000 horses.  Meigs immediately ordered trains bringing horses from Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and other locations to make their way directly to Frederick, Md., rather than Washington, D.C., but a shortage of rail cars delayed deliveries. On July 8, Meigs counted “7,000 horses…on their way to the army,” but he remained at the mercy of an under-strength labor force and a shortage of train cars. Day after day, until the army re-crossed the Potomac River, Meigs prodded, cajoled, counseled, and protected his overworked subordinates who toiled to surmount every challenge in providing for the needs of the army. Meigs had reported on June 1, 1863, that there were more than 14,000 disabled horses in just three depots, including 5,000 in Washington. Estimates for the post-Gettysburg period have not been located, but the grim toll the campaign exacted among the army’s horses and mules sparked the final decision to create the Cavalry Bureau and the massive horse depot at Giesboro Point in the District of Columbia. Veterans believed the Army of the Potomac’s Cavalry Corps came of age during the Gettysburg Campaign.  Historians generally agree, viewing the clashes at Brandy Station, Upperville and East Cavalry Field as the key crucibles on the long, difficult road to battlefield supremacy. But we should never overlook the animals, especially the more than 1 million horses and mules who died during the war, or the men who provided them. This story from America’s Civil War was posted on Historynet.com May 19, 2020.

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https://www.historynet.com/ladies-from-hell-bagpipers-led-the-charge-during-wwi.htm

‘Ladies from Hell’: Bagpipers Led the Charge During WWI

‘Ladies from Hell’: Bagpipers Led the Charge During WWI Over the top and amid the carnage and confusion of No Man’s Land stepped Highland regimental bagpipers. Screaming out “the Charge” it was “the most awful music to be heard by men who have the Highlanders against them, and with fixed bayonets and hand-grenades they stormed the German trenches,” wrote Sir Philip Gibbs, one of the five official British reporters during World War I. Originally used to signal tactical movements during battle, the unique keening of the bagpipe was, according to Dr. Yvonne McEwen, director of Scotland’s War 1914-1919 at the University of Edinburgh, “a way of driving the men on and intrinsically linked to Scottish identity. The pipers were there for morale and the Germans knew they would rally the troops.” Nicknamed Die Damen aus der Hölle (Ladies from Hell) by German soldiers for their distinctive tartan kilts and unparalleled bravery, the pipers from the “Black Watch”—the 3rd Battalion, Royal Regiment of Scotland—garnered a fearsome reputation on the battlefields of World War I. Standing in full view of German soldiers, oftentimes armed with only their bagpipes, pipers were the first “over the top”, acting as a clarion call for British troops to keep moving. The sound of the bagpipes would spread terror among the German troops—when one “Lady from Hell” fell, miraculously another piper would seemingly arise out of the trenches to take his place. “You were scared, but you just had to do it, they were depending on you,” Harry Lunan, the last WWI bagpipe player, recalled to the Sunday Express in 1993. “In the first assault [at High Wood], I played the tune Cock o’ the North. I played my company over the bloody top, right into the German trenches. It was stupid as hell…Men falling all around me, falling dead…it was bloody horrible….[but] hearing the pipes gave the troops courage.” The wailing of the pipers served to rouse the troops, but it came at a great cost. An easy target for the Germans, of the 2,500 pipers who served during the Great War, an estimated 500 were killed, while another 600 were wounded. It was a staggering statistic that was not lost on Lunan. “There were no bright spots in the war,” he stated. “There were very few that came back. I was lucky, I guess.”

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Largest WWII-Era Bomb Found in Poland Explodes During Attempt to Diffuse it

Largest WWII-Era Bomb Found in Poland Explodes During Attempt to Diffuse it On October 13 the largest WWII bomb ever found in Poland, a “Tallboy” weighing more than five tons, accidentally exploded while demolition experts attempted to deflagrate the bomb—a process which burns the explosive charge without causing a detonation, Adam Easton of the BBC reports. A navy spokesperson, Lt. Col. Grzegorz Lewandowski, told the Associated Press that no one was injured in the blast and that “the operation was carried out perfectly and safely and the bomb is safe now.” The Tallboy, or “earthquake” bomb was found in September of last year during the drudging of the canal outside the port city of Swinoujscie, Poland—formerly part of Germany and called Swinemünde at the time of the bombardment. More than 750 residents evacuated from the surrounding area as navy sappers attempted to diffuse the bomb. Embedded nearly 40 feet deep with only its nose sticking up through the muck of the canal floor, nearly half of the 19-foot-long Tallboy contained explosives. Invented by British aeronautical engineer Barnes Wallis, creator of the “Dambuster” and “Grand Slam” bombs, this particular Tallboy was likely dropped by a British Lancaster during an April 1945 bomb raid which sank the German cruiser Lützow. “The Tallboy was a seismic, deep-penetration bomb, designed to fall near a target and destroy it by exploding with a massive shockwave,” writes the BBC. It was previously considered too large for a controlled explosion for fear of the damage it could cause to the city and its people. While the unexpected blast was felt by local residents, “the object can be considered neutralized, it will not pose any more threat to the Szczecin-Swinoujscie shipping channel,” said Lt. Col. Lewandowski. Watch the stunning scene below: The largest unexploded #WW2 bomb ever found in Poland, a British Tallboy, has detonated during the defusing process. #NoInjuries pic.twitter.com/BHo4GQabpX — RG Poulussen (@rgpoulussen) October 14, 2020

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https://www.historynet.com/lashing-back-israel-1947-1948-civil-war.htm

Lashing Back – Israel’s 1947-1948 Civil War

Lashing Back – Israel’s 1947-1948 Civil War GUNS UP: Members of Haganah celebrate breaking the Arab forces’ blockade of Jerusalem, a success in April 1948 that helped to swiftly shift the momentum of the civil war toward Jewish forces. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images Israel has fought and won three major wars in its 61-year existence. The best-known today are the Six-day War of 1967 and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The first war it fought as a nation was in 1948, today referred to by Israelis as the “War of Independence” and by Palestinian Arabs as “al-Nakba,” the catastrophe. But perhaps the most important clashes in Israel’s relatively brief history took place in the months preceding its declaration of statehood on May 14, 1948, when the Haganah, the predecessor of the Israel Defense Forces—aided in a minor way by the dissident groups, the IZL and the LHI—battled Arab militias in the towns and villages of Palestine and along the roads linking them. At the time, Great Britain, while nominally charged with maintaining order as it disengaged from the Palestinian territory it had ruled since 1917, focused mainly on withdrawing with minimal casualties and with its political prestige in the Middle East intact, and only occasionally intervened in the fighting. Palestine’s Jews responded to the Arabs’ first attempt to wipe them out with a fierce, all-out war At stake in this civil war was Israel’s existence, and in the early months the Arabs appeared to be winning. By the end of March 1948, most of the Haganah’s armored car fleet lay in ruins, and Jewish West Jerusalem, with 100,000 residents, was under siege. Had the run of successful Arab convoy ambushes continued, and had Jerusalem gone under, it seems certain that the armies of the Arab states that invaded the country seven weeks later would have aborted the tiny state before its birth. Instead, in April 1948, with its back to the wall, the Yishuv (in Hebrew, the Settlement)—as the 630,000-strong Jewish community in Palestine called itself—struck back. In a series of campaigns lasting six weeks, they battled mercilessly with the Palestinian Arab militias and overran dozens of Arab villages and towns. Slowly but surely, the balance of the war began to tip in their favor. By 1947, waves of immigration had brought about half a million Jews to Palestine’s shores. Most came from Eastern Europe, fleeing bouts of anti-Semitic legislation and violence—pogroms—in the czarist empire and the resurgence of anti-Semitism in central Europe, cresting with the Holocaust during World War II. Underlying their desire to return to the Land of Israel was an age-old messianic longing for the ancestral territory and the resurrection of Jewish sovereignty. Palestinian Arab resistance to the Zionist immigration was slow to get off the mark—like Arab nationalism in general—but grew increasingly violent and increasingly religious during the 1930s, precisely when the Zionist movement was most desperately seeking a safe haven for Europe’s persecuted Jews. Even before this escalation, Jews had little trust in Palestinian Arabs. The Axis powers, Italy and Germany, had politically and economically supported the Palestine Arab revolt in 1936–1939, against both British rule and the burgeoning Zionist enterprise. And the Palestinian national movement’s leader, the anti-Jewish Muslim cleric Haj Amin al-Husseini, sat out the war years (1941–1945) in Germany, received a salary from the Third Reich’s foreign ministry, and broadcast calls to the Arab world to join in the anti-British jihad. The Zionists feared nothing less than a second Holocaust should the Arabs win political control of Palestine, obliterating the Jews and their dreams of a homeland. And, from 1939 on, the Zionists also had to contend with a British government that had turned from pro-Zionism to appeasing the Arabs. That year London issued a new Palestine White Paper, severely curbing Jewish immigration and providing for an independent Palestine governed by its Arab majority within 10 years. In response, the clandestine Jewish militias, the mainstream Haganah and the right-wing IZL (irgun zvai leumi, or National Military Organization, which the British called the “Irgun”) and its offshoot, the LHI (lohamei herut yisrael, or Freedom Fighters of Israel; the British called it the “Stern Gang” after its leader Avraham Stern), launched a campaign to oust the British from Palestine. The campaign had been suspended for much of the world war as Jews and Britons fought the common Nazi enemy, but it was renewed in 1944 with a surge of Irgun and Stern Gang attacks that claimed dozens of British lives. Meanwhile, the Haganah dispatched ships laden with thousands of illegal European immigrants to Palestine. The world war had vastly weakened Great Britain. By 1947, the country no longer had the resolve to deal with the dilemma in Palestine: the Zionists demanding statehood, at least in part of the country, and the Palestinian Arabs demanding all of the country as their indivisible patrimony. The additional embarrassment of having to fight illegal immigrants, most of them Holocaust survivors, and the trauma of continuous Jewish terrorist attacks finally persuaded Whitehall to throw in the towel. In February 1947 Foreign Secretary Ernst Bevin announced that Britain would terminate its rule and hand over the Palestine problem to the United Nations. The UN duly appointed a commission of inquiry, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), whose majority in September recommended to the General Assembly that Palestine be partitioned into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab. Jerusalem and Bethlehem, both having sites holy to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, were earmarked for international rule. The General Assembly proceeded to reduce the size of the recommended Jewish state to 55 percent of Palestine (the Arabs were to get close to 45 percent) and voted for partition: 33 in favor (including all of Western Europe, the United States, the Soviet bloc, and most of Latin America), 13 against (mostly Arab and Muslim or partly Muslim countries), and 10 abstentions (including Britain and China). The Zionist leadership and mainstream parties, though not the right-wing Revisionist movement, accepted the division, despite Zionism’s original quest for sovereignty over the whole Land of Israel; David Ben-Gurion, the chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive (the Yishuv’s “government”), and Chaim Weizmann, Zionism’s most prominent statesman, bowed to the diktat of history and circumstance. The Arab world, spearheaded by Palestine’s Arab leadership, responded with a resounding “no”—as they had in 1937, when the British Peel Commission had recommended that only 17 percent of Palestine be awarded for Jewish statehood, and most of the remainder for Arab sovereignty. The United Nations General Assembly passed the partition resolution (No. 181) on November 29, 1947, and Palestinian Arabs, in disorganized and dispersed fashion, launched hostilities to stymie the carrying out of the resolution. On November 30, Arab gunmen, in the first shots of the war, ambushed two Jewish buses near Petah Tikva, killing seven passengers, and snipers firing from the Arab town of Jaffa hit pedestrians in neighboring Tel Aviv. The Husseini-led Arab Higher Committee (AHC), the Palestinian Arabs’ “government,” called a general strike. The civil war had begun. The two sides were ill-matched. The Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, was much smaller: 630,000 to the Arabs’ 1.3 million. However, the Yishuv was tightly knit, highly mobilized, largely urban, educated, European, and motivated by the trauma of the just-ended Holocaust. Their leaders were public-service oriented and committed; they included the best and the brightest. From the 1920s into the 1940s the Yishuv had fashioned a state within a state, with its own governing institutions, including a cabinet (the Jewish Agency Executive), departments (such as the Jewish Agency political, settlement, and finance departments), and a militia, the Haganah, with some 35,000 members. When hostilities commenced, the Haganah had about 10,000 rifles, 3,500 submachine guns, 775 light machine guns, 157 medium machine guns, 16 antitank launchers, 670 two-inch mortars, and 84 three-inch mortars. Several thousand additional light weapons were in the hands of Jewish supernumerary policemen serving the British, most of whom were Haganah members. The Haganah had several spotter aircraft, though no combat aircraft, tanks, or artillery. In the course of the civil war, Haganah armorers produced makeshift armored cars—trucks protected by steel sheeting—and thousands of Sten submachine guns, as well as light mortars, grenades, mines, and ammunition. The Haganah had a standing, efficient strike force of some 2,000 to 3,000 members, the Palmach, which served as its backbone and shield as it mobilized and, from November 1947 to May 1948, was transformed from a militia into an army, with battalion and brigade formations. By May the Palmach could field 10 functioning, if underequipped and undermanned, brigades. Most of the Yishuv’s roughly 250 rural settlements—which were the front line for much of the civil war and the conventional interstate war that followed—had trenchworks, perimeter fences and lighting, bomb shelters, and a central armory, which usually included a few machine guns and light mortars. The Haganah was familiar with the terrain and had nowhere to flee—except into the Mediterranean. The Palestine Arabs enjoyed the support of the vast hinterland of Arab states, who, though in niggardly fashion, sent arms, money and, between December 1947 and February 1948, a 4,000-strong force of relatively well-equipped volunteers, most of them Syrians and Iraqis, known as the Arab Liberation Army (ALA). The ALA had medium and heavy mortars, armored cars, and, by April, half a dozen field pieces. In addition, hundreds of lightly armed Muslim Brotherhood volunteers arrived in southern Palestine from North Africa. But the Jews had organized for war; the Arabs had not. Although each of Palestine’s approximately 800 Arab villages and towns had a local militia, each with dozens or even hundreds of personal weapons, the Palestinians had failed to put together a national militia organization—and when it came to civil war, each village, town and, at best, region fought alone against the Haganah, the Irgun and LHI. Some of the militias were obedient to the Husseini family–dominated Arab Higher Committee (AHC) that nominally governed the Arab community; others obeyed local authorities (the urban national committees or village mukhtars). The Arab militiamen probably, like the Jews, felt that they were fighting for hearth and home—but, unlike the Jews, they always had the option of flight to hinterland Arab villages and states. And their militias had almost no mortars or armored cars. The Palestinians, like the Arab states, had no independent arms production capabilities. Palestine Arabs were largely illiterate, poor, mainly agricultural, and disunited, with a cluster of venal families, led by the Husseinis, at the helm. The leaders had little or no public-service orientation. The better-educated, wealthier Christian 8 percent of the Arab population feared the Muslim majority, townspeople looked down on fellahin (typically, farm laborers) and Bedouins (members of nomadic tribes), while fellahin feared and contemned Bedouins. The notable families had been bitterly divided since the 1920s by a power struggle between the Husseini-led leadership and the “Opposition,” led by another notable Jerusalem family, the Nashashibis. In the late 1930s, against the backdrop of the Palestine Arab revolt, the rivalry had erupted in systematic Husseini terrorism against their Arab opponents, leaving a trail of blood feuds and treachery that was to disunite the Palestinians when they confronted the Zionists a decade later. The Palestine Arabs also failed to put together an autonomous governmental structure. The Husseini-dominated AHC nominally “governed” the Arab community—but many Arabs opposed it. At the start of the civil war, local notables from the various factions set up “national committees” in each town, which tried to run the communities during the crisis. But in effect, most of the the middle and upper classes declined to join the fight—and most of them (including many national committee members) fled the country during the following months, beginning as early as November 1947. Very few sons of the urban upper and middle classes participated in the war. In the hilly spine of the country, running from Galilee through Samaria and Judea, the Arabs enjoyed an overwhelming superiority in numbers; there were practically no Jewish settlements. But in the areas earmarked by the United Nations for Jewish sovereignty—in the central and northern Coastal Plain, in the Jezreel and Jordan valleys and in Jerusalem—the populations were thoroughly intermixed. Along each road were Arab and Jewish villages, and many of the towns—Haifa, Safad, Tiberias—had both Jewish and Arab neighborhoods. The civil war, chaotic like most, was fought mainly in the predominantly Jewish areas. That included the lowlands—the Coastal Plain and the Jezreel and Jordan valleys—and in and around Jerusalem. In the city and its surrounds were roughly 100,000 Jews and a similar number of Arabs. Because the Arabs lacked a national militia and suffered from a deficit of national consciousness and commitment, especially among the majority rural population, the inhabitants of the core Arab areas—around Hebron, Ramallah, Nablus, and Nazareth—did not take part in the fighting. The Arabs may have started the war, albeit in disorganized, haphazard fashion, but they did so with widespread reluctance and deep foreboding; many, perhaps most, did not believe they could win, and lacked confidence in their political and military leaders. “The fellah is afraid of the Jewish terrorists….The town dweller admits that his strength is insufficient to fight the Jewish force and hopes for salvation from outside….[The] majority…are confused, frightened…All they want is peace, quiet,” reported one Haganah Intelligence Service (HIS) agent already in October 1947. The first stage of the civil war was characterized by a gradual snowballing of the hostilities, which at first engulfed only some seam neighborhoods in the mixed towns and certain rural roads (the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv road, the north-south Jordan Valley road). At no point between November 1947 and May 1948 did the Arab Higher Committee issue a blanket order to the various militias to “assault the Yishuv.” And during the war’s first four months the AHC blew hot and cold, occasionally instructing militias to attack this or that settlement or neighborhood, at other times vaguely instructing the locals to keep their powder dry until a general assault was ordered (an order that never came). Many Arab national committees, run by the propertied middle and upper classes, were reluctant to order or allow their militiamen (and in each of the large towns—Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem—there were a number of militia groups, each loyal to a different boss) to attack the Jews for fear of Jewish retaliation, which was bound to damage property and businesses and to cost lives. Attacks in the first four months of the war were limited to Arab bombings and snipings in the urban centers; assaults on Jewish urban neighborhoods and rural settlements; and ambushes against Jewish traffic, which from December 1947 generally moved in organized convoys, guarded by Haganah members, often riding in open vans and makeshift armored vehicles, and British armored cars. There were also, as feared, Jewish retaliatory attacks on Arab urban neighborhoods, villages, and traffic. In December, Arab militiamen assaulted and partly took Tel Aviv’s southern Hatikva Quarter before being driven back by Jewish militiamen. The following month, the ALA’s 2nd Yarmuk Battalion, supported by local militiamen, unsuccessfully attacked Kibbutz Yehiam in Western Galilee. In February 1948, the ALA attacked Kibbutz Tirat Zvi, in the Beit Shean Valley, but the Jewish defenses (and the vastly outnumbered Jewish defenders) and the mud proved too formidable. A British relief column arrived on the scene at the end of the battle and briefly engaged the Arabs. The ALA suffered 40 to 60 dead; the kibbutzniks, one dead and one wounded. As the war wore on, and partly in response to Jewish reprisals, the Arab militiamen also unleashed a wave of urban bombings. The focus was Jerusalem. On February 1, Arab bombers, aided by British deserters, struck the offices of the Palestine Post (today the Jerusalem Post), killing one person and injuring 20. On February 22, the bombers—most of them British deserters in this case—struck more effectively, blowing up three trucks in downtown Jerusalem’s Ben-Yehuda Street, levelling four buildings and killing 58 people. A third bomb, in an American consular car driven by an Armenian Arab, blew up in the courtyard of the Jewish Agency building, killing 12. For the first 10 days of hostilities, the Haganah limited itself to pure defense, hoping that the bout of violence would blow over after Arab tempers cooled, as had happened with previous anti-Zionist violence in 1920, 1921, and 1929. But on December 9, 1947, the Haganah General Staff decided to change to “active defense,” maintaining a general strategy of defense while occasionally retaliating against Arab targets. For the next three months, Haganah raiders responded to attacks on Jewish targets with similar, if less frequent, attacks on Arab traffic and villages. Usually, the orders were to avoid harming women and children, though there is no evidence that such instructions were ever issued to Palestinian Arab assailants. Inevitably, noncombatants died in the Haganah reprisals, which also tended to suck more and more Arabs into the circle of hostilities. From the start of the hostilities, the Irgun and the Stern Gang had deemed restraint a sign of weakness and ineffectiveness, and they now responded to Arab attacks with terrorism of their own; sometimes their targets were Arab militiamen and headquarters, more often the attacks were indiscriminate. In Jerusalem, Irgun men repeatedly threw grenades and bombs at milling groups of Arabs outside the Old City’s Damascus Gate; in Jaffa, in January 1948, LHI men, in a bold attack, levelled with explosives the old Saraya building, which housed a militia headquarters. In Jerusalem, also in January, the Haganah—in an uncharacteristic attack—blew up the Semiramis Hotel in the Katamon district, believing it to be a militia headquarters, though it probably wasn’t, and the Spanish vice consul was among the two dozen dead. Nonetheless, the Haganah for weeks refrained from attacking in areas not yet caught up in the fighting in the hope that the conflagration would die down. As in all civil wars, the hostilities resulted in and were often characterized by local revenge cycles. One such cycle occurred in Haifa. On December 30, 1947, an Irgun team threw a grenade into a crowd of Arab workers at a bus stop outside the Haifa Oil Refinery gate. Eleven were killed. This triggered a rampage by the Arab workers inside the refinery compound against their Jewish coworkers, and 39 were slaughtered with knives, crowbars, and hammers. On the night of December 31, the Haganah avenged the massacre by raiding the nearby village of Balad ash Sheikh, in which many refinery workers lived. Dozens of villagers died, some dragged from their homes and executed. A Haganah intelligence report from mid-May 1948 evaluated the Haganah, Irgun, and Stern Gang reprisals of December 1947 through March 1948 on the Palestine Arab community: “The main effect of these operations was on the Arab civilian population…[leading to] economic paralysis, unemployment, lack of of fuel and supplies because of the severance of transport. They suffered from the destruction of their houses and psychologically their nerves were badly hit, and they even suffered evacuations and wanderings….[All this] weakened the Arab areas and made the operations of the militiamen more difficult.” The hardier Yishuv, under similar hardships, stood fast. That report proved to be putting a gloss over a touch-and-go situation. It’s true that from early December 1947 on, Arabs began evacuating areas near Jewish population concentrations and in seam neighborhoods in the mixed towns. By late March 1948, much of the middle- and upper-class population had left, moving either into the Arab-populated interior of Palestine (Tulkarm, Nablus, Ramallah) or out of the country, to hotels and second homes in Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus. Most were fearful of being caught up in the fighting. The Arab Higher Committee was generally opposed to evacuations but was often ambiguous in its instructions to local authorities, except with regard to young males, who were reproached for leaving. Local authorities, such as the national committee in Haifa, often advised or even ordered the population to stay put, but to little avail. In the areas earmarked for Jewish sovereignty in the partition resolution, local Arab leaders or military commanders often ordered or advised rural communities to send away their women and children if they were already engulfed in the hostilities or about to be. In the Coastal Plain, complete evacuation was ordered in a handful of villages, so they would not appear to be accepting Jewish rule. In the period from November 1947 through March 1948, only one Arab village, Qisariya (Caesarea), south of Haifa, was forcibly evacuated by the Haganah. Down to the end of March 1948, the Haganah—and the Jewish Agency—abided by the Zionist mainstream’s policy of acquiescing in the emergence of a Jewish state with a large Arab minority. As Yisrael Galili, Ben-Gurion’s deputy as political head of the Haganah, put it in an order on March 24 to all the brigades, the organization was to respect “the rights, needs and freedom…without discrimination” of the Arab communities in the Jewish areas. (Exceptions were to be made only in the event of clear military necessity.) Evacuations aside, by late March, the situation along the roads had steadily deteriorated, and the Haganah General Staff began to fear a Jewish collapse, at least in Jewish West Jerusalem (which, with 100,000 people, contained a sixth of the country’s Jewish population). Early in the civil war, the Arabs noted the Yishuv’s main vulnerability: the roads that linked the main urban centers to one another and to clusters of rural settlements. On December 31, 1947, Haganah intelligence reported: “The Arabs intend to paralyze all Jewish traffic on the roads within the next few days.” Gradually during the first months of 1948 the Arab militias concentrated their attention on the convoys; by March their firepower and methods of operation had proved highly successful. For the Haganah, the last weeks of March were disastrous, as they lost much of their armored car fleet and dozens of troops. First came the convoy ambushes, all in the Jerusalem area, at Har-Tuv on March 18, Atarot on March 24, and Saris on March 24, in which a total of 26 died and 18 vehicles were destroyed. Then came two great disasters. On March 27, thousands of local militiamen swooped down on a 50-vehicle convoy heading back to West Jerusalem from the isolated Etzion Bloc—a cluster of four kibbutzim between Hebron and Bethlehem—and halted it, pouring fire on the 186 Haganah. By the following morning, the Jews’ situation was desperate. The overflights of Haganah spotter planes, dropping the occasional grenade on the militiamen, did little good. At last a British armored column got through and negotiated a ceasefire. The Haganah men were forced to abandon all their vehicles and hand over their arms. The Haganah lost 15 dead and 73 wounded, and 10 armored cars, 4 buses, and 25 armored trucks. An even worse fate befell a smaller Haganah convoy in Western Galilee, heading for Kibbutz Yehiam, on March 27. The convoy was lost to Arab Liberation Army and local ambushers, with 47 Haganah men killed; many of the bodies recovered by the British afterwards had been mutilated. A third convoy, on its way from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, was badly mauled at Hulda on March 31. The British High Commissioner in Palestine, Gen. Alan Cunningham, understood the significance of what had occurred. “It is becoming increasingly apparent that the Yishuv and its leaders are deeply worried about the future. The intensification of Arab attacks on communications…has brought home the precarious position of Jewish communities, both great and small, which are dependent on supply lines running through Arab-controlled country,” he reported to London on April 3. “In particular it is now realized that the position of Jewish Jerusalem, where a food scarcity already exists, is likely to be desperate after 16th May.…The balance of the fighting seems to have turned much in favour of the Arabs.” Throughout the conflict the British, gradually downgrading their military and civilian presence, tried to maintain law and order, and generally, until mid-March, aided the Haganah—with escorts for the convoys that travelled between the towns and occasional active intervention against attacking Arab militiamen. The Arabs were usually the aggressors and the British were committed to protecting life and property. At the same time, many British soldiers, for years targets of Irgun and Stern Gang terrorism, and occasionally with anti-Jewish biases, sympathized with and occasionally helped the Arabs; dozens of British deserters fought with the Arab militias. Politically, British policy and its implementation was evenhanded. British officials and troops generally turned over their installations to the majority population in each area (and the evacuated British police stations—in reality, forts—were often to be crucial during both the civil and conventional parts of the war). But during late March to mid-May, British policy was often ambiguous, partly because continued Irgun and LHI attacks on their personnel alienated them, partly because the British commanders, about to depart, saw no point in losing men in interventions against the belligerents, and partly because Whitehall was keen on leaving behind, in the (Arab) Middle East in general, as much sympathy and friendship as possible. Zionist feelings were of much less concern in London, where the anti-Zionist foreign secretary, Ernst Bevin, ruled the roost. The Zionist leadership was keenly aware of the impending British departure, scheduled for May 15, and the pan-Arab invasion that was to follow, as announced almost daily by the Arab leaders and media. The main Jewish areas, the roads between them, and the border areas of the emergent Jewish state all had to be secured before the Arab armies invaded—which meant that the Palestinian Arab militias had to be crushed first if there was to be any hope of beating the invaders. Additionally, the United States in mid-March had signalled its imminent abandonment of partition. Warren Austin, the U.S. delegate, proposed to the Security Council on March 19 that the United Nations suspend implementing Resolution 181 and impose an open-ended UN trusteeship on Palestine. It was clear to Ben-Gurion that the international community would follow the American lead—unless the Yishuv could prove that it was viable by defeating the Palestinian Arabs and establishing a state. No one was more acutely aware of the deteriorating situation for the Zionists than Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv’s “defense minister.” He was particularly perturbed by the fate of Jewish Jerusalem, whose fall, he knew, would be a mighty blow to the Jewish side. At a nightlong meeting with the Haganah General Staff on March 31–April 1, he decided to mount an operation in the Jerusalem sector that was to inaugurate a general change of strategy—going from the defensive to the offensive. Haganah also switched to the offensive in early April simply because it could. It had mobilized and trained a small army organized into battalions and brigades, and arms from Czechoslovakia, purchased by Zionist agents, had at last begun arriving in Palestine. A first shipment arrived by air on the night of March 31; a second, larger shipment, arrived by ship in Tel Aviv on April 2—all together 4,700 rifles, 240 medium machine guns, and 5.2 million rounds of ammunition. At last the Haganah would have a relatively large supply of weapons at hand to divert to a particular front. (Most of its arms until then had been dispersed among the different localities, in defense, and the localities refused to “loan” the headquarters arms, fearing they would be attacked when the arms were elsewhere.) The offensive decided upon on the night of March 31, dubbed “Operation Nahshon,” was designed to force open the Hulda–Jerusalem section of the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road so that several large food, fuel, and munitions convoys could push through to the besieged capital. Shimon Avidan commanded the operation. The German-born, 36-year-old Avidan, operations commander of the Givati Brigade, had been actively organizing illegal immigration from Europe at the end of World War II—and executing Nazi war criminals. Nahshon involved some 1,500 troops. As it turned out, it was to be the first of a succession of offensive operations—most of them triggered by Arab attack, siege, or pressure—that represented the piecemeal, staggered implementation of Tochnit Dalet (Plan D) and, taken together, quickly resulted in the conquests of Arab towns, urban neighborhoods, and swaths of countryside. From early April, although Haganah leaders did not agree on or institute a blanket policy of expulsion, an atmosphere of “transfer” took hold among them as margins of safety narrowed and as the prospective pan-Arab invasion loomed. Facing a war for survival, the Yishuv took off the gloves. Plan D had been finalized on March 10 by the 32-year-old Yigael Yadin, chief of operations of the Haganah and, in effect, its chief of general staff through the 1948 war. The plan was a blueprint for Haganah operations, originally scheduled to be unleashed during the fortnight before the final British pullout, and was designed to prepare for the expected pan-Arab invasion. It authorized the Haganah brigades to secure the main routes between the Jewish centers of population, the main Jewish urban concentrations and the border areas, and potential Arab invasion routes. It gave the Haganah brigade OCs carte blanche with regard to Arab villages—to conquer and garrison villages or to destroy them and expel their inhabitants. Each brigade was assigned specific targets. (Arab and pro-Arab chroniclers, like Walid Khalidi and Ilan Papper, were later to define Plan D as the “master plan” for expelling the Palestine Arabs—but it was not, although in putting the plan into effect, commanders depopulated large chunks of Arab territory.) Nahshon—in effect, the first stage of Plan D—was unleashed on April 2 and 3 with the conquest of the Arab hilltop village of al-Kastal, which dominated the road to Jerusalem. During the following days, Haganah battalions conquered a handful of Arab villages along the road—which served as the militias’ bases—and pushed two and a half supply-laden convoys to Jerusalem. On April 8, a Haganah sentry killed Abdel Qadir al-Husseini, the leader of the Arab militias in the Jerusalem hills area and the Palestinian Arabs’ foremost military commander, at Kastal as he approached the village, which he thought had already been retaken by his irregulars. A few hours later, the Arabs retook the village—but then abandoned it and streamed to Jerusalem for Husseini’s funeral. Palmach troops then peacefully reoccupied the village. The day before he died, Husseini, a cousin of Haj Amin’s, had jotted down a poem, dedicated to his son Faisal (later a senior PLO official): This land of the brave is the land of our forefathers. The Jews have no right to this land. How can I sleep while the enemy rules it? Something burns in my heart. My homeland beckons. Husseini’s death was a major blow to the Palestinian cause. So, for different reasons, was a second incident during Nahshon: the conquest of the village of Deir Yassin by Irgun and Stern Gang troops (marginally assisted by Haganah) on April 9. In the course of the fight, four Jewish soldiers were killed and several dozen were wounded. One hundred ten of the villagers, including women and children, died, some massacred after the battle. The survivors were then trucked to Arab East Jerusalem where they told horrific tales of Jewish atrocities, some of them true. These were subsequently broadcast by Arab radio stations—who exaggerated the number of Arab dead—in the hope of persuading other Arab villages to fiercely resist conquest. Instead, the broadcasts had a boomerang effect and triggered mass Arab flight around the country. The Haganah Intelligence Service defined Deir Yassin as “a major accelerating factor” in the mass exodus that was set off by the Haganah shift to the offensive. Between 250,000 and 300,000 Arabs left their homes from April through June 1948, becoming displaced persons. Arab militiamen eventually resealed the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road and reinstated the siege of the capital. But Nahshon, which lasted until April 15, was a pivotal event. It heralded the Haganah’s shift to the offensive, which proved decisive. For the first time, the organization had deployed a brigade-sized force, had cleared a swath of Arab territory, and, together with the Irgun and Stern Gang, had incited widespread flight from rural Palestine. During the following days the focus of the fighting switched to the country’s urban centers. From April 16 through 18, Haganah troops defeated the Arab militia in the mixed town of Tiberias, on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, which resulted in the Arabs’ organized departure under British escort. The town’s militiamen had interdicted Jewish traffic between the Jezreel and Beit Shean valleys and the upper Jordan Valley settlements to the north. Some of the approximately 5,000 Arab townspeople were trucked out to Nazareth; others fled to Transjordan. The Jews issued no expulsion order but it seems that the local British commanders had advised the Arabs to leave, arguing that they would have no protection after the British departed. Haifa followed. Haifa was Palestine’s most modern city and the country’s main port, earmarked, like Tiberias, by the UN partition plan for Jewish sovereignty. For decades its Arabs and Jews had lived in relative harmony. At the end of 1947 it had about 70,000 Jews, and a slightly smaller number of Arabs. On April 21, the Haganah, based in the Carmel Mountain Jewish neighborhoods that dominated the Arab-populated Lower City, attacked the seam neighborhoods. The British northern region commander, Gen. Hugh Stockwell, did not intervene in the fighting, though he prevented reinforcements from reaching the town from nearby Arab villages. Stockwell was interested in a swift end to the battle since Haifa was the main departure point from Palestine for the remaining British civilian administrators and military. The Arab militias quickly collapsed, their leaders fleeing the city at the start of the battle. By the afternoon of April 22, it was all over. That afternoon, Gen. Stockwell organized a meeting of the remaining Arab leaders and Jewish representatives in the town hall to hammer out terms of surrender (which the Arabs insisted on calling a “truce”). But the Arabs rejected what Stockwell deemed the Haganah’s moderate terms and announced instead that they would all depart the city. Apparently they feared that the Husseinis would consider them traitors should they remain, surrender, and accept Jewish rule. In the following days, the Arab population began leaving, by boat or in British-escorted transports. By early May, only some 5,000 Arabs remained in Haifa. The fall and evacuation of Arab Haifa undermined the staying power of Arab communities throughout the north. In itself, this accounted for about one-tenth of the war’s Arab refugees. Without doubt, Haifa also affected Jaffa. The Haganah had decided to leave Jaffa alone, believing it—with 70,000 to 80,000 Arabs, the largest Arab city in Palestine—would fall once the British left. The partition resolution had earmarked Jaffa as a sovereign Arab enclave inside the Jewish state area. But the Irgun also sought to emerge from the war with a bit of glory—and Jaffa had been harassing Tel Aviv, the Irgun’s main base of power, since November. The Irgun commanders, directed by the organization’s leader Menachem Begin, decided to take Jaffa. On April 25, six Irgun companies attacked the southern part of Manshiya, Jaffa’s northernmost neighborhood, threatening to cut it off from the town center, which they proceeded to barrage with mortars for three days. By April 27, after hard house-to-house fighting with the local militiamen, the Irgun troops had reached the Mediterranean—and Manshiya was cut off. Its population fled southward. This time, the British reacted—after being blamed throughout the Arab world for the fall of Arab Haifa and “collusion” with the Jews. Bevin sought to prove that he was the Arabs’ friend. He ordered in the Royal Air Force—which strafed a Jewish position—some destroyers, and an armored column, proceeding to push out the Irgun force. But Jaffa’s reprieve was short-lived. As chaos reigned during the following fortnight, most local inhabitants fled, and Arab militiamen, including an ALA contingent, and British troops looted the abandoned houses. On May 13, with the British gone, Haganah units quietly occupied the town. Only some 4,000 Arabs remained. The Jewish offensives also encompassed rural areas. In Operation Hametz, at the end of April, Haganah troops conquered the rural hinterland east of Jaffa. From April 15 through mid-May, other Haganah units, in Operation Yiftah, conquered Eastern Galilee, humbling the Arab Liberation Army and local militiamen. Yigal Allon commanded the operation. The Palestine-born officer in command of the Palmach was the Haganah’s best field commander. (During the following months, he was to display his skills when, in charge of the Israel Defense Forces’ Southern Front, he defeated the Egyptian Army in operations Yoav and Horev.) The Palmach took Safad—the “capital” of Eastern Galilee—originally with some 10,000 Arabs and 1,500 mostly Orthodox Jews, on May 9 and 10, the Arabs fleeing eastward, to Syria. Beit Shean, the Arab town at the center of the Beit Shean Valley, fell three days later, the inhabitants mostly going to Jordan. A few days after that, Jewish forces expelled those who remained to Nazareth. The rural areas of Eastern Galilee—designated for Jewish sovereignty—also fell to the Haganah. In all, the operation had also helped seal off the likely invasion routes from Syria. The coastal area of Western Galilee was next. In Operation Ben-Ami, a two-battalion column of Haganah’s Carmeli Brigade pushed north from Haifa’s suburbs on May 13; additional troops landed by sea at the small Jewish resort town of Nahariya. In 36 hours, the column linked up with the Nahariya forces and the isolated Jewish settlements of Eilon and Hanita, on the Lebanese border. They occupied and systematically levelled Arab villages along the way. Their populations had fled as the Jewish column approached. In the second stage of Ben-Ami, on May 20–22, Carmeli units pushed east, widening the Jewish-held area in Western Galilee. The operation, which had closed off the planned Lebanese army invasion route into Palestine, had probably helped to persuade the Lebanese to stay out of the war. During the last days of the civil war, as Arab Palestine was collapsing and the Yishuv braced for the pan-Arab onslaught, both sides tried to marginally improve their positions along what had become continuous front lines. Jewish troops of the Givati Brigade occupied a handful of Arab villages in the south, trying to block the expected Egyptian invasion routes and deny the Egyptians the Palestinian-inhabited forward bases. For their part, the Arabs—spearheaded by several companies of Jordanian troops with gun-mounting armored cars, who were seconded to the British Army in Palestine until May 14—attacked the Etzion Bloc. The attack was probably ordered by Gen. John Glubb, the British commander of the Jordanian army (known as the Arab Legion), and led by Col. Abdullah Tal, the commander of the Legion’s 6th Battalion. The Jewish defenders were badly outgunned—they had no artillery or antitank guns, and only a few PIATs (projector, infantry, antitank—a type of bazooka), whereas the Legion deployed gun-mounting armored cars and heavy mortars. The main settlement, Kfar Etzion, fell on May 13. As the Jewish troops surrendered, they were massacred by militiamen. Some Jordanian officers apparently tried to save some Jews, although others participated in the killing. All together, about 150 prisoners of war were killed. The next day, their position having been rendered untenable, the three remaining settlements surrendered. However, these combatants were shipped off to Jordanian prisoner of war camps. On May 15 the bulk of the Arab Legion crossed the Jordan into Palestine and linked up with the stay-behind companies, including those in the ruined Etzion Bloc. But the Etzion Bloc was the exception. By May 15, the Haganah and its allies had essentially won the Palestine civil war of 1947–1948. In doing so, they had managed to carve out and consolidate the core of a state. Click for larger image. (Courtesy of Baker Vail, Small World Maps.)It comprised a continuous strip—actually three linked strips—of territory (the Jordan Valley, the Jezreel Valley, and the northern and central Coastal Plain), with two adjacent, if semi-besieged, enclaves to the east (Jewish Jerusalem) and south (the Negev settlements zone)—from which it was to face, and eventually contain and repel, the invading armies of Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria. The Yishuv suffered 1,700 to 1,800 dead in the course of the civil war (and another 4,000 dead during the conventional war of the Arab invasion). The community incurred severe infrastructure and economic damage. But, apart from the Etzion Bloc, it had lost no settlements, and financial aid began to pour in from world Jewry. Arab society in Palestine had been shattered. The Palestinian Arabs had failed to establish a state or even to secure for themselves any part of Palestine. Their losses, in casualties, were probably two or three times as large as the Jewish totals—and their economic losses were much larger. The refugees ultimately landed in the Arab states or the areas these states were about to occupy in Palestine—the West Bank near Jordan and the Gaza Strip near Egypt—and were to be a burden on these states. The refugee problem, which was to grow threefold during the following months, was to destabilize the Middle East during the following decades, and Palestine remains a problem on the international agenda. The defeat of the Palestinian Arabs, without doubt, forced the Arab states’ hand and pushed their leaders into fulfilling their promises to invade Palestine—and attack Israel—on May 15. The most moderate of the Arab leaders, King Abdullah of Jordan (who in 1947 had secretly agreed with the Jewish Agency to share Palestine between them) on May 10—the eve of the invasion—explained to Golda Myerson (Meir), the Jewish Agency representative, that he was now one of a five-member coalition and could not act independently. “After Deir Yassin, Tiberias and Haifa,” much to his reluctance, he would have to participate in the invasion and the war. And so he did. But the civil war also affected the Yishuv, now the state of Israel. It emboldened the Yishuv’s political leaders to decide, on May 12, to declare the establishment of the state, against advice from the United States—and despite the certain prospect of pan-Arab invasion. (The Americans pressed the Zionists for a postponement, knowing that the declaration would provoke the invasion and possibly pull the United States into the war to defend Israel. But this did not happen. During the following months, Israel managed to defeat the Arab armies all by itself, while the United States continued to refuse to sell Israel any arms or provide any other nondeclarative help.) The civil war successes steeled the Yishuv as it faced the Arab states’ armies, and provided the Haganah with a great deal of military experience and self-confidence—both of which were to prove important in containing and eventually beating the invading Arab armies. MHQ Map of Israel at the end of the war for independence courtesy of Baker Vail, Small World Maps. To read about the current situation in this region and its recent history, see “Israel and Gaza – Intervention Time,” on GreatHistory.com.

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https://www.historynet.com/last-air-battles-of-world-war-ii.htm

Last Air Battles of World War II

Last Air Battles of World War II Confusion reigned 75 years ago when Japan announced its surrender but pilots on both sides kept fighting. World War II was a global conflagration that transcended geography and time itself—a fact best illustrated on the day the shooting stopped. In the Western Pacific on August 14, 1945, thousands of American airmen took off in wartime and landed in peacetime after midnight. Almost simultaneously, Allied and Japanese fliers fought and slew one another on August 15, mostly without knowing that Tokyo had agreed to surrender. It had much to do with time zones. Over the previous several days rumors and conflicting reports had skittered over radio broadcasts from Washington, D.C.: Japan was about to surrender; Japan was not surrendering. On the 10th, Tokyo had announced tentative acceptance of the Allies’ Potsdam Declaration calling for Japan’s unconditional surrender, provided that the emperor kept his throne. Meanwhile, the Japanese war cabinet remained divided over surrendering. The situation remained tentative, viscerally uncertain. The U.S. Twentieth Air Force had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs on August 6 and 9, immediately followed by the Soviets’ declaration of war and invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria. As Japan reeled under the triphammer blows, millions of people anticipated Tokyo’s capitulation. Days passed in gnawing uncertainty. A Vought F4U-1D Corsair of VBF-83 launches from the aircraft carrier USS Essex in August 1945. (Naval History and Heritage Command) After 45 months of combat across the world’s greatest ocean, U.S. servicemen were bone weary from the sanguinary slogging that ponderously advanced westward from Hawaii to Honshu—at an average rate of about three miles per day. In that time more than 400,000 Americans had died in combat or from war-related causes in defeating first Italy, then Germany and now perhaps Japan. Men were tense, dubious, sleep-deprived. They did not know what to believe. On the afternoon of August 14 (Tokyo time), Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay’s powerful XXI Bomber Command launched 750 B-29s from the Mariana Islands, some 1,500 miles south of Japan. Deployed in seven task forces, the Boeing firebirds were to target transport and oil targets, with overhead times between midnight and 3 a.m. The largest contingent was 140 Superfortresses of the 315th Bomb Wing, led by Brig. Gen. Frank Armstrong, an extraordinary airman and officer. He had led the first U.S. strategic bombing mission in Europe almost exactly three years earlier, striking transport targets in northern France. Since then he had exchanged his B-17 for a -29, and now headed what would likely be the last heavy bomber mission of the war—perfect bookends to a unique career. It was XXI Bomber Command’s longest nonstop mission: 3,700 miles round trip to a refinery 300 miles north of Tokyo. Employing the wing’s new high-definition Eagle radar, Armstrong’s bombardiers smothered the target and turned for home after more than eight hours en route. On the way back, the 8,250 men in LeMay’s bombers were acutely aware that they might be caught in a time warp. Radio operators eagerly monitored Radio Saipan and other stations, anticipating confirmation of the war’s end. In a stunning tribute to LeMay’s leadership and his command’s professionalism, every bomber returned to base that morning. Meanwhile, Frank Armstrong mused: “Every man aboard our aircraft was outwardly jubilant, but inside each experienced mixed emotions. We wanted no more of war, but it was difficult not to think of those who had not lived to see the dawn of this day. These thoughts brought waves of sadness, irony and gratitude. Too, there was a sudden surge of awe. Some of us had been in the business of killing for nearly four years. How would we adapt to a peaceful existence, and how much would we regret the havoc we had wrought, even though it had been absolutely necessary?” Then the U.S. State Department declared that, despite the unconditional surrender dictate from Potsdam, Emperor Hirohito could remain. Unknown to the Allies, that set off a bitter dispute, with the “big six” ruling Tokyo still divided. At that point the emperor personally intervened, stating that Japan would “bear the unbearable” and surrender. President Harry Truman announced the news in the evening of the 14th, Washington time. He concluded, however, “The proclamation of V-J Day must await upon the formal signing of the surrender terms by Japan.” The United Newsreel showed two million New Yorkers jammed into Times Square. “It’s all over, total victory,” the narrator intoned. “All night long the rejoicing continues. Never before in history has there been greater reason to be thankful for peace.” Thus began a three-day spree of joyous cele­bration and drunken revelry. But off Japan, the killing continued. Across the international date line, where LeMay’s bombers were returning to their roosts, the U.S. Third Fleet had already launched two of three scheduled air strikes on the morning of the 15th. Admiral William F. Halsey’s command had monitored communications during the night, keeping options open for continued operations or a stand-down. But when Admiral Chester Nimitz’s Pacific headquarters could not confirm Tokyo’s surrender, he directed Halsey to continue hostilities in the morning. The Third Fleet’s striking arm was Task Force 38, the most powerful military force on any ocean: more than 90,000 men aboard 106 ships with 17 fast carriers, including Britain’s HMS Indefatigable. They carried more than 1,300 fighters, dive bombers and torpedo planes—larger than some air forces. Vice Admiral John S. McCain was a Johnny-come-lately to aviation but he had the seniority needed to command Halsey’s carriers, and his staff was up to the task. His fleet air operations officer, Captain John S. “Jimmy” Thach, was an outstanding Navy fighter tactician who ran much of the task force for McCain. Vice Admiral John S. McCain (left) and his air operations officer, Commander Jimmy Thach, work a problem onboard USS Hancock. (Naval History and Heritage Command) Some aviators had been fighting since 1942, or even earlier. Leading Fighter Squadron 86 (VF-86) from USS Wasp was Lt. Cmdr. Cleo J. Dobson, survivor of Enterprise’s unwelcome greeting over Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He still ached for a shot at a Japanese aircraft. Strike Able, with 103 aircraft, launched at 5:30 a.m. against airfields and other facilities around Tokyo. But the first enemy contact that morning was made by Vought F4U-1D Corsairs off Essex. At 5:40 newly promoted Lt. Cmdr. Thomas Hamil Reidy latched onto a long, lean bogey near the task force. He closed in, identified it as a speedy Nakajima C6N1 Myrt recon plane and dropped it into the spume-tossed gray ocean. It was Reidy’s 10th victory, making him the last double ace in U.S. Navy history. Reidy subsequently received accolades for having scored the last aerial victory of the war. But another ace, Belleau Wood’s 21-year-old Lt. (j.g.) Edward Toaspern, actually carved his final notches after Reidy that morning when he downed two Mitsubishi A6M Zeros over land. Belleau Wood’s Air Group 24 was nearing its target when bandits tried to intercept about 25 miles off Inubosaki Lighthouse, a familiar coastal landmark. Four Grumman F6F-5 Hellcats splashed six single-engine fighters, two by pilots who had never scored before. A Navy Grumman F6F Hellcat toting a drop tank shoots down a Mitsubishi A6M Zero. (National Archives) San Jacinto, the “flagship of the Texas Navy,” launched its first strike overland off Mito, 45 miles northeast of Tokyo. An estimated 20 Japanese fighters engaged VF-49, which claimed seven kills and two probably destroyed without loss. At 6:30 the first fighter-bombers were in their dives when the fleet broadcast the cease-fire order: “All Strike Able planes return to base immediately. Do not attack target. The war is over!” The Third Fleet learned that Japan had agreed to surrender, accepting the Allies’ offer to retain the emperor. However, Ticonderoga’s Hellcats continued their attack rather than pull out of their dives at medium altitude within range of anti-aircraft guns. Lieutenant (j.g.) John McNabb was the “tail-end Charlie,” and his 500-pound bomb probably was the last one dropped on Japan. In some squadrons, air discipline unraveled. Pilots broke formation and indulged in joyful aerobatics at the sheer thrill of being alive. Among the inbound planes in Strike Baker was Essex’s Air Group 83. Ensign Donald McPher­son, a Nebraska ace, said: “We VF-83 pilots were part of a large attack force that was approaching the Tokyo Bay area when we were informed by radio of the ‘cease fire.’ We were to proceed back over the ocean and to jettison our bombs and rockets. After following those orders we broke formation and ‘celebrated’ by doing all kinds of aerobatics! What great feeling to have ended the conflict victoriously!” The third strike force’s aircraft shut down engines on their carriers’ flight decks. Bombers were struck below to hangar decks while fighters stood by to reinforce the combat air patrol. Meanwhile, an impromptu celebration erupted in Task Force 38. Men either shouted and pounded the backs of shipmates or stood frozen in place, trying to absorb the message. Aboard scores of ships, sailors took turns tugging lanyards that blared steam whistles. Many men blasted out the Morse Code dot-dot-dot-dash. V for victory. All offensive operations were cancelled at 7 a.m., but fleet defenses remained on full alert. And the killing continued. Deck crewmen reposition a F6F-5 Hellcat of fighter squadron VF-88 after it burst a tire while landing on the carrier Yorktown. (National Archives) Whether from ignorance or anger, numerous Japanese airmen continued resisting the intruders. Hardest hit was Yorktown’s VF-88, flying a joint mission with 24 Corsairs off Shangri-La and Wasp. Lieutenant Howard M. Harrison’s dozen Hellcats were dispersed in worsening weather, leaving six intact upon penetrating a cloud front. “Howdy” Harrison was enormously popular with his shipmates. They considered him the “friendliest, straightest guy you could ever meet.” Overflying Tokorozawa Airfield northwest of Tokyo when the cease-fire message was broadcast, Harrison was about to reverse course when the roof fell in. An estimated 17 enemy aircraft—reportedly a mixed bag of imperial army and navy types—dropped onto the Grummans from above and behind. It was a near perfect “six o’clock” attack. The attackers were from the 302nd Kokutai (naval air group), based at Atsugi. They had scrambled eight Zeros under Lieutenant Yutaka Morioka, a former dive bomber pilot with four victories, as well as four Mitsubishi J2M3 Jacks, big, rugged fighters with four 20mm cannons. Morioka set up the bounce well, hitting the Americans at 8,000 feet. Spotting the threat, Harrison knew there was no choice but to fight. His pilots shoved throttles to the stops, maneuvered for a head-on attack and opened fire. In that first frantic pass the Yorktowners thought they dropped four bandits, but the formations were shredded and the combat turned to hash. Fighting 88 was a tight-knit outfit. The previous week Lts. (j.g.) Maurice Proctor and Joseph Sahloff had volunteered to cover Harrison, who had ditched off Mito. They led the rescue amphibian to Harrison’s tiny life raft, knowing that otherwise he likely would not be found. VF-88 pilots hoist Lieutenant Howard “Howdy” Harrison after he was plucked from the Inland Sea. (Courtesy of Herb Wood) Now, as Proctor took up a protective position off Sahloff’s damaged Grumman, tracers streaked past his wings. He turned hard to starboard and Lt. (j.g.) Theodore Hansen shot the Japanese off his tail. Proctor and Hansen rejoined above Sahloff, observing two more Japanese planes afire but could not identify the victors. Abruptly Proctor was boxed in: six bandits ahead and one astern. Unaccountably, the attackers on his nose pulled up, allowing him to engage the stalker behind him. He scored decisive hits, sending the enemy down burning. By the time the enemy sextet returned, Proctor had enough of a start to dive toward some protective clouds. The Japanese hit his plane but he evaded through the weather, reaching the coast. There Proctor saw Sahloff’s crippled Hellcat spin out of control and crash into the sea. But Proctor couldn’t locate the others, and though he radioed his shipmates for a rendezvous, only Hansen replied. Hansen returned to the ship alone, sick at heart, believing he was the lone survivor. His spirits rose when Proctor trapped a few minutes later. In the debrief of the hard-fought combat Hansen claimed three victories and Proctor two. Subsequently the intelligence officer awarded one victory each to the pilots killed in action: Sahloff, Harrison and Ensigns Wright Hobbs and Eugene Mandeberg. It had been Hobbs’ 23rd birthday. Postwar analysis of available Japanese records indicated that the 302nd Kokutai had lost one Zero and two Jacks. The only confirmed success went to Morioka, achieving ace status on the last day of combat. The Royal Navy’s Indefatigable contributed a mission that morning against a chemical plant during which six Grumman Avengers escorted by eight Supermarine Seafires were jumped by perhaps a dozen Zeros. The Seafires, though based on the RAF’s immortal Spitfire, carried heavy drop tanks that limited their performance. With no choice, the British aviators turned to engage, some unable to shed their external fuel. Hit in the first pass, Sub-Lt. Fred Hockley bailed out of his crippled fighter. However, despite 20mm cannon malfunctions, his squadron mates claimed eight Zeros while an Avenger made a safe water landing. Because of continuing Japanese probes, the Americans were leery of any inbound aircraft. When Royal Navy Sub-Lt. Victor Lowden was threatened by inquisitive Corsairs, he lowered wheels and flaps, banking steeply to show his Seafire’s distinctive elliptical wing with blue and white markings. A Supermarine Seafire takes off from HMS Indefatigable as others prepare to launch in August 1945. The Royal Navy carrier was attached to the U.S. Third Fleet’s Task Force 38 and saw plenty of action on the morning of August 15. (IWM A25082) Meanwhile, Japanese conventional bombers and kamikazes still posed a threat. A Corsair from Hancock splashed a Yokosuka D4Y Judy dive bomber attacking Indefatigable that morning, as the British carrier narrowly avoided two bombs. Halsey responded with a widely quoted order: Investigate suspicious intruders and shoot down hostiles “in a friendly sort of way.” Attacks continued through the day. The penultimate victim crashed at 1:30 p.m. when Wasp’s fighter skipper Cleo Dobson received a vector from a radar controller. From 25,000 feet his wingman, Lt. (j.g.) M.J. Morrison, sighted a lone bogey 8,000 feet below. Dobson could not spot it so he ceded lead to the youngster. As the two Hellcats descended, he got a look at the dark-green intruder, a single-engine bomber. “Boy, he really made a splash,” Dobson wrote. “That was my first shot at a Jap in the air and I’ll tell you it really was a thrill.” A half-hour later Ensign Clarence A. Moore of Belleau Wood won the race to the last kamikaze. It was another Judy, the 34th U.S. aerial victory of the day and the final kill of World War II. Throughout the day Task Force 38 lost a dozen aircraft, with four Hellcat pilots killed and a Cor­sair pilot briefly captured. Emperor Hirohito’s message was broadcast to the nation at noon. Thus, 70 million Japanese learned what most of the rest of the world already knew. Many Japanese military men were astonished at the news. Navy Captain Minoru Genda, who had helped plan the Pearl Harbor attack, shared the opinion of many. He expected Japan to continue fighting indefinitely—as long as imperial warriors breathed. Others were more outraged than awestruck. Royal Navy Sub-Lt. Fred Hockley had bailed out of his Seafire that morning. Just 22, he was captured by civil authorities and turned over to the army. He was executed that night, several hours after Hirohito’s broadcast. Eventually two senior officers were hanged as war criminals. In a dingy prison near Fukuoka, three hours after the emperor’s announcement, 17 B-29 crewmen were dragged from their cells and murdered in outrage over Hirohito’s capitulation. Most of the killers escaped the gallows owing to Douglas MacArthur’s postwar “big picture” philosophy. Meanwhile, some senior Japanese naval leaders took their own lives. Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, commanding the Fifth Air Fleet, felt he owed the emperor a death and resolved to fly the war’s last kamikaze mission. He squeezed into the rear seat of a Judy dive bomber alongside the radioman. Ten planes left Kyushu, Japan’s southern island, that afternoon though three returned with mechanical problems. Ugaki’s plane is thought to have crashed on an islet near Okinawa. Ugaki’s friend, Vice Adm. Takijiro Onishi, had formed the Special Attack Corps in the Philip­pines in late 1944. He returned home to become vice chief of the navy general staff but sought atonement for the thousands of suicide aviators he had dispatched. He committed hara-kiri but botched the process and slowly bled to death the next morning. Reflecting on events of the day, Halsey recorded: “I hope that history will remember that when hostilities ended, the capital of the Japanese Empire had just been bombed, strafed and rocketed by planes of the Third Fleet, and was about to be bombed, strafed and rocketed again. Last, I hope it will remember…the men on strike Able One [who] did not return.” There were violent postscripts to the cease-fire. On the following two nights, Okinawa-based Northrop P-61 Black Widows intercepted two Japanese aircraft flying in violation of the cease-fire and destroyed both. Neither of the victories were credited because officially they occurred in peacetime. On August 18 two Consolidated B-32 Domi­nators from the 312th Bomb Group were intercepted on a photo mission over Honshu. The Japanese navy fighters, led by ace Saburo Sakai, inflicted damage on one, wounding three crewmen, though both bombers returned to Okinawa. However, Sergeant Anthony Marchione of Potts­town, Pa., died of his injuries—the last Amer­ican casualty of the war. Thus ended World War II, a monstrous conflict whose sulfurous breath had seared four continents and claimed perhaps 60 million lives. One fighter pilot spoke for all. Lieutenant (j.g.) Richard L. Newhafer—a future novelist and screenwriter—said the joyous news brought “all the hope and unreasoning happiness that salvation can bring.” Frequent contributor Barrett Tillman is the author of nearly 900 articles and more than 40 books. For additional reading, try Tillman’s Whirlwind: The Air War Against Japan 1942–1945 and U.S. Navy Fighter Squadrons in World War II; Japanese Naval Aces and Fighter Units of World War II, by Ikuhiko Hata and Yasuho Izawa; and Last to Die, by Stephen Harding. This feature originally appeared in the September 2020 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here!

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https://www.historynet.com/last-person-receiving-a-pension-from-civil-war-era-dies.htm

Last Person Receiving Pension from Civil War-Era Dies

Last Person Receiving Pension from Civil War-Era Dies On Sunday May 31, Irene Triplett, the last person receiving a pension from the U.S. Civil War, died at the age of 90 following complications from surgery, according to the Wilkesboro, North Carolina nursing facility where Triplett lived. Before her death Triplett continued to receive $73.13 a month from the Department of Veterans Affairs—nearly 155 years after the bullets stopped. Triplett’s father, Private Mose (sometimes written as “Moses”), holds the distinction of fighting for both the Confederacy and the Union. At the age of 16, Mose enlisted as a Confederate soldier in the 53rd North Carolina Infantry in May 1862, before transferring to the 26th North Carolina Infantry Regiment. As his regiment marched through Virginia prior to the Gettysburg campaign, Mose fell ill and remained in a military hospital for the duration of the battle. He was one of the few who survived unscathed. Records show that of the 800 men in the 26th North Carolina Infantry Regiment, 734 were wounded, captured, or killed. Mose deserted shortly after. “In addition to the novelty of this news, Triplett’s pension illustrates the very complex nature of the Civil War due to the fact that her father changed horses in the middle of the stream, so to speak. Not every Southerner supported the Confederacy, as this bears out,” said Dana B. Shoaf, Editor of Civil War Times magazine. In 1864, Private Mose managed to link up with the Union army in Tennessee and enlisted in the 3rd North Carolina Mounted Infantry, known as Kirk’s Rangers—named after Tennessee-born commander Col. George Washington Kirk. As a Ranger, Mose participated in acts of sabotage against Confederate targets in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, The Wall Street Journal reports. At the war’s conclusion Mose resided near Elk Creek, in Wilkes County, North Carolina with his first wife, Mary. There, Mose gained a reputation for being obdurate and ornery. “A lot of people were afraid of him,” Charlie Triplett, Mose’s grandson told the Journal in 2014. “Most of the time he sat on the front porch with his old military pistol and shot walnuts off the trees just to let people know he had a gun.” In 1924, after the passing of his first wife several years prior, the then 77-year-old Mose married Elida Hall, a woman 49 years his junior. Despite the large age gap, such marriages weren’t uncommon, with young women seeking financial protection and aging veterans seeking care. Born in 1930, both Irene and her mother suffered from mental disabilities, with Irene recalling a tough upbringing full of beatings both at home and at school. “I didn’t care for neither one of them, to tell you the truth about it,” she told the Journal in 2014. “I wanted to get away from both of them. I wanted to get me a house and crawl in it all by myself.” In 1938, days after attending the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt was in attendance, the 92-year-old Mose died of cancer. Unable to support her family, Elida and Irene moved into the Wilkes County Poorhouse. Irene’s younger brother, Charlie, ran away shortly after rather than live in the county home. The two women would remain there for 17 years until the facility shut down in 1960, and eventually settled down in a private nursing home paid in part by Mose’s small VA pension. Moving through several care homes throughout her life, in her later years Triplett remained in the Wilkesboro skilled-nursing facility until her death. Despite Triplett’s passing on Sunday, her life remains a reminder of the continuation of President Abraham Lincoln’s promise “to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.” “She’s a part of history,” Dennis St. Andrew, a past commander of the North Carolina Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, told the Journal. “You’re talking to somebody whose father was in the Civil War, which is mind-bending.”

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https://www.historynet.com/last-plane-cambodia.htm

Last Plane Out of Cambodia

Last Plane Out of Cambodia As the Communist Khmer Rouge overran Cambodia, a former CIA pilot pulled off a desperate escape. (Neil Hanson) Flying for Air America Inc., an airline secretly owned by the CIA in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, had been the most fulfilling nine years of my life. From 1964 to 1973, I had been based in Saigon and Vientiane, Laos, flying cargo and making airdrops of supplies to friendly locals in hostile territory. I left it in September 1973 when Air America’s Vientiane base closed. I joined my family who had been living in New Zealand and easily landed a couple of unstimulating jobs, flying tourists over a volcano crater and looking for smoke or lightning strikes in the forests. After a year of that drudgery, I needed a fix. I was filled with intermingled relief and ecstasy when I received a call from former Air America colleague Pete Snyder (not his real name, which has been changed to protect his privacy), the chief pilot in Cambodia for airline Tri-9. He offered me a job flying Convair 440s, essentially Convair’s version of the venerable DC-3 propeller-driven passenger and cargo plane. I began working for Tri-9 in December 1974. I was initially based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. Flying in Cambodia resembled nothing that occurred anywhere in the world of regulated aviation. It was a panic operation, a conglomerate with a wild bunch of pilots and planes—different airlines, but the same uniforms. Anyone with a pilot’s license flew for whatever airline happened to have a flight ready to leave. The crews operated in much the same way as sailors hanging out at a port looking for work on a freighter. Many of the planes were owned by trucking companies that no longer had safe overland passage because of the Communist Khmer Rouge insurgents overrunning the country. The attackers regularly shot at planes, and as a result most aircraft were adorned with flattened beer cans that had been pop-riveted onto their fuselages for emergency repairs. My narrowest escape occurred when a .50-caliber round went through the wing and fuselage but missed the fuel selector valve by just an inch. The Khmer Rouge had been fighting Cambodia’s Western-backed government of anti-communist President Lon Nol for years. Lon Nol fled into exile on April 1, 1975, and on April 17 Khmer Rouge troops entered Phnom Penh. The city initially met them with celebrations. Since the civil war was over and Americans were out of the country, order would finally be restored, people thought. Within hours, however, Phnom Penh’s population was rounded up and ordered to leave for resettlement in the countryside, where former urbanites became workers in a primitive agricultural society to serve the “common good.” People were starved and forced to work endlessly. Families were separated. Many Cambodians died from disease, torture or execution. The new regime, under leader Pol Pot, was a ruthless horror show. Although there are no definitive statistics, it is estimated that the Khmer Rouge killed between 1.5 million and 2 million people, at least a quarter of Cambodia’s population. I had left Phnom Penh in February 1975 and moved to Kompong Som, on the southwestern coast, roughly 150 miles from the capital, to fly rice in a Convair 440 for Angkor Wat Airlines, named after Cambodia’s majestic Buddhist temple complex built in the 12th century. Kompong Som was a white sandy beach town that might have passed for a trendy resort, except that the nightly entertainment was watching firefights with the Khmer Rouge in the distance. Thursday, April 17, 1975, began for me at 6 a.m. The noise of the cook slamming the screen door in the kitchen across the courtyard of my beachside motel woke me. From what I could see of the sky outside, it would be a great day for flying. I packed up my stuff in a battered old aluminum suitcase, donned a clean uniform and grabbed a can of PET condensed milk. On the far side of the courtyard, the cook had set the tables for breakfast. I found a table and punched a hole in the can of milk as my Filipino co-pilot joined me. I had heard the previous day that helicopters had evacuated the U.S. Embassy’s staff in Phnom Penh. By this time, the Khmer Rouge were only about 10 miles from the capital. With the arrival of that news, Pete and I agreed that he would meet me in Kompong Som and we would leave together. Khmer Rouge forces march into Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. (Sjobberg/AFP/Getty Images) A Douglas DC-3 captain and co-pilot—Chinese men who flew for Khmer Airlines, owned by a trucking company—also sat at our table. They had left the Kompong Som airport much later than we had the past evening, so I asked them if they had seen a Tri-9 Convair come in. Pete might be on it. They reported that only their DC-3 and our Convair 440 were on the ramp when they left the field. They were scheduled to fly a rice shuttle to Phnom Penh after breakfast. I suggested this was not a good time to be going to Phnom Penh. The Khmer Airlines captain was offended. “The Khmer Rouge wouldn’t hurt us—only long-nose Americans,” he said and left. Not wanting to tip my hand entirely, I told his co-pilot and mine that I was considering getting out. “Good idea, captain,” my co-pilot said. I told the Khmer Airlines co-pilot he could come along if he wanted but added that I did not want him to tell his captain or anybody else. I feared the Cambodian military might find out about our plans, stop us and turn us over to the Khmer Rouge, an understandable attempt to save their own hides by demonstrating that they were now devoted comrades of the new rulers. “No, I fly with him,” the loyal co-pilot said, “but if no good, no land, come back go with you.” “All right,” I agreed, “but if you’re not back by noon, I’m gone.” His jeep showed up, and he left for the airport with his captain. A half-hour later, a Land Rover sent by Angkor Wat Airlines showed up with the station manager driving and our steward and stewardess in the back. The steward was one of the airline owner’s relatives, and the stewardess performed no function other than being the steward’s girlfriend. The airport was about 9 miles away. As we started down the hill on the west side of the airfield, we could see our Convair 440, a mural of the Angkor Wat temples on its tail, sitting on the ramp and being loaded. The only other bird on the field was an old Curtiss C-46 military transport resting forlornly in the weeds off the ramp. The Khmer Airlines DC-3 presumably was en route to Phnom Penh. We had a normal load of pigs, rice and people. Our flight was scheduled to go to Battambang in northwest Cambodia on the first trip and then to Kampong Cham, 75 miles northeast of Phnom Penh. My co-pilot filed a flight plan to Battambang with a Cambodian major and give him his bonjour—a word that in this context translated into “bribe” rather than “good day,” the literal French. Meanwhile, I wandered over to the food stalls lining the edge of the ramp and bought a piece of sugar cane to munch on. 8:05 a.m. Showtime. I began my normal preflight check. We would have to play it cool. If it appeared we were trying to leave the country, we might be stopped by the military or mobbed by people trying to flee before the Khmer Rouge took control. I told my co-pilot to act like we were going to Battambang. We were going to have to delay takeoff until noon so Pete could join us. I had seen him the previous day in Battambang. He had to fix a flat nose wheel tire but should have been able to get out of there by now. 8:30 a.m. The air stair folded into the fuselage. In the cockpit, the routine went normally. The 2,500 horsepower Pratt & Whitney R-2800 CB16 engine on the right side grumbled to life, belching a cloud of blue-white oil smoke out the augmenter and then settling into a smooth mutter as all 18 cylinders began to warm up. The left engine wasn’t as cooperative, backfiring a few times as the augmenter overheated and beeped. The carburetor on that engine was stuffed and running the mixture too rich. I manually leaned the mixture until there wasn’t any more black smoke coming out. The temperature and pressures were improving nicely, so I stuck my hand out the window and flipped my thumb sideways, telling the station manager standing to the left front of the plane to remove the chocks from the wheels. After he completed the task, he returned to the left front, snapped a military salute and waved us out of the ramp. What did he think this was, Air Force One, instead of a sick old bird full of pig piss and puke? I returned his salute and advanced the throttles to taxi to the runway. On the way down the runway, I made a couple of calls on the radio using a plane-to-plane frequency in the blind to determine if there was anyone about to land at the Kompong Som airport, which had no control tower to relay that information. No reply. Where was Pete? At the end of the runway, I brought the power up and cycled the propellers a couple of times, then advanced the throttles to the field barometric pressure to check the magnetos—ignition devices using rotating magnets to create an electric current. The right engine checked out fine, but when I checked the magneto on the left engine, I slipped the magneto switch to the “off” position and back on. That made the engine backfire. “What the hell? We better go back to check this thing out,” I said and let out an exaggerated sigh. I then wagged my head in disgust. It was all an act, part of my escape plan, and I was proud of my thespian skills. Back on the ramp, we shut down. Our half-dozen or so passengers deplaned. We didn’t ask if anyone wanted to escape with us because we were afraid someone might divulge our plans to military officials at the airport. I climbed out and asked the station manager for a ladder so I could check the engine. As I climbed the ladder, I continued my deception, bitching about how hard it would be to get two trips in today. I pulled out a couple of spark plugs, went down the ladder, sat on the air stair and began picking some carbon out of the plugs. Khmer Rouge insurgents drive through Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, celebrating their capture of Cambodia’s capital. (Sjoberg/AFP/Getty Images) 9:30 a.m. “Captain, plane coming!” yelled my co-pilot. Barely over the hills to the north was a DC-3 heading our way. The pilot was too low. A few moments passed, and he could be heard coming in at high power, straight and fast. As he came across the threshold of the runway, he jerked the power off and the engines snapped and belched flames from the abuse. The landing was rough and fast. It was the Khmer Airlines DC-3 crew who had breakfast with us. They turned around at the end of the runway and headed to the ramp while still going very fast. The tires squealed, and one wing started up, but the pilot got the plane under control. The props were still turning when the captain jumped out of the door, yelling for gas. His co-pilot followed, trying to calm him. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Phnom Penh burning,” the captain answered, agitated. “They shoot at us!” he yelled, like that was something to be surprised about. “We go Bangkok now!” I grabbed him and hissed, “Shut up, don’t let the military hear you, or we’ll get arrested.” The passengers on the DC-3 started climbing out. “What are you going to tell the passengers?” I asked. “We tell them we try again to go Phnom Penh, but go to Bangkok,” the captain said. “Thai customs will love you,” I said. “You better go too.” “Sure, but let’s be a little careful,” I said. “Why don’t you wait in your plane? And I’ll help your co-pilot get gas and clearance.” The pilot went back to his DC-3. 10 a.m. His co-pilot showed up with the gas truck, and I cornered him. “You know your captain wants to go to Bangkok?” “Yes.” “I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” I told the co-pilot. “With passengers, customs there will give you a ration of shit, particularly if some of the passengers don’t want to go to Bangkok.” “Yes, but what else to do?” “Go to Sattahip, it’s a Thai Air Force Base, so there aren’t any customs to give you a hard time. If they get nasty, tell them you got lost, or there’s a problem with the plane. If your captain doesn’t like the idea, cold cock the son of a bitch with the fire extinguisher.” I gave him the frequency for the tower at Sattahip and asked him to monitor 123.9, the frequency used for calls between planes. I would contact him when we got off the ground. 10:30 a.m. The DC-3 was cranking up, and I went back to my Convair 440. The steward asked if the plane was fixed. I said it looked like we would have to unload and test fly it, maybe even have to go somewhere overnight to get it fixed. He might have picked up on my plan because he wanted to go home for some money and clothes. “Just be back before 11:30,” I said. The DC-3 started its takeoff roll, slowly breaking ground at the end of the strip and making a gentle turn to a west-southwest heading. The station manager, standing next to me, didn’t say anything about the DC-3 heading in the wrong direction for a flight to Phnom Penh. If he didn’t know before, he knew now that something was up. I asked him to get my plane unloaded so we could fly it. He hesitated and then went to get some workers who took off the rice and pigs. 11 a.m. My plane was now unloaded, and I had replaced the plugs. I had the co-pilot file a clearance for a local test flight. When he came back, he said, “Major nervous, can’t get anybody on the radio.” The major, the officer who received his bonjour earlier, had been trying to reach the military outpost north of the airport to determine if the Khmer Rouge was near. I didn’t want to risk running the batteries down, so we made a just a few short calls on the cockpit radio, with no luck except on frequency 123.9. The DC-3 answered faintly, reporting everything to be OK, but it had not yet been able to raise Bangkok Center. I gave the pilot my aircraft identification number in case he made contact with Bangkok, so he could tell the crew there that I would be arriving in a couple of hours. When we climbed back into the plane, I noticed some of the noodle stalls on the edge of the runway were gone and the rest seemed to be hurriedly closing up. I told the co-pilot to watch the road stretching to the hills in the distance and report if he saw dust coming from the north. I walked to the airport’s makeshift operations office, housed inside a large corrugated metal shipping container called a Conex box. I noticed two more noodle stalls had their front flaps closed and the cart with the sugar cane was being pulled up the road by a little Honda 50cc motorcycle. The only vehicles left were a truck and the major’s jeep. The major looked up from closing the briefcase that held his bonjour. His face bore the visage of someone who had seen a poisonous snake slithering through the door. “Going home already?” I asked. “No more flights today,” he said. Just for the hell of it, I asked, “When you go, could we ride with you?” “Not allowed!” “Never mind, our company car will come back soon. See you tomorrow.” Surely there was an Oscar in my future. The major had refused me a ride because he didn’t want to be anywhere near a round-eye the Khmer Rouge would think was CIA. He hustled out to the jeep while soldiers from the fuel and oil storage operation climbed into the truck. 11:24 a.m. There were only three of us left at the airport: the station manager, my co-pilot and me. 11:32 a.m. Where was Pete? His wife was in Phnom Penh. She probably would have caught one of the flights to Bangkok since most of the crews knew her, but I was afraid Pete might try to make sure she had gotten out. 11:46 a.m. The station manager was squatted down next to my co-pilot in the shade of the wing. Nobody was talking, just staring to the north where the shimmering heat seemed to magnify the hills in the distance. No dust, no breeze, just eerie quiet. 11:58 a.m. Here came the Land Rover, its driver looking like he was trying to qualify for the Indianapolis 500. He skidded up to the airplane, and the steward and stewardess jumped out. The steward was panicky. “No people on the road, people all go!” he said. “Where did they go?” I asked. “I no know, just go. No good here, we go now?” “Let’s get this show on the road.” 12:07 p.m. No Pete. Nothing else to do but leave. Before going up the air stair, I looked into the station manager’s eyes. “We are going to Bangkok. I want you to come too.” Unflinching, he stared directly back at me and fought to control his emotions. “No sir, I stay. My family. My family Phnom Penh, sir.” I didn’t reply. What could I have said? We shook hands for the first and last time. 12:11 p.m. We started the engines and broke the stony silence. No chocks to pull since I had already removed them, but the station manager was standing in his place, as usual, looking up at the cockpit, tears tracking down his cheeks. He snapped a salute. My earlier cynicism depleted, I returned his salute, and he waved us out of the ramp. At the end of the runway the temperatures and pressures looked good, so I turned around and poured the coal to it. The speed built up, and as we passed the ramp the station manager was still standing there. I realized I didn’t even know his name. Eighty knots. I came off the nose wheel steering and on to the yoke with my left hand. One hundred knots, rotate. The plane rises off Cambodian soil for the last time. **** Remains from a mass grave near Phnom Penh are a gruesome display of the Khmer Rouge’s rule, 1975 to 1978. (Mike Goldwater/Alamy) Pete arrived in Kompong Som after an unsuccessful search for his wife in Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge arrested him the next day in the motel room where I had stayed. They marched him to the Thai border and, miraculously, released him. Pete never found his wife. She became one of the victims of the Cambodian holocaust. The DC-3 crew arrived safely in Sattahip Air Base with little fanfare. My plane landed in Bangkok, and I was commissioned by the crown prince of Laos to take it to Vientiane and fly for Royal Air Lao. I remained there a few months until advancing Communist Pathet Lao forces necessitated another escape to Thailand, this time by boat. Southeast Asia was falling down around my knees. It was time to go home to the United States. —Neil Hansen travels the country on the speaking circuit, frequently recounting stories about his Air America days to military and veterans’ groups. He lives in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. “The Last Plane Out of Cambodia” is based on a chapter from his book FLIGHT (2019).

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“Last to Die,” 75 Years Ago: Last American Killed in Combat in World War II

“Last to Die,” 75 Years Ago: Last American Killed in Combat in World War II August 18, 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the death of the last American service member killed in combat in World War II. His name was Anthony Marchione. He’d just turned 21 and was killed by renegade Japanese fighter pilots three days after the August 15 ceasefire between the Allies and Japan went into effect. The following is an excerpt from Marchione’s story as described in the book, “Last to Die” by Military History Editor Stephen Harding. Just before 7 o’clock on the morning of August 18, 1945, a huge, four-engined aircraft moved slowly onto the end of a 7,000-foot-long runway at Yontan airfield on the southwestern coast of the island of Okinawa. Though the machine’s long, cylindrical fuselage, tall tail, and high, narrow wings gave her a certain elegance of line, on the ground she was ponderous. Loaded with fuel and men, she rocked heavily on squat tricycle landing gear as she turned her nose into the wind, then shuddered to a halt as her crew made the last preparations for takeoff. The aircraft, a B-32 Dominator heavy bomber of the U.S. Army Air Forces’ 386th Bombardment Squadron, was one of four scheduled to depart that morning on what everyone in the unit hoped would be a routine photo-reconnaissance mission over Tokyo. At that point in World War II “routine” should have been a given—Japan had accepted the Allies’ terms for unconditional surrender four days earlier and President Harry S. Truman had ordered the suspension of all offensive operations against Japan on August 15. Yet four B-32s flying a photo-recon mission over Tokyo two days later had been attacked and damaged by Japanese fighters whose pilots had apparently not heard of the cease-fire ordered by Japan’s Emperor Hirohito or, more ominously, had chosen to ignore it. At the early morning briefing for the August 18 mission the Dominator crewmen had been told to assume they’d be flying into what might still be very hostile territory. With final checks completed, the pilot of the lead B-32—24-year-old 1st Lieutenant James L. Klein—released the aircraft’s brakes and smoothly advanced the throttles. The low growl of four idling Wright R-3350 radial engines quickly swelled to a gut-rumbling howl, and the Dominator—the racy nose art painted on the left side of her forward fuselage identified her as Hobo Queen II—rapidly picked up speed as she surged down the runway. When the bomber hit 130mph abreast of the 4,500-foot marker Klein gently lifted the nose; the aircraft was instantly transformed from a lumbering, earth-bound behemoth into something far more graceful. Her gear coming up and flaps retracting, Hobo Queen II roared over the coral pit at the end of the airstrip and began a climbing 180-degree turn. Tony Marchione as a gunner on a B-24. Courtesy photo. With the runway clear the pilot of the second Dominator, 27-year-old 1st Lieutenant John R. Anderson, moved his bomber from the taxiway into take-off position. The aircraft shook as Anderson did a last engine run-up and the acrid smell of burning high-octane aviation gasoline wafted through the fuselage. Seconds later, her huge paddle-bladed propellers clawing the already-humid air, the B-32 began the sprint down Yontan’s runway. As Anderson’s Dominator picked up speed, four young men sat huddled on a low, cot-like settee fixed to the port side of the fuselage in the bomber’s rear cabin. Two of the men were gunners; once the Dominator was airborne they’d take their places, one in the tail turret and the other in the rear-most of the B-32’s two top turrets. The other two men—29-year–old Staff Sgt. Joseph Lacharite and 20-year-old Sgt. Anthony Marchione—were not members of the bomber’s crew. They were assigned to the Yontan-based 20th Reconnaissance Squadron, Lacherite as an aerial photographer and Marchione as a gunner/photographer’s assistant. At their feet rested a heavy canvas bag containing the K-22 camera they would use to record the images that were the ultimate purpose of the day’s mission. That mission—designated Number 230 A-8—was to photograph several Japanese military airfields sited to the east and northeast of the sprawling Tokyo metropolitan area. The reason was twofold: first, to verify that Japanese aircraft were being kept on the ground in compliance with the cease-fire terms; and second, to determine whether the fields were in good enough condition to handle the heavily laden Allied transports that would help bring in the first occupation troops. On paper the mission seemed straightforward: The four B-32s were to cross the assigned recon area at 20,000 feet and two miles apart, following parallel flight lines that ran directly east and west. When they finished “mowing the lawn,” they would begin the return leg to Okinawa. The 1,900-mile round trip—roughly equivalent to a flight from Los Angeles to Seattle and back—would take 8 to 10 hours if all went well. As soon as his B-32 was airborne and in her own climbing turn Anderson headed toward Klein’s Dominator, clearly visible ahead, the already bright morning sun glinting off the lead bomber’s uncamouflaged aluminum skin. The two other aircraft soon joined up, and in loose echelon formation the four B-32s began a gradual climb toward their cruising altitude and pointed their noses toward Tokyo. ________________________ At that same moment, some 900 miles to the northeast of Yontan, Emperor Hirohito and his senior advisers were most probably wondering if another Japanese city—perhaps even Tokyo itself—would soon disappear beneath a roiling mushroom cloud. Hirohito had been under no illusion that his August 15 radio address announcing the decision to surrender would be immediately accepted by all senior members of the government and the military, yet even he was shocked by the events that unfolded in the hours and days following the broadcast. The announcement had sparked an army-led coup intended to reverse the emperor’s surrender order, and naval and air units at various points around the country were still in open revolt, vowing to fight on to the last man. Should such pointless and ultimately futile military action convince the Allies that Hirohito was unable to enforce his surrender decision or, worse, that his government’s agreement to the Allied ultimatum was simply a delaying tactic meant to give Japan more time to organize its defense against an Allied invasion, the consequences for Hirohito’s much-diminished empire could well be catastrophic. _________________________ Among those diehards about whom Hirohito should have been most worried were several of the finest fighter pilots in the Imperial Japanese Navy. On the morning of August 18 the men—members of the elite Yokosuka Kokutai (Air Group) based just 24 miles south of the emperor’s Tokyo palace—had agreed to commit mutiny for the second time in as many days. The Yokosuka Kokutai’s primary purpose by this point in the war was the development and testing of naval aircraft, which meant that among its members were some of the most experienced, talented and successful pilots in what was left of Japan’s naval air service. As a result, the unit was also tasked with aiding in the air defense of the greater Tokyo-Yokohama region. Over the preceding months the Yokosuka Kokutai’s pilots had joined in the fierce defense of the east-central part of their homeland against the hordes of American B-29 bombers and Allied land- and carrier-based strike aircraft that had been systematically reducing the military facilities, harbors, industrial centers and key cities of eastern Honshu to smoking rubble. The willingness of the Yokosuka Kokutai’s pilots to continually launch themselves at the overwhelming numbers of enemy aircraft appearing daily—and nightly—over their nation implies a level of patriotic dedication verging on fanaticism. And Hirohito’s August 15 announcement of his decision to surrender to the Allies did little to dampen that nationalistic and professional fervor. Despite official orders from Imperial Japanese Navy headquarters to cease attacks on Allied aircraft, many of the Yokosuka Kokutai’s pilots felt—as did other army and navy aviators elsewhere in Japan—that the nation’s airspace should remain inviolate until a formal surrender document had actually been signed. That belief had led several Yokosuka pilots to attack the B-32s engaged on the August 17 mission, and the passage of 24 hours had done nothing to cool their martial zeal. They were ready to once again disobey direct orders and punish any Allied airmen who came within range. _______________________ Tony Marchione's grave. Courtesy photo. While they could not have known of the political turmoil in Tokyo or the mood of the Yokosuka Kokutai’s pilots, the men aboard the Dominators winging ever closer to the coast of Honshu on August 18 were only too aware of the mission’s potential for disaster. Most had seen enough combat in the past months to have an inherent, visceral distrust of their enemy, an emotion validated in their minds by details revealed at the morning’s pre-flight briefing of the Japanese fighter attacks on the B-32s involved in the previous day’s mission. Added to the airmens’ underlying unease was the fact that their own defenses had been reduced by half; about five hours after that morning’s takeoff from Yontan two of the Dominators had aborted the mission due to mechanical problems and returned to Okinawa. Adding insult to injury, both Klein’s aircraft and Hobo Queen II were dealing with balky turrets and inoperable guns. Sadly, Mission 230 A-8 would ultimately play itself out in ways that would exceed even the most pessimistic crewmember’s fears. Before the day ended there would be one last desperate air combat between Americans and Japanese; that combat would come perilously close to reigniting a war that seemed all but over; and a young man would quietly bleed to death in the bright, clear skies above Tokyo, in the process gaining the dubious distinction of being the last American killed in air combat in World War II. Stephen Harding is the Editor of Military History. He is the author of 11 books, including the New York Times bestseller THE LAST BATTLE, LAST TO DIE and THE CASTAWAY’S WAR. For more great stories, subscribe to Military History magazine here and visit us on Facebook:

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Lawman Legend Bass Reeves: The Invincible Man Hunter

Lawman Legend Bass Reeves: The Invincible Man Hunter Casualty rates among deputy U.S. marshals were extremely high in Indian and Oklahoma territories, but Reeves completed his long reign there unscathed while making life miserable for outlaws…white, black or Indian. He was a frontier lawman above reproach and probably made a greater impact on his assigned jurisdiction than any other badge wearer west of the Mississippi. Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves was part Superman, part Sherlock Holmes and part Lone Ranger. But he was real, and he was black. Born a slave, Bass Reeves fled his master and soon carved a name for himself as one of the most famous marshals in the West. (Oklahoma University Library) The larger-than-life African-American marshal worked in the most dangerous area for federal peace officers, Oklahoma and Indian territories, for 32 years. Recent research shows that before the two territories merged into the state of Oklahoma in 1907, at least 114 deputy U.S. marshals died on duty there. It was no picnic for members of the Indian police or local law enforcement, either, but the challenges and hardships were usually greatest for the deputy marshals. The majority of federal lawmen were killed in the Cherokee and Creek nations of Indian Territory, within a 50-mile radius of Muskogee, in the Creek Nation. When recognizing the wild towns of the Wild West, Muskogee must be mentioned along with Tombstone, Arizona Territory; Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory; Dodge City, Kan.; and El Paso, Texas. Born a slave near Van Buren, Ark., in July 1838, young Bass moved with his owner to north Texas in the 1840s. His owner, George R. Reeves, was a farmer, tax collector and sheriff before the Civil War. During the war, Colonel Reeves organized the 11th Cavalry Regiment for Grayson County, Texas. Bass Reeves said in a 1901 interview that he had been George’s body servant but that they had parted company (not on good terms, according to family history) during the war. Supposedly, Bass and George argued during a card game, and Bass knocked his master out cold. In Texas, a slave could be killed for such an act, so Bass headed for Indian Territory and found refuge with the Creek and Seminole Indians, learning their customs and language. (After the war, George Reeves would rise to become speaker of the House of Representatives in Texas before dying from a rabid dog’s bite on September 5, 1882.) Exactly what Bass Reeves did during the Civil War after he left his master remains uncertain. One uncorroborated claim says that Reeves served in the U.S. Army as a sergeant during the conflict. It’s possible he could have been with one of the guerrilla Union Indian bands in the territory, such as the Cherokee Pins. He might also have served with the Union’s First Indian Home Guard Regiment, composed mostly of Seminoles and Creeks, under an Indian name. The Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw and Seminole), who earlier had been relocated from the Southeast to Indian Territory, fought on both sides during the conflict. Afterward, the western portion of the territory was taken away from them and set aside as reservations for Plains Indian tribes (Comanche, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Apache and Kiowa) who were subdued by the U.S. military. By the early 1870s, Bass and his family (wife, Jennie, and four children; eventually there would be 11 children) were living in Arkansas. Although other blacks lived in the countryside near Van Buren, Reeves built a substantial home for his family right in the town proper on the riverfront. Several oral stories say that Reeves served as a scout and guide for federal lawmen going into Indian Territory in search of outlaws. A better employment opportunity came in 1875. That March, Judge Isaac C. Parker took over the Fort Smith federal court in Arkansas, which had jurisdiction over all Indian Territory and western Arkansas, and he promptly ordered his marshal to hire 200 deputies. At that time, the territory consisted of all the land that would become the state of Oklahoma except for the panhandle. This was the largest federal court, in terms of area, in U.S. history, and most likely there were never more than 70 deputies covering the vast area at any one time. Bass Reeves was one of the deputies hired that year. He was skilled with weapons, could speak several Indian languages and apparently knew the lay of the land. The federal police had jurisdiction over whites or blacks that were not citizens of the respective tribes in Indian Territory. The Indians had their own police and courts for their citizens. Noncitizens who committed crimes against the Indians would have to be arrested by deputy U.S. marshals and their cases heard in federal court. Bass Reeves has been called the first commissioned African-American deputy U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi River, but this may not be true. A story in the “Indian Pioneer Papers” at the Oklahoma State History Museum in Oklahoma City tells of a posse led by one “Negro” Smith from Fort Smith in 1867. Smith was sent to catch a gang of outlaws who had robbed a stagecoach and killed the driver near Atoka, in the Choctaw Nation. The Cherokee Advocate reported on October 14, 1871, that a Cherokee Indian named Ross had killed a black deputy U.S. marshal on the banks of the Arkansas River opposite Fort Smith. Reeves, though, was undoubtedly one of the first, and he certainly became the most famous black deputy to work the Indian nations before statehood. In the late 1870s, despite being a commissioned deputy U.S. marshal, Reeves served as a posseman and went into Indian Territory with more experienced lawmen, including Deputy U.S. Marshals Robert J. Topping and Jacob T. Ayers. Later, Reeves and his good friend Deputy U.S. Marshal John H. Mershon teamed up on occasion. Federal law mandated that deputies take at least one posseman whenever they went into the field. On extended trips into the territory, deputy marshals often brought two or more possemen, along with a guard and a cook. One or two supply wagons (sometimes referred to as “tumbleweed wagons”) would serve as headquarters on the prairie while the lawmen rounded up desperadoes. The Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad tracks in the territory were known as the “deadline.” Deputies couldn’t arrest anyone east of the tracks until they were on their way back to Fort Smith. The lawmen typically traveled west to Fort Reno and Anadarko, south to Fort Sill and then back to Fort Smith. This trip took in about 400 miles and would take one to two months depending on high water. Reeves made catching criminals while in disguise part of his modus operandi. He did this throughout his years while working for the federal courts at Fort Smith, Ark., and Paris, Texas. Sometimes he would appear as a drifter, other times as a cowboy, preacher or farmer. For example, he once got a tip that some dangerous outlaws were holed up in a log cabin, so he dressed in farmer overalls and intentionally got his ramshackle wagon stuck on a nearby tree stump. When the four outlaws came out to help him get unstuck, he got the drop on them and brought them to justice. In disguise or not, it was a dangerous business. The closest he came to losing his life, he said in a 1906 newspaper interview, came sometime in 1884 while riding the Seminole whiskey trail in search of four men, two white and two black, for whom he had warrants. His pursuit was interrupted by three brothers named Brunter—who had been accused of horse stealing, robbery and several unsolved murders in Indian Territory. The Brunters got the drop on Reeves. With their guns pointed at the lawman, they ordered him to dismount and keep his hands away from his Colt revolver. Reeves played it cool, showing the brothers warrants for their arrest and asking them what day of the month it was, so that he could make a record for the government. The outlaws thought the lawman must be out of his mind. They told Reeves, “You are just ready to turn in now,” but they were laughing too hard and relaxed their guard. Reeves whipped out his Colt and killed two of the brothers as quick as lightning. While he was in the act of shooting those two, he grabbed the gun barrel of the third outlaw, who could only manage three harmless shots. Reeves hit the third Brunter in the head with his revolver, killing him. There would be no fees to collect on the three dead men, but there were now three fewer desperadoes infesting Indian Territory. Also in 1884, a benchmark year in Reeves’ long career, Bass and the noted Choctaw lawman Charles LeFlore arrested Texas horse thief Robert Landers right in Fort Smith. Reeves’ most celebrated gunfight occurred that same year. Jim Webb, the foreman of the huge Washington-McLish Ranch in the Chickasaw Nation, was his foe. A black preacher who owned a small farm adjacent to the ranch had let a fire get out of control, and it spread onto ranch land. Webb had scolded the preacher, but that didn’t satisfy his anger. He had then shot him to death. Webb was one tough hombre who had reportedly killed 11 men while living in the Brazos River region in Texas. Reeves was able to arrest Webb without incident but was forced to go after him again when the foreman jumped his bond. In June 1884, Reeves located Webb at Bywaters Store at the foothills of the Arbuckle Mountains. Webb refused to surrender this time, and the two men had a running gunfight. After nearly being shot himself, Reeves got down from his horse, raised his Winchester and shot Webb twice from a distance of about a quarter-mile. Several cowboys and the owner of the store witnessed this gunfight. Heroics like that had caused the Muskogee Indian Journal to refer to Reeves as one of the best deputy U.S. marshals in Indian Territory. At that time, after Reconstruction, it was rare to find black federal policemen anywhere in the country except Indian Territory. Reeves and the other black deputies there would blaze a trail of justice and equality for all citizens of that federal protectorate. During the territorial era, at least 50 black deputy U.S. marshals served in Indian Territory. Reeves stood out in most any gathering of marshals, white or black, and not just because he stood 6-foot-2 and weighed 180 pounds. He had a reputation for being able to whip any two men with his bare hands and manipulate six-shooters and rifles equally well with either hand. His most trusted weapon was a Winchester rifle, but he was also known to carry as many as three revolvers, two butt forward at his belt for easy access. Territorial newspapers reported that during his career he killed 14 desperadoes—but it could have been twice that number. He brought in a great many men alive, too, including outlaws with bounties on their heads. As a man hunter, he had few equals. On one occasion he hauled in 17 horse thieves in “Comanche country” near Fort Sill. Texas rustlers often ventured into Indian Territory to steal ponies from the Indian residents. Not that Bass Reeves was perfect. Nobody could be a lawman that long without chalking up a blemish or two on his record. On one of his 1884 trips into the Chickasaw Nation, Reeves shot and killed his black cook, William Leech. On April 8, while Reeves and his posse were camped near the Canadian River, he uttered a few choice words about Leech’s cooking, and Leech responded in kind. The possemen assumed the banter was all in fun, since Reeves and Leech had seemingly gotten along in the past. But this time things apparently got out of hand. Leech, according to one popular account, poured some hot grease down the throat of a puppy that Reeves had in camp, and the deputy marshal proceeded to shoot down the cook. Then again it might not have happened that way at all, and the dog might have belonged to Leech. In any case, nothing came of the shooting for a while. The next year, 1885, was considerably less eventful. But in September ’85, Bass Reeves did swear out a warrant for the arrest of the infamous female outlaw Belle Starr, as well as Fayette Barnett, for horse stealing. Reeves and Belle Starr were apparently on friendly terms. Many times in dealing with people he knew, Reeves would inform them that they were wanted in Fort Smith and it might be better if they would turn themselves in so he wouldn’t have to haul them around the countryside. Although it is not known for sure that he made this suggestion to Mrs. Starr, she did soon turn herself in at Fort Smith—the only time on record that she did so—and reportedly said that she “did not propose to be dragged around by some federal deputy.” In January 1886, two years after shooting his cook, Reeves was indicted for first-degree murder, arrested by Deputy U.S. Marshal G.J.B. Frair and held in the Fort Smith federal jail. It took six months before Reeves could make bond. On May 21, President Grover Cleveland appointed a new U.S marshal, John Carroll—the first former Confederate veteran that Reeves would serve under at Fort Smith. Whether Carroll had anything to do with the proceedings against Reeves is not known. The trial was finally held in October 1887. Eleven witnesses were called for the prosecution, while Reeves and his excellent attorneys requested 10 witnesses for the defense. Reeves testified that he had argued with Leech while in camp but that nothing had come of it. That same evening, Reeves said, a cartridge caught in his Winchester rifle and while trying to dis lodge the bullet, the gun accidentally went off. The bullet, the defendant continued, struck Leech in the neck, and though Reeves sent for a doctor, the cook expired before medical help could arrive. Reeves was acquitted of malicious murder, but because the murder trial had depleted his substantial savings, he had to sell his home in Van Buren and move his family to a house on the outskirts of Fort Smith. Reeves resumed his productive ways in the field after this interlude, once again bringing in desperadoes and villains by the dozen. In the spring of 1889, Jacob Yoes, a Union Army veteran, was appointed U.S. marshal at Fort Smith. Late that year, Yoes sent Reeves after a gang of killers, and on December 30, Reeves sent a note to the marshal saying, “Have got the three men who killed Deputy Marshal [Joseph] Lundy [on June 14, 1889].” His three prisoners were Seminole Indians— Nocus Harjo, One Prince and Bill Wolf. In April 1890, Reeves captured the notorious Seminole Tosa-lo-nah (alias Greenleaf), who had murdered and robbed three white men and four Indians. Greenleaf had been on the run from the law for 18 years, and this was the first time he was arrested. In November 1890, Reeves went after an even more famous Indian Territory outlaw, the Cherokee Ned Christie, who was accused of killing Deputy U.S. Marshal Dan Maples in May 1887. Christie had maintained his innocence but refused to come to the white man’s court, for he felt no justice would be served. Reeves and his posse attacked Ned’s hideout in the Cherokee hills, known locally as Ned’s Fort Mountain. Reeves was able to burn down the fortified cabin. At first, he believed Christie was trapped inside, but he later found out that the renegade had escaped. Christie swore vengeance on Reeves but failed to make good on the threat before a large federal posse killed Christie at Fort Mountain on November 2, 1892. The first white and black settlers had been allowed onto Indian lands in 1889, when Oklahoma Territory, just west of Indian Territory, was opened. In a 1930s interview, Harve Lovelday, an early white settler in Pottawattomie County, described the scene in the territories: In Old Oklahoma the West was West when the six-shooters worked out in the gambling halls and in the saloons of Asher, Avoca, Wanette, Earlsboro, Violet Springs, Corner, and Keokuk Falls about the time of 1889 and 1890….These small Western towns were inhabited by Negroes, whites, Indians, half-bloods, gamblers, bootleggers, killers and any kind of an outcast…. Bass Reeves, a coal-black Negro, was a U.S. Deputy Marshal during one time and he was the most feared U.S. marshal that was ever heard in that country. To any man or any criminal what was subject to arrest he did his full duty according to law. He brought men before the court to be tried fairly but many times he never brought in all the criminals but would kill some of them. He didn’t want to spend so much time in chasing down the man who resisted arrest so would shoot him down in his tracks. The new Oklahoma Territory towns were different from the Indian Territory towns in that saloons were legal in the former. Profiteers—principally white men and women—could make a killing by buying liquor in Oklahoma Territory and bringing it into Indian Territory, as long as the deputy U.S. marshals didn’t catch them. The federal court for Oklahoma Territory was in Guthrie. Reeves, like many other deputy U.S. marshals, became cross-deputized so that he could work in both territories. The worst saloon town in Oklahoma Territory was said to be the Corner, just across the boundary with the Seminole and Chickasaw nations. The term “bootlegging” supposedly came from the drovers, cowboys and ranchers who would put a flat bottle of whiskey in their boots and smuggle the contraband into Indian Territory for profit. The term “last chance” was coined here, because these border saloon towns offered the last chance to get legal whiskey before a traveler crossed into the dry Indian nations. On at least one occasion, Reeves reportedly killed a gunman in a Corner saloon who called him out for a gunfight. In late June 1891, Reeves and his posse rode into Fort Smith with eight prisoners (five wanted for murder) from the Indian nations. The captured outlaws included William Wright, a black man; Wiley Bear and John Simmer, Indians; and William McDaniel and Ben Card, white men. McDaniel and Card had been arrested for allegedly killing John Irvin, a black man, but Reeves apparently didn’t have enough solid evidence to indict the pair. The Fort Smith Weekly Elevator attacked Reeves for chaining up the two men and dragging them around Creek country for nearly a month. Most likely, Reeves was reprimanded by Marshal Yoes, but there is no record of such action. Reeves left Fort Smith around 1893 and transferred to the federal court at Paris, Texas. This court had jurisdiction over much of the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations in the 1890s. Reeves was stationed at Calvin, Choctaw Nation, and would take many of his prisoners to Pauls Valley, Chickasaw Nation, where a federal commissioner was stationed and there was a jail. Hearings would be held at Pauls Valley, and if necessary, criminals were transferred to the Texas court for trial. By the late 1890s, three federal courts were located in Indian Territory to hear major and minor cases—the Southern District at Ardmore, Central District at McAlester and Northern District at Muskogee. Federal authorities transferred Reeves to the Northern District, where he was first stationed at tiny Wetumka in the Creek Nation. By 1898 he was living in Muskogee, where he would stay until statehood in 1907. Reeves escaped many assassination attempts during his career, one of the last occurring on the evening of November 14, 1906, at Wybark, Creek Nation. While riding in his buggy looking to serve warrants, he was fired upon under a railroad trestle by unknown parties. He returned fire, but nobody was hit. By that time, Reeves was focusing on arresting black and Indian felons, though he would still arrest white outlaws if the occasion called for it. The last major gunfight that Reeves took part in erupted in Muskogee on March 26, 1907. A large group of black anarchists calling themselves the United Socialist Club had taken over a two-story house and declared that they could claim any property in town. Two city constables, John Colfield and Guy Fisher, were sent with eviction papers, only to be met at the door of the house by gunfire. Fisher was wounded, but escaped; Colfield was severely wounded and couldn’t move from where he lay. The U.S. marshal’s office was alerted, and Chief Deputy U.S. Marshal Bud Ledbetter, along with a black deputy U.S. marshal named Paul Smith and others, arrived on the scene. An intense gunfight followed. Ledbetter killed two of the offenders, and Smith saved Ledbetter’s life by killing one of the radicals who had Ledbetter pinned down. Reeves arrived late. After noting where most of the gunfire was coming from, he plugged an anarchist who was shooting down on the lawmen from an upstairs window. The lawmen killed two more of the group before the remaining seven anarchists surrendered. Constables Colfield and Fisher recovered from their wounds, and Ledbetter called Reeves “one of the bravest men this country has ever known.” Even before that shootout, on March 8, 1907, the Oklahoma City Weekly Times-Journal ran a story headlined “He has Killed Fourteen Men: A Fearless Negro Deputy of the Indian Territory.” Two days later, on March 10, The Washington Post reprinted that lengthy article. It would be the most national exposure Bass Reeves received during his lifetime. And if accurate, it means that the black anarchist he killed later that month would have been No. 15. When Oklahoma became a state on November 16, 1907, the federal office was downsized, and many of the lawmen found other jobs. Bass Reeves, now 68, took a job with the Muskogee police department, walking a downtown beat. Old-timers reported that Reeves would walk with a sidekick who carried a satchel full of pistols and that there was never a crime on his beat. Reeves would complete 32 years of service as a law officer without ever being reported wounded. He died at home of Bright’s disease on January 12, 1910, at age 71, and was buried somewhere in Muskogee. The exact location is not known today; it was probably either in the Old Agency cemetery or in a small black cemetery west of town on Fern Mountain Road. Reeves’ long service and remarkable dedication to duty could match any lawman of his time, and his six-shooter had been, as the two newspapers reported in March 1907, “a potent element in bringing two territories out of the reign of the outlaw, the horsethief and bootlegger, to a great common wealth.” Art T. Burton, a native of Oklahoma, is a history professor at South Suburban College in South Holland, Ill. His 2006 book Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves is recommended for further reading along with his 1991 book Black, Red, and Deadly: Black and Indian Gunfighters of the Indian Territories. Originally published in the February 2007 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.

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https://www.historynet.com/lawmens-heated-gun-battle-in-hot-springs.htm

Lawmen’s Heated Gun Battle in Hot Springs

Lawmen’s Heated Gun Battle in Hot Springs When it comes to naming the wildest towns in the Wild West, the mining town of Tombstone, Arizona Territory, looms near the top on most anyone’s list. Tombstone, when it was booming in the early 1880s, featured gambling, shootings, political factions that divided the law enforcement community and, of course, the gunfight near the O.K. Corral, in which three Earp brothers and Doc Holliday killed three uncooperative cowboys. On the other hand, the resort town of Hot Springs, Arkansas, which got its name from the geothermal springs in the area, probably would not even make such a ‘wildest’ list. Yet one could find a hot time in that old town, too. Hot Springs had gambling galore, its share of shootings, law enforcers who definitely did not see eye to eye and two shocking gunfights on the same day–the first resulting in no casualties, but the second leaving five men dead. The Arkansas shootout that had a higher body count than the famous 1881 Tombstone fight occurred on March 16, 1899, and pitted lawmen against lawmen–the Garland County Sheriff’s Office vs. the Hot Springs Police Department. News of the Shootout on Central Avenue made the papers from New York City to California (though it became old news fast) and left the city fathers distressed. After the gunfight, lines of visitors rushed to take the next train out of town. Hot Springs depended on the tourist trade for its economic health, and a battle between local badge-wearers in the middle of Central Avenue was not exactly good for business. Hot Springs, some 52 miles southwest of Little Rock, was a site well known to American Indians. The little village that sprang up around the springs in the late 1820s was known as Thermopolis, but its first real resort season was the summer of 1832. That year, U.S. President Andrew Jackson signed a special act of Congress to protect what became known as Hot Springs. Stage service from Little Rock began three years later, and in 1851 Hot Springs was incorporated as a town. The place became virtually deserted during the Civil War but experienced a postwar population boom as more and more visitors ventured there to bathe in–and also drink–the legendary waters. By the mid-1870s, the federal government had begun administration of the Hot Springs Reservation (which would be renamed Hot Springs National Park in 1921). On January 15, 1874, an undetermined amount of money was taken when a stagecoach was robbed five miles east of Hot Springs on the road to Malvern, Ark. The robbery has been pinned on the famous James-Younger Gang, though some historians say otherwise. About eight months later, another stage robbery occurred about 10 miles east of Hot Springs, with the thieves taking some $1,000. The same year, successful businessman Joseph ‘Diamond Jo’ Reynolds decided to take a stage from the train station at Malvern to Hot Springs, where the soothing waters would help his rheumatism. That particular stage was not held up, but the terribly bumpy ride is said to have inspired Diamond Jo to build a 22-mile connecting narrow-gauge railroad between Malvern and Hot Springs. With this more comfortable transportation, Hot Springs became one of the favorite destinations not only of one-time New Yorker Reynolds but also of many other wealthy people from across the nation. Some of these visitors wanted more than just hot thermal baths. The local people were swift to comply, and watering holes sprang up to the point where one visitor wrote home, ‘I believe there is a saloon in every other store.’ Also springing up were brothels and gaming establishments. By the late 1870s, gambling, which probably existed in Hot Springs as early as 1849, had become a local growth industry that rivaled the healing waters. The question of who would control the gambling became an issue that influenced every election for many years. In February 1884, a gunfight occurred on Central Avenue between two gambling factions, known as the Flynns and the Dorans. Frank ‘Boss Gambler’ Flynn’s control of most of the gambling houses on Central Avenue had been challenged by Major S.A. Doran, a Confederate veteran who refused to submit to Flynn’s bullying. Each man had hired gunmen to protect his interests. Flynn’s plans to ambush Major Doran didn’t work out, but Doran’s gunmen soon went to work, opening fire on Flynn and his two brothers as they rode in a horse-drawn cab along Bath House Row. In the ambush and ensuing gun battle, three men were killed and three others, including Frank Flynn, were wounded. Within a few hours, a vigilante group called the Committee of Thirteen had formed, and these vigilantes herded many gamblers at bayonet point to the trains for hasty departures. Gambling in the spa city had taken a hit, but before long it revived and came on stronger than ever. The ‘Liberals’ knew that gambling was good for business, so they strived to make Hot Springs a wide-open town again. ‘Conservatives,’ who thought that refreshing waters were enough to soothe a man’s soul, fought to suppress gambling and keep Hot Springs healthier and safer for citizens and visitors alike. The position of mayor was hotly contested every two years. The elected mayor got to pick his chief of police, who held a lot of power there in the 1880s and ’90s. Gambling and prostitution either thrived or dried up depending on the politics of the mayor and police chief. In the election for mayor in 1897, Independent candidate William L. Gordon defeated Liberal incumbent W.W. Waters. Thomas C. Toler, who had been the chief of police at the time of the Flynn-Doran gambling battle, helped Gordon get elected, so Gordon appointed him to the chief’s job again. Toler was actually a Liberal with connections in the gambling community. Unlike Mayor Gordon, Toler liked Hot Springs better when it was an open town. The two men soon argued about policies, and Gordon tried to dismiss the popular Toler. The city council members sided with the chief, so Gordon backed off. With another election coming up in April 1899, Toler suddenly threw his support to Independent candidate C.W. Fry. Fry announced that if elected he would reappoint Tom Toler as chief of police. Trouble began to brew in a town that now had some paved streets, as well as electric trolleys, or streetcars, moving hundreds of visitors every day. The Democratic mayoral candidate, young businessman George Belding, had the support of perhaps the most powerful man in Garland County, Sheriff Robert L. Williams. Belding assured Williams that if elected mayor he would make Chief Deputy Sheriff Coffee Williams, the sheriff’s brother, chief of police. Such a development would mean control of the entire county for the Williams brothers. Until the 1899 election caused them to bump heads, Toler and Bob Williams had been warm friends. Toler, 45, was an experienced lawman, having been hired as a deputy in the early 1870s by the first sheriff of Garland County, William Little, and then appointed chief of police in 1883. During the Flynn-Doran fight the following February, he had disarmed the combatants and herded some of them off to jail. Afterward, one of the gunmen brought in by Major Doran, Edward Howell, hung around town threatening to kill Chief Toler on sight. Toler headed over to Howell’s favorite drinking establishment, the Opera House Saloon, and shot the gunman dead. It was ruled self-defense. Another time, Toler got the best of a Hot Springs encounter with O.K. Corral participant Wyatt Earp, at least according to the March 17, 1899, edition of the Arkansas Democrat: ‘A dozen or more years ago, [Toler] made Wyatt Earp, a notorious western killer, walk out of Hot Springs.’ Earp, the newspaper reported, was having a run of bad luck and getting mad about it. Chief Toler arrived and took Earp aside, telling him that Hot Springs welcomed visitors but didn’t want troublemakers. Earp didn’t press the issue, but the following night Toler was again summoned because Wyatt was drinking, losing and acting surly once more. At that point, Toler informed Earp he was ‘posted’ out of town, and Wyatt departed Hot Springs without further incident. Toler, who lived with a woman referred to as Mrs. Toler in official records, was the kind of police chief the citizens of Hot Springs wanted. He and his 10-man department collected enough fines to pay the salaries of the force, but they enforced the law without any undue hardship on the tourist trade. Toler’s second-in-command, Captain Lee Haley, was a painter by trade, but he had ventured into law enforcement and come to like it. Haley, 33, had married a local girl, and they had two children. Sergeant Thomas F. Goslee, a printer by trade, was considered a top-notch officer, fearless and totally loyal to Toler. Haley, Goslee and Toler would all be involved in the March 16 fight with members of the sheriff’s office, as would detective James E. Hart. Known by many Hot Springs residents as ‘Uncle Jim,’ the English-born Hart was in his 40s but looked considerably older. Appointed chief of police by Mayor D. Kimbell in 1887, Hart had proved too straight-laced for everyone and had accepted a demotion to remain with the department. He had a wife who was blind and three children. The Hot Springs Police Department was supportive of its chief but no more so than the Garland County Sheriff’s Office was supportive of its sheriff, Bob Williams. Born in Kentucky on January 22, 1851, Bob had moved with his family to Texas during the Civil War. After the war, the Williams family tried farming in Arkansas’ Polk County. Bob married Martha Allen there in 1872, and the couple moved to Hot Springs in 1878. Once he had found financial success as the owner of a mercantile store, his parents joined him in Hot Springs, as did his older sister, Matilda Watt, and her family and his younger brother, J.C. Williams, who everyone called ‘Coffee.’ Bob Williams entered the sheriff’s race in 1886 and won as a Democrat. He was re-elected in 1888 and 1890 and then was voted in as mayor in 1893. He chose not to seek a second term. When he decided he wanted to be sheriff again in 1898, he ran successfully as an Independent. Bob Williams was an outgoing individual, polite to women and friendly to most men, except those who disagreed with him too much. His brother Coffee had greater flaws. He drank too much and spent too much time hanging around the gambling clubs. Several of his business ventures had not worked out, and Bob had had to bail him out a few times. But Bob had appointed his brother chief deputy sheriff, and Coffee had handled his duties well. Bob Williams also appointed two nephews, Sam and Will Watt, as deputies. Sam showed good judgment and composure on the job, but Will was a bit unstable and more impetuous. The sheriff’s 22-year-old son, Johnny O. Williams, was managing the mercantile store in March 1899, but he had ridden on several posses headed by his father, and he loved to go out and practice target shooting with Uncle Coffee. Bob Williams’ friend Dave Young was a part-time deputy sheriff who occasionally worked in a liquor store. Last but not least of the deputies was Ed Spear, a tall, prematurely balding man who had been in his share of trouble but was now a loyal and supportive deputy, very much in Sheriff Bob Williams’ inner circle. On the morning of March 16, 1899, a caucus of Independent Party leaders met in the City Hall office of Police Chief Toler. Mayoral candidate C.W. Fry was present, along with a dozen or more other people, including several police officers. What was said at the meeting is not known, but it stands to reason that the officers were told that if Fry was elected, then Toler would be reappointed police chief and all the policemen would be able to keep their jobs. As soon as the meeting concluded, an unidentified man phoned Bob Williams at the courthouse, telling him all about it. The angry sheriff then stormed downtown. When he arrived on Central Avenue at about 1:30 p.m., he spotted his pal Dave Young. Over lunch at the Klondike Saloon, Williams complained to Young about the disturbing meeting at City Hall. At about that time, Sergeant Tom Goslee of the Hot Springs Police Department was having a piece of pie at Corrinne Remington’s cafe. Afterward, he went to Tobe and York’s barbershop at 614 Central for a quick haircut. Goslee had left his .44-caliber service revolver in his desk, but he carried a two-shot derringer. Williams and Young finished their meal and walked north on Central to the corner of Spring Street, where they stopped to talk some more in front of Joseph Mazzi’s saloon. Seeing Goslee come out of the barber shop across the street, the sheriff called out to him. Goslee waited for a trolley car to pass, then crossed over to the two unsmiling men. Instead of shaking Goslee’s hand, Williams gave the sergeant a piece of paper. ‘These are the people who held a caucus in the chief of police’s office this morning against Belding,’ the sheriff said. Goslee could see his own name on the list. ‘And I want to know what you mean by working against me,’ Williams demanded. Goslee calmly replied, ‘I am not unfriendly to Belding and have taken no active part in the caucus you have referred to.’ But then he saw fit to defend Police Chief Toler and even accuse Williams of being Toler’s enemy. The sheriff called Goslee ‘a liar and a coward’ and began a long tirade. When Williams seemed to move his hand toward his coat, Goslee responded by drawing his derringer. ‘I want no trouble from you, as you are the sheriff of the county,’ the sergeant said, ‘but I will defend myself if forced to.’ Dave Young stepped between the two men, gently placing a hand on each man’s shoulder. ‘Boys, boys, this will not do,’ he said. Later, he would tell an acquaintance, ‘I believe that Goslee would have killed Bob Williams had I not stepped between the two.’ As it was, the sheriff opened his coat and said, ‘As you can see, I am not armed,’ but he continued fuming at Goslee. Then the sheriff saw his son Johnny come out of the City Hall Saloon, at the intersection of Central and Prospect, and broke away to greet him. According to witnesses, Johnny Williams handed his father a short-barrel .44 revolver and then called to a friend, who passed him another revolver. Someone shouted ‘Look out!’ and gunfire quickly followed. Witnesses were divided over who fired the first shot, but Goslee would have been a fool to start a street gunfight armed with only a two-shot derringer. In any case, the sergeant had soon emptied both barrels and was retreating under fire. One bullet barely missed his head and embedded in the doorframe of Justice W.A. Kirk’s office. Other bullets ricocheted against the brick wall of F.J. Mobb’s drugstore. Bob and Johnny Williams kept shooting until their guns were empty, but they couldn’t get their man. Goslee slipped down an alley and stumbled into the lobby of the Sumpter House, not wounded but badly shaken. Goslee remained in the little hotel until Chief Toler and another officer arrived to escort him to City Hall. Toler notified David Cloud, Garland County prosecuting attorney, who quickly took statements from Sergeant Goslee and Sheriff Williams. Each blamed the other. Cloud believed Goslee and issued a warrant for Bob Williams’ arrest. The sheriff made bail, but the charge against him did nothing to improve his mood. Even though 14 shots had been fired, nobody had been hurt in the gunfight. Credit poor marksmanship or dumb luck. But the trouble wasn’t over, not by a long shot. Less than three hours later, their marksmanship would improve or their luck would run out–two of them would be dead and the third indicted for murder. The city fathers were not happy that a gunfight had taken place on Hot Springs’ main street, and Toler called Goslee into his office and said that the volatile situation had to be defused before further trouble occurred. He suggested that the sergeant meet with Johnny Williams, shake his hand and maybe have a drink, while he himself would try to patch things up with Sheriff Bob Williams. Toler then called for a meeting in his home, not wanting to risk another leak from the ‘City Hall spy.’ In attendance were C.W. Fry, Sergeant Goslee, Captain Haley, Arlington Hotel owner Samuel H. Stitt, and large-property owner George M. French. The chief went over the events of the day, and they discussed their plans on how to lessen the tension between the two law enforcement departments. When Toler called Bob Williams at his office and asked to meet for drinks at 5:30 p.m., William reluctantly agreed but said it had to be a short meeting because his daughter Florence was celebrating her 21st birthday that night. Williams then contacted his brother, Chief Deputy Sheriff Coffee Williams, at the Arkansaw Club, an elaborate gambling and sporting palace, and told him to get back to the sheriff’s office. After that, the sheriff heard from his son Johnny, who said that Goslee had called him to set up a friendly meeting. Bob Williams was suspicious. When Coffee arrived, the sheriff told him to accompany Johnny to the meeting. Coffee went to his desk and took out a revolver, which he stuck in the back of his waistband. Next, the chief deputy sheriff put on a brown suit coat, long enough to hide the gun. Coffee then walked with nephew Johnny on the east side of Central Avenue, heading north. They were soon joined by Deputy Ed Spear, and the three men stopped to talk. Back at the courthouse, Bob Williams briefed nephews Sam and Will Watt on what was going on and strapped on an old Colt revolver. They then headed outside toward Central Avenue. Before long, Dave Young joined them. After the small meeting at Toler’s house ended, the chief of police, Captain Haley and Sergeant Goslee walked south on Central Avenue. Shortly after passing Oliver and Finney’s grocery store at 607 Central, they spotted Coffee Williams, Johnny Williams and Ed Spear walking north on the same side of the street. As the two groups neared each other, Johnny Williams stepped up and extended his hand to Goslee. The sergeant shook hands and said, ‘Johnny, I am an officer and can’t be shooting around on the streets.’ Young Williams smiled and said, ‘All right, Tom, I want everybody for my friend.’ Seeing how well things were going, Chief Toler and Captain Haley moved down the sidewalk to Lemp’s Beer Depot, where Haley’s brother-in-law, Louis Hinkle, was a bartender. Lemp’s folding doors were open wide so that customers could stand at the bar and still enjoy the fresh air. Haley leaned against one end of the bar to talk to Hinkle. Chief Deputy Sheriff Coffee Williams and Deputy Spear had also drifted up the sidewalk and were now only a few feet away from Haley. Seeing Spear standing there, Haley addressed him, ‘Ed, I understand you have told people that if I put my head out, you’ll shoot it off.’ The accusation appeared to stun Spear for a moment. Then the deputy said, ‘Haley, anybody who said I told that is a goddamn liar.’ Hinkle took offense at Spear’s denial. ‘Don’t you make me out a liar,’ he snarled. Hinkle then put one of his powerful arms around Spear’s neck and tilted his head upward. In his other arm, the brawny bartender held an Anheuser-Busch knife with a 6-inch blade. It was no bluff. In one motion, Hinkle slashed Spear’s throat. With his throat bleeding profusely, Spear struggled to free himself. Hinkle wasn’t ready to let go. ‘Stop, for God’s sake,’ Haley pleaded. Chief Toler and Sergeant Goslee both started toward the struggling men, intending to break them apart. Before they got there, Spear twisted partially free, just enough so that he could yank out his .45-caliber revolver and pull the trigger. The bullet hit Hinkle in the throat and exited below his ear. The bartender released Spear and staggered backward. Coffee Williams took the opportunity to pull out his revolver and shoot Hinkle in the chest. Meanwhile there was more shooting going on. While running on the sidewalk toward the fray, Goslee went down. Johnny Williams had shot him twice, one bullet striking the sergeant just below the right knee and the other hitting him in the right groin, severing the femoral artery. The sergeant struggled up onto his left elbow and fired back at Johnny Williams, who was some 35 or 40 feet away. The shot struck the sheriff’s son in the head. Young Williams crumpled to the sidewalk near the entrance to the Klondike Saloon. He was mortally wounded, but Goslee wouldn’t make it either. A shot from Coffee Williams finished off the sergeant. Tom Toler quickly got into the act, firing at Coffee Williams, who backed into the street and took refuge behind a parked express wagon. Coffee fired back at the chief of police from behind the wagon, but Toler’s attention was soon diverted by a shot fired at him by the game Ed Spear, who was not letting his throat wound knock him out of the fight. Toler sent a couple of bullets Spear’s way, one of which grazed Spear’s right shoulder. With Spear and Coffee Williams shooting at him from both sides and the merchants’ doors all locked behind him, Toler felt trapped. He ran north on the sidewalk, trying to get a clear shot at Coffee, but the deputy chief moved from the back of the express wagon to the front and began firing his two six-shooters over the seat. Two bullets struck Toler at virtually the same time–the one that got him in the back of the head probably delivered by Coffee Williams, the one that got him in the chest probably unleashed by Spear. Either shot would have been fatal. But what of Captain Haley, whose comment to Spear seemingly opened the door for all the violence that followed? Witnesses later reported that when the first shot was fired by Spear, Haley had stood stunned for a few seconds and then had turned and run across Central Avenue, eventually finding refuge in Tobe and York’s barbershop. ‘A shot was fired and blood flew in my face and eyes and I retreated into the street blinded,’ Haley later testified. Strangely, neither Spear nor Coffee Williams had appeared concerned that the police captain was behind them on the west side of the street. Indeed, Haley never returned to the conflict. He had fled, much as Ike Clanton had done during the October 1881 Tombstone fight. After Toler went down, the shooting stopped. Hinkle and Goslee were already dead, Johnny Williams was dying on the sidewalk, and Haley was in hiding. Spear managed to stumble into the Klondike Saloon. ‘Boys, I am badly wounded,’ he gasped. ‘For God’s sake send for a doctor to help me.’ He then collapsed on the saloon floor, but, amazingly enough, it would not be his last gasp or last collapse. Coffee Williams stepped out from behind the express wagon and found himself standing alone in the street. He rushed over to his nephew, Johnny Williams, and called out for a doctor. But Coffee wasn’t sure it was really safe on the street. Still clutching his two six-shooters, he backed through the doorway of the Klondike. Citizens were slow in opening their doors and coming out to check on the damage. Only a few brave souls had done so by the time Sheriff Bob Williams arrived on the scene with deputies Sam and Will Watt and part-time deputy Dave Young. The sheriff first saw the bodies of Hinkle, Goslee and Toler, but his first cry of anguish didn’t come until he recognized that the fourth fallen man was his son, Johnny. Turning to his brother, the sheriff said: ‘My God, Coffee, did you do this? Is Johnny dead?’ Coffee was ready with an answer: ‘Yes, Johnny is dead, and I killed the son-of-a-bitch who killed him.’ At that point, the sheriff probably figured that the police had tried to ambush his men, not knowing that it was a spur-of-the-moment knifing by bartender Hinkle that had led to all the rest. Will Joyce, a friend of the sheriff’s, later testified that he saw Bob Williams cursing and stalking up and down with a revolver in each hand. Joyce helped carry Johnny into the Klondike Saloon while the young man’s father continued to rage. Resident C.H. Weaver, who had considered running for mayor, tried to calm the sheriff, but Bob Williams stuck both revolvers in Weaver’s face and cursed him. Weaver walked away, badly shaken but unharmed. Detective Jim Hart would not be so lucky. He had been over at the Diamond Jo Railroad Depot trying to keep riffraff and con men out of town when someone rode up to him and announced that there was ‘big trouble over on Central Avenue.’ Hart hurried to the shocking scene, where he didn’t even bother taking his revolver out, according to the later testimony of four people, including Mrs. Toler. That didn’t mean anything to Bob Williams. The sheriff walked up to Hart, grabbed the lapel of his coat with his left hand and said, ‘Here is another of those sons-of-bitches!’ Cocking the revolver in his right hand, Williams fired point-blank into Hart’s face. The hapless detective fell, his face blackened from the muzzle blast and his scalp blown off. That did not stop Deputy Will Watt from reaching over the shoulder of his uncle-sheriff and firing two more bullets into Hart. People who had come out of stores and homes fled back inside again. But not Mrs. Toler, who stood with her hands on her hips, staring directly at Bob Williams. She later said that the sheriff told her, ‘Yes, we got Toler, and I wish we had you where we’ve got him.’ After he said it, she went home without a word-not to weep but to get a loaded gun that her late husband kept in a bureau drawer. She wrapped the gun in her shawl and went back to Central Avenue, intent on ‘killing Bob Williams,’ but by then the sheriff was gone. Johnny Williams had not yet died, so Bob Williams had ordered some men to take his son home. The little birthday party for the sheriff’s daughter, Florence, was off. Instead the Williamses made Johnny as comfortable as possible and stayed with him until he died at 9:30 that night. Back on Central Avenue, the other fallen men lay unattended. Members of the sheriff’s office were still acting as if the conflict would resume. Dave Young, who had been unarmed and had not taken part in the street fight, borrowed a doublebarreled shotgun from one of the saloons. Coffee Williams, who had emptied two revolvers in the fight, tried to get more ammunition from Babcock’s hardware store. ‘They would not give me any,’ he said later. Nephew Will Watt then found him some cartridges. These preparations were not necessary, however. The Hot Springs Police Department had been defeated, and the carnage was over. Amazingly, though five men had been shot down in the Shootout on Central Avenue, the only bystander wounded was a young man named Alan Carter, who took a stray bullet while watching the action. Storeowners called City Hall to complain about the dead bodies on the sidewalk. Finally, Constable Sam Tate and his deputy, Jack Archer, brought the bodies of Hinkle, Goslee, Toler and Hart by freight wagon to the Gross Funeral Home. Tate stood in the rear of the wagon, with arms crossed and displaying two drawn revolvers. Mayor W.L. Gordon called an emergency meeting at City Hall and appointed L.D. Beldin to replace the fallen Tom Toler as chief of police. Next, Gordon and Beldin selected 150 men to carry out armed patrols to prevent any unlawful acts. They could not, however, stop visitors from departing town in droves. ‘The tragedy at Hot Springs resulting in the killing of five men and the probable fatal wounding of a sixth is one of the most deplorable affairs of this kind that has ever occurred in the state of Arkansas,’ the Arkansas Gazette stated. The Arkansas Democrat compared the street fight to those that had occurred earlier on the Western frontier: ‘That was a terrible affair at Hot Springs. Five men killed and another wounded in a street duel is a record seldom attained by the wild, reckless elements in new western towns. It is needless to say the whole state was shocked by the news of the tragedy.’ Hearings were held at City Hall the next day. Governor Dan Jones attended at the request of a number of businessmen. Coroner E.A. Shippey presided over the inquest. The jury quickly concluded that Sam Watt and Dave Young had not taken an active part in the gunplay. R.L. (‘Bob’) Williams, Coffee Williams, Will Watt and the wounded Ed Spear were charged with ‘unjustifiable homicide’ and were remanded to the county jail. All made bail. A series of courtroom trials began, but all came to naught. Spear claimed that he acted in self-defense after Hinkle attacked him with a knife. Coffee Williams claimed that he had shot Hinkle to help a fellow deputy in need, and that he had fired at Goslee and Toler only because they were shooting at him. The trials of Sheriff Williams and Will Watt ended in hung juries. Although several witnesses testified that Williams and Watt had shot down detective Hart, several other people came forth to say that Hart had first drawn his gun on Williams. Neither the sheriff nor his brother nor his nephew nor Ed Spear would have to serve a single day in prison. Hart’s blind widow later filed a civil suit for $20,000 against Sheriff Williams, but Will Watt testified that he had killed Hart to save his uncle’s life, and the jury found for the defendant. Understandably, Hot Springs would take some time to recover from its Tombstonelike gunfight. For one thing, the relations between the Garland County Sheriff’s Office and the Hot Springs Police Department remained strained well into the 20th century. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Wild West magazine today!

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https://www.historynet.com/leah-rosie-rosenfeld.htm

Leah Rosie Rosenfeld

Leah Rosie Rosenfeld It might come as a surprise to moms, daycare workers, or any woman who has carried a weighty toddler on her hip that there were once “women’s protective laws” forbidding members of the female sex from taking jobs that required them to lift more than 25 pounds or work more than eight hours a day. Leah “Rosie” Rosenfeld was a single mother of a dozen children working in the parched towns of southeastern California’s Mojave Desert for the Southern Pacific Railroad, when she came head-to-head with these so-called women’s protective laws in 1955. Rosenfeld applied for a promotion to become a station agent, but was passed over for a male employee with a decade’s less experience. Southern Pacific used women’s protective laws as cover for not promoting Rosenfeld, arguing the new job would require her to lift more than 25 pounds. As Rosenfeld later told railroad historian Shirley Burman in a 2009 interview for Trains magazine, she was already lifting far heavier loads than 25 pounds in the current job she had with Southern Pacific, and was getting paid less than she would have as station agent. For more than a decade, Rosenfeld kept applying for promotions, and Southern Pacific kept passing her over for male employees with less experience. In 1966 Southern Pacific denied her a promotion for the fourth time, again citing women’s protective laws, at which point Rosenfeld sought help from the newly-formed Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). This federal agency is responsible for enforcing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which “prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.” The EEOC encouraged Rosenfeld to sue Southern Pacific for violating federal law. Rosenfeld’s lawsuit claimed Southern Pacific discriminated against her when it hired a junior male employee instead of Rosenfeld “solely because of her sex.” On Aug. 30, 1968, the court ruled in Rosenfeld’s favor. Southern Pacific quickly appealed the verdict to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But the national news media was already taking notice of Rosenfeld’s groundbreaking legal moves. The NBC News program “The Huntley Brinkley Report” featured Rosenfeld on its April 1, 1970 broadcast about women filing discrimination lawsuits against employers who wouldn’t hire them solely because of their sex. Interviewed at the desk in the train station where she worked, the petite Rosenfeld, her gray hair loosely pulled back from her face, said matter-of-factly: “There may be some women who work for the pleasure of it, but I think most work because they have to. They have a family to support and they need the money. And I haven’t noticed that the grocery stores give us any discount on food, and yet we’re expected to work at a lower wage. And I don’t think it’s fair.” On June 5, 1971 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s decision to invalidate sections of the California Labor Code, stating, “The premise of Title VII, the wisdom of which is not in question here, is that women are now to be on equal footing with men… The footing is not equal if a male employee may be appointed to a particular position on a showing that he is physically qualified, but a female employee is denied an opportunity to demonstrate personal physical qualification.” The court’s decision made headlines, but not all of them were celebratory. The San Bernardino County Sun ran a story from the United Press International wire service with the patronizing banner: “Lady, You Can Have the Job If You Can Lift 50 Pounds.” Rosenfeld told friend and railroad historian Burman she didn’t have much time to enjoy her promotion before she retired. But her actions helped the countless women who would come after her. As Rosenfeld’s attorney wrote to his client in a letter, “You must realize that you were a pioneer in the battle for sex equality and that you made legal history. You should be proud of what you have done.” Bibliography Munts, Raymond, and Rice David C. “Women Workers: Protection or Equality?” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 24.1 (1970): 3-13. Web. Mackin, Catherine. “The Huntley-Brinkley Report.” The Huntley-Brinkley Report. NBC News. 1 Apr. 1970. Television. Dow, Bonnie J. “Chapter 2.” Watching Women’s Liberation, 1970: Feminism’s Pivotal Year on the Network News. N.p.: U of Illinois, 2014. 77-78. Print. Burman, Shirley. “Women and Railroading.” Trains Magazine. Kalmbach Publishing Co., 16 Nov. 2009. Web. 24 June 2016. “Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. USA.gov, n.d. Web. 24 June 2016. Leah Rosenfeld, Appellee, v. Southern Pacific Company, a Delaware Corporation, Appellant.leah Rosenfeld, Appellee, v. Southern Pacific Company, a Delaware Corporation, Et Al., Appellants, 444 F.2d 1219 (9th Cir. 1971). U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. 1 June 1971. Justia US Law. Web. 24 June 2016. UPI. “Lady, You Can Have the Job If You Can Lift 50 Pounds.” The San Bernardino County Sun 5 June 1971: A17. Newspapers.com. Web. 24 June 2016.

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What We Learned: from the Battle of 73 Easting

What We Learned: from the Battle of 73 Easting On Feb. 26, 1991, the three ground squadrons of the U.S. 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment were part of the Allied effort to retake Kuwait from Iraq. The 2nd ACR’s mission was to establish contact with the main Iraqi Republican Guard defenses, determine the enemy’s strength, find or create weakness and pull the following Allied heavy divisions into the fight under advantageous conditions. The 2nd Squadron’s E Troop—130 soldiers equipped with nine M1A1 Abrams tanks, 12 Bradley fighting vehicles and two 120mm mortars—was the first to make contact with the Republican Guard. I was E Troop’s commander. It had rained very hard during the night; a heavy fog remained in the morning. The fog eventually lifted, only to be replaced by a sandstorm that limited visibility to very short distances. Just after 1600 on the 26th, E Troop received orders to advance to the 67 Easting, a north-south grid line on the map. The troop moved in a formation that placed one scout platoon in the lead with three scout sections of two cavalry fighting vehicles each in a V-formation. The other scout platoon moved along the troop’s southern flank, its 25mm chain guns oriented south to cover the gap between E Troop and the 2nd ACR’s 3rd Squadron. The troop’s mortar section followed the first platoon, and the nine M1A1s moved behind the mortars in a nine-tank wedge, with the commander’s tank in the center. The cavalrymen were unaware they were paralleling a road that ran west to east along their boundary with 3rd Squadron, through a small uninhabited village and into Kuwait. They also did not know they were entering a training ground occupied by a brigade of the Tawakalna Division, one of Saddam Hussein’s best-equipped units. Its mission was to halt the American advance into Kuwait. The Iraqi commander thought it ideal ground from which to defend. Unaware that American units had received global positioning systems, he assumed they would move along roads to avoid becoming lost in the featureless desert, thus he organized his defense along the road by fortifying the village with anti-aircraft guns (used in ground mode), machine guns and infantry. The defense was fundamentally sound. He took advantage of an imperceptible rise in the terrain that ran perpendicular to the road and directly through the village to organize a “reverse slope” defense on the east side of that ridge. He built two engagement areas, or kill sacks, on the east side of the ridge, north and the south of the village, emplaced minefields to disrupt forward movement and dug in approximately 40 tanks and 16 BMPs (infantry fighting vehicles) about 1,000 yards from the ridge. His plan was to engage and destroy U.S. forces piecemeal as they moved across the crest. Hundreds of infantry occupied bunkers and trenches between his armored vehicles. He positioned a reserve of 18 T-72s, other armored vehicles and his command post along another subtle ridgeline approximately 3,000 yards farther east. At 1607 Staff Sgt. John McReynolds’ Bradley drove atop an Iraqi bunker serving as an observation post. Two enemy soldiers emerged and surrendered, and McReynolds took them to the rear. The Bradley of McReynolds’ wingman, Sergeant Maurice Harris, came under fire. As Harris engaged the enemy with his 25mm, 1st Lt. Tim Gauthier fired a TOW missile into the village so the explosion would orient our tanks. After my gunner, Staff Sgt. Craig Koch, fired a round to mark the target center, all nine tanks fired high explosive rounds into the village to suppress the enemy position. As 1st Platoon Staff Sgt. David Lawrence’s gunner, Sergeant Bradley Feltman, killed a T-72 with a TOW, E Troop received permission to advance two miles to 70 Easting. The troop shifted to a “tanks lead” formation. When my tank crested a rise north of the village, Koch reported, “Tanks direct front.” From my hatch I could see eight T-72s in prepared positions directly to our front. As I sent a contact report to the troop, Koch destroyed two more tanks. Then all nine Abrams engaged together as we advanced. Within about a minute everything in the range of our guns was in flames. As E Troop advanced through the smoke of burning enemy tanks, it engaged additional armored vehicles and large numbers of infantry. As the troop cleared the western defensive positions, my executive officer, Lieutenant John Gifford, radioed, “I know you don’t want to know this right now, but you’re at the limit of advance; you’re at the 70 Easting.” I responded, “Tell them we can’t stop. Tell them we’re in contact, and we have to continue this attack. Tell them I’m sorry.” E Troop continued toward a ridgeline, the 73 Easting, on which the enemy commander had positioned 18 reserve T-72 tanks and other armored vehicles. My tank and others destroyed the first of the reserve from a range of approximately 1,000 yards beginning at about 1640. We could not see the others until we crested the rise and entered the assembly area. The enemy reserve was attempting to move out, but E Troop tanks destroyed all of them at close range before they could deploy. As the troop consolidated its position, it received sporadic contact, ranging from machine-gun fire to one company-sized counterattack by T-72s and BMPs. E Troop destroyed those and other enemy vehicles at long range from its dominating position on the ridge the enemy reserve had occupied. The mortar section suppressed enemy infantry farther east, and two artillery strikes devastated enemy logistical bases. First Sgt. Bill Virrill led a team to clear bunkers using grenades and satchel charges. Just after 2200 the 1st Infantry Division moved forward through the Allied frontline in Third Squadron’s sector to E Troop’s south. The Battle of 73 Easting was a lopsided victory. In just 23 minutes E Troop destroyed approximately 50 T-72s, 25 armored personnel carriers, 40 trucks and numerous other vehicles, without suffering any casualties. Lessons: ■ Prepare for the human and psychological dimension of close combat. Leaders must develop tough, cohesive teams with the confidence to overcome fear and accomplish the mission. ■ Lead from the front. Leaders must build well-trained, combat-ready teams and lead by example. ■ Train as you expect to fight. Tough, realistic training enables soldiers and units to respond immediately, effectively and cohesively despite the intensity of battle. ■ Use airpower and technology. Air supremacy and technological overmatch win battles. ■ Shoot first. In armored combat, the first blow can be decisive if fire is accurate, overwhelming and followed up with offensive action. ■ Gain and maintain the initiative over the enemy. Do not allow the enemy to recover from initial blows. ■ Decentralize tactical decision-making, trust subordinates and encourage initiative in the field. ■ Exploit the enemy’s tactical weaknesses and low skill levels. ■ Read and apply relevant lessons from military history. E Troop based its preparations for desert combat on experiences during the North African campaign in World War II and the Arab-Israeli wars.

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What We Learned from the Battle of Taranto

What We Learned from the Battle of Taranto The 1940 British attack on the Italian naval base at Taranto had a significant impact on the early stages of World War II in the Mediterranean. It also had implications that went far beyond that time and place. Among Britain’s objectives was the preservation of Malta as an operational hub in the Mediterranean. For their part the Italians needed to preserve the battleships, cruisers and destroyers that supported Italian ground operations in North Africa, while also threatening British logistics in the theater. Those conflicting military objectives collided at Taranto on Nov. 11, 1940. The British night attack involved 21 Fairey Swordfish biplanes, launched in two waves from the Royal Navy carrier HMS Illustrious. Some aircraft were armed with torpedoes, others carried bombs. The torpedo attacks sank one Italian battleship and heavily damaged two others, and a heavy cruiser and several destroyers took bomb hits. It was an impressive score for a vintage aircraft the British affectionately dubbed the “Stringbag” for the variety of weapons and other gear it could carry. Prime Minister Winston Churchill assessed the impact of the raid in the House of Commons: The result, while it affects decisively the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean, also carries with it reactions upon the naval situation in every quarter of the globe. In light of widespread skepticism at the time about the viability of carrier-based airpower, the comment of Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, British commander in chief in the Mediterranean, was perhaps more noteworthy: Taranto and the night of November 11–12, 1940, should be remembered for ever [sic] as having shown once and for all that in the Fleet Air Arm the Navy has its most devastating weapon. In fact the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean was not altered as radically as Churchill claimed. Yes, Malta remained a crucial British base, but it faced continuous threat by land-based Italian and German aircraft, as did the shipping that supported it. In addition, the Italians maintained the basic integrity of their fleet and logistic support of their North African operations. In the long view of history, however, the Battle of Taranto changed the face of naval warfare forever. It signaled the replacement of the battleship by the aircraft carrier as the centerpiece of naval forces and an accompanying shift in naval tactics and strategies. The Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ferociously confirmed that transition. Of greatest historical significance, however, tactical airpower projected by sea quickly became a crucial component of U.S. national power, and more than seven decades later that special element of global power remains in full force. Lessons: ■ As the torpedoes and bombs exploded at Taranto, so did the traditional naval combat doctrines based on the big guns of battleships. ■ New technologies and the new tactics they enable can be surprisingly effective in applying ancient military maxims, such as Sun-tzu’s advice to “appear where you are least expected.” ■ Never underestimate the troublemaking capacity of a naval aviator at the controls of an aircraft—even one he jokes about—attached to a torpedo or bombs. ■ Surprise remains an invaluable force multiplier in naval warfare, whether you’re talking about triremes or ballistic missile submarines. ■ Admiral Lord Nelson’s combat doctrine—“the boldest measures are the safest”—articulated before the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, is timeless. ■ Others will mimic a successful tactic: What worked at Taranto was even more effective at Pearl Harbor. Originally published in the July 2013 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here.

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What We Learned From… Siege of Jadotville, 1961

What We Learned From… Siege of Jadotville, 1961 On June 30, 1960, amid violent riots after 52 years of colonial rule, Belgium reluctantly granted independence to Congo. No longer satisfied with the status quo, black enlisted men in the Force Publique (Congo’s military) mutinied against their white Belgian officers, and the country soon erupted in anti-white violence. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba subsequently Africanized the military as the Armée Nationale Congolaise, prompting Belgium to deploy its own troops to safeguard white citizens. Lumumba in turn petitioned the United Nations for the removal of the Belgian troops. The U.N. Security Council passed a resolution to that effect and ordered peacekeeping troops to the country. On July 11, four days before the first U.N. troops arrived, the southeastern province of Katanga, with support from Belgian troops and businessmen, seceded from Congo. The move augured financial collapse, as the majority of the nation’s revenue came from the mining region. The last Belgian troops left Congo proper by July 23, but Belgian and mercenary forces remained in Katanga. As tensions threatened to erupt into civil war, the U.N. sent additional troops, and by early 1961 its peacekeeping force numbered 20,000 men. That August the U.N. ordered its “Blue Helmets” into the breakaway province. Their primary mandate was to arrest and repatriate Belgian troops and mercenaries, effectively ending the revolt. The troops lacked accurate intelligence and were ill equipped, carrying gear better suited to their original policing mission. Furthermore, the Katangese, white and black alike, largely regarded the peacekeepers as invaders. Among the U.N. forces was the 158-man Company A of the Irish army’s 35th Infantry Battalion, led by Commandant Pat Quinlan. In early September the unit was sent to the remote mining town of Jadotville, 80 miles northwest of the Katangese capital of Elisabethville. Though most of Quinlan’s men were in their late teens or 20s and had never seen action, they had gained experience and developed a solid rapport while patrolling the region in previous weeks. They were armed with modern FN FAL battle rifles, but much of their supporting equipment dated to World War II, including Vickers machine guns, 60 mm mortars and a Bren gun. Noting a buildup of hostile forces, Quinlan ordered his men to stockpile water and dig trenches. The assault came on the morning of September 13, as 3,000 Katangese soldiers attacked the garrison under the direction of foreign mercenaries. Though outnumbered 20-to-1, Company A held its ground for five days. Finally, on September 17, his unit’s ammo, food and water exhausted and with no orders to the contrary, Quinlan was compelled to surrender. Some 300 Katangese lay dead, another 1,000 wounded. Company A had suffered just five wounded. After weeks of negotiations between U.N. officials and the Katangese, the Irishmen were sent home. Treated as outcasts for having capitulated, they were branded the “Jadotville Jacks.” Their reputation was somewhat restored by a 2016 film about the siege. Lessons: Accurate intelligence is crucial. Poor intel led to a breakdown in U.N. planning, resulting in Company A’s placement in an untenable position. Overconfidence breeds failure. Boasting better weaponry and numerical superiority, the Katangese sensed an easy victory. They miscalculated the resolve of the Irish peacekeepers. Plan for the worst. Had U.N. commanders anticipated the worst-case scenario, Company A would have had adequate air and ground support. Learn from your mistakes. The Congo Crisis was the U.N.’s first peacekeeping mission with a significant military component. It served as a training ground for subsequent operations, though U.N. forces again experienced setbacks in Rwanda in 1994 and Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995.

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Leave Them Standing

Leave Them Standing Visiting Gettysburg National Military Park should be unsettling. The site exists, after all, because of a breathtaking failure of the nation’s electoral system in 1860. Powerful members of Southern society thought Republican victory menaced the long-term viability of slavery and refused to accept the verdict of the ballot box. They dismembered the republic and opened the way for a war whose memory grappled with massive human loss, emancipation’s vast political and social consequences, and anger that lingered for years. As the nation continues to struggle with that memory, a sound understanding of the war and its legacies demands a level of discomfort. The presence of Confederate monuments at Gettysburg will upset some visitors, but that is a price worth paying to protect a valuable and instructive memorial landscape. The need to accept discomfort merits attention because heated debates regarding the Civil War’s memorial landscape have included calls to remove Confederate monuments at Gettysburg. These debates on social media, in the U.S. House of Representatives, and elsewhere raise the question of how best to handle the conflict’s deeply, and sometimes violently, contested memory. No other era in our history features the unfathomable complexity of political, social, and constitutional fracturing that sundered the republic and unleashed frightful slaughter. Through 12 years of Reconstruction, decades of Jim Crow rule in the South, the Civil Rights movement of the mid-20th Century, and beyond, conflicting memories of the Civil War affected national politics and culture. President Harry Truman offers his view of the Battle of Gettysburg to reporters from the base of the Virginia Memorial. (Courtesy of the Adams County Historical Society) Gettysburg National Military Park offers superb opportunities to study how the war has been remembered. The battlefield yields insights into memory traditions developed by both the war’s winners and losers. Because most Americans have little or no appreciation for the difference between history and memory, between what actually happened, and how events have been interpreted by different groups at different times, the memorials at Gettysburg hold substantial value as educational tools. As part of this commemorative landscape, which developed over more than a century and a quarter and retains great historical integrity, Confederate monuments should be woven into a touring narrative devoted to how Americans have recalled their defining national trauma. The addition of contextual waysides would enhance the quality of the educational experience by helping visitors recognize ideas and themes associated with various streams of memory. Before moving on, I will acknowledge that some critics have questioned the educational value of monuments. Education cannot reach everyone, they insist, and in the meantime monuments can offend some people—so we should take them down to make everyone feel safe. These arguments are misguided. Education is not just a convenient rationalization in support of retaining some elements of the memorial landscape; it is the only hope for a serious, productive engagement with our past—warts and all. And no education of any value depends on selective erasure of troubling dimensions of America’s story. History should not be turned into a simplistic morality play juxtaposing good and evil, heroes and villains, and contrived to serve current political goals. A memory tour at Gettysburg would illuminate controversies relating to secession, slavery, and reconciliation. It is also important to note that Confederate monuments in a national battlefield park, where professional staff are entrusted with preserving and interpreting the materials of Civil War history and memorialization, should not be declared identical to those in front of civic buildings, in public parks, or on campuses (the latter raise a set of their own particular issues). The Gettysburg park’s website places the number of monuments, markers, and memorials at 1,328, just more than 200 of which (15 percent) can be designated as Confederate. A few deal with soldiers from both sides. The majority of Confederate markers give brigade and battery positions, strengths, and casualties. Others do the same for divisions and corps headquarters and a few regiments. Purely informational, these markers seem ill-suited to provoke outrage. The most visible and controversial Confederate monuments are the 11 dedicated to individual states. They represent, in stone and bronze along Seminary Ridge, tangible evidence of history’s sharp and uncomfortable edges. They evoke the Confederate republic established to maintain a slaveholding society—and most especially the Rebel armies that pushed the United States to the precipice of disaster. Their presence forces us to acknowledge the messy interplay between history and memory. Without them, visitors might wonder why the Army of the Potomac went to Gettysburg and why more than a thousand Union regimental and other monuments dot the surrounding fields, ridges, and woods. A memory tour at Gettysburg should stress that Confederate memorialization proved controversial from the outset. In 1887, for example, a veteran of the 73rd Ohio Infantry spoke bluntly at a program in the National Cemetery: “I do not believe there is another nation in the civilized world that would permit a rebel monument to stand upon its soil for a single day, and I can see neither wisdom nor patriotism in building them here.” The earliest Confederate monument, to the 1st Maryland Infantry Battalion, went up in 1886, but with the designation “2nd MD. INFANTRY C.S.A.” carved on the front. The Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association mandated the change because two loyal units—1st Maryland Regiment, Potomac Home Brigade Volunteer Infantry, and 1st Maryland Eastern Shore Infantry—deserved precedence. All three monuments adorn the slope of Culp’s Hill, and visitors can see that “1 MD. CHANGED TO” has been carved in small letters just above “2nd MD. INFANTRY C.S.A.”—a lesson in disputed memory etched on a single piece of stone. The Mississippi State Monument depicts a soldier defending the “righteous cause” of the South. (Maurice Savage/Alamy Stock Photo) The imposing Virginia monument fits squarely within the Lost Cause tradition. It avoids the topic of slavery, a striking illustration of how memory can mask the reality of history. Its sparse text—“Virginia to Her Sons at Gettysburg”—conveys no political message, but Robert E. Lee, whose mounted figure gazes eastward toward Cemetery Ridge, carried enormous ideological weight among Lost Cause advocates and continues to be a flashpoint. A wayside should instruct visitors that by 1917, when the monument was dedicated, Lee had become a national hero for many Americans, central to a reconciliation memory that would witness, in 1925, a congressional resolution authorizing “restoration of the Lee Mansion in the Arlington National Cemetery” and a U.S. 50-cent piece featuring Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Previously, a statue of Lee had been placed in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall (a Virginia commission voted unanimously to remove it in July 2020). The Alabama and North Carolina monuments focus on soldiers. The former, erected in 1933, bears the inscription “ALABAMIANS! Your Names Are Inscribed on Fames Immortal Scroll” and the latter, Gutzon Borglum’s sculpture of five Tar Heel infantrymen completed four years earlier, just the words “North Carolina.” A United Daughters of the Confederacy tablet, situated just west of Borglum’s grouping, echoes inscriptions on monuments to fallen Rebels across the South: “To the eternal glory of the North Carolina soldiers. Who on this battlefield displayed heroism unsurpassed sacrificing all in support of their cause.” Five state monuments and the Memorial to the Soldiers and Sailors  of the Confederacy were erected during the Civil War centennial. The monuments, a wayside should explain, coincided with some of the most famous episodes of the Civil Rights movement and passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Soldiers and Sailors memorial casts Confederates as “Heroic defenders of their country,” while Georgia’s granite tribute allows the dead to speak for themselves: “We sleep here in obedience; When duty called, we came; When country called, we died.” Texas and Arkansas chose to laud the “valor” and “devotion” of their Confederate soldiers with no allusion to states’ rights, and Florida presented a text that celebrates the Floridians’ “courage and devotion for the ideals in which they believed” and, in a gesture toward healing sectional wounds, adds a hope that “By their noble example of bravery and endurance, they enable us to meet with confidence any sacrifice which confronts us as Americans.” South Carolina’s monument echoes the language of secession in its principal text. “That men of honor might forever know the responsibilities of freedom,” it reads, “Dedicated South Carolinians stood and were counted for their heritage and convictions. Abiding faith in the sacredness of States Rights provided their creed.” Unveiled on July 2, 1963, the monument invites consideration of statements at Gettysburg from two prominent politicians that same summer. Alabama Governor George Wallace claimed “South Carolina and Alabama stand for constitutional government,” in a speech during the ceremony for the South Carolina monument: “Millions throughout the nation look to the South to lead in the fight to restore constitutional rights and the rights of states and individuals.” On May 30, speaking in the National Cemetery, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a very different legacy of the conflict. “Until justice is blind to color,” he said, “until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.” Of the final three state monuments, Mississippi’s makes the strongest Lost Cause statement. The inscription trumpets the Mississippians’ “righteous cause” and how “To valor, they gave new dimensions of courage / To duty its noblest fulfillment / To posterity, the sacred heritage of honor.” Tennessee settled for the prosaic “Valor and courage were virtues of the three Tennessee regiments” and Louisiana the bare-bones “Louisiana July 1, 2, 3, 1863.” Clockwise from upper left: Louisiana’s monument is titled “Spirit Triumphant”; on North Carolina’s monument, Tar Heel soldiers forever seek an elusive victory; a veteran of the 1st Maryland Infantry (CSA) poses next to his regiment’s renumbered monument on Culp’s Hill. (Felix Lipov/Alamy Stock Photo; Patti McConville/Alamy Stock Photo; Courtesy of Adams County Historical Society) A tour keyed to Gettysburg’s monuments also demonstrates how Lost Cause and reconciliation streams of memory sometimes unite. The Eternal Light Peace Memorial, dedicated on the 75th anniversary of the battle, sought to be “An enduring light to guide us in unity and friendship.” In his remarks that day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt praised Union and Confederate veterans alike. “All of them we honor,” he affirmed, “not asking under which flag they fought then—thankful that they stand together under one flag now.” More recently, a Maryland state monument from 1994 depicts two wounded soldiers, one Union and one Confederate, helping each other off the field. It “proudly honors” the state’s 3,000 sons in blue and gray “who fought at Gettysburg in defense of the causes they held so dear” and “symbolizes the aftermath of that battle and the war. Brothers again, Marylanders all.” In 2000, Delaware erected a monument just a few yards from Maryland’s to honor “all Delawareans who fought at Gettysburg, both Union and Confederate.” A short distance to the northeast, the 1993 Masonic memorial, with “Friend to Friend / A Brotherhood Undivided” chiseled on the base, shows Union Captain Henry H. Bingham succoring the mortally wounded Confederate Brig. Gen. Lewis A. Armistead. These reconciliationist sentiments remind Gettysburg visitors that, for most loyal citizens of the United States, restoration of the Union entailed welcoming former Rebels back into the fold. Restoring the Union and pursuing genuine reconciliation, two linked but quite different processes, occurred while the generation that experienced the war established what became long-standing memory traditions. Union veterans tried to suppress or counter the Lost Cause, while former Confederates labored to disseminate their version of why 11 states seceded and what transpired during the war. The presence of Confederate monuments at Gettysburg, however disconcerting for some Americans, demonstrates that winners do not always control the memory of historical events and eras. All visitors to Gettysburg should keep that in mind as they contemplate the battlefield. ✯ Gary W. Gallagher is a member of the Civil War Times advisory board.

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Leland Smith: American POW in 1899 During the Philippine Insurrection

Leland Smith: American POW in 1899 During the Philippine Insurrection The band of American Prisoners of War shuffled down a faint trail cut through the forested mountain terrain, pushed along by short, swarthy men armed with rifles. Existing on rice cakes and what little food they could glean from the small villages they passed through, the shoeless and ragged Americans were about used up. But to stop was to die, so they kept moving, higher and higher into the mountains. A scene out of the Vietnam War in 1966? Maybe Korea in 1950 or the Pacific in 1942? No, though the area is about the same, being Southeast Asia–the Philippines, to be exact. However, the year was 1899, and the Americans were prisoners in a war that just barely made the history books. Leland Smith was to be starved, shot at, set up in front of a firing squad and generally almost walked to death in his three months as a POW during the Philippine Insurrection, one of the United States’ more obscure police actions. But his ordeal was a prelude to what many GIs would suffer in the following century. A few years before Smith’s death, in 1975–fittingly enough perhaps, for an American soldier, on July 4–I had the privilege of interviewing him several times. This is the story he told me. A native of Iowa, Smith enlisted in the 24th Michigan Infantry in May 1898, hoping to see action in Cuba. but the Spanish-American War wouldn’t wait, and by March 1899, he found himself mustered out without ever leaving the States. A picture of Smith in those days shows him to be a tough, wiry-looking man of medium height with dark brown hair and sharp features…and maybe there was a little impatience in there, too. ‘I felt cheated,’ said Smith. ‘I wanted to travel and see some action, so I enlisted again in Cleveland. I had a little photography experience and they sent me to Fort Myers, Virginia, to join up with the Signal Corps.’ By the time his 18th birthday rolled around, Smith was in Manila, assigned to cover U.S. troop action against the Philippine army. The Manila water supply was polluted at the time, and Smith remembered what a soldier told him when he arrived there: ‘Boil all Manila water for 24 hours. Then throw it away and drink beer.’ The war in the Philippines had taken a strange twist. American troops supposedly sent to help the Filipinos oust the Spanish were now busy fighting Filipino soldiers. Their leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, had earlier welcomed the arrival of the U.S. troops, but friction between the two armies had broken out. Not the least of the causes was the refusal of the American authorities to allow Filipino troops, who had helped liberate Manila, into the city after the Spanish capitulation–a grave insult. When it began to look as if the U.S. government’s plans for the Philippines didn’t include giving them immediate independence, Aquinaldo started having second thoughts. One thing led to another, and, on February 4, 1899, hostilities between American and Filipino troops broke out, and the United States found itself with a brand-new war on its hands. At first, Smith was assigned to tag along with the telegraph section of the Signal Corps. Later, along with a Corporal Saulsbery, he was told to take his cameras and ‘go out and make contact with the enemy.’ As it turned out, he made a lot closer contact then he wanted to. ‘We had to carry three or four large cameras in haversacks on our backs,’ Smith said. ‘One was a 5×7-inch film camera, but the others were big 8x10s. We had to lug around the glass plates they used, too. ‘We stopped to eat at any Army unit we happened to be near at the time, moving along with the combat troops, taking pictures of whatever we felt like,’ he said. ‘Then we went back to Manila every week or so to develop what we had shot.’ In October 1899, Smith and Saulsbery, who was recently out of the Army hospital in Bacoor after a bout with some illness, were near San Isidro, north of Manila. ‘We were under fire from the town,’ said Smith, ‘and the weather was lousy. It rained all the time and we were constantly dodging guerrilla sharpshooters. The corporal started getting sick again and when we moved west, over toward Arayat, he decided to go back to the hospital.’ On October 18, 1899, the two soldiers, on foot, headed down a tributary of the Papanga River. They soon met a gunboat steaming upstream. It drifted to a halt opposite the two men on the bank and out stepped Maj. Gen. Harry Ware Lawton, who asked them, ‘What are you two men about?’ ‘Corporal Saulsbery and Private Smith, Sir,’ Smith replied. ‘The corporal is pretty sick, General. Maybe the fever. Anyway, we’re trying to get downstream to the railroad.’ The general looked thoughtful. ‘That’s quite a walk you still have ahead of you. Why not take the banca tied to the stern?’ The general waved toward the native dugout tied to the back of the gunboat. ‘You shouldn’t have any trouble,’ Lawton went on. ‘The river’s clear downstream. No sign of the enemy.’ Lawton, a Civil War and Indian war veteran and a Medal of Honor recipient, had only a few months to live when Smith met him. In December, he was killed in action against insurgents near San Mateo. Then two soldiers stowed their cameras and other gear in the canoe and, with Smith rowing, headed downstream. The water was low and the two men drifted along in the dugout, the gunboat now out of sight behind them. Then came an unexpected shout from the riverbank. ‘Look! Over there! Gu-gus!’ Smith said excitedly, using the name American troops had pinned on the Filipino soldiers. ‘Must be 60 of them!’ The soldiers on the bank beckoned to the Americans and Smith started to head the boat toward shore, since the .38-caliber Colt pistol he had strapped to his waist was no match for the soldiers’ rifles. Suddenly, without warning, the soldiers on shore raised their weapons. ‘They’re going to shoot! We ain’t got a chance!’ yelled Saulsbery, as geysers of water sprung up around them and wood splinters flew from the banca. Smith’s hat was shot off, along with a little hair, and both men and all the equipment went into the water as the dugout capsized. Smith could never figure out how the Filipinos missed them. ‘I could feel the wind of the brass bullets pass my face,’ he recalled. ‘It was just our luck to run into a bunch of guerrillas out doing a little looting.’ The corporal stayed with the overturned dugout, to be fished out by the Filipinos, while Smith swam to the shore. ‘They took my Colt, two gold rings and my shoes,’ he said. The soldiers were armed primarily with Remington rolling-block rifles and some Spanish Mausers. The soldiers may have been armed with FMJ rounds, which would explain the ‘brass bullets’ Smith mentioned. The two men were marched off to nearby La Paz, though Smith had to carry Saulsbery much of the way. There, they were put in an old stone building with 18 other American prisoners. ‘Hey, new faces!’ someone called out. ‘Welcome to the La Paz Soldier’s Club!’ said another. And a third shouted, ‘Hey! It’s Smith and Saulsbery!’ Smith peered into the darkness of the old company. ‘Desmond,’ he said, ‘is that you?’ It turned out that Desmond and Stone, two men from Smith’s old company, had been captured outside Manila some time before. Smith and the others were held at La Paz for about a week. At one point Saulsbery and Smith were taken to Aguinaldo’s headquarters at Tarlac and questioned. The prisoners were allowed four-and-a-half cents a day, American, to buy their food with. If they couldn’t buy the food themselves, they had to pay some local to go to the market for them, which further cut into what little money they had to spend for food. As a result, they ate mostly sugar cane and rice cakes. Finally the prisoners were put on the road, heading toward Dagupan, except for Saulsbery, who was too sick to travel. Smith never saw him again though he later heard that he was rescued. The men marched through the tropical heat, most without shoes, their feet sore and bleeding. ‘At San Carlos, not far from the coast,’ Smith recalled, ‘five sailors were added to our band. Then they divided us into groups of four and sent us off in different directions, though generally still heading for Dagupan. We didn’t know it, but the Army was aware of our situation and had sent troops out to try and overtake us. The Insurrectos were attempting to avoid them.’ Finally the bands straggled into Dagupan on the west coast of Luzon. ‘We were able to rest here and even had some freedom to occasionally bathe in a small creek. We saw Aguinaldo again, and some of his family.’ Smith also said they could hear the U.S. fleet bombarding San Fabian, a few miles up the coast, and there was talk going around of U.S. troops pressing from the south. ‘This made the gu-gus move us out again and into the mountains to the north,’ Smith said. As they moved toward the interior, towns gave way to villages and those in turn gave way to rude collections of native huts. Once up into the mountains, they met the people of that area–not Malaysian but a shorter race, with dark brown skin and straight black hair. These were the Igorots. ‘Every now and then,’ said Smith, ‘we’d enter a village and see the rotting heads of men stuck on the ends of poles placed around the camp. Fortunately, the Filipinos had guns and the Igorots didn’t.’ The Igorots wore little but a G-string. The women went bare-breasted, tattoos often covering their arms to the shoulders. They were true headhunters, the taking of human heads being an integral and necessary part of their culture. As the POWs moved through the mountains, they would see many of these grisly symbols of native handiwork. In the interior, sometimes at altitudes of 6,000 feet, the nights were very cold. ‘All we had to cover ourselves with were banana and palm leaves,’ Smith said. ‘We did get to add a little corn to our ration, and the Igorots made a beer that wasn’t half bad.’ ‘The natives never bothered us,’ said Smith. ‘Of course, the soldiers did their best to keep them from having any guns. Just bolos and short, iron-tipped spears. Often the Igorots would simply leave a village until we’d moved on. We would just help ourselves to what they had. But it was a rough march, going from Baqiuo, through Bontoc to Bangued. Took 27 days to cover 100 trails, and we often marched all day and half the night on two meals of rice.’ They hit Bangued on Thanksgiving Day. ‘We hadn’t eaten all day,’ Smith said, ‘and our Thanksgiving meal consisted of some squash and a little meat some captured sailors had left.’ The sailors included 12 men and a Lieutenant Gilmore, captured off the coast of Luzon that April. Shortly after meeting up with the sailors, some of the men devised a plan to overpower a few guards, take their guns and hole up in a nearby building. While they weren’t aware there was an American rescue column pressing on the Filipinos, they must have suspected that U.S. troops might be near from the way they were being pushed on. Smith still scowled as he recalled the incident, 71 years later: ‘One man, by the name of Brown, was suspected of being in with the guards. A big bosun’s mate balled up his fist and threatened to kill him if word got out of our plans. But then Gilmore nixed the idea. As senior officer, we had to obey him. The general opinion was that he was scared for his own neck and figured it would be safer to stay prisoners than try and fight our way out.’ ‘Up to now the soldiers hadn’t really mistreated us,’ Smith continued. ‘They were Regulars and they pretty much left us alone as long as we didn’t make trouble. But here we were put under the command of a General Tino and his Irregulars. From here on out the treatment got a lot rougher.’ Smith didn’t know it at the time, but the POWs had just become expendable. Now numbering nearly 40 men, the weary column of POWs was placed back on the road on December 7, heading again in the general direction of Luzon’s west coast. ‘The third day after leaving Bangued, three of our party escaped,’ said Smith. ‘Others didn’t know they planned any such thing or more would have tried it. ‘From here we walked to mountains whose summits seemed so high it looked like we would never reach the top. We camped by small streamlets and cooked what little rice we had.’ And horseflesh. The soldiers had begun to slaughter their animals for food. The soldiers and their prisoners finally topped the mountains and started to move down the other side, toward Vigan and the coast. ‘We had to start out early the next morning as the officer in charge wanted to keep ahead of the main column of the retreating Filipino Insurrectionist Army,’ Smith said. ‘By marching all day and night over rocks and through raging rivers, we were able to make a valley the next day at noon. Here we stopped at a farmer’s place and got a little more rice. Then all the rest of the day and that night we kept marching through marshes and rivers. Gilmore was about done up and they were talking about shooting us because he wanted to stop and rest.’ At Vigan the party reached the sea again and turned northward. There, one POW named Charlie Baker, sick with fever and unable to keep up, was killed by soldiers using bayonets and bolos. Now the POWs knew they were expendable. Four days later, still along the Luzon coast, the column was halted for a rest near a small schoolhouse. ‘We knew some of the Filipino officers were grousing about how we were slowing up the march,’ said Smith. ‘Suddenly, one of them walked out and ordered us into a long column along one side of the road. A rank of soldiers with rifles was quickly formed and I damn near fainted when I heard the officer call out the ‘ready’ command. And then he yelled ‘aim.’ The man next to me said, ‘This is it!’ and I looked around for someplace to run to. But there wasn’t any place. ‘Just then another officer came galloping up on horseback and stopped the whole thing.’ Smith continued. ‘He and the first officer had a quick talk. Then they placed us back on the march again. We learned later that U.S. troops weren’t too far behind and they were afraid of reprisals if they killed us and were found out. But morale hit bottom because now we knew they would kill us anytime they thought they could get away with it.’ By this time, the POWs were going without food for days at a time. At Laoag they turned east, the pace quickening as they headed back into the mountains. What little the POWs ate was mostly what they could glean from the villages along the way–sugar cane and occasionally, bassi, a fermented drink made from the cane. The soldiers were almost as desperate for food as the POWs, and an officer finally killed his horse. The beast was hacked apart and eaten raw, brute hunger not waiting for the niceties of a cook fire. ‘We were pushed up some awfully steep canyon trails,’ Smith said. ‘I was pretty weak from lack of food and I’d go about 50 feet and then fall down. Everything would get black, my heart would race like a triphammer and I could hardly breathe.’ At that point, however, the feeling that God was with him came to Smith. He thought, ‘God is my life. He will see me through this trial.’ Gospel hymns began to come to him and he sang them to himself, softly. Before long he was able to get up and go on a little farther. And, of course, in the back of every POW’s mind, was the memory of little Charlie Baker. To stop for long was to die. ‘At one point, an officer told Lieutenant Gilmore that he was under orders to kill us as soon as he felt it was safe to do so,’ said Smith. ‘But he also said he didn’t have the heart to do it. Gilmore tried to talk him into giving us a few rifles to hunt food with and letting us go, but the officer refused. ‘On the night of December 15, the Filipino officers held a pow-wow,’ Smith continued. ‘That really had us worried. But the next morning when we awoke, they were all gone. During the night they had all pulled out.’ Smith said they were still pretty worried. The area was headhunter country and in the past the Filipino soldiers had given the natives orders to kill escaped American prisoners.The POWs held a hasty conference and decided to build rafts and head down the Abulug River, whose headwaters were nearby. ‘We started building rafts out of bamboo,’ said Smith. ‘Suddenly one of the men yelled ‘Headhunters!’ and we all looked up to see a lone figure upstream. There was a general panic until someone realized that the man we saw was an American soldier. We had been caught up with by a rescue column made up of part of the 33rd and 34th Infantry Brigades.’ Many of the men wept openly. It was this column, pressing hard on the Filipino troops, that had kept the POWs from being killed. The three men who had escaped earlier were with the column. But the rescuing column wasn’t much better off than the POWs. Some were without shoes–and also without the benefit of several months of sole-toughening barefoot marches that the prisoners had been subject to. At one point a soldier, careless of where he put his foot on the trail, stepped on a sharpened stake that went through his shoe and foot. And their haversacks were almost empty of food. The two colonels in charge of the column had expected a fight, not realizing the Filipino troops had departed. Once everyone had a chance to get acquainted, and the officers had a chance to evaluate things, it was decided the idea to float down to the coast was a good one. ‘We used poles 6 or 7 inches thick and about 18 feet long, cut and bound with vines,’ said Smith. The Abulug was a dangerous river at that elevation, almost a mile above sea level. It would drop 6,000 feet to the ocean in the next 50 miles. ‘I was a pretty good swimmer, and a few other men and I were put in charge of the rafts with the sick and injured. Each raft held about a dozen men. We ferried the disabled from sandbar to sandbar, trying not to shake them up too much.’ The nights were still frosty near the river, and the cold added to the hunger, disease and general fatigue from which almost all the troops were suffering. The two-week trip was one of constant danger, and for men already worn out by lack of food, rest and medical care, it was a nightmare. Often a raging torrent, the Abulug could suddenly narrow between sheer cliffs that rose more than 500 feet on either side. In a matter of seconds a raft would be caught by the edge of a whirlpool and swung around to smash against rocks, tearing bamboo poles from the vines. Men and equipment would slide into the foaming water, the gear never to be seen again, the men scrambling wildly toward shallow water or to another raft while others strained to reach out and pull them to safety. Smith shook his head. ‘We lost a lot of equipment and food,’ he said. ‘Of 37 rafts we started with, only 13 made it to the coast. But,’ he added proudly, ‘not one man was lost.’ On Christmas Day, the men ate nothing. That night a little unsalted rice was passed around. The river widened as it neared the foothills, and the soldiers heard a strange new sound. It was the pounding of the surf on the northernmost coast of Luzon, still several days away. On New Year’s Day there was nothing left to eat at all, and on January 2, 1900, the weary column, 40-odd POWs and their rescuers, about 180 men in all, stumbled into the coastal town of Abulug. Almost 80 of them were virtual stretcher cases. Learning that the coastal steamer Venus was waiting for them at Aparri, a few miles east of Abulug, the little band marched on and finally had their first decent meal in three months. The steamer stopped the next day, at Vigan, where the sailors went aboard naval vessels. The men of the 33rd and 34th Infantry went ashore while the POWs, still in their rags, went on to Manila aboard Venus, arriving on January 5. Several men from Smith’s old outfit were there, but they could hardly recognize him. The men were issued new clothes, but Smith couldn’t wear the shoes. His feet were two sizes larger from the months of marching. It would be two months before Smith recuperated sufficiently from malaria, dengue fever, dysentery and malnutrition to be reassigned to new duties, working on a cable repair ship that worked between the islands. He later served in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion as an official photographer, covering U.S. troop action. He finally mustered out in 1907. One thing seemed to stick out in Smith’s mind about his experience in the Philippines, something that happened after he had been rescued. ‘Shortly after getting back to Manila, Maj. Gen. Elwel S. Otis, commander of the Department of the Pacific, had all us POWs assembled before him,’ said Smith. ‘We supposed he was going to make a speech commemorating all our suffering and making note of our devotion to duty. He came out and stood before us, his retinue gathered behind him. He looked us over for a minute, then he said: ‘Well, you fellows have had a pretty good time. You’ve had a vacation and haven’t suffered any. I think you can go back to your outfits.’ ‘Then the general turned on his heel and walked out,’ Smith said, a disgusted look on his face, ‘leaving us with our mouths open, speechless.’ To the day he died, I think those callous words, uttered by a high-ranking officer serving safely in the rear, hurt Leland Smith more than his blistered feet ever did. This article was written by Brad Prowse and originally published in the February 1999 issue of Military History magazine. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Military History magazine today!

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Leonard Rosen: 82nd Airborne Paratrooper in Word War II

Leonard Rosen: 82nd Airborne Paratrooper in Word War II Leonard Rosen is a member of a very select fraternity. A volunteer for the paratroops, the 82nd Airborne ‘All-American’ Division trooper survived four combat jumps in 1943-44. Even among elite paratroopers, such an achievement is noteworthy. Although his experiences in uniform would be harrowing, for Rosen the war began much the same way it did for everyone in 1941 America. ‘I was in Huntsville, Ala., the day Pearl Harbor happened,’ he remembers. ‘I was listening to the radio in the hotel when they announced it, and I really got shocked…it was a terrific blow.’ Rosen was 21 years old on the morning of December 7. Like so many of his contemporaries, he quickly volunteered to serve, enlisting in the Army at Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, Calif. Rosen was then sent to Camp Roberts in Paso Robles, Calif., for basic training. Unwilling to accept the lot of an ordinary soldier, Rosen was looking for something more from his military experience. ‘As soon as I joined the Army, I wanted to be in the paratroops,’ he says. ‘I was a volunteer, so they sent me to Fort Benning, Ga., for parachute training. Training was fine as far as I was concerned. We trained in the `Frying Pan’ area.’ Rather than becoming one of the majority that fell out under the deliberately tough training, Rosen thrived. Part of his instruction was from the man who would make more combat jumps than any other general in World War II — James M. ‘Jumping Jim’ Gavin. ‘The head man who trained us was Gavin,’ Rosen recalls. ‘He was a captain. He came out of Panama and took over the parachute battalion for jump training. He became our regimental commander and then division commander. But we went and trained in Fort Benning, and then we were shipped to Fort Bragg, N.C. And then we were told we were taking a trip.’ Gavin’s goal was to MAKE the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR) second to none in combat performance. After much hard work, in July 1943, Jumping Jim had his chance to put all of his training to the test. The 505th was part of the initial assault on the Axis-held island of Sicily. Before its jump into combat, however, the regiment had to endure the far less glamorous Atlantic crossing on a troopship. Rosen and his comrades in F Company left the United States on SS Monterey. Their destination was the Mediterranean, where the regiment would make its final preparations for the invasion. Joining them would be the equally battle-ready 504th PIR, which followed the 505th one day later on SS George Washington. ‘The voyage was six or seven days,’ Rosen says. ‘We landed in Casablanca in North Africa. The next stop was Ouja, near Oran, in Algeria.’ Although the earlier landings in North Africa had been accomplished with little opposition, this time the Allies would be invading an Axis-held island on the doorstep of the Italian mainland. Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton, as well as other senior Allied leaders, anticipated that this invasion might be much more difficult.As with any amphibious landing, the invading force would be most vulnerable in the immediate aftermath of coming ashore. It would be the job of Gavin’s 505th to jump in to secure the approaches to the landing beaches. Particularly important was a ‘Y’ road junction near Gela that was protected by a series of concrete pillboxes. Members of the 505th PIR check one another’s equipment prior to boarding the Douglas C-47 that will take them to Sicily. Experience quickly taught the men that once fully loaded for a combat operation, getting into a parachute harness and ensuring it was properly adjusted took the help of other members of the stick. In the division’s first combat jump, the troopers were badly scattered but still managed to get into the fight. (National Archives) In what would be the largest American airborne operation to date, Gavin would drop his own regiment, along with elements of the 504th PIR and the 456th Parachute Field Artillery Battalion, behind the invasion beaches on the evening of June 9, 1943. Opposite them, in addition to Italian troops, were the Hermann Göring and 15th Panzer divisions. As the hour approached for takeoff, the paratroopers made final preparations. Busy with their own thoughts, at first many probably did not notice that the winds had picked up considerably. By the time the men were scheduled for takeoff, in fact, the winds had increased to 35 mph, which was 20 mph faster than what was considered safe during training jumps. It was too late to turn back, however, and the mission was too important to forgo the airborne landings, so Gavin and the others proceeded as planned. The combination of poor weather and inexperience meant the drop was widely scattered. Fortunately, of all the drops that evening, Rosen’s 2nd Battalion had the most concentrated ones, and the men were able to organize themselves quickly after landing and clear the beaches behind the 45th Division’s intended landing area. ‘It was windy,’ Rosen recalls. ‘We floated around and didn’t hit the exact spot — a mile or two away. We got together pretty fast.’ Not everyone was so lucky. It was later estimated that about 80 percent of Gavin’s 3,400 men were dropped from one to as much as 65 miles away from their intended drop zone. Fortunately for the Americans, the Italian defenders on the island seemed less resolute than their German comrades. ‘The Hermann Göring Division was there,’ Rosen remembered. ‘But they had the Italian army in there. They gave up right away. As soon as they saw an American they gave up. They were in front and the Germans were in the background directing them.’ Half-hearted Italian resistance and an unsuccessful counterattack by the Hermann Göring Panzer Division against elements of the 505th at Biazza Ridge ensured an Axis defeat. To lose barren tracts of sand in North Africa was one thing, but to allow a large Allied force to land on Italian soil in Sicily was quite another, and on July 25, 1943, Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini was arrested. Although the fighting continued until August 17, when Patton entered Messina, the outcome was no longer in doubt. After a rocky start, the Allies had captured a large piece of Italian territory and had driven the country’s dictator from power. German airborne general Kurt Student later said that it was the Allied airborne landings that were decisive, and he asserted that without them victory might not have been achieved. If Sicily was the baptism of fire for Rosen and the rest of the 82nd Airborne, the invasion of the Italian mainland just two months later demonstrated the division’s ‘anywhere, anytime’ readiness. Opposition to the Allies’ September 9, 1943, landing at Salerno was tougher than anticipated, and shortly after coming ashore the 36th Infantry Division found itself in hot water. With the situation quickly deteriorating, the call went out for the 82nd to reinforce the beleaguered attackers. At midnight on September 13, the 504th jumped into the beachhead with no genuine reconnaissance, and the next day Rosen’s 505th dropped onto a still-contested beachhead near the Sele River. The timely arrival of the 82nd forced the Germans — who Rosen says seemed to be fighting on alone with little help from their Italian allies — to slowly withdraw. ‘The Italians gave up, most of them,’ Rosen says. ‘There were Germans there running the Italians — but that wasn’t much of an operation.’ Although the Germans were slowly pushed back, they gave ground grudgingly. After regrouping inland from Salerno Beach at Monte Soprano, the 505th led the 82nd’s push north toward Naples. ‘We organized fast and we started to march to Naples,’ Rosen recalls. ‘The Germans made their stand at the Volturno River — they backed up to there. That was tough. The Germans really put up a stand at that river. I lost — from the artillery fire — two or three of my friends…there.’ Rosen was wounded during the brutal fighting at the Volturno River and was later awarded the Purple Heart. ‘I got hit by artillery fire,’ he says. ‘My whole hand was cut open.’ Despite the wound, Rosen remained with his outfit and was with it when it entered Naples on October 1. During the respite that followed, Rosen remembers that Gavin was promoted to brigadier general, and he also remembers that his former commander was quick to praise his men for their accomplishments: ‘He kept telling us we were better soldiers.’ They would need to be. The next mission for the 505th would be Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy. By November the 82nd Airborne — less the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment — was making final preparations to transfer from Italy to Great Britain, where it would train for its role in the invasion of France, which initially called for the division to jump well behind the beaches. Just prior to the operation, however, fears that the Germans had anticipated the location of Allied drop zones led to a change in plans. The 82nd’s drop zone was moved from the village of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte (in the center of the Cherbourg Peninsula) to an important transportation hub farther to the east that was closer to the Utah Beach amphibious landing area. Last-minute changes notwithstanding, Rosen didn’t concern himself with trying to predict the invasion orders. ‘I knew nothing until I jumped outta the plane,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know where I was going — nobody knew where they were going. We found out when we were on the plane that it was Normandy and we were going to Ste. Mère-Eglise. That’s where we jumped, over Ste. Mère-Eglise.’ To avoid another tragic friendly fire incident like the one during the Sicily operation, when nervous Navy crews had begun shooting with devastating effect on transport planes carrying Allied paratroopers to their drop zones, the C-47s that carried the 82nd to France departed from central England and swung far to the west, avoiding an overflight of the massive Allied flotilla that packed the English Channel. A veteran of previous drops, Rosen does not recall the same sense of drama and anticipation that other veterans have often described. ‘I took a smoke. We kibbitzed between us — with the guys talkin’…just regular conversation,’ Rosen remembers of the flight over. ‘I never thought about where we were going, I just wanted to get there and get out. I think everybody more or less thought that.’ The All-Americans jumped into Nazi-occupied France just five miles inland from where Allied landings would take place at Utah Beach. ‘I hooked up and I couldn’t wait to get out of the plane,’ Rosen says. ‘I was just anxious to get out because there was flak coming up. We’d say to each guy in front of us, `Let’s go! Keep goin’! Bang!’…You know, when they hooked up on the static line. I just wanted to get out there into the night.’ When the green light signal to jump came on inside Rosen’s C-47, the 2nd Battalion’s F Company hit the silk. ‘I was the fifth one out,’ Rosen recalls. ‘I wanted to get goin’, so I jumped out and pulled the chute open and I had a nice drop in between the hedgerows. Some people weren’t as fortunate.’ One of those whose drop was rougher than anticipated was Rosen’s battalion commander, Lt. Col. Benjamin H. Vandervoort. ‘I think he broke his ankle on the jump,’ Rosen says, ‘because the first time I saw him he was on a cart.’ Others who had a difficult time were the division’s glider troops. The drop zones inland from Utah Beach were bristling with deadly anti-airborne defenses that included 12-foot-tall posts topped with mines, wired together. These defenses and the hazards of landing one of the fragile gliders at night and in the confusion of the airborne drops led to terrible casualties among the glidermen on D-Day morning and during the landings that followed. For Rosen, the grisly casualties suffered by the glidermen were particularly hard to take. ‘We saw the 325th Glider Infantry come in at Ste. Mère-Eglise and that was a real tragedy — watching them hit Rommel’s asparagus posts. That was a rough deal. They just had to take their chances.’ Troopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions pause beside the Norman church at St. Marcouf on the morning of D-Day. Men from the two divisions frequently found themselves fighting together in the confusing first few days of the invasion. Rosen was lucky. He landed on the outskirts of Ste. Mère-Eglise and did not have to orient himself. (National Archives) Along with the rest of F Company, Rosen had come down near Ste. Mère-Eglise, and he believes that some of the German troops in the town thought the initial paratroop drop was the extent of the invasion. ‘First of all, I didn’t hear much ground fire. I think it kinda took them by surprise because when we landed in Ste. Mère-Eglise the German headquarters were all having a party. We caught them dumbfounded. There wasn’t too much action with the Germans running through the hedgerows. They had a few big artillery pieces that we captured right away. But we took them by surprise. ‘I was worrying about getting myself on the ground. I didn’t want to land on a house or whatever. I was maneuvering my position. We got into our drop area very well. Our company came together right away. After a few hours, it wound up that we were all together…those that were still alive.’ A paratrooper from Rosen’s stick, Private John Steele, landed on the church steeple inside Ste. Mère-Eglise and survived the night. He was hauled in by the Germans but escaped a few days later. Many did not escape. ‘One guy had gotten hooked up in a tree, and when we got to him he was dead already — they shot him,’ says Rosen. ‘That’s the part that hurt.’ But the hurt quickly turned into anger for Rosen. ‘I was mad at the enemy. I had guys die in my arms, and that was a tragedy. There was nothing I could do. It makes you mad as hell. The first German you see you wanna kill him right away.’ While paratroopers from the other regiments and the nearby 101st Airborne Division were badly scattered, Rosen’s 505th banded together pretty quickly in and around Ste. Mère-Eglise. ‘I was right on the edge of the village,’ Rosen says. ‘When we jumped, the French people were in their houses and I don’t think many came out until we secured the area. I don’t think they wanted to get killed.’ Working quickly, elements of the 505th drove off any German defenders and secured Ste. Mère-Eglise, earning for the previously obscure Norman village the distinction of being the first village liberated in occupied France. Major Edward ‘Cannonball’ Krauss marked the occasion by raising the Stars and Stripes over the town. No ordinary flag, Krauss’ banner was the same one that had flown over Naples, the first city liberated in occupied Europe. Unlike Naples, however, there was no time for celebration. Rosen and the rest of the 505th were busy fighting off a series of German counterattacks designed to retake the town. Men of the 505th pass through the rubble of Nijmegen, Holland, in September 1944. The Operation Market-Garden landings were among the 82nd’s most successful, but the subsequent fighting was intense and left many Dutch towns in ruins. (National Archives) As Rosen had experienced in Sicily and Italy, combat brought a number of close calls. One that stands out was the time he stepped on a mine: ‘I got flipped over with a machine gun on my side and nothing happened! I didn’t feel anything! No injury! As soon as we started to leave Ste. Mère-Eglise, they warned us that there were a lot of minefields there.’ Other hazards were presented by the deadly German 88s, which began to strike Ste. Mère-Eglise in earnest on June 7 once their gunners knew the town was under American control. ‘We had action because we ran up against artillery — those big 88s set up in certain areas they had camouflaged,’ Rosen recalls. ‘And we knocked out a couple of those. It was a rough deal. They’d say `we want volunteers,’ and three or four of us would go up there and heave hand grenades in there.’ Rosen would continue to fight with the division through its many battles in Normandy, and wasn’t evacuated until July 11, 1944. As expected, the division had performed magnificently during the Normandy campaign and achieved all of its objectives. Rosen and the others found, however, that with each step closer to the heart of the Reich, the fighting became more brutal and the cost heavier. The 82nd suffered 5,436 casualties during its monthlong stay in Normandy — 1,119 from Rosen’s 505th, a loss rate of 55 percent. Rosen had somehow beaten the odds and after a short respite prepared for his next jump. That call came in September 1944. As part of his attempt to kick open a doorway into the heart of Germany, British Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery proposed one of the most daring and spectacular operations of the war. Utilizing the newly formed First Allied Airborne Army, the field marshal would drop three airborne divisions behind German lines in Holland to seize a series of bridges so that a rapidly advancing armored column could drive up 60 miles of road and leap across the Rhine River. If everything went according to plan, the Allies would be across Germany’s great natural barrier in the West and deep inside Adolf Hitler’s Ruhr industrial heartland. As part of what was called Operation Market-Garden, the 82nd would be responsible for seizing bridges around Nijmegen. On September 17, 1944, the 505th hit the silk over Groesbeek, Holland, and began its fourth campaign. Rosen’s landing was a bit rougher than previous ones. ‘I jumped right through a house. I landed right into their kitchen while they were eating dinner. They had thatched roofs in Holland out in the country. They were so happy, they were hugging me!’ Stepping outside, Rosen was soon in the thick of the fight. ‘As soon as we landed, there was a trainload of supplies and troops — and we knocked that out right away. It was a German train going through with supplies. We took it.’ Nijmegen and its strategically vital rail and highway bridges over the Waal River were still to the north, so quickly after the 505th’s ‘train heist,’ Vandervoort pushed his battalion into the city. As was their standard practice, immediately after being driven from the city, the Germans reorganized and launched a counterattack. ‘We were in the park right by the bridge, German 88s firing out all the time. You couldn’t walk across the street,’ Rosen says of conditions in the town. ‘As soon as they saw somebody, those 88s went off. That was a tough deal. I lost my captain who just came from West Point. His name was Rosen too; he died in my arms. He was from Texas and wore side arms, like Texas Rangers, you know.’ During the fighting for the town, Rosen had one of his most peculiar encounters. After a failed attempt to clear Hunner Park, Rosen was resting when he was approached by Lt. Gen. Sir Miles Dempsey, commander of the British Second Army. Dempsey was near the front to observe the 504th’s attack on the city’s bridge, which was vital if his armored column was to proceed. ‘He came and talked to me in Holland when our squad was practically wiped out,’ recalls Rosen. ‘We lost a lot of men there. He said to me, `Who’s in charge?’ and I said, `They’re all dead.’ ‘ This did not stop the British general. ‘You’re in charge,’ Dempsey shot back. Although he was impressed that the general was near him in the thick of the action, Rosen was unfazed by his nominal promotion: ‘I took it with a grain of salt. It didn’t mean anything to me. He was a good man.’ The 504th eventually took the road bridge at Nijmegen, but only after it had suffered heavy losses in a brutal daylight river crossing. As the 504th attacked the bridge, Rosen’s 505th was busy inside the town. ‘Some guy come[s] running out of that tunnel — they [the Germans] must have been on drugs — he came running out and he [ran] up to my medic who I was talking to and shot him dead,’ remembers Rosen. ‘Right next to me. Shot him dead. And then one of my friends shot the German dead. The medic was saying, `Rosen, don’t let me die. I’m dying.’ But I couldn’t do anything. You feel helpless.’ He also felt helpless when, after the armored column failed to reach the British airborne troopers at Arnhem — and the bridge over the Rhine — the division was relieved by Canadian troops on November 10, 1944, nearly two months after first landing in Holland. The operation was ultimately unsuccessful, but a large swath of the Netherlands had been freed from a brutal occupation, and the division had added further laurels to its reputation as it repeatedly bested larger German forces. When General Gavin, now 82nd Airborne Division commander, rose to salute Dempsey after the successful capture of Nijmegen Bridge, the British general briskly returned the salute, thrust out his hand and said, ‘I’m proud to meet the commanding general of the finest division in the world today.’ With the end of the war only days away, troopers from the 505th wait on the banks of the Elbe River to be taken across. Even among the veteran troopers of the 82nd, there were very few men like Rosen who had been with the All-Americans for the division’s first drop in Sicily and were still with the outfit in the spring of 1945. (National Archives) Veterans now of four combat jumps, Rosen and his buddies had barely finished wringing the mud and filth from their sodden uniforms when they were again called into action. On December 16, 1944, Hitler launched his Ardennes counteroffensive and quickly ripped a huge hole in the Allied front in Western Europe. With his lines already stretched to the breaking point, Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower called on the only reserves he had — the war-weary 82nd and 101st — to plug the breach and try to restore some order. Rosen had just returned to the division’s cantonment near Reims, France, from a much anticipated leave to Paris, when he got the word that they were returning to the front lines. ‘After we got back to Paris and were having a ball, they said, `We’re leavin’ right now,” he recalls. ‘Just like that!’ As the troopers quickly assembled, soldiers from untried as well as combat-exhausted First Army divisions that had been resting in preparation for the spring campaign were fighting for their lives against three well-equipped German armies. When Rosen and his buddies asked why they were again being called to action so soon after Holland, they were told about the breakthrough and the desperate state of American troops caught there. ‘They called us [together] and told us that we had to go over there and stop this.’ In the actions that followed, the 101st Airborne gained immortality as the division that held a small Belgian farming town for eight days and was soon being praised as the ‘Battling Bastards of Bastogne.’ Just as important, though less well remembered, was the 82nd Airborne’s unglamorous and unheralded battles to hold back SS General Sepp Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army, which was battering outnumbered American units while driving toward its ultimate objective, the Belgian port city of Antwerp. Rushed to Belgium, Rosen and the rest of the 505th found themselves at Trois Ponts guarding crossings of the Salm River. Dietrich had to take these spans if his offensive was to have any hope of success. As the GIs quickly found out, the Germans were not their only enemy. ‘[We] couldn’t do anything because of the weather,’ Rosen recalls. ‘We were freezing to death. It was snowing all the time. You were cold and miserable. You didn’t even care if you got killed because what could be worse than this?’ The Germans were out there, however, and over the next 212 weeks the 505th and the rest of the 82nd held off repeated enemy attacks — many of the most intense coming from the tanks of the three SS panzer divisions that were thrown against the paratroopers’ lines. ‘There were a lot of casualties,’ Rosen remembers of the fighting along the Salm. ‘You’d see guys lying all over the place. I was sitting in a trench in the Battle of the Bulge; I’ll never forget this, my good friend named Lynch was sitting right next to me, an 88 hit him and blew his head off.’ The 505th fought off the German attacks until January 1, 1945, when the bulk of the remaining panzers were sent south to help the other surviving Wehrmacht and SS units withdraw safely from the salient created by their attack. Having endured two of the most difficult weeks of their time in combat, the men were given only a couple of days’ rest before taking part in the general American push to regain the ground lost during the German offensive. From January 3-10, the division fought a series of battles that brought them back to the positions the First Army had occupied at the start of the battle and all but destroyed the German 62nd Volksgrenadier Division. A veteran of more combat than most, Rosen stayed with his unit rather than seek reassignment. ‘I never thought about getting home because I wouldn’t go home until the Germans were defeated. I knew I still had work to do,’ he says. ‘It was the same the first time I went into battle and the same…[at]the closing battle — I felt the same way.’ After a short respite, Rosen’s unit returned to combat, fighting at the West Wall and crossing the Roer River in mid-February. Then it was back to Reims for another short rest before heading back to Germany, crossing the Rhine on April 4 and entering Cologne on April 25. Five days later, on the same day that Hitler committed suicide in the bowels of his Berlin bunker, the 82nd Airborne crossed the Elbe River. Near Lugwigslust, Germany, Rosen and the 505th found an entire German army group ready to lay down its arms. ‘The guy came right up to me and surrendered to a group of us together,’ Rosen recalls. ‘The line went for miles.’ Used to fighting a ruthless and determined foe, it now seemed as though the Wehrmacht could not capitulate fast enough. ‘Everybody was carrying white flags, and this German general was in the lead of his division. His whole division gave up.’ It was during this surrender that Rosen, a Jew, was given a shocking example of just how deep anti-Semitic feelings ran in Germany and a reminder of why he had fought so long and hard. After the general surrendered his defeated force, Rosen overheard him remark, ‘The Jews caused this whole war.’ As Rosen recalls: ‘It sounds funny now — didn’t sound funny then. Especially after what I went through, it didn’t sound funny at all. I was really mad. It was the first time I ever threatened to kill an unarmed man. They had to pull me away because I was going to kill him.’ The general’s remark is especially ironic considering that the notorious Woebblin concentration camp lay just outside the town where the surrender occurred. Incensed by what his men had discovered, General Gavin forced the citizens of Lugwigslust to dig the graves for the dead prisoners, despite their protests that they were unaware of the camp’s activities. Even after more than 60 years, Rosen does not accept this. ‘You wanted to punish everybody,’ he says. ‘When somebody would say to you, I didn’t know — that’s all BS. You didn’t believe them. You knew they all knew.’ Within a week, it was finally all over. Rosen remained with his outfit and, after a short leave to Marseilles, was back with the All-Americans sweating out his part in the war against Japan. By August, the veteran of six campaigns learned of the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While many men served in the 505th, only a scant few can claim to have survived all of its battles as a rifleman and to have been an integral part of a regiment that received two Distinguished Unit Citations, the French Fourragère, the Netherlands Order of William and the Belgian Fourragère. With no enemy left to fight and his mission finally accomplished, Rosen returned home and began a comparatively mundane life as a civilian. Now enjoying a well-earned retirement, Rosen has had an opportunity to look back on his distinguished combat career and what kept him going during those battles long ago. ‘We were just thinking about the job that had to be done,’ he says. ‘I didn’t think about getting killed or anything else. You’re young and you don’t think about that — I didn’t anyway. It was an adventure. When you get older, it becomes different.’ This written by Ben Herndon and article originally appeared in the May 2006 issue of World War II magazine. 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Lessons and Legacies from Bataan to Khe Sanh

Lessons and Legacies from Bataan to Khe Sanh In this book Thomas S. Helling, a surgeon at the University of Mississippi Medical Center and veteran of the Army Medical Corps, looks at the hell of war through a special—and very specific—lens: the medical care provided to America’s soldiers and marines on the battlefields of Bataan (1941–1942), Anzio (1944), Bastogne (1944), Chosin (1950), and Khe Sanh (1968). Each of these battles presented different challenges to American forces, and each left those forces dealing with the shock of large numbers of combat injuries and deaths. In his skilled telling of manifold stories of resilience and valor, Helling observes that the roles of medical care providers in these armed conflicts often changed to that of warriors fighting for the lives of their soldiers. “Medics, nurses, and doctors reached beyond their own safety,” he writes, “to uncover a courage few were aware they possessed.” All too often, however, the casualties came with such frightful regularity that medical staffs were unable to keep pace with the incoming wounded. Helling notes that doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel worked under harrowing combat conditions to stop bleeding, repair injuries, and save lives—even operating on patients while under enemy attack—and to keep rampant disease in check. Some of them, of course, suffered the same fate as did their fighting soldiers. But most gave all they had against hopelessness in saving others from probable death, performing their duties with insignificant regard for themselves, often under the most horrific circumstances imaginable. The Agony of Heroes is an inspiration to all combat medical personnel who will serve on the battlefields of the future. They are, to borrow Helling’s characterization, “mercy workers whose intent is to save and not destroy,” and all of us have a lot to learn from them. George A. Alexander, M.D., is a former deputy surgeon general in the Army Medical Corps. He has been a professor at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and an editorial board member of Military Medicine. This article appears in the Spring 2020 issue (Vol. 32, No. 3) of MHQ—The Quarterly Journal of Military History with the headline: Review | Lessons and Legacies 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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Let There Be Light: How a Film on PTSD Worried the Army

Let There Be Light: How a Film on PTSD Worried the Army Acclaimed film director John Huston put his Hollywood career on hold to enlist and make documentaries for the army. After the war, he returned to his old trade­: he directed 37 feature films and received 15 Academy Award nominations, winning twice. (National Archives) John Huston entered the U.S. Army in 1942 with distinctive credentials. In the previous two years, he had directed three hit films, including The Maltese Falcon starring Humphrey Bogart, which garnered an Academy Award nomination for Huston’s adapted screenplay. The army put his cinematic talents to good use. Major Huston filmed two ambitious documentaries for the Army Signal Corps in the next three years—one on army life in the Aleutian Islands, the other about the fighting near San Pietro, Italy. Now, he had a new assignment. As the war in Europe wound down and American forces approached the Japanese home islands, the army wanted to document the medical treatment of battle fatigue casualties evacuated back to the United States. Because the condition—an acute nervous reaction to the stresses of combat—had received little publicity during the war, the army feared that those affected would be “misunderstood, mistreated, and looked upon with suspicion” when they were discharged into the civilian workforce. It wanted to reassure the public, especially employers, that those former servicemen were not dangerous and could function as well as the next man. Huston had filmed the bitter fighting in Italy at perilously close range and understood what battle-fatigued soldiers were going through. “For months I had been living in a dead man’s world,” he said. This was true even after he returned home on leave: “Emotionally I was still in Italy in a combat zone.” In spring 1945, Huston and a crew of six cameramen, six electricians, and two soundmen began filming at Mason General Hospital, an army psychiatric facility near Brentwood, New York, following a group of 75 combat veterans, all suffering from battle fatigue, as they went through an eight-week treatment program. Huston kept the cameras running continuously throughout treatment sessions to ensure he captured “the extraordinary and completely unpredictable exchanges that sometimes occurred,” he said. He shot more than 375,000 feet of film—nearly 70 hours—for a documentary that would run less than an hour. The soldiers took the filming in good spirits, posting a sign in their ward that read: “Hollywood and Vine.” When the men first entered the program, many showed obvious signs of distress. Some had nervous tics; others had amnesia. Some were immobile; others stuttered so badly they could not communicate. The images Huston captured were jarring. He explained that “to see a psyche torn asunder is more frightening than to see people who have physical wounds.” The film’s message was that these were normal men who had cracked under the abnormal stress of combat. “Every man has his breaking point,” explained narrator Walter Huston, John’s father. “And these, in the fulfillment of their duties as soldiers, were forced beyond the limit of human endurance.” As an army psychiatrist told the men, “If a civilian, the average civilian, were subjected to similar stresses, he undoubtedly would have developed the same type of nervous conditions that most of you fellows developed.” They had nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of, he assured them. John Huston was impressed with the treatment the men received. “To me it was an extraordinary experience, almost a religious experience,” he said, “to see men who couldn’t speak, or remember anything at the beginning of their treatment, emerge at the end, not completely cured, it is true, but restored to the shape that they were in when they entered the army.” Huston spent several months editing the film, which had the working title Returning Soldier—The Psychoneurotic and was eventually renamed Let There Be Light, and hand-delivered the finished product to Washington, D.C., in February 1946. He was proud of the result, later calling it “the most hopeful and optimistic and even joyous thing I ever had a hand in.” Army brass were set to preview the film next, with a public premiere to follow in April at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. But the premiere never happened—for reasons that remain murky and may have had as much to do with stigma surrounding battle fatigue as with the revealing nature of Huston’s film. Battle fatigue—now called posttraumatic stress disorder—emerged as the most unexpected and difficult medical problem of the war. It blindsided the military and threatened to become an epidemic that drained desperately needed manpower by immobilizing physically healthy soldiers, sailors, and Marines. Doctors quickly came to understand that battle fatigue was as much an injury as a gunshot wound, but old-school officers wrote it off as cowardice. Caught in the middle were the millions of servicemen—all potential victims who feared the condition as a reflection on their strength, dedication, and courage. Non-stop fighting and constant artillery barrages attributed to some of the worst cases of PTSD. Soldiers who had been in the field for over 200 days showed the most severe symptoms. (National Archives) Let There Be Light illuminated that troubling issue. Battle fatigue, then called “shell shock,” had been a major problem for the Allies in World War I. It was widely reported among British and French troops who had been in combat for four years. And although American doughboys saw hard fighting for less than a year, nearly 12,000 of them were hospitalized for psychiatric reasons. In 1940-41, as the United States mobilized for another war, military psychiatrists believed that men with preexisting mental illness were the ones who would later break down. Hoping to remove men they considered vulnerable to battle fatigue, psychiatrists rejected recruits at a rate 15 times greater than they had in World War I. Despite those efforts, the tough fighting in early American campaigns produced an unexpectedly high incidence of battle fatigue among the troops. Navy doctor Lieutenant Commander Edwin R. Smith, who treated Marines evacuated from Guadalcanal, told Time magazine that conditions on the island had produced a “disturbance of the whole organism, a disorder of thinking and living, of even wanting to live.” Common symptoms were headaches, sensitivity to sharp noises, amnesia, panic, tense muscles, tremors, uncontrollably shaking hands, and weepiness. As the fighting intensified, the number of battle fatigue casualties increased dramatically. Psychiatric admissions to army hospitals jumped from 114,055 in 1942 to 341,087 in 1943 and to 367,815 in 1944. Army discharges for mental health reasons went from 27,086 in 1942 to 140,723 in 1943 and 100,789 in 1944. Battle fatigue was not limited to those new to combat. Author William Manchester, a Marine who served in the Okinawa campaign, recalled a combat-hardened sergeant major breaking down and ordering Manchester and his comrades to launch a suicidal bayonet charge through an artillery barrage. “This was trouble,” Manchester later wrote. “I had seen combat fatigue, and recognized the signs, but couldn’t believe they were coming from an Old Corps sergeant major.” When the barrage lifted, Manchester found the sergeant major spread-eagled outside his fighting hole, “shaking uncontrollably, first shrieking as I once heard a horse shriek, then blubbering and uttering incomprehensible elementary animal sounds.” What Manchester described became known as “Old Sergeant Syndrome.” Old-timers, even those with enviable combat records, could eventually crack under the accumulated strain of long-term fighting. At first, military doctors and line officers were shocked to see good soldiers, often decorated ones, felled by battle fatigue. They came to realize, however, that even the strongest could crack under combat of sufficient intensity or duration. Army psychiatrist William C. Menninger said those men reacted as “anybody might have if exposed long enough to combat.” The implications were staggering, as psychiatrist John W. Appel observed: every soldier, sailor, or Marine—no matter how tough—was a potential battle fatigue casualty. Nevertheless, some old-school officers clung to their belief that the condition was a sign of cowardice or malingering. The most notorious examples occurred in Sicily in 1943. On August 3, Lieutenant General George S. Patton encountered a battle-fatigue casualty, Private Charles H. Kuhl, at an evacuation hospital. Patton cursed Kuhl, called him a coward, slapped him across the face with his glove, and threw him out of the hospital tent. On August 10, Patton encountered another such casualty, Private Paul G. Bennett. Patton cursed him, called him a coward, slapped him, and threatened to shoot him. These incidents reflected Patton’s firmly held belief that battle fatigue casualties were “cowards [who] bring discredit on the army and disgrace to their comrades” by using “the hospital as a means to escape.” There may, however, have been more to the story. Private Kuhl later said Patton’s conduct that day was so extreme, he thought Patton himself “was suffering a little battle fatigue.” Historian Charles M. Wiltse, author of the army medical service history of the Mediterranean campaigns, agreed with Kuhl, noting that Patton was likely experiencing “the accumulated tensions of the preceding weeks of intensive combat.” Perhaps, as one editorial writer noted, “the difference between the slapper and the slappee was only a matter of rank.” George S. Patton (shown in a dramatization)—scoffed at the invisible effects of PTSD, accusing soldiers of cowardice. Historians have since speculated that Patton himself suffered from the condition at the time of the infamous slapping incidents. (20th Century Fox/Photofest) Doubts about the legitimacy of battle fatigue reached the highest levels of the military. In a memo dated December 30, 1943, U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall equated the condition with malingering and cited discredited claims from World War I that 80 percent of shell-shock victims had experienced an instantaneous cure the moment the armistice was signed. Marshall blamed America’s parents and teachers, accusing them of coddling the men, many of whom had grown up during the Great Depression. “While our enemies were teaching their youths to endure hardships, contribute to the national welfare, and to prepare for war,” Marshall wrote, “our young people were led to expect luxuries, to depend upon a paternal government for assistance in making a livelihood and to look upon soldiers and war as unnecessary and hateful.” Of course, malingering may have occurred. Gunshot or shrapnel wounds are visible and diseases can be diagnosed with objective tests, but there was no definitive test for battle fatigue. Its diagnosis depended on a soldier’s honesty and the skill of the examining physician. In the entire war, only 47 American soldiers were court-martialed for malingering; it is unknown if any faked their symptoms. Combat troops themselves accepted the reality of the condition as an unfortunate but unavoidable fact of wartime life. “A man who is taken out of combat for battle fatigue,” explained Marine veteran Fred Balester, “is usually no more to blame for his condition than a man who has contracted malaria or been wounded.” As one frontline commander wrote on a soldier’s evacuation tag, “This man now freezes on the trigger and freezes under artillery fire. He is in no way a goldbrick or a coward, but is of no further use as a combat soldier.” Doctors worked to return battle fatigue casualties to their units as quickly as possible. There was a war going on, and the services needed every man. Battle fatigue was considered a temporary condition and soldiers were treated as near to the front as possible, with an emphasis on relief of symptoms. Wise commanders learned to intervene when they saw the warning signs. Soldiers were first sent to the battalion aid station, where they got hot food, a shower, new clothing, and a chance to rest. “Hot food, hot drink, a chance to warm up—that’s what [a soldier] needed to keep going,” said Major Richard Winters of the 101st Airborne Division. For mild cases, that was sufficient. More serious cases went further back to division clearing stations, also known as exhaustion centers. If that did not work, they went to general hospitals. The most serious cases, like the men shown in Let There Be Light, were evacuated to the United States. Even old-school officers came to grudgingly admit the reality of battle fatigue. Army psychiatrist Edwin A. Weinstein remembered a colonel who encountered such a casualty late in the war. Channeling his inner Patton, the commander drew his .45 pistol, called the trembling soldier a coward, and threatened to shoot him if he did not return to his unit. “Well, Colonel, sir,” the trembling soldier stammered, “I guess you’ll have to shoot me.” The colonel turned to the nearest doctor and ordered: “Evacuate him, he’s crazy.” As doctors treated more and more battle fatigue cases, they began to understand the impact of precipitating events. The more intense the fight, the greater the number of battle fatigue casualties. A leading cause was artillery fire, since it forced a soldier to sit and take it; other triggers included the death of a buddy or bad news from home, like a “Dear John” breakup letter. But the most significant factor, doctors learned, was the number of days in combat. A man who had served 200 to 240 days in combat was no longer an effective soldier. If he had not yet broken, he was often too jittery or overly cautious. Men with fewer than 200 days were the most likely to respond to short-term treatment and to return to their units. These findings presented a dilemma because the army had no formal rotation policy for transferring combat veterans home. Most soldiers were overseas “for the duration”—until they were killed, wounded, or the war ended. Despite a better understanding of the issue and better treatment of afflicted servicemen, battle fatigue remained a problem until the end of the war. In 1945, 280,110 soldiers were hospitalized for battle fatigue, with 120,561 discharged for psychiatric reasons. In the navy, battle fatigue casualties increased late in the war as sailors endured the terror of kamikaze attacks. After V-J Day, the military refocused on treating the affected men and preparing them to re-enter civilian life. That is where it hoped to get a boost from Let There Be Light. In April 1946, critics and filmgoers eagerly an-ticipated the film’s premiere at the Museum of Modern Art. But at the last minute, the army pulled the film. Huston later claimed army MPs showed up and physically seized the film and classified it restricted, making it unavailable to civilian audiences. Critics who had already seen previews of Let There Be Light were livid. James Agee, writing in The Nation, called the suppressed film an “intelligent, noble, fiercely moving short film” and lamented that it “will probably never be seen by the civilian public for whose need, and on whose money, it was made.” He urged public pressure to get the army to change its mind. “If dynamite is required,” he wrote, “then dynamite is indicated.” New York Post critic Archer Winsten took solace in his belief that the film would eventually be released. “Some future audience is guaranteed not only a beautiful film experience,” he wrote, “but also the certainty that their generation has better sense than ours.” The army’s stated reason for suppressing the film was privacy. It did not want to stigmatize any identifiable ex-soldier as a psychiatric casualty. Indeed, an army directive from 1944 prohibited the release of the “names or identifiable photographs of neuropsychiatric cases.” Huston had anticipated this objection and obtained privacy waivers from those in the film, but officials questioned the ability of psychiatric patients to truly give informed consent. When Huston later went to retrieve the releases from an army file cabinet, he said, they had disappeared. Some believed privacy was not the army’s real objection. Agee suggested it was concerned that the film was so powerful that any man who saw it would think twice before enlisting. Huston felt the army wanted to maintain “the ‘warrior’ myth, which said that our soldiers went to war and came back all the stronger for the experience, standing tall and proud for having served their country well.” The army’s own actions seemed to undermine its stated concern for the soldiers’ privacy: it had supplied nearly a dozen still photos from Let There Be Light to illustrate an October 29, 1945, Life magazine article on the stateside treatment of battle-fatigue casualties. The photos clearly showed the faces of two men in the film and identified them as psychiatric patients. The army never explained why these photos were acceptable for Life’s civilian readers while the film was not. Although the army cited concerns about the soldiers’ privacy in its last-minute refusal to release Huston’s film, it approved stills­—clearly showing the men’s faces—for the October 29, 1945, issue of Life magazine. (LIFE Magazine) Instead, the army commissioned Joseph Henabery—a director and actor who, in 1915, had played Abraham Lincoln in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation—to produce a new film. Henabery’s film, Shades of Gray, was scripted, not spontaneous, and used professional actors instead of actual veterans. The result was what film historian Scott Simmon called “less a remake of Let There Be Light than an argument against it.” Shades of Gray suggested that preexisting mental illness was the cause of battle fatigue—a far different message than delivered in Let There Be Light, and not what military doctors had learned during the war. The narrator contended that one out of every 18 Americans would eventually be treated at a mental hospital—and that an army is no stronger than the population from which it is drawn. Even the title follows this theme, with shades of gray symbolizing the varying degrees of mental illness that, the narrator claims, all civilians and soldiers carry with them. When the army released Shades of Gray to the public in 1948, an army spokesman emphasized that the film was “definitely not connected in any way with Let There Be Light.” Meanwhile, American servicemen returned home with very real struggles. One such “new civilian” was William S. Freeman Jr. For many Thanksgivings after the war, Freeman stood in his yard and wept while his family enjoyed turkey dinner. He was haunted by memories of Thanksgiving 1944, when his men, lined up for a turkey meal served in canisters, were decimated by German artillery. Freeman’s enduring memory, he wrote, was “men torn to shreds around busted up turkey canisters.” Ira Hayes, one of the famed flag raisers of Iwo Jima, died from overexposure to the cold and alcohol poisoning in January 1955, at age 32. In the decade since the war, he had accumulated more than 50 alcohol-related arrests. Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of World War II, suffered from battle fatigue for the rest of his life. He endured chronic insomnia and recurring nightmares, and kept a loaded pistol under his pillow. He eventually took to sleeping alone in his garage with the lights on. Murphy recalled being terrified while acting in 1951’s The Red Badge of Courage, as the film’s Civil War battle scenes reminded him of his wartime experiences and left him trembling. The director of the film? John Huston. Of the soldiers who appeared in Let There Be Light, nothing is known of their postwar lives. As for the men Patton slapped in Sicily, both survived the war. Charles Kuhl worked as a janitor for the Bendix Corporation and died of a heart attack in 1971 at age 55. Paul Bennett later served in the Korean War and died in Georgia in 1973 at age 51. YEARS AFTER THE WAR, Let There Be Light was largely forgotten except by a small group of film aficionados. An unofficial copy circulated among them, reportedly “liberated” by a sharp-eyed film-buff soldier who had seen it in an army film library at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. America’s most decorated soldier of the war, Audie Murphy suffered from PTSD. Filming battle scenes in John Huston’s 1951 Civil War film, The Red Badge of Courage, left him trembling. (National Archives) In 1980, film historian and reporter Joseph McBride began a campaign for the film’s release and filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act. He soon gained important allies, including Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, Vice President Walter F. Mondale, and film producer Ray Stark. While the army continued to voice misgivings about the privacy of the soldiers, army secretary Clifford Alexander Jr. ordered its release in late 1980. The film premiered on January 16, 1981, at the Thalia Theater in Manhattan, nearly 35 years after the army blocked its original premiere. Critics were impressed with the film’s raw power. Michael Blowen of the Boston Globe called it “single-minded in its riveting portrayal of the mental fallout of war,” and Michael Kernan of the Washington Post thought it showed “just how delicate and yet how resilient the human mind can be.” The men’s faces haunted David Denby of New York magazine. “Seeing them break down is almost unbearable,” he wrote. But critics also noted shortcomings that may have escaped notice 35 years earlier. To Vincent Canby of the New York Times, “the impression given and even encouraged by the film is of a series of miraculous cures.” Indeed, said Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice, the film attributed to army psychiatrists “the combined talents and powers of Mandrake the Magician and Bernadette of Lourdes.” What was omitted, noted Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic, was any mention of “the possibility of recurrence in these men; and, worse, it says nothing about the sufferers with combat psychoneurosis who took longer to leave or who never got out of hospitals.” Perhaps, he suggested, suppression had given the film a better reputation than it deserved. What had been shocking and ground-breaking in 1946 was neither to current audiences who had “grown up seeing riots, wars and assassinations live-and-in-color” on TV, Canby asserted. Interest in Let There Be Light was revived in 2012, when the National Archives and Records Administration fully restored the film. It is now available online for all to see. While its cinematic techniques seem dated and the treatment methods quaint, the film stands the test of time as a stark reminder of the thousands of soldiers, sailors, and Marines whose wounds were not visible or physical—the men who were the hidden casualties of the war.✯ Sidebar: TRAUMA TERMS

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https://www.historynet.com/letter-aviation-history-lucky-penney-911.htm

This Daring F-16 Pilot Went on a Kamikaze Mission on 9/11

This Daring F-16 Pilot Went on a Kamikaze Mission on 9/11 On September 11, 2001, Air Force pilot Heather “Lucky” Penney was asked to do the unthinkable Nineteen years ago on a sunny September day, civil aviation as we knew it changed forever. So, too, did the lives of all Americans, as the horrifying spectacle of airliners crashing into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon made it obvious the world would never be the same. As a young lieutenant, Major Heather "Lucky" Penney was among the first fighter pilots in the air after the 9/11 attacks. (TSgt. Johnathon Orrell/National Guard Bureau) On that day then-25-year-old Heather “Lucky” Penney was a new first lieutenant serving as a training officer with the 121st Fighter Squadron of the District of Columbia Air National Guard, based at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. The first woman to serve in her ANG unit, she flew F-16Cs on training missions in preparation for combat. When the 121st received word of the second Trade Center strike, and a half hour later the Pentagon was hit, it became clear the United States was under attack. With news of a fourth airliner possibly headed toward Washington, Penney and her wingman, Colonel Marc “Sass” Sasseville, scramble-started their F-16s and took off to intercept it. Their mission was simple but sobering: Find the airliner and take it down by any means necessary. Since there had been no time to arm their F-16s, that essentially meant they would be flying a kamikaze mission, ramming their jets into the airliner. “I’m going to go for the cockpit,” Sass told her. “I’ll take the tail,” Lucky replied. Their flight path from Andrews took them over the Pentagon, and “there was no way to avoid seeing the smoke that was billowing out of the building,” she said. “I didn’t dwell on that because we had more important things to do.” Penney described feeling disconnected from her emotions as she focused on the mission: “It was a completely surreal experience.” She and Sasseville headed northwest into Pennsylvania, searching for the airliner but careful not to go too far. “We went out as far as Sass thought was reasonable to ensure that we had sanitized the airspace far out enough,” she said, “but then we needed to turn back home so that we could get over D.C. and make sure we weren’t flanked.” It would be some time before she learned that the airliner they were searching for, United Flight 93, had been taken down by a courageous group of passengers. Penney called them the real heroes because they were willing to sacrifice themselves, but then so was she. Asked about the lasting effects of 9/11, she said, “It fundamentally altered the vector of history, and we are all living with the impact of those events today. And I think that many of the tragedies that we see unfolding today are directly traceable…back to that moment in time.” Penney laments the freedoms that Americans have sacrificed in the name of security, pointing out that “being American is about adhering to certain beliefs and ideals and dreams that bind us all together….But with that comes risk, and if we’re unwilling to accept risk, then we lose something that makes us essentially Americans.” “I think the challenge we all have is to remain connected to those ideals, to those beliefs, to that kind of courage and live that out in our daily lives of service,” said Penney. “And remember that there are things in this world that are more important than ourselves…that are more important than security.”

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Letter From Aviation History: Young Aviators Take Wing

Letter From Aviation History: Young Aviators Take Wing This is what the future of aviation looks like. Ten young adults—kids really, ages 16 to 20—all members of the Lakeland AeroClub, flying cross-country from Florida to Wisconsin in five antique airplanes for the Experimental Aircraft Association’s annual Oshkosh AirVenture (photo portfolio). AeroClub members had spent 2½ years fully restoring one of the airplanes, a 1953 Piper L-18C Super Cub formerly owned by the Turkish air force and donated by James Ray, one of their adult mentors. For many of the young aviators, seeing the Super Cub fly in the Vintage Review at Oshkosh on July 23 was the airshow’s highlight. Founded in 2010 at Lakeland Linder Regional Airport, site of the annual Sun ’n Fun fly-in, the AeroClub is a model for similar flight clubs across the country whose mission is to engage high school students in aviation and foster their love of flying. According to AeroClub director Mike Zidziunas, who flew to Oshkosh with the young men in his 1956 Piper Pacer, the club has produced 32 private pilots and has had 56 students make their solo flight while members. He told The Ledger, a Lakeland newspaper, that the AeroClub and affiliated programs at the Central Florida Aviation Academy, Polk State College and Sun ’n Fun summer camps represent a “cradle to the cockpit” system. Club member Phillip Herrington, 20, who was attending his fifth AirVenture, told the EAA that he was there to spread the message that it’s possible for young people to attain their private pilot’s certificate—“Even though we’re young and the majority of society of today says we’re too immature to fly airplanes and take on a responsibility like this. They did it in World War II and we’re doing it again now.” “My favorite thing about AirVenture was getting to meet all the other young aviators and interact with kids my age that also share a passion for aviation,” said Trevor Penix, 16. For Vlad Prostocov, 20, “All of our trip was unbelievable, but my favorite part was volunteering on the airshow performance ramp. I saw a lot of the best pilots in the world so close, and we got to help Patty Wagstaff, providing ground support.” Donovan Richards, 18, echoed that sentiment, saying he enjoyed “getting the opportunity to work closely with the airshow performers, and getting to see an airplane I helped restore fly in the show.” Richards reported that this was the club’s third trip to Oshkosh. “It is a great reward for those who have done an excellent job working with the club,” he said. “Also a great learning experience for new pilots and soon-to-be pilots to fly across the country and back.” For these young aviators, who exhibit a sense of purpose and responsibility beyond their years, you get the feeling the sky’s the limit.

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Letter From Wild West — December 2020

Letter From Wild West — December 2020 New Mexico’s Kid The great racial divide in New Mexico Territory in the latter half of the 19th century was between Anglo newcomers and Hispanos (Southwesterners of Spanish descent). Anglos generally considered Hispanos inferior in mind, body, spirit, political thinking and social status, seldom treating them as true civil partners. Some Americans were skeptical of the Hispanos’ loyalties and thus considered New Mexico Territory a land apart, not deserving of statehood. “An unfortunate but instinctive distrust of New Mexico’s essentially foreign culture was the last and most durable brick added to the strong wall of opposition that prevented the territory from joining the Union until 1912,” wrote Robert W. Larson, author of New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 1846–1912. In part because Anglos migrated to New Mexico Territory in far smaller numbers than to states such as Texas and California, Hispano leaders continued to dominate territorial politics into the 20th century. In 1870 Lincoln was a predominantly Hispano village of about 220 people living in 80-odd single-story adobe homes. But Texans were moving in, and in 1873 one of them exchanged shots with Deputy Sheriff Juan Martinez. The violence that followed sparked a race war known since as the Horrell War, pitting the namesake Texan brothers and outlaw friends against the Hispano community. The surviving “invaders” ultimately left the area, but other Anglos came to dominate Lincoln economically and politically, notably businessman Lawrence Murphy and rival Texas cattleman John Chisum. Hostilities and grudges between those two and their supporters led to the infamous Lincoln County War of 1878. The biggest name to come out of that bloody conflict was Billy the Kid. Despite the violence, Lincoln, according to the 1880 census, had 157 dwellings and 638 residents, still mostly Hispano. Long after Bilito died young on July 14, 1881, Nuevoméxicanos remembered him as unos de los neustros (‘one of ours’) Billy the Kid was an Anglo (probably born Henry McCarty in New York City in 1859), as were most of the other major figures in the Lincoln County War. Murphy and James Dolan, his partner in the criminal faction known as “the House,” were born in Ireland, competitor John Tunstall was born in England, and attorney Alexander McSween—who worked in turn for the House and then Tunstall—in Canada. But in the December 2020 issue of Wild West Australian author James B. Mills reminds us in two feature articles that Hispanos played various roles in that brutal conflict, and that Billy the Kid (then calling himself William Bonney) endeared himself to much of the Hispano population, who called him Bilito or sometimes El Chivato (“the little goat” in the Nuevoméxicano dialect of Spanish). During a five-day siege of the McSween house, the climactic event of the Lincoln County War, Hispanos fought on both sides. “While there is no shame in being overshadowed by the legend that became Billy the Kid, they were more than merely a collective backdrop,” writes Mills. “They were men, many with families, willing to risk their lives, some paying a bloody price for have been drawn into a predominantly Anglo conflict from which they ultimately gained nothing for their participation.” José Chávez y Chávez and Yginio Salazar voluntarily took up arms and fought alongside Bilito as Regulators. Salazar remembered the Kid as the bravest man he ever knew, one who “did not know what fear meant.” He also noted that Billy “had the face of an angel, the soft voice of a woman and the mild blue eyes of a poet.” Others spoke of the Kid as being brave and loyal to his friends and kind and good to the poor. But as Mills notes, “Not all Hispanos in Lincoln County were fans of Billy and associates.” José Chávez y Baca, Manuel “Indian” Segovia and sharpshooter Lucio Montoya, for example, all took up arms for the House. While the Lincoln County War remains one of the best-known events in Old West history, the involvement of Hispanos in that bloody conflict has been largely forgotten. Billy the Kid has a prominent place in the pantheon of legendary Wild West figures mainly because of his bloody exploits as a young, controversial Anglo outlaw. But according to Mills, he was more than that. Long after Bilito died young on July 14, 1881, Nuevoméxicanos remembered him as unos de los neustros (“one of ours”). WW Wild West editor Gregory Lalire’s next historical novel, Man From Montana, comes out in April 2021. His earlier novels include 2019’s Our Frontier Pastime: 1804–1815 and 2014’s Captured: From the Frontier Diary of Infant Danny Duly. His short story “Halfway to Hell” appears in the 2018 anthology The Trading Post and Other Frontier Stories.

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https://www.historynet.com/letters-americas-civil-war-may-2013.htm

Letters – America’s Civil War May 2013

Letters – America’s Civil War May 2013 Clear and concise I’ve always liked America’s Civil War, but the March issue was great and particularly easy to understand. I am not a military person, nor am I well versed in mapmaking. I am often confounded by descriptions of troop movements, but in this issue I was able to follow everything, right down to the battlefield. Whatever you did, please keep it coming! Toni Criscuolo New Haven, Conn. Letter of the law As an admirer of Harold Holzer’s Civil War work and being a history teacher myself, I was thrilled to read “America’s second declaration of independence” (January 2013). I recently completed a unit with my eighth grade history students on the Declaration of Independence and its prose. As I told them, the declaration was not legally binding. Simply put, it was an exceptionally well-written “break-up letter” to King George III. However, calling the Emancipation Proclamation America’s second declaration of independence puts a bit too much pressure on what is an exceptionally well-written legal document. Lincoln was undoubtedly inspired by the Declaration of Independence: His Gettysburg Address is proof of this. I believe he wanted to evoke more of the declaration in his Emancipation Proclamation and to write a more heartfelt, emotional statement on the necessity of extinguishing slavery forever. But he feared the possible alienation of border states and the many Democrats who still tenuously supported a conflict to reunify the country. Lincoln knew this document was more than words to rouse the spirits of a broken nation, more than a dialogue with the people regarding the importance of unity and fairness; it was indeed a legal, binding document. John K. Renn Ionia, Mich. Shades of gray I found the story about a historical marker for Confederate spy David O. Dodd (Field Notes, March 2013) disturbing, particularly the comment about “how to recognize the heroes of the Civil War without endorsing their beliefs.” Since when does studying something or someone endorse any beliefs? There are courageous people in all wars, on all sides; do we only acknowledge those whose beliefs we share? We cannot judge people by current standards. If someone is following his beliefs, and does it honorably or with great personal sacrifice, can we not honor that? To quote Shelby Foote, “I yield to no one in my admiration for heroism and ability, no matter which side of the line a man was born or fought on.” Barbara Gilmore Asheville, N.C.

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https://www.historynet.com/letters-from-readers-august-2011-vietnam-magazine.htm

Letters from Readers – August 2011 – Vietnam magazine

Letters from Readers – August 2011 – Vietnam magazine Unique Insights into Storied Images I immensely enjoyed your story “One Wild Ride for Yankee Papa 10” by Paul Gregoire (April). As a longtime historian of the Vietnam War, I’ve always been fascinated by Larry Burrows’ legendary Life magazine photos of crew chief Lance Cpl. James Farley during this mission, and so wonderfully described by Gregoire. His vivid account of this combat action was a very rare, and highly unique, personal insight into one of the most significant combat photos to emerge out of war. Alejandro P. Villalva Dayton, Ohio Memories Can Be a Curse Gary Bray’s experience while assigned to the 11th Light Infantry Brigade as told in “Body Count”(October 2010) brought back memories of my tour with the same unit during the same time frame. I was a 21-year-old airman, arriving at Da Nang on October 10, 1969. After a week of orientation and listening to other guys who had been in-country for a while, I accepted an assignment with Helix 30 attached to the 11th, located on LZ Bronco, Duc Pho. From the day you’d arrive in-country and for the next month or so, your attitude changed and it only got worse. Gary Bray is right. You become “hard,” don’t smile and you don’t care anymore, except you just want out. When you get home, you feel like an old man, and when some event occurs, where your friends might feel pain and sorry, you only feel numbness. Memories are a curse on those who have served. Dan Thurber Buena Park, Calif. Aussie’s Happy Days with Dollies I commend you on your February issue and specifically your article about the Donut Dollies. It brought back memories. In April 1967 a squadron of Canberra B-20 bombers of No. 2 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force, was attached to the 35th Tactical Fighter Wing at Phan Rang Air Base. The squadron was there until June 1971. I was a member of No. 2 Squadron, and I still have wonderful memories of the American Red Cross girls whom you and us Aussies called the Donut Dollies, Kool-Aid Kids or Chopper Chicks. The Dollies visited our squadron’s domestic area and helped serve food every Wednesday at lunchtime. On their days off, the young ladies were frequent visitors to our officer’s club. Col Gardner Townsville, Australia Service a Barrier to Citizenship? Regarding your June issue story “Garcia’s Cadillacs,” I was also one of those “green card” Marines. I received my green card in February 1961, and I enlisted on January 9, 1968, my 18th birthday. I went to Vietnam in July 1968, and returned stateside a year later. I retired from the Marines in February 1989. I joined because it was the right thing to do and I wanted to give something back to this great country for the honor of being able to live here and have the opportunity to be whatever I wanted to be. I really had no problems with anyone about me being a Marine until 1996, when I applied to become a U.S. citizen. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) couldn’t accept my Certificate of Discharge (DD214). They had to get confirmation that I had served honorably. I pointed out that my DD214 states that I am retired with 21 years of active service and am receiving retiree pay. It also shows that I was awarded a Bronze Star Medal with Combat V, a Navy Commendation Medal, a Navy Achievement Medal with Combat V, a Purple Heart and a bunch of Unit Citations. Their answer: “Sorry, we have rules.” Two years after submitting my paperwork, I went for my interview to determine if I could read, write and comprehend English, and I passed. But I could not take the oath of allegiance because they had not received the confirmation that I had served honorably. A year later, after still no answer, I asked the INS when they had requested the information, and was told, “That was confidential.” I asked if I could submit a request for a copy of my records for them and they said no. In November 2000, I’d had enough, and went to the Tampa, Fla., INS office and told them that I never expected my military service to be held against me, that I was proud of my service and that they could take their citizenship and place it where the sun don’t shine. I did get a call telling me that they would “make an exception” and accept my DD214 until the confirmation arrives. I told them no thanks. I have never asked for special treatment, and I don’t want any now. David Ortuno Pearsall, Texas Of Rats and Zippos I was with 1st Battalion, 11th Marines, 4.2-inch Mortar Platoon, 1st Marine Division, and arrived on Hill 861-A on April 23, 1968. It was still a dangerous place as we were constantly shot at, mortared, probed and hit with 85mm mountain guns that screamed like hell when the rounds came in. A buddy of mine, John Dee Powell, was killed by a mortar there in June. In his story “Hell in the Hills of Khe Sanh” (June), Barry Fixler failed to mention the rat population on the hills at Khe Sanh. We used to leave them some of our C rations so they would not run all over us looking for food while we slept. Some Marines were still bitten by the rats and had to be medevaced out. Also, your Zippo story in the same issue reminded me of the lighter I had in Vietnam. It read: “To the U.S. Marines: God send me to see such a company together again when need is.”—Lord Howard of Effingham. I lost my Zippo in a Honolulu hotel room. If anyone finds it, I would pay to get it back! Edward M. Landry Lynn, Mass. Zippo Love Courtesy of David WilliamsI had this Zippo lighter engraved at Da Nang Air Field while I was with the 366th Security Police Squadron in 1972-73. The engraving represents the love of my life, my Vietnamese girlfriend at the time, Snow, who was to become my wife of 38 years—and still counting! David A. Williams Graceville, Fla. This is what is left of my Zippo. I had just finished lighting up a cigarette when my track ran over an antitank mine near Dong Ha Combat Base, where I was supporting a Marine mine sweeping team with A Battery, 1-44 Artillery in 1968. Jose Garcia-Anaya El Paso, Texas Jane as Icon of Betrayal The serious consideration given my book Hanoi Jane, Sex & Fantasies of Betrayal (Reviews, April) by Marc Leepson is evident in his grasp of its thesis that the vilifying of Jane Fonda has as much to do with those who disparaged her with that label as with the things she did while visiting Hanoi in 1972. I also take to heart his observation that a phrase like “crisis of masculinity” can obscure more than it illuminates. His criticism of my word choices, however, runs the risk of avoiding the message they carry—that there is a cultural legacy to the Hanoi Jane story with deeply psychological and discomforting implications. I have two responses to Leepson’s comment that I “minimize the plight of the American POWs.” First, I tried to not do that, writing, for example, that their treatment was at times “bewilderingly brutal.” But I also tried to avoid the condescension carried by the term “plight” that he uses. Some of the prisoners want to be remembered as “prisoners at war” for their time in Hoa Lo Prison, not defeated warriors sitting on the sidelines. Second, Leepson says that many POWs were “severely tortured,” and that I challenge the “well-documented” record of that. I read all of the POWs’ memoirs I could obtain, and secondary sources such as John Hubbell’s POW and Craig Howes’ Voices of the Vietnam POWs. With the sources we have, it is hard to distinguish what hardships were due to the harshness of prison life, the punishment for rule breaking, and torture. We have only the story composed by a small number of senior ranking officers, and the scholarly readings of that account find its claims of torture to be a subject for interpretation. As a study of myth and legend, my book is about more than historical documents and memories. Even without her trip to Hanoi, the sexually-charged roles that Jane Fonda played in films such as Klute and Coming Home primed her for a backlash from veterans reeling from the lost war and men feeling bruised from the women’s movement. With wartime betrayal figures like Mata Hari and Tokyo Rose already plying the public imagination, though, it was a certainty that she would get the casting call for a reprise of that role in the post-Vietnam War era. For now, I hope that Leepson is right that Hanoi Jane (the book) provides the food for thought on how and why Jane Fonda was made into an icon of betrayal. That’s what I set out to do. Jerry Lembcke Holy Cross College Worcester, Mass. At Hue Too Courtesy of Robert McDonnellRegarding the excellent article by James Willbanks in the February issue, “What Really Happened at Hue,”  there was more of a U.S. military presence in Hue on January 31, 1968, than just the 200 soldiers assigned to the MACV compound. As the commander of the 337th Signal Company headquartered at Da Nang, I had communications detachments providing communications in Khe Sanh, Hue, Da Nang, Chu Lai and Quang Ngai. The Hue site was a separate compound and was manned by 12 to 15 men. Just before the Tet Offensive broke, my team in Khe Sanh was hit during a rocket attack and I had to send in a replacement team. Lieutenant Grady Garner took a team into Khe Sanh, and I went to Hue. I was on the tower working to reinstall communications to Khe Sanh when the offensive got started. After reestablishing communications, I was able to return to my company headquarters, where I could better provide command direction to the entire company. The personnel in Hue were cut off from support for several days and, much to their credit, were able to maintain the site’s security and communication throughout the entire offensive. Tandy E. Bartay San Antonio, Texas James Willbanks responds: No slight was intended to the commo guys who deserve their due. The thrust of the point was that there were no U.S. combat units inside Hue at the time the Tet Offensive began. Remembering Vang Pao Thank you for the article about Maj. Gen. Vang Pao’s funeral. (News, June). He and his extended family came to the Bitter Root Valley of Montana soon after leaving Laos and remained for 10 years. His mother and a nephew are buried at Corvallis cemetery, and our American Legion Post honors those graves with the “Erawan” flag (pre-1975 three-headed elephant flag), when we post flags on all veterans’ graves for Memorial Day. The Hmong people are an inspiration to us and some still remain in Montana. Allen Bjergo Corvallis, Mont. Reunion Notices Now on the Web We are now posting reunion events online at VietnamMag.com. Mail or email your reunion information to the addresses below. Send letters to: Vietnam Editor, 19300 Promenade Drive, Leesburg, VA 20176; or email: Vietnam@weiderhistorygroup.com. Become a fan of Vietnam Magazine on Face­book.

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Letters From Readers—Aviation History March 2015

Letters From Readers—Aviation History March 2015 Frozen Odyssey I read with interest the article in the January issue by Joseph Caro about the Junkers W33 Bremen crash. Not mentioned was the rescue of Bremen’s crew via the Ford Tri-Motor pictured on skis on the front page of the Evening Graphic newspaper [P. 51 in Caro’s article]. That aircraft, which is still flying today, can be seen in beautifully restored condition [see photo at right] at the Golden Wings Museum at Minnesota’s Anoka Airport. It was flown by several well-known pilots, including Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Floyd Bennett—who piloted it during the Bremen rescue [and died of pneumonia on the return trip]—and Bernt Balchen, among others. The first Ford to be placed on floats, it was also one of the few to be fitted with skis. Great article in the best aircraft magazine in print. Dick Houck Roseville, Minn. Compliments to Aviation History and Joseph Caro for “A Newsman’s Frozen Odyssey.” Your readers might be interested in a few noteworthy ties to Bremen’s flight in my hometown: Copilot Colonel James Fitzmaurice later moved to Massapequa Park, on Long Island, and opened Fitzmaurice Flying Field (now the site of two Massapequa schools). Five streets in the village of Massapequa Park are named after aviation heroes: Lind­bergh, von Hünefeld, Fitzmaurice, Köhl and Balchen. There’s a small memorial in the lobby of Massapequa Park Village Hall commemorating Bremen’s flight from Baldonnel aerodrome, which was supposed to have ended at nearby Mitchel Field. It was most enlightening to read that the restored Bremen can be seen at Germany’s Bremen Airport Museum. Perhaps someday it will be displayed at the Nassau County Cradle of Aviation Museum, on the site of Mitchel Field. John Joseph Budnick Massapequa Park, N.Y. The Lost Squadron While Lieutenant Ted Thurnau (not Thurneau) of VMF-422 was fortunate in having survived the ditching of his F4U Corsair on January 25, 1944 (see “The Lost Squadron,” January 2015), his luck ran out the following month on February 28, during a stopover at Abemama airfield in the Gilberts. He was on his way to Engebi in the Marshalls when the left wing of his Corsair folded on takeoff. Thurnau died in the crash. The official history of VMF-422 indicates that the left wing locking pin had worked out of its position just as the Corsair became airborne. During a November 1974 visit to Abemama, I found the wreck of Thurnau’s ship, broken in half at the cockpit and missing its engine and left wing. This and my other experiences in searching for war relics in the Gilbert and Ellice islands were published in After the Battle magazine in 1977. Bill Bartsch Reston, Va. P-51 Pilot’s Long Haul I thoroughly enjoyed John Ottley’s article “The Long Haul,” about the last bomber raid of World War II, in the September 2014 issue. As an Iwo Jima–based pilot with the 47th Fighter Squadron “Dogpatchers,” VII Fighter Command, Twentieth Air Force, I was supposed to be on that August 14, 1945, mission escorting the B-29s in my P-51D, Clamwinkle McSlop. As a young second lieutenant, I was unaware it might be the last mission of the war, but some of the higher-ups did know—and as a result I was bumped off by a colonel. It turned out he had gotten into the air at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and wanted to be able to say he had flown both the first and last missions of the war. So I flew all the way to Japan, four hours each way, and stood by patrolling over the downed-pilot rescue submarines, but didn’t get credit for the mission because that colonel took my place over the target. Donald L. Kiggins Sr. Darien, Conn. Another Vega Restoration I read your January 2015 article about John Magoffin’s Lockheed Vega [“Restored”] with great interest. However, Stephan Wilkinson’s mention of “five surviving Vegas” overlooks another Vega that is alive and well. NC-13705, serial no. 203, has been undergoing restoration since 2011, with a goal of returning it to airworthy status. The work is now about 85 percent complete. The aircraft is currently being re-covered and painted and lacks only a new cowl and oil radiator. This Vega was part of Shell Oil’s fleet, designated as Shell No. 7. We have a dated photograph of the aircraft at a California airport, with a notation on the reverse that Jimmy Doolittle was its pilot. An article on our Vega appeared in the April 2014 issue of Skyways: The Journal of the Airplane 1920-1940, and I have included a photo of it. William McDevitt Heritage Aircraft Chalfont, Pa. Send letters to Aviation History Editor, World History Group, 19300 Promenade Drive, Leesburg, VA 20176-6500, or e-mail to aviationhistory@weiderhistorygroup.com.

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Letters From Readers – December 2007 – World War II

Letters From Readers – December 2007 – World War II Defending MacArthur I take exception to Richard Frank’s “The MacArthur No One Knew” (September 2007), complaining of MacArthur’s “deft cribbing of the ideas of others.” It is the duty of a commander to get ideas from his staff and to pick what he considers the best. The results are what count, and this marks the great commanders. It is not the duty of the commander to reveal the source of the ideas either to the press or to the enemy. Right or wrong, MacArthur was a national hero at a time when we were desperately in need of one. I think that this attack, sixty years after the event, was a cheap shot. John K. Skelton Wolfeboro, N.H. MacArthur could use some real criticism for his real faults, but he was hardly the only general officer of his age who used self-aggrandizement in promoting his career and theater of war. Here is a partial list of others who did the same thing: Montgomery, de Gaulle, Clark, Patton, Sims, Auckenlick, Alexander, Halsey, Harris, and Tedder. William H. Bacharach Pequea, Pa. I came ashore on Leyte in early March 1945 (almost missed the war). Driving down the beach road to the 96th Infantry Headquarters I spotted a strange pyramid made of concrete and stone that obviously used to have a plaque on it. A local GI told me it was a monument to where MacArthur had come ashore in October 1944. I asked what had become of the plaque. “Oh, the GIs tore it off and threw it in the ocean,” he replied. Apparently “I shall return” didn’t sit too well with the Battle of Leyte GIs. Lloyd M. Pierson Moab, Utah Richard B. Frank replies: I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Bacharach that MacArthur was not the only uniformed leader in World War II who engaged in self-aggrandizement—nor were the civilians innocent of such practices. MacArthur surpassed others by degree, not kind. He conducted a singularly relentless campaign to link his name with the concept and execution of every facet of his campaigns and he only grudgingly allowed the slightest public recognition of the contributions of others. I have no knowledge of the story of the alleged vandalizing of a monument to MacArthur on Leyte, but even MacArthur’s admirers noted the distaste many GIs expressed for MacArthur due to his self-promotion. I also agree emphatically with Mr. Skelton that other leaders have achieved acclaim by following plans conceived by subordinate staff officers or commanders without acknowledgment. What I tried to emphasize was that the actual pattern undergirding a majority of MacArthur’s greatest achievements of adaptation rather than innovation was the reverse of his carefully cultivated public image. The great irony of this is that I believe the pattern of adaptation forms a more useable and enduring template for achieving military success than the false image of singular military “genius.” Mr. Skelton will also find my work expresses distaste for MacArthur’s shameless self-promotion in his communiqués in the first Philippine campaign, but it also rebuts efforts to debunk the substantive basis for MacArthur’s rise to the status of national hero in 1942. Don’t Pass Kinkaid By Richard Frank correctly points out that MacArthur adopted his bypassing tactic in New Guinea in 1944 only after Admiral Halsey had introduced that practice in the Solomons in August 1943. Actually, bypassing had been introduced even earlier, in May 1943, when forces under Adm. Thomas Kinkaid invaded Attu in the Aleutians, purposely bypassing the heavily defended island of Kiska. And even before that, in the spring of 1942, the Japanese had bypassed besieged Bataan and Corregidor by leaving only a weak containing force there and shifting their main units further south to speed their invasion of the Netherlands Indies. Bypassing, as MacArthur himself later wrote, was “as old as warfare itself.” Stanley L. Falk Alexandria, Va. Memories of Stalag Luft III The caption under the picture of “1 Rm, 12 Beds, No Vu” (“Portfolio,” October 2007) states that Stalag Luft III housed only officers. Stalag Luft III was designated an officer’s camp but also housed some NCOs (I was a staff sergeant) who were sent there to be orderlies for the officers. The only orderly duty required of us was to distribute the food supplies from the central distribution center to the barracks; this the German commander insisted on. Our officers asked no other duties of us. The NCOs’ room in Barrack 130 had one window, so we did have a view. Charles E. Harbaugh Upper Sandusky, Ohio My uncle, Maj. Lawrence E. Anderson, was a prisoner at Stalag Luft III. He was a B-24 pilot, called in at the last minute to fill in for another crew’s sick copilot. The mission was a twelve-hour flight to Berlin and back, and they were shot down as they returned to England. My uncle and four others were the only ones able to bail out before the badly damaged plane spun into the ground. My uncle asked his captor whether they were in Belgium, and the German replied, “Nein, das es Deutschland and for you, da var es over.” The man then asked my uncle, “How’s da beer in St. Louis these days?” It seemed the man and his wife had lived there for about nine years until they came into property in Germany, returning just before the war broke out. My uncle was held for a few days in the local jail in a town about sixty miles southeast of Bremen, then shipped by rail with other prisoners on a five-day journey to Sagan and Stalag Luft III. He arrived on May 5, 1944, the day his son was born, and about six weeks after the “Great Escape” incident. Uncle Andy survived the January 1945 march from Sagan to near Spremberg, and went on to Stalag Luft VII-A. The conditions there were terrible, but he survived until the camp was liberated on April 29, 1945. My uncle returned safely to the United States, gave my aunt three more children, and continued to serve in the air force until his retirement. He and my aunt Avery Carlton Anderson live in Washington state, but his heart is never far removed from those prison experiences. Thank you for the “portfolio” of artifacts from those days. Lane Carlton Zatopek Boerne, Tex. A Long Campaign on the Eastern Front Your July/August 2007 edition really hit home with the cover line “The Deadliest Victory,” and could not have been more true. My family and I grew up during World War II in northeastern Italy near Udine, and our young men were recruited into the Alpine division of the Italian army. They still wear green felt hats with feathers and edelweiss. Unfortunately, my brother Angelo and my cousin were part of that recruitment, both at only twenty years of age. They did not believe in the war as Italy was aligned with Germany, but refusal to serve would have meant execution on the spot in Italy at the time. As the cruel Russian winter set in, I would receive letters from Angelo explaining the true despair that the cold had brought. Their feet were freezing and they were constantly building refuge from the cold, snow, and wind. My cousin’s feet developed hypothermia, and he fortunately was returned to Italy permanently due to his medical condition. When he returned, he told us the horrific news that my dear brother had been killed and had been buried in a massive grave, along with many others, somewhere in Russia. Poor Angelo had gone outside to gather some wood to build a fire and was shot by a Russian sniper. My other brother and I, already orphaned at a young age, were devastated by the senseless death of such a wonderful, sensitive young brother. About ten years ago, a group of people from my hometown, including veteran Alpini, visited the area where my brother and cousin were sent to fight in Russia. There is a marker there explaining what happened. My brother died on January 19, 1943, in Nowo Postojalowka, Russia, at only twenty-one years of age. It has already been a long time since that long campaign, but having grown up during that time I think about it often. Iolanda Tramontin Mazziol via e-mail World War II’s New Format I am a long-time subscriber to your magazine, also a veteran of World War II. Your new format for your magazine is great. The stories and features are a big improvement. I have enjoyed your magazine in the past but this is much better. Albert L. Gill Knoxville, Tenn. I must tell you that the last several magazines I received in the new format have been boring to me. I really enjoyed the true World War II magazine of old and would read these twice or more cover-to-cover, but I can’t get myself to finish reading some of these kinds of stories. Gene Fredericks Winslow, Ariz. I am thirty-six and have been an avid reader of World War II magazine for the past fifteen years. I could not wait to get ahold of the new publication, but could not stand having to wait two months. I loved that it began coming more frequently: the ten per year was a great change. You have once again gone above and beyond my expectations. The layout of the publication is pleasing and the photos are great. Thank you for making such a great publication. Mike Tyler Torrington, Conn. Send letters to World War II, 741 Miller Drive, SE, D-2, Leesburg, VA 20175, or worldwar2@weiderhistorygroup.com. Please include your name, address, and daytime telephone number.

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Letters from Readers – Vietnam magazine Feb. 2012

Letters from Readers – Vietnam magazine Feb. 2012 We Were Lob Bombed Too Following up on General Stanley Cherrie’s article (December, “Case of the Mysterious Lob Bomb”), I was a first lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion, 11th Marines, headquartered on Hill 55 southwest of Da Nang in the summer of 1969, serving as a fire direction officer and the crater analysis officer. We took two lob bombs in the position. The first was probably a 250-pound bomb that landed in the middle of a 105mm battery, killing a Marine. The second, launched a week later, barely cleared the Fire Direction Center and, by the size of the crater it left, must have been 500 pounds. Miraculously no one was injured. I took out patrols to a village from which the bombs were catapulted. It was amazing how the North Vietnamese could move those bombs across a river, dig holes for them and then catapult them 750 meters without being seen by our watchtowers. It was unnerving, because there wasn’t a bunker on Hill 55 that could withstand a direct hit of one of those bombs. Edward Kliewer III San Antonio, Texas As amplification of General Cherrie’s December 2011 article, I was a watch officer in the 3rd Battalion, 11th Marines Fire Direction Center on Hill 55, eight miles southwest of Da Nang in late 1968 and 1969. There were several lob bomb attacks against the Marines there, as the intelligence section of the June 1969 Command Chronology for 3rd Battalion, 11th Marines states: “The enemy continues to attack by fire using his relatively newly developed technique of catapulting dud ordnance onto the cantonment, as evidenced by the attacks on 12 May, 20 May, and 27 May 1969. The method remains the same: 250 lb. bombs are refitted with a new fuze, a small hole is dug, a launching charge is prepared, the bomb is placed over the charge and aimed toward the target, and the initial charge is detonated.” Jack Wells Cupertino, Calif. Remembering Song Re I enjoyed your article about the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) in the Song Re Valley in your December issue. I was the platoon leader of the 2nd Platoon, A Company, 2-8 Cavalry, and went into Landing Zone Pat with the second flight on August 9, 1967. I worked with Captain Robert Thompson during an earlier mission. I saw his gunship get hit and blow up as he was making a run on the anti-aircraft guns in the saddle between Hills 625 and 450, although I did not know it was him at the time. I have attached a picture (above) of Hill 650 while it was under air attack. Robert L. Wilkinson Spokane, Wash. I was pleasantly surprised to see the excellent article by Paul Hart in the December issue concerning the assault into the Song Re Valley in August 1967. I was the commander of Company A, 2-8 Cavalry (Airborne) that made the combat assault onto LZ Pat on August 9. I have never been so proud of my men as I was that day, and of the fearless support given by the chopper crews who supported us in that four-hour firefight. As was so often the case, the fight was totally unexpected—by both sides. The isolated situation that Company A found itself in cannot be really appreciated unless you understand the terrain of the area. LZ Pat was a very steep finger-ridge that jutted south out from Hill 450 on the north, which was in turn connected to the higher Hill 625. While the LZ and Hill 450 had only short grass on the top, their steep sides and Hill 625 were covered with dense brush and forest. All three were occupied by the dug-in enemy armed with heavy weapons—12.7mm machine guns, 82mm mortars, 57mm recoilless rifles—whose range covered the LZ from three directions. Once the fighting began, Company A, with 120 men spread along the ridge, was on its own. Reinforcements could not land, nor could I withdraw off the 1,200-foot-high ridge down to the lowland with my wounded. And I was leaving no one behind! Unknown to us was the camouflaged and covered underground fighting position in the center of the LZ, which had several automatic weapons that swept most of the LZ with fire at knee-high level. Other enemy positions were along the slopes of the hills. With the heavy fire incoming from so many directions, it took me a little time to suspect that we had bad guys in the middle of us. Once I did, I tasked Lieutenant Dick Hostikka to form a hunter-killer team from his 1st Platoon and sweep the LZ. They had to do this by low crawl, as standing up meant quickly getting hit. They finally found and eliminated the bunker. The men most exposed were our medics, who ran from wounded to wounded to treat and drag them back to a slight dip in the ridge that provided the only low area. We lost one medic killed and others wounded doing that. The heavy anti-aircraft and orientation of the terrain prevented resupply and medevacs from coming directly in. In an amazing display of courage and flying skill, several pilots finally got to us by approaching from below the top of the LZ ridge, then rising slowly up to us with the chopper skids parallel to the side of the ridge. With a chopper holding position just below the top of the ridge, men were able stand up enough to drag off ammo resupply and load several of the wounded with only few getting hit. Five men in the company were awarded Silver Stars, a number of Bronze Stars with V device, and a Valorous Unit Award was presented. Thanks for telling the story of those heroic soldiers and pilots. Colonel Ray Bluhm U.S. Army (Ret.) X-Ray Visions So much in your December issue touched me personally. Raul Taboada (“Eyewitness at LZ X-Ray”), who was portrayed in one of Bill Beck’s sketches, and I rushed to volunteer for the 1st Air Cav in the waning days of July 1965 so we could go to Vietnam with them. I was assigned to the 2-7 and he went to the 1-7. Raul was wounded at X-Ray on November 14. When my company arrived on the 16th to reinforce 1-7, the X-Ray battle was over. My platoon was assigned the left flank of the dry creek bed and the positions near where the 500-pound bomb fell that morning. We found Captain Nadal’s backpack somewhere outside the creek bed. I was wounded three days later, at LZ Albany. Somehow, Raul had learned about it, and when I arrived in San Francisco, an orderly at the hospital told me that Raul was expecting me. Raul was back in the field by December as an interpreter to the 82nd Airborne in the Dominican Republic. In 1968 he was in the 9th Infantry Division, and in heavy Tet battles in the Delta. We met again in 2001, at a 1st Cavalry reunion for a screening of the movie We Were Soldiers Once. I knew Jack Geoghegan (“Ghosts of Ia Drang”) from Pennsylvania Military College (PMC) days. He was in the Class of 1963; I graduated in 1964. Jack was an outstanding individual. Soft spoken, but firm and resolute, respected and admired by all. I’m glad to learn that at PMC he had not been forgotten. Enrique Pujals San Juan, Puerto Rico An Unlucky Choice of Words? I was an Army nurse in 1968-69 at the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku and was fascinated by Karl Marlantes article in the December issue (“The Truth About Lies in Vietnam”). It was informative and honestly written, but when I read the line, “luckily for me, the battalion commander was killed,” I was so stunned that I re-read it several times to be certain that I had read it correctly. I would like to think that this cannot be what Mr. Marlantes meant to write. I suppose it is the word “luckily” that I find difficult and sad. Perhaps another choice of work could have conveyed the same idea without the same shock. Maggie LaBarbera Bailey Indianapolis, Ind. Karl Marlantes replies: I was trying to convey the irony of what happened, and obviously failed. Had I known the effect that was produced, I’d have written it differently. Inspired to Seek Closure Your December interview with Lt. Gen. Ron Christmas took me back to 1969 and the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division at An Hoa combat base, southwest of Da Nang. A visit to The Wall and the Marine Corps National Museum is now high on my bucket list since reading the interview. The general’s words have inspired me to seek what I have for so very long avoided, coming face-to-face with myself at The Wall, with my brothers, and come to closure. Semper Fidelis. David B. “Bubba” McClellan Jacksonville, Fla. Send letters and reunion notices to: Vietnam Editor, 19300 Promenade Drive, Leesburg, VA 20176; or to Vietnam@weiderhistorygroup.com. Become a fan of Vietnam magazine on Face­book.

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Letters from Readers- America’s Civil War May 2011

Letters from Readers- America’s Civil War May 2011 Setting the record straight Who’s her daddy? I became interested in Nancy Hart after your recent article, “The Teenage Terrorist of Roane County” (March 2011), and did an Internet search to learn more. The Web site nkclifton.com/nancy.html contains a genealogy section with research on Nancy Hart. It states that Nancy’s parents were John and Rebecca Bolling Hart, not Stephen and Mary Hart, as has been written so many times. There are many cases where information on family is hard to determine with just circumstantial evidence, but I believe after viewing this site, you will see that creator Kathy Clifton did her homework. George Long French Creek, W.Va. From the horse’s mouth I respectfully, but strongly, disagree with Mr. Mozley’s letter in the March 2011 issue concerning his opinion that the “Confederate States of America did not fight the war to preserve slavery.” As Winston Groom pointed out most compellingly in that same issue, “Southerners saw the Republican victory…as an immediate and direct threat to the South’s ‘peculiar institution.’ ” But lest Mr. Mozley attributes this to a Union-biased Mr. Groom, the words of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens speak even more forcefully: The new Confederacy’s “cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery…is his natural and moral condition.” That says it all. Denise Hays Davenport, Iowa Pride without prejudice As we observe the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, the debate surrounding the cause (or causes) of the war continues to generate controversy. This controversy is not so much a matter of debate as it is a need for Southerners with deep roots to supposedly correct perceived misconceptions, most notably that the war was not about slavery, or that the South did not fight to maintain slavery. As a South Carolinian, I harbor a particular fascination with two documents critical to understanding the causes of the war: Senator John C. Calhoun’s speech opposing the Compromise of 1850 and South Carolina’s Declaration of Secession in December 1860. The dying Calhoun clearly warned the U.S. Senate that if the Northern states continued to tolerate abolitionism and failed to support the rights of slaveholders, the country could not remain whole. His predictions are echoed in the Declaration of Secession, which asserted under no uncertain terms that the Northern threat against slavery continued. Furthermore, it cited the election of Abraham Lincoln as the height of sectional agitation. Slavery and the sectional dilemma were widely discussed in Southern newspapers in the 1850s. The defenders of slavery were neither reluctant nor embarrassed to state their case in the most direct manner. Their words and actions were well recorded in their own time. Not all Southern soldiers fought a conscious battle to maintain slavery. Indeed, many had neither the desire nor the means to own slaves. Slavery, however, was held up as both a right and a necessity by its advocates, and history clearly shows that it was the predominant issue that stood in way of national unity. If we want to make the most of the sesquicentennial, we should strive to accept the complex nature of the war and acknowledge the role of slavery as a principal issue. I remain an avid student of the Civil War and a proud Southerner. Acknowledging the past has not diminished either identity. Randall C. Blackerby Fountain Inn, S.C. Originally published in the May 2011 issue of America’s Civil War. To subscribe, click here.

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Libbie Custer’s Literary Love Affair With Her Late Husband

Libbie Custer’s Literary Love Affair With Her Late Husband For nearly six decades after Little Big Horn, George Custer’s widow burnished the general’s reputation and wrote movingly of reconciliation with former foes Elizabeth Bacon Custer outlived her husband, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, by 57 years. In the nearly six decades between the annihilation of her husband and five companies of the 7th Cavalry on the Little Big Horn River in Montana and her own death, Libbie wrote three memoirs. The most famous of these, Boots and Saddles, describes the couple’s experiences in Dakota Territory and the years leading up to the 1876 summer campaign against the Sioux that ended in arguably the most famous blunder in American military history. Two other memoirs (Tenting on the Plains and Following the Guidon, respectively) treat the immediate postwar period in Texas, where Custer performed Reconstruction duty, and the events of the 1868 Washita Campaign, in which Custer served under Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan. They are almost unmatched in their detail about many elements of the U.S. Army’s experience in the aftermath of the Civil War, and, more broadly, about the meaning of that war for the future of the American West. For the most part, historians have dismissed the books as filled with nothing but saintly depictions of an army officer who fell from great heights after the Civil War and died trying to reclaim his military fame. Critics of George Custer’s vanity and impetuousness especially deride the work of his wife, who smoothed the edges off a prickly subject and countered depictions of the Civil War’s “Boy General” as an officer who disobeyed orders and endangered his command. In consequence of Libbie’s decades-long defense of her husband, she often has been categorized as one of the most prominent “professional widows” of the Civil War era. LaSalle Corbell Pickett Mary Anna Jackson Jessie Benton Fremont The label of professional widow followed several well-known women whose husbands participated in the Civil War. Without a doubt, LaSalle “Sallie” Corbell Pickett became the most prominent and problematical professional widow of the Civil War generation. Civil War scholars spent years unravelling the myth Sallie created about her husband, Confederate Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett, and his ill-fated charge on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg. Historian Gary W. Gallagher’s investigation into Sallie’s publishing record revealed that large sections of the widow’s work were plagiarized. In other cases, Gallagher noted, Sallie completely fabricated correspondence that later became the basis for popular historical fiction—in the form of author Michael Sharra’s The Killer Angels—as well as informing filmmaker Ken Burns’ documentary series on the Civil War. Sallie’s efforts to burnish her husband’s reputation and shift blame for the failure of Pickett’s Charge proved useful to advocates of the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause” mythologization of the war—supporting a narrative that Pickett’s Charge and the fight at Gettysburg had been the high-water mark of the Confederate struggle for independence. In a study dedicated to prominent husband and wife duos from the Civil War era, historians Carol K. Bleser and Lesley J. Gordon assert that Libbie Custer conformed to the stereotype of a professional widow, gaining “a measure of her own independence by promoting a man and creating a myth.” The authors include Libbie alongside Sallie Pickett, Mary Anna Jackson (widow of Confederate Lt. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson), and Jesse Benton Frémont (widow of Union general and 1856 presidential candidate John C. Frémont). In many ways, Libbie is the odd woman out among the other widows named by Bleser and Gordon. Unlike Sallie Pickett, Libbie did not fabricate evidence about her husband and his military career. Neither did Libbie, unlike Jesse Frémont, write under her husband’s name, and Libbie’s memoirs, in contrast to Mary Anna Jackson’s, were not designed to provide an embellished biographical sketch of her husband. Libbie hoped her writing would provide a depiction of the couple’s life and experiences on the American frontier. George is a central figure in the three books, to be sure, but he is by no means their sole subject. Yet Shirley A. Leckie, the most prominent biographer to tackle Libbie Custer, helped perpetuate the idea that George Custer’s widow wrote for the sole purpose of mythologizing her husband. Leckie contends that Libbie wanted her husband to serve as a model for young men, who could read her memoirs and be inspired to emulate the moral rectitude and Christian bearing she attributed to her husband. It is possible to read the memoirs of Libbie Custer and reach the conclusions drawn by Leckie and other Custer critics. Looking beyond the work Libbie did to weave the Custer myth, however, reveals the voice of a perceptive observer and active participant in the events of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Western expansion. Libbie Custer offers readers rare insight into the Civil War and its aftermath—providing glimpses of reunions between former foes, reflections on the meaning of the war, and a belief in the cause of reconciliation—that make her collected works well worth revisiting. Born to a prominent local judge in Monroe, Mich., on April 8, 1842, young Elizabeth Clift Bacon experienced a privileged childhood, though not one without tragedy. Her mother, Eleanor Sophia Page, died before Libbie’s 13th birthday. Libbie spent the next several years enrolled at the local seminary school, Boyd’s, where she graduated in 1862 at the top of her class. One year earlier, her husband had graduated at the bottom of his West Point class. Libbie and George met shortly after her graduation, but until Custer earned promotion to brigadier general of volunteers and distinguished himself in the Gettysburg Campaign, Libbie’s father disapproved of the match between his daughter and the young professional officer. Daniel Bacon worried that Libbie would not adjust well to Army life and that marriage to an officer would be a step down in social standing for his daughter. Libbie Custer was at ease in both the field and the halls of power in Washington, D.C. Sketch artist James E. Taylor depicted her riding sidesaddle with the general near Winchester, Va., and presenting battle flags captured by George Custer’s men to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. Whether or not Libbie found life in the Army difficult, her commitment to being by her husband’s side never wavered after they exchanged vows on February 6, 1864. That summer and fall, while her husband participated in General Philip Sheridan’s campaign in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, Libbie stayed in Washington observing and absorbing the culture of the national capital. She met many of the war’s most famous figures, including Abraham Lincoln, who recognized Libbie as the wife “of the man who goes into the cavalry charges with a whoop and a yell.” Lincoln told Libbie marriage might make Custer more cautious. Libbie assured the president that would not be the case. Given the boost Sheridan’s success in the Shenandoah Valley provided to Lincoln’s reelection campaign in 1864, the president doubtless felt a fondness for “Little Phil” and the cadre of hand-picked young cavalry officers who served alongside him. Sheridan’s own fondness for Custer later helped George out of several scrapes with Army higher-ups, who benched the former boy general in 1867 after he led 75 men some 225 miles across Kansas, from Fort Wallace to Fort Harker, without orders—for the purpose of visiting Libbie. Custer’s Civil War exploits, especially those that occurred after his marriage to Libbie, elevated him to the status of a national hero. He appeared on the cover of Harper’s Weekly in March 1864. Increasingly, Libbie shared her husband’s spotlight, delighting in being recognized around Washington as General Custer’s wife. When Civil War sketch artist James E. Taylor accompanied Sheridan’s 1864 Shenandoah Valley expedition, he sketched Libbie on horseback alongside her husband and as a solo rider during one of her visits to Custer’s headquarters near Winchester, Va. Taylor also sketched Libbie with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton at a Washington reception, where Stanton received Confederate flags captured by Custer’s command in the Valley. The Custers at their Virginia 1865 winter quarters. Brother Tom Custer is on the general’s right, while their father sits and reads at upper right. (Granger NYC) Libbie emerged from the war with a treasured memento that spoke to her husband’s importance and her own association with his activities. Sheridan gave her the table from Wilbur McLean’s parlor at Appomattox Court House upon which Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant drafted the terms of the Army of Northern Virginia’s surrender. The accompanying note to Libbie read: “There is scarcely an individual in our service who has contributed more to bring about this desirable result than your very gallant husband.” In 1912, Libbie loaned the table, which had spent much of its life in a fireproof warehouse in New York City, to the Museum of American History in Washington. Upon her death in 1936, the table officially joined the collections of the Smithsonian, in accordance with Libbie’s will. Libbie often defended her right to own the table in the press, denying that her husband had stolen the piece from the McLean House. In the December 5, 1885, issue of Harper’s Weekly, she supplied her reminiscences of acquiring the table—and a copy of a letter from Sheridan that proved “an unassuming little stand, of the cheapest stained pine” indeed belonged to her. The letter also served to remind readers of the high esteem Sheridan held for her husband at the close of the Civil War. The Custers dine al fresco in 1869 outside their field headquarters at Fort Hays in Kansas. (Courtesy of the National Parks Service) Libbie’s three volumes of memoirs focus most closely on details about living in army camps and at military forts on the Great Plains, which she believed Americans knew little about. Though she dedicated no book to Civil War recollections, the conflict is not absent from the three memoirs. Why did Libbie largely ignore the most formative national event her generation experienced? Perhaps she thought she had little original to say on the subject, as compared with her insights about life with the professional army after the war. She also never undertook a defense of her husband’s Civil War career comparable with that she offered regarding him as an Indian fighter. More than likely, she reckoned his Civil War reputation did not need polishing. Despite the overall lack of Civil War content, Mark Twain and his publishing partners at Webster’s deemed Libbie’s work worthy of inclusion in their “Shoulder Strap” memoir series. The series included the two-volume memoirs of Generals Grant, William T. Sherman, and Sheridan. Both Ellen McClellan and Almira Russell Hancock shepherded recollections begun by their husbands, Union Maj. Gens. George B. McClellan and Winfield Scott Hancock, to publication in the series. Samuel Wylie Crawford also contributed a volume on the coming of the war. Libbie’s Tenting on the Plains stood as the only volume written by a woman and from the perspective of an Army wife, rather than from a general in command. Moreover, it alone deals exclusively with events after the war. Libbie emphasized her perspective on the events she experienced, which further weakens the case that she wrote as a professional widow attempting to absolve her husband for his perceived failures. Libbie’s memoirs offer deep insight into how she made sense of the consequences of the conflict and the subsequent reunion of the country. She manifested a strong impulse toward sectional reconciliation throughout her work. Libbie’s recollections (all written within 25 years of the war’s conclusion) emphasized two primary themes in relation to how the Civil War should be remembered. First and foremost, the war had been waged for the preservation of the Union—Libbie and George (an ardent Democrat who joined Andrew Johnson on the campaign trail during his “Swing Around the Circle” campaign) gave little thought to emancipation as a further outcome of the conflict. Second, in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, reconciliation with former Confederates should be the paramount goal of Americans. Libbie did not present these themes didactically; rather, she used stories to illustrate her strong feelings about national reunion and forgiving former Confederates. Early in the text of Boots and Saddles, Libbie recalled the journey made by the 7th Cavalry from Elizabethtown, Ky., to Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota Territory, in 1873. While delighted at the prospect of escaping Reconstruction duty, Libbie arrived at present-day Bismarck, N.D., to find that she would not be allowed to travel with her husband while he accompanied a surveying expedition to determine a route for the Northern Pacific Railroad. She recorded her return to her family home, and the slow days she spent waiting for missives from her husband. Despite her disappointment in being left behind, Libbie gladly recounted her husband’s reunion with his old West Point comrade Thomas L. Rosser, a former major general in the Confederate Army who had taken a position as the chief engineer of the Northern Pacific. Libbie told her readers of Custer and Rosser’s long association, from their West Point days to their frequent encounters commanding troops in opposing armies on the battlefields of the Shenandoah Valley. During the war, Libbie suggested, neither man felt any true animosity toward the other, even though Custer had captured all Rosser’s supply wagons or routed his troops in battle. Libbie explained that even when one soldier got the better of the other, the letters that followed addressed a “dear friend.” That the two former generals should fall back into such an easy friendship, reclining on a buffalo robe and spending “hours talking over the campaigns in Virginia” provided evidence of an easy reconciliation. In present day Bismarck, Rosser Avenue remains a main thoroughfare. Libbie may have appreciated the fact that the street provides the northern boundary for Bismarck’s first municipal park, which the city named in the memory of her husband in 1909. The cityscape thus embeds their reconciliation story into the modern memorial landscape. A number of famous Civil War personalities appeared in Libbie’s memoirs to make the case for reconciliation, especially in Tenting on the Plains, which presented the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to readers. Among the figures that Libbie drew on were William T. Sherman and former Confederate Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood. Libbie remembered meeting Hood while sharing a steamboat bound for New Orleans as she and her husband prepared to travel to Austin, Texas, and begin their Reconstruction service. Libbie related a story of Hood’s quest to find the best possible prosthetic leg after losing one of his at the Battle of Chickamauga. He had tried models from England, France, Germany, the South and the North. She happily noted that Hood acknowledged, despite his previous sectional loyalty, that “the Yankee leg was best of all.” When the steamer arrived at Hood’s destination and he disembarked, “General Custer carefully helped the maimed hero down the cabin stairs and over the gangway.” Libbie believed that many of the Army’s highest-ranking officers shared her husband’s desire for an easy peace. “In retrospection,” she wrote, “I like to think of the tact and tolerance of General Sherman, in those days of furious feeling on both sides, and the quiet manner in which he heard the Southern people decry the Yankees.” Commending the general most famous for setting large swaths of the Confederacy ablaze, Libbie related that “he knew of their impoverished and desolated homes, and realized…what sacrifices they had made; more than all, his sympathetic soul saw into the darkened lives of mothers, wives and sisters who had given, with their idea of patriotism, their loved ones to their country.” He remembered a maxim that we all are apt to forget, ‘Put yourself in his place,’” she approvingly said of Sherman. Beyond the theme of reconciliation, Libbie believed her readers should appreciate the sacrifices of the volunteer soldiers who fought the Civil War. The section of Tenting on the Plains dealing with the need to honor the service of individual soldiers is strikingly modern. She described the wounds received by many of the men who had campaigned with her husband as Custer’s Wolverines in the cavalry division of the Army of the Potomac. She described a soldier who “carried always, does now, a shattered arm, torn by a bullet while he was riding beside General Custer in Virginia.” The wound, she explained “did not keep him from giving his splendid energy, his best and truest patriotism, to his country down in Texas even after the war, for he rode on long, exhausting campaigns after the Indians, his wound bleeding, his life sapped, his vitality slipping away with the pain that never left him day or night.” Libbie’s tribute to soldierly resilience could not ease the pain of the wounded men, but it recognized that not all Civil War service ended with an easy return to the pursuits of civilian life. Libbie and George pose together not long after his promotion to major general of volunteers on April 15, 1865. As a brooch, she wears a version of the “Custer Medal” designed by her husband and awarded to his troopers. (Heritage Auctions/Dallas) In their home at Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota Territory, George and Libbie surrounded themselves with mementos of the Civil War. He hung portraits of McClellan and Sheridan in his library, and she described how much the couple treasured two examples of sculptor John Rogers’ groupings—mass-produced plaster statuettes of various Civil War scenes—with which they crisscrossed the Great Plains. Life traveling in the back of army wagons did not particularly suit the statuary, but Libbie explained to readers that her husband’s first chore upon unpacking his library was mending the figures depicted in “Wounded to the Rear” and “Letter Day.” Looking upon the figures with guests (many of whom were Civil War veterans) sparked lively conversations about the war and how participants remembered their service. Elizabeth Custer revealed her memory of Civil War experiences in small glimpses, sprinkled among over 1,000 pages of recollections about life in the postbellum Army. Encouraging readers to practice sympathy toward defeated Confederates, she highlighted the degree to which her husband and other army officers committed themselves to reconciliation, while extending an army widow’s sympathy to maimed veterans. Her writings reveal that she thought a great deal about the war and its memory, independently of her husband’s role in saving the Union. To reduce Elizabeth Bacon Custer to just another professional widow denies modern readers a chance to explore the rich recollections she left of the most transformative period in the history of the United States. _____ Friendly Enemies In Boots and Saddles, Libbie Custer presented the wartime exchanges between her husband and Confederate cavalry commander Thomas Rosser as examples of a friendship the Civil War had briefly interrupted. In this passage from the book describing Lt. Col. Custer’s postwar campaign in the Dakotas, she put a humorous tone to events that occurred in the 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign: “[Custer] wrote of his delight at having again his whole regiment with him, his interest in the country, his hunting exploits, and the renewal of his friendship with General Rosser…Once General Custer took all of his friend’s luggage, and found in it a new uniform coat of Confederate gray. He wrote a humorous letter that night thanking General Rosser for setting him up in so many new things, but audaciously asking if he ‘would direct his tailor to make the coat-tails of his next uniform a little shorter’ as there was a difference in the height of the two men. General Custer captured his herd of cattle at one time, but he was so hotly pursued by General Rosser that he had to dismount, cut a whip, and drive them himself until they were secured.” Cecily N. Zander is a Ph.D. candidate at Pennsylvania State University, where she is completing a dissertation on the army and empire in the American West. She will publish a larger essay about Libbie Custer in a forthcoming volume from LSU Press. This story appeared in the April 2020 issue of Civil War Times.

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https://www.historynet.com/liberation-route-europe.htm

Retracing the steps of freedom with Liberation Route Europe

Retracing the steps of freedom with Liberation Route Europe On September 17, 1944, Sergeant Jacob H. Wingard jumped out the door of a C-47 transport aircraft flying over southern Holland. The 22-year old was one of 12 soldiers to leap out of the aircraft—among the 34,600 paratroopers dropping as part of Operation Market Garden, a large-scale British-led Allied operation to liberate Holland from Nazi occupation. Once on the ground and assembled, the 3rd Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division—including Wingard—was to secure the town of Eerde, located three kilometers southwest of Veghel. Other elements of the 101st Airborne would focus on Son and St. Oedenrode. Sgt. Jacob H. Wingard (National Archives) By the afternoon, 3rd battalion had secured Eerde, forming a defensive perimeter and digging in around the St. Antonius windmill. Throughout the night and through the following morning, German units repeatedly attacked the battalion’s positions, with many of the engagements devolving into fierce close quarters fighting in the town’s houses and sheds. The windmill also suffered extensive damage, from small arms, tank fire, and from shrapnel when a M4 Sherman tank was destroyed only feet from its base. During the morning’s fighting, Wingard, his platoon leader, and another paratrooper climbed into the windmill, using its elevated vantage point to direct artillery fire onto attacking German soldiers, who were threatening to overrun several areas along the 3/501st’s lines. At around 11:00 am, a German sniper saw Jacob Wingard at the windmill’s upstairs window and fired, hitting the American squarely in the chest. Wingard collapsed and died shortly thereafter. Faced with increasing numbers of German units pressing against American positions, the battalion was forced to withdraw out of the town and towards Veghel. The Germans soon recaptured and occupied Eerde. Wingard’s story and sacrifice is but one of many remembered and honored by the Liberation Route Europe Foundation, an initiative that traces its origins to the Netherlands in 2008. Liberation Route Europe is a network of 200 locations marking key events, people, and places of the Allied path across Western Europe in 1944-1945. The trail currently connects Great Britain, France, Belgium, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Germany, with plans to expand to Italy. Each point of interest is identified by a large boulder and plaque bearing the site’s historical significance. Visitors can use the foundation’s website or its app’s “audiospots” (combining personal stories with the larger historical context) to learn the firsthand experiences of people affected by the most crucial conflict of the 20th century. The St. Antonius Windmill now houses a memorial to Wingard and a monument to the men of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment. The monument, unveiled in 1981, is the site of an annual service in September, and the windmill was restored in 2011. Other Liberation Route Europe sites include: The National Liberation Museum, located near the 82nd Airborne Division’s drop zones during Market Garden, uses mixed displays and an impressively detailed and scaled diorama to examine the 82nd’s movements during the course of battle, including its advance toward Nijmegen, Grave, and across the Waal, Maas, and Rhine rivers. The 82nd’s drops were extraordinarily successful—nearly 90% of its paratroopers and 84% of its gliders ended up within 3,300 feet of their drop zones—and the diorama includes accurate locations for the latter. © National Liberation Museum 1944-1945 Three days after landing south of Nijmegen, American paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division were tasked with crossing the Waal River. Capturing the bridge over the river was one of the Allies’ primary goals, as it was crucial to keep open the single road leading north to Arnhem, where the British 1st Airborne Division and Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade were engaged in heavy fighting. After repeated logistical delays, paratroopers of 3rd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment were forced to use 26 canvas boats that provided no protection from enemy fire. An insufficient number of oars also forced many men to use their M1 rifle butts to row. The paratroopers crossed in multiple waves, suffering nearly 50% casualties, but succeeded in helping to capture the bridge intact. © Nationaal Bevrijdingsmuseum 1944-1945 Nearby, the Sunset March occurs every evening in Nijmegen at a new bridge over the Waal River. The span, finished in 2013, features 48 pairs street lights—one for each of the 48 American soldiers killed during the 82nd Airborne Division’s river crossing. Every evening, a military veteran marches across the bridge, and each pair of the tribute lights are switched on at their pace. The public is invited to join the march, which culminates at the memorial on the far end of the bridge. © Team31 The Airborne Museum is located at Villa Hartenstein. First established as an inn in 1728, the building served as the headquarters of the British 1st Airborne Division commanded by Major General Roy Urquhart. After dropping around Arnhem, the division fought off attacks from the II SS Panzer Corps for nine days. The British troops suffered over 75% casualties as they desperately clung to an decreasing perimeter before being ordered to withdraw on September 25. The museum, established in 1980, features interviews with soldiers and civilians who experienced the battle alongside unique historical objects—including Allied and German weapons, equipment, and personal effects. © Airborne Museum Hartenstein The Airborne War Cemetery in Oosterbeek, just west of Arnhem, is the location of more than 1,700 graves of Allied troops killed during 1944-1945. Most of the casualties are from Operation Market Garden, but others from subsequent operations were also interred there. The fallen include 1,432 British Commonwealth soldiers, 73 members of the 1st Polish Parachute Brigade, 8 Dutch civilians, and 253 unidentified bodies. An annual ceremony continues to be held at the site. © P.J.L Laurens The German War Cemetery in Ysselsteyn is the location of more than 31,500 graves, the vast majority of which fell during World War II. Those interred include soldiers of different nationalities who fought alongside the German military. The site is the largest German war cemetery in the world and is administered and maintained by the German War Graves Commission. © Jeroen van Wieringen Located on top of a former SS camp, the Camp Vught National Memorial stands to remember the 31,000 people who were imprisoned there between January 1943 and September 1944. The site features exhibits, places to reflect on the tragedy, and a memorial to nearly 1,300 Jewish children deported and murdered in June 1943. The museum includes reconstructed watchtowers, barracks, and a crematorium. © Nationaal Monument Kamp Vught The Overloon War Museum, also called the National War and Resistance Museum of the Netherlands, is the largest war museum in the Netherlands. Housed in a spacious hangar on 34 acres of land in South Brabant, it features more than 150 period vehicles, weapons, and aircraft that are presented alongside personal, firsthand experiences to commemorate the Battle of Overloon, an infantry and tank engagement that occurred shortly after Operation Market Garden. © Oorlogs- en Verzetsmuseum Overloon With the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe in 2019, Liberation Route Europe has launched a tourism campaign—Europe Remembers—to coordinate, facilitate, and organize travel to the dozens of commemoration events that are scheduled to take place on the continent. The campaign will provide historical information about the war and its millions of participants, as well as a calendar of events and other relevant tourist information. Europe Remembers also works with regional partners and foundations to provide resources and activities at a local level. One such initiative is Brabant Remembers, which intends to reach wider audiences—including younger generations—with a cutting-edge, interactive smartphone app. Among the 75 eyewitness stories, honoring each year since Europe’s liberation, the app uses 30 actors to portray 10 wartime experiences in Brabant. When at one of the sites, users will be able to view a personal story overlaid as a movie on top of the actual locations, effectively conveying the human experience to visitors. ©2018 Stichting Crossroads Brabant 40|45 In July 2019, the Travel the Liberation Route Europe guide will be available. The unique publication will feature both historical facts and personal stories, as well as providing a full overview of the organization’s activities and sites, including museums, memorials, recommended itineraries, and points of interest along the Liberation Route. In 2020, Liberation Route Europe will inaugurate an expansive and unique network of international hiking trails, stretching nearly 2,000 miles from London to Berlin. Focusing primarily on the last two years of the war, the cross-border trails will lead visitors through hundreds of historical sites marked by custom designed route markers called “vectors.” Touching on military and civilian experiences, the trail plans to honor international cooperation, the unification of European unification, and the 75 years of freedom since the end of the world’s most cataclysmic conflict. Visit: www.liberationroute.com App: iOS or Android

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https://www.historynet.com/lieutenant-general-sir-samuel-auchmuty-the-military-life-of-an-american-loyalist-and-imperial-general.htm

Lieutenant General Sir Samuel Auchmuty: The Military Life of an American Loyalist and Imperial General

Lieutenant General Sir Samuel Auchmuty: The Military Life of an American Loyalist and Imperial General Although born in New York City in 1756, Samuel Auchmuty’s family came from Fife, Scotland, where there still exist a village called Auchmuty. His family was also Anglican, or Episcopalian as it is called in Scotland and America, which former teacher and historian John D. Grainger regards as a factor in his decision to fight for the British Crown during the American War for Independence. That war may have ended in defeat for him, but it was only the beginning of a remarkable military career in India, Egypt and South America. During the Napoleonic Wars, Auchmuty organized Kent’s defenses against possible invasion and he later took part in the conquest of Java. Lieutenant General Sir Samuel Auchmuty (1756-1822), The Military Life of an American Loyalist and Imperial General, by John D. Grainger Auchmuty’s achievements were literally overshadowed by the personalities under whom he served, such as Charles, Earl of Cornwallis in India, David Baird in Egypt, John Whitelocke in South America, and by Gilbert Elliott-Murray-Kynynmound, 1st Earl of Minto and Thomas Stamford Raffles in Java. A major reason, Grainger posits, is that he left no autobiographical book or papers behind after his death. Nevertheless, the author found documentation enough to confirm his greatest achievements during the occupation of Montevideo, the campaign in Java and above all else his service in India. As a “Sepoy general” (like Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington), Auchmuty’s recommendations to the East India Company, such a soldier being paid a bounty for 12 years of service and after another five years, the option of either re-enlistment or honorable discharge, had their effect in India House. Indeed, Grainger believes that his reforms in the Madras Army had much to do with its remaining loyal to the company during the great rebellion of 1857-1858. Auchmuty’s last post was as commander in chief in Ireland, where here he died on August 19, 1822. Nothing is known of his relations with women, nor was he ever married…other than to the Army. Military scholars in search of a new personality among the professionals who forged the British Empire should find plenty of contextual interest in this fascinating profile of an American who took “the King’s shilling” for life.

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https://www.historynet.com/life-as-an-air-america-cia-pilot-in-vietnam.htm

Life as an Air America CIA Pilot in Vietnam

Life as an Air America CIA Pilot in Vietnam In September 1964, I began a journey that was to be my life’s adventure. I was hired as a pilot with Air America, the CIA’s secret airline, working on its clandestine operations in Southeast Asia. It was the world of spooks, covert air ops and adventure. Air America’s pilots were shadow people. The airline’s schedules and operations were irregular and unknown. I was 27 and had already been a pilot for more than half of my life when I left my home in Detroit for the wild escapades that awaited in Southeast Asia. After orientation in Taipei, Taiwan, and a stint flying big DC-6 transport planes out of Tachikawa, Japan, I was sent to Saigon. When I arrived in March 1965, the war was revving up, and Vietnam provided the aviation playground of my dreams, a place where I could take it to the limit and beyond. Air America’s slogan, “Anything, Anytime, Anywhere,” would soon become apparent. We delivered everything from rice to munitions to bodies, both living and dead. Our work was never boring. There was no such thing as a typical day. Urban Saigon was quite different from the Air America bases in remote areas of Laos and Thailand. It was difficult to go anywhere in the city because of the influx of refugees from the communist-controlled countryside, which in turn caused traffic jams that made the guys from Los Angeles feel right at home. Trips to and from the airport sometimes took one or two hours out of the day, adding to the irritability factor when I was forced to wait another hour or more in a hot cockpit while in line for takeoff. According to the movie representation of airmen at war, we were gray-suited knights, warriors all, who climbed onto our steeds of shining aluminum, blasting off into the blue skies in support of the battle with the godless communist hordes. Great rhetoric, perhaps, but that romanticized viewpoint could not have been further from the truth. In reality, when our intrepid birdman arrived at an airfield he was often already dusty and wrinkled from his ride on the potholed road to the field. He was still bone-tired from the previous day’s flying and in a bad mood after mosquitoes feasted on him as he waited in the dark for the Volkswagen bus that transported the crew to the plane. In many cases, a searing hangover coupled with gut-twisting diarrhea also made our knight a bit snappy. The crew bus dropped us off at Operations, a gray, uninspiring two-story building. In 1965, as our missions expanded, we were receiving new pilots almost daily, and the facilities were being taxed to the extreme. We got our daily flight schedule on the second floor, and then most of us went to the standby room, where there was always a pot of vile coffee. No matter how bad it was, everyone wanted a cup even though—when dumped into an already-troubled gastrointestinal system—it would send the lower intestine into violent spasms. No doubt a Viet Cong architect, or perhaps Ho Chi Minh himself, had placed the restrooms in the back of the building on the second floor. On the morning of July 5, 1965, I waited to depart Saigon from the midfield intersection of the north/south runway, which was crossed by main runway 25/7. The orange, pre-dawn glow was marred by someone beating a hammer on the inside of my skull behind my right eye, a repercussion from the previous night’s Fourth of July party hosted by our base manager. Even though I had gone home early, the pain was there. Adding to the discomfort was the rumble of the two R-985 radial engines on either side of the cockpit of my Beechcraft, a twin-engine plane built in the U.S. during World War II. The tower cleared for takeoff an Air America Beechcraft in front of me. I watched it roll until the tail came off the ground. Then the pilot cleared a C-46 Commando transport plane to my right on runway 25. As he began his roll I expected to get my own clearance for departure. But then I heard an expletive on the radio. I looked at the Beechcraft that had been cleared and noticed that it was flying, but in trouble and dropping. As though in slow-motion, it drifted down and crashed just outside the airport in the courtyard of a Catholic church. Dust and debris rose, almost gracefully, and obscured the airplane. I thought the pilot had managed to make a survivable crash landing,  but suddenly a ball of flame blossomed over the crash site. It was a tragedy, but I had no time to process it. After the emergency vehicles cleared the tarmac on the way to the crash site, the tower resumed business as usual. Another C-46 was cleared for takeoff on runway 25. As soon as it passed the intersection, the tower cleared me to roll on the north/south runway. I began the takeoff. Ease the throttles up, lead with the left a little for torque, tail comin’ up, the gauges lookin’ good, ease it off and snap up the gear. I flashed through the smoke from the funeral pyre and wallowed slightly from its rising heat. An odor from the conflagration below wafted through the air vents—the putrescent breath of the dying beast. According to the accident investigation report, some witnesses claimed to have seen an orange flash under the ill-fated aircraft as it cleared the end of the runway. The investigators surmised that it came from a “sky horse,” a simple piece of pipe implanted in the ground with a charge at the bottom and debris (nuts, rocks, etc.) placed on top. A Viet Cong hiding nearby probably set it off as a plane passed overhead. It had been a very close call for me. The totally uncontrollable dumbass luck factor had been in my favor. With the escalation of Air America operations, we were getting more airplanes every week and hiring several hundred pilots, which turned us into a sea of interesting characters. Some were the “hee-haw” funny kind. Others were the volatile punch-you-in-the-mouth-for-fun type. A few were one notch from being skid row alcoholics. There were also plenty of normal people, but some of them just didn’t stay very long. Most of the new pilots came from the retired or ex-military group. Civilian-trained pilots were the minority. I was assistant manager of flying and in charge of several aircraft programs, a job description that included training the new arrivals. Those who washed out considered me the rottenest son of a bitch who ever crapped between two boots. My washout rate was indeed alarming, but I was looking for eagles, not buzzards. In the entire time I spent with Air America in Vietnam, not a single pilot approved by me for a certain aircraft ever killed himself in that type of aircraft. I kept up the pressure on the trainees until I could smell their fear. I wanted to see if they could cope with the situation I had put them in. The winners of the Marquis de Sade School of Airborne Survival received a handshake and a set of wings with a star on top. The losers received a chance to go to some other company. Air America frowned on some of my methods, but never asked me to stop. I was getting the job done. Some of my screening practices were drenched in graveyard humor: I would give a new pilot a body bag with his name on it or put pictures of burnt crash victims on my desk. The trainees’ reactions would give me a glimpse into their ability to handle the unusual. Tom Harper (not his real name) was a short, pudgy pilot in his late 40s with a dusting of gray in his hair. He had recently retired from the Air Force and wanted to make some “big bucks” to add to his retirement check. In the briefing room with three others before their first training fight in-country, I noticed a tremble in his hands as he kept smoothing the chart laying across his knees. Airborne, Tom was even less than I expected. His abilities were barely average, but as he lost his nervousness he began to think he was better than his actual abilities. In such cases, especially when other trainees were observing from the cabin, I would make a cocky pilot look the fool. This made an enemy for life, but I wasn’t in the friend-making business. This first leg took us from Saigon to the old Michelin rubber plantation at An Loc, about 65 miles north of Saigon near Cambodia. We did a couple of touch-and-go landings on the airstrip at the plantation and then flew to Tay Ninh, near the Parrot’s Beak area above the Mekong Delta on the Cambodian border. There we did full-stop landings. Each trainee got a turn doing takeoffs and landings at all of the locations. En route to Tay Ninh, Tom, now at the controls, was telling me how he used to be a chief check pilot in the Air Force and could help me lay out a similar program. I just kept smiling and nodding. Keeping in mind the possibility of groundfire, we were up to 6,000 feet, so I asked Tom to give me a 60-degree banked turn to the left. Tom looked over his left shoulder to check for traffic as he rolled into the turn, and while he was looking out the window I reached down and shut the fuel off on the left engine. It takes a little while for the fuel line to empty, so I started to get on him to tighten the turn and “pull some Gs”—increase the gravitational force in the plane. By the time he had it honked in good and tight, the left engine quit. The sudden shock from the drag of the now windmilling propeller (a propeller spinning on its own without power from the engine) rolled us partially inverted, mainly because Tom didn’t react fast enough to the unexpected event. During his ensuing struggle to regain control, I moved the fuel selector valve back to the “on” position, which went unobserved by Tom. Just as he got the bird leveled, the left engine burst back to life, swiveling the airplane in the other direction. “What happened?” I asked. “Engine quit,” he wheezed through a sharp intake of air. “Gosh, wonder why? Maybe water in the gas?” “Uh, guess so. Let’s not do any more steep turns.” “Okay, Tom, let’s do a power-on stall straight ahead then.” As he began pulling the nose up into a stalling angle, I slipped my hand down between the seats onto the elevator trim wheel (a device that helps the pilot keep the plane at a constant speed and angle) and began to roll full nose up. As the speed bled off and the elevator control pressure became looser, he couldn’t feel what I was doing. The bird shuddered, and Tom dropped the nose to recover from the stall while applying full power to the engines. The resulting propeller blast now hit the fully deflected trim tab, which in turn slammed the hand wheel back into his gut, with a little help from my right hand on the side of the control column. This made the nose pitch up violently. Tom’s eyes started to bug out. He was oblivious to anything I was doing, so, as the aircraft entered a secondary stall in about a 45-degree nose-up angle, I shoved in full left rudder. This caused the machine to rotate in a neat snap roll. I leveled the airplane and released the controls to Tom, a move unnoticed and unfelt in his current state, as the dust was still settling in the cockpit. “Damn, that was pretty neat, Tom,” I commented. “Uh…huh,” he replied, “the elevator jammed!” “We better let the wrench benders know about that little problem. For now, we just won’t do any more of those.” Tom seemed a little nervous as we entered the traffic pattern at Tay Ninh. I had placed my left arm over the back of his seat, not in a gesture of friendliness as he thought, but to get my hand by the circuit breaker panel and pluck out the circuit breakers for the flaps and landing gear motor. As we came to the runway, I urged Tom to make a tight approach and get the plane on the ground as soon as possible. Eager to comply, he flipped the landing gear handle down, pulled off some power and rolled in close to the runway. To keep his mind occupied I said, “Hey, Tom, they’re shootin’ at us over here on the right!” The whites of his eyes expanded as he slammed the flap lever full down and pulled more power off, whipping it onto final approach. Without the landing gear and flaps down for drag, it is hard to slow an airplane and lose altitude at the same time. By the time Tom got to the approach end of the runway, he had pulled the throttles all the way back, but we were still high and fast. “Tom, you dipshit—go around before you put us in the dirt!” yelled one of the other trainees, concerned about our proximity to terra firma. The go-around brought a red flush to Tom’s neck and the sick realization that I had been doing something to make him look the buffoon in front of everybody. I am sure I hurt his feelings, but I hoped that a glimmer of the reasoning behind my actions had been imparted to him. If not, like Rhett Butler before me, “frankly, I don’t give a damn.” (Tom was a co-pilot for about a month before being given another check ride. He eventually made captain.) Black flights—secret/covert/possibly illegal—were for the most part utterly useless. If something went wrong, they were also dangerous for the crew because you would get no support. It was like the opening lines from the TV series Mission: Impossible: “The secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.” How true that proved to be for John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau, CIA agents who were captured trying to infiltrate China in 1952 and spent 20 years in a Chinese prison, waiting for the U.S. government to admit that they were agency operatives, all the Chinese government wanted to hear. Fecteau was released in 1971 and Downey in 1972 as U.S. relations with China improved during President Richard Nixon’s administration. Once, after my manager and I finished covering the day’s schedule behind closed doors, he asked if I would be interested in taking a Beechcraft on a black flight to the Ranch later that afternoon. The “Ranch” was a secret-customer operation at the Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base, roughly 145 miles northwest of Bangkok. My job was to get a guy out of Vietnam and into Thailand without going through the legal formalities of customs and immigration. It was made very clear that I was not to even look at the passenger. The embassy would call as soon as he left from downtown in a car, and I was to sit in the cockpit with the door closed until he knocked and climbed in, signaling me to crank up and go. We filed a legitimate flight plan to Bangkok with Takhli as my alternate. Then, just before letting down into Bangkok, I was to announce that I was diverting to my alternate. U.S. Embassy officials in Saigon assured me that no one would get upset over this minor change in plans. They would send one of the spooks from the embassy to make sure everything went smoothly. As soon as embassy called and said that my passenger was on his way, I did as they requested. I sat and waited…and waited…and waited. The cockpit temperature was over 130 degrees Fahrenheit,  and I was starting to see little floating spots in my vision. Then a black car with curtained windows finally drove onto the ramp and pulled up out of sight behind the airplane. While I waited for The Knock, I wondered how he was going to get from the car to the airplane without 50 ramp workers seeing him. Or could it be that I was the only one not supposed to see him? I really didn’t care if it was LBJ, the pope or Adolf Hitler—just as long as I could start the engines and get some cool air moving before I passed out. After The Knock, everything went like clockwork. The passenger got off in Takhli and walked to another curtained black car. I refueled, cranked up and was halfway out to the runway when two jeeploads of Thai soldiers blocked the taxiway and raised their rifles. When in deep crap, it is best to act very dumb and quiet. Although the Thais detained me for a week, they finally bought my story of being lost and let me go back to Saigon. So who was the mystery stranger and why did we smuggle him into a friendly country? Beats the hell out of me. One night in 1967, the bedside radio set woke me at 1 a.m. It was Operations calling to tell me that an embassy car would get me in 30 minutes and take me to the airport. On the way, I was to pick up an American to fly co-pilot. I dressed hurriedly, stuffed some underwear in my flight kit and went down to the front gate. The car arrived with an armed escort and swung by the co-pilot’s house to ruin his night of rest. At Operations, one of the embassy spooks pulled me into a corner, where even my co-pilot couldn’t overhear us, and briefed me. He had cargo already loaded in a C-46 that we were to fly nonstop to Hong Kong, without the normal refueling in Da Nang. As usual, we were not to look at the cargo, nor file a flight plan, nor contact anyone on the radio until we were 100 nautical miles (115 miles) from Hong Kong. Of course, we weren’t to worry about busting into the Hong Kong airspace unannounced—except we did worry. If Hong Kong didn’t like the idea, we wouldn’t have enough gas to fly anywhere else, and then the only options would be to face the heat or ditch the bird. At 100 nautical miles out, I gave Hong Kong air traffic control a call, and they responded as if we were a regularly scheduled flight; obviously someone had gotten the message at their end. Nevertheless, I didn’t really breathe a sigh of relief until we were in the terminal drinking a cup of coffee while the airplane was being offloaded into British military trucks. As soon as the customer’s stuff was well away, we departed Hong Kong, again sans a flight plan, nonstop to Saigon. And that was that. Once home, I ended my typical atypical day with a tepid shower and an 8-ounce very dry martini—made by whispering “vermouth” softly over the top of a gin-filled tumbler. Neil Hansen left Air America in October 1973. He travels the country on the speaking circuit, recounting stories about his Air America days to military, civic and veterans groups. He lives in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. This article was compiled from his forthcoming book FLIGHT: An Air America Pilot’s Story of Adventure, Descent and Redemption, History Publishing Co., 2019. This article was published in the June 2019 issue of Vietnam.

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https://www.historynet.com/light-frigate-uss-essex.htm

Light Frigate USS Essex

Light Frigate USS Essex Specifications Overall length: 141 feet Beam: 37 feet Depth of hold: 12 feet 3 inches Displacement: 850 long tons Complement: 300 officers and enlisted Armament in 1799: Twenty-six 12-pounders, ten 6-pounders Armament in 1801: Twenty-eight 12-pounders, eighteen 32-pound carronades Armament in 1812: Six 12-pounders, forty 32-pound carronades Funded by public subscription in Essex County, Mass., laid down in Salem on April 13, 1799, launched on September 30 and commissioned on December 17, USS Essex was one of six frigates the perennially slow-acting Congress had ordered five years earlier. It proved the most successful. During the 1798–1800 Quasi-War with France, Essex, armed with 32 12-pound long guns and commanded by Capt. Edward Preble, escorted convoys in the Pacific Ocean. On its return the frigate underwent an armament refit, short-range carronades replacing the 12-pounders on the forecastle and quarterdeck. It next sailed in 1801 under Capt. William Bainbridge to fight Tripolitan pirates in the Mediterranean during the First Barbary War. After returning stateside in 1802, Essex returned to the Mediterranean under Capt. James Barron from 1804 to ’06. While laid up in the Washington Navy Yard through early 1809 Essex underwent a more extensive refit, with 40 carronades and six 12-pounders split between the forecastle and forward gun deck. Though technically more of an outsized sloop of war, it retained its rating as the Navy’s only operational light frigate when war broke out with Britain in June 1812. That same month, with Capt. David Porter at the helm, Essex departed on the first of two voyages during which it would capture the sloop of war HMS Alert and some two dozen British merchant ships. Then, off Valparaiso, Chile, on March 28, 1814, the frigates HMS Phoebe and Cherub captured Essex after a bitter fight that cost the Americans 58 men killed. Essex served the Royal Navy as a troopship and prison ship till auctioned off in 1837. Its ultimate fate is unknown. MH This article was published in the July 2020 issue of Military History.

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https://www.historynet.com/light-my-fire-zippos-in-vietnam.htm

Light My Fire: Zippos in Vietnam

Light My Fire: Zippos in Vietnam Photo courtesy of Zippo Manufacturing Company. “Let me win your heart and mind or I’ll burn your God damn hut down.” Those are the words inscribed on the small, slightly beat-up silver Zippo cigarette lighter that sits on my desk. On the reverse is inscribed: “Vietnam, 67-68, Qui Nhon,” the time and place where I served. Below that is a pint-sized image of the pointy-nosed spy-versus-spy guy from the Mad magazine comic. I can’t remember just how and when I came into possession of that lighter. It’s been 43 years, and my memory is hazy. Its provenance aside, the fact that this wartime object keeps me company today is a small illustration of the iconic place that Zippo lighters have in the lives of those of us who took part in the American war in Vietnam—even those of us who don’t smoke. The fact is that Zippos are much more than simple metal cigarette lighters. The ubiquitous Zippo, engraved in-country, became woven into the fabric of the Vietnam War experience. These compact lighters “are the small, speaking, archeological objects that bear witness to great personal heroism, pride, pain and tragedy,” wrote Jim Fiorella in his photo-filled 1998 coffee-table book, The Viet Nam Zippo, 1933-1975. The lighters served as “amulets and talismans bringing the keeper invulnerability, good luck and protection against evil,” Sherry Buchanan penned in the excellent 2007 Vietnam Zippos, which examines the extensive Vietnam War Zippo collection put together by Bradford Edwards. The humble Zippo was born in 1932, when George G. Blaisdell, whose Pennsylvania oil business was foundering as the Great Depression put a chokehold on the world economy, designed a small silver-colored rectangular cigarette lighter with a hinged top. He coined a modern-sounding name for his innovative design, the “Zippo,” playing on the word “zipper,” and began selling the lighters for $1.95 in 1933. A few years later the Zippo Manufacturing Company began engraving words and images on its lighters, primarily as marketing tools for other businesses. The company hit the big time in World War II when—like many other American manufacturers—it stopped making consumer items and produced its lighters for the U.S. military. From 1943 to 1945, every Zippo made was shipped directly to post exchanges and Navy ships around the world. Millions of Zippos were carried into battle by American troops across the globe. They were a huge hit—an essential tool in the days when a high percentage of Americans, especially young men, saw smoking as a harmless and satisfying recreation—one that advertisements often even touted as having healthful benefits. Indeed, cigarettes were distributed to the troops by the Red Cross. “If I were to tell you how much these Zippos are coveted at the front and the gratitude and delight with which the boys receive them, you would probably accuse me of exaggeration,” the famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote in August 1944. “I truly believe that the Zippo lighter is the most coveted thing in the army.” To date, Zippo has produced nearly a half-billion cigarette lighters. The engraved Zippo played a unique role in the Vietnam War. Aside from the fact that GIs by the hundreds of thousands bought them at PXs and on the black market, the term “Zippo” worked its way into the war’s military lexicon wherever fire and flame were concerned. Burning down a hooch or a village, for example, was widely known as a “Zippo job,” a “Zippo mission” or a “Zippo raid.” Grunts who specialized in performing these fiery missions sometimes were called “Zippo squads.” The Army’s Vietnam War flame-throwing M-67 tanks and M-132 armored personnel carriers were commonly called “Zippos” or “Zippo tracks.” And, guess what the troops used to ignite the APCs’ napalm fuel when the electrical igniters wouldn’t work? No surprise also that the M2A1-7 portable flamethrower used in Vietnam was referred to as a “Zippo.” A “Zippo monitor” was one nickname for a Brown Water Navy boat that was equipped with a flamethrower. In fact, some people referred to the whole American operation in Vietnam as the “Zippo War,” branding the entire effort with Zippo-lit village-burnings. As for the other side, history does not record how many North Vietnam Army troops and Viet Cong fighters carried engraved American-made Zippos, but it’s a good bet that many of them did. And while the enemy didn’t have flamethrowers, they did use Zippos as a weapon—booby-trapping them and depositing the lighters in bars and other rear areas for unsuspecting Americans to pick up and detonate. More than half of American men 18 and over smoked in 1965, and about 44 percent did in 1970, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Extrapolating those statistics to the war zone—and taking into consideration that smoking always has been big among troops in a war—a good guess would be that well over a million men (and women) who served in the Vietnam War smoked while they were in-country. While other types and brands of cigarette lighters were available, the lighter of choice in Vietnam was, by far, the Zippo. It’s a good guess that American troops bought several hundred thousand—probably as many as half a million—Zippos in Vietnam. We used them, naturally enough, to light up, as well as to put fire to heat tabs or pieces of C4 plastic explosives to cook our C rations and pop our TV Time popcorn. They also served as a tiny mirror for shaving in the bush, or as repositories for salt tablets in the lighters’ bottoms to replenish on a sultry day in the boonies. We carried them most often in our fatigue chest pockets or tucked them into the camouflage band on our helmets. Enterprising Vietnamese entrepreneurs popped up around base camps setting up shop to engrave our PX-bought Zippos with whatever words or pictures we could dream up. Some creative guys engraved their own, too, as they whiled away the hours in the field or in the rear. The most common engravings were maps of Vietnam, unit insignias, places and dates, peace signs, cartoon characters (the irreverent beagle Snoopy from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip was big) and nude women—a lot of nude women. The most common phrases included the ubiquitous FIGMO (“Fuck it. Got my orders,” meaning your tour was up); variants of “Yea, though I walk through the valley of death…” from the 23rd Psalm; and “Death is our Business and Business is good.” The Zig-Zag man, who adorned papers used to roll your own cigarettes—as well as joints—was also a popular adornment, along with other phrases and illustrations regarding marijuana. The Zippo makers also churned out their own factory-engraved lighters that were specially designed to appeal to the troops in Vietnam. That included lighters featuring finely wrought images of all five service logos, and—perhaps because sailors were particularly big-time smokers back then—lots of Brown Water Navy boats. In the decades since the end of the Vietnam War, thousands of people—veterans, military memorabilia collectors and just-plain-old Zippo fans—have put together personal Zippo lighter collections. Unfortunately for collectors, fake Vietnam War–engraved Zippos, also known as counterfeits, have flooded the market. Counterfeiters have been cranking them out in Vietnam for years, and you can pick up a phony wartime Zippo there for a few bucks. The most obvious fake is a generic lighter and insert on which someone has engraved the Zippo logo. The Vietnam War tradition of engraved Zippos lives on in legitimate forms, too. In 1998 the Zippo company produced the “Vietnam Collectors Set,” lighters adorned with miniature images of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in black matte. The words “Vietnam, 1965-1972” are etched on the lid (even though the names on The Wall are from 1959-1975). Zippo limited production of the Vietnam Collectors Set to 5,000. I just saw one listed on eBay for $39.99. Journalist, historian and author Marc Leepson is the editor of Webster’s New World Dictionary of the Vietnam War, and is senior writer and columnist for The VVA Veteran magazine. Click here to view more Zippo art.

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https://www.historynet.com/lincoln-memorial-a-temple-of-tolerance.htm

Lincoln Memorial: A Temple of Tolerance

Lincoln Memorial: A Temple of Tolerance Cruel irony of segregated dedication ceremony has given way to reverence and rallies The brand-new Lincoln Memorial should have inspired a dedication ceremony of, by, and for the people—black as well as white. To adorn its interior, 72-year-old Yankee sculptor Daniel Chester French had created a magisterial but accessible colossus designed to beckon admirers of all backgrounds. And the inscription French had commissioned for the tablet behind the massive statue made no exceptions based on race: “In this temple / as in the hearts of the people / for whom he saved the Union /the memory of Abraham Lincoln / is enshrined forever.” But the May 22, 1922, dedication, long a dream for Washington’s countless Abraham Lincoln admirers, instead turned into a nightmare for the citizens Lincoln had long been credited with helping the most. Invitations like the one above were sent to dignitaries, but the general public could also attend the May 22, 1922, opening of the Lincoln Memorial. This image shows a small portion of the massive crowd. (Top, Heritage Auctions, Dallas; National Archives/Getty Images)African Americans arrived at the Greek-style temple rising from Washington’s once-swampy West Potomac Park early that hot dedication day, hoping for places at the front of a throng that eventually swelled to 50,000. For them, Lincoln was still Father Abraham, the Great Emancipator. But before the pageant got under way, on instructions from the Southern-born superintendent of the Office of Public Buildings, soldiers armed with guns and bayonets rousted the early arrivals from their chairs and herded them into a “colored section” at the far edge of the grounds, “roped in from the rest of the audience.” Aggressive bullying, one white Marine corpsman boasted crudely at the scene, was “the only way you can handle these ‘niggers.’” To add insult to injury, a group of “grey-clad survivors of the Confederate army”—elderly white men who had waged the rebellion to defy Lincoln and defend slavery—received special seats of honor alongside surviving veterans from the Union side. The Washington Post applauded the fact that “two groups of bowed men in blue and gray had seats to right and left of a flag for and against the existence of which they once did battle.” But an African-American eyewitness saw cruel irony in the fact that “Jim-Crowism of the grossest sort” had been practiced by “the hypocrites of the great nation” on a day devoted to Lincoln. The seating anomalies made it clear, he complained, that “the spoils have gone to the conquered, not the conquerors.” That dedication day, yet another indignity awaited Lincoln’s African-American admirers. This additional slight, however, would at first be known only to a few of the special guests who ascended to the speakers’ platform atop the Lincoln Memorial steps—all of them as white as the pillars fronting the building. The only African-American speaker on that day’s program was Robert Russa Moton, principal of the all-black Tuskegee Institute. In a seemingly generous gesture, organizers had invited him to represent “the colored race” with a separate, and presumably equal, dedication speech. Though known as a conservative, Moton drafted a surprisingly provocative address, insisting: “So long as any group within our nation is denied the full protection of the law,” then what Lincoln had called his “unfinished work” would remain “still unfinished,” and the new Memorial itself, “but a hollow mockery.” After reviewing Moton’s manuscript in advance, however, the White House insisted that the critical remarks be expunged; Moton could either intone a more anodyne speech or forfeit his place on the program. Facing the prospect of losing the largest audience he had ever addressed, Moton gave in to the censors. His original manuscript would remain unpublished for decades. Following Moton’s truncated speech, Chief Justice William Howard Taft, chairman of the Lincoln Memorial Commission, rose to declare almost defiantly that the new shrine represented the “restoration of brotherly love of the two sections,” not the two races. Lincoln, he insisted, was “as dear to the hearts of the South as to those of the North.” In his own remarks, President Warren G. Harding seconded that emotion. As if speaking mainly to the Confederate veterans in the audience, Harding declared of Lincoln: “How it would soften his anguish to know that the South long since came to realize that a vain assassin robbed it of its most sincere and potent friend…[whose] sympathy and understanding would have helped heal the wounds and hide the scars and speed the restoration.” To the black newspaper the Chicago Defender, Harding’s words seemed “a supine and abject attempt to justify in palavering words of apology the greatest act of the greatest American—the freeing of the poor, helpless bondmen.” The paper went so far as to advise its readers that no Lincoln Memorial dedication had occurred at all that day. In view of its disgraceful unveiling, the most remarkable thing about the Lincoln Memorial may be that it eventually emerged as the most universally revered of America’s secular shrines—and the most unifying. Nearly a century later, it is now the first and most important stop on many Americans’ list of patriotic destinations, as well as a magnet for groups numbering in the tens of thousands. Here, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. capped the 1963 March on Washington with his “I Have a Dream” speech. Here, a beleaguered Richard Nixon famously appeared unannounced shortly before his resignation to commune with Lincoln’s spirit. And here, presidents-to-be from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump have appeared on the eves of their inaugurations to lay symbolic claim to Lincoln’s mantle. Whether serving as a shrine for contemplation or a rallying spot for protest or pageantry, the memorial seldom disappoints. Sculptor Daniel Chester French poses with two plaster models of the Lincoln Memorial. Part of French’s genius was the ability to scale up his sculptures without losing proportion. (Topfoto/The Images Works) Not unimportant, the memorial is the crowning achievement of the gifted but elusive man who created the statue that looms within its walls: sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850-1931). Thanks to his vision and talent, the site still evokes the combination of majesty and humility that Americans believe their country and their greatest leaders personify. The somber behemoth manages to present its subject, as French put it, in all “his simplicity, his grandeur, and his power”—no easy trinity of virtues to convey in a single work of art. The textured portrayal personifies Americans’ concurrent belief in both their collective modesty and their preeminent standing in the world. French’s marble statue of Lincoln is probably the most famous sculpture ever created of or by an individual American—not to mention, at 19 feet in height and some 200 tons in weight, the largest. It is the most frequently visited, the most widely cherished, and the most often reproduced (in miniature and selfie alike) of national icons. In an age in which controversy rages over public statuary honoring Confederate generals, slave-holding founding fathers, and other blemished figures from the American past, French’s Lincoln remains majestically enthroned without objection. That this inspiring statue was the work of a reserved, sometimes impenetrable, professional artist who lived most of his life in the Gilded Age and left few written clues about his ideas or instincts, makes its ever-expanding relevance all the more astonishing. A professional sculptor for nearly half a century when his most famous statue took its place among Washington’s great public monuments, “Dan” French was on the most obvious level a crusty New Englander, a man of many accomplishments but few words. His shut-mouthed exterior, however, masked the soul of a creative genius. French never illuminated his art through explanation. Rather, he spoke, indeed existed, through his art—expressing himself passionately through an uncommon skill and a common touch that no other American sculptor has ever so successfully combined. “If I’m articulate at all,” he once remarked with typically modest understatement, “it is in my images.” Judged on visual terms alone, French became America’s most articulate public artist. He created the iconic “Minute Man” for his home town, Concord, Mass., when he was only 24 years old. He went on to fashion the central symbol of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, “The Republic,” along with acclaimed, realistic portraits of Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Adams. He specialized in campus statuary like “John Harvard,” “Thomas Gallaudet,” and “Alma Mater” at Columbia, along with evocative, symbol-laden cemetery markers honoring the late sculptor Martin Milmore in Boston and the three Concord-born Melvin brothers who died during the Civil War. Wartime military heroes became a specialty as well—all of them, of course, Union men. By the time French earned the commission to create the Lincoln Memorial statue (seemingly without competition), he was already America’s best-known, highest-paid sculptor, a trustee of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a summer resident of Stockbridge, Mass., where he lived and worked at a magnificent estate and studio, “Chesterwood”—now a National Trust site (see sidebar, below). French also chaired the National Commission of Fine Arts—the very body assigned to approve the Lincoln Memorial. He stepped down reluctantly only when it became evident the conflict of interest was insurmountable. Even so, the project might easily have gone off the rails. For one thing, congressional backers did not all believe that the swampy park at the western edge of the new National Mall was a fitting and proper spot for a Lincoln Memorial. Alternative suggestions included Union Station, the Capitol, the National Observatory, the Soldiers’ Home, and the midpoint between Washington and the Confederate capital of Richmond. Even when wiser heads prevailed regarding the site, details about the statue itself remained in dispute. To save time and money, some proposed ordering a replica of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ “Standing Lincoln” in Chicago. It took a concerted effort by French and the Memorial architect, his frequent collaborator Henry Bacon, to block that effort. The figure in the foreground is said to be one of the Piccirilli brothers, the Italian-born artisans who carved the marble statue under French’s supervision. Amazingly, the statue was never fully assembled until it was placed in the Memorial. (National Archives/Getty Images) Yet French originally contemplated a standing Lincoln of his own. He rejected the idea only when he wisely calculated that visitors approaching it from the bottom steps outside would be unable to see the face of an upright statue. For a time, French toyed with the idea of casting his Lincoln in bronze, an idea he later rejected. Planners chose the words of the Gettysburg Address and First Inaugural to surround the statue, but had French gotten his way, Lincoln’s farewell address to the people of Springfield, Ill., delivered on February 11, 1861, when he left for Washington, D.C., and his remarkable consolation letter to Lydia Parker Bixby, a Boston woman who lost five sons in battle, would have been added—the first an acknowledged masterpiece, though it antedated the Civil War; the latter a work whose authorship has since come under question. Less turned out to be more. As if by magic, French produced a small clay model at Chesterwood that captured the essence of the future statue from the start. Not until the building was nearing completion did the sculptor realize that the envisioned 12-foot-high final work would be dwarfed within its vast atrium. The sculptor convinced Congress to pay to increase its height by seven feet only after stringing a proportionately sized plaster head from the ceiling of the memorial’s interior to demonstrate that anything smaller would look underwhelming. French’s Italian-born, Bronx, N.Y., carvers then crafted the final statue from 28 blocks of marble. Remarkably, it was never assembled into a whole until it arrived at the building, block by block, in 1919. The final result represented French’s last stand for classicism in the fast-approaching age of modernism. That his Lincoln Memorial has so defiantly transcended changing artistic tastes and shifting public moods is a testament to the artist’s almost defiant belief in the enduring relevance of the heroic image. With the Lincoln Memorial, French accomplished not only a magisterial portrait for posterity, but also a platform for its infinite aspirations. But the metamorphosis of the Lincoln Memorial into something greater than a memorial to Lincoln did not commence until 1939, 17 years later. That spring, African-American contralto Marian Anderson was blocked from performing at the Washington headquarters of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Resigning her DAR membership in protest, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt urged that the concert be relocated to an even larger stage: the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. There, Anderson’s hour-long Easter Sunday program attracted an integrated crowd of 75,000, “the largest assemblage Washington has seen since Charles A. Lindbergh came back from Paris,” said the New York Herald-Tribune. A national radio broadcast brought to millions more Anderson’s magnificent renditions of “My Country ’Tis of Thee” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” The meaning of the Lincoln Memorial would never be the same; it had been transfigured, in the course of a single hour, from a monument to sectional reunion into a touchstone for racial reconciliation. The prestige of the Memorial expanded further through the power of popular culture. Frank Capra’s film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, released just six months after the Anderson concert, featured a particularly evocative scene from its interior. In search of inspiration, the uncertain freshman “Senator Jefferson Smith,” in the person of Lincolnesque actor James Stewart, visits the Memorial and listens “dewy-eyed” as a little boy reads the Gettysburg Address aloud to his visually impaired grandfather. An elderly black man enters the chamber just as the words “new birth of freedom” escape from the child’s lips. The scene fades out with a giant close-up of the statue’s face to the swelling strains of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “The Star Spangled Banner.” Dr. King’s appearance a quarter century later, in what he called “the symbolic shadow” of “a great American,” only cemented the metamorphosis. The original, flawed 1922 Lincoln Memorial dedication closed with a benediction—after which most of the dignitaries along its top step clustered around white-bearded Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s sole surviving son, to offer greetings. As the huge, segregated crowd below began to disperse, French strolled unnoticed into the building and spent a few silent minutes communing with the huge marble figure he had created. After a few moments in solitude, he glanced to his side and noticed Robert Russa Moton standing next to him, gazing at the work as well. To French’s delight, Dr. Moton “praised the statue.” French, in turn, confided to him that he remained worried about the way it was lit, for despite last-minute modifications, the sculpture still did not look as he had intended. “Dr. Moton was a sympathetic listener and Dan found himself being drawn out to give him some of the details of the building,” remembered the sculptor’s daughter. Did French confide to Moton that he had intended that the statue would “convey the mental and physical strength of the great president”? Did Moton confide his disappointment at the prejudice manifested at the dedication ceremony? Unfortunately, no one made a further record of their conversation. We know only that after they spoke, “the powerfully built college president and the frail-looking sculptor walked out into the sunshine and the May wind as they went down the steps and stood on one of the terraces looking up at the memorial”—the same breathtaking view enjoyed by millions of fellow Americans, black and white, ever since. Harold Holzer, winner of the Lincoln Prize and chairman of the Lincoln Forum, is the author, coauthor, or editor of 53 books, most recently Monument Man: The Life and Art of Daniel Chester French, from which this article is adapted. _____ The House at Monument Mountain In 1896, longing for a place to live and work during the summertime, Daniel Chester French purchased a farmhouse in Stockbridge, Mass. Although the main structure was dilapidated and an old barn seemed unsuitable as a studio, the surrounding vistas captivated him: Monument Mountain rising in the near distance, and a carpet of trees and flowers blooming on all sides. French called it “the best ‘dry view’ he had ever seen.” Obtaining a cash advance on a statue he was fashioning of General Ulysses S. Grant, French paid $3,000 to acquire both buildings and 150 surrounding acres. He named his new estate “Chesterwood” after his grandparents’ hometown of Chester, N.H. Chesterwood – the studio of Daniel Chester French located in Stockbridge, Connecticut. Daniel Chester French (1850-1931) was the sculptor of the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Memorial in Washington, D.C. The studio has a standard-gauge railroad track used to roll large sculpture outdoors for viewing in natural light. The museum holds what is probably the largest single collection of work by any American sculptor. For the next 33 years, French and his family summered here. The sculptor hired architect Henry Bacon—future designer of the Lincoln Memorial—to create a fine replacement house and an adjacent studio (moving the barn up the hill). By 1898, French began working here on an equestrian statue of George Washington for the city of Paris. Here, French would later fashion the original clay model of his seated Lincoln, plus sculptures of Civil War Generals Joseph Hooker and Charles Devens. French later said of his Chesterwood routine, “I spend six months of the year up there. That is heaven; New York is—well, New York.” Today the house, still furnished as French decorated it, and studio, housing his original plaster models and undisturbed workplace—now National Trust for Historic Preservation sites—are open to the public seven days a week, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., from May 25 through October 27. A bonus is a gallery devoted to French’s small plaster models and statuettes. Admission: $20 adults, $10 children 13-18; under 13 free, with discounts for seniors and veterans. For information: www.chesterwood.org.–H.H.

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https://www.historynet.com/lincolns-incomparable-address.htm

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address Is a Speech for the Ages

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address Is a Speech for the Ages With malice toward none, with charity toward all, the president sought to bind the wounds of the nation In August 1864, President Abraham Lincoln was so unpopular and the war so hated that he was certain he would not be reelected in November. In Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020, $28), journalist and historian Edward Achorn tells the remarkable story of how Lincoln won a second term, and then on Inauguration Day gave a timeless speech in which he argued that the war had been just and that nation’s new task was to heal the wounds of both battle and bitterness. Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln by Edward AchornAtlantic Monthly Press, 2020, $28 Edward Achorn (c) Nelson Mare How did Lincoln turn the tide? Before the election, Lincoln was seen by Radical Republicans as a timid man who had not provided the stern leadership needed to win the war. Democrats viewed him as a vile tyrant who had all but destroyed America by throwing his political enemies, including newspaper editors, in jail without due process and by pressing to make African Americans the social equals of whites. Lincoln wrote on August 23, “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected.” Sherman’s capture of Atlanta in September finally made it seem the war might be won, and Lincoln was able to persuade the public, as he put it, that “it is not best to swap horses while crossing the river.” Finally, he worked very hard to get pro-Lincoln soldiers to the polls. Set the scene at the U.S. Capitol on Inauguration Day, March 4, 1865. It had been raining for days, and the accumulated dirt and horse manure on the streets of Washington had turned into a watery yellow mud that splashed up on everybody and everything. Tens of thousands of people had been undeterred, though, and came to Washington to celebrate, more than filling every hotel. That morning, fierce winds tore through the city. Reporters lamented the ruined dresses of women who came to the Capitol for the inaugural events — a very big deal in those days. There was some fear that Lincoln would not be able to adhere to tradition and take the oath on the steps of the Capitol, on a wooden platform built for the occasion. But the rain let up enough for that to happen, and as he rose to give the speech the sun burst through the clouds. Many in the audience thought that providential, a sign from God that better times were coming. In writing his second inaugural address, Lincoln spent many months trying to make sense of the war and find a way to ease the hatred that divided the states. When did this process start and how did he craft his thesis? Lincoln seemed haunted by the question of what this hellish war meant. How could a just God permit so much death and agony? How could He not side with North, which in Lincoln’s view was fighting to save the last best hope on Earth for human freedom? How could He seemingly be against both sides? In 1862, he wrote down some of these thoughts and concluded that God’s purpose might be “something different from the purpose of either party.” He mined these thoughts in the Second Inaugural Address, concluding that the war was God’s judgment on America for the evil of slavery, and the country was obligated to use all necessary means — however horrific — to finally root it out. Lincoln believed that God would punish America—North and South—for the great sin of slavery and that he owed the country an explanation for the price it had to pay. Talk about how his religious beliefs were expressed in the inaugural address. Lincoln’s address was remarkable. He had struggled to save America at great cost and stood on the brink of finally winning this ghastly war. Yet there is no hint of triumphalism in his words. The speech is all about the suffering that both North and South had endured. One of the few things still uniting Americans in early 1865 was their intense Christian faith, including the belief that a just God watched over them. Lincoln tapped into that to make the argument that neither side had triumphed — that the war had been in God’s hands since no human could have imagined its magnitude. And God, Lincoln speculated, was using the war to end slavery. As he poignantly put it, if God willed the war to continue “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash” applied against the enslaved “shall be paid by another drawn by the sword,” the judgments of God could be deemed “true and righteous together.” It is in this context that Lincoln spoke so beautifully of binding up the nation’s wounds and proceeding “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” Both sides had been wrong. Both sides had perpetuated slavery. Both sides had to come together and move on. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, right, administers the oath of office to President Lincoln. (Library of Congress) Explain how the Book of Genesis’ words about tyranny formed the core of Lincoln’s moral beliefs—including his hatred of slavery and his veneration of the Union. Lincoln had always been struck forcefully by a passage in Genesis, in which God punishes Adam for his disobedience by condemning him, and his successors in human history, to lifetimes of work to survive. As God puts it, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” At the core of Lincoln’s moral beliefs — at the core of his hatred for slavery and love of individual liberty — was the belief that every man deserved to keep what he had earned from the sweat of his brow. No government, no aristocracy, no slaveholder had a right to deprive a fellow human of what they had earned for themselves. During his celebrated debates in 1858 against Senator Stephen Douglas, he said this was the “real issue” that would grip America long after he and Douglas were gone. Lincoln said of tyranny: “No matter what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it was the same tyrannical principle.” Lincoln believed that public opinion was central to whom would hold power in a representative democracy and that it was how well a speaker could frame an argument that meant the difference between winning and losing. The secret of Lincoln’s rise to power was his ability to connect to voters through his words. He worked and worked to be understood by the common people. The reporter Noah Brooks told a funny story about the reaction to Lincoln in the 1850s by one ornery Democrat who pounded his cane on the ground as he listened. “He’s a dangerous man, sir! A damned dangerous man,” the Democrat said. “He makes you believe what he says, in spite of yourself!” Lincoln understood the power of language in a system of self-government such as ours. “Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much,” Lincoln said. “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.” You can imagine how encouraging that is to someone like me, who works in his day job as an editorial writer and editor! What was it about Lincoln’s mastery of the English language and particularly his use of the rhythms of the King James Bible that made his inaugural address so timeless? Lincoln did not read widely but he read deeply. He read the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare over and over. He particularly loved a line in “Hamlet”: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends; rough-hew them how we will.” He knew all about rough-hewn wood, of course, but when you think of it, that phrase is pretty much the theme of Second Inaugural Address: that humans might have fought the war, but God shaped its ends. People said he read the Bible as he would a good book. Sometimes when he was feeling miserable about the war, he would slump on a couch and start reading it and found great relief. Aside from any dimension of faith, he found it a fascinating source of wisdom about dealing with problems and what it means to be a human being. I’m sure it was very useful to him as a politician, too, given the intense religious feeling of the voters. The resonance, tone and even language of the Second Inaugural are straight out of the Old Testament: a just God ultimately controls the world, and humans inevitably suffer at times for their errors and sins. The beautiful balancing of “with malice toward none, with charity for all” sounds to me like something from the Psalms or Shakespeare — the most lovely use of the English language you can find anywhere. Frederick Douglass, depicted meeting with Lincoln and the Cabinet to appeal for the enlistment of black soldiers, was barred from entering the Capitol for the speech. (Protected Art Archive/Alamy Stock Photo) Talk about the reaction of prominent listeners to the speech—Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, John Wilkes Booth. One of the key themes of the book is Frederick Douglass’s evolving opinion about Lincoln. Well into the war, as a former slave, Douglass considered Lincoln a despicable, conniving, immoral politician who did not care about the fate of African Americans. He had hoped another man would be nominated in 1864, someone like then-Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, who was a much more staunch abolitionist. But in time Douglass came to understand what Lincoln was doing: bringing the public along so that it would support radical changes such as the end of slavery and civil rights for former slaves. Douglass, as a black man, is barred from attending inaugural activities inside the Capitol, so he listens to the speech standing in the mud in front of the platform. He is amazed that here was a president who could express with such power that slavery was an evil so great that it had to be destroyed, even at the cost of the immense suffering in the war. That night, he is determined to shake Lincoln’s hand at a reception at the White House. Again, as a black man, he has a difficult time getting in, but when he does, there is a very moving scene. “Here comes my friend Douglass,” Lincoln says when he sees him in line. Lincoln presses him for his opinion of the speech. “Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort,” Douglass says. John Wilkes Booth nearly attacked the president that day. (Library of Congress) Walt Whitman is covering the inauguration for The New York Times. He treats the event poetically, describing the scene in glowing language. He doesn’t comment on the speech itself. I wonder if he could even hear it. What I’ve always found fascinating was his description of Lincoln after the speech. Lincoln, he wrote, “looked very much worn and tired; the lines, indeed, of vast responsibilities, intricate questions, and demands of life and death, cut deeper than ever upon his dark brown face; yet all the old goodness, tenderness, sadness, and canny shrewdness, underneath the furrows.” Whitman seemed to understand, before almost anyone else, the mythic nature of Lincoln — this prairie lawyer and calculating politician who told dirty jokes — as a great American hero. The popular actor John Wilkes Booth stalks Lincoln at the inauguration. He is pulled out of line when he gets close to the president, and many people later believed he would have killed Lincoln that day if he had not been stopped. Booth later told a friend, “What an excellent chance I had to kill the president, if I had wished, on Inauguration Day! I was on the stand, as close to him nearly as I am to you.” His friend asked him what good it would have done to kill Lincoln, Booth answered, “I could live in history.” One of the great ironies of this day is that, as that sun beams down on Lincoln, no one knows he will be dead in six weeks, gunned down by Booth at Ford’s Theatre. An abbreviated version of this interview appeared in May 2020 issue of America’s Civil War.

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https://www.historynet.com/long-island.htm

Lessons from the Battle of Long Island

Lessons from the Battle of Long Island The appearance of a British fleet in the waters off Long Island in late June 1776 did not come as a surprise to Continental Army Gen. George Washington. The size of the fleet did, however. Three months earlier the king’s army had evacuated Boston after unsuccessful attempts to suppress Patriot forces in the area. Bloodied during their return march from Concord and decimated by their pyrrhic victory at Bunker Hill, British Maj. Gen. Sir William Howe and his 9,000-strong army had sailed to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to regroup. Washington had correctly assumed the British would next target New York City, and he redeployed the army accordingly. Unfortunately, from Washington’s perspective, Manhattan was difficult to defend—especially against an enemy with unchallenged amphibious capability. Essential to its defense was Brooklyn Heights, prominent Long Island high ground on the opposite bank of the East River overlooking the city, the river and the harbor. On July 2 the vanguard of the British fleet began disembarking on Staten Island. By mid-August Howe had landed an army of 32,000 British and Hessian troops. Reinforced by militia units, Washington commanded scarcely 20,000 men in and around New York City. He split the force, sending half of the army to Long Island under Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene. He began fortifying Brooklyn Heights but fell ill and was replaced by Maj. Gen. Israel Putnam, who was unfamiliar with the Long Island terrain. On August 22 Howe led more than 15,000 men and 40 artillery pieces across the Narrows from Staten Island to Long Island, coming ashore unopposed just 7 miles from Brooklyn Heights. Keeping most of his 10,000-strong army atop Brooklyn Heights, Putnam pushed out strong covering forces of some 3,000 men along a ridge 2 miles south of the main position. Passes through the ridge were identified and covered—with the exception of Jamaica Pass, on the far east end of the American position. Local Tories informed Howe, who led 10,000 men at night through the pass and into position on the American rear and left flank. Howe launched a single massive assault on the morning of August 27. Patriot forces were overwhelmed. Howe’s forces swept to the base of Brooklyn Heights, from which Washington observed the unfolding disaster. The Americans had lost more than 2,000 men (1,000 captured), while British losses were around 400. At that point, however, Howe halted the attack. Likely shaken by the sharp British losses at Bunker Hill and unwilling to risk an immediate assault, he opted instead to besiege the cornered Patriots. Two days later Washington took advantage of darkness, fog and bad weather to ferry his surviving men and most of their materiel across the river to Manhattan. Though outgeneraled, outmaneuvered and outfought, Washington extracted most of his army, thus saving it and the Patriot cause. Lessons: Know the terrain. When your enemy knows more about the terrain you occupy than you do, expect the worst. Putnam’s dereliction regarding Jamaica Pass led to a rout of the entire forward position. A reeling army will respond to inspired leadership. Washington steadied the survivors of the routed covering force, stabilized the position atop Brooklyn Heights and snatched his army from the jaws of destruction through his successful retreat across the East River. Beware of applying previous “lessons learned.” Howe’s fears of another Bunker Hill–style bloodletting stayed his hand. He forfeited the opportunity to possibly bag the Patriot forces (including Washington) on Brooklyn Heights and end the Revolutionary War that afternoon. MH This article appeared in the November 2020 issue of Military History magazine. For more stories, subscribe here and visit us on Facebook:

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Losing His Legs to a Landmine Changed Professor’s Life

Losing His Legs to a Landmine Changed Professor’s Life After sharing Nobel Prize, Ken Rutherford wrote a history of Civil War explosive devices WHEN THE LANDMINE exploded under his Toyota Landcruiser, Ken Rutherford was temporarily blinded. Then he glanced on the floor of the vehicle and saw a dangling foot. It was his. Blood was everywhere. The date was December 16, 1993. The place: war-torn Somalia, where he was on a humanitarian mission on a brutally hot morning. Engaged to be married, Rutherford had no idea if he would live. He was 31 years old. In shock, Rutherford somehow radioed for help. The pain was searing, unimaginable. The taste of his own blood was sickening. As he lay on the ground, he stared at a deep-blue sky. He wondered if it would be his last view on Earth. Rutherford’s mind raced. He thought of Kim, his fiancée. Would he ever see her again? Airlifted to a hospital, he nearly bled to death. The former University of Colorado football player paid an awful price: His legs were amputated—the lower right leg in Kenya that day, the lower left in the United States in 1997. Rutherford keeps a snapshot of him and Princess Diana, who championed his campaign to eradicate landmines worldwide. Since that life-altering day in Somalia, Rutherford, a 57-year-old political science professor at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., has dedicated his life to the eradication of landmines worldwide. The Landmine Survivors Network, the organization he co-founded in 1996, even earned a champion in Princess Diana. My initial connection with Ken Rutherford was a book: his. In 2018, I edited his America’s Buried History manuscript about Civil War landmines. His passion for the subject began in 2011, when he read a historical marker in Virginia that incorrectly stated landmines were first deployed during the war in 1864. The weapon was actually first used in 1862 during the Peninsula Campaign. Rutherford dug deep into the history of landmines. He traces their development from before the war through the establishment of the Confederacy’s Army Torpedo Bureau, the world’s first institution devoted to the systematic production of the notorious weapons. “You’re a universe of one,” I told him during our first phone conversation. “No one else in the world has lost his legs and written such a book.” The more I got to know Rutherford over the phone, the more I was determined to meet the Ph.D. who shared a Nobel Prize for his work to ban landmines, visited 106 countries…and lived much of his life without legs. On a sunny Saturday, Ken and I explored hallowed ground in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. It was a remarkable eight-hour journey. Gray clouds slowly give way to bright sunshine as Rutherford and I stop at an often-overlooked Valley site. On October 3, 1864, John Meigs, an Engineer Corps officer, was mapping routes near Harrisonburg for the movement of Philip Sheridan’s troops. The 23-year-old’s father was Montgomery Meigs, the well-regarded quartermaster general of the Union Army. A West Point graduate, John was a favorite of Sheridan’s. About dusk on that raw, rainy Monday, Meigs’ group was approached on Swift Run Gap Road by three men on horseback. Were they Union soldiers? Rebel scouts? Guerrillas? Spies?  During a confrontation, Meigs was killed by a soldier in the 4th Virginia Cavalry.  A Federal soldier said he was shot in the back. Meigs was “murdered,” Sheridan wrote. “For this atrocious act,” Sheridan noted in his report in reference to Meigs’ death, “all the houses within five miles were burned.” “The switch went off and this became total war,” says Rutherford of the ugly turn taken by Sheridan’s Valley Campaign. “This,” the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation trustee adds as we examine the hillside where Meigs was killed, “is the most important site in the Shenandoah Valley.” Today, it’s bordered by a farm, railroad tracks, and massive silos. The approximate site of Meigs’ death is marked by a simple, gray granite marker. Soon, the immediate area, like much of the Valley, could be overtaken by 21st-century development. Even wearing prosthetic legs, Rutherford navigates the hillside seemingly without significant strain. Most of us, thankfully, will never know what it’s like to live without legs. There’s a physical toll, starting with putting on the legs each day. A mental one, too. As we contemplate 1864 while leaning against a farm fence, I gently steer the conversation to 1993. “I had a chance to write my eulogy on that hard Somalia ground,” he tells me, “then I was given a second chance.” Clearly, this man feels blessed to be alive. “My heart,” Rutherford says, “blazes with gratitude.” Debate continues over who shot Union Lieutenant John Meigs. But there is no doubt that Meigs’ death near Harrisonburg, Va., changed the tenor of the war in the Shenandoah Valley. (Photo by John Banks) Much of the Shenandoah Valley near Harrisonburg is a crazy quilt of farm land and modern development. As we near Cross Keys battlefield and see rolling, open acreage, I roll down the window of Rutherford’s silver Suburban, hoping to breathe in one of my favorite smells: freshly manured fields. In the past two decades, Rutherford has undergone 19 operations and received 20 blood transfusions. “My runway isn’t getting any longer for me,” he says. “…I don’t know how much longer I am going to make it.” And yet this man who has traveled the world has so much more to do. “I want to raise bees, raise animals,” he says. His voice trails off. “But I’ve run a good race.” We stand on a ridge where Con-federate Brig. Gen. Richard Ewell deployed his artillery at Cross Keys on June 8, 1862. Now choked with vegetation, the view is not as open as it was the afternoon Yankees under General Robert Milroy unsuccessfully assaulted the heights under artillery fire. A 25th Ohio soldier remembered “the crushing of timber by the dread missiles mingled with the unearthly yells of opposing forces and the dying and screams of the wounded.” Given what he experienced in Somalia, I wonder if Rutherford can relate to the suffering that occurred at Cross Keys. “These guys,” he says, “had so much more to sacrifice than me.” In nearby Port Republic, Civil War history jumps up at us at nearly every turn. With Union troops in hot pursuit “Stonewall” Jackson galloped down Main Street on “Little Sorrel” and across a covered bridge spanning the North River on June 8, 1862. Despite Union artillery crashing into its timbers, Jackson reached the relative safety of the opposite shore. Jackson escaped and whipped the Federals at Port Republic the next day. Brig. Gen. Turner Ashby’s body was put on display in the Frank Kemper house in Port Republic, Va., after the Confederate cavalry ace was killed by a bullet through the chest June 6, 1862, on the outskirts of Harrisonburg. (Photo by John Banks) Rutherford points out the site of the long-gone bridge used by Jackson. Then, a short distance away in the village, we visit the temporary resting place of the “Knight of the Valley.” On June 6, 1862, 33-year-old Brig. Gen. Turner Ashby was killed by a bullet through the chest on the outskirts of Harrisonburg. His body was taken to Frank Kemper’s house in Port Republic, where mourners, including Jackson, paid their respects. Ashby was propped up in a chair there and photographed by an unknown photographer. Behind a chain-link fence outside a nearby mom-and-pop store, 62-year-old Jeff Coffman sweats in front of a smoker packed with chicken. On a table behind “The Barbecue King” rests his not-so-secret ingredients: a massive jar of vinegar, seasoning, lemon juice, pepper, and who knows what else. Coffman tells us of a windstorm that toppled an ancient tree near his house several years ago. Under that white oak, according to local legend, Stonewall held a Sunday service in mid-June 1862. In 2007, trimmings from the “Jackson Prayer Tree” were used to create pens. At Piedmont, perhaps the least spoiled battlefield in the Valley, Rutherford and I admire an awe-inspiring scene: to our left, the Appalachian Mountains; to our right, Massanutten Mountain and the Blue Ridge. In an untilled field of wildflowers, Confederate General William “Grumble” Jones was killed instantly by a bullet to the head on June 5, 1864. Hours later, Rutherford and I stand in a seldom-visited Cross Keys field on the old Widow Pence farm, where soldiers in the 548-man 8th New York—mostly Germans and Hungarians—suffered nearly 50 percent casualties. “The dead and wounded Yankees,” a Georgia soldier wrote, “was lying on the field as thick as black birds.” Rutherford poses for a photograph, the beautiful, massive Massanutten Mountain looming over his right shoulder. Surely his family must be proud of this man who has achieved so much. Remember Kim, his fiancée? They were married in 1994. The couple has five children. I think about what Rutherford told me hours earlier: “I am grateful every single day I’m above ground.” And so our 100-mile journey in the Valley is complete. I learned so much—about perseverance, courage, tenacity, gratitude. I learned a lot about the soldiers who fought here, too. John Banks is the author of the popular John Banks’ Civil War blog. He lives in Nashville, Tenn. This story appeared in the December 2019 issue of Civil War Times.

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https://www.historynet.com/louisiana-maneuvers-1940-41.htm

Louisiana Maneuvers (1940-41)

Louisiana Maneuvers (1940-41) Infantryman get a close-up look at the M2A1 medium tank during a lull in the 'fighting' at the Louisiana Maneuvers (Courtesy National Archives) The mock battles of what became known as the Louisiana Maneuvers had one purpose: to prepare America’s soldiers for the war that had already begun in Europe and was threatening to spread around the world. It rained on Monday morning Sept. 15 over all Louisiana. From low, darkening clouds the drops spattered on the State’s good highways, on its hundreds of marshy mud roads, on its pine forests, and on its deep swamps full of quicksand. The rain fell, too, on 350,000 U.S. soldiers and 50,000 U.S. Army vehicles as they fought the greatest sham battle in U.S. history. The attack had come before dawn. With two fast-moving, hard-hitting armored divisions leading the way, Lieutenant General Ben Lear, commander of the Second (Red) Army, had pushed his troops across the muddy Red River, was already sending long tentacles down the highways to the south, where Lieutenant General Walter Krueger’s Third (Blue) Army lay in wait. Overhead, armadas of pursuit planes fought great dogfights, while sleek A-20A attack bombers and Navy dive bombers strafed the columns of tanks and trucks moving up to the front. That excerpt from the Oct. 6, 1941, issue of Life opened a multipage feature article on the largest mass training maneuvers undertaken by the U.S. Army to date. The mock battles of what became known as the Louisiana Maneuvers had one purpose: to prepare America’s soldiers for the war that had already begun in Europe and was threatening to spread around the world. In the early spring of 1940, the U.S. military faced a seemingly insurmountable task. With Poland overrun by German armored columns now poised to strike at France, and China under assault by Japan, America’s commanders had to prepare the U.S. military for war. The problem was not a dearth of troops—after Adolf Hitler’s blitzkrieg rolled through Poland in September 1939, Congress had mobilized the National Guard and Reserve and approved an increase in the size of the Army. It was that the existing troops were poorly trained or not trained at all. No one was more acutely aware of this than Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall. A student of history, Marshall was certain American boys were as courageous as any German or Japanese soldier, but they lacked sufficient training and combat experience—and time was short. Marshall concluded that what America’s burgeoning ranks needed was a complex training exercise, an exacting test in an environment that would closely approximate the realities of the battlefield. To help implement his idea, Marshall called on Lt. Gen. Stanley D. Embick, a veteran soldier and commander of the Third U.S. Army, headquartered in Atlanta. Marshall directed Embick to find a suitable location where thousands of U.S. troops could be deployed in a series of maneuvers to test their readiness. Armed with these instructions and accompanied by his aide, Major Mark Clark, Embick traveled to central Louisiana, where the Army had trained many of its soldiers during World War I. With a tattered road map as a guide, Embick and Clark tramped through Louisiana’s backcountry, noting the roads, trails, swamps and forests. Sparsely populated, thick with undergrowth and uncharted swamps, and scarred by rural traces that turn to muck at the slightest hint of rain, central Louisiana was an ideal place to prepare an army, with vast tracts of land that could accommodate the large-scale maneuvers the Army needed to conduct. The north-central part of the state is home to Kisatchie National Forest, a 604,000-acre virtual wilderness of pinewood hills. Just south of the national forest was Camp Evangeline, a 23,000-acre tract established by the Army in 1930. By linking the two tracts, the military had a ready-made training ground. But Embick determined the training area needed to be larger still. So the Army secured Louisiana’s permission to conduct maneuvers in rural areas south of the national forest. Embick and state officials worked quickly to iron out the details, and by early June 1940 the Army had secured the right to deploy across thousands of square miles in Grant, Natchitoches, Winn, Rapides, Vernon, Claiborne and Webster parishes. Embick went even further, securing use rights to large tracts of land in East Texas that bordered the primary Louisiana deployment grounds. Like central Louisiana, East Texas was then sparsely populated, with a network of unfinished roads that would challenge military topographers and unit commanders. The 3,400 square miles of combined maneuver area was also laced with rivers—the Sabine and Calcasieu to the west and the Red to the north—natural barriers that would present valuable training obstacles for the engineer units obliged to bridge them. Like Marshall, Embick had closely followed the German conquest of Poland. While he believed the maneuvers would be a good opportunity to test the Army’s new halftrack-mounted 75mm antitank gun, he and his planners also hoped to answer other questions: Could mobile units adequately replace horse cavalry? Could the Army’s newly formed paratrooper units actually be dropped en masse? Would armored units be able to maneuver effectively in difficult terrain and uncertain weather conditions? Would the Army’s new three-regiment “triangle divisions” maneuver more efficiently than the old four-regiment “square divisions”? Furthermore, Marshall was keen to see whether a professional officer corps of rising colonels and brigadier generals could command large units operating over vast tracts of territory, as they would be called on to do in the brewing war. Lt. Gen. Krueger later described what Marshall and America’s other senior commanders were looking for in their officers—men who possessed “broad vision, progressive ideas, a thorough grasp of the magnitude of the problems involved in handling an army, and lots of initiative and resourcefulness.” While it was one thing to find the right region for the maneuvers, it was another to make certain the maneuvers were challenging and instructive. Throughout the spring of 1940, Embick and his staff worked tirelessly to devise a series of increasingly difficult tests that would prepare soldiers for the battlefield and test command arrangements from the squad level to full army level. Embick wanted to test units under as many different conditions as possible, to see whether they could communicate with each other, deploy according to schedules and, perhaps most important, cover long distances at night. The exercises were designed to be exhaustive—and exhausting: There’d be scant sleep on a real battlefield, so there would be little time for relaxation in Texas and Louisiana. Embick sought logistics assistance from senior armored and infantry corps commanders, who insisted the maneuvers be as realistic as possible. Loudspeakers would blare the recorded sounds of battle, canister smoke would shroud the battlefield, and bags of white sand would be dropped from aircraft to simulate the impact of artillery shells. U.S. Army Air Corps spotter and reconnaissance planes would gather intelligence, while transports would deliver troops to newly constructed airfields. Planners stockpiled millions of rounds of blank ammunition, and Embick established rules to govern when units would join the line of fire and what kinds of “casualties” they’d suffer. His goal was not only to determine who could “kill” whom, but also to test the time it took medical units to transfer the “wounded” to rear-area combat hospitals. Finally, Embick appointed and trained hundreds of maneuver “umpires,” who, armed with clipboards and armbands, would monitor and assess units and leaders according to a complex grading system. While the umpires’ conclusions were important, even more important, from Embick’s perspective, was feedback from individual commanders, who were to assess their own performance and that of their troops. Embick’s goal was not to determine winners and losers of the exercises, but to create an effective training regimen for the coming war. By April 1940, all was ready for the Louisiana Maneuvers. There were to be two events in the spring and autumn of 1940 and two more the following year, with the largest, most complex and most important to be held in September 1941. The 1940 maneuvers began in May with 70,000 soldiers, who trained and “fought” in four separate exercises of three days each, beginning on May 9. These first maneuvers, Embick said, were “experiments,” not contests. The first was to see whether armored units could actually mobilize and travel long distances. To test this, the War Department ordered Maj. Gen. Walter C. Short’s IV Corps to move from its Fort Benning headquarters in Georgia to Louisiana—550 miles in six days, the longest motor march ever undertaken by the U.S. Army. Soon after arriving in Louisiana, IV Corps was thrown into a series of corps-on-corps exercises that pitted Short’s armored columns (the “Blue Army”) against Krueger’s IX Corps (the “Red Army”). As military historian Christopher Gabel noted: In the first exercise, Red Army took the offensive, crossing the Calcasieu while Blue Army defended the river line. In the second exercise, Blue Army attacked, enveloping both flanks of the Red force. The third maneuver again saw Blue on the attack, this time with penetrations of the Red line at Slagle and Hornbeck. In the fourth exercise, the provisional tank brigade and the 7th Mechanized Cavalry Brigade were combined into a provisional division totaling some 382 tanks—the first armored division in Army history. This force spearheaded a Red Army attack, which the Blue force countered with an antitank defense extending as far east as Gorum and Flatwoods. Embick followed up, crisscrossing the “battlefield” to question commanders and soldiers on both sides and reaching some preliminary conclusions on America’s combat readiness. What he found was not encouraging—the Army evidently had a lot to learn about mobile warfare. Vehicle breakdowns, repair team shortages, repeated traffic jams and poorly worded orders were all common. More important, senior commanders’ failure to lead from the front led to uncoordinated attacks and jumbled defenses. “Commanders and staffs mistakenly believed that they could run the war from headquarters,” Gabel noted, “relying on maps and telephones, much as they had in the static warfare of 1918.” In the wake of the May war games, several senior tank experts, including Colonel George S. Patton Jr., recommended the Army create separate armored divisions that could operate unencumbered by infantry or horse cavalry units. The recommendation was forwarded to Marshall, who quickly established a special armored training school at Fort Knox, Ky. While Embick bemoaned the performance of the armored units and the lack of communication between senior commanders and their frontline units, he was satisfied that young recruits were in good physical condition and would perform well in the event of war. And despite his disappointment that few senior officers manned the front with their troops, Embick was pleased to find the Army had created a dedicated officer corps comprising some of the nation’s best military minds. Among those who participated in the maneuvers and went on to assume major leadership roles in World War II were Clark, Patton and Lt. Col. Omar Bradley. Perhaps the most outstanding young commander of the 1940 maneuvers was Colonel Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell. During a key moment in the face-off between the Blue and Red armies, Stilwell commanded a “blitzkrieg” invasion of northern Louisiana with a flying column of tanks—just the kind of attack German General Heinz Guderian was then planning against France. Impressed, Embick and the umpires passed Stilwell’s name up the chain of command. After Pearl Harbor, Marshall appointed Stilwell to lead Allied troops against the Japanese in Burma and China. The 1941 Louisiana Maneuvers were held over three weeks in August and three weeks in September. To coordinate them, Marshall replaced Embick, who was retiring, with Brig. Gen. Lesley “Whitey” McNair, commandant of the Army’s Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The self-effacing McNair, whom Marshall described as “the brains of the Army,” had not only crafted the military’s 13-week basic training regimen, he had reoriented and reformed Leavenworth’s curriculum, passing on to Marshall the names of his best students. Like Marshall, McNair understood the challenges the U.S. faced in fighting the Germans and Japanese and was concerned about his service’s poor preparation. He decided to enlarge on what Embick had started, replacing the 70,000-soldier exercise of 1940 with the largest peacetime exercise in American history. “We didn’t know how soon war would come,” McNair later observed, “but we knew it was coming, and we had to get together something of an army pretty darn fast.” McNair conceived a groundbreaking war game that mobilized 400,000 soldiers in two armies—the Red, or “Kotmk,” representing Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri and Kentucky; and the Blue, or “Almat,” comprising Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. The armies would contend for control of the Mississippi River. As in Embick’s 1940 maneuvers, umpires would grade individual leaders and units on leadership and combat skills. Senior officers were warned to ensure proper supply and preparation of their troops. Communications systems that had plagued Embick the year before were improved with upgraded equipment, including new radios for senior commanders and their subordinates. This time, McNair insisted, senior commanders were to be as close to the front as the situation demanded. In June, July and August, corps deployments tested coordination between air and ground reconnaissance units, while a second set of corps-on-corps exercises honed combat leadership skills. Marshall focused considerable time on the 1941 maneuvers, calling them “a combat college for troop leading” and a laboratory to test the “new armored, antitank and air forces that had come of age since 1918.” He personally observed many of the corps- and division-level maneuvers and, in the autumn, an expanded training exercise in the hills of North and South Carolina. But the major focus was on the Red vs. Blue conflict in Louisiana and East Texas. The mock war began on September 15—just three months before Pearl Harbor—and pitted Lt. Gen. Ben Lear’s Second (Red) Army against Krueger’s Third (Blue) Army. Lear’s goal was to defeat the Blue Army and occupy Louisiana. A hard-bitten, gruff-talking disciplinarian, Lear was not well liked by his troops, but he had an eye for detail and was surrounded by a cadre of talented and aggressive officers, including veterans of Embick’s 1940 exercises. Among them was Patton, whom Lear tasked to lead a lightning combined-arms strike against Krueger’s Louisiana defenses. Krueger, an aging veteran and competitive taskmaster who too quickly bristled at unintended slights, desperately wanted to beat Lear. He gathered a staff of brainy if little-known assistants, including Lt. Col. Dwight Eisenhower as his chief of staff. Eisenhower was an old friend of Patton and, in May, began meticulously planning Louisiana’s defenses against Patton’s tanks. Marshall, who had doubts about Eisenhower, accepted Krueger’s word that “Ike” was a brilliant planner and tough soldier. Krueger’s judgment of Eisenhower was soon proven on the Louisiana battlefield. Lear’s army crossed the Red River on September 15 with Patton’s tanks in the lead. Eisenhower was ready. Three of Krueger’s mobile corps rapidly responded to the Red Army threat and moved to pin it against the river. Patton laughed off the threat, even circulating an offer to subordinates of $50 to any man who captured “a certain SOB called Eisenhower.” Unperturbed, Ike and Krueger ordered their armored units to flank Patton and prevent a breakout. Umpires deemed the maneuver successful. The first part of the war was over. The Blue Army, and Eisenhower, had won. It is now well-known American military lore that in his desk drawer in Washington, Marshall kept “a little black book” (one he once waved at a reporter, just to prove it existed) in which he listed those officers he believed would lead the nation in battle against the Axis. The list had grown through the years. McNair was on it, as were Bradley, Stilwell, Clark and Patton. By the end of the Louisiana Maneuvers, Marshall had added Eisenhower to his list. Three months later, eight days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he brought Ike to Washington. Within months, the newly promoted brigadier general was in London, planning the invasion of North Africa. Within two years he was supreme allied commander and Marshall’s eyes and ears in Europe. Marshall was not the only one impressed by Eisenhower. The young officer also entranced journalists covering the Louisiana Maneuvers, front-pages fodder through 1941. CBS reporter Eric Sevareid eyed Krueger’s staff and concluded that Eisenhower “makes more sense than any of the rest of them.” Drew Pearson, perhaps the best-known reporter of his day, agreed, telling his readers that Eisenhower “conceived and directed the strategy that routed [Lear’s] Second Army,” and that the balding lieutenant colonel was endowed with “a steel-trap mind plus unusual physical vigor.” Such reports wouldn’t have swayed Marshall—after all, no one on his list had actually been tested in combat. Still, the Louisiana Maneuvers had reinforced the chief of staff’s faith in realistic training. The Army he had built in just two whirlwind years had not been blooded, but Marshall was confident it would acquit itself well. And while he had taken note of Eisenhower’s talent, he was even more buoyed by Patton’s aggressive battlefield tactics. Following his failed breakout from the Red River “beachhead,” Patton was made a commander in Krueger’s Red Army, which would take the offensive during the second set of exercises. In the latter part of September, as McNair watched in amazement, Patton led his armored corps in a massed flanking attack against the Blue Army’s defense in depth. Patton’s 2nd Armored Division advanced 200 miles through northern Louisiana and East Texas in three days, enveloping Lear’s flank. It was a brilliant maneuver. Lear’s army thus surrounded, McNair suspended the exercise. McNair and Krueger spent the following weeks reviewing lists of senior officers, culling those who had failed the test of the Louisiana Maneuvers. Those who survived the process were marked for combat commands. Those who did not were shunted off to other service or retired. Lear was charged with training the Second Army and later replaced McNair, who died in Normandy, as the Army’s chief trainer. But Louisiana had sealed Lear’s fate: He would never obtain the combat command he desired. Krueger, thought too old to command, was sidelined as head of the Southern Defense Command. But in January 1943, General Douglas MacArthur told Marshall he wanted Krueger to head up the new Sixth U.S. Army, based in Australia. Krueger went on to become one of the toughest, if now largely forgotten, combat leaders of World War II. Of course, history records the achievements of Patton, Clark, Bradley and Eisenhower, who replicated in Europe what they first practiced in central Louisiana. Were the Louisiana Maneuvers a success? The ever-critical McNair praised the exercises, but was quick to point out they had revealed some weaknesses: “The principal weakness was deficiency in small-unit training due fundamentally to inadequate leadership.” If there is one hero of the maneuvers, it is McNair, who was everywhere at once, watching and taking notes. From these notes McNair—whom Marshall appointed commanding general of Army Ground Forces—shaped the most intensive and physically demanding training regimen for regular soldiers in American history. Over the next four years, until he was killed while watching the soldiers he had trained advance into Normandy, McNair molded the cadre of sergeants who became the backbone of the Army—the small-unit leaders he worried about during the steamy Louisiana summer of 1941. The Louisiana Maneuvers provided vital training for the tens of thousands of American boys who would go on to fight and win on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific. In the midst of that global conflict, soldiers who had battled near Shreveport, driven tanks in East Texas, flown reconnaissance missions over Evangeline Parish, or simply fought off the chiggers and ticks, would acknowledge the bond forged during a make-believe war. A Walk in the Sun, one of Hollywood’s most poignant accounts of World War II combat, features a memorable scene in which American soldiers slog forward under fire near Salerno to capture a farmhouse. Members of the platoon laughingly agree: Their assignment is going to be tough, but “it can’t be worse than the Louisiana Maneuvers.” For further reading, Mark Perry recommends: “The 1940 Maneuvers: Prelude to Mobilization,” by Christopher R. Gabel; “Careers of Officers Involved in the Louisiana Maneuvers,” by Rickey Robertson; and Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life, by Carlo D’Este.

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The Lucky Bastard Club

The Lucky Bastard Club Members of this informal brotherhood considered themselves fortunate to have survived World War II. “Would you like to see my Lucky Bastard Club certificate?” Paul Anderson asked me. We had struck up a conversation at the Glenns Ferry Historical Museum in Idaho after I commented on the cap he was wearing, embroidered with the image of a B-24 bomber. Then a museum volunteer in his 80s, Anderson gave a lively commentary on his World War II experiences. I had never heard of the Lucky Bastard Club, and it turned out I wasn’t alone—a lot of people don’t know about it. The phrase often brings a chuckle when people first hear it, yet it’s actually somber testimony to the fortitude of American airmen who survived a most dangerous period, flying combat missions over Europe. First Lieutenant Paul I. Anderson served as a bombardier on a B-24 Liberator from mid-March to early July 1944. His Lucky Bastard Club certificate states that he “achieved the remarkable record of having sallied forth, and returned, no fewer than thirty times bearing tons and tons of high explosive Goodwill to the Feuhrer [sic] and would-be Feuhrers [sic], through the courtesy of the Eighth Air Force A.A.F….” Anderson was kind enough to give me a copy of his certificate. It was only after I started researching the group’s history that I grasped how important those pieces of paper were to the recipients. Anderson mentioned to me that “It wasn’t anything official,” and he didn’t know how or where the Lucky Bastard Club had been started. Though its history is sketchy, the informal group seems to have sprung up among American aircrews in England early in WWII. Its purpose was to recognize those who had flown into enemy territory a prescribed number of times, hit their targets and managed to get back to England while being targeted by anti-aircraft fire and swarms of Luftwaffe fighters. More than 6,500 B-17 and B-24 bombers were lost over Europe during WWII. According to a 1953 Department of the Army report detailing casualties in the European Theater of Operations, 23,805 airmen were killed in action, 9,299 were wounded and 26,064 were captured and interned. Total U.S. Army Air Forces casualties in the European, Mediterranean and North African theaters amounted to a staggering 115,382. Bomber crews faced tough odds and horrendous conditions. Not only were the Germans trying to blow them out of the sky, they had to perform their jobs in the cramped confines of brutally cold aircraft. Cumbersome fur-lined jackets and boots—even heated suits—could do little to alleviate hours of high-altitude flight at temperatures of 50 below zero. The effects of lengthy, stressful missions—during which they endured bone-chilling cold, constant noise and vibration, equipment malfunctions and the threat of enemy fighters and flak—took a toll on the crews. The bombers were typically crewed by airmen barely old enough to shave, some of whom earned their wings and began piloting four-engine aircraft before they had a driver’s license. Many weren’t even old enough to vote, or had just reached voting age. When they were deployed, most had never before been to a foreign country. Roy R. “Jack” Fisher, pilot of the B-17 Mission Belle, celebrated his 22nd birthday on March 25, 1945, more than a month after completing his 35th mission. Once the crewmen reached a target and dropped their bombs, the danger was far from over. Returning home to base in an undamaged airplane was a rarity. “Lucky,” and in some cases “miraculous,” certainly describes the crews of many bombers that limped back to England full of bullet holes, missing chunks of tails and wings, with wounded crewmen aboard. Early in the daylight bombing campaign, it wasn’t unusual for a third to half of the airplanes on a given mission to be lost or damaged. At the war’s start, a combat tour for bomber crews was 20 missions. Any airman who completed the required number could look forward to being transferred to safer duty. As formation flying and fighter support became more effective, and the Luftwaffe lost many of its most experienced pilots, the number of missions went up to 25, then 30 and finally 35 in the fall of 1944. But the odds of reaching those milestones, no matter what the number, were always against the aircrews. Becoming a member of the Lucky Bastard Club was thus a significant achievement. “It meant you had survived,” Anderson explained. “You had completed your tour, and you were going home.” Anderson’s tour was supposed to be 30 missions, but he actually flew 32. Each mission is recorded on the back of his Lucky Bastard Club certificate, starting with a sortie to Brunswick, Germany, on March 15, 1944, and ending with a raid on a V-weapon site in France on July 2. He flew two missions on D-Day: one in support of Allied troops hitting the beaches of Normandy and a bombing mission to St. Lô, France. The Lucky Bastard Club wasn’t confined to the Eighth Air Force in England, though most members did hail from the Eighth. Regardless of where they served, only airmen who had flown their prescribed number of combat missions were inducted into this exclusive fraternity. “Crews of the 95th Bombardment Group that completed 35 missions earned membership in the Lucky Bastard Club,” reported B-17 pilot Eugene Fletcher. Aircrews often started celebrating the completion of their tour even before they landed from their last mission. As the returning bomber reached England’s coast, it would break out of formation to head directly for base, and the pilots would “pour on the coal.” They would then fly down the runway about 200 feet off the deck, firing off flares. Observers on the ground enjoyed the spectacle. “This was tangible evidence that a crew could live to finish a tour, and it was a real morale booster,” noted Fletcher. That evening the crewmen would be feted with a Lucky Bastard Club dinner. According to Fletcher, “The whole crew would dress in Class A uniform and come to the Combat Officers Mess Hall, where they were seated at a table of honor with a white tablecloth and given a steak dinner with a bottle of wine.” Each man received his certificate, and there was always a standing ovation from all the officers on hand. The celebration meant a lot to both the new members and those honoring them—not to mention it was the only time they would get a steak dinner in England. “It was all trivial in a sense,” Fletcher added, “but it meant somebody cared.” When a new CO took over the 95th Bomb Group in late 1944, however, he nixed all such revelry—the celebratory flyover, the flares, the steak dinner and even the Distinguished Flying Cross awards. “We had been present at the awards ceremony when [other] men finished their tours and were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross,” Fletcher said. “It made us proud because we knew that you could not complete a tour…and not exhibit the outstanding heroism and exceptional performance [needed] to win this award….” The new orders seemingly relegated combat missions to the realm of everyday labor. “A crew finishing their missions would not be recognized for what they had done…,” he lamented. “Apparently the art of preparing citations had now become a far too difficult task…in the European Theater of Operations.” At the end of his own final mission, on December 27, 1944, Fletcher decided he and his crew deserved to celebrate despite the CO’s orders. “While the wrath of a colonel is not to be taken lightly, a 105 millimeter shell exploding under your tail is no great pleasure either,” he commented. “As we made landfall on the coast of England, I shoved the throttles to the fire wall, lowered the nose, and called [for] a heading that would take us straight down the runway at the base. As we went roaring down the runway…at full high rpm, Lucky Sherry looked like a giant Roman candle gone mad, erupting the brightly colored magnesium flares….Old ‘Fireball Red Leader’ was coming home for the last time and our presence was being announced with great hilarity….It was the only time I ever knowingly failed to heed an order.” Jack Fisher described the completion of his 35th mission, on February 19, 1945, much as Fletcher had chronicled his own final flight: “We buzzed the field, as per custom. Contrary to orders, of course, but what the hell, the enlisted men and I are done. All the months of waiting, worrying, wrestling with the emotions and the fears are over. We survived. And reflecting on the number of men who didn’t, that in itself is a miracle. Now I am a member of the Lucky Bastard Club.” After the war some men displayed their Lucky Bastard Club certificates in their offices or homes, while others tucked them away for safekeeping. For most, it would remain a cherished memento— not just because it attested to their wartime accomplishments and heroism, but also because it served as a reminder of the many comrades who had not lived to complete their tours. Paul Anderson probably summed up the sentiments of most returning veterans when we parted company, saying, “You know, those of us who made it back really were lucky bastards.” Freelance writer Richard Bauman’s articles have appeared in more than 400 publications. Recommended reading: The Lucky Bastard Club: Letters to My Bride From the Left Seat, by Roy R. Fisher Jr. with Susan Fisher Anderson; and The Lucky Bastard Club: A B-17 Pilot in Training and in Combat, 1943-45, by Eugene Fletcher. Originally published in the November 2014 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here.

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Lust for Fame Made Smut This Puritan’s Chief Stock in Trade

Lust for Fame Made Smut This Puritan’s Chief Stock in Trade ‘Special Agent’ Anthony Comstock took reporters along when he raided purveyors of porn and prophylactics Anthony Comstock always dressed in black and white: black suit and shoes, starched white shirt, black bow tie—except at Christmas, when he replaced the black tie with a white one. Comstock saw the world in black and white, good and evil. You worked for God or you slaved for Satan. Comstock toiled for God, fighting what he saw as Beelzebub’s most insidious creation—erotica. There was, he proclaimed, “no more active agent employed by Satan in civilized communities to ruin the human family than EVIL READING.” For 42 years, Comstock served as the United States government’s official hunter of racy novels, risqué postcards, and sex manuals that dared to explain contraception. Professional bluestocking Comstock carefully curated his facial hair into an extravagant set of muttonchops that became a favorite target of cartoonists. (Matteo Omiead/Alamy Stock Photo) Brawny, broad-shouldered, and zealous, he loved to kick in doors and vault through windows to arrest smut merchants—especially if, as often was the case, he’d brought along a gaggle of reporters. Comstock craved publicity and meticulously recorded his triumphs. “In the 41 years I have been here, I have convicted persons enough to fill a passenger train of 61 coaches—60 coaches containing 60 passengers each and the 61st almost full,” he bragged not long before his death in 1915. “I have destroyed 160 tons of obscene literature.” A Puritan born on a Connecticut farm in 1844, Comstock grew up in a teetotaling Congregational household whose members spent most waking hours working or praying. One night a teenaged Anthony got drunk with a friend. Waking with a hangover that felt like God’s punishment, he swore off booze for life. At 18, he discovered that a store was illegally selling grog, so he broke into the place by night and opened the taps, emptying every keg—his first attack on God’s enemies. In 1863, he joined the Union army, which shipped him to the Florida coast. He saw little combat against Confederates but fought the devil every day. When his unit received its whiskey ration, he poured his share on the ground. His irked comrades would have been happy to drink it, but Comstock refused to be a party to the consumption of firewater. Sins of the flesh likewise tormented him. “I debased myself,” Comstock wrote in his diary of his habitual masturbation. “I deplore my sinful weak nature…” After the war, he became a clerk in a Manhattan dry goods business and married a pious woman ten years his senior. When a daughter died in infancy, the couple adopted a baby girl. But dry goods and domestic life bored Anthony. Lusting for action but loathing lust, he launched a personal crusade. He would buy racy books, then convince city cops to deputize him to arrest the sellers. One day, eager for publicity about his exploits, he brought a New York Tribune reporter with him as he busted seven booksellers. In 1872, Comstock went after New York’s famous stockbroker sisters—Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin—who published a weekly newspaper that advocated women’s suffrage and free love. When the scandal-mongering siblings published an article accusing America’s most famous minister, Henry Ward Beecher, of adultery, Comstock got the sisters charged with obscenity. The indictment made him famous, but after months of legal wrangling, the charges were dismissed. Bans on obscenity did not include newspapers. Obviously, Comstock needed a stronger law, so he traveled to Washington, DC, to lobby for one. Lugging a carpetbag of dirty books, he buttonholed congressmen, citing saucy passages, and won their votes for “An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use”—soon shortened to “the Comstock Act.” Signed by President Grant in 1873, the act outlawed use of the mails to send “obscene, lewd or lascivious” materials—as well as sale or possession of devices used “for the prevention of conception.” Comstock went after Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, two unconventional women who promoted female suffrage, sexual freedom and women’s ability to control their own investments. (Museum of the City of New York) Congress appointed Comstock a “special agent” of the U.S. Post Office, deputized to sniff out and snuff out porn and prophylactics. He got a badge and power to make arrests but no salary, so a like-minded organization, the Society for the Suppression of Vice, hired him as its staff vicebuster. He worked full time and loved the job. In 1873 alone, he logged 23,000 miles—his stops included Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and St. Paul—arresting 55 individuals and seizing 67 tons of one-handed books, 194,000 pictures, 5,500 decks of naughty cards, and 60,300 contraceptive devices. A tireless scold, Comstock maintained his frantic pace for 40 years, all the while hectoring Americans that “EVIL READING” inspired lust, which “defiles the body, debauches the imagination, corrupts the mind, deadens the will, destroys the memory, sears the conscience, hardens the heart and damns the soul.” By the late 1870s, he had defeated the nation’s major publishers of hot stuff, but rather than declare victory the zealot became overzealous, attacking political dissidents, birth control advocates, and, famously, playwright George Bernard Shaw. In 1878, Comstock arrested Ezra Heywood. The charge brought against the eccentric pacifist and atheist? Publishing Cupid’s Yokes, a 23-page endorsement of free love. The pamphlet was about as erotic as a telephone directory, but Heywood had irked Comstock by denouncing him in it as “a religio-monomaniac.” Convicted under the Comstock Act, Heywood drew two years at hard labor, but President Rutherford Hayes pardoned him after six months. In 1882, Comstock arrested Heywood once again, for selling Cupid’s Yokes and publishing Walt Whitman’s poem “To a Common Prostitute.” In 1887, Comstock raided a Fifth Avenue gallery, seizing 117 photographs of paintings by French artists depicting unclothed models. “Let the nude be kept in its proper place,” the Savonarola of Sensuality said, “out of the reach of the rabble.” In 1893, Comstock demanded that Chicago lock up World’s Fair belly dancers on charges that they were perpetrating an “assault on the sacred dignity of womanhood.” In 1905, Comstock warned the NYPD that a Broadway theater was rehearsing Shaw’s play Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Though Comstock hadn’t seen the play or read the script, he’d heard the titular “profession” was prostitution. He denounced Shaw as “an Irish smut dealer” and promised to “investigate his books.” The playwright responded appropriately. “Comstockery is the world’s standing joke at the expense of the United States,” Shaw said. “Europe likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place.” By then, Comstock, to his vast irritation, had become a laughingstock for many Americans. Newspaper columnists mocked him as a yammering fuddy-duddy. Cartoonists parodied his muttonchop whiskers. Increasingly irascible as he aged, he was ejected from multiple courtrooms for yelling at prosecutors who refused to prosecute those he’d arrested. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson named Comstock to represent the United States at the International Purity Conference, taking place that year in San Francisco. Comstock delivered several speeches at the conference, then caught a cold, which became pneumonia and killed him. Federal authorities enforced the Comstock Act until 1965. Its namesake took one secret to his grave: If erotica “corrupts the mind,” how was Anthony Comstock to spend four decades wallowing in titillation and yet remain uncorrupted?

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https://www.historynet.com/m1903-springfield.htm

M1903 Springfield

M1903 Springfield Specifications Length: 43.2 inches Barrel length: 24 inches Weight: 8 pounds 11 ounces Bore: .30 inches Effective range: 1,100 yards Maximum range: 5,500 yards Muzzle velocity: 2,800 feet per second In 1892 the U.S. Army adopted the Norwegian Krag-Jorgensen as its first bolt-action rifle. But during the 1898 Spanish-American War the Krag was clearly outclassed by the Mauser M1893 used by Spanish troops, leading the Ordnance Department to order a new weapon. What emerged from the Springfield Armory was essentially a copy of the Mauser—for which the Americans had to pay Mauser $250,000 in production rights—but it proved a good investment. Equally effective—and also German-inspired—was the spitzer round developed for it, officially designated the “cartridge, ball, caliber .30. Model of 1906,” but better known as the .30-06 (“thirty aught-six”), which remained the standard-issue U.S. military round until the 1954 introduction of the 7.62×51 mm NATO round. Issued in 1905, the M1903 Springfield turn-bolt rifle held five rounds fed into an internal magazine using a stripper clip. It earned a reputation for unmatched accuracy and durability during and after World War I, until the semiautomatic M1 Garand began to eclipse it in the mid-1930s. Springfield introduced gunsights for the M1903A3 compatible with those of the Garand, allowing U.S. troops to be trained in both types during World War II. Even after the Garand became the standard-issue infantry weapon, the M1903 remained in favor as a sniper’s weapon—especially in its specialized M1903A4 version—during World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Its continued popularity in civilian circles kept it in production until 1949, with a total of 3,004,079 built. MH

a584a48387f68861ff6cd8fa7251eb59

https://www.historynet.com/m4a1-76-mm-sherman.htm

M4A1 (76 mm) Sherman

M4A1 (76 mm) Sherman Specifications Power: 500-hp Ford GAA four-stroke V-8 water-cooled gasoline engine Length: 24 feet 9 inches (with 76 mm gun) Width: 8 feet 9 inches Height: 11 feet 7/8 inches (to top of pintle stand) Combat weight: 33 tons Armament: 76 mm M1A1 rifled tank gun or 105 mm M4 howitzer, one turret-mounted .50-caliber anti-aircraft gun, one coaxial .30-caliber machine gun and one bow-mounted .30-caliber machine gun Speed    Road: 26 mph    Cross country: 4–26 mph, depending on terrain Maximum range: 100 miles Crew: Five Entering combat late in 1942, the M4 Sherman provided the U.S. Army with a solid, reliable medium tank. By 1943, however, it was clearly outgunned by the German Panther’s high-velocity 75 mm cannon and the Tiger’s fearsome 88 mm gun. The British modified some 2,000 of their Shermans to carry 17-pounders in what they called the Sherman Firefly, while the Americans likewise installed a 76 mm M1A1 high-velocity cannon in many of their M4s. The M4A3 featured a wider T23 turret with a partial platform for the gunner and commander. Although the heavier, higher-velocity weapons improved the Sherman’s prospects against its German counterparts, they stressed its chassis to the limit. In an effort to provide a steadier and more mobile platform for them, the Americans in 1944 redesigned the chassis of the M4A3, replacing its original vertical volute spring suspension (VVSS) and 16.5-inch-wide track with horizontal volute spring suspension (HVSS) with a 23-inch wide track. Additionally, the cast hull was replaced by a roomier welded hull accommodating a wider T23 turret. In August 1944 the first of 2,617 M4A3E8s were built by the Detroit and Fisher’s Grand Blanc (Mich.) tank arsenals and entered combat just in time for the Battle of the Bulge that December. Although not a definitive solution to enemy firepower, the improved “Easy Eight” Shermans, in coordination with their more numerous forebears, ample logistics and air support, overwhelmed German armor until the first M26 Pershing battle tanks arrived in Europe in January 1945. Moreover, “Easy Eight” Shermans proved efficient during the Korean War and in service for a dozen foreign armies. Israeli-modified versions made their last contribution to victory amid the Six-Day War in June 1967. MH

6addb38e1d49b6c761e5eddacf3cd1ca

https://www.britannica.com/science/cuprous-oxide

Cuprous oxide

Cuprous oxide …accordance with its two valences: cuprous oxide, Cu2O, and cupric oxide, CuO. Cuprous oxide, a red crystalline material, can be produced by electrolytic or furnace methods. It is reduced readily by hydrogen, carbon monoxide, charcoal, or iron to metallic copper. It imparts a red colour to glass and is used… …industrial compounds of copper(I) are cuprous oxide (Cu2O), cuprous chloride (Cu2Cl2), and cuprous sulfide (Cu2S). Cuprous oxide is a red or reddish brown crystal or powder that occurs in nature as the mineral cuprite. It is produced on a large scale by reduction of mixed copper oxide ores with copper…

7b0f9121cf64cf3d560ed498e1859232

https://www.britannica.com/science/curie

Curie

Curie Curie, in physics, unit of activity of a quantity of a radioactive substance, named in honour of the French physicist Pierre Curie. (Even though the committee that named the unit in 1910 said it honoured Pierre Curie, some committee members later said the unit was in honour of both Pierre and Marie Curie [who also sat on the committee] or Marie Curie herself.) One curie (1 Ci) is equal to 3.7 × 1010 radioactive decays per second, which is roughly the amount of decays that occur in 1 gram of radium per second and is 3.7 × 1010 becquerels (Bq). In 1975 the becquerel replaced the curie as the official radiation unit in the International System of Units (SI).

38bac73ab5ca897bd2c1621a62c76d66

https://www.britannica.com/science/Curie-Weiss-law

Curie–Weiss law

Curie–Weiss law This equation is called the Curie–Weiss law (after Curie and Pierre-Ernest Weiss, another French physicist). From the form of this last equation, it is clear that at the temperature T = θ, the value of the susceptibility becomes infinite. Below this temperature, the material exhibits spontaneous magnetization—i.e., it becomes ferromagnetic.… This result, the Curie–Weiss law, is valid at temperatures greater than the Curie temperature Tc (see below); at such temperatures the substance is still paramagnetic because the magnetization is zero when the field is zero. The internal field, however, makes the susceptibility larger than that given by the…

06fa622aab94118b60ea604a800bdde2

https://www.britannica.com/science/Curies-law

Curie’s law

Curie’s law …approximate relationship is known as Curie’s law and the constant C as the Curie constant. A more accurate equation is obtained in many cases by modifying the above equation to χ = C/(T − θ), where θ is a constant. This equation is called the Curie–Weiss law (after Curie and… …proportion to the absolute temperature—Curie’s law. He then established an analogy between paramagnetic bodies and perfect gases and, as a result of this, between ferromagnetic bodies and condensed fluids.

8c3b2a1b20019be1db88ab5a5aa3a0fc

https://www.britannica.com/science/curl

Curl

Curl Curl, In mathematics, a differential operator that can be applied to a vector-valued function (or vector field) in order to measure its degree of local spinning. It consists of a combination of the function’s first partial derivatives. One of the more common forms for expressing it is: in which v is the vector field (v1, v2, v3), and v1, v2, v3 are functions of the variables x, y, and z, and i, j, and k are unit vectors in the positive x, y, and z directions, respectively. In fluid mechanics, the curl of the fluid velocity field (i.e., vector velocity field of the fluid itself) is called the vorticity or the rotation because it measures the field’s degree of rotation around a given point.

b14464b61538417334526e10cf141fe5

https://www.britannica.com/science/cusp-tooth

Cusp

Cusp …has three raised points, or cusps (i.e., is tricuspid), but modifications involving splitting of cusps or reductions to one cusp are numerous. The modification of the radular tooth reflects dietary differences between species. In particular, with each successive appearance of a carnivorous type during evolution, the teeth have been reduced… …to increase the number of cusps and reduce the number of teeth. Both molars and premolars show this tendency. No living primate has four premolars; primitive primates, tarsiers, and New World monkeys have retained three on each side of each jaw, but in the apes and Old World monkeys, there…