Military History Quarterly Fall 2020

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY

‘ERNIE WAS ONE OF US’

Journalist Ernie Pyle brought World War II home to millions of Americans—and was a hero to the ordinary soldiers he wrote about.

The Hollywood Hussar Showdown at Trevilians

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An Army Wiped Out Bicycles at War Testing the A-Bomb Soviet Female Ace Battle in Paradise Invasion Stripes

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THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

s PHluWHEN

HEMINGWAY WENT FROM WRITER TO FIGHTER H HOW U.S. CRYPTOLOGISTS BROKE JAPAN’S PURPLE CODE

DOUBLE TROUBLE

Japanese airman Nobuo Fujita

I BOMBED AMERICA

fighting in sioux 55 wars decades H LITTLE BIGHORN lieutenant’s testimony H THE PISTOL-PACKING RABBI H TRAIN DISASTER IN COLORADO

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ARMY AND GERMANY’S CO MPETED WAFFEN-SSR’S FAVOR FOR HITLE

THE ONLY PILOT TO STRIKE THE MAINLAND FACED AN UNLIKELY RECKONING

JUNE 2020

JULY 2020

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aleutian B-24s: memorials to a forgotten war zone

CIA’s Relentless Poisoner in Chief Doughboy Jazzman James Europe Union Goons Bomb L.A. Times Taking Thomas Jefferson to Court

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IRON BRIGADE AT GETTYSBURG: LETTER FROM THE FRONT H

Saving Jamestown How John Smith turned chaos into a colony

General McClellan with his staff officers, spring 1862.

PLUS

OVERLOOKED ANTIETAM SIGHTS ERY: GLORY & MIS JOSHUA IN CHAMBERLA AND HENRY WISE

NEW RESEARCH

phantom

MCCLELLAN’S

vs mig

SUPPLY CRISIS

how u.s. navy f-4 crews scored the first american victories over vietnam

NO SHOES, NO BLANKETS, NO COATS

flight of the yellow bird: surprised by the first transatlantic stowaway JULY 2020

DID HIGH COMMAND NEGLIGENCE BRING DOWN THE GENERAL

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No Artillery, No Problem U.S. Grunts Fought Like Hell

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HOMEFRONT Bobby Orr’s Bruins win the Cup in overtime

50th ANNIVERSARY

Cambodian Incursion Military triumph, political fiasco

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY

Hitler’s Obsession With the Occult Grenades: The Good, the Bad...

Plus!

Pickett’s Notorious Hangings Soldier Voten Gives Lincol the Edge in 1864

Bloody Maryland Morning

KILLER INSTINCT

Antietam

Kent State, May 4, 1970 The truth behind the tragedy

Gen. George Greene’s Gritty Stand at the Dunker Church

Two SEAL Medals of Honor One goes to a SEAL who saved the life of the other

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This man taught thousands of U.S. Army Rangers how to fight dirty in World War II.

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OPENING ROUND

CENTURION AUCTIONS

One day in the 1930s, as Wilbur C. Bedall wandered through the peach orchard on the farm that his father managed in Burkeville, Virginia, he happened on some old lead bullets from the Civil War. From then on he was hooked. Many afternoons Bedall would fill his pockets with so many lead bullets he’d found in the orchard that he’d have to hold up his pants with his hands as he headed home.

Bedall soon expanded his territory by seeking permission to search private property, and for more than 60 years he kept hunting relics, continually honing his skills, reading histories, studying maps of Civil War battles, and carefully documenting every find. In the 1980s a friend showed Bedall how to use a metal detector, and his first discovery with it—a Hotchkiss 3.67-inch shell that had been fired from a Union cannon—lit him up, he later recalled, “like 110 volts of electricity lights up an incandescent light bulb.” Now 91, Bedall doesn’t collect anymore: In 2016, he put up for auction most of his collection of Civil War ordnance and relics, perhaps the largest and most wide-ranging private collection of its kind.

One of Bedall’s choicest finds was this Confederate army Read shell from the Battle of Trevilian Station, June 11 and 12, 1864. (See “Battle of the Mounts,” page 46.)

The 3-inch shell measured about 7 1/2 inches long and employed a hard-powder fuse.

Its inventor, John Brahan Read, was a surgeon in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who had begun experimenting with projectiles and their sabots in the 1850s. In 1856 Read obtained a patent for his “Improved Mode of Constructing Projectiles for Cannons,” and with the onset of the Civil War, Read’s shell was modified, under his supervision, by the Confederate States War Department. As it turned out, however, Confederate forces used the Read shell chiefly with 3-inch ordnance rifles captured from the Union army, as its wrought-iron weapons were much less likely to burst when fired than the Confederacy’s cast iron or brass rifled cannons.

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NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

Volume 33, Number 1 Autumn 2020

In wartime, the ability to see the enemy can spell the difference between victory and defeat. In 1917, a severe shortage of optical glass forced the U.S. Navy to put out a call for binoculars, telescopes, and other such instruments.

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FEATURES 36 ‘He Was One of Us’

by Roy Morris Jr. Ernie Pyle made it his mission to cover World War II from a soldier’s-eye view. America’s fighting men and women— and millions of folks back home—devoured every word.

46 Battle of the Mounts

by Rick Britton In 1864 two of the Civil War’s fiercest cavalry commanders faced off at Trevilian Station, Virginia, which safeguarded a critical Southern rail line.

54 The SelfMade Hero

by Ron Soodalter Arthur Guy Empey parlayed his brief service during World War I into a best-selling book and a career in Hollywood.

Then he lost everything.

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62 Now See Here

PORTFOLIO Throughout modern military history, soldiers and sailors have relied on a variety of devices to aid the naked eye.

46 THIS PAGE: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

30

00 84

70 Baseball’s Odd Man Out

by Liesl Bradner Morris “Moe” Berg was a brainy academic who spoke a dozen languages and read 10 newspapers a day. As it turned out, he was also a spy.

DEPARTMENTS 6 Flashback 12 Comments 15 At the Front 16 Experience

A Scot at Cerro Gordo

20 Behind the Lines

Winfield Scott’s grand plan

24 War List

Warriors turned peaceniks

28 Battle Schemes

The lost city of Tenochtitlán

30 Laws of War

The scapegoating of John Byng

33 Weapons Check Medieval hand grenade

34 Letter From MHQ 77 Culture of War 78 Classic Dispatches The monster torpedo

83 Big Shots Archibald Butt

84 War Stories

When Don Ho flew

88 Artists

Kim Seong-hwan

91 Poetry

Miklós Radnóti’s last postcard

92 Reviews 95 MHQ Crossword 96 Drawn & Quartered On the Cover

Surrounded by enlisted men, war correspondent Ernie Pyle listens to a news report over the loudspeaker of a U.S. Navy transport ship en route to Okinawa for the planned U.S. invasion on April 1, 1945.

A few weeks later Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper on the island of Ie Shima.

COVER: BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES)

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FLASHBACK RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, MAY 1890

Hoisted in pieces and assembled atop a 40-foot pedestal, a 13-ton bronze statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee riding his horse is readied for its unveiling on May 29.

TODAY: Virginia governor Ralph Northam announces plans to have the 21-foot statue removed from its pedestal and put in storage until a new home for it can be found.

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MHQ Autumn 2020 ROBERT A. LANCASTER COLLECTION, THE VALENTINE

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FLASHBACK BATTLE OF THE TAGUS, SPAIN, 220 BCE

Carthaginian general Hannibal leads his 25,000 -man army to a resounding victory over a force of 100,000 Iberians from the Carpetani, Vettone, and Olcade tribes.

TODAY: Archaeologists announce that they have found the long-elusive site of Hannibal’s first major victory on the banks of the Tagus River between Driebes and Illana.

8

MHQ Autumn 2020

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MHQ Autumn 2020 VENDUEHUIS DER NOTARISSEN, DEN HAAG

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FLASHBACK

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PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII, DECEMBER 7, 1941

The USS Nevada, the only battleship to get underway during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, somehow survives after it is bombed and torpedoed at Hospital Point.

TODAY: Researchers locate the remains of the Nevada on the ocean floor 75 miles southwest of Pearl Harbor, where it was deliberately sunk in a 1948 naval gunfire exercise.

MHQ Autumn 2020 NATIONAL ARCHIVES

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COMMENTS

OFFENSE AND DEFENSE flict might have turned out differently if Colonel Daniel Morgan had also been fighting an attack from the west.

There are those who consider the Battle of Oriskany the turning point of the American Revolution. At least I do.

Thank you to Willard Sterne Randall for an excellent accounting of this episode in history.

Thomas P. Dolan Milford, Pennsylvania

Coca in the Cola In “Quench Warfare” [MHQ, Spring 2020], Peter Andreas writes that cocaine was removed from Coca-Cola in 1903 but then states that during World War II, “the company faced constant threats of shortages of both vanilla extract...and the coca leaf and cola nut extract referred to as Merchandise No. 5.” Is this an error, or was coca extract again added to Coca-Cola during the war?

Thomas Beach Gaylord, Michigan

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FROM THE EDITOR No, Peter Andreas had it right. Coca-Cola removed cocaine from its product in 1903—11 years before the narcotic became illegal in the United States—and added more sugar and caffeine. In 1929, the New Jersey–based Maywood Chemical Company perfected a process for removing all psychoactive elements from coca leaf extract and named its new product Merchandise No. 5, which was then added back into Coca-Cola.

Turning Point “Burgoyne’s Big Fail” [MHQ, Spring 2020] must surely be attributed in part to General Sir William Howe’s unexplained failure to advance his army north on the Hudson River. In addition, the defeat of Colonel Barry St. Leger at Oriskany in August 1777 robbed Major General John Burgoyne of at least 1,800 men who might have appeared on Major General Horatio Gates’s flank in September at Freeman’s Farm.

That closely contested con-

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METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

American soldiers gulp down some of the first bottles of Coca-Cola to reach Italy in 1944.

I am writing in response to Rick Britton’s article, “The Antihero of Gettysburg” in the Winter 2020 issue of MHQ, James Kocur’s letter about the article in the Summer 2020 issue, and Rick Britton’s response.

Sickles’s 1859 murder trial was the first time in American jurisprudence that the “temporary insanity” defense was used. The first American case to turn on the insanity defense was the murder trial of Abraham Prescott in 1834. (Prescott lost.) In 1835 Richard Lawrence was ruled insane after he tried to shoot President Andrew Jackson outside the U.S. Capitol. (Lawrence spent the rest of his life in hospitals and mental institutions.) Then, in 1844, Abner Rogers’s lawyers pleaded “insanity” for him after he murdered the warden of the Massachusetts prison in

BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES)

Sanity Clause

which he was an inmate. The Rogers case did make new case law.

And so by 1859 lawyers were well acquainted with the insanity defense. Sickles’s injection of the word “temporary” into his plea did not determine the case.

The jurors who acquitted him focused on the “unwritten law”—that is, the husband’s right to defend his honor and the sanctity of his home. Unfortunately, most Sickles biographers have focused on the “temporary insanity” angle of the case, probably because it had the bewitching word “first” attached to it.

Richard Selcer Fort Worth, Texas

ASK MHQ

Coulda Been

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES)

Was James McNeill Whistler, the famous artist, a West Point graduate?

Richard Sullivan Bloomington, Indiana One might say that in Whistler’s case, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, was just part of the proverbial process of “finding oneself.” Born in 1834 in Lowell, Massachusetts, Whistler was the son of a railroad man whose business travels took him to Britain and Russia, where at age 11 the boy was enrolled in the

Assigned in 1854 to make an engraving of California’s Anacapa Island, James McNeill Whistler took the liberty of adding some seagulls above Arch Rock. They were later removed.

Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. Back in the States, Whistler briefly attended Christ Church Hall School in Pomfret, Connecticut, until he decided (much to his mother’s disappointment) that he was not cut out for the ministry.

Though he was nearsighted and sickly, he managed to cull enough sponsorship to enter West Point in July 1851. There he became known as “Curly” for his nonregulation hair and was notorious for his sarcasm and insubordination. He barely managed satisfactory grades and accumulated a string of demerits. In a school founded on military engineering, Whistler acquired invaluable knowledge

in drawing and mapmaking from Robert W. Weir, a gifted and prolific artist who taught there, but his performance in a chemistry examination allegedly drove the academy’s superintendent, Colonel Robert E. Lee, to dismiss him after three years. As Whistler himself put it, “If silicon were a gas, I would have been a general one day.”

Despite that setback, Whistler landed a $1.50-a-day job as a draftsman and engraver with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, but he found the work boring and was often late or absent. It didn’t help that Whistler sometimes drew sea serpents, mermaids, and whales in the margins of his maps. After a few months Whistler de-

cided to have a go at being an artist, and in 1855 he left for Paris. He never returned to the United States, but by the time of his death in London in 1903 he had established himself as one of the great painters of the Gilded Age, most famous for his 1871 Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, more commonly known as Whistler’s Mother.

Jon Guttman is MHQ’s research director.

Have thoughts about a story in MHQ? Something about military history you’ve always wanted to know?

Send your comments and questions to MHQeditor@historynet.com.

MHQ Autumn 2020

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m

MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER DAVID STEINHAFEL PUBLISHER ALEX NEILL EDITOR IN CHIEF

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY AUTUMN 2020 VOL. 33, NO. 1

EDITOR BILL HOGAN

Killer Instinct Francois d’Eliscu taught thousands of U.S. Army Rangers how to fight down and dirty in World War II.

By Patrick J. Kiger

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AT THE FRONT EXPERIENCE 16

Led by their piper, the 7th Seaforth Highlanders (46th Highland Brigade, 15th Scottish Division) slog through a muddy wheat field in Normandy, France, on June 26, 1944, during the opening hours of Operation Epsom—an ambitious British offensive to outflank and seize the German-occupied city of Caen. So many pipers were killed leading troops “over the top” of trenches and into battle during World War I that the British War Office banned them from the front line in World War II.

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS (GETTY IMAGES)

BEHIND THE LINES 20 WAR LIST 24 BATTLE SCHEMES 28 LAWS OF WAR 30 WEAPONS CHECK 33

FOLLOW THE LEADER

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EXPERIENCE

A SCOT AT CERRO GORDO

George Ballentine, a Scottish weaver, sought a better life in the United States. He ended up fighting in the Mexican-American War.

“In a few minutes we were at the bottom of the hill occupied by the enemy.”

It was about 2 o’clock when we heard a few musket shots in front, followed by the sharp crack of our rifles, who had got within range of the advanced line of piquets. We immediately got the word to close up, and move in quick time to the front, and in a few minutes we were at the bottom of the hill occupied by the enemy. “First Artillery and Rifles form into line,

16

and charge up the hill,” was the word of command now given by [Brigadier] General [David E.] Twiggs. “I beg pardon, General, how far shall we charge them?” I heard one of our captains ask, as we hastily scrambled up. “Charge them to h—ll,” was the reply of the rough old veteran, who remained with the rest of the division at the bottom of the hill.

The balls came whistling in no very pleasant manner as we made our way up the steep hill, helping ourselves occasionally by the branches of the bushes; but the Mexicans are bad shots, and besides they were afraid to expose themselves by coming forward to take deliberate aim; so that all their balls went whistling over our heads, doing us no damage whatever. In the meantime on we went, shouting and hurrahing as if we were going to some delightful entertainment, every one in a state of the highest excitement, and nearly out of breath with hurrahing and running up the steep hill.

Before we reached the top of the hill, which we did with very trifling loss, the Mexicans quickly retreated down the opposite side of it, and now we experienced the bad effects of General Twiggs’s expression, “Charge them to h—ll.”

After obtaining possession of the hill, our object, I suspect, should have been to retain it in possession with the least possible amount of loss—General Scott having resolved to plant two 24-pounders on it during the night, and to open a fire early next morning on the battery at Cerro Gordo, and upon that side of the hill which he intended we should carry by assault. The summit of the hill is nearly half a mile distant from that of Cerro Gordo, and they are separated by a deep and rugged ravine. Our men were extended about half-a-mile along the face of the hill, firing upon the retreating Mexicans, with whom, in the eagerness of pursuit, we had become almost mixed up as we pursued them down the ravine. But when the enemy had got halfway up the opposite hill of Cerro Gordo, we saw the error we had committed in pursuing them, being now caught in a complete fix.

To attempt to retreat up the hill in the face of the continuous fire of some thousands of Mexican infantry, and that of their batteries, who now opened a crossfire (those to the left sweeping the side of the hill with round shot, and that of Cerro Gordo opposite pouring in volleys of grape and canister), would have been instant and total destruction.

We were forced to remain therefore under the cover of

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARIES (2)

By the time George Ballentine, a handloom weaver and British Army veteran in Paisley, Scotland, decided to emigrate to the United States in the summer of 1845, his country had fallen on hard times. The widespread adoption of power looms throughout Great Britain had put his profession on the path to extinction, and, like many of his countrymen, Ballentine could earn only starvation wages.

He hoped to find work as a weaver when he arrived in New York, but almost immediately he found his prospects there to be nearly as dismal. One day, on hearing that he could earn more than $100 a year as an American soldier (in addition to having his basic needs met), Ballentine walked into a U.S. Army recruiting office in lower Manhattan and offered to enlist for a five-year tour of duty.

A recruiting sergeant informed Ballentine that he had been ordered not to accept former British servicemen on the grounds that deserters generally turned out to be bad soldiers. But Ballentine had papers proving that he had purchased his discharge some five years earlier, and so on August 12, 1845, he joined the U.S. Army at age 33.

Sent to Fort Pickens, on Florida’s Santa Rosa Island, for training, Ballentine found himself mostly in the company of Irish, Scottish, and German immigrants.

Assigned to Battery I, 1st U.S. Artillery, he became part of the 12,000-man force led by Major General Winfield Scott that landed at Veracruz during the Mexican-American War and fought its way to the Mexican capital. The following account of the Battle of Cerro Gordo, on April 18, 1847, is drawn from Autobiography of an English Soldier in the United States Army, Ballentine’s 1853 memoir.

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“If it does not rise to the dignity of history,” the U.S. publisher of Ballentine’s memoir noted, “it at least partakes of the faithfulness of record and clearness of detail which gives history its record.”

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARIES (2)

rocks and trees, firing an occasional shot at the enemy only, who kept up an incessant, though fortunately for us a very ill-directed fire until near sunset. Indeed the loud and incessant roll of musketry all that afternoon, exceeded anything of the kind I ever heard.

At length, towards sunset, the enemy seemed preparing for a grand charge; there was a cessation of firing nearly; we could observe their officers forming their men into the ranks, and with colours displayed, and a band of music playing in front, they at last advanced towards our position, which at that moment seemed sufficiently perilous.

We had a small howitzer, of the kind called mountain howitzers, from their peculiar convenience in mountain warfare, for which they were expressly made; being light, and easily dismounted and carried up a hill. This was prepared for their reception, being well loaded with grape, and we waited with some anxiety to see its effects. On they came till near the bottom of the ravine, and within two or three hundred yards of us, when the howitzer sent its murderous contents among them. I never saw such sudden

havoc and confusion caused by a single shot. It swept right into the head of the advancing column, killing and wounding a great number of those in advance, among others several of the band, who ceased playing the moment the shot struck the column, which halted almost instantly.

The Mexicans were thoroughly taken by surprise by this shot, and had quickly resolved not to risk another, for taking up their wounded they immediately began to retire to their former position. Except a straggling shot now and then, the firing on both sides soon ceased; it was getting dusk, and our men began to make their way to the main body by circling round the hill. Parties were now sent out to search for and carry in the wounded; but owing to the nature of the ground, and the darkness of the night, with a share of culpable neglect on the part of those whose duty it was to see the search more carefully prosecuted, I am afraid a number of the wounded perished, who might have recovered if they had been promptly attended to.

Some men have blamed General Twiggs for leaving the remainder of the division inactive, while the small body sent to drive in the piquets were in such a dangerous pre-

MHQ Autumn 2020

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A SCOT AT CERRO GORDO

It was now dark, with a slight rain, and amidst the groans of the suffering wounded, who were having their wounds dressed, and amputations performed until late at night, the most smooth and soft piece of turf having been selected for their accommodation, tired and weary, we lay down to seek repose, and recruit our strength for the struggle of next morning. I had the bad fortune to be on a piece of ground which was full of small stones, but as we were ordered to keep our places as if in the ranks, in case of a night attack, I could not better it by shifting my ground. Still I managed to pick up a considerable number of them, and at last I found that it was somewhat more endurable. There was not much conversation amongst us this night, but taking a few mouthfuls of biscuit, a drink of water, and a smoke, we made ourselves as comfortable as, under the circumstances, was possible.

There was no disguising the fact that we had an ugly job before us next morning; but we had strong ground for hope in the positive cowardice of the Mexicans, our own comparative courage, and the superlative skill of General Scott. Besides, we had come through the baptism of fire that day, and were still unhurt, and perhaps we should be equally fortunate the next.

During the night, while we slept, the guns had with incredible exertions been got to the summit of the hill, and placed in position for opening upon Cerro Gordo next morning. A temporary breastwork of stones and earth had also been thrown up. When day broke, we immediately fell into the ranks, and began to ascend the hill. As we marched

“There was no disguising the fact that we had an ugly job before us next morning.”

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by a circuitous path, some of us turned occasionally to admire the appearance of the sky, which was tinted with a surpassing brilliance by the rising sun, while spread out beneath us, as far as the eye could reach, was some of the most picturesque and romantic scenery imaginable. But we were soon recalled to another sort of contemplation. A shot from the enemy’s batteries, who had now caught a glimpse of us, followed by another and another in quick succession, soon dispelled any disposition to sentimentalize. And having been cautioned to close up and quicken our steps, in a few minutes we gained the position we were to occupy, until the signal should be given for the charge.

There was a slight hollow in the top of the hill near where our 24-pounders were placed, and opposite Cerro Gordo; this was the position we ought to have maintained on the previous afternoon in place of following the Mexicans so rashly. In this hollow the rifles, a regiment of infantry, and our regiment, were ordered to lie down on the grass, in which position we were completely sheltered from the fire of the enemy’s batteries. While lying thus, we could watch the effects of the grape shot passing a few feet above us, with its peculiar harsh and bitter whistle, to the opposite bank, where the saplings and branches crashed, under the withering influence of these unseen messengers, as if by magic. But soon our 24-pounders opened on the Mexicans with most terrible effect, as they were in a dense mass on the top of the opposite hill, where some thousands of infantry were crowded, to repel our anticipated assault. We now received orders to prepare for a charge. While the rifles were forming in the bottom of the hollow, one end of their line had incautiously gone a little way up on the opposite bank, or side of the hill. A shower of grape, that killed and wounded at least a dozen of their number, was the result of this exposure, and a volley of oaths from Colonel [William S.] Harney, at the stupidity of the officer who had formed them in that position, seemed to grate as harshly on one’s ears as the missiles showering over us.

While this was going on, a division of volunteers under [Brigadier] General [Gideon Johnson] Pillow, had assaulted the batteries on our left, but were repulsed with considerable loss, [Brigadier] General [James] Shields being amongst the severely wounded. The moment had now arrived when we were to face the horizontal shower which for the last hour and a half had been flying almost harmless over us.

But the 24-pounders had done wonders, and Cerro Gordo was getting rather thinned of infantry by the panic created by their deadly discharges. The activity of the Mexican artillery was also rather slackened, they were evidently getting paralysed, and discouraged, at seeing the effects of our shots. Now was the time for the charge, and pausing for a few breathless moments till the next shower of grape hurtled over us, the bugle sounded the charge, and with a loud

DEA/G. DAGLI ORTI (GETTY IMAGES)

dicament; but there I think he acted with good judgment.

Had he engaged the whole division, he might have extricated the first party, but assuredly with a far greater sacrifice of life. Nothing but the paucity of our numbers, paradoxical as it may seem, saved us from a general slaughter on the occasion, enabling us to obtain the cover, of which a large body could not have equally availed themselves. The great fault which I, in common with all my comrades with whom I have conversed on the topic, think he committed, was that he did not give more explicit instructions to the officers in command of companies sent out on that occasion. Perhaps he did not clearly comprehend the instructions he had received from General Scott himself. At all events that a blunder had been made was evident, that it had cost us nearly two hundred men equally so, but no one thought of General Scott in connection with it. General Twiggs has all the credit of the first day of the battle of Cerro Gordo.

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DEA/G. DAGLI ORTI (GETTY IMAGES)

This lithograph of U.S. forces at the Battle of Cerro Gordo, based on an oil painting by Carl Nebel, a German artist who lived in Mexico, was published in an 1851 book on the Mexican-American War.

hurrah we leaped and tumbled down the ravine, opposite the enemy’s battery of Cerro Gordo.

A brisk fire of infantry opened upon us as we descended, and a few of our number dropped by the way; but we were in too great a hurry to stay and assist, or sympathize with wounded men just at that time. Bill Crawford, a Scotchman, and an old British soldier, with whom I had become acquainted at Vera Cruz, was going down the hill with me; we were within a few yards of each other, when recognising me he called out, “Ha! Geordie man, hoo are ye this morning, this is gey hot wark, how d’ye like this! Faith, Geordie; I doubt they’ve hit me,” he continued, as he sat down behind a rock, a musket ball having entered the calf of his leg. I asked him if he was badly hurt. “I’ve gotten a scart that’ll keep me frae gaun on; but gudesake, man, dinna mind me, I’ve shelter here; an I ken ye’ll no like to be the last o’ gaun up the hill.” I had just jumped down four or five feet, when a rattle of grape that splintered a ledge of rock where I had stood while talking to Bill, showed me the danger of delay. “Ah, Geordie, a miss is as gude as a mile; gude bye, tak tent o’ yoursel’; tell our folk where I’m sitting, when it’s ower,” cried the hearty old fellow, who had come through the Peninsula and Waterloo, unhurt, to be wounded in this shabby affair. It was not long before I reached the bottom of the hill.

On arriving there, both men and officers paused, but only for a few seconds, to recover breath. Here, feeling my

havresac, containing biscuit and other articles, an incumbrance, I took it off and threw it down at the foot of a large rock, intending to call again for it if I could find an opportunity after the action. We then began to climb the hill, which was very steep, but being rocky, and covered with brushwood for about two-thirds of the way, the enemy’s musket balls passed quite harmlessly over us until near the top. When we arrived at the summit, a hundred or two of the Mexican infantry posted behind a breastwork of large stones, checked our advance for three or four minutes, until seeing us reinforced by a number of infantry coming up the hill cheering, they threw their muskets down, and scampered in the utmost confusion down the opposite side of the hill. Several of the enemy’s guns were now manned, and fired on the retreating enemy, a disordered mass, running with panic speed down the hill, and along the road to Jalapa. The battle was now won; the other two forts, that a short time before had repulsed the volunteers, seeing the fate of Cerro Gordo, immediately pulled down their flag and hoisted a white one. They made an unconditional surrender, and the garrisons were marched out of the batteries to the road, without arms, to the amount of about 8000; they were employed to dig pits for the interment of the dead, and were afterwards permitted to go to their homes, on promising not to take up arms against the United States during the existing war. MHQ

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BEHIND THE LINES

THE EDUCATION OF WINFIELD SCOTT

His experiences in the War of 1812 and subsequent six-week captivity in Canada opened his eyes to the need for a professional regular army.

By Ethan S. Rafuse

Scott could barely contain his abject contempt for the New York militiamen.

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Scott could barely contain his abject contempt for the New Yorkers, characterizing them as “vermin who no sooner found themselves in sight of the enemy than they discovered that the militia of the United States could not be constitutionally marched into a foreign country.” Scott’s experiences in the Battle of Queenston Heights, in fact, left him with a lifelong disdain for amateur citizen-soldiers and a concomitant attachment to the professional soldiers in the regular army—the “rascally regulars,” as he affectionately called them. That mindset would prove to have a far-reaching effect on the future of American arms.

For the moment, though, Scott faced a more immediate problem. British infantry and artillery, supported by some 300 Mohawk Indians, had completely routed the American militia, which surrendered en masse at the edge of the river. Scott, his senior officers, and their remaining regular troops waited in vain for boats to cross the water to evacuate them. Finally, with Mohawk warriors furiously shooting at them to avenge the deaths of two of their war chiefs, Scott surrendered to British major general Roger Hale Sheaffe. On surrendering, Scott was astonished to see another 500 American militiamen emerge from hiding on the heights above and surrender also.

Sheaffe immediately paroled the American militia units across the river, perhaps assuming that no further trouble could be expected from them. Scott and other members of the regular army were transported to Quebec to witness the burial of British major general Sir Isaac Brock, who had been killed by a musket ball at Queenston Heights. Scott and his comrades were sent to Kingston and down the Saint Lawrence River to Montreal, where British governor Sir George Prevost ordered them to march in front of his garrison troops, which were drawn up in line of battle. Prevost, Scott would later write, subjected the Americans to other “slights and neglects which excited contempt and loathing.” Scott and his men were then taken to Quebec and put under the charge of the far more courteous and respectful major general George Glasgow.

Scott’s subsequent six-week captivity in Canada gave him the opportunity not only to reflect on the shortcom-

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

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t was the sort of message no soldier ever wants to receive, particularly not an untried 26-year-old U.S. Army officer leading his men as they confronted a disciplined and heavily reinforced British opponent. On the afternoon of October 13, 1812, Lieutenant Colonel Winfield Scott opened the note from his commanding officer, Major General Stephen Van Rensselaer. “I have passed through my camp,” Van Rensselaer advised him. “Not a regiment, not a company is willing to join you. Save yourself by a retreat, if you can.”

Just a few hours earlier Scott had crossed the 250-yardwide Niagara River to take charge of a ragtag force of regulars and militia on the heights overlooking the Canadian hamlet of Queenston, Ontario. Shortly after he arrived, Scott realized that the British force spread out before him was being heavily reinforced. From a strategic standpoint, Scott’s men had a good position on the heights, but with no re­inforcements of his own, the prospects for holding it were rapidly evaporating. Concluding that nothing more could be accomplished on Canadian soil that day, Scott led his men down the steep bank to the river but found no boats waiting to take them back across to American soil.

The problem wasn’t that Van Rensselaer had no men to send to Scott. It was that some of the militia units still on the New York side of the Niagara River had refused to follow their comrades into Canada, a refusal that Scott laid squarely on “the machinations in the ranks of demagogues.” The malcontents had argued that since they belonged to the New York militia, they were free to disregard orders to operate outside the state, effectively denying their commander’s authority over them. After feebly attempting to convince them otherwise, Van Rensselaer decided that he had no choice but to acquiesce. They stayed where they were, and Scott and his men were marooned on the other side of the river.

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NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

Scott’s ultimate triumph came in his brilliantly executed capture of Veracruz (shown here, with Scott in foreground) and 300-mile overland march and capture of Mexico City in the Mexican-American War.

ings of his own country’s army but also to observe how the men who had defeated him handled their business. He could not help but be impressed. With the exception of Prevost’s effort to embarrass the Americans at Montreal, Scott deemed the conduct of Glasgow and other British regular officers to have been exemplary. He saw at close hand the culture of discipline, service, and duty that characterized the British regular army and the proficiency and dependability with which British regulars of all ranks performed their duties.

Once exchanged, Scott returned home determined to change how the United States trained and deployed its land forces. Promoted to full colonel in the 2nd U.S. Artillery, in May 1813 Scott returned to the frontier and led a successful attack, in cooperation with American naval forces, that resulted in the capture of Fort George on the Niagara River. In March of the following year he was promoted to brigadier general and put in charge of organizing and training the American forces at Buffalo, New York. Applying the tactical, organizational, and administrative lessons he had learned from his large collection of history books as well as from his British captors, he pledged to make his force the best in the

American army. He spent long hours drilling his officers and men at a training camp he established at Flint Hill.

For two months the men were drilled 10 hours a day, seven days a week. Scott had a fanatical eye for detail; drills were conducted by squads, companies, regiments, and brigades—the last put through their paces by Scott himself.

No detail, however humble, was overlooked: Scott even specified how bread should be baked, where latrines should be located, and how frequently the men should bathe. In a break with tradition, he stressed discipline through professional pride rather than fear of physical punishment. Officers who struck enlisted men were suspended from duty.

The lack of standard drill and tactical manuals complicated Scott’s efforts, and he vowed to oversee the writing of a new manual after the war was over. In the meantime, since Scott could read and write French, he used a French training manual to drill the men.

That summer, Scott and his command crossed the Niagara River and took part in the Battles of Chippawa and Lundy’s Lane, where he was seriously wounded in the shoulder. Phineas Riall, a British officer at the former engagement, was so impressed with the conduct of Scott’s

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THE EDUCATION OF WINFIELD SCOTT ignorant, sunk into either sloth…or habits of intemperate drinking,” and the new officers seemed “utterly unfit for any military purpose whatever.” Scott was so disgusted that Scott’s success validated his emphasis on discipline and he strongly considered resigning. While serving in Louisileadership, providing a model for other regular army units ana he fought a duel with a fellow officer—each fired at the and leaving little doubt as to their superiority over the mi- other, a bullet grazed Scott’s scalp—and Scott was litia on the battlefield. Indeed, there was a conspicuous court-martialed and suspended for a year over minor ficontrast between the success of Scott’s forces along the Ni- nancial irregularities and his intemperate remarks conagara frontier and the disastrous performance of militia cerning his commanding general, James Wilkinson. But forces charged with defending Washington, D.C., later that Scott returned to active duty in 1810 and served through year. In the immediate after- the inconclusive end of the War of 1812.

The final battle of the war, at New Orleans, presented a math of that debacle, Scott tirelessly sought support for strong challenge to Scott’s concept of a professional standreforms that would profes- ing army. There, Major General Andrew Jackson, an old sionalize the regular army and Indian fighter and self-taught soldier, led a motley force of ensure its unquestioned pre- frontier militiamen, Gulf Coast pirates, and freed Blacks to a stunning victory over elite British regulars. Scott immedieminence over the militia.

In doing so, Scott was buck- ately realized the challenge. “Jackson and the Western miliing a long tradition of Ameri- tia,” he warned, “seem likely to throw all other generals and can support for part-time the regular troops into the background.” Another frontier-­ militias made up of citizen-­ schooled general, Edmund Pendleton Gaines, entered the soldiers. During the Revolu- fray, insisting that “the brave people of the West need no tionary War, George Washington had demonstrated the other preparation than what their own strong arms, good importance of having a well-maintained and technically rifles, and sound hearts will at the moment furnish.”

Scott believed that while citizen-soldiers could provide proficient regular army play the lead role in American defense. But many Americans disagreed with Washington. manpower when the nation went to war, the regular army They believed that every son of the republic had the qualities needed well-led officers who had professional expertise and necessary to be an effective soldier. They were bitter about adhered to formal standards of conduct in the execution of the conduct of the British red-coated regulars and angry their duties. To create such leaders, Scott and like-minded about centralized authority and increased taxes. In 1784, re- other officers and politicians decided the U.S. Military sponding to the popular will, congressional lawmakers re- Academy at West Point needed some improvements. In duced the standing army to a force capable of little more 1817 they installed as its superintendent Sylvanus Thayer, who had graduated from Dartmouth College a decade earthan guarding military stores.

A few years later, however, Shays’s Rebellion—an armed lier as the valedictorian of his class and proceeded to graduprising in Massachusetts against local taxing and judicial uate from West Point after a single year. In the decades that authorities—triggered new calls for a stronger central gov- followed, Scott would be a frequent visitor to West Point, ernment. Washington and his allies took advantage of the providing cadets and officers with a personal example of new political climate to write and ratify the Constitution of professional proficiency, attention to standards, and com1787, which pressed for a more robust national army. Still, mitment to the regular army as an institution. He also fulmany common Americans opposed efforts to strengthen filled a longstanding promise by writing a three-volume the central government and the nation’s standing army, training manual—Infantry Tactics, Or, Rules for the Exercise sentiments that helped propel Thomas Jefferson to a deci- and Manoeuvres of the United States Infantry—that until sive victory in the 1800 presidential election over incum- 1855 served as the U.S. Army’s standard drill manual.

Scott’s ultimate personal and professional triumph came bent President John Adams. in his brilliantly conducted landing at Veracruz and subseIt was during Jefferson’s presidency that Winfield Scott first quent 300-mile overland march and capture of Mexico City entered the U.S. Army, accepting a commission as a cap- during the Mexican-American War in 1847. No less an autain in 1808. His initial experiences in the army gave him thority than the British victor at the Battle of Waterloo, the little confidence in its abilities. With next to no guidance, Duke of Wellington, termed Scott’s campaign “unsurpassed Scott was expected to recruit the men who would fill the in military annals” and labeled Scott “the greatest living solranks of his command, and his fellow officers hardly in- dier.” Scott, for his part, credited to that bastion of military spired confidence. The veterans struck Scott as “coarse and professionalism, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point: command that he reportedly cried out in astonishment, “Those are regulars, by God!”

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NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

Scott’s success validated his emphasis on discipline and leadership.

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Scott’s demands for attention to detail and adherence to professional standards in dress and conduct saddled him with the unflattering sobriquet “Old Fuss and Feathers.”

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

“I will say to my dying bed that but for the Military Academy I never could have entered the basin of Mexico.”

Scott’s Mexican victory epitomized the canny observation by German chancellor Otto von Bismarck that “a generation that has taken a beating is always followed by a generation that deals one.” But Scott’s achievement was not universally praised. Even the president of the United States at the time, James K. Polk, underplayed it. “The gallant American soldiers could have won the war,” Polk said, “if there was not an officer among them.”

For the rest of his life, Scott struggled against grandstanding politicians who appealed to the popular mythology of the citizen-soldier and complained that the military academy and the regular army’s officer corps fostered European attitudes toward war and the military that were contrary to the spirit of republican government. In the meantime, Scott watched fellow generals Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Zachary Taylor exploit their images as frontier fighters and their homespun nicknames—“Old Hickory,” “Old Tippecanoe,” and “Old Rough and Ready,” respectively—to win the presidency. In contrast, Scott’s demands for attention to detail and adherence to profes-

sional standards in dress and conduct saddled him with the unflattering sobriquet “Old Fuss and Feathers” and undermined his own bid for the presidency in 1852.

Nevertheless, Scott ultimately succeeded in determining how the nation’s ground forces would be led. West Point graduates and products of the regular army would command both the great armies of the Civil War. His “Anaconda Plan” to win the war for the Union by blockading Confederate coasts and seizing control of the major inland rivers, although frequently ignored or superseded by events, eventually proved prescient. His influence would also be evident in William Tecumseh Sherman’s postwar labors as commanding general of the army. These included the establishment of a school at Fort Leavenworth for the development of regular officers and support for military theorist Emory Upton’s intensive studies of foreign armies and America’s own military history, which made a renewed case for Scott’s vision of a robust army of regulars led by professional officers.

While failures of administration by the army during the Spanish-American War served as a catalyst for change (even as Teddy Roosevelt’s well-publicized exploits in Cuba boosted the image of the amateur soldier), subsequent reforms only confirmed the preeminence of the regular army.

When the United States went to war in 1918 and again in 1941, it mobilized millions of citizen-soldiers, but in both instances they would be commanded by regular officers.

And even though post–Vietnam War reforms sought to better integrate the reserves and National Guard into the wartime force, Scott’s vision of American land forces firmly in the hands of the regular army has largely been realized.

It could all be traced to a few chaotic hours in October 1812 on the bluffs overlooking Queenston Heights and the Niagara River, when a haughty young officer snatched the lessons of command and professionalism from the jaws of defeat. While Queenston Heights was by no means the first or last time that American forces took a beating, no other American military defeat—not Bunker Hill, First Bull Run, Little Big Horn, Kasserine Pass, or Task Force Smith in the Korean War—would have a more profound or enduring effect on the future of the American military, beginning with the untried lieutenant colonel who endured that beating and, more important, learned from it. MHQ

Scott’s vision for how U.S. land forces should be led has largely been realized.

Ethan S. Rafuse is a professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

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WAR LIST

WAR AND PEACENIKS

After their military service, these distinguished warriors did a crisp about-face on the wisdom of armed conflict.

By Alan Green

In the spring of 1775, with the redcoats storming Boston, 16-year-old Noah Worcester joined his father’s company of New Hampshire militiamen on their trek south to team up with the patriot army assembling in nearby Cambridge.

Weeks later, as the Siege of Boston continued, Worcester served as a fifer at the Battle of Bunker Hill, where he narrowly escaped capture by British forces, and went on to complete 11 months of service in the Revolutionary War. He rejoined the patriot army for a two-month stint as a fife major in the summer of 1777 and took part in the victory at the Battle of Bennington. Its deadly aftermath spurred him to embrace pacifism and, in the process, kindle the American peace movement. Worcester went on to become a liberal clergyman in the Boston area, where he founded the Massachusetts Peace Society; launched and edited the influential quarterly Friend of Peace; and, in 1814, published the book (under the pseudonym Philo Pacificus) A Solemn Review of the Custom of War, still celebrated as a groundbreaking and enduring pacifist manifesto.

Leo Tolstoy

The celebrated novelist Count Lev (Leo) Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 on his family’s estate a hundred miles south of Moscow. Following years at university, distinguished largely by his fondness for partying, Tolstoy returned to his deceased parents’ estate, where he proved to be inept at farming and even worse at gambling, running up sizable debts. In 1851 his older brother Nikolay urged Leo to join him in the army; the aimless younger brother soon signed up and headed to the Caucasus Mountains. In November 1854, Tolstoy was transferred a thousand miles east to Sevastopol, Ukraine, where the young artillery officer spent nine months fighting in the Crimean War. But while Tolstoy’s courage earned him a promotion to lieutenant, his unsettling battlefield experiences also informed his famous antiwar writings and his strict, decadeslong embrace of pacifism, which was rooted in his religious beliefs rather than his moral misgivings, and which inspired global social movements dedicated to everything from spiritual reflection to vegetarianism. In fact, The Kingdom of God Is within You, Tolstoy’s philosophical treatise pub-

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lished in 1894, had a profound influence on such high-­ profile proponents of nonviolent resistance as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Smedley Butler

Though Smedley Darlington Butler was born into a Pennsylvania Quaker family in 1881, he dropped out of school weeks before his 17th birthday to join the U.S. Marine Corps. Butler was soon appointed a second lieutenant, and with that, “Old Gimlet Eye,” as he would come to be known, began a military career that few leathernecks have matched.

With postings that spanned the Spanish-American War in Cuba and the Boxer Rebellion in China to the Western Front of World War I and the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia, where he was commanding general, Major General Butler received the Distinguished Service Medal for both the army and the navy and was one of just two marines to garner Medals of Honor for two separate acts of outstanding heroism. But following his retirement, in 1931, Butler wrote War Is a Racket, a short book that grew out of a series of speeches before churches and pacifist groups all across the nation. Butler passionately criticized U.S. war efforts as both imperialistic and designed to enrich well-heeled profiteers who never shouldered a rifle.

War, he wrote, is the only enterprise “in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”

Claude Choules

In August 2011, Australian officials announced that the Largs Bay, a dock landing ship that the Royal Australian Navy had recently purchased, would be renamed in honor of Chief Petty Officer Claude Choules, who had died earlier that year in a nursing home. At the time of his passing, the English-born “Chuckles” Choules, 110 years old, was the last known surviving service member of World War I. He had joined the British Royal Navy shortly after his 14th birthday, and in 1918, from the battleship HMS Revenge, he watched the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet.

Choules later transferred to the Royal Australian Navy, and during World War II he served his adopted nation as an antisubmarine instructor and chief demolition officer; he finally retired from the Australian navy in 1956. Despite

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL; MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY; U.S. MARINE CORPS HISTORY DIVISION

Noah Worcester

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Clockwise from top: Leo Tolstoy served as an artillery officer in the Crimean War; Claude Choules joined the British Royal Navy at age 14; Noah Worcester fought the British forces in the Revolutionary War; legendary leatherneck Smedley Butler.

his lengthy wartime service, Choules was hardly enamored of the military. He became a pacifist and purposely steered clear of the annual Anzac Day parades honoring those who served and died in war. In fact, he refused to even discuss anything about that glorified war. “There was definitely no glory in it from his point of view,” his grandson told Time magazine. “He firmly believed that war was a pure waste of time, resources, and human life.”

Albert Bigelow

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL; MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY; U.S. MARINE CORPS HISTORY DIVISION

Albert “Bert” Bigelow, born in 1906, was endowed at birth with brains (later earning degrees from Harvard and M.I.T.), brawn (he was a hulking college hockey player), and, by all evidence, a destiny to be shaped at sea. During World War II, Bigelow served as commander of a U.S. Navy submarine chaser and later as captain of the destroyer escort USS Dale W. Peterson. In early August 1945, as DE-337 streamed into Pearl Harbor, Bigelow was on the bridge when news arrived of the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima. “It was then,” he later wrote, “that I realized for the first time that morally war is impossible.” In fact, Bigelow went on to become a pacifist and committed antiwar activist: In early 1958, he twice captained a 30-foot ketch, The Golden Rule, toward nuclear-bomb testing grounds in the Marshall Islands to protest atomic warfare, only to be intercepted near Hawaii by the Coast Guard and jailed for his news-making actions.

George McGovern

In January 1942, weeks after Japanese war planes launched a surprise bombing attack at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, college sophomore George McGovern, who had already earned his pilot’s license, volunteered to join the American armed forces. When he was finally called for service, more than a year later, the South Dakota native was trained to fly the Consolidated B-24 Liberator, a hulking four-engine bom­ ber alternatively known as the Flying Boxcar and the Flying Coffin. Beginning in late 1944, McGovern flew three dozen missions over European countries as part of a strategic bombing campaign designed to take out enemy oil refineries and railyards, his heroics earning him a rank of first lieutenant and a Distinguished Flying Cross. But the future U.S. representative, senator, and presidential candidate would go on to forge a legacy born of his anti–Vietnam War crusade, spearheading a high-profile campaign to end the conflict primarily by legislative means. “Every Senator

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Paul Newman

Decades before he was the Hustler or Cool Hand Luke, Paul Newman was known as Aviation Radioman Third Class, his three years of service in the U.S. Navy during World War II ending in 1946. Newman aspired to be a pilot, but his color blindness stood in the way. He was instead assigned to torpedo bomber squadrons and later served as a turret gunner in a Grumman TBF Avenger flying from aircraft carriers. After the war, Newman studied at the Yale School of Drama and the fabled Actors Studio in New York City, and he went on to parlay his brilliant blue eyes and leading-man looks into a legendary career on the stage and screen as well as in auto racing. But Newman also garnered notoriety far from Hollywood lots as an avid promoter of antiwar and social justice causes, and in 1971 his fervent opposition to the Vietnam War landed him on President Richard Nixon’s “enemies” list.

Seven years later, Newman would serve as one of five U.S. representatives to the United Nations General Assembly’s Special Session on Disarmament.

Abie Nathan

Abie Nathan was born in 1927 to Jewish parents in the Persian city of Abadan, which today is in southwestern Iran.

The family moved to Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1939, and four years later the 16-year-old student lied about his age

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and was drafted into a pilot-training course with the Royal Air Force. He later began training as a bomber pilot, but he left the armed forces before seeing combat and was recruited by Air India—a career move that was soon interrupted to fight with some 4,000 other foreign volunteers (the Machal) in Israel’s 1948 war of independence. Nathan served alongside Israeli forces as a combat pilot, bombing army forces and Arab villages—missions whose resulting carnage would one day spur him to become an internationally recognized advocate for peace, most notably between Israel and Arab nations. To that end, in 1966 he defied the Israeli Air Force and flew his “peace plane” to Egypt in hopes of encouraging dialogue between the two nations. He met with religious and political leaders around the world to promote peace. And along with numerous global antiwar and relief efforts, in the 1980s he operated a pirate radio station, the Voice of Peace, that broadcast throughout the Middle East from his Peace Ship, a reconfigured coastal freighter that sat just beyond Israel’s territorial waters.

Andrew Jacobs Jr.

After he graduated from high school in 1949, Andy Jacobs joined the U.S. Marine Corps, his rationale that his dress blues would be just the ticket to finding a weekly date. A year later, however, with the outbreak of the Korean War, the Indianapolis native would instead be suited up for combat, as his infantry unit was dispatched to Pusan, near the 38th Parallel. During his tour of duty, which ended in 1952, Private Jacobs was wounded in action, fought in the battle of Ka-san (aka Hill 902), and miraculously side-

LEFT: AP IMAGES; RIGHT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave,” he once proclaimed in floor debate. “This chamber reeks of blood.”

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LEFT: RUE DES ARCHIVES (GRANGER); NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

As a B-24 Liberator pilot in World War II, George McGovern flew 35 bombing missions over Germanoccupied Europe. Paul Newman was a radioman and rear gunner in the U.S. Navy during World War II.

Abie Nathan, a former combat pilot, defied the Israeli Air Force and flew his “peace plane” to Egypt in 1966.

After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy, Jimmy Carter was tapped for the nuclear submarine program.

stepped death when two armed Chinese soldiers allowed him and other marines to pass by with a stretcher bearing their wounded lieutenant. Jacobs was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives a dozen years after his discharge, where he was an early opponent of the Vietnam War (and every war thereafter, all of which he deemed unconstitutional), and a strong supporter of the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act, which would permit citizens to designate their tax payments for nonmilitary purposes. But “the conscience of the House,” as Ralph Nader dubbed him, may be best remembered for two phrases he coined in a 1999 memoir: “war wimps” and “chicken hawks”—those eager to send others to battle while never serving themselves.

LEFT: RUE DES ARCHIVES (GRANGER); RIGHT: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

LEFT: AP IMAGES; RIGHT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Jimmy Carter

On graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946, James Earl Carter Jr. was commissioned as an ensign and served as a surface warfare officer in the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets.

He then volunteered for submarine duty, eventually qualifying to be a sub commander and, in 1952, earning the rank of lieutenant. That same year, Admiral Hyman G. Rickover selected Carter for the fledgling nuclear submarine program, and Carter set his sights on working aboard the planned USS Seawolf. But following his father’s death in 1953, Carter resigned from active duty to run his family’s Georgia-based peanut-growing business. Two decades later, the 39th president of the United States governed like a lifelong dove: He pardoned all Vietnam War draft dodgers, halted development of the neutron bomb, and, against all odds, forged a Middle East peace treaty. He waged no wars

while in office—a first for an American commander in chief. Moreover, the Carter Center, which he founded in 1982, won the Nobel Peace Prize 20 years later.

Donald Duncan

Donald Walter Duncan, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Toronto in 1930, was drafted by the U.S. Army in December 1954 and the following summer was dispatched to Germany, where he ultimately served with an artillery unit as a noncommissioned officer in operations and intelligence. Duncan returned to U.S. soil in late 1957, where he later served with Special Forces until he volunteered for deployment in South Vietnam in the spring of 1964. Over 18 months in combat, he helped establish and then run Project DELTA special reconnaissance units—eight-man “hunter-killer” teams that did everything from enemy interrogations to commando raids. For his efforts, Master Sergeant Duncan received Bronze Star Medals for both heroism and meritorious service, along with other citations. But Duncan had grown disillusioned with American policies well before his discharge in September 1965, and on returning home he became an early and prominent critic of the country’s war efforts. For example, in a 1966 cover story for Ramparts magazine titled “The Whole Things Was a Lie!,” the decorated Green Beret wrote of antiwar protesters: “They are not unpatriotic….They are opposed to people, our own and others, dying for a lie, thereby corrupting the very word democracy.” MHQ Alan Green is a journalist in the Washington, D.C., area.

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BATTLE SCHEMES

THE LOST CITY This highly stylized map, published in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1524, provided Europeans with their first glimpse of Tenochtitlán, the gloriously grand capital city of the Aztec Empire. By that time, however, there was not much left of the island city.

Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his army had attacked the city in May 1521 and then destroyed it, paving the way for Mexico City, the capital of the viceroyalty of New Spain, to grow up in its place. MHQ

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NEWBERRY LIBRARY, CHICAGO (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES)

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LAWS OF WAR

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.

By John A. Haymond

Byng was executed not for what he had done but for what he failed to do.

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 import-

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ant 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.

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.

JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY, BROWN UNIVERSITY; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

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.”

Byng’s court-martial convened in December 1756, with four admirals and nine senior captains as judges. Charges

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JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY, BROWN UNIVERSITY; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

This 1756 print lampoons Britain’s ineffective conduct of the Seven Years’ War. The English lion has lost a foot, labeled “Minorca,” and on the left Admiral John Byng, in fetters, addresses his court martial.

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.

FRANCE The court-martial officers un­ animously wrote a decision that asked the Lords of the Admiralty to petition the king for Minorca SPAIN mercy. After all, no British admiral had ever been executed PALMA on such a charge before. As MEDITERRANEAN SEA 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 MHQ Autumn 2020

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As he faced a six-man firing squad aboard HMS Monarch on March 14, 1757, Byng at first refused a blindfold. 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 execu-

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tion 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 courtmartial 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).

NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH, LONDON

THE SCAPEGOATING OF ADMIRAL BYNG

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WEAPONS CHECK

MEDIEVAL HAND GRENADE

By Chris McNab

Dimensions

At 3 3/4 inches high with a 3-inch diameter at its widest point, the grenade fit comfortably in the palm.

Weight

The grenade, when empty, weighed about 1 pound. A warrior with a good throwing arm would have been able to hurl the grenade about 35 yards.

Body

The body of the grenade, pointed at one end, is formed from a heavy kiln-fired clay with raised tearshaped bumps in a regular pattern over nearly all of its surface.

Fill hole

TIMELINE AUCTIONS

After the grenade was filled with flammable liquid, the opening was sealed with a dome-like clay cap.

A cord fuse, threaded through a hole in the cap, ran down into the liquid.

The elegant lines and decorative artistry of this object belie its lethality. Originating in Syria in the 13th century, amid the seemingly endless wars of the Crusades, this early hand grenade gave Arab infantry their own form of hand-held artillery. Its shell, formed from black pottery, has ridges that would have helped users grip the grenade, though it is difficult to know whether the patterning was utilitarian or merely decorative. The grenade was filled with an incendiary liquid—simple alcohol or oil or perhaps naphtha—and the fill hole at the top sealed with a clay cap fitted with a fuse.

Incendiary grenades of similar type first appeared in Byzantine arsenals sometime around the 8th century, though the earliest examples were little more than crude glass, stone, or ceramic containers. The Byzantines were known for their use of flammable materials, particularly in the context of siege actions and maritime warfare, and the devices were adopted and redesigned by the Muslim armies

that became the Byzantines’ greatest opponents. To deploy the grenade, the soldier would have lit the fuse and then thrown the grenade against a combustible enemy structure, such as a wooden shield wall, a siege tower, or the decks and superstructure of a ship. The pottery shell was intended to shatter on impact, with the fuse igniting the fuel and creating a ferocious pool of fire that quickly spread if not contained. Such hand grenades were used in the Middle East up to the late Middle Ages, but cast-iron explosive grenades replaced them as the gunpowder era spread globally from the 14th century. MHQ Chris McNab, a military historian in the United Kingdom, is the author of many books, including, most recently, The Crusades: Holy Wars, Piety, and Politics in Christendom from the First Crusade to the Reconquista (Amber Books, 2019).

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GENA ASHER, COURTESY THE MEDIA SCHOOL AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY

Amelia Earhart, the legendary American aviator, presented Ernie Pyle with this Hamilton wristwatch in 1932. He was wearing it when he was killed by a Japanese sniper on the island of Ie Shima in 1945.

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THE SOLDIER’S FRIEND

GENA ASHER, COURTESY THE MEDIA SCHOOL AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY

E

rnie Pyle always seemed to be in the right place at the right time—until, on April 18, 1945, he wasn’t.

That morning, packed in a jeep with Lieutenant Colonel Joseph B. Coolidge and three other U.S. Army officers, he was heading to a command post on the island of Ie Shima, just off the northwest coast of Okinawa, when he was killed by a Japanese sniper.

As Roy Morris relates in this issue’s cover story, at the time of his death Pyle was the world’s most famous war correspondent—more famous than Homer Bigart (of the New York Herald Tribune), Walter Cronkite (of United Press), and even Edward R. Murrow (of CBS News). Pyle’s editors at the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain had styled him “Ernie Pyle, the Soldier’s Friend,” and they had recently asked him to head to the Pacific theater of World War II, where he filed six columns a week, just as he had done from the front lines in Africa and Europe.

Pyle never much liked his desk jobs in journalism. Soon after he moved to the nation’s capital in 1923 to take a $30a-week job as a reporter for the Washington Daily News (a Scripps-Howard paper), his boss promoted him to copy editor. He hated it. By 1927 he was so bored that he asked if he could try writing an aviation column—the first in the United States, it turned out—on the side. At 2 o’clock each afternoon, after finishing his shift on the copy desk, he headed out to airports and airfields in search of material for his column, which he would write on returning home and turn in the following morning.

Pyle’s column was so successful that in 1928 he was allowed to spend all his time covering aviation, which he did with gusto. And soon, with Scripps-Howard syndicating his column, Pyle was writing for a much bigger audience. He had a gift for painting vivid pictures with just a few words, for example, describing how it felt to land in a Pitcairn-Cierva Autogyro as “very much like going down in an elevator.”

In 1932, after four years of writing his aviation column, the 31-year-old Pyle reluctantly agreed to become the managing editor of the Washington Daily News. He had made quite a name for himself as an aviation writer—so much so that when the men and women Pyle had covered honored him with a small ceremony at Washington-­ Hoover Airport, it was Amelia Earhart, the famous American aviator, who presented him with a wristwatch. “Not to know Ernie Pyle,” she said, “is to admit that you yourself are unknown in aviation.”

As for Pyle’s new desk job, he hated it too, complaining to a friend that it was “deadening” and left him with “no chance to do any writing.” But he did coax and cajole the reporters under him to adopt the mindset that had served him well. In one memo to them he wrote: Get alive. Keep your eyes open. There are swell stories floating around your beats every day that you either don’t see or don’t bother to do anything about when you do see them….News doesn’t have to be important, but it has to be interesting. You can’t find interesting things, if you’re not interested….Always look for the story—for the unexpected human emotion in the story….Write a story as tho it were a privilege for you to write it….You don’t have to be smart-alecky or pseudo-funny. Be human. Try to write like people talk.

That’s exactly what Pyle himself would do throughout World War II, as he aimed in his columns “to make people see what I see.” The writing, though it seemed effortless, did not come easy to Pyle. His columns sometimes went through six or seven drafts as he struggled to get every word, every sentence, exactly the way he wanted it.

Unlike most other war correspondents, Pyle didn’t have to file daily dispatches on battles and the big strategic decisions that shaped U.S. involvement in the war. Instead he stuck to—and with—the men fighting it. It helped, too, that Stars and Stripes printed his columns and that he could count on friends in high places, among them Generals Omar Bradley and Dwight D. Eisenhower, for information and insights.

Pyle didn’t want to be among the journalists covering the Normandy landings in June 1944—he knew the risk of being killed in such an invasion would be high—but Bradley persuaded him to go. He arrived on the beach the day after D-Day, which was also the day after he would have been presented with a Pulitzer Prize for his wartime correspondence. Had he gone to New York City to accept the award, the world wouldn’t have seen what he saw on the beach at Normandy that day.

Less than a year later, when he was felled by a sniper’s bullet half the world away, Pyle was wearing the wristwatch that Amelia Earhart had given him 13 years earlier.

—Bill Hogan, Editor

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GRANGER

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‘ERNIE WAS ONE OF US’

GRANGER

Ernie Pyle covered World War II from a soldier’s-eye view. Millions of loyal readers devoured every word.

By Roy Morris Jr.

Ernie Pyle was America’s bestknown war correspondent during World War II. In 1944 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Invasion of Sicily.

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ERNIE PYLE

At the time of his death Pyle was the world’s most famous war correspondent.

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would never come has come at last.” He was referring to the looming Allied victory in Europe, but he might as well have been speaking about his own fate. “The companionship of two and a half years of death and misery,” he went on to observe, “is a spouse that tolerates no divorce.”

At the White House President Harry S. Truman announced Pyle’s death with a matter-of-factness that the correspondent would have appreciated. “The nation is quickly saddened again by the death of Ernie Pyle,” Truman said.

“No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told.

He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen.” It was only six days after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Truman’s towering predecessor. In one of the saddest ironies of a sad and often ironic war, neither the American president who tirelessly prosecuted the war nor the journalist who most piercingly reported on it lived long enough to see the victorious end of the fighting. Their personal wars ended first.

Handsome, patrician, urbane New York native Franklin Roosevelt had little in common with homespun Hoosier farm boy Ernie Pyle. Born in the flyspeck village of Dana, Indiana, on August 3, 1900, Pyle yearned for a life beyond the windswept flatlands of his home state. At age 18 he enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve, but World War I ended before he could complete basic training. He enrolled at Indiana University in 1919, majoring in economics but concentrating on journalism. Pyle served as the editor of the Indiana Daily Student and worked on the yearbook staff before he left college one semester shy of graduation in 1923 to take a job as a reporter for the Daily Herald in LaPorte, Indiana.

For the next dozen years Pyle worked for various newspapers in Washington, D.C., and New York City. He achieved some measure of national fame as “the Hoosier Vagabond,” crisscrossing the country and writing human-­interest features for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. His work as a columnist brought him into contact with common, hardworking men and women, and he honed a simple, plain­ spoken writing style, one that highlighted his sharp eye for detail as well as his inherent sympathy for the struggling underdogs of Depression-era America. With his wife, Jerry, at his side, Pyle visited all 48 states, plus Alaska, Hawaii, and parts of Central and South America. In his travels he talked with thousands of people—from the soda jerk in smalltown Iowa to Park Avenue millionaires to Hollywood movie stars. True to form, he favored “the little man.”

When World War II broke out in Europe in 1939, Pyle said he sensed that it would be “a war to end everything.”

He traveled to London in 1940, arriving in time to witness and report on the Nazi terror bombings known as the Blitz.

U.S. MARINE CORPS HISTORY DIVISION

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n April 18, 1945, at around 10 o’clock in the morning, U.S. Army lieutenant colonel Joseph B. Coolidge and four other men were bumping along in a jeep on a shell-pitted dirt road some 200 yards from the beach at Ie Shima (now Iejima), a small island just off the northwest coast of Okinawa, Japan. Coolidge, commanding the 305th Regiment, 77th Infantry Division, was en route to his forward command post; the others were bumming a ride. The road had been cleared of mines, booby traps, and other hazards, but it offered a clear line of sight to a coral ridge 300 yards away. Without warning, a Japanese machine gunner opened fire. The men jumped clear, tumbling into a roadside ditch. Coolidge and one of the other men, both of whom should have known better, raised their heads to look around. “Are you all right?” the man asked. Before Coolidge could reply, there was another brief burst of fire. Coolidge fell backward, unhurt, but his companion sagged to the ground, killed instantly by a bullet to the left temple, just below his helmet.

His name was Ernie Pyle, and at the time of his death he was the world’s most famous war correspondent, perhaps the most famous in American history. Certainly, he was the best liked. It was fitting that Pyle used his last words to ask about a fellow American soldier: He’d spent the past three years doing just that, in person and in print. “Ernie Pyle, the Soldier’s Friend,” his newspaper editors styled him, and millions of readers back home with husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, sweethearts, and friends serving on the front lines of World War II counted on Pyle to keep them informed of their loved ones’ lives— and, all too often, their deaths. Pyle took that responsibility very seriously, and it ultimately wore him down physically and mentally. Indeed, it may have been sheer exhaustion, more than anything, that unaccountably caused the veteran combat observer to raise his head while under fire at Ie Shima.

Pyle had frequently told his wife and colleagues that he was worn out. He didn’t expect to survive his current assignment, yet he felt he owed it to “the boys” to cover what was shaping up to be the last American campaign of the war. While sailing on a troopship from Western Europe to Okinawa, he had already written, but not filed, what turned out to be his final newspaper column. “And so it is over,” his handwritten draft read. “The day that had so long seemed

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U.S. troops wade from landing craft onto the beaches of Okinawa on April 1, 1945. Pyle, who sailed to the island on the command ship USS Panamint, confided to friends, “I’m not coming back from this one.”

He was sitting in his room at the Savoy Hotel on December 29 when 130 German bombers struck London in one of the largest incendiary raids of the war. Spurning the safety of the hotel’s basement bomb shelter, Pyle watched from his balcony as nearly 2,000 fires broke out in the city, some near historic St. Paul’s Cathedral. His graphic cable to New York described a “London stabbed with great fires, shaken by explosions, its dark regions along the Thames sparkling with the pinpoints of white-hot bombs, all of it roofed over with a ceiling of pink that held bursting shells, balloons, flares.” Through the rosy smoke he beheld the famous dome of St. Paul’s, still standing in the mayhem “like a picture of some miraculous figure that appears before peace-hungry soldiers on a battlefield.”

Time magazine reprinted Pyle’s column, calling it “one of the most vivid, sorrowful dispatches of the war” while pointing out that “until last week Ernie Pyle, an inconspicuous little man with thinning reddish hair and a shy, pixy face, was not celebrated as a straight news reporter.” His reputation was made. Roy W. Howard, the all-powerful head of Scripps-Howard, wired Pyle: “your stuff not only greatest your career, but most illuminating human

and appealing descriptive matter printed america since outbreak battle britain.” Pyle continued sending columns from war-torn England for the rest of the year.

Pyle returned to the States the next spring to attend his mother’s funeral and nurse his troubled alcoholic wife back to health after the first of several suicide attempts. Fans besieged him everywhere he went in his newly adopted hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico. So many people drove past the couple’s modest ranch house that Pyle had to rent a hotel room downtown to complete two new columns for an upcoming book of his London pieces, Ernie Pyle in England. He began planning a trip to the Far East to find new subjects to write about but had to scrap it when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Though he was 41, Pyle briefly entertained the notion of joining the American armed forces. The navy rejected him as too small (he was 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighed 110 pounds), and he ultimately decided against enlisting in the army. Instead, in June 1942 he accepted an assignment from Scripps-Howard to tour new American bases in England and Ireland. Four months later he accompanied U.S. forces

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to Algeria to prepare for a U.S.-British offensive in North Africa. At a forward air base at Biskra in mid-January 1943, Pyle witnessed his first combat fatality, the pilot of a crippled B-17 Flying Fortress that crash-landed back at the base after losing two engines in a bombing raid over Tripoli, Libya.

“One of the returning Fortresses had released a red flare over the field, and I had stood with others beneath the great plane as they handed its dead pilot, head downward, through the escape hatch onto a stretcher,” Pyle wrote. “The faces of his crew were grave, and nobody talked very loud. One man clutched a leather cap with blood on it. The pilot’s hands were very white. Everybody knew the pilot. He was so young, a couple of hours ago. The war came inside us then, and we felt it deeply.” Before the war was over, Pyle would see thousands more dead men of many nationalities, from North Africa to Western Europe to the coast of Japan.

In January 1943 Pyle attached himself to Major General Lloyd R. Fredendall’s II Corps infantry, headquartered at Tebessa, near Algeria’s border with Tunisia. He spent a month living with GIs in frigid mountain foxholes, sleeping on the ground, brewing coffee and cooking stew in a five-gallon gasoline can, and slouching next to the soldiers in chow lines. Unlike other correspondents, Pyle was relaxed and natural with the enlisted men, swapping stories about their hometowns, laughing at his own foibles, and never consciously attempting to guide conversations into ready-made articles. A New York soldier wrote to his father that Pyle was “a pleasant talker, easy­-going and with a faculty for becoming ‘one of the boys’ in two seconds flat.” It was Pyle’s greatest strength as journalist, something he had learned in his years of traveling across back-roads America during the Depression, and it would serve him well throughout the war.

In mid-February, Pyle witnessed firsthand the embarrassing rout of green American forces by the battle-­ hardened German Afrika Korps at Kasserine Pass. After watching German panzers obliterate American tanks at Sidi Bou Zid, Pyle joined the soldiers in a chaotic retreat through the mountain passes that he described as “awful nights of fleeing, crawling and hiding from death.” Even then, he demonstrated his concern for the families of the young GIs, silently picking through the wreckage of a bombed jeep for scraps of clothing, paper, or anything that might reveal the identity of the three Americans killed in the bombing.

Pyle told the truth to readers back home, describing the defeat at Kasserine Pass as “damned humiliating” and

Pyle conveyed the reality of modern combat to his readers.

“It ain’t no play,” he wrote.

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“a complete melee.” Still, he reassured them. “You need to feel no shame nor concern about their ability,” he wrote of the fighting men he was accompanying. “There is nothing wrong with the common American soldier. His fighting spirit is good. His morale is okay. The deeper he gets into a fight the more of a fighting man he becomes.” He estimated that it would take the United States, a peace-loving country, two years to fully adjust itself to war. Once in action, it took the frontline soldiers considerably less time than that to “make the psychological transition from the normal belief that taking human life is sinful, over to a new professional outlook where killing is craft,” he wrote.

“To them now there is nothing morally wrong about killing. In fact it is an admirable thing.”

Joining the 1st Infantry Division, the famous “Big Red One,” Pyle followed Major General Terry de la Mesa Allen Sr. and his men into battle at Bizerte, on the Mediterranean coast of Tunisia. “Terrible Terry” Allen soon became one Pyle’s favorite soldiers. The foul-mouthed Texan shared his headquarters tent with Pyle and always leveled with him about the progress of the campaign. “He didn’t give a damn for hell or high water,” Pyle wrote of Allen. “If there was one thing in the world Allen lived and breathed for, it was to fight. He hated Germans and Italians like vermin, and his pattern for victory was simple: just wade in and murder the hell out of the low-down, good-for-nothing so-and-so’s.”

Pyle accompanied the fighting men of the Big Red One as they hacked their way to Bizerte through waist-high wheat and up rocky hillsides held by grim-faced, seasoned German soldiers. “We’re now with an infantry outfit that has battled ceaselessly for four days and nights,” he reported. “This northern warfare has been in the mountains.

You don’t ride much anymore. It is walking and climbing and crawling country. The mountains aren’t big, but they are constant. They are largely treeless. They are easy to defend and bitter to take. But we are taking them.”

Hastily scribbling notes from a foxhole as snakes, lizards, and scorpions crawled nearby and machine gun bullets sprayed dirt within 10 feet of him, Pyle conveyed to readers the reality of modern combat. “It ain’t no play,” he wrote. Before Pyle, war correspondents had traveled in the rear with the generals, reporting on grand strategy and largely repeating what they were told by self-interested commanders. Henceforth, with Ernie Pyle as a model, they followed the men into combat, “the God-damned infantry, as they like to call themselves,” Pyle reported, “the mudrain-frost-and-wind boys that wars can’t be won without.”

Following the Allied victory at Bizerte and Tunis (taken by the British Eighth Army) in May 1943, Pyle joined Operation Husky, the joint British-American invasion of Sicily.

Tired and sick—he would spend five days in the hospital with “battlefield fever” amid the death rattle of fatally

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for the publication of his second book, Here Is Your War, after 428 days overseas, Pyle found himself besieged by autograph seekers, reporters, booking agents, advertising copywriters, intelligence officers at the Pentagon—even Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who invited Pyle to tea at the White House.

Here Is Your War climbed to the top of the bestseller lists, exhausting its first print run of 150,000 copies and forcing the publisher, Henry Holt and Company, to petition the government for more rationed paper to print extra copies, on the grounds that the book was good for American morale. Before returning to the front, Pyle finalized a deal with Hollywood producer Lester Cowan to make a movie based on his book. Cowan won the correspondent’s reluctant approval by promising to keep the usual movie “hokum” to a minimum and allowing Pyle to review the final script. Pyle subsequently met with the film’s chief screenwriter, a then unknown playwright named Arthur Miller, who would later win fame as the author of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. But the two men didn’t see eye to eye on the movie’s direction, with the idealistic young Miller insisting that the movie be about large issues and Pyle insisting equally that it be about “the guys” at the front. In the end, the two writers agreed to disagree.

From top: Pyle works at a desk in the field in Europe in 1944; Pyle takes a break on the side of a road in Okinawa with a 1st Marine Division patrol on April 8, 1945. wounded soldiers—he carried on. “I’m getting awfully tired of war and writing about it,” he admitted to his wife. “It seems like I can’t think of anything new to say; each time it’s like going to the same movie again.” Often, he told her, he had to get good and drunk before he could go to sleep.

To Pyle’s surprise, his readers back home didn’t seem to mind seeing the same movie again—or at least his descriptions of it. Returning briefly to the States that September

Pyle returned to the war in late November 1943, flying to Algiers, where he dropped off a copy of Here Is Your War at army headquarters for commanding general Dwight D. Eisenhower, and then hopping across the Mediterranean to Italy, where the U.S. Fifth Army was bogged down around Naples in knee-deep mud and heavy rains. It was the beginning of what Pyle called “the long winter misery” of the Italian campaign. Under Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark, the Fifth Army confronted a fiercely defended German line, 10 miles deep, in the jagged Apennine Mountains. Back at the front, Pyle reported on the army’s progress—or lack thereof. “The hills rose to high ridges of almost solid rock,” he wrote. “We couldn’t go around them through the flat peaceful valleys, because the Germans were up there looking down upon us, and they would have let us have it. So we had to go up and over.” The GIs, he said, were “living in almost inconceivable misery. Thousands of the men had not been dry for weeks. Other thousands lay at night in the high mountains with the temperature below freezing and the thin snow sifting over them. They dug into the stones and slept in little chasms and behind rocks and in halfcaves. They lived like men of prehistoric times, and a club would have become them more than a machine gun.”

On December 14, Pyle found himself at the base of Mount Sammucro, also known as Hill 1205, where elements of the 36th Infantry Division were hunkered down in a shallow mine dug out of the clay hillside. The hill was so steep

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ERNIE PYLE

Pyle’s account of Waskow’s death was instantly hailed as a classic of war reporting.

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larly 28-year-old sergeant Frank “Buck” Eversole, a transplanted Idaho cowboy about whom he wrote several articles.

Eversole was Pyle’s perfect embodiment of the American citizen-soldier: quiet, modest, tough on the outside but caring on the inside. Above all, he was “cold and deliberate in battle,” Pyle wrote. “War is old to him and he has become almost a master of it, a senior partner in the institution of death.” It was the image that Americans back home cherished of their fighting men, and one that Pyle, more than any other correspondent, had implanted in their minds.

Of the core eight soldiers in Company E, one was killed, two were wounded, one was captured, and three others, including Eversole, were sent to the rear with bad cases of trench foot caused by the incessant rains. A few weeks later, on March 17, 1944, Pyle himself narrowly escaped death when a 500-pound bomb exploded next to the four-story waterfront villa he was sharing with other correspondents at Anzio. The blast collapsed the top floors where Pyle was quartered, and one of his fellow correspondents announced, “Well, they got Ernie.” Remarkably, Pyle escaped with only a small cut on his face. He had gotten up an instant before the explosion to look out the window; seconds later, an entire wall fell on the bed where he had been lying.

Before leaving Italy in April, Pyle made a lasting contribution to his beloved GIs by calling for combat pay for infantrymen similar to the flight pay that American airmen received while conducting missions. A month later, Congress passed legislation authorizing a 50 percent increase in pay for men engaged in frontline combat. It became known as the Ernie Pyle Bill.

In April, Pyle returned to England, where Allied forces were massing for the D-Day invasion. He was staying at the Dorchester Hotel when he got word in early May that he had won a Pulitzer Prize for his war reporting. Characteristically, he played down the honor, and when someone compared his writing with “the rugged simplicity of the Bible,” Pyle joked, “I never did think the Bible was very well written.” His own style, honed over two decades of column writing, reflected the man himself: simple, direct, down to earth, and not showy. It was the verbal reflection of his modest Midwestern upbringing. A battalion commander, not a literary critic, explained concisely Pyle’s popularity with readers: “He writes about and writes to the great, anonymous American average.” That’s who Pyle was aiming for.

On June 7, D-Day plus one, Pyle waded ashore at Omaha Beach, where thousands of American soldiers had died the day before. The beach was still “hot,” with exploding mines sending geysers of dirt and water skyward at the shoreline and sniper bullets zipping overhead. The front had moved inland a couple of miles, but Pyle chose to stay behind for a day. It was an inspired decision. While other correspon-

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: ASSOCIATED PRESS; BOB LANDRY/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES); STANFORD UNIVERSITY; U.S. ARMY CENTER OF MILITARY HISTORY

that supplies had to be hauled up by mules and then handpulled the rest of the way by rope. As Pyle looked on, he noticed a young soldier limping into view. The soldier, a private named Riley Tidwell, told Pyle that his company commander had been killed that morning by an enemy shell.

The officer, Captain Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas, had pushed Tidwell out of the way before the shell exploded, striking the captain in the chest. “He was one of the finest men I ever met,” Tidwell told Pyle. The soldiers had to wait two more days and nights before they could bring Waskow’s body down the mountain on the back of a mule.

Pyle’s account of Waskow’s death became the most famous single dispatch of the entire war. As Pyle reported, the men in Waskow’s company filed past his body, one by one. “God damn it!” said one. “God damn it to hell anyway,” said a second. “I’m sorry, old man,” murmured a fellow officer. “I sure am sorry, sir,” said a fourth. One soldier held Waskow’s hand as he looked into the fallen captain’s face, straightened his collar, and rearranged his uniform as best he could. “The rest of us went back into the cowshed,” Pyle concluded. “We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.”

“The Death of Captain Waskow” was instantly hailed as a classic of war reporting, reprinted by hundreds of American newspapers, read aloud on the radio, and reprinted as a War Bond promotion.

The Washington Daily News splashed the column across its front page in large type, telling readers, “We thought Ernie Pyle’s story would tell you more about the war than headlines that Russians are 14 miles outside Poland.”

Grove Patterson, the editor of the Toledo Blade, praised Pyle for “the most beautiful lines that came out of the whole dark and bitter conflict,” adding that his piece was “the most beautifully written newspaper story I have ever read, and that covers a lot of ground.” The article has been widely anthologized ever since, and the incident served as the dramatic climax of the 1945 movie The Story of G.I. Joe, starring Burgess Meredith as Ernie Pyle and a then little-known Robert Mitchum as Captain Waskow (renamed Walker in the movie).

Pyle next linked up with a hard-fighting rifle company— Company E, 168th Infantry Regiment, 34th Division—in the mountains north of Naples. It had been in combat almost continually since landing in Italy in September. Of the company’s 200 original members, only eight remained; the rest had been killed, wounded, transferred, or rotated home. Pyle concentrated on the remaining eight, particu-

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CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: ASSOCIATED PRESS; BOB LANDRY/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES); STANFORD UNIVERSITY; U.S. ARMY CENTER OF MILITARY HISTORY

Clockwise from left: Pyle with General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lieutenant General Omar Bradley in Normandy in July 1944; with actor Burgess Meredith on the set of The Story of G.I. Joe in 1944; in a magazine ad; with a crew from the U.S. Army’s 191st Tank Battalion on the Anzio beachhead in 1944.

dents followed the fighting, got pinned down, and had little to write about (and no way to send their observations anyway), Pyle wrote one of his most memorable columns.

He went for a walk on the beach, he said—Omaha Beach.

“It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore,” Pyle wrote. “Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead.” He found the high-water mark “strewn with personal gear, gear that will never be needed again, of those who fought and died to give us our entrance into Europe. Here in a jumbled row for mile on mile are soldiers’ packs. Here are socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles, and hand grenades. Here are toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. Here are pocket-books, metal mirrors, extra trousers, and bloody, abandoned shoes. Here are broken-handled shovels, and portable radios smashed almost beyond recognition.” He stepped around a couple pieces of driftwood, only to see with a start that they weren’t driftwood at all.

“They were a soldier’s two feet,” he wrote. “The toes of his

G.I. shoes pointed toward the land he had come so far to see, and which he saw so briefly.”

Once again Pyle, with his clear, unsentimental eye for detail and his understated, matter-of-fact writing style, had brought the human cost of the war back to readers on the home front, in words and images they could relate to. The most momentous invasion in history had been reduced—or expanded—to the sight of a pair of dead infantryman’s boots pointing inland toward France, and toward victory.

Pyle accompanied the 9th Division, a unit he had previously covered in North Africa, on its drive across the Cotentin Peninsula to Cherbourg. To his chagrin, he found himself besieged by starstruck GIs wherever he went. “Hey, Ernie!” they called out, as though they were meeting an old friend. They brandished rifle stocks, canteens, franc notes, letters, and clippings of his old columns for him to sign.

Some asked him to pass along messages to their loved ones back home, a request he always took pains to grant. On one occasion, GIs actually interrupted a firefight with retreating Germans to crowd around him for autographs. A soldier in the 1st Armored Division explained Pyle’s appeal.

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Pyle with his wife, Jerry, and their Shetland sheepdog, Cheetah, at their home in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

“Most of these news men over here give me a healthy pain, but Ernie Pyle is different,” A. E. Bush observed in a letter to his father. “He lived and traveled right along with all of us, did the things we did, slept and sweated out all the things we did.” Pyle shrugged it off. “Soldiers like to read about themselves,” he said. Apparently, everyone else liked reading about them too: By that time, Pyle’s column was appearing in 700 daily or weekly newspapers, with an estimated readership of 30 million Americans.

The street fighting in Cherbourg was “full of sound and fury,” Pyle reported. He joined a company of riflemen on a foray up a narrow street. They crouched behind an old stone wall and then dashed one by one across an open culvert in the rain. “The men didn’t talk any,” Pyle wrote. “They just went.…They weren’t warriors. They were American boys who by mere chance of fate had wound up with guns in their hands sneaking up a death-laden street in a strange and shattered city in a faraway country in the driving rain.

They were afraid, but it was beyond their power to quit.

They had no choice.…And even though they aren’t warriors born to the kill, they win their battles. That’s the point.”

Pyle joined the 4th Infantry Division in late July on the breakout push codenamed Operation Cobra. On July 25, in an orchard outside Saint-Lô, he narrowly survived a mistaken dive-bombing by American planes that killed 111 GIs, including the overall commander of army ground

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forces, Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair, and Associated Press photographer Bede Irvin. Another afternoon, a German shell struck a mere 20 feet behind him—“not with a crash,” he wrote, “but with a ring as though you’d struck a high-toned bell.” Other shells destroyed a forward command post just moments before he arrived. Pyle interviewed Private Tommy Clayton, who had landed at Omaha Beach and spent 37 straight days in combat. The worst part of the experience, Pyle wrote, “is just the accumulated blur, and hurting vagueness of [being] too long in the lines, the everlasting alertness, the noise and fear, the cell-by-cell exhaustion, the thinning of the ranks around you as day follows nameless day. And the constant march into eternity of your own small quota of chances for survival.” Pyle spent four days and nights on his cot, sweating out fever, stomach pains, and a deadening sense of depression. “I really don’t believe I could go through the whole thing again and keep my sanity,” he told his agent.

A month later, still aching physically and mentally, Pyle rode into Paris alongside the onrushing Free French and American forces. Curiously, the accompanying celebration left him unmoved, even disgusted. The “pent-up semi­delirium” of the newly liberated citizens gave him a “rather low opinion of Paris,” he confessed privately. “I felt as though I were living in a whorehouse—not physically but spiritually.” It was time for another Stateside furlough, which he undertook in late September.

But Pyle got little rest on his return to the United States.

He passed through New York City, where his publisher was about to bring out a new book-length collection of his columns, Brave Men, and reunited with his wife in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she was hospitalized after another failed suicide attempt. (“Are you Ernie Pyle?” she asked. He said he was. “I don’t believe it,” she replied.) He then traveled to Los Angeles and met with director William A. Wellman and actor Burgess Meredith about The Story of G.I. Joe, the film version of Here Is Your War. He paid a brief homecoming visit to Dana, Indiana, and accepted an honorary doctorate from Indiana University, from which he had dropped out in 1923. “I’ve got to go back with the boys,” he told a childhood neighbor. “I’ve got to stick with them.”

For months, readers had clamored for Pyle to report on the war in the Pacific. Although his heart was still with the soldiers in Europe, he reluctantly agreed, departing the States on New Year’s Day, 1945. He flew from San Francisco to Honolulu to Guam. Everywhere he went, he was thronged by enlisted men and civilian autograph seekers. But he felt out of place in the Pacific and thought the fighting conditions there were a good deal more comfortable than in wintry Europe. It was “like watching a slow-motion picture,” he wrote, an “endless sameness” that drove the men

BOB LANDRY/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES); OPPOSITE FROM TOP: U.S. ARMY; U.S. MARINE CORPS HISTORY DIVISION; MEDIA SCHOOL, INDIANA UNIVERSITY BLOOMINGTON

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From top: Pyle’s body after a Japanese sniper killed him on August 18, 1945; Pyle’s father unveils the Boeing B-29 Superfortress named for his son at a dedication ceremony in 1945; the monument to Pyle where he was killed on Ie Shima.

LEFT: BOB LANDRY/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES); OPPOSITE FROM TOP: U.S. ARMY; U.S. MARINE CORPS HISTORY DIVISION; MEDIA SCHOOL, INDIANA UNIVERSITY BLOOMINGTON

“pineapple crazy” with boredom. Unless you were a marine on an island invasion, a naval flier, or a sailor on an infrequently engaged ship, “the bulk of the war out here, and the bulk of the men engaged in it, are simply marking time for months on a stretch,” he wrote “They’re just doing a sort of normal, safe, drudgery job away from home.” It was, he said, “dull as dishwater.”

The boredom lifted when the marines and army prepared to invade Okinawa, the last Japanese-held island before the mainland. Pyle sailed to the island aboard the command ship USS Panamint. He was fighting a bad cold—an ironic ailment in balmy Pacific waters for a veteran of the snowy foxholes on North Africa and Western Europe. Privately he confided to friends, “I’m not coming back from this one.” On April 18, on a rutted dirt road on the neighboring island of Ie Shima, Pyle’s premonition came true. He died holding the battered cloth fatigue cap he had worn all through North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and France. He was buried in a temporary grave beside an infantry private and a combat engineer. At the site where he was killed, the men of the 77th Division erected a monument noting: “At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy Ernie Pyle 18 April 1945.”

Millions of other soldiers, in Europe and the Pacific, felt the same way. General Eisenhower, who had known Pyle since the early days of the war in North Africa, spoke for all the men in his command when he said, “The GIs in Europe—and that means all of us—have lost one of our best and most understanding friends.” First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, recalling the afternoon she and Pyle shared tea, said, “I shall never forget how much I enjoyed meeting him in the White House last year, and how much I admired this frail and modest man who could endure hardships because he loved his job and our men.” And cartoonist Bill Mauldin, whose popular Willie and Joe comic strip was the visual equivalent of Pyle’s stories about the weary but persevering dogfaces, offered his own tribute: “The only difference between Pyle’s death and the death of any other good guy is that other guy is mourned by his company,” he said. “Ernie is mourned by his army.” For Ernie Pyle, that would have been more than enough. MHQ Roy Morris Jr. is the author of nine books, including, most recently, Gertrude Stein Has Arrived: The Homecoming of a Literary Legend (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).

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BATTLE OF THE MOUNTS

Major General Philip Sheridan was handpicked by Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant to lead the Army of the Potomac’s cavalry.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

In June 1864 two of the Civil War’s fiercest cavalry commanders faced off at Trevilian Station, Virginia.

By Rick Britton

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s Union brigadier general George Armstrong Custer barked out orders, the troops of his Michigan Brigade perfected their defense, churning up the dust as they deployed. They had just captured a large number of Confederate wagons, caissons, horses, and prisoners. But they were behind enemy lines in Virginia. Southern cavalrymen had the 800 Michiganders surrounded, caught inside what one Union trooper called “a living triangle.”

As enemy troops swirled around them, many of Custer’s squadrons remained mounted—a requirement for quick counterthrusts—but some took to the ground. On the eastern edge of the encirclement, dismounted horsemen hurriedly knelt behind a fence-rail barricade, their Spencer repeating carbines glistening in the midmorning sun.

When the Confederates attacked, they suddenly seemed to be everywhere at once. According to Michigan trooper Harmon Smith, they were fighting “at the front, in the rear, at the right and at the left.”

Shouting above the incessant firing, a muddled officer asked Custer whether they should move the captured Rebel property to the rear.

“Yes, by all means,” the young general replied. “Where in hell is the rear?”

Fought on June 11 and 12, 1864, the Battle of Trevilian Station was a contest between two of the war’s most aggressive cavalry commanders: Union major general Philip Sheridan and Confederate major general Wade Hampton III. At stake was a major section of the Virginia Central Railroad, the main rail link between the Shenandoah Valley—known as the breadbasket of the Confederacy—and General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The largest all-cavalry battle of the Civil War, Trevilians is also important for several other reasons. It not only illustrates the evolution of Civil War horse soldiers into mounted infantrymen but also marks Hampton’s emergence as a successful commander of Lee’s cavalry. Perhaps most important, the Confederate victory, because it safeguarded a critical Southern rail line, considerably prolonged the Civil War.

When the Confederates attacked, they seemed to be everywhere at once.

The Battle of Trevilian Station was fought in the third year of the Civil War, in the second week of June 1864. Just 10 miles

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northeast of Richmond, the Union’s Army of the Potomac under Major General George Meade—with his superior, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, looking over his shoulder—was stalled after launching disastrous assaults against Lee’s earthworks at Cold Harbor. The direct route to the Confederate capital was blocked, so Grant determined to move his huge army across the James River and take Petersburg, some 20 miles to the south. To accomplish this grand movement, Meade’s forces would have to draw off the bulk of the Confederate cavalry. A major diversion was needed.

On June 5 Meade ordered Sheridan, his cavalry corps commander, to ride west and capture Charlottesville. “Destroy the railroad bridge over the Rivanna [River] near that town,” read the orders, “[and] thoroughly destroy the [Virginia Central] railroad from that point to Gordonsville.” In the Shenandoah Valley, Union major general David Hunter had just won the Battle of Piedmont and had captured the city of Staunton. On June 6 Grant instructed Hunter to cross the Blue Ridge Mountains and, moving east, thoroughly tear up the Virginia Central tracks until he joined forces with Sheridan. These two forces, once combined, could wreak further havoc on Confederate supply lines throughout Central Virginia.

Born in Albany, New York, in 1831, Sheridan had graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1853. Starting off the war as a quartermaster, he was transferred to the cavalry and then the infantry, rising steadily in the ranks. Having distinguished himself on several battlefields, he came to Grant’s attention on November 25, 1863, when his infantry division—against orders—successfully stormed dug-in Confederates at Missionary Ridge, Tennessee. When Grant came east in early 1864, he brought along Sheridan to command the Army of the Potomac’s cavalry.

“Little Phil” Sheridan—“a small, broad-shouldered, squat man with black hair and a square head,” as a contemporary described him—set out confidently on June 7. As Sheridan would later write, he chose to march along the north bank of the North Anna River, cross the river at Carpenter’s Ford, and strike the Virginia Central Railroad at Trevilian Station, destroying rails there and between Gordonsville and Charlottesville to the west. Sheridan’s massive raiding party comprised two cavalry divisions under the command of Brigadier Generals Alfred T. A. Torbert and David M. Gregg, both 31-year-old West Point graduates.

The 9,200-man force, jangling along with its 20 pieces of artillery and 125 wagons, took up nearly six miles of road.

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BATTLE OF TREVILIAN STATION

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From top: Union brigadier general Alfred T. A. Torbert commanded one of two cavalry divisions; Union brigadier general George Armstrong Custer; Confederate major general Wade Hampton III came out on top at Trevilian Station.

On June 10 Sheridan’s horsemen splashed across the North Anna and went into camp a short distance beyond, near Clayton’s Store. Trevilian Station was just a few miles to the southwest. Once his experienced horsemen were astride the tracks the next morning, they would pry up the iron rails and bend them into uselessness after heating them atop blazing bonfires made from the ties. According to the plan, his next targets were Gordonsville and Charlottesville. What Sheridan hadn’t counted on, however, was the reception Hampton planned for him.

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Born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1818, Hampton had been one of the South’s wealthiest plantation owners.

When South Carolina seceded, he’d raised, uniformed, and equipped his own force—the Hampton Legion. “He looked a grand military chieftain,” wrote an admiring Southern cavalryman, “full-bearded, tall, erect, and massive; a horseman from life-long habit and natural aptitude.” By the spring of 1864 Hampton had become the senior major general—second in command—in Major General J. E. B. Stuart’s Cavalry Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia.

When Stuart was mortally wounded on May 11, however, Hampton—despite his seniority and a commendable battlefield record—was not immediately confirmed as chief of cavalry. Instead, Lee had the three cavalry division leaders report directly to him.

Hampton learned of Sheridan’s movement on June 8.

With Lee’s permission, by daylight the next morning the 4,400 cavalrymen of Hampton’s 1st Division were on the move. This force consisted of three brigades: one under Colonel Gilbert J. Wright; the famous “Laurel Brigade” under Brigadier General Thomas L. Rosser; and Brigadier General Matthew C. Butler’s brigade, which had just joined the army from the Charleston garrison. The men in this last unit, because it was armed with Enfield rifles—shorter versions of the infantry-issued rifled muskets—were more akin to mounted infantry than cavalry. Accompanying Hampton was a horse artillery battalion boasting 14 guns.

A second division under Major General Fitzhugh “Fitz” Lee, Robert E. Lee’s nephew, was ordered to follow.

On the evening of June 10, Hampton reached a position three miles west of Trevilian Station. Fitz Lee’s smaller cavalry division—two Virginia brigades totaling 1,800 men— went into camp near Louisa Court House, eight miles to the east. Not content to await Sheridan’s next move, and despite knowing that he was outnumbered, Hampton decided to attack the next morning.

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The first day of the battle was fought alongside an east– west stretch of the Virginia Central Railroad (and the Gordonsville Road that ran parallel to it) connecting Trevilian Station to Louisa Court House, four miles to the east, and along two roads heading north to Clayton’s Store (near Sheridan’s campsite). At Netherland Tavern, a two-story structure a mile east of Trevilian Station, the Fredericksburg Road plunged into the dense woods north of the iron rails and arrived at Clayton’s Store after wending a little over five miles. From Louisa Court House, the Marquis Road joined the Fredericksburg Road, just south of Clayton’s, after traveling north four miles. (These three main roads—Gordonsville, Fredericksburg, and Marquis— formed a rough triangle, with the Gordonsville Road as its base and Clayton’s Store its apex.) Along and to the south of the railroad the land was fairly open, but the area north of the tracks was heavily wooded, featuring only a few scattered farm fields. It was not well suited for mounted cavalry.

Early on the morning of June 11, Hampton, leaving Rosser’s brigade near Trevilian Station, marched north against Sheridan along the Fredericksburg Road with the troops under Butler and Wright. Fitz Lee was ordered to simultaneously attack north along the Marquis Road with his entire division. Sheridan’s two divisions at Clayton’s

Fitz Lee’s failure to press the attack had a major impact on the course of the battle.

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MAP BY ERWIN SHERMAN

The “uncooperatives”: Confederate major general Fitzhugh “Fitz” Lee (left) and Union major general David Hunter.

A mounted squadron of the 4th South Carolina trotted in advance of Hampton’s two brigades. Hampton had planned to surprise Sheridan, but the plucky Northerner was also on the move. When the troops made contact—prompting some frenzied shouting, an exchange of gunfire, and a brief mounted charge—Hampton dismounted Butler’s brigade and deployed it right and left. As the cavalrymen took to the woods as foot soldiers, horse holders—one man out of every four—led the riderless horses to the rear. “The ground was well chosen for the purpose,” Wells would later recall. “[The woods] would thus conceal [Confederate] numbers and dispositions…and in this way neutralize to a certain extent the greater effectiveness of the enemy’s magazine rifles.”

Because of the woods, the vicious fighting on either side of the Fredericksburg Road quickly devolved into confusion. Union captain Theophilus Rodenbough, commanding the 2nd U.S. Cavalry, wrote that his brigade, after driving in the 4th South Carolina, “advanced a quarter of a mile farther, when it found the enemy in force, dismounted, in a piece of timber, which extended across the road for some distance. Our cavalry was partly dismounted, and the entire First Division [under Torbert] became engaged.”

Now, as the cavalrymen made their way through the woods on foot, ragged volleys ripped through the tangled underbrush. Shouted commands were barely audible above the din of carbine and rifle fire. Both sides kept some of their squadrons mounted, the occasional open farm fields witnessing the only mounted actions.

With Butler’s brigade under pressure, Colonel Wright’s brigade came up on its left, deploying with great difficulty.

Artillery, too, got into the fight: Federal batteries unlimbered along a crest line and opened fire with shot and shell.

Confederate artillery responded from a mile away.

On Hampton’s right, Fitz Lee was less than fully cooperative. He did dispatch a force north along the Marquis Road, and the movement took place before daylight, but he sent only one brigade under Brigadier General Williams C. Wickham, not his entire division. After this force captured a 7th Michigan scouting party, it continued north until it encountered an enemy picket line posted on the opposite bank of Nunn’s Creek. When Wickham’s halfhearted assault resulted in a considerable firefight, and Federal reinforcements arrived, the Confederate general had had enough. He broke off the action and retreated down the Marquis Road. So much for Wade Hampton’s two-pronged attack.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

Store—still enjoying their morning coffee, the Confederates hoped—would thus be assaulted front and flank.

“Hemmed in and crowded together, with a river in the rear,” wrote Confederate trooper Edward L. Wells, “[Sheridan] could then be destroyed.”

ANATOMY OF THE BATTLE

MAP BY ERWIN SHERMAN

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

On June 8, 1864, ordered by Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant to destroy sections of the Virginia Central Railroad, Major General Philip Sheridan and his Union cavalry headed to Trevilian Station, Virginia. But Confederate cavalry under Major General Wade Hampton III beat Sheridan’s forces to the punch, and on June 11 the two sides fought to a standstill. The next day the two sides met again northwest of Trevilian Station, where both suffered heavy casualties as they fought into the night. In the end, Sheridan had little choice but to withdraw.

Fitz Lee’s failure to press the attack had a major impact on the course of the battle; it removed pressure from the Federal brigadier general at Nunn’s Creek: George Armstrong Custer. The 1861 West Point graduate had the perfect temperament for an outstanding commander of cavalry—the branch of the army that encouraged, indeed trained, its officers to be recklessly aggressive. He was nearly 6 feet tall, never weighing over 170 pounds. According to an army staff officer, Custer, with his hussar jacket, black velvet trousers, and straw-colored ringlet hair, looked “like a circus rider gone mad!”

Ordered to connect with the Federal forces pushing south along the Fredericksburg Road, Custer dashed down a little-used woods track that ran behind Nunn’s Creek to the Gordonsville Road. Not only did this lane bisect the two Confederate cavalry divisions—Hampton’s and Lee’s— but it also happened to be completely unguarded.

After just a short ride, Custer passed through the shielding woods and found himself a mile away from Trevilian Station—in General Hampton’s rear. In his immediate front sat Hampton’s ammunition and baggage trains, Butler’s and Wright’s horses, and the enemy riders who had

brought them there for safekeeping. Without hesitating, Custer ordered the 5th Michigan Cavalry to charge. In the wild, running melee that followed they captured hundreds of prisoners, 1,500 horses, and almost 100 vehicles— wagons, caissons, and ambulances.

Unfortunately for Custer, however, some of his riders ranged too far west. Confederate brigadier general Rosser—a friend of Custer’s from West Point—trotted his brigade down from Trevilian Station and attacked the Federal riders with two of his lead regiments. “I went crashing into him, breaking up and scattering his squadrons,” Rosser later recalled. “Sitting on his horse in the midst of his advanced platoons, and near enough to be easily recognized by me, he encouraged and inspired his men by appeal as well as by example.” When his headquarters color sergeant was shot down, Custer tore the flag from its staff and thrust it into his jacket.

Hampton and Sheridan continued to slug it out astride the Fredericksburg Road, but the day’s most vicious fighting centered on Custer’s position. From the north, Hampton withdrew a part of his division and ordered it back to reclaim the baggage and ammunition train. Fitz Lee at-

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Custer was surrounded and outnumbered for the first time in his military career.

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tiring west. He was isolated from Fitz Lee’s division by Sheridan’s possession of Trevilian Station and the woods and fields surrounding it.

Rain fell the night of June 11. At Mallory’s Crossroads, about two miles west of Trevilian Station, Hampton regrouped his division. His losses were heavy, but he was determined to impede the enemy’s advance. That evening Sheridan learned that General David Hunter had failed to cooperate with the strategic plan. Instead of marching over the Blue Ridge, “Black Dave” had continued up the Shenandoah Valley to Lexington.

The morning of June 12, Federal horsemen tore up three miles of the Virginia Central between Louisa Court House and Trevilian Station. This work accomplished, Sheridan in the midafternoon sent Torbert west to feel out Hampton’s defensive position. Deployed between the roads leading to Charlottesville and Gordonsville, Hampton’s line was shaped like the number 7, the top bar comprising Butler’s brigade sheltered behind the Virginia Central embankment, facing northeast. The balance of Hampton’s force—using piled fence rails to commence their fieldworks—had dug in along the 7’s descender, facing southeast. Open farm fields to the front promised deadly work for the troops’ carbines.

Unlimbered horse guns strengthened the line. Having circled south of Sheridan, Fitz Lee joined Hampton at this position, thereby providing him with a tactical reserve.

Torbert dismounted his troops and attacked on foot. Repeated Union assaults slapped against the Southern fieldworks. On the Confederate left, crouched behind the embankment, Butler’s Enfield-armed South Carolinians exacted a heavy toll. Merritt’s Brigade “went in on an open field to its right and attacked the enemy’s left flank vigorously,” Union captain Rodenbough noted. “It was slow work, however, and [the enemy] concentrated his force on the brigade, and gave the command as much as it could attend to.” When his right flank was threatened, General Merritt sent a mounted squadron—his last reserve—to cover it.

All afternoon the dismounted Federal assaults continued. A total of seven were counted. During one of the last attacks, Wells wrote, “One body marched…with beautiful precision, in close order, shoulder to shoulder, the rifles, Spencers or Winchesters, held horizontally at the hip and shooting continuously.” But when the unit’s leader was shot, Wells added, “immediately his men broke and ran.”

Torbert and Little Phil had had enough. As evening approached, Sheridan withdrew and began the trek back to the Army of the Potomac. He left behind about 100 woun­ ded. Nearly 2,000 African Americans attached themselves to the retiring Union column. Hampton’s force was too shaken to immediately pursue. Both sides suffered heavy casualties for the two-day battle—955 Federals and 813

CASE ANTIQUES

tacked Custer’s Brigade from the east. When Lee moved west along the Gordonsville Road, according to Rodenbough, he captured Custer’s wagon train and caissons, a spoil that included all of Custer’s previous captures (except 200 prisoners) and his headquarters wagon. Lee’s troops also took Eliza, Custer’s African American cook. (She later escaped, bringing Custer’s valise.)

With Lee’s division now sealing off the eastern flank, Rosser’s Virginians attacked from the west and south, and some of Butler’s South Carolinians moved in from the north. In the middle—in a position “very nearly a circle”— sat Custer and about 800 of his Michiganders. He was surrounded and outnumbered for the first time in his military career. Despite the seemingly dire situation, Custer’s troops did a superb job of holding on. The Southern forces had them trapped but could not overrun them. Undoubtedly, the firepower of the Michiganders’ Spencer repeating carbines greatly aided their defense.

Custer’s position was also bolstered by a battery, the 2nd U.S. Artillery under Lieutenant Alexander Pennington.

And these unlimbered fieldpieces—less mobile than soldiers fighting mounted or on foot—frequently became the targets of enemy attacks. John N. Opie of the 6th Virginia Cavalry, Lee’s division, later recalled how his company and another, not more than 80 men, charged Pennington’s guns: “The gunners fled upon our approach,” he wrote, “and left us, apparently, for the moment, victors of the field, with the guns in our possession.” They continued their charge with weapons drawn until a mounted regiment came dashing from the woods on their flank and drove them away. Opie—“shot through the bridle hand and through the lung,” he wrote—fell into enemy hands.

Learning of Custer’s situation and hoping for a breakthrough, Sheridan reinforced his troops fighting along the Fredericksburg Road. Hampton sensed the buildup and withdrew. A brief lull followed. Then, in the afternoon, in one large simultaneous assault, three of Sheridan’s brigades—those under Brigadier General Wesley Merritt and Colonels Thomas C. Devin and J. I. Gregg—forced the Confederates past Custer’s encirclement and reestablished contact. General Merritt reported that “the enemy was driven…to Trevilian Station; but not without serious loss to ourselves, though we inflicted heavy punishment on the adversary.” In the Confederate retreat, hundreds of Southerners were forced into Custer’s lines and taken prisoner.

The confused fighting of June 11 ended with Hampton re-

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Thomas L. Rosser and his famous “Laurel Brigade” attack Union forces under George Armstrong Custer on June 11. The two brigadier generals had been friends at West Point.

CASE ANTIQUES

Confederates—but of course the South, with its smaller population, found its losses much harder to replace.

Both sides claimed victory. Northerners said that Sheridan had succeeded in drawing away most of the Confederate cavalry while Grant pulled off his scurry to the left. And the Federal raiders had destroyed a few miles of track. (The damage to the Virginia Central, however, was trifling.)

Southerners countered that Hampton had stopped Sheridan cold; the former was obviously the better commander.

The first day’s fight was certainly a Federal tactical victory—as Custer was rescued from annihilation and the Confederates had withdrawn from the field—but the second day’s action was completely dominated by Wade Hampton. Hampton also scored the strategic victory. He’d handled his force superbly, outmarching Sheridan to get astride the Virginia Central ahead of him and ultimately denying him the two important railroad towns. Two months later, thanks to his performance at Trevilian Station, Hampton was made Lee’s chief of cavalry.

In 1866 Sheridan boasted that, following the Battle of the Wilderness, he and his cavalry “marched when and where we pleased; were always the attacking party, and always successful.” Yet he had concluded his Trevilian Sta-

tion after-action report to Grant by stating, “I regret my inability to carry out your instructions.”

Over the years, Trevilian Station has been at the center of many exaggerated boasts. Confederate major Roger Preston Chew, who fought at Trevilian Station, claimed that the battle was one of the most important of the war because it preserved the railroad. “Trevilians was so important to General Lee,” Chew wrote, “that he was enabled thereby to stay in Petersburg for nearly a year longer.”

How much longer did the Confederate victory extend the war? It’s impossible to say. But Southerner George Neese, another participant, hit the nail on the head when he wrote: “It seems that Uncle Sam is depending on, and putting his trust in, the might of numbers to grind the armies and the rebellious Southland down by sheer attrition and brute force; consequently the powers that be at Washington select the commanders for their butting qualities instead of strategical capabilities.” The Southland could win victories like Trevilians, but that “grinding”—the war of attrition waged in Virginia by men like Grant and Sheridan—would ultimately seal the Confederacy’s fate. MHQ Rick Britton, a historian and cartographer, lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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PICTORIAL PRESS LTD (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

THE SELFMADE HERO PICTORIAL PRESS LTD (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

Arthur Guy Empey parlayed his brief service in World War I into a best-selling book and a career in Hollywood. Then he lost everything.

By Ron Soodalter

In 1918 Arthur Guy Empey played himself in a silent motion picture loosely based on his best-selling World War I memoir. No print of the film is known to have survived.

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Empey found that life in the trenches was a mix of squalor and unnerving experiences.

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take him to a lieutenant at another office who would be willing to bend the rules for him.

Soon Empey was serving in the 1st Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, as the British Army’s City of London Regiment was known. Fully outfitted—hobnail steel-toed boots, puttees, bayonet, entrenching tool, felt-covered canteen, waterproof sheet, heavy woolen “trench cap”—Empey shipped out for France. He was about to experience the horrors of trench warfare, but that harrowing experience would, on his return home, help to make Empey one of the most famous people in America: a best-selling author, a lecturer who filled theaters, and a silent movie star and early Hollywood celebrity. But Empey’s meteoric ascent, fueled by his own talent for self-promotion, would be followed by an even steeper decline into controversy and, finally, obscurity. It’s a quintessentially American story of a man who struggled to live up to the legend he had created.

Empey arrived at Rouen, France, carrying the Lee-Enfield rifle he’d been issued. He was soon given a steel helmet, two “gas helmets,” a couple of blankets, and a tin of antifrostbite grease. He plunged into 10 days of intensive training on the rudiments of trench warfare, from putting up and repairing barbed wire to the procedures that should be followed during enemy poison-gas attacks. Then he and his British comrades headed off to the Western Front.

Empey soon found that life in the trenches was a mix of squalor and unnerving experiences—from the ever-present rats and lice to the continual German shelling to the ubiquitous mud. “The men slept in mud, washed in mud, ate mud, and dreamed mud,” he would later write. “I had never before realized that so much discomfort and misery could be contained in those three little letters, MUD.” But worst of all was when Empey and the others climbed out of the trenches and rushed into no man’s land to confront the Germans at close range. Empey later recalled one such foray, in which he was enveloped in a wave of carnage: “Tommy about 15 feet to my right front turned around and looking in my direction, put his hand to his mouth and yelled something which I could not make out on account of the noise from the bursting shells,” he wrote. “Then he coughed, stumbled, pitched forward, and lay still. His body seemed to float to the rear of me.” Empey tried to remember his bayonet instructor’s admonitions as he shut his eyes and plunged forward. He felt his rifle torn from his grip, as his bayonet sliced into a German soldier. “I must have gotten the German, because he had disappeared,” Empey recalled. He watched a towering German battle three British soldiers, smashing one’s skull like an eggshell with the

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS

I

n May 1915 Arthur Guy Empey, a 31-year-old recruiting sergeant with the New Jersey National Guard, was sitting in his office in Jersey City. It was a warm, pleasant spring day, and through his window, Empey—a sturdy man with an animated, energetic manner—could hear a street musician turning the crank on a hurdy-gurdy and playing a popular melody of the time, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.”

For Empey, the tune clashed discordantly with the top headline in the newspaper on his desk: lusitania sunk! american lives lost! He looked to a massive wall map of Europe; small flags pinned to it showed the positions of the German and Allied armies along the Western Front in France. A National Guard lieutenant silently went over to his desk, took an American flag from his drawer, and solemnly draped it over the map. “How about it, Sergeant?” the lieutenant said to Empey. “You had better get out the muster roll of the Mounted Scouts, as I think they will be needed in the course of a few days.” The two men worked into the evening, preparing telegrams telling guard members to report for duty so that the messages could be sent as soon as word came from Washington, D.C. But the orders they were waiting for didn’t come. After a few months, Empey’s lieutenant, sighing with disgust, took the American flag and put it back in his desk. Empey took the dusty stack of telegrams and pitched them in the trash. He felt depressed and uneasy.

A native of Ogden, Utah, whose family had moved back East, Empey had spent most of his adult life in uniform. After high school, he started out as a sailor in the U.S. Navy, where he’d nearly been killed in a turret explosion. He’d then enlisted in the U.S. Cavalry, where he’d attained the rank of sergeant major, become an expert marksman and equestrian, and patrolled the border during the Mexican Revolution. Now, he was spoiling for a fight with the Germans. One day, he abruptly decided that if President Woodrow Wilson wasn’t going to send him to fight, he’d go on his own. He booked passage on a ship to England and showed up at a British Army recruiting station on Tottenham Court Road in London, wearing an American flag pin on his lapel. Initially, he was turned down because he was from a neutral country, but a recruiting sergeant followed Empey outside and said he could

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IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS

This photograph purported to show British troops going “over the top” in the Battle of the Somme, where Empey was wounded, but it was actually taken during a behind-the-lines training exercise.

butt of his rifle before another got behind him and slammed a bayonet into his neck, so that the point came out through his throat. Empey saw the look of astonishment on the German soldier’s face as he fell.

In a moment, Empey felt something hit his left shoulder, and his side went numb. “It felt as if a hot poker was being driven through me,” he later recalled. “I felt no pain—just a sort of nervous shock. A bayonet had pierced me from the rear. I fell backward on the ground, but was not unconscious, because I could see dim objects moving around me. Then a flash of light in front of my eyes and unconsciousness.” When he woke up, he was back in the trenches, being carried on a stretcher.

After spending six weeks in the hospital recovering from his injuries, Empey rejoined his outfit. Along with several other soldiers, he was sent to a school for “bomb throwing.” The so-called Mills bombs were early iterations of fragmentation grenades, and before long Empey qualified as a “bomber.”

In July 1916, in the opening days of the Battle of the Somme—the “Big Push,” British soldiers called it—enemy machine guns opened up as Empey and his mates charged the German trenches. Taking cover in the darkness, he reached over and touched the body of one of his comrades

and discovered that the top of the man’s head had been blown off. He got up again, and a bullet hit him in the shoulder. The fear was gone, replaced by rage. He pulled the pin from a grenade and threw it blindly at the German trench just 10 feet away. He saw two German soldiers fall backward and crumple. He turned and ran back through the barbed wire as the surviving Germans opened fire on him. He was hit in the shoulder and in the face. Then everything went black.

The doctor who treated Empey told him that he had lain unconscious in no man’s land for a day and a half and that it was a wonder he was alive. Of the 20 men in his raiding party, 17 had been killed. Empey had lasted a year in the British Army, but now, for him, the war was over. It was time for him to start creating his legend.

At the American Women’s War Hospital near Paignton, England, a Harvard-trained surgeon rebuilt Empey’s battered face, grafting a piece of bone from a cadaver rib to fill the hole that a bullet had left in his cheek. After a lengthy recovery, Empey returned to America. He tried to enlist in the U.S. Army but was rejected because of his injuries.

Having been declared unfit for military service, Empey decided to bring the war home to Americans. He began

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XXXXXXXXXX

Empey’s book was an immediate success, selling nearly a million copies.

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the hardships and peril endured by soldiers “are far outweighed by the deep sense of satisfaction felt by the man who does his bit.”

Though Empey had served only briefly in combat, Over the Top made him into one of the war’s most famous heroes and an instant celebrity. Shortly after publication, he embarked on a nationwide promotional tour that doubled as an opportunity to recruit soldiers for the war effort. Variously reading passages from his book, boosting the sale of Liberty Bonds, and speaking about America’s need for volunteers, Empey became one of the nation’s most effective and charismatic purveyors of government war propaganda. According to one newspaper account he sold more than $1 million in war bonds.

Empey’s skill as a performer apparently caught the attention of Vitagraph, a Brooklyn-based movie studio, which hired Anderson to adapt the book into a screenplay.

The studio also offered Empey a chance to portray a version of himself on the screen, and he agreed.

As with many other silent films, no print exists of Over the Top (1918), which oddly bore little resemblance to the book, instead using the war mostly as a backdrop for melodrama. In it, Empey’s character, James Garrison “Garry” Owen, joins the British Army and, after being wounded in combat, returns to the United States. While in New York he falls in love with Helen, and they plan to marry after Owen returns from fighting with the American forces in France.

Improbably, a German officer abducts Helen and takes her

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TOP LEFT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS; BOTTOM LEFT: EVERETT COLLECTION; CENTER: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; RIGHT: VINTAGE IMAGES (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

giving lectures at clubs in New York, describing his experiences on the Western Front. He turned out to be a surprisingly riveting speaker. He had a trick of standing with one foot on the seat of a chair in the middle of a stage, as if he were on the edge of a frontline trench, while he described combat to his listeners. The jagged red scar on his cheek, faint but still perceptible, was evidence of what he had experienced.

Robert Gordon Anderson, a sales manager and occasional writer for the publishing house of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, went to one of Empey’s lectures and came away thinking that the ex-­soldier’s adventures would make a best-selling book. Empey agreed to collaborate with Anderson, and the two men produced a memoir, Over the Top. The book reached stores in 1917, shortly after the United States entered the war, which turned out to be perfect timing. Over the Top was an immediate success, selling nearly a million copies.

While depicting the hardships and gory mass slaughter of modern combat in vivid detail, Over the Top was also a clever piece of propaganda, aimed at shaming Americans into enlisting. “War is not a pink tea,” the book warns, but

LEFT: NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY; RIGHT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS

Left: Empey, posing here in his uniform, was billed as “The Lecture Sensation of a Generation” for a 1917 appearance in Baltimore. Right: Lois Meredith played Empey’s love interest in Over the Top.

TOP LEFT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS; BOTTOM LEFT: EVERETT COLLECTION; CENTER: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; RIGHT: VINTAGE IMAGES (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

LEFT: NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY; RIGHT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS

From left: Two surviving stills from Over the Top; Empey at Camp Wheeler, a U.S. Army base near Macon, Georgia, where the movie was filmed; Empey in 1911, when he was in the U.S. 11th Cavalry.

by submarine to Europe. Amping up the romantic drama, Owen is also captured by the Germans and forced to attend a banquet celebrating the German officer’s marriage to Helen. But after a servant poisons the German wedding guests, Owen kills the officer, and he and Helen escape to Allied territory.

Over the Top opened at the Lyric Theater in New York City on March 31, 1918. Advertisements in local newspapers for the 10-reel film, billed as “Vitagraph’s Stupendous Photo-Play of Empey’s World-Famed Book,” noted that “Sergeant Empey will appear personally tonight and at every performance for the first week.” In June, President Wilson attended the Washington premiere of Over the Top at the Strand Theater—which featured painted scenery, a fabricated trench, and a live orchestra—with his wife and members of his cabinet.

Cheesy as it may have been, Over the Top was apparently successful enough to launch Empey on a new career as an actor. In the summer of 1918, he appeared in a play, Pack Up Your Troubles. Around that time, the U.S. Army recognized Empey’s contribution to the war effort by commissioning him as a captain in the Adjutant General’s Department.

But Empey’s career as an officer ended before it had even started. According to the New York Times, after performing in Pack Up Your Troubles at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C., he used the curtain call to make a short speech in which he paid tribute to the soldiers in the French and British armies. Empey said those volunteers

were the real heroes, because they’d fought willingly— unlike the Americans who’d gone to war because they’d been drafted. The stunned audience—which included President Wilson—didn’t applaud him. A few days later, Empey’s commission was withdrawn, and he was discharged from the army. Wilson’s secretary sent him a letter, explaining that having Empey recruit volunteers would interfere with “the orderly selective process.”

But Empey didn’t let the embarrassment stop him. He had become friends with movie stars such as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and he soon moved to Hollywood, where he used the royalties from the book and movie versions of Over the Top to start his own studio, the Guy Empey Pictures Corporation, where he would work as a producer, screenwriter, and actor. Empey churned out a succession of pictures, such as The Undercurrent, Millionaire for a Day, The Midnight Flyer, and Into No Man’s Land, a contrived 1928 drama about a jewel thief and an investigator who reencounter one another in the trenches in France.

Empey continued his career as a writer as well, mostly producing books with a military slant, with titles such as A Helluva War. He even tried his hand as a songwriter, composing the lyrics to such patriotic ballads as “Our Country’s In It Now, We’ve Got to Win It Now,” “Liberty Statue Is Looking Right at You,” and “Your Lips Are No Man’s Land but Mine.”

Empey also continued to be in demand as a public speaker. In 1922, for example, he gave an impassioned ad-

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By the end of the 1920s, however, Empey’s star was rapidly fading. Silent films were on the way out, and the reading public had grown tired of books and stories with World War I themes. Also, Empey apparently wasn’t very good at managing his finances. In March 1929, a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times revealed that the former war hero had declared bankruptcy, with liabilities of $124,417.35 and assets of just $420, including two typewriters.

Empey, like many others in the motion-picture industry, was unable to navigate the transition to talkies. He was involved in one last silent movie, Troopers Three, a 1930 comedy. (Empey was credited with the story.) The film, set in the U.S. Cavalry, was billed as “The Greatest Laugh Hit of the Year.” It wasn’t. The film flopped, and Empey’s movie career was over.

In an effort to keep his writing career going, Empey gradually transformed his O’Leary character, converting him from a lout into an increasingly savvy and sophisticated adventurer—veteran of the French Foreign Legion, secret agent, ace fighter pilot, and commander of the “Black Wings Pursuit Squadron.” He made his villains increasingly fantastical as well, switching from nefarious Germans to outlandish characters like Unuk, the evil 500-year-old immortal high priest of the God of the Depths, and his right bower, Umgoop the Horrible, high priest of the subaquatic kingdom of Neptunia. Instead of machine guns and mustard gas, O’Leary now faced chemical mind control and a flotilla of airships equipped with death rays.

But the science fiction–fantasy approach never caught on, and in 1936 Empey’s publishers dropped his O’Leary series. His career as a pulp novelist was over as well.

By the end of the 1920s, Empey’s star was rapidly fading. He was also broke.

Behind Empey’s carefully cultivated image as a patriotic hero, he had a darker, disturbing side. His writing sometimes had anti-Semitic overtones—in Over the Top, for in-

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stance, he created a New York “money lender” named Ikey Cohenstein, and Tales from a Dugout includes an anecdote about a recruiting official whom Empey describes as “a little fat, greasy Jew.” By the mid-1930s, with his creative career on the wane and his World War I exploits fading in the public memory, Empey tried to remake himself again— this time as a leader in the nascent far-right, nativist movement seeking to counter President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the labor movement, and the leftist leanings of many in Hollywood.

Empey founded an organization called the Hollywood Hussars. Headquartered at the Hollywood Athletic Club, his volunteer paramilitary cavalry militia included signal and medical teams, an intelligence section, a motorcycle dispatch wing, and an MP-style police force. Its members wore natty uniforms, drilled regularly on horseback and on foot, and took firearms instruction. He described it as a “military-social unit, devoted to the advancement of American ideals.” The former sergeant assigned himself the rank of colonel.

While Empey was no longer a film star, his name was still familiar enough—especially in Hollywood—that his organization attracted national attention. Reportedly, publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst was one of its supporters. For his personnel director, Empey chose Edwin C. “Ted” Parsons. Parsons was a man after Arthur Empey’s own heart, having served as a pilot in the famed Lafayette Escadrille (he was an eight-victory ace), a special agent for the FBI, a technical consultant on high-budget war films, and a writer and radio narrator of his own wartime experiences. Parsons would eventually serve in the U.S. Navy during World War II, rising to the rank of rear admiral.

The Hussars soon boasted a roster that included some of Hollywood’s most prominent conservative celebrities, including actors Ward Bond and Gary Cooper. Cooper was America’s highest paid and most popular movie star, and his imprimatur lent further legitimacy to Empey’s organization. Cooper initially described the group as motivated by “Americanism,” which Hollywood political historian Donald T. Critchlow has noted was used by some as a code word for allegiance to the far right.

As Empey explained to the Motion Picture Herald, the Hollywood Hussars were “armed to the teeth and ready to gallop on horseback within an hour to cope with any emergency menacing the safety of the community, fights or strikes, floods or earthquakes, wars, Japanese ‘invasions,’ communistic ‘revolutions,’ or whatnot.” But according to Jimmy Stewart biographer Donald Dewey, Empey had another, even more bizarre ambition: invading the Soviet Republic of Georgia to secure oil drilling rights for an American millionaire who was one of the organization’s chief financial backers.

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dress to a meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Washington, D.C., in which he touted “real Americanism.” Among other things, he urged the DAR to pressure Hollywood to feature American heroes and stories rather than European ones—an odd stance for a man who had once extolled the virtues of British and French soldiers.

Empey also began pounding out World War I–themed short stories for magazines such as War Stories, Battle Stories, and War Birds, featuring a hard-drinking, roughneck soldier hero named Terence X. O’Leary.

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Clockwise from left: Actor Gary Cooper (as Sergeant Alvin York); the Hollywood Athletic Club, towering over Sunset Boulevard; Edwin C. Parsons, personnel director of the Hollywood Hussars; a 1935 recruitment ad for the Hussars.

In May 1935, journalist Carey McWilliams wrote a column for the widely read Nation magazine under the heading, “Hollywood Plays with Fascism.” In it, he pilloried Cooper and others in the Hussars, referring to them as “warriors-in-make-up,” and to Cooper specifically as a “movie-lot Bengal Lancer.” McWilliams accused them of “permit[ting] their names to be used as sponsors for fascist groups in Hollywood.”

Suddenly finding himself in the middle of a red-hot controversy, Cooper hastily announced that he had quit the Hussars. In a statement to the press that was almost certainly written by the Warner Bros. public relations department, he said, “The Hussars are not the social group I had thought….

The men behind it are trying to organize a national, semi-military organization of a political nature.”

Meanwhile, the Hollywood Hussars continued to drill under the instruction of active-duty police officials and retired army officers.

Empey’s vitriolic rhetoric aside, the Hollywood Hussars ultimately proved quite harmless, spending their time parading and posturing in uniform, giving speeches, practicing military maneuvers, playing polo, and staging social galas. There were no pall-mall horseback dashes to rescue the community from fights, strikes, floods, “Japanese invasions,” or “communistic revolutions,” nor did the community find the need to call on this band of misguided patriots for anything more challenging than what most of them already provided—entertainment.

In forming the Hollywood Hussars, Empey had attempted to recreate a cavalry unit reminiscent of his first military experience but with an extremist agenda. In the end, despite his goal of taking the Hussars nationwide, the organization lasted less than a year. The fiasco would provide a strange coda to his once promising Hollywood career.

During World War II, Empey resurfaced briefly, when a reporter for the Associated Press found him working the graveyard shift as a plant guard at the Burbank factory of Vega Aircraft Corporation. He told the wire service that it was the “first real job” that he’d ever had and that he was doing it to contribute to the war effort and to gather material for a novel about defense plant workers.

But Empey noted that World War II wasn’t the great adventure that the previous war had been. Warfare had turned into “a grim, cold and deliberate job,” he said.

Empey never published that last novel. Instead, he slipped back into obscurity; his world had vanished. He didn’t show up in the news again until 1963, when he died at the Veterans Hospital in Wadsworth, Kansas, at age 79.

The man who’d once been among the most celebrated heroes of World War I left behind little more than his British Army citations—two campaign medals and an honorable discharge badge. MHQ Ron Soodalter is the author of Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader (Atria Books, 2006).

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NOW SEE HERE

A gallery of devices designed to aid the naked eye

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n war, seeing is everything, and for more than 400 years militaries the world over have sought out new ways to scope out their enemies. Hans Lippershey, a Dutch spectacle maker, is credited with inventing the telescope (in 1608), but a prominent British science historian presented evidence in 1991 that Leonard Digges, an English mathematician and surveyor, had come up with a reflecting telescope sometime between 1540 and his death in 1559. As England lived in abject fear of a Spanish invasion, Digges’s invention may have been kept under wraps as a military secret, and England crushed Spain’s “Invincible Armada” when it finally arrived in 1588. As for Lippershey’s telescope, the Dutch tried to keep it a secret too, according to the late Archibald Roy, an astronomer at Glasgow University, correctly envisioning that “a general could overlook the whole field of battle with it.”

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Napoleon’s spyglass. In 1818, three years after Britain exiled him to St. Helena, France’s ex-emperor presented this Galilean telescope with eight draw tubes—more a fashion accessory designed to fit in the pocket than an instrument for making serious observations—to Captain Francis Stanfell of HMS Phaeton, which was plying the waters around the remote island to disrupt the Atlantic slave trade.

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NOW SEE HERE

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A. Washington’s telescope. In his will, George Washington identified this three-draw mahogany and brass spyglass by the London optical instrument maker Henry Pyefinch as one “which constituted part of my equipage during the late War.” B. Confederate spyglass. This spyglass, made by the London firm Negretti & Zambra (founded by two Italian immigrants) was used by the Confederate army’s signal corps during the Civil War. C. M16A1D telescope elbow. This fixed-focus, 3-power instrument with stadia lines (crosshairs) was designed to sight a 105mm howitzer when it was used as a direct fire weapon (the rubber eyepiece is missing); similar models were made for various field artillery pieces.

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(D) NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; (E, F) IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS (2)

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(A) MOUNT VERNON LADIES’ ASSOCIATION; (B) NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; (C) HERITAGE AUCTIONS

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(D) NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; (E, F) IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS

(A) MOUNT VERNON LADIES’ ASSOCIATION; (B) NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; (C) HERITAGE AUCTIONS

E

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D. Billy Mitchell’s flying goggles. These goggles, manufactured by E. B. Meyrowitz, were issued to military aviators as part of their standard flying equipment in World War I; this pair belonged to Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell, the commander of the U.S. Army Air Service. E. Splinterproof goggles. H. F. Game, a lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps, was wearing these goggles, made by the Triplex Safety Glass Company, when he crash-landed while flying with 48 Squadron in World War I; the firm later featured him in its advertising. F. Antigas goggles. The British Army issued these goggles to soldiers on the Western Front in 1915, but the goggles were deemed obsolete the following year.

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G. Grant’s field glasses. These binoculars, with cloth-covered barrels and 55mm objective lenses, belonged to Union lieutenant general Ulysses S. Grant, who probably used them during the Civil War; they’re now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution. H. Japanese trench binoculars. This tripod-mounted device, manufactured during World War II by the optical firm Nippon Kogaku (the forerunner of Nikon Corporation), features two periscope tubes that can be folded together or spread apart like scissors. I. Battle of the Little Bighorn field glasses. These French-made binoculars (missing one lens) were reportedly found in 1996 at the site of Custer’s Last Stand in southeastern Montana.

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(J, K) HERITAGE AUCTIONS (2); (L) NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

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(G) NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; (H) IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS; (I) HERITAGE AUCTIONS

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NOW SEE HERE

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(J, K) HERITAGE AUCTIONS; (L) NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

(G) NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; (H) IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS; (I) HERITAGE AUCTIONS

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J. U.S. Navy “big eyes” bridge binoculars. This naval observation device, which stands some 55 inches tall and measures 36 1/2 inches from eyepieces to objective lenses, has it all: elevation controls, focus adjustments, and a traversing mechanism. K. Hap Arnold’s World War I binoculars. Henry “Hap” Arnold used these French binoculars, purchased at Philadelphia’s John Wanamaker department store, when he was a major in the aviation section of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. L. Nikko binoculars. These Japanese binoculars were captured during the Battle of Leyte in 1944, just weeks after General Douglas A. MacArthur delivered his “I have returned” message to the Philippine people.

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(Q) INTERNATIONAL SPY MUSEUM; (R) AUTOMOTIVE ARCHIVE FUND

M. U.S. Army infrared M3 Sniperscope. First used in combat during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, this night-vision version of the selective-fire M2 carbine gave units the ability to see—and fire at—greenish images of enemy soldiers.

N. No. 2 MKIII rangefinder. British infantry units fighting in the trenches of World War I typically used these rangefinders with Vickers machine guns. O. Miniature monocular. Britain’s Special Operations Executive developed this matchbox-size telescope for use by its commandos in World War II. P. Civil War sniper’s rifle. This rifle was equipped with a 12-power telescopic sight made from cold-drawn steel that provided a 20-foot field of vision at 220 yards.

(M) ROYAL ARMOURIES; (N, O) IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS; (P) HERITAGE AUCTIONS

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NOW SEE HERE

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(Q) INTERNATIONAL SPY MUSEUM; (R) AUTOMOTIVE ARCHIVE FUND

(M) ROYAL ARMOURIES; (N, O) IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS (2); (P) HERITAGE AUCTIONS

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Q. Pigeon camera. Julius Neubronner, a German apothecary who relied on pigeons to deliver medications to his customers, patented a workable method for using the birds for aerial photography in 1907. In the early years of World War I, the German military strapped time-delayed miniature cameras to homing pigeons for aerial reconnaissance of enemy territory, but the rapid perfection of aviation soon rendered the avian approach obsolete. R. Truck-mounted night vision binoculars. The Soviet Union began experimenting with night-vision devices in the early years of its entry into World War II; this prototype, installed on a GAZ-AA truck, featured a roof-mounted 250-watt infrared headlamp.

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BASEBALL’S ODD MAN OUT

Moe Berg joined the Washington Senators as a catcher in 1932 and stayed through the team’s pennantwinning season the following year.

Berg’s move to the nation’s capital would change his life forever.

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BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES)

Morris “Moe” Berg was a brainy academic who spoke a dozen languages. He was also a spy.

By Liesl Bradner

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BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES)

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n the fall of 1934 Morris “Moe” Berg, a journeyman backup catcher for the Cleveland Indians baseball team, caught a break—or so it was thought. To the surprise of many people, he was named to a squad of 14 major league ballplayers preparing for a post-­ season tour of Japan, where he would be in the rarefied company of such superstars as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmy Foxx, Lefty Gomez, and legendary manager Connie Mack. It was the first time since high school that the whipsmart but light-hitting prodigy had made an all-star team.

Why Berg was picked to join the tour in the first place was never explained. A brainy academic—he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University, went on to earn a law degree from Columbia University, and read 10 newspapers a day—Berg was an enigma to his less intellectual fellow ballplayers, a man who was seemingly more interested in international diplomacy than daily batting averages.

“He could speak 12 languages,” a former teammate once joked, “but he couldn’t hit in any of them.” It was assumed that Berg’s mastery of languages would come in handy at a time when Japan was growing increasingly hostile to other countries in the region. As it turns out, the veteran baseball player was more than a talented linguist.

He was also a spy.

Did Berg use baseball as a disguise, or did he honestly enjoy playing the sport?

No one knows exactly when Berg’s baseball career collided with his shadowy spy craft, but altogether befitting a secret agent, he was an enigma to his teammates and friends. His life, then and later, was filled with unanswered questions.

Did Berg use baseball as a disguise, or did he honestly enjoy playing the sport? Those who knew him best believed it was a little of both.

The youngest of three children, Berg was born in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City on March 2, 1902, to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, sharing a tenement apartment on East 121st Street with his parents and his two siblings. Berg’s father, Bernard, operated a laundry while teaching himself to read English, French, and German.

From his home Moe could look across the Harlem River to Yankee Stadium, where the New York team played. In due time, he would play there himself. After excelling at night classes, the elder Berg earned enough money to open a pharmacy and move the family to a more comfortable apartment in Newark, New Jersey.

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From the start, his father encouraged Berg to study and read. Although Moe thrived in school, his real passion, like many kids his age, was baseball. One day a beat cop noticed him zipping a ball around on the street and invited him to join the local Methodist Episcopal Church team—much to the chagrin of Berg’s hard-working father, who viewed baseball as a waste of time and intellect. The only Jew on a team of Italian Catholics and Protestants, the imaginative 7-year-old Moe created his first pseudonym, changing his playing name to “Runt Wolfe.”

At age 16 Berg graduated at the top of his class from Barringer High School in Newark and was selected as the starting third baseman for a nine-man high school “dream team” chosen by the Newark Star Eagle. In the spring of 1918 he was accepted at New York University. The following year, after two semesters playing baseball and basketball at NYU, Berg transferred to Princeton, where he played first base and shortstop. Following in his father’s footsteps, Moe studied languages, excelling in Spanish, Latin, Greek, Italian, German, and Sanskrit. When not playing ball, he tutored his teammates. He was known to confound opponents by yelling tips in Latin back and forth with equally intellectual second baseman Crossan Cooper.

Being Jewish, Berg endured some awkward moments at Princeton. When one of his teammates was nominated for membership in one of Princeton’s prestigious dining clubs, the teammate refused to join unless Berg could also become a member. The club consented on the condition that the two of them not attempt to bring any more Jews into the club. The teammates declined. Feeling responsible for his teammate’s principled refusal, Berg talked him into becoming a member anyway. As for Berg, he never returned to Princeton for class reunions.

Despite the prejudice, Berg played baseball for three years at Princeton. In his senior season he was captain of the team, batting .337 for the year and a sparkling .611 against Princeton’s archrivals, Harvard and Yale. He played against Yale at Yankee Stadium and got three hits in one game.

Graduating magna cum laude in 1923, Berg signed a $5,000 contract to play major league baseball with the Brooklyn Robins (soon to be renamed the Brooklyn Dodgers), which was eager to add a Jewish ballplayer to expand its fan base.

Batting a dismal .186 as a backup shortstop that first year, Berg packed his bags after season’s end and sailed to Paris, where he enrolled at the prestigious Sorbonne to study Latin, ultimately registering for 32 classes.

Returning in time for spring training in 1924, Berg was exiled to the minor leagues. He spent the next two years playing for the Minneapolis Millers, Toledo Mud Hens, and Reading (Pennsylvania) Keystones. His more than respect-

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY; ARTHUR W. DIAMOND LAW LIBRARY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SHOOL OF LAW; BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES)

MOE BERG, SPY

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY; ARTHUR W. DIAMOND LAW LIBRARY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SHOOL OF LAW; BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES)

Clockwise from top: Berg (center) and Japanese ballplayer Takizo Matsumoto (left) with unidentified friend; Berg with his 16mm Bell and Howell movie camera; Babe Ruth with geishas during the 1934 tour of Japan.

able .311 batting average with the Keystones got him a ticket back to the majors with the Chicago White Sox in 1926, but not before he skipped spring training to finish his first year at Columbia Law School. A series of injuries to White Sox catchers gave Berg an opening: He volunteered to catch, even though he had never played the position before. In his first game behind the plate, White Sox pitchers held Babe Ruth hitless and won 6–3. Berg had a found new home.

Never much of a hitter, Berg had developed a strong throwing arm and used his dominating intelligence to help

his pitchers call better games. No less a player than Boston Red Sox’s Ted Williams sought his advice. During the second year of his storied career, Williams asked Berg how Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig had hit. “Gehrig would wait and wait and wait until he hit the pitch almost out of the catcher’s glove,” Berg replied. “As to Ruth, he had no weaknesses.

He had a good eye and laid off pitches out of the strike zone.”

The hitter Williams most resembled, said Berg, was Shoeless Joe Jackson, the former Chicago “Black Sox” great. “But you,” Berg told Williams, “are better than all of them.”

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MOE BERG, SPY

Berg returned to Japan in 1934 with a top-secret government assignment.

Berg’s move to the nation’s capital would change his life.

He was frequently invited to embassy dinners and parties, where his quick wit and formidable language skills caught the attention of prominent members of the incoming Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Following the 1932 season, Berg was invited to accompany fellow major leaguers Lefty O’Doul and Ted Lyons to Japan to teach baseball seminars at Japanese universities. After the other players returned to the United States, Berg made an extended tour of Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Germany before returning in time to participate in Washington’s pennant-winning season of 1933.

It was a sign of things to come.

Berg returned to Japan in 1934 with a team of American League all-stars headed by Babe Ruth—Beibu Rusu to the

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Following the Japanese tour, Berg continued his travels in the Far East, Russia, and Poland—all areas of great interest to American intelligence officials. After returning to the United States, he was picked up by the Boston Red Sox to resume his day job as a backup catcher. On October 17, 1938, Berg was invited to be a guest panelist on Informa-

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HERITAGE AUCTIONS

A knee injury Berg suffered in an exhibition game against the minor league Little Rock Travelers in 1929 severely limited his playing time. The following year Berg appeared in only 20 games, hitting a woeful .115. Looking to the future, he took a job in the off-season with the respected Wall Street law firm of Satterlee and Canfield. The Cleveland Indians picked Berg up in 1931, but he played in only 10 games, managing one hit in 13 at bats. The next spring, he joined the Washington Senators as a backup catcher, batting .236 in 75 games with no errors and throwing out 54.3 percent of would-be base stealers, the second best percentage in the American League.

BUNDESARCHIV

Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist in charge of the Nazis’ nascent nuclear program, was one of Berg’s targets.

Japanese—who had just completed his final season with the New York Yankees. Thousands of baseball-mad fans lined the streets of Tokyo to welcome the U.S. team when it arrived in November for a series of 18 exhibition games against a top-flight Japanese collegiate team.

At the time of his surprising selection to the all-star team, Berg, who by now was back with the Cleveland Indians, was known to his teammates as a mediocre player.

Rumors were that his language skills had gotten him a spot on the trip as an interpreter, although at that point he spoke limited Japanese. No one suspected that his ball playing was a guise for a top-secret government assignment. In his suitcase he carried a letter signed by U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, addressed to the American consulate in Tokyo and instructing the staff to show the catcher all due cooperation, official and otherwise.

Berg played in a handful of the exhibition games in Japan—the big leaguers won all 18 and Ruth hit 13 home runs—but his real work came afterward. During his downtime Berg would wander the streets of Tokyo in a black kimono and sandals, filming background scenes with a 16mm Bell and Howell motion picture camera provided to him by Movie­tone News, a newsreel production company that had contracted with him to film the trip for movie theaters back home. The Japanese government strictly prohibited such filming, but either Berg’s status as a big league ballplayer or his disguise as a 6-foot-1 Japanese enabled him to elude the authorities.

After a game at the Omiya fairgrounds near Tokyo, Berg slipped away, trading his uniform for his kimono, slicking back his hair, and buying a bouquet of flowers. Then he nonchalantly walked into the seven-story St. Luke’s International Hospital, one of the city’s tallest buildings. His cover story: a courtesy visit to the daughter of U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew, Elizabeth Lyon, who had just given birth.

Tossing the flowers aside once he had gained entrance, Berg sneaked out a side door to the roof. From there, with a commanding view of the city, he captured panoramic shots of the naval base at Tokyo Bay, commercial and industrial centers, and surrounding military targets. Then he quietly returned to his teammates. He never did see Lyon. His secret video was later shown to U.S. Army Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle and his raiders before their famous bombing raid on Tokyo in April 1942 in retaliation for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

HERITAGE AUCTIONS

BUNDESARCHIV

In 1933 Berg was one of 240 major league players featured in Goudy Gum Company’s new series of “Big League” baseball cards—the first such cards to be sold with sticks of chewing gum in every pack.

tion Please, NBC’s popular radio quiz show. Berg, who returned to the show three times, effortlessly demonstrated his wide range of knowledge by answering all types of questions, from astronomy to mythology to the derivation of words and names in Greek and Latin. “He did more for baseball in 30 minutes than I’ve done as commissioner,” Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s long-serving ruler, said. Berg also wrote a well-received article about baseball for Atlantic Monthly entitled “Pitchers and Catchers.”

After he retired from baseball in 1942 with a career batting average of .243, six home runs, and 206 RBI, Berg accepted a job with Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-­ American Affairs, an agency set up to counter Axis propaganda in Latin America. Berg’s linguistic talents came in handy as he met with various government officials in Brazil, Panama, and Peru. His first mission was a goodwill tour of Latin America that allowed him to covertly assess the willingness of political leaders in Latin America to side with the United States in the war.

In August 1943 Berg transferred to the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The OSS was headed by Brigadier General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who had commanded the 165th (formerly the “Fighting 69th”) Infantry Regiment in World War I. His recruitment was smoothed by a letter from Colonel Ellery Huntington, a partner at Berg’s law firm, Satterlee and Canfield. Berg, Huntington wrote, “would make a good operations officer, either here or on the field.” Placed on the

Balkans desk at the OSS, Berg monitored the movements of the exiled Yugoslavian king, Peter II, who was now a student at Cambridge. He also received field reports and crosschecked them with members of the Slavic-American community who likewise had been recruited into the OSS. (Stories that Berg parachuted into Yugoslavia to personally meet with Chetniks and communist partisans under Josip Broz Tito are now considered apocryphal.)

In late 1943 Berg was tabbed for a highly sensitive clandestine operation behind enemy lines in Europe. His mission, as part of Project Larson, was to interview top Italian scientists to assess their knowledge of Germany’s atomic bomb program. To prepare, he met with Nobel Prize–­ winning physicist William Fowler and Vannevar Bush, the chief of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development. In April 1944, after he was officially named an intelligence agent in the Special Ops Branch and authorized to carry a .45-caliber pistol, Berg flew to Italy via Portugal and Algiers. Neither he nor most other Americans knew at the time that the United States was already developing its own atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert under the code name the Manhattan Project.

Berg entered Italy on a submarine the OSS borrowed from the Italian navy at Brindisi. After landing he went to Florence to visit the Galileo Laboratory, where Italian scientists were working on long-range missiles. From his interviews with the Italians, Berg learned that Werner Heisenberg, the preeminent German physicist in charge of

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MOE BERG, SPY the Nazis’ nascent nuclear program, was scheduled to give a lecture in Zurich. Berg made contact with Paul Scherrer, the director of the Physics Institute in Zurich, and arranged to attend the lecture posing as a Swiss graduate student.

Armed with a pistol and a potassium cyanide capsule to swallow if necessary, Berg had orders to shoot Heisenberg if Berg determined from the lecture that the Germans were close to developing an atomic bomb.

The Nobel laureate was seated in the front row of the auditorium, surrounded by armed Nazi soldiers.

Berg, who had a basic understanding of nuclear physics, took meticulous notes during the lecture. A bit nervous and in over his head when Heisenberg launched into a lengthy discussion of Smatrix theory, Berg nevertheless concluded that nothing Heisenberg said in the lecture justified shooting him.

Berg’s snap judgment was confirmed when he attended a post-lecture dinner in Hei­ senberg’s honor and overheard the German remark that his country was losing the war and was nowhere near developing an atomic bomb. Heisenberg was spared the bullet and Berg the cyanide.

Staying on with the OSS until it was dissolved in 1945, Berg transferred to the staff of NATO’s Advisory Group for Aeronautical Research and Development. In 1951 he asked to be named station chief of the CIA office in Israel, but his request was denied. During the height of the Cold War, Berg was assigned to Europe to monitor the Soviet Union’s atomic program. He made it through the Czech Republic with nothing more than a scrap of paper emblazoned with a red star but ultimately learned nothing of value. The CIA officer who debriefed Berg on his return reported that the former catcher was “flaky.” Berg’s contract expired in 1954.

“Perhaps I couldn’t hit like Babe Ruth, but I spoke more languages than he did.”

Financial troubles plagued Berg for the rest of his life. For 17 years he lived with his brother Samuel in Newark before Samuel finally kicked him out, leaving their sister, Ethel, to deal with the eccentric former spy. Berg became a hoarder, spending his days reading stacks of newspapers. No one was allowed to touch his papers until he had read them all.

If anyone did, he considered the touched papers “dead” and would go out and buy the same ones again. He also wore the same black suit and tie every day and took three baths.

Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Harry S. Truman in 1946 for his wartime service, Berg declined to accept when he was told that he couldn’t explain to friends how he had earned the honor. He never

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married or held a full-time job after his baseball career ended. Instead he led a nomadic existence, carrying only a toothbrush and craftily making friends with train conductors who would let him ride for free. He spent hours at the New York City’s major league ballparks, watching the Yankees, Dodgers, or Giants play. One night he ran into his old friend Joe DiMaggio, who offered him a night’s stay at his upscale Manhattan hotel. Berg spent six weeks living off the Yankee Clipper’s hospitality.

In 1960 Berg made plans to write a book detailing his exploits as a ballplayer-spy. The project foundered after Berg’s cowriter mistook him for Moe Howard of the Three Stooges. The book was never written. Whenever anyone asked Berg what he was working on, he would hold a finger to his lips and whisper theatrically, “Shhh.” It was the closest he came to admitting that he’d been a spy.

Berg died on May 29, 1972, at age 70 from injuries he sustained in a fall at his sister’s home. A nurse at the Newark hospital where he died recalled his final words: “How did the Mets do today?” (They won.) In keeping with his stated wishes, his cremated remains were spread over Mount Scopus in Israel.

Later that year Berg’s sister accepted the Medal of Freedom on his behalf and donated it to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, where it is displayed alongside his well-worn catcher’s mitt and passport.

Berg would have approved. “Maybe I’m not in the Coopers­ town Baseball Hall of Fame like many of my baseball buddies, but I’m happy,” he once said. “I had the chance to play pro ball and am especially proud of my contributions to my country. Perhaps I couldn’t hit like Babe Ruth, but I spoke more languages than he did.”

In recent years Berg’s shadowy exploits have inspired a best-selling book The Catcher Was a Spy, by Nicholas Dawidoff; a 2018 movie of the same title starring Paul Rudd; and a 2019 documentary The Spy Behind Home Plate, by Washington-based filmmaker Aviva Kempner.

Berg’s major league baseball trading card is prominently displayed at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Former major league player and manager Casey Stengel, himself a noted eccentric, succinctly summed up Moe Berg. Stengel, like Berg, played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and once doffed his cap to let a bird fly out. In later years, as manager of the New York Yankees and New York Mets, he was celebrated for “Stengelese,” his fractured use of the English language. Berg, said Stengel, was “the strangest man ever to play baseball.” He would have known. MHQ Liesl Bradner, a California-based journalist, is the author of Snapdragon: The World War II Exploits of Darby’s Ranger and Combat Photographer Phil Stern (Osprey Publishing, 2018).

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CULTURE OF WAR CLASSIC DISPATCHES 78 BIG SHOTS 83 WAR STORIES 84 ARTISTS 88 POETRY 91 REVIEWS 92

MUSEUM OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR, MOSCOW

During World War II, with puppetry the only permissible form of political satire in the Soviet Union, Ekaterina Bekleshova (1898–1977) created this soft-sculpture caricature of Winston Churchill, now in the collection of Moscow’s Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War, to perform with her comic renditions of Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Benito Mussolini, and the like. https://artsandculture. google.com/partner/ museum-of-the-greatpatriotic-war

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CLASSIC DISPATCHES

EXPLOSION OF THE MONSTER TORPEDO

By Thomas Morris Chester

On April 3, 1865, Chester accompanied the triumphant Union army into Richmond.

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Chester made several return trips to Liberia—on one of them he established a newspaper in Monrovia, the capital.

But the outbreak of the Civil War in the United States changed everything for him. Although Chester regularly took to the podium to exhort African Americans to emigrate to Liberia, his audiences remained cool to the idea, and public support for the colonization movement waned after President Abraham Lincoln made his Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Weeks later, in an impassioned speech to a capacity audience at Cooper Union in New York City, Chester proclaimed an end to “the dark days of the republic,” saying that it was a time for “rejoicing and exultation,” and concluded by praising “the wise and just administration of Father Abraham.”

In August 1864 the Philadelphia Press hired Chester to report on the Union’s campaign against the Confederate capital of Richmond, making him the first African American to serve as a war correspondent for a major daily newspaper.

The same month, using the nom de plume “Rollin,” he filed his first bylined story, “Affairs Among the Colored Troops,” as the Union army camped outside Petersburg, Virginia. He went on to file numerous other dispatches, including one in which he related how the Confederates executed wounded and surrendering black soldiers, and on April 3, 1865, he accompanied the triumphant Union army into Richmond, where he wrote perhaps his most famous story from the speaker’s desk in the Virginia State House.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Thomas Morris Chester was born in 1834 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where his parents operated a restaurant that became known as a gathering place for abolitionists. (His mother was born into slavery but had escaped at age 19.)

They were successful enough that they could enroll Chester, at age 16, in the Allegheny Institute, a new school near Pittsburgh “for the education of colored Americans in the various branches of Science, Literature, and Ancient and Modern Languages.”

The enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 terrified Chester, who feared that his mother could be kidnapped and hauled back to the South. He felt certain the United States would never allow Blacks—who still did not even have the right to vote in Pennsylvania—to live as equals among Whites.

Refusing to submit to such “insolent indignities,” at age 19 he sailed to Liberia, the West African republic founded in the early 1820s to “repatriate” freed enslaved people, with the hope of finishing high school there. But he was so disappointed in the quality of education in Liberia that, after a year or so, he returned to the United States and earned his high school diploma at an academy in Vermont.

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The Union’s all-out amphibious assault on Fort Fisher, the Confederate stronghold that had been nicknamed the “Gibraltar of the South,” opened on December 24, 1864.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

After the war Chester went to England, where he earned a law degree and went on to serve for two years as Liberia’s diplomatic representative in Europe. Back in the United States, he became the first African American to practice law in Louisiana and later briefly held two minor federal positions before ending his career at the helm of a railroad construction company. He died in 1892 at age 58.

The dispatch that follows—Chester’s account of the Union’s bombardment and amphibious attack on Fort Fisher, in North Carolina, which protected the Confederacy’s last open seaport on the Atlantic Coast—appeared on the front page of the Philadelphia Press on December 30, 1864.

On the evening of the 7th, the 1st Division of the 25th Corps (colored), under Brigadier General [Charles Jackson] Payne, and a division of the 24th Corps, commanded

by General [Adelbert] Ames, Major General [Godfrey] Weitzel commanding the whole, broke camp in front of Richmond, and after considerable marching, camped for the night in the vicinity of Point of Rocks. On the following day they all embarked at Bermuda Hundred, and on the succeeding day the transports, about fifty in number, rendezvoused at Fortress Monroe, where they remained until Tuesday morning, the 13th.

Nothing could have exceeded our surprise when we found ourselves going up the Chesapeake Bay, whither the transports were ordered. On our arrival off Matthias’ Point

the sealed instructions were to be opened. I was on board the fast steamship Montauk, which was among the first to arrive at the point designated, when we learned that we must put about, and proceed to Cape Henry. No one could see the exact force of this marching up the hill and then down again, but upon the intimation that it might be strategy, all seemed to be satisfied. The fleet was about sixty miles from Washington when we put about to return, passing Fortress Monroe in the night, and anchoring to the westward off Cape Charles. Here we remained until the evening of the 14th, when the steamship Ben Deford, bearing the department flag of General [Benjamin] Butler, and having on board, besides that distinguished officer and staff, General Weitzel and his aides, came down the bay and stood out to sea. The transports followed, and as they passed Cape Henry the sealed orders which were to be read at that point were opened, which indicated that Wilmington was our destination.

On the evening of the 15th the transports arrived off Masonborough Inlet, far out at sea, where we remained, enduring a demoralizing monotony with commendable impatience, until the morning of the 19th, when the Montauk steamed away to Morehead City, N.C., for coal. Excepting the important fact that more cotton is raised now around this place and the neighboring town of Beaufort than previous to the rebellion, no item of interest could be obtained.

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THOMAS MORRIS CHESTER

“We were suddenly startled by the terrific thunder of her explosion.”

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On the morning of the 23rd our ship’s provisions were at an end, but having a line quartermaster on board, in the person of A. P. Barnes, we were all supplied with Government rations, which consisted of coffee, bacon, and hardtack three times a day, slightly diversified.

About four o’clock on the morning of the 24th we were somewhat startled by an explosion, which shook the very vessel under us. It took place about ten miles distant, in front of Federal Point. I have since learned that the explosion was heard even as far as Newbern, where the people had been expecting this crash. They had been informed by talkative persons connected with the fleet that a great boat was to be blown up to shake down the rebel fortifications, and they must have been waiting for it day and night. This vessel was an iron propeller of about 260 tons, built at Wilmington, and originally owned by a firm (S. & J. T. Flanagan) of [Philadelphia], and was for some time engaged in the Southern coasting trade from New Orleans to Fort Lavacca, Texas. At the outbreak of the war she was taken from her peaceful avocations, and made a gunboat to patrol the Chesapeake and the mouth of the James. She was with Burnside in his attack on the Roanoke Island works, and was somewhat injured in these fights. She went afterwards into the Neuse, and aided Gen. [John G.] Foster considerably when he was cooped up in Washington, N.C. She remained in those waters until the Ordnance Department selected and manipulated her into a monster torpedo.

The explosions of the last decade at Rouen, the effect of the great explosion in England, a short time ago, and even the comparatively small explosions in Connecticut, and at Dupont’s, in Delaware, were carefully considered, and their effects marked. It was concluded that if houses could be shaken down by pigmy gunpowder explosions, solid masonry could be toppled over by the concussion of a thunder rivalling Jove’s. This vessel was therefore taken to Norfolk, and fitted up to receive an immense charge of gunpowder.

Her masts were unshipped, her whole hull hollowed out, so to speak, by the removal of all partitions, etc., and made impervious to water. Two funnels were placed in her, and other alterations made so that she would have the precise appearance of a blockade runner. This was done so that when the attack on the rebel forts was about beginning she could rush in as if attempting to escape us, our vessels were to make believe to pursue, and she was to beach immediately under the guns of Fort Fisher. Powder was placed in a bulkhead occupying all the berth-deck, except that near the boilers, a little further forward, and nearer the boilers, a section of the deck and part of the hold were filled. The rest of the hold remained empty, to prevent the force of the explosion from going downward instead of upward and sideways. A house on the spar-deck was covered over

LEFT: RANDALL LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA WILMINGTON; RIGHT: NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

On the morning of the 20th we came out from the harbor and sailed for the rendezvous of the fleet. A stiff breeze from the north sprang up, and increased in fury until a young gale was howling over the ocean, continuing through the nights of the 21st and 22d. The usual indications of sea-sickness were manifested by most of those onboard the transport, and the 4th Regiment Colored Troops, which has earned a high reputation for discipline and courage, has never wavered from fear before the fiercest batteries of the enemy, trembled with natural terror during the last and most violent night of the storm, when the winds and waves buffeted our ship about as if it were an egg-shell. The sea was in a perfect tumult of foam and high-reaching billows. The transports and war vessels around us danced from crest to crest, now nestling away down in the foam depths, now tossed high up to descend again with lightning velocity into the valleys that lay between the great ever-shifting water mountains. Of course the fleet became separated, driven hither and thither, till one was lost to the sight of the other—disappearing in the carnival of seething, dashing spray. But in the midst of this elemental discord and before the violence of the tempest had scattered the fleet, it was a pleasing sight to see how bravely the little monitors behaved. Let it be a noteworthy fact that, if the monitors have failed on some occasions to weather a severe gale, they did not on this occasion. They rode over the waves with a seeming consciousness of their power and endurance against the assaults both of man’s ingenuity and the force of the elements.

Their sea-going staunchness excited general admiration.

Sometimes they would seem to be hurled beneath the water, but they would soon again rise to the surface and shake off the foam like a sturdy Newfoundland coming up from his dive. I think that hereafter there will be more confidence placed to them, not only as efficient war vessels, but also as safe and staunch sailers.

The storm did not, of course, pass us by without inflicting some damage. One of the horses tied on the deck of the Baltic was thrown overboard by the violent rolling and pitching of the vessel, and about thirty-six others, most of which were on the steamer Salvo, were by the same means badly injured. At each lurch they were knocked about till the stalls in which they were placed were broken down. They were then dashed from one side of the ship to the other, until some of them were killed outright and others had their legs broken. The sufferers were in pity thrown overboard.

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LEFT: RANDALL LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA WILMINGTON; RIGHT: NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

From left: The Union launched a second—and successful—assault on Fort Fisher in January 1865; Thomas Morris Chester was the first African American war correspondent for a major daily newspaper.

closely with tarpaulin, extending to the bow from the boilers, and piled up. The powder was laid in tiers—the first in barrels with the heads taken out, and the rest in bags. The arrangements for firing this tremendous charge were very complete. There was a fuse in each gangway, and one forward near the boilers, and from these a Gomez fuse extended all around the vessel, and terminated at one end in the berth-deck and at the other in the hold. The fuses were those known to military men as “three-clock” fuses. There were also fuses that led from each of the clocks to the points of ending of the other fuses. Each stretch of fuses intersected one another at different points, and were platted together at the intersection.

When the expedition left Fortress Monroe hence, this powder-ship was towed all the way to Beaufort by the Sassacus. On her arrival here she was put under steam and run ashore. Two hundred and fifty tons of powder were aboard her, and, as I have told you, we were suddenly startled by the terrific thunder of her explosion. Little boats could be seen approaching us, and about half way from the ship— five miles—rowing as if for life. They contained the commander of the magazine, Captain [Alexander] Rhind, of

the steamer Agawam, Lieut. [Samuel W.] Preston, Engineer [A. T.] Mullen, and Ensign [Douglas] Cassell—devoted men, who had risked their lives to give this novel engine of warfare its proper success.

The explosion was awfully grand to those who were not stunned with surprise at the reverberating roar. Sheets of fire, like the projecting leaves from a pine-apple (pardon the homely simile) shot up like winged flames, bearing in dark, tangled chaos black smoke and debris of the vessel. The concussion seemed to come over the water like a hurricane.

The sea broke into great majestic swells, heavy even at our distance, considering that they were the outer circles rolling out from a centre ten miles away. The vessel was a great shell. Her iron hull was disrupted as if it was made of tissue paper, and the broken fragments, small almost to diminutiveness, went whistling through the air with the speed of the lightning, and a million of tapering columns shot up from the water far and wide, falling back gently and in graceful curves when the power that reared them into sight had ceased to exist. Up went the black column, like a great magic funnel, widening as it rose, until it covered the whole sky, and was carried away and dissipated on the air currents

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THOMAS MORRIS CHESTER

About eight o’clock it was evident that active measures would soon begin. I looked hurriedly around for the transports, freighted with Union defenders, but only three were present—the Baltic, the Montauk, and the Victor—the last one having no troops on board. There were fifty-eight vessels of-war and six iron-clads in the grand fleet of Admiral [David Dixon] Porter, and some twenty-one transports— the largest naval force ever concentrated against any point upon the continent. The vessels-of-war got under way about 8 A.M., and stood in for Federal Point, on the right bank of Cape Fear river. It is hardly possible to conceive of a much grander sight than the advance of this fleet in the three lines of battle which you have no doubt already described, as the description was forwarded. The stars and stripes waved proudly from each peak, as each ship gradually neared the land.

When a short distance from Federal Point the ironsides and monitors steamed ahead, and bore down upon the enemy, while the wooden vessels followed close after without having taken the precaution of sending down their spars, customary before going into action.

About one o’clock, a shot from one of our ironclads at Fort Fisher is the signal for the beginning of the action, and at intervals, which under the circumstances seem protracted, another and another follows—each succeeding its predecessor in more rapid succession—until one of the grandest naval conflicts of American history is opened.

About half of the fleet was soon engaged, and the terrible roar of artillery seemed to be beyond endurance; but when they all participated, the thundering from the fleet intermingled with that from the heavy guns of the enemy, immense columns of white smoke brooded over the water, fringed and colored with bright yellow flame. Now and then the flame seemed to come forth in bright sheets, and cover the water as if with a fiery pall. Reader, imagine all this, so grand, so confusing, so blinding to the eye, presented to you

“At a quarter of four o’clock a dark smoke arose from the enemy’s works.”

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at the same time that the ear was tingled and tortured, not exactly with that thunder which “leaped from peak to peak, the rattling crags among,” [quoting Lord Byron] but that which came out sharp and terrible from the yawning throats of a thousand of those terrible engines of modern war.

Then, amid all this splendid panorama of death and this crashing thunder, could be heard the screaming of the great shells as they leaped through the air back and forward from fort to ships and ships to fort. The rebel fire was one of much precision, and some of their immense shells exploded over our vessels with great accuracy. The united concert of belching artillery seemed almost unbroken for hours. The fleet continued to pour into the forts, Fisher and Caswell, showers of shot and shell, until it seemed that they would be buried beneath the fragments of these missiles.

About half-past two o’clock the Montauk stood in close enough to afford a distinct view of the rebel colors, amid the clouds of almost unbroken smoke, upon Fisher, which is nearly as strong as Fortress Monroe. The soldiers pointed them out to me enthusiastically, with a wish that they might soon be sent to lower them. At a quarter of four o’clock a dark smoke arose from the enemy’s works. Fifteen minutes later an immense conflagration was distinctly seen, which indicated that the barracks in Fort Fisher were on fire.

At this sight it was difficult to restrain the enthusiasm of the troops onboard, and prevent them from lustily cheering. If they had, our transport would probably have drawn the fire of the enemy. Such expressions as “get out, Johnny,” “isn’t it too hot for you,” and others of similar import were freely indulged in. No words could adequately express the terrible bombardment at this juncture, or give an impression commensurate with the scene. As night lowered, rendering more distinct the meteoric flash of flying shells, the cannonading gradually ceased, until every gun was quiet.

About a half an hour before the action ended, there was but one of the gunboats that hauled off, or gave evidence of being injured. It had bursted one of its guns, killing and wounding several of the crew. Shortly after, another was towed away, but not until after the engagement was over.

Thus ended the first assault on Wilmington.

Neither Generals Butler nor Weitzel were present during the action, but were detained in the harbor of Beaufort, with the rest of the transports, by the severe storm, excepting those that had put to sea for safety. Late in the afternoon, General Butler’s boat hove in sight, and in the course of the night all the fleet withdrew about ten miles to the sea.

Such was our Christmas Eve. We retired to rest thinking of the probable injuries sustained by the fleet, and the condition of the forts. We thought, too, of the loved ones at home, wondering whether their Christmas would be as happy as ours promised to be glorious. MHQ

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that wafted it towards Wilmington. It was to that city the baptism of sulphur fumes that heralds what will come sooner or later—the baptism of fire. Although the vessel was close—not more than two hundred and fifty yards away—it is to be questioned whether, after all, the explosion had the effect that was expected. The fort, by subsequent developments, seems to have been but little injured. The intention was, however, to load the vessel with five hundred tons of powder, but as she would hold but two hundred and fifty, that quantity was, of course, all that was used.

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HARRIS & EWING COLLECTION (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

BIG SHOTS

Archibald Butt was born in 1865 in Augusta, Georgia, and named for his grandfather, who fought in the Revolutionary War. After college he worked for a few years as a newspaper reporter in Louisville and Washington, D.C., where he came to the attention of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico and was tapped to become the embassy’s first secretary. After the SpanishAmerican War broke out in 1898, he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the U.S. Volunteers. In 1901 he enlisted in the regular U.S. Army and served for several years in the Philippines before returning to Washington for a high-ranking position in the Quartermaster Corps. In 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt asked Butt to serve as his military aide, and the two men became close friends. When William Howard Taft became president in 1909, he asked Butt to stay on.

Butt found his White House work to be enormously stressful.

In 1912, hoping to shake off the demons of exhaustion and depression, he left for a six-week vacation in Europe with Francis Davis Millet, whom he described as “my artist friend who lives with me.”

(Historian Richard DavenportHines has described their relationship as “an early case of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’ ”) Butt and Millet booked passage on the RMS Titanic to return to the United States. When the ship struck an iceberg on the evening of April 14, Butt was playing cards in the first-class smoking room. The ship sank two and a half hours later, taking the lives of Butt, Millet, and more than 1,500 others.

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WAR STORIES

WHEN DON HO FLEW

The legendary Hawaiian entertainer’s stint as a pilot in the U.S. Air Force launched him on the path to international fame.

By Patrick J. Kiger

“If you can survive a crash,” Ho once explained, “you can do anything.”

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2007), noted in the introduction that Ho was such an icon in his home state that his endorsement helped Democrat George Ariyoshi win the state’s governorship in 1974.

But before Ho became the fun-loving entertainer, known for raising a glass of Scotch onstage and beckoning members of the audience to “suck ’em up!,” he was a Cold War–era air force aviator, who initially trained as a fighter pilot before switching to flying military personnel, equipment, and supplies across the Pacific. Ho’s decade in the skies, in fact, helped him develop the confidence to become a successful, internationally famous performer— and perhaps also the humility and playful sense of humor that charmed his audiences.

“If you can survive a crash,” he once explained, “you can do anything.”

Ho was born on August 13, 1930, in what he later described as a humble Honolulu neighborhood, Kakaako, the second of eight children of a Chinese-Hawaiian father and a mother who was of Hawaiian-Portuguese ancestry. When Ho was still in elementary school, the family moved to the town of Kaneohe on the island of Oahu, where his parents managed a small restaurant, which they eventually bought from the owner for $500 and renamed Honey’s Café.

In Kaneohe, Ho was the only Hawaiian kid in a school full of second- and third-generation Japanese-­American students, who introduced him to baseball, football, and basketball.

When Ho was 11, the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor changed everything. Suddenly the islands were filled with U.S. soldiers and marines, and Hawaii came under military rule. His father got a job at Hickam Air Force Base, and Honey’s Café turned into a bustling hangout for servicemen. The place attracted such a crowd that men were allowed only three drinks; then they had to go outside and get back in line to give others a chance to drink. Fights broke out so frequently that Ho’s mother got the base to provide a couple of MPs to hang around the bar and get rid of troublemakers. Ho helped out in the kitchen, where his mother cooked what he called “the best luau in Hawaii.”

Ho’s father and mother and aunts all loved music, and they usually closed down the bar at the end of the evening

TOP: UNDERWOOD ARCHIVES (GETTY IMAGES); BELOW: TOMMY LAU, DON HO COLLECTION (2)

S

ometime in the early 1950s in the skies over Texas, a Lockheed T-33A Shooting Star trainer jet flamed out and began to descend as the pilot at the controls—a native Hawaiian in his early 20s named Donald Tai Loy Ho—realized he’d made a bad mistake. Before taking off from Bryan Air Force Base on a routine training mission, he had failed to get enough fuel, and now he had run out. As Ho recounted years later to a writer for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, he hastily looked for an emergency landing spot.

“I popped the canopy at about 300 miles per hour,” Ho recalled. “I put her down on a farm. As I was sliding along the ground, the barn was coming up awfully fast. So I put the flaps down, right into the mud.”

Fortunately, Ho wasn’t hurt in the crash landing, and his aircraft escaped serious damage. Although he had to go through the customary investigation, there weren’t any repercussions. The U.S. Air Force, in fact, put him right back in the cockpit to make sure he hadn’t lost his nerve. But after the brush with disaster, Ho was a different man.

Until the incident, he had been “a shy kid, quiet, well behaved,” Ho told the StarBulletin interviewer. “The crash made me realize that life was to be enjoyed.”

For the pilot, who would go on to become famous as a singer, it certainly was a life-changing experience. After leaving the air force, Don Ho embarked on an entertainment ca­reer that spanned nearly five decades and included a signature hit, the 1966 single “Tiny Bubbles.” At the peak of his fame in the 1960s and 1970s, Ho was a staple on television talk and variety shows, made cameo appearances on Batman and The Brady Bunch, and even briefly broadcast his own daytime program from Honolulu on the ABC network. The handsome, laid-back baritone’s nightclub act at the Waikiki Beachcomber Hotel became a must-see experience for tourists.

Writer Jerry Hopkins, who worked with Ho on his memoir, Don Ho: My Music, My Life (published posthumously in

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TOP: UNDERWOOD ARCHIVES (GETTY IMAGES); BELOW: TOMMY LAU, DON HO COLLECTION (2)

Clockwise from top: Don Ho trained on a Lockheed T-33 Shooting Star; Ho (second from right) and fellow airmen at Bryan Air Force Base in Texas; Ho receives a Hawaiian sendoff before leaving for flight school.

by having a drink and singing. Ho learned to sing along to the eclectic mix of tunes on the bar’s jukebox—everything from Cliff Edwards (“Ukulele Ike”) to the Andrews Sisters and Tommy Dorsey. “It created a nice hybrid sound in my head,” Ho later told an interviewer.

Though shy and quiet, Ho had a tough side as well.

When he was in eighth grade, his parents sent him to the

Kamehameha Schools, a boarding academy where he quickly got in trouble for punching another boy in the face.

But he soon buckled down and became a serious, straight-arrow student and began singing in his class’s choral group. As a freshman, he went out for the football squad, and a coach was so impressed by his toughness and leadership skills that he made Ho the junior varsity quar-

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DON HO

More than anything else, Ho wanted to stay in Hawaii after college. He didn’t want to be in the military, even as an officer, but his ROTC friends persuaded him to try flight school. Soon he was on his way to Columbus Air Force Base in Mississippi, where the trainees started out on the PA-18, basically a more powerful version of the Piper Cub recreational aircraft.

Though Ho hadn’t been all that interested in flying, he took to it quickly and soon realized how much he enjoyed it. “You’re up there by yourself, and pretty soon you feel like you’re close to God himself,” he would later explain in his memoir.

After 40 hours in the small aircraft, Ho and his classmates progressed to bigger aircraft. At Bryan Air Force Base in Texas, Ho trained on single engine North American T-28 Trojans and Lockheed T-33 Shooting Stars, learning in mock exercises how to evade pursuing aircraft as well as other fighter-pilot tactics.

But Ho never got a chance to use his skills in combat. In 1951 Ho’s younger brother, Everett, a sergeant in the U.S. Army, had been killed in combat in the Korean War, but the war ended about six months before Ho entered active duty. “All of a sudden,” he later recalled, “the air force had no need for fighter pilots.”

Ho then got a chance to go back home and serve in Hawaii, where he was stationed at Hickam. Instead of fighters, he began flying big cargo aircraft—Boeing C-97 Stratofreighters—for the Military Air Transport Service.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the transport service was a crucial part of the struggle against the Soviet Union and communist China. When allied troops and civilians in West Berlin were cut off from surface transportation with West Germany, MATS took on the task of breaking the

He spent five years flying across the Pacific, logging thousands of hours in the air.

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blockade by airlifting supplies to the beleaguered portion of the city. During the Korean War, MATS pilots hauled supplies for the forces that fought the North Koreans and the Chinese. After the war, MATS basically functioned as a military airline, transporting soldiers, sailors, and marines between the U.S. mainland and destinations in the Pacific, such as Midway Island, the Philippines, Guam, and Japan.

Ho became an aircraft commander, leading the first all-Hawaiian crew in his squadron. The flying itself wasn’t that much of a challenge to him, but becoming a pilot did wonders for his self-esteem. “At that time, we always had a little insecurity about being from Hawaii and measuring up to the big island, America,” he told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 1999. “We were still a territory.”

Ho spent five years flying across the Pacific, logging up to 110 hours a month in the air. He built a reputation as a skilled, confident flyer—so sure of himself, as his flight engineer Tommy Lau later recalled, that he would sometimes take off his shoes, adjust his seat back, and then put his feet on the yoke as he flew. (“We had to keep that a secret, though,” Lau said.)

While in the air force, just for something to do, Ho fooled around with music. He already knew how to play guitar and ukulele, so he bought a portable Hammond organ and taught himself to play it, figuring out songs by pushing the buttons at random.

Ho, like some of his friends in the service, could have made a career of the air force. But in 1959 he decided to resign his commission, though he was in line for a promotion from first lieutenant to captain. At the time, his mother was ill, and his parents wanted him to help them run the business.

“The U.S. Air Force lost an outstanding person when Don left the service,” a master sergeant who had served with him wrote in a letter to the Star-Bulletin in 2007. “Don accumulated thousands of flight hours throughout the Pacific basin, supporting the U.S. Air Force’s mission.”

When Ho got home, he found that much had changed.

Most of the troops had left, and the once crowded bar was mostly empty. Money was so tight at first that Ho lived in a single room in the back of the restaurant with his wife Melva and their six children.

Ho’s father, looking for a way to jump-start the struggling restaurant, suggested to Ho that he begin performing as a singer. Ho resisted the idea, but eventually he gave in and started bringing his portable organ with him to work. Not yet confident of his ability, he initially recruited a backup group of experienced musicians. Later, as business at the restaurant started to pick up, he began working with the Aliis, a group of backup singers and musicians known for their tight vocal harmonies, who also happened

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terback. By his junior year, he was one of the stars on a team that won the state championship.

After Ho graduated in 1949, his high school principal arranged for him to receive a scholarship to Springfield College in Massachusetts, where he played defensive back on the football team. But he had trouble getting used to the cold winters, so he went back home and enrolled at the University of Hawaii. He became a starter at fullback but gave up the sport after he was knocked out cold in a game while making a tackle and woke up in the locker room. He joined the U.S. Air Force ROTC program and graduated from college in 1954 as a second lieutenant.

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if things went awry. Ho jokingly called himself as a “leftseater,” a reference to the commander’s spot in the cockpit.

“The work I do in entertainment, the people in my show, the way I run the show,” he once explained, “is like I ran my flight crew in the Air Force.”

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Ho with dancer Saki Tumi in a publicity photo for the television show Kraft Music Hall Presents: The Don Ho Fourth of July Special, which aired on July 2, 1976. to be fellow Hawaiians and air force vets. Ho paid them $125 a week—about twice what they had been making in the air force.

Ho gradually built a following. In the early 1960s he started performing at Duke Kahanamoku’s Waikiki nightclub—his first step on the road to fame and fortune. After releasing two successful live albums in the mid-1960s, he flew to the mainland and broke audience records in a twoweek engagement at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Successful shows in Las Vegas, Chicago, and New York followed, and soon Ho was making guest appearances on The Tonight Show and other television programs.

As an entertainer, Ho had a relaxed, fun-loving, and spontaneous vibe. (In 1969 an Associated Press writer called him “the Hawaiian Dean Martin.”) But beneath that, as his Honolulu Star-Bulletin interviewer observed in 1999, he still had a “pilot’s personality”—methodical and careful with details and always equipped with a contingency plan

As a performer, Ho also drew on his military experiences to give himself more authenticity. Early on, one of the signature songs in his stage show was his cover of “Born Free,” from the soundtrack of the 1966 movie of the same name about an orphaned lion cub being raised to return to the wild. When Ho first heard the song, it resonated powerfully with him, even before he knew anything about the movie. To him, it evoked his experiences traveling around the U.S. mainland as an air force officer, when restaurants sometimes would refuse to serve him because of his ethnicity. “I related to that song, and so did the Vietnam vets,” he later recalled. That gave Ho’s version an emotional energy that set it apart from those by other performers.

Ho also showed a special fondness for military personnel serving in Vietnam who got to come to Hawaii for R&R. “Don Ho would ask each military member to stand and be recognized, and the audience would give all who stood a standing ovation for our service,” a former soldier recalled in a letter to the Springfield News Leader in Missouri. It was a high moment for them, he wrote, “because someone actually took the time to acknowledge our commitment when there was little in public thanks or recognition, except from our families.”

In 1967 a U.S. Air Force squadron stationed in Vietnam presented Ho with a Tiger Award, usually given to crews for cutting their scheduled ground times at Da Nang. Back in Saigon, Ho was so popular with servicemen that nightclub singers on Tu Do street began covering such Ho songs as “I’ll Remember You” and “Pearly Shells.”

Ho’s recording and performing career stretched into the mid-2000s, despite his worsening heart problems. In 2007 he died of heart failure in his home in the prestigious Diamond Head neighborhood of Honolulu. He was 76.

At the memorial service for Ho, members of the Hickam Air Force Base honor guard presented Ho’s third wife, Haumea, with a folded American flag, and a Hawaii Air National Guard jet performed a fly-by—an unusual honor for a veteran in peacetime. It was a fitting tribute for someone who had used what he had learned in the air force to become a superstar entertainer and his gifts as a musician to recognize and celebrate others who served their country. 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.

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ARTISTS

SKETCHING A WAR’S TOLL

South Korea’s most famous cartoonist cut his teeth as an artist in the early 1950s while war raged through—and devastated—his homeland.

By Pamela D. Toler

Kim wandered through Seoul, sketching and painting scenes of his city at war.

Even before the war, Kim was never without his sketchbook, pencils, and watercolors. As his family was very poor, he helped support them when he was in high school by working as an occasional cartoonist and sketch artist for Korean newspapers, which often could not afford either a photographer or printing equipment capable of legibly

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printing photographs. Now that most of the civilian population had fled, Kim wandered through Seoul, making sketches and watercolor paintings of his city at war.

The North Korean army overwhelmed Seoul’s badly prepared defenders in three days. Kim watched the victorious army march into the city on June 28. He drew pictures of the occupying army as it moved through mostly empty streets that were still lined with sandbags: detailed sketches of soldiers riding on tanks and jeeps; foot soldiers in tan uniforms, dusty from the road; and tired soldiers hitching a ride on the lumbering oxcarts that made up the army’s supply train.

Over the next few days, Kim recorded the realities of occupied Seoul in muted colors and careful detail. In one drawing, North Korean troops question a man who is pale with terror. In another, a grieving couple covers a lifeless body before they walk away. He drew detailed images of a dying soldier, lying half naked and alone on a straw mat, and of shrouded dead soldiers surrounded by flies. “There were flies everywhere,” Kim later recalled. “Some bodies attracted more than others; maybe the flies liked fresh blood.” The young artist never portrayed the actual moment of violence, only the aftermath of destruction. He had made it his mission to document how the war affected the people of Seoul.

It became increasingly dangerous for Kim to record images of daily life in Seoul because the North Koreans had begun to conscript young men into their army and known artists into their propaganda unit. When Kim went into the streets, he carried a walking stick and faked a limp to make it look as if he were physically unfit to serve in the army. As an unknown high school student, he hoped he would not be forced into service as a propaganda artist.

When food became scarce in Seoul, Kim traveled to the North Korean city of Kaesong, where his aunt ran a boarding house. Once there, he hid in a small room in which his aunt stored blankets. Occasionally, when suspicious North Korean officials would inspect the house, Kim took shelter in the attic or under the kitchen floorboards. To amuse himself while in hiding, he sketched some 200 cartoons, an art form he had begun to experiment with before the war.

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eventeen-year-old Kim Seong-hwan was sitting with a friend on a hill on the edge of Seoul and watching as a seemingly endless convoy of North Korean tanks approached the city on June 25, 1950. Although they could see puffs of gray smoke from artillery on the horizon, the two teenagers weren’t worried. “We had heard over the radio that North Korea had invaded,” Kim later recalled, “but were told that the South Korean Army was pushing them back.”

In time Kim would grow bitter about the radio broadcasts because the false reports had misled the residents of the city. “Many people did not flee,” he said, thus becoming easy targets for the invading North Korean forces. For the moment, though, Kim and his friend were sure they were safe. So sure, in fact, that Kim pulled out his art supplies and captured the moment in a pencil and watercolor sketch—the first in a series of extraordinary images in which the young artist recorded his experiences in the opening months of the Korean War, from the North Korean army’s occupation of Seoul that June through the city’s liberation by American soldiers three months later.

When Kim returned to Seoul, he learned that the South Korean army had not been able to hold back the invaders. Kim created vivid portraits of the panicked exodus of Seoul’s residents, carrying everything they owned in bundles—on their heads, on their backs, on bicycles.

He watched one South Korean soldier change into civilian clothing, hide his uniform and weapon, and join the panicked evacuation.

Kim, however, chose to stay.

Over time, the city of Kaesong suffered more and more damage from American air raids. When a bomb destroyed Kim’s hiding place, he decided to return to Seoul. On the

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Kim Seong-hwan made hundreds of sketches and watercolors during the Korean War, including this depiction of the U.S. bombing of Kaesong, a North Korean stronghold near the border with South Korea.

way there he saw a North Korean army that was very different from the victors who had ridden through the streets of Seoul in late July—and Kim portrayed these beleaguered men in many of the drawings he made on the road. His evocative sketches of young North Korean soldiers on night marches reduce the men to a few quick lines of shadowy blue against darkened backgrounds, alongside detailed images of North Korean jeeps and trucks that had been strafed and abandoned on the side of the road. One picture, done in a cartoon style, captures an incident Kim later described in interviews as indicative of the general panic of the North Korean soldiers. An officer drew his pistol and threatened a farmer whose cart had knocked the officer’s motorcycle off the road. “The North Korean was out of his mind—everybody knows how long it takes a bullock cart to stop or turn,” Kim told an interviewer. “The war was going badly for them.”

Kim made his way back to Seoul a couple of days before U.S. Army forces landed at Incheon in the early morning hours of September 15. He arrived just in time to record the Second Battle of Seoul.

The North Koreans had seized the city with little difficulty, leaving the U.S. Army to face a more determined defense. Some 20,000 North Korean soldiers held the capital.

They had dug in and were prepared to fight for every yard of ground. They barricaded the streets with rice bags filled with sand and rubble and defended them with antitank guns and heavy machine guns.

Kim later reported that he heard nonstop artillery and machine-gun fire in Seoul from September 17, when the Americans arrived, until September 28, when they took control of the city. Once again, he ventured into the streets and recorded what he saw. In one detailed scene, U.S. Marines clear a roadblock; dead Korean soldiers lie scattered before their fire. In other drawings, American air strikes are silhouetted over the city against a purple sky, and clouds of smoke mark where bombs hit their targets.

The arrival of the Americans brought new opportunities for Kim Seong-hwan. For three months, the young artist had lived by his wits. After Seoul was reconquered, the South Korean Ministry of Defense hired him as a war

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artist. He spent time near the front line, attached to South Korea’s 6th Infantry Division, but for the most part, he created informational pamphlets intended for South Koreans.

After the war Kim went on to become Korea’s most famous—and influential—cartoonist. His four-panel cartoon strip featuring Gobau (“Strong Rock”), a character he had conceived while hiding in his aunt’s house during the war, was a powerful mixture of political and social criticism and wry wit. On occasion his commentary was so sharp that government censors periodically interrogated him, but he always managed to stay in print. In 1958 he enraged South Korean president Syngman Rhee with a comic strip that showed a pair of janitors exchanging bows with a colleague as they shuttle buckets of human excrement out of Cheongwadae (the Blue House), the country’s official presidential residence, and he was briefly jailed for his transgression.

From the moment his manhwa (comic, in Korean) debuted in Dong-A Ilbo in 1955, Kim aimed for Old Man Gobau to appeal to adults as well as children—an approach no cartoonist in Korea had ever tried. Another of Kim’s innovations was to draw Gobau without any facial expres-

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sion and get his point across in some other way. “I thought I should make him significantly different from other cartoon characters,” Kim once explained to an interviewer, “and I decided to express Gobau’s mood or psychological state with one hair instead of an expression.”

In 2000, after producing 14,139 four-panel episodes of Old Man Gobau), Kim decided to retire. “Wouldn’t it make sense to finish it on the 50th anniversary?” he explained.

South Korea’s national postal service marked the occasion by issuing a stamp that showing Gobau’s evolution over the past five decades, and the following year the Guinness Book of Korea recognized Kim’s creation as the longest running comic strip in the country’s history.

In retirement, Kim turned to Jangsaeng-do, a traditional form of Korean painting that emphasizes such symbols of longevity as the sun, mountains, clouds, pine trees, and turtles. He died in 2019 at age 86. MHQ Pamela D. Toler, who writes about history and the arts, is the author of several books, including, most recently, Women Warriors: An Unexpected History (Beacon Press, 2019).

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART, KOREA

As an official war artist for the South Korean Ministry of Defense, Kim spent time near the front line, where he made this watercolor, Observation Post of 1st Battalion 19th Regiment.

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POETRY

THE LAST POSTCARD

PETŐFI LITERARY MUSEUM

Miklós Radnóti

Miklós Radnóti was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1909.

His mother died while giving birth to him and his twin brother, who was stillborn, and his father died when he was 12 years old. Radnóti was taken in by relatives, and he worked for a while in an uncle’s textile business before deciding to pursue a career as a writer. He published his first collection of verse in 1930 and began studying Hungarian and French literature at the University of Szeged, where he formed important friendships with many prominent artists and intellectuals. Radnóti published his second volume of poetry in 1931, but Hungarian authorities banned it, branding it indecent, and he barely escaped imprisonment. Radnóti worked for a number of avant-garde magazines in Budapest, and in 1935 he married Fanni Gyarmati. He would go on to publish seven more collections of poetry and a memoir.

With the onset of World War II, Radnóti, a fierce antifascist, was conscripted into a Jewish labor battalion of the Hungarian army but continued to write poems and translate works by others. In 1943, with the political climate in Hungary darkening, Radnóti and his wife converted to Catholicism, but in May 1944 he was drafted into a third term of forced labor and deported to Bor, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), to work in the copper mines that fed the Nazi war machines. In September of that year, as Soviet troops advanced, Radnóti and some 3,600 fellow prisoners were force-marched in retreat from Bor to Szentkirályszabadja, Hungary, where on October 31 he wrote what would be his last poem. Days later, weakened from hunger and torture, Radnóti collapsed and was brutally beaten by a guard who was apparently annoyed by his scribbling in a notebook. Very soon after that, he and 21 other Hungarian Jews who were unable to walk were shot to death and buried in a mass grave.

When Radnóti’s body was exhumed from the grave after the end of the war, a small notebook containing his final five poems, written in pencil, was found in the front pocket of his field jacket. The poems, “Forced March” and four short “Postcards,” were included in Tajtékos ég, a collection of Radnóti’s poetry published in Hungary in 1946 and published in English as Clouded Sky in 1986.

The poem that follows is reprinted with permission of Sheep Meadow Press, which published a revised edition of Clouded Sky in 2003.

POSTCARD 4 I fell next to him. His body rolled over.

It was tight as a string before it snaps.

Shot in the back of the head—“This is how you’ll end. Just lie quietly,” I said to myself.

Patience flowers into death now.

“Der springt noch auf,” I heard above me.

Dark filthy blood was drying on my ear.

Translator’s note: “Der springt noch auf ” means something like “That one is still twitching.”

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REVIEWS

Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act

By Nicholson Baker.

464 pages.

Penguin Press, 2020. $30.

Reviewed by Bill Hogan

Nicholson Baker’s one-way journey down the rabbit hole of state secrecy began nearly a decade ago, when he set out to answer a seemingly straightforward question: Did the United States deploy biological weapons in North Korea and China during the Korean War? Baker, a passionate and estimable chronicler, had recently finished Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, his eye-opening exploration of the world’s gradual advance toward allout global war and Holocaust. Nearly as soon as that war had ended, with the unleashing of atomic weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. military was looking for more-covert methods of bringing enemies to their knees. Among the documents Baker would eventually unearth was a top-secret memo issued in 1950 by U.S. Air Force general Nathan F. Twining noting that “the Joint Chiefs of Staff have agreed that action should be initiated at once to

In 1952, as it accused U.S. forces of deploying biological weapons in the Korean War, China sought to alert the masses with these health posters.

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make the United States capable of employing toxic chemical and biological agents” and ordering his deputies to follow through. Baker’s book makes it clear that they did.

The secret program, which began and ended during the Korean War, was code-named Project Baseless. It appears, however, that the program was not exactly a secret in North Korea. In 1952 North Korea’s foreign minister, Pak Hon-yong, alleged that the U.S. military was “systematically dropping a large number of infected insects from aircraft on to our troop positions on our rear, and these insects are spreading the bacteria of infectious diseases.” To most Americans this surely must have seemed like a “fantastic plot,” just as Secretary of State Dean Acheson said in responding to what he called “this nonsense about germ warfare in Korea.” General Matthew Ridgway, the supreme commander of the United Nations forces in Korea, seconded the motion, saying, like Acheson, that the Communists were just covering up their own epidemics.

But again and again, Baker astutely connects the dots. Both the North Koreans and the Chinese, for example, reported that they had found feathers scattered over the ground after artillery shells exploded and after aircraft flew overhead. Perhaps that, too, would seem like part of a fantastic plot—until one learns, as Baker did, that Brigadier General Orrin Grover, a West Pointer who headed up the Air Force’s Division of Psychological Warfare at the time, had overseen the development of the E-73 feather bomb, a reengineered propaganda bomb that could use turkey or chicken feathers

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dusted with disease spores—packed into the bomb’s compartments instead of leaflets—to infect people, animals, or crops in an enemy country.

In 1950 the U.S. military, working closely with the CIA, hired General Mills, the producer of Gold Medal Flour, to begin work on what would become the E77 biological bomb, an anticrop weapon based on the design of Japanese fire balloons. The company’s engineers envisioned the E77 as an ideal delivery system for such contagions as wheat stem rust and hog cholera. The following year a committee on biological warfare set up by the Defense Department’s Research and Development Board was recommending that the government step up its work on Q fever, rabbit fever, and plague, in addition to warthog disease, anthrax, and “virulent races of wheat, oat, barley, and rye rusts.”

In writing Baseless, Baker became expert at reverse-engineering the redacted documents that he and other researchers succeeded in obtaining under the federal Freedom of Information Act, a public records law that many government agencies have managed to turn into so much Swiss cheese. He remains profoundly troubled, however, by what he calls “the pathology of government secrecy.”

How is a nation supposed to learn from its mistakes, Baker asks, when the government suppresses those mistakes for many decades?

No spoiler alert is warranted here, but Baseless should be required reading for all historians who confront government secrecy as they seek to get to the truth about major historical events. And you don’t have to agree with Baker’s conclusions about what really happened in the Korean War to share his sense of outrage at government nondisclosure. “My aim,” as he puts it in the book, “is to open the files, not necessarily to convince.”

Bill Hogan is the editor of MHQ.

From MHQ Contributors PERSHING’S LIEUTENANTS: American Military Leadership in World War I, edited by David T. Zabecki and Douglass Mastriano. (Osprey Publishing, $35.) Nineteen military historians tell the stories of key officers who worked for and with General John J. Pershing, the commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Forces, including Hunter Liggett, Douglas MacArthur, George C. Marshall, George S. Patton Jr., and Harry S. Truman.

New & Noteworthy THE 4TH MARINE BRIGADE AT BELLEAU WOOD AND SOISSONS: History and Battlefield Guide, by J. Michael Miller. (University Press of Kansas, $65.) A vivid and insightful account of a single brigade of marines in two key battles of World War I, with detailed maps and a 36-stop guide that links the text to the actual terrain, by a historian of the U.S. Marine Corps.

DECONSTRUCTING DR. STRANGELOVE: The Secret History of Nuclear War Films, by Sean M. Maloney. (Potomac Books, $50.)

A historian’s meticulously researched examination of nuclear crisis films that deftly explores how, in retrospect, they stack up against reality.

BATTLE OF BERLIN: Bomber Command over the Third Reich, 1943–1945, by Martin W. Bowman.

(Air World/Casemate, $52.9.5) A history of the unrelenting assault on the “Big City” by Allied air forces, drawing on accounts of those who flew missions over the German capital as well as those who suffered under the onslaught.

THE U.S. NAVY AND ITS COLD WAR ALLIANCES, 1945–1953,

by Corbin Williamson. (University Press of Kansas, $50.) An examination of how growing concerns about the Soviet naval threat in the immediate postwar era brought about the transformation of the U.S. Navy’s peacetime alliances.

CHURCHILL’S HELLRAISERS: The Secret Mission to Storm a Forbidden Nazi Fortress, by Damien Lewis. (Citadel Press, $27.) An award-winning historian’s account of the daring mission by an Allied special operations team to raid a Nazi headquarters north of the Gothic Line—a string of formidable defenses stretching across the northern Italy’s Apennine Mountains—in World War II. WIDOWMAKER: Living and Dying with the Corsair, by Tim Hillier-Graves.

(Casemate, $34.95.) A history of the Vought-Sikorsky Corsair, one of the most potent—and most flawed—fighter planes of World War II.

AN UNLADYLIKE PROFESSION: American Women War Correspondents in World War I, by Chris Dubbs.

(Potomac Books, $34.95.) The stories of Nellie Bly, Edith Wharton, and more than 30 other American women who broke the glass ceiling in war reporting during World War I.

THE ENDURING CIVIL WAR: Reflections on the Great American Crisis, by Gary W. Gallagher. (Louisiana State University Press, $34.95.)

A collection of 73 essays—all but three of them originally published in Civil War Times—by one of the preeminent historians of the American Civil War.

THE RISE OF THE G.I. ARMY, 1940–1941: The Forgotten Story of How America Forged a Powerful Army before Pearl Harbor, by Paul Dickson.

(Atlantic Monthly Press, $30.) A wideranging look at how the U.S. Army, in little more than a year, was transformed from a disjointed collection of ragtag military units into a disciplined fighting force 10 times its previous size.

U-BOAT COMMANDER OSKAR KUSCH: Anatomy of a Nazi-Era Betrayal and Judicial Murder,

by Eric C. Rust. (Naval Institute Press, $45.) The gripping story of a young lieutenant who, though highly successful as the skipper of U-154, was betrayed by his executive officer and sentenced to death for “undermining the fighting spirit” of the men on his boat.

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TODAY IN HISTORY AUGUST 24, 1814 THE BRITISH SET FIRE TO THE WHITE HOUSE. DURING THE WAR OF 1812, THE BRITISH SACKED WASHINGTON. SHORTLY BEFORE THEY REACHED THE WHITE HOUSE, DOLLEY MADISON AND A FEW SERVANTS SCRAMBLED TO SAVE VALUABLES, INCLUDING A FULL-LENGTH PORTRAIT OF GEORGE WASHINGTON CREATED BY GILBERT STUART. TODAY THE PAINTING HANGS IN THE EAST ROOM OF THE WHITE HOUSE. For more, visit

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19 Hollywood Squares winner 67 Monroe who entertained the 20 “Same goes for me”

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to hold a U.S. patent 39 Some old Dodges 85 Animal used in the Covert 40 First president to veto 100+ bills, Anti-Terrorism Stealth program

including Civil War pension bills 86 Entrenching ___ 46 “Fixin’ to Die ___” 87 Acronym of a military harness 47 Former home of the Mets 88 “___ vindice” (Confederate motto) 49 UN workers’ rights gp.

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98 First president to establish a

military academy, West Point 101 Able to enlist 103 Evening, in Italy 104 Roku remote button, for short 105 Added to a Hall of Fame, say 107 Hindu teacher 111 Kung Fu actor Philip 113 “___ be my pleasure!”

114 ___-Iraq War (1980–1988) 115 First president to serve in WWII,

becoming a five-star general 1 22 Mr. Robot actor Malek 1 23 “Sexy” woman in a Beatles song 1 24 Precede 1 25 “Thank God ___ Country Boy” 1 26 “Aid and ___ the enemy” 127 Newspaper essays 1 28 Three-wheelers 1 29 First POTUS to receive the Silver

Star Medal for valor in combat

Down

1 Nudge, as a memory 2 Grant, to Lee 3 “Rock and Roll, Hoochie ___” 4 Total disaster 5 Optimal 6 McCain was one: Abbr.

7 Basque separatist org.

8 Square dance maneuver 9 Manhattan area north of TriBeCa 10 Acronym for what the USS Nautilus

was first 11 War of the League of ___ (1526–1530) 12 Military job classification 13 State with certainty 14 Wistful 15 Pasta shapes 16 What constant stress does, they say 17 Restricted military ___ 18 Honker 24 ___ of Jhansi (India’s warrior queen) 25 Espionage gathering 30 ___ Soul (1968 Van Peebles album) 31 Column type 32 Bo Diddley hit 33 Site of civil war from 1975 to 2002 34 DARPA and DIA, for example 35 Game of Thrones beasts 37 Not as specific 41 String section member 42 Battle of ___ (1573) 43 “___ of Destruction” (1965 No. 1 hit) 44 Dressed snazzily 45 Knighted vacuum cleaner inventor 48 ___-Xiongnu War (133 BCE–89 CE) 53 Cambodian dictator ___ Nol 55 2011 novel Before ___ to Sleep 58 Transports for Tarzan 59 Some Camaros 60 Site of Child’s War (1686–90) 61 U.S. Army award; Abbr.

62 “Nordic” in the Third Reich 63 Purplish color 67 Thousands squared 69 Dirty digs 70 Tricare ___ (Medicare add-on) 71 WWII General William H. ___ 72 U.S. Navy tie, sometimes 73 Spherical bacterium, for short 74 Do much better than 75 Band of Brothers network 76 Courtroom figures: Abbr.

78 “Old Stone Fort” in Massachusetts 79 Oath of enlistment 81 Top of the line 82 Head locks?

83 RN’s workplace, sometimes 84 “Copy that” 86 ___ Mahal (beer brand) 90 “This isn’t a joke” 91 WWI Major General Irving J. ___ 92 Common parental explanation 94 Just beginning to learn 96 Pal of Aramis 99 Battle of the ___ River (394) 100 ___ Airman (Air Force rank) 102 Pet name?

106 Pivotal point 107 Actress Sorvino 108 __-Israeli War (1948) 109 Prisoner exchange, for one 110 Camouflage 112 Test the weight of 116 “For ___ a jolly good fellow” 117 Hindu title of address 118 “A mouse!!”

119 Wheaton of Stand by Me 1 20 Diplomats’ hdqrs.

121 British rule until 1947

For a printable copy of this puzzle (and the solution) please visit www. historynet.com/MHQCrossword4 or email MHQCrossword@ historynet.com.

MHQ Autumn 2020

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DRAWN & QUARTERED

THE WORLD CUP

PAUL POPPER/POPPERFOTO (GETTY IMAGES)

This Italian cartoon postcard, published before the outbreak of World War I in 1914, shows Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Joseph (right) and German emperor Wilhelm II kicking the world back and forth before an assortment of international onlookers. The caption reads: “How small the world is!”

96

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Gina Elise’s

PIN-UPS FOR VETS

Megan, USAF Veteran

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9/2/20 4:34 PM

“AND SO IT IS OVER....

THE DAY THAT HAD SO LONG SEEMED WOULD NEVER COME HAS COME AT LAST. ” —Ernie Pyle, referring to the Allied invasion of Europe in a handwritten column found in his pocket after he was killed by a Japanese sniper on April 18, 1945 page 36

AUTUMN 2020 VOLUME 33, NUMBER 1

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