THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY
HALLER’S MEN IN BLUE In World War I, a military dropout assembled an army that helped put Poland back on the map.
Last Gasp at Granville The Hellfighter SUMMER 2021 HISTORYNET.com
MHQP-210700-COVER-DIGITAL.indd 1
5/27/21 10:43 AM
Personalized Super Sturdy Hammer Hammers have a way of walking off. Here’s one they can call their own. Hickory-wood handle. 16 oz., 13"L. 816350 $21.99
Personalized 6-in-1 Pen Convenient “micro-mini toolbox” contains ruler, pen, level, stylus, plus flat and Phillips screwdrivers. Giftable box included. Aluminum; 6"L. 817970 $21.99
Personalized Extendable Flashlight Tool Light tight dark spaces; pick up metal objects. Magnetic 6¾" LED flashlight extends to 22"L; bends to direct light. With 4 LR44 batteries. 817098 $27.99
Personalized Garage Mats Grease Monkey or Toolman, your guy (or gal) will love this practical way to identify personal space. 23x57"W. Tools 808724 Tires 816756 $39.99 each
MHQP-2107000-001 Lillian Vernon.indd 1
O
5/19/21 3:48 PM
RUGGED ACCESSORIES FOR THE NEVER-ENOUGH-GADGETS GUY. JUST INITIAL HERE.
Our durable Lillian Vernon products are built to last. Each is crafted using the best materials and manufacturing methods. Best of all, we’ll personalize them with your good name or monogram. Ordering is easy. Shipping is free.* Go to LillianVernon.com
Personalized Grooming Kit Indispensable zippered manmadeleather case contains comb, nail tools, mirror, lint brush, shaver, toothbrush, bottle opener. Lined; 5½x7". 817548 $29.99
Personalized Bottle Opener Handsome tool helps top off a long day with a cool brew. 1½x7"W. Brewery 817820 Initial Family Name 817822 $11.99 each
Personalized Beer Caddy Cooler Tote Soft-sided, waxed-cotton canvas cooler tote with removable divider includes an integrated opener, adjustable shoulder strap, and secures 6 bottles. 9x5½x6¾". 817006 $54.99
Personalized Set of 6 Faux Leather Coasters Elegant individuality, rugged durability, and quality craftsmanship combine to create a set to impress. Water-resistant; 4" dia. 817712 $24.99
The Personalization Experts Since 1951 *FREE SHIPPING ON ORDERS OVER $50. USE PROMO CODE: H I S M H Q 7 1
LILLIANVERNON.COM/M H Q
OFFER EXPIRES 8/31/21. ONLY ONE PROMO CODE PER ORDER. OFFERS CANNOT BE COMBINED. OFFER APPLIES TO STANDARD SHIPPING ONLY. ALL ORDERS ARE ASSESSED A CARE & PACKAGING FEE.
MHQP-2107000-001 Lillian Vernon RHP.indd 1
5/19/21 3:49 PM
MHQP-191000-WWIAD.indd 1
7/1/19 6:20 PM
OPENING ROUND
HISTORYNET ARCHIVE
In 1784, Henry Shrapnel, a 23-year-old lieutenant in the British Army’s Royal Artillery, began working on a new type of ammunition that in time would revolutionize warfare and enshrine him in the annals of military history. Three years later he successfully demonstrated his “spherical case shot,” which he intended to be used as an antipersonnel weapon, at the British fortress of Gibraltar. Shrapnel had essentially married the canister shot, in use since the 1400s, with the delayed-action fuze, allowing an artillery shell to be fired intact into enemy positions, where it would detonate and explode in midair, showering debris at a high velocity in front of—or above the heads of—the enemy’s troops. Shrapnel’s invention more than tripled the effective range of canister shot (from about 1,000 feet to more than 3,500 feet). It was quickly adopted by the armies of all of Europe’s great powers and would be used with devastating effect throughout World War I, causing the majority of all artillery-inflicted wounds. The shot shown below are thought to be artifacts from the site of the Battle of Kostiuchnówka, which in 1916 pitted the Imperial Russian Army against the Polish Legions in the opening phase of the Brusilov Offensive, the largest Russian assault during World War I and one of the deadliest in history. (See “Poland’s Men in Blue,” page 34.) Shrapnel shells were rendered obsolete by high-explosive shells introduced after World War I. Nowadays the term “shrapnel” is typically used to describe fragments of munitions that maim and kill.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-OPENRND.indd 3
3 5/28/21 3:37 PM
Napoleon Bonaparte rewrote the rules of war, but he couldn’t fight the march of time. His two-hour delay in attacking the Russian army at Borodino in 1812 contributed to the Grand Armée’s defeat at the hands of “General Winter.”
FINE ART IMAGES (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES)
Volume 33, Number 4 Summer 2021
54
MHQP-210700-CONTENTS.indd 4
5/28/21 3:37 PM
19
FEATURES 34 Poland’s Men in Blue
by Peter Zablocki Józef Haller dreamed of an army that would help bring about the restoration of an independent Polish state after more than a century of partitions at the hands of neighboring powers.
44 Last Gasp at Granville
44
FINE ART IMAGES (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES)
19 Experience Pox Americana
22 War List
Great deceivers
26 Battle Schemes Japan in the crosshairs
28 Behind the Lines The Gettysburg Armory
54 The Time Factor
A reporter’s aerial view of the D-Day invasion
PORTFOLIO The coin-collecting containers we know as banks—piggy or otherwise—have been around for centuries, and those with military or war themes have been especially popular with savers of all ages.
70 The Hellfighter
70
Matters of proportion
Joint Direct Attack Munition
62 Banking on War
34
6 Flashback 12 Comments 15 At the Front 16 Laws of War
by Dwight R. Messimer In 1945 a German raiding force from the Channel Islands launched a daring attack on a port in Alliedoccupied France.
by Chris McNab In wars throughout history, for better or for worse, the clock has always been ticking.
62
DEPARTMENTS
by Stephen L. Harris “He was our benefactor and inspiration,” Eubie Blake, the jazz great, once said of James Reese Europe, who wielded a baton, not a rifle, for much of World War I.
31 Weapons Check
32 Letter From MHQ 77 Culture of War 78 Classic Dispatches 81 Big Shots
“The Eight-Fingered General”
82 Artists
Ernest Peixotto
86 War Stories
Tracing a grandfather’s trail as an airman in World War I
89 Poetry
Ode to a Spanish patriot
90 Reviews 96 Drawn & Quartered On the Cover
Detail from a 1917 recruiting poster for the “Polish Army in France”—also known as the Blue Army—created by Wladyslaw Teodor “W. T.” Benda (1873– 1948), a Polish-born painter, illustrator, and designer. Benda, who came to the United States in 1902 and settled in New York City, was deeply committed to the Polish cause and produced posters for the United States and Poland during both world wars. COVER: BOSTON ATHENEUM
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-CONTENTS.indd 5
5 5/28/21 3:38 PM
FLASHBACK
TOMB OF TUTANKHAMUN, EGYPT, 1922
British archaeologist Howard Carter discovers the intact tomb of King Tutankhamun of Egypt. It contains more than 50,000 artifacts, including the pharaoh’s war shield. TODAY: The Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo announces that it has been able to restore the shield, which had suffered extensive damage since its discovery nearly a century ago.
6
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-FLASHBACK.indd 6
5/27/21 11:59 AM
DANITA DELIMONT (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)
MHQP-210700-FLASHBACK.indd 7
MHQ Summer 2021
7 5/27/21 11:59 AM
FLASHBACK DENTS RUN, PENNSYLVANIA, 1863
According to legend, a Union army wagon train carrying 52 bars of gold, each weighing 50 pounds, is either lost or stolen as it makes its way to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. TODAY: Lawyers for a father-son team of treasure hunters obtain documents confirming that the FBI dug up a remote site in Elk County in 2018 in search of the fabled gold.
8
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-FLASHBACK.indd 8
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
5/27/21 11:59 AM
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-FLASHBACK.indd 9
9 5/27/21 11:59 AM
FLASHBACK
SPANISH CIVIL WAR, 1936
The Nationalist forces of General Francisco Franco, armed with German-made Krupp field guns, fire artillery shells at a Republican stronghold from a position near Madrid. TODAY: A hiker stumbles on an 80mm artillery shell after heavy rains exposed it; the shell is thought to have been made in the late 1800s and fired during the Spanish Civil War.
10
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-FLASHBACK.indd 10
5/28/21 3:38 PM
ULLSTEIN BILD DTL. (GETTY IMAGES)
MHQP-210700-FLASHBACK.indd 11
MHQ Summer 2021
11 5/28/21 3:39 PM
COMMENTS
REALITY CHECKS
The Spring 2021 edition of MHQ was splendid. MHQ is my flagship military magazine; I only wish that it were published monthly. My comment addresses the photograph on the cover of the magazine, which depicts members of the U.S. Army’s 79th Infantry Division battling to capture Cherbourg. While the photo purports to show soldiers actively engaged in combat, I believe that it was hastily posed. The first tipoff is the GI who’s directly behind the Browning heavy machine-
12
gunner. The muzzle of his M1 Garand is just to the left of the machine-gunner’s head, which in the midst of actual battle would have endangered his comrade. The machine-gunner is also in a combat posture, and on the ground to his left are some spent shell casings. The Browning, however, ejects casings directly downward and would have deposited them underneath and to the right of the weapon as well. Moreover, the Browning’s ammunition belt could have been fed directly from the attached ammunition can but was probably removed
FROM THE EDITORS: Military photographers in World War II, including those with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, faced countless challenges in realistically depicting combat operations without placing themselves directly in the line of fire or otherwise recklessly risking
Dead Wrong In John Haymond’s story on the 1917 Houston riots (“Tempest in Texas,” Spring 2021), I can’t seem to find any mention of how many innocent people the soldiers killed during their rampage. This is a glaring omission. One might consider that fact an important part of the story—even its central component. Otherwise the reader can only conclude that 19 of 150-plus men of the 3rd Battalion were executed for just “shooting out porch lights” and “disobeying orders.” In response to the author’s curious encapsulation of the shameful murders, in which he says of the rioters, “One can sympathize with their actions as an understandable retaliation against racist abuse”—I can only say: No.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-COMMENTS.indd 12
5/27/21 12:12 PM
FOTOTECA GILARDI (GETTY IMAGES)
Posed Mortem
their own lives. Often, staging or reenacting a scene from a real engagement was the best way for a photographer to maintain the freedom of movement needed to shoot dramatic images from an ideal vantage point. As you note, this was almost certainly the case with the KeystoneFrance photograph used on the cover of MHQ’s Spring 2021 issue. But it’s worth remembering that in World War II few photographers— military or civilian—were on the scene to record battles as they happened.
KEYSTONE-FRANCE (GETTY IMAGES)
Was this photograph of the Battle of Cherbourg staged?
from the can and extended into the foreground for dramatic effect. The 30-caliber ammo cans on the ground would not likely have been placed in such an exposed location or used as a rest for the machine-gunner’s M1 carbine. Finally, the soldier at the far left, rather nonchalantly observing the “action,” is fully exposed to the enemy. Why is his carbine lying on the ground? His proximity to the business end of the Browning is also problematic. In an authentic engagement this trooper would be armed and under cover or stationed in the unshielded foreground bravely assuring an efficient ammo feed for the gunner. These observations aside, I do realize that both real and orchestrated images are needed to effectively illustrate the nature of warfare. In this case, the cover photo is a testament to the courage of the American soldiers who valiantly defeated the enemy at Cherbourg. William Preston San Luis Obispo, California
FOTOTECA GILARDI (GETTY IMAGES)
KEYSTONE-FRANCE (GETTY IMAGES)
The justification of mob violence and mass murder is always wrong, whether in 2021 or 1917. Dan Milicevic Pensacola, Florida THE AUTHOR RESPONDS: I appreciate the reader’s letter, as it highlights one of the difficulties in condensing a short article from of a book-length study of a complex history—important details can be lost in the process. That was certainly the case in this instance, and the reader is spot-on in some of his critique. Sixteen people died in the violence in Houston that August night in 1917: 12 civilians (including two policemen) and four soldiers. Several victims were deliberately targeted during the march into the city, and the U.S. Army’s investigation later determined that six people died in the initial chaos of wild shooting that broke out when panic seized the soldiers’ camp. Numerous others were wounded. Most of these victims, it is fair to say, were innocent bystanders. The reader is correct to describe these killings as “shameful,” but they were also criminal homicides. Under military law, the offense of disobeying orders counts as a capital crime when unlawful deaths result from soldiers’ actions. Disobeying orders is no
minor offense, and the guilty men deserved prosecution and punishment. The problem in this case is that the army courtmartialed 118 men of the 24th Infantry without bothering to determine who among them were truly guilty of murder, as some of them certainly were. Consequently, justice was not only denied to the many innocent men among the accused but also to the residents of Houston who suffered in the violence. The three courts-martial were more about revenge than justice, and charges against some of the 19 men executed were never proven to the standard of law. My article did not aim to justify the crimes that occurred that night but argued that one can sympathize with those men in the historical context of racial abuse that was so prevalent in America at the time. There is no justification for murder, but sometimes there is still room for sympathy. Readers seeking a much more detailed examination of this tragedy, one that delves into the legal problems and historical facts of the case, may be interested in reading my full study, which is currently under review by the Secretary of the Army and available on the website of the South Texas College of Law in Houston. My research into this story continues.
British soldiers go “over the top” in World War I.
ASK MHQ Shock Treatment Who coined the term “shell shock?” Blake Anderson St. Petersburg, Florida
Mental impairment from sustained exposure to artillery is probably as old as gunpowder in siege warfare, though for centuries the condition was all too frequently dismissed as a loss of “moral fiber.” As early as 1914, however, doctors tending to soldiers in the British Expeditionary Force in Belgium and France began to notice many of them behaving as if they had suffered head wounds in spite of the absence of such injuries. Cases of panic, flight, inability to reason, and the inability to walk or think seemed to defy conventional wisdom regarding either head injuries or a loss of “moral fiber.” From what he observed, British psychologist Charles
Samuel Myers coined—or at least was the first to bring into the medical lexicon— the term “shell shock,” which became an accepted condition that was denoted with a “W” for “wound” if soldiers were known to have broken down under sustained enemy fire, but with an “S” for sickness if they had not. In the postwar British Army the Department of Veterans Affairs continued to use the terms “combat shock reaction” or “nervous mental shock,” although World War II would see it eclipsed by a more general diagnosis of “combat fatigue.” Today it is called posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. 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 Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-COMMENTS.indd 13
13 5/27/21 12:13 PM
m
MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER DAVID STEINHAFEL PUBLISHER ALEX NEILL EDITOR IN CHIEF
THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY SUMMER 2021 VOL. 33, NO. 4
EDITOR BILL HOGAN ELIZABETH G. HOWARD CONSULTING EDITOR JON GUTTMAN RESEARCH DIRECTOR
Race to the Rhine In World War II the U.S. Army’s famed “Fighting 79th” slugged its way through one Nazi stronghold after another. By Roy Morris Jr.
Search Online Visit HISTORYNET.com, with more than 13,000 articles and exclusives
MHQ Subscriptions PRINT, TABLETS, and READERS Shop at SHOP.HISTORYNET.com
KINDLE AMAZON.com NOOK BARNESANDNOBLE.com ZINIO ZINIO.com
Follow MHQ FACEBOOK FACEBOOK.com/MHQMAG TWITTER TWITTER.com/MHQMAGAZINE E-NEWSLETTER Sign up at: HISTORYNET.com/NEWSLETTERS
14
CONTRIBUTORS MARC G. DESANTIS, STEPHEN L. HARRIS, JOHN A. HAYMOND, HOLLY HUGHES, PATRICK J. KIGER, ERIC LINDBLADE, CHRIS MCNAB, DWIGHT R. MESSIMER, WILLARD STERNE RANDALL, LEON REED, BRENDAN SAINSBURY, PAMELA A. TOLER, PETER ZABLOCKI, THOMAS ZACHARIS CORPORATE ROB WILKINS Director of Partnership Marketing TOM GRIFFITHS Corporate Development GRAYDON SHEINBERG Corporate Development SHAWN BYERS VP Audience Development JAMIE ELLIOTT Production Director ADVERTISING MORTON GREENBERG SVP Advertising Sales mgreenberg@mco.com RICK GOWER Regional Sales Manager rick@rickgower.com TERRY JENKINS Regional Sales Manager tjenkins@historynet.com DIRECT RESPONSE ADVERTISING NANCY FORMAN/MEDIA PEOPLE nforman@mediapeople.com
SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION: SHOP.HISTORYNET.com United States/Canada: 800.435.0715; foreign subscribers: 386.447.6318 Subscription inquiries: mhq@emailcustomerservice.com MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History (ISSN 1040-5992) is published quarterly by HISTORYNET, LLC, 901 North Glebe Road, Fifth Floor, Arlington, VA 22203. Periodical postage paid at Vienna, VA, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send subscription information and address changes to: MHQ, P.O. Box 31058, Boone, IA 50037-0058. List Rental Inquiries: Belkys Reyes, Lake Group Media, Inc. 914.925.2406; belkys.reyes@lakegroupmedia.com Canadian Publications Mail Agreement No. 41342519, Canadian GST No. 821371408RT0001 © 2021 HISTORYNET, LLC. All rights reserved. The contents of this magazine may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the written consent of HISTORYNET, LLC. PROUDLY MADE IN THE USA
KEYSTONE-FRANCE (GETTY IMAGES)
JOIN THE DISCUSSION AT MHQMAG.COM
STEPHEN KAMIFUJI CREATIVE DIRECTOR BRIAN WALKER GROUP ART DIRECTOR MELISSA A. WINN DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY JON C. BOCK ART DIRECTOR ALEX GRIFFITH PHOTO EDITOR
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-MASTONLINE.indd 14
5/27/21 12:03 PM
BOGEY MEN
AT THE FRONT LAWS OF WAR 16 EXPERIENCE 19 WAR LIST 22 BATTLE SCHEMES 26 BEHIND THE LINES 28 WEAPONS CHECK 31
PHOTO 12 (GETTY IMAGES)
In a golf match staged in March 1961 for propaganda purposes, Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro (center) looks on as fellow revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara tries to hole a putt at the Colinas de Villareal golf course in suburban Havana.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210000-ATFINTRO-CHEGOLF.indd 15
15 5/27/21 11:30 AM
LAWS OF WAR
MATTERS OF PROPORTION
Societies throughout history have struggled with the matter of who, or what, can be a legitimate target for military action. By John A. Haymond
Dikes have always been a tempting target for military planners.
In 1899 the Hague Convention on the Law and Custom of War on Land tried to resolve the problem of proportionality but in a completely self-contradictory way. It declared that armies were not to deliberately “destroy or seize the
16
enemy’s property” but allowed for precisely that type of violence whenever “such destruction or seizure be imperatively demanded by the necessities of war.” This language, however, obviously gave individual belligerents far too much freedom to decide what was “necessary” in their wars. The Second Hague Peace Conference of 1907 did not appreciably clarify the matter. In trying to establish codes of lawful warfare, societies have always struggled with the matter of who, or what, can be a legitimate target of military action. The principle of proportionality seeks to limit lethal force to an “acceptable” balance between the expected destruction of property and loss of life caused by military action on the one hand and the anticipated tactical or strategic advantage gained by it on the other. Not surprisingly, wars have seldom been fought with such forbearance, even those supposedly governed by international convention. As many as 50 million civilians died during World War II, with millions of those deaths resulting from the disease and starvation that are war’s eternal handmaidens. One issue that contributed to that enormous human toll was the way the natural environment was used as a weapon of war and how such tactics factored into the development of legal concepts of proportionality in armed conflict. Dikes that hold back the sea and control rivers have always presented a tempting target for military planners. In April 1945, when the war in Europe was finally coming to its protracted, bloody conclusion, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that Dutch farmland was underwater and people were fleeing for higher ground after the retreating Germans destroyed a seawall at the Zuider Zee dike, potentially devastating a country where millions were already starving. The CBC correspondent said that destroying the dike had no military purpose—that Germans did it “for no reason but bloody-mindedness.” The CBC broadcast made no mention, however, of an Allied operation of the previous October in the Scheldt estuary of Belgium near the crucial port city of Antwerp. The Allies had seized the port, but they did not control the sea approaches because the Germans still held fortified positions on outer islands, of which Walcheren was the
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: DICK SWANSON/LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION, ADOC-PHOTOS, GEORGE RODGER/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES, 3)
W
hen a Roman army under the command of Scipio Aemilianus besieged the city of Carthage in 146 bce, it was the final act of nearly a century of bitter warfare between the two empires. One of the most familiar stories of that war says that when the Romans laid waste to the Carthaginian capital, they also sowed the surrounding fields with salt to ensure that the city could never thrive again. That detail was an invention of writers in later centuries, but it invokes a question modern laws of war are still trying to resolve: How should we regulate the use of the natural environment as a weapon of war? Ancient warfare was never noted for its restraint. Salted fields or not, Carthage was wiped out—its cities razed, its civilian population slaughtered or enslaved—and it was not the only ancient or medieval society to suffer that fate. By the time of the Thirty Years War in Germany in the 1600s, warfare that deliberately destroyed civilian and environmental systems was so devastating that it inspired efforts to restrain it under law. Beginning in the 19th century, international conventions sought to limit the worst excesses of war, but these emergent laws still allowed civilians to be targeted when necessary. This was the concept of proportionality— the idea that otherwise reprehensible tactics in warfare might be permissible in certain situations or to certain degrees. The problem, of course, is always the question of whose perspective determines the necessity or defines the degree. “Proportionality,” Gregory M. Reichberg of the Peace Research Institute Oslo notes, “is notoriously difficult to handle since it seems to call for comparison of incomparable things.”
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-LAWS-PROPORTION.indd 16
5/27/21 12:01 PM
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: DICK SWANSON/LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION, ADOC-PHOTOS, GEORGE RODGER/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES, 3)
Clockwise from left: U.S. planes spray Agent Orange on a delta area during the Vietnam War; Japanese troops in Nanjing, China, during the Second Sino-Japanese War; the destruction of the Walcheren Island seawall in 1944.
most important. German fortifications on the island were thus legitimate military targets, but the bombers didn’t attack them. On October 2, 1944, Allied aircraft dropped leaflets warning the civilian inhabitants of Walcheren Island to leave immediately. It was a pointless gesture since the German army did not allow civilians to move on or off the island. The very next day, 240 British bombers attacked the seawall that protected the island from the Atlantic tides, breaching the dikes in four places. The ensuing flood covered some 80 percent of Walcheren Island in seawater. The initial bombing raid killed 152 Belgian civilians; nearly 50 more drowned in the uncontrolled tides that covered the island that evening. Tragic as that was, it was nothing compared to an earlier instance of dike destruction as a military tactic. In that case, however, the appalling human suffering was not inflicted by an enemy.
In 1938 China was locked in the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Chinese were losing. The 10-year internecine conflict of the Chinese Civil War between Mao Zedong’s Communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists was eclipsed by the mutual threat of Japanese invasion and occupation, but for Chinese civilians the only real change was the name of the war that was destroying their society. One of the most notorious horrors of 20th-century warfare occurred from December 1937 to January 1938, when the Japanese army carried out a protracted orgy of murder and rape of Chinese citizens in the city of Nanjing. Even if the higher estimate of 300,000 civilian deaths in the massacre is inflated, it was by all definitions a war crime on a horrendous scale. Five months later even more civilians died at the hands of the Chinese. In June 1938 Nationalist Chinese forces used the ancient dike system of the Yellow River as a weapon in their war against the Japanese invaders. They breached the dikes
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-LAWS-PROPORTION.indd 17
17 5/27/21 12:01 PM
MATTERS OF PROPORTION at Huayuankou in an attempt to halt the inexorable Japanese advance into the province; the flood that followed inundated hundreds of thousands of acres of countryside and killed more than half a million Chinese civilians. More than a million people were forced to abandon homes, farms, and crops, and even after the floodwaters receded, the area remained an agricultural wasteland for years. As a military decision it was an act of strategic desperation—the Japanese simply reoriented their attack and were only delayed by a matter of months. The perceived military necessity of destroying the dikes was never worth the horrific cost in civilian lives. Even by World War II no international convention had yet attempted to apply specific definitions of proportionality to laws of war. That followed soon after. The Geneva Convention of 1949 established limited instances where environmental destruction would be proportional and identified three acceptable scenarios: flushing-out operations, where the natural environment shielded the enemy; protection tactics, when the environment could be used defensively; and, most controversially, scorched-earth operations, which permitted “wholesale destruction…when carried out with the intent to deprive the opposing force of material essential to the war effort.” The breaching of the Yellow River dikes in 1938 would seem to fit the second definition in that list—protection tactics—but the appalling loss of Chinese civilian lives was out of all moral proportion to the military advantage. This evolving theory of proportionality in warfare was further expressed in the 1956 edition of the U.S. Army’s Field Manual on the Law of Land Warfare, which stated that “a condition of war between two States” should be understood to mean that “every national of the one State becomes an enemy of every national of the other,” though they “must not be made the object of attack directed exclusively against them.” Most important, however, the manual then noted that “loss of life and damage to property must not be out of proportion to the military advantage to be gained.” It was, again, an attempt to reconcile two contradictory ideas that defied simple interpretation. This was the moral dilemma that American military strategists wrestled with in the air war against North Vietnam. The Red River, crucial to Vietnamese agriculture and commerce, was controlled by an extensive system of massive earthwork dikes. As such, the dikes presented a very
The Geneva Convention of 1949 finally addressed the issue of proportionality.
18
tempting target to American bombing missions. They were also of great propaganda value to the North Vietnamese government, which in 1972 used the long-running Paris peace talks as a platform to accuse the United States of deliberately attempting to destroy the dikes in an illegal and immoral effort to flood thousands of acres of farmland and starve the civilian population. American war planners actually had given serious consideration to bombing the dikes but ultimately decided against concentrated attacks on the river protection system. U.S. restraint in targeting the dikes was based on tactical practicality, not proportionality—anticipated limitations in bomb efficacy and political expediency rather than moral issues were apparently the deciding factors. In fact, President Richard M. Nixon responded to North Vietnamese criticism by stating that the U.S. military could have destroyed the dikes if it had wanted to. As it was, the serious flooding from breaks in the Red River dikes in 1972 was the result of typhoon damage rather than military action. Completely separate from this controversy was the American use of such toxic herbicides as Agent Orange and Agent Blue, which defoliated millions of acres of forest cover, crops, and other vegetation in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In 1976, Protocol I Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 represented another step in the doctrine of proportionality when it declared that combatants should not “attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motives.” Twenty-four years later, the U.S. Army, in its Operational Law Handbook, defined this policy by stating that Protocol I “does not employ the traditional balancing of necessity against the quantum of expected destruction. Instead, it establishes this level as an absolute ceiling of permissible destruction.” As it stands today, the theory of proportional violence in lawful warfare, especially in relation to environmental targets, is most often applied with that rather grim definition in mind—that belligerents may cause as much devastation as they decide is necessary within the limitations of “permissible destruction.” 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).
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-LAWS-PROPORTION.indd 18
5/28/21 5:46 PM
EXPERIENCE
POX AMERICANA
An epidemic ripped through the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Caleb Haskell lived to write about it.
DUNCAN1890 (ISTOCKPHOTO) XXXXXXXXXXXX
Soon after the onset of the Revolutionary War, the Continental Army launched its first major military initiative by sending two expeditions to invade modern-day Canada, where they took on the British in the Battle of Quebec. In September 1775, less than five months after the opening battles of the American Revolutionary War, the newly formed Continental Army invaded the British Province of Quebec, in modern-day Canada, with three objectives: to persuade French-speaking Canadiens to join the revolutionary cause, to take control of strategically important sea routes, and to drive the British out of Canada. Toward the end of the year two separate military expeditions, led by Colonel Benedict Arnold and Brigadier General Richard Montgomery, two officers in the Continental Army, approached Quebec City from the east and the south, joined forces, and set up camp outside the city. There, more than a thousand exhausted and weakened soldiers, packed into close quarters, lived in squalid conditions—a veritable Petri dish for smallpox infections.
By December 31, when Montgomery launched the attack that became the Battle of Quebec, the soldiers under his command were already fighting on borrowed time. The British troops they faced, on the other hand, were protected from smallpox by herd immunity. Montgomery died in the attack, as did 30 of his men; more than 400 others were taken prisoner by the British. The smallpox outbreak in the American army was documented by Caleb Haskell, a member of the fife and drum corps from Newburyport, Massachusetts, who contracted the disease. Haskell survived, and in 1881 his wartime journal was published as Caleb Haskell’s Diary: A Revolutionary War Soldier’s Record before Boston and with Arnold’s Quebec Expedition, from which the following excerpt is drawn.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-EXP-HASKELL.indd 19
19 5/27/21 11:57 AM
POX AMERICANA December 12th, Tuesday.—Exceedingly cold. Our guards were moved down towards the city; but little firing on either side today. At night I was on guard. We moved our cannon down to our batteries; getting in readiness to storm the city. December 13th, Wednesday.—Today the enemy kept a December 6th, Wednesday.—Most of the army has arrived. continual firing with cannon and small arms. At night we We are getting in readiness to lay siege to Quebec. The were employed mounting our cannon on our breastworks. small-pox is all around us, and there is great danger of its We had a number of shells thrown at us in our breastworks. spreading in the army. There are Spies sent out of Quebec At midnight we were beat off by the snow. December 14th, Thursday.—The enemy keep up a conevery day, and some taken almost every day, both men and women. We have a strong guard set around the city, and tinual firing upon us in our breastworks. We had three men last night we took a small schooner that was bound for killed and seven wounded in our fort. Employed tonight in getting in readiness to play upon the city in the morning. Quebec loaded with provision. December 15th, Friday.—Early this morning a hot canDecember 7th, Thursday.—To day we took 15 prisoners. We had several cannon shot fired upon our guards. A bad nonading began on both sides, which lasted several hours. We sent a flag [of surrender] to the city, but were snow storm. December 8th, Friday.—This morning we carried two refused. The firing began again and lasted till dark. We field pieces down to St. Roche’s suburbs, against the city had one of our carriages cut down, and one man killed on our breastworks. gates to prevent the enemy coming out. December 16th, Saturday.—Had but little firing today. December 9th, Saturday.—Employed in getting cannon and mortars ready to carry to We had one man killed with grape shot. I am unwell, and St. Roche’s, in order to can- have been for three days unfit for duty. December 17th, Sunday.—I was ordered to the hospital. nonade the city. In the evening the guard was doubled. Thirty- A bad storm; could not go. December 18th, Monday.—Myself and four more of our two men out of our company on fatigue. At one o’clock at company were carried to the Nunnery hospital. All still on night…our battery threw both sides. December 19th, Tuesday.—Today three of those who about thirty shells into the city. We had a number of shells and came to the hospital with me broke out with the small-pox; some shot thrown at us. We I have the same symptoms. December 20th, Wednesday.—This morning my bedhad one man wounded. We are throwing up breastworks fellow, with myself, were broke out with small-pox; we were carried three miles out in the country out of the in different places. I am on guard at the Nunnery. December 10th, Sunday.—This morning at daylight we camp; I am very ill. December 21st, Thursday.—The small-pox spreads fast moved our cannon and mortars from the suburbs. All still at sunrise. In the forenoon the enemy began to play upon in our army. December 22nd, Friday.—Poor attendance; no bed to lie us who are on guard and fatigue with cannon and small arms. About noon the enemy came out of the city and set on; no medicine to take; troubled much with a sore throat. December 23rd, Saturday.—My distemper works very fire to St. Johns suburbs which burned the rest of the day and part of the night. Our guards took two of those who bad. Does not fill out. December 24th, Sunday.—I feel much better today; am came out. At night we went down to St. Roche’s with five mortars and threw forty shells into the city. The enemy able to sit up much of the day. December 25th, Monday.—Christmas; a pleasant day. kept up a continual fire upon us with cannon, and threw a We have nothing from the camp. number of shells out to us but did no damage. December 26th, Tuesday.—There were two men brought December 11th, Monday.—We have kept the enemy busy playing upon us from one part of the city, whilst we here today with the small-pox. December 27th, Wednesday.—A man in our room died have been fortifying in another part. We have got our works almost completed. Today we had a man wounded, today with the small-pox. I am getting better every day. December 28th, Thursday.—All the houses in the neighand a woman killed by a shot from the city. We have got our breastworks finished on the plains. We threw thirty- borhood are full of our soldiers with the small-pox. It goes favorably with the most of them. five shells into the city in the night. A year after the disaster in Quebec, General George Washington ordered all American soldiers who had never been sickened with smallpox to be inoculated as protection against the virus—the first mass government-financed immunization campaign in American history.
20
YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY
“The small-pox spreads fast in our army.... No bed to lie on; no medicine to take.”
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-EXP-HASKELL.indd 20
5/27/21 11:57 AM
YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY
Brigadier General Richard Montgomery was killed in the Battle of Quebec. “Thus we were defeated,” wrote Jacob Haskell, “with the loss of our General and upwards of 400 of our officers and men killed or taken.”
December 29th, Friday.—We have nothing from the camp. December 30th, Saturday.—My distemper leaves me fast. I went to the door today. December 31st, Sunday.—Heard from the camp that General [Richard] Montgomery intended to storm the city soon. A bad snow storm. One of our company died of small-pox about twelve o’clock tonight. January 1st, 1776, Monday.—About four o’clock this morning we perceived a hot engagement at the city by the blaze of the cannon and small arms, but could hear no report by reason of the wind and storm, it being a violent snow storm. We supposed that General Montgomery had stormed the city. Just after daylight all was still. We are fearful and anxious to hear the transactions of last night. This morning I took my clothes and pack on my back, being very weak and feeble after the small-pox. Returned to the camp. Found all my officers and three of my messmates and almost all the company taken or killed, and the rest in great confusion. Could get no particular account of the siege till the afternoon, when we received the following: This morning about four o’clock, the time appointed to storm the city, our army divided into different parts to attack. General Montgomery was to storm the upper town and scale the walls, while Colonel [Benedict] Arnold was to cut the pickets leading from the walls to Charles river and enter the lower town as soon as the signal was given.
They proceeded; it being dark no discovery was made. They got near the walls, when a heavy fire of cannon and small arms began from the enemy, they being prepared and expecting us this night. Here a number of our men were killed and wounded. The rest not being disheartened rushed on; came to the walls, cannon roaring like thunder and musket balls flying like hail. Our men had nothing for cover. Our General and his Aide-camp and Captain Cheese man [Jacob Cheesman] were killed by a charge of grapeshot from the walls, which put this party in great confusion. There appeared no officer to take command. Colonel Camrael came up and ordered them to retreat. Colonel Arnold was wounded and brought off and a number of his men killed or wounded. The rest advanced and cut the pickets, so that with great difficulty they entered the town and took possession of the battery and secured themselves to wait till daylight. Hearing a great shout and the firing cease, and not knowing the occasion, concluded that the General had got in and the city had surrendered. After it was light, to their great disappointment, they found it otherwise. They found themselves surrounded and no retreat, and that they must fall into the hands of their enemies. Thus we were defeated, with the loss of our General and upwards of 400 of our officers and men killed or taken. Every Captain in Colonel Arnold’s party was killed or taken, and but four of his men escaped and they invalids. MHQ
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-EXP-HASKELL.indd 21
21 5/27/21 11:57 AM
WAR LIST
GREAT DECEIVERS
In one way or another, these 10 famous prestidigitators used their talents to serve their countries in time of war. By Holly Hughes
Currently filming in England, the motion picture War Magician will star Benedict Cumberbatch as Jasper Maskelyne, a British illusionist who claimed to have changed the course of World War II. The movie is based on David Fisher’s 2004 biography, which portrayed Maskelyne and his special unit creating fake tank units and a dummy harbor base—even camouflaging the Suez Canal—to fool Nazi forces in North Africa. Although historians have generally dismissed Maskelyne’s claims, he wasn’t the only magician drafted into war efforts. Here are a few others.
under French rule? No one can know, but the stage was set for magicians to play a part in war.
Harry Cooke (1844–1924)
Horatio Green Cooke was a teenage schoolteacher when he joined the 28th Iowa Volunteer Infantry to fight in the Civil War. He quickly became known for his marksmanship and excellent handwriting (a highly useful skill in those pre-typewriter days), but also for his knack for gleefully wriggling out of any restraint. After fighting at the Siege of Vicksburg, he became secretary to Union major general Philip Sheridan. Summoned to the War Office in Washing(1805–1871) Often called “the father of modern magic,” this 19th- ton, D.C., Cooke met President Abraham Lincoln and imcentury French watchmaker turned illusionist was a Euro- pressed him with an impromptu rope-escape trick. Lincoln pean sensation, the first person to prove that magic could immediately appointed Cooke a Federal Scout. Disguised succeed as a form of theater entertainment. But Jean Eugène as Confederate soldiers, Cooke and his fellow scouts would Robert-Houdin’s most intriguing feat of magic may have slip through enemy lines to gather information. In Septemtaken place after he retired from the stage. In Confidences ber 1864, however, during Sheridan’s Shenandoah camd’un Prestidigitateur, his 1858 memoir, Robert-Houdin paign, Cooke and six other scouts were captured by the claimed that two years earlier notorious Mosby’s Rangers. The Rangers made one misFrench emperor Louis-Napo- take: They tied their prisoners to trees overnight. In the leon Bonaparte had asked for dark, Cooke easily slipped free and released the others. He his help in regaining control and two comrades eventually made it back to Union lines— of the French colony of Alge- but, still wearing Confederate uniforms, they were nearly ria, where traveling Muslim shot, until by extraordinary coincidence Cooke was recogholy men, or marabouts, were nized by a cousin he hadn’t seen in years. At war’s end, inciting rebellion. His mis- Cooke went to the White House to report to Lincoln, only sion was clear-cut: to demon- to be told that the president was at the theater. Cooke ran to strate that French magic was Ford’s Theater, bought a ticket, and witnessed Lincoln’s asmore powerful than Algerian sassination. After his wartime adventures, Cooke became magic. In several shows in Al- an inventor and touring magician, billed as “Professor H. geria, Robert-Houdin performed his “Light and Heavy Cooke, Monarch Supreme of Spirit Mysteries.” Chest” trick, using under-stage magnets to create the illusion that Algerian tribesmen could be sapped of their (1874–1926) strength by the mere wave of a Frenchman’s wand. After Was Harry Houdini, the great escape artist, really a spy? It’s several such shows, Robert-Houdin sealed the deal by likely that while performing around Europe between 1900 meeting tribal chiefs in the desert, where he performed the and 1914, the famous magician did send reports to his classic magic trick of catching a bullet in his teeth. Algeria friend William Melville, the first chief of British intelliremained a French colony for another century, finally win- gence. Fascinated with the relatively new science of avianing independence from France in 1962. Was Robert- tion—in 1910, after buying a Voisin biplane, he’d become Houdin’s magic really the reason Algeria stayed so long the 25th person to pilot a powered craft—Houdini could
Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin
Harry Houdini (Erich Weiss)
22
TOP: APIC (GETTY IMAGES); BELOW: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Was Harry Houdini, the great escape artist, really a spy for the U.S. government?
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-WARLIST-MAGIC.indd 22
5/28/21 3:39 PM
Robert-Houdin
Houdini
have picked up useful details about Germany’s rapidly growing fleet of aircraft. By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, however, Houdini was in his early 40s—too old for active duty. (In 1918, as a publicity stunt, he registered for the draft under the name Harry Handcuffs Houdini.) Although he was born in Hungary, Houdini grew up in the United States and loved his adopted country fiercely, so he devoted the war years to fundraising performances, boosting morale and selling more than $1 million in Liberty Bonds. As the president of the American Society of Magicians, he persuaded members to sign a resolution of loyalty to President Woodrow Wilson and inspired other magicians to join the war effort as cryptographers, camouflage experts, and secret agents. He also donated his design for a quick-release underwater diving suit to the U.S. Navy and traveled tirelessly to training camps around the country, teaching soldiers how to escape a sinking ship and how to free themselves from handcuffs, ropes, and manacles. Who knows how many soldiers eluded capture thanks to Professor Houdini’s lessons?
Leslie Harrison Lambert (1883–1941)
TOP: APIC (GETTY IMAGES); BELOW: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
In the 1920s and ’30s British audiences were spellbound by the radio tales of A. J. Alan, a pioneering broadcaster whose cultured voice some say became the prototype for the socalled BBC accent. Alan’s fans, however, never knew that he was really Leslie H. Lambert, a buttoned-down employee of the Foreign Office. Lambert’s civil service job had already required him to abandon another career: as a performer of “drawing-room magic” (his audiences included Queen Mary and the Prince of Wales), accomplished enough to be invited to join London’s exclusive Magic Circle. But Lambert’s dual identity in fact disguised more. Since 1914, after a volunteer stint intercepting German transmissions off the Norfolk coast, he’d been recruited to work in Room 40, the Admiralty’s code and cryptography unit, which decrypted some 15,000 enemy communications during World War I. He continued in intelligence work after the war, as a Morse code and traffic analysis expert, in the top-secret Government Code & Cypher School. In 1939 Lambert was among the code breakers—using the alias “Captain Ridley’s shooting party”—who set up Bletchley Park, the top-secret country manor in Buckinghamshire. At Bletchley Park he worked in Hut 8 along with Alan Turing and others assigned to crack Germany’s Enigma Code. Lambert died in 1941, before the code was broken; only much later did the public discover A. J. Alan’s double life.
Harlan Tarbell (1890–1960)
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Harlan Tarbell, a 27-year-old illustrator from Chicago, found himself behind the front lines in France, serving as
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-WARLIST-MAGIC.indd 23
23 5/27/21 12:07 PM
GREAT DECEIVERS
In 1953 the Central Intelligence Agency hired Mulholland as a consultant.
Oswald Rae (1892–1967)
Born in Reading, Berkshire, Oswald Rae enlisted in the Royal Corps of Engineers in 1915 and shipped off to France. Like many of his fellow engineers, Rae was clever at building gadgets, and in his free time he would perform tricks for the other soldiers, delighting them with his humorous patter. Word of his talent spread, and soon he was asked to perform full shows. The war really launched his career—both in France and later in Germany, where he joined the Army of Occupation and presented some 500 wartime magic shows. Field Marshal Herbert Plumer, commander of the British Second Army, singled him out for praise; a pilot who went to one of his shows described him as “screamingly funny.” Once back in England, he worked his way up through variety and vaudeville until he was famous enough to perform exclusively at private society events, appearing before such celebrities as the Prince of Wales and the Queen of Belgium. He also published several books (Practical Patter, Original Magic, Wizardry with Watches); invented Flexible Glass, a device still used by
24
magicians; and founded the British Circle of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. When war broke out again in 1939, Rae was eager to entertain the troops again; too old for active duty, he put together a touring show for the Entertainments National Services Organization. After the war, he returned to society magic shows, performing until shortly before his death.
Richard Valentine Pitchford (Cardini) (1895–1926)
In the mid-20th century, no magician was in greater demand than Cardini, a master at manipulating cards, cigarettes, billiard balls, and other objects. (“His sleight of hand was so good,” another magician observed, “as to be invisible.”) Whether he was playing the White House, Radio City Music Hall, or a royal command performance at the London Palladium, Cardini delighted audiences with his suave routines in evening dress, top hat, and monocle—quite different from the look he sported in his first performances in the trenches of France during World War I. Born in Wales, Richard Valentine Pitchford was just another young mud-caked Tommy, whiling away the endless hours waiting for the next burst of bombs. To amuse his fellow soldiers, Pitchford resorted to his childhood hobby: performing card tricks. Even a battle injury couldn’t stop him: He practiced and performed incessantly while in the hospital. Given the bitter weather of the winter campaigns, he learned to perform sleight-of-hand effects without removing his wool gloves—a facility other magicians would later envy, watching him effortlessly fan out a pack of cards while wearing white dress gloves.
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: GEORGE KARGER, LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES); POTTER & POTTER AUCTIONS; PBS; GRANGER
medic to a kite balloon unit in the 24th Air Regiment. Curious and hard-working, Tarbell made the most of his time in France. Once his superiors discovered his artistic skills, he was assigned to make drawings for a military atlas, and somehow he met the famed impressionist artist Claude Monet, who gave him a few painting lessons. Meanwhile, Tarbell took every opportunity to practice his favorite pastime: performing magic tricks for other soldiers and for their French hosts. Through magic, he became so friendly with local villagers that at the outset of the flu epidemic in 1918, they came to Tarbell—“the magic doctor,” they called him—for help. A great believer in the power of suggestion, he convinced the entire village that no one else would die—and, against all odds, no one did. After the war, in the mid-1920s, Tarbell, by then an art director and part-time professional magician, was hired for his dream job: to write and illustrate a correspondence course for aspiring magicians. Eventually growing to eight volumes, the Tarbell Course in Magic became a best-seller, making “Doc” Tarbell a sought-after magic teacher. (His students included actor and filmmaker Orson Welles, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, and fellow magicians Harry Blackstone and Harry Houdini.) Over the years, Tarbell invented nearly 200 magic tricks, but none perhaps as great as saving the lives of a whole village.
John (Wickizer) Mulholland (1898–1970)
Born John Wickizer in Chicago, John Mulholland started his professional stage career at age 15, eventually becoming a popular author and lecturer, a close friend of Harry Houdini’s, and editor of The Sphinx, the nation’s top magic magazine. He hobnobbed with celebrities and performed often at the White House. Although he never served in the military, in 1944, Armed Service Editions published 100,000 pocket-size copies of his popular book The Art of Illusion: Magic for Men to Do, so soldiers could learn tricks to entertain themselves in camp. In 1953, however, the magic world was surprised when Mulholland retired from editing The Sphinx, citing poor health. The real reason was a deep secret. The Central Intelligence Agency, founded only a few years earlier in 1947, had hired Mulholland as a consultant to advise the agency on techniques of deception, disguise, and misdirection. Mulholland’s work—later published as The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception—included advice on how to send coded signals to clandestine contacts, how to slip a pill into an adversary’s drink, how to surreptitiously pick up a
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-WARLIST-MAGIC.indd 24
5/27/21 12:07 PM
Rae
Tarbell document or book from a table, and how to hide an agent in a secret compartment. Amid the tensions of the Cold War, this CIA initiative—code-named MK-Ultra—even conducted LSD experiments on unwitting servicemen. Whether or not Mulholland ever knew the extent of MK-Ultra’s activities, it was still a strange final chapter to his stellar career as a magician.
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: GEORGE KARGER, LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES); POTTER & POTTER AUCTIONS; PBS; GRANGER
John Casson (1908–1999)
John Casson, the oldest son of English actors Lewis Casson and Dame Sybil Thorndike, chose a career in the navy over one in the theater. Becoming a Royal Navy pilot in 1932, he flew some of the first reconnaissance missions of World War II. But on April 9, 1940, while leading an attack on the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst, Lieutenant Commander Casson’s Blackburn Skua dive bomber was shot down over Trondheim, Norway, and he wound up in a German prison camp near Frankfurt. Because of his age and rank, Casson became one of the POW staff, acting as liaison with German camp authorities—as well as secretly helping POWs plot escapes and send coded intelligence reports in their letters home. A talented amateur magician (in London he’d been a member of the Magic Circle), Casson performed tricks to amuse his fellow prisoners and frequently distracted guards with his magic shows. In 1942 he was transferred to Stalag Luft III in eastern Germany, where he helped plan the 1944 mass escape that inspired the movie The Great Escape. At Stalag Luft III, Casson built a small theater for camp entertainments, many of which he produced and directed. Little did the Germans know that the POW “stage crew” was digging an escape tunnel underneath the theater. Casson himself never escaped, returning to England only after the camp was liberated in 1945. Awarded an Order of the Brit-
Mulholland
Cardini (with wife Swann)
ish Empire for his wartime exploits, Casson retired from the navy to become a writer and—finally following the family path—a theater producer.
Paul Potassy (1923–2018)
As a boy growing up in Austria and Germany in the 1930s, Paul Potassy loved going to magic shows and learning to perform his own tricks. His parents, however, insisted that he choose a more practical career, so he pursued a degree in engineering—only to have his studies interrupted in 1941, when he was drafted into the German army and sent to the Russian front. Out on patrol one snowy day with a few other soldiers from his unit, he was suddenly struck by enemy gunfire. His companions dropped dead, and Potassy shrewdly decided to lie on the ground in his white camouflage coat, staying as still as possible until the Russians had left. Lying face down with his pistol beneath him, he could hear enemy soldiers approach, prodding nearby corpses and stealing their belongings. Reaching Potassy, they flipped him over and were about to shoot him when he quick-wittedly pulled out a deck of cards he always kept in his coat pocket. “Artist! Artist!” he declared and began to perform card tricks. Intrigued, the soldiers took him prisoner instead of killing him. For the next four and a half years, he lived in prison camps, charming his captors with sleight-of-hand tricks. (A trick he performed with tiny balls of bread helped him sneak extra food when rations were scarce.) After the war, Potassy abandoned engineering and did what he’d always wanted to do: perform his magic act on the nightclub circuit in Europe and Asia. MHQ Holly Hughes, a former executive editor of Fodor’s travel publications, is a New York–based writer and editor.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-WARLIST-MAGIC.indd 25
25 5/27/21 12:08 PM
26 MHQP-180300-BATSCHMS-JAPAN.indd 26
5/27/21 11:32 AM
BATTLE SCHEMES
IN THE BULL’S-EYE This colorful pictorial map, published in the New York Sunday News on September 3, 1944, aimed to show Japan’s “four chief worries” as Allied forces began to roll back its gains in the Pacific Theater and close in on Tokyo. Edwin L. Sundberg, a gifted and prolific staff artist, created many such maps for the newspaper and would go on to become its chief cartographer. MHQ DAVID RUMSEY MAP COLLECTION
MHQP-180300-BATSCHMS-JAPAN.indd 27
27 5/27/21 11:33 AM
BEHIND THE LINES
ARMS AND THE MEN
What’s this striking art deco building doing in the middle of the nation’s most important Civil War battlefield? By Leon Reed and Eric Lindblade
Hamme designed the Gettysburg Armory in a flamboyant art deco style.
28
there were among the primary threats to the Union artillery on Cemetery Hill, center of the famous Union “fishhook” defensive line on the second and third days of the battle. John B. Hamme, an architect in York, Pennsylvania, was selected to design the armory. Hamme had founded his firm in 1900 and run it until 1945, when he turned it over to his son, J. Alfred Hamme. While many of the armories and other buildings constructed by the PWA (including the nearby Waynesboro Armory) were done in a spare, modernistic style that has come to be known as PWA Moderne, Hamme designed the Gettysburg Armory in a more flamboyant art deco style. The building’s distinctive art deco characteristics included vertical emphasis, straight and smooth lines, streamlined and sleek forms, hard edges, waffle-pattern glass, and chevron arrangements. Its architectural merit and historic value later earned it a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. Construction began on January 10, 1938, shortly after a groundbreaking ceremony presided over by the commander of the Pennsylvania National Guard and the president of the county board of commissioners. The armory measured 96 by 61 feet and was built with nearly 63 tons of steel, 65,000 bricks, and 20,000 concrete blocks. It was originally scheduled to open by July 1938, in time for the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. The Guard units were impatient to move into their new quarters from their accommodations on the third floor of the American Legion building, but delays continued to plague the project. Another revised August 6 deadline came and went, and further delays pushed the occupation date of the armory to March 1939. Adams County, where Gettysburg is located, has a long history of national service. Its volunteer units have served in every war since 1800. During the Civil War, county companies served in the 90-day 2nd Pennsylvania (which answered President Abraham Lincoln’s first call for volunteers) and the three-year 30th, 74th, 87th, and 101st regiments. Another local unit, the 26th Emergency Militia, was formed in response to Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s June 1863 invasion of the North and had a brief scrap with Major General Jubal Early’s division a few days before the Battle of Gettysburg on July 1–3.
FROM TOP: ACROTERION, CC BY-SA 3.0; LEON REED (2); NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; NATIONAL ARCHIVES
B
y the time construction began on the National Guard Armory on West Confederate Avenue in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in January 1938, the federal Public Works Administration had already overseen hundreds of such projects around the United States. The PWA, established in June 1933 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, had spent the modern equivalent of $85 billion on 34,000 public works projects, including such well-known constructions as the Hoover Dam in Nevada, the Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge serving New York City, segments of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and the Overseas Highway in the Florida Keys. The goal was to help alleviate the social and economic ills of the Great Depression by creating jobs and purchasing power for construction workers and those working in factories producing the materials needed for the projects. Unlike such Depressionera projects as the Civilian Conservation Corps, which generally used its own employees, the PWA typically farmed out its work to local contractors. C. S. Williams of Dillsburg received a $41,321 contract to construct the armory building. Other contractors included Alfred LeVan of Gettysburg (heating and ventilating), A. G. Crunkleton of Greencastle (electrical), and B. O. Poff and Son of York (plumbing). Pennsylvania’s Armory Board sent proposals for a $2 million ($30 million in 2021 dollars) construction program as a part of the state’s $56 mil lion PWA building program. The Gettysburg Armory was to cost $40,000 ($600,000 in modern terms). The Borough of Gettysburg purchased land on West Confederate Avenue from Calvin Gilbert, a Union Civil War veteran, for $900. Gilbert had served in the 87th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment and after the war had operated a foundry in Gettysburg that built gun carriages for the cannons placed all around the battlefield. The proposed location of the armory wasn’t a site of heavy fighting during the Battle of Gettysburg, but it was used for part of Confederate corps commander A. P. Hill’s gun line. The batteries
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-BTL-ARMORY.indd 28
5/27/21 11:39 AM
From top: The Gettysburg Armory, with its waffle-pattern glass-block windows, as seen from the south; some of the armory’s other distinctive art deco details; the building’s gymnasium-like interior; a U.S. Army encampment at Gettysburg for the 75th anniversary of the battle in 1938.
FROM TOP: ACROTERION, CC BY-SA 3.0; LEON REED (2); NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; NATIONAL ARCHIVES
In 1870 the state’s militia became, officially, the National Guard of Pennsylvania. Its units were formed into a single division (the 28th) in 1879, making it the oldest continuously serving division in the U.S. Army. Gettysburg’s National Guard unit joined other Pennsylvanians of the 28th Division and served in the U.S. Army’s 1916–1917 expedition against the paramilitary forces of Mexican revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa. The 28th then deployed to Europe during World War I, where it saw particularly fierce fighting at Château-Thierry. The 28th suffered nearly 14,000 casualties and earned the distinction of “Men of Iron” from General John J. Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces. The opposing Germans termed it the “Bloody Bucket” regiment because of its red keystone insignia. Through all this time, Gettysburg’s National Guardsmen had a superb drill field but no home of their own. Although Gettysburg National Military Park wasn’t created until 1895, local residents had begun preserving the “hallowed ground” almost as soon as the armies left. The park was meant to protect the land and to mark combatant lines. But national military parks were also intended to help train soldiers and future military leaders. Gettysburg was used for summer maneuvers of the state’s National Guard troops even before the War Department took over management of the land, which was subsequently used as a tank training camp, known as Camp Colt, during World War I. While its main function was to support the local National Guard unit, the new armory was also made available for community uses. It housed public meetings, square dances sponsored by the local 4-H Club, and basketball games for local high schools as well as Gettysburg College. When World War II began, the 28th Division again went off to war. Gettysburg’s local unit, Company E of the 103rd Quartermaster Regiment, was inducted in February 1941, 10 months before Pearl Harbor, and left for a year’s training at Fort Indiantown Gap, the state’s National Guard training center. The 28th arrived in Europe on July 24, 1944, just as the Allied breakout from Normandy, known as Operation Cobra, was beginning. The regiment was involved in all the European campaigns to V-E day, receiving five battle stars and taking 15,904 battle casualties (equivalent to nearly its full strength). The Gettysburg Armory was put to an unusual use while the 28th was deployed in Europe. In mid-June 1944, a temporary POW camp was established on the Gettysburg battlefield. The tent camp was on the west side of Emmitsburg Road, just south of the Home Sweet Home Motel. (The
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-BTL-ARMORY.indd 29
29 5/27/21 11:39 AM
GETTYSBURG ARMORY motel was demolished in 2003.) The camp was built by 50 German prisoners, drawn from the first 100 German prisoners temporarily housed in the armory while they constructed the camp. This was not a high-security camp; the 400 inmates were used as labor in local orchards and fruit- and vegetable-packing plants. Any farmer, orchard owner, or packer could apply to the local employment service for POW labor. The German POWs in Gettysburg worked at 17 farms, 14 canneries, 3 orchards, a stone quarry, and a fertilizer plant. Employers paid them $1 an hour, with 90 cents going to the federal government and 10 cents to the prisoners in the form of coupons that they could use at the post exchange. In the last five months of 1944, the government took in $138,000 for the use of the POWs. In the coldweather months, the prisoners were housed in barracks at Camp Sharpe, in the McMillan Woods on the battlefield. The prisoners were welcome additions to the labor force; Adams County suffered chronic labor shortages after most of its young men went off to war. The prisoners were guarded at all times while working. A few attempted escape, but for the most part they were satisfied with their relatively soft and safe life. The prisoners particularly enjoyed the switch from vegetable-canning season to harvesting cherries and apples, which they could eat while they worked and smuggle leftovers back to camp in their pockets. In fact, some local newspapers published complaints that prisoners were “well fed and living the good life while brave Americans were neglected and starving.” Although there were strict rules barring fraternization between locals and the POWs, these rules were pretty much ignored. The prisoners were naturally regarded as a curiosity in the community, and one army officer complained that local women were loitering around the camp. A York newspaper reported that “many interested spectators lined the fences Sunday to watch the German boys playing a Teutonic type of handball.” A Gettysburg resident, John Augustine, who was 11 years old in 1944, recalled seeing German prisoners sitting on the steps of the armory strumming guitars, playing cards, and drinking beer. (They made a home brew with sugar stolen from the canning factories.) Joan Thomas, daughter of camp commander Captain Lawrence Thomas, said the prisoners played soccer constantly in their off-time and sang opera at night in their camp. Local residents worked alongside the POWs in the fields and factories. Stella Schwartz, then a Goucher College student working at the B. F. Shriver Canning Company in Littlestown, remembered that the prisoners offered to exchange personal belongings such as much-coveted pilot’s wings in return for science and math textbooks. Many Gettysburg residents commented on the prisoners’ mechanical aptitude and work ethic, and Marcus Ritter,
30
the manager of the Knouse Foods plant, noted that the POWs “learned English faster than [the locals] learned German.” Some prisoners even claimed that they had surrendered so that they could “get a chance to see America.” The last German escape attempt occurred after the war, in January 1946, when POWs Hans Harloff and Bernard Wagner slipped under the barbed wire at the work camp on Emmitsburg Road and hid at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Byron Cease, whose daughter, Pearl, had worked with one of the men at a canning factory in Orrtanna and secretly exchanged notes with him. The Ceases were arrested for helping the escapees, but the judge suspended their sentences, ruling that, as the war was over, a prison term “would serve no good purpose.” Harloff and Wagner said they had escaped because they liked America and wanted to see more of it instead of returning to Germany. In the years after the war, local newspapers reported the return of a number of former prisoners to visit the site of their incarceration. Following the war, the Gettysburg Armory remained in use for more than 70 years. National Guard units trained and deployed more than a dozen times for overseas conflict, natural disaster cleanups, and events such as diplomatic summits and a papal visit. The Gettysburg National Guard unit deployed overseas one last time from the armory in September 2008. Bravo Battery of the 1st Battalion, 108th Field Artillery went to Camp Shelby, Mississippi, and Fort Polk, Louisiana, before spending eight months in Iraq. Bravo Battery was welcomed home in September 2009. In 1995 the nearby Waynesboro armory was shuttered, and its tenants were consolidated with the Gettysburg Armory’s. A decade later, the Gettysburg facility was shuttered, and a new, much larger armory was constructed at South Mountain, Pennsylvania. The larger facility was needed to accommodate Battery Bravo’s new role in support of the 56th Stryker Brigade Combat Team. In January 2014, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania donated the Gettysburg Armory and the three-plus acre property to the Gettysburg Foundation, the organization that built and operates the Gettysburg National Military Park visitor center. On August 29, 2015, the foundation and park opened a facility in the garage on the armory property to perform maintenance on the roughly 400 gun carriages around the park. Authorities have discussed possibly using the armory for the park’s education program or as a police substation, but for now the building sits empty of everything except its memories. MHQ Leon Reed, a retired defense consultant and U.S. history teacher, is a writer and publisher in Gettysburg. Eric Lindblade is a licensed Gettysburg battlefield guide and a cohost of the Battle of Gettysburg Podcast.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-BTL-ARMORY.indd 30
5/27/21 11:40 AM
WEAPONS CHECK
JOINT DIRECT ATTACK MUNITION By Chris McNab
BOEING COMPANY
Tail kit The tail kit guides a bomb to targets up to 15 miles away and can adjust the attack profile— the flight path and angle of descent—along the way. A new Extended Range wing modification can triple the range to 45 miles.
Strake kit This feature improves airflow and bomb flight characteristics.
What’s been called the “JDAM Revolution” began in earnest on February 10, 1993, when a U.S. Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon dropped a single GBU-15 bomb from 35,000 feet, aiming at a target some 29,000 yards downrange. The unpowered glide weapon landed within 20 feet of the target—an astonishing level of accuracy. Subsequent tests confirmed its capabilities, and with later improvements the Joint Direct Attack Munition was born and entered service. During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the U.S. Air Force dropped hundreds of laser-guided and infrared- imaging precision guided munitions on Iraqi targets. While many of these PGMs struck home, it became clear that airborne dust, smoke, cloud cover, or fog could significantly affect accuracy. What’s more, the guidance systems also required input from the aircraft crew throughout the descent to target. The JDAM solved all these problems. The JDAM is not itself a weapon but rather a bolt-on kit that, when fitted to an existing piece of ordnance, turns a “dumb” bomb into a “smart” bomb. Its main parts are an INS/GPS (inertial navigation system/global positioning satellite)
INS/GPS guidance unit Once target coordinates are fed to the GPS, the INS adjusts the flight of the bomb in relation to those coordinates. The circular error probable—the radius of a circle in which 50 percent of the bombs would fall—is under 43 feet.
Warhead JDAM kits are fitted to 500-, 1,000-, and 2,000-pound bombs, creating weapons with GBU (guided bomb unit) designations.
guidance control unit, a tail section with aerodynamic control surfaces, and a body strake fitting. Target coordinates are fed to the guidance unit, and once dropped, the munition will steer itself without further input from the crew and regardless of weather or atmospheric obscuration. Some of the latest versions include a laser seeker for use against moving targets. JDAMs have transformed bombing accuracy for a fraction of the cost of other PGMs. During their first combat outing in Operation Allied Force, NATO’s large-scale air campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999, 652 JDAMs achieved a hit rate of 98 percent on intended targets. After 9/11, JDAMs were used prolifically over Afghanistan and Iraq— 20,000 of them had been dropped by 2006—and ongoing improvements ensure that they will remain the centerpiece of U.S. air-dropped ordnance for the foreseeable future. MHQ Chris McNab specializes in military history and technology. His latest books are The M4 Carbine and Arab vs. Israeli Armour: Six-Day War, 1967, both published by Osprey in 2021.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-WEAPONS-JDAM.indd 31
31 5/27/21 12:08 PM
HAGLEY MUSEUM AND LIBRARY
Seeing wounded GIs return from war only to experience painful complications from what he branded “that antiquated instrument of torture, the crutch,” industrial designer Thomas Lamb put his knowledge of anatomy to work to develop the Lamb Lim-Rest.
32
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-LETTER.indd 32
5/31/21 9:04 AM
BIRTH OF A NOTION (OR TWO)
HAGLEY MUSEUM AND LIBRARY
O
ne of the occupational hazards of editing a magazine, especially one that covers as much thematic territory as MHQ, is that one thing invariably leads to another, and sometimes the backstories we run across are too fascinating to ignore. That certainly was the case with the vintage coin banks showcased in the feature beginning on page 62. First case in point: “Adolf—the Pig,” a novelty piggy bank that industrial designer Thomas Lamb created in 1942. Lamb hoped that his porcine caricature of Hitler, with its coin-activated noisemaker and the legend “Save for Victory–Make Him Squeal,” would get Americans in the habit of saving their spare change to buy defense bonds. Lamb, born in 1896 in New York City, was something of a prodigy. At age 7 he became interested in the mechanics of the human body, and at 14, already a talented artist, he found a plastic surgeon who would give him anatomy lessons on weekends in exchange for doing medical illustrations. Lamb was already working on weekday afternoons with a textile designer in an embroidery and lace factory. These real-world experiences led Lamb to drop out of high school to study figure drawing and painting at the Art Students League of New York, and at age 17 he opened his own textile studio. Soon his bedspreads, scarves, napkins, and draperies were being sold in such toney department stores as Lord & Taylor, Macy’s, and Saks Fifth Avenue. In 1924 Lamb began writing and illustrating children’s books. His first, Kiddyland Story Balloons, led to a contract with Good Housekeeping magazine, a line of Kiddyland textiles and toiletries, and even a Western Union “Kiddygram” that bore Shirley Temple’s endorsement. Then came World War II. Lamb, determined to contribute to the American war effort, produced a line of “Victory Napkins” and dreamed up the piggy bank that would become a small-scale sensation, citing Hitler’s resemblance to “a precocious pig” named Pipa he’d met in the country. “Pipa was insulted at first at this comparison,” Lamb later recalled, “but I managed to persuade him to pose for me, and he served as my model.” As World War II wore on, Lamb turned to more serious pursuits. As he watched wounded and disabled veterans stumble or fall while using crutches, he became determined to design something better. In the process he nearly exhausted his savings and borrowed heavily to make ends meet and keep his business going. In time he unveiled the
Lamb Lim-Rest, hoping, he said, that it would render “that antiquated instrument of torture, the crutch,” obsolete. Despite Lamb’s best efforts, the Lim-Rest never took off, but it inspired him to design a new type of hand grip, which he patented in 1945 and dubbed the Lamb WedgeLock Handle (“It wedges the fingers apart,” he explained, “and locks the thumb and fingers on place”). In the coming years he adapted that patent, and another he obtained in 1954, for cookware, cutlery, small appliances, surgical tools, luggage, sports and industrial equipment, and even, under a top-secret contract with the U.S. Army, weapons. But by the time Lamb died in 1988 at age 91, he was largely forgotten as a pioneer of ergonomic design. Second case in point: the “Bomb ’n’ Bank,” manufactured in 1945 by EMCO Tool & Engineering Company of Woodside, New York, which marketed it as “a novel, educational toy” that would teach children to be “thrifty and accurate!” I could find no trace of such a company when I began researching the bank, but I noticed that the instruction sheet accompanying the bank included a copyright notice with the name of Carmine Coppola, also of Woodside. By any chance, I wondered, could this be the father of Francis Ford Coppola, the legendary film director? Coppola’s Wikipedia entry noted that two years after Francis was born in 1939, his father was named principal flutist for the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini and that the family had moved to New York, “settling in Woodside, Queens, where Coppola spent the remainder of his childhood.” Later, of course, he contributed original music to all three Godfather films, winning an Academy Award in 1974 for his original score for The Godfather Part II. He died in 1991 at age 80. I decided to settle the question by getting in touch with Coppola himself. “I know this is an unusual question,” I wrote in an email to the marketing director of Coppola’s winery in Geyserville, California, “but might you have any way to ask Mr. Coppola if the Carmine Coppola who invented this bank in 1945 was his father?” In a couple of days I had the answer to the question. “Yes, in those days, my father and his two brothers formed EMCO Tool & Engineering Company (as their father Agostino was skilled tool and die maker),” Coppola wrote. “The Bomb ’n’ Bank was Carmine’s idea.” —Bill Hogan
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-LETTER.indd 33
33 5/31/21 9:05 AM
POLAND’S MEN IN BLUE Józef Haller dreamed of an army that would help bring about the return of an independent Poland. By Peter Zablocki
34
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-FEATURE-BLUEARMY.indd 34
5/27/21 11:09 AM
Soldiers in the new Polish army stand at attention after being officially sworn in by General Józef Haller at Haussonville, France, on October 6, 1918.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
MHQP-FEATURE-BLUEARMY.indd 35
5/27/21 11:09 AM
OPPOSITE: NATIONAL DIGITAL ARCHIVES, POLAND; THIS PAGE: CORBIS (GETTY IMAGES)
Polish general Józef Haller knew that the Germans wouldn’t stop until he was captured or killed.
MHQP-FEATURE-BLUEARMY.indd 36
5/27/21 11:10 AM
HALLER’S BLUE ARMY
OPPOSITE: NATIONAL DIGITAL ARCHIVES, POLAND; THIS PAGE: CORBIS (GETTY IMAGES)
T
he battle began unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, on May 11, 1918. Polish general Józef Haller had one day to live. Haller’s Polish II Corps had spent the past few weeks fighting the Germans in small skirmishes more typical of guerrilla warfare. Ever since Russia’s withdrawal from World War I a few months earlier, Haller’s ragtag force of Poles had been acting as a rogue unit. Polish units such as the one he commanded had been conscripted into Russian or Austrian forces and were biding their time until they could fight for a unified Poland. Most didn’t survive long; they were usually disbanded, assimilated into the Russian White Army fighting the Bolshevik revolutionaries, or defeated by stronger German forces. The 44-year-old Haller, an experienced officer and a graduate of Vienna’s Technical Military Academy, was determined to save his troops from those fates. He had moved his soldiers to Kaniv, Ukraine, a week earlier, seeking a respite from the fighting in the Carpathian Mountains. On May 6 the German High Command had ordered the Poles to surrender. Haller was not ready to oblige. On the night of May 11–12, he and his men awoke to artillery fire raining down on their position. Within minutes, it was apparent to Haller that his 8,000 troops were surrounded. Haller reacted swiftly, ordering his men to take up defensive positions on the highest peaks encircling the nearby village of Yemchykha. The Germans attacked them relentlessly. For General Franz Hermann Zierold, the German commander, the battle was personal. Just a few months earlier, Haller had betrayed Austria, his country of birth and Germany’s ally, by sneaking his unit across its border into Russia. Haller was instantly infamous. As night turned into day and back to night, Haller worried about his soldiers’ lack of ammunition and supplies. He knew that the Germans wouldn’t stop until he was captured or killed. As he dispatched a runner to accept the German offer to negotiate the terms of surrender, Haller looked long and hard at the officers in front of him and sighed. He thought of the first verse of the Polish national anthem: “Poland has not yet perished / So long as we still live.” And then he decided to die. When the Germans accepted the surrender delivered by Haller’s second in command the next morning, they were notified that the general had been lost in battle. His body, which apart from the uniform and insignia was too badly mangled to be recognized, was shown to the initially skeptical German officers. As impossible as it seemed, it had to be true. The II Corps, they reasoned, would never have surrendered if Haller were alive. The real Haller, masquerading as a sweaty and dirty “Józef Mazowiecki,” linked up with hundreds of other
Józef Piłsudski, the founder of the Polish Legions, criticized Haller for having a “sometimes illogical military mind.” Polish military refugees from the front and made his way through the dense forests northward to Moscow. His aim was to contact the Polish Army Commission, which had been created under the tsar to champion the Polish cause. Haller hoped the commissioners would help smuggle him from Eastern Europe into France. In his pocket, Haller clutched the transcript of a June 4 decree from French president Raymond Poincaré. The French government had not only accepted Polish Legions into service but had also sanctioned the creation of a free Polish army, the first since General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski’s legions had fought for Napoleon Bonaparte a century earlier. Haller intended to command this army, even if he had to become someone else in order to do so. Coming from a family of landed gentry, Haller had gravitated toward the military from an early age, attending military schools in Hungary, Moravia, and Austria before spending 15 years as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army. After leaving the service with the rank of captain in the 11th Artillery Regiment, he helped train Polish scouts in a secret soldier society known as the Falcons.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-FEATURE-BLUEARMY.indd 37
37 5/27/21 11:10 AM
HALLER’S BLUE ARMY
Haller wanted to find a way for his army to keep fighting for the future of Poland.
ing policy toward the Poles. In 1914 Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, the commander in chief of the Russian army, issued a manifesto in which he promised a resurrected Poland “reconciled fraternally with Great Russia.” In one of the most striking ironies of war, Poles would find themselves fighting against other Poles for Polish independence. The winter of 1916–1917 was a time of reprieve for the newly appointed colonel Haller and his 2nd Infantry Brigade. Russia’s gigantic Brusilov Offensive, at a huge loss of life on both sides, had halted the German and Austrian advance on the Eastern Front. For Haller’s brigade, the vicious fighting at the Battle of Kostiuchnówka during the early phases of the offensive had been very costly. Although Haller’s troops valiantly held their positions and were the last to retreat, the general lost some 2,000 men in the battle. As Haller sat down to dine with his officers on Christmas Eve 1916, the sacrifice of the most recent battle was not lost on him. While fighting under the Austrian flag on the Eastern Front, the Polish Legions faced as many as 200,000 of their own countrymen who shared the same dream of Polish independence. The only difference was that they were fighting with the Imperial Russian Army to achieve it. The history-altering Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918 would abruptly end that alliance. After assuming effective control of Russia in late 1917, communist leader Vladimir Lenin immediately decided to withdraw Russia from the war. As Russia’s withdrawal approached, details of the negotiations between the Bolsheviks and the Central Powers leaked to the press. Haller found himself commanding agitated troops who no longer believed that Germany and Austria supported an independent Poland. With the United States now entering the war, Haller and his comrades could see that the tides were turning. They had suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of the conflict. With its grip on the Poles slipping, Austria-Hungary’s high command attempted to force the members of the Polish Legions to take an oath of allegiance. In a closeddoor meeting, the leaders of the three Polish brigades, among them Józef Piłsudski, decided to refuse the Austrian ultimatum, but the commander of the 2nd Brigade did not agree. Haller wanted to find a way for his army to keep fighting for the future of Poland. The next day Haller watched 5,000 soldiers and 166 officers of the 1st and 3rd Brigades of the Polish Legions being led to POW camps at Beniaminów and Szczypiornio.
Opposite, clockwise from top: Poland is nowhere to be seen on this satirical map of Europe, published in Germany in 1914; Arthur Szyk created this propaganda poster in 1919 (“To Arms! Everyone to the Front”) for the newly formed Polish army; Russian Cossacks attached to the 5th Siberian Rifle Regiment in Poland in 1916.
38
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: BRITISH LIBRARY; STATE ARCHIVES OF POLAND; MIRRORPIX (GETTY IMAGES)
When World War I broke out in 1914, it held no great promise for the fate of the forgotten nation of Poland or its people. At the height of its power, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth controlled a vast empire that encompassed present-day Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, and western Ukraine. By 1795 and its fateful last partition, however, Poland was no longer a real nation-state. In fact, because they were so geographically divided, Poles began World War I fighting for the Allies in the Russian and French armies as well as for the Central Powers in the Austro-Hungarian and German armies. But Haller, the man who would eventually command the first independently recognized Polish army in more than a century, had at that time quit the military life altogether and was back home tending to his family farm in Lviv. Haller’s story was not much different from that of General Ulysses S. Grant, the celebrated American commander whose eventual military glory contrasted sharply with his prewar obscurity. Haller, like Grant, had been brought out of quasiretirement. Haller resumed command as a colonel in the Austrian army in the summer of 1914. Around this time, Józef Piłsudski, the eventual commander in chief of Poland’s postwar armed forces, said that Haller had a “weak military background and lackluster leadership abilities” as well as a “sometimes illogical military mind” and was scarcely fit to command a squadron, much less lead a Polish army of more than 100,000 men. At the beginning of the war, Piłsudski had convinced Austria and its ally Germany that their manpower problems could be easily remedied by creating three Polish Legions that would fight for the Central Powers in exchange for the establishment of a new quasi-Polish state, the Kingdom of Poland. That weak promise of eventual Polish independence freed the Germans from having to keep a large occupying force in Poland at a time when the war on the Western Front demanded more and more men. For the next three years the Polish Legions fought bravely under the flag of Austria-Hungary, even though the German and Austrian governments remained noncommittal on the matter of Poland’s postwar status. Seeing an opportunity to acquire additional troops for its own hard-pressed army, Tsarist Russia developed a welcom-
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-FEATURE-BLUEARMY.indd 38
5/30/21 8:52 AM
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-FEATURE-BLUEARMY.indd 39
39
5/27/21 11:11 AM
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: BRITISH LIBRARY; STATE ARCHIVES OF POLAND; MIRRORPIX (GETTY IMAGES)
XXXXXXXXXX
Haller aimed to effectively steal the last Polish unit out from under the Austrian flag.
40
trance into the war on April 6, 1917, the U.S. War Department, having sorted out its own selective service campaign, entered the picture. It began helping the Chicago-based Polish National Department, the leading organization of Polish Americans, create a new Polish army. On October 8, 1917, with President Woodrow Wilson’s blessing, the federal government announced that all Poles who were not U.S. citizens and not subject to the draft could enlist in the new Polish army. The subsequent recruiting campaign exceeded all expectations, especially considering the restrictions attached to it. Within a month of Wilson’s approval, more than 3,000 men had gathered at a specially designated military training camp at Niagara-on-the-Lake in southern Ontario, Canada. The number of recruitment centers doubled within the first two months of the campaign, and by the end of 1917 nearly 6,000 men had begun basic training. At the same time the French government established a Polish army training camp at Sillé-le-Guillaume in northwestern France. The camp was filled with Polish POWs released from Italy, Germany, and France. By September 1917, the Polish army, which was now being referred to as the Blue Army because of the color of its uniforms, got a boost when 16,000 Poles from French prisoner-of-war camps joined its ranks; the POWs had fought for the Central Powers but now had switched their allegiance. These were experienced soldiers and officers, well trained and indispensable to the newly formed legions. The European recruitment was completed by conscripting a small Polish unit that had fought for the French Foreign Legion since the start of the war.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-FEATURE-BLUEARMY.indd 40
5/27/21 11:11 AM
CANADIAN WAR MUSEUM
Playing for time, Haller eventually signed the loyalty oath, while also perfecting a plan to effectively steal the last Polish unit out from under the Austrian flag. He intended to lead the 2nd Brigade across the front lines and join Polish units fighting on the Russian side. On February 15, 1918, Haller made his move, leading his men under the cover of darkness through the town of Rarańcza in the Carpathian Mountains of eastern Ukraine. Illuminated only by the stars, the men moved quietly, trying to avoid detection, as they approached the weakly defended Austrian line outside of town. Suddenly artillery and machine-gun fire began raining on them. Haller ordered his officers to return fire and keep moving. Despite suffering heavy losses as they broke through the front, Haller and his forces made it successfully into the Russian lines. Initially, Haller took command of the newly formed Polish 5th Siberian Rifle Division, but he was quickly promoted to general of the Polish II Corps in Ukraine. Meanwhile, he continued to nurse the dream of commanding an independent Polish army and reestablishing his homeland. Unbeknownst to Haller, the future independent Polish army that would bear his name was forming in the most unlikely place: the United States. Following the nation’s en-
ULLSTEIN BILD (GETTY IMAGES)
A line of riflemen in the Polish Legions face off against Russian forces in the gigantic Brusilov Offensive of 1916. Haller’s 2nd Infantry Brigade fought valiantly at the Battle of Kostiuchnówka but at a cost of some 2,000 men.
After the U.S. government sanctioned the creation of a new Polish army in 1917, thousands of Poles living in America traveled to a special military camp at Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario, Canada, for their basic training.
CANADIAN WAR MUSEUM
ULLSTEIN BILD (GETTY IMAGES)
When Haller led his force across the Austrian front in February 1918, about 12,000 officers and men trained in the United States and Canada had already been transported to Europe to join the Polish units in France. Initially deemed not ready for its own command, the Polish army found itself dispersed among 28 different corps in the various Allied armies. In June 1918, the 1st Polish Rifle Division became the first autonomous Polish unit, fighting alongside other Allied units at the Second Battle of the Marne and helping blunt the last major German offensive of the war. On the morning of June 23, 1918, Roman Dmowski, who had founded the Polish National Committee to push for the establishment of an independent Polish state, slowly made his way through the wounded troops of the 1st Polish Division. As he looked down on the faces of Poles from the United States, Brazil, Holland, Russia, France, Italy, Germany, and other corners of the world, he could not hide his pride. Just four days before Dmowski’s visit to the Western Front, the Allies had officially recognized the Polish 1st Division as one of their fighting units. Not since 1812 had a fully autonomous Polish army flying full Polish colors fought on a European battlefield. On June 28, 1918, a few days after the Polish Division was honored for its valor at the Second Battle of the Marne, Haller walked into the headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force in the Russian port city of Murmansk. Dressed in civilian clothes and exhausted from his long
trek across Russia, Haller was eager to reach the new Polish army on the Western Front. Having been briefed on the successes of the Polish army in France, Haller was determined to join them. Haller declined a commission in the British Army but accepted a berth aboard a Royal Navy vessel sailing from Murmansk to France. He arrived in Paris on July 13 in time to watch Allied units, among them regiments of the Polish 1st Rifle Division, parade down the streets of the French capital on Bastille Day. His future army had not yet united into a single force. Since arriving in France and being dispersed among the French forces, the Polish divisions had suffered 206 killed in action, 862 wounded, and 15 permanently disabled. In the following weeks, the 1st Polish Division saw extensive action along the Western Front. Besides helping beat back the German offensive at the Marne River, the division captured the town of Auberive and fought off an assault by the German 66th Regiment near Saint Hilairele-Grand. After Haller’s arrival and before the consolidation of the Polish forces under his command, the 1st Polish Division saw extensive action along the Western Front, serving with distinction in battles and skirmishes near Rheims, as well as Alsace and Lotharingia. In a move supported equally by Great Britain and the United States, France officially granted the Polish army autonomous status on September 28, 1918. A week later, Haller stood on a field near Nancy, France, overseeing the formations of his new Polish army, to become known as Haller’s Blue Army.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-FEATURE-BLUEARMY.indd 41
41 5/30/21 8:53 AM
While the war may have been over for the Allies, it was not yet over for Poland.
42
Ukrainian People’s Republic seized control of the provincial capital of Lviv, Polish residents rose up in resistance to the power grab. The Poles took back Lviv, and fighting spread across the region, with neither side gaining a decisive advantage. On May 14, 1919, Haller’s forces undertook a major offensive aimed at breaking the stalemate in eastern Galicia. Well equipped by their Western allies, Haller’s troops broke through the Ukrainian defenses, eventually reaching the Zbruch River. In June, Haller’s wartime comrade Józef Piłsudski arrived to take charge of the Polish forces. Offensives and counteroffensives continued throughout the summer, before the Allies brokered a peace treaty giving Poland effective control of Galicia. Some 25,000 Polish and Ukrainian soldiers were killed in the short but brutal war. In the meantime, Haller assumed a new command position in Pomerania. On the blustery cold morning of February 10, 1920, at the seaside retreat of Puck on the Baltic coast, Poles gathered to celebrate their newfound independence. Every half mile along the scores of miles of approaching avenues, garlands were stretched from tree to tree, and in every village schoolchildren threw floral greetings beneath the hooves of the Polish cavalry. At midday, churches in the city sounded chimes and guns thundered in salute as a long column of troops moved toward the beach and the Baltic Sea. Three companies of British marine infantry kept the lines straight as several
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-FEATURE-BLUEARMY.indd 42
5/27/21 11:12 AM
SZCZEBRZESZYNSKI
As he looked over the field, Haller raised his right hand and swore an oath to his mother country: “I am ready to lay down my life for the sacred cause of its unification and liberation, to defend my banner to the last drop of blood, to keep discipline and obedience to military authority, and in all proceedings to guard the honor of Polish Soldiers.” Haller’s Blue Army was assigned to the front at Alsace in the Vosges Mountains, where it saw limited action. When the armistice was announced on the Western Front on November 11, 1918, Haller’s army was just reaching its full strength: 108,000 troops divided among three corps, seven squadrons of airplanes, and tank and supply regiments. While the war may have been over for the Allies, it was not yet over for Poland, which now needed the strength and experience of Haller’s Blue Army to secure and defend its new borders. In the spring of 1919 Haller and his troops entered the Polish-Ukrainian War, which centered on the disputed territory of eastern Galicia, a predominantly Ukrainian enclave regarded by the Poles as part of their historical homeland. After a military group calling itself the West
NATIONAL WWI MUSEUM AND MEMORIAL
“Of all the nations,” observed a magazine correspondent covering the Allies’ World War I victory parade in Paris on July 14, 1919, “the Poles, now passing, are getting the most strenuous applause so far, save that for Americans.”
HALLER’S BLUE ARMY
SZCZEBRZESZYNSKI
NATIONAL WWI MUSEUM AND MEMORIAL
squadrons of cavalry and French infantry carried multicolored Polish banners. Haller, on horseback, detached himself from the group and rode into the sea. Turning to address the crowd, he noted the significance of the moment. After 138 years, he said, Poland had once again returned to the sea. On the beach, officers made way for a dozen color-bearers, each holding aloft the standard of a Polish regiment. A Catholic priest stepped forward with his blessing. Haller dismounted and stood in the cold waters of the Baltic. From his finger he drew a golden ring and threw it far into the water, saying, “As Venice so symbolized its marriage with the Adriatic, so we Poles symbolize our marriage with our dear Baltic Sea.” In the ensuing Polish-Soviet War, Haller would earn praise for his role in the defense of the capital during the Battle of Warsaw, in which he would lose a leg. The Polish victory in the battle against overwhelming odds, fought along the country’s largest river, became known as the “Miracle on the Vistula.” It was a hugely consequential victory, effectively ending Bolshevik efforts to spread communism into Western Europe. Three years later, Haller came to the United States as a guest of the American Legion. Newspapers hailed him as “the maker of Modern Poland” and “the Sentinel of Civilization.” At the American Legion’s National Convention in San Francisco, Haller found himself treated as a hero and was given a membership pin. He dined with President Calvin Coolidge in the White House and paid a quick visit to automaker Henry Ford in Michigan. Yet the trip was not without controversy, as rumors spread about the Catholic-dominated Blue Army’s alleged anti-Semitism in Galicia. When 85,000 Jews in Boston protested his visit there, Haller wholeheartedly denied any accusations of discrimination, maintaining that “at no time have I issued edicts, official or unofficial, by sign, word or mouth or intimation, the Jewish people should be treated differently from other nationalities residing in Poland.” According to Haller, the charges revolved around an order for all men, including observant Jews, to have their beards cut off to counter a typhus epidemic raging through Polish military camps. Lice, he said, did not discriminate between religions and creeds. Despite his denials, the rumors would follow Haller for the rest of his life. Reliable studies have found that several hundred Jews, in fact, were killed by the Blue Army or paramilitary groups in Galicia during the Polish-Ukrainian War, although there were no organized pogroms against Jewish residents. Haller left the army in May 1926, following a military coup by Piłsudski, his erstwhile comrade, that overthrew the democratically elected government.
A monument in Warsaw, unveiled in 1998, honors the American volunteers who fought in Haller’s Blue Army.
After leaving the army, Haller quietly retired to Pomerania, on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea. When World War II broke out in 1939, the 66-year-old one-legged general asked the Polish consulate in Great Britain for a commission, only to be rejected because of his age. Instead, he put his experience to use as a minister without portfolio, traveling to the United States in late 1939 to encourage Poles to enlist in the Polish army in France. Following the fall of France, Haller escaped to Great Britain, where he served the government in exile as a minister of education. When the war was over, Haller remained in London. The man who as a child had dreamed of a free Poland and had grown up to command the army of the independent nation, died alone in his London flat on June 4, 1960. After the fall of communism three decades later, Haller’s remains were returned to Poland and placed in a crypt in St. Agnieszka’s garrison church in Kraków. He was home again— this time for good. MHQ Peter Zablocki is a historian and the author of Denville in World War II, which will be published in 2021 by the History Press.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-FEATURE-BLUEARMY.indd 43
43 5/27/21 11:13 AM
LAST GASP AT GRANVILLE In 1945 a German raiding force from the Channel Islands launched a daring attack on a port in Allied-occupied France. By Dwight R. Messimer
44
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-FEATURE-GRANVILLE.indd 44
UNITED ARCHIVES (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES)
5/27/21 11:15 AM
Four of the Kriegsmarine’s large M class minesweepers, like those in this flotilla, took part in the Nazi raid on Granville in 1945.
MHQP-FEATURE-GRANVILLE.indd 45
5/27/21 11:15 AM
THE GRANVILLE RAID
In desperation, Schmettow began planning a raid on the French port of Granville.
The prisoners’ daredevil escape electrified hard-pressed Germans everywhere, and Adolf Hitler himself summoned the five men home to Berlin so that he could personally decorate them. But Allied night fighters downed their air-
46
craft on Christmas night over Bastogne, Belgium, and all the men on board were killed. As the first French port the Allies had liberated, Granville had briefly been the busiest, most important harbor in the world. Warehouses sprang up overnight, and 18 new cranes were erected to help bulk-load supplies onto railcars and transport trucks. As other ports came on line at Morlaix, Saint-Brieuc, and Saint-Malo, Granville became primarily a coal port, with convoys arriving every other day from the English port of Falmouth. A U.S. Army battalion guarded the installations at Granville, while U.S. Navy patrol boats prowled the islands nearby. The first German raiding party sailed from Saint Helier on the night of February 7–8. It soon turned back, however, because of heavy swells and fog, mechanical problems, and its discovery by an alert U.S. Navy subchaser, PC-552, an hour after the flotilla set out. The captured LCVP from the POWs’ escape had joined the raid, but it foundered and had to be abandoned on the rocks south of Jersey. The lead raiders got close enough to the harbor to hear music coming from the beachfront Hôtel des Bains and Hôtel Normandie before heading back to Jersey empty-handed. The raiders had been able to recover and redeploy a number of British parachute mines at the northern approaches to Saint-Malo and had not been detected by Allied radar. Vice Admiral Friedrich Hüffmeier took over command of the Channel Islands from Schmettow on February 20, and he ordered plans drawn up for another raid. The new blueprint included an amphibious assault with a main attack, a diversion, and remote security. The raiders’ ambitious goals were to destroy cargo-handling equipment, sink any cargo vessels in the harbor, bring away one or more coal-laden colliers, free German POWs, capture American officers, and destroy or render useless all enemy patrol craft in the area. The attack fleet would consist of 12 vessels in four groups, each group with a specific mission. Hüffmeier, a former captain of the battle cruiser Scharnhorst, enthusiastically endorsed the plan. Hüffmeier’s promotion had nothing to do with his suitability or skills as a commander. Hitler, in the wake of a failed assassination attempt against him the previous summer, had begun replacing Wehrmacht army officers of questionable loyalty with rabid Nazi naval officers such as Hüffmeier, whose previous command had been an almost complete disaster. While serving on the captain’s bridge of Scharnhorst, Hüffmeier had run the ship aground on a sandbar, catapulted a reconnaissance aircraft off the deck (killing all but one crewman), wrapped a buoy cable around the starboard screw, and collided with another German
IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS
I
n the early winter of 1944–1945, the 30,000 German troops occupying the Channel Islands between Great Britain and France were miserably cold and hungry—as were the British subjects under their jackboots. Soldiers and civilians alike shivered on the windswept bits of land off the coast of Normandy and waited for the war to end. By this point Germany’s occupation of the Channel Islands was well into its fifth year, but the successful Allied landings in France the previous summer had irreparably severed its supply lines. (The Allies had chosen to bypass the heavily fortified islands entirely, leaving them isolated in the rear.) All across Europe the winter had been unusually harsh, and although Britain was regularly shipping coal to France via the French port of Granville, none was going to the Channel Islands. The Germans allowed the International Red Cross relief ship SS Vega to drop off shipments of food, clothing, and medical supplies, but only occasionally. “Let ’em starve,” British prime minister Winston Churchill had declared in September 1944. “No fighting. They can rot at their leisure.” It was unclear whether Churchill was referring the islanders or their German captors. As the Wehrmacht commander on the Channel Islands, Lieutenant General Rudolf Graf von Schmettow, was desperately seeking a solution to the supply problem, one simply dropped in his lap. On December 21, 1944, four German paratroops and a navy midshipman who had been captured at Brest escaped from the Granville POW camp. They stole an American LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel) from Granville Harbour and, with only a hand-drawn map and a pocket compass, had motored across 30 miles of treacherous Atlantic to Saint Helier on Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands. The escapees told Schmettow that coal-laden colliers were arriving in the harbor every other day and that lightly guarded dockside warehouses were filled with cases of C-rations. Schmettow immediately began planning a raid on Granville to obtain much-needed food and coal for his troops.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-FEATURE-GRANVILLE.indd 46
5/28/21 3:52 PM
A German military band marchews past a branch of Lloyds Bank on The Pollet, one of the main streets in the capital of Saint Peter Port, Guernsey, during the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands in World War II.
IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS
vessel while on maneuvers in the Baltic Sea. He had even falsely claimed credit for leading Scharnhorst on a celebrated “Channel dash” weeks before he had even taken command of the vessel. The sailors under him were delighted to see him go, and the army officers now under his control considered him a fanatic, perhaps even a lunatic. Preparations for a new raid on Granville continued apace, despite a suspicious fire and explosion at the Palace Hotel at Bagatelle, near Saint Helier, where the Germans were planning the raid. The incident, which claimed the lives of nine German soldiers and injured several others, occurred on March 7, the same day American infantrymen crossed the Ludendorff railway bridge at Remagen and entered Germany for the first time. It was not a good day for the German war effort. Hüffmeier, undeterred, launched the second Granville raid one day later. He felt the need for speed. A collaborationist Frenchwoman working at the Hôtel des Bains had
secretly informed the Germans that several high-ranking American officers were staying there. At the same time, Hüffmeier received reports of a new convoy of coal barges coming down from in England. The forecast for the often stormy Atlantic was fair, with calm seas and no moon. It was now or never. Codenamed Kommando-Unternehmen Granville, the raid was led by 41-year-old Captain Lieutenant Carl- Friedrich Mohr. The invading flotilla consisted of six minesweepers, three fast motor launches, a large seagoing tugboat, three barges and assorted fighting boats and harbor craft. The raiding party—600 soldiers and sailors in all—was divided into five assault groups. Each of the groups had a specific assignment: Group 1a was made up of the minesweepers M412 and M452 and numerous soldiers and naval personnel. Its mission was to demolish port facilities and the radar station and then provide crews for captured Allied ships. Mohr selected M412 as his command ship. Group 1b’s minesweepers, M432 and
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-FEATURE-GRANVILLE.indd 47
47 5/28/21 3:52 PM
M442, would take up positions to shell the landward approaches to the harbor and prevent reinforcements from reaching Granville. Group 2 included three armed ferry boats mounted with 88mm guns. Commanded by Lieutenant Otto Karl, its mission was to lure away the Granville guard ship and take on any other ships sent from Saint-Malo. To thwart possible pursuers, the group was also to destroy the lighthouse at Grand Chausey. Group 3, with three fast motor launches, would land diversionary forces and raid the Hôtel des Bains and Hôtel Normandie to seize any American officers housed there. Group 4, including the auxiliary minesweeper M4613 and the cutter FL13, would screen the Cotentin passage. Eight army assault groups were aboard the vessels in Groups 1a and 3; Group 1a also had a six-man Luftwaffe flak crew. Three naval assault groups were aboard Group 1b. The Americans quickly detected the approaching German flotilla. Shortly be fore 10 p.m., the U.S. Army radar station at Coutainville reported an enemy vessel just 20 miles from Granville, moving at 10 knots. At the same time PC-564, commanded by Lieutenant Percy Sandel, was making its usual patrol off Granville. The British collier SS Gem was anchored three miles from the entrance to Granville Harbour. Gem had come out of Granville at high tide that afternoon and was to remain anchored until the five colliers still in Granville came out the next day. The six colliers would then sail to the United Kingdom in convoy under the escort of HMS Pearl, an armed trawler. At 10:05 p.m. the army radar station at Coutainville picked up a new target on the same course as the original target, and it picked up a third target a few minutes later. This information was relayed to the Joint Operations Command in Cherbourg and to the headquarters of the army’s 156th Infantry Regiment, the primary coastal defense unit, at Donville-les-Bains. The Granville port commander, Major William Brown, was also notified. He sent a radio message to PC-564, warning Sandel of the threat and directing him to take appropriate measures and to tell Pearl to protect Gem. The three targets that the Coutainville radar station was tracking were three artillery lighters in German Group 2 headed for their station off Saint-Malo. Another group began showing up at 10:43 p.m. and grew in size for the next hour. The new group comprised the tug Diecksand, with 20 sailors who were to capture or sink any freighters that were in the harbor; four M-40 minesweepers carrying 150 German commandos; three harbor defense boats, car-
The U.S. Army radar station at Coutainville detected the approaching German flotilla.
48
rying 50 commandos to attack the officers’ billets; and two Kriegsfischkutters, V203 and V204, to protect the northern flank of the raid. All were heading to Granville at 10 knots. Twenty-three minutes later, the harbor entry control post at Cherbourg notified the 156th Infantry Regiment that the lead elements of the hostile group were 17.6 miles west of Coutainville. Brown notified Captain Philip H. Carlin, the commanding officer of the 3528th Ordnance Company, that several targets were approaching the Granville port. At 11:30 p.m., Brown was again advised that several targets were coming his way, so he darkened the port and sent the German POW cargo handlers back to the prison stockade. Fifteen minutes later PC-564’s onboard radar picked up the three artillery lighters at 3,000 yards, and Sandel, who had been in command for only 12 days, ordered the 3-inch gun to illuminate the targets. A split second later, the flash of a star shell from a German ship clearly exposed the American vessel. The gunnery officer, Lieutenant (junior grade) R. F. Klinger, opened fire. Sandel directed the helmsman to bring PC-564 broadside. PC-564 was just starting to turn when it was hit by four 88mm rounds. The first round exploded against the front of the wheelhouse, killing or seriously wounding everyone on the bridge. The blast destroyed the vessel’s magnetic compass, gyro repeater, and rudder angle indicator and knocked out the power steering. Sandel and Klinger were on the wing bridge when the first round struck. The concussion knocked Klinger down, and Sandel took some shrapnel in his left arm. PC-564’s 3-inch gun got off one round before its breech block jammed, and the crew was unable to clear it. A second 88mm round struck the mast seven feet above the gun deck, taking out both 20mm gun crews. The third hit took out the 40mm gun crew. The fourth round hit the deck, starboard side just aft of the bridge, and started a fire in the starboard officer’s cabin. Carlin, at his 3528th Ordnance Company headquarters on the northern edge of the town, heard gunfire and saw flares in the sky south of the port. He called the naval lieutenant in charge of defense at Granville Harbour to see what was happening but got no answer. He awakened his company and issued arms and ammunition and set up a roadblock at the entrance to Granville as outlined in the harbor defense plan. Brown and Carlin appear to have been the only officers who realized that something was wrong. The radar contacts had been widely distributed to units throughout the area, but most of the recipients thought the contacts were for informational purposes only, and no one had given a general alert or sounded sirens before the Germans attacked. While Carlin was deploying his company, PC-564 was steaming in a circle, on fire, with all guns out of action and
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ULLSTEIN BILD DTL. (GETTY IMAGES); BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS
THE GRANVILLE RAID
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-FEATURE-GRANVILLE.indd 48
5/27/21 11:16 AM
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ULLSTEIN BILD DTL. (GETTY IMAGES); BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS
Clockwise from top: Members of a Kriegsmarine assault detachment stand at attention after the Wehrmacht’s invasion and occupation of the Channel Islands in 1940; German troops man a defense post in the Channel Islands; the International Red Cross ship SS Vega delivers packages of food to civilians in Guernsey in 1944. half the crew dead or wounded. One German ship was on its port bow, another on the starboard, and the third astern. All of them continued to illuminate PC-564 while firing into it with their 20mm antiaircraft guns. The American crewmen who were still alive and not seriously wounded were fighting the fire belowdecks, and the gun crew was still trying to clear the breech block jam. At this point Sandel thought his ship was lost. “I decided that there was nothing we could do except abandon ship,” he said in his after-action report. “We stopped the engines
and I went up the ladder with the engine room gang when Mr. Klinger came up to me and said that the Germans had ceased firing. He suggested that we make a run for it, adding that ‘we couldn’t lose anything by it anyway.’” Sandel ordered the engines restarted and then ran forward. He shouted for everyone to remain aboard, but 10 men had already abandoned ship in the starboard life raft. They were never seen again. When he reached the bridge, a crewman pointed out the location of the Pierre-de-Herpin
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-FEATURE-GRANVILLE.indd 49
49 5/28/21 3:53 PM
“Put the bow on the light,” Sandel told the helmsman, “and hold her there.”
50
possible deployment at either Coutainville or to the south. The antitank company at Coutances was alerted and told to “be prepared for any movement that might be ordered.” Cannon Company and Company C, then en route to Coutances, were directed to continue on to Granville. At 1:50 a.m. M412, M432, and the tug entered the outer harbor, guns blazing. M442 and M452 veered off and took up positions outside the harbor where they could support the landing with covering fire. The tug made a hard right turn and entered the inner harbor lock. As the two minesweepers continued their run across the outer harbor, headed for the east quay, M412 ran hard aground 20 yards out. M432 reached the quay, disembarking 75 German infantrymen, each armed with a Schmeisser MP40 submachine gun and carrying a satchel of explosives. Brown and Captain T. R. Wilkinson were climbing the steps to the top of Pointe du Roc, where the Germans had built fortifications and a gun battery, when the enemy raiders entered the harbor. Brown wanted the French security unit and the 52 American riflemen garrisoned there to go to their respective defense positions. The two officers had just reached the top of the Rock, as Granville’s upper city of La Haut Ville was known, when the first artillery fire landed on the barracks. They found the Americans in their positions, but the French soldiers were still in the barracks and refused to come out. Brown tried to persuade the French lieutenant in charge to send his men into their assigned defense position, but the officer steadfastly re-
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-FEATURE-GRANVILLE.indd 50
5/27/21 11:17 AM
PHOTOSNORMANDIE
lighthouse. “Put the bow on the light,” Sandel told the helmsman, “and hold her there.” At 12:45 a.m. on March 9, Sandel beached PC-564 near the lighthouse. Five crewmen made the boat fast to a large rock and Sandel hustled up to the lighthouse to get help. While the three German artillery lighters were mauling PC-564, radar station Cat Bird, at Coutainville, was reporting more targets coming out of Jersey and moving southeast. Examining the radar plots, officers at the Joint Operations Command headquarters in Cherbourg assumed that whatever the Germans were doing was probably aimed at Cherbourg and that the activity directed at Granville was merely a feint. Colonel Morris T. Warner’s 156th Infantry Regiment staff had been studying the same plots and thought what they saw indicated potential threats to both Coutainville and Granville. At 11:16 p.m. Warner ordered the 3rd Battalion at Coutainville to “stand to” while he waited for more information. Fifty minutes later he put the entire 3rd Battalion on alert and ordered more beach patrols. He directed the battalion’s commanding officer to alert Company M at Montmartin and Company K at Coutances to be ready for
ULLSTEIN BILD DTL. (GETTY IMAGES)
A Nazi propaganda photo depicts a Wehrmacht soldier standing watch on La Corbière (“a place where crows gather”), off the coast of Jersey, in 1940; a lighthouse built on a tidal island is visible in the distance.
Large fires spread through the docks in Granville on March 9, 1945. “Enemy forces seem to have withdrawn,” a British soldier wrote in his diary, “though heavy explosions are going on intermittently and fires burning.”
PHOTOSNORMANDIE
ULLSTEIN BILD DTL. (GETTY IMAGES)
fused, and Brown finally had to give him a direct order. Brown thought the officer may have believed the Americans were practicing. While lead raider Mohr was trying his best to get M412 unstuck, his 75 infantrymen climbed into rubber rafts. The gunners on M412 and M432 continued firing at the town and the inner harbor. M442 and M452, positioned outside the harbor, shelled the French army barracks on the Rock and the town. The raiders quickly spread out through the harbor to destroy the cranes and other cargo-handling equipment, while five machine-gun crews set up their guns so that they covered every entrance to the harbor with enfilade fire. The plan ran like clockwork. The Germans had caught the Americans flatfooted and 15 minutes after landing were in complete control of the harbor. Inside the harbor were five Allied coastal steamers—Eskwood, Kyle Castle, Nephrite, Parkwood—and the Norwegian vessel Heien. They were sitting ducks. Six raiders, led by Lieutenant Scheufele, came ashore and quickly climbed the steep footpath to the top of the Rock. Their job was to attack the lighthouse, the army lookout post, and the signal station that were at the west end of Pointe du Roc. Once they reached the top of the Rock, three of them went to the lighthouse; three others, including Scheufele, charged the signal station and lookout post. Scheufele was killed in the process, becoming the only German officer to die in the raid.
Simultaneously with the landings in the harbor, 50 specially trained sailors, armed with MP40s and hand grenades, landed in rubber boats on the tidal beach on the north side of the Rock and stormed the Hôtels des Bains and Normandie. Spraying the hallways and rooms of the hotels with bullets, they killed one American officer and wounded another. After capturing nine American staff officers and a civilian—John V. Alexander, a United Nations relief officer—the Germans led their prisoners to the beach, where other raiders waited with inflatable boats. One of the captives, newly arrived Lieutenant Newell Younggren, was still wearing the pajamas his grandmother had sent him as a Christmas present. From his vantage point atop the Rock, a worried Brown watched the raid unfold with almost no opposition. It was obvious that the members of the 514th Port Battalion, who had little combat training and carried only M-1 carbines, were no match for the heavily armed Germans. At 1:15 a.m., Brown put in a call to the 15th Infantry Regiment’s command post at Donville, asking for help. At 1:20, Lieutenants Albert Dieyerbach, Frederic Roger Lightoller, and Emil Cremery drove their jeep into the harbor and ran head-on into gunfire that forced them to abandon their vehicle and seek cover. Lightoller set out on foot to port headquarters. Later that morning his body was found outside the Hôtel des Bains. Heroism ran in the Lightoller family. The lieutenant’s father, Charles Lightoller, had been second officer aboard
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-FEATURE-GRANVILLE.indd 51
51 5/27/21 11:17 AM
the doomed luxury liner RMS Titanic, and after valiantly supervising the loading of life rafts with women and children, had leaped into the frigid water and managed to take command of one of the rafts. He was the highest-ranking ship’s officer to survive the sinking. After being awarded the Distinguished Service Cross in World War I, Lightoller, along with his son Roger, then served heroically in the spontaneous civilian evacuation of Dunkirk, repeatedly shepherding their private vessel across the English Channel and rescuing 127 of the trapped British soldiers. (A lightly fictionalized account of their actions is a main plot point in the 2017 movie Dunkirk, with Academy Award– winning actor Mark Rylance playing Lightoller.) Lightoller’s youngest son, Brian, was killed on the first day of the war as he piloted a Royal Air Force bomber in a daylight raid on Wilhelmshaven, Germany. Just over an hour after the Germans landed in Granville, Warner moved his antitank company (less two platoons), one platoon of the cannon company, and all available reserve personnel of Company C, 3rd Battalion, from Donville to Coutances. He and his intelligence officer left the regimental command post at Donville at 1:35 to establish a temporary command post at Coutances. Before
52
Eskwood’s departure at 3 a.m. marked the beginning of the German exodus. As the Germans were leaving, M421 was burning, and its ammunition was cooking off. The Germans continued shelling the harbor as they steamed
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-FEATURE-GRANVILLE.indd 52
5/27/21 11:17 AM
HARRY SHEPHERD (GETTY IMAGES)
After the raid, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz ordered his subordinates not to undertake any more offensive actions.
he left, Warner put Major Robert Levy in charge with orders to send the rest of Company C to Coutances. The colonel arrived at his new command post at 2:40 a.m., almost two hours after the Germans had entered Granville. He was now 14 miles from Granville and seven miles from Coutainville, having decided the German attack would be on Coutainville. When the colonel arrived in Coutances, the 3rd Battalion commander told him that one platoon from Company K and one antitank platoon had been sent from Coutances to Donville together with 10 scout cars from the 474th Infantry Regiment. In accordance with the harbor defense plan, Carlin had established a roadblock on Highway V-171 near the entrance to Granville. Gunfire and explosions were still coming from the harbor when a captain in the 156th Infantry told Carlin that Warner would be along soon. Forty minutes passed and the colonel did not show up, so Carlin sent a messenger to the infantry at Donville. Contacting Carlin at 3:15, Brown learned that a reinforced infantry company was just outside Donville and asked Carlin to send them in. In the meantime, German prize crews had boarded four of the five colliers that were in the harbor and had met armed resistance. The shootouts were brief and one sided, a matter of pistols against submachine guns. The boarders killed a gunner and the ship’s steward on Eskwood, two officers and two gunners on Kyle Castle, the captain and two gunners on Parkwood, and three ship’s officers and three crewmen on Nephrite. The raiders had assumed that they could take the captured ships out of the harbor, but they had miscalculated. The tide was now so low that three of the four ships were scraping the bottom. Only the smaller, 1,200-ton Eskwood was still afloat. The raiders put a scuttling charge into Parkwood’s boiler, which destroyed it and blew a hole in the ship’s starboard side. Nephrite’s boarders did the same thing, but only the boiler was damaged. The fifth collier, Heien, was not boarded and remained undamaged. When the four prize crews were aboard Eskwood, the tug entered the inner harbor and took Eskwood in tow. The tug stopped briefly to take 62 escaped German POWs aboard Eskwood and then headed for the entrance to the harbor. Another two dozen such escapees contrived to be recaptured, preferring the comparative comfort of the Granville prison camp to the rigors of the Channel Islands. The tug cast off the towline as soon as the harbor was behind it, and Eskwood headed for Saint Helier on its own, reluctantly crewed by its captured British crewmen.
ULLSTEIN BILD (GETTY IMAGES)
THE GRANVILLE RAID
XXXXXXXXXX
Exuberant crowds welcome British troops on Jersey on May 13, 1945, four days after Germany formally surrendered to the Allies. Vice Admiral Friedrich Hüffmeier had been taken into custody the previous day.
HARRY SHEPHERD (GETTY IMAGES)
ULLSTEIN BILD (GETTY IMAGES)
away. Six French civilians were killed when they peered out their windows to see what was happening. A seventh civilian, a dockworker, was shot down as he ran for cover up rue General Patton. Warren arrived at the roadblock at 3:35 with Company K and Company M. He found that the Germans had left and the commanding officer of the 3rd Battalion had already gone into Granville with two platoons. More than two hours after Brown had placed his urgent call to the command post at Donville, help had finally arrived. Of the German raiders, 3 were killed, 15 wounded, and 1 captured. Allied losses were 9 killed (including Lieutenant Lightoller), 40 wounded, and 67 taken prisoner. For their parts in the raid, Captain Lieutenant Mohr and Senior Lieutenant Otto Karl, the skipper of ferry AF65, were awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. Hüffmeier was praised specifically in a report by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, although most of the planning had been done under Schmettow, Hüffmeier’s predecessor. The Americans’ relatively poor showing was hard to explain. It seemed that the 156th Infantry Regiment, which had all the heavy caliber and automatic weapons available in the area, was constantly out of position and had failed to go into the harbor when the Germans were still there. As it happened, in fact, no infantry units arrived in force until
after the raiders had withdrawn. Brown, whose men bore the brunt of the attack, said bitterly, “One cannot fight 88s, .50 caliber, 20mm, and 40mm with carbines.” Others thought that the Germans were simply better trained and armed and had caught the Allies completely by surprise. The highest praise came from Wilkinson, who said: “The weather on the morning of the raid was ideal for the purpose. There was no moon or wind and the sea was dead calm. The raid was perfectly timed and executed, and the results indicate that the personnel participating were expertly schooled and thoroughly trained to carry out their mission.” Hüffmeier was eager to mount a follow-up raid on Granville, but Dönitz, having taken over as supreme commander of German forces after Hitler’s suicide in his Berlin bunker, ordered him not to undertake any more offensive actions. Hüffmeier was taken into custody at Jersey by British seamen on May 12, four days after Germany formally surrendered to the Allies. The rabid Nazi’s final order to his men was that they greet the victors with “Sieg Heil!” salutes. They ignored him. MHQ Dwight R. Messimer is the author of a dozen books on military and naval history, including, most recently, An Incipient Mutiny: The Story of the U.S. Army Signal Corps Pilot Revolt (Potomac Books, 2020).
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-FEATURE-GRANVILLE.indd 53
53 5/27/21 11:18 AM
This wristwatch was worn by Captain A. A.“Dudley” Apthorp, the senior officer of “Appy’s Locusts,” an unofficial battalion of British POWs on the Burma railway in World War II.
MHQP-210700-TIME.indd 54
5/27/21 11:21 AM
THE TIME FACTOR In wars throughout history, for better or for worse, the clock has always been ticking. By Chris McNab
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-TIME.indd 55
55 5/27/21 11:22 AM
Soldiers began to realize the military potential of wristwatches in the second half of the 19th century. Unlike the pocket watch, a wristwatch could be consulted easily while a person did other things—ride a horse, handle an artillery piece, march in full gear, navigate a ship. Accurate battlefield timekeeping also offered several tactical advantages. Even widely dispersed units could launch offensives simultaneously or at agreed-upon intervals, without worrying that their signals could be easily intercepted. And they could time combat maneuvers to the second with supporting artillery fire. By the 1880s, wristwatches made by the venerable Swiss firm Girard-Perregaux were in wide use in the German Kriegsmarine, and British Army troops wore them in the
56
Third Anglo-Burmese War of 1885 and the Second Boer War (1899–1902). British-made models such as Mappin & Webb’s “Campaign Watch” and Goldsmiths & Silversmiths Company’s “Company Watch” became popular, with a British officer heartily endorsing the latter in an advertisement: “I wore it continually in South Africa on my wrist for 3½ months. It kept most excellent time, and never failed me.” Other watchmakers tapped into the growing military market as watches increasingly became standard issue, at least for officers. In 1903 the Swiss firm Dimier Frères & Cie produced a watch with wire lugs for strap fitting, a design quickly adopted for military use. In the early 20th century, both Cartier (France) and Zenith (Switzerland) produced watches specifically for military aviators, while the rough conditions of trench warfare in World War I led to features such as hardened glass and luminous dials and hands. Military watches became ubiquitous; the Hamilton Watch Company, based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, issued one million watches to air crews and infantry officers alone in 1917–1918. In the interwar period, additional models and innovations were introduced by the likes of Omega and Breitling, two other Swiss watchmakers; the latter introduced the push-button chronograph stopwatch into its wristwatches in 1923, a feature much appreciated by bomber crews and artillery battery commanders during the next world war. The emergence of wristwatches underscored the central role of time itself in warfare. Military thinkers have long recognized the importance of time in determining the outcome of war. Three elements of time are considered essential: speed, tempo, and duration. One of the best encapsulations of the first two properties comes from Warfighting, the U.S. Marine Corps
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-TIME.indd 56
5/28/21 3:53 PM
LEFT: DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES; RIGHT: ARCHIVE.ORG
A
t this very moment you might be wearing one of the most consequential weapons in military history: a wristwatch. Today, we take precision timekeeping for granted. Modern professional armies synchronize forces, time attacks, and schedule global maneuvers—all with atomic levels of accuracy and extraordinary sophistication. But that, of course, hasn’t always been the case. The driving force behind the widespread adoption of wristwatches in the 19th century was the military, although portable mechanical timepieces had been invented long before. Noblewomen began wearing expensive (and inaccurate) forms of wristwatches in the 16th century. Men discreetly tucked pocket watches in their waistcoats to protect them from the elements and theft. Other than these relatively rare and expensive items, time was kept on large, static timepieces—clanging, clicking affairs that adorned mantelpieces, walls, and, like Big Ben in London, majestic civic towers.
PREVIOUS SPREAD: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS; THIS PAGE, LEFT: PANTHEON DE PARIS; RIGHT: MUSÉE DES BEAUX-ARTS, ROUEN (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES)
From left: Attrition, fatigue, and shifting allegiances shaped the outcome of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, which slogged on from 1337 to 1453; Napoleon Bonaparte’s two-hour delay in attacking the Russian army at Borodino in 1812 contributed to his cataclysmic defeat at the hands of “General Winter.”
LEFT: DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES; RIGHT: ARCHIVE.ORG
PREVIOUS SPREAD: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS; THIS PAGE, LEFT: PANTHEON DE PARIS; RIGHT: MUSÉE DES BEAUX-ARTS, ROUEN (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES)
From left: Demologos, the first steam-powered warship, was launched from New York Harbor in 1815 and began the process of freeing the navies from their dependence on unpredictable winds; the French warship Gloire, launched in 1859, was the first ironclad with transoceanic capability—a revolutionary advance.
manual first published in 1989: “Speed is rapidity of action. It applies to both time and space. Speed over time is tempo—the consistent ability to operate quickly. Speed over distance, or space, is the ability to move rapidly. Both forms are genuine sources of combat power. In other words, speed is a weapon.” Ancient Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu was more succinct. “Speed is the essence of war,” he said. “Divine swiftness is to be esteemed.” The third element of military time—duration—anticipates how long a war will last. The longer a conflict continues, the higher its logistical, moral, economic, and human costs and the greater the likelihood of unforeseen outcomes, which is why thoughtful combatants seek victory in the shortest possible time. The concept of duration was well understood in the ancient and medieval periods, with their grinding and endurance-testing sieges. (The average siege lasted for about a month.) As soon as a siege was locked in place, the clock began ticking. A swift ending was something of a mercy, for sieges could play out over prodigious lengths of time—indeed, some became almost generational affairs. The longest siege in history was that of Venetian- ruled Candia, Crete, in the 17th century, when the Ottomans besieged the town for 21 years (from 1648 to 1669). Even sieges of single-digit years were object lessons in human fortitude and misery. It is difficult to think of a single tactical, operational, or strategic factor in warfare that is not, at its core, about time. In one sense, time is free; it is a weapon in everyone’s arsenal. It is what one does with time in warfare that makes the difference between victory and defeat. From the ancient period to the middle of the 19th century, the chief time factors governing the conduct of war were seasonal and diurnal. Military campaigns in the Western world were generally undertaken between March
and mid-August. These were the optimal months for war making. Longer daylight hours provided the opportunity to march greater distances. Warmer nights not only meant that outdoor living, eating, and sleeping were more comfortable, but also that personal loads could be reduced. Less rainfall, albeit far from guaranteed in much of the Northern Hemisphere, usually meant firmer roads for wagons, horses, and foot traffic. Pack animals could find more opportunities to graze. For armies relying heavily on feudal levies or citizen reserves, the typical Western campaign season meant that men and animals could be taken away from the land during the growing months but returned to work the harvest. Thus a state could begin a war in the spring, wrap it up by the end of the summer, and have everyone back in the fields in plenty of time to fill the stores for the long autumn and winter months ahead. Get the seasonal timing wrong, however, and the consequences could be catastrophic—as illustrated by Napoleon Bonaparte’s disastrous foray into Russia in 1812: “General Winter” succeeded in defeating the seemingly invincible French emperor when ordinary enemy troops could not. For once, Napoleon forgot his own injunction: “You can ask me for anything you like, except time.” His two-hour delay in attacking at Borodino on September 7, 1812, contributed to his cataclysmic retreat from the gates of Moscow a month later and the weather-racked debacle that followed. In a very real sense, time ran out on the Grande Armée.
It is difficult to think of any aspect of warfare that is not, at its core, about time.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-TIME.indd 57
57 5/27/21 11:24 AM
Railway networks allowed wars to be fought, quite literally, on a timetable.
58
The nautical revolution brought about by the transition from sail to steam transformed the world. At the end of the century, warships were crossing oceans in about a tenth of the time it had taken ships at the beginning of the century. The Royal Navy benefited most from the time compression; it was now able to maintain and police the vast British Empire with unchallenged speed and authority, aided by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The navies of many other countries were also increasingly able to sustain and extend their global presence. The 19th century also saw the emergence and explosive growth of railways. In 1840 the total world railway network measured 4,700 miles; by 1913, on the eve of World War I, that network had risen to 685,000 miles. The relationship between the growth of the railway system and the rise of industrialized warfare was a fundamental one. This mode of transportation was not especially fast, particularly if trains were long and heavy laden, but the rails offered a tremendous advantage in terms of volume: A single train could haul several thousand troops or thousands of tons of matériel in a single trip and on a predictable schedule. Wars could now be fought, quite literally, on a timetable. The fact that railways could inject scale and speed into military campaigns first became apparent during the Crimean War between tsarist Russia and Great Britain and her allies. In 1855 the British built the seven-mile Grand Crimean Central Railway to help support the Allied siege of Sevastopol. During the American Civil War a decade later, the nation’s ever-burgeoning rail network lay the foundation for the Union victory. Helmuth von Moltke, the commander of the Prussian army during the Franco- Prussian War (1870–1871), carefully studied the transportation lessons of the American Civil War and applied them rigorously to the rail network and mobilization plan of the Prussian army. Moltke maximized the efficiency of militarized rail transport to unprecedented levels. His staff created detailed timetables for troop movements and put in
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-TIME.indd 58
5/27/21 11:24 AM
IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS (2)
For centuries, the temporal rhythms of sunrise, sunset, and seasons shaped the parameters of war. From the mid19th century on, however, the pace of war increased exponentially with each passing decade. The rise of steam energy revolutionized transportation, both civilian and military. In 1815, the first steam-powered warship (technically a floating gun battery), the Demologos, was launched in New York Harbor and went into service with the U.S. Navy. With its wooden catamaran hull and paddlewheel propulsion, the vessel was anything but swift—its best time was 5.5 knots, or 6.3 miles per hour— but it began the process of freeing the world’s navies from their dependence on unpredictable winds. Sails gradually disappeared from warships, even as a form of auxiliary power, and the second half of the century saw the rise of irondriven armored leviaclads: steam-powered, propeller- thans. The first ironclad with transoceanic capability was the French warship Gloire, launched in 1859, but as the century progressed the British, German, and American navies all bought in to the ironclad concept, building ever- greater fleets with increasing firepower, range, and speed. The rise of the ironclad brought about a profound time compression in both maritime and land warfare: Troops and supplies could now be ferried to far-off locations with greater speed. During the age of sail, a good Atlantic crossing with favorable winds took about six weeks; if the weather was poor, a crossing could take as long as 14 weeks. By the end of the 1830s, civilian steamships were crossing the Atlantic in just two weeks; in 1840 the SS Great Britain made the voyage in just 11 days. By the beginning of the 20th century, the record had shrunk to five days.
LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: LIFE PHOTO COLLECTION
From left: During the Civil War, the North’s superior railroad and telegraph infrastructure allowed men and matériel to be moved where they were most needed; less than a decade earlier, during the Crimean War, the British had similarly achieved huge tactical and temporal advantages by laying rails and telegraph cable.
From left: This Swiss-made wristwatch, in a solid nickel hunter case, belonged to Joshua Strong, a corporal in the Canadian infantry, who was killed in action in World War I at age 29; Kaiser Wilhelm II receives a message by field telephone during training maneuvers of the German Imperial Army in Lower Silesia in 1906.
IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS (2)
LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: LIFE PHOTO COLLECTION
place the administrative structures that enabled military troop and transport trains to cross German state and rail company borders with little organizational intrusion. When war finally broke out, the Prussians deployed 15 corps of troops to the front line with elegant precision, each unit arriving on time at the intended position. The Prussians’ skillful use of the rail network set the stage for a shockingly quick victory. The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century brought many other advances to society, in both war and peace. In the world of communications, the perfection of the electric telegraph by Samuel F. B. Morse and others in the 1830s and 1840s transformed the speed of long-distance communications. The tactical and temporal advantages of this system became particularly obvious during the Crimean War. In the early stages of the conflict, it took about 20 days for a message to be transported physically overland and by sea from Balaklava, the Black Sea supply port in southern Crimea, to London, imposing a major time lag on the British command-and-control system. This problem was resolved by the laying of 345 miles of underwater telegraphic cable beneath the Black Sea from the two British outposts at Varna and Balaklava, a feat of engineering unprecedented at the time. The cable was laid by April 13, 1855, and when communications began to crackle through the line, it took just a few hours for a message to travel between the field headquarters and the General Staff in London. Vice Admiral Sir Edmund Lyons, the commander in chief of the Mediterranean Fleet during the Crimean War, maintained that “the telegraph cable lessened the duration of the war by two or three months by affording the means of rapid communications with the Crimea.” The late 19th and early 20th centuries brought many other innovations that altered the time equation of warfare. Telegraph communications were bolstered by the introduction of telephones, which Alexander Graham Bell had pat-
ented in 1876. Field telephones were notoriously unreliable for communication at first, but steady improvements both in cable-laying techniques and in the quality of the telephones themselves led to their more extensive use by the British during the Second Boer War (1899–1902). Field telephones not only accelerated the tactical communications between frontline units and headquarters but enabled much closer coordination between infantry and artillery. During World War I, field telephones were used to coordinate artillery barrages of real-time complexity, synchronized with infantry advances. Every company commander wore a wristwatch. The early 20th century also saw the emergence of radio (wireless) telegraphy, which rapidly became the central means of military communications, creating a “telenet” that united air, ground (armor, artillery, and mechanized infantry), and naval forces in holistic, synchronized combat capability. But few technologies had a more seminal impact on the speed of warfare than the invention and astonishingly rapid development of aircraft. The age of fixed-wing heavier-than-air combat aircraft essentially began in 1909, with the U.S. Army Signal Corps’s adoption of the Wright Model A, redesignated as the “Military Flyer.” With a maximum speed of 42 miles per hour, its time-shrinking potential was initially limited, but both the speed and combat radius of operational aircraft seemed to increase dramatically with each passing year. By the end of World War I, combat aircraft were pushing top speeds of 150 miles per hour; by the end of the next world war, the new generations of jet aircraft were exceeding 600. Then, on October 14, 1947, the sound barrier was broken, and the jet age truly arrived. The increasing orientation toward speed in warfare made time perhaps the defining weapon of the future. In World War II, the ability to maintain tempo was a huge asset on and off the battlefield. By mid-1940, it had become evident
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-TIME.indd 59
59 5/27/21 11:24 AM
XXXXXXXXXX
The duration of the fighting— just six days— was the core indicator of the Israeli success.
60
surprise, professionalism, decentralized decision-making (frontline troops and commanders could take tactical initiative in real time), and sheer boldness. What unfolded over the next six days was nothing short of world-changing. Operation Focus gutted the Egyptian air force within a day—total Egyptian aircraft losses may have been as high as 338 aircraft—thereby establishing the superiority of the Israeli Air Force for the rest of the campaign. Even as the Israeli jets were strafing and bombing their initial targets, armored and mechanized forces launched a powerful thrust into the Sinai Peninsula against the Egyptian army. Over the duration of the war, Israeli forces would fight successfully on three fronts: the Sinai, Jordan, and the Golan Heights. It was an emphatic and impressive victory for Israel, with all its enemies convincingly defeated and all its territorial and tactical objectives achieved swiftly and comprehensively. The fact that history has chosen to label the conflict the Six-Day War is illustrative. This was a war in which the duration of the fighting, just six days, was the core indicator of the Israeli success. Contrast this with another great conflict, the Hundred Years’ War, the generational struggle between England and France that dominated much of Western European history from 1337 to 1453 ce. “Six-Day War” evokes speed, energy, decision, focus, and clarity. “Hundred Years’ War,” by contrast, suggests attrition, fatigue (both social and individual), ambiguity, and shifting allegiances. In both cases, time was at the center of the wars’ outcomes. Since 1945, military time has gone into warp speed, and not just because of the ever-looming threat of nuclear annihilation. The progressive computerization and digitization of weapons systems and command-and-control from the 1960s on has been the driving force behind the movement, networking the battlefield and reducing the time lag between information gathering and operational
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-TIME.indd 60
5/27/21 11:25 AM
FROM LEFT: ,MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVE, U.S. ARMY (GETTY IMAGES, 2)
that the war would be a matter of endurance, though seminal advances in military technology brought greater speed of maneuver, broader networks of communications, and more efficient tools of attrition. An enemy subjected to unrelenting pressure, of course, could not sustain an equivalent tempo of counteroperations. Thus, Germany was virtually destined for defeat once it found itself at war with Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States, whose combined military and industrial forces could exert a three-front tempo that the Wehrmacht simply could not match. The U.S. military’s island-hopping campaign against Japan from 1943 to 1945 was a perfect example of tempo-based operations: a rhythm of territorial reconquest that steadily shrank the Japanese imperial perimeter to nothing, one island at a time. Nowhere was this better illustrated than the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab adversaries in 1967. On June 5, 1967, at 7:45 a.m., dozens of combat aircraft of the Israeli Defense Forces roared into the clear morning sky. The wings of their planes heavy with ground-attack and air-to-air ordnance, they immediately banked west, turning their noses toward their targets: Egypt’s airfields. Operation Focus, as the action was known, was the opening move in Israel’s extraordinary gamble—a preemptive strike against the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. (Subsequent fighting also drew in the forces of Iraq.) By every metric, Israel was profoundly outnumbered. It had a total of about 260,000 troops (80 percent of them reservists), 300 combat aircraft, and 800 tanks against nearly 550,000 Arab troops, 950 combat aircraft, and more than 2,500 tanks. In Israel’s favor, however, were the elements of
LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; RIGHT: U.S. AIR FORCE
From left: Crew members of a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress unit operating from Bassingbourn, England, during World War II synchronize their watches during a briefing; on October 14, 1947, Captain Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager, a trailblazing test pilot in the U.S. Air Force, became the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound.
FROM LEFT: ,MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVE, U.S. ARMY (GETTY IMAGES, 2)
LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; RIGHT: U.S. AIR FORCE
From left: From early on in the Vietnam War, U.S. forces battled a technologically inferior enemy that could afford to hang on and wait for things to change, which they always do; similarly, in Afghanistan, the United States faced a seemingly tireless enemy in the Taliban, which took an attritional approach from the beginning. combat decisions. Consider, for example, the U.S. Navy’s Aegis Combat System, an integrated command-and- control weapons system that can detect, track, and engage dozens of targets simultaneously. War waged at the speed of computers, which themselves have made astonishing leaps in processor speed, has spread to every sphere of combat, including logistics and transport, infantry tactics and training, weaponry, aviation, armor, and, most visibly, the inexorable spread of unmanned technologies. In the years since World War II, many disadvantaged combatants have chosen to combat speed with duration. The most successful implementation of this strategy was the Vietnam War, a conflict that brought a superpower United States against a technologically inferior opponent in North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, the Viet Cong. The Communists’ strategy consciously embraced duration, inflicting frequent pinprick losses that in themselves were largely insignificant but when played out thousands of times over many years added up to eventual victory. All the Communists had to do was to hang on and wait for things to change, which they always do. For the Communists, the war lasted 30 years (1945 to 1975), during which time the United States went through five presidents and many profound cultural changes; Ho Chi Minh’s leadership of North Vietnam, by contrast, transcended the governance of four of those presidents. The North Vietnamese Army’s greatest general, Vo Nguyen Giap, was essentially at the helm of the country’s forces from 1948 until 1980. For the two combatants, time was entirely relative. The North Vietnamese could afford to wait. In the end, they won, and the last U.S. helicopter took off from the rooftops of the American Embassy in Saigon, soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City, on April 30, 1975. The recent experience of American forces in Afghanistan underscores the rationale for duration over speed. In 2001, a joint U.S. and NATO coalition deployed to Afghanistan, taking with it an almost incomparable superiority in
every domain of warfare over an enemy of often poorly trained, scattered, and crudely armed Taliban insurgents. Yet by December 2014, when the coalition formally announced the end of its combat mission, the Taliban remained intact and still controlled large swaths of the country. The Afghan guerrillas’ chief weapon, above all others, was duration. Afghanistan’s tribal peoples, particularly in the rural parts of the country, typically have a far broader concept of time than clock-watching Westerners, marking life through generational, seasonal, diurnal, and religious rhythms rather than minutes, hours, and days. Like the North Vietnamese, the Taliban have therefore been able to sit through multiple American and European administrations and through numerous sequences of sixmonth military deployments, content to wait until their enemy tires. In the long, contentious history of Afghanistan, the waiting game has always been the winning game. In many ways, speed remains an overarching concern for Western armies, not least because wars that last more than a president’s or prime minister’s term of office often have vague and unpromising outcomes. Warfighting still has room to speed up—the rise of autonomous combat technologies powered by artificial intelligence will ensure that. But future armies, and the politicians who direct them, would do well to keep in mind that speed itself is not always the surest route to victory. It is how speed is used, its duration in time, that ultimately matters. In all wars, the clock is constantly ticking, but the method of timekeeping is subject to various, often conflicting interpretations. Not everyone tells time with a wristwatch—Cartier or not— but time tells on everyone, in war and in peace. MHQ Chris McNab is a military historian based in the United Kingdom. His latest books are The M4 Carbine and Arab vs. Israeli Armour: Six-Day War, 1967, both published by Osprey in 2021.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-TIME.indd 61
61 5/27/21 11:25 AM
BANKING ON WAR Vintage realms of the coin...
T
he coin-collecting containers we know as banks—piggy or otherwise—have been around for centuries, and those with military or war themes have long been popular with savers of all ages. While coin banks (or money boxes, as they’re known in Britain) seem to have faded in popularity during the 1970s, collectors covet old ones of all varieties, and there are plenty to be found in antique shops and thrift stores as well as at auctions and a host of online venues. A single mechanical bank fetched more than $250,000 at auction in 2014, but if you’re lucky enough to find one of the war- and military-themed collectibles shown on the pages that follow, rest assured that it certainly won’t break the bank.
62
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-PORT-BANKS-BH1.indd 62
5/28/21 3:55 PM
ABOVE: HAGLEY MUSEUM AND LIBRARY; BELOW: BP AUCTIONS
BP AUCTIONS
“Bomb ’n’ Bank” (1945). This castaluminum plane, which sold by mail for $1.95 postpaid, featured a mirrored bombsight mechanism that allowed coins to be dropped, one by one, into the target—an enemy gas tank.
ABOVE: HAGLEY MUSEUM AND LIBRARY; BELOW: BP AUCTIONS
BP AUCTIONS
“Adolf—the Pig” Bank (1942). Industrial designer Thomas Lamb created this Hitler-themed piggy bank, made from pressed wood and inscribed “Save for Victory–Make Him Squeal,” to encourage Americans to buy defense bonds. The bank featured an internal noisemaker and sold for 39 cents.
MHQP-PORT-BANKS-BH1.indd 63
5/27/21 10:40 AM
64
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-PORT-BANKS-BH1.indd 64
5/27/21 10:41 AM
TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: MILESTONE AUCTIONS; BP AUCTIONS; RSL AUCTIONS CO.; BOTTOM: BP AUCTIONS (2)
Top, left to right: This colorfully painted cast-iron bank, which depicts General George Washington in his military uniform, sword at his side, has been widely reproduced over the years; the second cast-iron bank, this one with a bronze-tone finish, is a bust of General John J. Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, and was patented in 1918; during World War II manufacturers of coin banks were forced to turn away from metals, as was the case with this bust of General Douglas MacArthur, which was modeled from papier-mâché. Bottom: The “Victory Carrier Bank,” manufactured from a ceramic material during World War II by New York– based Novelty Manufacturing Company, showed eight planes on the flight deck and more in the hangar below.
BP AUCTIONS (4)
BANKING ON WAR
TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: MILESTONE AUCTIONS; BP AUCTIONS; RSL AUCTIONS CO.; BOTTOM: BP AUCTIONS (2)
BP AUCTIONS (4)
Top, left to right: This chalkware bank is in the form of a scowling, grenade-wielding U.S. Army drill sergeant; Hubley Manufacturing Company of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, turned out cast-iron toys, doorstops, and bookends by the thousands, including this saluting sailor bank; when Benjamin Butler, a Union officer in the Civil War, ran for president on the Greenback ticket in 1884, the J. & E. Stevens Company of Cromwell, Connecticut, lampooned him as a boodle-clutching frog. Bottom, left to right: This USS Oregon bank aimed to commemorate the battleship’s role in the Spanish-American War; Frank Goss, a ceramics designer in Chatham, New Jersey, came up with this duffel-toting sailor, manufactured by McCoy Pottery of Roseville, Ohio, as a promotional item for the Seamen’s Bank for Savings. MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-PORT-BANKS-BH1.indd 65
65 5/28/21 3:55 PM
66
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-PORT-BANKS-BH1.indd 66
5/27/21 10:41 AM
FROM TOP: RSL AUCTION CO.; COWAN’S AUCTIONS
BP AUCTIONS (3); TOP RIGHT: MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ART
Clockwise from left: Introduced in 1918, the “1 Pounder Bank” was made in the form of a World War I artillery shell by Grey Iron Casting Company of Mount Joy, Pennsylvania; the “Atomic Bank,” manufactured in die-cast metal by Duro Pattern & Mold Company of Highland Park, Michigan, sought to capitalize on the public fascination with the “A” word in the years immediately following World War II; the cast-iron, silver-painted “Graf Zeppelin” bank was manufactured by A. C. Williams Company of Ravenna, Ohio, in the image of the German airship that debuted in 1928 and was used by the Nazis as a propaganda tool; the “Battle of Gettysburg—100th Anniversary” bank was produced in 1960 by Wilton Products of Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, three years in advance of the battle’s centennial.
FROM TOP: RSL AUCTION CO.; COWAN’S AUCTIONS
BP AUCTIONS (3); TOP RIGHT: MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ART
BANKING ON WAR
From top: In 1919 Robert Eastwood Starkie and his wife, Nellie Starkie, of Burnley, England, were granted a British patent for their cast-iron “Tank and Cannon Bank,” which employed a piston-like striker to shoot a coin from a platform at the cannon’s muzzle into a slot in the side of the tank, the armored vehicle that had been developed five years earlier for use in World War I by British Army colonel Ernest Swinton, and the following year the Starkies obtained a U.S. patent for their bank, which was manufactured in both aluminum and cast iron; the “Artillery Bank,” featuring the same sort of mechanical coin-shooting action, was patented in 1892 by J. & E. Stevens Company and manufactured in bronzetone and painted cast iron, with alternate versions featuring either a Union or Confederate soldier alongside the mortar. MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-PORT-BANKS-BH1.indd 67
67 5/27/21 10:41 AM
68
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-PORT-BANKS-BH1.indd 68
5/28/21 3:56 PM
BP AUCTIONS (3); TOP RIGHT: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS
Clockwise from top: This unmarked tin bank, with lithographed cartoons of a U.S. Army barracks on all four sides, did double duty as a lollipop holder or display, hence the 22 small holes on either side of the coin slot on top; this painted plaster “Tank Bank,” created in 1942 by the Novelty Manufacturing Company, has a sticker on the bottom that says: “This Bank will hold $18.75 in quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. When full, open and go to nearest bank or Post Office and buy a War Bond to aid our country’s war effort”; the “Army and Navy Bank,” known to collectors as a safe bank, was introduced in the wake of the Spanish-American War in 1898 by the Kenton Hardware Manufacturing Company of Kenton, Ohio, which advertised it as a “double compartment savings bank.”
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: BP AUCTIONS (2); RHODE ISLAND INTERNET CONSIGNMENT AND SALES INC.
BANKING ON WAR
BP AUCTIONS (3); TOP RIGHT: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: BP AUCTIONS (2); RHODE ISLAND INTERNET CONSIGNMENT AND SALES INC.
Clockwise from top: The “Bomb Bank,” made during World War II from pressed cardboard and embossed with the legend “Keep ’em Flying” on the reverse side, sold for as little as 9 cents in drug and five-and-dime stores; this British bank was made in the shape of an Mk IV tank, with the oversized head of a “Tommy” with a shrapnel-torn Brodie helmet protruding from the top—a figure modeled after “Old Bill,” a cartoon character created during World War I by Charles Bruce Bairnsfather—and the legend “Where’s that blinking Kaiser?” on the side; this German helmet bank was manufactured in the shape of a stahlhelm but made from lead rather than steel; the German pickelhaube bank was made in Japan and sold by Swank Inc., a leading manufacturer of men’s jewelry, accessories, and leather goods. MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-PORT-BANKS-BH1.indd 69
69 5/28/21 3:56 PM
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
70
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-EUROPE.indd 70
5/27/21 10:34 AM
THE HELLFIGHTER
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
“He was our benefactor and inspiration,” Eubie Blake, the jazz great, once said of James Reese Europe, who wielded a baton, not a rifle, for much of World War I. By Stephen L. Harris
Lieutenant James Reese Europe and his felllow musicians in the all-Black 369th Infantry Regiment—the “Harlem Hellfighters”—return from World War I in 1919.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-EUROPE.indd 71
71 5/27/21 10:34 AM
JAMES REESE EUROPE
By the end of the war Europe was renowned abroad and at home as the Jazz King.
Since the death of jazz virtuoso Scott Joplin two years earlier, nobody embodied that rhythm—ragtime rhythm— better than James Reese Europe. Born in 1881 in Mobile, Alabama, he was raised in Washington, D.C. His parents were talented amateur musicians, and they made sure that Jimmy and his siblings learned to play the piano as well as the violin—he studied violin with Enrico Hurlei, the assistant director of the U.S. Marine Band—and fostered in them a love of classical music. To continue his musical
72
studies, Jimmy moved to New York City in 1904, settling in its notorious Tenderloin district. There he took charge of the African American musicians hanging around saloons and brothels, waiting for calls to perform. He organized them into a cohesive union, dubbed the Clef Club, and moved them to a more respectable waiting place. He found the musicians regular work, calling their engagements “gigs,” reportedly a word he coined himself. On May 2, 1912, Europe conducted his own Clef Club Symphony Orchestra, the largest African American orchestra yet to play Carnegie Hall. David Mannes, the concertmaster of the New York Symphony Orchestra, never forgot the moment when Europe walked onstage. “Big Jim Europe was an amazingly inspiring conductor,” Mannes later recalled. “Of a statuesquely powerful build, he moved with simple and modest grace, always dominating this strange assemblage before him with quiet control.” The concert, with people crowded together, regardless of race, throughout the theater, was a stunning success. It was also the beginning of Europe’s dream to create what he termed a true “National Negro Symphony Orchestra.” He had already organized the Tempo Club, a popular ragtime group, and provided music for the most beloved dance couple in the country, Vernon and Irene Castle. While Europe was organizing Harlem’s musicians, the city’s African American community was clamoring for a National Guard regiment of its own. At the time, New York City had almost a dozen militias, from the silk-stocking 7th Regiment on the Upper East Side to the Fighting Irish 69th downtown on Lexington Avenue. But the calls from Harlem went unanswered until June 2, 1913, when Governor William “Plain Bill” Sulzer signed into law legislation authorizing a “colored” regiment. The headline in the city’s African American newspaper, the New York Age, read: “We Have the Regiment!” But no such regiment was formed. For several years the law was ignored or forgotten. It took Mexican revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa to change the situation. In 1916, Villa and his bandits crossed into New Mexico and killed 18 Americans. An infuriated President Woodrow Wilson responded by sending federal troops, led by Brigadier General John J. Pershing, across the border to hunt down Villa. Wilson also sent National Guard troops from various states to protect the U.S.-Mexico border from Texas to California. New York dispatched its entire division to the banks of the Rio Grande River in southeastern Texas. Suddenly there was hardly a National Guard unit left in the Empire State.
LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; RIGHT: UNDERWOOD ARCHIVES (GETTY IMAGES)
L
ong before the SS Stockholm docked in New York Harbor on February 12, 1919—Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, just three months after the end of World War I—the combat-hardened African American soldiers aboard the transatlantic liner had already achieved some measure of fame in their homeland. They were the “Harlem Hellfighters” of the 369th Infantry Regiment, returning to the United States after more than a year on the bloody battlefields of the Western Front, where they had earned their proud nom de guerre, which defines them to this day. For much of the war, the most famous Harlem Hellfighter of them all was armed not with a rifle, but with a baton. Lieutenant James Reese Europe, renowned on two continents as the Jazz King, was the only remaining African American officer in his unit. He pressed against the ship’s railing alongside members of his regimental band, which had electrified all of France during the war. Catching sight of the Statue of Liberty, Europe turned to the band and had it play “The Star Spangled Banner.” Then, as the Stockholm neared the pier to dock, the musicians swung into “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.” All the soldiers on board joined in, singing at the top of their lungs. A reporter for the New York Tribune, caught up in the moment, wrote: “The syncopated volume of sound that swelled from the Stockholm’s deck found responsive chords in the hearts of the bronzed veterans on the transport and in those hundreds of their relatives, friends and sweethearts from their home district in Harlem, who had chartered the steamer Correction to go down the bay. Swaying bodies, snapping fingers, inimitably contorted faces greeted each other across the narrow expanse of water in the language of rhythm.”
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-EUROPE.indd 72
5/27/21 10:35 AM
LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; RIGHT: UNDERWOOD ARCHIVES (GETTY IMAGES)
From left: The Harlem Hellfighters and members of another African American infantry regiment arrive in New York on the SS Stockholm; Colonel William Hayward persuaded Europe to organize his regimental band. William Hayward, an enterprising, young assistant district attorney, soon noticed the absence of citizen soldiers to protect New York City. Hayward, who had managed Republican Charles Whitman’s successful campaign for governor in 1914, located the old law that Sulzer had signed, and with the backing of the state’s adjutant general, he and Lorillard S. Spencer, the governor’s military secretary, convinced Whitman to organize an all-Black regiment with Hayward as its colonel. The governor did so, and the 15th New York Infantry Regiment was born. The moment Jim Europe heard about the new regiment, he knew that he had to enlist. “I have been in New York for 16 years and there has never been such an organization of Negro men that will bring together all classes of men for a common good,” he explained to fellow jazzman Noble Sissle. “And our race will never amount to anything, politically or economically, in New York or anywhere else unless there are strong organizations of men who stand for something in the community. New York cannot afford to lose this great chance for such a strong, powerful institution, for the development of the Negro manhood of Harlem.” Very few African Americans, however, were enlisting in the regiment. Those who did had no uniforms and were forced to march on the streets of Harlem with broomsticks instead of rifles. Hayward was about to give up—until the moment he realized that one of the enlistees was the famous conductor Jim Europe. He begged Europe to organize a regimental band. He believed that a band marching under the baton of the famous ragtime composer would save the
regiment. Europe balked. He wanted to be a soldier, he said, not a bandleader. As a civilian he had already led several bands—even an orchestra. Why enlist to lead another? To accommodate Hayward, however, Europe agreed to organize a band if the colonel could raise $10,000. The money would be used to entice the very best musicians into the regiment. Europe believed that it would be impossible for Hayward to raise such a kingly sum. But the bandleader had badly underestimated the colonel. Thanks to his background in politics and government, Hayward was exceptionally well connected. He figured that if he could get 100 people to each donate $100, he would soon have Europe’s $10,000. Hayward’s first stop was to see industrialist Daniel G. Reid, known as the “Tin Plate King.” Reid had amassed a fortune manufacturing tin plate and had joined J. P. Morgan in organizing the United States Steel Corporation. Hayward asked Reid if he would personally contribute $100 and send letters to 30 or 40 of his richest friends asking them to donate to Hayward’s effort. Instead, Reid wrote out a check for $10,000 and handed it to Hayward, saying, “That’s a damn sight easier than writing you forty letters of introduction.” Europe was now on the hook. To Hayward, he said, “Yes, sir, I gave you my word, so you can depend on me.” With the help of his friend Noble Sissle, now his drum major and lead singer, Europe began to recruit the best musicians, not just in New York but also in Chicago, where he signed crack cornet player Frank De Broit, and even as far away as
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-EUROPE.indd 73
73 5/28/21 3:57 PM
JAMES REESE EUROPE
The 15th New York became the first Black regiment to march onto French soil.
74
Before long Europe and his band would become famous throughout France. Director Winthrop Ames and actor E. H. Sothern, representatives of the YMCA’s National War Work Council, were on the hunt for performers to entertain doughboys at a planned recreation center in Aix-les-Bains, a posh resort town at the foot of the French Alps. They stopped by Saint-Nazaire to visit with Hayward. One night they were sitting around a muddy field when the 15th’s band marched in. The YMCA men were startled at its size. “No sooner had they begun to play,” Ames noted, “than it became obvious that we were not listening to the ordinary army band at all, but to an organization of the very highest quality, trained and led by a conductor of genius.” Ames asked Hayward who the conductor was and was amazed by the answer. “We asked his name,” Ames later recalled, “and were told that he was no less a musician than James Reese Europe, already famous in America, but whom we little expected to find a soldier in France.” Ames signed Europe and his band on the spot to open at Aix-lesBains. The ensuing train trip across the war-ravaged countryside of France, from the ocean to the Alps, began auspiciously with an overnight stay in Nantes. The townsfolk there were ready. Because it was Lincoln’s birthday, they had planned a gala reception and evening concert in the city’s opera house. The square in front of the opera house was jammed. Inside, all the seats were filled. Very few French people had ever heard ragtime music. When Europe and his band reached the square and began to play, there was no holding back the throng. After maintaining a polite silence during the playing of a number, the listeners burst into wild applause. The next day the band continued on to Aix-les-Bains. It stopped along the way at Tours, where war correspondent and author Irwin S. Cobb chronicled the band’s reception there. “Music poured in at their ears and ran down to their heels,” Cobb wrote. “When the band got to ‘Way Down Upon the Suwanee River’ I wanted to cry.” He saw, too, how the music affected the French villagers who had already endured three long years of suffering. They openly cried, he reported. From Tours, the band stopped at 10 more towns and then finally reached Aix-les-Bains on February 15, where it received another rousing welcome. With the mayor and Major Arthur Little leading the way, the military musicians marched through the crowded streets of the resort town to the Casino Theater, where for the next 16 days they entertained doughboys fresh off the battlefield. The soldiers, some with trench mud still dried on their uniforms, were startled at first to be entertained by Black musicians. But the moment the band broke into George M. Cohan’s “Over There,” they jumped onto their tables and shouted and waved their caps. “Play it again!” they yelled.
ADOC-PHOTOS (GETTY IMAGES)
Puerto Rico, where he recruited 18 first-class instrumentalists. Europe picked up several more musicians from the well-known Jenkins Orphanage Band of Charleston, South Carolina, including drummers Herbert and Steve Wright (not related). They would prove to be fateful additions to the group. When Europe’s regimental band paraded down the streets of Harlem, it drew thousands of onlookers, many of whom rushed off to enlist at the regiment’s recruiting office, which had taken over a cigar store. Soon the ranks of the 15th New York were filled. The band’s biggest moment came on June 22, 1917, just after the United States had declared war on Germany. That evening, more than 4,000 people crowded into the Manhattan Casino, a popular nightclub at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue in Harlem, for the band’s gala performance. Powder was spread on the dance floor to keep the hardwood “from burning up when four thousand pairs of feet started shuffling over it,” according to Sissle. Lester Walton, a critic for the New York Age, wrote that the dance floor “resembled the Brooklyn Bridge at rush hour.” After a racially charged training stay at Camp Wadsworth in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the 15th was hastily ordered back to New York and sent across the Atlantic Ocean to the Western Front—presumably to keep it out of harm’s way. Hayward and his men landed in Brest on a snowy and bitterly cold day—the first African American regiment to march onto French soil. Instead of marching to the front, however, they were assigned to the port of Saint-Nazaire on the west coast of France and put to work as common laborers. Captain Hamilton Fish III, the captain of K Company, scorned it as “pick and shovel work.” The men helped build up the port to handle American troopships and the landing of thousands of eager doughboys. The men of the 15th “did everything in France but fight,” a reporter for the New York Evening World wrote. “They chopped wood, dug holes, and built railroads.” The reporter described how the men struggled to lift their spirits by playing music and singing hymns and other familiar tunes, including ragtime and the latest songs of the war. They serenaded the French civilians and the soldiers stationed at Saint-Nazaire. “Jim Europe’s band made the greatest kind of hit in the drab life of the French and the villagers used to walk for miles to hear it,” the reporter observed, adding that their singing “tickled the French fancy.”
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-EUROPE.indd 74
5/27/21 10:36 AM
ADOC-PHOTOS (GETTY IMAGES)
On July 4, 1918, with Europe leading his machine-gun company in combat, Second Lieutenant Eugene Mikell leads the 369th’s band in a concert at French general Henri Gouraud’s headquarters in Châlons-sur-Marne.
“No other form of entertainment appealed to them quite so much,” recalled Winthrop Ames. The gig was extended for two more weeks. Meanwhile, Hayward finally received the orders he wanted for his regiment. It had been assigned to the French Fourth Army and its numerical designation changed from the 15th to the 369th. It was now on its way to the front. And so were Europe and his band. At the last concert, the director of the recreation area went on stage. “Tomorrow, these men, who for a month have given us so much pleasure, proceed to the front lines, to serve in the trenches against…” He never got to finish. Everyone in the theater rose to their feet, yelling and whistling, yanking flags from balconies and waving them in patriotic fervor. “On the stage,” Little wrote, “the colored soldiers who had been spat upon in Spartanburg, rose and bowed—and grinned.” The journey back to the front had been long and winding. The band had traveled almost 2,000 miles and played in more than 25 cities. Ragtime had arrived in France. Europe’s time with the band was over—at least for a bit. He now realized his wish to become a gun-toting officer, but it wouldn’t last long. He was soon sent to Paris to rejoin his
band and perform at hospitals and before government dignitaries, French and American. At the same time, the War Department ordered all African American officers in the 369th to other Black regiments, technically leaving Europe the only African American officer in the original 15th New York. As part of that order, Noble Sissle, the band’s singer and drum major, was promoted to lieutenant and sent off to the 370th Infantry. He and Europe would not reunite until after the war. Paris proved another triumph for Europe and his fellow musicians. Europe later described his first performance in the French capital to Grenville Vernon, a drama critic and celebrated denizen of Broadway: “What was to be our only concert was in the Théâtre des Champs Élysées,” he told Vernon. “Before we had played two numbers the audience went wild. We had conquered Paris.” In the audience, he said, was General Tasker H. Bliss, the U.S. military representative to the Allied Supreme War Council, seated with high-ranking French officers. When they heard the band, Europe said, they “insisted we should stay in Paris, and there we stayed.” The turning point, according to the bandleader, came at Tuileries Gardens, where the Hellfighters joined some of the greatest military bands in the world—the British Gren-
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-EUROPE.indd 75
75 5/27/21 10:36 AM
adiers Band, the Band Garde Républicaine, and the Royal Italian Band—in performing before 50,000 people. “Ragtimitis,” as Sissle described it, spread across France. Europe believed that the reason he and his band “won” France was that they were “playing music which was ours and not a pale imitation of others.” He was firmly convinced that African Americans should compose their own music and not imitate White music. “The music of our race springs from the soil,” he explained to Vernon. On returning to the United States, he was planning to pick up where he had left off before the war. Keeping his band together and adding more musicians, Europe organized a barnstorming tour of the States from New York through Pennsylvania, as far west as St. Louis, and then back east to Boston and Harlem. Before heading out on the tour, the band cut a record for Pathé. The numbers included the two compositions about no man’s land that Europe had written overseas, as well as “Jazz Baby,” “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” “That Moaning Trombone,” “Plantation Echoes,” and “Memphis Blues” by the noted composer W. C. Handy, the widely heralded “Father of the Blues” and Europe’s dear friend. The tour got off to a resounding start, with sellouts at every stop. Newspapers showered the band with glowing reviews as the best in the land. A critic for the Philadelphia Evening Ledger, the city’s most popular newspaper, gushed: “If Shakespeare had heard Jim Europe’s jazz band at the Academy yesterday afternoon, he would have gone home, dipped his quill in the blackest black ink he could find, and written jazz.”
76
Stephen L. Harris is the author of five books, including Harlem’s Hell Fighters: The African-American 369th Infantry in World War I (Potomac Books, 2005).
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-EUROPE.indd 76
5/27/21 10:37 AM
XXXXXXXXXXXX
The all-Black 15th New York Infantry Regiment marches up Fifth Avenue in New York City in 1917. The following year it would be redesignated the 369th Infantry Regiment.
For nearly two months the Hellfighters traveled by train from one city to another. On May 8, they chugged out of Philadelphia and into Boston, their last concert before returning home. In Massachusetts, the band would play at the Boston Common in front of the statehouse, with Governor Calvin Coolidge in attendance, to honor the allBlack 54th Massachusetts Infantry of Civil War fame. The musicians arrived in the rain with a strong wind blowing off Boston Harbor. Some of the band members were irritable; almost all were downcast. Europe had picked up a cold and worried that it might turn into pneumonia. To make matters worse, the venue for their first concert, Mechanics Hall, was, according to Sissle, “very cold and barn-like.” Pounding rain kept attendance low for the matinee as well as the evening concert. The tour was ending on a downbeat. Europe was in a sour mood, and his main drummer, Herbert Wright, was acting strangely, sometimes wandering off stage while his bandmates were playing. “Put more pep in the sticks,” Europe snapped at Wright. Leaving Sissle to conduct the band, Europe left the stage to seek shelter in a backstage dressing room. Wright, who was subject to wild mood swings, possibly exacerbated by disease or posttraumatic stress disorder, jumped up from behind his drums and followed Europe. (Sissle, sensing that something bad was about to happen, wasn’t far behind.) Inside the dressing room, the two got into a heated argument. Wright attacked the composer with a penknife. With a wild backhand blow, he struck Europe in the neck, nicking Europe’s carotid artery. Stunned, the conductor tugged at the stiff collar of his uniform. When he got it loose, Sissle observed, “a stream of blood spurted from a small wound.” Within moments an ambulance arrived to carry Europe to a hospital. As he was wheeled out of Mechanics Hall, he whispered to Sissle, “I am going to the hospital, and I will have my wound dressed and I will be at the Common in the morning in time to conduct the band.” He was wrong; there would be no statehouse ceremony. Doctors were unable to stop the bleeding, and Europe died that night. His dream of a National Negro Symphony Orchestra died with him. Wright was subsequently convicted of manslaughter, though the charge was reduced because of his diminished mental capacity, and served eight years in the Massachusetts State Prison. With Europe’s death, America lost one of its greatest ragtime composers. The “fighting bandmaster” who had brought music and harmony to America and the battlefields of France was buried with full military honors, as a bugler played “Taps,” at Arlington National Cemetery. MHQ
BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES)
JAMES REESE EUROPE
CULTURE OF WAR CLASSIC
DISPATCHES 78 BIG SHOTS 81 ARTISTS 82 WAR STORIES 86 POETRY 89 REVIEWS 90
AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL
In 1918, after being gassed in World War I, Private Maximillian Nicholls returned to Australia with a violin he’d made with his pocketknife and odds and ends from the battlefields of France, including a field telephone box, a German rifle, a dead soldier’s patella (kneecap), hair from a mule’s tail, and assorted shell and bullet casings. Now, more than 100 years later, it’s part of “3D Treasures,” an online exhibition that features three-dimensional digital scans of objects in the collection of the Australian War Memorial. www.awm. gov.au/3dtreasures
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-COW INTRO-VIOLIN.indd 77
77 5/27/21 11:52 AM
CLASSIC DISPATCHES
EYES ON AN INVASION By Roelif Loveland
“We saw the curtain go up on the greatest drama in the history of the world.”
his overseas dispatches, columns, and editorials. “After a lifetime of writing, I concluded after reviewing Loveland’s work that I really don’t know how to write,” Porter wrote in the foreword to the book. “Loveland did. He was one of the greats, possibly the greatest.” On June 6, 1944, Loveland joined First Lieutenant Howard C. Quiggle, a fellow Clevelander, aboard a Martin B-26 Marauder on a bombing mission in support of the D-Day invasion. His eyewitness account of the invasion—one of the first such stories to appear in an American newspaper—ran the following day on the front page of the Plain Dealer. It is reprinted here with the permission of the Plain Dealer. A NINTH AIR FORCE MARAUDER BASE IN ENGLAND, June 6—We saw the curtain go up on the greatest drama in the history of the world, the invasion of Hitler’s Europe. We saw it from a balcony seat high up in God’s heaven, in a combat-bound Marauder piloted by a Cleveland boy, First Lieut. Howard C. Quiggle, 17118 Lipton Avenue S.E. Flak flew about us and tracer bullets missed us by uncomfortable margins, but our bombardier dropped 16 250-pound bombs on military installations near the area in which our troops were to come ashore for the invasion. Being only one of thousands riding the tail of a comet to see history in the making leaves a witness drained of all emotion and too numb to be very articulate. How can words describe properly the deathless bravery that the world saw on the shores of France? How can words describe properly a sky filled with planes, fighters, bombers, risking life itself to give the infantry the best possible chance to succeed. What magnificent teamwork! They called us out of bed early this morning. It’s a little difficult to eat at such a time. Briefing took place soon after. Some of the boys still thought that it was a dry run and that they would be told to go back to bed. But they changed their minds when Col. Richard T. Coiner, commander of this station, started off by reading a letter from Gen. Dwight Eisenhower in which the general
Clockwise from top: An aerial view of American troops and tanks coming ashore in Normandy on D-Day; Allied bombs hit a German command post on D-Day; Roelif Loveland with the U.S. Third Army in 1944.
78
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION, INTERIM ARCHIVES (GETTY IMAGES, 2); SUSAN LOVELAND
Roelif Arthur Loveland was born in 1899 in Oberlin, Ohio. Just as he was finishing high school the United States entered World War I, and he decided, at age 18, to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps. While serving with the American Expeditionary Forces in France, he was wounded and gassed in the bloodiest fighting the AEF would see in the war: Belleau Wood, Soissons, Saint Mihiel, and, finally, in the Meuse-Argonne. After the war, Loveland attended Oberlin College and then settled on a career as a newspaperman. In 1922, following a brief stint at the Cleveland Press, he landed a job at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which would be his professional home for the next 42 years. Loveland made a name for himself writing “color” pieces (as well as occasional verse), and in 1944 the Plain Dealer sent him to Europe to report on the Allied invasion of France. After landing at Normandy, Loveland covered Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr.’s Third Army as it swept through northern France. He often shared a jeep with Ernest Hemingway, who was also following Patton’s army as a war correspondent. Loveland made it a point to include soldiers from the Cleveland area in the dispatches that he filed almost every day; in this he was taking a page from Ernie Pyle, the famous correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate, whom he met in London and greatly admired. Loveland was one of the first correspondents to set foot in liberated Paris, and he followed the Third Army to the German border before he was recalled to the States by the Plain Dealer. Once back home, Loveland spent a year covering the Cleveland Indians baseball team for the Plain Dealer. He was then made an associate editor and soon after that became an editorial writer and columnist. He died in 1978 at age 78. In 1979 Philip W. Porter, Loveland’s longtime editor at the Plain Dealer, compiled and edited an anthology of
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-DISP-LOVELAND.indd 78
5/27/21 11:53 AM
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-DISP-LOVELAND.indd 79
79
5/27/21 11:54 AM
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION, INTERIM ARCHIVES (GETTY IMAGES, 2); SUSAN LOVELAND
EYES ON AN INVASION commended the Ninth Air Force for splendid work in the past and exhorted the men to give their very best to the task at hand. Then Brig. Gen. Samuel Anderson, commanding general of the Ninth Bomber Command, walked to the front of the briefing room and the elite group of fighting men stood up at attention. The general told them that the work for the immediate future would be hard and they must all draw on hidden strength which always seemed to come to American fighting men when they had need of it. He told them that they would have to fly many missions every day and that their success in destroying enemy points would have a real effect on the length of the war. “This, gentlemen, is it,” said Col. Coiner. “We are to spearhead the invasion.” Then the chaplain, Capt. Clarence R. Comfort, led the men in prayer and every head was bowed. They did not know what they would be facing exactly, but they feared it would be pretty tough and they wanted to act like men whether they were scared or not. The briefing was unusually long, in itself an indication of something or other. The fliers did not wear shining armor when they went out to their planes, the sleek, deadly, Marauders. They looked bulgy, and no man can look otherwise who is wearing a Mae West life preserver, a parachute, a flak suit, earphones and a flak helmet. Before we got into the plane we had to remove all personal letters and such. I was assigned by choice to Lieut. Quiggle’s plane, the Dottie Dee, named after his wife. When you start out on a strange adventure at that time in the morning you sort of like to be with a hometown boy. It’s kind of scary, no fooling. The moon was in the sky when we started, and it followed us all along, and presently we were riding over clouds which looked like cotton wool of a lavender color. I can’t imagine that heaven could be more beautiful. But angels probably would ride the clouds better than we could have done if the Dottie Dee had not been purring along sweetly. Purring is a bad word. The Dottie Dee roars, but your earphones sort of dim the noise. When you are in a fighting plane advancing toward the enemy the plane becomes your one little world and none of the sweet things of life exist any more. And your fellows become the most important people in the world, even more important to you than Mr. Churchill or Mr. Roosevelt.
“Flak began to come pretty soon and tracer bullets shot in front of us like red hot rivets.”
80
Sergt. William J. Burns, 36, of East Hartford, Conn., went to his position as tail gunner. Sergt. James W. Russell, 21, of West Monroe, La., went to his spot as waist gunner. Lieut. Quiggle, of course, was piloting the plane, and Second Lieut. Anthony V. Petraitis of Scranton, Pa., sat beside him as co-pilot. Sergt. Edwin Rodie, 23, of Fresno, Calif., was manning the top turret gun, and Second Lieut. J. W. Goodwin, 26, the bombardier of Dothan, Ala., was sitting in the nose. I stood up in front behind the pilots and watched England fade from view. And not long afterward, so perfectly had the job been synchronized, we saw the invasion ships. The sea—the channel, if you prefer—was thick with them, as thick with ships as the sky was thick with clouds. In addition to the big landing craft were large naval vessels, and fighters were hovering over the ships, guarding them. Nothing which could have been thought of to spare life was spared. The lads had everything which it was humanly possible to give them. We saw our own naval vessels shelling the daylights out of German installations on the French coast. We could see the red flashes as the shells struck home. They were big shells. Flak began to come pretty soon and tracer bullets shot in front of us like red hot rivets, but the expression on the face of the kid from Cleveland who was piloting the plane did not change in the slightest degree. He followed the course to target and then the bombardier did his stuff and the plane fairly leaped up in the air, and down below the flames shot up. Weather was not too good, and the bombing was done from about 4,000 feet instead of the usual 12,000 feet. This is not considered particularly healthy, but it was the only thing to do. Then we started back. We had taken off at 4:45 a.m., but by now it was light. Guns shot at us again, but missed badly. The Allied battlewagon was continuing to pour in shells, and whenever it was necessary to give the signal of our identity Petraitis took care of the matter with flares of the proper colors. In a few minutes all danger seemed to be past. Later, when all danger was past, the sergeant with 20 missions to his credit remarked: “I’d sure hate to do this for a living.” Daylight showed strained faces, and we got back at breakfast time. I’m afraid this has been told badly, but I’m grateful that I was permitted to see the curtain rise on this great life and death drama. I am also kind of glad that, having seen it, I can pass along some of the impressions. One will never forget the sight of the ships and the landing craft heading for France, any more than a knight would have forgotten the appearance of the Holy Grail. MHQ
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-DISP-LOVELAND.indd 80
5/27/21 11:54 AM
BIG SHOTS
HARRIS & EWING COLLECTION (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
Huang Xing, the first commander in chief of the Republic of China, was born in the village of Gaotang in 1874. From an early age he aspired to the highest levels of the imperial civil service. He received the coveted jinshi degree at age 22 as well as a government scholarship to study in Japan, where he began privately training for the military under a retired Japanese officer. After returning home he became the leader of the Huaxinghui, a secret revolutionary society, and while still in his 30s he led a series of unsuccessful insurrections. After the Second Guangzhou Uprising, where two of his fingers were shot off, Huang was nicknamed “The Eight-Fingered General.” In 1911 Huang helped organize the Wuchang Uprising, which finally succeeded in overthrowing the Qing Dynasty, thus ending 2,000 years of imperial rule in China. Soon after that, however, Yuan Shikai, the former Qing military commander, crushed the forces behind the uprising and moved the government to Beijing. Huang was forced to flee, first to Japan and later to the United States, where he lived in exile for two years. In 1916, after Yuan’s death, Huang returned to China, but he died several months later at age 42.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-BIGSHOTS-XING.indd 81
81 5/27/21 11:31 AM
ARTISTS
THE ENLISTEE
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Ernest Peixotto was eager to lend his hand to the effort. By Pamela D. Toler
Peixotto was born into a prominent San Francisco merchant family in 1869. He studied painting first at San Francisco’s School of Fine Arts and then at the Académie Julian in Paris, one of the most respected art schools in the world at the time. By the time the war began, he was well established as a painter and illustrator. He showed paintings at important exhibitions in Paris, New York, and San Francisco and acquired an international reputation as a muralist. He wrote and illustrated his own travel books, and he illustrated
82
books written by others, including Theodore Roosevelt’s Oliver Cromwell: The Story of His Life and Work (1904). When the United States officially entered World War I in April 1917, Peixotto and other artists were eager to lend their pencils and paintbrushes to the effort. As the American secretary of the aid organization Appui aux Artistes, Peixotto was in close contact with artists in France and aware of what they were doing to help the French war effort. In July 1917 he wrote an article for the American Magazine of Art in which he urged the government to enlist artists to help in the war effort. Titled “The Use of Art in Warfare,” the article suggested that the U.S. government could not only call on artists to create camouflage and design recruiting and propaganda posters but could also follow the French example and create an official department of war artists. That same month, the newly created Committee on Public Information, a semiofficial propaganda agency of the U.S. government, recommended that artists be commissioned for special service with the AEF—an idea that may have been inspired by Peixotto’s article. For several months, both the committee and the U.S. Army Signal Corps explored the idea, but in the end the Corps of Engineers took over the project, with the support of General John J. Pershing, the commander of the AEF on the Western Front. A committee headed by illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, who had earned fame with his stylized “Gibson Girl” drawings, selected eight artists, all of whom were commissioned as captains in the U.S. Army. (Accredited war correspondents were given the same rank.) All eight had strong backgrounds as commercial illustrators, with work published in such popular magazines as Harper’s, McClure’s, and Scribner’s. Peixotto, who was considerably older than the other artists under consideration, was the third artist to be offered a commission. He accepted without hesitation.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION (2); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
I
n late July 1914, American artist Ernest Peixotto and his wife, Mary, returned from a sketching trip in Portugal to the small studio-home in the French village of Samois-sur-Seine that had been their base for 15 years. The town was filled with people enjoying the summer weather: families boating on the river, ladies hosting outdoor tea parties under colored awnings, soldiers on leave sauntering along the streets. A week later, Germany and France declared war on each other. Overnight, the atmosphere of gaiety disappeared. Five days after the French government posted an order for general mobilization, Peixotto joined the local communal guard. For six weeks, from early August to the First Battle of the Marne on September 12, Peixotto helped patrol the local roads, woods, and fields, watching for spies and deserters. The Allied victory at the Marne dashed hopes on both sides that the war would be brief. Faced with the prospect of a long and brutal conflict, the Peixottos decided to return to the United States. Four years later Ernest Peixotto would return to France as one of eight artists attached to the American Expeditionary Forces. As a unit, the uniformed artists were charged with the often conflicting tasks of documenting the war for the historical record while creating stirring images of American soldiers in battle that could be used for propaganda at home. Peixotto recorded his experiences in sketches and paintings he produced for the War Department and in a powerful memoir of his months as an official army artist, The American Front, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1919.
On March 14, 1918, just 10 days after receiving his commission, Peixotto sailed for France along with fellow artist Wallace Morgan on the USS Pocahontas, a German ocean liner formerly known as the SS Prinzess Irene that the United States had commandeered when it entered the war.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-ART-PEIXOTTO.indd 82
5/30/21 8:54 AM
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION (2); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Clockwise from top: Ernest Peixotto’s sketch of the U.S. Air Service’s 3rd Aviation Instruction Center at Issoudun, France; a machine-gun battalion at drill; Peixotto in uniform with his wife, Mary, in 1918.
When they arrived in France two weeks later, Peixotto and Wallace reported to the AEF’s general headquarters at Chaumont after being misdirected to the Corps of Engineers’ headquarters at Tours. Though Pershing had approved the appointment of “The Eight,” as the group of artists soon came to be called, no one was quite sure what to do with them. Eventually Pershing’s staff decided that though the artists held commissions in the Engineer Reserves, they should be attached to the Press and Censorship Division of the AEF’s Military Intelligence Branch and stationed with the accredited war correspondents. Despite
the dual nature of the artists’ mission, Pershing’s staff clearly saw their job as another type of reporting. Lieutenant Colonel Walter C. Sweeny, who was in charge of the Press and Censorship Division, immediately asked the artists to give him a report outlining the supplies and conditions they would need to work effectively. At the top of their list was as much freedom of movement as possible. Sweeny agreed. When the artists asked whether they would need official documents giving them the authority to travel and make sketches, Sweeny assured them that their captains’ bars would take them wherever they needed to go.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-ART-PEIXOTTO.indd 83
83 5/27/21 11:28 AM
Peixotto, however, had his doubts. Deciding to test Sweeny’s assertion, he set up across the street from General Pershing’s quarters in Chaumont, which was close to Sweeny’s office, and began to sketch. Sure enough, a lieutenant in the military police soon appeared and asked Peixotto whether he had orders permitting him to sketch. Peixotto said that he did not. Captain’s bars notwithstanding, the lieutenant apologetically arrested Peixotto. Since the post commandant was out of his office, the lieutenant took Peixotto to Sweeny’s office. Sweeny vouched for Peixotto, who had proved his point, and agreed that the artists would need written orders permitting them to move as they wished through the American occupied zone. With identity papers and permanent passes from both the American and French commands, Peixotto and the other artists headed to the forward trenches. For several weeks Peixotto traveled from sector to sector, visiting various divisions to get a taste of how soldiers lived—and fought—in the trenches. At each location, Peixotto trudged through the trenches in borrowed rubber boots and his own “tin hat,” ankle-deep in red clay mud so slippery that he struggled to stay upright, noting the construction of different dugouts and the personalities of different divisions. American soldiers were not yet involved in offensive warfare, but even in the quietest sectors, Peixotto experienced what he described as “bits of real warfare.” He heard the “pap-pap-pap” of German machine guns while visiting the trenches of the 32nd Division in Alsace and was shelled by German artillery as he walked between observation posts along the Canal du Rhône, on the edge of no man’s land. The reality of war came closer yet when Peixotto was sketching in an advanced position. He failed to notice puffs of brown smoke, one after another, coming nearer to him—evidence of shrapnel fire. Finally the lieutenant in charge of the battery poked his head out of his dugout and yelled: “Come in out of that, Captain. That’s a very unhealthy spot just now; they’re trying to get our range.”
Peixotto witnessed part of every important AEF offensive after Belleau Wood.
On May 30 the Germans broke through the French line. A few days later they had fought as far as Château-Thierry. The AEF’s period of preparation—and that of its official artists—was over. Peixotto arrived in Paris on June 1—just in time to experience a major air raid. Through four separate attacks, he remained trapped on a rail siding with just the roof of a
84
railroad car for protection. (In his memoir, Peixotto admitted that he was terrified—the only time he used the word in 230 pages, even though he was frequently under fire.) When he returned to headquarters a few days later, the first days of the Battle of Belleau Wood were over. He hurried to the Aisne-Marne Sector to be sure that he didn’t miss the end of the battle as well. By his own account, Peixotto witnessed part of every important AEF offensive thereafter. He watched American troops march into Château-Thierry in July and followed the Allied advance toward Fismes, in early August. He arrived at the front on the eve of the Battle of Saint-Mihiel in mid-September, and he watched Pershing, French general Philippe Pétain, U.S. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, and French premier Georges Clemenceau enter the liberated city to welcoming cheers at the battle’s end. He was with American forces at the beginning of the Meuse- Argonne Offensive in late September and returned to the Argonne Forest twice in October. Peixotto’s last trip to the forest cost him the chance to witness the final weeks of World War I. After following the AEF for several days, he made a studio and base camp for himself in a deserted room in Rarécourt. The weather was foul—“rain and slush; mud and dirt,” he later wrote. Inside was not much better, with a fireless fireplace and a leaking roof. Drawing was a challenge because his paper was damp and his hands were numb from the cold. Nonetheless, he made sketching trips to Montfaucon, where he drew the remains of the German fortifications there, and to observation posts overlooking the grim wastes of Hill 304 and Le Mort Homme. Peixotto followed the progress of the AEF until the Germans stopped their advance and a serious bout of flu—this in the middle of the 1918 influenza pandemic—stopped his own advance at much the same time. His commanding officer ordered him to take time off to recover, which he chose to spend at his studio-home in Samois-sur-Seine. After his recovery, Peixotto went to Paris for the signing of the armistice. He then returned to his unit at Neufchâteau and continued to make sketching expeditions, recording the impact of the war on the French countryside. (On one trip he arrived at Sedan some hours before Pershing made his official entrance into the liberated city.) Peixotto’s memoir is a vivid account of his time with the AEF. He describes the discomfort of life in the trenches, the sensory realities of the battlefield, and his own reactions to what he saw. His art is more distant from the experience of battle, though he often worked on the edge of an active battlefield. Many of his pieces depict ruined towns and the blighted French countryside. In piece after piece, the remaining
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-ART-PEIXOTTO.indd 84
5/30/21 9:21 AM
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION (3)
ERNEST PEIXOTTO
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION (3)
Clockwise from left: Peixotto’s sketches of an American soldier seen through a German trench; a ruined church spire atop a hill in Flirey, France; and several men rolling out a DH-4 at an unidentified airfield.
walls of bombed-out churches are surrounded by mounds of rubble and debris. In others, roads stretch into the distance, lined by shell-torn buildings or formerly grand trees reduced to stumps and gaunt skeletons. In one sketch, a large crater dominates the foreground while a row of ruined buildings defines the horizon. The images are tied to the war’s events only by their place-names. Peixotto includes few humans in these scenes; people are so small in scale and impressionistic in treatment that they are reduced to elements in the landscape. Even those pieces that show soldiers at work often focus on the infrastructure of warfare. Soldiers building a new bridge across the Marne River to replace one destroyed by German bombs. Barracks dug into a hillside. Soldiers playing cards in their billets. Airplane engine shops, locomotive works, and the camouflage depot in Dijon. Planes on the ground at the airfield at Issoudun. Soldiers lining up outside a commissary. A few pieces show troops in movement, but the soldiers are always moving toward battle rather than engaged in battle. In February 1919, Peixotto was offered one last assignment on behalf of the AEF when it joined forces with the YMCA
to provide educational opportunities for the soldiers stationed in France. The most ambitious element of the project was the creation of the AEF’s own university at Beaune, including an art school. Peixotto was offered, and accepted, a position as head of the school’s painting department, though his tenure was short-lived. The university opened its doors on March 17, 1919, but closed three months later with the rapid demobilization of the AEF. With the closing of the university, Peixotto returned to his interrupted career as an artist. In 1921 the French Legion of Honor awarded him the rank of chevalier (knight) for his work in the war and for promoting friendship between France and the United States. He went on to serve as the president of the National Society of Mural Painters from 1929 to 1935 and was the director of murals for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Murals, he once observed, “have stirred the feelings of a mass of American people who have never been stirred artistically before.” Peixotto died at his home in New York City in 1940. MHQ Pamela D. Toler, who writes about history and the arts, is the author of several books, including Women Warriors: An Unexpected History (Beacon Press, 2019).
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-ART-PEIXOTTO.indd 85
85 5/27/21 11:28 AM
WAR STORIES
THE AIRMAN
A dramatic scene in 1917, the film directed by Sam Mendes, set the author on the trail of his grandfather in World War I. By Brendan Sainsbury
Sainsbury, the observer and aerial gunner in the plane, is fresh out of the trenches.
86
By the spring of 1918, the average life expectancy of a British airman was three weeks. Flying itself was precarious enough. Aerial combat was even deadlier. The German ace of aces, Manfred von Richthofen, better known as “the Red Baron,” had gotten his comeuppance 12 days earlier, shot down over Vaux-sur-Somme, a village three miles to the north. Brown and Sainsbury are part of No. 48 Squadron, headed by Major Keith Park, a tough New Zealander. Park will go on to become a Knight of the Realm and a key commander in the Battle of Britain during World War II. But none of this is relevant to Brown and Sainsbury today. Counting their blessings, they’re just glad the sharp- shooting New Zealander has lent them his favorite plane. They owe him a rum ration. Some 60 miles to the northeast, at an airfield just outside Lomme, near the France-Belgium border, Paul Aue, an offizierstelvertreter (officer deputy) in the Imperial German Air Force, tucks in his scarf, pulls down his goggles, and runs an eye over his plane’s instrument panel. The single- seat Pfalz D.IIIa is ready for takeoff. Two wing wardens, one on either side, give him a running start. Once the plane is airborne, Aue feels invigorated and fueled with adrenalin. After being seriously injured in a dogfight above Roulers, Belgium, the previous September, he’s been grounded for eight months. This is his first mission since the layoff, and he’s hungry for a combat victory. Aue is a German flying ace. Before his injury, he had scored five combat victories, including a British SPAD S.VII downed over Belgium in June 1917. He belongs to Jagdstaffel (Jasta) 10—a crack German air squadron whose 13 aces are feared for their skill and precision in battle. Today he’s accompanied by five other planes, maintaining a loose formation as they head southwest toward the front. Cruising at the vanguard, Aue looks through the sights of his LMG 08/15 machine gun and weighs his chances. He’s feeling lucky. It’s just gone noon and Brown and Sainsbury are circling in their F.2B above the French village of Proyart. Sainsbury, his face tightened in a squint, thinks he may have spotted some tank movements on the ground, when, out of the
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-WARSTRS-SAINSBURY.indd 86
5/27/21 12:10 PM
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: MUSEUM OF FLIGHT FOUNDATION (GETTY IMAGES); COURTESY BRENDAN SAINSBURY; PRINT COLLECTOR (GETTY IMAGES); PICTORIAL PRESS LTD (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)
V
illers Bretonneux, Northeastern France. May 3, 1918. Two young British airmen emerge from a canvas tent and hurry across a makeshift airfield to a waiting airplane. They are RAF Second Lieutenant Alexander Brown and Corporal Bill Sainsbury. Brown, the pilot, gets in first, slipping effortlessly into the front cockpit. Sainsbury, the observer and aerial gunner, squeezes himself more carefully into the seat behind. A mechanic grabs the front propeller and gives it a violent pull. Brown, eyes on the instrument panel, starts counting down. “Three…two…one…go!” He turns the starter handle and coaxes the engine to life. Having obtained his aviator’s certificate in 1913, just before the war, he is by now an experienced pilot. Sainsbury, who interprets the maps and operates a twin-barrel Lewis machine gun from the rear, is fresh out of the trenches, where he served with the First Battalion of the Wiltshire Regiment during the Battle of the Somme. Their plane is a Bristol F.2B Fighter, one of the most agile and robust aircraft of World War I. (Pilots nicknamed the single-engine plane “the Biff.”) In a flurry of dust and noise, the biplane rolls shakily along the grassy runway before takeoff, heading east toward the German front line. Climbing steadily at 800 feet per minute, Brown settles on a coasting speed of 85 miles per hour as the Bristol bobs gently above the fields of France. All is quiet on the Western Front thousands of feet below. The mission today is reconnaissance: tracking the movement of tanks, the war’s newest terror weapon. The previous week, the German Second Army had briefly occupied the town of Villers Bretonneux as part of its Spring Offensive, piercing the Allied line with its armored A7Vs and sparking the first major tank-on-tank battle in military history. Brown’s face is a mask of concentration. Behind him, Sainsbury alternates ground observation with nervous glances for enemy planes.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: MUSEUM OF FLIGHT FOUNDATION (GETTY IMAGES); COURTESY BRENDAN SAINSBURY; PRINT COLLECTOR (GETTY IMAGES); PICTORIAL PRESS LTD. (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)
Clockwise from top left: A Bristol F.2B Fighter; Bill Sainsbury; German soldiers gather around a Pfalz D.IIIa in 1918; in a scene from the film 1917, British corporal Will Scofield tends to his wounded comrade, Tom Blake.
corner of his eye, he sees something more sinister on the horizon. A swarm of six dots the size of wasps are approaching from the northeast. Amid the roar of the Bristol’s Rolls-Royce V12 engine, he taps Brown on the shoulder and points. The two airmen exchange glances. The whites of Brown’s eyes reveal his fear. One enemy plane is manageable; six seems impossible. The wasps soon grow to the size of bumblebees and then crows. Sainsbury readies for a dogfight. The plane lurches. He grasps the Lewis gun with both hands and slides it around the ring-mount like a sailor at the wheel of a keeling ship. Aue smiles to himself. This one is his; the other German planes are just decoys. He steals a glance below and ascertains that he’s still safely over German lines. Bleib zurück! (Stay back!) he yells to no one in particular. Adjusting the controls, he eases the Pfalz up, one hundred, two hundred feet, before going into an exhilarating dive, tailing the F.2B as the panic-stricken British gunner fires his Lewis uselessly into the air. Aue pursues the Bristol mercilessly, pitching left and right, measuring his distance, looking through his telescopic sight. Then he lets loose a salvo.
They’re hit. Smoke is pouring from beneath the cockpit. “Lieutenant! Lieutenant!” Sainsbury is shouting. They’re losing altitude. Brown sits hunched in the cockpit, his face deathly white but rigidly determined. The ground is racing up to meet them. Sainsbury sees a muddy field, heavy artillery, craters, corpses. He screams, preparing for the impact. An airplane bursts into flames and the audience lets out an audible gasp. The smell of popcorn wafts over from the row of seats in front as two British soldiers on the big screen rush to the plane and pull out the pilot, barely alive. It’s January 2020 and I’m sitting in a cinema in Canada with my 14-year-old son watching 1917, the film directed by Sam Mendes. It’s a powerful drama about two British soldiers named Will Scofield and Tom Blake who undertake a dangerous mission during World War I. One of the most defining scenes depicts the shooting down of a German plane in a dogfight. When the aircraft crash lands in a field near an abandoned farmhouse, Scofield and Blake, who are resting after a dangerous dash across no man’s land, run over to help the injured pilot. Their actions have fatal consequences.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-WARSTRS-SAINSBURY.indd 87
87 5/28/21 3:58 PM
THE AIRMAN The scene is frightening and graphic in the cinema. As I watch it, I can’t help thinking of my grandfather. Through old family stories, I was aware that he had been involved in a similar plane crash in World War One, but I was ignorant of the details. Was this what it was like for him? Mendes based the movie on the wartime exploits of his grandfather. In doing so, he set me on a path to find out more about mine. My grandfather, Arthur William “Bill” Sainsbury, died at age 74 when I was four months old. I grew up with only a vague notion of his wartime exploits. “He didn’t talk about it,” my father would snap wherever I asked about my grandfather’s time in the RAF. “No one did!” I gave up asking, pushing my grandfather to the back of my mind save for a brief two minutes at church every Remembrance Day. Then came the film and the harrowing airplane scene. Over the following weeks, my curiosity got the better of me. I started to investigate my grandfather’s war record online, surprised at how much I could find out with just a few clicks. As the weeks progressed, I delved deeper into the story, disappearing for hours into forums and websites containing endless lists of war records. Within a month, I had become an expert on the geography of northeastern France (thank you Google Maps!), the history of the German Spring Offensive, and the forward-firing Vickers machine gun. Aside from the family connection, what intrigued me most about my World War I education was the bravery of the hopelessly inexperienced airmen, fighting to the death in the crude, rickety aircraft that took them into battle. Like Mendes, I slowly began to piece together a story, embellishing the facts with elements of fiction to paper over the bits I didn’t know. Much of the information was available in military records, including Brown and Sainsbury’s flight on May 3 from Villers Bretonneux, the details of their Bristol Fighter, and the subsequent attack by Aue’s Pfalz. While I didn’t have a Hollywood budget or an army of military researchers to help me, it became increasingly clear that my grandfather’s mission was no less dangerous or dramatic than the one undertaken by Corporals Will Scofield and Tom Blake in the film. And it, too, ended tragically.
My grandfather returned to England in 1919, three months after the war ended.
At 12:15 p.m. on May 3, 1918, Colonel Paul Aue shot down Alexander Brown and Bill Sainsbury in their Bristol F.2B Fighter, serial number C814, over German-occupied Proy-
88
art, France. The Bristol had been in the air for 95 minutes. One can only imagine the terror and trauma of the crash landing. Both airmen were listed as missing. Brown died of his injuries three days later. My grandfather, wounded and presumably pulled from the plane by German soldiers, was subsequently taken prisoner. He was initially transferred three miles southeast to Herleville and then to a POW camp in Guben, Germany, on the border with Poland. He didn’t find out that Brown had died until several weeks later. In Guben, he saw out the final six months of the war amid the deadly Spanish flu pandemic in a camp populated mostly by Russian prisoners. A local newspaper announced his return to England in February 1919, three months after the war ended. My grandfather came home a changed person. Family testimonies depict him in later life as a detached and introverted man who worked as a postmaster in a small corner shop and rarely left his hometown. It’s an image vastly at odds with the daring airman he must have once been. I wasn’t able to determine the extent of his wartime injuries, though it’s likely the mental scars lingered longer than the physical ones. At the time of his death in 1966, he was still drawing a military disability pension. On the other side of the English Channel, Paul Aue finished the war with 10 combat victories to his name. He joined the Luftwaffe in the 1930s as a flying instructor and served on the Eastern Front in World War II. He was captured by the Soviet army in the spring of 1945 and died in a POW camp a couple of weeks before V-E day, at age 53. Inside the 12th century St. Peter and St. Paul’s Church in the small village of Mottistone on the Isle of Wight in southern England, a memorial on the wall is dedicated to Alexander Claud Garden Brown who “died of wounds received in aerial combat” in Herleville, France, on May 6, 1918. “Though mortally wounded himself,” it says, “he effected a landing, thereby saving the life of his observer.” He was 27 years old. Brown’s fate sums up the cruel lottery of war—the awful mixture of heroism and tragedy, youthful sacrifice, and survivor’s guilt. Dead before he could have children himself, the brave lieutenant saved my grandfather’s life and, in doing so, guaranteed mine. It would take 20 years and another war for society to fully understand the costly sacrifices made by the courageous airmen of World War I when Winston Churchill, emerging from Keith Park’s 11 RAF Group headquarters on the eve of the Battle of Britain, uttered the immortal words: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” MHQ Brendan Sainsbury, a freelance travel writer, lives near Vancouver, Canada.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-WARSTRS-SAINSBURY.indd 88
5/27/21 12:10 PM
XXXXXXXXXX
Republican volunteers in Madrid take up arms against the Fascists in 1936.
POETRY
ODE TO A PATRIOT
UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE (GETTY IMAGES)
Miguel Hernández
Miguel Hernández Gilabert was born in Orihuela, Spain, in 1910. His parents were poor, and his father kept him out of school and physically abused him for reading and writing instead of tending the family’s goats and sheep. But Hernández was set on becoming a poet, and he published his first volume of poetry, Perito en lunas (Lunar Expert), at age 23. With the help of others—notably the Catholic writer Ramón Sijé, who became his mentor—Hernández would master his craft and emerge as one of Spain’s greatest and best-loved poets. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Hernández, a member of Spain’s Communist Party, joined the Fifth Regiment, part of the Republican forces fighting Generalissimo Francisco Franco and the Nationalists. He served in the 11th Division during the Battle of Teruel, one of the bloodiest of the war, and also campaigned for the Republicans by organizing cultural events, writing poetry, and addressing soldiers deployed to the front. In 1939, after the Republicans surrendered, Franco’s regime arrested, tried, and convicted Hernández for writing poems critical of the Francoist cause. He was to be executed, but the death sentence was commuted to a prison term of 30 years thanks to the intervention of poet Pablo Neruda, who was the Chilean consul in Madrid at the time. Hernández was later transferred to a prison in Alicante. Subjected to extraordinarily harsh conditions, he came down with pneumonia and in 1942 died of typhus and
tuberculosis. Just before his death, Hernández scrawled his last verse on the wall of the hospital prison: “Goodbye, brothers, comrades, friends: let me take my leave of the sun and the fields.” The following poem is from The Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández: A Bilingual Edition by Miguel Hernández (University of Chicago Press, 2001) and appears here with the permission of the editor, Ted Genoways, who also translated the poem.
To the International Soldier Fallen in Spain If there are men who contain a soul without frontiers, a brow scattered with universal hair, covered with horizons, ships, and mountain chains, with sand and with snow, then you are one of those. Fatherlands called to you with all their banners, so that your breath filled with beautiful movements. You wanted to quench the thirst of panthers and fluttered full against their abuses. With a taste of all suns and seas, Spain beckons you because in her you realize your majesty like a tree that embraces a continent. Around your bones, the olive groves will grow, unfolding their iron roots in the ground, embracing men universally, faithfully.
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-HERNANDEZ.indd 89
89 5/28/21 3:59 PM
REVIEWS
The Battle of Valcour Island, fought on Lake Champlain in 1776, was the climactic naval action of the Revolutionary War.
Valcour: The 1776 Campaign That Saved the Cause of Liberty By Jack Kelly 304 pages. St. Martin’s Press, 2021. $28.99. Reviewed by Willard Sterne Randall
History has not been kind to Benedict Arnold, the Manichaean figure whose name became the timeworn proxy for “traitor” in popular histories of all varieties. Little matter that serious students of the Revolutionary War appreciate the fact that the French compared Arnold with Hannibal and considered George Washington a mere technician. Nonetheless, for many years Arnold’s heroic exploits, including the march to Quebec and his victorious roles at Valcour Island and Saratoga as George Washington’s top field commander, were best known to devotees of the historical novels of Kenneth Roberts. In the 1950s, the popular appetite for stories of espionage narrowed the focus in James Flexner’s The Traitor and the Spy: Benedict Arnold and John André to Arnold’s plot to surrender West Point, its garrison, and Washington to the British. But massive U.S. government research projects in the 1960s, including the 10-volume Naval Documents of the American Revolution, opened new avenues for exploring the details of the Revolutionary War. The result was a spate of new books and media treatments of Arnold. Now comes Jack Kelly’s Valcour: The 1776 Campaign That Saved the Cause of Liberty, which succeeds admirably in connecting the reader to the daily lives and sacrifices of the defenders of the North against a terrifying if sluggish invader. Kelly’s story begins in the days immediately after 56 revolution-minded
MHQP-210700-REVIEWS.indd 90
NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND
TWISTS OF FATE
5/29/21 6:14 PM
NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND
politicians signed the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, when the smallpox- ravaged remnants of an American army that had failed to drive British at forces out of Canada gathered Crown Point, New York, on Lake Champlain. At the northern tip of the lake, a massive British expeditionary force was preparing for its mission: to divide and conquer the newly united American colonies. It aimed, in a coordinated offensive, to cleave radical New England from the less rebellious middle colonies, thus preventing reinforcement from the south. The plan was for a combined naval and land-based force to dash down Lake Champlain and Lake George and then down the Hudson River to Albany, where it would link up with the main British force attacking north from New York City. The British were certain they could crush the American rebellion before the year was out. And the British seemed to have an overwhelming advantage. In addition to 10,000 Regulars they had 2,000 German mercenaries—including 200 professional artillerymen—and 700 handpicked Royal Navy crewmen to build and man Britain’s first-ever blue-water squadron. To scout and harass the Americans, the British had assembled 4,000 Native Americans; to build roads and bridges, 4,000 FrenchCanadian draftees. The Continental Army had only about 2,000 able-bodied men to face these 20,000 adversaries. Of 11,000 Americans sent to Canada, only 5,200 had survived; of these, 3,000 were too sick with smallpox to fight. “I can scarcely imagine a more disastrous scene,” 20-year-old Colonel John Trumbull wrote in a letter to his father, the governor of Connecticut, on arriving at the American advance base camp at Crown Point. “I found not an army, but a mob, the shattered remains of twelve or fifteen battalions, ruined by sickness, fatigue and deser-
tion and void of every idea of discipline or subordination.” In Valcour, Kelly takes readers into an American council of war in the ruined old French fort at Crown Point on July 7. Major General Philip Schuyler, the second highest-ranking general in the Continental Army and commander of the Northern Department, presides. Horatio Gates, his most senior general, sits to his right and advocates a defensive strategy against the British. But newly promoted brigadier general Benedict Arnold, sitting at the foot of the table, is having none of it. Arnold laid out a bold plan: quarantine the sick to keep the rest of the men healthy; then abandon Crown Point and move the effectives south to a supply base at Fort Ticonderoga and strengthen the fort with artillery. To secure naval superiority on Lake Champlain, Arnold also pressed for building a fleet of row galleys, armed gundalows, bateaux, and a frigate. His goal was to impose a season of delay on the British juggernaut. Schuyler, a veteran logistician of the French and Indian Wars, approved Arnold’s plan. Gates, who preferred the fort to the battlefield, was to take command at Fort Ticonderoga, extend its works, and build up its supplies. He delegated command of the lake to Arnold, who was aiming to get a ship finished every week, but blocked his request to build a frigate. In fine journalistic style, Kelly expands on a chapter on the Battle of Valcour Island in his 2014 book, Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America’s Independence, to craft a day-by-day account of the summerlong arms race. A former mystery writer, Kelly skillfully builds suspense for the climactic naval action of the Revolutionary War. Kelly draws out the uncertainty of the contest until the reader is waiting as anxiously as Arnold and his men for the battle finally to be joined. He is gifted at characterization but does not
presciently judge his actors before their later failures and misdeeds. Gates is not a plotter and a blunderer yet, and Arnold is the stalwart who assembled a 16-vessel fleet in 90 days and then personally aimed the cannon that stopped the British invasion from the north. When, after losing a year and retreating to Quebec, the British commander had to explain to London what went wrong, he answered simply, “It was Arnold.” To Alfred Thayer Mahan, the eminent American naval officer and historian, there was more to it. “Save for Arnold’s flotilla, the British would have settled the business,” he wrote. “The little American navy was wiped out, but never had any force, big or small, lived to better purpose.” And thanks to Jack Kelly’s highly readable book, we now know much more about the summer of sacrifice and struggle on Lake Champlain that saved the American Revolution. Willard Sterne Randall, professor emeritus of history at Champlain College, is the author of 14 books, including Unshackling America: How the War of 1812 Truly Ended the American Revolution (St. Martin’s Press, 2017), and a past recipient of MHQ’s Thomas Fleming Award for Outstanding Military History Writing.
The Sacred Band: Three Hundred Theban Lovers Fighting to Save Greek Freedom By James Romm 320 pages. Scribner, 2021. $28. Reviewed by Marc DeSantis
Ancient Thebes was deeply overshadowed by Athens and Sparta. The Thebans could lay claim to neither the cultural achievements of the Athe-
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-REVIEWS.indd 91
91 5/29/21 6:15 PM
Theban general Epaminondas dies after a spear is thrust into his chest at the Second Battle of Mantinea in 362 bce (as portrayed by Dutch painter Isaac Walraven in 1726).
92
the Spartans on the enemy’s right wing, defeating them well before its left wing could even get into combat. The era of Theban greatness, however, was remarkably short. Epaminon das would perish just a few years later in battle at Mantinea in 362 bce, and the Sacred Band itself would be slaughtered at Chaeronea in 338 bce by the Macedonians, who then cemented their own dominance over Greece. The politics of this age, to use anachronistic descriptors, was both Machiavellian and byzantine, and Romm skillfully captures the shifting alliances and treachery, as well as the nobility and heroism, that pervaded the Greek world. Marc DeSantis is the author of Rome Seizes the Trident: The Defeat of Carthaginian Seapower and the Forging of the Roman Empire (Pen and Sword Military, 2016).
Roman Britain’s Missing Legion: What Really Happened to IX Hispana?
By Simon Elliott 208 pages. Pen and Sword Military, 2021. $39.95. Reviewed by Thomas Zacharis In Roman Britain’s Missing Legion, Simon Elliott, a leading authority on Roman military history, investigates the sudden disappearance of Legio IX Hispana, a unit originally formed in Spain that established a base at Eboracum, a fort in the province of Britannia that developed into York, the largest city in northern Britain. “Uniquely among the Roman legions,
RIJKSMUSEUM
nians nor the military glories of the Spartans. Rather, they were often denigrated by other Greeks as clog-shod rustics of backward Boeotia. Yet there was another side to the Thebans that belies this reputation. For several decades in the fourth century bce, their city was the most powerful and influential of the Greek states. This period of preeminence is the subject of James Romm’s The Sacred Band, which takes its title from the elite infantry unit of the Theban army. A 300-strong regiment composed of 150 pairs of male lovers, the Sacred Band, fighting in close formation, was virtually invincible. Pelopidas, the band’s foremost commander, writes Romm, had grasped that its “strength…lay in this dense array, a cohesion cemented by erôs.” At Leuctra in 371 bce, the outstanding Theban general Epaminondas secured victory by aiming the elite regiment straight at
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-REVIEWS.indd 92
5/30/21 8:54 AM
DURING POLICE INTERROGATION FOLLOWING THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, LEE HARVEY OSWALD STATED, “NO, I AM NOT A COMMUNIST. I AM A _____.” Law-abiding citizen, proud Texan, Catholic, or Marxist?
For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ MAGAZINES/QUIZ
HISTORYNET.com ANSWER: MARXIST. OSWALD WAS SHOT IN THE BASEMENT OF THE DALLAS POLICE HEADQUARTERS WHILE BEING ESCORTED TO THE CITY JAIL. OSWALD DIED LESS THAN TWO HOURS LATER AT PARKLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL, THE SAME HOSPITAL WHERE KENNEDY WAS PRONOUNCED DEAD TWO DAYS PRIOR.
HOUSE-OSWALD.indd 40
4/28/21 9:11 AM
REVIEWS of which there were over time more than sixty,” Elliott points out in the introduction to his book, “we have no idea what happened to it.” The great German classical historian Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) argued that Legio IX Hispana was destroyed during a revolt of the Brigantes, the largest tribe in Britain from a territorial standpoint, sometime around 117 ce and was never reconstituted. Archaeological evidence, however, has since indicated that the legion existed in Eboracum after that and that officers and subunits of it were transferred to Noviomagus (now Nijmegen), the oldest city in the Netherlands, and Aquae Granni (now Aachen), Germany, as late as 120. The only certainty is that Legio IX (VIIII in the Romans’ notation) ceased to be mentioned in Roman army records after 168 ce. Elliott explores the alternative possibilities that the legion was lost while serving in Germany, in Judea (modern- day Israel), or in the war against the Parthian Empire only to return to the conclusion that it was definitively annihilated in northern England. He establishes that in 122 ce Legio IX was replaced in York by another legion organized in Spain, Legio VI Victrix (“Sixth Victorious Legion”), by the Roman emperor Hadrian. Was there an intended meaning to Legio IX’s replacement coming from the same province but named in such a way to underscore its opposite fate? That lesser mystery remains. The Roman army, which influenced such later militaries as Napoleon’s imperial army and even the Wehrmacht, has fascinated historians throughout the ages, and so the quest to determine the true final fate of Roman Britain’s missing legion is sure to continue. Thomas Zacharis, who lives in Thessaloniki, Greece, regularly reviews books for MHQ and other magazines.
94
From MHQ Contributors AERIAL FOREIGN LEGION: Volunteer Foreign Airmen in French Escadrille Service, by Jon Guttman. (Aeronaut Books, $49.99.) From MHQ’s research director comes the fascinating story of the airmen from all over the world who volunteered to serve in the French air service during World War I. The main text is supplemented by appendixes on foreign airmen in Italy’s Corpo Aeronautico Militare and French airmen in the Russian Imperial Military Air Fleet, as well as sidebars on such related topics as a Venezuelan in the Red Baron’s Flying Circus. THE M4 CARBINE, by Chris McNab. (Osprey Publishing, $22.) An authoritative history of one of the most important and widely deployed tactical infantry weapons of the past quarter-century. ARAB VS. ISRAELI ARMOUR: Six-Day War, 1967, by Chris McNab. (Osprey Publishing, $22.) Drawing on compelling firsthand accounts from both unit commanders and individual crews, the author dissects the tactical and mechanical dynamics of one of history’s greatest postwar armored engagements.
New & Noteworthy NEW YORK’S WAR OF 1812: Politics, Society, and Combat, by Richard V. Barbuto. (University of Oklahoma Press, $39.95.) The author, an emeritus professor of history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, authoritatively documents the state of New York’s decisive role in America’s least understood war. DEAR BOB...: Bob Hope’s Wartime Correspondence with the GIs of World War II, by Martha Bolton
with Linda Hope. (University Press of Mississippi, $28.) From 1941 to 1991 Hope made 57 tours for the USO, entertaining active-duty American military personnel around the world. This volume offers many examples of Hope’s down-to-earth, heartwarming, and often touching communications with soldiers, nurses, and their loved ones back home. AIRPOWER IN THE WAR AGAINST ISIS, by Benjamin S. Lambeth. (Naval Institute Press, $55.) An expert’s incisive and no-holdsbarred post mortem of the U.S. Central Command’s planning and conduct of Operation Inherent Resolve—the air campaign waged against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria from August 2014 to early 2019. KOREAN AIR WAR: Sabres, MiGs, and Meteors, 1950–53, by Michael Napier. (Osprey Publishing, $40.) In this meticulously researched and richly illustrated history of the first major conflict between the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, the author examines in detail the air power of the major combatants. FOURTEENTH COLONY: The Forgotten Story of the Gulf South during America’s Revolutionary Era, by Mike Bunn. (New South Books, $28.95.) A lively history of British West Florida, from the colony’s formation in 1764, its opting out of the First Continental Congress, and through the dramatic series of land and sea battles that ended its days under the Union Jack. THE GUNS OF JOHN MOSES BROWNING: The Remarkable Story of the Inventor Whose Firearms Changed the World, by Nathan Gorenstein. (Scribner, $28.) A riveting and long-overdue biography of “the Thomas Edison of Guns,” many of whose innovations are still in use around the world.
PINUPSF
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-REVIEWS.indd 94
5/29/21 6:15 PM
Gina Elise’s
PIN-UPS FOR VETS Supporting Hospitalized Veterans & Deployed Troops Since 2006 Pin-Ups For Vets raises funds to better the lives and boost morale for the entire military community! When you make a purchase at our online store or make a donation, you’ll contribute to Veterans’ healthcare, helping provide VA hospitals across the U.S. with funds for medical equipment and programs. We support volunteerism at VA hospitals, including personal bedside visits to deliver gifts, and we provide makeovers and new clothing for military wives and female Veterans. All that plus we send care packages to our deployed troops.
visit: pinupsforvets.com Alicia, Army Veteran
CRIMEA FROM POTEMKIN TO PUTIN A groundbreaking military history of the Crimean naval citadel, Sevastopol, from its founding in 1783 to the tensions that threaten the region today.
PINUPSFORVETS-halfhoriz.indd 22
4/27/21 7:17 AM
AVAILABLE FROM ALL GOOD BOOKSHOPS AND ONLINE AT WWW.OSPREYPUBLISHING.COM
MHQP-210700-REVIEWS.indd 95
5/29/21 6:15 PM
DRAWN & QUARTERED
A CARDINAL IN HAWK’S CLOTHING
In 1967 caricaturist Edward Sorel took on Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York for his unbridled support of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. But when Spellman died that year, Sorel could find no magazine willing to print his drawing.
96
MHQ Summer 2021
MHQP-210700-DNQ-POPE.indd 96
© EDWARD SOREL, 1967
5/27/21 11:55 AM
Subscribe Now! JULY 3, 1863: FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT OF CONFEDERATE ASSAULT ON CULP’S HILL H
DEATH FROME ABOV
A Scottish Hero? The Somers Mutiny Ted Williams at War Israel’s Close Call Riding a Torpedo Cedar Creek, 1864
HISTORYNET.COM
HISTORYNET.com
ROGUE U-BOAT! SUB S, A GERMAN194 DEFYING ORDER . COAST IN 5 PROWLED THE U.S
. NAVY HOW A U.STT D FORCE BA OULER E-H RE TH A KAMIKAZE T GH ONSLAU
lusPRO-NAZI G.I. PTHE
LEE TAKES
SENTENCED TO DIE FOR TREASON RELICS OF D-DAY FROM THE BEACHES OF NORMANDY
COMMAND DECISIONS 16 CRUCIAL 1862 SEVEN DAYS CAMPAIGN OF THE
H THE WAR’S LAST WIDOW TELLS HER STORY H JUNE 2021
WW2P-210600-COVER-DIGITAL.indd 1
4/8/21 2:34 PM
In one week, Robert E. Lee, with James Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson, drove the Army of the Potomac away from Richmond.
CWTP-201400-COVER-DIGITAL.indd 1
2/3/21 11:34 AM
Night of Terror Enemy Commandos Invade U.S. Base
The Fatal Romance of Consumption New Netherland’s Enduring Shadow Dragging Quakers to Abolitionism Lone Star State’s Tent Show King
HOMEFRONT Richard Roundtree becomes John Shaft
Green Berets Dramatic scenes of Special Forces in combat FIRST IN A FOUR-PART SERIES
A U.S. Special Forces leader directs local militiamen atop a hill in Ha Thanh.
Eyes in the Sky The pilots who directed airstrikes to save the troops below
April 2021 HISTORYNET.com
MARCH 2021
MIHP-210300-COVER-DIGITAL.indd 1
1/13/21 10:58 PM
f-107 ultra sabre: best fighter the USAF never bought?
Fall From Grace Brilliant but star-crossed, Herbert Hoover followed a landslide victory with a landslide defeat
The ’Nam
Marvel Comics enters the war
slow but deadly
the sbd dauntless dive bomber sank japan’s pacific war strategy pan am clippers: when luxurious flying boats conquered the world
VIEP-210600-COVER-DIGITAL.indd 1
aerial minesweeping: ingenious solution to an undersea menace
April 2021 HISTORYNET.com
JUNE 2021 HISTORYNET.com
4/7/21 1:49 PM
AMHP-210400-COVER-DIGITAL.indd 1
2/2/21 7:20 AM
AVHP-210500-COVER-DIGITAL.indd 1
MAY 2021
3/11/21 12:14 PM
THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY
THE AMERICAN FRONTIER
RACE TO THE RHINE
1862 breakout from san quentin christian general oliver otis howard unsung outlaw CHEROKEE BILL
In World War II the famed “Fighting 79th” slugged its way through Nazi strongholds
gall’s last stand
FitZ John Porter
Scapegoat
army artillery forced his 1881 surrender in montana territory
The general was a rising star in the Union Army until blamed for defeat at 2nd Bull Run Rebel artillery commanders Plus! feud on the road to Gettysburg Rare 1861 images of 1st Massachusetts Cavalry
JUNE 2021 HISTORYNET.COM
WIWP-210600-COVER-DIGITAL.indd 1
4/6/21 9:29 AM
ACWP-210700-COVER-DIGITAL.indd 1
JULY 2021 HISTORYNET.COM
4/26/21 10:24 AM
SPRING 2021 HISTORYNET.com
MHQP-210400-COVER-DIGITAL.indd 1
2/28/21 10:04 AM
HISTORYNET is the world’s largest publisher of history magazines; to subscribe to any of our nine titles visit:
HOUSE-9-SUBS AD-05.21.indd 1
4/28/21 7:54 PM
“LET ’EM STARVE. NO FIGHTING. THEY CAN ROT AT THEIR ” LEISURE. —British prime
minister Winston Churchill, referring to the German-occupied Channel Islands, in a note scribbled on September 27, 1944 page 44
SUMMER 2021 VOLUME 33, NUMBER 4
MHQP-210700-C4QUOTE.indd 52
5/28/21 6:14 PM