MHQ Summer 2022

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY

GHOSTS OF THE GLORIOUS

The lingering mystery of a British carrier’s final World War II voyage

Steinbeck’s Anti-Nazi Masterpiece Iran-Iraq War’s Bloody Stalemate

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TODAY IN HISTORY JANUARY 16, 2001 THEODORE ROOSEVELT BECAME THE ONLY U.S. PRESIDENT EVER TO RECEIVE THE MEDAL OF HONOR. PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON AWARDED THE MEDAL TO ROOSEVELT POSTHUMOUSLY FOR HIS SAN JUAN HILL BATTLE HEROICS. THEODORE ROOSEVELT JR. ALSO RECEIVED THE MEDAL OF HONOR AS THE OLDEST MAN AND ONLY GENERAL TO BE AMONG THE FIRST WAVE OF TROOPS THAT STORMED NORMANDY’S UTAH BEACH. For more, visit HISTORYNET.COM/ TODAY-IN-HISTORY

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OPENING ROUND

UNITED NATIONS

On April 22, 1915, at Ypres, Belgium, the “horrors of war” acquired a new terror weapon: poison gas. That day, the Imperial German Army began the Second Battle of Ypres by releasing via cylinders across a broad four-mile front a huge greenish cloud of chlorine gas that wafted its way over an Allied line sector manned by Canadian, British, and French troops.

Totally unprepared and having not yet developed defensive countermeasures such as gas masks, French troops in the path of the chlorine gas suffered about 3,000 casualties—half of those fatalities. British and Canadian troops fared little better when the Germans unleashed more poison gas as the battle progressed.

From that point on, poison gas became a new, deadly weapon of war, not simply rending soldiers’ flesh like bullets and shell fragments but attacking their lungs and respiratory systems, slowly choking the life out of them through asphyxiation by chlorine and phosgene gasses released through gas cylinders and by the explosions of artillery shell bombardments. Incapacitating chemical agents, such as mustard gas (which could also kill in large doses), were extensively used in World War I, and in the 1930s German chemists discovered even more deadly chemical agents—tabun and sarin gases—which attacked the nervous system, killing much quicker and more efficiently.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War would degenerate into the use of chemical weapons, including artillery-delivered nerve gas such as the 152mm sarin binary projectile shown here. (See “Bloody Stalemate,” page 72.)

Conventional warfare tactics, including mass human wave attacks, had consistently failed to achieve any decisive results on the battlefield, causing the belligerents—initially Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—to attempt to break the stalemate and suppress the country’s restive civilian population through chemical weapons employment.

MHQ Summer 2022

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Volume 34, Number 4 Summer 2022

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HENRI BUREAU/CORBIS (GETTY IMAGES)

On September 25, 1980, three days after Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran began the Iran-Iraq War, three Iraqi soldiers halt their truck—which proudly displays Saddam’s photograph—along the road to Basra. One of them gives a woefully premature victory sign.

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FEATURES 36 Ghosts of the Glorious

by Wendell Jamieson The Royal Navy aircraft carrier’s June 8, 1940, sinking under the deadly gunfire of German heavy battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau raised lingering questions about what really happened.

48 Piece de Résistance

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by Timothy J. Boyce One of America’s most acclaimed novelists, John Steinbeck, picked up his pen and joined the struggle against the Axis in World War II, creating an anti-Nazi propaganda masterpiece.

56 Through Patton’s Eyes

PORTFOLIO General George S. Patton Jr. took countless personal photographs as he led his forces from North Africa to Germany between 1942-1945.

64 War Games

HENRI BUREAU/CORBIS (GETTY IMAGES)

48

30 00 64

by Rick Britton Charles S. Roberts’s military passion sparked his creation of a new multimillion-dollar industry that has evolved into one of today’s most enduring and popular pastimes.

72 Bloody Stalemate

by Chris McNab From 1980 to 1988, Iran and Iraq slugged it out in a brutal, futile war. But was it history’s last purely conventional war, as some strategists have suggested?

DEPARTMENTS 6 Flashback 12 Comments 15 At the Front 16 Experience

The Red Baron takes flight

20 Laws of War

Rise and fall of flogging

23 Weapons Check Panzerfaust 60

24 Behind the Lines

Gettysburg’s famous maps

28 Battle Schemes The Rainbow’s Trail

30 War List

Ten accurate battle films

32 Letter From MHQ 81 Culture of War 82 War Stories Mao’s Canadian hero

86 Poetry

Ukraine’s Taras Shevchenko

88 Artists

World War I’s colorful aircraft

91 Big Shots

William L. “Billy” Mitchell

92 Reviews

Credible nuclear deterrence

96 Drawn & Quartered On the Cover

Built during World War I as a battle cruiser, HMS Glorious was converted to an aircraft carrier in 1930. In spring 1940, Glorious supported British operations to defeat Hitler’s Norway invasion.

When the Allied efforts failed, the carrier took part in Operation Alphabet—the evacuation of British forces from Norway.

Glorious’s June 8, 1940, sinking proved another blow to Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s government, already reeling from early war setbacks in France.

COVER: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

MHQ Summer 2022

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FLASHBACK

TENOCHTITLÁN, MEXICO, CIRCA 1500

Thousands of Aztecs pour into the teeming marketplace in the capital city of Tenochtitlán to trade their wares and pay tribute to their emperor, Montezuma II (in white robe).

TODAY: Archaeologists working in Mexico City unearth a long-lost offering to Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war, at the ruins of the Templo Mayor (Main Temple) in Tenochtitlán.

6

MHQ Summer 2022

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SÉBASTIEN LECOCQ (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

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FLASHBACK

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U.S. MINT, PHILADELPHIA, 1839

The U.S. Mint strikes a single gold medal to replace one made for General Daniel Morgan in 1790, honoring his victory at the Battle of Cowpens in 1781 but later stolen.

TODAY: An anonymous consignor puts the one-of-a-kind replacement medal, untraced since 1885 and thought for many years to have been lost or melted, on the auction block.

DON TROIANI (U.S. NATIONAL GUARD)

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FLASHBACK XXXXXXXXXX

PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII, DECEMBER 7, 1941

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NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

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The USS Oklahoma begins to sink after being hit eight times

by Japanese torpedo bombers, and a ninth torpedo hits the battleship as it capsizes; 429 crew members die in the attack.

TODAY: The U.S. military ends a six-year project to identify those killed on the Oklahoma after matching human remains from the ship with the names of 396 sailors and Marines.

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COMMENTS

RECREATING HISTORY

Your Autumn 2021 article, “The Making of Tora! Tora!

Tora!”, brought back a memory from my time on a U.S. Navy ship. My department head, Lieutenant Commander Handle, had worked as an extra on the movie when he was enlisted.

He pointed out the boat on which he was the coxswain, seen in the film where the ships are burning and small boats are crossing the harbor. He told a story about an old navy chief who had served on subs in World War II, who was taking a nap in the back of one of the tourist boats. The planes they used in the movie were flying—it must

12

have been during filming— and they awakened him.

The chief then looked up and cried out, “Oh my God, they are doing it again.”

James Boiko Humble, Texas

Remember[ing] Pearl Harbor I’d like to commend you and author Wendell Jamieson for putting together a history of the making of Tora!

Tora! Tora! [MHQ Autumn 2021]. I grew up in Hawaii and lived in Aiea, which overlooked Pearl Harbor, and I have a few memories of the filming from when I was in my late teens. At that time I worked at a service station on Kamehameha

Highway and remember a truck driving by on its way to Wheeler Air Force Base and which was carrying fake aircraft for the movie. I also remember seeing the replicated USS Arizona. I also distinctly remember rushing outside in my backyard to watch some of the overhead aerials as the “Japanese” planes maneuvered for their bombing and strafing runs. I also remember seeing the thick black smoke.

As a final memory, my father, who was 35 at the time the film was made and a veteran, claimed he’d been on his way on December 7, 1941, to a golf game at Schofield Army Barracks, next door to Wheeler Army Airfield in Wahiawa, with Lieu-

FROM THE EDITOR: Although efforts by family members and descendants of Kimmel and Short to exonerate the two of principal responsibility for the destruction wrought by the Japanese attack, particularly to restore their full wartime ranks—their supporters calling them “scapegoats” and referring to them as “the final two victims of Pearl Harbor”—no U.S. president has approved any of the efforts to do so.

Like Father, Like Son The Granville Raid feature [“Last Gasp at Granville” by

MHQ Summer 2022

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POPPERFOTO (GETTY IMAGES)

“This IS a Drill!”

HERITAGE AUCTIONS

The 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora! recreated the December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor attack.

Film publicity featured Robert McCall’s dramatic concept paintings, including this one.

tenant General Walter C. Short. Both men never made the game. Short, played by Jason Robards, is seen in the movie in his golfing clothes.

My father said he also stopped on the highway before reaching his destination and redirected traffic away from the airfield.

I did learn from some reading that Admiral Husband E. Kimmel (Martin Balsam) did not live at the top of Aiea Heights Drive, as seen in the movie when he looks down to see his naval command under attack. On that morning he was living much closer, in a brand-new residence at 37 Makalapa Drive.

David Mattison Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

POPPERFOTO (GETTY IMAGES)

HERITAGE AUCTIONS

Dwight R. Messimer, Summer 2021] mentioned the death of Lieutenant Roger Lightoller, son of Herbert “Titanic” Lightoller. Roger was a very gallant officer who saved many lives during the war. He was awarded Britain’s Distinguished Service Cross for his part in a brutal coastal forces battle in 1943 when his small motor gunboat, MGB-603, took on six E-boats to protect sister MGB-607, which had been crippled ramming and sinking E-boat S-63. One of his two “Mentioned in Dispatches” was for saving six U.S. personnel in Portsmouth harbor. Roger’s only child, Daphne, emigrated to the U.S. after the war and still lives in New England.

Sadly Tony Chapman, who was probably the last survivor of the approximately 180 men saved by Roger Lightoller, has recently died at the age of 97. He was featured along with Lightoller in the Coastal Forces Heritage Trust newsletter. I live in the same town where Tony lived, and I grew up in the same village that Herbert Lightoller lived in when serving on the Titanic. I passed the old family home every day on my way to school. Tony Chapman and myself were both born in Southampton, and Tony was a near neighbor of my father in the early 1930s.

Tony Martin South Molton, North Devon, Great Britain

ASK MHQ Belligerent “Neutrals”

Besides the American Volunteer Group, a.k.a. the Flying Tigers, in China, were there any other squadrons from nominally neutral countries that were actively involved in World War II? Joseph E. McWilliams Port Tampa, Fla. Commencing operations in April 1941—eight months before the AVG in China— No. 71 Squadron was a Royal Air Force unit made up of American volunteers, and soon joined by two others, Nos. 121 and 133 Squadrons. All were initially equipped with Hawker Hurricane fighters, later obtaining Supermarine Spitfires.

The three all-American squadrons thinly veiled their neutral nationality behind the term “Eagle Squadrons.” On September 19, 1942, with the United States fully in the conflict, all three units were transferred to the Eighth Air Force as the 334th, 335th, and 336th Fighter Squadrons. By then they were collectively credited with 73 1/2 aerial victories, but lost 77 Americans and five British.

There were at least two other units active during World War II whose personnel were volunteers from

Four American Eagle Squadron RAF pilots run toward their Hawker Hurricane fighters of No. 71 Squadron in 1941. nominally neutral countries. During the First Soviet-Finnish War, the Winter War of 1939-40, neutral Sweden sent a unit called Flygflottilj (Flight Regiment) 19 to aid Finland.

Commanded by Major Hufo Beckenhammer, F19 had 12 Gloster Gladiator fighters and four Hawker Hart light bombers—both biplanes—and flew its first combat mission on January 12, 1940. When the war ended on March 10, F19 had lost two Gladiators and three Harts, but had shot down 10 Soviet aircraft.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Spain’s dictator, Generalisimo Francisco Franco, nominally neutral but pro-Axis, provided Hitler a ground division of “volunteers”—the Blue Division (División Azul)— and a squadron of Spanish pilots—the Blue Squadron

(Escuadrilla Azul)—flying Luftwaffe-supplied Me-109 fighters, later replaced by Fw-190s. Franco stipulated that his “volunteers” limit their combat operations exclusively to fighting the Soviets over the Eastern Front. Withdrawn in October 1943, the five Spanish air squadrons were credited with downing a grand total of 156 Soviet aircraft for the loss of 10 pilots killed in action, two killed in accidents, and 10 being brought down and taken prisoner, not being released until 1954.

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 2022

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m

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MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN AND PUBLISHER

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY SUMMER 2022 VOL. 34, NO. 4

JERRY MORELOCK EDITOR JON GUTTMAN RESEARCH DIRECTOR KIRSTIN FAWCETT ASSOCIATE EDITOR BRIAN WALKER GROUP DESIGN DIRECTOR MELISSA A. WINN DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY PAUL FISHER ART DIRECTOR ALEX GRIFFITH PHOTO EDITOR

Churchill’s Secret Weapon How a scientific genius thwarted the Luftwaffe in World War II

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AT THE FRONT EXPERIENCE 16

In 1937 Nicholas Casale of Newark, New Jersey, arguing that the U.S. Army had illegally ignored its own height and weight rules to draft him into military service during World War I, began picketing the U.S. Capitol as part of his campaign for a gold medal that would recognize him as the smallest American soldier to have served in the conflict.

“The humiliation was awful,” he told reporters.

“I even sawed six inches off my rifle so I could shoot it.”

HARRIS & EWING COLLECTION (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

LAWS OF WAR 20 WEAPONS CHECK 23 BEHIND THE LINES 24 BATTLE SCHEMES 28 WAR LIST 30

PINT-SIZED PROTEST

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen wears the Orden Pour le Mérite (a.k.a. the “Blue Max”) around his neck. Richthofen received Germany’s highest military honor in January 1917 after his 16th confirmed aerial victory. He would score 64 more before his death on April 21, 1918.

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EXPERIENCE

BECOMING “THE RED BARON”

In 1917, World War I’s “ace of aces,” Manfred von Richthofen, authored a book recounting his war experiences. His secret to success was having a great teacher.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

R

ittmeister (cavalry captain) Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen (May 2, 1892-April 21, 1918), known from the color he painted his fighter planes as “The Red Baron” to his allied enemies (to fellow Germans he was “der rote Kampfflieger”—“the Red Battle Flyer,” or “the Red Fighter Pilot”), was the Great War’s famed “Ace of Aces.” Between September 17, 1916, and April 20, 1918, Richthofen scored 80 officially credited victories before being killed by ground fire (most likely fired by an Australian machine gunner, Sergeant Cedric Popkin) near Morlancourt, France, on April 21, 1918. He was 11 days short of his 26th birthday.

Richthofen’s 200-page memoir, written and published in Germany following his 52nd aerial combat victory, devotes the first 60 pages or so to his family background, his entry into service as a cavalry officer, and the first year of the war.

He then recounts transferring to the Imperial German Air Service (Die Fliegertruppe) in May 1915 and his becoming a pilot. Notably, Richthofen’s journey to becoming Germany’s—and World War I’s—most famous fighter ace began with a chance meeting on a train with then-Leutnant Oswald Boelcke in October 1915. Already making a name for himself as Germany’s best fighter pilot, Boelcke replied to aerial observer (still not a certified pilot) Richthofen’s “Tell me, how do you manage it?” question in typical, straightforward Boelcke style: “Well, it is quite simple.

I fly close to my man, aim well, and then of course he falls down.” Richthofen recalled, “I took great trouble to get more closely acquainted with that nice modest fellow whom I badly wanted to teach me his business.” Beginning in August 1916, that is exactly what Boelcke, by then Germany’s leading ace, would do for Richthofen. Boelcke taught the fledgling fighter pilot the principles and tactics of aerial warfare, providing Richthofen the tools and skills to become the war’s “Ace of Aces.”

By August 1916, Hauptmann (Captain) Oswald Boelcke, Germany’s preeminent ace (18 victories) following his rival Max Immelmann’s (17 victories) death on June 18, was closing in on 20 aerial victories; had received Germany’s highest valor decoration, the Orden Pour le Mérite (known as the “Blue Max”); and had written and published

“Boelcke’s Dicta”—his eight principles of aerial combat, distributed throughout German air service units. Boelcke was considered the “Father of Air Combat,” and Richthofen idolized him, writing, “I am only a fighting airman, but Boelcke was a hero.” Ordered to form, train, and command what became Germany’s elite fighter pilot squadron, Jagdstaffel (Jasta) 2 in August–September 1916, Boelcke again met Richthofen while touring the Russian Front, recruiting him to join Jasta 2. Richthofen was ecstatic to join his hero’s new squadron.

This excerpt from Richthofen’s memoir, Chapter VIII (“My First English Victim”) of The Red Battle Flyer, the 1918 New York-published English translation of Richthofen’s 1917 book, Der rote Kampfflieger, recounts his tutelage under the guidance of the combat-experienced leading ace, Boelcke. Richthofen describes how he applied Boelcke’s teachings and training to achieve his first aerial victory over a British “Farman Experimental” FE.2b two-seater pusher type biplane. Later, he also details the ironic death of expert fighter pilot Boelcke, who succumbed to a midair collision with another of his pilot protégés, Leutnant Erwin Böhme, whom Boelcke had recruited for Jasta 2. The latter pilot was devastated, writing, “Why did he, the irreplaceable, have to be the victim of this blind fate, and why not I?” Without Boelcke’s teaching, training, and mentorship, there likely would have been no “Red Baron.”

We were all at the Butts [ground stationary firing range for zeroing and adjusting aircraft guns] trying our machine guns. On the previous day we had received our new aeroplanes and the next morning [Hauptmann Oswald] Boelcke was to fly with us. We were all beginners. None of us had had a success so far. Consequently everything that Boelcke told us was to us gospel truth. Every day, during the last few days, he had, as he said, shot one or two Englishmen for breakfast.

The next morning, the seventeenth of September, was a gloriously fine day. It was therefore only to be expected that the English would be very active. Before we started, Boelcke repeated to us his instructions and for the first time we flew as a squadron commanded by the great man whom we followed blindly.

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THE RED BARON

It was an exciting period. Every time we went up we had a fight.

18

I was at his back with my excellent machine [an Albatross D.II biplane]. I give a short series of shots with my machine gun. I had gone so close that I was afraid I might dash into the Englishman. Suddenly, I nearly yelled with joy for the [pusher] propeller of the enemy machine had stopped turning. I had shot his engine to pieces; the enemy was compelled to land, for it was impossible for him to reach his own lines. The English machine was curiously swinging to and fro. Probably something had happened to the pilot.

The observer was no longer visible. His machine gun was apparently deserted. Obviously, I had hit the observer and he had fallen from his seat.

The Englishman landed [his plane] close to the flying ground of one of our squadrons. I was so excited that I landed also and my eagerness was so great that I nearly smashed up my machine. The English flying machine and my own stood close together. I rushed to the English machine and saw that a lot of soldiers were running towards my enemy. When I arrived, I discovered that my assumption had been correct. I had shot the engine to pieces and both the pilot and observer were severely wounded. The observer died at once and the pilot while being transported to the nearest dressing station. I honored the fallen enemy by placing a stone on his beautiful grave.

When I came home Boelcke and my other comrades were already at breakfast. They were surprised that I had not [yet] turned up. I reported proudly that I had shot down an Englishman. All were full of joy for I was not the only victor. As usual, Boelcke had shot down an opponent for breakfast and every one of the other men also had downed an enemy for the first time.

I would mention that since that time no English squadron ventured as far as Cambrai as long as Boelcke’s squadron was there.

During my whole life I have not found a happier hunting ground than in the course of the Somme Battle. In the morning, as soon as I had got up, the first Englishmen arrived, and the last did not disappear until long after sunset. Boelcke once said that this was the El Dorado of the flying men.

There was a time when, within two months [September 2-October 26, 1916], Boelcke’s bag of machines increased from twenty to forty. We beginners had not at that time the experience of our master and we were quite satisfied when we did not get a hiding. It was an exciting period. Every time we went up we had a fight. Frequently we fought really big battles in the air. There were sometimes from forty to sixty English machines, but unfortunately the Germans were often in the minority. With them quality was more important than quantity.

Still the Englishman is a smart fellow. That we must

BUNDESARCHIV

We had just arrived at the Front when we recognized a hostile flying squadron that was proceeding in the direction of Cambrai. Boelcke was of course the first to see it, for he saw a great deal more than ordinary mortals. Soon we understood the position and every one of us strove to follow Boelcke closely. It was clear to all of us that we should pass our first examination under the eyes of our beloved leader.

Slowly we approached the hostile squadron. It could not escape us. We had intercepted it, for we were between the Front and our opponents [prevailing westerly winds over Europe tended to drift Allied aircraft eastward over German lines]. If they wished to go back they had to pass us. We counted the hostile machines. They were seven in number.

We were only five. All the Englishmen flew large bomb-carrying two-seaters. In a few seconds the dance would begin.

Boelcke had come very near the first English machine but he did not yet shoot. I followed. Close to me were my comrades. The Englishman nearest to me was traveling in a large boat [slang for the “boat” or “tub-shaped” fuselage of this pusher-type, 2-seater aircraft] painted with dark colors [it was an F.E. 2b; Lieutenant Lionel Morris (pilot); Captain Tom Rees (observer)]. I did not reflect very long but took my aim and shot. He also fired and so did I, and both of us missed our aim. A struggle began and the great point for me was to get to the rear of the fellow because I could only shoot forward with my [in-line, fuslage-mounted] gun. He was differently placed for his [open cockpit, pivot-mounted] machine gun was movable. It could fire in all directions.

Apparently, he was no beginner, for he knew exactly that his last hour had arrived at the moment when I got at the back of him. At that time, I had not yet the conviction “He must fall!” which I have now on such occasions, but on the contrary, I was curious to see whether he would fall. There is a great difference between the two feelings. When one has shot down one’s first, second or third opponent, then one begins to find out how the trick is done.

My Englishman twisted and turned, going criss-cross.

I did not think for a moment that the hostile squadron contained other Englishmen who conceivably might come to the aid of their comrade. I was animated by a single thought: “The man in front of me must come down, whatever happens.” At last a favorable moment arrived. My opponent had apparently lost sight of me. Instead of twisting and turning he flew straight along. In a fraction of a second

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Richthofen learned his deadly fighter pilot skills from his hero, Oswald Boelcke, known as the “Father of Air Combat.” Boelcke received his Blue Max in January 1916.

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allow. Sometimes the English came down to a very low altitude and visited Boelcke in his quarters, upon which they threw their bombs. They absolutely challenged us to battle and never refused fighting.

We had a delightful time with our chasing [pursuit] squadron. The spirit of our leader animated all his pupils.

We trusted him blindly. There was no possibility that one of us would be left behind. Such a thought was incomprehensible to us. Animated by that spirit we gaily diminished the number of our enemies.

On the day when Boelcke fell the squadron had brought down forty opponents. By now the number has been increased by more than a hundred. Boelcke’s spirit lives still among his capable successors.

One day [October 28, 1916] we were flying, once more guided by Boelcke against the enemy. We always had a wonderful feeling of security when he was with us. After all he was the one and only. The weather was very gusty

and there were many clouds. There were no aeroplanes about except fighting ones.

From a long distance we saw two impertinent Englishmen in the air who actually seemed to enjoy the terrible weather. We were six and they were two. If they had been twenty and if Boelcke had given us the signal to attack we should not have been at all surprised.

The struggle began in the usual way. Boelcke tackled the one and I the other. I had to let go because one of the German machines got in my way. I looked around and noticed Boelcke settling his victim about two hundred yards away from me.

It was the usual thing. Boelcke would shoot down his opponent and I had to look on. Close to Boelcke flew a good friend of his [Leutnant Erwin Böhme]. It was an interesting struggle. Both men were shooting. It was probable that the Englishman would fall at any moment. Suddenly I noticed an unnatural movement of the two German flying machines. Immediately I thought: Collision. I had not yet seen a collision in the air. I had imagined that it would look quite different. In reality, what happened was not a collision.

The two machines merely touched one another. However, if two machines go at the tremendous pace of flying machines, the slightest contact has the effect of a violent concussion.

Boelcke drew away from his victim and descended in large curves. He did not seem to be falling, but when I saw him descending below me I noticed that part of his plane had broken off. I could not see what happened afterwards, but in the clouds he lost [his] entire plane. Now his machine was no longer steerable. It fell [within German lines near Bapaume, France] accompanied all the time by Boelcke’s faithful friend [Böhme].

When we reached home we found the report “Boelcke is dead!” had already arrived. We could scarcely realize it.

The greatest pain was, of course, felt by the man who had the misfortune to be involved in the accident.

It is a strange thing that everybody who met Boelcke imagined that he alone was his true friend. I have made the acquaintance of about forty men, each of whom imagined that he alone was Boelcke’s intimate. Each imagined that he had the monopoly of Boelcke’s affections. Men whose names were unknown to Boelcke believed that he was particularly fond of them. This is a curious phenomenon which I have never noticed in anyone else. Boelcke had not a personal enemy. He was equally polite to everybody, making no differences.

The only one who was perhaps more intimate with him than the others was the very man who had the misfortune to be in the accident which caused his death.

Nothing happens without God’s will. That is the only consolation which any of us can put to our souls during this war. MHQ

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LAWS OF WAR

LAYING OFF THE LASH

Attitudinal changes in the 19th-century U.S. and British militaries— and within society in general—gradually ended corporal punishment.

By John A. Haymond

British Army regulations listed no fewer than 222 offenses that could draw the death penalty.

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course, but the infliction of this punishment could be incredibly capricious. Some British officers were benevolent disciplinarians who resorted to the lash only when the severity of the offense or the immutability of military law required them to do so, but others were infamous for their proclivity for flogging men on almost any pretext. Major General Robert “Black Bob” Craufurd, the tactically brilliant but notoriously mercurial commander of the British army’s Rifles Brigade in the early years of the Peninsular War, was a ferociously strict officer who threatened to flog any man in his brigade who stepped out of the line of march in order to avoid a mud puddle in the road. Coming from a man of Craufurd’s reputation, it was no idle threat.

His nickname originated from his moodiness rather than his physical appearance, but it might just as accurately have been applied to his draconian views on military discipline.

The enlisted men in armies on both sides of the Atlantic endured decades of passive neglect and outright condemnation from their civil societies, and the same sort of negative stereotypes were applied to British and American soldiers alike. The Duke of Wellington’s frequently-quoted remark that the soldiers of his army were the “scum of the earth” might have been more a judgment on the shortcomings of the British recruiting system than on the individual qualities of the British soldier, but it has usually been interpreted as a comment on his solders’ predilection for drink and disorder. The French army of the Napoleonic Wars, on the other hand, relied on nationwide conscription and so at least theoretically brought men of better character into the ranks since it drew men from all walks of life. That was a stereotype, and as such it was no more accurate than was the British opinion that only the most dissolute and desperate men in their society would ever accept the King’s shilling and enlist voluntarily. The British public celebrated their soldiers when they won victories on the battlefield but reviled them as reprobates and criminals the rest of the time. This attitude persisted for decades, and Wellington himself expressed it on occasion. In 1829 he wrote, “The man who enlists into the British army is, in general, the most drunken and probably the worst man… of the village or town in which he lives… they can be brought to be fit for what is to be called the first class only by discipline.” This

RELIC IMAGING LTD. (NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM, LONDON), CC BY-SA 4.0

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he British Army of the early 19th century had a well-earned reputation for deplorable conditions of service and excessively harsh discipline; to a lesser degree, the same could also be said of the U.S. Army in the same period. Reforms in military law—and more importantly, changes in national attitudes toward matters of military discipline and punishment— occurred along similar lines on both sides of the Atlantic.

Describing the culture of military discipline that existed in the U.S. Army during the frontier era, historian Don Rickey has said, “Fear of punishment was the basis of discipline.” This was true of all armies throughout history, just as it has been a factor in human behavior in most civilian societies and cultures. Fear of the punitive and punishing hand of the law, after all, was supposed to hold the criminal element in check, particularly when that punishment was known to be swift, sure, and severe. How well this deterrent worked in practice was always debatable, but for centuries the prevailing belief in militaries the world over insisted that military discipline could only be maintained by the heavy-handed application of harsh punishments.

The British soldier at the beginning of this period was subject to a code of military law that was, in a word, brutal. In 1800, British Army regulations listed no fewer than 222 offenses that could draw the death penalty, and corporal punishment in the form of flogging was taken to such an extreme that sentences of as many as 500 lashes were regularly ordered. That number of lashes was enough to kill a man, a fact which led several contemporaneous observers to question the ultimate intent of such punishment. Even in an era when flogging was firmly established in military law, there were always critics who deplored it as barbaric.

How much the individual British soldier was at risk of a flogging depended to some degree on his own conduct, of

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Flogging as punishment was laid on by multi-tailed wood and leather whips, like this 19th-century British military example. The number of lashes (strokes) depended on the crime’s severity and the commander’s whim.

belief that most soldiers were utterly deficient in moral character was accompanied by the view that the only way to keep them in check was by harsh discipline enforced by savage forms of corporal punishment.

British commanders down to the company level had authority to sentence soldiers to brutal punishments for the most trivial of offenses. The returns of one regiment in 1811 were not at all unique in the penalties its officers imposed for minor transgressions. The trivial infractions soldiers committed, and the punishments imposed, included: “Deficient of frill, part of his regimental necessaries.”—100 lashes; Deficient of a razor, part of his regimental necessaries.—200 lashes; for making an improper use of the barrack bedding.—400 lashes.”

In the U.S. Army flogging was also a standard punishment at the outset of the 1800s, for a wide range of offenses.

When the United States encoded its first version of the Articles of War in 1806, flogging was applied to no less than 30 offenses. The British applied the lash with even greater frequency to many more violations of military regulation, and the rigidly conservative senior ranks of both armies regarded the lash as indispensable to maintaining good order and discipline. As one historian notes, “Traditionalists tended to look on private soldiers as incorrigible reprobates who required stiff doses of punishment to keep their animal instincts in check.”

Reform came slowly in both nations, and changes in military justice reflected changes occurring at the same time in civilian law and societal attitudes toward crime and punishment. The growing civilian repugnance for the spectacle of soldiers tied to the halberds for floggings in view of their assembled regiment arguably had more to do

with progressive attitudes about the inhumanity of the punishment itself than with any real concern for the rights of the soldiers themselves, at least at first. The activists who protested against the savagery of military punishments did not express nearly as much indignation about the wretched conditions of soldiers’ lives, even though the two issues were inextricably linked. By 1850, public pressure in the United States had forced a drastic reduction in the number of military offenses for which the lash could be imposed, but the army managed to avoid an outright abolition of flogging by keeping it as an optional punishment under intentionally vague and ambiguously worded regulations.

For British soldiers, the wide degree of interpretation applied to charges such as “insubordination” meant that they were always at risk of severe punishment for minor offenses—almost any action or behavior could be interpreted as insubordination if their officers chose to interpret it as such. In 1849, one soldier was punished on a charge of insubordination for “wearing new trousers outside the barrack gates while drunk.” The charge of “disgraceful conduct” was even more ambiguous, so much so that in that same year the government felt it necessary to warn the army that “the indiscriminate use of the term tends to weaken its moral effect.” Even so, the overuse of the lash as punishment for violating hopelessly vague and ambiguous rules continued. The problem was not as severe in the U.S. army at that time, but American court-martial records from the period show that soldiers were flogged for offenses such as “making a disrespectful gesture to the adjutant,” and “loss of a bridle.”

In both Britain and the United States, the incremental shift away from military flogging happened at nearly the

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CORPORAL PUNISHMENT

same time—during the Napoleonic Wars in Britain, and after the War of 1812 in America. Humanitarian concerns were only part of the objections raised. Most critics focused on the fact that flogging simply did not seem an effective deterrent to misbehavior. “I have closely watched the career of many of the recipients of this degrading punishment,” one former British soldier wrote, “and I can safely say that I never knew not even one that it made any improvement in, either his moral character or as a soldier.”

Over a career of 21 years in the ranks, this soldier estimated that he had witnessed at least 100 floggings, so he held a very well-informed opinion.

The U.S. Army from its creation in 1775 used flogging as a punishment, though with less frequency and certainly for fewer offenses that did other armies of the same era.

The lash remained an option of military justice in the American army up until the Civil War, when it was finally stricken from army regulations in 1861. Until then, the offense for which it was most commonly applied was the crime of desertion, and it was usually applied as one of a series of punishments that often included branding with the letter “D.” Branding remained a legal punishment in the U.S. Army until it was replaced by the practice of “indelible marking” or tattooing of the shameful letter, and was finally abolished completely in 1870.

In time, the shift in civilian and military attitudes toward corporal punishment was reflected in increasingly creative alternatives to the old standby of flogging. By the time of the American Civil War, soldiers in the U.S. Army incurred such punishments as being made to stand on a barrel in the middle of camp, carrying a heavy log under

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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).

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

When Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper published this 1864 engraving of Union soldiers being physically punished, flogging had been forbidden by regulation.

Less harmful forms, like this “riding a rail,” emphasized discomfort and public humiliation.

guard, or riding a wooden sawhorse while holding an enormous wooden sabre, all of which relied more on discomfiture and public humiliation than physical abuse. A British soldier of that era might be made to wear his uniform inside out, stand at the position of attention with his face to a wall while wearing full marching kit, or report in different uniform configurations for inspection every hour throughout the duty day. That last punishment continues to be used by noncommissioned officers in both armies to this day. One Victorian-era British officer was noted for his inventive punishment for drunkenness. Rather than making a formal entry on a soldier’s charge sheet and consigning the miscreant to the guardhouse for regimental correction, he ordered him confined to the post hospital on a course of emetics, a purgative that induced uncontrollable vomiting, then docked his pay for the costs of the medicine and the laundering of the bed sheets.

This sort of creative innovation on the part of the commanding officer allowed more lenient, progressive-minded officers to exercise their individual discretion.

At the same time, however, it also allowed excessive punishment to take root outside the scope of military regulations.

One Scottish soldier who was serving in his regiment’s officers mess was sentenced to 48 hours of solitary confinement, to have his hair shaved, five days of marching drill, 14 days of confinement to his barracks, and forfeiture of two days’ pay. His offense was that he had been slow to provide the senior officer of the mess with a bottle of soda water when it was demanded.

Even as the harshest forms of discipline slowly gave way to progressive reforms, however, the inconsistent application of military punishments was recognized as an enduring problem. “I think,” one senior British officer wrote in the midst of the debate over proposed changes to military justice, “a greater discretionary power would only produce petty tyrants, who will torment the soldiers into desertion and drinking… he is merely a zealous fool, hot after unimportant minutiae.” Policymakers in the American military expressed the same concern, and that issue continues to the present day. Commanders’ personalities and their views about how discipline should be enforced are constant variables that have made soldiers’ lives difficult in all armies throughout history and probably always will, despite reams of military regulations that try to eliminate those factors from the process of maintaining good order and discipline in the ranks. MHQ

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WEAPONS CHECK

PANZERFAUST

By Chris McNab

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS

Launch tube The launch tube was about 3 ft. in length and contained the black powder propellant charge; the Panzerfaust 100 had two charges to increase the range of the weapon.

Firing mechanism The Panzerfaust featured a simple trigger bar on the top of the launch tube; squeezing the trigger ignited a primer that initiated the main propellant charge.

Sight The Panzerfaust was fitted with a tall flip-up leaf sight, which had to be raised to allow the firing mechanism to operate. The sight had aiming notches cut into it to give various ranges.

The Panzerfaust is popularly associated with being a lastditch weapon, wielded by the old men and young boys of the Volkssturm in the final days of the Third Reich. Yet by the end of the war, 8.3 million of these cheap, handlaunched tank-killers had been produced, and between September 1943 and May 1945 they accounted for a significant portion of total German armor kills. Development began in 1942. The first iteration was known as the Faustpatrone (“fist cartridge”) or Panzerfaust 30 klein (“armor-fist 30 short”), but subsequent improvements led to the three core variants of the war years: the Panzerfäuste 30, 60 (the most common), and 100. All these types shared a common design layout. Essentially the Panzerfaust comprised a metal tube holding a black powder propellant charge and mounted with a firing mechanism and basic sight. The charge fired a bulbous warhead to ranges of 30, 60, or 100 meters—the range of each type was denoted in meters in the variant number. The weapon was fired via a simple two-handed grip, and it operated on recoilless principles; it gave almost

Warhead The angular cut of the shaped-charge warhead was to ensure more efficient detonation and penetration against sloping armor.

Warhead weight was between 2.4 and 5.3 lb., and typical armor penetration was 7.8 in.

no recoil but did impart a vicious and dangerous backblast—the official instruction was not to stand fewer than 10 meters (33 feet) behind one being fired. Panzerfäuste had many limitations. Their short range put the operator in serious danger of return fire from both armor and infantry, and the dust kicked up from the backblast easily identified his position. The weapons were not especially accurate, and mechanical malfunctions were common. Yet distributed in the millions, they became a nerve-wracking threat to Allied armor crews, especially in close-quarters urban or wooded terrain. Thousands of Allied armored vehicles fell victim to the Panzerfäuste, and had they been developed earlier in the war and issued to more highly trained soldiers, their impact could have been considerably greater. MHQ Chris McNab is a military historian based in the United Kingdom. His most recent book is The U.S. Army Infantryman Pocket Manual: ETO & MTO, 1941–45 (Casemate, 2021).

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BEHIND THE LINES

GETTYSBURG’S FAMOUS MAPS

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brace of massive topographical maps of the Civil War’s pivotal July 1-3, 1863, Battle of Gettysburg—though one is over six times the size of the other—have entertained, inspired, and educated generations of visitors to Gettysburg National Military Park. The unique, one-of-a-kind maps have also helped park rangers, guides, and military officers study, explain, and interpret the tactics of the bloodiest battle fought on American soil.

The best known of these—although not the oldest by far—is the 27x27-foot Electric Map, started by the Rosensteel family, which owned the largest collection of Gettysburg artifacts and operated for more than 50 years the most prominent private museum in town.

The route toward the family’s prominence as collectors and the creation of the Electric Map started a few days after the battle, when 12-year-old John Rosensteel came up from the cellar where he had taken shelter during the raging battle and began to help with the sickening chore of burying the dead. Like many other residents, he began picking up the things left behind on the battlefield, starting on July 5, 1863, when he removed a sharpshooter’s rifle from the grip of a dead Confederate soldier near Spangler’s Spring. That one item grew into the largest collection of Gettysburg items in existence, which now forms the core of the GNMP’s collection of 43,000 Civil War artifacts.

John’s nephew, George Rosensteel, started his own artifacts collection and by 1921 had enough to open a small museum. But both the collection and the Rosensteel property on Taneytown Road grew as George continued buying land—and more artifacts. His collection grew to epic proportions in 1927, when he inherited his Uncle John’s own collection and ultimately John’s Round Top Museum in his building on Taneytown Road.

It was George’s son, Joseph, who had the idea for the Electric Map. Always fascinated with maps, when he returned from college he conceived of using lights to illustrate battlefield action locations accompanied by a narration of the battle’s flow. The first Electric Map debuted in 1939, and the existing larger version replaced it in a then-new 500-seat theater in 1963. In 1964, the Gettysburg Times described the new map. “Young Rosensteel has per-

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fected a system of lights … whereby an electrical pageant of the battle is shown every thirty minutes. There are 314 lights on the map, 175 switches controlling them. Two miles of wire was used in making the connections.”

Concerned about the possibility of a buyer redeveloping the site, the Rosensteel family sold the museum and nearly seven acres of land to the National Park Service in August 1971 for $2.35 million. At the time, it was the largest land purchase ever by the GNMP and the first purchase nationally that included a transfer of a copyright. It was reported then that the museum and the Electric Map were attracting more than 500,000 visitors a year.

During the height of the family vacation era, from the 1950s through perhaps the early 1980s, the Electric Map was the essential first stop at Gettysburg, and even today it represents the most vivid memory of youthful visits to Gettysburg for millions of Boomers. No other attraction—not the wax museums, the Charlie Weaver Museum, not Fort Defiance or Fantasyland, not the miniature golf or the National Tower—ignited the loyalty and nostalgia of the Electric Map. Over the years, the 22 to 30-minute performances probably did more to create the public story of Gettysburg than any other single resource. The narrator read the script—later recorded—and flicked the appropriate lights to show the location and movements being discussed. For example, when the narrator stated that Confederate Lieutenant General James Longstreet’s troops moved forward into the Devil’s Den/Little Round Top area, a series of lights traced that movement.

Word about the Electric Map spread widely. Among the frequent visitors was Gettysburg’s best-known resident, Dwight D. Eisenhower. The local newspaper reported on May 11, 1957, that then-president Eisenhower had started a

From top left: George Rosensteel’s National Museum in Gettysburg, pictured here in 1935, was expanded several times to accommodate increased tourism; in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery stopped to experience the Electric Map on their tour of the battlefield; in 1963, a larger version of the Electric Map debuted in a new 500-seat theater.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: AUTHENTICATED NEWS (GETTY IMAGES); BILL ACHATZ (ASSOCIATED PRESS); GETTYSBURG NATIONAL MILITARY PARK, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

Two unique maps inspired generations of visitors to America’s most famous battlefield.

By Leon Reed

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GETTYSBURG MAPS

Rather than sending it to a landfill, the Park agreed to auction off the Electric Map.

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for safety and Americans with Disabilities Act access issues and is now open on an appointment-only basis.

The smaller topographical map, known as the Cope Map, is even older than the first (1939) Electric Map. It was created in 1904 as a U.S. War Department exhibit for the St. Louis World’s Fair and was then brought back to Gettysburg.

A newspaper article described the map as “an accurate representation of the topography of the field, with all the existing buildings, avenues, and roads, on a horizontal scale of 200 feet to the inch and a vertical scale of 72 feet to the inch, and embracing an area of 21.15 square miles. The map is …

9 feet 3 inches in width and 12 feet 8 inches in length.”

The map was built in layers, with the topographical map laid out and then successive 1/6 -inch layers of white pine strips, each layer representing 12 vertical feet, with the contours of the land cut out and pegged together “until every hill, ridge, and the entire surface is built up and shown in successive terraces of wood.” The precision of the map was described in a newspaper article: “… the division of the land into fields appears, what kind of fence, whether post or rail, tapeworm or stone, is made plain on the map; so much of the ground as is covered with brush or timber is made plain. The farm buildings are all accurately located … Any building can be instantly recognized.” In a 2021 lecture on the map, ranger Troy Harman agreed, noting, “I can’t emphasize enough how precise it is. This matches up with the land in ways no other map I’ve ever seen. Areas that were altered by development—if you want to see what they looked like [before the development], come back and look at this map.”

For about a half-century, the map was in the GNMP offices on the second floor of the Federal Building (now the Library), then was moved in 1963 to the Cyclorama Center, where it lay flat in the second story lobby before making the move to its present home in the new park Visitor Center.

The Cope Map never had the public exposure of the Electric Map, and until the move to the new Visitor Center was primarily used by rangers, licensed guides, and other specialists. Frederick Tilberg was hired in 1937 as the park’s first historian, working there until his retirement in 1965. He wrote a 16-page guidebook for the average visitor, started the park’s summer campfire program, and created the first auto tour route. The buildings now known as the West End Guide Station and the South End Guide Station were the primary visitor reception facilities until the modernist Cyclorama Building opened in 1963, but some visitors stopped at Park Headquarters in the old post office building, and those who visited could receive an orientation lecture from Tilberg or another park ranger at the relief map. Until the opening of the Cyclorama building, most visitors’ only contact with an interpretive ranger was

TOP AND RIGHT: MELISSA A. WINN (2); LEFT: GETTYSBURG NATIONAL MILITARY PARK, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

daylong tour of the battlefield for World War II colleague Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, 1st Viscount of Alamein, deputy NATO commander, with a stop at the Electric Map. The paper reported that the two watched Mr. Rosensteel’s program intently, occasionally whispering comments to each other. Leaving the map, Montgomery remarked that if he were in charge, he would have sacked both [Union commander George G.] Meade and [Confederate commander Robert E.] Lee for the way they fought the battle. Asked his opinion by accompanying reporters, Ike quipped, “If you had fought the way Lee did, I’d have sacked you myself.”

The Electric Map was also used as a training tool for military officers, including students from the nearby Army War College in Carlisle. A newspaper article from 1964 noted, “That knowledge … made [Joseph Rosensteel] a lecturer in demand, using the map, for Army officers.

Yearly, numerous officers, many from foreign countries, come here to hear Rosensteel give details of the battle on the map. By using different combinations of lights he can give a four hour or longer lecture getting down to such fine details as maneuvers of regiments.”

The Electric Map was rejected for a place in the new visitor center, which opened in 2008. Visitation had slipped and it was considered outmoded. Park Superintendent John Latschar was frequently quoted referring to it as “The Electric Nap.” The park repeatedly said the map would be replaced with a higher tech, more modern presentation, but in the end it was replaced with…nothing.

But the Park yielded to the public outcry—and the public comments by the Rosensteel family urging the park to turn the map over to a “proper nonprofit organization”—and at last agreed to auction the Electric Map off rather than send it to a landfill. Two bidders materialized at the 2012 auction, and Hanover businessman Scott Roland won with a bid of $14,000. Roland hoped the map could help attract tourist and conference business to Hanover, which is 12 miles east of Gettysburg and the site of a June 30, 1863, cavalry battle.

Then came the hard part—transporting four 5-ton, 27x7-foot pieces to Hanover, lifting them with a crane through a second story window, and then the exacting work of restoring the map—running seven miles of wires, replacing hundreds of light bulbs—before regenerating the program and the lighting cues with little or no documentation.

The map was opened (briefly) in 2016 before being closed

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From top: Hundreds of lightbulbs were replaced to restore the Electric Map to its original working condition after it was sold at auction in 2012; shown here in its new location in Hanover, Va., the Electric Map can now be viewed by appointment; the Cope topographical map is presently on display in the Visitor Center. at the relief map at the old Post Office building where they received an orientation lecture.

Ranger Troy Harman agrees that the map is useful for understanding the battlefield and the combat that took place. “I’ve had the good fortune to do many battle walks. I can’t tell you how many times I was stuck in the old Cyclorama building in the winter. I couldn’t get out and study for the summer program that I had. I would walk out in the lobby and study this map. It was so precise; it would help us prepare over and over again.”

The Cope Map did make the cut to come over to the new visitor center. In its current location near the museum exit, the map is frequently mistaken by visitors for the Electric Map. Many people standing by the map have misremembered, their fading memories prompting comments such as, “I remember seeing this when I was a kid, but back then it had lights and they did a little show.”

And it is still used to provide orientations for visiting groups from the Army War College and other U.S. and

international military units.

Ken Rodriguez, a retired officer who brings groups of special operations soldiers to Gettysburg, described the importance of studying a topographical map. “There’s nothing quite like an accurate and realistic map to assist the warrior-leader in understanding the battlespace …. A good map can identify hazards, obstacles, routes of march, ambush sites, rally points, and advantageous high ground.

Good maps are also essential for training and education. I would never have understood the Battle of Gettysburg without … the large relief map at the Visitor Center.

Though we had been studying the battle for two days, the map made it ‘click’ for many of my team, especially when we were drawn into the distances, orientations, terrain, structures, and relief of the battlefield.” MHQ Leon Reed, a retired defense consultant and U.S. history teacher, is a writer, editor, and publisher in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

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THE RAINBOW’S TRAIL The 42nd “Rainbow” Division owes its existence to then-major Douglas MacArthur, who, after the April 1917 U.S. entry into World War I, convinced his boss and champion, secretary of the army Newton D. Baker—and shortly after, getting final personal approval from President Woodrow Wilson—to activate it in August 1917 as a National Guard division whose subordinate units would “stretch over the whole country like a rainbow.” Although the division demobilized in May 1919, it was reactivated as a three-regiment “triangular division” under the command of Major General Harry J. Collins in July 1943.

Maintaining its “Rainbow Division” concept, the army filled it with soldiers from every state— a unique achievement given World War II constraints.

The Rainbow Division disembarked at Marseilles, southern France, on December 8-9, 1944.

Except for a brief mid-December assignment to Patton’s Third Army, the 42nd served in Lieutenant General Sandy Patch’s Seventh Army, moving through France, then Germany—liberating Dachau concentration camp. On V-E Day, the 42nd was southeast of Munich.

Division casualties totaled about 4,000 killed and wounded.

Postwar, it was part of the U.S. occupation army in Austria before demobilization in 1947. MHQ

DAVID RUMSEY HISTORICAL MAP COLLECTION

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WAR LIST

10 ACCURATE BATTLE FILMS World War II movies that tell it like it was

By Mark DePue

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hours of screen time. The Netherlands campaign lasted nine days and involved hundreds of thousands of participants, including British, Americans, Canadians, Poles, and Germans, plus Dutch civilians caught in the maelstrom. Ryan’s book on the campaign is 672 pages long, filled with facts based on countless interviews and meticulous research. William Goldman, who wrote the screenplay, faced the challenge of determining which of Ryan’s stories to include, which to ignore, and how to weave them into a coherent screen narrative. Attenborough, for his part, then had to take Goldman’s screenplay and bring it to life in a way that matched the epic scale of Operation Market Garden itself.

Given budgetary and time constraints, Goldman and Attenborough had little choice but to drastically compress the basic elements of the story. As a result, the seizing of a key highway bridge, which took several British military units nearly four hours of brutal fighting to accomplish, takes up just eight minutes of screen time. And there was not just one bridge seized that day, but two. Such compromises have been commonplace in World War II movies, as in other movies based on events occurring in other historical eras. To put the issue into military terms, the ultimate objective for filmmakers is to make a profit. And while a secondary objective might be to tell the story as accurately as possible, directors and screenwriters still have producers and financiers to answer to, and a public to please.

Below is one movie fan’s admittedly subjective list of the 10 arguably most accurate World War II movies, presented in the order of their release, knowing full well that there will be many movie fans who will bemoan the omission of one or more of their favorites.

The Dam Busters 1955

This movie about the Royal Air Force’s mission to destroy a series of Ruhr River dams by rotating cylindrical bombs like so many stones across a lake is not well-known today, despite being Great Britain’s most popular film of 1955.

The movie deserves to be on the list despite the limitations imposed on filmmakers by Great Britain’s Official Secrets Act and the regrettable state of special effects in 1955. The Dam Busters hews close to the facts, and also excels in conveying the tension experienced by the Lancaster aircrews

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ore than 80 years after World War II began, there are few aspects of humanity’s most catastrophic war that have not been explored many times over by Hollywood. Yet World War II-themed films keep coming. But how often do these films get things right, accurately portraying either a particular event or capturing what it was really like for those who were there at the time?

It is a valid question, both artistically and historically.

Listed below are 10 of the most accurate World War II movies based on three criteria: First, did the filmmakers get the basic storyline correct, accurately portraying the timeline of events and the characters involved? Second, did they capture the “feel” of the time, the conditions in which the military and civilian participants lived and fought, and the way they typically interacted with each other? Third, did the filmmakers get the “look” of things right, clothing their actors in accurate uniforms with the right patches and insignia, using the actual weapons and equipment, and employing the tactics used at that time?

All three criteria play a part in creating a historically accurate movie.

Such criteria present a significant and potentially expensive dilemma for moviemakers. Combat rarely occurs in a tight, straightforward sequence of events.

Anyone who has fought in battle, large or small, can tell you that nothing is more chaotic, confusing, and unsettling than war. Accounts of the same event may vary widely from one veteran to another.

But above all, moviemaking is a business driven by the bottom line: making a profit. And in order to do that, filmmakers must tell their war stories concisely, within their budgets and time-constraints, and, as Hacksaw Ridge screenwriter Robert Schenkkan explained, “in the most compelling and exciting and emotionally gripping way” possible. Doing so can conflict with historical accuracy.

As a notable example, Joseph E. Levine’s adaptation of Cornelius Ryan’s classic nonfiction book A Bridge Too Far, a movie that is generally praised for its accuracy, illustrates well the filmmaker’s dilemma. Consider that director Richard Attenborough needed to tell the entire Operation Market Garden story, portraying one of the most complex operations of the war in only about three

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as they flew perilously low through a hail of bullets to deliver the bombs—and by those waiting back home in England to hear the results. Star Wars buffs can thank the “dam busters” for inspiring the rebels’ attack on the Death Star in the original 1977 Star Wars film. Not a bad legacy for the movie, and especially for the intrepid pilots and crewmen who, in fact, “busted” two of the Ruhr dams and damaged a third in May 1943.

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The Longest Day 1962

This blockbuster movie, directed by a trio of American, English, and German directors, is a commendable rendition of Cornelius Ryan’s 1959 eponymous classic book. The main emphasis of the movie is the D-Day story itself and not any particular participant, virtually all played by major movie stars (John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Sean Connery, Robert Mitchum, and Richard Burton, among many others). The producers saved some money by filming in black and white but otherwise did not skimp on depicting the events as accurately as possible, given the technology of the day. Even so, the landing on Omaha Beach suffers in comparison to Steven Spielberg’s wrenching version in the 1998 movie Saving Private Ryan, lacking both its accuracy and intensity. Nonetheless, The Longest Day remains the classic film of the war’s single most important day. The film won two Academy Awards, one for best black-and-white cinematography and another for special effects.

Tora! Tora! Tora! 1970

In terms of historical accuracy, this film got it right, although critics such as the late Roger Ebert panned it at the time for being dull due in part to poor character development. But that was the point. It was not meant to be about any specific personalities, but about the event itself. Having two Japanese directors shoot their part of the story, while Richard Fleischer directed the American sequences, added to the film’s accuracy and is one reason it holds up so well. It is worth watching the Japanese scenes that were cut from the general release and are now available on a recent DVD release. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards and won one for special effects. The movie could be advantageously watched in tandem with 2001 film Pearl Harbor, which focuses on the American side of the December 7, 1941, attack.

Patton

1970 This landmark movie, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, was released in the midst of America’s most controversial war.

And remarkably, both Vietnam War-era hawks and antiwar doves found things to like about the film, with nearly everyone praising George C. Scott’s masterful embodiment of George S. Patton in all of his complexity. Francis Ford Coppola, later an accomplished director himself, wrote the screenplay years before it was filmed, knitting together revealing anecdotes about the man taken from several first-

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This German classic on submarine warfare opens with a sobering statistic: “40,000 served on U-Boats—30,000 never returned.” Then we watch a drunken bacchanal as German submariners celebrate in a French tavern, the scene laden with the knowledge that we are (figuratively) watching dead men walking—or stumbling. Where the film excels is in the sense one gets of actually being in the cramped bowels of a World War II German submarine with its crew. Viewers experience the grime, the bawdy camaraderie, the claustrophobia, the churning seas, the tactics of the hunt, and the unrelenting terror of being hunted in turn. There is the constant dread of pinging enemy sonar and the roar of explosions during depth charge attacks, and foreboding doom while trapped on the ocean floor. The film provides a visceral experience, leaving viewers with the undeniable realization that this was what life was truly like for the crewmen on a German U-boat.

Band of Brothers 2001

The same creative team that produced Saving Private Ryan— director Steven Spielberg, actor Tom Hanks, and others— also breathed life into author Stephen Ambrose’s splendid 1992 book on the American paratroopers of Easy Company,

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Downfall 2004

In a riveting portrayal of the end of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime, Downfall recounts the Führer’s deranged last few days while trapped inside his bunker in Berlin. Based in part on the memoirs of Traudl Junge, one of Hitler’s secretaries and bunker mates, the movie is engrossing despite the demonic figure at its heart. The creators of Downfall strove to humanize history’s most demented and infamous mass murderer, and in doing so left viewers to work out for themselves how Hitler and all he embodied had come to pass. Swiss actor Bruno Ganz was justly heralded for his complex portrayal of Hitler, and the film itself was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign film of 2004.

The movie remains controversial, within and outside Germany, for its nuanced depiction of Hitler as anything more than a monster.

Letters From Iwo Jima 2006

Clint Eastwood’s film presenting the Iwo Jima campaign is often difficult to watch, in the same way that Saving Private Ryan and Das Boot are difficult to watch. Like those movies,

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Das Boot 1981

506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. The result is a superb 10-part TV miniseries that follows the men of Easy Company from their time in a stateside training camp to the ultimate surrender of Wehrmacht units near Adolf Hitler’s Berchtesgaden Alpine retreat. Few films portray the experiences and emotions of the average G.I. better than this masterpiece in its totality. One can safely conclude that Band of Brothers depicts what it was actually like for the soldiers in Easy Company. Filmed interviews with some of the actual members of the company contribute an extra layer of humanity to the viewing experience.

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hand accounts. Coppola created the film’s now-famous opening scene, where a bemedaled Patton addresses his troops while standing in front of an enormous American flag, by weaving together quotes from several of Patton’s actual speeches in a way that conveys the fundamental essence of the man. Patton won seven Academy Awards, including best picture, best director, best actor, and best screenplay.

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it viscerally conveys the horrors of combat, yet does so from the Japanese perspective. Considering that all the Japanese characters depicted in the film died during the battle, and that those in the film who survived are fictional characters, it is not totally accurate in the literal sense, but it excels in accurately capturing the horrors of combat for the typical Japanese soldier. To Eastwood’s directorial credit, he plausibly presents General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (portrayed by Ken Watanabe), Baron Takeishi Nishi, and other Japanese leaders, capturing their character and spirit as professional soldiers serving a doomed cause. Letters from Iwo Jima, filmed back-to-back with his companion piece movie, Flags of Our Fathers (also released in 2006)—depicting the battle from the American side— excels in conveying the true nature of combat in the Pacific Theater in all its brutality and barbarity. Letters from Iwo Jima won an Academy Award for best sound editing.

Unbroken 2014

When actress-director Angelina Jolie brought Laura Hillenbrand’s bestseller about American airman and POW Louis Zamperini to the screen, she crafted a truly inspirational film that tracks admirably close to her subject’s story. Zamperini was a troubled youth growing up in Torrance, California, before discovering he possessed phenomenal speed and an indomitable spirit, leading him to compete as a middle-distance runner in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Those traits served him well during the 47 days he survived on a raft in the Pacific Ocean, followed by years of captivity, torture, and starvation suffered at the hands of his sadistic Japanese captors. The most powerful message of Zamperini’s life—his discovery of the redemptive power of forgiveness—is saved for the final

credits. Only by watching the DVD’s special features does one get the full measure of this amazing man.

Dunkirk 2017

Christopher Nolan and the creators of Dunkirk went to extraordinary lengths to accurately portray the events of the Dunkirk evacuation, told from the perspective of the encircled British Tommies, a handful of pilots, and the hundreds of intrepid British civilians who helped evacuate more than 338,000 British and French soldiers from France. Dunkirk was a devastating defeat that was in some ways also a victory, for it led to the resurrection of the British Army and the creation of a Free French force. While most of the characters in the film are fictional, they are composites of real-life individuals which helps the movie accurately convey the confusion, desperation, and bravery of those involved. For another Dunkirk point of view, Darkest Hour (2017), depicting Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s (Best Actor Oscar-winner Gary Oldman) role in the evacuation, proves that history does sometimes turn on the decisions of one great man.

Dunkirk won Academy Awards for best film editing, best sound editing, and best sound mixing.

Another dozen movies worthy of honorable mention include: The Story of G.I. Joe (1945); Battleground (1949); To Hell and Back (1955); The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957); The Great Escape (1963); PT-109 (1963); Midway (1976); Schindler’s List (1993); Saving Private Ryan (1998); Conspiracy (2001); The Great Raid (2005); and Midway (2019). MHQ Mark DePue is the former director of oral history at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois.

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hat if there was an incredible treasure of immense value, but its existence was essentially unknown to those who would most appreciate its worth? In 1996, Kevin M. Hymel—a historian, magazine research director, author, and battlefield tour leader— stumbled upon just such a treasure while mining the Library of Congress’s Patton Papers collection. “What a gold mine!” Hymel recalled after discovering that the library’s collection not only contained the general’s papers, but also held boxes of his photographs and negatives, most personally taken with his ever-present Leica camera during his World War II campaigns from North Africa to Germany. Hymel’s “gold mine” historical treasure revealing the existence of the photo stash was so rarely known and unexpected that even Patton’s acclaimed biographer, Martin Blumenson, was taken by surprise: “I didn’t know Patton had a photo collection,” Blumenson told Hymel. The discovery of the library’s Patton Papers photo collection is, indeed, of immense value since it provides Patton scholars and World War II historians in general, as Hymel noted, “a whole new dimension on one of World War II’s greatest commanders.” In 2006, Hymel’s excellent book, Patton’s Photographs: War As He Saw It, featuring many of the Library of Congress’s Patton Papers collection photos—and including quotes from the general’s war diary referring to specific photo scenes—was published by Potomac Books.

History owes a great debt to Hymel’s lucky find—and to Patton’s trusty Leica.

Today’s enduring image of General George S. Patton, Jr. nearly always features him wearing his two famous ivory-handled pistols. Yet based on photos of him taken during the war—and considering the proliferation of photos Patton took—it appears that his most often “go-to” personal accoutrement was his Leica camera. Throughout the war, Patton habitually carried a German-made “Heer” (“Army” model) Leica II 35mm camera with a built-in rangefinder, a collapsible lens, and a separate 50mm wideangle lens, a model introduced by the famed camera company in 1932. It was the first practical camera using the popular 35mm format. Its aluminum body making it light enough for easy carry, it was nonetheless made more durable by including brass plates on the camera body’s top and bottom. Passing through several versions, the

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Leica II was produced until 1956. Patton’s Leica, purchased in 1934, was personalized with “G.S.P., Jr.” in gold letters engraved on it.

Patton took countless photos with the camera as his tank and infantry forces rolled forward to eventual victory over Italy and Germany from November 1942 in Morocco until May 1945 in southern Germany. Typically, the camera is often seen in wartime photographs of the United States Army’s most famed—and American enemies’ single most feared—battlefield leader, hanging around his neck by the strap of its brown leather case during the campaigns he led in North Africa, Sicily, and western Europe (France, Belgium, and Germany). His wide-angle lens was carried in a separate leather case on his belt. Postwar, his wife, Beatrice, gave the Library of Congress the 11 albums of photos she created from the snapshots her husband had sent her during the war. Indeed, the photos and negatives fill six boxes in the library’s Patton Papers in its Manuscript Reading Room. Although the boxes also include some Signal Corps photos and pictures of Patton taken by others, most are photos he took. Patton even claimed that during the Sicily Campaign (July-August 1943) his penchant for suddenly stopping to take photographs “saved my life:” after impetuously halting his command car during the race to Messina to take photos, German artillery rounds blasted the road ahead at approximately where he judged he would have been had he not stopped.

Yet Patton did not wield his Leica with the idea of winning photography awards. And the real value of his photograhs is that they not only document real scenes from Patton’s World War II march to victory, the individual photographs show the images that he, himself, thought worthy of preserving and what he personally was interested in capturing. His photos track the progress of his forces and reveal what he was thinking at the time. Whether his photo showed burned-out German tanks, wide-angle views of U.S. forces sweeping over the landscape, dead Axis soldiers lying as disheveled corpses, or the bombed-out rubble of cities, they are the images that caught Patton’s attention— that made him halt his command car; that enticed him to get out, even under enemy fire; that compelled him to record for posterity. These photographs show World War II through George Patton’s eyes.

—Jerry Morelock, Editor

COURTESY OF THE GENERAL GEORGE PATTON MUSEUM, ARMY MUSEUM ENTERPRISE

PATTON’S TRUSTY LEICA

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COURTESY OF THE GENERAL GEORGE PATTON MUSEUM, ARMY MUSEUM ENTERPRISE

Patton bought only the best as his personal accoutrements, and his Leica II camera is a prime example. Introduced in 1932 with a built-in rangefinder, it pioneered the excellent 35mm format.

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The HMS Glorious, which originally saw action as a battle cruiser during World War I, was later converted into an ungainly aircraft carrier.

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GHOSTS OF THE GLORIOUS On June 8, 1940, two German battle cruisers sank the British carrier HMS Glorious and its escorts.

But questions linger over what really happened that day.

By Wendell Jamieson

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GHOSTS OF THE GLORIOUS

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History—and especially the history of World War II— shapes day-to-day life in Britain more than it does, for example, in the United States. But the intense emotions stirred up by the sinking of the Glorious are unusual, as is the fact that more than 50 years afterward, the incident merited heated debate in the heart of the nation’s government. Many of Beith’s questions went unanswered in 1999 and remain unanswered today.

The story of the sinking of the Glorious is shot through with drama and subplots. The ship had been the setting for the daring recovery on its deck of land-based Hawker Hurricane fighters, even though the planes had no arresting hooks and their pilots had no carrier training. But the Hurricanes—and most of the pilots— would go down with the ship a day later. The pilots were among the hundreds of men who perished in the Arctic waters because it took 24 hours for word of the sinking to reach the Royal Navy’s high command. The one ship that might have saved them, a cruiser just 50 miles away, did not deviate from its course because it had on board a passenger whose safety was paramount: King Haakon VII of Norway, who was accompanied by his entire cabinet.

The Admiralty has long maintained—as Spellar did again that day in 1999—that the Glorious was sent home on its own because its mission was complete and it was low on fuel. Perhaps those were two of the reasons it was lost.

Another is without a doubt the inexcusable and almost incomprehensible lack of precautions taken. But in recent decades an even darker theory has taken hold.

“The truth may lie in a different direction,” Beith intoned ominously, after dismissing the contention that it had been low on fuel. “HMS Glorious may well have become detached from the greater safety of the convoy because of a serious breakdown in relations among her senior officers. She was an unhappy ship.”

The Glorious was an ungainly looking thing, with a flush flight deck and towering bridge island grafted onto what had once been the low-slung form of a battle cruiser. In its fierce original incarnation, during World War I, it saw action in the Battle of Heligoland Bight in 1917 and was present when the German fleet surrendered to the Allies. It was converted into an aircraft carrier under the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922.

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On that fateful day in 1940, he asked, why was HMS Glorious sent home on its own?

reconnaissance? Was there not sufficient intelligence about German activity in the region to suggest that Glorious should have been in a much greater state of readiness?”

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t just a few minutes past 6:30 p.m. on January 28, 1999, Alan Beith, a member of Parliament representing the constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed in the north of England, rose to address his colleagues to begin what is known as an adjournment debate. Members of Parliament may set any issue as the topic of such a debate, and an appropriate government official is required to attend, listen, and respond.

In this case, John Spellar, Britain’s undersecretary of state for defense, was on hand.

It was a clear, unseasonably warm evening in London, the sidewalks crowded with Tube-bound commuters. The front page of the Evening Standard announced Ford Motor Company’s purchase of Volvo and displayed the smiling face of Julia Roberts, the actress. But inside Parliament, as Beith spoke, this routine Thursday in the last year of the 20th century faded away, and a terrible moment from 59 years earlier came into focus. The existential worries of wartime replaced the incidental concerns of peacetime, busy London dissolved into a frigid Norwegian Sea, and one of the great and inexplicable disasters of Britain’s desperate fight against Germany took center stage.

“On the afternoon of 8 June 1940, two German battle cruisers, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, sighted a wisp of smoke on the arctic horizon,” Beith began. “Two hours later, the carrier HMS Glorious and its two escorting destroyers, Ardent and Acasta, had been sunk.” Beith went on to describe how more than 1,500 lives had been lost, qualifying the incident as one of England’s worst naval disasters of World War II. The Glorious and its escorts had been caught while returning to Scapa Flow in Scotland following England’s failed bid to save Norway in the early days of the war. In the rock-paper-scissors game of that era’s naval warfare, aircraft carriers reigned supreme—until they came under the guns of an enemy battleship, in which case they were utterly helpless.

So it was for HMS Glorious.

“Why was Glorious returning home independently of the main convoy?” Beith asked. Several of his constituents, he said, were pushing him to get answers. “Why was she so badly prepared? Why was her air power not used even for

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Clockwise from top: Smoke billows from burning buildings in Narvik, Norway, after the coastal city is bombarded

by German artillery in 1940; the British destroyer HMS Eskimo is left without its bow after being hit by a German torpedo during the Second Battle of Narvik; British ships burn in a Norwegian fjord after a Nazi air raid in 1940.

As with similar conversions in other navies, the result was successful but awkward. The ship’s flight deck did not extend to the bow; rather, the Glorious retained the classic fo’c’sle of the battle cruiser it had once been. Gunports and platforms were cantilevered here and there; it all looked a bit makeshift. One officer referred to the ship, affectionately it seems, as a “flat-topped old barmaid.” It lacked the clean lines of a modern, purpose-built carrier, such as the Ark Royal, which had joined the Royal Navy in 1938.

The Glorious was in the Mediterranean when the war broke out and was soon dispatched to the South Atlantic to search for the German pocket battleship Graf Spee. It re-

turned to the smooth, sunny Mediterranean before being assigned to help protect Norway from German invasion.

The rough, slate-gray Arctic was a dramatic change for the 1,200 men crowded in the ship’s labyrinthine steel interior of hangars, galleys, cabins, and endless corridors, the thrum of the engines and the motion of the sea constants.

“A carrier is a rum sort of a place, with its windswept flight-deck, its great grey cliff of steel up to the bridge and its bays of guns,” Ronald “Tubby” Healiss, a member of a Royal Marine antiaircraft crew, would write in his memoir, Arctic Rescue: A Memoir of the Tragic Sinking of HMS Glorious. He described the ship’s “miles of low-roofed passage-

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by HMS Wishart, one of its escort destroyers, in 1939. The Wishart, like the Glorious, was built during World War I.

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ways and a thousand coamings to stumble over, NORWAY its brine-sprayed great hull and all the time its sickly sweet oil stench.”

Up in the bridge atop that great cliff of steel was the Glorious’s captain, Guy D’Oyly-Hughes.

Before assuming command, he had been the executive officer of its sister ship, HMS Courageous, and was something of a legend in the Royal Navy. D’Oyly-Hughes had begun his career as a submariner in World War I, during which he single-handedly—and famously—swam ashore with a raft of explosives, blew up a portion of the Constantinople–Baghdad Railway, and then swam back to the sub.

Photographs from the early 1920s, when he acted out this feat for newspaper photographers, show a beaming daredevil, bearded and stripped to the waist, happily embracing his central-casting looks. He was said to be a favorite of Winston Churchill’s.

D’Oyly-Hughes also had a temper, which often seemed to be aimed at Commander J. B. Heath, the director of air

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operations, and Lieutenant Commander Paul Slessor, Heath’s number two. Petty Officer Dick Leggott, the pilot of a Gloster Sea Gladiator fighter, recalled a strange introduction after he’d touched down on the flight deck for the first time. “We were taken up to the bridge to meet the captain, D’Oyly-Hughes, and he said, ‘Well, I’m very pleased to see you. You’ll be more use to me than those two over there.’ ” He gestured to Heath and Slessor. “We thought, ‘Oh, God, what’s going on here?’”

In a 1999 BBC documentary, D’Oyly-Hughes’s daughter, Bridget, recalled not only her father’s thrill at commanding an aircraft carrier but also his exacting standards.

A man who blew up railroads and engaged in other solo Lawrence of Arabia–type exploits, she said, expected the same level of commitment, daring, and even showmanship from his underlings.

“He was delighted because he’d been so keen on flying, he’d learned to fly, he thought flying mattered, and it brought aeroplanes and the sea together in one command,” she said of her father’s appointment to be captain of the Glorious. As for a possible feud with his air staff, “he would have been

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HMS GLORIOUS SINKING

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impatient of any lack of enthusiasm on their part,” she said.

“He was always impatient of lack of enthusiasm.”

J. B. Heath, interviewed years later, described being constantly overruled and “stamped on” by the captain. And he offered a radically different opinion of D’Oyly-Hughes’s ability, saying that he seemed to have a “total lack of knowledge of air affairs.”

The coming disaster would suggest that Heath’s assessment was correct.

The Glorious, the Ark Royal, and their escorts arrived off the coast of Norway on April 24, 1940, flying off planes that had been loaded by crane in Scotland to the airfields where they would be based. Their arrival meant that the Glorious’s own complement of Sea Gladiators and Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers, both biplanes, would be reduced.

Nonetheless, those that made the trip were kept busy. “The clatter of arrester wires was going all the time as the Swordfish came back after nonstop two-hour patrols,” Healiss recalled. “It was pretty sure things were hotting up. You could tell that, too, by the mechanical hammerings coming all night from the hangars, where some of the Swordfish were struck down for maintenance as the other fighters were operational. The racket seemed to fill the whole ship, and I didn’t sleep too well.”

Between April and June the Glorious would make five round trips from Norway to Scapa Flow, with fuel concerns keeping it in the battle zone for relatively short periods, usually a few days. (It was known in naval parlance as a “short-legged” ship.) On May 26, its second-to-last visit, the Glorious safely flew off 18 Hawker Hurricanes of 46 Squadron that flew from the ship to land bases. It was on this mission that things came to a head between the captain and his air staff.

The Glorious was ordered to also send its Swordfishes, now only five, to land bases, where they were to attack German positions. Heath refused, saying the objectives were vague and this was not the proper use of naval aviation. In the wardrooms the pilots had been lamenting the fact that their light naval aircraft were outclassed by the Luftwaffe’s heavier, more powerful, and faster land-based fighters. Moreover, Heath argued, the assignment would leave the ship defenseless. “Do you risk matériel and men for five poor old aircraft trying to bomb a target that they don’t know even exists?” he recalled asking. “It was the most crazy high heroics that you could think of.”

D’Oyly-Hughes was furious at Heath, and the two men had a row. Interestingly, the pilots sided with the captain, not their air commander. “We thought an effort perhaps should be made to do something and help the army,” Leggott would later recall. When the ship returned to Scotland, Heath was placed under arrest, taken ashore, and

The captain of the Glorious, Guy D’Oyly-Hughes, as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy during World War I.

charged with “cowardness in the face of the enemy.” He would await court-martial on dry land. Slessor, his number two, remained on board.

By early June it was obvious that Norway was lost and that the 18,000 British personnel there, along with their planes and other equipment, needed to be brought back to England to protect the homeland. The nightmare of Dunkirk was unfolding simultaneously. Operation Alphabet was launched to get everyone out. The Glorious and the Ark Royal steamed back to Norway, taking up station off Narvik.

Stranded ashore were the Hurricanes of 46 Squadron that had been flown in just days earlier. There would be no time to load them aboard with cranes, nor would the Glorious be risked by docking, and they didn’t have the range to fly from Norway to Scotland. The choice was to burn them or try to land them on a carrier at sea. The Hurricanes didn’t have arresting hooks to catch on flight deck cables, and their pilots had no carrier training. But their commander, Lieutenant Kenneth Cross, was determined to save his planes.

Ground-crew members surmised that placing sandbags in the planes’ tails and slightly deflating their tires might slow them enough when they hit the deck to keep them

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GHOSTS OF THE GLORIOUS Roughly 30 minutes later the carrier requested permission to depart without the fleet, and it was granted by L. V. Wells, the vice admiral in charge of carriers. The Glorious and two destroyer escorts—the Ardent and the Acasta— sailed for home. Immediately after the war the Admiralty would maintain that the trio was sent in advance of the task force because the Glorious was running low on fuel.

But in 1968 the captain of another destroyer, HMS Diana, would be quoted as saying that he had seen the carrier communicating via signal lamp with the Ark Royal, the flagship, asking for permission to proceed ahead to Scapa Flow for Heath’s court-martial.

In any event, the tiny squadron sailed into the stillbright Arctic summer night.

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At 3:46 p.m. on June 8, the Glorious and its escorts, reaching a point several hundred miles off the coast of Norway, had turned south on a heading of 205 degrees for Scapa Flow. They were in the “fourth state” of readiness, steaming at 17 knots with 12 of the carrier’s 18 boilers lit, zigzagging to throw off any lurking German U-boats. No planes were in the air for reconnaissance, nor were any ready for takeoff. Nor was there a lookout in the Glorious’s crow’s nest. It was a calm sea with 6.5-knot winds—modest by Arctic standards—with unlimited visibility.

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from shooting off the bow. While this had never been tried before, the Hurricane pilots decided to give it a go.

The Glorious was chosen because the elevators from its flight deck down to its hangar were large enough to accommodate the planes, whose wings, unlike those of naval aircraft, did not fold. So it was at 2 a.m. on June 8 that, one by one, the Hurricanes arrived over the Glorious and the other British ships. They circled, lined up, descended, and squealed to a stop on the flight deck, the pilots giving the brakes all they had, as the Glorious raced into the wind at full speed of 30 knots to give the fliers a few crucial meters of extra runway. None of the planes came even close to overshooting; they all stopped two-thirds of the way down the deck.

“We were rather proud of ourselves,” Cross recalled. He jumped out of the cockpit, relieved like the others to be safely out of Norway, and was taken up to the bridge to meet D’Oyly-Hughes. The captain’s words of welcome?

“What took you so long?” He offered no handshake.

HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES)

HMS Ark Royal, shown here laden with Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers, sailed with the Glorious to Norway in 1940 to provide fighter protection for British warships.

The German battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were great wolves of the sea—32,000-ton state-of-the-art capital ships, both sporting three main turrets, each with three 11-inch guns. Their raked bows slid down in sheer, unbroken, almost elegant lines to their sterns. Their superstructures were modernist towers of bridges, compass platforms, range finders, and even early radar. It is hard to imagine two ships less like Britain’s “Old Barmaid.”

Throughout April and May, either as a pair or with others, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau had trolled the ocean, harassing British ships and, on at least one occasion, getting chased by Royal Navy battleships. After returning to port for repairs, the ships set sail on June 4 under the command of Admiral Wilhelm Marschall, who, like D’Oyly-Hughes, had been a submariner during World War I. Marschall was under orders not to engage enemy warships but, rather, to find and sink retreating merchant ships and troop transports. The gray wolves raced through the Denmark Strait and into the Norwegian Sea, attracting the attention of at least one Allied coastal observer. British code breakers at Bletchley Park also noted increased German navy radio traffic suggesting a possible breakout and relayed the intelligence to the Admiralty. The warnings were ignored.

Improbably, the German battle cruisers had a motionpicture crew onboard.

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HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES)

The German battle cruiser Gneisenau, a 32,000ton capital ship (shown here in port with its crew in 1941), was launched by Nazi Germany’s Kriegsmarine in 1936 and completed in 1938.

Leggott was having a cup of tea. Cross was in his bunk.

Healiss was on the flight deck. “The sea was calm and deep blue,” Healiss would recall. “A good June day for the Arctic.”

At 4 p.m. two strange ships were sighted on the Western horizon on a course heading of 330 degrees. The Ardent was ordered to investigate and sped off toward them as a call came down to the Glorious’s hangar to arm the five Swordfish with torpedoes and bring them up on deck.

Twenty minutes later a call came for “action stations.”

German lookouts had already spotted the British ships.

The battle cruisers turned toward their quarry and revved to top speed; Marschall was not going to waste this opportunity. On they came, with the faster Gneisenau slowly overtaking the Scharnhorst. The Ardent issued a challenge with its signal lamp: Identify yourselves. At 4:27 p.m. they answered by opening fire.

Hit repeatedly, the Ardent fired a spread of torpedoes and turned around. One barely missed the Scharnhorst.

The Acasta raced in behind, and both destroyers started belching smoke to shield the carrier.

It wasn’t enough. The battle cruisers trained their main batteries on the Glorious, with the Scharnhorst firing its first salvo at 4:32 p.m. from 16 miles away. The Gneisenau followed 12 minutes later.

“I was having my tea when I saw through the port hole splash, splash, splash,” Leggott later recalled. “I said, ‘What the hell is that?’ ” His memory might have been slightly off because records indicate action stations were called before

the first salvo landed, but his words nonetheless capture the utter surprise with which many on the British ships greeted this sudden and violent intrusion on their peaceful journey home.

Healiss found himself pushing through a crowd of sailors to grab his sea boots, helmet, and a few bars of chocolate from his locker—he knew from experience that he might not eat for hours—before reaching his gun station.

Cross and his fellow Hurricane pilots mustered at their evacuation stations.

Cross’s station was just over the stern beneath the aft end of the flight deck. “I assumed it was a practice drill, having been through many,” he said.

But now, as Glorious turned to escape, he could see the attackers on the horizon as “two tiny smudges of smoke.”

Distant flashes sparkled.

Scharnhorst’s first salvo had landed about 10 yards away, sending three towering pylons of water into the sky—accuracy that Cross thought “remarkable” considering the distance. He decided to report to D’Oyly-Hughes and see if, as commander of the Hurricane squadron, he could be of service. He made his way up a ladder. “As I stepped onto the flight deck the second salvo hit the ship

At 4 p.m. on June 8, two strange ships were sighted on the Western horizon.

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XXXXXXXXXX The Gneisenau, shown here at sea, joined the Scharnhorst, its sister ship in the Nazi fleet, to sink the Glorious and its two escorting destroyers.

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The temperature of the water was 34 degrees; the men of the Glorious traded scorching heat for bitter cold. Healiss belly-flopped into what felt like concrete. Before he and the others went over the side, they were calmed by the officers walking through the flame and smoke, patting the backs of the young sailors and marines, some of whom could not swim. “C’mon, lads, don’t panic now. Get in line.”

Any hope of a quick rescue faded as night fell, though the sky remained bright, and the next day dawned as clear as the last. The men bobbed in the current, most treading

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After finding the range, the German gunners struck the Glorious again and again.

lessly in circles. “This was murder,” Healiss said. “Sudden, blazing dirty murder.” The now thoroughly engulfed airplane hangar was a “living furnace,” as Healiss put it, and horrors abounded. He saw one of his favorite shipmates confused and walking unsteadily because he had lost a leg.

Film footage taken on the German ships shows mountains of water as high as 10-story buildings falling around the Glorious in the opening minutes of the battle, followed by the frenzied and seemingly panicked defense by the destroyers. Finally, the footage captures the listing, burning hulk of the mortally wounded Old Barmaid, smoke and flames pouring from every opening, its already inelegant lines a shambles.

The Acasta and the Ardent, with their small 4.7-inch guns, each scored a hit on a German ship—with little effect— and the Acasta struck the Scharnhorst with a torpedo, killing 51 men. It was a spirited and courageous defense that drew praise years later from German sailors, but in the end, hopelessly outgunned, both destroyers were sunk.

Glorious went down at 6:10 p.m. The German ships sped off, leaving more than a thousand men in the sea.

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about 10 yards in front of me,” he said. He finally made it to the bridge, but the “tenseness of the faces,” he said, made it “plain to me that I would be in the way.”

Tenseness can only be an understatement, whether in Cross’s description or in the emotions the officers allowed themselves to display. They were in serious trouble. The powerful German ships were coming at them from the same direction as the wind, which meant that if the Glorious wanted to launch its torpedo-laden Swordfish, it would have to turn toward the Germans, closing the range even more.

That option had already disappeared, however, because the Scharnhorst’s first hit had gone through the flight deck, rendering it unusable, and set the bombers in the hangar beneath on fire, along with several of Cross’s Hurricanes.

It also ruptured a steam line, causing a momentary decrease in speed. The fire began to spread.

The Germans had found the range. The next salvo hit the compass platform directly above the bridge. “Plumes of smoke filled the air as I watched in horror,” Healiss wrote.

“They’d hit the bridge. At the impact I threw myself on the platform instinctively.”

That shot killed D’Oyly-Hughes and most of the command staff. But for others the ordeal had only barely begun.

The German gunners struck the Glorious again and again.

One projectile blasted through several decks and hit the engine room, slowing the ship and causing it to turn help-

AKPOOL GMBH/ARKIVI (AKG-IMAGES)

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Throughout April and May, 1940, either as a pair or with others, the Scharnhorst (in foreground) and the Gneisenau had trolled the ocean, harassing British ships and, on at least one occasion, getting chased by Royal Navy battleships.

water, some in the few half-swamped lifeboats and launches that had broken free from the Glorious. Leggott recalled hanging on to a piece of rope with another man and asking if he was all right. “He said, ‘Yeah,’ and with that he died.”

He described how others would simply put a hand up, as if to say goodbye, and then slip away.

Cross remembered excruciating thirst, and how the sea was dead calm, and how he could see several fathoms straight down. Healiss made it to a waterlogged launch with 20 others, many of them Royal Marines like himself, who at first sang heartily, “Roll out the barrel, let’s have a barrel of fun.” After a night and a day and another night, however, he was the only one left alive.

The Glorious had managed to get off one or two Morsecode action reports, but whether they were picked up or understood remains a matter of dispute. A notation in the log of the cruiser Devonshire records that it had received a report as the Glorious was being shelled, but the location was believed to be in error. Moreover, the cruiser was under orders to maintain its course for home, and strict radio silence, because the king of Norway and his cabinet were aboard. While the Devonshire could certainly have rescued men from the sea, German battle cruisers lurking in the vicinity could easily have overwhelmed it.

The Germans didn’t consider the one-sided fight to be much of a victory. Marschall was removed from his com-

mand because he’d engaged warships rather than troopships. He’d also used too much ammunition and allowed the Scharnhorst to be badly damaged.

The British Admiralty didn’t learn of the sinking for 24 hours—and then from a German broadcast. Search planes were finally dispatched. In the end, only 41 survivors were rescued; 1,519 British seamen, naval airmen, and marines died, the nation’s single largest loss of life in a sea action during the war.

In the end, Alan Beith, the member of Parliament, didn’t get many answers that January day in 1999 when he challenged John Spellar, Britain’s minister of defense. Nor did the Naval Historical Branch veer from its long-held position that the carrier had been sent home for lack of fuel.

Beith, now a member of the House of Lords, wasn’t surprised. “When government agencies arrive at a view their instinct is often to defend that view unhesitatingly,” he told MHQ in a recent email exchange. “That is often the case on policy issues, and in this case it applied to history.”

Why did the Glorious episode still cause so much pain so many decades later?

“Anyone who has lost a family member in war feels pain, and that pain is even greater if there is reason to believe the death could have been avoided if better decisions had been made,” Beith said. “Then there were all the issues

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The answers may not lie in secret files or documents or long-forgotten memos.

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istry of Defence dismissed the theory. But the truth may not be revealed until 2041, as the sinking of the Glorious is the only British carrier loss of World War II for which the records have been sealed for 100 years.

Perhaps it was the court-martial. Perhaps it was fuel.

Perhaps it was Operation Paul. Those are all possible reasons that the Glorious, Ardent, and Acasta were out alone in the Norwegian Sea. It might even have been a combination of those factors. But no one has been able to explain a perhaps more baffling issue: Why was D’Oyly-Hughes, a veteran mariner, so unprepared for action? How could he have allowed his men and ships to put themselves in such a hopeless situation? Cranky or not, he was by all accounts a skilled naval man and, after all, there was a war on.

The answers to these questions may lie not in secret files or documents or long-forgotten memos, but in the very nature of command, of management, and of loyalty and what one might call the “tyranny of experience.”

Glorious had made five round trips without incident.

The journey had become routine. And breakouts by German surface ships were relatively rare. Cross believes that even though the captain could fly, he was at heart a classic sea commander, one from a bygone era, and he didn’t fully grasp the 360-degree, round-the-clock nature of modern naval combat. In D’Oyly-Hughes’s view, Cross suggests, the little trio of ships was out of the battle zone and out of danger and sailing home.

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around commander D’Oyly-Hughes’s conduct and the then impending court-martial of Commander Heath, who was vindicated, and Lieutenant Commander Slessor, who was lost in the sinking.”

In recent years, the Naval Historical Branch has given more credence to the theory that D’Oyly-Hughes had decided to leave early to court-martial Heath. But because he died in the early moments of the encounter, his motivations will never be known. In 2019 Ben Barker, whose grandfather commanded the Ardent, offered a new theory: that the Glorious was dispatched early because it was needed for Operation Paul, a secret but unexecuted plan to mine the harbors of neutral Sweden so that the Germans couldn’t export badly needed iron ore. Barker’s evidence is intriguing, though largely circumstantial, and his investigation garnered some press coverage. The theory would certainly explain why the British government prefers not to discuss the sinking of the Glorious, even today—such an operation would have been akin to an attack on a neutral nation. D’Oyly-Hughes’s daughter was quoted in the Times of London as saying it vindicated her father, while the Min-

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All the facts surrounding the sinking of HMS Glorious (depicted here in a German painting from the early 1940s) may not be known until 2041, when the British government is to lift a 100-year seal on its official records of the incident.

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Caught by a motion picture crew, the Gneisenau, sporting a Nazi swastika on its foredeck to better identify itself to Luftwaffe aircraft, fires its 11-inch guns at the Glorious on June 8, 1940.

Maybe. And it is certainly not the captain’s job to go up to the crow’s nest to make sure someone is up there looking sharp. The captain sets the tone, the degree of readiness, and expects his orders to be carried out. But it doesn’t always work out that way.

In the history of the Royal Navy, there is a storied episode from 1893, when, off Tripoli in the Mediterranean, HMS Camperdown collided with HMS Victoria, sending it to the bottom of the sea with 358 men. The two battleships were on maneuvers and executing a complex course change on orders of Vice Admiral Sir George Tryon, a demanding commander not known to favor the opinions of others. As the ships turned, it became clear that the Camperdown was on a collision course with the Victoria. Still, the ships plunged ahead. At least one junior officer quietly asked the vice admiral if he was sure about his orders, but the junior officer was rebuffed. The commander of the oncoming Camperdown was certain that Tryon would signal a course change at the last second; he assumed Tryon had a plan. He finally ordered the engines reversed. But it was too late. On a clear, calm, and sunny day, the Camperdown’s ram tore into the Victoria’s innards. The ship was gone in 15 minutes. Tryon was among the drowned.

Did D’Oyly-Hughes’s executive staff assume he knew what he was doing when he set the Glorious to the fourth degree of readiness? Or did they simply not feel like tangling with him? This was a man who’d blown up a desert railway by himself and was known to favor initiative and “high heroics” while barely acknowledging the exploits of others. He was a strong and forceful personality vividly remembered decades after his death. He saw loyalty as obedience, and he had gained fatal confidence in his own judgment through decades of successful exploits and service.

Was his personality so strong, his convictions so deep, his wit so biting, that his junior officers were afraid to speak up? If true, this was his greatest failure as a commander. A true leader must have the confidence to create an atmosphere in which divergent views can be aired. Clearly that wasn’t the case on Glorious’s bridge, high atop that great gray cliff of steel. MHQ Wendell Jamieson, an award-winning reporter and editor, has worked for every major New York City newspaper, including, for 18 years, the New York Times.

He is the author of New York by New York (Assouline Publishing, 2018).

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PIECE DE RESISTANCE In World War II, John Steinbeck, the acclaimed novelist, turned his talents to a masterpiece of anti-Nazi propaganda.

By Timothy J. Boyce

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Residents of Copenhagen stop to stare at the Langebro bridge on March 27, 1945, after members of the Danish resistance group Borgerlige Partisaner (BOPA), seeking to disrupt operations of the Nazi occupation force, detonate more than 330 pounds of explosives on a railway wagon.

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In 1940, just days after the fall of France, Steinbeck met with FDR to offer his help.

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impetus Steinbeck needed: His time there thoroughly convinced him that the Nazis were winning the propaganda battle in Latin and South America. “The Germans have absolutely outclassed the Allies in propaganda,” Steinbeck wrote to his uncle. “If it continues, they will completely win Central and South America away from the United States.”

On June 24, 1940, just two days after the fall of France, Steinbeck, now back in the United States, wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, offering to meet with him: “If my observation[s] can be of any use to you, I shall be very glad to speak with you.” While Steinbeck and FDR had no previous personal relationship, Steinbeck’s fame (and the good opinion of Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor) led to a face-toface encounter just two days later, on June 26. There, Steinbeck suggested that the United States set up its own propaganda office, using print, radio, and film to counter the concerted efforts of the Nazis. Nothing came of the meeting—at least initially. But Steinbeck had planted a seed.

Meanwhile, Steinbeck continued to offer suggestions to anyone who would listen—and to some who would not.

Three months later, for example, Steinbeck again met with FDR; this time he suggested a plan to counterfeit German currency and flood occupied Europe with it.

Writing afterward to poet Archibald MacLeish, the Librarian of Congress, Steinbeck maintained that while the president liked the idea, “the money men”—U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. and Philip Henry Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian, Britain’s ambassador to the United States—didn’t. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Nazis, having the same thoughts, had developed their own sophisticated counterfeiting scheme. Operation Bernhard used prisoners housed, in the strictest secrecy, in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, 25 miles north of Berlin.

The following year, in August 1941, Steinbeck wrote to William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, whom FDR had just named to head the Office of Coordinator of Information (COI), the forerunner of the Office of Strategic Services and, in turn, the Central Intelligence Agency. In his letter, Steinbeck suggested “air-dropping tiny grenades over occupied countries so children could toss them from rooftops at German soldiers.” Donovan didn’t bother to reply, but Steinbeck wasn’t disabused of his idea.

In October 1941, whether because of his urgings the preceding year or because others convinced FDR that the United States needed an organized counterpropaganda campaign, Steinbeck was summoned to a meeting in Washington, D.C., with other writers under the auspices of the Foreign Information Service. The newly created operation, directed by Robert Sherwood, had been formed as a unit of the COI to generate pro-Allied and anti-German propa-

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hen World War II erupted in Europe on the morning of September 1, 1939, writer John Steinbeck was at the pinnacle of his creativity and his fame. His most recent work, The Grapes of Wrath, published just five months earlier, had taken the United States by storm. Despite its hefty 464-page length, an astonishing 200,000 copies were sold in its first two months alone. It would be the bestselling book of 1939 and remain popular well into 1940 and beyond. One critic called it “a phenomenon on the scale of a national event.” Steinbeck’s novel would go on to win both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. “Readers loved him,” writer and journalist John Hersey, one of Steinbeck’s contemporaries, said.

“Even people who really didn’t read books read Steinbeck.”

Movie rights went quickly, for $75,000—one of the largest sums ever paid for a novel. Steinbeck’s previous work, Of Mice and Men, had also been a bestseller on its release in 1937, selling more than 100,000 copies in its first month. The theatrical version was voted Best Play in 1938 by the New York Drama Critics Circle. A motion-picture version, which premiered in late 1939, boasted the first film score ever written by Aaron Copland and garnered four nominations for Academy Awards. The film version of The Grapes of Wrath, starring Henry Fon­da, was released just a month later; it won two Academy Awards while receiving seven nominations.

And Steinbeck’s fame was not solely confined to the United States. The Grapes of Wrath was a huge hit in England and was immediately translated into Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and other languages. In 1941 a Russian translation would receive a print run of 300,000 copies, the largest any American book had ever received. Translations of Steinbeck’s earlier works, including Tortilla Flat (1935) and Of Mice and Men (1937), had also appeared abroad.

Artistically and financially, 37-year-old John Steinbeck was riding high.

But like many other Americans, he watched with growing concern as German forces quickly overran Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France, and his thoughts turned from literary pursuits to the plight of occupied Europe.

What could a middle-aged man of letters do to help prepare his country for the war, or at least provide aid and comfort to the peoples of occupied Europe? A trip to Mexico in early 1940 to write a film script provided the

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From top: A Nazi flag hangs from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in June 1940; two Danish freedom fighters pose for a photograph in front of their command center on Købmagergade, a busy shopping street in the old town of Copenhagen, in 1945. ganda. Sherwood, a noted playwright as well as a speechwriter for President Roosevelt, was eager to enlist the help of America’s foremost journalists, novelists, and dramatists.

Steinbeck immediately joined the effort, though he apparently never formally accepted a position in the FIS. While writing overseas broadcasts, Steinbeck interviewed recently arrived refugees from occupied countries. From this experience an idea rapidly developed:

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I became fascinated with these [underground] organizations which refused to admit defeat even when the Germans patrolled their streets….Gradually I got to know a great deal about these secret [resistance] armies and I devoted most of my energies in their direction.

Then it became apparent that each separate people had to learn an identical lesson, each for itself and starting from scratch. I did not and do not believe people are very different in essentials. It seemed to me that if I could write the experiences of the occupied…such an account might even be a blueprint, setting forth what might be expected and what could be done.

Steinbeck got to work. As with Of Mice and Men, the manuscript was developed as both a short novel and a play. The setting in his initial draft was an unnamed town in the United States that had been invaded and occupied by a foreign power. Steinbeck’s superiors at the Foreign Information Service, however, had other ideas. Even tacitly admitting that the United States could be defeated and occupied, at a time when the German Wehrmacht seemed invincible, raised fears that such a story would have a “devastating effect on morale.” The draft was rejected, Steinbeck wrote, “with dizzying speed.”

At the urging of friends from various European resistance groups who were outraged by the decision, and aware that no one had yet written an account of the process of occupation and resistance, Steinbeck elected to universalize his locale. He would instead use an unnamed country he later described as “cold and stern like Norway, cunning and implacable like Denmark, reasonable like France.” Moreover, he said, “I did not even call the Germans Germans but simply invaders.” Notwithstanding Steinbeck’s diplomatic explanation, the setting looks most similar to Norway—and the Norwegians certainly believed it had been modeled on their country.

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“I don’t know whether it is any good or not,” Steinbeck confided to his lawyer.

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England, and delivers a message for the Allies: “If we could have simple, secret weapons, weapons of stealth, explosives, dynamite….We will know how to use them!” Sure enough, the town is soon blanketed with tiny packages floating from the sky, each suspended from a miniature parachute. The packages contain a piece of chocolate (to tempt children in the town to collect them) and a small stick of dynamite.

Mayhem ensues—the rail line carrying coal to the dock is damaged faster than it can be repaired. Lanser, at wit’s end, resorts to arresting Orden as a hostage to deter the sabotage. But as Orden explains, “I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to.”

In the final climactic scene, as Orden is led off to his execution, he explains to Lanser the fundamental difference between the occupier and the occupied, and in so doing, articulates Steinbeck’s rationale for why democratic nations will always triumph in the end: “The people don’t like to be conquered, sir, and so they will not be. Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars.”

By early 1942 the public got a double-barreled exposure to Steinbeck’s newest creation: The Moon Is Down was published on March 6, 1942, and the play version of the book opened in New York on April 8, 1942. Curiously, the two forms of the same story experienced rather different receptions. The play was savaged by the critics and closed after two months. The novel, on the other hand, was a popular success, though some detractors thought Steinbeck had gone soft on the Germans and presented an overly optimistic outcome for the war. The New York Times called it “the most memorable fiction to have come out of the war.”

The book soon topped the bestseller lists, selling an astounding 450,000 copies in its first four months, outpacing even The Grapes of Wrath.

Amazingly, given the headwinds the theatrical version experienced, Twentieth Century Fox soon bought the film rights for $300,000, a staggering sum at the time—indeed a new record, and twice the previous high-water mark (paid for Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls). Production began soon thereafter, and Steinbeck was pleased with the work. “It is a really beautiful job and there is a curious three-dimensional quality in it,” Steinbeck wrote. The film premiered in April 1943, with an all-star cast, including Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Colonel Lanser and Henry Travers as Mayor Orden. A minor character, Lieutenant Prackle, was played by John Banner, who would reprise his role as a German guard 22 years later as Sergeant Schultz in the television show Hogan’s Heroes.

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In a November 25, 1941, letter to his lawyer and friend, Toby Street, Steinbeck played down his approach and his expectations, saying that it was simply a story about a little town that had been invaded and how its residents—and even the invaders—would feel. “It has no generalities, no ideals, no speeches,” he wrote. “It’s one of the first sensible things to be written about these things and I don’t know whether it is any good or not.”

By December 7, 1941, the very day Japan’s surprise attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor precipitated the nation’s entry into the war, Steinbeck had completed the manuscript for the play. The novel version was finished shortly thereafter. For his title Steinbeck borrowed a line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Act II; Scene 1). Banquo, just before meeting Macbeth (who is on his way to murder Duncan), asks his son Fleance “How goes the night, boy?” Fleance replies: “The moon is down; I have not heard the clock.”

Perhaps Steinbeck felt the imagery of a moonless night reflected the darkness falling all across occupied Europe and the evil following in its train, as in Macbeth.

The action moves quickly in The Moon Is Down. It begins with a peaceful and peace-loving hamlet, home to an important coal mine, which is suddenly invaded with no warning and virtually no opposition. At first the inhabitants seem simple, almost buffoonish, in their early interactions with the invaders. The occupiers are after the coal; as long as they get it, all will be well. “This is more like a business venture than anything else,” explains Colonel Lanser, head of the occupying forces, to Orden, the mayor of the town. And while the colonel’s staff initially marvels at how “calm and obedient” the townspeople are, Lanser, a veteran of a prior war, doesn’t buy it. “There are no peaceful people,” he observes. “There are no friendly people.”

Lanser is soon proven right. A miner, chafing under orders to keep working, lashes out in a fit of anger and accidentally kills a soldier. By now, the townspeople have become “sullen,” and Orden refuses to collaborate and approve the resulting court-martial. Initially hesitant and confused, Orden now realizes that “this is war....You will have to kill all of us or we in time will kill all of you.” The miner’s death sentence ushers in an era of “dry, growing hatred.” Productivity at the mine languishes; no occupier can relax his watchfulness, let alone socialize with the townsfolk. The besiegers are now the besieged.

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From top: Danish saboteurs in Odense set a Nazi-controlled auto repair shop on fire in 1944; French resistance fighters derail a Nazi oil train as it passes through Faverney in 1944; a makeshift radio station operated by the Danish resistance broadcasts from the attic of a rectory in Myker, on the island of Bornholm, in 1945; Danish resistance fighters pose with an armored car in 1945.

TOP AND LOWER MIDDLE: NATIONALMUSEET, DENMARK (2); UPPER MIDDLE AND BOTTOM: KEYSTONE-FRANCE (GETTY IMAGES, 2)

While both the play and the novel had drawn criticism for portraying Nazi soldiers sympathetically, the film critics, echoing Steinbeck, celebrated the “three-dimensional quality” of the invaders, which stood out “in bold relief against the usual run of Nazi villain, Hollywood style.” No doubt the improved prospects of the war also tempered the public’s perceptions of the film. Gone were the darkest days of 1942, when hope hung by a thread. By now, Germany’s defeats at Stalingrad and El Alamein had destroyed the myth of German invincibility.

Of course, not everyone at home and abroad had as favorable an opinion of Steinbeck’s work. When the local draft board in Monterey, California, contemplated drafting Steinbeck in 1942, General Henry H. (Hap) Arnold, the commander of all Army Air Forces, requested a deferment on his behalf. Steinbeck, Arnold pointed out, had just completed a book on the training of bomber crews and was doing important work for the government. According to Toby Street, who attended the hearing, “The members of the draft board couldn’t figure how you who had always written trash could write anything that could be of any benefit to the Army.” Arnold’s request for a deferment was denied, but in the end Steinbeck was never drafted.

Whatever the mixed reception to Steinbeck’s work in the United States, his target audience was really overseas, and there both the play and the novel were smashing successes, the play opening to rave reviews in March 1943. In Stockholm demand was so great that performances had to be moved to a larger theater. According to Time magazine, Swedish critics praised Steinbeck for his “prophetic insight,” remarking that, with resistance activity increasing in neighboring Norway, his play was “truer today than when it was written.” Three months later the play opened at the Whitehall Theatre in Dundee, Scotland. Although Steinbeck was in London at the time, he did not attend the opening. But someone with direct, personal knowledge of resistance work did attend—none other than Haakon VII, the exiled king of Norway. He must have been impressed: After the war Steinbeck would be awarded the King Haakon VII Freedom Cross, given to heroes of the Norwegian resistance. (Writing to his Norwegian publisher in 1963, Steinbeck admitted that he had “never been one for medals or decorations....But there was one that meant very much to me—that was the Haakon VII cross.”) A theatrical adapta-

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STEINBECK’S WARTIME MASTERPIECE

When Steinbeck toured Europe after the war ended, he was given a hero’s welcome.

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translated and ran off five hundred copies on a mimeograph….Requests came in for it from all over.” Given Steinbeck’s previous reception in Russia, The Moon Is Down instantly found an eager audience when it was translated into Russian in 1943. In fact, it was the best-known work of U.S. literature in Russia during the war. Clearly, Steinbeck had succeeded in writing “the experiences of the occupied” to an uncanny degree.

Moreover, the eagerness with which formerly occupied countries rushed to publish “legal” versions of Steinbeck’s novel in the immediate postwar era attests to its important role during the long, hard months of occupation. There was a very practical reason for this phenomenon as well: Many of the underground copies had simply disintegrated from constant use. In Norway a corrected edition appeared in bookstores within weeks of V-E Day (May 8, 1945), and the two printings, of 10,000 copies each, quickly sold out— this at a time when the average print run in Norway was only 1,000 to 2,000 copies. Three months later the play version of The Moon Is Down was the season opener at Oslo’s National Theater. Steinbeck’s prewar publisher in Denmark, Gyldendal, chose The Moon Is Down as the appropriate book with which to resume regular publication in the newly liberated country. Similarly, a new edition appeared in France before the end of May 1945. Holland, too, saw a new edition of the book, together with a debut of the play version, immediately after the war. Italy saw three separate translations published in a single year, 1944–1945.

When Steinbeck toured Scandinavia in 1946 and France in 1947, he was given a hero’s welcome.

Notwithstanding his punishing workload as wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill (like Steinbeck, a future Nobel Prize laureate in literature) read the novel as soon as it was published and deemed it “a well-written story.” He was particularly intrigued by Steinbeck’s depiction of an armed citizenry, even if Wild Bill Donovan had been cool to the idea. On May 27, 1942, a little more than two months after The Moon first appeared in the United States, Churchill dashed off a memorandum to Lord William Selborne, his minister of economic warfare. In it he emphasized how the book stressed “quite rightly, providing conquered nations with simple weapons, such as sticks of dynamite, which could be easily concealed and are easy in operation.”

Selborne, in turn, in his capacity as head of the Special Operations Executive, ordered Operation Braddock, a plan to airdrop “attack packages” across occupied Europe to resistance fighters and others. Its goal: to create “confusion, fears, insecurity and demoralization” in enemy territory. Hundreds of thousands of the “attack packages,” containing incendiary devices, were dropped over Europe from September 1944 until the closing days of the war.

Steinbeck’s fanciful suggestion to Donovan back in 1941,

LEFT: LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION; RIGHT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS

tion even appeared in Zurich, where, according to professor Heinrich Straumann, it enjoyed “one of the greatest successes of the theaters of Switzerland during the war years.”

England, Sweden, and Switzerland were of course free to stage dramatic performances. The real test would occur in countries under the Nazi yoke. Steinbeck’s critics were doubtful. One even sniffed: “Whether in actual value the book will do more to inspire or to disarm the struggle against the Axis is still debatable….Its effects will probably be somewhere along the line from the useless to the downright dangerous. No book that bases its hopes for the conquered peoples on such physical weapons as dynamite and chocolate…is likely to help the war effort.”

But the critics were wrong; Steinbeck’s friends in the resistance, who were sure that his story would boost morale in their homelands, were right. Steinbeck scholar Donald V. Coers describes the book’s reception as “extraordinarily positive….It was easily the most popular work of propaganda in occupied Western Europe.” The great efforts the resistance communities devoted to translating, printing, and distributing Steinbeck’s book, all in secret and all at enormous personal risk, testify to the importance they attached to its message and to the impact it would have on their country’s morale.

The Moon Is Down appeared in numerous underground translations: French, Danish, Dutch, Italian, Russian, and of course, Norwegian. A German language version as well as a separate French translation appeared in Switzerland. Even the Chinese produced a translation. The Moon Is Down made its first overseas appearance in Norway. The Norwegian Legation in nearby Stockholm engaged a fellow exile to produce a version to be smuggled into the country. The first of the many thousands of copies eventually printed began to appear in Norway by late 1942. Shortly thereafter two law students produced a Danish translation that several underground presses picked up. The owner of a Copenhagen bookstore sold his life insurance to acquire a mimeograph machine with which he alone produced 15,000 copies. French translations appeared in Switzerland in 1943 and in France itself in 1944. A Dutch version also appeared in 1944. As in Denmark and France, revenue from sales of the illegal book helped finance the resistance.

In 1957, while visiting Florence, Steinbeck met a man who had been in the Italian resistance. The man related how “during the war he came on a little thin book printed on onion skin paper which so exactly described Italy that he

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John Steinbeck, photographed in 1937 for Life magazine as his novel Of Mice and Men hit the bestseller lists; a poster for the motion-picture version of The Moon Is Down, which premiered in 1943 with an all-star cast.

LEFT: LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION; RIGHT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS

which he had been sure to insert into his novel, turned out to be not so far-fetched after all.

After the war Steinbeck continued to write, but he never achieved the extraordinary successes he’d experienced at the beginning of his career. In 1962 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception.” At the time he was only the sixth American to be so honored. Two years later he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died in 1968 at age 66.

Steinbeck was always proud of the role his slim, hastily crafted volume had played during the war. Some 20 years after the first appearance of The Moon Is Down, Steinbeck received in the mail “a beat up, paper-covered mimeographed manuscript” of the Danish version from a leading writer in Denmark; the man had discovered it in his late father’s papers. Its arrival prompted Steinbeck to reflect on the “strange and dreamlike story” of the book: The little book was smuggled into occupied countries.

It was copied, mimeographed, printed on hand presses in cellars, and I have seen a copy laboriously hand written on scrap paper and tied together with twine.

The Germans did not consider it unrealistic optimism.

They made it a capital crime to possess it, and sadly to my knowledge this sentence was carried out a number of times. It seemed that the closer it got to action, the less romantic it seemed.

Since Steinbeck’s death in 1968, critics have continued to argue over the merits of his wartime novel as propaganda and as literature. But whether as propaganda or as literature, its intended effect during the war was undeniable.

Steinbeck’s novel, as Swiss scholar Straumann put it, was “the most powerful piece of propaganda ever written to help a small democratic country to resist totalitarian aggression and occupation.” But if Steinbeck’s work was propaganda and nothing more, its relevance would have ended with the war. “And yet,” as critic Roy Simmonds has observed, “of all the works of propagandist war fiction written during the years 1939–1945 it is one of the mere handful that have survived and are still being read and discussed.”

Perhaps Straumann and Simmonds are both onto something. At last count The Moon Is Down has appeared in at least 92 editions throughout the world, in at least 21 different languages, from Arabic to Hungarian to Urdu.

Steinbeck was right about one thing: He did not believe that “people are very different in essentials.” While visiting Norway in 1946 to receive the King Haakon VII medal, Steinbeck was repeatedly asked how, writing thousands of miles away from the action, he understood so completely what the resistance was doing. “I put myself in your place,” he replied, “and thought what I would do.” MHQ Timothy J. Boyce, a lawyer and writer who lives in Tryon, North Carolina, is the editor of From Day to Day: One Man’s Diary of Survival in Nazi Concentration Camps (Vanderbilt University Press, 2016).

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On his 59th birthday, November 11, 1944, Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr. photographed this German Jagdpanzer IV tank destroyer knocked out in France by his Third Army forces. That’s his shadow in the foreground.

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eneral George S. Patton Jr. (November 11, 1885— December 21, 1945), America’s best-known World War II battle commander, was famously nicknamed “Old Blood and Guts” for his aggressive and daring leadership style—an image deliberately cultivated through ostentatious uniforms and profanity-laced “motivational” speeches to his troops.

Patton led American soldiers to victory in campaigns from November 1942 to May 1945 in North Africa, Sicily, France, Belgium, and Germany. However, to gain some insight into how Patton himself viewed the war, the Library of Congress’s Patton Papers includes six boxes of photos and negatives that Patton personally took during the war and sent home to his wife, Beatrice. The 11 “coffee table-sized” photograph albums Beatrice created and donated to the library provide a fascinating snapshot of what caught Patton’s eye as images worthy of capturing in personal photographs. Here’s a look at how George Patton saw World War II.

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From top left: His riding pants still wet from wading through the surf at Gela, Sicily, in July 1943 during Operation Husky, Seventh Army commander Patton grasps his Leica camera and neck strap and assumes a “commanding” pose.

Binoculars, riding crop, and ivory-handled Colt add flair to what he considered his “best picture” in Sicily; writing in his diary that the November 11, 1942, capture of Casablanca was “a nice birthday present,” Patton snapped this photo of U.S. soldiers marching through the city during the Operation Torch invasion of North Africa; while serving as military governor in North Africa, Patton hunted wild boars, bagging “my biggest pig” and strapping it and two smaller ones to his half-track’s hood. He sent Beatrice the boars’ tusks. Opposite from top: Patton was fascinated by ancient ruins (particularly Greek and Roman sites in North Africa and Sicily), visiting and taking tourist-style photos as often as he could. This ancient Doric temple on a hilltop at Segesta on Sicily’s northwest coast is believed to be one built circa 420 BC by indigenous Elymians; “Another good Hun” is how Patton referred to this jackbooted German soldier’s corpse.

PHOTOGRAPHS: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, COURTESY KEVIN M. HYMEL (PATTON’S PHOTOGRAPHS: WAR AS HE SAW IT, 2006, POTOMAC BOOKS); THIS PAGE, FAR LEFT: PHOTOQUEST (GETTY IMAGES)

THROUGH PATTON’S EYES

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PHOTOGRAPHS: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, COURTESY KEVIN M. HYMEL (PATTON’S PHOTOGRAPHS: WAR AS HE SAW IT, 2006, POTOMAC BOOKS); THIS PAGE, FAR LEFT: PHOTOQUEST (GETTY IMAGES)

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From top: After crossing the Moselle River near Nancy, France, in mid-September 1944, Patton visited this division observation post. Patton witnessed a “lovely” tank battle, as two German tanks burned and four American tanks attacked into a wooded area. He claimed he could hear machine gun fire and wrote that he could tell the difference between U.S. and German machine guns— which is very believable given the German machine guns’ much more rapid rate of fire. “It was all very merry,” he wrote; captured German and Italian weapons and armored vehicles collected in Sicily await shipment to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where U.S. specialists will examine them. For this photo, Patton apparently used his Leica’s wide-angle lens attachment; in October 1944 in France, Patton holds his Leica in his left hand after photographing a U.S. flame-thrower tank. He hated his pose, claiming he looked like his sister, Nita. Opposite: During the September 1944 capture of Nancy, France, Patton observed his XII Corps pummeling the city with artillery fire and aerial bombing.

Pilots reported that this smoke column rose 4,000 feet; Patton marked some of his photographs to identify enemy positions or terrain features. These indicate German outposts at Nancy.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, VIA KEVIN M. HYMEL (5)

THROUGH PATTON’S EYES

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, VIA KEVIN M. HYMEL (5)

Patton marked photographs to identify enemy positions or terrain features. These indicate German outposts at Nancy.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, VIA KEVIN M. HYMEL (5)

THROUGH PATTON’S EYES

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, VIA KEVIN M. HYMEL (5)

Opposite from top: Third Army spearheads rolling into Germany in 1945 often came upon their tank gunners’ mouthwatering “target-rich” environments—roads packed with enemy vehicles. Patton called this sight a “tanker’s dream come true.”

Reportedly, targets were engaged at ranges as close as 10 feet; the main prize of the Soviet Battle of Berlin (April 20-May 2, 1945) was the German Reichstag building. Patton photographed its battered and burned façade in July 1945, its columns defaced by Russian soldiers’ graffiti. Most of the legible inscriptions read as soldiers’ names and hometowns—several translate to “Baku,” capital city of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. From top: Third Army’s combat engineers provided vital mobility—such as this pontoon footbridge—which propelled the army’s incredibly rapid gains; after being owned by a downed RAF pilot, the white bull terrier, Willie, was bought by Patton in 1944. When Patton visited Valhalla Memorial, a Neoclassical building containing a Hall of Fame for well-known “Germanics” above the Danube River at Donaustauf near Regensburg, Bavaria, Willie got a celebrity-worthy seat; mounting Patton’s three-star placard and claxon horns, his Third Army command jeep (bumper-marked “3A” and “HQ 1”) crosses the Moselle River in France in September 1944.

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WAR GAMES Marylander Charles S. Roberts (1930-2010) pursued his passion for the military to become “the father of board war gaming.”

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PERMISSION FROM BALTIMORE SUN MEDIA, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Charles S. Roberts never intentionally set out to invent a widely popular new pastime, but fate led him to it.

By Rick Britton

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PERMISSION FROM BALTIMORE SUN MEDIA, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

WAR GAMES

The future multimilliondollar war game industry was born as a parttime venture.

Charles Swann Roberts, “the father of board war-gaming,” was born in Baltimore on February 3, 1930, and grew up just outside the city in Catonsville. Two fascinations dominated his childhood. One was the military. He once recalled how he and his young friends created a war game that involved maneuvering pins and needles—the game’s units—across a fictional battlefield.

Railroading was his other obsession. Both his father and grandfather were veteran Baltimore & Ohio Railroad men, and a great-great-uncle, his namesake, had been the president of that line from 1848 to 1853. Naturally, Charlie caught “railroad fever,” but his father persuaded him to look elsewhere for a career. After graduating from Catonsville High School in 1947, Roberts worked for his local newspaper, the Herald-Argus, and as a copyboy for the Baltimore Sun. In 1948, when he turned 18, Roberts enlisted in the U.S. Army. On his discharge in 1952, Roberts was commis-

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sioned in a Maryland National Guard infantry regiment and, as he would later write, “applied for what was known as a Competitive Tour of Duty [in Korea], at the successful completion of which my reserve commission would be magically converted to a Regular one.” As he waited to hear about his application, Roberts took a stab at advertising, working at VanSant Dugsdale & Company, Baltimore’s largest ad agency, and at Emery Advertising Corporation, just north of the city in Hunt Valley.

Roberts was convinced, however, that his future was with the military. He hoped to serve in combat, and he wanted to learn everything he could about war—its theories, doctrines, and tenets. “The Principles of War [are] to a soldier what the Bible is to a clergyman,” he would later write. “The Bible, however, may be readily perused….Wars are somewhat harder to come by.”

In 1952 Roberts decided that while he was training with the National Guard, he would learn the nuances of war in a way that was “less noisy”—through a board game. No such game existed at the time, however, so he designed his own, one with which he could command armies and army groups, not just small platoons. It was the right move at the right time. In 1952, with the Korean War stalemated, the U.S. Army had mothballed its competitive tours program.

Roberts briefly considered U.S. Army Ranger School but feared its two weeks of jungle training. Then the U.S. Air Force turned him down because he failed its hearing test.

Roberts’s career in the military had hit a dead end.

The dream, however, lived on in Roberts’s Catonsville apartment. The result, in 1954, was Tactics, which today is widely considered the first commercial board game about war. “I found game design interesting, and I knew a thing or two about marketing,” Roberts would later tell an interviewer. “I didn’t start out to build a board game business.

Fate just led me to that point.”

Roberts named his new enterprise Avalon Game Company, after a historic neighborhood near his home. Over the next four years, doing business exclusively by mail order, Roberts sold about 2,000 copies of Tactics—a number, he later recalled, that “either netted or lost thirty dollars.” After getting home from his full-time day job in advertising, he would spend his evenings packaging and addressing his orders for shipment. The future multimillion-dollar war game industry was thus born as a part-time venture—“almost as a lark,” Roberts would later write.

Tactics came in a 14-by-22-inch black-and-red box. The cover copy, written by the young ad man, read, in part: “Tactics. The new, realistic land army war game! Designed and perfected by an infantry officer.…Actual principles of war apply….An excellent gift for the ‘Chess and Checkers’ type.”

LEFT: LOOK AND LEARN (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES); RIGHT: SOTHEBY’S

T

he young army commander quickly surveyed the enemy battle lines. Thus far his opponent, a much older general officer, had fought well. But as the youthful leader studied the enemy left, he concluded that his seasoned adversary had made a serious mistake. The opposing troops on that flank occupied a long ridge just a short distance away, across a beautiful orchard-speckled valley. It should have been a good position, but its left was vulnerable—“in the air,” as they used to say. He planned to hit that flank hard.

It was time for decisive action. With a flurry of hand movements, he ordered his men forward—across that vale, against that opposing ridgeline. As his units closed with the enemy, he heard the volley fire—a distinctive ripping sound—and saw the defending artillery’s bright muzzle flashes. He even thought he could smell the acrid smoke of black powder.

The battle would soon be over. With a couple of rolls of a die, cross-indexed with the odds on the combat results table, the young commander eliminated several enemy pieces, removing them from the map. At that point his opponent conceded, saying something about how he had failed not only his army but also President Abraham Lincoln. It was a tremendous victory—one he would always remember. He had won the Civil War’s most famous engagement, and he’d defeated his father, all thanks to his wonderful birthday present: the Gettysburg battle game created by Charles Roberts.

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LEFT: LOOK AND LEARN (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES); RIGHT: SOTHEBY’S

British officers in 1872 play Kriegsspiel, an umpired tactical war game invented by a Prussian guardsman in the early nineteenth century; with roots in seventh-century India, chess is one of history’s oldest battle simulations.

The game’s map, mounted on sturdy cardboard, unfolded to 22 by 28 inches, a nonstandard size that bewildered printers. On the game board, overprinted with a square grid, two hypothetical modern nations—“Blue” and “Red”—battled it out with army units portrayed by cardboard “counters,” the war-gaming term commonly used for playing pieces. These pieces represented regular infantry units, armored units, headquarters units, and specialized forces such as mountaineers, paratroops, and amphibious units.

Modern-day war gamers would recognize some of the game’s basic mechanics. Every combat unit had a movement factor and a combat factor. Movement across the grid was from square to square. Players resolved the game’s combat by using an odds-ratio combat results table. A unit with 4 combat factors attacking a unit with 2 combat factors, for example, would have a 2-to-1 attack ratio. Once players determined the odds for an attack, they rolled a six-sided die, and the result was cross-indexed on the table. Outcomes included retreats, advances, and such dire battlefield results as “defender eliminated” and “attacker eliminated.”

Tactics paved the way for an entirely new pastime, but the game’s map was still rather primitive. The mountains looked odd, and coastlines and rivers followed the grid’s square edges, making them look extremely unnatural. The rivers also had another problem: They ran “in the wrong direction,” as Roberts later admitted.

Tactics, of course, wasn’t the first war game. Chess—whose beginnings are unclear—is obviously a battle simulation, albeit an abstract one. Its earliest known predecessor appeared around the seventh century in India and traveled from there to Persia, the Muslim world, and eventually to southern Europe, where its current form was established in the 1600s.

Chess variants more akin to today’s war games started to appear in Europe in the late 18th century. One example was designed in 1780 by Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig, a Prussian mathematics professor, who published an updated edition in 1803. Called Versuch eines aufs Schachspiel gebaueten taktischen Spiels von zwey und mehreren Personen zu spielen (or “Attempt to build upon chess a tactical game which two or more persons might play”), it featured a map that measured 49 by 33 squares (compared to chess’s 8 by 8). Across the map’s varying terrain—squares that contained mountains, swamps, or watercourses—the players maneuvered infantry, cavalry, and artillery units, each of which had unique movement capabilities.

The similarities to chess made Hellwig’s variant attractive to chess players, but the map’s square grid made it unrealistic. Only one unit could occupy a square at a time, despite the area of that square, and—in a problem that later plagued Tactics—all the natural features were rigidly fitted to the rectilinear grid. That artificiality was especially noticeable in rivers that ran perfectly straight or turned at 90-degree angles.

This early war game interested the public, but not the military—until Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz, a skilled fencer, violinist, and, most importantly, a first lieutenant in the Prussian Guard Artillery Brigade created one of his own.

In 1824 Reisswitz presented the Prussian general staff with a highly realistic war-themed board game he’d created with his father. Designed as a military training tool, his Kriegsspiel (meaning literally “war game”) was played across a gridless, accurately illustrated terrain map with rectangular metal pieces that represented the various infantry regiments, cavalry squadrons, and artillery batteries. Prussian units were painted blue, enemy units red (an

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arbitrary choice that nonetheless established a military mapping convention wherein “friendlies” always appear in blue and “enemies” in red).

Without a grid to limit them, Reisswitz’s units could move freely on the board, subject to the varying natural features, of course, and tables in the rule book stating how far the foot soldiers, or horsemen, or cannons, could move in a turn. Based on information gathered during the Napoleonic Wars, these tables even accounted for whether a unit was marching, running, or—in the case of cavalry— galloping.

And Reisswitz’s war game was chock-full of other realistic touches: options for movements that are not visible to the enemy; rules that covered morale and unit exhaustion; playing pieces whose sizes were based on actual unit frontages; and combat resolution using dice (thus adding randomness to the simulation). Additionally, the Kriegsspiel units, unlike chess pieces, could suffer partial losses before being removed from play.

An umpire administered this battle simulation. After receiving written orders from the opposing players, the umpire moved the metal battalions according to ruled measurements, rolled the dice, determined the resultant casualties, and executed the combat results. The use of an umpire kept Kriegsspiel focused on training and decision-making instead of competition.

The Prussian generals were greatly impressed. “It’s not a game at all!” wrote General Karl Freiherr von Müffling, a military theorist, chief of the general staff, and Waterloo veteran. “It’s training for war. I shall recommend it enthusiastically to the whole army.” Reisswitz’s Kriegsspiel thus became the first board war game to be used for military training. It attracted very little attention outside Prussia until 1871, when the Prussian military soundly defeated French forces in the Franco-Prussian War. Prussia’s relatively easy victory was attributed by many to its reliance on war game training for its officer corps.

Soon, civilian war game clubs were established across Europe—Oxford University’s Kriegspiel [sic] Club was founded in 1873—and other militaries started taking a serious look at battle games. The U.S. Naval War College, for example, made war-gaming an official part of its training in 1894.

In 1958, four years after launching Tactics, Roberts determined to publish more games. “I [had] learned something about the marketing of games in this [first] reconnaissance-in-force,” he would later write, “and…decided to have a go on a larger and more serious scale.” But when he applied for a new business license, he found that another firm was using his original company’s name. Thinking of the ridge on which his house was situated, he added a

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word and rechristened his business The Avalon Hill Game Company.

Now Roberts went at it full-time. Continuing to operate out of his home, he hired a staff and put out three games of his own design in 1958: Tactics II, Gettysburg, and the railroad game Dispatcher.

Tactics II was a direct descendant of the 1954 title. The map was the same, as were the playing pieces, except that the new version featured circular headquarters units. The new, expanded rules challenged players. The rule booklet noted that while the mental problems posed by the game were not easy, “it is in the correct solutions to these problems…that the Avalon Hill player finds the ultimate in self-satisfaction.” The booklet also included a basic treatise on modern combat—unity of command, economy of force, the use of surprise, and so forth—and presented the different types of attacks: frontal, flanking, and envelopment. (Tactics II was so popular that it would be republished in 1961 and again in 1973.)

The Gettysburg title marked an important milestone in the history of board war-gaming. It was the first game in the genre based on an actual battle. Roberts chose the Battle of Gettysburg with the upcoming American Civil War Centennial in mind. Played on a map of the battlefield overprinted with a black grid of fairly large squares, Gettysburg unfolded much like existing games played with painted miniature soldiers. Surprisingly, the grid was used only for tracking hidden movement, not to regulate the normal movement of the game’s uniquely rectangular playing pieces. For normal movement, the players instead employed carboard “range cards.” The length of the range card was a counter’s maximum movement; the width was the greatest distance it could fire.

The Gettysburg combat results table was similar to that used in Tactics II, but attacking and defending were quite different. Gettysburg’s combat counters, representing infantry divisions, cavalry brigades, and artillery battalions, had an actual facing, or orientation; meaning that they had a front, two flanks, and a rear. An attacker could greatly increase the odds in his favor by assaulting the flanks and the rear.

Avalon Hill counted Gettysburg a success; it sold well.

But, as Roberts later recalled, because the game was released without being play-tested, the rules were vague and incomplete, so players were often on their own when it came to resolving some of the game’s conundrums.

Designing war games in the early years, Roberts admitted, was difficult. New wargame players with the “chessand-checkers mindset,” as he put it, were used to moving only one playing piece at a time. Now, however, his battle games were introducing a wholly new method of play: Players could move any or all of their pieces, and each

FROM TOP: ROLF NOHR AND RALF WEGEMANN, CC BY-SA 4.0; STIFTUNG PREUSSISCHE SCHLÖSSERUND GÄRTEN BERLIN-BRANDENBURG; MATTHEW KIRSCHENBAUM, CC BY-SA 4.0

WAR GAMES

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From top: This board game is a modern reconstruction

by Rolf Nohr of Prussian mathematics professor Johann Hellwig’s 1780 chess-like tactical game; the cabinet containing Prussia’s Kriegsspiel war game looks more like a piece of furniture than an officer training device; reconstruction of Reisswitz’s 1824 Kriegsspiel.

FROM TOP: ROLF NOHR AND RALF WEGEMANN, CC BY-SA 4.0; STIFTUNG PREUSSISCHE SCHLÖSSERUND GÄRTEN BERLIN-BRANDENBURG; MATTHEW KIRSCHENBAUM, CC BY-SA 4.0

piece wasn’t required to move its maximum movement allowance. Additionally, unlike chess and checkers, the results of an attack weren’t automatic; they were resolved with the roll of a die. Another difficulty was finding the historical data—orders of battle, unit sizes, times of arrival on the battlefield, and so on—essential for accurate design.

Roberts wanted to ensure that his players were not just enjoying the combat simulation but also learning about the events his games portrayed.

By 1959 Avalon Hill was doing so well that Roberts moved the operation into a commercial site in Baltimore.

That year U-Boat became the company’s first naval war game, the first copies of which featured metal miniatures— submarines and destroyers—instead of die-cut cardboard playing pieces. In the basic game for novice players, one U-boat and one destroyer attempted to sink one another while maneuvering across a square-gridded map. At a disadvantage, the Allied player was uncertain of the enemy sub’s position and depth. The advanced game pitted three U-boats against three destroyers. (The 1961 revision of U-Boat featured better rules covering torpedoes and depth charges. This improvement established what became a standard operating procedure at Avalon Hill: the continual revising and updating of well-selling games as the customer base grew and as those customers gained experience and demanded better and more accurate games.)

In 1959 the company also published Verdict, its first game designed by outsiders—in this case, corporate attorneys. Roberts was beginning to sense that his battle games could carry the company forward, but he wanted to hedge his bets by branching out. (Verdict was reprinted in 1961.)

The following year the business moved again, this time to downtown Baltimore. Roberts knew he needed to acquire new creative talent to expand Avalon Hill, so he lured Thomas N. Shaw, a high school friend, away from a local ad agency. In 1959 Shaw had successfully created and self-marketed two sports games: Baseball Strategy and Football Strategy. The company produced but one game in 1960, Management, a business strategy title designed by Roberts.

In 1961 Avalon Hill moved yet again, this time to an industrial park in Baltimore, and doubled the size of its product line by publishing seven new games. An important innovation first appeared in its 1961 lineup of warthemed board games: the use of a hexagonal grid. On a

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WAR GAMES

His battle games relied heavily on intellect, and were ‘games of almost pure skill.’

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With his business and marketing background, Roberts managed the business well, and it grew rapidly. The war games were the best sellers, but the company continued to publish what it called “civilian titles.” In 1961 these included Nieuchess by Roberts, “an abstract attempt to bridge the gap between chess and wargames,” a complete failure; Verdict II, created by Tom Shaw, another failure that was soon dropped from the product line; Air Empire, another Shaw creation—an “application of the Management game system to the transportation theme”—that netted lackluster sales; and LeMans, the company’s first sports game, designed by Rodney Mudge and Scott Wright, who had first manufactured it on their own in 1956. It was a good game but a slow seller. “Industry historians are always surprised,” Roberts noted, “when I point out that Avalon Hill published more civilian titles than wargames during its first five years.”

That trend held true in 1962, when three of the company’s five new products were non-military. The first two were Tom Shaw creations, Baseball Strategy and Football Strategy, which he’d originally sold in mailing tubes. Avalon Hill bought the rights, boxed them up, and had a readymade sports line. In JZ, “the TV ad man’s game,” up to six players competed for advertising accounts. Created by WJZ-TV in Baltimore as a promotional item, it’s considered one of the Holy Grails of Avalon Hill collecting.

The historical simulations released in 1962 were Waterloo, designed by Lindsley Schutz and Tom Shaw, and Bismarck, a team effort by Roberts, Schutz, and Shaw.

Waterloo, like Normandy, had a misleading title. Instead of focusing tactically just on the battle, the game—with its map portraying a large section of south-central Belgium— was actually strategic. It simulated Napoleon’s entire Waterloo Campaign.

The Avalon Hill product line had grown substantially, but sales were plummeting. Writing 20 years later, Roberts cited many reasons: the rise of discount retailers, “runaway” television advertising that smothered small businesses, and a “nasty recession” in 1960–1961 that plunged the company into the red. Additionally, he wrote, “too many low-selling civilian titles made our line imbalanced.”

Enormous amounts of time and corporate resources had been spent chasing one of Roberts’s elusive dreams. This potential product—a tactical war game he called Game/ Train—was first created as a 20-foot-long training aid for the U.S. Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Nonetheless, by the fall of 1962 Roberts believed that they’d turned the company around, though it was highly leveraged financially. Its new products in 1963 included a Schutz-and-Shaw creation, Stalingrad—another of the company’s classics that never sold well—and Word Power

by Tom Shaw. Unfortunately, 1963 also witnessed the re-

LEFT: GREENC, CC BY-SA 4.0; RIGHT: COURTESY OF THE STRONG, ROCHESTER, N.Y., USA

square grid, equidistant movement is available in only four directions: up, down, right, and left. Diagonal moves, to the contrary, are not equidistant: They allow a playing piece to move farther. On a hexagonal grid, however, movement to any of the six adjacent hexagons (or “hexes,” as gamers call them) is always equidistant. This simple and elegant change became very popular and has been a key aspect of war-themed board games ever since.

The company’s 1961 releases, all designed by Roberts, were Chancellorsville, D-Day, and Civil War. Chancellorsville, a recreation of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s greatest victory, featured a heavy game board, over 300 diecut counters, and a pamphlet on the May 1863 battle. But Chancellorsville didn’t sell well—perhaps because the map board was a pastel-colored graphics disaster—and was discontinued two years later.

D-Day simulated World War II’s Western Front between June and September of 1944, (not just, as the name implies, the June 6 Normandy landings, which are normally executed on the game’s first turn). Today it’s judged one of Avalon Hill’s “classic” war games—all of which employed relatively simple move-attack game mechanics.

Several unique aspects made D-Day memorable: The Allied player could choose to invade France at several other possible locations, including the southern coast. And the German player had flexibility in the placement of his forces, but of course he’d have no knowledge of his enemy’s intentions.

Rounding out the 1961 historical lineup was Civil War, a very abstract strategic-level board game using plastic pawns instead of die-cut cardboard counters.

The game was printed only once, evidently in low numbers, and was quickly discontinued. Its scarcity has made it a valuable find for collectors.

In 1961 the Baltimore Sun described Avalon Hill as “one of the leading game publishers in the nation.” Sales that year totaled nearly $1 million. What made the company’s games so popular? It was their basic design, Roberts told reporter Carroll E. Williams, along with the fact that—unlike other games that used dice—Avalon Hill’s battle games relied heavily on the participants’ intellect. They were “games of almost pure skill,” he said.

And the company’s distribution network had grown.

Avalon Hill’s games were being sold in leading department, toy, and bookstores all across the country. The nation’s largest mail-order houses, too, were advertising Avalon Hill games.

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LEFT: GREENC, CC BY-SA 4.0; RIGHT: COURTESY OF THE STRONG, ROCHESTER, N.Y., USA

Roberts’s 1950s home sat on a ridge in the Avalon neighborhood in Catonsville, Maryland, outside Baltimore. In 1958, he created The Avalon Hill Game Company, and Gettysburg, the first board war game based on a historical battle.

lease of a line of Shaw-designed games for preschoolers— Imagination; What Time Is It?; Doll House; and Trucks, Trains, Boats & Planes—that were all huge flops.

By the end of 1963, Roberts would later write, “we were in effect working for our creditors.” He planned to file for bankruptcy on December 13, but the company was saved from extinction at the eleventh hour by two of its creditors: Monarch Office Services, which printed Avalon Hill’s game components, and J. E. Smith & Company, which manufactured and printed the boxes and assembled the games.

Roberts had high praise for A. Eric Dott, Monarch’s president: Of all the creditors, only Dott had bothered to visit Avalon Hill’s offices.

Avalon Hill was now completely reorganized—expenses were cut to the bone, and the company moved yet again, to another Baltimore location. Only one employee was retained: Tom Shaw, who now became Avalon Hill’s marketing director. His new duties included making sure that the company’s battle games were historically accurate and, with the help of a panel of over 100 play testers, ironing out any bugs before the games were manufactured.

Roberts declined a position in the reorganized company.

In 1964 Avalon Hill settled into a schedule of publishing two new games a year. One of that year’s releases was a Roberts creation, developed with help from Schutz and Shaw. Played across a map depicting the North African coastline, Afrika Korps simulated the back-and-forth World War II contest that pitted German field marshal Erwin Rommel (“The Desert Fox”) against British general Bernard Law Montgomery.

Afrika Korps represented Roberts’s last association with the company he had founded and built from scratch.

Under Dott’s leadership Avalon Hill, in the manner of a huge battleship, began turning itself around. Its big suc-

cesses included Blitzkrieg (1965), Panzerblitz (1970), Richthofen’s War (1973), and Squad Leader (1977).

The rise of computer games in the 1980s, however, spelled doom for publishers of war-themed board games.

In 1998 Dott sold the company to industry giant Hasbro for $6 million. Avalon Hill is now a brand of Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary. Its 14-title product line includes Axis & Allies, Diplomacy—both conflict simulations—and Scooby-Doo: Betrayal at Mystery Mansion.

After his departure from the war games industry in 1964, Roberts spent a few years as a corporate executive and then became the head of a Baltimore publishing house that specialized in titles for the Catholic market. In 1973 he and his second wife, Joan Barnard Lynch, founded Barnard, Roberts & Company Inc., which published Catholic titles, even though Roberts was not Catholic or even particularly religious. Eventually, however, the company shifted its focus to railroad history. Roberts became a railroad historian, editing, writing, or coauthoring 30 books before he died in 2010.

It’s been almost 60 years since Charles Roberts published his last war game, Afrika Korps, but the industry still reveres him. In 1974 a group of enthusiasts established the Charles S. Roberts Awards to honor excellence in war-gaming. They had to twist Roberts’s arm to go along with the idea because, as he had always said, he’d never intended to found a company, an avocation, or an industry. “I would rather be known for something I had set out to do,” he said.

“This just happened.” MHQ Rick Britton, a historian and cartographer, lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. His own war game, Manassas: Sunday, July 21st 1861, was nominated for the Charles S. Roberts “Best Initial Release” award in 1981.

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BLOODY STALEMATE Despite suffering casualties in the millions, neither side in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War achieved much of lasting value.

By Chris McNab

Thick smoke from a burning Iranian oil refinery blackens the sky shortly after the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War in September 1980.

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The casualties from this war are estimated at anywhere Iran–Iraq War therefore between one The demands our attention, not and two million. least for its potential to hold

a unique position in the world’s military narrative. Some historians and strategists have defined the Iran–Iraq War as the last conventional war in history. That is a bold claim in an age that has been packed with conflict since 1988, so it deserves testing. But we can raise the possibility that the Iran–Iraq War is not only the last conventional war to date but could also be the last conventional war ever.

We should first establish our definition of conventional warfare. Typically, conventional warfare is fought between nation-states by conventional military means—that is, with small arms, artillery, armor, combat aircraft, and warships, and not by nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons.

The military effort is primarily directed at destroying the operational capability of the opposing army. Conventional warfare is usually compared to counterinsurgency, which, as well as being tactically dissimilar to open warfare, is typ-

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ically fought within state boundaries. In conventional warfare, states lock horns on the open, bloody battlefield.

The roots of the Iran–Iraq War were many and complex.

Geography was crucial. Iran is more than three times the size of Iraq, with excellent access to maritime trade. In addition to facing the Caspian Sea to the north, Iran has 1,250 miles of coastline bordering the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Oman, and the Persian Gulf—that most vital channel for Middle Eastern oil traffic. But Iraq is almost entirely landlocked, hemmed in by Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, countries that have not always been Iraq’s friends. Iraq’s vulnerability on its land borders was compounded by having only 25 miles of coastline bordering the Persian Gulf, from which the Shatt al-Arab waterway extends to form the southernmost border with Iran.

Because the economies of both countries depended heavily on oil production and export, control of the Shatt al-Arab, the location of numerous ports and oil facilities, was crucial to both countries, but especially to Iraq. The 1975 Algiers Agreement settled a long-standing dispute over the waterway, with an agreed border running down the center of the main channel, but it remained a potential flashpoint.

It was one among many. There were religious fault lines too. Iran’s population was 95 percent Shia. Iraq’s people were about 60 percent Shia and 30 percent Sunni, but the Sunnis formed the ruling class, and power was concentrated in the hands of the Baath Party. Sunni rule was therefore potentially fragile, not least because Iran regularly reached across the border to stir dissent between Sunni and Shia. Other metrics would have heightened Iraq’s sense of vulnerability in 1979. Iran’s population was 39 million; Iraq’s was 13.5 million. Iran produced 5.2 million barrels of oil per day, compared with Iraq’s 2.6 million. The shah of Iran—Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the monarch of Iran since 1941—had also built one of the most powerful militaries in the Middle East, with impressive purchases of advanced military technology from the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. The shah had a land army of 285,000 men, but with the potential for drawing more than five million men into armed service. Iran’s total defense budget for 1977 was nearly $8 billion; in the same year, Iraq’s was about $2 billion. Nevertheless, the Iraqi regime had invested heavily in military expansion, with an army of 200,000 but capable of more than doubling in strength through the recall of reservists, and respectable arsenals of armor, artillery, and aircraft, mainly sourced from the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and France.

In 1979 everything changed. On July 16 Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti became president of Iraq, although he had al-

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I

n the early 1980s, many Western engineering and building contractors working in Iraq witnessed from the leisurely space of their hotel balconies a spectacle they would never forget. At night, the entire horizon was suddenly scorched and illuminated, a migraine-like strobing produced by the unceasing flashes of artillery fire and explosions, accompanied by an ominous chest-bass rumble. This continued for hours. When morning came, a long, bedraggled line of civilian vehicles would snake back into town, coffins strapped to their roofs, the recent war-dead inside. The cycle was repeated night after night.

The contractors and other foreigners were shocked witnesses to the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), a conflict that despite its years of horror is strangely sidelined in modern Western military history. Sandwiched between the Vietnam War (1965–1975) and the Gulf War (1990–1991) and roughly coterminous with the Soviet–Afghan War (1979– 1989), the Iran–Iraq War has been largely overshadowed by conflicts that play more strongly in Western consciousness.

Yet the scale of the Iran–Iraq War was dizzying: eight years of World War II–style armor, artillery, and infantry battles accentuated by chemical weapons attacks, burning cities, and blazing oil tankers. The casualties from this war are estimated at anywhere between one million and two million.

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From top: Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein’s cult of personality is evident in 1984 Basra; Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, recreated Iran as a militant theocracy, the Islamic Republic; key terrain in the eight-year war included Khuzestan province and the city of Basra.

ready been its de facto ruler for some time. Saddam was paranoid, cunning, and cruel. His raison d’être was little more than long-term political survival, his power cemented by an all-seeing state surveillance system and regular, brutal culls of both friends and foes. By the time he assumed the presidency, however, an even greater change had occurred across the border in Iran. This was the year of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, a grassroots uprising that ejected the shah from his own country and brought to power the previously exiled Grand Ayatollah Khomeini. On April 1 Khomeini declared Iran an Islamic republic.

The transformation from authoritarian monarchy to militant theocracy was not just a domestic matter for Iran.

Khomeini envisaged the Islamic revolution as a globally exportable phenomenon, starting with Iraq. An Iranian-sponsored campaign of political terrorism claimed or threatened the lives of many Iraqi officials. Then, on September 17, 1980, Iran abrogated the Algiers Agreement, threatening Iraq with loss of control of its key access route to the Persian Gulf through the Shatt al-Arab waterway. Despite the confident Iranian foreign policy, however, the revolution also provided Saddam with a window of opportunity. Revolutionary disruptions to the economy sent Iran’s oil revenues

plunging, the fall compounded by the flight of thousands of skilled foreign contractors. Further, Khomeini initiated a purge of the ranks of the country’s armed forces, executing or firing hundreds of senior officers tainted by their historical associations with the shah. The army rapidly dropped to 155,000 men. For Saddam, the message was clear: if he was going to go to war with Iran, now was the time to strike, before Iran’s economy and army could get up off their knees.

On September 22, 1980, Saddam pulled the trigger in what he hoped would be a short but decisive invasion of Iraq. The assault, spread across a 40-mile front, had a critical concentration in the south against the oil-rich Iranian province of Khuzestan, over which Iraq had long extended claim. The objective was to capture Khuzestan, isolate it from the rest of the country, and simultaneously secure the Shatt al-Arab. Saddam wanted to avoid a deep and logistically challenging invasion into the heart of Iran (Tehran, the Iranian capital, was nearly 500 miles from the Iraqi border), instead initiating a cross-border campaign that would quickly stop and establish a defensive line, compelling negotiations and Iranian capitulation. Thus Saddam committed only seven of his 12 available divisions, five of the seven in Khuzestan.

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This was an infantry conflict, defined by masses of human beings on the battlefield.

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patchy, with many soldiers going into action with little more than two weeks of basic infantry instruction, but the Pasdaran in many ways became the principal instrument of Iranian warfighting, with the regular army often alienated in secondary status. In addition to the Pasdaran, however, were the Basij, by far the most disturbing element of the Iranian military. The Basij were mostly poor, uneducated, and fanatical (at least in theory) volunteers. At first it was made up mostly of 18-to-30-year-olds, but the entry requirements were later loosened to scoop up legions of children, some as young as 12, as well as old men. To the outside world, the Basij were the very definition of cannon fodder, given almost no training and armed mainly with their conviction of a fast pass to heaven, indicated by their red bandanas displaying Quranic verses. Some 155,000 Basij would die in the war, with acceptable practices including the herding of mostly unarmed children through minefields to clear the way. Some Iraqi soldiers remember the sight of Iranian children riding against their lines on bicycles, the Iraqis laughing and withholding their fire until the children suddenly started throwing grenades, after which they were pounded to destruction by small-arms fire and artillery—a searing memory for the defenders.

Although armor, artillery, and aircraft—especially artillery—would be heavily applied in the Iran–Iraq War, this was pervasively an infantry conflict, one defined by masses of human beings on the battlefield. Nor was there much sophistication in command and control. Both armies were heavily politicized, centralized, and riven by interservice dissension. Frontline initiative among officers was either suppressed or absent, with command decisions jealously guarded by the regime’s political masters. The reality check of combat, with its heaps of dead soldiers, did go some way toward correcting gross inefficiencies. By 1985, for example, Iran’s overreliance on the Pasdaran and Basij for crude frontal assaults eventually gave way to greater combined-arms cooperation between the army and the paramilitaries, while in 1986 Saddam was compelled to give army commanders more direct tactical control as the demoralized army teetered on the edge of mutiny.

In January 1981, following the Iraqi invasion, Iran attempted to dislodge its opponents with three armored brigades, pro-

From Top: Iraqi soldiers patrol past damaged and abandoned ships in the Iranian port city of Khorramshahr in November 1980; Saddam’s tank and infantry forces move past Basra toward the besieged Iranian city of Ahvaz; motorcycle-mounted Iranian Revolutionary Guards armed with rocket-propelled grenades cheer enthusiastically before seeking Iraqi tanks; Iranian schoolgirls in Tehran, armed with AK-47s, are mobilized to fight as volunteer forces.

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The invasion indeed caught the Iranians unprepared (most of their major forces were deployed in Iran’s interior) and inflicted heavy casualties, but Iraq also lost 7,000 men, many of them in a close-quarters street battle to clear the city of Khorramshahr of fiercely determined Iranian paramilitaries. Abadan—the site of one of the world’s biggest oil refineries—was besieged, but not taken. Despite imperfect results, on December 7 Saddam announced that his forces would advance no farther and would hold the defensive line they had set in western Iran, pending negotiations.

Yet the invasion electrified the Iranian regime and population, resulting in a massive mobilization of forces, much of the new manpower coming from enthusiastic volunteers committed to the new jihad (holy war).

Contrary to Saddam’s intentions, what followed the invasion was essentially more than seven years of old-school attritional warfare. This outcome had much to do with the internally divided structure of the armed forces on both sides. Iran and Iraq both had large conventional armed forces, but their political masters regarded them with suspicion. Armies and their commanders were, after all, the traditional wellspring of sudden and violent coups in the Middle East and were tainted by their connections to legacy regimes. To offset this potential threat, revolutionary Iran and Baathist Iraq created ideologically or politically “pure” sub-armies. These formations were loyal, above all, to the regime and not to the wider military. Iraq had the Republican Guard, formed in 1963 as a small Baath Party bodyguard force, but by 1988 it was some 103,000 strong, with loyalty cemented by highly preferential training, equipment, pay, and conditions of service. Saddam could also draw on extensive paramilitary forces, chiefly the Iraqi Popular Army (a politicized civilian volunteer force) and the Kurdish National Defense Battalions. These bodies were capable of little more than light infantry skirmishing, and the defense battalions, with high desertion rates, were highly unreliable, yet they added another half million men to Saddam’s armed capability outside the regular army.

The Iranian regime was even more suspicious of its conventional forces. Its revolutionary equivalent of the Republican Guard was the Pasdaran, established on May 5, 1979.

Known officially from 1981 as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the soldiers in the Pasdaran were fanatically committed to the Islamic regime. The Pasdaran’s growth was astonishing: In June 1981 it numbered 25,000 men; by 1987 it was half a million strong. Training was poor and

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Iran moved away from the human wave in favor of more orthodox military tactics.

The year 1985 was a turning point. By now, Iraq had built up its strategic strength, mainly as the beneficiary of massive economic and military support from an international

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community fearful that the Islamic Revolution would spread. Advanced weaponry flooded in from the Soviet Union, France, Egypt, and other countries, while the United States gave financial credits for major infrastructure projects. Iran, meanwhile, was beginning to struggle, economically and operationally, as it became a pariah state.

It therefore turned to a scattered range of military suppliers, including North Korea, Libya, China, South Africa, Pakistan, and even Israel. But while Iran thus solved its supply problems in terms of volume, the sheer diversity of equipment types became a nightmare for stock control, maintenance, and training, and many of the systems went unused or underused.

Nevertheless, the Khomeini regime finally realized that it could not win the war simply by feeding men into the voracious mouths of Iraqi guns. From 1985 on, Iran moved away from the human wave in favor of more orthodox military tactics, boosted by greater interservice cooperation and improved warfighting training for the Pasdaran. In 1986 the new approach brought game-changing dividends when, on February 9, Iran launched Operation Dawn 8 with 100,000 troops. It consisted of a diversionary attack against Basra, Iraq’s second largest city, but the main thrust fell in the far south on the al-Faw peninsula, which was overrun and captured by the ecstatic victors. Three Iraqi counterattacks could not dislodge the Iranians, and on March 10 the Iraqis gave up trying to do so, the battle for the peninsula having cost 10,000 Iraqi and 30,000 Iranian dead.

The capture of the al-Faw peninsula spurred Saddam to refocus more of its efforts into strategic actions against the Iranian economy. Since 1984, Iraqi aircraft had been attacking Iranian merchant ships and oil tankers passing through the Persian Gulf, and this so-called tanker war soon intensified, leaving many of the ships listing and blazing in the blue waters of the Gulf. Saddam also launched the so-called War of the Cities, an air and missile artillery assault on major Iranian urban centers, including the capital city of Tehran. In addition, Western intervention in the conflict now went up a gear, triggered by Iran attacking international ships bound for Iraq, including vessels from Kuwait. The United States launched Operation Earnest Will, shielding Kuwaiti shipping with protective escorts and raising the possibility that Iran might inadvertently clash with a superpower adversary. Such a conflict became a reality when President Ronald Reagan authorized the U.S. Navy to retaliate after the USS Samuel B. Roberts, a guided missile frigate, was holed by an Iranian mine on April 14, 1988. Six Iranian vessels, including two frigates, were sunk; two F-4 jets were shot down; and two oil-drilling platforms were assaulted by U.S. Marines. Further, in July 1987 the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 598, calling for a ceasefire. Saddam deeply desired

LEFT: JACQUES PAVLOVSKY/SYGMA (GETTY IMAGES, 2); RIGHT: KAVEH KAZEMI (GETTY)

ducing the biggest tank battle of the war. (Some 300 tanks were destroyed in the engagement.) But from then until 1985, Iran concentrated on repeated frontal assaults. These were vast, bludgeoning efforts reminiscent of the Western Front in World War I and included “human wave” attacks that attempted to overwhelm Iraqi guns with sheer volume of moving manpower. There was, however, some element of tactical thought here. Typically, the Iraqi army would launch an attack with armor, artillery, and air strikes, the Pasdaran following in a surging swarm, often using rapid guerrilla-style infiltration tactics to disorient and terrify the defenders at multiple locations. These were big actions.

Operation Undeniable Victory on March 22, 1982, for example, saw 100,000 Iranian troops attack in the Dezful-Shush area, while Operations Dawn 5 and Dawn 6 in February 1984 used 500,000 men across 150 miles of front.

Iran’s overarching objectives were to push the Iraqis out of Iran and then maintain the momentum into Iraq itself, occupying its vital commercial and oil-producing centers and overthrowing Saddam’s regime. Despite horrific casualty numbers, the Iranians succeeded in driving the punchdrunk Iraqi forces from Khuzestan and from Iran altogether by May 1982, but the forward movement was eventually arrested at an immensely strong defensive line established on the Iraqi border, defended by 20 Iraqi divisions. For the next three years, Iran threw hundreds of thousands of soldiers, many of whom were little more than civilians repurposed by uniforms against these positions without significant result, other than to scatter the arid landscape liberally with corpses. Notably, the Iraqi defense now included the tactical deployment of chemical weapons, at first mustard gas but escalating to appalling nerve agents such as Tabun, VX, and Sarin. These were used against not only Iranian soldiers but also Iraq’s own people in a vicious terror campaign that sought to crush all semblances of resistance within the Kurdish population. On March 16, 1988, in the most grotesque such incident, 5,000 civilians died and up to 10,000 more were seriously injured by a combined mustard gas and nerve agent attack on the town of Halabja, the agents dispersed indiscriminately over the town via bombs dropped from Iraqi MiGs and Mirages.

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LEFT: JACQUES PAVLOVSKY/SYGMA (GETTY IMAGES, 2); RIGHT: KAVEH KAZEMI (GETTY)

From top: Iraqi soldiers are trucked past the body of an Iranian fighter near Basra in 1985; grim-faced Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen in red headbands listen to speeches in Tehran’s Imam Hussein Square; two Iranian soldiers lie dead in foxholes at Al Beida, Iraq, after an Iraqi counterattack in 1984.

a ceasefire, and now he had international backing for one.

By 1987, though Iran was still strong militarily, popular support for the war was waning. Khomeini decided on a last throw of the dice. He issued a fatwa (an Islamic legal pronouncement) commanding his forces to win the war by March 21, 1987, the Iranian New Year. Thus began yet another round of blunt offensives, part of the “Karbala” campaign, with an especially vigorous attempt to break through and capture Basra. The offensives bled out in the sand, by which time Iran was teetering on the brink of economic and social collapse.

Nearly eight years after its initial invasion of Iran, Iraq now returned to the offensive. In total, Saddam’s forces launched five offensives from April through June of 1988, recapturing the al-Faw peninsula, pushing Iranian forces back over the border, and driving into Iran itself once again. Khomeini’s regime was facing catastrophic defeat.

The survival instinct kicked in. Khomeini accepted U.N. Resolution 598, and Iraqi forces withdrew to the border to

facilitate the discussions. Silence now reigned over battlefields soaked with the blood of hundreds of thousands of men, the human cost being paid despite almost no change in the prewar borders of the two countries.

Elements of the Iran–Iraq War defy the “conventional war” classification. Chemical weapons were used extensively, not just conventional arms. The war also included insurgency campaigns: Iran and Iraq both fought Kurdish separatist groups in their northern territories, and Iran faced a further campaign of sabotage and assassination by the leftwing People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran, or the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, which was only quashed in the late 1980s.

But the insurgencies were incidental to the main war.

With only a slight adaptation of definitions, the Iran– Iraq War arguably stands as the last conflict in which conventional mass was central to the outcome of both the battles and the war. It was a conflict of tactical volume— huge numbers of troops and equally large concentrations

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In 1987, Saddam built a Martyr’s Memorial (Al Shaheed Monument) in Baghdad to honor the Iraqi dead of the Iran-Iraq War, which ended a year later. of artillery firepower deployed across broad fronts. The employment of mass was in many ways a byproduct of the overly centralized command-and-control arrangements, which resisted operational complexity, and also the largescale conscription and volunteerism that expanded the armies. Although both sides fielded some truly professional units, the majority of troops were lightly or poorly trained and erratically equipped. The armed forces also mirrored wider societal problems. Iran’s army, for example, reflected the country’s 60 percent illiteracy rate.

The argument that the Iraq–Iran War is the last conventional war is open to challenge. It could be argued instead that the title might be better given to the 1990–1991 Gulf War. As Saddam’s ruthless solution to resolving his war debt, Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait led to Iraqi forces being violently ejected from Kuwait and beaten heavily in land combat in Iraq by a vast U.S.-led coalition, the war including several major armor battles and some infantry engagements. Yet while much of the Gulf War was certainly conventional, it can’t really be compared with the Iran–Iraq War, primarily because the coalition force totally dominated the Iraqis in the technological domain. Operation Desert Storm signaled the moment when traditional conventional warfare, centered on mass of people and firepower, met the future, focused more on digital warfare, remote surveillance, and precision killing. Thus, in this one-sided conflict the coalition lost just 292 killed and about 500 wounded versus estimated Iraqi casualties of up to 50,000 killed, 75,000 wounded, and 80,000 captured.

In 1990, in the lead-up to the Gulf War, Stephen C. Pelletiere and Douglas V. Johnson wrote Lessons Learned:

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Iran-Iraq War for the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College. Based on takeaways from the Iran– Iraq War, they recommended three key strategies to defeat Saddam: to eliminate Iraq’s missile force and prevent Saddam from escalating the war to Israel; to secure air supremacy; and to negate Iraq’s artillery capabilities by destroying Iraq’s fire support system. In all these measures, the priority was to blunt or erase Iraq’s very capability to wage conventional war, which was largely all it knew. The coalition also stripped Iraq of its command-and-control network, and its decapitation rendered the Iraqi forces blind and wandering, barely able to respond coherently.

The two major international conflicts that followed the 1990–1991 Gulf War—Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001 and 2003, respectively—were certainly bloody and prolonged conflicts, but were primarily massive counterinsurgency operations. Thus the idea of two mass armies slugging it out with artillery, bombs, missiles, and small arms still felt like a receding memory of a bygone age. Then, shockingly, on February 24, 2022, Russia launched a mass invasion of Ukraine, pouring 190,000 troops and thousands of armored vehicles and artillery pieces over the border. In this action, we have witnessed the return of conventional warfare. The war has, on many levels, been reminiscent of the great battles of World War II: entire cities demolished by artillery and missile strikes; prolonged offensive and defensive infantry battles; major armor and antiarmor actions, including tank vs. tank engagements; levels of military casualties not witnessed since the Iran–Iraq War. The war in Ukraine differs from the Iran–Iraq War in many ways, not least technological—examples from Ukraine include the extensive use of combat and surveillance drones, the key influence of sophisticated guided antiarmor and surface-to-air missiles, and the use (or misuse) of digital communications. But the Russian invasion is a startling reminder that conventional interstate warfare has perhaps been waiting in the wings, hiding behind our beliefs in cooperative internationalism and the new ways of “hybrid” warfare. Conflicts such as the Iran–Iraq War, therefore, suddenly have much to teach us about issues such as open-terrain tactics, the use of artillery against defensive positions, combat logistics, and strategic endurance. International involvement and the provision of advanced weapon systems had a major influence on the outcome of the Iran–Iraq War, as it may well do in Ukraine.

The Iran–Iraq War, however, was primarily fought between just two adjacent nations. Only time will tell whether the Russo–Ukrainian War remains similarly contained. MHQ Chris McNab is a military historian based in the United Kingdom. His most recent book is Armies of the Iran–Iraq War: 1980–88 (Osprey, 2022).

FRANCOIS LOCHON/GAMMA-RAPHO (GETTY IMAGES)

BLOODY STALEMATE

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CULTURE OF WAR WAR STORIES 82

GIFT OF BENJAMIN AND MIRIAM RUDOLPH, MUSEUM OF JEWISH HERITAGE, NEW YORK CITY

POETRY 86 ARTISTS 88 BIG SHOTS 91 REVIEWS 92

When Polish-Jewish artist Arthur Szyk’s political cartoon replacing Lady Liberty with Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler surrounded by his thuggish henchmen and sympathizers appeared in the November 1941 issue of American Mercury magazine, the United States had not yet entered World War II. But, titling the cartoon “A Madman’s Dream,” Szyk wanted to make sure Americans knew what Hitler had in store for them if Nazi Germany won the war. Szyk’s satirical cartoon is one of more than 750 original items and survivor testimonies in the Museum of Jewish Heritage— A Living Memorial to the Holocaust’s new core exhibit, The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do, open on July 1, 2022.

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WAR STORIES

SURGEON WITH A CAUSE

A brush with death radicalized Norman Bethune. A self-proclaimed socialist, he traveled to France and China in the 1930s to fight fascism.

By Peter Snow and Ann MacMillan

From his earliest years, Bethune had thrived on taking chances.

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After the war Bethune completed his medical studies and headed to London. He worked at the Hospital for Sick Children on Great Ormond Street and became fascinated by surgery. In 1923 he married a Scottish heiress, Frances Campbell Penney, whom he later divorced, remarried, and again divorced—all within 10 years.

At this stage of his life, Bethune was a handsome man who enjoyed life to the full. Women loved him. One friend described the dashing doctor as “the most aggressively male creature I ever encountered.”

In 1926, after he’d returned to Canada, Bethune contracted tuberculosis and went to an expensive sanatorium in New York for treatment. He had fun there at first, sneaking out at night and drinking bootleg whiskey in a nearby town. But as months passed and his disease got worse, Bethune came to fear that he was dying. He thought of suicide and painted a mural that included his gravestone. Fortunately, the sanatorium had a good library, and he came across an article in a medical journal that gave him hope. It described a procedure in which a needle was used to collapse a diseased lung to let it heal. Bethune rushed to his doctor, gave him detailed instructions about how to perform the procedure, and demanded to go straight to the operating room. The operation was so successful that when the surgeon checked on Bethune hours after collapsing his lung, he found him standing on a chair finishing his mural.

Bethune later wrote that his year in the sanatorium had given him time to think and deepened his intellectual and spiritual life. Being treated at one of the most expensive sanatoriums in North America had also awakened Bethune’s social conscience. “There are two kinds of tuberculosis—the rich man’s and the poor man’s,” he wrote. “The rich man lives and the poor man dies.”

Bethune told friends that he was determined to do something great for humanity before he died. Finding a cure for tuberculosis was at the top of his list. He took up thoracic surgery in Montreal, but condemned other surgeons’ old-fashioned ways, shouted at nurses, and complained about equipment. One doctor remembered seeing a trail of surgical knives that Bethune had discarded along a hospital hallway because they weren’t sharp enough. He was unpopular with his colleagues, but his perfectionism brought huge benefits to his profession. He invented new

FROM TOP: LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA; IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS

I

n November 1936 two men from Canada drove through France’s Rhone Valley on their way to the Spanish Civil War. A handwritten sign on the side of their battered Ford station wagon made it clear that the Canadians, like the majority of foreign volunteers, were on the side of Spain’s recently elected Republican government.

French sympathizers raised clenched fists in support as the station wagon passed by. But one of the men, Norman Bethune, a physician from Montreal, barely noticed. He spent much of the journey immersed in a book about blood transfusions.

Four months before Bethune arrived in the capital city of Madrid, General Francisco Franco had declared war on the new government. Franco’s Nationalist forces had the support of wealthy landowners, big business, leaders of the Catholic Church, and the Falange, Spain’s Fascist party.

Fascist leaders elsewhere in Europe also rushed to Franco’s aid: Germany’s Adolf Hitler provided 100 warplanes and 16,000 soldiers; Italy’s Benito Mussolini sent 50,000 troops.

The Spanish government, on the other hand, was backed by workers, liberal writers, and artists and left-wing political parties, along with some 40,000 volunteers from more than 60 countries.

From his earliest years, Bethune had thrived on taking chances. In 1896, when he was just six years old, he disappeared from his Toronto home one morning only to return hours later to announce that he had walked across the entire city (more than nine miles). His father, a Presbyterian minister, was not amused. Bethune loved being outdoors and tackling new challenges. He dropped out of university for a year to work at a logging camp in northern Ontario. After chopping down trees all day, he spent the evening teaching lumberjacks how to read and write. Later, his medical studies were interrupted by World War I. Serving as a stretcher-bearer at the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium gave him firsthand knowledge of how quickly the wounded died from lack of blood.

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banned organization. He passionately campaigned for free health care, urging the Canadian government to adopt a national health system, but his plans were rejected. So when the Spanish Civil War broke out, Bethune could hardly wait to leave Montreal and rush to the aid of his Spanish comrades. He looked on fascism as a disease, an insanity that threatened civilized society. “It is in Spain the real issues of our time are going to be fought out,” he wrote. “It is there that democracy will either die or survive.”

On reaching Madrid in November 1936, Bethune wrote to a friend: “The world war has started—democracy against fascism. I wouldn’t be anywhere else.” But Madrid was a city under siege. Franco’s troops surrounded most of the Spanish capital, and Bethune wrote that Fascist bombs fell like “great black pears leaving bodies where once there were women and children.”

From top: While in China, Bethune grew a Lenin-style goatee and enjoyed being told that he resembled the leader of the Russian Revolution; Bethune and an assistant pose in front of their mobile blood transfusion unit in Spain. surgical instruments that transformed cardiothoracic surgery, including the Bethune Rib Shears (with “long handles, powerful biting jaws, suitable for all ribs,” a catalog said)—that are still in use today.

Outside the hospital Bethune hung out with artists, painted, and wrote poems, plays, and short stories. Though a self-proclaimed socialist, he was a vain man and enjoyed life’s luxuries, splashing his face with the most expensive colognes and dressing elegantly. In 1935 he traveled to Russia, where he was hugely impressed by its free hospitals, and on his return he joined the Communist Party of Canada, a

The first blood transfusions in history took place in France in 1667, when King Louis XIV’s doctor gave animal blood to humans—with disastrous results. Transfusions then fell out of fashion until the 19th century, when the invention of rubber tubing allowed blood to be transferred from donor to recipient. In most cases, however, the donor had to lie on a bed next to the person who needed the blood.

Nearly as soon as he set up Servicio Canadiense de Transfusion de Sangre, Bethune began advancing the science of blood transfusion. Once blood was collected, he and his workers put it into a bottle and stored it in a refrigerator. Crucially, they added sodium citrate to the blood to stop it from clotting. When Bethune appealed for blood donors on radio and in newspapers, so many Republican patriots queued up that on some days it was not possible to take blood from everyone in line.

In February 1937 Bethune took his transfusion unit to the front lines. He and his mobile transfusion team covered a huge area with more than 100 hospitals and first-aid stations. As soon as a call for blood came, the refrigerator would be loaded, and Bethune and his driver would be off.

He later spoke of seeing wounded soldiers lying whitefaced and motionless in their hospital beds and described how he watched their skin turn pink and their eyes sparkle as the bottled blood brought them back to life.

It was dangerous work. He and his team were once forced to jump out of their truck when it came under fire from Franco’s soldiers. Another time, as Bethune was taking his mobile blood unit to southern Spain, he witnessed a scene that would haunt him for the rest of his life: When the little sea port of Almeria was completely filled with refugees, we were heavily bombed by German and Italian Fascist airplanes….They deliberately dropped ten great bombs in the very centre of

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After seven months Bethune had a falling out with Spanish authorities who wanted to take over his transfusion service. He decided to return to Canada, leaving behind a fully functioning mobile blood service. It has been estimated that the number of people who died from their wounds dropped by 30 percent thanks to Bethune’s pioneering work.

Mao Zedong greeted his guests with a smile and embraced Bethune.

Bethune was on a crosscountry tour of Canada, raising money for the Spanish Republican cause, when on July 7, 1937, Japan launched a full-scale attack on China.

China was already in turmoil, with the Nationalists under General Chiang Kaishek trying to destroy the Communist forces led by Mao Zedong.

As Bethune saw it, the Chinese were involved in the same struggle as the Republicans in Spain—a fight against fascism—only on a much greater scale. He resolved to help Mao. In January 1938 he left Vancouver on a ship headed for Hong Kong, accompanied by two other Canadians: Charles Parsons, an experienced doctor, and Jean Ewen, a

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nurse. Ewen was fluent in Chinese. When they arrived in Hong Kong, however, it became apparent that Parsons, an alcoholic, had spent most of their expense money buying drinks on board the ship. There was nothing left to pay for hotel rooms. Bethune hit the roof. “I have not seen such a temper before, except in my father,” Ewen wrote. “He stomped and kicked everything in sight except Parsons.”

Parsons was left behind as Bethune and Ewen made the dangerous journey by foot and train to join Mao’s Red Army. It took them six weeks to travel some 800 miles to Mao’s headquarters in Yan’an. Along the way Bethune treated wounded soldiers and civilians. Ewen helped him remove bullets from arms and legs, set broken bones, and amputate infected limbs. Even in the midst of death and destruction, Ewen had it drummed into her how Bethune expected her to behave: “I was never to call him by his first name. I was not to take it upon myself to diagnose or treat patients. I was a servant, no more, no less.”

Ewen found Bethune to be unsympathetic and rude but was impressed at how calmly he accepted the dangers they encountered on their journey. They were bombed, shot at, and several times nearly killed.

When they finally arrived in Yan’an, the town’s citizens waved flags and banged drums, as Bethune’s reputation had reached even this out-of-the-way place. No sooner had he and Ewen collapsed in their beds than a knock at the door summoned them to meet Mao. Their escort explained that Mao worked from midnight until eight or nine in the morning because that was when it was quiet. The two Canadians were taken to a cave where Mao lived. Mao greeted his guests with a smile and embraced Bethune. Drinking tea and eating peanuts, they talked for hours, with Ewen trans-

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WILLIAM BERRY (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

town on the exhausted refugees….After the planes had passed I picked up in my arms three dead children from the pavement….In the darkness the moans of wounded children, shrieks of agonized mothers, the curses of the men rose in a massed cry higher and higher to a pitch of intolerable intensity.

LEFT: NORMAN BETHUNE HEALTH SCIENCES CENTER, JILIN UNIVERSITY; RIGHT: EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

From left: Bethune, whose motto was “Go to the wounded—don’t wait for the wounded to come to you,” operates on a Chinese soldier in the field in 1938; Bethune and Mao Zedong talk for hours upon their first meeting in 1938.

NORMAN BETHUNE

WILLIAM BERRY (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

LEFT: NORMAN BETHUNE HEALTH SCIENCES CENTER, JILIN UNIVERSITY; RIGHT: EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

lating, about the wars in China and in Spain. They also discussed the need for good medical care for Mao’s soldiers.

It was decided that Bethune’s medical skills were most needed at the front, some 200 miles to the north. Ewen was sent off to buy medicine but was unable to make her way back. “In this great area of thirteen million people, and 150,000 armed troops, I am the only qualified doctor,” Bethune wrote to friends. “The Chinese doctors have all beat it. My life is pretty rough and sometimes tough as well.”

In China, Bethune’s most important invention was a mobile medical unit that could be transported in wooden cases on the back of a donkey. The cases contained a folding operating table, 25 wooden legs and arms to replace severed limbs, and supplies for 100 operations. The staff accompanying these units could go into action within 30 minutes of arriving on the scene.

Bethune spent his days frantically treating patients who had “old neglected wounds of the thigh and leg—most of them incurable except by amputation” and who, he said, were “dying of sepsis.” On one occasion he performed 71 operations in 40 hours with the help of two assistants he had trained. He even found time to give classes in basic medical care and to write a textbook.

Working long hours and constantly on the move, sleeping in peasant huts full of lice, and getting frostbite had a disastrous effect on Bethune’s health. He lost 30 pounds and looked much older than his 49 years, but he told friends he hadn’t been as happy for a long time. In less than two years Bethune became a hero in China. He was nicknamed Bai Qiu’en, which means “White One Seeking Grace.”

On October 28, 1939, as he worked in a mountain village, Bethune cut his finger during an operation. His immune system was weakened, so the wound remained open. In early November he performed brain surgery on a soldier. He had run out of gloves, so his cut came into contact with the man’s highly infected brain tissue. Bethune developed a fever, his finger became swollen, and an abscess appeared in his armpit. On the morning of November 12, Bethune died in a tiny hut in the village.

Bethune left a note saying that he knew he was dying and that his only regret was that he was not able to do more. The note ended: “The last two years have been the most significant, the most meaningful years of my life.

Sometimes it has been lonely but I have found my highest fulfilment here among my beloved comrades.”

His devoted translator wrote: “Our doctor died on the night of many stars in the sky. The heavens wept.”

When Mao Zedong learned of Bethune’s death, he wrote a eulogy in which he called him a martyr who selflessly supported the cause of the Chinese people’s liberation. Mao urged every Communist to learn from him.

This bronze statute of Bethune, wearing traditonal Chinese clothing and a stethoscope, is on the campus of the University of Toronto, where he completed his medical studies in 1916.

During the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, the eulogy was made compulsory reading in every school in China.

Bethune is buried in the city of Shijiazhuang, and his grave has become a place of pilgrimage. Nearby is the Norman Bethune International Peace Hospital and a museum. It contains a glass case displaying his typewriter, some medical instruments, and papers—the doctor’s only possessions to survive the war. MHQ Peter Snow, an author and broadcaster, is the author of several history books, including When Britain Burned the White House: The 1814 Invasion of Washington (Thomas Dunne Books, 2014). He lives in London.

Ann MacMillan worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for many years after marrying Peter Snow and moving to London. They are the authors of War Stories: From the Charge of the Light Brigade to the Battle of the Bulge and Beyond (Pegasus Books, 2018), from which this article is excerpted.

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POETRY

STILL INSPIRING FREEDOM Taras Shevchenko

Siberia and central Asia. His final seven years in exile were spent at one of the worst penal settlements, Novopetrovskoye on the Caspian Sea’s eastern shore in Kazakhstan.

Shevchenko finally returned from exile in 1857, although he remained under police surveillance after an amnesty granted by Czar Alexander II. During Shevchenko’s life, he was a serf for 24 years, a free man for only 9 years, and a prisoner in Siberian exile for 10 years. He died on March 10, 1861, in St. Petersburg due to debilitating illnesses and deteriorating health following his Siberian exile. Initially interred in Smolensk Cemetery in St. Petersburg, his friends and admirers arranged to have his remains reburied on Taras Hill in Kaniv, central Ukraine, two months later.

Even today, a century and a half after his death, Shevchenko’s poetry and art continue to galvanize Ukrainian identity. His memory and spirit were widely invoked to inspire the 2013-2014 Maiden Revolution and fuel Ukraine’s resistance to the 2022 Russian invasion. The following poem excerpt, composed by Shevchenko over 150 years ago, reads as if he is describing Ukraine’s agony today.

UKRAINE AFLAME …The people die— Within their prisons they are slaughtered; Children without a God or friend The Kozak children—and the daughters.

The beauty of the native land Are held in bondage…

Ukraine is flaming to the sky: Through villages the naked children Weep for their fathers.

Faded leaves Are rustling o’er the lifeless meadows, The clouds are drowsing, sun’s asleep, And villages draw howling shadows Which scent the corpse…

A war-damaged bust of poet Taras Shevchenko stands forlornly before a destroyed apartment building in Borodianka, Ukraine, 35 miles from Kyiv. Russia’s 2022 invasion killed hundreds of Borodianka civilians.

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CELESTINE ARCE/NURPHO (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (1814-1861) remains Ukraine’s most revered poet. He was also a renowned artist, playwright, and ethnographer of Ukrainian life as it existed under oppressive Imperial Russian rule. Of Cossack lineage, he was born a serf in the small village of Moryntsi, located at nearly the exact center of Ukraine, about 80 miles due south of Kyiv. Although czar Peter the Great had abolished slavery, per se, throughout the Russian Empire in 1723, he nonetheless strengthened the feudal-style system of serfdom that bound peasant serfs to the land they inhabited. This system of being enslaved to the land owned by aristocrats or wealthy landowners continued until Czar Alexander II permanently abolished the system in 1861—the official manifesto dated just seven days before Shevchenko died at age 47.

The best-known collection of Shevchenko’s poetry, the work that established his enduring reputation as a brilliant poet, is the 115-page book collection of eight poems, Kobzar. A kobzar was an itinerant Ukrainian musician who traveled from village to village singing and playing his kobza, a multi-stringed instrument. First published by Shevchenko in St. Petersburg in 1840, it was republished twice during his lifetime (1844 and 1860) but was immediately censored by czarist officials. Obsessed with perpetuating Russian dominance over the czar’s multi-ethnic empire, official censors brutally suppressed any manifestation of non-Russian ethnic nationalism, such as Shevchenko’s pride in his distinctive Ukrainian culture.

Censors banned Kobzar for what they claimed was the author’s lack of sufficient gratitude for being redeemed from serfdom (his mentors and supporters purchased his freedom in May 1838), for writing it in the “Little Russian” (i.e., Ukrainian) language, for alleging that Russia “enslaved” Ukraine and Ukrainians (which was essentially true), for glorifying the freedom of Cossack culture and lifestyle, and for slandering the czar (Nicholas I), czarina, and the Imperial family.

In 1847, Shevchenko was convicted of crimes against the state and exiled as a private soldier—specifically prohibited by czar Nicholas from writing and painting!— to a series of bleak, isolated Russian military garrisons in

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ARTISTS

BODY OF WORK

Among the squadron markings of World War I, every picture told a story.

By Jon Guttman

Escadrilles assigned to Groupe de Combat 12 began using storks as insignias.

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squadron in the French air service and produced the most aces, including second-ranking French ace Georges Guynemer. After N.3 was made the flagship squadron of a fighter group to achieve local air superiority in November 1916, all the other escadrilles assigned to Groupe de Combat 12 replaced their existing insignias with storks in different attitudes of flight. Several underwent changes in the course of the war; soon after N.26 joined GC.12, it replaced its burning torch with a stork designed by a Japanese pilot in its ranks, Captain Kiyotake Shigeno, whose stork, by no coincidence, looked more like a crane.

Some escadrilles acquired their insignias from recognized artists of the age. When Captain Georges Matton and his executive officer, Lieutenant Armand de Turenne, conceived of a crowing rooster head for N.48, artist Jacques Nam worked up the definitive version. A Swiss volunteer in the unit, Jacques Roques, had the face of a young lady as a personal marking on his Spad VII hand-painted by his Parisian friend, artist Georges Lepape. The commander of Spa.78, Captain Armand Pinsard (27 victories), flew Spad VIIs with black fuselages, on the sides of which were a “white leopard of Borneo,” and another in gold, designed by Théophile Steinlen, a Swiss-born painter who had settled in France to become a leading illustrator of art nouveau. In April Steinlen was painting black leopards on the fuselages of Spa.78’s other aircraft, with Arabic numerals for individual identification. Spa.173 received its bird of paradise marking from Jean-Gabriel Domergue. The Bréguet 14.B2s of Br.129 had a rabbit carrying a vagabond’s pack, and the Spad XVI two-seaters of Spa.bi.278 had a laughing rabbit, both created by Benjamin Rabier, an illustrator of children’s literature. Cartoonist Marcel Jeanjean provided the clown insignia of Salmson 2A2 escadrille Sal.252.

On at least two occasions the artistic refinement came from American volunteers of the Lafayette Flying Corps.

In November 1916, N.124 adopted the sobriquet of “Escadrille Lafayette” and an Indian head insignia based on the logo of the Savage Arms Company. In April 1917, however, two pilots who had been architects before the war, Edward F. Hinkle and Harold B. Willis, decided the emblem too bland. “It was a rather round Indian head,” Willis said in a postwar interview, “and Hinkle and I thought we could do one that would be a little more distinctive from a distance.

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: PHOTO JOSSE (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES); LA CONTEMPORAINE, PARIS; NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION (2)

O

ne of the great paradoxes of humankind is its capacity for combining destruction with creativity in the wars in which it engages. In the case of World War I aircraft, the artwork that their crews devised had a function beyond mere self-expression. At a time when only larger, more powerful aircraft could carry radios, unit markings were a means of recognition and identification in the air.

France, ever the trendsetter in fashion, established a principle that was followed to various degrees by its allies, especially the Americans. An agreed-upon escadrille (squadron) insignia was painted or stenciled on the fuselage side, with an Arabic numeral ahead or aft of it to identify the individual pilot.

There were a handful of exceptions to that basic pattern, such as escadrille N.103, whose personal aircraft were identified by Roman numerals aft of its stork insignia, or the famous N.124 “Lafayette,” each of whose pilots sported a personal motif such as an initial, a monogram, a band, or a star aft of the Indian head.

Also unusual were the different numbers and colors of fuselage bands to identify the crews of Br.128, whose emblem was a red scarab beetle. Sop.63’s Sopwith 1.A2s sported a parrot, with different-colored feathers for each plane, while similarly those of Sop.287 had a court jester, each with a different colored cowl.

The most famous emblem among French fighter units was the stork, a bird long known for its migrations from, and always back to nest in, the chimneys of Alsace—a winged metaphor for France’s ambition of returning to Alsace since its annexation by Germany in 1871. Captain Antonin Brocard, commander of N.3, and an artistically inclined observer, Adjutant Charles Borzecki, devised the stork and a stencil that allowed it to be applied in a variety of colors, depending on the light or dark fabric on a particular Nieuport’s fuselage. With 175 confirmed victories to its credit, Spa.3 (as it was designated when its Nieuports were replaced by Spads) was the highest-scoring

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CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: PHOTO JOSSE (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES); LA CONTEMPORAINE, PARIS; NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION (2)

Clockwise from left: Jean-Jacques Berne-Bellecour portrays second-ranking French ace Captain Georges Guynemer (53 victories) beside his Spad VII of escadrille Spa.3, its stork emblem visible; early renditions of Spa.81’s greyhound before being standardized in the spring of 1918; the Egyptian golden falcon adopted by Spa.75; the “Sioux Indian head” souvenired by David McKelvey Peterson from his Spad VII of escadrille Spa.124 “Lafayette.”

Also we wanted to achieve an insignia that, from extreme distances, would give out a blotch of red, white and blue, even if you couldn’t make out the Indian head.”

The result, for which the two men designed a stencil, appeared on Spa.124’s Spad VIIs until February 1918, when the Escadrille Lafayette was transferred en masse into the U.S. Army Air Service as the 103rd Aero Squadron. Not only did that “Sioux” head remain as the 103rd’s emblem, but when it became the nucleus of the 3rd Pursuit Group, three variations on Indian Heads were adopted by its three other components, the 28th, 93rd, and 213th Aero squadrons (in clear emulation of the stork variations of French GC.12 and GC.21, whose five escadrilles were identified by diagonal fuselage bands in different color combinations).

At the end of 1917, escadrille Spa.81 adopted a greyhound as its insignia. Initially it took several handpainted forms, but in March 1918 the squadron got an American pilot through the Lafayette Flying Corps, Sergeant James Alexander Bayne, who had attended the Chicago Art Institute and, among other things, had designed the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes package before the war. “Alec Bayne was engaged in the Foreign Legion for the duration of the war,” said Spa.81 pilot and five-victory ace Pierre Cardon in an interview. “An art student and a very

good designer, it was he who improved the design of our greyhound insignia and made up the stencil to reproduce it on all Spa.81 airplanes....” Tragically, Bayne was accidentally killed while test-flying a newly delivered Spad XIII on May 8.

The basic format of French aircraft eventually became the template for marking the aircraft of its allies. In 1917 Italy’s units were identified by either their numbers, as was the case with the 76th, 78th, 81st, and 82nd Squadriglie de Caccia, or common insignias like the 77th Squadriglia’s red heart and the 91st’s griffon. As early as 1916, Russian squadrons were sporting insignias, most notably the black skull and crossbones on the white rudders of fighters of the XIth Corps Air Detachment, and the white skulls and crossbones on the black rudders of the XIXth Corps Air Detachment.

The most regimented user of the French-inspired marking system was the U.S. Army Air Service. By August 1918 the 103rd Aero Squadron had seen the last of its personal motifs replaced by yellow Arabic numerals, and all squadrons from then on combined a unit insignia with a different colored number on the fuselage sides, and the upper and lower wings, often supplemented with different colored bands on the upper wing opposite the number. Additionally, pursuit squadrons that were subdivided into

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flights often had them identified by cowlings painted red, white, or blue. Personal markings were usually limited to names inscribed under the cockpit.

Besides the Native American insignia of the 103rd Aero Squadron, the most famous American emblem was, according to Lafayette Flying Corps pilot John W. F. M. Huffer, a personal marking—a stovepipe hat marked in red, white, and blue, as worn by Uncle Sam—that he used while with escadrille N.62, but introduced to the 94th Aero Squadron when he was given command of it in March 1918.

On March 28, Major Raoul Lufbery led First Lieutenants Douglas Campbell and Edward Rickenbacker on their first armed patrol over the front, followed the next day by First Lieutenants Thorne C. Taylor and John Wentworth. Upon their return to base at Gengoult, the squadron surgeon, Captain Paul H. Walters, raised a cheer by proposing that since the 94th’s hat was now “in the ring,” it be identified accordingly. Wentworth, an architect in civilian life, developed the definitive form of the insignia, with Huffer’s Uncle Sam hat flying through a red band. When the 94th became the basis around which the 1st Pursuit Group was organized, its sister unit, the 27th Aero Squadron, adopted a “screaming eagle,” the 95th used a kicking mule inspired by its equine mascot Jake, and the 147th used a rat terrier that its commander, Major Geoffrey H. Bonnell, remembered from his days in the Royal Flying Corps.

In stark contrast to France and most of its allies, Britain’s Royal Flying Corps came to favor a subdued marking

Britain’s Royal Flying Corps came to favor a system that discouraged self-expression.

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system that discouraged self-expression on its aircraft.

Aside from the national markings, squadrons were represented by bars or geometric figures in white against an olive drab finish, with letters or Arabic numbers for the individuals and red, white, or blue wheel hubs to represent flights.

The Royal Naval Air Service often indulged in colorful personal markings, but that ended on April 1, 1918, when the RFC and RNAS were amalgamated into the Royal Air Force.

As for the enemy, the first German identification system is alleged to have come about when Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, commander of Jagdstaffel 11 and then Germany’s top living ace, first painted his Albatros D.III red all over. When his men protested that he would become a marked men in the sky, he and they worked out a sort of compromise, with all aircraft in the Staffel given red noses and wheel hubs, and individual fuselages or tails painted in colors of the pilot’s choice. Variations on that theme became the norm in most German fighter squadrons, using colors representing the army regiment, region, or city from which the pilot came, or even the family coat of arms. Collectively, they presented the Allies with a colorful array of opposition that explains why the British referred to their most proficient units as “flying circuses.” By late 1917 Austria-Hungary had come to emulate the Germans in principle, although most of its Fliegerkompagnien limited their unit colors or markings to the wheel hubs.

The most successful or famous units to emerge from the first worldwide air war have sustained the traditions they established through a number of conflicts since. The emblems and the heritage they represent live on, albeit smaller or in more subdued colors, on warplanes today. MHQ Jon Guttman is MHQ’s research director. His latest book on World War I aviation is Aerial Foreign Legion: Volunteer Foreign Airmen in French Escadrille Service (2021).

FROM LEFT: BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES); NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

Members of the 94th Aero Squadron pose beside one of its Spad XIIIs. From left: Joseph K. Eastman, James Meissner, Edward Rickenbacker, Reed Chambers, and Thorne Taylor; recovered from Harvey Weir Cook’s Spad XIII, his seven victories were displayed as Maltese crosses within the 94th’s “Hat-in-the-Ring” insignia.

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BIG SHOTS

HARRIS & EWING COLLECTION (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

William “Billy” Mitchell was born in Nice, France, in 1879 but grew up on his family’s estate in Wisconsin, where his father was a U.S. senator. He dropped out of college during the SpanishAmerican War to join the U.S. Army and would go on to serve in France during World War I, where he became the first American to fly over enemy lines and later commanded all American air combat units. After returning home in 1919 to become deputy director of the Air Service, he emerged as an outspoken proponent of an independent air force, arguing that bombers had rendered battleships obsolete. But his nonstop advocacy rankled his superiors, who ordered him court-martialed for insubordination in 1925 after he publicly accused them of “incompetency, criminal negligence, and almost treasonable administration of the national defense.” Mitchell resigned from the army the following year but continued to preach air power until his death at age 56 in 1936. Today he is universally regarded as the father of the U.S. Air Force.

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REVIEWS

DETERRING ARMAGEDDON

by Tom Ramos Naval Institute Press, 2022, 288 pages, $39.95.

The nearly half-century-long Cold War between the U.S.-led West and the Soviet Union (1946-1991) pro-

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duced a plethora of “hot spots,” flashpoints where the Cold War could turn “hot” overnight. But none of these potential Armageddon-provoking locations was more important nor more critical to solidifying Western resolve than was Berlin (Germany’s once and future capital city). Cut off from the West by its location 115 miles inside Soviet-controlled Communist East Germany (officially, the DDR, Deutsche Demokratishe Republik) the fourpower administered (USSR, U.S., U.K. and France) city was an isolated

From the deck of USS Observation Island off the Florida coast, President John F. Kennedy watches a Polaris missile successfully launch from the submerged USS Andrew Jackson. island of economically-fueled freedom trapped within the bleak, dismal, depressing landscape of the egregiously misnamed “Communist workers’ paradise.” The visible success of West Berlin, a vibrant symbol of the West’s economic dominance over the wheezing and puffing, inefficient machine

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War

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NATIONAL ARCHIVES

that ran the economy of the USSR and its satellites, was downplayed by Soviet leaders. (East German road signs then read, in small font, “westberlin,” as if the city was a nearly-forgotten afterthought, while trumpeting “BERLIN: Hauptstadt der DDR” in huge, oversized letters—despite the East German capital still containing rubble from World War II Allied bombing raids.)

The “West versus USSR” leaders who faced off over the Berlin hotspot in 1961 seemed to mimic the contrasts presented by the divided city.

America’s president John F. Kennedy was youthful, handsome, and dynamic. His Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, was a bald, overweight, gap-toothed caricature of a Communist apparatchik in an ill-fitting suit who’d earned his spurs under the tutelage of dictator Josef Stalin. Jack Kennedy had spent World War II as a PT boat captain in the Pacific Theater.

Khrushchev had spent the war helping to send millions of Red Army soldiers to their deaths defending Stalingrad. Stalin had already tested the West’s resolve with his failed 1948-49 Berlin Blockade. In the summer and fall of 1961, Khrushchev played the “Berlin card” once again. Author Tom Ramos reveals why this new Berlin Crisis was so dangerous: “It involved the leader of the Soviet Union directly threatening the democratic free world with [nuclear] destruction.”

Both sides’ “trump card” in the Berlin standoff was the very real threat of eventually employing nuclear arms, the ultimate weapon in the U.S.-NATO and USSR’s military arsenals. Once the U.S. monopoly on atomic weapons had evaporated in 1949 when Soviet scientists produced the USSR’s own atomic bomb that year, both sides rapidly built growing nuclear arsenals to convince their enemy not to use weapons they’d poured billions of dollars and rubles into creating. Ironically, the “value” of nuclear arsenals was not in their destructive power if un-

leashed, but in their ability to deter any such use of them at all. Yet the strategy of nuclear deterrence can only be effective if the weapons and their delivery systems—fixed-wing bombers, ICBMs, missile-launching submarines—are credible. That’s where Lawrence Livermore Labs—the Rad Lab (Radiation Laboratory) boys— enter the conflict.

Ramos explains that the U.S. nuclear deterrence strategy was not “fully effective without Lawrence’s young professionals, who complemented [the] strategies with weapons that credibly deterred a militarily powerful Soviet Union from seeking world dominance.” The Rad Lab physicists designed and developed the nuclear warheads for various delivery systems employed by the U.S. armed forces. By 1991, when the collapse of the USSR effectively ended the U.S. designing and developing new nuclear weapons, Rad Lab physicists had produced double-digit numbers of such warheads for strategic and tactical nuclear weapons with yields ranging from about two kilotons to many megatons.

None of the Rad Lab weapons, however, were more important to Kennedy’s successful resolution of the 1961 Berlin Crisis than the Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile.

It dramatically solidified the undeniable credibility of America’s nuclear deterrent that Kennedy needed to face down Khrushchev’s nuclear saber-rattling over Berlin. Lawrence Livermore physicists had worked on developing the Polaris missile for the previous four years, and it was serendipitously ready for full deployment aboard U.S. Navy “boomer” subs as the Berlin Crisis unfolded. To Jack Kennedy, it was as if the cavalry had ridden to the rescue. In March 1962, four months after the crisis had ended the previous November, Ramos reveals, “Kennedy thought about how close the country had come to destruction, and he flew out to Berkeley, California, to meet

and thank this small troop of physicists for helping the country avert a nuclear war.”

Author Ramos, a West Point graduate who commanded combat engineer troops before earning a degree in high energy physics at MIT, has been a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the past 40 years.

He is friends with some of the physicists he writes about in the book, and knows the story from firsthand accounts. Ramos explains his motivation for chronicling what he describes as the Rad Lab’s “physicists who orchestrated the victory won in Berlin in 1961” by noting, “No one knew what they had done…Their contributions deserve to be recognized by the society they have served so well.”

Jerry Morelock is the editor of MHQ.

New & Noteworthy BRITISH CELTIC WARRIOR VS ROMAN SOLDIER: Britannia AD 43-105, by William Horsted (Osprey Publishing, $22.)

An entry in the publisher’s “Combat” series, this volume pits invading Roman legionaries against native Celtic tribesmen beginning with Rome’s AD 43 invasion of Britain.

Weapons, tactics, clothing, and daily routines of the opponents supplement coverage of the major battles.

GETTYSBURG: Three Days That Saved the United States, by Ben Nussbaum (Fox Chapel Publishing, $24.99.) Details the war’s most famous battle through maps, timelines, historic photos, facts, stories of the participants, and contemporary newspaper articles.

The book packs volumes of information into just 96 colorful and fact-filled pages.

THE WHARTONS’ WAR: The Civil War Correspondence of General

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Gabriel C. Wharton and Anne Radford Wharton, 1863-1865, edited by William C. Davis and Sue Heth Bell (University of North Carolina Press, $45.) Mines more than 500 letters exchanged by the Whartons during the war’s final two years to present the couple’s evolving views on subjects such as shifting gender roles, relations with enslaved people, and definitions of duty and honor.

! t u O t i k c e Ch

THIS WEEK IN

HISTORY

AN ORIGINAL VIDEO SERIES

Join hosts Claire and Alex as they explore—week by week— the people and events that have shaped the world we live in.

THE FIRST CODE TALKERS: Native American Communicators in World War I, by William C. Meadows (University of Oklahoma Press, $24.95.) Long before World War II’s famed Navajo code talkers, the U.S. Army pioneered the “unbreakable code” of tribes’ native languages in World War I using Choctaw, Cherokee, Comanche, Osage, Sioux, and other tongues.

D-DAY 1944: The Deadly Failure of Allied Heavy Bombing on June 6, by Stephen A. Bourque (Osprey Publishing, $24.) One of the publisher’s “Air Campaign” series, this volume chronicles the bombing effort by the Royal Air Force and U.S. Army Air Forces to shatter German coastal defenses on D-Day, concluding their efforts largely failed.

NATO AND WARSAW PACT TANKS OF THE COLD WAR,

by Michael Green (Naval Institute Press, $60.) Through detailed images, precise technical data, and expert analysis, Green examines the series of main battle tanks used by both sides, from the early days employing World War II leftovers through the development of the latest models.

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EMPIRE’S VIOLENT END: Comparing Dutch, British, and French Wars of Decolonization, 1945-1962, edited by Thijs Brocades Zaalberg and Bart Luttikhuis (Cornell University Press, $44.95.)

Analyzes the use of extreme violence

by European colonial powers as their African and Far Eastern

subject-nations gained post-World War II independence. This book is the first on the subject to place the Dutch-Indonesian experience at the center of the comparison.

THE TALE UNTWISTED: General George B. McClellan, the Maryland Campaign, and the Discovery of Lee’s Lost Orders, by Gene M. Thorp and Alexander B. Rossino (Savas Beatie, $18.95.) Offers a new interpretation of one of the Civil War’s most controversial questions: Did McClellan inexcusably dawdle after he received a copy of Lee’s Special Orders No. 191 on the eve of Antietam? The authors conclude he did not.

DAYS OF VALOR: An Inside Account of the Bloodiest Six Months of the Vietnam War,

by Robert L. Tonsetic (Casemate, $16.95.) Focusing on the American 199th Light Infantry Brigade, Tonsetic covers the war’s most intense and costly period: December 1967 through May 1968, an interval of combat dominated by the Tet Offensive.

WITNESS TO POWER: The Life of Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy,

by Henry H. Adams (Naval Institute Press, $34.95.) FDR’s hands-off leadership style gave Leahy, his personal chief of staff and the seniorranking active-duty U.S. military officer in World War II, extraordinary power and influence.

Leahy was not only a “witness to power,” he wielded it, as Adams’s insightful biography reveals.

FORGING THE ANGLOAMERICAN ALLIANCE: The British and American Armies, 1917-1941, by Tyler R. Bamford (University Press of Kansas, $49.95.)

Examines the decades of relations between the British and U.S. armies that made it possible for the two nations to—surprisingly quickly— form history’s most successful military coalition in World War II.

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DRAWN & QUARTERED GALLOWS HUMOR

ALFRED WHITAL STERN COLLECTION OF LINCOLNIANA (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

Currier & Ives artists lampooned Confederate president Jefferson Davis in this early 1861 cartoon depicting secession as the hanging offense of treason. Waiting their turn on the scaffold while lamenting their fate are other notorious secessionists: (L-R) Robert Toombs (Davis’s secretary of state), General P.G.T. Beauregard, Alexander Stephens (Davis’s vice president), and William Pickens (South Carolina’s governor).

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