MHQ Military History Quarterly Winter 2020-2021

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY

2 4 ’ F O R E M SUM

the trial of eight as n to ng hi as W e tim ar w in re he Fear was everyw there more? e er W d. ar rw fo ed sh pu ly im gr rs captured Nazi saboteu

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GARY GALLAGHER ON GETTYSBURG’S CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS H

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

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PHILIPPINES, DECEMBER 8, 1941

Thomas Taylor of the 8th Louisiana was seriously wounded in the Cornfield fight.

SEPTEMBER 17, 1862

ANTIETAM NEW LOOK AT THE DEADLY CORNFIELD MCCLELLAN AT THE FRONT UNTOLD STORY OF A BATTLEFIELD GRAVE

WHY DID MACARTHUR WAIT FOR THE ENEMY TO STRIKE FIRST?

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DOUBLE TROUBLE

—page 28

CLE

DEBA H PEARL HARBOR OWED ONE BAD CALL SHAD LIFE A YOUNG OFFICER FOR ED TRAD WHO H THE MAN ORM UNIF HT RMAC HIS WEH UES FATIG Y ARM U.S. FOR

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

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A UNION CAPTAIN’S HORRIBLE DAY

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First Modern Scandal Hits DC Camp Followers’ Amazing Journey When the Draft Resumed in 1940 Maine Splits From Massachusetts

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THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

JEFFERSON v. ADAMS, 1800 SCARE TACTICS / RELIGIOUS SMEARS / FOREIGN MEDDLING

Fighting Dirty

BILLY THE KID

thunder from above

the untold story of hispanO fighters who rode with him

republic’s p-47 ‘jug’ hit the germans hard in the air and on the ground

H oklahoma SOONERS H L.A.’s DEADLIEST RIOT H THE FIRST WESTERN

sabre ace race: u.s. fighter pilots in korea took on migs and each other ltv a-7e corsair II: vietnam-era jet recalled for duty in the gulf war NOVEMBER 2020

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GUNFIGHTER?

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THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY

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

7th Cav’s brutal fight to save a trapped patrol ‘We’re now in a war—where you can get killed’ The 1962 battle that shocked U.S. helicopter pilots

Mystery Death in Saigon Diamond smuggling, gunrunning, and the CIA

9 Crucial Decisions

Chaos at Shiloh What Grant, Johnston did right...and wrong The Union’s critical Plus! Russian connection

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KILLER INSTINCT

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TODAY IN HISTORY DECEMBER 18, 1934 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT VISITED BEAR RUN IN SOUTHWESTERN PENNSYLVANIA AND REQUESTED A SURVEY OF THE AREA AROUND A PARTICULAR WATERFALL. PITTSBURGH BUSINESSMAN EDGAR J. KAUFMANN HAD COMMISSIONED WRIGHT TO BUILD A COUNTRY HOME WITH A VIEW OF THE WATERFALL. THE FAMOUS ARCHITECT SURPRISED HIS CLIENT

BY INSTEAD DESIGNING THE HOME OVER THE WATERFALL. FALLINGWATER COST $155,000 TO COMPLETE IN 1941. THE HOME WAS MADE AVAILABLE TO VISTORS IN 1964.

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OPENING ROUND

INTERNATIONAL MILITARY ANTIQUES

The Spencer repeating rifle was the most sought-after firearm of the Civil War, and little wonder: It was deadly accurate out to about 300 yards, could unleash up to 20 shots a minute, and loaded seven metallic cartridges from a spring-action tubular magazine in the buttstock. Named for its inventor, Christopher Miner Spencer of Manchester, Connecticut, the lever-operated rifle would terrorize Confederate troops during the Civil War and give the Union army an important edge on battlefield after battlefield. (See “A New Kind of Firepower,” page 26.)

President Abraham Lincoln, on test-firing the rifle with its inventor in 1863, immediately recommended it to the War Department. But the U.S. Army’s chief of ordnance, Brevet Brigadier General W. James Ripley, basically ignored his commander in chief, believing all breechloaders to be “newfangled gimcracks.” It took Ripley’s forced retirement from active duty to get the procurement wheels turning, and soon Spencer was awash in orders for his rifle.

Spencer’s rifle used .56 –56 copper rimfire cartridges, based on the Smith & Wesson Company’s 1854 patent, which fired a 350-grain .540-to-.555-diameter (depending on the manufacturer) bullet backed by 45 grains of black powder. Once in a while Confederate forces managed to capture some Spencer rifles and the cartridges that went with them, but the weapon was of limited use to them, as a shortage of copper in the South precluded the manufacture of additional ammunition.

Spencer received a steady stream of testimonials from Union soldiers at the Massachusetts factory that was turning out his rifles by the thousands. “At this point it absolutely seems a pity to kill men so,” Colonel John T. Wilder wrote in describing the use of Spencer’s rifle by his “Lightning Brigade” of mounted infantry at the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863. “They fell in heaps, and I actually had it in my heart to order the firing to cease in order to end the awful sight. But the merciless Spencer seven-shooter would not cease.”

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Volume 33, Number 2 Winter 2021

62

ROGER FREEMAN COLLECTION (IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS)

Thousands of tons of incendiary bombs rain devastation on the Japanese port and industrial city of Kobe on June 4, 1945— all dropped from more than 500 U.S. Boeing B-29 Superfortresses equipped with Norden bombsights.

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FEATURES DEPARTMENTS 36 Summer of ’42 3 Opening Round

by Bill Hogan It was wartime in the nation’s capital, and fear was everywhere.

Were Nazi submarines landing saboteurs on American beaches?

70 56

46 Crapshoot at Cassino

Gettysburg from the South

24 Battle Schemes

Trouble brewing in Gallipoli

56 Dawn of the Nuclear Age

34 Letter From MHQ 79 Culture of War 80 Classic Dispatches

by Robert O. Harder The Norden bombsight, one of the most closely guarded secrets of World War II, achieved legendary status.

But it never lived up to its promised precision.

ROGER FREEMAN COLLECTION (IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS)

20 Experience

26 Behind the Lines

62 Eye in the Sky

36

The 1946 Lichfield trials

by George Aarons In 1944 a soon-to-be-famous photographer wrote of his harrowing experiences in one of the longest and bloodiest battles of World War II.

PORTFOLIO In 1946, soon after the end of World War II, three U.S. military artists were on hand as two atomic bombs were detonated at Bikini Atoll.

46 80

6 Flashback 12 Comments 15 At the Front 16 Laws of War

70 Revolt of the Ionians

by Marc G. DeSantis The Greek cities of Asia Minor tried mightily to free themselves from Persian subjugation. Their rebellion, however, ultimately backfired.

The Spencer carbine

30 War List “War Is...”

33 Weapons Check Browning M1910

The Battle of New Orleans

82 War Stories

Raymond Chandler

86 Artists

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Self-Portrait as a Soldier

90 Poetry

Colin McIntyre’s “Horse Transport”

91 Big Shots

John Foster Dulles

92 Reviews 96 Drawn & Quartered On the Cover

In June 1942, German submarines landed two teams of Nazi saboteurs on American beaches. The mission: to cripple U.S. airplane production and other war-vital industries. But after one of the saboteurs spilled details of the sabotage plan to the FBI, all were arrested, brought to a jail in Washington, D.C., and prosecuted in a rare military trial shrouded in security and secrecy.

COVER: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (6); PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN WALKER

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FLASHBACK BATTLE OF GRUNWALD, JULY 15, 1410

A Polish-Lithuanian army marches into East Prussia and decimates the German-Prussian Knights of the Teutonic Order near the villages of Tannenberg and Grunwald.

TODAY: A search team wielding metal detectors unearths two axes used in the hand-to-hand fighting during one of the most brutal and pivotal battles of the Middle Ages.

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NATIONAL MUSEUM, WARSAW

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FLASHBACK

SHARPSBURG, MARYLAND, 1864

Simon G. Elliott, a railroad engineer and surveyor, visits the site of the 1862 Battle of Antietam to prepare a map of the burial places of 5,844 Union and Confederate soldiers.

TODAY: Two historians searching for information about Elliott in the collection of the New York Public Library stumble on his long-forgotten—but recently digitized—Antietam map.

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NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

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FLASHBACK STRAIT OF MALACCA, APRIL 22, 1943

The crew of the USS Grenadier (shown here at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard) scuttle the Tambor-class submarine off the coast of Thailand after it is attacked by Japanese bombers.

TODAY: A team of four divers announce that they have found what they believe to be the wreckage of the long-lost sub sitting upright more than 260 feet below the ocean surface.

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BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY

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COMMENTS

THE BLONDE BOMBSHELL

More Marilyn Marilyn Monroe chats with U.S. Army officers in Korea.

Colonel Thomas J. Badger (in glasses) is to her right.

Prized Photos

Betty Badger, died in 1999, the Monroe pictures went to The Winter 2020 issue of various family members.

MHQ featuring Marilyn Your article inspired us to Monroe’s 1954 visit to U.S. try to round up the photos troops in Korea [“Marilyn in so we could share them with Korea,” by Liesl Bradner] was you. My dad is the darkhaired smiling guy wearing of special interest to me.

My father, Colonel Thomas glasses. Monroe is wearing J. Badger, commanded an ar­ the same dress she wears in tillery unit in Korea at the one of the photographs that time and had the honor of appears in MHQ. We never knew the identity spending several hours with Monroe during her visit. of another woman in some For many years, photographs of the photos but now, thanks documenting the occasion to your article, we do: Jean were displayed in my parent’s O’Doul. [Married to former home. Colonel Tom died in major league baseball player 1971, and after my mother, Frank “Lefty” O’Doul, she

12

Thank you so much for the story on Marilyn Monroe in Korea [MHQ, Winter 2020].

It really gave me a new in­ sight and greater respect for Monroe as a person.

The article went into great detail as to Monroe’s dress, accommodations, and so forth. I showed the article to some of my coworkers, who commented that in the cover photo Monroe’s shoes appear to be way too small. If she was wearing her own clothes, why did her shoes not fit?

Tim A. Williams Orlando, Florida FROM THE EDITOR: We can’t answer the fit question, but Monroe’s gold leather high-heeled shoes— with “The French Room” stamped on the soles and designed with curved front

ASK MHQ

Past Pattons?

Is it true that Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr. believed in reincarnation?

Stephen Morse Savannah, Georgia Patton was as eccentric as he was tactically brilliant, and from childhood on he had an unshakable belief in rein­ carnation. While comman­ ding the Third Army in World War II, Patton wrote a poem, “Through a Glass Darkly,” in which he de­ scribed visions of his past warrior selves.

Karl F. Hollenbach sorted out eight of the past lives in his 2012 study, Patton: Many Lives, Many Battles. Before that, during World War I, Patton was shown around the French town of Langres, the site of a former Roman base camp, during which he described details with which he seemed to be familiar, even though he had never been there before, at least in his current lifetime.

As Hollenbach determined, Patton’s first incarnation was as a Greek hoplite fighting for Alexander the Great, most

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NATIONAL ARCHIVES

FROM THE EDITOR: A special thanks, too, to Ms. Lugauer’s sister, Mary Badger, of Northbrook, Illinois, for arranging to have the photographs digitized so that we could reproduce one of them here.

and ankle straps—were from her personal wardrobe.

When they came up for auction at Christie’s in 1999, the shoes sold for $32,200— far more than the presale estimate of $4,000–$6,000.

COURTESY MARY BADGER

accompanied Monroe to Korea.] Unfortunately, we do not know who the other men in the photos are.

Thanks for the memory.

Bonnee Beth (Badger) Lugauer Cudahy, Wisconsin

vividly at the Siege of Tyre in 332 bce. His next was in the first century bce, as a legionary in the X Legion of Gaius Julius Caesar’s army in Gaul (when he was stationed at Langres) and was later killed while fighting the Parthians, presumably at Marcus Licinius Crassus’s defeat at Carrhae in 53 bce. After living as a Viking, he was a French soldier fighting alongside John, the Blind King of Bohemia, at Crécy in 1346, where he was impaled by an English lance. His next incarnation was as one of King Henry V’s “band of brothers” defeating the French at Agincourt in 1415. Patton then recalled fighting at sea, as an antislaver, a privateer, or even a pirate. Next, he was a Scottish Highlander during the English Civil War. Finally, he recalled being an aide to Marshal Joachim Murat at the Battle of Jena in 1806 and in Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Patton concluded his poem as he might have at the end of any of his previous lives, of “battle as of yore, dying to be a fighter, but to die again, once more.”

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

COURTESY MARY BADGER

No Cigar

How close did a B-47 bomber come to triggering a nuclear explosion when it crashed into a nuclear weapons storage facility at Lakenheath, England, in 1956?

Joseph Emmons Oakland, California

Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr. is honored at a parade in Los Angeles in 1946.

The Cold War produced at least 36 known “broken arrows”—U.S. Air Force jargon for nuclear weapons that were accidentally launched, fired, detonated, stolen, or just lost since 1950. If that’s not scary enough, six were never recovered. Thanks to carefully thought-out precautions, even under such circumstances, the world has been spared the consequences of an unintended nuclear detonation. Thus far.

One of the most unsettling broken-arrow events occurred on July 27, 1956, when a U.S. Air Force Boeing B-47 of the 307th Bombardment Wing on a training exercise crashed into the igloo-shaped nuclear facility at

Royal Air Force Lakenheath in Suffolk, England, killing all four crewmen and causing a fire.

After preliminary examinations, the bomb disposal officers remarked that it had been a miracle that the exposed detonators to the three Mark 6 nuclear bombs in the facility failed to explode, adding that if any had, southeastern England would have turned into a desert.

Cooler heads have since prevailed in appraising the actual threat. Although each contained 8,000 pounds of high explosive and depleted uranium, the Mark 6 weapons required the installation of nuclear capsules to detonate, and those were stored

separately, to be manually installed only before an actual strike while en route to target. As for the U-238 in the weapons, it was not fissionable by high explosive compression or fire. The damaged weapons and their components were returned to the Atomic Energy Commission and that, for the time being, was that.

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 Winter 2021

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m

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

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY WINTER 2021 VOL. 33, NO. 2

EDITOR BILL HOGAN

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

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AT THE FRONT LAWS OF WAR 16

A soldier in the U.S. Army Signal Corps transports feathered messengers in a wicker backpack at Fort Bonnelle in Langres, France, in 1919. Many of the pigeons returned from the front lines even after being wounded by machine-gun fire or shrapnel.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

EXPERIENCE 20 BATTLE SCHEMES 24 BEHIND THE LINES 26 WAR LIST 30 WEAPONS CHECK 33

HOME SWEET HOME

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LAWS OF WAR

DISPARATE JUSTICE

The punishments meted out in the Lichfield courts-martial of 1946 underscored the long-held belief that military justice is far from fair.

By John A. Haymond

At Lichfield, the abusers and the victims were all American soldiers.

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The army responded only after an outcry from the American people, who were shocked by stories of mistreatment of their men in uniform. Even then, the military authorities seemed more concerned with putting the matter to rest as quickly as possible than undertaking any real effort to investigate the allegations and punish the perpetrators of the abuses.

When the initial investigation substantiated the charges of brutality and inhumane treatment at the Lichfield depot, the army convened a general court-martial on December 1, 1945, to try the men accused of “cruel and inhuman disciplinary treatment of stockade prisoners” during the previous winter. But if military authorities hoped that such action would calm the critics, they were surely disappointed in the legal maelstrom that ensued. The courts-martial erupted into monthslong snarls of personality clashes, perjury and recantation of testimony, countering charges, and repeated attempts by the lead defendant to trigger a mistrial.

The first courts-martial focused on nine former staff members of the depot. All the defendants were enlisted men, a fact that was not lost on most observers, including a soldier familiar with the case who, in a letter published in Stars and Stripes, said they were “scapegoats.”

It appeared from the start of the trials that nothing would go smoothly. The defense’s primary strategy was obfuscation and denial, which the prosecution argued was not for the benefit of the defendants but to protect senior personnel who bore the real responsibility. “It was immediately apparent that the witnesses for the defense were falsifying their testimony and that such falsification was apparently prearranged and preconcerted,” the trial advocate wrote in his official report of the first trial. “To prevent an obvious fraud against the government of the United States it was necessary to break down this falsification. This resulted in an extended trial and with the now well-known results of defense witnesses, officer and enlisted, recanting their former false testimony.”

Witnesses for the prosecution testified that they had suffered brutal treatment in the guardhouse. Private Robert Schwerdtfeger said that on one occasion he had been beaten by six guards using clubs, rifle butts, and their fists before being confined in solitary for five days on bread and

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STAFFORDSHIRE REGIMENT MUSEUM

I

n June 2003, four months after the United States invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian regime, disturbing reports and photographs of the mistreatment and torture of Iraqi detainees in the American-controlled Abu Ghraib prison began surfacing, and pressure from the news media and human rights organizations eventually forced a full investigation. A U.S. Army report, released in February 2004, confirmed “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” by “the military police guard force.” The torture and vile conditions at Abu Ghraib galvanized renewed armed resistance to the U.S. military occupation of Iraq.

In a different war, in a different country half a century earlier, another scandal involving American military abuses of prisoners shocked the nation, prompted official investigations and courts-martial, and ended the careers of soldiers implicated in the case. In the matter of the U.S. Army’s 10th Reinforcement Depot in Lichfield, England, however, the abusers and the victims were all American soldiers.

More than 200,000 enlisted servicemembers had passed through the depot in 1944, either en route to their first frontline assignments in World War II or as they were returning to the front after being wounded or reassigned. Soldiers ended up in the depot’s guardhouse for such minor offenses as being two hours late returning from a pass, and the guardhouse was run with the intent of making it “the most miserable place in the world.”

Troubling allegations surfaced in Stars and Stripes and U.S. newspapers that soldiers confined in the Lichfield depot’s guardhouse were subjected to terrible abuse at the hands of guards and depot officers. Former inmates said they were beaten with clubs, kicked, made to perform calisthenics or stand “nose and toes to the wall” until they were unable to do so any longer, and kept in solitary confinement in dark, cold cells. Men who complained about insufficient rations were made to eat massive portions of food and then administered castor oil to induce vomiting and diarrhea.

STAFFORDSHIRE REGIMENT MUSEUM

Lieutenant Colonel James A. Kilian (third from right), shown here with other American and British officers in 1943, was in charge of the U.S. Army’s 10th Reinforcement Depot in Lichfield, England.

water with no light or heat, no blanket, and no cot. Sergeant Joseph Miller testified that when he was supervising work details at the guardhouse he had seen Lieutenant Leonard Ennis, one of the depot officers, following a prisoner who was being forced to double time around the compound, striking him in the back with a billy club whenever he slowed down.

Private James Jones, a former guard at the depot, testified that he had struck—and had seen other guards strike— prisoners and that repeat offenders were “worked over.”

Prisoners testified that they were given only five to seven minutes to eat their meals, and those who complained were beaten by groups of guards. One soldier said he was beaten unconscious for refusing to eat a rotten potato.

After regaining consciousness, he was put in solitary for 16 days and received only four loaves of bread for food.

Private Edward Skul testified that he was in the guardhouse on two separate occasions. On the second occasion, the group he arrived with was asked whether any of them had been there before; the seven or eight who answered in the affirmative were taken to the latrine one at a time and savagely beaten. Skul also said that he and some other prisoners were punished for complaining to an inspecting offi-

cer that they didn’t have enough time to eat. Skul and four others were forced to eat two trays of food each, then administered castor oil and made to stand against the wall while they were racked with vomiting and diarrhea.

Sergeant Judson Smith, the former provost sergeant of the guardhouse, was found guilty as charged and sentenced to three years imprisonment at hard labor and a dishonorable discharge. The other enlisted defendants were given shorter sentences. The preponderance of evidence produced in these first trials finally forced the army to reluctantly turn its attention to the officers responsible for conditions at the depot. Its commander, Lieutenant Colonel James A. Kilian (who held the temporary rank of colonel); Major Richard LoBuono, the depot provost marshal; and Lieutenants Granville Cubage and Leonard Ennis were indicted. The first to be tried were the junior officers.

The defense produced numerous witnesses, mostly of officer rank, who testified that they never saw prisoners abused when they were at Lichfield. The depot chaplain dismissed the allegations of abuse out of hand, saying that prisoners were occasionally “shoved around” but insisting that “any man in the guardhouse will say he’s been mistreated.”

The trial transcripts quickly filled up with ferocious argu-

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THE LICHFIELD TRIALS

Carroll’s concerns were corroborated in April 1946, when seven enlisted men then in confinement on minor charges refused to testify at the court-martial of a former guard, Staff Sergeant James M. Jones. One of them, Private Otto Holt, told the court that he was being mistreated and feared further mistreatment if he testified.

It quickly became apparent that the problems at the depot went all the way to the top of the chain of command. In his trial, Cubage admitted falsifying his first testimony in the Smith case and said that Kilian had instructed him to do so.

Defense counsel insisted that the accused officers were unaware of any mistreatment by depot staff, but the prosecution produced testimony refuting that. A former guard, Private William Morris, testified that Cubage once ordered him to beat a prisoner but then told him not to because the prisoner “was going to court the following morning” and the bruises would prove problematic.

When Ennis took the stand in his trial, he testified that Kilian had chewed him out for being too lenient and said: “What are you running down there, a playhouse or a guardhouse? You’ve got to be tougher.” Because of this order, Ennis said, he told the guards under his command that “if they were not rough enough they would be relieved from duty.” He admitted telling guards that “they could ‘drive a man to the floor’ ” but claimed he did not intend his words to be taken literally. The finger-pointing and blaming continued, with every defendant claiming that his superiors knew full well what was going on in the depot.

Cubage was found guilty, reprimanded, and fined $250.

His punishment, coming on the heels of the harsher prison sentences and dishonorable discharges that the enlisted defendants had received, produced another round of outrage from both military and civilian observers. The Harvard Crimson summed up many opinions in an editorial that concluded, “The military caste system is merely adding

Kilian insisted that his junior officers had acted without his knowledge or instruction.

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cruel insult to a long list of injuries.” The assessment seemed borne out when Ennis, whom numerous witnesses said was particularly brutal in his treatment of prisoners, was also convicted but was only reprimanded and fined $350.

As the trials of the more senior officers got underway, the army found itself dealing with a public relations crisis that worsened with every official blunder and misstep. In February 1946, when the Senate Military Affairs Committee sent forward a list of 349 lieutenant colonels recommended for promotion to full colonel, Kilian’s name was on it. “An embarrassed committee,” newspapers gleefully reported, “asked the Senate if it could withdraw the list” when Kilian was indicted. The House Military Affairs Committee received so many letters protesting the results of the Lichfield trials that a form letter was prepared for committee members to reply to their angry constituents. “Please be assured,” the letter said, “that this inquiry will continue until the reduction to a minimum of injustices is accomplished.” This blithe assurance was repudiated when Kilian went to trial in the summer of 1946 in Bad Nauheim, Germany.

Kilian’s defense counsel maintained that the colonel knew nothing about any alleged mistreatment of prisoners.

“There must have been something wrong at Lichfield which was concealed from me,” Kilian said when he took the stand. “It looks like they have passed the ball to the old man.” His junior officers, he insisted, had acted without his knowledge or instructions. The defense argued that he was only “following orders”—the same philosophy that the international war crimes tribunal rejected when it was offered in defense of senior Nazi officials during the Nuremburg trials that were even then in session 150 miles away.

When Cubage was recalled as a prosecution witness in Kilian’s court-martial, he testified that during the trials of the enlisted guards he had “attended meetings in Colonel Kilian’s room in London, at which meetings the testimony to be given in the Smith trial was discussed. At these meetings Colonel Kilian said he hoped to obtain a mistrial.” If Cubage’s testimony was true, Kilian’s actions presented a clear case of a defendant attempting to interfere with witnesses, and Cubage was not the only one to make that assertion. As the prosecutor told the court: “We have in this case a situation without parallel to my knowledge to any trial before a military court. We have a high ranking officer, a full colonel of the regular army, contacting witnesses, bringing them to his rooms, instructing those witnesses as to their testimony, checking up on what the witnesses have testified to, and calling them back for criticism when the testimony does not agree with some prearranged idea of his own. If this were an ordinary court of justice I would ask for a bench warrant and have him placed in arrest immediately.” The court chose not to pursue the matter of witness tampering.

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

ments between members of the court as the legal proceedings careened ever closer to chaos. Some witnesses were rejected when it was shown that they were not at the depot during the period the investigation covered; other witnesses perjured themselves and then recanted; at one point the panel declared the defense counsel to be in contempt of court and then changed its mind; and the trial judge advocate, Captain Earl J. Carroll, made repeated official protests over what he described as attempts to intimidate or retaliate against enlisted soldiers who testified for the prosecution.

Presumably fearing retaliation, seven enlisted men confined at Lichfield refused to testify at the court-martial of a former guard, Staff Sergeant James M. Jones, shown here (center) with two members of his defense team.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Never one to avoid confrontation, Kilian took the stand in his own behalf. After four days of Kilian’s testimony, Carroll, the judge advocate, recommended that he should face additional charges of “contempt of court, interference with witnesses, and conspiracy to administer cruel and unusual punishments to prisoners in custody.” When the court rejected these charges, Carroll resigned in protest.

Adding to the procedural chaos, Colonel Buhl Moore, the president of the court, effected his own resignation from the court-martial panel by asking that his fitness be challenged for cause. The reason, he said, was “friction between himself and law members of the court.”

When Kilian’s court-martial concluded on August 29, 1946, the outcome echoed the earlier trials of his subordinate officers. He was convicted of permitting conditions that resulted in the mistreatment and degradation of American soldiers, but the panel acquitted him of having knowingly permitted the abuses at the Lichfield depot. His sentence: an official reprimand and a $500 fine.

The verdict infuriated almost everyone except Kilian’s superiors. “This wrist-slap satisfied no one but the Army’s brass hats, who were only too glad to see the whole unsavory mess over and done with,” the correspondent for Time magazine wrote. The editor of the Washington Post had an especially pointed rebuke. “Generals Yamashita and Homma were convicted,” he wrote, referring to the two Japanese commanders who had been executed following U.S. Army courts-martial earlier that year. “Is the principle of a commander’s responsibility for Japanese only?”

One person who wrote a letter to Congress expressed the outrage that many Americans surely felt over “the obvious travesty [of] justice of the disparity in sentences between enlisted men and officers, particularly Colonel Kilian.” A former officer wrote, “Sadism, brutality, and flagrant misuse of authority and responsibility has gone virtually unpunished, with such punishments as has been made apparently being in inverse ratio to the rank and measure of control involved.” To critics such as these, it was especially galling that Kilian was promoted to the permanent rank of full colonel a few months after his court-martial conviction.

This stark imbalance between punishments was echoed 58 years later when soldiers accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib faced military justice. Two senior officers received reprimands and a brigadier general was demoted to colonel. Eleven enlisted soldiers, however, were court-martialed and received sentences ranging from terms of imprisonment, dishonorable or bad conduct discharges, fines, and reduction in rank. For many soldiers, it confirmed the rank-and-file’s long-held cynical belief that military justice is far from fair. “Different strokes for different folks,” the old barracks saying went, and the punishments handed down in two different cases in two different prisons half a century apart seemed to bear it out. MHQ John A. Haymond is the author of Soldiers: A Global History of the Fighting Man, 1800–1945 (Stackpole Books, 2018) and The Infamous Dakota War Trials of 1862: Revenge, Military Law, and the Judgment of History (McFarland, 2016).

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EXPERIENCE

‘A MOST REMARKABLE CONFLICT’ On July 17, 1863, two weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg ended in defeat for Confederate general Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia, the Daily Richmond Examiner brought its readers an eyewitness account of events before, during, and after the battle. The Examiner, one of a handful of newspapers published in the capital of the Confederacy, clearly saw its firsthand narrative as a scoop, billing the story—an excerpt from a letter written by an unnamed officer in Lee’s army—as “the only connected, intelligent and intelligible account that has yet been given to the public of the movements of General Lee from his crossing of the Potomac to his return to Hagerstown.”

An unsigned editorial on the back page of the singlesheet newspaper, probably written by its executive editor, John M. Daniel, struck a pessimistic note. “The Confederacy has lost several thousand able officers & brave soldiers,” it said. “But war cannot be made without such losses.”

The advance of the Second corps crossed into Maryland on Thursday, June 18th, near Shepherdstown. [Major] General [Robert E.] Rodes had already crossed below Martinsburg, and was occupying Hagerstown. [Brigadier] General [Albert G.] Jenkins was at Chambersburg, and [Brigadier] General John D.] Imboden about Cumberland. The Second corps (excepting Rodes’ division) occupied the battlefield of Antietam the 20th, 21st and 22d of June, and marched beyond Hagerstown on the 23d.

The reception of these gallant victors of Winchester all through the lower valley was refreshing, and at Shepherdstown fair ladies crowded the streets, and welcomed the soldiers with flowers and smiles. Sharpsburg was black Union, but Hagerstown turned out wild with joy at our approach. On the 24th the corps pushed on through Greencastle to Chambersburg. I should say here that [Major General Jubal] Early bore off to Waynesboro and was at York when the rest occupied Carlisle. At Greencastle and Chambersburg the stores were taken possession of by the Quartermaster, the contents

“Sharpsburg was black Union, but Hagerstown turned out wild with joy at our approach.”

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seized, so far as they were useful to the army, (i.e. to the Quartermaster) and appropriated according to an accurate distribution by Chief Quartermasters and sub Quartermasters. A Major General got a hat, but as to the rest, hats, shoes, boots, calicoes, whiskey, for the most part, that great unfathomable sponge, the active Quartermaster’s Department got them.

At Shippensburg the track of the railroad was torn up and a bridge burned. The citizens, who turned out in large numbers to witness the passage of the rebels, were generally quiet.

Occasionally you found a spirited girl, or a spunky person.

But, if one fact was more remarkable than any other, it is this: That portion of Pennsylvania which our army occupied, was completely subjugated; very few having the courage to raise their heads. Foraging thrived. For a little Confederate note, and often for nothing, a soldier could get quantities of onions, apple butter, cow butter, ham, good Dutch loaves, cheese, and every delightful thing in the grand category of the productions of the great Cumberland Valley.

On Friday, 26th, we took up the line of march through Chambersburg on the Harrisburg road. The splendid band in the 4th Louisiana brigade, Colonel [Jessie M.] Williams, preceded the column, playing “Dixie” and the Marseillaise, whilst our red-cross banners flaunted proudly over the dark columns of our gallant troops. We passed through Shippensburg to the sound of martial music again, and went on to Carlisle. The troops were not allowed to plunder. Horses were taken and receipted for by authorized agents. So with cattle and flour. “Foraging” was tolerated, but the soldiers were expected to pay for their supplies. It was thought, and perhaps rightly, that licensed plundering would demoralize the army, and render it useless for great achievements. But this was occasionally carried to absurd lengths. We overheard an officer, with lachrymose countenance, deprecating the destruction of a cherry tree by some hungry rebels. The burning of rails was at first prohibited, but after a day or two it was generally permitted.

We sta[ye]d long enough at Carlisle to get what we wanted. Harrisburg was in a panic—and some of our engineer officers went to the banks of the Susquehanna and found them fortifying the enormous heights on the southern side. Early and Jenkins were at York and beyond, seeing after the bridges up as far as the river, all of which were destroyed.

On the 30th [Major General Edward] Johnson marched back

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Two weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg, a newspaper in Richmond, Virginia, published this eyewitness account of what had happened.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Alexander Gardner, who had previously worked for Mathew Brady, photographed the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. This image shows Confederate dead at the edge of Rose Woods on July 5.

from Carlisle to Fayetteville, leaving Rodes at Carlisle. On Wednesday, July 1st, [Lieutenant General] A. P. Hill marched from South Mountain to the neighborhood of Gettysburg, followed by Johnson. Early reached the same vicinity on the same day from York, and Rodes from Carlisle. [Major General George] Meade’s advance of three or four army corps disputed the occupation of the town, giving battle to the north and east of the town from 10 A.M. to about 5 P.M. The result was a glorious victory to the Confederates. The invincible and gallant Early, who ought to be a Lieutenant General, drove the force opposed to him for miles, and occupied the town. The 11th corps of Chancellorsville memory, gave themselves up by the thousands. [General John Brown] Gordon’s brigade made what is regarded a most brilliant charge.

It could but be successful without such men and such a leader. The Fayetteville road was “cleaned out” by Hill.— Rodes swept down the Carlisle road, and Early down the York turnpike. The loss of the Confederates in killed and wounded was probably 600. The Yankee loss in killed probably reached 400 and his wounded 2,000. We captured most of his wounded and 5,280 additional prisoners.

Gettysburg is in Adams county, Pennsylvania, some where near eight miles from the South Mountain, which is the

eastern boundary of the Cumberland Valley. It is a beautiful town of some 5,000 inhabitants, and the centre of the following roads: a road from Baltimore; a road from Frederick, both on the southern side of the town, and the three roads just mentioned; between these two former roads and about ¾ of a mile from the town were two tall hills, one wooded and detached, the other, the front of a range that swept backward to the South. The positions boldly commanded the town and vicinity, and Meade occupied them Wednesday, heavily intrenching during the night. On Thursday morning, [Lieutenant General Richard S.] Ewell’s corps lay beneath the first eminence and near the Baltimore road. A. P. Hill occupied a position to the west of the town and near it. [Lieutenant General James] Longstreet was not yet up. During the morning, occasional artillery and infantry skirmishing alone broke the silence that hung over the expectant hosts. The day was warm and beautiful. The enemy’s cavalry stretched up to the south of the York road, threatening our rear, but was closely watched by the indefatigable [Major General J. E. B.] Stuart, whose recent seven days and nights march from the vicinity of Washington was the most wonderful cavalry achievement of the war.

At last, Longstreet having passed to the south of A. P. Hill, opened at 4 P.M., followed by Hill and Ewell. Then

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ensued undoubtedly the fiercest cannonade of the war. This terrific fire lasted till night. About dark Ewell charged the position on the wooded hill. The enemy had several lines on this eminence and cannon in position, with abattis [sic] and planted sticks in rows to prevent our advance. The sides of the hill were rocky and precipitous to almost an inaccessible degree. Our lines, however, gallantly marched under a fearful fire of musket balls and grape. A partial advantage was gained by Johnson’s troops, and lost by accident. But it was beyond mortal endurance to stand before that terrific blast of shot, and the men were withdrawn, after suffering heavy loss. During the afternoon the other corps had attacked the positions on the south without success.

On Friday, July 8th, the battle was renewing early in the morning, and, with the exception of a lull from ten o’clock, A.M., to one o’clock, P.M., lasted all day. The Confederates did not succeed in holding any of the crests, although one or two were reached; and night again closed on the smokewrapped field. From 3½ to 5 P.M., General Stuart succeeded in driving back, very handsomely, the enemy’s cavalry threatening our rear. The fight was quite severe and loss unknown.

Thus ended the great battle of Gettysburg, the most remarkable conflict of the war. The loss of the enemy was probably 25,000 men—perhaps 30,000 during the three days. He was severely handled—for it is believed that he fell back with the greater portion of his force on Friday night, toward Boonsboro. What their papers say you know better than I. It is reported with us that they claim little or nothing, but I don’t believe it. When I turn from this to our own loss my heart sickens. It was frightful. The loss in general officers was remarkably great. I believe the following to be correct: Brigadier General [Richard B.] Garnett, killed; Major General [Isaac R.] Trimble, leg amputated and captured; Brigadier General J. R. Jones, severely wounded; Brigadier General [William E.] Jones, of the cavalry, captured; Brigadier General [James J. Archer, wounded and prisoner; Brigadier General [Lewis] Armistead, wounded and prisoner; Brigadier General [William] Barksdale, mortally wounded and left; Brigadier General [James L.] Kemper, killed; Brigadier General [Albert G.] Jenkins, slightly wounded.

The list of Colonels and other field officers lost is enormous. The field officers of the First Maryland battalion were severely wounded. All of the field officers of [Major General George] Pickett’s division, except the commander and one Lieutenant Colonel, are killed and wounded. This division was almost destroyed in one brilliant charge; and, as its gal-

“When I turn from this to our own loss my heart sickens. It was frightful.”

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lant commander looked over the pitiful remnants of his brave boys, he bowed his head and wept like a child.

All our wounded that could be transported were removed beyond the Potomac. Those severely wounded had to be left. The Confederate loss in killed, wounded and prisoners (of which there are few) must be twenty thousand.

All day long of July 4th our army lay in line of battle, in a new position overlooking the town. Scarcely a picket shot disturbed the day-long quiet. Meade was withdrawing, but we did not know it. Our trains were quietly moving back to Williamsport, and are now safely parked there, with the loss of but twenty vehicles, of various kinds, and teams!

This was brilliantly executed.

On the night of the 4th the army began quietly to fall back

by Fairfield towards Hagerstown. We marched slowly, for the whole army took one road. About 2 A.M., July 5, I halted with some men near a Confederate hospital, where I found several unburied dead—one noble form lying between two wounded men—and several other dead in the straw. They were North Carolinians—many severely wounded. All needed water and other attentions. One poor fellow lay there with his bowels out and some fingers off, in the last agonies, with no covering and no water. Another was delirious, and spoke sensibly on but one subject—he wanted water! water! which he drank with fierce thirst as I held his head. Not a nurse nor surgeon in all the building was left! All gone, cowardly gone. There these poor maimed men were left to wait for hours, nay, it might have been days, for some Yankee attention—poorly supplied when twenty-five thousand parched tongues demanded food and water in Yankee hospitals.

The march back to Hagerstown, some twenty-four miles, occupied three days! The army took one road most of the way, and marched quietly and with dignity back. No defeat to the Confederates was shown in that proud, invincible tread, that spirited and bold heart, that grieved but proud and fierce array of freemen. The morale of our army was utterly unaffected; but Meade dare not say so much, as he points to his terrible loss and his enforced retreat. One word here as to his greater loss. It may be said that the attacking army, especially when assailing such a position, must suffer more than the other. But the Yankees were crowded on their hills, and when our eighty cannon opened on them the slaughter was terrific. So when Johnson’s division attempted the crest, nearly every shot of our men told among their compact ranks.

We shall not cross the Potomac, I believe. Our army is yet numerous, and perfectly defiant. Witness even this fact: A few days ago the Yankees, with three pieces of cannon, attacked our park at Williamsport. Imboden, with his men, armed the teamsters and charged the enemy. The wagoners fought like devils and took two pieces of artillery, and the enemy fell back.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG

While on the Gettysburg battlefield, Gardner also photographed the badly mutilated corpse of a Confederate soldier (left) and dead Confederate soldiers in the “slaughter pen” at the foot of Little Round Top (right).

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

General Stuart (glorious, unconquerable Jeb) fought the Yankees yesterday morning, a few miles from Hagerstown, on the Boonsboro road, and drove them back, after a furious fight, gaining a very handsome victory.

The rear of our army was feebly attacked as far as South Mountain, eight miles from Gettysburg, on its retirement; but Meade has shown no disposition to trouble us with his main army.

The battle of Gettysburg was a most remarkable conflict. It is strange that [General Robert E.] Lee attacked Meade where he was, when he had it in his power to choose his own position and compel Meade to fight him. As far as we can see (which isn’t far) the battle as projected and executed on the 2d and 3d was a great military blunder. If Meade had been soundly defeated, as he would have been on even ground or when he had attacked our heights, his army could have been cut to pieces and dissipated before he could reach Baltimore or Washington. The Monocacy could be his only hope, and this was too far off. As it is, we may yet beat him. Most persons adhere to the notion that we shall cross the river, but I cannot, will not believe it. The proud army of Northern Virginia will terminate this bloody campaign within the halls of the Federal Capital.

We saw many a Pennsylvanian tired of the war. We met several Knights of the Gold[en] Circle [a proslavery secret society]. One intelligent farmer told me that “we ought to be unsuccessful in the war, unless we captured Abe Lincoln this trip, and that our advent in Pennsylvania was hailed with hearty joy by three million Northern Democrats.” Take this for what it is worth. There is truth somewhere in it.

You all complain of “respecting private property.” Such was the order from headquarters and attempted to be faithfully executed. But take your horse and follow the track of our army up the Cumberland Valley, thence to Gettysburg and thence to Hagerstown. You will find the route marked by the devastating trail—destroyed bridges, burnt fences, beat down wheat and rye fields, devoured clover fields, ransacked stores, horseless and cattleless farmers. At Gettysburg four houses were burnt, three large brick buildings during the battle of the 1st by the explosion of shell. The vicinity of the city is desolate and trampled and cut up—being, I believe, the most marked field of the war. There has been no tendency to outrage. Our forces have not plundered, except in unauthorized squads, and these were few. Order has been enforced as much as possible, and well for us—but still there is the necessary, inevitable trail, which a great army leaves in its own country.

Chambersburg or Carlisle should have been burnt by authority in retaliation for the ruthless destruction of Darien. [Union forces had burned the undefended Georgia town to the ground on June 11.] Such destruction does not demoralize an army—whilst it gives the foe a wholesome lesson by which we vastly profit. How long will our Government pursue this weak-kneed policy of supinely receiving the enemy’s cruelty and inhumanity and admitting it within the pale of civilized warfare by the sanction which this failure to retaliate inevitably carries with it.—Burn! but by authority. Destroy! but through official proclamation and always with reference to some desecrated home or ruined city that once adorned a sunny landscape in the South. Au revoir. MHQ

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BATTLE SCHEMES

TROUBLE BREWING

In 1915, as World War I ground to a stalemate along the Western Front, nearly 60,000 Australian soldiers were sent to fight in the Gallipoli campaign, an Anglo-French operation aimed at knocking Ottoman Turkey—an ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary—out of the war. Hoping to capitalize on the huge interest in the new (and little known) theater of war, Melbourne-based Robur Tea Company published this detailed “war map” of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles, offering to send a copy to anyone who mailed in four penny stamps.

In the end, the Gallipoli campaign, with 26,111 Australian casualties (including 8,141 deaths), was a disaster for the Allies. MHQ

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BEHIND THE LINES

A NEW KIND OF FIREPOWER

O

n August 18, 1863—a day that saw fighting in Virginia, Kentucky, and both Carolinas—President Abraham Lincoln stood in the Oval Office with Christopher Spencer, very carefully examining his guest’s repeating rifle. “Handling it as one familiar with firearms,” Spencer would later recall, “he requested me to take it apart to show [him] the ‘Inwardness of the thing.’” Intrigued, Lincoln invited the inventor to return the next day so that he could, as Spencer recalled, “see the thing shoot.”

At the appointed hour Spencer met the president, his son Robert, and a Navy Department officer at the White House.

The men walked to a spot near the unfinished Washington Monument, where the officer set up a target—a three-footlong pine board with a black spot for a bullseye. Spencer then handed Lincoln his loaded seven-shooter, and the president paced off a suitable distance. “Mr. Lincoln’s first shot was low,” Spencer later wrote, “but the next hit the bullseye, and the other five were close around it.” When it was the inventor’s turn, he bested the president by a bit. Lincoln, according to Spencer, said, “Well, you are younger than I am, have a better eye, and a steadier nerve.”

After another such shooting match the following day, Spencer felt certain that Lincoln would recommend his repeater to the U.S. Army’s Ordnance Department.

Lincoln invited Spencer to return the next day so that he could “see the thing shoot.”

Over his lifetime, Christopher Miner Spencer was awarded more than 40 U.S. patents for such diverse inventions as a silk-winding machine, a fully automatic turret lathe, and an automatic screw machine. In 1862, a year before his visit to the White House, he built a steam-powered carriage that he regularly drove to work until the authorities asked him to keep off the roads because it spooked the horses. He is best known, however, for the seven-shot repeating rifle that Lincoln tested. In the hands of Federal soldiers in the latter part of the Civil War, the .52 caliber Spencers spelled

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victory on many a hard-fought battlefield. Dubbed “horizontal shot towers” by the Confederate soldiers who first faced them in battle, Spencer’s lever-action seven-shooters were the war’s finest repeating weapons.

Born in 1833 in Manchester, Connecticut, Spencer acquired an enthusiasm for firearms from a grandfather who had been an armorer for the Continental Army. At age 14 Spencer began an apprenticeship at the Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company in Manchester, and in two years he became a full-time journeyman machinist. But he soon grew restless and drifted around for the next few years, making machine tools in Rochester, New York; repairing locomotives for the New York Central Railroad; and working as a machinist in Chicopee, Massachusetts.

Spencer also began using his skills as a machinist to repair damaged six-shooters at the Colt’s Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company in Hartford, Connecticut. It was there, at his oil-soaked workbench, that the idea for a repeating rifle was born. Several such weapons already existed, but Spencer, now 21, envisioned one that fired selfcontained metallic cartridges—an entirely new concept. In 1855 Spencer returned to his hometown and the Cheney Brothers silk mills, where in his off hours in the machine shop he could construct a working model of the rifle he envisioned. His first prototype was made of wood.

On March 6, 1860, Spencer was awarded a U.S. Patent (No. 27,393) for his “Magazine Gun.” The weapon featured numerous innovations. It fired copper-cased cartridges, seven of which were held in a spring-loaded tubular magazine in the weapon’s buttstock, which also protected them from damage. Because the cartridges were rim fire, there was no need to prime the rifle after loading it—an action required with muzzle-loading muskets. The Spencer’s lever action also afforded several advantages. When lowered with the hammer at half cock, the lever would eject the spent cartridge. Raising the lever—which doubled as a trigger guard—would push a new round into the barrel and completely seal off the breech. All that remained was to fully cock the hammer, aim, and pull the trigger.

Thanks to these innovations, Spencer’s rifle was extremely easy to load and fire—a trooper could easily fire all seven rounds in its magazine in just one minute. (Some

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: LILJENQUIST FAMILY COLLECTION OF CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHS (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS); WINDSOR HISTORICAL SOCIETY; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; GOOGLE PATENTS

Christopher Spencer’s seven-shot repeating rifle gave Union forces in the Civil War a fearsome edge against their Confederate enemies.

By Rick Britton

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: LILJENQUIST FAMILY COLLECTION OF CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHS (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS); WINDSOR HISTORICAL SOCIETY; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; GOOGLE PATENTS

Clockwise from top left: Two Union soldiers with Spencer carbines and Colt revolvers; Christopher Miner Spencer at age 28; Colonel John T. Wilder; detail from one of Spencer’s patents showing the spring-loaded magazine.

accounts claim up to twice that number of rounds.) The majority of soldiers in the Civil War were armed with muzzle-­loading weapons—the .58 caliber Springfield, and the .577 caliber Enfield being the most common—that could be loaded and fired, at best, three times per minute.

The Spencer’s rate of fire was thus two to potentially almost five times that of other shoulder arms used at the time.

The first Spencer repeating rifles were manufactured in 1861. Hindsight tells us that Northern armies completely

outfitted with the seven-shooter could have defeated the Confederacy in short order. It would be two years, however, before Spencers made their presence felt on Civil War battlefields. The holdup was the U.S. Army’s Ordnance Department, whose chief in 1861, 66-year-old Brigadier General James W. Ripley, delayed the purchase of repeating weapons because he believed that soldiers so armed would waste ammunition. To overcome this fogeyism, Spencer contacted army and navy brass directly. U.S. Navy captain

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THE SPENCER CARBINE

“The rebel lines begin to waver, and soon the enemy is in full retreat.”

The sharp crack of a Spencer repeater was first heard in combat on October 16, 1862, during a skirmish near Cumberland, Maryland. The rifle was fired by Sergeant Francis O. Lombard, 1st Massachusetts Cavalry, a former Smith & Wesson gunsmith and a friend of Christopher Spencer, who’d given him a handmade prototype of his gun.

At Hoover’s Gap, Tennessee, on June 24, 1863, Spencer’s seven-shooters played a decisive role. There, Colonel John T. Wilder’s famous “Lightning Brigade”—2,000 mounted infantrymen, all armed with Spencers they had purchased themselves—advanced ahead of the army, seized the gap through the Cumberland Mountains, and dug in to defend it against a much larger enemy force. When Confederates charged Wilder’s artillery, the fire from the Spencers caused them to reel. “Thinking to reach our battery before our guns can be reloaded,” recalled Colonel James Connolly, 123rd Illinois Mounted Infantry, the Confederates rallied and con-

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tinued on, when “their charging yell was answered by another terrible volley, and another and another without cessation,” until they were “literally cut to pieces.”

At Hunterstown, Pennsylvania, on July 2, 1863—while fighting raged at nearby Gettysburg—a line of 6th Michigan cavalrymen covered the withdrawal of Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer’s brigade. “The enemy attempted a charge in pursuit,” Captain James H. Kidd of the 6th wrote, “but the dismounted men…kept up such a fusillade with their Spencer [rifles]…that he was driven back in great confusion.” The following day, during a large-scale cavalry fight east of Gettysburg, Confederate major general J. E. B. Stuart tried to break into the rear of Union colonel Russell A. Alger’s 5th Michigan Cavalry. Armed with Spencer rifles, Kidd wrote, Alger’s men “forced their adversaries slowly but surely back, the gray line fighting well, and superior in numbers, but unable to withstand the storm of bullets.”

After Gettysburg, a Confederate officer was captured during a skirmish and taken to the rear. When he passed a line of his dead behind a stone wall he began to complain bitterly, saying, “Almost all are shot through the head,” implying that they had been murdered after surrendering.

Shown the Union troops’ Spencer repeaters, he marveled that more hadn’t been shot. One writer claimed that a Confederate soldier who had experienced the seemingly unrelenting fire from Spencer repeaters shouted out to a Union skirmish line: “Helloa Yanks, have you got them damned guns loaded to the muzzle again?” Southerners learned to fear the seven-shooters and were elated when they captured them. When they ran out of ammunition, however, the Spencers were useless, as the Confederacy was unable to manufacture the copper-cased cartridges the rifle required.

During the 1864 fighting in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, Union major general Philip Sheridan commanded about 20 regiments armed with Spencers, including the 37th Massachusetts Infantry. On September 19, at the Third Battle of Winchester, that unit was ordered to advance “with its 296 rifles and seven times that number of deadly shots,” according to James L. Bowen, the regiment’s historian. “One crashing volley followed the order to fire, supplemented by…a rapid succession of shots….The demoralization of the Confederate lines was speedy and complete.”

Brought back east to rejoin the Army of the Potomac, Sheridan’s Spencer-armed units greatly assisted in the annihilation of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. At Five Forks, Virginia, on April 1, 1865, the 1st Rhode Island cavalry was ordered to attack dismounted against a large Confederate force posted behind a fence. “The men unsling their carbines,” the unit’s chaplain wrote, “and, resting the butts on their hips, charge in solid ranks….We give them the contents of our seven-shooters….The rebel lines begin to waver, and soon the enemy is in full retreat.”

TOP: HERITAGE AUCTIONS; BOTTOM: INTERFOTO (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

(later admiral) John A. Dahlgren test-fired a Spencer in June 1861, the result of which was an order for 700 rifles. A U.S. Army test board under then-captain Alfred Pleasonton (who later commanded the Union cavalry at Gettysburg), gave it a favorable review after shooting it that November. President Lincoln’s recommendation in 1863 was icing on the cake. “After that,” Spencer said, “we had more orders than we could fill, from the War Department as well as the navy, for the rest of the war.”

All told, the Spencer Repeating Rifle Company, established in 1862, supplied some 106,000 of the seven-shooters for the Union war effort. Manufactured at the former Chickering & Sons piano factory in Boston, Spencers came in two basic models: a rifle, with a 30-inch barrel and a stud for attaching a sword bayonet, and a cavalry carbine, with a 20-inch barrel. During the war the Union army purchased 12,000 rifles, 94,000 carbines, and 58 million rounds of Spencer ammunition at a total cost of approximately $4.2 million.

The Spencer’s main competitor was the .44 caliber Henry rifle, the ancestor of the Winchester. Also lever action, its tubular magazine, beneath the barrel, held 16 rounds. But according to Brigadier General George D. Ramsay, who replaced Ripley as chief of the U.S. Army’s Ordnance Department, it was “expensive and too delicate for service in its present form.” Only about 1,700 Henry rifles were officially purchased for the army, but perhaps as many as 10,000 saw service in the war because many soldiers purchased their own, as they did with many other types of arms.

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TOP: HERITAGE AUCTIONS; BOTTOM: INTERFOTO (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

The Spencer rifle’s lever, when lowered with the hammer at half cock, ejected the spent cartridge. Raising the lever (which doubled as a trigger guard) pushed a new round into the barrel and sealed off the breech.

Five days later, at the Battle of Sayler’s Creek, the 37th Massachusetts Infantry helped smash the Confederate right rear. Once the regiment closed within range, “the Spencer rifle did the work for which it was intended,” Bowen wrote. “Volley followed volley with almost the rapidity of thought, tearing the opposing line into demoralized fragments.” Many of the enemy surrendered, including Major General Custis Lee, Robert E. Lee’s eldest son.

The surrender at Appomattox Court House, the end of the war in Virginia, came only three days later, on April 9.

Abraham Lincoln—the president who had test-fired and promoted Spencer’s seven-shooters—was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth the evening of April 14. Coincidentally, when Booth was cornered and killed 12 days later, he was armed with a Spencer repeating carbine.

At war’s end Spencer was left with a large inventory of weapons he couldn’t sell, and his company declared bankruptcy in 1868. The following year the Winchester Repeat-

ing Arms Company (the firm that by then was producing an improved version of the .44 caliber Henry) purchased the Spencer company’s assets. In 1869 Spencer founded Billings & Spencer Company in Hartford, Connecticut, which went on to manufacture machine tools and dropforged hand tools. In the 1880s another firearms company Spencer founded produced the world’s first commercially successful pump-action shotgun. When that company, too, went under, Francis Bannerman & Sons acquired Spencer’s patents and manufactured his shotgun into the early 1900s.

Spencer died in 1922 at age 88 and was buried in Windsor, Connecticut. An inveterate tinkerer and a brilliant inventor, his screw machine and other manufacturing innovations greatly advanced American industry. But Spencer is best remembered for his repeating rifle, which helped propel the North to victory in the Civil War. MHQ Rick Britton, a historian and cartographer, lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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WAR LIST

‘WAR IS...’

A through-the-ages compendium of definitions by poets, philosophers, historians, heads of state, military leaders, critics, writers, and others

War is men’s business.

Homer, ancient Greek poet, quoting Hector in The Iliad

It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.

Robert E. Lee (1807–1870), Confederate general in the

War is sweet to those who have no experience Civil War, during the Battle of Fredericksburg (1862) of it. But the experienced man trembles exceedingly War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: in his heart at its approach.

Pindar (ca. 518–438 bce), ancient Greek lyric poet, the decayed and degraded state of moral and quoted in Adagia (The Adages), by Dutch philosopher patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is and scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1500) worth a war, is much worse.

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), British philosopher and War is the trade of kings. economist, in Principles of Political Economy (1848) War, in its fairest form, implies a perpetual violation of humanity and justice.

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), British historian, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788)

War is the business of barbarians.

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), French statesman and military leader

War is merely the continuation of politics by other means.

Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), Prussian general and military theorist, in Vom Kriege (On War) (1832)

Unless a nation’s life faces peril, war is murder.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), Turkish field marshal and statesman, in a 1923 speech

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

James Madison (1751–1836), U.S. president, in “Political Observations” (1795)

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War is a brutal and fierce means of pacification; it means the suppression of resistance by the destruction or enslavement of the conquered.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881), Swiss philosopher and critic, in Journal Intime (1876)

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), British essayist and historian, as paraphrased by Emma Goldman in “Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty” (1911)

War is at best barbarism. Its glory is all moonshine.

It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation.

War is hell.

William Tecumseh Sherman (1820–1891), Union general during the Civil War, in an 1879 address to the graduating class at the Michigan Military Academy

War is a monster with snaky locks, and fiery bloodshot eyes, and harpy claws, passing over fair fields and leaving its footprints in burning villages,

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION; HULTON ARCHIVE; BILDARCHIV PREUSSISCHER KULTURBESITZ; MAISON DE GEORGES CLEMENCEAU; NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; BRITISH MUSEUM; IANDAGNALL COMPUTING (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

John Dryden (1631–1700), English poet, dramatist, and literary critic, in King Arthur (1691)

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Mill

Clausewitz

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION; HULTON ARCHIVE; BILDARCHIV PREUSSISCHER KULTURBESITZ; MAISON DE GEORGES CLEMENCEAU; NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; BRITISH MUSEUM; IANDAGNALL COMPUTING (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

Madison

Dryden

Homer

Bonaparte

Clemenceau

dying men, weeping wives and children, and needs to be seen by those who so eagerly clamour for it at every opportunity.

War is too important a matter to be left to the military.

War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

War is a contagion.

War is not two great armies meeting in the clash and frenzy of battle. War is a boy being carried on a stretcher, looking up at God’s blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to close; war is a woman carrying a child that has been injured by a

Moncure D. Conway (1832–1907), American abolitionist minister and reformer, in Platt’s Essays (1884)

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Russian writer, in War and Peace (1865–69)

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945), U.S. president, in the Quarantine Speech (1937)

War is peace.

George Orwell (1903–1955), British author, in 1984 (1949)

Georges Clemenceau (1841–1955), French statesman and journalist, as quoted in Soixante Anneés d’Histoire Française, by Georges Suarez (1932)

Thomas Mann (1875–1955), German writer, in This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of One Hundred Thoughtful Men and Women, by Edward R. Murrow (1952)

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‘WAR IS...’

A hospital alone shows what war is.

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970), German novelist, in All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.

Mao Zedong (1893–1976), Chinese Marxist theorist, soldier, military strategist, and stateman, in “On Protracted War” (1938)

Junger

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), American historian and social critic, in Technics and Civilization (1934)

Westmoreland

shell; war is spirited horses tied in burning buildings and waiting for death; war is the flower of a race, battered, hungry, bleeding, up to its knees in filthy water; war is an old woman burning a candle before the Mater Dolorosa for the son she has given.

Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958), American writer and war correspondent, in a report on World War I, Saturday Evening Post (1915)

War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.

William Faulkner (1897–1962), American novelist and short-story writer, in A Fable (1954)

War is like a fire….One man may start it, but it will spread all over.

T. H. White (1906–1964), British writer, in The Once and Future King (1958)

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

Winston Churchill (1874–1965), British statesman, army officer, and writer, in The Second World War, Volume 3: The Grand Alliance (1950)

All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.

John Steinbeck (1902–1968), American novelist and war correspondent, in Once There Was a War (1958)

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Robert Sherrod (1909–1994), American war correspondent and author, in a letter to Time Inc. publisher Henry Luce (1945)

I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships.

Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.

John Fowles (1926–2005), British novelist, in The Magus (1965)

War is fear cloaked in courage.

William Westmoreland (1914–2005), U.S. Army general, writing in McCall’s magazine (1966)

War is what happens when language fails.

Margaret Atwood (1939–), Canadian writer, in The Robber Bride (1993)

War is a bit like other people’s marriages; it’s hard enough to understand even when you know all the facts. When you only know one side of the story, you have no chance.

Hew Strachan (1945–), British military historian, in The First World War: Volume 1: To Arms (2001)

War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.

Sebastian Junger (1962–), American journalist, author, and filmmaker, in War (2010)

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE; SHAUN HIGSON/PORTRAITS (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

Atwood

It is true that war is a horribly fascinating thing, however much man may hate it.

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WEAPONS CHECK

BROWNING M1910

By Chris McNab

B A

C D

ROYAL ARMOURIES, LEEDS

E

A. Blowback mechanism. When the M1910 is fired, the rearward gas pressure on the cartridge case cycles the weapon, as the slide is not locked to the breech.

B. Sights. The weapon’s practical range is a little more than 30 yards, with the sights arranged in a groove cut along the top of the slide.

C. Barrel. With a barrel measuring just 3 1/2 inches, the pistol’s overall length is a mere 6 inches.

D. “Triple Safety.” A lever at the rear of the grip has to be depressed before the pistol will fire. There’s also a magazine safety, which blocks firing when the magazine is removed, and an external safety lever.

E. Magazine. The magazine holds either six rounds of .380 or seven rounds of .32 ammunition.

It’s not nearly as well known as the Colt M1911 or the Luger, yet the Browning M1910 fired one of the most consequential shots in history. On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb nationalist, used an M1910 to shoot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife Sophie, as their motorcade passed through Sarajevo, mortally wounding both.

This single act set the political and military dominoes falling, ultimately leading to World War I. Princip’s weapon of choice was cutting edge for the time, thanks to the ingenuity of John Moses Browning. Browning began designing magazine-fed “self-loading” (or semiautomatic) pistols around 1896 and found a willing manufacturer in Europe: the Belgian company Fabrique Nationale d’Armes de Guerre. The M1910 was a slender blowback handgun, chambered in both .380 ACP (9×17mm) and .32 ACP (7.65 mm Browning Short); all it took to switch

calibers was a barrel change. The barrel was the guide for the wraparound recoil spring, a design that contributed to the gun’s sleek profile, and the M1910 was striker fired, with no external hammer. The magazine held either six or seven rounds, depending on the caliber. (The Model 1910/22, introduced in 1922, featured a longer barrel, a larger grip frame, and two extra rounds in the magazine.)

The M1910 remained in production until 1983, with more than 700,000 going to military, police, and civilian markets. With its compact design, it was a perfect assassin’s weapon. The M1910 also claimed the lives of Paul Doumer, the president of France, in May 1932, and Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana, in September 1935. MHQ Chris McNab is a military historian based in the United Kingdom. His most recent book is U.S. Supercarrier: Operations Manual (Haynes Publishing, 2020).

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O

n June 25, 1942, barely six months after the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Donald M. Nelson traveled to Capitol Hill to appear before the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program.

Nelson, who for most of his adult life had been an executive of Sears, Roebuck & Company but now, by order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the chairman of the War Production Board, laid out his plans for getting the nation’s sluggish and sputtering war machine into high gear. The biggest problem, he told members of the committee, was overcoming a severe shortage of raw materials, especially steel plate and copper.

The shortage was so grave, Nelson said, that the federal government would need to take up to 1 million pounds of copper from the civilian sector—some of it by melting down such items as brass nameplates and ashtrays, bronze bank doors, and statues—and stockpile it for war production.

Then he ventured deeper into what would prove to be sensitive territory. “We may indeed find it necessary before we are through to go well beyond what is normally considered scrap,” he told members of the Senate committee. What did he have in mind? “In Europe, the process has gone further to include taking in such sources as metal fences and statuary, and other decorative metal work,” he explained. “Any one of us can walk down any street in Washington and see substantial quantities of metals that might thus be used.”

Statuary? Was he talking about the mammoth bronze equestrian statue of General Ulysses Grant at the west front of the U.S. Capitol, with its flanking groups of artillery and cavalry—the much-admired work that took sculptor Henry Merwin Shrady some 20 years to complete?

Or the bronze equestrian statues of Major General George B. McClellan and Major General George Henry Thomas?

Like many of the 17 other statues of Civil War heroes in the nation’s capital, the latter had been produced with melted-­ down bronze cannons captured from Confederate forces.

And the bronze statue of Admiral David G. Farragut? It had been cast from bronze propellers reclaimed from the USS Hartford, Farragut’s Civil War flagship.

Then there were the bronze equestrian statues of Brevet Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, who in his 53-year career in the U.S. Army served under every president from

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Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln, and of Andrew Jackson, the general who commanded U.S. forces in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, in the center of Lafayette Square, just north of the White House. And, also in Lafayette Square, bronze statues of four Revolutionary War patriots: Lafayette (for whom the park was named), Kościuszko, Rochambeau, and Steuben.

The notion that such monumental works of art could end up in a furnace as scrap metal was, to many Washingtonians, downright alarming. “Once you toss time-­ honored statues in the melting pot of metal salvage, they are gone forever,” one resident warned in a letter to the Washington Post. “We don’t yet have to resort to such tactics, which would be a tip-off to the enemy that we have to toss in the reserves of the last resort now—so let’s have a save our statuary drive.”

Just a few days later, the Post printed a letter from Edwin C. Barringer, the president of the Washington-based Institute of Scrap Iron and Steel, who implied that Nelson may have been misinformed. “Quite apart from any aesthetic viewpoint,” Barrington wrote, “the fact is that there is no shortage of most grades of nonferrous scrap, including aluminum and the bronze in which these statues are cast.”

Roosevelt himself entered the fray on August 7, when, during the 840th press conference of his presidency, a reporter asked him about Nelson’s proposal. “There are a great many statues around the country which would probably look better if they were turned into guns,” Roosevelt replied, drawing laughter from the reporters in the room.

“They could perhaps be replaced after the war with something—what shall I say?—a little more artistic.”

May Craig, a correspondent for the Gannett newspaper chain, then wryly pointed to another potential source of scrap metal. “Mr. President,” she said, “there are a lot of elegant brass doorknobs and mailboxes in this town.” FDR returned Craig’s volley by asking her, “Would you like the chairmanship of that committee?”

In the end, Washingtonians may have saved the statues by turning out in force for a series of scrap parades and rallies. (See this issue’s cover story, “Summer of ’42,” beginning on page 36.) Fortunately, Nelson’s meltdown plan ended up in a scrap heap of its own.

—Bill Hogan, Editor

NATIONAL PHOTO COMPANY COLLECTION (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

PEDAL TO THE METAL

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NATIONAL PHOTO COMPANY COLLECTION (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

A huge crowd gathers below the west front of the U.S. Capitol on April 27, 1922, for the unveiling of the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial.

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SUMMER OF ’42 It was wartime in the nation’s capital, and fear was everywhere.

Were Nazi submarines landing saboteurs on American beaches?

By Bill Hogan

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In 1942 beer was probably easier to buy in Washington than gasoline, as all the parked cars here show.

Note that the word “Defense” on the billboard has been changed to “War.”

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WASHINGTON IN WARTIME

Somewhere, the capital of the United States was just a pushpin on an Axis map.

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and saying something in German. “Shut up, you damn fool,” Dasch barked. But it was already too late.

After realizing that Cullen was unarmed, Dasch threatened him, suggested he “forget the whole thing,” and pushed a wad of bills on him as a bribe. With some hesitation, Cullen accepted the money, thinking it most important to get back to his Coast Guard station in one piece.

“Now look me in the eyes,” Dasch said. As Cullen stood eyeball to eyeball with this stranger—who kept repeating, “Would you recognize me if you saw me again?”—he had the distinct impression he was being hypnotized.

As Cullen backed away and disappeared through the mist, Dasch assured his men that everything was all right, and the group proceeded to bury everything they had brought ashore, down to the last cigarette butt. By the time Cullen and three other Coast Guard officers armed with .30-caliber rifles returned to Amagansett Beach, only fog remained.

Later that day, some 250 miles to the south, residents of Washington, D.C., were receiving detailed instructions for the city’s first full-scale, dusk-to-dawn blackout. The exercise had been planned so that the U.S. Army Air Forces’ I Interceptor Command could observe “the ability of this coastal area to conduct the protective measures considered essential in the event of an enemy attack.”

The darkened buildings and deserted streets of a citywide blackout promised Washington some sort of overdue calmness, even serenity. Forgotten, at least for the moment, would be the headaches and heartaches of the summer of 1942: the unending and overpowering influx of strangers, which led to overcrowding, rudeness, and despair; the shortages and rationing, which led to waiting lines, hoarding, and black markets; and the long hours, which led at first to short tempers and then only to exhaustion.

Nearly 70 years ago, Washington was transformed into a sprawling, brawling boomtown, wholly unlike the comfortable city its residents had known before. The nation’s capital, for better or worse, had been thrust suddenly into the role of nerve center for the entire Allied war effort, and it was feeling—at times reeling from—the strain.

In the darkest moments of that summer, Washingtonians were given to wondering whether the air-raid drills and blackouts might only be dress rehearsals for disaster.

Somewhere, as unsettling as it seemed to any who thought about it, the capital of the United States was just a pushpin on an Axis map.

On the other side of the world, Japanese forces now controlled the entire South Pacific, and their invasion of Australia was reported to be imminent. Close to home, the

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LEFT: THOMAS D. MCAVOY/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES); RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

A

dense curtain of fog gripped the coastline of Long Island, New York, in the early hours of June 13, 1942, parted here and there only by misty beams of moonlight. Amagansett Beach, a sheltered stretch of rolling dunes and tall grasses, was deserted, serene.

But from 500 or so yards out, a German submarine was disgorging a rubber lifeboat that would silently bring to shore George John Dasch, Ernest Peter Burger, Heinrich Heinck, and Richard Quirin, all top graduates of the Nazi sabotage school at Quenz Lake, just outside Berlin. They carried more than $90,000 in U.S. currency, flawlessly forged Social Security and Selective Service cards, and enough explosives to cripple American airplane production and other war-vital industries.

The surreptitious landing on Long Island was the opening episode of Operation Pastorius, a frighteningly ambitious sabotage plan devised by the Abwehr, the Nazi intelligence agency. Four days later, another German submarine would deposit a second team of four saboteurs in Ponte Vedra, Florida, just south of Jacksonville Beach. The two teams were to rendezvous later at Chicago’s Commodore Hotel.

It was less than six months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The German high command, though confident of its military might in Europe, deeply feared the sleeping American industrial giant, which was just now bringing assembly-line efficiency to war production. The German war machine had been buried by an American onslaught once before; Adolf Hitler was determined not to let it happen again.

Now, with the first saboteurs safely landed, members of the submarine crew reeled in a tow rope attached to the collapsible lifeboat. Heinck and Quirin sat on the beach, calmly puffing on German cigarettes and sipping from a bottle of brandy. Dasch, the team leader, heard an unfamiliar voice call out and turned to find himself on the receiving end of a flashlight beam.

Dasch walked directly toward its source, confronting 21-year-old John Cullen, a second-class Coast Guardsman assigned that night to patrol the beachfront. Cullen, of course, wanted to know who these men were and what they were doing; Dasch gamely replied that they were Southampton fisherman run aground. At that moment, however, Burger emerged through the fog, dragging a bag

LEFT: THOMAS D. MCAVOY/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES); RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

From left: Prefab office buildings go up on the grounds of the Washington Monument; photographer Gordon Parks made his own version of “American Gothic” with Emma Watson, a charwoman at the Office of War Information.

relentless German U-boats, prowling East Coast shipping lanes in wolf packs, had sent more than 200 Allied vessels to the bottom of the sea, bringing transatlantic supply efforts to a virtual standstill. At times, American military preparedness—and, for that matter, any comprehensive planning for civilian defense—seemed pitifully short of what was needed.

The nation’s newspapers carried accounts of new draftees being trained with broomsticks and eggs instead of guns and grenades. In Washington, the soldiers guarding government buildings and sentries looking out over the Potomac River had World War I hand-me-downs: doughboy helmets and Springfield rifles. Some of the antiaircraft batteries silhouetted at night atop Washington’s meager skyline were manned by wooden mannequins, a fact that Washington’s jittery populace surely wouldn’t have found reassuring.

If any Washingtonians had been tempted to consider the city’s first blackout as only a novelty, the events of the following weekend would be sobering. Even with gasoline rationing, thousands managed to make it to the beaches of Maryland and Virginia in search of relief from the searing summer sun. Those who went down to Virginia Beach got more than they bargained for. Shortly after midday, they heard deep rumblings merge into an awful, almost deafening roar. Then came the numbing shock waves from backto-back explosions, and the beachgoers watched in horror as flames engulfed two merchant ships just a few hundred yards away. One, totally crippled, sank out of sight.

As the summer of 1942 settled in, all eyes turned to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But even his reso-

nant and reassuring voice could not completely calm the nation’s rattled nerves or those of its capital.

It was wartime in Washington. Fueled by fear, rumors swept across the city with startling speed—rumors, even, that Nazi submarines were landing saboteurs and spies on American beaches.

There had been a time, after the shock and anguish of Pearl Harbor had faded like a bad dream, when the newness and excitement of the war galvanized the nation’s capital. The influx of new residents—with their peculiar accents and appearances, manners and morals—injected a refreshing dose of exuberance into a stodgy, somewhat Southern, city.

Out of Washington’s jukeboxes wafted tunes like “Goodbye, Mama, I’m Off to Yokohama” and “You’re a Sap, Mister Jap,” and crowds at public gatherings spontaneously broke into choruses of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “God Bless America.” Sugar rationing had begun in May, but it was a tolerable annoyance in the beginning, a rollup-the-sleeves sacrifice; besides, most people who could afford it hoarded huge bags of the stuff.

People joked about the housing crunch and Washington’s willing women and the burgeoning bureaucracy. The War Production Board was one of the prime targets of the snickering: it had, for example, something called the Biscuit, Cracker, and Pretzel Subcommittee of the Baking Industry of the Division of Industry Operations (the BCPSBIDIOWPB), which stumbled on the remarkable discovery that one byproduct of the cracker-making process—crumbs—would actually thicken canned soups.

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All this and plenty more was needed for the nation’s nerve center, but Washington was also being transformed into a world capital. The British, for example, maintained almost a shadow government in the city, with some 5,000 diplomats, soldiers, and civilians. When the British Embassy’s contingent outgrew two new annexes on Massachusetts Avenue, it was split up and moved into a big apartment building and the entire top floor of the Willard Hotel.

In this respect, the British were lucky: No one else in Washington seemed to be able to find a hotel room. The thousands of people needing a place to sleep and shower as they looked for permanent lodging had depleted the pool of available rooms. At the time of the 1940 census, Washington had ranked 11th in population among American cities; by 1942, the massive invasion of government job seekers, influence peddlers, and assorted hangers-on had bumped the city into eighth place.

The dingiest boarding houses in and around the nation’s capital—even those with exacting admission standards and exorbitant rates—had no trouble finding tenants. Newly arrived government workers queued up in long lines to look at vacant rooms and apartments; many soon discovered, however, that palm-greasing was more effective than persistence. Some families were forced to ship their children off to relatives in other cities because they could find no affordable housing in Washington— even back then, large homes in certain neighborhoods were fetching $1,000 or more a month.

Nearly all the hotels in and around Washington were pushed to the breaking point. After hours, they set up cots in their anterooms, parlors, and even restaurants. Some hotels, alarmed at the number of guests who were staying for unusually long stretches, placed three- or five-day limits on occupancy. But even these restrictions accomplished little: Patrons simply shuffled around town in a kind of musical-chairs routine, accompanied by their luggage-­laden bellboys.

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FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (8)

Old-line Washingtonians, of course, grumbled that the city was going to hell in a hand-basket. They were forced to suffer the indignities of waiting in line alongside total strangers and were treated as brusquely as everyone else in the city’s eateries—no matter how expensive or exclusive— where the unwritten rule was Eat Quickly, Pay Up, and Get Out. The feeblest protest would invariably earn the standard rejoinder—“Don’t you know there’s a war on?”—an insultingly trite indecency to which there could be no intelligent response.

Wartime, in short, didn’t gently tiptoe up to Washington. The city was rudely jolted from its normal state of somnolence by a cacophony of construction and congestion. In earlier summers, the nation’s capital would have been just emptying out; now, as the federal government was being converted into a bureaucracy at breakneck speed, it was furiously filling up. Soon there would be too many people working too hard and living too close together.

For probably the first time in Washington’s history, government simply could not keep up with itself. The Pentagon—by any measure a mammoth edifice—had been built from the bottom up in just eight and a half months. Inside, more than 35,000 workers walked through 17½ miles of corridors and drank 25,000 cups of coffee a day. It was ballyhooed as the world’s biggest office building, but it was not big enough. Uncle Sam commandeered office buildings and downtown apartment houses at a rapid clip—one count put the number at 189—booting out residents, who had nowhere else to go.

The picture-postcard parts of Washington, around the Mall and the monuments, soon seemed like some kind of Downtown Dogpatch, as massive work crews threw up huge, prefabricated office buildings. They were quickly christened “temps” or “tempos,” shorthand for temporary.

It was an eye-opening contrast in architectural aesthetics: Next to majestic palaces of gleaming white marble were barracks-like boxes of mouse-colored asbestos siding.

LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES)

From left: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with military leaders at his side, reviews the 1942 Memorial Day Parade in Washington, D.C.; commuters, servicemen, and other travelers jam the concourse of Washington’s Union Station.

WASHINGTON IN WARTIME

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (8)

LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES)

The city’s transportation system nearly cracked under the pressure. The streetcars were jammed beyond capacity, even after all the seats were ripped out to allow passengers to stand shoulder to shoulder, swaying and sweating.

Washington’s fleet of taxicabs was shrinking—the war effort had ushered in labor and gasoline shortages—and a force of under 7,000 struggled to serve a metropolitan-area population of more than 1 million. Fare sharing became commonplace, as did another form of transportation previously rare in urban areas: hitchhiking.

But the city’s cabbies, as could have been expected, managed to keep everything in perspective. Washington, one of them said, was “the greatest goddamn insane asylum of the universe.”

No place in Washington better exemplified the city’s new pressure-cooker pastiche than cavernous Union Station, once a pleasant enough place, but now a roiling sea of humanity. People pushed and pulled, yanked and yelled, in one big blur of motion and sound. Many seemed in too much of a hurry to get somewhere; others simply gazed through the gates at those lucky enough to have a ticket out of Washington.

Military uniforms—many of them from distant parts of the globe—turned the station into an ever-changing kaleidoscope as soldiers and sailors passed through the major North–South railroad hub on the East Coast. Scalpers methodically worked the long lines at ticket windows, selling black-market Pullman reservations at steep markups and staying on the lookout for the eagle-eyed gumshoes from the Office of Price Administration.

Businessmen heading into town in search of a lucrative defense contract (or a piece of one) were well represented in the typical train-station crowd too. They would soon find themselves dealing with a new breed of Washington wheeler-dealer: the “five-percenters,” so named for their standard cut of a government contract. (Some, however, still preferred to call them lobbyists.) Most of the smalltown businessmen went home with nothing to show for their entrepreneurial excursions but unbridled contempt for the capital. “Washington’s a funny town,” one said. “It’s got scores of hotels, and you can’t get a room. It’s got five thousand restaurants, and you can’t get a meal. It’s got fifty thousand politicians, and nobody will do anything for you.

I’m going home.”

Then there were those flowing into Washington in search of a home, or at least a job. They would keep the gears of government running smoothly and process the most precious commodity in the nation’s capital—paper.

Civil Service recruiters had fanned out through the nation in search of typists, stenographers, file clerks, switchboard operators, transcribers, mail sorters, and so on. By war’s

The Nazi saboteurs (from top row, left to right): Ernest Peter Burger, George John Dasch, Heinrich Heinck, Edward John Kerling, Richard Quirin, Herbert Haupt, Hermann Otto Neubauer, and Werner Thiel. All eight men were German residents who had lived in the United States; Burger and Haupt were American citizens.

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Dasch spelled out the details of the sabotage plan: names, dates, places, times, targets.

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the-keyhole problem. Automobiles, which afforded a modicum of privacy, were not supposed to be used for pleasure driving (gasoline was rationed and hard to find)—or, presumably, pleasure parking.

As a result of all this, Washington-area parks enjoyed a new surge in popularity, especially in the evening hours.

Wooded tracts like Rock Creek Park were a favorite, though strangers out for a nighttime stroll posed obvious risks to couples not wanting to be disturbed or discovered.

Even the grounds near Arlington National Cemetery were a popular locale for liaisons. Did shame, asked some Washingtonians, know no bounds?

Parents, with some justification, sought to insulate their older children from this parade of promiscuity, lest they be drawn into it. A major issue of public debate, in fact, was the matter of whether brothels near military bases ought to be legalized and supervised. “What substitute do we offer for prostitution?” asked naval surgeon Winfield Pugh Scott. “Like it or not, somebody’s daughter.”

And from Captain Rhoda Milliken, the chief of the Women’s Bureau of the Metropolitan Police Department, came a warning in early June to parents all over the nation.

“If your daughter is emotionally unstable, keep her away from Washington,” she said. “Parents who have not bothered to instill character and responsibility in their daughters are courting trouble by letting them come here.”

Among the thousands of people elbowing their way through the crush in Union Station at around 7 p.m. on June 18, 1942, was George John Dasch. The day before, his hotel in New York had managed to get him a room at The Mayflower in Washington, where he was now headed to try to reach J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI. Sometime during the last few days, for reasons not entirely clear, he had decided that the Nazi sabotage plan should be terminated.

Hoover, as it turned out, was in New York, but Dasch was able to get through to FBI agent Duane L. Traynor the next morning, who hastily arranged for him to be brought to FBI headquarters. Over the next few days, Dasch spelled out the Abwehr’s plan in detail—names, dates, places, times, targets—the logistics that had been drilled into him at Quenz Lake.

The prime targets of the two-year Nazi sabotage plan included hydroelectric facilities at Niagara Falls; three of the nation’s major aluminum plants; bridges, reservoirs, and canals; and the legendary horseshoe bend of the Pennsylvania Railroad at Altoona, the destruction of which would have stymied the state’s anthracite coal industry.

And to undermine American morale, already sagging, the saboteurs were instructed to place time bombs in lockers at major railroad terminals and in department stores and other crowded places.

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CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: MYRON DAVIS, THOMAS D. MCAVOY, MARIE HANSEN (LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES, 3)

end, some 280,000 would come to town, three-quarters of them women (average age, 20).

Lured to the seat of government by high wages—and, fumed one congressman, promises of “plenty of dates” from stories in their hometown newspapers—most found it difficult to make ends meet in Washington. So many of these “14-40 girls” (their annual government salary was $1,440) flooded into the city that the federal government had to build miniature towns of dormitories and apartments. Among other things, they pushed D.C.’s marriage rate skyward and inspired a genuine bonanza for local jewelers, who happily reported up to 300 percent increases in wedding ring sales.

Union Station also had its share of “undesirables.”

Bookies, numbers runners, prostitutes, and pickpockets hung around the shadowy areas of the domed concourse or milled around outside as if they had something to do. But at least they were professionals in their respective trades.

The amateurs were the “khaki-whackies” or “V-girls,” teenagers spellbound by the mystique of uniforms. They flitted and flirted about in search of conversations with military men—all in the hope that it might lead to a movie, a drink, a trip to the Glen Echo Amusement Park, or some other, more powerful, relief for loneliness.

The V-girls sported a standard uniform of their own: Sloppy Joe sweaters, bobby socks and saddle shoes, and neon-­ red lipstick. Such was their reputation that other teenagers, with more wholesome notions of recreation, avoided any semblance of the getup for fear they might be pegged by young servicemen as easy marks.

Washington, like most major cities during the war, struggled to understand its younger generation’s declaration of independence. “By the time we’ve reached the stage when our parents permit us to wander this far away from the family fireside we should be able to order our lives as we wish,” one of the city’s 14-40 girls wrote in a newspaper essay on the miserable life in boarding houses. “By this time most of us have decided whether we are going to be good little girls or naughty little girls—and we shall continue to be good little girls or naughty little girls whether or not there is an eye at the keyhole.”

For those young people gripped by passion, and perhaps emboldened by drink, there was often the vexing question of where to “do it.” Hotels, of course, were almost always out of the question because of the citywide room shortage. Boarding houses presented the irritating eye-at-

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: MYRON DAVIS, THOMAS D. MCAVOY, MARIE HANSEN (LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES, 3)

Clockwise from left: Job hunters—nearly all of them women—file applications for government positions; trucks in a “Salvage for Victory” parade pass by the U.S. Capitol; a crowd gathers for a war bond rally in Washington, D.C.

The Abwehr’s industrial sabotage experts had equipped their eight trainees with compact arsenals of destruction, including, among other items, bombs built to resemble chunks of coal and abrasives designed to ruin railroad engines. It had also devised fountain pens with powerful incendiary compounds hidden inside.

It was difficult for Dasch to remember all the details, but the Abwehr had even provided for that eventuality: They were written in invisible ink on several pocket handkerchiefs, which Dasch handed over to the federal agents.

The FBI began rounding up the unusual suspects.

By the time FBI Director Hoover made the incredible disclosure to the nation’s press on June 28, five of the other Nazi saboteurs had already been arrested, and the remaining two were under surveillance. Dasch, at 39, was the oldest; 22-year-old Herman Haupt, an American citizen, was the youngest. Amid frenzied cries for summary execution, all were brought to the District of Columbia Jail near the southeast corner of Washington, where a second-floor wing of cells had been cleared for them.

Justice, or some version of it, would be swift. A 20-by100-foot makeshift courtroom was under construction in the Justice Department building, so that a rare military

trial (rare because it was not a court-martial) could begin only four days later.

The entire trial was to be shrouded in secrecy and security, only fueling rumors and speculation as to what went on behind the closed doors of the courtroom. It was widely assumed from the beginning that the death penalty, at least for most of the saboteurs, was a foregone conclusion. Reporters assigned to cover the trial managed to find a few inside sources, but their stories mainly focused on descriptions of witnesses heading in and out of the special chamber. On one occasion, reporters were allowed into the courtroom for 15 minutes; later that day, Washingtonians could read graphic portraits of how the saboteurs had fidgeted in their seats.

As the trial of the eight Nazis pushed grimly through July 1942, its grasp on the attention of Washington was momentarily loosened by an episode of equal drama. Two years earlier, a mysterious sniper had terrorized the city’s Black community with a string of nighttime shootings.

Four Black people were killed, including 17-year-old Hyland McClaine, gunned down as he walked along Rock Creek Parkway near Virginia Avenue, N.W. John Eugene Eklund, a former college student now in his mid-20s, had been sentenced to death for McClaine’s slaying. But

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The government asked that the saboteurs be executed by hanging or firing squad.

Washington did not worry much about justice in the summer of ’42, or at least about equal justice. The city’s Southern roots still ran deep. Although Black people constituted more than one-quarter of Washington’s population, the highest such proportion among the nation’s major cities, they were rarely treated as more than second-class citizens— even by those who were much more recent emigrants.

Many of Washington’s Black people lived in the notorious “alley houses.” Life in the alleys was so vile, so squalid,

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that there had been riots in earlier parts of Washington’s history. But little had been done to improve conditions— several families still crowded into single rooms, sanitation was virtually nonexistent, and most were helpless against the epidemics that swept swiftly through the streets.

Largely because of Washington’s awful alleys, the city’s death rate from tuberculosis was the highest in the nation.

The boomtown bureaucracy should have been expected to help lift many of Washington’s Black people out of poverty, but it did not work out that way. In 1941, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Pullman Porters, threatened a massive march on the nation’s capital to protest discrimination against Black people in defense industries—one survey showed that more than half of the nation’s defense contractors closed their doors completely to them. The Fair Employment Practices Commission, created by President Roosevelt to address such discrimination, was given legal authority only to investigate complaints, not to resolve them.

There were other injustices and incongruities. The helpwanted and housing ads in Washington’s two major newspapers often included racial restrictions. Even if the city’s hotels had been empty, Black people would not have been able to book a room. The armed forces were segregated, and in the military parades through Washington streets, Black regiments marched near the trailing end of the procession.

And there would be demonstrations against the Capital Transit Company because it refused to hire Black people as conductors and motormen, fearing that its White employees would quit. Moreover, when the streetcars crossed the District line into Virginia, any Black passengers sitting in front had to move to the back.

And even in the backyard of the U.S. Congress, Black and White “14-40 girls” would work side by side in government office buildings during the day, only to return to segregated housing at night.

By July 20, the government had wrapped up its case against the eight Nazi saboteurs, asking that they be executed by hanging or firing squad. During the 11 days of secret hearings, few details of the case against them leaked out, but there were enough to provide grist for lunch-counter chitchat. As some Washingtonians went about their business, they caught fleeting glimpses of a caravan of armored cars, prison vans, and motorcycle outriders speeding through the streets, carrying the eight Germans back and forth from jail.

To expedite the resolution of the government’s case, the U.S. Supreme Court convened in a rare special session on July 29 to decide whether the military commission trial was constitutional and whether President Roosevelt was empowered to deny the defendants a hearing in civil court.

A line began forming outside the Supreme Court building

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FROM LEFT: BETTMAN, HULTON DEUTSCH (GETTY IMAGES, 2)

Eklund had been granted several stays of execution. And after one of the prosecution witnesses admitted he had perjured himself, Eklund won a new trial.

The jury in his second trial had deadlocked, so Eklund was being returned to jail—the same jail holding the Nazi saboteurs. As two deputy marshals opened the doors to the van in which he had been transported to and from District Court, Eklund, still handcuffed, lunged past them. It was 10:20 p.m., the city was in the middle of a blinding July rainstorm, and the marshals lost sight of Eklund within moments after he bolted away. No shots were fired, and Eklund did not care to look back.

The manhunt that followed was said to be the most intensive since John Wilkes Booth escaped after shooting President Abraham Lincoln. Every available Washington policeman, plus a special team of 50 soldiers, scoured the swampland bordering the Anacostia River. Four boatloads of harbor police patrolled the shore, and Coast Guard boats plowed the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers in case Eklund tried to swim away.

Two days later, even as the Potomac was being dragged for his body, Eklund was arrested. He was walking nonchalantly along Peabody Street, N.W., between 7th and 8th Streets, somehow free of the handcuffs he was wearing at the time of his escape.

Eklund later said he had panicked as he was brought back to District Jail. “It was a dark night and I thought they were trying to put me in the electric chair,” he said. “I hadn’t planned to try to escape, but when I saw the rain and how dark it was, I lunged past the deputies and ran.” The day after his capture, the jury’s verdict was unsealed: guilty of second-degree murder, with a maximum possible sentence of 15 years to life imprisonment.

Eklund was probably fortunate. If it had been the other way around—a Black man convicted of gunning down a white youth—even a lifetime sentence would have been decried as too lenient.

XXXXXXXXXX

FROM LEFT: BETTMAN, HULTON DEUTSCH (GETTY IMAGES, 2)

From left: Four of the Nazi defendants at their 1942 trial, separated by an unidentified army officer (in light suit); soldiers guard ambulances carrying the bodies of the six executed Nazi saboteurs from the District of Columbia Jail.

at 9 in the morning, and at noon, 300 spectators were led into the chamber. But as soon as word came that the eight defendants would not appear, most spectators left.

The Supreme Court cleared Roosevelt’s path, and he moved swiftly. Dasch and Burger, for cooperating with the prosecution, were spared from the death penalty by presidential commutation. (Dasch got 30 years at hard labor, Burger life imprisonment.) Roosevelt was determined to keep crowds away from the jail by clamping a tight lid on his plans, but a grisly death watch began nonetheless.

At one point, four soldiers—three American and one British—offered “to save the government some money on electricity” by serving as a firing squad. Reporters and photographers traded shifts outside the jail to watch for dimming lights, which was said to be a telltale sign of an impending execution.

On August 9, FDR’s orders were carried out with precision. The six Germans were served a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast at 7 a.m. At half past the hour, they were informed one by one that the president had ordered their executions. Each reacted with complete equanimity. At one minute past noon—as an air-raid siren masked the sound of drizzling rain outside—Herman Haupt was strapped into the electric chair; by four minutes past 1, a team of four professional executioners had completed its work.

Later that day, the six bodies would be taken out to a potter’s field at Blue Plains, where they would be buried in unmarked graves.

The summer of 1942 had arrived on Washington’s doorstep with a military parade, the first since U.S. entry into World War II. In earlier years, Memorial Day celebrations would bring whoops and yells, whistles and applause, cheering of all kinds. This time, however, it was strangely silent. Few of

the more than 100,000 spectators along the parade route even talked to one another. The grim reality of wartime seemed to have sunk in, to have stunned them just a bit. At times, the rhythmic thudding of military boots against pavement was all that could be heard, with the occasional punctuation of a corporal’s “hep, hep.”

And as the summer drew to a close, it would be much the same. Unlike the Labor Days of earlier and happier times, there were no speeches, no rallies, no great picnic crowds. There was no holiday, really, because Washington had accepted the normality of wartime. No one knew how long the war would last, but it was at least clear that Washington and the rest of the nation were in for the long haul.

There were some signs of hope, even of happiness. More than 16,000 people had crammed into Griffith Stadium for a huge salvage rally heavily laced with patriotism. They brought with them more than 30 tons of scrap rubber and metal—the admission “tickets”—and laughed with Jimmy Cagney and sang with Gene Autry.

While conditions would get worse—rationing would reach deeper into every Washington household—by the end of the summer, most who lived in the city had finally adjusted to the annoyances and figured it made sense to do the best they could under the circumstances.

For better or worse, the wartime summer of 1942 had ended Washington’s era of innocence. Before the war, Washington had been a somewhat sleepy, Southern town that frowned on unescorted women walking down the street. It had considered itself invulnerable, its manners invariable, and its daughters inviolable.

Now, with the passing of the summer of 1942, all that had changed. And Washington would never be the same again. MHQ Bill Hogan is the editor of MHQ.

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CRAPSHOOT IN CASSINO In 1944 a soon-to-befamous photographer wrote of his harrowing experiences in one of World War II’s longest and bloodiest battles.

By George Aarons

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS

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An official photographer for the U.S. Army reconstructed this scene of Allied infantrymen clearing buildings in Cassino, Italy, in 1944.

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BATTLE OF MONTE CASSINO

They gave me a Tommy bowler and a leather jerkin and made me take off my combat suit.

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Stewart—relaxing at a bar in full formal wear on New Year’s Eve. He shot Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall at their home on Christmas Eve; Katharine Hepburn driving along the waterfront at Montego Bay, Jamaica; President John F. Kennedy with First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy at the White House; and surrealist painter Salvador Dalí at a ball in New York City and at the Ritz in Madrid.

Aarons died in 2006 at age 89 in Montrose, New York.

Once, when asked how he came to travel the world on assignment for such magazines as Life, Vogue, Town & Country, and Holiday, photographing the rich and the famous in opulent settings, he replied, “I felt I owed myself some easy, luxurious living to make up for the years I had spent sleeping on the ground in the mud, being shot at, and being bombed.”

Today it is largely forgotten that during World War II, Aarons also wrote some dramatic stories for Yank magazine, including the following account of the Battle of Monte Cassino, which originally appeared as “Cameraman in Cassino” in its May 12, 1944, issue. Sadly, it isn’t clear what happened to Aarons’s remarkable photographs of the battle, seven of which accompanied his story.

WITH THE FIFTH ARMY IN ITALY—They gave me a Tommy bowler and a leather jerkin and made me take off my combat suit. Otherwise, they said, the British snipers might shoot at my American helmet because it looked like the German one. The captain briefed us, explaining that our load would be rations and barbed wire. He gave us the password and checked to see if everyone knew the rendezvous at the edge of town.

There were 11 in our party: eight of the men carrying rations, the captain, another man, and myself carrying wire. The moon had come up by this time, bringing the slopes of Monte Cassino out of the darkness.

The captain, the wireman, and I started off in a jeep, sitting all three in the front; the back was loaded with the five reels of barbed wire. The windshield was down, so I got the full benefit of the cold night air. It seemed as if we were the only mechanized travel. Soon we began to pass long, slow lines of mules, heavily laden and led by soldiers. The mule lines turned and wound with the road into the valley.

The soldiers leading them were evidently of several nationalities, because whenever our jeep turned a corner and came up unexpectedly on the rear of a column, we heard voices cry out warnings in French and English and sometimes in Italian.

When the mule trains became scarcer, we caught up with jeeps pulling loaded trailers. Occasionally we passed companies of Infantry replacements moving up.

TOP: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS; BOTTOM: MONDADORI PORTFOLIO (GETTY IMAGES)

George Aarons was born to Yiddish-speaking parents in New York City in 1916, but in later years he called himself “a simple farm boy,” obscuring some of the unpleasant circumstances of his childhood. His father was a phantom figure in his life, and as a boy he was passed around among relatives after his mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital. His grandparents gave him his first camera when he came to live with them on their New Hampshire farm.

In 1935 Aarons enlisted in the U.S. Army at age 18. He talked his way into a job as a “hypo dipper”—processing photographic prints in a darkroom—and before long earned an assignment to work as a photographer at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. There, he met, and apparently charmed, Hollywood director Frank Capra, who was shooting scenes for Prelude to War, the first of his propaganda films for the Office of War Information.

Capra recruited him for Yank magazine, the weekly spinoff of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, and soon Aarons, attached to the 8th Infantry Division, was headed overseas on a Pan Am Clipper.

When Aarons arrived in London, Yank issued him a Speed Graphic camera and sent him to cover the North African campaign. Almost immediately Aarons ditched the unwieldy press camera (“How can you even think of using it in a war?” he asked) in favor of a much smaller 35mm Leica. For three years, Leica in hand, he braved battlefields in North Africa and Europe. In Italy he recorded the brutal fighting at Monte Cassino, and he was wounded during the invasion of Anzio when the Germans blew up a dock along the beachhead. Aarons reached Rome in time to see it fall to the Allies, but by then he’d had his fill of war.

“After you’ve seen a concentration camp,” he explained, “you really don’t want to see any more bad things.”

After the war Aarons headed for Hollywood—“the dream capital of the world,” he called it—and began photographing movie stars and other celebrities as a freelancer for Life magazine. But when Life asked Aarons—then going by his nickname, Slim—to cover the Korean War, he declined, saying, “I’ll only do a beach if it has a blonde on it.”

Throughout the 1950s and beyond, Aarons would make a lucrative career out of what he famously called “photographing attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places.” He captured the “Kings of Hollywood”— Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gary Cooper, and James

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TOP: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS; BOTTOM: MONDADORI PORTFOLIO (GETTY IMAGES)

In just four hours, 256 Allied bombers reduced the abbey of Monte Cassino to rubble and dust.

Below: Allied soldiers try to free a jeep from dense mud at the base of Cassino.

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The driver was familiar with the road and he began to speed up, never lingering long on the high points or crossroads because, he said, “they have those spots zeroed in.” Although the flats in front of the town were occasionally shelled, nothing fell near us.

I noticed that smoke shells were being put down in front of the town, blocking out the lower slopes but leaving the monastery clearly visible above.

We passed a few dead mules by the side of the road and then a Bren Gun Carrier lying in a ditch. There was a heavy smell in the air, a mixture of dead mules and the bright yellow flowers patching the flats in the valley.

Then we came to the flats flooded by the Germans.

We made the turn at Hell’s Fire Corner, clearly marked by strips of mine tape strung on two shot-up six-by-sixes and two wrecked ambulances.

The driver stepped on the gas, and we raced across the Rapido [River], bounced past a couple of knocked-out tanks, and came to an intersection. The inevitable MP stood there, directing traffic. We turned left at a barracks, and it was then that we began to see the first effects of the terrific shelling and bombardment the town had received. Only a few pillars remained standing above the debris of the barracks on the

We began to see the first effects of the terrific shelling and bombardment.

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outskirts. Here and there were dead Shermans, which had thrown their treads as a snake sheds its skin.

Pulling up in front of our meeting place, we quickly unloaded the wire. Before we could acknowledge the hurried “Bye, Yank, see you tomorrow night,” the driver raced away, leaving the captain and me alone with our reels of barbed wire.

I’d expected the worst during the ride but nothing had happened, and now I remarked to the captain: “It’s pretty quiet tonight.” He turned and said quietly that there was an understanding among the men never to mention things like that on these trips. He told me he made a trip like this one every night.

While we waited for the truck to arrive, he demonstrated how to carry a coil of barbed wire. You stand inside the coil and then grab hold of the looped pieces of insulated wire on each side.

Soon there was a terrific clanking down the road, and I was sure every German in Cassino could hear the truck coming. The noise was made by chains carried over the truck’s bumper.

The men scrambled out and the captain checked to see that each man had his proper load. The rations were carried in pairs of sandbags tied together at the mouth and then slung over the men’s shoulders. Each man also carried a small bag in each hand.

While the captain was attending to the final details, the Germans started. There’s a funny thing about mortars:

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THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES; ABOVE RIGHT: DAVID E. SCHERMAN/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES)

From left: Aarons’s account of the Battle of Monte Cassino, featuring his own photographs, made the cover of the May 12, 1944, issue of Yank; many of his dramatic photographs received full-page treatment.

THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES; ABOVE RIGHT: DAVID E. SCHERMAN/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES)

From left: Aarons photographed these soldiers from New Zealand as they set up an antitank gun in the ruins of a thick-walled house in Cassino; Aarons in his U.S. Army uniform in London in 1942.

when they’re going to miss you they can be heard, but the closer they get the quieter they sound.

There would be a swish-swish, a burst of flame, and then a loud explosion. I felt very uneasy. The shells were exploding in the very path we were traveling, and I whispered to the New Zealander behind me: “It’s getting kind of noisy.’’ He whispered back: ‘‘Jerry’s having his bit of hate.”

When we moved off, the captain placed me behind him and explained that we must keep five yards between us. He picked up his coil and started off, hugging the bank alongside the road. Picking up my coil, I noticed that it was off-balance but decided there was no time to do anything about it now and took up the trail right behind the captain.

I heard the man behind me do the same.

Everything was still all around us. Suddenly a burst of machine-gun fire shattered the silence, synchronized with a single tracer that lazily arched its way across us toward our lines. This was followed by a couple of mortars, and then all was quiet again.

It was a beautiful night, filled with all the signs of an awakening spring. A lonely night bird was sounding off over in Purple Heart Valley [the Cassino corridor], and the sting had gone out of the breeze coming down off the mountain.

When we got to the edge of the town, the captain set his coil down near an overturned Sherman and stopped. I was puffing hard and was grateful for this chance to rest. In the distance we could hear the sound of long-range shelling.

Occasionally the tanks bedded down in the flats would fire a mission, and then all would be quiet again.

The captain asked me how I was doing and then said that we didn’t have much farther to go, but that it would be rougher now; we were coming to the rubble. “I hope Spandau Alley is quiet tonight,” a Kiwi whispered in my ear, explaining that it was a spot along our route that the Kraut sprayed every so often in the hope of catching just such a party as ours. “We’ve been pretty lucky so far,” he said. ‘‘He’s just missed every time.”

As we started off again. I hoped silently that he would continue to miss. In a few minutes we were in the rubble. and when someone stepped on a tin can my heart seemed to stop. As it resumed its normal beat, I could see that we were walking on what had once been a street; we were trying to hug the stumps of walls of houses. It was so quiet that I could hear a cat crying.

There was actually no shape to the road as we climbed over heaps of rubble covering the first floor of what had once been a house, down the other side into a bomb crater, and then around a tank that lay on its side. I had no idea at times whether we were going up or down a slope and just followed the man in front of me.

Suddenly the near quiet was broken by a very sharp swish, then by the crash of a mortar. The captain shouted: “Take cover, blokes.” Everybody dropped what he was carrying, stretched out flat, and tried to crawl to some hole or to get behind a heavy wall that was still standing.

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I could hear the captain moving about to make sure that everyone was safe. I found myself sprawled out behind a two-foot-thick wall, in the company of a Kiwi who wasn’t wearing a helmet. Shivering and sweating at the same time, I whispered to him: “Isn’t this a helluva place?” He whispered back: “I wish I was in the desert again.” So did I. There was another crash and a burst of flames, and the ground shook under us. The falling plaster dust tickled my nose, and I tried to get closer to the ground and curl my long legs in under me. Pieces of rubble pelted us, and a pebble hit me in the back of the neck, making me wish I was wearing my deep American helmet.

After a few seconds I raised my head. There was a lot of dust, and the smell of the shell was still hanging in the air.

But I could see the captain going from man to man to check whether they were all okay. He had plenty of guts.

I heard a lot of swishing in the air over our heads. Some of it was our stuff, and I remembered someone saying that we give the Kraut about seven for every one he sends over. Any other time I would have been comforted by the thought, but at the moment it wasn’t very reassuring because a lot of his stuff was coming at us. We all stayed where we were, but finally no more came, and then our guns stopped firing, too. All was quiet again, but we didn’t move until the captain said: “Let’s get cracking, blokes.”

I went back to where I had dropped the wire. “Quite close, eh, Slim?’’ the captain said. “Too bloody close,” I mumbled.

The dust had cleared away but it was quite dark now; some clouds had blown in front of the moon. Stumbling over huge blocks of masonry, girders, and bomb craters large enough to hide a six-by-six, we made our way along.

Every so often we’d pass some infantry replacements going in, others on their way out. I could understand now why I’d had to change uniforms. Someone seeing my different rig might have thought I was a German who’d infiltrated.

“Quite close, eh, Slim?” the captain said. “Too bloody close,” I mumbled.

Coming out of a crater behind a tank, I saw the captain step out of his coil. “We’re here,” he said as I came up to him. All I could see was a ruin similar to those we had passed.

The Kiwis filed in with the rations while we left the barbed wire outside. Squeezing into the entrance, I heard a voice in the dark say: “Give me your hand, Yank.” I stuck my hand out, groping, and the owner of the voice grabbed it. I followed him in the dark, turned right, and went down some steps into a room. It was dimly lit by a shielded candle in a box.

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Coming out of the dark, I found even this light seemed bright. There were many coats and blankets lying on the floor, some American and some British. I plopped down and wiped some of the sweat off my face.

There was a double-decker bunk in one corner of the room. The Germans had built it, but none of our men was sleeping in it because it was too hard. This was company headquarters, and the bunk was serving as a set of shelves.

From here men went to various other houses to deliver the loads. I was introduced to the major in charge and to the rest of the men in the house.

A walkie-talkie was going in the corner of the house and the radioman was trying to contact a forward platoon in another house. The telephone lines were out, and headquarters was using the radio to maintain contact with this platoon.

When the men of the carrying party got back, they threw themselves down and started to light up. The major cautioned them against smoking in the outer room. One fellow lit his cigarette with a match and then passed the cigarette around so the others could light up.

The soldiers occupying the house gathered around the carrying party to get all the latest news and rumors from camp. Loud talking interfered with the radioman’s reception and he shouted: “Shut up, back there!”

The captain asked if there was anything else the men wanted, but there was no answer. He picked up their letters and waited for a barrage of shelling to stop before he left.

He shook hands and said that he would see me tomorrow.

Then he gathered his men together and left. On the return trip they carried back salvage—broken rifles, clothing, and even the dead.

The major went out to make the rounds of his forward platoons. After every barrage, the man on the phones checked to see if the wires were still in. If the platoons could not be contacted, headquarters would try to reach them by radio until a man could be sent to repair the break.

When the major came back, he said I could take any place on the floor and handed me two blankets. I picked out an empty spot and spread them out. There was a layer of debris dust insulating the blankets from the bare floor.

The radioman left word with the sentry to call him every hour, the major snuffed out the candle, and I crawled in between the blankets with all my clothes and shoes on.

All through the night many shells hit near the building; occasionally one would hit the house, but this house had withstood many previous hits.

Often I could hear short bursts of machine-gun fire.

They say you can tell a German Spandau from our guns because it fires more rounds per minute, but to me they all sound the same.

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IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS

BATTLE OF MONTE CASSINO

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS

British soldiers in S Troop, 307th Battery, 99th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment put their heavy-class ML 4.2-inch mortars into action at the start of the final offensive on Cassino on May 12, 1944.

Early next morning we were awakened by the sound of machine-gun fire coming from every direction. The major leaped up and called out: “Take position, men.” It was just beginning to get light, and someone said it was 5 o’clock.

The major called his forward platoons by radio to find out what had caused all the noise. He was told that the Germans had attacked earlier in the night with a strong patrol but had been detected. Flares were sent up, and our

artillery had shelled them. The patrol had hunted around most of the night and at first light had attacked again. They had been beaten off and three prisoners taken. The major told me the Germans were just testing our strength.

I didn’t feel like going back to bed and decided to look around the place. As I came up the stairs out of the cellar, I saw two Kiwis on guard at the window of a room right across the way. There were two guards at the lookout

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BATTLE OF MONTE CASSINO

It was my first lesson in the unwisdom of walking outside in daylight.

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Later that afternoon the major asked if I’d like to go visiting. We started off for our next­ door neighbor’s.

Although the distance between the houses was only about 25 yards, it looked like an obstacle course. As the major led the way, I sidestepped our barbed wire, jumped over a block of masonry, and leaped in and out of a crater, never daring to look back. We rounded a chunk of wall, wiggled through an entrance that was nothing more than a shell hole in the wall, then slid down a pile of rubble to the main floor, where we ran smack into a Kiwi with a tommy gun. The Kiwi seemed to have heard all about the Yank with a camera, so I figured the communications system was still functioning.

We were barely inside when we heard the crash of mortar shells dropping on our recent route, as if to say: “You’re not putting anything over on us.”

This house was about the same as the other except that it had more armament. There were Bren guns, and the Kiwis were setting up an antitank gun, carried up during the night. I took a few pictures and then decided to go back. We made the same quick scramble between houses, and a few minutes after we got inside, the Germans loosed a burst of machine-gun fire that hit the outside of the house. “It’s not good to run around like we did,” the major said; “it angers the Kraut and he wakes up the men who are trying to sleep.”

There was little doing the rest of the day, and life in a Cassino fortress seemed pretty dull. The boys had a pin-up of Marguerite Chapman [an American actress], salvaged from a beat-up British magazine. They also had a bottle of Scotch, donated by some correspondents. They’d had the bottle for a week but there was still some Scotch left. “We’re saving it for a tough spot,” they said. These boys have been fighting the war for three years now, so I reckon it’s going to be a pretty tough spot.

While we were eating supper the Kraut threw over some stuff. “Here comes his iron rations,” one soldier said to me, looking up from his stew. “He puts over a stonk every day at this time.”

By this time mortar fire sounded as commonplace to me as an auto horn on a street back home. I felt perfectly safe in this temporary home.

Time wore on after supper and there was nothing to do except wait for the ration party. I sat at the entrance and made conversation with the guard. “The ration party is our only link with the outside world,” he said. “They bring us our letters every day and anything we want. They had a tough job getting some rat poison we asked for.”

Since the bombing of Cassino, the rats have increased in number and boldness. They feed on the dead lying in the shell holes and run all over the place at night.

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IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS

window at the opposite end of the room and two guards at the only entrance to the house. They all had tommy guns.

The walls of the house were at least a foot and a half thick, and there were two floors of fallen rubble over our heads. The only thing that could knock us out was a direct bomb hit. I could understand now how Stalingrad had held out. We and the enemy were so close that neither side could effectively use heavy artillery or bombs for fear of hitting its own men.

I peered out the lookout window but couldn’t see much because of the early morning haze. The guard was reduced to one man at the lookout and one at the entrance, while the others set about preparing breakfast.

The room used for a kitchen was also a combined dining room and latrine, and the odor left you in no doubt as to the latter function.

After breakfast two of the men stepped cautiously out of the house and crept to a nearby well to get water. Just as the men reached the well a barrage of mortars let go. and some of the shells hit the house, shaking up the rubble. The men at the well got back safely, though I never thought they would. It was my first lesson in the unwisdom of walking outside in daylight. Though I spent most of the morning looking out the window with binoculars, I couldn’t pick out a living thing. There must have been at least 60 houses occupied by our troops, besides those held by the Germans—more than a thousand men concealed before me. Yet I never saw a soul or heard a human sound. Nothing ever happens in Cassino in the daytime.

The day passed quickly.

The men who were not on guard sat around talking sex and politics, except for the night guards who were sleeping. The telephone man was checking up to find out which wires he’d have to repair that night. He said that no repairs are ever made by day and that never a day goes by that wires aren’t torn up by shell fire.

From my post at the lookout window I could see smoke shells landing on the flats. Each side uses smoke shells to hinder observation. As I looked out, Cassino reminded me of a ghost town wearing down with the years.

Above the house on a ridge sits the castle—or what’s left of it—which we now occupy; and on the ridge right behind is Hangman’s Hill, so called because a piece of framework that looks like a gallows stands there. The Germans, who hold Hangman’s Hill, look down our backs as we use the outdoor latrine.

A British soldier with a Bren gun takes aim at an enemy position from the ruins of the monastery of Monte Cassino; Aarons was told to ditch his American helmet so as not to be mistaken for a German.

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS

I looked out the entrance and couldn’t see a hundred yards in front of me. We seemed to be an island in a sea of smoke. The guard was increased; this was the time of day when most of the attacks came. Soon it was dark. There was nothing to do, so I went back in to catch a nap.

I was awakened by the noise of the entrance of the ration party. Now that the time had come, I was afraid to leave this safe house. I could understand now why the men never liked to go outside. We said the usual ‘‘good lucks,” shook hands all around, and stepped out into the darkness. The Germans had just finished a barrage, so this was the best time to leave.

Most of the men had loads of salvage on the return trip, but there was nothing for me to carry. As we were leaving the town, we heard some machine-gun fire. Looking back, I could see the faces of the men behind me reflecting the light of flares. There was mortar fire, but none came near

us. I was glad I had changed my helmet; we were certainly visible to British snipers.

It had rained during the day but the sky was clear now.

We kept moving, hugging the walls. In the distance the flashes of our big guns lit the sky at intervals. When we passed the spot where we had hit the dirt the previous night, the captain dropped back and showed me where a shell had landed right in the path. “It came only a few yards from the last man,” he said.

The captain walked quietly beside me. Then he asked: “Do you get this kind of training in America?” The big guns were splashing the sky with angry dabs of flame. I looked back at the town, still lit by the flares, listened to the mortar shells exploding and the machine guns playing, studied the valley that the Americans had so appropriately named the Valley of the Purple Heart, and turned back to the captain.

“They didn’t when I was there,” I said, shaking my head, “but I sure hope they do now.” MHQ

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The underwater detonation of the second atomic bomb produced a collapsing cloud that rained millions of gallons of radioactive water over the target fleet that had been assembled at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands for Operation Crossroads. Charles Bittinger, a captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve, made this oil-on-canvas painting of the scene.

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DAWN OF THE NUCLEAR AGE

In 1946 three U.S. military artists were on hand as two atomic bombs were detonated at Bikini Atoll.

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A. USS Skate, July 5, 1946, Enyu Atoll, watercolor on paper, Arthur Beaumont. This Balao-class submarine was heavily damaged by the first blast, which bent its masts and antennas and buckled its superstructure, but somehow the hull remained intact.

The radioactive submarine was towed to California, studied, and then sunk as a torpedo target in 1948.

B. Sinking of the Saratoga, watercolor on paper, Arthur Beaumont. Although the U.S. Navy mounted an extraordinary effort to save the USS Saratoga after the tests, the Lexington-class warship was hopelessly contaminated by radiation and eventually sank.

C. 0900...through Protective Goggles...on the USS Appalachian, watercolor on illustration board, Grant Powers. Observers watching the tests from a support ship wore special goggles to protect their eyes from fireballs that were brighter than the sun.

ALL IMAGES: U.S. NAVY (NATIONAL ARCHIVES, 8)

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n June 1946 the U.S. military assembled a fleet of more than 95 obsolete, decommissioned, and captured ships at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands to study the effects of nuclear weapons on ships, equipment, material, and living creatures. The exercise, dubbed Operation Crossroads, involved exploding two 21-kiloton atomic bombs—the first (Able) airdropped and detonated above water at a low altitude and the second (Baker) submerged on a barge in shallow water and then detonated. (A planned deep-sea explosion was scrubbed after the second test.) Three U.S. military artists painted these scenes from Operation Crossroads: Commander Arthur Beaumont and Captain Charles Bittinger, two officers in the U.S. Naval Reserve, and Grant Powers, a gunnery sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps, who served as the operation’s official combat artist.

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ALL IMAGES: U.S. NAVY (NATIONAL ARCHIVES, 8)

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D. Japanese Battleship Nagato, watercolor on paper, Arthur Beaumont.

When the two blasts failed to immediately sink the much-despised flagship of the Pearl Harbor attack force, mines were strapped to its sides to get the job done. The underwater wreck is now one of the world’s top destinations for scuba divers.

E. Cross Spikes Club, watercolor on paper, Arthur Beaumont. This improvised bar and hangout area was one of the only places that U.S. servicemembers from Operation Crossroads could find entertainment— including spirited table tennis games—during their four-month stay at Bikini.

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OPERATION CROSSROADS

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F. Start of Able Bomb, oil on canvas board, Charles Bittinger.

Though the artist wasn’t on Bikini Island for the first detonation—no one was allowed to be within five miles of the atoll during the blast— he painted this scene as if he had been. Palm trees along the beach are visible in the foreground as the explosion’s mushroom cloud towers over the ships of the target fleet.

G. USS Arkansas, watercolor on paper, Arthur Beaumont.

With the end of World War II, Arkansas ferried U.S. servicemen in the Pacific back to the United States as part of Operation Magic Carpet.

The dreadnought battleship managed to survive the first explosion but succumbed to the second when it capsized under a moving wall of water from the blast. Today the ship lies inverted in about 180 feet of water at the bottom of Bikini Lagoon.

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First Lieutenant R. F. Brubaker, a bombardier with the 91st Bomb Group of the U.S. Army Air Forces, uses a Norden bombsight from inside the nose of his Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress in June 1943.

EYE IN THE SKY

The Norden bombsight achieved legendary status in World War II but never lived up to its promised precision.

By Robert O. Harder MHQ Winter 2021

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t 9:10 a.m. on Monday, August 6, 1945, Thomas Ferebee was hunched over his Norden M-9B bombsight, serial number V-4120. Ferebee, a 24-year-old major in the U.S. Army Air Forces, was the bombardier aboard Enola Gay, a specially modified Boeing B-29 Superfortress that was coasting in on Honshu, Japan’s largest island. It was a beautiful, clear day—what flyers called CAVU, or ceiling and visibility unlimited. The plane, piloted by Colonel Paul W. Tibbets Jr., was still 9 miles south of its initial reference point, the city of Mahara. Ferebee, temporarily configuring his bombsight into extended vision mode, had already peered through his 3.2X power telescope and acquired his aiming point: the Aioi Bridge over the Ota River at Hiroshima.

Human history was about to change forever.

Extended vision—a feature of the X-1 Reflex Sight—was one of the more useful innovations in the final versions of the Norden Bombing System. By engaging the X-1 sight, Ferebee had raised the forward vision angle by another 20 degrees, enabling him to pick out the target from an astounding 75 miles away. The bombardier would stay in extended vision mode through the plane’s inbound turn before switching back to the normal viewing configuration. Enola Gay’s three-minute bomb run was a complete success—“the easiest I ever made,” Ferebee would recall. Mild winds, a well-defined aiming point, and the bombardier’s skillful synchronizing of the crosshairs and accurate calculation of the airplane’s 31,060-foot true altitude above sea level resulted in the bomb missing ground zero by 800 feet, a meaningless deviation.

“Little Boy” was the world’s first atomic bomb. The strikes at Hiroshima and three days later at Nagasaki, which effectively ended World War II, would not have been possible without decades of work on sophisticated new bombsights. Much of that work was conducted in private and acquired legendary status before the first new, improved bombsight was ever installed in American warplanes.

The U.S. Navy aimed to build a precision bombsight that could target enemy ships.

The idea of dropping ordnance from flying machines came relatively late in their development. The mindset of army general staffs had long been that the airplane was useful only for reconnaissance—a better method than observation balloons. The first time a heavier-than-air flying machine dropped high explosives was in 1911, during the

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Italo-Turkish War, when Italian sublieutenant Giulio Gavotti, flying an Austrian-built Etrich Taube, bombed Turkish forces at the oases of Ain Zara and Tajura in western Libya. Gavotti simply tossed 17 Cipelli hand grenades from the cockpit as he passed over the enemy troops.

When the world exploded into flames three years later, it became clear that a more scientific approach to aerial bombardment was needed. Further, it quickly became apparent that gravity-propelled bombs also faced formidable atmospheric problems—the air beneath a bomber can be a virtual layer cake of wind patterns. It wasn’t until 1915, the second year of World War I, that a British professor turned artillery lieutenant, Henry Tizard, developed a simple mechanical bombsight that used two rigid aiming bars mounted on the side of the plane’s fuselage. The pilot sighted along them until they lined up with the target, consulted his stopwatch, and then tripped the release lever at the appropriate moment. While this was an advance over the previous eyeball and windage guesswork methods of 1914, the Tizard CFS-4 was still inadequate. But it was the most sophisticated option at the time, and several thousand of Tizard’s bombsights were manufactured.

The Tizard was followed by the Mark I, the first reasonably effective mechanical bombsight. Developed by Harry Wimperis for the Royal Navy in 1917 and subsequently adopted by the U.S. Army Air Service in 1919, it marked the first time a bomb-aiming designer had seriously tried to compensate for ground speed and drift. Unfortunately, the advance came with a serious drawback: Pilots had to crisscross the target at 90-degree angles to obtain usable readings. (Navigators later called the procedure a double drift.) Flying a warplane back and forth across a heavily defended target was not practical, to say the least. Further, it often took a great deal of ordnance to accomplish the job. In a 1921 test bombing, it took 65 bombs for American airmen, under General Billy Mitchell, to sink a stationary, captured German battleship.

Engineers made significant advances in bombsight development in the 1920s. Taking the lead was Carl L. Norden, a Dutch engineer who had immigrated to the United States in 1904 and worked for the Sperry Gyroscope Company in New York before becoming a consultant to the U.S. Navy in 1915. The navy asked Norden, who was known as “Old Man Dynamite” because of his explosive temper, to develop a precision bombsight capable of targeting enemy ships. Working alongside Norden were former U.S. Army colonel Theodore Barth, who had been in charge of gas mask production in World War I, and U.S. Navy lieutenant (later captain) Frederick I. Entwistle, the assistant research chief at the navy’s Bureau of Ordnance.

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FROM LEFT: NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; TED H. LAMBERT, CC BY-SA 3.0; HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

NORDEN BOMBSIGHT

FROM LEFT: NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; TED H. LAMBERT, CC BY-SA 3.0; HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

From left: It took 65 bombs for American airmen to sink a captured German battleship in 1921; Enola Gay bombardier Thomas Ferebee with the Norden bombsight after the dropping of “Little Boy”; Carl Norden in 1944.

Before Norden’s work, the vexing trigonometric difficulties in obtaining consistent bombing accuracy had defied solutions. How did one accurately place varying types of gravity-propelled weapons on specific earthbound targets when releasing them from fast-moving airborne vehicles operating in three dimensions? As any experienced bombardier could testify, it was a lot tougher than it looked on paper. The long list of variables included the size, weight, and shape of the bomb; the manner of releasing the bomb; malfunctioning bombs; broken bomb fins; defective bomb-aiming equipment; turbulence and wind drift; the aircraft’s altitude and speed; ballistics computation errors; aiming errors; flak; and, of course, Murphy’s Law. Norden’s answer was to design a completely new bombaiming system. It was built around an autopilot, a revolutionary concept in itself, and what today would be characterized as an optical-mechanical analog computer. It had two primary components: the removable sight head— nicknamed “the Football” (because of its shape) in Europe and “the Blue Ox” (after its code name) in the Pacific—and a stabilizer bolted to the airplane. Spinning gyros kept the Norden in three-dimensional equilibrium. These major hardware elements were supported by a complex array of knobs, dials, levers, cranks, cams, mirrors, tiny motors, and a multipower telescope.

After manually entering his ballistic calculations and other data into the Norden Bombing System and having departed the bomb run’s Initial Point (IP), the bombardier would position himself over the bombsight and begin aligning the separately controlled crosshairs on the aiming point. Using the turn and drift knob and the rate and displacement knob (for range to target), he would manually

crank the crosshairs until they were atop the aiming point.

If his precomputation estimates (especially for wind) were off a little—they always were—he could “kill” the actual drift and speed differences by repeatedly dragging the hairs back to the aiming point, allowing the Norden’s analog computer to neutralize the variations, thus stabilizing the crosshairs. This process of coordinating a vertical crosshair (course line—the plane’s heading) with a horizontal crosshair (release line—perpendicular to course line) came to be called the “synchronous” method of bomb aiming. Considerable manual dexterity (all the synchronizing was performed with the right hand) and finesse were essential.

Once the bombardier was satisfied that he had acquired the target, he and the pilot would “clutch in,” slaving the Norden bombsight to the C-1 autopilot and fully uniting the Norden Bombing System. The bombardier would continue to synchronize the two crosshairs on the target all the way through release, with the autopilot turning the airplane accordingly. Meanwhile, the To Go meter ticked down toward Bombs Away, which occurred when the Norden analog computer sensed that the sighting angle had intersected the dropping angle—about 70 degrees from the vertical at 30,000 feet, when the bombs automatically released.

(As a frame of reference, it took 43 seconds after release from 31,060 feet for Ferebee’s “Little Boy” uranium bomb to reach its planned airburst altitude of 1,890 feet, which caused more widespread destruction than a ground blast.)

Initial testing of the Norden prototype Mark XI was conducted at the U.S. Navy’s proving ground in Dahlgren, Virginia. Pilots and bombardiers were unimpressed, complaining that the new device “demanded both hands, both feet, and their teeth.” Testing for circular error probable predicted that 50 percent of the bombs would fall within a

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NORDEN BOMBSIGHT 110-foot circle when dropped from a 3,000-foot altitude— an error of 3.6 percent, which actually was worse than existing systems. Despite the problems, in 1928 the navy awarded a $348,000 contract for 40 new bombsights to the newly created Carl L. Norden Inc. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army was working on its own bombsight improvements. Swiss immigrant Georges Estoppey, a designer in its engineering division, came up with his Bombsight Type D-4, and Elmer Sperry, the inventor of gyroscopic-stabilized sensors that mitigated steamship wave action, developed the Sperry C-1 (gyro-stabilized) Bombsight. Estoppey’s D-4 relied on mechanical stopwatch principles (lining up the target by viewing through a manually movable sight and timing the release with a stopwatch) much like those used by the Royal Navy’s Mark I. Neither the D-4 nor the C-1, however, proved effective. A highly publicized target-practice bombing of a condemned bridge over the Pee Dee River in North Carolina in 1927 turned into an embarrassing five-day fiasco. It took U.S. Army Air Corps pilots of the 1st Provisional Bombardment Squadron, flying Keystone LB-5 bombers, more than 100 sorties to destroy a middle section of the bridge.

mass production. On top of everything else, there was bad blood between Carl Norden and Elmer Sperry—during World War I, Norden had worked for Sperry until the two had a major falling out in 1915. When Norden’s new sight came out in the early 1930s and its technical problems surfaced, Sperry promptly developed his own Sperry S-1 Bombsight, a knockoff of the Mark XV. The Norden sight had been married to the newly developed Honeywell C-1 autopilot (necessary for accurate and stable level bombing but not for dive bombing); Sperry joined the S-1 to its own A-3, A-4, and A-5 autopilots.

At the same time, Estoppey, sensing his own opportunity, developed the mechanical D-8 Bombsight, which did not require an autopilot. The D-8 was a big improvement over the earlier D-4 and much less complicated and expensive to manufacture than either the Norden or Sperry. For lower-altitude, slower-speed level bombing, the D-8 would come to occupy an important wartime niche. (Although Sperry had developed a rudimentary, one-off gyroscopic autopilot for Wiley Post’s solo around-the-world flight in 1931, the modern autopilot was actually invented to support Norden and Sperry bombing systems, not to relieve pilot fatigue during long flights, which only later became a Norden continued refining his designs, unveiling the Mark happy byproduct of the design.)

While the Mark XV concept had always been sound, XV on paper in 1931. The first working prototype of the device appeared two years later, along with his company’s formidable manufacturing difficulties continued to surface greatly exaggerated claim: “It’ll drop a bomb in a pickle with disturbing regularity. As a consequence, by December 7, barrel from 20,000 feet.” While 1941, more of the rival Sperry S-1 bombsights had been init took several more years to stalled in American bombers (though only a few hundred perfect, the Mark XV gyro-­ level bombers were operational). In fact, until 1943, when stabilized bombsight was the the Norden was fully perfected, the dirty secret in the air big breakthrough. The prelim- force was that many bombardiers preferred the less troubleinary results of the precisely some, easier-to-master Sperry S-1 to the Norden Mark XV hand-machined prototypes so and its descendants, the Norden M-Series Bombsights.

Even after going operational, the Mark XV had serious impressed U.S. Army Air Corps brass that for the first problems. First, its carbon brushes wore out frequently time, a dedicated bombardier and had to be replaced, and carbon dust from the brushes station was installed in the would settle into the sensitive gimbal bearings, necessitatnose of a production bomber: ing frequent cleaning and oiling. Second, accurate leveling the Martin B-10B, a twin-engine, retractable-gear, all-metal of the vertical gyro required manual setting of two liquid monoplane that entered service in 1934. The B-10’s Norden levels, a process that took 510 seconds—a significant segsystem proved so successful that the air corps ordered it in- ment of any bombing run. Third, both the azimuth and stalled in all subsequent American medium and heavy range-operating knobs were on the right side of the bombbombers, a task that wasn’t completed until 1943—years sight, making simultaneous two-hand sighting of a target virtually impossible. Finally, the vertical gyro would tumble longer than anyone could have imagined.

Not surprisingly, the Sperry Company didn’t take the off its axis of rotation in rough air, losing its target.

Nevertheless, with each year Norden’s manufacturing news of this development lying down, especially once it learned that Norden had run into major technical difficul- and technological capabilities improved, and fewer orders ties that dramatically limited production. The most serious went to Sperry. By the beginning of 1944, the Sperry S-1 sysof these were obtaining satisfactory lubricants and achiev- tems had been phased out of all U.S. bombers and replaced ing the extremely precise machining tolerances (to as fine by the Norden. That was partly because the removable oneas .0001 of an inch) the bombsight would require during piece Sperry sight head–stabilizer weighed 75 pounds; the

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LEFT: BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES); RIGHT: U.S. AIR FORCE (2)

“It’ll drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from 20,000 feet.” the breathless claim went.

LEFT: BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES); RIGHT: U.S. AIR FORCE (2)

Clockwise from left: An officer at the U.S. Army Air Forces Tactical Center in Orlando, Florida, provides a peek at the Norden bombsight in 1945; a Sperry bombsight undergoing evaluation in 1936; the Enola Gay in 1945.

removable Norden sight head weighed just 35, with its stabilizer permanently bolted on the aircraft. The decision by the air corps (renamed the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1941) to eventually commit its higher flying bombers solely to the Mark XV, however, was complicated by Norden’s special relationship with the U.S. Navy. His breakthrough Mark XV had been specifically designed to function in the lower operating altitudes and slower speeds of flying boats, the navy’s primary level bombing platforms at the time. As a result, to oblige the U.S. Army’s sudden interest in the 1930s following the B-10B bomber’s success, the XV would require significant modifications to accommodate the air corps’ still-­ developing concept of high-flying, four-engine bombers.

The problem was further exacerbated by the fact that Norden had already granted the navy an exclusive on all bombsight orders, forcing the army to order its bombsights through the navy, which wasn’t even getting as many as it desired. Inevitably, the army sights actually delivered were not only too few but also unmodified for higher altitudes. The situation became intolerable, and the air corps turned to Elmer Sperry and his S-1 bombing system to fill the vacuum.

At this point Norden’s president, Ted Barth, had stepped in, determined to maintain his firm’s primacy in military procurement. While the Sperry company had conducted business without guile through the late 1920s and into the

1930s, Barth hadn’t been above using backdoor tactics. His flamboyant salesmanship, extensive army and navy contacts, and brilliant “pickle barrel” public relations strategy would prove decisive. The Sperry Company inadvertently played into Barth’s stratagems by keeping a low profile and remaining quietly professional. Even more damaging, Sperry was widely perceived to be tainted by its multinational status and prewar licensing agreements in Germany and Japan.

Sperry’s own technical problems in the mid- to late 1930s helped tilt the growing momentum toward Norden. As soon as Norden’s technical issues were solved and production was able to meet demand, the ax fell on Sperry. On August 4, 1943, Brigadier General Barney M. Giles, the chief of staff of General Headquarters Air Force (a separate organization within the air force), recommended that all bombsight production be standardized with Norden. That November, Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, the commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces, issued orders “to proceed immediately with the cancellation of all contracts for Sperry S-1 bombsights and A-5 autopilots.” For the rest of the war the air force standard would be the Norden Bombing System— the M-Series bombsight and the Honeywell C-1 autopilot.

Not long after the first European bombing missions began in August 1942, bombardiers began openly sneering at the

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NORDEN BOMBSIGHT

The Germans somehow managed to plant a spy in the Norden factory.

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of the new device were released, and even the name of the factory producing the sights was classified. The U.S. military developed an intricate system for shipping and handling the Norden sights, with armed guards escorting the sights to and from aircraft and monitoring special storage vaults between flights. There was, early in the war, even a written “bombardier’s oath,” which had the bombardier pledge to destroy the bombsight and himself if threatened with capture. Novelist John Steinbeck produced a U.S. Army Air Forces recruitment documentary, Bombs Away, in which he noted that the bombsight was never left unprotected. “On the ground, it is kept in a safe and under constant guard,” he wrote. “It is taken out of its safe only by a bombardier on a mission, and he never leaves it. He is responsible not only for its safety but its secrecy. Should his ship be shot down, he’s taught how quickly and effectively to destroy it.” The 1943 motion picture Bombardier further exalted the Norden’s deadly accuracy, with multiple shots of a bombardier hunched over the sight like a diamond cutter working on a priceless jewel, without ever providing so much as a glimpse of the instrument itself.

But the elaborate precautions taken to protect the secrets of the Norden bombsight were all for naught. It was grotesquely, almost hilariously ironic that the Germans found out details about the device even before World War II— through a Nazi spy in the Norden factory. Herman W. Lang, a German-born U.S. citizen, was a trusted Norden draftsman by day and a cunning agent-for-gain at night. In January 1938, he smuggled plans and blueprints of the device aboard an Atlantic steamer bound for Bremen, Germany. Later the same year Lang took a “vacation” back to Germany, ostensibly for a family visit but in reality to further assist Luftwaffe technicians in evaluating the Norden (and not incidentally collect his 10,000 reichsmark reward).

Later in the war, Lang would be caught up in the arrest of the infamous German Duquesne Spy Ring—the largest espionage case in U.S. history that ended in convictions— and sentenced to 18 years in prison.

The subsequent German mock-up of the Norden was comparable to the Luftwaffe’s own Lotfernrohr 7, or Lotfe 7, and similar in concept to the Mark XV, although in form it resembled the Sperry S-1. The Germans, who only used two-engine bombers that dropped weapons from about 15,000 feet, ultimately decided that their Lotfe 7 was simpler to use and less expensive to build. Consequently, they shelved the Norden plans for the balance of the war. In the end, only the Allied public remained in the dark about the “secret” Norden bombsight.

Norden M-Series Bombsight production totals compiled by various sources leading up to and during World War II vary dramatically. (Sperry and Estoppey totals are

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MONDADORI PORTFOLIO (GETTY IMAGES)

“pickle barrel” propaganda they had once more than halfbelieved. In a classic military training lapse, the first bombardiers had been instructed in twin-engine, lower flying Beechcraft airplanes, completely out of touch with the then-operational high flying Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress.

Major Thomas Ferebee of the Enola Gay later said that he had never dropped a bomb from above 12,000 feet until his first combat mission in August 1942 at 20,000 feet. The degree of difficulty in obtaining acceptable bombing accuracy with the 8,000-foot altitude difference was enormous.

What’s more, at 20,000 feet the bombardier had to be harnessed to a clumsy oxygen apparatus to avoid hypoxia and, because of colder temperatures at that altitude, had to wear a heavy suit and thick gloves that made synchronizing the crosshairs on the aiming point very difficult. Further, the layers of wind shear hidden below could blow the bombs off trajectory, and inherent aiming errors were magnified accordingly. Before World War II, a 200-to-400-foot circular error from a rated bombardier at an altitude of 12,000 to 15,000 feet was probably about average. In 1943, however, under combat conditions at higher altitudes, the circular error was 1,200 feet, on average, and often much larger.

The U.S. Army Air Forces had drawn up its comprehensive European bombing plan with the understanding that the Norden would be the primary bombing platform. A single B-17 bomber was believed to have a 1.2 percent probability of hitting a 100foot target from 20,000 feet, meaning that 220 bombers would be needed for a 93 percent probability of one or more hits on a pinpoint objective like a factory. Air force leaders remained sanguine in the face of such dismal forecasts, and one can only wonder what they could have been thinking. As early as 1941, the British had come to understand that such low success rates against pinpoint targets were not likely to win the air war, which is why they turned to their brutal but more effective strategy of bombing cities, railways, harbors, industrial districts, and the like rather than purely military targets.

Nevertheless, the American air force continued to maintain that it could effectively strike individual targets through daylight bombing.

Throughout the war the American press functioned as a de facto publicity arm of the Norden company (egged on by air force brass, who desperately wanted to believe their own daylight bombing propaganda), printing favorable and often exaggerated reviews. At the same time, an aura of mystery and glamour surrounded the project: No photos

MONDADORI PORTFOLIO (GETTY IMAGES)

A formation of Norden-equipped Boeing B-17G Flying Fortresses from the Fifteenth Air Force bomb a railway network near the Hungarian border in September 1944. fairly consistent.) Sources also disagree as to the total number of men completing undergraduate bombardier training (award of basic wings), though here the reason becomes obvious after study. Most accounts count the same man two and even three times because he also graduated from advanced training (bombardier-navigator training, radar navigation training, and the like, for example). To arrive at a reasonable estimate of bombsights produced requires sifting through a great deal of material and weighing such factors as total level bomber production, total number of undergraduate bombardiers trained (approximately 50,000 men), and source reliability. The bombsight production numbers that Albert L. Pardini compiled in The Legendary Norden Bombsight (Schiffer Publishing, 1999) seem most reliable. During the war, Pardini was a supervisor at a bombsight repair and modification center and claims to have researched his highly technical book for nine years.

Pardini’s production totals were 52,083 Norden M-Series bombsights, 10,080 Estoppey bombsights, and 5,563 Sperry bombsights, for a grand total of 67,726. These were installed in seven major level bomber types totaling 59,974 aircraft: Boeing B-17 four-engine Flying Fortress, Consolidated B-24 four-engine Liberator, Boeing B-29 four-engine Su-

perfortress, Douglas A-20 two-engine Havoc, North American B-25 two-engine Mitchell, Douglas A-26 two-engine Invader, and the Martin B-26 two-engine Marauder.

The U.S. military would continue to use the Norden well into the Vietnam War on older two-engine bombers like the A-26. (While Vietnam War B-52C and D Stratofortresses had similar optical sights, they were used only for post-release bomb damage assessment). The Norden was last used in combat by Naval Air Observation Squadron Sixty-Seven (VO-67). Flying U.S. Navy OP-2E Neptune twin-engine propeller patrol bombers under Operation Igloo, this unit gathered clandestine military intelligence by dropping electronic sensory devices along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The unit was deactivated in July 1968. Though it was no longer used in direct combat operations, optical bombsight capability continued to be installed in American strategic bombers all the way through the B-52F Stratofortress, built in the mid-1950s.

The optical bombsight’s demise was inevitable. All models had a built-in Achilles’ heel: They worked only in daytime and clear skies. In the nuclear age, with all-weather jet bombers flying at near supersonic speeds, such limitations were simply unacceptable. The solution, which was already well on its way before the end of World War II in the Pacific, was radar aiming that used the same gyroscopically stabilized, though greatly enhanced, Norden-Sperry technology. Although radar bombing had been phased in to all American level bombers by the mid-1950s, that still left the intractable problems and inherent inaccuracies of gravity bombing. Developed after the Vietnam War era, “smart bombs” and GPS-directed weapons have since overcome those difficulties. While such technologies continue to be refined, looming on the horizon is perhaps the ultimate solution to the bombing problem: unmanned, artificial intelligence–driven weapon systems that combine standoff launching, pinpoint accuracy, and zero aircrew risk.

Today, visitors to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s annex at Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C., can view for themselves the brilliantly restored Enola Gay as it appeared on August 6, 1945. Sharp-eyed onlookers peering up through the bottom of the B-29’s greenhouse glass nose will see V-4120, the truly legendary Norden bombsight, still in place, as if waiting for bombardier Thomas Ferebee to unleash the ultimate weapon on another disbelieving enemy and its unsuspecting people. MHQ Robert O. Harder, a Vietnam War–era Boeing B-52D navigator-bombardier and an FAA-certificated flight instructor, is the author of The Three Musketeers of the Army Air Forces: From Fortress Europa to Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Naval Institute Press, 2015).

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REVOLT OF THE IONIANS The Greek cities of Asia Minor tried mightily to free themselves from Persian subjugation. But their rebellion ultimately backfired.

By Marc G. DeSantis

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An alliance of Ionian cities sought to defend Miletus by sea but were decisively defeated by Persian forces at the Battle of Lade in 494 bce.

ANGUS MCCOMISKEY (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

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IONIAN REVOLT

For more than four decades, Persian kings had lorded over the Ionians.

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stead, they adopted a scorched-earth strategy that denied the Persians much-needed supplies and remounts.

Frustrated by his inability to force the Scythians to stand and fight, Darius had halted his pursuit and begun retracing his path home to Persia. Waiting nervously at the Danube River, not far from the Black Sea, were some of the Ionian tyrants and their men. Earlier, Darius had charged them with protecting the pontoon bridge that he had thrown up over the river so that he and his army could cross back safely. The Ionians had dutifully waited for him, week after week, with mounting anxiety. He was now long overdue.

While the Ionians waited, the Scythians rode up to the river and urged them to destroy the bridge. The Persians would then be trapped on the northern side of the Danube, where the Scythians promised to crush them. Some of the Ionian tyrants liked the idea, even though it was pure treason. The Persians, after all, had long smothered Ionia. Miltiades, an Athenian tyrant of the Hellespont, the narrow strait to the northwest, urged his comrades to betray Darius. One prominent Ionian, however, refused to listen to such talk. Histiaeus, the tyrant of Miletus, reminded the others that they owed their positions of power to Darius, not the Scythians, and that at any rate they would have to live with the Persians—and the consequences of their decision—when they returned home. The tyrants quickly reconsidered their flirtation with treachery.

Histiaeus and his men then began to tear down the northern end of the bridge—but only to trick the Scythians into thinking that he meant to do what they had requested.

He then convinced the Scythians to search for the Persians.

Meanwhile, Histiaeus and the other Ionians waited for Darius and his army—what was left of it—to show up.

When the Persians finally arrived at the Danube one night in 512 bce, the Ionians sent boats to ferry them over.

Darius rewarded Histiaeus for his loyalty by permitting him to build and fortify a new city, Myrcinus, on the Strymon River in Thrace. This aroused the jealousy and suspicion of other Ionian tyrants, including Megabazus, one of Darius’s top generals, who went straight to the king with his fears. “Just think of what you have done,” he told Darius.

“You gave a dangerously clever Greek permission to found a city for himself in Thrace, where timber is abundant for construction of ships and oars, where there are also silver mines and multitudes of Greeks and non-Greeks. As soon as these people find a leader, they will follow his orders day and night.” Histiaeus, Megabazus argued, now had everything he needed to become a potentially threatening warlord on a remote frontier of the Persian Empire.

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LITHUANIAN ART MUSEUM, VILNIUS

O

n a spring night in 498 bce, spiky tongues of orange and yellow flames darted high into the Anatolian sky. By morning, the ancient city of Sardis would be a smoking pile of ash and corpses.

Even the Temple of Cybele, the revered mother goddess of Asia Minor, had been destroyed. The raging inferno was the work of the Ionians—the Greeks on the western shores of Asia Minor and its nearby islands.

They had revolted against Darius I, the Great King of Persia, and had come to Sardis to strike a blow for their freedom. Instead, they set in motion a horrific disaster.

For more than four decades, Persian kings had lorded over the troublesome Ionians. Insular and argumentative, the Ionians even kept apart from other Greeks, zealously seeking to preserve the 12 cities of their “cultural league.”

Chief among these was Miletus, at the mouth of the Maeander River on the southwestern coast of Asia Minor. The Milesians were renowned for their love of philosophy, science, and the arts, unlike their more warlike neighbors.

Milesian traders, who were among the first Greeks to use writing and coinage, established dozens of colonies on the Black Sea and as far away as Egypt and Italy.

Of the major cities on the Ionian mainland, only Miletus had avoided being annexed by Croesus, the king of Lydia.

But then Persian king Cyrus I defeated Croesus in the Battle of Thymbra in 547 bce and captured Sardis, the Lydian capital, after a 14-day siege.

During the campaign, Cyrus appealed to the Ionians for aid, but they remained loyal to Croesus. After Croesus’s defeat, the Ionians offered to transfer their allegiance to Cyrus on the condition that they could maintain the same relative autonomy they had enjoyed under Croesus. But Cyrus understandably declined, conquering the Ionian cities and installing subsidiary rulers, called tyrants, to control them. The new arrangement rankled the proud Ionians, though they remained reasonably docile for the next half century.

In 513 bce, Darius, who had overthrown Cyrus’s successor nine years earlier, launched an ill-fated punitive campaign against the nomadic Scythians—Persia’s first incursion onto European soil. His target was land they controlled adjacent to the Black Sea. The Scythians, renowned for their horsemanship and skill with the bow and arrow, stymied the Persians by refusing to stand and fight. In-

LITHUANIAN ART MUSEUM, VILNIUS

This painting by Lithuanian artist Franciszek Smuglewicz portrays a gift-bearing messenger from Scythia meeting Darius I of Persia after the king’s unsuccessful campaign against the Scythians.

As a precaution, Darius cannily invited Histiaeus to become one of his senior advisers in the imperial capital of Susa, in Iran. Histiaeus initially considered the summons a great honor, little suspecting that it was designed merely to keep him far away from Ionia.

While Histiaeus was still the official tyrant of Miletus, his cousin and son-in-law, Aristagoras, became its de facto ruler. In 500 bce a contingent of exiled noblemen from the island of Naxos came to Aristagoras, seeking aid to restore them to their homeland, from which they had been driven by their own people. The Naxian exiles claimed xenia, or guest-friendship, with Histiaeus. Xenia was a pact, ordinarily between noblemen of different city-states, that entailed mutual obligations of hospitality and assistance.

Among the Greeks this bond was taken very seriously.

Seeing an opportunity to boost his power and perhaps even gain control of the island himself, Aristagoras pledged to attack Naxos. Lacking sufficient forces of his own, he went to Sardis to seek aid from Artaphernes, the Persian satrap (governor) there. The Naxian exiles had empowered Aristagoras to offer Artaphernes money in exchange for his military support. In addition to this financial enticement, Aristagoras suggested to Artaphernes that he might acquire some of the other Greek islands that dotted the Aegean.

Aristagoras asked for 100 triremes, the triple-tiered oared warships that represented the zenith of contemporary naval design, and Artaphernes, tantalized by the prospect of conquest, pledged twice that number. After Darius also approved Artaphernes’s plan, a huge army was assembled under the command of Megabates, a cousin of Artaphernes, and boarded the triremes for transport to Naxos.

Aristagoras and Megabates, however, began quarreling before the expedition had even set out. Neither man was willing to accede to the other’s command, and Aristagoras further inflamed the situation by intervening when Megabates tried to discipline one of the Ionian commanders for failing to post watch on his vessel. In the spring of 499 bce Aristagoras’s fleet, approaching the island, found it locked up tight against an assault. The Persians launched their siege anyway. After four months, having run through all their provisions, they finally gave up and sailed away.

Aristagoras was now in a very bad position. He had failed to conquer Naxos as he had promised, and his finances had been gutted in the attempt. To deflect blame, Aristagoras spread the false story that Megabates had warned the Naxians about the invasion. (More probably, a trading ship had brought news of the approaching invasion to the island after

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resupplying the standing Persian fleet at Chios, some 70 miles away.) Aristagoras feared that Darius, on hearing the rumors circulated by Megabates, would strip him of power at Miletus. With his once bright future dimming by the day, Aristagoras began to cast about for a way to save himself.

Around the same time, Aristagoras’s long-absent fatherin-law reentered the picture. Histiaeus, chafing in his gilded cage in Susa, wanted to get back to Miletus. The best way to accomplish this, he thought, was to secretly spark a revolt in the city that would cause Darius to turn to him to put it down. But how to instigate such a revolt? Because any message might be intercepted by Darius’s agents before it reached Miletus, Histiaeus had to be creative. He had the head of his most reliable slave shaved and the secret order to revolt tattooed on the slave’s scalp. Histiaeus then waited

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OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

This terra-cotta amphora depicts a hoplite soldier (left) attacking a Persian archer in the Greco-Persian Wars.

for the slave’s hair to grow back and cover the message. The slave then set off for Miletus, with orders to tell Aristagoras to shave the messenger’s head when he arrived.

Aristagoras received the secret message as planned, but he was already plotting his own scheme for rebellion. He convinced some leading Milesians to support the revolt against Persia and, in the meantime, pretended to come out in favor of democracy. He called for the other cities of the Ionian League to depose their own tyrants and install governing boards of generals, who would in turn report to him. It did not seem to occur to anyone that the new arrangement would merely place Aristagoras at the head of a new, enlarged tyranny. Nevertheless, inspired in part by the Persians’ intolerable practices of enslavement, forced deportation, and even the concubinage of Ionian women, the league’s members followed Aristagoras into open revolt.

Aristagoras sailed to mainland Greece to drum up support for the revolt, but he had no success in persuading the typically warlike Spartans to aid the Ionian cause. To impress Cleomenes, the king of Sparta, Aristagoras brought with him an engraved bronze map of the world, using the impressive new visual aid to show Cleomenes the locations of the various rich Persian client states. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Aristagoras told the Spartan king that “the people who live in those lands possess more in the way of assets than the entire population of the rest of the world.” All this, said Aristagoras, could belong to Cleomenes if only he would “cease fighting for small patches of valueless land with narrow borders” and turn his attention to Persia. While Cleomenes liked the idea in the abstract, he quickly soured on the plan when Aristagoras admitted that it would take three months to march from the Ionian coast of Asia Minor to Susa—some 1,600 miles. According to Herodotus, even the king’s 8-year-old daughter saw the folly of such a plan, warning her father that “your guest-friend is going to corrupt you if you don’t get away from him,” so Aristagoras left Sparta empty handed.

Aristagoras next went to Athens. The Athenians had recently overthrown their own tyrant, Hippias, and reconstituted themselves as a democracy; they were primed for action against Persia. Hippias had tried and failed to reclaim power with the help of Sparta, Athens’s traditional rival, fleeing to Sardis, where he attempted to convince Artaphernes to support another attack on Athens. The Persian satrap declined to actively take part, but he instructed the Athenians to reinstall Hippias as tyrant. They refused, which amounted to an act of war against Persia.

Aristagoras, addressing a crowd of 20,000 Athenian citizens, played on tribal loyalty, reminding his listeners that Miletus had been settled—at least in part—by Athenian immigrants. He also stressed the purported inferiority of the Persian infantry. Finally, Aristagoras emphasized that

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

IONIAN REVOLT

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

In 490 bce, after the Ionian cities of Asia Minor went to war against their Persian overlords, King Darius I of Persia used Athens’s role in the uprising as a pretext for his invasion of Greece. he had instituted democracy in Miletus and helped other Ionian cities throw off their tyrants. Athenian-style democracy was on the rise everywhere, he implied, conveniently leaving out his own power grab. He received a good response. Apparently it was “easier to deceive a crowd than a single man,” Herodotus noted dryly.

The Athenians agreed to lend military support to the uprising, chiefly in the form of 20 triremes. “These ships,” Herodotus wrote, “turned out to be the beginning of evils for both Greeks and barbarians.” The Athenian squadron arrived at Miletus in early spring 498 bce, and with it came five additional triremes from Eretria, a city on the island of Euboea. Aristagoras proceeded to send the Ionians, Athenians, and Eretrians to Sardis while he remained safely behind Miletus’s stout walls.

The expedition started out well. The rebels sailed north to Ephesus, left their ships behind at the port of Coressus, and marched inland, following the Cayster River to Mount Tmolus. Sardis was sited on the spur of the mountain overlooking the Hermus Valley and the western terminus of the

Persian royal road. The Ionians seized the lower city without a fight. Artaphernes, caught entirely by surprise, retreated to the high ground at the acropolis with a substantial body of soldiers.

A fire, probably set intentionally, although Herodotus implied it was accidental, rapidly spread through the reedand straw-thatched houses. The townsfolk, surrounded by the blaze, fled to the banks of the Pactolus River, source of the gold dust that had given rise to the legendary wealth of the former Lydian king, Croesus. The massive fire kept the Ionians from plundering Sardis. In a do-or-die show of courage, the city’s inhabitants organized themselves into a semblance of a fighting force. The serendipitous arrival of Persian reinforcements caused the Ionians to hurriedly withdraw from Sardis to Mount Tmolus, where they watched the flames rise high into the night sky. By morning nothing was left of the city but smoldering ruins. Particularly galling to the townsfolk was the destruction of the famous temple of Cybele, principal goddess of the Persians.

The Ionians began heading back to their ships without any loot. As news of the attack on Sardis spread rapidly

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IONIAN REVOLT

“Let it be granted to me,” King Darius vowed, “to punish the Athenians.”

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Aided by the desertion of two contingents of Ionian charioteers, the Persians gained the upper hand, killing Onesilus, the king of Salamis, in the process. The loss negated the naval victory that the Ionians, who had contributed their warships to the defense of Cyprus, had scored the same day against the Phoenician fleet. Judging the battle for Cyprus a lost cause, the Ionians sailed home, leaving the Persians to begin the bloody process of breaking the other rebellious Cypriot cities.

It was a grinding, brutal campaign. Soli, a walled city on the northern coast of Cyprus, held out against a siege for more than four months, falling only after the Persians had undermined its walls. At Palaepaphos, on the west coast, the Persians overcame the city’s walls—while under constant attack—by constructing a large siege ramp from soil, tree trunks, stones, and even nearby statues and altars.

Though the Palaepaphians tried to collapse the ramp with four countermines, the city fell, and the defenders’ slingshots were no match for the Persians’ bows and arrows.

Within a year the Persians had reclaimed all of Cyprus.

In 496 bce, in southwestern Asian Minor, the Persians routed a rebel army along the Marsyas River in breakaway Caria. The Carians made a good showing but were defeated by an enormous number of Persians. Although the Carians lost 10,000 men to the Persians’ 2,000, they received reinforcements from Miletus and fought another battle in Caria, at Labraunda. Again they were defeated. Still the plucky Carians would not give up, and in a third engagement, at Pedasus, they ambushed a Persian force and inflicted heavy losses on the king’s troops.

LEFT: SILVERFISH PRESS/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC IMAGE COLLECTION (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES); RIGHT: IVY CLOSE IMAGES (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

across Asia Minor, the Persians mounted a swift counterattack, with cavalry pursuing the slowly retreating Ionians.

When a report of the burning of Sardis reached Darius, the king called for his bow. Then, notching an arrow and shooting it skyward as an offering to the supreme sky god Ahura Mazda, the king uttered a solemn vow: “Let it be granted to me to punish the Athenians.” To etch the vow in his consciousness, he instructed a servant to attend him each night at dinner and repeat the phrase: “Master, remember the Athenians.”

Three of Darius’s sons-in-law led the pursuit. After a furious chase the Persians caught up to the Ionians just outside Ephesus, a city on the Aegean Sea some 60 miles from Sardis.

The Ionian hoplites—infantrymen with bronze helmets, reinforced linen cuirasses, round shields, and iron-tipped spears—formed a battle line, shoulder to shoulder, shields locked, but they were no match for the Persian juggernaut. The Persians, in quilted corselets and bronze helmets with towering horsehair crests, were masterful horsemen.

They hurled their javelins at the stationary Ionian phalanx or charged it with their spears, while mounted archers showered the Ionians with arrows. Overwhelmed by the vengeful Persians, many hoplites perished on the battlefield.

Their army shattered, the Ionians straggled back to their home cities, any prospect of freedom from the Persian yoke bleaker than before. The Athenians, in turn, abandoned their erstwhile allies and returned to the Greek mainland, resolved to take no further part in the revolt, despite Aristagoras’s repeated pleas.

Although the burning of Sardis was a catastrophe for all involved, the Ionians continued their revolt against their Persian overlords, and in 497 bce the Greeks of Cyprus and the non-Greeks of Caria, in southwestern Asia Minor, joined them. They, too, wanted Persian rule to end. That same year several Greek cities of the Hellespont, including Byzantium, also entered the fray. With a sudden rebellion spreading in the west, Darius turned to the one person he thought could end it: Histiaeus. Receiving the king’s permission to return to Miletus, Histiaeus quickly left Persia for good.

A Persian counteroffensive was already underway. A fleet composed mainly of ships from Phoenicia crossed from Cilicia in southern Asia Minor to rebel-held Cyprus. The troops, led by Artybius, a Persian commander, disembarked and advanced on the coastal city of Salamis, crushing a hastily assembled force drawn from several Cypriot cities.

Despite the setback at Pedasus, the Persians were relentless, and as they continued to rack up victories, the Ionian revolt crumbled. Artaphernes invaded Ionia, capturing Clazomenae and the city of Cyme in neighboring Aeolis. To the north, the Persians subdued rebel cities in the Hellespont.

Aristagoras, seeing the Persians winning on all fronts, tried to save himself. He considered escaping to Sardinia but chose instead to go to Myrcinus, in Thrace, where Histiaeus had resumed building the town. Once there, Aristagoras and his reduced force continued making trouble, attempting to establish a colony of their own on the Strymon River.

Aristagoras managed to secure a foothold in Thrace, but later died in battle while besieging a neighboring town.

Histiaeus, too, came to grief after his release from Susa.

Artaphernes, whom he had met with in Sardis after his return from Susa, blamed him—correctly—for having incited the Ionian revolt. “You stitched up the shoe,” he told Histiaeus, “and Aristagoras put it on.” In 494 bce the people of Miletus refused to take him back as their ruler, and his attempt to capture the city by force failed.

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LEFT: SILVERFISH PRESS/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC IMAGE COLLECTION (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES); RIGHT: IVY CLOSE IMAGES (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

In 480 bce, on the heels of their defeat at Thermopylae, the Greeks brought the war to an end with an improbable naval victory in the Battle of Salamis (left); a Persian admiral is killed in the fighting (right).

Elsewhere, Persian diplomats worked hard to detach rebel cities from the alliance. They sent former Ionian tyrants to win back their peoples, but all of them were rebuffed. Meanwhile, Persia fitted out a massive fleet of 600 triremes. When ready, it set sail for Miletus, accompanied on the land route by a giant army.

The Ionians prepared their own fleet of 353 triremes to meet the Persian force at the island of Lade, where they sometimes practiced naval maneuvers under Dionysius, a Phocaean admiral. Dionysius, who commanded one of the finest fleets in the Greek world, aimed to improve the battle tactics of the other Ionian naval contingents. His daily practice sessions involved training with armed troops on board as the Greek war galleys sailed in formation.

Dionysius showed the rowers how to perform the diekplous (breakthrough) maneuver, in which they would row into line, penetrate the enemy line, and then wheel around to ram the vulnerable sides and sterns of the opponent’s vessels. This advanced maneuver offered the Ionians their only real hope of defeating the Persian fleet, which was composed mainly of ships from Phoenicia. But the Phoenicians, the best sailors of the day, were already well versed in the maneuver, and Dionysus was in a race against time to instruct his own sailors in the tactic.

The precision and discipline needed to carry out the diekplous proved too much for some of the Ionian crews.

As their resentment of the well-intentioned Dionysius boiled over, they went on strike, causing the whole effort to

implode. The Samians, who were a major part of the Ionian Greek naval coalition at Lade, were so frustrated and worried by this collapse that they sought out their former tyrant, Aiakes, and struck a separate deal with him. When the naval battle at Lade began, the Samians simply turned and rowed away. This in turn sparked a disintegration of the Ionian battle line, and the Persians went after the remaining Ionians with a vengeance.

As the ships closed, they exchanged missiles: first arrows, then slingstones, then javelins. The Phoenician triremes, executing the diekplous and homing in on their targets with the guidance of their skilled helmsmen, rammed the Ionian ships, crushing their timbers and flooding them.

Triremes, built with a positive buoyancy, usually did not sink outright. Instead, they settled low in the water, swamped, and became stuck. Meanwhile, warriors in enemy triremes came up alongside and prepared to board and seize the foundering vessels, waging hand-to-hand fights with swords, spears, and shields.

The 100 triremes of the naval contingent from Chios, the largest in the allied fleet, fought particularly well. Even after the Samians betrayed them, the Chians stayed put and managed to pierce the Persian battle line several times.

Each Chian trireme had 40 hoplites aboard as marines, and they took on Persian galleys until almost all their own ships were lost. A handful of Chian triremes escaped.

Another survivor was Dionysius of Phocaea. During the fighting he had seized three Persian triremes, but he

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IONIAN REVOLT fled when the battle turned irretrievably against the Ionians. Knowing that it was just a matter of time before the Persians overran Phocaea, he made his way to Sicily.

There he became a pirate, capturing Etruscan and Carthaginian ships in western Mediterranean waters but never harming Greek vessels.

The aftermath of the Battle of Lade was grim. Corpses floated facedown in the bloody water, along with the unfortunates who had tumbled overboard, beside broken timbers and cracked oars. Though the Ionians had put up a stiff fight, the Persian fleet triumphed and Greek naval power in Ionia was obliterated.

The way to Miletus was now wide open. The Persians, with their extensive siegecraft skills, easily overcame its high walls, just as they had done at Soli and Palaepaphos. The Persians not only constructed earthen siege ramps leading up to the walls but also tunneled under them, bringing battering rams forward to finish the job. Like the Palaepaphians, the Milesians defended themselves ferociously, but the result was the same. The Persians overran the defenses and seized the city, looting and torching the nearby temple at Didyma in delayed revenge for the destruction of the temple of Cybele at Sardis. They killed the majority of the Milesian men and enslaved the women and children. Next the Persians returned to Caria, where they had taken a rare beating at Pedasus, finally overrunning the province.

Histiaeus, playing the part of a freebooting pirate at Byzantium, captured merchantmen as they tried to transit the straits from the Black Sea to the Aegean. Leading troops drawn from Lesbos, he landed on Chios and then crossed the sea to attack Thasos. When news came that a Persian fleet was moving up from Miletus against the rest of Ionia, Histiaeus went to Asia Minor to find food. There, the Persian general Harpagus defeated him in battle and took him prisoner.

Recalling his previous service to the Persian crown, Histiaeus confidently believed that Darius would forgive his most recent transgressions. Artaphernes and Harpagus, fearing just such a possibility, had Histiaeus impaled on a spike and beheaded. Their fears that the Greek would win royal forgiveness were well founded. When they sent Histiaeus’s head to Susa (probably to prove that he had been executed), Darius was furious. He still appreciated Histiaeus and the other Ionian tyrants for helping him get

With the bloody conclusion of the Battle of Lades, the way to Miletus was now wide open.

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his army back across the Danube after his miscarried Scythian invasion. Darius ordered his old comrade’s head buried with honors.

Having quelled the Ionian Revolt, the Persians continued mopping-up operations into 493 bce, with Chios, Lesbos, and Tenedos falling, along with the Chersonese in Thrace. The rebellion may have been over, but Darius had not forgotten his vow of vengeance. His colossal army would soon visit his wrath on all who had taken part in the destruction of Sardis, and that, above all, meant Athens. In 492 bce Darius appointed his son-in-law, Mardonius, as the supreme commander of a punitive invasion of Greece.

Mardonius was politically astute, and he shrewdly placated the Ionians by removing the recently restored—and still very unpopular—tyrants from control of their cities. The democracies he set up instead were nonetheless securely under his control. It was an ironic end to a revolt that had begun with dreams of just such democracies.

It would take a long time for the gargantuan Persian army and fleet to reach Greece, but they were on their way.

The Athenians had made a mortal enemy of Darius, the most powerful man in the Western world, and the failed Ionian revolt would lead to the Greco-Persian Wars. In 490 bce came the Battle of Marathon, where the Athenian hoplites finally defeated the Persians in open combat.

Darius died of illness in 486 bce at age 64. In 480 bce his successor, Xerxes, avenged Marathon at the Battle of Thermopylae after overcoming the heralded last stand by 300 Spartans. The improbable Greek naval victory that same year at Salamis concluded the war in the Greeks’ favor.

The consequences of the Persian invasions would be felt long afterward. Athens would forge an empire of its own when it took the lead in chasing the Persians from the Aegean basin in the early sixth century bce. In the fourth century bce, Alexander the Great would use the devastation inflicted by the Persians as justification for his own war of vengeance against them. His conquest of the eastern Mediterranean altered forever the political landscape of the region and saw the establishment of brilliant Hellenistic kingdoms that dominated Persia’s former territories in Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere for centuries to come.

The Greek acculturation of these areas in turn smoothed the way for a rising Rome to subsequently exert control over them. In modern times, the Greek battles for freedom from Persian control still loom large in Western memory.

All these developments trace their origins to that fateful and fiery day at Sardis in 498 bce. MHQ Marc DeSantis is the author of Rome Seizes the Trident: The Defeat of Carthaginian Seapower and the Forging of the Roman Empire (Pen and Sword Military, 2016).

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CULTURE OF WAR CLASSIC

DISPATCHES 80 WAR STORIES 82 ARTISTS 86 POETRY 90 BIG SHOTS 91 REVIEWS 92

CANADIAN WAR MUSEUM

Two big dangers for tankers in World War I were machine-gun and artillery fire and the violent motion of their vehicles lumbering over trenches or shell-cratered terrain. This leather helmet guarded against impact injuries; the armored goggles and chain-mail mask offered some protection from small-arms fire that might come through the tank’s vision ports and from “splash”—the metal fragments sent flying through the crew compartment from shells or other projectiles hitting its hull.

Canadian War Museum, https://www.warmuseum. ca/firstworldwar

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CLASSIC DISPATCHES

GREAT VICTORY! In 1815 James Morgan Bradford may well have become the first modern war correspondent when he sent a firsthand account of the Battle of New Orleans to The Time Piece, the tiny newspaper he had established four years earlier in St. Francisville, Louisiana.

Bradford was born in Virginia in 1777 but grew up in Frankfort, Kentucky, where his father published a newspaper. Shortly after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Bradford moved to New Orleans, where he bought a printing plant and began publishing the Orleans Gazette. In 1805 he became the Louisiana Territory’s official printer, but his strident calls for the use of military force to liberate “the wretched subjects of despotic Spain” brought him into direct political conflict with the territory’s governor, who revoked his contract in 1809. At that point Bradford sold his interest in the Gazette and moved to St. Francisville, where he took up the study of law, founded The Time Piece (the town’s first newspaper), and was admitted to the Louisiana Bar. In January 1815, as the British—unaware that the Treaty of Ghent had formally ended the War of 1812 on December 24, 1814—turned their sights on New Orleans, Bradford joined a Louisiana unit, Captain Jedediah Smith’s “Feliciana Troop of Horse,” to defend the port city against an enemy assault. U.S. Army forces under the command of Brevet Major General Andrew Jackson scored a resounding victory in the Battle of New Orleans, making Jackson a national hero.

After the war Bradford decided to devote all his time to the practice of law. He lost his bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1822 and ran again, unsuccessfully, in 1834. He died in 1837 of stab wounds received during a quarrel.

Bradford’s account of the Battle of New Orleans was published in an extra edition of The Time Piece on January 17, 1815, under the headline great victory. (Some of the punctuation in the annotated version that follows has been modernized for readability.)

Bradford’s paper rushed his account of the Battle of New Orleans into print.

After my letter of the 6th [Bradford’s previous dispatch], every thing remained tranquil until the 8th. On the morn-

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ing of that day, between day light and sun rise, the enemy made an assault on our works. He advanced in three columns—his right on the edge of the swamp, flanked by the woods, which was his strongest effort, directed against our left, and where our line of riflemen commenced—His left on the levee, directed against our right. The left and centre columns halted at about 400 paces distance, except about 100 men, who advanced under cover of the levee, and were mistaken for our own piquets, until they got possession of our bastions, in front of the extreme right of our breast work.

As soon as they entered the bastion, three officers rushed upon our breast work, one of whom having reached the top, called out to the Yankee Rascals to cease firing, and flourishing his sword, cried “the enemy’s works are ours.”

The words had not time to cool upon his lips, when he fell with his comrades, lifeless in our ditch. Not a man who entered our bastion was permitted to return & tell the tale of their desperate carnage—all perished, penetrated with innumerable wounds.

As this part of the column reached our right, Capt.

[Enoch] Humphrey opened upon the halted columns a most destructive fire, from four 12 pounders. The most desperate attack was that on our left. This column was suffered to advance to our ditch, when three 24 pounders opened upon it with grape and cannister, and every fire cut a lane through the advancing column. After the first discharge of cannon our musketry opened, say from about a thousand hands. Never did I hear such a roar of small arms. The action continued between 40 and 50 minutes, when the enemy retired. Thrice did he advance, and thrice did he retire, mowed down by the irresist[i]ble effect of our fire.

The right column of the enemy was [led], as we are induced to believe from the reports of prisoners, by the Right Honb. Edward Pakenham, Lieut. Gen. and commander in chief. He was killed, as was another General, and Maj. [John] Kean is severely wounded. All the prisoners concur in saying they never witnessed such an action. Those who were at Talavera, Badajo[z], and St. Sebastians [three battles of the Peninsula War] acknowledge that they suffered not half as severely in proportion to our force, as on the dreadful 8th. You may estimate the result after this manner—losses of the enemy 600 killed, 1,000 wounded, & 400 prisoners—total 2,000—800 stand of arms taken, in

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HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION

By James Morgan Bradford

HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION

Brevet Major General Andrew Jackson (on white horse) and two other mounted officers lead American forces on January 8, 1815, as red-coated British soldiers storm their line in the Battle of New Orleans. an action of 50 minutes—whilst our losses was not exceeding 15: five killed and ten wounded.

After detailing this glorious result of the battle of the 8th, at our line, I feel indescribable pain, in detailing the issue on the opposite bank of the Mississippi. On the night of the 7th, the enemy succeeded in getting some of his barges into the river, and crossed over about 900 men. [Brigadier] Gen. [David] Morgan with about 600 state troops, and 400 Kentuckians was posted there, where was also erected a battery of 12 and 24 pounders, and a howit[zer], taken from Lord [Charles] Cornwallis at Yorktown. The Gen., apprised of the situation of the enemy, sent about 100 men under Maj. [Charles] Tessier of Baton Rouge to oppose his landing. The Maj., supposing, or effecting to suppose, that the enemy’s object was an attack on fort St. Leon, at the English Turn, returned, & suffered him to land without molestation.

In the morning of the 8th, the enemy advanced, and made an attack on Gen. Morgan, simultaneous with that on Gen. [Andrew] Jackson. Capt. [T. W.] Scott of Feliciana, and one or two other companies, from New Orleans, sustained the shock with great coolness. Our artillery gave the foe a spirited fire, and halted his advance for a moment, but our right under Maj. Tessier having given away without firing a gun, and falling back upon the Kentuckians, threw them into confusion. The enemy returned to the charge, and our men at the battery having spiked their guns, retired. The result of this affair was two killed and one wounded on our

part, with the loss of the howit[zer]—and that of the enemy, we say 8, as six graves and two unburied bodies were discovered and we took two prisoners. The enemy retreated with great precipitation. I have no hesitation saying that had Maj. Tessier’s command behaved with that firmness that became our character, the defeat would have been as signal to the enemy on the west, as on east bank of the river.

A most awful cannonade began on the night of the 10th, and continued until a late hour last night, at fort St. Philip (Plaquemine). On the 11th, an express reached Gen. Jackson, that on the 10th at 10 o’clock P. M. the enemy commenced the attack, leading in ships, gunboats, bomb vessels, barges, &c innumerable. About sunset last evening, two explosions took place in the direction of St. Philip, supposed to be the enemy’s vessels. Of the result we cannot give any account—but we feel great confidence that it is favorable to our arms.

I feel singular pleasure in informing you that our companions have yet suffered nothing, although we were as near the action of the 8th as possible. Of our fellow citizens and acquaintance, the companies of Capts. Lewis Davis and Isaac Johnson were at the breast work on the 8th, and supported by their courage, the high character our parish has so justly acquired.

I must close—for as I write, I am informed our squadron is engaged with the enemy’s piquet, and I must hasten to join them. MHQ

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WAR STORIES

THE SHORT GOODBYE

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n the photograph, the private allows himself a tight little smile as though he has just shared a wisecrack.

A cutaway doublet-style jacket drapes his slight, 140-pound frame. He’s about 5-foot-9 and wears a khaki kilt apron with a pocket replacing the traditional sporran. His knees are bare. He holds the barrel of a rifle with his right hand, the butt resting on the ground. He looks like an underfed accountant forced into a Highland uniform, which is just what he was. Before enlisting in the military, he had worked as a bookkeeper for a creamery, handling its ice cream accounts.

His parents’ marriage had been cut short by his father’s alcoholism. The enlistment form asked whether his father was living. “I don’t know,” he wrote. He had turned 29 the previous month and had last seen his father when he was 7.

The Great War in Europe had been raging for three years by the time the photograph was taken. The private was entirely unknown. Years later, in 1939, as the world staggered toward another conflagration, he published, at age 51, his first novel, The Big Sleep.

Today, Raymond Chandler’s name evokes a punchy, hard-boiled style of detective fiction. His tough-guy private eye, Philip Marlowe, a boozer, as Chandler was, has been portrayed on the big screen by the likes of Humphrey Bogart, James Garner, and Robert Mitchum. Marlowe, a loner, is an honest man making his way through the seamy Los Angeles underworld. He is quick with a quip and fearless. He is knocked out—a lot. He is unlucky, of course, in love.

The creator of this paragon of American masculinity may have been born in United States, but he was raised in England and fought in World War I for one of the Dominions. On the day his photograph was taken, Chandler was wearing the uniform of the 50th Regiment, the Gordon Highlanders of Canada.

Before enlisting in the military, Chandler had worked as a bookkeeper for a creamery.

Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888.

His peripatetic childhood was made more precarious after

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his father, Maurice (Morris) Chandler, a civil engineer for a railway company, abandoned his family. Mother and son depended on the assistance of her relatives, first in Nebraska and then in England, where they shared a red-brick house in London with an unmarried aunt and the boy’s grandmother. In September 1900, young Chandler, age 12, enrolled at Dulwich College, where he excelled in mathematics and the classics. An uncle covered the cost of studying French and German on the continent after graduation.

Since he was planning to enter the civil service, Chandler needed to settle the question of his citizenship on his return to London. Born in the United States to an American father and an Anglo-Irish mother, he applied for a certificate of naturalization from the Home Secretary. Three days later, on May 23, 1907, before a justice of the peace, Chandler signed an oath of allegiance to King Edward VII. After working in the Admiralty for six months, Chandler left to try to support himself and his mother as a freelance writer. He lived in London’s Bloomsbury district, submitting poetry to the prestigious though stodgy literary magazine The Academy. Chandler was dissatisfied with his efforts, later dismissing his verse as “grade B Georgian.”

Chandler also tried his hand as a journalist, working for the Daily Express and the Westminster Gazette.

In 1912 Chandler boarded the American Line steamship Merion in Liverpool bound for Philadelphia, a new start financed by a loan from the uncle. Aboard ship, he befriended Warren Lloyd, a Nebraska-born lawyer, who was traveling home to Los Angeles with his wife, Caroline, and their daughter and two sons. It was a fortunate meeting, for it was through the Lloyd family that Chandler would be introduced to the married woman who would in time become his wife. Chandler followed the Lloyds to the promised land of California, where he picked apricots for 20 cents an hour and earned $12.50 per 54-hour workweek stringing tennis rackets for a sporting goods company.

Chandler’s mother eventually arrived from England.

She and Raymond moved in with the Lloyds in a stylish home in a posh neighborhood. The couple ran a weekly salon for a group of literary and musical friends they called The Optimists. Among them was Julian Pascal, a British-­ born pianist who performed at recitals and was the musical director at the Wilshire School for Girls. In 1917 Chandler

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IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS

“Once you have had to lead a platoon into direct machine-gun fire,” Raymond Chandler would later write,“nothing is ever the same again.”

By Tom Hawthorn

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS

A young Raymond Chandler poses in the tam and uniform of the 50th Regiment, the Gordon Highlanders of Canada.

wrote a libretto and Pascal the music for a comic opera in the fashion of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Chandler became besotted with Pascal’s wife, Cissy, a red-haired beauty. It was said that she did housework in the nude, though her acquiescence to drudgery was perhaps more surprising.

Thanks to Lloyd’s connections, Chandler got a job with the Los Angeles Creamery Company, completing a threeyear bookkeeping course in just six weeks of nighttime study. He was promoted to manager of the creamery’s Santa Barbara branch. Ahead of him lay a career of modest, anonymous achievement. It was not what he wanted.

On March 31, 1917, Chandler signed a declaration of intent to become an American citizen, promising to re-

nounce his allegiance to the British Crown, then embroiled in the third year of a grinding war against Germany and the Central Powers. If Chandler sought a change of citizenship to avoid military duty, his plan was upended just a week later when the United States ended its neutrality by declaring war on Germany.

On June 5, Chandler filled out a draft registration card.

He described himself as single and the sole provider for Florence. He claimed exemption from the draft “on account [of] mother.” The following month his name appeared with a draft selection number in the Santa Barbara Daily News and Independent. By September, Chandler would be listed as delinquent in reporting for a medical examination, by which time he was already in uniform with an Allied nation.

As it happened, on August 14, 1917, a fine summer’s day in temperate Victoria, British Columbia, Chandler had reported to a mobilization center to volunteer for service with the Gordon Highlanders. What changed his mind and what brought him to Canada when American forces were seeking recruits for wartime service? It seems likely that Chandler had visited the San Fernando Building in downtown Los Angeles at Fourth and Main Streets. There, the U.S. Army was signing up volunteers adjacent to space operated by a recruiting office shared by the British and Canadians. angelenos go in steady stream to allied camps, the Los Angeles Times reported in a headline that month, adding, “British-Canadian recruiting office a place of romance and efficiency from which warriors depart in quiet groups, calmly and unsung.” The newspaper dispatched a feature writer and a sketch artist to observe a dozen volunteers for the Canadian armed forces board the 2 p.m. Pacific Electric train to the harbor to catch a boat bound for San Francisco and on to Vancouver Island. The 50th Gordon Highlanders, the resulting story said, was one of two “picturesque kiltie regiments” seeking reinforcements.

After 36 months of war, the slaughter on the Western Front left the Gordons in desperate need of reinforcements between the ages of 18 and 40. The regiment placed advertisements in newspapers promising single men $1.10 per day with all living and clothing expenses covered. Married men were promised that their wives would receive about $17 every month, as well as a $20 separation allowance.

The regiment offered to pay recruits the cost of travel to Victoria and further offered to assist dependents with funds from the Canadian Patriotic Fund. The promise of financial support likely influenced Chandler’s decision. He had been giving his mother $60 a month.

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Chandler arrived in Victoria with 30 other California recruits, including his 20-year-old London-born friend Gordon Pascal, Cissy’s stepson. Each witnessed the other’s attestation papers. On the form, Pascal listed his occupation as actor; Chandler said he was a journalist. Both statements were more aspirational than factual. Though only weeks earlier he had signed a promise to renounce his British allegiance in exchange for American citizenship, Chandler now vowed to “bear true Allegiance to His Majesty King George the Fifth” and agreed to serve in the Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force for as long as war lasted between Britain and Germany. He again signed his name, as did Pascal as witness. Both were warned that a false statement could mean as much as six months’ imprisonment under the Army Act. The Gordons bivouacked at Willows Camp, a flat expanse of fairgrounds (including a horse racing track) just east of the city. Recruits were put through training that included aerobic exercises and such strengthening regimens as straightarm plank holds. They also played cricket and other sports.

For practice, they thrust bayonets into bales of twigs.

If Chandler had a chance to read the local newspapers on his arrival, he would have known about China’s entry into the war and about Canada’s success in capturing a strategic position overlooking the occupied French city of Lens in the celebrated Battle for Hill 70. The newspapers printed casualty lists, of course, as well as news about an upcoming meeting of the Win-the-War League at the Royal Victoria Theatre. He might also have spotted a small advertisement for a tearoom offering ice cream and tobacco and only recently named Vimy Ridge after Canada’s great victory three months earlier. He would see the real Vimy Ridge soon enough.

Soon Chandler’s battalion was in the trenches, enduring sniper fire, shelling, and gas attacks.

Chandler sailed to England aboard the converted ocean liner Megantic, arriving in Liverpool on December 7, 1917.

By March he was in the field with the 7th Battalion, one of 126 reinforcements to join in a reserve position at Loos, France. He was posted to No. 1 Company.

Almost without delay, his battalion was in the trenches, enduring sniper fire, shelling, and gas attacks. In just three months, he would be rotated into the front lines near Vimy Ridge as Germany’s massive spring offensive, dubbed the Kaiserschlacht (Kaiser’s Battle), bolstered by divisions diverted from the Eastern Front following the Russian Revolution, hammered into British forces.

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There was little respite even behind the lines. Many dawns were heralded by explosions of long-range artillery shells; gas shells kept all alert; occasionally a bomb from an enemy biplane fell from the sky.

After two months Chandler was promoted to acting sergeant and given command of 30 men. “Once you have had to lead a platoon into direct machine-gun fire,” he would later reflect, “nothing is ever the same again.” The slaughter he witnessed changed his outlook on life, which perhaps would find expression in the coming years through his own destructive behavior.

After a dozen harrowing weeks on the Western Front, he transferred to England for a commission in the Royal Air Force. He underwent training at No. 2 Cadet Wing at St. Leonards-on-Sea, a resort town on the English Channel. He was still undergoing flight training as an officer cadet at No. 6 School of Military Aeronautics in Bristol when the armistice was signed.

Many Chandler biographies describe the private as having been concussed by a shell, some suggesting he was the sole survivor of his platoon in the explosion. His personnel record from the war makes no mention of such an injury.

He did, however, survive two six-day bouts of Spanish influenza while stationed in England in July and October 1918.

On February 1, 1919, Chandler was one of 25 cadets, as well as 95 officers and 3,074 of other ranks, to board the RMS Carmania in Liverpool for the journey home. It was the first sailing for the Cunard liner without wartime camouflage paint. Among the civilians on board were the English novelist John Galsworthy and the celebrated war correspondent Philip Gibbs. The Canadians on board put on a program of songs, step dances, and magic tricks.

On demobilization in Vancouver, Chandler was presented a War Service Badge (Army Class A). The round badge bore the inscription, “For service at the front,” surrounding a Union Jack shield. It also included the inscription, CEF, for Canadian Expeditionary Force. He returned once again to Willows Camp in Victoria, where he would catch a ship back to California.

He thought Victoria “dullish as an English town would be dull on a Sunday, everything shut up, churchy atmosphere.” When he returned in 1932 for a short stay at the famous Empress Hotel, one of the dailies noted that the Hollywood scriptwriter had a limp from a 2,000-foot fall while flying a Sopwith Camel for the Americans during the war. Perhaps Chandler sought to add some sparkle to Victoria’s routines with a fanciful tale.

Back in California, Chandler pursued his romantic interest in Cissy Pascal, who divorced an understanding Julian. The romance was complicated by Chandler’s domineering mother, who lived with her son and frowned on the relationship.

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LEFT: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS; RIGHT: SMITH ARCHIVE (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

RAYMOND CHANDLER

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LEFT: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS; RIGHT: SMITH ARCHIVE (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

From left: A platoon of Gordon Highlanders stands for rifle inspection near Arras, France, in 1918; actor Humphrey Bogart played Philip Marlow in the 1946 motion-picture version of The Big Sleep.

On Valentine’s Day in 1924, a few months after his mother’s death, Raymio, as his bride called him, wed Cissy.

The marriage license gave his age as 35, hers as 43. (In fact, she was 53.) It was his first marriage, her third.

Chandler became a bookkeeper and auditor for the Dabney Oil Syndicate, a job he held until 1932, when he was fired for drunkenness and chronic tardiness, among other transgressions. His personal life was a jumble of infidelities. Job prospects in the depths of the Depression were poor. He was saved by a $100 monthly allowance from the Lloyd family after he assisted one of the sons in a libel suit.

The financial cushion afforded Chandler the time to analyze mystery and detective stories by Erle Stanley Gardner and others published in the popular pulp-fiction magazine Black Mask. Toward the end of 1933 Chandler sold his first story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,” to the magazine. When The Big Sleep was released, advertisements promoted Chandler as the next big thing to follow Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain.

Chandler’s old creamery accountancy job, as dull as it surely was, gave him an introduction to the violence and criminality of a sun-kissed land where fortunes were to be made. The creamery’s boss, George E. Platt, had been convicted and fined for a scheme in which he passed off a mixture of milk and condensed milk as high-priced cream.

Two years later, Platt was shot in the back by a man who claimed to have been the victim of a land swindle. The man then shot himself in the head, dying instantly. There was darkness in the land of eternal sunshine, and Chandler was just the guy to go poking about in it.

Many of the secondary characters in his novels were war veterans. Chandler’s Marlowe is always getting knocked out—by drugs, drink, or a dry-gulching. The

author undoubtedly saw lots of men getting concussions on the Western Front, though from the Hun’s shells rather than a blackguard’s cosh.

Chandler rarely wrote about his war experiences. He made an exception in 1957 while corresponding with a young fan. Biographer Sarah Trott quotes Chandler’s letter: Courage is a strange thing. You can never be sure of it. As a platoon commander many years ago, I never seemed to be afraid, and yet I have been afraid of the insignificant risks. If you had to go over the top somehow all you seemed to think of was trying to keep the men spaced, in order to reduce casualties. It was always very difficult, especially if you had replacements or men who had been wounded. It is only human to want to bunch for companionship in face of heavy fire.

Cissy’s death in 1954 devastated Chandler, who fell into a drunken despondency. In 1956, he at last became an American citizen. He died of pneumonia less than three years later, before he completed arrangements to have Cissy’s cremated remains buried with him.

It took 52 years and a court order initiated by fans of the mystery writer to have her ashes buried next to his at San Diego’s Mount Hope Cemetery. On the late couple’s Valentine’s Day anniversary in 2011, some 100 people gathered at the gravesite for the occasion. A new headstone included the inscription: “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”

The line, of course, is from The Big Sleep. MHQ Tom Hawthorn, a Canadian journalist, lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

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ARTISTS

FALLEN STAR

German artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a pioneer of the European avant-garde movement. This self-portrait is his most famous work.

By Leonard V. Smith

“The most moving was a self-portrait in uniform with his right hand cut off.”

Few have questioned the meaning of Self-Portrait as a stridently antiwar painting. Certainly, Nazi officials read the image that way. They seized the painting in 1936 and displayed it—presumably as a negative example—in an exhibit of anti-Bolshevik art that same year. More famously,

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in 1937 they included the work in an exhibition of “degenerate art” in Munich. The Nazis retitled it Soldat mit Dirne (Soldier with Whore).

The standard interpretation of the work as a bitter repudiation of World War I long survived the defeat of Nazi Germany. Generations of art historians, more recently with the aid of gender theory, have affirmed again and again that the painting provides a searing testimony to the artist’s disgust with that conflict. As art historian Donald Gordon wrote in 1987: The artist cannot paint and soldier cannot fight. His violation is as frustrated as his body is mutilated. The painting’s personal symbolism is one of paralysis and castration, of functional loss both professional and sexual. Its social symbolism, however, is one of defiance and military authority, of an imagined sacrifice of a body part to avoid a battlefield sacrifice of the whole person. If a man must be unmanned to avoid military action, then Kirchner shows by a wished-for amputation a deeply felt pacifism.

Nazi critics in the 1930s and a serious academic art historian writing in the 1980s would of course place radically different value judgments on the work and its message. But if both could arrive at similar interpretations, there would seem little left to explain. Kirchner’s self-portrait represents an emasculated victim, impotently protesting the tragedy of World War I even as that tragedy was still unfolding.

Yet it has always been too easy to assume a connection between the artistic avant-garde in the early 20th century and unconditional pacifism. From well before 1914, the avant-garde concerned itself with finding the proper means of artistic expression—not with rejecting war per se.

Indeed, in his Manifesto of Futurism, published in 1909, Italian artist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti embraced a future conflagration. Other figures certainly accepted war when it came. French painters Fernand Léger and Georges Braque responded to the call to arms when their country mobilized in August 1914. Poet and surrealist Guillaume Apollinaire, born in Italy of a Polish mother and Italian father, applied for French citizenship and ultimately joined the artillery.

Artists Max Beckman, Otto Dix, and George Grosz all volunteered to serve their German fatherland. In Vienna,

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CHARLES F. OLNEY FUND, ALLEN MEMORIAL ART MUSEUM, OBERLIN COLLEGE, OHIO

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rnst Ludwig Kirchner’s Self-Portrait as a Soldier remains one of the most famous European paintings produced during World War I. The fame of the work grew from the time Kirchner painted it in 1915. In fact, the self-portrait was his first piece to appear in major museums—first as a loan to the Staatliche Gemäldesammlung in Dresden and subsequently as an acquisition by the Städelsches Kunstinsitut in Frankfurt am Main.

The famed German philosopher Eberhard Grisebach, who visited Kirchner in Berlin in March 1917, offered a respectful assessment of the artist’s works. “Each picture had its own particular colorful character, a great sadness was present in all of them; what I had previously found to be incomprehensible and unfinished now created the same delicate and sensitive impression as his personality,” Grisebach wrote. “Everywhere a search for style, for psychological understanding of his figures. The most moving was a self-portrait in uniform with his right hand cut off.”

Kirchner’s expressionist style, with its bright colors and sharp lines, throws into sharp relief easily recognizable human features. Kirchner represents himself as an artist in uniform. A cigarette dangles from his lips. Alarmingly, his right hand (which Kirchner used to paint) has been cut off, leaving a red but bloodless stump. The left hand bears little resemblance to an actual hand and seems almost to merge with the body of a naked woman just behind the artist. Likewise, his face appears to brush against the arm of the woman. But there is no explicit connection between the two human figures, both of whom gaze with unfocused eyes in different directions. Neither shows any identifiable human emotion.

CHARLES F. OLNEY FUND, ALLEN MEMORIAL ART MUSEUM, OBERLIN COLLEGE, OHIO

Nazi officials included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Self-Portrait as a Soldier in an exhibition of “degenerate art” in Munich in 1937, retitling the work Soldat mit Dirne (Soldier with Whore).

Oskar Kokoschka sold paintings expressly to pay for his equipment to serve in the cavalry of Austria-Hungary.

Kirchner held a unique place as a rising star in the European avant-garde before the war. A member of Die Brücke (The Bridge), a group of German expressionist artists founded in Dresden in 1905, Kirchner marshaled his

talents against realist artistic convention. But members of the group also acknowledged deep connections to older, particularly artisanal traditions—such as the work of Albrecht Dürer, Mathias Grünewald, and Lucas Cranach the Elder. Not by coincidence, all had been important figures in a distinctly German school of Renaissance art.

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A fine book by Peter Springer, Hand and Head: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Self-Portrait as a Soldier” (University of California Press, 2002), details the origins and exhibition history of the painting. In 1914, when Germany mobilized for war, the 34-year-old Kirchner placed his name on a recruitment list for the artillery. In April 1915, he wrote to his friend, art critic Gustav Schiefler: “I went to the muster for the field artillery, a beautiful and for me interesting division. I am now waiting for the call-up; when you’re in the military you always have to wait.”

By then, the Great War had already transformed how Europeans waged war. The carnage on the Western Front had reached unprecedented levels. No one could tell how, when, or even whether the conflict would end. In May 1915 Kirchner entered Manstein Field Artillery Regiment No. 75 (the number on his uniform in the self-portrait). He served behind the lines and became strongly attached to the horse he tended.

Before the war Kirchner’s mental state was less than stable, a condition exacerbated by poor physical health. He drank, smoked heavily, and used morphine and barbiturates. Once in the army, he all but stopped eating.

An understanding commanding officer excused Kirchner from regular drills on the thin pretext that the unit needed his photography skills. But Kirchner’s health continued to deteriorate, and he was given a leave to recuperate. Perhaps not by coincidence, the field surgeon authorizing the leave soon found himself in possession of a Kirchner painting. By December 1915, Kirchner’s superiors rendered his medical leave permanent and discharged him from the army. Thus, Kirchner’s direct military service in World War I was over in a matter of months. Not only had he never been wounded, he had never even served near the front. By 1917, his personal retreat from the war took him to Davos, Switzerland, where he remained most of the rest of his life, which ended with his suicide in 1938.

His health deteriorating, Kirchner spent much of the war in and out of sanatoriums.

Art historians, knowing that Kirchner suffered no combat injuries during the war, have interpreted the amputated hand in Self-Portrait as symbolic: The horrible war robbed Kirchner of his creativity, even of his manhood. The artist cannot be a man if he cannot paint or if he can only paint images of walking wounded such as himself. He could only paint art without beauty, the hideous having become the only aesthetic thinkable in the war of the trenches.

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But in fact, the very existence of Self-Portrait and other important works from this period suggests that diminished creativity in wartime was the least of Kirchner’s problems.

Indeed, he continued to produce artistically significant works, including another war-related painting, Das Soldatenbad (Artillerymen in the Shower), in 1915. To be sure, Kirchner spent much of the war in and out of sanatoriums, in a foredoomed effort to restore his health and to wean him from insalubrious habits, notably his dependence on Veranol, the first commercially sold barbiturate. But it was also during the war that Kirchner began to enjoy commercial success. The Schames Gallery in Frankfurt held an exhibition of his works in October 1916 that provided the artist with unaccustomed financial security. His response was another nervous breakdown and a return to the sanatorium that December. His many wartime and postwar landscapes are unfailingly electric, but arguably, after 1915 he never created a work as powerful as Self-Portrait.

Perhaps more surprisingly, Kirchner’s commitment to the war endured. Like so many other Europeans, he seems to have made a distinction between the world war and his personal war. The world war might be senseless and irreparably damage the lives of those it touched, but Kirchner maintained a highly idiosyncratic form of attachment to it, even from Switzerland. He continued to pursue commissions related to the war effort, including a patriotic statue of the Schmied von Hagen (Blacksmith of Hagen). He wrote to Schiefler in October 1916, some 10 months after he left the army for good: “I want to publish a small book to show the German people that I would gladly contribute something human and artistic, not just with weapons.”

Indeed, it seems plausible to turn the time-honored reading of Self-Portrait as a Soldier on its head. Perhaps the deep anxiety of the painting reflects not so much the artist’s victimization by the war as his sense of his own insufficiency before it. He signed up for duty as a soldier and failed utterly, well before he got anywhere near physical danger. He became a living mockery of his own intentions.

The painting presented in lurid colors, to use a slang term of the time, a militärischer krüppel, a “military cripple.”

This term of derision meant a weakling not able to live up to the masculine norms of soldiering.

From this point of view, the nude woman in the painting becomes not the objectified emblem of Kirchner’s sexual impotence, as critics have long maintained, but an extension of the author himself. The painting is, after all, a “self ” portrait. The conventional reading of the woman as a sex worker seems reasonable, given the frequency with which Kirchner photographed and painted such women.

But in Self-Portrait the soldier and the woman almost merge—in the soldier’s left hand and along the woman’s right hand and the soldier’s face. The key to understand-

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KIRCHNER MUSEUM DAVOS

ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER

“A painter paints the appearance of things, not their objective correctness,” Kirchner once wrote of his approach to art. “In fact he creates new appearances of things.”

KIRCHNER MUSEUM DAVOS

ing this melding is understanding Kirchner’s mortal fear of returning to active duty, his permanent medical leave notwithstanding. He could not escape what he saw as his own emasculation. He wrote to Schiefler in November 1916: “Right now I’m just like the prostitutes I painted.

Whisked away, gone the next time.” The woman remains an objectified site of misogyny, but here a site internalized. She, an alternative embodiment of Kirchner, is very much a part of Self-Portrait.

Kirchner, like millions of Europeans, revised his views of the war shortly after it ended. For Kirchner, the jump was a short one from self-loathing militärischer krüppel to victim of a cruel war beyond his control. After the bitter peace of 1919, Kirchner could blame the totality of individual and collective suffering on the war, which had devoured the lives of millions and, for Germany, resulted in defeat. In 1921, the prospect appeared of a commission to design a monument to students from the University of Jena who had been killed in the war. Kirchner declined, protesting that “the task goes against my inner conviction. I have always been an opponent of war, right from the start, and cannot with an honest and clear conscience work for the glorification of soldiers.” At best, this contention oversimplified his own responses to the war. But in rejecting the chance to compete for this commission, Kirchner could complete his personal journey from acceptance to endurance to repudiation of the Great War. Kirchner did not so much exhibit bad faith on the matter as change his views on the war more completely and more quickly than he cared to remember. Millions of other

Europeans on both sides did the same. By 1921 he could efface the problematic facts of his prior embrace of the war.

Kirchner could tell himself that his refusal of the war had been the story all along rather than merely the end of it. His journey consisted of his journey’s end, pure and simple.

Thus, if read as a monument that represents the Great War as victimization and tragedy culminating in complete renunciation of the Great War as a worthy cause, Kirchner’s Self-Portrait as a Soldier is not in fact an avant-garde work at all. Kirchner simply expressed in strong lines, bright colors, and facial expressions, harrowing in their blankness, a point of view that by the 1920s had become utterly mainstream in European culture. The task of the historian lies in disentangling the historically specific meanings of the object at different points in time. What a painting came to mean is not what it always meant.

The Nazis would later reinforce Kirchner’s own interpretation of his work by including it in their exhibit on “degenerate art.” By World War II, Self-Portrait had fallen to into obscurity. Under unknown and perhaps dubious circumstances, Kurt Feldhausser, a private collector (and possible Nazi Party member), acquired it in 1943. After Feldhausser’s death in an air raid in 1945, his mother sold the painting to Erhard Weyhe Gallery in New York. Oberlin College purchased the work from the gallery in 1950.

Because the Nazis seized the work from a public museum rather than a private individual, it is not considered “looted” art in the manner that has led to so much controversy with other objects. In the fraught world of provenance, Oberlin’s claim to the work appears to rest on solid legal ground. Kirchner’s Das Soldatenbad, in contrast, was returned to the heirs of the prewar owner by the Guggenheim Museum of New York in 2018.

Like many museums, Oberlin’s Allen Memorial Art Museum does not reveal what it paid for objects in its collection. But local folklore has the price at a pittance compared to its present immense value. At the very least, the curators of the Allen at the time made a shrewd guess as to its future value. In artistic and art market circles, by the 1950s, German Expressionism became respectable. It provided a contrast to the patriotic “realism” fetishized by Nazi Germany, as well as the similar aesthetics of Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union. Ironically, the Cold War made avant-garde Expressionism mainstream. Almost as soon as Self-Portrait arrived, Oberlin began to loan it out for exhibitions. It remains one of the most famous objects in the Allen’s entire collection. MHQ Leonard V. Smith is Frederick B. Artz Professor of History at Oberlin College. His most recent book is Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Oxford University Press, 2018).

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POETRY

COLLATERAL CASUALTIES Colin McIntyre

HORSE TRANSPORT Horses are not for war.

Perhaps for the sabre-slash of the hunting-field, or a white-lathered dash into clay-thick farmyards, or the soft-silver slide of Imperial Reviews.

But not for the uphill slog as pack transport, the noise, mud, shell-sliver scream of beast panic as artillery-fire rains down.

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In 1974 the BBC tapped McIntyre to head its newly launched Ceefax teletext service, which exploited the unused lines of a television signal to transmit news, weather reports, and other information. McIntyre liked to describe Ceefax as “printed radio,” and under his leadership it would eventually attract some 22 million viewers a week. He took early retirement in 1982, explaining that he wanted to devote more time to his “42 hobbies and interests.” One of those interests was military history, and in 1990 he published two books in the genre, Monuments of War: How to Read a War Memorial and World War II at Sea. In 2005 McIntyre became the editor of the Salamander Oasis Trust, a charity set up to collect, edit, and publish poetry written by soldiers who served in World War II, on the death of its founder and editor in chief, Victor Selwyn.

That same year the organization finished transferring more than 20,000 original poems, diaries, drawings, and letters it had collected to the Imperial War Museum in London.

McIntyre died at age 85 in 2012. The poem above is reprinted with the permission of his son, Angus McIntyre.

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Colin McIntyre was born in 1927 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where his Scottish parents had moved so that his father could take a job running a British cotton factory there. At age 18 McIntyre left home to join the British Army and was commissioned in the Black Watch, his father’s old regiment. He saw no combat in World War II but served as a platoon commander and company commander with the Lovat Scouts in Greece in 1946 and as a captain and staff officer with the 6th Airborne Division in Palestine. During this period he became one of the “Oasis Poets,” who had come together in Cairo and published their first anthology of wartime poetry there in 1943.

With the end of the war McIntyre left the army to study English at Harvard University, where he met his future wife.

In 1952 he moved to England to join the BBC World Service as an editor, and four years later he became a BBC correspondent at the United Nations, where he covered the Suez and Hungary crises. He also enlisted in the Territorial Army (today the Army Reserve), where in time he would rise to the rank of major.

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS (GETTY IMAGES)

Their soft quivering noses are too pure, too soft, too velvety-kind.

Only Man deserves brute suffering.

BIG SHOTS

HARRIS & EWING COLLECTION (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

John Foster Dulles was born in 1888 in the Washington, D.C., home of his maternal grandfather, a brigadier general in the Civil War and secretary of state under President Benjamin Harrison. In 1917, with World War I raging in Europe, Dulles, by then a lawyer, tried to enlist in the U.S. Army but was rejected because of his poor eyesight. Instead, he received an army commission as a captain, and then a major, on the War Industries Board.

Dulles would go on to a long career as a diplomat. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, he was a chief architect of U.S. foreign policy through the early years of the Cold War. Dulles died in 1959 at age 71 and was interred at Arlington National Cemetery.

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REVIEWS

PLOTS AND SUBPLOTS The Lenin Plot: The Unknown Story of America’s War Against Russia

The U.S. government secretly began scheming in 1917 to help topple Vladimir Lenin’s new Soviet regime.

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In December 1917, President Woodrow Wilson approved a covert U.S. government initiative to help anti-­ Bolshevik Cossacks in the south of Russia topple Vladimir Lenin’s new Soviet regime and get Russia back into the war still raging against Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany. So began a series of efforts in this vein that author Barnes Carr collectively calls “the Lenin Plot” in his new book of that title. There was never a good chance that any of these ventures, some better baked than others, would succeed. The plotters on the whole were amateurish, without a keen sense of strategy and tactics, and their movements were easily detected by the Cheka, the Soviet secret police under the command of Felix Dzerzhinsky, known as “Iron Felix.” In fact, Edward M. House, a key Wilson adviser, opposed the Cossacks scheme: “Personally I consider it dangerous for the reason that it is encouraging internal disturbances without our having any definite program in mind,” he presciently told Robert Lansing, Wilson’s secretary of state.

Nevertheless, as Barr meticulously recounts, Washington proceeded with assorted forms of meddling in Lenin’s Russia. The tale is at once farce and

GIANCARLO COSTA (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES)

By Barnes Carr.

400 pages.

Pegasus Books, 2020. $29.95.

Reviewed by Paul Starobin

11/23/20 8:48 PM

GIANCARLO COSTA (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES)

tragedy. One of the Americans, Xenophon Dmitrievich de Blumenthal Kalamatiano—a track star and University of Chicago graduate of Russian extraction who had been affectionately nicknamed “the Terrible Russian” by his fraternity brothers—managed to get himself arrested in September 1918

by Chekists stationed outside the U.S. consulate in Moscow. He had thought, naively, that he would be able to get through by declaring that he was going to the consulate for his passport. Dzerzhinsky’s men quickly discovered that Kalamatiano’s “gentleman’s cane” contained a hidden tube stuffed with “a secret cipher, spy reports, a coded list of thirty-two spies, and money receipts from some of them,” a Cheka officer later wrote. Kalamatiano’s goal was to aid and abet internal opponents of Lenin who were bent on assassinating or perhaps kidnapping him. “His supreme miscalculation led to the roll-up of most of his agents,” Carr writes. And so it went, with another American plotter admitting to his interrogator that the United States was running an “information service” in Russia. “Error was piled upon error,” Carr says in summing up. “Was it stupidity on the part of the plotters? Arrogance? Or simply sloppiness?”

Kalamatiano languished in Butyrka, Moscow’s ancient, vermin­ infested prison, and endured mock executions by firing squads before the U.S. government managed to gain his release. In the meantime, an overt component of the Lenin Plot, an Allied military incursion into northern Russia, made little headway. As rivers froze and the snow piled up, “frontline troops were stuck in their little forts, surrounded by larger enemy forces,” Carr writes, with the Red Army making use of local partisans as “ski troops for reconnaissance.” The Great War ended, Lenin kept his grip on power, and Herbert Hoover, as director of the American Relief Administration in postwar Europe, oversaw an

effort to get food into the mouths of the starving Russian people.

Carr is to be commended for his deep research into a story that’s worth savoring in its own right but that also resonates with contemporary events.

Washington has never stopped meddling in Russia—and Moscow, of course, has a parallel history of interfering with America. From Moscow’s point of view, the escapades that Carr lumps together as the Lenin Plot may, even today, justify Russia’s clandestine forays into American politics. There is no reason to think that these games will stop anytime soon—not with the ample mistrust between the two nations and the imaginative and sometimes bumbling players on both teams.

But the American people are unlikely to learn of such antics from their government—that’s for diligent researchers like Carr to dig out of the archives, usually long after the fact. “The Lenin Plot had been a colossal embarrassment for the U.S. government,” he concludes, “and the State Department wanted to forget it ever happened.”

history at the University of Southampton, and 12 other historians focus on the background of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb nationalist. The authors shed new light on Franz Ferdinand’s personality and contradict the opinion of Austrian biographer Stefan Zweig that the archduke was an inconsequential actor whose death the Austrian people initially accepted with indifference. Cornwall’s studies reveal that Franz Ferdinand, who had broken a Hapsburg taboo in marrying a commoner, deliberately kept a low profile when, on the death of his father, Carl Ludwig, he assumed the throne. Behind that self-­ effacing facade he created his own little court in Belvedere Palace, which had formerly been the home of Prince Eugene of Savoy, the Austrian Empire’s best general. In fact, Franz Ferdinand himself always supported the development of a modern, powerful Austro-­ Hungarian army, and it was he who tapped Franz Graf Conrad von HötPaul Starobin, a former Moscow zendorf, a hawkish general, to be its bureau chief for Business Week, is the commander in chief. author of Madness Rules the Hour: At the same time, in an effort to unCharleston, 1860, and the Mania for dermine Serbia’s attempts to represent War (PublicAffairs, 2017) and, most itself as liberator of the southern Slavs, recently, A Most Wicked Conspiracy: Franz Ferdinand proposed a “trialist” The Last Great Swindle of the Gilded solution: establishing a third autonoAge (PublicAffairs, 2020). mous state within the monarchy made up of the imperial territories populated by southern Slavs—Slovenia, Croatia-Slavonia, Bosnia, and Istria.

For that reason the archduke was the primary enemy of the Serbian-backed Black Hand and its commander, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic.

Edited by Mark Cornwall.

The authors’ conclusions include 320 pages. this ironic fact: The Austro-Hungarian Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. Empire that launched the first invasion $100. of World War I was financially bankReviewed by Thomas Zacharis rupt. Its sorry financial condition was mostly the result of mobilizing its In this collection of essays, Mark Corn- army during the Balkan Wars of 1912– wall, a professor of modern European 1913, which, combined with the loans

Sarajevo 1914: Sparking the First World War

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REVIEWS it had taken to build a fleet of modern dreadnoughts to rival the Italian fleet, rendered it unable to effectively mobilize its army again following the assassination. At the same time, Serbia had likewise fallen into bankruptcy from its participation in the Balkan Wars and the resources it had devoted to modernizing its artillery with Schneider field guns. Even so, at that point in the histories of both nations, the time for diplomatic efforts to prevent a third Balkan War had passed.

Sarajevo 1914 offers new insights on the origins of a conflict whose unforeseen results laid the groundwork for the creation of new states—and for a second world war.

Thomas Zacharis, who lives in Thessaloniki, Greece, regularly reviews books for Historynet.com.

New & Noteworthy THE UNTOLD STORY OF SHIELDS GREEN: The Life and Death of a Harper’s Ferry Raider, by Louis A. DeCaro Jr. (New York University Press, $28.) An incisive biography of “Emperor” Shields Green, a fugitive slave from South Carolina who joined John Brown’s fateful effort to take over the U.S. armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and sacrificed his life for the abolitionist cause.

CIVIL WAR SUPPLY AND STRATEGY: Feeding Men and Moving Armies, by Earl J. Hess. (Louisiana State University Press, $50.) An awardwinning military historian traces how the Union army managed to penetrate deep into Confederate territory during the Civil War by developing a powerful logistical capability that, among other things, kept food and other resources flowing to its soldiers and animals.

TRIBUTE TO A GENERATION: Haydn Williams and the Building of the World War II Memorial, by David F. Winkler. (Naval Institute Press, $34.95.)

A historian highlights the largely unsung

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role of the late F. Haydn Williams, a World War II naval officer and former ambassador, in the 17-year effort to make the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., a reality.

University Press, $50.) A historian examines British sympathy for the Confederate cause during the Civil War, with a focus on one of the leaders of the pro-Confederate lobby in Britain.

STORMING VICKSBURG: Grant, Pemberton, and the Battles of May 19–22, 1863, by Earl J. Hess.

(University of North Carolina Press, $40.)

A respected Civil War scholar assesses Union major general Ulysses S. Grant’s strategy and tactics in the opening phase of his campaign to capture Vicksburg, Mississippi.

ATHENS AFTER EMPIRE: A History from Alexander the Great to the Emperor Hadrian, by Ian Worthington.

(Oxford University Press, $39.95.) While Hellenistic Athens has typically been portrayed as a city in decline, the author offers a compelling alternative narrative and chronicles its attempts to reject Roman rule.

THE PEOPLE ON THE BEACH: Journeys to Freedom after the Holocaust, by Rosie Whitehouse.

A journalist tells the story of how, in 1946, more than a thousand Holocaust survivors secretly traveled to a secluded beach on the Italian Riviera, boarded a ship disguised as a banana boat, and sailed to Palestine.

BEHIND THE ENIGMA: The Authorized History of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency, by John Ferris. (Bloomsbury Publishing, $40.) A leading expert on intelligence and strategy pulls back the curtain on Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, the agency at the forefront of its secret statecraft.

MANIPULATING THE MASSES: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda, by John Maxwell Hamilton. (Louisiana State University Press, $49.95.) A former journalist and government official plumbs the largely untold story of the Committee on Public Information, the opinion-molding operation that President Woodrow Wilson established a week after the United States entered World War I in April 1917, and the threat that propaganda poses to American democracy.

STONEWALL JACKSON, BERESFORD HOPE, AND THE MEANING OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR IN BRITAIN,

by Michael J. Turner. (Louisiana State

TO THE END OF THE WORLD: Nathanael Greene, Charles Cornwallis, and the Race to the Dan, by Andrew Waters. (Westholme Publishing, $30.)

An account of one of the pivotal campaigns of the Revolutionary War, as British and Continental forces raced each other across the Carolinas during the winter of 1870–1871 in a contest of wits and wills that would ultimately lead to Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown.

ROMANS AT WAR: The Roman Military in the Republic and Empire,

by Simon Elliott. (Casemate, $39.95.)

A historian and archaeologist examines the Roman military machine and explores how it was able to always stay a step ahead of its opponents on campaign and in battle.

COMPLEAT VICTORY: Saratoga and the American Revolution, by Kevin J. Weddle. (Oxford University Press, $34.95.)

The author, a professor of military theory and strategy at the U.S. Army War College, offers a detailed and authoritative history of the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777.

WASHINGTON’S ENGINEER: Louis Duportail and the Creation of an Army Corps, by Norman Desmarais.

(Prometheus Books, $29.95.) An intriguing biography of the French lieutenant colonel who was secretly sent to North America in 1777 to serve in George Washington’s Continental Army and went on to become the founder and first commandant of the Army Corps of Engineers.

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STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION (required by Act of August 12, 1970: Section 3685, Title 39, United States Code). 1. MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History 2. (ISSN: 1040-5992) 3. Filing date: 10/1/20. 4. Issue frequency: Quarterly. 5. Number of issues published annually: 4. 6. The annual subscription price is $74.95. 7.

Complete mailing address of known office of publication: HistoryNet, 1919 Gallows Rd. Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182. Contact person: Kolin Rankin. 8. Complete mailing address of headquarters or general business office of publisher: HistoryNet, 1919 Gallows Rd. Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182. 9. Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor. Publisher, Michael A. Reinstein, HistoryNet, 1919 Gallows Rd. Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182, Editor, Bill Hogan, HistoryNet, 1919 Gallows Rd. Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182 , Editor in Chief, Alex Neill , HistoryNet, 1919 Gallows Rd. Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182. 10. Owner: HistoryNet; 1919 Gallows Rd. Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182. 11. Known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent of more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: None. 12. Tax status: Has Not Changed During Preceding 12 Months. 13. Publisher title: MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. 14. Issue date for circulation data below: Fall 2020. 15. The extent and nature of circulation: A. Total number of copies printed (Net press run). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 18,008. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 10,967. B. Paid circulation. 1. Mailed outside-county paid subscriptions. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 5,558.

Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 5,609. 2. Mailed in-county paid subscriptions. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0.

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Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 7,708. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date; 6,409. D. Free or nominal rate distribution (by mail and outside mail). 1. Free or nominal Outside-County. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 2. Free or nominal rate in-county copies. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 3. Free or nominal rate copies mailed at other Classes through the USPS. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 4. Free or nominal rate distribution outside the mail. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 458. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 378. E. Total free or nominal rate distribution. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 458. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 378. F. Total free distribution (sum of 15c and 15e). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 8,166. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 6,787. G. Copies not Distributed. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 9,842.

Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 4,180. H. Total (sum of 15f and 15g). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 18,008. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing: 10,967. I. Percent paid. Average percent of copies paid for the preceding 12 months: 94.4% Actual percent of copies paid for the preceding 12 months: 94.4% 16. Electronic Copy Circulation: A. Paid Electronic Copies.

Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. B. Total Paid Print Copies (Line 15c) + Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 7,708. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 6,409. C. Total Print Distribution (Line 15f) + Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 8,166. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 6,787. D. Percent Paid (Both Print & Electronic Copies) (16b divided by 16c x 100). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 94.4%.

Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 94.4%. I certify that 50% of all distributed copies (electronic and print) are paid above nominal price: Yes. Report circulation on PS Form 3526-X worksheet 17. Publication of statement of ownership will be printed in the Winter 2021 issue of the publication. 18.

Signature and title of editor, publisher, business manager, or owner: Shawn G. Byers, VP, Audience Development & Circulation . I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanction and civil actions.

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HOW MANY TIMES HAS THE DESIGN OF THE U.S. FLAG CHANGED? 27, 31, 36 or 40?

For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ MAGAZINES/QUIZ

ANSWER: 27. THE CURRENT DESIGN HAS BEEN IN PLACE SINCE 1960 WHEN THE FLAG WAS MODIFIED TO INCLUDE HAWAII, THE 50th STATE.

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11/18/20

DRAWN & QUARTERED ON TOP OF THE WORLD

PAUL POPPER/POPPERFOTO (GETTY IMAGES)

This propaganda postcard shows Count Oku Yasukata, the commanding general of Japan’s Second Army, reigning supreme after handing Russian forces a series of bloody defeats in the Russo-Japanese War (1904– 1905). With its victory, Japan became the first Asian power in modern history to defeat a European power in war.

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Gina Elise’s

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“WAR IS MAINLY A CATALOGUE OF BLUNDERS. ” —Winston Churchill, British statesman, army officer, and writer, 1950 page 30

WINTER 2021 VOLUME 33, NUMBER 2

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