Military History January 2021

U.S. Coastwatcher Marine on the Nile Navy SEAL School Croatian Hell Camp Black Hawk’s Folly Dutch Jungle War HISTORYNET.com

UNDER HAMMER

THE

THE ARMIES OF ISLAM FACED AN IMMOVABLE FOE IN CHARLES MARTEL

JANUARY 2021

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ON FR E FO E S UR HI OR PPI M NG OR E

Actual size is 38.1 mm

Why Are Dealers Hoarding These 100-Year-Old U.S. Silver Dollars?

W

hen it comes to collecting, few coins are as coveted as the first and last of a series. And when big anniversaries for those “firsts” and “lasts” come around, these coins become even more coveted.

Take, for example, the 1921 Morgan Silver Dollars. These 90% pure silver coins were the last of their kind, a special one-year-only resurrection of the classic Wild West Silver Dollar. Three years prior, the Pittman Act authorized the melting of more than 270 million Morgan Silver Dollars so their silver could be sold to our allies in the United Kingdom. Facing our own Silver Dollar shortage, the world’s favorite vintage U.S. Silver Dollar was brought back for one year only while the U.S. Mint worked on its successor, the Peace Silver Dollar.

Dealers Begin Stockpiling Last-Year Morgans

Knowing what we’ve told you about special anniversaries, dealers around the country are preparing for a surge in demand. 2021 will mark the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Morgan Silver Dollar—the last-yearof-issue for the most popular vintage U.S. Silver Dollar ever minted. But slow-moving collectors may be disappointed in what they find when they seek out these coins.

Since the days of the Pittman Act, millions more U.S. Silver Dollars have been melted or worn down in commerce. It’s been estimated that as few as 15% of all the Morgan Dollars ever minted have survived to the present day. That number grows smaller each year, with private hoards now accounting for virtually all the surviving Morgan Silver Dollars. And that was before silver values started to rise...

Interest in Silver Is on the Rise

19 19 19 19 19 19 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 LY G T T V C N B R R Y E LY G JU AU SEP OC NO DE JA FE MA AP MA JUN JU AU

Silver Trend Chart: Prices based on monthly averages. ©2020, AMS

As you can see from the chart on the left, in 2020, we’ve seen daily silver prices close as low as $12.01 per ounce and as high as $28.33 per ounce. That rise in value has led to a sharp increase in buyers’ interest in silver. We’re already seeing a surge of interest from collectors wanting to add vintage Morgan Silver Dollars to their collections. But at what price?

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11/10/20 3:48 PM

JANUARY 2021

Letters 6 News 8

24

Features

Under the Hammer Seventh-century Muslim invaders faced an immovable Frankish foe in Charles Martel.

By Patrick S. Baker

32

A Method to His Madness Dutch commando Raymond Westerling was brutally good at waging a counterinsurgency.

By Benjamin Welton

Departments

14

Interview Ben Macintyre Tracking Agent Sonya

18

Valor A Wing and a Prayer

2 MILITARY HISTORY JANUARY 2021

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Reviews 72 War Games 78 Captured! 80

42

48

Those who would be Navy SEALs must first survive grueling BUD/S training.

By Jon Guttman

Young cattle rancher Franklin Nash became America’s only Pacific Theater Coastwatcher.

By Ron Soodalter

Not in Colorado Anymore

To Hell Week and Back

56

Black Hawk’s Folly In the last major fight of the War of 1812 Missouri Rangers battled a Sauk war party.

By Douglas L. Gifford

64

A Marine on the Nile Was former Marine George English a true convert to Islam, or was he a spy?

By Andrew McGregor

20

What We Learned From...

The Battle of Schmidt, 1944

22

Hardware M4A3E8 Sherman

On the cover: Charles Martel (depicted at left with raised ax in this early 19th century oil by Charles de Steuben) beat back Muslim invaders led by Abd al-Rahman (with light beard) at the decisive Oct. 10, 732, Battle of Tours. (Château de Versailles)

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76

Hallowed Ground Jasenovac Concentration Camp, Croatia 3

11/18/20 10:36 AM

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

Join the discussion at militaryhistory.com

Tommy’s Other Guns

John T. Thompson’s namesake submachine gun became the stuff of legend, but his other firearms innovations are nothing to sneeze at

By Michael O’Brien IN THE ARCHIV E S :

Spirit of New Orleans Andrew Jackson won a great victory, effectively ending the War of 1812 and awakening our national identity

By John McManus

Interview Author Michel Paradis relates the 1942 Doolittle Raid against Japan, its impact and the fates of the airmen who undertook it Tools The M1903 Springfield combat rifle was modeled after the Mauser M1893 used by enemy troops during the Spanish-American War

JANUARY 2021 VOL. 37, NO. 5

STEPHEN HARDING EDITOR DAVID LAUTERBORN MANAGING EDITOR ZITA BALLINGER FLETCHER SENIOR EDITOR JON GUTTMAN RESEARCH DIRECTOR DAVID T. ZABECKI CHIEF MILITARY HISTORIAN STEPHEN KAMIFUJI CREATIVE DIRECTOR BRIAN WALKER GROUP ART DIRECTOR JON C. BOCK ART DIRECTOR MELISSA A. WINN DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY ALEX GRIFFITH PHOTO EDITOR C O R P O R AT E ROB WILKINS Director of Partnership Marketing TOM GRIFFITHS Corporate Development GRAYDON SHEINBERG Corporate Development SHAWN BYERS VP Audience Development JAMIE ELLIOTT Production Director ADVERTISING MORTON GREENBERG SVP Advertising Sales mgreenberg@mco.com RICK GOWER Regional Sales Manager rick@rickgower.com TERRY JENKINS Regional Sales Manager tjenkins@historynet.com DIRECT RESPONSE ADVERTISING MEDIA PEOPLE / NANCY FORMAN 212.779.7172 ext. 224 nforman@mediapeople.com © 2021 HISTORYNET, LLC

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4 MILITARY HISTORY JANUARY 2021

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11/18/20 10:46 AM

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FORMS MUST BE RECEIVED ON OR BEFORE 12/31/2020. FAX ORDERS TO 504-527-6088 OR MAIL TO: THE NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM, ROAD TO VICTORY BRICK PROGRAM, 945 MAGAZINE STREET, NEW ORLEANS, LA 70130. The National WWII Museum’s Road to Victory brick program honors the WWII generation, the American heroes who served during the war, and their families. The goal of our program is to celebrate the American spirit while forging a link between the present generation and the generation who fought to secure our nation’s freedom during World War II. Therefore, the Museum reserves the right to deny requests for inscriptions that might be considered offensive or inappropriate to those who sacrificed during the WWII era, or messages that do not align with the Museum’s mission, which is to tell the story of the American experience in the war that changed the world—why it was fought, how it was won, and what it means today—so that all generations will understand the price of freedom and be inspired by what they learn.

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9/24/20 1:58 PM 11/10/20 6:24 PM

Letters

[Re: “Museum of the Pacific War Upgrades Nimitz Gallery,” News, by Brendan Manley, July 2020:] The following statement is made about Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz: “… and presided over Japan’s formal surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945.” Fleet Admiral Nimitz signed the instrument of surrender on behalf of the United States; however, he was not the presiding officer at this ceremony. The presiding officer was General of the Army Douglas MacArthur [above].

Anthony Clark Boulder, Colo.

Editor responds: Good catch.

The National Museum of the Pacific War is justly proud of Nimitz’s wartime accomplishments. However, it was Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces MacArthur who presided over the ceremony

aboard Missouri and accepted the Japanese surrender.

Close Enough I read with great interest the article “Close Enough” [by Michael W. Robbins], in the September 2020 issue of Military History. A very interesting article, as is your excellent magazine.

My father was a major in the U.S. Army’s 162nd Field Artillery during World War II and served in Panama as part of the defense of the Panama Canal prior to shipping out to the Pacific Theater. Your article vividly brought back his telling of his time in Panama. According to him, due to the high humidity and jungle conditions—similar to what the armed forces would experience in the Pacific—they were secretly issued war materials for testing to determine their performance under those special climatic

Battle of Britain Your article on the Battle of Britain [“‘The Few’ Four

Score On”], in the September 2020 issue, was interesting. Barrett Tillman was correct when he said Operation Sea Lion was never a serious plan, but rather Adolf Hitler was hoping to scare the British government into signing a separate peace. Otto Skorzeny, the famed SS commando, said in his memoirs Hitler confided in him that an invasion of Britain would not have ended the war in Europe. Winston Churchill would have continued the war from either Canada or South Africa. Also, it would have given the Germans another country to occupy.

Bob Scardaci New Brunswick, N.j.

Baltimore’s Own I look forward to reading Military History each month.

The November 2019 review of With Their Bare Hands [by Gene Fax] mentions the U.S. 79th Division in World War I was filled with “raw recruits from the streets of Boston, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.” The 313th Infantry Regiment (within the 79th) was mostly filled with men from Baltimore. My grandfather was a corporal in Company M. The 313th was known as “Baltimore’s Own.” Mark Anderson Stevensville, Md. Send letters via e-mail to militaryhistory@historynet.com or to Editor, Military History HISTORYNET 901 N. Glebe Road, 5th Floor Arlington, VA 22203 Please include name, address and phone number

U.S. ARMY SIGNAL CORPS (NATIONAL ARCHIVES)

Not Nimitz

conditions. The most important tests related to the firing of “special” ammunition—proximity-fuzed projectiles for regular and anti-aircraft guns—under torrential rains and extreme humidity to determine how the rounds would perform and if heavy rains would detonate them. They also tested new jungle combat boots made of canvas with rubber soles, since the regular-issue boots did not last long in the jungle. The soles of the regular issues would come off after a few days due to the high humidity and the suction caused by the very wet clay soils. The boots they tested ultimately were issued and used by our troops.

The 162nd was mostly made up of Puerto Rican– born men, sent to Panama due to their English-Spanish bilingualism. A school for Spanish-speaking South American officers was set up, and my father and fellow officers became instructors in the use and maintenance of U.S. military weapons.

After Panama my father shipped out to Hawaii to prepare for the invasion of Japan. He was in an advance staging area when Japan surrendered, and he was able to return home and tell me his experiences.

These stories, told to me when I was a young boy, I have always cherished.

Rafael A. Torrens Jr. San Juan, Puerto Rico

6 MILITARY HISTORY JANUARY 2021

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News

By Brendan Manley

‘MERRILL’S MARAUDERS’ EARN CONGRESSIONAL GOLD MEDAL and 32 smaller actions over five months, spending much of that time in continual combat. Although vastly outnumbered, they inflicted heavy losses on the Japanese 18th Division and on May 17, 1944, captured Myitkyina airfield, the key transport supply hub in northern Burma. Only 200 Marauders completed the protracted mission, the survivors having lost an average of 35 pounds. The unit disbanded that August.

In 1944 the Army awarded the Marauders a Distinguished Unit Citation, and every member received the Bronze Star. Dozens of Marauders have received other awards, including the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star and individual Congressional Gold Medals. In 1962 writer-director Samuel Fuller, himself a World War II veteran, paid homage to the unit with the historical epic Merrill’s Marauders, starring Jeff Chandler in his final role.

‘My one regret is that only eight of us are alive to enjoy this historic honor’ —Marauder veteran and historian Robert Passanisi 8 MILITARY HISTORY JANUARY 2021

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FROM TOP: WHITE HOUSE; NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY; CITY OF VANCOUVER ARCHIVES

The 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional), aka “Merrill’s Marauders,” spent five months fighting behind enemy lines in Burma (Myanmar).

BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES)

In October 2020 President Donald J. Trump approved the Congressional Gold Medal for the U.S. Army’s 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional)—the storied World War II jungle fighters better known as “Merrill’s Marauders.” Time correspondent James Shepley bestowed that nickname in honor of unit leader Brig. Gen. Frank Merrill. Eight of the original Marauders are still living.

The elite unit originated in late 1943, when Lt. Gen. Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell, then commander of U.S. forces in China, Burma and India, conceived a long-range penetration mission into Japanese-occupied Burma to disrupt enemy supply and communication lines while a larger Allied force fought to reopen the Burma Road into China.

Some 3,000 U.S. servicemen volunteered for the Marauders.

Setting out in February 1944, the unit (code-named “Galahad”) marched some 750 miles over the Himalayan foothills through dense jungle, contending with the enemy, hunger and rampant disease. Despite lacking heavy weapons support, the Marauders engaged in five major battles

WAR RECORD

Nat’l Museum of the U.S. Army Opens The National Museum of the United States Army, at Fort Belvoir, Va., opened to the public on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 2020. Exhibits in the 185,000-squarefoot main building relate the history of the Army

from its 1775 founding amid the American Revolutionary War, while an experiential learning center offers educational and teambuilding activities. Free timed-entry tickets are required for admission.

Dec. 16, 714

CALIFORNIA AIR GUARDSMEN AWARDED DFCS FOR RESCUE In September 2020 President Trump awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross to seven guardsmen from two California Army National Guard aircrews that repeatedly flew into the midst of a Sierra National Forest wildfire to rescue hundreds of trapped campers. Earlier that month the crews—part of the 40th Combat Aviation Brigade—responded to the Creek Fire, which stranded campers at the Mammoth Pool Reservoir north of Fresno. Despite calls from officials to abort the mission, the pilots pressed on and rescued 242 people in a single night. Two days later as visibility improved, the crews evacuated another 175 people from nearby China Peak, Lake Edison and the Muir Trail Ranch.

FROM TOP: WHITE HOUSE; NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY; CITY OF VANCOUVER ARCHIVES

BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES)

Dec. 10, 1946

Turkish-born Dutch commando Raymond Westerling (P. 32) begins a campaign to eliminate insurgents in South Sulawesi and restore Dutch control of the Indonesian island. His brutal tactics quell dissent, but Indonesia wins its independence in 1949, regardless.

Dec. 31, 1942

Japanese Emperor Hirohito endorses the withdrawal of troops from Guadalcanal, in the Solomons. Helping the Allies to victory are Australian Coastwatchers, joined by U.S. Cpl. Franklin Nash (P. 48), who report on enemy movements.

‘Candy Bomber’ a Centenarian Retired U.S. Air Force Col. Gail Halvorsen— the celebrated “Candy Bomber” of the 1948– 49 Berlin Airlift—turned 100 on Oct. 10, 2020.

(Read our interview with him at Historynet.com.)

As an airlift pilot Halvorsen covertly dropped candy to children while delivering supplies to Allied-controlled West Berlin amid the Soviet blockade. For his milestone birthday some of the onetime young Berliners—now in their 80s and up— sent thank-you cards and video messages to “Uncle Wiggly Wings,” as they knew him.

Pepin of Herstal, selfproclaimed duke and prince of the Franks, dies, having named a grandson heir. But following a civil war his illegitimate son Charles (P. 24) rises to lead the Franks, earning the moniker le Martel (“the Hammer”) in battle with Muslim invaders.

WWII GERMAN CRUISER FOUND OFF NORWAY Norwegian state-run power grid operator Statnett has confirmed discovery of the wreck of the World War II German cruiser Karlsruhe, sunk in battle off Kristiansand on April 9, 1940. Resting at 1,600 feet in the Skagerrak strait, the 571-foot warship first turned up on sonar in 2017 as the company inspected an undersea power cable between Norway and Denmark. Statnett returned this summer for a closer look using multibeam echo sounders and a remotely operated vehicle.

Boasting a main battery of nine 5.9-inch guns in three triple mounts, Karlsruhe landed troops at Kristiansand during Operation Weserübung, the Nazi invasion of Norway and Denmark. The cruiser was later scuttled by its crew after being torpedoed by the British submarine HMS Truant.

January 1962

Amid rising tensions in Southeast Asia the U.S. Navy forms its first two Sea, Air and Land (SEAL) teams (P. 42), their members drawn from the Navy’s World War II–era Underwater Demolition Teams.

Jan. 8, 1815

American troops under Andrew Jackson defeat the British at the Battle of New Orleans—often mislabeled as the final battle of the War of 1812. The May 24 Battle of the Sinkhole (P. 56) was in fact the last major clash.

9

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11/18/20 10:54 AM

News

D-DAY ‘THEME PARK’ SPARKS CONTROVERSY

Effective Veterans Day 2020, the Department of the Interior granted U.S. veterans and Gold Star families free lifetime entry to national parks, wildlife refuges and other federal lands.

Free access for the military was previously limited to activeduty service members, their dependents and totally disabled veterans. The change opens access to millions more deserving veterans and their families.

Apocalypse ’45 Relives Pacific Director Erik Nelson’s latest documentary, Apocalypse ’45, powerfully recounts the Pacific Theater of World War II, from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, via nearly two hours of color archival footage

Public outcry is brewing, particularly among French veterans of World War II, over a proposed Normandy attraction called Homage to the Heroes, slated to open in 2024 in time for the 80th anniversary of the June 6, 1944, Allied invasion. Opponents contend its developers will commercialize that hallowed ground with a spectacle more Disney theme park than respectful memorial. Others praise the project for its educational value, not to mention the projected boost to regional tourism.

The developers—television producer Stéphane Gateau, music producer Roberto Ciurleo and promoter Régis Lefebvre—are seeking a roughly 86-acre site near the historic landing beaches, where they hope to accommodate up to 600,000 annual visitors. The 50-minute “living documentary” will comprise mobile grandstands on rails that will shuttle spectators past re-enacted battle scenes blending “archive imagery, immersive techniques and living paintings.” Commercial offerings will be limited to a gift shop.

Among its most outspoken critics are veterans of the wartime Commando Kieffer and their descendants. Led by Capt. Philippe Kieffer of the Free French Navy, the unit was the only uniformed French ground force to come ashore on D-Day. More than 150 descendants of the commandos signed an appeal against the project that was published in the French daily Le Monde.

Those backing the effort include Normandy President Hervé Morin, a former French defense minister. He and other authorities have dismissed criticism as uninformed and insist the devel- restored to digital 4K opers would take an ethical approach. British military historian Sir Antony Beevor has also resolution. Two dozen U.S. veterans, including expressed support for the memorial.

‘If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone’ —Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a speech he wrote had the D-Day invasion failed

Medal of Honor recipient Hershel “Woody” Williams, share their stories of the conflict. The film will soon debut on the Discovery Channel.

TOP: KEITH DOUGLAS (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); RIGHT: DISCOVERY CHANNEL

Memorials line the Normandy coast, but some object to a proposed attraction involving re-enacted D-Day battle scenes.

Nat’l Parks Now Free to Veterans

10 MILITARY HISTORY JANUARY 2021

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News The People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals in Britain has awarded its Gold Medal for valor to Magawa, a giant African pouched rat, for “lifesaving bravery” while detecting 39 land mines

and 28 unexploded devices in Cambodia since 2013. A star pupil of the rat-training Belgian nonprofit minesweeping group APOPO, Magawa has thus far cleared about 35 acres—the equivalent of some 20 soccer fields.

BRITISH FIGHTING DOG EARNS DICKIN MEDAL The People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, a noted British veterinary charity, has awarded its Dickin Medal for gallantry— the “animals’ Victoria Cross”—to Kuno, a Belgian Malinois that in 2019 charged through gunfire to aid pinneddown British special forces troops battling al-Qaida in Afghanistan.

The dog and his handler had been deployed to support Special Boat Service commandos conducting a night raid. Equipped with specially modified night-vision goggles, Kuno took down the lead enemy fighter despite bullet wounds to both back legs. He lost a paw to amputation and later became the first British military dog fitted with custom-made prosthetics. Since retired from military service, Kuno is the 72nd recipient of the Dickin Medal. Previous honorees include 34 dogs, 32 messenger pigeons, four horses and a cat.

COVID AID COMING FOR HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS

Russia Releases Nuke Footage Russian authorities have declassified archival Cold War footage of the Soviet construction and October 1961 test of the 50-megaton Tsar Bomba, the largest-ever nuclear bomb. The 40-minute YouTube video is titled “50 Megaton Tsar Bomba Declassified.”

As big as a doubledecker bus, the 27ton RDS-220 was airdropped in the Russian Arctic over the Novaya Zemlya islands, flattening them and spawning a mushroom cloud nearly 50 miles high.

Over the next two years Germany will provide $662 million in aid to some 240,000 holocaust survivors suffering hardship due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The recipients, who were children during World War II, reside primarily in Israel, North America, the former Soviet Union and Western Europe.

While confined in Nazi concentration camps, they were deprived of critical nutrition, thus many still suffer health problems, making them more susceptible to coronavirus complications. Many also struggle with psychological trauma and live on the poverty line. Each survivor will receive two $1,400 payments. To date the German government has paid more than $80 billion in Holocaust reparations.

HONOR REGAINED

“Success always demands a greater effort,” said Winston Churchill.

That bit of wisdom has proved especially true on the battlefield, as evinced by the following famed commanders, who rose from defeat to sweet triumph.

George Washington

Decades before Washington led American Patriots to victory, his military career began amid British and French tensions in North America. Lt. Col. Washington’s first taste of combat came in 1754 at Jumonville Glen, Pa., when his Virginia militia ambushed French troops suspected of having overrun another British force.

In July the French handed Washington a defeat at Fort Necessity, sparking the French and Indian War.

Andrew Jackson

Jackson was a boy during the American Revolution, and he and his family suffered firsthand under British occupation. He thereafter bore a grudge against the Redcoats. He exacted his revenge in 1815, making the British pay at the brief but bloody Battle of New Orleans, essentially ending the War of 1812.

Douglas MacArthur

On arrival in Australia in March 1942 after having fled the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, MacArthur famously promised, “I shall return.” In October 1944 he fulfilled that vow, starting with landings at Leyte to liberate Filipinos from Japanese forces.

FROM TOP: PDSA (2); XINHUA NEWS AGENCY (GETTY IMAGES)

Mine-Sniffing Rat Recognized

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TODAY IN HISTORY JANUARY 30, 1835 ANDREW JACKSON SURVIVED AN ASSASSINATION ATEMPT WHILE ATTENDING A FUNERAL AT THE U.S. CAPITOL. UNEMPLOYED HOUSE PAINTER RICHARD LAWRENCE TWICE TOOK AIM AT JACKSON, MISFIRING BOTH TIMES. IN RESPONSE JACKSON THRASHED HIM WITH HIS CANE. THE CROWD, WHICH INCLUDED U.S. REPRESENTATIVE DAVID CROCKETT, SUBDUED LAWRENCE. For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ TODAY-IN-HISTORY

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Interview Tracking Agent Sonya

By Dave Kindy

What did she do?

Ursula was important before World War II. She was working with communist underground networks, defying the Nazis, fighting the Nationalists in China, fighting the Japanese occupiers in Manchuria. She was even more important during the war. She was running the most important spy network inside Germany. She came closer to assassinating Hitler than many of the failed attempts. Information of top quality was coming through her to Moscow and helped change the course of the war.

Ursula was absolutely pivotal after the end of World War II. When the Cold War subsequently developed, she became one of the most important operatives in the entire Western world.

She was running the top atomic spy, Karl [Klaus] Fuchs, and it doesn’t get much higher than that.

Why did you write this book?

I came to the story largely by accident.

I was actually investigating another story, which was about the American use of anti-Nazi agents at the end of the war. I was always very interested in Operation Hammer, when the OSS parachuted spies into Europe. When I started digging, I discovered this shadowy figure of a female spy who was recruiting communists to infiltrate this

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COURTESY OF PETER BEURTON

By the end of World War II Ursula Burton was living an unassuming life in England’s rural Cotswolds—or so everyone thought. The married mother of three was actually Ursula Kuczynski, a colonel in the Soviet military and one of the most significant spies of World War II and the Cold War. Born a German Jew, she went by the code name Sonya and ran one of the 20th century’s most effective espionage rings.

Her agents nearly assassinated Adolf Hitler and later stole secrets from the U.S. and Britain to enable Russia to detonate an atomic bomb in 1949. Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy details the exploits of this professional spymaster and dedicated communist who changed history. A writer at large for The Times in London, Macintyre is the author of Operation Mincemeat and The Spy and the Traitor.

Why was she so successful?

Ursula understood she could be effective by exploiting her gender. She knew that the more children she had, the better her cover. She knew that being a wife and mother would work brilliantly. In fact, you see this when you look at her MI5 file. They got closer to catching her than anyone. But when Ursula shows up at the door wearing an apron while baking a birthday cake for her son, they effectively said, “It can’t be her, she’s a mother.” That’s how ingrained those views were. The GRU (the Russian military intelligence service) realized very early on the same reality—that as a woman she was virtually invisible—and they exploited that brilliantly.

Also, many spies in World War II were amateurs. They were recruited because they had a facility for languages or some other skill. Often they were extremely poorly trained. These agents perished disproportionately, because they were not adequate to the task. Ursula was different, because she was a professional. She was a career military intelligence officer. At the age of 21 she had decided that would be her vocation. I think that makes her completely different than any other female spy I have come across.

RANDY GLASS STUDIO

Ben Macintyre

Ursula Kuczynski’s exploits remain largely unknown. Why? One of the reasons we don’t know about her is because she was a woman. I think that played a huge part. Historians have tended to assume that if she was overlooked by her colleagues, then she should be overlooked by history. Actually, she really made a huge difference. One of the reasons why she’s an obscure figure to history is because she spent the last part of her life in East Germany and was used for propaganda purposes by the communists. But the atomic stuff is extraordinary. She rose through the ranks of military intelligence, which is rare to the point of being unique. I don’t know of another woman who rose so high in the military intelligence service anywhere in the world.

In 1945 Ursula Kuczynski (alias Burton) posed with her children (from left) Michael, Peter and Janina.

They didn’t learn of her secret life until middle age.

COURTESY OF PETER BEURTON

RANDY GLASS STUDIO

effort. It was only later that I worked out this was Agent Sonya, who also ran Fuchs when he worked at the British nuclear weapons program. Before that Fuchs stole atomic secrets from Los Alamos for the Soviets.

How did Ursula become a spy?

The story really began back in Weimar Germany when Ursula and many other left-leaning Germans believed the only way to stop the appalling scourge of Nazism was to back the communists.

That was a perfectly respectable position to take at that time. History eventually pivoted around Ursula, and she began to spy against the West. But to begin with, she was absolutely allied with the West in trying to stop Hitler.

Before World War II she went to Shanghai and worked with the communist underground. She was recruited

by American novelist Agnes Smedley and Richard Sorge, who Ian Fleming said was the most formidable spy in history. Ursula was later trained in Moscow, went to Poland and then Switzerland, where she ran a vast spy network operating inside Nazi Germany and plotted the assassination of Hitler. Her final and most important role was as a spy in rural Britain, where

she ran agents inside Britain’s atomic weapons program. That’s the moment when she really started to affect the course of history.

How tough was she?

Her courage was astonishing. Her capacity to absorb the shocks of the 20th century is amazing. She was tough as only somebody who lived through those appalling events could be. Her family was forced into exile, her friends had been destroyed, the things she believed in had been systematically attacked and disabused.

Those are her attractive traits. Where Ursula is more difficult for us to understand is the way she treated her children. She was a good mother and adored her children. But there is little question to me, and little doubt they had, that at the end the revolution came first. If it had come to a battle, she would have been prepared to sacrifice her family. Let’s bear in mind that she put her family at high risk. We find it repellant that any parent could put a cause above human relations. On the other hand, it’s worth remembering that some of the heroes we celebrate the most acted similarly. Think of the French Resistance fighters who stood

She often asked the question of herself, ‘Was I a bad mother but a good spy?’ up to Nazism. They also put their families at risk. They were prepared to die in a cause and see their families die in a cause. I do think there is a double standard. She often asked the question of herself: “Was I a bad mother but a good spy?” That is not necessarily a question we would ask of a man.

What kind of person was Ursula, really?

For an indoctrinated communist, Ursula was amazingly open-minded. She was prepared to listen to opposing views. Her beliefs evolved over time.

By the end of her life she had a much more subtle attitude toward things.

She was still a communist—there’s no doubt about that—but she was absolutely prepared to admit that terrible mistakes had been made and that the people who had applied communism had gotten it appallingly wrong. As

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Stalin’s hands. Yet she—a spy, a foreigner, a woman and a Jew—survived.

She knew her spycraft, and she employed it brilliantly. She never broke the rules. We don’t like to hear it, but the Soviets were very, very good at this stuff. They were brutal, they were horrendous, they served an appalling regime, but in the art of espionage— to coin a phrase—nobody did it better.

the Berlin Wall came down, I think she was deeply disillusioned. There were moments later in life that she saw the effects of communism and saw it for what it really was.

Ursula was not a one-dimensional, female James Bond character. She wasn’t a simple fictional heroine—she was a real person, a human being who was fallible and complicated. She believed things we don’t believe. I always try in my books to explore what ordinary people do in extraordinary circumstances. How do they respond to an appalling tidal wave of history? Ursula was very different from many of the people I’ve written about before

and in some ways far more demanding as a subject.

What happened to her?

Ursula managed to retire from espionage—which is rarely an easy thing to do. She walked away with almost no retribution and lived to the ripe old age of 93. The only other person that I can think of who did that was Kim Philby, but he lived a life of utter misery.

One of the most extraordinary things about Ursula was her ability to survive inside the Soviet system. She never fell foul of the purges, especially at a time when Jews and spies were particularly suspected and died in the hundreds at

How should we remember Agent Sonya?

I don’t want readers to love Ursula, though some actually may end up doing so. I don’t even want them to like her, although many certainly will. I would be much more content if they understand her and get a sense of the world she came out of.

We tend to look back on history as if it was some kind of moral lesson.

There are good people, and there are bad people. The villains always lose, and the heroes always win. Of course, life isn’t like that, and neither is history.

History is composed of fascinating shades of gray. We don’t need to pass moral judgment on it. We just need to try to get to grips with it, and then we start to learn from it. MH

COURTESY OF PETER BEURTON

Posing above in 1936, Kuczynski spent much of her life masquerading as an unassuming wife and mother, a role that disguised her extraordinary talents as a master spy.

How did her children react to her being a spy?

Ursula didn’t reveal herself as a spy until her children were in middle age, so it came as an enormous shock to them. Michael, the oldest child, never really completely recovered from the fact that his mother was someone else.

He loved and admired her but was devastated by her secret. He was very poignant about it. I spoke to him before he died early this year in his 90s. One of the things he said that really moved me was, “Reading your book, I feel like I know my mother better now than I ever did before.” He also told me, “I don’t think I ever really learned to trust anybody.”

People get damaged in this type of story. Secrets are toxic in the end. People suffer. There is a human cost to all of this. One of the costs for Ursula was her children.

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Valor A Wing and a Prayer Realizing the fire was out of control, Mifflin made the difficult decision that Jackson stood a better chance of survival if let loose, and crewmen pushed the parachute from the cockpit hatch.

Mifflin then gave the order to abandon ship. Of Jackson’s six crewmates, four survived. Mifflin and the rear gunner went down with the Lancaster.

Meanwhile, Jackson—his parachute two-thirds burned—was unable to control his descent and landed heavily in a field, breaking an ankle. His right eye was sealed shut from burns, and he could not use his hands. At daybreak he crawled on his knees to a nearby village and knocked on the first door he reached. While the German who answered reviled him as a “Churchill gangster,” the man’s two daughters took pity and tended his wounds.

Jackson spent 10 months in a GerTwenty-five-year-old RAF flight engineer Sgt. Norman Cyril Jackson man hospital before being moved to Norman Jackson had just completed his required Royal Air Force a POW camp. He made two escape 30-mission first tour in April 1944 when he agreed Victoria Cross attempts, succeeding on the second to fly one more mission in order to finish with his Germany original seven-man Lancaster bomber crew. That in reaching a unit of Lt. Gen. George April 26–27, 1944 decision led Jackson to perform, as his Victoria Patton’s U.S. Third Army near Munich.

Cross citation put it, “an almost incredible feat.” But Jackson was not one to boast. His On the night of April 26–27 Jackson’s aircraft was one of 215 Lancaster heavy story only came to light after surviving bombers and 11 Mosquito fighter-bombers targeting ball-bearing works in the crewmates, released from German capBavarian city of Schweinfurt. Jackson’s crew dropped its payload on the target. tivity at war’s end, shared their accounts.

But as the bomber turned for home, a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter strafed it with Jackson was duly promoted to warrant cannon fire, sparking a fire on the starboard wing, between the fuselage and officer and awarded the Victoria Cross. inboard engine and adjacent to a fuel tank. The plane’s internal fire extinguisher “Had he succeeded in subduing the failed to put out the flames. Shrugging off shrapnel wounds to his right leg and flames,” his citation read in part, “there shoulder, Jackson shoved a handheld extinguisher inside his jacket and resolved was little or no prospect of his regainto fight the fire at the source. Gaining the captain’s permission, he snapped on ing the cockpit.”

For the rest of his life the firefighting his parachute, jettisoned the emergency hatch over the pilot’s head and climbed out onto the fuselage. As he emerged, his parachute deployed, fortunately spill- flight engineer suffered from permaing back into the plane’s cockpit. Gathering the chute, quick-thinking crewmates nently scarred hands, periodic deplayed out the rigging lines as Jackson inched back toward the starboard wing. pression and recurrent nightmares of his time out on the wing. Regardless, The bomber was flying 200 mph at 22,000 feet in frigid air.

Just then Flying Officer Fred Mifflin banked the Lancaster to avoid another Jackson found work as a whiskey salesfighter attack. Thrown off balance, Jackson fell heavily from the fuselage to the man and raised seven children with starboard wing, tumbling the extinguisher from his jacket to earth. As the his wife, Alma.

“I was young and cocky,” he recalled, sergeant held on to an air intake for dear life, the flames whipped up and severely burned his face and hands. He finally lost his grip. Flung backward into the “and thought I could do anything.” His bomber’s slipstream, he dangled just behind the rear turret, twisting in the lines four surviving crewmen were grateful he had tried. MH of his parachute, which were also smoldering.

LEFT: AUCKLAND MUSEUM; RIGHT: NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON

By Chuck Lyons

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What We Learned From...

The Battle of Schmidt, 1944

By David T. Zabecki

O

n Nov. 2, 1944, the U.S. 28th Infantry Division moved to capture the town of Schmidt, which controlled many key roads through Germany’s Hürtgen Forest. The hilly and impenetrably wooded Hürtgenwald was the last major physical barrier before the wide and flat plain leading directly to the Rhine River. Just five months after landing in Normandy, the Allies had pushed the German army out of France, and the Germans were starting to call up old men and young boys.

Most Allied commanders assumed the badly pummeled Wehrmacht was on the verge of collapse. That assumption turned out to be a bad one.

The 28th Infantry Division was deployed along a north-south ridgeline, with Schmidt on a parallel ridge immediately to the east. Between the two ridges the Kall River snakes through a steep and very deep gorge. It was perfect ground for defense. Maps showed a logging trail running into the gorge and a bridge at the bottom over the Kall. That would be the main avenue of attack and the division’s main supply route, but no one sent out a reconnaissance patrol.

That caused serious problems during the attack.

The main effort was made by the 112th Infantry Regiment, down one side of the gorge, up the other side and into Schmidt. Meanwhile, the 109th Infantry Regiment attacked north along the western ridge, while the 110th Infantry Regiment attacked into the gorge to the southeast—but neither was actually

Lessons: Don’t underestimate your enemy. The Germans had taken a beating to that point, but they were now fighting in their homeland and among the most skillful and tenacious defenders in the history of warfare.

Never diverge your combat power. The farther apart your forces get, the more difficult it is for them to provide mutual support. In the case of the Schmidt attack it was impossible.

Control the key terrain. Key terrain is the ground that will cause your operation to fail if the enemy controls it, or bring you victory if you control it. As long as the Germans sat atop Hill 400, the American attack didn’t have a chance.

Never advance blind. Maps are nice, but there is no substitute for eyes on the ground. MH

ALBATROSS (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

Soldiers of the U.S. 28th Infantry Division man a captured German position amid one of the worst American defeats of World War II.

to cross the Kall. In other words the division’s three regiments diverged, instead of converging on the objective. Making matters worse, the Germans controlled a piece of high ground labeled on maps as Hill 400, which was not an attack objective. Hill 400 overlooked the entire battlefield, and German observers could and did call down fire on anything American that moved.

The 112th got across the gorge with great difficulty and took Schmidt on November 3. Then the Germans counterattacked. By November 8 they had pushed the 112th back across the Kall to its original line of departure. The 109th and the 110th also were mauled in their own piecemeal actions. By the time the battle ended on November 8, the 28th Infantry Division had sustained 6,184 casualties. It was among the worst American defeats of the war.

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Hardware M4A3E8 Sherman

4

By Jon Guttman Illustration by Jim Laurier

3

E

ntering combat late in 1942, the M4 Sherman provided the U.S. Army with a solid, reliable medium tank. By 1943, however, it was clearly outgunned by the German Panther’s high-velocity 75 mm cannon and the Tiger’s fearsome 88 mm gun. The British modified some 2,000 of their Shermans to carry 17-pounders in what they called the Sherman Firefly, while the Americans likewise installed a 76 mm M1 highvelocity cannon in many of their M4s.

In an effort to provide a steadier and more mobile platform for the more powerful guns, the Americans in 1944 redesigned the chassis of the M4A3, replacing its original vertical volute spring suspension (VVSS) and 16.5-inch-wide track with horizontal volute spring suspension (HVSS) with a 23-inch wide track. Additionally, the cast hull was replaced by a roomier welded hull accommodating a wider T23 turret. In August 1944 the first of 2,617 M4A3E8s were built by the Detroit and Fisher’s Grand Blanc (Mich.) tank arsenals and entered combat just in time for the Battle of the Bulge that December.

Although not a definitive solution to enemy firepower, the improved “Easy Eight” Shermans, in coordination with their more numerous forebears, ample logistics and air support, overwhelmed German armor until the first M26 Pershing battle tanks arrived in Europe in January 1945. Moreover, “Easy Eight” Shermans proved efficient during the Korean War and in service for a dozen foreign armies. Israeli-modified versions made their last contribution to victory amid the Six-Day War in June 1967. MH

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water-cooled gasoline engine Length: 24 feet 9 inches (with 76 mm gun) Width: 9 feet 10 inches Height: 9 feet 9 inches (to top of turret) Combat weight: 37 tons Armament: 76 mm M1 rifled tank gun, one turret-mounted .50-caliber anti-aircraft gun, one coaxial .30-caliber machine gun and one bow-mounted .30-caliber machine gun Speed Road: 26 mph Cross country: 4–26 mph, depending on terrain Maximum range: 100 miles Crew: Five

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Rear light Power plant Machine gun stowage bracket Radio Loader’s hatch Commander’s cupola C oaxial .30-caliber machine gun

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15. Periscope protective guard 16. Hull vent cover 17. Bow .30-caliber machine gun 18. Drive sprocket 19. Track end connector 20. Suspension bogie assembly 21. Return roller

FROM M4 (76 MM) SHERMAN MEDIUM TANK 1943–65, BY STEVEN J. ZALOGA (OSPREY PUBLISHING LTD.)

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22. Road wheel 23. Turret traverse system 24. Commander’s seat 25. Fuel tank 26. Idler wheel 27. Spare track block rack 28. Track tensioning assembly

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R E D N U R E M M A H E TH

e Pyrenees th s s ro c a g in rg Su ced an fa s m li s u M , y r in the 7th centu h foe in Charles Martel is immovable Frank r e

By Patrick S. Bak

Charles de Steuben’s early 19th century oil of the Frankish victory at Tours falsely depicts Charles Martel, at left with raised ax, and Abd al-Rahman, with light beard, in close combat.

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Frankish nobles often wore bejeweled gold rings bearing Christian symbols.

Used both to seal documents and suggest the wearers’ piety, rings lost in battle became prized war booty.

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he Franks gasped and strained as they rolled the massive log battering ram up against the main gate at Avignon. From the battlements above Muslim garrison troops rained heavy stones and torches down on the attackers, yet the siege engine’s thick, peaked roof of leather-shrouded wooden planks deflected the stones and would not burn. Frankish archers shot volleys at the defenders, providing some cover for the ramming crew. Once the ram was in place, men with wedges and hammers locked its wheels.

The crew then repeatedly drew back the iron-tipped log and swung it forward, building momentum. On impact, the ram dented and splintered the massive gate. The blows that followed did even more damage.

As distracted Moorish troops continued to shower the ram with projectiles, a group of especially agile Franks clambered atop structures adjacent to the curtain wall and flung grappling hooks fixed to ropes over the parapet. Once the hooks were firmly set, warriors clambered up the knotted ropes and over the wall to infiltrate the city. Armed with swords and shields, they ran through the streets to the gate and attacked its startled defenders from the rear.

After dispatching the Moorish sentries, the Franks swung open the gate, and the bulk of the attacking army poured in. During the subsequent battle the Franks slaughtered anyone who resisted and captured the rest.

Once the siege was complete, the victors burned the garrison and razed Avignon’s defensive walls.

The Moors targeted local supporters of Charles, killing some and driving others away Moors then raided north into Aquitaine and Burgundy.

In the spring of 721 al-Samh laid siege to the Aquitanian capital of Toulouse. Three months into the siege Eudes the Great, duke of Aquitaine, attacked the besiegers, decimating the Muslims, killing al-Samh and lifting the siege.

The survivors retreated southeast to Narbonne in disarray. At least temporarily Eudes had checked Moorish expansion in Western Europe.

Just four years later, in 725, the new emir, Anbasa, took fortified Carcassonne by storm and forced Nîmes to

tating raid, or razzia, from Nîmes up the Rhône Valley.

Riding into Burgundy, the Moors looted the countryside around Avignon and Lyon and sacked and burned the city of Autun. In 726 Anbasa died, and for the next six years the Moors were too preoccupied with internal dissent to attack the Franks.

In 731 the Muslim district governor of Cerdagne, a Berber named Munusa, rebelled against Emir Abd alRahman and signed a nonaggression pact with Eudes of Aquitaine, the man who had defeated the Moors at Toulouse a decade earlier. In response Abd al-Rahman raised an army and besieged Munusa in his fortress-city.

The defeated rebel leader was either killed or committed suicide, and Abd al-Rahman reportedly had his severed head shipped to the caliph in Damascus.

A year later Abd al-Rahman decided to eliminate what he viewed as a major strategic threat to his realm in al-Andalus—Aquitaine and its troublesome duke, Eudes. Gathering upward of 20,000 men at Pamplona, the emir led his army across the Pyrenees at Roncesvalles Pass and first stormed Bordeaux, on the River Garonne, sacking the city, looting and burning its churches and slaying its inhabitants. The Moors then slaughtered Eudes’ army at the Battle of the Garonne.

Barely escaping with his life, the duke led survivors north to join Charles, duke and prince of the Franks, the primary Christian leader in the West. The Moors pursued the defeated Aquitanians, looting and destroying churches and forts along the way.

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GRANGER

future when in 711 an Umayyad Muslim army crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from North Africa to the Visigothic Kingdom (spread across present-day southwestern France and the Iberian Peninsula). Within a few years the Umayyads conquered much of Iberia, renaming it al-Andalus.

In 720 al-Samh, the emir (governor general) crossed the Pyrenees into Gaul to conquer the Visigoth remnant, centered on the city of Narbonne. The Moors—as Muslim inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula were called—brutally sacked the city, killing all men and selling women and children into slavery. Using Narbonne as a base, the

PREVIOUS SPREAD: CHATEAU DE VERSAILLES; THIS PAGE: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK

The Franks’ 737 siege of Avignon was still decades in the capitulate. That same year the emir launched a devas-

GRANGER

PREVIOUS SPREAD: CHATEAU DE VERSAILLES; THIS PAGE: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK

On learning of the approaching Muslims, Charles gathered an army of some 15,000 Franks and moved south to link up with Eudes and his surviving troops. Between Tours and Poitiers (near present-day Moussais-la-Bataille) Charles drew his army into formation atop a hill between woodlands. There he waited. The Moorish cavalry, unable to flank the heavy infantry line, were forced into a series of headlong charges. According to a contemporary chronicle, the Franks stood “immobile like a wall, holding together like a glacier in the cold regions, and in the blink of an eye annihilated the Arabs with the sword.”

Abd al-Rahman was killed. The surviving Muslims waited till nightfall and then fled south. Charles’ decisive victory earned him the sobriquet le Martel (“the Hammer”).

The battle also served to draw Charles’ belated attention to the imminent threat the Moors posed to his realm, thus shifting his strategic focus southward. In 733 he occupied Lyon, in southern Burgundy, then pressed his

A circa 1375 painting on the leather ceiling of the Sala de Los Reyes, at the Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain, depicts Moors in conversation.

way down the Rhône. By 737 Charles and his Franks controlled all of Burgundy and Provence, from Orléans south to the Mediterranean.

Frankish control of the Rhône Valley presented the Moors of Narbonne with a serious strategic quandary, blocking them from raiding either north into Burgundy or east to the Alps. They found help from an unexpected source—Maurontus, a Provençal duke displaced by Charles’ sweep through the region. Willing to ally with the Moors for personal gain, the disgruntled duke and followers opened the gates of Avignon to the invaders.

After placing a small garrison in the city, the Moors targeted local supporters of Charles, killing some and driving others away.

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OPPOSITE: BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; RIGHT, FROM TOP: HIPKISS’ SCANNED OLD MAPS AT HIPKISS.ORG; ADOC-PHOTOS (GETTY IMAGES)

Saracens mass outside Paris, a fiction intended to spur Frankish emotions, in this 19th century painting by German artist Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld.

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OPPOSITE: BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; RIGHT, FROM TOP: HIPKISS’ SCANNED OLD MAPS AT HIPKISS.ORG; ADOC-PHOTOS (GETTY IMAGES)

In south-central Gaul, Avignon was the gateway to the lower Rhône, the Mediterranean coast and the passes to Italy, thus the Muslim presence posed a threat to the Frankish position in the south. Charles’ reaction was swift. First he dispatched half-brother Duke Childebrand with an advance force of about 2,000 men and a siege train large enough to surround the city. Charles followed with 8,000 additional troops. On arrival he got word the Moors were massing a relief force near Narbonne. He thus took Avignon by lightning assault rather than siege.

As the garrison lay smoldering, Charles went on the strategic offensive. Leaving his siege train and a garrison of locals in Avignon, he crossed the Rhône with 10,000 men, bypassed Muslim-occupied Nîmes and fast marched west along the Mediterranean coast to Narbonne. He found the Moorish relief army in a fortified camp just outside the city walls. The Franks surrounded Narbonne and the camp with earthworks and built fortifications along the banks of the Aude to thwart waterborne assault.

Charles then had his engineers build battering rams and catapults for an assault on either Narbonne or the camp.

The Moors sent a message to Emir Uqba ibn al-Hajjaj of al-Andalus, who organized a relief force of about 5,000 men in Barcelona under Omar ibn-Chaled. Rather than risk the Pyrenees passes, ibn-Chaled’s army traveled by sea, landing on a peninsula (present-day Port-Mahon) south of Narbonne and using an old Roman dock to unload their horses. Believing he had landed undetected, ibn-Chaled had his men establish a fortified camp on the peninsula’s high ground and rested for the night. The next day the emir planned to move his army up the Berre Valley to the Via Domitia, the Roman coastal road, and then march north to attack the Franks besieging Narbonne.

But Charles got wind of the threat, likely from local Christians. Resolving to split his forces, he left Childebrand and some 5,000 men at Narbonne and led the other half of his army south along the Via Domitia. The men under Charles included his most trusted counts and their leudes (elite mounted retinues), as well as Austrasian Franks, his most elite and battle-hardened infantry. Most were veterans of Charles’ annual campaigns, some of the older men having faced the Moors at the 732 Battle of Tours.

Marching hard down the Via Domitia, the Franks covered the 10 miles to the River Berre in a half day, encamping for the night near an old Visigoth palace. Rising early the next morning as the sun burned off the morning mist, they filtered out of camp and assumed their traditional battle formation—an even line, infantry to the front, with archers and horsemen behind. Charles had them face east, toward the sea, the line anchored on the left by the river and the right by the Étang de la Palme marsh.

The infantrymen stood close together, their 3-foot-wide, half-inch-thick round shields overlapping and their deadly 8-foot iron-tipped spears angled forward.

BATTLE OF TOURS

A member of the Damascus-based Umayyad dynasty, Abd al-Rahman fled Syria to avoid assassination by Abbasid usurpers. He ultimately conquered much of the Iberian Peninsula, renaming it al-Andalus.

The average Frankish infantryman was a part-time soldier, called out for spring and summer campaigning before returning to his farm for the harvest. He wore an iron helmet but generally could not afford a chain mail shirt or a sword and scabbard. Few men, outside of the nobles’ leudes, could afford such arms and armor.

Some 15 to 20 percent of the Frankish force comprised archers, armed with simple European self bows with a range of about 180 yards. The archers stood to the rear of

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Constructed beginning in 756, the Castle of Gormaz was Abd al-Rahman’s primary fortress after he became emir of Cordoba.

Below right: Two decades earlier, in 732, Charles Martel enters Paris in triumph, having defeated Abd al-Rahman at Tours.

ponies—galloped to within yards of the Frankish line, hurled javelins and rode quickly away, hoping to lure the Christians out of formation. Charles’ men proved disciplined, however, as Frankish archers loosed volley after volley at the retreating Berbers.

Next to enter the fray was the Moors’ heavy cavalry, mounted on large Arabians. Sheltering behind yard-wide shields, its well-trained horsemen wielded yard-long

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MELISSA JOOSTE (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

the infantry, while the leudes—who acted as flank guards and messengers for Charles and the others—formed up just behind the bowmen. The mounted men were equipped with spears, swords and bows as well as shields, BATTLE OF COLOGNE 716 helmets and chain mail armor. Trained to quickly dismount and fight on foot in a pinch, BATTLE OF AMBLÈVE 716 they could serve as a reserve to close gaps in BATTLE OF VINCY the infantry line or reinforce the archers.

717 Keeping in tight formation, Charles’ army BATTLE OF SOISSONS advanced slowly down the valley, halting atop 718 a rise at what today is the village of Sigean.

BATTLE OF TOURS Though surprised by the sudden appearance 732 BATTLE OF THE BOARN of their enemy, the Moors had likely already 734 assumed their traditional five-part battle SIEGE OF AVIGNON formation—a vanguard, with two equal-sized 737 units slightly to the rear, and light and heavy SIEGE OF NARBONNE cavalry, infantry and archers to the left and 737 right of the van. In the center, protected by BATTLE OF THE BERRE cavalry, were ibn-Chaled and his messengers.

737 Directly to their rear, a small infantry and SIEGE OF NÎMES archer reserve stood ready to plug any breech.

737 With cries of “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is the greatest”) echoing across the field, the warriors of Islam started forward. At about 200 yards, the maximum range of their recurve bows, the Moorish archers unleashed an arrow storm at the Franks. Intended to break the enemy’s morale and weaken their line, the volleys made little penetration against the Franks’ heavy shields. At that point the Moorish light cavalry—Berbers on mountain

FROM TOP: PHAS, PHOTO 12 (GETTY IMAGES, 2)

Campaigns of Charles Martel

swords and 9-foot lances. Their saddles were fitted with stout iron stirrups that enabled a rider to stand and stab downward with devastating force. On this occasion, though, that ability proved useless, as the Arabians largely shied away from the rows of Frankish infantry spears.

Those Moors able to strike a blow found their lances breaking against the Franks’ overlapping shields. Nor did their heavy swords make much of an impact on the shield wall. Meanwhile, the Franks stabbed back with spear and sword, aiming their blows at the unarmored flanks and legs of the horses and unprotected legs of the cavalrymen.

As the Moorish cavalry bounced off the compact Frankish infantry formation, Muslim foot soldiers moved forward. Each bore a 12-foot spear known as a rumh, which they held with both hands. Unable to hold a shield as they advanced, the lightly armored Muslims proved easy targets for Frankish archers. When the Moors dropped their spears to bring shields and swords into play, they opened themselves to attack by Frankish spearmen.

As the Moors fell back, the Franks moved forward, their line like a living threshing machine intent on reaping men. Halting to absorb another Moorish charge, it again moved relentlessly forward, the cries of wounded men and screams of injured horses filling the air.

Unable to stop the European juggernaut and jammed into shrinking ground between the Berre, the swamp, the sea and the enemy, ibn-Chaled organized one last desperate charge. The attempt failed, and he was killed.

The survivors broke and fled. Unable to reach their fortified camp, many of the Muslims tried swimming out to their fleet off Port-Mahon. “The Franks were quickly after [the Moors] in boats with whatever weapons came to hand and ... drowned them,” a contemporary Frankish scribe recorded. Watching the disaster unfold ashore and in the water around them, the commanders of the Moorish fleet lifted anchor and sailed away. Shifting their attention to the lightly defended enemy camp, the Franks soon captured it and a trove of plunder.

MELISSA JOOSTE (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

FROM TOP: PHAS, PHOTO 12 (GETTY IMAGES, 2)

Despite his resounding triumph on the Berre, Charles lifted his siege of Narbonne. It is possible he’d lost too many men in the pitched battle to guarantee success at the city, or perhaps he was concerned another enemy army might march north from al-Andalus. The looming end of the campaign season doubtless had his troops clamoring to return to their farms. In any case, “the Hammer” marched away, leaving Narbonne to the Moors.

On the march home, however, the Franks in turn captured the fortified cities of Agde, Béziers and Nîmes. They destroyed the walls and burned the garrisons of all three, rendering them useless as forward military outposts.

With the near total destruction of the Moorish army on the Berre and the demolition of their forward outposts, the Muslims of Narbonne never again threatened the Frankish position in the Rhône Valley or Aquitaine. Two

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Martel’s crucial victory at Tours in 732 halted the Muslim invasion of Aquitaine. His son Pépin ultimately drove the Moors back into Iberia.

decades later Martel’s son, Pépin the Short, king of the Franks, returned to Narbonne with a Christian army, taking the city in 759 after a long siege. He then drove the Moors back into Iberia, establishing the present border between Spain and France and freeing Europe north of the Pyrenees from Muslim rule. MH U.S. Army veteran Patrick S. Baker has a master’s degree in European history and contributes to magazines in the United States and Europe. For further reading he suggests Merovingian Military Organization, 481–751, by Bernard S. Bachrach; The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710–797, by Roger Collins; and The Age of Charles Martel, by Paul Fouracre.

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A METHOD TO HIS MADNESS Tasked with suppressing a nationalist insurgency in the East Indies, Turkish-born Dutch commando Raymond Westerling proved brutally successful

By Benjamin Welton

Dutch marines return fire amid an ambush by Indonesian nationalists in 1946, the first year of what would prove a bitter counterinsurgency.

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The maréchaussée sabel (gendarmerie saber), commonly known as the klewang, was carried by KNIL officers and NCOs.

At the turn of the 17th century Dutch traders established a mercantilist monopoly on several Indonesian islands, including resource-rich Java and Sumatra. With these islands in their orbit, representatives of the Dutch East India Co. sold to Europe nutmeg and other spices, coffee, sugar and other items in high demand. An intraAsian trade proved most lucrative, with Dutch ships controlling most major sea routes in the South China Sea. The capital of this new commercial empire was Batavia (present-day Jakarta), on Java. Atop the ruins of a small Muslim garrison company men built a fortified city crisscrossed with canals and steeped in a unique Dutch-Malay culture. Chinese culture was present as well, thanks to thousands of immigrants from the southeastern province of Fujian.

Batavia’s founder, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, once hailed as a Dutch national hero, is reviled in Indonesia as the “Butcher of the Banda Islands.”

In February 1621, seeking to avenge several failed expeditions against the archipelago, Coen stormed ashore at Fort Nassau on Banda Neira

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NATIONAAL ARCHIEF (2)

Young Westerling (circled) passed through some of the British army’s toughest training schools and served with No. 10 Commando.

ling (dubbed “The Turk,” due to his upbringing) resolved to get into the fight as soon as possible.

Over the course of the war he would pass through some of the British army’s toughest schools, including the Commando Basic Training Center in Achnacarry, Scotland, and serve with such legendary fighting units as No. 2 (Dutch) Troop of No. 10 Commando and the Princess Irene Brigade. Despite his eagerness to fight, the Turk did not come to grips with the enemy until spring 1945 when, as a commando embedded with the Dutch resistance, he led his men on hit-and-run missions against German positions. War’s end did not dash his hopes of seeing combat, however.

In August 1945 Westerling, who had learned his mother tongue while serving with Dutchmen in the British army, received orders to ship out to the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia). Still in the uniform of a British junior officer, he took command of a small Anglo-Dutch force tasked with establishing order following the surrender of Japanese occupation forces.

There in the steamy Southeast Asian jungles Westerling made his name as one of the most successful (and infamous) counterinsurgents in modern history.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: NATIONAAL ARCHIEF, NETHERLANDS: THIS PAGE, TOP: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS; LEFT: KONINKLIJKE LANDMACHT

T

he only thing Dutch about Raymond Paul Pierre Westerling was his blood. Born on Aug. 31, 1919, in the ancient city of Istanbul, where several generations of Westerling men had made their living as antique dealers, young Raymond showed signs of the adventurer he would become in adulthood. In his 1952 autobiography, Challenge to Terror, Westerling noted having spent his boyhood capturing snakes and lizards, gamboling with playmates through the merchant souks, experimenting with firearms and gunpowder, and reading everything from “stories of pirates, historical romances and Wild West adventures” to detective tales.

A precocious child who breezed through formal schooling, Westerling grew up in a cosmopolitan milieu—his father spoke English, French, German, Italian and Turkish, while his mother spoke French alongside her native Greek. By age 18 the young man was proficient in all of these languages. Ironically, the only tongue he couldn’t speak was Dutch, though he and his family were citizens of the Netherlands.

Westerling’s life turned far more adventurous in early 1941. Itching to see the world and experience life outside Istanbul, he visited the Dutch Consulate and enlisted in the Free Dutch Forces in exile, as the Netherlands was already under German occupation.

His father doubted his headstrong son would accept military discipline. Embracing the challenge, Wester-

NATIONAAL ARCHIEF (2)

PREVIOUS SPREAD: NATIONAAL ARCHIEF, NETHERLANDS: THIS PAGE, TOP: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS; LEFT: KONINKLIJKE LANDMACHT

Saluting with his klewang, Westerling leads Dutch special operations troops during a 1947 parade in Batavia marking the birthday of Princess Juliana of the Netherlands.

with a punitive force comprising 19 ships, nearly 1,700 Dutch soldiers and some 300 Japanese Sukarno mercenaries. Linking up with the 250 soldiers from the port’s garrison, Coen’s invasion force mercilessly sacked the island.

Despite the actions of Coen and others, for centuries Dutch power in the East Indies did not extend much beyond Java and parts of Sumatra. Indeed, their control over all of the Indonesian islands would not be finalized until the 19th century. By that point, long after the collapse of the Dutch East India Co., the East Indies were the centerpiece of Amsterdam’s small but wealthy empire.

In 1905 the Dutch government demonstrated its attachment to the East Indies by sending 40 million guilders for the development of Java and Madura. The Dutch built thousands of schools between 1900 and 1930. The archipelago also saw the expansion of roads and hospitals.

Inspired in part by expediency, but also by a brewing nationalist movement, colonial administrators established an advisory People’s Council (Volksraad) in 1918 in order to give political voice to the three largest demographic groups—Indonesians, Chinese, and the Dutch and Eurasians (mixed Dutch and Asian). Despite growing autonomy, however, all was not well. Newer Dutch arrivals, particularly those fleeing economic hardship back in Europe, tended to view the East Indies as a

pleasure palace to be exploited for maximum profit. Many refused to interact with the Eurasian population, which had long been accepted as part of the social hierarchy. Homegrown nationalist groups further destabilized Amsterdam’s colonial rule.

In the 1920s several Dutch-educated Indonesians returned to the East Indies armed with revolutionary ideals. The Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger, or KNIL) and police readily suppressed a 1926 revolt in West Java by the small Communist Party of Indonesia, but other parties, such as the Indonesian National Party

Westerling made his name as one of the most successful (and infamous) counterinsurgents (Persatuan Nasional Indonesia, or PNI) and the studentrun Indonesian Association (Perhimpunan Indonesia, or PI), proved harder to eliminate. Such groups espoused a left-wing brand of nationalism, envisioning a centralized and secular state. From the ranks of the PNI rose Kusno Sosrodihardjo, aka Sukarno, future president of the Republic of Indonesia.

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late winter 1942. Between February 28 and March 1 a 34,000-strong Japanese invasion force bested a defending force of 25,000 KNIL soldiers and limited Allied support units following three amphibious landings on Java.

The Japanese had better armor and air support, while the KNIL suffered from poor morale and worse logistics.

Intended primarily for internal security, the KNIL had an ethnically mixed body of soldiers which had never numbered more than 50,000. Some units fought well (notably the 38th Division), but much of the KNIL either surrendered, evacuated to Australia or ditched their uniforms and melted in with the Indonesian population.

Three years of Japanese occupation saw the Europeans, Eurasians and Chinese civilians and Dutch and Allied POWs herded into filthy concentration camps, where tens of thousands died from starvation and tropical dis-

Take a Stab at It

During the post–World War II fighting in the Dutch East Indies insurgents and KNIL and Dutch troops all carried the traditional Indonesian kris dagger. Its asymmetrical blade proved deadly when used as a stabbing weapon.

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NATIONAAL ARCHIEF (2)

Dutch control in the East Indies effectively ended in

eases. As harsh as Japanese rule was, a beaten Tokyo’s decision to let anarchy reign in Indonesia before the first Allied liberation troops could enter made things even worse. “The Japanese,” Westerling recalled, “did not attempt to check the marauding bands which formed spontaneously in the confusion of the end of the war.”

Many Japanese soldiers sold their weapons to the bandits and let them pick army arsenals clean. Some joined the ranks of nationalist insurgent forces as military advisers. As for the men, women and children held in concentration camps since 1942, the Japanese either kept them locked away or allowed the roving bandits to brutalize, rape and execute them in cold blood. The situation was untenable. It was obvious someone needed to establish stability in the East Indies. The first nation tasked with the assignment, Britain, did not have the stomach for it.

After landing on several Indonesian islands in October 1945, the British tried to enforce a cease-fire, demanding local militias surrender their arms. The Indonesians refused, and before long they were targeting British officers for assassination. The standoff came to a head in November amid the Battle of Surabaya. For three weeks British

LEFT: NATIONAAL ARCHIEF; RIGHT: JOHN FLOREA/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES); BOTTOM: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS

Much like the later French and American wars in Vietnam, the conflict in the Dutch East Indies was characterized by small-unit operations in challenging terrain (above) and by the widespread use of reprisal operations aimed at civilians believed to be aiding insurgents (right).

soldiers battled nationalist militias, the British losing nearly 300 men, the Indonesians upward of 6,000. Despite its military victory, London decided Indonesia was not worth the cost. Yet Britain, Australia and the United States collectively resisted the idea of handing back Indonesia to their erstwhile Dutch allies. Only the French, then trying to reassert colonial rule in Indochina, backed Amsterdam’s claims. Foreign bickering mattered little to the average Indonesian or European islander, who were more concerned about survival. Given the British did little more than man their scattered garrisons, those seeking to quell the chaos sought other means. By early 1946 Dutch soldiers, many of whom were veterans of the resistance, joined remnants of the KNIL in a last-ditch effort to establish order and prevent suspected communists from wresting control of the East Indies.

Such was the situation at war’s end when Westerling arrived in-country. The Turk’s first assignment called for his special operations talents, when superiors tasked him and a force of European, Eurasian and Indonesian soldiers with rescuing remaining prisoners from the Japanese camps and stopping the rampant banditry.

NATIONAAL ARCHIEF (2)

LEFT: NATIONAAL ARCHIEF; RIGHT: JOHN FLOREA/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES); BOTTOM: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS

Westerling’s way of dealing with the “terrorists” (his term) was as effective as it was harsh. For example, during one operation he and his men snuck into a village and captured a suspected rebel leader. After interrogating the man, Westerling had him decapitated. His men then returned to the village with the rebel’s head, which they impaled atop a stake as a warning.

“In the East it is not the execution itself which impresses and deters other would-be murderers,” Westerling reflected. “It is the method of execution.”

A more infamous incident occurred at a social club in the city of Makassar, present-day capital of the province of South Sulawesi. Having warned a known Indonesian spy to refrain from visiting the club, Westerling confronted the man a second time at his regular table.

“Do you remember what I told you?” the Turk asked.

When the spy nodded nervously in the affirmative, Westerling pulled a revolver and shot him in the face. The man collapsed to the floor, dead.

Even amid the darkest days of the insurgency, Indonesian and Dutch residents of the East Indies branded Westerling a murderer for his aggressive approach to counterterrorism. Sukarno’s republican government decried him before the United Nations, laying the murders of thousands of Indonesian civilians at the Turk’s feet.

In Challenge to Terror Westerling dismissed such talk as “hullaballoo.” Contrasting his method of executing insurgent leaders with the traditional military response of shelling or bombing enemy villages, he raised the rhetorical question of which method kills more innocents.

Whatever his justifications, Westerling’s small-unit tactics proved effective. Thanks to the “Westerling method”—

While counterinsurgency operations in the Dutch East Indies relied heavily on local recruits to the KNIL (top), regular troops of the Royal Netherlands Army and Marine Corps also played important roles, particularly in protecting such vital infrastructure as railways (above).

a mix of violent displays, targeted assassinations and night raids—by September 1946 the Turk’s commando unit controlled the large and lucrative island of North Sumatra. His 500-man DST (Depot Speciale Troepen), composed of KNIL soldiers and village-based militiamen trained

by Westerling, became experts at police-style operations

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Indonesian Insurgency

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t the turn of the 20th century the Dutch East Indies (as Indonesia was known) remained a colonial outpost whose administrators grew wealthy trading in such goods as spices, coffee, sugar and other commodities. Amsterdam showed its appreciation by investing profits in the economic development of the islands, including projects to build canals and roads, hospitals and schools. Yet the majority Indonesian population lacked a voice. In 1918 administrators established the advisory People’s Council (Volksraad), but nationalist groups increasingly pressed for independence, their pleas turning to violence by mid-century.

In 1942, with the Netherlands government in exile, Japanese forces invaded the archipelago, quickly besting the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger, or KNIL). Before leaving in 1945, the Japanese loosed roving bands of nationalists to frustrate Allied administrators. On August 17 leading nationalist Kusno Sosrodihardjo, aka Sukarno, proclaimed the Republic of Indonesia.

But the remaining Dutch weren’t about to surrender their jewel in the Pacific, and fighting broke out. MH

Operation Kraai

On Dec. 19, 1948, the Dutch intiated their final large-scale offensive of the conflict, successfully seizing the insurgents’ West Javanese capital of Linggadjati and capturing President Sukarno.

But all had been for naught, as the international community recognized Indonesian independence.

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Failed Experiment

From his symbolic declaration of independence on Aug. 17, 1945, Sukarno served as authoritarian president of Indonesia until ousted in 1967. Political infighting and economic malaise forced his successor, Suharto, to resign in 1998. Regional, ethnic and religious strife continue to bedevil the republic.

Japanese Invasion/Occupation

In late winter 1942 Japanese troops landed in the Dutch East Indies and swept aside defending KNIL troops. They soon herded islanders of all stripes into concentration camps to die by the tens of thousands.

Worse still, at war’s end the humiliated Japanese unleashed armed mobs to hinder the arriving Allies.

Operation Product

On July 21, 1947, the KNIL and Dutch army regulars launched this large-scale offensive to quell unrest across the archipelago. Sent to South Sulawesi were British-trained counterinsurgency expert Raymond “The Turk” Westerling and his Dutch commandos.

His brutal tactics included summary executions.

DISTANCE: Batavia to Surabaya 413 miles/665 km

MAPS BY STEVE WALKOWIAK/SWMAPS.COM

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Having interrogated and identified a suspected insurgent (in white shirt), Dutch troops force villagers to watch the man’s execution—a harsh tactic routinely practiced by Westerling.

South Sulawesi was on the verge of absolute breakdown.”

From the December outset of his campaign the Turk implemented his policy of summary prosecution and execution. The KST would encircle a village before dawn, gather its men in the village square and employ various interrogation methods to identify suspected terrorists. Those singled out Westerling had shot on sight. Unquestionably brutal, his methods again proved effective, and by March 1947 the KST had subdued South Sulawesi. An estimated 3,000 to 5,000 islanders died in the fighting, while some 400 were executed. In Challenge to Terror Westerling admitted to having personally killed more than 100 men.

Though combined KNIL-Dutch operations on Sumatra and East and West Java also proved successful, the U.N. condemned the Dutch administration for its own failure to abide by the Linggadjati Agreement. Ratified on Jan. 17, 1948, the Renville Agreement mandated the Dutch would continue to occupy Sumatra and East and West Java until national elections could be held. In the meantime, the insurgency continued.

The endgame for Dutch military power in the East Indies came in December 1948, when General Simon Hendrik Spoor launched Operation Kraai, managing to capture the republican capital of Yogyakarta and capturing President Sukarno. The operational goal was to force the intransi-

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NATIONAAL ARCHIEF (2)

requiring minimal use of artillery, armor and air cover. Exhibiting a strong esprit de corps, Westerling’s men marched into the jungles Small Units Can Win. unsupported. Although always outnumbered, If they are well-trained, they regularly won the day.

-equipped and -led From the start, however, politics hamand, above all, very strung such “police actions.” Even as the highly motivated with strong esprit de corps. DST and similar forces successfully pursued Colonialism Loses ... various counterinsurgency measures, the The decades following weak Dutch administration faced mounting the end of World War II British, American and Soviet pressure to proved conclusively cede its authority over the East Indies. On that colonial empires can be solidly beaten March 25, 1947, the Linggadjati Agreement by native peoples granted de facto independence to Java, Madcommitted to national ura and Sumatra. Sukarno’s republicans did self-determination. not abide by the agreement, though, and by ... As Does Brutality. summer the ground war heated up as insurHarsh repression of civilians during counter- gent attacks netted heavier responses from insurgency operations the KNIL and the Dutch military. may initially reduce Launched on July 21, Operation Product resistance, but won’t was the first large-scale offensive of the war. succeed over time.

As part of the broader operation Dutch administrators sent Westerling’s beefed-up force, redesignated the KST (Korps Speciale Troepen), to South Sulawesi, where Javanese radicals had established cells designed to take down the island’s pro-federalist government.

Westerling’s subjugation of South Sulawesi proved much harder than his earlier fight in North Sumatra, due partly to geography and partly to the fact that, as Dutch historian Jaap A. de Moor wrote, “Dutch authority on

KONINKLIJKE LANDMACHT

Tactical Takeaways

NATIONAAL ARCHIEF (2)

KONINKLIJKE LANDMACHT

gent republicans to abide by earlier agreements, and by January 1949 the success of that mission seemed assured.

But overseas politicians promptly negated Spoor’s victory.

Much like the later French and American experience in Indochina, Dutch soldiers and their Indonesian allies had won the battles but still managed to lose the war.

Alarmed at the prospect of Javanese hegemony, Westerling armed and trained village militias to repulse republican soldiers and bandits alike. These self-defense units, along with former KNIL paratroopers, pledged allegiance to the Turk. His private army became known as the Angkatan Perang Ratu Adil (APRA), or Prince Justice Legion.

The name stems from an Indonesian prophecy about a Javan savior of Turkish descent. Westerling’s men perceived the Turkish-born Dutchman as Prince Justice— a belief Westerling wholeheartedly encouraged.

On Jan. 23, 1950, the APRA launched a coup against Sukarno’s government. Due to a loose-lipped Dutch officer, the Indonesian National Armed Forces (Tentara Nasional Indonesia, or TNI) anticipated the operation.

Despite having lost the element of surprise, the outnumbered and outgunned APRA did win an engagement in the city of Bandung, capturing the barracks of the TNI’s elite Siliwangi Division without losing a single man.

The republicans may have lost as many as 100 dead.

Unfortunately for Westerling, the planned key uprising in Jakarta folded, as those tasked with smuggling firearms into the city were thwarted. In the aftermath of the failed coup, the APRA withdrew from Bandung, and Westerling fled to Singapore, then a British Crown colony. Indonesian authorities pressed for his extradition in vain.

After spending months in a Singaporean prison, Westerling relocated his family to the Netherlands. After penning A Challenge to Terror, which ends with a warning that the Soviet Union and Red China had intelligence agents and terrorists in Indonesia, Westerling unexpectedly became an opera singer, though his single public recital in 1958 reportedly flopped. His marriage failed, though he later remarried. Ending his days as a purveyor

As is often the case in counterinsurgencies, these Dutch troops are unsure of the direction from which they’ve been taking heavy fire.

of antique books in Amsterdam, Westerling died of heart failure at age 68 on Nov. 26, 1987.

To Dutch leftists and Indonesian nationalists Westerling was the embodiment of brutal colonialism. Though tactically effective, he employed his method in the service of a doomed effort. For despite his tactical brilliance, Sukarno’s Republic of Indonesia won the day largely due to international pressure. Sukarno himself served as authoritarian president until 1967, when one of his generals, Suharto, staged a successful coup and nationwide purge of Sukarno-aligned communists. Indonesia’s troubled experiment with independence remains a work in progress. MH Benjamin Welton is a freelance writer based in New England. For further reading he suggests Challenge to Terror, by Raymond Westerling; A Lifetime of News, by Robert L. Kroon; and Gangsters and Revolutionaries, by Robert Cribb.

Branded a war criminal by Indonesian and Dutch leftists, Westerling lived out his life as an Amsterdam bookseller.

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Once known as “surf torture” but now called surf conditioning, this exercise requires BUD/S trainees already exhausted from physical training to hook arms and lie side by side in the Pacific surf line in the dead of night or on even colder early mornings.

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TO HELL WEEK AND BACK It takes intensive training and far more determination to earn the coveted golden trident of a U.S. Navy SEAL

By Jon Guttman

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TO HELL WEEK AND BACK

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A Log PT requires hefting a 200-pound length of telephone pole, rendered smooth and slippery by previous wielders, to impress on all trainees the importance of teamwork. B Toting heavy objects quickly is standard military procedure, but McBurnett describes BUD/S buddy carries as “trying to balance the 200-pound wet, sandy noodle of a student on your back” while running from the surf across the beach, up a berm and back again. C “Hell Week” applies one’s growing stamina to all manner of problem-solving under constant extreme pressure.

PHOTOGRAPHS EXCERPTED FROM THE BOOK UNCOMMON GRIT: A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY THROUGH NAVY SEAL TRAINING BY D. MCBURNETT U.S. NAVY SEAL, RET. COPYRIGHT © 2020 BY DARREN MCBURNETT. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF GRAND CENTRAL PUBLISHING. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

P

erhaps the most important lesson learned from the illstarred 1915 Allied landings on Turkey’s Gallipoli peninsula during World War I was the importance of both gathering intelligence on an objective and clearing mines and other obstacles from the beaches. Tasked with those responsibilities during World War II were the U.S. Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams. In the mid-1950s the UDTs’ role expanded into unconventional warfare, incorporating guerrilla/counterinsurgency tactics, high-altitude parachuting and covert operations. This evolution culminated in the January 1962 formation of Sea, Air and Land (SEAL) Team One, at Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, Calif., and SEAL Team Two, at Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek, in Virginia Beach, Va. By 1986 the last UDTs had made the transition to SEAL teams.

During the Vietnam War and every other conflict in which the United States has since been involved, the SEALs have played a key role, displaying extraordinary toughness, skill, endurance and versatility in myriad environments, from Middle Eastern deserts to Afghan mountains. To become a team member, one must be born with the right physical and mental characteristics, which trainers discover and hone over the course of the grueling 24-week BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/ SEAL) course. Hardly a well-kept secret, this legendary process of elimination and refinement is the subject of Uncommon Grit: A Photographic Journey Through Navy SEAL Training, by retired SEAL turned photographer Darren McBurnett. MH

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PHOTOGRAPHS EXCERPTED FROM THE BOOK UNCOMMON GRIT: A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY THROUGH NAVY SEAL TRAINING BY D. MCBURNETT U.S. NAVY SEAL, RET. COPYRIGHT © 2020 BY DARREN MCBURNETT. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF GRAND CENTRAL PUBLISHING. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

B C

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TO HELL WEEK AND BACK

D E

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F G

D When not in the surf, Hell Week trainees drill in the sand and pool, though not before cleaning off beneath the 50 coldwater nozzle jets at the decontamination station. E “Everyone has a moment of struggle during log PT,” McBurnett says, “but you dig deep and keep going because your crew is counting on you.” F Drownproofing in the combat training tank (i.e., pool) demands trainees swim 100 meters, float for five minutes and bob for five minutes in 9 feet of water, all while doing tasks—with one’s hands and feet bound. G From the moment they begin the course, trainees are kept continually on the run. “In the unlikely event that you graduate BUD/S,” McBurnett quips, “you are then allowed to walk and get your diploma.”

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A third-generation Colorado cattle rancher, Benjamin Franklin Nash enlisted in the U.S. Army after Pearl Harbor and ultimately played a key role in tracking enemy forces in the South Pacific.

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NOT IN COLORADO ANYMORE

Young American cattle rancher Franklin Nash risked life and limb in the Pacific as a member of Australia’s covert Coastwatchers

By Ron Soodalter

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T

Alerted by Coastwatcher reports, Allied aircraft attacked Japanese vessels transporting troops and supplies to scattered South Pacific outposts.

“He was the guy who really rode the horse and gathered the cattle, and he did it better than anyone.”

Nash took time off ranching to study geology at the University of Colorado in Boulder and was in his sophomore year in December 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The 23-year-old immediately left school and enlisted in the Army.

It turns out that Nash had long been preparing for life in the military. While a student at Cañon City High School he’d completed three years of Junior ROTC training, working his way up from cadet private to captain, commanding one of the cadet companies and serving as battalion adjutant. According to another daughter, Harriet Holloway, he also accumulated “a collection of medals… as a sharpshooter” on the ROTC rifle team. While in college Nash had joined the Colorado National Guard.

The young recruit was assigned to a signal company in California, where the Army put his marksmanship skills to use training other recruits to shoot.

When it appeared he might spend the war stateside, he pressed superiors for a combat assignment. “I guess the commander figured he was serious,” Harriet says, “as they finally shipped him out to the South Pacific.”

Corporal Nash was assigned as a radio operator to the 410th Signal Company (Aviation), initially stationed in the New Hebrides (presentday Vanuatu). In January 1943 the 410th moved to Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands, where Nash helped install and operate the first Allied radio control tower at Henderson Field, a vital and hotly contested airstrip recently wrested from the Japanese.

Less than a month after arriving on “the Canal,” Nash found the action he’d been seeking. A letter of commendation signed by Lt. Gen. Millard F. Harmon records how the young American performed. “Rather than exercise your privilege

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL

The role of the Coastwatchers was fraught with imminent danger. It required daring men willing to set up observation posts on occupied islands teeming with enemy troops to observe their sea, land and air buildup and dispositions, then transmit coded intelligence in the open. Based on their information, planners would create lists of viable targets for Allied ships, fighter planes and dive bombers. If that weren’t dangerous enough work, the Coastwatchers also took responsibility for rescuing downed airmen and shipwrecked sailors.

At first glance Nash seemed an unlikely candidate for such a group. The lanky, laconic 6-foot-2-inch Coloradan was a third-generation cattle rancher, a member of a family that raised registered Hereford cattle on a 40,000-acre spread his father and grandfather had started as a homestead in the late 1800s. Young Franklin was virtually raised in the saddle. “He lived what the John Wayne movies only show,” daughter Julie Nash says.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: ISTOCK (GETTY IMAGES); INSET: COURTESY OF THE NASH FAMILY; THIS PAGE: U.S. NAVY (NATIONAL ARCHIVES)

here were far safer assignments during World War II than hiding amid tropical rainforests on Japaneseoccupied islands to spy on the enemy and radio information to Allied intelligence. Capture was an all-too-real possibility and would spell certain torture and death. But that was precisely the duty for which some 800 Australians volunteered. Known as Coastwatchers, they were arguably the most vital yet unsung heroes of the Pacific War. Among their number was a lone American GI. The story of how Benjamin Franklin Nash—Franklin, to family and friends—came to spend more than two years observing and reporting on Japanese activities from behind their lines would doubtless make for a thrill-a-minute film. Three decades after war’s end a pair of veterans who had served with Nash in the South Pacific exchanged letters in which they reminisced about their friend and fellow soldier. “I remember Frank Nash expressing a desire to get into coast watching,” wrote one, “and I figured the guy must be stark raving mad. It was bad enough at [Guadalcanal], but to consider operating a radio from Japanese territory seemed suicidal.”

“He was a real hero,” replied the other veteran, a retired colonel. “When I heard what he wanted to get into, I thought he must be out of his mind.…My hat is off to him.”

While serving with the 410th, Nash learned of the Coast-

AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL

PREVIOUS SPREAD: ISTOCK (GETTY IMAGES); INSET: COURTESY OF THE NASH FAMILY; THIS PAGE: U.S. NAVY (NATIONAL ARCHIVES)

of seeking shelter when Japanese bombers attacked Henderson Field,” it states, “you remained at your post in the control tower to keep airplanes notified of conditions at the field and to direct the takeoff of departing aircraft.” One pilot radioed his plane was low on fuel, whereupon Nash “brought it safely in during the most violent part of the engagement.” His actions earned him the Bronze Star, the first of several awards and commendations he would amass by war’s end.

watchers, an organization of Royal Australian Navy (RAN) volunteers who set up posts on enemy-held South Pacific islands to report on Japanese movements. These were not professional military men. “The watchers appointed by the navy,” recalled Lt. Cmdr. Eric Feldt, wartime director of the Coastwatchers, “were generally postmasters, harbormasters, schoolteachers, police or railway officials—people who had at hand the means of passing information by telegraph.”

The Coastwatchers’ forward station, call letters KEN, was on Guadalcanal. As a radio operator Nash was privy to accounts of their dramatic sea rescues of downed aviators and shipwrecked sailors, as well as transmissions

Operating behind enemy lines, Coastwatchers and the islanders who aided them observed Japanese movements, which they reported by radio to higher headquarters on Guadalcanal and in Australia.

that warned of Japanese troop movements and enabled the interception and sinking of countless enemy vessels.

Operating singly and in pairs, the Coastwatchers had infiltrated the broadleaf forests of the Solomons, working closely with friendly natives while seeking to avoid those with Japanese sympathies. To avoid detection they kept moving from one barely accessible location to another, shouldering heavy equipment that included the radio set, a 70-pound generator and a 5-gallon can of fuel.

Nash was instantly smitten with their mission. This was precisely the sort of action that appealed to him, and he wanted in. He later told an interviewer the prospect of spying on the enemy and reporting their activities “intrigued the hell” out of him. But a few significant obstacles stood in his way.

For one, South Pacific rainforests bore no resemblance to the cattle country of south-central Colorado. Second, the Yank had no training or experience in the type of clandestine warfare practiced by the Coastwatchers. Third, and perhaps the deal breaker,

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KOLOMBANGARA ISLAND

ARUNDEL ISLAND TO GUADALCANAL

ENLARGED AREA

MUNDA

he was not a member of the Australian military.

Nash was undeterred. “When he made up his mind to do something,” son Clint recalls, “nothing would stop him.” On learning the 410th Signal Co. was moving to the rear, Nash visited Station KEN and volunteered his services.

Lt. Cmdr. Hugh Mackenzie, Feldt’s deputy, happened to need a good radio operator and agreed to put the eager American to work, providing he apply for temporary reassignment from the U.S. Army to the RAN. After sending the relevant paperwork and waiting for a predictably slow response, an impatient Nash chose to reassign himself. “I sort of deserted,” he recalled. The transfer papers eventually arrived, officially loaning the young Coloradan to the Coastwatchers.

Nash completed a course in jungle survival, and natives delivered him to Kolombangara Taking on Nash proved an inspired decision. A memorable American character in the 1963 war film The Great Escape was nicknamed “the Scrounger” for his uncanny ability to procure hard-to-find items. He had nothing on Nash. As irregulars the Coastwatchers often ran short of supplies and provisions. Their new Yank colleague was an answer to their prayers, for Nash always seemed able to beg, borrow, steal or simply build what they required.

In early May 1943 the brass at Station KEN decided to send a man to assist RAN Sub-lieutenant Arthur Reginald “Reg” Evans, a wiry and resourceful Coastwatcher. Working with a network of natives he employed as scouts, spies and bearers, Evans had set up a one-man observa-

tion post high on the small volcanic island of Kolombangara, just east of New Georgia in the Solomons. From his perch he watched the comings and goings of enemy shipping as thousands of Japanese soldiers built an airstrip below him. His radio reports to air strike command regarding enemy shipping had already cost the Japanese dearly, and traffic had picked up in his sector.

Nash jumped at the chance to help Evans. Mackenzie overcame his initial reluctance, and in mid-May, after Nash completed a three-day crash course in jungle survival, natives delivered the young American to Kolombangara in a dugout canoe. He and Evans hit it off immediately, and Nash could not have had a better mentor. The older man had an uncanny ability to adapt to his surroundings and a knack for recognizing and reporting important enemy developments. A few months after Nash’s arrival on the island the teammates were peripherally involved in a rescue operation with future international ramifications.

Blackett Strait, the narrow channel flowing between the south coast of Kolombangara and the north end of neighboring Arundel, proved an ideal supply route for the Japanese, the number of enemy warships and barges conveying troops and supplies through the strait steadily increasing. To counter the enemy buildup, Evans and fellow Coastwatchers reported on the types, numbers and location of enemy aircraft and vessels, whereupon U.S. bombers, fighter planes and PT boats searched for viable targets.

Meanwhile, the Coastwatchers maintained a lookout for fliers and seamen whose vessels had crashed or sunk.

On the moonless night of August 1–2 Evans and Nash spotted a sudden eruption of flames against the inky black sea and sky. It was obviously the funeral pyre of a vessel, but it was impossible to tell whose. Nash radioed their intention to scour the coastline for survivors. The next morning the pair spotted wreckage in mid-channel, but their search yielded no results.

Shortly thereafter a PT boat was reported missing and presumed sunk, its crew lost. Nearly a week later, however, after a heroic effort in which the young lieutenant commanding the vessel managed to drag or lead ashore 10 of his 12 crewmen, a pair of Evans’ native scouts reported having encountered the shipwrecked sailors on a nearby island.

Evans immediately sent a half dozen native paddlers in a supply canoe along with a note: To Senior Officer…Have just learned of your presence on Naru Is.…Strongly advise you return immediately to here in this canoe, and by the time you arrive here I will be in radio communication with [American] authorities at Rendova, and we can finalize plans to collect balance of your party.

The lieutenant followed the Coastwatcher’s instructions, hiding beneath palm fronds as natives paddled the

ANTIQUA PRINT GALLERY (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY OF THE NASH FAMILY; AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL (2); PETER NEWARK AMERICAN PICTURES (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES)

TO BOUGAINVILLE

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ANTIQUA PRINT GALLERY (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY OF THE NASH FAMILY; AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL (2); PETER NEWARK AMERICAN PICTURES (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES)

Eric Feldt

canoe, and the two soon met, whereupon Evans invited the young American into his tent for tea. The skipper of the wrecked vessel was Lt. John Fitzgerald Kennedy (the future 35th U.S. president), his boat the soon-to-belegendary PT-109. To the Coastwatchers he was just another shipwrecked sailor in need of help. An American patrol boat soon picked up Kennedy from Kolombangara, then retrieved his crew.

Under Reg Evans’ tutelage Nash was a quick study, and given the course of events in the Solomons, he would have to be. Immediately after Kennedy’s rescue, Evans relocated to nearby Gomu, leaving his American partner the sole Allied presence on Kolombangara—with several thousand Japanese to keep him company.

Reg Evans

Nash (top photo, circled) was not only the sole American among the Australian Coastwatchers, he was also one of few enlisted men in the organization. John Kennedy (above left, circled) and the other PT-109 survivors owed their lives to Evans, Nash and their islander helpers.

As the Solomons campaign heated up, the Allies and Japanese engaged in a massive game of maritime chess.

The Allies had initiated their island-hopping strategy of bypassing and isolating various enemy strongholds, forcing the Japanese to hurriedly evacuate troops from bases that were no longer viable. For such operations they required a steady stream of barges and other vessels. From his observation post on the Kolombangara heights Nash radioed their movements to Evans, who

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relayed the intelligence to direct Allied air strikes. When the Japanese evacuated Kolombangara, Nash moved his equipment to Good Intel Is Vital.

Gomu, where he joined Evans’ replacement, The information on Forbes Robertson. enemy movements When life on Gomu proved uneventful, the provided by Nash and pair closed up shop and headed for the Coastother Coastwatchers watchers’ advance base on Munda. There helped Allied forces disrupt Japanese Nash received orders to scout Mono, one operations throughof the Treasury Islands, in preparation for an out the South Pacific.

Allied landing. Existing intelligence was long Movement Is Life. outdated, thus it fell to the young American For those working to accurately determine the enemy presence. behind enemy lines, constant changes of On the night of October 21–22 Nash and position can mean the three teammates paddled a mile from a PT difference between boat to a beach only a short distance from survival and death. a village, whose residents fortunately proved Work With Locals. friendly. A rumor had circulated at Station Islanders provided information, support KEN that downed American airmen had and protection vital made their way to Mono and were living in to the success of the the bush. As Nash and his men soon learned, Coastwatcher ops. the rumors were true. Three airmen had been shot down that June. The wind and ocean currents had propelled their raft to Mono, where the trio had spent the intervening months. Four more downed American fliers had joined them on the island, only to take their chances in a dugout canoe. Meanwhile, hundreds of Japanese troops fleeing the Allied advance swarmed onto Mono, making the remaining castaways’ position ever more precarious. After assessing the situation on

the ground, Nash arranged a rendezvous with a PT boat and returned to base with both accurate intelligence and the rescued airmen.

Although the Solomons were being liberated one by one, Nash was far from finished with his service as a Coastwatcher. The New Guinea campaign was going full tilt, and on November 1 the Allies landed in force at Torokina, a coastal village on the south side of heavily occupied Bougainville. Before any of the thousands of troops hit the beach, a half dozen Coastwatchers, including Nash, had landed to observe the enemy.

“Our basic job on Bougainville,” Nash recalled, “was to go up in the bush and keep an eye on the Japs so they wouldn’t come back down while we built an airstrip at Torokina. There was a lot of Japs left on Bougainville. …We had to be prepared at a moment’s notice.” The Japanese did, indeed, try to take the airbase. “They didn’t get it done,” Nash said succinctly.

Given a precious month’s leave in Australia, a restless Nash inquired about working on a cattle ranch. “A guy told me if I wanted to go to the backcountry, I could find work,” he recalled. “I took a train to the interior and got back to ranchin’ for a while, workin’ with horses and cattle.” When his leave was over, he got back to work in Bougainville, helping to guide dive bombers and supply planes to the new airstrip.

By definition the Coastwatchers were strictly observers and information gatherers; combat was not a part of their mandate. “It was not their duty to fight and thus draw

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TOP: UNITED KINGDOM MINISTRY OF DEFENCE; BOTTOM: COURTESY OF THE NASH FAMILY

Tactical Takeaways

FROM LEFT: INTERIM ARCHIVES, TIME LIFE PICTURES (GETTY IMAGES, 2)

Its position revealed by Coastwatchers, a Japanese transport falls prey to Allied aircraft. Right: A Japanese officer executes Australian commando Leonard Siffleet—a fate Coastwatchers could expect if captured.

TOP: UNITED KINGDOM MINISTRY OF DEFENCE; BOTTOM: COURTESY OF THE NASH FAMILY

FROM LEFT: INTERIM ARCHIVES, TIME LIFE PICTURES (GETTY IMAGES, 2)

attention to themselves,” Feldt recalled. “It was their duty to sit, circumspectly and unobtrusively, and gather information.” There were occasions, however, when contact with the enemy was unavoidable. Jesse Scott, one of the airmen rescued from Mono, alluded to that in a letter to Nash’s parents. “[He has] saved a lot of us fliers,” Scott wrote, “as well as taking care of a few of the…Japs himself.”

A 1945 letter of commendation from Lt. Gen. Stanley G. Savige, the Australian commander who accepted the Japanese surrender on Torokina, detailed Nash’s interactions with the enemy. It referenced the Coloradan’s “forest craft, courage, initiative [and] leadership,” adding, “S/Sgt. B.F. Nash…has carried out extensive patrols and scouting missions in enemy territory, accompanied only by natives, for the purpose of gathering intelligence and organizing guerrilla warfare against the Japanese. Many of his patrols yielded valuable information and resulted in the killing and capture of numerous Japanese.”

In letters home Nash happily discussed the family cattle business. But he was markedly silent regarding the nature of his service—largely due to its secret nature, of course, but perhaps also to avoid alarming his parents.

In December 1945 Nash was honorably discharged from the Army at the rank of technical sergeant. In addition to the Bronze Star and his letters of commendation, he carried home medals and citations from the United States, Britain and Australia. These included the U.S. Legion of Merit, South Pacific Service Ribbon with two battle stars and two Presidential Unit Citations, as well as Britain’s George Medal.

What had possessed Nash to not only volunteer for such perilous duty, but also remain behind enemy lines for more than two years? In 1974 author Walter Lord interviewed the Coloradan for Lonely Vigil, his history of the Coastwatchers. Nash told Lord he’d joined the Australian force for the adventure. But Nash was no war lover.

Every assignment he undertook, every letter he wrote home, expressed the motives of a young man whose primary objective was to contribute to a speedy end to World War II. Not content to remain in a safe berth stateside, he badgered superiors to transfer him to a hot spot. When activities there proved too tame, he sought transfer into another nation’s army in order to place himself where he could accomplish the most good. And there he stayed.

As rescued airman Scott noted, the Coloradan Coastwatcher “just couldn’t leave ’til he saw the finish of it.”

Nash’s deep-seated sense of service to his country stands in contrast with his disdain for those he considered “draft dodgers.” In late 1943, while playing his dangerous game of hide-and-seek with the Japanese, Nash heard over the radio that a group of American coal miners had gone on strike, an action he viewed as a hindrance to the war effort. “I hope to see the whole lot in hell,” he wrote to his parents. “I hate their guts and all the rest of the big husky ones hiding behind their essential jobs.”

On his return home Nash again took up breeding registered Herefords. In June 1947 he married Clara Giem of Cañon City, Colo., with whom and where he remained until his death at age 87 on Aug. 1, 2005.

The couple had seven children and lived to see 11 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. An advocate of education and the arts, Nash sold off much of his ranchland to sponsor scholarships at the University of Oklahoma and New Mexico’s Doel Reed Center for the Arts. For six decades he hardly spoke about the war, sharing his experiences only on rare occasions.“When Walter Lord came to the ranch to interview Dad,” daughter Harriet recalls,“we were all shooed out of the room; and when Dad walked out to take some air, there were tears running down his face. It was the only time I ever saw my father cry.” MH

George Medal Instituted by Britain’s King George VI in the fall of 1940 (concurrently with the George Cross), the George Medal honors acts of gallantry not occurring in face-to-face battle. Franklin Nash received one for his two years of intelligence work behind Japanese lines.

Ron Soodalter is a frequent contributor to Military History and other publications and the author of Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader. For further reading he recommends The Coastwatchers, by Eric A. Feldt; Coast Watching in WWII: Operations Against the Japanese on the Solomon Islands, 1941–43, by A.B. Feuer; and Lonely Vigil: Coastwatchers of the Solomons, by Walter Lord.

After the war Nash returned to ranching in Colorado, breeding registered Hereford cattle until his Aug. 1, 2005, death at 87.

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BLACK HAWK’S FOLLY In the last action linked to the War of 1812 Missouri Rangers cornered Sauk warriors atop a bluff overlooking the Mississippi floodplain

By Douglas L. Gifford

At the outset of the War of 1812 the Sauk and Fox tribes allied with the British, with Black Hawk (opposite) as Sauk war leader.

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against British-allied Indians raiding down from the Great Lakes region. There were not nearly enough soldiers or militia to construct proper garrisons, so families pooled their resources to build settler forts. During the war they sheltered and slept within such fortifications, the men leaving only to farm crops and tend livestock.

Among the largest of the settler strongholds was Fort Howard, named for territorial Governor Benjamin Howard and sited just north of present-day Old Monroe, Mo. Built atop a rise on the floodplain west of the Mississippi, the fort was completed by settlers and Rangers over a few weeks in the summer of 1812. Commanded by Capt.

Peter Craig, Fort Howard enclosed a half acre of land and

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TOP: HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION; LEFT: NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; RIGHT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS

After the United States declared war against Britain on June 18, 1812, the federal government could not spare Regular troops for duty on the Missouri frontier. Thus Congress authorized the formation of Ranger companies to safeguard settlers. These were active-duty Volunteers, not militia called up during an emergency. The government recruited them primarily from French settlements within Missouri Territory. Rangers were responsible for providing their own horses, weapons, ammunition and rations, and were—in theory, anyway—to be reimbursed by the federal government.

When news of the brewing war reached the Missouri frontier, settlers began building forts for protection

PREVIOUS SPREAD: BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; THIS PAGE: AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

S

ometimes referred to as the “Forgotten War,” the War of 1812 officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent by delegates of the United States and Britain in Belgium on Christmas Eve 1814. News traveled slowly in the Age of Sail, however. The British commander in North America had yet to learn of the cessation of hostilities when he attacked American forces under Andrew Jackson in New Orleans in January 1815. Word of the peace agreement was even slower to reach the upper Mississippi Valley.

That spring the Missouri frontier was aflame as Sauk and Fox (Meskwaki) warriors from what are today Iowa and Illinois raided isolated settlements, killing soldiers and civilians alike. Although the fighting eventually ceased, the last battle of the war did not unfold in the salons of Europe or on the field at New Orleans. The final engagement pitted Missouri Rangers against British-allied Sauk warriors atop a pitted limestone bluff overlooking the Mississippi floodplain.

TOP: HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION; LEFT: NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; RIGHT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS

PREVIOUS SPREAD: BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; THIS PAGE: AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

On Christmas Eve 1814 American and British representatives signed the Treaty of Ghent (opposite). Forces in the field were unaware of the treaty when they fought the Battle of New Orleans (below), on Jan. 8, 1815. The news took even longer to reach the upper Mississippi Valley, where fighting between British-allied Indians and American Rangers and settlers continued into June.

housed the Rangers and 30-odd families.

47-year-old war chief had led raids against The stockade was 210 feet long by 105 Osages and settlers in Missouri since he feet wide, its long sides running north was a teen. At the outset of the War of and south, with blockhouses on all but 1812 the Sauks and Foxes had allied the southeast corner. Its residents lived with the British, battling U.S. forces in constant fear of Indian attack—espealong the upper Mississippi cially in spring and early summer, when and attacking settlers on the William Clark floodwaters enabled Indian canoes to reach Missouri frontier. According to high ground outside the fort. To access fresh Black Hawk, after a friend’s son water, the settlers dug a well within the stockade. he’d adopted as his own was “cruelly In 1813 the Rangers built nearby Fort Independence, and wantonly murdered by the whites” on the west bank of the river across from a prominent in the spring of 1815, he vowed revenge sandstone formation known as Cap au Gris (just east of against settlers. Gathering warriors from present-day Winfield, Mo.). The fort was also called Cap Saukenuk, his home village and the Sauk au Gris (Cape Gray), though gris was actually a misspell- capital (near present-day Rock Island, Ill.), ing of the French word grès (“sandstone”). While some he led the war party down the Mississippi families lived at Fort Independence, it was primarily a in canoes, passing through deserted country- To help secure and maintain the allegiance military installation, built to control traffic on the river side. “We were pleased to see that the white of North American and serve as a staging area for operations on the upper people had retired from the country,” he Indian tribes during Mississippi. Fort Howard lay a few miles to the south- recalled in his autobiography. the War of 1812, the west, and a trail connected the outposts. In 1815 Capt.

On the morning of May 24 he and an- British distributed David Musick commanded Fort Independence. other warrior paddled past Fort Indepen- the King George III Peace Medal, cast Leading the Sauk raids in Missouri that spring was dence, undetected in the predawn darkness, in silver and worn Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak (Be a Large Black Hawk), and beached their canoe on the west bank suspended around known to English speakers simply as Black Hawk. The of the river. Starting down the trail to Fort the wearer’s neck.

Peace Medal

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While American settlers on the Missouri frontier had their own weapons, they largely relied on the volunteer Rangers for protection against Indian attacks.

Black Hawk and his companion soon circled back and found Durgee alive. Black Hawk described the scene:

Around noon the Sauk warriors reached the base of a limestone bluff overlooking the floodplain a quarter mile

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TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; MAP BY HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

Howard, the pair encountered two men tandem riding a horse. The warriors fired their muskets, toppling settler Roswell Durgee to the ground. Bucked from the startled horse, the second man, noted Indian trader and scout Frederick Dixon, fled. Black Hawk gave pursuit, but on recognizing the scout, he resolved to let him live, as Dixon had helped the Sauks in better times. Meanwhile, Black Hawk’s companion scalped Durgee and left him for dead. After recovering his horse, Dixon tried to lead his suffering companion to Fort Howard. Durgee, however, was delirious and unable to walk, so Dixon abandoned him to his fate.

Durgee was not the first of Dixon’s traveling companions to have met with misfortune. In 1804 a Sauk war party led by Black Hawk killed three young sons of pioneer William McHugh as they rode with the scout a few miles north of the future site of Fort Howard. Dixon had managed to escape then, too.

About the time Black Hawk’s comrade was finishing off Durgee, the main body of the Sauk war party, some 30 strong, landed their canoes near the mouth of the Cuivre River, a few miles southeast of Fort Howard. Black Hawk and companion joined the warriors as they sloshed across the floodplain toward the fort.

TOP: BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; LEFT: NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM, LONDON (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES)

Contract Pistol

Among the weapons used by Black Hawk and other chiefs were pistols presented them by their British allies. This and similar 1814 ordnance pattern flintlock pistols were manufactured by gunmaker William J. Rolfe of Birmingham, England.

We met the man supposed to be killed coming up the road, staggering like a drunken man, all covered with blood! This was the most terrible sight I had ever seen. I told my comrade to kill him, to put him out of his misery! I could not look at him.

A hand-colored period lithograph depicts the war dances of Sauk and Fox warriors at about the time of the Battle of the Sinkhole.

Battle of the Sinkhole

MISSOURI P R E S E N T- D AY BORDERS

TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; MAP BY HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

TOP: BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; LEFT: NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM, LONDON (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES)

MISSOURI RIVER

ILLINOIS RIVER

MILES 0

10

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St. Louis MISSISSIPPI RIVER

below Fort Howard. As they paused there amid the timber, a party of five Rangers paddled by in a canoe, bound for the fort. Capt. Craig had dispatched the men to retrieve a grindstone from settler Benjamin Allen’s deserted farm.

Springing from cover, the Sauks splashed through the shallows and attacked the Americans, shooting and tomahawking the men before they could react. The warriors killed three of the Rangers outright and mortally wounded a fourth. The fifth presumably escaped.

Hearing the shots, soldiers and settlers poured from the fort and opened fire on the warriors. The range was too great, however, and the Sauks fled up the bluff. Craig led about 40 Rangers through the shallows in pursuit, while some two dozen settlers circled around to cut off the warriors. The parties collided atop the bluff, and a vicious firefight erupted. The warriors made a stand on what Ranger John Shaw later described as a mostly cleared field “about 40 rods [660 feet] across, beyond which was pretty thick timber.” The field was dotted with sinkholes—depressions caused by water flowing through limestone. Men on both sides sheltered behind the scattered trees for protection. “The loading was done quickly,” Shaw recalled, “and the shots rapidly exchanged.” In the initial exchange

several Americans were killed or wounded. When a Ranger was hit, comrades sang out his name.

Unknown to either side, Capt. Musick and 20 Rangers from Fort Independence were only about a mile south of the bluff when the firefight started. Musick and his men were returning from a scout along the Cuivre, watering and grazing their horses, when they heard gunfire from the direction of Fort Howard. The captain led his men to investigate. Their arrival startled the Sauks, who retreated north along the bluff. A dozen or so ran for the banks of Bob’s Creek, just north of the fort, while Black Hawk and some 20 others made for a large, brush-lined sinkhole.

In the excitement Craig foolishly stepped into the clear and was shot dead for his trouble.

The Rangers quickly surrounded the sinkhole, which Shaw later described in detail:

Battle of the Sinkhole COMPANY OF MISSOURI RANGERS

7

KILLED

3 WOUNDED, 3 SETTLERS KILLED

BAND OF SAUK WARRIORS

5+

KILLED

The sinkhole was about 60 feet in length and from 12 to 15 feet in width and 10 or 12 feet deep. Near the bottom on the southeast side was a shelving rock, under which perhaps some 50 or 60 persons might have sheltered themselves. At the northeast end of the sinkhole the descent was quite gradual, the other end much more abrupt, and the southeast side almost perpendicular, and the other side about like the steep roof of a house.

Far from being a deathtrap, the sinkhole proved an excellent defensive position for the outnumbered warriors. To get a clear shot at the enemy, a Ranger had to crawl to the lip of the hollow and fire downward, exposing himself to Sauk fire in the process.

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The stalemate had dragged on through late afternoon when Lt. Edward Spears proposed a means of approaching the Sauk position. “[He] suggested that a pair of cart wheels, axle and tongue, which were seen at Allen’s place, be obtained, and a moving battery constructed,” Shaw recalled. “The idea was entertained favorably, and an hour or more was consumed in its construction. Some oak floor puncheons, from 7 to 8 feet in length, were made fast to

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ABOVE: NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE; BELOW: EDDIE RODRIGUEZ (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

From their limestone lair the warriors dared their opponents to attack, while the Rangers did the same from above. Some Sauks sang death songs to the accompaniment of a makeshift drum of skin stretched over a hollow tree section. From time to time a warrior would crawl up to the lip of the sinkhole to fire at the Rangers, or a Ranger would crawl to the edge to fire down at the Sauks.

AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

Painted by artist George Catlin in 1834, this Sauk warrior is armed with a lance, bow and quiver and carries his shield over one arm.

ABOVE: NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE; BELOW: EDDIE RODRIGUEZ (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

Tactical Takeaways

an axle in an upright position, and portholes made through them. Finally, the battery was ready for trial Cultivate Allies. and was sufficiently large to protect Like France, Britain some half dozen or more men.” recruited Indian tribes From the sinkhole the Sauks as allies in the North heard the sounds of chopping and American conflicts, hammering. Several curious braves gaining skilled fighters while freeing finally crawled to the lip of the holup better-armed low and popped up for a glimpse. regular troops.

About then the Rangers were Exploit the Ground. pushing the completed battery forDuring the Battle of ward. As the structure rolled toward the Sinkhole Black Hawk turned the the sinkhole, the Sauks noticed a odd geography of flaw—an 18-inch gap between the the battlefield to his ground and the wheeled end of the tactical advantage. battery. The Rangers had planned Victory Is Fleeting. to fire at the Indians through the Despite besting the Americans at the portholes in the planks, but the warSinkhole, Black Hawk riors fired up into the gap and at the and his men could not portholes. One round struck Spears stem the settler tide. in the head, killing him, and other Rangers were wounded before they abandoned the battery.

Around nightfall the Rangers noticed more Indians moving toward Fort Howard. Hoping to draw attention away from their besieged comrades, the Sauks who had sought shelter in the brush along Bob’s Creek had emerged within yards of the undefended post and were firing in the air. Fearing for the families inside, Capt. Musick abandoned the fight at the sinkhole and had the men return to the fort with their dead and wounded—all but Spears, whose body was too close to the sinkhole to risk a recovery. In addition to Capt. Craig and Lt. Spears, five Rangers had been killed, three wounded. Three settlers lay dead.

Black Hawk and his men waited for nightfall before emerging from the sinkhole to join up with the other Sauks. Rather than make for the canoes through hostile countryside, Black Hawk decided they would return to Saukenuk on foot. He also may have feared the prospect of paddling up the Mississippi against the current only to run the gauntlet at Cap au Gris, where Rangers from Fort Independence would likely be watching for them. Anyway, Black Hawk was satisfied with the results of the raid.

warrior, but based on the amount of blood observed in the sinkhole, the Rangers speculated the Sauks had carried off most of their dead and wounded.

Musick and his men then returned to Fort Independence. The presumptive commander at Fort Howard, Lt. Drakeford Gray, had the dead buried and dispatched a runner to St. Charles, 14 miles southeast on According to the Chicago Blackhawks ice hockey the Missouri River, for medical aid. team, which joined the That summer the representatives of 19 National Hockey League tribes met with U.S. commissioners in Por- in 1926, its name and tage des Sioux, 25 miles down the Missis- logo are a tribute to owner sippi from the battle site, and signed a treaty Frederic McLaughlin’s meant to assure peace on the Missouri fron- World War I service in the 86th “Black Hawk” tier. Territorial Governor William Clark, of Infantry Division, itself Corps of Discovery fame, presided over the named for the Sauk leader. negotiations. Black Hawk refused to attend.

Not until the following year did he meet with Clark in St. Louis to sign his own treaty with the government. The venerable Sauk warrior refrained from taking up arms against the United States until the 1832 Black Hawk War, a conflict centered on the disputed terms of past treaties.

“The War of 1812 was a serious threat to the settlements along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers,” wrote Duane Meyer in The Heritage of Missouri. Yet with peace, thousands of Americans flocked to the territory. Settlement proved so rapid that Missouri achieved statehood only six years after the Battle of the Sinkhole. MH

Ice Hawkey?

Historian and retired Army officer Douglas L. Gifford specializes in American military history. For further reading he recommends Life of Black Hawk, by Black Hawk with John Barton Patterson; Tales of Black Hawk, the Red Head and Missouri Rangers, by Robert E. Parkin; and The Heritage of Missouri, by Duane Meyer.

Inspired by Black Hawk, the 48-foot statue The Eternal Indian, by sculptor Lorado Taft, was dedicated in 1911 at Illinois’ Lowden State Park.

The settlers inside Fort Howard passed the night of May 24–25 in terror, realizing the spring floodwaters would allow Indian canoes access to the high ground. Shaw said the men stayed awake all night, their families “fearing they might not be permitted to behold another morning’s light.” There was no doctor at the outpost, so the ablebodied cared for the wounded as best as they could.

The next morning the Rangers returned to find the sinkhole abandoned. The Sauks had left behind five dead; beneath one lay Spears’ corpse, scalped and placed there for effect. Black Hawk admitted having lost only one 63

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Born into a well-to-do family in Cambridge, Mass., U.S. Marine Corps Lt. English left the service for intrigue in the deserts of Egypt.

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A MARINE ON THE NILE George English resigned his commission, converted to Islam and joined an Egyptian campaign upriver to Nubia—but to what end?

By Andrew McGregor

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A

Muhammad Ali Pasha

ments, “modified a little and expressed in Arabic,” proved toxic to his scholarly reputation. Leaving Harvard, he ventured to the Allegheny frontier, where he briefly edited a newspaper. In 1808, before entering divinity school, he’d sought a military appointment, putting down as a reference U.S. Senator John Quincy Adams, who taught rhetoric and oratory at Harvard. In 1815, facing limited prospects and amid renewed conflict with Britain, English again applied for a commission, with backing from then U.S. Ambassador to Russia Adams. This time it took.

President James Madison nominated English for an appointment in the Marine Corps, and the 27-year-old was commissioned a second lieutenant on March 1, two weeks after the Senate ratified the Treaty of Ghent. English served in the Mediterranean Squadron, in the aftermath of the Barbary wars, and was promoted to first lieutenant in April 1817. Soon after he resigned his commission and moved to Constantinople, though he remained on the Naval Register until 1820. President James Monroe had since tapped Adams as his secretary of state. Was English acting as Adams’ covert agent in the Middle East?

By 1820 English had reportedly converted to Islam, changing his name to Muhammad Effendi. Relocating to Cairo, he parlayed the influence of British Consul General Henry Salt to secure an appointment in the Egyptian army as chief of artillery. Joining him were two American sailors who had seemingly deserted from the Mediterranean Squadron. Remembered only by their adopted names, New Yorker Khalil Aga and Swiss-born Achmed Aga converted to Islam and acted as English’s servants.

Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali Pasha was planning a campaign south into Sudanese Nubia, hoping to build a dynasty to rival the Ottomans in Constantinople. (He and his sons would ultimately seize Sudan, Syria, Palestine, parts of the Red Sea coast and the holy cities of Arabia.)

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LEFT: RUMYANTSEV MUSEUM, MOSCOW; RIGHT: GRANGER

Born on March 7, 1787, to a prosperous family in Cambridge, across the Charles River from Boston, English studied first law and then divinity at Harvard College. In 1813, after exposure to both the Quran and a collection of 17th century documents questioning tenets of Christianity, English wrote The Grounds of Christianity Examined, in which he criticized key doctrines of the faith. The work elicited outrage in Protestant New England. English was excommunicated from his church. His stated belief Islam was a moral system drawn from the Old and New Testa-

PREVIOUS SPREAD: F9PHOTOS (GETTY IMAGES): LEFT: CHATEAU DE VERSAILLES

fter a month’s march through sand amid the ruins and palm trees lining the Nubian Nile an invading Egyptian army of cutthroats and mercenaries drawn from across the Ottoman empire encountered its first real resistance at the town of Kurti on Nov. 4, 1820. The formidable horsemen of the Sudanese Arab Shaigiya tribe were determined the Egyptians would never take their lands. Screaming, they fell upon the army’s scouts with sword and lance, wiping them out. It was a bad start for the Egyptian commander, 25-year-old Ismail Pasha, whose artillery was still being shipped south by boat.

Ismail brought his troops into line against the Shaigiya, who were led by a young girl on a richly decorated camel. It was she who gave the order to attack, in a tradition celebrating the exploits of a fearless 17th century female Shaigiya warrior. The Arabs’ horses pounded across the plain, smashing into the Egyptian infantry with such violence that its line began to collapse. As disaster loomed, the Egyptians’ formidable second-in-command, the Albanian Abdin Bey, led his horsemen in a series of desperate countercharges. Rallying, the Egyptian infantry poured fire into the Shaigiya ranks. The invaders prevailed, only to begin what one of their number later described as “12 months of misery and starvation.”

Joining the Egyptian expedition to Sudanese Nubia were three American mercenaries, including former U.S. Marine Corps Lt. George Bethune English, though illness kept him from the battlefield that day. The Massachusetts native, a convert to Islam, related his experiences as an artillery commander in Sudan in his 1822 memoir, A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar. Yet nearly two centuries after his death English remains an enigma—was he a mercenary, a spy or a sincere Muslim convert?

LEFT: RUMYANTSEV MUSEUM, MOSCOW; RIGHT: GRANGER

PREVIOUS SPREAD: F9PHOTOS (GETTY IMAGES): LEFT: CHATEAU DE VERSAILLES

The second purpose of his expedition was to exterminate the Mamluks, a military slave caste that had ruled Egypt before being treacherously slaughtered by Muhammad Ali a decade earlier. The survivors had fled to Nubia, where they practiced slave trading and forced farmers to grow their food on the blazing river plain while they basked on huge rafts anchored in the middle of the Nile.

Muhammad Ali’s third goal was to create a new Egyptian army composed of black slaves, something Napoléon Bonaparte had tried during his regional campaign. He resolved to seize thousands of Sudanese to fight his own wars of conquest and those he was obliged to join on behalf of his suzerain, Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II. Led by Muhammad Ali’s third son, Ismail Kamil Pasha, the Egyptian invasion force was 4,000 strong, with 10 fieldpieces, two small howitzers and one mortar. The infantry included Turks, Kurds, Albanians, Circassians, Greeks, Syrians and 700 Maghrebis (mercenaries from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco). Turkish cavalry and some 700 camel-mounted Bedouins completed the force.

The Mamluks (above left), whom Muhammad Ali sought to exterminate, practiced slave trading and exploited farmers along the Nile for their sustenance. English’s choice to swap the dress uniform of an American Marine officer (above right) for desert robes seems quixotic at best.

Six cataracts lie between Aswan (where Nubia begins) and the confluence of the White and Blue Nile rivers. Each comprises a series of white water rapids and waterfalls over granite bedrock. Ismail would compel thousands of Nubians to haul the expedition’s boats past these cataracts.

Leaving Cairo in July, the Egyptian army marched up the Nile, with 120 boats carrying supplies and ammunition. By mid-October they’d set up camp in Nubia at the Second Cataract. While there English was struck with severe ophthalmia, an eye disorder that caused him such pain he was unable to sleep without doses of opium.

Ismail’s army pressed on without him.

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MEDITERRANEAN SEA

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EGYPT P R E S E N T- D AY BORDERS

ASWAN

CATARACTS OF THE NILE

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KURTI

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SUDAN P R E S E N T- D AY BORDERS MILES

Ismail. En route they suffered the loss of several boats, crocodiles gathering to feast on the drowned sailors.

Meanwhile, the expedition had come up against the Shaigiya, whom English described as “a singular aristocracy of brigands.” They had ruled the Dongola region from clifftop castles for more than a century, forcing Nubians to grow their food and serve as infantry. In battle each Shaigiya warrior carried a lance, a double-edged

Ismail sought to please his father by offering a reward for every pair of enemy ears straight sword of European origin and a shield of hippopotamus hide or crocodile skin. Holding death in contempt, the Shaigiya were unmoved when Ismail demanded they abandon their swords and till the soil.

After sweeping them from the field at Kurti, Ismail sought to please his father by offering a reward for every pair of enemy ears collected. His soldiers mutilated the dead and wounded, then raided neighboring villages, cutting the ears from men, women and children. Ismail shipped the ears to Cairo, where an angry Muhammad Ali reminded him such behavior was incompatible with the modern European-style army he sought to build. English said nothing of these atrocities. But others bore witness.

6 B LU E NILE

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A pair of Englishmen, Cambridge-educated scholar George Waddington and the Rev. Barnard Hanbury, were traveling up the Sudanese Nile when they encountered the southbound army at Merowe on November 26. While English was pleased to see them, Waddington later wrote he had no respect for a man who would abandon his religion. The scholar also noted the deathly silent countryside behind the Egyptian army, strewn with the rotting carcasses of beasts and mutilated men, many of its wells fouled by decaying corpses. The odor was gagging.

Waddington’s published account, Journal of a Visit to Some Parts of Ethiopia, included scathing criticism of English and his religious pretensions. The author described his host as a pale and delicate-looking man who had taken on the grave and calm demeanor of the Turks. Noting that English was a Protestant who had adopted various strains of Christianity before becoming a Jew and an orthodox Muslim in succession, he suggested the adventurer would soon turn Hindu in his “tour of the world and its religions” and would ultimately die an atheist. English claimed Waddington later apologized, but the remarks stuck.

On December 2 the Shaigiya again challenged Ismail, across the Nile at Jabal Daiqa. Although their reconstituted Nubian infantry was impressive, the Shaigiya had lost experienced fighters at Kurti. To embolden the replacements, holy men showered them with magic dust said to render them impervious to bullets. What they didn’t know was that Ismail’s field artillery had finally caught up to the army (English remained absent). As the Nubians charged the Egyptian line, artillerymen touched off their guns, blasting the foot soldiers to pieces at point-blank range. As the attack faltered, the Shaigiya fled the field, leaving the Nubians to be slaughtered by Abdin Bey’s cav-

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BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

English relied on Henry Salt (above), the British consul general in Cairo, to gain him a position with Muhammad Ali. A noted Egyptologist, Salt asked English and others to locate and secure artifacts for shipment to Britain.

BERBER

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BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

FROM LEFT: BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; BRITISH MUSEUM; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

alry. (The defeated Shaigiya later proposed entering Egyptian service as irregular cavalry rather than taking up the shameful occupation of farmer. The offer was accepted.)

English described Shaigiya Chief Shouus, reputedly the greatest warrior on the Upper Nile, as “a large stout man of a pleasing physiognomy, though black.” The American was stunned by the chief’s ability to repeatedly swim his entire cavalry force across the Nile.

Even as English recovered from his ophthalmia, he was struck by dysentery that left him extremely weak. As his condition improved, English visited the temples, castles and pyramids lining the Nile. On several such ancient monuments he inscribed the name of Salt, a noted Egyptologist—at the time a common means of establishing claim to an antiquity for retrieval and shipment to Europe.

Meanwhile, sailors in the party spent their time ashore pillaging villages, robbing and murdering local men and raping women. The “insolence” of villagers who demanded recompense for grain angered English, who suggested the soldiers’ conduct “was not much to be blamed.”

As the army continued downriver in February 1821, Muhammad Ali ordered Ismail to march on the Blue Nile sultanate of Sennar and its fabled riches. The first leg of the journey entailed a forced march across the Bayuda Desert to Berber, bypassing the Great Bend of the Nile.

A baggage delay stranded English for a few days. When he did cross the desert, the ordeal left the New Englander with severe sunburn and a recurrence of ophthalmia.

The boats were left to make their way back upriver through the two worst cataracts—the fourth and fifth— in a punishing trip of 57 days. Separated from English by the baggage delay, Khalil and Achmed were forced to

After a harrowing return trip to Cairo, English was unable to secure payment from Muhammad Ali and again relied on Salt for support.

accompany the boats. Both suspected the machinations of Ismail’s personal doctor (or protomedico), a Smyrniote Greek and experienced poisoner, but their skills as sailors may have prompted their assignment. Thus, without intending to, Khalil became the first Westerner to travel upriver as far as Sennar.

Achmed died on the Fourth Cataract, Khalil suspecting he’d been poisoned by the protomedico after a quarrel.

The most competent physician on the expedition, the Genoese Dr. Andrea Gentile, had met the same fate when the protomedico decided it was easier to poison his colleague than repay a loan. The protomedico had sold off the contents of the expedition’s medicine chest in Cairo to cover debts and surrounded himself with a cadre of thugs. Other Europeans on the expedition feared for their lives, including French geologist Frédéric Cailliaud, who’d joined the expedition to record the legendary pyramids of Meroe. “Death,” he wrote, “seemed to want to claim all the gentlemen around me.” Ismail’s Italian tutor and translator, Domenico Frediani, died as a “chained maniac” in Sennar after a dispute with the protomedico.

Ismail was apparently aware of the doctor’s transgressions but found him useful as a spy and henchman.

Four days after setting out across the desert, the army reached Berber, home to 100 fugitive Mamluks. While most fled, the remainder submitted, accepting an offer either to return to Cairo or serve as Ismail’s bodyguards.

What English observed in town disturbed him. The Berbers proffered female slaves to the soldiers for mere coins, while a chief’s wife offered the American the choice of

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As the army approached Sennar, Badi VII, the 26-yearold sultan, greeted Ismail with overtures of peace and escorted the pasha into the legendary city. The magnificent trappings and mounts of the royal entourage seemed promising, assuring the troops they would reap due rewards after their brutal 1,250-mile march from Cairo.

They approached the city with cries of joy and volleys of musket fire. Their delight was dashed when they realized the glory days of Sennar had long been over. After decades of decline, the city was little more than a heap of broken ruins, its population inhabiting some 400 squalid huts.

The only buildings of any substance were the half-ruined brick palace and mosque. There were no riches, no gold.

With no pay for eight months and only durra to eat, the soldiers began to sell their clothing to buy food and pilfer supplies to hawk in the market. Ismail’s worsening mood was reflected in the growing numbers of headless bodies dumped in the streets. Soldiers impaled anyone who showed the slightest sign of resistance. English overheard scandalized female observers declaring such punishments fit only for Christians. Like the soldiers, he had little use for the inhabitants, describing them as “a very detestable people,” their women as “the ugliest I ever beheld.”

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NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE MARINE CORPS

bedding either of her married daughters—episodes he recorded as “irreconcilable with the precepts of the Quran.”

He later claimed sunstroke spared him from temptation.

The offended daughters dismissed him as a rajil batal (“good-for-nothing man”).

The army was soon joined by Nimr, the Sudanese Arab malik (king) of Shendi, “very dignified in his deportment and highly respectable for his morals,” according to English. To spare the artillery horses for the coming battle, English ordered the guns pulled by camels. Rough treatment would lead to their loss in great numbers.

After a three-week slog down the west bank of the White Nile, Ismail spent little more than two days ferrying his army across the mile-wide river by boat. Following form, the Shaigiya swam their horses across, as did the Bedouins with their camels. A Turkish officer who decided he could do the same lost 70 horses and a number of men. (Khartoum, the present-day capital of Sudan, marks their landing site.)

The march down the south bank of the Blue Nile to Sennar took 13 days, the men on the move from 2 a.m. to 10 a.m., at which point the heat became too intense.

Their only sustenance was durra, a local grain requiring much preparation.

ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST

Muhammad Ali’s hatred of the Mamluks was well documented even before the 1820 expedition in which English took a nominal part.

In 1811 the pasha had ordered the slaughter of all Mamluks in Cairo.

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE MARINE CORPS

ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST

Flying columns raided the still-defiant hinterland, the Egyptians shooting down hundreds of armored warriors and shipping thousands of men, women and children north to the Cairo slave markets. Though a native of abolitionist New England, English acquired a “black slave” of his own. The onetime Marine sat out the slave raids. He instead spent his time demanding Ismail allow him to return to Cairo on health grounds before the onset of the miserable four-month rainy season.

In the meantime, Ismail ordered two captured chiefs impaled. The first awaited his end by reciting the Muslim profession of faith. The second insulted and cursed his executioners. When he could no longer speak, he spat at them. The executions disgusted English, who was shocked at the dark turn Ismail had taken.

After a harrowing return trip to Cairo, English went to see Muhammad Ali to collect the funds he was owed for his military service. The American adventurer found the pasha in a foul temper. He’d just received word that son Ismail had been burned alive in Shendi by Malik Nimr, whom Ismail had offended and struck. Broke and desperate, English called on Consul General Salt, who provided him with the funds to return home in exchange for his narrative manuscript and various artifacts. Salt published the work, which the author dedicated to him, “my fatherly friend in a foreign land.” Khalil Aga composed his own unpublished journal of the expedition, only recently discovered among Salt’s papers at the British Library. He remained in Egypt, living as a Muslim and continuing to serve Muhammad Ali. In January 1822 Pliny Fisk, an American evangelical missionary working in Egypt, reached out to English after hearing the American was ready to “return to his country and the religion of his fathers.” The penalty for abandoning Islam or the army was death, but English made his way to Salt’s consulate, where a network stood ready to smuggle remorseful converts out of Egypt. On April 1 English joined Fisk aboard a Malta-bound ship, playing the part of the missionary’s servant. Fisk, who normally recorded everything, shared nothing of his long shipboard conversations with English, only that the latter exhibited “obstinate hostility to the truth.” Apparently the lapsed Christian had not entirely abandoned Islam.

English’s account of his adventures in Sudan went largely unremarked. Reading more like an intelligence report, it revealed nothing of its author, who freely admitted he’d missed the main engagements of the campaign. English assured readers of the high regard in which he was held by Ismail, but his service record suggests otherwise—he had missed the two major battles of the campaign, typically lagged behind the main body of the army, eschewed the slave-raiding parties out of Sennar and demanded a return to Cairo.

English’s father and friends sought to ease his return stateside by writing letters to newspapers, praising his

“achievements” in Sudan and disputing the sincerity of his conversion to Islam.

English did not overtly practice Islam on his return to the United States, but he did publish yet another work critical of Christianity, against the objections of his remaining friends. Secretary of State Adams continued to act as his patron, sending English on a trade mission to Constan- English carried a button tinople in 1822, where he appears to have from his U.S. Marine tunic during his adventures resumed life as a Muslim. in Egypt. Was it simply As president, Adams continued to find a keepsake, a reminder employment for English. On July 22, 1828, of his time as an officer he engaged him as a bearer of secret dis- and a gentleman, or was patches to Commodore William Crane, it a talisman for a man who had ostensibly concommander of the Mediterranean Squad- verted to Islam as part of ron. Two days later, however, English was an undercover operation? driven off in disgrace. There is no record of what happened, only an entry in Adams’ journal referring to “mortifying” misconduct by English. “Notwithstanding his eccentricities, approaching to insanity, have continued to favor him till now,” the president wrote. “I can now no longer sustain him.”

Had English worked for the British, the Americans, both or neither? Had he sincerely converted to Islam, or had that been a means to infiltrate Muhammad Ali’s expedition to Sudan, a region of growing interest to Britain?

Some U.S.-based Islamists maintain English was “America’s first Muslim” and kept true to his adopted faith.

English’s death on Sept. 19, 1828, just two months after his dismissal, deepens the mystery. His obituary provides no clue as to how the 41-year-old perished.

Suicide or illness seem possible. His memoir sheds no

Semper Fi

The penalty for abandoning Islam or the army was death, but English was smuggled out light on his motivations. His religious works passed into obscurity with him. No portrait seems to survive of the shadowy American mercenary—fitting for a man who took so many secrets with him to the grave. MH Andrew McGregor is the director of Toronto-based Aberfoyle International Security, specializing in security issues in the Islamic world. For further reading he recommends A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Vol. 1: White American Muslims Before 1975, by Patrick D. Bowen; Americans in Egypt, 1770–1915, by Cassandra Vivian; and American Travelers on the Nile: Early U.S. Visitors to Egypt, 1774–1839, by Andrew Oliver.

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Reviews

General John Pershing (at far left, holding map) and senior officers brief Secretary of War Newton Baker during his 1918 visit to the Western Front.

Pershing’s Lieutenants: American Military Leadership in World War I, edited by David T. Zabecki and Douglas V. Mastriano, Osprey Publishing, New York, 2020, $35

The Army with which the United States entered World War I was not the U.S. Army of today, nor even the Army with which the country went to war in 1941. In May 1917 the Army commanded by Gen. John J. Pershing had only 210,000 troops and ranked 17th in the world, behind that of Portugal. Yet by war’s end in November 1918 the Army had grown to more than 3.7 million men, some 2 million of whom Pershing had led to Allied victory in a war more than 3,000 miles from home—an unprecedented historic feat.

Needless to say, the general could not have done it without some extraordinarily talented help. Pershing’s Lieutenants recounts the achievements and occasional failures of key officers who helped create and lead the AEF, many of whose stories have hitherto been overshadowed by that of their celebrated

commander. Those officers included no fewer than five future chiefs of staff of the Army and two Marine Corps commandants. Pershing’s Lieutenants also profiles a number of his senior staff officers, as well as commanders of individual armies, corps and divisions, with a chapter devoted to each.

The book includes a number of “regimental” and “specialist officers” of lesser rank who rose to prominence during the war or in later careers. Among them are Billy Mitchell (chief of the U.S. Army Air Service), George Patton (a significant leader in Pershing’s tank corps) and William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan (commander of the 165th Infantry Regiment, who later established the Office of Strategic Services, the intelligence organization that became the Central Intelligence Agency). Other standouts include Lt. Col.

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Black Jack’s Men

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Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (the president’s son, who became a noted general in World War II) and artillery Capt. Harry S. Truman (future 33rd president of the United States).

Tapping the talents of many experts in the field, Pershing’s Lieutenants is a valuable resource for those interested in the U.S. contribution to victory in World War I. —Robert Guttman

Smith argues that Bond, Fleming’s postwar literary superspy, reflected aspects of the author’s personality, combined with traits of his soldiers, who experienced the action he craved. Other stock Bond characters, such as his cranky boss M, was an amalgam of intelligence chiefs Colin Gubbins and John Godfrey. Smith reveals Fleming’s life experiences in each Bond story. For example, the Rus-

PHOTO 12 (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

Ian Fleming’s Inspiration: The Truth Behind the Books,

by Edward Abel Smith, Pen & Sword, Yorkshire and Philadelphia, 2020, $34.95 In his first book, Active Goodness (2017), author Edward Smith studied efforts to save Czechoslovakian Holocaust refugees. The author’s second book is an attempt to place the popular James Bond spy films, and the books that inspired them, in the context of creator Ian Fleming’s life, with a special emphasis on his World War II career in British naval intelligence.

When Fleming was 5 years old, his father was killed in World War I. Growing up with a domineering mother led the moody youngster to live life in the fast lane with fine dining, excessive drinking, fancy cars and loose women. After working as a journalist in Soviet Russia for Reuters and as a stockbroker in London, Fleming found his true calling as a spymaster in World War II. He formed and led No. 30 Commando/ 30 Assault Unit, a select team of spies and saboteurs who participated in many operations through war’s end in Germany in 1945, including the invasion of North Africa in 1942 and D-Day in 1944.

sian defector with the secret code machine in From Russia With Love is based on wartime efforts to break the German Enigma code, while something as silly as an angry mistress throwing an octopus into Fleming’s bedroom at his Jamaica estate, Goldeneye, influenced Octopussy.

Generally well written, Fleming’s Inspiration was poorly edited and is riddled with errors ranging from the mundane to the profound.

There remain typos, but these are overshadowed by far more egregious errors, including a note that Fleming’s mistress Muriel Wright was killed in the first V-1 rocket attack on London in June 1944, when in fact she died during a conventional air raid that March; a reference to Cla-

rissa (née Spencer-Churchill) Eden as Winston’s daughter when she was his niece; and the rather amazing allegation that Fleming and Churchill each had an affair with Cara Delevingne, who wasn’t born until 1992! Smith almost certainly meant Cara’s aunt, Doris (née Delevingne) Castlerosse, who was romantically linked with Churchill’s son Randolph.

—William John Shepherd

Recommended

Master of Deception: The Wartime Adventures of Peter Fleming, by Alan Ogden, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2019, $27

Mussolini’s War

As a schoolboy I happened across a 1933 copy of Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure. I discovered Peter was a sibling of Ian Fleming, who like his younger brother played a major role in British naval intelligence operations during World War II. In addition to his trek across Brazil, Fleming made two epic journeys to the Far East and recalled them in what became best-selling books. At the outbreak of the war he was appointed to the short-lived Military Intelligence Department One (Research) and was later a founding member of the Special Operations Executive.

Among his early tasks was to prepare a guerrilla force to harass the Germans should they land in Britain. Weapons he considered included bows and arrows tipped with poison, the effects of which Fleming had seen on his Amazonian travels.

In January 1941 Fleming was sent to the Middle East to sift captured Italian troops for anti-fascists with whom

By John Gooch This account of Italy’s experience outlines the rise, initial triumph and eventual fall of the Fascists, from the invasion of Abyssinia to Benito Mussolini’s arrest. The war’s results were at odds with prewar Italian plans—a series of desperate improvisations against an Allied force with global resources. Mussolini’s declaration of war proved a horrifying miscalculation.

British Army Uniforms

By Carl Franklin With more than 200 full-color plates of uniforms and accoutrements based on contemporary records and paintings, this volume identifies each British cavalry and infantry regiment from 1751 to 1783.

Divided into four sections, it also details the tartans of the Highland Regiments and includes regiments from the American Revolutionary War.

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Reviews Recommended

The World Encyclopedia of Knives, Daggers & Bayonets

By Tobias Capwell Edged weapons have played an indelible role in shaping human history. This directory features more than 350 examples, from ancient flint knives to medieval European daggers, 17th century bayonets and World War II commando knives. With more than 700 photographs, the book is a resource for collectors and amateur enthusiasts.

The Highland Battles

By Chris Peers The wars fought in Scotland’s northern and western highlands between the ninth and 14th centuries have rarely been studied in depth. Peers describes campaigns and battles that shaped Scotland, revealing the strategies and tactics of rival chieftains as well as Scotland’s relations with England, Ireland and Continental Europe.

he might form a free Italian force. He then did demolition work in Greece while evading the Germans.

With the British reeling from Japanese advances in Southeast Asia, Gen. Sir Archibald Wavell called for Fleming to join him in India and conduct military intelligence, a posting in which he could dream up schemes to deceive the Japanese. In one such scheme a car reportedly carrying the general “plunged into a ditch” close to the Burmese front lines. On inspection of the wreck the Japanese discovered Wavell’s briefcase, replete with notes about vast phantom British forces stationed in India.

Other deceptions followed, but Fleming longed to be on the front lines and often slipped away to see things for himself. In a letter home he told one of his sons he was having a lovely time living in the woods and battling the Japanese.

At war’s end Fleming received a paltry Order of the British Empire, hardly an appropriate reward for the services chronicled here.

—David Saunders Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938–1941, by Alan Allport, Knopf, New York, 2020, $35 Britain may have suffered during World War II, but readers of this splendid history, the first of two volumes, will have no complaints. British historian Allport delves into person-

alities, politics and economics and has read a vast number of journals and letters. Neville Chamberlain poured out his heart to his sister; Winston Churchill to everyone. The result is a steady stream of well-documented analyses that may raise hackles.

Despite the absence of warfare, Allport’s account of 1938 is not short of firew o rk s. C h amb erlain ’s bowler and umbrella give the impression of a milquetoast, but he saw himself as a hard bargainer “who could get anyone to say ‘yes,’ given enough time.”

Everyone denounces Chamberlain for having sold out Czechoslovakia at Munich, but as Allport emphasizes, Britons dreaded repeating the slaughter of World War I and thus many cheered the development. Anti-appeasers were a niche, upper-class coterie with little popular support, including Churchill.

Chamberlain ultimately regretted Munich—but so did Adolf Hitler. Unlike almost everyone throughout Europe (and his own officials), the Führer wanted war and, to the end of his

life, looked on the Munich Agreement as a mistake.

Allport repeats the universal praise for Churchill’s early attacks on Hitler, but under the popular delusion that mass bombing would decide future wars and that the French army could handle the Wehrmacht, he paid little attention to Britain’s army. The date Parliament declared war, Sept. 3, 1939, was also the date it passed mass conscription.

In their eagerness to recount Dunkirk and Britain’s “finest hour,” popular histories pass quickly over the September 1939 to May 1940 “Phony War.” Allport notes the French still believe Britain left them in the lurch after Germany’s invasion. Preparing to fight alone, Britain refused to commit its entire air force and, without prior consultation with France, instead opted to evacuate Dunkirk.

Although genuinely heroic, the Battle of Britain was more stalemate than victory. The next two years saw a series of failures in Greece, Crete, Dieppe and North Africa, frightening losses to U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic, and a poor performance

by Bomber Command over Germany. Hitler’s invasion of Russia thrilled a beleaguered Britain, but it was only America’s entry into the war (in the forthcoming volume) that made victory certain.

Not the History Channel version, but insightful and a delight to read.

—Mike Oppenheim

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Taking Flight

The Nadine Ramsey Story Raquel Ramsey and Tricia Aurand Foreword by Maj. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt, USAF

“Taking Flight, Nadine Ramsey’s story, is more than the tale of her days as a WASP pilot ferrying high-priority army aircraft across the skies of wartime America. It is the heartfelt account of her family and its collective grit, patriotism, and raw courage. We learn of Nadine’s painful recovery from an early plane crash, the healing that allowed her to fly as a WASP, and finally her battle against the recurring pain in later life. A good read and a ton of great research.”—Sarah Byrn Rickman, author of The Originals: The Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron of World War II and WASP of the Ferry Command: Women Pilots, Uncommon Deeds “From humble beginnings, Nadine Ramsey was destined to fly. Chasing planes and opportunities, she honed her skills as a ‘hot pilot.’ Soon she was in the ranks of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots in World War II and was one of the first women to fly military aircraft. This honest and heartfelt book chronicles the life of a woman who struggled to overcome the barriers of her day, and occasionally brushed the bounds of heaven.”—Lisa K. Shapiro, author of No Forgotten Fronts: From Classrooms to Combat

312 pages, 74 black and white photos, 13 color photos, Cloth $29.95

Ebook edition available from your favorite ebook retailer.

University Press of Kansas Phone 785-864-4155 • www.kansaspress.ku.edu

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THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY

‘ERNIE WAS ONE OF US’

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

The Hollywood Hussar Showdown at Trevilians

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Hallowed Ground Jasenovac Concentration Camp, Croatia

W

hile not as instantly recognizable as Dachau or Buchenwald, Jasenovac concentration camp has nevertheless been described as the “Auschwitz of the Balkans” in recognition of its size and the scale of horrors that occurred there during World War II. In April 1941, following the Axis powers’ invasion and partition of Yugoslavia, the nationalist Ustashe organization was appointed to govern the newly anointed Independent State of Croatia. The fascist Ustashe were diligent students of the Nazi regime, thus the repressions seen in Germany—chiefly the victimization of Jewish and other minority citizens and the rise of Aryanism—filtered into everyday Croatian life. Prison cells filled. To implement large-scale detainments, the Ustashe began constructing concentration camps.

Jasenovac was the largest, comS LOV E N I A prising five subcamps spread across C R OAT I A 81 square miles of marshland.

Constructed near the border with JASENOVAC CONCENTRATION Bosnia-Herzegovina, its facilities CAMP straddled the banks of the Sava and B O S N I AH E R Z EG OV I N A Una rivers. While the paramilitary Ustashe Supervisory Service handled day-to-day operations, it was the Germans who oversaw Jasenovac’s activities. The camp was an integral part of their “Final Solution,” while Jasenovac provided the Ustashe the means by which they could fulfil their own nationalist ambitions through the genocide of the Serbs (initially identified in the camps by blue armbands).

While the horrors of World War II concentration camps are well known, it’s noteworthy that Jasenovac was considered—even by the Nazis—to have had especially hellish conditions. “These camps have reached the height of hideousness here in Croatia,” said General Edmund GlaiseHorstentau, Adolf Hitler’s plenipotentiary in the region.

“The greatest of all evils must be Jasenovac, which no ordinary mortal can glimpse.”

Prisoners held in the camps endured ghastly living conditions overseen by sadistic guards. There was scant food and even less potable water, driving prisoners to slake their

thirst with river water. Their ramshackle quarters provided little protection from snow and rain, and in freezing conditions the guards only furnished prisoners with windbreakers. Area III-C, which housed Romani, or Roma (Indo-Aryan gypsies), was the most poorly constructed and maintained of the facilities. One subcamp held only children, an estimated 20,000 of whom died in Jasenovac.

For some the suffering was brief. Known communists were executed on arrival at sites near the camp. Others struggled for longer periods to survive the elements, deprivation and the guards. During postwar trials it emerged that on the evening of Aug. 29, 1942, guards at Jasenovac laid bets as to who could slaughter the greatest number of inmates. Employing a knife designed to reap wheat that the Ustashe grimly dubbed the “Serb-cutter,” Franciscan friar turned Jasenovac guard Petar Brzica claimed to have singlehandedly slashed the throats of some 1,360 new arrivals.

On April 22, 1945, with Allied forces near at hand, some 600 prisoners rose up against their captors, though scarcely 50 of them succeeded in escaping. Following the revolt the Ustashe razed the camp and murdered the several hundred remaining captives before fleeing. The Allies ultimately leveled the ashen ruins of Jasenovac.

The number of people killed at Jasenovac remains in dispute. Those who’ve studied the issue estimate upward of 100,000 victims, Serbs representing nearly half that total.

Some of those responsible were captured and tried for war crimes. Chief guard Miroslav Filipovic—a Franciscan friar and Ustashe military chaplain known as Fra Sotana (“Brother Satan”) during his time at Jasenovac—was executed in 1946, reportedly in his friar’s frock.

After the war workers raised hundreds of monuments (spomeniki in Serbo-Croatian) to commemorate key World War II sites. Constructed mainly during the 1953–80 dictatorship of Josip Broz Tito, these spomeniki are often massive in size and typically fashioned by local sculptors of concrete and steel. At Jasenovac a nearly 80-foot-tall concrete flower, rendered in 1966 by wartime communist partisan Bogdan Bogdanovic, marks the site of the former camp, while an adjacent museum catalogs the horrific events that unfolded here. It remains one of Croatia’s most visited spomeniki. MH

TOP: MEMORIJALNI MUZEJ JASENOVAC (UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM); BOTTOM: DANIJEL H (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

By Chris Allsop

76 MILITARY HISTORY JANUARY 2021

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TOP: MEMORIJALNI MUZEJ JASENOVAC (UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM); BOTTOM: DANIJEL H (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

Top: Ustashe guards herd captives, most of whom were Eastern Orthodox Christian Serbs, toward likely death at Jasenovac.

The floral spomeniki marking the camp site is one of the most visited in Croatia.

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War Games 1

2

Can you match each of the following commanders to the invaders he drove from his home territory?

4

5

1. Holy Roman Emperor Otto I 2. Ferdinand II of Aragon 3. Themistocles 4. Menelik II 5. Alexander Nevsky 6. Charlemagne

6

7

7. Zhu Yuanzhang 8. Dmitry Donskoy of Moscow 9. Charles de Salaberry 10. Yi Sun-sin

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____ A. Swedes ____ B. Yuan Mongols ____ C. Magyars

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10

____ D. Japanese

Fly-by-Nights

____ E. The Golden Horde

Can you match each nocturnal bomber or fighter with its photo?

____ F. Persians

____ A. Avro Lancaster

____ F. Junkers Ju 88G

____ G. Grenadine Muslims

____ B. Messerschmitt Bf 110G

____ G. Short Stirling

____ H. Italians

____ C. Handley Page Halifax

____ H. Heinkel He 111H

____ I. Avars

____ D. Nakajima J1N1-S Gekko

____ I. Bristol Beaufighter

____ J. Americans

____ E. de Havilland Mosquito

____ J. Northrop P-61 Black Widow Answers: A1, B10, C8, D4, E5, F6, G9, H3, I2, J7

Answers: A5, B7, C1, D10, E8, F3, G2, H4, I6, J9

78 MILITARY HISTORY JANUARY 2021

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NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

Barbarians at the Gate

LEFT: ALBUM (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); 1, 2, 5, 9: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS (4); 3: BUNDESARCHIV; 4, 6, 10: PJF MILITARY COLLECTION, PLANECOLLECTION (ALAMY, 3); 7: U.S. AIR FORCE; 8: U.K. ROYAL AIR FORCE

3

Dmitry Donskoy

Battles Without Wars Sometimes the combatants hadn’t realized the broader war was over.

Others were one-off fights.

1. Which conflict was preceded— and possibly touched off—by Col. George Washington’s defeat at Fort Necessity?

A. War of the Austrian Succession B. French and Indian War C. War of Jenkins’ Ear D. American Revolutionary War 2. Who won the Battle of Issy, on July 3, 1815—two weeks after Waterloo?

A. Karl Friedrich von Steinmetz B. Jean Rapp C. Dominique Vandamme D. Hans von Zieten

A majestic forbidding land, a very dark desert, magnificent desolation, or a really groovy place?

For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ MAGAZINES/QUIZ

ANSWER: MAGNIFICENT DESOLATION. BUZZ ALDRIN, THE SECOND MAN TO WALK THE LUNAR SURFACE, SPOKE THESE WORDS SHORTLY AFTER NEAL ARMSTRONG SAID “THAT’S ONE SMALL STEP FOR A MAN, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND.”

NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

3. In which World War I battle did the Allies continue their assault for days after an armistice was signed?

A. Vittorio Veneto B. Ostend D. Toulgas C. Stenay 4. Which island saw the last major fighting of—or rather, after—World War II? A. Iturup B. Kunashir C. Paramushiro D. Shumshu 5. On what date did U.S. Army Air Forces Sgt. Anthony Marchione become the last U.S. airman killed in combat in World War II? A. Aug. 15, 1945 B. Aug. 18, 1945 C. Aug. 19, 1945 D. Aug. 23, 1945

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Answers: B, D, A, D, B

LEFT: ALBUM (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); 1, 2, 5, 9: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS (4); 3: BUNDESARCHIV; 4, 6, 10: PJF MILITARY COLLECTION, PLANECOLLECTION (ALAMY, 3); 7: U.S. AIR FORCE; 8: U.K. ROYAL AIR FORCE

Fort Necessity

HOW DID BUZZ ALDRIN FIRST DESCRIBE THE LUNAR LANDSCAPE?

11/18/20 11:00 AM 11/13/20 1:30 PM

Captured!

Jump Shot

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

During a late-1950s test flight a soldier simulates firing his M1 carbine while perched atop a prototype of Hiller Aircraft’s VZ-1 Pawnee one-man flying platform. Powered by ducted fans, the machine was supposed to steer via kinesthetic control— the pilot simply leaning in the direction he wanted to go. Hiller built three variants, but the steering proved problematic, and the Army never adopted the Pawnee for field use.

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Gina Elise’s

PIN-UPS FOR VETS

Megan, USAF Veteran

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9/2/20 4:34 PM

STUDY WORLD WAR II WITH WORLD-CLASS SCHOLARS Learn Online and on Your Own Time

The National WWII Museum and Arizona State University have launched new online education programs focused on the most significant event of the 20th century.

The fully accredited Master of Arts in World War II Studies program features an in-depth academic survey of the war and its legacies.

Continuing education course offerings provide history enthusiasts a rare opportunity to engage and interact with leading experts on an array of WWII topics.

There is an enriching journey into WWII history here for learners of all backgrounds—from educators seeking professional development to students of all ages looking to expand their understanding of the war that changed the world.

AN ENRICHING JOURNEY INTO WWII HISTORY FOR LEARNERS OF ALL BACKGROUNDS

MEET THE FACULTY, EXPLORE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS, AND LEARN MORE TODAY: N AT I ONA LW W 2 MUS E UM.O R G /A SU D I S TA N C E L E A R N I N G

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10/28/19 5:32 PM 11/10/20 6:21 PM