Military History November 2020

Nazi Cathedral English vs. Scots War in Korea Best General Ever?

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Having defeated Persian King Cyrus the Great, Queen Tomyris orders his head dipped in blood.

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NOVEMBER 2020

Letters 6 News 8

30

Features

If God Is for Us As Scots battled a usurper to the English throne, the pretender raised a sacred standard in divine appeal.

By Murray Dahm

22

Women of War Women have long been as capable on the battlefield as their male counterparts.

By Emily Anne Jordan and Jonathan W. Jordan

Departments

14

Interview Michel Paradis War and Justice

16

Valor Italy’s African Eagle

2 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2020

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Reviews 70 War Games 78 Captured! 80

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Tommy’s Other Guns Though best known for his namesake submachine gun, John T. Thompson was no one-hit wonder.

By Michael O’Brien

56 Korea

It has been called the first war the United States ever lost, but South Korea’s very existence suggests otherwise.

By Jon Guttman

48

62

Heinrich Himmler turned a fabled German cathedral into a neo-pagan Nazi shrine.

By Zita Ballinger Fletcher

Frederick Schomberg fought enemies and former allies alike during his six-decade career.

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18

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On the cover: French painter Jean-Simon Berthélemy rendered this depiction of Tomyris, queen of the Massagetae people, fulfilling her promise to give Persian King Cyrus the Great his “fill of blood” when defeated in battle. (Bridgeman Images)

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

Join the discussion at militaryhistory.com

Odyssey of the Ten Thousand Hiring on for a Persian war they didn’t understand, these vaunted Greek mercenaries faced an epic fight for their lives

By Justin D. Lyons IN THE ARCHIV E S :

Women in War In the roughly organized armies of 16th century Europe men and women were partners in pillage

By John A. Lynn

Interview German-born American Guy Stern, 98, parlayed his language skills into a wartime assignment interrogating Nazis Tools The Hawker Hurricane accounted for

more than half of the victories claimed by RAF Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain

NOVEMBER 2020 VOL. 37, NO. 4

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 © 2020 HISTORYNET, LLC

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Letters

Trench Art I was visiting my parents recently and came across this match striker box my grandfather (born in 1900, in Kobe, Japan) picked up around 1920 when he visited China. I have discovered it was very common for soldiers to create trench art. I met a veteran who suggested I subscribe to a military history magazine that might be able to give me a bit more information about the box.

I chose your magazine, as it covers an amazing amount of information as well as a diversity of stories about the wars throughout the world.

Denise Jackson Lingle, Wyo. Editor responds: Denise, you’ve come to the right place, as in the July 2014 issue we featured a portfolio, “Art From the Trenches,” of similar creative works wrought amid the chaos of war. The armored car depicted on the cover of your grandfather’s brass match striker box—likely rendered from a spent artillery shell casing—looks to be either a

British Rolls-Royce or a French Delaunay-Belleville. Both saw service with the British Royal Naval Air Service during World War I. Just who crafted the match striker box your grandfather discovered in postwar China or how it arrived there (perhaps traded by a passing sailor?) remains a mystery worth looking into.

Proximity Fuze Michael W. Robbins’ article “Close Enough,” in your September 2020 edition, about the development and operational use of the proximity fuze against Axis forces is an outstanding story.

However, the section describing the May 11, 1945, account about kamikaze attacks during the Battle of Okinawa is in error. That section notes: The fighter director tally later revealed that the little group of ships and planes had to oppose a total of 156 enemy planes.…At the end of the first half-hour the Evans had been hit four

In actuality it was USS Hugh W. Hadley (DD-774), a Sumner-class destroyer, that shot down the 23 kamikazes, earning it the all-time gunnery record of any ship in a single engagement, when its gunners fired 801 rounds of 5-inch/38-caliber, 8,950 rounds of 40 mm and 5,990 rounds of 20 mm in that one hour and 40 minute engagement. It was subsequently hit by three kamikazes, one 500-pound bomb and one smaller bomb before the damage took it out of action.

The National Museum of the Pacific War showcases a memorial plaque donated by the USS Hugh W. Hadley reunion group. Additionally, the Battle of Okinawa section of the museum’s Bush Gallery showcases a video about Hadley in this engagement.

Wayne D. Slaughter Docent, National Museum of the Pacific War Fredericksburg, Texas Editor responds: Thank you for calling attention to the error and giving credit where due. As noted by Robbins, the battle account you cite comes directly from a 1945 report in the wartime Bureau of Naval Personnel bulletin All Hands.

On review of that report it appears All Hands reversed

the kill totals for Hadley and Evans. A battle account we’ve since found credits Evans with two additional kamikazes, for a total of 14 kills that day.

Invasion Stripes Just received the July 2020 issue and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was especially interested in Dave Kindy’s article [“Warplanes of a Different Stripe”] about invasion stripes, but I was also a little confused. On P. 61 Kindy states gliders were one type of aircraft exempted from Maj. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s striping order, but on P. 63 there is a picture of Horsa and Waco gliders with invasion stripes. Is this an error, or is the picture from a later operation, perhaps Market Garden?

Douglas Ault Chipley, Fla. Editor responds: Author Kindy was correct when he wrote of Operation Memorandum No. 23 “Distinctive Markings—Aircraft” that gliders (and four-engine bombers, transports, night fighters and seaplanes) were exempt. However, follow-on orders added gliders to the list of British and American aircraft slated to carry the distinctive markings—a decision that likely saved additional lives on June 6, 1944, and afterward.

Send letters to Editor, Military History HISTORYNET 1919 Gallows Road, Suite 400 Vienna, VA 22182-4038 or via e-mail to militaryhistory@historynet.com Please include name, address and phone number

COURTESY OF DENISE JACKSON

times by suicide planes, each ablaze from the AA f i re . T h e H a d l e y h a d knocked down a dozen enemy planes, and the Evans had accounted for 23 before she had to retire from the fight.

6 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2020

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News

A dozen Hawaii-based veterans gathered aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Pearl Harbor.

The 75th anniversary of the end of World War II took on a tone of finality this fall, as the COVID-19 pandemic limited commemorative events and kept most of the remaining veterans at home. An estimated 300,000 of the 16 million Americans who served are still living.

On Sept. 2, 1945—commemorated in the United States as Victory Over Japan Day (V-J Day)—Allied and Japanese representatives gathered in Tokyo Bay aboard the battleship USS Missouri to sign the formal surrender documents. This year, due to coronavirus restrictions, only a dozen Hawaiibased veterans were able to gather for recognition aboard Missouri, now a museum ship docked in Pearl Harbor. They were treated to an aerial parade of historic aircraft, including a B-25 Mitchell bomber, two PBY Catalina flying boats, an SNJ Texan trainer, four AT-6 Texans, an FM-2 Wildcat fighter, an F8F Bearcat fighter, a Stearman biplane trainer, a TBM Avenger torpedo bomber, a P-51 Mustang fighter and a T-28 Trojan

trainer, all of which the Navy transported to Honolulu aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Essex. Air Force F-22 Raptor fighters, C-17 Globemaster III transports and KC-135 Stratotankers from Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam also participated. The flyovers recalled V-J Day in Tokyo Bay, when hundreds of U.S. aircraft overflew Missouri in a show of force.

Museums and municipalities nationwide offered mostly virtual events to mark the anniversary. The National WWII Museum in New Orleans live-streamed free content that included veterans’ firsthand accounts of the war, Q&A sessions with historians and a screening of the new documentary Apocalypse ’45, which relates the closing months of the war. The 75th World War II Commemoration Committee has designed trading cards featuring the 14 aircraft transported to Hawaii on Essex as well as other famed warbirds. See the “What’s New” tab on the committee website [75thwwiicommemoration.org].

‘Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended.

A great victory has been won’ —General of the Army Douglas MacArthur in a V-J Day broadcast

PETTY OFFICER 1ST CLASS GILBERT BOLIBOL, U.S. NAVY

75TH WWII ANNIVERSARY MAY BE LAST FOR VETERANS

8 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2020

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TOP: COURTESY OF SEAN KIMMONS VIA U.S. ARMY; LEFT: MASS COMMUNICATION SPECIALIST 2ND CLASS PETER D. MELKUS, U.S. NAVY; RIGHT: CARL MYDANS/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES)

By Brendan Manley

TOP: COURTESY OF SEAN KIMMONS VIA U.S. ARMY; LEFT: MASS COMMUNICATION SPECIALIST 2ND CLASS PETER D. MELKUS, U.S. NAVY; RIGHT: CARL MYDANS/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES)

PETTY OFFICER 1ST CLASS GILBERT BOLIBOL, U.S. NAVY

WWI Museum to Reach Students To serve housebound students the National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Mo., in cooperation with the Doughboy Foundation and the World War One Centennial Commission, has launched How World War I Changed America [wwichangedus.org], an interactive educational website exploring the legacy of the war and offering free downloadable resources. Content is split among nine topics, each featuring a video, a primary source document, a lesson plan and a podcast.

Constitution Open to Public The 223-year-old frigate USS Constitution—the world’s oldest commissioned naval vessel afloat—has reopened as a museum ship in Boston’s Charlestown Navy Yard after a fivemonth closure amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Its accompanying shorebased museum is also open. Launched in 1797,

“Old Ironsides” saw action in the First Barbary War and the War of 1812.

It later served as a U.S. Naval Academy training ship before retiring from active service in 1881.

RANGER RECEIVES MEDAL OF HONOR

WAR RECORD Oct. 19, 1950

China enters the Korean War (P. 56), a month later launching the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, which prompts the withdrawal of U.N. troops from North Korea.

Oct. 29, 1957

President Donald J. Trump has awarded the Medal of Honor to Sgt. Maj. Thomas “Patrick” Payne, a U.S. Army Ranger who risked his life to rescue dozens of hostages during a 2015 raid on an Islamic State prison compound in Huwija, Iraq. Fittingly, the White House ceremony was held September 11 on the anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks. While under fire from ISIS forces, Payne and his unit cleared two buildings and liberated 75 hostages, including Kurdish allies, slated for execution.

With the second detention building aflame, Payne braved suffocating smoke and enemy fire to cut two locks and free 30 men, re-entering the inferno twice more to ensure every hostage was rescued.

Among history’s famed female war leaders (P. 22), former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir is one of several officials injured when Syrian Jew Moshe Dwek (who would later run unsuccessfully for the Knesset) hurls a grenade into the legislative chamber.

November 1689

Amid the Williamite War in Ireland Frederick Schomberg (P. 62), the Germanborn English commander, suffers a setback when disease decimates his entrenched Protestant forces near Dundalk. The following year Schomberg is killed at the July 1 Battle of the Boyne.

Nov. 2, 1914

CONGRESS TO HONOR WWII ARMY RANGERS The Senate has unanimously passed a bill co-sponsored by Senators Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), both veterans, to award the Congressional Gold Medal to U.S. Army Rangers who served in World War II. Precursors to the modern-day Rangers fought under Capt. Benjamin Church during King Phillip’s War (1675–78) and Maj. Robert Rogers during the French and Indian War (1754–63). During World War II they turned the tide in numerous battles, notably scaling Normandy’s Pointe du Hoc cliffs under fire to destroy enemy gun emplacements during the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied France. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), a former Navy SEAL, is spearheading efforts to pass the bill in the House.

John T. Thompson (P. 40), namesake inventor of the Tommy gun, retires from the Army. As chief engineer at Remington Arms he later supervises construction of Pennsylvania’s Eddystone Arsenal, a key Allied source of World War I munitions.

Nov. 25, 1120

William Adelin, son and heir of English King Henry I, drowns when White Ship sinks in the English Channel. His death sparks a succession crisis and a civil war known as the Anarchy.

Scotland joins in the fray, notably at the 1138 Battle of the Standard (P. 30).

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News

LAST OF THE NAZI WAR CRIMES TRIALS? A German court recently handed down a two-year suspended sentence to 93-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard Bruno Dey, convicted of 5,230 counts of accessory to murder in what may be the last Holocaust-related war crimes trial. Dey claims to have been forced into military service and insists he was merely an observer to wartime atrocities at the Stutthof camp in Danzig (present-day Gdansk), Poland, where he started work as a tower guard in April 1944.

Prosecutors had sought a three-year prison term, but Dey’s lawyers successfully argued the defendant would not survive imprisonment.

In the immediate postwar period Allied military tribunals doggedly prosecuted high-ranking Nazi officials and other notorious war criminals. Best known of the postwar reckonings were the 1945–46 Nuremberg trials. In the first and best-known trial two dozen leading Nazi political and military officials faced the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg, Germany. Twelve were convicted and sentenced to death, including Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, chief of the German High Command Wilhelm Keitel and ranking SS official Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Of the remaining dozen defendants IMT sentenced seven to prison terms ranging from 10 years to life, acquitted three and reached no decision against two others.

However, prosecution of the thousands of wartime concentration camp guards has only been possible over the last decade. German law changed in 2011 with the landmark conviction of former Sobibor (Poland) extermination camp guard John Demjanjuk, opening the door to the prosecution of other former guards. By that time most potential defendants had died, adding pressure on prosecutors to identify and charge those still living.

‘I am the last. I’m the one who can still speak.

After me it’s history’ —Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal

Victoria Cross For Aussie Hero Royal Australian Navy Ordinary Seaman Edward “Teddy” Sheean has been awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. The Tasmanian sailor was just 18 on Dec. 1, 1942, when HMAS Armidale was struck by Japanese torpedo bombers in the Timor Sea during World War II. As the corvette sank, a wounded

Sheean strapped himself into an anti-aircraft gun and provided covering fire as fellow sailors abandoned ship.

Forty-nine of his crewmates survived.

Nat’l Museum for Mounted Warriors in the Works Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy has approved construction of the $11M, 58,000square-foot National Mounted Warrior Museum at Fort Hood, Texas. The museum will honor the cavalry units that have served at the post and relate the general history of mounted combat in the Army. Slated to open in 2022, Phase I of the museum will feature 20,000 square feet of exhibit space.

LEFT: DANIEL BOCKWOLDT/POOL/AFP (GETTY IMAGES); RIGHT: AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL

Hiding his face in court, former concentration camp guard Bruno Dey, 93, received a two-year suspended sentence.

10 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2020

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News The nonprofit Battleship Texas Foundation has assumed operational control of USS Texas— the last surviving battleship to have fought in both world wars— having signed a 99-year lease with the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department. The first U.S. battleship converted into a

museum ship, Texas is anchored in the Houston Ship Channel offshore from the San Jacinto Monument. It is being prepped for transport later this year to a shipyard for repairs. The foundation hopes to reopen the battleship to the public in early 2022.

USS New Jersey Shuts to Public The battleship USS New Jersey, which has operated as a museum ship on the Camden, N.J., waterfront since 2001, has temporarily closed due to a drop in revenue tied to the coronavirus shutdown. Launched in 1942, New Jersey served in the Pacific during World War II, saw action in the Korean and Vietnam wars, and supported U.S. troops in Beirut during the 1983– 84 Lebanese Civil War. It earned 19 battle stars.

Curators hope to reopen the ship in the spring.

WILMINGTON NAMED WWII HERITAGE CITY

WAR FOR SALE One never knows what historic relic might end up on the open market.

Yamamoto’s Flag

President Trump has named Wilmington, N.C., the nation’s first official World War II Heritage City. For a city to receive the National Park Service designation, it must have made a significant contribution to the war effort and actively preserved its wartime heritage. During the war Wilmington was home to the North Carolina Shipbuilding Co., which from 1941 to ’46 turned out 243 vessels, including 126 Liberty ships and 54 Navy warships. A 24-hour USO Center drew an estimated 35,000 servicemen downtown each weekend. The city also hosted three POW camps that by war’s end had processed more than 550 German prisoners.

Wilmington strove to safeguard that legacy and in 1961 prepared a berth for the retired World War II battleship USS North Carolina, among the most visited attractions in the state.

JAPAN COMPENSATES ‘BLACK RAIN’ VICTIMS

Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s Rising Sun rank flag, which flew from the bridge of the battleship Nagato during the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, recently fetched $40K at auction. A member of the U.S. Navy prize crew that boarded the captured battleship in Tokyo Bay in August 1945 retrieved the ensign and brought it stateside. Nagato was sunk during the 1946 Bikini Atoll nuclear weapon tests.

On Your Radar?

For £500K you can purchase Barrow Common in Norfolk, U.K., an 82-acre seaside spot that hosted a World War II Chain Home radar station. Its concrete buildings and radio mast footings remain.

M*A*S*H Chopper

Platinum Fighter Sales is offering a former U.S. Navy Bell 47D-1 helicopter (Serial No. 263) featured in the credits of the TV series M*A*S*H. The 1951 warbird also appeared in the last scene of the series finale— among the most watched TV episodes of all time.

A Hiroshima court has ruled that those who suffered illnesses from radioactive fallout (aka “black rain”) after the Aug. 6, 1945, atomic bombing of that city are entitled to receive the same medical and other benefits awarded those who lived within the blast range. The explosion instantly killed some 70,000 people, while the bombing of Nagasaki three days later killed 40,000 more. In each city tens of thousands survived the blast, only to develop radiation-related illnesses. “Black rain” refers to the fallout particles and carbon from resulting fires that mixed with rain, thus spreading radiation well beyond the blast zone.

Historic Hospital The Civil War–era U.S. Marine Hospital in Galena, Ill., is on the market.

Completed in 1860, the 6,300-square-foot, threestory brick building boasts 12- to 14-foot ceilings. The 11-acre property is listed for $379K, and its caretaker is willing to stay on.

LEFT: UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP NORTH AMERICA LLC (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); CENTER FROM TOP: PETER ZAY/ANADOLU AGENCY, ASAHI SHIMBUN (GETTY IMAGES)(2)

USS Texas Has New Caretaker

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Interview War and Justice

By Dave Kindy

In answer to the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the Doolittle Raid sought to bolster the morale of stunned Americans and warn the Japanese their country was now the target of a determined foe. Sixteen Army Air Forces’ B-25Bs launched from the carrier Hornet on April 18, 1942, to bomb the Japanese Home Islands. While relatively small in scale, the raid had lingering repercussions. Eight of the 80 crewmen were captured and tortured. Three were executed for “war crimes.” Last Mission to Tokyo: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raiders and Their Final Fight for Justice is equal parts courtroom drama, survival story and history lesson. Author and Defense Department attorney Michel Paradis has led cases at Guantanamo Bay and in war-torn regions. He is a lecturer at Columbia Law School and a frequent contributor to NPR, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and other media.

What happened to the raiders?

The miraculous thing is they not only succeeded in attacking Japan, but 69 of them, including James Doolittle, escaped capture and returned home as heroes. Eleven were not so lucky.

Three died in the effort. Eight others were captured by the Japanese in China.

They were taken into custody by the secret police, subjected to brutal torture and taken to secret prisons. Tojo, the prime minister, asked lawyers in the war ministry if there was a lawful way to condemn the Doolittle Raiders.

They came up with a plan to try them under international law as war crimi-

Tell us about the trial.

After the war the Army’s judge advocate—a colonel by the name of Edward “Ham” Young—implemented war trials in the Pacific. He was a real lawyer’s lawyer and one of the founders of modern military law. Young wanted justice for the raiders. He interviewed the survivors, who told this harrowing story, and handed it to Robert Dwyer to build a case. When the murders of the raiders were publicly announced in 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt promised those responsible would be held personally accountable.

Dwyer put the judge, prosecutor, general in charge and prison warden on trial. These were the people who perverted justice by doing the paperwork for murder. It was a radical innovation in the law and not certain to succeed. Dwyer was a bulldog of a prosecutor and was relentless in putting the case together.

On the other side was Edmund Bodine, a combat pilot who had been awarded the Silver Star. He became the defense lawyer for the Japanese, despite the fact he was not actually a lawyer. He understood he was there to look good failing. His involvement meant the Japanese got a fairer trial than they gave the raiders, but no

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U.S. AIR FORCE

Michel Paradis

Much of Last Mission to Tokyo revolves around the postwar trial. Why? The book starts with the execution of three of the Doolittle Raiders—William Farrow, Dean Hallmark and Harold Spatz—then jumps a few months back in time to cover the actual mission.

But the story is really about the trial and seeking justice. This is the first time this story has been told. It was highly publicized back then, but faded from memory.

nals before a military commission and execute them.

The eight Americans went before a show trial. The Japanese needed evidence to show they committed atrocities, so the military presented signed confessions. They were all sentenced to death, but only three were executed.

The emperor commuted the sentence of five to life in solitary confinement.

One died in captivity but the other four were rescued in August 1945 by members of the OSS who weren’t even looking for the Doolittle Raiders.

RANDY GLASS STUDIO

Why did you write this book?

One of the things that made the story fascinating is that it’s a true-life legal thriller based on one of the most famous missions of World War II. It highlights the stakes like other war crimes cases couldn’t. I’ve been involved in a fair number of war crimes cases, on all sides and in different places, including Guantanamo and Central America. Anyone who has done these cases understands they are not normal. There is a political context that sometimes overwhelms the law.

When I stumbled upon this case and saw that it involved the Doolittle Raid, it made it so much more true to life.

One of eight Doolittle Raiders captured by the Japanese, Lt. Robert L. Hite survived torture and imprisonment and was liberated in August 1945.

U.S. AIR FORCE

RANDY GLASS STUDIO

one thought anything but the gallows awaited the four Japanese officers.

Bodine committed to the case in surprising ways. He got to know the defendants and understand them as human beings. By the time the trial started in 1946, Bodine was committed to ensuring they’d get a fair trial.

Why did the Allies want to hold war crimes trials?

Roosevelt insisted we have proper trials to demonstrate justice. He got a lot of resistance to that. Joseph Stalin came around—he loved a good show trial— but Winston Churchill remained opposed. He was totally consistent with history. The idea that you would lay waste to your defeated enemies was a given. It’s a credit to Roosevelt and then Harry Truman for insisting the Allies temper revenge with justice.

This idea we were going to impose peace through fairness is important.

As a historian of warfare, I see that moment as one of the great leaps forward in humanity. And it worked! Germany and Japan became some of our most reliable allies for the next 75 years.

Who are the book’s heroes?

Bodine and Dwyer are heroic figures, even though they are antagonistic.

Young is an unsung historic figure.

Doolittle is an incredibly heroic figure. You can’t overestimate the significance of the Doolittle Raid in terms of both galvanizing American morale and causing the Japanese to make tactical and strategic decisions that turned out to be catastrophic.

Why is this trial so important?

What transpired is an inspiring debate between Dwyer and Bodine, two imperfect men of genuine good faith fighting for what is right. And the outcome shocked everybody. Rather than sending the four men to the gallows, a military commission convicted them of some charges, acquitted them of others and gave them all sentences of five years, except for one, a lawyer. He received a nine-year sentence, because he should have known better.

The outcome stunned the United States. It was such a politically controversial decision that Congress promised an investigation. There were letters

to the president and Gen. Dwight Eisenhower demanding the trial be redone so “proper” sentences—of death—could be imposed.

Young, the judge advocate, wrote a 60-page report, ultimately concluding that justice was done. This is what makes American justice special. It established a precedent that became international law. The values of fair trials and equal justice became part of the Geneva Convention of 1949.

True justice is not the outcomeoriented response the Japanese pursued against the raiders. It is understanding the accused individual. You are holding people accountable for crimes while getting to know the person behind the act and then deciding what is just. That’s what justice is.

What’s your takeaway from this project?

The idea that humanity can get better.

It takes standing up for what is right when it is not politically expedient or socially acceptable. If you follow your conscience, humanity can get better— but that is the only way it does. MH

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Valor Italy’s African Eagle

During World War I at least five black airmen overcame both the technological challenges of early aviation and the prejudice of peers to enter various wartime air arms.

On Nov. 11, 1916, Ottoman navy 1st Lt. Ahmet Ali Celikten, the grandson of a Nigerian Yoruba slave, qualified to fly reconnaissance missions and went on to a career in the Turkish air force. Sgt. William Robinson Clarke, from Kingston, Jamaica, earned his Royal Flying Corps wings on April 26, 1917. In August 1917 Georgia-born Lafayette Flying Corps member Eugene Jacques Bullard entered French service as a fighter pilot, only to be returned to the infantry months later after an altercation with an officer. In 1918 Pierre Réjon of Martinique also flew fighters for the French. He was killed in a postwar crash.

Beating all four of these intrepid pioneers into the air, however, was an East African orphan. Born in Asmara, Eritrea, on June 30, 1886, Wolde Selassie was a Christian Tigre whose homeland was forcibly colonized by the Italians in 1890.

A year later Italian army Col. Attilio Mondelli adopted the 5-year-old orphan.

Taken to Italy, the rechristened Domenico followed in his adoptive father’s bootsteps, studying at military colleges in Rome and Modena. Graduating in 1905 as a second lieutenant, he commanded a succession of companies in the elite Bersaglieri infantry. Developing an interest in aviation, Mondelli qualified on Feb. 20, 1914, for a certificate from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.

When Italy entered World War I on the Allied side on May 24, 1915, Capt.

Mondelli was assigned to the 7th Reconnaissance and Combat Squadron and flew numerous reconnaissance missions in Nieuport IVMs. Amid the First and Second Battles of the Isonzo, between May and August 1915, Mondelli was cited for zeal in seeking out Austro-Hungarian artillery. On Feb. 18, 1916, he took command of the newly formed 7th Bombardment Squadron. In this role he led raids on the Austro-Hungarian–held regions of Slovenia and Venezia Giulia using Caproni

Domenico Mondelli Italian Armed Forces Silver Medal for Military Valor World War I

Ca.33 trimotor bombers. From July 14 to 25, 1917, he commanded the XI Bombardment Group, comprising the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th and 15th Squadrons.

At that point Mondelli returned to an infantry role. On October 10 he was promoted to major and assumed command of the XXXIII “Crimson Flames,” a newly formed unit of special assault troops dubbed arditi (“the daring”). On May 1, 1918, Mondelli took command of the 1st Battalion, 242nd Infantry Regiment and led it during the June 15–24 Battle of the Solstice along the Piave River. On August 19 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. By war’s end his battlefield leadership earned him two Silver Medals for Military Valor, another Bronze Medal and the title of Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy.

Mondelli led an assault battalion in Albania when Italy tried to assert control over that country through a June 1917 mandate, provoking the Albanians to armed resistance on June 4, 1920.

After two months of fighting the Italians abandoned their claims with a protocol signed on August 2. During that time Mondelli was awarded another Bronze Medal for Military Valor.

When the Fascists under Benito Mussolini came to power, Mondelli’s ambitions met a brick wall of racial discrimination. In 1925 his imminent promotion to colonel was blocked by an army that would not permit a black officer to command white soldiers. He spent World War II sidelined and simply trying to survive until Rome fell to Allied forces in June 1944. Afterward he rejoined the army, rising in rank to lieutenant general in 1968. On June 10, 1970, he was given the title of Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, his adoptive nation’s highest order. Mondelli died in Rome on Dec. 13, 1974, leaving behind a remarkable legacy in aviation and military achievements. MH

LEFT: EMEDALS; RIGHT: GRANDE ORIENTE D’ITALIA

By Jon Guttman

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What We Learned From...

The Battle of Long Island, 1776

By James Byrne

T

he appearance of a British fleet in the waters off Long Island in late June 1776 did not come as a surprise to Continental Army Gen. George Washington. The size of the fleet did, however.

Three months earlier the king’s army had evacuated Boston after unsuccessful attempts to suppress Patriot forces in the area. Bloodied during their return march from Concord and decimated by their pyrrhic victory at Bunker Hill, British Maj. Gen. Sir William Howe and his 9,000-strong army had sailed to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to regroup.

Washington had correctly assumed the British would next target New York City, and he redeployed the army accordingly. Unfortunately, from Washington’s perspective, Manhattan was difficult to defend—especially against an enemy with unchallenged amphibious capability. Essential to its defense was Brooklyn Heights, prominent Long Island high ground on the opposite bank of the East River overlooking the city, the river and the harbor.

On July 2 the vanguard of the British fleet began disembarking on Staten Island. By mid-August Howe had landed an army of 32,000 British and Hessian troops. Reinforced by militia units, Washington commanded scarcely 20,000 men in and around New York City. He split the force, sending half of the army to Long Island under Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene. He began fortifying Brooklyn Heights but fell ill and was replaced by Maj. Gen. Israel Putnam, who was unfamiliar with the Long Island terrain. On August 22 Howe led more than 15,000 men and 40 artillery pieces across the Narrows from Staten Island to Long Island, coming ashore unopposed just 7 miles from Brooklyn Heights.

Keeping most of his 10,000-strong army atop Brooklyn Heights, Putnam pushed out strong covering forces of some 3,000 men along a ridge 2 miles south of the main position. Passes through the ridge were identified and covered—with the exception of Jamaica Pass, on the far east end of the American position. Local Tories informed Howe, who led 10,000 men at night through the pass and into position on the American rear and left flank. Howe launched a single massive

Lessons: Know the terrain. When your enemy knows more about the terrain you occupy than you do, expect the worst. Putnam’s dereliction regarding Jamaica Pass led to a rout of the entire forward position.

A reeling army will respond to inspired leadership. Washington steadied the survivors of the routed covering force, stabilized the position atop Brooklyn Heights and snatched his army from the jaws of destruction through his successful retreat across the East River.

Beware of applying previous “lessons learned.” Howe’s fears of another Bunker Hill–style bloodletting stayed his hand. He forfeited the opportunity to possibly bag the Patriot forces (including Washington) on Brooklyn Heights and end the Revolutionary War that afternoon. MH

DOMENICK D’ANDREA (U.S. NATIONAL GUARD)

Troops of the Delaware Regiment engage British forces during the fight for Brooklyn Heights.

assault on the morning of August 27.

Patriot forces were overwhelmed.

Howe’s forces swept to the base of Brooklyn Heights, from which Washington observed the unfolding disaster. The Americans had lost more than 2,000 men (1,000 captured), while British losses were around 400. At that point, however, Howe halted the attack.

Likely shaken by the sharp British losses at Bunker Hill and unwilling to risk an immediate assault, he opted instead to besiege the cornered Patriots.

Two days later Washington took advantage of darkness, fog and bad weather to ferry his surviving men and most of their materiel across the river to Manhattan. Though outgeneraled, outmaneuvered and outfought, Washington extracted most of his army, thus saving it and the Patriot cause.

18 MILITARY HISTORY NOVEMBER 2020

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Hardware Springfield M1903

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n 1892 the U.S. Army adopted the Norwegian Krag-Jorgensen as its first bolt-action rifle. But during the 1898 Spanish-American War the Krag was clearly outclassed by the Mauser M1893 used by Spanish troops, leading the Ordnance Department to order a new weapon. What emerged from the Springfield Armory was essentially a copy of the Mauser—for which the Americans had to pay Mauser $250,000 in production rights—but it proved a good investment. Equally effective—and also German-inspired—was the spitzer round developed for it, officially designated the “cartridge, ball, caliber .30. Model of 1906,” but better known as the .30-06 (“thirty aught-six”), which remained the standard-issue U.S. military round until the 1954 introduction of the 7.62x51 mm NATO round. Issued in 1905, the Springfield M1903 turn-bolt rifle held five rounds fed into an internal magazine using a stripper clip. It earned a reputation for unmatched accuracy and durability during and after World War I, until the semiautomatic M1 Garand began to eclipse it in the mid-1930s. Springfield introduced gunsights for the M1903A3 compatible with those of the Garand, allowing U.S. troops to be trained in both types during World War II. Even after the Garand became the standard-issue infantry weapon, the M1903 remained in favor as a sniper’s weapon—especially in its specialized M1903A4 version—during World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Its continued popularity in civilian circles kept it in production until 1949, with a total of 3,004,079 built. MH

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TOP: FROM THE M1903 SPRINGFIELD RIFLE, BY LEROY THOMPSON (OSPREY PUBLISHING, BLOOMSBURY PRESS PUBLISHING); RIGHT: PHOTOQUEST (GETTY IMAGES)

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Stock Firing pin rod Cocking piece Safety lock spindle Safety lock thumb piece 6. Receiver 7. Main spring

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8. Bolt 9. Firing pin sleeve 10. Extractor collar 11. Firing pin 12. Gas escape hole 13. Rear sight 14. Hand guard 15. Lower band

16. Upper band 17. Front sight 18. Bayonet mount 19. Lower band spring 20. Magazine 21. Magazine spring 22. Magazine follower 23. Floor plate

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24. Floor plate catch 25. Sear spring 26. Trigger guard 27. Sear 28. Butt plate 29. Scabbard 30. Scabbard catch 31. M1905 bayonet

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TOP: FROM THE M1903 SPRINGFIELD RIFLE, BY LEROY THOMPSON (OSPREY PUBLISHING, BLOOMSBURY PRESS PUBLISHING); RIGHT: PHOTOQUEST (GETTY IMAGES)

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Specifications Length: 43.2 inches Barrel length: 24 inches Weight: 8 pounds 11 ounces Bore: .30 inches Effective range: 1,100 yards Maximum range: 5,500 yards Muzzle velocity: 2,800 feet

per second A dearth of M1s following the attack on Pearl Harbor meant some U.S. troops—including these Marines on Guadalcanal—used M1903s.

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WOMEN OF WAR

From Cleopatra to Elizabeth and Njinga to Meir, strong women have proved every bit as resolute as their male counterparts

By Emily Anne Jordan and Jonathan W. Jordan

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Famed for leading an ultimately unsuccessful 60 ad revolt against the Romans, Queen Boudica of Britain’s Iceni tribe is honored with a statue on London’s Thames Embankment.

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Cleopatra

brick towers, Ptolemy’s army blocked Cleopatra’s path to the capital. The Egyptian king waited for his sister’s army to disintegrate in the desert.

It was then one of history’s twists jarred the plans of both siblings. The appearance in Alexandria of Julius Caesar, conqueror of Rome, forced Ptolemy to leave his army and return to his palace. Hoping to please Caesar, Ptolemy had had the general’s exiled chief rival, Pompey, slain.

When Caesar arrived, he was presented with Pompey’s head, but the grisly trophy instead appalled the Roman.

Meanwhile, Cleopatra took action. In one of history’s more dramatic entrances she first stowed away on a small boat to Alexandria, then had a stout follower stroll into the royal palace toting his queen in a bedroll. Emerging from cover in Caesar’s quarters, a coquettish Cleopatra persuaded the general to arrange a reconciliation with her brother. But Caesar’s announcement Cleopatra would return to rule with Ptolemy triggered anti-Roman riots in the city, and the general and his two understrength legions found themselves besieged in the palace for months.

Cleopatra undoubtedly gave Caesar political advice and shared local insights. She also engaged in an affair with the general and by the fall of 48 bc was pregnant with his son.

The spring arrival of Caesarian reinforcements forced Ptolemy to lift his siege and march east toward Pelusium.

Seizing the moment, Caesar moved his legions up the Nile, concentrated his forces and destroyed Ptolemy’s army on the riverbanks. While fleeing the Roman wrath, Ptolemy toppled from his barge into the Nile. Weighed down with armor, the teenage king sank and drowned.

Caesar’s victory left Cleopatra de facto sole ruler of Egypt. In a strategic alliance she supplied Caesar with war materiel, while he gave political protection to the 22-year-old queen, expectant mother and war leader.

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BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

Perhaps the best known among ancient warrior queens was Egypt’s legendary Cleopatra. She ascended to the throne in Alexandria in 51 bc at age 18 to rule Egypt jointly with her younger brother, Ptolemy XIII. Three years into their joint reign Ptolemy’s courtiers orchestrated a palace coup and drove Cleopatra into the Sinai. There the queen amassed a force of some 20,000 mercenaries and marched her army west toward Alexandria. Cleopatra’s brother met her with an equal force at Pelusium, a fortress east of the city. Protected by the fort’s

PREVIOUS SPREAD: STUART FORSTER ENGLAND (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); LEFT: ALTES MUSEUM, BERLINER MUSEUMSINSEL

ueen Tomyris of the Massagetae glared as her soldiers dragged in the battered corpse of Cyrus the Great, slain founder of the Achaemenid empire. She had rejected his proposal of marriage to avoid war. In the subsequent vicious campaign to repel the Persian invaders, Tomyris had lost Spargapises—her son and commander of her army—and a third of her troops and had made a mortal enemy of the empire to the west. Persia, on the other hand, had lost its monarch.

Days before battle in 530 bc the queen of the nomadic Iranian tribal confederation had warned Cyrus not to march his army into her dominion northeast of the Caspian Sea. Following her son’s ignominious defeat at Persian hands, she flew into a rage and sent Cyrus one last letter, vowing to give him more blood than he could drink. Her army of the steppes defeated the Persian horde in a battle unusually violent even by ancient standards. After the field quieted and the surviving Persians fled west, she ordered her men to find Cyrus’ body. Soldiers brought her his corpse as servants waited with a wineskin filled with human blood. Thrusting the head of the lifeless emperor into the gore-filled bag, Tomyris hissed, “Thus I make good my threat and give you your fill of blood!”

Herodotus’ account of Queen Tomyris is hardly the first story of a woman who led her nation in war. Ancient Egyptian stone monuments relate that Queen Hatshepsut, an 18th Dynasty ruler who came to the throne in 1478 bc, sent armies north into the Levant. The biblical Book of Judges recalls the generalship of Deborah, a judge from the tribe of Ephraim, who defeated a chariot-equipped Canaanite army in Israel’s Jezreel Valley around 1125 bc. A generation after Tomyris defeated Cyrus, the Persian emperor’s grandson, Xerxes, had as one of his trusted naval commanders the brash Queen Artemisia of the Persian satrapy of Caria.

BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

PREVIOUS SPREAD: STUART FORSTER ENGLAND (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); LEFT: ALTES MUSEUM, BERLINER MUSEUMSINSEL

Having defeated Cyrus the Great, Queen Tomyris keeps her pre-battle promise to give the Persian invader—or at least his head—“your fill of blood!”

Caesar’s 44 bc murder set off a civil war between his assassins and his avengers, tribune Mark Antony and Caesar’s nephew, Octavian. Cleopatra took a fleet of warships to support the avengers, only to see the vessels delayed by a storm and arrive too late to help.

Meanwhile, Gaius Cassius Longinus, one of Caesar’s assassins, marched a dozen legions against Egypt.

Cleopatra threw together a hasty home defense, but Cassius was diverted north by the arrival of Antony and Octavian in Greece. The Caesarian victory at Philippi in 42 bc ended the republican threat to Cleopatra’s kingdom.

In the wake of the campaign Antony, who ruled Rome’s eastern provinces, summoned Cleopatra to meet him at Tarsus. Clad as a goddess, she arrived with barges loaded with riches from her kingdom and seduced Antony.

He moved to Alexandria, and Cleopatra bore him twins.

This is dummy very they read when best desk lining pointed kicks whenever desk asking when beiner pony therefore.

Clad as a goddess, Cleopatra arrived with riches from her kingdom and seduced Antony Antony and Cleopatra ruled Rome’s eastern provinces for a decade as king and queen, god and goddess. Antony provided generalship and troops, while Cleopatra supplied money, weapons, ships, food and military intelligence. She accompanied Antony on the first leg of his disastrous campaign against Parthia and dispatched a relief column to protect the remnants of his army as it limped home.

In the spring of 32 bc, as tensions between Antony and Octavian flared into war, Cleopatra stockpiled ships, funds and weapons for her lover’s next campaign. She then

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Eqypt’s Queen

In the 1620s, two decades after Elizabeth’s reign, Queen Njinga of Ndongo (present-day Angola) came to power as an adept diplomat and warrior.

By the late 16th century west Africa was a bustling hub of the slave trade. Having established dominance over the central Atlantic coast, Portuguese officials and Jesuit missionaries moved south toward the lands of the Ndongo. At first the relationship between the Portuguese and the Ndongo king seemed amicable. However, in 1618 the Portuguese governor allied with local Imbangala tribes, fierce mercenaries who raided neighboring lands and practiced cannibalism and infanticide. A PortugueseImbangala army stormed the Ndongo capital the following year, driving its leaders from the coast. Around 1624 Ndongo King Mbandi died under suspicious circumstances after naming his young son as his heir. Not to be denied, Mbandi’s aggressive sister, Njinga, had her nephew killed and declared herself ruler.

A Roman Catholic convert, Njinga at first tried to negotiate with the governor and continued to supply Portuguese merchants with slaves. Clashes ensued after Njinga set strict limits on the trade and officials complained of the queen’s willingness to harbor runaways.

The discord prompted Portugal to back the claims of a rival. War raged between the two factions until 1628, when Njinga’s army was driven from the Ndongo capital.

Withdrawing to Matamba in the African interior, Njinga assembled a coalition of Ndongas, Matambas and Imbangalas. An adept politician, she adopted the ways of the warlike Imbangala, reportedly participating in ritual

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LEFT: NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON; RIGHT: CHRISTIE’S IMAGES (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES)

accompanied Antony to Greece, where they held together a restive coalition of eastern allies and Roman legions.

Octavian’s navy gained control of the sea, trapping Antony and Cleopatra in western Greece. Isolated from her Egyptian base of support, Cleopatra likely encouraged Antony to regain naval superiority in a decisive battle or, failing that, to break out to Alexandria. Antony sallied forth against Octavian’s fleet in 31 bc and was soundly defeated at the Battle of Actium. Fleeing in one of the warships, Cleopatra led a squadron home and prepared to defend Alexandria once again.

Yet the tides of war had turned against Antony and Cleopatra. Antony sailed back to Egypt a broken man, and his armies melted away. Cleopatra prepared to move a fleet from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and escape east, but hostile locals burned her ships and cut off her retreat.

In the summer of 30 bc Octavian marched into the Egyptian capital. Cleopatra hid in a tomb built for her. Some accounts suggest Long before Cleopatra came to power, Eqypt she deceived Antony into believing she was had at least one female already dead by having a messenger tell him pharaoh. Of royal lineshe had killed herself. Bereft of options and age, Hatshepsut claimed believing his lover to be dead, Antony fell the title for herself in c. 1479 bc and reigned for on his sword. Cleopatra survived to bury some two decades until him, then met with Octavian, who promshe was succeeded by ised leniency. When she learned he instead her stepson and nephew, intended to take her to Rome in chains, Thutmose III. Cleopatra committed suicide by poison.

Elsewhere in the world in the time of the western Roman empire other women proved effective rebel leaders. Around 40 ad the Trung sisters of northern Vietnam led a rebel army against the invading Han empire, staging hit-and-run raids for three years before the Chinese cap-

TOP: NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH; LEFT: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

Elizabeth I of England

tured and beheaded the duo. Twenty years later Boudica, queen of the Iceni tribe in eastern Britain led a bloody revolt against the Roman occupation. Her rebel army burned the Roman settlement at Londinium, site of present-day London, and sacked several other towns before being overwhelmed. Boudica reportedly took her own life.

Laws of succession during the Middle Ages did not always result in men assuming military leadership. In the Caucasus in the late 12th century Queen Tamar of Georgia fought off revolts led by her ex-husband and defeated neighboring Muslim armies. In the mid-1400s Queen Manduhai reunited the warring Mongols and led armies to restore the glory of Genghis Khan’s empire. During the 15th century Wars of the Roses Margaret d’Anjou, Lancastrian queen of England, rallied soldiers to the standard of her mentally broken husband, King Henry VI. The Renaissance and Reformation also produced their share of warrior women. In 1484 Italian countess Caterina Sforza led a column of horsemen to capture Rome’s fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo while seven months pregnant.

A century later Elizabeth I of England sent armies to the Netherlands, France and Ireland. Most famously, in the summer of 1588 the queen’s navy, led by Sir Francis Drake, defeated the Spanish Armada in the English Channel.

Queen Njinga of Ndongo

LEFT: NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON; RIGHT: CHRISTIE’S IMAGES (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES)

TOP: NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH; LEFT: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

Empress Maria Theresa employed both political acumen and military force during her 20-year reign over the Hapsburg empire.

sacrifice and drinking human blood. Completing her transformation into a war queen, she merged Ndongo and Imbangala units into an effective fighting force of light troops and even adopted European innovations, often fielding a company of matchlock musketeers.

Over the next dozen years Njinga’s forces raided Portuguese coastal settlements. Then, in 1641, Portugal lost the key port of Luanda to a Dutch expeditionary force.

Sensing her enemy’s weakness, Njinga allied herself with the Dutch and intensified the war. From 1643 to ’48 she led her forces to a string of minor victories, marred by a defeat resulting in her sister’s capture.

In 1648 the Portuguese retook Luanda and drove inland. Njinga again retreated into the Matamba interior, knowing the Portuguese could not operate that far from their coastal bases. While she continued to mount guerrilla raids, neither Njinga nor the Portuguese could force a decisive battle.

In time Portuguese emissaries reached out to Njinga for peace talks, with the primary interest of maintaining the lucrative slave trade. The exiled queen negotiated a treaty that required Portugal to return her sister and render military assistance when called on. In return Njinga supplied the Portuguese with slaves, granted them a concession to hold trade fairs, reconverted to Christianity and allowed missionaries to enter deep into Matamba lands.

Njinga died at age 82 in 1663, a symbol of resistance to colonial Europe. Her corpse, put on public display clad in jewel-encrusted robes and clutching bow and arrow, was mourned as a national hero.

The 18th century produced a succession of notable female war leaders. Amid the 1740–48 War of the Austrian Succession Empress Elizabeth of Russia joined forces with Austrian Queen Maria Theresa to battle Prussia’s Frederick the Great. Elizabeth’s niece-in-law, Catherine the Great, seized the Romanov throne from her husband in a military coup. By the time of her death in 1796, Catherine had captured a warm-water port on the Black Sea, expanded her nation’s frontiers along the Danube and established Russia as the dominant power in Eastern Europe.

The modern era has witnessed a panoply of warrior women. In the 19th century rebel queens Rani Lakshmibai

Njinga died at 82 in 1663, a symbol of resistance to colonial Europe of India and Yaa Asantewaa of Ghana’s Ashanti people battled the British empire, albeit unsuccessfully. During World War II women fought as frontline ground troops and military aviators in the forces of the Soviet Union, while Resistance movements throughout Nazi-occupied Europe relied on women as both support personnel and combatants. A wave of democratization following the war saw the popular elections of such women as Indira Gandhi, who led India through the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War. In 1982 Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the

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Among modern female war leaders, none played for such high stakes as a plump Israeli grandmother named Golda Meir. Born in Kiev, the present-day capital of Ukraine, and raised in Milwaukee, Meir immigrated to

As Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir had to think beyond the war’s opening salvos what was then Palestine after World War I and worked her way up the ranks of the Jewish political establishment.

A committed Zionist, she worked strenuously to end the British mandate and was among the signatories of Israel’s 1948 declaration of independence. After stints in the Knesset and Israeli cabinet, Meir served as foreign minister during the 1956 Suez Crisis and informally advised the government during the 1967 Six-Day War. Two years later she was elected Israel’s first female prime minister.

Years of war had hardened Meir to the reality of life surrounded by enemies. “Are we supposed to sit here with our hands folded, praying and murmuring, ‘Let’s

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JOHN DOWNING (GETTY IMAGES)

famed “Iron Lady” of Britain, led her nation to victory over Argentina in the Falklands War. And the list goes on.

AFP (GETTY IMAGES)

Israel’s first female prime minister, Golda Meir guided her nation through the dark initial days of the Yom Kippur War and on to eventual victory.

hope that nothing happens?’” she responded to one interviewer. “Praying doesn’t help. What helps is to counterattack. With all possible means, including means that we don’t necessarily like.”

Meir remained Israel’s prime minister in September 1973 when intelligence reports painted an ominous picture: Syria and Egypt were calling up reserves and moving armor and infantry to Israel’s borders. At 3:45 on the morning of Oct. 6, 1973, Meir’s intelligence chief informed her a reliable source in the Egyptian high command had disclosed Egypt and Syria would attack Israel that very day—Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.

Israeli Chief of Staff David Elazer recommended a pre-emptive air strike against Syrian and Egyptian airfields, a strategy that had proved successful in 1967.

Under a cloud of fighter-bombers, he argued, Israeli armor and infantry could then roll back the invaders.

Meir fully appreciated Israel’s precarious position. Only 109 miles separated the Syrian border from Tel Aviv, the Israeli capital. To counter as many as 800,000 Arab troops on two fronts, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) could field only 135,000 active-duty troops. It would require the quick mobilization of 250,000 reservists to hold the battle lines. On Yom Kippur, though, those reservists would be praying in temples and at home with their families.

It would take time to form them into combat units.

A pre-emptive air strike might level the playing field.

As prime minister, however, Meir had to think beyond the war’s opening salvos. Israel depended on the United States for ammunition, aircraft and replacement parts, and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had privately warned her a preemptive strike would ignite strong antiIsraeli sentiment and make it difficult for President Richard Nixon to render military aid. Kissinger insisted Israel not attack first, even in the face of grave danger.

Haggard from stress, Meir duly ordered her commanders to refrain from a pre-emptive strike, though she did immediately mobilize active-duty troops. The IDF would have to hold the line as best it could until reservists fell in and the United States came through with replacement weapons and ammunition.

Later that morning sirens blared in Jerusalem’s empty streets as word of Syrian air strikes spread. Meanwhile, Egyptian engineers threw bridges over the Suez Canal, and T-55 tanks, covered by Soviet-built surface-to-air (SAM) missiles batteries, rolled across and smashed into the Bar-Lev Line, a thin chain of fortifications along the east bank. To the north Syrian tanks blasted a path toward the Golan Heights, the plateau overlooking northern Israel.

For a few days Israel’s survival hung in the balance.

The IDF lost a quarter of its tanks and an eighth of its fighter-bombers. Cracks appeared in the Bar-Lev Line, as the Syrians made inroads along the Golan Heights.

If either Syria or Egypt broke through the IDF’s thin shell, the Israeli heartland would be wide open to attack.

Meir spent several anxious days as chief diplomat, strategist and cheerleader. Chain-smoking and gulping a gallon of coffee each day, the 75-year-old boosted the badly shaken spirits of her defense minister and veteran general, Moshe Dayan. Rattled by Syrian gains in the north, he sought permission from Meir to ready Israel’s nuclear arsenal for deployment. The prime minister refused. The battle would be fought in Sinai and on the Golan Heights.

The war would be won—or lost—with the support of Israel’s friends. There would be no nuclear option.

Shadowing Meir as she reviewed reports with Dayan, the defense editor of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote, “It was strange to see a warrior of seven campaigns and brilliant past chief of staff of the IDF bringing clearly operational subjects to a Jewish grandmother for decision.”

Absorbing severe losses, Israeli attack aircraft managed to snuff out the deadly SAM batteries and begin picking off Egyptian tanks from the air. In Syrian skies Israeli F-4 Phantom jets pounded Damascus, while on the ground IDF Centurion and Patton tanks drove Syrian troops back behind their start lines. Meir’s “no first strike” strategy paid off, as Nixon sent waves of cargo planes into Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport bearing 28,000 tons of ammunition, spare parts and supplies from U.S. arsenals.

As IDF spearheads crossed the Suez Canal, Kissinger warned Meir the United Nations would insist on a cease-fire. Again, she tempered military judgment with the eye of a statesman, realizing that to humiliate the Egyptians would only ignite their thirst for revenge.

Meir deemed it best to reach an accord with Israel’s enemies.

On October 29, less than a month after the war began, IDF commanders in the Sinai met their Egyptian counterparts beneath a tent stretched across the guns of four parked Israeli tanks. In its welcome shade they negotiated the withdrawal of Egypt’s encircled Third Army on terms that permitted Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat to save face and, in time, negotiate a lasting peace with Israel. Four years later Sadat visited Jerusalem and shared a few peaceful moments with his former enemy, the 79-year-old grandmother from Milwaukee who led her nation to victory. MH

Tactical Takeaways Sex Is No Barrier Female warriors— whether in trenches or command bunkers— have proven more than capable of winning battles and wars.

But Sexism Can Be When women are prevented from fully participating in any aspect of society— including military service—their nations are the lesser for it.

Victory Is Blind In the end, winning in combat is about leadership, focus and ability, not biology.

Jonathan W. Jordan is the author of Brothers, Rivals, Victors: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley and the Partnership That Drove the Allied Conquest in Europe and American Warlords: How Roosevelt’s High Command Led America to Victory in World War II. Emily Anne Jordan, a nursing student at the University of Kentucky, is coauthor with her father of The War Queens: Extraordinary Women Who Ruled the Battlefield. For further reading the authors recommend Women Warriors: An Unexpected History,

by Pamela D. Toler; When Women Ruled The World: Six Queens of Egypt, by Kara Cooney; and Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, by Robert K. Massey.

JOHN DOWNING (GETTY IMAGES)

AFP (GETTY IMAGES)

India’s Indira Gandhi and Britain’s Margaret Thatcher led their respective countries during international conflicts—the former during the 1971 IndoPakistani War and the latter through the 1982 Falklands War.

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IF GOD IS FOR US As Scottish invaders challenged a usurper to the English throne in 1138, the pretender’s army raised a sacred standard heavenward in divine appeal

By Murray Dahm

In Sir John Gilbert’s 1880 painting kneeling soldiers look on as a clergyman standing before banners from the most important churches in north England appeals for God’s help against the invading Scots.

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When the English and Scots clashed at Northallerton, they employed the same sorts of weapons and tactics used at the 1066 Battle of Hastings, depicted below.

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TOP: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC IMAGE COLLECTION (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); RIGHT: BRITISH MUSEUM

I

n 1138, as rival factions staked claim to the English crown, the English and the Scots engaged in a fierce clash in the marshy reaches of Northallerton, North Yorkshire. While the opposing forces grappled on the battlefield, amid the English lines rose an unusual totem comprising a wooden mast, a dangling silver box and sacred banners—a standard the English hoped would bring them divine assistance.

King David I of Scotland had invaded England that year in support of his niece, Matilda, then embroiled in a fight against her cousin, Stephen of Blois, for control of the English throne. This period of civil war, known as the Anarchy, raged in England from 1135 until 1153. Sparking it was a succession crisis following the drowning death of William Adelin—Henry I’s only legitimate son—in the tragic 1120 wreck of the royal transport White Ship. Although the king had designated daughter Matilda as his heir, on Henry’s death in 1135 his nephew Stephen had seized the throne. Matilda and husband Geoffrey of Anjou moved to overthrow King Stephen by launching an invasion from their base in English-held Normandy. Set for 1139, the cross-channel assault was pre-empted when King David invaded from the north.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: GUILDHALL ART GALLERY; THIS PAGE, LEFT: BRITISH MUSEUM

Wooden spears employed by both sides at Northallerton were tipped by long, narrow iron heads with triangular center sections.

TOP: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC IMAGE COLLECTION (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); RIGHT: BRITISH MUSEUM

PREVIOUS SPREAD: GUILDHALL ART GALLERY; THIS PAGE, LEFT: BRITISH MUSEUM

David’s forces soon conquered much of Northumbria. in York with their contingents. From there A force he sent into Lancashire routed an English army at the Battle of Clitheroe on June 10. Monastic English chroniclers described the invading Scots as “more atrocious than the pagans” and accused them of committing every kind of atrocity, from the credible selling of women and children into bondage to the hyperbolic drinking of the blood of slain children. In truth, many communities guaranteed their safety by promising not to move against David. Some northern English lords (such as Eustace Fitz John) joined forces with David and declared loyalty to Matilda. Regardless, contemporary sources record widespread alarm at the invasion. In part that was David’s intention. If he could divert Stephen’s attention north, that would make Matilda’s invasion from the south easier.

As rumor spread David intended to march on York, a patchwork force gathered to confront him. Leading it was the elderly Archbishop Thurstan of York, Stephen’s lieutenant in the north. Stephen himself was occupied with a rebellion of pro-Matilda barons in the south. Loyal commanders from as far south as Derbyshire soon arrived

the English army first marched north to Thirsk, then set out on the Roman road to Northallerton (roughly tracing the presentday A19). The ailing Thurstan was unable to accompany them. In his stead marched Bishop Ralph Nowell of Orkney with a cadre of clergymen. Before them they held aloft the banner of St. Peter the Apostle Recovered from the from York Minster. Other contingents River Thames in the 1980s, this type of broadcarried similar banners. bladed iron ax head was The idea of sending a standard ahead common across Europe to encourage one’s army was likely in- in the 10th through 12th spired by biblical accounts of the Ark of centuries. Axes of this the Covenant, containing the stone tablets design appear in the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry inscribed with the Ten Commandments, and were likely used in which the ancient Israelites bore into battle battle at Northallerton. draped in a veil and suspended by long poles. Roman legions carried the aquila (“eagle”), a standard capped by a bronze representation of the raptor and ascribed quasi-religious significance. At the time of

Battle Ax

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Matilda

King Stephen

containing Communion bread—and beneath it the standards of St. Peter, St. John of Beverley and St. Wilfrid of Ripon (other sources add the banner of St. Cuthbert of Durham). The presence of banners from the most important churches in north England—York Minster, Beverley Minster, Ripon Minster and, perhaps, Durham Cathedral—suggest just how dire a threat David’s invasion posed in the minds of the English. For additional reassurance the clergy may have read aloud to the men from Romans 8:31: “If God is for us, who can be against us?”

Several early illustrations depict the standard perched

Northallerton sits 10 miles south of the River Tees, which formed the border of Yorkshire. No sooner had the English arrayed themselves a couple of miles north of town than the Scots came into view, advancing south from the Tees.

The battlefield was hemmed in by marshy ground.

Cinnamire marsh, on the low ground to the English left, protected their flank from being turned by the more numerous Scots, while on the English right Brompton Grange and The Grange were also dominated by marshy terrain. Thus the Scots would be inexorably funneled toward Northallerton, and by deploying on or near Red Hill, the English could block their southward advance and force battle. The English numbers may have been sufficient to deploy in an unbroken line the quarter mile or more between Cinnamire and Brompton Grange.

The English likely centered their lines on ground marked by present-day Scotpit Lane, perhaps as far south as present-day Red Hill. The Scots drew up farther north on what has since been known as Standard Hill. Some modern-day reconstructions depict the English battle line arrayed on Standard Hill with the Scots deployed south of them, closer to Northallerton. This is clearly wrong, for that would suggest the Scots managed to get behind the English, a nearly impossible task, given the terrain.

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ABOVE: NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND; BELOW: BRITISH LIBRARY

The standard oversaw the victory its English followers believed it had wrought

atop a wheeled-cart for mobility. Thus it served not only as a sign of divine support, but also as a rallying point for the English.

FROM LEFT: 19TH ERA, PRISMA ARCHIVO (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)(2)

Stephen and Matilda’s clash for the English throne, the French marched into battle raising the Oriflamme (from the Latin for “golden flame”), the sacred banner of the Abbey of St. Denis. However, doing so was not common practice in 12th century England.

The elaborate construction for which the forthcoming Battle of the Standard was named took shape at Northallerton. First, the men erected a frame to support a ship’s mast. Atop the mast was hung a pyx—a silver container

Likewise, to assert the English were deployed on Standard Hill and the Scots farther north also makes no sense, given the relative location of Scotpit Lane, the spot where most of the Scottish casualties fell and were buried.

Contemporary chronicler Prior Richard of Hexham estimated Scottish numbers at 26,000 men. While no such estimates are available for the English forces, they were outnumbered, perhaps massively. Poorly armed peasants made up much of their ranks. The greater part of the English knights fought afoot, some interspersed with archers in the front line, while most others gathered about the standard. Foot soldiers led the horses to the rear and held their leads, to prevent them shying away amid the clamor of the oncoming Scots.

Most of the Scots were also afoot, their horses held at the rear. David and his knights formed up in the center, wrote Richard of Hexham, while “the rest of the barbarian host poured roaring around them.” Richard left scant details of the battle itself, relating only that it was fought between the “first and third hours” of August 22. He did note that “numberless” Scots were slain in the first attack, the rest throwing down their arms and fleeing. An account by fellow contemporary chronicler Abbot Ailred of Reivaulx is more detailed, though it contains problematically fictional elements, such as long speeches allegedly made by participants.

ABOVE: NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND; BELOW: BRITISH LIBRARY

FROM LEFT: 19TH ERA, PRISMA ARCHIVO (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)(2)

According to Ailred, David intended his knights and archers to advance first, but he was opposed by the men of Galloway, who maintained it was their right to be in the front rank during the attack, owing to their recent victory over the English knights at Clitheroe. David acceded to their demands. As many as 7,000 Galwegians took the front line. Behind them, line abreast, stood the three Scottish divisions. David’s son, Prince Henry, led the division on the Scottish right, comprising his knights and archers as well as the men of Cumbria and Teviotdale. David was in the center with Scots, Moravians and the knights of his English and French allies. The left comprised the men of Lothian, Lorne and the Scottish isles. Ailred claimed the English were so few that they formed but a single division (he uses the term column), the knights in front with archers and lancers distributed among them. This was an unusual formation but entirely possible.

The Galwegians gave their customary three fearsome battle cries before charging the English lines, initially driving back the lead ranks of English spearmen. The English knights quickly recovered, however, holding their own as their archers took a devastating toll on the unarmored Galwegians, said to be so stuck with arrows they resembled hedgehogs. In agony the men of GalloAbove right: Scottish King David I, left, and his grandson and successor Malcolm IV appear in an early royal portrait. Right: King Henry I mourns his son’s 1120 death aboard White Ship.

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Battle of the Standard

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urope had been wracked by scores of succession crises by the 1135 outbreak of the Anarchy, an English civil war prompted by the death of Henry I, who left no direct male heir. He had designated daughter Matilda as his successor, but his nephew Stephen seized the throne. Matilda and husband Geoffrey of Anjou resolved to invade and overthrow Stephen from their base in English-held Normandy. King David I of Scotland, Matilda’s uncle, beat them to the punch, invading from the north in 1138.

David met with early successes, defeating an English army at Clitheroe on June 10 and conquering much of Northumbria and Cumbria. When he marched on York that summer, a patchwork force led by Archbishop Thurstan of York moved to head him off.

The English carried before them sacred banners of the saints from prominent churches. Rallying at Northallerton, they combined the banners with a ship’s mast and a silver Communion container into an elaborate standard intended to secure God’s help in the coming battle.

The English defenders deployed just north of town along the slope of Red Hill, their flanks protected by the Cinnamire marsh to their left and marshy Brompton Grange on the right. On August 22 the Scots marched down the Great North Road to meet them. MH

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English chronicler Prior Richard of Hexham estimated Scottish numbers at 26,000 men. No known estimates of English forces survive, but they were outnumbered. Both armies led their horses to the rear and prepared to fight afoot. Abbot Ailred of Reivaulx recounted that the men of Galloway, who’d led David to victory at Clitheroe, demanded to lead the Scottish attack. After issuing their traditional battle cries, the unarmored Galwegians surged forward, only to suffer greatly under English archers’ volleys.

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The opposing armies clashed, David leading the Scots from the center. As the Galwegians faltered under the storm of English arrows, David’s son, Prince Henry, led the Scottish right in a furious charge that drove back the English left and threatened the opposing horse handlers, who also withdrew. It was at that point a “certain prudent” English soldier held aloft the severed head of a random fallen Scot and cried out that King David had been slain. The ploy spread panic among the Scottish ranks.

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Hoping to belie the rumor of his death and restore calm, David threw aside his helmet to make himself visible. But his men continued to flee, compelling the king to retire. As the royal banner vanished north, Prince Henry advised his men to drop their banners, blend in with the advancing English and make their way back to Scottish lines. Richard of Hexham estimated 10,000 Scots had fallen in battle against a handful of English. The victors watched the vanquished retreat from atop Standard Hill.

MAPS BY STEVE WALKOWIAK – SWMAPS.COM

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Though history records the Battle of the Standard as a Scottish loss, David did manage to distract Stephen, thus aiding Matilda.

UNKNOWN FEW

26,000

10,000+

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MARK SUNDERLAND PHOTOGRAPHY (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

Ivory Knight

Battle of the Standard

the damage was already done. He could not sustain the fight and retreated. David’s retiring royal banner spread word to the surviving Scots of his capitulation. Prince ENGLISH TROOPS Henry, fighting behind the English front line, saw the reversal and ordered his men to drop their banners CASUALTIES and make for the Scottish lines, hopefully intermingling unnoticed with the English pursuers. They could only have done this effec- SCOTTISH TROOPS tively if dismounted, as his English opponents probably were. An alternative theory suggests Henry’s men CASUALTIES may have charged in mounted but become unhorsed over the course of the combat.

Several modern accounts posit David and his division acted as a reserve and fled without ever having engaged the English. But had David not been in the thick of the fight, why would his men believe the ruse that he’d been killed? As the Galwegian charge faltered, that all-important “head fake” likely prompted them to break and flee. Two of their leaders, Ulgric and Donald, had already fallen.

According to Ailred, the unengaged men of Lothian, Lorne and the islands on the Scottish left also fled in haste. It is unclear exactly in what order events took place. One reconstruction places Henry’s charge late in the battle, at the moment of the rout, to mask the king’s retreat.

According to the chroniclers, the English suffered few casualties, though given the initial success of both the Galwegian charge and Prince Henry’s attack, that seems

TOP: GUILDHALL ART GALLERY; LEFT: BRITISH MUSEUM

way flailed blindly at friend and foe, their charge dissipating.

David has been criticized for having allowed the Galwegians to lead the attack, instead of using better armored troops. But there were sound reasons for him to have taken the action he did. First, the Galwegian charge had proved decisive against similarly armored enemies at Clitheroe.

Second, the marshy terrain to the left and right of the English position meant David could not outflank them, thus only a frontal attack was feasible. Perhaps David While the Middle Ages hoped the Galwegians would absorb Engwere a time of strife in lish attention—and arrows—until he Europe, the nobles likely could send better troops into the fray. spent downtime playing At the moment when the Galwegians chess. This knight— were most hard-pressed, Prince Henry led carved in Norway from walrus ivory—is among out the Scottish right, putting the Engthe Lewis chessmen, a lish left to flight and charging down on 12th century set found the men holding the horses. The English in 1831 in Scotland’s retreated a quarter mile, the poorly armed Outer Hebrides islands. peasants scattering before them. While several reconstructions of the battle depict Henry’s charge as mounted, there are reasons to believe the Scots advanced afoot.

As the fighting grew ever more desperate, one quickthinking English soldier, known to history only as “a certain prudent man,” raised aloft the severed head of a fallen Scot and cried out that King David was slain. To quell the ensuing panic in his ranks, David threw aside his helmet to prove he remained very much alive, but

unlikely. Sources trumpeting the victory likely underestimate English losses and likewise exaggerate Scottish casualties. That said, only one English knight of note— Ilbert de Lacy—is known to have fallen. Richard of Hexham wrote that more Scots died during the retreat than in battle. He paints a vivid picture of the aftermath: The plain was strewn with corpses; very many were taken prisoner; the king and all the others took to flight; and at length, of that immense army, all were either slain, captured or scattered as sheep without a shepherd.

Richard notes that while no estimate could be made of the enemy dead, 10,000 men were missing when David’s army returned to Scotland. Other sources cite as many as 12,000 Scottish dead. Fifty Scottish knights were captured, all ransomed by November.

The English did not pursue the retreating Scots far, possibly because no knights were mounted, as their horses had been driven off a quarter mile by Prince Henry’s charge. It is, therefore, reasonable to suggest that Standard Hill was not named as the location of the initial English deployment, but rather as the farthest extent to which they advanced with the standard on its wheeled cart.

From that vantage, roughly where the Scots had drawn up their battle lines, the standard oversaw their retreat and the victory its English followers believed it had wrought.

The defeated David regrouped at Carlisle, there fretting the fate of his son till Henry joined him two days later. His men made their way back to safety piecemeal. Amid the rout many of the less well-armed and -armored Scots fell to English arrows, swords and spears. Of the estimated 200 knights that accompanied Henry, only 19 made it back to Scotland with their armor, many without their horses. At Carlisle the king negotiated a truce with Stephen. Under its terms David would retain his territorial gains in Cumbria and Northumbria, which he did until his death in 1153. He advanced his border to the River Tees and installed son Henry as Earl of Northumbria.

Stephen in order to aid Matilda. Despite the truce, David kept a 14,000-man army on his southern border, forcing the English to keep a wary eye to the north. A year later Matilda invaded as planned. Despite early successes the war soon devolved into a stalemate, Matilda controlling Normandy and much of southwest England, Stephen the remaining territory north to the River Tees. Matilda returned to her husband in Normandy in 1148, leaving their son, Henry, to continue the fight in England. He ultimately succeeded and was crowned Henry II in 1154, eight weeks after Stephen’s death. It seems God wasn’t with the usurper after all. MH

Tactical Takeaways Praise the Lord, but...

While asking for divine aid in wartime can’t hurt, sharp combat skills and tactical savvy are necessary means to victory.

Armor Trumps Ardor.

While David’s Scottish warriors were famed for their ferocity and close-combat skills, they were vulnerable when facing armored English knights.

Ruses Win Battles.

By holding aloft a severed head as “proof” of King David’s death, a “certain prudent” Englishman broke the Scots’ will.

Australia-based Murray Dahm is the author of Macedonian Phalangite vs. Persian Warrior. For further reading he recommends The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon, Comprising the History of England, From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Accession of Henry II, by Henry Huntingdon; Battles Fought in Yorkshire: Treated Historically and Topographically,

by Alex. D.H. Leadman; and Battles and Battlefields in England, by Charles Raymond Booth Barrett.

MARK SUNDERLAND PHOTOGRAPHY (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

TOP: GUILDHALL ART GALLERY; LEFT: BRITISH MUSEUM

Today several landmarks north of Northallerton bear names related to the Battle of the Standard, notably Standard Hill, Scotpit Lane and Red Hill. Their relation to one another is useful when plotting the course of the battle.

The term “hill” in this area is overly generous. Neither Standard Hill nor Red Hill are hills in any real sense, more gentle rises of a few feet from the surrounding plain. Local tradition has it Red Hill was so named because its slopes ran red with blood during the battle. The Scottish casualties were reportedly buried where the majority of them fell—at Scotpit Lane, marked on early maps as the Scots Pits. That makes sense, as it would have been difficult to move the bodies of the fallen to a different location.

Though history records the battle as a Scottish loss, David did achieve his alternative purpose of distracting

This monument in Northallerton commemorates the pivotal 1138 battle.

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TOMMY’S OTHER GUNS John Thompson’s namesake submachine gun became the stuff of legend, but his other firearms and ammunition innovations are nothing to sneeze at

By Michael O’Brien

John Thompson helped develop the M1903 Springfield rifle and variants, including sniper versions equipped with telescopic sights— like this camouflaged World War I example.

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The M1903 .30-06 “spitzer” round that Thompson approved may be the most widely produced ammunition ever made.

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rigadier General John T. Thompson was the inventor of the Thompson submachine gun, the iconic “Tommy gun” of so many gangster movies. Even people who are not historians, history buffs or gun enthusiasts give the Thompson recognition only a select few weapons earn. The Colt Model 1911, the Luger, the Uzi—the list is short.

One memorable namesake invention would be a fine legacy for most people, but in Thompson’s case it is a shame, because so much is left out. From ordnance officer during the Spanish-American War to developer of one of the most widely used rifle rounds in the world, Thompson was a giant in the manufacture of modern American military firearms. Only John Moses Browning had a hand in making more U.S. Army infantry weapons than Thompson.

William Crozier

John Thompson

munitions to be shipped to Cuba.

While Thompson was plowing through that herculean task, Lt. John Henry Parker, who’d been training infantrymen on machine guns, brought to his attention more than a dozen crates of Gatling guns idling on the docks. These early hand-cranked weapons were not on the manifest of items urgently needed in Cuba, but on his own authority Thompson resolved to ship them immediately. He also sent Parker with a letter recommending Shafter appoint him to set up a Gatling gun attachment. The Gatlings saved the day at the July 1 Battle of San Juan Heights, allowing Col. Theodore Roosevelt, his Rough Riders and fellow American soldiers to clear Kettle Hill and force the Spanish off adjacent San Juan Hill. For his wartime accomplishments 27-year-old Thompson was promoted to colonel of volunteers—the Army’s youngest at the time.

As veterans returned stateside, Thompson debriefed them about the weapons they’d used, and it became clear the Krag-Jorgensen rifles issued by the Army were inferior to the Mauser M1893 used by Spanish troops. On reviewing the findings, Chief of Ordnance Brig. Gen. William Crozier promoted Thompson to regular captain and assigned him to the Springfield Armory to come up with a solution.

When considering Thompson’s qualifications, it is instructive to know what Crozier thought about ordnance officers in general: The designing and constructing ordnance officer must be a mechanical engineer.…

The ordnance officer’s knowledge of engineering subjects must not be merely that of the liberally educated man…but that of the expert with details at his finger ends, and

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MORT KÜNSTLER (U.S. NATIONAL GUARD)

was the son of Army Lt. Col. James Thompson. Despite a childhood spent moving from post to post, John decided to follow in his father’s footsteps. He graduated 11th in West Point’s Class of 1882 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the 2nd U.S. Artillery. After attending engineering and artillery schools, he joined the Ordnance Department in 1890, earning a reputation as an intelligent and steady officer. At the April 1898 onset of the Spanish-American War he was a gunnery and ordnance instructor at West Point, but the War Department promoted him to lieutenant colonel of volunteers and appointed him chief ordnance officer for Maj. Gen. William Rufus “Pecos Bill” Shafter, commanding the V Corps landing in Cuba. To his disappointment Thompson was instead ordered to Tampa, Fla., to sort out the enormous tangle of materiel being shipped there from across the nation. He was the man for the job. Over the course of

PREVIOUS SPREAD: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; THIS PAGE, TOP: GAERTNER (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

Born on New Year’s Eve 1860, John Taliaferro Thompson the conflict he arranged for more than 18,000 tons of

he must have a specially sound mastery of principles, since he must oftentimes deduce the methods of their application to his art without the aid of the many handbooks and practical treatises which are available in the civil practice of the engineering profession.

MORT KÜNSTLER (U.S. NATIONAL GUARD)

PREVIOUS SPREAD: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; THIS PAGE, TOP: GAERTNER (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

The Krag-Jorgensen rifles used by U.S. troops in Cuba in 1898 were inferior to the Mauser M1893s used by the Spanish troops they fought.

Crozier himself had patented a number of inventions used by the Army before becoming its chief of ordnance.

As may be expected, Thompson did not make all the decisions by himself. Usually he was the lone ordnance officer on a board composed variously of line officers, civilian representatives of industry, and military and private designers. In the end no gun or cartridge was adopted without Crozier’s approval.

Then why credit Thompson with developing the weapons and ammunition listed herein? Thompson was Crozier’s representative, and no decisions were made without his sign-off. If the design failed in any way, there was no doubt who would get the blame. Similarly, he deserves credit for having contributed to so many successes.

With regard to the Krag, the first step Thompson and the ordnance board took was to develop a high-velocity round, a time-consuming effort in itself. But the breech

mechanism was not robust enough for the more powerful cartridge. A new rifle was called for.

After much reflection and hesitation, the board decided to pattern a rifle after the Mauser design. The decisionmakers were in good company, as in the forthcoming

The Gatling guns Thompson sent to Cuba saved the day at the Battle of San Juan Heights world wars virtually every participant army would rely on a rifle owing something to the classic Mauser. Reinventing the wheel takes time and money, and the Mauser was a proven winner, so that’s where Thompson started.

His design, however, proved too obvious a copy, and the federal government ultimately had to pay a quarter million dollars in royalties to Mauser for copyright violations—not just for the new rifle but also for the ammunition clip and bullet. Unlike many government purchases, it turned out to be money well spent.

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Combat in the Philippines showed the U.S. Army–issued .38-caliber round was too light Hyperbole aside, leading the design team for the M1903 had been an impressive notch in Thompson’s belt. That said, the cartridge he helped develop for the M1903 would have an even more lasting and widespread impact.

The Krag’s smokeless cartridge was underpowered, so Thompson supervised the design and production of

M1903 Springfield

Thompson was not yet done producing military classics.

An unexpected outcome of the Spanish-American War was the acquisition of the Philippines, followed by a major uprising against U.S. rule of those far-off islands.

In 1892 the Army had switched from the .45-caliber M1873 Colt revolver to the .38-caliber Colt M1892, but combat experience in the Philippines showed that rounds from the latter were too light to stop a charging opponent, particularly if that opponent were a suicidal Moro warrior

M1917 Enfield

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TOP: BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES); BOTTOM LEFT: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; BOTTOM RIGHT: GERALD R. FORD PRESIDENTIAL MUSEUM

The resulting weapon, the M1903 Springfield, was the Army’s standard-issue infantry rifle until 1936, though it was partially supplanted in 1917–18 by an Enfield design midwifed by Thompson. Crozier was impressed with the result. “The standard rifle of the American service, popularly known as the Springfield, is believed to have no superior,” he crowed after the war.

One wonders what the designer of the Mauser would have thought of that.

the improved, roundnose .30-03, which debuted in 1903.

Even as it was being issued, however, European armies were switching to more aerodynamically efficient pointed “spitzer” bullets. The U.S. Army had to follow suit and once again copied a Mauser design a little too closely.

Complicating matters further, the new type of round necessitated modification of the M1903, with a shorter barrel at the breech and a resized chamber. Meanwhile, work continued on an acceptable cartridge.

Approved in 1906, that cartridge was the .30-06, commonly called the “thirty aught-six.” The round and its derivatives may constitute the most widely produced ammunition ever made. Despite the introduction of a copper jacket, further aerodynamic refinement in 1926 and multiple variations in propellant composition, it essentially remains the same round to which Thompson gave his stamp of approval.

TOP LEFT: NPS PHOTO; TOP RIGHT: PICTORIAL PRESS LTD. (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); BOTTOM LEFT: MILITARY HISTORY (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); BOTTOM RIGHT: MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Above: Designer John Garand holds his namesake 1936 M1 Garand, the first Army rifle since 1903 Thompson had not approved. Right: Thompson helped John Browning (here with his M1895 machine gun) develop the .45 ACP round.

TOP: BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES); BOTTOM LEFT: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; BOTTOM RIGHT: GERALD R. FORD PRESIDENTIAL MUSEUM

TOP LEFT: NPS PHOTO; TOP RIGHT: PICTORIAL PRESS LTD. (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); BOTTOM LEFT: MILITARY HISTORY (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); BOTTOM RIGHT: MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY

hopped up on painkilling drugs. As a stopgap the Army dusted off its surplus .45s for distribution to the troops.

Crozier then tasked his right-hand man, Thompson, with finding a viable replacement.

For this assignment Thompson’s research took an unusual turn. In 1904 he and Medical Corps Maj. Louis La Garde, a specialist in wound ballistics, traveled to Chicago. There they visited a cattle stockyard and spent two days shooting dozens of steers with assorted weapons and calibers of ammunition to establish which was most effective. They also fired rounds into human cadavers.

Though grotesque by present-day standards, the tests were conducted with the intention of saving American lives on the battlefield. As a starting point Thompson and La Garde decided the new sidearm would have to be .45-caliber and hold at least six cartridges. An impressed Crozier promoted Thompson to regular major and placed him in charge of a new Small Arms Division responsible for selecting a pistol.

Armed with a mandate and no war on the horizon, Thompson spent the next six years working with such known designers and manufacturers as Colt, Savage and Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken (employer of one Georg Johann Luger). Working for Colt at the time was John Moses Browning, whose resume of brilliant pistol, rifle, shotgun, machine gun and ammunition designs gave him an obvious edge over his competitors.

The contest came down to a 1910 endurance test between Browning’s Colt design and one from Savage.

In the end the Savage suffered dozens of breakdowns, the Colt none at all. The next spring the Army adopted Browning’s semiautomatic pistol as the Colt M1911.

It would serve as the standard Army sidearm for 75 years —a record unparalleled since the flintlock era.

At the same time Browning designed a .45-caliber rimless cartridge for the M1911. Though it started out as a .41-caliber round for a cavalry gun, troopers wanted more stopping power, and he upped the cartridge to .45.

With minor modifications, the Army adopted the .45 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol) in August 1911. Browning had designed it as a low-velocity round, as high-velocity bullets tend to zip right through their unfortunate targets, while low-velocity rounds are likely to cavitate when they hit and cause more damage. The .45 ACP was later used in both the Thompson submachine gun and the M3 “Grease Gun” intended to replace the Tommy.

Thompson M1928A1 submachine gun

Thompson hefts a stockless M1921 “antibandit” gun during a 1922 sales exhibition.

With the M1903 Springfield, the “thirty aught-six” cartridge, the Colt M1911 and the .45 ACP round, Thompson had set the Army on the path to having modern, hard-hitting small arms that would serve soldiers well for years to come. By 1913 he’d risen to the rank of colonel.

And then he retired.

By 1914 Thompson had been a soldier for 32 years. He decided to hang up his sword and land a bigger paycheck, though with the onset of World War I he felt compelled to use his technical knowledge and experience to help defeat the Central Powers. As long as his country sat out the war, the best way he could participate was outside the Army. He was in luck. Remington Arms hired him to be chief engineer at an enormous new factory they were building in Eddystone, Penn., to manufacture .303-caliber Enfield rifles for the British. The Eddystone Arsenal was the largest factory in the wartime United States, turning out nearly 2 million rifles between 1915 and ’19.

Thompson did not make it to 1919 with Remington.

On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Ger-

Colt M1911 45

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WSC’s Tommy

the rims overlapping in the right sequence to avoid potential jams. The British had been about to switch to a rimless cartridge in 1914, but then the war broke out and forced them to crank out the rifle and ammunition they had in hand. “The ammunition which it fired was out of the question for us,” Assistant Secretary of War Benedict Crowell said. “Not only was it inferior, but since we expected to continue to build the Springfields at the government arsenals, we should, if we adopted the Enfield as it was, be forced to produce two sizes of rifle ammunition.”

Thompson had been on the team that designed and built the M1903, and he’d been the engineer in charge of manufacturing hundreds of thousands of Enfields. Surely, he’d know which course was best? He did. He wanted neither.

In his opinion both rifles were all but obsolete. The simplest solution was to update the Enfield and rechamber it to use the .30-06. Best of all, he told Crozier, he could have it ready for production in four months. He did.

Thus the M1917 Enfield was born. Within a year Eddystone and other factories were turning out 10,000 M1917s a month. Thompson was promoted to brigadier general and was later awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. “The decision to modify the Enfield was one of the great decisions of the executive prosecution of the war,” Crowell recalled, “all honor to the men who made it.”

Interestingly, the Army never adopted the M1917 as its standard-issue rifle. The M1903 carried on in that capacity until replaced in 1936 by another outstanding design, the M1 Garand—the first Army rifle since 1903 not to have Thompson’s fingerprints all over it. As the

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LEFT: BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES); RIGHT: CPL. CHRIS STONE, U.S. MARINE CORPS

many, and with that Ordnance Chief Crozier recalled his most trusted aide to uniform and gave him a task for which he was uniquely qualified—jump-starting rifle production.

“I called Colonel Thompson back into active service,” Crozier recalled, “and placed him in charge of small arms and small arms ammunition, and had the benefit of his expert and especially well-informed advice.”

Thompson had a couple of options. He could simply ramp up production of the M1903 by increasing capacity at existing facThis photo of British tories and building huge new facilities like Prime Minister Winston he had for the .303 Enfield. Unfortunately, S. Churchill holding an there was nothing simple about it. The arM1928 during a July 1940 inspection of troops near senals already producing the M1903 would never be able to keep up with demand, while Hartlepool was used for propaganda purposes by new factories are expensive and take time. both the British and the There would be a minimum six-month lag Germans. The latter before production could start, and none portrayed him as a typical would reach full capacity for 18 months.

“Hollywood gangster.”

On the other hand, the largest rifle factory in the world was already cranking out guns for the British in the United States by the trainload. The Army could just adopt the .303 Enfield. But the problem was the .303 was just that. While the Army had millions of rounds of .30-06 in stock, it had no .303. As a final blow, by universal consensus the .303 was not as good a round as the .30-06. It was weaker, and the rimmed cartridge had to be carefully loaded into the Enfield’s internal box magazine,

FROM TOP: U.S. MARINE CORPS HISTORY DIVISION; NEIL HANSHAW (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS

A Marine on Okinawa employs his M1A1 against a Japanese sniper on Okinawa in 1945. The .45 ACP round (below) proved highly lethal at close range.

The Tommy gun and the Colt M1911 both soldiered on long after their creators passed away, seeing use with the Viet Cong (left) and U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, among others.

LEFT: BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES); RIGHT: CPL. CHRIS STONE, U.S. MARINE CORPS

FROM TOP: U.S. MARINE CORPS HISTORY DIVISION; NEIL HANSHAW (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS

Garand only partially replaced the M1903 at the start of World War II, Springfield ramped up production of the latter out of necessity until enough Garands were available. Both the M1903 and M1917 soldiered on in steadily diminishing numbers through war’s end, the M1903 lingering even longer as a sniper rifle.

Ironically, the final resting place of most M1917 Enfields was Great Britain. Before the United States was jolted into World War II, the Army had geared up to make millions of M1 Garands, believing they wouldn’t need all those old bolt-action rifles in surplus. Army brass sold many such M1917s to the British during their 1940 invasion scare.

More than 700,000 were ultimately issued to its Home Guard, the citizen militia fondly recalled year’s later in the BBC sitcom Dad’s Army. Unfortunately, the U.S. version of the rifle caused the British the same kind of headaches adoption of the .303 Enfield would have caused Americans. They were forced to allot scarce money and even scarcer shipping space to import millions of .03-06 rounds from across the pond. At least you could load an M1917 in the dark without setting yourself up for a jam.

The M1917 is not just a historical footnote. “Sportsterized” surplus rifles proved so popular among hunters and target shooters that Remington rolled out more than 25,000 Model 30 civilian versions. These, along with surplus military models sold to the general public, are still used for hunting and target shooting. Original M1903s are being sold (and some fired) as we speak. It is the most revered and collected U.S. Army rifle ever made.

So it should be for all of Tommy’s other guns, as well as the ammunition he designed for them. By the end of World War I Thompson was already deep into the process that would result in his “Trench Broom” being produced, first in trickles, then by the hundreds of thousands as the world went to war once again. The Thompson submachine gun was the first and only gun he’d designed outside the Ordnance Department, but he used the same

The M1903 carried on until replaced in 1936 by the outstanding M1 Garand techniques he had on all his other projects, and it enjoyed the same success. But while the famed Tommy gun may overshadow John Thompson’s many other achievements, they are neither gone nor forgotten. MH Michael O’Brien is a graduate of the University of Kansas whose lifelong interest in history was sparked by his Army officer father’s extensive library on the subject. For further reading he recommends Tommy Gun: How General Thompson’s Submachine Gun Wrote History, by Bill Yenne; The Thompson Submachine Gun: From Prohibition Chicago to World War II,

by Martin Pegler; and Ordnance and the World War,

by Gen. William A. Crozier.

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TEMPLE OF DOOM SS leader Heinrich Himmler transformed a fabled German cathedral into a Nazi shrine

By Zita Ballinger Fletcher

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Founded in 936, Quedlinburg Abbey became the scene of arcane Nazi rituals when ReichsfĂźhrer-SS Himmler grew obsessed with a legendary German king.

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I

n 1936 Adolf Hitler’s Schutzstaffel—the dreaded SS—began transforming a medieval castle abbey associated with Germany’s first king into a Nazi worship center. The shrine to the Führer and National Socialism was in the scenic town of Quedlinburg, amid the northern foothills of Saxony’s Harz Mountains.

A region of dark crags and misty mountains well known for its folktales of witchcraft and demons, the range gained an even more chilling reputation when in his play Faust Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called it a gathering place of evil spirits. The SS seizure of Quedlinburg Abbey from its congregation ensured the region became an epicenter of Nazi occultism. The twisted transformation that unfolded would see a battle for a church, a hunt for a missing royal skeleton, ghostly candlelit ceremonies in an ancient crypt and the transformation of a medieval church into a temple of Nazi terror.

Since the death of Heinrich der Vogelfänger (Henry the legend could be adapted to Nazi narratives—for example, Heinrich’s unification of Germany, wars with Eastern countries and rugged Nordic attributes. Himmler referred to the king as the founder of Germany’s first “Reich” and a “Führer personality.”

“He had the knowledge that the German people… must look beyond their own clan and their own space so as to align themselves with greater things,” Himmler said of Heinrich in his address at the 1936 millennial ceremony. “His ‘Slav wars’ found the first step beyond the Elbe for German colonization.…We present-day Germans perceive his meaning with complete clarity.” Himmler also used the king’s myth to validate genocidal SS policies.

“He had the courage to create unpopular politics and had the wherewithal and the power to see them through.”

Himmler’s obsession with Heinrich—whose first name he shared—grew to such an extent that SS members

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BUNDESARCHIV (2)

Heinrich der Vogelfänger

PREVIOUS SPREAD: MAURITIUS IMAGES GMBH (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); LEFT: DOROTHEUM, VIENNA

Fowler) in 936, the details of his life have fallen into obscurity. The first king of a unified German state, Heinrich was popular in his day for having waged wars against Eastern European neighbors. Despite being married to a devout Christian, he refused the traditional church anointing of his coronation.

German poets, playwrights and nationalists have since romanticized Heinrich in their works. The rugged king— known to have been an avid hunter—has a leading role in Richard Wagner’s famed opera Lohengrin, appearing in all three acts. The seat of Heinrich’s power was the mountain town of Quedlinburg, where, like many German rulers, he established his imperial residence in a hilltop castle.

After his death the widowed Queen Mathilde founded an abbey church adjoining the castle and dedicated to St. Servatius. The famed king was said to have been buried within a shadowy rock-hewn crypt beneath the abbey.

Heinrich rose again to the forefront of German national consciousness in 1936 when circumstances brought him to the attention of the notorious Heinrich Himmler. Formerly a frustrated Bavarian chicken farmer, as Reichsführer-SS—head of all internal and external police forces —Himmler was among the most powerful members of the Nazi elite. He oversaw the regime’s infamous mass atrocities, including the political purges, conBerlin centration camps, forced labor, medQuedlinburg ical experimentation and genocide.

GERMANY A racist extremist, he had fantasized about conquests against foreignFrankfurt ers since his youth as an agronomy student in the early 1920s. A former Catholic, Himmler became obsessed with mysticism and created his own neo-pagan religion. His interest in both racial supremacy and mysticism prompted his fascination with Heinrich and Quedlinburg Abbey.

In a secret report dated Oct. 24, 1935, Hermann Reischle, head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office, informed Himmler that July 2, 1936, would mark the millennial anniversary of Heinrich’s death. “The thousand-year anniversary within the coming year is, from a propaganda standpoint, virtually a godsend for us,” Reischle wrote. Himmler instantly recognized the king’s

claimed Himmler viewed himself as the mythical monarch’s reincarnation, asking associates to address him as “King Heinrich.”

Himmler was quick to stake his claim on Heinrich’s burial place. He created an SS task force to manage affairs at Quedlinburg Abbey and the crypt beneath it. In 1936 members’ initial job was to inspect and prepare the place for the millennial event, dubbed the Heinrichsfeier— “Heinrich’s celebration.”

The task force had a ceremonial staircase constructed outside the abbey to accommodate marchers and divided the town into 10 sections for organizing the marches.

Meanwhile, crews comprising some 14,000 men sorted out an estimated 11 miles of cable to accommodate broadcast media. Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach “consecrated” flags representing Germany’s children. Chief SS propagandist Gunter D’Alquen described the event:

BUNDESARCHIV (2)

PREVIOUS SPREAD: MAURITIUS IMAGES GMBH (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); LEFT: DOROTHEUM, VIENNA

The streets were decorated with touching care, the houses painted and wreathed, when on July 2, 1936, the long column of guests of the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, first went out through the streets of the town to the old royal courtyard.…Ascending to the castle among the closely packed files of men were the soldiers in black, and the sun shimmered in their bare weapons and polished steel helmets.

The widely publicized ceremony drew many figures who would soon become notorious—Reich intelligence director Reinhard Heydrich, the “Butcher of Prague”; Robert Ley, head of Germany’s central slave labor organization; Wilhelm Frick, Hitler’s minister of the interior; August Heissmayer, concentration camp inspector and head of SS-Totenkopfverbände (Death’s Head) squads; Karl Wolff, Himmler’s chief of staff; Hans Frank, the eventual governor-general of Nazi-occupied Poland, and many others. The SS and Quedlinburg city officials made enthusiastic plans for annual Heinrichsfeiern.

Yet a yearly festive ceremony was not enough for the obsessed SS leader. Himmler wanted the cathedral transformed into a Nazi shrine. Laying the groundwork, he attacked Christianity in his 1936 speech, claiming it was a harmful foreign influence on Germany. His views found their way into the media, and Nazi publications expressed support for the pagan transformation of the abbey. A propaganda rant published in a 1938 edition of the newspaper Der Mitteldeutsche alleged Christianity had “falsified the cathedral.…It was made into an un-German expression of compassion.…But does this world ever progress through compassion and mercy?”

The SS formally notified the mayor of Quedlinburg that certain “VIPs” found the church crypt in “unworthy condition,” incapable of producing a “feeling of inner holiness.” The SS obtained loans at special rates from

Top: The interior of St. Servatius Cathedral (as Quedlinburg Abbey was also known) before the SS remodeled it into a neo-pagan temple. Above: Thought to be the resting place of King Heinrich, the ancient shadowy crypt beneath the sanctuary became a focus of Nazi occult ceremonies.

Dresdner Bank—the official Nazi Party bank, which drew funds in part from confiscated Jewish property—to finance a massive reconstruction. The total budget available amounted to 250 million Reichsmarks, of which an estimated 13 million was spent before the end of World War II. Forced laborers from concentration camps performed the construction work.

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Heinrich Himmler

Fake Runes

While preparing for the 1936 ceremony, Himmler’s Quedlinburg task force came to the rude realization that King Heinrich—by then styled as Germany’s “first Führer”—was not actually buried in the abbey crypt. On the opening of the vault SS officials were bewildered to discover only the sarcophagus of Heinrich’s beloved wife and queen, Mathilde. In the spot where the legendary

And finally I must lay bare a truth that is heartwrenching and shameful for our people—the bones of the great German Führer no longer rest in their burial place. Where they are, we do not know. We can only ponder over it. It could be that his loyal troop of followers took his holy body to a dignified but unknown place—or it could also be that the sinister, unquenchable hatred of political dignitaries scattered his ashes to all the winds.

The king’s empty resting place was outfitted with a wrought-iron grille and oak wreaths, framed by iron chandeliers and overseen by rotating pairs of SS guards in an “eternal watch of honor.” The crypt became the focal point of “hours of reverence”—a worship service mimicking Catholic Holy Hours before a tabernacle complete with candlelight and meditation. Members of the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls often participated in these ceremonies, and SS recruits swore “blood oaths” in the crypt.

Meanwhile, Himmler ordered his minions to find the king’s missing corpse. An article in the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps declared the SS would “sieve every inch of soil” to locate the royal remains. Scrambling to please their impatient leader, SS troops found themselves performing amateur archaeology work. They first tore up the abbey floors in search of the king’s tomb, creating debris and unearthing a variety of skeletons, including the remains of a small child and other unidentified individuals.

During the search for Heinrich’s lost body the SS also cracked open the sarcophagus of Queen Mathilde, thinking perhaps the couple might have been buried together,

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LEFT: ULLSTEIN BILD (GRANGER); RIGHT: GRANGER

The SS stripped the cathedral interior of Christian imagery and draped the walls with royal blue cloth. They tossed the altar and pulpit into an outdoor courtyard and replaced the central stained-glass window with a transparent one emblazoned with a Nazi eagle. Urns containing soil samples collected from all regions of Germany lined the sanctuary. Himmler demanded that wooden shields decorated with medieval runes be hung on the walls. In fact, these were local “house marks” used in the town as property symbols. Black SS flags stood out from the walls, while candles and stark lighting created visual drama. Himmler envisioned a red granite stone altar depicting King Heinrich and bearing heraldic symbols. He also planned to install The stylized lighting bolt “Heinrich stations” in a perverse imitation letters that represented of the Catholic Stations of the Cross. the SS in Schutzstaffel “This is no longer a church in an ordi(“protection squadron”) were drawn from German nary sense—this is a temple, a fest-hall of nationalist interpretaa strong, almighty creator,” D’Alquen wrote tions of a Norse solar rune. in a tribute published by the Völkischer Nazis reinterpreted the symbol, known in German Beobachter, the Nazi Party newspaper.

There was only one problem with the as the doppelte Siegrune, to signify “victory.” new shrine—it was missing its idol.

king was thought to have rested, the Nazis found only an empty shaft.

At the conclusion of his 1936 address Himmler was forced to admit to captivated attendees that the great king everyone had come to honor was not actually there:

TOP LEFT: ULLSTEIN BILD (GRANGER); TOP RIGHT: BUNDESARCHIV; LEFT: WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

Above right: Himmler (at center, in black uniform) and other Nazi notables pass through an honor guard of SS troops on arrival at the cathedral for the July 1, 1936, opening of the first annual Heinrichsfeier celebration.

LEFT: ULLSTEIN BILD (GRANGER); RIGHT: GRANGER

TOP LEFT: ULLSTEIN BILD (GRANGER); TOP RIGHT: BUNDESARCHIV; LEFT: WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

but the coffin contained only the queen. Running out of ideas, the SS began to excavate a portion of the town cemetery, a move that upset local citizens.

It was not the first time Himmler had ordered coffins pried open in search of noble remains. In 1935 he’d become fascinated with another Heinrich—the duke known as the Lion of Saxony—and demanded to view the ruler’s bones. However, when that coffin was opened, Himmler was horrified to behold a slight skeleton with hip damage instead of the mighty, leonine figure he’d anticipated. According to a 2000 article in Die Zeit magazine, German authorities investigating that exhumation in the 1970s determined the Nazis had accidentally opened the coffin of the duke’s wife.

With Himmler looming over them, the desperate SS “archaeologists” searching for Heinrich the Fowler were hard-pressed to solve the problem of the missing king.

The search became ever more frenzied as the 1937 festival approached. Just in time, in a seeming miracle, the SS men announced they had found a decorated royal corpse they were certain was King Heinrich’s.

The SS organized an elaborate reinterment ceremony in 1937. Placing the body within a massive carved stone sarcophagus decorated with runes, they held a midnight

Above left: Civilians pack the streets of Quedlinburg for the opening ceremonies of the first Heinrichsfreier ceremony. Above: In the cathedral itself Himmler and other VIPs render a mass salute.

ritual in the candlelit crypt accompanied by suitably austere organ music.

“Now King Heinrich has his eternal peace,” declared a July 8, 1937, article in Das Schwarze Korps. “An old sacrilege is expiated! An old shame is absolved! According to his wishes, the king lies to the left of his beloved

The desperate SS men were hard-pressed to solve the problem of the missing king wife, and no one will ever again dare to disturb his peace!

We are proud and happy with our work.”

Yet no discovery had been made. The bones buried in the stone sarcophagus did not belong to the fabled Heinrich. Not until after the war would that well-guarded secret be revealed.

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‘I felt like I was in a junk room,’ Pastor Hein wrote. ‘They have made it into a den of thieves’ tion” over the building. A subsequent SS order further stipulated, “Members of the cathedral congregation are no longer allowed to enter the crypt. The keys to the crypt and the treasury will be received by Himmler.”

In response the congregation sought assistance from Protestant authorities, including church representatives in Berlin. Leading their efforts was Pastor Rudolf Hein, who wrote the following impassioned letter on Jan. 28, 1938:

The letter, cosigned by sacristans and the abbey bookkeeper, was a bold stand against Himmler, as signatories risked severe punishment for defying the Nazi state. At a meeting on February 5 the church council resolved never to surrender control of the abbey to Himmler. However, the very next day an SS officer demanded the keys to the sanctuary, underscoring that disobedience would be tantamount to “resistance to government authority.”

The congregation understandably surrendered the keys.

The SS punctuated its victory by raising the Nazi flag from the cathedral tower, its central swastika illuminated at night by the beam of a spotlight. Members of the congregation were subsequently placed under surveillance.

The police even attended church services, parsing the pastor’s sermons for incriminating statements.

Congregants held their last Christian service in the cathedral that Easter. Pastor Hein vented his outrage in his diary. “On April 8 I had to conduct a wedding at the lower altar by rearranged church pews strewn halfway in the central aisle,” he wrote. “I felt like I was in a junk room.…They have made it into a den of thieves.”

Afterward, the congregation was expelled, and entrance to the cathedral required special permission from the SS. Such restrictions did not end opposition to the cathedral’s Nazi makeover, however.

Uncomfortable with the site’s Christian origins, Himmler set about rewriting its past. He had the uniformed

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TOP RIGHT: INTERFOTO (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); BELOW: PICTURE ALLIANCE (GETTY IMAGES); BOTTOM: IMAGE PROFESSIONALS GMBH (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

The townspeople of Quedlinburg had lived in isolation for centuries, and those living there in the 1930s were displeased with the upheaval the SS brought to their community. The anger and resentment engendered by the confiscation of their abbey and destruction wrought by subsequent Nazi “renovations” were further exacerbated by the SS excavations in the town cemetery.

In June 1937 local authorities announced they wished to “entrust” the abbey to Himmler as a “sanctuary of the German nation,” a move enthusiastically supported by the mayor. But many citizens, particularly the cathedral’s Protestant congregation, strongly opposed such a designation and sent letters of complaint to Third Reich officials.

On December 18 the Reich Ministry for Religious Affairs claimed the congregation had “no legal jurisdic-

[The] community of Quedlinburg, to which a portion of the church community belongs, reacts with deepest outrage to the fact that the Reichsführer-SS wants to take ownership of the cathedral. We ask the General Church Council, in the interest of our cathedral community and the entire Protestant Christian community of Germany, to put up the fiercest resistance against this.

LEFT: NEW YORK TIMES CO. (GETTY IMAGES); RIGHT: KULTUR- UND HEIMATVEREIN, QUEDLINBURG

Above: Members of the Hitler Youth often participated in Heinrichsfeiern.

Above right: Quedlinburg came through World War II relatively unscathed, though bomb damage prompted shortening of one of the cathedral towers.

SS men who guided tourists and curious foreigners around the abbey present a Nazi version of its history. On Aug. 14, 1939, the cathedral was visited by an ecumenical group of some 120 tourists, including 20 Swedes. According to a contemporary SS report the tourists asked a “flurry of questions” about why the pulpit and crucifixes had been removed. When the SS guide launched into a speech on Nazi mythology, some tourists challenged and heckled him, while others declared they were interested in architecture, not in being “converted to paganism.” The guide lost his composure when an elderly woman in the group removed and cleaned her false teeth inside the crypt, an “indecent act” for which the woman was reprimanded.

For his trouble, the guide was relieved of his duties.

TOP RIGHT: INTERFOTO (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); BELOW: PICTURE ALLIANCE (GETTY IMAGES); BOTTOM: IMAGE PROFESSIONALS GMBH (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

LEFT: NEW YORK TIMES CO. (GETTY IMAGES); RIGHT: KULTUR- UND HEIMATVEREIN, QUEDLINBURG

Though Himmler had intended the Heinrichsfeiern to be annual events, they ended with the outbreak of war in September 1939. Regardless, the SS continued to oversee the abbey and town, and bodies of prisoners from the nearby Langenstein-Zwieberge concentration camp were later trucked to Quedlinburg for incineration in the local crematorium. Not until April 11, 1945, was the camp was liberated, by troops of the U.S. 8th Armored and 83rd Infantry divisions. According to an April 20 article in Stars and Stripes, the gaunt prisoners alive to greet their liberators had been surviving only on water and potato peels.

The cathedral itself survived the war intact, with only minor bomb damage to one of its towers. Himmler had cached its relics and treasures, and several of those— including illuminated manuscripts and various liturgical objects—were in turn stolen from their hiding place

by U.S. Army Lt. Joe T. Meador. The items were eventually traced to Meador’s heirs and, following a series of lawsuits, returned to Germany in 1991.

Pastor Hein reassumed control of the cathedral, which was re-sanctified on June 3, 1945. After the war Quedlinburg became part of East Germany, whose communist government frowned on religious services and kept parishioners under surveillance.

On Feb. 25, 1948, experts opened the stone sarcophagus the SS had venerated as the resting place of Heinrich the Fowler.

On forensic examination the skeleton inside turned out to be that of a woman. The unidentified remains were reinterred weeks later in a different location, and the sarcophagus was later removed. While some theorized the bones might have belonged to a prioress of the medieval convent, most experts concluded that, due to the obvious gender of the skeleton, the Nazis had deliberately used a counterfeit. The only certainty is that an unknown woman had received the burial of a pagan king. MH

Royal Myth An original royal seal (top) and a modernday replica depict King Heinrich I as portrayed in medieval times. Regarded as the first ruler of a unified Germany, Heinrich became the subject of myths that Heinrich Himmler and the SS readily exploited.

Zita Ballinger Fletcher is Military History’s senior editor.

For further reading she recommends Endtime Warriors: Ideology and Terror of the SS, edited by Wulff E. Brebeck; The Gestapo: A History of Horror, by Jacques Delarue; and Treasure Hunt: A New York Times Reporter Tracks the Quedlinburg Hoard, by William H. Honan.

The counterfeit skeleton and stone sarcophagus at the king’s grave were removed from the crypt after the war.

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It has been called ‘the first war we lost,’ but South Korea’s very existence suggests otherwise

By Jon Guttman

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W

Marines climb scaling ladders to secure a beachhead at Inchon, South Korea, on Sept. 15, 1950. The assault, a gamble by General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, took the North Koreans by surprise, catching them between that force and U.N. forces counterattacking from the Pusan Perimeter the next day. The battle marked the first of three dramatic turnabouts in the first year of the Korean War.

hen North Korea sought to reunify with South Korea by force on June 25, 1950, a small peninsula in East Asia turned into an international hot spot amid the steadily intensifying Cold War. The United Nations Security Council roundly condemned the invasion (while the Soviet Union was boycotting the council and thus in no position to veto it). Military contingents from the United States and 20 other nations joined forces with the Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) in what President Harry S. Truman termed a “police action.”

The communist Korean People’s Army (KPA) overran the South Korean capital of Seoul on June 28, and by August the ROKA and the U.S. Eighth Army held one-tenth of the country with the city of Pusan at their backs. There, however, they regained the initiative. On September 15 General of the Army Douglas MacArthur made an end run to land American and South Korean troops at Inchon. The next day U.N. forces broke out of the Pusan Perimeter, and the KPA began disintegrating. Seoul was retaken within 10 days, and MacArthur pushed on into North Korea.

However, on October 19 the nascent People’s Republic of China, perceiving the imminent collapse of North Korea as an existential threat, intervened with its 250,000-strong People’s Volunteer Army, which by December drove back U.N. forces. Seoul fell again on Jan. 4, 1951, but U.N. firepower took a heavy toll on the Chinese. On May 20 U.S. forces under Gen. Matthew Ridgway launched a counteroffensive that retook Seoul by midJune and drove communist forces back north of the 38th parallel. The war continued there in a bloody stalemate until all sides agreed to an armistice and cease-fire on July 27, 1953. The participants have yet to sign a treaty ending the Korean War. While some Americans regard Korea as “the first war we lost,” the thriving Republic of Korea suggests the United States and the U.N. achieved their objectives. China also got what it wanted by preserving North Korea as a buffer zone, leaving the latter nation as the conflict’s only outright loser, having failed in its goal to reunify the peninsula. MH

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KOREA

A

B

C

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Military forces from 21 nations joined South Korea in what Harry Truman termed a ‘police action’

D E

F

A Marines withdrawing from North Korea’s Chosin Reservoir on Dec. 26, 1950, attack a Chinese position just hit by a U.S. Navy F4U-5 Corsair fighter-bomber. B Confronting the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army, on the offensive since late November 1950, a flamethrower team of the 1st Marine Division flushes enemy troops from hiding on May 5, 1951. U.N. forces were again on the counterattack by June, only to grind to a halt mid-month. C Corsairs return to the aircraft carrier USS Boxer as an HO2S helicopter hovers over the flight deck on Sept. 4, 1951. Much of the air support during the war was based on U.S., British and Australian carriers.

D Backed by an M26 Pershing tank, Marines advance into North Korea in 1950. On June 25, 10 days after the landings at Inchon, they retook Seoul. The Chinese People’s Volunteer Army would drive them and the other U.N. forces back in the fall. E American airborne troops and supplies parachute to frozen ground during a 1951 U.N. operation. F Navy LCVPs (landing craft, vehicle, personnel) carrying Republic of Korea marines approach North Korea’s Sin Do Island. Though initially outmatched by their communist counterparts, the South Koreans ultimately made a critical contribution toward reversing two enemy onslaughts within a year.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; A, B: U.S. MARINE CORPS HISTORY DIVISION (2); C, E, F: NATIONAL ARCHIVES (3); D: DAVID DOUGLAS DUNCAN PAPERS AND PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTION, HARRY RANSOM CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

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KOREA

Korean War JUNE 1950–JULY 1953

1,780,000 SOUTH KOREAN AND U.N. FORCES

170,927

G

KILLED

566,434 WOUNDED; 32,585 MISSING; 373,599 CIVILIANS KILLED, 229,625 CIVILIANS WOUNDED; 387,744 CIVILIANS ABDUCTED/MISSING

3,042,000 NORTH KOREAN, CHINESE AND SOVIET FORCES

589,000 KILLED

686,500 WOUNDED; 145,000 MISSING; 1,550,000 CIVILIANS KILLED OR WOUNDED

H

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I K J

K

G American F-86 Sabres patrol the stretch of the Manchurian border known as “MiG Alley” for Soviet-built MiG-15s. Although the main protagonists in these first jet-versus-jet duels were matched technically, communist pilots varied in skill—ranging from crack Soviet “honchos” to a later wave of less well-trained Russians, as well as Chinese and Korean pilots lacking adequate training. The result was a claimed overall shootdown ratio of 10-to-1 in the Sabres’ favor. H Australian soldiers ride an M4A3E8 Sherman tank 50 miles north of the North Korean capital of Pyongyang during the U.N. advance in 1950. Other national contingents also fought with distinction during the conflict. I Chinese and North Korean soldiers celebrate what they regard as a victory on learning of the armistice in July 1953. While the North Koreans’ combat doctrine was similar to that of their Soviet patrons, China used strategy and tactics developed during its recently concluded civil war. J A South Korean refugee carrying her brother pauses in front of a stalled M48 Patton tank in June 1951. Civilians of the North and South were killed at a higher percentage than in World War II or the Vietnam War. K A U.S. soldier comforts another whose buddy was killed, as a medic fills out casualty tags, on North Korea’s Haktang-ni high ground in 1950.

G, K: NATIONAL ARCHIVES (2); H, I, J: HULTON DEUTSCH, SOVFOTO, INTERIM ARCHIVES (GETTY IMAGES)(3)

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‘ABLEST SOLDIER OF HIS AGE’ Frederick Schomberg fought staunch enemies and former allies alike during his six-decade European military career

By David T. Zabecki

By the time Schomberg posed for his official portrait as a marshal of France, he was already a veteran of the Dutch, Swedish and Portuguese armies.

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Bearing Meinhard Schomberg’s coat of arms on its hilt, this sword was likely carried by an officer of Schomberg’s Horse at the Battle of the Boyne.

T

he military profession today is a matter of nationality. Modern-era soldiers spend their careers serving the country of their citizenship. It wasn’t always that way. In centuries past the international brotherhood of arms was almost a nationality in itself. Highly skilled professional officers routinely crossed national borders to offer their services where political or religious convictions took them—or where pay was better.

Even by the standards of those earlier times Germany’s Frederick Schomberg had a breathtakingly diverse military career, including service in six different armies and high command in five of those.

Along the way he became a naturalized citizen of the Netherlands, England, France, Portugal and Brandenburg. He served in eight major wars, and his resume reads like an outline of 17th century military history.

Meinhard Schomberg

old and raised by his grandmother. His education was sponsored by family friends, including the elector of the Palatinate, Friedrich V—the “Winter King” of Bohemia, over whom the Thirty Years’ War started.

In 1633, at age 17, Schönberg joined the army of Prince Frederick Henry of Orange and participated in the siege of Rheinberg amid the 1568–1648 Eighty Years’ War. The following year he joined the Swedish army in Germany and served in the Thirty Years’ War on the Protestant side. In 1635 he purchased a commission as a company commander of German infantry in the French army. A year later he fought at the siege of Dôle. In March 1637, at age 21, he led an unsuccessful attempt to relieve the siege of the Rhine River fortress at Ehrenbreitstein, then led a force of some 8,000 German troops into East Friesland.

After fighting a duel in which he and his opponent were wounded, Schönberg left military service and withdrew to manage his family estate near Darmstadt. In 1638 he married first cousin Johanna Elisabeth von Schönberg, with whom he would sire six sons, Otto (born 1639), Friedrich (born 1640), Meinhard (born 1641), Heinrich (born 1643), Karl (born 1645) and Wilhelm (born 1647).

In 1639 Schönberg rejoined the army of Orange as a lieutenant and served through the 1648 close of the Thirty Years’ War. Appointed a gentleman of the court of William II, Prince of Orange, in 1650, Schönberg supported William’s ultimately failed coup to gain ascendancy over the regents of the United Provinces of the Netherlands.

When the prince died suddenly from smallpox that November, Schönberg was forced to flee.

Despite being a Protestant, Schönberg went to France, where he later Gallicized the spelling of his name to Frederick Schomberg. In 1652 he accepted a French army commission as a captain in a unit of Scottish Jacobite

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in Heidelberg on Dec. 6, 1615, little more than two years before the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, the religious conflict that killed up to 75 percent of the population of German states. His family was an old and noble one in the Electorate of the Palatinate (corresponding roughly to the present-day state of Rhineland-Pfalz). The Schönbergs were Calvinist Protestants. Friedrich was the only child of Count Hans Meinhard von Schönberg, a Palatinate marshal and courtier. His English mother, Anne, was the daughter of Edward Sutton, the 5th Baron Dudley.

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Schomberg was born Friedrich Hermann von Schönberg Friedrich, however, was orphaned before he was a year

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expatriates. During the latter part of the 1635–59 FrancoSpanish War, amid the internal Fronde revolts, Schomberg served under Marshal Turenne—Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, Viscount of Turenne—in the campaigns against Louis II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé.

In 1655 Schomberg was promoted to lieutenant general in the French army, marking an impressive advance in rank over a short period. He participated in the sieges of the fortresses of Condé and Saint-Ghislain and the siege of Valenciennes in 1656, where his 16-year-old son, Otto, was killed in action. Schomberg was serving as governor of Saint-Ghislain in 1657 when a force of 12,000 Spanish troops surrounded the fortress. After a 17-day siege he was forced to surrender to Condé and Don Juan José of Austria, but not before inflicting 2,000 casualties on his enemies during the final seven days of action.

Following the signing of the Treaty of the Pyrenees on Nov. 7, 1659, Turenne and Cardinal Jules Mazarin of France negotiated an appointment for Schomberg as military adviser to Portugal, which since 1640 had been fighting for its independence from Spain in the Portuguese Restoration War. Schomberg’s posting was a covert way for France to exert pressure against Spain. Charles II— the recently restored Stuart king of England—also secretly approved the arrangement.

Arriving in Lisbon in November 1660, Schomberg was assigned command of the Portuguese forces in Alemtejo.

During the next several years he fought a series of indeci-

Schomberg and William of Orange (at lower right) prepare to board a Dutch fleet on the River Maas, bound for the 1688 invasion of England.

sive battles, handicapped by the incompetence and insubordination of his Portuguese officers, who resented a foreign commander. After forcing a number of tactical and organizational reforms on the Portuguese army, Schomberg won a decisive victory on June 17, 1665, at Monte Claros against the Spaniards under Luis Carrillo, Marquis of Caracena. That battle clinched Portuguese independence, though the opponents did not conclude a formal peace treaty until 1668.

Even by the standards of earlier times, Frederick Schomberg had a diverse military career Schomberg’s campaigns in Portugal solidified his reputation as a brilliant military commander. Returning to France in late 1668, the widower (Johanna had died in 1664) became a naturalized French citizen, as did sons Meinhard and Karl (who thereafter went by Charles). In 1669, after purchasing the lordship of Coubert near Paris, 53-year-old Schomberg married Frenchwoman Susanne d’Aumale. Yet despite repeated personal appeals from King Louis XIV, he refused to convert to Roman Catholicism.

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In 1673, amid the 1672–74 Third Anglo-Dutch War, Charles II of England extended Schomberg a commission as a lieutenant general. Serving under Prince Ruprecht of the Rhine, Schomberg was assigned command of the expeditionary force Charles intended to send against the Dutch at Walcheren. The half-English Schomberg arrived in England that summer and assumed command of some 6,000 troops on the coast at Yarmouth, awaiting the outcome of the naval battle off Texel between the Dutch and English navies for control of the English Channel. In the meantime, Schomberg got into a petty protocol squabble with Ruprecht. In November, with the English navy licking its wounds and the invasion called off, Schomberg resigned from English service and returned to his French estate at Coubert.

In Memoriam

Struck in Nuremberg following Schomberg’s 1690 death in English service at the Battle of the Boyne, this silver medallion commemorates the fabled soldier’s life.

The obverse bears a crown, a serpent and his many coats of arms fixed to a laurel branch.

Louis XIV’s 1672–78 Franco-Dutch War

pitted France, England and Sweden against the Dutch Republic, Spain, the Holy Roman empire and the Electorate of Brandenburg and their respective allies. Reentering French service, Schomberg initially commanded the French army between the Sambre and Meuse rivers. During the winter of 1673–74 he linked up with the forces of François-Henri de Montmorency, Duke of Luxembourg, in the process skillfully outflanking the 24-year-old Prince William III of Orange, whose father and predecessor Schomberg had served so well.

Made a duke in 1674, Schomberg assumed command of all French forces in Roussillon, the slice of Catalonia that France took from Spain under the Treaty of the Pyrenees. When a Spanish force attacked into Roussillon, he intended to fight on the defensive, but his subordinate, Lt. Gen. Alexandre le Bret, attacked against orders and was routed. Schomberg’s son Charles was captured in

the debacle. Schomberg remained entrenched at Céret, just outside of Catalonia, and bided his time. In 1675 he forced his way back into Catalonia and that July encircled the fortress of Bellegarde, the key to the region, which surrendered after a 10-day siege.

After Turenne was killed in action on July 27, Louis made Schomberg a marshal of France, despite his continued refusal to convert to Roman Catholicism. In March 1676 Schomberg took command of the French army in Flanders, under Louis’ brother, Philippe I, Duke of Orléans. When William III of Orange besieged Maastricht in the summer of 1676, Schomberg moved to lift the siege.

In May 1677 Schomberg was transferred from Flanders to command a French army of observation on the Meuse.

That fall Louis XIV gave Schomberg permission to travel to London to attend the November wedding of Mary Stuart, daughter of the future King James II, to William of Orange, the very prince Schomberg had been battling the previous five years. The Stuarts had long been among Schomberg’s strongest supporters, and a decade later the newlyweds would become William III and Mary II of England.

After Schomberg returned to France, the army promoted his son Meinhard to the rank of maréchal-de-camp (roughly equivalent to brigadier general). Both Schombergs participated in the capture of Ghent and Ypres in March 1678, but in July Meinhard was wounded in the head and taken prisoner. That August the signing of the Peace of Nijmegen ended the war, and Meinhard was released. A special article in the treaty guaranteed the interests of the Schomberg family in the Palatinate. In 1679 France also concluded a separate treaty with Sweden, but when the elector of Brandenburg refused to surrender his recent conquests in Pomerania, Schomberg, at the head of 20,000 troops, occupied the Duchy of Cleves, which had been annexed by Brandenburg several years earlier.

In 1680 Louis began to exploit the weakness of his European rivals by establishing French-controlled courts of claims, known as Chambers of Reunion, to determine

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Schomberg fought for the English during the 1672–74 Third Anglo-Dutch War. Opposite: A map of the 1656 siege of Valenciennes, during which Schomberg’s 16-year-old son, Otto, was killed.

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just which outlying dependencies belonged to the areas France had acquired through the recent peace treaties.

The French land grab sparked the brief but brutal 1683– 84 War of the Reunions. Louis had claimed Luxembourg, and in June 1684 Schomberg commanded the French army that moved into the duchy. Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I responded by confiscating Schomberg’s lands in the Palatinate. Schomberg then assembled a force of 30,000 in preparation for invading Germany.

Under the threat of invasion Leopold and Charles II of Spain agreed to the Truce of Ratisbon, which recognized most of the French acquisitions. Leopold, however, held on to Schomberg’s lands in Germany.

Despite having risen to become a duke and a marshal of France, Schomberg saw his world turned upside down on Oct. 22, 1685, when Louis XIV issued the Edict of Fontainebleau. The royal decree revoked the Edict of Nantes, which in 1598 had granted substantial civil rights to the French Calvinists, known as Huguenots. With a single stroke of the quill Louis had disenfranchised tens of thousands French families, including Schomberg’s.

Seven days later Friedrich Wilhelm, the duke of Prussia and Brandenburg’s “Great Elector,” issued the Edict of Potsdam, inviting the dispossessed Huguenots to resettle in his territories. Many jumped at the offer.

Schomberg considered his options. Louis XIV gave him one more opportunity to convert, but the marshal stead-

fastly refused, and in March 1686 he was dismissed from the French army, albeit with a pension. He was also allowed to retain his estate at Coubert. Schomberg then made his way to Portugal, where he remained in high regard. However, when it became apparent King Pedro II would not offer him a military command, Schomberg sailed for the Netherlands on a Dutch vessel. After consulting with his sometime opponent William of Orange, Schomberg finally accepted the invitation of Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg, yet another former opponent.

Schomberg became a marshal of France, despite his refusal to convert to Roman Catholicism On Schomberg’s arrival in Berlin in April 1887, Friedrich Wilhelm made him a privy counselor and appointed him general in chief of the armies of Brandenburg. Schomberg’s son Meinhard also entered Brandenburg service and eventually rose to the rank of general of cavalry (equivalent to a lieutenant general). When the Great Elector died on April 29, 1688, his son and successor, Friedrich III, reconfirmed Schomberg’s appointments.

At that point the 72-year-old commander and soonto-be second-time widower was quite willing to live out

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the rest of his days peacefully in Berlin.

But that summer Louis XIV laid claim to the Palatinate and then pushed for a proFrench candidate as elector-archbishop of Cologne. That was too much for the Holy Roman empire. Brandenburg’s new antiEIGHTY YEARS’ WAR French elector, Friedrich, sent Schom(1568–1648) berg with 3,000 troops to occupy Cologne, which he did on September 21. Four days later French troops crossed the Rhine THIRTY YEARS’ WAR (1618–48) and invaded Germany.

That proved the opening move of the 1688–97 War of the League of Augsburg FRANCO-SPANISH WAR (or Nine Years’ War), which ultimately (1635–59) pitted France against the Holy Roman empire and Spain and their respective allies. The papacy also supported what PORTUGUESE RESTORATION WAR became known as the Grand Alliance (1640–68) between England, the Dutch Republic and Austria against France. By late October Schomberg had a strong force on THIRD ANGLO-DUTCH WAR the east bank of the Rhine north of Mainz (1672–74) to check any French advance in that direction. Personally affronted that his former FRANCO-DUTCH WAR marshal had taken up arms against him, (1672–78) Louis ordered the confiscation of the Coubert estate and the termination of Schomberg’s pension. Louis also pressured the WAR OF THE REUNIONS king of Portugal to terminate Schomberg’s (1683–84) Portuguese pension.

William of Orange was one of the prinWAR OF THE LEAGUE OF cipal leaders of the League of Augsburg.

AUGSBURG/NINE YEARS’ WAR Almost as soon as the war started, the (1688–97) Glorious Revolution in England deposed the Stuarts for the second time and ultiWILLIAMITE WAR IN IRELAND mately brought William and wife Mary jointly to the throne. James II had been (1688–91) trying to return Roman Catholicism to England, while staunchly Protestant William and Mary had many local supporters across the channel. Since the death of the Great Elector, William had also been secretly recruiting Schomberg. With his primary sources of income cut off, the veteran commander did come over to William, with the full backing of Brandenburg’s Friedrich. In doing so, Schomberg again found himself taking up arms against former patrons and supporters— this time the Stuarts.

On Nov. 5, 1688, the Prince of Orange, with Schomberg as his second-in-command, landed at Torbay on the southern English coast. Their force comprised some 21,000 troops, including 6,000 Schomberg brought with him from Brandenburg. Within weeks English commanders John Churchill and Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Grafton, had defected to William. In December James II fled to France, and William entered London. The Stuarts

1634–48 1652–59

1660–65 1673

1674–78 1684

1688–89

1688–90

Tactical Takeaways

were not yet finished, however.

With strong support from cousin Louis XIV, James landed in Kinsale, Ireland, on March 12, 1689, Skills Are Portable. backed by a small Anglo-French Having learned the army. Largely Catholic southern art of war early in life, Schomberg was able Ireland had raised an army to sup- to put his vast experiport his restoration and gave him ence to good use for a variety of sovereigns. a warm welcome.

After William III and Mary II of Beliefs Can Be Costly.

England were crowned on April 11, A lifelong Protestant, Schomberg strongly Schomberg was well rewarded for resisted conversion to his support. He was naturalized as Roman Catholicism, a an English citizen, made a Knight stance that eventually of the Garter and appointed master led King Louis XIV to confiscate his land general of the ordnance. The latter and pension income. appointment put him at serious Old Soldiers Do Die. odds with Churchill, who thought War is an inherently William owed him the job. In May dangerous profession, Schomberg was created Baron and even the most gifted soldiers often Teyes, Earl of Brentford, Marquis become its victims. of Harwich and Duke of Schomberg in the English peerage. Parliament also voted him £100,000 in compensation for the loss of his French estates.

In order to consolidate William III’s hold on all of Britain, James II had to be driven out of Ireland. On Aug. 13, 1689, Schomberg, at the head of 10,000 men, landed at Bangor Bay in Protestant Northern Ireland, which had been secured by pro-William forces two weeks earlier at the Battle of Newtownbutler. By month’s end Protestant recruits would double his force. Schomberg soon occupied Belfast, then moved on the Jacobite garrison at Carrickfergus.

After capturing the castle and town, he headed south to Dundalk, just over the Ulster–Leinster border. At Dundalk, however, an epidemic of typhoid and dysentery broke out among his raw and largely undisciplined troops. Withdrawing north into Ulster, he went into winter quarters.

In April 1690 Schomberg led his remaining forces against Charlemont, capturing the town in about three weeks. William III, meanwhile, landed at Carrickfergus on June 14 with 16,000 fresh troops. Assuming personal command, William immediately pushed south with a combined army of 36,000. While Schomberg remained his second-in-command, William had lost a great deal of confidence in his old warhorse due to the debacle at Dundalk. Meanwhile, Jacobite forces of about 23,500 entrenched along the south bank of the River Boyne, the only defensible line north of Dublin.

William’s army reached the Boyne on June 29. The following day William himself was slightly wounded while reconnoitering fords along the river. Late that night he held a council of war. Schomberg was very ill but left his sickbed to attend. He counseled caution and recommended a wide flanking movement, rather than a direct

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Frederick Schomberg’s Wars 1633

BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

William III’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne owed much to Schomberg’s brilliant river crossing at Oldbridge.

attack across the river. William overruled him. Tired and despondent, the ailing marshal returned to his tent.

On the morning of July 1 William sent about a quarter of his force under Schomberg’s son Meinhard on a feint to the west at Roughgrange. To meet the perceived threat, an inexperienced James sent nearly half his men and most of his artillery. The elder Schomberg then spearheaded William’s main attack in the center across the ford at Oldbridge. Once on the south bank Schomberg directed the deployment of crossing infantry. As William’s infantry formed up on the south bank, however, a Jacobite cavalry force broke through and surrounded Schomberg’s party. After receiving two saber wounds, Schomberg took a carbine round to the back and was killed instantly.

Most of his staff died with him.

Despite the death of their second-in-command, William’s forces prevailed at the Battle of the Boyne. As William entered Dublin unopposed, the Jacobite forces withdrew to Limerick. Shortly thereafter James again fled to France, never to return, although it took William until October 1691 to finally secure all of Ireland. Meinhard Schomberg continued serving in the English army as a general of horse, was created Duke of Leinster in 1692 and became a naturalized English citizen. When brother Charles was killed in Italy in 1693, Meinhard succeeded to his father’s English title as 3rd Duke of Schomberg.

At the time the Battle of the Boyne was not perceived as a great victory. Overshadowing it was the French defeat of the Anglo-Dutch fleet at Beachy Head nine days later amid the broader war. Ironically, Continental observers considered the victory on the Boyne the first significant win for the League of Augsburg—the first important alliance between the papacy and many key Protestant powers of Europe. Indeed, the victory inspired other nations to join the Grand Alliance against France.

As for Schomberg, he was entombed in the Protestant St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. British author Daniel Defoe paid tribute to him in a 1701 satirical paean to William III entitled The True-Born Englishman. It reads in part: Schomberg, the ablest soldier of his age, With great Nassau did in our cause engage: Both join’d for England’s rescue and defense, The greatest captain and the greatest prince.

With what applause his stories did we tell?

Stories which Europe’s volumes largely swell. MH Major General David T. Zabecki (U.S. Army, Ret.) is Historynet’s chief military historian. For further reading he recommends Marshal Schomberg, 1615–1690, by Matthew Glozier, and The Battle of the Boyne 1690: The Irish Campaign for the English Crown, by Michael McNally.

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Reviews

Noted Victorian painter Lawrence AlmaTadema was among many artists to depict the fateful 41 bc first meeting between doomed lovers Antony and Cleopatra.

The War Queens: Extraordinary Women Who Ruled the Battlefield,

by Jonathan W. Jordan and Emily Anne Jordan, Diversion Books, New York, 2020, $27.99

It has been said the female of the species is deadlier than the male. This entertaining new volume, written by a father-daughter team, seeks to prove the point by delineating the careers of 13 of the most successful female war leaders in history (see related feature, P. 22). The War Queens covers a range of eras and places, from the 6th century bc to 1982, and from China to the Falkland Islands. The lives of some, such as Elizabeth I of England and Cleopatra of Egypt, have already been exhaustively chronicled elsewhere. Others, such as the Mongol Mandukhai and Angola’s Njinga, were rather more obscure. Still others, such as Tomyris of the Massagetae and Boudica of Britain, were so ancient as to have become nearly mythological, although contemporary records prove they were very real.

Perhaps the one glaring omission from the authors’ list of notable warrior-queens is Maria Theresa of the Holy Roman empire. Despite being forced to go to war to secure her position almost as soon as she ascended the throne— at age 23—and having fought Frederick the Great of Prussia to a draw in three conflicts despite her erstwhile ally Tsar Peter III of Russia withdrawing from the third prematurely, she is given surprisingly short shrift.

The authors’ primary thesis is that these female war leaders owed much of their success to the inherent difficulties they experienced having to wrest power in environments where only men ruled. “In life,” the authors say, “they saw themselves as problem-solvers, not trendsetters or role models for future women. If war was part of the solution, so be it.”

—Robert Guttman

SOTHEBY’S

Women at War

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SOTHEBY’S

The Battle of Guilford Courthouse: A Most Desperate Engagement,

by John R. Maass, The History Press, Charleston, S.C., 2020, $32.99 A historian for the U.S. Army Center of Military History, John R. Maass is the author of several books focusing on the American Revolution, including The Road to Yorktown (2015) and Horatio Gates and the Battle of Camden (2001).

His latest book studies the crucial but little-known 1781 Battle of Guilford Courthouse, N.C., which put the battered British army on the rocky road to ultimate defeat and ignominious surrender at Yorktown.

Beginning with their 1778 capture of Savannah, Ga., British forces and their Loyalist allies had been largely successful. By the end of 1780 they occupied Charleston and key points throughout Georgia and South Carolina, having routed an American army led by Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates at Camden, S.C. Though the British suffered reverses in the backcountry at Kings Mountain and Cowpens, S.C., that did not prevent the aggressive British commander, Lt. Gen. Lord Charles Cornwallis, from invading North Carolina. Despite logistical challenges, the British took Charlotte.

By the end of February most of the rebellious colony was under their thumb. The outcome at Guilford Courthouse changed all of that.

There American Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene, employing tactics similar to those used

by Brig. Gen. Daniel Morgan at Cowpens, deployed his army of 4,500 men, largely

militia, in three lines. Cornwallis attacked head on with his smaller, more professional 2,100-man army. Though the latter managed to repel the ably led Americans, Greene knocked out a quarter of Cornwallis’ men, slowing his momentum. News of the battle was received poorly in London, one Parliamentarian wag wryly exclaiming, “Another such victory would ruin the British army!” Lacking additional Loyalist recruits, Cornwallis was unable to pursue his enemy and forced to retreat, ultimately back to Virginia. Greene, on the other hand, kept his army

in the field and was able to resupply. “We fight, get beat, rise and fight again,” he said in defiance. By May 1781 most of North and South Carolina were back under American control.

Containing a select bibliography, detailed endnotes, an extensive index, and contemporary and modern maps, as well as engravings and black-and-white autographs strategically interspersed throughout the text, The Battle of Guilford Courthouse is thoroughly researched, engagingly written and highly recommended.

—William John Shepherd

Fagen: An AfricanAmerican Renegade in the PhilippineAmerican War, by Michael Morey, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2019, $36.95 Between 1899 and 1902 the U.S. military fought a nasty counterinsurgency against the Philippine Republic.

Some sources claim the war continued until 1913, when American forces put the final nail in the coffin of the Muslim Sulu sultanate and its army of Moro warriors fired up by the call to jihad. The war resembled the later counterinsurgency in Vietnam, though in the Philippines the U.S. plans and tactics worked and culminated in a victory. That victory came at a brutal coast—hundreds of thousands of Filipino civilians died, American interrogators resorted to such torture methods as the “water cure,” and the U.S. military government in the Philippines provided a blueprint for domestic spying operations stateside.

Fagen, by independent scholar Michael Morey, shines a light on yet another bleak aspect of the PhilippineAmerican War through the extraordinary story of David Fagen (sometimes spelled Fagin), a 20-year-old black private from Tampa, Fla., who volunteered to fight with the legendary “Buffalo Soldiers” of the 24th Infantry Regiment in the prior Spanish-American War. He didn’t see combat during that conflict, instead serving as an orderly for U.S. troops stricken with yellow fever. After riding out the disease himself, Fagen returned with the 24th

Recommended

The Compleat Victory

By Kevin Weddle The author, a professor at the U.S. Army War College, offers an authoritative history of the 1777 Battle of Saratoga, explaining how General John Burgoyne’s underestimation of American forces turned a British foraging expedition into a rout. Weddle unravels the web of contingencies and play of personalities that ultimately led to what one American general dubbed “The Compleat Victory.”

Unconditional

By Marc Gallicchio Released on the 75th anniversary of the September 1945 Japanese surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Unconditional not only offers a narrative of the capitulation in its historical moment, but also reveals how the policy underlying it poisoned American postwar politics and warped our understanding of World War II for decades.

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Reviews Recommended

The Spartans

By Andrew J. Bayliss Famous down through the ages for their doomed stand at Thermopylae in 480 bc and immortalized by contemporary Athenian writers, who viewed them as the “exotic other,” the Spartans—and their brutality and bravery—both fascinate and appall us. Author Bayliss reveals the best and the worst of that harsh society, separating myth from reality.

The York Patrol

By James Carl Nelson Though the Oct. 8, 1918, events that led to an award of the Medal of Honor to Tennesseeborn Sgt. Alvin C. York have been covered exhaustively since the end of World War I, author Nelson reveals new insights, especially concerning the 16 other Americans who followed York and, in Nelson’s view, have been lost to history.

to Fort Douglas, Utah.

According to those who served with him, Fagen was a poor soldier, “always lighthearted, careless and full of jokes, gambling or drinking when he could get the money.” Morey also suggests Fagen bore a deep hatred of whites due to injustices he experienced as a young man. When the 24th redeployed to the Philippines, Fagen deserted and took up arms alongside Filipino revolutionaries.

He soon became a master of guerrilla warfare and a symbol of anti-colonial and anti-white resistance.

Fagen presents a balanced narrative, moving between its protagonist and the broader conflict in which he engaged. This is not standard military history by any means. Morey devotes many pages to the U.S. racial tensions in the 1890s, when Southern Democrats introduced Jim Crow laws, and lynchings were common. At the time President William McKinley had embarked on a great age of American imperialism, and Morey asserts the acquisition of the Philippines was McKinley’s plan all along, even if the American military bumbled its way toward conquest.

Morey also believes imperialism is the reason the Philippine-American War has been scrubbed from national memory.

The biggest problem with Fagen is one to which Morey readily admits: Very little is known for certain about Fagen. For example,

there is no conclusive proof Fagen joined the Filipino insurgency due to any racism on the part of white Army officers. Indeed, a fellow soldier with the 24th suggested Fagen deserted because the rebels promised to make him a general.

Given the dearth of sources, Morey relies on suggestion and supposition.

Despite that central flaw, Fagen is a readable volume written in clean, sharp prose. Fagen proves as in-

teresting as he was elusive, while such supporting figures as Brig. Gen. Frederick “Fighting Fred” Funston are equally captivating. The result is an engrossing read that imparts lessons from the U.S. counterinsurgency in the Philippines and reminds readers that racial animosity is nothing new.

—Benjamin Welton Crusaders: An Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands, by Dan Jones, Viking, N.Y., 2019, $30 In 1095 Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos appealed to Pope Urban II for aid against the attack-

ing Muslim Turks. Present-day scholars, British historian Dan Jones among them, still struggle to make sense of what followed, but there’s no doubt Alexios succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

His first taste of the Crusade fervor that swept Europe was the arrival at Constantinople in 1096 of thousands of soldiers and pilgrims, followers of the monk Peter the Hermit.

Alexios quickly ferried them across the Bosporus, where they marched into Turkish territory to mostly end up dead or enslaved.

That fiasco was dubbed the People’s Crusade. Far more effective were the organized armies of the First Crusade, which after three years of bloody, atrocityridden fighting managed to capture Jerusalem in 1099 and then mostly returned home. Alexios rejoiced, having recovered most of the Anatolian Peninsula.

But four small Crusader states had difficulty fighting off surrounding Muslim nations, which were as divided and quarrelsome as Europe but ultimately got their act together.

The armies of the Second Crusade (1147–50) failed to reconquer Edessa, the first of the four Crusader states to fall. Then, in 1187 Muslim forces under Saladin recaptured Jerusalem, thus prompting the Third Crusade (1189–92), led in part by Richard I, the “Lionheart” of England, who regained some territory but not Jerusalem.

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The armies of the Fourth Crusade (1202–04) sacked Constantinople. The forces of the Fifth Crusade (1217– 21) failed before Jerusalem and then invaded Egypt, with disastrous consequences. During the Sixth Crusade (1228–29) the Christians recovered Jerusalem. Preoccupied with domestic issues, the local sultan agreed to a 10-year truce with Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in exchange for the city and much surrounding territory. Muslims retook the city in 1244.

At the outset of the Seventh Crusade (1248–54) F re n c h K i n g L o u i s I X landed in Egypt (then ruling the Holy Land) and suffered a catastrophic defeat, in which he was captured and later ransomed.

A glutton for punishment, Louis led the Eighth Crusade in 1270 but died from dysentery soon after landing, his diseased army returning home with little to show for their efforts.

Two years later an army under future King Edward I of England launched the Ninth Crusade (1271–72),

invading the Holy Land, winning a few victories and then departing. It was the last Crusade to reach Palestine, though a few abortive attempts followed. The last Christian fortress city, Acre, fell in 1291. Crusades also raged within Europe then and in later centuries, and Jones recounts many waged with purely secular intent against the pope’s political opponents.

Jones writes rousing history, though readers may weary of the accounts of atrocity-ridden bloodshed.

Present-day scholars tend to paint the Crusaders as the bad guys, but Jones turns up plenty of Muslim dishonor and cruelty. Medieval religion, no less than medieval warfare, was not for the faint of heart.

—Mike Oppenheim The War for the Seas: A Maritime History of World War II, by Evan Mawdsley, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2019, $32.50 Across the history of human conflict most wars comprise dozens of land battles and few sea battles. While following a chronology of engagements on land will generally inform you regarding the overall course of a war, following a chronology of maritime battles won’t, especially not in World War II. Naval battles were rare in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, yet even in the Pacific maritime clashes alone can’t explain the broader conflict.

The gaps in that narrative are of vital importance, and Evan Mawdsley does an excellent job of filling them in.

The “fleet in being,” or mere threat of naval force —a phantom hovering around the edge of most historical naval strategy— applies to the Kriegsmarine early in the war, less so in the Mediterranean, where Mawdsley’s account shines.

That theater seldom grabs headlines due to its dearth of consequential battles; the raids at Taranto and Alexandria were more important than any ship-toship combat. Yet the war of maneuver was intricate and important in a domain where the strength of Italy’s Regia Marina and Germany’s Luftwaffe and the dispersion of the Royal Navy across the globe made for several risky years. The Regia Marina largely squandered its prospects, or hewed closely to port for lack of oil, but such knowledge wouldn’t have proved reassuring in 1941.

The other deficiency in even the best histories is that ships tend to appear as if by magic. Mawdsley keeps close track of the broader, shifting disposition of naval resources, a concern especially important for Britain. A mighty fleet grows a bit less formidable when covering five oceans. In the second half of 1942 there were no Royal Navy battleships or carriers in the eastern Mediterranean, having been moved to the Indian Ocean to support the invasion of

Madagascar. Consider HMS Exeter’s journey, engaged with the Graf Spee in South America’s Rio de la Plata in 1939, then sunk half a world away in the 1942 Second Battle of the Java Sea. Mawdsley also addresses o th er o v erlo o k ed e l e ments: the French navy’s future after the Dakar and Mers El Kébir attacks, or the course of naval combat in the Baltic, featuring the Soviet withdrawal from Tallinn at the loss of more than 50 ships and 15,000 dead.

“Maritime” is an apt word in the subtitle, given Mawdsley’s close attention to troop and supply shipping. The author also tersely synthesizes multiple national technological evolutions (or their absence), of paramount importance in a conflict where the right projectile from virtually any sort of craft could cripple the mightiest of ships. Danger and opportunity, supply chains and research— Mawdsley skillfully combines all this and more in an invaluable volume.

—Anthony Paletta

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Reviews The Secret History of Soldiers: How Canadians Survived the Great War,

by Tim Cook, Allen Lane, London, 2018, $26 In his memoirs former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George referred to the Canadian Corps—four divisions deployed on the Western Front from 1915 to 1918—as storm troops.

“Whenever the Germans found the Canadians coming into the line,” he wrote, “they prepared for the worst.” Author Pugsley describes the corps as “the most effective fighting formation among the British armies on the Western Front, superior in performance to its vaunted Australian contemporary in terms of organization, tactical efficiency and staying power.” Attention has been lavished on the corps’ combat effectiveness by Bill Rawling (Surviving Trench Warfare: Technology and the Canadian Corps, 1914– 1918) and Shane B. Schreiber (Shock Army of the British Empire: The Canadian Corps in the Last 100 Days of the Great War), among others.

In The Secret History of Soldiers Tim Cook turns his attention to the latter question—the corps’ staying power. Rather than ordnance or organization, bombs or bullets, Cook assesses the sense of community, the social and cultural bonds that kept members of the corps in the pink and saved them from “getting their wind up”—succumb-

ing to what is now termed PTSD. Slang and jargon, Cook argues, are key components of a specific corps dialect that united the group and served to exclude outsiders. Liberal use of any and all obscenities also served to unite the men of the corps in a unique brotherhood.

Cook explores and attributes similar power to singing (by both professional entertainers and the soldiers), vaudeville shows, theatrical troupes (most famously “The Dumbells”) and viciously satirical trench newspapers produced by the “Poor Bloody Infantry” themselves. The generation, transference and evolution of trench culture sustained the combatants and gave them a sense of “agency within a consistently dehumanizing war,” according to Cook.

The author is eminently qualified to tackle this complex and comprehensive cultural approach to the corps. Over the past quarter century Cook has published dozens of academic articles and 10 books, including the 2008 volume Shock Troops: Canadians

Airmen of Arnhem: The Heavy Lift Crews of Operation “Market,”

by Martin W. Bowman, Pen & Sword Books, Philadelphia, Pa., and Barnsley, U.K., 2020, $42.95

Author Martin Bowman recounts the extremely hasty preparations for Market Garden, the only largescale airborne operation of the war for which there was no specific training or rehearsal. The Allies proceeded with the operation, he adds, despite knowing there were insufficient transport aircraft to simultaneously support three airborne divisions.

The bulk of Bowman’s narrative is in the words of those who participated. In one poignant passage the pilot of a Royal Air Force de Havilland Mosquito relates his mission to knock out the main German telephone exchange in Arn-

Much has been written about the heroism of Allied airborne troops during Operation Market Garden, the ill-fated September 1944 attempt to shorten World War II by capturing the German-held bridges across the Rhine River in the Netherlands. Indeed, the operation even inspired a major motion picture, A Bridge Too Far (1977).

Far less has been recorded about the ordeal of the airmen who repeatedly risked their lives to supply those troops. Flying low and slow in unarmed transport planes over the course of nine days, they faced enemy fighters and intense flak to support their comrades on the ground.

A large number were shot down, while many others returned wounded, their aircraft seriously damaged.

hem on the morning of the airborne assault. He recalls his shock at flying over a yard filled with Tiger tanks that were not supposed to be there and realizing he had no chance to warn the airborne troops already on their way.

Airmen of Arnhem is invaluable to anyone interested in wartime transport operations or the ill-fated campaign in general.

—Robert Guttman

Fighting the Great War, 1917–1918, recipient of the Charles Taylor Prize, Canada’s highest award for nonfiction. In 2013 he was awarded the Pierre Berton Prize for popularizing Canadian history. His latest encyclopedic treatment of Canadian involvement in World War I does indeed lay bare, per the subtitle, “how Canadians survived the Great War.” —Bob Gordon

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Gina Elise’s

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Hallowed Ground The Great Chain, West Point, N.Y.

F

rom the outset of the American Revolutionary War it was apparent to the combatant armies that control of the Hudson River Valley would in all likelihood determine the outcome of the conflict. Certainly British domination of the valley would effectively sever New England—the hotspot of the conflict— from the other colonies.

It was equally obvious the river itself was the key to holding the valley. John Adams termed it “a kind of key to the whole continent.” In 1776 the British seized the seaport of Manhattan (see related story, P. 18), driving the Continental Army up the valley and opening the river to invasion. Royal Navy warships wasted no time in availing themselves of it.

To halt the progress of British men-of-war, the Patriots first constructed and submerged chevaux-de-frise—an array of sharpened logs intended to pierce the hulls of enemy vessels—between Forts Washington and Lee, in the Hudson off the northwest end of Manhattan. Naively, the builders left a gap for the safe passage of American ships. A local

A stalled enemy vessel would be open to fire from Patriot guns on both sides of the Hudson River Tory got wind of the gap and informed the British, who took full advantage. Skirting the barrier, they captured both Patriot forts in mid-November 1776.

The colonists tried again, installing a chain and floating log boom some 35 miles upriver, just above presentday Bear Mountain Bridge. They strung it from newly built Fort Montgomery, on the west bank, to a peak opposite known as Anthony’s Nose. However, on Oct. 6, 1777, the British marched overland to simultaneously seize neighboring Forts Montgomery and Clinton, then dismantled the chain and boom. With the river open before them, they raided 40 miles farther upriver, as far north as Kingston.

In 1778 the colonists made their third attempt at a blockade. They chose a spot beneath West Point, a prominence 5 miles north of Fort Montgomery, where the Hudson narrows and forms an S-curve, and hills on either bank afford a clear overview of the river. American Brig. Gen. James Clinton, reporting on the viability of a barrier there, considered it ideal, “as it is not only the narrowest part of the said river, but best situated on account of the high hills contiguous to it, as well on the west as east side of the river, which cover those parts, so that without a strong easterly wind or the tide no vessel can pass it; and the tide on said part of the river is generally so reverse that a vessel is usually thrown on one side of the river or the other, by means whereof such vessels lay fair and exposed.” Put simply, a stalled vessel would be open to fire from Patriot guns on both sides of the river. Gen. George Washington considered it the most important strategic position in the colonies and later moved his headquarters there.

That spring Patriot work crews ran a truly Brobdingnagian chain supported by rafts of huge logs from the shore at West Point east to Constitution Island. Forged in a New Jersey foundry and assembled in Warwick, N.Y., a day’s ride west of West Point, the chain weighed upward of 75 tons.

Each link, varying from 19 inches to more than 3 feet long, weighed more than 100 pounds. The Great Chain, as history has dubbed it, took six weeks to forge and assemble and was floated downriver on rafts to West Point in April.

This time the chain—fronted by an impressive log boom —did halt enemy traffic upriver, proving a source of great frustration to Lt. Gen. Sir Henry Clinton, William Howe’s replacement as British commander in North America. The next spring, when Clinton agreed to compensate Patriot turncoat Maj. Gen. Benedict Arnold with a British generalship and £20,000 sterling in exchange for the betrayal of West Point, one of the traitor’s major selling points was a promise to weaken the Great Chain. Thankfully for the Patriots, their scheme was exposed.

Several links of the Great Chain remain on permanent display on the grounds of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. They overlook the river that nearly two and a half centuries ago helped determine the fate of a nation. MH

TOP: NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY; BOTTOM: AHODGES7 (CC BY-SA 3.0)

By Ron Soodalter

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TOP: NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY; BOTTOM: AHODGES7 (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The British frigates Tartar, Roebuck and Phoenix skirted the first Patriot barrier on Oct. 9, 1776. Below: Links of the Great Chain remain on display at West Point.

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War Games 4

3 5

Agustina de Aragรณn

Women Under Siege Can you match each of the following female fighters to the siege for which she became famous?

1. Agustina de Aragรณn 2. Jeanne de Montfort 3. N jinga of Ndongo and Matamba

6

7

8

4. Matilda of Tuscany 5. Lyudmila Pavlichenko

9

10

6. Margaret Corbin 7. Rani Lakshmibai 8. Countess Agnes Randolph 9. Anastasya Stepanov 10. Jeanne Hachette

____ A. Dunbar, 1338 ____ B. Gwalior, 1858 ____ C. Stalingrad, 1942 ____ D. Beauvais, 1472

Weird Weaponry

____ E. Masangano, 1647

Can you name these unusual designs, most of which actually saw action?

____ F. Hennebont, 1342

____ A. Charlton automatic rifle

____ F. Caltrop

____ G. Sevastopol, 1941

____ B. Great Panjandrum

____ G. Sherman crab

____ H. Zaragoza, 1808

____ C. Atlatl

____ H. Ansaldo MIAS

____ I. Canossa, 1092

____ D. Fu-Go

____ I. Hafner Rotabuggy

____ J. Fort Washington, 1776

____ E. Dynamite gun

____ J. Krummlauf Answers: A2, B10, C8, D7, E3, F5, G1, H9, I6, J4

Answers: A8, B7, C9, D10, E3, F2, G5, H1, I4, J6

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SABAH

2

LEFT: AUGUSTO FERRER-DALMAU (CC BY-SA 3.0); 1: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS (GETTY IMAGES); 2, 5: AUCKLAND WAR MEMORIAL MUSEUM; 3, 4, 9: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; 6, 10: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS; 7: U.S. ARMY; 8: DE AGOSTINI (GETTY IMAGES)

1

Breaking Barriers

Ahmet Ali Celikten 1. Which of the following was not a pilot but an observer?

A. Sainte-Luce Calixte B. Ahmet Ali Celikten C. Robbie Clarke D. Pierre Réjon 2. The second known black combat pilot, Ahmet Ali Celikten, flew for which service?

A. Aéronautique Militaire B. Royal Flying Corps C. Ottoman navy D. Luftstreitkräfte 3. In which air arm did William Robinson Clarke serve?

A. Aéronautique Militaire B. Royal Flying Corps C. K.u.K. Luftfahrtruppen D. U.S. Army Air Service 4. Who was the first black fighter pilot of World War I? A. Eugene Bullard B. Robbie Clarke C. Sainte-Luce Calixte D. Pierre Réjon

SABAH

5. Who was the first black fighter pilot with a confirmed aerial victory?

A. Marcel Pliat B. Eugene Bullard C. Sainte-Luce Calixte D. Pierre Réjon

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John J. Pershing, Jeb Stuart, Adna R. Chafee Jr., Walton Walker, or Stonewall Jackson?

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

HISTORYNET.com ANSWER: STONEWALL JACKSON. THE M46 PATTON WAS ONE OF THE U.S ARMY’S PRINCIPAL MEDIUM TANKS OF THE EARLY COLD WAR, WITH MODELS IN SERVICE FROM 1949 UNTIL THE MID-1950s.

Answers: A, C, B, A, D

LEFT: AUGUSTO FERRER-DALMAU (CC BY-SA 3.0); 1: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS (GETTY IMAGES); 2, 5: AUCKLAND WAR MEMORIAL MUSEUM; 3, 4, 9: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; 6, 10: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS; 7: U.S. ARMY; 8: DE AGOSTINI (GETTY IMAGES)

Several airmen of African descent flew during World War I. Can you sort out the following fliers?

THE M SERIES PATTON TANKS ARE NAMED FOR GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON. WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING GENERALS NEVER HAD A TANK NAMED IN HIS HONOR?

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Captured!

Dog of War

JOHN PHILLIPS/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES)

Butch, a 1-month-old mixed-breed puppy, watches over his owner’s M1918 155 mm howitzer in May 1940 during a lull in the U.S. Army’s massive Louisiana Maneuvers.

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!

N IO T C U D O R P Y C N E G R E EM

Actual size is 40.6 mm

Rush Production of U.S. Silver Dollars Creates 2nd Lowest Mintage in History

4,000,000

2,000,000

The Mystery of Silver Bullion A coin’s value is often tied to its rarity.

One way to determine a coin’s rarity is by its mint mark—a small letter indicating where a coin was struck. Since Silver Eagles are almost always produced solely in West Point, the coins don’t feature one of these mint marks. But this year’s Silver

2015-P

2020-P

2017-P

2016-P

2017-S

1996

0

1994

1,000,000

Philadelphia Steps Up For just 13 days, the U.S. Mint struck an “Emergency Production” run of U.S. Silver Dollars at the Philadelphia Mint.

This was great for silver buyers, and really great for collectors. Here’s why:

2nd Lowest Mintage (240,000)

3,000,000

1997

West Point, the U.S. Mint branch that normally strikes Brilliant Uncirculated (BU) Silver Eagles, went into lockdown.

Prices quickly shot up, and freshly struck Silver Eagles became much harder to find at an affordable price. To meet the rising demand, the U.S. Mint knew it had to act—and act fast.

5,000,000

1995

U.S. Mint Halts Production

Eagles were also produced in Philly—so few (a scant 240,000) that they are now the second smallest mintage of Silver Eagles ever struck! So how do we tell a 2020(W) Silver Eagle from a 2020(P)?

2016-S

O

ne of the most popular ways to buy silver is the Silver Eagle— legal-tender U.S. Silver Dollars struck in one ounce of 99.9% pure silver.

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Certified “Struck at” Coins Numismatic Guaranty Corporation (NGC) is one of the world’s leading third-party coin grading services. Thanks to some skilled detective work, they have certified these coins as being struck at the Philadelphia Mint during this special Emergency Production run. What’s more, a number of these coins have been graded as near-flawless Mint State-69 (MS69) condition—just one point away from absolute perfection!

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2020 Philadelphia (P) 1oz (31.101 grams) 99.9% Silver 40.6 mm 240,000 Mint State-69 (MS69) Emergency Production

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GovMint.com • 14101 Southcross Dr. W., Suite 175, Dept. EPE221-01 • Burnsville, MN 55337 GovMint.com® is a retail distributor of coin and currency issues and is not affiliated with the U.S. government. The collectible coin market is unregulated, highly speculative and involves risk. GovMint.com reserves the right to decline to consummate any sale, within its discretion, including due to pricing errors. Prices, facts, figures and populations deemed accurate as of the date of publication but may change significantly over time. All purchases are expressly conditioned upon your acceptance of GovMint.com’s Terms and Conditions (www.govmint.com/terms-conditions or call 1-800-721-0320); to decline, return your purchase pursuant to GovMint.com’s Return Policy. © 2020 GovMint.com. All rights reserved.

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EXPERIENCEWWIIPOW

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uring World War II, Douglas was home to the primary prisoner of war camp for Wyoming. There were 17 satellite camps throughout Wyoming.

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One prisoner at the camp was quoted saying, “We never had it so good.” For many of the prisoners, it was the first time since being drafted that they had clean clothes, a warm bed, good food and health care. Prisoners at the camp ranged from 14 to 80 years old.

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