World War II April 2021

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EXC LUSIVE

TORPEDOED! AMERICAN SUBS IN THE PACIFIC KILLED FAR MORE ENEMY THAN PREVIOUSLY KNOWN — page 28

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Japanese transport Teiko Maru succumbs to a torpedo from the USS Puffer on February 22, 1944.

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German veterans give the Nazi salute outside London’s Buckingham Palace in July 1937. As war neared, concerns in Britain rose about Nazi sympathizers within its own population.

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A P R IL 2021 ENDORSED BY THE NATIONAL WORLD WAR II MUSEUM, INC.

F E AT U R E S COVE R STO RY

28 SLAUGHTER AT SEA

American submarines killed far more Japanese troops in the Pacific War than previously known RICHARD B. FRANK

38 THE ENEMY WITHIN

A small team of agents devised a diabolical ruse to flush out Nazi supporters in Britain ROBERT HUTTON

W E A P O N S M A N UA L

46 MUSCLE CAR

Italy’s Autoblinda 41 armored vehicle

48 FRIENDLY DECEPTION

A Soviet plan to aid downed U.S. airmen in Siberia was so secret that even the fliers were kept in the dark STUART D. GOLDMAN AND YAROSLAV A. SHULATOV

P O RT F O L I O

58 WORTH THE WAIT

Decades in the making, a new U.S. Army museum places the focus on its soldiers’ stories

64 THE MAN BEHIND THE MAN

The U.S. Army’s wartime chief of staff got an essential—and little remembered—assist from his precedessor DAVID T. ZABECKI

D E PA RT M E N T S

8 MAIL 12 WORLD WAR II TODAY 18 CONVERSATION

Even after 26 convoy crossings, Douglas Burgess loves the sea

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20 FROM THE FOOTLOCKER 22 NEED TO KNOW 24 TRAVEL

Resistance fighters’ beguiling battlefield in central France

72 REVIEWS

Agent Sonya, Stalin’s War, Rock Force, and a film roundup

76 BATTLE FILMS

Why you might want to give 1943’s Bataan a fresh look

79 CHALLENGE 8O FAMILIAR FACE APRIL 2021

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Michael A. Reinstein CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER David Steinhafel PUBLISHER Alex Neill EDITOR IN CHIEF

German general Hermann Balck

WWII Online WORLDWARII.com

Readers glad to meet General Malin Craig in this issue’s “The Man Behind the Man” will want to read these other explorations of leadership by historian and retired major general David T. Zabecki:

The Greatest German General No One Ever Heard Of

In December 1942, Hermann Balck wiped out a force 10 times the size of his in the most brilliantly fought divisional battle in modern military history. Yet Balck, who ended the war as a three-star general equivalent, remains virtually unknown today.

Mentor to the Stars

Although Major General Fox Conner retired from the army a year before World War II began, his mentorship of Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, and George C. Marshall made him a significant contributor to the Allied victory.

VOL. 35, NO. 6 APRIL 2021

EDITOR

KAREN JENSEN Larry Porges SENIOR EDITOR Kirstin Fawcett ASSOCIATE EDITOR Jerry Morelock, Jon Guttman HISTORIANS David T. Zabecki CHIEF MILITARY HISTORIAN Paul Wiseman NEWS EDITOR Stephen Kamifuji CREATIVE DIRECTOR Brian Walker GROUP ART DIRECTOR Melissa A. Winn DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY Guy Aceto, Uliana Bazar, Jennifer E. Berry PHOTO EDITORS ADVISORY BOARD

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FRANK

ZABECKI

KENNEDY

GOLDMAN, SHULATOV

HUTTON

CONTRIBUTORS Sea”) is an internationally recognized authority on the Asia-Pacific War. The first volume of his trilogy on the subject, Tower of Skulls, was published in March 2020; this issue’s cover article stems from his research for volume two. Frank met IT specialist Jay D. Fagel at The International Conference on World War II in New Orleans. Fagel developed a database on Japanese vessels sunk by undersea craft during the war, which serves as the basis for the piece.

STUART D. GOLDMAN (“Friendly Deception”) has a PhD in history from Georgetown University. From 1979 to 2009, he served as the Congressional Research Service’s senior specialist in Russian and Eurasian political and military affairs. Goldman and colleague Yaroslav Shulatov met in Mongolia; this is the second article the two have collaborated on for World War II.

6

ROBERT HUTTON (“The Enemy

Within”) is a freelance writer based in London. While working as Bloomberg’s U.K. political correspondent in 2014, he stumbled across MI5’s forgotten secret “Fifth Column” operation. The tale inspired two novels, but Hutton tells the true story in full in Agent Jack (2019), published in the U.S. by St. Martin’s Press.

BARBARA NOE KENNEDY (“The

Hidden Fight”) is a former editor at National Geographic Travel Publishing and a freelance travel journalist who writes about art, history, culture, and food. Kennedy had the chance to delve into the riveting history of the Maquis during a recent trip to France’s Limousin region.

YAROSLAV A. SHULATOV (“Friendly Deception”) is a professor at Kobe University in Japan. Born and raised in Russia, he holds PhDs in history and law. Several years ago, Shulatov’s

grandfather—also a Russian historian—gave him a letter written to Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov about a rescue mission in the Soviet Far East, asking him to look into its backstory. Ensuing research on American airmen downed in Siberia became the basis of his feature with Stuart Goldman.

DAVID T. ZABECKI (“The Man Behind

the Man”) retired from the U.S. Army as a major general in 2007. He started his military career in 1966 as an infantry rifleman, serving in Vietnam from 1967-68, and holds a PhD in military history from Britain’s Royal Military College of Science. Along with this issue’s article on General Malin Craig, many of his books and articles have focused on military history’s most significant— yet forgotten—figures, including U.S. general Fox Conner, British general Sir Frederick Morgan, and German general Hermann Balck.

PORTRAITS BY JOHANNA GOODMAN

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Sh Se

THE SAILOR STANDING ON THE HIGGINS BOAT with an open shirt on page 37 of your December 2020 issue is my dad, Carl James Mullen. He enlisted in the navy in March 1942 and was discharged, I believe, in September 1945. He spent the entire war on the attack transport USS Elmore, nearly all of it at sea. He told me for years that his picture was taken when General Douglas MacArthur waded ashore in the Philippines, but we never saw it until after he was dead.

Shortly after I joined the army, I asked my dad why he joined the navy. His answer: “I didn’t want to sleep on the ground.”

Thomas James Mullen Stafford, Va.

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Reader Thomas Mullen spotted a familiar figure—his father—in the background of the famous 1944 photo of General Douglas MacArthur arriving on Leyte.

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I read “The Fourth Axis Power” (December 2020), your story on Hungarian leader Miklós Horthy, with great interest. I would like to share a postscript. In 1968, while studying history at Brooklyn College, I had the good fortune to take a class in military history taught

by Professor Béla Király [right], who was not your ordinary college instructor. He was a towering, distinguished, and imposing figure who carried himself with the grace of the dashing cavalry officer he’d been 30 years before.

In 1940, Király was a young Hungarian army captain when his country’s leader, Horthy, joined Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo in the Axis alliance. By 1943, he was a colonel commanding a Hungarian regiment supporting the German army in Russia. During that time, Király refused Nazi orders to murder members of a Jewish forced labor battalion, thereby earning the enmity of his German superiors. Colonel Király and his staff were removed from command, arrested, and sent back to Hungary under guard for insubordination. (Once back home, with experienced officers at a premium, he was reinstated in the army.) Fifty years later, Király’s defiant actions in Russia would earn him the title “Righteous Among the Gentiles” from the Yad Vashem memorial institute in Jerusalem.

Paul Bernstein Brooklyn, N.Y. The story of General MacArthur’s delayed actions in the Philippines, “Pulled Punches” (December 2020), struck a personal blow to me as a World War II navy veteran. In 2000, my wife and I served as co-chairpersons of a grassroots project in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, to raise funds for the long-delayed WWII Memorial in Washington, D.C. To stir interest, we interviewed local World War II vets about their combat experiences.

The story of one interview subject, John Walker, brought home the highly personal cost that so many suffered as a result of MacArthur’s apparent dedication to President Quezon, rather than him taking immediate action to give U.S. forces an opportunity to defend against Japanese attacks. Walker, a ground crew member of the U.S. Army Air Corps’ 21st Pursuit Squad, 35th Air Group, was at Clark Field when the B-17s were destroyed on the ground. After fighting val-

FROM THE EDITOR Béla Király in 2009

iantly in the ground battle—continually short of rations—he was one of those who surrendered on April 9, 1942. Then came the Bataan Death March, the excruciating transfer north to San Fernando in which unbelievable Japanese cruelty resulted in perhaps 10,000 American and Filipino deaths. Walker survived that dreadful march, and a long series of mistreatments as a POW, before finally being liberated as a 65-pound human skeleton on August 15, 1945. Could appropriate action by MacArthur have saved him and a host of fellow veterans from such savagery?

Bill Clark Sheffield Village, Ohio

What I love about history is how it often feels like a treasure hunt. Dig deep enough, and you will find something fresh. Two stories this issue highlight that point. New access to Soviet documents allowed an intrepid pair of historians, Stuart D. Goldman and Yaroslav A. Shulatov, to flesh out the story of how downed American airmen escaped from Soviet internment camps—without realizing, by design, that the Soviets were assisting them (“Friendly Deception,” page 48). And renowned Pacific War historian Richard B. Frank found a big untold story in an existing pile of numbers.

The result (“Slaughter at Sea,” page 28) casts new light on the role of U.S. submarines in that conflict, and the varied and sometimes unexpected consequences of that role. The deeper the dig and the more persistent the digger, the better the find. Happy hunting!

—Karen Jensen

TOO MANY COOKS

Thanks to Joseph Connor for writing a balanced, in-depth article on MacArthur that sheds new light on a 78-year-old question.

Clearly, the situation had many facets, one of which was political. There’s an old saying in the Army Officer Corps: “I can work for any son of a bitch in battle, but only one son of a bitch at a time.” Roosevelt did MacArthur no favors in giving him the Philippine assignment. American officers are steeped in and fully expected to honor the concept of civilian leadership of the military, as provided for in our Constitution. So while Roosevelt expected MacArthur to follow his orders as Commander-in-Chief of U.S. forces, MacArthur was also expected to follow the orders of Presi-

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MacArthur’s former chief of staff, Richard K. Sutherland (here in 1963, right), made a memorable holiday guest.

man S. Root, and how I could look at the general’s shoes and see my reflection, complete with a few missing front teeth; that’s how shiny they were. I also remember General Sutherland enjoying a few glasses of scotch with no ice and smelling like cigarette smoke when he would visit during Christmas.

As Joseph Connor’s article states, Sutherland was a self-described “first-class son of a bitch.” I think we need more of those in today’s world.

John S. Root Jupiter, Fla.

CREDIT DUE

SMOKE AND MIRRORS

Your piece on MacArthur’s inability to mount a response to the Japanese was well-placed and insightful. MacArthur was effective at one thing and one thing only: maintaining the self-aggrandizing mythology created not only by him but by the staff of public relations men who continually enhanced his image.

Their efforts worked: MacArthur gained an undeserved reputation as a military genius and incomparable soldier. But if one spends time examining MacArthur’s “victories,” there isn’t much to look at, especially when examining the Philippine’s military situation prior to the Japanese invasion. Our military preparedness was virtually nil—and our personnel paid dearly for it.

Denis Chericone Boise, Idaho

A DYING BREED

I enjoyed reading “Pulled Punches.” As a young man, I had the honor of meeting MacArthur’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Richard K. Sutherland, as he was my step-grandfather.

I’m not sure how my grandmother met General Sutherland, but I remember being age six or seven when he’d visit my father, Chap-

10

Sergeant Al Allen

FROM TOP: COURTESY OF JOHN S. ROOT; COURTESY OF THE IDA RUPP PUBLIC LIBRARY VIA DONALD L. CALDWELL

dent Quezon, who was commander-in-chief of Philippine forces.

MacArthur needed both forces in the Philippines if he were to have any chance at all in holding off the Japanese until help arrived (unlikely), or until U.S. forces were evacuated from a neutral Republic of the Philippines, as Quezon hoped. One boss was a war president, and the other had hopes of being a neutral president: an impossible situation that forced MacArthur to wait for an aggressive act on Philippine soil—not on a distant Pearl Harbor.

Wayne E. Long Haverford, PA.

I am the widow of Sergeant Al Allen of Company C, 192nd Tank Battalion; he appears in Donald Caldwell’s October 2020 piece “Ten Little Tanks Spitting Death” about America’s first tank victory in the Philippines. This was Al’s first—and last—battle there before being taken prisoner in Manchuria for three and a half years, but it never escaped his mind; he’d later discuss it with family members and veterans. Caldwell’s article is the most detailed and accurate account of the battle I’ve ever encountered. He did a fantastic job researching all that action I never fully understood when I was younger and newly married. Thank you, Mr. Caldwell and World War II, for publishing it all these years later. In my heart, I feel like Al knows his story has finally been told.

Nancy C. Allen Mansfield, Ohio

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WWII TODAY

Top: G.I. Martin Adler poses in 1944 with the three Naldi children. Above: The siblings, here with author Matteo Incerti, reunited online with Adler in December.

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WELCOME REUNION FOR AMERICAN G.I.

IT WAS ONE OF THE FEW happy memories Martin Adler took from a war that mostly left him with nightmares.

Entering a house in northern Italy to search for German troops in the fall of 1944, he saw movement from inside a big basket. Adler and a fellow soldier raised their rifles and screamed for anyone inside to reveal themselves. Just then, a woman burst into the room shouting: “Bambino! Bambino! Bambino!”

With that, three little kids aged 3 to 6, the woman’s children, tumbled out of the basket. They were Bruno Naldi and his younger sisters, Mafalda and Giuliana. Adler laughed with relief and asked if he could have a photo taken with the children he almost shot. The mother insisted that they first change into their Sunday best.

Fast forward 76 years, and Adler is living in coronavirus isolation in a Florida retirement community with his wife, Elaine. Seeking to cheer him up, Adler’s daughter, Rachelle Adler Donley, posted the photo on several World War II internet sites along with a note: “Trying to find these children from Italy,” she wrote. “My dad Martin Adler, 96 years old, would be overjoyed. Please share.”

Among those who took notice was Matteo Incerti, the Italian author of several World War II books. He narrowed the whereabouts of Adler’s company in the fall of 1944 to the Gothic Line, the last major German defensive front in northern Italy. Unable to pinpoint the incident’s exact location, he turned to social media and asked Italian journalists for help. Newspapers and TV news programs ran stories about the search.

Upon seeing the story, Bruno Naldi, now 83, conferred with Mafalda, 81, and Giuliana, 79. They agreed: they were the children in the picture. In December, Italy’s TGI news program broadcast a virtual online reunion of Adler with the three Naldi siblings.

“I kept wondering what happened to those kids,” Adler said. Once it is safe to travel, he hopes to go to Italy and see the three in person.

After the war, Adler got a degree in social work and spent his life working with the deaf and blind. His daughter told the New York Times that he didn’t speak much about the war: too many terrible memories. But when it came to the Naldi kids, “he would always tell this story with such joy…that smile in that picture is so genuine.”

HANDOUT / MATTEO INCERTI / AFP (BOTH)

REPORTED AND WRITTEN BY PAUL WISEMAN

DOD SEARCHES FOR BUFFALO SOLDIERS’ KIN The 92nd Infantry trains for war. The DOD is hoping to identify the remains of Buffalo Soldiers killed in Italy.

THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE wants help identifying the remains of dozens of “Buffalo Soldiers”—Black troops of the 92nd Infantry Division—who died fighting in Italy in early 1945.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) is urging family members of the fallen to provide DNA samples.

The 92nd, which comprised primarily White officers and enlisted African American men, was the only segregated Black division to see ground combat in Europe during World War II. Fighting Germans in the Apennine Mountains of northern Italy, the division lost 548 killed in action; 53 remained unaccounted for when the war ended. Only three have since been identified.

The DPAA has an idea of where many of the missing men may be. “There are 51 unknowns buried in Florence [Italy] American Cemetery,” said Dr. Sarah Barksdale with the agency’s European-Mediterranean directorate, adding that the DPAA’s goal is to ascertain how many of the unknowns are missing 92nd members.

But DPAA researchers need “family reference sa mples”—DNA—before they ca n exhume the remains and attempt any identifications. The actual DNA analysis is done by the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

Tracking down family members is difficult.

“There was a lot of relocation in the African American community after the war,” said Colonel Jon Lust, head of the Europe-Mediterranean directorate. And distrust, too, after wartime discrimination in the military. A DPAA press release assures donors that, by law, the DNA samples will only be used to help identify fallen soldiers. Relatives of the missing 92nd Infantry Division troopers can call the Army Casualty Office toll-free at 1-800892-2490 to arrange to provide a DNA sample.

“This is an outfit that faced the enemy in Italy, but also faced segregation from the War Department and their own countrymen,” Barksdale said. “Bringing them home and honoring their service doesn’t correct those injustices. However, the opportunity to return them to their families and tell their stories in an honest and open way, I think, is a really important part of our mission.”

FROM TOP: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; USPS

HANDOUT / MATTEO INCERTI / AFP (BOTH)

STAMP HONORS NISEI SERVICEMEN THE U.S. POSTAL SERVICE is introducing a stamp this year to honor the 33,000 Japanese Americans who served in the U.S. military in World War II. The “Go For Broke” stamp, depicting a Japanese American G.I., takes its name from the nickname for the segregated 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

Second-generation Japanese Americans—or Nisei—earned a reputation for valor. In October 1944, they rescued the “Lost Battalion”—211 troops from the 36th Infantry Division, comprising Texas National Guardsmen, who had been surrounded by 6,000 Germans in France. The Nisei fought for five days and took 800 casualties, but finally broke through and reached the trapped men. In 1963, they were named “honorary Texans” by Governor John Connally.

For heroism during the war, Japanese American soldiers received 21 Medals of Honor, nine Presidential Unit Citations, and nearly 9,500 Purple Hearts.

APRIL 2021

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DISPATCHES

A KAMIKAZE PILOT REMEMBERS KAZUO ODACHI, 93, is not supposed to be here, among the living.

As a teenager, he became a Japanese kamikaze pilot, assigned to suicide missions in the last, desperate days of World War II. For years, Odachi kept his kamikaze experience a secret as he raised a family and worked as a Tokyo police detective. But he began to open up, first to friends and then in a book, which was translated into English in September as Memoirs of a Kamikaze.

Odachi enlisted in 1943 and joined the Yokaren, elite teenagers trained to fly for the Imperial Navy. Even before Japan turned to suicide missions, the young pilots were taught to expect death in combat. They were compared to cherry blossoms, short-lived but stunning. “We all knew that ‘happily ever after’ was an unlikely outcome,” he wrote.

Once the kamikaze missions began, Odachi escaped death.

Once, unable to outmaneuver American fighters, he jettisoned his 1,100-pound bomb and got away. Seven other missions also failed because the fliers were unable to find a target. He was readying for his final flight when a ground crew member ran onto the runway, shouting and waving. Japan had surrendered.

In Odachi’s telling, the kamikaze were not the wild-eyed fanatics of legend. He recalls Japanese officers seeking volunteers for a suicide mission only to be met with silence.

“We weren’t dashing heroes, nor were we happy to die for our country,” he says. “We were all just young boys.”

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WORD FOR WORD “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now.”

—President Harry S. Truman, April 13, 1945, to reporters upon taking over the presidency after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NORIKO HAYASHI/NEW YORK TIMES; COURTESY OF KAZUO ODACHI; THE UNITED STATES MINT; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; OPPOSITE, LEFT TO RIGHT: DIOCESE OF BUFFALO ARCHIVES; ZUMA PRESS INC./ALAMY

A new book by retired police detective Kazuo Odachi details his time as a kamikaze pilot in World War II (inset).

The U.S. Mint is issuing a coin to honor the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-Black group of pilots and airmen who fought in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy during World War II. The quarter, officially released on February 1, carries the inscription “They fought two wars”—recognizing the airmen’s fight against Nazis in Europe and racial discrimination at home. The coin is the last of the Mint’s “America the Beautiful Quarters” program, launched in 2010 to recognize national parks and other sites in all 50 states, plus territories. The coin commemorates Alabama’s Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site.

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BELATED MEDAL FOR HERO CHAPLAIN

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NORIKO HAYASHI/NEW YORK TIMES; COURTESY OF KAZUO ODACHI; THE UNITED STATES MINT; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; OPPOSITE, LEFT TO RIGHT: DIOCESE OF BUFFALO ARCHIVES; ZUMA PRESS INC./ALAMY

LIEUTENANT THOMAS CONWAY (right), a priest who comforted USS Indianapolis survivors in shark-infested waters, was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross in January.

Supporters had spent years lobbying for the recognition, and Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite apologized for the delay. “I am here today to correct the record and to right a wrong,” he said in a ceremony at Conway’s church in Waterbury, Connecticut.

Japanese torpedoes sank the Indianapolis in the Pacific on July 30, 1945. More than 300 crewmen went down with the heavy cruiser, but 880 slid into the water, where most died—killed by sharks, exposure, and dehydration. Conway, 37, spent more than three days swimming between men, offering prayers and comfort before succumbing to exhaustion on August 2 and sinking into the ocean himself.

Father Conway “gave his all in his duty,” Braithwaite said. “Three

and a half days in the water. Nothing to drink.

Nothing to eat. And yet he went on.” Conway died hours before the 316 survivors began being pulled from the water. The navy credits him with saving 67 crew members.

Earlier medal attempts failed because, by the time efforts to recognize Conway began, no senior officer serving with him was alive to sign the request, as mandated by navy rules.

From Normandy to the Bulge: The First Division’s Race Across Europe

SEPTEMBER 5-16, 2021 Visit the places where the 1st Infantry Division made history, leading the way to Allied success in WWII.

in partnership with Academic Travel Abroad

@fdmuseum | #FDMuseum

For an itinerary, travel details and pricing, or to reserve your place, please visit FDMuseum.org/footsteps or call Academic Travel Abroad at 1-877-298-9677.

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Please note that the First Division Museum offers this travel experience as a way to engage our audience and does not benefit financially from this trip.

2/12/21 3:11 PM

Q: When and where was napalm first used in the European and Pacific theaters, and were there particular uses unique to either theater?

—Paul Minault, San Rafael, Calif.

A: Invented in 1942, napalm saw combat for the first time in Sicily in August 1943, when American troops incinerated a wheat field believed to shelter Germans. In the Pacific, U.S. soldiers first used napalm on December 15, 1943, in flamethrowers used to burn Japanese defenders out of a cave on Pilelo, a tiny island northeast of New Guinea.

Air bombardments followed in short order. Airmen mixed napalm powder with various combinations of oil and gasoline, creating firebombs. Standard Oil’s M-69 napalm bombs saw Pacific combat for the first time on February 15, 1944, when the Seventh Air Force attacked the town of Pohnpei, capital of the eponymous Micronesian island. A total of 118 tons of bombs hit the island over the next 11 days.

Requests poured in as commanders observed napalm’s effectiveness. Bombs quickly, and permanently, surpassed flamethrower requisitions. Napalm firebombs proved to be “an excellent tactical weapon to use against supply dumps, troop concentrations, convoys

Napalm first came into use in the Pacific War as fuel for American flamethrowers (left). and vehicles,” according to an official history. In Europe, 13,000 M-47 napalm bombs, mixed with explosives, gutted a German Focke-Wulf aircraft plant at Marienburg in October 1943; another napalm attack the same month critically damaged ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt. Napalm assaulted German forces caught in the Falaise Pocket at the end of the Battle of Normandy in August 1944. Ultimately, more than 500,000 napalm bombs fell on Germany: perhaps 10,000 tons of flaming gel. By December incendiaries, including napalm, accounted for 40 percent of all U.S. bombs dropped in Europe.

The U.S. used napalm to immolate entire cities in Japan. On the night of March 9, 1945, about 690,000 pounds of f laming napalm from M-69 bombs burned 15 square miles of central Tokyo. A supernatural open chimney of flames and smoke rose 18,000 feet over the city amid gale-force winds. Official tabulations recorded 87,793 people dead from the firestorm—more than from the nuclear explosions at Hiroshima or Nagasaki—and 40,918 injured, over 1 million homeless, 267,171 buildings wrecked, and 18 percent of Tokyo’s industrial area and almost two-thirds of its commercial district destroyed. Airmen gagged and vomited from the smell of burning flesh penetrating their B-29s. Tail gunners saw a red glow from the burning city 150 miles away on the flight home.

—Robert M. Neer, author of Napalm: An American Biography SEND QUERIES TO: Ask World War II, 901 N. Glebe Road, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203 OR EMAIL: worldwar2@historynet.com

DISPATCHES Seven crab fishermen were injured when nets on their boat snagged an unexploded World War II munition in the North Sea, 25 miles off Britain’s coast. The men—two British, five Latvian—were hauling in crab pots when they pulled up the mine or bomb.

It exploded underwater, blowing the boat, the Galwad-Y-Mor (left), out of the sea, rupturing the hull, and flooding the engine room (far left). Several of the fishermen suffered injuries that were described by authorities as “lifechanging.” The men were taken to hospitals onshore for treatment.

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TOP: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; BOTTOM (BOTH): © CROWN COPYRIGHT GOV.UK

ASK WWII

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

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PHILIPPINES, DECEMBER 8, 1941

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

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WHY DID MACARTHUR WAIT FOR THE ENEMY TO STRIKE FIRST?

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DOUBLE TROUBLE

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

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

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

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This man taught thousands of U.S. Army Rangers how to fight dirty in World War II.

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CONVERSATION WITH DOUGLAS BURGESS

BY MICHAEL W. ROBBINS

IN HIS ELEMENT FASCINATED BY SHIPS AS A BOY, Douglas Burgess—who grew up in Queens, New York—often went to New York Harbor to observe the great ocean liners. When he graduated from Queens College two months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he promptly joined the navy, telling officials he wanted to “go to sea and sail in the Atlantic Fleet.” Burgess got his wish, and then some: he spent three years in the midst of the long-running, high-stakes Battle of the Atlantic. As an officer aboard a new destroyer escort, he survived 26 combat crossings on antisubmarine convoy duty. Burgess left active duty in early 1946, then served in the Naval Reserve for 30 years. He’ll turn 101 on April 22.

Where did the navy send you following officer candidate school?

I was assigned to subchaser training in Miami Beach. Part of that was aboard a destroyer escort, the type of ship that escorts convoys. When we finished, I was assigned to the USS Brough— pronounced “Bruff”—which had just been launched. We had the commissioning ceremony on September 18, 1943, at Consolidated Steel in Orange, Texas. We sailed to New Orleans, then Galveston, and on to Bermuda for a 30-day shakedown.

We were ordered to the Charleston Navy Yard for upgrading the ship’s armament. The morning we sailed from Bermuda, we hit a nasty storm. I was on the bridge, as junior officer of the deck. The captain, Lieutenant Commander Kenneth J. Hartley, was there too, and he noticed that the canvas cover on the Number 2 gun was flapping in the wind. He and the chief boatswain mate went to tie it down. They were working on it when we took a huge wave over the bow. It knocked the captain down, and he hit his head on the gun mount. They took him to the wardroom, and the officer of the watch ordered me to go see how he was. I went down there, and the captain was lying on the floor with his leg at an awkward angle. His eyes were open. But as I looked at him, he shut his eyes and died. He died right there. We had to turn around and go back to Bermuda, to take his body ashore. It was a bad way to get started on our new ship. Then we sailed on to Charleston, had some work done, and were ordered to Newport News to pick up a convoy sailing the next day for Casablanca.

How many ships would be in a convoy?

About a hundred—tankers and ordinary merchant ships carrying war materiel. And there were usually six destroyer escorts around the forward end of the convoy, with the commander in the center.

Then there were six more around the rest of the convoy.

18

Burgess (top, and last fall, opposite) crossed the Atlantic 26 times on convoy duty aboard the destroyer escort USS Brough (above).

One hundred ships must have covered a lot of ocean.

Horizon to horizon, pretty much, and there was not much room to maneuver. At night, we used only red lights because they can’t be seen very far. We kept station by watching the light on the stern of the ship ahead.

That’s how the captain would know where he was. In inclement weather, it was awful because the ships were all over the ocean.

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2/4/21 8:14 PM

MICHAEL W. ROBBINS; OPPOSITE: COURTESY OF DOUGLAS BURGESS

After that?

that kind of thing. So they put a CPA-type guy in charge of the supplies and commissary, and I became the assistant communications officer. I collected all of the notices to mariners of changes in buoys and things like that, which had been made on the charts for the ports we were going to visit. It kept me pretty busy. And standing watch on the flying bridge.

Did you stand watch at night?

Many times. Usually four of us at a time: the officer of the deck, the assistant officer of the deck, a signalman, and me, as junior officer of the deck. The signalman was there so we could stay in touch with other ships. It was our job to make sure the ships stayed on station and didn’t drift off. We had to herd them along and keep them under control. If it was a clear night and calm, they were easy to see. But in rough seas, it was really a clambake, with ships all over the place. It’s amazing we never had a collision.

Were you out in the open?

Yes. The flying bridge was open-air for visibility, with no weather protection. When we had storms and rough weather, it was bitter cold.

Of course, we had our warm jackets and rain gear. But it was cold!

How long did you stay out there?

Were there collisions?

We never had one, strangely enough. But if there was a torpedo strike on one ship, everybody else had to get out of the way. It was general mayhem then. That only happened a couple of times.

MICHAEL W. ROBBINS; OPPOSITE: COURTESY OF DOUGLAS BURGESS

What was your normal convoy routine?

We were four hours on and four hours off. We had lookouts with binoculars stationed around the ship, looking for signs of sub activity night and day. Once a shift I made a round of the ship, checking on the lookouts and gun crews, making sure no one was asleep. It was scary in bad weather when the ship was rock-

“In rough seas, it was really a clambake, with ships all over the place.”

We would go back to the United States with a convoy of empty ships, to fill up with food and war materiel, and take the next convoy going out.

Our normal run was from New York to England. The British would come out to meet us at a point at sea where we transferred control of the convoy. British destroyers would take the ships into port. Then we would go up to Northern Ireland to the River Foyle. Londonderry is where we had our breaks between convoys. They did repairs to the ship there, and we got new supplies of fresh food before we took empty ships back to New York. That break usually took about a week.

ing and rolling, and waves would come over the bow. Passageways were narrow and wet, and there were no real rails, just steel cables.

What were your duties at sea?

Sounds pretty risky.

At first, as an ensign, I was a supply and commissary officer. My job was to order supplies for the kitchens, the food, and whatever was needed. Also, to arrange the meals with the kitchen crew and mess boys, who were my responsibility. Then the navy realized that they couldn’t have men like me, with no accounting experience, handling

Yes, convoy duty was a hard business. But I was in my element. I felt extremely fortunate because this was what I had always wanted to do, and I loved it. But the sea didn’t like me as much as I loved the sea. H APRIL 2021

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19 2/4/21 8:14 PM

Jack M. Spangler (bottom) enlisted in the Army Air Corps at age 19, survived the attack on Pearl Harbor, and brought this vivid parachute home.

AIR SUPPLY Curators at The National World War II Museum solve readers’ artifact mysteries

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I have a parachute that belonged to my father, Jack M. Spangler. An aircraft mechanic, he was stationed at Oahu’s Wheeler Field when Pearl Harbor was bombed. I don’t know where or when he acquired this parachute, but it looks like a cargo chute. It’s hot pink (and I mean hot!). It appears to have never been used; the straps and clips are still wrapped in paper. Any leads on its history would be greatly appreciated.

—Julee Sallaz, Bangor, Mich.

The item in question certainly appears to be a cargo parachute. During World War II, the U.S. Army developed not only the equipment needed to deliver parachutists to the front but also to resupply them in action. Eventually, the army produced cargo chutes in four sizes, designed for different-sized loads and available in five colors: red, green, yellow, blue, and natural. Loads were packed in chutes of varied colors for easy identification at the drop zone; local command decided which colors to use. Cargo chutes could be dropped from racks suspended under a plane’s belly or shoved out the cargo door. The army also developed eight standard containers for dropping supplies and equipment.

Airdropped supplies played a crucial role several times during the war. On D-Day, equipment bundles containing mortars, machine guns, and bazookas were dropped along with the paratroopers. And, like the paratroopers, the equipment bundles were scattered widely; their recovery provided critical weapons in the early battles of the Normandy campaign. Paratroopers misdropped at the French village of Graignes, for example, were still able to mount a stubborn defense after local civilians recovered supply and equipment bundles from the surrounding flooded areas.

The most significant attempt at resupply by air was probably during 1944’s Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands. The failure of airborne and ground forces to link up in accordance with the planned timetable made resupply there critically important.

And unfortunately, the capture and occupation of drop zones by enemy forces made that almost impossible.

As for this parachute’s shocking color, it’s not as unusual as it might seem. While its shift from red to pink is a factor of age, the point, after all, was for the chute to be highly visible. This chute is probably brighter still because it has remained in storage since it was made. —Tom Czekanski, senior curator and restoration manager Have a World War II artifact you can’t identify?

Write to Footlocker@historynet.com with the following: — Your connection to the object and what you know about it.

— The object’s dimensions, in inches.

— Several high-resolution digital photos taken close up and from varying angles.

— Pictures should be in color, and at least 300 dpi.

Unfortunately, we can’t respond to every query, nor can we appraise value.

COURTESY OF JULEE SALLAZ (BOTH)

FROM THE FOOTLOCKER

WORLD WAR II

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2/10/21 9:10 PM

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BY JAMES HOLLAND

MATTER OF CHOICE

“I WAS MERELY OBEYING ORDERS.” It’s a well-worn trope of Nazis accused of war crimes, and an excuse that suggests they had no choice in the matter. Certainly, it’s widely assumed that if a soldier refused to execute a prisoner, he would be shot for disobeying the order and the prisoner would still be executed. In other words, there was no point in taking a moral stand because two people would end up dead rather than one.

The other day, I got into a conversation about this issue of choice with Waitman Wade Beorn, formerly with the U.S. 10th Cavalry and now teaching history here in the U.K. He’s done some fascinating—albeit very grim—work on the Holocaust on the Eastern Front, looking at crimes carried out by the regular army, the Wehrmacht, rather than by the SS-led Einsatzgruppen.

Waitman told me about the operations of the German 691st Infantry Regiment’s 1st Battalion in Belarus in October 1941. The battalion commander, Major Alfred Commichau, was ordered to round up the Jews in the area and execute them all, whether man, woman, or child. At the time, his three companies were based in different towns, and so he, in turn, issued orders to each of his company commanders. First Lieutenant Hermann Kuhls, commander of 2nd Company, was a Nazi Party member and also in the SS, despite serving in the Wehrmacht. A rabid anti-Semite, he immediately complied, executing all the Jews in his jurisdiction with enthusiastic and brutal efficiency.

The 3rd Company commander was Captain Friedrich Nöll. He was ordered to round up the 150 Jews of the small town of Krucha, where he and his company were stationed, and eliminate the lot. This caused Nöll “great confusion and agitation,” as he put it. He believed it was wrong, and he didn’t want any part in such a deed. However, his first sergeant, Emil Zimber, argued that Jews supported the partisans—irregular Soviet troops operating behind German lines—so, in effect, they were partisans and, as a result, a legitimate target. This link between Jews and partisans was, of course, utter nonsense, but it folded neatly into the warped Nazi ideology about the

22

ILLUSTRATION BY RICHARD MIA

NEED TO KNOW

menace of the Bolshevik-Jew—something that had been recently “confirmed” at a Wehrmacht training conference in the Belarusian city of Mogilev. It was even more absurd because, at that time, there was no real partisan threat. Nonetheless, if it were to be involved in such operations, the Wehrmacht needed to convince its ranks that Jews were a legitimate danger. At any rate, Sergeant Zimber had no qualms and carried out the order on Nöll’s behalf, while his company commander stayed well away and played no direct part in the slaughter.

The 1st Company commander received the same order. Captain Josef Sibille, a 47-year-old teacher, spent what he called “anxious hours and a sleepless night ” worrying about what to do, before telling his battalion commander that neither he nor anyone in his company would kill any Jews. Major Commichau told him he needed to be tougher and gave him three days to carry out the order. But Sibille still refused, telling Commichau he was not prepared to dishonor himself or his company.

Was Sibille shot for disobeying a direct order? No. Nor was he courtmartialed or punished in any way at all. When Sibille reported to Commichau five days later, the battalion commander did not even mention this moment of insubordination.

Afterward, Sibille reported hearing that he’d been considered “a bit soft.”

That was the only consequence of his refusal to murder innocent people.

As Waitman pointed out, it was remarkable that three companies of the same battalion were given the same order to murder Jews, yet each company commander responded differently. Clearly, orders did not always have to be obeyed when it came to taking an active part in the Holocaust. In other words, Germans did have a choice. I couldn’t stop thinking about my conversation with Waitman for days afterward. If only more people had had the same moral courage as Captain Sibille. H

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TRAVEL LIMOUSIN, FRANCE

BY BARBARA NOE KENNEDY

THE HIDDEN FIGHT MONT-GARGAN IN THE HEART OF FRANCE is a peaceful place, its 2,400-foot peak topped by the ruins of the neo-Gothic Notre-Dame de Bon Secours chapel. From here, a pathway moseys to a prairie-covered point overlooking the surrounding Limousin countryside, a pastoral realm of chestnut woods, thousand-year-old villages, and sparkling streams. The sun falls beneath undulating maroon hills along the Massif Central’s western edge, casting a magical glow in a landscape that appears straight out of a 19th-century Romantic painting.

“Guingouin used to picnic here, after the war,” Claudine Legouffe from the Châteauneuf-la-Forêt tourist office tells me. “He loved the view.”

I try to wrap my head around that—the legendary Resistance leader, Georges Guingouin, who headed a famed 1944 assault against the Nazis at this very spot, enjoying a picnic with a view? But that was decades after he had gone underground, in 1941, to organize a Resistance network in the Limousin region—one of the largest Maquis groups of rural guerrilla fighters.

I come face to face with Guingouin—or at least a black-and-white photograph of him—at the Musée de la Résistance in Limoges, Limousin’s regional capital, which details local Resistance activities during World War II. With soft, friendly eyes peering from behind round glasses, he appears every bit the teacher he started out as in the nearby town of Saint-Gilles-les-Forêts. As he defended his communist ideals in the 1930s in this very left-wing region, publishing and distributing leaflets and making false identity cards, his charisma and teaching experience made him a natural leader.

After the fall of France in 1940, when the Limousin region became a part

24

of unoccupied Vichy France, Guingouin wrote a manifesto denouncing the collaborationist regime and Germany’s occupation of his country.

Not surprisingly, he was fired from his teaching job for being a communist militant. Going undercover in February 1941, he organized smallscale Resistance activities in the countryside, growing a force of fellow Maquisards who stole ration cards from town halls and sabotaged balers to prevent farmers from supplying the Nazis with wheat, among other nefarious activities.

I head out with Claudine into the Limousin countryside, about 20 miles southeast of Limoges, to learn more about this man, the force he built to fight the Germans, and the battle of Mont-Gargan—one of the rare clashes in which Wehrmacht and Resistance fighters fought head-to-head—that earned him his lauded status.

Pulling into a picturesque farm in Saint-Méard, next to Châteauneufla-Forêt, I have the honor of meeting the last remaining Limousin Resistance fighter, René Arnaud. A spirited man of 95 years, he ushers me into his small country kitchen, his smiling wife hovering behind.

“I was 18 years old in 1943,” Arnaud says. “We weren’t free. We wanted to dance, and we were forbid-

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OPPOSITE: HEMIS/ALAMY; TOP LEFT AND INSET: BARBARA NOE KENNEDY; TOP RIGHT: LE MUSÉE DE LA LIBERATION DE PARIS

Views of the Limousin countryside stretch for miles from atop MontGargan in central France. In 1944, local Maquis Resistance fighters took on the German army here.

OPPOSITE: HEMIS/ALAMY; TOP LEFT AND INSET: BARBARA NOE KENNEDY; TOP RIGHT: LE MUSÉE DE LA LIBERATION DE PARIS

During the war, Resistance leader Georges Guingouin built a secret forest hideout that still stands (left).

den. We did it anyway. We can’t live in a world without liberté, fraternité.” And so he joined the Resistance.

Dressed in the dungarees and overcoat of a hardworking farmer, he speaks French using the local patois, his eyes bright with a far-off memory. “We blew up bridges, telephone lines, and the railroad,” he says.

Arnaud didn’t know Guingouin, who was an “unknown,” someone who could never expose himself.

Arnaud was a “plain-sight” Maquisard, working as a farmer during the day and as a fighter at night.

Taking these stories with me, I head out to explore.

In the forest just outside Châteauneuf-la-Forêt, I walk down a grassy clearing bordered by trees. If Claudine hadn’t pointed it out, I might have missed it. But there, after all these years, is Guingouin’s hideaway. Dug into the soft earth, its roof is made of chestnut piquets—a layer of dried leaves and earth, in turn covered and camouflaged with leaves and forest litter.

“Go inside!” Claudine urges. It is dark and damp, and my first instinct is “no”—but I descend anyway, ducking as I enter the cramped, fusty space.

After Guingouin went underground, he hid from Vichy authorities in barns, friendly homes, and abandoned buildings. He and four comrades built this hideout in 1943, using only two shovels and two picks.

Back in the car, we start climbing up Mont-Gargan’s flanks. As we drive, Claudine fills me in on some of the events that followed.

In 1943, many young Frenchmen avoiding forced labor in Germany—service required by the Vichy-approved Service du Travail Obligatoire—joined the Resistance fight. “As Guingouin’s ranks grew, so did the brazenness of his acts, including stealing 3,900 pounds of dynamite from a German-guarded coal mine at Saint-Léonard on the night of January 25, 1943—and using it to destroy the Bussy-Varache viaduct two months later,” she says.

Twice in 1944 the Nazis came to the Limousin region to eliminate Guingouin’s Maquis. The first time was in April, when they arrested three Resistance fighters, questioning and torturing them before deporting them to concentration camps. They came again between July 17 and 24, after word got out that on July 14 the Allies had airdropped supplies on Mont-Gargan, on a saddle

René Arnaud, the last surviving Limousin Maquisard, greets the author at his farm in the town of Saint-Méard.

between Sussac and the mountain at the Clos de Sussac.

We stop at that airdrop site, a long, grassy expanse along the side of the mountain overlooking the glorious countryside. A placard explains what unfurled that day—“Opération Cadillac”—and I imagine the scene: 36 Flying Fortress heavy bombers—part of Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle’s U.S. Eighth Army Air Force, each loaded with 400 pounds of arms and supplies for the Resistance and escorted by 200 Spitfire fighters of the Royal Air Force—buzzed past at the low altitude of 350 feet, discharging their tricolor-parachuted packages at APRIL 2021

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Gilles-les-Forêts as a silent witness to where it all started.

The drive to the summit of Mont-Gargan opens up commanding views of the Limousin countryside. At the top, we stroll along a lane of towering beeches, passing Guingouin’s picnic spot and then the ruins of Notre-Dame de Bon Secours chapel, built between 1868 and 1871. We walk through prairie brush to an overlook, and I imagine what transpired Paris around me during that FRANCE seven-day battle. Aware Limoges that the Nazis had learned marked drop zones with Mont-Gargan about the July 14 drop, targeted accuracy.

Guingouin and his Maquis “The red, white, and blue fighters sped to hide the of the pa rachutes wa s a weapons and ammunition they symbol of hope on July 14, the had received on the mountain and lay in French national day,” Claudine says.

We continue southward, to the out- wait for the Germans.

Sure enough, the Wehrmacht soldiers— skirts of the village of Salon-la-Tour, where a cross and a stone monument committed to finishing off the Maquis— stand at a crossroads. Claudine tells me, started arriving on July 16. Skirmishes “Churchill and de Gaulle recruited special erupted on Mont-Gargan and throughout agents—women!” Among them was Vio- the region. René Arnaud was part of this lette Szabo, an Anglo-French undercover battle. “We didn’t eat or drink for three agent who parachuted into Nazi-occupied days, because we had to fight,” he says.

In the end, 38 Maquisards died, with France to aid the Resistance movement.

“She was very beautiful,” Claudine says. 54 injured and five missing; losses on the “All the boys wanted to see the ‘Ameri- German side were three times higher.

Even so, the Germans took the mount— can’—because she spoke English.”

Alas, on June 10, 1944, while carrying but by then, the Resistance had managed the message to local Resistance leaders to slow the enemy troops’ advance and that any German troop movements head- had secured their precious arms to coning north toward Normandy should be tinue the fight. Mission accomplished.

Just a little over a month later, it all hindered, Szabo’s car was ambushed by SS soldiers. She and her two male com- ended, at least locally. Guingouin and his panions fled across the fields; the men fellow Maquis surrounded the city of escaped, but Szabo was captured, then Limoges, and the occupying Nazis, realtortured and eventually shot in the neck izing they were trapped, lay down their at Ravensbrück extermination camp in arms and fled.

As we return to Limoges that night, Germany in 1945. She was only 23 years old. The memorial marks the intersec- driving through its quiet streets, I imagine the evening of August 21, 1944, when tion where she was captured.

Off the D39A, we pull into a small the Resistance fighters entered the city “Garden of Memory,” where we come to the cheers of welcoming crowds. close to the illustrious man himself, Arnaud says he was part of the exuberant buried next to his wife after he died in festivities, and I picture him as a young 2005 at age 92, surrounded by the wil- man celebrating victory with his comderness he loved. Guingouin’s tiny school rades—before returning to his farm to get still stands in the nearby town of Saint- back to work. H

26

WHEN YOU GO Limoges is located about 250 miles south of Paris and is easily accessible by train.

The Musée de la Résistance (resistance-massifcentral.fr) is located at 7 rue Neuve Saint-Étienne. You’ll need a car to tour the Limousin countryside—pick up maps and info at the Office de Tourisme Briance Combade in Châteauneufla-Forêt. Your best bet is to hire a guide; the tourist office can provide a list, which includes children of Resistance fighters.

WHERE TO STAY AND EAT Limoges is a pretty city with plenty of hotels and restaurants. Hôtel les Beaux Arts (hotel-beaux-arts-limoges.fr) occupies a 19th-century building in the town center.

For traditional fare—including pig’s trotter crépinette and pot-au-feu—try Chez Alphonse (chezalphonse.fr) in the city’s historic Quartier du Château.

WHAT ELSE TO SEE AND DO Limoges is famous for its hard-paste porcelain, produced in the region beginning in the late 18th century.

Les Routes de la Porcelaine (routes-porcelainelimoges-hautevienne.com) has a downloadable brochure to help plan visits to factories, shops, and museums.

On June 10, 1944, Nazis massacred 642 residents of the Limousin village of Oradour-sur-Glane (oradour. info). Charles de Gaulle ordered the village be kept exactly as it was on that day as a memorial, complete with roofless buildings, rusting cars, and bikes leaning against charred walls.

PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

Resistance fighters receive training on a British Sten gun, circa 1943.

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R E T H G SLAU A E S T A were a s e in r a m b u s n a Americ acific P e th in e c r fo l a far more leth own n k ly s u io v e r p n War tha nk a r F .

B d r a h ic R y B

I

t’s a story more than 75 years old, but revealed in detail here for the first time. Simply stated, the contribution of American submarines in the Pacific War was far greater than previously recognized. Indeed, American undersea craft killed at least 97,342 Japanese soldiers—more than the Marine Corps and the U.S. Army did in the central Pacific drive from Tarawa in November 1943 to Iwo Jima in February–March 1945. The grand total may prove to be higher still. Why this contribution remained obscured for so long is an intriguing story in itself that requires some background.

The standard narrative about U.S. submarines’ performance emerged shortly after the war, when the U.S. Joint Army-Navy Assessment Committee (JANAC) studied the causes behind the loss of Japanese naval and merchant vessels. Despite some gaps in the study—it was limited to merchant vessels over 500 tons, for example, and missed some larger vessels—the assessment still serves as a sturdy reference point. By JANAC calculations, American forces sank 611 Japanese naval vessels, totaling 1,822,210 tons; and 2,117 merchant vessels, of 7,913,858 tons. Of that, submarines contributed a huge part, accounting for 201 naval vessels (540,192 tons) and 1,113 merchant vessels (4,779,902 tons)—or about 33 percent of naval vessels by number and 30 percent by tonnage, and 52.5 percent of merchant vessels by number and 60 percent by tonnage.

For decades, published histories, notably Clay Blair’s monumental 1975 work Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan, mentioned instances in which many Japanese soldiers perished in some of those sinkings. But the full story remained concealed because JANAC and the other sources from which Blair and others

28

U.S. Navy submarines claimed a huge number of Japanese lives during the Pacific War. Unintentional losses included Allied POWs and slave laborers transported by the Japanese.

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30

worked rarely included figures on losses among the ship’s crews or human cargo—predominantly Japanese troops.

Then in 2009, John D. Alden and Craig R. McDonald published a revised version of United States and Allied Submarine Successes in the Pacific and Far East During World War II. Alden’s original edition had appeared in 1989. He was a World War II submariner himself and the author of a still-standard 1979 work on the development of the World War II U.S. “fleet” submarine. What distinguished this updated edition was the addition of 321 pages of data that McDonald, a programmer analyst, had developed, incorporating a trove of new detail about crew and passenger losses from a translation of Japanese sources by independent researcher Erich Mühlthaler. One day several years later, as I skimmed over entries for 1944, it struck me for the first time that a great many more Japanese soldiers had died in U.S. submarine attacks than had been previously recognized.

I suggested to Alden that he try to total the losses of Japanese soldiers in such attacks

and write about it. Unfortunately, Alden died in 2014, leaving the project unfinished.

When I decided to pursue it myself, I quickly realized there was a huge obstacle in getting from the raw data to its ultimate revelation. Alden and McDonald had employed a tabular format, with standard entries that identified the submarine, its target, the results, and other relevant facts. The information on human loss, however, appeared in text running beneath the standard data boxes and, therefore, could not be readily extracted with a few keystrokes.

This is where an IT businessman with a master’s degree in World War II history, Jay D. Fagel, volunteered to step in to perform the laborious but essential task of extracting that information and entering it into a program.

His background perfectly suited him for this challenge; he created a program specifically for this project, and we collaborated on what data to extract and use.

The numbers collectively tell the story of U.S. submarines’ increasing effectiveness and the toll taken on Japanese soldiers—one

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NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

The numbers collectively tell the story of U.S. subs’ increasing effectiveness and the toll taken on Japanese soldiers.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; BERNARD HOFFMAN/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES; U.S. NAVY; PREVIOUS PAGES: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

Moored in San Diego in 1940, an array of subs awaits deployment. Admiral Thomas C. Hart (below) set the first of these in motion only hours after Pearl Harbor was attacked—but flaws with the Mark XIV torpedo (bottom, left) hindered their early performance.

best examined by breaking down the campaign by year. The numbers also present a parallel story: the loss of life of Allied prisoners of war and slave laborers serving Japan.

They were transported aboard Japanese vessels, exposing them to attack by both American and British submarines. These stories rise to a crescendo in 1944, before radically changed circumstances in 1945 left U.S. submarines with few targets.

In July 1942, the USS Sturgeon sank Japan’s Montevideo Maru. The ship was later found to have been carrying more than 1,000 Australian POWs and civilian internees. Such losses continued throughout the war.

NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; BERNARD HOFFMAN/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES; U.S. NAVY; PREVIOUS PAGES: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

DECEMBER 1941 AND 1942

On December 7, 1941, immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy deployed 56 submarines in the Pacific. These included 12 elderly small “S-boats” of World War I vintage. The rest were large modern fleet submarines developed for the Pacific’s long reaches. From then until the end of 1942, defects beset this modest force, degrading its effectiveness.

The most crippling handicap stemmed from three faults in the standard U.S. Mark XIV submarine torpedo. First, the torpedo would often run under the target without exploding because of a defective depth-setting mechanism. Second, its ultra-secret Mark VI magnetic exploder—designed to detonate when the torpedo was below the target’s hull, where it would inflict more severe damage than a hit on the hull side—typically either did not detonate the weapon at all or caused it to explode before it reached the target. Finally, the torpedo’s conventional contact exploder was fragile and often failed.

Ironically, a hit that struck at, or close to, a 90-degree angle—considered near-perfect accuracy—was the most likely to jam the firing pin and fail.

Several other issues also degraded performance. Codebreaking of the time divulged little information for submarines to exploit.

The force also learned with embarrassment that it had a “skipper problem”: too many commanders, trained in peacetime environments, proved too cautious and, hence, ineffective. Top command misjudgments sent submarines to patrol off well-guarded major Japanese bases and to attempt interceptions of large combatant vessels—carriers and battleships, for example—that customarily cruised at a speed that outpaced U.S. submarines, making pursuit or attack futile.

Within hours of the Pearl Harbor attack, Admiral Thomas C. Hart, Commander in

Chief of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet in Manila, radioed his command to “execute against Japan unrestricted air and submarine warfare”—an order that effectively also initiated the campaign against Japanese shipping.

Hart’s fleet included 29 of the 56 American submarines in the Pacific.

They constituted the most potent American force not just in the Asiatic Fleet but in the Philippines. But, because of the torpedo and skipper problems, their overall performance was a dismal failure.

Effectiveness improved as 1942 progressed and those two deficiencies began to be addressed. By the year’s end, U.S. submarines had mounted approximately 350 war patrols, sinking about 180 Japanese merchant vessels of 725,000 tons. The only major success against warships was the sinking of the heavy cruiser Kako. In all, Allied submarine attacks killed 1,218 Japanese soldiers and 342 other Imperial Army personnel, for a total of 1,560. Seven U.S. submarines were lost.

Regrettably, 1,903 POWs were also lost in submarine attacks, outnumbering the deaths of Japanese soldiers. The USS Sturgeon, under Lieutenant Commander William L. Wright, inflicted the deadliest single attack in this period. In June 1942, the Japanese herded 845 Australian prisoners of war and 208 civilian internees captured at APRIL 2021

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Rabaul, New Britain, aboard the Montevideo Maru—a former passenger-cargo vessel impressed into Imperial Navy service. In the first hours of July 1, Sturgeon hit the vessel with one or two torpedoes, and Montevideo Maru sank west of Luzon with all 1,053 Australians and about 20 Japanese crewmembers. Wright had no way of knowing that the vessel was carrying prisoners of war or civilian internees. In subsequent episodes during the war, submarine crews were likewise unaware of which Japanese ships bore friendly human cargo.

1943

This year saw major enhancements to the submarine campaign. In the spring, Allied codebreakers fully mastered Japanese merchant ship codes, yielding critical aid to U.S. submariners. And by September, the defects

1944

Several factors converged to make this the year of slaughter. Previously, the Imperial Army had primarily focused on fighting on the Asian continent, relegating the Pacific front to secondary status. In January 1943, only 6.5 percent of all Japanese soldiers served in the Solomon Islands and New Guinea fronts. As 1944 began, the Imperial Army finally pivoted its focus to the Pacific Theater. This caused a massive shift—including releasing 12 divisions from the premier Kwantung Army, which had been facing the Soviets in Manchu-

FROM TOP: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; ASAHI SHIMBUN; OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; PHOTOQUEST/GETTY IMAGES; NATIONAL ARCHIVES; NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; COURTESY OF CRAIG R. MCDONALD

U.S. Marines on Tarawa seek cover alongside a fallen comrade (top). Far fewer Marines would have been killed had Japan’s 7th Sasebo Special Naval Landing Force (above, in 1938) been shipped off the island as planned. A U.S. submarine sank the troopship bearing their less-powerful army replacement battalion in May 1943.

About half died; the remainder never reached Tarawa to replace the naval unit.

in the Mark XIV torpedo were largely cured.

The raw figures for 1943 show 350 patrols, almost the same amount as for the 13 prior months, but now accounting for about 335 Japanese merchant ships totaling approximately 1.5 million tons. These numbers are nearly double the figures for December 1941 through December 1942. Bulk commodities reaching Japan fell from about 19.4 million tons in 1942 to 16.4 million tons in 1943.

Because new construction of merchant vessels helped offset losses, the net reduction in shipping tonnage was 1.1 million tons. The only major Japanese warship sunk was escort carrier Chuyo. Lost with the troop-bearing ships that U.S. submarines sunk were 9,177 Japanese soldiers; POW and slave laborer deaths totaled 2,172. Fifteen U.S. submarines were lost.

The May 20 sinking of the troopship Bangkok Maru by USS Pollock combined significance with misfortune. The Imperial Navy had deployed its well-trained and equipped 1,559-man 7th Sasebo Special Naval Landing Force (SNLF) to Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands.

As Tokyo wrangled over island garrison responsibilities, orders came to replace that unit with an ad hoc 800-man Imperial Army battalion. Thanks to a decryption of Bangkok Maru’s routing instructions, Pollock intercepted the vessel, fired effective torpedoes, and sank it in about 90 seconds. About half the battalion was lost. The 400 survivors ended up on Jaluit in the Marshall Islands, where they sat out the war, while the 7th SNLF remained on Tarawa. Because the army battalion had only about half the Imperial Navy unit’s strength and was much less well-armed, had the exchange occurred, Marine losses in the November 1943 Tarawa invasion would certainly have been substantially reduced.

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FROM TOP: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; ASAHI SHIMBUN; OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; PHOTOQUEST/GETTY IMAGES; NATIONAL ARCHIVES; NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; COURTESY OF CRAIG R. MCDONALD

By fall 1943, with torpedo defects largely corrected and more seasoned crew aboard (top and bottom, right), subs’ lethality increased. As Japan began moving more troops by sea the following year, ship sinkings—and the death toll—escalated.

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million tons, fell victim to American submarines—more than in the first 25 months of war combined. Japanese commodity imports plunged from 16.4 million tons to 10 million tons; the net loss of shipping was about two million tons. For the first time, U.S. submarines struck hard at key ships in the Imperial Navy, sinking seven Japanese carriers, one battleship, and two heavy and seven light cruisers. The cost of this triumph was not cheap: 19 American submarines.

With the oceans now packed with Japanese troopships, American submarines inflicted a calamity on the Imperial Army, killing some 79,004 Japanese soldiers. In a remarkable coincidence, the two leading submarines achieved their rank by virtue of sinking two sister ships of the Mayasan Maru class. The Japanese termed these brand-new 460-footlong vessels “landing craft depot ships.” The loss of one of them, Tamatsu Maru, occurred on August 19, during what was perhaps the most devastating single U.S. submarine assault on a Japanese convoy during the war.

Tamatsu Maru joined a major Singaporebound convoy, HI-71, originally comprising 17 merchant ships ultimately guarded by three destroyers, nine kaibokan (a relation of the Allied corvette type), and an escort carrier,

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FROM TOP: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; PJF MILITARY COLLECTION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

ria, to confront the American advances across the Pacific. These divisions and other units put vastly more Japanese soldiers afloat than at any prior point in the war.

This coincided with the U.S. submarine effort becoming “devastatingly effective,” in the words of Clay Blair. On January 1, 1944, the central and southwest Pacific submarine commands numbered almost 100 excellent fleet boats. Well-seasoned, aggressive commanders and crews comprising mostly patrol veterans exploited new and superior radar and sound sensors and effective torpedoes.

Codebreaking, much of it done by now highly proficient women, showered the patrolling submarines with intelligence that set up fatal rendezvous with targets, including many troop-bearing ships.

While the Japanese had far more escort vessels than in prior years, the increase in their numbers did not coincide with an increase in effectiveness. Japanese sensors— especially radar—lagged. And although the number and efficiency of Japanese antisubmarine weapons had increased, they remained inferior to those on American and British vessels.

In about 520 war patrols in 1944, 603 Japanese merchant ships, totaling about 2.7

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

British and Australian POWs clamber aboard the USS Sealion after it and two other U.S. subs sank a pair of Japanese transports in September 1944.

FROM TOP: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; PJF MILITARY COLLECTION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

The USS Spadefish set off on its first war patrol in mid-1944 and, despite its late start, quickly became the deadliest U.S. sub in the Pacific War; its battle flag (below) attests to its many kills.

Taiyo. At 10:22 p.m. on August 18, USS Redfish torpedoed Taiyo. The escort carrier sank with some 850 crewmen. Then, at 11:10 p.m., USS Rasher, running on the surface, scored three torpedo hits on the huge, 17,537-ton transport Teia Maru (the ex-French liner Aramis), carrying 4,795 Japanese soldiers and 427 civilians. The transport sank with 2,316 troops, 275 passengers, and 74 crew members, for a total of 2,665 killed. Shortly after midnight, Rasher torpedoed armed merchant cruiser Noshiro Maru and transport Awa Maru. Both beached themselves to avoid sinking; casualties, if any, are unknown.

At 3:20 a.m. the next morning, USS Bluefish hit fleet oiler Hayasui. The Japanese vessel burst into flames and drifted for a while before finally sinking. (There is no data on its crew or passenger losses.) At 5:10 a.m., Bluefish put three torpedoes into oiler Teiyo Maru.

It ignited and then sank stern-first. Down with it went 41 crewmen and 58 passengers.

At 3:33 a.m., Lieutenant Commander Gordon W. Underwood’s USS Spadefish, on its first spectacularly successful patrol, came in at radar depth (submerged except for its periscopes and radar mast) and fired six torpedoes at Tamatsu Maru. Two hit the big landing craft depot ship. Its screws stopped, and it rolled over and sank with 4,755 troops and 135 merchant seamen. That afternoon, one of the convoy’s escorts discovered Tamatsu Maru’s debris field littered with wreckage and about 2,000 bodies drifting in the water. In less than 24 hours, convoy HI-71 had been devastated, with some 8,504 Japanese perishing.

In November 1944, Mayasan Maru, the class’s namesake, formed up in convoy HI-81, bound for Singapore with nine other ships escorted by destroyer Kashi, seven kaibokan, and escort carrier Shinyo. USS Queenfish torpedoed landing craft depot ship Akitsu Maru at 11:56 a.m. on November 15. It sank with 2,093 soldiers of the 2,500-strong 64th Infantry Regiment. Not quite seven hours later, Lieutenant Commander Evan T. Shepard’s USS Picuda torpedoed Mayasan Maru. The huge landing craft depot ship took the plunge in about two and half minutes in rising seas. Losses came to 3,187 troops from the 23rd Infantry Division, along with 56 crewmen and 194 gunners, for a total of 3,437 dead. Lieutenant Commander Underwood’s Spadefish pitched into the convoy and, at 11:09 p.m., ripped open the hull of escort carrier Shinyo. Wreathed in terrible fires, it succumbed with 1,104 crew members, leaving just 61 survivors.

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According to Japanese historian Sadae Ikeda, some 176,000 Japanese soldiers and paramilitary personnel perished in ships sunk from all causes over the course of the war. That number raises an important point. According to Craig McDonald, while he is certain the figures he and John Alden used in their 2009 book were accurate, they recognized that their sources did not comprehensively cover all troop losses.

Therefore, the 97,342 figure mentioned earlier— while constituting more than half of the total number of Japanese military personnel lost at

FROM TOP: CITY OF VANCOUVER ARCHIVES, CVA 447-2345, PHOTOGRAPH BY E. FROST; U.S. NAVY

When Japan’s Junyo Maru (top, in 1933) was downed in September 1944, it took with it a staggering 5,620 Allied POWs and slave laborers. In the last year of the war, fewer targets gave U.S. subs (above, at Pearl Harbor in July 1945) less to do.

sea—should be viewed as the floor, not the ceiling, on losses in submarine attacks.

In January 1945, Imperial Army General Headquarters published a circular, “How to Deal with Maritime Emergencies,” based on a study of troopship losses in the East China Sea. The document noted that the density of embarked troops per vessel had soared during the war: soldiers were packed into holds of requisitioned ships with bunks called “silkworm shelves” (kaikodana) stacked three high. Only extremely steep wooden ladders, completely inadequate for evacuation in an emergency, afforded access to the topside decks. The study recorded how torpedo strikes left some men unconscious and detailed the horrors that others faced. Some lost the will to live after floating in the water for a while, when they realized there was scant chance of rescue. Some committed suicide to avoid death by drowning. Some, exhausted, began to hallucinate and jumped into the ocean from rafts.

Others become violent with fellow survivors.

Tragically, Allied advances had prompted the Japanese to also move tens of thousands of POWs by ship to more secure locations. The Japanese also impressed more slave laborers to boost war production. As a result, their deaths in ship losses soared: 11,699 POWs and slave laborers died at sea in 1944—nearly three-fourths of the war’s 15,774-death total.

While the majority of these deaths resulted from U.S. submarine attacks, proportionately more POWs and slave laborers were exposed to attacks in the Southeast Asia hunting grounds of British submarines. These circumstances, and pure chance, produced an episode in September with the largest combined loss of Allied POWs and slave laborers in the entire war.

The 5,065-ton Junyo Maru was built in Glasgow in 1913 and acquired by Japan in 1927, but was now serving as an Imperial Army troop transport. On September 15, at the port of Batavia on Java, it took on about 2,200 Dutch, British, American, and Australian POWs, and some 4,500 Javanese slave laborers. They endured two days of hellish confinement before the ship sailed for Sumatra, where the POWs and slave laborers were to be employed. On September 18, the British submarine HMS Tradewind intercepted Junyo Maru and sank it in about 22 minutes with two torpedoes. Some 1,449 POWs and 4,171 slave laborers went down with the ship—a combined total of 5,620 deaths. It was

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Japanese Military Personnel Lost to U.S. Submarines Soldiers/ Other military troops killed personnel killed

Total Soldiers/ Troops and other Military Personnel Killed

Dec. 1941–1942 1,218 1943 1944 1945 TOTAL

342 5,117 4,060 67,512 11,492 5,448 2,153 79,295 18,047

97,342

NOTE: THE SOURCES IN THE 2009 WORK USED TWO DIFFERENT CLASSIFICATIONS FOR IMPERIAL ARMY PERSONNEL: “SOLDIERS/ TROOPS” AND “MILITARY PERSONNEL.” THIS DISTINCTION WAS MAINTAINED IN THE DATABASE FOR PURPOSES OF ACCURACY.

Most Deadly U.S. Submarines Ranked by Japanese military personnel killed 4,755

Spadefish (SS-411)

4,159

Picuda (SS-382)

3,998

Queenfish (SS-393) Steelhead (SS-280)

3,792

Snook (SS-279)*

3,746 3,627

Sturgeon (SS-187)

3,412

Jack (SS-259)

3,114

Drum (SS-228) Grayback (SS-208)*

2,587

Gurnard (SS-254)

2,524

Raton (SS-270)

2,403

Whale (SS-239)

2,380

Trout (SS-202)

2,358

Bluegill (SS-242)

2,356

Tautog (SS-199)

2,342

Rasher (SS-269)

2,316

FROM TOP: CITY OF VANCOUVER ARCHIVES, CVA 447-2345, PHOTOGRAPH BY E. FROST; U.S. NAVY

Icefish (SS-367) Peto (SS-265)

2,200 2,043

Trigger (SS-237)*

1,940

Sea Devil (SS-400)

1,843

Marshalls 8,707 Gilberts 5,534 Eniwetok 4,271 TOTAL 91,667* *APPROXIMATELY 20,000 WERE NAVAL PERSONNEL OR LABORERS

1945

The immense destruction of Japanese shipping and warships in 1944 markedly reduced the number of potential targets for U.S. submarines the following year. Shipping traffic also plummeted due to aircraft based in the newly recaptured Philippines, and to carrier operations off Asia that severed the convoy routes from areas to the south that had provided Japan with vital imports, like oil. On top of that, land-based and carrier aircraft exacted a terrible toll on Japanese shipping in 1945. But the most lethal threat to Japanese shipping that year was the aerial mining campaign, mainly around the Home Islands. In 1,528 sorties, Mariana-based B-29s laid 13,102 mines. This campaign not only sank ships outright, but it also blocked entrance to repair yards so that there was no hope of restoring any seriously damaged ship to service. It further blocked entrance to the best ports and forced rerouting to inferior ports.

This effort sank 283 merchant vessels of 396,371 tons and damaged beyond repair another 137 vessels.

Because of all these factors, U.S. submarines sunk only 156 vessels in 1945, almost a third of those during a foray in the Sea of Japan in June and July. Eight U.S. submarines were lost that year.

SUMMARY

*SUBMARINE LOST WITH ENTIRE CREW

Japanese Fatalities in the Central Pacific Drive

the worst loss of life from a single ship in the Pacific War. This toll constituted nearly half of all the POWs and slave laborers lost in 1944.

Approximately 880 POW and slave laborer survivors were rescued and continued to Sumatra, where ultimately only 96 POWs, and none of the slave laborers, survived the war.

Iwo Jima

19,850 Marianas

53,305

The charts on this page present the most significant data about the effectiveness of American submarines against Japanese soldiers in terms of total loss; loss by individual submarine; and, in contrast, loss in land battles.

Overall, the U.S. submarine force lost about 375 officers and 3,131 enlisted men during the war, out of some 16,000 who participated in war patrols. That is a 22 percent loss rate—the highest death rate within the American armed forces. The grim math discloses that for every U.S. submariner lost, about 28 Japanese soldiers perished. But the math also tells us that for every U.S. submarine sailor who died, many more Marines and soldiers lived. H APRIL 2021

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THE ENEMY WITHIN

I

n April 1943, Nancy Brown sat down with three friends in a London apartment to describe a German bombing raid she had witnessed a few weeks earlier in her hometown of Brighton, on England’s south coast.

“Someone said: ‘Oh, look at those planes,’” she explained, “and they looked out to sea and saw some big black planes flying in over the top of the water— couldn’t hear a sound—and just as they got to the end of the pier t hey seemed t o t u r n t hei r engines on and they flew straight up like that, branched out, and started machine­- gunning and cannon­-firing and dropped a lot of bombs!”

This was a “tip-and-run” raid, when Luftwaffe fighters would fly in from France below the British radar, strafe coastal towns, and then get out before the Royal Air Force could scramble to take them on.

Brown, a fresh-faced woman in her early twenties, had been in a café when the raid started. “I’d no sooner sat down in Ward’s to have my coffee when suddenly: ‘Crack! Crack! Crack!’ And every-

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A pub in the English city of Brighton (opposite) bears the marks of a German air raid. A wouldbe Nazi informant believed a similar attack was the result of her work: she’d sketched targets (top) and bragged about the raid (above) to a British agent pretending to be a Gestapo operative.

FROM TOP: THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES, KEW, KV 2/3873 AND 2/3874; OPPOSITE: FOX PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES

A small team of agents devised a diabolical ruse to flush out Nazi supporters in Britain

By Robert Hutton

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FROM TOP: DAILY HERALD ARCHIVE/SSPL/GETTY IMAGES; THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES, KEW, KV 4/11

THERE WAS NO QUESTION in anyone’s mind in 1940 that such a fifth column existed.

It was an article of faith that similar groups in

other countries contributed to Germany’s rapid advance across Europe. Britain’s ambassador to Holland, Sir Nevile Bland, who had barely escaped before the country surrendered, reported to Winston Churchill that victory had been handed to the Nazis by a network of spies, many of them Germans working as domestic servants. “The paltriest kitchen maid,” he wrote, “not only can be but generally is a menace to the safety of the country.”

Bland’s memo had helped spark hysteria, with people arrested simply for having German-sounding names. Actual Germans were rounded up and held in camps (as were Austrians and Italians), even though many were in Britain because they were fleeing the Nazis.

Throughout that year, MI5 was overwhelmed with tip-offs, almost all of them bogus. But by the end of 1941, the spy-hunters had reached a conclusion: Germany had no organized network of spies in Britain. German intelligence didn’t seem to have given much thought to the idea that it might find itself fighting a long war with Britain and had done little to establish any deep network there. Much of the information that might have been wanted in areas such as industrial capacity was freely available in Britain’s open prewar society.

But even if MI5 couldn’t find a fifth column, it did keep finding people who wanted to join one. There were plenty of British people who didn’t understand why they were at war with Germany. Like Nancy Brown and her friends, they liked the look of what Hitler had done to his country, bringing order with strong government and seeing off the communists. And they hated Jews, believing they used their money and connections to cheat others, and admired the Nazis’ treatment of them. They would welcome a negotiated peace and an alliance with Germany against the Soviet Union.

All of this was on the mind of a man who had a good claim to be MI5’s most glamorous officer. He was certainly its richest. Victor Rothschild had a seat in the House of Lords and was the heir of the English branch of the family bank. Thirty-one years old, he seemed to enjoy every blessing. Not only did he have limitless money, but he also had good looks, with a sweep of dark hair matching his dark eyes, and was a skilled cricketer as well as a brilliant scientist—a microbiologist working at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Rothschild was also Jewish and, because of that, had at least once been refused service in

FROM TOP: COURTESY OF CRISTA MCDONALD; THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES, KEW, KV 2/3873

MI5 agent Eric Roberts (top), whose faked Gestapo credentials (above) listed his name as “Jack King,” had a long history in undercover work, including infiltrating the British Union of Fascists (opposite, top) in 1934.

body dived to the back of the shop because they felt quite sure the bullets were coming in at the windows and we were all huddled together,” she said. “And then Boomp!”—she banged the table—“Boomp! Boomp!

And the windows blew in and out and the doors blew in and out. And when we came out we could see great columns of smoke coming up.”

Attacks like this were quite common at this stage of the war.

What made Brown’s experience unique was that she thought the German bombing raid was the result of her work. Nancy Brown believed herself to be a Nazi informant. She had been recruited by the two women with her, and they reported to the man whose apartment they were in, Jack King.

We know what Nancy Brown said because she was one of the targets of an extraordinary British intelligence operation. “Jack King” was, in reality, Eric Roberts, a 35-year-old Englishman and married father of three who lived in the pleasant commuter suburb of Epsom, southwest of London. Until 1940, he had been a clerk at Westminster Bank and a source of some frustration to his employers, who found him altogether lacking in seriousness.

What Westminster Bank didn’t know was that since his teenage years, Roberts had been living a double life as an agent of MI5, Britain’s domestic security service. He had spied on communist groups in the 1920s, and in 1934 had become MI5’s first man inside the British Union of Fascists (BUF), the political party led by the charismatic and outspoken former member of parliament Sir Oswald Mosley. After the outbreak of war and the banning of the BUF, Roberts had joined MI5 as an officer, with the job of hunting for a subversive “fifth column” of fascist sympathizers in Britain who were waiting to rise up and support a Nazi invasion.

FROM TOP: DAILY HERALD ARCHIVE/SSPL/GETTY IMAGES; THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES, KEW, KV 4/11

FROM TOP: COURTESY OF CRISTA MCDONALD; THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES, KEW, KV 2/3873

a British restaurant. But more than that, he and his family were to many the ultimate example of Jewish power. Victor knew that he and his young children were at the top of Nazi arrest lists if Britain fell, and he was determined to do whatever he could to stop that from happening. “He is quite ruthless where Germans are concerned,” noted the man who recruited him into MI5 at the start of the war, “and would exterminate them by any and every means.”

Rothschild’s official job was counter-sabotage. That meant understanding the mechanics of the bombs that Germany was placing onboard ships carrying supplies destined for Britain from Spain and Gibraltar. These were often ingeniously disguised as pieces of coal or bars of chocolate, or placed in a vacuum flask, hidden under an inch and a half of hot tea.

To learn about how they worked, Rothschild sought examples of bombs that hadn’t gone off and then took them apart.

It wasn’t a job for the nervous: he went to work on the first one well aware that the last person to attempt to take that model apart had lost an eye and an arm when it exploded. Hoping to save at least his eyes, Rothschild performed the operation while kneeling behind an armchair.

He quickly found he was adept at the task: his years of dissecting frog and fish eggs while studying biology at Cambridge University had given him a

With the outbreak of war, the search for Nazi collaborators intensified—and led to a lot of dead ends. A suspicious mark in a field (above) was simply a farmer’s effort to rid himself of extra barley.

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FOR MOST OF 1941, Rothschild had worked with Eric Roberts searching for German spies in the British arm of Siemens, the giant manufacturing company headquartered in Munich that produced everything from electric meters to telegraph equipment. They

hadn’t found any, but in the course of his work, Roberts had come into contact with a remarkable woman.

Marita Perigoe, 27, was the daughter of Australian composer May Brahe, author of the beloved inspirational ballad “Bless This House.” Born and brought up in London, Perigoe had become a dedicated fascist. Her husband Bernard shared her views and was then interned on the Isle of Man for trying to organize support for fascism. MI5 knew little about Perigoe, but Rothschild and Roberts quickly realized she was far more dangerous than her husband.

“She is a masterful and somewhat masculine woman,” they wrote in a case summary for their superiors at the agency. “Both in appearance and mentality she can be

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FROM TOP: SLADE SCHOOL OF FINE ART, UCL; BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

steady hand. The jeweler Cartier, who valued him as a customer, gave him a special set of small screwdrivers; he recruited a young artist, Laurence Fish, to diagram the bombs’ workings. But his mind was on more than explosives and fuzes. Rothschild was worried about the depth of secret British support for Hitler, and he had an idea about how to discover it.

If there was no genuine fifth column, why shouldn’t MI5 set one up and see who joined it?

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: AKG-IMAGES/WHA/WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE; RAMSEY AND MUSPRATT, CAMBRIDGE/PETER LOFTS PHOTOGRAPHY; REPRODUCED WITH THE PERMISSIONS OF THE TRUSTEES OF THE ROTHSCHILD ARCHIVE/ILLUSTRATION BY LAURENCE FISH

In 1940, the British government gathered thousands of Germans and other “enemy aliens” in the U.K. and sent them to camps (top). To further squelch sabotage, MI5 officer Victor Rothschild (above, right) studied the workings of disguised German bombs (above) before devising a plan to track potential saboteurs.

FROM TOP: SLADE SCHOOL OF FINE ART, UCL; BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: AKG-IMAGES/WHA/WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE; RAMSEY AND MUSPRATT, CAMBRIDGE/PETER LOFTS PHOTOGRAPHY; REPRODUCED WITH THE PERMISSIONS OF THE TRUSTEES OF THE ROTHSCHILD ARCHIVE/ILLUSTRATION BY LAURENCE FISH

described as a typical arrogant Hun.” Perigoe was determined to do whatever she could to help Hitler win the war. In her, Rothschild saw a danger—but also an opportunity.

“A woman of this type, with so much misdirected ingenuity, might do great harm,” he wrote, “unless she were controlled.”

So he gave her a controller. In early 1942, Roberts, who had met Perigoe under the identity of “Jack King,” told her that he was a Gestapo operative, tasked with identifying people who might be willing to help Germany in the event of invasion. He showed her a pass, faked for MI5 by their colleagues at the foreign intelligence service MI6. He didn’t claim to be German—simply an Englishman loyal to the Nazi ideal, as she was.

MI5 initially arranged a room for Roberts to meet his recruits in the basement of an antique shop on Marylebone High Street in London’s West End—Rothschild noted that the aspiring traitors had “certain somewhat melodramatic ideas”—but after a few months, they shifted the location to a more comfortable apartment in West London. There it was wired up with a bug, most likely planted in the telephone that sat on the table. Every word spoken was recorded onto 12-inch cellulose disks and then transcribed. Hundreds of pages of those transcripts now sit in Britain’s National Archives at Kew in West London.

From its beginning, the operation was controversial among the small number of MI5 officers aware of it. At the start of the war, the service had recruited many lawyers and academics, who brought with them more liberal instincts than were usually found in a security service. These men took a dim view of “provocation”—u ndercover policemen encouraging people to commit crimes and then arresting them. It was not a very British way to behave. More than that, they warned that the courts would object, making any evidence Roberts gained inadmissible.

But Guy Liddell, MI5’s head of counterespionage, agreed with Rothschild. Just shy of 50, Liddell was a thoughtful, gently humorous man whom the staff admired for his wisdom.

He felt it was important to find out how many potential Nazi supporters there were. Two years earlier, Nazi landings had seemed imminent. In 1942, Germany was too busy elsewhere to attempt an invasion of Britain—but what if the situation were to change? “We must I think regard the whole situation in the

light of a collapse on the Russian front, ourselves driven out of the Mediterranean and 200 German divisions brought back to the West,” he wrote in his diary. “In such an eventuality, how should we be feeling about the 60,000 enemy aliens at large in this country and other subversive bodies?”

Liddell’s problem was one faced by secret police through the ages: testing hidden loyalties. “We knew the man who waved a swastika flag in the street, the man who waved it in his back garden and was seen by his neighbours, but did we know one who waved it inside his own house?” Liddell wrote. He argued that there was no use being squeamish about civil liberties in a time of war, telling a colleague that “we might not like anything that savoured of agents provocateurs, but such methods were necessary in times of crisis.”

Liddell was aware, however, that the Home Office—the government department that oversaw MI5—was already worried about the way the spy-hunters were behaving in wartime: trying to get suspects locked up simply on the basis of their suspicions, or on the evidence of a single, sometimes doubtful, witness.

This was exactly the sort of operation that would outrage the Home Office. He solved the problem by not telling them.

In 1943, worried that it didn’t have enough supporters in government, MI5 began sending Winston Churchill monthly reports on its activities. The prime minister delighted in tales of the “Double Cross” operation, where captured spies in Britain were used to supply false information to the Nazis, and particularly in the activities of Eddie Chapman, better known as Agent Zigzag: a former safecracker who at different points worked for both Germany and MI5. But a conscious decision was made to leave out mention of counter-subversion operations like the one Rothschild was running with Eric Roberts.

Liddell didn’t think Churchill would disapprove, but he feared the prime minister might mention something to the Home Secretary, who was being kept out of the loop.

Roberts, meanwhile, was getting on with building his network. It was going even better

Rothschild and Roberts saw an opportunity in Nazi supporter Marita Perigoe (top) and encouraged her to round up recruits, whom they could then monitor. MI5’s head of counterespionage, Guy Liddell (above), felt that war negated any civil liberty concerns related to such work.

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FROM TOP: © IWM E(MOS) 1451; PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT HUTTON

he was doing something for his family and the country of his birth: Roberts’s recruits got to experience the thrill of living a secret life.

“Once one becomes conscious, one becomes sort of…brighter,” Eileen Gleave told Nancy Brown. They were spies, part of the same world as everyone else, but now aware of a different level of it—a place of secret communications and clandestine meetings.

Kohout, in particular, was very good at it.

Within months of being recruited, he had brought Roberts details of Britain’s new fighter-bomber, the de Havilland Mosquito, which he had obtained from a drunk employee of the company making its flight instruments, and information about a prototype jet.

At first, Roberts tried to discourage his recruits from gathering intelligence in an effort to stay on the right side of the “provocation” line. But their determination to do something was such that Rothschild concluded that letting them spy was preferable to their alternative proposal: carrying out acts of sabotage. This had to be continually forbidden. As D-Day approached in 1944, the group even discussed whether it would be possible to kill General Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was a plan that Roberts hastened to reject. He was learning that the life of an agent-runner— even a fake one—was a lot of hard work.

Kohout’s greatest coup came in 1943 when the Air Ministry approached his employer and asked if it could manufacture strips of foil to precise specifications. The purpose wasn’t explained, but it was for Britain’s “Window” system (known as “chaff” to Americans): a top-secret technology that used strips of foil to fool German radar about the location of Allied bombers.

“Kohout has hit upon something which is considered to be one of the most secret and hush-hush devices so far developed in the U.K.,” Rothschild reported on May 4, 1943. “It is obvious that the slightest leakage of it to the Germans would put them in a very strong position.” But while the Austrian had a credible claim to be the best spy that Nazi Germany had in Britain during the war, his tragedy was that none of his reports made it any closer to Berlin than MI5 headquarters.

Kohout’s success created new problems.

Perigoe, having brought him into the group, now became jealous of him. She tried to undermine him, and Roberts had to start meeting the pair separately. Perigoe never

FROM TOP: COURTESY OF ERNEST KOHOUT; ANL/​S HUTTERSTOCK

Hans Kohout (top) and Eileen Gleave (above) were two of Perigoe’s recruits. An MI5 report noted of Gleave, a former member of the British Union of Fascists: “She is ardently pro-Nazi and the sort of person who really would carry out what she said she would do.”

than he and Rothschild had hoped— or feared.

Marita Perigoe was proving to be an outstanding recruiter. A case summary by Rothschild in July 1942 listed 17 of the “more interesting” people Perigoe had brought in. Many were women, people she knew from her middle-class neighborhood of Harrow, in West London. There was Eileen Gleave, who “would, in time of invasion, be prepared to raid the Wembley Home Guard arms depot in order to assist the enemy.” Hilda Leech worked as a clerk at the oil company Shell Mex and began providing weekly updates on the a mou nt of petroleu m stored around the country. And there was Nancy Brown, who drew maps to show the location of Brighton’s defenses, and pledged to guide an invading force around them.

Probably Perigoe’s g reatest recruit, though, was Hans Kohout.

Austrian by birth, Kohout had moved to Britain a decade earlier and was an expert in the manufacturing of aluminum foil. In his late 30s, with a thick accent he never managed to shake, he had escaped internment at the start of the war both because this knowledge was va luable to the wa r ef for t a nd because he had obtained British citizenship. His loyalties, however, were very much divided. In the summer of 1939, his Austrian-born wife and his infant son had traveled to Austria for a vacation. Kohout joined them for a couple of weeks and then returned to London for work. His wife had stayed on with her parents, probably enjoying having some help with childcare. When war broke out at the start of September, she was trapped, only able to communicate with her husband via infrequent letters passed on by the Red Cross.

Kohout, therefore, found himself living in a country that was dropping bombs on his wife and son. Worse, he was helping: the factory where he worked had a number of secret military contracts. So when Perigoe approached him and asked if he would like to work for the other side, the offer held an immediate appeal. It wasn’t just about feeling

The Austrian-born Kohout believed he had revealed to Germany Britain’s system for fooling radar using strips of foil (above). The thanks for his fake spy work? A fake medal (right). Kohout never learned he was duped.

FROM TOP: © IWM E(MOS) 1451; PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT HUTTON

FROM TOP: COURTESY OF ERNEST KOHOUT; ANL/​S HUTTERSTOCK

totally trusted “Jack King” either. Every so often she would remark that he might be an MI5 man, and say that she would cut his throat if she found out that he was. Roberts didn’t doubt her seriousness.

AS THE END OF THE WAR approached, MI5 faced a new problem. The number of fascist sympathizers on Roberts’s books had grown to around 500—a huge number, considering that the operation was based on one man simply making himself available. The vast bulk of those individuals were simply people whom Roberts’s more active recruits had identified as possible supporters— but even if MI5 looked only at the people actually working with Roberts in the belief that he was a Nazi spy, they had identified some 20 willing traitors. What should it do with them all?

One option was to put them on trial. People had been jailed for much less, and a conviction for treason carried the death penalty. But that would mean revealing the operation to, among other people, the Home

Office, where there might be questions about why they hadn’t been informed about it.

Besides, MI5 didn’t know who its next enemies would be. The operation was continuing to provide useful intelligence about underground British fascist movements. And through his recruits, Roberts was plugged into all of them. Why not just let it run?

So it was that January 1946 saw one of the oddest ceremonies relating to the war, as Eric Roberts, in his guise as Jack King, presented Marita Perigoe and Hans Kohout with the Kriegsverdienstkreuz 2. Klass—War Merit Cross, Second Class—ostensibly on behalf of a grateful, if defeated, German government.

The recipients were, Liddell recorded in his diary, “extremely gratified.” Perigoe said she would hide hers in the stuffing of her armchair. Roberts now claimed to be representing an underground network dedicated to continuing the Nazi struggle and asked the pair to continue supplying him with information.

In the years that followed, it quickly became clear that the main threat to British security was communism, not fascism, and the operation tailed off. Marita Perigoe and Eileen Gleave both moved to Australia.

Kohout, reunited with his family, went into business—with a Jewish friend. They and the rest of the would-be spies went to their graves thinking they had a great secret— that they had spent the war working for Hitler—while unaware of the greater one: that they had been dupes of MI5.

In 1947, Roberts was loaned to MI6 for an unsuccessful operation in Vienna. When he returned, MI5 was seeing traitors everywhere in the wake of the discovery that there had been Soviet agents at the heart of British intelligence since before the war. Feeling sidelined and mistrusted, he moved his family to Canada in 1956.

Hans Kohout died in 1979. Going through his things, his grandson, Ernest Kohout, found a small red leather box containing a Nazi medal and asked his mother what it was.

Though she knew the truth, she replied that it had been given to his grandfather as a mark of his long service on the Austrian railway.

Amused, Ernest hung the medal on his bathroom wall. H APRIL 2021

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WEAPONS MANUAL ITALY’S AUTOBLINDA (AB) 41 ARMORED CAR ILLUSTRATION BY JIM LAURIER

MUSCLE CAR

ITALY CAME LATE to the armored car business. When it entered World War II in 1940, the country had very few mechanized vehicles, preferring to assign its reconnaissance functions to motorcycles and even horse-mounted cavalry. That changed as Italian battle commanders began clamoring for a modern, small, and speedy recon vehicle after seeing the effectiveness of British armored cars in North Africa. The AB 40 came first; the beefier AB 41, with an 80-horsepower engine and a 20mm gun in its turret, arrived in Libya in September 1941.

Although a top performer on roadways, the AB 41’s larger specs made it too heavy—and still underpowered—for the desert sands. Despite these failings, the AB 41 performed yeoman’s work and was always in demand—though underproduction helped fuel that demand. The AB 41 obtained an upgraded 120-horsepower engine in 1942, but the country’s surrender in 1943 derailed further improvements. The Italian army continued using the AB 41 after the war, and several examples survive in museums and private collections. —Larry Porges

BACK-SEAT DRIVER Initially designed for urban settings and other narrow roadways, the AB 41’s dual-drive capacity allowed it to motor either forward or backward without turning around. The rear driver’s seat and steering wheel faced backward aft of the vehicle.

ITALIAN AUTOBLINDA 41

Crew: 4 / Weight: 7.4 tons / Length: 17 ft. / Range: 250 miles / Max. speed: 47 mph / Armor: 18mm / Armament: 1x20mm gun and 2x8mm machine guns / The AB series evolved from models built in the 1930s for the Italian police, who continued using the AB 41 throughout the war.

THE COMPETITION AMERICAN M8

Crew: 4 / Weight: 8.7 tons / Length: 16.4 ft. / Range: 350 miles / Max. speed: 55 mph / Armor: 25mm / Armament: 1x37mm gun, and 1x.50cal and 1x.30-cal machine guns / Ford’s 6-wheel M8 armored car, dubbed the “Greyhound” by the British, was fast and mobile.

BRITISH HUMBER MARK IV

Crew: 3 / Weight: 5 tons / Length: 15.1 ft. / Range: 200 miles / Max. speed: 50 mph / Armor: 15mm / Armament: 1x37mm gun and 1x7.92mm machine gun / The Humber Mark IV saw action in Burma with Britain’s Indian regiments. The Indian Army employed the vehicle long after the war ended.

FRENCH PANHARD 178

Crew: 4 / Weight: 9 tons / Length: 15.7 ft. / Range: 186 miles / Max. speed: 45 mph / Armor: 20mm / Armament: 1x25mm gun and 1x7.5mm machine gun / Modern and effective, the Panhard was considered the gold standard among World War II’s armored cars.

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READY TO ROLL Spare wheels attached to the side of the AB 41’s hull were able to rotate, helping the vehicle negotiate uneven off-road terrain.

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ID CARDS Regiments usually painted a red-and-white Cross of Savoy and a tricolor, both elements of the Italian flag, on the armored car’s hull front and side for easy identification—and to dissuade attacks from friendly airplanes.

CRAMPED STYLE The AB 41’s interior provided little room for the crew, who regularly wore battle helmets to protect them from sharp metal edges while driving over bumpy terrain. The gunner’s position was so tight that the 20mm gun’s butt pressed against his chest.

Germany confiscated Italy’s AB 41s and built 120 others after occupying the country in 1943—though their use was limited mainly to protecting road convoys in Italy and the Balkans.

SPIN CONTROL The Breda 20mm gun mounted on the turret provided substantial firepower, but its manual operation was a burden.

It took 95 cranks of the gun wheel for the turret to rotate a full 360 degrees.

PHOTO: BUNDESARCHIV BILD 101I-005-0021-11 PHOTO O.ANG

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FRIENDLY DECEPTION The Soviets devised a top-secret operation to repatriate U.S. airmen downed in Siberia

By Stuart D. Goldman and Yaroslav A. Shulatov

During the war, U.S. airstrikes against Japan led to dozens of damaged bombers—including this B-24 (inset)—landing or crashing in the Soviet Far East. Hundreds of U.S. airmen were stranded in the U.S.S.R., creating a conundrum for America’s Soviet ally, which was not at war with Japan.

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FROM TOP: U.S. AIR FORCE; THE ASAHI SHIMBUN VIA GETTY IMAGES

C

aptain Ed York watched the fuel gauges nervously. His bomber hadn’t even reached the Japanese coast before he’d had to switch from the depleted auxiliary fuel tanks to the main tanks. He was burning gas too fast and knew he wouldn’t make it to friendly Chinese territory. It was April 18, 1942, and York’s B-25 was one of the 16 bombers on the Doolittle Raid— America’s first blow against Japan, four months after Pearl Harbor. After his bomb run against a factory near Tokyo, York turned north toward the allied Soviet Union—even though he knew Moscow had denied the United States’ request to use its territory in operations against Japan.

Soviet air defense mistook the B-25 for a similar-looking Soviet Yak-4 bomber. York bypassed Vladivostok and landed at a naval air base 40 miles north of the city. The astonished Soviets greeted the five Americans warmly. Vodka flowed. The base commander asked if they had been part of the Tokyo raid. “I admitted that we had been,” said York, and if he could get some gasoline, “we would take off early the next morning and proceed to China.” To York’s delight, the commander agreed. However, someone up the Soviet chain of command said, “Nyet.”

According to international law, when a combatant enters a neutral country, he is to be interned throughout the duration of hostilities.

Although America and Russia were allies in the war against Germany, Russia and Japan were at peace, both upholding their April 1941 Neutrality Pact. When York’s B-25 landed, the Red Army was in a lifeor-death struggle against Germany, with the outcome in doubt. Meanwhile, Japan was racking up victory after victory in Asia. Moscow dared not antagonize Tokyo by breaching international law and releasing the fliers, who could again attack Japan. On the other hand, U.S. Lend-Lease aid to Russia was vital, and Stalin was desperate for the Americans to open a second front against Hitler. Washington wanted its airmen back. What was Moscow to do? The solution was an ingenious covert scheme that operated throughout the war and remained classified for years afterward.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES; PREVIOUS PAGES: MIKE KOROSTELEV/GETTY IMAGES AND U.S. AIR FORCE HISTORICAL RESEARCH AGENCY (INSET)

Mitchell B-25s cram the flight deck of USS Hornet prior to the April 1942 Doolittle Raid. Fifteen of the 16 bombers crashed in or near China; one instead headed toward the Soviet Union.

THE SOVIET FOREIGN MINISTRY made a formal protest to U.S. Ambassador Admiral William Standley and announced publicly that the Americans would be interned. Tokyo got the message: Moscow would follow international law and honor their neutrality pact. Privately, Joseph Stalin assured Ambassador Standley that the airmen were in good condition and would be treated well. Japanese archives reveal that Tokyo closely monitored the situation. It took Soviet authorities a year to devise a plan that would placate their American allies without risking a crisis with Japan.

The Americans traveled by train across Eurasia to a village 300 miles southeast of Moscow, accompanied by an English-speaking escort, Lieutenant Mikhail (“Mike”) Schmaring. They were housed in a large, relatively clean, walled compound. Conditions were decent, and a housekeeping staff took care of all chores. The Americans played volleyball and watched Soviet movies. Some studied Russian and learned chess. “Mike,” their constant companion, translated war reports from Pravda, from which they gleaned that the Red Army was retreating. In August, they began hearing Soviet antiaircraft fire.

The fighting was getting closer.

The German offensive that would die in the rubble of Stalingrad that winter led to the internees being moved eastward to the foothills of the Ural Mountains. Their log house had a kitchen, a dining room, four small bedrooms, wood-burning stoves, and a toilet—an “indoor outhouse” with a hole in the floor. This would be their home for the next seven months.

Mike remained their daily supervisor and interpreter. Four local women were recruited for housekeeping and cooking, but conditions began deteriorating. October 7 brought the first snowfall; soon, the weather turned bitterly cold. The food supply grew critical in November. The men subsisted mainly on frozen potatoes, barley, black bread, and tea—as did most locals. By mid-December, the daytime temperature was below zero, sometimes dropping to 50 degrees below at night.

York’s despondent crew decided to appeal to the Soviet High Command. In early January 1943, with Mike’s help, they drafted a letter to the Head of the General Staff asking to be released or given meaningful work in a more moderate climate. Mike promised to mail it. Two weeks later he disappeared, his fate unknown. More discouraged than ever,

FROM TOP: U.S. AIR FORCE; THE ASAHI SHIMBUN VIA GETTY IMAGES

NATIONAL ARCHIVES; PREVIOUS PAGES: MIKE KOROSTELEV/GETTY IMAGES AND U.S. AIR FORCE HISTORICAL RESEARCH AGENCY (INSET)

the airmen’s thoughts turned to vague notions of escape. In late March, however, a Red Army major arrived with the surprising news that their letter had achieved results.

They would be transferred south and given work assignments.

The major accompanied them on a long train journey. York’s four crewmen shared two compartments; York shared a compartment with an English-speaking passenger in civilian dress they called “Kolya,” who befriended

the Americans. Kolya had several bottles of vodka, which cemented the friendship.

It turned out they were all headed to the city of Ashkhabad in Soviet Central Asia, near the border with Iran. Kolya stayed in touch upon their arrival.

The Americans’ new duties involved maintaining small military training planes at Ashkhabad’s airport. Kolya, housed conveniently nearby, spent most evenings with them. York and the others stressed how eager they were to get home; Kolya listened sympathetically.

York believed he was enlisting Kolya’s help to escape, and the Russian seemed ready, willing, and able.

Kolya introduced York to a man he claimed was a smuggler who said that for $250 (almost the exact amount the five Americans had among them), he could get them across the border into Iran, then occupied by British and Soviet troops. Kolya told the Americans they should head for the British consulate in Sovietoccupied Meshed. He helpfully provided a hand-drawn map.

On the evening of May 10, 1943, the Americans climbed into the back of a truck for a 150-mile drive towa rd Meshed—a nd freedom.

Kolya tearfully saw them off. After a bumpy but uneventful ride, the driver ordered them out near the border. The airmen had to crawl several hundred yards and under barbed wire. Despite a bright moon, border guards took no notice. The truck crossed the border, met the Americans on the other side, and drove them to the outskir ts of Meshed. Within hours, the airmen were safely in the British Consulate.

The Brits arranged for York’s crew to be driven surreptitiously through Iran into British India. From there, they flew across the Middle East, North Africa, and the South Atlantic to Miami and, on May 24, 1943— nearly 400 days after bombing Japan—to Washington, D.C. The crew was ordered to treat their time in, and departure from, the Soviet Union as top secret.

Their escape had gone according to plan.

But whose plan was it? The fact that York was assigned to a railway compartment with

Captain Ed York believed he was enlisting Kolya’s help to escape, and the Russian seemed ready, willing, and able.

After dropping his bombs on Japan, Doolittle Raider Captain Ed York (here a major, top) veered north and landed in Russia. The Soviet Union, at peace with Japan after signing the Neutrality Pact in April 1941 (left), was bound by international law to hold York and his crew until the end of hostilities—but Stalin found a workaround.

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friendly, English-speaking Kolya—who lived within walking distance of their hut, cultivated their friendship, introduced them to a “smuggler,” and gave them a map for their escape—was too much for mere coincidence in Stalin’s Russia, where consorting with foreigners, not to mention aiding their escape, would ordinarily be suicidal. At the time, the Americans may have taken it all at face value. Within a year, however, it became clear to military insiders that the airmen’s “escape” had been arranged by Soviet authorities, although this was kept secret at the time and for years thereafter. Military historian Otis Hays Jr.’s excellent 1990 book, Home from Siberia, brought some of this to light.

Materials released in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union helped reveal the full story.

“Kolya” was Major Vladimir Boyarsky, an NKVD (Soviet secret police) counterintelligence officer. In an interview published in Russia in 2004, Boyarsky stated that in March 1943, “I was urgently summoned to Moscow…and ordered to implement an operation to transport to Iran the crew of an American plane that had made an emergency landing in our country. This was a personal order from Stalin himself. The operation was to be carried out in the strictest secrecy…. The most important thing was for them to believe that they themselves had prepared their escape from the U.S.S.R.” The local border troops (part of the NKVD) constructed a fake section of the border in a remote area, complete with barbed wire. “We skillfully created the simulation of an illegal border crossing,” recalled Boyarsky. “You should have seen the Americans, in the moonlight, looking around and kneeling in order to crawl under the wire barriers as they fled to freedom.”

Although the charade was very realistic, most of the Americans eventually wised up. Tail gunner David W. Pohl wrote years later, “I now believe that our whole escape was engineered by the General Staff and the NKVD.” Copilot Robert G. Emmens, however, disagreed. “Our escape was too real,” he wrote. “It cost us every cent we had.... [Kolya] kissed each of us when we left him.... He had tears in his eyes.”

Why did Moscow decide to release the Americans after holding them for a year? Perhaps the victory at Stalingrad in February 1943 and Japan’s defeats in the Pacific had reduced Soviet fear of a violent Japanese reaction. Perhaps repeated requests from the U.S. government had some effect. Perhaps the decision was triggered in part by the airmen’s letter to Moscow. Soviet sources claim that York’s wife managed to get through to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who personally interceded with Stalin. In any case, the Americans’ “escape” established a pattern that would be repeated.

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IN 1943, U.S. AIR OPER ATIONS against Japan intensified. More U.S. aircraft began coming down in the Soviet Far East, adding to Moscow’s problem of interned Americans.

Five days after York’s crew arrived in Washington, U.S. forces recaptured the Aleutian island of Attu, seized by Japan in June 1942.

U.S. bombers were soon operating from Attu against enemy bases in the Kuril Islands, the northernmost part of the Japanese homeland.

From the northern Kurils one can see the tip of the Soviet Kamchatka Peninsula jutting south from Siberia into the North Pacific like a huge frozen version of Florida.

American pilots recalled Soviet coastal artillery firing safely behind U.S. planes in a “display of neutrality.” Soviet fighters sometimes appeared “to drive off any Japanese fighters that might have followed us.” Still, from August 1943 to July 1945, 32 damaged U.S. bombers carrying 242 crewmen landed or crashed in Kamchatka or ditched at sea nearby.

Russian archives reveal that at one point, 34 American fliers were housed in Kamchatka near 17 Japanese seamen rescued from a shipwreck—a delicate problem for Moscow.

The Soviets responded to this influx of American airmen by establishing a permanent internment camp near the village of Vrevsky, 35 miles southwest of Tashkent, the largest city in Soviet Central Asia. Tashkent could provide superior logistical support, there would be no sub-zero weather, and there were road and rail lines leading toward Iran.

The camp at Vrevsky occupied a former school complex with buildings sufficient to house well over 100 internees and a staff of housekeepers, cooks, administrators, guards, and a doctor. The head interpreter, Nona Solodovinova, an attractive woman in her 40s, sympathized with the men’s problems and became known to many of them as “Mama.”

The camp was not a prison. There were no fences or walls. The internees could walk into town, shop at the market, and mingle with the local population. But it was neither free nor comfortable. Internees were required to be back in camp each night. A few individual escape attempts ended with the airmen being quickly caught and returned to camp. The camp commandant and the ranking U.S. offi-

ALL IMAGES THESE PAGES: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

After landing near Vladivostok (left), York and his crew were held for more than a year, finally “escaping” with the help of a Soviet NKVD officer.

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cers jointly maintained military discipline and order. Food quality and quantity varied, but at best was monotonous and often far worse. Dysentery and bedbugs were pervasive.

The men played baseball, volleyball, and chess; they had a piano and were allowed a shortwave radio; they read magazines, studied Russian, and watched Russian movies. They repeatedly asked, in Russian and English, “When are we going home?” The answer: often a vague “skoro” (soon). The men adopted two mongrel dogs. They named one Skoro. The internees knew nothing of the York crew’s “escape” or of any plans for their own repatriation.

IN MID-1944, U.S. B-29s began hitting Japan from Chengdu, China. The big new Superfortresses had enough range for the round trip from central China. Their second mission on August 20 met intense Japanese flak. As Major Richard McGlinn banked his B-29, one of his engines was hit. He feathered the prop and headed across the Yellow Sea toward China.

But he and his navigator concluded that the plane was too heavily damaged to limp back to Chengdu, so they flew north across Korea toward Vladivostok. In the darkness and heavy weather, they missed Vladivostok and, fearing they had veered west into Japaneseoccupied Manchuria, continued north until they were sure they were over Soviet territory.

When their crippled plane ran short of fuel, the crew bailed out. In the darkness, 11 men parachuted into the vast wilderness of eastern

The U.S. retook Attu from Japan in May 1943. Access to the Aleutian island’s air base (top) allowed B-25s and other U.S. aircraft to attack Japan, in turn causing more emergency landings in Russia.

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DOWN AND OUT The ordeal of most American fliers downed in the Soviet Union began in eastern Siberia, migrated to an internment camp near Tashkent, and ended with freedom in Iran.

MAP INDICATES NATIONAL BOUNDARIES CIRCA WORLDA WAR P RIII L 2 0 2 1

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had focused on India and China, not Siberia.

Trudging through the dense swampy forest sapped their energy. Their rations soon gave out, and they faced hunger. One recalled, “We ate anything and everything edible, including angleworms.” Had their mission been a few months later instead of August, they would all quickly have died of exposure. As it was, they were doomed to a slow death unless they could get outside help.

One of the airmen in the group of seven had a small map of Siberia. After bushwhacking downstream for days, the exhausted men decided to build a raft. Construction consumed several days and much energy, but their makeshift raft could only carry three men. They decided that the three strongest, Lieutenant Eugene Murphy and Sergeants John Beckley and Melvin Webb, would pro-

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FROM “HOME FROM SIBERIA,” TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY PRESS

Siberia. They landed scattered across the sparsely populated and almost impenetrable taiga—swampy forestland between the Siberian steppe and tundra—ill-prepared for the ordeal that awaited them.

Dawn on August 21 found the airmen in three separate groups.

Seven landed close enough to each other that they were able to assemble by shouting and firing their sidearms. Led by Lieutenants Almon Conrath, the engineer, and bombardier Eugene Murphy, they followed a stream they hoped would steer them to an inhabited area.

Navigator Lyle Turner and copilot Ernest Caudle landed deep in the forest, apart from the others. They also started following a small stream they hoped would lead to civilization.

Major McGlinn landed on the other side of the mountains. His parachute snagged in a big tree, and he hung 60 feet off the ground, soaked by rain all night. When he finally got to the ground, he started blowing a signal whistle and eventually got a response from his tail gunner, Charles Robson. They united far from the others. Their ordeal would be the longest.

The airmen’s gear included emergency rations, matches, compasses, knives, and small arms, but little ammunition. Their survival training

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

B-29 Superfortresses fly past Japan’s Mount Fuji. Japanese air defenses forced four B-29s down in Russia; their crews joined the cadre of American airmen held in temporary Soviet custody until additional “escapes” could be set in motion.

FROM “HOME FROM SIBERIA,” TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY PRESS

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

ceed downstream through the wilderness in an effort to bring help to the others. Two days after this party left, navigator Turner and copilot Caudle miraculously stumbled upon the remaining four men. The six hunkered down together.

After a few days on the water, the three trailblazers found the stream impassible and abandoned their raft. A week of hacking through the taiga had left them half-starved and exhausted when, on September 10, they saw several collapsed buildings on the far side of a midsize river. A man and a boy appeared in a hand-hewn boat and ferried them across the river to a tiny village. The local woodsmen spoke no English but treated the Americans kindly and fed them.

A FEW YEARS AGO, one of the authors, historian Yaroslav Shulatov, came across ​an unusual archival document: a short but heartfelt letter from a minor official in an obscure village in the forests of the Soviet Far East to Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister.

This document trig gered the authors’ research into this story and led to the discovery of unpublished Soviet documents that provided details of the Americans’ rescue not previously known in the West.

The three airmen had reached the village of Bira on the Anyuy River, 100 miles northeast of Khabarovsk, the administrative center of the Soviet Far East. After two more days on the river, they were brought to the town of Troitskoye, where they met an NKVD Border Guard officer who spoke a little English. The Americans immediately explained that their buddies upstream desperately needed help.

Soviet officials saw this as a life-and-death situation. The local party boss, Leonid Vol kov ich, met w it h t he loca l N K V D commander, Captain Pavel Kolachev, to coordinate rescue efforts. That same day, the first of several groups of hunters and NKVD border g ua rds set out look ing for the Americans. Captain Kolachev personally led a search party that trekked nearly 200 miles through the taiga for two weeks. Meanwhile, Volkovich reached out to higher authorities in Khabarovsk for help, and Soviet Air Force planes joined the search.

After three days at Troitskoye’s rudimentary hospital, the three fliers traveled via motorboat to the milita r y hospita l in Khabarovsk. That same day, a Soviet pilot

sighted a signal mirror flashing in the forest. The six U.S. airmen on the ground were overjoyed when the plane circled and signaled it had seen them. The next day, the plane returned and dropped food and a message in English: “Be patient, help is on the way, your three comrades are safe.”

It took four days for the rescuers to reach them, forcing their way upstream against a strong current, log jams, and debris. In another four days, the woodsmen and border guards transported the six Americans by boat and horseback to Troitskoye, where they received the same kind treatment as their three comrades. Lieutenant Turner later recalled that the Soviets “gave us everything they had, and even more—the nurses even brought us food from their own homes.” The Americans also got another piece of wonderful news: Soviet fliers had discovered two men up north. It had to be McGlinn and Robson.

McGlinn and his tail gunner had landed in a particularly remote area and began trekking northward, but this led them deeper into the wilderness. For weeks they struggled against the nearly impenetrable forest, tortured by clouds of gnats day and night, weakened by chronic hunger, and disheartened by the total absence of any sign of human presence. McGlinn recalled, “Anything that we could catch, whether it crawled or flew, was food.” They were losing nearly a pound a day and were in desperate shape.

Soviet Air Force planes were flying longrange searches. On September 22, 32 days after the Americans blundered into the taiga, smoke from a fire they had kindled caught a Soviet pilot’s eye. He banked closer and saw the flash of a signal mirror. The next day, the plane returned and dropped food and a message: “You are in Soviet territory and Soviet pilots are at your service.” McGlinn and Robson attacked the food and ate for hours. Three days later, the plane brought more food and instructions: “Stay where you are. A rescue party will arrive soon.”

The rescue party, led by an engineer working on a railroad construction project, arrived two days later and brought McGlinn and Robson by boat to the village of Tolomo. (The railroad was a strategic project managed by

The Soviets interned the Americans in a camp near Tashkent. There, Nona Solodovinova, the camp’s main translator, lent a sympthetic ear, earning her the nickname, “Mama.”

The plane dropped food and a message to the desperate Americans: “You are in Soviet territory and Soviet pilots are at your service.”

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WHEN MCGLINN’S CREW reached the camp at Vrevsky on November 26, 1944, Soviet plans for a third escape to Iran were already well advanced, although the Americans knew nothing of it. The intent was to duplicate the scenario employed the previous February.

On November 30, the same NKVD, Red Army, and U.S. Embassy trio arrived. Colonel McCabe told the assembled internees that they were being transferred to Tbilisi in the Caucasus. They were to leave on December 3. “Mama” Nona, who had been in the camp in February, confided to the ranking U.S. officer, “You’re not going to the Caucasus, you’re going home!” But events back home fouled up the plan.

Just before departure, two stories appeared in American newspapers from unknown sources about the Doolittle crew’s release from Soviet internment. The second account was detailed and accurate.

When authorities in Moscow learned of these leaks, they halted the operation. By then, the train carrying 100 American airmen was nearing the Iranian border. It pulled onto a siding, and a grim-faced Colonel McCabe told the men that they were going back to Vrevsky. Over the next few hours, separate groups of internees—34 men in all—more or

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the NKVD. Ironically, the NKVD—the principal instrument of Stalin’s terror—played a positive role throughout this saga.)

McGlinn later wrote, “The treatment received at their hands…could be likened only to the loving care that any close relative would receive from one of their kin.” Two more days of river travel brought the exhausted airmen to the military hospital in Komsomolsk, some 240 miles northeast of Khabarovsk—40 days after their plane went down.

In November 1944, they traveled by train to the camp at Vrevsky, where they joined nearly 100 other interned American airmen.

None of these Americans knew that the previous February, a group of 60 U.S. internees, told they were being moved to the Caucasus, had been smoothly transported by train and truck to Tehran, Iran. Their transfer to the trucks was masked by a pretend mechanical breakdown on one of the railroad cars. It was only then that the airmen learned their true destination. This charade was orchestrated flawlessly by the NKVD. The internees were accompanied by Colonel Robert McCabe from the U.S. Embassy, an NKVD officer, and a Red Army staff officer.

From Tehran, the airmen followed a circuitous route back to the U.S. to conceal the fact that they had departed from Russia. Like York’s B-25 crew, they were ordered to treat being interned in and released from the U.S.S.R. as top secret.

less spontaneously began walking away from the railcars in hopes of reaching the border.

None got very far, and they were rounded up by alerted Soviet sentries. By December 13, all 100 men were back in camp. Remarkably, there was no Soviet punishment for the attempted escape.

On January 2, 1945, President Roosevelt assured Moscow that he had ordered strict censorship of any news stories regarding the release of internees from neutral countries.

Six days later, the NKVD informed the U.S. Embassy that the “escape” plan could resume.

The internees—this time briefed on the plan in advance—boarded a train on January 26, and two days later transferred to a convoy of Lend-Lease trucks for the two-day drive to Tehran. Greeted by U.S. medical corpsmen, they were deloused, issued fresh clothes, and treated to an American meal. McGlinn recalled that the simple white bread and butter “tasted like angel cake.” Finally, they collapsed in “beautiful, clean, white beds.”

The men f lew, with many layovers, from Tehran to Naples, Italy, where they boarded a U.S. transport ship that brought them to New York City. They were required to sign pledges swearing them to secrecy about being interned “in a neutral country.” Most men respected the pledges.

Even before this third escape was launched, more American bomber crews were making emergency landings or crashing in Kamchatka. On February 5, 1945, just a week after the 100 internees had left Vrevsky, a fresh batch began arriving. They found ample evidence of the earlier American occupants, but the Russian staff kept mum about what had become of them. By mid-May, there were 43 internees at Vrevsky. Germany had surrendered a week earlier, and the Red Army was secretly preparing to enter the war against Japan. Japan was being crushed by American might, and Moscow was no longer worried about what Tokyo might do in response to the release of American internees. On May 18, Colonel McCabe’s replacement and two Soviet officers flew to Vrevsky to supervise the final “escape.” It followed the same scenario and route as in February, without much drama or a make-believe railcar breakdown. Because of

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Major Richard McGlinn (far left) and his crew bailed out over Russia after their B-29 was damaged by Japanese flak on August 20, 1944.

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NATIONAL ARCHIVES

the small number of evacuees and the end of hostilities in Europe, the men flew from Tehran to Washington in four days. Like their predecessors, they were sworn to secrecy.

Over the years, some of the Americans continued to regard their internment bitterly, feeling that they had been treated like POWs. Many more, however, concluded that they were treated as well as could be expected under the extreme conditions in the Soviet Union, which was fighting for survival, suffered 27 million war dead, and had to avoid the risk of a second front against Japan at all costs.

“We were treated far better than the average Red Army officer,” Major McGlinn concluded—an opinion shared by many others.

In the fall of 1945, Leonid Volkovich, the man who had helped rescue McGlinn’s crew the previous year, sent the official letter mentioned earlier to Vyacheslav Molotov. Why did an obscure party official from Troitskoye appeal directly to the number-two man in the Soviet hierarchy, over the heads of his innumerable superiors? Volkovich believed he was calling attention to an issue of national importance—the operation that had saved the

lives of 11 Americans. Apparently hoping to be recognized and rewarded for his work, Volkovich described the ground and air maneuvers in detail, emphasizing that the “heroic” efforts made to locate and aid the Americans had honored the Soviets’ duty to their U.S. allies. Brimming with emotion, he stressed the successful rescue’s magnitude and value: “We…allowed the airmen to return home and tell their fellow Americans how a large number of ordinary Soviet people, running themselves ragged at great cost and at risk to themselves, rescued them from the arms of certain death…and returned them to the ranks of the United States Army.”

But by late 1945, frigid Cold War winds were already blowing through government offices in Moscow and Washington, chilling the fragile wartime friendship. The Soviet leadership had no sympathy for Volkovich’s glorification of Soviet-U.S. cooperation. The authors could find no reply from Molotov in the archives. H

McGlinn’s crew parachuted into unpopulated swampy forestland in the Soviet Far East (top). Surviving for weeks on “anything that crawled or flew,” they were finally rescued by a Soviet search team. One of the rescue organizers, local official Leonid Volkovich, sent a heartfelt letter to Soviet foreign minister Molotov after the war (above) extolling the merits of the rescue effort.

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WORTH THE WAIT

Decades in the making, a new history museum highlights the U.S. Army’s most timeless asset: its soldiers

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BY THE BOATFUL One of the National Museum of the United States Army’s rarest—and largest—artifacts is a Higgins boat, or LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel), that participated in the 1944 Normandy landings. Measuring 36 feet long, its size required builders to place the craft into position before beginning construction on the surrounding museum in 2017. As for its lifesize crew, the figures are all modeled after men in today’s New York Army National Guard.

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HISTORY PRESERVED This life preserver belonged to war hero James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle who, as a lieutenant colonel, led the eponymous April 18, 1942, bombing raid on Japan in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack. A month later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt presented Doolittle—newly promoted to the rank of brigadier general—with the Medal of Honor. The vest is dated October 15, 1944; at the time, Doolittle was serving as commander of the Eighth Air Force in England.

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY, SCOTT METZLER

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ore than 245 years after the U.S. Army’s founding in 1775, America’s soldiers finally have a history museum of their own—one that puts their personal stories front and center.

Located on a public area of Fort Belvoir in Northern Virginia, the National Museum of the United States Army (NMUSA) celebrated its grand opening on Veterans Day in November 2020. Its completion marked a milestone for those involved in the launch: “Talk of building the museum had been around for decades,” stretching back to the 1960s, says Chief of Exhibits Paul Morando. Following years of anticipation (and budget constraints), the army initiated construction plans in the early 2010s and broke ground for the 185,000-square-foot institution in 2017. The building material of choice was stainless steel—over one million pounds of it—a metal intended to symbolize the soldier’s strength. Inside, a soaring lobby and spacious halls and exhibition spaces are both visually striking and conducive to future socially-distanced visits.

(The NMUSA is currently closed due to Covid-19. Check its website, thenmusa.org, for updated hours of operation.)

The museum’s overarching mission—to honor ordinary American soldiers from across the globe and time—is introduced in its Soldiers Stories gallery, which begins outside the building’s entrance and stretches past the inside lobby into the main concourse. Forty-one metal “pylons” positioned throughout the space feature the portraits and biographies of male and female soldiers from the 18th century to the present, highlighting the triumphs and tribulations of individual service members. This curatorial approach enabled staff to sift through thousands of potential exhibition objects to find “strong artifacts that connect us to a story,” Morando says of the 1,389 objects currently on display throughout the building.

One of the museum’s largest exhibition spaces is dedicated to World War II. It includes an M4 Sherman tank, nicknamed “Cobra King,” that served in Bastogne, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge and a Higgins boat that saw action on D-Day at Normandy. Surrounding these gargantuan installations are display cases featuring soldiers’ personal artifacts—a bracelet and a Bible among them‚ which, though small in size, serve as a reminder that their owners were ordinary soldiers who accomplished extraordinary deeds. Many of these objects, and insights into the men and women who owned them, were collected from internet-based groups via the Army Historical Foundation, including a good number relating to women and minorities.

“You have to do a little more digging, a little more research to find those stories,” Morando said, adding that, in the end, the hunt is “certainly worth it.” —Mary M. Lane

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ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY, SCOTT METZLER

HEAVY METAL A mighty tank with a nickname (“Cobra King”) to match, this M4 Sherman (top) played a pivotal role in the Battle of the Bulge. Operated by a crew from Company C of the 37th Tank Battalion, 4th Armored Division, it was the first to break through German lines at Bastogne, relieving its defenders from the 101st Airborne Division. Like the Higgins boat, Cobra King was installed onsite prior to the museum’s construction.

FATEFUL FIND Following D-Day, a farmer in Normandy found an M1 Garand rifle with “M. Teahan” carved into its stock. Decades later, in 2016, his family sold the gun to a French army paratrooper commander. The collector surmised from its various markings that the M1 had belonged to a member of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment. This hunch helped him locate the grateful descendants of Private Martin Teahan, who died on D-Day at age 20.

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WORTH THE WAIT

HIDDEN TALENT A trained artist, Private First Class Clayton M. Rollins channeled his skill—and suffering—into this wooden sculpture (top left). He’d been captured in Corregidor and, in 1942, pressed into the Bataan Death March; the small scene of guards flanking a weakkneed POW was carved from memory.

Rollins, who escaped and sought shelter among Filipino guerrilla fighters, likely created the grim piece while in hiding.

WATER, WATER, EVERYWHERE While forging through North Africa, Sicily, and Italy with the 3rd Infantry Division, Private First Class Charles Trent turned a canteen (top) into a travel log, etching their stops into its aluminum sides.

Collectively, these locales document the1943 Allied assault on what Winston Churchill dubbed the “soft underbelly of Europe,” enabling the Allies to weaken Germany from the south.

TRAVELING MAN From his family’s home in Hawaii to Europe and North Africa, Sergeant Gary Kazuo Uchida of the 100th Infantry Battalion kept his favorite memories close at hand with this decorated canvas bag (left). It’s covered in roughly 135 names, phrases, and drawings, ranging from inside jokes with army peers (“Any volunteers for permanent KP?”) to sketches of landmarks and quotes written in Hawaiian and French.

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ROUGH PATCH Mindful of dangers beyond the skies, Captain John Rogers donned this horsehide A-2 flight jacket while transporting supplies, equipment, and personnel across the China-Burma-India Theater as a member of the U.S. Army Air Forces’ Air Transport Command. Sewn across the jacket’s back is a “blood chit”—an I.D. patch with instructions from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government ordering Chinese civilians to assist downed pilots in exchange for a monetary reward.

SHOT FIRED Captain William G. Burd, a member of the 1st Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, wore this helmet during 1944’s Operation Market Garden. German soldiers shot and killed Burd in southern Holland, near the municipality of Heeswijk; prior to the skirmish, the captain had been tending to a group of injured parachutists as the rest of his battalion forged ahead to capture two nearby bridges. Burd’s bulletpierced helmet was left behind in Heeswijk and discovered a year later.

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THE MAN BEHIND THE MAN The U.S. Army’s wartime chief of staff got an essential—and little-remembered—assist from his predecessor

By David T. Zabecki

Prewar U.S. Army chief of staff General Malin Craig (left, in 1938) laid the groundwork that helped make his successor, General George C. Marshall (right), America’s “Architect of Victory.”

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THE DESCENDANT OF several generations of U.S. Army officers, Malin Craig was born in Saint Joseph, Missouri, in 1875 and graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1898. A cavalry officer, he served in Cuba, the Philippines, and China and, between overseas assignments, at isolated cavalry posts in the American West and on the Mexican border.

It was while he was in command of a cavalry troop at Fort Clark, Texas, in July 1905, that Craig first encountered George C. Marshall, then a lieutenant. Marshall had been out in the field for a long time, leading a mapping expedition. When he arrived at Fort Clark to requisi-

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The son of a cavalryman, Craig was admitted to West Point at age 19 and graduated in 1898.

tion a replacement horse for his party, he was wearing a ragged, dusty uniform and an old straw hat that was missing a chunk, thanks to a mouthy mule. Not sure if Marshall was an officer, Craig spoke only with the sergeant accompanying him. It was an inauspicious start to what, 30 years later, would be one of the most important military working partnerships in modern U.S. Army history.

Just months earlier, Craig had graduated from the newly established U.S. Army Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, making him one of the United States’ first formally trained general staff officers. Four years later, in 1909, he attended the U.S. Army War College in Washington, D.C. There, a West Point classmate who would become widely recognized as the U.S. Army’s greatest professional mentor, Fox Conner, was one of his instructors. Lieutenant Colonel Hunter Liggett was Craig’s fellow War College student. Although Liggett was senior to both Conner and Craig in rank and experience, Conner paired them to work through a particularly complex tactical exercise. That working relationship would bear great fruit on the battlefields of France just a few years later, as Liggett emerged as arguably the best American battlefield commander of World War I. In 1917, when Liggett assumed command of the newly formed 41st Division, he selected Craig as his chief of staff. The division arrived in France that November. Two months later, Liggett moved up to assume command of I Corps, the recently created command and control headquarters for several divisions; Craig went with him as chief of staff. By the summer of 1918, Craig, then a brigadier general, was coordinating closely with Colonel George Marshall, the operations officer of the U.S. First Army, to plan the war’s first major attack completely under American command—the successful September 12 Saint-Mihiel Offensive. Immediately afterward, Craig and Marshall coordinated the rapid and complex 65-mile transfer of U.S. forces to the MeuseArgonne sector in preparation for a massive American attack on September 26, 1918.

I Corps was on the left flank of the attack.

One of the units assigned to support its three divisions on the front line was the 1st Tank Brigade, led by a 32-year-old colonel, George S. Patton. Five days before the start of the attack, Craig had approved Patton’s innovative “Memorandum on the Use of Tanks,” which included

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eneral of the Army George C. Marshall is justly remembered as America’s “Architect of Victory” in World War II. From the day he took over as U.S. Army Chief of Staff in September 1939 until the war’s end, the army grew from a force of only 187,890 to more than 11 million. In addition to recruiting the force, the new troops had to be trained, equipped with modern weapons, organized into fighting units, deployed throughout the world, and logistically sustained. It was a herculean task.

Largely forgotten today, however, is the fact that Marshall did not have to start from ground zero on the day he assumed office. His predecessor as chief of staff, General Malin Craig, clearly saw the looming global conflict and understood what America had to do to get ready. With his tenure as chief of staff sandwiched between General Douglas MacArthur and Marshall—two towering giants of American military histor y—Craig has long-since been eclipsed. Nonetheless, Craig spent his four years in office working tirelessly, most of it behind the scenes, to begin correcting the army’s most serious deficiencies. He also knew exactly who had to replace him when his term ended to carry the process through. He brought Marshall to Washington, D.C., groomed him as his successor, and played a major role in assuring that Marshall would lead the U.S. Army through the coming world war. Without the foundation Craig had left for him, Marshall would have faced a far more daunting—and perhaps even impossible—task.

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a detailed terrain analysis of the ground over which I Corps was scheduled to attack. Craig had the memo reproduced and distributed to I Corps’ divisional commanders. It was the first significant plan to closely coordinate American tanks and infantry in combat.

Right in the middle of the Meuse-Argonne campaign, Liggett moved up to assume command of First Army; Craig remained at I Corps as chief of staff to the new commander, Major General Joseph Dickman—who, by then, was serving in his fifth American war. Just two days after the Armistice went into effect on November 11, 1918, Dickman, with Craig as his chief of staff, assumed command of Third Army, established only six days earlier. Its mission was to serve as the postwar army of occupation for the American sector of the German Rhineland. The new command team had just four days to organize a headquarters from scratch, coordinate the reassignment of the necessary forces from the First and Second Armies, and get everything in position for the start of a large-scale, long-distance movement to the Rhine, scheduled for November 17.

On the evening of November 13, Craig visited Marshall at First Army headquarters, requesting his help in getting the divisions moving while Craig pulled together a new staff. Marshall immediately committed all of First Army’s resources to supporting Dickman and Craig. He also helped Craig by detailing officers, NCOs, and clerks to Craig’s staff.

And on the 17th, Third Army moved out on schedule. During the subsequent interwar years, Craig would remember Marshall as both a master of military staff work and a consummate team player.

FOLLOWING THE WAR, Craig and Marshall continued to interact professionally. Returning to the United States in 1919, Craig reverted to his permanent rank of major. In early 1920, he joined General John J. Pershing on an inspection tour of all army posts in the United States. Also accompanying the former commander of the American Expeditionary Forces were Colonel Fox Conner and Pershing’s aide-de-camp, now-Captain George Marshall. During that tour, Craig, Conner, and Marshall cemented a close relationship.

By 1923, Craig had worked his way back up to brigadier general and was in command of the U.S. Army Cavalry School at Fort Riley, Kansas. One of the schools’ graduating stu-

dents that year was George Patton, whom Craig remembered well from France and the Meuse-Argonne. On his final student evaluation form, Craig wrote of Patton: “Very energetic, enthusiastic and versatile officer. Does Everything exceptionally well.”

The high opinion went both ways: that October, Patton wrote directly to Pershing— “cavalryman-to-cavalryman,” as he put it—to recommend Craig’s appointment as the next chief of cavalry. A month later, Pershing wrote back to Patton: “Craig seems to be the general choice, and if things work out as I think possible, he will probably be selected.”

He was, becoming chief of cavalry in 1924.

Shortly thereafter, Patton graduated from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff School as that year’s honor graduate. Craig sent Patton a note of congratulations that reflected his own professional values: “I firmly believe that lasting individual honor and preferment

Men of the U.S. First Army (top) advance on September 13, 1918, after the successful Saint-Mihiel Offensive Craig developed with then-colonel George Marshall. In a subsequent battle, Craig employed the innovative tank tactics of another promising colonel: George S. Patton (above). Craig strongly believed in recognizing and cultivating talent.

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heart, with tremendous effectiveness.

The following year, on October 2, 1935, Craig succeeded General Douglas MacArthur as U.S. Army Chief of Staff. He had not been MacArthur’s choice of successor, but he had been strongly supported for the position

by General Pershing, who still carried tremendous influence in American military circles. In July 1938, Craig brought Marshall, a brigadier general by then, to Washington, D.C., as chief of the War Department’s War Plans Division. Just three months later, he named Marshall the Deputy Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. In making Marshall the second-most important general officer on active duty, Craig was sending a clear signal that he was positioning Marshall as his successor.

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are gained only through individual effort to improve the efficiency of the service at large.”

Craig advocated for officers he viewed as especially worthy, although not always with the results he wanted. In 1926, Craig teamed up with Fox Conner—then the Deputy Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army (the equivalent of today’s Vice Chief of Staff)—to lobby for Patton’s assignment as Commandant of Cadets at West Point. Their effort fell short, and another officer received the assignment. Writing to Patton, Craig told him: “My dear George…I regret very much that circumstances existed as they did, as you are the one fellow for whom I am always willing to go to bat.”

In 1934, when Craig was the commanding general of the IX Corps Area, responsible for all U.S. Army units on the West Coast, he was a member of a promotion board that recommended Marshall for brigadier general.

Marshall, however, was not selected for promotion. Craig responded by sending a testy letter to Secretary of War George Dern complaining that the army’s flawed promotion system resulted in too many deadwood senior colonels being promoted to the general officer ranks, while high-quality officers like Marshall were passed over. The belief that promotions should be based on merit and not seniority was one that Marshall later took to

AS U.S. ARMY CHIEF OF STAFF, Craig fought a never-ending battle against the bureaucratic forces of complacency and inertia.

When he assumed office, one of his first actions was to initiate a complete review of the army’s existing war plans. As he suspected, those plans were completely unrealistic. They were largely based on the assumption that the army had large stocks of equipment and ammunition left over from World War I—items that, in fact, either no longer existed or were long since obsolete. The plans also had the Regular Army training the National Guard and the Army Reserve for rapid mobilization. But the Regular Army of 1935 was a mere skeleton of what it had been at the end of World War I. Craig spent most of his time in office working to convince Congress of the army’s great weaknesses in manpower and materiel, and fighting to modernize the force in the face of the severe budgetary and other constraints of the 1930s. Institutionally and culturally, the U.S. Army’s mindset was still mired in the world of 1919. Thus, while fighting to convince the civilian leaders who controlled the purse strings of the critical need to modernize the army, Craig also had to fight internal battles to overcome resistance to change from those who believed the organizations, equipment, and tactics that had withstood the test of combat in World War I were still good enough for any future war. He faced intense opposition from older and entrenched senior officers who believed that change would threaten their own positions.

The army’s infantry division structure was one of those bureaucratic battlegrounds. The main point of contention was whether to retain the huge “square” division structure of the World War I-era or adopt a smaller and more flexible “triangular” structure. The massive square division of two infantry brigades of two regiments each, supported by an artillery brigade, was a cumbersome force of 28,000 men—about the size of an entire French, British, or German corps in World War I. It was difficult to control and more difficult to maneuver. The triangular division was a far more flexible force of three infantry regiments, supported by a four-battalion divisional artillery.

It was only about half the size of the square division and far more mobile. In 1937 Craig—who had long supported experimenting with lighter and more flexible divisional organizations—appointed a special three-man board to recommend a final structure. The board consisted of Major General Fox Conner, Brigadier General George Marshall, and Brigadier General Lesley J. McNair, who would go on to command U.S. Army Ground Forces in World War II. Marshall later

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Marshall (right) with General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing in France, circa 1918: the respected Pershing was a strong advocate for both Marshall and Craig.

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As chief of staff, Craig (above) directed the army’s largest peacetime maneuvers to date: the Plattsburg Maneuvers in upstate New York. “What a sight,” a participant enthused in a postcard to relatives (left).

referred to the board as a “stacked deck for the triangular division.”

But because Conner had to retire for health reasons, the board never met, and it largely fell upon McNair to develop the smaller, more mobile “Proposed Infantry Division,” following extensive field tests.

Marshall later acted quickly to formalize this, approving the new triangular division organization on September 14, 1939—only two weeks after he was named chief of staff. With the Germans and Japanese having the mobility and flexible divisional structures to run circles around the old square divisions, that decision quickly proved its worth.

Craig also made a number of important decisions that strengthened the army’s implementation of armored warfare. In June 1937, he ordered an examination of its 1931 mechanization policy, which had divided development responsibility between the infantry and the cavalry—something that Craig knew would limit its scope. The cavalry, for example, tended to limit the use of tanks and other armored vehicles to the traditional horse cavalry roles of reconnaissance and screening; Craig recognized that mechanized forces had offensive potential far beyond that. This was a significant insight for an officer who had once been the chief of cavalry. In March 1938, Craig took the War Department’s mechanization policy out of cavalry and infantry hands and centralized it. Within a few short years, that action directly led to independent, self-contained mechanized forces capable of deep operational employment—in other words, armored divisions.

In the area of global military strategy, Craig kick-started the pro-

cess that produced one of the United States’ most important policy changes prior to the start of the war. The version of “War Plan Orange” for war with Japan, initially adopted in 1924, was obsolete and completely unworkable. In May 1938, at Craig’s constant prodding, the Joint Army and Navy Board began revising the entire existing set of war plans with color-coded names for specific individual opponents. That was a feat: with no unified Department of Defense at the time to provide oversight, the army and navy were their own standalone fiefdoms. The Joint Board was the body responsible for developing and synchronizing joint global strategy.

But, with no authority figure over them to make the final decisions, it all had to be done by consensus.

By October 1939, the final result was the famous five “Rainbow Plans,” developed to meet the threat of a two-ocean war against multiple enemies.

During those lean years of the 1930s, there were few resources available for field maneuvers—an essential component of larger unit training. When the possibility of greater military appropriations slowly started to appear APRIL 2021

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FRANK INGOGLIA/U.S. ARMY ART PROGRAM

in late 1938, Craig directed War Department staff to revamp and expand an upcoming First Army maneuver, scheduled for the following summer. Perhaps the most important change to the exercise was Craig’s insistence that the Army Air Corps focus on the direct support of ground forces, in contrast to its preferred missions of strategic bombing and air superiority.

The resulting Plattsburg Maneuvers of August 1939, held just before Craig left office, were then the largest American maneuvers to occur in peacetime. More importantly, the exercise, conducted in upstate New York, was the essential foundation upon which was built the pivotal Louisiana Maneuvers of August and September 1941—the first real test of America’s ability to conduct the type of large-scale, combined-arms warfare that the Germans were then practicing in the Soviet Union.

In late 1938, the War Plans Division also issued the results of a study Craig had directed that called for increases in army manpower and the actual formation of the army’s five infantry divisions—which, at that point, only existed on paper. Throughout his tenure as chief of staff, Craig had to work continuously to reassure an often-skeptical Congress that the changes he was promoting were for purely defensive purposes. Congressional skepticism toward defense spending was deeply rooted in traditional American isolationism. Even as the global war clouds were gathering throughout the 1930s, the majority of Americans and most of their political leaders clung to the belief that the country could somehow stay out of it if the rest of the world exploded in war.

The Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936, and 1937 severely limited the United States’ ability to provide material support to the potential allies that most military leaders believed the U.S. would soon have to fight alongside. President Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated a “cash and carry” policy to circumvent those acts, based on the thin fiction that selling weapons to any country that could come to America and pick them up

for transport home complied with the Neutrality Acts restrictions. Britain was the primary beneficiary of that policy. In 1938, the British requested to purchase some early models of the B-17 bomber. Army Air Corps Headquarters opposed the request because of its own expansion program, but Craig overruled the Air Corps. The sale went through on the specific condition that the transfer would not delay any already-programmed deliveries of new bombers to the Army Air Corps.

Another of Craig’s important contributions to American preparedness for a major war was the “Protective Mobilization Plan of 1939.” Completed at Craig’s direction by the War Plans Division in December 1938, it was based on a two-stage expansion of the army. It called for the establishment of an “Initial Protective Force” of about 400,000 troops— mostly Regular Army and National Guard—to be operational by 30 days after mobilization.

An expansion to 1,150,000 active troops by 240 days after mobilization would follow. A $575 million arms program supported the plan. It was a small effort compared with the later reality of World War II but—considering the state of the U.S. Army in 1939—it was a bold step forward in the face of political and bureaucratic gridlock. It became the army’s basic prewar expansion plan.

As a first step, Craig sent Marshall to Congress in February 1939 to argue for an increase in the army’s authorized strength by 40,000. He also directed Marshall to press for the need for additional funding to equip the Regular Army and National Guard with modern equipment—especially the M-1 Garand semiautomatic rif le and the new M2A1 towed 105mm howitzer, then two of the world’s most advanced weapons. Marshall managed to secure an authorized increase of only 17,000 troops, but it was a start, and he did get appropriations for the new weapons.

In his final “Annual Report of the Chief of Staff,” issued in June 1939, Craig urged the U.S. government to reorganize the army’s five geographically scattered standing divisions.

These would be based in a fully-garrisoned outpost line running from Alaska to Hawaii to

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (BOTH)

Craig aided a future ally by permitting Britain to purchase some early B-17s (left)—something the Army Air Corps had opposed. Such planning left Marshall (below) on firmer ground when he took over as chief of staff on September 1, 1939.

FRANK INGOGLIA/U.S. ARMY ART PROGRAM

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (BOTH)

Panama to Puerto Rico, which needed to be established. He also recommended the creation of a war reserve with equipment for one million men. And Craig accurately warned that because of the time lag in industrial production, the modest appropriations already approved for increased military equipment would not “be fully transformed into military power for two years.”

Ultimately, of course, the global war the United States fought from 1941 to 1945 was different from the defensive scenario Craig had envisioned in 1939. Following the Pearl Harbor attack, and in the face of rapidly changing strategic realities, General Marshall had to completely revise war plans and force structures several times. But it may well have been impossible for him to do so without the foundation that Craig had left for him.

As Craig’s mandatory retirement date approached in August 1939, he and Secretary of War Harry H. Woodring forcefully lobbied President Roosevelt to appoint Marshall as the next chief of staff, even though Marshall was then junior in seniority to 32 other general officers. The timing of his appointment was eerie. George C. Marshall officially assumed the duties as chief of staff on September 1, 1939—by sheer coincidence, the day Germany marched into Poland.

MALIN CRAIG’S SERVICE to the U.S. Army continued after he departed as chief of staff.

One of the most difficult tasks Marshall took on in his new role was the forced retirement of “deadwood” among the army’s senior officers—those too old or physically and mentally unfit to lead troops in combat. This process, which ultimately resulted in the elimination of some 600 officers, was managed by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson’s War Department Personnel Boa rd, established on September 26, 1941. Marshall brought Craig back on active duty as a full general to serve as president of that board. It was a difficult and even gut-wrenching job that had to be conducted by someone who shared Marshall’s ideas about the qualifications needed for senior combat command and the critical need to clean out the ranks of senior officers— including longstanding personal friends of both Marshall and Craig.

Another of the board’s primary functions was the screening and selecting of seniorlevel civilian specialists for direct commis-

sions in the army. The most senior of those went to William “Big Bill” Knudsen, a native of Denmark, who in 1940 was the president of General Motors. Directly commissioned as a lieutenant general in January 1942, Knudsen was appointed as the Director of Production, Office of the Under Secretary of War. With his expert guidance, American production of machine tools for the manufacture of war materiel tripled.

Craig was still on active duty when he died at age 69—at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C.—on July 25, 1945. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Craig left no memoirs, and no major biographies have been written about him. Ideally, some historian will take on that task. The mildmannered, balding, bespectacled man looking out from his official chief of staff portrait looks more like a high school English teacher than the hard-nosed operations officer, dynamic innovator, and brilliant strategist he was. Malin Craig was the kind of officer Frederick the Great was talking about when he told his generals, “Be more than you seem to be.” H

When Craig (in his official portrait, above) died in July 1945, acting Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson said: “As chief of staff during critical years between 1935 and 1939, he directed the United States Army with rare skill and judgment.”

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REVIEWS BOOKS

UNDERCOVER MOTHER

AGENT SONYA Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy

By Ben Macintyre.

400 pp. Crown, 2020. $28.

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THE GREAT DEPRESSION led many to become disillusioned with capitalism. For wealthy, left-leaning academics—the prominent Kuczynski family of Berlin among them—communism was appealing, as the movement championed workers’ rights and challenged rising fascism in Europe and Asia.

It was an early awareness of class disparities—and a blow from a policeman’s truncheon during a workers’ May Day parade—that radicalized the Kuczynski’s daughter, Ursula, and paved the way for an extraordinary career. While living in mid-1930s Shanghai with her architect husband, Ursula gained the confidence of American journalist and communist sympathizer Agnes Smedley, who believed that Ursula could be useful to the Soviet cause. Smedley passed her name to Russian spymaster Richard Sorge, who gave Ursula a task: he asked that she use her home as a safe house to hide communists from the Nationalist government. She agreed. Sorge gave Ursula the codename “Sonya.”

As Sorge’s trust in Ursula grew, so did her responsibilities in carrying out espionage for

COURTESY OF PETER BEURTON

Soviet spy Ursula Kuczynski—dubbed “Agent Sonya”— dressed for travel in 1936 to meet her handler in London.

the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. From concealing communists in prewar China to running agents in Nazi Germany and collecting nuclear secrets in Britain, Sonya lived in a world of illusion in which codenames and forged documents passed for true identities. Typically, a wartime agent’s life hinges on his or her ability to keep real and fabricated personas separate. But Sonya skillfully blended her public and clandestine lives, using her domestic roles—sister, wife, mother—to recruit top agents from unlikely places, all the while flying under the radar.

It’s tempting to consider Agent Sonya to be a story of a modern woman torn between home and career. But for Sonya, the stakes were much higher than those of her peers with conventional lives and occupations. If discovered, Sonya’s children might grow up motherless; little balance existed between the spheres in her life. And as a committed Communist, she overlooked Stalin’s purges and willingly sacrificed much—including multiple marriages and, frequently, what was best for her children—to serve Mother Russia.

Epics featuring female spies are finally coming to the fore—dozens debuted in 2020 alone—and Macintyre shows us that Sonya was one of the best. One important recruitment can make a spy’s career; Sonya staked her claim as one of the Soviet Union’s greatest agents by stacking up extraordinary recruits like cordwood. Her biggest prize was nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs, a German Communist Party member and arguably the most important spy of World War II. Fuchs provided Sonya with hundreds of documents that sped the development of the Soviet Union’s atomic bomb. It was chiefly due to him and other scientist recruits that Stalin knew about the West’s nuclear advances years before Truman revealed the Manhattan Project’s success to him at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945.

Macintyre is a master storyteller, but it’s his meticulous research that truly stands out: Ursula Kuczynski’s family granted him access to hundreds of photographs and letters, as well as her girlhood diary. Together, these documents reveal the agent’s innermost tensions, bringing the remarkable “Agent Sonya” fully to life. —Craig Gralley, a former senior officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, is the author of Hall of Mirrors: Virginia Hall—America’s Greatest Spy of World War II (2019).

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REVIEWS BOOKS

COURTESY OF PETER BEURTON

EASTERN TIME IN HIS INTRODUCTION to Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, author Sean McMeekin argues that today’s view of World War II is far too Hitler-centric, the mad cruelties of the German dictator blinding us to the equal ghastliness of his Russian counterpart. Few readers of this fresh look at the Soviet Union’s role in the conflict will disagree; after all, Hitler’s regime died in the rubble of Berlin while Russia emerged victorious with an expanded empire that lasted nearly another 50 years. More controversial is McMeekin’s portrayal of Joseph Stalin as a master strategist and diplomat, outmaneuvering the Allies and his enemies at every turn.

In over 660 sometimes tendentious but always stimulating pages, McMeekin, a history professor at Bard College, blends diplomatic and military history, beginning with America’s reluctant recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933 and ending with Stalin’s occupation of Manchuria and Korea in August 1945. Contrarian arguments come thick and fast, including the view (currently fashionable in Russia) that Stalin was not, in fact, taken by surprise by Hitler’s 1941 invasion.

STALIN’S WAR McMeekin is on his firmest—and most A New History of fascinating—ground with his account of Roosevelt’s “naïve” and “obsequious” wooing of World War II Stalin with the Lend-Lease program. AmeriBy Sean McMeekin. ca’s wartime aid to the Soviet Union was 864 pp. Basic Books, remarkably generous, covering everything 2021. $40. from Spam to entire factories (and, at one point, $7 million worth of gold braid for Red Army uniforms). Dozens of Soviet engineers were allowed access to American defense plants. The program was cheered on by a network of high-placed Soviet sympathizers in the Roosevelt administration, some of them actual spies. One jawdropping story is of the secret shipment to Russia, in February 1943, of enriched uranium and heavy water. (The government argued in postwar Congressional hearings that to refuse the request would have blown the whistle on America’s own nuclear program.)

Happy telling patent untruths straight to people’s faces, Stalin repeatedly wrong-footed Roosevelt and Churchill at various wartime summits.

November 1943’s Tehran Conference was a turning point: Russia had beaten the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad but still needed American aid to press home its advantage. Instead of extracting concessions in exchange, Roosevelt rolled over, siding with Stalin in pressuring Churchill for a second front. That evening at dinner, Stalin laughed that he would, upon beating Hitler, execute 50,000 German officers—something he had already done to 15,000 Polish ones, as Churchill and Roosevelt well knew. Churchill exploded, but Roosevelt went along with the “joke,” suggesting that perhaps 49,000 Germans would do.

McMeekin concludes the book by floating a series of hypotheticals.

What if, for instance, Lend-Lease had ended in 1943, depriving the Red Army of the Studebaker trucks and Willys jeeps—over 143,000 vehicles in total—in which they raced into Poland and beyond? (The probable answer: Poles, Hungarians, and the rest would have escaped Sovietization, but more British and American soldiers would have died; the Red Army suffered 360,000 casualties in capturing Berlin.) It’s valuable, though, to be reminded that for many of its supposed beneficiaries, the end of World War II was no liberation—and that history only seems inevitable with hindsight. —Anna Reid is a historian of Ukraine and Russia

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RESISTANCE

Directed by Jonathan Jakubowicz, starring Jesse Eisenberg. 121 min.

Amazon Prime Video In this true-life coming-of-age tale, a teenage Marcel Marceau— the French actor and mime who gained fame postwar for his stage character “Bip the Clown”—uses his budding theatrical skills to rescue imperiled Jewish orphans.

A CALL TO SPY

Directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher, starring Sarah Megan Thomas. 124 min. Amazon Prime Video Legendary secret agents Virginia Hall and Noor Inayat Khan get their due on the silver screen in this sprawling yet well-paced drama. Set in occupied France, it follows their heroic efforts to outwit the Nazis and overcome sexism.

RECON

Directed by Robert David Port, starring Alexander Ludwig. 95 min. Amazon Prime Video Wintry weather, an enemy sniper, and memories of a war crime plague four American soldiers sent on a reconnaissance mission up an Italian mountain in this adaptation of the novel Peace (2008) by Air Force veteran Richard Bausch.

APRIL 2021

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REVIEWS BOOKS

FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD

ROCK FORCE The American Paratroopers Who Took Back Corregidor and Exacted MacArthur’s Revenge on Japan

By Kevin Maurer.

304 pp. Caliber, 2020. $28.

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KEVIN MAURER’S Rock Force takes what, in many accounts of the Pacific War, is little more than a footnote and expands it into a fast-paced telling of the dramatic 1945 American operation to take back the island fortress of Corregidor in the Philippines. Maurer, a seasoned journalist and author who has embedded with units in Iraq and Afghanistan, is well-suited to tell this tale of raw emotion and sacrifice.

Guarding the entrance to Manila Bay, the island—or “the Rock” as it was known, due to its craggy topography—first held the world’s attention in early 1942 as American troops there offered stiff resistance against Japanese invaders. More than four months later, in May, they finally surrendered, and the Japanese took 11,000 Americans and Filipinos as prisoners of war.

Maurer’s book picks up the story in February 1945, recounting the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment’s role in reclaiming the stronghold. It was a risky mission, with the

regiment unleashing more than 2,000 troops onto a postage stamp-sized drop zone located on the U.S. garrison’s former parade field and golf course. The airdrop achieved the desired element of surprise, and Japanese troops on Corregidor scrambled to react to the unexpected gambit.

The ensuing battle largely unfolds through the eyes of three paratroopers: Captain Charlie “Doc” Bradford, a battalion surgeon; Lieutenant Bill Calhoun, an infantry platoon leader; and Private Anthony Lopez, an automatic rifleman. Their perspectives provide insight into the human cost of war and the emotional toll of leading troops against a fanatical, unyielding enemy.

In some regards, Maurer’s book is mistitled: the actual “Rock Force” comprised the airborne troops who parachuted onto Corregidor and a reinforced battalion from the 34th Infantry Regiment—troops who landed amphibiously on another section of the island. However, he references the latter group only in passing. Readers should also keep in mind that Rock Force is not a conventional military narrative of the two-week battle. Its reliance on personal stories (and lack of a comprehensive battle map) might leave some readers struggling to follow the campaign and fully grasp its strategic context. Further, it was the occupied island’s threat to Allied shipping entering Manila Bay that made the attack a necessity—not, as Maurer implies, its control center for command-detonated naval mines (most of which the U.S. Navy had already swept prior to the mission). From the island’s commanding position, Japanese gunners had harassed passing vessels and hit several, including two American destroyers. Securing Manila and its harbor required seizing Corregidor.

But at its heart, Rock Force is a compelling war story, and Maurer concentrates on where his affinities lay: those troopers whose boots were on the ground. Their stories of valor and tragedy will hook readers from the very first page. —James M. Fenelon is a former paratrooper. His book Four Hours of Fury: The Untold Story of World War II’s Largest Airborne Invasion and the Final Push into Nazi Germany was published in 2019.

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A member of the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment jumps at just 400 feet onto a tiny target while recapturing Corregidor in 1945.

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BATTLE FILMS

BY MARK GRIMSLEY

BIRTH OF A GENRE IF YOU’RE OF A CERTAIN AGE, you’ve probably turned on the television late at night and stumbled upon Bataan, a 1943 film about a squad of American soldiers caught up in the doomed defense of the Philippines. It’s unlikely you gave the film much thought. If you did, you might have told yourself, “This isn’t Sands of Iwo Jima” (1949), or possibly “This isn’t Saving Private Ryan” (1998). Or, for that matter, The Big Red One (1980), Platoon (1986), or American Sniper

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(2014). But all these movies share something in common: they are examples of the combat film genre. And, film historian Jeanine Basinger argues, they all owe a debt to Bataan, an otherwise forgettable movie made entirely on a Hollywood backlot.

The success of a genre film depends upon the assumptions that audiences bring with them into the theater. When we see a certain kind of movie—a Western, an action thriller, or a romantic comedy, for example—we come with expectations. The cavalry will arrive in the nick of time to save the embattled settlers; the hero will hurtle from one heart-pounding peril to the next; the guy will meet the girl, lose the girl, and then get the girl. We feel cheated when these genre conventions aren’t observed. We are delighted, shocked, or plunged into thoughtful silence when they are observed in an unexpected way.

In 1978, Basinger began searching for the first example of the World War II combat film, which she argues is a distinct genre in a way that the war film is not. (A war film is merely any film that prominently features a war; The Bridge on the River Kwai, released in 1957, is a war movie, but so is the 1958 musical South Pacific.) She began by looking for “what presumably every member of our culture would know about World War II combat films—that they contained a hero, a group of mixed types, and a military objective of some sort.” After viewing dozens of movies, she settled upon Bataan as the first to fully combine all of these genre elements.

Bataan was a product of the Golden Age of Hollywood, when the major studios cranked out hundreds of films on a nearly assemblyline basis. It was the 28th film directed by Tay Garnett, best known for The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). It was the 37th film for lead actor Robert Taylor, who played Sergeant Bill Dane, a noncommissioned officer of the U.S. 31st Infantry Regiment assigned to take an improvised squad of 11 men to blow up a strategically vital bridge to prevent the advancing Japanese army from rebuilding it.

It’s a doomed mission—and as the film progresses, we see them perish, one by one, down to Sergeant Dane himself. But we also get to know them. They represent a racial and

HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

Directed by Tay Garnett, 1943’s Bataan might seem cheesy on first viewing due to its instantly predictable—yet at the time innovative—plot.

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ethnic cross section of America—six WASPs, as Basinger calls them; a Mexican American; a Jew; a Pole; an Irishman; and an African American, as well as two Filipinos. And they are recognizable types; among them, the Hero (Sergeant Dane); the Youth (a wet-behind-the-ears navy musician, played by Robert Walker); the Comic Relief (Tom Dugan as a wisecracking mechanic); and the Hero’s Adversary— a c y n ic a l, shadow y cor pora l acted flawlessly by Lloyd Nolan, who, Basinger

HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

All combat movies owe a debt to one World War II-era film: Bataan. writes, is “an important stand-in for audience doubts, and for its unwillingness to face the hardships the war will bring.”

When my editor inquired about my next column’s topic and I told her it would focus on Bataan, she asked if I could have a draft to her by a certain date. That would not be a problem, I replied. “The problem,” I added, “will be having to watch the movie again. Yes, it’s the foundation of the combat film genre and, in that sense, important.

But it’s pretty hokey.” I did re-watch the film, of course, and when I did, I felt a sense of disappointment. Not in the movie, however, but in myself.

Bataan is actually competently written, well-directed, capably acted, and surprisingly realistic considering its limited budget and filming locations restricted to studio sets. Yes, it has its hokey moments, as when Private Felix Ramirez fiddles with a shortwave radio until he finds a big band orchestra playing live in the U.S. “That’s Tommy Dorsey from Hollywood!” he tells Sergeant Dane giddily. “Oh, he sends me, Sarge! He makes me lace up my boots!….

Give me some of that trombone talk, Tommy!”

But for the most part, Bataan holds up well. If it seems mundane, it’s only because the genre conventions it first assembled are now so familiar, having influenced some of WW2-210400-001 Mystic Stamps.indd the finest war films ever made. Bataan, I realized, is one of those things in life we often overlook: an exquisite gift right in front of us, if we only had eyes to see. H

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Please mention code 114351 when ordering.

REMOTE-CONTROLLED EASILY SHIFTS FROM FLAT TO A STAND-ASSIST POSITION

Genuine Italian Leather

Chestnut

classic beauty & durability

Long Lasting DuraLux™

Chestnut

Burgundy

Tan

Chocolate

Blue

stain & water repellent

MicroLux™ Microfiber

Burgundy Cashmere Chocolate

breathable & amazingly soft

Because each Perfect Sleep Chair is a made-to-order bedding product it cannot be returned, but if it arrives damaged or defective, at our option we will repair it or replace it. © 2021 firstSTREET for Boomers and Beyond, Inc.

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Indigo

46556

Footrest may vary by model

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CHALLENGE

GOOD COMPANY

PNA ROTA/GETTY IMAGES; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN WALKER

We altered this photo of Winston Churchill and Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1942 to create one inaccuracy. What is it?

Answer to the December Challenge: We had a huge

number of entries this time—a pandemic side effect?—with 337 of you correct that we had given the Grumman F4F-4 Wildcat a four-bladed propeller. Its propeller should actually have three blades (far left). No, we didn’t mess with the fighter’s paint scheme.

Congratulations to the winners: Pete Behenna, Dale G.

Lanz, and William J. Miller

Please send your answer with your name

and mailing address to: April 2021 Challenge, World War II, 901 N. Glebe Rd., 5th Fl., Arlington, VA 22203; or email: challenge@ historynet.com. Three winners, chosen at random from all correct entries submitted by April 15, 2021, will receive Rock Force by Kevin Maurer. Answer will appear in the August 2021 issue.

APRIL 2021

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FAMILIAR FACE

Defiance and daring came naturally to Leonard Alfred Schneider— before, during, and after the war. The man who would become known as the edgy stand-up comic Lenny Bruce joined the U.S. Navy in 1942 at the age of 17. He was assigned to the light cruiser USS Brooklyn, where he manned deck guns and, over three years, participated in the invasions of Salerno, Sicily, Anzio, and southern France. “When the War was on, the alternation of routine and confusion sustained my interest, but then it was over and I wanted out,” he wrote. He took to feigning homosexuality, which succeeded in getting him discharged in July 1945, and then studied acting under the G. I. Bill. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, his provocative routines earned him a following—including by the law, with a series of obscenity charges. He was just 40 when he died. But his barrier-breaking influence left a lasting mark on comedy.

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NATIONAL ARCHIVES; INSET: GETTY IMAGES

BOLD AS CAN BE

WORLD WAR II

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

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

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

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

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

AN ENRICHING JOURNEY INTO WWII HISTORY FOR LEARNERS OF ALL BACKGROUNDS

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

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Proudly Serving Our Brave Military

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