World War II Spring 2023

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38

An American soldier gazes at Manila as it

Two U.S. armies competed to be the first to reach the Philippine capital.

SPRING 2023

ENDORSED BY THE NATIONAL WORLD WAR II MUSEUM, INC.

FEATURES

COVER STORY

30 LONDON’S CRIME BLITZ

War creates chaos, and chaos offered opportunity for Britons willing to skirt the law ROBERT HUTTON

38 TASK FORCE SHOESTRING

Douglas MacArthur aimed to capture Manila, but his armies had to get there first JAMES M. FENELON

WEAPONS MANUAL

48 HOME SECURITY

Britain’s Blacker Bombard

50 RESCUING NORWAY’S GOLD

Once the Germans attacked, Norwegians scrambled to keep nearly 54 tons of gold out of their clutches TIMOTHY J. BOYCE

PORTFOLIO

58 BOMBER BOYS

Every leather flight jacket from the war comes with a story attached JOHN SLEMP

64 DOG BAIT ON CAT ISLAND

These dogs of war received an unusual assignment, and it involved Japanese American soldiers JESSICA WAMBACH BROWN

DEPARTMENTS

6 FRONT LINES

8 MAIL

10 WORLD WAR II TODAY

18 CONVERSATION

Author Bruce Henderson talks about Bridge to the Sun

22 FROM THE FOOTLOCKER

24 NEED TO KNOW

26 TRAVEL

A monument in the nation’s capital commemorates the war

70 REVIEWS

Half American; The Lost Paratroopers of Normandy; and more 76 BATTLE FILMS

The Pilot tells the story of a Soviet airman who refused to die 79 CHALLENGE

80 FAMILIAR FACE

burns.

Michael A. Reinstein CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER

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PROUDLY MADE IN THE USA

VOL. 37, NO. 4 SPRING 2023

Follow along the path where America’s best and brightest fought in WWII as you travel from England to Normandy to the Ardennes on our D-Day to the Rhine Tour. Pay homage to the fallen in Europe and the Pacific on our Operation Overlord, Original Band of Brothers, Iwo Jima, Battle of Britain, Battle of the Bulge, Ghost Army, In Patton’s Footsteps, Italian Campaign, Manhattan Project, Normandy Campaign and Poland and Germany tours. Our WWII, Civil War and American History tours are unrivaled in their historical accuracy!

The best way to understand history is to study the places it was made.

DR. STEPHEN AMBROSE

Published in 96 weekly editions, the Marshall Cavendish History of the Second World War provided a thorough overview of the global conflagration.

FRONT LINES

GREETINGS

I’M THE NEW GUY HERE, having inherited the magazine from Karen Jensen, who did a superlative job as editor for many years. (Senior editor Larry Porges made a smooth transition possible by shepherding the Winter 2023 issue into print.) This new position gave me the excuse to dust off some treasured volumes from my youth, back when I was first diving into the ever-fascinating topic of World War II. This was in 1973, when Marshall Cavendish started publishing its History of the Second World War in weekly installments. There would be 96 parts in all, organized into six volumes, starting at 95 cents each. By the time the last part appeared, the price had jumped to a buck. The publishers also sold binders for the volumes, at $3.50 each. “By keeping your weekly issues in the handsome, gold-blocked binders specially made for the work you will build up the most comprehensive and readable account of the Second World War ever published,” said the publishers. Sold.

In any event, they had me at the first installment, the cover of which depicted a diving Junkers Ju-87 Stuka bomber with the word “Blitzkrieg!” spelled out at an angle in big type. For a 12-year-old who got maybe a couple of bucks a week for allowance (occasionally supplemented by lawn mowing income), it was quite an investment. I probably drew a deep breath before I handed over

my first 95 cents because I knew I was making a commitment. It was 96 issues or bust. So every week I made the trip to my local bookstore and bought the latest edition and dutifully ordered my binders one by one.

Although I bought all 96 issues, I drew the line when the publishers announced two additional volumes to cover supplemental topics. And I did not buy any of the separate magazines they published on war weaponry, even though they featured great illustrations by John Batchelor. By that point I had spent more than $100 of my hard-earned cash. I wasn’t made of money—plus I had a comic book habit I needed to finance.

I still have all six of my Marshall Cavendish volumes, and they remain a decent resource, although they are dated in some respects. For example, you will find not a single mention of Britain’s codebreaking operation at Bletchley Park, which provided vital intelligence about German activities and had a big impact on the war’s course. That’s because the work at Bletchley remained classified until after the history was written.

Years later I got to meet Batchelor, when he contributed illustrations for the magazine where I worked. He had been born in 1936 and I recall him talking about the first drawing he ever made, a depiction of an aerial battle he observed as a child during the Battle of Britain. I was saddened to learn recently that he died in 2019. At least his illustrations survive, not only in in Marshall Cavendish’s History of the Second World War but in many other publications as well.

All of which is a long way of saying, it’s great to be editing World War II H

Tom Huntington

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PROS AND CONS

THE WINTER 2023 COVER STORY by James Scott [“Night Terrors”] made me angry. It wasn’t a history lesson; it was Mr. Scott’s opinion of a tactic used to defeat a ruthless enemy. I suggest Mr. Scott read about the Rape of Nanking or the Bataan Death March. I am a World War II veteran, 99 years old. I was a Hump pilot and fought the Japanese in Burma and China. At the time, if a bomb could have destroyed the entire island of Japan and all its inhabitants, every American would have rushed to pull the trigger. You had to be there.

Robert Moore St. Petersburg, Florida

I’ve always felt that Curtis LeMay’s firebombing campaign was a war crime, and after reading your informative article, I still do. While it is understandable that he would adopt firebombing when it became clear that precision bombing wasn’t working, this is still no justification. The real question is whether the firebombing campaign shortened the war. My sense of this is no: it took atomic bombs to do that. Many have criticized our use of atomic bombs on Japa-

nese cities, but those bombs not only shortened the war; they ended it.

John Pooler Doraville, Georgia

I found James Scott’s article on Curtis LeMay both fascinating and horrific. LeMay was a complicated man charged with the unenviable task of winning the war as quickly as possible regardless of the human cost.

As a long-time student of WWII history, I knew much of General LeMay’s story and had two personal connections to it. First, my father served during WWII in the 9th Armored Division (Remagen Bridge) and remained in Germany following the end of the conflict to serve in the Army of Occupation. His post-war duty was as an army mail clerk in Wiesbaden, the HQ of U.S. Air Forces in Europe (USAFE). He told the story of a run-in he had with LeMay, the commander of USAFE, when he refused the general’s request to mail a pair of skis back to the States. Apparently the size exceeded the army’s mailing regulations. A staff sergeant rarely finds himself in a situation of refusing a general. He heard later that LeMay got the skis sent home by arranging for them to be placed in a passenger seat of a plane flying to the U.S. My second connection to LeMay is that we both attended South High School in Columbus, Ohio, though many years apart. When I was at South High in the late sixties, a painted portrait of perhaps its most famous alumnus, General LeMay, hung in the main hallway. Being a WWII buff, I knew who the man in the portrait was but I’m sure most of my fellow students were clueless. In 1968, when LeMay ran as the vice-presidential candidate with George Wallace, the portrait was taken down. It was a turbulent time, with protests against the Vietnam war, racial unrest, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. I often wonder who made the decision to remove the painting and what became of it.

Otto Tennant

Knoxville, Tennessee

BRAIN FAILURES

The Winter 2023 article “Brain Power” by David Sears is certainly interesting, but there are two apparent oversights. First, Sears

General Curtis LeMay remains a controversial figure today.

states that radio direction finding [RDF] was “a technology that determined the direction, though not the range, of wireless transmissions.” B ut surely he must be aware that the range (distance) of the transmission could be ascertained with two (preferably three) receivers of the transmission acquiring direction. Those azimuths plotted on a map will reveal the distance to that transmission, indeed, its exact location. Second, at the end of his article Sears says that the National Security Agency was “an organization so wrapped in secrecy that its very existence wasn’t revealed until 1975.” Not so. NSA was recruiting people at college campuses well before that. I took their exams on the campus of the University of Minnesota in 1968.

Gary Peterson

Bozeman, Montana

David Sears replies:

While it’s true that a single RDF reading provided bearing, not range, it’s also true that the intersection of two or more readings could solve the range. I tried to make that clear in the same paragraph by saying “effectiveness required amassing enough transmissions…” But I also see that putting it that way didn’t make it clear enough. As to your second point— you’re correct. The NSA was wrapped in secrecy (the quip being that NSA stood for “No Such Agency”) but 1975 was not when its existence was revealed. Instead, October 1975 marked the first time NSA’s head was called to testify openly before Congress.

POLITICALLY CORRECT?

I read Mark Grimsley’s South Pacific installment in “Battle Films” [Autumn 2022]. Was that last paragraph, including the 2010 quote from theater critic Jim Lovensheimer (“The irony of Americans fighting a war against racist enemies while their own racism remains unresolved”), really needed? Sounds like a bit of editorializing to me…and not the good kind in a review of a film from 1958, about a war fought in the 1940s. Do the readers of World War II really need to be reminded of the demoralizing and many times devastating effects of racial bigotry? In addition, almost the entire theme of Mark Grimsley’s review came off as little more than pandering to the social forces that have seemed to gain control of the narrative since 2020. I am not uncomfortable with confronting racial preju-

dice. I do so all the time. But at an appropriate time and place.

Martin E. Horn

South

Plainfield,

New Jersey

ARMED MEDICS

One page 45 of “Into the Abyss” [Autumn 2022] there’s discussion of an M1911 issued to Eugene Sledge’s father, a medical officer in WWI. My grandfather was also a medical officer in WWI and also had a 1918 M1911. However, it was always my understanding that non-combatant medical officers did not carry sidearms. Was issuing an M1911 sidearm to medical officers in WWI standard practice? Within the family it was widely held that our grandfather, a bit of an operator, had secured the weapon as a battlefield requisition. But now it would appear that there may be more (or less) to the story.

John G. Meyer, Lieutenant Colonel (USAF, retired) Cincinnati, Ohio

HistoryNet Historian Jon Guttman replies:

According to the Geneva Convention, medics had every right to defend themselves and the wounded soldiers in their care, provided it was in self-defense. For that purpose, the U.S. Army would issue pistols to medics expected to be in situations where they might come under attack. The pistol (like the M1911) was favored because it freed up the medic’s hands so he could do his job, but if none were available the medic had the right to carry the next-handiest weapon available, such as the M1 carbine.

KUDOS TO NURSES

I thoroughly enjoyed your article on the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps [“World War II Today,” Winter 2023], as my mother was a graduate of the program and went on to be a registered nurse for over 40 years. At least Arlington National Cemetery recognized her service during WWII, as evidenced by her grave marker. Both she and my father served our country when it needed them most.

Dennis D. Cavit, Colonel (USAF Retired)

Lake

City, Colorado

PRINT LOVER

I have subscribed to your magazine for a long time and look forward to the next issues, even though they will come quarterly instead of every two months. A few years ago I paid for a gift subscription for my cousin, Bob Stewart, a Marine Corps veteran. He lived in an area that didn’t always have reliable internet service. Bob told me that four or five of his veteran buddies would stop by and read his copies of World War II cover to cover. Reading an issue online was not an option for his friends.

I hope HistoryNet never forgets that an actual magazine, passed from hand to hand, is a wonderful thing. My cousin Bob passed away last year in hospice care, and I bet he died with a copy of your magazine sitting next to his bed.

Sidney Spezza Bend, Oregon

worldwar2@historynet.com

Please include your name, address, and daytime telephone number.

@WorldWarIImag

TOKYO ROSE’S LEGACY RE-EXAMINED

Iva Toguri D’Aquino, a.k.a. Tokyo Rose, after her postwar arrest in Japan. She was convicted of treason in 1949, but a new graphic novel questions her guilt.

GRAPHIC NOVELS OFTEN tell the tales of superheroes and intrepid zombie hunters. A new one sets out instead to salvage the reputation of a young woman vilified as a traitor after World War II.

In Tokyo Rose: Zero Hour, released by Tuttle Publishing in September 2022, graphic novelist Andre Frattino seeks to redeem the legacy of Iva Toguri D’Aquino, one of only seven Americans ever convicted of treason. Her crime: allegedly mouthing Imperialist Japanese propaganda in radio broadcasts designed to demoralize American troops in the Pacific.

Frattino makes the case that there really was no Tokyo Rose and that D’Aquino—an American citizen and daughter of Japanese immigrants who became trapped in Tokyo during a visit when the war broke out—was innocent all along.

Frattino remembers watching old black-and-white World War II movies in which sultry-voiced Japanese sirens sought to sap the morale of American troops over the radio by making them homesick and worried that they’d been betrayed by wives and girlfriends back home. “I remember this character from all these old movies,” he says. But D’Aquino “was the one that was singled out and persecuted for it.”

In many ways, the woman labeled Tokyo Rose was an all-American girl. Iva Toguri was born on the Fourth of July in 1916 to parents who wanted to Americanize her as much as possible. Growing up, she didn’t speak Japanese or learn to use chopsticks. She played tennis and harbored a crush on actor Jimmy Stewart. She got a degree in zoology from UCLA.

Her life was upended after her parents sent her to Tokyo in the summer of 1941 to care for a sick aunt. “Japan was as foreign to her as it would have been to any of us,” Frattino says. She didn’t like eating rice regularly— “It’s killing me,” she wrote in a letter home.

Unable to read Japanese newspapers, Toguri was slow to realize how badly U.S.–Japanese relations were deteriorating in the fall of 1941. Belatedly, she booked passage back to the United States in November. But she missed the ship because of a paperwork error—and was stuck in Tokyo after Pearl Harbor.

She refused to renounce her American citizenship, was labeled an enemy alien, and was denied a ration card. She borrowed money from friends, including the Portuguese-Japanese pacifist Felipe D’Aquino, whom she later married. She found work as a typist at Radio Tokyo and eventually went on the air with an Australian POW, broadcasting as “Orphan Ann” to American troops in the Pacific. Their performances were mostly humorous and meant to sabotage any propaganda content with sarcasm. Introducing one song, for instance, she joked: “Dangerous enemy propaganda, beware! Our next propagandist is Arthur Fiedler with the Boston Pops Orchestra.”

After the Allied victory, D’Aquino was briefly detained in Tokyo, then released when General of the Army Douglas MacArthur’s staff found no evidence that she had aided Japan during the war. But radio personality Walter Winchell and the American Legion lobbied relentlessly for her to be prosecuted. She was re-arrested upon returning to the United States in 1949, found guilty of treason, and sent to prison for six years.

After evidence emerged that she’d been convicted on perjured testimony, she was pardoned by an outgoing President Gerald R. Ford on January 19, 1977. She settled in Chicago, worked at a shop selling Japanese products with her father, and divorced Felipe in 1980 after he was repeatedly refused entry to the United States. “She lived the rest of her life rather quietly,” Frattino said. “She was just the little lady behind the counter.” D’Aquino died of natural causes in 2006 at age 90.

WORD FOR WORD

— Lieutenant General Courtney H. Hodges in a March 7, 1945, phone call to Omar Bradley, relaying news that American forces had seized an intact bridge over the Rhine River at Remagen, Germany.

DISPATCHES

The D-Day Squadron—an educational nonprofit organization set up to honor veterans of the Normandy invasion—has released a documentary, Into Flight Once More, narrated by actor and veterans advocate Gary Sinise. The film, available on Blu-ray and DVD at intoflightoncemore.com, recounts the flight the group organized in 2019, when it took 15 wartime C-47 cargo planes (which ferried paratroopers to Normandy in 1944, as above) to France to mark the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

“Brad, we’ve gotten a bridge.”

CRASHED B-24S DISCOVERED IN ADRIATIC

THE AMERICAN B-24 BOMBERS would take off from an air base in Foggia, Italy, and conduct raids across Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe. Crippled by German fighters and flak, many didn’t make it back, frequently ditching in the Adriatic Sea, which separates Italy from the Balkans. The wrecks of 30 American aircraft are believed to be submerged in those waters.

Researchers from the University of Delaware, the nonprofit Project Recover, the U.S. Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), and Croatia found five of them over the summer after scouring 24 square miles of seafloor. And they’re going back for more.

Three of the five B-24 Liberators were identified, pointing researchers to the names of 23 crew members who had been listed as MIA. “With those IDs we now know who was aboard…and the MIAs associated with the aircraft,” said mission leader Mark Moline, professor of marine studies at the university and co-founder of Project Recover. Moline added that the next step in the process will be to look into the feasibility of excavating and recovering the airplanes and any human remains.

The wrecks were found in about 300 feet of water. The engine cowlings, propellers, and wings were mostly undamaged—to the surprise of the researchers, according to an account in Stars & Stripes

It was the biggest find ever by Project Recover, which for the first time loaded a side-scan sonar, a magnetometer, and a high-resolution camera onto an unmanned mini-submarine. “Combining these technologies is extremely powerful,” Moline said. “An aircraft wreck site often doesn’t look like an aircraft…. The sonar provides very good

information whether the object is manmade. The magnetometer provides information on whether an object has ferrous material [iron] even if it is buried in the sediment. The imagery gives confirmation on whether it is aircraft or not. Combining these to provide simultaneous data streams helps us confirm a site consistently with high confidence.”

The searches are likely to get another technical assist going forward. University of Delaware researchers are working on algorithms that will help explorers sort through a “firehose” of sonar data to find likely wreck sites.

The DPAA is pushing to develop new technologies and methods to locate and identify war remains. The university and Project Recover are also planning to look for wrecks in the Pacific in 2023. More than 72,000 Americans are still missing in action from World War II.

A diver explores a submerged B-24, one of five wartime wrecks recently located in the Adriatic Sea by Project Recovery (inset) and researchers in the U.S. and Croatia.

ASK WWII

Q: Why didn’t the United States just conduct a total naval blockade of Iwo Jima rather than invade it? Granted the caves were well fortified, but after a few months the Japanese soldiers’ food and water would have run out, as the volcanic island had no way of growing food.

—Wallace Berliner, Edison, N.J.

A: It was scheduling issues that made the blockade option very unlikely. The strategic concept called for the invasion of Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945, and Okinawa on April 1, a gap of less than six weeks. Preliminaries for the attack on Okinawa started with a series of carrier strikes on Kyushu and Honshu, during which the carrier USS Franklin sustained devastating damage on March 19—just one month after the initial landing on Iwo Jima. Likewise, many ships, particularly heavy gunfire support ships, rotated from Iwo Jima to Okinawa. No blockade operation was going to take less than several months and would have required very substantial naval assets (including carriers and gunfire ships) to sustain it. The blockade option would have forced a long pause before the Okinawa invasion, which U.S. military leaders would have viewed as unacceptable.

—Richard B. Frank is an expert on the Pacific War. His most recent work is Tower of Skulls (2020), t he first volume of a trilogy on the Asia-Pacific War

SEND QUERIES VIA EMAIL to Ask World War II at worldwar2@historynet.com

ON THE HOME FRONT

Washington, D.C., children carry their weekly contribution of scrap paper to school in August 1942 as part of the “Salvage for Victory” program. The federal goverment initiated the program on January 10, 1942, a mere four weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, encouraging everyday citizens, cities, and industries alike to collect and conserve critical war materials. Millions of tons of scrap paper, metal, rubber, and more were gathered and recycled over the course of the war, helping to create a “pitch in” climate that boosted American morale.

Thousands of Marines died in the 1945 invasion of Iwo Jima. Was starving out the Japanese with a naval blockade ever an option?

EIGHTY YEARS LATER, WWII STILL CAUSING DAMAGE

said Josefien Van Landuyt, a doctoral student at Belgium’s Ghent University. “In fact, their advancing age might increase the environmental risk due to corrosion, which is opening up previously enclosed spaces. As such, their environmental impact is still evolving.”

THE WRECK OF A GERMAN patrol boat leaks arsenic and other pollutants into the North Sea for 80 years. A wartime uranium dump contaminates an elementary school outside St. Louis. These recent headlines are another reminder that World War II left a toxic legacy around the world.

During the war, 50,000 tons of chemical weapons were dumped into the Baltic Sea, while more than 300 oil tankers sank in the Pacific. Researchers estimate that 8,600 shipwrecks from both World War I and World War II contain up to 20 million tons of petroleum products that can leak into the surrounding waters. “Although we don’t see these old shipwrecks, and many of us don’t know where they are, they can still be polluting our marine ecosystem,”

Van Landuyt was the lead author of a study published in October on the ecological impact of the wreck of the German patrol boat V-1302 John Mahn. British warplanes sank the converted fishing trawler off the Belgian coast on February 12, 1942; 27 of the ship’s crew were rescued, but 11 perished. The study notes that ships are sometimes sunk deliberately to create artificial reefs that protect marine life. By contrast, the researchers write, “wartime shipwrecks were sunk without being stripped of hazardous materials, often having reserves of crude oil or other petroleum derivatives and unexploded munitions still on board.”

Van Landuyt and her colleagues took samples from the wreck’s steel hull and the sediment nearby. They found a variety of toxic pollutants—heavy metals, arsenic, and explosive compounds. But the news from the John Mahn wasn’t all bad. The researchers also found that microbes had been degrading oil that had leaked from the wreck, limiting the ecological damage.

Halfway around the world in Florissant, Missouri, environmental consultants found radioactive contamination “far in excess” of what was expected in an elementary school outside St. Louis, near where nuclear weapons were produced during the war. After the inspection in August, Jana Elementary School was closed and students shifted to online learning until they could be transferred to other schools. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers later declared the school safe—but local residents remain skeptical.

A new study found arsenic and other pollutants near the German patriol boat John Mahn (left), sunk off Belgium in 1942. Soil samples taken along the axes noted above revealed the contamination.

Greatest Tanks of World War II

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BATTLE SCARS

The crumbling ruins of Oradour-sur-Glane (above) are a somber reminder of one of the worst atrocities committed in France during World War II. On June 10, 1944, troops of the 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer Division— Das Reich —rounded up the entire population of the village, located about 15 miles from Limoges in Vichy France, and herded the men into barns and the women and children into a church. The SS then set fire to the barns and threw hand grenades into the church, shooting anyone who tried to escape. In all, 643 men, women, and children were murdered.

While the direct impetus for the destruction of Oradoursur-Glane has never been conclusively determined, Das Reich had deployed to France from the Eastern Front, where such wholesale “operations” were painfully common. Plus, the attack occurred only four days after D-Day, and the SS company had received orders to deal with suspected Resistance members and its sympathizers “with the greatest severity and without leniency.”

In 1946, the French government declared Oradour-surGlane a national memorial site and mandated that its ruins remain undisturbed in perpetuity as a reminder of the war crime. A new village was built nearby, and today a museum marks the entrance to the wartime site, where thousands of visitors come annually to pay their respects to France’s “martyred village.”

DISPATCHES

The National Park Service has named 18 new American World War II Heritage Cities, memorialized for contributing to the war effort on the home front. Lewistown, Montana, was honored for the nearly 1,000 airmen who trained there in B-17s for missions overseas; more than two dozen submarines were built for the U.S. Navy in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, another new Heritage City; and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was recognized for the vital research conducted on the Manhattan Project. Joining Lewiston, Manitowoc, and Oak Ridge— and Wilmington, North Carolina, which got the inaugural designation in 2020—are:

l Casper and Natrona counties, Wyoming

l South Texas Bend area and Corpus Christi, Texas

l East Hartford, Connecticut

l Evansville, Indiana

l Los Alamos County, New Mexico

l Montgomery County (Dayton), Ohio

l New Orleans, Louisiana

l Pascagoula, Mississippi

l Paterson, New Jersey

l Pensacola and Escambia Counties, Florida

l Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

l Savannah and Chatham Counties, Georgia

l Springfield, Massachusetts

l Tri-Cities (Kennewick, Pasco, Richland, and West Richland), Washington

l Wichita, Kansas

Manitowoc, Wisconsin

Oak Ridge, Tennessee

CONVERSATION WITH BRUCE HENDERSON

BY DAVE KINDY

“DEFEND YOUR COUNTRY AND MAKE US PROUD”

IN WORLD WAR II, thousands of Japanese American soldiers served their country as translators in the Pacific Theater. Bruce Henderson’s new book examines this little-known story about the Nisei— first-generation Americans born of Japanese parents—who fought against their ancestral homeland. Bridge to the Sun: The Secret Role of the Japanese Americans Who Fought in the Pacific in World War II details the experiences of some of these soldiers. Henderson, a New York Times bestselling author of several histories about World War II, talked with World War II about the book.

Why did you decide to write this book?

I came to it in a serendipitous way. I was researching my last book on the Ritchie Sons and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned with the U.S. Army to Fight Hitler—and I came across information about the Japanese Americans who fought in Europe. I knew about that. But then I read there were several thousand Japanese American soldiers who trained for the Pacific Theater. I’ve written World War II books and I didn’t know that. I figured most people probably didn’t know it, either.

I circled back when I finished the Ritchie Boys and found that there were strong parallels between them. Both were trained in secret for identical missions, only in opposite theaters of war. And each endured their own brand of prejudice and distrust. Many of the Ritchie Boys were Jewish Germans with accents. Of course, the Nisei and their families were rounded up and put in camps because they were not trusted. Both had to overcome those barriers to become valuable assets for the U.S. military. They knew the language, culture, and customs of our country’s enemies better than anyone and could gather valuable intelligence.

In your book, you focus on a select cadre of soldiers. Why?

I tell a bigger story through the lives of a few. I want readers to get to know these men. I want readers to know what they’re thinking, feeling, and fearing. I feature the Kibei, who are Nisei educated in Japan. It was not uncommon then for immigrant parents to send

their sons back to the homeland. These boys were as American as anybody. But when the war broke out with Japan, our government didn’t trust them as ethnic Japanese. Over 60 percent of folks in the internment camps were American citizens. Then, four or five months into the war, the army realizes they need this language skill in the Pacific.

Many Nisei raised by immigrant parents could speak a little Japanese but were not fluent in reading and writing. However, the Kibei were. Suddenly they went from being the most distrusted to being the most desired by the army. Even though they’re in the internment camps, the great majority of these young men were ready to prove their loyalty.

Kazuo Komoto was the first Nisei wounded in the war. He was shot in the knee in July 1943 at New Georgia Island in the Solomons and ends up in his hospital in Fiji. Who comes by his bed? Eleanor Roosevelt! We actually found a picture of that moment. He told the president’s wife how unfair it was that his family was behind barbed wire while he was being shot at. Later, he admitted to feeling guilty about challenging the president’s wife but, by God, he wanted to let her know how he felt.

What kind of bigotry did these men have to endure?

Komoto was still recovering when he left the hospital, so he went to visit his family in Arizona. He stopped at a store because he heard the interned didn’t have fresh meat. The butcher looks at him and says, “I don’t sell to Japs.” Komoto, who is in his uniform with his ribbons, answers, “I’m not a Jap. I’m an American.” The butcher looked him over said, “Well, what do you want?” Here is this guy who’s fighting for his country and this is what he faces his first time back.

That’s why I thought it was time for this story. We’re in a country where anti-immigrant sentiments are still prevalent. Too often, America still prejudges based on race, ethnicity, country of origin. Bridge to the Sun is a timeless message of what true patriotism is all about.

Why don’t we know this story?

For starters, it was highly secret during the war. We didn’t want the Japanese to know we had teams in the Pacific with these skills. The Japanese were arrogant about their language. They felt Westerners, even if they could hold a conversation, weren’t going to be able to read or write it. In Burma, Roy Matsumoto of Merrill’s Marauders climbed up a tree and listened on a telephone line as Japanese soldiers spoke without using a code. They are at an ammunition dump and Roy figures out the coordinates so they can destroy it. That’s why it was so secret. There weren’t a whole lot of men who served over there. Only about 4,000 made it to the Pacific, compared to something like 20,000 Japanese Americans who fought in Europe. They served in small 10- to 12-man teams, so there wasn’t a lot of camaraderie like the bigger units. After the war, they got busy living their lives, going to school, working, raising families. They just didn’t talk about it. Some families tell me they didn’t realize the stuff their dads did. It wasn’t something these men freely shared.

Considering what the Nisei experienced, where did their fighting spirit come from?

These guys had several motivations. There was anger because they went from being 1A to 4C for the draft, meaning they couldn’t serve at first. They were not good enough to defend their country. They also

wanted out of the detention camps. They wanted to win the war in the Pacific so they could get their families out of the camps.

All they wanted to do was serve their country. One Japanese mother told her Nisei son, “This is America. It’s your country. It’s not my country, nor your father’s country. You must defend it and make us proud.” Those boys went to war with that message ringing in their ears.

Tell us more about Roy Matsumoto. Roy was born in California and went to school in Japan. He was ready to come home when

his parents moved back to Japan, so he lived there with them. Roy went back to America and was living in L.A. with his sister when the war broke out. He was highly agitated when he found out he could not join the army. Then he and other Japanese Americans were rounded up and sent to a camp in Arizona. Recruiters were looking for these fellows who could

“Bridge to the Sun is a timeless message of what true patriotism is all about.”

Left: When Kazuo Komoto was recovering from wounds, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt made a hospital visit. Below: Bruce Henderson used Komoto’s story as an example of what Nisei experienced.

Savage [U.S. Military Intelligence’s language school in Minnesota]. Then he volunteered for Merrill’s Marauders. He was one of 12 with that team. They were translators but they were in combat in Burma, fighting alongside the riflemen. Roy became a true hero when his battalion was surrounded on a mountaintop and were in danger of being overrun. At night, he crawled through the brush and got close enough where he hears Japanese soldiers talking about the next day’s battle. Before heading out, Roy leaves his helmet and gun behind and takes two hand grenades with him. His lieutenant asked him why. Roy said, “One is for them and one is for me.”

Roy comes back and tells his superiors where the Japanese are going to attack. The Americans rig the area with explosives and set up fields of fire. When the first wave attacked, the Japanese were mowed down. The second wave hesitated when they saw all the dead bodies. Roy stood up and yelled in Japanese, “Charge, charge, charge!” The second wave was annihilated, too. Something like 60 or 70 Japanese soldiers were killed but not a single American died. When Merrill’s Marauders started having reunions, Roy was always honored as the hero of the Second Battalion for what he did that day in Burma.

Who are some of the other heroes?

Takejiro Higa was born in Hawaii to Okinawan parents. He was taken to Okinawa when he was 2, staying until he was 17. Then he joined his sister in Hawaii, finishing school there. When he was recruited, Higa’s biggest fear was that he might have to fight on Okinawa. All of these guys felt that way. Matsumoto had three brothers in Japan and he worried he was going to see them on the other side of the battleline. Would they have done their duty? Of course, but can you imagine what they went through?

Higa went with a team in a division that was preparing for the invasion of Okinawa. Once he gets to the island, he does everything he can to help civilians. He never fired his rifle. He went to the caves to convince the Okinawans not to kill themselves. They had been

brainwashed into believing the Americans were going to torture them and figured it was better to die with their family in a cave. Higa convinced them not to. He went from one cave to the next, always saying the same thing: “I’m Okinawan, but I am in the U.S. Army. We will care for you. We will feed you.” Fifty years later, he went back to Okinawa and met someone he had talked out of a cave. That guy thanked him. At that moment, Higa really felt that he had done his duty for America by saving lives on Okinawa.

Tom Sakamoto is an amazing guy. I joke he was my Forrest Gump because he was everywhere, including on the USS Missouri when the Japanese surrendered. He was the first Nisei officer to go into Hiroshima after the bombing, escorting Western correspondents.

Then you have people like Grant Hirabayashi and his cousin Gordon. They grew up together and each makes a totally opposite choice when the war breaks out. Grant joins the army and serves with Merrill’s Marauders. At the same time, Gordon protests the treatment of Japanese Americans, refuses to register for the draft, and is arrested. His case goes to the Supreme Court. Yet both men respect the decision made by the other. Grant, a true war hero, does not think any less of his cousin for the choice he made.

What do you want readers to take away from the book?

It’s a dramatic and inspirational story at a time when it’s sorely needed in this country. Japanese Americans with ancestral ties to a nation we were at war with were distrusted. But they stepped forward as Americans and became huge assets to our military because they knew the enemy better than anyone. They were highly motivated to see America win the war.

With the anti-immigrant sentiment in this country today, we need to be reminded that we all came from somewhere. We prejudge way too often on the basis of race, ethnicity, and countries of origin. For me, that’s the takeaway. I just shake my head in awe when I think about what these men accomplished. H

Takejiro Higa (left) used his language skills to save lives on Okinawa by talking Japanese civilians out of killing themselves.

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TWO-FACED FROM THE FOOTLOCKER

I got this patch from my grandfather, who served in the European Theater. I have never been able to find out what outfit the patch is from. Any ideas? This has been driving me crazy for 45 years!

—

War

Michael Nieskens, New Jersey

Group insignia with conjoined creatures were sometimes created by flying units that used twin-engine aircraft. For example, the men of the 339th Fighter Squadron, operating the Lockheed P-38 Lightning—which was powered by two growling V-1710 Allisons—wore the image of a gremlin astride a wicked-looking double-headed eagle on their jackets. But an exhaustive search of the legions of known Army Air Forces and U.S. Navy and Marine Corps squadron and group insignia from World War II came up snake eyes for this one.

It turns out that this is no unit patch at all. Instead, the emblem is associated with an army airfield. These patches are rarer than those of the flying units, but not unheard of. A bombardier school at Deming Field, New Mexico, used an image of the wicked Queen Grimhilde from Disney’s Snow White plucking bombs from her cursed picnic basket. The

They say that two heads are better than one. But what does it mean when the heads belong to snakes that are wrapped around a bomb?

flexible gunnery school in Kingman, Arizona, adopted Warner Brothers’ Bugs Bunny, showing the cartoon rabbit intently firing his weapon into the desert skies.

Your grandfather’s patch comes from Douglas Army Airfield, in Arizona near the border with Mexico, which was a training ground for pilots working to transition to twin-engine aircraft. Hence the coat of arms featuring a two-headed snake coiled around the explosive body of an aerial bomb.

In hopes of qualifying to operate twinengine fighters or medium bombers in combat, student aviators started small, at the controls of somewhat forgiving Cessna Bobcats and Curtiss-Wright Jeeps. Over time, the curriculum called for the use of more weighty and complex aircraft, including the Beechcraft C-45 Expeditor. Finally, most airmen at Douglas moved up to a flight line populated with nearly combat-ready North American B-25 Mitchell medium bombers.

Graduates served all over the globe as army aviators, flying the Lightning fighters, Douglas C-47 Skytrain cargo planes, and Martin B-26 Marauder bombers that helped turn the tide against the Axis in Europe, the Pacific, and beyond. While most of these men added the emblems of combat units to their flight jackets, surely a few of them kept the tattered insignia of their alma mater to remember their days training at Douglas.

The sunbaked airfield is still there today, now known as Bisbee Douglas International Airport. You can find it on your aeronautical charts under the inelegant FAA location identifier of DUG. It’s a general aviation facility with the impressive moniker of international airport—after all, the Mexico border is a mere five miles from the end of the runway.

—Cory Graff, Curator

Have a World War II artifact you can’t identify?

Several

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

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

Curators at The National World

II Museum solve readers’ artifact mysteries

TODAY IN HISTORY

JANUARY 25, 2005

RENOWNED ARCHITECT PHILIP JOHNSON PASSED AWAY IN THE INFLUENTIAL GLASS HOUSE, OR JOHNSON HOUSE, HE BUILT IN 1949. CONTROVERSY REGARDING THE STRUCTURE STILL EXISTS AS TO THE EXTENT JOHNSON ‘BORROWED’ FROM THE DESIGN OF MIES VAN DER ROHE’S FARNSWORTH HOUSE. JOHNSON’S RAMBLING ESTATE LOCATED IN NEW CANAAN, CT BOASTS AN UNDERGROUND ART GALLERY WITH WORKS BY STELLA, JOHNS, RAUSCHENBERG AND WARHOL.

For more, visit HISTORYNET.COM/ TODAY-IN-HISTORY

BY JAMES HOLLAND

WHAT’S LUCK GOT TO DO WITH IT?

EVERYONE NEEDS some good luck in life, but that was especially true for those who lived and fought through World War II. I recently opened a diary of a German frontline soldier and found, carefully taped to the first page, a dried four-leaf clover. I’m glad to report the soldier survived, because his letters and diaries made him seem like a decent fellow. It got me thinking about the nature of luck in war. Some years ago, I went to Wolfsburg in Germany, home of the Volkswagen, but also of Jupp Klein, a former Fallschirmjäger (paratrooper) and veteran of long years in the war in Russia, Sicily, and Italy. Did he remember his first time in combat, I asked? Yes, he replied. He’d just arrived at the front and immediately came under fire from heavy mortar shelling by the Red Army. He was in a slit trench with two other men, he in the middle. When it was over, he discovered both his comrades were dead, but he had not suffered a scratch. “I was lucky,” he told me.

Later he was standing in the ruins of Cassino in Italy. “Suddenly, something made me hit the ground,” he said. “A sixth sense. A splitsecond later, a shell hurtled right over my head.” That sixth sense, he reckoned, had only come from experience. That had not been luck.

Statistics don’t lie, and infantrymen had a bum deal, make no mistake. Allied infantry in northwest Europe, for example, statistically had no chance of getting through unscathed, although, of course, plenty did. Ray Saidel was the only man of some 40 frontline servicemen I talked to about their experiences in Italy who came out without a scratch. He’d been in the 1st Armored Infantry Regiment.

Eugene Sledge was one of eight men who was still standing in his company after going through Peleliu and Okinawa. Why him? And why did Ray survive unblemished when statistically he had no right to do so? Was it a sixth sense for self-preservation? Or pure luck?

A little while ago, at the wonderful National World War II Museum in New Orleans, I caught up with Ken Beckman, aged 100. He had been a bomber navigator in the Eighth Air Force. Not any old navigator either, because Ken was so good at his job, he’d become the youngest major in the Eighth and by the war’s end had chalked up 48 combat missions, which certainly defied the statistics of survivabil-

ity. “When people ask me how I’ve made it to a hundred,” he said with a grin, “I always say it’s down to pure luck.”

Hmm, I wondered. Ken had joined the Eighth in the fall of 1943, literally the worst possible time. The air force was suffering such terrible casualties that statistically it was impossible to complete even 25 missions. When Ken’s squadron went out on the second Schweinfurt raid on October 14, 1943, his ship was one of only two to make it back. He told me the story of how one time they’d been due to bomb an airfield in Holland. As lead navigator, he got them to the target all right, but the lead bombardier dropped too early and so they missed completely. Later, on his second tour in the latter half of 1944, Ken’s aircraft had been badly shot up and urgently needed a place to land. “We came down on the very same airfield in Holland we’d been due to smash up six months earlier,” he said, chuckling. “Quite by chance. As I said, I was lucky.”

Surely, though, I suggested, experience must have helped him? He shrugged. He wasn’t the pilot. And not many survived two tours. “It was luck, that’s all.” Maybe he’s right. Or maybe a combination of good fortune and experience saw him through. Clearly, a fourleaf clover cannot save anyone, but the other statistics don’t lie either; many did defy the odds and survive. Maybe some people simply are born lucky and that’s all there is to it. H

The Boeing B-17 The All American III was nearly sliced in two over North Africa but returned safely to its base before the tail fell off. Some would say the crew had been lucky.

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SECRETS IN THE STONES

THE RAIN HAS STOPPED, though steel-gray clouds hover above the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., where nine elderly men and one woman are escorted to their places of honor in front of a small crowd. On this 81st anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 2022, a wreathlaying ceremony pays tribute to these World War II veterans who fought across Europe and the Pacific.

Admiral Chris Grady, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gives the keynote, saying: “This memorial tells the story of the greatest generation that stood tall in the face of oppression, and we are here to honor those that sacrificed so much. And, of course, the price of freedom is always high, and it’s always paid in blood.”

The setting couldn’t be more perfect. Dedicated in 2004, the World War II Memorial is a striking monument in a prominent place on the National Mall. Two impressive rows of 17-foot pillars and a pair of triumphal arches surround a fountain-bedecked plaza, creating an impression of power and might. Quotes from Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and many commanding officers of America’s wartime military adorn the memorial’s walls.

But it’s more than just a heroic-looking monument. The World War II Memorial contains layers of meaning, and by understanding that symbolism, the presence of the honored veterans—indeed, the presence of this memorial on the National Mall—becomes even more poignant.

“It’s a triumphant memorial,” Ranger Nate Adams tells me as he guides me around the monument. “You’re honoring the dead here, for sure. But this

memorial is talking about victory, unity, and sacrifice.”

We walk along the memorial’s ceremonial entrance, where 24 bronze bas-reliefs sculpted by Ray Kaskey depict both home-front and battle scenes in chronological order—12 on the north side representing the Atlantic Theater, and 12 on the south portraying the Pacific Theater. The panels show the complete transformation of American society as it mobilized military, agricultural, industrial, and human resources to fight for democracy—and how less represented people were instrumental in achieving victory. In one panel you’ll find Rosie the Riveter, for example, the cultural icon typifying the women who worked in factories and shipyards. Others show African Americans, in the throes of segregation, who answered the call to fight and to help on the home front.

As Nate leads me along the northern row of pillars etched with the names of states and territories, my eye catches the Philippines, where my mother grew up and was imprisoned by the Japanese during World War II. “The elements of sacrifice on the pillars are important,” Nate says. “There are two wreaths on each pillar, one on front and one on back.” They are oak and wheat, represent-

Most of the architectural features of Washington, D.C.’s majestic World War II Memorial symbolize specific elements of the war.

ing industry and agriculture. “So not only did the states and territories give up their sons and daughters; they also gave up their hard work and resources.” A rectangular hole cut out of the center of each pillar represents those who didn’t come home, while twisted bronze roping at the pillars’ base connects each state and territory. “What can be more indicative of unity than a rope binding it all together?” Nate says.

I have to ask: “Are the pillars arranged in the order the states came into the Union?” That, apparently, is the most popular question visitors ask rangers. Nate’s response intrigues me. “The monument honors the dead,” he says, pointing to a field of gold stars at the memorial’s western side, commemorating those who did not return, called the Freedom Wall. “That’s the head of the table, and they’re seated at the place of honor. Protocol says that you seat your most honored guests closest to the right, closest to the left, back and forth.” In this case, the most honored guests are in order of state ratification of the Constitution and admittance to the Union as a state or territory— Delaware is first, on the right, then Pennsylvania, on the left, and so on, all the way through the territories and District of Columbia.

As we make our way toward the Freedom Wall, we walk through the Atlantic victory pavilion, one of two small open-air vaults standing opposite one another across Memorial Plaza, representing the two theaters of war on opposite sides of the world.

Standing inside, my eyes are drawn to the sculptural canopy above our heads, officially called a baldacchino. Four bald eagles, with wing spans of 11 feet, carry garlands in their beaks, which in turn support a laurel victory wreath. “The artist, Ray Kaskey, said, ‘Let’s do something different,’” Nate says. “He had seen something in a church in Rome, a circle with angels. But he put eagles. What’s more American than the bald eagle?” Beneath our feet, an enlarged bronze medallion depicts the World War II Victory Medal, with the goddess Nike or a figure of Liberation (it’s debated which) looking into the dawn of a new day. The medal was awarded to all members of the military who served in the war.

Water is a prominent feature of the World War II Memorial—the architect, Friedrich St. Florian, placed fountains and ponds throughout. Rainbow Pool, in the center of the main plaza, existed before the memorial was built. Two

fountains rise from the pool in spectacular watery flows, accentuating the victories in the Pacific and Europe. Some say they also represent the European fountains American soldiers joyfully played in at the war’s end. As we near the Freedom Wall, we stroll past more cascading waters splashing loudly over a berm supporting the memorial’s western side. “You hear the noise of the water,” Nate says, adding “then, as you approach the stars, it’s quieter. It makes

Top left: Depictions of Victory Medals grace the two memorial pavilions. Top right: Each Freedom Wall star represents 100 Americans lost in the war. Above: A playful “Kilroy” peeks out from an undisclosed location.

focal point, rises above a placid pond. Across its dark façade are 4,048 gold stars, each one representing approximately 100 American service members who lost their lives during the war. In front of the ensemble, words on a stone marker proclaim: “Here We Mark the Price of Freedom.” As Admiral Grady said in his speech, “It is proof that freedom is worth dying for, it is proof that no matter the cost, brave men and women will answer this nation’s call.”

Nate mentions something else. “This is a place where hard stories are shared,” he says. “I remember when a veteran was here with his son. The son told me, ‘I found some medals in a case, and one was a silver star.’ I looked at him and said,

‘They don’t give you a silver star for sitting behind a desk.’ That man had been in a very dangerous situation and did something incredibly brave. The father had never shared that story.” Stories like that are revealed time and time again in this sacred space, he says.

Not everything about the memorial is sobering. Nate reminds me that so many soldiers were very young men, 18 and 19 years old. That’s why, tucked away in unassuming nooks, are two “Kilroy was here” etchings—Kilroy, of course, is the famous chalk-and-pencil sketch of a bignosed man peering over a wall that popped up everywhere during the war as a morale booster. The National Park Service doesn’t tell people where they are. You have to find them yourself. (Hint: they’re outside the main memorial space.)

I then meet Dan Arant, a National Park volunteer who provides additional insights into the memorial’s symbolism. He leads me to the Announcement Stone, a block of granite at the monument’s ceremonial entrance on 17th Street. In the years before its dedication, the memorial was a controversial project. “So many people were against it,” Dan says. “There were public hearings and lawsuits, all It took 17 years before Congress voted its approval.

Part of the issue was the memorial’s central location on the National Mall; some people feared it would break up the sweeping vista between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial. “This Announcement Stone explains why the memorial is where it is,” he says. The quotation engraved on it starts: “Here in the presence of Washington and Lincoln…” And this is perhaps the memorial’s most powerful symbolism—its presence looks to the nation’s forefathers who established democracy, and spotlights the importance of American generations later who sacrificed so much to preserve it.

In this setting, the veterans at the end of the Pearl Harbor ceremony are ushered to the Freedom Wall, where they lay wreaths on behalf of each military branch. Guests shake their hands and thank them for their service against the backdrop of gold stars shining brightly in their place of honor. H

WHEN YOU GO

The World War II Memorial (nps.gov/wwii) is located in West Potomac Park near the intersection of 17th Street and Independence Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. The memorial is open 24 hours a day; rangers are on duty to answer questions between 9:30 a.m. and 10 p.m. and provide interpretive programs throughout the day and upon request. The nearest Metro subway stops are Smithsonian (0.7 mile away) and Federal Triangle (0.9 mile away).

WHERE TO STAY AND EAT

There are nearly unlimited lodging options in most price ranges in Washington, D.C. Visit Destination DC (washington.org) for suggestions. Legendary Ben’s Chili Bowl (bens chilibowl.com) on U Street NW has been serving half-smokes, along with southern-style breakfasts, cheese fries, milkshakes, and, of course, chili, since 1958; Martin Luther King Jr. often visited when he was in town.

WHAT ELSE TO SEE AND DO

The commanding Iwo Jima Memorial—officially the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial; search at nps. gov—rising on a knoll in Arlington, Va., is based on the iconic photograph taken by AP photographer Joe Rosenthal of six Marines raising the second American flag at Iwo Jima on February 23, 1945. Nearby, the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery (arlingtoncemetery.mil) includes unidentified soldiers from World War I, World War II, and the Korean War.

WORLD WAR II MEMORIAL

WHITE HOUSE

LINCOLN MEMORIAL U.S. CAPITOL

LONDON’S CRIME BLITZ

As German bombs rained down on England, lawbreakers found opportunities galore

By Robert Hutton

Gordon Frederick Cummins took advantage of London’s wartime conditions and gained infamy as the “Blackout Ripper.”

In July 1942, a demolition worker named Benjamin Marshall descended into the basement of a bombed-out Baptist chapel in Vauxhall, south London. He set to work with his spade, clearing the debris on the floor, when he noticed a paving slab was loose. Lifting it up, he discovered a mummified body.

Finding a corpse in the church wasn’t a huge shock. More than 100 people had been killed in the fire that had followed the bombing of the building in October 1940, at the height of the Luftwaffe attacks on London known as the Blitz. But Marshall and his colleagues summoned the local police anyway. They, too, initially assumed it was another victim of the Blitz: part of the skull was missing, as were the lower arms and legs. Presumably they had been blown off in the blast. Nonetheless, the police asked a pathologist, Dr. Keith Simpson, to take a look. He realized that something was wrong. The head appeared to have been intentionally removed from the torso, as were the limbs below the elbows and knees. The amputa-

Lights out! London’s skyline stays dark due to blackout laws. The lights were extinguished to prevent German bombers from using them for targeting. On the ground, British citizens found that the blackout and other laws offered new ways to violate regulations.

tions were too clean to be the result of a bombing, and marks from a saw were visible on the bones. Looking closer at what remained of the flesh on the skeleton, he concluded he was looking at the body of a woman who had been strangled.

The police had a pretty good idea of who she was: Rachel Dobkin. The previous year, a woman named Polly Dubinski had reported that her sister Rachel had gone missing, and she accused Rachel’s estranged husband, Harry Dobkin, of being involved. The pair, she said, had a bad relationship, and Harry resented his wife’s requests for financial support. At the time, the police had been unable to trace Rachel or pin anything on Harry. But now they noted that Harry had formerly worked as a night watchman for an office next to the very chapel where the body turned up.

Short of money and fed up with his wife’s demands, Dobkin had decided that the Blitz offered an opportunity. With so many people dying violent deaths—40,000 between September 1940 and May 1941, half of them in London—who was going to notice one more

corpse? He had killed his wife, removed anything he thought might identify her body, and buried her at the bombed-out chapel near his workplace. That November he was convicted of his wife’s murder, and in January 1943 he was hanged at Wandsworth Prison.

Dobkin’s tale is an extreme example, but he was far from the only Englishman who ventured into criminality during the war. The number of reported crimes in England and Wales rose nearly 60 percent between 1939 and 1945, but with many going unreported and undetected, that is likely to be a vast underestimate. Government propaganda worked to give the impression of a nation that was keeping calm and carrying on, with much talk of “Blitz spirit” and “business as usual” and pictures of plucky Londoners picking their way through the rubble to proceed with their lives in the face of the bombing. But there was a far murkier side to wartime life.

ONE REASON FOR THE SURGE in crime was that there were simply more crimes to commit. As Britain began participating in total war, the law began intruding into almost every area of life. Things as harmless as speaking your mind, turning a light on, and buying more than a couple of ounces of butter could now turn people into criminals.

Top left: Barbed wire frames the Palace of Westminster’s Clock Tower as London braces for a German invasion. Top right: The invasion never happened, but Germany’s Luftwaffe pounded the city from the air. Here a building burns on New Year’s Eve, 1940. Above: London police arrest one man who learned that crime did not pay.

Top: Evelyn Oatley (also known as Nita Ward) was an “actress” who became the Blackout Ripper’s second victim. Center: This gas mask helped identify the killer. Bottom: London Blackout Murders (1943) was inspired by actual events.

During the “invasion panic” of 1940, when it seemed the Germans were on the point of crossing the English Channel, people were prosecuted for spreading “alarm and despondency.” A woman who’d been overheard in a hotel room saying to her boyfriend, “Who cares if Hitler does come, so long as we can have fun like this?” was jailed for a month. Prosecutions like that sparked a backlash. Writing in The Spectator magazine, the novelist Dorothy L. Sayers said they gave “a very faint glimpse of the thing we are fighting against” and that citizens spying on each other “is the thing that Nazi government means, and it is a thing we will not endure.” The English saw themselves as freedom-loving people who didn’t snoop on their neighbors, even if the number of reports going into the police from busybodies suggested there were plenty who did. Prime Minister Winston Churchill signaled that he wanted such prosecutions to stop.

The blackout law was the change that affected everyday life quickest. The authorities were terrified by the prospect of bombing, something that had only had a limited impact on Britain in World War I but now, with the development of larger, longer-range airplanes, threatened to level cities. Fearful that lights on the ground would guide German pilots to their targets, the government ordered streetlights turned off and car headlights largely covered, and decreed that not a single bit of light should show from any building. Police and air raid wardens patrolled the streets, warning the British, “Get that light out!”

It was a huge effort, as householders across Britain covered their windows at dusk each evening with heavy cloth—or simply painted or wallpapered over them—and it had a human cost: with drivers and pedestrians unable to see each other, the number of road deaths doubled in the early months of the war, at a time when German bombers had barely gone near Britain. It also brought many previously lawabiding citizens into contact with the courts. In 1940, 300,000 people were charged with breaking the blackout. The usual penalty was a stiff fine, but in 1943 one persistent offender was sentenced to two months’ hard labor.

Some breaches of the blackout were frivolous. The British television critic Nancy Banks-Smith recalled that she and a fellow teenager made bras with material cut from their boarding school’s blackout curtains. “The bosom-shaped holes we left, signalling brightly to passing planes, were the occasion for a blistering sermon from the headmistress, Dame Emmeline, about giving comfort and support to the enemy,” Banks-Smith said.

Other violations were deadly serious. In the summer of 1940, the domestic security service, MI5, received word that a group of fascist sympathizers in Leeds, in northern England, were plotting arson attacks to attract German bombers. The men were arrested and sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea between England and Ireland.

And, of course, the darkness of the blackout provided cover for other crimes. In February 1942, the body of a 41-year-old pharmacist, Evelyn Hamilton, was discovered in an air raid shelter in Marylebone, central London. She had been strangled, apparently on her way home from a late dinner. The next day a 34-year-old prostitute, Evelyn Oatley, was

found in her flat in Soho, a mile away. This time the victim had been mutilated. Scotland Yard’s detectives didn’t yet use the expression “serial killer,” but they suspected the murders were the work of the same man, and they feared he would strike again. Police increased patrols of the area and quizzed prostitutes if they had seen anyone unusual.

In an echo of the 19th-century’s infamous Jack, the murderer became known as “The Blackout Ripper.” He killed twice more over the next three days, each time mutilating his victims’ bodies. Another prostitute managed to escape him as he started to strangle her. And then, five nights after the first attack, the police had some luck. An 18-year-old delivery boy was carrying a crate of bottles to a central London pub when he heard a scuffle in a doorway. He went to investigate and a man in military uniform fled the scene, leaving an unconscious woman behind him. She told police an airman had approached her in a pub and walked outside with her. There he tried to grope her and, when she resisted, strangle her. As he fled, the man had dropped his gas mask—a standard piece of equipment that everyone was advised to carry in case the Nazis resorted to chemical warfare. It was marked with a Royal Air Force identity number.

The following morning, the police arrested Gordon Frederick Cummins, a 27-year-old pilot cadet. Though he protested his innocence, the police found valuables stolen from

his victims among his possessions, and the woman he had picked up in the pub identified him. He was hanged in June 1942. In an appropriate twist for a man who had made such use of the blackout, he is the only person to have been executed during an air raid.

Not even such horrific stories could dissuade women from prostitution. The imminence of death had led to a surge in demand for their work, and that was met with an equal surge in supply. Although brothels— “disorderly houses” as they were known in British law—were illegal, prostitution itself was not, so there was little the police could do about the large numbers of women who turned out onto London’s streets. These women were dubbed “Piccadilly commandos” or “Piccadilly warriors” because the trade centered on the famous thoroughfare and public space in London’s West End.

Military authorities cared little for the moral questions but were deeply worried about the health impact. At the end of 1942, rates of venereal disease among U.S. troops were 39 per thousand if they were stationed on home soil, and 58 per thousand if they were in Britain.

IT WAS HARDLY SURPRISING that a lot of American troops, thousands of miles from home in a world gone mad, indulged their passions. But for one, it went much further. Karl Hultén was a private in the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, stationed in Reading, west of London. In July 1944, aged 22, he went AWOL, joining other

Top left: Wartime shortages meant long lines for meat and other groceries. Top right and above: Ration books, coupons, and stamps became part of daily life, although unscrupulous citizens could find ways to work the system.

deserters in using the anonymity of the big city to hide from the military police. Without the correct papers at a time when you needed a ration book to buy food, these men had to break the law to survive—police estimated a tenth of London’s crime was the work of deserters from the various Allied forces based in Britain. Arrested and returned to his unit, Hultén stole a U.S. Army truck and fled again, this time buying himself a second lieutenant’s uniform as a disguise. For several months he lived a counterfeit life, sneaking into cinemas, eating in cheap cafes, sleeping in the back of the truck, and trying to get by without getting picked up.

Then he met Elizabeth Jones, a troubled 18-year-old from Wales. She was already married, to a soldier who had disappeared to the war a year earlier. She moved to London in search of excitement and found work as a stripper. As she sat in cinemas watching gangster movies, she dreamed of life as a moll in Chicago. An encounter with this young American was a dream come true.

Both Jones and Hultén seem to have been fantasists. Both were using fake names when they met in October 1944. He told her that he was working for the mob and showed her the automatic pistol he was carrying. Over the next six days they egged each other on into a crime spree that culminated in the shooting of a taxi driver. Both were arrested and sentenced to death. Hultén was hanged on March 8, 1945, in Pentonville Prison. The government, uneasy about hanging a teenage girl, commuted Jones’s sentence to a jail term, over protests from many members of the public who saw her as equally guilty.

Unusually, the U.S. authorities waived the Visiting Forces Act and allowed Hultén to be tried in a British court so his case could be heard alongside Jones’s. For the most part, American soldiers faced American justice in makeshift courts with the Stars and Stripes pinned to the wall. These courts heard a full range of cases, including ones related to another booming area of British crime: the black market.

BY THE TIME American troops arrived in Britain, most of the things regarded as essen-

tial to everyday life were being rationed: meat, butter, oils, eggs, milk, sugar, canned goods, gasoline, tires, clothing, paper, and even soap. To get any of these in a shop, you needed both money and a ration book, which showed whether you’d already had your allocation. On top of that, there were shortages. If word spread that a consignment of some coveted foodstuff had arrived at a shop, a queue would immediately form.

With everything in short supply, it was hardly surprising that the British people began to cut corners or seek extra profits. Farmers could sell their eggs legally, but they got more if they sent them to the black market. Shopkeepers who came into a little extra stock would reserve it for customers whom they knew would pay extra for it. If there were a spare supply of something—not everyone took their entire cheese ration, for instance— a shopkeeper could keep it under the counter and sell it on the sly to favored customers. Such private enterprise was now a crime, but how much of it took place remains unknowable. Both parties to the transaction were happy, and neither had any interest in reporting it. But the government felt otherwise and assigned nearly 900 inspectors to ensure that citizens followed regulations.

Churchill was well aware of the danger of turning ordinary citizens into criminals. In 1942, newspapers reported on people who gave rations to neighbors, which was illegal.

Shoppers in East London queue up to buy fresh vegetables. If the grocer’s sign can be believed, the oranges traveled across the Mediterranean, nicknamed “Musso’s Lake” after the Italian dictator.

Hultén and Jones egged each other on into a crime spree that culminated in the shooting of a taxi driver.

But it was perfectly natural to swap rations with friends, or to contribute to a neighbor’s birthday cake. The prime minister urged his staff not to “enforce vexatious regulations.”

Rations were enforced by a complex system of coupon books and the bureaucracy created temptations to fraud. At first, shopkeepers were supposed to collect all the ration coupons they gathered and submit them to the government, receiving vouchers in exchange

that could be used to claim more goods. But many realized that no one checked the envelopes that arrived in government offices full of tiny pieces of paper, and simply sent in scraps, using the vouchers they got back themselves or selling them on.

Ordinary citizens quickly realized that the ration books themselves had value. If you could afford more than your ration allowed, you might be tempted to try to get your hands on another ration book. An obvious strategy was to claim yours had been lost, or destroyed in a bombing raid. Or you could buy one from someone who either couldn’t afford to use theirs—this was especially common with clothing rations—or who had got hold of spares by underhand means. In the first year of clothes rationing, 800,000 people claimed to have lost their books. Burglars targeted the books when they robbed houses, and staff working at printers or in the postal system had opportunities to filch them.

As bombs from the Luftwaffe set London ablaze, some people took advantage of the chaos to loot damaged buildings—despite warnings about repercussions from the authorities.

Criminal gangs got into the act. Organized crime had fallen in the early months of the war, which one senior police officer attributed to the disappearance of a lot of young offenders into the armed forces. But war created opportunities, and professional thieves began organizing heists of places where they knew ration books were stored. At one point, a ration book would sell for £5, close to a week’s wages for many people. But in a sign of how many were stolen, that price would later fall to £1.

Theft was only one option. Underground printers, who before the war had been producing pornography, found that forged clothing coupons sold even better. In 1942 a sophisticated nationwide counterfeiting ring stood trial, but most forgeries proved untraceable.

While people at the bottom were gaming the system, those at the top of British society did their bit to keep illicit businesses thriving. They were the ones, after all, who had the money to benefit from the black market. Wiltons restaurant in central London celebrated its 200th anniversary in 1942. Its proprietor, asked the secret of his excellent wartime mayonnaise, replied with nonchalance: “Quite simply, fresh eggs and olive oil.” It would not have done to ask how he obtained these.

THE BLACK MARKET may have become accepted as a fact of wartime life, but one crime was regarded as unspeakably wicked: looting. People returning to their homes after bombing raids often found their valuables had been grabbed while they were hiding underground. In 1940, the first year of the Blitz, London reported more than 4,500 cases of looting. There was a similar pattern in every other city that was hit. Air raid wardens learned to post guards at houses and shops that had been damaged in raids, to protect them from follow-up raids by their fellow Britons. But those doing the guarding weren’t above helping themselves to valuables they found in the streets. In 1941 the government tried more than 30 members of the Royal Engineers for stealing valuable lead from the roofs of houses they’d been sent to demolish. And not every bombing victim was genuine. One London man claimed government compensation for having been “bombed out” 19 times over the course of five months.

Organized criminals made enthusiastic use of the chaos of bombing. With explosions all around, who was going to notice the noise of a safe

being blown? In the darkness of the blackout, who could tell whether a getaway van disguised as an ambulance was genuine? Who had the time to check? Professional burglars likewise didn’t bother picking through rubble, preferring to identify large houses they knew were unoccupied during raids, and then clearing them of valuables.

Or why bother with houses at all, when there were warehouses full of goods whose value had ballooned due to rationing? It wasn’t just food. Nylon stockings, sanitary napkins, toys, and soap were all suddenly worth a burglary for people who knew how to use a crowbar.

Another crime that remained socially unacceptable was trying to dodge the draft. Those who wanted to avoid conscription could find a corrupt doctor who would provide a medical certificate, or pay someone with a condition to impersonate them at a physical examination. One man with a bad leg charged £150 for the service, and another with a heart condition set his fee at £200. Dodgy officials could be bribed to provide a certificate that

a man was in a “reserved occupation” and exempt from service.

The British people’s attitude to this when peace came was complicated. Decades after the war ended, people still told stories about returning soldiers who made it clear to men who had dodged service that they should leave town. But the long-running and much-loved sitcom of wartime life, Dad’s Army, first broadcast in 1968, featured as one of its main characters a black marketeer who, despite being obviously fit, had avoided conscription because he was allergic to corned beef. Arguably the show’s most popular character was a butcher who would hand parcels of illicit sausages to the town’s apparently upright bank manager. For all the stories of Blitz spirit and solidarity, there were few people for whom the war didn’t involve compromises. H

Robert Hutton is a British journalist, the author of Agent Jack , a true story of British wartime spies and fascists, and the host of “A Pod Too Far,” where old war movies are given a fresh airing. He lives in London.

In a shot staged by the photographer, a London milkman (actually the photographer’s assistant with a borrowed coat and bottles) appears to be making his rounds despite the destruction of war. Most Britons did carry on and obey wartime regulations, but many did not.

Organized criminals made enthusiastic use of the chaos of bombing.

TASK FORCE SHOESTRING

Two American armies in the Philippines set their sights on Manila. Only one of them could get there first

By James M. Fenelon

Members of the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment prepare their equipment for the drop on Tagaytay Ridge south of Manila. Part of the 11th Airborne Division, the 511th planned to link up with infantry for a move on the Philippine capital.

As dawn lightened the skies on January 31, 1945, a naval flotilla of more than a hundred vessels held station in the dark waters off Nasugbu Beach on the Philippine island of Luzon. The convoy was poised 40 miles south of Manila, ready to land 6,462 troopers of the 11th Airborne Division.

But first came the air strikes: 18 twin-engine Douglas A-20 Havoc medium bombers zoomed over Red Beach, chewing up suspected Japanese positions with their forward-mounted .50-caliber machine guns. Nine Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighters followed them in, repeating the performance.

At 7:15 a.m., two American destroyers rotated their 5-inch guns into position and began hurling 55-pound shells at the shore, tearing apart the tree line in a series of shattering explosions. Simultaneously, rocket-equipped landing craft angled to align their rudimentary launchers with the landing beach. The rockets lifted off with deafening whooshes as paired salvos arched across the pink sky.

An hour into the bombardment, boatswains gunned their landing craft toward the beach to land the first wave of infantry. Intelligence suggested there were 7,000 Japanese soldiers south of Manila, with 500 guarding the beach itself. By this point the battle for Luzon had been raging for three weeks, so keeping track of enemy units was dif-

ficult at best. Ten days into the campaign General of the Army Douglas MacArthur had complained about the slow pace of his field commander, Lieutenant General Walter Krueger, whose Sixth Army was plodding south toward Manila despite light enemy resistance. To spur Krueger forward, MacArthur authorized a second landing south of the capital city. The operation, code-named MIKE VI, fell to Lieutenant General Robert L. Eichelberger, commander of the Eighth Army. Eichelberger proposed to amphibiously land the 11th Airborne’s two glider infantry regiments and then airdrop the division’s parachute regiment farther inland a few days later.

The second landing was likely spurred by MacArthur’s desire to use the rivalry between his two army commanders to hasten Manila’s capture. There was a simmering antagonism between the two men, and Eichelberger, who believed MacArthur was “disgusted” by Krueger’s slow progress, referred to the Sixth Army commander as “old Molasses in January.” Eichelberger’s own Eighth Army was a skeleton organization, slimmed down from its normal complement of several divisions to just the undersized 11th. With a total manpower of just over 8,300, the 11th was roughly sixty percent the size of a standard infantry division. Additionally, the navy provided barely enough ships to support the landing, and the Air Corps had scraped together just 50-odd transport planes, a third of what was needed to drop the entirety of a regimental combat team in a single lift. Eichelberger privately referred to his command as “Task Force Shoestring.”

Major General Joseph M. Swing, the 11th’s 50-year-old commander, begrudgingly supported the plan, “Well, half a loaf is better than none, I suppose…. We’re going in half airborne and half amphibious,” he wrote to his father-in-law. “As you can imagine, it’s an end run with a forward pass.”

This was Swing’s second campaign of the war. He and his division had already fought their way through the jungles of Leyte as part of MacArthur’s triumphant return to the Philippines in October 1944. While Swing was

Top: Douglas MacArthur (left) confers with the Eighth Army’s Robert Eichelberger. Below left: Joseph Swing (at right) and Eichelberger (center) examine a map of Luzon. Below right: Walter Krueger and his Sixth Army approached Manila from the north. Eichelberger referred to Krueger as “old Molasses in January.”

a relative newcomer to the Pacific theater, he had served almost 30 years in uniform, having received his West Point commission in 1915 and serving in General John “Black Jack” Pershing’s 1916 expedition into Mexico as his first assignment. There he witnessed Pershing’s propensity for leading from the front—a trait

he took to heart. In 1917, Swing served as a captain with the 1st Infantry Division in World War I, where his experiences in the mire of the trenches taught him that static positions and frontal assaults were no way to win a war. By 1941, Swing had earned the star of a brigadier general and was Major General Matthew B. Ridgway’s artillery officer when the 82nd Infantry Division transitioned into the army’s first airborne division. In February 1943, with a second star on his collar, he was assigned to command his own airborne division.

Above: On Nasugbu Beach, Swing’s men drag a small field gun ashore. Below: Japanese commander-in-chief in the Philippines, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, ceded Manila’s defense to the navy.

The 11th’s landing at Nasugbu was technically a “reconnaissance in force” to determine the “Japanese strength, deployment, and intentions.” The exact goals remained vague—Eichelberger labeled them “indefinite plans,” and he and Swing agreed to exploit the ambiguity and get into the main action. Their field orders advised commanders to be “prepared to advance north” after seizing their initial objectives. “North” was a veiled reference to Manila.

Swing landed on Red Beach with the third wave. As he and his staff hustled out of their landing craft, several Japanese machine gun bursts erupted from the left flank. Swing’s assistant division commander, Brigadier General Al Pierson, was hit in the stomach by what felt like a baseball bat. Miraculously, the bullet struck his army-issue compass. The instrument would never point north again, but it had saved Pierson’s life. As the staff lay pinned down in the dunes, bullets stitched the beach, and random artillery shells exploded in geysers of

setting it and several surrounding structures ablaze. The guns fell silent.

squad diving for cover. Now 11 miles inland, the road threaded uphill through a draw formed by three mountains. The left was dominated by

American soldiers on Nasugbu Beach examine a wrecked Zero fighter. After moving inland to Tagaytay Ridge, Eichelberger planned to pivot his forces north toward Manila.

IMUS MOUNT CARILIAO WW2P-230400-MANILA.indd 42 1/19/23 11:51 AM

MILES 0 5

2,100-foot Mount Cariliao, with the sharp rise of Mount Aiming at its base. One of the troopers described Aiming as “a thimble at the base of an overturned teacup.” On the right, Mount Batulao rose to 2,700 feet. The heights were covered in thick scrub and provided a commanding view of the road. Bullets cracked in from machine gun positions on all three mountains. Japanese observers, eyeing the Americans through binoculars, called down artillery and mortars. As the glidermen crawled for protection, shells whistled into pre-sighted points up and down the gravel road.

While Soule’s mortar teams thumped out high-explosive rounds to suppress the incoming fire, cannoneers wheeled up heavier guns: four 75mm pack howitzers of the 457th Parachute Field Artillery Battalion. The crews, ignoring ricocheting bullets, muscled their gun tubes into position and aimed them by looking over the barrels as though they were shotguns. Each successive WHOOOOM! of a howitzer shattered a distant machine gun nest. But rifle fire still snapped overhead and the artillery shells raining down forced Soule’s lead battalion to withdraw.

With the sun well up, circling Havocs streaked out of the sky, seeking enemy howitzers and pummeling the hilltops with bombs and strafing fire. While the

Japanese hunkered down, Soule’s men attacked. Captain Raymond F. Lee led a company through a steep gorge on the north side of the highway and then on the ascent of Aiming. Their close-quarters assault with rifles, grenades, and bayonets cleared the summit and captured a 105mm howitzer in the process. Lee and his men rolled Japanese corpses out of foxholes so they could use the dugouts for their own defense. Lee’s men spent the afternoon fending off several banzai attacks, and in between the Japanese pounded them with artillery.

Simultaneously, on the right flank, troopers cleared enemy positions up to the base of Mount Batulao. The day’s work resulted in 91 enemy dead and several captured howitzers, but it came at a heavy cost: 16 dead Americans and 44 wounded.

Friday, February 2, dawned with clear skies and good visibility, perfect weather for air -

Swing’s men move past the city hall in the town of Nasugbu on their way toward Tagaytay Ridge. Jubilant Filipinos watch and cheer the end of Japanese occupation.

At daybreak, the rattle of machine guns sent the men diving for cover.

strikes and artillery barrages. The Havocs and howitzers paved a path and by midday the troopers had swarmed past three Japanese anti-tank ditches to sack a command post littered with bloody medical supplies and nearly 100 tons of ammunition. The advance had been a modest two miles, but it was close enough to Tagaytay for Eichelberger and Swing to agree: the airdrop was on. Even so, the Japanese weren’t done. Artillery, mortars, and machine guns harassed Soule’s forward lines all night. Infiltrators crept through the inky jungle to assault artillery positions and forced the cannoneers to desert their guns before mustering to retake them.

The next morning, February 3, was the big push. Swing and his entourage were up front with the infantry who, after scarfing down a few bites of cold rations, pulled themselves out of their foxholes. It was time to go to work. They trudged forward to close on the last hill between them and Tagaytay.

An hour into their trek, a low, steady droning noise caught their attention. It came from an armada of 51 lumbering C-47s escorted by darting P-38s. As the first serial approached, the pilots found the ridgeline obscured by a

low cloud bank. Fortunately, a break in the haze revealed the final checkpoint. The lead pilot, now assured of his position, led the following aircraft to the drop zone.

Paratroopers surged out the doors once the jump light glowed green. Weighed down with equipment, they tumbled more than jumped. One of them, Charlie Sass, recalled, “I carried double my weight out the door—two bandoliers, rockets, grenades, BAR clips, assorted firing devices, three days of K-rations, first aid packet, shovel, two canteens, plus chute, reserve, and me. The whole rig may have toted up to four hundred pounds.”

The trailing serials were still six miles short of the drop zone when either an equipment bundle was intentionally dropped or jarred loose or someone jumped early. In any event, troopers mistook the parachute canopy as the signal to jump. The resulting chain reaction was inevitable. First Lieutenant Randolph Kirkland remembered, “Our lead officer in the door had to make a quick decision. The planes were going much too fast, and we were certainly some miles from the true drop zone. He did what I would have done—he jumped.” Kirkland followed, holding a tight body position until he felt the reassuring jerk of his deploying chute. But exiting before the pilot slowed down meant a rough opening shock. Kirkland’s experience was typical of many. “My musette bag, with my poncho, C-rations and bourbon, disappeared into the clouds,” he said. “The grenades in my pockets joined them. The opening shock well-nigh knocked me out.”

The sky filled with parachutes as troopers descended into the cloud bank. Kirkland recalled, “[I] was rudely brought to reality when a palm tree whistled by me. It was a ground fog and not a cloud.”

Members of the 11th Airborne Division’s parachute regiment make the jump at Tagaytay Ridge. Most men ended up landing short of the drop zone.

Exiting before the pilot slowed meant a rough opening shock.

Within minutes 886 troopers were on the ground but only 345 of these had landed on the planned drop zone—the rest were strung out four to six miles away. The men shrugged off their chutes, loaded their rifles, and scurried off to their assembly areas. Overhead the rumbling C-47s banked into their return route to pick up the second lift.

Soule’s glidermen made steady uphill progress toward the drop zone until 10:15, when 300 Japanese troops opened fire with rifles and machine guns. Explosions from the incoming artillery walked up the length of the American column.

In the vanguard, Eichelberger, Swing, and their contingent of highranking staff officers scrambled for cover. They were there to prod momentum, intent on making a smooth linkup with the paratroopers. A colonel sheltering near Swing was killed in the barrage along with seven other men. Twenty-one more were wounded, among them ‘Shorty’ Soule. Undaunted, he crawled half a football field back to his jeep while more shells whistled in. Soule’s driver, Pius Corbett, was under the jeep, shielding himself from flying shrapnel.

“Corbett, do you want to hand me that radio?” asked Soule.

“No, sir,” replied Corbett, “I don’t even want to move.”

Despite Corbett’s reluctance, Soule got the radio and ordered his reserve battalion into the fray. Soule, refusing medical treatment, instead crawled to a better spot to direct his artillery against the ridge. At the same time, the air support party radioed the Havocs to wing in for strafing and bombing attacks. Soule’s fresh battalion rushed forward under a thunderous umbrella of howitzers, mortars, and aircraft, while on the right flank, a company swept around the hill to press a

second attack. The Japanese who survived the devastating barrage were routed with hand grenades and flamethrowers.

Just after noon, the returning C-47s roared overhead and dropped the second sortie of 906 paratroopers. Only 80 of them dropped in the correct location. Seeing the collapsed parachutes on the ground from the first group’s early jump, most of the second sortie also jumped too soon. As a result, only 425 of the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment’s paratroopers landed on the drop zone; the remainder were spread over four to six miles away. Fortunately, potential disaster was averted because the Japanese were not defending the ridge. As the men descended, one noted, “There was the loud sound of artillery firing a few ridges away and because the land is rolling (with the hills terraced for farming) it was impossible to determine just where the shells were bursting.” The glidermen were still flushing out Japanese holdouts on the western slopes.

Soldiers of the 61st Field Artillery Battalion fire 105mm howitzers toward Manila on February 5, 1945, at the start of the battle to liberate the city.

With the division’s linkup completed, Eichelberger, Swing, and their combined staffs moved farther up the ridge. From there they could see Manila shimmering in the distance, some 30 miles due north. Eichelberger, champing at the bit, later wrote, “Our real written orders…were to establish ourselves on Tagaytay Ridge and stabilize conditions in that part of Luzon.” But there was Manila, tantalizingly within reach, its southern door apparently wide open.

But the enemy disposition in Manila was uncertain. The Americans assumed that the Japanese would declare it an open city, as MacArthur had in 1942 to avoid widespread destruction and civilian casualties. And indeed, the Japanese commander-in-chief in the Philippines, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, reasoned it was too populated, its structures too flammable, and its terrain too flat for a prolonged defense. But the Imperial Navy posited they could best delay the Americans by fortifying Manila’s urban labyrinth.

So, as the army withdrew, Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi moved in with nearly 14,000 marines, soldiers, and sailors. Although Yamashita was in overall command, the 49-year-old Iwabuchi believed himself subject to the army only after completing his mission and he made it clear to his men they

would all go down fighting. “If we run out of bullets, we will use grenades; if we run out of grenades, we will cut down the enemy with swords; if we break our swords, we will kill them by sinking our teeth deep in their throats,” he decreed.

This was all unknown to the Americans, whose early intelligence suggested the Japanese were evacuating the city. More recent reports from local guerrillas, however, reported the construction of urban strongpoints: fortified buildings, emplaced landmines, and barricaded road intersections. Eichelberger dismissed the updates. “The guerrilla reports make me laugh,” he wrote. “The report tonight is that Manila is being burned by the Japanese, and yet I can look right down into the town and see lights and one little fire.”

Eichelberger ordered the 11th Airborne into the city.

AT TAGAYTAY RIDGE, Swing tapped his paratroopers to lead the charge since the glidermen had been fighting for four days without rest. With the bulk of his supplies still at Red Beach, Swing pressed every available man into service. The band’s musicians hauled cargo ashore and operated bulldozers to assist engineers in grading beach access roads. The division’s clerks, cooks, and parachute riggers served as stevedores, unloading rations and tons of crated artillery, mortar, and rifle ammunition as well as grenades, medical supplies, and radio batteries. The headquarters’ finance staff, along with members of the adjutant general’s office, humped the artillery and mortar shells forward. Five hundred local laborers were paid to help organize the growing stockpiles.

More improvisation was required to get the troops the 30-odd miles to Manila. Five hundred troopers of the 2nd Battalion would depart first in a few jeeps and 17 cargo trucks. Two jeeps towing 75mm pack howitzers and two tank-like, pug-nosed M8 self-propelled 75mm howitzers brought up the rear. They’d drive until they made enemy contact, at which point the trucks would go back for the next group, which was heading north on foot.

The convoy made it 22 miles to the village of Imus, where the Japanese had blown the main bridge over the 80-foot-wide Imus River. A fierce skirmish erupted over a secondary crossing, with an M8 clanking forward to hurl 75mm shells into the enemy. Following an infantry assault, the paratroopers continued forward. Eichelberger and Swing were both up front, urging speed. Eichelberger later wrote, “Things were bogged down a bit, so we jazzed it up.”

Brutal street fighting characterized the battle once U.S. troops entered Manila. Here American tanks make their way through the walled city.

By the time Manila fell, more than 100,000 citizens were dead and the city was rubble.

The troopers kept moving, pinning down any resistance while other units flanked the skirmishes to keep moving toward the capital. Six miles south of the city center, in the suburb of Parañaque, the point squad was stopped cold. The Japanese had fortified the last bridge into the capital with several pillboxes. Up the coast, troopers could see a glowing conflagration as Manila’s port became engulfed in flames. Iwabuchi had ordered the demolition of the docks and fuel storage depots and the fires had set bordering houses aflame.

The Japanese holding the city were now caught in a vice, with Swing’s division poised to the south, and two of Krueger’s closing from the north. The stage for a tragedy of unimaginable horror was set.

The next morning, February 5, 1945, a dawn assault got the paratroopers across the bridge. But by sunset they had only gained a few blocks and were digging in to avoid flying shrapnel from incessant artillery. They had run into Iwabuchi’s Genko Line, a fortified belt approximately two and a half miles deep, starting at Manila Bay’s shoreline and running east five miles or so to high ground at Laguna De Bay. An estimated 4,000 Japanese manned more than 150 light, medium, and heavy-caliber anti-aircraft guns bolstered by dozens of dug-in howitzers. Hundreds of pillboxes covered open fields and road intersections with machine guns and rifles.

Krueger’s 1st Cavalry Division dismissed the report by Eichelberger and Swing that their forces had made a toehold in the capital. Instead,

Krueger’s command claimed that they had beat their rivals by six hours. Swing later argued in his own favor, but U.S.-issued maps showed that his men, while certainly in the suburbs, were still four miles south of the prewar city limits.

The approach to Manila was over, but far worse was yet to come. The ensuing battle for the city would last for several weeks of bitter street fighting, ending on March 3. As one trooper lamented, “From now on our advance was not measured in miles, it was measured in yards.” By the time the city fell, more than 100,000 citizens were dead and Manila, once hailed as the Pearl of the Orient, was reduced to rubble. H

James M. Fenelon is a former paratrooper and author of Four Hours of Fury, the story of the 17th Airborne Division’s jump across the Rhine River. His next book, Angels Against the Sun , chronicles the 11th Airborne Division in the Pacific and will be published in April 2023.

American soldiers fire a 37mm gun toward an enemy position along an unidentified street near Manila. The approach to the city had been relatively easy compared to the bloody task of capturing it.

WEAPONS MANUAL BRITAIN’S BLACKER BOMBARD

ILLUSTRATION BY JIM LAURIER

HOME SECURITY

THE BRITISH EXPEDITIONARY FORCE’s rapid 1940 departure from Dunkirk left the English desperately short of military hardware, especially anti-tank guns. As 1941 progressed, the British Home Guard instituted a series of ad hoc defensive measures to protect the homeland ahead of a feared German invasion.

Enter the Blacker Bombard, a spigot mortar designed by Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Blacker from a design he started in the 1930s. The concept was relatively simple: a shell containing propellant and explosives was slipped onto a steel rod—a spigot— from which it was triggered and launched. The weapon’s intended role was as an anti-tank mortar, but it proved mostly ineffective in this capacity, as the low velocity of the 20-pound shells gave them little chance of penetrating heavy armor. In addition, faulty fuzes meant the shells often failed to explode on contact—and when they did, flying debris caused as much danger to the firing crews as it did their targets. All the same, the British built nearly 22,000 Blacker Bombards for home defense. Portable versions were secured into the ground (as in our illustration, right), while fixed weapons were mounted on concrete blocks 3.5 feet in diameter (as in the photo opposite). With modifications, the mortar was also capable of firing 14-pound anti-personnel bombs, and it was in this capacity that the Bombard saw its only limited live action, in the North African campaign.

As we know, the German invasion never happened, so the mortar’s lasting legacy is the hundreds of concrete firing blocks that still dot the English countryside. —Larry

Porges

THE COMPETITION

TRIGGER FINGER

To fire the mortar, a crewman squeezed the main firing lever, which compressed a spring via a cable. Pulling a small trigger at the top of the firing lever released the spring and launched the shell.

Shell weight: 660 lbs. / Caliber: 320mm / Firing range: Up to 1,000 yds. / Max elevation: 45 degrees / The Japanese often fired the Type 98’s huge 660-lb. shells en masse as a psychological weapon. The mortar saw action at Bataan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.

Shell weight: 47 lbs. / Caliber: 200mm / Firing range: Up to 770 yds. / Max. elevation: 80 degrees / German engineering crews used the Leichter Ladungswerfer spigot mortar mostly in the early years of the war, to clear mines and other obstacles.

GERMAN LEICHTER LADUNGSWERFER

JAPANESE TYPE 98 SPIGOT MORTAR

PLAYING THE ANGLES

If used as an anti-tank weapon, the mortar’s angle of trajectory was kept low. As an anti-personnel weapon, the angle was increased so the shell would drop from above.

AGENTS OF SHIELD

Metal casing surrounding the shell and a steel plate near the aiming and firing mechanisms protected the crew from the blast of the propellant.

DROP THE HAMMER

To secure each of the mortar’s 44-pound legs, operating crews hammered down onto a picket—a metal bar that drove a connected spade into the ground.

BRITISH BLACKER BOMBARD

Shell weight (anti-tank): 20 lbs. / Caliber: 29mm / Firing range: Up to 150 yds. / Max. elevation: 40 degrees / A three-man crew operated the mortar: the commander controlled and set the range; the No. 1 aimed and fired; and the No. 2 loaded the shell.

RESCUING NORWAY’S GOLD

By Timothy J. Boyce

At 4:16 a.m. on the frigid morning of April 9, 1940, the German heavy cruis er Blücher steamed within view of the Norwegian fortress of Oscarsborg. The Blücher and its accompanying ships formed Gruppe V of Operation Weserübung, Germany’s unprovoked invasion of Norway. Gruppe V was one of six naval task forces making synchronized dawn attacks on all of Norway’s key coastal assets, stretching from Kristiansand in the south to Narvik, more than 1,000 miles to the north . Situated on a small island in the middle of Oslofjord, Oscarsborg provided the last line of defense for Oslo, Norway’s vulnerable capital and its largest city.

A gold coin bears the likeness of Norway’s King Haakon VII. The nearly 54 tons of gold that Norway denied the Germans included coins like this.

Of all Weserübung’s targets, Oslo was the biggest prize. It was home to the royal family, the Storting (Norway’s Parliament), all government offices, and the headquarters of the Bank of Norway, guardian of the nation’s gold reserves. In their earlier incursions into Austria and Czechoslovakia, invading Germans had seized almost 140 tons of gold to help finance their military juggernaut. Norway’s reserves now appeared within their grasp as well.

In the murky pre-dawn light, Colonel Birger Eriksen, Oscarsborg’s commander,

When Germany attacked Norway in 1940, it hoped to capture the country’s gold reserves. Norwegians were equally determined to make sure that didn’t happen.

had a split-second decision to make. Was the flotilla friend or foe?

Attacking it would either make him a hero or result in a court-martial. Nevertheless, he didn’t hesitate. Eriksen’s men shot first and two 560pound shells slammed into the Blücher with devastating effect. Two torpedoes from a nearby shore battery did the rest, and the ship capsized and sank, killing a large portion of the crew as well as the invasion force. The remaining ships in Gruppe V prudently retreated down the fjord to regroup. Norway was now at war with Germany.

By sinking the Blücher, Eriksen bought Norway’s leaders precious hours to organize an evacuation of King Haakon VII and members of his government. By 7:30 a.m. they had all departed Oslo on a special train, heading north to Hamar, 80 miles away.

But what of the gold housed in the Bank of Norway?

Norway’s government had fervently hoped that Hitler would respect its neutrality and as a result had been taken completely by surprise by the events of April 9. Norway’s central bankers, however, had taken no chances. In the years, months, and weeks leading up to the invasion, Nicolai Rygg, governor of the Bank of Norway, made three crucial decisions. First, starting as early as 1936, Rygg had ordered the construction of three special bombproof vaults: in Oslo, in Stavanger on the west coast, and in Lillehammer to the north. Secondly, following the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, Rygg moved the bulk of Norway’s gold reserves (134 tons, or more than 70% of its total holdings) to safety in the United States and Canada, leaving only the minimum amount required by law in Oslo. Thirdly, Rygg had all remaining bullion, still weighing in at 53.8 tons and worth about $3 billion in today’s valuation, carefully packed into 1,542 sturdy wooden crates and barrels for immediate transport. Without this latter effort, it would been impossible to pack and move such a large shipment in the few hours Eriksen had purchased at Oscarsborg.

One matter Rygg had not yet addressed, however, was an emergency evacuation plan for transporting such bulk at a moment’s notice. In the early morning of April 9 bank officials scrambled to round up 25

trucks. The drivers were not told what they were transporting and were warned they could be bombed and strafed along the way. Nevertheless, with no time to ask questions, weigh risks, or even alert their families, they stepped up. It was the first of what would be many such selfless acts in the attempt to save Norway’s gold.

Loading almost 54 tons of gold (including

The sinking of the German cruiser Blücher bought Norway some time to save its gold. Below: Colonel Birger Eriksen made a split-second decision to fire on the vessel as it headed toward Oslo.

the crates, the total payload came to 58.4 tons) was backbreaking work, equivalent to moving almost 1,300 90-pound bags of cement. Once loaded, each truck immediately set off for the bombproof vault in Lillehammer—115 miles to the north. The last truck departed Oslo early on the afternoon of April 9, just minutes before the first German column finally marched into town and accepted the local garrison’s surrender.

Norway had won the opening round.

LILLEHAMMER’S VAULT could shelter the gold only so long as the city held. Unfortunately, Norway’s armed forces—a hasty patchwork of partially mobilized units, volunteers, and even rifle club members—were no match for a heavily armed foe with mastery of the air. Within days it became clear that Norway could not defend Lillehammer indefinitely. It was also apparent that safeguarding and transporting gold in wartime required skills not typically found in a central banker. Consequently, on April 17, Oscar Torp, the minister of finance, authorized Fredrik Haslund to take charge of the effort. Haslund, age 41, seemed an unlikely choice. Trained as an engineer, he was at the time secretary of Norway’s Labor Party. Torp, as the party’s head, must have noticed something special about Haslund’s organizational skills and resourcefulness. As events would prove, Haslund was an inspired choice.

On the night of April 18-19, all 58.4 tons in the Lillehammer vault were loaded back onto trucks for the short drive to the local train station, where it was transferred to awaiting train cars. Haslund’s destination was Åndalsnes, a port town of 2,000 lying 150 miles northwest of Lillehammer at the head of the Romsdalsfjord. It appeared to be a sensible move. The British, rushing to Norway’s aid, had landed at two sites in central Norway: Åndalsnes, south of the strategic city of Trondheim, and Namsos, a port north of Trondheim. Åndalsnes thus seemed to offer the strength of British arms to protect the gold, and, should the worst occur, the ability to evacuate the gold by sea.

T he situation, however, also had drawbacks, since the British presence acted as a magnet for Germany’s Luftwaffe. Shortly after the gold train arrived in Åndalsnes at 4:30 a.m. on April 20 the Luftwaffe arrived to pound the town with relentless air attacks.

Instead of being a refuge, Åndalsnes became a target. The town— almost entirely wood-built—became an inferno. British ships could safely load and unload only between nightfall at 10:00 p.m. and sunrise at 6:00 a.m., when German airplanes once again filled the skies. In the face of all this, the gold train hastily retreated a few miles southeast to a secluded rail siding in a steep valley. That same day, Norwegian officials notified their stunned British counterparts that all of Norway’s remaining gold lay hidden on a nearby train and requested help evacuating it to England.

By now it was apparent that safeguarding the gold in the face of relentless German advances was almost impossible, and that the British—unprepared, disorganized, and poorly equipped—were losing the battle of Norway. Lillehammer fell to the Wehrmacht on April 22. As in Oslo, the Germans rushed to the offices of the central bank and once again found an empty vault. Norway had won round two.

With little left in Åndalsnes to destroy, German air attacks slowed, and Haslund took advantage of the lull to deliver 200 cases of gold, weighing almost nine tons, portside. HMS Galatea , a British light

Top: Nicolai Rygg, governor of the Bank of Norway, had already taken steps to protect the country’s gold before the Germans invaded. Above: Enemy soldiers disembark in Oslo. By the time they arrived, the gold had left.

cruiser, had just arrived with British troops and equipment. By early morning on April 24 all soldiers and supplies had been disgorged and the gold onloaded. The Galatea sailed off. Two days later the ship and its special cargo arrived safely in Rosyth, Scotland.

As Galatea retreated down Romsdalsfjord, Haslund turned his attention to the slightly more than 49 tons still in his care. True, the Germans didn’t know exactly where it had gone, but they certainly understood that the gold must be somewhere along the rail line between Lillehammer and Trondheim. In any event, Åndalsnes had become completely untenable. The village was in shambles, and the British were growing increasingly nervous about risking their capital ships inside the narrow fjords. Moreover, the Germans were close to breaking through the new defensive line the British and Norwegians had hastily thrown up after Lillehammer fell.

The port of Molde, 30 miles by land northwest of Åndalsnes on the Romsdalsfjord, offered a sheltered, deep-water harbor that had escaped the kind of attention the Luftwaffe had lavished on Åndals-

nes. Equally attractive to the British, it was closer to the open sea. Unfortunately, there was no rail connection with Åndalsnes, and only one rather primitive road, which included a ferry crossing, linked the two towns. But Haslund didn’t have many other options; the Germans were approaching from the south and time was running out.

Consequently, he had the remaining 1,342 cases of gold laboriously detrained and reloaded onto trucks for the perilous trek to Molde. The narrow, unpaved road was pocked by bomb craters and potholes; conditions were exacerbated as the spring thaw turned such roads to mush. As overloaded trucks broke down, their contents had to be redistributed to others in the convoy. Farmers along the way were roused in the middle of the night to enlist their draft horses to rescue trucks that had slipped into ditches. The ferry along the route could handle only two trucks at a time; it took six hours for the entire convoy to make it safely across the narrow fjord. If that were not enough, the convoy was repeatedly strafed, but miraculously emerged unscathed.

In the early morning hours of April 26, the convoy finally reached Molde, a town of 3,200 inhabitants. The gold was unloaded and stored in the basement of a factory that was close to the town pier and had a basement of reinforced concrete.

When German forces entered Åndalsnes on May 2, only hours after the last British soldier had been evacuated, they found the town in ruins. But once again they found no gold. Norway had won the third round.

IF HASLUND HOPED that Molde would offer a respite from the chaos of Åndalsnes, those hopes were quickly dashed. The Luftwaffe started its assault shortly after the last case of gold had been unloaded into the factory basement. This could not have been due to the gold, because its location remained a mystery to the Germans. A more likely explanation was the arrival, on April 23, of King Haakon and his government ministers, making Molde the de facto capital of Norway. The king’s location was supposed to be a closely guarded secret but, as one historian observed, “However they were receiving the information on the King, wherever he appeared, an uncannily short time later the bombers would arrive overhead.” Whatever the reason, Molde, like Åndalsnes, suffered mightily as incendiaries

Top: German soldiers advance deeper into Norway. The invasion took the Norwegians and the British by surprise. Above: One of Germany’s targets was the king (left), shown here with his son, the crown prince. The royals managed to keep one step ahead of the invaders.

rained down from above.

Finally, on April 29, Haslund received instructions from the British to deliver the gold to Molde’s main pier at 10:00 p.m., when the light cruiser HMS Glasgow was expected. Glasgow’s primary, top-secret mission was to evacuate the king, his son (the crown prince), and other government officials to England or any other “place of safety” they chose. Haakon, still unwilling to abandon his country, chose to go to Tromsø, Norway’s northernmost city, located almost 850 miles north of Molde and still safely under Allied control.

The Glasgow reached Molde at 11:00 p.m. Its captain was determined to depart no later than 1:00 a.m. to ensure his ship was clear of the fjord and at sea before dawn. King Haakon, his son, and various government ministers boarded within minutes of the ship’s arrival, and the gold, delivered by small boats as well as trucks, soon followed.

At 1:00 a.m. a German Heinkel He-111 bomber passed overhead “so low that it seemed certain to hit our masts,” in the words of one sailor. The Glasgow got underway so quickly that one overlooked mooring hawser remained tied, and the ship dragged part of the quay into the sea. In what has been described as “seamanship of the highest order,” the cruiser, almost 600 feet long and

A Hazardous Journey North

The gold’s journey began in Oslo on April 9, 1940, and progressed northward aboard trains, trucks, and ships. Although the Germans made steady advances through Norway, Haslund and his volunteer work force managed to keep ahead throughout the fraught journey. Not until May 24 was the last of the precious cargo sent to England from the port of Tromsø.

GALATEA DEPARTS ÅNDALSNES APRIL 24

GLASGOW DEPARTS TROMSØ MAY 1

DEPARTS MAY 24

GLASGOW DEPARTS MOLDE APRIL 30

KRISTIANSAND GALATEA ARRIVES

26

The German Luftwaffe inflicted great damage on the port town of Åndalsnes after the train with the gold reached it. Nonetheless, the Norwegians managed to ship some of the treasure out of the port aboard a British light cruiser.

displacing 11,000 tons, ran at full speed in reverse for over an hour down the narrow, twisting, and darkened fjord before turning around and sailing away.

In the space of two hours, under the most trying conditions, Haslund had gotten 29.5 tons of gold safely stowed aboard the Glasgow, leaving only 20 tons behind. After depositing the king and his ministers in Tromsø on May 1, Glasgow and its gold proceeded to Great Britain, arriving on May 4.

With all the confusion at the quay, some government officials and soldiers had not escaped with the king aboard the Glasgow, and they found refuge on a nearby steamer, the Driva. Haslund, with 20 tons of gold still on his hands, sent his remaining trucks racing through burning Molde to the undamaged pier where the Driva was taking on passengers. The gold transfer continued until an aerial bomb set the pier aflame and exploded so close to the Driva that it lifted the 330-ton steamer out of the water, miraculously without damaging it. This was a sign for Driva’s skipper to leave—gold or no gold. By then only about half the remaining reserves—10 tons—had been loaded.

It was now 2:00 a.m. Before the Driva departed, Haslund arranged with its skipper to rendezvous the next day in Gjemnes, a fishing village about 30 miles north of Molde, to take on the remaining 10 tons still on his trucks.

Steamers like the Driva were too slow to cross the North Sea to England unescorted, and too large to simply blend in with the small fishing boats that were ubiquitous along Norway’s coast. Before Driva had even reached Gjemnes, a Junkers Ju-88 bomber attacked. Rather than

risk his valuable cargo, Driva ’s skipper ran the ship aground. Eventually the bomber moved on without scoring any hits, but the Driva was stuck fast by the bow. The crew started to manually transfer all the gold, then amidships, to the stern. The work was as toilsome as ever but, helped by a rising tide and a tow from a fellow steamer, the ship wriggled free and proceeded to its scheduled rendezvous in Gjemnes. Haslund, whose truck caravan had reached Gjemnes ahead of the ship, knew he needed to adopt yet another plan of escape— the Driva was simply too conspicuous to risk on a long voyage.

HASLUND’S THOUGHTS turned to “puffers,” stubby and broad-beamed fishing boats that got their nickname from the characteristic puff of smoke—and accompanying sound— from their single-stroke engines. As one historian noted, “The German pilots never seemed to realise the full value of the puffers to the Norwegians and the Allies.… Too small to be bombed under most circumstances, some puffers were machine-gunned if suspicion had been aroused. Unless the crew was hit directly, however, this had limited effect on the sturdy ships.”

Haslund requisitioned four puffers in Gjemnes to take on the remaining gold from the Driva and the truck caravan. He set aside a fifth puffer for the use of escaping officials and soldiers. By 2:00 a.m. on May 1, the flotilla got underway, ostensibly headed as far north as Namsos, where the British were still believed to be engaged.

On the way, Haslund’s puffer group learned that the British had already evacuated Namsos. The prospect of now transporting 20 tons of gold many hundreds of miles north, in defenseless boats, through German-patrolled skies and German-patrolled seas, seemed hopeless. In any case, the puffers’ skippers had not agreed to go farther than Namsos. They had risked their boats, their livelihoods, and their very lives for their country, but there were limits. Once again Haslund had to adopt a new expedient. He concluded that any flotilla larger than two boats—even puffers— might attract undue attention. So, at the tiny island of Inntian, lying at the mouth of the Trondheimsfjord, he had the gold reloaded— yet again—this time onto two larger, newlyrequisitioned fishing boats, each carrying approximately 10 tons.

Top: Fishing boats called “puffers,” like the Grimsøy shown here, carried the Norwegian gold to the island of Inntian. Above: Fredrik Haslund (right) did everything he could to prevent the gold from falling into German hands.

Thus began the final, and longest, leg of Haslund’s odyssey, and in many ways the most perilous, requiring all his improvisational skills. He was no longer in touch with his superiors. He lacked a clear picture of where the Germans were. The British had abandoned central Norway, leaving the Germans free to roam at will. In the chaotic, panicked atmosphere then prevailing in Norway, paranoia regarding any strangers ran high. Haslund’s mysterious party, on the other hand, couldn’t say where they were going, where they had come from, or what they were carrying. All this fed suspicions that they were spies, or worse; suspicions that hindered Haslund’s efforts to obtain needed information, supplies, and food along the way. For his part, Haslund didn’t know whom he could trust, given the suspected presence of “Quislings,” Norwegian traitors sympathetic to the Nazis. One false move could easily betray the entire mission.

In addition to dangers lurking on land, enemy airplanes circled above and enemy ships roamed at sea. With each passing day, and each passing mile northward, the hours of daylight increased, and the crucial protection provided by darkness lessened. In fact, Tromsø, Haslund’s ultimate destination, has no true night after March 27 and before September 17 each year.

On May 9, 30 frenetic days since Colonel Eriksen’s bold actions bought Norway a few precious hours, Haslund’s two-boat flotilla sailed at last into Tromsø harbor. The gold’s 1,000-plus-mile odyssey, through almost the entire length of Norway, was over. The final 20 tons still needed to be moved—one last time—into the hold of the British light cruiser HMS Enterprise. It marked at least the seventeenth time some or all of Norway’s 58-ton gold reserves had been physically moved. On May 24 Haslund boarded the Enterprise and departed Tromsø along with his gold, reaching the English port of Plymouth five days later. All the gold was now safe.

Norway had won the final round.

Despite being totally unprepared for the Nazis’ sudden onslaught, the Norwegians had somehow accomplished something neither Austria nor Czechoslovakia had. Nor would many of the countries subse-

quently invaded by Germany succeed in safeguarding their gold reserves, a list that included the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Italy. Before Germany was finally defeated, it would seize a total of almost 600 tons of gold from nearly a dozen countries. But it got none from Norway.

Equally impressive, despite the multiple loadings and unloadings, always under cha-

otic wartime conditions, a mere 297 coins, amounting to a few pounds, were lost during the gold’s laborious trek to safety.

This remarkable feat represented Nicolai Rygg’s foresight, Birger Eriksen’s intrepidity, and Fredrik Haslund’s resourcefulness. But it also represented the incredible labor and unflagging courage of untold anonymous Norwegians—soldiers, truck drivers, train personnel, puffer crews, farmers, and townspeople—who helped keep the gold always one step ahead of the Germans. H

Timothy Boyce is the editor of From Day to Day: One Man’s Diary of Survival in Nazi Concentration Camps (Vanderbilt University Press, 2016). He lives in Tryon, North Carolina.

The last of the gold was finally loaded aboard the HMS Enterprise on May 24 and transported to safety in England.

Haslund didn’t know whom he could trust, given the presence of “Quislings.”

BOMBER BOYS

Text and photographs by

The highly individualistic art depicted on the World War II “bomber jackets” worn by American aircrew during World War II continues to fascinate, educate, and entertain. The images painted on the back of leather A-2 work jackets reflect the attitudes of young airmen who were subjected to the vagaries of modern warfare in the sky, and the successes, failures, and eventual triumphs of surviving their missions over stubbornly defended enemy territory.

I’m not sure anyone ever consciously decides to write a book about leather jackets. Yet, that’s precisely what happened after I began photographing A-2 flight jackets in 2014 for the book I published in 2022 called Bomber Boys: WWII Flight Jacket Art.

As the number of jackets I shot grew, the stories of their owners began to weigh more heavily on my mind. I began to realize that the jackets were mobile signposts reflecting the distinct and potentially mortal challenges every flier faced. Initially, I was drawn to the artwork and symbology, but as

Jack Nabors, a flight engineer and top turret gunner in Martin B-26 Marauders over Europe, wore this jacket. He completed 67 missions.

A new book tells the stories behind flight jackets from the war—and something about the people who wore them.

John Slemp

was a ball turret gunner in the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and flew a total of 34 combat missions. On his last mission, he swapped aircraft at the last minute to fly with his buddies. The aircraft he was originally supposed to fly in was shot down in front of him, and Mitchell saw the ball turret falling away from the aircraft. He returned home to his wife shortly afterward, and lived into his mid-90s.

gunner. Inset, above: Harold “Hal” Weekley was shot down on his 20th mission, and successfully evaded capture for three weeks with the help of local French civilians. He eventually made it to friendly lines and returned to the United States.

I more fully understood their cultural and historical implications, I became more engaged with the task at hand.

The emotion these jackets engender has been nothing short of astounding. To illustrate that point is the case of the daughter of a WWII airman who, during an early exhibition of the work, stood in front of a print of her dad’s jacket for almost two hours. As we were leaving, she pulled me aside and said in a quivering voice, “You have no idea what this means to me.” It was a telling moment and has provided continuing incentive to bring the work to fruition.

For the project, I photographed more than 150 A-2 jackets, including examples from the National Museum of the United States Air Force, the 390th Memorial Museum, 475th Fighter Group Historical Foundation museum, Allen Airways Flying Museum, Indiana Military Museum, Air Zoo Aerospace & Science Museum, Lowndes County Historical Society Museum, March Field Air Museum, Minnesota His-

BOMBER BOYS

On the jacket of Lieutenant Colonel (later Brigadier General) Robert W. Waltz of the 390th Bomb Group, each bomb represents a mission flown and each swastika is an enemy aircraft shot down. The small flour sack and POW symbols are for Operation Chowhound and prisoner evacuation missions at the war’s end.

torical Society, National Naval Aviation Museum, San Diego Air & Space Museum, and the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. The book also showcases 37 jackets from private collections.

When I recently met Brigadier General Charles McGee of the Tuskegee Airmen, I asked him why, at 101 years of age, he was at the EAA’s AirVenture airshow meeting and talking with kids. He simply replied, “It’s important to tell these stories.”

It felt like I received marching orders that day to finish the work. So we have.

You can find more information about the book at wwiibomberboys.com H

Above left: This jacket belonged to B-17 navigator Joseph F. Doyle, who was assigned to the 570th squadron of the 390th Bomb Group. Doyle flew 30 missions over Europe. Above right: Lieutenant Colonel E.J. North, a B-17 pilot, wore this A-2 jacket.

Below left: Virginia Mae Hope belonged to the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs). The jacket here is a reproduction. Below right: This “Auger” jacket was worn by Lockheed P-38 Lightning pilot T.P. Smith of the 475th Fighter Group. The group flew for the Fifth Air Force in the Pacific.

Walter Hood Thomason of Atlanta, Georgia, piloted a B-17 called “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” He kept bomb tags as souvenirs of the 34 missions he flew over occupied Europe. He earned several Air Medals as well as the Distinguished Flying Cross for his service.

BOMBER BOYS

DOG BAIT ON CAT ISLAND

Japanese American soldiers and canines trained together for a bizarre, secret mission

By Jessica Wambach Brown

The U.S. Army envisioned using dogs in the Pacific to sniff out enemy Japanese soldiers. Things did not work out as planned.

Private Raymond Nosaka raced to the base of a live oak tree in the mosquito- and alligator-infested interior of Cat Island, nine miles offshore from Gulfport, Mississippi, in the Gulf of Mexico. The humidity was stifling, even in December. Nosaka began to climb the oak, the hockey pads he wore making the ascent even more difficult. He steadied himself on a branch 10 feet off the ground and caught his breath. Minutes later, he could hear a pack of dogs crashing through palmettos and marsh grass, hunting him.

A German shepherd reached the oak first, followed closely by a boxer and some kind of mutt. As Nosaka looked down at the snarling and barking dogs, he found it hard to imagine that they, and the four or five dozen other canines kenneled on the tiny island, had been household pets just a year earlier. Like him, they had been volunteered for secret and experimental training.

Taking a deep breath, Nosaka fired a pistol into the air and jumped to the ground. In an instant, all three dogs were on him, sinking their teeth into the leather and cotton that covered most of his body.

DURING WORLD WAR II, nearly 20,000 U.S. families donated their canine pets for military service through the Dogs for Defense program, the brainchild of a group of dog-loving civilians. The U.S. Army’s Quartermaster Corps trained most as guards, scouts, messengers, and casualty locaters. It wasn’t unprecedented: The German military had been using dogs in tactical capacities since the late 19th century and other European forces followed suit in World War I. When the United States entered World War II, its military had fewer than 100 dogs, used primarily to pull sleds in the Arctic. In January 1942, prominent New Jersey canine expert and poodle breeder Arlene Erlanger joined with Professional Handlers’ Association head Len Brumby and New York Sun reporter Arthur Kilbon to organize what they called Dogs for Defense. They intended to recruit canines the military could use to patrol Atlantic beaches, key industrial facilities, and other places ripe for saboteurs. Americans responded enthusiastically, donating healthy dogs from a list of 30-some breeds that were deemed trainable, adaptable to military working conditions, and appropriately sized— ideally around 50 pounds. Some parted with their pets out of patriotism, while others could no longer care for them due to deployments, increased work hours, or economic hardship.

By July 1942, Dogs for Defense’s first hundred canine “volunteers” had proven their utility as sentries. The Secretary of War then expanded the “K-9 Corps” to include scout and messenger dogs and assigned training responsibilities to the Remount branch of the Quartermaster Corps, which traditionally provided trained horses for army units. Dogs for Defense, now backed by the American Kennel Club, continued to lead recruitment, while Erlanger drafted the army’s first formal dog-training manual. By the end of 1942, the Quartermaster Corps had dog and handler training facilities in Front Royal, Virginia, and Fort Robinson, Nebraska, and had plans to open others at San Carlos, California, and Camp Rimini, Montana. Graduates were

assigned to U.S. Army, Coast Guard, or Marine Corps units.

In June 1942, a Swiss expatriate dog trainer in New Mexico named William A. Prestre wrote to the War Department suggesting another war-time opportunity for canines. Prestre believed dogs could be taught to sniff out and attack Japanese servicemen based on their distinct smell. Although the dog trainer had no scientific basis for his theory, the War Department was intrigued enough by the possibility to finance an attack dog experiment under the Army Ground Forces, rather than the Quartermaster Corps. Secrecy was para-

mount—Americans might hesitate to donate their precious pets for such violent duty.

Prestre, who would be paid as an army captain, toured the Quartermaster Corps’ Front Royal facility in September and initially dismissed the line-up of volunteer dogs there. He asked the army to launch its own selective breeding program and field only animals between the ages of one-and-a-half and two years. The army refused. With U.S. ground forces already entangled with the Japanese on Guadalcanal, there wasn’t time. Prestre needed to work quickly.

To train his dogs, Prestre required ethnic Japanese targets. The army wouldn’t use Japanese prisoners, as Japan could exact reprisals

Private Raymond Nosaka (front row, center) was recruited to serve as “dog bait” in an army program. Here he’s seen on Cat Island with other human participants, and one canine.

on its American prisoners should word of the

running north-south for three. The War Dog Reception and Training Center shared the island with a bombing range and a practice landing area that was used by Naval Construction Battalions.

The 25 enlisted Nisei and two officers debarked that first night on neighboring Ship Island, eight miles due east of Cat Island, which the Coast Guard used for anti-submarine patrols and the army for recreational facilities. Here the men were housed in barracks near Fort Massachusetts, a 19th-century brick fortification used by both sides during the U.S. Civil War. Two weeks into their stay, the soldiers were finally informed that they would continue to bunk on Ship Island and ferry daily to Cat Island to train war dogs.

“They said to ‘train the dogs,’ but we called it ‘dog bait,’” Nosaka remembered. “We were the bait.”

THE JAPANESE AMERICAN soldiers arrived on Cat Island mid-morning each day. There they joined about 30 personnel stationed on the island and 50 to 60 dogs housed in neat rows of wooden kennels elevated above the white sand. Each soldier was issued a helmet, padded clothing, and slabs of raw horse meat. The first phase of the program was to train the dogs to find the Nisei in foxholes or trees in the brackish marsh that made up half of the island. The men honed their climbing skills quickly. Although the raccoons were long gone, a slip could easily land a soldier within reach of a hungry alligator. When a dog found a Nisei, the soldier would fire a pistol into the air, pretend to fall dead, and toss the dog the meat as a reward.

Prestre, who was rarely seen by the Nisei, believed dogs would work best in packs and that the constant presence of a human handler would impede their work. The results quickly created doubts about his methods. Once released, a pack of dogs typically separated, and few proved able to find their bait without human intervention. Those that did were clearly lured by the horse meat. The army was concerned, and a few weeks into the program it sent one of its own dog trainers, Master Sergeant John Pierce, to Cat Island. His assignment was to train dogs to alert human handlers when an enemy was present and attack only on command. Pierce’s training proved more successful than Prestre’s and it reinforced the sense that dogs worked best

Top: The soldiers taking part in the dog training program, seen here on

program leak. Instead, the army drafted a small contingent of men from its 100th Infan-

individually or in pairs, and always under a handler.

Still confident in his approach, Prestre moved from scout to attack training. He had dogs released into the marsh to find and “kill” the Nisei. The soldiers acting as bait now submitted themselves to the dogs’ jaws, sometimes wrapping meat around their necks to encourage bites to the jugular vein. The protective padding helped, but most of the men left Cat Island bearing scars. Nosaka had to visit the small dispensary multiple times to receive treatment for bites to his legs and feet.

As the dogs grew more familiar with the Nisei, they became less willing to attack and would often just grab the horse meat and run. Prestre resorted to brutal methods that canine-loving soldiers like Nosaka found despicable. The trainer had dogs tethered and the Japanese Americans were ordered to whip and beat them until they drew blood. Then the padded men would back up 10 paces and the dogs were released to exact a vicious reprisal. “Oh, I feel so bad,” Nosaka recalled years later as he remembered the brutality.

Despite the unique hardships of their duty, the Japanese Americans on Cat Island enjoyed four-hour workdays, plenty of beach time, and fresh seafood. One December evening an alarmed shrimper alerted authorities that two Japanese men had rowed to his boat near Ship Island and claimed to be American soldiers seeking shrimp for their Christmas dinner. On New Year’s Day 1943, the men received a pass to New Orleans to watch the University of Tennessee Volunteers defeat the University of Tulsa by a touchdown, 14-7, in the Sugar Bowl.

In mid-January, Army Ground Forces leadership visited Cat Island

for a review of the dogs’ readiness for war. The results were dismal. Prestre had to lead the animals to the Japanese American soldiers and very few were willing to attack on command. Colonel Ridgely Gaither dismissed the demonstration as “somewhat of a vaudeville animal act.” On February 2 the army cancelled Prestre’s program and relieved him of his duties. The Swiss expat was livid. He issued vague threats to cause trouble if the

Above: Some of the Cat Island dogs enjoy chow time at their hastily constructed kennels. Right: The dogs entered the military as part of the United States’ “Dogs for Defense” program, which encouraged civilians to donate their pets to the military.

Top: When the war began, the U.S. military had fewer than 100 canines, most of them serving as sled dogs. Above: A happy recruit named Pal is fitted for a parachute harness so he can be dropped to aid downed aviators.

program were not reinstated, which landed him on an FBI list of potentially dangerous subversives. Prestre promptly disappeared from the public record.

The trainer’s belief that dogs could differentiate ancestral heritage by smell proved unfounded—human scent is determined primarily by diet and the men of the 100th ate like the average U.S. soldier, apart from the extra shellfish. The army, however, was not willing to give up and continued to explore the utility of exposing dogs to people of Japanese heritage. The original group of Nisei soldiers remained on Cat Island several weeks after Prestre’s departure, presumably training under Pierce. Nosaka was one of the last to transition back to the 100th Battalion, returning on March 21 to train for the pending invasion of Italy in September. The 100th would become the most decorated U.S. military unit of the war for its size and length of service. Several of the men who served on Cat Island would be wounded or killed in action.

PRESTRE’S EXPERIMENT ended the Army Ground Forces’ dog training, but the K-9 Corps continued to grow. The Quartermaster Corps assumed management of the Cat Island center and expanded

facilities to accommodate the training of 400 dogs and their handlers for a variety of tactical duties. For instructors, the army recruited civilian experts—from esteemed bird hunters to guide-dog trainers—then scoured its ranks for anyone with useful experience.

Robert Coates was nearing the end of basic training with the 94th Infantry Division in May 1943 when the army noticed he had expressed an interest in dogs on his induction paperwork. He received an invite to join the dog training program. Coates, whose family had volunteered its collie for Dogs for Defense, accepted. He reached Cat Island on June 15 as a sergeant and moved into the island’s standard lodging: a 16-foot-square, five-man hut made half of plywood, half of mesh screen, and topped with a canvas roof. Although Coates served on Cat Island months after the “dog bait” of the 100th Infantry Battalion departed, he and other trainers recalled working with a handful of Japanese American soldiers, likely from the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, who would hide in the brush so the dogs could find them.

Coates trained several dogs, his first a smart and friendly German shepherd named Champ. As a scout trainee, Champ learned to stop, stiffen his body and tail, raise his hackles, and prick his ears when he detected an unfamiliar human. Coates’ second dog was Sis, part of a casualty detection training program. Sis learned to locate humans lying on the ground and alert her handler. Other dogs received training to identify manmade disturbances in Cat Island’s sand that might indicate the presence of a non-metallic German mine that was undetectable by traditional methods.

The island also provided home to a program that trained dogs to run messages through difficult terrain using leather pouches attached to their collars. For practice, the dogs were frequently dispatched to deliver notes between the main camp and the various training sites across the island. Toward the end of 1943, a contingent of the 828th Signal Pigeon Replacement Company arrived on the island to test whether dogs could effectively carry messenger pigeons on their backs and bring them to isolated outposts.

By 1944, the army had fine-tuned the list of breeds that were most useful for its purposes. They included German shepherds, Doberman pinschers, Belgian sheepdogs, collies, giant schnauzers, Siberian huskies, malamutes, and

Eskimo dogs. Not all dogs were eager to work or disciplined enough for their assigned tasks. More than one finely bred animal was dismissed from the K-9 Corps for chasing Cat Island’s native pigs. Others were more helpful with the wildlife. Johnnie Johnson, an army trainer from Tidewater, Virginia, was crawling through the marsh with an exceptional scout, a springer spaniel named Susie, on a night exercise when the dog signaled him to stop 10 feet shy of a deadly coral snake. Despite her apparent abilities, Susie mysteriously failed her test for overseas scout duty and the Midwestern kennel that had donated her gave Johnson permission to keep her as a pet. He later admitted that he had failed Susie intentionally because he couldn’t bear to part with her. The dog lived to age 17.

Although the Quartermaster Corps continued training elsewhere, the Cat Island War Dog Reception and Training Center closed in July 1944. The island returned to private ownership after the war. In 2002, the National Park Service acquired nearly 2,000 acres for inclusion in the Gulf Islands National Seashore.

FROM 1942 through March 1945, Dogs for Defense recruited more than 19,000 dogs, approximately 10,400 of which completed training and were deemed suitable to serve with the U.S. Army, Marines, or Coast Guard. At least 1,000 other dogs were donated by breeders, smuggled into the military by their serving owners, or adopted by units that befriended them in the course of duty. About 1,900 dogs saw service overseas, among them members of 15 Quartermaster Corps-trained dog platoons. The scouts in these platoons, seven of which served in Europe and eight in the Pacific, received credit for dramatically reducing enemy ambushes.

At the end of the war, the Quartermaster Corps eased the war dogs’ transition back to civilian life. Coates, who had attended Officer Candidate School after leaving Cat Island, supervised German prisoners in a dog retraining program at Front Royal. Most Dogs for Defense returned to their original owners or were adopted by their wartime handlers. The army received 15,000 applications for the remaining 3,000 dogs that were available for purchase as war surplus. Of all dogs placed with new owners, only four were returned as unsuitable for civilian life.

Working canines had proven their worth. Training responsibility transitioned from the Quartermaster Corps to Army Field Forces in 1948. About 1,500 dogs served in the Korean War, primarily as sentries. Four thousand deployed to Vietnam, where 281 were killed in action. In the Persian Gulf and 21st-century conflicts, dogs have added search and rescue to their military roles, along with drug and explosives detection. Dog training responsibilities today belong to the 341st Training Squadron at Joint Base San Antonio, Texas.

The canines’ most valuable contribution in war has likely been companionship. Their instinctive loyalty and compassion have helped soldiers cope with the hardships of combat and its aftermath. Nosaka, who agonized over being forced to abuse the training dogs on Cat Island, owed his life to the kindness of a stray he encountered on the 100th Battalion’s long and bloody push toward Rome. During one cold evening in November 1943 in the hills near Italy’s Santa Maria Oliveto, an artillery shell badly injured Nosaka’s right thigh. That night, as Nosaka lay wounded, a dog wandered up and slept beside him, keeping Nosaka warm until help arrived in the morning. H

Jessica Wambach Brown earned her master’s degree in diplomacy and military studies from Hawai’i Pacific University. A former newspaper reporter, she now writes about U.S. history and historical travel from her home in Kalispell, Montana.

A sturdy canine undergoes training in 1944 at the War Dog Reception and Training Center in San Carlos, California.

From 1942 through March 1945, Dogs for Defense recruited more than 19,000 dogs.

NEED TO KNOW World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence

By Nicholas Reynolds. 512 pp. Mariner Books, 2022. $29.99.

REVIEWS BOOKS

COMPANY MEN

AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE efforts tend to come off brilliantly in Hollywood films, but don’t fare so well when analyzed by historians. The years 1940-45 provide an exception, and former CIA officer Nicholas Reynolds delivers plenty of satisfying insights in this lively, opinionated account of the agency’s origin and spectacular growth.

During the somnolent 1930s, America had no equivalent to Britain’s MI6, which handled foreign intelligence. The army and navy had small bureaus to collect information, mostly “above board” through military and naval attachés, though there was also a small naval codebreaking group.

Few readers will disagree with Reynolds

that codebreaking contributed more to Allied victory than all other intelligence elements. Britain’s Bletchley Park still dominates popular history, but U.S. codebreakers deserve equal billing. America’s tiny cryptanalysis service cracked many Japanese codes between the wars, but it hit the jackpot in 1941 by breaking Japan’s Foreign Office code, which provided priceless information— although not enough to predict the attack on Pearl Harbor. Within a year, the U.S. had broken so many enemy army and navy codes that almost no significant Japanese effort came as a surprise.

Other intelligence efforts (espionage, propaganda, covert operations) may have been

William J. Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, America’s first dedicated special operations and intelligence organization, rankled some in the military establishment but paved the way for the CIA to follow.

marginal, but they’re fun to read about as Reynolds moves back and forth between codebreaking and William J. Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Donovan, a World War I hero, Wall Street lawyer, and Republican internationalist, pestered President Franklin D. Roosevelt into allowing him to found an organization to collect information and conduct “special” operations. This was the OSS, universally considered the ancestor of the CIA, but far more slapdash. It never had the field to itself. Besides promoting their own intelligence departments, the army, navy, and the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover peppered FDR with complaints about the OSS stepping on their toes, doing work they were perfectly capable of doing themselves, or (in the case of Donovan) getting more than his share of the headlines.

Energetic and charismatic, Donovan attracted a steady stream of adventureseekers. Peaking at 13,000 members, the OSS devoted itself to research and analysis, espionage, and sabotage. Its record as a spy service was only fair and its covert operations produced spotty results. The agency shone brightest when supporting Allied armies, especially before and after D-Day, when it dropped men and supplies into occupied France to reinforce the resistance before providing intelligence and conducting sabotage as armies fought into Germany.

Donovan lobbied for a postwar intelligence service, but his efforts were in vain; President Harry S. Truman shut down the OSS in September 1945. Donovan’s many enemies were still in office when the CIA was born two years later, and they made sure he remained on the sidelines, although many of his recruits signed up.

T he definitive history of American intelligence remains Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes (2007), with a fine update in 2022’s A Question of Standing by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, but readers will appreciate Reynolds’s expert account of five golden years when heroes were not in short supply and matters came to a more or less happy ending. —History buff Mike Oppenheim has been reviewing books for HistoryNet magazines for 20 years.

REVIEWS BOOKS

LAST STAND

OSPREY INAUGURATES “Dogfight,” a new series in its ever-growing library on military history, with Fw 190D-9, Defence of the Reich 1944-45. Each volume in this series will focus on a single fighter type, using firsthand accounts and combat reports as much as possible to appraise the subject from the cockpit, from its performance in combat to the perspective of its opponents.

Entering service in August 1944, the Focke-Wulf Fw-190D-9 was essentially an Fw-190A adapted to use the Junkers Jumo 213A engine with a GM-1 nitrous oxide injection boost system. The resulting “Long Nose Dora” was meant to be an interim design until Focke-Wulf designer Kurt Tank completed his high-altitude Ta-152, but its performance, among the best of any piston-engine fighter during World War II, led to it being mass-produced as well as Germany’s straining industry could (peaking at 1,030 in January 1945). Although the Messerschmitt Me-262A jet was faster, its low acceleration rate made it vulnerable during takeoff and landing, so many Fw190D-9s were employed defending the Me-262 airbases from marauding Allied fighters.

Robert Forsyth’s collection of airmen prove many and varied when it comes to this outstanding piston-engine fighter. Luftwaffe veteran Karl-Heinz Ossenkop, for example, states that while the Fw-190D-9 had the edge in climb and turns, the Hawker Tempest could outdive it and his advice regarding the Republic P-47D is “Never try to dive away from a Thunderbolt.” As for the North American P-51, after being shot down, German pilot Hans Hartigs told a fellow POW: “Even an outstanding pilot can’t get away properly from a Mustang by banking that ‘190’; it’s out of the question. I tried it.”

Aficionados of firsthand accounts will enjoy this volume, which also includes a wealth of photos, color illustrations, and diagrams of various air actions. —Jon Guttman

FW 190D-9 Defence of the Reich 1944-45 by Robert Forsyth. 80 pp. Osprey Publishing, 2022. $22.

A Focke-Wulf FW-190D-9 evades bombs dropped by American B-26 Marauders over Germany in early 1945.

REVIEWS BOOKS

TIES THAT BIND

THE JUNE 6, 1944, invasion of Normandy resides in American popular memory as one of the biggest stories, if not the biggest, of World War II. It was a great, sweeping event composed of a vast number of smaller episodes, many lost in the shadow of the grander narrative. One such story involved around 140 paratroopers of the 3rd Battalion, 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, and the people of the small French village of Graignes.

THE LOST PARATROOPERS OF NORMANDY A Story of Resistance, Courage, and Solidarity in a French Village

By Stephen G. Rabe. 262 pp. Cambridge University Press, 2022. $24.95.

For Stephen Rabe, this forgotten tale is personal. His father, Sergeant Rene Rabe, was one of the men who held Graignes for eleven days, slowing the advance of Germany’s 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division toward the invasion beaches. Yet, these G.I.s were not even supposed to have been there.

While most of the airborne troops who jumped into Normandy in the wee hours of D-Day missed their drop zones, the men of the 3rd Battalion landed more than 60 miles south of where they expected to be. Having made the decision to hold the ground where they found themselves, the 3rd Battalion

A mortar platoon joined other members of the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment’s 3rd Battalion in the French village of Graignes, where the Americans fought a resolute defense for 11 days after D-Day.

paratroopers dug in—along with some stragglers from the 101st Airborne Division and two men from the 29th Infantry Division who had wandered 40 miles inland, through German lines, from Omaha Beach.

Rabe unfolds the narrative of these Americans and the French villagers who welcomed and adopted them into this tiny, liberated island in the sea of Germanoccupied Normandy. He writes of “five days of joy and liberation” that came before the arrival of the SS Panzers on June 11, and of three determined assaults against G.I.s outnumbered by at least four to one. Rabe quotes an unlikely tribute to the tenacity of the American troops. SS Oberführer Werner Ostendorff noted that the men against whom his troops fought were “crafty and astute,” defending Graignes with a “nasty combat spirit.” Finally, having delayed the Waffen SS advance by several days, the paratroopers withdrew about ten miles north to the town of Carentan, which had been captured by the U.S. 101st Airborne.

More than 30 Americans died at Graignes, about half of them murdered after they were captured. The people of the little town suffered more. An estimated 44 of them were summarily executed, and the rest forcemarched south, leaving Graignes to be all but obliterated by the vengeful SS.

Rabe relates the poignant stories of the people of the village as they returned later that summer to pick up the battered pieces of their civic life and start to rebuild. Finally, he tells of the 3rd Battalion veterans who began revisiting Graignes many decades later, and the affecting way the former paratroopers were welcomed once again by old friends in a tiny village that had never forgotten them.

Bill Yenne is the award-winning author of numerous books about the Second World War and is a frequent contributor to World War II magazine

BOOK BRIEFS

WINGS OF WAR

The World War II Fighter Plane that Saved the Allies and the Believers Who Made It Fly

By David Fairbank White and

Margaret Stanback White. 336 pp. Dutton Caliber, 2022. $29.00.

This volume on the short World War II career of the North American P-51 details the Mustang and its use—or misuse—as well as the men who championed its cause.

RISE OF THE WAR MACHINES

The Birth of Precision Bombing in World War II

By Raymond O’Mara.

338 pp. Naval Institute Press, 2022.

$49.95.

O’Mara, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, examines the intersection of humans and technology behind the doctrine that was supposed to win World War II. One of the History of Military Aviation series.

THE MIGHTY EIGHTH Masters of the Air over Europe 1942-45

by Donald Nijboer.

320 pp. Osprey Publishing, 2022.

$40.

A comprehensive history of the U.S. Eighth Air Force in World War II. Colorful aircraft illustrations complement wartime photographs and evocative artwork to bring the “Mighty Eighth” to life, from its 1942 stateside origins to its oversized role battering Nazi Germany in Europe.

REVIEWS GAMES

STREET FIGHT

UNDAUNTED: Stalingrad Osprey Games. $120.

WORLD WAR II RATING H H H H H

THE BASICS In Undaunted: Stalingrad, you either play a platoon commander in the German Sixth Army or the Soviet 62nd Army during the early months of 1942-43’s pivotal Battle of Stalingrad. The units are controlled with a combination of counters on the map representing different parts of the squad and cards in players’ hands that decide what actions those soldiers can conduct.

THE OBJECTIVE The game has a series of scenarios that have variable objectives. For example, you may be trying to capture a key building, but later you may be trying to defend it. All the while you must manage your soldiers carefully, as losing too many during one fight means you won’t have as many available for later ones.

HISTORICAL ACCURACY Undaunted: Stalingrad accurately captures the difficult tactical decisions platoon and squad leaders were constantly making during the battle’s tough urban combat. The game also realistically recreates the swift pace of action and the just-as-swift consequences of mistakes and bad luck.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY This game has simple rules and lends itself to fast gameplay. The city tiles realistically recreate Stalingrad, and it is fun that they can be replaced as the game goes along and the city becomes increasingly damaged. But, while accurate, the components are somewhat bland. Different colored terrain and uniforms would have added a lot visually to the cards and map, but admittedly would have made the game less realistic. The only ugly part of the game is the steep price.

PLAYABILITY

The entire campaign can be played in 2-3 hours, which lends itself to an entertaining evening. The rules are easy to learn, but it will take you several sessions to master the strategies of playing the long game, as each scenario affects the next—and figuring this out means you’ll be taking it off your shelf to play often.

THE BOTTOM LINE This is a fun, fast, and accurate game of tactical squad combat in Stalingrad, but it does come with a high sticker price. —Chris Ketcherside, a retired Marine, is currently completing his PhD in American history.

REVIEWS BOOKS

WORLD OF HURT

HALF AMERICAN The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad

By Matthew F. Delmont. 374 pp.

Viking, 2022. $30.00.

HALF AMERICAN is a lucidly written introduction to the African American experience during World War II, intended primarily for readers who know little about it. It is not uncommon for lay students of World War II to know the basics of the Double V campaign (victory over fascism abroad, victory over racism at home); the pressure that civil rights activists successfully placed upon President Franklin D. Roosevelt to forbid racial discrimination in defense industries; the almost unbelievably pervasive contempt for African American men in uniform—by not just civilians but also by White military officers and enlisted men; the struggle to overcome the barring of African American pilots from service in the Air Corps, a barrier that, once removed, paved the way for the squadrons that became famous as the Tuskegee Airmen; and the segregation of the U.S. armed forces and the deep resistance to the use of African American soldiers in combat.

“My hope is that the Black veterans, war workers, and citizens who fought not only enemy armies but also their own countrymen to secure freedom and democracy will finally be recognized,” writes author Matthew Delmont, a history professor at Dartmouth College, in the book’s introduction. In this aim the book amply succeeds. Even specialists will profit from the wealth of deftly selected vignettes that drive home the appalling depth of the prejudice Blacks faced and how they endured—and to some extent eroded—the challenges they faced at home and abroad.

One can nonetheless regret the author’s incuriosity about most Whites. For example, he notes only in passing that Republican congressman Everett Dirksen played a crucial role in paving the way for the eventual admission of Blacks as military pilots. He does not say why Everett championed the issue. He documents Major General Edward Almond’s open contempt for the Black soldiers who made up the

African American Tuskegee Airmen overcame the army’s institutional racism and served with honor.

very 92nd Infantry Division that Almond commanded. But he does not examine how Lieutenant General Mark Clark, who commanded the Fifth Army of which the 92nd was a part, felt about Almond’s hostility, nor the opinion of theater commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who surely knew about it.

The author also makes it seem as if White racism was leveled exclusively at African Americans. He makes no mention of the Japanese relocation camps or the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (RCT) composed of Japanese Americans. The 1943 so-called Zoot Suit Riots, in which mobs of White sailors and Marines conducted a five-night rampage directed mainly against Latinos in Los Angeles, is noted in a single sentence, primarily because African Americans were also among the targets. A comparative glance at the treatment of other races would have raised important questions about the Black experience. Why, for example, did the 442nd RCT become the most decorated unit in the army while medals for Black soldiers who performed equally extraordinary feats of valor were routinely denied?

Even so, Half American is a powerful book that generates an intense emotional understanding of its subject and is well worth reading by anyone interested in the American experience during World War II. —Mark Grimsley is a professor at The Ohio State University

THINKING BIG REVIEWS BOOKS

FOR MANY YEARS Douglas Dildy has been best known as the editor of the Small Air Forces , a periodical devoted to lesserknown aircraft. In No. 27 of Osprey’s “Air Campaign” series, however, he shows his ability to “think big,” by recounting a pivotal struggle between the fighter elements of the U.S. Army Air Forces and the German Luftwaffe in “Big Week” 1944

“BIG WEEK” 1944 Operation Argument and the Breaking of the

by Douglas C. Dildy.

90 pp. Osprey

Publishing, 2022. $24.

The year 1943 had been exceedingly costly to the Allied effort to bomb Germany’s cities and industrial centers, largely due to an efficient radar-directed interception system. By February 1944, however, the arrival in quantity of North American P-51B Mustangs offered the U.S. VIII Fighter Command a single-seat fighter capable of flying as deep into enemy territory as the Lockheed P-38J Lightning. On January 6, 1944, Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle took over command of the Eighth Air Force and altered its priorities: while VIII Bomber Command targeted aircraft factories, the escort fighters would focus on not merely protecting the bombers but also destroying the German fighter force, or Jagdwaffe. From February 20 to 25, this concerted effort to reduce Germany’s air defenses—aided by the tactical Ninth Air Force and Italy-based Fifteenth Air Force by day and Royal Air Force Bomber Command by night—constituted history’s first successful offensive counterair campaign. Profusely illustrated with photos, illustrations, and maps, “Big Week” 1944 gives a succinct summation, told from both sides, of the week that put the Allies on the offensive in the air. —Jon Guttman

Jagdwaffe

BATTLE FILMS

BY JON GUTTMAN

NEVER SAY DIE

AS EARLY AS WORLD WAR I, airmen who lost limbs in combat refused to let that keep them out of the air. In the Imperial Russian Navy, Alexander Prokofiev de Seversky lost a leg but learned to fly with a prosthetic and became a six-victory ace and later an airplane designer in the United States. During World War II, he would be outdone by Soviet fighter pilot Aleksey Maresyev, who survived a horrendous ordeal to become a fighter ace with no legs at all. The Pilot: A Battle for Survival is a Russian film that follows the contours of Maresyev’s ordeal.

Born on May 20, 1916, Aleksey Petrovich Maresyev joined the Red Army in 1937 and earned his wings in 1940. In August 1941 he was assigned to the 296th IAP (fighter aviation regiment) in the central

Ukraine, flying the Polikarpov I-16. Over the following months, Maresyev was fortunate just to survive while flying that obsolescent airplane. Then, in March 1942, he was reassigned to the 580th IAP in the Demyansk Pocket, equipped with the new Yakovlev Yak-1. In less than a month of intense fighting he was credited with four German aircraft.

On April 5, 1942, Maresyev was shot down in German-held Russian territory in what were still winter conditions. Emerging from the wreck of his Yak with both legs crushed, he crawled toward Soviet lines, living on tree bark and berries for 18 days until he reached a farmhouse. It was another week before he reached a hospital, where his gangrenous legs were amputated.

During his nearly year-long therapy with prosthetics, Maresyev read a magazine article about de Seversky and another on Douglas Bader, the British pilot who lost both legs in a 1931 crash but went on to become an 18-victory ace during the Battle of Britain. Their examples inspired Maresyev to convince his higher-ups he could still fly. In June 1943 he returned to the front, flying Lavochkin La-5s.

“When I was appointed to be his wingman,” said Sergei F. Petrov in an interview, “I asked myself the question: ‘If he has no legs, will he be able to protect me in combat?’ But we carried out a number of missions together and I was convinced that he was a better pilot than many who had legs.”

Released on December 2, 2021, The Pilot is reputedly based on a novelized account of Maresyev’s life. Director Renat Davletyarov has called it his version of the American 2015 film The Revenant, with Nazi pursuers and a pack of wolves substituted for that film’s bear and hostile Indians. Instead of flying fighters, The Pilot ’s protagonist, Nikolay Komlev (Pyotr Fyodorov), is a ground attack pilot, allegedly because there were no Yak-1s or La-5s available for the film, but a newly restored and flyable Ilyushin Il-2 was. Historical nit-pickers might point out that twoseater Il-2s and Messerschmitt Me-109Gs were not around in December 1941, the film’s setting. As for differences between the real Maresyev and the fictional Komlev, the whole matter is rendered moot when the end credits list about a dozen other Soviet airmen who lost both limbs but returned to active service, making it clear that Komlev is based on a composite of many “true stories.”

That said, The Pilot delivers visceral thrills during its 106-minute runtime, punctuated at intervals by a series of flashbacks to a developing love story that adds motivation to Komlev’s determination to survive. There is a certain universality to its theme, although Russia’s 2022 invasion of neighboring Ukraine has made a pariah of the country in which The Pilot was filmed.

The real Maresyev returned to combat for the Battle of Kursk on July 20, 1943. He and Petrov each downed a Junkers Ju-87 Stuka, then Petrov was shot up by a Focke-Wulf Fw-190. As a second Fw-190 got on his tail for the coup de grâce, Petrov looked back and saw it explode—courtesy of his legless wingman, who then downed a second Focke-Wulf. On August 24 Maresyev received the Gold Star of a Hero of the Soviet Union (the Russian Medal of Honor) and went on to bring his score up to 11 victories in 86 combat sorties—seven of those victories achieved with artificial legs.

After the war Maresyev continued as a flight instructor until his retirement in 1994. He became the subject of A Story About a Real

Man , a novel based on his wartime experiences, and now two fictionalized postwar films. (The first came out in 1948.) In regard to all the adulation that attended him, however, he remarked: “There’s nothing extraordinary in what I have done. The fact that I’ve been turned into a legend irritates me.”

On May 19, 2001, Aleksey Maresyev was en route to attend a ceremony marking his 85th birthday in Moscow when he suffered a heart attack. Rushed to hospital, he died an hour and a half before the ceremony. H

The filmmakers used a recently restored Ilyushin Il-2 as the main character’s airplane in The Pilot. In truth, the twin-seater Ilyushin had not entered service at the time in which the film is set.

A BOOK BY JOHN SLEMP

CHALLENGE

HURRICANE FORCE

We altered this photo of RAF personnel loading ammunition into a Hawker Hurricane to create one inaccuracy. What is it?

ANSWER TO THE WINTER CHALLENGE:

As 91 of you correctly guessed, we rotated the cross at the center of the flag. We did not alter helmets, shadows, or wristwatches.

Please email your answers to this issue’s challenge to challenge@historynet.com

SEE OUR SUMMER ISSUE FOR THE ANSWER TO THIS ISSUE’S CHALLENGE!

SPRING 2023 79

SCIENCE!

Arthur C. Clarke demonstrated an interest in science from an early age. Born in 1917 in Minehead on England’s Bristol Channel, he moved to London in 1936, where he joined the British Interplanetary Society. During World War II he served in the Royal Air Force as a radar trainer and technician and worked on Ground Controlled Approach, a system that used radar to guide aircraft in bad weather. (In 1963 Clarke published Glide Path, a novel based on his experiences.) After the war, Clarke earned a degree in physics and mathematics. In 1948 he published a groundbreaking paper about the use of geostationary satellites for global communications. But Sir Arthur (he was knighted in 1988) remains best known for his science fiction, especially 2001: A Space Odyssey, a book he wrote in conjunction with his work on the landmark 1968 film with director Stanley Kubrick. (Clarke is pictured on one of the film’s sets in the image below.) Sir Arthur died in 2008 at the age of 90.

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