World War II October 2020 by HistoryNet

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AMERICAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S FIRST TANK VICTORY

WHY AN OBSCURE CLASH IN THE PHILIPPINES DESERVES A PLACE IN HISTORY

An American tanker atop his M3 light tank in Luzon, 1941.

TOM HONAHISNLAKTESST FILM HO H THE DENTISNTDW LY SINGLE-HA F AED FOUGHT OF ANZAI FRENZIED B CHARGE H A B-17 GUNNEERDAY RECALLS THISSION HIS FIRST M LAST BECAME HIS

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Infantrymen of the 27th Division display battlefield trophies in the aftermath of the brutal battle on Saipan, August 1944. THE NEW YORK STATE MILITARY MUSEUM COVER: CARL MYDANS/GETTY IMAGES; BACKGROUND: THEDAFKISH/ISTOCK; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN WALKER; INSET: COURTESY OF APPLE

62 16 24 2

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O CTO B E R 2020 ENDORSED BY THE NATIONAL WORLD WAR II MUSEUM, INC.

F E AT U R E S COVE R STO RY

28 ‘TEN LITTLE TANKS SPITTING DEATH’

The U.S.’s first armored victory of the war came at a time when loss was the norm DONALD L. CALDWELL

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

38 NO LIGHTWEIGHT America’s M3 light tank

40 BEN SALOMON’S BATTLE

An army dentist with an affinity for solders’ work dared to take on a banzai charge on Saipan JOHN C. MCMANUS

50 THE PRIVILEGE OF PLAYING A PART

A coastguardsman’s journey to the deadly shores of Normandy unfolds with disarming candor in his diary JOHN D. LONG

P O RT F O L I O

58 BEARING WITNESS

Rocked by what they saw at Hiroshima, two Japanese artists transformed their experience into a monumental work of art

62 WORRY ABOARD OLE WORRYBIRD

The author and former B-17 gunner looks back nearly 76 years to the one day he won’t forget BILL LIVINGSTONE

D E PA RT M E N T S

8 MAIL 10 WORLD WAR II TODAY 16 CONVERSATION

Tom Hanks on his latest film—and the lasting intrigue of World War II

20 FROM THE FOOTLOCKER 22 NEED TO KNOW 24 TRAVEL

The chalk hills of Mimoyecques, France, once held a German secret

70 REVIEWS

Twilight of the Gods, Countdown 1945, and an end-of-war roundup

76 BATTLE FILMS

Enduring lessons in the 2008 film Miracle at St. Anna

79 CHALLENGE 8O FAMILIAR FACE OCTOBER 2020

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WWII Online WORLDWARII.com

A Japanese Type 89B medium tank in Nanjing, China, 1937.

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

VOL. 35, NO. 3 OCTOBER 2020

EDITOR

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

One of our best-selling issues in recent memory featured a sharp analysis of Japan’s armored force during the war. If you enjoy Donald L. Caldwell’s “Ten Little Tanks Spitting Death” on page 28, you’ll want to check out this story, from March/April 2017:

Pride Before the Fall: Why Japan Failed at Tank Warfare By Jiaxin “Jesse” Du Japan was a leading nation in armored warfare before the war. What changed?

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CALDWELL

LIVINGSTONE

McMANUS

MORTIMER

LONG

CONTRIBUTORS

BILL LIVINGSTONE (“Worry Aboard

Ole Worrybird”) entered the U.S. Army in 1942 after spending a semester at the University of Southern California. While stationed with the 95th Bomb Group, he was a replacement gunner aboard the B-17 Ole Worrybird when it was shot down over Germany in 1944. He and the crew spent the war’s remainder in prisoner-of-war camps. A retired urban planner, Bill published the

memoir Remembering World War II: Recollections of a POW in Germany in 2006.

JOHN D. LONG (“The Privilege of

Playing a Part”) is the director of education at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia, whose collection includes coastguardsman Jack Rowe’s original diary, the basis for his story. An alumnus of Roanoke College and the University of Virginia, he has taught history at Roanoke College, Radford University, and Virginia Western Community College. His most recent book is 2018’s Murder in Roanoke County: Race and Justice in the 1891 Susan Watkins Case.

JOHN C. MCMANUS (“Ben Salomon’s Battle”) is the Curators’ Distinguished Professor of U.S. Military History at the Missouri University

of Science and Technology. He is the author of 14 books, including a major two-volume series on the U.S. Army in the Pacific War. The first volume—Fire and Fortitude, covering 1941-43—was published in 2019. The second, from which his research for U.S. Army dentist Ben Salomon’s story is derived, is forthcoming and will cover 1944-45.

GAVIN MORTIMER (“Great Guns”)

is a British historian based in Paris, France, whose published works include a history of Merrill’s Marauders and an account of the London Blitz. His frequent trips home to the U.K. bring him close to the Mimoyecques complex, near the Channel coast, where the Nazis once located their V3 supergun. Mortimer recently visited the site and discovered why this V-weapon never got off the ground.

PORTRAITS BY JOHANNA GOODMAN

DONALD L. CALDWELL (“Ten Little Tanks Spitting Death”) is a retired research chemist in Round Rock, Texas. He wrote seven books on the Luftwaffe before turning his attention to a little-known National Guard tank unit that served and surrendered on Bataan in 1942. The result was his 2019 book, Thunder on Bataan: The First American Tank Battles of World War II.

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Un o 13 pen 8 Y ed ea fo rs! r

Discovered! Unopened Bag of 138-Year-Old Morgan Silver Dollars Coin experts amazed by “Incredible Opportunity”

 Historic Morgan Silver Dollars  Minted in New Orleans  Struck and bagged in 1882  Unopened for 138 years  26.73 grams of 90% fine silver  Hefty 38.1 mm diameter  Certified Brilliant Uncirculated

The Morgan Silver Dollar is the most popular and iconic vintage U.S. coin. They were the Silver Dollars of the Wild West, going on countless untold adventures in dusty saddlebags across the nation. Finding a secret hoard of Morgans doesn’t happen often—and when it does, it’s a big deal.

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Morgans from the New Orleans Mint

In 1859, Nevada’s Comstock Lode was discovered, and soon its rich silver ore made its way across the nation, including to the fabled New Orleans Mint, the only U.S. Mint branch to have served under the U.S. government, the State of Louisiana and the Confederacy. In 1882, some of that silver was struck into Morgan Silver Dollars, each featuring the iconic “O” mint mark of the New Orleans Mint. Employees then placed the freshly struck coins into canvas bags...

The U.S. Treasury Hoard

Fast-forward nearly 80 years. In the 1960s, the U.S. government opened its vaults and revealed a massive store of Morgan Silver Dollars—including full, unopened bags of “fresh” 1882-O Morgan Silver Dollars. A number of bags were secured by a child of the Great Depression—a southern gentleman whose upbringing showed him the value of hard assets like silver. He stashed the unopened bags of “fresh” Morgans away, and there they stayed...

 Limit five coins per household Actual size is 38.1 mm

third-party grading service Numismatic Guaranty Corporation (NGC), and they agreed to honor the southern gentleman by giving the coins the pedigree of the “Great Southern Treasury Hoard.” These gorgeous 1882-O Morgans are as bright and new as the day they were struck and bagged 138 years ago. Coins are graded on a 70-point scale, with those graded at least Mint State-60 (MS60) often referred to as “Brilliant Uncirculated” or BU. Of all 1882-O Morgans struck, LESS THAN 1% have earned a Mint State grade. This makes these unopened bags of 1882-O Morgans extremely rare, certified as being in BU condition—nearly unheard of for coins 138 years old.

Don’t Miss This Rare Opportunity—Order Now! Regular 1882-O Morgans sell elsewhere for as much as $133, and that’s without the original brilliant shine these “fresh” 138-yearold coins have, without their special NGC hoard designation, and without their ability to tell their full, complete story from the Comstock Lode all the way to your collection.

Given the limited quantity of coins available from this historic hoard, we must set a strict limit of five coins per household. Call quickly to secure yours today as supplies are sure to sell out quickly! 1882-O Morgan Silver Dollar NGC Certified BU from the Great Southern Treasury Hoard — $99 ea.

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V-J Day arrived right before a very relieved George Barger (right), 21, was slated to depart for the Pacific.

he agreed, paid the man his fee, provided the mysterious photographer his name and home address, and never gave the exchange another thought. At the end of 1947, the picture [left] arrived in the mail at my grandparents’ house in Illinois. The photograph now belongs to me. My grandfather is the taller sailor on the right. Aside from their great uniforms, with their sailor hats and bellbottoms, I think that the look on my grandpa’s face encapsulates the general feeling of the country at that time. Robert Barger Tucson, Ariz.

MONUMENTAL LEGACY

MY GRANDFATHER, George Charles Barger, was 21 years old in 1945 and awaiting transport to the Pacific at Naval Station Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. On V-J Day on August 15, 1945, he and his shipmate had taken to the streets of San Francisco. My grandfather told me that they weren’t necessarily even in the mood to celebrate; they were just unbelievably relieved. As the two young sailors floated through the city on good vibes, they turned the corner from iconic Mason Street; they walked, talked, and rejoiced until they reached the end of the block, where my grandfather was tapped on the shoulder by a man holding a camera. The man told him that he was a professional photographer and that he had just taken Grandpa George’s picture; for $1, he would send him a copy. My grandfather was in such a jovial mood that

If I weren’t cooped up in home isolation, I wouldn’t bother with this. But since there’s not much else to do, here it goes: in your story “Broken and Unbroken,” you mention Genevieve Grotjan, 27, who had studied math at SUNY Buffalo. In the 1930s there was no SUNY Buffalo. There was the State Teacher’s College at Buffalo, from where she received her degree; it wasn’t until the early 1960s that Governor Nelson Rockefeller started the State University of New York (SUNY). I was one of the early graduates of SUNY Buffalo in 1966. Geoffrey Palmer Madison, Conn.

SIGN OF THE TIMES

Your “Broken and Unbroken” article in the June 2020 issue was extremely interesting on a number of levels. Richard B. Frank did an excellent job of piecing together the fabric that

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VICTORY WALK

CABIN FEVER

COURTESY OF ROBERT BARGER

MAIL

Richard B. Frank’s “Broken and Unbroken” article addressing the life of William F. Friedman and his contributions in breaking Japan’s Purple code is superb— the best short treatise of this great man I have ever read. I had the honor of working with the fantastic people of the National Security Agency (“No Such Agency” was the inside joke at the time) for 16 years. The NSA’s large William and Elizebeth Friedman Building at headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, is their testament to this giant. Jack Davey Phoenix, Ariz.

George S. Patton’s journal states, “I hope we can conceal this”), news outlets never caught wind, and the American soldiers involved were never tried or punished. Historians believe they may have been acting on verbal orders from senior comma nders, who informed their subordinates before the offensive in Chenogne that “no prisoners were to be taken” during battle. Romesh Bhattacharji New Dehli, India portrayed wartime intelligence-gathering. Of further interest is the picture of the team of eight cryptanalysts on page 46. On the wall behind them is a sign with the word “Think.” That sign was initiated by Thomas Watson, the founder and CEO of IBM from 1914 to 1956. The sign was on the walls of all of his plants and offices. I first saw it when I toured their computer assembly plant in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1953. Fascinating to think that this team would extract his word to act as a stimulant to their thinking even in the mid1930s. Perhaps some or all of these cryptanalysts worked for IBM at some point. Art Hershey Calabasas, Calif.

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COURTESY OF ROBERT BARGER

TAKING NO PRISONERS

Neither Joseph Connor’s April 2020 cover story on the Malmedy massacre nor reader letters published in subsequent issues mention the Chenogne massacre. This Allied war crime has been erased from America’s memory. The Chenogne massacre occurred shortly after Malmedy on January 1, 1945, during the Battle of the Bulge. Members of the 11th Armored Division took several dozen German soldiers— members of the Führerbegleitbrigade and 3rd Panzergrenadier Division—prisoner in the village of Chenogne in Belgium. Instead of transferring them to a prison camp, the Americans rounded these men up in a snowy field and proceeded to slaughter them with machine guns, according to eyewitness accounts from that day. Officials covered up the atrocity (General

CLAIM TO FAME?

Nobuo Fujita, the subject of your June 2020 cover story “Burning Ambition,” was not the first pilot to bomb the Lower 48. That dubious distinction belongs to an Irish American mercenary named Patrick Murphy, who bombed the hamlet of Naco, Arizona, in 1929. Murphy fought with revolutionaries in the Escobar Rebellion; at the time battles were being fought in Naco, Mexico, which shares a border with Naco, Arizona. A Mexican, variously reported as a general or the head of Mexican Customs, stored his Dodge car on the American side, next to the Customs Station. By accident or design, as Murphy was flying his biplane overhead, one of his fellow revolutionaries dropped a homemade bomb from the plane onto the car, destroying it.

FROM THE EDITOR Ever since my staff and I departed our office to work from home during the pandemic, I’ve returned to the building only rarely. So it seemed especially fortuitous that one visit coincided with a recently delivered letter left on my desk. “My name is Bill Livingstone, and I am a 96-year-old veteran of WWII,” it began. Livingstone was offering to write the story of the day he bailed out of a crippled B-17. I followed up; he proved to be a talented, lively, and kind individual; and the result appears on page 62. A number of other features in this issue are built around the actions of one person: coastguardsman Jack Rowe, tanker Bill Gentry, acting army surgeon Ben Salomon. I urge you to get to know these amazing people. Offices, theaters, streets may be empty, but in the magazine’s pages, we’re all in good company. —Karen Jensen

When mercenary Patrick Murphy bombed the border town of Naco, Arizona, in 1929, the only major casualty was a Mexican official’s Dodge car.

Steven Trent Smith, the author, did a good job, but Naco deserves its proper place in U.S. history as the first place in the Lower 48 to be bombed from an aircraft. Seth R. Nadel Apache County, Ariz.

Correction: On page 12 of June 2020’s WWII Today, we incorrectly stated that a cache of Jewish artifacts was discovered beneath a historic synagogue in Krakow, Poland. They were, in fact, discovered in the nearby town of Wieliczka, Poland.

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WWII TODAY

REPORTED AND WRITTEN BY PAUL WISEMAN

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MUSEUM OF POLISH HISTORY, WARSAW

Bassins de Lumières’s first exhibit features works by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt (here and above).

BUILT BY SLAVE LABOR to protect German submarines that prowled the North Atlantic, a former U-boat base has been reborn as the world’s largest digital art museum. The Bassins de Lumières (“Pools of Light”) opened in Bordeaux in southwest France on June 10—its debut delayed several months by the coronavirus pandemic. Culturespaces, a French firm that manages cultural sites, renovated the compound at a cost of $15 million. The inaugural exhibitions, running through January 2021, feature the works of Austrian painter Gustav Klimt and abstract German artist Paul Klee. The U-boat base was one of five the Germans built on the French coast. Serving as the home for Germany’s 12th U-boat flotilla of supply (“milk cow”) submarines, the heavily

FROM TOP: SABINE GLAUBITZ/PICTURE ALLIANCE VIA GETTY IMAGES; GEORGES GOBET/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

FORMER U-BOAT PEN NOW HARBORS ART

MUSEUM OF POLISH HISTORY, WARSAW

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A German U-boat bunker in Bordeaux, France, has been transformed into a compelling new venue for digital art.

fortified bunker became operational in 1943, survived several Allied bombing attacks largely unscathed, and was abandoned when the Germans fled Bordeaux in August 1944. The bunker comprises 21 million cubic feet of reinforced concrete—enough, Smithsonian magazine notes, to fill 240 Olympic swimming pools. As art historian Mathieu Marsan told reporter Charlotte Bellis of Al Jazeera, the “concrete monster” was so large that, after the war, “destroying it would not have been economically viable.” Exhibition director Augustin de Cointet added, “When we visited the space, we knew we had to work with it,” he said. “We had this epiphany. We knew we had to put on exhibitions here.” Ninety projectors throw images onto the pen’s concrete walls measuring up to 300 feet long and 36 feet high. Artwork is reflected in four pools, which visitors view from gangways above. “What really makes Les Bassins unique is the reflections in the water,” de Cointet said. Playing in the background as visitors take in the artwork is the music of Richard Wagner, Ludwig van Beethoven, Gustav Mahler, and Philip Glass. The unconventional gallery is getting enthusiastic reviews. Britain’s Guardian newspaper declared the exhibit a “spectacular, sensorially overwhelming light-and-sound display.”

ENIGMA MACHINE HEADS TO POLISH MUSEUM ONE OF THE ENIGMA MACHINES that helped the Allies win the war is headed to Poland, home of the cryptographers who made it. London’s Polish Institute donated the encryption machine in July (above) to the Museum of Polish History in Warsaw. The machine is one of four produced in France by cryptographers from the Polish Cypher Bureau who fled Poland after the Nazis invaded on September 1, 1939. “A priceless piece of Polish national heritage has been secured,” the history museum said in a statement. The Enigma machine was created by German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I to encode messages. Polish cryptographers started work in the early 1930s to make their own Enigma machines and break the German codes, ultimately deciphering about 75 percent of German messages. The Poles didn’t reveal what they knew until the summer of 1939 when, with war approaching, they gave one Enigma each to France and Britain. After the German invasion, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski of the Cypher Bureau escaped to France and resumed codebreaking work on the Enigma. It is one of their machines that is going back to Poland. Later, the work continued at Britain’s Bletchley Park cryptology center, where Polish expertise helped British intelligence read German messages—a development that likely shortened the war. OCTOBER 2020

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V-J

AMID THE ONGOING COVID-19 PANDEMIC, scaled-back commemorations marking the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II took place in several countries around the world on August 15, the date Japan announced its surrender. (The U.S. and others celebrate V-J Day on September 2—after this issue went to press— when Japan signed the official terms of surrender.) Clockwise from above: King Willem-Alexander honors Dutch war dead at The Hague’s Indies Monument; Japan’s Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako attend a memorial service in Tokyo; the Royal Air Force’s Red Arrows fly over Belfast, Northern Ireland; New Zealand’s governor-general, Dame Patsy Reddy, and her husband lay flowers in Wellington; students remember war victims at Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall in China; and Australian prime minister Scott Morrison lays a wreath at Canberra’s Australian War Memorial.

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ADDI BA, born in Guinea before moving to France, fought with colonial Senegalese troops early in World War II only to be captured by the Germans. He escaped from a prison in France’s Vosges mountains and joined the Maquis—a band of resistance fighters—and worked as a liaison between different guerrilla groups. Riding his bicycle through the countryside, he took notes in Arabic on German positions. Taken prisoner, he refused to reveal any information on his Maquis allies and was executed on December 18, 1943. Two streets in France are now named in his honor. The French government would like similar remembrances created around the country. In July, the defense ministry released a 210-page booklet that is meant to encourage the country’s mayors to officially recognize 100 African soldiers, mostly from French colonies, who fought for France in World War II. Junior Defense Minister Geneviève Darrieussecq said that the “names, faces, lives of these African heroes must become part of our lives as free citizens, because without them we would not be free.” The push comes in the wake of anti-racist protests stemming from America’s Black Lives Matter movement. In June, a protester sprayed paint on a statue of a 17th-century official who wrote the rules governing slavery in France’s colonies. “Rather than knocking down, I ask you to build,” Darrieussecq said. “I ask you to consider turning our public spaces into places to teach...today very few of our streets are named after these African combatants, so the aim is to build.” After Germany conquered France in 1940, thousands of Africans from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, and other French colonies joined General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Forces. Hundreds of thousands—up to 80 percent of the invasion force—participated in the August 1944 Allied landings in occupied southern France, Operation Dragoon, helping to liberate Toulon and Marseille. In January, the southern French town of Bandol renamed its central square to honor five African soldiers who fought to liberate the town. “Freedom Square” has now become “African Liberators Square.”

CALL TO HONOR FRENCH AFRICAN FIGHTERS

“Rather than knocking down, I ask you to build.”

UPDATE

Addi Ba was one of thousands of French Africans who served in World War II.

MUSEUM ARTIFACTS TO RELOCATE

The coronavirus outbreak finished off a unique exhibition of World War II artifacts—Honolulu’s Home of the Brave Museum. The museum and an adjacent brewpub were already fighting for survival (see “WWII Today,” June 2020) when the pandemic hit and upended owner Glen Tomlinson’s plans to move the operation from Oahu’s gentrified Kakaako warehouse district to tourist-heavy Waikiki. Now he is auctioning off some items online and planning to relocate the rest to Durango, Colorado, where his son Bear lives. The plan is to create a new attraction featuring the wartime memorabilia along with exhibits on Durango’s history as a Western boomtown. OCTOBER 2020

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ASK WWII Q: I watched a documentary recently that described the distribution of stimulants to German soldiers to make them more aggressive in combat. The show went on to imply that American troops had used them as well. I fought in the European Theater of Operations but have no recollection of drugs in battle, either by the Germans or us. Were stimulants in fact used by either side? —Arthur O. Spaulding, Ojai, Calif.

SEND QUERIES TO: Ask World War II, 1919 Gallows Road, Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182 OR EMAIL: worldwar2@historynet.com

DISPATCHES Dame Vera Lynn, an English singer who raised wartime morale by serenading the troops with sentimental songs such as “We’ll Meet Again,” died June 18 at her home in Sussex at age 103. Known as the “Force’s Sweetheart,” Lynn entertained British soldiers waging jungle warfare against the Japanese during a three-month tour of Burma in 1944 that reduced her chiffon ball gowns to rags. Her songs uplifted Londoners during the Blitz. “Churchill didn’t beat the Nazis,” comedian and singer Harry Secombe once said. “Vera sang them to death.”

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FROM TOP: CHRISTIAN MURDOCK/THE GAZETTE; ROGER VIOLLET VIA GETTY IMAGES; OPPOSITE, TOP LEFT: WORTHPOINT (BOTH); BOTTOM LEFT: SHAUN CURRY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES; BOTTOM RIGHT: POPPERFOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES

The amphetamine Benzedrine first appeared on the market in the 1930s. Speed was used by soldiers on both sides of the war.

A: Amphetamines—often called pep pills, go pills, uppers, or speed—arrived just in time for World War II. While the Germans pioneered pill-popping on the battlefield during the first phases of the war, Japanese, American, and British forces also consumed large amounts of amphetamines—though, as indicated by Mr. Spaulding’s letter, each serviceman’s experience differed. As Lester Grinspoon and Peter Hedblom wrote in their classic 1975 study, The Speed Culture, “World War II probably gave the greatest impetus to date to legal medically authorized as well as illicit black-market abuse of these pills on a worldwide scale.” Armies had long consumed various psychoactive substances, but this was the first largescale use of a synthetic performance-enhancing drug. While precise numbers are unavailable, all evidence suggests it was pervasive on all sides, except for the Soviets. Speed use in the military long outlasted World War II— the United States continued to regularly dispense amphetamines to its troops in the Korean and Vietnam wars. —Peter Andreas, author of Killer High: A History of War in Six Drugs (Oxford University Press, January 2020).

AVIATION MUSEUM EXPANDS The National World War II Aviation Museum in Colorado Springs, Colorado, added a new 40,000-square-foot hangar over the summer to house many of its vintage aircraft. The museum, opened in 2012, occupies 20 acres at the Colorado Springs airport and contains more than 3,000 artifacts and documents, military vehicles, and 28 restored (and flyable) aircraft, including a P-47D Thunderbolt (above), a Lockheed P-38 Lightning, and a North American B-25 Mitchell bomber. The new hangar increases the museum’s exhibition space by about 50 percent.

UPDATE

SURVEY PROJECT COMPLETED It took two years and 190,000 pages, but researchers at Virginia Tech—aided by an army of online volunteers—managed to complete “The American Soldier in World War II” project. They transcribed 65,000 surveys of American troops in World War II in time for the 75th anniversary of the war’s end in Europe on May 8. The project (see “WWII Today,” February 2020) was funded by a National Endowment of the Humanities grant. The Virginia Tech project solicited volunteer help by using Zooniverse.org, a crowdsourcing tool. The original surveys were conducted during the war by the Army Research Branch of the War Department. By offering GIs confidentiality, the military brass hoped to get a clearer picture of the men’s experiences in the hopes of making the army more effective. They got back frank assessments of military life—descriptions of boredom, fear, bad food, and ineffectual leadership.

WORD FOR WORD

“Führer, we are on the march! Victorious Italian troops crossed the Greco-Albanian frontier at dawn today!” —Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, October 28, 1940. Italy’s invasion of Greece was a debacle; Hitler had to intervene six months later.

OCTOBER 2020

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CONVERSATION WITH TOM HANKS BY KIRSTIN FAWCETT

FULL CIRCLE

TOM HANKS HAS PLAYED everything from an astronaut to an animated cowboy, but he keeps coming back to World War II. The actor (and self-proclaimed history buff) starred in 1998’s Saving Private Ryan, co-produced the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers and The Pacific, and spent the better half of a decade bringing his latest period piece to life: Greyhound, a movie adaptation of C. S. Forester’s 1955 novel, The Good Shepherd. The naval drama follows Commander Krause, skipper of the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Keeling (codenamed “Greyhound”), as he braves U-boats and the elements while leading an Allied convoy across the Atlantic Ocean in 1942. Greyhound—which Hanks wrote and stars in—was set for a spring 2020 theatrical release until Covid-19 swept the nation; the film instead premiered in July on the video streaming service Apple TV+. Even then, Hanks managed to draw parallels between the unprecedented change in plans and—you guessed it—World War II.

Why are you so interested in World War II?

The war created this loss of certainty in everyone’s lives, this loss of

a prescribed calendar that said, “I will finish college. I will enter the workforce. I will find a mate. I will have children. I will get on with life.” This puts forth the question: “What would I have done if I were in the same circumstance?” That, to me, is the power of cinema. That’s why I keep coming back to World War II again and again. When I first read C. S. Forester’s The Good Shepherd, I stumbled into the perfect examination of this scenario: a U.S. naval officer in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean not knowing where the enemy is, if he’s doing right or wrong, or if he’s going to live to see another day. He’s hoping he can hold on long enough so that some combination of serendipity, luck, training, and instinct will see him through another 24 hours.

WORLD WAR II

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In Greyhound, Tom Hanks plays the commander of a destroyer on convoy escort duty—a character inspired by a C. S. Forester novel.

“I picked up a copy because of its cover. I thought, ‘Who is that guy, and what has his day been like?’”

seen.” How did your role in the project take shape?

I didn’t want to direct. I didn’t want to write the screenplay, but nobody else bit. It wasn’t until I finally had the time and the inclination that I said, “Let’s see what I can make of this.” I viewed it as a labor of love.

Did you always picture yourself playing Krause?

How did you first discover Forester’s work?

I knew that Forester had written the Horatio Hornblower series of novels as well as The African Queen [1935]. But around eight years ago, I picked up a used copy of The Good Shepherd because of its cover. It featured a picture of Krause. His hat was off. He had gray hair; his clothes were askew, and he was standing at the rail of a ship. A signal is flashing behind him, and a ship is sinking on the horizon. I thought, “Who is that guy, and what has his day been like?”

When you finished the book, you told yourself, “That’s a movie I haven’t

Yes. I’m older now, so I can no longer play a younger guy in the army, or the navy, or in the air force. But Kraus is a middle-aged man, a career navy officer who is about to retire. That’s in my wheelhouse.

How faithful is Greyhound to the novel?

We [director Aaron Schneider and producer Gary Goetzman and I] always wanted to make as taut and as spare and even as cryptic a movie as possible, so we took liberties with it while staying true to the DNA of the original material. For example, we aren’t at sea in the film for as long as Krause is in the book. We created a different backstory for him that requires less explanation. In Forester’s book, the USS Keeling is trailed by a possible U-boat from the very beginning; we have one showing up like an attacking shark.

The Battle of the Atlantic isn’t as frequently depicted in popular culture as other World War II campaigns.

The Battle of the Atlantic is hard to shoot without modern-day technology. With older nautical World War II films like The Enemy Below [1957], In Harm’s Way [1965], and Run Silent, Run Deep [1958], OCTOBER 2020

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Since playing an army captain in the 1998 film Saving Private Ryan, Hanks (foreground) has repeatedly returned to the subject of World War II.

The film pays great attention to historical detail, from ship protocol to naval technology. You even shot much of it aboard the USS Kidd, the decommissioned World War II-era Fletcher-class destroyer in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

The Good Shepherd is chockablock with these types of details. It was actually serialized by Life in the 1950s because it was so authoritative; many magazine readers had participated in the war. Not only did we have very powerful source material, but we also had technical advisers for all things military. Every cast member went to school; they spent time aboard the USS Kidd and ran through all the naval drills. They trained for their characters’ jobs, all the way down to how quickly they switched the dog watch [the dinner watch] and the midwatch [the night watch].

World War II naval films seldom include African Americans. But Greyhound briefly features actor Rob Morgan as Cleveland, one of the ship’s messmen. Was it important for you to create this character?

That was very important. There was a segregated military; Black Americans were not allowed to be the soldiers and sailors they could have been. They could be bakers, cooks, and orderlies. We would’ve been doing an artificial thing if we had ignored this, and we would have been doing an artificial thing if we had expanded it. We wanted

to show the boldfaced difference between White officers and Black messmen.

Are there any other World War II– related projects on the horizon?

Masters of the Air, the miniseries follow-up to 2001’s Band of Brothers and 2010’s The Pacific, will eventually air on Apple TV+. We are currently in the process of completing a screenplay; it’s based on Don Miller’s 2007 book about the Eighth Air Force and the air war over Europe against the Nazis.

Any unique takeaways for homebound viewers during this period in history?

We’re currently in the middle of something that is perhaps as stressful and anxietycausing as some aspects of World War II itself. We didn’t know we were going to be relea sing Gre yhound at t he time of a worldwide pandemic. But it ended up being a thematic match to what’s going on right now: when we’re in the middle of something with no end in sight—just like Krause is in the movie—we can trust procedure, luck, fate, and instinct, and we might be able to pull through it. H

PICTORAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY

the sea had to be calm because crews couldn’t get a camera out there otherwise while filming. With CGI, we could be much more realistic, environment-wise.

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FROM THE FOOTLOCKER

CREATIVE FORCE

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

My uncle was in the navy and served in the Pacific Theater; this object—which I assume is a Japanese hand grenade or mortar round—was among the items he gave my father. I have seen Japanese fragmentation grenades in museums that look nothing like this item, which is three-and-a-half inches long. Can you confirm what type of weapon this is? —Mike Hume, Orange, Mass. Identifying artifacts is often a challenge, particularly if the item has been modified or is incomplete—or both, as in the case of this one. At first glance, the object looks to be an artillery fuze of some type. Yet artillery fuzes normally have an exposed thread to screw into a projectile; nothing like that is present here. That’s because it seems as though two fuzes have been screwed together—an effort at what I assume to be trench art. The photos show kanji characters on each end; while I cannot read Japanese, I can recognize kanji numbers. The markings indicate that both fuzes, although different from each other, are Type 88s. An internet search shows there

were indeed two kinds of Type 88 Japanese fuze: an army type for artillery shells and a navy type for mortar shells. Further searching turned up several examples that more closely resemble your uncle’s artifact, with the exception that most of them have been fitted with improvised tail fins cut from scrap aluminum, making the whole piece resemble a miniature mortar round. (Actual mortar rounds vary in length but are typically at least one foot long.) That was likely the original intent behind the object we have on hand, with the tail fins either lost over the years or never added. The end result was probably meant as a desk ornament. Certainly an interesting item to identify. —Tom Czekanski, senior curator and restoration manager Have a World War II artifact you can’t identify? Write to Footlocker@historynet.com with the following: — Your connection to the object and what you know about it. — The object’s dimensions, in inches. — Several high-resolution digital photos taken close up and from varying angles. — Pictures should be in color, and at least 300 dpi. Unfortunately, we can’t respond to every query, nor can we appraise value.

MAIN PHOTO COURTESY OF MIKE HUME; OTHERS: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

The mystery object at left (A) is not a weapon, but an incomplete work of art; a finished example (B) was built of two Japanese fuzes—one for an army artillery shell (C) and one for a naval mortar shell (D)—with faux tail fins added.

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BY JAMES HOLLAND

SENSE OF PLACE IT’S AWFULLY FAR AWAY for most and pretty remote, but I can think of few World War II battlegrounds that are better to visit than Guadalcanal in the South Pacific—a place that really got me thinking about the nature of strategic importance. We’re often reminded of the vast numbers involved in the fighting on the Eastern Front, and many historians have claimed this was why it was there that the war against Nazi Germany was won, rather than in the West, where the numbers were comparatively lower. Visiting Guadalcanal, however, led my thoughts to the relationship between boots on the ground and strategic importance. I’ve always believed that to really understand how a battle unfolded, you need to walk the ground; suddenly, what had seemed a two-dimensional and mostly monochromatic place becomes three-dimensional and thrust into vivid Technicolor. You can see how landscapes interconnect, and that, in turn, makes you understand what really happened with greater clarity. On Guadalcanal, this is especially rewarding because much of the areas of fighting on this remote island have changed little in the intervening years. It was blisteringly hot and humid when I went there last May. As I tramped up to Galloping Horse, a key feature in the hills and the scene of some of the fiercest fighting, my shirt became drenched within minutes while my admiration for those who fought here rose another notch as I considered what was involved in simply existing—let alone fighting—in this inhospitable place. Battle debris was everywhere: bullets, shell cases, magazines—I couldn’t walk a few yards without spotting something. Then, on Bloody Ridge, we found the position from where Sergeant John Basilone of the 7th Marines famously fought his Medal of Honor action. Remains of American foxholes abounded along that position, but right at the spur’s end, as it sloped into dense jungle, the strength of the defensive position quickly became crystal-clear. So, too, did the fighting’s desperate nature. Remains of the perimeter barbed wire were still in place. When I crouched in one hole, I found myself

ILLUSTRATION BY RICHARD MIA

NEED TO KNOW

looking down the slope and imagining the Japanese emerging through the trees and charging. Moments later, I noticed a round tin lid; then, having cleared away some dead leaves, six more. Examining them, I realized they were from handgrenade tubes—the cardboard had long since rotted away, but the lids remained. They must have been dropped there back in October 1942 as the Marines hurled the grenades toward the advancing enemy. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and was a reminder that in jungle warfare, the fighting was often very close-quartered indeed. From Bloody Ridge, it became clear why this bit of otherwise unremarkable ground was so important: only a mile or so away was the airfield, vital for supply, defense, and as a bomber base—the one airfield that could be carved out of the almost tot a l ly mou nt a i nou s S olomon Islands. In fact, it’s only this stretch of northern coastline that is really habitable. The island is also small in scale. You could almost reach out and touch the airfield from Bloody Ridge. Suddenly it became obvious why so comparatively few fought here; its remoteness, size, and geography limited the numbers that could be brought to bear. There simply wasn’t room for more. Nonetheless it was here, on Guadalcanal, that the Americans stopped the advancing Japanese tide in World War II. Between July 1942 and February 1943, the U.S. won the naval battle, the air battle, and the land battle—initially with barefaced courage, but then by grinding dow n the enemy w ith increasingly superior lines of supply. It meant this tiny island was a place of vital importance in the war, and yet compared with the numbers involved on the Eastern Front, it was a pinprick. It reminded me that numbers of men involved and strategic importance do not necessarily go hand in hand and are not the best metric by which we should judge the impact of the war’s battles. H

WORLD WAR II

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BY GAVIN MORTIMER

GREAT GUNS STUDENTS OF WORLD WAR II are familiar with Nazi Germany’s V1 and V2 weapons that brought terror to southern England in the last year of the war. Less known is the V3—which the Nazis also called the “London Cannon”—a massive, multi-charge gun designed to shoot a 215-pound shell nearly 100 miles. Adolf Hitler hoped it would blast the British capital to smithereens. A ballistics engineer named August Coenders sold the concept of a super cannon to the Führer in 1942. Coenders’s design called for an initial charge in the gun’s breechblock that would propel a 150mm shell into a huge, 139-yard-long barrel. The shell would then be accelerated through the barrel by successive detonations of 32 additional charges, creating a muzzle velocity of 1,640 yards per second. According to Coenders’s calculations, a deployment of 50 guns launching 3,000 rounds a day would saturate London with shells over a 15-square-mile area. But the practicalities of designing such a weapon and keeping it secret from the enemy would soon cause Coenders no end of problems. Those problems have been preserved for posterity in the Mimoyecques (pronounced “me-mo-e’-eck”) museum in northern France, 12 miles southwest of Calais, the nearest port to England across the English Channel. It’s deep in the countryside and not a particularly accessible site, but then that’s why the Germans chose this place to install its V3 cannon. Hitler entrusted the V3 project to Armaments Minister Albert Speer. Speer’s first task was to select a suitable location in which to construct the necessary cavernous bunkers. Of paramount importance for any potential gun site was its proximity to London, but the Germans chose Mimoyecques in June 1943 for several additional reasons. Six miles from the coast, it was too far inland to be targeted by Royal Navy guns or a commando raid. It was also close to a railway line, along which munitions, materials, and workers could

be transported. Finally, the geological structure of Mimoyecques was ideal—the hill of solid chalk reached a depth of 110 yards, ensuring stability for the weapon’s foundations. It’s easy to miss the Mimoyecques museum from the roadside. Were it not for half a dozen flags fluttering on their poles, I might have driven past the site. Walking the short distance from the car park to the reception center, I pass a concrete slab set in the ground, which, I learn later, was built to a thickness of 16 feet to protect the muzzles of five guns beneath. Inside the reception center, one staff member raises an eyebrow at my attire and advises me that shorts and a T-shirt might not be adequate 100 feet below ground at a temperature of 50 degrees. I pull a sweater from my backpack that I’d packed at the last moment, and boy was I glad. Workers, numbering between 1,200 and 1,500 in total, began arriving in June 1943. Some were skilled engineers from Schachtbau und Tiefbohr, a German company that specialized in underground construction, but the backbreaking excavation work was done by the Reich’s Organisation Todt, which undertook a vast array of engineering projects in Germany and its conquered nations. At Mimoyecques,

WORLD WAR II

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TOP LEFT: DAVID CROSSLAND/ALAMY; TOP RIGHT: DANITA DELIMONT/ALAMY; INSET: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

TRAVEL MIMOYECQUES, FRANCE

GAVIN MORTIMER

Germany built a vast subterranean complex in Mimoyecques, France, to house its V3 supergun. An unassuming hillside tunnel marks the entrance today.

TOP LEFT: DAVID CROSSLAND/ALAMY; TOP RIGHT: DANITA DELIMONT/ALAMY; INSET: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

GAVIN MORTIMER

Within Mimoyecques’s labyrinth of tunnels is a replica 6-inch-diameter V3 gun barrel (right). Inset: Allied bombers pockmarked the site in a sustained air campaign in 1943-44.

Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and Poles were bused in from their spartan camps a few miles west to slave for 12 hours at a time. Their job was to build two identical bunkers, 3,000 feet apart. In all, the intention was to have 10 inclined weapons chambers, 138 yards long, dug into the earth at an angle of 50 degrees, with each chamber housing five guns—50 in total. The Germans also built two railway tunnels 100 feet underground and 650 yards long in order to bring supplies and ordnance for the planned garrison of 1,200 men. This material would be stored in a large network of galleries carved off the railway tunnels. I exit the reception center and descend down a concrete walkway, leaving behind me the light and warmth of the surface. I feel both nervous and excited as I listen to the echo of my footsteps. The network of tunnels is well-lit but nonetheless I shiver, and not just because of the temperature. In the human psyche the subterranean has sepulchral connotations, and this sense is reinforced in Mimoyecques: the museum, open to the public from April to October, closes for six months in fall and winter and becomes one of the biggest bat sanctuaries in France. If bats give you the creeps, don’t worry; they make themselves scarce during the summer months. It was not bats but the British who made life disagreeable for the engineers and laborers. In September 1943, as construction was ongoing, Allied reconnaissance photographs detected abnormal activity at Mimoyecques. In November the Royal Air Force bombed the site, and although the damage was minimal, the Germans now knew the British were onto them. All this is explained in 15 billboards in English located throughout the 650 yards of chambers. A brief video playing on one of the walls shows a virtual reconstruction of how the Germans expected the cannon to wreak havoc on London. Then there are the relics: the rotting husk of an excavator once used for tunneling and a small wagon that carried the chalk rubble to the surface. As the workers toiled underground, Coenders continued to test his design, but the results weren’t good. The barrel was constructed in numerous sections, each one about 10 feet in length, but trials found that this produced a brittleness that didn’t allow sufficient muzzle velocity for the shells to reach London, about 93 miles northwest. In November 1943 Speer reduced the planned number of V3 guns from 50 to 25, and in April 1944 cut the number again to

three batteries of five guns each. Of course, the British knew none of this; they were aware only that something big was being constructed at a site near the Channel coast with openings on the surface facing London. When the first V1 rockets—the “doodlebugs” that my father still remembers watching flying overhead toward London as a six-year-old—began hitting southern England in mid-June, the Allies intensified their bombing campaign against Mimoyecques. In total, between November 1943 and August 1944, British and American aircraft dropped 4,102 tons of bombs on Mimoyecques. The nearby OCTOBER 2020

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Mimoyecques FRANCE Paris

village of Landrethunle-Nord was flattened and had to be rebuilt after the war, but because of the depth of the chambers and the 157,000 cubic yards of concrete that had been cast inside, only 11 workers were killed in the raids. There is a memorial to these workers inside one of the side chambers, as there is to the most famous Allied airman killed while raiding Mimoyecques, U.S. Navy lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy and copilot Lieutenant Wilford J. Willy were flying a converted B-24 Liberator packed with explosives toward the site as part of Operation Aphrodite. This ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful initiative envisaged destroying important Nazi targets such as V-weapon sites and U-boat pens by converting B-24s into precision-guided missiles. The aircraft would be piloted into the air by a skeleton crew, who would bale out once airborne, leaving the flying bomb to be directed to the target by radio control from an accompanying “mother” plane. Kennedy and Willy took off on August 12, 1944, but as the aircraft climbed over eastern England, it exploded. The memorial deservedly honors the courage of Kennedy, but unfortunately Willy’s name is omitted. Though the technology for what today are called drones was still dangerously primitive, another military innovation had already derailed Mimoyecques’ V3 program prior to Kennedy’s ill-fated mission. On July 6, 16 RAF Lancasters each

released a 12,000-pound “Tallboy” bomb over the V3 site from a height of 25,000 feet. Packed with 5,500 pounds of powerful explosives, these 21-foot-long steel bombs hit Mimoyecques at supersonic speed, generating shock waves below ground similar to a small earthquake. Several of the gallery arches collapsed as the bombs struck, bringing down tons of rubble that blocked the gun chambers. While the Germans abandoned the site in August 1944, there was one last big explosion to rock Mimoyecques when, on May 14, 1945, the British Army destroyed the two bunkers with 36 tons of TNT to ensure the site could never be used to bring terror to Britain. As Winston Churchill said in a speech that same week, the discovery of “multiple long range artillery which was being prepared against London...might well have seen London as shattered as Berlin.” One end of the tunnel system was partially reopened in the 1980s, and it’s here that the museum has been situated since 2010. There are half a dozen guided tours annually to parts of the site that are normally out-of-bounds, including the surface area turned into a lunar landscape by the devastating Allied bombing. It takes me an hour and a half to tour the tunnels and read all the billboards. I emerge blinking into the bright, warm sunlight. It had been an informative visit, but I’m glad to be back on the surface—and, as a Londoner, I’m relieved that Hitler never saw his V3 in action. H

WHERE TO STAY AND EAT The nearest decent hotel is the Hôtel de la Baie de Wissant (www.hoteldelabaiedewissant.com), six miles west on the Atlantic coast. Wissant was a popular resort in the interwar years, and its golden beach is a reminder of why. Less tranquil is the port city of Calais, which has numerous hotels and restaurants. The museum’s reception center sells a small range of soft drinks and snacks.

WHAT ELSE TO SEE AND DO Ten miles west of Mimoyecques is the Museum of the Atlantic Wall (www.batterietodt. com; in French) at Audinghen, housed in one of four casemates that composed a battery of German coastal artillery. La Coupole (www.lacoupole-france.co. uk), a World War II museum inside one of the launching bases of the V2 rocket, is 30 miles southeast of Mimoyecques and also boasts a 3D planetarium.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

London

The V3’s design called for groups of five guns—arrayed within chambers carved from solid chalk—with 150mm shells accelerating through the 139yard-long barrels via 32 successive booster charges.

The Mimoyecques complex (mimoyecques.fr/fr/en/ home/), on the outskirts of the village of Landrethun-leNord, is seven miles from the rail station of CalaisFréthun, which is serviced by regular high-speed trains from Paris (approximately two hours) as well as three daily Eurostar trains from London. Renting a car at Calais-Fréthun will allow you to explore the region fully, though there is also a taxi stand at the station; a round trip to the complex is approximately $50.

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‘TEN LITTLE TANKS SPITTING DEATH’ America’s first armored victory came at a time when loss was the norm By Donald L. Caldwell

Japanese troops advance behind a tank in the Philippines; a small clash early in the war proved the superiority of American tanks and gave the U.S. a much-needed win. OCTOBER 2020

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Looking for an alternative to farm work, Bill Gentry (inset) joined a National Guard tank company before the war and wound up leading a tank platoon in the Philippines.

lished in the Philippines the previous month with the arrival of its commander, Brigadier General James R. N. Weaver. The PTG’s organization was unique in the army: it comprised two tank battalions—the 192nd and 194th—each consisting of three National Guard tank companies and each containing 54 M3 light tanks and 22 M2 and M3 half-tracks along with the required auxiliary vehicles, all new; plus the 17th Ordnance Company (Armored) for heavy maintenance. The 17-ton M3s were the U.S. Army’s latest model (see “No Lightweight,” page 38); they were of excellent mechanical quality and would soon prove their worth in the Philippines. BILL GENTRY HAD had a good war so far. A Kentuckian, he, his brother, and a friend had joined the 38th National Guard tank company in his native Harrodsburg in 1936, fascinated by its machinery and the prospect of a regular paycheck. Harrodsburg had no armory at that time; the company housed and serviced its two light tanks on the Gentry tobacco farm. Bill and his brother gained points for promotion by driving the tanks back and forth to town for drills. He managed to finish one year of college but knew he was destined

AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL 9114; INSET: COURTESY OF THE BATAAN PROJECT VIA DONALD L. CALDWELL; OPPOSITE: ROBERT YARNALL RICHIE/ THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER; PREVIOUS PAGES: THE ASAHI SHIMBUN VIA GETTY IMAGES

irst Lieutenant William H. Gentry checked the placement and camouf lage of his platoon’s five M3 light tanks. He had positioned them beneath a handful of stilted huts in a village on Luzon, the largest of the Philippine islands. The day before— December 27, 1941—Japanese infantrymen had forded a wide river just north of him and were making their way relentlessly southward. As was their custom, the Philippine Army infantry had pulled back early in the evening; most of the U.S. 192nd Tank Battalion’s Company C followed the retreating army. Bill Gentry’s tank platoon had been left behind. Gentry, 23, had been with the company less than a week, but his platoon had already been selected several times as its rear guard. This time headquarters gave him an additional order: to radio back the tactics the Japanese used in their attack. The Japanese came into view that afternoon of the 28th; to see clearly, Gentry had to stay outside his tank. He covered himself with brush and began his report. He had much to say. The Japanese troops double-timed down the road, dropping to the ground p er io d ic a l ly a lt houg h t hey weren’t under fire, giving shouts including the soon-to-be-famous “banzai,” then standing up and resuming their march. According to Gentry’s account, one curious soldier left the formation and began to climb on Gentry’s tank. Gentry reached behind his back, pulled out the wav y-bladed kris dagger he had bought in Manila, and slit the man’s throat. Gentry decided that by that time he’d done his duty and fired a prearranged shot. The five tanks then turned on their sirens, pulled out of their hides, and roared down the highway past the startled Japanese infantry. The tanks belonged to the Provisional Tank Group (PTG), which had been estabWORLD WAR II

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The M3 light tank—here on prewar maneuvers— was the army’s newest model. Opposite: an assembly line of M3 tanks gets their turrets.

M I L E S 0

LINGAYEN GULF

L U Z O N CABANATUAN

GAPAN FORT STOTSENBURG

BALIUAG CALUMPIT PLARIDEL

BATAAN PENINSULA SOUTH CHINA SEA

MANILA

MANILA BAY

to remain on the farm as a hand, so he was glad when Harrodsburg’s tank company was federalized in November 1940 as Company D of the 192nd Tank Battalion. He applied for and received a commission as a second lieutenant and, as was standard procedure, was transferred to another company. He reached the Philippines in November 1941 as the 192nd Tank Battalion communications officer. Gentry had been allotted an excess of men and spare equipment, with the intention of his setting up a new school for Philippine Army radiomen, but the onset of war fated him to remain within the 192nd. When the Japanese landed at Lingayen Gulf on Luzon’s northwest coast on December 22, intent on advancing across central Luzon toward the capital city of Manila, the 192nd had been ordered north from its base at Fort Stotsenburg, near Clark Field. They were to support Major General Jonathan M. Wainwright’s North Luzon Force in defending the beaches—but the captain who had brought the battalion’s Company C overseas had a complete breakdown and had to be relieved. The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Theodore F. Wickord—a former ConEd lineman from Maywood, Illinois, who had risen through the Guard ranks by the time-honored methods of correspondence courses and seniority—chose First Lieutenant Harold Collins, the company’s senior platoon leader, as the new company commander. To fill Collins’s old role, Wickord selected Gentry from his own staff. The senior platoon leader served as the company’s executive and OCTOBER 2020

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maintenance officer, so Gentry’s experience made him a good fit for the position. But Collins, now a captain, proved to be a weak leader, and Gentry wound up in effective command of the company. According to Gentry, Collins was personally brave and could follow orders, but could not make decisions. He was afflicted with what Gentry called the “10,000 mile stare”—far worse than the “2,000 yard stare” combat artist Tom Lea evoked later in the war in that it reached all the way to Collins’s home in Ohio.

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The Japanese invasion (above, a Type 95 Ha-Gō light tank) left Generals Jonathan Wainwright and Douglas MacArthur (top) scrambling to mount a defense.

ON THEIR WITHDRAWAL from Lingayen Gulf the day after the Japanese landings, Company C, Gentry’s platoon included, had been under orders to move down a secondary highway on the North Luzon Force’s eastern flank as it looped around and reached the main northsouth highway at Cabanatuan, a major crossroads town in central Luzon. There they were to turn left and then head south for 50 miles until turning west and joining the rest of the defenders. General Douglas MacArthur’s prewar plan to defend the Luzon beaches with his Philippine infantry had not lasted past the day of the landings: the inexperienced infantry broke and ran, and the few supporting forces—Philippine Scout cavalry, Philippine Army artillery, and American light tanks—could only follow them to the next quicklyestablished defensive line. So MacArthur—who had already decided to declare Manila an open city in hopes of sparing it— reverted to an earlier plan. What had begun on December 23 as a panicked retreat from the beaches now had a goal—to reach the defensible Bataan Peninsula in good order. On the evening of December 28, a sergeant in the 192nd Battalion’s reconnaissance platoon scouted Cabanatuan and discovered that Japanese from a second wing advancing south via a more westerly approach were setting up artillery to cut off the company. His radioed warning allowed the leading elements of the company to bypass the ambush and join the highway south of Cabanatuan. After its brush with the Japanese earlier that day, Bill Gentry’s platoon was still well behind the rest of the company; now it circled around the roadblock and attacked it from the rear, overrunning the Japanese field pieces before they could be manhandled around to face the onrushing tanks. The platoon sustained no losses; Japanese losses are unknown, but American communiqués call them “considerable.” Gentry and his men then put enough distance between themselves and the enemy to rejoin the rest of Company C the next day, 10 miles south of Cabanatuan at a barrio called Gapan. Everyone was covered in grime and bone-tired, having been on rear-guard duty and without sleep for nearly a week. The Japanese force pursuing Company C down the road was heading for its intersection with a road coming up from Manila that passed through the town of Plaridel. To the west of Plaridel lay the broad Pampanga River and the two bridges crossing it at the town of Calumpit—the Japanese capture of which would block the defenders of southern Luzon from entering Bataan and also head off the other half of General Wainwright’s force, then pursuing a more westerly route south from the gulf. The American commanders scrambled to set up a defensive line at a barrio called Baliuag, six miles to the northeast of Plaridel. Built mainly of stilted bamboo huts, with a downtown area of stucco churches and other buildings, Baliuag was a town of some 3,000 people along the Angat River and its tributaries. Although the Americans had infantry from two Philippine Army divisions at their disposal, one was down to just 200 effectives, most of the missing men having already fled for their homes. There were also a couple of Philippine artillery units and Company C’s light tanks. The tankers received fuel, ammunition, and rations in Gapan and then proceeded down to Baliuag, where they bivouacked south of town and planned for a longed-for full night’s sleep. They didn’t get it. As Gentry recalled, “We were awakened in the middle of the night by

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the radio operator, who said, ‘I’ve got a message, I’ve got a message here, and I’ve had them repeat it and repeat it, and I get the same answer every time.’ And we said, ‘Well, what is it?’ And he said, ‘Hold at all costs.’” CAPTAIN COLLINS again gave Gentry an important mission—this time, the most critical mission in the Philippines. The defense of Baliuag was to be Gentry’s responsibility. He had the long-range support of field artillery and half-tracks, and he was given tactical control of another platoon’s five M3s—Second Lieutenant Marshall Kennady’s—in addition to those of his own. The next morning, December 30, recon troops and Gentry himself scouted the approaches to Baliuag. Philippine Army engineers had destroyed all but one of the bridges across the Angat and its branches; they left a narrow-gauge railroad bridge leading into the western outskirts of town intact. Planking would be required before tanks and other heavy equipment could cross, but the Japanese attack would then be funneled into the barrio’s narrow streets, where Gentry’s tanks would be waiting. Was the bridge deliberately left unblown as bait to attract the Japanese?

This would have been the most adept tactical move in the campaign, but it has never been confirmed. No surviving American commander took credit for the decision. Lieutenant Gentry spent the rest of the day positioning his defenders. As he had done days earlier, he placed his five tanks beneath stilted huts—these about half a mile south of the bridge. The huts were some 8 to 10 feet above the ground, giving Gentry’s men a clear view of the railroad bridge across drained rice paddies. They camouflaged the tanks with foliage and bamboo mats to further hide them from the Japanese infantry and did the same to Lieutenant Kennady’s five tanks on the other side of town. Captain Collins’s company headquarters blocked the only road exiting the town to the south. That evening, Japanese troops began crossing the bridge and camping on its south side, short of where Gentry’s tanks were hidden. More troops continued to cross the next morning—the 31st—closely watched by Lieutenant Gentry from his hut. At his signal, the Philippine Army’s 15 75mm artillery pieces and half-dozen half-tracks began shelling the Japanese infantrymen, who dug in, waiting for their Type 89B medium tanks.

A Japanese Type 89B medium tank—then the standard Japanese infanty-support tank— heads for Manila over an improvised bridge.

MacArthur’s prewar plan to defend the Luzon beaches with his Philippine infantry had not lasted past the day of the landings.

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JAPANESE OBSERVATION POST

RI CE PA D D IES LIEUTENANT GENTRY’S TANKS UNDER STILTED HUTS TO PLARIDEL

500

AMERICAN OBSERVATION POST

ANDRÉS BONIFACIO STATUE

ANGAT RIVER

CAPTAIN COLLINS’S COMPANY HEADQUARTERS

In a battle lasting all of 90 minutes, 10 American M3 tanks (like the one shown at top) dominated a unit of Japanese Type 89Bs and troops in the village of Baliuag. The map is derived from one hand-sketched by Lieutenant Gentry.

Armed with a short-barrel 57mm gun and weighing only 14.1 tons, the diesel-engine Type 89B was then the standard Japanese infantry support tank. The Japanese tankers, in turn, waited for the engineers to lay planking on the bridge. By mid-morning the tanks began to cross and park in an open field. The nervous Philippine Army infantrymen south of town took off farther south for Plaridel, without orders. The Japanese infantry moved deeper into the town and established an observation post in the largest church—unaware that some Americans had set up their own observation site in the tower

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NATIONAL ARCHIVES; INSET: COURTESY OF THE IDA RUPP PUBLIC LIBRARY VIA DONALD L. CALDWELL

BATTLE AT BALIUAG

JAPANESE TANKS

U.S. ARMY NATIONAL GUARD; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

LIEUTENANT KENNADY’S TANKS UNDER STILTED HUTS

of another building just down the street. One of the men there was Sergeant Al Allen of C Company’s recon platoon. Allen, 21, had enlisted the previous January. Sharp and inquisitive, he was a good fit for the company ’s reconnaissance section, where he quickly rose to sergeant and senior enlisted man. Allen had already lost the first motorcycle he had been assigned when an officer took it on an unauthorized drunken spin to Manila and crashed it into a tree. Allen made sure to hide his replacement Harley-Davidson securely within the observation post. The officers with him had binoculars, good observation perches, and a working radio. After the shooting began, they kept battalion headquarters well informed, leaving Gentry free to conduct the battle. Gentry continued to observe the Japanese until about 5 p.m., when he was interrupted. Major John Morley, the battalion intelligence officer, came riding into Baliuag in a jeep, stopped outside Gentry’s hut, and came in. “I informed him that we were sitting there looking at a collection of Jap tanks out in the field,” Gentry recalled, irritated that Morley was calling attention to their position, “and, also, that the Jap lookout in the church steeple was quite excited as to why Morley was there. And that the only thing for him to do was to get in his jeep and drive out of town just as though nothing happened. And we would hold fire until we thought he was clear of the town, and then we would attack.” Before opening fire with his own tank, Gentry sent a prearranged signal to Kennady and the artillery, radioed his men, and burst from cover. His main targets were the Japanese tanks, two of which immediately burst into flames. The Type 89Bs turned out to be ineffective against American armor. Their 57mm guns fired only high-explosive ammunition, which could not penetrate armor—even that as thin as an M3’s. The Japanese infantrymen had no antitank weapons, and their small-caliber 6.5mm rifle and machine gun fire plinked harmlessly off the American tanks’ skins. As the Japanese tanks raced into town, Gentry’s tanks immobilized the parked artillery pieces without wasting armor-piercing 37mm ammunition on them: they rode over them, broke wheels off, knocked barrels askew, and overran trails. The M3s then wheeled into town.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES; INSET: COURTESY OF THE IDA RUPP PUBLIC LIBRARY VIA DONALD L. CALDWELL

U.S. ARMY NATIONAL GUARD; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

The victory bought the defenders time to retreat to Bataan. Allied troops would eventually return to take on the Japanese, but not until much later in the war. Here, American GIs advance behind M4 Shermans in March 1945.

FOR THE FIRST TIME in the war with the Japanese, American tankers were in complete control of the battlefield—and they took advantage of it. The remaining Japanese tanks and an estimated 400 to 500 enemy infantrymen fled into the town, away from Lieutenant Gentry, only to come under fire from Lieutenant Kennady’s platoon. According to Sergeant Allen, the opposing tanks chased each other up and down the streets, but the American M3s—much faster and more agile than the Japanese Type 89Bs—did most of the chasing. Gentry reported that the turrets of the Japanese tanks could traverse only a few degrees, although in theory they were fully traversable. It’s likely that the Japanese gunners, untrained in tank-to-tank combat and stunned by the surprise tank attack, simply could not hand-crank their turrets quickly enough to follow the speeding American M3s, which sustained no damage from the Japanese tank guns. The careening tanks did considerable

damage to the barrio, smashing through the bamboo huts and setting them on fire with tracers, and knocking great chunks of masonry off the permanent buildings. The equestrian statue of the Filipino revolutionary leader Andrés Bonifacio that dominated the town square lost its head to a shell fired by a sergeant who told Sergeant Allen later that the head was an aiming point for sighting his cannon. After neutralizing the enemy tanks, the Americans turned their attention to the infantry; the four .30-caliber machine guns on their M3s—more in number than on any later U.S. tank—were ideal for slaughtering exposed men. The Americans reportedly killed most of them, driving the survivors back toward the bridge. The battalion staff had been tuned in to Gentry’s radio frequency and burst in with words of encouragement, as if cheering on a football team. Sergeant Allen, the only C

A savvy recon man, Sergeant Al Allen warned U.S. leaders about nearby Japanese troops—all the while protecting his prized Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

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BILL GENTRY AND HIS MEN were treated as heroes when they finally reached battalion headquarters. C Company’s only casualty was

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Company member among the battalion brass in their observation post, left early to report to battalion headquarters several miles west of the Pampanga, either under orders or because—as he said, possibly in jest—he wanted to protect his precious new motorcycle. He proceeded alone south down the highway until he chanced on the rear echelon of the 194th Tank Battalion in Plaridel. These men were directing the 194th’s Company C and the supply and Philippine Army units that were heading north from Manila and reorganizing behind the Calumpit bridges before continuing their retreat west to Bataan. Sergeant Allen informed the 194th supply officer that the rumbling they all could hear was artillery in Baliuag and that the rear guard would soon be coming down the highway, followed by the Japanese. This 194th tank company had been fighting in southern Luzon, and its officers had no idea that the Japanese in northern Luzon were so close; Allen was ordered to find the 194th commander, Colonel Ernest B. Miller, and give him the news. Miller was the only World War I veteran in the Provisional Tank Group; some of the men thought he considered himself superior to everyone else in the theater. He was loath to

listen to an enlisted man—Sergeant Allen—until Miller’s supply officer arrived and confirmed Allen’s story. The rumbling had grown louder, as had the distinctive roaring of the M3s’ radial engines. Miller got his men to Calumpit, and they made it across the bridges safely. Gentry’s force stopped firing at about 6:30 p.m. when it ran out of ammunition. As it pulled south of Baliuag to its earlier bivouac, Gentry took a minute to inspect a Type 89B that had been immobilized on the town square and shot at by every passing M3. The corpses of the four Japanese tankers were inside the tank, which was perforated by 40 to 50 37mm holes. Many of the shells had come in one side of the tank and out the other. In his after-action report Gentry said that the American M3s were superior to the Japanese mediums in all respects. The Philippine Army artillery resumed firing on the Japanese, who had retreated back north of the river. The Filipino artillery ceased fire soon before nightfall of the 31st, prepared their guns for movement, and headed south, followed at about 10 p.m. by C Company, which had finally been ordered to withdraw. The Japanese reentered Baliuag cautiously that evening and followed the Filipino and American forces at a distance. At Plaridel, the Philippine Army rear guard held the Japanese off briefly and then headed for Calumpit. General Wainwright, the Luzon commander, waited impatiently on the western side of one bridge, accompanied by his engineering officer and General Weaver. At 6:15 a.m. on New Year’s Day, after the last troops had crossed the bridges, they detonated explosives. Seven tons of dynamite erupted, dropping the twin spans into the river. The Filipino and American soldiers were only a few days away from entering the Bataan Peninsula, where they wrongly believed the U.S. Navy would relieve them—but as the Japanese put it, they were just “entering the sack.”

LEFT: WILLIAM SHROUT/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Filipino engineers prepare to demolish a bridge on Luzon (right). Following the tank victory, Gentry (above) was hailed as a hero.

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LEFT: WILLIAM SHROUT/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Ultimately, the retreat to Bataan proved a dead end; here, a Japanese guard watches over American and Filipino prisoners captured there.

one man who sprained his ankle jumping from his tank there to tell his story. The Americans were credited with destroying eight Japanese tanks and killing several hundred men in Baliuag. The accuracy of this claim is unknown, as the area was evacuated after the battle, but the American armor’s performance definitely impressed the Japanese, who did not again use their own armor aggressively until the final days of the Bataan campaign. This was the first victory in the war by American land forces, an event eagerly awaited in the United States. Gentry’s men had held up the Japanese advance for a full day, allowing the defenders of Luzon to escape to Bataan. Frank Hewlett of the United Press interviewed Gentry two weeks after the battle (he had been in the hospital, down with a fever), and news media across America picked up Hewlett’s account of the “ten little tanks spitting death.” Baliuag was a clear-cut victory and important in bucking up homefront morale in January 1942, when the war news was almost all bad. For his performance on December 31, Gentry was awarded a Silver Star, one of the few in the campaign.

He went on to survive the Bataan death march and was rescued before the war’s end during the January 30, 1945, U.S. Army Ranger raid on the prison camp at Cabanatuan. Gentry returned to Harrodsburg to a hero’s welcome but remained bitter that the military—with the war not yet over and afraid of provoking Japanese retaliation against remaining POWs—had ordered him not to reveal the terrible details of the men who’d died as prisoners. Later events quickly overwhelmed the minuscule battle, and it was soon forgotten by anyone who had not taken a direct part. General Wainwright’s version of it in his memoir is so confusing as to be totally useless as history. Colonel Miller’s bitter memoir, Bataan Uncensored, slights the battle and its participants entirely, for which Al Allen never forgave him. U.S. Army historian Louis Morton’s The Fall of the Philippines devotes one page to the engagement, which it calls the “Battle for Plaridel.” A tiny group of American tankers had won a victory at Baliuag when victories were very rare. This deserves to be remembered, and under its own name. H

Company C’s only casualty was one man who sprained his ankle jumping from his tank to tell his story.

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WEAPONS MANUAL AMERICA’S M3 LIGHT TANK ILLUSTRATION BY JIM LAURIER

NO LIGHTWEIGHT SNUG QUARTERS DOUBLE DUTY Most M3s carried the gas-fueled, 7-cylinder Continental W-670-9A engine as their powerplant. Initially developed as an aircraft engine, the W-670-9A also powered Stearman 75 and Fairchild PT-19 planes during the war.

The tank driver sat in the left-front of the hull; the assistant driver was directly to his right. The commander (also the shell loader) positioned himself in the turret’s right rear, and the gunner was to his left.

THICK-SKINNED Armor on the M3 varied in thickness from 25mm on the hull’s sides and rear to 38mm on the turret and 44mm on the hull’s front. Japan’s Type 89B tank, the M3’s opponent at the Battle of Baliuag in the Philippines (see page 28), boasted armor of only 6–17mm.

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FIREPOWER The early model M3’s main gun was a 37mm antitank M5 with a 103-round capacity. Although the mid-war M3 upgraded to a longer-barrelled M6, the gun remained most effective against other light tanks and the M3 soon became obsolete in Europe against Germany’s heftier medium tanks.

AND ONE MAKES FIVE The M3 carried more machine guns than any later U.S. tank, with four .30-calibers mounted on the hull. A fifth, mounted atop the turret, served as an antiaircraft weapon.

The M3 light tank was admired by the British Army in North Africa, who dubbed it the “Stuart” and, more affectionately, the “Honey.”

AS WORLD WAR II BEGAN, the 1930s light tanks that had served Europe and the U.S. were slowly being upgraded to better-armored models. The result in America was the M3 light tank, made by the thousands by the American Car & Foundry company from 1941 to 1943. The M3 served initially as a Lend-Lease tank for the British and Soviets; its tour of duty started in November 1941 with the British in North Africa. The M3’s performance earned it fans in the British Army, but combat against larger German medium tanks revealed its deficiencies and pushed it into a secondary role as a reconnaissance and supply vehicle. The M3 found its niche when the U.S. entered the Pacific War. More nimble, faster, and better protected than its Japanese opponents, the M3 served with distinction in the Philippines (see “Ten Little Tanks Spitting Death,” page 28), Guadalcanal, Saipan, and other major Pacific campaigns. Gradually replaced by the M4 Sherman medium tank, the M3 was retired by all major combatants soon after the war’s end. –Larry Porges AMERICAN M3 LIGHT TANK

Crew: 4 / Number produced: 4,800 / Length: 14 ft. 10 in. / Weight: 28,000 lbs. / Maximum speed: 36 mph / Maximum range: 87 miles / The M3 saw action for the U.S., Great Britain, and the Soviet Union on every major front of the war.

THE COMPETITION GERMAN PANZER II

Crew: 3 / Number produced: 1,856 / Length: 15 ft. 9 in. / Weight: 17,800 lbs. / Maximum speed: 24.5 mph / Maximum range: 120 miles / The Panzer II played a critical role in the Wehrmacht’s early campaigns against Poland and France.

JAPANESE TYPE 95 HA-GO

Crew: 3 / Number produced: 2,300 / Length: 14 ft. 4 in. / Weight: 14,800 lbs. / Maximum speed: 28 mph / Maximum range: 130 miles / The Type 95’s ineffective thin armor made it susceptible to enemy shells and even small-arms fire.

ITALIAN L6/40

Crew: 2 / Number produced: 283 / Length: 12 ft. 5 in. / Weight: 13,600 lbs. / Maximum speed: 26 mph / Maximum range: 120 miles / The L6/40, best suited as a scout, also served with regular Italian army units due to medium tank shortages.

PHOTO: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

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BEN SALOMON’S BATTLE It was a fight of unspeakable horror— one the young officer seemed to have trained for his whole life By John C. McManus

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A 27th Infantry Division gun crew on Saipan peers toward the front. With loss evident, Japanese troops there launched a 6,000-man banzai attack on July 7, 1944.

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FROM TOP: GEORGE STROCK/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES; U.S. MARINE CORPS/MARINE CORPS ARCHIVES & SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

FROM TOP: COPPERDOME, 1946/SHOREWOOD HIGH SCHOOL; RECORDS OF THE SELECTIVE SERVICE SYSTEM/NATIONAL ARCHIVES; PREVIOUS PAGES: THE NEW YORK STATE MILITARY MUSEUM

n Saipan’s steamy predawn darkness on July 7, 1944, thousands of Japanese attackers hurled themselves at frontline positions held by the U.S. Army’s 27th Infantry Division, unleashing the largest banzai assault of the Pacific War. With total defeat imminent, the Japanese commander on Saipan, Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito, had ordered the attack as an expression of the hallowed word gyokusai—literally meaning a broken jewel or bead, but more broadly referring to choosing an honorable extinction over compromising one’s principles or capitulating to an enemy. Wounded and feeble, Saito himself opted to commit suicide rather than lead the attack. Heedless of the general’s death, about 6,000 of his survivors smashed into the 27th Division line at the appointed hour. The entire front erupted with fire. Multicolored tracer rounds stabbed through the darkness. Along a narrow spit of front about 1,000 yards wide and manned by only the 105th Infantry Regiment’s 1st and 2nd Battalions, the attackers smashed into the forward positions and, in many cases, poured through gaps. One of the few American officers to survive the onslaught, Major Edward McCarthy, compared it to a “stampede staged in the old wild west movies. These Japs kept coming and didn’t stop. It didn’t make any difference if you shot one; five more would take his place. The Japs just kept coming and coming. I didn’t think they’d ever stop.” Another survivor, Tech Sergeant John Polikowski, said with wonderment, “It reminded me of a circus ground, or maybe…Yankee Stadium. The crowd just milled out on the field, pushing and shoving and yelling. There were so many of them you could just shut your eyes and pull the trigger on your rifle and you’d be bound to hit three or four with one shot.” Sergeant John Domanowski saw Japanese troops running in single file: “They weren’t in uniform, but had Captain Ben Salomon on top of friendly lines. A drumtattered clothes and bandanas on their foreheads. They had worked as a dentist beat of flares from American ships looked mean. We had to fight to stay alive.” Another before registering for offshore bathed the area in halfthe draft in October infantryman commented bleakly that “the enemy 1940 and entering the light. Hundreds of Japanese were appeared drunk with a thirst to kill.” hit, maimed, shot to pieces, killed U.S. Army as a private. The Americans raked them with a storm of machine instantly, or wounded; some of the gun, rifle, mortar, and artillery fire. One company commander, Cap- wounded simply lay down and killed themtain Louis Ackerman, placed a desperate call to Captain Bernard Toth, selves. “It was a raging, close quarter fight, an artillery observer friend: “For God’s sake, Bernie, get that artillery grenades, bayonets, fire-arms of all descripcloser.” Toth replied that he was already placing the shells within 150 tions, fists, spears, and even feet were used,” yards of the company. He shortened the range to 75 yards, almost right Captain Edmund Love—a combat historian

FROM TOP: GEORGE STROCK/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES; U.S. MARINE CORPS/MARINE CORPS ARCHIVES & SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

FROM TOP: COPPERDOME, 1946/SHOREWOOD HIGH SCHOOL; RECORDS OF THE SELECTIVE SERVICE SYSTEM/NATIONAL ARCHIVES; PREVIOUS PAGES: THE NEW YORK STATE MILITARY MUSEUM

attached to the 27th Division who participated in the fighting—later wrote with a palpable sense of awe. Still, the Japanese kept coming. Inside a muggy, pyramidal aid station tent just 50 yards behind the 2nd Battalion’s forward foxholes, the acting surgeon—bespectacled, handsome 29-year-old Captain Ben L. Salomon—could not begin to treat all of the many wounded soldiers who lay around him on stretchers or the ground. As the fighting raged a short distance away, even more wounded men crawled, walked, or were carried by litter teams to the tent. Salomon soon had so many patients to treat that he found it necessary to order his aides to move the less seriously wounded outside. Moments later, he heard a scream. Salomon looked up from a patient just in time to see a Japanese soldier jam his bayonet into a wounded American in the corner of the tent. In an instant, two more enemy soldiers appeared in the tent’s front entrance. Salomon knew that he and his medics were now the last line of protection for the many helpless wounded men under their care. It was a dire situation—and yet, ironically, Ben Salomon had gone out of his way to put himself in just this sort of position. GROWING UP IN MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin, as the only child of middle-class Jewish parents, Salomon had aimed from childhood to become a dentist. Athletic, popular with classmates, and the proud recipient of an Eagle Scout badge, Salomon first attended Marquette University before transferring to the University of Southern California (USC), from which he graduated with a degree in dentistry in 1937. True to his dream, he practiced dentistry in Southern California for the next three years—but his life would soon change. On September 16, 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Service Act for males between the ages of 21 and 35, the first-ever peacetime draft in American history. Later that same year, Salomon became among the first to receive a draft notice. Though he had explored the possibility of pursuing a commission as a dental officer— and drew zero interest in that prospect from the army—he instead entered the service in March 1941 as a private with the 102nd Infantry Regiment, 43rd Division. After the onset of war, the unit deployed to remote Canton

Island, nearly 2,000 miles south of Hawaii, to guard against the possibility of a Japanese invasion that never came. In the meantime, Salomon proved himself to be a natural and highly enthusiastic infantry soldier. In regimental competitions, he consistently emerged as the best rifle and pistol marksman. He could fieldstrip and clean weapons blindfolded faster than most men could with their eyes open. He cheerfully took on any task, no matter how onerous. The officers of his regiment uniformly considered him to be the unit’s best enlisted soldier, and Salomon soon became a sergeant in charge of a machine gun section. During off-hours, he performed dentistry for the local population.

While eventually assigned to the Army Dental Corps (top), Salomon found his interests and talents more aligned with soldiers’ work. They converged when he manned an improvised hospital at the front, like this Marine facility, above, on Bougainville.

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THE NEW YORK STATE MILITARY MUSEUM

In the summer of 1942, the army finally decided to make him a dental officer after all. The War Department sent a letter to his home in Los Angeles, ordering him to report for commissioning. But when Salomon received the forwarded letter in Canton, he refused the commission; he preferred to stay in the infantry. The army would not relent, though—even when Salomon’s commander attempted to get him a commission as an infantry officer. Salomon, then 27, finally bowed to the seemingly inevitable and became a lieutenant in the Army Dental Corps. In March 1943, he was assigned as the dental officer for the 27th Div ision’s 105th Infantr y Regiment in Hawaii—a fairly cushy job that promised little combat action.

Although Salomon enjoyed his new practice, he badly missed life with an infantry company. As the division trained intensively for battle, Salomon kept honing his own combat expertise. In the mornings, he saw patients. But each afternoon, he changed into a field uniform and trained with the rifle company soldiers, again winning all skills competitions. “He wallowed in the dirt and the mud,” Love wrote of him. “He made the long, hot hikes. He fired on the range.” Colonel Leonard Bishop, his regimental commander, called him “the best instructor in infantry tactics we ever had.” Salomon soon earned a promotion to captain. In late May 1944, Captain Salomon and the soldiers of the 27th Infantry Division left Oahu, bound for Saipan in the Marianas, a vital steppingstone on the long road to Japan. On June 15, 1944, the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions carried out the initial invasion of Saipan against heavy Japanese resistance. Within a couple of days, the 27th Division reinforced the Marines. As a dental officer, Salomon initially had little to do besides hang around regimental headquarters, tend to lightly wounded men, and assist with supply efforts. That changed on June 22 when the 2nd Battalion’s surgeon was badly wounded and evacuated. Salomon eagerly volunteered to replace him. His training as a dentist had prepared him for the rudiments of the job. In combat surgery, practical know-how often

THE NEW YORK STATE MILITARY MUSEUM

Headed to Saipan to reinforce Marines already fighting there, men of the 27th Division receive a shipboard orientation lecture.

THE NEW YORK STATE MILITARY MUSEUM

Reinforcements wade from their LSTs (Landing Ships, Tank) across a reef to a Saipan beach in June 1944.

mattered more than formal training. A natural leader, probably because of his down-to-earth demeanor and innate courage, he quickly earned the loyalty of the battalion medics. One of his men, Tech 3 Vincent Donnolo, described him as “a swell guy. He pitched in like one of the boys in the aid-station.” Though Salomon had never attended medical school, he proved himself to be a highly competent combat surgeon. Indeed, he enjoyed his new job so much that he confided to one friend his intention to become a medical doctor after the war. “He told me he wanted to be the best surgeon that ever lived,” the friend later recalled. SALOMON LOGGED two weeks in combat as the 2nd Battalion’s surgeon, treating and saving an untold number of wounded soldiers. Though no one could ever have been truly prepared for the moment when the Japanese sol-

diers attacked his aid station on the chaotic morning of July 7, Salomon was better equipped than most. His talents as an infantry soldier, combined with his competitive and protective nature, made him a formidable adversary. He picked up a rifle and, in a squatting position, shot and killed the Japanese soldier who had bayoneted the wounded G.I. Wielding the rifle like a club, Salomon then charged the other two enemy soldiers who had entered the tent. He bashed them so hard that the rifle stock broke. Moving more quickly than the stunned Japanese, he picked up another rifle, shot one man, and stabbed the other to death. Four more enemy attempted to crawl underneath the tent flaps. Salomon stabbed, shot, and even head-butted them. By now the erstwhile dentist had worked himself into the sort of fury that is common to those who perform valorous deeds in combat. “Captain Salomon was pretty mad,” one of the

As the division trained for battle, Salomon kept honing his own combat expertise.

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mon’s unit—later jotted in his diary. “Japs short of firing weapons came upon us with sticks with bayonets attached to them, pointed hard cane stalks, hand grenades, bayonets, sumari [sic] swords, rifle and small arms. Saw Japs mowed down like one would run a scythe… to cut wheat. I fired my carbine into a mass of Japs not a hundred feet away. To my left…I could see hand to hand fighting. The scene was undescribable for the howling of the Japs…and our wounded rent the air.” Donnolo watched in horror as enemy soldiers hacked helpless wounded soldiers to death. Meanwhile, Captain Salomon returned to the tent. “Everybody’s dead out there,” he told his medics. “I can do these guys [the wounded] more good out there than I can in here. You’re responsible from now on. Get them all back to regiment if you can. I’ll try to hold these bastards off till you get going. See you later.” From inside the tent, one of

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FROM TOP: W. EUGENE SMITH/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES; U.S. MARINE CORPS/MARINE CORPS ARCHIVES & SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

wounded men who survived the battle later commented. “He was muttering about some sons of bitches not doing their job very well, and he charged out of his tent with his fists doubled up, like he was going to beat hell out of somebody.” Undoubtedly Salomon was frustrated that the frontline companies had not been able to keep the Japanese attackers from reaching his aid station. Outside the tent, though, he saw the true gravity of the situation. Enemy soldiers were overrunning the entire 2nd Battalion front, medics included. “It was insane to try to hold the line,” Vincent Donnolo—the young medic from Salo-

FROM TOP: U.S. ARMY SIGNAL CORPS/GIFT OF DONALD E. MITTELSTAEDT/ THE NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM; INTERFOTO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Soldiers man a .30-caliber Browning machine gun in an unknown location— possibly Saipan—in July 1944. Salomon commandeered a similar machine gun during the banzai charge, taking on desperate Japanese armed with bayonet-tipped Arisaka rifles (below) as well as improvised weapons.

FROM TOP: W. EUGENE SMITH/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES; U.S. MARINE CORPS/MARINE CORPS ARCHIVES & SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

FROM TOP: U.S. ARMY SIGNAL CORPS/GIFT OF DONALD E. MITTELSTAEDT/ THE NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM; INTERFOTO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

his men glimpsed him in a kneeling position, firing a rifle at the attackers. Moments later, Salomon took control of a machine gun after the crewmen were killed and began firing steady bursts at the Japanese. No American ever saw him alive again. BY THE AFTERNOON OF JULY 7, Saito’s banzai attack had met disaster, destroying most of what remained of his defeated army. The dismembered, decomposing bodies of his men covered northwestern Saipan like a macabre blanket. “The whole area seemed to be a mass of stinking bodies, spilled guts and brains,” one war correspondent wrote. The 27th Division conducted a meticulous count of the remains and claimed a total of 4,311 Japanese dead, including 2,295 in the 1st and 2nd Battalion, 105th Infantry Regiment sectors. Once counted, the burial parties sprayed milky-colored sodium arsenite solution on the remains to disinfect them and suppress their powerful stench, and then they unceremoniously dumped the corpses into mass graves. “Each sign on top of a mound of earth had the number of dead inscribed such as ‘10, 20, 30, etc’ Japanese dead,” Private Robert Cypher later wrote. In many cases, the Americans used bulldozers to bury the bodies. Tech 3 Donnolo watched several dozers dig hasty holes, repeatedly scoop up mounds of corpses, and dump them into the pit. “What a ghastly sight—the stench was too great for me,” he told his diary. “The dozers just pushed the Japs into the holes with their blades.” He estimated that they buried as many as 400 this way. The counting parties included Major General George W. Griner Jr., the division commander; Lieutenant Colonel Miles Bidwell, the division personnel officer; Captain Love, the historian; and many others. Outside the 2nd Battalion aid station, they were astounded and aghast at the scene they beheld. They found Captain Salomon’s body, his shirt pulled to his waist, bent over the barrel of a machine gun, its ammunition depleted. Around Salomon’s position, the Americans counted 98 Japanese bodies. “The area to the front of the weapon was covered with enemy dead, in some instances three and four bodies high,” Chief Warrant Officer Stephen Burns, one of the counters, later testified in a sworn statement. By following the trail of spent cartridges and the pattern of the bodies, Burns, Love, and the others

determined that Salomon had probably moved the gun four separate times before running out of ammunition. His body was riddled with bullet and puncture wounds. Love later said he counted 76 bullet holes in addition to the stab wounds. A physician who examined the corpse determined that 24 of the wounds occurred before Salomon’s death. “There were no witnesses, but it wasn’t hard to put the story together,” Love wrote. “One could easily visualize Ben Salomon, wounded and bleeding, trying to drag that gun a few more feet so that he would have a new field of fire. The blood was on the ground, and the marks plainly indicated how hard it must have

The toll from the July 7 attack was a staggering 4,311 enemy dead— most unceremonially buried in mass graves (top). Yoshitsugu Saito, the Japanese general who ordered the charge but committed suicide instead of leading it, was buried with full military honors after Marines found his body in a cave (above).

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TINA HAGER/COURTESY GEORGE W. BUSH PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY & MUSEUM

An officer awards men with medals following the fighting. Salomon’s heroics cost him his life, but a misunderstanding delayed his award.

been for him, especially in that last move.” During the months that followed the Saipan battle, historian Love painstakingly reconstructed the action by tracking down and speaking with every survivor from the two 105th Infantry battalions that had borne the brunt of the massive Japanese attack. Unsurprisingly, he never did find anyone who actually witnessed Salomon’s death. He did locate three of Salomon’s men from the aid station who testified to the captain’s actions in the tent and his selflessness in manning the gun so they could evacuate the wounded. Their stories and the related evidence moved Love to spearhead a Medal of Honor nomination for the valorous dentist, but General Griner quickly squelched it—not from lack of respect for Salomon’s actions, but because he believed that Salomon had violated the Geneva Convention by wielding weapons. In Griner’s view, such an action

THE NEW YORK STATE MILITARY MUSEUM (BOTH)

A Graves Registration Service team pounds newly painted crosses into the ground at a 27th Division graveyard on Saipan.

Long Time Coming

TINA HAGER/COURTESY GEORGE W. BUSH PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY & MUSEUM

THE NEW YORK STATE MILITARY MUSEUM (BOTH)

When Major General George W. Griner Jr. turned down the recommendation for Captain Ben Salomon’s Medal of Honor in fall 1944, he unwittingly set in motion nearly six decades of gross injustice. Salomon’s exploits began gaining wider recognition shortly after the war, when Captain Edmund Love, the combat historian, prominently mentioned them in a 1946 article he wrote for Infantry Journal about the 27th Infantry Division’s experiences on Saipan. Some two years later, a radio host, Paul Whiteman, read the story on his national program. In his audience that day was Ben Salomon’s father. The elder Salomon had previously known nothing about how his son died; the U.S. government had not even sent him the captain’s Purple Heart. Ben Salomon Sr. wrote a letter of inquiry to Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson, who asked Love to initiate another effort to award the Medal of Honor to the courageous dentist. Love had great difficulty locating anyone who had witnessed Salomon’s actions and lived through both Saipan and the 27th Infantry Division’s subsequent bloody battle on Okinawa. But by the early 1950s, he had managed to compile a new nomination packet that included three additional affidavits with witness testimony. In the meantime, though, the Department of Defense had been established; the Korean War had broken out; and, on January 22, 1952, Patterson had died in a plane crash. The army’s hierarchy had little time or inclination to reconsider the case. According to Love, an archivist returned the packet to him, “on the grounds that the statute of limitations for the award of World War II decorations had run out.”

President George W. Bush presents Dr. Robert West with Salomon’s longoverdue Medal of Honor.

Almost two decades later, in 1969, Dr. John I. Ingle, Dean of the University of Southern California (USC) School of Dentistry and Major General Robert B. Shira, Chief of the Army Dental Corps, undertook a new attempt—the third—to get Salomon the medal. The nomination wound its way through the bureaucracy and made it all the way to the Richard M. Nixon White House, where it inexplicably went no further. Ingle believed that the administration had no wish to awaken memories of banzai attacks when relations with Japan were tense over President Nixon’s attempt to re-establish relations with China. In the late 1990s, Dr. Robert West, a USC-trained dentist and World War II veteran, took up the cause, working through California Congressman Brad Sherman, in whose district the Salomons had once lived. West and Sherman found an eager ally in Major General Patrick Sculley, who had just become chief of the Army Dental Corps. This time the nomination worked its way successfully through the army’s decorations bureaucracy. In 2001, the Secretary of the Army and the Department of Defense at last approved it, as did President George W. Bush. At the White House ceremony the next May, in recompense for what the president eloquently called a “debt that time has not diminished,” Ben Salomon finally received the Medal of Honor. —John C. McManus

could, under some circumstances, become scandalous. “I am deeply sorry that I cannot approve the award of this medal…although he richly deserves it,” he wrote apologetically on the nomination papers. IN POINT OF FACT, Griner was wrong: the 1929 Convention expressly allowed medics to use weapons in defense of themselves or their patients. Nonetheless, the general’s misunderstanding of these rules doomed for decades Salomon’s chances of receiving the nation’s highest military decoration. (See “Long Time Coming,” above.) Not until 2002—after multiple attempts over the years on the part of his advocates—did Salomon finally receive a posthumous Medal of Honor. On May 1 of that year, at a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, President George W. Bush presented the medal to Dr. Robert West, a fellow USC dentist and World War II veteran who had led the

successful effort for Salomon to receive his recognition. West accepted Salomon’s Medal of Honor on behalf of the USC dental school and the Army Dental Corps, as Salomon’s only next of kin—his father, Ben Salomon Sr.—had died in 1970. In the U.S. Army’s long history, Ben Salomon remains the only dentist to receive the Medal of Honor. Today, that medal is on display at the U.S. Army Medical Department Museum at Texas’s Fort Sam Houston. It rests in a glass case underneath a painted portrait of Captain Salomon—mute and moving testimony to a man of unique talents and extraordinary valor. H OCTOBER 2020

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COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL D-DAY MEMORIAL FOUNDATION; OPPOSITE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Thousands of coastguardsmen took part in the Alliesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; amphibious landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, including at Utah Beach (pictured).

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COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL D-DAY MEMORIAL FOUNDATION; OPPOSITE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

“F

ebruary 10, 1944: I am glad to be leaving…it seems there is another job to be done in which I have the privilege of playing a part. I am going to describe my trip…in a hope that it will be of interest to those who read it.” So began the shipboard diary of Seaman Second Class Jack Edward Rowe, United States Coast Guard, as he diligently recorded his experiences in 1944. He probably didn’t fully comprehend it yet, but the “job to be done” was the biggest and riskiest invasion of the war: Operation Overlord, the Allied assault on Nazi-occupied France. He did, however, understand that what he experienced as a coastguardsman would be a small part of a big war, and should be preserved. His insightful and highly personal diary provides a fascinating glimpse into the days and nights of one man leading up to D-Day. Never blessed with lucid handwriting, Rowe stowed a small portable typewriter in his seabag and spent a few minutes each day pecking out his recollections, observations, and experiences. Jack was no admiral or staff officer involved in making key decisions; he was just a Seaman Second Class whose perspective was pretty much limited to a single ship. Yet his perceptive (and often witty) observations provide a unique voice to the history of World War II. In 2016, Rowe’s family, seeking to preserve his story and honor his legacy, donated the typescript diary, along with photographs and artifacts, to the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia. Now part of the Memorial’s collection, the diary illuminates an oft-forgotten aspect of the Normandy invasion: the essential role of the U.S. Coast Guard, whose D-Day story is one of courage and sacrifice. JACK ROWE WAS BORN IN 1922 in Rhode Island, the son of Raymond and Reba Rowe. He seemed to have a typical American boyhood during the Roaring Twenties and then the Great Depression, developing a love of reading, art, and sports. W hen the U.S. entered World War II, Jack, like most young men of his generation, put on a uniform: that of the U.S. Coast Guard Reserves. By early 1944, the ruggedly handsome 21-year-old coastguardsman was serving aboard the attack transport USS Joseph T. Dickman (APA-13), named for the officer who commanded a division, two corps, and an

THE PRIVILEGE OF PLAYING A PART

From dates on the town to final invasion training, a coastguardsman’s diary brings the weeks leading up to D-Day vividly to life By John D. Long

Seaman Second Class Jack E. Rowe’s insightful journal chronicled his thoughts and actions as he readied for D-Day.

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army in World War I. The Dickman departed Norfolk, Virginia, on February 11, 1944, part of a convoy of, Jack estimated, “thirty-five or forty ships…transports (American and English), two aircraft carriers, a battlewagon, cargo ships and Navy tankers used in refueling the D.E.’s [destroyer escorts] and destroyers” that protected the convoy. The 10-day crossing was mostly uneventful to Rowe: “This is the most monotonous trip I have ever made anywhere.” But a wintry stint of rough seas added some excitement—and some discomfort to break the monotony. “I will now hit the sack, lie still and let my insides float up and down in a circular motion,” he noted toward the end of the journey. On February 22 the Dickman reached its destination, revealed now to be Gourock, Scotland, on the Firth of Clyde about 30 miles west of Glasgow. Jack was captivated by the scenery he observed on either side of his ship: “I can’t seem to find words for the beauty of the shoreline, and since I couldn’t do it justice

anyway, I’ll let it go at that.” W hile in Scotland for the next three months, with occasional diversions to English ports, the men of the Dickman were kept busy with training exercises, not only sharpening their own skills for the impending invasion but helping the ground forces prepare for the challenges of an amphibious assault on the French coastline. Rowe’s specific job would be aboard an LCM—Landing Craft, Mechanized—housed aboard the Dickman. Less wellknown but larger than the iconic LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel) “Higgins Boat,” LCMs could transport dozens of troops or various combinations of vehicles, from jeeps to trucks to tanks. Getting these assets to the beach on D-Day would be crucial to the invasion’s success. The rigorous training notwithstanding, Rowe often devoted more space in his diary to leisure activities than to his workaday tasks. Reading and movies were especially important to him as a way to break up the routine of ship-

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TOP: RALPH MORSE/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT COLUMN: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES (BOTH)

Leisure activities like reading and movies were especially important to Rowe as a way to break up shipboard life.

U.S. COAST GUARD COLLECTION/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

A jeep is lowered onto Jack Rowe’s LCM (Landing Craft, Mechanized) during final invasion training. Rowe is leaning against the ramp at the far left.

TOP: RALPH MORSE/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT COLUMN: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES (BOTH)

U.S. COAST GUARD COLLECTION/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Warship routine included plenty of downtime. Rowe, like these sailors, often read to pass the hours.

board life. Among the movies Rowe recorded seeing, along with his comments, were Captain Caution (“very good”), Jungle Book (“good”), Mister Big (“fair”), The Gorilla Man (“not very good”), and The Pride of the Yankees (“one of the best shows I have seen in a while”). As for reading, Jack favored westerns, but he seemed content to turn the pages of whatever book came his way. End of the Trail, The Gambler Takes a Wife, All Night Long (about the Soviet war effort against Germany), Jungle Harvest, and The Owl Hoot Trail are only some of the books he finished during his tour. He reported that Pearl Buck’s The Promise was “very good, but also dry in spots.” NOT SURPRISINGLY for a young man, one topic consumed his thinking above all others: the opposite sex. While Jack had a steady girl back home in Rhode Island, he was not averse to seeking out some female companionship when he could. And the good-looking American in uniform had little trouble attracting attention. He mentions taking several Scottish girls to dances or dinner. One night in March Jack went on a blind date in Glasgow with the sister of a buddy’s girlfriend. Jack and this girl, Jessie Hammond

(“long dark hair, big dark eyes, very good looking”), hit it off and would see each other several times in the coming weeks, as well as exchange letters. Jessie even offered to write Rowe’s mother in Rhode Island for him, a common trick for American servicemen to convey information to loved ones at home while avoiding wartime censorship. Despite his platonic dalliance with Jessie, Jack remained committed to his girl back home (whom he never names) and even pondered popping the question when the Dickman returned stateside. However, he also expressed in places the universal concerns of young love in wartime. If he hadn’t heard from her for a while (and the mail was sporadic at best), he fretted: “It helps to know how things are at home and if your one and only still cares.” Later he wondered if “some 4-F or beach pounder” might steal her away. “Just kidding,” he consoled himself. “Or am I?” In mid-April, Jack got another shore leave and arranged to meet Jessie in Glasgow as part of a triple date. While the other two couples went dancing, he found that Jessie had recently undergone an operation on her foot, so the couple stayed in for dinner and hours of conversation. Finally Jack took his leave,

Rowe took the opportunity to watch several Hollywood films aboard the USS Dickman. He found The Pride of the Yankees to be “one of the best shows I have seen in a while,” but was less flattering about The Gorilla Man: “Not very good.”

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eager to catch the train back to his base to meet his early morning curfew. He got to a train station, but no train ever arrived. Worried, Jack began hoofing it to another station, but: “I ran into four civilians who were looking for trouble. They tried to stop me by various remarks but I kept going. Next, they tried force. They knocked me down from behind. I got up and hit one and kneed one in the groin—then ran like hell.” The short delay was a costly one for the soon-to-be AWOL coastguardsman. “I got to the station just as the train was pulling out. Tried to get a taxi—no soap.” He soon met an American sailor who was in the same fix, and the two set out together to try to make it back to Gourock by curfew. But they quickly realized it was no use. Jack decided “to have a good time since I was in trouble—

THE REST OF APRIL AND MAY passed with a steady drumbeat of trainings, practice exercises, and preparations for the invasion. Rumors were rampant about when it would be and where the landings would take place, but the observant coastguardsman picked up clues that the big day was approaching. One day he recorded a rumor, soon proved true, that the ship’s personnel records were going to

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COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL D-DAY MEMORIAL FOUNDATION (BOTH)

One topic consumed Rowe’s thinking above all others: the opposite sex.

PETER STACKPOLE/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES

Like many seamen stationed in far-off ports during the war, Rowe dated local women while on shore leave.

no more trains or buses until morning.” Resigned to their fate, Jack and the sailor sat on the riverbank in Glasgow Green park south of town and chatted up two girls for a while before starting back toward the city center at 3:30 a.m. They had to dodge patrols of MPs looking for servicemen out after hours, but “finally at 0500 we found a place to sleep” in Glasgow. The following morning, Jack’s plan to catch an early train was hampered by restrictions on enlisted men on the streets. MPs picked him up, but he was able to talk his way out of arrest and hide at a friend’s house for several hours. Finally, toward evening when he was again allowed to be seen out in public, he showed up at Jessie’s house for another homecooked supper. She didn’t greet him very enthusiastically, however. Jessie was furious that he’d missed his train. She understood his offense would likely cancel any further shore leaves—and any chance for the two to see each other for the foreseeable future. Eventually he made his way back to his ship and sheepishly reported for duty. The wayward coastguardsman knew he couldn’t escape the consequences of his 24-hour AWOL adventure. Sure enough, three days later he appeared before the captain and was sentenced to 90 days without leave. He also would be denied a promotion that was due. But always cheerful and optimistic, Jack took his punishment in stride. “I guess at last I will save some money. I have been wondering how I was going to do it,” he consoled himself. Sardonically he noted the next day that “today starts 90 days on this lovely ship. I am really happy about it. I guess I have really found a home at last.” Three months’ restriction didn’t seem so bad. The time would pass. He’d endure it. But what he couldn’t understand at the time was that the most important operation of the war was at hand. And Seaman Second Class Jack Edward Rowe would have a front-row seat for the Allied invasion of Europe.

COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL D-DAY MEMORIAL FOUNDATION (BOTH)

PETER STACKPOLE/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES

Rowe’s LCM beaches during a training exercise off England’s southern coast. Right: An antiaircraft crew aboard the Dickman prepares for combat on D-Day.

be transferred to shore—“that means one thing. The invasion is not far off.” On April 22, Rowe reported that the ship was getting underway, with the rumored destination Plymouth. The Dickman would soon moor there and at Torquay, on the southern Channel coast of England, over ensuing days. Jack described intense practice exercises, as his LCM was repeatedly lowered from crane-like davits “over the side” to make the mock run to pretend landing beaches. “Everything is done like the real thing,” he recorded. “Small and large craft are shelling the beach. Support boats using rockets. Soldiers using live ammunition. Shells bursting on the beach.” Although Jack couldn’t know the extent of the maneuvers, this was part of Operation Tiger, a major test run for the invasion staged around Slapton Sands, south of Torquay. Jack did not mention, and almost certainly did not know, the sad sequel to Tiger. German E-boats (torpedo boats) successfully infiltrated the perimeter on April 28 and sank a number of Allied vessels carrying troops. More than 700 American soldiers perished in the icy waters, a fact that was covered up for decades. For Jack, the days passed, with shipboard tedium punctuated by the rigors—and risks—of training. The Dickman busily shuttled between the Channel ports and Gourock, seldom staying in one place for long. Although still on restriction, he occasionally got ashore, running errands or piloting the launches that took more fortunate Coasties to liberty. He even met a “very attractive” English girl and had a “wonderful time with her” in a couple of chance encounters. During off-hours he read his westerns, saw whatever movies were shown on ship, and trained for boxing competitions. He also sketched prolifically and proficiently. An aficionado of drawing, he often decorated his companions’ seabags and wrote enthusiastically of applying to a correspondence school in Michigan for art. He thought it would be a good career move. The invasion was soon, and that meant the end of the war sometime

after that. He had to choose a career, especially if he were to get married. Jack’s future awaited him, and he wanted to be ready for it. IN EARLY JUNE, Jack predicted that “we will invade Monday (morning) June 5.” He didn’t explain the reasons for his conclusion, but he was actually correct. The invasion was indeed set for the 5th; however, a massive storm front that day would move D-Day to the 6th. At the same time Jack finally received something that fortified his courage: a letter from his “best girl,” containing a photograph. He pledged to carry it with him into battle when the time came. The role of the U.S. Coast Guard in the Normandy invasion is often overlooked. Many are surprised to learn that the Coast Guard was even there. In fact, coastguardsmen served aboard naval and merchant vessels and rescue cutters, as well as crewing several of their own ships. These forgotten men would serve with OCTOBER 2020

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valor and at great cost; indeed June 6, 1944, was the costliest day ever in the Coast Guard’s history in terms of vessels lost. But most at risk were the Coasties who piloted or crewed various landing craft, like Jack Rowe. As the day approached, the crew of the Dickman received clarifying instructions as to their role in the risky assault. Jack’s LCM (PA-13-2) would ferry demolition teams of the 4th Infantry Division to a stretch of coastline designated Utah Beach. They were not to linger—landing craft like the LCM were too scarce and irreplaceable to remain under fire. They were to offload their troops and equipment and pull back for subsequent loads. On June 4, the Dickman crew received a briefing (Jack called it a “briff”) on what to expect from the German defenders of Normandy. Undersea obstacles, probably mined, were a certainty; the Germans may ignite floating oil as a barrier; the Luftwaffe would prowl the skies. Particularly mentioned by Jack was the possibility of poison gas attacks on the landing beaches. While this fear proved to be unfounded, his commanders took the threat seriously, informing the men that “the chances of them using gas is 3 to 1.” By the next day, the imminence of action had been confirmed, and the Dickman left as part of a convoy from the anchorage at Torquay. “Every other thing that floats is also with us. Battlewagons, heavy and light cruisers, destroyers, minesweepers, PCs, DE’s and PT boats.” In

0030: Minesweepers are sweeping the way and dropping [marker] buoys as they go. The sky is being lighted up by constant flashes about two points off the starboard bell. My shipmates are climbing out of the pits, some noisy as usual; some of the noisy ones are very quiet; others talking; making speeches in a kidding way; the heavy sleepers weaving around the compartment trying to wake up. It’s hard to tell who was putting on a show to cover up his feelings, but I think I spotted a couple. Most are glad the time is here at last. It has been tiresome waiting month after month for something you know is bound to happen. Well, I have a few little odds and ends to do before I go over the side, so I guess I will be off now to see history made and the biggest show of any war yet of its type. When I come back I will have a lot to write about. As to coming back, there is no doubt in my mind but that I will.

NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

Casualties are transferred from an LCM to a larger ship for evacuation from the Normandy landing beaches.

keeping with longstanding military tradition, the soon-to-be invaders received inspirational messages from the top brass. “While eating chow we were read some farewell addresses from various Generals and Lieutenant Generals. Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, General Montgomery, and some [other] English general. Eisenhower’s speech is to be passed out to us sometime this evening.” That speech from the Supreme Commander was Ike’s “Order of the Day,” informing the men that he had “full confidence in their courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!” The nervous tension on the ship was palpable, with some men trying to relax and others too apprehensive to sleep. “The fellows are taking showers, shaving, you would think they were going to see their girls…[some] are reading, trying to catch some sleep, talking about how they think things will be on the beach. Others are at church.” Jack got only a short catnap, waking up at 11:30 p.m. to dress for the “rough and windy” weather. The day had come. He had trained for this extensively and had months to anticipate the invasion everyone knew must eventually come. At 12:30 a.m. on June 6, Jack Rowe paused to type out one last entry in his journal:

Jack’s confident closing sentence rings through history with tragic poignance. In fact, he would never return.

TOP: RED CIRCLE IMAGES RM; BOTTOM: COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL D-DAY MEMORIAL FOUNDATION

NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

A CREWMATE ON ROWE’S LCM, Motor Machinist Mate 1st Class Robert Weik, would later record Jack’s fate. “Our boat had disembarked an army demolition squad. We had backed off the beach and were turning when we were hit from a German shore battery with what later proved to be an armor piercing shell…. Jack and I had laid down in the well of the boat to avoid being hit. Unfortunately for Jack, the shell exploded nearer to him.” Grievously wounded, Jack was transferred to a destroyer, the USS Shubrick, where his buddies hoped he could receive better medical treatment than on the Dickman. But it was to no avail. The witty diarist with the terrible handwriting, the gentle artist who loved drawing designs on seabags, the dedicated coastguardsman who thought it a privilege to serve, would not survive. Jack Edward Rowe died

aboard the Shubrick on D-Day and was taken back to England for burial. It would be years before his mother Reba would discover his actual resting place: in Cambridge American Cemetery. Some of Jack’s crewmates visited it with Reba every June 6 for the rest of her life. Some 16 million Americans served in uniform in World War II. A quarter-million of these served in the U.S. Coast Guard. Some 400,000 Americans would give their lives. On D-Day itself, 2,502 U.S. servicemen are known to have been killed. Thirteen of them were coastguardsmen. Jack Rowe was only one man out of these numbers. Yet, unlike the vast majority of his brothers-in-arms, he left behind a chronicle, an eloquent record of his last few months. His voice speaks to us across the decades, a powerful reminder that it was not anonymous statistics who died on D-Day. Individuals did—young men who once looked hopefully into the future, dreaming dreams that would never be fulfilled. H

Jack Rowe’s diary is part of the collection of the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia, which honors all Allied forces that participated in the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. For information on the Memorial’s operational schedule, visit www. dday.org.

Four of Jack Rowe’s crewmates gather for a photo aboard their LCM after D-Day. The damage behind them is from the shell that killed Rowe.

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BEARING WITNESS

For a pair of Japanese artists, Hiroshima’s levelling was their greatest tragedy—and inspiration

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apanese artists Iri and Toshi Maruki wanted the world to see what had happened in Hiroshima. Buildings aflame, corpses scorched like kindling, the air dense with flies and smoke. Horrors the couple couldn’t comprehend—only paint, first as three collaborative murals, then two more, and so on as their commitment to sharing eyewitness accounts grew. Known simply as The Hiroshima Panels, these tableaux were the earliest artworks to portray human suffering in the wake of the world’s first-ever deployed atomic bomb—a weapon thought to have killed an estimated 140,000 Japanese both on and after August 6, 1945. The U.S. government suppressed details of the blast in Hiroshima, as well as that in Nagasaki three days later. That continued in occupied Japan, where the press was under American

“Glass shards pierced bellies/arms and legs were lost/people fell and were taken by the fire,” recounts a poem by Iri and Toshi Maruki describing their vivid painting F ire, above and on the next spread.

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tion swallowing throngs of civilians; its siblings, Ghosts and Water, follow victims as they stagger through the streets and seek refuge in a river. For many Japanese, these renderings of Hiroshima’s dead and dying were the first depictions of what had occurred on that fateful day. The Marukis continued the theme after Allied occupation ended in 1952. Their growing body of work raised awareness of the

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MARUKI GALLERY FOR THE HIROSHIMA PANELS (ALL)

control. But unlike many in Japan, the Marukis—husband-and-wife pacifists—had witnessed the nuclear fallout for themselves while rushing to Hiroshima to aid relatives days after the blast. As Iri Maruki shared in a 1986 documentary about their work, Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima, the streets were thick with “the stench of death.” “Many people died without knowing what had happened,” he remembered. “They must have thought the earth had split open.” Fearing collective amnesia, the Marukis began painting reimaginings of their experiences, and by 1950 the duo had completed a trio of multi-segment works. Fire (shown on these pages) shows a conflagra-

MARUKI GALLERY FOR THE HIROSHIMA PANELS (ALL)

cataclysm in Japan and abroad—but it also elicited criticism from wartime victims of the Japanese. These exchanges prompted a new commitment from the artists to depict war itself—not just nuclear warfare—as the world’s ultimate scourge. By the time the duo unveiled the 15th and final Hiroshima Panel in 1982, the Marukis had gone on to paint many other historic horrors—including ones committed by Japan. —Kirstin Fawcett

Trained in traditional Japanese ink painting, Iri Maruki (1901-1995) added shadow and depth to wife Toshi Maruki’s (1912-2000) violent yet graceful imagery in The Hiroshima Panels.

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WORRY ABOARD OLE WORRYBIRD A B-17 gunner recalls the day his first mission became his last By Bill Livingstone

ith two of four engines shot out by antiaircraft fire, our B-17G, Ole Worrybird, sank slowly away from the rest of the 334th Bombardment Squadron and fell farther and farther behind. Those guys are flying home to England, I thought, but will we make it? We had just completed a bombing mission and were still over Germany. Soon, the remaining 95th Bombardment Group aircraft disappeared over the horizon. It was about half past noon on November 2, 1944—my date of infamy. Our pilot, First Lieutenant Bill Pozolo, came over the intercom and made a roll call; he wanted to know if everyone on his crew was OK. Each answered in the affirmative until he called the tail gunner’s name. No answer. The pilot called again. Still no answer. The closest crew members—the waist gunners—could not see the tail gunner unless they crawled on their hands and knees back into the plane’s narrow tail section. “Leo,” I heard the pilot say, “go back and see if he’s OK.” Staff Sergeant Leo Moser was a waist gunner, and a big guy. “Roger,” I heard Leo reply over the intercom, and he crawled back into the tail section dragging a portable oxygen bottle. In about a minute, he came back over the intercom. This time, in a strained voice, he said, “Waist gunner to pilot, he’s gone.” “What do you mean, gone?” the pilot asked. Leo’s voice cracked as he almost shouted, “My God, man, he got hit by flak; he’s dead.” I learned later that Leo had, at great difficulty, dragged the tail gunner, Staff Sergeant James Martin, from the narrow space back to the waist section to see if he could tend to his wounds. Our pilot responded with a steady voice. “Take it easy, everybody. We’re going to be OK.” Even after more than 75 years, the details of that flight, and the events that led up to it, remain etched in my memory.

A B-17 with the 95th Bomb Group labors after losing an engine.

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Author Bill Livingstone, after enlisting in January 1943: his one and only mission in November 1944 became one he would never forget.

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95TH BOMB GROUP ASSOCIATION (ALL)

TWO DAYS BEFORE, on October 31, an orderly entered the Quonset hut where I was dozing at the 95th Bomb Group’s base—Station 119 at Horham Airfield in Suffolk, England. “Hey, Livingstone,” he said. “Wake up.” I rose on one elbow and shook the sleep out of my head. “Yeah?” “The major wants to see you.” I had joined the 95th Bomb Group about a month prior to be an aerial gunnery instructor. But aside from a week spent training on a new gun site at a Royal Air Force base near Bath, I had killed all my time goofing off—bored as I waited for the “training equipment” that someone said was set to arrive from the States. I later learned that “gunnery instructor” was a euphemism for “replacement gunner.” That was a little scary, but I actually looked forward to flying a mission. Major Harry M. Conley, commander of the 334th Bomb Squadron— a tall, good-looking Gregory Peck-type fellow—said, “Sergeant Livingstone, the nose gunner on Willis Pozolo’s crew is sick. I’d appreciate it if you’d volunteer to fill in for him for one mission.” “Yes, sir,” I replied—enthusiastically, as I recall. The major looked relieved. “Good. Go to supply, get a flight suit, and report to the briefing room at oh-five-hundred tomorrow morning

“GENTLEMEN, today the 95th’s target is the Leuna oil refinery at Merseburg.” With the briefing officer’s words arose groans of trepidation from the 350 airmen jammed in the cigarette-smoke-filled room early on November 2. They faced little danger from enemy aircraft by that time in 1944, but heavy antiaircraft protection on the ground made Merseburg the second-most feared target in Nazi Germany; Berlin was the first. At dawn, our “big-ass bird,” as we affectionately called the B-17, w ith its four 1,200-horsepower Pratt & Whitney radial engines, roared down the runway and lifted into England’s perennial overcast. For the flight, I was bundled in a leather helmet, a fleece-lined jacket, pants, and flight boots, all of which I donned over an electrically heated suit. Under that, I wore my regular olive-drab wool Army Air Forces uniform and long johns. On top of all that was my chest-pack parachute and harness, and, finally, my flak jacket and dishpan-shaped flak helmet. Plus, of course, my oxygen mask. No, I wasn’t too warm, because, at the altitude of 29,000 feet, the temperature was 41 degrees below zero. There was certainly no cabin heat in those days. I sat on a stool at the very front of the plane with the Plexiglas nose cone nearly surrounding me. I was not only the nose gunner; I was also the togglier—the guy who flipped the toggle switch that dropped the bombs. (Only our squadron’s lead plane had a bombardier.) After nearly five hours of flying over a dense cloud cover, I heard our pilot’s voice over the intercom: “Pilot to togglier, time to ready the bombs.” “Roger,” I responded and, after connecting my oxygen mask to a “walk-around” oxygen bottle, headed back to the narrow catwalk running through the center of the bomb bay. I leaned away from the catwalk toward the noses of the 10 500-pound bombs that hung on each side, one above the other, and with pliers in hand removed the cotter pins that prevented the bombs from arming accidentally.

COURTESY OF BILL LIVINGSTONE; PREVIOUS PAGES: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

for a practice mission, and you’ll fly a combat mission with the Ole Worrybird crew day after tomorrow.”

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COURTESY OF BILL LIVINGSTONE; PREVIOUS PAGES: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

That job being accomplished, I made my way back to my picture window in the sky. The only thing that had changed during the 10 minutes it took to arm the bombs was that the clouds below were now quite thin, and I could make out features on the ground, such as rivers and forests. At about 15 minutes before noon, I noticed a small dark cloud directly ahead of us, and I heard the pilot say over the intercom, “Flak, twelve o’clock.” The little cloud—rectangular and rapidly getting closer—was actually hundreds of puffs of black smoke: antiaircraft shells

exploding at our altitude and directly in our line of flight. The 95th Bomb Group had to fly right into that box of flak to reach our planned bomb-drop zone. Just before we entered this “cloud,” the pilot announced, “One minute to bombs away,” and we were suddenly in it— black puffs of smoke all around us. I remember thinking: this is just like the newsreels I’ve seen at movie houses for the last two years. At one point I heard what sounded like a paper bag pop, and the flak jacket I had laid over the lower part of the Plexiglas nose cone flopped back over my right foot. There was a small hole in the Plexiglas; I quickly put

Pilot Bill Pozolo (top, back row center) gathers with his crew from an earlier mission; in the front row are James Martin, second from left; Tony Capone, second from right; and Leo Moser, far right. While awaiting his first mission, the author whiled away time at Horham Airfield (above left and right) in England.

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and-a-half tons lighter, and I felt the force of gravity on my seat as if we had hit an air thermal updraft. Our entire squadron immediately banked hard to starboard to escape the flak zone; in 30 seconds, we emerged. What a relief. A couple of minutes later, though, I realized we were about 1,000 feet below—and dropping behind—the rest of our squadron. The pilot came over the intercom: “Attention crew. We’ve lost number one and number three,” he said. I quickly looked at the number-one engine: the propeller was feathered and motionless. As I turned to look at number three, the pilot said, “They must have hit a hydraulic line. I can’t feather number three. It’s windmilling.” Bad news. A windmilling propeller causes drag and slows the plane down. That’s when the pilot called roll. Because our radio operator, Tech Sergeant Tony Capone, had to maintain radio silence so as not to give away our position to enemy aircraft, he could not call for help. But two P-51 Mustang fighters spotted us falling behind and started doing “lazy-eights” over Ole Worrybird to fend off any enemy fighters. About then, Ole Worrybird’s entire electric system shorted out. We could no longer communicate over the intercom, use the radio, or fire the electrically operated .50-caliber machine guns. Even worse, superchargers on the two remaining engines no longer operated. Ole

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the flak jacket back in place. At that moment I glanced back at the navigator, First Lieutenant Bob Strachan, a veteran of 24 combat missions (he, too, was filling in for this mission). He was crouched on a couple of flak jackets and had a couple more draped over his head. I, on my first mission, sat up there in the nose cone dumb and innocent, watching the action all around me. The intercom crackled and I heard, “Pilot to togglier, open the bomb bay doors.” I f lipped the bomb bay door sw itch and reminded myself not to be distracted—to keep my eyes on our squadron’s lead plane. After what seemed like forever, but was probably about 60 seconds, I saw the smoke flare signal drop from the lead plane’s bomb bay. I put my finger on the bomb toggle switch. Shortly, there they were: 10 bombs dropped from the lead plane’s belly. I flipped the toggle switch. Ole Worrybird instantly became two-

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

A B-17 burns after being hit by flak over Germany. Because bombers needed to fly straight and level for several minutes during a bomb run, they were vulnerable to attack.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Worrybird sank to about 2,500 feet, and our airspeed dropped to 100 miles an hour. I learned later that at one point, while we were flying through the flak and taking evasive action, the waist crew thought we were going down and tried to open the escape hatch in the waist section but could not. Trapped, they decided to completely drop the ball turret, leaving a four-foot diameter hole in the bottom of the plane; bailout through that would be easy. Tony Capone, the radioman, had been sitting on the radio room floor with his feet dangling through that hole when Leo Moser shouted—mistakenly—“We’re out of control. Jump,” and Tony slid out into thin air. Their shock lessened just slightly when they saw his parachute bloom. WITHOUT GUIDANCE from an electric compass, the navigator, Bob Strachan, was unable to tell the pilot exactly where we were. He looked out the windows and then back to his charts a number of times, trying to figure out our location by comparing the configuration of the small towns, rivers, and roads below us to those on his charts. At about 1 p.m., half an hour after we dropped our bombs, the two escort P-51s ran low on fuel. They dipped their wings and sped toward England while we struggled on behind over the plains of northwestern Germany. Seeing them fly away left me with a strange feeling of loneliness. Soon the two fighters were out of sight. Fifteen minutes later, our pilot spotted a small airstrip and decided that because we were flying so low, it would be better to land and be taken prisoner than risk being shot down over the front lines. Most ground fighting at that time was in Holland and Belgium, not Germany. And, of course, there was the possibility we might avoid capture. While we repeatedly circled over the little airstrip, our pilot told the crew chief, Tech Sergeant Raymond Hill, to crank down our landing gear. One wheel cranked down easily, but the other was jammed; it wouldn’t budge. Meanwhile, when it became apparent to the rest of us that our pilot planned to land, I signaled to Strachan that the highly secret Norden bombsight should be destroyed first. I did this by pointing my right index finger with my thumb up, like a pistol, at the bombsight. Bob shook his head and pointed to his hip, where he might have carried a pistol, but

there was none. Sometime earlier in the war, the Army Air Forces had determined that its officers’ Colt .45s got them into more trouble than out of, and they no longer carried them into combat. But Bob agreed with me, and he signaled for me to go back to the escape hatch at the rear of the plane’s nose section. He unbolted the bombsight and handed it to me; I opened the hatch door against the wind stream and dropped it. I remember watching it grow smaller and smaller until it disappeared. I started to crawl back toward the front of the nose section; over the engines’ roar I heard Bob shout, “Bill.” When I looked up, he pointed behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw our copilot, Second Lieutenant Bart MacNeill, crouched in front of the hatch door I had just closed. He pulled the red jettison handle; the hatch door flew off and Bart rolled headfirst out into thin air. When I looked back at Bob, he signaled me to follow MacNeill on out. I had no idea what was going on, or why the copilot had bailed out. But without thinking about it or having time to be scared, I crawled back to the open hatch, crouched in front of it, and rolled out. That was when I became aware of what had happened. As I fell headfirst, I looked toward my feet and saw Ole Worrybird beyond them, perhaps 100 yards away, nosing down at a 45-degree angle. Flames were trailing from the right wing back to the tail assembly. Beyond the plane, I saw the belly of a German Focke-Wulf Fw 190 pull up from what must have been at least a second attack on our plane. The crew,

Luftwaffe personnel capture a group of American airmen (top). The author and fellow crewmen of Ole Worrybird spent time in several POW camps before winding up in the large Stalag VII/A in Moosburg, Germany, source of the ID tags above.

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U.S. AIR FORCE LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS; OPPOSITE: COURTESY OF BILL LIVINGSTONE

A typically detailed German POW identification card notes Livingstone’s mother’s maiden name, that his nose is medium-sized, and that he has a kräftig— powerful—build.

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the majority of whom had successfully completed 16 combat missions, now dropped out of Ole Worrybird like peas out of a pod. I’m plenty clear of the plane, I thought; there’s no reason to count to 10 like they’d taught us in gunnery school. I grasped the aluminum handle on the front of the chest pack and gave it a hard yank. The chute trailed above me as I continued to fall headfirst. It quickly blossomed open with a loud pop. The sudden stop whipped me around with a violent jerk, and everything went quiet. With an almost morbid fascination, I watched our magnificent hunk of machinery as it angled ever more steeply toward the ground. Within 30 seconds it crashed into a hedgerow about a half-mile away and exploded in a great ball of flame and black smoke. What a humiliating end to such a proud airplane. WITHIN A COUPLE OF MINUTES, my feet, butt, and head hit the ground hard. I thought about how lucky I was to be still wearing my flak helmet. I rolled onto my stomach, reached my knees, collapsed my chute, and stood up in a large plowed field with no cover in sight. After the bailout, the seven Ole Worrybird crewmen—minus James Martin and Tony Capone—were strung out on the ground fewer than 100 yards apart, close enough to exchange shouts. I heard my downwind neighbor yell that the man beyond him, the first to land, was hurt. I passed the word along and jogged over to where our copilot, Lieutenant MacNeill, with a look of disgust on his face, lay on the ground with a broken leg. Injuries like this rarely happened, even for first-time bailouts without paratrooper boots. We quickly gathered around our fallen copilot and were discussing what to do next when out of nowhere, a grizzled little old farmer ran up to us, waving his arms and shouting in either German or Dutch. We couldn’t understand his words, but we had no trouble understanding his frantic gestures: he wanted us to get the hell out of there. He didn’t want us to get caught on his farm, I suppose, where he might be suspected of aiding the enemy. We still didn’t know where we were—Germany, Belgium, or Holland—so I held up my hands to the farmer to stop his jabbering. I pointed in a northerly direction and said, “England.” Then I pointed toward the west and said, “France.” Finally, I pointed straight down at the ground and asked, “What is this?”

Former POWs celebrate the liberation of Stalag VII/A on April 29, 1945. “We were miserably housed, always hungry, usually too cold,” the author writes of his time as a POW. But he believed a happy ending would come, and it did.

He didn’t understand those words, but he certainly understood what I wanted to know, because he turned his shriveled-up face to me and said, “Geermony!”—his way of saying, “Deutschland” in English. Here we were at two in the afternoon, in enemy territory, with no cover or hiding place in sight. We hadn’t figured out yet what to do about Lieutenant MacNeill when we saw a dust cloud rising behind a motorcycle and a small, camouflage-colored panel truck bounding across the plowed field in our direction. Someone said, “That’s it. We’ve had it.” The vehicles came to a stop 30 feet from us, and a dozen German Wehrmacht soldiers spilled out of the back of the truck, their rifles pointed. They shouted, “Oben, oben!” Clearly, they wanted us to raise our hands. This we did, in complete surrender. Quickly a small crowd of civilians gathered to look at the “Yonkee Schreckenfliegers” (Yankee Terror Flyers). Because we had spent about 10 minutes circling the small landing field, they had had plenty of opportunities to see us bail out of the burning Ole Worrybird. At first, I was concerned, as I knew how angry German civilians were about the Allied bombing of their country. But more curious than hostile, these country folk—unlike the Germans who lived in cities—had been mostly isolated from the terrible destruction of war. Finally, the soldiers put our copilot in the motorcycle’s sidecar and took him away to a hospital. They made the rest of us gather up our parachutes and marched us down a country road. After about three miles we came to a small Wehrmacht garrison, where we officially started our tour as prisoners of war. That night, billeted in a cold damp stable, the remaining six of us discussed our fate and retraced the last flight of Ole Worrybird. I and the others spent the next six months in various POW camps in Nazi Germany. It was at our final camp, Stalag VII/A near Moosburg in southern Bavaria, that one of our crewmen crossed paths again with Tony Capone, whom I kept in touch with until his death in 2018. We were miserably housed, always hungry, usually too cold, but always knowing in the end that we would return home to our parents and loved ones. We just had to wait it out. The single day that got me there is the best-remembered out of all the days of my 96 years. H OCTOBER 2020

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Japanese crewmembers salute as their aircraft carrier, Zuikaku, sinks into the Pacific during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

REVIEWS BOOKS

By Ian W. Toll. 944 pp. W. W. Norton & Company, 2020. $40.

TWILIGHT OF THE GODS, which covers 1944 and 1945, completes naval historian Ian Toll’s much-lauded trilogy on the Pacific War at sea between the United States and Japan. The first two volumes, 2012’s Pacific Crucible and 2016’s The Conquering Tide, carry the story from Pearl Harbor to Midway, then Guadalcanal to the Mariana Islands. This one picks up in the United States, with a vivid and shrewd account of president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s contentious relationship with the press—which Toll writes had “deteriorated sharply since his first presidential term”— followed by a colorful portrayal of FDR’s July 1944 Pacific strategy meeting with General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz at Pearl Harbor. From there Toll hops across the globe to Asia, launching into a riveting narrative that never

moves at less than flank speed. A highlight of Twilight of the Gods is Toll’s action-packed, 100-plus page account of the 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle of World War II and an Allied victory that crushed the Japanese Combined Fleet. Toll sheds light on Japan’s strategic and operational decisions, focusing on the divide between Tokyo headquarters and the forces afloat. He writes that the Japanese sailors manning the ships understood that the unstated basis of Tokyo’s orders was to ensure that the fleet “put up one last good fight before the war came to an end.” But the men ordered to carry out a nautical banzai charge wondered why the commander-inchief of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Soemu Toyoda, remained at his headquarters ashore rather than assume personal leader-

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TWILIGHT OF THE GODS War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945

COURTESY OF MR. KAZUTOSHI HANDO, U.S. NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

FINAL ACT IN THE PACIFIC THEATER

NARODOWE ARCHIWUM CYFROWE

COURTESY OF MR. KAZUTOSHI HANDO, U.S. NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

ship of the death ride. Furthermore, the officers and men sensed that their own annihilation offered no realistic prospect for securing any significant advantage for Japan in the war. Like almost all historians of the battle, Toll justly castigates Admiral William F. Halsey for chasing a decoy force of Japanese carriers (most without planes) with his entire Third Fleet and leaving the Leyte invasion force exposed to Admiral Takeo Kurita’s formidable surface ship task force. But Toll is, in my view, too charitable to Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, the Seventh Fleet commander. As the Battle of Leyte Gulf peaked on October 24-25, 1944, Kinkaid based his strategies upon the crucial assumption that Halsey had left behind his Task Force 34 battleship force to guard San Bernardino Strait and thus block the passage of Admiral Kurita’s task force. Kinkaid, however, based this belief on a misinterpretation of one of Halsey’s radioed orders that was not even addressed to him. Very belatedly, Kinkaid sought to confirm this foundation for his whole operational plan in the early hours of October 25— far too late for a timely response. His failure to seek clarification hours earlier when it might have proved pivotal constitutes an egregious failure. The remainder of the book consists of balanced yet nuanced coverage of an array of topics including MacArthur’s “return” to the Philippines; life on the American home front; the battles for Manila, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa; and the final agonized Japanese route to surrender. The one caveat of Toll’s trilogy is that it overwhelmingly focuses on the United States and Japan, to the exclusion of other nations like Australia and the Philippines. But overall, this volume—as well as Toll’s trilogy as a whole—represents a triumph of research, storytelling, and fluid prose. —Richard B. Frank is an internationally recognized historian of the Asia-Pacific War. His book Tower of Skulls, the first volume of a trilogy on the Asia-Pacific War, was published in March 2020.

German soldiers tear down a Polish border post on the first day of the invasion.

REVIEWS BOOKS

FIRST TO FIGHT WHEN HITLER LAUNCHED HIS ATTACK on Poland on September 1, 1939, igniting World War II, the disparity between invader and defender could not have been greater. The Germans enjoyed a 5-1 advantage in aircraft and a 3-1 advantage in artillery and tanks; plus, Polish hardware was hardly comparable. My father, a Polish cadet officer at the time, led a platoon equipped with castoff World War I Renault tanks. They had no chance against the Panzers that quickly overwhelmed them. But it wasn’t just Germany’s superior firepower that doomed Poland to defeat, explains British historian POLAND 1939 Roger Moorhouse in his compelling account of Germa- The Outbreak of ny’s September campaign against the first country that World War II dared to fight rather than submit. Britain and France By Roger Moorhouse. 432 pp. Basic Books, had vowed to defend Poland; yet aside from formally 2020. $32. declaring war on Germany on September 3, they largely stood by and watched their ally get crushed. Whatever hopes the Poles still had for survival swiftly evaporated when Red Army troops invaded from the east on September 17, carving up the country as agreed under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact signed less than a month earlier. Although often scattershot and poorly coordinated, the Polish defense was far more valiant—and inflicted more casualties—than their invaders expected. After one battle, a German 7th Army Corps report acknowledged: “Brave lads, these Poles.” An SS officer also praised their enemy’s courage, pointing out that they “proved repeatedly they know how to die.” Such tributes, however, did nothing to lessen the invaders’ savagery in what they saw as a race war. German forces viewed Poles and other Slavs as Untermenschen: subhumans who could be slaughtered at will. Any pretext was good enough to justify mass executions and destroyed villages. While Jews were often singled out by Hitler’s troops, the Holocaust had yet to begin in earnest. But as Moorhouse illustrates, everything that happened during this opening act of the war—including the terrors simultaneously experienced by Poles in Soviet-occupied territory— offered a preview of larger horrors to come. —Andrew Nagorski is the author, most recently, of 1941: The Year Germany Lost the War (2019). OCTOBER 2020

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SECONDARY VILLAINS

LAST MISSION TO TOKYO The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raiders and Their Final Fight for Justice

By Michel Paradis. 480 pp. Simon & Schuster, 2020. $28.

THE DOOLITTLE RAID is one of the greatest stories of World War II, a virtual suicide mission flown by 80 volunteer airmen aiming to pummel Tokyo and then escape to free China. As such, the April 1942 mission led by famed aviator Jimmy Doolittle has been the subject of numerous books and documentaries; it’s also been included in more than a few Hollywood movies, most recently director Roland Emmerich’s 2019 film Midway. Attorney and legal scholar Michel Paradis is therefore wise to avoid rehashing this familiar history in his new book, Last Mission to Tokyo, focusing instead on the lesserknown 1946 war-crimes trial that rounded out the raiders’ story. Eight airmen were ultimately captured in the strike. Japan executed three of them; a fourth starved to death in prison, and the remaining men suffered more than three years in horrific prisoner-of-war camps, much of that time spent in solitary confinement. At the war’s end, prosecutors set out to pursue charges against

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COURTESY OF BULLFROG FILMS, INC.

REVIEWS BOOKS

those involved in the Allied airmens’ imprisonment, torture, and execution. Paradis centers his book around the 17-day trial of four Japanese defendants, mostly low-level, little-known officia ls who w i l l li kely not garner any sympathy from readers. (One, in fact, was later convicted in another trial for decapitating two American airmen captured later in the war.) The real big fish was General Sadamu Shimomura, who issued the raiders’ execution orders; he was too valuable a postwar asset, so General Douglas MacArthur’s staff protected him from prosecution. His absence robs the trial of a dominant villain. Paradis also details a handful of American characters, including raider Chase Nielsen, the only airman who testified in the trial; prosecutor Major Robert Dwyer; and defense lawyer Lieutenant Colonel Edmund Bodine. Those interested in the Doolittle Raid won’t find much new in Last Mission to Tokyo that can’t be gleaned from previous books on the topic. That said, Paradis does a good job bringing the trial to life while also highlighting less-famous war figures like Japanese General Tomoy uki Yamashita, who was hanged in 1946 for atrocities committed by his forces during the Battle of Manila—overall, a much more consequential trial that resulted in a Supreme Court decision. Paradis’s laser focus on the raid’s ensuing legal proceedings does come at the expense of developing the characters of the imprisoned and executed raiders, an oversight that would have elevated the emotional stakes of the trial story he tells. That said, fans of the famed air raid as well as legal enthusiasts will find much to enjoy in this book. —James M. Scott is the author of the Doolittle Raid history Target Tokyo, a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in History, and of Rampage (2018), a history of the Battle of Manila.

COURTESY OF SIMON & SCHUSTER

Japanese defendants wait to be tried in 1946 for committing war crimes against eight Allied airmen from the Doolittle Raid.

BRIEFS

THE PRICE OF PEACE

A bevy of new titles marks the 75th anniversary of the victory against Japan

140 DAYS TO HIROSHIMA The Story of Japan’s Last Chance to Avert Armageddon By David Dean Barrett. 352 pp. Diversion Books, 2020. $27.99.

This thoroughly researched history takes readers inside the Japanese and U.S. governments as they grapple with fateful decisions leading up to the war’s end: Should the U.S. invade or drop the atomic bombs? Should Japan surrender or die to the last man and woman? A gripping day-by-day narrative.

EAGLE AGAINST THE SUN The American War With Japan

By Ronald H. Spector. 688 pp. The Folio Society, 2020. $115. Republished to commemorate the 75th anniversary of V-J Day, military historian Ronald H. Spector’s detailed and well-paced 1985 chronicle of the Allied war against Japan now comes complete with 32 pages of rare photographs, brand-new maps, a foward by Yale history professor Paul Kennedy, and fresh cover art. A classic worth re-reading—and displaying.

KAMIKAZE Japan’s Last Bid for Victory Setsuko Thurlow (top, and second from right here) survived the Hiroshima bombing as a teenager.

SETSUKO THURLOW, who survived the bombing of Hiroshima as a 13-yearDirected by old schoolgirl, channels her trauma Susan Strickler. into activism. The 88-year-old travels 82 minutes. the world as an anti-nuclear crusader, Bullfrog Films, reliving the horrors she observed on Streaming on August 6, 1945, as a representative for Ovid.tv: www. the International Campaign to Abolish ovid.tv/videos/ the-vow-fromNuclear Weapons. The Vow From Hirohiroshima. shima, a documentary released to coincide with the Hiroshima attack’s 75th anniversary, follows Thurlow as she moves hearts and minds around the globe, jointly accepts a 2017 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, and mentors the younger Mitchie Takeuchi, a Hiroshima native who mines Thurlow’s wisdom for insights into her own mother’s experience with the bombing—and her reluctance to discuss the disaster.

COURTESY OF BULLFROG FILMS, INC. (BOTH)

COURTESY OF SIMON & SCHUSTER

THE VOW FROM HIROSHIMA

By Adrian Stewart. 224 pp. Pen and Sword Books, 2020. $29.95.

In 224 succinct pages, British author Adrian Stewart studies the samurai origins of the Japanese concept of kamikaze and how the terrifying suicide attacks came to be used against the U.S. throughout the Pacific, especially at Okinawa, as an increasingly desperate Japan tried to stave off final defeat.

UNCONDITIONAL The Japanese Surrender in World War II

By Marc Gallicchio. 288 pp. Oxford University Press, 2020. $27.95. An in-depth, readable look at FDR’s “unconditional surrender” policy, the ideological and partisan divide behind its support and opposition in the U.S., and how it’s colored our understanding of the war and played a role in the conduct of America’s wars for decades to come.

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REVIEWS BOOKS

TWO-EDGED SWORD THE ATOMIC AGE has been a topic of discourse from the moment an unnatural light flashed over the New Mexico desert sky on July 16, 1945. Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and other eyewitnesses recorded their realtime thoughts, observations, and emotions toward the Trinity nuclear test in intimate By Chris Wallace, detail. Since then, society’s collective view of with Mitch Weiss. America’s use of nuclear weapons against 320 pp. Avid Reader Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been revisited in Press, 2020. $30. print many times as each generation puts the decision to drop the bombs on trial anew. Into this literary mushroom cloud venture Fox News anchor Chris Wallace and investiga-

COUNTDOWN 1945 The Extraordinary Story of the Atomic Bomb and the 116 Days That Changed the World

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

A mushroom cloud rises above the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

tive reporter Mitch Weiss with their new book, Countdown 1945. Taking a reporter’s approach, the two mine human vignettes, colorful quotes, and small yet telling details from archival sources and interviews, packaging them into a highly readable, balanced account of the bombings. The race to build the world’s first atomic weapon became the war’s second-most expensive weapons project—exceeded in cost only by the B-29 bomber program whose most famous product, the Enola Gay, carried the “Little Boy” uranium bomb from Tinian Island to Hiroshima. From inception to explosion, Little Boy’s story could fill several volumes, but Wallace and Weiss focus on the brief yet key period between Truman’s investiture as America’s 33rd president in April 1945 to his receipt of Japan’s announcement of surrender four months later. The book’s hero is Colonel Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay over Hiroshima and led the super-secret 509th Composite Group from its training in the Utah desert to the tiny Pacific island of Tinian. Other characters, American and Japanese, receive their due as well, from Truman, Oppenheimer, and Major General Leslie Groves, the Manhattan Project’s leader, to bombing survivors like Hideko Tamura, a 10-year-old girl who survived the terrifying blast in her family’s Hiroshima home. Countdown 1945 provides a balanced moral judgment of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings: war is hell, but no responsible decisionmaker in summer 1945 felt there was any other realistic alternative to end the war. Writers often examine this legacy through a technical lens, citing detailed descriptions of uranium isotopes and Pacific weather conditions before and during the bomb drops. Countdown 1945’s value, however, lies in its general yet comprehensive telling of a sobering story, enlivened through character and dialogue. By teasing out the human side of the nuclear behemoth, Wallace and Weiss tell a humane story of an inhumane weapon. —Jonathan W. Jordan is the bestselling author of Brothers, Rivals, Victors: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, and the Partnership that Drove the Allied Conquest in Europe (2011).

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BOOK BRIEFS 12 SECONDS OF SILENCE How a Team of Inventors, Tinkerers, and Spies Took Down a Nazi Superweapon

By Jamie Holmes. 416 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. $27. This story of the small band of Americans who developed the proximity fuse—a smart weapon that triggered explosive devices near their targets—zips along with the propulsion of a thriller. Deployed over London in mid-1944, it neutralized the V-1 threat.

40 THIEVES ON SAIPAN The Elite Marine Scout-Snipers in One of WWII’s Bloodiest Battles

By Joseph Tachovsky with Cynthia Kraack. 338 pp. Regnery History, 2020. $29.99. A gritty tale of a Marine scout-sniper team, as told by its leader’s son. Its novelized approach, with fictionalized characters and recreated action and dialogue, may frustrate history purists.

SOVIET JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II COURTESY OF SIMON & SCHUSTER; OPPOSITE: OSPREY GAMES

By Francine Hirsch. 560 pp. Oxford University Press, 2020. $34.95. A fascinating deep-dive into the little-explored Soviet role at the Nuremberg trials. Hirsch mines documents from Soviet archives to detail how the Russians first championed the concept of war crimes—and also how the trials exposed their own complicities in one of the opening salvos of the Cold War.

REVIEWS GAMES

DESERT SHOWDOWN UNDAUNTED: NORTH AFRICA WORLD WAR II RATING

Osprey Games, $40.

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THE BASICS Undaunted: North Africa is a card-driven, tacticallevel wargame played between two people representing either the British Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) or the Italian Army. The cards command squads of 15 to 20 soldiers and vehicles; they can also alter capabilities or direct which soldiers and vehicles a player can move during any given turn. THE OBJECTIVE Each game introduces new scenarios, with objectives ranging from protecting or destroying structures and controlling terrain to annihilating enemy soldiers and vehicles. HISTORICAL ACCURACY Undaunted: North Africa offers a great

blend of accuracy and simplicity. While it may not provide the detailed realism of a more elaborate tactical-level game, players will still experience challenging decisions confronted by real tactical commanders. The soldiers and their vehicles also accurately reflect the capabilities of the LRDG and the Italian Army in the early North African campaign. The same can be said of the missions, which mirror those that the LRDG conducted, and the type of battles the Italians fought against them.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY The cards make the game

exciting, as you can never be certain which your opponent has or how they will play them. And from an aesthetic standpoint, pieces representing both the units and the map tiles are both detailed and beautiful. However, one small criticism against the game is its limited scope: despite the title, Undaunted: North Africa focuses entirely on battles between the LRDG and the Italians. While the North African Theater is a sadly neglected historical topic among boardgames, players won’t, say, be able to command the feisty Desert Rats of the Eighth Army against Rommel’s vaunted Afrika Korps.

PLAYABILITY

The rules are well-written and easy to understand, and the cards create enough variance that participants will be excited to replay the same scenarios over again. However, over time, the limited types of units and cards might become familiar enough to players that the game slowly loses its appeal.

THE BOTTOM LINE Undaunted: North Africa is fun: the card

system mirrors warfare’s unpredictability, resulting in a fast, thrilling game. —Chris Ketcherside is a retired Marine, a lifelong wargamer, and a PhD candidate in American history.

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BATTLE FILMS BY MARK GRIMSLEY

BROKEN FAITH

MIDWAY THROUGH director Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna, his 2008 film about a squad in the “Buffalo Soldiers,” the all-Black 92nd Infantry Division fighting in Italy in 1944, an African American sergeant, Aubrey Stamps (played by Derek Luke), explains to his peers what he is fighting for: his home country. “We helped build it from the ground up,” Stamps says. “I’m here for my children and future grandchildren. This is about progress.”

A nother sergeant, Bishop Cummings (Michael Ealy), will have none of it, reminding Stamps of an incident stateside in which a restaurant refused service to the squad as German prisoners of war contentedly dined inside. Incidents like this actually happened: Time magazine reported in July 1944 that Black troops passing through El Paso, Texas, were barred from entering a local restaurant where they could clearly see the POWs seated at tables and served hot food. The American troops received cold handouts. In addition to capturing the rampant racism that African Americans were facing on the home front, Miracle at St. Anna correctly portrays the resistance and skepticism toward utilizing Black combat soldiers during World War II. In 1942, the U.S. War Department surveyed White enlisted men and discovered, unsurprisingly, “a strong prejudice against sharing recreation, theater, or post exchange facilities with Negroes.” Confronted with this news, Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall simply threw up his hands. “Experiments within the Army in the solution of social problems are fraught with danger to efficiency, discipline, and morale,” he warned. (The postwar desegregation of the armed forces, of course, showed that these problems could be overcome.) Although activated in October 1942, the 92nd Infantry Division did not see combat for nearly two years until advance units disembarked at Naples in August 1944. The action in Miracle at St. Anna occurs several months later, when the 92nd attempts to cross the Serchio River in Tuscany as a prelude to attacking the Gothic Line, the German defensive line established across Italy just north of Florence. As the Americans approach the river, a German truck with loudspeakers blares a recording of “Axis Sally,” the American-born propaganda broadcaster, who appeals to the Buffalo Soldiers to give up their fight, noting that back home they are second-class citizens. Why die in a White man’s war? When, in the ensuing assault, one infantry company makes it across the river, its White captain—far to the rear—flatly disbelieves that Black troops could have covered such a great

COLLECTION CHRISTOPHEL/ALAMY; OPPOSITE: PICTORIAL PRESS LTD./ALAMY

Spike Lee’s 2008 film Miracle at St. Anna follows the 92nd Infantry Division “Buffalo Soldiers” as they battle racism and Nazis in German-occupied Italy.

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distance against withering German fire. Instead of firing artillery at the position that Stamps identifies as the location of the German defenders, the captain calls down fire upon the company’s own position. Forced to re-cross the Serchio under heavy German machine gun fire and now facing artillery shells from both sides, most of the company is wiped out. Stamps and three other soldiers crawl farther onto the German side instead, setting in motion the film’s main plot as it follows them through a series of harrowing, ultimately tragic adventures. Miracle at St. Anna, too, accurately characterizes real-life 92nd Division commander Major General Edward M. “Ned” Almond’s distaste for his underlings. Historically, he declared, “The white man…is willing to die for patriotic reasons. The Negro is not. No white man wants to be accused of leaving the battle line. The Negro doesn’t care.” In the film, learning that the four soldiers are on the German side of the Serchio, the Almond character gives orders that the squad capture a German soldier who can be interrogated to confirm reports that German forces are massing for a counterattack. He is unconcerned that to do so the soldiers must leave the tenuous refuge they have found in a small Italian village and face almost-certain death when they encounter any of the German units that surround them. Three of the four squad members, including Stamps, perish in the following scenes. After all of these injustices, one might wonder what Stamps’s ghost would make of the conditions under which his descendants exist today. During World War II, African Americans championed a “Double-V Campaign”: victory over the Axis abroad, victory over racism at home. Yet even 75 years after the war’s end, the campaign’s second goal still

“I’m here for my children and future grandchildren. This is about progress.” falls short of being fulfilled. Faced with this disheartening reality more than seven decades after his death, could Stamps believe otherwise than that America had broken faith with the ultimate sacrifice he had laid upon the altar of his country? H

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THE ONLY PILOT TO STRIKE THE MAINLAND FACED AN UNLIKELY RECKONING

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TODAY IN HISTORY JULY 17, 1918 TSAR NICHOLAS II OF RUSSIA AND HIS FAMILY WERE EXECUTED. YEARS LATER, CONSPIRACY THEORIES EMERGED, AND IMPOSTORS BEGAN TO SURFACE. AN EASTERN EUROPEAN WOMAN NAMED ANNA ANDERSON CLAIMED TO BE GRAND DUCHESS ANASTASIA ROMANOV, SPARED DEATH IN 1918 BY A SYMPATHETIC GUARD. TEN YEARS AFTER HER DEATH IN 1994, DNA TESTING CONCLUDED SHE WAS NOT ANASTASIA BUT A MISSING POLISH FACTORY WORKER. For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ TODAY-IN-HISTORY

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CHALLENGE

STARRING ROLE

PHOTOQUEST/GETTY IMAGES; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN WALKER

We altered this photo of General George S. Patton preparing to review troops from the air to create one inaccuracy. What is it?

Answer to the June Challenge: Many of you—194

to be exact—correctly called us out for rotating the 3rd Infantry Division’s insignia. The unaltered version is at far left. A number of the correct entrants noted that they recognized the insignia because it had been Audie Murphy’s, one of the U.S.’s most decorated soldiers.

Congratulations to the winners: Dave Duff, Dave

Nystuen, and Karen Ritzer

Please send your answer with your name

and mailing address to: October 2020 Challenge, World War II, 1919 Gallows Road, Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182; or e-mail: challenge@ historynet.com. Three winners, chosen at random from all correct entries submitted by October 15, will receive Countdown 1945 by Chris Wallace, with Mitch Weiss. Answer will appear in the February 2021 issue.

OCTOBER 2020

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FAMILIAR FACE

FUNNY BUSINESS

U.S. MARINE CORPS/NATIONAL ARCHIVES AT ST. LOUIS; INSET: GETTY IMAGES

New York-born Donald J. Yarmy served in Guadalcanal with I Company of the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines, where a serious bout of blackwater fever—a complication of malaria—cut his combat role short. The private first class spent a year at a navy hospital in Wellington, New Zealand, before being transferred back to the U.S. After the war he embarked on a career as an impressionist and comedian, assuming his wife’s last name—Adams—professionally. In the mid-1960s, NBC offered him the lead role in the spy spoof, Get Smart. And Don Adams played the ironically named Maxwell Smart (below) well—perhaps too well: he thought he became typecast, which hindered his career. Sorry about that, Chief.

WORLD WAR II

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

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THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY

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Pickett’s Notorious Hangings Soldier Voten Gives Lincol the Edge in 1864

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SEPTEMBER 2020

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