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STEP INTO IKE’S 1945 WAR ROOM A BABE’S LAST HOME RUN

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NOT-SO-GREAT ESCAPE POWs Tunnel Out of Prison —But Can They Get Away?

The War • The Home Fro

PREDATORS IN THE

PACIFIC US Subs Shred Japanese Ships

The Enemy Within? Feds Round Up German And Italian Immigrants

Lieutenant Commander Dudley Morton, skipper of the shipkilling USS Wahoo

April 2013

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AM E RICA I N

WWII The War

• The Home Front • The People

April 2013, Volume Eight, Number Six

40

24

14

FEATURES

14 PREDATORS IN THE PACIFIC US sub skippers were overcautious at the war’s start, and their torpedoes were junk. Three years later, they had taken down half of Japan’s shipping. By Drew Ames

24 THE NOT-SO-GREAT ESCAPE Long before it became a movie, the so-called Great Escape was 76 real POWs tunneling out of Stalag Luft III—and Germans excecuting 50 of them. By Tom Huntington

32 ENEMIES IN OUR MIDST? As GIs battled Nazi and Fascist forces overseas, the US government put 15,000 German and Italian immigrants in prison to keep an eye on them. By Melissa Amateis Marsh

40 ALPHA DOG Every morning, FDR received a breakfast tray with eggs and toast—and a treat for his most trusted and faithful friend, America’s most highly placed canine. By David A. Norris

departments 2 KILROY 4 V-MAIL 6 PINUP: Wanda McKay 7, 47, 51 FLASHBACKS 8 HOME FRONT: Babe’s Last Blast 10 THE FUNNIES: Jungle Jim 12 LANDINGS: Victory’s Schoolhouse 46 I WAS THERE: Unsung Sailor 54 WAR STORIES 58 BOOKS AND MEDIA 60 THEATER OF WAR: Slaughterhouse-Five 62 78 RPM: Fats Waller 63 WWII EVENTS 64 GIs: Airman Down COVER SHOT: Lieutenant Commander Dudley “Mush” Morton, skipper of the sub USS Wahoo (SS-238), looks like a movie star in his circa-1943 portrait by Hollywood photographer Bert Longworth. Morton’s nickname was short for Mushmouth, a Moon Mullins comic character. Under Morton, Wahoo sank 17–19 Japanese ships before disappearing north of Japan in October 1943. NATIONAL ARCHIVES

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A KILROY WAS HERE

• The Home Front • The People

March–April 2013 Volume Eight • Number Six www.AmericaInWWII.com PUBLISHER

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Read Like My Dad I WAS TALKING WITH A FRIEND RECENTLY after she looked over our February 2013 issue. She mentioned that she thought my writing was good, but that I shouldn’t expect her to read it because she didn’t care much for the subject matter. After applying a tourniquet to stop my pride from spilling from the wound and ruining the carpet, I thought about why people might not be especially interested in the story of the four years that our parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents spent changing the world.

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Heidi Kushlan 717-564-0161, [email protected] A Publication of 310 PUBLISHING, LLC CEO Heidi Kushlan EDITORIAL DIRECTOR James P. Kushlan AMERICA IN WWII (ISSN 1554-5296) is published bimonthly by 310 Publishing LLC, 4711 Queen Avenue, Suite 202, Harrisburg, PA 17109. Periodicals postage paid at Harrisburg, PA. SUBSCRIPTION RATE: One year (six issues) $29.95; outside the U.S., $41.95 in U.S. funds. Customer service: call toll-free 866-525-1945 (U.S. & Canada), or write AMERICA IN WWII, P.O. Box 421945, Palm Coast, FL 32142, or visit online at www.americainwwii.com. POSTMASTER: SEND ADDRESS CHANGES TO AMERICA IN WWII, P.O. BOX 421945, PALM COAST, FL 32142. Copyright 2013 by 310 Publishing LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this issue may be reproduced by any means without prior written permission of the publisher. Address letters, War Stories, and GIs correspondence to: Editor, AMERICA IN WWII, 4711 Queen Ave., Suite 202, Harrisburg, PA 17109. Letters to the editor become the property of AMERICA IN WWII and may be edited. Submission of text and images for War Stories and GIs gives AMERICA IN WWII the right to edit, publish, and republish them in any form or medium. No unsolicited article manuscripts, please: query first. AMERICA IN WWII does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of advertisements, reviews, or letters to the editor that appear herein.

I recalled years ago reading a column the late political commentator Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote about interest in politics. She explained that she couldn’t understand how some people would not closely monitor events that affected their lives and required an informed vote from them on Election Day. There they sat at the breakfast table, flipping past the newspaper’s meatiest pages, merely glancing at the headlines on the way to the comics and sports sections. One day it dawned on her that she didn’t deserve special commendation for reading every jot and tittle of political news and analysis that came within arm’s reach. She did so because she had an insatiable interest in the material. She invested her time and effort the way someone else might with tying intricate flies for trout fishing or following the twists and turns of Taylor Swift’s love life. The same goes for history. We can make ourselves feel a little more important by speaking about how we learn lessons for the present and future by inquiring into the past. But we can learn valuable lessons from the dedicated study of anything that has some depth to it. History does hold out more hope of rewarding us with wisdom than most other subjects do, but whether or not we study it still comes down mostly to personal interest. My dad began subscribing to this magazine back when we started publishing it in 2005. A 12-year-old at the war’s start who watched his brothers ship out to fight overseas, he sat on the couch in the 2000s and read each of our issues more or less cover to cover. He’d insert a bookmark when he took a break, so he could make sure he didn’t accidentally miss anything when he picked it back up later. He usually didn’t say much about what he’d taken in, but on occasion he’d suddenly enthuse about, say, a favorite song of his that I’d written about in 78 RPM, or talk sadly about something more serious that bothered him, like the rounding up of immigrants from Axis nations here in the States (see page 32 for coverage of the internment of German and Italian aliens). My dad’s experience is what we hope for all readers. Assuming he didn’t read the magazine only out of a sense of obligation to his son (but if he did, I’m OK with that!), he must have found the stories, and our particular treatment of them, interesting and enjoyable. I’d like to think he even learned something of value.

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A V-MAIL THE MAD GASSER’S NOXIOUS GAS I WAS DRAWN BY the sight of a friend of mine on your February 2013 cover: Alex Vraciu. Being a forensic toxicologist, I was also drawn to “The Mad Gasser” article. I was a little taken back by the spokesman for Atlas claiming “trichloroethylene was odorless and did not produce ill effects in humans.” In the early 1970s, my first job out of college was for a construction testing company. We routinely used Trisolve (liquid trichloroethylene) to wash asphalt from core samples when testing mix samples from bad sections of highways. Let me tell you, that stuff is not odorless, especially when poured over hot asphalt samples. This action alone probably produced a good quantity of phosgene, a WWI poison gas. One day, we heard that one of the guys had collapsed over the weekend and was in the hospital. His kidneys were failing. After two weeks in the hospital, he was back on his feet, but didn’t return to work for months. During this time, I saw a report of extreme body shutdown caused by trichloroethylene and the consumption of alcohol. The subject of the report was tiling a large shower and washed down the walls with trichloroethylene. Following the day’s work, he went to his local bar for a few beers. He became weak and violently ill, throwing up blood, and developed kidney failure. M ARK W. MAXWELL forensic toxicologist, retired New Jersey State Police Office of Forensic Sciences received via e-mail

MORE GOOD-WAR GOTHAMITES I ENJOYED Tom Huntington’s article “Gotham and the Good War” in the February 2013 issue. He listed several prominent New Yorkers who figured in the war, but he left out two: former New York Governor Hugh L. Carey and former New York City Mayor Ed Koch. Carey and Koch were members of the 104th Infantry Division, serving under General Terry de La Mesa Allen from Belgium through Holland and into 4 AMERICA IN WWII

APRIL 2013

Germany to the end of the war in Europe. Carey served in the headquarters of the 415th Infantry Regiment and on Allen’s staff. Following the war and his time as governor, he served on the Battlefield Monuments Commission and was one of those who planned the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC. Koch served as an enlisted man in F Company, 415th Infantry Regiment. W ILLIAM S. JACKSON Hummelstown, Pennsylvania

ERROL FLYNN SCANDAL EPILOGUE OVER THE YEARS I heard of the Errol Flynn rape scandal [“Scandal in Hollywood,” February 2013]. After the war, attorney Jerry Geisler would go on to defend actor Robert Mitchum in the Marijuana Trial. As for Betty Hansen and Peggy Satterlee, musical trivia offers that one of them, probably Satterlee, portrays a chorus girl while Mitzi Gaynor performs “Honey Bun” in the 1958 movie production of South Pacific. J OHN ORR Orlando, Florida

mostly Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Infantry Battalion] were awarded the highest honors by the free nation of France and the State of Texas for their battlefield heroism, even though many were not welcome to return to their hometowns. Nisei in the Military Intelligence Service served crucial roles as interpreters and translators, but couldn’t receive the thanks of a grateful nation because the government didn’t acknowledge their existence for over 40 years. Nisei soldiers were involved in the liberation of Dachau, but the army covered it up. All of this while their families were illegally incarcerated. D AVID UNRUHE Auburn, California received via e-mail

TALKING WWII, THINKING VIETNAM? IN THE V-MAIL SECTION [February 2013 issue] Fred Davis’s letter “What’s a Door Gunner?” was interesting because there is such a person as a door gunner. During the Vietnam War, the men who manned M-60 defensive machine guns on assault helicopters sat in the door area and were referred to as door gunners, which probably triggered the confusion in the original article. JOSEPH RACHINSKY

BRITS ON THE USS CARMICK? THE PHOTO ON PAGE 32 [“D-Day at 900 Yards,” February 2013] does not show crew members on the Carmick, unless the destroyer had a British crew. The guys in the photo are wearing Royal Navy square-cut T-shirts and sailor hats, not the Dixie cup–style white hats as seen on the American gun crew on page 33. The US white hat was occasionally dyed dark blue for camouflage purposes, but the cut differs from the hats worn by the Royal Navy sailors. B OB TAYLOR Painesville, Ohio

West Chester, Pennsylvania received via e-mail

GREMLINS February 2013: “Hell on Wings”—Truk Lagoon was not the crash location of the Japanese Zero Robert Duncan shot down on October 5, 1943; the Brewster Buffalo was model F2A, not F2B; and Jiro Horikoshi was not a Japanese navy officer but the designer of the Zero. “D-Day at 900 Yards”—The USS Carmick was named for Daniel Carmick, not John Carmick, as the bottom caption on page 34 states.

received via e-mail

JAPANESE AMERICAN HONOR I SINCERELY APPRECIATED your column in the February 2013 issue [Kilroy, “A Thousand Words”]. Members of the 100/442 [the

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WWII PINUP

Wanda McKay First, the name had to go—a girl could hardly become a star with “D-o-r-o-t-h-y Q-u-a-c-k-e-n-b-u-s-h” promoting her on movie theater marquees. The daughter of Guy and Ethel Quackenbush of Portland, Oregon, became Wanda McKay. McKay took her first high-heeled steps toward starletdom as Miss American Aviation in 1938. The following year, New York photographers voted her among the 10 most beautiful models in the country. Soon she signed with Paramount Pictures. The 24-year-old McKay was a hit in Southern California and earned renown as “the most kissed girl in Hollywood.” In the latter half of 1941, after months of gossip had linked her with actor John Howard, she married actor Ben Roscoe. Three days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, she gave birth to their son, Richard. By now, the photogenic face and figure of the former Dorothy Quackenbush was appearing everywhere: blown up on billboards, shilling for Chesterfield cigarettes, prettying magazine covers that decorated GIs’ barracks walls. Through the war years, she appeared in a couple dozen movies, none of which has stood the test of time. McKay continued acting into the 1950s, transitioning from silver screen to small screen with appearances in The Lone Ranger and other series. In 1977, long divorced, she married songwriter Hoagy Carmichael. She was widowed four years later and succumbed to cancer in 1996. PHOTO COURTESY OF WWW.DOCTORMACRO.COM

A AMERICA IN WWII FLASHBACK

A

BOB GABRICK COLLECTION

L I G G E T T & M Y E R S TO B AC C O C O.

•

1942 APRIL 2013

AMERICA IN WWII 7

A HOME FRONT

Babe’s Last Blast by Carl Zebrowski

T

home plate in Yankee Stadium was a little rounder above the belt than most fans remembered him from the last time they saw him in that spot. Middle age will do that. But George Herman Ruth wasn’t the slimmest figure even in his playing days. In fact, you could argue that the extra girth was something the most famous player in baseball had leveraged to the fullest as he hammered 714 pitched balls out of parks across the United States, setting a home run record that would stand until Hank Aaron broke it four decades later. For the thrill of watching the Babe swing the bat for the first time in seven years, 69,136 people turned out on August 23, 1942. These fans would also get to see Walter Johnson for their money. The 55year-old was in the Hall of Fame along with Ruth, having racked up 417 wins in a Washington Senators uniform, a record still bested only by the iconic turn-of-thecentury right-hander Cy Young, who had logged 511. It was between the games of a doubleheader pitting Ruth’s old New York Yankees against Johnson’s former Washington Senators that the two legendary players trotted onto the empty field along with catcher Benny Bengough and umpire Billy Evans. After the official announcement of the names of the exhibition participants, thunderous applause from the fans of the Babe’s former team, and some slapstick goofing around with Babe’s cap, the oldtimers took their respective places at the plate and on the pitching mound. The current Yankees and Senators players stood at the edge of their dugouts to watch history being made. The Babe was nervous. “The Babe was worried and fretted far, far more than he ever worried on the eve of a deciding HE MAN STANDING AT

APRIL 2013

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

8 AMERICA IN WWII

A middle-aged Babe Ruth assumes the pose he refined while watching 714 career homers leave the park.

World Series game,” his wife, Clair, recalled of the day before the event. “Tomorrow he was going back to his Stadium, before his fans. Would he rise to the occasion as he always had?” Johnson had a tough start. His first couple of pitches hit the ground in front of home plate. Gone was the 90 mph fastball that he had slung sidearm past so many major league batters. The third pitch was a good one. And a good pitch in this case, as far as Johnson and the tens of thousands of fans gathered in the seats of the House that Ruth Built were concerned, was one that the lefty-batting Babe could pull over the right-field wall. That’s exactly what the 47year-old living legend did. On the far end of this line-drive home run was 15-year-old Bob Balthazar. Two hours of train rides had delivered Balthazar to the park along with his dad and his dad’s friend Russ O’Brien, an advertising execu-

tive. It was O’Brien who got the tickets for the game, specifically ordering seats in the right-field stands, a section known as Ruthville for all the home run balls Ruth had sent there. He was hoping the Babe would deliver a priceless souvenir over the intervening 300-some feet and into their hands. Ruth’s homer was whistling its way straight for the trio. “It bounced just before us, over us, and rattled around,” Balthazar recalled. “Everybody was scrambling for the ball, and my dad came up with it.” The Ruth and Johnson exhibition soon ended, and the all-time greats left the field to let the doubleheader continue. Five and a half innings into the second matchup, the home-plate umpire called the game on account of darkness. But the day in baseball history was not done for O’Brien. He had a press pass and decided to use it to get signatures on the ball while the Balthazars filed out with the crowd and waited beyond the stadium gates. O’Brien reunited with the Balhazars to show off the autographs of Ruth, Johnson, and Evans that were scribbled on the ball’s curved surface. He handed the day’s trophy to the teen to keep. The ball remained Balthazar’s for 53 years before he gave it to his grandson on the boy’s 12th birthday. In 2006, the souvenir brought $86,000 at auction. That sum was almost exactly what the Ruth and Johnson exhibition raised to aid war veterans and their families that midsummer’s day in 1942—just about a buck for each fan in attendance to witness the last home run ever by baseball’s greatest slugger. “…There was a kind of sadness in both of us,” Ruth said later. “Walter had been the greatest pitcher in the league; I had been the greatest slugger. But he was no longer a part of the game, and the same was true for me.” A

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A THE FUNNIES

Hang On, Jim! by Arnold T. Blumberg

the marines in 1944, replacement artists took over. Jim stayed on the hunt until 1954, but by then he had made inroads in other media, appearing in Ace Comics, Big Little Books, a weekly radio series starting in 1935, and a 1936 Universal movie serial. In 1948 former Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller began starring in a Columbia series of Jungle Jim films that ran until 1956 and spawned a short-lived 1955–56 TV show. The Weissmuller incarnation moved the action to more familiar territory: Africa. More comic book reprints from Standard, Dell, and Charlton ran until 1970, and “Jungle Jim” was a nickname used by the 4400th Combat Crew Training Squadron (1st Air Commando Group) in the 1960s. Jim was no ape man, but he was a survivor. A DR. ARNOLD T. BLUMBERG is an educator and the author of books on comic books and other pop culture topics. He resides in Baltimore, Maryland.

Above: Jungle Jim ran in Sunday newspapers across the county. This strip went to print two weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack. Opposite: Popular in the 1930s, Big Little Books like this 1936 adaptation of Jungle Jim were small and fat: 3.5 inches wide, 4.5 inches high, and 1.5 inches thick. They were heavily illustrated inside; for every page filled with text, there was one filled with artwork. 10 AMERICA IN WWII

APRIL 2013

IMAGES COURTESY OF GEPPI'S ENTERTAINMENT MUSEUM, WWW.GEPPISMUSEUM.COM

O

JANUARY 7, 1934—five years to the day after Buck Rogers and Tarzan made their 1929 debut—a new sci-fi and jungle comic strip duo stepped onto the pages of America’s newspapers. Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon would soar to fame for his futuristic exploits, just like Buck Rogers. And Jungle Jim…well, he would never swing as high as the bellowing ape-man Tarzan. But he would hang on, even when war brought other strips crashing down. Jungle Jim was a Sunday-only “topper” strip that ran above Flash Gordon. It featured hunter Jim Bradley in tales illustrated by Raymond and scripted by Don Moore. Unlike other jungle stories, Jungle Jim was set in Southeast Asia, not Africa. Attended by native sidekick Kolu and femme fatale Lilli DeVrille, the fully clothed Jim tackled pirates and slavers. But as World War II came his way, he found himself fighting the Japanese. Many topper strips vanished thanks to wartime paper shortages, but Jungle Jim earned its own Sunday slot. When Raymond joined N

A LANDINGS

Victory’s Schoolhouse by Mark D.Van Ells

I

N THE EARLY MORNING darkness of May 7, 1945, a small party of German officers entered a nondescript redbrick schoolhouse in Reims, France. Despite appearances, this modest building was the headquarters of the supreme Allied commander in Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Here, the moment millions were hoping and praying for was about to arrive: the Germans had come to surrender. This humble place with a big role in history is preserved today as the Musée de la Reddition (“Surrender Museum”), and it’s just one of many reasons to visit Reims, one of France’s most important cities. Perhaps best known for its magnificent cathedral, Reims is famous also for its champagne, which can be sampled in great abundance here. The city suffered terribly during the First World War, and the surrounding countryside still bears scars. American doughboys fought in 1918 at Belleau Wood, a sacred place in the annals of the US Marine Corps that’s just a 30-minute drive to the west. In 1940 the Germans captured Reims, and the US Third Army under Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr., liberated it on August 30, 1944. The Voie de la Liberté (“Liberty Road”), which traces Patton’s path from Normandy to Bastogne, Belgium, passes through. Eisenhower established a forward headquarters in Reims in September 1944 to be closer to the front, first working out of a local chateau. He moved into the redbrick technical school near the city’s main rail station in February 1945. By May, Germany was in ruins and Adolf Hitler was dead. Admiral Karl Dönitz, who’d become führer after Hitler’s suicide in April, sought an end to the war. On the rainy afternoon of May

12 AMERICA IN WWII

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Outside Reims, France, a marker indicates the Voie de la Liberté, which lets visitors follow the path of liberating US tanks.

5, German Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg appeared in Reims authorized to surrender to the Western powers, but not to the Soviet Union. Reiterating a demand for unconditional surrender, the Allies refused the offer. The following day, General Alfred Gustav Jodl, chief of staff of the German armed forces, arrived to make another attempt at partial surrender. That too was turned down. The Germans assessed their situation and, after midnight on May 7, agreed to give up unconditionally. Signing the official surrender took less than 15 minutes. At 2:30 A.M., Allied mili-

tary officers sat down at one side of a large wooden table in Eisenhower’s war room. No larger than an ordinary classroom, this was where Eisenhower directed the Allied effort. Ike himself refused to meet with the Germans and delegated General Walter Bedell Smith to lead the proceedings. British, French, and Soviet representatives were also there. Jodl, Friedeburg, and Jodl’s aide Major Wilhelm Oxenius then entered the room, clicked their heels, and sat down facing the Allied leaders. After a reading aloud of the surrender terms, Jodl announced that he accepted them and signed the document at 2:41 A.M. Resistance was to cease the next day. Afterward, Smith told reporters, “Fini la guerre” (“The war is over”), but it wasn’t quite true. The Soviets raised questions about the proceedings, and another signing took place in Berlin. In any event, the European conflict ended on May 8. After the war, Ike’s headquarters was returned to educational use and is today the Lycée Franklin Roosevelt. But the war room was sealed off and left virtually untouched. Today, the Musée de la Reddition takes up the school’s western corner. A visit here begins with a 10-minute film exploring the occupation and liberation of Reims and the German surrender. The war room is upstairs, and adjacent to it are exhibits that add context to the events of May 7. Naturally, much of the museum focuses on the French experience. On display is a small flag stolen from a German officer’s car by a young local boy. Also here is the ornate kepi (military cap) of General François Sevez, France’s sole representative at the surrender.

ALL PHOTOS BY MARK D. VAN ELLS

Above, bottom left: In Reims, a humble school was the center of Allied operations in Europe. It became the site of Nazi Germany’s surrender in 1945. Today, a portion of the school is set aside as the Musée de la Reddition (“Surrender Museum”). Above, top left: Exhibits like this headquarters scene document the US military presence in Reims. Above, right: The war room, where the surrender took place.

The Americans were a major presence in wartime Reims, and the museum devotes much attention to them. There is a mannequin of a 101st Airborne Division paratrooper in full battle gear, for example. The Screaming Eagles made their headquarters in the Reims schoolhouse when the Battle of the Bulge broke out in December 1944. It was from this very building that Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe organized the 101st’s movement to Bastogne, Belgium, where it would famously refuse to crack under a week of intense siege. Also on display is the program for a football game planned for Christmas Day 1944 between two elements of the 101st that was dubbed the Champagne Bowl. The deployment to Bastogne canceled the game. Other exhibits explore the lives of American WACs (members of the Women’s Army Corps), photog-

raphers, and journalists. The museum’s main attraction is the war room. Except for glass panels and railing to prevent visitors from pulling up a chair at the surrender table, the room looks frozen in time. The walls are almost entirely covered with maps and charts left just as they were in May 1945. One huge map shows the Allied rail network in Europe. Nearby is an even bigger map of supply bases. They stretch from floor to ceiling and are remarkably detailed. Looking closely, one can see the staples used to fasten them to the wall—along with the inevitable wrinkling, discoloration, and other signs of age. There are battle maps, too. One near the entrance shows the pockets of German resistance that still remained around St. Nazaire and Lorient in western France at

IN A NUTSHELL WHAT Musée de le Reddition (“Surrender Museum”)

war’s end. The map of Central Europe, with a stark red line indicating the battlefront deep inside Germany, dominates the room. In front of this map are 15 chairs at a long table. This is where the signing took place. A photograph taken at the historic event is on display, along with a key identifying each participant. Each chair also has a brass plaque indicating who sat where. British General K.W.D. Strong did not actually sit in his assigned place, but stood behind the Germans as a translator. This one small room vividly conveys the gravity and finality of the surrender. One can easily imagine Jodl’s frame of mind. He faced an assemblage of grim but triumphant Allied officers. Behind them loomed a massive map showing the utter evisceration of his country, and he was surrounded by evidence of overwhelming Allied might. There in Eisenhower’s war room, Jodl could not escape the decisiveness of Germany’s defeat as he signed his name and put an end to the Third Reich. A

WHERE 12 Rue Franklin Roosevelt, Reims, France WHY The site of Nazi Germany’s surrender • General Dwight Eisenhower’s headquarters from February to May 1945 • Eisenhower’s war room as it was preserved in May 1945 For more information visit www.ville-reims.fr/index.php?id=899

MARK D. VAN ELLS teaches at the City University of New York and is currently writing a traveler’s guide to First World War historic sites. APRIL 2013

AMERICA IN WWII 13

P R E D A T

O R S

in the Pacific

US sub skippers were overcautious at the war’s star t, and their torpedoes were junk. Three years later, they had taken down half of Japan’s shipping.

by Drew Ames

P R E D AT O R S in the Pacific

S

by Drew Ames

USS TANG (SS-306), Lieutenant Commander Richard “Dick” O’Kane peered through binoculars into the darkness that blanketed the Formosa Strait. O’Kane’s Balao-class submarine had spent the last hour knifing carefully through a gauntlet of Japanese destroyers to get at the soft prey they protected—some two dozen vulnerable oil tankers and transport ships bulging with supplies. Conveniently lit up by the enemy’s nervous searchlights, the guarded vessels were a startling sight and a rare opportunity, even for such an accomplished hunter as O’Kane.

Just one night earlier, October 24, 1944, Kane and his crew had sunk three Japanese freighters not far from where the Tang was now—in the shallow waters between the island of Formosa (now Taiwan) and the coast of China. And despite frantic efforts by the Japanese convoy’s protective escorts to locate his prowling sub, O’Kane again had the Tang in position to wreak havoc. Earlier in the war, things had been very different for US subs in the Pacific. Rarely was one in position to wreak havoc. The battle tactics of that time made skippers overcautious, and understandably, because they had no effective weaponry; the US torpedoes they had were notoriously unreliable. But as the Tang was now demonstrating, there had been a change in the sea that separated America and Japan. O’Kane’s hunt of the Japanese tankers and transports in late October 1944 was but one moment in a sustained effort to dominate the Pacific from its briny depths, an effort that would not end until US subs had taken down half of Japan’s shipping. Five minutes into October 25, O’Kane yelled “Fire!” He yelled the order a half-dozen times, and six bow torpedoes struck their marks 900 to 1,400 yards away. O’Kane then maneuvered his sub parallel to the convoy and loosed three stern torpedoes as enemy shells splashed nearby. The first of the Tang’s stern-fired torpedoes struck a tanker, which blew up in a tremendous fireball. The second slammed into a transport, crippling but not sinking it.

O’Kane then got a dose of good fortune when a Japanese destroyer that had been bearing down on the Tang exploded after it was hit by either the Tang’s third torpedo or friendly fire from other Japanese destroyers. Powering away from the area at her best speed, Tang withdrew about 10,000 yards. Down to just two torpedoes (of the sub’s original 24), O’Kane and his crew took an hour to check and reload them. Then the Tang headed back to the firelit scene to finish off the damaged transport, now a sitting duck. To avoid the circling Japanese destroyers, O’Kane brought his boat about in a wide circle. Then Tang fired her last two torpedoes. The first darted straight to the target. The second malfunctioned, broke from its path, and whirled back toward Tang. O’Kane had scarcely had time to shift course when the torpedo slammed into his submarine’s port side near the stern, causing a tremendous explosion and destroying the aft torpedo room and the two compartments forward of it. Motor Machinist’s Mate Clay Decker was sitting in the sub’s control room at the time of the explosion. “The hatch above me was open and water was gushing in,” he said later. “Those lads in the conning tower fell into the control room, a drop of eight or ten feet. I heard them falling and hitting the steel deck.” O’Kane later reported, “Our ship sank by the stern in seconds, the way a pendulum might swing down in a viscous liquid. The seas rolled in from aft, washing us from the bridge and shears [the above-

Previous spread: USS Puffer (SS-268) sails off California’s Mare Island after a November 1944 overhaul. The sub’s crew went through a terrible ordeal a year earlier, when Puffer remained submerged without ventilation or cooling for 37 hours to escape Japanese warships. Top: A submarine service recruiting poster emphasizes adventure. But with the adventure came risk, complicated by faulty weapons. Above: USS Tang (SS-306) slides down the ways on August 17, 1943. After a successful run, she would sink by her own torpedo. 16 AMERICA IN WWII

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TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

ALL PHOTOS THIS STORY (UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED): NATIONAL ARCHIVES

TANDING CALMLY ON THE BRIDGE OF THE

Tang’s future commander, Lieutenant Richard “Dick” O’Kane (left), chats with Lieutenant Commander Dudley “Mush” Morton on the bridge of USS Wahoo (SS-238). Morton’s success as a sub commander gave him credibility when he complained of the Mark 14 torpedo’s flawed detonators.

deck platform that housed the periscopes], and of small consolation now was the detonation of our 23d torpedo as it hit home in the transport.” O’Kane and three other men who were forced into the sea with him managed to stay afloat long enough to be picked up by a Japanese ship. The Tang’s devastated aft compartments quickly filled with water, dropping the submarine’s tail to the ocean floor 180 feet down. With her exposed bow still protruding defiantly up through the surface, the creaking 312-foot sub lolled precariously in the oilslicked surf. In a flash, perhaps a third of the vessel’s 87-man crew had died. Others soon succumbed to smoke inhalation. The survivors, meanwhile, were thrust into a desperate struggle to survive. To that end, the men first flooded the main ballast tank in order to level the Tang on the ocean floor. Then they moved into the forward torpedo room, above which sat the sub’s tiny forward escape trunk. As Japanese depth charges exploded outside the ship’s hull, a fire in the forward battery compartment generated additional heat and smoke that soon made it difficult to breathe. After taking some time to burn sensitive documents, which gener-

ated additional smoke, 30–45 remaining men halted escape preparations to wait out the bombardment. After about three hours, the first of these anxious crewmen climbed into the escape trunk, an uncomfortable cylinder large enough for just five men. It was a tricky contraption, normally kept flooded with just enough air space at the top to allow its temporary tenants to breathe. The trunk was designed to allow men to slip out through a door located on its side when the water pressure inside and outside the vessel was equalized. They could then ascend to the surface. But the conditions on the Tang made a difficult process nearly impossible. “The compression of the air as the water flooded the trunk caused a great amount of heat,” one survivor later reported. “When the water was above the door, it left a very small air space and everyone had difficulty in getting their breath. The pressure made the voices very high and almost inaudible. All these combined to create a certain amount of panic in everyone.” Most of the men had strapped on a Momsen lung, a curious rubber breathing apparatus that essentially recycled exhaled air. “I felt at ease using the ‘lung’ and knew it would work after I tested it APRIL 2013

AMERICA IN WWII 17

P R E D AT O R S in the Pacific

by Drew Ames

Progression of Pacific

Submarine Bases

Tokyo

CHINA

Toward Japan

J A PA N

East China Sea

Midway 7/42

Subic Bay

Saipan

Hawaii

7/44 South 2/45 China Manila Guam Philippine Sea

Sea

Pearl Harbor

10/44

Majuro

Submarines, Pacific Fleet

DREAMLINE CARTOGRAPHY/DAVID DEIS

4/44

Mios Woendi 8/44

Southwest Pacific Submarine Command

Darwin

Manus Milne Bay 10/43

Coral Sea AUSTR ALIA

Equator

5/44

Brisbane 4/42

Fremantle

3/42

under the water before leaving the trunk,” one survivor test fied later. “I had made a one hundred-foot escape before.” Nevertheless, rather than risk the watery ascent, some decided against joining their mates in several escape attempts. Of the 13 who did ultimately strike out for the sea’s surface, just 5 survived the ordeal, becoming the first men of the war to successfully escape a fully submerged vessel. The balance either drifted off into the black abyss or drowned. Those that made it were also “rescued Japanese, who expressed their anger in th tiest of terms. The destroyer escort that pic up the survivors “was one of the fou which were rescuing Japanese troops and personnel,” O’Kane wrote later. “When we realized that our clubbings and kickings were being administered by the burned, mutilated survivors of our own handiwork, we found we could take it with less prejudice.” The men finished out the war in a prison camp. O’Kane was late awarded the Medal of Honor. If Tang’s fifth and final war patrol had tragically, its overall results had been st just two weeks of work, it had sunk at least seven ships, roughly 21,000 tons of Japanese shipping. Such impressive results reflected everything that had finally begun to go right for the US submarine force in the Pacific after a

trying year and a half of mostly fruitless combat. Ironically, considering the Tang’s fate, the biggest improvement had come with the development of better torpedoes. The old he steam-driven Mark 14 eatured either a magnetic senesigned to detonate when the pedo passed beneath the keel its target, or a physical trigger hat detonated on contact. The US Navy Bureau of Ordnance had tested the magnetic detonator just once, and it did not work well in battle conditions. he Mark 14 had two other oblems: the contact exploder jammed, resulting in a dud; often failed to run at the depth t was set, resulting in a miss. p blems proved difficult to pinpoint. As a result, complaints about the torpedoes were initially sketchy, and poor combat results were too often attributed to the performance of sub skippers and their crews. Answers id not begin to appear until May 1943, after ieutenant Commander Dudley W. “Mush” orton and the crew of the USS Wahoo (SS-238) red an exasperating series of torpedo malfuncring operations off the Kurile Islands between Japan. After watching one torpedo strike but merely dent a freighter, Morton wrote, “The target course and speed had been most accurately determined and it is inconceivable than any normal dispersion could cause it to miss.” During eight days of superbly conducted patrolling, Wahoo sank three ships,

Pacif ic Ocean

Above, bottom: Seen through the periscope of Morton’s USS Wahoo, an Asashio-class Japanese destroyer burns and sinks off New Guinea’s northern coast on January 24, 1943. Wahoo’s torpedo had cut the destroyer in two. Above, middle: Another Wahoo victim—a Japanese freighter—sinks on April 21, 1943. Top right: After a refit, Wahoo undergoes sea trials off Mare Island in July 1943. She had completed her fifth patrol, sinking more than 90,000 tons of Japanese shipping. But half of the torpedoes she fired had been duds. 18 AMERICA IN WWII

APRIL 2013

TIME LINE US Sub Action in the Pacific 1941 DECEMBER 7 • After Pearl Harbor attack, US Navy orders all-out sub warfare against Japan

1942 MARCH 3 • US sub base at Fremantle, Australia APRIL 15 • US sub base at Brisbane, Australia MAY 31 • USS Silversides sinks Shunset Maru No. 5 off Cape Muroto JULY 15 • Sub base at Midway 1942 STATS: 350 patrols, 7 subs lost, 180 ships sunk

but faulty torpedoes cost her three others. Morton was the submarine service’s best-known commander at that time and had the credibility to draw serious attention to the torpedo issue. Rear Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, commander of Submarines, Pacific Fleet, ordered the magnetic exploder for Mark 14 torpedoes deactivated in late June 1943. But Rear Admiral Ralph W. Christie, who ran the largely independent Southwest Pacific submarine command out of Fremantle, Australia, was not convinced that the much-discussed defects were legitimate and kept the device in use. Finally, in November, Vice Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, the new head of Allied naval forces in the Southwest Pacific, ended the controversy definitively by ordering the magnetic exploder deactivated in all submarine commands. Meanwhile, a somewhat more reliable torpedo, the Mark 18, entered service. The torpedo problem was never completely solved, as the circular run that brought down the Tang demonstrated, but the changes vastly improved an American submarine’s odds of success. During O’Kane’s October 24–25 attack, for instance, only one of his torpedoes, the fateful 24th, failed him.

T

TANG HIGHLIGHTED not just the torpedo problem, but also the inherent dangers of life as a submariner, the most obvious of which was living and working underwater in a high-pressure environment. If trapped, a submarine could quickly run out of options. The crew of USS Perch (SS176), for instance, spent March 2, 1942, stuck at the bottom of the Java Sea as Japanese destroyers took turns dropping depth charges on her. The sub survived the teeth-jarring assault and surfaced. The next morning, Captain David Hurt ordered a test dive, which revealed nearly wrecked propulsion and electrical systems in addition to massive leaks and inoperable torpedo tubes. “So we had to resurface,” Electrician’s Mate Ernest Plantz said later, “and when we did, there was three Jap tin cans [destroyers] and two cruisers about three thousand, thirty-five hundred yards out ahead of us, and they started to fire. The first salvo went over us, the second one fell short of us, and the Skipper alerted us that we probably have to scuttle ship if we couldn’t dive.” Soon Hurt did give the order to scuttle, and the steaming, exhaust-filled Perch drifted to the sea bottom, while Hurt and his crew were picked up by an HE DEMISE OF

1943 FEBRUARY 16 • USS Amberjack (SS-219) lost in action off New Britain JUNE • US Rear Admiral Charles Lockwood orders magnetic exploders on Mark 14 sub torpedoes deactivated JULY 7 • First US sub raid in Sea of Japan JULY 24–25 • USS Tinosa (SS-283) fires 15 torpedoes at a Japanese oiler and destroyer; 14 are duds SEPTEMBER • US Navy introduces Mark 18 electric torpedo OCTOBER 8–10 • USS Skate (SS-305) loses crewman while rescuing six downed airmen off Wake Island OCTOBER 11 • Commander Mush Morton’s USS Wahoo lost in La Pérouse Strait between Russian and Japan 1943 STATS: 350 patrols, 15 subs lost, 335 ships sunk

1944 FEBRUARY 29 • USS Trout sinks Japanese transport Sakito Maru and then is sunk herself by Japanese destroyers in East China Sea JUNE 19 • During Battle of the Philippine Sea, USS Albacore sinks Japanese carrier Taiho AUGUST 24 • Patrol Boat No. 102, a captured American destroyer rebuilt by Japan, sinks USS Harder off Luzon SEPTEMBER 17 • On way to rescue Allied POWs set adrift when a Japanese transport sank, USS Barb sinks carrier Unyo OCTOBER 25 • Struck by its own faulty torpedo, USS Tang sinks in Formosa Strait 1944 STATS: 520 patrols, 19 subs lost, 603 ships sunk

1945 FEBRUARY 9–12 • USS Batfish sinks three Japanese subs MAY 3 • USS Lagarto sunk in South China Sea, probably by Japanese minesweeper Hatsutaka MAY 15 • USS Hawkbill sinks Hatsutaka JUNE 22 • Commander Eugene Fluckey’s USS Barb makes history by shelling Japanese port Shari with deck-mounted rockets AUGUST 15 • US receives official word of Japan’s surrender 1945 STATS: 345 patrols, 7 subs lost, 189 ships sunk

Sailors man Wahoo’s controls on January 27, 1943, keeping the sub at 300 feet to avoid depth charges from a persistent enemy destroyer escort. Morton reported the situation with the message “Another running gun battle today. Destroyer gunning, Wahoo running.”

enemy ship and then dispatched to a prison camp. Life aboard a submarine included numerous other challenges. “It’s very boring at sea, during the 40–50-day patrols,” says Richard Deconcini, who served as a ship’s cook, 2nd class, on USS Hake (SS -256), USS Burrfish (SS-312), and USS Conger (SS-477). O’Kane’s success was indeed an exception. During a patrol of one to two months, an American submarine typically sank no more than three enemy ships. When not at battle stations or on routine duty, seamen sought ways to pass the time. Deconcini remembers three seamen walking into the mess one time carrying a needle, pliers, and soap and offering to pierce ears for earrings. Then there was the heat generated by 70 to 90 men packed into a tube with very little open space. Temperatures in submerged boats could become unbearable when air conditioning was turned off for silent running, which was often required during stressful combat situations. The crew of USS Puffer (SS-268) suffered through one such nightmare on October 9–10, 1943. With his vessel’s sonar heads damaged from a grounding a few days earlier, Lieutenant Commander M.J. Jensen was trying to sink a large merchantman in the Makassar Strait, between the Indonesian 20 AMERICA IN WWII

APRIL 2013

islands of Borneo and Sulawesi. After blasting the ship with two torpedoes, Jensen swung his boat around to finish off his prey with stern torpedoes. But one proved to be a dud, and the other exploded prematurely. “At this time [11:19 A.M. on October 9] noted that Chidori Type destroyer previously sighted was closing the scene fast,” read the ship’s patrol report. “Ship commenced firing small caliber guns in our direction. Ship still seemed to be swinging very slowly. Commenced maneuvering for another stern shot and favorable track.” Then, at 11:28: “Heard pinging and fast screws getting closer. Commenced clearing scene, still hoping for another shot.”

A

11:45, THE REPORT CONTINUED, a series of depth charges “rocked the boat like a sailboat in a typhoon, let water in hatches and Conning Tower door, backed sea valves off seats, blew out plug in casting for sea valve to Maneuvering Room water closet…allowing considerable water to enter…. Apparently sprung rudder and stern planes as evidenced by increased noise and overloading of motors. Starboard sound head thrown out of alignment. Blew gaskets out of engine air T

P R E D AT O R S in the Pacific

by Drew Ames

induction and ship’s ventilation supply outboard valves. Miscellaneous glass and cork flew around.” Ordering Puffer down to about 400 feet, Jensen decided to wait out the lingering escort. It was a long wait. Determined to sink the American sub, the Japanese destroyer stayed around to drop depth charges every hour or two. Puffer went still deeper, to a risky 530 feet. After 12 hours, a second Japanese ship joined the first. Their depth charges caused the Puffer no additional damage, but kept it from surfacing for ventilation and repairs. The psychological effect of doing nothing but absorbing punishment began to weigh on the crew. More difficult was the heat. In order noise and conserve power, Jensen shut down conditioning and ventilation systems. The t perature rose from around 80 degrees to a high as 130, and the men could not cool down because the humidity got so bad that their perspiration would not evaporate. Jensen and his executive officer lost control of the crew about halfway into the sub’s 37-hour ordeal. The men did not mutiny; they simply stopped doing their duty, either because they were physically incapacitated o mentally worn-out. Anger and frustration

who had the stamina and the will to move and think. Many of the others were past the stage of caring what happened.” The last depth charge fell at 1:15 A.M. on October 10, but the enemy ships continued to lurk until 12:25 P.M. As soon as his antagonists steamed off, Jensen ordered the Puffer’s ballast tanks emptied. The sub surfaced, and within an hour, the flooding caused by the initial depth-charge attack was fixed, the hatches were open, the engines were running, and the crew was starting to revive. Jensen took Puffer back to base in Fremantle. Though he was praised for keeping order during the emergency and getting Puffer and her he was reassigned to a staff position. About crew was transferred to other boats. Puffer’s experience illustrated the vital portance of modern systems such as air conitioning, other wartime developments proved no less vital. These included air- and surfacesearch radar and, eventually, short-range FM sonar for minesweeping. Perhaps the most significant of all the new technologies was he Ultra code-breaking system, which lowed the decryption of Japanese radio trafDecoded Ultra messages were used to direct rican subs to intercept Japanese convoys,

taken over, much of it directed at themselves for what they now saw as their own foolish decisions to join the sub service. The heat was oppressive and the air was going bad. “Both CO2 absorbent and oxygen were used but despite that the air was very foul toward the end of the dive,” read the sub’s official history. “Breathing was very difficult and headache was severe. An officer making the rounds from control room to after torpedo room had to stop and rest several times on the journey. A good many of the men were in a state of physical collapse. From the stupor in which they sank, it became impossible to arouse them to go on watch. Toward the end, stations were manned by volunteers, and by men

warships, and submarines. The intelligence spurred the submarine service’s devastating hunting of 1944 and 1945. The US submarine service’s trial-and-error improvements from 1942 to 1945 had made killers of already excellent boats. American subs offered solid diving performance, engines, and optics. But their livability really set them apart. The Tambor, Gato, Balao, and Tench classes—all nearly identical from the outside, but each incrementally better than its predecessor—featured air conditioning and freshwater distillation. Both technologies served dual purposes. Freshwater was necessary to maintain the electrolyte mixture in a sub’s batteries, but also allowed the men to shower

Above, left: Submariners went to sea well trained, and that saved many from death. These recruits at the Submarine Training School in New London, Connecticut, in June 1942 are learning to adjust the bow and stern plane wheels to keep their sub level. Above, right: For US fliers shot down over the sea, subs were salvation. Here, Tang crewmen help rescued pilots aboard their sub in April 1944. Top: Subs could go where surface ships dared not. This is Japan’s Mount Fuji, seen through a periscope on April 22, 1943. APRIL 2013

AMERICA IN WWII 21

FLAG INSET: LEIBOLD AND DASILVA FAMILIES. COURTESY OF DA CAPO PRESS

P R E D AT O R S in the Pacific

by Drew Ames

once or twice a week and do laundry. The patrols produced no confirmed kills. In air conditioning dehumidified the subs’ all, US submarines sank about 200 interior, preventing heat exhaustion Imperial Japanese Navy ships totaling among the crew but also averting electrisome 540,000 tons of shipping. By cal problems such as short circuits. comparison, US carrier planes sank 161 Besides their role as hunters of enemy Japanese naval ships for 711,236 tons. shipping, submarines performed a variMore impressive was the devastating ety of special missions including bomtoll the Pacific subs took on the bardment of targets on shore, landing Japanese merchant fleet: about 1,110 of troops and supplies, mine-laying, vessels for some 4,800,000 tons of shipOpposite: Wahoo returns to Pearl Harbor in photo reconnaissance, and even mine ping. Crewed and supported by roughly February 1943 after a successful patrol (indicated by detection. Particularly valuable was life50,000 servicemen—just 1.6 percent of the “clean sweep” broom atop her tower). Morton guard duty—the task of picking up total navy personnel—submarines sank is on the bridge. The pennant says “Shoot the sunza bitches!” Eight Japanese flags beneath it indicate downed aviators. Eighty-six American 54.6 percent of all Japanese vessels lost enemy ships sunk. Above: Tang displayed her kills submarines spent a total of 3,272 days in the war. By early 1944, US subs were on her battle flag, featuring a panther bursting at this work and rescued 504 stranded sinking more Japanese tankers than the through a rising sun. Small Japanese flags indicate airmen. island nation could replace. A year later, ships sunk (those with rays indicate warships). By mid-1945, US subs were regularly Japan was virtually unable to import Top: A sub ties up at Pearl Harbor after a long operating in Japanese home waters and oil, the need for which had helped drive patrol, her paint worn by saltwater and weather. the number of enemy targets was rapidher into war to begin with. ly decreasing. But success came with a cost. Of the 16,000 subFor postwar chroniclers, the numbers hint at what might have mariners who served on war patrols, 375 officers and 3,131 men been. “After the war, when the full impact of the submarine blockdied—a loss rate of 22 percent, the highest of any American servade became known,” wrote historian Clair Blair, Jr., “many ice. Fifty-two of 288 boats were lost. experts concluded that the invasions of the Palaus, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, and the dropping of fire bombs and atomic bombs on Japanese cities, was unnecessary.” A ESPITE THEIR SLOW START , US submarines ultimately enjoyed great success. The 263 boats sent into combat made a total of 1,588 war patrols. The vast majority of DREW AMES of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, regularly reviews books these, 1,474, took place in the Pacific Ocean; in the Atlantic, 114 for America in WWII.

D

APRIL 2013

AMERICA IN WWII 23

s al POW e r 6 7 s ape wa c s E t a them. re f G o d 0 e l l 5 g ca the socecutin x , e e i v s o n a m m nd Ger came a a e b — I t i I I e t tington n uf for L u e b H g a g l n m a St Lo by To out of g n i l e n tun

THE NOT-SO-GREAT ESCAPE

G

by Tom Huntington

EORGE H ARSH , J R ., SAT IN A N AZI PRISON CAMP surrounded by barbed-wire fencing, observation towers, and rifletoting guards. But the Milwaukee native was hardly unnerved. He had been in prison before, doing hard time for murder. Now, in November 1942, he was a prisoner of war in Germany’s Stalag Luft III, and his long experience behind bars put him in the thick of secret preparations for what would become the most famous Allied prison break.

the age of 17, he felt that “something went sour” in him. As a student at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Harsh was callow and arrogant and indulged a taste for booze and high jinks. An acquaintance later told a reporter that Harsh was often “disgracefully drunk” and that when in such a state he was “mean and nasty instead of foolish or high-spirited.” Harsh also happened to be easily bored, a trait he shared with friend Richard Gallogly, whose well-to-do family owned the Atlanta Journal. Restless at school and fueled on Prohibition-era

Previous spread: Through this tunnel carved some 30 feet below ground, 76 Allied POWs escaped from Stalag Luft III in March 1944. Above, top: Flashy promos like this one hyped the July 4, 1963, release of The Great Escape. The star-studded film immortalized the escapees, two-thirds of whom were not alive to see it. Above, left: Atlanta college student George Harsh faced a murder rap and a death sentence in 1928, but fate eventually landed him in Stalag Luft III. Above, center: A typical Stalag Luft III room is crammed with triple-deck bunks. Above, right: Leader of the Royal Air Force’s 92 Squadron, Roger Joyce Bushell, was shot down in May 1940. He spent the next 44 months working to escape prison camps. 26 AMERICA IN WWII

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Harsh was lucky just to be alive at this point, having been sentenced to hang for murder in Georgia in the late 1920s. But he was a long way from what might have been. “Life started out for me with great expectations,” he wrote in his 1971 autobiography Lonesome Road. Born in 1909, Harsh was the son of a wealthy shoe manufacturer in Milwaukee. His father died young, at age 53, but he left 12year-old Harsh with a substantial trust fund and a hefty annual allowance. The money did not keep Harsh happy, however, and at

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Allied “kriegies” (short for kriegesgefangenen, the German word for prisoner of war) exercised and killed time by walking what they called “the circuit,” a path beaten into the ground along the rail that warned prisoners of the barbed-wire fencing 10 yards beyond.

liquor, Gallogly, Harsh, and a few other students began discussing the possibility of committing the perfect crime. In early October 1928, the gang began robbing small businesses for the thrill of it, often with Gallogly and Harsh alternating between driving the getaway car and doing the dirty work with a Colt .45 automatic pistol. During one of the gang’s first jobs, guns were fired and a stray bullet killed grocery clerk E.H. Meeks. Then, on the rainy night of October 16, Harsh entered a store and encountered a pair of wary employees. “This is a holdup!” Harsh yelled, drawing his gun. “Don’t move!” One of the clerks, a newlywed named Willard Smith, pulled his own gun from under the counter and opened fire. Harsh fired back and Smith fell dead. Harsh staggered out of the store and back to the car with a bullet wound in his groin. Gallogly hit the gas and roared off through the rain to the home of a Harsh family friend to lie low. Harsh’s wound was not serious, and he resumed his spotty classroom attendance. But his luck ran out. A housekeeper had discovered his bloody clothes, which bore his name, and sent them to a local dry cleaner, who was startled and called the police. Harsh was arrested and tried for Smith’s murder, as was

Gallogly. Harsh’s lawyer offered a plea of temporary insanity, but a jury quickly found Harsh guilty. A judge sentenced him to death. After Gallogly pled guilty and received a life sentence, however, Harsh’s sentence was reduced to life, too.

H

ARSH WAS SUBSEQUENTLY SENT OFF to spend the rest of his days doing hard labor on chain gangs. Weighed down by heavy steel leg shackles, Harsh and his new companions worked daily under the hot sun shoveling dirt and gravel for roads under the glare of guards who welcomed opportunities to administer beatings. At the end of each torturous day, Harsh collapsed on his bunk inside his wooden camp cage with nothing to look forward to but more of the same. “This was a brutal, harsh life we lived, and we were surrounded on all sides by violence, sadism, and horror,” he wrote. He admitted stabbing another prisoner to death for stealing his soap. He escaped punishment for that crime when his fellow inmates claimed they had seen nothing. Six years passed. Harsh’s life took a turn for the better when a violent camp escape revealed the prison’s inhumane living conditions. Harsh testified in the investigation that followed and received a transfer to a prison system closer to Atlanta, where life proved easier. His leg shackles were removed, and he gradually APRIL 2013

AMERICA IN WWII 27

THE NOT-SO-GREAT ESCAPE

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earned responsibilities and a measure of freedom as an aide at a prison hospital. One day the doctor handed him a copy of Grey’s Anatomy and suggested he study it. “Over the months I almost learned that tome by heart,” Harsh wrote later, “and I went on then to other medical books, to the study of syndromes and symptoms, to the procedures of diagnosis and treatment.” On one winter’s day in October 1940, according to Harsh, a guard rushed a prisoner with appendicitis to the infirmary. A howling ice storm prevented the doctor from reaching the prison, so Harsh performed emergency surgery himself. Impressed by Harsh’s life-saving work, the doctor wrote to Georgia Governor E.D. Rivers to recommend a pardon. On November 21, Rivers granted it, and after 12 years in captivity, Harsh walked out of prison. Bewildered by life as a free man, Harsh boarded a train for Canada—after declining an opportunity to work as a hired gun for a numbers racket. He soon found himself drinking in a Montreal bar with a motley mix of Canadians and Americans bound for war duty, some with the Black Watch (Canada’s famed Royal Highland Regiment) and others with the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). The United States was still a year from entering the war, but the Canadian armed forces needed men badly enough to overlook a potential soldier’s advanced age or checkered past. Encouraged to volunteer, Harsh signed up, trading his American citizenship for an RCAF uniform. “I was trying to prove that ‘they’ were wrong when ‘they’ sentenced me to hang,” he later wrote; “I was trying to prove that ‘they’ were wrong when ‘they’ passed a law barring exconvicts from the armed services; but most of all, I was trying to prove myself, trying to prove to my own satisfaction, that I really belonged in this world as a full member of a society that had once expelled me.” After three months of training and gunnery school, Harsh the ex-con-turned-aerial-gunner received an officer’s commission in the Royal Air Force (RAF). Shipped to England, he was soon serving as a squadron gunnery officer during bombing runs over Germany. “It seems rather useless now, useless and repetitious, to write of my experiences during the months I was an operational airman flying combat missions,” he wrote. “The whole period, looking back on it, is one strung-together mishmash of times during which I was either half-drunk or half-terrified, and sometimes I was both together.” In the overnight darkness of October 5, 1942, Harsh’s Handley Page Halifax heavy bomber was part of a raid on Cologne when it ran into a funnel of German anti-aircraft fire. “Pieces of shrap-

by Tom Huntington

nel began hitting us, and it sounded like wet gravel being hurled against sheet metal,” Harsh remembered. “Then we started taking direct hits, and the aircraft jumped and bucked and thrashed, and pieces of it were being blown off, and I could see them whipping past me.” As the pummeled aircraft began its fatal plunge to earth, an explosion propelled Harsh out its rear turret. Saved by his parachute, he woke up on the ground—in the hands of German soldiers.

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FTER PROCESSING ,

HARSH WAS SENT to Stalag Luft III, a prison camp for Allied airman run by the Luftwaffe (“Air Force”) and located 100 miles southeast of Berlin in Sagan (now part of Poland). Rechristened Kriegsgefangener (“Prisoner of War”) 10522, Harsh had little trouble adapting to the loss of his briefly held freedom. “I had been through all this before,” he recalled. “I don’t believe I had fully made the adjustment to once more being ‘free’ when I found myself again imprisoned. It was almost as though I had traded one set of guards in black Stetsons for another set in steel helmets.” Stalag Luft III , which would eventually stretch across 60 acres and hold 10,000 prisoners, held numerous long-suffering British airmen who, after countless attempts to escape myriad other prison camps, were expert tunneldiggers. Their leader was Wing Commander Harry “Wings” Day, who regularly reminded his charges that it was a soldier’s duty to attempt escape. If nothing else, Allied escapees could aid the war effort by forcing German troops who were needed elsewhere to chase them across the countryside. Day’s second-in-command in the camp’s X Organization, the select group that handled the escape plans, was fellow RAF officer Roger “Big X” Bushell, a squadron leader. As Australian flier Paul Brickhill would note in his 1950 chronicle The Great Escape (on which the 1963 film of the same name would be based), “The British had a head start on the Americans because they were there first. Then the Yanks joined us and took to the escape business like ducks to water.” One day in early 1943, Wally Floody, a tall Canadian whom Brickhill characterized as having a “strong-minded, overpowering personality,” took Harsh for a walk around the camp’s perimeter and briefed him about brewing escape plans. Stalag Luft III was growing, and hundreds of Allied airmen would soon be moved into its new North Compound. Once settled in the drab new quarters, the prisoners would dig three tunnels codenamed Tom, Dick, and Harry. Bushell reasoned that while the Germans might discover

Opposite: This aerial view shows Stalag Luft III’s tidy plot outside Sagan, Germany. Above: The prisoners’ escape committee quietly identified and studied each camp overseer and his daily routine. Such secretive work included luring Germans to spots where concealed kriegies could snap their pictures. Here is a photo of five of the camp’s “ferrets,” enlisted men whose sole duty was to sniff out escape plans. The ferrets’ sneakiness and the authority they had to enter and search huts without warning made them the special objects of kriegie animosity. APRIL 2013

AMERICA IN WWII 29

THE NOT-SO-GREAT ESCAPE

by Tom Huntington

one or even two of the passages, they would hardly suspect the prisoners were digging three. While the men carved their way through the earth, a security team would keep tabs on all Germans, especially the “ferrets” who wandered around camp poking their noses into every nook and cranny. Bushell already had an American, Lieutenant Colonel Albert P. “Big S” Clark, in charge of security. Clark was a future US Air Force general whose quiet cunning had earned him the admiration of senior British officers. But the Germans were reportedly planning to separate the Yanks from the Brits, and Bushell needed someone to safeguard what was sure to be a longterm project. Floody, with whom Harsh had shared details of his sordid past, believed that the experience peculiar to an ex-con

was hidden beneath a large shower drain; and Harry extended from beneath a wood-burning stove that was continuously lit. Floody, who had worked in Canadian gold mines, oversaw the digging. Working in shifts, prisoners hauled dirt up from the tunnels in water jugs and dumped it into blankets. “Penguins,” so named for their waddling, disposed of the dirt by spilling it bit by bit around the camp from bags suspended beneath their coats or under their pants. Improvisation and ingenuity became operational hallmarks for the complex operation, as prisoners did everything from manufacturing compasses and forging official travel documents to tailoring civilian clothing and German uniforms. “For over a year the work progressed on the tunnels, and whenever possible we worked

would prove useful, so he asked Harsh to take the job. “You crazy bastards are going to get the whole lot of us shot!” Harsh protested. “It’s as stupid as a lion tamer sticking his head in a lion’s mouth and then kicking the lion in the balls!” Floody brushed off his objections, and Harsh eventually joined the effort. He and the 200 men of his security detail began sharpening an elaborate series of signals— opening a window, closing a book, coughing, and so forth—to serve as alarms whenever ferrets approached. On April 1, 1943, Harsh and some 600 other men moved into the North Compound, and Bushell immediately put them to work. Prisoners began digging tunnels in three separate barracks, plunging each one 30 feet straight down before turning to run parallel to the ground—deep enough so the surveillance microphones Germans had inserted in the soil around the camp would not pick up sound. The tunnel entrances were cleverly disguised according to designs by a Polish officer known simply as Minskewitz. Tom’s invisible trap door lay unassumingly alongside a chimney; Dick’s entrance

around the clock,” Harsh wrote. “Looking back on that period of my life, I seemed to have spent most of the time with my heart in my mouth.” The digging was hard, made more difficult by the sandy soil, which tended to collapse. Yet the tunnels steadily advanced. Tom had stretched a good 260 feet—still short of the surrounding forest, but an impressive 140 feet outside the prison’s barbed wire—by the time Germans discovered it during a surprise inspection. It was a crushing blow, but Bushell’s earlier reasoning proved correct: the Germans did not suspect more than one tunnel. The prisoners now shifted their full attention to Harry, limiting Dick’s use to storage. Shored up by wood liberated from bunks and building frames, Harry stretched for 336 feet. A coil of wire swiped by a prisoner kept it well lighted, while a juryrigged pump filled it with fresh air through a pipe fashioned from discarded milk tins. To ease access to the tunnel’s increasing length, the men managed to lay wooden tracks for wheeled trolleys manipulated by ropes.

Above, left: These forged papers helped Dutch airman Bram Van der Stok slip out of Germany after the Great Escape. Above, upper middle: One kriegie crafted this crude but effective compass. Above, right: The air pipe that ventilated the tunnel known as Harry was largely fashioned from empty cans of Klim brand powdered milk. Above, bottom: This Red Cross box greeted Lieutenant Colonel Albert Clark when he returned to the States. Rather than its original food parcels, it contained two of Clark’s scrapbooks and a bound volume of the Luftwaffe magazine Der Adler (“The Eagle”). Clark had been transferred out of the Stalag Luft III North Compound shortly before the escape. 30 AMERICA IN WWII

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Gibraltar. Casting a wide net, Germans captured another 23 As the spring of 1944 approached, Harry inched closer and escapees and sent them back to prison. closer to the sheltering forest. Then, on March 1, the always-suspicious Germans singled out 19 men they assumed would be involved in any escape attempt and transferred them to a camp in HE OTHER ESCAPEES WERE LESS FORTUNATE . In an effort to Belaria, a few miles to the west. Among them was George Harsh, discourage future escape attempts, Adolf Hitler ordered a who, after supporting the tunnel work for nearly a year, had sudnumber of Stalag Luft III’s escapees shot. A total of 50 were denly lost his chance to escape. executed, although official reports stated that the men had been The prisoners finally made their break 23 days later, on the shot trying to escape. Among the dead was Roger Bushell. After night of March 24, 1944. Things did not go smoothly. When pristhe war, the RAF Special Investigations Branch tracked down 18 oner Johnny Bull peered cautiously out of the hole, he got the members of the Gestapo (secret police) and Kriminalpolizei shock of his life: Harry was a good 10 feet short of the forest, so (“Criminal Police”) and tried and convicted them of murder. alert guards would be able to spot Fourteen received death sentences. the men as they popped out of the Harsh remained in the Belaria ground. The prisoners quickly stockade until January 1945, when improvised a plan to have a man the German captors rounded up the hiding in the woods tug on a rope to famished, rag-clad prisoners there alert the next man in the tunnel and marched them west. “My life when it was safe to emerge. But that appeared to be one long black joke meant each prisoner’s exit had to be perpetrated by the gods, and this timed with the guards’ movements, march was the culminating piece of limiting the number of men who black humor,” he wrote. Herded could get out. Amid the tense operaalong by a handful of guards, he and tion, portions of the tunnel’s roof perhaps a hundred other prisoners collapsed, and precious time ticked had reached Luckenwalde, just south away as the men frantically cleared of Berlin, when Soviet Red Army out the debris. Making matters still forces swept into the area and took worse, the Germans cut off the possession of them. The Soviets sent camp’s electricity in response to a the POWs across the Elbe River to British air raid, plunging Harry into American forces, who responded in total darkness. kind with Soviet prisoners whom they Despite the obstacles, anxious airhad liberated. Once again, Harsh men continued to emerge from the was free. His frustrating but timely ground and crawl into the woods transfer shortly before the Stalag until about 4:55 A.M., when the pitch Luft III breakout had probably saved his life. night turned to gray morning. When When Brickhill penned his narraa guard wandered in the direction of tive of the escape, he asked Harsh to the escape hole, he noticed steam riswrite the introduction. “It is the ing from the warm tunnel into the story of achievement against imposcold morning air and became suspiThe Great Escape angered Germans all the way up the sible odds,” Harsh wrote. “And it cious. He lowered the rifle from his command chain to Adolf Hitler, who ordered a crackdown proves something that I believed then shoulder. One last prisoner popped in all prison camps. A copy of this warning poster was and know now—there is nothing from the tunnel and broke for the hung in each Stalag Luft III compound. that can stop a group of men, regardwoods. To protect him, two others less of race, creed, color or nationality, from achieving a goal once hiding nearby jumped in front of the guard with their hands up. they agree as to what that goal is.” By the time he wrote “Nicht schiessen!” (“Don’t shoot!”), they shouted. Lonesome Road, his viewpoint had changed. “At this date, after Eighty men had emerged from Harry. The guards captured four the passage of all these years and because of the events that have of them at the exit, and 76 others escaped into the night. Word of transpired during these years,” he wrote, “I consider the Great the breakout quickly reached Berlin, where Heinrich Himmler, Escape to have been an act of typical military madness, a futile, commander of the elite Nazi SS, grumbled about having to send empty gesture and a needless sacrifice of fifty lives.” A 60,000 to 70,000 troops hunting for a handful of Allied miscreants. Only three of the escapees ever reached the safety of Allied lines. Two of them, disguised as Norwegian electricians, hopped TOM HUNTINGTON, a contributing editor of America in WWII, is trains to the port town of Stettin, where sympathetic Swedish the author of the newly released Searching for George Gordon sailors smuggled them aboard their vessel. A third made his way Meade: The Forgotten Victor of Gettysburg from Stackpole through Holland, Paris, neutral Spain, and finally British Books.

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AMERICA IN WWII 31

Enemies

in Our Midst? As GIs battled Nazi and Fascist forces overseas, the US government put 15,000 German and Italian immigrants in prison to keep an eye on them.

by Melissa Amateis Marsh

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Enemies in Our Midst? by Melissa Amateis Marsh

ANNA SCHNEIDER was in her home in Southern California on the night of December 7, 1941, just hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when she heard a knock on the door. It was FBI agents. Schneider, a 33-year-old native of Backnang, Germany, let them in and then let them search her house. They discovered a box of letters from Schneider’s relatives overseas. One postcard featured a picture of Adolf Hitler. That was enough, it turned out, to place Schneider under arrest. ERTRUDE

converted women’s prison southeast of Dallas. She was just one of thousands of German and Italian immigrants and American citizens who suffered this sort of treatment. While American fighting men faced the enemy overseas, the American government tracked down, uprooted, and funneled 10,905 Germans and 3,278 Italians into detention camps. If those numbers paled in comparison to the masses of Japanese and Japanese American citizens interned for the war’s duration, the experiences of the individuals were much the same.

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Bewildered and scared, Schneider said little during the ride to the police station until one of the agents asked her why she never became an American citizen. “I told him that my folks were citizens, my husband was a citizen, and that I had two American-born children,” she recalled later. “I felt like an American and just hadn’t begun the application for the citizenship papers themselves.” Separated from her husband and two daughters, Schneider spent the next year at the Camp Seagoville internment camp, a

By the mid 1930s, the continuing, oppressive effects of the Great Depression, the rise of Fascism and Nazism overseas, and the increasing aggression of Japan, Germany, and Italy had American government officials on edge. Rumors of Nazi spy rings were splashed across newspaper front pages. In some cities, rabid members of the German American Bund, an alliance of perhaps 25,000 sympathetic to the Nazi cause, attended robust rallies, while pro-Fascist Italian American newspapers sang the praises of

Previous spread: German-born Gertrude Schneider (left), the wife of a US citizen, was arrested hours after the Pearl Harbor attack. Native Italian Filippo Molinari (right) had fought alongside Americans in World War I before moving to the United States. His job with the Italianlanguage newspaper L’Italia caught the attention of federal lawmen. Opposite: Schneider’s immigrant record classified her as an “Alien Enemy or Prisoner of War.” Above, top: This government-produced poster featuring a German soldier reminded American industrial workers that enemies could be in their midst. Above, bottom: Internee sports teams and band members pose in the Seagoville, Texas, internment camp in 1943. 34 AMERICA IN WWII

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RIGHT & PREVIOUS SPREAD: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Italian Premier Benito Mussolini. In Washington, DC, President Franklin Roosevelt contemplated the frightening potential of a growing so-called Fifth Column of subversive elements within the United States as Hollywood films warned of Nazi and Fascist characters bent on destroying America. In September 1936, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, with Roosevelt’s blessing, began compiling lists of people considered potential threats to the United States. Every FBI office received a memo instructing it to gather information about individuals or organizations with Nazi, Fascist, or Communist connections. German and Italian immigrants who were not American citizens were especially suspect. Many, like Gertrude Schneider, had been residents for years but had never taken the time to go through the citizenship process. Some still identified too strongly with their native coun-

tries to give up their existing citizenship. Others mistakenly thought that bearing children in America automatically made the parents citizens. Whatever the reason an immigrant was not an American citizen, the fact caught the wary eyes of War Department and Department of Justice officials who suspected that some foreign nationals refused to apply for citizenship because they were under the ideological spell of Nazism and Fascism. By the spring of 1939, Hoover, with help from the US Army’s military division and the US Navy Office of Naval Intelligence, had gathered 10 million names. Most of these belonged to entirely loyal residents. Some were German or Italian WWI veterans, members of heritage-based social clubs, or unknowing victims of excessive scrutiny. As pockets of anti-German and -Italian sentiment grew, Hoover added to jangled nerves by announcing “that there is a Fifth APRIL 2013

AMERICA IN WWII 35

Enemies in Our Midst? by Melissa Amateis Marsh Column which has already started to march is an acknowledged reality. That it menaces America is an established fact. That it must be met is the common resolve of every red-blooded citizen.” Roosevelt, Hoover, and Martin Dies, chairman of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, considered the Fifth Column threat genuine and urged Americans to be vigilant. They got their wish. Reports of suspected espionage and other suspicious activity skyrocketed. In 1938 the FBI had received a total of 250 such complaints; during a single day in May 1940, Hoover’s men were overwhelmed by 2,871. The FBI was indeed tracking a number of foreign spies operating on American soil. But the lines between Nazi and Fascist and ordinary German and Italian immigrants were becoming blurred.

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ITH FEARS OF INTERNAL SUBVERSION increasing, the government debated what would be done with potential troublemakers in the time between their arrest and possible deportation. In 1939, US Representative Sam Hobbs of Alabama introduced legislation that would legalize the detention of “enemy aliens” (a misleading term ultimately applied to all aliens from Axis countries) in camps under the jurisdiction of the US Department of Labor. Scorned by its opposition as the “Concentration Camp Bill,” the Hobbs bill (House Resolution 3) drew heated opposition from the likes of the radical Congressman Vito Marcantonio from East Harlem. “Nowhere in this bill is any provision found for due process; in other words, for any kind of a trial, with or without a jury,” Marcantonio fumed. After months of acrimonious debate and numerous revisions, the Hobbs bill was defeated in November 1941. By then, however, Roosevelt had authorized an emergency program that allowed the Justice Department “to arrest and detain those persons deemed dangerous in the event of war, invasion, or insurrection in and of a foreign enemy.” Out came the FBI’s expanding list of names of those believed to be threats to national security. Inclusion on the list didn’t always require hard evidence. In the tense prewar environment, a wronged spouse, a jealous neighbor, or a vengeful employee could file a complaint and send the FBI scurrying after the accused. One German alien was added to the roll after his neighbors heard him listening to German music. The Justice Department organized the growing roster into three

categories. Category A was for those considered dangerous and subject to immediate arrest if America entered the war, B was for potentially dangerous people, and C was for those who merited close observation. Thus was born the ABC List. According to a December 8, 1941, memorandum from Hoover to an Immigration and Naturalization Service official, the majority of those on the ABC list were naturalized or native-born American citizens. Following the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939, the US government stepped up its domestic security efforts. The Alien Registration Act of 1940 required all immigrant residents over the age of 14 to report to be fingerprinted, photographed, and registered. Each was assigned a number and given a registration card that he or she was required to carry at all times. The process ultimately established that some 4.9 million aliens lived in the United States, the largest group of which was Italians, at 695,000. Germans ranked second and Japanese third. Upon signing the act, Roosevelt stated that it “should be interpreted and administered as a program designed not only for the protection of the country but also for the protection of the loyal aliens who are its guests…. The only effective system of control over aliens in this country must come from the Federal Government alone.” Department of Justice officials concluded that enemy aliens “should be treated as prisoners of war rather than as criminals.” Plans for selecting internment camp sites moved forward, as did a case-by-case evaluation process. Hearing boards were created. Arrested aliens would appear before these three-man panels along with optional counsel, who could not address the board or examine witnesses. Witnesses could testify on the behalf of the accused. After completing an evaluation, the board would send its report to the Justice Department’s Enemy Alien Control Unit, which could decide on one of three courses of action: conditional or unconditional release, supervised parole with or without bond, or internment for the rest of the war. Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, Roosevelt issued Presidential Proclamations 2525, 2526, and 2527, which instantly certified Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants as “enemy aliens.” Like the controversial Enemy Alien Act of 1798, the declarations technically pertained only to citizens not born in the United States. Arrests began that night, though Congress had not yet issued declarations of war against Germany and Italy.

Above: This poster was a tool in the German American Bund effort to recruit Americans sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Opposite: A 60-foot portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas dominates a massive bund rally in New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Washington’s Birthday in 1939. Opposite, inset: Fritz Kuhn leaves Ellis Island after the government ordered him deported in 1946. Kuhn, a chemist who had served in the German army during World War I before migrating to Mexico and then the United States, was a Ford Motor Company employee who became head of the bund in 1935. In 1939 he was convicted of embezzlement and sent to jail, where he remained through the war. 36 AMERICA IN WWII

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Filippo Molinari was among the first to be apprehended in San Jose, California. “At 11 P.M. three policemen came to the front door and two at the back,” he later wrote to a relative. “They told me that, by order of President Roosevelt, I must go with them. They didn’t even give me time to go to my room and put on my shoes. I was wearing slippers.” German immigrant Peter Joseph Greis endured a similar ordeal in Milwaukee on December 9. “Everyone in the house was asleep when the FBI agents pounded on our door,” his son Guenther later testified. “My father went to the door, half-asleep. The FBI agents demanded that he come with them. He was not allowed to bring anything. My mother was horrified and begged them not to take him. That was the last we knew of Dad for 6 weeks.” During the fear-fueled days following the attack on Pearl Harbor, government officials arrested 857 Germans and 147 Italians in 35 states. On December 17, Hoover instructed agents to furnish the FBI with “the names concerning persons of American citizenship, either by birth or naturalization, who you believe should be considered for custodial detention.” Those on the list who were not immediately arrested had to deal with restrictions on travel and property ownership and surprise visits by FBI agents. Items the bureau deemed contraband under the circumstances—short-wave radios, cameras, weapons, and even flashlights—were regularly confiscated. Italian-language schools were

closed. German or Italian social groups and gatherings drew close scrutiny. By February 1942, 2,192 Japanese, 1,243 Germans, and 264 Italians had been interned. On February 19, Roosevelt, under intense pressure from the War Department, issued the controversial Executive Order 9066, which established restricted “military areas”—wide swaths of land near vulnerable coastlines, power plants, and military outposts—from which enemy aliens could legally be removed. This harsh measure that even the infamously zealous Hoover called “wholly unnecessary” littered areas from Washington State to Southern Arizona with public proclamations that read: “The United States Government requires all aliens of German, Italian, or Japanese nationality to vacate this area.” The order also led to the mass relocation of some 110,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast. A scattering of military commanders that included the outspoken General John L. DeWitt, commander of the Ninth Corps Area headquartered in San Francisco, called for a similar withdrawal of all Italians and Germans. But the calls went unheeded, mostly because the sheer numbers and widespread nature of those stateside populations would have guaranteed a challenging roundup operation that might have disrupted the war effort. But roughly 10,000 were forced to move, which, along with government-imposed curfews and travel restrictions, cost many of them their jobs. This was APRIL 2013

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ALL PHOTOS THIS SPREAD: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

especially true for Italian fishermen, since wharves from which they operated were now closed to them. Aliens who were arrested were dispatched to camps scattered across the nation. Their numbers included German and Italian aliens the United States had accepted from Peru and other Latin American countries in the interest of security in the hemisphere. Spouses and other loved ones often went along voluntarily with those arrested to avoid being separated. The camp sites where they were held included converted former Civilian Conservation Corps campuses, parts of existing military bases, and even churches. Most of the enemy aliens arrested on the East Coast were processed at the Ellis Island Reception Center, known typically as the gateway into America. Those to be deported or repatriated to their native coun-

tries were dispatched directly from there. Eventually, some 2,650 internees were exchanged for Americans held in Germany. The internment camps varied in condition. Some were pleasant. Others, like Texas’s Crystal City Internment Camp, were not. Home to a substantial Japanese contingent, Crystal City also held Germans and a smaller number of Italians. It sat close to the border with Mexico, and its scalding desert environment was harsh and unforgiving. Guard towers, attack dogs, and barbed wire constantly reminded those inside of their circumstances. In July 1943, 17-year-old German immigrant Eberhard Fuhr and his older brother were reunited with their younger brother and their parents at Crystal City. “The camp was filled with insects and scorpions,” Fuhr remembered. “We received letters from friends

Above: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover entered the national spotlight as an assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in 1918. Amid postWWI fears of communism’s spread, Hoover worked on the Palmer Raids, which resulted in the deportation of hundreds of immigrants suspected of anarchist leanings. Opposite: Beginning in 1940, the federal government kept special records on immigrants from Axis countries. The next step for thousands of those aliens was internment camp. San Jose resident Filippo Molinari (left) and Cincinnati teenager Eberhard Fuhr (right) were among them. 38 AMERICA IN WWII

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Enemies in Our Midst? by Melissa Amateis Marsh

and relatives, but these were heavily censored with much information cut out. Living conditions were tolerable at best.” At Gertrude Schneider’s destination of Camp Seagoville, Texas, families resided in second-hand, prefabricated houses that had been dubbed “victory huts.” Others stayed in dormitories. Conditions at Seagoville were vacation-like compared to Crystal City, as Alfred Plaschke discovered after being transferred from Seagoville to Crystal City. “We thought we’d been brought to the end of the world…,” he recalled. “Suddenly we saw nothing but dry, hot, flat desert, with rows and rows of plasterboard and tarpaper shacks.” Seagoville’s population hovered at around 700. Crystal City’s was four times that. Treatment of internees was based on the Geneva Conventions, the series of international agreements on the treatment of prisoners of war. Detainees were provided food, clothing, and basic sanitation. They had access to exercise and religious and medical services, and there were social activities such as theatre, singing groups, orchestras, and athletics. Men and women worked, and children went to school. Camp residents were supplied with plastic tokens, which they redeemed for food and clothing at a general store. Most camps turned out their own newspapers. Some internees made the best of things. Exasperated troublemakers started fights or stole from others. Nationally, the treatment of supposed enemy aliens, particularly Germans and Italians, sparked considerable debate. Attorney General Francis Biddle, a newer addition to Roosevelt’s cabinet and a counterweight to unyielding War Department officials, later described the government’s security measures as “protective and negative.” Amid a series of government hearings held in late February and early March 1942, US Representative John H. Tolan of Northern California testified that it was wrong “to treat alien mothers of soldiers…in the same way as dangerous enemy aliens.” By the fall, such sentiment, along with more practical considerations, had gained some traction, and on Columbus Day, October 12, Biddle announced, “Italian nationals in the US would no

longer be classified as ‘enemies.’” It was a decision made with at least some political and military considerations in mind. The invasion of North Africa was imminent and a follow-up step into Italy was increasingly likely, and Roosevelt needed the political support of Italian Americans, some 500,000 of whom were serving in the armed forces. “I don’t care so much about Italians,” Roosevelt once said. “They’re a lot of opera singers.” Still, half of the interned Italians were not paroled until Italy’s surrender to Allied forces in September 1943.

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ERMAN INTERNEES FARED WORSE .

Roosevelt was more leery of Germans than he was Italians. “They may be dangerous,” he said. Following Germany’s surrender in May 1945, Germans considered a threat were notified that they were being expelled from the country. Others were paroled, exchanged, or transferred to other camps as their own transient homes were boarded up. Shipped to Ellis Island, Eberhard Fuhr remained there with his family until September 1947, more than two years after the war ended. Gertrude Anna Schneider had walked out of Camp Seagoville in January 1943, after numerous hearings and a year of confinement. By then, two of her brothers were serving in the US Navy. Meanwhile, her husband, Paul, had been forced out of numerous jobs and had lost the family home, despite his being an American citizen. In desperation, the Schneiders briefly relocated to Wisconsin, where they remained until Paul finally managed to convince FBI agents of his loyalty. As frustrated as Gertrude remained over her own treatment, she felt worse for Paul: “The injustice of my internment, and knowing that his citizenship meant nothing during wartime—since he was ‘just a German’—was something he never got over.” A

MELISSA AMATEIS MARSH has a master’s degree in history from the University of Nebraska. Her most recent article for America in WWII was “Charlie Brown’s War” in the December 2012 issue. APRIL 2013

AMERICA IN WWII 39

ALPHA

DOG

Every morning, FDR received a breakfast tray with eggs and toast—and a treat for his most trusted and faithful friend, America’s most highly placed canine.

by David A. Norris

ALPHA

DOG by David A. Norris

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WHITE HOUSE PRESS CONFERENCE on September 20, 1943. Instead of taking a seat, he wandered among the more than 100 radio and newspaper journalists in the room. He occasionally sniffed an ankle or shoe. When he lost interest, he wandered outside for a bit, then trotted back in. Parading nonchalantly past the president of the United States, he jumped into an empty fireplace, curled up, and took a nap.

None of this shocked anyone in the room. Being friends with the president had its perks, and for Fala, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s friendly Scottish terrier, sleeping in White House fireplaces was just one of many. The little dog was FDR’s constant companion throughout the war years, even on the road, often overseas, and on the president’s final journey. Originally named Big Boy, Fala was born to Scottish terriers named Peter and Wendy on April 7, 1940, in the home of Katharine Kellog of Westport, Connecticut. Kellog gave the shaggy black puppy to a friend, Roosevelt’s cousin Margaret “Daisy” Suckley. She in turn taught the dog a few tricks and delivered him to the White House as a present on November 10, 1940. Big Boy soon became Murray the Outlaw of Falahill, in honor of a swashbuckling 15th-century Scottish ancestor of FDR—Fala for short. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, had owned other dogs, and some had caused trouble at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In 1933, when the Roosevelts moved into the White House, Eleanor’s eight-year-old Scottish terrier Meggie bit a reporter and made headlines. Winks, the Roosevelts’ English setter puppy, got news coverage for wolfing down several plates of bacon and eggs that had been laid out in the servants’ dining room one morning in 1934. And Major the German shepherd made an even bigger story in 1935 by biting America’s first elected female senator, Hattie Caraway of Arkansas. Winks got chuckles for his offense; not so Meggie and Major, who were exiled to new homes.

Unlike those delinquent dogs of the 1930s, Fala adjusted well to White House life and formed a special bond with Roosevelt. In the early 1940s, the stress of the presidency and the war eroded FDR’s health. It is impossible to measure the positive effect that Fala’s affection had on the Allied war effort by reviving Roosevelt’s spirits. For some time, as “first dog,” Fala wore the District of Columbia’s dog license tag No. 1. Unfortunately, wartime metal shortages induced the district to issue new plastic tags in 1943, and numbers 1 and 2 went to other dogs whose owners worked at the White House. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s dog got tag No. 3. Even without license tag No. 1, Fala got top treatment at the White House. There was always a treat for Fala with FDR’s breakfast tray—though the presidential pet did have to wait to get his main dinner at suppertime. In between, there were orders forbidding anyone but the president himself to feed Fala. Otherwise, White House employees and visitors just couldn’t resist giving treats and snacks to the friendly little dog. At night, Fala curled up and slept in a chair near the foot of the president’s bed. Much of FDR’s personal care was handled by his valet, Arthur Prettyman. A retired navy chief steward, Prettyman helped the president with bathing, dressing, and other personal tasks. His duties also included taking Fala for walks, and he was often photographed walking the dog at railroad stations during halts on trips. Prettyman was the only person allowed to bathe Fala.

Previous spread: There is no better goodwill ambassador than a loveable dog—the White House press photographers could vouch for that. Here they pose for Fala, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Scottish terrier, on the White House lawn in 1942. Top: As the president’s constant companion, Fala naturally enjoyed certain distinctions and privileges, including a dog tag engraved with his famous address. Above: But Fala also had to do his part for the war effort. In June 1942, that meant giving up his toys to an emergency scrap rubber drive. 42 AMERICA IN WWII

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movies, in 1944, von Fritsch directed the classic horror film Curse of the Cat People.) So popular was Fala that he received several thousand letters, notes, birthday cards, and presents. White House staffers answered all of Fala’s fan mail. Quite a few letters came from dog owners who sent proposals of, well, “marriage.” Fala eventually fathered two female puppies named Meggy and Peggy in early 1945. The mother was Buttons, a Scottish terrier owned by Suckley. According to some reports, Fala and Buttons did not get along. They quarreled so violently that they sent each other to the veterinarian. Like America’s non-canine celebrities, Fala helped with the war effort. He posed for publicity photos for bond drives and served as the ROM THE FUNNY PAPERS , Fala went to Hollywood—well, sort of. The White Top: Each morning, the president’s breakfast honorary president of Barkers for Britain. tray came with something for Fala—a dog The organization was an offshoot of Bundles House pooch was a character in the 1943 movie comedy Princess O’Rourke, starring biscuit in this case. Above: Everyone wanted for Britain, a charity that collected clothing, to give Fala treats, but that wasn’t good for blankets, and other non-military supplies for Olivia de Havilland and Robert Cummings. him. So FDR laid down the law: only he British civilians. Dog owners bought memberAlas for Fala, his scenes were filmed with a could feed Fala, as he is about to do (after ships in Barkers for Britain for their pets, stand-in named Whiskers. some teasing) in this March 1943 photo. receiving metal collar tags for their donations. Later that year, Fala did get his moment As president of the United States, FDR traveled widely during on the silver screen, in MGM’s Fala: The President’s Dog. About the war years, making inspection and campaign trips around 10 minutes long, the film was part of the popular Pete Smith America and taking longer journeys to Canada and overseas to Specialties series of comical short features. Gunther von Fritsch, confer with Allied leaders. Most of the time, Fala was with him, who directed the film, would handle another MGM short titled traveling many miles by train and ship. Fala at Hyde Park in 1946. (Quirky fact: Between those two

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Fala was a natural for the media. Cute and well behaved, perky and friendly, the pup appeared in numerous press photos. One had him posing by a camera, as if he were going to take a picture of the photographers at a press conference. In 1942, he appeared with his master on the cover of the magazine Liberty. That same year, Suckley and Alice Dalgliesh co-wrote a “biography” of the president’s dog, The True Story of Fala. In 1943 Fala starred in a newspaper cartoon series, Mr. Fala of the White House, drawn by Alan Foster. A prominent illustrator of the time, Foster boasted a resume that included several covers for the Saturday Evening Post.

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1943, WHEN FDR TRAVELED by rail to the First Quebec Conference, Fala was part of his entourage. Details of the president’s trips away from Washington were often kept secret until his return, for security reasons. And although Roosevelt used an armor-plated railroad car with bulletproof windows, the Ferdinand Magellan, the car looked much like an ordinary Pullman from the N

outside. What gave it away was Fala. From so many newsreel clips and newspaper photos, the famous dog was instantly recognized whenever he was taken outside the train for a walk. The popular pet tipped off the president’s whereabouts so often that the Secret Service agents nicknamed Fala “The Informer.” So it was on the trip to the Quebec Conference. FDR’s train made a quick stop at Montreal on August 17, 1943, en route to Quebec City. Strict precautions made people at the station curious about the newly arrived train, but no one was told that it carried the president of the United States. The sight of the shaggy black Scottie immediately gave away the secret. On July 21, 1944, Fala accompanied Roosevelt aboard the heavy cruiser USS Baltimore (CA-68) for a tour of Hawaii and the Aleutian Islands. The visit to Hawaii wasn’t much fun for Fala. Regulations required all dogs to be quarantined for four months before setting foot on Hawaiian soil. So the Scottie had to stay aboard the cruiser for several days until the president returned. They then spent a few days off the Alaskan coast

Top: Fala’s visits to the White House pantry left him disappointed. But the public loved this scene when they saw it in MGM’s 1943 short Fala: The President’s Dog. Artifacts: Fala’s fame made him a natural for promoting the war effort. He was honorary president of Barkers for Britain (top tag), which raised money for war-torn England. And though Fala wasn’t cut out to be a war dog, he joined Dogs for Defense (laminated tag), which recruited dogs, trainers, and funds. Such roles were perfect for Fala, who was, as his dish testified (bottom), a dog. 44 AMERICA IN WWII

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On August 3, 1941, FDR left Washington by train, supposedly to board the presidential yacht Potomac for a few days’ vacation. Fala went along. But the vacation was actually a ruse to hide a secret meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Roosevelt transferred to the heavy cruiser USS Augusta (CA-31). With a flotilla of other US Navy vessels, the Augusta rendezvoused with Churchill in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, on August 9–10, 1941. The president and prime minister discussed the growing war and, looking ahead, drew up the Atlantic Charter with aims for a better postwar world. Fala was aboard Augusta and was photographed aboard Churchill’s ship, HMS Prince of Wales.

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before returning home aboard the destroyer USS Cummings leash, the Scottie “rolled on the warm grass” not far from FDR’s (DD-365). grave, reported the Associated Press. When West Point cadets For some of the most distant presidential trips, such as the fired three rifle volleys in salute at the end of the burial service, Allied summit conferences in Casablanca (Morocco), Tehran Fala barked after each volley’s crashing echo. (Iran), and Yalta (Soviet Crimea), Fala remained behind, usually Eleanor Roosevelt recalled a touching moment after the funerin Suckley’s care. al, when a special motorcade brought General Dwight Eisenhower So fond of travel was Fala that he apparently tried to arrange to place a wreath on her husband’s grave. Upon hearing the comsome trips on his own. In 1941, he invited himself to his master’s motion of the sirens and engines, Fala perked up. He seemed to third inauguration. Roosevelt was waiting to expect it would be his missing master returning at last. depart for the ceremony when his dog jumped When the family of FDR’s successor, President Harry into the car and sat down next to him. The Truman, moved into the White House, Fala’s president had a guard take the disappointed “replacement” was a six-month-old Fala back inside the White House. A short Irish setter named Mike. The new dog time after the festivities, Fala escaped from was a present to Truman’s daughter, the White House grounds. Searchers found Margaret, from Robert E. Hannegan, him several blocks away, sitting in front of the newly appointed postmaster genera movie theater. Newspapers joked that he al. The Trumans soon gave Mike away, wanted to see the newsreels of the inauguhowever. One of the reasons was that the ral ceremonies he’d missed. poor dog constantly got sick from being Fala’s travels with his master once put fed too many treats by the staff. him at the center of a political scandal. FDR had arranged for Suckley to take After the trip to Hawaii and the Fala after he was gone, perhaps thinking Aleutians in the summer of 1944, false that Eleanor would be too busy with her rumors appeared in the press that Fala own work to take care of a dog. But had been left behind accidentally in the Eleanor missed Fala so much that she Aleutians. With FDR running for an asked to have him back with her. unprecedented fourth term, some of his After 1945, Eleanor lived at Val-Kill, Republican opponents amplified the the house that had been her getaway from rumors. They claimed that several million the large Roosevelt mansion at Hyde dollars and considerable effort by the navy Park. Fala spent his time there, often were wasted by diverting a destroyer to playing with the Roosevelt grandchilAlaska to bring back the presidential pet. dren, and making occasional visits to FDR closed the matter with a flourish at Eleanor’s New York City apartment. a Teamsters union campaign dinner on September 23, 1944. His remarks that night EWSPAPERS ACROSS America ran obibecame known as “the Fala Speech.” He tuaries for Fala when he died on stated that it was routine to hear “malicious April 5, 1952. It was seven days short of falsehoods” about himself. But “not content seven years since his master had died. with that, they now include my little dog, Fala was buried in the Rose Garden at Fala.” Even worse, he continued, Fala’s Hyde Park, near the graves of Franklin thrifty “Scotch soul was furious” at being and, later, Eleanor Roosevelt (who lived accused of frittering away millions of doluntil November 7, 1962). Above: It wasn’t surprising for Liberty magazine lars needed for the war effort. “He has not Today, Fala holds a unique honor to put FDR on its cover on August 22, 1942. But been the same dog since,” FDR added. The among White House pets. Among the that Fala was beside him was an indicator of just radio carried the laughter of the audience how often the dog appeared with the president— statues in the Franklin D. Roosevelt across the country, and the attempted politMemorial in Washington, DC, is a lifeeven at high-level meetings and historic events. ical storm was over. (Footage of the Fala size bronze sculpture by Neil Estern that Top: Fala has a place of honor in the Franklin speech is available on YouTube.) depicts Fala seated near his master. In Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC. On FDR’s final trip, Fala was by his tribute to Fala’s memorable wartime master’s side. They left Washington on March 29, 1945, for a friendship with FDR, he is the only dog included in a memorial to train ride to Roosevelt’s summer home at Warm Springs, Georgia. an American president. A There, Roosevelt died from a stroke on April 12. At the president’s funeral, Suckley looked after Fala. The DAVID A. NORRIS has written frequently for America in WWII, mourning of FDR’s inner circle and the whole nation contrasted about everything from stamps and money to airplane recognition with the innocent behavior of the little dog. At the end of his models and V-mail.

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Unsung Sailor by Don Ellwood

OF CON GRESS

D LWOO DON EL ESY OF COURT

GLENN STUART PEARCE, LIBRARY

AS SOON AS HE WAS OLD ENOUGH, Don Ellwood joined the US Merchant Marine to move troops and supplies for America’s war effort. He and his fellow mariners didn’t often fire guns, but they felt the shock of enemy fire just like any other sailor.

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WAS 13 YRS OLD when I was sitting in my high school classroom in Toledo, Ohio, the morning after Pearl Harbor was attacked and President Roosevelt’s voice came on our speakers to announce that war was declared. Every boy that was 18 jumped up and yelled that he was going to enlist and ran out of school.

So for the next three years, I volunteered to work on the farms to help out [after farm workers went off to war], and we even trained with the American Legion in military drills so that we knew what to do when we were old enough to enlist. The legion gave us a wooden rifle, a cap of tan color, and a name badge. I felt so grown up by being in this group of fellow students and wore my cap with badge even when I was not drilling. We all thought that the marching in formation and learning the manual drill for the rifle would be essential to us. When I was old enough to get a Social Security card, I got a job

Above, left: At the end of his active and reserve service, Senior Chief Quartermaster Don Ellwood wears a slew of ribbons. The bottom row are (from left) WWII US Merchant Marine Victory, Pacific War Zone, and Atlantic War Zone medals. Above, right: Wartime recruiting. 46 AMERICA IN WWII

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to learn, as one day, if our ship was to be abandoned, not only our life but also our fellow shipmates’ lives could depend upon a successful launching of the lifeboat. One thing I always remembered about the lifeboats was that we had to memorize the contents stored in each boat—such as how many cans of water, how many cans of food, etc.—as that meant life or slow death if you were not rescued for a long time. In mid-December 1944 I received my seaman’s passport and documents and, after reporting to the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific [a labor union] for a ship, I was assigned to the SS James Whitcomb Riley,

mess hall for lunch when our ship’s hull vibrated suddenly and—I didn’t know what happened to our ship. But then one of my shipmates told me that the navy escort ships had shot depth charges and it was their explosions whose shock hit our ship. So from then on, I was never worried about it. Finally, for the first time in my young life, I was in a ship in a convoy that was actually being attacked by enemy subs. Now I knew what war actually was like, as it could have been our ship that the enemy submarine was torpedoing. I was not frightened because I had confidence in my fellow shipmates and the ship. After 15 days, we arrived safely and my passport was stamped and I went into town to experience what war had done to a city. I met several girls and a boy my age who took me home to meet his parents. It

COURTESY OF DON ELLWOOD

COURTESY OF DON ELLWOOD

at the Chevrolet parts division as a parttime machinist trainee (drill-press operator) during the summer of 1944. It was in September of 1944, after becoming a senior in high school, that I saw an advertisement in the Toledo Blade newspaper that the US Maritime Service was looking for boys 16 1/2 and 17 years of age to be trained as merchant marine seamen. My father had served in the navy reserve and as an ordinary seaman on the Great Lakes when he was younger, so it didn’t take too much to persuade him to support my enlisting. After passing my physical exam, I was sent by train from Detroit, with other boys my age, to Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York, where for three months I was trained to stand lookout watches, steer a ship, learn the nomenclature of the ship, shoot a 20mm cannon, and launch a lifeboat.

Above, left: Ellwood took this photo of quartermasters on the deck of the destroyer USS Stormes (DD-780) during his naval service in the Korean War. He sailed aboard six destroyers and an aircraft carrier in his nine years of active duty. It was this—not his dangerous merchant marine service in World War II—that officially made him a veteran. Above, right: Officers photographed by Ellwood aboard the Stormes.

Everything was so new to all of us trainees. We were given the chance to shoot a simulated 20mm cannon on a huge screen, where we could see the tracers moving in red dots just as though they were real. Can you imagine the thrill of seeing that from the standpoint of a young boy if it was real, if my ship was being attacked by an enemy fighter aircraft, and seeing it hit and diving into the ocean? Launching a lifeboat while training is really a comical set of numerous errors, even though the instructors demonstrated how to do it before we trainees were given the opportunity. It never caused any of us injuries, but we got a lot of yelling from the instructors. This was extremely important 48 AMERICA IN WWII

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a Liberty ship, for duty as an ordinary seaman. I was assigned to the 4-to-8 [o’clock] watch section, which had two older professional seamen in it who didn’t exactly like my wearing a navy type of uniform when I went ashore on liberty. But after a while, I was accepted, as by January 1945 hundreds of ships had young boys like me serving on board, wearing navy-type uniforms. I guess that as long as we did our jobs and were not a hindrance, we were accepted. The thing is, if we were not filling out the vacancies shipboard, who else were they going to get? Our first voyage to Liverpool, England, was in a convoy that was attacked by German submarines. I was sitting in the

was a fascinating experience for a 16-yearold boy to step ashore in a nation that was in the news back home with stories about its bombing by German aircraft and buzz bombs [V-1 flying bombs] and its people living by rationing of food, clothing, and other necessities of life. I remember our American dollars having to be converted into English currency. Not knowing how much things cost, I would depend upon the honesty of the seller, as I could never understand shilling, pence, and the paper currency in relation to our US money. I remember going to the movie theater and there were one or two girls standing outside. I was wearing my US maritime uniform and peacoat, as it was January

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Ellwood first went to sea—and war—aboard the Liberty ship SS James Whitcomb Riley. He went aboard in December 1944, bound for Liverpool.

1945, so with boldness I never had before, and with my uniform giving me that, I went up to the girls of my age and asked one if she’d like to see the movie with me, and she said yes. In the theater, all I did was hold her hand rather than putting my arm around her shoulders. From the movie theater, we had lunch at a restaurant and then parted after I thanked her for being with me. Everyone was very friendly to me. I always remembered those days. It was my first time having the famous fish and chips snack in a rolled-up newspaper. It was sometime in this period that we heard that President Roosevelt died. We were about midway across the Atlantic on our way back to New York City; a oneway trip took 15 days. As I remember hearing that, it had as much effect upon me and most of my fellow deck seaman as if a well-known movie star had died. It’s because it didn’t affect us personally like it would if our wife, parent, or child had died. Nothing was observed as a special event by the ship’s officers in that regard. After arriving back in New York, I went home to visit my parents and two younger brothers. I felt so much older, and I visited my high school and some of my teachers.

When I arrived back aboard ship, I noticed that our No. 2 hatch was fitted out with troop-type bunks and two large steam kettles, yet when we got underway for Swansea, Wales, we didn’t take on any troops. Upon arriving in Swansea and offloading some of our cargo, I went ashore and while in a small department store, I noted that there was a wireless station there where I could send a message back to my parents in Toledo. So I sent the message that I was alive and well.

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for Cherbourg, France, not too long after the D-Day invasion [of Normandy, June 6, 1944], we tied up at the large, reinforced-concrete former German submarine pens. An hour or so later, our soldiers marched 500 German POWs to our ship to be loaded aboard. I really can’t say that they were actually Germans, only that they were wearing German uniforms. But these prisoners were boys ages 12 and 13 and men old enough to be grandfathers. After having to leave everything in their possessions on the dock, they were taken aboard and we got underway with the army soldiers as guards. This now meant that we FTER GETTING UNDERWAY

had the entire ship’s crew, a Navy Armed Guard gunners unit, and now 500 prisoners and guards aboard. While we were at sea coming back to New York City, the army soldiers that were to guard the POWs let 100 of them out on the main forward deck for air and exercise. We sailors used them to chip rust away and paint over the bare spots. I, being about the same age as the young POWs, talked with one of them, although we were told not to talk. I managed to exchange a packet of cigarettes for his German belt buckle. I lost it many months later. Instead of taking a northern route to New York City, we took a southern route that took us just north of the Azores islands. When we were there, we encountered a hurricane. It was my first experience to see how high the seas can get, and with not much ballast to keep our hull in the water. Having no cargo in our holds, the ship only had its fuel as ballast; so, essentially, we were like a floating cork. The sky all around us on the horizon was as though it had a heavy fog, and each hour the seas were getting bigger in height. I was on the ship’s steering wheel and looking straight ahead, it looked like a solid wall of water, deep green APRIL 2013

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Royal Oak, was loading avgas [aviation gasoline] in Texas City, Texas, at night. My shipmates took me into the general area, where at 11 P.M., we found a house where three women in outfits like swimming suits were sitting outside on the porch with the porch light on. My two fellow shipmates told the women that I had never had sexual intercourse, and one took me by the hand and took me into a bedroom where she undressed. I was so nervous that I kept

Mexico heading for Mobile, Alabama, that we heard World War II was over. It was sort of a letdown in a way—glad that the war was over, but the reason we were all hyped up, doing our bit to win the war, was now gone. Everything would go back to business as usual. In other words, the patriotism, the motivation that people had to win the war, would be greatly lessened, and with so many soldiers coming home, how would the civilians react to this influx of soldiers looking for their old jobs back? I signed off the ship and decided to take a train to Los Angeles to meet my mother, my stepfather, and my half sister who lived there. It was there in Los Angeles that I joined the Army Transport Service and was assigned as an ordinary seaman on an army hospital ship, the USAHS Shamrock. By this time our government issued a plea to all merchant marine seamen to stay on the job because we had to bring home our troops and to continue to supply the troops remaining overseas and our Allies. So I listened to our government’s pleas and stayed on the job. (Boy, did we ever get shafted by our so called “grateful” government, which denied veteran status to us merchant marines.) I reported aboard Shamrock in the San Pedro, California, harbor. This ship was built in the early 1920s, and when we deckhands were to chip the hull of its rust, I had to stop chipping in one area, as I could have gone right through the hull and sprung a leak. We were to off-load all of the caskets and other items as the ship was going to be decommissioned. After a few weeks, I was transferred to the army hospital ship USAHS Emily H.M. Weder, also there in San Pedro. It, too, was off-loading caskets, but this time the red cross was to be painted out, and it was to be renamed as the army troop ship USAT President Buchanan. While changing some halyard lines to the mast, one line had to be taken up by hand and put through one of the signal blocks. A seaman could get up about halfway on the mast easily, but not the upper half. When none of us seamen was willing to risk the danger of falling off the mast, the second mate said he would. He was nearly at the top when he suddenly fell NATIONAL ARCHIVES

in color, higher than the bridge of the ship. So I could watch the bow of the ship actually seeming to rise up the huge wall, and as the sea would pass under the ship, it left the propeller spinning in the open space before digging into the sea again. Our ship’s safety depended upon the bow always heading directly into the sea and never to be broadsided to it, as then we’d capsize. One would think a young boy on a ship in the middle of the hurricane’s mountainous seas would be scared out of his wits, but I really wasn’t. It was thrilling to watch our ship rising and falling, and feeling that the ship would always come through it okay. So enjoy the ride! Even with the shrieking high sound of the winds, I could hear the screams of terror from the prisoners that we had padlocked in the hold. There were not enough lifeboats and life rafts to accommodate the prisoners and our crew. Fortunately, after five days of riding the storm out, we came through safely and entered New York City harbor to offload the prisoners and guards onto an army ferry boat. I felt sorry for them. I had previously heard stories from the older merchant marine seamen aboard about the trips to Murmansk, Russia, and how few ships made it to Russia and back. So when I saw in the New York City warehouses what I thought was cargo that had the stamps for Russia, I signed off the SS James Whitcomb Riley. After going home to Toledo for a week, I returned to New York, and the Union hall dispatcher assigned me to a tanker that was loaded with P-38 Lockheed Lightning fighter aircraft on the main deck and leaving for Texas and then the far Pacific. This time, there was no navy ship escort going with us. We sailed to the Panama Canal, where we had to tie up at a pier until the next day. So I and a shipmate, both of us being 17 years old, went into Panama City, where there were servicemen everywhere. We saw a whorehouse where army MPs [military police] were standing outside to keep army soldiers from going in. My shipmate and I dared one another about going in and getting our second time in our lives lying with a woman. The first time was when our ship, the SS

When World War II drew to a close, Ellwood went to work as a seaman for the US Army Transport Service, sailing aboard the hospital ship USAHS Shamrock.

buttoning and unbuttoning my pants. My shipmates were watching from outside the bedroom windows and were laughing at my attempts. It was over as fast as it started. So when our ship arrived in Panama, I wanted to try it again.

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EXT MORNING, we went through the canal, and for the next 15 days, we had good weather. We arrived at Guam and unloaded our cargo and planes. About midway back to the Panama Canal, our ship’s radio heard the radio broadcast about atomic bombs being dropped on Nagasaki, Japan [actually, the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945]. And while transiting the Panama Canal a second bomb was dropped [the Nagasaki bomb, on August 9]. It was when we were in the Gulf of

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A and bounced off the lower structure and then onto the main deck. He died there and I ran to tell the captain. The body was sent ashore for examination and to be prepared for burial at sea after we got underway in a week. Since we were now a troopship, we took aboard troops that were discharged and their dependents for the trip to Honolulu. When we got underway and were outside the five-mile boundary, we stopped the engines to hold a burial at sea ceremony for the second mate. As the body slipped over the side, there was a great many flash cameras of the passengers going off. I forgot to say that this ship also was a very old ship, because two days off Honolulu the ship’s freshwater evaporators broke down and we seamen were told to collect all of the freshwater cans from the lifeboats to distribute to the passengers. The following day, the engines broke down and we had to radio for a tow from the army in Hawaii. It was about a month later, while we were tied up alongside the pier on April 1, 1946, and we seamen were in the passage-

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way waiting to pick up our pay, when the ship lurched to one side. There was a tidal wave that hit Honolulu and all of the water in the harbor went out to the sea. We had to rush up on deck and put out new lines to moor with, as all of the existing mooring lines snapped.

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and had to work in a meat-packing plant for a few days before a ship en route to Long Beach, California, needed a seaman to sign on, so that is how I got back to the States. I stayed with my mother for a short while before signing on a Victory ship going to Oregon to load large, trimmed tree trunks for paper mill plants in California. Then for the next several months, I worked on two or three oil tankers on the West Coast until about late September 1946, when I left California on a train bound for Toledo. SIGNED OFF THAT SHIP

My brothers and parents were glad to see me, as I them, for it had been a long time. In early October 1946, two years after leaving high school to become a merchant marine seaman, I re-enrolled at Libbey High School to finish my senior year. To say that I was an oddity in my class rooms is mild. One day I had to go to the coast guard headquarters in downtown Toledo to upgrade my seaman’s ticket to “able-bodied” seaman, as I had enough time at sea to do so. The next morning, the dean passed the word over the loudspeakers for me to report to his office. When I reported, he asked me if I was absent yesterday and, if so, where was my excuse slip written by my parents? Needless to say, I was dumbfounded. I told him that I was a veteran and that I had business to conduct with the coast guard, and I only came back to high school to finish my education and didn’t feel that I needed an excuse slip. He said he understood and would take care of the paperwork. I was now the same age as the rest of the seniors in school, and I re-applied at the Chevrolet company for a job as a machin-

Spend the day in 1944 aboard the World War II Liberty Ship JOHN W. BROWN The six hour day cruise on the Chesapeake Bay features: continental breakfast, buffet lunch, music of the 40’s, period entertainment & flybys of wartime aircraft (weather permitting). Tour museum spaces, crew quarters, bridge & much more. View the magnificent 140-ton tripleexpansion steam engine as it powers the ship through the water.

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Tickets are $140 ea Group rates available To order Cruise tickets call: 410-558-0164 Ticket order forms available on our website at: www.liberty-ship.com Last day to order tickets is 14 days before the cruise. Conditions and penalties apply to cancellations Project Liberty Ship is a Baltimore based, all volunteer, nonprofit organization 52 AMERICA IN WWII

APRIL 2013

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

On USAHS Emily H.M. Weder, Ellwood unloaded war dead. Then Weder became USAT President Buchanan (above), and Ellwood finished his merchant marine service by bringing living GIs home.

ist trainee until I graduated in June 1947. Then I took an able seaman’s position on one of the Great Lakes ore carriers, the SS James Thompson. But in August 1947, after learning that my younger brother enlisted in the navy, I decided to do the same. I was the only recruit in my company that wore merchant marine battle rib-

bons on my chest. Upon graduation, I served on one aircraft carrier and six destroyers in nine years of active duty as a quartermaster and signalman during the Korean War. Being honorably discharged, after one year, I enlisted in the Navy Ready Reserve in January 1958 and served honorably for 25 years and retired as a senior

chief quartermaster. I had served as a reserve all during and after the Vietnam War, which included duty on three minesweeper vessels, an amphibious assault ship, a destroyer escort, a frigate, and several reserve units. This is the end of my story. I retired in May 1983 when the navy decided that anyone having over 34 years of service must retire. I have nine gold hash marks on my dress uniform coat sleeve, each representing four years of good conduct. My service ribbons consist of the Merchant Marine Atlantic and Pacific War Zone and Victory ribbon, the Navy Good Conduct medal, Korean Service medal, United Nations medal, China Service medal, Korean Presidential ribbon, Europe Occupation medal, Naval Reserve ribbon, Combat Action medal, and the medal that everyone got by being in the service [World War II Victory Medal]. A DON ELLWOOD, who lives in Pendleton, Indiana, wrote a short version of this account for www.justinmuseum.com.

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AMERICA IN WWII 53

A WAR STORIES

A WWII Scrapbook

US ARMY

HE SAW ERNIE PYLE DIE

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in the army after Pearl Harbor, when he was 31 years old. He was a sergeant in Company B, 305th Regiment, in the 77th Infantry Division. He rarely spoke of the war. One day I was talking with my dad about Ernie Pyle [the Pulitzer Prize–winning American news correspondent killed Y FATHER ENLISTED

on Ie Shima on April 18, 1945]. “I was 20 yards from Pyle when the Japs got him,” said my dad. “Did they ever get the sniper that shot him?” I asked. My dad looked down and shook his head. “That’s not what happened. My rifle squad was advancing up a road when the Japs opened on us. Trained on the road they had an anti-aircraft machine gun

they had salvaged out of one of our downed planes. We were pinned down when we heard a vehicle approaching from our rear. It was a jeep driven by a colonel, and Pyle was in the passenger seat. We all yelled and waved our arms trying to warn them not to come any closer. The colonel just kept right on, and the Japs opened up on the jeep with the anti-aircraft machine gun. Pyle was

Ernie Pyle, the most famous American journalist of World War II, reportedly predicted that he would die within a year of the April 1945 landings on Okinawa. Tim Landis’s father was on the scene when Japanese machine-gun fire killed Pyle on Ie Shima weeks later. 54 AMERICA IN WWII

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blown right out of the jeep. He was dead before he hit the ground.” Dad died in 1992 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Editor’s note: Despite an official telegram sent to Pyle’s father stating that the journalist was killed by a sniper, the generally accepted account of Pyle’s death puts him under enemy machine-gun fire in a jeep with a lieutenant colonel and three others. The accepted account differs from Landis’s perception of the killing only in that it has Pyle and the others leaving the jeep to seek cover, with Pyle being killed as he lifted his head to look around.

O

CIDER WITH A PUNCH

sometimes given R & R [rest and recreation] when our battalion was rotated to a so-called rest area. Sometimes we were trucked off to small French villages for an evening of recreation. If we were in luck, we might spend the evening with a fine dinner of Spam and whatever our company could share, complete with fine table linens, including napkins, no less. UR OUTFIT WAS

AM E RICA I N

WWII

L ingo! 1940s GI and civilian patter devils in baggy pants: what some German troops called US 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers, who tucked their pants into their boots baby: a plane’s detachable extra fuel tank; this baby could be dropped in tight situations to reduce weight cooking a grenade: pulling a grenade’s pin, then hesitating a few gutsy seconds before throwing the bomb, for detonation on arrival

JACK DELANO PHOTO. LIBRARY OF CONGESS

Tim Landis New York, New York

“Go Greyhound” could have been a rallying cry for GIs. Most, like these at a terminal near Georgia’s Fort Benning—and air cadet Richard Lewis—spent time cramped in a bus.

On one such visit to the town of Quimper, my medic dugout partner and I went wandering around, ripe for adventure. In our meanderings we passed a long entrance walkway that led to the front door of a French residence. Along this walk was a case of what we determined to be cider, right there for the taking. Occasionally in the past we had been able to purchase sweet cider from French farmers for cigarettes (we didn’t smoke much back then). So both of us appropriated a bottle for each of our greatcoat pockets and ambled down the street, innocent as you please. With no music, dancing, or anything else to be found in the town, we rendezvoused with our truck to travel back to camp. On the way, my medic friend and I got thirsty, so we opened a bottle of cider and took a swig. Dear Lord, that wasn’t cider! It had to be that stuff we were warned against: Calvados, a strong French apple brandy that to us seemed to be at least 177 percent alcohol. We were going to throw it out, but then we decided it might come in handy somehow. Back at camp, we got into our dugouts for the night. The following morning, a wet snow was on the ground, and we tried to get fires started in what we called our

submarine stoves, which were in the dugouts when we arrived. My friend in the adjacent dugout was fussing because he couldn’t find any dry Stars and Stripes newspapers or dry wood to start his fire. Hey, guy, I called—try some of the Calvados on the fire. He did, and whoosh! Hey, who moved one of our 81mm mortars back here? My friend emerged from his dugout with slightly burned eyelashes and a blistered ego. John F. Simon wartime army medic Mason, Ohio

I

MAKING THE CUT

A COLD , gray winter day in Southeast Missouri as I waited for the Greyhound bus and wondered what lay ahead of me at army boot camp. My folks were being quiet, and I knew they were upset. My wife, Margie, was holding the baby and holding back tears. As the bus came in I kissed a tearful mother and wife goodbye, then boarded the bus. The bus ride lasted two hours, but it seemed much longer as we traveled through the Ozark Mountains. The train station we stopped at was full of soldiers, sailors, and marines coming and going. As T

WAS

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A

56 AMERICA IN WWII

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WAR STORIES

ple of weeks I was finally notified I would be accepted into flight training as a pilot. Richard B. “Dick” Lewis wartime lieutenant colonel, 493rd Bomb Group, Eighth Army Air Force Jacksonville, Florida

The Purple Heart, earned by Montra Jones and others the hard way—by getting wounded.

I

A CASUALTY CHRONICLE

in May of 1943. The following month, I was on a train to Denver from Fort Logan, Colorado, to take my marine physical. By July 1 I was headed for Camp Roberts, California, for four months of training. And by December 24 I was in New Zealand, where I got the worst sunburn of my life on Christmas Day. It was just the beginning of my wartime ailments. From New Zealand we were shipped to Guadalcanal and finished the campaign there. A few months later we were sent to the mosquito-filled jungles of New Guinea. GRADUATED FROM HIGH SCHOOL

That’s where I came down with dengue fever. I was in the hospital for better than 30 days. When I got back to camp, we were getting ready to hit Luzon in the Philippines. There, I ran into another setback, thanks to some Japanese shrapnel. In the midst of a battle around 8 A.M. one day, I was wounded, so I yelled for a medic. He dressed the wounds in my back, but he didn’t see the one under my arm. I lay on the beach until about 4 P.M., at which time another medic spotted my other wound. He gave me a shot of morphine to kill the pain and, 12 hours after I was hit, I was finally loaded onto a landing craft that took me out to the ship I came in on. The shipboard doctor operated to take the shrapnel out of my chest. I asked why he didn’t take all the pieces out, and he said they were too close to my heart to remove, and it might do more harm than good to dig them out. I was then transported by several ships and a C-47 to a station hospital, where I stayed for three months. But even that stay off the lines wasn’t peaceful, for one night a ship exploded in a nearby harbor, and we thought the Japs were attacking. While I was in the hospital, a general gave me a Purple Heart. Once I was well enough, I was sent from the hospital to Leyte. But on the trip there, I came down with malaria, and when we landed I was put in the 4th Station Hospital for more than 30 days. When I recovered I went to a replacement depot, and while waiting for a ride back to my outfit, I became a cook. My wartime service was coming to an end. On December 31, 1945, my homebound ship sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge. We landed on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, and on January 6, 1946, I was discharged at Fort Logan, where my travels had begun. Montra Eugene Jones wartime marine Kensington, Kansas

NORWEGIAN GIs IN MALMEDY

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99TH Infantry Battalion (Separate) was a US Army unit made up entirely of Norwegians by birth or descent. We were billeted near Liège, Belgium, when the Battle of the Bulge began. We were ordered into combat, and as we moved forHE

LEFT: COURTESY OF THE JAMES L. KING FAMILY COLLECTION. OPPOSITE: AMERICA IN WWII COLLECTION

I waited for my troop train, I watched several tearful separations and wondered how many of the guys would not come back. Once I boarded the train it took three days to arrive at our destination. It was 10:30 P.M. when we finally disembarked. A sergeant met us at the station and lined us up for roll call, but all we wanted was a bed. After roll call we were not allowed to leave or even go to the men’s room. We waited and waited. After 45 minutes a guy walked up and whispered something to the sergeant. We were told to march as near like soldiers as we could and proceed outside to waiting buses. We finally arrived at boot camp about midnight and were issued bedding. We marched to our barracks, and it must have been 1:00 A.M. before I collapsed into bed and immediately fell asleep. Fifteen minutes later—or so it seemed— a bugle blew and the barracks lights came on. We were informed that we were in the army now, and it was time to rise and shine as, I was amazed to discover, it was 6:30 A.M. Before all of us had a chance to shave, we were rousted outside and lined up to march off to breakfast. Our first day was spent getting our clothing, being lectured, being shown how to salute, being told who to salute (everyone), and being informed that we—the aviation cadets—were the lowest form of life allowed in the army. Our last lesson that day was how to make a bed so neat and taut that a quarter could bounce into the air off of it and flip over. Finally, once supper was over, we were left alone to try to digest all that we had been exposed to that day. On the morning of the second day, we were taken to the post barbershop and told we were all getting haircuts—and that we would be paying for them. After that, our days all seemed to run together. Our activities included marching, school, and physical training. There was also a series of tests to pass, both mental and physical, interspersed with occasional stints of KP [kitchen patrol] and guard duty day or night, and 20-mile hikes with jeeps driving by to spray smoke or tear gas on weary GIs. Nonetheless, I seemed to be getting into better condition all the time, and after a cou-

AM E RICA I N

ward, we saw members of the 10th Infantry Division marching back from the front. Afterward, we ended up in Malmedy, Belgium, and its immediate area for about 31 days. During our time there we were bombed by our own air force twice and had a P-47 [a Thunderbolt fighter, an American plane] drop a few personnel bombs to get

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The insignia worn by Fredric Zinger and fellow Norwegian Americans of the 99th Infantry Battalion.

our attention, after which he dropped surrender leaflets in German! One late afternoon, we were strafed by Bed Check Charlie [GI slang for a lone enemy plane that shows up at night to bedevil ground troops]. On another occasion two German soldiers visited one of our company’s kitchens to see their girlfriends. They left in a hurry when they saw our men. We had no route out of Malmedy that was not under German fire. Only when our troops began the counterattack were we finally relieved of duty. The 99th was a great outfit. We finished our duties by shipping out to Norway to accept the German surrender.

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Fredric M. Zinger wartime technician fifth grade, 99th Infantry Battalion (Separate) Zephyrhills, Florida

Send your War Stories submission, with a relevant photo if possible, to WAR STORIES, America in WWII, 4711 Queen Avenue, Suite 202, Harrisburg, PA 17109, or to [email protected]. By sending stories and photos, you give us permission to publish and republish them.

APRIL 2013

AMERICA IN WWII 57

A BOOKS AND MEDIA

New Images of Nazi Germany: A Photographic Collection, compiled and with captions by Paul Garson, McFarland, 496 pages, $55.

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in 1945, German families turned Adolf Hitler’s portrait to the wall and got on with the job of surviving in a new social landscape. Souvenirs and pictures from the Nazi era were tossed into the backs of closets and purposely forgotten. Denial became the national coping strategy; if asked, many people would say that they hadn’t understood what the Führer was talking about and that they hadn’t done anything, seen anything, or known anything. But, of course, it had all been real. And for more than a dozen years, countless Germans had been proud members of the Nazi party and followers of the Führer. For many of them, the 1930s, the time before the fighting, would be remembered silently and fondly as the “good old days.” Collector of historical photographs Paul Garson has gathered private photo images of Germany in those years, the items hidden or lost since the end of World War II, and offered them up in a peculiar book with the simple title New Images of Nazi Germany. ITH THE WAR OVER

58 AMERICA IN WWII

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The result is something oddly fascinating, frankly instructive, and vaguely distressing. There they are in Garson’s collection, uncles, aunts, and sweethearts, Nazis in good times: Nazis at weddings, Nazis singing and dancing, Nazis showing off new uniforms, marching Nazis, baby Nazis, uniformed pre-school Nazis, teenage Nazis, beer-swilling Nazis, smiling Nazis, happy Nazis. Most of the people in the images are unnamed or unknown. But with Garson’s notes, their pictures illustrate the near-complete penetration of Nazism into daily German life and culture. Garson interprets everything from signage to uniform insignia to home decoration. He explains the exploitive propaganda value of German sports stars such as boxing great Max Schmeling and movie actors like Oscar-winner Emil Jannings. His photos and notes also remind readers of Nazism’s connections with the broader world—that renowned fashion designer Hugo Boss created Hitler’s uniforms and those of his closest Reich associates, that the Standard Oil and Shell Oil companies helped give Hitler’s prewar economy a boost, that Coca-Cola was everywhere even then. This collection of photographic memorabilia is another frightening example of

the phenomenal success of the Big Lie in political science, of repeating grand and outrageous falsehoods so loudly and so long that they overwhelm any real dialogue or debate and become the truth of choice for the targeted demographic. In the internet era, these same techniques have been used to isolate and energize conspiracy buffs and believers in crank theories, as well as influence political campaigns. The methods used are often credited to the vile genius Joseph Goebbels, Reich minister of propaganda, a political ally of Hitler’s dating back to the 1920s. Goebbels used sophisticated media techniques to create a brand that reached out to every speaker of German, validating every angry suspicion about those who were not German or “Aryan,” reinforcing every positive belief Germans held about themselves and their nation and tying it all to one man and one party, Hitler and the Nazis. Garson’s photographs demonstrate how the Nazis’ swastika symbol and the Führer’s image were attached to every possible civic and commercial item, how an amazing number of Nazi organizations and uniforms were created for varied segments of the German population, how adding a Nazi touch to any public or pri-

vate occasion became expected or fashionable, and how all of these elements helped tie peacetime Nazi Germany together. The collection does cover a bit more than the prewar 1930s. There are also souvenir photographs from conquered France and Poland, pictures of anti-Semitic literature and Axis postage, trophy photographs of Allied prisoners of war, and special sections devoted to horses and to the German love of amateur photography. It is an interesting but odd anthropologic mix. Unfortunately, however, the whole of the book is hard to read because the slipshod design breaks up the type and the flow of information. The photo captions and main text intermingle, and there are copyediting errors. This book was published by McFarland, whose website states it is “especially known for…going to great lengths to manufacture our books to the highest standards and library specifications.” But does the publisher not see the need for an active editor or co-author, or a practical book designer or art director? As it stands, Garson’s effort is made to look more like a roughed-out photo book proposal than a finished publication. I can’t recommend it. —John E. Stanchak Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War, by Paul Kennedy, Random House, 464 pages, $30.

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AUL K ENNEDY, KNOWN FOR The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, has made a career of chronicling global strategic dimensions of war and diplomacy. In his latest effort, Engineers of Victory, he writes very differently, focusing not on the grand strategies of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, but on the engineers, inventors, and industrialists whose innovations in technology and techniques greatly accelerated Allied victory. Few of these names will be familiar to you, yet their influence was vast. Kennedy explores the mid-war period from January 1943 through D-Day in June 1944, before technologies such as atomic weapons and the B-29 bomber had

appeared. He presents five long, fascinating case studies: the Battle of the Atlantic, the air war over Europe, the reversal of the Blitzkrieg, the evolution of beach invasions, and the struggle to cope with vast distances in the Pacific. He views this period as a pivotal inflection point, where the course of the war was indelibly altered. Few would be surprised by this. Kennedy’s contribution is seeing each case study not as a single cause and effect (hence the paucity of setpiece battle narratives), but as a cumulative effect of several factors. This inevitably brings to the foreground elements and actors seldom showcased, and we find ourselves on delightfully unfamiliar ground. Take for instance Kennedy’s second case study, the fight to control the air over Europe. Rather than dwelling on the development of US and British strategy, Kennedy asserts that the pivotal factors in emerging Allied supremacy were the P-51 Mustang fighter’s airframe, Merlin engine, and addition of wing tanks. These permitted the thousand-plane armadas to travel to and from their distant targets with effective fighter protection and thereby wage a sustainable air war. That spelled the end of the line for the Luftwaffe. And that, in turn, allowed the success of Operation Overlord (the Western Allies’ invasion of German-occupied France)—and, looking east, eased the task of the Soviets in their remorseless drive to Berlin. Yet there was nothing inevitable in the Mustang’s apotheosis, and Kennedy shows how much luck and individual insight married the P-51 airframe with the Merlin engine. Beyond that, even after astonishing flight tests, it was vehemently opposed by staunch advocates of the P-39, P-40, P-47, and other models and was adopted only after intervention by Churchill and wellconnected Brits. Clearly, the battle over Europe could have gone quite differently had some other test pilot been assigned to the new P-51, or had there been less-effective back-channels. With such an emphasis on engineering and mechanics, it is surprising that Kennedy has time and interest for the personalities involved. Yet they are memorably presented, from the Edison-like Henry Royce, the guiding spirit behind the

marvelous Merlin engine, to the naval commanders and airmen who tried out and field-engineered their own solutions. In this connection, Kennedy also makes a larger point, albeit briefly. He notes that historians of great-power politics and the primacy of economic and cultural forces could never anticipate, let alone explain, the rise of the P-51, which relied so much on good luck and serendipity. The section on the end of the Blitzkrieg is the least strong, though it possesses great narrative interest, covering the spectacular German successes early in the war and their subsequent irreversible failures at Stalingrad, Kursk, and elsewhere. In terms of engineering, much of the focus is on the Soviet T-34 medium tank, which here emerges as not nearly so invincible as generally described. Kennedy gives good examples of its strengths and considerable weaknesses, including a fascinating review by American engineers. Engineering, however, seems to have been less crucial than the Soviets’ emerging strength in production and improvements in strategic management. Even so, Kennedy makes many interesting points about the Eastern front, and reminds us that much essential background material remains inaccessible to scholars. This is one of the best high-level books on the war I have read since John Ellis’s Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War (1990). The only thing I would have added would have been an emphasis not merely on hardware engineering, but process engineering as well. Curtis Lemay’s re-engineering of the bombing campaign over Japan is one of the best examples of this, where alterations in methods turned a lackadaisical campaign into a barnburner. Similarly, the American practice of rotating aircrews out after 25 missions meant that the best pilots eventually went on to teach their secrets to subsequent generations of airmen, whereas their German and Japanese counterparts flew until they died or the war ended. Yet this is not to denigrate; it is only to wish for even more. As it is, Kennedy’s analysis teems with insights into the war and its historians. Even his footnotes make for good reading. Engineers of Victory is not for devotees of memoirs and battle narAPRIL 2013

AMERICA IN WWII 59

A ratives, but for anyone wishing for a deeper understanding of the hidden life of the war, Kennedy has produced an absolutely riveting book. —Thomas Mullen Flemington, New Jersey Dog Company: The Boys of Pointe du Hoc, the Rangers Who Accomplished D-Day’s Toughest Mission and Led the Way Across Europe, by Patrick K. O’Donnell, Da Capo Press, 320 pages, $26.

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O’DONNELL IS the author of a number of books focusing on special operations during World War II, including Beyond Valor: World War II’s Ranger and Airborne Veterans Reveal the Heart of Combat (2001), for which he won the William E. Colby Award for Outstanding Military History. In his latest ATRICK

A THEATER OF WAR Slaughterhouse-Five. Directed by George Roy Hill, written by Stephen Geller, based on the book by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., starring Michael Sacks, Ron Leibman, Eugene Roche, Valerie Perrine, 1972, 104 minutes, color, rated R.

F

Kurt Vonnegut struggled to write about the firebombing of Dresden. In February 1945, Allied bombers had unleashed a flaming maelstrom that reduced the beautiful German city to ruins and killed, by official tallies, 18,000–25,000 civilians. Vonnegut (whose own estimate ran to more than 100,000 dead) had a unique vantage point on the event: as an American POW he had been taken to Dresden on a work crew. He and his fellow prisoners had been herded into an underground slaughterhouse—Schlachthof-Funf or “Slaughterhouse-Five”— which protected them from the inferno raging above. “After that we were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters; women, children, old men; dead from concussion, fire or suffocaOR DECADES

60 AMERICA IN WWII

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BOOKS AND MEDIA

release, Dog Company, he again centers on a special forces unit, this time D (Dog) Company of the US Army’s 2nd Ranger Battalion. Faced with writing a history of an organization with many members, O’Donnell uses a familiar method: he focuses on a select group of soldiers and follows them through to the end of the war. He draws on his long-time work with veterans of America’s wars, collecting large numbers of oral histories and even establishing the website www.dropzone.org to store them. He also brings the experience he gained in a real combat environment while serving as a reporter attached to marines during the 2004 battles of Fallujah, Iraq.

tion,” Vonnegut wrote in a letter home. “Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city.” Vonnegut remained haunted by what he had witnessed. In 1969 he published Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death. The movie that followed is a reasonably faithful adaptation of the novel. Both tell the story of Billy Pilgrim, an American POW who, like Vonnegut, survived the firebombing. Unlike Vonnegut, Pilgrim later becomes “unstuck in time” and bounces from one period of life to another, with stops in childhood, World War II, suburban postwar life as an optometrist and family man, and a specimen under the eyes of beings from the planet Tralfamadore, who pluck him from Earth and place him in a dome on a planet billions of miles away with sexy actress Montana Wildhack (Valerie Perrine) for company. Yes, it’s safe to say SlaughterhouseFive isn’t your typical WWII movie. Yet Pilgrim’s war experiences, especially Dresden, provide the film’s emotional and dramatic core. The film opens with Pilgrim (Michael Sacks) fleeing through

O’Donnell relies heavily on his collection of oral histories. He conducted most of the interviews himself, but he also uses the official histories complied by the army, weaving them all together in a complementary fashion. The relationships among the Rangers from training through combat propel the narrative. It is here that O’Donnell effectively captures the story of these Dog Company Rangers in combat. Building around his core group of Rangers, O’Donnell subdivides his book into four basic sections chronicling the

snow to escape German soldiers. He finds shelter in a foxhole with psychopathic GI Paul Lazzaro (Ron Leibman). After the two men are taken prisoner, Lazzaro develops an irrational hatred of Pilgrim and vows to kill him someday. In a stalag Pilgrim encounters kindly Edgar Derby (Eugene Roche), who takes the hapless young man under his wing. But in Dresden, Germans soldiers execute Derby after he pockets a small china figurine. As Vonnegut might have said in the book, “And so it goes.” The film manages to weave its tangled chronology, but its weakness is Pilgrim’s

most intensive actions of this elite group. The first, of course, is the assault on Pointe du Hoc during the Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944. This is a tale told many times over, but O’Donnell’s work with the Ranger veterans, many of whom are now friends of his, produces a riveting account of the assault. We learn that two Rangers, Len Lomell and Jack Kuhn, found the Pointe’s guns—which had been pulled from the Pointe to a nearby wooded area to protect them from Allied air attack—and proceeded to destroy the guns’ optics by bashing them with their rifle butts and then fused the gears together with thermite grenades. This hard-fought action continued in the days following the assault, because the Rangers’ mission was not merely to take out the guns, but also to hold the position until they were relieved. Dog Company’s next mission took place

lack of personality, which makes him less-than-compelling as a protagonist. Through all periods of his life, Pilgrim remains a passive observer. And why not? The Tralfamadorians teach him that everything that has happened will always happen, and that includes the eventual end of the universe, caused accidentally when a Tralfamadorian pushes the wrong button. “He has always pressed it, and he always will,” an unseen alien explains. “We have always let him, and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.” Perhaps Vonnegut is saying that the only way we can face horrors like Dresden is by believing we can do nothing about them. “The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it,” Vonnegut wrote later. “I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I’m in.” And so it goes. —Tom Huntington Camp Hill, Pennsylvania

near Brest, on the English Channel. The German defenders of Cherbourg, the largest port nearest the Normandy beachhead, had destroyed its port facilities, creating a serious problem for Allied logistics. The Rangers were tasked with helping eliminate a powerful German fort guarding the important port of Brest, which they did in spectacular fashion. O’Donnell’s tale of the audacious capture of this installation deserves inclusion in American military history. That autumn, the 2nd Ranger Battalion faced what was arguably its most difficult mission: to take and hold Hill 400, part of the bloody struggle to control the Hürtgen Forest, a conflict that saw several entire US divisions mauled. The strategic Hill 400 provided the Germans with a commanding view of the surrounding countryside. After an armored task force failed to capture the hill, the Rangers moved past the burnedout hulks of American tanks and vehicles to approach the position. A reconnaissance by the Rangers led to one of the most compelling moments in US Army history in the European theater of World War II. The Rangers were ordered to fix bayonets and take the hill. With bloodcurdling yells they charged the German defenders, throwing them off enough to secure most of the hill. The assault was a costly one, though, and the Rangers found themselves in a meat grinder for several days as Dog Company and the other Rangers withstood repeated fierce German counterattacks. The eruption of the Battle of the Bulge, however, would push the story of Dog Company’s valor on Hill 400 to the back pages of its history. In the Bulge, the Rangers were used to fill a gap in the hardpressed American lines. Long, cold nights of watching, waiting, and patrolling took their toll on the soldiers. After the defeat of the German offensive, the Rangers moved forward into Germany. O’Donnell provides notes, several pages of photographs, and—essential to any book on operational military history— maps. The book is a fast-paced personal story of many of the men of Dog Company. It blows away the dust of history to reveal that the mission of the Rangers in the European theater did not end with

the assault on Pointe du Hoc, but continued all the way to VE Day. —Michael Edwards New Orleans, Louisiana Nick Cardy: The Artist at War, by Nick Cardy and Renée Witterstaetter, 128 pages, $24.95.

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ICK C ARDY BEGAN his comic book career illustrating stories assembled by the Eisner and Iger packaging shop for various publishers. But although he played a role in forming the comics’ Golden Age, Cardy’s exploits were cut short on April Fools’ Day 1943, when he was drafted into military service. He later returned to comics and became one of the most influential DC Comics artists, shaping the Silver Age look of the publisher’s universe in titles such as Tomahawk, Aquaman, and The Teen Titans. Cardy crafted most of DC’s covers for much of the 1970s and later went on to a successful career in advertising and movie poster art. But this man who helped shape some of the most memorable superhero adventures was himself a hero in World War II, receiving two Purple Hearts while serving as a tank driver with the 3rd Armored “Spearhead” Division in Europe and designing the patch for his former unit, the 66th Infantry “Black Panther” Division. Like so many other artists who served in the military during that time, Cardy not only experienced the war, but also documented it in ink on paper, delineating the details of his journey through a landscape forever transformed by bloody conflict. From the global and grotesque grandeur of the era to the intimate and humorous connections between human beings, Cardy’s WWII line work is so evocative that all these decades later it seems to capture even more of the true emotional impact of the war than photography does. The sketchiness of shading, the waning thick and thin lines, and the varying bluish tones of his “spit drawings” (created by drawing in ink, then wetting his finger with spit to spread and dilute the color) that trace the shapes of people, places, and things forever lost to time are rendered with such passion that they seem desperate APRIL 2013

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A to leap off the page. As both an escape for the young soldier that he once was and a legacy for the aging artist who now turns this personal work over to the world, this is a unique glimpse of how war and art intertwine with memory. Cardy’s role as an assistant tank driver meant a lot of down time, and it was then that he committed what he saw to paper. The story of World War II is a story of so many people, so many viewpoints, and Cardy’s view is a seemingly instant nostalgia—scenes caught at the very moment they happened with a wash of wistful watercolors dabbed out of a jury-rigged Sucrets cough drop box. When drawn in Waterman pen (one he still owns) or pencil, his figures are usually mere suggestions of people—combinations of sharp lines and blobs of shading that catch soldiers shaving and brushing teeth with water in their helmets, sleeping every

BOOKS AND MEDIA

chance they can get, and collapsing from sun stroke on the rifle range. His watercolors and sepia-toned drawings bring his knack for lighting to life, showcasing the muddy, earthen world of war, occasionally lit by explosive activity. Mingled in with all the artwork in this book are Cardy’s own tales of war, including chilling encounters with liberated concentration camp prisoners and bloodsoaked friends. A section of actual photographs concludes the volume, but as in other such books, the photos are wisely held back until the end so they don’t clash with the artwork or shatter the illusion of the world as created by the pen. Finally, we are treated to some of the more elaborate

paintings that Cardy completed at the end of the war while he was in Paris. The book itself is a beautiful, glossy, hardcover production with a landscape design that allows Cardy’s art and memories to breathe across every page. The artwork is displayed chronologically, as Cardy drew it in his original sketchbooks. Titan Books is well known for producing stunning volumes of this quality, and this is another excellent addition to those ranks (produced in association with Eva Ink Publishing). Cardy leaves us with a reminder that although he is in his nineties, he still recalls the faces of fear that revealed the true cost of war. He went on to great success as an artist, but perhaps some of his most meaningful work was produced with a broken brush and a wetted finger in the confines of a tank, as the world outside went mad. —Arnold T. Blumberg Baltimore, Maryland

A 78 RPM

The One and Only Fats

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homas Wright Waller’s life was just about over by the time the United States joined the Second World War. That’s saying a lot more than it should: when the Japanese attacked, the wise-cracking, pianopounding rock-and-roll forefather known to the world as Fats was only 37. Fortunately, Fats came to music young, fooling around on the pump organ in his family’s home in Harlem. He took classical lessons and played hymns—and got into trouble with his church-going parents by slipping jazz stylings into the arrangements. In 1924 Fats made his first recording— the first of more than 500. Then came writing his first song—the first of more than 400. Within three years he pronounced “I am now the greatest jazz organist alive.” He was being more clever than cocky: Fats was the only jazz organist alive. Fats was well on his way to stardom, accompanying vocalist Bessie Smith and other blues giants through the thirties, mostly on piano, though organ always remained his preference. When war came to America, the self-described “285 pounds of jam, jive, and everythin’” jumped right in to aid the cause. Just 19 days after Pearl Harbor, his recording of “(Get Some) Cash for Your Trash” was airing on radios across the country, encouraging Americans to turn in metal and other materials to be recycled for war use. A few weeks after that came a forgettable debut

62 AMERICA IN WWII

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as bandleader at Carnegie Hall. Fats turned to the bottle to wash away his nervousness about performing in the grand old temple of classical music, and his playing ability washed away right along with it. That July he rebounded from the embarrassment with a rousing rendition on 78 RPM of the celebratory war tune “Swing Out to Victory.” Fats helped make some history in 1943, writing songs for the first all-black movie musical, Stormy Weather. And he played “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby” and his own classic “Ain’t Misbehavin’” on screen. Later that year, he copyrighted his last song, “When the Nylons Bloom Again,” a light-hearted lament about the disappearance of women’s stockings after parachutes and other military goods drained the nylon supply. From afar, things were looking good for Fats in 1943. He was on movie screens across the nation in Stormy Weather while his 1929 musical Hot Chocolates was enjoying a successful revival on Broadway. Late in the year, he was touring West Coast military bases to entertain troops before he boarded a train to head home for a New York City Christmas. Exhaustion from the performance schedule, along with lingering symptoms of pneumonia, had taken their toll. Halfway home, on December 15, Fats died in his Pullman bunk. —Carl Zebrowski editor of America in WWII

A WWII EVENTS

CALIFORNIA • Apr. 6, Chino: Monthly living history day. Panel discussion and flight exhibition of the Fork-Tailed Devil, the Lockheed P-38 Lightning airplane. 10 A.M. Planes of Fame Air Museum, 7000 Merrill Avenue. 909-597-3722. planesoffame.org Apr. 13, Palm Springs: “The Doolittle Raid: America’s First Strike on the Japanese Homeland.” Commemorative program with flight exhibition. 1 P.M. Palm Springs Air Museum, 745 North Gene Autry Trail. 760-778-6262. palmspringsairmuseum.org GEORGIA • Apr. 27 and 28, Peachtree City: WWII Heritage Days. Program re-creates sights and sounds of the war with vintage aircraft and equipment, demonstrations, reenactors, and canteen show. 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. Commemorative Air Force Dixie Wing Historical Airpower Facility, 1200 Echo Court. 678-364-1100. wwiidays.org MASSACHUSETTS • Mar. 16 and 17, Fall River: St. Patrick’s Day Weekend at the Cove. Destroyer USS Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., open for Irish celebration with scavenger hunts and prizes. 9 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. Battleship Cove, 5 Water Street. 508-678-1100. battleshipcove.org Apr. 13, Fall River: The Pearl Harbor Experience. Newest exhibit re-creates the sights, sounds, and feel of the surprise attack on the island. Every hour from 11 A.M. to 3 P.M. Battleship Cove, 5 Water Street. 508-678-1100. battleshipcove.org Apr. 19, Fall River: Family Nautical Night. Stay overnight in crew quarters aboard USS Massachusetts (BB-59), eat in the officers’ wardroom, participate in shipboard activities. Battleship Cove, 5 Water Street. 508-678-1100. battleshipcove.org

COMING SOON

Century Division soldiers in France days before the unit’s combat debut in the Low Vosges mountains.

FIRST BLOOD After waiting two years for battle, the Century Division fought through a line that had resisted attacks over two millennia.

Look for our June 2013 issue on newsstands on April 23, 2013.

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NEW HAMPSHIRE • Mar. 10, Wolfeboro: “African American Submariners of WWII and Beyond.” Lecture. 2 P.M. Wright Museum of WWII History, 77 Center Street. 603569-1212. wrightmuseum.org Apr. 7, Wolfeboro: Japanese Weapons of WWII. Presentation and exhibition of weapons, including pistols, swords, and rifles. 2 P.M. Wright Museum of WWII History, 77 Center Street. 603-569-1212. wrightmuseum.org NEW JERSEY • Through Mar. 29, Camden: Overnight Aboard the Battleship. Dine in the USS New Jersey’s mess, sleep in crew bunks, tour the ship. Battleship New Jersey Museum and Memorial, 62 Battleship Place, 100 Clinton Street. 866-877-6262. battleshipnewjersey.org NEW MEXICO • Mar. 17, White Sands Missile Range: 24th Annual Bataan Memorial Death March. Challenging 14.2- or 26.2-mile march across desert terrain in honor of those who experienced the WWII march. Online registration closes March 6. Opening ceremony 6:35 A.M. bataanmarch.com NORTH CAROLINA • Apr. 12, Durham: Public lecture on “Gender, War, and Culture: Music in the United States during World War II.” Delivered by Annegret Fauser of the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill Department of Music. 4 P.M. Duke University’s Carr Building. gwc.web.unc.edu TEXAS • Mar. 9 and 10, Fredericksburg: Pacific combat living history reenactment. Reenactors demonstrate weapons and discuss tactics. 10:30 A.M., 1 P.M., and 3:30 P.M. Pacific War Museum Combat Zone, East Austin Street, two blocks from the museum, which is at 340 East Main Street. 830-997-8220. pacificwarmuseum.org VIRGINIA • Mar. 26, Bedford: Lunchbox Lecture: “Fly Girls and Aviation in WWII.” Noon. National D-Day Memorial, 3 Overlord Circle. 800-351-DDAY. dday.org

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A GIs

Airman Down

PHOTOS COURTE SY OF JE REMY AM ICK

Right: Alfred Eiken is dressed for success at Missouri’s capitol. Left: In the Pacific, things went well at first. Eiken (the tallest man standing) completed 28 missions before things went terribly wrong (not in this plane).

A

LFRED E IKEN KEPT HIS THOUGHTS about joining the military quiet. Then, after graduating from St. Francis Xavier School in Taos, Missouri, in 1941 and working for a year in St. Louis, he announced that he had enlisted in the US Army Air Forces. “He didn’t talk much about it,” remembered his eldest sister, Frances. “He just went and did it.” Eiken completed his initial training at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, and then went on to finish bombardier school in Texas in 1943. After additional training in locations throughout the United States, he was transferred to India in November 1944. In 1945 Eiken was assigned to a B-29 bomber on Tinian in the Mariana Islands, and he and his crew flew 28 successful missions. On the 29th, a run to deliver prisoner-of-war supplies on August 30 ended when one of the plane’s wings clipped a mountain and the plane crashed. The air forces could not find the wreckage and sent telegrams to the crew’s families to inform them that the men were classified “missing.” A few months later, the Eikens received another message from the army. “When the second telegram came, we thought that it

would say he was coming home,” recalled Francisca, Eiken’s sister. “But [it] stated that he had been killed.” The 12 crewmen were buried in the US Armed Forces Cemetery in Yokohama, Japan. In 1949 Eiken’s remains were returned to his family and reinterred in the parish cemetery of St. Francis Xavier in Taos. A museum display in Takachiho, Japan, honors the crewmen, and the curator there sent the Eiken family pieces of the plane that were found nearby in the Kyushu Mountains. The local community commemorates the men with a memorial site and an annual ceremony. Eiken’s niece, Donna Boyd, said, “It is nice to know that this has led to a promotion of goodwill and peace between our two nations while helping us share memories of a family member who never came home.” A Submitted by JEREMY AMICK, public affairs officer for Silver Star Families of America, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Clever, Missouri, that assists wounded and ill veterans and their families.

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