MHQ Vol.29 No.2 - 2017 Winter

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY

THE ART OF WAR How America’s greatest artists saw the Great War

WINTER 2017

HistoryNet.com

The Noose at Korsun McClellan’s Big Miss

OPENING ROUND

PLEZ BAGBY/WWW.VIRGINIARELICS.COM

Ira W. Shaler of Brooklyn, New York, hoped that his innovative “compound bullet,” patented on August 12, 1862, would change the face of the Civil War and help propel the Union Army to victory. The three sections of the bullet were intended to separate after leaving the barrel of a .58-caliber rifle musket, inflicting more damage on a single target or even striking multiple targets. But Shaler’s efforts to market his sectional bullet to the War Department weren’t all that successful, even as he changed the bullet’s design several times to improve its accuracy and range. (At one point he even pitched his bullet by writing to President Abraham Lincoln.) In all, Shaler sold about 200,000 of his three-in-one bullets; the Army of the Potomac is known to have used them at the Battle of South Mountain (see “McClellan’s Big Miss,” page 76).

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With the Red Army closing in, German soldiers in the 1st SS Panzer Division (Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler) look on helplessly as a truck and a Panzer VI Tiger tank get bogged down in mud.

FEATURES 26 The Korsun Noose Volume 29, Number 2 Winter 2017

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by Robert M. Citino In January 1944, the Red Army was pushing back the German Wehrmacht from its long, meandering line along the Dnieper River in central Ukraine. Suddenly the Germans found themselves encircled by an overwhelming and vengeful enemy. Was there any way out?

34 The Art of War PORTFOLIO American artists took a leading role in chronicling World War I, helping to shape how its appalling human toll was mourned and memorialized.

44 World War I’s Wonder Drug by Łukasz Kamieński Never before and never after did the military consume such large amounts of cocaine as it did in 1914–1918.

52 The Day the Earth Blew Open by Edward G. Lengel The story of Britain’s daring underground assault on a German stronghold in Belgium during World War I.

60 Portrait of a Revolution by Paul Staiti Charles Willson Peale—painter, militiaman, patriot—gave a face to a new day in the history of the American republic.

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52 66 The Battle of Anacostia Flats by Bill Hogan Thousands of veterans came to Washington in 1932 to demand payment of their World War I pensions. General Douglas MacArthur got rid of them.

76 McClellan’s Big Miss by Ron Soodalter Union commander George B. McClellan won the Battle of South Mountain in 1862. So why was it such a strategic disaster?

60 DEPARTMENTS 4 Flashback 10 Comments 13 At the Front 14 Laws of War 16 Battle Schemes 18 Experience 20 War List 23 Weapons Check 25 Letter From MHQ

83 Culture of War 84 Classic Dispatches 87 Artist 90 Poetry 92 Reviews Adam Hochshild’s history of the Spanish Civil War; an irreverent exploration of military science; rethinking U.S. grand strategy in the Middle East; and the story of how the Allies sabotaged Nazi Germany’s atomic bomb program

96 Drawn & Quartered

76 On the Cover Norman Rockwell’s matchless touch is evident in Over There, a painting of four young doughboys singing by a campfire that he made for the cover of the January 31, 1918, issue of Life magazine. Rockwell’s original 29-by-24-inch oil painting, from the collection of Susan and Elihu Rose, is featured in an exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (page 34). Mr. Rose co-founded MHQ in 1988 and was the chairman of its original advisory board. COVER: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ILLUSTRATION. OPPOSITE PAGE: BUNDESARCHIV; THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: JOHN STEUART CURRY/CUMMER MUSEUM OF ART & GARDENS; BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; MATHEW BRADY COLLECTION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY; FRANK HURLEY/AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL

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FLASHBACK

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HORACE ABRAHAMS/HULTON ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

BERCHTESGADEN, GERMANY, 1945 After discovering Hermann Göring’s collection of looted art in tunnels underneath a Luftwaffe headquarters building near Lake Königsee, American soldiers examine a 15th-century statue of Eve, three Rembrandts, and other treasures. TODAY: The Commission for Looted Art in Europe reports that German authorities sold back hundreds of stolen works of art after World War II to the very Nazis who had taken possession of them, including Göring’s widow.

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FLASHBACK BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA, 1985

CARLOS GONZALEZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A Brazilian-made EE-9 Cascavel armored vehicle crashes through the front entrance of the Palace of Justice as soldiers and policemen prepare to rush inside, where leftist guerrillas are holding hostages. TODAY: Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for his resolute efforts” to bring the country’s half-century-old civil war, which has claimed more than 220,000 lives, to an end.

FLASHBACK

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JOHN DOBREE PASCOE COLLECTION/ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY

WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND, 1944 Hundreds of New Zealanders, cheering and waving flags, gather in Wellington Harbor to welcome more than 750 Polish orphans aboard the USS General George M. Randall before they disembark to travel to refugee camps created for them in Pahiatua. TODAY: Pope Francis urges Poland to welcome people fleeing conflict and hardship, chastising a right-wing government that has refused to share the burden during Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II.

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COMMENTS

KICKIN’ BACK

Britain’s push to export opium to China in quantities large enough to counterbalance its imports of tea created drug addicts by the millions in China and triggered two wars. The Second Opium War removed the final restraint on its drug trade.

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I enjoyed David Silbey’s excellent article, “Kickin’ the Gong,” in the Autumn 2016 issue of MHQ. But his statement that “the American commodore, Josiah Tattnall, decided that ‘blood was thicker than water,’ disobeyed his orders, and laid down a covering fire  on the Dagu Forts to cover the British withdrawal” is not supported by other accounts of the incident. Both Richard Hill in War at Sea in the Ironclad Age (Cassell, 2000) and Byran Perrett in Gunboat! Small Ships at War (Cassell, 2000) state that Tattnall gave nonfiring assistance. As Perrett describes it, though America was officially neutral, Tattnall, a veteran of the War of 1812, did not enjoy seeing the British squadron being “knocked about.” Disregarding Chinese fire, he took a steam launch to the embattled British flagship. Going aboard, he suggested to the British commander that his launch be used to evacuate the wounded, an offer that was gratefully accepted. Returning to the launch, Tattnall discovered its crew missing. They presently appeared, sweating and powder-stained. Tattnall asked them what they had been doing and whether they knew that the Americans were neutral. He received the reply that they had noticed that the British were shorthanded on one of the guns firing at the Chinese and that they had decided to give them a hand while waiting for him.

At this point Tattnall turned to his British counterpart and said, “I guess blood must be thicker than water.” Theodore Kuhlmeier San Antonio, Texas DAVID SILBEY RESPONDS: I thank Mr. Kuhlmeier for his comment about my somewhat compacted account of Josiah Tattnall’s actions in China. Without going too deep into details, what seems to have happened was that, observing the British and French assault, Tattnall (making the blood-is-thicker-than-water comment at the start of the incident, not later) towed British and French launches against a stiff tide to reinforce the attack, then visited the British admiral’s ship in the midst of the fighting, during which some of his crew manned a gun and helped lay down a covering fire. The claim that they did this on their own seems doubtful, as the lieutenant accompanying Tattnall to the British ship wrote in his diary that Tattnall ordered the American sailors into action by saying, “Meanwhile, my good fellows, you might man that gun forward till the boat is ready, just as you would on your own ship.” Tattnall’s account of this is quoted at length in Charles C. Jones, The Life and Services of Commodore Josiah Tattnall (Morning News Steam Printing House, 1878), pages 98–101. His order to his men can be found in Edgar Stanton Maclay, “New Light on the ‘Blood Is Thicker Than Water’

KACHELHOFFER CLEMENT/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES

The Plot Thickens

Episode,” Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute, Vol. 40, No. 4 (July–August 1914), 1085–1104.

Beg Your Pardon? Reading the very interesting article by Marc G. DeSantis in your Autumn 2016 issue “The Court-Martial of Colonel Billy Mitchell, 1925,” I wonder whether any attempt has been made to obtain a presidential pardon for Colonel Mitchell. Rick Miller Wallingford, Pennsylvania MARC G. DESANTIS RESPONDS: Mitchell came to be recognized after his death in 1936 as a prophet of air power whose theories had largely been borne out by the events of World War II. In 1956 his son, William A. Mitchell, Jr., led an effort to set aside the guilty verdict against his father. The all-civilian Air Force Board for Correction of Military Records that heard the matter in 1957 voted 4–1 to recommend that the sentence be set aside, finding that Mitchell had been courtmartialed for his opinions, not for a breach of the 96th Article of War, a catchall provision of military law that allowed an office to be tried for just about any action deemed to be “of a nature to bring discredit upon the military service.” Secretary of the Air Force James H. Douglas, Jr., ruling on the board’s recommendation in 1958, disagreed strongly with its finding, not-

ing that Mitchell had indeed accused the War and Navy Departments of incompetence, criminal negligence, and of being “almost treasonable.” Holding that Mitchell had clearly violated of Article 96, Douglas refused to overturn the verdict. When Douglas refused to modify the decision of the 1925 tribunal, hundreds of American newspapers ran editorials in favor of overturning the verdict against Mitchell. Syndicated columnist Roscoe Drummond went so far as to urge his readers to write to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and urge him to grant Mitchell a posthumous pardon. “The awful irony of it,” Drummond wrote, “is that what General Mitchell did above all else was not to discredit the military services but to discredit the menacing, massive, monumental smugness of military thinking 30 years ago.” Mitchell never received a posthumous presidential pardon.

ASK MHQ The Longest War Was the Hundred Years’ War the longest war in history? Geoffrey Walker New Market, Maryland That’s a reasonable guess, especially since it went into overtime and ended up lasting 116 years. But the record goes to the 335 Years War, which, in stark contrast to its more famous rear rival, was virtually bloodless. As the English Civil War neared its conclusion, the Netherlands allied itself with the most likely winner—Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentarians. Indeed, by the spring of 1651 the Parliamentarians had driven King Charles II and his Royalists deep into Cornwall, while what remained of his fleet had taken refuge in the Isles of Scilly. From there Royalist warships struck at the occasional target of opportunity, which included a fair number of Dutch ships. At that point the Dutch made a bid to recoup their losses, dispatching 12 warships under the command of Admiral Marten Tromp to Scilly, where he demanded monetary restitution from the Royalists. When a satisfactory response was not forthcoming, Tromp declared war against the Isles of Scilly. Whether the Dutch government had given Tromp authority to declare war has been open to debate ever since. In any case, his warships

blockaded the Isles until June 1651, when a Parliamentarian fleet under General at Sea Robert Blake arrived and compelled the Royalist commander, Sir John Grenville, to surrender. With no more Royalists to fight, Tromp withdrew and apparently forgot about the entire episode. So did everyone else, apparently, until 1985, when Roy Duncan, the chairman of the Isles of Scilly Council, got in touch with the Dutch Embassy in London to ask if the old war story could possibly be true. The embassy’s staff looked into the matter and ascertained that Tromp’s declaration of war was official. At that point Duncan, thinking it high time the sideshow was resolved, invited Dutch ambassador Jonkheer Rein Huydecoper to the Isles to sign a peace treaty. That he did on April 17, 1986, with the tongue-in-cheek observation: “It must have been awful to know we could have attacked at any moment.” With that gesture Scillonians could, at long last, rest easy. However disputable its beginning, after 335 years the longest war in history had come to an indisputable end. Jon Guttman, HistoryNet’s research director, is the author of many military histories.

Something about military history you’ve always wanted to know? Send your questions to MHQeditor@ historynet.com

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CONTRIBUTORS KEVIN BAKER, ROBERT M. CITINO, MARC G. DESANTIS, RICHARD A. GABRIEL, PETER HART, JOHN A. HAYMOND, LUKASZ KAMIENSKI, EDWARD G. LENGEL, CHRIS MCNAB, MICHAEL S. NEIBERG, DAVID SILBEY, RON SOODALTER, PAUL STAITI, PAMELA D. TOLER

MHQ Winter 2017

MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History (ISSN 1040-5992) is published quarterly by HistoryNet, LLC, 1919 Gallows Road, Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182-4038, 703-771-9400. Periodical postage paid at Vienna, VA, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send subscription information and address changes to: MHQ, P.O. Box 422224, Palm Coast, FL 32142-2224. Single copies: $19.95. Yearly subscriptions in U.S.: $74.95; Canada: $99.95; Foreign: $99.95 (in U.S. funds only). Canadian Publications Mail Agreement No. 41342519, Canadian GST No. 821371408RT0001 © 2017 HistoryNet, LLC, all rights reserved The contents of this magazine may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the written consent of HistoryNet, LLC PROUDLY MADE IN THE USA

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STEPHEN KAMIFUJI CREATIVE DIRECTOR BRIAN WALKER GROUP ART DIRECTOR PAUL FISHER ART DIRECTOR DREW FRITZ SENIOR PHOTO EDITOR

AT THE FRONT LAWS OF WAR 14 BATTLE SCHEMES 16 EXPERIENCE 18 WAR LIST 20 WEAPONS CHECK 23 NATIONAL ARCHIVES

HIGHER CALLING The Student Army Training Corps was formed in 1918 “to train draftees in a variety of trades needed for the war effort.” Here, students who mastered pole climbing as part of a course for telephone electricians at the University of Michigan pose with some of their SATC classmates and instructors. MHQ Winter 2017

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LAWS OF WAR

THE BLOODY CODE

In April 1797 the Royal Navy was confronted with one of the largest mutinies in its history when sailors on 16 ships in the Channel Fleet mutinied at Spithead, an anchorage near Portsmouth, and sailors at the Nore, an anchorage on the Thames Estuary, followed suit. Later that year, the bloodiest mutiny in British naval history occurred in the West Indies when the crew of HMS Hermione killed most of the ship’s officers in a violent insurrection. Military law stood ready to enact swift punishment on mutineers, but the law itself was part of the reason for widespread unrest aboard the fleet. In that year of mutiny the Royal Navy was governed by the most repressive and severe laws ever imposed on the British military, before or since. The legal system under which the navy existed was so harsh that it was widely referred to as “the Bloody Code.” The draconian nature of these laws was no accident: In both civilian and military courts of the period, “the terror of example” was believed to be a necessary deterrent to criminal behavior. The heavy hand of military justice was imposed in the form of punishments that included flogging, branding, mutilation, and death by hanging or firing squad. While the Articles of War originally attached the death penalty to 50 specific crimes, 60 additional offenses were added during the reigns of George II and George III (from 1727 to 1820). For centuries the Articles of War had regulated and disciplined the army and navy in the name of the Crown in eras when “military forces were regarded as personal retainers of the sovereign,” as one scholar put it in 1917, and the personal will of the monarch was the basis of military governance. It was a monarchical crisis, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, that resulted in the creation of the Mutiny Act. When James II was deposed that year in favor of William of Orange, troops loyal to James refused to acknowledge the authority of the new king. Under English law, the punitive measures of the Articles of War could not be applied to soldiers and sailors within the kingdom’s domestic borders; thus no legal consequence could be brought against the mutineers. The government’s response, in 1689, was to close that loophole in the law by issuing the first Mutiny Act. While the Articles of War were restricted to times of war or to service outside the realm, the Mutiny Act was different, in both its derived authority and its application, and it transferred the responsibility for governing the military from king to Parliament. For more than a century and a half, the Articles of War and the Mutiny Act exercised joint authority over the army and

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navy. Because the British constitution prohibited the maintenance of a standing army in time of peace, the Mutiny Act required annual renewal by Parliament. The process of issuing the law anew allowed other measures to be written into the law, such as the Quartering Acts that were added to the Mutiny Acts of 1765 and 1774. The Articles of War covered matters both mundane and extraordinary. Article 1 of the 1757 version of the law required the “public worship of Almighty God, according to the liturgy of the Church of England established by law”; Article 2 prohibited “profane oaths, cursings, execrations, drunkenness, uncleanness, or other scandalous actions in derogation of God’s honour.” Beyond matters of moral conduct, the articles imposed severe penalties for offenses such as striking a superior officer, disobedience, cowardice, malingering, mutiny, rape, and desertion, all of which were capital crimes. A host of other transgressions could also send a man to the gallows: stranding a ship or running it aground, sleeping on watch, simple robbery, sodomy or bestiality, or “clipping the Coin of Great Britain or any Foreign Coin current in the Garrison.” The harsh regimen of the Articles of War, and the sometimes liberal application of those laws by captains who were the absolute masters of sailors’ lives aboard ship, was an undeniable cause of deep discontent in the Royal Navy of the era. Additionally, living conditions on many ships ranged from bad to abysmal, sailors’ pay was not adjusted to keep pace with the steady inflation that challenged the British economy after the American war, and the practice of impressing men into the navy against their will—all combined to create an undercurrent of desperation and anger in the ranks. The unrest reached a critical point in April 1797, when mass mutiny broke out on ships riding the anchorage at Spithead. The mutiny was well-organized, and its leaders took care not to antagonize the Admiralty any further than was absolutely necessary to achieve their limited aims. For the most part, the mutinied crews maintained their ships under regular naval discipline during the crisis, often under their regular officers, and the mutineers made it clear to the Admiralty that all hands would immediately respond in defense of the nation if a French fleet appeared in English waters. The Spithead mutiny was resolved peacefully within two months. Admiral Lord Richard Howe negotiated with the leaders of the mutineers, having himself rowed around the fleet for 12 hours to meet with them individually. Improved pay was

FROM TOP: ENGLISH SCHOOL/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; JOHN CAMERON/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

By John A. Haymond

Sailors of the Royal Navy “man the yards” during their mutiny at the Nore, an anchorage on the Thames estuary, in 1797 (top). Mutineers frequently went ashore and marched in procession to demand better pay and conditions (bottom).

guaranteed, and, most important, a royal pardon was granted to the mutineers. But even as the crisis was settled at Spithead, another mutiny erupted at the Nore anchorage. Right from the beginning, the Nore mutiny was an entirely different affair. There was much less unity among the Nore mutineers, perhaps because they were not part of a unified fleet, as was the case at Spithead, and the leaders of the Nore mutiny took an aggressive approach to their demands that was all but certain to antagonize the Admiralty and the government. In addition to requesting pardons and pay raises, the mutineers demanded that the king dissolve Parliament and strike an immediate peace with the revolutionary government of France, two ultimatums to which the Crown was never going to agree. The Admiralty offered basically the same concessions it had given the Spithead mutineers. The leaders of the Nore mutiny responded with even more bad judgment, attempting to blockade shipping into London and declaring their intention to sail their ships to France, a political move that divided the already contentious mutineers, most of whom still considered themselves loyal Englishmen even if they hated the navy. The internal dissension continued as more and more ships slipped away to give themselves up to the Royal Navy’s authority, many of them fired on by mutinous ships, and finally the insurrection collapsed. The ringleaders of the mutiny, 29 men in all, were hanged from the yardarms of their ships. Another 29 mutineers were punished with prison sentences, nine were flogged, and some others were exiled to a penal colony in Australia. Somewhat surprisingly, the Admiralty chose not to pursue reprisals against the majority of the rank-and-file mutineers. In the wake of Spithead and Nore, the British government moved to strengthen the mutiny laws. The Incitement to Mutiny Act of 1797 made any case of disaffection in military forces at sea or ashore a full act of treason, punishable by death, a law reinforced in 1817 by the passage of the Allegiance of Sea and Land Forces Act. The harsh punishments of the Articles of War and the Mutiny Act began to ease with the issuance in 1837 of the Punishment of Offences Act, which downgraded the penalty for inciting mutiny from death to “transportation for life” (permanent exile). It was further reduced in 1857 to penal servitude for life, and reduced again in 1948 to life imprisonment. After the First World War the death penalty was abolished for offenses such as striking a superior officer, sleeping on watch, and disobedience. After a further revision of the law in 1930, mutiny remained the sole strictly military crime drawing a death sentence, though military courts-martial could still impose capital punishment for acts of high treason, such as attempting to kill the sovereign or engaging in armed revolt against the government. The death penalty continued on the books as the ultimate punishment for mutiny until the passage of the Human Rights Act of 1998, which finally abolished capital punishment in the British military altogether. MHQ John A. Haymond, a conflict historian, is the author of The Infamous Dakota War Trials of 1862: Revenge, Military Law, and the Judgment of History, which was published in 2016 by McFarland & Company. MHQ Winter 2017

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BATTLE SCHEMES

‘DON’T FIRE UNTIL YOU SEE...’

FROM LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; GETTY IMAGES

On June 16, 1775, some 1,200 colonial troops under the command of Colonel William Prescott marched from Cambridge, Massachusetts, onto the Charlestown Peninsula, where they occupied Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill and braced for battle. The British attack came the next day. Prescott, knowing that his troops were low on gunpowder, ordered them to hold their fire as long as possible. (Reputedly his order was: “Men, you are all marksmen—don’t one of you fire until you see the white of their eyes.”) While the rebels stunned the British by repulsing their first two assaults, they finally were forced to retreat to Cambridge. This map, “Plan of the Action which happen’d 17th June 1775,” was made by Lieutenant (later Sir) Thomas Hyde Page (above), an English military engineer and cartographer. Page’s map, with Breed’s Hill at the center, shows the American and British lines, the various troop movements, and cannonfire from British naval ships. Page was wounded by a cannon ball during the battle and lost his leg below the knee, an injury for which he was awarded a grant of ten shillings a day for life. MHQ

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EXPERIENCE

VOICES FROM THE TRENCHES

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Peter Hart, then a young oral historian at the Imperial War Museum in London, conducted 183 interviews with British veterans of World War I, the last of whom died in 2009. Here is some of what they told Hart about life—and death—in the trenches.

We collected rubbish and buried it in a shell hole in the back. Some units didn’t seem to bother and they threw the empty tins over the wire. That’s where you got your rats roaming around at night feeding in the tins. We were instructed and always told to bury your rubbish. If anybody had to be buried, it wasn’t long before you could see where they’d been at each end of the grave going down to the body. They would eat human flesh if they’d the chance and that didn’t go down very well if it was one of your pals who’d just been buried. Private Horace Calvert, 4th Grenadier Guards We were issued with our sheepskin coats. Oh dear me! You could wear them inside out or the right way. Now if you wore them inside out, you had the lining on the outside and all the wool was inside next to your body—but you were absolutely covered—you had millions of lice on your body. They were creeping out of your neck. They didn’t hurt—they were just itchy. You would be sat talking to a chap and you would see one come up out of his shirt and walk up his neck. There was only one thing to do— burn them! That was the only way—get your shirt off and get the flame going along the seams. We used to run a match—or a candlelight, better, it lasted longer—up the seam and burn every egg. You could hear them crack, crack, cracking. Private George Ashurst, 2nd Lancashire Fusiliers We used to get a penny out each, take a louse out from under your arm and put it on the penny. So you got eight of you in the line with eightpence involved. And the first louse to get off the edge of the penny wins the eightpence, you see. Sergeant Alfred West, 1/1st Monmouthshire Regiment A hole: everybody had to go in there, officers and all. No paper, we had to do the best we could. We couldn’t be bothered about anything else, the quicker you did it and got your trousers up to be ready, the better. The whisper would come through, ‘There’s a patrol going out tonight!’ You’d be numbered off, ‘You, you, you, you! You rest now during the day, you’re going out on patrol tonight!’ It wasn’t voluntary, you take it in turn. At night we’d gather

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together, we were given our orders and we were given a password.... We’d stay out for about three or four hours. Get back the same way; then when we come back over the parapet we had to whisper the password. Private Ivor Watkins, 15th Welsh Regiment Charlie Reid, he was a great little fellow. He stood up one day outside a trench dugout, pulled out a German helmet and put it on his head. There was a pair of spectacles attached to it, so he put the spectacles on his face, stood up, and said, ‘Ho, boys!’ He folded his arms and stood up there and a German sniped him right away—he was gone—through the head. Private Sibbald Stewart, 238th Machine Gun Company There were six in my bay. It was my turn on duty for a couple of hours. They said, ‘Let’s go in the next bay; they’ve got some cards in there—we can have a game of cards.’ Away these other five went. That made about twelve in their bay and only me in this one. All of a sudden there’s one—God, honestly and truly I’ll never know what happened—it was such a bloody explosion and it blew me, the sandbags, the barbed wire all in a bloody heap. While I was trying to get myself together a young officer came along, he says, ‘You all right?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I was a bit dazed. I said, ‘Where did that shell fall then?’ He said, ‘You should see your next bay, all dead, all of them!’ He said, ‘Can you help me dig them out?’... We got down to it and did the best we could. Pulling bits and pieces out. We got hold of a fellow’s neck bone—his head was off—to pull him out of the loose earth and all it was was his two legs and his backbone. Next one the shell had scalped him, so that all his skull was peeled white, a hole in the skull. As I tried to get my hand under his chin, all his brains shot out all over my arm. Private William Holbrook, 4th Royal Fusiliers You couldn’t have individual graves, you put twenty, thirty and more in graves. We had identity discs, one was red, the other was a kind of green. You buried the man with one and the other went back with his effects. So that when the chap was eventually dug up and reburied he’d still have this green disc. Private Basil Farrer, 2nd Yorkshire Regiment

A pal of mine, Arthur Hill, had the job of sewing up the dead in blankets. This poor fellow had been in a dugout, a gas shell had burst, he got the full effects and he died. Arthur asked me to give him a hand to fix this fellow up. As he did so the gas was bubbling out of his mouth! A dreadful sight it was; an awful death. Private Joe Yarwood, 94th Field Ambulance

PAUL POPPER/POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES

When things were nice and easy you could keep your friends, but as soon as you got casualties you’d got to make another friend and as the war went on, the casualties were so enormous the turnover of friends became—every other month you’d probably get a new pal because your friend previously had been killed or something. The fellows I’ve slept with, divided my bread with, divided my butter with. Then all of a sudden they’re killed—gone. Corporal Donald Price, 20th Royal Fusiliers I went out on the Menin Road with a section commander, Basil Groves. We’d got part of the way up the road and the Germans started to get nasty, put a few over at us, so were dived into a shelter which was just at the side of the Menin Road, half underneath it. We were sitting there in the dark and our eyes got accustomed to the gloom and I said to Basil, ‘Hello, there’s some Jerrys here!’ There was a double-tiered bunk and on the top bunk was a dead German. We were sitting talking and smoking, waiting for the ‘storm’ to abate up above when all of a sudden the dead German on top

flung out his arm which came round and caught my friend a clip on the head—which frightened him considerably. I think what had happened was that these two had been put in there are rigor mortis had set in. I suppose the heat of our presence had just turned the temperature enough to release the dead man’s arm. We looked at them closely and examined their eyes and so forth but they were as dead as mutton. Captain Norman Dillon, B Battalion, Tank Corps I was apprehensive—I wondered if I’d be alive that night, I wondered whether I was going to be killed. I accepted the fact as a soldier; the thing was, you had to be a fatalist. Private Basil Farrer, 2nd Yorkshire Regiment They used to take their puttee off and wrap it round the foot or the toes and fire the rifle into it—self-inflicted. They would do anything to get out of there. They were crippled for life. I’ve had some tight corners but I never thought of doing a thing like that. Private James Watson, 9th Northumberland Fusiliers MHQ Peter Hart is Oral Historian of the Imperial War Museum in London. Adapted from Voices from the Front: An Oral History of the Great War with permission from Oxford University Press USA. Copyright © 2016 Peter Hart and published by Oxford University Press USA. First published in Great Britain by Profile Books. All rights reserved. MHQ Winter 2017

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WAR LIST

LAST GASPS

A sampling of closing remarks by famous military leaders By Bill Hogan

—Jacques de Molay, last grand master of the Knights Templar, an order founded during the Crusades; in 1314, in Paris, before he was burned at the stake for heresy

“Make my skin into drumheads for the Bohemian cause.” —Jan Žižka, one-eyed Czech military genius and leader of Bohemia’s Hussite Revolution, the first of the religious wars during the Protestant Reformation; in 1424, near the Moravian border, dying of the bubonic plague

“Hold the cross high so I may see it through the flames!” —Saint Joan of Arc, French military leader during the Hundred Years’ War; in 1431, in Rouen, before she was burned to death for heresy by the English and their French collaborators

“Now, God be praised, I die contented.” —James Wolfe, British Army officer; in 1759, dying of a wound received while leading his forces in the capture of Quebec from the French

“I have much business that must be attended to of greater moment than your ruined garrison and this wretched country.” —Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, French general who was commander in chief of forces in Canada during the Seven Years’ War; in 1759, near Quebec, where he was mortally wounded while trying to rally his shattered army

“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” —Nathan Hale, American Revolutionary officer who attempted to spy on the British; in 1776, before he was hanged

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“Let me die in this old uniform in which I fought my battles. May God forgive me for ever having put on another.” —Benedict Arnold, American Revolutionary officer until 1779, when he shifted his allegiance to the British; in 1801, in London

“ ’Tis well.” —George Washington, first president of the United States; in 1799, after his personal secretary assured him that he had heard Washington’s instructions: “I am just going. Have me decently buried; and don’t let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead.”

“Now I am satisfied. Thank God, I have done my duty.” —Horatio Nelson, British naval commander; in 1805, after being shot through the shoulder and chest by a French sniper at the Battle of Trafalgar, when he learned that 15 enemy ships had been taken

“Don’t give up the ship! Fight her till she sinks!” —James Lawrence, U.S. naval officer and captain of the frigate Chesapeake; in 1813, after being mortally wounded in a sea fight off Boston with HMS Shannon

“I am mortally wounded, I think.” —Stephen Decatur, U.S. naval officer and commodore-hero of the Barbary Wars; in 1820, from a wound received in a duel with disgraced navy commodore James Barron near Bladensburg, Maryland

“Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” —Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, Confederate army general during the Civil War; in 1863, after being wounded by friendly fire at the Battle of Chancellorsville

MATHEW BRADY COLLECTION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

“Let evil swiftly befall those who have wrongly condemned us. God will avenge us.”

“They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance. ” —John Sedgwick, Union army general during the Civil War; in 1864, moments before being mortally wounded by a Confederate sharpshooter’s bullet at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House

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“Give me 80 men and I can ride through the whole Sioux Nation.” —William J. Fetterman, U.S. Army captain; in 1866, before he and his soldiers were killed in a battle with Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arapaho Indians

—Henry Wirz, Confederate army captain during the Civil War; in 1865, as the noose was cinched around his neck before he was hanged for conspiracy and murder

—Francisco “Pancho” Villa, Mexican Revolutionary general; in 1923, after being shot by assassins

“I just wish I had time for one more bowl of chili.” Or, by other accounts, “Goodbye, friends. Adiós, compadres.”

“Strike the tent.”

—Christopher Houston “Kit” Carson, American frontiersman; in 1868, after suffering an abdominal aortic aneurysm

“This is a hell of a way to die.”

“I am not going. Do with me what you like. I am not going. Come on! Come on! Take action! Let’s go!”

“Lower the shades. Pull me up. Higher. I want to go. God take me.”

—Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa Lakota chief and holy man; in 1890, before he was shot by Indian agency police who were trying to arrest him

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“Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”

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—Robert E. Lee, Confederate army general during the Civil War; in 1870, after suffering a stroke

—George S. Patton, senior officer of the U.S. Army; in 1945, dying of injuries sustained in a car accident

—Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. president and army general; in 1969, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center following a heart attack MHQ

HAROLD VON SCHMIDT/AKG-IMAGES

“This is too tight.”

WEAPONS CHECK

LEWIS GUN

By Chris McNab

The Lewis gun embodied a new concept in the field of small arms—the light machine gun. It was invention of two Americans: Samuel Maclean, who developed the original gasoperated design in 1911, and Colonel Isaac Newton Lewis, who refined it and sold it to the Belgians in 1913. Shortly thereafter, with war engulfing Europe, the British Army adopted the gun, making it one of its principal infantry weapons. Although the Lewis originally was a tripod-mounted medium machine gun, its defining use was as a bipod-mounted light machine gun. While the unloaded gun weighed 26 pounds, it was still portable enough to be carried forward in an assault, to provide suppressive fire at point of need. Two features made the infantry Lewis instantly recognizable: its standard

47-round pan magazine (a 97-round version was later available) and the tubular cooling unit that shrouded the barrel. Firing the .303-inch British rifle cartridge, the Lewis could spray out rounds at 550 rpm. Lewis guns served on land and sea and in combat aircraft throughout World War I and even into the next global conflict. Despite the weapon’s proven capabilities, the U.S. Army never officially adopted it for anything other than aircraft use. MHQ Chris McNab is a military historian based in the United Kingdom. His most recent book (as consultant editor) is American Battles & Campaigns: A Chronicle from 1622 – Present (Thomas Dunne Books, 2016).

Recoil mechanism

Barrel radiator

Bipod

Mechanism

The pan magazine held the cartridges with their noses pointing into the center like a fan, the cartridges mechanically indexed into the gun.

The Lewis gun used a novel helical recoil spring arrangement. The gun’s mechanical complexity meant it cost more than a Vickers machine gun to produce.

The barrel was surrounded by a cooling radiator unit in a metal jacket. This jacket was omitted on many aircraft and vehicle mounts.

The Lewis gun’s classic mount was its integral bipod, but it could also be fitted to single- or twin-gun vehicle or aircraft pintle mounts.

The Lewis gun was gas-operated, with propellant gas tapped off near the muzzle to power a piston mechanically linked to the gun’s bolt.

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM

Pan magazine

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NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ILLUSTRATION; NORMAN ROCKWELL MUSEUM

WAR STORIES

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orman Rockwell always wanted to be an artist. He was just 14 when, in 1908, he began taking classes at the New York School of Art. Two years later he dropped out of high school to study full time at the National Academy of Design and then at the Art Students League, both in New York City. By 1913 Rockwell was the art editor of Boys’ Life, the official magazine of the Boy Scouts of America, and in 1916, at age 22, he was commissioned to paint his first cover for The Saturday Evening Post. He would go on to paint 321 more. His last, a portrait of John F. Kennedy, appeared in 1963, a week after the president’s assassination. Rockwell also wanted to serve his country. In 1918, with World War I raging in Europe, Rockwell tried to enlist in the U.S. Navy, but he was turned down because, at 140 pounds, he was deemed 8 pounds underweight for someone six feet tall. The night of his rejection Rockwell gorged on bananas, doughnuts, and liquids until he’d put on enough weight to be able to enlist the next day. Assigned to the Charleston Navy Yard in South Carolina, the skinny new sailor was put to work drawing cartoons and designing layouts for its official newspaper, Afloat and Ashore. Rockwell got his work done so quickly that he was able to keep turning out paintings for the Post and other magazines, many of them emphasizing the naïveté of the young men called to war from America’s farms and small towns. After the war ended in November 1918, Rockwell found genuine fame as an artist and illustrator. Rockwell’s success owed much to the fact that he saw his works as “pictures” rather than “illustrations” or “paintings.” He believed that each one—and he made more than 4,000 in his career—needed to carry a story. “The story is the first thing and the last thing.” When the United States was once again thrust into war, Rockwell was eager to put his formidable talent to work for his country. In 1942 he went to the Office of War Information in Washington, D.C., with sketches for posters illustrating the four

freedoms that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had laid out in his 1941 State of the Union Address. The agency wasn’t interested. So he took his idea to The Saturday Evening Post, which eagerly assigned him to paint his “Four Freedoms” pictures. He labored over them for the better part of a year. When they appeared in four consecutive issues of the magazine, starting on February 20, 1943, the public reacted so enthusiastically that the government decided to use them to sell war bonds. The Office of War Information, which had said no to Rockwell the year before, now put out two and a half million “Four Freedoms” posters and made his original paintings the centerpiece of a 16city tour that drew huge crowds and generated more than $130 million in war bond sales. In 1977, a year before his death, Rockwell was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for his “vivid and affectionate portraits of our country and ourselves.” To be sure, he had sometimes been criticized on the same count—namely, that his works were too affectionate, too cheery, too humor-laden. But those kinds of knocks, fortunately, have waned in recent years. Rockwell did not wear rose-colored glasses as he painted; his pictures about the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, and the United Nations attest to that. Rockwell chose not to glorify killing in his war pictures, including the one on the cover of this issue (also shown at left on the sheet music for George M. Cohan’s “Over There”). Indeed, he painted only one battle picture in his career. Rockwell may have had his own reasons for avoiding scenes of bloodshed and devastation. “The view of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and ugly,” he wrote in a 1960 memoir. “I paint life as I would like it to be.” Surely Rockwell’s work is so popular, and so enduring, because he painted life as the rest of us would like it to be as well. — Bill Hogan [email protected]

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THE KORSUN NOOSE

Encircled by an overwhelming and vengeful Soviet army, German soldiers on the Eastern Front desperately searched for a way out. By Robert M. Citino

BERLINER VERLAG/AKG-IMAGES

A soldier of the German Wehrmacht looks out over the Dnieper River, in central Ukraine, in early 1944.

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The calendar reads January 30, 1944. The clock says 2 p.m. The thermometer? Well, let’s just call it cold. A small group of German infantrymen—landser in the vernacular, “ground pounders”—are huddled around a map table in a small clearing in a forest west of Cherkasy, in central Ukraine. “Damn it,” the captain shouts. “We have to get out of here now!” He slams a fist down on the table, sending the map flying. He is big, raw, and fearless and has a Knight’s Cross—the coveted Ritterkreuz—to prove it. His men don’t see him as much of a talker, and most of what he does say is strewn with profanities. But now, a tap seems to open and the words pour out of him. “We’ve got to get out of here while we’re still close to friendly lines and our horses and equipment are in good shape.” He pauses and looks around at the others. “It’s life or death.” He’s shouting now. “We can do it. One battle, one march, and we’re out of here!” The captain is done talking. No one speaks. Somewhere in the distance, a machine gun barks. Theirs? Ours? The men stand rooted, eyes cast down. The captain has said everything there is to say. Every landser around the table knows exactly what the big man is talking about. Two days ago, Russian attacks south of the Dnieper River drove into the Germans’ deep right flank and linked up with another Russian column coming around their left. The Germans are cut off, trapped, encircled. They all know the word: kessel, German for “cauldron” or “kettle.” They don’t need to read a map. They can feel it. They are trapped in a filthy, freezing mud hole, and if they don’t break out soon, they are all going to die.

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t could have happened anywhere on the extended German front west of the Dnieper in the winter of 1944. The tattered divisions near Korsun just happened to draw the unlucky number. The year had dawned with the Red Army on the march, pushing back the Wehrmacht from its long, meandering line along the Dnieper. While the Germans managed to make a stand here or there, the Soviets had learned to probe for weak spots and then smash into them with massive force. Take the German Eighth Army, under the command of General Otto Wöhler, for example. Thus far in the Soviet offensive it had remained untouched, but Red Army attacks had already gouged deep into the neighboring German armies on Wöhler’s flanks. As a result, most of the Eighth Army was now isolated in a kind of sack, its front still resting on the Dnieper but its flanks dangling far to the south. Wöhler had asked for permission to pull back from this dangerous perch, but Führer Adolf Hitler had

given his by now customary answer, demanding that Eighth Army hold its position “to the last man and bullet.” Sitting in that big bulge on the Dnieper, the German Eighth Army was a tempting target, and on January 24, the Soviets pounced. Under the inestimable Marshal Georgy K. Zhukov, two “fronts” (the Soviet term for army group) launched a coordinated assault on it. The Second Ukrainian Front of General Ivan S. Konev came down from the north and west; its partner, the First Ukrainian Front of General Nikolai F. Vatutin, did the same from the east and south. As always for the Soviets, the force levels were massive: five ground armies; 400,000 men; 500 tanks; 5,000 guns; at least 1,000 aircraft. The Germans, by contrast, were threadbare. With manpower stretched to the limit and matériel in short supply, the Wehrmacht could barely hold a cohesive front; reserves and air power were also scarce. While the Germans had three panzer divisions in play—their calling card for hard-hitting, mobile operations—all three were understrength. Together they didn’t even add up to a single full-strength division. No surprise, then, that the initial assault broke through almost everywhere on the first day. The German commander of XXXXVII Corps, General Nikolaus von Vormann, was at the front and described how “the red flood rolled over the tanks and artillery of the 3rd, 11th, and 14th Panzer Divisions around noon, heading west.” The scene, he wrote, was “amazing, dramatic, shocking…the dam broke and a great unending flood inundated the plain.” Over the next few days, that “great unending flood” rolled on. Soviet tanks were motoring in the clear, and on January 28 the two fronts joined near the village of Zvenigorodka, along a little river called the Gniloy Tikich. A huge German force lay surrounded in a roughly circular pocket centered on Korsun. Ever since Stalingrad in 1942, Soviet offensives had been beating the Germans badly and tearing great gaps in their defenses, but the Wehrmacht had managed to avoid a repeat disaster. Now, for the forlorn German divisions in the Korsun kessel, the hour had struck. The forces trapped in the pocket belonged to two units: XXXXII Corps, lying to the west, and XI Corps, lying to the east. The German High Command now formed them into a single command under General Wilhelm Stemmermann of the XI Corps. This “Stemmermann Group” contained 60,000 men, including 5,000 Russian civilian auxiliaries (Hilfswilligen, or “Hiwis”). Parts of six divisions were present, though none was at full strength after the hard fighting of the past few months. Their matériel situation was woeful. Among them they had just 26 tanks and 14 self-propelled guns. That made 40 armored vehicles versus the 1,000 on the Soviet side.

Opposite, top: German soldiers in the SS Leibstandarte division—originally the unit responsible for guarding Adolf Hitler’s person—look on helplessly as a truck and a Panzer VI Tiger tank get bogged down in mud. Opposite, bottom: German infantrymen in white camouflage suits advance along train tracks in the cover of an LT-38 tank.

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BUNDESARCHIV; ULLSTEIN BILD/AKG-IMAGES

KORSUN POCKET

KORSUN POCKET

First Ukrainian Front

Dnieper River Ross River Korsun

Second Ukrainian Front

Lisyanka

Zvenigorodka

Korsun U K R A I N E

Soviet Attacks, Jan. 24–Feb. 3 Soviet Attacks, Feb. 4–Feb. 17 German Counterattacks

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Marshal Ivan S. Konev, the commander of the Second Ukrainian Front, and Colonel General Matvei V. Zakharov, his chief of staff, lay plans for the encirclement of the German Wehrmacht prior to the Korsun operation in 1944.

Mud also foiled German relief attempts from outside the pocket. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, the commander of Army Group South, reacted quickly to the encirclement, assembling III Panzer Corps and XXXXVII Panzer Corps for a relief effort. The two forces looked impressive on paper, with no fewer than nine panzer divisions. But churning through the mud wasn’t easy, and veterans still shuddered years later at memories of the “Mud March” (Schlamm-Marsch) at Korsun. One panzer battalion moved a grand total of eight kilometers in 12 hours. Panther tanks sank up to the hull during the day and were immobilized when the mud froze at night, and many tanks spent their days dragging others forward through the mud instead of getting at the enemy. Still, the Germans came on gamely. Their target was close, just 25 miles away. The first relief attempt, on February 4, broke through the initial Soviet defenses but soon bogged down—literally. The Germans reinforced their second attempt on February 11 more heavily, and the result was one of the great tank melees of the war. In the van for the Germans was the heavy tank regiment of Lieutenant Franz Bäke, an experienced tank commander. Fighting alongside Bäke was a battle group from 1st Panzer Division, Kampfgruppe Frank. Their target was Hill 239.0, a dominant height southwest of the kessel. The Soviets understood its importance as much as the Germans, and a great armored brawl broke out there on February 16, with German Panthers and Tigers ranging against Soviet T-34s and the new “Josef Stalin” heavy tank. The close-range fight left both sides bruised. Kampfgruppe Frank lost every company commander and platoon leader in the course of the day, and Soviet tanks learned to avoid Bäke if they could. Supply was the undoing of the Germans. A Tiger tank was a fearsome weapon, but keeping it in fuel and shells was a difficult task even over dry ground and good roads. Korsun had neither. As so often in this war, the German drive petered out excruciatingly close to a crucial objective, with Bäke’s Tigers reaching the village of Oktiabr, a little more than a mile from Hill 239.0 and just five miles from their trapped comrades. Inside the kessel, the troops were enduring something akin to the five stages of grief: denial, anger, perhaps some private spiritual bargaining with the Almighty, depression, and acceptance of

SOVFOTO/UIG VIA GETTY IMAGES; BRIAN WALKER

While Soviet tanks completed the encirclement on January 28, their supporting infantry armies were still hustling up to the front to solidify the inner ring around their German quarry. A kessel has its best chance to break out in the first week, but the Germans failed to jump. With typical bombast Hitler had dubbed the Korsun pocket a “fortress on the Dnieper,” but a more elemental factor was at work. On the night of February 1, the winter cold suddenly broke and a warm front rolled over the battlefield. Warm weather is normally good news, but now along the Dnieper, it spelled trouble. The thaw melted the ground, and the result was an ocean of mud. Just when German troops in the newly formed kessel needed speed, they found themselves stuck fast.

TOP: IZRAIL OZERSKY/TASS VIA GETTY IMAGES: BOTTOM, FROM LEFT: ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY IMAGES; BUNDESARCHIV (2); AKG-IMAGES

Top: Wrecked German military equipment near the village of Shanderovka on the southwestern perimeter of the Korsun pocket. Bottom, from left: A German Tiger tank attacks a Ukrainian village; Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, the commander of the German Army Group South; General Otto Wöhler, the commander of the German Eighth Army; Marshal Georgy K. Zhukov, who coordinated the Red Army’s drive to form two armored rings around its Nazi adversaries.

their fate. But morale in the ranks seemed to hold steady, even as Soviet attacks drove them into a smaller and smaller pocket under constant artillery bombardment, as the Soviet air force thundered overhead, and as the promised air supply of the pocket didn’t even come close to the target tonnage. Soviet aircraft also dropped into the pocket millions of propaganda leaflets from captured German officers, urging them to surrender and promising them humane treatment, but apparently without effect. Likewise, Stemmermann and the other commanders resisted a personal appeal from a former brother in arms, Gen-

eral Walther Seydlitz, a genuine tough guy taken prisoner at Stalingrad who had turned against the Third Reich with a vengeance. Stemmermann refused to treat with a Soviet envoy who came into the pocket under a white flag of truce with a surrender ultimatum. A German regimental commander met the envoy, and the two men shared a bubbly glass of sekt. But the Germans never answered the ultimatum. Doubt was taking hold among those trapped at Korsun. Rumors flew. Help was on the way, or it wasn’t. Their officers had a brilliant escape plan; their officers were idiots. Hitler had perMHQ Winter 2017

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KORSUN POCKET

With Soviet pressure building, the choice was stark: Break out or die.

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ing as it did out of nowhere, caught the Soviets napping. Almost before the Germans knew it, their first echelon was through the Soviet defenses and heading southwest. The opening success marked the end of the operational plan for the breakout. No one in the rank and file cared any longer about the order of approach or the timetable. The second and third echelons spilled forward, and then the rear guard. It was a surging mass of humanity, all crammed into a box a couple of miles square and streaming down the few good roads toward Hill 239.0. Group Stemmermann, a military formation organized a few minutes earlier, fell apart. Stemmermann himself took a direct hit from Soviet artillery that killed him instantly. Command and control broke down at the very moment when it was most needed. The German force inside the Korsun pocket had exited the realm of “war” and had entered something like a state of nature, where survival is the imperative and rational thought recedes. As if part of some cosmic plan, the weather decided to frame the situation perfectly—unloading a furious blizzard onto the scene, adding to the yard or so of snow already on the ground. One thought guided the fleeing soldiers: Hill 239.0 meant freedom. It was just a few miles up the road, and the surging German horde was nearing it in the early morning hours of February 17. They were under fire from both flanks, but no one expected that breaking through such a narrow corridor was going to be easy. Just a couple more miles, and they’d be out. They could make out the dim shape of the big height just ahead. Their comrades were waiting. The sense of euphoria grew. Just then the hillside erupted with a roar, as Soviet artillery, machine guns, and tank rounds slammed into the defenseless mass of infantry. The scene was pure horror. Standing at the very gate of freedom was a wall of Soviet armor. Within minutes, the German dead covered the ground. Thousands more surged to the front, only to meet death in their turn. Soviet tanks ratcheted the terror by rolling forward to crush everything in their path: wagons, the dead and wounded lying on the ground, and men desperately trying to get away. The carnage peaked as the Soviet 5th Guards Cavalry Corps charged into the German mass, riding down their victims and hacking away with their sabers. The entire slaughter took place with heavy German forces sitting, quite literally, on the other side of the hill. What had happened? It’s clear that the men in the pocket thought Hill 239.0 was in German hands. When Manstein and his staff sent Stemmermann his breakout orders on February 15, they believed that Bäke’s tanks would be taking the hill the next day—a tragic mistake. No one could have predicted the fuel shortages that cropped up at the worst possible moment or foreseen the unlucky breakdown in radio communications between III Panzer Corps and Stemmermann that prevented him from learning about Bäke’s failure. Even had he known, however, his breakout order had galvanized his men so strongly that canceling the breakout might have been impossible. Staggered in front of Hill 239.0, the human flood turned away and swerved south. The survival instinct was in play:

SPUTNIK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; AKG-IMAGES; SOVFOTO/UIG VIA GETTY IMAGES

sonally ordered a relief column sent up, or he hadn’t. And then there were the questions: Why haven’t we been mentioned in the Wehrmacht dispatch (Wehrmachtbericht) lately? Why haven’t they come for us yet? Have they written us off? In their uncertainty, the landsers groaned and grumbled, as soldiers have done from time immemorial: “We criticized, blamed, and scolded,” one of them recalled, “swearing like troopers.” And then, suddenly, salvation: On February 15, headquarters gave Stemmermann permission for a breakout. Manstein had decided to defy Hitler and to issue the order on his own. The breakout would begin on the night of February 16, under the code word “Freedom.” By now there was no choice. The pocket was shrinking daily, as Soviet attacks along the perimeter reduced it to an oblong gash just five miles long by three wide, every inch of which was raked with fire. German troops had given up Korsun itself, losing their only workable airfield. With Soviet pressure building by the day, supplies running out, and the relief columns stalled, the choice was stark: Break out or die. The news spread rapidly and worked like a tonic on the filthy, frozen Germans. “Enough of these broken men,” a survivor later wrote, “enough of all this talk about dying.” He knew they would get through—they had to. It was time, as he put it, to “throw your heart over the hurdle” and just do it. After weeks of sitting still, only one thing mattered: “We’re breaking out!” Certainly, the plan was a desperate one. Stemmermann formed three assault columns: Panzergrenadier Division Wiking on his left, 72nd Division in his center, and a few shattered remnants combined as “Corps-Detachment B” on his right. Two divisions, the 57th and 88th, made up the rear guard, ready to follow on to the breakout point once the initial assault had pierced Soviet defenses. The assault wedges themselves were perhaps unique in German military history. Each had three waves: a first “bayonet echelon,” to launch the assault with no preliminary maneuver or fire; a second “heavy echelon,” arrayed around the tanks and mortars (at least the few that could be muscled out of the mud); and a third “supply echelon,” made up of the trucks and wagons in the German army’s rear area. All three echelons were to head for the same objective: Hill 239.0, the “receiving point” where friendly forces of the III Panzer Corps were ready to take them in. With speed and surprise of the essence, Stemmermann even decided to leave behind 1,500 severely wounded men, along with a handful of medics—a ruthless decision that didn’t sit well with anyone, least of all the medics. By all odds, the Korsun breakout was doomed. But predictions are never certain in war. The first echelon charged forward late in the evening of February 16, shouting “hurra!” and brandishing their rifles and bayonets. Their initial rush, com-

From top: Disabled Nazi tanks strewn across a field in the wake of the Korsun operation; the body of General Wilhelm Stemmermann, who commanded the German forces in the Korsun pocket and was killed while attempting to escape, is placed in a wooden transport coffin; Red Army soldiers in the First and Second Ukrainian Fronts with German POWs captured in the Battle of the Korsun-Cherkasy Pocket.

Desperate to remove themselves from Soviet fire to their west and facing the well defended village of Dzurzhentsy to the north, they had no choice. Onward they came, again like a wave, with two streams parting around the village of Pochapintsy, then rejoining once past it, heading south, now turning west, toward the village of Lisyanka. They had apparently hit a temporary seam in the Soviet defensive ring; the dark of night had made a confusing situation even more perplexing for both sides. They actually managed to get around the base of Hill 239.0, and once again, freedom beckoned. All they needed to do now was cross a river. The Gniloy Tikich was at high water, 7 to 10 yards deep and some 80 feet across. The water was icy, with jagged floes on the surface and a steep, slick western bank. As the numbers of men in the horde swelled on the eastern bank, they formed a choice target for Soviet artillery, and they could see Soviet tanks arriving from the north. Once again, there was no other option: Thousands of men plunged into the river’s icy waters. Many drowned in their panic; many were killed in the water, gunned down or blown apart; many got across to the other side but failed to gain a purchase on the icy bank and fell back into the water. Hundreds drowned within a few yards of safety. As dawn broke over this chaotic, bloody field on February 17, III Panzer Corps launched yet another attack and finally took Hill 239.0. Bäke’s tanks could now provide covering fire for the scattered remnants of the breakout force, still milling around or hiding in various states of confusion. In the end, a surprising number of German soldiers—perhaps 30,000 men—managed to survive the ordeal and beat the odds. But turn that number over, and it means that some 20,000 men had perished in one horrible night. If the Germans could have coordinated their two operations—the relief column and the breakout— just a bit more effectively, they might have eluded disaster. Fine tuning of this sort, however, is exactly what separates successful operations from a debacle like Korsun. Sadly for the Germans, Korsun wasn’t a one-time event. Over and over in 1944–1945, German forces on the Eastern Front found themselves in the same dire straits as XI Corps at Korsun: outnumbered, undersupplied, and encircled, with the only hope for survival being a desperate, against-the-odds breakout. The Wehrmacht may have had a chance to win the war in the Soviet Union early on, but those days were long gone. Korsun was the new normal for the last two years of the war, as the goal for the German soldier shifted from victory to survival. Trapped in an unwinnable war, the landser could read the signs on the sprawling Soviet landscape all the way from the Baltic Sea to the Black, and they all said the same thing: No way out. MHQ Robert M. Citino is senior historian at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans and the author of eight books, including The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich; Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942; and The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943. MHQ Winter 2017

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THE ART OF WAR How American artists portrayed the horrors and heroism of World War I

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Portrait of Lieutenant Jean-Julien Lemordant, 1917 Susan Macdowell Eakins, (1851–1938), one of the foremost female artists of her time, poured herself into painting after the death of her husband, artist Thomas Eakins, in 1916. She made this portrait of Lemordant, a famous Breton painter who was left sightless after being struck in the forehead by a bullet at the Battle of Artois in 1915, when he came to the United States in 1917—still with bandages covering his wound— to lecture and receive the Howland Prize at Yale University. Decades later Lemordant’s sight was restored after a series of operations. Lemordant, who devoted most of his life to the cause of pacificsm, died of teargas poisoning during the May 1968 student uprisings in Paris. Oil on canvas, 30 1/8 × 25 in.

PENNSYLVANIA ACADEMY OF THE FINE ARTS (ALL)

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t was said to be “the war to end all wars,” but it wasn’t. Its magnitude is still hard to grasp—some 10 million lives lost in combat by its end—but the centenary of World War I is a time for remembrance, reflection, and perhaps even reassessment. Nearly 100 years after the last shot was fired comes, remarkably, the first major exhibition devoted to exploring the impact of the war on American art and the manifold ways in which American artists reacted to it at the time and in the years after. World War I and American Art, organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, includes approximately 160 works—paintings, drawings, sculpture, prints, photographs, posters, and ephemera—by some 80 artists, including those on the following pages (and on the cover of this issue). The exhibition opens in Philadelphia on November 4 and runs through through April 9, 2017; afterward it will travel to museums in New York City and Nashville, Tennessee.

Parade to War, Allegory, 1938 John Steuart Curry (1897–1946) is considered one of the three important painters of the American Regionalist movement, along with Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. In this painting, which Curry produced in the wake of the Great Depression and on the eve of World War II, he transforms a patriotic military parade into a haunting scene of foreboding. The faces of the young soldiers, who wear doughboy outfits and wield bayonets on their rifles amid a shower of streamers, are hollow, skeletal visages—suggesting, perhaps, a new generation headed to its slaughter after a celebratory send-off. Curry, who often worked as a muralist and illustrator, believed that art was for the common person; in this work he may have been inspired by the massive antiwar sentiment of the day. Oil on canvas, 47 13/16 × 63 13/16 in.

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Henry Howard Houston Woodward, 1921 Violet Oakley (1874–1961), who came from a family of artists, was for much of her life considered the most distinguished woman painter in the United States. George and Gertrude Woodward—her lifelong friends and patrons—commissioned Oakley to make this portrait of their son three years after he was killed in the war. Woodward, a fighter pilot in the French army’s aviation service, was shot down near Montdidier in 1918. Oakley was raised an Episcopalian but later became a Quaker, embracing its advocacy of equality and pacifism. Oil on canvas, 53 × 35 in.

The Devil’s Vineyard, n.d.

Front Line Stuff, ca. 1919

Harvey Dunn (1884–1952), a protégé of legendary artist Howard Pyle, was a brilliant and prolific illustrator. (He once completed 55 paintings in 11 weeks for illustration assignments.) Dunn was one of eight war artists assigned to the American Expeditionary Forces in France, and he later struggled emotionally as a result of his wartime experiences. In this painting, fallen soldiers and their weapons lie among the posts and wires in a French vineyard. Oil on canvas, 34 × 44 in.

Claggett Wilson (1887–1952) lived through heavy fighting on the front lines as an infantryman in the U.S. Marines. In the summer of 1918, for example, he was drenched in poison gas in the bloody Battle of Belleau Wood. Claggett tried, through art, to clear his head of the terrible things he had seen. Watercolor, pencil, and varnish on paperboard, 18 3/4 × 22 7/8 in.

The Germans Arrive, 1918 In 1918 George Bellows (1882–1925), the influential American realist painter, completed a series of works highlighting Germany’s wartime atrocities. This painting, based on an actual account, gruesomely depicts a German soldier restraining a Belgian teenager as his hands are severed. When another artist criticized him for painting scenes he hadn’t witnessed, Bellows sarcastically professed being unaware that Leonardo da Vinci “had a ticket of admission to the Last Supper.” Oil on canvas, 49 1/2 × 79 1/4 in.

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Gassed, 1919 John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was considered the leading portrait painter of his generation, but in 1907 he pledged not to accept any more portrait commissions and increasingly devoted himself to painting murals. (He was also a gifted landscape painter and watercolorist.) This monumental painting—portraying the aftermath of a mustard gas attack on the Western Front in August 1918, just as he had seen it—is his late-career masterpiece, a large-scale, friezelike composition that dramatically conveys the waste and tragedy of war. The British Government, which commissioned Sargent to produce the piece, intended it to be the central painting in the Hall of Remembrance for World War I, but the memorial was never built. Oil on canvas, 90 1/2 × 240 in.

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Dog Fight Over the Trenches, 1935 Horace Pippin (1888–1946), a self-taught painter, enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917 and fought with the famed African American 369th Infantry Regiment, known as the Harlem Hellfighters. Wounded, honorably discharged, and permanently disabled in his right arm, Pippin maintained that the suffering he witnessed and experienced on the front drove his art for the rest of his life. “I can never forget suffering,” he once wrote, “so I came home with all of it in my mind, and I paint from it today.” Oil on canvas, 18 × 33 1/8 in.

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The Pestilence (formerly War), ca. 1918

Avenue of the Allies, 1918

Hugh Henry Breckenridge (1870–1937) was a pioneering modernist painter and teacher who established summer art schools in Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts. Breckenridge referred to the vigorous neo-impressionist technique he often employed as “tapestry painting,” and this large canvas reflects his overwhelming fascination with color. Breckenridge’s bold palette and expressionistic use of color inspired scores of artists, including many of his students. Oil on canvas, 65 3/16 × 80 1/4 in.

Childe Hassam (1859–1935), a pioneer of American expressionism, was also prolific: He produced more than 3,000 paintings, oils, watercolors, etchings, and lithographs during his career, but he is perhaps best known for the 30 paintings in what have become known as Hassam’s “Flag Series.” This one shows a flag-draped Fifth Avenue, which was renamed “Avenue of the Allies” during the Liberty Loan Drives of 1918. Oil on canvas, 36 × 28 3/8 in.

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WWI’S WONDER DRUG The British Army relied extensively on Forced March, a cocaine-and-cola-nut product manufactured by Burroughs Wellcome & Co., a London pharmaceutical house that later launched the production of cocaine in tablet form.

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MUSEUM OF THE ROYAL PHARMACEUTICAL SOCIETY

“A German has tested this stuff on soldiers,” Sigmund Freud wrote,“and has reported that it has really rendered them strong and capable of endurance.” By Łukasz Kamien´ski

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Rumours are circulating that the factory’s [Nederlandsche Cocaïne Fabriek’s] deliveries during the war were misused to enhance soldiers’ performance on the battlefield. Cocaine wasn’t just used as an anaesthetic, but as an instrument of war! —Conny Braam, The Cocaine Salesman

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n the early 19th century the Europeans began to seriously consider the possibility of using coca to improve the physical endurance and raise the fighting spirits of troops. General William Miller, an English-born soldier who in the 1820s fought alongside the Peruvian army during Peru’s War of Independence, realized that chewing coca leaves was an essential and effective means of increasing soldiers’ strength and resilience. In Europe it was Paolo Mantegazza, an Italian neurologist and physiologist, who conducted the first research on the stimulating effects of coca leaves. Most significant for the popularization of coca in the West, however, were the trials carried out by the distinguished Scottish toxicologist Sir Robert Christison of the University of Edinburgh. In 1870 he investigated the effect of coca on fatigue with two of his students, who tired themselves by walking 16 miles. After they were given between six and eight grams of leaves, hunger, thirst, and fatigue vanished, so they could continue walking for another hour. Eventually, in May 1875, at age 78, Christison tested the effects of coca on himself. The results of his experiments were published in 1876 in the influential British Medical Journal. He was very enthusiastic about the potential use of coca to mitigate exhaustion from strenuous physical exertion. He was not alone in this view. Dr. William Hammond, who had served as the surgeon general of the United States Army during the Civil War, would later promote his own coca-and-wine blend as a general tonic and stimulant. In France, also in the 1870s, Charles Gazeau tested coca on himself and concluded that its potent appetite-reducing property could be crucial in sustaining troops in the field. The French Dictionnaire encyclopedique des sciences medicales, published in 1876, recommended the use of coca in both army and industry. And in Britain in 1893 Field Marshal Sir Henry Evelyn Wood tested the military value of coca on British soldiers and wrote that they “found great benefit from the leaves.” Thus the European armed forces slowly began to recognize the unique properties of coca and its potential military applications. Theodore Aschenbrandt, a Bavarian army physician, was familiar with the discovery made in 1859 by Friedrich Wöhler and his student Albert Niemann, who were the first to synthe-

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size cocaine from the coca plant. Their invention was announced the following year, and in 1862 Merck of Darmstadt, a German pharmaceutical company established in 1668, began to manufacture cocaine. Merck advertised its new product as “a stimulant which is peculiarly adapted to elevate the working ability of the body, without any dangerous effect.” In 1883 Aschenbrandt carried out an experiment in which soldiers on maneuvers were given cocaine dissolved in water. “I have drawn the attention of the military and inspired them to further research,” he wrote, summing up the results of his trials. “I believe I have given sufficient evidence of its eminent usefulness.” At that time, the overall military utility of the drug was recognized not in its boosting but rather in its appetite-reducing effect. Hence it was first seen as a potential effective means of lowering by an estimated 15 to 20 percent the costs of army food supply. Aschenbrandt’s experiment caught the attention of Sigmund Freud, a 29-year-old student of medicine. In a letter to his fiancée, he wrote: “A German has tested this stuff on soldiers and has reported that it has really rendered them strong and capable of endurance.” In 1884 Freud bought one gram of Merck’s cocaine, a huge investment for a student as it cost the equivalent of one month’s average salary, and he began to conduct his first experiments on himself. The initial results of Freud’s work were so promising that in July 1884 he published an essay titled “Über Coca.” It should be kept in mind that Freud saw cocaine as a good opportunity to promote himself and gain position within the medical profession, to garner publicity, and to make money. In 1885, after testing cocaine to cure facial neuralgia, he confessed: “I am so excited about it, for if it works I would be assured for some time to come of attracting the attention so essential for getting on in the world.” Freud not only formed hasty and untested opinions on the medical effects of cocaine but sometimes even slightly falsified research results. But he did not hide his desire to make a quick and successful career at any cost, through fraud if necessary. Others pursued more rigorous and reliable research. Many European and American doctors experimented with cocaine in the search for new breakthrough applications. They found these not only in medicine (for example in anesthesia and the treatment of fever) but also in sport. Sport, in fact, proved to be an extremely useful instrument of state policy, since it prepared young boys for their future role as soldiers. Aschenbrandt’s prediction concerning the future military utility of cocaine was proved correct by the First World War,

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THE COCAINE WAR

during which the drug amply demonstrated its overall battlefield effectiveness. Although many of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the First World War became severely addicted to morphine after it was used in the treatment of their war-related injuries, it was not morphine but cocaine that dominated the discourse on this war. Demand for cocaine remained rather low until well into the late 1880s, but its production increased steadily. The statistics available from Merck vividly illustrate this dynamic. Between 1881 and 1884 it produced a total of 1.4 kilograms of cocaine hydrochloride. In 1885 alone, it produced almost 30 kilograms. In 1913 Merck’s production of the drug reached nearly 9,000 kilograms. The war then interrupted international trade, impeding the movement of Peruvian coca leaves and crude cocaine to European factories. As a result, by late 1915 Merck’s annual production of cocaine fell to only 500 kilograms. At the same time, paradoxically, the First World War created an increasing demand for cocaine and paved the way for the rapid development of one pharmaceutical company: Nederlandsche Cocaïne Fabriek Ltd., established in March 1900 in Amsterdam as a joint venture of the Koloniale Bank and coca plantation owners in the Dutch East Indies. The Dutch writer Conny Braam tells a narrative history of Nederlandsche Cocaïne Fabriek in her novel The Cocaine Salesman. The book is based on detailed research Braam conducted in Dutch, Belgian, British, and German archives and libraries. Lucien Hirschland, the protagonist of the story, travels across Europe to negotiate contracts for NCF-manufactured cocaine. Owing to his outstanding sales results, the company earns huge profits from exporting the drug to many countries, mostly Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, and Britain. Only after the war does he realize that the national pharmaceutical companies of the warring parties had supplied their armies with Dutch-produced cocaine and that the drug was issued to soldiers not only as a medicine for pain relief but also as a potent stimulant. During the war NCF, which eagerly sold high-quality cocaine to both the Central Powers and the Allies, developed into the world’s leading manufacturer of the drug, producing an average of 14,000 kilograms a year. The war gave the company the perfect opportunity to choke off its competitors and make enormous profits. As production increased, the factory modernized and nearly doubled in size. A huge growth in demand from the military led to a sharp rise in production,

Top: Lucien Hirschland, the fictional protagonist of Conny Braam’s The Cocaine Salesman. Center: Merck, the giant German pharmaceutical company, began manufacturing cocaine in 1862; Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud saw cocaine as a good opportunity to make a name for himself—and to make money. Bottom: Two views of the Nederlandsche Cocaïne Fabriek factory in Amsterdam, which was established in 1900. MHQ Winter 2017

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It was on the front lines that the demand for the drug was the highest.

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ommended dosage was one tablet “to be dissolved in the mouth every hour when undergoing continued mental strain or physical exertion.” Ads for Tabloid claimed: “Allays hunger and prolongs the power of endurance.” So it is hardly surprising that the command of the British Army decided to try it out on the soldiers of the Expeditionary Force in Europe. Given the addiction of epidemic proportions among the veterans of the First World War, it’s reasonable to assume that hundreds of thousands of them remained addicted afterward. The combatants, particularly on the Western Front, were probably unaware, more often than not, of being given a white “boosting” powder mixed with food or drink. Braam learned that British soldiers “got a cup of rum before they went over the top” and concludes that “cocaine might have been in the rum, because with alcohol it works doubly well.” Although the French accused the Germans of smuggling cocaine in order to deliberately weaken the French people, it was in Britain where the truly nationwide drug panic broke out. The hysteria was largely generated by politicians, the military establishment, and the news media. The Times, for example, hailed cocaine as a danger even deadlier than bullets. The problem was grossly exaggerated and presented as a threat not only to British troops on the front but also to the British Empire. Before the war cocaine was a common ingredient in medicines and tonics for hay fever, as it cleanses the respiratory tract by reducing swelling of the mucosa and nasal discharge. The most popular American drug, called Ryno’s Hay Fever, which was 99.9 percent cocaine, was touted as the best cure for a clogged, reddened, and sore nose. Also, Burroughs Wellcome marketed Tabloid cocaine tablets as perfect for singers and public speakers looking to improve their voices. Overall, mass-produced cocaine, which some doctors (including William Hammond) held out to be as harmless as tobacco, had come into widespread use before the war, and soldiers were but a minority of its users. Thus, if the consumption of drugs in Britain developed into a problem, it was a problem not so much of the army but of society at large. In February 1916 many pharmacies were fined for selling soldiers cocaine and morphine without observing the restrictions of the 1868 Pharmacy Act. Among those punished was not only the famous London store Harrods but also the wellknown Mayfair pharmacy Savory & Moore. In a December 1915 edition of the Times Savory & Moore advertised a small mail-order medical kit in a handy case containing, among other items, cocaine and heroin. And Harrods offered small packages of morphine and cocaine complete with syringe and spare needles, which were recommended as “A Useful Present for Friends at the Front.” Girls often brought to the train station a cocaine kit as an ideal gift for their loved ones leaving for war. Although it advertised cocaine products, the Times created alarm by suggesting that supplying soldiers with the drug would inevitably undermine the combat effectiveness of

WELLCOME LIBRARY, LONDON

which rose to between 20,000 and 30,000 kilograms a year. But unavoidably, this large supply resulted in a considerable drop in cocaine’s price, from $280 an ounce in 1885 to a mere $3 an ounce in 1914. NCF benefited enormously from the neutrality of the Netherlands during the war, which severely hit its competitors by cutting off their supply of coca leaves from the Dutch East Indies. As a result they became dependent on Dutch cocaine. Moreover, NCF’s Amsterdam factory was relatively close to the front lines; it could thus deliver, even on short order, large quantities of cocaine almost directly to the war fronts. And it was on the front lines that the demand for the drug was highest. The rate of cocaine use by soldiers remains unknown. What is certain, however, is that never before and never after did the military consume such large amounts of this drug as it did in 1914–1918, not only for medical purposes but also for performance enhancement. The armed forces of the warring parties dispensed cocaine to keep the combatants energized and fuel their fighting spirit. It usually helped calm soldiers with shattered nerves and improved their performance. German fighter pilots took the drug during long-distance flights. French records reveal that early airmen were particularly keen on it: “Cocaine infused into the few duellists of the air who made use of that cold and thoroughly lucid exaltation which—alone among drugs—it can produce....At the same time it left intact their control over their actions. It fortified them, one might say, by abolishing the idea of risk.” But cocaine was certainly much more popular among infantrymen than airmen. For example, shortly before an attack at the Battle of Gallipoli (April 1915–January 1916), Australian soldiers were administered significant amounts of the drug. Further, the wounded and sick soldiers of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps were routinely prescribed the easiest and most effective treatment: the two potent pain medications morphine and cocaine. Unsurprisingly, many patients became addicted to these drugs and remained so long after their recovery. Such was the grim reality among the armies of European Great Powers. The British Army relied extensively on a product whose effectiveness had been proved on long and exhausting polar expeditions in 1907 and 1912. Sold under the trade name Tabloid or Forced March, it contained cocaine and cola nut extract and was manufactured by Burroughs Wellcome & Co., a London pharmaceutical company that later launched the production of cocaine in tablet form. This development extended the shelf life of the drug, enabled its more convenient storage and intake, and made its administration more hygienic. The rec-

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the British Army. “To the soldier subjected to nervous strain and hard work cocaine, once used, must become a terrible temptation,” it observed on February 12, 1916. “It will, for the hour, charm away his trouble, his fatigue and his anxiety; it will give him fictitious strength and vigour. But it will also, in the end, render him worthless as a soldier and a man.” The Daily Chronicle, too, fueled the cocaine hysteria by reporting, for example, that soldiers were literally crawling into chemists’ shops to get the drug. Readers were informed that the habit “is driving hundreds of women mad. What is worse, it will drive, unless the traffic in it is checked, hundreds of soldiers mad.” The consequences of cocaine use were said to be terrifying, as crazed soldiers turned aggressive and insubordinate and sometimes even committed murders. It was suggested, in essence, that the armed forces were plunging into confusion and anarchy. Because in the popular imagination drugs were clichéd and commonly associated with hostile foreign influences, they were easily portrayed as a tool of war employed by the scheming enemy to undermine the spirit of Britannia. And the wartime conditions only favored the rise of conspiracy theories and xenophobic narratives. As we know, however, the world’s largest cocaine manufacturer and supplier was not in hostile Germany but the neutral Netherlands. Politicians, military commanders, and the news media promoted and reinforced the view that intoxicants were a secret or unfair weapon, deployed by the Central Powers, mostly Germany, whose scientists, after all, had pioneered the production of cocaine. The drug covertly supplied by the Germans was believed to get British soldiers addicted, thus eroding their combat performance, undermining military discipline, and ultimately causing a rapid decay of the army. Sir Francis Lloyd, a general in command of the London district, accurately captured the essence of the cocaine panic that seized public opinion: “I am told that this evil practice is exceedingly rife at the present time. It is doing an immense amount of harm, I am told. They say that it is so ingrained that once you take it you will not give it up.” The drug plague was therefore allegedly destroying the British military. With politicians and media playing on the paranoid fears of enemy subversion, the moral panic around cocaine was spreading at lightning speed and turning into mass hysteria not only over cocaine but over drugs in general. Given such an explosive social climate, with public opinion highly susceptible to manipulation, the military command could not stay idle. It seemed that it was high time to take emergency action in defense of the army and Britain’s fighting power. Under intense and relentless public pressure, on May 11, 1916, the

“But it will also, in the end, render him worthless as a soldier and a man.”

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Army Council banned any unauthorized sale or supply of psychoactive substances—mostly cocaine but also codeine, hemp, heroin, morphine, and opium—to any member of the armed forces, except for medical reasons and only on prescription. All violations were punishable by six months’ imprisonment. Further regulations were introduced under the Defence of the Realm Act, which had been passed four days after Britain entered the war in August 1914. DORA served as the cover for various wartime regulatory schemes and social control mechanisms, including censorship and a limited prohibition on alcohol. The act allowed the executive to create criminal offenses through regulation; hence under DORA regulation 40B, passed on July 28, 1916, the sale of cocaine and opium-based products to military personnel without a nonreusable prescription was prohibited for anyone except medical practitioners, pharmacists, and veterinarians. Soldiers accused of violating the ban could face court-martial. The historical importance of Regulation 40B lay not so much in its scope, since it was limited to cocaine and opium and covered neither marijuana nor heroin, but in the very essence of the prohibitive principle—that is, in putting particular substances under strict state control and the criminalization of their sale and use. The subsequent Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920 retained most of the provisions of DORA 40B, thereby transforming the wartime regulations into a peacetime law. The drug-control regime was significantly widened to cover not only military personnel but all citizens. Moreover, the list of controlled substances was extended to include cocaine, heroin, morphine, raw opium, and, to an extent, barbiturates. The act brought Britain into line with national control regimes introduced earlier by the United States (under the Harrison Act of 1914) and the Netherlands (under its Opium Act of 1919) and, above all, with the demands put forward by the Versailles peace conference (1919) on the need to restrict the international trade in opium. Therefore, the overblown problem of cocaine use in the military resulted in the adoption of strict government drug-control regulations in Britain. In truth, the cocaine crisis in Britain was widely exaggerated. Nonetheless, the character of the First World War, with its totality, brutality, anonymity, and harsh conditions on the front lines, propelled the military demand for cocaine—and not merely for its medical value. Along with alcohol, tobacco, and morphine, it allowed for temporary escape from the terrifying reality of modern warfare. Although cocaine would never again achieve such popularity among combatants, in time it would emerge as a highly fashionable intoxicant. By World War II amphetamines—not cocaine—would be the drug of choice within the military services on all sides of the conflict. MHQ Łukasz Kamieński is assistant professor of international and political studies at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and the author of Shooting Up: A Short History of Drugs and War (Oxford University Press, 2016), from which this article is adapted.

FROM TOP: NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND; GL ARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

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Above: A British soldier’s comrades watch him as he sleeps in a sandbag-lined trench near Thiepval, France, during the Battle of the Somme. Below: Australian soldiers were administered significant amounts of the drug before an attack at the Battle of Gallipoli.

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THE DAY THE EARTH BLEW OPEN

TRINITY MIRROR/MIRRORPIX/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

“Gentlemen, we may not make history tomorrow,” General Hubert Plumer reportedly told his staff,“but we shall certainly change the geography.” By Edward G. Lengel

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British soldiers survey the gargantuan craters left by “Magnum Opus”—the code name for their unprecedented underground assault-by-explosives on Hill 60, the German stronghold atop the Messines Ridge south of Ypres, Belgium, in World War I.

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THE BIG BLAST

Ypres, he discovered that the rotund little general had anticipated him by several months. Indeed, Plumer had been laying the groundwork for an operation to annihilate the German defenses south of the salient in a single blow. His plan’s success would not rely primarily on planes, tanks, or guns but on a few thousand miners from four nations and nearly 500 tons of explosives. Military mining dates to ancient times. In the Middle Ages besieging armies dug tunnels to undermine castle walls. As technology developed, they laid and detonated explosives that reduced stonework to rubble. Earthwork field defenses and strongpoints fell victim to the same techniques during the Crimean War of 1853–1856 and the American Civil War, when Union forces detonated mines beneath Confederate works around Vicksburg and Petersburg in 1863 and 1864. But the assaults that followed often failed, typically because of poor timing and coordination by the attacking troops and the ability of the defenders to bring up reserves to plug gaps. In the First World War the British and French were slow to take up mining. The Germans did so with some success in 1914 and 1915, but never systematically. Plumer’s decision to incorporate military mining into his plan to push the Germans back from Ypres resulted in part from the terrain-related obstacles opposing him. South of the Ypres salient the Germans occupied Messines Ridge. The ridge stretched approximately five miles as the crow flies, from the village of St. Yves (near the town of Messines) in the south to Hill 60, which was just below the salient’s tip in the north. Hill 60, standing nearly 200 feet above sea level, marked the ridge’s highest point. From the ridge the Germans enjoyed commanding views of the entire salient. Naturally, then, they fortified the ridge thoroughly—especially Hill 60—and planned to hold it indefinitely. Attacking infantry, no matter how well supported by artillery, would endure terrific casualties in any attempt to take the ridge, unless some other means were found to eject the German defenders first. The visionary thinking that this challenge demanded was to be supplied by John Norton-Griffiths, an eccentric Member of Parliament and passionate imperialist known to his fellow lawmakers as “Empire Jack.” Like Plumer he was a veteran of Britain’s imperial conflicts, but Norton-Griffiths also had extensive experience in military and civilian engineering. At the outset of the war he had been supervising a sewer drainage project in Manchester that relied on clay-kicking. In this method, which had also been employed in building London’s Underground, workers braced their backs against tilted wooden boards facing the earth to be excavated. With their feet kicking modified

Opposite, top: After the blast, a British soldier enters a tunnel near Hill 60 as his comrades look out from an observation point. Bottom, from left: Lieutenant General John Norton-Griffiths came up with the idea of blasting the Germans from below ground; General Sir Hubert Plumer executed the plan with precision; Australian sappers played a key role in tunneling beneath the enemy.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: FRANK HURLEY/AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL (2); AFT HISTORY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO (2)

I

n the early morning hours of June 7, 1917, one of the largest nonnuclear explosions in the history of the world erupted along a minor ridge in a tiny corner of Belgium. Ten thousand lives were snuffed out instantly. A gigantic red-and-black plume of smoke and debris blotted out the crescent moon as a shock wave of sound swept for miles in all directions—reaching, by some accounts, as far away as London and Dublin. For the men who detonated this explosion, perhaps the largest in history until an American B-29 dropped an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, it vindicated years of planning and put an end to months of toil and terror in the mines of Messines. World War I, replete with so much tragedy, brought some startling innovations. Most of these, such as tanks and new types of aircraft, were designed to break through or circumvent the network of trenches that scarred France and Belgium from the Swiss border to the English Channel. But none enduringly shattered the trench stalemate, and men continued to die in the millions on the Western Front. There seemed to be no way to escape the horrendous casualties from frontal assaults against massed machine guns and artillery. To British and Dominion soldiers, no place better symbolized the war’s inherent heroism and horror than the Ypres salient. Ypres, an ancient Flemish textile town with a magnificent medieval cloth hall, occupied a sliver of northwestern Belgium that German forces struggled and failed to capture for almost the entire war. While the British held Ypres after barely managing to repulse two major German offensives against the town in 1914 and 1915, their troops inhabited a narrow salient overlooked by the enemy on three sides. German artillery unceasingly pummeled the town and its environs. Reduced to ruins, the cloth hall became an icon of British tenacity. The troops who trudged past it on their way to the front thought of it as a gateway to hell. At the beginning of 1917 the British commander in chief, Field Marshal Douglas Haig, aimed to break the German grip on Ypres as a preliminary to a larger offensive designed to aid his hard-pressed French allies and liberate much of occupied Belgium. He entrusted the execution of his plan to General Sir Hubert Plumer, commander of the Second Army that occupied the salient. Philip Gibbs, one of the most famous war correspondents of his day, described Plumer as “almost a caricature of an old-time British general, with his ruddy, pippin-cheeked face, with white hair, and a fierce little mustache, and blue, watery eyes, and a little pot-belly and short legs.” In reality, though, Plumer was a combat-hardened veteran of Britain’s imperial wars who founded his command reputation on precise planning and efficient staff work. When Haig ordered Plumer to prepare for an offensive at

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THE BIG BLAST spades, they chipped away at the earth face while an assisting kicker’s mate disposed of the debris behind them. The technique was simple but efficient in heavy clay soil. Studying the military situation in France and Belgium, Norton-Griffiths quickly surmised that clay-kicking might be used for military purposes. The hidebound British War Office rejected his initial requests to field-test the technique in France, but after the Germans successfully detonated mines beneath British lines at Festubert on December 20, 1914, he was granted an audience with Lord Kitchener, the secretary of state for war. Kitchener at first expressed skepticism, to which the dynamic engineer responded by seizing a shovel from a nearby fire grate, plopping down on the floor, and giving an impromptu demonstration of clay-kicking. Amazed, Kitchener sent Norton-Griffiths to France, where he won over a succession of British generals and was given responsibility for recruiting, assembling, and training several tunneling companies for service on the Western Front. Even as Norton-Griffiths set to work in the spring of 1915, the first British military mining activities were underway on Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula. There, Australian and British troops improvised countermining techniques in response to underground operations by German-trained Turkish forces. Australian tunnelers, recruited from volunteers who had been miners in civilian life, were remarkably adept at subterranean warfare and quickly overpowered the Turks. Their talents would later prove useful at Messines. Meanwhile, in France and Belgium, Norton-Griffiths had been touring the lines in a battered Rolls-Royce laden with cases of fine Scotch whisky. Touting his War Office authority, which included the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel, he commandeered experienced miners for his tunneling companies from infantry formations. The cases of Scotch came in handy for soothing the wounded egos of infantry officers. After training in newly established mining schools, Empire Jack’s “moles”—as he preferred to call them—moved to the front, where they quickly made their presence felt in the fall of 1915. While the British miners proved their worth, Edgeworth David, an Australian geology professor and polar explorer, persuaded authorities in his country to form their own tunneling units in September 1915 with an initial quota of just over 1,300 officers and men. Organized in three companies and recruited from experienced miners and technicians, including veterans of Gallipoli, the Australians arrived in France in May 1916 and were assigned immediately to Flanders. They found the mining of Messines Ridge well underway. Norton-Griffiths had visited the Ypres salient in July 1915

French sappers pioneered the technique of placing explosives in tunnels they dug underneath German trenches in World War I. British and Australian sappers spent two years placing 21 huge mines beneath the German lines at Messines Ridge.

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Hill 60

Ypres St. Eloi German front line Trench line with fired mines

Messines Ridge Mining Offensive YARDS 0

500 1,000 1,500

Netherlands

Messines

Enlarged BELGIUM area France

Germany Lux.

INFOGRAPHIC: BRIAN WALKER; TOP: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

and scratched out an informal sketch for detonating mines beneath the ridge. British engineering and mining officers subsequently transformed the sketch into a plan that Plumer initiated on a large scale in February 1916. From the beginning his goal was to blow up the entire crest of the ridge by detonating more than two dozen explosives-packed mines beneath every major enemy strongpoint. Two massive charges would target Hill 60. In pep talks to the tunnelers, Norton-Griffiths suggested that their jobs would be easy. Just dig the mines, pack them with explosives, and return to your dugouts, he told them; after the order comes to trigger the charges, all you will have to do is sit back and watch the Germans “going up” in a grand fireworks display. But the task would be far more difficult, and protracted, than he imagined. The tunneling companies from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Great Britain that dug toward Messines Ridge in the summer and fall of 1916 quickly discovered the utility of clay-kicking. The thick blue clay of Flanders was exceptionally difficult to work and foiled the tunnel-boring machines available at that time. Clay tunnel walls tended to swell after excavation, hopelessly encasing any large equipment. The alternative was clay-kicking. The Australians, detailed in sections, opened their pits at night to avoid observation, but they made certain everyone else knew who was doing the digging by erecting wooden kangaroos above the entrances to their shafts. Shafts were dug straight down, to depths of up to 100 feet, before tunnels were pushed forward toward the enemy positions. Men sandbagged the telltale blue clay on removal and dispersed it at night to avoid detection by enemy aircraft. The tunnelers labored in shifts. Clay-kicking was exhausting, and so was the job of shoring up the galleries with wooden boards. Tunnels were prone to flood or collapse, and methane gas built up insidiously. Miners here, as in coal shafts, relied on mice and canaries to provide warning. Nothing caused more stress, though, than the fear of enemy detection. Work had to be carried on in absolute silence. The scale of the British tunneling was so great, however, that the Germans quickly caught on. They dug their own tunnels— also quietly—to discover and destroy their counterparts. The consequences of discovery could be grim. At times German troops broke suddenly through gallery walls and laid about with serrated knives, spiked maces, and pistols. More often they detonated small explosive charges known as camouflets to wreck galleries, entombing the tunnelers or—more mercifully—killing them outright. In these aggressive tactics the British and especially the Australians gave as good as they got. They were fortunate to have had superior technology, especially the French-designed geophone. This was similar in appearance to a stethoscope. Listeners wore headpieces with two rubber tubes attached to microphones, which would be placed at various points on the gallery walls to detect enemy picks in action. The location of the enemy activity could then be pinpointed from multiple lis-

tening posts via compass and countermeasures taken. Detected and surprised constantly, the Germans soon found themselves losing the subterranean war. The most important British tunnels were pushed forward undetected. By the summer of 1916 an astonishing 24,000 men were tunneling for the Allies on the Western Front. Mines were being detonated everywhere—so many, in fact, that one exploded every three hours in British sectors alone. The Australians exploded their first mine, a fairly small one, on June 6 near Ypres; but they mostly focused on the larger tunnels being dug into Messines Ridge. By November Canadian tunnelers had finished digging two large mines beneath Hill 60 and packing the chambers with 56,000 kilograms of ammonal explosives and gun cotton. The 1st Australian Tunneling Company took over from there to protect and maintain the charges until detonation. The Australians had no idea when the mines would be blown, and the Germans were working furiously to find them. Although the Canadians had done superb work in digging and charging the mines, the Australians would arguably have the tougher job in shepherding them through to the moment of detonation. As soon as they entered the sector, the Australians worked aggressively to fend off German mining operations. But their worst nightmare seemed to come true almost immediately, as listeners detected signs of German tunnelers approaching one of the two mine chambers beneath Hill 60. If the Germans got too close, the Australian would have no choice but to evacuate the chamber or explode it prematurely, compromising Plumer’s offensive. There were no safe options for dealing with the threat. The Australians could do nothing and hope the Germans missed the chamber, or they could dig close to the enemy tunnel and explode a camouflet. But the Germans were now so close that the camouflet might also detonate the central mine chamber. Characteristically, the Australians chose the more aggressive option. As the Australians inched toward the Germans, they used as little noise-deadening wooden propping as possible, even though it increased the chances that their tunnel would collapse on their heads. The closer they got, the more clearly they could hear the Germans’ picks working. Only a shower curtain’s width seemed to separate the two tunnels, and with each strike of a German pick, clods of clay tumbled from the roof onto the dogged Australians. Finally, on December 18, 1916, the tunnels were judged close enough, and the miners carefully packed 1,100 kilograms of explosive at the end of their gallery. The Australians slithered silently out of the gallery, clambered up the shaft, and waited in tense expectation.

Only a shower curtain’s width seemed to separate the two tunnels.

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The order to blow the camouflet was given at 2 a.m. the following morning. At that moment, according to one account, “a huge tongue of flame leapt skyward from the enemy’s lines, and then all was deadly quiet.” For an instant, the same fear was in every mind: that the primary charge had blown beneath Hill 60. But the explosion was too small; the central chamber was safe. Failing to deduce how close they had come to a crucial discovery, the Germans abandoned their operations at that spot. Elsewhere beneath Hill 60, the subterranean war would continue for months. Only later did it become apparent how the Australians’ aggressive tactics had paid off. Here and elsewhere around Messines Ridge, the quantity and quality of the human and material resources that Norton-Griffiths and Edgeworth David had secured for their tunnelers simply overwhelmed the Germans. Though the German miners struggled heroically to countermine and blew numerous camouflets, they could not be everywhere at once. And they were overconfident. Each mining success reported to German army commanders led them to conclude that they had decisively thwarted the British. As a result, at a meeting in April 1917, the German generals decided not to redouble their mining efforts but to scale them back. Plumer was unaware of the German decision but sensed that he was nearly ready. When Haig told him to plan and prepare an offensive for the beginning of 1917, Plumer did so with his customary thoroughness. He detailed three corps, from north to south the X, XI, and II Anzac, to attack the ridge concentrically. Their infantry—including men from Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia—would train exhaustively beforehand so that they could move according to meticulous timetables. Tanks would accompany their assault, while aircraft strafed, bombed, and spotted for the artillery. The big guns would play the most vital role aboveground, saturating

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the German positions with high explosives and poison gas for several days before the primary assault, and then accompanying the advancing infantry to suppress enemy fire. Everything, though, depended on the mines. They had to be completed and fully primed before the attack could begin. As winter moved into spring 1917, Haig grew increasingly nervous. The French offensive on the Chemin des Dames that began on April 16 ended during the first week of May in bloodsoaked confusion and widespread mutiny among the infantry. Haig was soon receiving cries for help from his allies to take pressure off of their front, even though the British had already attacked the Germans in another offensive near Arras. Most of the mines at Messines Ridge were ready to detonate, but Haig feared that German discovery of even one of them could wreck the whole offensive. He pestered Plumer to attack immediately, but the general held his ground. Nothing, he insisted, could move forward until every element of his plan was in place. On June 1, finally, the British artillery bombardment began, pummeling the German primary trenches and strongpoints as well as rear areas. The devastation seemed immense, but the infantry knew that this did not necessarily ensure their safety. On the Somme in 1916, the artillery had pounded German trenches for several days until it seemed that not a single enemy soldier survived. But German soldiers who had ridden out the bombardment in their deep dugouts simply returned to their guns and in a single day (July 1, 1916) inflicted 60,000 casualties, including 19,000 dead, on the British. At Messines Ridge in 1917, the mines would be the infantry’s only insurance against wholesale slaughter. For the Australians, the tension became nearly unbearable. With no way of knowing that the Germans had cut back their countermining operations, the Australians continued to take

FRANK HURLEY/AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL (2)

Members of the 1st Australian Tunneling Company (left) took over the mining operations underneath Hill 60 in November 1916. Following the detonation of the mines on June 7, 1917, British Army soldiers (right) inspect trenches captured from the German Army at Messines Ridge.

Fernand Cuville, who served as a photographer in the French army, captured the aftermath of the explosion (left) using an early process called Autochrome Lumière. Two of the five members of the Australian Infantry Forces in this informal photograph (right) taken the day before the explosion were killed in action the next day.

casualties from camouflets and German artillery that pounded their dugouts. As the final days ticked down, the Australians checked and rechecked their explosives, shored up galleries, and listened for German countermining. Elsewhere along the ridge, so did miners from Britain, Canada, and New Zealand. The waiting finally ended at 3:10 a.m. on June 7. As nine infantry divisions with about 80,000 men prepared to move forward, officers manning the entrances of 19 tunnels—the total number that had been completed beneath Messines Ridge, some of them just hours earlier—detonated their charges within seconds of one another. At his post 437 yards from Hill 60, Australian captain Oliver Woodward was so nervous that he threw his electric switch too violently, accidentally touching his hand to a live 500-volt pole. As he reeled across his dugout, stunned by the sudden shock, the mines exploded in unison. E. N. Gladden, a British private waiting to attack the strongpoint, later recalled feeling his body suddenly “carried up and down as by the waves of the sea.” As he peered forward, “the earth opened and a large black mass was carried to the sky on pillars of fire, and there seemed to remain suspended for some seconds while the awful red glare lit up the surrounding desolation.” After a few moments, Gladden recalled, the sound “leapt over us like some immense wave.” Soon the infantry surged forward into smoke and unnerving silence, with nary a rifle fired against them. Atop the ridge the soldiers discovered scenes of utter devastation. Hill 60 had two craters, one 90 yards across and 16 deep and the other 69 yards across

FERNAND CUVILLE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL

Atop the ridge the soldiers discovered scenes of utter devastation.

and 11 deep. Each crater was surrounded by three-yard-high rims of concrete and debris, including fragments of equipment and men. Here and there a lucky survivor emerged to surrender, but the equivalent of an entire German infantry division had been eliminated in an instant. Messines Ridge was finally in British hands, breaking a major portion of the German grip on the Ypres salient and, in the long run, saving the lives of many Allied soldiers. Unfortunately, the days that followed dashed some of Plumer and Haig’s hopes. Pushing east from Messines Ridge, the British infantry again encountered well-prepared German defenses and paid the price, with 20,940 casualties before the battle closed on June 14. German casualties were comparable but included more than 7,000 prisoners, many of them stunned into helplessness by the explosions. Although the ridge fell, no breakout took place, and Haig’s next offensive at Ypres—the Battle of Passchendaele, on July 31—became a new byword for futility and slaughter. The mining of Messines Ridge nevertheless marked an important if fleeting breakthrough in modern military history. The craters are still easily visible. In some places, mines that failed to detonate or were not completed in time lay sleeping below ground, still packed with explosives; a lightning strike detonated one of them in 1955. Hill 60 in particular—the subject of the 2010 movie Beneath Hill 60—has become a testament to the bravery of the Australian tunnelers who ensured victory on that explosive June day in 1917 and to the 335 of them who died during the First World War. MHQ Edward G. Lengel, a professor at the University of Virginia and director of its Papers of George Washington Project, writes frequently about the World War I era. His most recent book is First Entrepreneur: How George Washington Built His—and the Nation’s—Prosperity (Da Capo Press, 2016). MHQ Winter 2017

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PORTRAIT OF A REVOLUTION

Charles Willson Peale’s life-size, full-length portrait of General George Washington, commissioned in 1779 for installation in the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) and depicting him at the end of the Battle of Princeton, was the first piece of public art in the United States.

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YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY

Charles Willson Peale—painter, militiaman, and ardent patriot— gave a face to a new day in the history of the American republic. By Paul Staiti

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CHARLES WILLSON PEALE

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WASHINGTON and the brave men under his command,” the council said in its resolution. The painting would stand as “a mark of the great respect which they bear to His Excellency,” and as the council made clear, there was hope it would accelerate the American war effort by inspiring others “to tread in the same glorious and disinterested steps, which lead to publick happiness and private honour.” Two days after the resolution was passed, Washington graciously assented to the council’s request to sit for a portrait and let it be known that their sentiments had made “the deepest impression on my mind.” The person to be entrusted with carrying out the commission was Charles Willson Peale of Philadelphia. Painter, militiaman, assemblyman, and ardent patriot, Peale had impeccable credentials for the job, both as an artist and as a political and military man. In December of 1776 he had joined Washington’s army on the banks of the Delaware River (“the most hellish scene I ever beheld,” he wrote), and a month later he fought under Washington at the Battle of Princeton. Peale would forever remember and take to heart the painful sight of frightened soldiers retreating in waves from grisly battlefields covered with blood and carrying the dead. He also had visited Washington’s Valley Forge encampment, where he painted himself looking remarkably cheerful, given the hunger, disease, and despair afflicting the troops that winter. After Washington reclaimed Philadelphia in 1778, Peale was put in charge of identifying loyalists in the city and then confiscating their estates, sometimes in a heartless way. He was so hated by some factions in the city that during the last two years of the war he had to walk through the streets with a seasoned-ash cane, which he’d dubbed “Hercules,” to protect himself from assault. Peale’s credentials as an artist were equally impressive: three years of study under Benjamin West, the distinguished American painter in London; dozens of portraits of Continental officers, many taken at campside; and artistic commissions from congressional leaders, including John Hancock and Samuel Adams. For the State House portrait, Washington made himself available to Peale for sittings between January 20 and February 2, 1779, at which point the general moved to his military headquarters in Middlebrook, New Jersey. Over those two weeks Peale had to work on the eight-foot portrait at lightning speed. And he had to ask himself, and ask Washington, what the picture should show. The choices were endless. Washing-

ARTEPICS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

P

atriots in Revolutionary America were finally feeling optimistic in January 1779. They had not forgotten the summer three years before when the British outmanned, outfought, and overwhelmed the Continental Army in New York, forcing General George Washington and his soldiers to flee, first to New Jersey and then to the banks of the Delaware River. They still had vivid memories of the invasion and occupation of Philadelphia, the capital city, in 1777, and the subsequent escape of the Second Continental Congress into the Pennsylvania countryside, followed by the wintering of Washington’s army at Valley Forge, where unremitting disease, exposure, and malnutrition ravaged the soldiers, killing 2,500. In those years, America’s future as an independent country was anything but auspicious. But in 1778 history seemed to be turning in the patriots’ direction. Benjamin Franklin successfully persuaded France to forge a powerful military alliance committing the Versailles court to “make all the efforts in its Power” to uphold the liberty, sovereignty, and independence of the United States. That opened the doors to the formidable French army and navy, laden with troops, commanders, and cannons, as well as an ancient and active hatred of Britain. Fearing this new alliance would escalate the war into a global conflict, the British evacuated their stronghold in Philadelphia and hastily sent envoys to the Continental Congress to sue for peace. In June 1778 Washington broke camp at Valley Forge and took back Philadelphia. In November a freshly buoyant Congress rejected the British peace overture and declared that from then on any settlement of the war would have to be on America’s terms. Sensing the tide of war had shifted in the northern states, Pennsylvania passed a resolution on January 18, 1779, to honor “those who have rendered their country distinguished services, by preserving their resemblances in statues and paintings.” This, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council added, was the sort of thing “the wisest, freest and bravest nations” do “in their most virtuous times.” Seizing the moment, it appropriated money for a life-size, full-length portrait of Washington, the nation’s commander in chief, to be installed in the Council Chamber of the Pennsylvania State House, now Independence Hall. The portrait—the first piece of public art in the United States—would be an enduring acknowledgment of “how much the liberty, safety and happiness of America in general, and of Pennsylvania in particular, is owing to His Excellency General

In a self-portrait, Peale raises the curtain on the museum he created “to instruct the mind and sow the seeds of Virtue” in the new American republic. An offshoot of his portrait-painting business, Peale’s Philadelphia Museum contained everything from an extensive gallery of “Portraits of Illustrious Personages” to thousands of natural history specimens, including a nearly complete skeleton of a mastodon he excavated in New York State.

CHARLES WILLSON PEALE

The slashing of George Washington’s portrait tells us that works of art carried extra weight in a time of revolution.

After Peale put the finishing touches on the picture by traveling to Princeton to check the topography and review the architecture of Nassau Hall, he installed the huge portrait in a prominent place, behind the Speaker’s chair in the State House, in majestic celebration of the great man of the new republic of virtue. It hung there until September 9, 1781, a Sunday, when loyalists broke into the building and slashed it repeatedly with a knife. The Freeman’s Journal, a Philadelphia weekly, reported that “at night, a fit time for the Sons of Lucifer to perpetrate the deeds of darkness, one or more volunteers in the service of hell, broke into the State House in Philadelphia, and totally defaced the picture of His Excellency General Washington.” Peale was called in to remove the picture and

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repair the damage, and over the next two weeks he cut away the damaged parts, patched in new canvas, and repainted those areas to match what had been there before. Some of the Philadelphia public felt “indignation at such atrocious proceedings,” the newspaper reported. But for the loyalists, still in considerable numbers, slashing the picture must have been satisfying retribution for a cause that was lost largely because of Washington. The painting had been left alone for two and a half years, during which time the fortunes of the war shifted back and forth. But when the picture was cut in the fall of 1781, during the siege of Yorktown, Britain’s surrender was imminent and some of Philadelphia’s loyalists must have felt the need to strike back against the inevitable, at least symbolically. The slashing of Washington’s portrait tells us that works of art carried extra weight in a time of revolution, and that they could be vivid enough to provoke disfigurement or destruction. If the work of art was an official portrait, such as Peale’s Washington, it was doubly vulnerable to attack. And if the artist himself was perceived to be a political ally of the person in the portrait, as Peale was, it was triply vulnerable. That ancient logic had been repeated countless times over the centuries: If you can’t kill the person, you can at least mutilate his image and send a strong message to him and his supporters. A symbolic death even had some advantages over the real thing in that it was possible not only to destroy Washington’s image but also to insult the values present in that image: respectability, pride, success, smugness, and anything else that loyalist Philadelphians saw in it. Loyalists could not do anything to reverse the British defeat at Princeton in 1777 or to fend off the doomed British campaign at Yorktown, but they could at least erase the satisfied look on Washington’s face and turn a handsome picture into something repulsive. The slashing episode in Philadelphia was just one instance in which the defacement or destruction of a portrait underscored the special significance that artworks possessed during the revolution. Loyalists attacked patriot images and patriots attacked monarchical images. During the British military occupation of colonial Boston in 1769, the leading painter in the city, John Singleton Copley, was hired to paint a portrait of the despised British colonial governor of Massachusetts, Francis Bernard. After it was installed in Harvard Hall in Cambridge, radical activists broke in and cut the heart area out of the portrait. A rattled Copley was called in to repair the damage, prompting one Boston newspaper to comment that “our American limner, Mr. Copley, by the surprising art of his pencil has actually restored as good a heart as had been taken from it.” The commentator sarcastically added, “Upon a near and accurate inspection, it will be found to be no other than a false one.” Not even the great Copley, the best artist in America, could fix the heartless Governor Bernard. In 1770, accompanied by toasts, military music, and artil-

SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY (2)

ton might be depicted in the midst of a battle, and if so, there would be the question of which one. Or he could be seen far from the battlefield, perhaps at field headquarters or appearing before Congress. There were ample reasons to portray him as a fearless warrior leading troops, but just as compelling, he could simply be seen as an exceptional person. Peale and Washington must have agreed to focus on the decisive Battle of Princeton, which took place a week after the crossing of the Delaware and the Battle of Trenton. One of the most brutal scenes of combat during the revolution, Princeton was fought on January 3, 1777, and it was won because Washington rallied the demoralized troops by coming to the front and then marching his horse directly into the line of fire. When it was over, the battle acquired special significance, not only because the British lost that day but also because it proved that their army was not invincible. Princeton was the first glimmer that the revolution was winnable. A decision also needed to be made on what aspects of Washington’s character Peale should emphasize and what messages the portrait ought to broadcast. Since it would be put on display in a building at the heart of American independence, Peale needed to demonstrate the new concept of leadership in a republic. Rejecting the climactic moment when Washington thrust himself into the battle, he instead emphasized the aftermath of victory, when Washington’s inner qualities were most visible. Approachable, knowable, understated, calm, benevolent, and slightly ungainly, Peale’s Washington looks directly at his audience and comes across as a man of easygoing refinement and complete confidence.

In Peale’s penetrating self-portrait of 1785, his wife Rachel comes to life as a portrait in progress while their daughter Rachel reaches around to guide his brush with her fingertips. Peale painted the self-portrait shown below some six years later.

lery fire, the British erected a giant equestrian statue of King George III on Bowling Green in New York City, accompanied by toasts, military music, and artillery fire. Covered in shiny gold leaf and surrounded by an iron fence, it was the public assertion of British authority in the city. Six years later, in the summer of 1776, as the British were poised to take the city with an overwhelming force of 32,000 men, Washington gathered his deflated Continentals into defensive positions in lower Manhattan. Though defeat was imminent, on July 9 their spirits lifted when John Hancock sent Washington a copy of the new Declaration of Independence and asked that he inform his men of it. After dinner that evening, Washington ordered it read aloud on the Commons, on Broadway near present-day City Hall. In unison the troops shouted “three Huzzas,” according to the Freeman’s Journal, and then raced down to Bowling Green, tore down the statue of the king, dismembered it, and dragged it through the streets of New York before it was recycled into musket balls that were used against the British Army. In the logic of the revolution, the best way for American troops to diminish the king’s living power was to destroy his monument and then weaponize the metal for use against him. Works of art were thus capable of arousing potent emotions in times of intense political change, when all the sentiments active in civic disputes and battlefield contests also crystalized around and adhered to paintings and sculptures. Indeed, Peale’s stunning portrait of Washington, showing him so self-possessed after a fierce battle, gives the indisputable impression that America’s progress in the war was assured. This was a new day in the history of America, and Peale had condensed the new order of rule into a single image of Washington. As presented by Peale, Washington carried symbolic weight as a national icon representing the values and principles of the American republic. Here was the living embodiment of republican virtue, a person of wealth and standing, willing to risk life and limb for a cause he believes in. One glance at Peale’s portrait was all that was necessary for citizens to grasp the clear-cut difference between Washington and King George III, between America and Britain, between the values of a republic and those of a monarchy, and, above all, between the present and the past. MHQ Paul Staiti is the Alumnae Foundation Professor of Fine Art at Mount Holyoke College and the author of Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution Through Artists’ Eyes (Bloomsbury Press, 2016), from which this article is excerpted. MHQ Winter 2017

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THE BATTLE OF ANACOSTIA FLATS In 1932 thousands of veterans traveled to Washington to demand payment of their World War I pensions. General Douglas MacArthur got rid of them. By Bill Hogan

MPI/GETTY IMAGES

At the height of the Great Depression, more than 20,000 World War I veterans camped out in the nation’s capital to demand payment of the “adjusted compensation” that Congress had voted them in 1925.

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hile some of Washington slept on the eerie evening of July 28, 1932, Douglas MacArthur stood near the bridge to Anacostia, cradling a cup of coffee in his fingertips and calmly chatting with a reporter. The city behind him, transformed only hours before into a combat zone, still smoldered. Clouds of smoke climbed above a dense bluish haze, hiding from view, every now and then, the dome of the United States Capitol. Though sunset had passed, traces of tear gas still seared the eyes of Washingtonians making their way through downtown. In the distance, flames disturbed the drapery of darkness that hung over the nation’s capital. It was quiet, save for the occasional wail of a police or fire-engine siren. The entire operation, MacArthur thought, had been crisply efficient; there was only some mopping up to do and it all would be over. President Hoover, no doubt, would be pleased. MacArthur, as U.S. Army chief of staff, had carried out his commander’s marching orders and more, bulldozing a beleaguered and anemic opponent into total submission. Soon, still nattily attired in riding boots and breeches, he would be standing alongside Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley at a press conference in town, describing how the nation’s seat of government had been secured—saved from an army of insurrectionists that had occupied and irritated it for two months. “That mob down there was a bad-looking mob,” MacArthur told reporters. “It was animated by the essence of revolution.” “It was a great victory,” Hurley added. “Mac did a great job—he’s the man of the hour. But I must not make any heroes just now.” The subjects of MacArthur’s scorn were thousands of disgruntled and destitute World War I veterans. With the onset of summer, they had descended on Washington in waves to press for immediate payment of their insurance certificates, to petition their government for a redress of grievances. Most had made the pilgrimage to the nation’s capital in desperation; out of work for months or years, unable to support their families, they yearned for some sort of signal that the country they had served in wartime would not turn its back on them in their hour of need. They were, until their government all but crushed them, members of the Bonus Expeditionary Force, a proud but pathetic army camped out in abandoned buildings, makeshift tent cities, and shantytowns south and east of the Capitol. The biggest camp had risen almost overnight from the mud flats of Anacostia, a little boomtown of billets—a bona fide Hooverville, in fact. Congress, in 1925, had voted war veterans “adjusted compensation”—$1 for every day served at home and $1.25 for every day served overseas—but it was not to be paid until 1945.

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Democratic Representative Wright Patman, the plain-talking populist of Capitol Hill, had led the movement in Congress for prepayment of the bonuses. If $2.4 billion were put immediately into the pockets of jobless veterans, the line of reasoning went, it would deliver a huge and helpful jolt to the American economy, perhaps providing the means to lift the nation out of the Great Depression. The U.S. House of Representatives had passed one incarnation of the Patman plan, but the Senate seemed if not insensitive to the plight of the veterans at least intransigent on the matter of the bonus. So the veterans came to Washington—by boxcar, by truck, and by foot, from every corner of the nation. There was strength in spirit and in numbers: At one time in the summer of 1932, more than 20,000 veterans, virtually all of them with honorable discharges, were encamped in Washington. This “bonus army” of occupation, held the rallying cry, just might help change the Senate’s collective mind. But the Senate could not be nudged that summer, and by July 23 the commissioners of the District of Columbia, in concert with federal authorities, decided it was time for the Bonus Expeditionary Force to go. That morning, government agents of unknown employ, backed up by the District police, began to evict the soldier-squatters from a federal building on Pennsylvania Avenue below the Capitol; shortly before noon, Attorney General William D. Mitchell ordered that all veterans be evacuated from government property within Washington proper. In scattered spots along Pennsylvania Avenue, scuffles erupted between the veterans and the police. The call to MacArthur went out in early afternoon: orders to clear the areas of engagement and round up any unruly veterans who refused to leave for their camps on the outskirts of town. Within hours the troops were massed in staging areas along the Ellipse, and at 4:30 p.m. sharp they began to move down Pennsylvania Avenue. To clear out the bedraggled army of veterans, MacArthur had ordered up an impressive show of force—200 cavalry, 300 infantry, five tanks, and a machine-gun squadron—and at his call, a methodical, military march began. Armed with tear gas, bayonets, and sabers, the troops moved through the veteran encampments in southeast Washington one by one. After the areas had, more or less, been cleared, they were torched. By midnight, the encampment, only the day before a bustling little bonus town, would be reduced to rubble. The Battle of Anacostia Flats, if it could even be properly called that, was over. The exact origins of the Bonus Army were then—and still are—obscure, but its roots in Washington can be traced to May 26, 1932, when more than 500 World War I veterans assembled outdoors at Judiciary Square. A contingent of Oregon veterans had left their state for the nation’s capital the month before,

FROM TOP: ASSOCIATED PRESS; UNDERWOOD ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES; ASSOCIATED PRESS

ANACOSTIA FLATS

From top: U.S. Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur chats with a reporter after tear-gassing the bonus marchers into submission and burning their shacks to the ground. Members of the Bonus Expeditionary Force march past the U.S. Capitol on April 8, 1932. BEF member Frank Tracy of Pittsburgh, Pa., gets a Father’s Day salute from four of his six children. attracting national press attention as they tried, in several major cities, to hop free rides aboard freight trains bound for Baltimore and Washington. The idea of a bonus march on Washington somehow caught on elsewhere—a kind of bonus brushfire—and soon the newspapers would be sprinkled with announcements that groups of veterans, usually numbering in the hundreds, were setting out for the nation’s capital. On that Thursday afternoon, in Judiciary Square, urged on by a retired brigadier general named Pelham D. Glassford, the veterans organized themselves into the Bonus Expeditionary Force, or BEF, and elected him as their secretary-treasurer. The impromptu election might have escaped the notice of Washington newspapers except for the fact that Glassford, who had commanded the 103rd Field Artillery in France during the First World War, happened to be the District of Columbia’s superintendent of police, and a rather controversial one at that. Only six months earlier, the commissioners of the District of Columbia had summoned Glassford to clean up and streamline the city’s corrupt and inefficient police force. At six-foot-three, with the snap-to posture and stern bearing of a West Point graduate and career military man, Glassford at least looked like a police chief. There was, however, a good bit of snickering around town about his eccentricities (he was an amateur, but accomplished, oil painter) and about his somewhat eclectic experiences before coming to Washington. He had spent some time as a reporter for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner and had once worked for a circus. When reporters asked the newly appointed police chief to summarize his qualifications for the job, Glassford gamely replied that he’d gotten a speeding ticket or two. For Washingtonians accustomed to a succession of humorless, run-of-the-mill police chiefs—and particularly for the city’s reporters, who had covered them—Glassford was a delightful departure from the past. By day, he zipped around on a deepblue Harley-Davidson motorcycle, in the process thoroughly explaining his army nickname of “Happy”; by night, his sleek roadster was frequently spotted in places other than his garage. Glassford seemed even to have a refreshing irreverence for his own authority and larger doses for many of those around him, particularly two of the District’s three commissioners: Dr. Luther H. Reichelderfer and Major General Herbert C. Crosby (even though it was Crosby who had suggested him for the job in the first place). Shortly after Glassford assumed his post, Washington officialdom had its first cause for consternation. In December 1931 a crew of communists invaded the city to mark the opening of Congress with a march against hunger. In other cities, communist marchers had been badgered and beaten in public demonstrations. But as Glassford saw it, there was nothing illegal about the Communist Party—it was, after all, on the election ballots— MHQ Winter 2017

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From top: District of Columbia Police Superintendent Pelham D. Glassford, a retired brigadier general, zipped around the city on a deep-blue Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Policemen haul a BEF squatter out of a building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Opposite: Glassford and a lieutenant, with the help of some BEF volunteers, keep a Bonus Army crowd in check.

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so he announced that the communists could march through the city unmolested as long as they did so peaceably. As the bonus marchers began streaming into Washington in early June of 1932, Glassford took it upon himself—no one else seemed disposed to do anything—to find places for them to stay. Recognizing that the District government was already hard-pressed to care for more than 19,000 jobless Washingtonians, Glassford announced that he would raise private money through benefit boxing and wrestling shows. Jimmy Lake, manager of the Gayety Theater downtown, immediately announced he would stage a benefit burlesque show for the veterans—with Superintendent Glassford as guest of honor. Glassford laid out a Washington welcome mat for veterans who had been ignored, if not insulted, by their government. (He did, though, send notices to out-of-town newspapers asking them to advise veterans not to come to the nation’s capital.) The first wave of arrivals was met at the District line by a squadron of motorcycle police, who brought them to the abandoned Bieber & Kaufman department store near Eighth and I Streets, S.E. On their surprise parade through the city, the 310 veterans were greeted by friendly pedestrians, who waved and shouted words of encouragement. Some of the veterans wore the faded, tattered remnants of their world-war uniforms and limped along, weather-beaten and travel-weary from nearly a month on the road. To stock a commissary he established for the bonus marchers, Glassford reached into his own pocket for $120 and persuaded local businesses to donate beef, coffee, bread (from 11 different area bakeries), and medical supplies and equipment. The Dixie Barbecue Company catered a pork barbecue dinner for the veterans; another meal was provided by the owner of the Carroll Fish Company, who contributed four 150-pound turtles for the cause of soup. Later on in the summer, many other public-spirited citizens would lend a hand; one evening, for example, Evalyn Walsh McLean, the millionaire wife of the Washington Post’s publisher, ordered one thousand sandwiches to go at a downtown eatery, paid for them on the spot, and brought them to the biggest BEF camp. On the whole, the veterans were grateful and well behaved, organizing themselves into units—complete with cooks and military police—for a semblance of discipline. They pledged complete cooperation with Glassford and his men. There was, however, one major public-relations problem for the veterans. Many conservatives in the capital mistakenly viewed the Bonus Expeditionary Force as a thinly disguised front for the Communist Party, and, in fact, there had been attempts by communist organizations to take credit for the remarkable solidarity of the veterans. But as the inhabitants of “Camp Glassford,” as it was now called, prepared to bed down one evening, one of Glassford’s men, James E. Bennett, told them: “Fellows, you’re welcome here. But once you start mixing with Reds and Socialists, out you go.” The veterans roundly cheered. (Later on, after a series of beatings and kangaroo-court procedures in the bonus camps, Glassford would be compelled

FROM TOP: NATIONAL PHOTO COMPANY COLLECTION/SHORPY ARCHIVES; UNDERWOOD ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

ANACOSTIA FLATS

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

to inform the veterans that communists were entitled to freedom and fair treatment, too.) The ranks of the incoming veterans swelled so quickly that Glassford was forced to look for yet more space, and he settled on a plot of land known as Anacostia Section C, between the 11th Street Bridge and Bolling Field. Soon, some 7,500 veterans would be quartered there, sleeping in billets—the euphemism for shacks crudely constructed from egg crates, cardboard boxes, corrugated iron roofing and other scrap metal, rusty bed springs and frames, and even tin cans and old wallpaper. As miserable as conditions were, the men held fast to their promise not to leave until Congress responded. “The men will stay here until they get the bonus or hell freezes over,” said W. C. Cox, a leader of the original Oregon marchers. “They fed us in ’17 and ’18 and they can feed us now.” As incongruous as it may have seemed, Anacostia Flats took on a kind of sideshow atmosphere. Many of the veterans had brought along their wives and children, and family wash hung on clotheslines crisscrossing the settlement. Amateur entertainers sang and performed vaudeville skits on a wooden stage originally conceived as a speaker’s platform. There was a mock cemetery with tombstones dedicated to prominent opponents of the bonus, like President Herbert Hoover and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Visitors to the

camp could tender a small donation to view, through a wooden tube, one veteran who arranged daily to be “buried” six feet under. For a while, Anacostia Flats was a big Washington tourist attraction. On the evening of June 7, a crowd of 100,000 or so Washingtonians watched what undoubtedly was the strangest parade in the city’s history. More than 8,000 of the veterans—many of them in ragged, faded shirts and rumpled, olive-drab uniforms they once had worn in hometown victory parades—marched slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue in the hope that the display would impel Congress to vote the bonus. Some carried crude placards—“Here We Stay, Til the Bonus They Pay” and “No Bonus, No Votes” were typical messages—with zeal, but most simply shuffled along the parade route, devoid of emotion and drained of energy. Even though thousands of onlookers cheered on the gaunt bonus marchers, it was an altogether saddening spectacle. One reporter called it a “ghost parade.” The parade had been shrewdly recommended by Superintendent Glassford, mainly to take the steam out of a communist procession scheduled for the following evening. It had exactly that effect, and Glassford soon established a separate camp for one small group of communist bonus marchers. “In their own camp,” the Washington Post drily noted, “the Communists will be allowed to make as many speeches as they like.” If the District commissioners ever harbored serious hopes MHQ Winter 2017

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that the bonus marchers just might poop out and leave, a minor episode on June 9 quickly disabused them of the notion. On that Thursday, the commissioners had announced, all veterans would have to get out of the capital. They would be given a free breakfast and transportation to various points 50 miles or so outside of the District. But when the trucks showed up at Anacostia Flats to take them away, they were greeted with catcalls and laughter by the veterans, who proceeded to load three dummies aboard. Following another big parade on Flag Day, June 14—a parade the American Legion eventually threatened to boycott unless bonus marchers were allowed to participate—the House of Representatives, on June 16, passed the $2.4 billion bonus bill, 211 to 176. Drenching rains, which turned the outdoor bonus camps into seas of muck, failed to dim the exuberant spirits of the veterans now in Washington, whose ranks had peaked somewhere near 25,000. Earlier in the day, Glassford had made his almost daily visit to the BEF encampment at Anacostia Flats. “You men have as much right to be here as anyone else,” he told the veterans. “I’ll admit I’ve been trying to get some of you to go home to make room for others who are coming in. At 11 o’clock every morning we have trucks available with sufficient rations for those who want to go. But I want to tell you boys who want to stay here we’ll keep feeding you as long as a cent remains, and we’ll do the best we can for you.” Perhaps a quarter of them turned up on the steps of the U.S. Capitol the next evening to await the Senate’s vote on the bonus measure. There were those in the Senate wing of the building who, peering through the windows at the hordes of veterans outside, wondered whether they might overpower the Capitol police and storm the place. But when Walter W. Walters, the BEF’s commander in chief, announced the bad news—the Senate had voted no, 62 to 18—a band struck up “America,” and

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the veterans somberly sang along in chorus. From inside the Capitol, Senators could hear the crowd singing as they dealt the last blow to the bonus bill by tabling, 44 to 26, a motion to reconsider it. The veterans dispersed quietly, and with military precision, singing “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag” and other wartime songs. During the days ahead, some of the veterans left Washington in despair, but most stayed on, having no money, no jobs, and no place to go. Their obstinacy, or perhaps simply endurance, was a source of endless vexation for official Washington. When a meager band of maybe 50 veterans picketed the White House, President Hoover ordered Washington police to mass in the area. It was the largest show of police force since the city’s race riots shortly after the world war. The Executive Mansion was placed under round-the-clock guard, its gates closed and chained, the streets around it evacuated and cordoned off. Hoover had avoided several customary trips to Capitol Hill simply to avoid seeing any of the bonus marchers; now, he was determined not to let them see him. On July 21 the District commissioners ordered the evacuation of all bonus marchers from public property by noon, August 4, but they were backed into withdrawing the order the next day after Glassford warned them that such an edict might lead to riots and bloodshed. Within the next few days, however, both local and federal officials—particularly Secretary of War Hurley—grew increasingly impatient with what they viewed as Glassford’s unnecessary accommodation of the bonus marchers. On the morning of July 28, Glassford finally received the ultimatum he did not want but would obey: Evacuation of government buildings below the Capitol grounds must be immediate and complete, to make way for wrecking contractors. The operation began peacefully enough, but shortly after noon someone apparently heaved a brick, and a brief scuffle between the police and the veterans broke out; it was over,

FROM LEFT: UNDERWOOD ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES; BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

From left: World War I veterans battle with D.C. police officers at one of the Bonus Army camps. MacArthur’s troops use tear gas on BEF members. The ruins of the Bonus Army encampment at Anacostia Flats.

however, as soon as police officers began using their nightsticks. Sometime later, probably between 1:30 and 2 p.m., there was a much more serious incident: A policeman who had gotten into an altercation with angry veterans pulled his gun and started firing—at one point even aiming his pistol at Glassford—and hit two of them. One of the veterans died on the spot; the other died later in a Washington hospital. This miniature riot was quickly quelled, but even before it began, the United States Army, with Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur in charge, had been ordered to the scene at the request of the D.C. commissioners. The Hoover administration later used the violence to justify the calling out of troops, but the order had actually gone out before the violence erupted. MacArthur’s right-hand man and liaison, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, forcefully argued that the operation shouldn’t be a military one—even MacArthur, he said, shouldn’t wear a uniform. MacArthur, as was his irritating habit, replied in the third person. “MacArthur has decided to go into active command in the field,” he told Eisenhower. “There is incipient revolution in the air.” A military courier was quickly dispatched to Fort Myer to fetch the chief of staff ’s tunic, decorations (five rows of ribbons), boots, and breeches. By the time Glassford reached MacArthur, at sometime between 2 and 3 o’clock that afternoon, most of the troops had been brought in from across the river and assembled in the Ellipse, within the sight of President Hoover, who was sequestered inside the well-guarded White House. The police super-

EVERETT COLLECTION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

“We are going to break the back of the BEF,” MacArthur coolly told Glassford.

intendent, who had regarded MacArthur as a more reasonable man than Secretary of War Hurley, argued with him not to march on the protesters, maintaining that a confrontation with the veterans should be avoided until all other remedies had been exhausted. “We are going to break the back of the BEF,” MacArthur coolly told Glassford. “Within a short time we will move down Pennsylvania Avenue, sweep through the billets there, and then clean out the other camps. The operation will be continuous. It will all be done tonight.” Glassford begged MacArthur to put aside his plans for an evening raid on Anacostia Flats; it was “the height of stupidity,” he said. MacArthur refused to reconsider—his dislike for second-guessers was deep and visceral—and headed for his limousine. Reporters found MacArthur there (it was, in fact, the army’s sole limousine, reserved for the exclusive use of the nation’s only four-star general) and started peppering him with questions. MacArthur had the same answer for all of them. “Watch me,” he said. “Just watch me.” Late that hot Thursday afternoon, MacArthur’s forces plodded down Pennsylvania Avenue: four troops of cavalry (with Major George S. Patton leading one of them), four companies of infantry, a machine-gun squadron, and Whippet tanks. The significance of their approach to the troubled area had not yet sunk in. They were met with cheers, both from the veterans sitting along the curbs and from the huge crowds of onlookers assembled nearby. Then, with little or no warning, pandemonium erupted: Infantrymen were hurling tear-gas grenades, which they carried in sacks slung over their backs; cavalrymen charged into the crowd of veterans, brandishing sabers; tanks swung their turrets. Women and children, caught and confused in the melee, were being trampled. Three thousand or so bystanders, looking on from a vacant lot across the way, suddenly found themselves MHQ Winter 2017

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being chased by the cavalry. The sounds of that hour were of people choking from the gas, shouting and screaming as they ran wildly from the scene of absolute chaos. There had been plenty of jeers aimed at MacArthur and his men, but the tear gas quickly erased them. “The American flag means nothing to me after this,” one bonus marcher had shouted within earshot of MacArthur’s limousine. “Put that man under arrest,” the general barked, “if he opens his mouth again.” By shortly before 6 p.m., the areas around the Capitol and at Third Street and Pennsylvania Avenue had been completely cleared and set ablaze, and the troops moved slowly on, scattering everyone before them—bonus marchers and civilians alike, including hundreds of government clerks making their way home through rush hour. The troops methodically moved into bonus camp areas at Third and Fourth Streets and Maryland and Maine Avenues, S.W., tossing more tear-gas bombs and setting more shacks afire. Having cleared that part of town by 6:30, they moved on toward the Anacostia bridge, where they were met by a crowd of booing and jeering spectators. Again, tear gas was the remedy. There is little doubt that MacArthur had planned, from the beginning, to destroy the Anacostia Flats camp, by far the biggest of perhaps two dozen. President Hoover’s orders clearly did not authorize military operations beyond the city proper, and, in fact, Secretary of War Hurley at one point transmitted a

The tear gas quickly erased the jeers aimed at MacArthur and his men.

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message that the commander in chief did not want the troops to cross the river. MacArthur, whose reputation as a military megalomaniac would be confirmed 20 years later, ignored it. MacArthur’s troops returned Anacostia Flats to its original condition in short order. The 300 infantrymen again donned their gas masks as they moved through the biggest bonus village with bayonets fixed. The tanks rumbled through, too. Few veterans fought back; it was no contest, and most simply fled with women and children in tow. As the billets burned, so did the rough-lettered signs bonus marchers had put up weeks before: One outlined the BEF’s four-point rule—“Stay until the bonus is granted; no radical talk; no panhandling; no booze”— another said, simply, “War is hell, but loafing is worse.” The spectacle deeply affected even Eisenhower. “The whole scene was pitiful,” he later recalled. “The veterans, whether or not they were mistaken in marching on Washington, were ragged, ill-fed, and felt themselves badly abused. To suddenly see the whole encampment going up in flames just added to the pity one had to feel for them.” That evening, as the sky of the nation’s capital still glowed with fire, most members of the Bonus Expeditionary Force were taking part in a final, and unexpected, parade—a parade out of Washington. Roads leading away from the city were cluttered with small groups of veterans and their families—there was no one, including their government, to take care of them now. Ironically, it was the midnight incursion into Anacostia— an incursion that probably would have offended his Quaker sensibilities—that made Herbert Hoover a hated president. A single, pathetic portrait left horror and anguish in the hearts of many Americans: thousands of destitute and hopeless men, women, and children scurrying through the countryside in the middle of the night, herded out into Maryland and Virginia.

NATIONAL PHOTO COMPANY COLLECTION/SHORPY ARCHIVES

Before and after: The Bonus Expeditionary Force’s sprawling encampment at Anacostia Flats (with the U.S. Capitol in the distant background), and an aerial photograph, taken on July 29, 1932, of its bulldozed and smoking remains.

EVERETT COLLECTION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Even many of those who did not side with the bonus marchers in the first place were repulsed. One of them, for example, was Representative Fiorello LaGuardia, a progressive and peppery Republican from New York City who once had said Patman’s bonus bill would “not solve a single problem” and that it would serve a “sordid, selfish purpose.” Now he sent a scathing telegram to the president: “Soup is cheaper than tear-gas bombs and bread is better than bullets in maintaining law and order in these times of Depression, unemployment, and hunger.” Years later, in his memoirs, Hoover would admit in a slightly roundabout way that MacArthur had overstepped his orders, but the former president defended the tactics even then by claiming that most of the veterans were either communists or criminals. Many members of the Bonus Expeditionary Force, or what was left of it, wound up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, nearly 200 miles from the nation’s capital. Mayor Eddie McCloskey, an ex-prizefighter, had visited the BEF camp at Anacostia some time back and had invited the veterans to his town. When they arrived, something McCloskey thought would never come to pass, the bonus marchers were put up in the abandoned Ideal Amusement Park five miles outside of town, where conditions were anything but ideal. While the local newspaper denounced them as “thieves, plug-uglies, degenerates,” social workers sent in by Pennsylvania’s progressive governor, Gifford Pinchot, found them to be ordinary Americans. What most hurt the men, all of whom carried their certificates of honorable discharge, was that their own government was calling them insurrectionists and communists. By August 6 the Ideal Amusement Park once again was empty. The businessmen of Johnstown had collected money to

pay for special B&O and Pennsylvania Railroad trains, because that was the only way to get the bonus marchers far away from town. To the greatly thinned and beleaguered force of veterans and their families, it was the final indignity. There would be other bonus marches on Washington, but none as concentrated or compelling as the 1932 encampment. On the night of July 28, as MacArthur’s tanks were placed on Washington bridges to keep the bonus marchers from returning, Franklin D. Roosevelt was reported to have said, “This is bound to help put me in the White House.” But it was not until four years later, in 1936, that Congress finally authorized payment of the bonuses. The same evening, from inside the governor’s mansion in Albany, New York, Roosevelt, his anger mounting, complained to Professor Rexford Tugwell of Columbia University about the president. “There is nothing inside the man but jelly,” he said. “Maybe there never was anything else.” Then, Roosevelt was given to wonder what undoubtedly was passing through the minds of millions of other Americans: “Why didn’t Hoover offer the men coffee and sandwiches, instead of turning Pat Hurley and Doug MacArthur loose?” In late October, the District commissioners fired Pelham Glassford (or, more politely, asked for and got his resignation). For some time, he was a one-man truth squad against the attempts of Hoover and his attorney general, William D. Mitchell, to shape history’s verdict of the events of the summer of 1932. Beyond the bonus marchers themselves, who called the police chief “the friendly enemy,” Glassford remains one of the few heroes of an altogether sorry episode in the history of the nation. If someone higher up had listened to Pelham Glassford that summer, the Battle of Anacostia Flats might never have been. MHQ MHQ Winter 2017

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Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s forces were soundly defeated in the first major battle of the Civil War fought north of the Potomac River. But he and his army would live for another day.

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ENDICOTT & CO./LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

MCCLELLAN’S BIG MISS

Union commander George B. McClellan won the Battle of South Mountain in 1862. So why was it such a strategic disaster? By Ron Soodalter

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SOUTH MOUNTAIN

to include abolition and unequivocally remove the prospect of a “conquered peace” from the Rebels’ plans. When McClellan became aware of the threat of a Rebel drive across the Potomac River, he moved with atypical swiftness. He had already combined his Army of the Potomac with Major General John Pope’s Army of Virginia, and he led his 75,000man force out of the capital’s fortifications and marched to intercept Lee’s army. Lacking specific information on Lee’s exact location, McClellan marched west toward Frederick, Maryland, in the general direction where he expected to find him. By then, Lee’s army had crossed the Potomac near Leesburg, Virginia, and had indeed marched north into Frederick, then west across South Mountain toward Hagerstown, near the Pennsylvania border. Uncharacteristically, Lee—whose intelligence from the normally reliable Major General J. E. B. Stuart was sparse and inaccurate—underestimated his enemy, and on September 8 he wrote to Davis of his expectation that McClellan was still in Washington. In fact, the Union commander was already well on his way to Frederick. Thus far, McClellan had done everything right. Then the fates rewarded McClellan with an extraordinary gift. A copy of Lee’s Special Orders No. 191, drafted on September 9, had been lost by the Rebels and discovered on their campsite four days later by Union soldiers, who passed it up the chain of command to McClellan. It detailed Lee’s plans to divide the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee had sent Major Generals Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, A. P. Hill, Lafayette McLaws, and John George Walker to attack the isolated garrison at Harpers Ferry, in western Virginia, from both sides of the Potomac. The rest of the army, which included Major General James Longstreet’s command and Major General Daniel Harvey Hill’s division, was ordered to march as a rear guard with the reserve artillery and supply trains to Boonsboro, just two miles beyond South Mountain. A rugged continuation of the Blue Ridge Mountains, it formed a natural barrier between the Cumberland and Hagerstown valleys and Eastern Maryland. By the time McClellan read Lee’s lost order, his advance body was already approaching South Mountain. Barely able to contain himself, McClellan reputedly proclaimed: “Now I know what to do! Here is a paper with which, if I cannot whip Bobby Lee, I will be willing to go home!” He resolved to cross South Mountain and—as he later specified in his orders to a subordinate—“cut the enemy in two and beat him in detail.” On September 13, McClellan put Major General Ambrose

Opposite, clockwise from left: Union major general George B. McClellan, who was nicknamed “Little Mac” by his men (and “Young Napoleon” by others); Confederate general Robert E. Lee, whose precariously divided army was forced to retreat from South Mountain; Union major generals John Pope and Ambrose Burnside; and Union major general William B. Franklin.

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MATHEW BRADY COLLECTION/NATIONAL ARCHIVES (5)

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n the annals of warfare, it is beyond rare that the commander of an army is given the enemy’s battle plans. Yet that is precisely what happened in September 1862, when a copy of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s Special Orders No. 191 fell into the hands of the commander of the Union’s Army of the Potomac, Major General George B. McClellan. It was, in the words of historian Bruce Catton, “the greatest security leak in American military history,” and for a moment it gave McClellan the opportunity to end the Civil War—an opportunity that was, tragically, squandered. Lee had assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia in June 1862 and had succeeded in driving the Union forces back to the security of Washington. In early September, flush with his victories at the battles of the Seven Days and Second Manassas, he decided to lead his army into western Maryland, taking the war, for the first time, into the Northern homeland. By now, Confederate generals Braxton Bragg and Edmund Kirby Smith were marching through Tennessee into Kentucky; it remained only for Lee to cross the Potomac. Before his Maryland Campaign, Lee—in concert with Confederate president Jefferson Davis—had declared several objectives. The northward incursion would put an end to the South’s defensive war and level some retribution on the Yankees. And, after a year and a half of fighting on Southern soil, the farms, towns, and industries of Northern Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley would get some respite from the war’s devastation. Lee and Davis assumed that Marylanders would welcome a Confederate military presence and hoped to bring them into the Southern fold. Of all the states not in secession, Maryland was the most problematical to the Union, as the earlier Baltimore Riots of 1861 had demonstrated. Frustrated by the situation, President Abraham Lincoln had stretched the limits of his executive power by suspending the writ of habeas corpus and jailing some 31 Maryland legislators as well as Baltimore’s mayor. Lee and Davis believed that Maryland needed little encouragement to join the Confederacy. Mainly, however, it was the Confederacy’s hope that a series of defeats on Union soil, compounded on those already suffered during the summer, would drive the now-demoralized citizens of the North to reject both the war and their Republican president, replacing him in the upcoming elections with a Democrat who was more inclined to a settled peace. Neither Lee nor Davis could have known that it was Lincoln’s plan to use the next Union victory as a springboard for his Emancipation Proclamation, which would expand the focus of the war

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Burnside in command of the army’s strong right wing, consisting of Major General Joseph Hooker’s I Corps and Major General Jesse Lee Reno’s IX Corps. They were to cross South Mountain through Fox’s and Turner’s Gaps, march on Boonsboro, overwhelm Longstreet and Hill, and drive a wedge between Lee and the rest of his army. The center, under Major General Edwin Vose Sumner, was to be held in reserve. McClellan then directed Major General William B. Franklin, commanding the left wing (VI Corps and a division of the IV), to cross South Mountain at Crampton’s Gap the next morning, attack the rear of McLaws’ undersized division overlooking Harpers Ferry on Maryland Heights, relieve the beleaguered garrison there, and return to assist Burnside. Although McClellan didn’t know it at the time, the prospects for a swift and decisive victory were even better than he had envisioned. Responding to a false report that a large Yankee force was on its way down from Pennsylvania, Longstreet’s two divisions had left Boonsboro for Hagerstown to meet them, leaving only D. H. Hill’s five-brigade division of battle-weary men to defend South Mountain. Theoretically, all McClellan had to do was whip Hill’s exhausted troops, push his army over the mountain to Boonsboro, make short work of Longstreet, and send a contingent to relieve Harpers Ferry and defeat Jackson. A major victory was within his grasp. Lee was caught off guard when he discovered that elements of the Army of the Potomac were advancing on South Mountain. He had suddenly lost the initiative and, forced to take a stand against superior numbers on ground that was far from ideal, he ordered D. H. Hill’s division to establish defensive positions at Fox’s and Turner’s Gaps, and called Longstreet back to Boonsboro. The gaps—which were in harsh, mountainous terrain, much of it steep, rocky, and covered in thick undergrowth—were now well defended. Any ground taken there by the Yankees would be hard-won. Still, McClellan’s forces vastly outnumbered each of the scattered segments of Lee’s army, and his plan was sound: to keep Lee from uniting his forces and destroy his army “in detail,” one segment at a time.

The prospects for victory were even better than McClellan had envisioned.

The fighting commenced at 9 a.m. on September 14, when Brigadier General Jacob D. Cox’s Kanawha division of the IX

Corps attacked the Rebels in General Samuel Garland’s brigade at Fox’s Gap with such force that it drove them to flight from behind a stone wall, killing Garland himself. Cox stopped to wait for reinforcements from Reno, but they were late in coming. The fighting continued off and on throughout the day, with the Rebels, buoyed by the timely arrival of Brigadier General John Bell Hood, doggedly holding their own even as they were driven back a step at a time. When darkness fell, Reno rode to the summit in frustration to see about the holdup and was shot from his saddle and killed—a major loss for the Union army. Meanwhile, Burnside decided not to risk an all-out assault on Hill’s position at Turner’s Gap until Hooker’s corps arrived. Hooker, however, didn’t make it there until 4 in the afternoon— seven hours after the battle had begun—giving Longstreet time to return from Hagerstown and support Hill’s beleaguered forces. Eventually, although the Yankees had driven the determined Rebels from the summit, nightfall prevented them from taking the gap. By this time, the Rebels had reinforced both passes, and although badly battered, with the coming of dark they still held Fox’s and Turner’s Gaps. Earlier in the day, Franklin’s VI Corps, consisting of nearly 13,000 men, set out to capture Crampton’s Gap six miles to the south. Given the urgency of the situation, and with Harpers Ferry in imminent danger of falling to the enemy, McClellan should have ordered Franklin to break camp the night before. Barring that, Franklin might well have seized the initiative himself and not waited till morning to pursue his mission. Instead, he let his men get a good night’s sleep, losing a crucial 11 hours. To protect his rear, McLaws had left a small force behind at Brownsville and Crampton’s Gaps. It consisted of an artillery battery, three regiments of infantry, an undersized detachment of cavalry, and a single brigade under Brigadier General Howell Cobb—2,100 men in all. Franklin’s VI Corp finally appeared at Crampton’s Gap around noon, to a greeting of Rebel artillery fire. Assuming that he faced a large enemy force, Franklin set about making elaborate plans for battle, despite outnumbering the Rebels six to one. Three hours later, he assaulted the enemy position. The fighting was fierce, with the Rebels giving ground only in the face of overwhelming numbers. Finally, the Confederate infantry was driven from the summit, by which time it was dusk. Stretching out before Franklin’s IX Corps lay Pleasant Valley; just beyond it was Maryland Heights, and McLaws’s small contingent. Again taking a page from McClellan’s book, Franklin convinced himself that McLaws’ small force outnumbered his own and halted his advance. The Rebels at Crampton’s Gap had held out for three grueling hours which, combined with Franklin’s initial delay in leaving

Top: A Union division under Brigadier General John P. Hatch drives the Rebels over the top of South Mountain just north of Turner’s Gap. Bottom: Six miles to the south, nearly 13,000 Union soldiers under Major General William B. Franklin approach Crampton’s Gap, one of three passes over South Mountain, where they will outnumber the enemy six to one.

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FROM TOP: E.B. KELLOGG & E.C. KELLOGG/MARYLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY; ROBERT KNOX SNEDEN/CIVIL WAR TRUST

SOUTH MOUNTAIN

“The hard work and real fighting of the cavalry usually preceded and followed the great battles of the war,” a Union cavalryman who fought in the Battle of South Mountain wrote.

The Battle of South Mountain is generally viewed as a tactical Union victory. Late on September 14, Lee himself stated matterof-factly, “The day has gone against us.” It was, however, a strategic disaster for McClellan. Through a series of inexcusable delays, the Army of the Potomac’s commanders—having squandered so much precious time—failed to follow up their success in the South Mountain passes with a decisive move against Lee. Historians have long debated the extent of McClellan’s culpability in allowing Lee’s army to escape and regroup. “The blame…cannot rest entirely on McClellan’s shoulders,” John David Hoptak has observed. “It was his subordinates…who let him down.” Some responsibility certainly lies with Franklin. Some also rests with Burnside, who wasted many hours on the 14th awaiting the arrival of Hooker’s division. And by delaying the mobilization of the IX Corps the following day, he lost the chance to pursue and destroy Longstreet’s and D. H. Hill’s retreating columns. McClellan, as Timothy Reese succinctly points out, “was not well served by his wing commanders.”

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Ultimately, though, the responsibility rests with McClellan. With superior forces and the intelligence in hand to bring the war to an end, he failed to take advantage of the opportunity. Catton, in his timeless Army of the Potomac Trilogy, faults McClellan for a fatal lack of urgency: “With everything in the world at stake, both for the country and for McClellan personally, why couldn’t the man have taken fire just once?” Although the Battle of South Mountain caused Lee to rethink his strategy, a far bloodier confrontation lay just ahead before Lee would abandon his Maryland Campaign. By failing to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia after South Mountain, McClellan gave Lee enough time to solidify his position and ready his forces for the major battle that would follow within days. The Rebels would remember it as the Battle of Sharpsburg; to the people of the North, it was Antietam, and it would claim some 23,000 casualties, making it the bloodiest single day of combat in the nation’s history. And once again, despite possessing superior numbers, McClellan—through an excess of caution bordering on timidity—would fail to seize a second opportunity to destroy Lee’s army. The war was destined to last another two and a half years, and to tally a butcher’s bill of three-quarters of a million lives. MHQ Ron Soodalter has written for the New York Times, Military History, Wild West, Smithsonian, and other publications. He is the author of Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

camp, doomed Harpers Ferry. The Union garrison surrendered the next morning. Worse, by failing to attack McLaws as ordered, Franklin gave Jackson and McLaws time to rejoin Lee’s army. When Lee was first informed that Crampton’s Gap had fallen, he ordered Fox’s and Turner’s Gaps abandoned, intending to lead his men back into Virginia. But word soon reached him of the surrender of Harpers Ferry, and—with the reunification of his army—he instead determined to confront the Army of the Potomac in open battle a short distance from South Mountain.

CULTURE OF WAR CLASSIC DISPATCHES 84

TATE BRITAIN, LONDON/IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM

ARTISTS 87 POETRY 90 REVIEWS 92 DRAWN & QUARTERED 96

Paul Nash was still in his 20s when, in 1917, he was appointed by the British government to serve as one of its official war artists. In that role he created some of the most haunting battlefield landscapes of World War I, including this oil painting, The Menin Road, which he finished in February 1919. It depicts two soldiers making their way through a veritable hell on earth in what Nash called “the most dreaded and disastrous locality” of the Western Front. Tate Britain, London, through March 5, 2017

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CLASSIC DISPATCHES

LIFE ON A TORPEDO BOAT

By Malcolm McDowell

In 1907 a fellow journalist described Malcolm McDowell as “writer upon any topic at a minute’s notice, reporter, war correspondent, lecturer, conversationalist, good fellow, and one-time soldier.” McDowell, in fact, was all these and more. He achieved some fame as a war correspondent in 1898 after the USS Maine exploded and sank in Havana Harbor, where it had been sent to protect U.S. interests during the Cuban revolt against Spain, and his employer, the Chicago Record, hastily assembled a nine-member team of writers and artists to cover the brand-new war. After the war McDowell became the manager of Republican Charles G. Dawes’s 1902 campaign for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. Dawes was soundly defeated. Announcing that he was done with politics, Dawes organized the Central Trust Company of Illinois and brought McDowell aboard as an officer. McDowell, while working as a banker, also became nationally known for operating a coffee wagon—or, as one newspaper put it, a “restaurant on wheels”—that provided free food, drink, and clothing to Chicago’s homeless and unemployed. He left banking to become an official of the Board of Indian Commissioners, a federal advisory committee, but when President Franklin D. Roosevelt abolished it in 1933 McDowell returned to the newspaper business—this time with the Chicago Daily News. McDowell, who died in 1943 at the age of 82, today is known mostly for his stories about the Spanish-American War, including this one, filed from Key West, Florida, in May 1898.

The torpedo flotilla in the war fleet lying off Key West is a little fleet of itself.

Fat men are not wanted aboard torpedo boats, nor men who tower head and shoulders above the average crowd. Space is so valuable on one of these little marine sprinters that the cook sleeps in the pantry and the men have to go ashore to salute their officers. The torpedo boat consists of an engine out of all proportion to the craft it drives, a powerful propeller, three or four Whitehead torpedoes and a hull, covered with a turtle back, just wide enough to carry essentials and long enough to get the greatest speed possible from the engine and propeller. This hull is of steel only three-eighths of an inch thick, and it

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is pushed through the water at the rate of 30 to 37 miles an hour—the speed of an express train. The torpedo flotilla in the war fleet lying off Key West is a little fleet of itself, commanded by Lieutenant Commander W. W. Kimball. There are six torpedo boats, any one of which is capable of sending to the bottom the strongest, stanchest, largest ship in the fleet, and any one of which will curl up like hot paper if the gunner of a 6-pounder draws a bead on it and sends a few armor-piercing 6-pound shells into it. The men who serve on these little marine porcupines with their explosive quills are not paid extra money, as their class in some of the foreign navies are rewarded for the extra-hazardous duty, but there is an eager rivalry to draw a billet on a torpedo boat. Torpedo-boat crews are made up of picked men, especially selected as to physique and character. Their uniform is not white and natty, but consists of a knit watch cap and a suit of blue Dungoree. The men at a short distance look like highpriced machinists in a first-class railroad shop, for mechanics and machinists wear jumpers and overalls made of blue Dungoree. But the men aboard a torpedo boat are active as cats, alert and enthusiastic, and from their hearts believe a torpedo boat, and the identical torpedo boat on which they sail, is the greatest war vessel afloat. Torpedo boats are divided into three classes. The third class now is considered obsolete. They were small enough to be carried aboard a ship, for they were 30-tonners. The second class were about 65 tons. They were intended for harbor service only, and were not sea-going. The first-class boats are sea-going craft, but are intended to operate from a base, for the coal and water storage capacity is limited. This precludes a torpedo boat from cruising more than 75 to 80 miles from its base of supplies. First-class boats vary in tonnage from 115 to 175 tons, in length from 140 to 190 feet, and in draught from five to eight feet. They are perfectly seaworthy and can ride out the heaviest gales. But there is no sleep aboard a torpedo boat in rough weather, for it pitches rolls and prances around to a degree which gives every man under the closed hatches an acute attack of insomnia. The armament consists of three to four 18inch Whitehead torpedoes and three or four 1-pounder rapid-firing guns. In addition there is a revolver and two or three rifles for each of the 22 to 30 men, the rifles supplied with sword bayonets to repel boarders. The Cushing is one of the best known of the torpedo boats

HAVERFORD COLLEGE

Years after he made a name for himself as a war correspondent, Malcolm McDowell became an official of the Board of Indian Commissioners, a federal advisory committee. In this photograph, taken in June 1916 in Hominy, Oklahoma, he stands with Osage Indian Chief Robert A-she-gra-hre.

in the navy. It has the longest cruising record and is known all the way from Galveston to Bath, Maine. Its engines, of 1,820 horse-power, can drive it 23 knots (a knot is one and one-sixth miles) an hour. Coal economy doesn’t enter into the operation of torpedo boats. They are like fire engines—when needed expense is no object. But on an economical speed of 11.3 knots an hour the Cushing consumes but five tons of coal a day, and her bunkers can carry 39 tons. When running at maximum speed the stokers must shovel nearly five tons of coal an hour into the boiler fires. But two officers are required on a torpedo boat. In the flotilla there is a surgeon and a passed assistant engineer, but they might be called “fleet” officers. The commander of a torpedo boat is a lieutenant of the line, and his assistant generally is an ensign. The lieutenant is called captain on the boat he commands. Life aboard a torpedo boat in fair weather is as cozy as existence in a five-room flat. On the Cushing Captain Gleaves and Ensign Baldwin have snug quarters in the after part of the boat. Folding bunks, which are laid up against the sides of the room like the upper berths of a sleeping car, are separated by curtains when down for the night. With bunks and curtains out of the way, there is a tight, tidy room, with leather-covered divans running around it, suspended lamps and electric lights over a square reading table, a folding desk for the captain, some easy chairs, and a stub-tailed dog. Leading aft from the captain’s quarters is the pantry, in which the cook sleeps, over a box of fixed ammunition for the 1-pounders. Up against the wall of the captain’s quarters are two innocent cupboard boxes; in one are the wet and in the other, which is on the opposite wall, are the dry gun-cotton primers. There is enough explosive force in each box to blow the whole internal economy of the Cushing all over Key West. Forward of the aft conning tower is a small square compartment, occupied by the four chief petty officers—the chief gunner’s mate, the gunner’s mate, first-class, and two chief machinists. Forward of that is the after fireroom, containing the after boiler; next comes the miniature engine room, its two engines filling it almost entirely; then the forward fireroom; then comes the galley, the kitchen of the boat, and the ship’s nose, in which are berths and hammocks for the 18 men who compose the rest of the crew. Half the crew belong to the engineer’s force, for the entire boat is but a mobile machine, and is filled with machinery and intricate mechanism. The magazine is under the after conning tower. In it are stored the ammunition of revolvers, rifles, and rapid-firing guns, and in times of peace the war heads of the Whitehead torpedoes, each war head containing 70 pounds of gun cotton. But there are now no war heads in the magazines of the torpedo flotilla. Each is on the business end of a cigar-shaped steel cylinder, which is stowed away in a torpedo tube, ready to be sent on its frightful errand. Of more than ordinary interest are the six young ensigns who are billeted on the six torpedo boats, for they are the men who will start torpedoes toward a Spanish man-of-war if the dons and Yankees ever “mix up.” No range-finders or spiderweb sights are used to draw a bead on a hostile warship from the deck of a torpedo boat. The sighting is done with the eye of judgment and experience gained from practice. It is an MHQ Winter 2017

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CLASSIC DISPATCHES exaggerated case of wing-shooting, for when the torpedo is launched the boat is traveling rapidly, and the ensign, hanging over the off side of the boat, sights his big prey much as a duck hunter brings his shotgun to bear on a winging mallard. When a torpedo boat goes into action everybody is ordered below except the man at the torpedo tube and the executive officer, who “sights” the self-moving missile. The captain is in the forward conning tower. The engineer and his crew are in the fire and engine rooms. The cook stands ready to hand up ammunition for the 1-pounders. There is 250 pounds pressure of steam in the boilers. The engine is spinning the propeller wheel around 450 times a minute. Not a light is seen on the boat, and it drives straight through the night toward the black shape which sweeps the water with the luminous fingers of the electric searchlight, feeling for just such deadly pests as a torpedo boat. The little craft has no puffing steam to betray it, for every bit of steam goes to the condenser, to return as water to the trembling boilers. The captain in the conning tower steers the torpedo boat on a course which brings it in line with the forward quarter of the ship he is after. On the turtle-back deck the two men crouch—the ensign on the side farthest from the ship and the gunner at the torpedo tube, training it as directed. When within 500 yards one torpedo is launched; the boat sheers around, and as she points directly at the ship she sends out her bow torpedo, if she has one, as the Cushing has. By this time the boat is within 300 or 200 yards of the ship, and as she swings around to show her stern to the ship she sends out the torpedo on the other side. Then the little craft gives a leap and scuds away for dear life. That is, if no dazzling electric beam discloses her and holds her in the full radiance of the searchlight. Then the rapid-firing guns on the warship spit out explosive shells, and if enough hit the mark the chances are that torpedo boat will not fire any more Whiteheads. An impression has gone abroad that a torpedo is shot under water. The fact is the torpedo is ejected from a tube which is mounted on a standard bolted to the deck. The tube may be swung around and has a vertical motion, so that the inclination may be varied. The torpedo is ejected by a charge of four ounces of black powder, just enough to throw the automobile projectile into the water. When once in the sea the screw propeller drives it to the mark at the rate of 29 knots—nearly 34 miles—an hour. The Whitehead torpedo has a shape somewhat like a Londres cigar. It is 11 feet 8 inches long, and, to be exact, 17.7 inches at its greatest diameter. When loaded it weighs 839 pounds. The shell is of steel. Propulsion is effected by compressed air, 7,154 cubic feet of which are stored up in the “air

The Whitehead torpedo has a shape somewhat like a Londres cigar.

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flask” under the enormous pressure of 1,350 pounds to the square inch. Although built up in five sections, the torpedo is divided into three parts—the head, or the exploding end; the “air flask,” the central part, and the “after body,” in which is the propelling and steering machinery. There are two heads—the “exercise” head and the “war” head—and they are interchangeable. The exercise head is used for practice; it is of steel and is ballasted with lead and water. The war head is made of phosphor bronze and contains 90 pounds of wet gun cotton and a “primer case” for the dry gun-cotton primer. The “war nose,” which contains the firing mechanism, occupies the forward end of the primer case. While the principal object in “firing” a torpedo is to blow up a hostile ship, it is equally important to prevent the torpedo exploding near the torpedo boat. So the firing mechanism performs a double service. It keeps the torpedo a harmless shell until it is at least 75 yards from the launching point, and it explodes the gun cotton when the war nose rubs up against the bottom of the enemy’s ship. The device which does this is regulated by a small four-bladed screw fan on the extreme bow point of the war nose. The fan is revolved by the resistance of the water as the steel fish darts ahead. When the prescribed distance is covered the mechanism driven by the screw fan sets the “firing pin” in a position to strike the detonating cap of the primer case when the torpedo comes in contact with the target. Air pipes lead from the air flask to the engine and suitable valves reduce the storage pressure to the required working pressure. The “engine room” of the torpedo contains the main or driving engine, the “valve group,” the “steering engine,” and sinking and locking gears. The ingenuity displayed in condensing and compressing this nested mechanism so that it has working room in the torpedo seems little short of marvelous when it is remembered that the indicated horse-power of the engine is 60. The engine is a three-cylinder single-acting one, the cylinders arranged around the crank shaft at an angle of 120 degrees apart. The engine begins working at low speed, while the torpedo is in the air between the ejecting tube and the water. But the instant the shell enters the water a steel flap is swept backward by the resistance of the water, and the throttle is thrown wide open. The torpedo is driven by two two-bladed 12-inch propellers—one is keyed to the main shaft and the other to a hollow shaft. By means of bevel gears these screws are revolved in opposite directions, and other things being equal the torpedo is kept on a straight course without the use of vertical rudders. By a combination of horizontal rudders, a pendulum, and a hydrostatic piston, the torpedo can be made to swim horizontally at a required depth, generally five feet below the surface. Provision is made to sink a torpedo carrying a war head, in case it misses its mark, for if left to float around a friendly ship might foul it and never know what it struck. So holes are bored in the walls of the buoyancy chamber. During a run little or no water enters the holes, but when the torpedo stops the water fills the chamber, the torpedo sinks, and $2,500 is lost. MHQ

ARTISTS

DEMING’S LAST STAND

When it came to portraying Native Americans, he was as much a poet as a painter. By Pamela D. Toler

D. C. WARD/THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL

On June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and five companies of the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry died at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The road to Custer’s death began in the early 1870s with the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota, an area the Sioux tribes considered sacred. Recent treaties with the U.S. government guaranteed Sioux control of the region, but gold changed everything. When it proved impossible to keep prospectors and settlers out, the U.S. Army decided to remove the Native American tribes instead. Custer and the 7th Cavalry were part of a three-pronged strategy to encircle the Sioux and drive them from their treaty territory. When Custer’s scouts reported the discovery of a Sioux village, he divided his 12 companies into three battalions, keeping five companies with him to face a Native American force that turned out to be larger than estimated. His decision proved fatal. Little Bighorn was insignificant in military terms, but artists turned Custer’s death into an emblem of the Indian Wars that shaped America’s westward expansion. The battle is one of the most frequently illustrated military actions in U.S. history, giving it a mythic status. The first image of the battle appeared on July 19, only weeks after Custer’s death: a full-page illustration in the New York Daily Graphic titled The Battle on the Little Big Horn River—The Death Struggle of General Custer. More than 300 depictions of the scene have been produced since then. Every major artist with an interest in Western themes painted at least one work exploring the events of Custer’s death. But among them, illustrator, painter, and sculptor Edwin Willard Deming was particularly well-suited to the task. Edwin Willard Deming (1860–1942) was 16 when Custer and his men died at the Little Bighorn. He had already begun to develop the relationships with Native American tribes on which his later reputation as a knowledgeable interpreter of their life and religion would be based. The Deming family’s farm in northeast Illinois was near the traditional lands of the Sac and Fox Nation, and Indians often returned to the area in the winter to hunt and trap. Deming grew up playing with Indian children and listening to their fathers’ stories about the past. He had shown talent as an artist from an early age. He modeled statuettes of native wildlife from clay that he dug from the banks of the creek and sketched on whatever scraps of paper came to hand. He even earned a

For many years Edwin Willard Deming would live with different native American tribes in the summer and fall—frequently with his wife and their six children—and return to New York City in the winter to paint.

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EDWIN WILLARD DEMING commission from a neighboring farmer to paint an eagle on the side of his barn. In 1879, three years after Custer’s battle, Deming made an extended visit to the tribes in the Indian Territory. When he arrived by stagecoach in what is now White Eagle, Oklahoma, he was carrying oil paints and a letter from the U.S. Interior Department (perhaps procured through the influence of a family friend), instructing agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to help him with his studies. It seems likely that Deming was already considering a career painting scenes of Native American life. Deming’s father insisted that he become a lawyer instead. After three miserable months as a law student in Chicago, Deming returned home determined to become an artist. For two years he worked alongside his father on the family farm, spent his spare time sketching, and raised a pony herd that he would use to finance art lessons. In 1882 he sold the ponies and traveled east to study at the Art Students League of New York, in Manhattan. After a year there, he moved on to Paris and the community of international students at the Académie Julian. In Paris he was introduced to the romantic realism of Gustave Boulanger’s Orientalist painting and the proto-impressionist landscapes of Barbizon school painters such as François Millet and Camille Corot. Both styles would influence his work. But Deming’s interest in Native American themes remained strong. “I have been thinking about painting Indian subjects, as there are a great many incidents [in history] that would make splendid subjects for a picture,” he wrote in a letter to his family in January 1885. Back in the United States, Deming found work in Chicago, painting horses on cycloramas of the Battle of Gettysburg. For two years he “fought the Battle of Gettysburg,” as he once put it, and then returned to New York City, where he earned a living making Native American and Western illustrations for The Youth’s Companion, a boy’s magazine. He didn’t stay for long. Hearing “the call of the wild,” Deming later wrote, he headed west again, this time to the Apache reservation in Arizona. For many years thereafter he lived with different Native American tribes in the summer and fall and returned to New York to paint in the winter. When he married, in 1892, he and his wife spent their honeymoon on a yearlong trip camping with the tribes of New Mexico and Arizona. Later they would take their six children with them on similar trips.

Deming’s father insisted that he become a lawyer, not an artist.

By 1891 Deming was a recognized artist. In addition to illustrations, he received commissions for murals, watercolors, and oil paintings from wealthy individuals and institutions like the American Museum of Natural History, which commissioned Deming to paint a mural series for its Plains Indians Hall. His

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studio became a gathering place for politicians, visiting Native Americans, displaced Westerners, explorers, writers, artists, photographers, and others interested in Native American cultures, including Theodore Roosevelt, who was a frequent visitor. Unlike Western painters Frederic Remington, Charles Russell, and Charles Schreyvogel, his contemporaries and professional peers, Deming specialized in scenes of Native American life. His works often have the narrative focus typical of Western painting, but their soft colors and impressionistic style give them a feeling often described as poetic. In 1906 a review in The Collector and Art Critic placed Deming among the top Western artists of the day: “While Schreyvogel gives us the strenuosity of army life at the frontier, and Remington depicts illustratively many interesting scenes, we must turn to Deming for a true combination of artistic quality and the typifying of a passing race.” A reviewer for the New York Post was more emphatic: “One might say that Mr. Remington has seen the story of the hard-pressed native along the sights of a rifle, and Mr. Deming wrapped in one of their own blankets.” For the most part, Deming painted scenes of Native American religious practices and everyday life. But he was also drawn to traditional historical subjects, generally choosing those that aligned with his conviction that “the white man owes the red man a debt greater than he can ever repay and is in honor bound to record as true a history of the oldtime Indian as possible.” In Braddock’s Defeat (1903), an event in the French and Indian War, French irregulars and their Native American allies fill the foreground and center of the canvas, while British general Edwin Braddock falls from his horse in the misty distance. In Bird Woman Sacajawea Meeting Lewis and Clark on the Upper Missouri (1904), Sacajawea is the focal point of the work. In The Landfall of Jean Nicolet (1907), the viewer shares the perspective of the Menomonee tribesmen who watch the French explorer step onto Wisconsin soil. The same subtle shift in emphasis also shapes Deming’s Custer paintings. Deming first explored the possibilities of depicting Custer’s death on a visit to the Crow Reservation in South Dakota in 1887. While there, he made studies of the country around the Little Bighorn and interviewed Crow warriors who had served with the 7th Cavalry in the Indian Wars. His interest in the subject solidified two years later, when he visited the Sioux Agency at Standing Rock, North Dakota, and met a number of Native Americans who had fought against Custer. While there he listened to the Sioux version of the Indian Wars. He also made portraits of Chief Gall, Sitting Bull, and Rain in the Face—who signed his portrait with a sketch of thunder, lightning, and rain pouring into a representation of his face. Deming is known to have painted at least three versions of Custer’s final battle: a 20-by-22-inch oil painting (1904), now in the collection of the Buffalo Bill Museum in Golden, Colorado; a second version to illustrate an article he wrote in 1926, on the 50th anniversary of the battle, for The Mentor magazine (Custer’s Last Stand: The Indians’ Version of the Massacre); and a 34-by-60-inch oil (1926), owned by the Deming family.

BUFFALO BILL MUSEUM AND GRAVE, GOLDEN, COLORADO

Deming is known to have painted at least three versions of Custer’s final battle, including the 20-by-22-inch oil canvas shown here, which he completed in 1904.

Although the paintings differ in details of weaponry and costume, all three focus on what Deming described as “the grand charge that ended the fight.” In each one, a Sioux warrior in an eagle-feather war bonnet replaces Custer as the focus of the action. In the foreground, a Sioux warrior plunges to the ground over the head of his falling horse, his rifle still in his grasp. The painting now at the Buffalo Bill Museum in Colorado originally appeared in the September 1904 issue of Pearson’s Magazine. In it, the mounted Sioux warrior is poised to spear Custer with a lance. Below him, the unhorsed Custer defends himself with saber in one hand and revolver in the other. A second mounted Sioux, riding parallel to the main figure, aims his rifle at Custer. Behind Custer, the force of the Sioux charge has pushed a small cluster of soldiers to the right edge of the canvas and partway out of the frame. Despite the inherent violence of the scene, Deming draws on the same color palette and soft lines that he uses in his more peaceful work. The palette is muted, except for the blood-red accents on the central Sioux warrior’s head and waist and the brilliant blue of the sky.

In the two later versions, Deming moves the composition to the left and increases the space between the Sioux warriors and Custer’s men. The mounted warrior in the war bonnet remains the dominant figure in the picture, while Custer is absorbed into the middle of the cavalry, first among equals rather than a solitary hero. Custer’s men occupy a larger portion of the canvas and are no longer pushed beyond the frame. As a result, the forward momentum of the charge is lost, and with it the sense of Custer’s inevitable demise. Deming shifts the focus from Custer’s doomed force toward the Sioux warriors. And yet it is impossible to forget that while the Sioux won the Battle of the Little Bighorn, they ultimately lost the war. “The Indian of the old time has passed away,” as Deming wrote “and we have certainly very little to be proud of in our dealing with him.” MHQ Pamela D. Toler writes frequently about history and the arts. She is the author of Heroines of Mercy Street: The Real Nurses of the Civil War (Little, Brown and Company, 2016). MHQ Winter 2017

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POETRY

THE BALLAD OF OLD JOE

By Damon Runyon

WITH DICKMAN TO THE RHINE Yes, ‘twas a wonderful trip, sir, with wonderful sights to see; Sights that I’ll tell me kids about when I take ’em upon my knee. When I’m an old bird with whiskers I’ll lift those kids of mine, And tell how I hiked with Dickman—old Joe Dickman—to the Rhine! Many a thing I remember well, Especially hearing someone yell: “FALL OUT! FALL IN! FORWARD, MARCH!” Scenery there was plenty, sir, the like I never have seen; Some of it struck me as brownish-like, and some of it mighty green. Some of the roads were muddy, sir, and some of them pretty fine, As I hiked up with Dickman—old Joe Dickman—to the Rhine! Went right through with all our bands, And ran the army on three commands: “FALL OUT! FALL IN! FORWARD, MARCH!” We started from Etain, sir, a most historic town— It wasn’t so very far from there our slum-gun busted down. And we were short on eats, sir, from there on up the line, When I hiked up with Dickman—old Joe Dickman—to the Rhine! And the thing that I remember well Was hearing our young captain yell: “FALL OUT! FALL IN! FORWARD, MARCH!”

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Yes, ‘twas a long hard trip, sir; as hard as I’ve ever found; And often the seat of my pants, sir, were sort o’ dragging the ground. And sometimes I rather thought, sir, that it didn’t quite seem so fine, To be hiking along with Dickman—old Joe Dickman—to the Rhine! I wonder if Old Joe’s the bird Who gave that war-cry to the Third: “FALL OUT! FALL IN! FORWARD, MARCH!” Think of the things we saw, sir, and the history that we made! Longwy? Why, it was near there we struck a hell of a grade! And there was a place in Athus that sold some pretty good wine. As I hike up with Dickman—old Joe Dickman—to the Rhine! And what sticks to my memory Is hearing someone yell at me: “FALL OUT! FALL IN! FORWARD, MARCH!” Remember the Moselle River? Well, I should say I do— ‘Twas there at Wasserbillig that I got a stone in my shoe. And Trier? Why, at Trier a Fraulein was teaching me “yah” and “nein,” As I hike up with Dickman—old Joe Dickman—to the Rhine! And I was teaching her to say The words that I heard every day: “FALL OUT! FALL IN! FORWARD, MARCH!” Castles? Well, yes, some castles. The Boche was good at them arts; But most of them all mussed up, sir, like castles get in these parts. And many a roadside joint, sir, where I bought my beer in a stein As I hike up with Dickman—old Joe Dickman—to the Rhine! And the thing I never will forget Was hearing as I hike and sweat: “FALL OUT! FALL IN! FORWARD, MARCH!” Yes, sir, I hiked with Dickman, sir, and I’ll say I hiked far; I say I hiked with Dickman, sir, though Dickman hiked by car. No, sir, I never saw him, but I know he’ll think it’s fine To hear that I was with him, sir—with Dickman to the Rhine! And he’ll be pleased to know that I Will always recollect that cry: “FALL OUT! FALL IN! FORWARD, MARCH!”

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

Damon Runyon was born in Kansas in 1884 and grew up in Pueblo, Colorado. He enlisted in the U.S. Army at the age of 14 and was sent to the Philippines to fight in the SpanishAmerican War. He returned from the war to work as a newspaperman, and by 1911 he was the baseball columnist for the Hearst newspaper chain. One year, while covering spring training in Texas, Runyon met Pancho Villa in a bar, and in 1916 he covered Brigadier General John J. Pershing’s unsuccessful expedition into Mexico to capture Villa. Runyon went to Europe in World War I as a Hearst correspondent. One of his dispatches, bearing a dateline of “Coblenz, Germany, 1918,” was this poem about Major General Joseph T. Dickman, the commander of the Third Army.

Damon Runyon first earned fame as a war correspondent and columnist for the Hearst newspapers. After Runyon’s death in New York City in 1946, Eddie Rickenbacker, the legendary World War I flying ace, scattered his friend’s ashes over Broadway from a DC-3 airplane.

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CAUSES AND EFFECTS

Spain in Our Hearts Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 By Adam Hochschild. 438 pages. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. $30. Reviewed by Kevin Baker

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It was the cause of a generation, the foreign war for which more Americans volunteered than any other in our history. The Spanish Civil War, as Adam Hochschild makes clear in this outstanding history, reshaped everyone and everything it touched. Many individuals and institutions we would prefer to revere— among them the Catholic Church, the European democracies, American business leaders, the press, President Franklin Roosevelt and his government—behaved abominably, while many devoted to the worst causes, such as Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, nobly met the challenge. Hochschild is plainly sympathetic to the left-wing “Republican” (Loyalist) side that was the democratically elected Spanish government. But he does not look away from its outrages: the murder of more than 7,000 members of Spain’s Catholic clergy, the burning of hundreds of churches and cathedrals, and the purges by its Stalinist secret police. The rebelling Falangists— the Spanish fascists politely known as “Nationalists”—ran up a much higher body count, shooting prisoners and murdering thousands of peasants, workers, and “intellectuals.” The Falangist leader, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, a shabby, potbellied psychopath, openly endorsed terror bombing, mass looting, and

rape as weapons of war. The Catholic Church enthusiastically supported all this and worse. While Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini provided tanks, warplanes, submarines, and troops—without which Franco undoubtedly would have been defeated—the Western democracies did almost nothing to help the Republicans. It is unlikely that Roosevelt could have done as much as Hochschild implies he could have to actively intervene on their behalf. But it is inexcusable, as Hochschild makes clear, that his administration ignored the machinations of Torkild Rieber, the pro-Fascist chairman of Texaco, who provided Franco with free oil, conveyed it in his company’s tankers (in violation of U.S. law), and used his company’s maritime intelligence network to betray Republican supply ships to Mussolini’s submarines. The silence of the democracies left the Republicans dependent on the Soviet Union, which supplied them with arms and advisers in exchange for nearly threefourths of Spain’s gold reserves as well as a frightening campaign of political trials and executions. What was left, then, was only the courage of the people who could not countenance the rape of Spain, the thousands of men and women from all over the Western

world who joined the International Brigades. Hochschild focuses on a handful of subjects—among them an ambulance driver, a nurse, and several journalists, including Ernest Hemingway, then a swaggering correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance. One wishes that Hochschild had cast his net a little wider, but that would not have allowed for the shining courage and tenacity that he draws out of his subjects’ narratives. While the Spanish valued these men and women, they were often sacrificed to the confusion and exigencies of the war: thrown into suicidal assaults, barely trained and equipped, and provided with little in the way of food, shelter, or proper medical care. They bore up anyway and helped keep the Republic alive for an astonishingly long time. And for their efforts, they were often treated as nearcriminals in the McCarthyist years after World War II. The volunteers who came to Spain were mostly dedicated socialists and communists, and Hochschild doesn’t hesitate to explore their naïveté or their at times willfully blind obedience to the Moscow party line. Almost all his subjects, though, are heartbreakingly American types. Even Hemingway, for all his macho bombast, proved to be serious about his work there and was genuinely affected

Ernest Hemingway, who went to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance, visits soldiers on the front lines in Teruel in December 1937.

ROBERT CAPA/MAGNUM

when the shot-up International Brigades were pulled out of Spain, shouting “They can’t do it! They can’t do it!” before bursting into tears. Hochschild makes us feel like doing the same today. Kevin Baker is a novelist, historian, and journalist. His most recent book is America the Ingenious: How a Nation of Dreamers, Immigrants, and Tinkerers Changed the World (Artisan, 2016).

Grunt The Curious Science of Humans at War

By Mary Roach. 285 pages. W. W. Norton, 2016. $26.95. Reviewed by Ron Soodalter War isn’t supposed to be funny. But when science writer Mary Roach takes on a subject, readers can assume she will find a fair amount of

humor in it. So it is with Grunt, the latest of her insightful and often irreverent investigations of offbeat topics, which have included some that most people avoid, such as the afterlife of cadavers (Stiff), and the passage of food from the mouth to, well, its final destination (Gulp). Grunt examines the military’s drive to equip, protect, and maximize the performance of soldiers in the field. Roach begins by looking at the “chicken gun,” a long-barreled piece of artillery that hurls dead chickens

at unmanned airplanes to help the U.S. Air Force figure out how to prevent “birdstrikes” that cause tens of millions of dollars in damage, and many human casualties, every year. Roach goes on to cover such subjects as the difficulties involved in outfitting soldiers in uniforms that are at once protective, comfortable, and sporty; efforts to “uparmor” land vehicles so their crews can survive IED and RPG attacks; the harmful as well as beneficial effects of flies and maggots in military MHQ Winter 2017

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settings; and the development of the stink bomb. Roach isn’t afraid to face what she calls “unpretty facts”—to broach subjects that many of us have secretly wondered about, such as bowel movements under battle conditions (covered in her chapter on how the architects of secret ops missions plan for such gastrointestinal eventualities as diarrhea). Light though her tone often is, Roach takes a serious approach when it is called for. She devotes an entire chapter—“Below the Belt: The Cruelest Shot of All”—to the reconstructive surgery required to repair or re-create the penis when it has been damaged or destroyed in combat. Her final chapter, “Feedback From the Fallen,” is a jarring study of military autopsies, which analyzes not only injuries to the victim but also the methods used in attempting to save him or her. (Today, everyone killed in U.S. military service receives an autopsy.) Although Roach describes herself as a “goober with a flashlight,” she certainly is much more than that, skilled as she is in presenting complex scientific information in an easy conversational style. Grunt not only entertains and informs but also answers, along the way, more than a few questions that in less capable hands might go unanswered. Ron Soodalter, a frequent contributor to MHQ, is the author of Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader.

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America’s War for the Greater Middle East A Military History By Andrew Bacevich. 453 pages. Random House, 2016. $30. Reviewed by Michael S. Neiberg

Readers familiar with Andrew Bacevich’s work will know him as a perceptive and sharply critical analyst of U.S. grand strategy in the Middle East. In America’s War for the Greater Middle East he is at his best, examining our strategic missteps in the region. Bacevich’s deconstruction of what has gone wrong for the United States there is devastating, though he is careful to put failed decisions into the proper historical, political, and social contexts. The problems he identifies are therefore failures of the American system as much as they are the results of the poor choices by our nation’s leaders. Bacevich, a professor of international relations and history at Boston University, identifies four flawed assumptions that have shaped our approach. Most fundamentally, he writes, Americans have assumed that their historical narrative is not only the correct one for the Middle East but also one shared by people in the region. Having defeated fascism and communism, we think that radical Islam or false constructs like “Islamofascism” are merely the next incarnations of evil. Second, Americans have

presumed that technological superiority and military might are appropriate instruments for dealing with political and social problems in the Middle East. Third, Americans have seen military power as an appropriate way to bring democracy to a region that has never really experienced it, failing to recognize how brute force in such a tinderbox can have deadly unintended consequences. Finally, by presuming that their own vision will inevitably prevail, Americans have not seen themselves as fighting against laws of history. Bacevich’s lucid and compelling book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why American forces have so often ended up in the region—and why it is so difficult for them to leave. Michael S. Neiberg is chair of war studies at the U.S. Army War College.

The Winter Fortress The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler’s Atomic Bomb

By Neal Bascomb. 400 pages. Houghton Mifflin, 2016. $28. Reviewed by Richard A. Gabriel A curious paradox of writing is that historians rarely write novels and novelists almost

never write history. Occasionally, however, a writer combines historical research with a riveting narrative to produce a first-rate work of nonfiction. Neal Bascomb’s The Winter Fortress is just such a book. It’s a fast-paced adventure tale about how Norwegian and British commandos tried to destroy the heavy water plant at Vemork, Norway, during World War II, crippling the Nazi atomic bomb program by denying it this crucial element. Through Bascomb we meet the Norwegian patriots who, making their way to England after the Germans have occupied their country, enlist in the British Special Operations Executive. We come to know their difficult training as commandos, their deployment by parachute in the winter night, and their struggle to survive the punishing weather of the Norwegian tundra as they prepare to assault the Vemork plant. We can almost feel the cold, hunger, and fear that these brave men endured for love of country. In the end, not all of them survive the war or its psychological aftermath. Owing to Bascomb’s skillful storytelling, this is sure to leave many readers with a sense of personal loss. Richard A. Gabriel is a professor of history and war studies at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario.

Yank in the SS Maori Warriors Revolution Prequel War on the Great Wall Over by Christmas? Rangel on Vets HistoryNet.com

THE FACE OF EVIL?

MASSACRE AT BATAK EXPOSES OTTOMAN BARBARISM

JANUARY 2017

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

DRAWN & QUARTERED

BEFORE KONG THERE WAS... Who wouldn’t be terrified by German aggression in World War I after seeing this U.S. Army recruitment poster? Created by artist Harry R. Hopps in 1917, it depicts a barbaric, drooling, ape-like monster—mustachioed in the style of Kaiser Wilhelm II and wearing a German pickelhaube— stepping onto the shores of America. The rampaging beast carries the limp, half-naked body of a woman in one arm and brandishes a bloodied club with the other.

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“GIVE ME 80 MEN AND I CAN RIDE THROUGH THE WHOLE SIOUX NATION.” —U.S. Army captain William J. Fetterman, 1866 page 20

WINTER 2017 VOLUME 29, NUMBER 2