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WORLD
WAR II
Ma r ch /A pr il 2015 FEATURES C O V E R S T ORY
Out of Time
The Last Cavalry Charge
The USS Hornet had a date with destiny. So did a Marine defending the aircraft carrier
Outnumbered and outgunned, the U.S. Army’s 26th Cavalry Regiment battled the future—and won
STAN LELAND
DAVID SEARS
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48
Looking for Trouble
WEA PONS MA NUA L
Irregular forces Britain sent against the Afrika Korps included hard-charging Jewish volunteers
America’s BAR
GAVIN MORTIMER
JIM LAURIER
34
56
P O R T F OLIO
They Just Said No
Ghosts of Kiska
Even in a war between good and evil, not everyone was willing to take up arms
Lifetimes later, the war still exerts an eerie presence in the Aleutians BRENDAN COYLE
40
The Browning Automatic Rifle was an armload of automatic equalizer
RACHEL S. COX
58
2WORLDWARII.COM 2 World War II magazine @WWIImag
THESE PAGES AND COVER: NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Endorsed by The National World War II Museum, Inc.
DEPARTMENTS Weider Reader
From the Footlocker Curators at The National World War II Museum solve readers’ artifact mysteries
Reviews Nazis and Islam, George Marshall in focus, Japanese suicide subs
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World War II Today U.S. used Nazi spies; Hitler’s drug habit; Bf 109 flies again; John Nagl’s Reading List
Fire for Effect Northern Exposure
Battle Films The Big Red One: How Sam Fuller Made His War a Movie
6 Mail
10 Conversation Black GIs in Italy fought Hitler with one hand and Jim Crow with the other
ROBERT M. CITINO
23 Time Travel The Lane Victory Carries On
MARK GRIMSLEY
75
LIESL BRADNER
Challenge Dumb ol’ Dirty Dozen
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79
GENE SANTORO
Pinup
16
80
Swerving to evade attackers on October 26, 1942, the USS Hornet heels sharply to starboard, in a course marked by the wake in the foreground and at the stern. ON THE COVER: The Hornet six months earlier, en route to launching a flight of B-25s against Japan in the April 18, 1942, Doolittle Raid.
Contributors
W EIDER H ISTORY EDITOR IN CHIEF
Roger L. Vance
Vol. 29, No. 6 EDITOR
BRA D NE R
COX
CO YL E
MARCH/APRIL 2015
Karen Jensen Cynthia Currie
Art Director
Michael Dolan
Senior Editor
Guy Aceto
Photo Editor
Bridgett Henwood
Associate Editor
Jon Guttman
Research Director
Paul Wiseman
News Editor
David Zabecki
Senior Historian
ADVISORY BOARD Ed Drea, David Glantz, Jeffery Grey, John McManus, Williamson Murray, Dennis Showalter, Keith Huxen
DIGITAL
Brian King Gerald Swick Barbara Justice
PRESIDENT & CEO Eric Weider Bruce Forman LE LA ND
M ORTIM ER
Director Editor Senior Graphic Designer
Chief Operating Officer
SEARS Karen G. Johnson Business Director
Liesl Bradner (“Time Travel”) is a Los
Angeles-based journalist. A contributing writer and editor for the Los Angeles Times and Truthdig, she has also written for the Guardian and Variety. She is an advisor for the West Los Angeles Veterans Home Support Foundation. Rachel S. Cox (“They Just Said No”) is a
freelance journalist based in Washington, DC. Her book, Into Dust and Fire: Five Young Americans Who Went First to Fight the Nazi Army, was published in 2012. She is currently at work on a biography of John Gilbert Winant, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom during World War II. Her web site is rachelscox.com. Brendan Coyle (“Ghosts of Kiska”) is a
resident of British Columbia, Canada, and works as an estimator in the ship repair industry. To visit Kiska, Coyle signed on as a field assistant to a biologist studying native Aleutian seabirds. He has written three books on World War II on North America’s west coast, including Kiska: The Japanese Occupation of an Alaska Island. Stan Leland (“Out of Time”) is a long-
time history buff and has recently begun interviewing veterans and writing their 4
WORLD WAR II
stories, including one appearing in the February 2015 issue of Weider History’s Vietnam magazine. In December 2012 he interviewed Lou Carnaghi and created the narrative that became “Out of Time.” Lou died as Leland was writing the article. Leland is a member of the Airborne Demonstration Team, a World War II living history group, and a living history volunteer at the National Museum of the Pacific War. Gavin Mortimer (“Asking for Trouble”),
the author of more than a dozen books on military warfare, specializes in World War II special forces. The British writer’s history of Merrill’s Marauders debuted in 2013; his next work, The Men Who Made The SAS: The History of the Long Range Desert Group in WW2, will be published in June 2015. David Sears (“The U.S. Cavalry’s Last
Charge”) is a New Jersey-based author and historian who writes frequently for Weider History publications. His World War II books include Pacific Air, At War with the Wind, and The Last Epic Naval Battle. Sears was particularly honored to have interviewed Dominador “Dan” Figuracion, who may be the last living U.S. Cavalry veteran to have charged into battle on horseback.
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WE I D E R R E A DE R A sampling of decisive moments, remarkable adventures, memorable characters, surprising encounters, and great ideas from our sister publications
MILITARY HISTORY
AMERICAN HISTORY
AVIATION HISTORY
Hard Traveling
Movie Night at the Roosevelts’
Bug with a Bite
Ten weeks after hitting Oahu, the same Japanese carrier group struck Darwin, Australia. February 19, 1942, dawned hot and humid in Australia’s Northern Territory. Father John McGrath was working outside near his Catholic mission at Nguiu, across from the port of Darwin, when he heard airplane engines. Through breaks in the clouds, he saw a large formation of aircraft. Besides tending souls, McGrath was a coastwatcher—one of several hundred military and civilian observers around northern Oz and the South Pacific who kept eyes peeled for suspicious ships or aircraft. The Japanese had landed in the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies and New Guinea, invaded Thailand and Malaya, and taken Hong Kong. Four days ago, Singapore had fallen. Most Australians believed their country was next. Unsure of what he was seeing, McGrath ran to a hut in a citrus orchard where he kept a pedalpowered radio transmitter. Once the set warmed up, he sent Darwin a warning. Within minutes six Zero fighters of the Imperial Japanese Navy swooped from the clouds, methodically machine-gunning a civilian transport plane parked on the mission airstrip. That was nothing compared to what was about to befall Darwin. From “Australia’s Pearl Harbor,” by Stephan Wilkinson, in the March 2015 issue
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In 1937 Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn screened their documentary, The Spanish Earth, at the White House. Hemingway recounted the evening in a letter to his mother-in-law. “Mrs. Roosevelt is enormously tall, very charming and almost stone deaf,” he wrote. “She hears practically nothing that is said to her but is so charming that most people do not notice it. The president is very Harvard charming and sexless and womanly, seems like a great Woman Secretary of Labor, say. He is completely paralyzed from the waist down and there is much skillful manoevering [sic] of him into the chair and from room to room. The White House, when we were there, was very hot, no air conditioning except in the President’s study, and the food was the worst I’ve ever eaten. (This is between us. As a guest cannot criticize.) We had rainwater soup followed by rubber squab, a nice wilted salad and a cake some admirer had sent in. An enthusiastic but unskilled admirer.” The Roosevelts liked the film. “They both were very moved by the Spanish Earth picture,” Hemingway wrote, “but both said we should put more propaganda in it.”
De Havilland’s versatile Wooden Wonder racked up an admirable combat record in jack time. Of the hundreds of types of aircraft flown during World War II, every fancier could list the dozen most iconic. Spitfire, P-51, Zero, Stuka, Bf 109, PBY, B-17, Corsair, Lancaster, B-29, Fw 190, Me 262…the roster is nearly endless, and rarely duplicative. But it’s a fair bet that many would include the Timber Terror, the Loping Lumberyard, the Wooden Wonder— also known as the de Havilland Mosquito. One could argue that no plane amassed as remarkable a combat record in so short a time as the Mosquito. It entered the war relatively late—a year to the day after the Battle of Britain ended—but with technology and aerodynamics far advanced beyond the Spitfire’s. Certainly no airplane flew as many different kinds of missions and performed them as well as the Mosquito, one of the world’s first successful multirole combat aircraft. The Tornado strives to be its successor; the F-35 should be so lucky. From “The Miraculous Mosquito,” by Stephan Wilkinson, in the March 2015 issue
From “Hemingway Catches a Movie With the Roosevelts,” by Peter Carlson, in the April 2015 issue To subscribe to any Weider History magazine, call 1 (800) 435-0715 or go to HistoryNet.com
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YOUR VOTES FOR MOST OVERRATED LEADER
tion to be asked, a field for more fruitful research, would be, “Who are the underrated leaders of World War II?” David H. Lippman Newark, N.J. 35% Montgomery
23% MacArthur
Good Old Seabees
6% de Gaulle
6% Halsey
6% Hitler
6% Yamamoto
I was in the Marines in Vietnam and can tell you the Seabees are a great outfit. Can’t resist telling you an old World War II Marine Corps joke, though: Never hit a Seabee, he might be your grandfather! Edward M. Landry Lynn, Mass.
Look-alike Weapons 3% Bradley
3% Clark
3% Eisenhower
The Best of the Worst Our expert historians picked 16 nominees for November/December 2014’s “Who Was the War’s Most Overrated Leader?” Those 16 weren’t enough for readers, who added Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, American Admiral William Frederick Halsey, American Major General Lloyd R. Fredendall, and Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo to the list. Some choice comments follow. Bernard Montgomery. All of the candi-
dates had their periods of idiocy but Montgomery was consistent in his. David Williams, via email Douglas MacArthur. But he served the
public’s need for a hero. Nathanial Maccabees via Facebook Despite his reputation as a genius of naval strategy, Isoroku Yamamoto was such a pathetic bungler that that idiot
3% Fredendall
3% Patton
3% Tojo
President Roosevelt should have done everything possible to keep him alive. Joseph B. Stahl New Orleans, La.
The caption for the photo of Private First Class Bob Fincher describes the rifle propped against the sand bags as a Japanese Arisaka (“Victory Fever at the Tenaru,” November/December 2014). I’m writing to differ. The rifle propped against the sand bags is a U.S. M1903 Springfield
Charles de Gaulle built himself up and
sold himself to the French people as their savior. He was so arrogant, and presented himself as winner of the war. Ron Howard, via email I read your article and found it interesting, but I think the whole question of “most overrated leader of World War II” is by itself overrated. It’s a bit like the questions amateur historians and buffs ask on discussion groups: “Who’s cooler? Patton or Rommel? Prove it.” All of these leaders at some point, were overrated. They were human beings and capable of mistakes, and they made plenty of them. And millions of human beings paid the price. The debate can go on and on. Again, “Prove it.” Can’t be done. So to me, as a historian, a better ques-
FROM TOP: GEORGE RODGER/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION, NATIONAL ARCHIVES, © THE PRINT COLLECTOR/ALAMY, NATIONAL ARCHIVES, © BETTMANN/CORBIS, GETTY, POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES, NATIONAL ARCHIVES, BOB LANDRY/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION, NATIONAL ARCHIVES, NATIONAL ARCHIVES, NATIONAL ARCHIVES; BOTTOM, COURTESY OF WILLIAM H. BARTSCH
with a M1905 bayonet affixed, the principle rifle the Marines were armed with when they landed on Guadalcanal. Tom Campbell Vail, Ariz.
Tenaru Treasures Last year I visited Guadalcanal and saw the Alligator Creek sandbar across which MARCH/APRIL 2015
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Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki’s men charged into the U.S. lines (“Victory Fever at the Tenaru”). I was standing where the Japanese began their charge when a young man paddled up to me with a GI dog tag he had found buried near the U.S. lines (right). After haggling, I bought it for $100 Solomon dollars, about $13 U.S. With the help of my OSS Society colleagues, I was able to locate the family of U.S. Army Private Everett W. Hancock, and returned it to them on board the USS North Carolina in Wilmington, North Carolina. On Bloody Ridge the U.S. barbed wire still stands, and on the Gifu foxholes and spent ammo are everywhere. Bill Coulson Glenview, Ill.
Corrections Many readers wrote in to take us to task for a misnamed gun—the result of editing
GI dog tags still resurface at Guadalcanal’s Alligator Creek sandbar.
errors—in William H. Bartsch’s “Victory Fever at the Tenaru.” Here’s our favorite: Reading “Victory Fever at the Tenaru” made me think of a close friend and coworker: Robert Spencer (he passed about eight years ago). Bob went in on D+3 and
fought until wounded in Belgium. Betcha Bob would have said “Whiskey-TangoFoxtrot?” about page 62 and its reference to a machine gunner tilting a “30-caliber water-cooled Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR)” and raking targets “at 125 rounds a minute.” You see, Bob carried the Browning Automatic Rifle. He said the aircooled, gas-operated BAR was damn heavy. Even unloaded it was 20 pounds and when loaded, with bipod and all they were required to carry, it neared 25 pounds. Quite the load, even for a strapping 18-year-old. (See “Murderously Mobile,” page 56.) I can just picture Bob, with that twinkle
Straight Shooters The brass revolver identified as a piece of trench art in the “From the Footlocker” section of the November/December 2014 issue (below) is actually a product of the Philippines’ thriving bootleg gun business. Even today knock-off guns still are made in small shops there. There is a word for it: paltik. During World War II many were made for local guerrilla forces. This revolver would require molds and castings and lots of full time work; it was not a spare-time project by a bored sailor. MICHAEL D. LEISTER DOVER, DEL.
Doug Wicklund, senior curator at the NRA National Firearms Museum in Fairfax, Virginia, concurs. “There was definitely a thriving need for expedient arms in the Philippines during
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World War II, when resistance fighters were short of weapons to use against Japanese forces,” Wicklund explains. “This brass-framed revolver likely drew its inspiration from American and British single-shot flare pistols that would have been used by military forces in the Pacific.” When I read the recent “From the Footlocker” my first thought was that it was aptly named because I remembered I had an item like that in my footlocker. In March 1945, I was put in charge of an advance party of my unit, the 308th Airdrome Squadron of the U.S. Army Air Corps, to occupy and set up operations on an airstrip near the northern Philippine city of Laoag, on the island of Luzon. The Philippines’ guerrilla army had recently liberated the airstrip. Our security at Laoag was to be provided by the guerrillas, whom we learned to respect highly during the first few weeks of operation. About two weeks after settling in, I was approached by a man identifying himself
Captain William Bakel (above) received a bootleg gun (opposite) from a guerrilla in the Philippines.
TOP, COURTESY OF BILL COULSON; BOTTOM LEFT, COURTESY OF DAN MARTINEZ; BOTTOM RIGHT AND OPPOSITE, COURTESY OF WILLIAM BAKEL
Churchill and Lincoln – Never Give Up by Lewis E. Lehrman
Churchill had in mind a new verse to the Harrow school song which the students had recently written:
in his eye, saying: “Well, just maybe those boys had a different version of the BAR in the Pacific!” Michael D. Carrico Aloha, Ore. In the same article, Lenard Cresswell was identified as a lieutenant; he was in fact a lieutenant colonel. Also, in “First Blood on the Ghost Front,” the southernmost “422rd Infantry” label in the map should read “423rd Infantry.”
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as a guerrilla who, in broken English, conveyed his thanks for our being in the city, and in appreciation wanted to give me a memento of his friendship. The memento turned out to be a homemade pistol. Upon opening the breech and noting a smooth bore rather than one with rifling—grooves that would put a stabilizing spin on the bullet—I asked, “Shoot straight?” Taking the piece, he closed the breech, cocked it, pushed it into my stomach—demonstrating the range needed for accuracy—and pulled the trigger. With a big grin he replied, “Okay?” Barely able to resist the urge to deck him for a stunt like that, I managed a weak “Okay.” WILLIAM P. BAKEL WICHITA, KANS.
Not less we praise in darker days The leader of our nation, And Churchill’s name shall win acclaim From each new generation.
Winston Churchill celebrating American Thanksgiving, Albert Hall, London, November 23, 1944.
“Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days.” Churchill spoke only one year after Britain had victoriously defended itself against the relentless Luftwaffe bombing of London. But for English bravery, the Battle of Britain could have ended the war before America joined it.
Only four score years before Churchill’s speech at Harrow, Abraham Lincoln, at a time of equally great crisis, had become president of the United States. If attacked, Lincoln was as determined as Churchill to fight. The president would persist in the face of great odds. Lincoln’s public writings and speeches, combined with his persevering example, inspired the nation to wage relentless war for the Union, and for emancipation, until victory in 1865...
TO READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE, VISIT:
www.lincolnandchurchill.org/never-give-up
The War Years They were different men with different backgrounds & very different leadership styles Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill lived through remarkably comparable challenges in cataclysmic wars separated by a mere eight decades. Brilliant writers and communicators, Churchill and Lincoln unified and rallied their nations in order to defeat well-armed challengers whose social ideologies held little respect for human liberty and dignity. A Project of The Lehrman Institute
A Free Website Resource For History Enthusiasts Visit www.LincolnandChurchill.org Today!
MARCH/APRIL 2015
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W W I I T ODA Y
WAR II
Hitler: Cruising on Chemistry
W
U.S. Ran Ex-Nazis as Cold War Spies
D
uring the Cold War the CIA and other American security agencies employed at least 1,000 former Nazis as undercover operatives overseas, calculating that the ex-fascists’ value against the Soviets outweighed what one official called “moral lapses.” As recently as 1995, intelligence agencies were hiding from Congress the size of their complement of former Nazis. New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau unearthed the information for a book, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, published in October. Into the 1950s, the FBI and CIA aggressively recruited former Nazis such as ex-SS officer Otto von Bolschwing, Reported and written by
Paul Wiseman
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who as an aide to Adolf Eichmann wrote handbooks on how to terrorize Jews. The CIA stationed Bolschwing in Europe before rewarding him for what the agency called “loyal postwar service” by moving the agent and his family to New York City in 1954. “They used him, and he used them,” Bolschwing’s son Gus, 75, told the Times. “It shouldn’t have happened. He never should have been admitted to the United States. It wasn’t consistent with our values as a country.” Eventually the father’s wartime record came to light, triggering a prosecution. The elder Bolschwing died within months of surrendering his American citizenship in 1981. The CIA employed Nazi collaborator Aleksandras Lileikis to spy in East Germany—even though the
Bolschwing (left) had a visa photo made in 1953; Lileikis’s passport photo is undated.
agency’s own records implicated the Lithuanian in the deaths by machine gunning of 60,000 Jews in his homeland. Lileikis, paid $1,700 a year and two cartons of cigarettes a month by the agency, eventually moved to Boston. In time he was deported— after the CIA tried to block a Justice Department investigation into his wartime record. “There is no evidence that this Agency was aware of his wartime activities,” the CIA told the House Intelligence Committee in 1995. Some émigrés from Nazi Germany and Nazi collaborators from the Soviet Union “were intelligence assets, whom the agency felt a desire to protect,” says Michael Wolf, a Justice Department Nazi hunter in the mid1980s. “But I don’t think it stopped us from pursuing any of our cases.”
as Hitler a meth head? What is now known as crystal methamphetamine was among 74 drugs injected into the dictator by personal physician Theodor Morell. Other ingredients in the Führer’s pick-me-ups included bull semen and morphine, reports British documentary Hitler’s Hidden Drug Habit. The producers based their assertions on the contents of an America military dossier dated November 29, 1945. In 2012 a collector listed the 47-page file with Alexander Historical Auctions in Chesapeake City, Maryland, which sold the item to an unnamed Hitler’s furies may buyer for have had to do with $9,560. Bill pharmaceuticals. Panagopoulos of the auction house used his knowledge of the documents to enlighten the producers. According to the documentary, Hitler was likely loaded on meth in July 1943 when he raged for hours at Axis partner Benito Mussolini at a notorious meeting in Feltre in northern Italy.
W W I I T ODA Y 1. The Battle of the Bulge room hits visitors with frigid air. 2. Signage conjures the feel of a German bunker. 3. Teens in France fashioned this flag for the liberation. 4. The “hedgerows” are quite convincing. 5. GIs’ lost objects lie on sand from Normandy, evoking a famously moving column by journalist Ernie Pyle.
VIEW MORE IMAGES IN OUR IPAD EDITION
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NEW AT THE NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM
The Road to Berlin
T
he New Orleans facility’s latest installation, the European Theater Galleries, offers an immersive experience. Taking half of a new 32,000-square-foot space, a series of 10 exhibits traces Allied troops’ progress from North Africa all the way to the German capital. “The Road to Tokyo,” which will fill the rest of the pavilion, will open in December 2015. —Michael Dolan
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OPPOSITE: TOP LEFT, DOJ; TOP RIGHT, AP; MIDDLE, INTERFOTO/ALAMY; BOTTOM, LABORANT/ALAMY; THIS PAGE: 1 AND 4, THE NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM; ALL OTHERS, GUY ACETO
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POWs often starved, like men finally being fed on Formosa.
Japan Honors Ex-POWs
T
hey first came as prisoners of war, then as honored guests. In October, seven American ex-POWs returned to Japan, invited officially to make amends for mistreatment seven decades earlier. William Sanchez, 96, of Monterey Park, California, stood on the Tokyo waterfront and tried to pinpoint the location of Camp Omori, where he was held. Highrise apartments stand where Sanchez and other prisoners
loaded cargo. “Amazing,” Sanchez said. “I had a lot more to eat this time,” Bataan Death March survivor Phillip Coon, 94, quipped to Stars and Stripes. Forty percent of Allied prisoners taken by Japanese forces died in captivity, compared to barely one percent of Americans captured by the Germans, according to a navy study. But not every Japanese prison guard was a sadist. Darrell Stark, 91, an army
infantryman captured in the Philippines in 1942, recalled a kind-hearted supervisor at a camp in western Japan. When Stark and another prisoner made off with the man’s lunch, he said nothing. But the next day the Japanese brought two lunches. “‘One for you, one for me,’” Stark, of Stafford Springs, Connecticut, told the Associated Press. “If he had reported me, I wouldn’t have been speaking to you tonight.”
Former POW William Sanchez
DISPATCHES
-The Czech Republic
gave its highest honor—the Order of the White Lion—to Briton Nicholas Winton, 105, who helped hundreds of Jewish children escape Nazioccupied Czechoslovakia on eight trains; a ninth did not make it out, and the 250 children aboard died. The ex-stockbroker, himself Jewish, kept silent about his deeds until 1988, when his wife found his scrapbook.
Beach (Florida) Airport when its landing gear failed. The fighter had crashed before, in January 1942, killing its pilot; salvagers retrieved the hulk from a Hawaiian peak, leading to a restoration in the late 1980s.
-A P-40B Warhawk fighter that escaped damage at Pearl Harbor crash-landed in October at New Smyrna
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Nicholas Winton
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Werner Christukat, 89, should not stand trial for a 1944 SS massacre, a German court ruled. Christukat, during the war a Der Führer regiment machine gunner, admits that he was present on June 10, 1944, when his unit murdered 642 men, women, and children at Oradour-sur-Glane, France, but denies shooting. His inclusion on a list of men who did shoot “cannot legally be considered as assisting in murder without the presentation of additional proof,” the Cologne court declared.
Congress: Nazis Bad
I
f anything can unite the U.S. Congress, it’s the National Socialist Workers Party. In early December, the House and Senate passed the No Social Security for Nazis Act. The uncharacteristic fit of unanimity erupted after the Associated Press reported that of 66 individuals admitted to the United States after the war but eventually deported as suspected war criminals with ties to the Nazi regime, 38 continued to collect Social Security checks abroad. Benefits went to former death camp guards, a scientist who used slave laborers to build German rockets, and a collaborator who organized the arrest and killing of thousands of Polish Jews. The Justice Department used the threat of loss of those benefits to pry the men out of the country, the news service reported. A Justice spokesman denied that the department used Social Security payments as a crowbar. At least four beneficiaries are alive, including Croatian Jakob Denzinger, an Auschwitz guard who was living in Ohio in 1989 when he learned he was under investigation and fled to the old country. Denzinger settled in Osijek, Croatia, where AP says he lives in a spacious riverside apartment. “It’s absolutely outrageous that Nazi war criminals are continuing to receive Social Security benefits when they have been outlawed from our country for many, many, many years,” U.S. Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) told AP.
TOP, KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES; MIDDLE, AP PHOTO/KOJI SASAHARA; BOTTOM, REX FEATURES VIA AP IMAGES
W W I I T ODA Y
DISPATCHES
ASK WWII
Q. Germany’s Panzerfaust antitank weapon had many assets, including one-man operation and a shaped charge that could penetrate any Allied armor. The 82nd Airborne Division preferred captured Panzerfausts to its own M1A1 bazookas. Why didn’t we steal the Germans’ idea? —Herb Mosher, Orchard Park, New York
-Hitler’s personal copy
of Mein Kampf fetched a mere $30,000 at auction in October—less than a third of the anticipated selling price. The book was found in Hitler’s Berlin apartment in 1945. In a similar sign of declining Führer futures, a signed copy of the screed sold at another auction in Britain for only $75.
8
in 1963: the Light Antitank Weapon, or LAW. The Panzerfaust likewise influenced the Soviets to create an antitank grenade launcher, leading in 1961 to the RPG-7. The Germans, meanwhile, were stealing our idea. Bazookas they captured in North Africa and Russia in
A. We did—after the war. American armorers combined the Panzerfaust’s low cost, lightness, and disposability with the bazooka’s range in a hybrid the U.S. Army adopted
1942 made an impression. Employing the same principle of a tube-launched antitank rocket, the Reich engineered a more powerful 88mm version, the Panzerschreck. Its arrival in 1943—and the appearance of thicker-skinned Tigers and Panthers—spurred the U.S. to start work on a 3.5-inch “super bazooka,” which arrived too late for World War II, but took a heavy toll on North Korean T-34/85 tanks in July 1950. —Jon Guttman Q Send queries to: Ask World War II, 19300 Promenade Drive, Leesburg, VA 20176, or e-mail: worldwar2@ weiderhistorygroup.com.
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W W I I T ODA Y THE READING LIST
John Nagl An Army at Dawn The War in North Africa, 1942–1943 Rick Atkinson (2002)
“Atkinson examines the under-appreciated North Africa campaign, which taught an inexperienced U.S. Army lessons it needed to triumph and become the foundation for American global hegemony. This book’s themes are essential to understanding the European campaign.”
delaying action during the Battle of the Bulge and later became Deputy Chief Historian of the U.S. Army.”
Noted historians Murray and Millett explain why American forces were so unprepared—and how today’s and tomorrow’s generals can ensure that this regrettable situation never recurs.” Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh (1945)
“My favorite novel. Waugh served during World War II in the Royal Marines and then in the Royal Horse Guards; his Sword of Honour trilogy is a sardonic look at the travails of the British military. But Brideshead is his masterpiece. The story of a British manor house used as a barracks as the Allies were preparing for the invasion of Normandy, this volume details how a generation that would save the world lost its innocence.”
Military Innovation in the Interwar Period Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett (1996)
“As the Second World War began, the
The Last Convertible Anton Myrer (1978)
“Myrer left Harvard in 1942 to join the Marines, fighting on Guam and in the Marianas. His novel Once an Eagle is much beloved by the army; the less treacly Convertible follows five Harvard men and their Packard Super Eight, providing insights into all the theaters of the war and the men and the women who fought it.”
John Nagl, a retired U.S. Army officer, served as a tank platoon leader in Operation Desert Storm and as a tank battalion task force operations officer in Operation Iraqi Freedom. A graduate of the U.S. Military
Company Commander
Academy and a Rhodes Scholar, he had his
Charles B. MacDonald (1947)
doctoral dissertation published under the
“World War II was a company commander’s war. This work remains the best American memoir of that conflict from that point of view. MacDonald was 21 and a captain when given command of a rifle company in September 1944 He earned a Silver Star for a successful
title Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. He
American military was far behind its foes, whose advances in fighter and bomber aircraft, armor, and artillery had left America’s forces underarmed; tactical and operational innovations similarly caught Uncle Sam’s forces off guard.
helped General David Petraeus write The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Nagl’s latest book, Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice (Penguin) includes suggested readings on many of America’s wars.
Hybrid Messerschmitt Comes Alive
A
fter 45 years in storage, a Messerschmitt Bf 109 about to be auctioned proved its value last fall by starting on the first try. The fighter, built under license by Spanish aircraft company Hispano Aviación in the early 1950s, last flew nearly five decades ago during the making of the film The Battle of Britain. The fighter, fitted with a Rolls Royce Merlin
14
WORLD WAR II
engine, belonged to Texas stunt pilot Wilson “Connie” Edwards. He accepted the aircraft and others as payment for choreographing stunts for and flying in the 1969 film. Expecting his son to inherit the planes, Edwards stored his fleet in a barn until last year, when the younger Edwards died in a car crash and his father began auctioning the warplanes.
This Bf 109 last flew in 1969’s The Battle of Britain (inset).
ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE CAPLANIS; ABOVE, BUSCHUNG GLOBAL; INSET, AF ARCHIVE/ALAMY
Conversation with Ivan J. Houston
A Buffalo Soldier’s War on Two Fronts By Gene Santoro
“I
FOR MORE, WATCH A VIDEO INTERVIEW ON OUR IPAD EDITION
GREW UP in a world where black people had rights and freedom,” says Ivan J. Hous-
ton. “But I knew what to expect in the service: segregation.” In
cold. Supplies and wounded had to be brought up and down the mountains by mule or by hand. After five weeks, out of about 3,000 infantrymen, we had 263 casualties. And that doesn’t include a lot of others who got sick or were otherwise injured.
1943 Houston, 17, a student at integrated UC-Berkeley, joined the Enlisted Reserve Corps; in January 1944 the army called him to active duty. His induction test scores got him into the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), which sent 140,000 GIs—including 1,400 African Americans—to college. But in March the army abruptly
That doesn’t sound unusual for such a hard fight.
cancelled ASTP; it needed infantrymen to make up for heavy losses. Assigned to the all-black 92nd Infantry Division (“Buffalo Soldiers”), Houston faced the bloody northern Italian campaign, racism, and insults about his division’s ability and will to fight. Here Houston, the author of Black Warriors: The Buffalo Soldiers of World War II, speaks his mind.
Your background and level of education were rare in the 92nd.
Aside from other ASTP men, yes. The rest…some were illiterate, some semiliterate. Many if not most were from the rural South, a totally alien culture to me. But I was able to fit in, because I could take care of myself—I was a great boxer during college—and proved it. All the men below second lieutenant were black. If I’d grown up in Alabama it might have seemed more normal. Was the 92nd’s officer cadre all white?
Not at first, no. I was in 3rd Battalion, Headquarters Company, of the 370th Regimental Combat Team; they culled the best men in the division for our group. Our company commander and 16
WORLD WAR II
Company K’s were white; Companies I, L, and M had black commanders. So it was a mixed bag. But pretty soon you could see the structure. When white lieutenants transferred to our units, they never served under a black officer. No black officer could command a white soldier, never mind a white officer! In July 1944, you landed in Naples.
We went right to the Arno River—one of the roughest fronts. After Florence was liberated a month later, we crossed the Arno and went north into the mountains, toward the Gothic Line. The geography got much worse. So did the fighting. It became fierce as we liberated cities and villages like Ripafratta. We faced constant heavy shelling, high mountains, fierce
The problem was that so many of our casualties were leaders—officers and NCOs who were out in front trying to inspire the men. We had disproportionate losses of them the whole time we were there. The black officers were young guys who had some college or were college graduates. The NCOs were at least a peg or two above the rest of the enlisted men. So right off the bat the best men were killed or wounded, which meant a significant change in the division. What happened at Seravezza?
Seravezza is at the base of Mount Cauala, at the confluence of two rivers. It is only three miles from Pietrasanta, but the road was under consistent enemy fire from the hills above, so we had to use a narrow, winding mountain trail that would have been too much even for mules. It got dark and was raining in torrents. We could see virtually nothing. The sound of the Sera River on our left was a menacing roar. Men stumbled, fell, and lost equipment in the mud and darkness. Flashes of lightning blinded and confused us. It took JEREMY JACKSON
four hours to go just under two miles. By the time we rounded everybody up, the river had swollen and couldn’t be forded, so the attack set for October 10 had to be postponed. In town we had to be very careful: the mountain dominated Seravezza, and the enemy could see everything. Medium and heavy artillery raked the buildings regularly; when men exposed themselves, small-arms fire swept the street.
“It’s not surprising men started to wonder if we were being sent on suicide missions.”
How did the attack go?
By 11:10 p.m. on the 11th, the last man slipped into the Sera’s icy waters. We climbed specially constructed ladders up the mountain. Knife-edged rocks ripped clothing and tore flesh. We groped for footing in the blackness. Keeping units together was difficult. By 4:45 the morning of the 12th, K Company was on top of the mountain, but no one was sure how many men had been killed by the machine guns spattering the trails, or had slipped and plunged to the rocks below. Companies I and L joined K by 7:30 a.m. Then the Germans counterattacked.
Terrific artillery fire lashed the command post at the foot of the mountain, so they were unaware of the plight of the men up there. Messengers couldn’t get through the Germans. A dozen men, including yours truly, joined an ammunition detail, carrying a 25-pound metal box in each hand. Right away we met machine-gun fire, and took out the enemy soldiers. Halfway up we hit more machine guns and mortars. Shrapnel flew everywhere. A few guys got hit. My clothes got burned through to the skin. We had to head back downhill. Soon men from the rifle companies were coming off the hill. It became a mess. About 4 p.m., a heavy barrage of our own artillery fell short and smashed into the entrenched remnants of Companies K and L. That was more than they could take; they withdrew. We hurriedly organized defensive units and positions, but the Germans stopped short of trying to retake Seravezza. COURTESY OF IVAN J. HOUSTON
the Bulge. The 36th Infantry Division had a bad time at the Rapido River. There were countless “stragglers” at Monte Cassino. But in talking about us, the term “melting away” is used, which isn’t used to describe the others. I wrote the reports for my battalion, and I never used that term. I think it came from the top. General Almond thought black people were incapable of being combat troops. He was quoted as saying he would never sit down and eat with them. He had never led combat troops before. He revered the Confederacy. How could a guy like that build morale in our division? It’s not surprising men started wondering if we were being sent on suicide missions. In early February 1945, Almond sent the 370th back to Cauala.
December 1944
What was the state of your regiment?
Demoralized. Italian boys—9, 10, 11 years old—were bringing so many bodies down the mountain they still talk about it. When your leaders get killed and wounded, and you don’t have sufficient guys with the same qualities and education, you really have a problem. See, there were no black infantry replacements, because the army didn’t train black infantry; they made blacks truck drivers and orderlies and so on. Some of our replacements came from the disciplinary barracks; they could bring down morale pretty quickly. Our division commander, a southern major general named Edward M. Almond, questioned our black officers’ and NCOs’ abilities and dedication. None of this was good for morale or unit cohesion. This was where the idea that the 92nd wouldn’t or couldn’t fight got started. Why?
I never witnessed mass hysteria or panic. I think the notion started because we were black. Over 6,000 men of the 106th Division surrendered during the Battle of
That’s where we lost two valiant black captains from I and L Companies; one was killed in action, the other was in a hospital suffering from shell shock. They knew we were being criticized, and I feel that as a result they probably took even more chances. I don’t have any idea what General Almond was trying to do there. He put units in the worst possible positions: an attack through sand over a canal, where they were caught in a huge bombardment by German railroad guns, which decimated the front. Historians still debate the Buffalos’ performance. What’s your take?
The Jim Crow laws that determined civilian life for black Americans during World War II had an awful lot to do with what happened to us in the army. I saw mortally wounded black officers leading their men till they dropped. We were fighting Jim Crow with one hand and fascists and Nazis with the other. That had its effects on us. I believe we fought as well as anyone. The Italians think we’re heroes. Our liberation of Lucca is celebrated every year. Maybe that’s because Italian civilians and the partisans who fought beside us went through what we went through. 2 MARCH/APRIL 2015
17
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WORLD
WAR II
From the Footlocker
Curators at The National World War II Museum solve readers’ artifact mysteries
1
My father, Gerhard Heuer, served in the German army from 1938 until 1942, but I don’t know any details. He came to the U.S. from the town of Celle in 1952 along with my mother and oldest brother, and died in 1970; my mother died in 1992, so I have little to go on. I’d like to know where he served, and
under which army unit. I have his German Wehrpass, which has many stamps in it, but I cannot find unit information; this picture of my dad has a number on his sleeve. Can you help solve this mystery? —Gary Heuer, Portland, Oregon
This photo was taken when your father was a member of the Reichsarbeitsdienst— the RAD, or Reich Labor Service—as the shovel-shaped patch indicates. The RAD, founded to help relieve unemployment and indoctrinate young adults with Nazi ideology, provided the Reich with unskilled labor, usually for construction work. Later in the war the organization helped transport supplies around the country. Young men were required to serve for six months in the RAD before entering the military, to harden future recruits. The “185” and “4” indicate the overall unit and section. According to what we can make out from his Wehrpass—his military record book—your father went on to join the Heer, Germany’s regular army. After enlisting in 1939 he served with the 487th Infantry Replacement Division. Although nonstan-
dard abbreviations and sloppy handwriting make it difficult to pinpoint, he apparently remained with this unit through the war. He served briefly in Luxemburg and Belgium as part of Germany’s army of occupation, but seems mainly to have been stationed in Celle, then in nearby Grimma, both in Saxony. He served in his battalion’s headquarters company, which mostly trained and provided replacements to other units, often on the Eastern Front. —Brandon Stephens, Curator
2
I recently bought a stein, which had been a GI’s war trophy. I’ve seen quite a few military German steins from
different eras, but nothing like this. I would like to know about the unit depicted on it, where was it stationed, the type of weapon they used, and what the writing says. Was this type of stein common for these units? There is a name hand-engraved on the inside of the lid and a date (’43). I’m considering contacting the family of this soldier, if possible, and returning it. Thanks. —Edgar Zimmerman, Bowie, Maryland
German military 1 Arecord book—a Wehrpass—and a sleeve patch shed light on one soldier’s wartime story.
steins were 2 Beer popular souvenirs for both Germans and GIs—like these 63rd Division, Seventh Army, troops (far left) in Heidelberg on March 30, 1945.
PHOTO 12/UIG/GETTY IMAGES
Steins, traditional beer mugs known in German as a Krug or Steinkrug, were a common souvenir for men serving in the German army or Luftwaffe. Like this one, many were labeled with the phrase “Erinnerung an meine Dienstzeit” (“In remembrance of my service”). The unit memorialized—Uffz. Korps 9./Flakregiment 5 München—is the Luftwaffe’s 9th Unteroffizier Korps (very roughly, “9th NCO Corps”), 5th Flak Regiment, Munich. Established in Munich in 1935 and incorporated in 1938, the unit was transferred in 1942 to Italy and operated in Verona for the remainder of the war. The weapon pictured is a light antiaircraft gun, likely a 20mm Flak 38, the primary German light antiaircraft gun of MARCH/APRIL 2015
19
From the Footlocker
World War II. Someone etched the stein’s inner lid with the Luftwaffe symbol, an eagle—although without a swastika in its talons—and the name “Alfred Birnstiel.” You may be able to track information about him and his service through the Military Archive Department of the Bundesarchiv at: bundesarchiv.de/bundesarchiv/ dienstorte/freiburg/—Kimberly Guise, Curator/Content Specialist
3
My father, Lieutenant Phil-
from World War II battlefields in the Pacific. She writes that the wooden tag is a patient registration ticket—“something given when people visit the hospital and wait to see a doctor.” The letter is more personal. Intended to be sent by military mail from Kwajalein on February 1, 1944, the letter never reached its intended recipient. It was penned by a soldier to a business employing his parents, a common practice among Japanese soldiers. Some words are not readable, but the gist is:
lip Crawford, served aboard the USS Monrovia, an attack transport, from 1943–1945.
He participated in the invasions of Sicily, Tarawa, Kwajalein, Saipan, Leyte, Luzon, and Okinawa. In his sea chest are two items from Kwajalein. A wooden block approximately two-and one-fourth-by-one inches with a hole at the top appears to be some sort of
Greetings It’s been a long time to since the last meeting. I wonder how everyone has been doing. I am just doing fine and energetically moving forward to attack the enemy every day, so do not worry about me. My parents are also taken care of by you, so thank you for your generous support. Please take a good care yourself.
medallion or dog tag. The other is a three-and-a-half-by-five-inch postcard or communication. A translation of the items would be much appreciated. —Phillip Crawford Jr., Gilbert, Arizona
To identify these items, we asked Yukari Akatsuka, of Kuentai-USA (kuentai-usa.com), an organization dedicated to retrieving American dead
U.S. Navy Lieutenant 3 Phillip Crawford (inset) brought this wooden tag and handwritten card home from Kwajalein.
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WORLD WAR II
Have a World War II artifact you can’t identify? Write to
[email protected] with the following: • Your connection to the object and what you know about it • The object’s dimensions, in inches • Several high-resolution digital photos taken close up and from varying angles. Pictures should be in color, and at least 300 dpi. Unfortunately we can’t respond to every query, nor can we appraise value.
Fire for Effect
Northern Exposure By Robert M. Citino
S
TUDENTS OF 1944 tend to fixate on the Eastern and Western Fronts, with the Soviets pulverizing the Germans from one direction and the AngloAmericans punching from the other. The more I look at that bloody year, however, the more I focus on the situation in the far north and the massive German deployments in Norway and Finland. The Germans first came to Scandinavia in 1940 for sensible reasons: to protect iron ore supplies bound for the Ruhr from neutral Sweden, to seize the long Norwegian coast as a staging area for U-boat operations against Britain, and to forestall an Allied invasion through Norway. By 1944, however, Norway had become a strategic backwater. The crackpot notion of a massive Norway landing never ranked high on the Allied list, and Operation Overlord’s success shrank interest in invading there to below zero. And so we have 1944 and its curious strategic situation. With the Soviets smashing an entire German army group in Belorussia, the other Allies swarming France, and every battlefront chewing up irreplaceable German manpower, the Wehrmacht nonetheless maintained a huge force on duty in Norway, doing… well, not much—holding somnolent ports, manning coastal guns that would never fire a shot in anger, and occupying cities and towns full of baleful Scandinavians. For these tasks the Germans assigned no fewer than 370,000 men. Pause and ponder that number. As the German official history tells us, the troop commitment to Norway amounted to “more German soldiers, relative to the population, than in any other occupied
ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY CAMPBELL
territory,” including the Soviet Union. Those 370,000 men amounted to at least 15 divisions, the equivalent of two field armies—precisely what a hard-pressed Wehrmacht needed most down south. But we aren’t done with Germany’s northern daydreaming. The Reich had yet another army, the 20th Mountain, in Lapland, the Finnish province that straddles the Arctic Circle. With three full corps—six divisions—plus the army-level formations of artillery, engineers, and transport, the 20th—200,000 men—was not on static occupation duty, but holding a front line contested by the Soviets. In Finland as in Norway, German strategy sprouted sensibly. In 1941 the Germans used Finland as a base from which to attack the northern U.S.S.R. Those operations, with appellations like “Reindeer” and “Silver Fox,” aimed to take the key Arctic port of Murmansk. But the offensives fell short, victims of logistical woes, tough Soviet opposition, and the unforgiving tundra. Ever since, the German front, along the Litsa River, had
hardly moved an inch. The Germans were in the U.S.S.R., but Murmansk, only 30 miles east by road, might as well have been on the moon. In the summer of 1944 this quiet front suddenly plunged into chaos. A massive Soviet offensive in June forced the Finns to ask for an armistice by September, and a second assault in October smashed the German position outside Murmansk. The 20th Mountain Army had to retreat, scurrying out of Finland and into Norway. Soon more than half a million German troops were crowding Norway—about one man in field gray for every six Norwegian citizens, which must be some sort of perverse record—at the very moment that the Red Army was lunging to the Vistula River, undertaking its Shermanesque march against Berlin, and the western Allies were driving headlong toward the German border. This insane state of affairs traced to several causes, such as Hitler’s congenital refusal to countenance retreat and the German navy’s bitter insistence on holding Norwegian ports to the end. And even if the Führer had relented, lack of transport might have made it difficult to ferry the boys out of Norway and into battle. Whatever the cause, 1944 was the year German strategy came off the rails. The Allies were driving hell-bent for the Fatherland, eyes on the prize, while the Germans were frittering away their strength in senseless deployments illustrating the term “overstretch.” Hitler and company lost for many reasons, but prime among those reasons is that you cannot protect your turf when you have hundreds of thousands of men far away holding down forts long past saving. 2 MARCH/APRIL 2015
23
Time Travel
On for the Long Haul By Liesl Bradner
Arriving late to the big fight helped the SS Lane Victory survive a startling seven decades.
I
F DURING SOME Southern California summer you notice warplanes with wartime German markings flying toward the Port of Los Angeles, you have not entered a wormhole—it’s merely showtime. The pilots, aboard disguised AT-6 Texan trainers from the Condor Squadron of Van Nuys, are pretending to swarm the SS Lane Victory, a World War II cargo ship turned museum that offers a glimpse into the Allied supply line. Staged by the museum three times a year during day-long summer sea cruises, the spectacular mock aerial assault and a swing-dancing session follow a service memorializing one of the 1,500-plus merchant ships that were lost during the war. One of three Victory ships still functioning, the Lane Victory is the only one
24
WORLD WAR II
In 1944 Victory ships under construction filled Los Angeles’s Terminal Island yard.
certified seaworthy. The ship, a National Historic Landmark, began its museum career in 1992—restored and ready for passengers to tour. But a 70-year-old vessel is a fragile thing, and in 2014 management suspended the summer ocean cruises because many of the ship’s steamgenerating tubes had failed. The U.S. Merchant Marine Veterans of World War II, the nonprofit that maintains the ship, is hoping to raise $2 million for the repairs through grants and donations— such as a “Buy-a-Boiler Tube” campaign—and hopes to have the transport ready for summer 2015 cruises. Constructed by the California Shipbuilding Corporation at nearby Terminal Island, the Lane Victory was one of 534 Victory ships meant to outperform the TOP, PETER TITMUSS/ALAMY; BOTTOM, EVERETT COLLECTION/ALAMY
Time Travel
earlier Liberty ship, courtesy of their modern steam plants, electric winches, and stronger hulls. Like many of its ilk, the Lane Victory was named after an educational institution: Lane College, in Tennessee. (Victory ships were also named for towns, cities, and United Nations member states.) And like most Victory ships, it was launched late in the war, on May 31, 1945. Within a month, the crew was carrying munitions and supplies across the Pacific. On a run to Guam, the ship spent 14 days in a typhoon. After the war, the Lane Victory carried Marshall Plan supplies to Europe. The 10,750-ton ship’s most dangerous mission came during the Korean War. In December 1950 the crew took on more than 7,000 refugees at Wonsan and transported them to Pusan, a voyage of more than 300 miles. In 1966, the Lane Victory transported supplies to South Vietnam. Decommissioned in 1970 and mothballed in northern California, the aging vessel became a pet cause of Merchant Marine veterans petitioning to designate a World War II cargo vessel as a memorial museum—as occurred in 1988, leading to a three-year restoration effort. With the exception of three days reserved for cruises and special events, the Lane Victory is open daily 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Painted wartime gray, the stately ship docks at Berth 49 in Los Angeles’s San Pedro neighborhood at the Port of Los Angeles. One of the nation’s busiest container ports, it is home to several maritime museums and historic vessels, including the battleship USS Iowa. It was a perfect morning when I visited the Lane Victory with my kids, ages 12 and 10. I’d learned from the museum brochure not to wear open-toed shoes, which would keep me from visiting the engine room. Crossing the gangplank toward the 455-foot ship, my son pointed out a sea lion frisking in the water below. A crewmember greeted us with a smile, a self-guided tour map—visitors can roam at will or join groups led by a guide—and a briefing on the layout. For the moment, we had the vessel to ourselves. LIESL BRADNER (ALL); MAP BY JANET NORQUIST/CREATIVE FREELANCERS
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The Lane in LA 110
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From top: Steam turbines dominate the engine room; U.S. Naval Armed Guards slept very tight; underage antiaircraft gunners stretch their legs to reach the pedals of twin 40mm Oerlikons.
Area of Detail
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O
R
IN TO DE ST H R AL AV B LE E Y Y D O M BY UR A NE BR Y XT IC 2 FA K 5 LL .
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Time Travel
With three forward holds and two aft, the Lane Victory could accommodate five tons of freight; today two holds are exhibit spaces. The Hold #4 Museum displays World War II artifacts, such as chronometers, uniforms, and weapons. In a letter home on display in Hold #4, a seaman writing from a different Victory ship describes how, in 1946, he and his shipmates were transporting GIs home from Antwerp, Belgium. “We may purchase 24 candy bars at prices from 2 – 4 cents” and, “twice a day, gobs of ice cream,” he writes, boyishly boasting that he snagged a top bunk. He writes of previous trips on which the ship hauled German POWs from Le Havre and reports his gross income for 1945: $1,680.31. My son steered us topside to climb ladders and navigate narrow passageways to the cozy crew cabin, the starker Naval Armed Guard sleeping quarters and its triple-decker hammocks, and the galley. Passing the main mast, cargo booms, and winches, we arrived at the forecastle deck. At the bow we found the hulking anchor windlass and chains, a three-inch gun, and 20mm antiaircraft guns. Other visitors arrived, ending our reign as masters of the ship. My son briskly led us to the bridge and beyond. We descended the stairs to the Hold #2 Museum, aka “The Jeep and Torpedo Room,” a miscellany of military and maritime gear. Torpedoes and mines illustrate the danger Allied merchant ships faced; U-boats sank nearly six million tons of shipping in the first six months of 1942. Naturally for a vintage vessel harbored so near Tinseltown, the Lane Victory makes its share of film and TV appearances; the ship features props from The Thin Red Line, Flags of Our Fathers, and was drafted to make special effects test shots for The Life of Pi, among other cinematic cameos. Hold #2 Museum’s centerpiece display is a 20-ton, 1,000-horsepower triple expansion steam engine. Considered the state-of-the-shipbuilding-art in 1920, the engine originally powered a trawler repurposed as a wartime convoy escort.
The engine was restored for the Academy Award-winning 1966 film, The Sand Pebbles, with Steve McQueen as the engineer who keeps the temperamental machine running. When the Lane Victory is under way the engine’s piston rods and crankshaft move in harmonious but only decorative action, driven by electricity. We saw the ship’s own power plant in the engine room as part of a tour group that first went to the bridge. Pausing at the radio room to see the original RCA 4U communications unit, we filed past a mess hall and the captain’s quarters to steep steps leading to the bridge. Our guide, merchant mariner and able-bodied seaman Wendy Joseph, explained the gyroscopic compass, binnacle, and radar system, and decoded signal flags stashed along the wheelhouse ceiling. Amidships, Wendy stopped the group and opened a hatch, revealing the engine room—hands down the tour’s highlight. Two forced-draft oil-fired boilers gener-
ate the power to run the steam turbines that could push a Victory ship to 16.3 knots. We got to study the main control panel and the generator that provides the ship’s electricity. During a cruise, we’re told, it roars. The engine room holds only eight people—and inside the tight quarters I understood why sandals aren’t allowed. Continuing our descent, we edged single file through the not-forthe-claustrophobic propeller shaft alley. At the stern, Wendy let us glance up the 50-foot ladder leading to an escape hatch allowing in a tiny circle of sunlight. After the tour, we strolled the stern. Above the armed guard quarters was a gun tub that had held a five-inch piece. The navy removed it after the war but left the tub, used temporarily as a swimming pool and stowage. Hanging onto their journey into the past, the kids mounted gunner’s seats and pretended to man twin 40mm antiaircraft guns. Then we stepped down the gangplank and out of history. 2
WHEN YOU GO
For a schedule of Lane Victory cruises and other events, visit lanevictory.org. The ship is located 20 miles south of Los Angeles International Airport, in San Pedro—a lively neighborhood with plenty of activities for everyone. The town’s most prominent landmark, visible for miles, is the 1,500foot Vincent Thomas Suspension Bridge, immortalized in films like Gone in 60 Seconds and the 1960s TV series Mission: Impossible. WHERE TO STAY AND EAT The Double Tree Hotel is steps from the Cabrillo Marina, a yacht marina near the Lane Victory’s dock. Nearby is the 15-acre Ports
O’Call Village, filled with waterfront shops and dining establishments, including the popular seafood restaurant of the same name. Away from the crowds there’s Think Café, Grinder Restaurant, Green Onion Mexican Restaurant, and Neil’s Pasta & Seafood Grill in San Pedro. Looking to spend the night on a luxury liner? The Queen Mary, docked nine miles east at Long Beach, offers original first class staterooms and hosts a permanent exhibit, “Her Finest Hour: A WWII Tour.” For more of a Hollywood-style retreat, the Mediterranean style Terranea Resort, with stunning oceanfront views, is 10 miles northwest in Rancho Palos Verdes.
WHAT ELSE TO SEE At Angel’s Gate Park, overlooking the Pacific, the recently restored 17-ton Korean Bell of Friendship honors the sacrifice of Americans who fought in Korea. The vintage red trolley is a convenient way to take in the sights such as the free Frank Gehrydesigned Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, the Bellagioinspired Fanfare Fountains at Gateway Plaza, Fort MacArthur Museum, Los Angeles Maritime Museum, and the art deco Warner Grand Theater, opened in 1931. Last year San Pedro completed a $32 million promenade and harbor revitalization project intended to make the waterfront more family friendly.
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Out of Time When the USS Hornet went down, coincidence enveloped a young Marine gunner By Stan Leland
Artist Tom Lea, who sailed on the Hornet for 66 days, based images for Life magazine (opposite) on accounts of the carrier’s October 26, 1942, sinking. Marine Private First Class Lou Carnaghi (above), aboard only slightly longer, was an antiaircraft gunner.
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DEATH OF A CARRIER
VIEW MORE OF TOM LEA’S ART IN OUR IPAD EDITION
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As the waves splashed and rolled past the USS Hornet, Lou Carnaghi glanced at his watch. It was just after 10 a.m. Lou treasured that watch. His folks had saved for months to buy it 10 years ago as a present when he graduated from eighth grade in Joliet, Illinois. Now Lou was 24, a Marine antiaircraft gunner aboard the big carrier as it patrolled off the eastern Solomons. It was October 26, 1942. Lou had enlisted a week after Pearl Harbor. After basic training and six weeks of sea school, he boarded the Yorktown-class flattop at Pearl Harbor as one of 88 Marines manning the carrier’s 20mm and 1.1-inch guns. The Hornet had returned from the Battle of Midway on June 13 and spent the next several weeks refitting and training. For long-range protection, at each corner the Hornet mounted a pair of five-inch guns. Around the perimeter, the 1.1s, in quad mounts, were effective to 6,300 yards as intermediate defense. The last line of defense was the 20mm array. A 20mm gun had a range of 800 yards. Gunners learned to eyeball targets, leading them and walking rounds to an attacking plane by tracking tracers mixed every few shells into each 60-round magazine. When only one crew was firing, walking rounds was a piece of cake. But let other 20mms open up on the same target, and the game got dicier. “When all the guns were firing at one plane it was hard to keep track of your own tracers and adjust your aim,” Lou said. The Hornet had four groups of 20mm guns: one battery fore and aft on each side. Individual 20mms were mounted on the bow, stern, and superstructure, or island. Lou worked on the starboard side at the second of that battery’s four 20mms. Each weapon had a crew of three; at Lou’s post were gunner Earl DeLong and aimer Clarence Holt. Lou was the loader. Just aft of their station was a 1.1-inch gun with its own three-man crew, making a total of 15 men.
A harness strapped Earl right to his 20mm, which was why it fell to Lou to attach full magazines, remove the empties, and reload. “Our gun platform was about five feet below the level of the flight deck,” he said. “My head was just above the surface of the flight deck to my right as I stood next to the gun.” Behind the gun crews was the ready room, stocked with antiaircraft ammunition magazines and staffed by sailors. As soon as a gunner emptied a clip, his loader popped the empty magazine free and swapped it for a full one from the men in the ready room. On patrol around Hawaii from July 13 to August 17, Lou and the rest of his gun crew trained under a gunner’s mate named White, who had 12 years in the navy. On August 17 the Hornet left Pearl Harbor for the eastern Solomons, where for nearly two months the carrier had only minor contact with the enemy. On October 24 the carrier USS Enterprise joined the Hornet near the island of Santa Cruz. At 12:50 the afternoon of October 25, scout PBY Catalinas from Espiritu Santu spotted Japanese carriers about 415 miles away. The Enterprise launched 12 SBD Dauntlesses to pinpoint the enemy flattops’ location but the search came up empty. During the night PBYs once again located the Japanese fleet, which was now 300 miles away. Early the next morning, fleet commander Vice Admiral William Halsey ordered an attack. Aboard the Hornet the fighter cover launched at 6:50 a.m. The two attack groups took off at 8:31 and 8:56. Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, aboard the Japanese carrier Shōkaku, ordered his planes into the air at 8:18. At 9:20 that morning, Hornet radar identified an incoming force of Japanese planes 60 miles away. The Hornet’s fighter cover was directed to intercept. General quarters sounded at 9:45; the second fighter cover group launched at 9:48. Lou’s watch read just after 10 when he spotted the Japanese dive-bombers and torpedo planes. The
From left: The carrier, afire from two bombs, makes a turn; the pilot of a crippled Val dives at the Hornet, with a Kate in the distance; the strike sets off a blast amidships as another Kate approaches at far right.
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PREVIOUS PAGES: PHOTO, COURTESY OF GARY CARNAGHI; ART, ARMY CENTER OF MILITARY HISTORY, FT. BELVOIR, VA. COURTESY OF THE TOM LEA INSTITUTE, EL PASO,TEXAS; THESE PAGES: NATIONAL ARCHIVES (ALL)
JUST SECONDS BEFORE, LOU CARNAGHI HAD BEEN AMONG 15 MEN AT HIS STATION. NOW ONLY LOU AND JOHN GAITO WERE UNHURT; EACH MANNED A 20MM AND BEGAN RETURNING FIRE. Enterprise, steaming about 10 miles away, had ducked into a squall, vanishing in mist and rain. All the Japanese aircraft, 22 dive-bombers and 18 torpedo planes, were forming up to come after the Hornet. The next few minutes would test the carrier— and Lou Carnaghi—to the breaking point.
“I was excited and anxious,” Lou said. “Fear was a part of the mix but not so much fear about dying as it was about doing my job and not letting my buddies down. Honestly, it was like the jitters I would get before a big football game in high school.” At 10:10 the five-inch guns nearest to Lou’s station opened up. “My training kicked in and the emotional buzz was gone,” he said. “Just like the kick-off in football; no more jitters. I just stood on the side of my 20mm waiting to replace magazines.” The enemy dive-bombers were approaching at 17,000 feet. Each Japanese plane’s line of attack was like a spoke on a wheel, with the carrier as the hub. The bombers were only 1,300 feet from the ship when they released their payloads. Japanese torpedo planes were circling, too, about 200 to 300 feet above the Pacific. Pilots released torpedoes at 1,000 yards, at the edge of a 20mm gun’s range, though as they turned, their planes were vulnerable. This high/low strategy kept the Marine
gunners from concentrating firepower in any one direction. A bomb struck the Hornet’s flight deck near the island and penetrated to the hangar deck and the crew quarters before detonating in the mess hall, killing 88 men. Seconds later a bomb hit the flight deck about 20 feet from the Number 4 gun in Lou’s battery, blowing an 11-foot hole in the deck and killing all six men at guns 3 and 4. Shrapnel glanced off Lou’s 20mm, wrecking the gun but entirely missing Lou. A piece of scrap metal caught gunner Earl DeLong in the wrist. Lou helped Earl out of his harness and laid the gunner on the floor of the platform. Aimer Clarence Holt was bleeding from the side of his head; shrapnel from the same bomb had severed his ear. But Clarence could walk, so, streaming blood, he made his own way to the casualty collection point. A few seconds earlier, Lou’s battery had consisted of 15 men; now six were dead and seven wounded. Only Lou and John Gaito were unhurt. “John and me each manned a 20mm and began returning fire,” said Lou. Another bomb hit the flight deck, exploding three levels down. A crippled dive-bomber carrying three bombs struck the ship forward of the island. One bomb exploded on impact, the other two penetrated the flight deck. Fuel from the crashed plane turned that part of the island and deck into an inferno.
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While Lou was busy with the 20mm, a torpedo hit the Hornet starboard, a little aft of the island. A second torpedo hit almost directly beneath where Lou and John Gaito were keeping up their fire. The torpedoes knocked out the ship’s power, and within minutes the carrier was dead in the water, listing to starboard with flames raging all over. The attack had lasted almost exactly 10 minutes. Lou came out of what felt like a trance. “I became aware of the smell of smoke, men shouting orders, and the cries of wounded men,” he said. “I was breathing like I had just run a mile and my mouth felt like sandpaper. I looked over at John and he had a dazed look that I’m sure I must have had as well.” Earl lay on the platform, moaning. Lou helped him up and walked him to the island, where sailors and Marines were spread out flat on the flight deck waiting for corpsmen to examine them. As Lou helped Earl lay down he noticed Steve Garvey, who had been manning the 1.1-inch gun where the dive-bomber had crashed. Lou knelt next to Steve and stroked the hair away from his badly wounded friend’s forehead. “How you doing?” Lou asked. “My legs are killing me!” Steve said. Both of Garvey’s legs were gone above the knee. Somebody had knotted belts around his thighs as makeshift tourniquets but blood was puddling from the raw stumps. “You’ll be okay,” Lou said, telling Steve he had to get back to his battle station.
Smoke from an enemy bomb surrounds the Hornet’s signal bridge (above). Lou Carnaghi operated a 20mm antiaircraft gun like these being fired in practice on the USS Enterprise.
Three destroyers came alongside the Hornet to help fight fires. By 11 a.m. the crew had the flames under control except for a blaze below decks where an enemy bomb had gone off. By word of mouth—the public address system and the intercom were out of commission—men heard that excess personnel were to head to the destroyers. John and Lou helped wounded men get to the island and prepared for another attack. At 4:20 p.m. it came—torpedo planes. The destroyers skedaddled. Once again Lou and John were firing and loading on their own. A torpedo struck starboard, flooding the engine compartment. So much for repairing the engines or restoring power. The Hornet’s starboard list worsened to 14.5 degrees. Japanese dive-bombers arrived, starting high and slamming low. Not one of these enemy planes scored a hit but the detonations shook the enormous vessel. Around 5 p.m. Lou and John were in the ready room
watching the ocean come their way; the ship appeared to be listing 18 degrees. Lou had come upon a can of peaches and was eating for the first time in 24 hours when a sailor shouted at the Marines that there was an order to abandon ship and they were to get over to the port side. They scrambled into the hangar deck, struggling against the fatal tilt and surfaces so slippery the only way to make progress was by crawling.
BOTH OF GARVEY’S LEGS WERE GONE ABOVE THE KNEE. SOMEBODY HAD KNOTTED BELTS AROUND HIS THIGHS AS TOURNIQUETS BUT BLOOD WAS PUDDLING FROM THE RAW STUMPS. 32
WORLD WAR II
ABOVE, U.S. NAVY; TOP AND OPPOSITE, NATIONAL ARCHIVES
On the port side they encountered dozens of knotted ropes dangling; men were using the lines to get to the water. Lou and John were waiting their turn when up ahead a young ensign froze, began blubbering, and would not move. Finally a Marine sergeant kicked the junior officer in the behind. “Climb down the #^&@ rope!” the leatherneck yelled. Down the ensign went. John and Lou followed. “I went hand over hand,” Lou said. “I slipped and as I grabbed at the rope my wristwatch was torn off. I can still see it falling into the ocean.” In the water, Lou, wearing a life jacket, joined hundreds of men paddling around. No ships were there to rescue them; expecting more air attacks, the destroyers had dispersed again. Lou knew he had to get away from the Hornet. If he stayed close he risked being bombed or strafed—or sucked under when the big ship went down. As he swam he saw what looked like a white balloon. It was a condom someone had inflated. Inside was a watch. The case had an inscription on it. “Well, I guess I have a watch again,” Lou said to himself. He pocketed the timepiece and went back to swimming. Lou had put about a mile between himself and the Hornet at 6 p.m., when Japanese dive-bombers made the final sortie of the day. One bomb hit the carrier’s flight deck; the rest missed. Lou braced for the worst. He had learned in training that an explosive shock travels much farther in water than on land, generating pressure that can force water into the rectum like a fire-hose colonic. “We were taught that if we were anywhere near an underwater explosion to use our hands to push our butt cheeks together to stop the deadly enema,” Lou said.
Even a mile off, the men in the water were in serious danger. “Everybody squeezed themselves as tight as possible,” Lou said. “The shock wave hit and I felt like someone had shoved a rod in my rectum and stirred it around. Everything inside me hurt all at once. I thought if I opened my mouth salt water was going to shoot out. I leaned back in my life jacket and stared at the sky hoping I wasn’t bleeding to death.” The USS Barton appeared, idling among the survivors, its crew pulling men from the water until they had packed the destroyer to the gunwales. Marines and sailors stripped off oilsoaked clothes and changed into whatever was available. The next day, as the tin can made for Nouméa, New Caledonia, Lou was on the Barton’s deck watching the waves. Gunner’s mate White joined him. They talked about what had gone on yesterday and wondered how the battle had turned out. As he and the old salt were shooting the breeze, Lou was trying to set his new watch. He told the story of how he had come by it, which White enjoyed. They said goodbye, and Lou went back to watching waves. Hours later, he was still at the rail when White reappeared, this time with a navy officer in tow. The navy man said he had been aboard the Hornet, and that as the carrier sank he had stowed his watch in a condom. “He wondered if it was the watch I had,” Lou said. “The watch was a college graduation gift from his mother and it had an inscription, which he recited. I handed over the watch. He thanked me and he and White walked away. I turned back to the railing and resumed watching the waves splash and roll past the ship. I needed to get another watch.” 2
Crewmen bob in rafts astern of the abandoned carrier. The Hornet sank less than two hours after the last torpedo hit.
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Irregular warfare in North Africa’s desert drew men willing to risk all in murderous terrain. Above and below, Long Range Desert Group vehicles; at right, some of the French Special Air Service men who participated in raids involving the British Special Interrogation Group; top right, opposite, two original LRDG volunteers with neighbors.
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Asking for Trouble To undermine the Afrika Korps, Britain’s Special Interrogation Group went to extremes By Gavin Mortimer TOP AND BOTTOM LEFT, IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM E 2298, E 12385; ALL OTHERS COURTESY OF GAVIN MORTIMER
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I
n the high Libyan desert, a convoy of five Ford one-and-ahalf-ton trucks and eight Canadian Military Pattern threeton trucks, their beds shrouded by canvas tarpaulins, climbs atop an escarpment. Tobruk lies 20 miles north. In the valley below, the main road—a layer of piercedmetal planking that leads to the German-held port—catches the fading light. It is 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, September 13, 1942. The Fords are painted salmon pink to blend with the haze of the sun at dawn and dusk. Their drivers and riders belong to the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), mainly Englishmen commanded by Captain David Lloyd Owen, who dismounts from the lead truck and walks to the eight larger trucks. He chats with Lieutenant Colonel John Haselden, who commands the big trucks’ passengers and drivers. These 15 officers and their 77 men wear the uniforms of commandos, artillerymen, and signalers. None is armed. The only soldiers carrying weapons are 14 men clothed in the faded olive cotton tunics and shorts of the Afrika Korps. They sit in the trucks’ cabs, one fellow at the wheel, the other training a Schmeisser MP40 submachine gun on his unarmed captives. Some LRDG men join Owen on the escarpment; others wander down the line of trucks, wishing the vehicles’ occupants good luck. They’ve spent the past week together, the LRDG transporting the other men 700 miles north from a hideout in Libya’s Kufra Oasis. Now, standing by their Fords, the LRDG men watch the curious convoy descend the escarpment. Each of the three-ton trucks is emblazoned with the characteristic Afrika Korps palm-and-swastika motif. Night has fallen by the time the vehicles reach the east gate of the perimeter fence that encircles Tobruk. A German sentry halts the lead truck. The transport’s Allied origins do not faze the guard. These days most of the Afrika Korps seems to travel in British- or North American-made vehicles, spoils of war taken the June before when Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and his men seized Tobruk and swept the British 350 miles east to El Alamein. The German notes the motif on the truck’s cab. He asks for the password. The driver provides it, and flashes his papers. The guard orders the barrier raised. Two more miles and they’ll be in Tobruk. The eight trucks have rumbled a few hundred yards into the darkness when the lead vehicle veers off the road, the others following. The drivers steer into one of the many wadis, or dry riverbeds, that fissure the Libyan desert. The vehicles jolt through the wadi and then turn northeast near the main Luftwaffe landing field at Bir-el Gubi. The commandos begin retrieving weapons hidden aboard the trucks. The men in German uniform pile out of their trucks’ cabs and, lest they be shot as spies, peel off Afrika Korps tunics to reveal British battledress and the insignia of the Special Interrogation Group (SIG). Soon the raiding party is moving stealthily north on foot, toward Tobruk. Overhead, scores of British and American warplanes are making a racket. Colonel Haselden checks
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THE SIG MEN, ALL DISPLACED JEWS, WERE TO LIVE, BREATHE, AND TRAIN AS IF THEY WERE SERVING IN HITLER’S AFRIKA KORPS. his watch. Right on schedule. One of the most audacious raids of the war in North Africa is underway.
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nly a culture as irreverent as Britain’s could have produced the SIG, with its blend of boldness, eccentricity, and ferocity. The unit was the brainchild of Captain Herbert Cecil Buck, 25, the quintessential British officer of his era: impeccably bred—his father was a retired colonel—intellectually formidable—an Oxford scholar, he spoke nine languages— and singularly brave—he already had received a Military Cross. In early December 1941 the Germans had captured Buck near Gazala, but in the confusion he escaped. Stumbling across a dead Afrika Korps officer, Buck stripped the corpse and in German drag slipped through enemy lines to British-occupied territory. That feat’s ease solidified an idea Buck had nurtured since a chance 1941 encounter in Palestine. Driving from Tel Aviv to Haifa, Buck stopped for two Jewish hitchhikers. En route, one mentioned a German-speaking unit of the Palmach, a Jewish paramilitary brigade. Back in Cairo after his escape, Buck proposed that the British War Office raise a cadre of German-speaking Jews to infiltrate enemy territory and gather intelligence. In March 1942 Military Intelligence approved creation of a “Special German Group as a sub-unit of Middle East Commando…with the cover name ‘Special Interrogation Group,’ to be used for infiltration behind the German lines in the Western Desert, under 8th Army.” Buck was appointed commanding officer and given carte blanche to recruit approximately 30 soldiers from the recently disbanded No. 51 Middle East Commando. That unit’s 150odd men had been pursuing Italian targets in Abyssinia and Eritrea until spring 1941, when the Afrika Korps’ arrival in Libya changed the nature of the war. The men of 51 Commando—60 percent Jews, 40 percent Arabs—were bored and ripe for recruitment when on March 17, 1942, their war diary noted Buck’s arrival at the unit’s base in Burg el Arab “to select German speaking personnel with a view to certain work.” Leo Hillman, 19, an Austrian Jew who before the war had been imprisoned for demonstrating against the Nazis, signed up. So did Maurice Tiefenbrunner,
26, an athletic, belligerent fellow who had grown up a Jew in Germany. In 1938, he had fled to British-run Palestine, where he joined the British Army. Once Buck recruited him, Tiefenbrunner changed his name to “Tiffin,” perhaps at the urging of Buck, who would have known from his days with the Punjab Regiment that “tiffin” was slang among Englishmen of the Raj for the hour when all hands stopped for afternoon tea. Buck also combed the French Foreign Legion and Free French and Free Czech forces, as well as Jewish paramilitaries in Palestine. He offered soldiers who had the background he sought little more than a guarantee of dangerous undercover work until he had 30 men. Recruits like Ariyeh Shai, a veteran of 51 Commando, traveled to a training base at Geneifa in the Suez Canal zone. “We received no promises. Captain Buck had warned that lives would depend on our ability to wear our disguises faultlessly, to learn to perfection the slang prevalent among the soldiers of the Afrika Korps, and to drill in accordance with all the German methods,” Shai said. “He told us, ‘If your true identity is found out, there is no hope for you.’” To keep enemy agents from unmasking his men, Buck barred interaction with other British regiments. SIG men were to live, breathe, and train as if they were in the Afrika Korps. To reinforce the ruse, Buck issued German pay books, cigarettes, and chocolates. Into their tunics the men tucked letters and snapshots of them with sweethearts in the Fatherland—in reality, British girls driving and clerking at army headquarters in Cairo who posed with the men in their Afrika Korps uniforms against suitably Teutonic backdrops. The final touch was recruiting German POWs Walter Essner and Herbert Brueckner. When captured in late 1941—Essner was a sergeant, Brueckner a corporal—both men claimed to be fervent anti-Nazis, leading their captors to recruit them as agents and assign them to SIG to train the Jewish volunteers in German procedures and jargon. “Brueckner was in his twenties. He was big, brash and fair. Essner was quiet, good-natured, and in his thirties,” Tiffin said. “They joined us at our
camp and the real German training began, including German songs. We learned German commands, how to handle their weapons and how, and to whom, to salute.” By May 1942 SIG operatives were behind enemy lines on missions that were small and unspectacular but useful. Driving German trucks and disguised as military policemen, the men set up roadblocks, stopping and questioning drivers, military and civilian. Along Libya’s main coastal road, they haunted cafés, mingling with diners and subtly extracting information. Tiffin even persuaded a field cashier to advance him pay, so caught up in his performance as an Afrika Korps Landser that he hardly had time to dwell on the danger.
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IG operations might have stayed at intelligence-gathering but for Major David Stirling. Like Buck, Stirling was an upper-class maverick with ingenious ideas about making war. In 1941 he had created the Special Air Service, a commando regiment whose motto was Qui audet vincit (“Who Dares Wins”). Stirling, who saw in Buck a kindred spirit, invited him and his lot to collaborate with SAS troops on a pair of raids. The targets: German airfields 100 miles west of Tobruk at Derna, on the Libyan coast, and Martuba, 16 miles to the southeast and a few miles inland. Planes from the fields were harassing Allied shipping in the Mediterranean. The attack would include 15 French SAS soldiers led by Lieutenant Augustin Jordan. The raiders, plus Essner and Brueckner, set out on June 8 from an SAS base at Siwa Oasis, near Egypt’s border with Libya, in three LRDG vehicles. The two Germans’ presence disturbed the SIG men. Having the POWs as instructors was one thing, but including them in an operation was unwise, Tiffin told his superior. “Captain Buck said to me, ‘Maurice, everything is all right,’” Tiffin recalled. “‘They have been interviewed, interrogated, observed, they are 100 percent all right. They are really idealists, fighting the Nazis like you.’” The French SAS men, wearing khaki overalls and blue Maurice “Tiffin” Tiefenbrunner (far left) departed Germany in 1938 for Palestine. Initially with 51 Commando, he was among the early SIG recruits. At left, two Afrika Korps soldiers operate an American-made jeep. Combatants in North Africa used whatever vehicles they could scrounge.
LEFT, IDF ARCHIVES; RIGHT, COURTESY OF GAVIN MORTIMER
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forage caps, were in two trucks bearing Afrika Korps markings and driven by SIG men armed with Schmeissers and German “potato masher” grenades. Another SIG man drove a German staff car. The convoy reached Derna’s outskirts without hindrance. Late on the afternoon of June 12, Buck and Jordan reconnoitered the airfields. One held Messerschmitt 110 fighter-bombers; the other, Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers. They returned to the rendezvous, five miles from each target, to wait for sunset. At dark, leaving Tiffin at the meeting point with the staff car, Buck and Essner drove Corporal Jean Tourneret and four men toward Martuba. A second truck, with Brueckner at the wheel and machine-gun-wielding SIG man Peter Hass—another Zionist from Palestine—as passenger, headed for Derna. In the truck bed the other French SAS men, led by Jordan, hid under a tarp with their weapons and explosives. “The lorry kept spluttering to a halt,” Jordan recalled. Each time, Brueckner ducked under the hood, coaxing the engine to life. At the airfield, the vehicle stopped yet again. Jordan, beneath the tarpaulin, heard the cab door open and close, and then footsteps. Hass whispered that Brueckner had gone to a hangar to ask a German for a wrench. Seconds passed. Minutes. Jordan heard running. Lifting the tarp at the tailgate, he poked his head out. Hands jerked him to the ground. German soldiers ringed the vehicle. “Heraus!” they cried. “Aber Schnell!”—“Get out here! And quickly!” One by one the French soldiers jumped down, hands raised. “The only one who stayed in the lorry was Hass,” recalled Jordan. “He knew what would happen to him.” Hass fired his Schmeisser at the SAS weapons cache, blowing himself and the truck to pieces and sending the Germans
and their prisoners diving every which way—all but Jordan, who sprinted into the dark, evading capture. A German fighter pilot later captured by the British, Luftwaffe Lieutenant Friederich Korner, provided details of the double-cross. “Brueckner got out, saluted the CO and stated that he was a German soldier acting as driver of a German lorry containing a party of heavily armed English troops in German uniform with explosive charges to destroy aircraft,” Korner said. “The CO was rather suspicious at first but the driver pressed him to organize as many men as possible with all speed and as heavily armed as possible to disarm the raiding party. The truck was immediately surrounded and the occupants forced to get out. A few seconds after the last one had got out, there was an explosion inside the lorry and it was completely destroyed.” Besides exposing the Derna raid, Brueckner warned the Germans that Martuba was about to be hit, and showed them where the enemy rendezvous was. From the rendezvous site, Tiffin could hear fighting at both strike locations. After dropping the Martuba raiders, Buck and Essner joined him, unaware of events at Derna. An exhausted Jordan arrived on foot. When he told of Brueckner’s betrayal, Buck ordered an immediate evacuation; Tiffin trained his gun on Essner. “For me now he was a German, an enemy,” Tiffin said. “I said, ‘When you move, you are a dead man.’” Later, Essner did try to escape, and died in a volley of British bullets. Violence awaited the Frenchmen at Martuba. When they found the base on high alert, they did not attack but settled in to monitor enemy activity. As they left for the rendezvous Germans spotted them, and all were captured or killed. Buck later blamed his misplaced trust in Brueckner for the debacle.
Sons of the Desert: How Britain’s Irregulars Came to Be In mid-1940, with only desert separating 50,000 British troops in Egypt from 425,000 Italian soldiers in Libya, the British Army needed to patrol the intervening 750,000 square miles of sand. The Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), the Special Air Service (SAS), and the Special Boat Squadron (SBS) got the
Middle East Special Service Battalion July 1940
Special Air Service July 1941
Special Boat Section July 1940
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same assignment: monitor and harass the foe. SAS men were twenty-somethings, eager for action. Desert-savvy LRDG men—older, perhaps veterans of the last war, sometimes fluent in Arabic—looked on the SAS as older brothers do younger brothers. Gradually the units began to collaborate,
Long Range Desert Group Formed July 1940 LAYFORCE (named for commander Robert Laycock) March 1941
Special Boat Squadron April 1943
with the LRDG supporting missions like those chronicled here. By May 1943, when the war in North Africa ended, the LRDG moved to the Mediterranean and Adriatic; the SAS, to Europe. After the war the army disbanded both, but later revived the SAS—now among the world’s premier special ops units.
Middle East Commando December 1940
1st Special Service Regiment May 1942
Special Interrogation Group March 1942
Condenser tanks and radiator grilles hacked to boost air flow are hallmarks of jeeps run by British irregulars. These Special Air Service men are embarking on a raid.
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empted to disband the SIG, the army instead gave Buck a final chance—the raid on Tobruk. The aim was to cripple key supply ports ahead of an Allied offensive at El Alamein. The SAS would attack Benghazi. The LRDG would hit Barce, 160 miles east of Tobruk—itself the target of a commando force, artillerymen, Royal Marines, British infantry, and the SIG. Lieutenant Colonel Haselden would command the attack. The commandos and the SIG were to bluff their way into Tobruk to silence the port’s coastal batteries, allowing Royal Navy destroyers HMS Zulu and HMS Sikh to land a battalion of marines. An infantry force in 20 Motor Torpedo Boats would swoop in as well. On Sunday night, September 13, the commandos penetrated Tobruk, heading for the coastal guns on the eastern outskirts. Haselden and Buck, with five SIG men including Leo Hillman, the young Austrian, seized a small house and established a command post. But the operation began to unravel. The man assigned to lead the infantry ashore got lost. As the landing boats circled, enemy gunners spotted the British vessels, eventually sinking both destroyers. The Germans surrounded Haselden, Buck, and their little force. “It was too dark to see the enemy but they were about 10 yards away,” recalled Hillman. “We continued to hold back the enemy for another 10 minutes until we ran out of ammunition.” At this, Haselden charged singlehandedly. Before the others could use the distraction to get away, the Germans killed him. They captured all but Hillman, who stumbled through the night until he encountered seven British soldiers led by a commando, Lieutenant Tommy Langton. Hillman had lost a boot and badly cut his foot, but surrender was not an option; he limped on. By the time the group reached their rendezvous east of the city their LRDG transport, as arranged, had left. Hillman and accomplices set off on foot for the British lines 400 miles east. Friendly Arabs guided the soldiers to Bardia. For four weeks they hid in a wadi, with Arabs providing food
SPECIAL AIR SERVICE REGIMENTAL ASSOCIATION
and water. When they reached British lines on November 13, Hillman found Tiffin, who had good news and bad news. The British Army had succeeded with its attack on El Alamein, but was dissolving the SIG. With Buck a POW, the group had no commander—and the Germans had withdrawn hundreds of miles west, leading the army to conclude that there was no role in the Desert War for Tiffin, Hillman, and cohort. Headquarters folded the SIG into the SAS, ending brief months of activity during which, despite doing little physical damage, the Special Interrogation Group rattled the Germans. In a June 1942 message to Rommel that British code breakers intercepted, Hitler, calling the SIG “German political refugees,” demanded they “be mercilessly wiped out.” The British Special Operations Executive recruited Hillman to organize anti-Nazi partisans in Austria. He emerged from the war with a Military Cross. In December 1942, Italian troops captured Tiffin and other SAS men bound west for American lines. “We broke down,” said Tiffin. “We were spotted from an Italian outpost in the Benghazi area, and they sent an armored car to find out who we were.” Convincing his captors he was Canadian, he spent 10 months as a POW in Bari, Italy. When Italy surrendered in September 1943, he was transferred to a German camp near Hanover. After the war, Tiffin reclaimed his surname. Tiefenbrunner learned that his parents had perished at Auschwitz. After participating in the 1948 war that established the state of Israel, he and his wife raised four children in London. He spent his final three decades in Israel, working as a bookbinder until he retired in 2011. In 2013, Tiefenbrunner gave an interview about one of the war’s most secretive, shortest-lived units. The SIG “did the job they were asked to do and a bit more,” he said. “We fulfilled a duty that could not have been done by a whole regular army because we could spring a surprise and carry out an action which was a complete surprise of our enemy.” Soon after, Maurice Tiefenbrunner, the last SIG man, died at 97. 2 MARCH/APRIL 2015
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[ portfolio ]
“The dead would be left on this lonely tundra wilderness forever, the landscape of which is bleakness itself…” So wrote Kaoru Kasukabe in August 1943 as 35,000 American and Canadian troops massed off the island of Kiska. The Allied force was intent on driving Kasukabe and his fellow imperial soldiers from the island at the western end of Alaska’s Aleutian archipelago. Buffeted by gales and beset by cold and fog, Kiska was an unlikely battlefield, nearer Siberia than mainland North America. Fourteen months earlier, on June 6, 1942, Japanese forces had seized Kiska and the island of Attu, at the Aleutians’ extreme west. The invaders garrisoned Kiska with 7,500 troops, establishing a seaplane and submarine base fortified with heavy artillery. Before the Allied troops struck Kiska on August 15, 1943, the Japanese pulled out, leaving shipwrecks, bunkers, tunnels, and personal relics. For decades, inaccessibility and climate worked in history’s favor, making Kiska possibly the best-preserved battlefield of World War II. Japan’s peculiar foray and Kiska’s isolation have long had a hold on me—bringing me, finally, to camp there for 51 days, exploring and photographing traces of the only enemy occupation of North America during the war. 40
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Story and photos by Brendan Coyle
FACES OF WAR Discarded gas masks—these U.S. Army-issued—brought the tribulations of the common soldier home to me; each once belonged to an individual, posted to this remote battlefield on the edge of Alaska’s Bering Sea.
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[ portfolio ]
ANTIQUES ROADSHOW I came across this Japanese Type 41 mountain gun at an earthen fortification’s entrance. Manufactured in the early 1900s, it was used to great effect by the Japanese in Manchuria. Although outmoded, the guns would have been a formidable obstacle for advancing Allied troops.
BLAST FROM THE PAST The retreating Japanese set off demolition charges to render these two-man midget submarines inoperable. But the vessels were poorly suited for the tempestuous North Pacific, indicative of Japan’s ill-conceived Aleutians campaign.
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BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOS: TOP, AUTHOR’S COLLECTION; BOTTOM, ALASKA DEFENSE COMMAND/ADVANCE INTELLIGENCE CENTER NORTH PACIFIC COMMAND
MIGHTY HULK The rusting hull of a Japanese cargo ship, beached in front of my camp at Gertrude Cove, greeted me each morning. Destroyed in a fierce attack by B-26 Marauders, the Borneo Maru, like the other decaying weapons of war, offers a stark contrast with Kiska’s panoramic backdrops, profuse wildflowers, and trickling waterfalls.
[ portfolio ]
THE ELOQUENCE OF EVERYDAY ITEMS Personal effects evoke the life of the soldier stationed on lonely Kiska. What weary American private cast off this machine-gun belt? Who wore these jika-tabi—Japanese twotoed boots—or ate his ration from this rice bowl, discarded in a stream?
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VIEW MORE IMAGES AND A PANORAMA IN OUR IPAD EDITION
LIGHTNING STRUCK A flash of rare sunlight led me to the wreckage of Captain Miles A. Werner’s downed P-38 Lightning—a blunt remembrance of the vicious air war over Kiska. American troops discovered the March 1943 wreck later that year (right); the enemy had buried Werner nearby. The fighter’s violent impact left a wide debris field and rent the ground with deep scars still visible today.
BLACK AND WHITE PHOTO, AUTHOR’S COLLECTION
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[ portfolio ]
HEAVEN AND EARTH Allied soldiers inspect a Japanese 75mm gun (right) that continues to point skyward, awaiting a bygone enemy. Kiska was well-defended by these dual-purpose weapons, which sent up great clouds of flak at marauding American and Canadian warplanes. Opposite: Unexpended 7.7mm Arisaka rifle clips slowly subsume into Kiska’s rocky soil.
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BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOS: ABOVE, BARNEY A. MALEY; TOP RIGHT, ALASKA DEFENSE COMMAND/ADVANCE INTELLIGENCE CENTER NORTH PACIFIC COMMAND
WAY OFF-ROAD One of several truck bodies left on Kiska, this Type 180, built by Toyoda (now Toyota), proved too light-duty for the rigors of Kiska. With Kiska’s treeless terrain, trucks also made easy targets for Allied fighters. Oddly, the rear tires—Americanmade Dunlops—are still inflated.
LAST CHARGE THE U.S. CAVALRY’S
With obsolescence looming and the Philippines in peril, American horse soldiers rode in an unlikely but successful fight
Japanese troops land on northern Luzon (above), as part of a force encircling Manila—a conflict American and Filipino horse soldiers had trained for (opposite) in the preceding months.
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ABOVE, KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES; OPPOSITE, CARL MYDANS/LIFE/GETTY IMAGES
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KINNY” WAINWRIGHT WAS FIGHTING mad. With the Japanese poised to cross the Batalan River unopposed, he hastened to Bagac, a village on the west coast of the Bataan Peninsula, part of southern Luzon in the Philippines. It was January 16, 1942. After five weeks on half-rations, Major General Jonathan Wainwright looked even more gaunt than usual as he climbed from his green Packard scout car to confront Brigadier General Fidel Segundo, commander of the Philippine 1st Division. Wainwright had earlier dispatched some of Segundo’s infantry to Morong, a village about four miles north on the coastal road, along the Batalan’s south bank. The American had hoped to delay the Japanese at Morong, but Segundo had withdrawn. The Batalan was the only natural obstacle to a Japanese advance against the Mauban Line, which defended the western half of Bataan. Wainwright ordered the Filipinos back to Morong; an advance guard would reconnoiter, then hold the village until reinforcements arrived. Also in Bagac were the remnants of the U.S. Army’s 26th Cavalry Regiment, a Philippine Scouts unit led by American officers. The skeletal men and horses of the depleted regiment’s E and F Troops had consolidated into one understrength unit. A young officer from G Troop was on hand. His unit had just been sent to the rear after completing a grueling reconnaissance, but he had stuck around because he knew the area and wanted to help. Captain John Wheeler, who commanded E and F troops, was standing alongside the man from G troop when Wainwright,
From left, snapshots of cavalry life in the prewar Philippines: 26th Cavalry Regiment troopers in a recently acquired armored car chat in October 1940 with a comrade on oldschool messenger duty; Philippine Scouts prepare for a January 1937 exhibition; Lieutenant Edwin Ramsey rides at a U.S. Army parade ground on Luzon in 1941. Soon after, he would order the last U.S. Cavalry charge ever.
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a cavalry veteran, recognized the fellow. “Ramsey, isn’t it?” Wainwright barked. “You played in the polo match at Stotsenburg? You take the advance guard. Move out!” Wheeler started to explain Ramsey’s presence. “Never mind!” said Wainwright. “Ramsey, move out!” Sixty years later, Ramsey recalled that moment. “You know the old saying in the Army, ‘Keep your bowels open, your mouth shut, and never volunteer’?” he said. “Well, I violated all three.”
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APAN’S CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE Philippines, begun with an air strike hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, succeeded spectacularly. In less than two weeks the invaders had destroyed American air and naval power in the islands and landed strong detachments on Luzon and Mindanao. Japan’s strategy was to encircle the Philippine capital, Manila, by landing troops all around the island of Luzon. Preliminary landings began on December 10 in areas of northern Luzon defended by General Wainwright’s North Luzon Force—three unseasoned Philippine Army divisions along with the 26th Cavalry and a field artillery unit. Owing to the December 11 destruction of the U.S. Far East Air Force and Wainwright’s decision not to oppose the incursion on the northern coast, the Japanese, under Fourteenth Army commander Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, easily established a firm foothold in northern Luzon. On December 12, the Japanese invaders achieved a
THE 26TH’S HEART WAS ITS NONCOMMISSIONED OFFICERS, SOME WITH 20PLUS YEARS OF SERVICE. second lodgment 260 miles southeast of Manila. As several that insurgency. By the 1930s, however, American military thousand imperial soldiers advanced northwest on Decemhorseflesh was giving way to machines. In 1939 Chief of ber 23, the Filipino 51st Division, part of the South Luzon Cavalry Major General John K. Herr insisted to CongresForce, withdrew from that region. sional skeptics that horse cavalry had stood “the acid test of The day before, from Northern Luzon, Japanese forces war”—but even then it had been three years since the army penetrated to within 170 miles of Manila. To the west, had published the final edition of its horse cavalry manual. 43,000 men of Homma’s Fourteenth Army were splashNearly all the 26th’s 50 officers, mostly Americans, and ing ashore at Lingayen Gulf. Soon, after landing troops its about 800 enlisted troopers, mostly Filipinos, were garon Luzon’s southeast coast, the Japanese were also threatrisoned at Fort Stotsenburg, where the unit had formed ening the Philippine capital from that direction. in 1922. The 26th’s ranks included a headquarters “The rat,” Skinny Wainwright conceded, “was troop, a machine-gun troop, and a platoon with in the house.” scout cars and trucks. The regiment was the Wainwright’s best fighting force was the first Filipino unit to be issued the new M1 26th Cavalry, part of a storied tradition. Garand rifle, which mounted troops stowed American cavalrymen—known as “Yelin saddle scabbards. The unit’s heart was its lowlegs,” after the yellow stripe down the cadre of noncommissioned officers, some seams of their uniform trousers—could with more than 20 years’ service. Many of trace their lineage to the Revolution. (See the younger men in the unit had been lit“Hooves on the Ground,” page 52.) At the erally raised in the cavalry. Private Domiturn of the century, they fought Philippine nador “Dan” Figuracion, 21, for instance, had rebels; the “Stotsenburg” Wainwright menbeen soldiering less than a year, but had been tioned was a U.S. Army fort 50 miles north born at Fort Stotsenburg; his father, Juan, Ramsey found his way into of Manila named for a cavalryman killed in still served in the regiment. Before the war, the cavalry through polo.
TOP, COURTESY OF THE RAMSEY FAMILY; ALL OTHERS, NATIONAL ARCHIVES
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friction had arisen between the Filipino troopers and their white officers over perceived disparities in discipline. But under the leadership of Colonel Clinton A. Pierce, a legendary cavalryman, the regiment had regained its historic cohesion and esprit de corps. Wheeler and Ramsey, two of Pierce’s spirited young officers, were a study in contrasts. John Z. Wheeler, son of a St. Paul, Minnesota, physician, had grown up in affluence, with piano lessons, NRA marksmanship badges, summers spent boating, and daydreams of battlefield valor. Following his junior year at Minnesota State, where he enrolled in the Reserve Officer Training Corps, Wheeler toured Europe. After graduation and a stint at Harvard Business School, he joined the army. In December 1941, Captain Wheeler was a troop commander on Luzon. “I am very happy here,” he wrote home, “happy selfishly because I love the island, happy unselfishly because I know I am doing a man’s job, a necessary job, and doing it well.” Edwin Price Ramsey, 24, born in Illinois and raised in Kansas, was the scrappy product of a broken home. Jailed on charges of beating his wife, Ramsey’s father had killed himself. Ed’s mother, Nelle Brown Cozad, raised her son and his sister Nadine while operating a thriving cosmetology business. Nadine Ramsey became the first woman to deliver U.S. airmail and was later a stunt pilot. Ed’s adolescent drift carried him to the discipline of Oklahoma Military Academy—and polo. Love of the mounted sport led him to law school at the University of Oklahoma, home to a championship team, and a commission in the U.S. Cavalry, where polo was a prestigious pastime. Polo and climate lured Ramsey from the 11th Cavalry, then patrolling the California/Mexico border, to the 26th, which was recruiting. “The mountains along the border… are pretty cold and miserable,” he wrote later. “I didn’t even
know where it was when I first volunteered except that it was a warm country, it was tropical, they had a good polo team.”
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HEN JAPAN ATTACKED IN EARLY December, Wheeler and Ramsey deployed in opposite directions. “We had been playing polo the day before war broke out,” Ramsey said; Wainwright had officiated. “I didn’t know we were at war until I woke up the next morning.” Ramsey and his horse Bryn Awryn were trucked out of Fort Stotsenburg with Troop G 120 miles northeast in case the enemy landed in that vicinity. Attacked by air but not by land or sea, G troop remained there through Christmas before being rerouted south. During that time, most of the 26th, including Wheeler and Troop E, had been clashing relentlessly with the Japanese south and east of Lingayen Gulf. Whenever Wainwright’s defenses sprang a leak, he plugged the 26th into the hole. After General Douglas MacArthur’s command fled to Corregidor, the best Wainwright could achieve was delay; the longer he withstood the Japanese surge, the more of his battered corps would be able to siphon south into siege positions. The 26th fought five rear-guard battles in as many days—losing a quarter of its men and nearly half its horses. On December 23, near the barrio of Rosario, inland of Lingayen Gulf, John Wheeler reined up at what he thought to be a straggling American tank. “What the hell’s the idea?” the horseman shouted before realizing that the head rising from the turret hatch was Japanese. Squeezing off a round from his .45 pistol, Wheeler joined a costly, panicked stampede. Finally the remnants of his troopers crossed a bridge over the Apangat River, with Japanese armor and infantry in hot pursuit. Wheeler and two others blocked the span with a flaming truck—a
HOOVES ON THE GROUND For more than a century, the U.S. Cavalry carried America’s banner into battle REVOLUTIONARY WAR 1775-1783 Combat often occurs face to face, as at the 1781 Battle of the Cowpens.
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CIVIL WAR 1861-1865
INDIAN WARS 19TH CENTURY Cavalrymen fight en masse in huge battles such as Brandy Station, in northern Virginia.
Circa 1900, an Indian artist paints the June 26, 1876, Battle of Little Big Horn.
From Essential to Outdated Until World War I, America’s most
trucking its mounts into battle and
decades of American military pres-
mobile ground force was the U.S. Cav-
fighting in tandem with vehicles. How-
ence. Even in the late 1930s, troopers
alry. After 1918, though, unit after unit
ever, hooves and harnesses lost out to
of the 26th Cavalry and other Philip-
mechanized. Cavalry regiments and
all-wheel drive and armor.
pine Scout outfits were battling their
even divisions existed on paper or as
The 26th Cavalry Regiment, in the
actual National Guard units, but time
Philippines, was one of the few active
was not on the horse soldiers’ side.
U.S. Cavalry outfits abroad. The United
poised the 26th, headquartered on
Invoking Russian and German suc-
own countrymen. Japan’s December 1941 invasion
States had annexed the islands upon
Luzon, for what history would record
cess early in World War II on horse-
defeating Spain in 1898, inheriting and
as the last combat charge by the U.S.
back, diehards imagined a hybrid force
prolonging an insurgency that triggered
Cavalry. —-Michael Dolan
feat that earned each man a Distinguished Service Cross. As Wheeler’s force clattered through darkened Rosario, F Troop horsemen, including Dan Figuracion, on his horse Santango, provided them with covering fire. By the time Figuracion reached the command post in Rosario, Santango had a loose shoe and his rider was the sole survivor of an eight-man squad. Turning Santango loose, Figuracion jumped aboard a scout car bound north for Baguio, an inland city east of the mouth of Lingayen Gulf. At the Kennon Road Bridge, which crossed the Bued River, flowing to the southeastern shore of Lingayen Gulf, an officer told Figuracion to follow him. The man leaped from the car and dashed onto the span. While Figuracion stood lookout, the officer wired the bridge, which already was rigged with explosives. After the men retreated to the scout car, the bridge blew, severing a line of Japanese advance from the north. Perhaps the most memorable stand came on Christmas Eve outside Binalonan, a gateway to the vital Agno River.
Company L of the U.S. 6th Cavalry poses at the Ming Tombs north of Peking, China.
PEKING, CHINA 1900
Brigadier General John “Black Jack” Pershing leads American cavalry troops in Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa.
MEXICO 1916
FROM LEFT: MPI/GETTY IMAGES; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; ANN RONAN PICTURES/ GETTY IMAGES; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; NATIONAL ARCHIVES (BOTH)
Crouching all morning in filthy ditch water, men from B and E Troops, armed with pistols, rifles, machine guns, grenades, and gasoline-filled soda bottles—and eventually reinforced by A Troop—blunted assaults by two columns of Japanese tanks backed by screaming waves of infantry. A sustained attack would have crushed Wheeler’s line, but “the tank crews contented themselves with firing their main guns,” he said. Still, the tankers’ 47mm rounds inflicted fearsome losses. At midafternoon, the remnants of A, B, E, and F Troops, alternately riding and leading their mounts as regimental scout cars motored ahead, withdrew. They moved in stages through Binalonan and east across the Agno River to a new line of defense. By January 10, 1942, Americans and Filipinos far south had established Bataan’s newest rampart, the Mauban Line. Troop G, assigned to secure its seaward flank, ceaselessly scoured the coastal countryside. “The animals were scarcely able to lift their feet over the vines that clogged the trail,” Ramsey wrote. “The troopers
Cavalrymen briefly see action before being made couriers but recruiting continues.
WORLD WAR I 1914-1918
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slumbered in their saddles.” Limping into Bagac on January 15, Troop G was ordered to the rear, with Ramsey remaining behind to assist Wheeler. The next day, wearily responding to Skinny Wainwright’s orders to reconnoiter Morong, Wheeler roused E and F Troops. Because Ramsey knew the coast road—really, a rutted trail—he took the lead with the first platoon, three squads totaling about 27 men. Wheeler followed with the second and third platoons. Ramsey ordered his troopers— among them Dan Figuracion—into a staggered column of twos, hoping to present less of a target. Four men rode point, 30 yards ahead of the main body. It was the dry season, so the horses hooves’ kicked up powdery gray dust that stung men’s eyes and throats. From either side, dense underbrush poked and slapped, impeding the riders and severely reducing visibility. “It was an invitation to an ambush,” Ramsey recalled. Outside Morong, Ramsey halted his column and pulled out a pair of binoculars. Three trails branched from the road. The middle one led directly into the village, a jumble of nipa grass huts atop bamboo stilts rigged to pen livestock. A towering stone church commanded Morong’s central plaza. Ramsey raised his left arm and gestured toward the middle trail. He divided his platoon into a column of three squads. On his signal, every man reached for his hip holster and withdrew his Colt .45 pistol. Ramsey ordered the point riders to advance into Morong. As this vanguard, pistols aloft, trotted into the outskirts, the rest of the men steadied their mounts and listened for opposing gunfire.
None came. Ramsey nudged Bryn Awryn forward, his platoon following. Even though Morong seemed deserted Ramsey halted short of the square. Beyond the town lay dense coconut groves inclining through a swamp stretching to the sea. To their right coursed the narrow Batalan River, spanned by a crude wooden bridge. Ramsey’s vanguard had turned into the square and out of sight. His three squads followed cautiously, pistols at the ready and eyes on the huts. Suddenly explosions erupted. Birds screeched and soared away in a flutter of brilliant plumage. Horses reared or bucked. As riders swiveled their heads and struggled to rein in their mounts, rifle and machine-gun fire chattered from the north. Ramsey could see scores of Japanese infantrymen who, he said later, “turned out to be the advance guard of the Japanese who had been landed from Subic, north of Morong.” Following behind these skirmishers came rank upon rank of what appeared to be hundreds more enemy soldiers, some wading the chest-deep river, others crowding the ramshackle bridge. Ramsey’s point men galloped back. One, Private First Class Pedro Euperio, had been shot several times in his left arm and shoulder. Remarkably, Euperio “held his… pistol with his right hand while the rein of his mount still remained hanging in his left elbow.” Ramsey ordered the wounded trooper to the rear for medical treatment. It was now fight or flee. With the Japanese attackers advancing on the church, Ramsey drew on ingrained training. “I formed a line,” he said later. Then, pistol aloft, he shouted, “Charge!”
Riders of the 26th Cavalry Regiment pass an American light tank in January 1942. Mechanization in the U.S. Army quickly diminished the cavalry’s role in combat to the vanishing point.
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U.S. ARMY CENTER FOR MILITARY HISTORY
OUTNUMBERED AND OUTGUNNED, TROOPERS SLAMMED INTO THE JAPANESE, TRAMPLING SOME.
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HE COMMAND WAS AS OLD AS MOUNTED cavalry—and as stirring to Ramsey’s “Yellowlegs” as it had been to generations before. Instinctively, men crouched low in their saddles, hugging their horses’ necks. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Scouts galloped forward and slammed into the Japanese, trampling some and felling others with point-blank pistol shots. When Dan Figuracion and other troopers found themselves blocked by bamboo fences, they dismounted, holstered their .45s, unsheathed their M1s, and continued afoot. Panicked enemy soldiers vaulted into huts. Others bounded for the river. “They say Japanese don’t run but they did that day,” Figuracion said. “We caught them by surprise.” One kill rankled Figuracion long after. “I shot him in the back, still bothers me,” the cavalryman said. “But he was the enemy.” Knowing he had to hold Morong long enough for Wheeler to arrive and reinforce him, Ramsey halted the charge. While a handful of troopers grabbed reins and led horses to shelter, one squad established a perimeter, hoping to pin down the main Japanese column. With his second squad Ramsey galloped into Morong, intent on clearing its huts. Mounted and afoot, the men systematically fired into windows, doors, and grass walls. The men inside returned fire, and crossfire erupted from Japanese advancing on the eastern flank and enemy light mortar crews whose 50mm projectiles set huts ablaze and terrified horses. The hooves of riderless mounts thumped and skidded along Morong’s paths. One horse, standing calmly near the church as its rider fired into a hut, took the brunt of a mortar blast. The doomed animal reared, screamed, and “crumbled onto its haunches,” as the trooper, wounded and enraged, regained his feet and resumed shooting.
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MID THE EXPLOSIONS, SMALLARMS fire, shouts, and horses’ shrieks, the troopers barely heard approaching hoof beats: John Wheeler’s reinforcements had arrived. In a letter to his father, Wheeler had written, “I have found myself entirely equal to everything we’ve been up against, steady and unafraid…. As for my men, they
have proved themselves splendid fighters.” Now, steady and unafraid, Wheeler waved one platoon of his splendid fighters to reinforce Ramsey’s riverbank line while he and his other platoon joined the door-to-door melee. Several of Wheeler’s horsemen chased fleeing Japanese, leaving enemy bodies in their wake all the way to Morong’s outskirts and pressing the chase to the banks of the Batalan. In Morong, Wheeler’s reinforcements joined Ramsey’s Scouts in securing the town center. For hours, as enemy mortar rounds landed and riverbank sharpshooting held off the Japanese main column, the cavalrymen secured Morong. At midafternoon, Fidel Segundo’s infantry regiment, accompanied by Wainwright, poured into town and chased the Japanese into the jungles beyond Morong. Enemy casualties littered the area. One horse soldier lay dead; at least six had serious wounds, including Pedro Euperio, who had not gone for care. “Here he is standing, waving a pistol in his hand,” Ramsey said. “[H]e said, ‘Sir, I am still on guard.’ He was so brave. I thought he was dead.” Wheeler had been shot in the calf. Shrapnel had caught Ramsey’s knee, but more than blood stained his breeches. “I had wet myself,” he said. “The fear and frenzy of the fighting had anesthetized me both to that and to the shrapnel.” The 26th’s glory proved short-lived. The Japanese soon overwhelmed Fidel Segundo’s troops. The cavalrymen withdrew but within days their rail-thin mounts had gone to army quartermasters for butchering—but no matter how hungry they got, no one in the 26th ate horse meat. When Bataan fell on April 9, Wainwright, Pierce, and Wheeler were among those captured; Wheeler died in the subsequent ordeal. Others, including Figuracion and Ramsey, avoided capture. Ramsey originally thought “to get out of Bataan, down and across into the Sierra Madre, south to where we could get a boat and work our way to Australia. It was very ambitious, probably stupid....” He made it into the hills, organized guerrilla forces—at one time he led 40,000 irregulars—and survived to become an attorney and author of a best-seller about his wartime experiences. Edwin Price Ramsey died in 2013 in Los Angeles, California. Dan Figuracion, 94 and living in California, may be the only surviving veteran of the last charge by U.S. Cavalry horse soldiers. 2
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WEAPONS MANUAL by Jim Laurier
Butt In An operator firing from a prone position could raise a hinged butt plate to his shoulder, improving his aim.
Always in Stock Stocks were of black walnut until wood shortages forced a switch to a plastic blend.
Working with the Wind The rear sight, adapted from the .30-caliber Browning machine gun, could be adjusted for windage with the knob at left.
Handling Charge Added late in the war, a handle helped stabilize the weapon when a gunner was crouching.
Squeeze One Even with solely automatic settings, skilled gunners could loose a single round.
Slower Better? A device in the stock let a BAR gunner switch from 550 rounds per minute to 350.
Murderously Mobile America’s M1918A2 Browning Automatic Rifle American troops’ main squad-level light machine gun of World War II began with gunsmith John M. Browning’s World War I-era concept of a portable “machine-gun killer.” Gas from expended rounds powered the air-cooled mechanism, which started out capable of both full-auto fire at 550 rounds per minute and single shots. In 1939, to improve accuracy, armorers introduced the M1918A2, with an additional lower rate of fire and no single-shot option. American manufacturers began making the latest model—by 1945 they would produce 188,380— and updated earlier BARs. The 20-pound weapon, able to use 56
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tracer, armor-piercing, incendiary, and ball rounds, was effective against targets too near for mortars and too far away to hit with hand grenades. Barrels ran hot; to help the steel cool more quickly, manufacturers cut down the upper stock. The BAR’s utility led to expanded use of automatic rifles. Early in the war, a Marine platoon had three BARs; in 1944, that number rose to nine. Helpers fed gunners clips from bandoliers. On D-Day, Sergeant Clarence Colson of the 1st Infantry Division crossed Omaha Beach hip-firing a Browning so fast his helper had trouble keeping the gunner in loaded magazines.
The Competition French Fusil Mitrailleur Model 24 M29 Rate of fire: 450 rpm • Cartridge: 7.5mm x 54mm • Magazine: 25 rounds • Weight: 19.7 lb. • Crew: 2 • Action: air-cooled, gas-operated • Offered BARs and FMs, French troops preferred the homegrown weapon for its more durable barrel.
An updated World War I BAR looms in September 1944 as a German in Illy, France, surrenders to a GI with a finger on his weapon’s trigger.
British Bren Gun Rate of fire: 500 to 520 rpm • Cartridge: .303-in. • Magazine: 20 to 100 rounds • Weight: 22.8 lb. • Crew: 2 • Action: air-cooled, gas-operated • British troops tended to fire prone on bipods; Australians often hip-slung Brens, firing as they marched.
Magazine Rack Magazines held 20 or 40 .30-06 rounds and were reloadable, so squads scrounged empties.
Under Pressure Gas from expended rounds drove a piston in this tube, powering automatic fire.
Into Leather The BAR shown has an original leather sling; in 1943 a canvas version took its place.
Solid Grounding A bipod lent stability. Skid plates enabled a gunner to tilt and pivot as he was firing.
BARs pack such punch a .50-caliber machine gunner keeps one handy at Remagen in March 9, 1945. A German knife sheath pokes from his coat.
PHOTOS: NATIONAL ARCHIVES (BOTH)
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Good War or not, thousands of Americans refused to fight in it By Rachel S. Cox
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Men not willing to kill but wanting to help the war effort voluntarily starve themselves for a nutrition study (opposite). At Leyte, in the Philippines, actor and conscientious objector Lew Ayres tends to wounded Japanese prisoners.
EUGENE SMITH/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES; OPPOSITE, WALLACE KIRKLAND/ LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
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J
APAN’S ATTACK on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war galvanized the nation. Officially, domestic conflict over whether to fight resolved into the tempered elation of common purpose. “We are all in it—all the way,” FDR declared on December 9, 1941. “Every single man, woman, and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history.” But not every American was a partner. Even when bright lines defined good and evil, freedom and repression, individuality and enslavement, some men refused to fight. By August 1945, nearly 70,000 Americans had declared that they “by reason of religious training and belief”—as the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 put it— opposed war in any form. Although fully half these men still chose to serve their country through alternative service, that did not stop fellow Americans from damning conscientious objectors (COs) as draft dodgers or worse. Even FDR seemed to equate pacifism with cowardice. “There are some timid ones among us who say that we must preserve peace at any price,” he said in May 1941. “What is the view that permits a man to accept safety instead of service in the midst of a war for survival?” asked New York Times writer Robert Van Gelder in a May 1942 magazine article. Van Gelder distinguished derisively between nonconformist religious pacifists and intellectuals opposing war on political and philosophical grounds. “In the one instance, some of the men can’t see the world as it is because their eyes are not sufficiently open,” Van Gelder wrote. “In the second instance a man can’t see the world as it is because he himself is in the way.” Once the United States was at war, those unwilling to fight often bore the blame for the preceding years of vacillation. “The preachment and the practice of pacifists in Britain and America were a cause of the World War,” New York Herald Tribune columnist and World War I veteran Walter Lippmann wrote in August 1943. “They were the cause of the failure to keep pace with the growth of German and Japanese armaments. They led to the policy of…appeasement.” Professing conscientious objection could cost a man his job. Louisiana barred state agencies from employing either COs or enemy aliens. New York Attorney General Thomas Dewey ruled that state workers registering as objectors had to enlist as noncombatants or be fired. Kentucky, Florida, and Ohio towns 60
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barred conscientious objectors from teaching in their schools. Even sports heroes and matinee idols faced derision when they did not head for the barracks. Boston Red Sox star Ted Williams, wanting to see the 1942 season through, justified his 3A draft deferment by claiming to be his mother’s sole support. Skeptics sneered that Mrs. Williams and her notoriously peckish boy, 25, had not seen one another in two years. Williams joined the navy reserve and later became a flight instructor. When in 1942 actor Lew Ayres, star of the 1930 antiwar epic All Quiet on the Western Front and the boffo Dr. Kildare franchise, declared himself a philosophical objector, the industry booed. Raged mogul Louis B. Mayer, “You’re through in Hollywood!” Theater owners boycotted Ayres’s films. The actor, who said bearing arms would cause him “to live in a nightmare of hypocrisy,” briefly worked at a camp for objectors in Oregon, then enlisted as an unarmed medic. “The most publicized CO in the country,” A Plymouth, New in historian Paul Fussell’s words, Hampshire, barber Ayres won three battle stars caring gave COs a piece for soldiers and civilians under fire of his mind—until neighbors shamed in New Guinea and the Philippines. him into tolerance. Hollywood rehabilitated the actor, who donated his army pay to the American Red Cross. To avoid derision, many men who had identified as pacifists in the 1920s and 1930s simply joined up. Others didn’t see themselves as having a choice. “To a real degree in 1941,” said Steve Cary, a World War II CO who went on to become the president of Haverford College in Pennsylvania, “you were a CO knowing that you didn’t have another answer.” As an Amish objector told a filmmaker decades later, “World War II was a hard war to be a CO in.”
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BJECTORS’ ranks were nearly as diverse as the army’s. Consider Robert Lowell, a Boston poet whose forebears arrived on the Mayflower and included a signer of the U.S. Constitution, and Willie Dixon, a slave’s grandson, ex-con, and former pugilist from Mississippi carving a career as a bassist and songwriter in Chicago. Having withdrawn from Harvard at his psychiatrist’s urging and finished his degree at Kenyon College, Lowell was 26 when he received a draft notice in August 1943. As if declining a party invitation, he responded directly to President Roosevelt. “I very much regret that I must refuse the opportunity AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE/SWARTHMORE COLLEGE PEACE COLLECTION
you offer me…for service in the Armed Force,” Lowell’s letter began. “You will understand how painful such a decision is for an American whose family traditions, like your own, have always found their fulfillment in maintaining, through responsible participation in both the civil and military services, our country’s freedom and honor.” Lowell believed that what had originated as a war for survival had devolved into a campaign to obliterate the people of Germany and Japan. Dixon, imprisoned as a youth for “jumping trains”—hoboing—outside his native Vicksburg, was 21 when he migrated to Chicago to box—he was 6’6”, weighed 250 pounds, and sparred with Joe Louis—but quit the ring to sing the blues. Upon receiving an induction notice, Dixon declared that he felt no black man owed racist America national service. “Why should I go to work to fight to save somebody that’s killing me and my people?” he wrote in an autobiography. Police arrested him onstage mid-show. Both landed behind bars—Lowell for a year and a day in New York City and in Danbury, Connecticut; Dixon, for 10 months in a Chicago jail—and they were not alone. Some 6,000 men did time for Selective Service Act violations; during the war, one man in six in an American prison was a draft resister. Roughly 1,600 “absolute resisters” refused to cooperate at all. The other 4,400 inmates were Jehovah’s Witnesses seeking exemption from military service not as COs but as ministers, requests the government denied. Thousands more refused to fight but worked with the system. Dutiful resisters filed under Selective Service and Training Act Section 5(g), completing DSS 47, “Special Form for Conscientious Objectors.” Petitioners had to satisfy draft boards and sometimes appeals panels of their seriousness by answering 10 requests, starting with “Describe the nature of your belief which is the basis of your claim.” A man had to explain how he acquired his beliefs, give evidence and references, and answer the query, “Under what circumstances, if any, do you believe in the use of force?” TOP, ARCHIVE PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES; BOTTOM, MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES
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OME 27,000 MEN who were prepared to resist induction didn’t have to: they washed out after the physical. Of the rest, 25,000 opted for military duty as uniformed noncombatants, mostly in the Medical Corps. Desmond T. Doss, a Seventh-day Adventist from Lynchburg, Virginia, received the Congressional Medal of Honor for rescuing scores of wounded under fire on Okinawa while serving as a medic with the 77th Infantry Division. Others wanted to work with the system but rejected noncombatant service on the grounds that filling a rear-echelon slot simply freed another man to kill. These objectors could serve in the Civilian Public Service, an alternative to military service that gave patriotic COs a chance to help their country outside of the armed forces. Civilian Public Service arose from the country’s World War I experience with absolute draft resisters, who numbered fewer than 2,000 and who, according to Selective Service System director Clarence Dykstra, “presented difficulties…far out of proportion to the numbers involved.” Lacking an option during 1917 to 1918, the military posted objectors to army camps, presumably in hopes that in the company of other draftees men disinclined to combat might make themselves useful somehow or take up the gun after all. When “conchies” refused to follow orders, camp staff cut the men’s rations and stuck them in solitary, sometimes inflicting abuse tantamount to torture. With this harsh history in mind, in the 1930s the Peace Churches—an umbrella term for the Society of Friends, Mennonites, and Church of the Brethren— collaborated with the American Civil Liberties Union, the War Resisters League, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation to seek reforms. About 58 percent of objectors had ties with the Peace Churches, and found in the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” a statement of purpose. “No one could make me kill someone else,” William Anderson, who as a conscientious objector participated in a grueling
POET
ROBERT LOWELL The New England aristocrat chronicled his wartime prison term for draft resistance in a 1959 poem, “Memories of West Street and Lepke.” He later emerged as an early critic of American involvement in Vietnam. He refused to ally formally with antiwar groups, but in 1967 joined writer Norman Mailer in protesting the war at the Pentagon.
BLUESMAN
WILLIE DIXON The 6’6” Dixon didn’t mind fighting—at 22 he won the Illinois Golden Gloves title for novice heavyweights and later sparred with Joe Louis—but refused to fight for a country he thought racist. A lifelong singer, he took up the bass and was gaining traction as a member of the Five Breezes when he refused induction. After the war, Dixon was among the godfathers of Chicagostyle electric blues.
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starvation study, told a historian. idents planted trees and built campsites. More camps opened The Peace Churches wanted a civilian-run system, and in response to Soil Conservation Service, Forest Service, and would administer camps and support the resisters. WorkNational Park Service requests for men to build firebreaks, ing with Congress, the War Department, and even President roads, and trails, install and repair phone lines, and watch Roosevelt, they helped incorporate alternative service into the for forest fires. Crews of objectors worked for the Bureau of Selective Service and Training Act taking shape on Capitol Reclamation building dams and fences, digging ditches, plantHill. The United States would not pay resisters for their sering, and building irrigation systems. Wartime labor shortvice. (That last touch came to gall COs, espeages broadened resisters’ options. By June cially since Uncle Sam paid German POWs 1943, 500 COs were working in agriculture as held stateside 80 cents a day.) unpaid laborers. Others served as dairy testers Alternative service gained a key supporter and manned experiment stations. when Brigadier General Lewis B. Hershey Dispersing objectors reduced chances of became Selective Service System director on conflict and made it harder for COs to publiJuly 31, 1941. A World War I veteran of Swiss cize their views, but complaints still arose. “So Mennonite ancestry, Hershey had seen how why are these conscientious objectors with the forcing objectors into uniform did more harm jitterbug complex allowed to go out, drink, and wthan good. He believed in national service publicly flount [sic] their draft status in front CO AND HERO for all men but sympathized with the demands of hundreds of people who have dear ones in DESMOND T. DOSS of conscience and the need to protect dissithe Uniform of These United States?” the LinVIEW A VIDEO OF THE MEDAL dent minorities. Through the war he defended coln County Times in Oregon editorialized. CEREMONY IN OUR IPAD alternative service, which he called an experCOs encountered threats veiled and overt, EDITION iment “to find out whether our democracy is were refused service at shops and restaurants, big enough to preserve minority rights in a and got booted from vehicles by drivers who time of national emergency.” picked them up hitchhiking, asked why they were out of uniThe Civilian Public Service program dispersed COs among form, and bridled at the answer, sometimes turning around to 152 work camps set in rural areas. In a variation on draftees’ try to run over the offending objector. “When I looked for jobs, progression once sworn in, program participants packed, bid they’d ask what my husband did,” said a woman whose spouse loved ones farewell, and traveled far to live regimented lives was serving at a camp in Southern California. “I was literally cheek-by-jowl with fellow Americans of all kinds. cursed and kicked out the door. I learned to say my husband The first camp opened on May 15, 1941, at a disused Civilworked for the Forest Service.” Vandals wrecked Peace Church ian Conservation Corps site outside Baltimore, Maryland. Resoffices. Objectors working on road crews got used to being
Pacifists in 1940 stage a mock hearing in New York City to demonstrate types of questions resisters might encounter.
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TOP, AP/US SIGNAL CORPS, WALLACE KIRKLAND; BOTTOM, AP PHOTO/ANTHONY CAMERANO
shouted at. Some were shot at. Disgust for objectors turned self-destructive. A fire broke out in Plymouth, New Hampshire, near Civilian Public Service Camp 32, whose residents were trained firefighters. Townspeople let a third of Plymouth burn rather than ask COs to help.
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ET OBJECTORS ALSO encountered kindness or won over critics. In that same New England town, shaggy COs seeking a trim faced the notice, “No skunks allowed! So you conscientious objecters [sic] Keep to H--- out of this Shop!” Vandals also tore down the camp sign. But rather than shy away, the COs attended church, sang in choirs, and worked with youth groups. The barber backed off, a replacement camp sign went undisturbed, and locals began inviting objectors into their homes. Servicemen often showed more sympathy than civilians. Freedom of expression was, after all, one of the ideals for which men in uniform were fighting and dying. Objector Warren Sawyer’s most steadfast supporter was his brother, a Marine who enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor. And the hard time some public service men got may not have represented American sympathies at large. In a 1945 survey, four-fifths of respondents endorsed alternative service for conscientious objectors, while three-fourths believed COs deserved wages and dependency allowances.
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BJECTORS expecting to do something meaningful sometimes felt thwarted. Objector John H. Abbott told Studs Terkel in The Good War that the “work of national importance” the government promised objectors participating in the system felt more like “work of national impotence.” Men at some units organized work slowdowns and hunger strikes to support demands for pay, dependency allotments, and insurance coverage. Some men simply went absent without leave. Other frustrated COs sought more sat-
TOP, MARK RUCKER/TRANSCENDENTAL GRAPHICS, GETTY IMAGES; BOTTOM, PHOTOFEST
isfying projects. Hearing that the Forest Service was short of wilderness firefighters, Philip Stanley started Civilian Public Service Camp 103 in Missoula, Montana. Volunteers learned to parachute into wilderness blazes and, beginning in 1943, some 220 CO smokejumpers who spurned the front lines went onto the fire line. “It took a lot of gumption,” says historian Robert Cottrell. “No one should have accused them of being cowards.” Beginning in March 1942, COs could satisfy the alternative service requirement by volunteering at hospitals and public health clinics. In Crestview, Florida, objectors screened windows in residents’ houses to fight malaria and improved sanitation to fight hookworm. In Puerto Rico, COs rebuilt a hospital surgery and prepared a medical index that identified parasites as the leading cause of disease. Participants could join “guinea pig units” generating medical data useful to the war effort. At Indiana University, COs slept in cold rooms beneath wet sheets to illuminate the physiological effects of clothing in differing climates. A dehydration study volunteer drinking seawater lost 16 pounds in less than a week. To study typhus, public service men in Campton, New Hampshire, donned lice-infested undershorts and tested insecticides by going weeks without changing their clothes or bedding. When researchers sought more lice fodder, most firstround volunteers re-upped. COs took risks now outlawed, voluntarily undergoing infection with jaundice, malaria, atypical pneumonia, influenza, typhus, and hepatitis C. Some died. “I wanted to show that I was not a coward,” CO Neil Hartman, survivor of intentional hepatitis, said. “It fit right in with my scheme of things proving that I was willing to take risks on my own body, but I just did not want to kill someone else.” With malnourished refugees and liberated POWs expected to number in the many thousands, University of Minnesota nutritionist Ancel Keys, father of the K ration, needed to learn how to feed them. The 36 participants he picked for his Min-
FIELDER
TED WILLIAMS Drafted in January 1942, the “Splendid Splinter” successfully appealed his Selective Service status, which enabled him to finish the 1942 season, as he hoped. But after fans booed and sponsor Quaker Oats dropped him, he joined the U.S. Navy Reserve, served as a flight instructor, and resumed his playing career after the war. During the Korean War, Williams flew fighters in combat.
ACTOR
LEW AYRES Famed for portraying doomed soldier Paul Bäumer in 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Ayres had a hit franchise with the Dr. Kildare films—until his refusal to carry a gun sank his career. Ayres enlisted as a medic and resurfaced after the war, amassing four decades’ worth of credits including roles in Johnny Belinda, The Carpetbaggers, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, and Battlestar Galactica.
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Objectors enrolled in alternative service programs wrangle logs in Maryland (left) and fight forest fires in Montana.
nesota Starvation Experiment from among 200 CO volunteers lived on about 1,500 calories a day and walked 45 miles a week. Once a man shed a quarter of his weight, he began to receive calibrated nutrition. A newspaper reported, “Army medical authorities who visited their barracks said their shrunken muscles and swollen joints give the men a striking resemblance to the prisoners freed from German concentration camps.” Study subject Max Kampelman, who went from 161 pounds to below 120, dreamed of candy bars and read cookbooks. “It is amazing what hunger can do,” he wrote in a memoir. “I never see a picture of famine victims without empathizing with the dehumanizing effects on the quality of their lives.” COs profoundly affected care of mental patients. After six lonely months felling trees in North Carolina, objector Warren Sawyer wanted to work with people. He transferred to Pennsylvania State Hospital, a 6,000-patient facility for the mentally and physically impaired in Philadelphia that, like many asylums, needed staff. Byberry, the facility where Sawyer worked, was a cluster of firetraps. At each, brutal attendants herded 400 patients, many naked and incontinent, straitjacketed or strapped to beds, and given to fighting whoever was at hand. There and at 62 institutions nationwide, more than 3,000 CO volunteers strove to make life more peaceful. “We improved things just by the fact that we weren’t beating the patients,” Sawyer said. “Fighting lessened because the patients knew we would stop them without getting involved [in the violence].” Objectors working at snake pits compared notes and documented what they saw. After objector Charles Lord surreptitiously took a camera into Byberry, his nightmarish black-and-white images found their way to Life magazine, 64
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which featured them in an article after the war. In “Bedlam 1946,” writer Albert Q. Maisel called American asylums “little more than concentration camps on the Belsen pattern.” The resulting outrage spurred reforms, and a new national organization launched by COs at Byberry, the National Mental Health Foundation, continued to obtain improvements in institutional mental health care after the war’s end.
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ANY OBJECTORS hoped to do relief work overseas, but Congress forbade it. Mennonite Robert Kreider traveled to China expecting an assignment there only to have to turn back when the ban kicked in. Still, objectors’ efforts had a far-reaching influence. “The relief training units in several Civilian Public Service camps and hospital units encouraged many to consider postwar relief service,” said Kreider, who in February 1946 began what would be three years of relief work in Europe alongside fellow former COs. In 1947 the American Friends Service Committee won the Nobel Peace Prize for its aid programs. In time, some ex-COs recanted. “I don’t think there was any other way to defeat Hitler,” said David Lyttle, a CO who worked at Byberry and later became a literature professor. Hiroshima and Nagasaki persuaded Max Kampelman that passive resistance was no alternative to war. He went on to negotiate arms control treaties with the Soviet Union. Others, like Warren Sawyer, never looked back. After V-J Day, Sawyer turned in his draft card to President Truman, determined never to go to war. “I’ve never had a day’s regret,” Sawyer, 93, said. 2 LEFT, WALLACE KIRKLAND/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT, AP PHOTO
U.S. GOV’T GOLD U.S. Gold Coins Authorized for Immediate Release
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REVIEWS [
BOOKS
]
The Enemy’s Friends Bosnian Waffen-SS volunteers kneel during a daily prayer. Germany began recruiting Muslim soldiers in 1941.
ISLAM AND NAZI GERMANY’S WAR By David Motadel. 500 pp. Harvard University Press, 2014. $35.
A
Middle Eastern proverb observes that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” That ancient nugget is the key to Islam and Nazi Germany’s War. Scholar David Motadel describes a process that at first might seem inexplicable: the alliance between Nazi Germany and various Muslim communities during World War II. Hitler despised all “non-Aryan” peoples as racially inferior, and devout Muslims should have seen plenty to fear in Hitler’s brutal, expansionist ideology. But remember the proverb. Hitler was at war not only with Britain and France, but with their overseas empires, which included regions teeming with millions
BUNDISARCHIV/BILD 146-1977-136-U3A PHOTO MIELKE
of disaffected Muslims eager to throw off the hated imperialist yoke. As the Wehrmacht advanced into regions with Muslim populations, the Nazis could make plausible propaganda claims that they had arrived not to dominate, but to liberate. The Allies claimed they opposed Hitler to stand for human freedom, a narrative we tend to accept today. But these same Allies had been longstanding and brutal oppressors of hundreds of millions of people worldwide, hypocrisy the Germans were able to successfully exploit. Japan benefited from a similar dynamic in its East Asian war, since it could plausibly declare to the conquered populations that
its real mission was not conquest, but the destruction of western imperialism. As the Wehrmacht advanced into North Africa, the Balkans, and finally the Soviet Union, millions of Muslims came under German control, as did great Islamic cities like Sarajevo and Tunis. In all these places, Nazi propaganda emphasizing anti-Western and anti-Soviet themes attracted thousands of Muslims, men who enlisted in the Wehrmacht’s “Eastern Legions” (54 battalions worth by 1943) or the SS- ā division. Provided with halal food, the right to celebrate holy days, and the spiritual care of imams, these troops fought loyally and bravely, MARCH/APRIL 2015
67
REVIEWS
mainly in the East but in Italy, France, and the Balkans as well, until the bitter end in 1945. Most paid with their lives, vanishing into the Soviet Gulag or being shot outright by the NKVD. Stalin would go even farther, deporting the Crimea’s entire Muslim population to Central Asia and Kazakhstan for the ostensible crime of collaborating with the Germans. If the reader is willing to wade through nearly 500 pages of turgid academic
prose, Islam and Nazi Germany’s War offers food for thought. Motadel sees the recruitment of Muslims as an example of Berlin’s increasing “pragmatism.” As the war dragged into 1942 and 1943, devastating defeats at Moscow and Stalingrad bled the master race. The Germans needed fresh manpower and they could no longer be selective about the racial composition of their recruits. While the author deliberately down-
[
BOOKS
plays ideology, it seems only fair to point out that one other link existed between the Nazis and Muslim leaders like Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem: their mutual and murderous hatred of Jews. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and during World War II, the haters tended to stick together. —Robert M. Citino is a professor at the U.S. Army War College and a frequent contributor to World War II magazine.
]
A Kaiten Type 1 launches from the cruiser Kitakami (left). Only one Japanese sailor (bottom) manned each suicide torpedo.
KAITEN Japan’s Secret Manned Suicide Submarine and the First American Ship It Sank in WWII By Michael Mair and Joy Waldron. 384 pp. Berkley Caliber, 2014. $27.95.
J
apanese suicide tactics never threatened the Pacific War’s outcome, but they left indelible marks on the lives and psyches of sailors. The military withheld news of kamikaze successes from Americans while those attacks raged. Largely unappreciated is the terrifying variety of suicide weapons—air, sea, and undersea—the Japanese devised. In Kaiten, Michael Mair and Joy Waldron collaborate on a crisp, persuasive narrative about one of the least known “Divine Wind” weapons: a one-
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WORLD WAR II
man suicide submarine based on a Type 93 Long Lance torpedo. This “Heaven Shaker,” the name for a manned torpedo or suicide vessel, was first used to devastating effect in November 1944 against navy oiler USS Mississinewa in Ulithi Atoll’s vast lagoon. Stories of the war at sea focus on aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. Kaiten’s narrative reminds us that before any plane launched or any gun fired, a tireless shadow fleet of vital
but too often unheralded ships just like Mississinewa provisioned combat vessels with fuel and stores at sea. Lead author Michael Mair might have been tempted to put his late father John A. Mair Jr. —a survivor of the Mississinewa—at the narrative’s center. Instead, the elder Mair’s experience is a piece in a larger mosaic; each Miss crewman gets his due. Mair and Waldron delve into the Japanese perspective—a rare and authoritative balance of friend/ foe coverage. And though the scope of the duo’s research is convincing, they avoid unwarranted complexity. Errors only occasionally mar Kaiten: The torpedo used at Pearl Harbor was the aerial Type 91, not the Type 93. “Knots” rather than “knots per hour” is the nautical speed unit. The United States bombed Hiroshima in 1945, of course, not 1944. Still, the account’s drama makes Kaiten a page-turner. —David Sears is a New Jersey-based author and historian.
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REVIEWS
[ GEORGE MARSHALL A Biography By Debi and Irwin Unger with Stanley Hirshon. 552 pp. HarperCollins, 2014. $35.
M
uch has been written about the larger-than-life military leaders of World War II—Montgomery, Eisenhower, Patton, MacArthur. But as these public men did their jobs, another less conspicuous man ran the war. In George Marshall: A Biography, Debi and Irwin Unger explore the life of the unassuming and sometimes overlooked army officer. Well researched and written with a clean, journalistic style, the book will appeal to popular and academic audiences. The Ungers’ coverage of Marshall’s role as army chief of staff during the war alone makes the volume worth reading. They rightly depict the general as a skilled organizer responsible for transforming America’s anemic armed forces into a formidable combat machine. By Marshall’s estimate, the country’s “ability to fight stood at less than 25%” in December 1940. In response, he streamlined the army’s “decrepit” post-Civil War structure and helmed the Victory Program, a blueprint for rearming the military and bolstering industrial output. Most important, however, is their objective treatment of Marshall; they strike a healthy balance between admiration of his achievements and recognition of his foibles. Marshall suffered his share of lapses, some of them quite serious, like his support of Operation Sledgehammer. As the Dieppe Raid demonstrated, Allied forces were not yet equipped to carry out this cross-Channel assault on German-occupied France, but Marshall stubbornly insisted on the plan’s feasibility. Ultimately the Allies overruled him,
BOOKS
]
abandoning the idea in favor of the North African campaign, Operation Torch. Overall, the Ungers offer a sound portrait of Marshall as an ordinary man who was determined, honest, and unpretentious—qualities that softened his
shortcomings and earned the respect of his contemporaries. Because of this, his story is more than a military history; it is a lesson in character and leadership. —Michael G. Williams is a Marylandbased critic and journalist.
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REVIEWS
[
IPAD APP
]
THE COMPUTER WORE HEELS By LeAnn Erickson. iTunes, $2.99.
The app is rich in photos, like the image below of women operating a numbercrunching computer.
W
orld War II threw women into the workforce, but not just in factories and industrial warehouses. Filmmaker LeAnn Erickson illuminated a lesserknown facet of their war effort in her 2010 documentary Top Secret Rosies. The film documents women’s wartime contributions to state-of-the-art computer technology. The subjects of the film— selected by their high school teachers as highly skilled in mathematics—qualified for the government job of “Junior Computer.” They were schooled in advanced math and data entry and worked on machines that used formulas to calculate trajectories for high-altitude bombing. Making her own steps into innovative
technology, Erickson has turned her documentary into an interactive iPad book app, The Computer Wore Heels. The e-book follows two women on their journey into “human computing.”
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Visit our website
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WORLD WAR II
The app evokes a notebook or diary, with yellowed pages covered in scrawled notes and documents “clipped” to pages—even the typewriter-style font is effective. Almost every page is interactive: expandable newspaper clips illuminate key events, yearbook photos of the main characters and snapshots of the machines they operated are clear and expandable, and sound effects like clacking train wheels and 1940s music provide background and context. Erickson’s team also produced newsreels that mimic period design and provide extra information with blackand-white reenactments and historical images. Especially noteworthy are original schematics of the cutting-edge Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) the girls operated near the end of the war and their hand-lettered math equations. Though the computers made these large-scale calculations possible, the women’s skill, accuracy, and speed were absolutely crucial, as their findings went straight to B-17 bombing squads flying over Germany. The design is intuitive and easy to use and the story is told plainly and an easy read; when paired with the interactive elements it excels as a snapshot of this indispensible home front duty. —Bridgett Henwood is the associate editor of World War II magazine. LEFT, COURTESY OF LEANN ERICKSON; RIGHT, U.S. ARMY
REVIEWS
[ ALAN TURING: THE ENIGMA By Andrew Hodges. 736 pp. Princeton, Paperback 2014. $16.95. The bio that inspired the new film The Imitation Game reanimates the ill-treated Englishman who merged intellect and instinct to crack the German code.
THE TRAIN TO CRYSTAL CITY FDR’s Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America’s Only Family Internment Camp During World War II
BOOK BRIEFS
]
town into a plein air prison for 6,000 captive U.S. citizens, many German-Americans.
THE BLACK PANTHERS A Story of Race, War, and Courage: The 761st Tank Battalion in World War II By Gina M. DiNicolo. 321 pp. Westholme, 2014. $29.95. DiNicolo goes deep, baring both obstacles and triumphs of the 761st, America’s first black armored combat unit in World War II.
DON’T GIVE UP, DON’T GIVE IN Lessons from an Extraordinary Life By Louis Zamperini, David Rensin. 237 pp. Morrow, Paperback 2014. $22.99.
By Jan Jarboe Russell. 400 pp. Scribner, 2015. $30. How American authorities turned a Texas
This undeservedly obscure memoir is full of verve and wit. Zamperini survived Japanese captivity raring to get back to the business of living. Reissued to coincide with Unbroken, the 2014 movie about his war directed by Angelina Jolie.
GERMANY AT WAR 400 Years of Military History Vols. 1–4 By David T. Zabecki (editor) with William H. Van Husen, Carl. O. Schuster, Marcus O. Jones. 1,797 pp. Abc-Clio, 2014. $415. From the 1944 assault on Aachen to Christian von Zweibrücken, who fought for France at Yorktown, an encyclopedia that delivers a dazzlingly comprehensive torrent of Teuton militaria. Edited by Weider History’s chief historian. —Michael Dolan
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Battle Films
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ELEASED IN 1980, The Big Red One tells the story of a squad leader and four privates fighting in every World War II campaign involving the U.S. 1st Infantry Division, whose nickname gives the film its title. These men are not the squad’s only members; they’re just the ones who survive. The rest are simply replacements, who look upon the veteran privates—“the Four Horsemen,” they’re called—with awe: How on earth do these men repeatedly escape death? For their part, the Horsemen regard replacements as “dead men who temporarily had the use of their arms and legs.” Replacements come and go so fast the Horsemen learn to keep them at a distance. A joke that runs through the film is that even after months of training alongside fellow soldiers none of the quartet has bothered to learn their names. Lee Marvin plays the squad leader, known simply as The Sergeant. He is a veteran of World War I, grizzled, taciturn, and utterly realistic. The Horsemen are played by Mark Hamill—yes, that Mark Hamill—Bobby Di Cicco, Kelly Ward, and Robert Carradine. In this ensemble effort Carradine’s character, Zab, ranks first among equals and has the most developed role—unsurprising, since Zab, who provides a voiceover narration, stands in for Samuel Fuller, the man who lovingly wrote and directed The Big Red One. Sam Fuller (1912–1997) himself fought THE KOBAL COLLECTION/LORIMAR
Director Samuel Fuller based his 1980 movie on his own wartime experiences.
in the Big Red One. A precocious writer, he was covering crime for the New York Evening Graphic in his teens and as a young man scripted B movies. He said he joined the army because “I had a helluva opportunity to cover the biggest crime story of the century, and nothing was going to stop me from being an eyewitness.” Superiors tried twice to make him an official army reporter, but he insisted on serving in the infantry. Like alter ego Zab, Fuller published a mystery novel at the height of the fighting, sold the film rights to Hollywood, and spent a thousand dollars of the proceeds on a party for his squad days before the Battle of the Bulge. Like Zab, Fuller chomped cigars and did everything possible to make himself seem larger than life. And like Zab, he got through the war in one piece. Fuller went on to become a Hollywood director whose 23 films have a deserved reputation for combining gritty realism and vivid characters with unabashed
melodrama. During his life Fuller won little critical acclaim, but he influenced directors who became masters, including Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Goodfellas) and Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Inglourious Basterds). Fuller spent years trying to get The Big Red One financed. When he did, the studio, horrified by his film’s four-and-ahalf-hour length, demanded edits that reduced the running time to 113 minutes. The director initially claimed to be glad the movie had been produced at all, but subsequently expressed regret that the public had not seen the movie he had imagined. His friend and admirer, film critic Richard Schickel, felt the same. After Fuller’s death Schickel supervised a “reconstruction” of The Big Red One, incorporating 49 minutes of footage the studio had cut. Upon the expanded version’s appearance in 2004, Pulitzer-prize winning critic Roger Ebert promptly placed it on his list of great movies. The Big Red One isn’t merely based on Fuller’s wartime experiences. It pretty much recounts them—something that becomes obvious if you read his memoir, A Third Face, published posthumously in 2002. Even the least likely episodes turn out to dramatize events that really occurred: the private in Sicily who has a testicle blown off and is told that that’s why the good Lord gave him two, the raid on a Belgian insane asylum, the underage civilian sniper who when captured isn’t MARCH/APRIL 2015
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shot but spanked, the liberation of a concentration camp. Zab’s narration is pure Fuller, as when the Horseman explains an explosive device used to clear concertina wire on Omaha Beach. “The Bangalore torpedo was 50 feet long and packed with 85 pounds of TNT and you assembled it along the way, by hand,” Zab says. “I’d love to meet the asshole who invented it.” Almost none of the incidents that comprise The Big Red One build upon one another; instead, they stand as deliberately unrelated vignettes. Fuller maintained that that is the combat soldier’s life: a string of vivid episodes, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Thus the director could place a 20th century firefight in a Roman amphitheater without invoking gladiators, as many another filmmaker might. In a heavyhanded scene, a battle is taking place inside an insane asylum when one of the
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The combat soldier’s life, according to Sam Fuller, is a string of vivid episodes, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
inmates grabs a submachine gun. “I am one of you!” the madman shouts as he indiscriminately sprays bullets. “I am sane! I am sane!” This would be the clumsiest kind of symbolism—except that Fuller was recreating a wartime incident he witnessed and in his memoir even supplies the patient’s name. At the conclusion, Zab conveys the film’s moral: “Surviving is the only glory in war.” This declaration makes The Big Red One sound like an antiwar film. It isn’t. Fuller plainly regarded World War II as a great adventure, and his mindset seeps into the film, lending it a seductive appeal. The focus on Zab and his comrades tempts the viewer to identify with the Four Horsemen, to imagine participating in the adventure and coming away unscathed. It’s easy to forget that in combat, a soldier’s fate is just as likely to be that of a replacement. 2
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Challenge
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Hollywood Howlers
The Dirty Dozen (1967) tells the story of an unconventional unit of men dropped into France shortly before D-Day to assassinate top German leaders. In a training scene
(above), the recruits leap over England from a C-47 bearing the U.S. Army Air Forces’ white-star-in-blue-roundel markings. Where did the filmmakers go astray?
Hollywood Howlers Throughout, the American, British, and German tanks are all portrayed by American Patton tanks, which were not introduced until after the war.
Congratulations to the winners: Ken Weiler, Tom Machowski, and Daniel McDonald
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WORLD WAR II
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