WAR ENDS VICTORY OVER JAPAN
Hellcats’ Last-Minute Fight to the Death Truman Takes Charge | A Pilot’s-Eye View of Enola Gay PLUS: The Man with Steel Teeth | Vesuvius Attacks
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FEATURES
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32 The Last Air Battle
50 Truman Takes Charge
62 An American
For the U.S. Navy aviators of Task Force 38, the air war in the Pacific ran all the way to the limit
Bomber Group Takes a One-Two Punch
DAVID SEARS
FDR’s sudden death placed a neophyte president at the helm— responsible for the war’s biggest decision JONATHAN W. JORDAN
40 Russia’s Rock
P ORT FOLI O
Though tortured in Stalin’s purges, Konstantin Rokossovsky stood tall for Mother Russia when it counted most STUART D. GOLDMAN
58 Pilot’s-eye View
WE AP ON S M ANU AL
Artifacts collected by Enola Gay copilot Robert Lewis provide an intimate look into his historic mission to drop the atomic bomb
68 Fat Man and Little Boy
WORLD WAR II
First Mount Vesuvius, then the Nazis, wreaked havoc on B-25 airmen in Italy RICHARD R. MULLER
To end a war that had engulfed the globe, Americans built earthshaking weapons JIM LAURIER
DEPARTMENTS 10 World War II Today
26 Fire for Effect
74 Battle Films
Rethinking wartime souvenirs; Jochen Hellbeck’s Reading List
Oh, Darwin
Japan’s Longest Day: How the Empire finally didn’t strike back
ROBERT M. CITINO
28 Time Travel 20 Conversation
New Mexico’s Trinity Site
B-29 flight engineer Fiske Hanley endured brutality as a “special prisoner” of the Japanese
ALETA BURCHYSKI
MICHAEL DOLAN
The duke, the duchess, and their unsavory romance with Nazism; The Ship That Wouldn’t Die; a Japanese scholar examines how warring Japan mobilized its citizenry
23 From the Footlocker Curators at The National World War II Museum solve readers’ artifact mysteries
71 Reviews
MARK GRIMSLEY
IN EVERY ISSUE
6 Mail 79 Challenge 80 Pinup Visit us at worldwarii.com World War II magazine @WWIImag
A view across 1944 Naples includes Allied ships in the harbor, and Mt. Vesuvius simmering in the distance. COVER: The Japanese delegation somberly faces Allied officers during the official surrender ceremony on the USS Missouri, September 2, 1945. THIS PHOTO, NATIONAL ARCHIVES; COVER, © BETTMANN/CORBIS
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
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Contributors
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Michael A. Reinstein Dionisio Lucchesi William Koneval
Vol. 30, No. 3 B URCH Y S K I
G OLDM AN
JO R D A N
EDITOR
Roger L. Vance CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER PRESIDENT ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
Karen Jensen Art Director Senior Editor Guy Aceto Photo Editor Bridgett Henwood Associate Editor Jon Guttman Research Director Paul Wiseman News Editor David Zabecki Chief Military Historian Cynthia Currie
Michael Dolan
M U LLE R
ADVISORY BOARD
Ed Drea, David Glantz, Jeffery Grey, John McManus, Williamson Murray, Dennis Showalter, Keith Huxen
DIGITAL
Brian King Gerald Swick Barbara Justice
former associate editor at World War II magazine. She is currently copy editor at Outside magazine, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Since moving to the state, visiting the Trinity Test Site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated, has been at the top of her weekend-excursions list. Stuart D. Goldman (“Russia’s Rock”) has been scholar in residence at the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research since 2009. From 1979 to 2009, Goldman was a Russian specialist at the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress. Before that, Goldman served on the Pennsylvania State University international studies faculty. He holds a PhD in history from Georgetown University. His book, Nomonhan, 1939: The Red Army’s Victory That Shaped World War II (Naval Institute Press), debuted in 2012. Jonathan W. Jordan (“Truman Takes
Charge”) is the author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers Rivals Victors: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, and the Partnership that Drove the Allied Conquest in Europe and the recent American Warlords: How Roosevelt’s High Command Led
Editor Senior Graphic Designer
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Aleta Burchyski (“Time Travel”) is a
Director
America to Victory in World War II, from which his article is adapted. His writing has appeared in World War II magazine and a variety of military history publications. Richard R. Muller (“One-Two Punch”)
is a military history professor at the United States Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. A native of New Jersey, he has spent the last 24 years educating air force officers at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama (home of the B-25 Mitchell in the above photo). He is the author of The German Air War in Russia and coauthor of The Luftwaffe over Germany: Defense of the Reich. He is currently writing a history of the 452nd Bomb Group. David Sears (“White-knuckle Countdown to Peace”) is a New Jersey-based historian and author who writes frequently for World War II and other HistoryNet publications. David served as a U.S. Navy officer with extensive sea duty aboard a destroyer and as an advisor to the Vietnamese navy during the Vietnam conflict. David has published four popular military history books including Pacific Air: How Fearless Flyboys, Peerless Aircraft, and Fast Flattops Conquered the Skies in the War with Japan.
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East German leader Erich Honecker visits Prora—then home to an East German military school—in 1972.
I enjoyed the story on the Third Reich’s holiday resort at Prora (“Hitler-Era Resort Undergoes Revival,” May/June 2015). Although never completed, the site was used by the Red Army after the war and then housed the East German army’s Erich Habersaath Military Technical School. It was also the location of one of military history’s most surreal moments. On October 2, 1990, all East German personal assembled in full uniform. After the band played the East German national anthem and a short speech was given, the East German flag was lowered. The following day, October 3—German Unity Day—all personnel gathered once
Editor’s Note: Regular readers of World War II will have already noticed this issue’s new cover stock and paper—part of our ongoing effort to improve the experience of reading the magazine. Look for upgrades to all our sister publications; to see the full range of HistoryNet magazines, visit historynet.com.
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more, now wearing the uniform of the Bundeswehr, the unified armed forces of Germany. The military band played Deutschland über alles, the troops all saluted, and an army walked into history. Mark Claussner West Chicago, Ill.
Retaliation Tactics I am surprised that the Doolittle Raid article (“Aftermath,” May/June 2015) made no mention of another consequence of the raid: the Japanese army’s determination to conduct a return raid on the American homeland. This goal was actually accomplished by the launch of bomb-dropping balloons that floated over the Pacific Ocean and then North America in late 1944 and early 1945. This amazing story was well reported in the February 2003 edition of World War II. Vernon Squires Winnetka, Ill.
Tune In and Turn Up Richard J. Evans’s fine article on the Volkswagen (“Think Again,” May/June 2015) mentions the People’s Receiver, the Volksempfänger, saying it was “shortwave so listeners couldn’t tune into for-
The Japanese army floated bombs across America late in the war.
TOP LEFT, BUNDESARCHIV BILD Y 10-1908-80, PHOTO O.ANG.; TOP RIGHT, HISTORYNET ARCHIVE; BOTTOM, NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Backdrop to History
eign broadcasts.” This is a misconception about short-waves—perhaps he meant “short-range.” Short-wave bands tune to higher frequencies, and might have provided worldwide reception with a sensitive radio. Short-range radios, on the other hand, tuned long- and mediumwave bands (the medium-wave band corresponds to the U.S. standard AM broadcast band). Nazi radios used these bands, which normally work well over only short distances, though sensitive medium-wave sets could have provided long-range reception at night. The radios were also deliberately made to lack sensitivity to weak signals. So, both legal prohibitions and technical tricks were used to restrict Germans to hearing only the Reich’s
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version of the news. Horace W. Hall Colorado Springs, Colo.
Before Alan Turing
corroborate this data, but certainly not the Hollywood film industry. A monument on the grounds of Bletchley Park gives credit to the Poles for breaking the code. Daniel E. Josephs Westchester, Ill.
The Polish mathematicians who broke the German Enigma code were Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski, and Jerzy Różycki. They conNot My Maker structed copies of the Enigma In “Death in the West” (May/ Henryk Zygalski, Marian Rejewski, and Jerzy Róz˙ycki cracked the machine but also created the June 2015) the P-51 Mustang Enigma code before the war, paving the way for Alan Turing. original Bombe and the design is incorrectly attributed cyclometer, both of which were used to to the Consolidated Aircraft Corporaearned recognition for the brilliant work help break the code. All of this was turned tion, not its actual maker: North Amerihe did on progressively breaking the over to the British and French in the can. Ouch! That hurts! evolving versions of Enigma and for his famous July 25, 1939, meeting between It is tough enough when our comcreativity that led to the development of Polish, British, and French intelligence pany is forgotten by military hismodern computers. He was a brilliant officers and cryptographers at an intellitorians, but when an established man, but not the one who broke the gence center in the Kabackie Woods, military history publication, Enigma code, as stated in May/June 2015’s near the village of Pyry, south of Warsaw. such as yours, attributes the Bletchley Park Time Travel piece (“House Alan Turing certainly deserves wellgreatest long-range fighter of Games”). There are many sources that of World War II to a competitor who should be remembered for its PBYs and B-24s, that is too much! Ed Rusinek, North American Aviation Retirees Bulletin Rossmoor, Calif.
PRELUDE to PEARL A historical novel that chronicles the lives of a young US naval intelligence officer, a ruthless German spy, a cosmopolitan Japanese maiden, and an ambitious Japanese naval aviator in the tumultuous decade leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the years immediately before the Second Sino-Japanese war, Francis Marian, a young sailor with a “photographic memory,” is enlisted by the Office of Naval Intelligence to gather secret information on Japan as it extends it tentacle’s into China and southeast Asia. International businessman, Werner Breidstein, actually a German spy, comes to Manila where he spars with Marian while gathering intelligence on Japan’s escalating expansion into China, Indochina, and the islands of the Central Pacific as war with the United States draws closer and closer. The two men share a common friendship—and possibly more—with a young, once-innocent Japanese woman who has a broken relationship with a Japanese naval officer who knows the details of the coming attack on Pearl Harbor. When Marian seeks to warn Macarthur of the only-hours away attack on Pearl Harbor, Marian and Breidstein clash as family secrets are revealed.
Available as Hardcopy and ebook on Amazon.com 8
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Corrections In the map on page 39 of the May/June 2015 issue, the label “5th Panzer Division” should read 5th Panzer Army. The 5th Panzer Division (the best on the Russian Front) was in East Prussia preparing to evacuate to northwest Germany. James H. Stevenson Pinehurst, N.C. A caption on page 14 incorrectly identifies a stretch of “Balkan shore.” It should read “Baltic shore.”
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W W I I T ODA Y
Painted in oils on copper, this triple view of England’s King Charles I, thought to be from the school of Anthony van Dyck, was returned to its rightful German owner.
T
he spoils of war—Lugers, German medals and pins, Wehrmacht helmets, Nazi flags—came home in footlockers, boxes, and packages, whether to memorialize fallen friends or impress girls stateside. But European Theater booty also crossed the line into theft. Ignoring repeated warnings from General Dwight D. Eisenhower, GIs not only took legitimate souvenirs but also robbed churches, homes, castles, and museums of valuable jewelry, art, and ancient books, simply because they could. Some swag is returning to Reported and written by
Paul Wiseman
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its origins, thanks in part to the Monuments Men Foundation. Started by oil man and author Robert Edsel, the foundation celebrates the Allied military’s Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program, which protected and recovered art in war zones, and has expanded its brief to retrieving items looted by Allied soldiers. The foundation has helped return 18 objects snatched at war’s end to European owners or turned them over to the National Archives in Washington. Veterans and heirs suspecting they own or know of stolen art can call 1-866994-4278 or e-mail info@ monumentsmenfoundation. org to provide information
and seek advice. “We’re now the clearinghouse for those with questions about cultural objects sent or brought home after the war by soldiers, immigrants, and others,’’ Robert Edsel says. In a May ceremony in Washington, DC, the foundation arranged repatriation of five paintings. In a 1945 poker game, U.S. Army 750th Tank Battalion tank commander Major William Oftebro had won three works pilfered from a salt mine near Dessau. German authorities had hidden the works in the mine. The paintings were The Prodigal Son, by 17th-century Flemish painter Frans Francken III,
CAN YOU KEEP IT? Call the Monuments Men Foundation tip line, 866-WWII-ART (866-994-4278), if you know about or suspect you own stolen art. MILITARY EQUIPMENT
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Rethinking Wartime Souvenirs
W W I I T ODA Y Landscape With Staffage, by Austrian artist Franz de Paula Ferg, and a landscape by German artist Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich; each is worth at least $25,000. Oftebro died in 1994; his widow had hung the paintings in her apartment. Twice, appraisers told Oftebro’s stepson the paintings had been stolen and should be returned. He balked, reasoning that Nazi evildoing justified keeping the artwork, until the 2014 movie The Monuments Men, based on Edsel’s book of the same title, convinced him otherwise. The other two returned paintings were purchased from GIs in postwar Nuremberg by Margaret Reeb, a Women’s Army Corps officer and wartime acquaintance of
Frans Francken III’s The Prodigal Son was anted up in a GI poker game.
Eleanor Roosevelt who was overseas to set up libraries for American servicemen. One canvas depicts Queen Victoria and her daughter; the other, King Charles I. Soldiers had stolen both from Kronberg Castle Hotel, which the army had requisitioned as an officer’s club. Reeb’s heirs
found them in a safe deposit box after she died in 2005. The paintings are going back to the hotel. The line between fair and foul gain is fairly distinct. “The taking of military equipment is condoned, but stealing noncombatants’ property is not,” says Seth Givens, an Ohio University doctoral student who has written about Allied looting and worked with the Monuments Men Foundation. “In practice, then, Lugers were fair play but paintings weren’t—the latter is looting and the former is souvenir hunting.” Adds Edsel, “Anyone who goes into a church and takes stuff—you can’t say, ‘I didn’t know who that belonged to.’” But sometimes the line wavers, as when a GI boosted
an historical artifact belonging to the man who started the war. Near war’s end, paratrooper John Pistone was in Adolf Hitler’s home at Berchtesgaden, Germany, where he grabbed a 12-pound catalog of photographs showing artwork looted by the Germans during their heyday and meant for a museum to be built for the Führer. In 2009, at the urging of a local history buff, Pistone gave up the book through the Monuments Men Foundation. The U.S. State Department transferred the volume into German hands. The catalog, one of 31 that German curators assembled while Hitler was riding high and the 20th recovered since his defeat, helped fill blanks in the history of Nazi art looting.
SS Accountant Admits Complicity TOP, MONUMENTS MEN FOUNDATION; BOTTOM, RONNY HARTMANN/POOL PHOTO VIA AP; INSET, HISTORYNET ARCHIVE
I
A repentant Gröning awaits judgment. His younger self thought the SS “dashing.”
n a German court, “the accountant of Auschwitz” charged with being an accessory to 300,000 counts of murder declared himself “morally complicit” in the concentration camp’s horrors. Gröning, 94, voiced repentance but said his guilt is such that he cannot ask for forgiveness. “As concerns guilt before the law, you must decide,” he told Judge Franz Kompisch. The case was to wrap up in the summer. After being conscripted, the former bank accountant volunteered in 1940 to join what he called the “dashing and zestful” Schutzstaffel. At Auschwitz, Gröning kept records of cash that he and guards took from prisoners. In November 1942, he watched an SS soldier silence a crying baby by fatally dashing the infant against a truck. He also saw prisoners gassed. Repelled, Gröning sought a transfer from the camp, eventually succeeding. In April, Auschwitz survivor Eva Mozes Kor approached Gröning as he ate a cheese sandwich during a break in the near-empty courtroom, the Guardian reported. “Mr. Gröning,” Kor said, “I have much sympathy for you. I know it is mentally, physically, and emotionally hard for you, and I think you are courageous.” Gröning nodded.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
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Bestiality on Exhibit
T
he American captives assumed the men in white smocks were doctors, not science-minded murderers who intended to use them like lab rats. “They never dreamed they would be dissected,” said Dr. Toshio Tono, who participated in the 1945 “experiments” as a student at Kyushu University’s School of Medicine in Fukuoka, Japan. The school’s faculty is admitting the institution’s stained history; since April a campus museum has included an exhibit on vivisection of American POWs. On May 5, 1945, after a Japanese fighter rammed a B-29 near Fukuoka, the bomber’s crew bailed out. Japanese authorities captured at least eight survivors and turned the men over to the medical school, where for 19 days doctors treated them like lab animals, injecting seawater to test a saline substitute, ripping out a man’s liver to see how long he survived, cutting into aviators’ brains. All eight men in these
Six of these airmen and two others, including Dale Plambeck (inset), died in Japanese hands. Far right, the medical school’s full POW vivisection exhibit.
“experiments” died. Trying to evade judgment, medical school officials faked documents to indicate that the men were transferred to Hiroshima and killed in the atomic bomb strike. But the truth came out, and in 1948 the Allied war crimes tribunal sentenced five university workers to death and 18 to prison. Occupation commander General Douglas MacArthur commuted the executions and reduced the
sentences; by 1958, all parties had gone free. Meanwhile, the U.S. government told the vivisected men’s families they were missing in action. After a newspaper mentioned the experiments, the mother of Lieutenant Dale Plambeck of Fremont, Nebraska, pressed the War Department to come clean. In November 1947, the
family got notice that Plambeck and fellow POWs might have died in the experiments. Confirmation came in January 1950. A government letter declared it impossible to pinpoint the day Plambeck died. “It is necessary, therefore, to accept 2 June 1945, the latest date on which your son could have been alive, as the date of his death,” the correspondence stated. The episode faded from memory until Tono later published a book, Disgrace, about the vivisections.
-Responding to a dance video shot at a Black Sea memorial
to World War II (left)—nostalgia for which Russian President Vladimir Putin uses to justify aggression in Ukraine—a Russian court in April convicted two women and a teenaged girl of hooliganism. The performance included a dash of twerking, a provocative move in which dancers crouch and thrust their hips at high speed.
-Researchers located the “amazingly intact” wreck of the
USS Independence 2,600 feet down off California’s Farallon Islands. The aircraft carrier, which fought in the Pacific, was a target during the postwar Bikini Atoll atomic bomb tests before being scuttled. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found the wreck using a Boeing submersible and Coda Octopus sonar imaging technology.
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Search Goes on for Anne Frank’s Betrayer
T
he identity of the Judas who gave up the Frank family to German forces occupying Amsterdam is one of World War II’s enduring mysteries. Suspects come and go—a warehouse manager, a petty thief, a cleaning lady. A new Dutch-language book names a fresh suspect: Nelly Voskuijl, sister of one of the family’s protectors. As in previous instances, the allegations are murky. The four Franks hid for two years behind the Amsterdam offices of Otto Frank, Anne’s father. Elisabeth “Bep” Voskuijl, his typist, kept the Franks fed until 1944, when German authorities came for them. Anne, her sister Margot, and their mother died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After the war, Otto found Anne’s diary. Published in 1947, the book became an international sensation, but the snitch’s identity remained a mystery. The latest allegations appear in a biography of Bep by her youngest son and a Flemish journalist. Drawing on testimony by a third Voskuijl sister and Bep’s wartime fiancé, Bep Voskuijl: Silence No More presents circumstantial evidence: Nelly easily got a visa to visit Germany; a Dutch police officer claimed that a young woman fingered the Franks; the Nazis never arrested Bep, possibly a nod to Nelly’s help. But the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam does “not see any reason” to accept the
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DISPATCHES
-A Czech TV reality show
WHO SNITCHED ON ANNE? Ever since Anne Frank’s wartime diary came into public view in 1947, Dutch authorities and armchair detectives have been trying to identify the person who reported the Frank family to Nazi officials, setting them up for capture and deportation to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. NELLY VOSKUIJL, latest suspect
A new book theorizes that the sister of the woman keeping the family fed did it. But among the slim circumstantial evidence is Nelly Voskuijl’s obtaining a visa to visit Germany—something true of many. TONNY AHLERS, petty thief and Nazi
In a 2002 book, The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, Carol Anne Lee notes that before the Franks went into hiding Ahlers was blackmailing Otto, Anne’s father, apparently for doubting Germany’s prospects in the war. The evidence is far from conclusive. WILLEM VAN MAAREN, warehouse manager
is drawing fire for a series in which contestants live as if on a farm in 1939 under Nazi rule. In Holiday in the Protectorate, members of an actual family contend with crude plumbing, vintage tools, conniving neighbors, and actors portraying door-kicking, night-raiding Nazis. The payoff for enduring eight episodes: as much as $40,000. Critics say the show trivializes Nazi atrocities in the actual Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, from which the Germans deported 82,000 to concentration camps. The show drew a respectable 500,000 viewers. Director Zora Cejnkova says: “We want viewers to ask themselves, ‘What would I do in that situation?’”
The manager of a warehouse adjoining the Franks’ hideout, van Maaren set traps after suspecting something was up. Inquiries in 1948 and 1963 found no conclusive evidence.
LENA HARTOG, cleaner
Questioned in 1948, Hartog, who cleaned Otto Frank’s building, did not reveal where she worked. She reportedly knew Jews were on the premises and feared her husband, a colleague of van Maaren, would be arrested.
allegations. Visas to Germany were easy to obtain; the story of the female informer “is insufficiently substantiated”; and the Nazis also neglected to arrest Miep Gies, who, like Bep, helped the Franks. The hunt will likely prove futile, says David Barnouw, retired historian at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. The Franks’
refuge was visible from perhaps 100 windows, he notes. “Maybe dozens of people saw something moving in the hiding place but kept their mouth shut,” he says. “One of them could have told it to a friend and the friend to another friend and the last in this line could have informed the Germans. So we will never know, I am afraid.”
Above, TV “Gestapo” come calling. Below, “tensions” ease between takes. RIGHT (BOTH), CESKA TELEVIZE; CENTER (ALL), HISTORYNET ARCHIVE
WAR II
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W W I I T ODA Y THE READING LIST
Jochen Hellbeck Life and Fate
to preserve their Polishness, Poles collaborated with the occupiers, joined the partisans, or wrote journals— all of this, and more, is documented in this engrossing diary kept by a physician practicing in an eastern Polish town that became an epicenter of World War II. Inexplicably, Klukowski’s vivid account is out of print, but used copies are available on the Internet.”
Vasily Grossman (1959)
“Most Westerners fall in love with Russia after reading Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. I started with War and Peace and went directly for Life and Fate. Both came from my father’s library, and he—once a very young soldier at the Eastern Front— encouraged me to study Russian. Grossman was a war reporter in Stalingrad during the most critical weeks of the city’s defense, and readers of his epic feel this presence on every page. Watch for the little-known prequel (Stalingrad) to come out in English.”
Leningrad Under Siege First-hand Accounts of the Ordeal Daniil Alexandrovich Granin (2006)
“As if in a morbid laboratory, inhabitants of Leningrad whose diaries comprise this collection observe, day by day, how hunger reduces their bodies and chips at their efforts to remain human amid a German siege more than two years long. This abridged translation falls short of the original Book of the Blockade (published in Russian in 1979), but does offer English readers selections in these important wartime voices.”
The Inhumanity of War: Russia, 1941–1944 Willy Peter Reese (2005)
“When the wartime memoirs of this young soldier and aspiring writer debuted in German in 2003 they were rightly hailed as a sensation. Reese’s feverish writings about his experience on the Eastern Front exhibit a wrenching paradox: he hails the landscape and the spirit of Russia, yet partakes in atrocities against Soviet citizens; he laments the destructive violence of war, yet yearns to return to the front line where he would be killed in 1944.”
Diary from the Years of Occupation 1939–44 Zygmunt Klukowski (1993)
“How Poland desperately fought before disappearing from the map; how the Germans imposed a rule-bound regime of deportations and mass killings; how,
WORD FOR WORD
“Japan today is one of the predatory powers; she has submerged all moral and ethical sense and has become frankly and unashamedly opportunistic, seeking at every turn to profit by the weakness of others.” —Joseph Grew, U.S. ambassador to Japan, memo to State Department, September 12, 1940 16
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The Unknown Black Book The Holocaust in the GermanOccupied Soviet Territories Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman (2010)
“Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, two Soviet Jewish writers, teamed during World War II to chronicle Nazi atrocities against Soviet Jews. The Unknown Black Book presents scores of eyewitness reports that did not go into the original Black Book. The horrors they describe defy the imagination and make for difficult reading. This masterful edition sheds light on a crucial, yet barely known dimension of the Holocaust.” Jochen Hellbeck, scion of West German diplomats, grew up in Asia and Europe, including five years in East Berlin. In 1989 he watched the Berlin Wall breached from Bloomington, Indiana, where he was an exchange student. He holds a Ph.D. in Russian history from Columbia University and teaches at Rutgers University; his most recent book is Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich (Public Affairs, 2015).
ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE CAPLANIS; BOTTOM, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
A Stranger to Myself
The 70th Anniversary of WWII Conference Series Presented by Tawani Foundation in association with Pritzker Military Museum & Library
NOVEMBER 19–21, 2015 The National WWII Museum & Hyatt Regency New Orleans Join The National WWII Museum and top scholars as we explore the dramatic final throes of World War II. The three-day program will cover key pivotal moments, delving into topics that have engrossed historians for the past 70 years–including the reaction to concentration camps throughout Europe, the ethics of firebombing, and the politics of peace. Register now to secure your spot at our best Conference yet! The Battle of the Bulge I The Battle of Manila I The Air War: The Effects and the Ethics I Planning the Postwar World I Iwo Jima Okinawa I Invading the Enemies’ Homelands I The Battle of Berlin I Saving the Art of Italy I Dachau I The Decision to Use the Atomic Bombs Rick Atkinson I Dr. Conrad Crane I Robert Edsel I Richard Frank I Alex Kershaw I Dr. Donald Miller I Dr. Allan Millett I Dr. Mark Stoler I Dr. Gerhard Weinberg
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W W I I T ODA Y ry’s breadth. A movie set during the Napoleonic Wars lambastes the French. A Boer War epic points out that the British invented the concentration camp. Fictional Russian soldiers slaughter a German family. The 1941 film I Accuse— released as the Reich was murdering the disabled—portrays a woman with multiple sclerosis begging her husband, a doctor, to end her misery. And Jews are, of course, targets; 1940’s The Eternal Jew compares them to rats. Moeller interviewed historians, filmmakers, officials, former neo-Nazis, and ordinary filmgoers about the
Some Nazi films have inadvertently hilarious elements— like the singing pilots (below) in Stukas. But virtually all— like Süss the Jew (right)— display a wide spectrum of hate.
Nazi Propaganda Films Get an Airing
N
azi movies weren’t just anti-Semitic. They were anti-British, anti-Russian, anti-Polish and antiFrench. German director
Felix Moeller’s documentary Forbidden Films: The Hidden Legacy of Nazi Film, screened in May at New York’s Film Forum, reveals the catego-
Third Reich’s poison oeuvre. Germany still bans dozens of Nazi movies by title, allowing screening only with experts on hand to provide context. Much of the fare is ludicrous. A wartime musical features German pilots crooning a mid-mission paean to their Stukas. Still, the films seem to retain persuasive power. Forbidden Films shows a modern-day German filmgoer leaving Homecoming, which depicts Poles abusing ethnic Germans, convinced Germany had grounds for its 1939 invasion. Perhaps that is why an Auschwitz survivor interviewed in the documentary says it is dangerous to show such films “to an unprepared audience…. It’s better to be too careful than not enough.”
ASK WWII
A: After arriving at Tinian, the 509th Composite Group made a series of unescorted practice runs over Japan by small flights of B-29s, each dropping a single bomb. The flights revealed that the enemy was reluctant to expend their dwindling fighter, fuel, and antiaircraft resources. “Our strange tactics served to confuse the enemy,” Lieutenant Colonel Paul W. Tibbets wrote
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In July 1945 Iwo Jima was awash in P-51 Mustangs that often guarded B-29s— but not the A-bomb planes.
in his memoir. “Although air raid sirens would sound when we came overhead, fighter planes were seldom sent up, and antiaircraft artillery was unable to reach our 30,000foot altitude.” The presence of P-51s likely would have alerted the Japanese that something was up and attracted fighters, flak, or both. —Jon Guttman Q Send queries to: Ask World War II, 19300 Promenade Drive, Leesburg, VA 20176, or e-mail:
[email protected].
TOP, HISTORYNET ARCHIVE (ALL); BOTTOM, NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Q: We had P-51 Mustangs based on Iwo Jima; did they escort Enola Gay and Bockscar on their flights to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki? And did the Japanese have antiaircraft guns that could reach B-29s? —John Worth Gamel, Louisville, Kentucky
THE RING OF SOVIET STEEL around Berlin inexorably tightened Adolf Hitler chose to remain in the German capital and there meet his ultimate fate... On the 20th of April, 1945, the WS315 occasion of his 56th birthday, the German leader made his last public appearance outside the führerbunker of the Reichkanzlei. There, in the ruins of what remained of its garden, a small group of decorated Hitlerjugend were presented to him. Slowly and deliberately he went down the line of young boys shaking hands with each one and occasionally paing a cheek or squeezing a shoulder in encouragement. By his side was the Hitlerjugend Leader, Arthur Axmann.
SETTING THE SCENE KING & COUNTRY’S latest WW2 release portrays that fateful day in April 1945 with five special new sets... WS312 shows Hitler and HJ leader Axmann greeting 3 Hitlerjugend standing at
WS312
WS318 aention. WS313 represents a section of the “Führerbunker”, itself. WS314 is one of the “Ventilation Towers”, situated in the ruins of the Reichkanzlei garden. WS315 comprises 2 SS bodyguards. WS318 provides 2 additional HJ boys waiting in line to meet Hitler. Together all of these sets make an original and historic display of the final desperate days of Hitler’s crumbling thousand-year Third Reich. THE TREEFROG COLLECTION
WS314 WS313
Conversation with Fiske Hanley II
Engineered to Last By Michael Dolan
guest of honor at last year’s Hollywood pre-
miere of the film Unbroken,
about airman Louis Zamperini’s ordeal as a POW. Former B-29 flight engineer Hanley, 95, knows in detail what Zamperini endured. He also was shot down, taken prisoner, and tormented—a story he tells in his 1997 memoir, Accused American War Criminal.
You took to flying early.
I was born in Texas in 1920. I was five when Dad gave me an 1890 silver dollar that became my lucky charm. He’d bring me to the airfield outside Wichita Falls. Once, a Ford Tri-Motor pilot said he’d take up passengers for a penny a pound. Dad anted half a dollar and I made my first airplane flight. You pursued aviation in college.
I studied aviation engineering at North Texas Agricultural College and Texas Tech University. I became an aviation cadet to stay in school until spring 1943. I got my lieutenant’s bars in February 1944. The air force assigned us to B-29s, but didn’t have B-29s yet; we trained in B-24s and B-17s and simulators. In December 1944 my 504th Bombardment Group crew moved to Herington, Kansas, where we finally got airtime in a B-29.
Upon flying to Hawaii you learned things you wished you hadn’t.
A college friend on a general’s staff told me about operations Olympic and Coronet—the invasion of the Japanese home islands—right down to the November 1, 1945, start date. I didn’t want to know that. I’d be flying over Japan, and had been trained that if taken prisoner I was to answer interrogation questions honestly. But off we flew to Tinian. In the combat zone there was no dress code. I went with suntans—khaki shirt and trousers with a watch pocket where I kept my lucky silver dollar. Our first combat flight was to Iwo Jima to hit the airfield. Unfortunately, our bombs landed on the beach. We left craters Marines were able to shelter in, so the Marines loved us.
That was a very new plane.
Oh, the B-29 was still quite experimental. Those Curtiss-Wright engines would catch fire. And if you didn’t watch carefully, you could use more fuel than you thought, and you’d run dry. We lost an awful lot of planes that way. 20
WORLD WAR II
Late March 1945 saw your crew take on a very significant mission.
My crew got orders to mine the Shimonoseki Straits. It seemed like such a cinch our tail gunner stayed home. But the Japanese had learned the Allies would
be invading Okinawa. There were searchlights, tracers, flak. It was terrible and chaotic. Our engines caught fire. The navigator and the gunner were killed; the copilot said the commander and the bombardier were dead. The only way out was through the nose wheel well, but to reach the hatch, that nose wheel had to be down. That required electricity and hydraulics, and our systems were shot. All of a sudden the nose wheel dropped. As the two of us were jumping, a song was in my head: “Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.” I landed on Honshū in a rice paddy— couldn’t see anyone from my plane—and people were on me with bamboo spears and what all. A policeman pushed them back and took me away on a fire truck. Were you okay?
I had bad shrapnel wounds to my rear end, which I didn’t realize until I got to the mayor’s office and bled all over his divan. Medics put a needle into my chest and bandaged my wounds. To do this they undressed me, but they didn’t find my silver dollar. Kempeitai officers arrived and took me outside. I saw my copilot and tried to talk with him, but the Kempeis beat us. Next the Kempeis sat me by a charcoal grill with irons set on the coals. I thought, “This doesn’t look good.” I answered every question. The Kempeis never did reach for those irons. The Kempeitai moved you to Tokyo.
They crammed eight airmen and three Japanese into a 5-by-9-foot cell. We
GUY ACETO
F
ISKE HANLEY was a
couldn’t bathe or wash; we used a honey bucket. Our overseer was a corporal, Yoshio Kubayashi. We called him “Shorty.” He would punch us and beat us with clubs made of bamboo slats called kendo clubs. For two months, they interrogated me daily, asking how it would affect the American population if everyone in Japan was willing to die in a wall of corpses. I would say, “I don’t know, all I read is the funny papers.” But they never asked about Operation Olympic.
“If POWs tried to talk with one another, the guards would knock us around with gun butts.”
My silver dollar seemed to be a piece of hope. When we were by ourselves I would take it out and we’d hold it. Not many men have had college reunions in the midst of a POW camp.
The Japanese considered all captive B-29 crewmembers special prisoners.
They wanted me to sign something admitting to war crimes. I refused, so they gave me the treatment—knocking me around, sticking me with bayonets, hitting me with kendo clubs and gun butts. That would happen if POWs tried to talk with one another, too. August 14, 1945, was a big date.
COURTESY OF FISKE HANLEY II
The emperor said Japan would surrender. The guards took us through Tokyo to Omori Island POW camp, and told us to bathe in Tokyo Bay. You should have seen these human skeletons—I weighed 70 pounds—happy as the devil, splashing around. Then the Kempeitai turned us over to Camp Omori prison. Conditions improved.
I’ll say. Each of us had his own 2-by-6foot sleeping spot, with clean blankets. We got full rations and then some, and brand-new uniforms the Japanese had
I bought a beautiful Ford convertible, offwhite, tan leather upholstery, $1,400. Bill Grounds and his wife knew several American Airlines stewardesses. I was a big hit with them. I married the prettiest one, Betty Baker, in ’47. Aviation became your career.
What a desperate situation.
One day new prisoners came in. This fellow sits opposite me. “You’re from Texas,” he says. “You’re Fiske Hanley!” It was Bill Grounds. We’d been in ROTC at North Texas Agricultural College.
Your back pay went to good use.
His childhood interest in flying led Fiske Hanley II to become an aviation cadet.
captured. We were tickled to death. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. All day Marine and navy planes dropped food supplies. A torpedo bomber opened its bomb bay and dropped a huge load of Mounds candy bars—right into a cesspool, an awful disaster! On August 28, a Marine fighter dropped a note reading, “Tomorrow you will be liberated.” At midafternoon six Higgins boats landed carrying Marines armed to the teeth. I was still badly wounded, and wound up in a hospital on Okinawa. Was your family aware of what had happened to you?
One of the Texas newspapers let my family know I was all right, but only after getting to San Francisco in October was I able to put a call through. My mother answered, and I spoke with Dad. The next day the Red Cross said I was being expedited home because my father was dying of cancer. Dad died two weeks after I got to the house. I can think of no happier occasion, even getting married, than being with my family again.
I took a job at Convair for $1.25 an hour, and gradually moved up to flying B-36 bombers. Then I became an executive in engineering. I was in my office one day when this Asian fellow, Bill Hagase, came in. He worked for General Dynamics, which had acquired Convair. I asked how he got into aviation. “I was a kamikaze,” he said. I told him about myself, and he explained that when he was 16, waiting to fly and die, the war ended. During the occupation he worked for an American colonel who sent him to Texas Christian University. He married a Texas girl and went to work at General Dynamics. Once in a while Bill and I do a presentation where we talk about our individual wartime experiences and our friendship. How were you able to process that wartime experience?
As I was recovering from being a special prisoner, I couldn’t sleep. I got out my college typewriter and typed out what happened. I’d take two or three pages a day to the stewardesses, who edited them. Kept at it, and that was that. Never did talk with anyone about it. After I retired from General Dynamics in 1989, I wrote my 504th Bomb Group’s history. Betty died in 1992. In ’97 I wrote my book, Accused American War Criminal. What was it like to watch Unbroken?
My wife Peggy and I attended the premiere. Louie Zamperini had just died; I sat in his seat. The flak and torture scenes bothered me. I saw it again in Texas. Now when I’m going to speak with a group about the film, I say, “Okay, you watch it. I’ll be happy to talk with you afterward, but I’m not going to watch that again.” 2 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
21
From the Footlocker
Curators at The National World War II Museum solve readers’ artifact mysteries
1
My grandfather, Roger Elmer, served with the 39th Infantry Regiment, 9th Infantry Division, after V-E Day. His letters home had a logo, A-A-A-O, on the envelope and stationary. I’d appreciate any information regarding this logo. —Kevin Elmer, Chicago, Illinois
In 1943, while fighting in Sicily, the 39th Infantry Regiment acquired a new commander, Colonel Harry “Paddy” Flint, who was somewhat eccentric. “Paddy Flint is clearly nuts, but he fights well,” Patton once said. To galvanize his men’s morale, Flint introduced a new slogan: “Anything, Anytime, Anywhere—Bar Nothing.” He had the slogan, abbreviated to “AAA-0,” painted on helmets and vehicles, despite a ban on distinctive insignia that could alert enemy intelligence to American units’ identities. The men of the 39th proudly embraced the slogan, using it as their main identifier. A sniper killed Flint in July 1944 in Normandy, but the 39th Infantry Regiment emerged as one of the European Theater’s most successful American units, with three Presidential Unit Citations and awards from Belgium and France. —Brandon Stephens, Curator
2
This SS pin, which I acquired at an antique market in northern Italy, is slightly larger than a silver dollar
with no markings on the back. I have several books on identifying World War II items, but this is in none of
seasoned cavalryman, Colonel Harry 1 A“Paddy” Flint (below) was 55 when he
them. Thank you for any help you can provide. —Casey Martin, Aviano, Italy
took over command of the 39th Infantry Regiment in 1943, and gave it the distinctive slogan that marks Corporal Roger Elmer’s letters home (above).
PHOTO: 9THINFANTRYDIVISION.NET
would-be SS 2 This pin is a clever fake known as a “fantasy” pin: not only does the item itself not stem from the Nazi era, neither does the design.
Unfortunately, this appears to be a fake. No such pin was issued in Nazi Germany. The collector’s market for Nazi regalia began to grow shortly after the end of the war, and fakes have become increasingly common. Fakes of this type, which are similar to actual Nazi pins but entirely invented, are known as “fantasy” pins and were produced to be distinct enough from originals that the makers and sellers could get around antiforgery and fraud laws. The motto, “Meine Ehre heisst Treue” (“My honor is loyalty”), was the SS motto and has become popuSEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
23
Footlocker
WWII SERIES BASED ON ACTUAL EVENTS
288 members hold a banner 3 Sonderverband praising Allah and identifying them as volunteers from Algeria. The man in the foreground has the unit patch on his sleeve.
PHIL WARD
3
I was active duty United States Air Force and found this patch on a visit to Venice, Italy, in 1989. Originally thinking it was from
the Africa Korps, I took it to an Antiques Roadshow visit in Tampa in 1999; folks there steered me to a German militaria expert who suggested the patch was not from the Africa Korps, but likely from one of the Nazi liaison groups to the Middle Eastern nations. But he couldn’t nail down the country or unit associated with the patch. Can you? —Mark T. Cripe, Tampa, Florida
WWII NOVELS Those Who Dare, Dead Eagles, Blood Wings, Roman Candle, Guerilla Command and Neccessary Force are available for purchase or Download at Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble or your local book store. Private Army Coming Soon!
24
WORLD WAR II
The patch is that of Sonderverband 288, an extremely specialized unit that went on to serve under Erwin Rommel in North Africa. The unit, formed in 1941, included many Germans who before the war had been living in Africa, India, and the Middle East, and were fluent in a variety of languages. Sonderverband 288, which acted outside the Wehrmacht command structure, comprised some unusual entities, including a print shop and a group trained to use disguises to blend in with local populations. Sonderverband 288’s mission was to
exploit anticolonial sentiment in the Middle East and India to cut Britain off from its colonies and the natural resources they provided. Once British resistance in North Africa collapsed, the unit was to race through Egypt inciting unrest and capturing oil fields and other infrastructure—perhaps even taking the Suez Canal, to sever Britain’s shortcut to the Pacific and British India. When the German offensive in North Africa faltered, Sonderverband 288— never more than 12 companies at its largest—was reorganized into a Panzergrenadier regiment and helped cover the German retreat. As an elite force, the regiment was often held in reserve to assist other units; despite mounting German losses, it fought with distinction. The unit was disbanded after the Axis collapse in Africa. Authentic patches of this type are quite rare. —Brandon Stephens 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.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF GERHARD MESSELBECK
Maj. John Randal is back in Book VII of the Raiding Forces Series. Raiding Force is tasked with interdicting Field Marshal Rommel’s Afrika Korps 1200 mile supply lines, the Via Balbia that run along the Mediterranean Sea coast line. To accomplish their mission Raiding Forces reorganizes into two squadrons-Raiding Forces Desert Squadron (RFDS) and Raiding Forces Sea Squadron (RFSS). Download and read Chapter 1 of Desert Patrol at raidingforces.com.
lar with today’s neo-Nazi organizations. —Brandon Stephens
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Adapt or Die
W
AR IS Darwinism writ extreme. Consider the Luftwaffe, whose war began well enough. Leading the pack at rearming during the 1930s, Germany produced modern fighter designs like the Messerschmitt Bf-109, the first stressed-skin, low-wing monoplane in general production, and the very effective Ju-87 Stuka dive-bomber. German pilots spent more hours training in the cockpit than did counterparts, and most tasted action in the Spanish Civil War. The 1939 to 1940 Luftwaffe could boast the world’s best planes flown by the world’s best-trained pilots. Employed mainly in close support of the army, German air units intervened decisively in Poland, Norway, and France. But within a year, the war’s unpredictable course handed the Luftwaffe a mission it could not handle: controlling the skies over the British Isles. Germany’s air advantage was mainly the result of an early start, and Britain soon caught up. The Hawker Hurricane fighter was a match for the Bf-109, and the Supermarine Spitfire, which arrived in time for the Battle of Britain, was more than a match. With Adolf Hitler opening new fronts and making new enemies seemingly by the month, things for the Luftwaffe went from bad to worse: a continental-scale campaign against the Soviet Union, an intensive campaign against the Allies in North Africa and the Mediterranean, and the imperative to defend home skies against Allied strategic bombers. An air force designed to do one thing—support troops on the ground—was now multitasking, and not very successfully. The Luftwaffe tried to react, rush-
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ing new planes into production. But Luftwaffe 2.0 was a fiasco. The Heinkel He-177, for example, was a high-performance bomber design. This plane had a very complex power plant—a pair of twinned engines, each twin driving an extra-long, four-blade propeller. Oh, and those engines tended to blow up at midair in level flight. Wary crews dubbed the He-177 the Luftwaffenfeuerzeug—the Luftwaffe’s lighter. The Germans also rushed the Messerschmitt Me-210 aloft before thoroughly testing that heavy fighter; the 210 proved unstable in level flight and prone to spin at high angles of attack. Management had no choice but to yank both models out of production with no backstops or substitutes. As innovators, German engineers yielded to none, and over time they developed a phenomenal aerial stable: jets and rockets and buzz-bombs and even a prototype ICBM. They built every manner of craft: strange pushmi-pullyus like the Dornier Do-335 Arrow and a jet made of wood—the He-162 “People’s Fighter.”
But after 1941, innovation mattered little. Germany was now fighting the world’s three greatest industrial economies, able to manufacture in ways the Reich could only imagine. The war had become one of attrition, and Germany could only mass-produce whatever it had going at the moment— the Bf-109, a 1935 plane long since bypassed as the state of the art. Other possibilities— jets, in particular—were not ready for prime wartime. Even mass production was no panacea. Germany could not fight a troop-heavy war in the Soviet Union and man enough factories well enough to keep up with the Allies. In this realm, the Nazis displayed typical brutality, enslaving POWs and concentration camp inmates on an unimaginable scale. Gargoyles out of central casting like SS Commandant Otto Förschner were in command, working prisoners to death in vast underground factories like the Dora-Mittelbau tunnel complex near the Nordhausen camp. But slavery could not turn the tide. In 1944, Germany produced 34,000 combat aircraft, compared with 1942’s 13,000. However, that year the Allies built 127,000 warplanes, 71,000 of them made in the United States. And the numbers ignore quality control, a decisive Allied advantage as the war was ending. From its peak, the Luftwaffe had slid a long way, descending from a swift, gleaming, and deadly debut into a nightmare of skeletal slaves chained to presses, grinders, and lathes banging out parts for one outdated Messerschmitt after another. The Luftwaffe had devolved. Darwin was right. Wartime military forces adapt, or they die. 2
ILLUSTRATION BY JASON GREENBERG
By Robert M. Citino
Time Travel
The Original Ground Zero Story and photos by Aleta Burchyski
New Mexico’s Trinity Site reflects the emptiness that made it so attractive to Manhattan Project planners.
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T’S EARLY MORNING on Saturday, April 4, and I’m cruising down I-25 alongside mountains, farmland, train tracks, and the gentle course of the Rio Grande. I’m on my way to White Sands Missile Range to visit a wind-worn crater. There, a fraction of a second before 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, an explosion equal to 19 kilotons of TNT lit up the landscape with the daylight of 20 suns before its blast column surged thousands of feet high, sending winds that warmed distant onlookers like a fireplace. This was a test, codenamed Trinity, and with it the atomic bomb went from scientific theory to world-changing reality. As I drive, I use my phone’s compass to play at spotting the test site. It’s still another 90 miles away, but that’s nothing given the monstrous size of the blast. Santa Fe railway engineer Ed Lane was just down the tracks from here, in Belen, when he saw the explosion. “All at once
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it seemed as if the sun had suddenly appeared in the sky out of darkness,” Lane recounted in Ferenc Morton Szasz’s The Day the Sun Rose Twice. “There was a tremendous white flash. This was followed by a great red glare and high in the sky there were three tremendous smoke
Geiger counters notwithstanding, radiation levels at Trinity are low.
rings. The highest was many hundreds of feet high. They swirled and twisted as if being agitated by a great force. The glare lasted about three minutes and then everything was dark again, with dawn breaking in the east.” I try to transpose this vision onto the expansive blue before me, but the desert defies all sense of scale. The final stretch of road leading to White Sands’ Stallion Gate makes clear why the desert aptly named Jornada del Muerto—Journey of the Dead—was a natural for testing an A-bomb. To the east and west, respectively, the San Andres and San Mateo Mountains contain a 27-plus-mile flat expanse of rock, sand, and scrub punctuated only by an occasional yucca. In 1945, adjacent Socorro County had 11,422 residents— only about 6,000 fewer than today. If you want to unleash an unfathomable payload without destroying anything of value while shielding the event from the
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outside world yet be able to observe the blast from every angle—within easy commuting range of Los Alamos—the Jornada has it covered. Of course, the Trinity Test was still at the mercy of the weather, war’s most irascible factor. Planners had very little historic meteorological data and, like many of New Mexico’s high deserts, the Jornada has its own particular weather patterns. In March 1945, Trinity’s new chief meteorologist, Jack M. Hubbard, had to pinpoint a window for testing— clear and dry, with calm winds and stable atmospheric temperatures. To avoid a tropical system, he recommended July 18 to 21; a higher-up set the date for July 16. “Right in the middle of a period of thunderstorms,” wrote Hubbard in his diary, “what son-of-a-bitch could have done this?” That would prove to be President Harry S. Truman, hoping for a big reveal at Potsdam. Fortunately for Truman, rain and winds subsided, delaying the 4 a.m. ignition by only 90 minutes. This April morning the Jornada is in a haze, as it was prior to the test. I’m grateful for the softened glare as I crawl through the hour-long entry line. Fierce sun is why the site is open in spring and fall instead of the July anniversary, when temperatures in the 90s are typical. Finally I reach the checkpoint and, after a quick reminder not to take photos anywhere other than the Trinity Site, I’m zooming past anonymous equipment shelters and silos dubbed “Permanent High Explosives Test Site.” Even as I approach the parking lot adjacent to ground zero, a line of cars is pulling out. It’s 9:30 a.m., an hour and a half after the gate opened, and I’m one of thousands already here on pilgrimage. Army ROTC cadets point me to a parking space, and I follow the stream of visitors to Trinity’s ill-used sentinel: a rust-colored, open-ended, bus-size cylinder called Jumbo. Before the test, project scientists worried that a failed detonation would waste precious fissionable plutonium. The solution: fit the bomb inside a 25-foot-long, 10-foot-wide steel cylinder
Jumbo, which went unused, had 14-inch walls to contain plutonium if the test failed.
SEE MORE ARCHIVAL IMAGES IN OUR IPAD EDITION
Scientists and workmen prepare to winch the test bomb, known as the Gadget, to the top of a 100-foot tower. A bunker to the west of the tower held instruments (bottom right); the blast fused sand into glassy, green-gray Trinitite (bottom left).
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from which material could be recovered for a second test bomb. Jumbo was, as test director Kenneth Bainbridge later called it, “the physical manifestation of the lowest point in the Laboratory’s hopes.” By the time Jumbo was ready, the Manhattan Project plutonium reactors were in full swing and confidence in the weapon’s design had grown. Jumbo instead would experience Trinity 800 yards from ground zero. The steel container survived the blast unscathed, but not the postwar years. In 1946, the army stuffed it with eight bombs that blew out both ends. It was buried until the early 1970s, when the army unearthed it; Jumbo has been at its current post since 1979. I have to work my way through the crowd to get a moment face to face with Jumbo, which echoes with children running around its innards. It feels right to acknowledge Jumbo this way, since it resembles playground equipment and has a playful name—and given that Trinity’s success rendered it obsolete in an instant. The procession down the dusty quarter-mile path to ground zero is subdued. Paces slow, voices hush. The final steps into the 240-foot-diameter chainlink ring feel weighted.
Los Alamos
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Trinity Site White Sands Missile Range Alamogordo 50 MILES
Here humanity unleashed the atom with a five-foot-wide spherical bomb known as the Gadget. And here the New Mexico desert proved the greater force, almost immediately swallowing the evidence. The blast made a four-foot depression in the ground, melting the sandy surface into a crust of green glass dubbed Trinitite. The tower holding the Gadget was reduced to an anonymous outcropping with a bristle of rebar. Today the crater is indistinguishable from the surrounding desert, save for the fence protecting the crater’s remaining foot of slope. Radiation levels at the site are low; an hour there delivers about one-twelfth the radiation of a chest x-ray.
WHEN YOU GO The Trinity Site Open House takes place on the first Saturdays in April and October, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. The Stallion Gate Entrance, on U.S. 380, is 90 minutes from Albuquerque; if you’re coming from Texas, consider joining the convoy known as the Alamogordo Caravan (alamogordo.com/trinity-site/), which meets just north of Alamogordo at 8 a.m. and enters White Sands Missile Range on the eastern side.
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WHERE TO STAY AND EAT Albuquerque has ample amenities for a quick trip. For a longer stay, Santa Fe is two and a half hours north of Trinity and makes a great base for exploring northern New Mexico. One tried-and-true day trip: spend the morning at the 33,000-acre Bandelier National Monument for an easy-access taste of nature and ancient civilization, then swing through Los Alamos for a lunch of
Mexican and northern New Mexican fare at local fave El Parasol (elparasol.com). WHAT ELSE TO SEE If you like dinosaurs, don’t miss Albuquerque’s New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science (nmnaturalhistory.org). In Los Alamos, the Bradbury Science Museum provides an excellent overview of both the Manhattan Project and the global conflict, as well nuclear science in general (lanl.gov/museum).
The Trinity Site opened for visitors in 1953; in 1965, the army marked the center of ground zero with an obelisk of local volcanic rock. That monument has become a staple of visitor photos, though the more apt symbol is the model of Fat Man—a plutonium bomb, like the Gadget, used at Nagasaki three days after another A-bomb destroyed Hiroshima— sitting nearby on a tractor-trailer bed. After a lap around the fence, I return to the parking lot and board the bus that runs to and from the site where workers assembled the Gadget’s plutonium core. The 1913 McDonald ranch house, 3,400 yards southeast of ground zero, is a haunting little homestead, with tumbledown fieldstone outbuildings and derelict spans of barbed wire. One of two remaining wartime structures, it feels more like a ghost town than a part of world history. The base camp, where personnel lived and worked before the test, was disassembled shortly after. Concrete shelters where scientists and others sat front row for the detonation 10,000 yards away were also demolished. The other surviving building is an instrument bunker 800 yards west of ground zero, on the site’s access road. With one last look at Jumbo and the obelisk beyond, I drive to the bunker, clamber its sandy bank, and try to imagine its larger siblings, stuffed with physicists. North Oscura Peak looks on in the distance. I still cannot fathom light brilliant enough to illuminate its night-shrouded shoulders brighter than day. Already this far south and with nowhere else to be, I did what a handful of Trinity scientists did post-test and head another hour south to relax and recharge at Elephant Butte Lake State Park, a 24,500-acre man-made oasis that is hopping even so early in the season. I hand over the $8 overnight fee and drive a mile or so down the dune-swept shore to a secluded inlet. There, I pitch my tent and surrender to the diluted beats of country music drifting from the campsites across the water and the occasional splash of a trout jumping at late-afternoon gnats. 2
MAP BY HAISAM HUSSEIN
Time Travel
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For the U.S. Navy aviators of Task Force 38, the air war over the Pacific ran right to the limit By DAVID SEARS
WhiteKnuckle Countdown to Peace Hellcat pilots of VF-88 in action over the Pacific late in the war.
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over coastal Honshū—the main Japanese home island—U.S. Navy Lieutenant (junior grade) Henry J. O’Meara marveled to see a Tokyo Plain “so thickly studded with airfields that 10 or a dozen were visible from almost any point.” O’Meara, 21, had experienced combat, but many of his fellow aviators in the aircraft carrier Yorktown’s Fighter Squadron 88 were getting not only their first glimpse of Japan’s heartland, but a first exposure to aerial warfare. After plastering enemy fields with tons of fragmentation bombs on July 10, 1945, O’Meara and mates were brimming with swagger. However, O’Meara wrote afterward, the fliers also were “quite disappointed over the lack of Jap planes in the air.” The war was clearly in its closing days—or was it? For months the Army Air Forces had dispatched B-29s carrying incendiaries over Honshū industrial centers like Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, and Osaka to ignite firestorms. And with the Okinawa campaign finally over, Pacific Fleet commander Chester W. Nimitz at last unleashed Third Fleet commander William F. “Bull” Halsey to pound Japan from its home waters with aerial attacks,
ON JULY 1, TASK FORCE 38, COMMANDED BY VICE Admiral John S. “Slew” McCain, had sortied from the Philippines, zigzagging at 17 knots toward Honshū’s Pacific coast, roughly 1,800 miles northeast. McCain and Halsey still were feeling the lash of a court of inquiry that had assigned the two “primary responsibility” for fleet damage arising from a June 5, 1945, typhoon. Twice in less than a year inquiry findings had faulted Halsey for putting his forces in the track of murderous storms. U.S. Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal wanted to retire the Bull but backed off; removing so popular a leader might boost enemy morale and prolong the war. As historian Samuel Eliot Morison later put it, Bull and Slew now had “blood in the eye” and a force to express that wrath. Three task groups, each consisting of two or three large Essex-class carriers and two light carriers, with battleship,
VF-88 commander Dick Crommelin points out details on a map to fellow Hellcat pilots (from left) Buck Rogers, Maury Proctor, and Joe Sahloff.
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COURTESY OF HERB WOOD
From his Hellcat
shipping sweeps, and even shore bombardment. But imperial militarists had not laid down their swords. Allied calls for unconditional surrender motivated the Japanese to fight even harder. Invading the home islands would cost dearly. Japanese warlords had concealed several thousand planes for use in kamikaze attacks, hoping to destroy 30 to 50 percent of the invasion fleet before the Allies could land. Third Fleet’s objective was to apply relentless violence in hopes that Japan would stand down—but, if not, lay destructive groundwork for an invasion. Aboard, most seasoned veterans longed for peace and home shores, but many untested men—especially hotshot aviators like those of VF-88—were eager to square off with a foe, even one bent on a final showdown.
On July 24, 1945, carrierbased U.S. Navy planes from the Third Fleet bracket a camouflaged Japanese cruiser with bombs at the enemy’s Kure naval base.
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Once, Japanese airmen had staggered U.S. Navy aviators. Now the Americans all but owned the Pacific sky. cruiser, and destroyer screens, dominated the horizon. Army Air Forces B-29s and U.S. Navy B-24s reconnoitered targets. Other land-based aircraft thwarted Japanese reconnaissance. And U.S. Navy submarines ensured the task force made its approach undetected, or at least unmolested. The power and personnel on the decks and in the ready rooms of the three task groups embodied years of planning, design, production, testing, recruiting, training, deployment, and combat experience. Once, Japan’s airmen had staggered U.S. Navy aviators. Now the Americans all but owned the Pacific sky. Through the war, the navy’s aviation training command had delivered rookies—“nuggets,” in aviator parlance—to staff squadrons. A nugget was likeliest to survive and thrive if he stuck with and learned from his flight leader. Of the 14 air groups in Task Force 38, eight, including Air Group 88, were making their first combat deployment and were dense with nuggets. VF-88, Air Group 88’s Hellcat fighter component, had formed at Atlantic City, New Jersey, less than a year ago
and had joined Yorktown only two weeks earlier. VF-88’s “Gamecocks” reported to Lieutenant Commander Richard “Dick” Crommelin. The Alabaman was one of five Annapolis-schooled brothers who served in the Pacific, four as aviators. Crommelin, 28, had flown with VF-42 off the first Yorktown. During the May 1942 Battle of the Coral Sea, Crommelin, then a lieutenant (junior grade) jockeying a Wildcat, had helped destroy a Japanese flying boat and downed two Mitsubishi Zeros before being splashed himself. At Midway that June, Crommelin helped defend the doomed Yorktown. Twice awarded the Navy Cross and credited with 3.5 aerial kills, he had precisely the credentials to lead a fighter squadron. His executive officer, Lieutenant Malcolm W. “Chris” Cagle, was another matter. The 1941 Annapolis graduate had served two years on tin cans, as sailors called destroyers, before undergoing flight training, then became an assistant flight instructor, and only now was facing combat. VF-88, however, could count on half a dozen transfers with extensive fighting experience. Lieutenant Howard M. “Howdy” Harrison of Columbus, Ohio, for example, had seen action over Makin, Eniwetok, Truk, Palau, and Hollandia. According to S. P. Walker, a press officer on Task Group Commander Arthur Radford’s staff, Harrison was “easily the most popular man in the squadron.” Eight others qualified as “much pilots,” in airman argot, because they flew radar-equipped F6F-5N Hellcats like Henry O’Meara’s. In thick weather, these aviators often guided radarless Corsairs and Hellcats. Like O’Meara, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
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AS A JAPANESE AIRCRAFT CARRIER ARMADA HAD when nearing Hawaii in early December 1941, Task Force 38 used a weather front to mask its July 9, 1945, approach to Honshū. At 2 a.m. the next morning, the three task groups emerged, launched planes, and slipped back into the front to avoid counterattack. Weeks of elaborate planning paid handsome dividends. Virtually unopposed—even flak was meager—American pilots pummeled 12 Tokyo-area fields, destroying some 109 ground-bound planes and damaging 231. Out to sea, only two Japanese aircraft probed the task force. Combat air patrols took out both. Flak did hit Lieutenant (junior grade) Ray Gonzalez’s Hellcat, but Gonzalez ditched safely near a rescue destroyer. Refueling and replenishment ate up two days. When weather canceled sorties set for July 13 against northern Honshū and 36
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TBF Avengers (top) flew to the last, bombing enemy fields. Japanese ground crews had disabled these Zeros (right) by removing their propellers.
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most in this elite cadre could claim at least some combat experience; two exceptions were the neophyte Lieutenants (junior grade) Ted Hansen of Santa Cruz, California, and Bill Watkinson of Montclair, New Jersey. Two squadron stalwarts had distinctive personalities. Lieutenant (junior grade) Maurice “Maury” Proctor “was alert, quick off the mark, and apparently unafraid of anything or anybody,” wrote press officer Walker. And Lieutenant (junior grade) Joseph G. “Joe” Sahloff, from near Albany, New York, thought to handle a Hellcat as well as any naval aviator, stood out for his gangling physique—as Walker put it, “in flight gear he looked rather like an aeronautical Ichabod Crane”—and for chain-smoking fat cigars, even aloft. More typical of VF-88’s younger set were Ensigns John Haag of Lewiston, Pennsylvania, and Herb “Woody” Wood of Tipperary, Iowa—capable aviators in need of seasoning. Wood, 22, already had a wife and baby; for luck, he had sewn one of his daughter’s booties to his leather flight helmet. Back in February, as Intrepid, the carrier ferrying VF-88 to Hawaii, was departing San Francisco, a squadron mate had awakened him. “Hey Woody! Get up!” the man shouted. “We’re going under the Golden Gate!” Wood burrowed into his rack. “No,” he said. “I’ll see it when I get back.” Two other VF-88 youngsters required especially close mentoring: Ensigns Wright C. Hobbs of Indiana, nicknamed “Hybrid” for his fascination with strains of corn, and Eugene Mandenberg, in prewar days a reporter in Detroit. Neither, many squadron mates thought, displayed fighter pilot demeanor or discipline. Woody Wood felt both were “too excitable.” Bill Watkinson knew Mandenberg well, although he had not flown with him, and liked him. But, as Watkinson recalled, “he had a reputation of being more interested in the ‘flora and fauna’ than flying formation.”
Hokkaido, the large island to its north, Task Force 38 retired east out of range. The ships returned the next day, July 14, to conditions scarcely better but sufficient to sustain two days of flights against coastal targets as well as a foray by cruisers and destroyers to shell targets ashore. For aviators, risk rose in tandem with foul weather. Flying by instruments toward a target that day, Joe Sahloff’s Hellcat grazed Dick Crommelin’s. Crommelin disappeared, never to be found; a shaken Sahloff completed the mission. Executive Officer Chris Cagle took command of VF-88 on the eve of yet another loss: Lieutenant (junior grade) Herman “Pancho” Chase, downed near southern Hokkaido’s Otaru Harbor and listed as missing in action. During refueling on July 16, a second group centered on British carrier HMS Indefatigable—Task Force 37—joined Halsey’s fleet. July 18 strikes saw Yorktown lose two aviators, one of them VF-88’s Lieutenant (junior grade) Theron Gleason, claimed by flak. The “Fighting Lady” retired east with Task Force 38 for four days to refuel, rearm, and replenish—
Left, VF-88 pilot Howdy Harrison celebrates his rescue from the Inland Sea. Right, Bill Watkinson kneels on his Hellcat as another man examines flak damage.
COURTESY OF HERB WOOD
Cagle led wingman Ken Nyer into an overmatched fight with more than a dozen Japanese planes. Nyer went missing. and let aviators rest. “I am mixed up on the [dates],” Wood wrote in his diary. “I was so tired I never got to write.” VF-88’s new commander was putting his stamp on the unit. During squadron meetings, Bill Watkinson recalled, Cagle “invited” suggestions from veterans—but his body language made clear he wanted none. “He was a bull, no questions asked,” said Watkinson, who had revered Crommelin but held Cagle in low regard. After a July 24 strike, Watkinson remembered, Cagle led wingman Lieutenant (junior grade) Ken Nyer to the wrong rendezvous point, embroiling them in an overmatched fight with more than a dozen Japanese aircraft. In the ensuing melee, Cagle shot down two Mitsubishi “Jack” fighters and got away, but Nyer went missing. In scarcely two weeks VF-88 had lost its veteran skipper and three other aviators. July 25 dawned soupy, limiting flights to airfield sweeps. Enemy flak forced Howdy Harrison to ditch in the Japanese-controlled Inland Sea that separates Kyūshū—the southernmost home island—and Honshū. Maury Proctor and Joe Sahloff saw their fellow airman escape to his emergency raft. Back on the Yorktown, they pressed to guide a Mariner rescue flying boat, known as a “Dumbo,” to where Harrison was bobbing. That would keep the task force within range of Japanese
counterattack, but the two got approval from the task group commander’s chief of staff. The three planes plowed through overcast with a radarequipped craft from another carrier initially bird-dogging the way. “I could hardly make out Dumbo,” Sahloff said. “Often I couldn’t see Proctor at all.” In the ponderous Mariner, pilot Lieutenant (junior grade) George B. Smith, low on fuel, could not climb above the murk. A Japanese destroyer escort threatened Harrison until carrier pilots’ rockets and machinegun rounds drove it off. “I could hear the A.A. and see the smoke,” Harrison said. “Then it got quiet again.” Finally the rescue triad—“a big St. Bernard…with a couple toy bulldogs,” as Proctor put it—broke through to clear sky pocked by puffs of enemy flak from a coastal airfield. Smith set down on the swells for a double rescue: his crew heaved a lifeline to Harrison and towed the Hellcat pilot’s raft astern while cruising on to fetch Ensign John H. Moore, a Corsair pilot from the carrier Shangri-La who had ditched nearby. After 45 anxious minutes, with both Harrison and Moore finally aboard, the Mariner lumbered aloft, droned to Task Group 38.4, and set down, fuel tanks all but dry. Smith, his 10-man crew, and their charges were hustled aboard the destroyer Wren. As the task group sailed east, 40mm gun crews aboard Wren and a second destroyer, the USS Mertz, scuttled the abandoned rescue bird. ON JULY 31, A TYPHOON THREATENED TASK FORCE 38. A cautious Halsey called off strike operations and instead had ships refuel while crews waited out the storm. Under orders from Admiral Nimitz, Bull also dialed down his appeSEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
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AFTER REFUELING ON AUGUST 14, TASK FORCE 38 poised for two August 15 scenarios: an end to hostilities, or another pummeling of Tokyo. At 4:15 a.m., carriers launched combat air patrols and assembled aircraft for strikes and sweeps. Two hours later, with planes in the first waves approaching targets, Nimitz ordered Halsey to suspend offensive operations: Hirohito had promised to surrender. McCain immediately recalled planes aloft and canceled impending strikes. Pilots able to do so jettisoned their payloads at sea and turned back. However, others, both Yanks and Brits, were already over Japan—and fighting to stay alive. )RXU+HOOFDWVUHWXUQLQJWRHancock may have been the first $PHULFDQVDWWDFNHGLQWKLVZKLWHNQXFNOHFRXQWGRZQWRSHDFH 38
WORLD WAR II
VF-88 pilot and diarist Herb “Woody” Wood with his plane at Hawaii, months before he and his fellow airmen tangled with Japanese fighters over Honshu¯ on August 14, 1945.
COURTESY OF HERB WOOD
tite for Tokyo targets. The air force boys had unspecified but major plans, so he put the force on a northerly course to hit northern Honshū and Hokkaido. News of the A-blasts at Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9 animated speculation. An airman who had taken a physics course tried to explain atomic energy, but his lecture didn’t sink in, Watkinson recalled. The evening of August 10, according to the Yorktown after-action narrative, “all hands were electrified when a radio broadcast reported that the Japanese government had announced its willingness to consider the terms of the [Allies’] Potsdam ultimatum,” provided Emperor Hirohito could keep his throne. Wrote Woody Wood: “We really thought the war was over for us today.” But, if anything, action over Japan grew fiercer. On a strike the day Nagasaki was hit, Wood “saw more A.A. than ever before” and VF-88 lost Lieutenant (junior grade) William B. “Dad” Tuohimaa. In retaliation, “We shot the hell out of the yellow S of Bs,” Wood recalled. That same day, while pathfinding for Corsairs, Bill Watkinson took a hit to his Hellcat’s port wing that left a rip as big as a manhole. He limped to Yorktown, circled as other recoveries played out—staying aloft more than six hours—and made a jolting pinpoint landing. Enemy pilots now seemed determined to fight. On August 8, the four aviators in Wood’s combat air patrol downed two would-be kamikazes. “One plane burned right in front of me, the other spinning in at 16,000 [feet] and crashed in the sea,” he wrote. On August 9 airmen saw no enemy planes over targets, but at sea combat air patrols splashed 12 Japanese aircraft. Bad weather ruled August 11 and 12, with strikes canceled in favor of refueling. On August 13 aviators destroyed more than 400 enemy planes parked near Tokyo; combat air patrols downed 19 at sea—a “red letter day” for killing enemy aircraft, Halsey declared. But it was also the day VF-88’s Lieutenant Wilson Dozier crashed in flames after losing a wing. With peace near enough to touch, such losses were especially bitter.
Jumped by seven Japanese, leader Lieutenant Paul Herschel and mates downed a Zero and two Jacks, taking no losses. At 5:45 a.m., Zeros jumped HMS Indefatigable Grumman Avenger bombers escorted by eight Supermarine Seafires— naval versions of the Spitfire fighter—near a chemical plant QHDU VRXWKHUQ +RQVKnj¶V 2GDNL %D\ 6XE/LHXWHQDQW )UHG Hockley, flight leader for five of the Seafires providing close cover, went down in the first enemy pass. Meanwhile, three WRSFRYHU6HDILUHVOHGE\6XE/LHXWHQDQW9LFWRU/RZGHQ FRQIURQWHGDVHFRQG=HURHOHPHQW/RZGHQ6XE/LHXWHQDQW ³7DII\´:LOOLDPVDQG6XE/LHXWHQDQW6SXG0XUSK\FRPELQHG WRVSODVKVL[DWWDFNHUVDQGGDPDJHWZRPRUH6XE/LHXWHQDQWV 'RQ'XQFDQDQG5DQG\.D\WZRRIWKHQRZOHDGHUOHVVFORVH cover pilots, rallied to down a pair of Zeros. The Avenger crews held course, fended off other Zeros, dropped bombs, and flew back. All bombers save one landed on Indefatigable; the other ditched near a friendly destroyer. The seven surviving Seafire aviators, concerned foremost with +RFNOH\¶VIDWHRQO\OHDUQHGRIWKHFHDVHILUHXSRQWRXFKLQJ down. (Hockley had bailed out, but the Japanese quickly cap tured him and that night executed him in secret.) 6KRUWO\DIWHUWKH%ULWLVK-DSDQHVHDLUEDWWOH+HOOFDWV and Corsairs from Yorktown, Shangri-La, and Wasp were DSSURDFKLQJ&KǀVKLWKH7RN\RDUHD¶VHDVWHUQPRVWFLW\7KH HLJKW9)+HOOFDWVZHUHWRVSOLWLQWRWZRJURXSVDW7RNXUR zama airfield, northwest of Tokyo. Two pilots would stay high WRUHFHLYHDQGUHOD\DQ\FHDVHILUHPHVVDJHZKLOHWKHUHVW² Howdy Harrison, along with Maury Proctor, Ted Hansen, Joe Sahloff, Wright Hobbs, and Gene Mandenberg—attacked. +DUULVRQ¶VVL[+HOOFDWVZHUHORZRYHU7RNXUR]DPDDW DPZKHQWKH\JRWWKHFHDVHILUHQHZV'HFDGHVODWHU7HG
En route from its last wartime station, the USS Yorktown steams by the Golden Gate Bridge in autumn 1945.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
“Let’s get our fannies out of here,” Hansen thought after learning of the cease-fire. Then Japanese fighters attacked. Hansen, who had been flying on Maury Proctor’s wing, told an interviewer that he recalled thinking, “Oh God, let’s get our fannies out of here.” Seconds later 17 Japanese fighters— Kawanishi Georges and Nakajima Franks along with Zeros and Jacks—assailed the Americans from behind and above. Harrison turned his flight into the attack and opened fire. Hansen thought himself a goner, but during the first headto-head pass he splashed two Franks, one of them about to ram him; Maury Proctor shot the wing off a third. Hansen and Proctor lost track of Harrison, Hobbs, and Mandenberg, but when they spotted a Jack on Joe Sahloff’s tail, both swung to starboard. From 700 yards, Proctor exploded the troublesome Jack, but Sahloff’s F6F was smoking and clearly in trouble. Sahloff headed for the coast but was never seen again. Proctor had planned to escort Sahloff home until tracers bracketed his own Hellcat. Knowing Hansen was weaving somewhere above him, Proctor slewed right, allowing Hansen to shoot a Frank off his tail. When Proctor reversed, he spotted two more bandits in flames and seven Japanese, six ahead, one
behind, aiming his way. Fortunately, the six ahead started to climb, giving Proctor a killing belly shot at one. After ducking into clouds to elude the bandit on his tail, Proctor flew coastward and tried to radio the other five fliers. According to Proctor, only Ted Hansen responded—but Hansen recalls hearing nothing from any of the five. He eventually touched down on Yorktown, certain he was the sole survivor—until Proctor landed five minutes later. The wild fight over Tokurozama, World War II’s last substantial air battle, interwove victory, tragedy, and irony. The six VF-88 aviators battled harsh odds to claim nine kills but at the cost of four missing—and finally presumed dead: Howdy Harrison, Hybrid Hobbs, Gene Mandenberg, and Joe Sahloff. The fallen on both sides died in the opening moments of peace. In VF-88’s scant month of combat, the unit lost 10 aviators. For all of Air Group 88, including men lost during training, the tally was 31. The newest Yorktown had deployed so recently that its airmen and sailors remained in the Pacific until October 1945. Only then did the Fighting Lady sail for San Francisco. Departing the Bay months before, Herb Wood had resolutely ignored the crowds cheering from the iconic bridge spanning the Golden Gate. This time, though, Wood was on deck, anticipating a welcome, only to realize that the homeland he had defended had made a far swifter transition to peace than he. “When I returned, having lost all those buddies,” he said wistfully in a recent conversation, “there were only six people waving to us from the bridge.” 2 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
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RUSSIA’S ROCK Though tormented in Stalin’s purges, Konstantin Rokossovsky stood tall for Mother Russia when it counted most BY STUART D. GOLDMAN
Konstantin Rokossovsky, here commanding the 1st Belorussian Front, earned broad respect for his even temper, penetrating analysis, and battlefield savvy.
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THE RED ARMY MARKED THE END OF THE MOST TERRIBLE WAR
IN EUROPEAN HISTORY ON JUNE 24, 1945. RAIN WAS POURING AS THE VICTORY CEREMONY, IN MOSCOW’S RED SQUARE, BEGAN WITH TWO BATTLE-WORN CAVALRYMEN RIDING INTO THE VAST SPACE:
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...AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON
Stalin longed to lead Victory Day from atop a horse, but as he trained in secret his spirited Arabian mount threw him. Not mentioning the mishap, Stalin gave the white stallion, and the lead position, to Marshal Georgi Zhukov.
SOVFOTO/UIF VIA GETTY IMAGES
Marshal Georgi Zhukov, mounted on a white Arabian stallion, and, on a black charger, Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, the parade’s official commander. Stocky and pugnacious, Zhukov—the most famous and the most decorated of Joseph Stalin’s generals and deputy commander in chief of the Red Army—took the imposing, handsome Rokossovsky’s salute. From a reviewing stand atop the Lenin Mausoleum, Stalin, the supremo, looked on as an honor guard hurled hundreds of captured German battle flags at his feet. The premier and Rokossovsky had met for the first time early in the war years. “Were you tortured in prison?” the dictator asked. “Yes, Comrade Stalin,” Rokossovsky answered. He needed say no more; in the late 1930s, Stalin himself had ordered the arrest, torture, and killing or imprisonment of a third of the Red Army officer corps, Rokossovsky included. Despite the trauma of his years-long ordeal, once Rokossovsky returned to military service he resolutely stepped up for Mother Russia, playing a key role in Moscow’s 1941 defense and in legendary battles at Stalingrad and Kursk. In 1945, he commanded one of the three Soviet armies that invaded Germany. Many senior Wehrmacht commanders regarded Rokossovsky as the Red Army’s ablest general, a conclusion echoed by the prominence his own country accorded him in Red Square that solemn, soggy Sunday. According to the most reliable account of Konstantin Rokossovsky’s childhood, he was born in 1896 in a small town in northwest Russia to a Polish railway worker and his Russian wife. When the boy was small, the family moved to Warsaw, at the time part of the Russian Empire. By 1910, both parents were dead. In August 1914, their bilingual son—he spoke Russian with a Polish accent—enlisted in the tsarist army as a cavalryman, rising from private to noncommissioned officer to junior officer and seeing action that got him wounded twice and earned him three Saint George medals. After the revolution, Rokossovsky joined the Bolsheviks; his old cavalry regiment elected him its deputy commander. During the civil war he was wounded, again, in hand-to-hand combat. His renown as a cavalry commander was of a piece with his looks: tall and broad-shouldered, with piercing blue eyes. Many of his fellow horse soldiers were coarse and swag-
gering; Rokossovsky projected refinement and modesty. He and Zhukov met in 1924 at the Leningrad Higher Cavalry School, where they became friendly rivals. By 1930, Rokossovsky was commanding the 7th Cavalry Division, which included a regiment Zhukov led. Evaluating his subordinate, Rokossovsky characterized his classmate as willful, decisive, persistent, and brimming with initiative—but also excessively demanding, stubborn, and “pathologically vain.” An ironic reversal of fortune would cast Rokossovsky as Zhukov’s
subordinate in the Soviet Union’s greatest struggle. As Rokossovsky and Zhukov were advancing in the ranks, Stalin was consolidating political control. In 1928, he unleashed at horrific human cost a radical program of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization of agriculture. Peasants resisted state takeover of their land; mass shootings, deportations, and a man-made famine left more than three million dead. In this atmosphere of violence and terror, the pathologically distrustful Stalin sought ever more control.
Riding Polyus—”the Pole”—Rokossovsky (right) shows equestrian elan, as does fellow horse soldier Zhukov. Accompanying are their aides-de-camp on matching steeds.
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ROKOSSOVSKY ON LEADERSHIP A RETICENT MAN strenuously marked by the perilous times in which he lived, the field marshal was not inclined to candor. Even so, throughout A Soldier’s Duty, his 1968 memoir, appear flashes of the real Konstantin Rokossovsky: “Soldiers are only human and it is quite natural that, especially in times of danger, they want to feel a comrade’s support and see their commander. Furthermore, it is essential for the section commander to see his men, to be able to encourage one or praise the other, to influence them and keep them in hand.” “We did our best to create a favorable working atmosphere in which there would be no place for relations based on an ‘as you say, sir’ footing, no place for a feeling of restraint in which people hesitate to express views differing from those of a senior officer.” “I was glad that my assistants were educated men in love with their Continued on page 47
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Always at ease in the company of soldiers, Rokossovsky solicited and trusted his men’s opinions.
In 1937 he issued orders establishing categories of enemies deemed hostile to, or insufficiently supportive of, his rule. He set quotas for each category and pressured the NKVD, or secret police, to round up ever-larger numbers of victims. From mid-1937 to late 1938, the NKVD arrested approximately 1.5 million people, of whom some 700,000 were shot. Stalin struck at the army as Rokossovsky was heading a cavalry corps. On June 11, 1937, the general read in Pravda that the NKVD had arrested eight of the Red Army high command’s most distinguished leaders on charges of treason. The next day they were shot. Within nine days, the NKVD arrested 980 more officers, including 20 corps commanders and 37 division commanders. Most were shot after being forced under duress to implicate others. The terror escalated. In 18 months the NKVD executed three of five marshals of the Red Army, the commanders of every military district and all 11 deputy commissars for defense, the chiefs of staff of the army, navy, and air force, 14 of 16 army commanders, all eight full admirals, 60 of 67 corps commanders, 136 of 199 division commanders, 221 of 397 brigade commanders, and half of the army’s regimental commanders. Of the U.S.S.R.’s 75,000 to 80,000 military officers, 30,000 went to prison or the grave. Few, if any, had committed a crime. On August 17, 1937, it was Rokossovsky’s turn. The NKVD arrested him, imprisoned him in Leningrad, and leveled the standard accusations of sabotage, treason, and espionage. Weeks of “interrogation” cost the accused general nine teeth —later replaced with steel—and three cracked ribs; his inquisitors smashed his toes with hammers, ripped out his fingernails, and twice stood him before mock firing squads. He did not confess. Prosecutors bungled kangaroo court proceedings so badly—a “co-conspirator” they claimed gave evidence against Rokossovsky had died in 1920—that Rokossovsky escaped execution. He spent the next three years in prison near Leningrad. In March 1940, following the Red Army’s miserable performance against Finland in the Winter War, the NKVD released Rokossovsky. His 1968 memoir, A Soldier’s Duty, strikingly says not a word about his arrest, torture, and imprisonment. Rokossovsky told his daughter, however, that following his 1940 release he made sure always to have a pistol handy. If the secret police came at him again, they would not take him alive. Rokossovsky began rebuilding his career. A former comrade-in-arms, Commissar for Defense Semyon Timoshenko, offered him command of a cavalry corps in the Kiev Military District, noting that if war came, the Kiev sector would be crucial. Its commander was Rokossovsky’s long-time colleague Zhukov, who had passed unscathed through the purges. A rigid, by-the-book culture now prevailed in the Red Army. The hardheaded, domineering Zhukov exemplified this approach, which became a source of tension between him and Rokossovsky. However, within months Zhukov departed for Moscow to become chief of the general staff.
Zhukov (left) and Rokossovsky met in cavalry school, from which they graduated in 1925. Except during the purge years of the late 1930s, their careers often intertwined.
HISTORYNET ARCHIVE
ON JUNE 24, 1941, ROKOSSOVSKY DREW THE GERMAN 13TH PANZER DIVISION INTO AN ARTILLERY AMBUSH THAT SENT THE ENEMY TANKERS REELING WITH HEAVY LOSSES. Rokossovsky, 44, moved up to major general, assuming command of a new mechanized corps that was made up of two tank divisions and a motorized infantry division. The lifelong cavalryman readily grasped armor doctrine. True to the nature that had put him at odds with Zhukov, Rokossovsky insisted that he would “foster in each and every officer an aptitude for independent and bold action.” However, though Zhukov was gone another vexing personality took his place. As a sector commander, the inept General Mikhail Kirponos was far out of his depth. In spring 1941, with the Germans massing troops on the frontier, Kirponos ordered all his artillery units to a distant firing range for gunnery practice. Rokossovsky refused to send his guns and gunners away from Kiev—a decision that would prove crucial. In June 1941, when the Wehrmacht stormed into the U.S.S.R., the Red Army all but collapsed. In three weeks, the Soviets lost nearly two million men, 3,500 tanks, and more than 6,000 aircraft. German commanders termed the Soviet
performance “infantile.” One reason was lack of preparation— Stalin had disregarded warnings of the German attack from his own intelligence services and from foreign governments. The purge also figured, claiming as it had so many able leaders. Yet the Red Army rebounded, and capable commanders emerged. Besides Zhukov, many generals—Ivan Bagramyan, Vasily Chuikov, Ivan Konev, Rodion Malinovsky, Aleksandr Vasilievsky, and Nikolai Vatutin—had avoided the purges. Others tried to set aside memories of torment; 15 percent of officers imprisoned in the purge fought Germany. The most illustrious was Rokossovsky. Keeping his artillery at hand paid off. Thanks to those big guns, the 9th Mechanized Corps could hit hard. On June 24, 1941, for example, Rokossovsky drew the German 13th Panzer Division into an artillery ambush that sent the enemy tankers reeling with heavy losses. All around, however, Soviet command, control, and communications were dissolving. Stalin had forbidden retreat, a diktat to which Kirponos blindly adhered even though Western Front commander Timoshenko personally told him to fall back from Kiev to avoid encirclement. Fighting in that pocket killed Kirponos and many other senior commanders. The Red Army lost 650,000 men there— but not Rokossovsky, who Timoshenko had called to Moscow and assigned a special unit. Initially comprising three tank divisions and an infantry division, the “Rokossovsky group” had broad authority. As Rokossovsky later recounted in A SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
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Soldier’s Duty, his orders empowered him to “assume command over any other troops I met on the way to Yartsevo.”
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olling into the Russian heartland, German troops had taken Yartsevo, east of the city of Smolensk, some 200 miles from Moscow. Rokossovsky checked the German advance and helped stabilize the situation in the Smolensk region. His troops temporarily repulsed the Wehrmacht, retaking Yartsevo, but the situation remained touch-and-go. In the face of a German tank attack supported by Stuka dive-bombers, some frontline Soviet troops began to break and run—until they saw Rokossovsky and his artillery commander in plain view of the enemy, upright and unmoving. “Wait! Where are you running?” men yelled to those fleeing. “Look at the generals! They’re still there! Back!” Soldiers returned to their positions and resumed firing. A Soviet 76mm battery knocked out several enemy tanks, the rest of the German vehicles withdrew, and the attack ended. Rokossovsky strove always to understand his troops. One day, during the fighting around Smolensk, he crept to the front line, where standard individual foxholes cratered the ground. The general took the place of one of his soldiers in a foxhole.
In June 1941, a purge-ravaged Soviet army could not keep the confident Wehrmacht from barreling deep into the Russian heartland.
Instantly he felt alone. All around him men were dug in, but Rokossovsky could neither see them nor feel their presence. “I was an old soldier and had taken part in many battles but, to be quite frank, I was not at all comfortable or at ease in that hole,” Rokossovsky wrote later. “I kept wanting to crawl out and see if my comrades were still in their own foxholes; or perhaps they had abandoned them and I was alone in the field?” That day Rokossovsky ordered all his units to replace foxholes with defensive trenches and sent Timoshenko a report to that effect. Timoshenko endorsed the change and soon the army’s lines stiffened. German pressure, however, forced Rokossovsky to conduct a fighting withdrawal east from Smolensk. Rokossovsky’s successful delaying tactics led to command of the 16th Army—six tank and infantry divisions plus sundry tank and artillery units—which was assigned a 30-mile front along the route to Moscow, the Smolensk-Vyazma road. Rokossovsky defended masterfully, inflicting heavy losses and slowing the Germans, who found their momentum also being sapped by an early, exceptionally brutal winter. Meanwhile, Stalin was amassing reserves east of Moscow for a major counteroffensive coordinated by Zhukov. The assault began before dawn on December 6, 1941, spearheaded by 18
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fresh divisions, 1,700 tanks, and 1,500 aircraft redeployed from Siberia and the Soviet Far East, along with Rokossovsky’s 16th Army and many other units that had been fighting the Germans for months. The devastating counterattack pushed the enemy from the gates of Moscow to a line 100 to 200 miles west and held the invaders there through the winter. However, Stalin and Zhukov overreached, attempting a major spring offensive without adequate preparation or reserves. A powerful German counterthrust hurled back the Soviet troops and steamrolled south toward Ukraine and the Caucasus—the campaign that culminated at Stalingrad. On March 8, 1942, Rokossovsky was at his command post near Maklaki, a village southwest of Moscow, when an enemy artillery round burst only yards away. Shrapnel badly wounded him in the back. Evacuated by air to Moscow, he spent months recuperating while the Germans began their southward thrust. In July 1942, a recovered Rokossovsky assumed command of the Bryansk Front: four field armies, a tank army, two additional tank corps, and a cavalry corps, facing German forces near Tula and Voronezh, south of Moscow. In September, however, Stalin suddenly summoned him and Zhukov to Moscow and ordered them to fly immediately to Stalingrad to assess that grave situation. After a quick inspection, Zhukov told Rokossovsky to assume command of that front. “I requested that I be allowed to command the troops myself within the spirit of the overall task set by GHQ, adapting to the situation in hand,” Rokossovsky recounted later. “‘In other words,’ Zhukov said with a smile, ‘there’s no point in my being here? All right. I’ll leave today.’” Rokossovsky took over at once and set about examining his new force and its circumstances. To inspect General Chuikov’s 62nd Army, grimly holding the last Soviet foothold inside Stalingrad, Rokossovsky and staff crossed the frozen Volga on foot. Drawing enemy artillery and mortar fire and dodging shell bursts, “now spurting forward, now doubling back, we finally reached the other bank,” Rokossovsky wrote. “The [62nd] Army occupied a narrow strip of land along the riverfront and the section of the city adjoining the river, of which nothing remained but piles of rubble with the occasional skeletons of buildings…turned into impenetrable fortresses…. A vast area in front of the [German] defense line was dotted with our damaged and gutted tanks: the dismal result of the hastily conceived and haphazard counterattacks into which our troops had been thrown. We would make no such attack! We would prepare the offensive thoroughly.” Zhukov, Rokossovsky, and their colleagues prepared an assault that began with a two-pronged envelopment by armor aiming at the enemy’s flanks. In mid-November, five days of hard fighting forged the first slender bands of Red Army encirclement, which gradually thickened, tightened, and doubled. An inner ring clenched General Friedrich von Paulus’s Sixth Army in Stalingrad; a second ring faced outward to repel
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work, but what I liked most in them was their ability to uphold their views. This made me think twice over a suggestion, and as often as not I would end up by saying, ‘You’re right there, I overlooked that point.’” “If you want to form an opinion of an officer listen to what he says about his subordinates. It is part of the character of a good commander to be able to define his comrades’ contribution to the common cause in the difficult struggle with the enemy.”
…AND ON DEALING WITH THE PRESS “...THE RETREATING NAZIS set villages on fire and mined the houses they had not burned down. “Major General A. A. Lobachev, Chief of Staff Mikhail Malinin, several other comrades, and I took up quarters in one of these houses, after demining, of course. We unfolded our maps and were about to get down to our work of taking stock of the situation when some correspondents burst in, followed by several newsreel men with their cameras. They filled the room, the only habitable one in the house, and it was quite impossible to work. “Something had to be done. “The defused mines suggested an idea. A simple pulley clock hung on the wall. Its proper weights had been replaced by cloth bags filled with some heavy substance. Looking up, I remarked that the Nazis planted all kinds of booby-traps—a fact that the newsmen knew only too well—and warned them to be careful not to touch the clock. “My words acted like magic, and in a few moments we were able to go on with our work without having actually turned the unwanted visitors out.” SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
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attempts at relief. On January 26, 1943, Rokossovsky unleashed an offensive that split the Sixth Army and crushed German resistance. On January 31, he and artillery commander General Nikolai Voronov accepted von Paulus’s surrender. At Stalingrad, Germany and its allies lost as many as 800,000 men killed, missing, seriously wounded, or captured—losses from which Hitler’s army would never recover.
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fter Stalingrad, the Red Army faced the Germans on an enormous, nearly continuous front reaching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Toward the center, near Kursk, a bulge in the Soviet line poked 120 miles west into German-held territory. Rokossovsky, who commanded the forces in that salient, expected the enemy to try to pinch off the bulge and trap his men. In a detailed memo to the general staff he accurately predicted the exact axes of German attack and recommended those areas be reinforced with dense tank and artillery formations augmented by a multi-echelon defense in depth and a very large reserve held well to the rear of the salient—precisely what Zhukov did. German preparations for the Kursk offensive were massive, methodical, and obvious. Perhaps not since the Somme in 1916 had an attacker so blatantly telegraphed his intentions. German forces slowly massed on the northern and southern
SOME BELIEVE STALIN WANTED TO DENY ROKOSSOVSKY, WHO WAS PARTLY OF POLISH DESCENT, THE GLORY OF CAPTURING HITLER’S CAPITAL. flanks of the Kursk salient, but Hitler repeatedly postponed the attack, awaiting delivery of more Panther and Tiger tanks needed to defeat the Soviets’ fleet of stalwart T-34s. Recapitulating their duet at Stalingrad, Zhukov had overall strategic command while Rokossovsky exercised battlefield command of the central front. On the night of July 4, 1943, Soviet troops captured several German sappers clearing minefields. The captives claimed enemy troops were poised at jump-off points for a 3 a.m. attack. Gambling that the prisoners spoke the truth, Rokossovsky immediately had his 500 heavy guns, 460 mortars, and 100 rocket launchers open fire. The impromptu barrage, which disrupted the northern wing of the German attack, began the Battle of Kursk, Germany’s last strategic offensive in the East. Rokossovsky’s prescription for a defense in depth and large reserves proved decisive. Both sides endured awful losses, the Soviets losing more heavily in
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Soviet soldiers carrying an antitank rifle and PPSh submachine gun race past a defunct enemy tank, emblematic of the Red Army pivot that drove the Germans back west.
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men and machines. But the German army failed strategically and had to retreat, a withdrawal that continued nonstop for 22 months, from Kursk to Berlin. The Soviet surge forced the Wehrmacht into fighting retreats—a German forte. Rokossovsky adroitly countered every feint and parry, like a grandmaster at the chessboard. He even bucked Stalin. In May 1944, the high command was readying a broad offensive into Poland. With the boss present, Rokossovsky urged a two-pronged assault at one sector; Soviet doctrine demanded a single breakthrough point. Disagreeing strongly, Stalin twice ordered him to step outside to “think it over.” Rokossovsky stood his ground. After the premier pressed a third time, an ominous silence overtook the room. Stalin, who stood more than a head shorter than his general, reached up and patted the cavalryman’s shoulder. “The front commander’s insistence proves that the offensive has been fully thought out,” he said. “This is a reliable guarantee of success.” And it was. The action was code-named Bagration for General Pyotr Bagration, who brilliantly led tsarist armies against the Poles, the Turks, and Napoleon. “I have no Suvorov [a legendarily undefeated Russian general of the same era],” Stalin said later. “But Rokossovsky is my Bagration.”
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y 1944 Rokossovsky was commanding the 1st Belorussian Front: 10 field armies, one tank and two air armies, three tank, one motorized infantry, and three cavalry corps, and naval craft on the Dnieper River. His mission was to drive the Wehrmacht out of northwest Ukraine and Belorussia, through Poland, and back into Germany. He had an advantage in manpower of as much as four to one, and an edge in artillery and armor as high as six to one. On August 1, as his forces approached the Polish capital, resistance fighters loyal to the Polish government-in-exile—25,000 strong but armed mainly with light weapons—rose against Warsaw’s German occupiers. Miles east, Rokossovsky halted his advance and sat—for two months—while the Germans slaughtered the Polish Home Army and 30,000 noncombatants, leaving Warsaw a ruin. Stalin almost certainly ordered this pause so the Nazis could exterminate foes he otherwise would have had to face in postwar Poland. In his memoir, Rokossovsky sticks to the Soviet line that his forces were exhausted, his supply lines overextended, and he could do nothing to help foolish Poles who had risen up prematurely without consulting him or Moscow. After the Polish Home Army surrendered on October 2, 1944, Rokossovsky resumed the offensive. On November 12, however, Stalin phoned him to announce that Zhukov would be taking over the 1st Belorussian Front and Rokossovsky would shift to the less critical 2nd Belorussian Front. “This was so unexpected,” Rokossovsky recalled, “that I blurted out without thinking, ‘What have I done to be transferred from the main to a secondary sector?!’” Stalin tried to placate him, explaining that both Belorussian fronts and Gen-
Zhukov (center) and Rokossovsky greet Bernard Montgomery (black beret) in Berlin after a July 1945 ceremony decorating the Russian generals.
eral Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front would collaborate to assault the enemy homeland. “If you and Konev don’t advance,” Rokossovsky quotes Stalin as saying, “neither will Zhukov.” Instead, as the Red Army pushed into Germany in January 1945, general headquarters ordered Rokossovsky north, then into East Prussia toward the Baltic Sea, then west along the Baltic coast, while Zhukov drove west to Berlin. Some believe Stalin wanted to deny Rokossovsky, who was partly of Polish descent, the glory of capturing Hitler’s capital. On April 30, hours after Hitler’s suicide, men of Zhukov’s 3rd Assault Army hung a huge red banner on the Reichstag. Three days later, near the Baltic port of Wismar, Rokossovsky’s 3rd Guards Tank Army linked up with British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s Second Army. The war in Europe was over. Rokossovsky had earned command of that Victory Day parade. Soon after, Stalin made him Soviet viceroy in Poland. Declared a Polish citizen in 1949, he was that country’s defense minister for seven years. Zhukov became Soviet defense minister in 1955. Their wartime boss died in 1953. In 1961, Premier Nikita Khrushchev had Stalin’s body moved from the Lenin Mausoleum to an obscure niche in the Kremlin Wall. Rokossovsky was 71 when he died in August 1968; his ashes rest in the Wall as well—in a place of honor. 2 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
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Accompanied by a grim Bess Truman, Harry S. Truman takes the oath of office in the White House Cabinet Room on April 12, 1945, some three and a half hours after FDR’s death.
CENTRAL PRESS/GETTY IMAGES; OPPOSITE, HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY
War does not tarry for any man’s death— not even a commander in chief ’s Truman Takes Charge BY JONATHAN W. JORDAN
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N THE WHITE HOUSE Cabinet Room at 7:09 p.m. on April 12, 1945, a short, bespectacled man who thought he would be playing poker that night was holding a Bible and repeating the oath of office to Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone. Meanwhile, U.S. Army chief of staff General George C. Marshall, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, chief of naval operations Admiral Ernest J. King, and special military advisor Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy were preparing to explain to an unplanned president what they had been doing to win the war. An hour and a half earlier, Harry S. Truman—Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president for all of 83 days—had been summoned to the White House and directed to Eleanor Roosevelt’s second-floor sitting room, where she delivered the news of her husband’s death. Though obviously shaken, the First Lady was, in her moment of grief, a tower of dignity and strength. With the uplifting spirit that had given heart to thousands of wounded soldiers and millions of
From AMERICAN WARLORDS: How Roosevelt’s High Command Led America To Victory In World War II by Jonathan W. Jordan. Published by arrangement with NAL Caliber, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2015 by Jonathan W. Jordan.
America’s poor, she stood and put her hand on a shaken Truman’s shoulder. “Is there anything I can do for you?” Truman asked her. “Is there anything we can do for you?” Mrs. Roosevelt answered. “You are the one in trouble now.” Harry Truman was, in nearly every way, a different man from the glib glad-hander who had ruled the White House since 1933. Quick and plainspoken, he made no small talk, avoided no question. At ease among close friends, Truman lacked the instant familiarity that FDR offered freely to one and all. And unlike Roosevelt, he believed the buck stopped in the Oval Office. As Truman later told British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, “I am here to make decisions, and whether they prove right or wrong, I am going to make them.”
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RUMAN HAD KNOWN the job of president might be thrust upon him prematurely. In August 1944, FDR had his new running mate over to the White House for lunch and a photo session on the South Lawn. When he got back to his Senate office, Truman told a friend that when Roosevelt “tried to pour cream into his tea, more went into the
JOURNEY TO THE END OF WORLD WAR II APRIL 25, 1945: Secretary of War Henry Stimson briefs newly sworn-in President Harry S. Truman on the imminent completion of “the most terrible weapon” in human history, the atomic bomb
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MAY 8: V-E Day; troops in Europe prepare to move to the Pacific
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JUNE 7: China drives back Japan’s Twentieth Army, ending the last major Japanese offensive of the war
FROM LEFT: (MANHATTAN PROJECT PATCH) GUY ACETO, ARCHIVE PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES, HISTORYNET ARCHIVE
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It is “very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter,” the war secretary told Truman.
FROM LEFT: LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY, US ARMY, NATIONAL ARCHIVES
saucer than into the cup.” He added, “It doesn’t seem to be a mental lapse of any kind, but physically he’s going to pieces.” The “juggler,” as FDR had called himself, refused to see the pieces crumbling, and was, by his own design, the only man who knew what the right and left hands of his administration were doing. For 12 years he had fragmented information, ignored jurisdictional lines, and overlapped responsibilities. Secretive while being genial, concealing everything when being garrulous, Roosevelt rendered no concessions to his political or physical mortality by taking his vice president—any of his vice presidents—into his confidence. When deriding the qualifications of Roosevelt’s Republican opponents, Truman had told the newspapers, “To entrust the winning of the war and the framing of the peace into the hands of any man with a limited outlook and without the experience needed for such a job would be the sheerest folly.” Yet FDR never showed Truman any of his secret cable exchanges with Stalin and Churchill. Truman had never seen the White House Map Room—where FDR charted the course of the war—or even been told of its existence. He knew nothing of Allied strategy or the atomic bomb. War secretary Henry Stimson knew the new president would be “laboring under the terrific handicap of coming into such an office where the threads of information were so multitudinous that only long previous familiarity could allow him to control them.” After giving Truman several days to adjust, Stimson felt one topic could wait no longer. On April 24, he wrote the new president: I think it is very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter.
I mentioned it to you shortly after you took office, but have not urged it on account of the pressure you have been under. It, however, has a bearing on our present foreign relations and has such an important effect upon all my thinking in this field that I think you ought to know about it without much further delay. Truman summoned his war secretary to the White House the next day. Acquainting Truman with details of the innocuously dubbed Manhattan Project, which was working to develop a nuclear weapon out of a laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and elsewhere, Stimson said the weapon’s destructive power made it “the most terrible weapon ever known in human history.” In time, he said, its secrets would undoubtedly spread to other nations. Statesmen would be called upon to develop “thorough-going rights of inspection and internal controls” sufficient to prevent the weapon from being used irresponsibly. With these controls, Stimson said, a new relationship between mankind and the atom offered an opportunity “to bring the world into a pattern in which the peace of the world and our civilization can be saved.” Stimson suggested creating an advisory committee on the political and policy effects of the bomb, which Truman approved. Stimson’s “Interim Committee” included, among others, himself, an assistant secretary of state, a navy undersecretary, and the incoming secretary of state, James F. Byrnes. Stimson also invited four eminent scientists: J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Los Alamos complex, and Nobel laureates Enrico Fermi of Columbia, Arthur Compton of Chicago, and Ernest Lawrence of the University of California. Sitting with
JUNE 21: After 82 days of fighting, Allies declare Okinawa secure
JUNE 18: Truman approves November 1 invasion of Japan
JUNE 16: First A-bomb test, at New Mexico’s Trinity Site, succeeds
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A DEVASTATING NEW WEAPON UNLEASHED
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them as guests were Generals Marshall and Leslie J. Groves, military overseer of the Manhattan Project. Stimson’s committee met periodically throughout May, holding its climactic meeting the last day of the month. Deferring to the generals on military matters, the scientists joined in a discussion of the bomb’s effects. The gaunt Oppenheimer described his vision of the hellish blast. “The visual effect would be tremendous,” he promised. “It would be accompanied by a brilliant luminescence which would rise to a height of 10,000 to 20,000 feet.” Stimson said he preferred to use the bomb with no advance warning, in an area sufficiently populated as to “make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible.” On this point there was little dissent. Oppenheimer went further, suggesting multiple simultaneous strikes, though Groves argued that each individual bombing would provide valuable information that could make subsequent attacks more effective. As Stimson recalled, the committee carefully considered alternatives such as bombing an uninhabited area, or giving an advance warning. A specific warning, they feared, might prompt the Japanese army to move American prisoners to the target area. Moreover, some in the administration did not believe the bomb would work. Admiral Leahy, for one, called it “a professor’s pipe dream.” It might stiffen Japanese resistance if the United States announced the development of a fantastic new weapon and the fantastic new weapon turned out to be a dud. Stimson had discussed ways of warning Japan and which targets to use two days earlier with Marshall and Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy. Jack McCloy had been Stimson’s emissary, troubleshooter, and right-hand man since early 54
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1941, and he was one of the few men Stimson entrusted with the full story of the atomic bomb. Marshall had suggested hitting a purely military target, such as a naval installation, with the first bomb. He also believed some kind of warning should be given to Japan’s citizens, designating a number of manufacturing areas that the United States intended to destroy with a short time to evacuate. “We must offset by such warning,” he said, “the opprobrium which might follow from an ill-considered employment of such force.” Planning military operations around an unprecedented weapon was not easy, given the veil of secrecy concealing it even from those charged with its use. Admiral King, for instance, could not tell anyone on his staff—not even his intelligence chiefs—of the bomb’s existence. In early summer he called in Captain William Smedberg, his intelligence head, and told him, “Smedberg, now this is very, very secret, what I’m going to say to you. I want you to go back and I want you and your staff to work and in the next two or three days I want you to tell me when you think the Japanese will surrender if the most awful thing you can imagine happens to them in, say, the next two or three months.” A baffled Smedberg returned to his office with no idea of what King was talking about. “The most awful thing you can imagine,” he supposed, was a big earthquake. Japan had a long history with them, and he knew the Allies had discussed packing a line of freighters with explosives and detonating them along a fault line. Perhaps that was what King meant. On June 1, the Interim Committee submitted its recommendations to Truman, proposing to use the bomb against Japan as soon as possible, without warning, and against a target that would demonstrate the weapon’s “devastating strength.” With
FROM LEFT, NATIONAL ARCHIVES; HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY
JULY 24: At Potsdam Conference in occupied Germany, Truman informs Stalin of successful Trinity blast
JULY 25: Truman authorizes use of atomic bomb as soon as weather permits visual sighting of target
AUGUST 9: B-29 Bockscar drops “Fat Man” on Nagasaki The Soviet Union declares war on Japan; Soviet forces enter northern China AUGUST 6: B-29 Enola Gay drops “Little Boy” on Hiroshima
AUGUST 8: The Soviet Union dissolves neutrality pact with Japan
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some discussion and hand-wringing, the committee reaffirmed its recommendation “that the weapon be used against Japan at the earliest opportunity…on a dual target, namely, a military installation or war plant surrounded by or adjacent to homes or other buildings most susceptible to damage.”
NATIONAL ARCHIVES (BOTH)
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N A MONDAY AFTERNOON a little more than two weeks later, Harry Truman sat at his desk and listened carefully as Leahy, Stimson, Marshall, and King spoke of death. Death the nation could expect to suffer in Operation Downfall, the two-stage invasion of Japan. The Joint Chiefs and General Douglas MacArthur had planned Operation Olympic, the invasion of Japan’s southern island of Kyūshū, to commence in November 1945. About four months after that, they would launch another invasion, Operation Coronet, against Japan’s main island of Honshū. MacArthur would command the first invasion with an army of 750,000 soldiers. For the second, he would lead just over a million. The question weighing on Truman’s mind was how many of those American soldiers would be buried in Japanese soil before the war ended. Earlier that month, former president
Herbert Hoover had sent Truman a memorandum suggesting that an invasion of Japan would cost a million American lives. Truman forwarded the memo to Stimson for analysis, since the Joint Chiefs had been working with a number closer to half a million total casualties—killed, wounded, and missing. All these numbers were little more than guesswork. At the June 18 strategy meeting, Marshall told Truman there was no reliable projection of American dead and wounded. Considering only Kyūshū, the smaller of the two islands, Marshall gave Truman a rather vague ratio of American and Japanese losses, based on which he concluded that during the first 30 days on Kyūshū, American casualties would not exceed the proportionate price the nation paid for Luzon in the Philippines—about 31,000 casualties. Of course, those casualties were only a down payment. In the end, no one could say whether the entire population of Japan would rise up against the invaders in a national hara-kiri. Leahy approached the question of casualties from a different angle. On Okinawa, he pointed out, American forces suffered a 35 percent casualty rate. He asked Marshall the size of the force he planned to use for Olympic, and the general replied that 766,000 troops would be used. No one got out
Weighing on Truman’s mind was how many American soldiers would be buried in Japanese soil before the war ended.
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a pencil and paper to do the math, and King pointed out that Kyūshū offered more attack options than Okinawa did. But it was easy to see that if the Okinawa ratio held, total casualties on Kyūshū might top 268,000. And Kyūshū, of course, was only step one. Another 1.2 million enemy soldiers awaited on Honshū, and that meant more Americans would die. Japanese military casualties would depend on how many soldiers the emperor fielded. The math itself was easy: take the total number of Japanese soldiers—there were 350,000 on Kyūshū—and subtract a tiny fraction of those left alive but too badly injured to commit suicide. That would give the number of Japanese combat deaths. Civilian deaths could not be predicted, but, as in all wars, they would be far more numerous. Truman’s war chiefs were divided on the wisdom of invasion. Planners for U.S. Army Air Forces commander Henry H. “Hap” Arnold argued that conventional air bombardment would bring Japan to its knees. By the time of the invasion, General Arnold had predicted, there would be virtually no industrial centers left; large portions of Japan’s major cities would simply have ceased to exist.
Admiral Leahy believed a naval blockade, combined with air bombardment, would force the island nation to surrender on reasonable terms. Nippon no longer had access to oil or steel. It had little in the way of food, and the Joint Chiefs were considering a plan to drop salt over rice paddies to spoil crops as they were maturing. A blockade might take more time and more money, but would cost fewer American lives. King agreed with Leahy. Letting fortified islands starve had worked magnificently for Rabaul and Truk. Blockading Honshū would simply be a “die on the vine” strategy writ large. King later wrote of his private objections to invasion: “I have said many times we (U.S.) didn’t have to get in such a fix if we could merely wait for the effective Naval Blockade to starve the Japanese into submission for lack of oil, rice and other essentials. The Army, however, with its complete lack of understanding of ‘Sea Power’ insisted on a direct invasion and occupational conquest of Japan proper—which I still contend was wrong!” Marshall would not countenance a war lasting into late 1946. As in Europe, he looked for the fastest and surest way to end the fighting. And as with Nazi Germany, Marshall believed
THE FALL OF THE IMPERIAL JAPANESE EMPIRE AUGUST 18: Soviet forces land in northern Korea and Japan’s Sakhalin and Kuril Islands
AUGUST 15: Emperor Hirohito announces Japan’s surrender
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FROM LEFT, ASAHI SHIMBUN VIA GETTY IMAGES; HISTORYNET ARCHIVE
Japan’s indifference to casualties convinced Marshall a blockade would lengthen the war for not months, but years.
FROM LEFT, NATIONAL ARCHIVES; ©AMERICAN PHOTO ARCHIVE/ALAMY
Japan’s will to resist would be broken quickest by invasion, not by blockade or bombardment. Fanatical resistance on Okinawa and Saipan, Japan’s legendary contempt for surrender, and its apparent indifference to the massive firebombing campaign the U.S. Army Air Forces’ Pacific bomber commander, Major General Curtis LeMay, had been conducting since March convinced Marshall that a blockade would lengthen the war, producing more casualties than would be avoided. Airmen shot down and naval victims of kamikaze attacks, to say nothing of Russian and Japanese casualties in Manchuria, would pile up as Japan held out for months, perhaps years. Marshall later described his mindset the day he urged invasion on Truman: “We had to assume that a force of 2.5 million Japanese would fight to the death, fight as they did on all those islands we attacked. We figured that in their homeland they would fight even harder. We felt this despite what generals with cigars in their mouths had to say about bombing the Japanese into submission. We killed 100,000 Japanese in one raid in one night, but it didn’t mean a thing insofar as actually beating the Japanese.” However mixed their inner feelings, at the White House meeting the Joint Chiefs appeared united. General Arnold’s representative, Lieutenant General Ira Eaker, fell in line with Marshall, pointing out that air casualties would run about 30 percent per month if bombers attacked an enemy able to focus all its domestic resources on antiaircraft defense. King voiced general agreement with Marshall, and emphasized the importance of taking Kyūshū as a springboard for air and naval operations. Leahy, who had told the Joint Chiefs he would go along with the invasion only if they persuaded President Truman, questioned Marshall’s estimates, but never openly disagreed
with Marshall’s premise that invasion was a prerequisite to Japan’s surrender. Henry Stimson, recovering from a migraine headache that morning, said he favored invasion. But before taking that last step, he suggested that the Allies find a way to reach out to what he called “the submerged class” in Japan. He believed a silent majority opposed the war; this underclass would fight tenaciously if their islands were invaded by white soldiers, but they also might force Japan to give up before an invasion became necessary. After listening to his war chiefs, Truman summarized the consensus. He said he understood the Joint Chiefs to be unanimous in recommending an invasion of Kyūshū in November as the “best solution under the circumstances.” The chiefs said they agreed. With nothing left to discuss, the meeting began to break up. As the participants stood up to leave, the president noticed Jack McCloy standing silently off to one side. Realizing that the undersecretary had not voiced an opinion, Truman asked McCloy what he thought. McCloy said they should look for a political solution that did not require an invasion. Fixing his eyes on Truman, he referred obliquely to the “new weapon.” His reference to a “new weapon” brought shocked looks from around the room. “It was just like mentioning Skull and Bones at Yale,” McCloy said later. “You shouldn’t have said that out loud, yet everyone knew it was there.” Jack McCloy had brought the atomic bomb into the question of Japan’s fate, and Harry Truman told his advisers to sit back down. They had one more item to discuss. 2
SEPTEMBER 2: V-J Day: Japan formally surrenders aboard battleship USS Missouri, officially ending World War II
AUGUST 28: Occupation of Japan, under Allied Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur, begins
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A stylized drawing by Enola Gay copilot Robert A. Lewis (right)—likely derived from sketches at an August 4, 1945, briefing by the B-29’s weaponeer, William “Deke” Parsons— shows the B-29’s approach to the target, bomb release, and abrupt departure in a diving, 155-degree turn. Lewis quotes Parsons as saying, “now let’s look at these sketches, and you will better understand this designed maneuver and why every second is critical.” The aftermath of the bombing was the most dangerous part of the mission for the B-29’s crew: no one knew if the massive bomber could withstand the shock waves from the blast.
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ALL IMAGES, BONHAMS, EXCEPT WHERE NOTED
SHOCK AND AWE
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Pilot’s-eye View Captain Robert Lewis preserved an archive of an epic moment in history
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THIS PAGE, COURTESY 509TH BOMB WING
f I live a hundred years, I’ll never quite get these few minutes out of my mind,” Robert A. Lewis wrote shortly after the B-29 he was copiloting, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In August 1945 the confident and rambunctious Lewis was 27, with sturdy, all-American good looks and a reputation as a skilled pilot and determined ladies’ man. Lewis had enlisted in the Army Air Corps early in the war; electronics experience got him a gig testing weapons systems on a bomber under development, the B-29 Superfortress. Another pilot in the B-29 program, Lieutenant Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, selected Lewis to join him in
a combat force—the 509th Composite Group—training in secret to use the bomber to deliver a weapon of unprecedented power. Lewis, later a settled family man with five children, spent a lifetime reflecting on the mission. “He would place items on the dining room table and then we would spend most of our day together discussing them in detail,” Lewis’s youngest son, Steven, recalled. The elder Lewis gave the artifacts on these pages to Steven; they went up for sale last April at New York’s Bonhams auction house, where the collection brought in $112,000, and offered a revealing look at one man’s war story. —Karen Jensen
SILVERPLATE SPECIAL On June 14, 1945, Bob Lewis ferried a modified B-29 known only as Superfortress 44-86292 to the Utah base where the 509th Composite Group was training for its special assignment. Mission leader Paul W. Tibbets—standing at far right, next to Lewis—later named the B-29 after his mother.
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Ephemera from Lewis’s historic mission include shock wave calculations (top left) and a drawing of the approach and escape plans of Enola Gay and its two companion aircraft (above). “I was flying the biggest of all bombers as if it were a fighter plane,” chief pilot Tibbets later remarked. A rare color shot taken inside the Enola Gay (left) shows radio operator Richard Nelson at work at his position— likely during one of the practice runs in Tinian in July 1945. Nelson, 20, was the youngest member of the crew. After the bomb detonated over Hiroshima and the bomber successfully about-faced and survived the shock waves, Nelson transmitted a two-word code to mission superiors: “Results excellent.”
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MAGAZINE COVER, TIME INC.
IN THE DETAILS
UNFORGETTABLE En route, Lewis made notations in a log (top) and detailed events in a notebook (left), as he had agreed to do for William L. Laurence, the New York Times reporter covering the mission. “Just how many Japs did we kill?” he wrote as Enola Gay headed home. “I honestly have the feeling of groping for words to explain this or I might say my God what have we done.” Lewis would become known for those words, repeated by Time magazine (above) on the 40th anniversary of the bombing. “I’ll never forget that feeling,” Lewis reflected a year before his death in 1983. “You could see a good sized city, then you didn’t see it anymore. It was simply gone.”
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OOEn route to bomb German troops at Cassino, Twelfth Air Force B-25s pass Italy’s Mount Vesuvius. Its March 1944 eruption caused turbulence aloft and did damage below.
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An American Bomber Group Takes a One-Two Punch. First Nature, then Nazis By Richard R. Muller SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
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Many young GIs in Italy from 1943 to 1945 were making their first trips overseas, and the vivid traces of ancient culture they encountered fascinated them. Troops landing at Salerno in September 1943 gazed at the awesome Greek temples at Paestum. A month later Naples fell to the Allies. That battered gem quickly became a magnet for tourists in olive drab, along with the Roman city of Pompeii. That city was destroyed in 79 AD by Vesuvius—mainland Europe’s only active volcano—and subsequently excavated. The volcano itself, just east of Naples, proved an irresistible draw. The Red Cross organized jaunts up the smoking slope via funicular railroad. At the base, British and American troops gaped at “droolings of lava issuing from fissures,” as one American recalled. GIs drank “volcano-made coffee”; an urn of java lowered into the lava crust emerged piping hot. Volcanically toasted bread was popular. Souvenir hawkers did a brisk trade in ashtrays made from coins pressed into blobs of molten lava. GIs suspected—correctly—that not long ago the same vendors had been selling versions bearing Nazi insignia. Vesuvius had erupted periodically for centuries and inter-
OOGIs of the Fifth Army watch the volcano spew ash and gas.
mittently emitted reminders of its power. Small disturbances had been occurring more recently, but locals swore that when Vesuvio, as they called it, was noisy, all was well; the time to worry was when the mountain got quiet. Until March 1944 the volcano had hardly figured in the war, except as a geographic obstacle between Salerno and Naples. Once the Allies moved beyond Naples, the region around Vesuvius became a quiet rear area where pilots occasionally reported bumpy air caused by thermals rising from the crater. At night a dull red creep of lava mocked Allied blackout procedures by marking the route to Naples harbor—10 miles due west—for German aviators. Many Allied units set up housekeeping in the vicinity. Just east of the restive mountain, the 340th Bombardment Group was based at Pompeii airfield, a new strip and a big improvement over the outfit’s previous field at muddy and overcrowded Foggia. Headquarters staff took over a villa three miles from the flight line; lower ranks made do with requisitioned houses or tents. Group headquarters and each of the four attached squadrons’ intelligence sections captured the experience in detailed histories and war diaries. “We found ourselves based on a fine field cleared among orchards and vineyards,” one such diary recorded. “Vesuvius reared up into a soft blue sky a few miles away, smoking and steaming quietly. ‘Used to erupt’—someone had said. We all knew that was away back in dead history somewhere.”
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nown as “The Avengers,” the 340th—part of the Twelfth Air Force—flew the North American B-25 Mitchell medium bomber. The unit began its war in early spring of 1943 based at Medenine, in southeast Tunisia, bombing Afrika Korps chief Erwin Rommel’s supply lines. By year’s end the crews were at Foggia, assisting the Allied slog up the Italian boot. With a Distinguished Unit Citation in hand the 340th’s fliers thought they were hot stuff—though even the hottest hands had to admit the unit’s bombing accuracy and formation discipline had slackened lately. Spells of bad weather, inactivity, and boredom had dulled the group’s edge. Change was in order. New Year’s 1944 brought relocation to Pom-
GEORGE RODGER, LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES (BOTH); ALL OTHER PHOTOS, NATIONAL ARCHIVES
flows like metal in a foundry. The towns of San Sebastiano and Massa di Somma were being overrun by the lava today, a stream 50 feet high, slowly engulfing everything in its path. Trees, a hundred feet away, suddenly swell and burst from the expanding sap and are immediately consumed with fire.” GIs hauled terrified civilians to safety, the impromptu convoys blocked by camera-toting soldiers heading to the lava flow the locals were trying to escape. Near midnight the mountain seemed to calm itself, but at 2 a.m. the crater began spewOOAs debris from the erupting Vesuvius darkens the skies, citizens flee for ing pea-size pellets. By dawn on the 22nd, a safer precincts. Towns at the foot of the slope were engulfed in molten rock. “black snow storm” of ash was falling “and the missiles had grown to walnut size with occapeii field and a new broom. On January 8 Lieutenant Colosional baseballs,” wrote Captain Everett Thomas of the 488th nel Charles D. Jones assumed command, immediately laying Bombardment Squadron. Lightning, a frequent accompanion rigorous practice missions and scrutinizing the results. ment to volcanic eruptions, added to the spectacle. Bolts at the Another skipper making the same demands might have raised summit seemed to summon larger spouts of lava. Still, group hackles, but Jones’s affable professionalism and high standards headquarters, in that sumptuous villa some three miles from quickly won converts. Soon Jones was “whipping the group the flight line, did not grasp the situation. Command staff into its old-time condition of morale and efficiency,” a war instructed ground crews to “keep the wings shoveled off and diarist noted. By mid-January, the group was striking enemy the planes protected as well as possible,” Thomas wrote. transport choke points in support of the Anzio landings. By all Now the volcano was throwing superheated pyroclasts the measures, performance dramatically improved. size of footballs that shattered on impact to reveal glowing On March 10, 1944, over the Littorio marshalling yards white-hot cores. “The phenomenon had passed a bit beyond north of Rome, flak took down the bomber in which Jones was the purely interesting stage,” a droll ground crewman reported. flying. Observers saw five of seven crew members parachute Chunks of hot rock smashed plane turrets and cockpits, ripsafely before the blazing B-25 augered in. German radio soon ping through fabric control surfaces. Despite frantic sweepannounced that the “popular and esteemed” Jones was a POW. ing, heavy ash accumulated on wings and fuselages. Finally, A week later the unquiet Vesuvius became even more so. after several hours of confusing orders and counter-orders, the Daily, the crater sent an enormous pillar of steam and smoke group’s personnel evacuated the shattered base, leaving behind miles into the heavens; by night, huge lava spouts arced skynot only ruined aircraft but most of their equipment and perward. A new lava flow a mile long, a quarter mile wide, and sonal possessions. In trucks and jeeps, the bedraggled convoy eight feet deep began slithering toward Naples. crept along roads covered by a foot of drifting volcanic ash. Even so, Pompeii field seemed safe. “From our side we could By nightfall the worst was over. Civil and military authorisee only the usual bubbling red cone and silhouette, no lava ties tallied 28 dead, mostly locals. The personnel of the 340th flowing,” one war diarist wrote. The 340th’s new commandgot off very lightly; the only injuries were a broken nose and a ing officer, Colonel Willis F. Chapman, decided to stay put. broken arm. GI medics treated evacuated civilians. The sight He wanted to keep attacking the enemy, and avoid tempting of San Sebastiano horrified one British soldier. “Where it had Luftwaffe night raiders by crowding nearby fields. He also had stood was nothing but a big slag heap of lava, and a memory,” faith in locals’ assurances. Flights of B-25s kept hitting targets he wrote in a letter to his parents. “Bombs make a terrific row through March 20, as Vesuvius, in the words of a nervous and leave ruins. Lava makes no sound and leaves—nothing.” airman, continued to “grunt like a giant pig.” The men of the 340th returned on March 25 to Pompeii field, Events of March 21 called Chapman’s judgment into queshoping to find only scorched paint and fabric and destroyed tion. “Vesuvius going stronger than ever,” a squadron member Plexiglas. But heaped tons of volcanic ash had twisted wings dutifully recorded. “At suppertime blasts were getting to be and tail surfaces, reducing many bombers to scrap. one continual rumble and just after supper it began to seem German radio propagandist Axis Sally ballyhooed the disasthat the whole top of the mountain was going to come off… ter, claiming Germany had nature on its side. “We got the the lava started to come down our side, dropping in big hot colonel,” she crowed, referring to the captive Jones. “VesuSEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
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OOA B-25 whose fabric control surfaces have burned away stands useless, above. Below, a crewman digs at cinders that nearly buried a ruined plane’s aft machine-gun mount and destroyed its Plexiglas bubble. The weight was enough to crush a tail assembly. At right, a ground crewman sweeps a wing of debris; note how the nose wheel is off the ground.
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vius got the rest.” German radio claimed the group had been wiped out to the last man and ship. “She was nearer right than she knew on ships at least,” one squadron historian lamented.
A
sh and soot sifted from the sky for weeks, but the Avengers recovered swiftly. Only four days after the evacuation the group was flying again from a field near Paestum with six borrowed B-25s per squadron. Replacements returned the unit to full strength, using the latest model B-25, by mid-April. All 88 Mitchells at Pompeii—$25 million worth—seemed to be shot to hell, but maintenance crews cannibalized hulks until, by the end of April, they had 14 planes in working order. From Paestum the unit followed the Allied advance, relocating in late April 1944 to Alesan airfield on the east coast of Corsica, so checkered with American bases that crews nicknamed the island “USS Corsica.” As the 340th resumed its attacks on German infrastructure, the press of combat pushed thoughts of Vesuvius to the side. Jones’s admonition to watch for enemy sorties became sidelined as well. Even unit war diaries noted that complacency was again setting in. Aside from the occasional nuisance raider or photo-recon snooper, the Luftwaffe had never brought a serious attack to bear on the 340th at any of its bases. Protection by Allied night fighters patrolling out of other Corsican fields added to the sense of invulnerability. On May 12, 1944, the airmen gathered for movie night. The popular 1943 comedy Holy Matrimony, starring Gracie Fields and Monty Woolley, had men rolling in the aisles—even after they saw tracer fire to the north, which they assumed was from nuisance raiders. “Like children,” a squadron diarist recorded, everyone enjoyed the sight of streams of incendiary rounds. What 340th personnel were seeing was a heavy Luftwaffe attack on Poretta airfield, 15 miles north and home to the fighters that guarded Corsica’s Allied bomber bases. The Germans, knowing an enemy offensive was in the works, had coordinated efforts to disrupt Allied air cover for that attack and take pressure off fellow defenders. The Junkers Ju 88 bombers that hit Poretta returned to Ghedi in northern Italy to rearm and refuel, and set out again—this time for Alesan. At 3:30 a.m. on May 13, a German pathfinder laid flares among the base’s dispersed B-25s, many of them brimful of fuel and loaded with ordnance for the morning sortie. “The flares make the field appear as though there is a night baseball game being played back home,” a 489th Bombardment Squadron member wrote. “I can hear planes overhead but cannot see them.” Enemy fragmentation and light demolition bombs shredded the parked planes. “Planes continue to burn,” the writer continued. “It is a holocaust but an awe-inspiring one.” The Luftwaffe killed nearly two dozen men and injured more than 75. Ground crews—some in slit trenches, others
caught in the open—took especially heavy casualties. Several of the dead were new arrivals, their gear barely unpacked. Tightlipped airmen trudged to the medical tent to donate blood for the wounded. Of the 65 B-25s the Germans hit, 30 were total losses. Some Americans noted that Vesuvius had done worse damage, but most agreed with a squadron diarist’s sentiment: “Vesuvius was bad but man wreaks much greater destruction than nature.” The string of funerals hit the 340th hard. Men lamented their carelessness in days past, when wearing helmets and digging slit trenches “was considered almost cowardly,” a diarist wrote. “Have we learned a bitter lesson?” All four squadrons resolved that if the Luftwaffe returned, the Germans would find everyone at last dug in. The 340th rebounded, mounting a mission the next day. Colonel Chapman stayed in command, and welcomed the newly freed Jones at war’s end. In September 1944 the group received another Distinguished Unit Citation—and in time became unexpectedly immortal. Eight days after the Alesan raid, a replacement bombardier arrived. Lieutenant Joseph Heller, 21, soaked up chatter about the attack, flew 60 combat missions, and throughout took heed of personalities and events on Corsica. In 1953 Heller began transmuting his war into fiction; in 1961, Simon & Schuster published his novel Catch-22, which became a bestseller and remains in print. But that is another story. 2
OOA repair crew hoists a fresh nose into position to replace one the eruption destroyed.
WEAPONS MANUAL by Jim Laurier
America’s Atomic Bombs The tools that made nuclear war a reality had code names from fiction. A fan of hard-boiled novelist Dashiell Hammett, Manhattan Project physicist Robert Serber dubbed one “Thin Man” for a Hammett protagonist; a second “Fat Man,” from The Maltese Falcon, and a third “Little Boy,” as world-weary Sam Spade calls a hoodlum. Thin Man went unused; B-29 crews dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima and Fat Man on Nagasaki. In Little Boy, 10 and a half feet long, 28 inches wide, and weighing 9,700 pounds, a 6.5-inch cordite gun fired a large piece of uranium-235 into a smaller one to cause an explosion equal to 12,500 tons of TNT. Nine feet long and 59 inches wide, the 10,800-pound Fat Man detonated a dynamite wrap to mash a plutonium core and yield a blast equal to 21,000 tons of TNT.
As Fat Man hangs from a chain on Tinian Island, a worker sprays sealant over puttied joints on the casing.
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No Direction Home UHF antennas let crews track bombs as they fell.
Armed and Dangerous The red knobs are arming plugs. The Naval Gun Factory in Washington, DC, cast Little Boy’s gun and breech.
Enola Gay pilot Paul W. Tibbets thought Little Boy, here being loaded onto the B-29, was misnamed. “It was a monster compared with any bomb that I had ever dropped,” he wrote.
PHOTOS: NATIONAL ARCHIVES (ALL)
Destroyers of Worlds
Little Boy’s Lineage As each test bomb was completed, workers stenciled on a production number. To minimize risk of an accident at takeoff from Tinian, Little Boy L-11 was armed aboard Enola Gay in flight.
Fat Man’s F-bomb The Fat Man team signed their work. “JANCFU” stood for—politely—“Joint Army Navy Civilian Foul Up.” On their bomb, Little Boy handlers added, “Greetings to the Emperor from the men of the Indianapolis.”
A Case of U-235 Both bombs’ steel casings were assembled from components whose fabrication was divided among three factories to keep the design secret. Each bomb’s detonation style called for a differently shaped shell—hence the long Little Boy and the round Fat Man.
Fins for Falling Tail fins stabilized the bombs in descent. Expert Tool and Die Co. in Detroit, Michigan, built the fairings and mounting brackets.
HOW THEY STACK UP In explosive power, the new weapons outdid standard ordnance to an almost incomprehensible degree.
The Competition
BOMB
GERMANY SC 2500 German SC 2500 Introduced in 1940 during the London Blitz, the 5,500-lb. “Max,” part of a family of cylindrical German bombs, was so heavy that it often buried itself too deeply to inflict much damage on intended targets.
British Grand Slam “Ten Ton Tess,” which debuted in 1945, cost cash-strapped Britain so much to build that aircrews accustomed to jettisoning unused ordnance on aborted missions had orders to return with their 22,000-lb. Grand Slams.
BRITAIN GRAND SLAM U.S. FAT MAN
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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
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REVIEWS [
BOOKS
]
Friends with the Enemy Adolf Hitler and the Duchess and Duke of Windsor (looking down, center) had a mutually solicitous relationship.
17 CARNATIONS The Royals, the Nazis, and the Biggest Cover-up in History By Andrew Morton. 370 pp. Grand Central Publishing, 2015. $28.
ALAMY
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ndrew Morton is what we reviewing hacks call a “pathographer”—a biographer who specializes in his subjects’ personal shortcomings. For most of his career, Morton has confined himself to contemporary celebrities: boffo sorts like Madonna, Tom Cruise, and more British royals than you can shake a jeweled scepter at. With 17 Carnations, however, he’s gone back in time to the decades bracket-
ing the war. But he’s still in the land of celebrity pathology. Carnations concerns the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, perhaps the first international celebrities in the 20thcentury style: victims or beneficiaries of ubiquitous, global mass media. Wallis Simpson was the ambitious American divorcée; Edward was the English ruler who fell for her so hard that he abandoned his throne to marry her in 1936. Morton portrays both Windsors as almost pathologically self-indulgent. When war came, it impressed itself on them mainly as an “inconvenience.” To get the duke as far as possible from
the action, Churchill appointed Edward governor of the Bahamas, where he mostly fretted about his villas in France, quietly beseeching the Nazis to maintain them unharmed. The duchess obsessed particularly over bed linens. Discovering that she had left behind a favorite green swimming suit, she demanded the help of American diplomats in securing its return. They obliged. Stupid and foppish royals are nothing new—like hemophilia, they’re just another consequence of all that in-breeding. What made the Windsors singular— and what required Edward’s appalled family after the war to undertake the cover-up in the subtitle—was their romance with Hitler and his thugs. In the prewar years, Nazi officials shamelessly SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
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REVIEWS
flattered the duchess, addressing her as “Your Royal Highness,” and treated the couples’ prewar visits as state affairs. Once war commenced, Hitler plotted to kidnap Edward and install him as puppet king upon Britain’s inevitable fall to the German advance. Horrifying to contemplate, the duke might have obliged. As it was, he spoke in private of the utility of the Blitz as a way to force the British government to see reason and sue for peace. “What a shame that he is no longer king!” said Joseph Goebbels. “With him an alliance would have been possible.” During the war, Morton writes in this highly readable, slightly breathless account, Allied officials treated the duke as they would any treasonous politician, like “a Quisling or Laval in the making, watched warily by both Washington and London.” When the war ended, he and his wife sank into political and diplomatic irrelevance, celebrities cast into “genteel exile.” It was probably a better fate than they deserved. —Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard.
[
By Victor Brooks. 256 pp. Carrel, 2015. $34.99. Toggling between home front and battlefronts, Brooks shows how history teetered on the fulcrum of events during a year in which the promise of victory proved brutally elusive.
STORMTROOPER FAMILIES Homosexuality and Community in the Early Nazi Movement By Andrew Wackerfuss. 352 pp. Harrington Park, 2015. $90 hardbound, $35 paper. If ever a subculture tested tolerance for gays, it was the Sturmabteilung, a gang of butch goons who helped Hitler take power
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]
The Popular Perspective GRASSROOTS FASCISM The War Experience of the Japanese People By Yoshimi Yoshiaki, translated by Ethan Mark. 347 pp. Columbia, 2015. $45.
P
ostwar Japan, unlike Germany, has had trouble finding a comfort zone in which to discuss its wartime history. When Yoshimi Yoshiaki, a professor of modern Japanese history—admired by many but vilified by the country’s vociferous far right—wrote Grassroots Fascism in 1987, he had on his mind precisely Japan’s need “to engage in a deep ‘self-inspection’” following German examples. Now available in English with an excellent introduction by translator Ethan Mark,
[ THE LONGEST YEAR America at War and at Home in 1944
BOOKS
BRIEFS
the book demonstrates just how farreaching, complex, and oftentimes perfectly voluntary Japan’s wartime popular mobilization was. Grassroots Fascism weaves together material from a variety of sources, including official documents, contemporaneous diaries, letters, and postwar memoirs. The book begins in 1937, with the China War, and is divided into four chapters: “From Democracy to Fascism,” “Grassroots Fascism,” “The Asian War,” and “Democracy from the Battlefield.” Yoshimi’s definition of wartime Japanese polity as “fascist” might be challenged, but he makes a compelling argument throughout that Japan’s was “fascism under the emperor.” The deep involvement of politics in the everyday life of ordinary men
]
and were rewarded for it with the Night of the Long Knives.
LAST TO DIE A Defeated Empire, A Forgotten Mission, and the Last American Killed in World War II By Stephen Harding. 288 pp. Da Capo, 2015. $26.99. Every war ends badly for one combatant. In the Pacific, that was Sergeant Anthony J. Marchione, as Harding ably chronicles.
THE COST OF COURAGE By Charles Kaiser. 278 pp. Other, 2015. $26.95. When France fell the three Boulloche siblings joined the Resistance, fighting clandestinely through the occupation. They
kept their story untold until, through a family connection of his own, Kaiser, a master raconteur, winkled out the amazing details.
WAR CRIMES IN JAPAN-OCCUPIED INDONESIA A Case of Murder by Medicine By J. Kevin Baird and Sangkot Marzuki. 274 pp. Potomac, 2015. $34.50. With Japanese denialism stronger than ever, it is appropriate that Baird and Marzuki raise a cleansing wind of fact. In detail and with rigor their book reveals the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’s murderous nature, which cost millions of Indonesians their lives when Japan tried to avoid blame for enslaving them by slaying them. —Michael Dolan is the senior editor of World War II.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
REVIEWS
and women does indeed make it seem that Japanese society was, at the very least, “fascistic” in character. Especially at the war’s start, most Japanese believed that victory would bring a better future, and enough of these people organized themselves to support a totalitarian regime. Patriotic zeal sometimes became frantic, leading to fierce competition among women’s associations, with each group enthusiastically recruiting members and sending countless care packages to soldiers on the front lines. Convinced that Japan’s war held some higher meaning beyond territorial aggrandizement, such as overturning Western colonialism and white supremacy, too many were eager to overlook the campaign’s more destructive implications for those it supposedly was liberating. Yoshimi convincingly shows that the apparently seamless whole encompassing the home front, war theaters, and Japan’s occupied territories was in fact highly diverse. For example, enormous tensions affected different minority and social groups of the empire, as expected in the administering of any massive region. Yoshimi does not reserve his normative judgment here: “The order of imperial fascism was built upon the blood sacrifices of many people who suffered discrimination and oppression.” This chronicle of wartime mentalities from the bottom up is essential reading for anyone interested in fascism conceptually and the Asia-Pacific Theater of World War II. It testifies to Yoshimi’s unflinching scholarship and his ongoing quest to promote serious debate about Japan’s wartime past, including his pioneering research into “comfort women,” or “sex slaves”—another contentious term that he valiantly stands by. Now 69, Yoshimi is a founding member of the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan’s War Responsibility. —Eri Hotta is the author of Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy, which was selected as one of the Best Books of 2013 in a nonfiction category by Kirkus Reviews.
[
BOOKS
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Open Water Resilience THE SHIP THAT WOULDN’T DIE The Saga of the USS Neosho; A World War II Story of Courage and Survival at Sea By Don Keith. 382 pp. NAL Caliber, 2015. $27.95.
T
aking aerial scouting reports at face value could mislead World War II fleet commanders—and court disaster. On December 16, 1941, for example, Lexington dive-bomber pilots mistook an abandoned dynamite barge for a Japanese carrier. They bombed it— but missed. The Lex task force commander meanwhile detached fleet oiler Neosho, sending the vessel and its volatile cargo out of “harm’s way.” Nearly five months later, in the lead up to the 1942 Battle of the Coral Sea, Japanese scouts mistook Neosho itself for a carrier—and nearby destroyer Sims for a cruiser. Carrier commander Chu¯ichi Hara trusted this aerial sighting because it conformed to his expectations. Hara dispatched 80 strike planes due south to destroy the would-be enemy. His real opponent—Frank Jack Fletcher’s Task Force 17—was over 300 miles northwest. Hara’s misstep gave Fletcher the initial advantage in what, though a tactical draw, became an important strategic U.S. Navy victory. Most accounts of the Battle of the Coral Sea treat the attack on Neosho as a footnote—a fateful lapse that Hara ascribed to Japan’s “victory fever.” Author Don Keith takes a different angle, sticking with Neosho, Sims, and their crews as they battle the Japanese and then the cruel sea and blistering sun. The story is replete with heroic endurance and selflessness—but also human failings and miscues. Keith doesn’t airbrush the inglorious. Instead, he balances
all elements to construct a satisfying narrative with deep human interest and cliffhanger appeal. One caveat. Keith styles himself a storyteller; in the author’s note he admits to putting “words in the mouths and thoughts in the heads of people who may or may not have spoken those precise words or held those exact thoughts.” He reasons that historical
The USS Neosho (center) avoided damage at Pearl Harbor, but wasn’t as lucky in the Coral Sea.
sources are themselves subject to inaccuracy; even first-person accounts decay with time. He’s right, but documented sources also anchor historical storytelling and need not kill pace. When Keith creates multipage dialogues (as he does when Neosho’s skipper delivers final abandon-ship instructions) they sound contrived—and risk further muddying history. Other narrative devices would have served better. That said, Keith keeps his facts straight, doing justice to Neosho, Sims, and the men who fought courageously in a crucial but unappreciated role at the Battle of the Coral Sea. The Ship That Wouldn’t Die makes a good read—though a grueling one. —David Sears is the author of this issue’s lead story, “White-knuckle Countdown to Peace.”
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER
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Battle Films
Enduring the Unendurable By Mark Grimsley
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TOHO COMPANY/THE KOBAL COLLECTION
O
N AUGUST 15, 1945, milsumoto) rises to respond, Okalions across Japan stared at moto superimposes a clock, then radios, listening in amazement to the film’s title. The documentary their emperor’s voice, reproduced structure falls away and Japan’s on a 78-rpm phono disc. Hirohito Longest Day plays out as a drama was reading an edict declaring that intercutting the cabinet and his military forces would surrenemperor as they make their final der unconditionally. Many listendeliberations, the push to record ers missed his meaning—most and air the capitulation edict, and commoners had never heard an hardcore militarists plotting to emperor speak and Hirohito, who keep the emperor’s speech from was using classical Japanese diffireaching the Japanese people. cult for most of his countrymen to “It is impossible to continue to follow, never actually said “defeat” prosecute this war,” Hirohito tells or “surrender.” Afterward, an the cabinet, voice halting as he announcer drove home the godtries to control his emotions. “No king’s stunning point. For the first matter what happens to me . . . my time in Japan’s 2,600-year history, people . . . save my people. I can the nation had met defeat. no longer endure letting them In 1967, Toho Company, Ltd.— suffer any longer.” Kihachi photofamous in America for its Godzilla graphs this scene carefully, hiding franchise—released Japan’s LonHirohito’s face. Besides showing gest Day, an account of the 24 deference to the emperor, this hours before Hirohito’s broadcast. framing focuses our attention on 'LUHFWHG E\ 3DFL¿F :DU YHWHUDQ Anami’s reaction to his sacred Little known in the U.S., this 1967 film hews closely .LKDFKL2NDPRWRZKRVH ¿OPV leader’s declaration. When the rest to the factual history of the 24 hours it chronicles. LQFOXGHPDQ\ZLWK:RUOG:DU,, of the cabinet is bursting into tears, Minister Baron Kantarō Suzuki (Chishū themes, Japan’s Longest Day—in the the dry-eyed Anami, who knows of the Ryū). The diehards’ strongest voice is the style of The Longest Day, its 1962 Hollywould-be coup, wears an expression of empire’s war minister, General Korewood namesake—featured an all-star austere resignation. His heart is with the HQVHPEOH OHG PHPRUDEO\ E\ 7RVKLUǀ chika Anami (Mifune). Reluctant at best hardcore militarists, but to join the resis0LIXQH-DSDQ¶V-RKQ:D\QH7KH¿OP to accept surrender, Anami argues that tance would be to defy his emperor, and the Potsdam Declaration does not offer closely based on fact, became Japan’s he is too traditional a man to do so. adequate assurance that the Allies will VHFRQGKLJKHVWJURVVLQJ¿OPRI For the rest of the film, characters race 7KHWLWOHUHIHUVWRWKHJULSSLQJHYHQWV permit the emperor to keep the throne. one another and time. The cabinet wranThe cabinet, he insists, must force the between noon August 14, when Hirohito gles over the edict’s wording. Staff-level Allies to be clear on this point. “Because if importuned his cabinet to end the war, officers deduce what is underway and that is not the case,” the general tells the and the following day’s *\RNXRQKǀVǀ, plot a coup d’état. Commanders at key air cabinet, fist on the hilt of his long sword, or “Jewel Voice Broadcast.” bases Atsugi and Kodama vow to fight on “we must fight to the last man.” In a 21-minute documentary-style by sending kamikazes against an AmeriUnable to decide even with Hiroshima opener, Okamoto portrays the cabinet can fleet off the coast. Anami, after sternly and Nagasaki in radioactive cinders and struggling to answer Potsdam Declarainstructing his staff to obey the emperor, the Soviets invading Manchuria, the cabtion demands for unconditional surrengoes into foreboding seclusion. inet finally meets with the emperor to der, with the only alternative “prompt Okamoto’s juxtapositions can be starseek resolution. Suzuki, then Anami, and utter destruction.” The cabinet splits. tling. Civilians, including many schoolpleads his case. As Hirohito (Hakuō MatA pro-peace faction centers on Prime children, throng an airfield to sing an
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$9999 $
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anthem of support for pilots preparing to fly to their deaths. The song continues as the perspective cuts to officials placing the finished edict before the emperor, who signs it. The recording session takes place; the emperor’s men hide the disk at the Imperial Household Agency. The plotters invoke the impending kamikaze attacks as they plead with General Takeshi Mori (Shōgo Shimada), commander of the 1st Imperial Guard Division, to join their coup. Rebuffed, the conspirators murder Mori, forge orders in his name, and transmit them to the empire’s remaining forces. Imperial Guard detachments surround the palace and ransack the royal household looking for Hirohito’s surrender recording. The coup begins to fall apart. The guardsmen cannot find the record. The forged orders’ origins come to light. General Shizuichi Tanaka (Kenjiro Ishiyama),
‘Live on, and work earnestly,’ Anami tells his companions. ‘In no other way can the nation be rebuilt.’
commander of the Eastern District Army, arrives at the palace to stop the plot for good. In counterpoint, Anami, alone but for two young subordinates, resolutely prepares to commit seppuku—self-disembowelment. He tells his companions, who are there to witness his suicide, that they must help to rebuild Japan. “Each and every Japanese must stand by their station, live on, and work earnestly,” Anami urges the pair. “In no other way can the nation be rebuilt.” Anami kills himself. Separately, so do the plotters, whose bodies are on screen as we hear the announcer’s voice introducing the emperor’s recording. Japan’s Longest Day ends not with an outright rejection of militarism—70 years on, Japan has yet to come to terms with what its aggression wrought—but with the suggestion that for a new Japan to rise, the old Japan had to die. 2
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Challenge
ANSWERS
Hollywood Howlers
to the May/June Challenge
ANSWERS: FROM TOP, TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX CORPORATION; NATIONAL ARCHIVES; HISTORYNET ARCHIVE; HOWLERS, PARAMOUNT PICTURES; WHAT THE, HISTORYNET ARCHIVE; PATCH, GUY ACETO COLLECTION
What the…?!? Mine-clearing wheels mounted on a 712th Tank Battalion tank
Maps in the 2001 Stalingrad epic Enemy at the Gates portrayed a Germany-dominated Europe to a wildly inaccurate degree. One
goof in particular rises mountainously higher than others. In what way did these movie mapmakers really mess up?
Hollywood Howlers The guns were 20mms but the flak was 88mm
Name That Patch The 69th Infantry Division—the patch forms a six and a nine Congratulations to the winners: Robert Derrit, Garrett DeMeyer, and Thom Whitledge
Please send your answers to all three questions, and your mailing address, to: September/October Challenge, World War II 19300 Promenade Drive, Leesburg, VA 20176 or e-mail:
[email protected] Three winners, chosen at random from all correct entries submitted by October 15, will receive the book The Ship That Wouldn’t Die by Don Keith. Answers will appear in the January/February 2016 issue.
What the...?!? Name this apparatus.
Name That Patch Which unit wore this insignia? SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
79
WORLD
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Pinup
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Gorgeous Dolores Moran had the looks
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