SNIPER THE MAKING OF A LEGENDARY
At Stalingrad, Germans cowered as his tally grew
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015 HISTORYNET.COM
Germans in Olive Drab: Deception at the Bulge
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30 Russian Sniper
46 Drawn into War
60 Call Me Kate
Amid Stalingrad’s ruins, Vasily Zaytsev made every slug count
Unable to fight, cartoonist Milton Caniff sent his creations into battle
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Though outdated, the Nakajima BN5 was Japan’s mainstay torpedo bomber JIM LAURIER
40 Scholars in Olive Drab
52 Friend or Foe?
High IQ scores got 200,000 GIs out of combat and into college—for a while DANIEL B. MOSKOWITZ
At the Battle of the Bulge, Germans in disguise rattled Allied nerves ANTONY BEEVOR
62 Imaginary Invasion A hunger for good news early in the war led to the creation of some in the jittery Philippines JOSEPH CONNOR
The slogan on a formidable Soviet KV-1 heavy tank in the wrecked streets of Stalingrad declares determination to fight “for the Motherland.” ON THE COVER: A German infantryman in Stalingrad crouches in wait. NATIONAL ARCHIVES COVER, AKG-IMAGES.PICTURE-ALLIANCE/DPA
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DEPARTMENTS 12 World War II Today
25 Fire for Effect
74 Battle Films
VA lets down mustard gas test survivors; Mitsubishi apologizes; James Wheeler’s Reading List
Generally speaking, this guy was the worst ROBERT M. CITINO
Patton: Making music out of a military man’s life MARK GRIMSLEY
26 Time Travel
IN EVERY ISSUE
20 Conversation
At sea, in Idaho
During World War II, future U.S. senator Bob Dole was a GI Everyman MICHAEL DOLAN
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8 Mail 79 Challenge 80 Pinup
23 From the Footlocker Curators at The National World War II Museum solve readers’ artifact mysteries
69 Reviews Rare bravery in Berlin; Rescue at Los Baños; Tiger Leader board game; gripping young adult read
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B R O WN
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Antony Beevor (“Friend or Foe?”) is the British author of Crete: The Battle and the Resistance; The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939; The Second World War; and Ardennes 1944, from which this article is excerpted. His books have been translated into 30 languages and have sold more than six and a half million copies. He is a visiting professor at the University of Kent. In 2014 he received the Pritzker Military Museum and Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. Jessica Wambach Brown (“Time Travel”), a former newspaper reporter and graduate of the University of Montana School of Journalism, earned her master’s degree in diplomacy and military studies from Hawaii Pacific University while working for a U.S. Pacific Command organization. Raised in central Montana and now residing with her husband in Bellevue, Washington, she embraced the opportunity to retrace Farragut Naval Training Station veterans’ journeys through the woods and waterways of the Pacific Northwest. Joseph Connor (“Imaginary Invasion”) graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson University with a degree in history and from
CO N N O R
M O S KO WITZ
Rutgers Law School. After a seven-year stint as a newspaper reporter and editor, Connor worked for 27 years as an assistant county prosecutor in Morris County, New Jersey. Since retiring, he has spent his time reading the books he always meant to, restoring antique shortwave radios, and learning to play the five-string banjo. Jochen Hellbeck (“Russian Sniper”) is a
professor of history at Rutgers University and a specialist in 20th-century Russia. His most recent book is Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich. Hellbeck runs a website, facingstalingrad.com, that features portraits and interviews taken with German and Russian veterans of the battle of Stalingrad. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Daniel B. Moskowitz (“Singled Out… For a While”) is an award-winning veteran journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, BusinessWeek, and many other publications. He teaches courses on Broadway musicals and American popular songs in the adult education program of American University. He is the author of “Let’s Put on a Show!” in the July/ August 2015 issue of World War II.
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knowledge, of Werwolfs but we were told never to use the latrine trenches alone at night because of suspected German infiltrators. After having roused one’s buddy for the third or fourth time for a trip to the latrine, one was usually told—“Sorry, pal. You’re on your own!” (Actual responses were far more colorful.) Tom Sitter McFarland, Wisc.
Doolittle Raider Robert Hite: would he have bailed out with his cap?
In “World War II Today” in the July/ August 2015 issue you show a photo of Robert Hite, a copilot of one of Doolittle’s planes, as a POW of the Japanese. Your caption states he was captured after bailing out of his bomber. Question: Can one bail out and retain his air force crusher cap while bailing? Don’t think so. Herb Mosher Orchard Park, N.Y.
lar to those depicted in the interesting July/August 2015 article “Werwolfs of Deutschland.” Alongside these “menacing” figures were the words: “Psst! Feind Hört Mit!” Translated to “The Enemy Is Listening!” That suggested to us that these cautions were directed to the German civilian population to beware of enemy agents rather than warnings to Allied troops. We were never cautioned, to my
James M. Scott, World War II contributor and author of Target Tokyo, responds: Bobby Hite said in various oral history interviews that he bailed out while wearing his flight jacket. Many of the Raiders stuffed their pockets and jackets with candy bars, cigarettes, pistols, and other supplies. It is possible Hite stuffed his cap inside his jacket before bailing out—or that the Japanese gave him one to wear after he was captured so as to enhance the photo for propaganda value.
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There is an interesting side note to your review of the 1942 film Mrs. Miniver involving American actor Richard Ney and British star Greer Garson (“War is Rude,” July/August 2015). Ney played the son of Garson’s character in the film. In 1943, the two actors married; they divorced in 1947. Garson was Ney’s senior by 12 years. Canada was represented in the cast as well. Costar Walter Pidgeon, Greer’s onscreen husband, was Canadian. Robert E. Beedle Midland, Mich.
Bombs Away
Moonlight Fright In March of 1945 when our troops crossed the Rhine and invaded the towns of Germany, we encountered silhouettes of skulking men very simi-
Family Affair
Shadowy figures loomed over posters warning Germans to avoid the “enemy.”
I think that dropping the atomic bomb on Japan was one of the top 10 decisions of the war (“What Was the War’s Best Decision?” July/August 2015). The action saved many American lives and prevented the Pacific War from becoming a terrible months-long meat grinder. My late father was a sailor on the USS Indiana, BB-58. He was at Okinawa and shelled the home islands. Had we not ended the war when we did, I may not be sitting here writing this. Dave Howard Falls Township, Pa.
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Giving Up—Finally
Although not much is visible, the rifle he carries is clearly a M1 Garand— to quote General Patton, “the greatest battle implement ever devised.”
M1 GARAND RIFLE
THIS ONE
BROWNING AUTOMATIC RIFLE (BAR)
NOT THIS ONE
Jerry Reynolds, Elko, Nev.
Back to Boot Camp Wow! We goofed. Thanks to our eagleeyed readers, we received a record number of corrections about a misidentified gun in our July/August 2015 article “Into the Inferno”—an editing error. Here are some highlights: You will probably get many notes about this. The Marine in the lead photo for the Okinawa article is carrying an M1 Garand rifle, not a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle).
CARL SARDARO, MILAN, N.Y.
A BAR is pictured on page six of the same issue. Notice that the nozzle on the BAR does not have a blade front sight on the end of it like the M1 Garand.
KENNETH R. SCHNECK, PHILADELPHIA, PA. I enjoyed your magazine and found it, with these minor exceptions, soundly based on careful research.
DALE MCINTYRE, BARTLESVILLE, OKLA. Let me know if you need a “proofreader”…no charge.
NORBERT G. ALLSTON, WILMINGTON, DEL. Your photo shows a Marine carrying an MI Garand, not a BAR. I have carried both in Korea.
SAMUEL THAMES, ALBANY, GA.
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Looks like an M1 to these old eyes. Great magazine.
JIM BOLLINGER, TULSA, OKLA.
Harold Agnew carries the plutonium core of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
sion. My father was at the Trinity Site and scheduled to fly as an observer on the third drop over Japan. If Germany had been a viable military threat in August 1945, Frankfurt would have been a frankfurter. I assure you, the Manhattan Project personnel fully intended to, and would have, used the bomb against Hitler. Bruce Krohn Los Lunas, N. Mex.
Corrections Admiral James G. Stavridis described the book The Thin Red Line (1962) by James Jones in his July/August 2015 Reading List, not From Here to Eternity. On page 57 of “What Was the War’s Best Decision?” we incorrectly indicated a direction. The Red Army marched west from Stalingrad to Berlin, not east.
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Harry Bollinger, 88, of Freeport, Pa., underwent mustard gas tests at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC. Below, subjects enter a gas chamber at Edgewood Arsenal in March 1945.
VA Fails Vets Poisoned in Wartime Tests
I
n 1991, Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Anthony Principi told 60 Minutes his agency would “do right” by World War II veterans exposed to mustard gas in secret American military experiments. The VA isn’t keeping that promise, National Public Radio reporters found. Of 4,000 men subjected to the most extreme wartime tests, VA officials working after Principi’s television appearance tried to contact only 610—and then with only a single mailing. The department claimed incomReported and written by
Paul Wiseman
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plete records thwarted its outreach, but NPR needed only two months to locate 1,200 survivors, some of whom told of being unable to convince the VA to give them benefits. Charlie Cavell, 88, who volunteered for the tests at 19 in exchange for two weeks’ leave, presented the VA handwritten records from the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, showing how long navy scientists locked him in a gas chamber and the amount of mustard gas he had been exposed to. Cavell also showed that he experienced illnesses the VA has linked to mustard gas, including skin cancer
and chronic lung problems. The department denied his claim—until NPR asked about his case. Mustard gas testing involved about 60,000 men from the army and navy.
Cavell says the services threatened the men with dishonorable discharge if they said anything. In 1990, veteran Nat Schnurman led a group of veterans who finally exposed the pro-
W W I I T ODA Y gram, prompting Principi’s 60 Minutes performance. Schnurman died in 2013. Scientists applied chemical agents directly on subjects’ skin, secured subjects inside locked gas chambers, or gassed them outdoors to
simulate battlefield conditions. The military, fearful Axis forces would use mustard gas, was testing gas masks and other protective gear to see how the poison, which can cause third degree burns, blindness, and
cancer, affected different body types. Military officials disproportionately used black, Puerto Rican, and Japanese-American test subjects to study the effects of the poison on certain racial and ethnic groups.
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-Britain’s Sun newspaper
As many as 189 personnel staffed Fan Bay Deep Shelter at Dover during the war.
Dover Opens a Time Tunnel
B
Carvings (above) emerged in a restoration that included volunteers like Gordon Wise (below).
ritain’s National Trust has restored a tunnel network dug into the White Cliffs of Dover to house a coastal gun battery. The compound of five bombproof chambers and a hospital ward, which could hold more than 120 men, was built from 1940 to 1941 after a furious British Prime Minister Winston Churchill learned German ships were sailing the English Channel unmolested. In 1950, workers closed off the tunnels with 100 tons of rubble and soil. Three years ago, after raising $1.9 million, the National Trust bought the land and began excavating the warren. Volunteers uncovered graffiti—including a crude reminder for artillerymen to use toilet paper. The complex reopened in July for guided tours; visitors must book in advance.
ballyhooed 1933-vintage footage of future Queen Elizabeth II at about age 6, giving a Nazi salute while playing with younger sister Margaret and their uncle, later King Edward VIII, a Hitler sympathizer. Buckingham Palace criticized the paper’s decision to run the image on page 1 headlined “Their Royal Heilnesses.”
-John Leslie “Les” Munro,
last of the Dambuster pilots, died August 4 in Auckland, New Zealand. He was 96. Of 133 Royal Air Force crewmen only 77 returned from the celebrated May 16–17, 1943, night raid in which Lancaster bombers sent customized bombs bouncing across the water to smash dams and flood Germany’s Ruhr Valley. After the war, Munro became mayor of a local district council in Waitomo, New Zealand.
Munro in the heavy bomber “W for Walter” he flew in the 1943 Dambusters raid.
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
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Mitsubishi Apologizes to Once-Enslaved POWs
J
ames Murphy, a U.S. Army radioman captured in the Philippines in early 1942, survived the Bataan Death March only to face 30 months of hell in a Mitsubishi Mining copper mine. “It was slavery in every way: no food, no medicine, no sanitation,” Murphy, 94, told the Associated Press. On July 19, Murphy accepted a face-to-face apology from Hikaru Kimura, a senior executive at Mitsubishi Materials, successor to the wartime entity. Making a deep ritual bow, Kimura said, “Today we apologize remorsefully for the tragic events in our past.” The event, at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, California, marked the first time a Japanese corporation has apologized for mistreating wartime prisoners. “This happens to be the
first time that we’ve heard those words,” Murphy said. “They really touch you at the heart.” Through the war at least 12,000 American POWs worked in appalling conditions at Japanese slave labor camps, suffering a shockingly high death rate. Mitsubishi Materials enslaved A Mitsubishi executive (left) bows in apology for the wartime abuse of POWs at sites like a mine in northern Japan (above).
900 Americans. Of the two who could be found, only Murphy was fit enough to travel to Los Angeles. Mitsubishi is not offering any cash compensation.
Mitsubishi’s apology was one of several on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of V-J Day. Emperor Akihito, son of wartime Emperor Hirohito, voiced “deep remorse” for the war; Akihito has made similar comments before but never in his annual official statement on August 15. Separately, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe expressed “utmost grief” for Japan’s wartime behavior. But he said Japanese should not have to keep seeking forgiveness. China and Korea, targets of Japanese aggression in the 1930s and 1940s, did not take Abe’s statement well. South Korean President Park Geun-hye told Agence France-Presse Abe’s speech “left much to be desired.”
Q: During the war many American companies converted to military production. Was this mandatory? Were prices negotiable? If a company balked, could the government force the switch? —Ron Wilson, Katy, Texas
A: American mobilization depended on cooperation. Britain and the United States favored voluntarism over mandate—but the U.S. War Production Board did lean
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hard on industries by controlling allocation of raw materials and barring manufacture of “nonessential” civilian goods, such as nylon stockings and refrigerators. The government funded factory expansions. Business executives became “dollar-ayear men” advising the Feds. President Franklin D. Roosevelt still encouraged unionism, in 1941 canceling a contract after Ford forbade organizing. FDR sapped
Alcoa’s aluminum monopoly by subsidizing rival Reynolds, but in general 1930s-style antitrust enforcement withered. “I’d rather have some sinful aluminum now than a lot of virtuous aluminum a year from now,” said Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson in 1941. —Jon Guttman
Q Send queries to: Ask World War II, 19300 Promenade Drive, Leesburg,
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VA 20176, or e-mail: worldwar2@ historynet.com.
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WORLD
Pentagon Vows to Identify Oklahoma Dead
A
lice Hopkins of Keene, New Hampshire, died in 1987 believing her son Edwin’s body would come home from Pearl Harbor. She had his name engraved on a stone in the family plot. That wait may be over. In July, the Pentagon POW/MIA Accounting Agency disinterred five sets of unidentified remains of sailors and Marines killed when the USS Oklahoma sank on December 7, 1941. The aim is to identify all 388 battleship crewmen still unaccounted for. “We’re not ‘mission complete’ until we return them home,” Lieutenant Colonel Melinda Morgan of the POW/MIA unit told the New York Times. The agency plans to open 61 caskets from 45 graves and analyze their contents using dental records and DNA. When Japanese bombs and torpedoes sank the Oklahoma, 429 men died. The navy buried hundreds as unknowns,
Edwin Hopkins, with his parents, left, was interred in a coffin like one unearthed in June (above). His ship, the USS Oklahoma, went down in the Pearl Harbor attack.
sometimes several sets of remains per casket, in cemeteries around Hawaii. Raising the ship in 1943, the navy identified and buried
more remains. In 1949 the National Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl, became the islands’ main military burial
DISPATCHES
-German police confiscated a World War II
Panzerkampfwagen V “Panther” medium tank from a basement of a villa in Heikendorf, a wealthy suburb of Kiel. It’s unclear whether the 78-year-old householder was breaking the law by owning the nonfunctioning armored fighting vehicle, which 20 soldiers spent nine hours extricating. Neighbors knew of the unidentified man’s relic. “He was chugging around in it during the snow catastrophe of 1978,” said local mayor Alexander Orth.
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ground. Personnel reburied there often were labeled “Unknown.” A mechanism tangled in red tape has identified few. The POW/ MIA Accounting Agency is counting on better technology to speed the process and match remains with missing men, like Fireman Third Class Edwin Hopkins, who quit high school in New Hampshire to join the U.S. Navy. Hopkins’s family is hoping to inter him properly in spring 2016. Edwin Hopkins’s status has been “like an open wound,” said second cousin Thomas Gray. He noted that upon raising the Oklahoma in 1943 the navy identified Hopkins, put his remains in a coffin, and buried him at Halawa Cemetery on Hawaii. In 1949, the military moved those interred at Halawa to the Punchbowl, in the process mislabeling Hopkins’s remains as unknown. The family is confident Hopkins is in the same coffin, which has been exhumed and opened. Government labs are analyzing its contents, encouraging the family to expect they’ll have him back home soon, Gray said.
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W W I I T OD AY THE READING LIST
Colonel James Scott Wheeler historian and biographer who taught
Patton’s Peers John A. English (2009)
at West Point, Wheeler finds the study
of American generalship in World War II
“A long-needed account of six commanders who, in addition to Patton, led the seven Allied armies in Europe from 1944 to 1945. Patton has long overshadowed Canadian Harry Crerar, Briton Miles Dempsey, the Americans Bill Simpson, Courtney Hodges, and Alexander Patch, and French First Army commander Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. Besides examining historians’ failure to appreciate these men, English portrays their relationships with Eisenhower, Montgomery, Bradley, and Devers.”
“incredibly useful” to future military leaders.
Eisenhower’s Lieutenants Russell F. Weigley (1981)
“Weigley’s account of Eisenhower’s interactions with his senior commanders is a classic study of the team that orchestrated Allied operations against Germany. This very practical assessment was among the first to treat Eisenhower as less than perfect. No book better covers this level of senior leadership during the war.”
Marshall and His Generals
Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life
Stephen R. Taaffe (2011)
Carlo D’Este (2002)
“The best-written, most even-handed account of Ike’s life focuses on his Second World War and his interactions during it with American and Allied leaders. With page-turning style and new insights into Eisenhower and subordinates, D’Este makes clear that Ike was a solid coalition commander but often less than competent at strategy and tactics.” Decision at Strasbourg David P. Colley (2008)
“Colley’s provocative analysis of Eisenhower’s November 1944 decision
to forbid General Jacob Devers’s 6th Army Group from crossing the Rhine illuminates Eisenhower’s personality and leadership style. Colley shows how lack of strategic imagination kept Ike from seizing an opportunity that might have shortened the war, or at least forestalled the Battle of the Bulge. The French and American armies in 6th Army Group were first to the Rhine—by four months—and, Colley concludes, could have changed the course of the war for the better by pressing on.”
WORD FOR WORD
“Casualties: many. Percentage of dead: not known. Combat efficiency: we are winning.” —Colonel David M. Shoup, U.S. Marine Corps, battle report from Tarawa, November 21, 1943 18
WORLD WAR II
“A superb, deeply researched study of senior leaders in all theaters. Taaffe assesses men like Eichelberger, Krueger, Patch, Simpson, and Hodges, all of whom we seldom read or hear about. He clarifies Marshall’s role as mentor to subordinates and architect of victory, and fascinatingly evokes MacArthur, Bradley, and Devers.” Once an Eagle Anton Myrer (1968)
“One of the best novels about the ethics of leadership, Eagle follows Sam Damon from the First World War through his command of a division in the Pacific to his death in Vietnam. The main relationship in the book is between Sam, a selfless professional soldier, and Damon’s antithesis, Courtney Massengale. In my days teaching at the U.S. Military Academy, I regularly gave copies to my most promising cadets.”
Colonel (Ret.) James Scott Wheeler served in U.S. Army armored and aviation units in Germany, Vietnam, and the United States before becoming Professor of European History at the U.S. Military Academy (1987 to 1999). His five books to include The Big Red One (2007) and the forthcoming Jacob L. Devers, A Sol-
Shoup (center) on Tarawa on November 22,1943.
dier’s Life (University Press of Kentucky, 2015).
ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE CAPLANIS; BOTTOM, NATIONAL ARCHIVES
A
The 70th Anniversary of WWII Conference Series Presented by Tawani Foundation in association with Pritzker Military Museum & Library
NOVEMBER 17–19, 2016 The National WWII Museum
Espionage and the Cold War I War Crimes Trials I A New America I Coming Home I The End of Empires The Iron Curtain I Displaced Persons I China Goes Red
presented by:
ww2conference.com
877-813-3329 x 511
[email protected]
Conversation with Bob Dole
The Gentleman from Kansas By Michael Dolan
R
How did lettering in three sports at Kansas University serve you in the army?
OBERT J. DOLE rose to fame during a decadeslong career in state and
Playing sports made me more competitive, which I think helped me not only in the army but all the way through life. When you’re in a race, you want to win, so you give it all the energy you have. As I think back on it, athletics was a big plus for me.
national politics that included 35 years in Congress, campaigns for the vice presidency and presidency, and roles as an advocate for veterans and Americans with disabilities— and as a pitchman for the drug Viagra. However, during World War II the amiable Kansan was a GI Everyman.
What surprised you most at first about military life?
As Depression-era children, he and his siblings had many
Digging holes. If someone caught you smoking, you had to dig a big hole to bury the cigarette butt.
jobs; a teenaged Bob was a soda jerk at Dawson’s Pharmacy in his hometown of Russell, Kansas. While a student athlete at the University of Kansas
What memories do you have of the action that took you out of the war?
Enlisted Reserve Corps—later renamed the Army Reserve. Inducted in 1943, he briefly participated in the Army Specialized Training Program before being reassigned to the infantry. There he qualified to train as an officer and was commissioned a second lieutenant. On April 14, 1945, Dole’s unit of the 10th Mountain Division was in northern Italy, advancing under fire on a German position, when enemy machine-gun rounds ripped into his back, severely wounding him. More than once during an excruciating 39-month recuperation, recounted in his 2005 memoir, One Soldier’s Story, Dole’s survival was
a working man who dealt with farmers all his life. My mother, Bina, sold sewing machines and taught sewing. There were four of us siblings and we were expected to study in school and work on Saturdays, either delivering handbills or newspapers or mowing lawns. We grew up knowing a little about responsibility.
in doubt. However, he recovered, adjusted, and became a lawyer. At 92 he is of counsel
Which job did you like most?
to the law firm Alston & Bird in Washing-
I loved being a soda jerk. I gained eight pounds my first month working at Dawson’s. My favorite treat is a chocolate shake. I like ’em real thick, where you have to eat ’em with a spoon, so I put in a lot of ice cream and chocolate syrup but not too much milk.
ton, DC, where this interview took place.
How did your upbringing affect your time in the military and after?
Both my parents were hard workers, which they passed on to us. My dad was 20
WORLD WAR II
We were on a hill called 913. There were Germans in our way. My radioman, Corporal Sims, had been wounded— mortally, it turned out. I was trying to get Sims back to safety when I felt a sting on the right part of my back. After that I was pretty much out of it. The bullet bruised my spinal cord, which caused me trouble with my hand and leg. That happened three weeks before the war in Europe ended. How did you cope with that?
At that age—I was 21—I thought I’d be healed up and be all right. You don’t think of what’s really gonna happen. I figured the surgeons would patch me up and I’d be okay, but when you’re in a hospital in Pistoia, Italy, you get to thinking a little more that your condition may last a while. That’s true particularly when other people have to write
JENNIFER BERRY
from 1941 to 1944, he joined the
letters home for you—they were happy to do it, of course, but not being able even to write is pretty tough. Even with that, I never was, quote, “depressed.” I wasn’t happy but I was feeling fairly normal, although I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t walk. I thought, I’m a young guy, I’m gonna be okay.
“I was embarrassed about not being able to use my right arm and about not walking too well. I felt kind of useless.”
Tell us about Percy Jones Army Hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan.
I was part of what we later called the Percy Jones Alumni Caucus. Our ward’s ranking officer was Colonel Philip Hart, who later became Senator Phil Hart, after whom the Hart Senate Office Building is named. Phil was recovering from an arm wound that was serious, but not as serious as some. He was able to run errands for all of us, and he really took care of guys like a former football player from Michigan State who, like me, was in a neck harness. Another guy in our ward was Dan Inouye. He was the best bridge player in the whole hospital and later represented Hawaii in the Senate. He had been wounded in Italy, too—he lost his right arm. I was skinny; I had gone into the army at 190, but I had lost 70 pounds. These days I’m trying to lose five, which is a lot harder than it was to lose 70 back then. But Dan only weighed 93 pounds. That was the core of our little alumni caucus.
COURTESY OF THE ROBERT J. DOLE INSTITUTE OF POLITICS
What pulled you through?
When I was growing up my dad was always wisecracking, and I learned from him to have a good sense of humor. The nurses would wheel me around to visit patients who weren’t ambulatory; I remember Joe Brennan from Chicago, who had bedsores that would make you cry. I visited him a lot. Joe and I spent a great deal of time together, and he was always cheerful and positive. There were a few noteworthy disincentives to speedy recovery.
We had great nurses, like Kathy Stobbins, who was tougher than nails; if we didn’t do what she said, we were in trou-
Dole shipped out in late 1944, and was seriously wounded four months later.
ble. At the beginning I wasn’t able to feed myself, so at every meal one of the nurses would feed me. I probably could have taken care of doing that sooner but our nurses were so good-looking I saw no reason to hurry. Finally, though, I realized that if I wanted to get better I would have to start eating on my own, so I did the right thing. What was the most difficult part about returning to Russell?
Initially I didn’t know whether I was going to have a career at all or wind up selling pencils on a street corner somewhere. I was deeply embarrassed about not being able to use my right arm, because I had no feeling in it, and about not being able to walk too well. I felt kind of useless. Fortunately, I had this
drive and sense of purpose that I had acquired from my parents and which I never forgot. You gotta turn the page or you just vegetate. When did things brighten up?
I had a really great experience in law school. As a Kansas University undergraduate before going into the army, I did not have what you would have called an illustrious academic career. The war was on, and everybody was going off to join the service, so we had to have a lot of parties and—jiminy—I sure missed a lot of lectures, although I didn’t miss many parties. I attended the university, but not many classes. Didn’t flunk out, but I had some Ds. At law school, however, I was more focused. I had great professors and the Veterans Administration had furnished me with a disk machine I could use to record their lectures. Each night I would listen to the disks I had recorded that day and I would laboriously write down everything that was on them. As a result, I had the best notes of anybody in my class, and around test time I became a very popular guy with people who had been goofing off in class when it came to note-taking. I came through law school with all As except for a B in municipal law. I didn’t know anything about municipal law then, and I don’t know anything about municipal law now, but I vividly remember using that recorder. You have a satisfying way of spending part of your weekends.
For a number of years now I’ve been going over to the National World War II Memorial every Saturday. I go there to meet the veterans—guys from my generation, but also from Korea and Vietnam. These fellows usually come to the World War II memorial first, and then make their way down the Mall to the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. This Saturday there’s an Honor Flight group coming in from Orlando, Florida. I’m looking forward to seeing those fellows. 2 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
21
From the Footlocker
Curators at The National World War II Museum solve readers’ artifact mysteries
1
My grandfather gave me this paper rectangle. It is signed “Cpl. J. L. McConahy,
the lightweight sheet, which measures
April 4, 1945, Duisburg, Germany.” I believe McConahy was a friend of my
roughly 6 by 8 1/4 inches. Thank you for
grandfather, William Warwick, who worked on the railroad in western Penn-
the research. —Ronald Chamberlain,
sylvania and retired in the late 1940s. The image appears on both sides of
Costa Mesa, California
residents in 1938 (right) 1 Vienna welcome German soldiers by waving flags much like the paper wartime souvenir above.
PHOTOS: TOP, ©CORBIS; BOTTOM, NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Army 2 AAirU.S. Forces photographer in 1945 (left) kneels on a street in Rangoon, Burma, littered with Japanese invasion money. The specimen above is from the Philippines.
This miniature flag resembles those onlookers waved during parades and processions. Paper construction made it cheap and easy to mass-produce. Allied troops scooped up many souvenirs as they pushed into the heart of Germany in spring 1945; this one apparently hails from a strategically important city. A major steel production center, Duisburg, at the confluence of the Ruhr and the Rhine Rivers, was the target of roughly 300 bombing raids—most notably during the Battle of the Ruhr in 1943. In March 1945, Hitler designated a Duisburg bridgehead as a “line of no retreat” to keep open his supply route to the North Sea. By the first week in April, the Allies had encircled the area, creating the “Ruhr Pocket.” The 17th Airborne Division, acting as infantry, captured Duisburg on April 12, 1945; men of many other units, notably the 79th Infantry Division, played large roles in clearing resistance. Your grandfather’s friend may have been among them. —Kimberly Guise, Curator/Content Specialist
2
My late father was a quartermaster on the escort carrier USS Hoggatt Bay. I know he spent time in Japan after the
surrender. I found this bill in his collection; I would appreciate any information you could give me. —Daniel Arensmeyer, Havre, Montana
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
23
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pieces of regalia were common in Nazi 3 These Germany. The armband was worn by civil servants, and the lapel pin issued to members of the Nazi Party—in 1945, some 8.5 million people.
This is Japanese invasion money: scrip printed to replace national currencies in countries Japan conquered or intended to conquer and incorporate into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—the de facto empire the Japanese expected victory to bring them. This bill hails from the Philippines. Japanese puppet governments had monopolies on issuing such banknotes and ruthlessly cracked down on trade in other currencies. The invasion money, whose value the Japanese set, was nearly worthless; Filipinos called it “Mickey Mouse Money.” Holders needed bags of bills to buy groceries. After the war the scrip’s only value was as souvenirs. Invasion currency quality degraded throughout the war, with the last bills printed using inks of extremely poor quality. Knowing the derision in which local populaces held the currency, American forces frequently used it to create propaganda, overprinting the bills with the message “The Co-Prosperity Sphere: Was it Worth It?” —Brandon Stephens, Curator
3
My uncle, Bernard Dale Fischer, who was assigned to the Eighth Air Force in England, gave me this armband when I was a small
kid; I found the lapel pin in 1985, while
24
WORLD WAR II
walking along the Isar River in Munich. Who would have worn these items? —Charles Berry, Honolulu, Hawaii
The armband was worn by German officials acting “in service to the state,” whose ranks included civil servants at agencies that did not issue specialized uniforms or armbands. Armbands were extremely popular in Nazi Germany; they allowed the enforcement and semblance of conformity without the cost of uniforms. Bureaucrats like tax assessors, as well as teachers and professors, would have worn armbands like this. Your lapel pin ranks among the most common of Nazi-era relics. All party members, civilian or military, were entitled to wear this badge pin. In 1945 approximately 10 percent of the German population—some 8.5 million people—belonged to the Nazi Party. —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.
Fire for Effect
Generally Bad By Robert M. Citino
ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN TOMAC
W
HO WAS THE war’s worst general? The question isn’t easy to answer. We need to define our terms. Are we discussing operational bungling? Lack of initiative? Faulty timing? Different criteria yield different names. So let us apply a minimal standard: humane behavior toward one’s own men. In that case, the winner of this race to the bottom, hands down, is German Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner. Schörner came to the fore late in the conflict. As Germany’s situation was deteriorating, Hitler assigned him a series of increasingly hopeless commands: Army Group A and Army Group South Ukraine in the spring of 1944; Army Group North (later renamed Army Group Courland) that summer; in January 1945 Army Group Center, which Schörner led to the end. He never won a battle, but that wasn’t all his fault. Schörner was competent enough technically, but nothing short of nuclear weapons could have evened up the fight against Soviet forces vastly superior in numbers and equipment. However, this field marshal’s art of war consisted solely of loyalty to Adolf Hitler—who, true to form, eventually decreed Schörner his favorite general. The Munich native was a diehard true believer, even as things were falling apart. Of all the Führer’s fanatical minions, Schörner was the most enthusiastic, a National Socialist to the bone. Worse, his bedrock command gesture was to shoot large numbers of his own men for “cowardice” to terrify survivors into obeying him. The phrase “der Ferdi kommt” (“Here comes Ferdi”) almost always meant trouble for the
rank and file. “You handle the operations,” he scolded his chief of staff. “I’ll keep order.” He did so through fear, flitting in his little Fieseler Storch aircraft around his army groups’ rear areas. He would land suddenly in a divisional or corps area of responsibility and hand out death sentences galore on the flimsiest of evidence, all the while staring down at his immaculately manicured fingernails. In the weeks after the July 20, 1944, attempt on Hitler’s life, Schörner opened staff meetings by asking, “How many men did you hang today?” More than once, he shot dogs for barking too loudly. Like all tyrants, Schörner enveloped himself in a posse of thugs who did most of his dirty work. His security troops once came upon a tank workshop at which a crew was waiting for mechanics to repair its reconnaissance vehicle; Schörner’s men shot the vehicle commander for “malingering.” At Lednice, Czechoslovakia, on May 7, 1945, Schörner was reportedly present when his goons shot 22 German soldiers for “standing around
without orders.” Note the date: Hitler had been dead a week and the war was all but over, but Schörner was still murdering his men. He rationalized these crimes on grounds that he had to maintain discipline to ensure that his army group could flee into American custody rather than have the Soviets overrun it. His strategy was an “organized flight to the West,” a maneuver that had to proceed systematically. Two days before the murders at Lednice, Schörner issued his last order of the day to Army Group Center. “In these hard days, we must not lose our nerves or become cowardly,” he declared. “Any attempt to find your own way back to the homeland is a dishonorable betrayal of your comrades and of our people, and will be punished.” Blood-stirring words. Too bad that on May 9, Schörner abandoned his post. He boarded his Storch and flew off, leaving Army Group Center to the Soviets after all. The marshal who harangued his men to hang tough for the Führer—and hung them if they didn’t—turned tail and ran. Schörner reached the American lines in Austria, where GIs did something that still makes me proud of this country. They handed the field marshal over to the Soviets, who tried him and imprisoned him for 10 years alongside the very soldiers he had left in the lurch. Freed in late 1954, Schörner returned to West Germany to a chorus of angry outbursts from many of his former soldiers and their families. The West Germans tried Schörner, too, and he spent four more years in prison. All in all, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. 2 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
25
Time Travel
At Sea in the Deep Woods Story and photos by Jessica Wambach Brown
The base of an antiaircraft gun mount south of Idaho’s Lake Pend Oreille recalls U.S. Navy training days past.
T
O THE CASUAL EYE, Bayview, Idaho, betrays no hint that the quiet hamlet with fewer than 500 residents once had as a neighbor Farragut Naval Training Station, the secondlargest such facility in the United States. Modest homes and a handful of businesses dot the hills rising from the town’s distinguishing feature—a small marina packed with the vessels of fishermen and recreational sailors attracted by the tree-ringed 148-square-mile body of water that drew the navy more than seven decades ago: Lake Pend Oreille (pronounced “pond aw ray”). Birds tweet reveille as the sun peeks over the Green Monarch Mountains looming beyond Pend Oreille’s east shore. Ponderosa pines again cover an area Farragut veteran Tom Depew—a Kansas City native who arrived as a recruit in February 1943 and stayed through November attending radio
26
WORLD WAR II
school—recalls clearing to build officers’ quarters. The area is a fitting location for beautiful Whitetail Campground, where I pitched my tent in mid-May after spending a day with Farragut State Park ranger Dennis Woolford, who has coauthored a pictorial history of the training station and regularly leads tours that focus on the park’s military interlude. Farragut Naval Training Station arrived with remarkable speed. The attack on Pearl Harbor and fears of strikes against the mainland coast led the navy in 1942 to expand Naval Station Great Lakes in Illinois and to seek two new inland locations for training recruits. One would be in central New York, the other in the West. Local lore credits Eleanor Roosevelt with touting the southern tip of Lake Pend Oreille for navy duty after spotting it while flying to Seattle, but in fact three navy officers chose the site on a March 20,
1942, reconnaissance flight. More than 400 miles from the Pacific but only 50 from Spokane, Washington, this portion of the wild and densely forested Idaho Panhandle boasts the country’s fifth deepest body of fresh water. Plunging to 1,150 feet in spots, glacier-carved Lake Pend Oreille (French for “ear”) got its name from its shape, set among rocky cliffs. In 1942, few roads reached the 111-mile shoreline. Within a month, the training station—named for David Glasgow Farragut, Civil War hero and America’s first admiral—was going up. Maps from the visitor center encourage the history-minded guest to hunt for the site’s past on the recovering landscape. A flat, open area, once the main drill field, is now a runway for radio-controlled model aircraft. Hiking trails meander 45 miles among storehouse foundations, ties from spur lines shut down after the base was decom-
CENTER LEFT AND BOTTOM, IDAHO DEPARTMENT OF PARKS AND RECREATION
Time Travel
missioned, and other remnants. Metal rings outlining horseshoe pits and volleyball courts are vestiges of the station’s sewage treatment plant. The 180-acre hospital campus is now a series of worldclass Frisbee golf courses. “It’s like the silhouette is still there,” Woolford said as we traced trainees’ leather-shod steps through the park. “If you know where to look, there are remnants.” From its September 1942 commissioning through March 1945, 293,000 seaman recruits from 24 mostly western and midwestern states passed through Farragut before receiving advanced training or heading to some front. The navy still uses the lake for acoustic submarine research, but decades ago the training station grounds became a 4,000-acre state park that interlaces year-round recreation opportunities with traces of World War II. The navy meant the station to be temporary; nearly all its 776 structures were built of wood. Minnesota-based contractor Walter Butler Company brought in portable sawmills to lumber pines felled to make way for the facility. Northern Idaho could provide few of the 22,000 men needed to complete the project as quickly as required, so Butler lured workers nationwide with promises of high wages and fantastic Kokanee salmon fishing, which still attracts anglers. Northern Pacific and Spokane International Railways trains brought supplies and coal to Athol, Idaho, some four miles west. Spur lines brought the stuff to Farragut. At peak, in 1943, Farragut had six self-contained camps, each able to train 5,000 recruits—“boots”—at a time. A seventh camp housed schools teaching specialties ranging from signaling to baking. The first 61 recruits arrived on September 17, 1942, shortly after the first camp was in place. By year’s end, five camps were running and 8,000 seamen had graduated. Two weeks into 1943, a 1,477-bed hospital—the largest in the Pacific Northwest—opened at the northeast end of the station to care for
Only cement structures like this pump house remain from the once-busy facility.
From top left: Farragut Naval Training Station celebrated itself in picture postcards; today 45 miles of hiking trails offer stunning views of the great lake; in the station’s heyday, companies of “boots” lined up outside mess halls to march in for chow.
SEE MORE ARCHIVAL IMAGES IN OUR IPAD EDITION
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
27
Time Travel
patients. “We often joke today how we couldn’t get plans together, let alone an environmental impact assessment, in the time it took them to build the entire base,” says Woolford. Statistically, the station became Idaho’s largest city, home to around 55,000. Boots arriving by bus or train at Athol shuttled to the station in “cattle car” semitrailers Farragut veteran Depew likens to oversized orange crates. Initially training for recruits, average age 17, ran 13 weeks. As the war expanded so did the need for boots. By 1944, when passenger trains reached the base, companies were graduating in six weeks. Recruits mastered knot tying, firefighting, and swimming and learned to operate whaleboats and other vessels on Lake Pend Oreille, which station commander Captain F. H. Kelley described as an “inland ocean.” Besides barracks and drill and mess halls, each camp had an indoor rifle range, swimming pool, dispensary, bowling alley, and other amenities. Central service nodes offered shoe repair, a movie house, and other practicalities and amusements. Demand for recruits dwindled in late 1944, but the renamed Farragut Naval Training Center hustled with new missions such as processing dead sailors’ personal effects. The hospital, expanded to nearly 2,300 beds, cared for wounded personnel. In February 1945, a camp housing 750 captured German soldiers opened outside Farragut’s main gate.
Lake Pend Oreille
5 MILES
Sandpoint
Kaniksu National Forest
200
2
Lake Pend Oreille 95
Green Monarch Mountains
Farragut Naval Training Station Bayview Athol
54
Farragut State Park
Canada WA
Area of detail ID
OR
For pay of 80 cents a day apiece, POWs landscaped the grounds and did odd jobs with minimal supervision. “Many times we didn’t even have anybody watching us,” former POW Karl Tews said in a 1999 interview. “The boot camp guys, I think they were worse off than we were.” Idaho’s dry summers and snow-blanketed winters draw half a million visitors yearly to the park. Of those, about 25,000 encounter the navy’s brief stay courtesy of the Museum at the Brig. Two dozen cells that corralled unruly recruits now house exhibits like artifacts from the POW camp and a model drill hall crafted by a prisoner at Idaho State Penitentiary. Most items have been donated by Farragut veterans or locals. In 2013,
at an Athol wrecking yard, automobile restorers Paul and Gina Victorino saw a 1942 International dump truck with “U.S.N.” visible on its worn blue paint. Woolford confirmed that the rig had been a Farragut vehicle. The International joined a restored 1938 Ford truck and a 1942 Peter Pirsch open-cabin fire engine that help visitors imagine the bustling city 70 years gone. The navy left northern Idaho abruptly. Decommissioned in June 1946, Farragut spent two years as a nonprofit technical college for veterans. When no one wanted to buy the parcel and improvements, the General Services Administration removed the olive-green buildings. Crews sawed two-story barracks into thirds and sold the hunks for pennies on the dollar. Contractors and homeowners came scrounging. “We have people who come in and say, ‘My windows are from Farragut,’ or ‘My rafters are from Farragut,’ or ‘My house started from Farragut and we added on,’” Woolford says. Only the cement brig, pump houses, and water towers remained. The feds transferred the title to the state of Idaho, which opened Farragut State Park in 1965. Each fall, the park welcomes Farragut veterans; the 2016 reunion is set for September 10. “It’s just like seeing your family again,” Farragut recruit Henry “Bud” Evans says in a 1999 public television film shown at the museum. “It’s just like seeing your brother.” 2
Farragut State Park (208-6832425, parks andrecreation.idaho.gov/ parks/farragut) is at 13550 E. Highway 54, Athol, Idaho, 60 miles northeast of Spokane International Airport and easily accessible by car. The Museum at the Brig is open Memo-
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WORLD WAR II
rial Day through Labor Day. Admission is included in the $5 per vehicle entrance fee. WHERE TO STAY AND EAT Farragut State Park has four well-developed tent and RV camp-
grounds with several handicap-accessible sites. Fees start at $25 per night; make summer reservations in advance. Bayview and Athol, both within five miles of the park, offer several hotel and bed-and-breakfast options. The Country Boy Café in Athol is renowned
for bountiful and delicious breakfasts. WHAT ELSE TO SEE The Museum of North Idaho in Coeur d’Alene, 25 miles south, offers exhibits on local Indian tribes and the fur trading, mining, and log-
ging that dominate the region’s history. From Coeur d’Alene, visitors can get on the breathtaking multi-use North Idaho Centennial Trail. Eight miles from Farragut, Silverwood, the Northwest’s largest theme park, is a major attraction for families.
MAP BY HAISAM HUSSEIN
WHEN YOU GO
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Each colored square represents a kill
SNIPER
RUSSIAN
At Stalingrad, a diminutive Red Army man made a big difference, one bullet at a time BY JOCHEN HELLBECK
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244 enemy dead
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O
BLIVIOUS TO NEARBY MORTAR blasts, the lieutenant gestured to the noncommissioned officer to follow him. Carrying rifles, the two climbed over twisted rails and into a destroyed metal factory. A brisk dawn was breaking as the men clambered past derelict furnaces and forging hammers. At a half-ruined brick wall the soldiers took out binoculars to study a gullied landscape. Through the lenses the men saw threads of smoke rising from enemy dugouts. They waited unmoving until the lieutenant elbowed the noncom, a short, stocky man who before entering military service had been a bookkeeper. He barely nodded and raised his Mosin-Nagant rifle, squinting into the simple sight. From a dugout stepped a German infantryman holding a
SQUINTING
kettle. Pressing his right cheek to the rifle’s wooden stock, the former bookkeeper controlled his breathing, relaxed, and squeezed the trigger. The German collapsed. The two men settled in again. Three hours later, another enemy soldier emerged. Again, the lieutenant nudged the man beside him. Again, the noncom breathed in, then halfbreathed out. Again the cheek to the stock, the finger on the trigger, the squeeze, the puff of dust from another field-gray uniform whose wearer was now dead. Guns slung on shoulders, the two men retraced their steps out of the factory. It was October 4, 1942. With his shooting, the diminutive rifleman, Vasily Grigoryevich Zaytsev, had qualified as a sniper with the Red Army’s 284th Rifle Division on the war-wrecked streets of Stalingrad. Some of his targets had been nearly half a mile away. The next day, the novice killed five German soldiers; within the month his daily score had reached as many as 15. By the time the battle for Stalingrad ended four months later, contemporary reports listed Zaytsev as having killed between 225 and 238 enemy soldiers. Zaytsev himself said 244—including at least 10 German snipers—and was acknowledged by the Soviets and the invaders alike as a symbol of a sniper corps that had afforded the Red Army a decisive edge in a crucial conflict.
Zaytsev and the tool of his violent trade.
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VASILY ZAYTSEV TRAVELED A MEANDERING PATH to the role of sniper. Born in 1915, he grew up in the Chelyabinsk region east of the Ural Mountains, in Western Siberia. Appropriately for a woodlands clan, the name “Zaytsev” is related to the Russian word for “hare.” Vasily got his first rifle at 12. His forester father taught his offspring to shoot by having them hunt squirrels; Vasily and one of his brothers decided their sister deserved a squirrel coat; to keep the pelts intact, they dispatched each animal with a single pellet. But only his grandfather saw the small boy—whom his family called the “little pancake with ears”—as a born hunter, and invited the youngster along when he shouldered his rifle and went stalking goats and wolves. In 1929, the Zaytsev family was transferred to a local collective farm. Vasily traded hunting for herding, then attended construction school. In the 1930s he helped build blast furnaces at the nearby construction site of Magnitogorsk. Harassed by older workers, he turned to bookkeeping instead. He liked the work, so precise and exacting, and
ITAR; PREVIOUS PAGE, BUNDESARCHIVBIL 101I-394-1499-06 PHOTO LEO
INTO THE SIMPLE SIGHT, THE FORMER BOOKKEEPER PRESSED HIS RIGHT CHEEK TO THE RIFLE’S WOODEN STOCK, RELAXED, AND SQUEEZED THE TRIGGER. THE GERMAN COLLAPSED.
SKG IMAGES/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/TASS
Amid the desolation characteristic of 1942 Stalingrad, Soviet soldiers move into position to engage the foe.
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from 1933 until 1937 kept the books for a cooperative. In February 1937, at age 22, he enlisted in the Soviet navy, assigned as a petty officer to the 4th Submarine Brigade at the Pacific port of Vladivostok. Zaytsev was there as a quartermaster when word came in August 1942 that the Germans were advancing on Stalingrad. After two weeks of bombing that claimed thousands of civilians, German commanders sent infantry into the rubble, hoping to take the prize in a walk. But Soviet premier Joseph Stalin forbade a general evacuation of Stalingrad’s civilian population; he meant to hold his namesake city at all costs. A key center for industry and weapons production, Stalingrad extended like a ribbon 25 miles along the Volga’s west bank. The factory district in the north included the Red October steelworks, which produced 10 percent of Soviet steel, and the Dzerzhinsky tractor plant, a major producer of T-34 tanks in the Soviet Union. Stalingrad had been reborn during the 34
WORLD WAR II
prewar Soviet industrialization campaign. In 1930 the city counted around 150,000 residents; by the time the war broke out, the population had swelled to exceed 400,000, not including more than 100,000 refugees who were fleeing wartorn towns and regions further west. The Germans were enthralled with the mystique of Stalingrad. Hitler believed by conquering the city—home as he saw it to one million staunch Bolsheviks—he would break the Soviet dictator’s neck. The task of capturing Stalingrad fell to the Sixth Army, an elite formation Hitler had called capable of “storming the heavens.” Stalingrad’s defenders, led by 62nd Army commander Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, held on by their fingernails. To neutralize German artillery and airpower, Chuikov positioned his forces as near the enemy as possible. From basements, hidden bunkers, and ruined factories, squads of Red Army fighters staged partisan-style ambushes. The key weapons in this novel form of urban combat were submachine guns, hand grenades, knives, sharpened spades—and rifles in the hands of snipers. FOUR THOUSAND MILES EAST IN VLADIVOSTOK, men of the 4th Submarine Brigade, Zaytsev included, offered to join the fight at Stalingrad. The high command
BUNDESARCHIVBIL 1011-218-0510-22 THIEDE
A confident German Sixth Army advances in 1942, riding high on the assumption that the U.S.S.R. soon will fall.
INTERPHOTO/ALAMY
Zaytsev (left) liked to train students on the battlefield. He holds a MosinNagant rifle fitted with a scope.
reassigned the volunteers to the 284th Rifle Division, held in reserve in the Urals, 3,000 miles nearer the besieged city. A day before the 284th was to board trains for the front, the “submarines,” as soldiers called them, arrived. Changing from black seaman’s jackets and flared trousers into earthen Red Army uniforms—Zaytsev wore his horizontally striped seaman’s shirt under his infantry garb— the former sailors mustered before rifle company officers. Commanders eagerly picked tall and athletic types, ignoring Zaytsev except to snicker at his gigantic footwear; infantry boots his size were out of stock. A head for numbers and communications skills landed Zaytsev in charge of a supply platoon. Nothing suggested he was destined for combat. Zaytsev’s platoon served under Lieutenant Vasily Bolsheshchapov, who during the days-long train trip to Stalingrad’s vicinity instructed his new-fledged ground troops in machine-gun maintenance and technique. He stood men one by one before a weapon disassembled and spread across a railcar floor. Most struggled with the metal puzzle, but the little bookkeeper crisply built up the machine gun. Astounded, the lieutenant asked where he had gotten his facility with weapons. Explaining his background, Zaytsev pleaded to be a rifleman. Bolsheshchapov consented. The train stopped in Burkovka, 10 miles east of Stalingrad;
from the village the soldiers marched to the Volga’s east bank. Across the river the entire city seemed to be burning. Under intense enemy fire, ferrymen and rowers were hauling Soviet wounded to safety. Bandaged and bleeding men limped and crawled past the fresh troops. Overhead, Luftwaffe pilots were downing one Soviet plane after another. That night, ferries carried the 284th across the water and into the flaming ruins. At dawn mortar rounds rained on them. The infantry troops dove behind fuel storage tanks, only to have enemy planes attack. Gasoline from ruptured tanks soaked the soldiers, who fell back to the Volga, ripping off burning clothes and leaping into the frigid water. Some had on only undershirts; some were naked, some draped with tarps. Even so, they went on the attack, forcing Germans out of the Metiz metal factory at the foot of Mamayev Hill, the most hotly contested patch of Stalingrad. For four months, control of that hill would seesaw between the opposing forces, and between the two sides’ sniper units. DURING THE 1930s THE RED ARMY HAD MAINTAINED multiple marksmanship schools whose textbooks enshrined “sniper terror,” a doctrine stipulating that these specialists should seek not only to kill but to immobilize and demoralize. Techniques included stalking and shooting but also NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
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at Stalingrad had one—Zaytsev’s was serial number 2828— but a standard Mosin, with its low-tech sight, was nothing to sneeze at. The rifle was said to be accurate to 1,000 yards, and was much less cumbersome when not fitted with a scope. “Say you’re inside a building, next to a small embrasure,” Zaytsev explained after the battle for Stalingrad. “With a periscope you need a larger embrasure, and if the embrasure is large, then the enemy can see you. So there are times when it’s better just to use an ordinary rifle. And with an ordinary rifle, a distance of two hundred meters is still just two hundred meters. Your accuracy isn’t as good, but if you know how to shoot that doesn’t matter.” In addition to sessions in the pipe, Zaytsev oversaw gunnery practice—and practiced what he preached, shooting daily, as neophytes did, with sniper rifles and ordinary rifles. They used standard sights for targets as far as 1,100 yards away, and scopes to reach 1,600 yards. The drill mixed carefully framed single shots with precision volleys. Wartime Stalingrad was short on squirrels, but mice and rats made ready targets. Playing on the meaning of “Zaytsev,” other soldiers called Vasily’s students zaichata, or “baby hares.” When Zaytsev thought a class of zaichata had developed sufficiently, he took one or two at a time into combat. He showed them how to locate a hide, and how to build one invisible to the enemy. German snipers tended to occupy a single hide for prolonged periods. Zaytsev kept several hides, moving every two or three shots, or after every kill. Don’t rush, he would say. “For the enemy not to recognize you, kill him with your first shot,” he noted, crowding his apprentices into a hide. As they watched through scopes or binoculars, often for hours, Zaytsev waited for a shot. After the first
THE RIFLE
Vasily Zaytsev and other Soviet snipers wielded the Mosin-Nagant 91/30—introduced in 1891, updated in 1930, and named for the Russian and the Belgian on whose designs it was based.
1
2 3
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COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION/NATIONAL FIREARMS MUSEUM; PHOTO BY GUY ACETO; INSET, ITAR
how to build “hides”: camouflaged nooks as complicated as a hunter’s shooting stand or as simple as makeshift shields of scrap wood, metal, or even corpses. The cult of the sniper came to rival that of hero workers like Aleksey Stakhanov, who in August 1935 dug 102 tons of coal in a single shift, sparking the “Stakhanovite Movement.” Following the German invasion in June 1941, posters and other propaganda extolled the individual Soviet gunman, whether working alone or with a spotter using a periscope. Men and women could be Red Army snipers if they had the requisite tenacity, patience, and sang-froid—Stakhanovite killers, harvesting German corpses. After Zaytsev’s spectacular debut as a shooter, he helped make his unit, the 1047th Rifle Regiment, an improvised finishing school for snipers. Along with his regular duty at the front, he toured bivouacs, identifying marksmen by their eagle eyes, superior grasp of weapons maintenance and tactics, and unblinking capacity to kill. He became a teacher, taking only students eager to attend an academy where death was the passing grade—and the price of failure. Five or six apprentice snipers at a time joined Zaytsev in his “lecture hall”—a ventilation pipe at the Metiz factory. The introductory course focused on rifle mechanics, specifically those of the Mosin-Nagant. That venerable five-shot, bolt-action rifle dated to 1891, when the Czar’s army issued it. The weapon underwent modernization in 1930. Simple, reliable, and accurate—though not as technologically sophisticated as the Walthers and Mausers that German snipers used—the Mosin was a Red Army staple. A sniper variant of the Mosin, mounting an outdated telescopic sight, was highly prized; only about half the shooters
5
“KILLING
HIM DOESN’T TAKE LONG,” ZAYTSEV TOLD HIS STUDENTS. “BUT OUTWITTING HIM, THINKING ABOUT HOW TO GET THE BETTER OF HIM— THAT’S NOT SO EASY.” German fell, each student took a turn. Adopting Zaytsev’s revolutionary tactical approach, Soviet snipers were able to neutralize the enemy’s technological advantages. Sniping is intellectual, Zaytsev told neophytes. “Killing him doesn’t take long,” he said. “But outwitting him, thinking about how to get the better of him—that’s not so easy.” He told how, on Mamayev Hill, he had dueled with a German sniper positioned somewhere opposite him. The first three days of their assignment the Russian killed two enemy soldiers. On day four, Romanians serving with the Wehrmacht passed through Zaytsev’s field of fire. When he did not shoot, the German, believing himself safe, raised the sheet of iron he had been hiding under and crawled out to stretch. Zaytsev killed him with a shot—and when the Romanians rushed to the dead man he killed them, too. Another time on Mamayev Hill, an enemy bunker protected by snipers was thwarting Soviet attacks. Zaytsev sent two gunmen after their enemy counterparts, but his men missed their shots and were wounded. A superior ordered
Zaytsev into the fray, telling him to take two snipers. As the Soviets neared the scene, shots suddenly had the trio lunging and crawling on all fours to hunker in a trench far back from the contested bunker. Zaytsev set his helmet on a parapet. A shot by the German sent the headgear flying. Five hours of similar exchanges gradually revealed the enemy sniper to be somewhere far on the back side of the bunker. Zaytsev stretched a mitten over a slat and raised it. The German fired. Analyzing the hole, Zaytsev deduced the bullet’s trajectory—and his opponent’s location. Grabbing a trench periscope, he scanned the battlefield as the Soviet infantry charged the bunker, which was spitting machine-gun fire. The German sniper, perhaps thinking he had killed the man
4
Somewhere on the Eastern Front, a Soviet photographer got a sniper’s-eye view through a scope of a German in the cross hairs.
In skilled hands, telescopic sights extended the rifle’s range to 875 yards or more (1). The internal magazine held five 7.65x54 bullets—equivalent to the U.S. .30-caliber round. (2,3). A round left the barrel at a muzzle velocity of 2,838 feet per second (4). Rough finishes and tool marks (5) are common on wartime weapons manufactured in a hurry and with less rigorous quality control.
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
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who had been testing him, rose into view. Zaytsev shot. The German fell. Zaytsev then went for the gunners in the bunker, suppressing their automatic fire. The Red infantry took the bastion without losses. In describing such episodes, Zaytsev emphasized the need not only to survive missions but to speak of them. Like sharing food or tobacco, storytelling forged friendship and trust, he said, adding that all soldiers depend on one another, but snipers especially need comradeship to augment the skills of cunning and ruse. PROPAGANDISTS CAPITALIZED ON the Stalingrad shooters’ exploits. Red Army newspapers counted kills; a boldface October 21, 1942, headline read simply “66”—readers needed no more information. “Sniper Sytnikov has killed eightyeight Germans,” the same edition declared. “What about you?” Unblooded gunners had to live with catcalls. Echoing the 1930sera Stakhanovite phenomenon, authorities encouraged “socialistic competition for the largest numbers of Fritzes killed.” Some gunners embraced their press coverage. “The fascists should know the strength of weapons in the hands of Soviet supermen,” one proclaimed. Zaytsev was not immune. “I always know that I am cleverer and stronger than the German and that my rifle is more accurate than his,” he was quoted as saying. “I am always calm and I therefore don’t fear the Germans.” This outlook found reinforcement everywhere. Red Army political officers issued every infantryman a pocket journal in which to record kills. The title page quoted the writer Ilya Ehrenburg: “Unless you’ve killed at least one German in a given day, your day has been wasted.” Soldiers loved Ehrenburg, who described the Germans as “worse than wild beasts,” worthy only of being dispatched. Ehrenburg summed up his ethos in the title of his best-known wartime article: “Kill!” Patriotic propaganda resonated with Soviet soldiers, especially those new to combat. “When I first got the rifle, I couldn’t bring myself to kill a living being: one German was standing there for about 38
WORLD WAR II
1
3
2
RIFLEMEN Many westerners
forces Soviet soldiers
set in Iraq and based
first encountered
back, Red Army
on a memoir by the
Vasily Zaytsev
machine gunners
late U.S. Navy Seal
in Enemy at the
mow down retreat-
Chris Kyle, portrayed
ing comrades; NKVD
by Bradley Cooper.
Gates
1
, a 2001 film
loosely based on his
political officers did
story. That looseness
shoot men they
Sniper carry on in the
begins with casting;
deemed cowards,
tradition of 1941’s
to play the stocky,
but the actual Red
top-grossing Ameri-
five-foot-four-inch
Army did not assign
can film, Sergeant
Siberian, the produc-
machine-gun squads
York
ers cast willowy
to that task.
tion, nominated for
Both Enemy and
3
. That produc-
English six-footer
Zaytsev himself
11 Academy Awards,
Jude Law. Enemy
provided one of the
starred Gary Cooper
also presents the
film’s tall tales in his
as former pacifist
284th Rifle Division’s
memoirs. Enemy
Alvin York, awarded
stealthy nighttime
ends in a sniping
a Medal of Honor for
Volga crossing as a
duel between Zayt-
marksmanship while
midday bloodbath.
sev and one Major
serving in the Ameri-
And—unlike the real
König, a German sent
can Expeditionary
Red Army, which
to take out his Rus-
Forces in France
issued each trooper a
sian counterpart. But
during World War I.
rifle—the fictional
there is no evidence
Interestingly, all
force at Stalingrad
that a sharpshooter
three master snipers’
hands every other
named König existed.
diaries and memoirs
soldier a Mosin-
Sniper duels have
reveal that they
Nagant; the empty-
huge box-office
learned to shoot as
handed are to take
appeal, though; the
youths, hunting
up weapons dropped
makers of 2014’s
squirrels in the
by those who fall in
American Sniper
combat. Likewise,
concocted a one-on-
see, in the Urals,
when in the movie a
one rivalry in that
and in Texas.
German fusillade
military melodrama,
—Jochen Hellbeck
2
woods—in Tennes-
COURTESY OF JOCHEN HELLBECK; OPPOSITE, FROM TOP LEFT, MOVIESTORE COLLECTION LTD/ALAMY; WARNER BROS PICTURES/PHOTOFEST (BOTH)
four minutes, talking, and I let him go,” sniper Anatoly Chekhov recalled. “When I killed my first one, he fell at once. Another one ran out and stooped over the killed one, and I knocked him down, too. I was shaking all over: the man was only walking to get some water! I felt scared: I’d killed a person! Then I remembered our people and started killing them without mercy.” Memories of atrocities animated even the tough-minded Zaytsev. He could remember how, at the metal factory, he and other soldiers had to watch Germans drag away a woman, evidently to rape her. “Mama, where are they taking you?” a boy yelled. “Brothers, save me!” she shouted. “Help me!” The Soviet soldiers stood helpless. “How does that affect you?” Zaytsev recalled a year later. “You’re on the front line. You don’t have enough men. If you rush out to help her you’ll be slaughtered; it’ll be a disaster. Or another time you see young girls, children hanging from trees in the park. Does that get to you? That has a tremendous impact.” Red Army snipers at Stalingrad initially operated defensively from ambushes, but gradually went over to the attack. On December 17, 1942, Zaytsev’s battalion failed to take a
A post-Stalingrad poster featuring Zaytsev reads, “Be precise: kill an enemy with each bullet!”
bridge, with heavy losses. Zaytsev and four compatriots, carrying rifles and submachine guns, slipped around the German flank and into a bombed-out building on the route to the bridge. When their battalion resumed its attack, Germans ran out to hurl grenades, only to be shot down. The Germans retaliated by bringing out a heavier gun, but Zaytsev’s group deployed automatic weapons to kill every enemy soldier; the final tally was 28. Their battalion took the bridge. In the course of the battle for Stalingrad, Soviet snipers killed some 10,000 Wehrmacht soldiers, but numbers do not account for psychological impact. Zaytsev and his pupils sought to wear down their prey, keeping enemy troops from being able to stand erect or eat or haul ammunition. German veterans of Stalingrad described shots coming from behind stumps, from out of pipes, from beneath corpses. Several times, German fire almost claimed Vasily Zaytsev. Among his most effective hides was the furnace in a burned building. Spotted there, he came under mortar volleys that collapsed the chimney onto him. He lay unconscious for two hours, then tried to dig himself out, which proved impossible until he jerked his feet from his buried boots. He wrapped his feet in rags and ran down an alley. On January 15, 1943, Zaytsev was firing at German snipers on Mamayev Hill from beneath an abandoned railcar when the enemy spotted him. A hail of bullets struck the railcar. A larger round exploded above. Face burned, body and clothing shredded by shrapnel, one knee dislocated, right eardrum ruptured, Zaytsev was still alive, but clearly out of the fight. Soon after, the 284th Rifle Division took Mamayev Hill for good, and within weeks the battle for Stalingrad was done, the Germans and their Axis allies routed in the Red Army’s turning point victory of the war. By late February, Zaytsev was at the Kremlin accepting the Hero of the Soviet Union, his nation’s highest honor. He had the shakes, and pieces of shrapnel still lodged under an eye, but he spoke with amazement of his months in combat. “We didn’t know fatigue,” he said. “We’d go three or four days without sleeping, without even feeling sleepy. How can I explain this? You’re in a constant state of agitation; the whole situation is having a terrible effect on you. Every soldier, including myself, is thinking only of how he can make them pay more dearly for his life, how he could slaughter even more Germans. You think only of how to harm them even more, to spite them as much as you can.” In April 1943, his sniping days over, Zaytsev recounted his story to a historical commission. During his testimony, he mused on how his experiences in civilian life had figured in his days as a soldier. “Bookkeeping is good, calm, quiet work,” Vasily Zaytsev said. “It takes you into the depths of life. You feel like you’re in charge, that something depends on you. I like that. It’s independent work, and whatever you do, you must apply to your life.” 2 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
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A pair of soldier enrollees in the Army Specialized Training Program study at Princeton University.
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The short, bittersweet life of the Army Specialized Training Program BY DANIEL B. MOSKOWITZ
L
DMITRI KESSEL/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
loyd Emerson has always had a bad left eye—but not bad enough to render him 4F. He was drafted in January 1943 out of Washington State University; his problematic vision moved the army to put Emerson, 19, into limited duty, a step toward service as a hospital orderly. That lasted two months. “I was suddenly called one morning to the commandant’s office and told I was going to be transferred in a few days to Stanford, where I was going to be enrolled in the ASTP, the Army Specialized Training Program,” Emerson said. “Well, when somebody took me out of being a soldier to being a student, I accepted it.” Emerson’s transfer came courtesy of a high IQ score on the Army General Classification Test, which he had taken during induction. The score qualified him for ASTP, which promised more than 200,000 Lloyd Emersons accelerated college educations, likely to be followed by commissions and appropriate postings. Skill-specific classes were structured to assure that the army had the man- and mind-power needed in highly technical jobs and to avoid squandering the best and the brightest GIs on tasks suited to men less able. Emerson shipped to Palo Alto, California, for refresher math and language courses—“kindergarten for ASTP students,” he jokes—after which he and 100 other soldier-students left for the University of Oregon in Eugene. Emerson
was to train as an engineer. By January 1944 he had finished three 90-day semesters in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and drafting when the army gave him and his classmates new orders: school was out, and they were to join fighting units. Emerson was reassigned to the 11th Armored Division at Camp Cooke near Lompoc, on the California coast. The outfit’s old-timers scorned the newcomers. “It was a kind of a hazing operation,” Emerson said. “There was a lot of stuff like picking up cigarette butts, KP.” He especially hated hauling garbage from the officers’ messes. “My studies at the University of Oregon and Stanford were a far cry from what I was doing now. The ASTP in conception was very good, but it was not very practical. It really didn’t accomplish much; it didn’t have time.”
B
attle plans rarely survive combat, where success depends on recognizing when to change tactics. That is what happened to ASTP, one of the most ambitious personnel programs undertaken by the American military during World War II. When the army proposed ASTP in September 1942, the Selective Service was taking only men older than 20. Even with the era’s lower college enrollments, that pool included a significant number with some post-secondary schooling. The army, especially the Army Air Forces, historically had put sharper
Singled Out ...for a While NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
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fellows into intellectually demanding jobs. However, with Congress preparing to drop the draft age to 18— as it did that November— some army administrators wanted a college program to capitalize on inductees with aptitude. The idea was to train soldiers in disciplines high among army priorities but scant in the ranks. “The Army has been increasingly handicapped by a shortage of men possessing desirable combinations of intelligence, aptitude, education, and training in fields such as medicine, engineering, languages, science, mathematics, and psychology,” Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall explained in 1943. With the draft age reset at 18, the army had to maintain a steady flow of bright recruits, he noted. ASTP enlisted 227 universities and colleges, leaving criteria and methods to each institution. Approaches ranged from recruiting 17-year-olds to be cadets entitled to take college courses, to letting men already in uniform test into ASTP, to paths only open to holders of advanced degrees. The program got $127 million—today, $1.86 billion—for tuition and fees. Putting $635 ($9,296 in 2015) per average soldier-student into institutional coffers gave the program much clout. To ready men who had been general-track high school students for college, the program required tutorials, hence Emerson’s “kindergarten” sessions. The military needed linguists able to speak fluently; to meet ASTP standards, language curricula had to shift from writing and reading to speaking and comprehension.
An ASTP student works on his Arabic.
ASTP, and even outfits not sapped dramatically had men playing key roles leave for the classroom. That was exactly what skeptics like Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair, commander of Army Ground Forces, had feared would happen. McNair saw no need for more than a quarter of officers to have bachelor’s degrees. “He observed that a college program would further deplete units in training of high grade men and would compete with programs of officer candidate schools, whose quotas the ground forces were already having difficulty filling,” the official army history of the war says. ASTP adjusted. Now men scoring high enough were either invited or ordered into the program. “High enough” became a moving target, starting at the 110 IQ required for officer candidate school (OCS) but rising to 115, then to 120. Confusion reigned. James Ochs was among Princeton University’s first ASTP enrollees. “I don’t know what the plans are for you men, but I know you’ll all come out of this officers,” their colonel told Ochs and company. “I’m going to Washington and I’ll get information.” Three months later he again assembled his troops. “I still haven’t found out what their plans are for you, but I’m still trying,” he said. “You should come out at least a high-ranking noncom.” Three more months, and the colonel announced that Princeton ASTP was out of business and good luck in the infantry, men. While ASTP lasted “it was quite a dream,” said Jack Cooley. Growing up in Mesick, Michigan, he graduated from high school at 16 in 1941 and got work as a machinist. He had logged a year in aeronautical engineering at the University of Michigan when his draft notice came in 1943. The army offered him sergeant’s stripes, OCS, or ASTP. He picked ASTP. Julius Van Oss, who was making Sherman tank gun brackets when his call came, had no say in his fate. “They said, ‘You’re going to college,’ and they shipped me off to
A 42
cceptance depended solely on IQ, opening campus gates to many men otherwise unlikely to attend college. However, the program’s reach strained certain army units. The 44th Infantry Division lost most of its medical technicians to
WORLD WAR II
DMITRI KESSEL/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
The idea behind ASTP was to train soldiers in disciplines high among U.S. Army priorities but scant in the ranks.
the University of Illinois,” he said. “Well, wow! The food was good. We lived in a fraternity house.” The program sent 1943 draftee Warren Heyer to Los Angeles City College. “With my duffel bag on my shoulder, I entered the cool, green courtyard that was surrounded by a four-story dormitory, and heard the beautiful sounds of a jazz clarinet echoing off the walls,” he said. “I thought I was in heaven.”
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olonel Herman Beukema, the West Point history professor who headed ASTP, liked to say that his troops were “soldiers first, students second,” but the program was marginally martial. Often enrollees drilled with dummy weapons. Marching at Oregon, Lloyd Emerson hoisted an eightounce balsa “rifle” only to have the fake firearm fly over his head, earning him a chewing-out. At Virginia Military Institute, Brooklyn-born Melvin Kaminsky—later to earn fame as writer/director/producer/ actor Mel Brooks—learned saber technique. “They had us ride horses and cut down flags on bamboo poles,” he said. “I was trained to become a Confederate officer.” At the College of Puget Sound, soldier-students woke not to reveille but to a recording of “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!” At the University of California, Berkeley, “we didn’t march to class or between classes; we were free to go to classes and return to our quarters on our own, just like civilians,” said Robert E. Shaw, who in June 1943 was among Kansas State University students activated from the enlisted reserve. ASTP assigned him to California. “We all liked being in college,” Heyer recalled. “But we liked being in Hollywood more, with its glamour, and with the beaches of Santa Monica nearby.” And there was that wartime skew to gender ratios. “What was wonderful was to be sought out by the female ASTP students students for dances, picnics, clamber up a horseback riding, canoeing cargo net at the University and you name it,” said Rayof Illinois. mond Kitchell, posted at Oregon State. Too strapped to
pay for college, he had apprenticed as a machinist at Sperry Gyroscope and enlisted in the army in late 1942. For undisciplined youths, ASTP could be a little too wonderful. Arthur Chickering, who later wrote the seminal book on how to design higher education to promote student development, entered the program at 17, a graduate of tony Mount Hermon School in Gill, Massachusetts. “They sent me to the University of New Hampshire in July,” he said. “I was kicked out in December because I spent most of my time partying, playing cards, and rabble-rousing.” James H. Burke, from New York, was assigned to Stanford at 18. His engineering studies went well until a roommate asked him to double date. His new friend, a high school senior, was driving her dad’s Cadillac convertible. “We spent many evenings sneaking out to meet the girls and went to a nearby beach until the wee hours of the morning,” Burke said. “I flunked out after the second semester.” ASTP was not meant to be a picnic. Men who flunked out returned to active duty, and for its tuition payments the army required 24 hours a week of class or lab time, six hours’ physical training, five hours’ military drill, and at least 24 hours of supervised study. There was no slack. At Fordham University, “we took the first year of college in the first three months and the second year of college in the second three months,” Darrell B. Thompson said. High test scores did not predict preparedness for the program’s rigors. Georgia Tech professors “were aghast to learn that the army thought we could handle college-level subjects from scratch,” Bob Wells said. “And we proved that we could not.” Inducted in March 1943 at 19, Wells credits an older brother’s coaching with helping to produce the remarkable Army General Classification Test score of 150 that prompted ASTP to pluck him from the infantry—and which he could not replicate in class. “I got past the first half of the semester, but got incompletes in math and physics,” he said. That bounced him back to being a foot soldier. Novice engineer Van Oss studied math, physics, geog-
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS ARCHIVES
The West Point history professor who headed ASTP liked to say his troops were “soldiers first, students second.”
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nati, a premedical training program survived. ASTP men jerked out of dorms and frat houses and into barracks and mess halls sometimes had difficulty adjusting to combat units—and vice versa. When the University of California, Berkeley, shut its ASTP branch, the student soldiers left Zeta Beta Tau for Lompoc’s gritty Camp Cooke. “Needless to say, we college GIs—with our garrison caps, shined shoes, and tennis rackets—were not looked upon with great favor by the grizzly desert-toughened guys of the 11th Armored,” Robert Shaw said. Morris Kleiman was at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, when the army sent his entire ASTP engineering class to Camp Maxey, near Paris, Texas, to join a seasoned professional army unit. “We were college boys and they didn’t like us,” he said. “They thought college boys didn’t belong in the infantry.”
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ne irony of the cutback was that even men doing well in ASTP were sent to fighting units—usually as infantry privates, even though to join ASTP they might have forsworn sergeant’s stripes or OCS. The reversal chafed. “I was very bitter with the army when I was reassigned in April 1944. I believed it had cheated me and all the other ASTPers,” says Walter R. Dineen. “I started ASTP based on promises which were then broken. To locate and isolate the best and brightest youth in the nation only to throw their lives away
EVEN MORE SPECIAL THAN THE ARMY THOUGHT
KURT VONNEGUT Writer
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MELVIN KAMINSKY (MEL BROOKS)
Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee Engineering
Actor and Director
Transmuted the experience of being captured in the Battle of the Bulge into the novel Slaughterhouse-5.
Hearing enemy troops singing one night, the combat engineer crooned “Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye” in response.
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Virginia Military Institute Engineering
HENRY KISSINGER
GORE VIDAL
Policymaker
Novelist, Man of Letters
Lafayette College Engineering
Virginia Military Institute Engineering
When Allied troops took Krefeld, Germany, the Bavarian-born Private Kissinger organized a civilian government in eight days. He received a Bronze Star for counterintelligence work against Gestapo saboteurs.
Based his debut book, Williwaw, on his service aboard a troopship in the Aleutians. The novel, published in 1946 when Vidal was 20, takes its title from the Alaskan island chain’s notorious winds.
FROM LEFT, CARNEGIE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY; VMI; SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND COLLEGE ARCHIVES, SKILLMAN LIBRARY, LAFAYETTE COLLEGE, EASTON PA; VMI
raphy, and chemistry. “And military, of course, and gym,” he said. “They were throwing it at you.” Writer Gore Vidal, 17 when he joined ASTP, struggled with physics and math, and soon was out. “There’s a story that an ASTP student dropped a pencil in class,” Vidal said later. “While he was leaning over to pick it up he missed a term.” Oregon farm boy Eldon C. Hall enrolled in physics at the University of Washington and joined ROTC. Activated in March 1943 and assigned to ASTP, he started in electrical engineering at Rutgers University that July in a class of 200. In January 1944 only 65 men remained. That month ASTP collided with global war. Casualties and deferment-slimmed draft rolls were leaving the army short-handed just as plans were jelling to invade Europe and, reports the official army history, ASTP was serving “no need recognized as immediate by most elements in the Army.” Pressed by Congress to dismantle the program, Marshall delivered an ultimatum: slash enrollment to 30,000 or see the army disband 10 divisions, three tank battalions, and 26 antiaircraft battalions. That did it. The ASTP semester ended in March 1944, and of the 86,167 men then enrolled, 68,995 became infantrymen. The campus programs they had attended shut down, a pattern repeated until by August enrollment was 30,000. A handful of ASTP students—fewer than 1,000—were selected for noncombatant slots in military intelligence, the Office of Strategic Services, or the army’s Civilian Affairs Division. At the University of Cincin-
as poorly trained infantry was criminal.” Even among men kept in school, ASTP did not always work out. By the time Jerry Epple finished a University of Pennsylvania Japanese language and culture program, the war was over; the army proposed to commission him and fellow students and assign them to counterintelligence—provided they enlisted for four years plus Private Lloyd Emerson, several more as reservists. who outlasted three Epple refused to take the Sherman tanks, at ease in Gmunden, Austria. officer’s oath, ending his training. He served out his enlistment at First Army headquarters. “If they had told us that up front I would have asked for a transfer right away and saved the army the expense of my language training,” said Epple. “My ASTP experience was interesting, but it did not advance either the welfare of my country or myself.” For a few soldiers, immersion in ASTP did prove out. The army assigned Eldon Hall and most fellow Rutgers electrical engineering grads to a super-secret venture eventually revealed to be the Manhattan Project. Rodger Davies, a product of Penn’s Arabic ASTP course, served in the army in North Africa, later joining the U.S. Foreign Service as a Middle East specialist. He was U.S. ambassador to Cyprus in 1974 when a gunman killed him. ASTP’s dentistry program propelled Jack Vorhies into a career as an orthodontist in Greenwood, Indiana. But the indirect payoffs also were considerable. Even if participants only spent months in ASTP, thousands of men attested that the experience revealed academic talents they never imagined. In peacetime 80 percent returned to college. Hundreds of institutions that might have had to close for lack of male students were able to stay open. Remedial study courses developed for ASTPers became a postwar norm. The program revolutionized American language instruction; since 1946 oral fluency has been the grail.
And ASTP acknowledged that the national defense should incorporate a well-educated cadre of young people. That was among the pillars of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, or GI Bill, which helped nearly eight million World War II veterans get post-secondary educations and became a keystone of American policy. ASTP’s model of university-government collaboration inspired Title VI of the 1958 National Defense Education Act, essentially an update of ASTP. The last year of fighting found many ASTP men far, far off-campus. Lloyd Emerson, the engineering student turned tanker, arrived in Europe in autumn 1944 at the controls of a Third Army Sherman M4. In Belgium, an 88mm round lodged in his tank’s engine but did not explode. His crew got a fresh M4. Near the Siegfried Line, that Sherman fell prey to Teller mines. Again Emerson was unscathed, and again his crew buttoned up in a new tank. Near war’s end, outside Meiningen, Germany, enemy troops with a Panzerfaust blew a tread off the third Sherman. In the ensuing fracas, shrapnel, probably friendly, caught Emerson at the back of the head. Back home he finished a history degree at Washington State University. “I had seen how horrible war was, and I thought to myself, ‘God, we must never do this again!’” he said. “So I thought, ‘Let me get some place where I can perhaps have a little voice in preventing this carnage.’” On the GI Bill he obtained a master’s degree in foreign relations at New York University. He worked successively for the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and finally the United Nations, from which he retired in 1982. He and his late wife, Susan, had two daughters. Lloyd Emerson, 91, lives in Bethesda, Maryland, where occasionally a piece of scrap metal works its way out of his scalp. 2
COURTESY OF LLOYD EMERSON
Thousands of men said the experience revealed academic talents they never imagined; after the war, 80 percent returned to college.
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D
uring the war years, Americans read comics more than any other form of printed material. In 1944, more than half of adults and two-thirds of kids over six—65 million people—followed the funnies; at PXs, comic books outsold other periodicals 10 to one. Given the times, it was natural for comic strips to adopt military themes. Milton Caniff, creator of Terry and the Pirates, was the undisputed leader of that movement. Even before the United States entered the war, Terry and the Pirates, which premiered in 1934 and was set in China, did: a 1938 panel showed the rising sun on a warplane piloted by unnamed invaders. After the U.S. entered World War II, main character Terry Lee, a teenaged adventurer when the strip began, enlisted in General Claire Lee Chennault’s Fourteenth Air Force, the successor of the famed Flying Tigers. From then on, Terry was a military strip. When Terry won his wings, the full-panel Sunday strip from October 17, 1943 (opposite), became the most famous of Caniff’s cartoons. To keep things real, the left-handed Ohio State University art school graduate (Caniff drew with his left hand and wrote with his right) observed Army Air Corps dive-bomber exercises and scrutinized equipment manuals, photos, and other artifacts. Actual military personalities, including Chennault and General Joseph W. Stilwell, made appearances in the strip. In one early 1944 story line, Caniff unwittingly described a real operation, bringing FBI interrogators to his studio on the Hudson River north of New York City. Caniff’s final Terry ran on December 29, 1946—the result of a dispute with his syndicate, which turned the strip over to another artist. Weeks later Caniff returned with a new hero, Steve Canyon, a stalwart air force flier whose Cold War adventures continued until Caniff’s death in 1988. —David T. Zabecki
Drawn into War Cartoonist Milton Caniff combined talent and a longing to fight to create a cast of memorable characters
PILOT’S CREED In Caniff’s most famous cartoon (opposite), newly commissioned pilot Terry Lee receives an inspirational talk from his flight instructor. Impressed by the strip’s “noble sentiments,” a congressman from California read it into the Congressional Record. Caniff was an exacting draftsman (he was never happy with the thumb in the ninth panel) who prided himself on accuracy— the complexities of which he parodies in the self-caricature above.
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THIS PAGE (ALL), ©2015 THE ESTHER PARSONS CANIFF ESTATE AND HARRY GUYTON, EXECUTOR/CLASSIC COOL/ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Caniff palliated frustration at being 4F due to phlebitis by creating the racy strip Male Call for military camp newspapers—something he did weekly for four years at no charge. Featuring comely “Miss Lace,” the strip was mostly innocent fun, though Caniff enjoyed pushing the limits with censors. The playful strip at right was a reject.
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MAKER’S MARK Caniff’s additional contributions to the war effort included illustrating booklets and designing military insignia (below)— 65 in all. The USS Boarfish was a Balao-class submarine.
TRAVEL TIPS Cartoon illustrations for the army’s Pocket Guide to China (left) include tips—cloaked in the racist sentiment of the day—on how to distinguish Japanese (“J”) men from Chinese (“C”). “Look at their profiles and teeth,” one panel advises. “C usually has evenly set choppers—J has buck teeth.”
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FAREWELL, TIMES TWO Caniff drew Terry and the Pirates for 12 years—from October 22, 1934, to December 29, 1946, after which another artist, George Wunder, took it over for 27 years. As Caniff says goodbye to his creations in his final Terry (below), Terry Lee says goodbye to a possible love interest, army nurse Jane Allen.
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SEE YOU IN THE FUNNY PAPERS
CLAIRE LEE CHENNAULT
PHILIP G. COCHRAN
Generals Claire Lee Chennault and Joseph W. Stilwell make a rare, convivial joint appearance in a Terry and the Pirates strip from August 1942 (far left). A recurring character in the series, Flip Corkin, is modeled after another actual individual, fighter pilot and squadron leader Philip G. Cochran. Caniff and Cochran, an innovative tactician, attended Ohio State together. “Thanks to Phil Cochran’s ability to do the spectacular thing at the right time, my Flip Corkin version of him has had to run to keep up,” the cartoonist joked.
JOSEPH W. STILWELL
PHOTOS: TOP RIGHT, NATIONAL ARCHIVES (ALL)
AFTER TERRY In his New York studio in 1947, Caniff displays his latest creation. Steve Canyon, which, like Terry, is built around the adventures of a military pilot, began January 13, 1947, and ended on June 3, 1988, three months after Caniff’s death. A June 4 strip was a tribute by Caniff’s assistant, Richard Waring Rockwell, nephew of illustrator Norman Rockwell. “Though he enjoyed the confidence of honored peers,” Rockwell wrote, “he never forgot the inkblot kid who burned with ambition’s night-long dreams of adventure.”
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FRIEND GI artilleryman— or enemy in disguise come to raise fatal havoc behind Allied lines? That was the fix the German ruse posed in the Ardennes attack. This man, photographed at Murrigen, Belgium, was the genuine item.
OR FOE?
In the fight for the Ardennes, a fiendish German scheme shattered Allied certainty about who was real and who was not BY ANTONY BEEVOR
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ON OCTOBER 21, 1944, THE DAY HITLER SUMMONED SS COMMANDO OTTO SKORZENY to East Prussia for a personal briefing, not even Field Marshals Gerd von Rundstedt or Walter Model, who would be leading it, knew the dictator was planning a massive attack in the Ardennes. Skorzeny, six feet four inches tall and with a large scar on his left cheek from his days as a student duelist, towered over the bent and sickly Führer. “Skorzeny,” Hitler said, “this next assignment will be the most important of your life.”
From ARDENNES 1944: The Battle of the Bulge by Antony Beevor. Published by arrangement with Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright ©2015 by Antony Beevor.
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or this mission Skorzeny had unlimited powers. His officers had the authority to obtain whatever they wanted by saying, “Order from the Reichsführer.” Revealing only that they were going to be undertaking “interpreter duties,” the high command summoned English-speaking officers and noncommissioned officers from all the services—some were navy men, the rest Waffen SS, army, and Luftwaffe—to Schloss Friedenthal outside Oranienburg, in northeast Germany. At Oranienburg SS officers interrogated candidates in English, explaining that they would be part of a special unit, the 150th Panzer Brigade, and swearing them to secrecy, with leaks punishable by death. Like Skorzeny, their commander, the wonderfully named Colonel Friedrich Musculus, had student-dueling scars. Musculus, a tanker, promised that the 150th Panzer Brigade would have a “decisive effect on the course of the war.”
German guards march GIs captured in the Ardennes on December 17, 1944. The POWs’ motley dress reflects a scarcity of winter clothing.
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TOP, HEINRICH HOFFMANN/ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES; ©CORBIS; PREVIOUS PAGE, GEORGE SILK/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
As a component of the attack, first called Operation Watch on the Rhine and then Operation Autumn Mist, Operation Greif (“griffin”) would be a special venture, Hitler explained. Handpicked troops operating captured American vehicles and clad in olive-drab uniforms would penetrate Allied lines and cause mayhem and confusion— the perfect duty for the Austrian colonel, whom even fellow officers described as a “typical evil Nazi” and “a real dirty dog.” Of the hulking SS man, a panzer general once said, “Shooting is much too good for him.” Otto Skorzeny
A GI rests upon a German Panther tank disguised as an Allied M10 tank destroyer. Skorzeny’s troops used similar Panthers in sheep’s clothing.
HISTORYNET ARCHIVES
GERMANS IN AMERICAN VEHICLES AND UNIFORMS WERE TO CAUSE MAYHEM BEHIND ALLIED LINES. The group moved en masse to a training facility at Grafenwöhr, in Bavaria. There, superiors assigned a young navy lieutenant named Müntz to hunt for American uniforms at POW camps. Müntz had until November 21 to collect 2,400 complete outfits, including those for 10 generals and 70 officers, as well as genuine American identity cards, pay books, and other paperwork, to go with the American and British currency they would be issued. Planners did not know that the U.S. Army itself was so short on winter uniforms that GIs were freezing in the Hürtgen Forest, Lorraine, and Alsace. Nonetheless, bearing an order signed by Hitler himself, Müntz first went to Berlin to the department of prisoners of war, whose head, after declaring that Müntz’s undertaking was illegal under international law, provided him with written instructions to show camp commanders. Müntz set off with a truck and crew. The POW camp commander at Fürstenberg an der Oder refused the order to strip 80 GIs of their field jackets. The brigade called off the scavenger hunt and recalled Müntz
lest the Red Cross hear of the row and alert the Allies. At Grafenwöhr, officers gave all orders in English to men kitted out in the few uniforms Müntz and his men had managed to obtain. Trainees learned to salute in the American style and other quirks, such as eating K rations “with the fork after laying down the knife.” They studied the nuances of American smoking, including the affectation of pausing before lighting a cigarette to tap the smoke on the pack. To absorb idiomatic terms such as “chow line” and to improve their “American” accents, the trainees watched Hollywood movies and newsreels. Instructors also taught all the usual commando skills, such as close-quarter combat, demolition, and use of enemy weapons.
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iven more details of Operation Griffin, some men expressed doubts about fighting in enemy uniform. An SS lieutenant colonel declared that shirkers would be sentenced to death. Another blow to morale came when supervisors issued ampules of cyanide hidden in cheap cigarette lighters. On the other hand, Skorzeny inspired. SS men worshiped him for his exploits: in Italy, he had been among commandos who rescued defeated dictator Benito Mussolini, while in Hungary he had led a special ops team that kidnapped the son of Hungarian leader Miklos Horthy to pressure Horthy into letting a Nazi sympathizer assume power. To those who NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
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The dynamic Skorzeny (with Benito Mussolini in 1943) inspired his men with his rakehell daring.
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men were divided into demolition groups to blow up bridges and ammunition and fuel dumps; reconnaissance groups to scout routes to the Meuse and observe enemy strength; and teams to disrupt American communications by cutting wires and issuing false orders. Each strike team had a “speaker,” chosen for his grasp of American idiom. Three or four men rode in each jeep. But four in a jeep was a mistake. The Americans seldom packed a jeep so full. As the nervous Einheit Stielau commandos waited to set off, an officer from headquarters tried to assuage them. American soldiers in German uniform had been captured behind German lines, he claimed, adding that the army would take a lenient view and treat the captured GIs, who by rights could be shot as spies, instead as prisoners of war.
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n December 16, 1944, the day the Ardennes attack began, eight of Skorzeny’s nine Einheit Stielau jeep teams—the best English speakers, some carrying vials of sulfuric acid to fling in sentries’ faces if an encounter went sour—slipped through the American lines. Some cut communications wires and carried out minor sabotage, such as changing road signs. At least one team managed to misdirect an American infantry regiment. But Operation Griffin’s greatest success was to trigger an Allied overreaction bordering on paranoia. The Griffin teams’ impact multiplied thanks to a simultaneous drop of German paratroopers who generally came to grief but in the process set GI teeth on edge. At a bridge on the edge of Liège, American military policemen stopped four men in a jeep. The interlopers were dressed in U.S. Army uniforms and spoke English with American accents, but when asked to show the trip tickets that every GI driver carried they produced blanks. The MPs ordered them out of the vehicle and found German weapons and explosives, and swastika insignia under their American uniforms. The jeep, investigators discovered, had been captured from British forces at Arnhem. The MPs handed over their prisoners’ commander, Lieutenant Günther Schultz, to a mobile field interrogation unit. Schultz appeared to be cooperating fully. He admitted serving in Einheit Stielau and told questioners that his commander had said their orders were to “penetrate to Paris and capture General Eisenhower and other high-ranking officers.” Schultz was parroting Skorzeny’s line of palaver, but it is still not clear whether he believed what he was saying, was in on the original rumor, or simply was trying to impress his interrogators to save his skin. Schultz described an “Eisenhower Action” carried out by a “special group” commanded by an Oberleutnant Schmidhuber operating directly under Skorzeny. The plot to kidnap or assassinate Eisenhower included about 80 men, he said. Participants were to rendezvous in Paris at the Café de l’Epée or
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loved him the Austrian offered “conspicuous friendship.” One wrote later, “He was our pirate captain.” The training camp at Grafenwöhr reverberated with rumors about the mission. Some said the action was going to be an airborne reoccupation of France. Skorzeny later claimed to have spread a yarn about heading to Paris to kidnap General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Skorzeny split his 2,400 recruits into two units. The larger portion kept the name 150th Panzer Brigade. This much stronger force spread nearly 2,000 men among paratroop battalions, Panzergrenadier companies, heavy mortars, antitank guns, and two captured M4 Sherman medium tanks—augmented with German Mark IVs and Panthers unconvincingly masquerading as Shermans, painted olive drab with the white American star, some of them without the official surrounding circle. Commanders of other German units participating in the offensive would exert no control over Skorzeny’s troops, who were assigned to secure bridges over the Meuse at Andenne, Huy, and Amay. Hiding by day, they would move by night, using side roads and tracks to outpace the regular army panzer spearheads. Skorzeny’s smaller force comprised the 150 best of the 600 English speakers he had rounded up. He called the troop Einheit Stielau, or “Stielau’s unit,” after the captain who led it. Mounted mostly in jeeps and in American uniform, the
SO YOU WANT TO
IMPERSONATE AN AMERICAN
BASED ON OPERATION GRIFFIN TRAINING METHODS Subtle cultural touches set Germans and Americans apart. To pass as GIs, Skorzeny’s undercover troopers had to relearn many basic activities and gestures.
STEP 1 Smoke holding cigarette between the first two fingers held upright, with thumb toward chin.
Figure 1 German style
Figure 2 American style
STEP 2 Indicate the number three by closing thumb over pinky finger and raising middle fingers.
Figure 1 German style
Figure 2 American style
ILLUSTRATIONS BY COLIN HAYES
STEP 3 Cut food holding a knife in right hand and fork in left. To eat, set knife on plate edge, transfer fork to right hand, spear morsel, and raise to mouth.
Figure 1 German style
Figure 2 American style
the Café de la Paix, Schultz was not sure which. He claimed that another German special operations unit, the Brandenburger commandos, also was involved. Despite the improbability of 80 German soldiers assembling in a Parisian café, the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) believed Schultz. The next morning, Eisenhower found his security stepped up such that he almost was a prisoner. In like fashion, an alarmed CIC directed General Omar Bradley not to use a car, nor depart or arrive at the front door to his billet, the Hôtel Alfa in Luxembourg. He was to use the kitchen entrance at the hotel’s rear and move to rooms deeper in the building. For now, his vehicles and his personal helmet would not display general’s stars. Bradley now traveled sandwiched between a machine-gun-mounted jeep in front and a Hellcat tank destroyer behind.
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he idea of German commandos behind American lines, dressed as GIs and wielding GI-issue weapons, badly rattled American soldiers. Troops barricaded every route to interrogate vehicles’ occupants. “Question the driver because, if German, he will be the one who speaks and understands the least English,” orders read. “Some of these G.I. clad Germans are posing as high-ranking officers. One is supposed to be dressed as a Brigadier General…. Above all don’t let them take off their American uniform. Instead get them to the nearest PW [prisoner of war] cage, where they will be questioned and eventually put before a firing squad.” Hoping to trip up fakers, sentries and MPs improvised questions: quizzes on baseball; the name of the president’s dog or Betty Grable’s current husband; and “What is Sinatra’s first name?” Stopped by a sentry told to watch for “a kraut posing as a one-star general,” one-star Brigadier General Bruce C. Clarke missed an answer about the Chicago Cubs. “Only a kraut would make a mistake like that,” his interlocutor declared, detaining Clarke for half an hour. Even Bradley was held captive for a short time, despite having correctly named the capital of Illinois, which the MP insisted was not Springfield. Britons moving about in the U.S. Ninth Army rear area aroused considerable suspicion. Actor David Niven, a reconnaissance officer in British Army uniform, was stopped and questioned by an American sentry. “Who won the World Series in 1940?” the guard demanded. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” the urbane Niven claimed later to have replied. “But I do know that I made a picture with Ginger Rogers in 1939.” “OK, beat it, Dave,” the GI said. “But watch your step, for crissake.” With an aide, British Major General Allan Adair, commander of the Guards Armoured Division, stopped at a checkpoint manned by black soldiers. The aide could not find his or his chief’s papers. After standing by and watching NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
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At checkpoints across the battle zone, wary GI sentries had to assume every vehicle could be carrying German saboteurs.
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WITHIN DAYS, THE STRIKE TEAM WAS TRIED AND SENTENCED TO “BE SHOT TO DEATH WITH MUSKETRY.” American intelligence officer gasped. “Gerd?” the lieutenant said. “Gunther!” Unwin said. The cousins enjoyed a battlefield reunion. The night of December 17, GIs captured a Skorzeny strike team at the Belgian town of Aywaille, fewer than a dozen miles from the Meuse. A search of the trio turned up German papers and stacks of American dollars and British pounds. One commando captured at Aywaille repeated the story about the plan to seize or kill General Eisenhower, confirming CIC’s worst fears. Reports described orders given a group of Frenchmen, formerly of the paramilitary militia and the SS Charlemagne Division, to sabotage fuel dumps and railcars while disguised in American coats and pretending to be escapees from Nazi forced labor. Within days, the Aywaille three were tried and sentenced to “be shot to death with musketry,” the eventual fate of at least eight Einheit Stielau personnel. One group, slated for
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
the two Britons engage in much fruitless searching, the large noncom in charge finally said, “General, if I were you, I’d get myself a new aide.” Another popular security check was to examine for regulation underwear, which led to a dramatic sequence of events for one Allied soldier. Like others in his family, Gerald “Gee” Unwin, a Jewish soldier in British uniform, had left Germany for England soon after Hitler came to power. His Anglicized name replaced his original moniker, Gerhardt Unger. In Brussels on leave the evening of December 16, Unger/Unwin, who spoke with a heavy German accent, wound up in a bar drinking with GIs from the U.S. First Army. Hearing their new friend’s story, the Americans mentioned their intelligence officer, Lieutenant Gunther Wertheim. Funny coincidence, Unwin said; one of his cousins had the exact same name. In the wee hours of December 17, Unwin accompanied his new friends to their unit, based near where the Germans had first broken through. Near Eupen, Unwin and his companions came to a roadblock. In Allied uniform but lacking paperwork to justify being in the area, Unwin was arrested. Guards holding him in a school classroom had him drop his trousers; army issue shorts kept Unwin from being shot but did not get him released. The next day he was marched into another room to be interrogated. Seeing his next subject, the
JOHN FLOREA/LIFE PICTURES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
a firing squad, sought a reprieve on grounds that they had faced certain death if they refused to follow orders. “We were sentenced to death and are now dying for some criminals who have not only us, but also—and that is worse— our families on their conscience,” they said. “Therefore we beg mercy of the commanding general; we have not been unjustly sentenced, but we are de facto innocent.” The Allies rejected the appeal; Bradley confirmed the sentences. Three other Einheit Stielau operatives were to be executed on December 23 at Eupen, near where captured German army nurses were being interned. The doomed men asked that before they were shot they hear the nurses sing Christmas carols. With GI riflemen standing by, “the women sang in clear strong voices,” a witness said. The guards “hung their heads struck by the peculiar sentimentality of it all.” The officer in charge was “half afraid that they’d shoot at the wall instead of the man when the command was given.” That same day, British troops of the 29th Armoured Brigade were guarding the bridge over the Meuse at Dinant in heavy fog. “An apparently American jeep drove through one of the road blocks approaching the bridge on the east side of the river,” the commanding officer of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment wrote. “This road block, as were all the others, was mined by the 8th Rifle Brigade who had established a movable barrier and arranged for mines to be pulled across the road should any vehicle break through the barrier without
Military policemen ready Skorzeny trooper Günther Billing, dressed in U.S. Army fatigues, for execution by firing squad.
stopping. As we were by now in contact with the Americans, this jeep was not fired on, but as it refused to stop the mines were drawn across the road and it was blown up, killing two of the three men in the vehicle, found to be Germans.”
A
long with the Einheit Stielau teams’ general impotence, the 150th Panzer Brigade proved a complete anticlimax. Skorzeny, who had known dolled-up German tanks would not fool Americans except perhaps at night, gave up all idea of thrusting through to the Meuse bridges when the 150th bogged down in mud and the immense traffic jams congealing behind the 1st SS Panzer Division. The evening of December 17 Skorzeny asked Waffen SS general Sepp Dietrich for permission to recast his force as an ordinary panzer brigade. Dietrich, pestered by an SS panzer corps commander’s demands that he withdraw the Austrian’s men, who were “hindering the operation of the corps by driving between vehicles and doing exactly as they pleased,” consented, telling Skorzeny to take the 150th Panzer Brigade to Ligneuville. On December 21, in a freezing fog, the 150th attacked north to Malmédy. Skorzeny’s men forced back a regiment of the U.S. 30th Infantry Division until American artillery loosed new proximity-fuzed rounds that exploded as they neared targets. In that day’s fighting more than 100 men of the 150th were killed and 350 wounded. Shrapnel nearly cost Skorzeny an eye. He withdrew the 150th Panzer Brigade from the offensive, ending Operation Griffin. By chance, as with Einheit Stielau, the 150th had achieved the goal of sowing confusion. The attack on Malmédy convinced the Americans that the 6th Panzer Army was preparing a drive north. The “Skorzeny effect” lingered well after its perpetrators had departed the field of battle. Tension at Allied checkpoints remained high, and across the region, both at the front and behind the lines, anxiety about the infiltrators persisted. Talk of the commandos’ methods and disguises took on a life of its own. “German agents in American uniforms are supposedly identified by their pink or blue scarves, by two [finger] taps on their helmets and by the open top button on their coats and jackets,” an aide of Bradley’s noted in his diary for December 22, 1944. “When Charlie Wertenbaker a Time magazine journalist came this evening, we pointed to his maroon scarf, warned him of a shade of pink and he promptly removed it.” And at Bastogne, a crossroads town where American paratroopers had held out against Hitler’s besieging forces, shivering Volksgrenadiers found dead GIs in the forest and stripped them of coats and boots. When these Wehrmacht troops finally lost resolve and tried to come in from the cold, wary GIs, remembering Skorzeny’s commandos and seeing olive drab on Germans, considered the men approaching with hands raised—and shot many of them dead. 2 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
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First Striker The craft depicted here, a B5N2, bears the markings of the “Kate” that Ensign Taisuke Maruyama flew at Pearl Harbor.
Three’s Company A “greenhouse” canopy covered the crew. The radioman/gunner operated a rear-facing 7.7mm Type 92 machine gun; some later models also had a Type 92 in each wing.
Long Enough, Strong Enough The 34-foot-9-inch fuselage was the most a carrier’s deck elevators could accommodate.
The Competition
Fatal Fish B5Ns carried the Type 91 torpedo, a paragon of reliability and power. Alternately, Kates could haul 1,760 pounds of other types of ordnance.
British Fairey Barracuda • Crew: 3 • Top speed: 228 mph • Weight: 7 tons • Range: 686 miles • Arms: 2 7.7mm rear-facing machine guns • Production: about 2,607 • At first the Barracuda hydraulic system, whose fluid contained ether, tended to spring small leaks, often at the pressure gauge, spraying the narcotic into the faces of airmen wearing no oxygen masks. Multiple crews died in crashes until engineers diagnosed and corrected the fatal sedation problem. American Grumman Avenger • Crew: 3 • Top speed: 275 mph • Weight: 9 tons • Ceiling: 30,000 feet • Range: 1,000 miles • Arms: 1 30-cal. nose machine gun or 2 .50cal. wing machine guns, 1 dorsal .50-cal. machine gun, 1 .30-cal. ventral machine gun, 8 3.5- or 5-inch rockets, 1 Mark 13 torpedo or 2,000 lb. bombs • Production: 9,839 • Grumman held the official opening of its first Avenger plant, on Long Island, New York, on December 7, 1941. The TBF’s stolidity and size—it was the heaviest single-engine plane of the war—led to the nickname “turkey,” but it was rugged and versatile.
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During the war, an American flies a captured, repainted Kate stateside for aircraft identification training.
Of the 1,149 Kates produced, enough lasted to be used as kamikazes, like this one ground crews are saluting.
Workhorse Wings The first B5Ns had hydraulic folding wings but the navy demanded a simpler, more reliable manual mechanism.
Motor Muscle The 1,000-horsepower second-generation Sakae engine pushed the Kate’s top speed to 235 mph. The Kate had a ceiling of 27,100 feet and a range of 1,237 miles.
PHOTOS: ABOVE, KINGENDAI PHOTO LIBRARY/AFLO/CORBIS; OPPOSITE, NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Outclassed but Still Punching Japan’s Nakajima B5N torpedo bomber The carrier-based B5N, which the Allies nicknamed “Kate,” peaked early. Even its 1938 combat debut against the Chinese showed that the aircraft needed armor to protect its fuel tanks and three-man crew. Too heavy, said the Imperial Navy, which instead had Nakajima install a bigger engine, hoping pilots could outrun pursuers. Delays in an update made the B5N Japan’s main torpedo bomber through the war. On December 7, 1941, a force that included 143 Kates left carriers off Hawaii to attack Pearl Harbor; a Kate from Hiryu sank the battleship USS Arizona. In May 1942,
at the Battle of the Coral Sea, Kate crews damaged carrier USS Yorktown and so disabled carrier USS Lexington it had to be scuttled. A month later at Midway, 81 of 93 Kates went down, but heavily damaged enemy warships; in October at the Battle of Santa Cruz Islands, Kates helped sink the carrier USS Hornet. Late in the war, superior Allied design and aircraft production, plus harsh attrition among Japan’s carriers and carrier aviators, relegated the B5N to a primary role of trainer and target tug. Kates also made antisubmarine sorties and kamikaze runs. No intact specimens survive. NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
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Post-Pearl Harbor jitters had troops in the Philippines ready to believe an attack was taking place—and newsrooms all too ready to run good news in bad times 62
WORLD WAR II
Imaginary g Invasion BY JOSEPH CONNOR
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
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Japanese aggression had the Philippines shuddering with fear and dismay. Though Filipinos knew their archipelago was a prime target for the empire, islanders at first clung to an unrealistic sense of security. Filipinos revered Lieutenant General Douglas MacArthur, commander of U.S. Army Forces in the Far East, who had his headquarters in Manila, the capital. “Everybody thought the [Japanese] planes would come over Manila and our boys would knock them out and it would be pretty as hell to watch,” Associated Press correspondent Clark Lee wrote.
But only eight hours after imperial forces struck Pearl Harbor, Japanese pilots sortied against Clark Field, 50 miles from Manila, and smaller Iba Field, 70 miles north of Clark. The raiders destroyed 18 heavy bombers, 56 fighters, and 25 or 30 other aircraft, mostly on the ground, a mortal blow to Filipinos’ sense of safety. That Manila itself had not been bombed “did not restore the structure of imagined security,” Time correspondent John Hersey wrote. “Nothing could now.” On December 10, Japanese fliers, mostly unopposed, destroyed the naval base at Cavite, south of Manila. Amid sooty clouds and flames, civilians could not see what was happening at the U.S. Asiatic Fleet home port, “but it looked
smoky and dusty and bad,” Hersey reported. Despite MacArthur’s steady barrage of optimistic communiqués, Allied forces seemed inert. “Where are the American planes which they said were sent to defend these Islands?” asked Father Juan Labrador, a Dominican priest. The government ordered blackouts; in response, anxious policemen fired at any stray illumination. The first wartime shots many of Manila’s 684,000 inhabitants heard were “rifles and revolvers fired at automobiles with dimmed headlights or at windows through which a crack of light was shining,” Lee noted. The fusillades contributed “almost as much as a wave of enemy bombers to keeping the city restless in
THIS PAGE AND PRECEDING, NATIONAL ARCHIVES
U.S. Asiatic Fleet facilities at the port of Cavite burn after a mostly unopposed Japanese attack on December 10, 1941.
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Filipino constables round up Japanese nationals in Manila on the first day of the war.
CARL MYDANS/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
Officials arrested air-raid wardens for spreading a falsehood that the Japanese had poisoned Manila’s water. Some individuals, certain the poison tale was true, sought emergency medical care. bed,” recalled Teodoro Locsin Sr., publisher of the weekly Philippine Free Press. Officials rounded up Japanese nationals as suspected saboteurs and arrested Filipinos, including air-raid wardens, for spreading a falsehood that the Japanese had poisoned Manila’s water. Some individuals, certain the poison tale was true, sought emergency medical care. On December 11, the tide appeared to be turning. Word swept Manila of a decisive home-side victory at Lingayen Gulf, about 125 miles north. The exhilarating news had the invading Japanese repelled by Filipino troops, who sank landing craft and slaughtered the attackers. In Manila, Major LeGrande A. Diller, MacArthur’s public relations officer, confirmed to the press that defenders had thrown back a Japanese landing force. There was only one problem: not a single word of the Lingayen invasion story was true.
I
n late 1941 MacArthur had about 31,000 U.S. Army soldiers and airmen, a head count that included 11,900 Philippine Scouts—well-trained indigenous troops
in American uniform. MacArthur’s main force was the 120,000-man Philippine Army, many of whose units were poorly equipped and only partly trained. The archipelago lay across trade routes linking Japan to Southeast Asia and its oil and minerals, and American military planners had long recognized that west Luzon’s Lingayen Gulf was a likely spot for a Japanese invasion. The gulf lay only about 400 miles south of Japanese-held Formosa and within 125 miles of Manila, prize of any invader’s campaign. Roads out of Lingayen would allow the Japanese to march quickly on the capital. To defend the 120 miles of gulf coast, MacArthur assigned two Philippine Army divisions. The 11th Division covered the east shore. Covering the southern shore, the likeliest landing zone, were the 21st Division’s 8,000 troops, who wore blue fatigues, carried World War I-era bolt-action Springfield or Model 1917 Enfield rifles, and had .30-caliber and .50-caliber machine guns. The men were spread “butter thin” across their position, said Colonel Richard C. Mallonée, an American serving as an instructor with the unit. To cover 30 miles NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
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Fear of the unknown triggered jumpiness among defenders— here on Corregidor—throughout the Philippine archipelago.
a reputation as a no-nonsense commander. MacArthur’s headquarters accepted Capinpin’s report at face value, confirming the news and releasing a communiqué. Reporters in Manila representing wire services and American newspapers jumped on this topic, quickly banging out copy that they cabled to newsrooms around the world. Once, Americans had been inclined to dismiss Japan as a thirdrate power, but Pearl Harbor had left them fearing that the empire was unstoppable. The specter of Japanese attacks— perhaps even an invasion—was terrifying the West Coast. On December 14, as they unfolded their Sunday papers, American readers received unexpectedly good news. “Japanese Forces Wiped Out In Western Luzon,” the New York Times bannered its front page. “Lingayen Regained From Japanese,” another headline proclaimed. “Filipinos Beat Off 154 Enemy Boats,” read another account. Allied troops “were credited officially with having disposed of the Japanese forces that had landed in the Lingayen area about 110 miles north of Manila,” according to the Associated Press. United Press reported a three-day battle, claiming defenders had “blasted 154 motorboat loads of invading Japanese soldiers without letting one of them reach land alive.” Lingayen was not the only phantom battle reported. A wire-service story describing the bogus December 10 invasion cited an eyewitness’s account of a separate “coordinated attack” on Luzon by Japanese paratroopers “killed while dangling from their parachutes” or captured on the ground. As at Lingayen, no such assault occurred. The optimistic coverage lasted two days before rapidly unfolding news from the Atlantic and Pacific, much of it bad, pushed Lingayen Gulf into the background. However, in Manila, Life magazine photographer Carl Mydans, who had come to renown as one of the Farm Service Administration photographers who documented the Depression, saw a chance to get into the next issue. Mydans, 34, packed his cameras and hurried to Lingayen to memorialize the aftermath of the great battle, the only correspondent to go to the scene. The Life lens man found the beach smooth, the waters placid, and troops of the 21st Division resting beside their weapons. Seeing Mydans’s puzzlement, an American major approached with a smile. “Looking for bodies?” the officer asked, gently explaining that there had been no Japanese landing. Mydans
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
of coast, the 21st Field Artillery had two dozen 75mm field guns, including eight wooden-wheeled relics of horse-drawn artillery’s heyday. Mallonée positioned his gun crews and their weapons at the water’s edge. Filipino soldiers were not immune to the fear gripping their civilian counterparts. At night, during the war’s first few days, troops defending northern Luzon reported seeing rockets, flares, and strange aerial lights—maybe fifth columnists. When soldiers investigated, however, “we met the probable flare shooters who were themselves excitedly looking for traitors,” Mallonée reported. The troops dug in and waited. At around midnight on December 10, observers with the 21st Division reported seeing “dark shapes” approaching the mouth of the Agno River at Lingayen Gulf. A skeptical Mallonée thought troops were looking at waves striking a sandbar but authorized a 75mm battery to fire. That volley galvanized the inexperienced troops. “It was like dropping a match in a warehouse of Fourth of July fireworks,” Mallonée recalled. “Instantly, Lingayen Gulf was ablaze around its perimeter, as far as the eye could see, with shell bursts, machine-gun tracer bullets, and small arms.” But dawn revealed no signs of fighting. No bodies littered the beaches. No ruined vessels careened in the Lingayen shallows. Mallonée doubted the Japanese had attempted to land; only “thousands of shadows” had perished, he said. Even so, 21st Division commander Brigadier General Mateo Capinpin promptly notified MacArthur’s headquarters that his men had thwarted a Japanese landing. Capinpin, 54, had served in both the U.S. and Philippine armies and had
Accounts of the imaginary invasion appeared in the New York Times and Life magazine—as well as in General Douglas MacArthur’s postwar memoirs.
Americans feared the empire was unstoppable. But as they unfolded their Sunday newspapers on December 14,1941, American readers got some unexpected good news. returned to Manila, found Diller, and told him what he had learned. The army publicist shrugged. His release said otherwise, Diller replied. Even Life reported the phantom landings: Japanese “attempt landing at Lingayen Dec. 10, are repulsed Dec. 13,” the January 5, 1942, issue declared.
NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
J
apanese military men had, in fact, been in Lingayen Gulf the night of December 10—but not in force and not to invade. A crew in a small boat, probably launched from one of several Japanese outposts newly established in far northern Luzon, had motored into the gulf to conduct reconnaissance for landings to occur later in the month. The impromptu Filipino army barrage missed the scouts and their vessel but gave away the 21st Division’s position, which the enemy scouts recorded. On December 22, when Japanese troops really did invade at Lingayen, they avoided the area where their earlier probe had received a hot welcome. The force quickly established a beachhead and began driving south toward Manila. The 11th and 21st Divisions withdrew, eventually joining Filipino and American units retreating to the Bataan penin-
sula, between Manila Bay and the South China Sea. Hoping for resupply and reinforcement, that cobbled-together force held out until, on April 9, 1942, American commander Major General Edward P. King surrendered more than 70,000 American and Filipino troops, including the 11th and 21st Divisions and the 21st’s commander, General Mateo Capinpin, who would go on to survive the Bataan Death March and prisoner of war camps that claimed many of these men. Capinpin, who had propelled the bogus battle story into the headlines, did not speak again of the incident, which after the war found its way into history. The shootout that never was appears in MacArthur’s official postwar report on his campaigns (“An enemy landing was attempted in the Lingayen area, but was repulsed by a Philippine Army division…”) and his 1964 autobiography Reminiscences (“The enemy…attempted a landing in the Lingayen area, but was repulsed with severe loss by a Philippine Army division….”). Writer John Hersey had a more realistic take. As the war began, civilians and soldiers in the Philippines “were for a brief spell committed to fear,” Hersey wrote. “And they went out foraging for fear’s food, which is rumor.” 2 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
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REVIEWS [
BOOKS
]
Hiding in Plain Sight
Though Jewish, Marie Jalowicz Simon (above) remained in Berlin through the war. She evaded deportation by concealing her identity, always skirting danger.
UNDERGROUND IN BERLIN A Young Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany By Marie Jalowicz Simon. 366 pp. Little, Brown, 2015. $28.
LEFT, HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; HERMANN SIMON
I
n 1942, Marie Jalowicz Simon, just 20 years old, threw away her yellow star and became a “submariner,” one of an estimated 1,700 Jews who escaped death by assuming false identities in Nazi Germany. Hers was an extraordinary feat—surviving the Holocaust in the Third Reich’s wartime capital. Simon’s adventures began simply enough. After seeing so many of her friends and relatives deported, she decided to skip work at an armaments factory. She visited a forced labor office
instead, and, pretending to be a nosy neighbor, declared that one Marie Jalowicz Simon had been sent to the East. Officially, she ceased to exist. “I did not want to belong to the community of death,” she recalled. “I wanted to live.” Simon fled Germany and reached Bulgaria only to find that the Nazis were busy rounding up that country’s Jews for planned deportation. She realized she would be safer back in Berlin. Simon again submerged amidst Berlin’s working class, surrounded by people prepared to risk their lives to help her, unlike, as she put it, the “educated German bourgeoisie who had failed.” Ironically, some of the worst “catchers”—people hired by the Nazis to track down those of her ilk— were Jews themselves.
Simon was extraordinarily lucky. She had vanished into a city where Nazis deported almost every Jew as death mills worked overtime to annihilate nearly 90 percent of the prewar Jewish population. She dyed her hair, slept rough, and even prostituted herself, doing whatever was necessary to stay “submerged.” For three long years Simon lived like a hunted rat: always on the run, never sure whom she could trust, yet never losing hope that she would defy the odds and somehow avoid detection by the Gestapo or betrayal by those she sought shelter with. “The survival of every single submerged person was based on a chain of coincidences that was hard to believe and often wonderful,” she recalled. “I lived on a tightrope.” NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
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REVIEWS
Thankfully, Simon was a skilled actress and a quick thinker. Indeed, it took enormous sang-froid to share an apartment with a particularly rabid Nazi with venereal disease who bragged to her face that he could “smell Jews a mile off.” On one occasion, a different male roommate lashed out at her in rage. Simon took the blows stoically.
Late in the war, amidst vast ruins, Simon took revenge of sorts on her tormentors by defecating on the doorsteps of Berliners whose names sounded German enough to be Nazis. But her greatest act of defiance was survival itself. Fortunately, she was able to recount her experiences to her son before her death in 1998, ensuring
[
BOOKS
that her story lives on in this important book. At times impossibly tense, Underground in Berlin is a haunting testament to the power of the human spirit, with the considerable advantage of reading like a well-crafted thriller. —Best-selling writer Alex Kershaw’s most recent work is Avenue of Spies (Crown, 2015).
]
Civilians Stranded but Valiantly Saved RESCUE AT LOS BAÑOS The Most Daring Prison Camp Raid of World War II By Bruce Henderson. 366 pp. William Morrow, 2015. $27.99.
T
he outbreak of the war with Japan stranded at least 10,000 American civilians inside the Japanese Empire. Some, like their Japanese counterparts stuck in the United States, were diplomats whose repatriation was assured, though not easily accomplished. Meanwhile, there was no telling how others—journalists, business people, doctors, teachers, students, even tourists—would fare. These inno-
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cents became human pawns in an aspect of the Pacific conflict in which the Allies, primarily the Americans and British, came up short: There were simply many more trapped Allied civilians eager for repatriation than there were comparable Japanese civilians. Carefully negotiated exchanges brought many home—small comfort for the excess in this bizarre “balance of trade.” Japanese Empire outposts swelled with “guests” whom “hosts” were unwilling to repatriate or treat humanely. Bruce Henderson’s Rescue at Los Baños is a bracing account of the ultimate deliverance of more than
2,000 American and Allied civilian internees and a small number of military POWs trapped in a Japanese internment camp south of Manila. World War II literature is replete with POW ordeals; stellar examples include Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides and Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. Rescue at Los Baños is a worthy addition to the genre, with the distinction that the prisoners are predominantly noncombatants, rather than soldiers. Henderson’s agents of mercy are the U.S. Army’s 11th Airborne Division paratroopers who, abetted by Philippine guerillas and an amtrac battalion, spring the captives in a well-coordinated daybreak assault. The rescue was a risky venture, coming as it did on February 23, 1945, just weeks after the POW rescue from Luzon’s Cabanatuan prison camp. But the specific timing helped immensely: when paratroopers arrived, most Los Baños guards were unarmed and in their skivvies, doing morning exercises outside the gates. Human stories—civilian and military—anchor the book. Although most are cobbled from previously available sources, they are no less appealing. One particularly rending account concerns Margaret Sherk, an American wife and mother, separated from her POW husband Bob, a languishing survivor of the
CARL MYDANS/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
More than 2,000 civilian internees survived ever-worsening conditions at Los Baños prison camp, near Manila.
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REVIEWS
infamous Bataan Death March. Henderson finds ready villains in the Japanese guards. Los Baños was located in a bounteous region, yet captors systematically starved internees—and may even have plotted their massacre. Worst is Warrant Officer Sadaaki Konishi, a petty tyrant ultimately convicted of
war crimes and sentenced to death. In the book’s closing passages Henderson offers new revelations on Konishi’s trial and convoluted fate. It is one last piece of chilling narrative that sets Rescue at Los Baños apart from lesser escape capers. —David Sears is the author of Pacific Air and a contributor to World War II.
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AMERICAN KNIGHTS The Untold Story of the Men of the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion By Victor Failmezger. 352 pp. Osprey, 2015. $25.95. In North Africa and Europe, tank destroyer units often delivered a killing punch against German armor. Knights tells one outfit’s story in compellingly human terms.
HIT THE TARGET Eight Men Who Led the Eighth Air Force to Victory over the Luftwaffe By Bill Yenne. 370 pp. NAL Caliber, 2015. $26.95. Readers who associate the air war over Europe with 50-mission crush hats, leather jackets, and Big Band music will find in Yenne’s thoughtful interconnected profiles a sky’s worth of canny tactical thinking, aerial horror, and boundless courage.
THE ORPHEUS CLOCK The Search for My Family’s Art Treasures Stolen by the Nazis By Simon Goodman. 353 pp. Scribner, 2015. $28. Surviving the Nazis by severing Old World ties, the Gutmann family cut off the next generation from its Jewish roots. Recounting his immersion in the lives that begat his own, the author excavates in deft, dynamic, and deeply felt prose a heritage lost and, to a degree, recovered.
STAY THE RISING SUN The True Story of USS Lexington, Her Valiant Crew, and Changing the Course of WWII
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WORLD WAR II
By Phil Keith. 234 pp. Zenith, 2015. $30. The Lexington may have gone down in the Coral Sea, but this carrier will sail forever in the memories of those who, like Keith, know how to recognize heroism. —Michael Dolan is the senior editor of World War II.
REVIEWS
Wise Beyond Their Years MY BROTHER’S SECRET By Dan Smith. 293 pp. Chicken House,
[
GAMES
]
A Solitary Faceoff
2015. $16.99.
DAN VERSSEN GAMES
M
ost young adult books about the war are told from the Allied or Jewish perspective and clearly show good versus evil. It’s not often that you find a book with a Nazi boy hero. In My Brother’s Secret I learned about what Germans, especially youth, experienced during World War II. Karl Friedmann is an eager member of the Deutsches Jungvolk who looks forward to joining the Hitler Youth. Karl even turns his older brother, Stefan, over to the Gestapo ϐ Ǥ
ϐ
Karl discovers that Stefan is a member of the German resistance, the Edelweiss Pirates. When the boys’ soldier father dies in Russia, Karl begins to doubt that dying for the Nazis is something to be proud of, and loses faith in the Führer. Too young to join the Edelweiss Pirates, Karl and his friend Lisa become
ϐ Youth. They stay one step ahead of local Gestapo Kriminalinspektor Gerhard Wolff, who eventually arrests Stefan for hanging resistance posters. As a bombing distracts the town, Karl and Lisa face Wolff to break Stefan out of jail. I couldn’t put this book down. The action is fast-paced and suspenseful. I didn’t know if I could connect with the Nazi-obsessed Karl, but as the book progressed I was inspired by his courage to do the right thing. I would recommend this book to young adults interested in exploring another side of the war and the struggles it brought to German families. —Jamie Anderson is a 13-year-old eighth grader. He enjoys history, politics, and running cross country.
TIGER LEADER The World War II Ground Combat Solitare Strategy Game Dan Verssen Games, 2015. $89.99. World War II Rating
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
THE BASICS: Dan Verssen Games, founded in 2002, is a relative newcomer to the wargame scene, but the company has carved out a niche with “solitaire” wargames—essential for players who love board games but have trouble finding opponents. Tiger Leader joins the ranks of similar solo DVG offerings like Field Commander Rommel and U-Boat Leader.
THE OBJECTIVE: Tiger Leader is a tactical-level game recreating combat on every German front from 1939 to 1945. Using a point system, the player creates a German Kampfgruppe (“battle group”) that he or she commands. A card draw determines both the session’s objective and the makeup of a comparable enemy force, as well as the opposing force’s actions.
HISTORICAL ACCURACY: Outstanding. The player can only use units that existed in the specified time frame—no deploying a Panther tank into 1940 France. The vicissitudes of combat are well-represented, too. Tanks explode; vehicle suspensions break; infantry units panic. The cardboard game counters are accurate and highly detailed.
PLAYABILITY: Tiger Leader has increasing levels of difficulty, so, like German commanders, as you gain experience, challenges become more complex. The solo gameplay is impressive, though deploying enemy troops against yourself requires self-discipline. The geomorphic mapboard and random card draw ensure no two games will be the same.
THE GOOD, BAD, AND UGLY: The true gem of the game is that each session is not just one battle, but an entire campaign. The player must consider not only the tactical mission at hand, but the next one as well. If you “win” the battle with 90 percent casualties, you’ll still lose the game. One small drawback: the rules are not easy to follow at first.
THE BOTTOM LINE: The game components are beautifully rendered and a real joy to handle, and the mapboard itself is tactically challenging without being intrusive. A perfect answer to someone who enjoys a good board game but doesn’t have opponents in the neighborhood. —Chris Ketcherside, a former Marine, is working on a PhD in military history.
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Battle Films
Command Performance By Mark Grimsley
HE OSCAR-nominated rendition of a speech Patton soundtrack to the Oscarmade to his troops. The track winning 1970 film Patton is begins with the fanfare, which almost as synonymous with Goldsmith meant to convey that movie as George C. Scott’s “the archaic part of [Patton], Oscar-winning portrayal of the historical, the intelGeneral George S. Patton. It is lectual part of him.” These one of the great scores in cinrepeating tripled trumpet ematic history. Anyone who notes—“dah-dah-dah, dah-dahhas seen Patton instantly recdah, dah-dah-dah”—may be ognizes the main theme. But this distinctive score’s most few know how deliberately distinctive part. The composer composer Jerry Goldsmith drew inspiration from Pat(1929–2004) approached his ton’s conviction that throughcomposition’s iconic elements. out human history he had Long before Patton, Goldfought in multiple lives as a smith had mastered his craft. warrior. In the film Scott’s Four of his scores had earned character invokes this belief Academy Award nominations; several times, particularly at an ultimately he collected 18, ancient Carthaginian battlewinning in 1976 for The Omen. field where Patton declares, “I Unlike film composers whose was here.” To create the effect, work sounds much the same, Goldsmith ran the trumpeters’ Goldsmith tailored his scores playing through an Echoplex, a to each project. One would device that caused the tripling never guess from Patton, for to fade gradually into silence. example, that he also wrote the An organ, low and magisteAn inventive score underlines a famous 1970 film portrayal smoky soundtrack for 1974 film rial, joins the horns. This is the of an American general as near-mythical figure. noir Chinatown, ranked ninth chorale, intended to represent The composer never viewed Patton on the American Film Institute list of the Patton’s religious side. A single piccolo as a war film, he told an interviewer in 25 greatest scores. On that roster, Goldintroduces the theme. The melody, 2002. Instead, Goldsmith saw it as the smith is one of only five composers cited jaunty but innocent, would have been biography of a “complex personality”—a more than once. His other AFI entry, at home in one of director John Ford’s man of war, a man of faith, and a man at 18, is his score for 1968’s Planet of affectionate Old West cavalry films, of intellect—and discovered a way to the Apes. To reflect the bizarre world of and suggests Patton’s beau ideal of depict those aspects musically through Apes, Goldsmith incorporated among the soldiering. The full orchestra takes up theme, chorale, and fanfare. “Theme,” of distinctive sounds the theme, which the musicians repeat course, refers to a musical composition’s a ram’s horn, a Bratwice. Now the track strides into march principal melody; “chorale,” to a harmozilian drumhead time, redolent of Patton’s love for battle, nized, hymn-like passage; and “fanfare” device that closely before beginning to wind down. The WATCH to a brief ceremonial flourish played on imitated ape vocaltheme repeats twice again; the organ THE MOVIE FOR FREE! brass instruments. Goldsmith designed izations, and even a becomes dominant, augmented by Use the code the Patton score “so that all three could steel kitchen mixing the tripled brass notes, and finally nothPATTONRENT to stream the be played simultaneously or individually bowl. His score for ing remains but the trumpets, which film from our or one or two at a time.” Patton was just as echo away. sister company CinemaNow.com. The three appear in the title track, carefully conceived Some scores attempt to tell a listener Code valid until which plays after Scott’s tour de force and innovative. how to feel. Francis Lai’s Love Story 1/1/2016. 74
WORLD WAR II
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score, which beat Goldsmith’s for the 1971 Academy Award, is of that sort. Not so the Patton soundtrack, which sometimes does function as commentary—as at Kasserine Pass, where the trumpets struggle against ugly dissonance, contrasting Patton’s idealized view of combat with the horrors of an actual battlefield’s charred vehicles and strewn corpses. But mainly Goldsmith’s compositions reflect Patton’s state of mind, with tripling most prominent in scenes that involve him. The trumpets are notably absent from “No Assignment,” the track for a sequence in which Patton has lost his command for slapping a shell-shocked soldier during the 1943 Sicily campaign. “No Assignment” is slow and mournful, as if Patton’s self-image has collapsed. Goldsmith mutes his motif in “The Hospital”; contemplative French horns, not strident trumpets, play the tripled notes. The composer meant this gentle track, filled with compassion for the wounded soldiers Patton visits at a field hospital, to create sympathy for Patton so that at mid-scene, when an uncharacteristically subdued Patton erupts at that shell-shocked soldier, strikes him, and rages, “You’re just a goddamned
The composer used a gentle track to create sympathy for Patton so a violent about-face is all the more disturbing. coward!” the violent about-face is all the more disturbing. The track appears on the soundtrack album but not in the film; Goldsmith and producer Frank McCarthy agreed that the music didn’t work—or rather, that it worked too well. “It did create sympathy for Patton, so much sympathy that you thought he was justified in the act,” the composer said. Given that we so closely identify this score with the film, it is almost astonishing to realize that in its entirety the music lasts only 39 minutes, a fraction of Patton’s 170-minute running time. But when the music is playing it recalls George C. Scott’s comment on the main requisite for great acting: “joy in performance.” Goldsmith’s score for Patton has joy in abundance. 2 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
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Challenge
ANSWERS to the July/August Challenge
What the…?!? The Panzer VII Maus, weighing over 200 tons
Hollywood Howlers Versatile actor Nicolas Cage has played weapons merchants, infantrymen, and many other manly characters. In USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage, due to premiere in 2016, Cage will head the cast of a film that recounts one of the war’s most excruciating episodes. By then, this advance promotional poster may have been deep-sixed for an excruciating goof. What’s wrong with this image?
Name That Patch Hollywood Howlers Ampicillin was not developed until 1961
ANSWERS, FROM TOP: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES; PARAMOUNT PICTURES/PHOTOFEST; GUY ACETO COLLECTION; HOWLERS, HISTORYNET ARCHIVES; WHAT THE, BUNDESARCHIVE BILD 101I-554-0872-07 PHOTO PIRATH, HELMUTH; PATCH, HISTORYNET ARCHIVES
Name That Patch The U.S. 9th Fighter Squadron, the “Flying Knights”
Which unit wore this insignia?
What the...?!? Identify this winged behemoth.
Congratulations to the winners: Grayson Richmond, TJ Obora, and Bill Fernandez
Please send your answers to all three questions, and your mailing address, to: November/December 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 December 15, will receive the book Avenue of Spies by Alex Kershaw. Answers will appear in the March/April 2016 issue.
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
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WORLD
WAR II
Paper Doll Innocent yet sexy, Miss Lace—a creation of cartoonist Milton Caniff—was the heroine of the slyly sensual comic strip Male Call, which ran in more than 3,000 military camp newspapers during the war. “Miss Lace became the single central figure both because she had one,” Caniff explained, “and because a pretty girl is a nice thing to look at even if she is a paper doll.” She preferred enlisted men, always calling her companion “general” or “admiral”; no wonder
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WORLD WAR II
servicemen loved her back. Miss Lace, an aircraft nose art favorite, is among the most popular comic strip pinup girls ever. Caniff ended Male Call six months after V-J Day. But for years afterward he honored requests to draw Miss Lace for military reunion programs. Now plans are afoot to bring her back again; a California company is developing a Miss Lace cartoon series, set for first release in late 2016 or early 2017. Cherchez la femme.
©2015 THE ESTATE OF ESTHER PARSONS CANIFF/HARRY GUYTON EXECUTOR/CLASSIC COOL; ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Pinup
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