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DEATH OF A HATED MAN Submariners load a Mark 18 torpedo aboard their vessel in July 1945.
A broken Japanese code allowed the U.S. to target Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
WAS KILLING YAMAMOTO A MISTAKE?
MACARTHUR’S WALK INTO PHOTO FAME TRUE FICTION ON GUADALCANAL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017
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JA N U A R Y/ F E B R UA R Y 2 017 E N D O R S E D B Y T H E N AT I O N A L WO R L D WA R I I M U S E U M , I NC. F E AT U R E S COVER STORY
30 DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD
44 THE THIN RED TRUTH
60 THREE-WHEEL RUMBLER
Killing Admiral Yamamoto threatened to expose America’s key strategic advantage in the Pacific JOSEPH CONNOR
Each man fought his own war—on Guadalcanal and in James Jones’s novel PAUL MAGGIONI
Germany’s BMW R75 motorcycle and sidecar deftly handled rough conditions ILLUSTRATION BY JIM LAURIER
40 SHORE PARTY During his famed return to the Philippines, Douglas MacArthur quickly recognized the power of a photograph JOSEPH CONNOR
2
WEAPONS MANUAL
PORTFOLIO
54 THE VIEW For this German-born GI, guarding German POWs in the United States was a surreal experience
62 UNSTOPPABLE FORCE Allied commanders in occupied Germany tried in vain to restrict troops’ interactions with civilians—women in particular SUSAN L. CARRUTHERS
D E PA RT M E N T S
10 WORLD WAR II TODAY
24 FIRE FOR EFFECT
74 BATTLE FILMS
The homesick wife who threatened the D-Day invasion; how long should secrets last?
The price of war—in vivid color ROBERT M. CITINO
A unusual brand of hero in Hell is for Heroes MARK GRIMSLEY
20 CONVERSATION
26 TIME TRAVEL
Bob Balkam’s job as an army air traffic controller took him from Omaha Beach to Belgium to Germany MICHAEL DOLAN
Looking back 75 years to the fierce Battle of Crete HEIDI FULLER-LOVE
22 FROM THE FOOTLOCKER
70 REVIEWS
Curators at The National World War II Museum solve readers’ artifact mysteries
Hitler’s Soldiers; reassessing Germany’s lightning war; Hearts of Iron IV game
IN EVERY ISSUE
8 MAIL 79 CHALLENGE 80 PINUP
An American soldier chats with a German woman in Berlin, August 1945. By that time, “anti-fraternization” rules had been relaxed in post-war Germany. MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES; COVER: WORLD HISTORY GROUP ARCHIVE/ALAMY
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017
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WWII Online Visit us at WorldWarII.com
Michael A. Reinstein CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER David Steinhafel ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Alex Neill EDITOR IN CHIEF
VOL. 31, NO. 5 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017
EDITOR
KAREN JENSEN Paraag Shukla SENIOR EDITOR Rasheeda Smith ASSOCIATE EDITOR Jon Guttman, Jerry Morelock HISTORIANS David Zabecki CHIEF MILITARY HISTORIAN Paul Wiseman NEWS EDITOR Stephen Kamifuji CREATIVE DIRECTOR Brian Walker GROUP ART DIRECTOR Paul Fisher ART DIRECTOR Guy Aceto PHOTO EDITOR ADVISORY BOARD
Readers who enjoyed this issue’s “The View,” about German POWs held in the United States, will want to check out these features:
Coming to a Town Near You Americans on the home front had to cope with an unprecedented enemy invasion, as thousands of German POWs moved in for the duration By Ronald H. Bailey
Ed Drea, David Glantz, Jeffery Grey, Keith Huxen, John McManus, Williamson Murray, Dennis Showalter DIGITAL
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The Not-So-Great Escape This time, it was German POWs digging their way out of an Arizona prison camp, in a plot that was brilliant, daring, and farcical By Ronald H. Bailey
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Submariners load a Mark 18 torpedo aboard their vessel in July 1945.
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SUSAN L. CARRUTHERS (“Unstoppable Force”) is a professor of history at Rutgers University in Newark. She has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, and at Princeton University. She is the author of The Media at War (2011) and Cold War Captives (2009). Her story is drawn from her recent book, The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace, published this past November. JOSEPH CONNOR (“Have You Heard?” and “Shore Party”) has been fascinated by the World War II era since childhood. He graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson University with a bachelor’s degree in history and from Rutgers Law School with a juris doctor degree. After a seven-year stint as a newspaper reporter and editor in New Jersey, Connor worked for 27 years as an assistant county prosecutor. He retired in 2010, and lives with his wife, Carole, and three sons in New Jersey. HEIDI FULLER-LOVE (“Time Travel”) is a writer, photographer, and a radio personality for the iconic BBC series, From Our Own Correspondent. Her twin passions are history and travel. While based in Greece earlier this year, she visited Crete and found herself fascinated by the courage and tenacity of the natives and the Allied forces who fought by their side in the Battle of Crete.
USS ARIZONA UP CLOSE FIRST SHOTS AT PEARL JAPAN’S INFAMOUS TORPEDO
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JIM LAURIER (“Weapons Manual”) has been illustrating World War II’s Weapons Manual since 2011. As a pilot as well as a painter and author, he uses his experiences flying civil and military aircraft to bring realism to his aviation paintings. His artwork is displayed in both private and public collections, including those of the Pentagon, the U.S. Air Force, the History Channel, Columbia Pictures, Lockheed Martin, and the National Aviation Hall of Fame.
PAUL MAGGIONI (“The Thin Red Line between Fact and Fiction”) has spent 15 years as a contracted archaeologist and historian for the U.S. Army. Since reading The Thin Red Line as a teen, he has retained a fascination for both James Jones and the battle of Guadalcanal, which recently inspired him to work on the combat history of the 27th Infantry Regiment in World War II. He lives in Savannah, Georgia, as a senior project manager for LG2 Environmental Solutions.
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WORLD WAR II
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It reminds me of a man I met in the early ‘60s who flew his own small private plane. He was on a bomber crew during the war and said the trainers were cranking out pilots as fast as they could. The trainers were also convincing every pilot that they were one of the best in the air force—and the crews that their pilot was one of the best. He said that if he knew then what he knew now about piloting, he would have almost been afraid to fly with them. John Joines Las Vegas, Nev.
THE FEW, THE WHO? After surgery, McConnell served with the army’s 1111th Signal Company in Assam, India.
September/October was yet another great issue, but must say I am a bit disappointed about one thing. In your piece about correcting the Iwo Jima flag raisers’ identities, I really wish the photo on page 10 had named and pointed out all of the six flag raisers. Perhaps you could do this in a future issue. I think it would interest a lot of folks! Keep up the great work and thanks much. Bryan Moseley Albuquerque, N. Mex.
MEMORY LANE
SICK BAY SHENANIGANS
I
enjoyed the piece on the nurses of World War II (“Drafting Women,” September/October 2016). Before boarding a troopship for India as an 18-year-old draftee in 1943, I developed a hernia and was surgically repaired in an army hospital in New Orleans. At that time this meant 16 days in bed before setting a foot on the floor, providing more than enough time for me to develop plans for relieving boredom. Accordingly, one day, when our nurse, Lieutenant Walker, routinely inserted our daily oral thermometers, I stealthily removed mine and briskly rubbed it against the sheets until it registered about 104 degrees. I returned it to my mouth and attempted to assume a pathetic, semiconscious appearance. To my amusement, upon reading my thermometer, Nurse Walker exhibited appropriate dismay then hastily took a glass from my bedside table, half-filled it with rubbing alcohol, and slowly poured it over my head! Ellicott McConnell Easton, Md.
HIGH EXPECTATIONS I read your reply in “Ask WWII” (September/October 2016) regarding the number of air force personnel in training during World War II.
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WORLD WAR II
FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT I found your “Conversation with Simon Goodman” (September/October 2016) very interesting. Having seen the movie The Monuments Men—which is about a group of men trying to recover personal and historical art pieces from the Nazis during World War II—and seeing Mr. Goodman have his own personal quest for his family’s heritage, it reveals to me how the effects of the war are still very much active today, and how it has forever shaped our daily lives—for better or for worse. I wish Mr. Goodman the best of luck and that his family won’t be erased from my memory. Jack Nelson Tulsa, Okla.
COURTESY OF ELLICOTT MCCONNELL
MAIL
Your Portfolio, “Laugh Your Axis Off” (September/ October 2016), did just that for me. Back in 194950, I was eight or nine years old and my father worked in a factory around the corner from our apartment building. In nice weather when my dad was on lunch or a break, the men would sit on the sidewalk along the building in the shade to get some fresh air. Many times I would go there and sit with him. One of his coworkers gave me the folding puzzle of Hitler and I carried that in the pocket of my dungarees until it was worn out. My dad passed away only a year later. The instant that I turned the page and saw the puzzle, I had to laugh. It brought back so many good memories and it was nice remembering him and the old neighborhood. Thanks to Rasheeda Smith and the staff. Scott Jenkins Gallatin, Tenn.
EDITOR’S NOTE World War II readers never fail to amaze me. Collectively deeply knowledgable and passionate about the war, they are quick to call us out on factual missteps and to enlighten us, often drawing on their own experiences. The letters in this issue are a good example. Not only did we hear from a man who could identify the gas cape in our “What the...?!?” photo (below) but he filled us in on working at the plant that made them. Thank you, Robert W. Ouimette—and everyone else. Please keep it coming! —Karen Jensen
INTEGRATING THE NAVY In the September/October issue of “Mail,” you give the impression that before 1948 the only positions African Americans could hold in the navy were steward mates and cooks. In 1943 at the Casco Bay, Maine, recruiting station I met an African American man whose last name was Cobb. His rank was watertender first class. Cobb told me that he started out as a stoker on an old coal-burning ship. Also during World War II, there were two ships, the destroyer escort USS Mason (DE-529)
and the sub chaser USS PC-1264, both of which had predominantly black crews. George L. Rumble Moon Township, Pa. Editor’s Note: It is true there were only two U.S. Navy warships with mostly African American crewmembers, created after President Franklin D. Roosevelt received a letter from the NAACP requesting that African Americans be accepted into the navy for roles other than “messman” duties. The navy initially balked at the suggestion, but Roosevelt insisted on proceeding. Both the USS Mason (pictured above at its March 1944 commissioning, with commanding officer Lieutenant Commander William M. Blackford at center) and the USS PC-1264 served in the Atlantic in 1944-45.
TOP: U.S. NAVY; BOTTOM: POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES
GOT IT COVERED In September/October’s “Challenge,” the picture shown is a plastic gas cape manufactured at a plant called Arvey Corp. in Chicago. I was working there in the assembly department during 1944 and 1945 when I went into the navy. The company was located on Kimball Avenue, just south of Addison, Illinois. It employed mostly elderly women in that department. The cape’s lower portion was made of green plastic material and the top portion out of clear flexible material. Then the entire assembly was folded into a small package about four-by-eight inches and three-fourths of an inch thick. The department was temperature controlled to prevent the materials from sticking together. I never saw any of these in surplus stores after the war. Hope that helps identify the mystery image. Robert W. Ouimette Bradenton, Fla.
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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017
9
LIFTING THE VEIL OF SECRECY... 75 YEARS ON 10
WORLD WAR II
LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS. But do they still pose a threat more than seven decades after the fleet has sailed? Not necessarily, a federal judge ruled in September. On June 7, 1942, the Chicago Tribune delivered a front-page scoop by war correspondent Stanley Johnston: the U.S. Navy knew in advance the Japanese fleet’s plans at the ongoing Battle of Midway, including which enemy ships were involved and that the Japanese assault on the Aleutians was just a feint. The subsequent overwhelming American victory proved to be a turning point in the Pacific War. The newspaper’s revelation outraged President Franklin D. Roosevelt—political enemy of Tribune publisher Robert McCormick. After all, discerning readers could have realized some-
TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY
W W I I T ODAY R E PORTE D A N D W R I TTE N BY PAU L W I S E M A N
TOP, LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; TOP, RIGHT: COURTESY OF CLAUDETTE GILBERT BAYKO; CENTER: COURTESY OF AIMEE FOGG
In 1942, the Justice Department accused Chicago Tribune staff, including reporter Stanley Johnston (left, with managing editor J. Loy Maloney), of publishing classified information.
thing the Tribune had not explicitly stated: that the United States had cracked Japanese codes. So Roosevelt’s Justice Department began to assemble a legal case against Johnston and fellow Tribune reporters for violating the Espionage Act of 1917—apparently the only such prosecution brought against reporters. (For more on the difficulties of keeping America’s code-breaking a secret, see “Have You Heard?,” page 30.) Although Assistant Attorney General Wendell Berge thought the government’s case was “tenuous,” a special prosecutor nevertheless presented evidence to a grand jury, which ultimately decided against an indictment. Newsmen considered the decision a victory for free speech, but the proceedings stayed secret. Historian Elliot Carlson, currently working on a book about the Tribune case, has sought to have those papers unsealed. Lawyers for the Justice Department fought back, arguing not that the details of the decades-old case were still sensitive, but that grand jury proceedings must remain secret to protect witnesses and the privacy of those who came under investigation. On September 15, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit handed Carlson—and historians—a victory. By upholding a lower court decision, Judge Diane Wood ruled that historical significance “can be a sufficient reason” for lifting the veil “when there is little countervailing need for secrecy.” Writing for the Bloomberg View, Harvard University law professor Noah Feldman called the ruling “a win for democracy and a free press.” The government can still take the case to the full appeals court or the Supreme Court. As it turns out, the Japanese apparently never read the Chicago Tribune. Carlson notes that they continued to use the same old, compromised codes for the rest of the war.
After visiting her great uncle’s grave in Belgium, Aimee Fogg (below, in pink) began researching the stories of other GIs buried there, including David Gilbert (above).
BRINGING MEMORIES HOME AIMEE FOGG WAS THE FIRST MEMBER OF HER FAMILY to travel to the Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery in Hombourg, Belgium, to visit the grave of her great uncle. During the trip, she was struck by the realization that most of the cemetery’s 8,000 American war dead were not memorialized in their hometowns. So Fogg, a 37-year-old resident of Gilford, New Hampshire, set out to salvage their stories. She started with the 38 New Hampshire men buried at Henri-Chapelle, including her great uncle, Paul Lavoie, a 21-year-old soldier killed in the assault on the Schwammenauel Dam in February 1945. Fogg compiled those stories in a book, The Granite Men of Henri-Chapelle (2013). After telling the stories of those New Hampshire casualties, Fogg researched 25 Vermont casualties and is now writing about the 54 Maine men interred at Henri-Chapelle. “These men had families,” Fogg told the Bangor Daily News. “They had lives. They had children they probably never had the opportunity to meet…They sacrificed their lives for complete strangers. I call this project a celebration of life. It’s a chance for us, and my generation, to honor these men.” JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017
11
The RAF intended to use the new Avro Lincoln to bomb Japan.
APPRAISING AN UNEXPECTED DISCOVERY WHAT COULD THE HOT DOG KING OF CHICAGO possibly have in common with Japan’s greatest wartime admiral? Just possibly, a gold tooth. Dick Portillo, 76, the hot dog and Italian beef magnate who two years ago sold his fast-food empire for nearly $1 billion, owns a tooth that might have belonged to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. “I’ll do whatever it takes to find out,” Portillo told the Chicago Tribune. Yamamoto commanded the Japanese fleet and masterminded the attack on Pearl Harbor. After American code-breakers decrypted Japanese messages revealing Yamamoto’s travel plans, a group of American P-38 fighters intercepted his Mitsubishi G4M “Betty” bomber and shot it down, killing him on April 18, 1943. Portillo, a former Marine, has traveled repeatedly to Pacific battlefields. In July 2015, he visited the Yamamoto crash site in present-day Papua New Guinea. One of Portillo’s fellow adventurers, retired professor Anderson Giles, was crawling through the wreckage of Yamamoto’s aircraft when he spotted what he described as “this little glint that oozed up.” It turned out to be a tooth. Giles, who recalled that Yamamoto reportedly had been shot in the jaw by an American .50-caliber bullet, thought the tooth might have belonged to the admiral. A local clan chief demanded the tooth, forcing Portillo to finance a second trip to retrieve it—for $14,000. Portillo has sought the expertise of several historians and three dentists, who confirmed it is a human tooth and was removed by a violent act or trauma. Yamamoto biographer Yukoh Watanabe, in Yokohama City, Japan, cautioned the Tribune that since 11 men were aboard the bomber, it is unlikely that the tooth was Yamamoto’s. But as a lover of history, he says, he hopes it is. Portillo is trying to arrange a DNA test and says he would like to eventually return the tooth to the Japanese government—after making a documentary about the discovery.
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WORLD WAR II
A S K WW I I Q: Besides the United States, were aircraft from other Allied nations involved in bombing mainland Japan? —Walter Chesshir, Jourdanton, Texas A: The U.S. Twentieth Air Force conducted the only strategic bombing of the Japanese home islands. Soviet activity in the region was limited to tactical air support for its army in Manchuria and Korea. In 1944, Britain’s RAF Bomber Command began assembling Tiger Force, a group of 22 squadrons of Avro Lancasters, Avro Lincolns, and B-24 Liberators to strike Japan. The war ended before the unit was ready, and it was disbanded in October 1945. The only British aircraft to strike targets in Japan came from Task Force 57, a British component attached to the U.S. Fifth Fleet. On one such raid, an F4U Corsair piloted by Canadian Lieutenant Robert Hampton Gray flew low through heavy anti-aircraft fire and, although in flames, dropped a bomb onto the enemy ship Amakusa and sank it. Gray crashed and was killed; he posthumously received the last Victoria Cross of the war. —Jon Guttman SEND QUERIES TO: Ask World War II, 1919 Gallows Road, Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182, OR EMAIL:
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D I S PAT C H E S On September 3, Google devoted its daily Doodle to Malay resister and nurse Sybil Kathigasu, recognizing what would have been her 117th birthday. Kathigasu and her husband aided guerillas resisting the Japanese occupation. In 1943, she was arrested and tortured, but survived the war. She died in 1948. The Doodle, a modified Google logo celebrating events and people, depicts Kathigasu outside her home in Papan, Perak, Malaysia.
TOP, LEFT AND INSET: TERRENCE ANTONIO JAMES/CHICAGO TRIBUNE/VIA AP; TOP, RIGHT: INTERPHOTO/ALAMY; BOTTOM, RIGHT: GOOGLE
Dick Portillo is trying to determine if a gold tooth discovered on a South Pacific expedition is that of Japanese Admiral Yamamoto.
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IN 1946, a group of Jewish resistance fighters and Holocaust survivors calling themselves the “Avengers” hatched a wildly ambitious act of vengeance against the Nazis. They gathered enough arsenic to kill 60,000 people and spread it on 3,000 loaves of bread being served to German POWs in an American-run camp outside Nuremberg. The details of the plot, revealed in a 1947 U.S. military report obtained by the Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act, included its puzzling result: despite being poisoned, not a single German died, Joseph Harmatz (above) is one although 2,200 of them fell ill. of the Jewish “Avengers” who The idea started with resistance poisoned bread from a bakery fighter Abba Kovner, who wanted to (top) supplying a camp of poison the water supply at NuremGerman POWs. None died, but burg. But the plotters worried about 2,200 prisoners fell ill. killing innocent people and narrowed their focus. They found work at a bakery that supplied the nearby POW camp. On April 13, 1946, three Avengers spent two hours coating the bread with arsenic. Plotter and former resistance fighter Joseph Harmatz told the Guardian newspaper that their goal was simple: to “kill Germans.” Investigators found four water bottles filled with a mix of enough arsenic, glue, and water to “kill approximately 60,000 persons.” Why the plot failed so completely remains a mystery. The plotters may have spread the poison too thinly. Or perhaps the Nazis sensed there was something wrong with the bread and did not eat enough of it.
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WO R D F O R WO R D
“In the course of the practical implementation of the Final Solution, Europe will be combed through from west to east.” —SS General Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Holocaust, at the Wannsee Conference, January 20, 1942.
D I S PAT C H E S The U.S. Navy will name a new Arleigh Burke -class destroyer for Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone, who received the Medal of Honor for heroism at Guadalcanal and was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross after he was killed at Iwo Jima. The destroyer is being built at Maine’s Bath Iron Works and is expected to join the fleet in 2022.
TOP, LEFT: AP PHOTO; CENTER, LEFT: AP PHOTO/TSAFRIR ABAYOV; TOP, RIGHT: BUNDESARCHIVBILD 146-1969-054-16; BOTTOM, RIGHT: USMC PHOTO
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Frustrated by her dreary life in England, Araceli Gonzalez (left, with her husband in sunnier times) threatened to reveal the Allies’ invasion secrets.
U P DAT E H I T L E R H OU S E The Austrian house where Adolf Hitler was born will be either torn down or renovated to the extent that it will no longer be recognizable. In October, Austrian Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka initially said the site in Braunau would be demolished, but then later said it might just undergo a thorough redesign. Either way, the idea is the same: to discourage neo-Nazis from turning the three-story Renaissance-era home into a shrine.
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TOP (BOTH): NATIONAL ARCHIVES, LONDON; BOTTOM, LEFT: AP PHOTO/ KERSTIN JOENSSON; BOTTOM, RIGHT: PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY
AN UNEXPECTED THREAT TO THE NORMANDY INVASION
A HOMESICK SPANISH HOUSEWIFE, depressed by England’s weather and disgusted by its food, nearly exposed Allied plans for invading Nazi-occupied France, according to newly declassified British intelligence. Araceli Gonzalez de Pujol was the wife of double agent Juan Pujol Garcia (codename Garbo), who managed to convince the Germans that he was running a spy network on their behalf in Britain—and that the Allied invasion of France would target Pas de Calais instead of Normandy. British MI5 files recently transferred to the UK’s National Archives tell the story: Gonzalez was unhappy living with her husband and infant son in an MI5 safe house in the London suburbs. She missed her mother back in Spain, hated the dreary weather, and complained that English cuisine was overloaded with macaroni and potatoes and did not offer enough fish. Finally, she threatened to expose the Allies’ D-Day deception unless she could visit home. “I don’t want to live five minutes longer with my husband,” she shouted to MI5 officer Tomas Harris in June 1943, a year before the invasion. “Even if they kill me, I am going to the Spanish embassy.” The resourceful Pujol devised a scheme: to have MI5 tell his wife that he had been arrested because of her threats. MI5 even took her, blindfolded, to his purported cell in the Camp 020 interrogation center. As a result, she backed off and Pujol was released from his bogus incarceration. The Allies’ D-Day ruse succeeded, too, but the marriage did not last. Juan Pujol remarried and wound up running a book shop in Venezuela. He died in 1988.
L I M I T E D
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THE PIANIST Wladyslaw Szpilman (1946) “With the same title as the award-winning film, Szpilman’s book gives a personal and uncensored view of the conditions and challenges he faced in Warsaw throughout the war. This memoir on what it’s like to hide and survive in an abandoned city is excellent and invaluable. Szpilman almost becomes a part of the city, noting every detail that occurs from the start of the war and beyond.”
EMPIRE OF THE SUN J.G. Ballard (1984) “Loosely based on the author’s experiences, this harrowing book follows Jamie, a British boy whose family is living in Shanghai when the war breaks out. He is separated from his parents and interned by the Japanese. Seen through the eyes of an unusual eyewitness, this book is a poignant reminder of war’s impact on a person.”
THE HERO OF BUDAPEST The Triumph and Tragedy of Raoul Wallenberg Bengt Jangfeldt (2013) “Jangfeldt publicizes previously unknown facts about Wallenberg and sheds new light on what happened after the Soviets captured him. The use of never-before-seen photos of Wallenberg’s private life gives us a glimpse at the personal side of the humanitarian’s enduring legacy of rescue.”
CHRISTOPHER HUH HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR Christopher Huh wants everyone to heed history’s lessons. After learning about the Holocaust in the seventh grade, he decided to do something to engage his peers and spark their interest in history beyond the pages of their textbooks. So he researched, wrote, and illustrated a graphic novel about the Holocaust, called Keeping My Hope. Huh received praise for his book and is already at work on his next project: a graphic novel about Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish businessman and diplomat who saved 100,000 Hungarian Jews—the most rescued by a single person during the war.
LETTERS AND DISPATCHES 1924-1944 Raoul Wallenberg (1995) “Written by the man himself, Wallenberg’s inner thoughts are revealed in this collection of correspondence between him and his grandfather, who played a major role in Wallenberg’s life. The extensive exchange of thoughts, occurrences, and advice that helped to shape Wallenberg’s personality—and his eventual mission in Budapest—makes this a priceless archive of letters.”
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HIROSHIMA John Hersey (1946) “Hersey shows the magnitude of destruction that befell Hiroshima through first-hand accounts of survivors. His use of testimony serves to reveal the depth behind the countless stories and lives affected by the bomb, and how the fates of survivors became intertwined.”
RAOUL WALLENBERG The Heroic Life of the Man Who Saved Thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust Ingrid Carlberg (2016) “Probably the most extensively researched material on Wallenberg’s life before and during the war, with a detailed account of the events surrounding him. The amount of time and effort put into her research is evident with the inclusion of all aspects of Wallenberg’s life. His triumphs and troubles have never been highlighted so well.” Christopher Huh is a 2016 Davidson Fellow—one of only 20 students nationwide recognized by the Davidson Institute for Talent Development. His graphic novel, Keeping My Hope, was nominated for the Sophie Brody Award and has been translated and published in South Korea.
ILLUSTRATION BY PABLO (INCORPORATING A DRAWING BY CHRISTOPHER HUH)
W W I I T ODAY T H E R E A D I NG L I ST
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WWII C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H RO B E RT B A L K A M BY M ICH A E L DOL A N
CONTROL AMID CHAOS Bob Balkam, 95, grew up on the South Shore of Massachusetts. Between graduating from high school in 1938 and enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1942, he delivered newspapers, worked at a theater on Cape Cod, and drove for a salesman whose route included New Orleans, where Balkam met Laurin Cooper; they married just after he joined the army. After boot camp Balkam sailed aboard the Queen Mary to Britain where, as a private, he tested into Officer Candidate School and trained as an air traffic controller. Laurin enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps, made lieutenant, and was assigned to the Commandant’s office in Washington, DC. On June 16, 1944— D+10—Balkam’s unit landed at Omaha Beach to take over landing field A-1, carved from an orchard overlooking the English Channel.
What was going on at A-1 when you arrived? C-47s were flying in small-arms ammunition. A C-47 could land in 1,500 feet—half the length of our runway, which was made of wire mesh. We would tell pilots to go to the end and turn around. They never did. They would get halfway—near where our control truck sat—and lock a wheel and turn. Those locked wheels broke the mesh every time, which meant we would have to stop flying and bring in the engineers to repair the runway mesh. You arrived on D+10, but traces of D-Day remained. Men who had drowned that first day had sunk, then surfaced. Along the shore below the field, bodies were floating. Pilots with the 366th Fighter Group, which we supported, collected scrap wood and got aviation gas and burned the bodies. They did that a couple of times. Describe your “control tower.” We had one-ton trucks with a box behind the cab where we worked. Our unit was given this beat-up one-ton truck; an enlisted man built the box. He scrounged a Plexiglas dome from a B-26 bomber so we could see out. It was a two-man operation. One man was at the desk with telephones; I was looking through the dome for planes and manning five radio channels—at the squadron and group levels and theater-wide. American bombs were a big problem. The P-47 carried two 500-lb. bombs. A little propeller at the nose triggered the detonator by spinning. To use the bombs, pilots would fly about 15 miles east to the front at Saint-Lô. Often dust from the runway would clog the release and cause a bomb to hang. Before landing, pilots with hung bombs were supposed to go out over the Channel and shake them loose. That didn’t always happen. Every time someone landed with a hung bomb, it would come loose and skid into the dirt. The bomb squad would disarm the bomb and the tech sergeant would come back and say, “Well, Lieutenant,
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two more revolutions and that one would have gone off.” Three to six times a day bombs would go off near our truck. Fortunately that blast goes up at an angle, and we were under it.
Did you have to worry about mines? Yes, the Germans had mined the whole area. Engineers took out enough of them to lay the airstrip, but left the rest of the mines in place. We knew where they were. Once, a P-38 Lightning came in damaged and ended up in a minefield. We told the pilot about that. He walked out without triggering an explosion. Did the top brass ever make an appearance? On June 29, 1944, General Dwight Eisenhower was making his first trip to the beachhead, and General Omar Bradley had come by road to meet him. He and I were in the truck for a couple of hours, making small talk. When General Eisenhower’s plane landed, I followed General Bradley and heard him tell Eisenhower that Cherbourg had just fallen. You listened in on the tragedy at Saint-Lô. The day of the breakout I was on the radio overhearing ground controllers scream to bomber pilots that they were dropping too close and killing our own troops. That was the incident that killed General Lesley McNair. How much of a strain was the job? On an afternoon shift, 1 to 5 p.m., I would smoke a pack of cigarettes and not remember smoking one. As the war moved east, you did too. Some positions were better than others. At Laon-Couvron, our place looked like a quartermaster’s champagne depot. I was chasing champagne with cognac or cognac with champagne. The only thing that stopped it was when a cork would break off before you got the bottle open. There was another plus. Pilots there did not have to land on mesh; there was a German-built concrete runway with taxiways and primitive buildings.
“Every time someone landed with a hung bomb, it came loose and skidded into the dirt.”
LEFT: JAMES KEGLEY PHOTOGRAPHY; RIGHT: COURTESY OF THE BALKAM FAMILY
Wartime air traffic controller Bob Balkam at home recently (above), and in Washington, DC, in January 1946 with his wife Laurin (right).
Then there was Asch, Belgium. We were at airfield Y-29 at Asch during the Battle of the Bulge. If the Germans took Antwerp, we would be cut off. My brother, Gil, was a civilian accountant attached to the armed forces in Paris. It was going to be my third Christmas overseas, and I was missing my family. I got informal permission to go to Maastricht, Holland, and catch a ride to Paris. At Maastricht, wearing my dress uniform, I went to headquarters, where every GI was in battle dress. The Germans were taking GI uniforms off corpses and posing as Americans, so any variation in appearance was suspect; I stood out like a sore thumb. “Pardon me, Lieutenant, where are you from?” a second lieutenant asked.
“Massachusetts,” I told him. He asked if so-and-so hadn’t just been elected to the Senate from there. No, I said, that was in Tennessee; we elected so-and-so. He was very embarrassed.
But you made it to Paris. The vehicle I was in, a command car, almost immediately ran off the road, but the driver got it free and we reached Paris around 7:45 p.m. My brother’s landlady let me in. A few minutes later Gil arrived. “What the hell are you doing here?” he yelled. I said, “I came to spend Christmas with you.” “Don’t you know there’s a curfew?” he says. “Anyone on the streets after 8 p.m. is presumed to be a German.” I had just made it.
Where were you when the Germans surrendered? In Münster. Not long after, an investigator came to our base asking about a certain P-47; our records showed a ferry pilot had taken it. Once the plainclothesman decided I was telling the truth, he told me the plane been seen flying under the Eiffel Tower. Every time I was in Paris after that, I would look at the tower and wonder why a damned fool would try such a thing. How did you and Laurin reunite? I mustered out at Fort Devens, Massachusetts. We agreed to meet at Union Station in Washington the day after Thanksgiving. We weren’t sure we’d recognize one another; when we parted she was a civilian and I was a buck private, and now we were both lieutenants. Through Marine headquarters she had booked us a room at the Statler Hotel and had gotten tickets for the Army-Navy game, which was that Saturday. We met on the platform at the train station, and we had no trouble finding one another. + JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017
21
This stickpin was issued to members of a German civil defense group—two of whom (left) participate in an air-raid drill.
A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN Curators at The National World War II Museum solve readers’ artifact mysteries
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I hope World War II historians can identify this Nazi-era stickpin. The front, which is about the size of a nickel, has three letters or symbols, along with a swastika. The back has words or abbreviations arranged in circular fashion reading: “G. BREHMER MARKNEUKIRCHEN” and “GES. GESCH.” I acquired the pin by trading with a schoolmate as an elementary school student, circa 1950. —Robert A. Jones, Brandon, Mississippi This stickpin would have been issued to a member of the Reichsluftschutzbund (RLB), or National Air Raid Protection League—a program established
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.
HEINZ FREMKE/ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY IMAGES
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on April 29, 1933, by the Reich’s Ministry for Air Defense. The markings on the back indicate the manufacturer and place of origin; the term “Ges. Gesch.” is essentially a copyright mark. The RLB was a civil defense outfit charged with preparing for and responding to air raids. Initially a volunteer association under the German air ministry, the RLB had about 15 million members (out of a population of some 80 million) by 1939. By 1944, with the Allied bombing campaign operating with a vengeance, the RLB was incorporated into the Nazi Party and participation in the organization became compulsory. The League was divided into groups responsible for specific blocks and neighborhoods, with air raid wardens overseeing response teams. The National WWII Museum’s collection contains a related item—a flag from the RLB’s Frankfurt am Main zone, the western regional group. As with much of our material, an American serviceman—Edward F. “Boots” Booth, who served in Europe with the 69th Armored Regiment and was wounded during the Battle of the Bulge—collected and kept the item as a souvenir. —Kimberly Guise, Assistant Director for Curatorial Services +
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THEY SAY THAT THE PELELIU LANDING in September 1944 was pointless: “they” being military historians, armchair strategists, and buffs of every stripe. The operation cost thousands of lives, offered no real strategic benefit, and contributed nothing to the final victory. As a result, a lot of people think the American decision to invade Peleliu was one of the worst calls of the war. Count me among them. I had to rethink that position recently, however, when I visited an exhibition of works by wartime artist Tom Lea. A talented guy from El Paso, Texas, Lea signed on with Life magazine during the war to paint far-flung battlefronts for a fascinated audience back home. And he was good! Whether depicting convoy battles in the North Atlantic or South Pacific carrier warfare, Lea could meticuolously render a scene. He painted a group of destroyers huddled around their tender in foggy Argentia Bay, Newfoundland, that look for all the world like cubs huddling around their momma bear. And his portrait of Claire Chennault captures this firm-jawed tough guy better than any photograph I’ve ever seen. I felt like snapping to and saluting it. Tom Lea didn’t just paint, though. Unlike many of us who talk about Peleliu, he
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U.S. ARMY CENTER FOR MILITARY HISTORY, WASHINGTON, DC © JAMES D. LEA
F I R E FO R E F F E C T B Y RO B E RT M. C I T I NO
actually took part in the landing. Up until then, we can’t say that he had truly experienced combat. Oh, he had seen it, to be sure, but from a relatively safe distance. Even his most violent painting, depicting the tremendous explosion onboard the USS Wasp as it takes three Japanese torpedoes in the gut, was a long-range one. On Peleliu, Lea closed that range with all the finality of a prison gate slamming shut. He felt the fear, heard the screams, and saw the different ways combat can shatter a man: physically by fire, or emotionally by the inhuman stress of the fight. Lea was pretty modest about his role. “My work [on Peleliu] consisted of trying to keep from getting killed,” he later wrote. His short stay on the island changed him, however, and resulted in two of the war’s most harrowing images. That 2,000-Yard Stare is Lea’s iconic look at a Marine who has had enough: too much danger, too much surging adrenaline, and one too many synaptic jolts. The poor guy has checked out, perhaps for an hour or a day, perhaps for a lot longer than that. His eyes give him away; they are wide, out of phase, unfocused. Lea described them as “two black empty holes.” The Marine is here in the moment, but he is also a long way away. You want to reach into the painting and comfort him, tell him that he is going to be all right, but you know he won’t be listening. He is looking into some empty space where few of us would ever wish to go. The second is an action shot. The Peleliu landing is in progress, and a Marine is hitting the beach. Lea paints the precise moment when the beach hits back. A Japanese mortar shell has wounded our hero. No—“wounded” doesn’t really do justice to what is happening here. It’s more like “shredded.” His left eye is gone, his arm looks like hamburger, he is leaching bright red blood all over the place. What struck Lea was the look of abject patience in the dying Marine’s eye, as if he had all the time in the world. Or as if time no longer mattered. He called this horrible creation The Price. Peleliu was the place where Tom Lea, artist, gazed into the face of war. Peleliu was where he learned the truth, and where he showed America the price its sons were paying every day. Was Peleliu pointless? I’m no longer sure. It might have been the most important battle of the war. +
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BACK TO THE BATTLE FOR CRETE I’M STANDING ON A SMALL HILL COVERED IN WILD THYME regularly pruned by feral goats that wander down from nearby mountains. Spread below, the scrubby olive-green expanse of Crete’s Maleme airfield stretches to the distant sea. I drove to this rural hillside from Chania, a seaside town on the northwest hem of the largest of the Greek islands. Its harbor is home to a jumble of lively cafés that serve dishes cooked in local virgin olive oil. I am here to attend a three-day commemoration of the Battle of Crete, which began 75 years earlier on this very day—May 20. “This is Hill 107; from here our Allied troops shot down many planes,” says native-born Giorgos Milonakis, whose father was 10 years old when the battle started. Milonakis’s eyes glint in the midday sun as he squints down at the German War Cemetery, where the graves of thousands of enemy soldiers stud the surface. Far below us, fields and olive groves slumber in the hot sun, much as they did that May morning in 1941 when the Nazis launched Operation Mercury, a massive airborne assault that dropped some 7,000 German paratroopers around Maleme and Chania. The success of the mission was vital to the Germans; whoever controlled Crete had easy access to the Suez Canal—the shortest route for conveying supplies to North Africa. German occupation of Crete would also prevent British bomb-
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ers from flying from there to attack the Romanian oil fields that fueled the Nazi war machine. The Battle of Crete had a number of significant firsts. It was the first largescale German airborne offensive. It was also the first time the Allies had, thanks to intercepted Enigma transmissions, advance notice of a major German offensive—one the Allies failed to adequately exploit, but recognized as a heads-up for the future. And it was the first time a civilian population massively resisted a German advance. The German chief of military intelligence, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, had believed that the Cretans—renowned for their republican and anti-monarchist stance—would welcome their German liberators with open arms. Instead they met the paratroopers with fierce opposition. Armed with antique rifles, daggers, and even pitchforks, they took up arms alongside Allied troops from Greece, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. As a result, the invasion of Crete took longer than Germany had expected. Though Allied troops began to retreat just a week later, Cretan resistance fighters continued their assault on enemy troops, forcing Hitler to send reinforcements. The next day, I arrive at a flag-raising
JOANA KRUSE/ALAMY
T I M E T R AV E L B Y H E I D I F U L L E R - L OV E
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ceremony at Chania’s Firkas Fortress, a seventeenth-century stronghold located at the entrance of the city’s harbor. A handful of veterans, some in wheelchairs, watch as the ensigns of the four countries that helped defend Crete are slowly raised above the fortress walls. To further preserve the memory of this event, the locals have created a Battle of Crete exhibit housed within the fortress. Amid ancient amphorae and remnants from 400 years ago, when the Republic of Venice colonized Crete, there are rooms full of battle memorabilia, including German parachutes, newspaper headlines, cigarette packets, and photos of resistance fighters. One of them shows a group of local men waiting to be executed. “The Germans murdered them for helping the Allies,” someone behind me murmurs. Despite Crete’s strong resistance, Maleme airfield fell to the Germans on May 21 and, after failed attempts to retake it, Allied troops began retreating to the south coast for evacuation on May 27. The exhausted men withdrew over rocky ground while members of the New Zealand 28th (Maori) Battalion, along with Australian 2/7th Battalion’s C and D Companies, established a defensive line to buy time for the retreating soldiers.
Later in the day, I meet Marshall Cook, a Maori and member of the New Zealand Defense Force (NZDF), a military unit made up of settlers and Maoris— the indigenous people of New Zealand. Cook is here to pay his respects to a relative who, along with other troops in the defensive line, lost his life charging the Germans. “The 28th (Maori) Battalion stepped up and ripped into our traditional Haka war cry.” Cook tells me. “They used it to psych themselves up for the charge. They were up against some horrendous odds tearing off into the olive groves in face of the oncoming German attack.” Following the ceremony, a drive
Clusters of shops line the scenic harbor of Chania (opposite), a seaside town German paratroopers infiltrated on May 20, 1941, as part of Operation Mercury—the invasion of Crete (above). Following Crete’s defeat, German soldiers lined up Cretan resistance fighters (below) and swiftly executed them.
through the warren of Chania’s backstreets takes me out to Souda Bay, a natural harbor just outside town and home to the British Commonwealth War Cemetery, where 1,500 servicemen who lost their lives in the battle are buried. Many of them are Maoris. There, Jack Rudolpf, a Maori cultural adviser to the NZDF, tells me that the warlike Maori felt—and
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WHEN YOU GO Apart from winter months, Crete can be very hot. Be sure to take water and plenty of sunscreen. Some battle sites lack signage and are difficult to find, but most Cretans speak some English and are eager to help, if asked. Strata Tours leads full-day tours to battle sites and war cemeteries. Englishspeaking guides are available. For tour information, contact Stelios Milonakis, Strata Tours; (info@ stratatours.com; stratatours.com).
A visitor at the British and Commonwealth War Cemetery pays her respects to a Maori relative who fought in the battle.
WHERE TO STAY AND EAT SOUDA BAY
German Invasion
GREECE
Allied retreat
CRETE
Souda
MEDITERRANEAN SEA
Rethymno Sfakia Allied retreat
Heraklion
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still feel—at ease with the locals. “We owe them a lot of thanks,” he says, “because some of our soldiers who were left behind wouldn’t have made it home without them.” Approximately 16,000 evacuated Allied troops eventually reached Egypt by ship. The majority of these embarked between May 28 and June 1 from the southern harbor of Sfakia, where I arrive after a twohour drive the next day. Coasting along the curvy roads, I imagine how hard it must have been for the retreating men to hide from gunfire on these rocky hillsides. More than 5,000 Allied troops and thousands of Greeks remained behind in Sfakia hiding in caves, but surviving for a time thanks to the help of Cretan villagers and resistance fighters—many of whom German troops later massacred. Although German forces fought against a defiant populace during the entire Greek campaign of April to June 1941, resistance was strongest in Crete, where Germany took the most casualties. Out of about WORLD WAR II
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22,000 German troops who fought to capture Crete—those in the initial paratroop assault and the several thousand mountain troops who later landed by sea—more than 4,500 Germans were killed. Nazi leadership deeply felt those losses and, for the remainder of the war, never attempted another large airborne operation. Luftwaffe general Kurt Student, who headed the invasion, later wrote that Crete “conjures up bitter memories. I miscalculated when I proposed the operation and my mistakes caused not only the loss of very many paratroopers, whom I looked upon as my sons, but in the long run led to the demise of the German airborne arm I had created.” The tiny fishing port of Sfakia looks much the same as it did in photos from 75 years ago. Seated in a café on the waterfront where I am surrounded by Crete’s starkly beautiful landscapes and proud people, it is easy to understand why they had fought so fiercely. +
Most battle sites are within short distance of Rethymno and Chania. The Caramel Boutique Hotel in Rethymno has superb beachside facilities, plenty of dining options, and a helpful concierge service; (caramel. grecotel.com). A good low-cost option close to Maleme is Chania’s Mike Hotel, which has apartments and a small restaurant; (hotel-mike.com). Chania has a cluster of restaurants along the seafront catering to all tastes, but to sample authentic Cretan food head for Mesogiako located in the Splanzia Quarter. Try raki liquor served with small meze dishes ranging from tender octopus chunks to dakos—crispy bread made with barley, topped with grated tomatoes and olive oil; (mesogiako.com).
WHAT ELSE TO SEE The War Museum of Askifou is a family-owned museum in Kares, about 30 miles south of Chania. Created by Giorgos A. Hatzidakis, a Cretan born in 1931 who lost his home and family members during the war, it houses a personal collection of some 2,000 historical objects collected until his death in 2007. These include World War II firearms, military uniforms, and even the propeller of a plane shot down during the Battle of Crete; (warmuseumaskifou.com).
HEIDI FULLER-LOVE; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER
Maleme
Chania
SEA OF CRETE
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HAVE YOU HEARD? The greatest threat to America’s key strategic advantage in the Pacific was Americans themselves By Joseph Connor
Talkative Americans— including the fighter pilots (pictured) who shot down and killed Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto—risked revealing that the United States could read the Japanese naval code.
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UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS, EUGENE MCDERMOTT LIBRARY
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017
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hey did it. On April 18, 1943, 16 U.S. Army Air Forces fighter pilots from Guadalcanal flew more than 400 miles to ambush Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto as he flew to Balalae airfield in the Solomon Islands. They sent the Japanese Combined Fleet’s commander in chief to a fiery grave in the jungles of Bougainville. The United States had exacted revenge against the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack and one of the Imperial Navy’s highest-ranking officers—but at what cost? Behind the scenes, President Franklin D. Roosevelt reacted with glee, writing a mock letter of condolence to Yamamoto’s widow that circulated around the White House but was never sent: Dear Widow Yamamoto: Time is a great leveler and somehow I never expected to see the old boy at the White House anyway. Sorry I can’t attend the funeral because I approve of it. Hoping he is where we know he ain’t. Very sincerely yours, /s/ Franklin D. Roosevelt Ironically, the success of the mission, aptly named Operation Vengeance, threatened to expose the most important secret of the Pacific War: the U.S. Navy’s ability to read the Japanese navy’s topsecret JN-25 operational code. If the Japanese suspected a broken code had led to Yamamoto’s death, they would drastically overhaul all their military codes and the United States would lose its priceless strategic advantage. As nervous commanders waited to see if there would be a day of reckoning, America’s own servicemen would prove to be the gravest threat to this crucial secret. YAMAMOTO, then 59, was one of the most hated men in America. Not only had he planned the attack on Pearl Harbor; almost as galling, he had reportedly bragged that he was “looking forward to dictating peace to the United States in the White House.” In reality, he had never made this boast. It was a product of Japanese propaganda, but Americans took it as the gospel truth. The Japanese navy, widely deployed throughout
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the Pacific, heavily relied on coded radio transmissions to send many of its most secret messages— and the U.S. Navy was listening. American cryptanalysts had broken the latest version of the JN-25 code just in time for the Battle of Midway in June 1942. With advance knowledge of Japanese plans, the outgunned U.S. Navy inflicted a stunning defeat on a superior enemy force. The cryptanalysts were about to score again. In early April 1943, Yamamoto planned a one-day inspection trip from Rabaul to bases around the southern tip of Bougainville. In preparation, his staff sent the itinerary to local commanders. Although the staff wanted Yamamoto’s schedule hand-delivered to Bougainville, Japan’s Eighth Fleet naval headquarters was so confident in the security of the JN-25 code that it sent the message by radio. The Japanese had modified parts of their JN-25 code on April 1, as they periodically did, but for U.S. Navy code-breakers it was only a temporary setback—the basic code system remained unchanged. Therefore, American cryptanalysts could soon read large parts of new messages. On April 14, they intercepted and decoded Yamamoto’s travel schedule. It was a code-breaker’s dream. As he read it, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Alva Lasswell, one of the top cryptanalysts, exclaimed, “We’ve hit the jackpot.” The decoded itinerary not only included the date and precise times for Yamamoto’s upcoming visits to the bases on Bougainville, but also revealed that he would be flying in a twin-engine bomber escorted by only six fighter planes. Ironically, his inspection tour was set for April 18, 1943, exactly one year after the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, conferred with Commander Edwin T. Layton, his chief intelligence officer. They understood that this could be their only chance to get Yamamoto because it might be the closest he would ever venture to the front. They calculated that American P-38 Lightning fighters based on Guadalcanal could fly the more than 800-mile round trip distance to Balalae airfield and back. Nimitz knew that if the Japanese thought Yamamoto had been ambushed, they could suspect their code had been broken and change it. He decided the risk was worth it, because the Japanese had no one
TOP AND BOTTOM-LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; BOTTOM-RIGHT: WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE / ALAMY
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, was one of the most hated men in America.
Code-breaking efforts helped American SBD Dauntless dive-bombers (above) sink Japanese ships in the Battle of Midway—including the cruiser Mikuma (below)—inflicting a stunning defeat on Admiral Yamamoto (right), who had planned the Pearl Harbor attack.
of comparable stature to replace Yamamoto. To be safe, he and Layton concocted a cover story: that Australian coastwatchers hiding in the jungles of Rabaul had tipped them off. Nimitz ordered Admiral William F. Halsey, commanding the area of operations that included Guadalcanal, to get Yamamoto. Like Nimitz, Halsey was concerned the mission would endanger their codebreaking secrets. Nimitz said he would assume responsibility for the risk and suggested that every effort “be made to make the operation appear fortuitous. Best of luck and good hunting.” Halsey’s headquarters transmitted the order: “Talleyho. Let’s get the bastard.” On April 18 at 7:10 a.m., 18 P-38s took off from the Fighter II airstrip on Guadalcanal. Each twin-boom fighter was fitted with external fuel tanks to extend its range to over 1,000 miles for the mission—made longer by the need to take a circuitous route to avoid Japanese radar. A flat tire on takeoff and a mechanical failure reduced the flight to 16 planes. Shortly before 10 a.m. near Empress Augusta Bay on Bougainville, the American pilots spotted two Japanese G4M Betty bombers and their escorting A6M Zero fighters. The P-38s’ bullets and cannon shells quickly downed both bombers, and the one carrying Yamamoto crashed into the jungles of Bougainville. One American pilot, Lieutenant Raymond K. Hine, was lost in the ensuing fight. The U.S. Army Air Forces later credited two other pilots—Lieutenant Rex T. Barber and Captain Thomas G. Lanphier Jr.—with the kill. At every stage, planners had stressed the need for secrecy. But even before the P-38s had landed, security was compromised. AS THE RETURNING PLANES neared Guadalcanal, Lanphier radioed to the control tower: “That son of a bitch will not be dictating any peace terms in the White House.” Lanphier’s announcement was shocking to others on the mission. Air-toground messages were broadcast in the clear, and the Japanese monitored American aviation frequencies. Lanphier’s message left little to the imagination. Bystanders on Guadalcanal, including a young navy officer named John F. Kennedy, watched as Lanphier executed a victory roll over the field before landing. “I got him!” Lanphier announced to the crowd after climbing out of his cockpit. “I got that son of a bitch. I got Yamamoto.” Halsey and Nimitz heard of the success from a secure message, which concluded with: “April 18 seems to be our day.” Halsey jokingly expressed regret, saying he had hoped to give Yamamoto a trip to the White House “up Pennsylvania Avenue in
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chains.” He passed along his congratulations to the “hunters,” saying it sounded as though “one of the ducks in their bag was a peacock.” When General Douglas MacArthur heard the news, he later wrote, “One could almost hear the rising crescendo of sound from the thousands of glistening white skeletons at the bottom of Pearl Harbor.” MEANWHILE, U.S. OFFICIALS were trying to make it appear as if the attack on Yamamoto had been sheer happenstance. Over the next few weeks, they repeatedly sent P-38s to Balalae to give the impression that the long journey was a regular mission for American fighter patrols. Additionally, American officials made no public statements to suggest they knew that Yamamoto had been killed. Despite their best-laid plans, officials had forgotten to factor in human nature: people talk. The secret spread quickly on Guadalcanal, a bustling base humming with activity. Servicemen openly discussed the mission’s details, which soon became common knowledge on the island. With men arriving and leaving every day, the truth was impossible to contain. Eventually, the story spread so widely that it became the subject of cocktail party gossip in Washington, leading at least one citizen, concerned at hearing the loose talk about sensitive operational details, to directly call U.S. Army chief of staff General George C. Marshall. Chatty pilots became the most serious threat to the code-breaking secret. After the successful mission, the two fliers credited with downing Yamamoto—Lanphier and Barber—enjoyed 10 days of leave in New Zealand. The two were golfing with Brigadier General Dean Strother when an Associated Press correspondent, J. Norman Lodge, approached them. The reporter seemed to know a lot about the Yamamoto mission and, using an old reporter’s trick, asked the pilots to just clarify some details. Amazingly, Lanphier and Barber talked candidly and freely about the mission. Although Strother told Lodge to forget about a story because it would never clear the military censors, the reporter was not easily deterred. On May 11, 1943, Lodge filed his story with the censors for transmission back home. Although he did not mention the breaking of Japanese codes, he wrote that American “intelligence had trailed Yamamoto for five days” and that American pilots had specifically targeted him. The story included Lanphier’s description of the mission and quoted Strother as saying that the U.S. military had known Yamamoto’s itinerary. If Lodge’s story had seen the light of day, the JN-25 code might have quickly become a thing of
NATIONAL ARCHIVES (BOTH)
The secret spread quickly on Guadalcanal and, with men arriving and leaving each day, the truth was impossible to contain.
The mission to intercept Yamamoto fell to the 339th Fighter Squadron and its P-38G aircraft (like those above). Although it was successful, bitter disputes arose from claims by (left to right) Thomas G. Lanphier Jr., Besby F. Holmes, and Rex T. Barber over who actually shot down the enemy bombers. The U.S. Army Air Forces officially credited both Lanphier and Barber with downing Yamamoto’s aircraft, but disputes continue to this day.
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He started in on a tirade of profanity the like of which I had never heard before. He accused us of everything he could think of from being traitors to our country to being so stupid that we had no right to wear the American uniform. He said we were horrible examples of pilots of the Army Air Force, that we should be court-martialed, reduced to privates, and jailed for talking to Lodge about the Yamamoto mission.
FROM SWORN ENEMY TO UNLIKELY ALLY?
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Halsey’s bark was worse than his bite; he simply reduced their Medal of Honor recommendations to the second-highest valor award, Navy Crosses. ON MAY 21, 1943, just over a month after the mission, Japan announced that Yamamoto had met a “gallant death on a war plane” while “engaged in combat with the enemy.” It was front-page news in the United States. American officials kept up their façade about not knowing what had happened. The U.S. Office of War Information told reporters it thought Yamamoto had been killed in a passenger plane crash between Bangkok and Singapore on April 7, 1943. Other news accounts claimed he might have taken his own life because of recent Japanese setbacks. Reporters flocked to the White House, and the president’s reaction suggested the news was anything but a surprise. “Is he dead?” Roosevelt asked, “Gosh!” The president joined in the ensuing laughter, and all that was missing was a wink and a nod. Then, two magazine articles poked holes in the American cover story. The May 31, 1943, issue of Time magazine included a story on Yamamoto’s death. It ended with: “When the name of the man who killed Admiral Yamamoto is released, the U.S. will have a new hero.” That was incompatible with an accidental plane crash or suicide. In that same issue, another story described a mission in the South Pacific that mirrored Operation Vengeance. Although the story did not explicitly name Yamamoto, it described Lanphier shooting down a bomber and, on the way home, wondering if he “had nailed some Jap bigwig.” The implication was clear: the United States knew its fliers killed Yamamoto. Loose talk about the mission continued and was so prevalent that General Marshall wanted to make an example of any officer caught talking about it. That officer happened to be Major General Alexander M. Patch, who had recently returned from Guadalcanal and subsequently discussed the mission at the Washington Press Club. Patch told Marshall that he “was unaware or uncon-
Isoroku Yamamoto (left, in 1926) was quickly vilified as a symbol of Japanese treachery, as evidenced by the December 22, 1941, cover of Time (above).
To wartime America, Isoroku Yamamoto personified Japanese treachery and arrogance because of the attack on Pearl Harbor and his alleged boast that he would dictate peace terms at the White House. He was, however, a man of many dimensions. With his death, the United States lost an enemy who, had he lived, might have become a valuable ally in helping to bring the Pacific War to a quicker resolution. Yamamoto knew the United States well. He had studied economics at Harvard and had served as a naval attaché in Washington, where he became an avid poker player and socialized with some
of the U.S. Navy officers he would later fight against. He was fluent in English and an admirer of Abraham Lincoln. He had traveled in the United States more widely than most Americans. He appreciated America’s potential might, having seen Detroit’s automobile factories, Pittsburgh’s steel mills, the wheat fields of the Midwest, and the Texas oil fields. He had been outspoken in opposing war with the United States and Japan’s alliance with Germany and Italy, earning death threats and the enmity of Japanese nationalists, who called him a traitor and pro-American. Above all, he was a realist who knew that
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (BOTH)
the past. Not only did his story show that the United States knew of Yamamoto’s death, which Japan had not announced, but also that the Americans had known Yamamoto’s location. No Australian coastwatcher would have known his precise schedule; a compromised JN-25 code was the only explanation. The censors could not believe what they read. They quickly passed the story up the chain of command. Nimitz immediately ordered Halsey to “secure and seal in safe” Lodge’s notes and story. He told Halsey to “initiate immediate corrective measures and take disciplinary action as warranted.” Lanphier, Barber, and Strother returned from leave to find a summons to meet Halsey on his flagship. When they arrived, an irate Halsey refused to return their salutes and simply stared at them. When he finally erupted, the bombastic Halsey outdid himself. As Barber recalled:
scious that there was any further need for absolute secrecy regarding an enterprise which had occurred many weeks previously.” Marshall was amazed and angry that “a secret so dangerous to our interests should be publicly discussed.” Marshall was powerless, however, because disciplining an officer of Patch’s rank would have attracted more attention to the story and made matters worse. The publicity endangered not only the code-breaking secret but also Lanphier’s family. In late August 1943, Lanphier’s younger brother, Charles, was captured when his F4U-1 Corsair went down near Bougainville. As Halsey later wrote, if the Japanese “learned who had shot down Yamamoto, what they might have done to the brother is something I prefer not to think about.” Charles Lanphier died in captivity—without the Japanese realizing what his brother had done.
COURTESY OF J. NORMAN LODGE
After interviewing loose-lipped pilots Lanphier and Barber, Associated Press correspondent J. Norman Lodge (above) filed a story that would have inadvertently revealed to the Japanese the extent of America’s ability to read their codes.
Japan, with its limited resources, could not stand toe-to-toe with the United States in a prolonged war. Three months before Pearl Harbor, he predicted that if war came, “I will run wild, and I will show you an uninterrupted succession of victories” for the first six to 12 months. After that, he admitted, “I have no confidence in our ultimate victory.” Instead of war, he urged continued diplomatic negotiations with the United States. Some American intelligence officials thought that killing Yamamoto was a serious blunder since the Japanese war cabinet would never admit that the war was lost. With his realistic out-
look, his status as a national hero, and his high standing with Emperor Hirohito, they felt that Yamamoto might have been the one man who could have persuaded the emperor to end the war before it became the to-the-death struggle it eventually was. That would have saved the thousands of lives that were lost after Japan’s defeat had become a fait accompli, but any chance for achieving earlier peace died along with Yamamoto. Yamamoto’s boast about dictating peace terms at the White House was in fact the work of Japanese propagandists seeking to rub salt in America’s
DESPITE ALL THESE MISSTEPS and close calls, the United States’ codebreaking secret held until the end of the war, and decoded messages continued to supply targets for American submarines, planes, and ships. “Despite temporary setbacks as a result of the Japanese introducing new additives or code books,” wrote Commander Layton, Nimitz’s chief intelligence officer, “there was never a sustained period when we were not able to read communications in the principal JN-25 operational system.” The story behind Operation Vengeance became public less than two weeks after Japan’s formal surrender. “Yamamoto Death In Air Ambush Result of Breaking Foe’s Code,” blared a headline in the New York Times on September 10, 1945. The story, written by an Associated Press reporter, credited fellow reporter Lodge as the source for stating that Yamamoto had “met flaming death…because this country broke a Japanese code.” American fliers, the Associated Press reported, “knew in advance the course his aerial convoy was to follow and ambushed him.” Two years after he initially filed his story with
wounds. In a letter to a friend, Yamamoto had written that a war against the United States would not be easy because that country would fight long and hard: It is not enough that we should take Guam and the Philippines or even Hawaii and San Francisco. We would have to march into Washington and sign the treaty in the White House. In the afterglow of the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese media broadcast an inaccurate and selfserving version: …I shall not be content merely to capture Guam and the
Philippines and occupy Hawaii and San Francisco. I am looking forward to dictating peace to the United States in the White House at Washington. From that point on, news stories about Yamamoto seldom failed to mention this boast, and stories about his death mocked it. “The Jap who looked forward to dictating peace to the U.S. in the White House is dead,” Time magazine announced. And the New York Times called him the man who bragged of dictating peace terms “from a seat in the White House.” As for Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto understood
America’s capable strength and knew that Japan’s only chance of success was the military equivalent of a first-round knockout. He therefore planned a surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor—immediately following a Japanese declaration of war—that would immobilize the U.S. Navy while Japan seized the territory and resources it desired. Then Yamamoto would lure the remnants of the Pacific Fleet into a decisive battle, which would force a defeated United States to the peace table. The admiral was so convinced that his continued on page 38
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the censors, Lodge finally had his scoop. Even though the war was over, the navy was still upset by the story. Its officers were debriefing a high-level Japanese intelligence officer who had provided them with valuable information. The naval officers planned to interview other captured officers, too, but feared the code-breaking revelation might shame the Japanese officer into drastic action. “[W]e do not want him or any of our other promising prospects to commit suicide until after next week when we expect to have milked them dry,” radioed a navy officer based in Yokohama. An exasperated navy department sent back a memorable reply:
continued from page 37
Gordon W. Prange, it was “strictly a formalistic bow toward the conventions.” Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura was told to deliver to Secretary of State Cordell Hull a message breaking off negotiations promptly at 1 p.m. on December 7, 1941 (8 a.m. Hawaiian time). Because of delays in decoding and typing the message, however, Nomura did not arrive at the State Department until 2:05 p.m. (9:05 a.m. Hawaiian time). By then, the Pearl Harbor attack was under way. Even if delivered on time, Nomura’s message would not have given the United States fair notice of
plan was correct that he threatened to resign if his superiors did not approve it. Yamamoto saw the irony in an anti-war admiral planning the attack that would start the war. “I find my present position extremely odd,” he wrote, “obliged to make up my mind and pursue unswervingly a course that is precisely the opposite of my personal views.” The Japanese government planned to break off all negotiations with the United States before—but only minutes before— the first bomb fell on Pearl Harbor. According to historian
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Your lineal position on the list of those who are embarrassed by the Yamamoto story is five thousand six hundred ninety two. All of the people over whose dead bodies the story was going to be published have been buried. All possible schemes to localize the damage have been considered but none appears workable. Suggest that only course for you is to deny knowledge of the story and say you do not understand how such a fantastic tale could have been invented. This might keep your friend happy until suicide time next week, which is about all that can be expected.
war. The message did not declare war or even break off diplomatic relations. It simply ended negotiations. Japan did not formally declare war until hours after the attack. The Japanese Foreign Ministry had prepared a clearly worded declaration of war before the attack but chose not to have it delivered to Secretary Hull. The inescapable conclusion is gamesmanship. The Japanese government wanted to orchestrate the attack so that it could receive the tactical benefits of a sneak attack but still be able to later deny that it was, in fact, a sneak attack.
The question remains: why didn’t the Japanese follow the clues and realize that their JN-25 code had been compromised? In retrospect, it is incomprehensible. Otis Cary, an American navy officer who debriefed Japanese naval officers after the war, wrote that while the Japanese suspected Yamamoto had been ambushed, they “never seemed to have considered seriously that we might be breaking their secret codes.” It is almost impossible to believe that if the shoe was on the other foot, American or British intelligence would not have figured out what had happened. It remains one of the great and enduring puzzles of the Pacific War. Historian Donald A. Davis, author of Lightning Strike—an absorbing account of the Yamamoto mission—suggests the reason was hubris. The flaw, he wrote, was not in the code itself, “but in the arrogant and incredibly naïve Japanese belief that Western minds could not possibly understand the intricacies of their complex language, particularly when it was wrapped in dense codes. Despite all of the clues, hubris had overtaken them, and they were unwilling to accept the logical truth that their code was worthless.” It was a flaw that cost Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto his life and hastened Japan’s defeat. +
How much Yamamoto knew of this gamesmanship still remains an open question. Cary, the navy officer who debriefed high-level Japanese naval officers shortly after the war, believed that the Japanese government had kept Yamamoto and the Japanese navy in the dark: It had never occurred to the men I talked with that the plan was laid around the fact that the attack was going to take place before war had been declared. Certainly Admiral Yamamoto had not conceived of it as that, although he had made the decision
that Hawaii would have to be attacked. Yamamoto’s actions support this viewpoint. The weak resistance to the Pearl Harbor attack led him to suspect that the attack had come before a declaration of war. He asked an aide to investigate because, he said, “there’d be trouble if someone slipped up and people said it was a sneak attack.” Yamamoto knew how the United States would react, and he was right. It was a sneak attack, and it did lead to trouble— trouble that ended in his death in the skies over Bougainville. —Joseph Connor
TOP: ASAHI SHIMBUN VIA GETTY IMAGES; LEFT: THE NEW YORK TIMES; RIGHT (BOTH): AIR FORCE MAGAZINE/AIR FORCE ASSOC.
Why did the Japanese not follow the clues? It remains one of the great and enduring puzzles of the Pacific War.
Two weeks after announcing Yamamoto’s death, the Japanese government held a state funeral for the revered leader in Tokyo (above). It was not until the end of the war that the New York Times revealed the essential role that code-breaking had played in shooting down Yamamoto’s G4M Betty bomber—which remains in the jungles of Bougainville (below, right).
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SHORE PARTY
During his famed return to the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur quickly recognized the power of a photograph By Joseph Connor
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conic photos often have their own stories—some real, some myth. For more than 70 years, questions have swirled around the famous photos of General Douglas MacArthur’s beach landings—first on Leyte, then on Luzon—as American troops returned to liberate the Philippines. Stories persist that MacArthur, no stranger to controversy or drama, staged the photos by coming ashore several times until the cameraman got the perfect shot, or that the photos were posed days after the actual landings. Those who were present say neither of these oft-repeated stories is true. But what really happened is even stranger than these misguided rumors.
Douglas MacArthur’s anger at being forced to wade ashore at Leyte in October 1944 (above) faded when he saw the powerful photo that resulted. GETTY IMAGES
MACARTHUR’S RETURN was the high point of his war. In July 1941 he had been named commander of U.S. Army Forces in the Far East, including all American and Filipino troops in the Philippines. In March 1942, with Japanese forces tightening their grip around the Philippines, MacArthur was ordered out of the islands for Australia. After reaching his destination, he vowed to liberate the Philippines, famously proclaiming, “I shall return.” By April 1942, Japanese units advancing across the Philippines forced beleaguered Allied troops there to surrender. From then on, the Philippines “constituted the main object of my planning,” MacArthur said. By late 1944 he was poised to fulfill his promise—until an interservice battle threatened to derail his plans. The U.S. Navy wanted American forces to bypass the Philippines and invade Formosa (now Taiwan) instead. MacArthur objected strenuously, both on strategic grounds and upon his belief that the United States had a moral duty to the people of the Philippines. The dispute went all the way up to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who ultimately sided with MacArthur. Finally, on October 20, 1944, MacArthur made his long-anticipated return. JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017
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The navy beachmaster was too busy to bother with a four-star general. “Walk in,” he growled. “The water’s fine.” 42
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At 10 a.m., his troops stormed ashore on Leyte, an island in the central Philippines. The heaviest fighting took place on Red Beach, but by early afternoon, MacArthur’s men had secured the area. Secured, however, did not mean safe. Japanese snipers remained active while small-arms and mortar fire continued throughout the day. Hundreds of small landing craft clogged the beaches, but the water was too shallow for larger landing craft to reach dry land. Aboard the USS Nashville two miles offshore, a restless MacArthur could not wait to put his feet back on Philippine soil. At 1 p.m., he and his staff left the cruiser to take the two-mile landing craft ride to Red Beach. MacArthur intended to step out onto dry land, but soon realized their vessel was too large to advance through the shallow depths near the coastline. An aide radioed the navy beach-
master and asked that a smaller craft be sent to bring them in. The beachmaster, whose word was law on the invasion beach, was too busy with the chaos of the overall invasion to be bothered with a general, no matter how many stars he wore. “Walk in—the water’s fine,” he growled. The bow of the landing craft dropped and MacArthur and his entourage waded 50 yards through knee-deep water to reach land. Major Gaetano Faillace, an army photographer assigned to MacArthur, took photos of the general wading ashore. The result was an image of a scowling MacArthur, jaw set firmly, with a steeleyed look as he approached the beach. But what may have appeared as determination was, in reality, anger. MacArthur was fuming. As he sloshed through the water, he stared daggers at the impudent beachmaster, who had treated the general as
TOP, BOTTOM, AND OPPOSITE: CARL MYDANS/ THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/ GETTY IMAGES; CENTER: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
he probably had not been treated since his days as a plebe at West Point. However, when MacArthur saw the photo, his anger quickly dissipated. A master at public relations, he knew a good photo when he saw one. Still, rumors persisted that MacArthur had staged the Leyte photo. CBS radio correspondent William J. Dunn, who was on Red Beach that day, hotly disputed these rumors, calling them “one of the most ludicrous misconceptions to come out of the war.” The photo was “a one-time shot” taken within hours of the initial landing, Dunn said, not something repeated sometime later for the perfect picture. MacArthur biographer D. Clayton James agreed, noting that MacArthur’s “plans for the drama at Red Beach certainly did not include stepping off in knee-deep water.”
Hoping to replicate the effective walk ashore at Leyte (another view, center), MacArthur arranged for his landing craft to stop offshore at Luzon. After an awkward start (top), he assumed a confident gait, which photographer Carl Mydans captured in a famous image (opposite). When leaving the beach, MacArthur made sure to again wade through knee-deep water, this time back out to the landing craft (above).
THE NEXT LANDING, however, was a different story. On January 9, 1945, American troops arrived at Luzon, the main island in the Philippines, catching the Japanese by surprise. Opposition was light. MacArthur watched the landings from the cruiser USS Boise and at 2 p.m.— about four hours after the initial landings—he headed for shore. Navy Seabees had quickly built a small pier with pontoons so that MacArthur and his staff could exit their vessel without getting wet. On seeing this, MacArthur ordered his boat to swerve away from the pier so that he could wade ashore through knee-deep water as he had done at Leyte. He knew that Life magazine photographer Carl Mydans was on the beach. As he strode toward shore, MacArthur struck the same pose and steadfast facial expression as at Leyte. Mydans snapped the famous photo that soon appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the United States and became what Time magazine called “an icon of its era.” No one, Mydans said later, appreciated the value of a picture more than MacArthur. There is little doubt that MacArthur chose to avoid the pier—and dry feet— for dramatic effect. “Having spent a lot of time with MacArthur,” Mydans said, “it flashed on me what was happening. He was avoiding the pontoons.” Biographer D. Clayton James wrote that the Luzon landing “seems to have been a deliberate act of showmanship. With the worldwide attention that his Leyte walk through the water received, apparently the Barrymore side of MacArthur’s personality could not resist another big splash of publicity and surf.” MacArthur, on the other hand, blamed fate. “As was getting to be a habit with me,” he wrote, perhaps with tongue in cheek, “I picked a boat that took too much draft to reach the beach, and I had to wade in.” Other circumstances conspired to make it appear that MacArthur had waded in at Luzon more than once. Although Mydans worked for Life, on that day he was the pool photographer, which gave any news organization free license to use the image. On January 20, 1945, a tightly cropped version of the photo, making MacArthur the focal point, appeared in newspapers throughout the United States. When Life ran the photo a month later, editors used the uncropped version, which included other vessels and figures on the periphery and even another photographer in the foreground. Only a sharp-eyed viewer would realize that it was the photo they had already seen in newspapers weeks earlier, giving rise to the impression of repeat photo sessions. Life had also surrounded the iconic photo with other images Mydans had snapped moments before and after that one, including an unflattering shot of MacArthur being helped down the ramp of the landing craft. All of this may have been a ploy by the magazine—having been scooped by its own photographer— to make readers think they were seeing something new and different. In the end, controversies about MacArthur’s landings will likely continue. “These are stories that once created will keep being told,” Mydans said, “and each new generation will find…some reason for telling it. Usually it’s with delight.” + JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017
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THE THIN RED LINE BETWEEN FACT AND FICTION Each man fought his own war— on Guadalcanal and in James Jones’s acclaimed novel By Paul Maggioni
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ames Jones’s The Thin Red Line is considered one of the finest combat novels to emerge from World War II. The second work in a trilogy alongside From Here to Eternity and Whistle, The Thin Red Line’s hard-hitting depiction of exhausted American soldiers battling the Japanese across Guadalcanal received glowing critical responses upon its publication in 1962. The Christian Science Monitor compared the book to Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage; Newsweek called it “a rare and splendid accomplishment…as honest as any novel ever written.” At the beginning of the novel, Jones wrote: “Anyone who has studied or served in the Guadalcanal campaign will immediately recognize that no such terrain as that described here exists on the island. ‘The Dancing Elephant,’ ‘The Giant Boiled Shrimp,’ the hills around ‘Boola Boola Village,’ as well as the village itself, are figments of fictional
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imagination, and so are the battles herein described as taking place on this terrain. The characters who take part in the actions of this book are also imaginary…. [A]ny resemblance to anything anywhere is certainly not intended.” However, this is not completely true. Jones served on Guadalcanal as a corporal in Fox Company, 27th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, and found fault with the official U.S. Army histories of the war. “You can read the history of a campaign in which you served, and find the history doesn’t at all tally with the campaign you remember,” he wrote. While working on The Thin Red Line, Jones told his editor, “No book has ever really been written about combat in wartime with real honesty.” So, like his literary hero, Thomas Wolfe, Jones used “only those things I have experienced myself, and those told me by men in my old company.” Indeed, the actual experience of Fox Company so closely corresponds with The Thin Red Line that it
HOWARD BRODIE/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; OPPOSITE: JAMES JONES LITERARY SOCIETY
is often difficult to determine where the novel leaves off and history begins.
Corporal James Jones (right) was 21 when he first saw combat on Guadalcanal; it deeply affected his writing. The fighting likewise influenced army artist Howard Brodie. Jones greatly admired Brodie’s sketches (like the one above), later writing that the artist “permanently captured on paper the filth and misery and fatigue we had lived through.”
ON DECEMBER 19, 1942, Fox Company’s commanding officer, Captain William Blatt, gathered his command group on “B” Deck of the U.S. Army transport Hunter Liggett. Blatt looked around at the men—including executive officer Lieutenant William Burn and Lieutenant Champ Jones, and noncommissioned officers like tough First Sergeant Frank Wendson, Sergeant William “Chubby” Curran, and Blatt’s temperamental clerk, Corporal James Jones. It had been 13 days since the company had shipped out of Schofield Barracks in Hawaii and rumors swirled about their destination. Now Blatt dropped a bombshell: they were going to fight on Guadalcanal, where American troops had been battling the Japanese since August. Blatt, a Chicago lawyer in peacetime, had been in command of the company since before Pearl Harbor. He was generally unpopular; Jones recounted how the men felt that both Blatt and Lieutenant Burn took pains to keep the company’s enlisted men in their “proper place.” At times they showed open contempt for the captain. Just before the men shipped out from Hawaii, regimental headquarters had canceled their leave passes, but they angrily blamed Blatt and 15 of them went AWOL. Jones, however, had a more compassionate view; Blatt had approved Jones’s requests to take English Literature classes at the University of Hawaii. The prospect of going into combat further softened Jones’s feelings for his commanding officer. “The more I think of Blatt, the more I am inclined to sympathize with him,” Jones wrote while aboard the Hunter Liggett. “Trying to keep 180 men satisfied, healthy & useful is impossible.” Jones closely based The Thin Red Line’s company commander, Captain James Stein, on Blatt. But Blatt—along with everything else—seemed to disgust First Sergeant Wendson. A seasoned soldier with 10 years’ service, Wendson was a great athlete, the best shot in the company, and something of a legend in the regiment. He hid his genuine concern for the men behind a sarcastic and bitter outer shell, and often waxed cynical about the country he served: “Balls to a democracy like this! It’s politics and nothing else. Dog eat dog.... I just wish the Goddam Jap would win this war, just to see how these millionaire bastards would cringe on their bellies.” Jones adapted Wendson into central character First Sergeant Edward Welsh in his novel. Instead of remaining on deck with the others after Blatt’s briefing, Jones returned to his bunk to record it in his journal. He had one grand ambition: “I hope,
someday, to be a great author,” he wrote in 1942. In The Thin Red Line, Jones would base the intelligent but emotionally fragile character of Corporal Fife, the company clerk, on himself. Jones had been with Fox Company for two years. After failing to make the boxing or football teams—and badly injuring his ankle—Jones kept mostly to himself. His closest friend, a Kentuckian bugler and boxer named Robert Lee Stewart, had been promoted, busted, and sent to the stockade multiple times before being reassigned out of the company. Jones fell back on his solitary literary aspirations, and later adapted Stewart into The Thin Red Line’s Private Robert Witt. BY DECEMBER 30, the Hunter Liggett was anchored off Guadalcanal and Fox Company prepared to disembark. Word circulated that Japanese planes had been seen approaching Guadalcanal. Jones prepared by securing a dog tag to each wrist and ankle, so that if he was blown up someone could still identify a piece of his body. The soldiers swung over the transport’s sides and clambered down the cargo netting to the waiting landing craft. Fortunately for Jones and his comrades, the company made it ashore before the Japanese aircraft reached the area. The men watched in horror and fascination as the enemy bombed the American transports. Jones remembered that a “loaded barge coming in took a hit and seemed simply to disappear.” After the Japanese planes buzzed away, men fished out their wounded and dying comrades. Jones drew from the incident in The Thin Red Line, describing its effect on the men pulled from the water:
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They had crossed a strange line; they had become wounded men; and everybody realized, including themselves, dimly, that they were now different. Of itself, the shocking physical experience of the explosion, which had damaged them and killed those others, had been almost identically the same for them as for those other ones who had gone on with it and died. The only difference was that now these, unexpectedly and illogically, found themselves alive again. The regiment spent two weeks acclimating to Guadalcanal’s terrain and climate—as well as to nightly bombing raids—before division headquarters ordered them into action. They were tasked with capturing a hill complex dubbed the “Galloping Horse” for its shape in aerial photographs. In The Thin Red Line, the corresponding fictional terrain became the “Dancing Elephant.” Second Battalion—comprised of Easy, Fox, and George companies—would play a crucial part of American forces’ January 1943 offensive, which aimed to gain ground west of the Matanikau River and launch a final campaign to drive the Japanese off the island. The battalion was initially placed in reserve; Jones and his comrades had ringside seats to the first two days of combat, as 3rd Battalion attacked westward along the “Galloping Horse.” After capturing Hill 52 at the center of the hill mass, the men continued pushing west until enemy fire stymied their advance. Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Mitchell, 2nd Battalion’s commanding officer, prepared to take over the assault. He assigned Fox Company the toughest job: pushing forward into the teeth of Japanese defenses. Their attack would be aimed at capturing two features: a left-hand ridge to their southwest, then a distant ridge further west. Fox Company was to next press on to take Hill 53. AT DAWN ON JANUARY 12, a thin line of soldiers in olive drab herringbone twill fatigues, their eyes wide and mouths open against the concussion of their artillery bombardment, clutched their rifles and hugged the dirt as shells whistled overhead and exploded. Fox Company waited for the attack order. The terrain ahead of them consisted of open, rolling hills, clearly visible from elevated observation points behind. From one such point, division commander Major General J. Lawton Collins and corps commander Major General Alexander M. Patch waited to observe the attack; word spread that U.S. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Admiral Chester Nimitz, and Admiral Bill Halsey were on the island
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and could be watching, too. At 6:30 a.m., the pre-assault bombardment ceased and Blatt sent Lieutenant Champ M. Jones’s platoon forward. “I was able to move down a hill about 100 yards and I stopped in some tall grass,” Champ Jones later recalled. “I stayed in place for a while and looked for members of my platoon since I was in charge. In looking for my platoon…I stood up enough to be wounded” in the arm, chest, and shoulder by Japanese machine-gun fire. As Champ Jones fell, Japanese small-arms and mortar fire tore into Fox Company from the surrounding hills. Despite a flurry of casualties, the company captured the forward ridges. James Jones admitted being “scared shitless” during the assault. He worked to keep up with Blatt, who had begun to earn his men’s respect by staying forward, seemingly unafraid of exposing himself to danger. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Colonel Mitchell, no doubt feeling pressure from the brass observing his battalion’s attack, telephoned Blatt and complained that Fox Company had veered too far right, exposing their flank. Mitchell committed Easy Company to plug the gap and ordered Blatt to continue attacking across the wide, open ground. But Japanese fire from the distant western ridge kept Fox and Easy Companies pinned down; the men desperately sought shelter in shell holes or behind folds in the ground. Mitchell demanded that Blatt continue to attack westward. Instead of going straight into the buzz saw and losing more men, Blatt wanted to pull Fox Company back, move through the jungle, and concentrate an assault on Hill 53 from the north. A furious Mitchell demurred, instead ordering Blatt to continue the frontal attack. With Japanese fire tearing into his men, Blatt made a critical decision. He flatly refused Mitchell’s order. Jones later dramatized the exchange in a pivotal scene of the novel, when Captain Stein refuses the same direct order from the novel’s Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Tall. “Colonel, I refuse to take my men up there in a frontal attack. It’s...suicide! I’ve lived with these men two and a half years. I won’t order them all to their deaths. That’s final. Over.”…Tall was stupid, ambitious, without imagination, and vicious as well. He was desperate to succeed before his superiors. Otherwise he could never have given such an order. Meanwhile, Blatt’s company command post, located behind a low ridge, came under Japanese mortar fire. One of the shells exploded near Jones,
Japanese fire tore into them from the surrounding hills, causing a flurry of casualties.
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The Galloping Horse
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In January 1943, Jones’s 27th Infantry Regiment attacked a hill complex (left, named for its shape when viewed from north to south). Japanese resistance was fierce, and evacuating casualties proved to be a dangerous task, as depicted in Brodie’s sketch (above).
TOP: HOWARD BRODIE/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER
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FRONT LINES JAN. 11
F Company advance
Hill 53
E Company advance
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throwing him through the air and wounding him in the head. Jones mirrored the incident in The Thin Red Line, with his alter ego, Corporal Fife: He heard the soft ‘shu-u-u’ of the mortarshell for perhaps half a second. There was not even time to connect it with himself and frighten him, before there was a huge sunburst roaring of an explosion almost on top of him, then black blank darkness. He had a vague impression that someone screamed but did not know it was himself. “I came to...several yards down the slope, bleeding like a stuck pig and blood running all over my face,” Jones later recalled. “As soon as I found I wasn’t dead or dying, I was pleased to get out of there as fast as I could.” He cautiously walked back to the hospital, where medics treated him with morphine and sulfa powder. In the novel, Fife again channels Jones’s feelings:
Fife…suddenly realized that he was free. He did not have to stay here any more. He was released. He could simply get up and walk away—provided he was able—with honor, without anyone being able to say he was a coward or courtmartialing him or putting him to jail. His relief was so great he suddenly felt joyous despite the wound. UNDER THE RELENTLESS TROPICAL SUN, afternoon bled into early evening as the companies tried again in vain to capture Japanese positions on the ridges. Captain Charles W. Davis, a strapping, athletic Alabamian, was the battalion executive officer and volunteered to assist the men. Davis, who became the model for The Thin Red Line’s Captain John Gaff, braved over 300 yards of exposed ground in his dash from the battalion command post to the frontline. Heavy fire from a hidden Japanese strongpoint on the reverse slope of the distant ridge brought the
HOWARD BRODIE/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
They were exhausted, dehydrated, and on the verge of collapsing. Mitchell ordered another attack.
American assault to a standstill. Davis realized they had to locate that enemy position and led two others in a crawl along the east side of the ridge toward it. The Japanese spotted the trio, killing one of them with a burst of machine-gun fire. But Davis found the strongpoint. After making several attacks, men in the assault companies were exhausted and, in Guadalcanal’s extreme heat and humidity, dehydrated, too; no water had been sent to the frontline since the early morning and the men were on the verge of collapsing. Nevertheless, Mitchell ordered another attack; it failed. With darkness falling, the troops established a defensive perimeter for the night. At daybreak, Mitchell walked from his command post to the frontline, where Fox Company awaited his orders. Rather than sending them forward yet again, Mitchell ordered them north through the jungle to take the “Horse’s Head,” as Blatt had repeatedly urged the previous day. A small team from Fox Company, including Sergeant “Chubby” Curran, volunteered to eliminate the Japanese strongpoint. Jones later novelized Curran as “Skinny” Culn, a “round, red-faced, Irishman…an easygoing sort…but a careful, well-grounded soldier.” “After we had gone over the crest of the hill a machine gun opened up,” Curran remembered. “We were in the high grass on the saddle. Snipers hidden in ‘spider holes’ then opened up and got three of my men right through their helmets. Two were dead and [another] wounded.” The GIs managed to crawl within 25 yards of the enemy strongpoint, but ran out of grenades. When one of his men was wounded, Curran took him back down and
asked for volunteers to get more grenades and finish the job. Davis volunteered to lead Curran’s survivors back up the hill for the second attempt on the strongpoint. The next 20 minutes proved decisive. The assault party crawled forward on their bellies; when they were within 10 yards of their objective, the Japanese showered them with grenades. By a stroke of luck, the explosives were defective. One grenade landed between Curran and Davis; “It didn’t go off; however, we did!” Davis recalled. The GIs threw their own grenades and charged the Japanese positions. Davis remembered “bolting from the prone to a running position, following our grenades…we made a charge much like those pictured during the Civil War.” Davis stood up, his rifle at hip level, and squeezed the trigger. Jammed. He threw the rifle aside and drew his .45-caliber pistol. Jones later described the assault in the novel: “Go in! Go in!” Gaff cried, and in a moment all of them were on their feet running. No longer did they have to fret and stew, or worry about being brave or being cowardly. Their systems pumped full of adrenaline to constrict the peripheral blood vessels, elevate the blood pressure, make the heart beat more rapidly, and aid coagulation, they were about as near to automatons without courage or cowardice as flesh and blood can get. Numbly, they did the necessary. The storming party wiped out the Japanese in vicious close-quarter fighting. Division commander Major General J. Lawton Collins witnessed
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
After capturing the Galloping Horse complex, the regiment advanced westward toward Kokumbona (above, in another Brodie sketch), aggressively wiping out pockets of Japanese resistance. For his bold leadership in eliminating a Japanese strongpoint, Captain Charles W. Davis received the Medal of Honor (right).
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the attack: “As he led this charge, Davis was silhouetted against the sky in clear view of the bulk of the battalion, as well as the Japs. His action had an electrifying effect on the battalion.” Inspired, Easy Company advanced up the hill to help wipe out any remaining Japanese resistance. At about the same time, Fox Company assaulted the enemy positions on the ridge to the north. Jones’s comrades later described to the still-recovering corporal their frenzied and chaotic attack: as the Americans overran the Japanese defenders, they went “kill-crazy,” Jones recalled. “They bayoneted sick & wounded Japs. They shot them when they came out naked, hands in air.” Fox Company successfully captured the ridges, and division headquarters pulled the regiment off the line for a well-deserved respite. TEN DAYS AFTER HE WAS WOUNDED, Jones returned to a Fox Company that felt different from the unit he had known. Blatt was gone; Mitchell had
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relieved him of command for his refusal to obey the attack order. Casualties had also changed the ranks—sergeants had assumed command of two of the platoons, and more than a quarter of Fox Company had been killed or wounded. And in what felt like a personal betrayal by First Sergeant Wendson, Jones discovered that another soldier had replaced him as company clerk. Jones was assigned to a rifle platoon in time for the second offensive toward the Poha River and the Japanese base at Kokumbona. Unbeknownst to the Americans, the Japanese had decided to evacuate Guadalcanal. Consequently, the regiment’s offensive on January 22 was stunningly successful—they encountered only desperate enemy rear guards or disorganized units in flight. After another battalion captured Kokumbona—“Boola Boola Village” in Jones’s novel—Fox Company carried on in a blur of rapid advances. At night, the men bivouacked on grassy hillsides. The unexpected swiftness of the advance
THE MARSHALL FOUNDATION/25TH INFANTRY DIVISION ASOCIATION COLLECTION
Fox Company at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii a month before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Corporal James Jones is standing in the second row, fourth from right. The soldier who annotated the photo remains a mystery.
stretched the regiment’s supply lines, and Jones remembered three days and nights without supplies, “drinking water from shell holes,” with only two four-ounce D-ration chocolate bars per platoon. He also noted—with disgust—that Lieutenant Burn had a 12-ounce C-ration can at his command post. The unit reached the Poha River in two days. For Fox Company, that marked the end of their combat on Guadalcanal. They spent months recuperating and training before they traveled up the Solomon Islands to fight in the New Georgia campaign. But Corporal James Jones was not among them. Jones’s right ankle had troubled him since Hawaii, and he took to firmly taping it for marches or maneuvers. But in late March, while walking with Wendson, Jones reinjured the ankle. Wendson ordered him to have it examined, adding in his usual style: “If it’s as bad as what I saw, you got no business in the infantry.” The medics agreed, and Jones left Fox Company forever. But he carried in his mind the
events, the men, and the drama, and would immortalize his outfit in The Thin Red Line. The novel as an art form often reveals fundamental human truths through fiction. Conversely, Jones knew history sometimes obscures truth, writing that “the whole history of…World War II has been written, not wrongly so much, but in a way that gave precedence to the viewpoints of strategists, tacticians and theorists, but gave little more than lip service to the viewpoint of the…fighting lower class soldier.” Aside from its literary merits, The Thin Red Line places the frontline soldier’s viewpoint front-and-center in its vision of a world gone mad. Jones himself acknowledges the subjective nature of interpreting the human experience in the last line of his novel: One day one of their number would write a book about all this, but none of them would believe it, because none of them would remember it that way. +
Jones carried in his mind the events, the men, and the drama, and would immortalize his outfit in The Thin Red Line.
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THE VIEW A German-born artist and GI looks back on the strange months spent guarding his former countrymen in American POW camps
PRAIRIE COWBOY
In a painting begun in 1945 and completed in 1993, Naegele depicted himself astride a horse. Soldiers rode the camp’s horses to keep an eye on prisoners working on local farms and, in one instance, to search for escapees. “We found they were missing at roll call,” he says. “So everybody had to be compared to photo IDs— I had to call off 1,000 names in subfreezing weather under an ice-blue sky in a snow-covered field. I lost my voice.” A local farmer found the escapees several days later, not far from camp. “In this painting, I put myself on the colonel’s horse,” Naegele says. “And I did ride that horse—once. It ran away from me. I never got back on.”
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ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THOMAS F. NAEGELE, EXCEPT WHERE NOTED
IN 1944, THOMAS F. NAEGELE was 19 and training to be a telephone repairman at Camp Crowder, Missouri, when he first saw German prisoners of war. Like the PWs, as they were then called, Naegele was German-born and new to the Midwest; unlike them, he was a soldier in the U.S. Army, observing them doing the camp’s dirty work. When a complicated task arose, Naegele’s camp commander asked, “Anyone here speak German?” Naegele raised his hand and the assignment changed the course of his short army career—leading to posts as a guard and interpreter at a series of camps housing some of the 378,000 German prisoners in the United States during the war. Shortly after arriving at the camp at Indianola, Nebraska, Naegele received a present from home for his 20th birthday: a box of paints from his parents, with a suggestion from his father to portray camp life. He did—and the paintings grew into a collection. Fifty years later, with some of the works still half-finished, he filled out the series and published them in a small volume titled Love Thine Enemies. Now on permanent exhibit at the Nebraska Prairie Museum in Holdrege, Nebraska, Naegele’s paintings depict the characters and comic nature of camp life, far removed from the brutal war overseas. The prisoners and guards came to know and even like one another. This was not Abu Ghraib or even Hogan’s Heroes. It was closer to Andy Griffith’s Mayberry. On the following pages the artist, now 92, recalls these colorful stories.
THE VIEW
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HOME SWEET HOME
When Naegele first arrived at the camp at Indianola (top) there were no prisoners and just a small complement of American troops. “The PWs arrived days later by train, in passenger cars fitted with barred windows,” Naegele recalls. “Then they were marched along the road to the camp. This was September; it was still warm. And I saw this long column of German soldiers in gray winter uniforms with overcoats—the same clothes they had as they were taken prisoner and as they made their Atlantic crossing. They were totally stunned.”
POINTING THE WAY
After learning Naegele spoke German, his company commander assigned him to work with a PW labor detail, which arrived by a truck (above). “This was my first encounter with them, and my first contact again with my countrymen,” Naegele says. The job at hand: dismantling a wooden building and then moving it. At the urging of a German master sergeant, 50 American troops instead joined the PWs in hand-carrying the nearly intact structure to its new location. “I worked out the commands for heaving and starting to walk,” Naegele says.
CLOTHES ENCOUNTER
“How can I get a uniform like yours, comrade?”a prisoner asks Naegele. The prisoner was from Murrhardt, a small village east of Stuttgart where Naegele’s parents had a summer home, and, remarkably, knew members of Naegele’s family.“He didn’t fully understand why I was over here in an American uniform,” Naegele recalls. “A decade later I saw him again. It was my father’s 70th birthday. We were visitng Murrhardt, and he was singing in a choir. And as the choir was filing out, he says to me, “And how are things in Nebraska?”
The artist in his New York City apartment, October 2016.
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THE HOSTESS WILL SEAT YOU
Most German prisoners were peaceful—but not all. “In late spring, right before V-E Day, somebody reported that a group of PWs was planning a last stand of some sort,” Naegele says. Interrogators identified a group of about 50 active Nazis and loaded them on a train with barred windows, destined for a camp for troublemakers. En route, though, they needed a meal; hence the surreal, all-American dinner at a USO hall in Kansas City (top). Says Naegele: “Some of them asked me, ‘What is the meaning of this?’ They wondered if it was some mean trick.”
WELL-LIT ROOM
“One young PW, an architect, took offense to the camp’s open bay toilets, 18 in a row,” Naegele recalls (above, left). Calling them “indecent,” the prisoner saw them as a sign of American contempt. But the set-up was identical to the one the GIs had. The artist adds: “Almost everything the soldiers had, the PWs had as well. When they worked, they were paid, according to the Geneva Conventions, 80 cents a day for being willing and able to perform assigned duties. They had their own PX inside the stockade. They had access to the same newspaper and radio reports that we did.”
PHOTO: TOBIAS NAEGELE
THE VIEW
SHOPPING SPREE
In November 1944, Naegele took two prisoners into McCook, Nebraska, to shop for props for a Christmas show the Germans were planning. “They weren’t wearing their PW uniforms,” Naegele says. “They went in their original German uniforms.” A store manager greeted the three: “Sears, Roebuck is proud to serve our boys in the armed forces.” Naegele recalls: “I said we need to buy blankets and stockings. He sends us to ladies underwear, where there’s a women in a black dress spreading out nylon stockings to show how sheer they were. It was bizarre.”
W E A PONS M A N UA L I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y J I M L AU R I E R
THREEWHEEL RUMBLER Germany’s BMW R75 motorcycle and sidecar BMW R75 Displacement: 745cc / Production: 16,510 / The sidecar’s design initially allowed it to tow a light artillery gun, but crews increased the R75’s mobility and versatility by instead mounting a machine gun.
THE COMPETITION BSA M20 Displacement: 496cc / Production: 126,335 / Although initially criticized for being slow and heavy, the M20 was reliable and easy to maintain. It served in various roles in nearly every theater of the war.
HARLEY-DAVIDSON WLA Displacement: 740cc / Production: 90,000 / After a modest introduction in 1940, production significantly increased after the U.S. entered the war, with the WLA serving in escort, courier, police, and transport roles.
DNEPR M-72
Soldiers regularly appropriated equipment from other theaters, like this Soviet 12L field kitchen thermos.
PHOTOS, FROM FAR LEFT: GALERIE BILDERWELT/GETTY IMAGES; ©EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL/ALAMY; ©DPA PICTURE ALLIANCE/ALAMY
Displacement: 750cc / Production: 6,000 / After the poor performance of its motorcycles during the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finland war, the USSR adapted a BMW design to create the rugged M-72.
MEALS TO GO
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STINGER The swivel-mounted MG 34 offered frontfacing firepower; its versatility and reliability made it a favorite among R75 crews.
KEEPING IT HANDY Most soldiers used their gas mask canisters to keep more useful items within reach and stowed their masks.
DIRT BIKERS JERRY’S CANS In the desert, water and gasoline were treasured commodities, and crews strapped on 20-liter jerrycans when possible.
The BMW R75’s success stemmed in large part from its ability to operate in extreme environments. Whether the machine was crossing hot desert sands (like the Afrika Korps crew, opposite, far left), the frigid mud of the Eastern Front (with a properly garbed soldier, center), or Paris’s paved Champs-Élysées (near left), the R75 proved to be a reliable mount that served in multiple roles.
The insignia represents the Afrika Korps, which fought on the continent from March 1941 until surrendering in May 1943.
WHILE ADVANCING ACROSS EUROPE, THE WEHRMACHT recognized the need for a small and quick vehicle capable of negotiating various terrain. In response, Bavarian Motor Works (BMW) introduced the R75, a three-wheel motorcycle and sidecar combination that was fast, maneuverable, and capable of handling rough conditions. The Germans widely deployed the R75 across multiple theaters of war, from the North African desert to the vast Eastern Front. Although the R75 had a hefty starting weight of more than 900 pounds, its 750cc engine drove its rear and sidecar wheel to a top speed of 60 miles per hour. To ensure the vehicle had sufficient stopping power, BMW fitted brakes on all three wheels—hydraulic brakes on the rear wheels and mechanical brakes on the front. Its two-stage transmission offered one gear ratio for rough terrain and another for paved roads. By August 1942, the Germans sought to simplify their manufacturing process and urged BMW and its rival, Zündapp, to standardize their parts and create a hybrid machine. They agreed to do so once BMW’s production reached 20,200 R75s, but Allied bombing knocked out its Eisenach factory after it had built 16,510 R75s. —Paraag Shukla JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017
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In occupied Germany, there was one battle the Allies couldn’t win By Susan L. Carruthers
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RALPH MORSE/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
UNSTOPPABLE FORCE
A ban on fraternization between American GIs and civilians in occupied Germany did little to thwart interactions of all kinds. JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017
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ingenious players in occupied Germany’s game of cat and mouse were the fräuleins who set out to tease and ensnare guileless GIs. German women, in effect, were doing the real pinioning. Wearing “flimsy” summer dresses—or even less at Germany’s beaches and pools—they paraded their untouchable assets. “Girls flaunt themselves partly to taunt the Americans,” Life explained, “but chiefly in order to get ‘frau bait’ of candy, gum and cigarets [sic].” Stars and Stripes published similar photographs of solidly constructed young women in two-piece bathing suits that both reminded GIs about what was off-limits and encouraged them to disregard the prohibition. “Verboten—but not too bad from this angle,” ran one caption. The claim that women solicited their occupiers’ attention—for both amusement and profit—quickly became a dominant explanation for the breakdown of soldiers’ sexual restraint in occupied Germany. No less an authority than Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery endorsed this thesis; the British general accused the country’s female population of practicing a “new form of German sabotage by wearing fewer and fewer clothes, thereby undermining nonfraternization policy.” Time reported that this treacherous striptease had disarmed both Tommies and GIs: “German girls in brief shorts and halters systematically sunned themselves in full view of U.S. engineers…. Military policemen…had their patience tried by a girl who patted her backside and whispered ‘verboten’ every time she passed…. The effect on [troops] was exactly what the Field Marshal feared.” This story encapsulated the contradictions that characterized the press’s take on sex and the occupation soldier. On the one hand, nothing seemingly sullied the good name of the American occupation government more than illicit intimate contact between American personnel and German women. As war correspondent Percy Knauth pointed out in Life, they were “girls who used to go out with the guys who killed your buddies.” That German women were “preoccupied”—the former lovers of Nazi Party bigwigs or Wehrmacht small fry—made them all the more dangerous, or, worse yet, all the more alluring. Yet, however lamentable this sordid state of affairs, GIs were not wholly, or even primarily, to blame. The “unspeakable” was also highly marketable. Rarely did magazine editors pass up an easy double entendre. When Collier’s magazine published a story in October 1946 entitled “Heels among the Heroes,” it illustrated Edward Morgan’s essay about low morale and lax morality among American occupation forces with a photograph of three “comely German Fräuleins” in bikinis protesting an “offlimits” sign planted at a beach. The GI they peti-
Wearing “flimsy” summer dresses, German women paraded their untouchable assets.
From The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace by Susan L. Carruthers. Published by Harvard University Press. $29.95. Copyright © 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
RALPH MORSE/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
F
rom the moment Allied occupation troops entered Germany, two things became apparent: first, that GIs would waste little time in finding new sexual partners and, second, that with just as much gusto, American reporters and photographers would alert stateside audiences to these liaisons. No occupied territory excited greater or more prurient interest than the female body. Nor did anything more speedily tarnish the image of America’s postwar occupation than the avidity with which American servicemen of all ranks engaged in what was euphemistically termed “fraternization” with defeated former foes. Military leaders had expressly forbidden American service personnel from fraternizing with Germans, of all ages and both sexes, in any way whatsoever. GIs were reminded about this prohibition at every turn, from the Pocket Guide to Germany to orientation films, radio spots, posters, and large billboards that lined the routes along which Allied soldiers poured into the Third Reich in the war’s closing months. At first, Germany—and German women— appeared suitably hostile or simply absent from the visual record of Allied conquest. Life magazine’s March 19, 1945, issue carried a striking, full-page image of an amused American corporal cinching a female figure with a passing facial resemblance to Marlene Dietrich. On closer inspection, her extravagantly arched eyebrows turned out to be the least improbable feature of this GI’s inamorata—a mannequin wearing almost nothing other than a long wig and a Wehrmacht officer’s cap. “American soldiers are forbidden to ‘fraternize’ with real German girls,” the caption explained. Although the text went on to remark that fraternization was “hard to prevent,” Life offered no further illumination. That would soon change. Four months later, the magazine devoted several pages to a photo story illuminating the “No. 1 gripe of American GIs in Germany, the official policy of ‘nonfraternization’”: a rule that meant “soldiers are forbidden marriage, visits, drinking, shaking hands, playing games, hobnobbing, exchanging gifts, walking, sitting, dancing or talking to the Germans.” To show how egregiously American soldiers were violating the ban, Life devoted an entire page to a photograph showing a GI pinioning a young woman against the wall of a dreary apartment building, his body angled toward hers, their faces just inches apart. “In a back yard near Wiesbaden, U.S. soldier corners a pretty, laughing German girl,” the caption read. But the other photographs in the story served a rather different purpose: to show that the truly
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The press accused German women of taunting occupying soldiers. British Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery called it a “new form of German sabotage.”
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AS THAT CHIMERICAL recommendation suggests, the antifraternization rule was not exclusively, or even primarily, a military device contrived to starve soldiers of sex. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s order prohibiting all social contact—issued on September 12, 1944, the day after the first American troops occupied a small pocket of southwestern Germany around Aachen—reflected the tightening of Washington policy on the so-called “German Question.” As such, the ban sought to impress on citizens of the Third Reich their “collective guilt” by force of complete ostracism. To help Germans “see the error of their ways” they would be “held at arm’s length,” as General John H. Hilldring, commander of the War Department’s Civil Affairs Division, put it. The terms of Eisenhower’s prohibition made his figurative expression literal. Germans wouldn’t just be held at arm’s length; they wouldn’t be held at all. Even handshaking was banned. The prohibition of more intimate physical contact was left unspoken but implied. Washington’s line on fraternization toughened under popular pressure. Soon after American troops occupied Aachen, photographs appeared in stateside newspapers showing soldiers enjoying the hospital-
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ity of German families—taking convivial meals together, with GIs’ arms familiarly draped over children’s shoulders. Within days, President Franklin D. Roosevelt cabled Eisenhower about photographs “considered objectionable by a number of our people.” The president asked that SHAEF both stamp out fraternization and ensure that “publication of such photos be effectively prohibited.” Eisenhower responded that he had already insisted “that fraternization be suppressed completely,” but the ban would henceforth be more total in its remit. Military commanders found themselves in the uncomfortable position of imposing a prohibition they believed unenforceable. They employed every conceivable argument to urge men away from contact with Germans—playing, in particular, on fears of contamination. Antifraternization propaganda construed German women as doubly dangerous: carriers of noxious ideological strains as well as sexually transmitted diseases. Posters presented a lurid image of female siren-saboteurs poised to infect American boys’ minds with the bacillus of Nazism and their bodies with syphilis and gonorrhea. In the spring of 1945, after the Allies had liberated the concentration and extermination camps, antifraternization warnings also incorporated photographs of Germany’s victims to underscore the message that Americans must shun the perpetrators of these abhorrent crimes. But the terms of the ban were extraordinarily difficult to respect. Military personnel whose work required them to interact with German civilians on a day-to-day basis found it especially awkward. On occasion, drivers, translators, and other subordinates rebuked military officers for unthinkingly offering their hands to German civilians or returning salutes before they had had time to curb reflexes of military courtesy. Some checked their instincts but wondered whether they had been correct to do so. On May 22, 1945, Major John Maginnis recounted in his diary that he had gone to pick up some photographs from a small shop in Berlebeck: “In the normal European fashion, [the elderly proprietor] courteously preceded me to the door and extended his hand as I departed. I did not take it and somehow it bothered me that I did not. Had I given him the customary brief handshake, would I have been fraternizing? Probably.” Maginnis did not pursue the logic of his unease further. But others certainly wondered whether the ban was not calculated to engender more hostility than remorse, particularly among Germans who had not been party members and bristled at the undifferentiated guilt Americans attached to the entire population.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; © PICTORAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY; RALPH MORSE/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES; 123RF; THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
To help Germans “see the error of their ways,” policy decreed they were to be “held at arm’s length.”
tioned was dressed only in bathing trunks. “It takes a strong man to remain firm,” the caption nudged. One troublesome word, “occupation,” thus found itself inextricably entangled with another: “fraternization.” It was an “awful big word for most GIs,” an army field surgeon wrote to his wife from Germany in July 1945, but it “usually just means one thing to them.” A much simpler, four-letter word could readily be substituted for this cumbersome term—or it could be abbreviated to “frattin,” with no truncation of meaning. Neither before nor during World War II had American military commanders hit on a reliable formula for constraining soldiers’ sexual activity in all its unruliness. A ban on fraternization had been tried in Germany before, when American troops occupied the Rhineland after World War I. The prohibition failed and was quickly rescinded. During World War II, soldiers overseas had become accustomed to having sex with or without the military establishment’s direct facilitation. It was inconceivable that troops would cease and desist from all sexual activity upon entry into Germany, no matter what stern injunctions SHAEF—Allied supreme headquarters—might issue. Recognizing this, one senior officer proposed that if superiors insisted on a fraternization ban, “we should import into Germany at the earliest possible moment our own women in as large numbers as may be.”
One nettlesome question was whether children deserved to be stigmatized in exactly the same way as their parents and other adults. Sidney Eisenberg told his family in the Bronx about a fleeting encounter, two days before Germany’s final capitulation, that had rattled him: “As you know I take this non-fraternization business very seriously— far more than most. I slipped up once. I walk home from work every day—3 1⁄2 miles—for the exercise and completely ignore the Herrenvolk en route. But the other day a sweet little girl—about 7 years old— dragging a tiny kid brother, smiled at me faintly— hopefully. I grinned at her efforts and she immediately broke into the loveliest smile imaginable—one I shall never forget tho I felt guilt about even this afterward.”
A photographer used the German word for bath or spa—bad—to playful advantage (top) in documenting the ban on fraternization; a costumed corporal (center, left) had his own fun with it, posing with a mannequin. Despite omnipresent warnings—on a road to Berlin (center, right) and on a guide for GIs (above, left)—enlisted men and officers alike widely violated the ban, with few punished. A courtroom scene (above, right) shows a rare exception. The fine was $65.
BAN OR NO BAN, American soldiers found Germany alive with sexual activity in the spring and summer of 1945. One particularly galling phenomenon to many GIs was the fact that German POWs were being released and returning home by the early summer. “Darling it sure does burn the boys over here to see all the German soldiers walking down the road going home and then we have to stay here and watch them,” infantryman Aubrey Ivey wrote to his wife from Landa on May 26, 1945. Worse yet, these demobilized veterans were publicly resuming their romantic lives, and seemingly flaunting their freedom to do so, under the disgusted gaze of the occupiers. On June 6, Leo Bogart, a sergeant in the Army Signal Corps, wrote his parents in Brooklyn on the subject: “To the GI who is faithful to a woman back in the States, or who just wants to keep his nose clean and sticks to the nonfraternization rule, there is something extremely irritating in the sight of a Nazi soldier, in his uniform, walking slowly down the street of an evening in the embrace of a good-looking Fräulein.” Former Wehrmacht soldiers were not the only ones enjoying an instant “peace dividend.” Some female Displaced Persons—many of them former forced laborers from Eastern Europe—were also running “miniature houses of joy,” as one military government officer put it. “I broke that up fast for the two were Polish and therefore had to be shipped to a repatriation center if they weren’t doing useful work,” Second Lieutenant Maurice Kurtz informed his spouse, quipping that “useful” was all a matter of perspective. Predictably enough, the Poles’ clientele was not limited to other DPs. Since the fraternization ban did not extend to other nationalities, American soldiers quickly entered into liaisons with DPs. Life also alerted its readers to the way in which GIs would spuriously “renationalize” women to JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017
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recorded his vexation that a general, Frank Howley, failed to take a serious view of two field-grade officers openly “having social parties” with German women, letting the men off with nothing more than a “good dressing down.” Meanwhile in the Bavarian Alps, Colonel Clifton Lisle, commander of the 2nd European Civil Affairs Regiment, tried to hold the line by court-martialing an officer who had consorted with a woman Lisle described as a “notorious Nazi whore.” (His diary noted his incomprehension over “such things,” but not the verdict.) DESPITE SOME OFFICERS’ BEST EFFORTS, the line was not to be held. As army historian Earl Ziemke writes, nonfraternization policy “did not end, it disintegrated.” The first substantial retreat came on June 4, 1945, when SHAEF quietly released word that contraction of VD would no longer be “used directly or indirectly as evidence of fraternization”—an indication the ban had done nothing to curb escalating rates of infection. In fact, halfhearted attempts to respect nonfraternization had just the opposite effect. One army medic noted that after Eisenhower’s initial order was decreed, the bowl of condoms that had formerly sat at the end of the chow line was removed—with predictable consequences for the sexual health of soldiers and their partners. However, these pragmatic rationales for rescinding the ban hardly made for the best PR. The public narrative, as spun for the home front, attempted to turn a negative into a positive by first authorizing friendly relations between military personnel and children. Eisenhower made this announcement on June 11, conjuring a heartwarming image of the generous GI to whom youngsters everywhere were irresistibly drawn. This surely elicited knowing chuckles from men only too well aware that it was hardly the dispensing of Hershey bars to infants that had preoccupied the high command. The new amendment also seemed almost to encourage GIs to set their sights ever lower, since interaction with young girls could now, however disingenuously, be justified by the official sanction given to friendly dealings with children. In this vein, Life tellingly captioned a photograph of a GI greeting a young German woman, “Goodday, child.” What was left of the ban lasted only another month before Eisenhower announced that soldiers could henceforth engage German adults in conversation. Gamely, but misleadingly, he asserted that this move reflected the great strides that had been made with denazification. By permitting verbal exchanges, the ameliorated policy would encourage yet more progress since, Eisenhower suggested, GIs
HISTORYNET ARCHIVES (ALL)
If military rule was not persuasive enough, perhaps fear of contamination would be—hence the myriad posters alerting GIs to the dangers of venereal disease.
circumvent the ban against fraternization, pretending that German girlfriends were not, in fact, German. “The boys never admit fraternizing, and it’s always a French girl, or a Belgian, or a Russian, or a Pole involved. They’re very cagey,” Dr. Felix Vann, a major in the 863rd Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion, informed his wife in late May. In an attempt to stamp out this ruse, Twelfth Army Group headquarters began issuing colored cloth armbands to DPs that would identify them by nationality: a practice uncomfortably redolent of the Nazi insistence that persecuted populations literally wear their identity on their sleeves. Another unit tried something similar with lapel buttons. Predictably, these readily discarded markers of identity did not prove an effective impediment to GI ingenuity. Indeed, enlisted men’s can-do entrepreneurialism simply ensured that a brisk black market developed for DP armbands and buttons. Officers were just as quick to circumvent the fraternization ban as enlisted men. But where the latter often required deviousness to maneuver around rules, officers simply bent them on a grander scale. Officers, after all, both devised and enforced the rules—or ignored them. Felix Vann expanded on his observations about enlisted men’s associations with DPs, or Germans they passed off as such, with equally scathing diatribes about officers. Many of them, he noted in July 1945, were “going off the deep end.” Married and single officers alike routinely maintained relationships with women they had met earlier in France and Belgium, issuing themselves passes so they could return west at whim to visit their girlfriends. Unlike enlisted men, officers enjoyed the self-assigned leisure and mobility required to sustain long-distance romances. Others, Vann noted, were “shacked up with WACs [Women’s Army Corps] and nurses,” leading to another common complaint of enlisted men: that their superiors monopolized all the available American women. With some officers openly pursuing affairs in Germany and beyond, enlisted men inclined to break the rules no doubt felt all the more vindicated in pursuing their own amorous adventures. In this permissive environment, punishment for violations of the fraternization ban was rarely severe, especially after V-E Day. Enlisted men faced fines of $65 for fraternization, a sum equivalent to two or three months’ net pay for most, but few offenders were actually docked. Officers tended to be especially lenient in excusing one another’s “indiscretions.” Major Maginnis, who in his diary had expressed misgivings about his interaction with a German shop owner, also
AP PHOTO
The ban lasted only until summer 1945, when American servicemen could at last begin fraternizing openly—like these soldiers and their dates in Berlin on July 27.
would now be able to express their outrage to Germans about the horrors of the extermination camps. Few, one suspects, had either the language skills or the inclination to take up this opportunity. Rather than reflecting the success of denazification, the retreat from nonfraternization actually demonstrated how unworkable the hard-line policy had proven in practice. Reporters greeted the end of the ban as tantamount to an order from Ike to copulate; at any rate, they announced that GIs had gleefully taken his “fraternization order” that way. Some officers agreed, infuriated that enlisted men were now quite openly consorting with German women in public. Indeed, according to Brigadier General Jack Whitelaw, it was impossible to go outdoors in Berlin without tripping over fraternizing couples: “Yesterday being Sunday, I took the afternoon off and went for a walk around the lake,” he wrote to his wife on September 17, 1945. “The thing called fraternization is still going on there full blast; in fact, it’s increasing and I’ve about decided that I must find some other form of exercise.”
Whitelaw did not give up his perambulations around Berlin’s Grunewald, but his attitude toward German civilians soon softened. By winter 1945, he and many other officers were more alarmed by the possibility of Germans starving or freezing to death than by no-longer illicit liaisons. Over time, American recollections of the occupation would also soften as Germans transformed from bitter foes to firm Cold War allies. Hollywood, meanwhile, turned postwar Germany into safe territory for squeaky-clean teens. In 1960, America’s best-known soldier serving overseas, Elvis Presley, rued the unavailability of German girlfriends for lonesome American boys in GI Blues. Without any need for a formal ban on fraternization, chaste fräuleins apparently kept GIs at arm’s length, issuing their own stern injunctions against inappropriate trespass. “They all wear signs saying ‘Keepen Sie Off The Grass,’” Presley crooned regretfully in the title number. The wholesome Germany of GI Blues was a far cry from the days just after the war when American journalists decried the “unbearable availability” of German fräuleins, lamenting how swiftly VD had followed V-E. + JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017
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THE MORAL QUESTION HITLER’S SOLDIERS The German Army in the Third Reich By Ben H. Shepherd. 639 pp. Yale University Press, 2016. $35.
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THE GERMAN ARMY had its ups and downs during World War II, winning a series of dramatic early victories and then suffering a parade of catastrophic defeats until the final collapse of 1945. Its historical reputation has followed the same pattern. Most military writers loved it in the immediate postwar years. They admired its innovative adoption of mechanized warfare, its intricate interplay between tank formations and air power, and its daring operational maneuvers. Starting in the 1990s, however, that reputation began to tarnish. As new records became available, especially from the now-defunct Soviet Union, the focus shifted away from the German army’s operational excellence and toward the criminal nature of the war it waged. The army used to get a pass on Hitler’s horrors, while the more fanatical Waffen-SS got the blame. But no serious person can still believe that the German army had “clean hands” in World War II. The evidence against it is simply overwhelming. These two schools—operational excellence and criminality—often talk past one another, however, and that is the very reason why Hitler’s Soldiers is such a rich and satisfying book. Ben H. Shepherd is an exponent of both trends. He spends much of the book describing the army’s
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Troops of the Waffen-SS (left) took most of the blame for atrocities during the war yet collectively the German army was culpable. “astounding record of military success.” Before we ask why the German army lost, he notes, we “need to ask how it won, so repeatedly and spectacularly, in the early years of the war,” and then remained in the field later, under blows that would have crumpled many other armies. However, Shepherd also narrates the nastier aspects of the German war. His previous books have dealt with antipartisan warfare and he is an expert on all facets: the army’s brutal occupation policies, its smash-and-grab economic practices, and the plastic nature of the term “anti-partisan,” which gave the men in the field carte blanche to kill anyone they wished, as long as the dead showed up in the official reports as “bandits” or “terrorists.” When we think of the Holocaust, our minds usually turn to Auschwitz, but millions of Jews perished in the German army’s aggressive anti-partisan campaigns, even though the victims never grabbed a gun or lifted a finger against their German occupiers. The key to understanding both viewpoints of the German army at war, Shepherd argues, is Nazi ideology and propaganda. From the high commanders down to the typical “ground-pounder,” German soldiers really did believe in the Führer’s “world-historical mission” to redeem Germany. They believed in Nazi racial theories, crackpot notions that saw some races as born to rule and others as innately inferior or lazy or evil. They really did believe that Germany stood under attack by an “international Jewish conspiracy” and that the stakes were nothing less than victory or death. The men might not have all been “ideological fanatics,” but they were “permeated” with Nazi ideology, Shepherd argues, and these attitudes help to explain why the army stayed in the field so tenaciously, and why it killed civilians so viciously. Shepherd notes the paradox, however. The more fanatically the German army fought—whether holding on senselessly in a war long lost or carrying out ever more mind-numbing atrocities—the more determined its enemies became to destroy it utterly, along with Germany itself. “Thus did the German army’s moral failure and military failure reinforce one another,” he writes in conclusion. Of all the guides that modern armies use in war, the maps and charts and aerial reconnaissance photos, the moral compass remains the most indispensable. —Robert M. Citino is the Senior Historian at the National WWII Museum’s Institute for the Study of War and Democracy.
R E V I E W S BOO K S
BLITZKRIEG is a particularly successful synergy of correspondence and interviews, archival material from four countries, and the massive body of published literature addressing one of warmaking’s greatest surprises: the German conquest of France and its Low Countries in fewer than six weeks during May and June 1940. This phenomenon has been commonly explained as the result of a new form of warfare based on speed and shock: Blitzkrieg—lightning war. But building on recent scholarship, especially Karl-Heinz Frieser’s, The Blitzkrieg Legend, Lloyd Clark—a prolific military historian and a master of sources—makes a strong case for an alternative perspective. Blitzkrieg emphasizes operational and tactical evidence to persuasively argue that the 1940 campaign was decided not by tanks and dive-bombers alone, but through an BLITZKRIEG updating of German military experiMyth, Reality, and Hitler’s ence infused, but not dominated, by Lightning War: France 1940 technology. Leadership, initiative, By Lloyd Clark. 480 pp. Atlantic training, fighting spirit: Clark presMonthly Press, 2016. $27. ents these features of the German way of war as the taproots of a victory that was anything but inevitable. They were applied in the contexts of a country unprepared for war and a High Command riven by doubts and frictions—not all of the latter attributable to Adolf Hitler. These same worries and internal frictions were ones that had defied and broken the Second Reich between 1914 and 1918, and that offered every prospect of disaster in 1940. A desperate situation called for desperate measures, for thinking outside the box. The result was Germany’s revised strategic decision to focus the main attack through the Ardennes instead of Belgium, the consistent readiness at all levels of command to take high risks for the prospect of high gains, and the unfailing willingness of German soldiers to endure the physical and emotional stress of continuous operations. As Clark demonstrates, Germany overpowered its enemy so effectively that the adversary’s plans and orders might well have been drawn up by the Germans themselves. Mistakenly, France had prepared for an alternate form of war, defensively oriented, based on attrition and position, featuring a managerial approach to command that discouraged initiative and relied on masses of routine correspondence. Consequently, the Germans consistently set the campaign’s pace by observing, acting, and adjusting while the French and their allies were trying to determine what was happening—largely without success. Fighting on an enemy’s terms is like playing cards with the other man’s deck—it seldom ends well. In 1940, Germany’s strategic combination of technology, doctrine, and execution generated a level of effectiveness that resulted in a victory that was as much psychological as it was operational and material. Ever since, armies across the world have sought to replicate it— usually in vain. —Dennis Showalter is professor of history at Colorado College and former president of the Society for Military History.
BROKEN LEGEND
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HIGH-TIDE VICTORY THE FLEET AT FLOOD TIDE America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-1945 By James D. Hornfischer. 640 pp. Bantam, 2016. $35.
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IN JUNE 1944, on the eve of the invasion of Saipan, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander of joint forces in the Pacific Ocean Areas, had estimated that the Pacific War had passed through three phases. In the first, Japan expanded while America recovered from Pearl Harbor, secured lines of communication, and stopped the Japanese at Midway. The second phase ended in mid-1943 with the capture of the southern Solomons. As a consequence of the third, the February 1944 conquest of the Marshalls, American forces cracked the outer barrier of Japan’s defenses. Each phase brought the United States closer to Japan’s home islands. But Operation Forager, the
American offensive to neutralize Japanese bases in the Mariana Islands and Palau, heightened the stakes of winning—and the consequences for losing. Japanese warlords considered the perimeter connecting the Marianas, the western Carolines, and western New Guinea as a tripwire to finish the fight in the Pacific. Meanwhile, Americans were intent on leveraging a “powerful triad” of naval power, amphibious assault, and strategic aviation to force unconditional surrender. In the process, author James D. Hornfischer argues persuasively in The Fleet at Flood Tide that both sides passed a threshold into total war. Yet it was Japanese leaders’ adherence to a policy of “bloody status quo” that dictated the endgame. After Saipan, two truths emerged: “A great victory was in hand…and far worse lay ahead.” In contrast to his earlier work, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors (2004), Hornfischer’s new book paints a bigger canvas, one exploring the conquests of the Marianas (and to a lesser extent, Leyte, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa), the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, the B-29 raids on Japan, and the use of atomic bombs. Throughout, Hornfischer adheres to a narrative he describes as “at the level of How Things Work,” illustrating how the actions of soldiers, sailors, and airmen combined to achieve victory. In doing so, he deploys a fine cast of strategic and tactical characters. Strategically, Fifth Fleet Commander Raymond A. Spruance represents high seas naval might; Amphibious Forces Commander Richmond Kelly Turner, the projection of that might ashore; and U.S. Army Air Forces’ Colonel Paul Tibbets, the advent of a new aerial strategic weapon—the atomic bomb. There is also plenty of battle action involving submariners, B-29 crews, UDT frogmen, Marines and GIs, even Amtrak drivers. With a more panoramic narrative, the drama in The Fleet at Flood Tide is more episodic and less visceral— but by no means less propulsive. In a very real sense the book is also a Spruance testimonial. He, in Hornfischer’s words, “emerges as the indispensable man.” During the Battle of the Philippine Sea, Spruance hewed to the strategy of capturing Saipan while his aviation admirals agitated to chase after Japanese carriers. In short, “Spruance saw his mission as larger than sinking enemy ships.” Perhaps most significantly, the admiral stood in sharp contrast to the “frenetic desperate death cult that was imperial Japan.” —New Jersey-based writer David Sears is a historian and frequent contributor to World War II.
U.S. NAVY; OPPOSITE: PARADOX INTERACTIVE
Chester W. Nimitz (left) gets the lion’s share of attention in Pacific War histories, but Hornfischer casts Raymond Spruance (right) as “indispensable.”
DAWN OF INFAMY A Sunken Ship, a Vanished Crew, and the Final Mystery of Pearl Harbor By Stephen Harding. 249 pp. DaCapo, 2016. $25. Originally an article in World War II (“Prelude to Pearl,” January 2009), Stephen Harding’s story of an American cargo ship sunk by a Japanese sub some 1,000 miles northeast of Pearl Harbor hours before the Japanese attack is thought-provoking and artfully told.
THE WAR WITHIN Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad By Alexis Peri. 370 pp. Harvard University Press, 2017. $29.95. The battle for Leningrad claimed as many as two million Soviet lives—nearly half of them civilian. Drawing from 125 previously unpublished diaries, author Alexis Peri heartbreakingly personalizes their stories.
ADOLFO KAMINSKY, A FORGER’S LIFE By Sarah Kaminsky. 232 pp. DoppelHouse Press, 2016. $18.95. As a teenager, Adolfo Kaminsky forged documents to help people escape the Nazis, eventually becoming the Resistance’s primary forger in Paris. Written by his daughter, this edition includes images of Kaminsky’s expertly forged documents.
THE PLOTS AGAINST HITLER By Danny Orbach. 432 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. $28.00. An in-depth look at the anti-Nazi underground in Germany and the conspirators’ efforts to end Hitler’s reign. The book covers the birth of a close-knit group of resisters, its expansion into a broader conspiracy network, and its culmination in the well-known July 1944 operation led by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg.
R E V I E W S GA M E S
IRONCLAD FUN HEARTS OF IRON IV Paradox Interactive, $39.99. WOR L D WA R I I R AT I NG
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Hearts of Iron IV allows players to control a combatant nation in World War II at the highest strategic level. Players decide on everything from structuring research to setting national conscription laws, along with diplomacy, trade, military deployments, and more.
THE BASICS
THE OBJECTIVE To help win the war, or to be on the winning team. This is done by making grand strategic decisions, utilizing resources, and deploying forces more skillfully than the enemy. HISTORICAL ACCURACY Hearts of Iron IV equally blends historical accuracy and historical fiction. For instance, countries are limited to the weapons that existed in World War II, but any country may develop them: Japan may create a powerful armored force, or Germany may develop atomic weapons. The game features optional variations from history. One scenario starts in 1936 where the Soviet Union allies with Britain before the war. This can be fun, especially for players who loved the classic game Axis and Allies but wore out the historically accurate yet limited possibilities. Like its predecessors, Hearts of Iron IV’s level of detail becomes difficult to manage. For instance, trade, infrastructure, and production in the United States is handled separately in each state, making it tedious.
THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
The game mechanics take practice. While fictional events help expand game possibilities, the AI suffers, using default maneuvers rather than employing counter-strategies to players’ moves. However, online players may find themselves doing the same, initially playing turn-to-turn instead of creating an overall game-winning strategy.
PLAYABILITY
THE BOTTOM LINE Hearts of Iron IV is not for players who want to control units and fight an operational-level war. Players taking the United States’ side in the game take on the roles of Roosevelt/Marshall, not Eisenhower/Patton. In other words, players set the conditions for victory rather than fighting for it. This is not a criticism; Hearts offers an interesting and unusual take on a war game that requires a far different set of skills and strategies.—Chris Ketcherside, a former Marine, is working on a PhD in military history. JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017
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B AT T L E F I L M S B Y M A R K G R I M S L E Y
A NEW BRAND OF HERO A SMALL BAND OF MEN, led by a hero, going somewhere, to do something dangerous. That’s the essence of the combat film genre. But the genre has other familiar features. The men, for example, are a polyglot of different religions, class backgrounds, and ethnicities. One functions as comic relief. Another has a grudge against the leader from some previous encounter. Internal tensions lead to a crisis that threatens to tear the group apart. The climax centers on the achievement of victory. The combat film genre first emerged in World War II. By the late 1940s it
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was well established, and when audiences flocked to such movies as Sands of Iwo Jima and Battleground (both released in 1949), they knew what to expect as surely as if they were going to watch a horror film or a western. But, as happens with every genre, over time filmmakers began to play with its elements in an effort to keep the stories they told fresh, and to interpret them in new ways. One of the first and best of this new wave of World War II combat movies is Hell is for Heroes, released in 1962 and starring Steve McQueen, who was just then emerging as one of America’s iconic movie stars. In many ways Hell is for Heroes follows the conventions of the combat film genre. It starts by introducing a squad of American infantrymen bivouacked in a ravaged French village near the German border in late 1944. The squad is the usual polyglot. The crew’s leader, Sergeant Jim Larkin (Harry Guardino), is bluff and by-the-rules. Corporal Frank Henshaw (James Coburn) loves nothing better than to tinker with automobile engines. Private Stan Kolinsky (Mike Kellin) is a Polish American. Into this mix comes a replacement, Private John Reese (McQueen). Reese is a loner, terse, cold and remote, a first-rate soldier in combat, but reckless and selfdestructive when out of action. He was a senior noncommissioned officer before an off-duty escapade cost him his stripes. The GIs soon board trucks and travel to a defensive position opposite the German Siegfried Line. It transpires that the understrength squad (six riflemen) must hold a line that would require an entire infantry company (120 riflemen) to defend properly. This desperate mission perfectly fits the combat film genre. Tension soon develops between Larkin and Reese. While this conflict between leader and outsider is also a standard of the combat film genre, Hell is for Heroes gives it a crucial twist. The audience is asked to identify not with Larkin, who in earlier combat films would have been the hero, but with Reese, the outsider who in earlier films would have been the antagonist. Hell is for Heroes is thus one of the first in this genre to feature an antihero: a protagonist who lacks heroic attributes. The quarrel between Larkin and Reese centers on a violent disagreement about tactics. Larkin, who believes in following orders literally, wants the squad to hunker in its foxholes. But Reese argues that a static defense would be fatal. The Germans would expect a company-strength unit to probe their defenses as a matter of course. The absence of
©PHOTOS12/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
The 1962 war drama redefined the combat film genre, becoming one of the first to feature an antihero rather than a traditional ruleabiding protagonist.
THE FIRST U.S. GOVERNMENTFUNDED FALLOUT SHELTER IS LOCATED IN THIS CITY
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Reese is a loner—a first-rate soldier in combat, but reckless and selfdestructive when out of action.
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HistoryNet.com TIME OUT. THE 1959 ALBUM BY THE DAVE BRUBECK QUARTET FEATURED THE SINGLES “TAKE FIVE” AND “BLUE RONDO À LA TURK.”
a probe would telegraph weakness and therefore invite a German attack. Consequently, the squad must convincingly simulate a patrol. Reese’s judgment, the audience grasps, is correct. Eventually, Larkin grudgingly agrees. The simulation works, but subsequently a German patrol comes at the group from out of the darkness. In a brief sharp firefight, most of the enemy soldiers are killed or captured. But two or three, Reese figures, have been able to get away with word of the weakness of the team’s position. That augurs a certain full-scale German attack. The only solution, Reese argues, is an assault on the German pillbox in front. This strikes Larkin as crazy, particularly since the pillbox is surely protected by a minefield. But a shell explosion soon obliterates Larkin; command of the squad falls to Corporal Henshaw. Henshaw, strictly a mechanic at heart, knows that Reese has the better head for tactics. From then on, Reese calls the shots. Taking a 40-pound satchel charge, Reese leads Henshaw and Kolinsky into no-man’s land and they crawl on their bellies, with Reese in the lead, feeling for land mines and marking each one for the others. But it doesn’t work. Henshaw trips a mine and is killed. Now discovered, Reese drops the heavy satchel charge. He and Kolinsky race back to their foxholes, but just short of safety a machine gun rips open Kolinsky’s belly. Screaming in agony, he dies. Reese has gambled and lost. And, it turns out, lost needlessly, for almost immediately a company unexpectedly arrives to hold the position in strength, and the embattled squad dissolves as its survivors are folded into another unit. The next morning, the Americans launch an assault. Reese recovers the satchel charge and knocks out the pillbox, but only by deliberately sacrificing his life. It’s an atonement, we realize. But the camera pulls back, taking in the whole battlefield. Seen from a distance, the attacking Americans are like ants, and the squad survivors we have come to know are somewhere anonymously within the swarm. The only distinguishable feature is the burning pillbox— Reese’s funeral pyre. That’s the final twist of Hell is for Heroes. It denies movie-goers the triumphant ending they have come to expect. The audience assumes that if Reese must die, then it will be like the death of John Wayne’s character in Sands of Iwo Jima: an apotheosis. But seen from a distance, Reese’s death is just an incident. And he, like the squad he tried to save, is simply gone. +
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THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY
The Noose at Korsun McClellan’s Big Miss
THE ART OF WAR How America’s greatest artists saw the Great War
WINTER 2016
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C H A L L E NG E
WHAT THE ...?!? What was the purpose of this inflatable device?
What the…?!? Protective plastic cape to shield against chemical attacks
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Hollywood Howlers “Scrambled eggs” refers to gold leaf branches worn on the dress hat, not the chest.
Name That Patch 43rd Bombardment Group
Congratulations to the winners: Karl Kaucher, Ron Mathesis, and Douglas Swim PLEASE SEND YOUR ANSWERS to all three questions, and your mailing address, to: January/February Challenge, World War II 1919 Gallows Road Suite 400 Vienna, VA 22182 or e-mail:
[email protected] Three winners, chosen at random from all correct entries submitted by February 15, will receive Blitzkrieg by Lloyd Clark. Answers will appear in the May/June 2017 issue.
HOLLYWOOD HOWLERS The 1965 film Battle of the Bulge sought to depict the last major German offensive of the war—launched in the Ardennes region of Belgium and Luxembourg. For the film’s climax (above), the production used American tanks to stage a battle between the U.S. 2nd Armored Division and the German 2nd Panzer Division. How did the filmmakers desert their common sense?
NAME THAT PATCH Which unit wore this patch?
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017
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NIGHT MUST FALL
VOGEL COLLECTION
A model since childhood, Renee Haal moved from New York City to London in 1938 at age 19 looking for work as a singer. She found that— and love. She and British actor, director, and sometimes-magician Peter Godfrey moved to the United States in 1939 and married in Beverly Hills in 1941. The pair entertained troops on USO tours with a magic show; she was the “leggy assistant.” In 1945, as Renee Godfrey, she appeared in the film Bedside Manner—for which this publicity photo was shot. But family and illness intervened; Renee remains known today mainly for what a publicist called “her fateful face.”
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