World War II 2017-09-10 (Vol.32 No.03

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CORREGIDOR See page 38

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34 AMERICAN HISTORY

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30

Paratroopers in Tunisia in summer 1943. Later that year—as the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion—they would face another big test near Avellino, Italy. 509TH PARACHUTE INFANTRY ASSOCIATION; COVER: AP PHOTO

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O CTO B E R 2017 ENDORSED BY THE NATIONAL WORLD WAR II MUSEUM, INC.

F E AT U RE S COVE R STO RY

30 THE DARKEST VALLEY Scattered behind enemy lines in Italy, American paratroopers resorted to wreaking havoc JAMES M. FENELON

38 ESCAPE ARTIST B-17 navigator Edgar Whitcomb defied the odds against the Japanese—five times DAVID SEARS

48 ALTAR OF PEACE There was much more to the surrender ceremony on Tokyo Bay than its spectacular surface indicated RICHARD B. FRANK

P O RT F O L I O

54 HOW DO I LOVE ‘V’? The “V for Victory” campaign inspired a dizzying array of decorative “V” pins

W E A P O N S M A N UA L

58 WINTER WARRIOR Finland’s rugged and accurate KP/-31 submachine gun

60 MEDICS IN HELL Soldiers of the 120th Evacuation Hospital were forever haunted by what they found at Buchenwald JOHN C. McMANUS

D E PA RT M E N T S

8 MAIL 10 WORLD WAR II TODAY 20 CONVERSATION Al Schmidt drew a lesson from war crimes trials in the Philippines

38

22 FROM THE FOOTLOCKER 24 FIRE FOR EFFECT 26 TIME TRAVEL Fort Stevens, Oregon: site of a 1942 Japanese sub attack

68 REVIEWS Norman Kleiss memoir, The Lost Eleven, Sniper Elite IV game

74 BATTLE FILMS Go for Broke! tried but failed to combat prejudice

79 CHALLENGE 80 PINUP OCTOBER 2017

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WWII Online Michael A. Reinstein CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER David Steinhafel ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Alex Neill EDITOR IN CHIEF

VOL. 32, NO. 3 OCTOBER 2017

EDITOR

KAREN JENSEN Paraag Shukla SENIOR EDITOR Rasheeda Smith ASSOCIATE EDITOR Jerry Morelock, Jon Guttman 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

Ed Drea, David Glantz, Jeffery Grey, Keith Huxen, John McManus, Williamson Murray, Dennis Showalter

Those who enjoyed this issue’s “The Darkest Valley” should check out these engaging stories about paratroopers in action:

Into the Fire In the Ardennes, German paratroopers encountered a host of woes—but still rattled the Allies By James M. Fenelon

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The 82nd Airborne’s “Jumpin’ Jim” Gavin never asked his men to do something he wouldn’t do himself By Carlo D’Este

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FRANK

JESSICA WAMBACH BROWN (“Time Travel”) stumbled upon Battery Russell while camping along the Oregon Coast in summer 2016 and decided to take a closer look at the only mainland U.S. military installation fired on by a wartime enemy since the War of 1812. A graduate of the University of Montana School of Journalism and Hawaii Pacific University’s Master of Arts in Diplomacy and Military Studies program, she writes about history and veterans’ affairs from her home in Carnation, Washington.

JAMES M. FENELON (“The Darkest Valley”) is a former U.S. Army paratrooper who developed an avid interest in World War II Airborne history during his military service. He has traveled to battlefields in North Africa and Europe, and has jumped out of a C-47 in Normandy during the commemoration of

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FENELON

D-Day’s 70th anniversary. Fenelon currently resides in the Texas Hill Country, and is writing a book about Operation Varsity, the Allied crossing of the Rhine in 1945.

RICHARD B. FRANK (“Altar of Peace”) is an internationally recognized scholar of the Asia-Pacific War, best known for his award-winning books Guadalcanal (1990) and Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (1999). He is a member of the Board of Presidential Counselors of the National World War II Museum in New Orleans; this article grew from his advisory role with that institution for its “Road to Tokyo” exhibit. He recently finished the manuscript for the first volume of a trilogy on the Asia-Pacific War.

JOHN C. MCMANUS (“Medics in Hell”) is the author of Hell Before Their Very Eyes: American Soldiers

Liberate Concentration Camps in Germany, April 1945 (2015). A member of World War II’s editorial advisory board, he is a Curators’ Distinguished Professor of U.S. Military History at Missouri University of Science and Technology.

DAVID SEARS (“Escape Artist”) is a New Jersey-based historian and author who writes frequently for World War II and other HistoryNet publications. Sears served as a U.S. Navy officer with extensive sea duty aboard a destroyer and as an advisor to the Vietnamese navy during the Vietnam conflict. He has published four popular military history books, including Pacific Air: How Fearless Flyboys, Peerless Aircraft, and Fast Flattops Conquered the Skies in the War with Japan (2012). He first learned of Edgar Whitcomb’s exploits while researching World War II’s civilian exchange voyages.

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Many today still debate whether Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel (left) was scapegoated for actions at Pearl Harbor.

the military and this country. They should be treated like every other flag officer in World War II and have their records reflect the highest rank they held during the war. It may be a small administrative edit, but any scar on the honor of our armed forces and America is never a small thing. Jim Cowardin Columbus, Ohio

WHO’S TO BLAME?

R

ichard B. Frank’s review of A Matter of Honor (March/April 2017) leaves me a bit confused. His high praise for the book hits the mark. But then he states that making the two commanders at Pearl Harbor scapegoats was due to “command responsibility.” Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter C. Short were but soldiers under the command of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Had the president and the military heads used as much clear thinking and creativity in analyzing the intelligence they had before the attack on Pearl Harbor as they did in creating the cover-up of their failed leadership, Pearl Harbor would not have been the blight on our history that it is. A Supreme Court justice set up a kangaroo tribunal, the highest-ranking military officials told blatant, shocking lies, and the accused officers were never allowed courts-martial because the truth would have damaged FDR politically and buried his historical legend. After all, FDR was the commander in chief with ultimate responsibility. The continued evisceration of Kimmel and Short is a blemish on

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WORLD WAR II

Richard B. Frank responds: I devoted the limited space available in a review to the facts on the ground concerning Admiral Kimmel and the attack on Pearl Harbor. What the Kimmel family and its supporters are pursuing, quite understandably, is a posthumous bureaucratic apology for the wrongs done to the admiral. I believe the hour has passed for that—as it has with numerous cases during the war where justice was not done. The remedy now available is to strive to get the history right for the future.

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

MAIL

Richard B. Frank’s book review of A Matter of Honor misses an important point with his conclusion that “scapegoating was inexcusable; accountability was not.” The truth is that Admiral Kimmel’s lack of promotion had nothing to do with assigning accountability, and everything to do with Washington’s bureaucratic malice and abuse of authority. In 1948 the navy omitted the admiral’s name from the list of flag officers whose promotion was authorized without any reference to his performance, constituting a belated punitive disciplinary action without notice to the officer. The army treated General Short in the same underhanded way. The issue of advancement under the Officer Personnel Act of 1947—which sets times for officer promotions—should not be retroactively justified by arguments not considered at the time of the act. Doing so speaks more to administrative animus and abuse of power than to upholding the principle of command accountability. Tom Kimmel Cocoa Beach, Fla. The writer is the grandson of Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel

Obviously the author has never been in the military and doesn’t realize that the “cream of society” usually evades dangerous military service; for the most part, it is the working class that does the fighting. So the boys came from a hard working-class background and were on the wild side. So what? They volunteered to serve their country and died doing their duty. The author shows his elitist arrogance in the story, but what’s your excuse for publishing this trash? D. Rivers Corona Del Mar, Calif.

FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT Your article “Measure of a Man” on Benjamin Ferencz, the prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen trials (March/April 2017), was a fine tribute to an often-overlooked, brilliant attorney and moral beacon. As an autograph collector, I asked Mr. Ferencz to sign a quote of his from the trials, which I believe stands as an eloquent and profound remark in his opening statement to the court: “The case we present is a plea of humanity to law.” His autographed quote is on the wall of my office for all to read and reflect on. George Haber Jericho, N.Y.

SEASIDE SIGHTS I found some of the articles in your June 2017 issue extremely interesting. “The Guinea Pig Club” was touching and inspirational. And I loved the one about the Bremerton, Washington, World War II shipyards (“Time Travel”). I have been to Bremerton many times and visited the Navy Museum, which is superb. I have a son who lives in Bremerton and another son who spent a hitch in the navy, so Bremerton is my kind of town. Keep up the good work. Dick Riggs Lewiston, Idaho

FROM THE EDITOR The common wisdom that truth is stranger than fiction certainly applies to the story of American airman Edgar Whitcomb. Through a stunning combination of guts and determination, Whitcomb achieved five times what would be exceptional to achieve just once. Turn to page 38 to learn more. The constant meshing of remarkable stories with remarkable human traits is what makes the subject of World War II ever-fascinating to me—a bond I’m sure I share with all of you. —Karen Jensen

UNSUNG HEROES

NATIONAL ARCHIVES; INSET COURTESY OF RON JESZ

PASSING THE TORCH As a longtime reader of your magazine I wanted to take a minute to say how much I enjoyed your news item “A Young Man’s Single-Minded Mission” in the March/April 2017 issue (WWII Today). I am truly impressed by the personal sacrifices Rishi Sharma is making to accomplish his goal of recording the stories of the remaining war veterans. I hope his efforts provide the younger generation with some insight into the experiences of these men who truly are the “Greatest Generation.” In today’s media-driven society it is refreshing to see someone like this young man doing his part to record this history from those who have experienced it firsthand. Michael J. Ranalla Stillwater, Minn.

BROTHERLY SACRIFICE I picked up the latest issue and want to tell you how disappointed I was with the story about the Sullivan brothers (“Band of Brothers,” June 2017)—the first time I’ve ever been upset over an article of yours. I don’t understand why the author wants to slander those boys.

I have been a subscriber to World War II for more than 15 years and have yet to see any mention of the U.S. Army’s 76th Division. My father, Edward, was assigned to the 76th and the 385th I n f a nt r y Reg i ment f r om 19 4 4 through the end of the war. According to the unofficial history of the division, We Ripened Fast by Joseph J. Hutnik, the 76th landed in Le Havre, France, in September 1944, and worked their way east through France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Germany. They endured 110 straight days of combat, even participating in the latter days of the Battle of the Bulge as part of General Patton’s Third Army relief of Airborne units in Bastogne. The 76th had many highly decorated soldiers, including several Medal of Honor recipients. Since it was primarily a replacement division, I believe Audie Murphy was assigned to the 76th when he entered the ETO. I’m proud of my father’s service and believe there’s a story there that needs to be told. Ron Jesz Rockwall, Tex.

Private First Class Edward J. Jesz with the 76th Division.

PLEASE SEND LETTERS TO: World War II 1919 Gallows Road, Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182-4038

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OCTOBER 2017

9

W W I I TO DAY R EPO RT ED AND W R I T T E N BY PAUL WI S EMAN

ASSOCIATED PRESS ACCUSED OF COOPERATING WITH THE NAZIS 10

WORLD WAR II

REPORTING IN ADOLF HITLER’S GERMANY posed a big dilemma for journalists. To what extent would they have to cooperate with a repressive regime to work inside the country or from Nazi-occupied territory? Critics say the nonprofit American news agency Associated Press bowed to Nazi pressure, compromising its independence to ensure that it could continue sending stories and pictures to newspapers across the United States during Hitler’s rise to power and the subsequent war. German historian Harriet Scharnberg argued last year that AP’s cooperation with the Third Reich let the Nazis “portray a war of extermination as a conventional war.” AP responded in May with a lengthy report of its behavior in Germany from 1933 to 1945, arguing that the agency acted as “forthrightly and independently as possible” but admitted “it should have done some things differently.” Written by former AP deputy international editor Larry Heinzerling and AP investigative researcher Randy Herschaft, the report said the news agency recognized the “tremendous news value” of photos from Germany at that time but did not tailor images or stories to fit regime propaganda. It does, however, regret that state-censored German media wrote captions and headlines that reflected Nazi indoctrination. Some photos that AP sold in Germany were used in propaganda material against the Jewish population in Europe. In 1935 AP complied with an anti-Semitic Nazi law by dismissing or reassigning six employees the regime considered Jews. The AP notes that it had resisted the law for two years and helped the six resettle; they survived the Holocaust. Several of AP’s German employees supported Hitler’s regime, including ardent Nazi Franz Roth, an Austrian-born freelance war photographer who traveled with Waffen SS units. Scharnberg’s report referred to Roth as an “AP photographer, SS-Oberscharführer,

ASSOCIATED PRESS (BOTH)

AP facilitated getting photos into Nazi Germany, like a shot of a B-17 arriving in Britain (left), and out of it—like that of a hale-looking Hitler greeting Mussolini shortly after an attempt on Hitler’s life.

and photojournalist in the SS Propaganda Company.” The report describes how AP “received exclusive rights” to Roth’s photos and the accompanying German captions, which were published in American newspapers. When AP photos ran in German publications, Nazi propagandists drafted the accompanying captions; unsurprisingly they offered a different perspective on events in Europe. For example, the original Allied caption for a photo of a B-17 arriving in Britain (opposite) read: Joint Anglo-U.S. raids on Germany coming: giant Flying fortresses preparing in Britain. General Carl Spaatz...had some good news...preparations for the joint Anglo-U.S. aerial offensive against the enemy have made such fine progress that “we are now...ahead of actual schedule.” These pictures show how advanced the preparations are in this country, with the American flying fortress playing a leading part. The German caption, approved by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, contrasted sharply with the original text:

RIGHT: PHOTOQUEST/GETTY IMAGES; BOTTOM: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

The first picture of the “Flying Fortress.” With planes of this type, the construction of which requires two million hours of labor, Roosevelt wants to win the war in the air. The appearance of the plane was celebrated with typical American bluff...where these giant planes appear over Europe, they become most welcome targets of our gunners.

WORD FOR WORD

“Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. The skies no longer rain death. The seas bear only commerce. Men everywhere walk upright in the sunlight.” —General Douglas MacArthur, in a radio address to the American people following the Japanese surrender ceremony aboard USS Missouri, September 2, 1945.

After the United States entered the war in 1941, Germany expelled AP from the country. The following year, AP and Germany reached an agreement, approved by American authorities, by which the news service sent photographs to Germany through neutral countries and received censored photos from Nazi-occupied territory. “Although the exchange necessitated dealing with the Nazi regime,” the report said, “it was the AP’s belief then and now that the photos gave the American public a much fuller picture of the war than could have been obtained otherwise.” The report concluded that “suggestions that AP at any point sought to help the Nazis or their heinous cause are simply wrong.” Although Harriet Scharnberg praised the wire service’s willingness to examine its past, she averred that her own findings still stand. For example, she said, photographer Franz Roth was in the Ukrainian city of Lemberg (now Lviv) during the 1941 slaughter of thousands of Jews. But his photos, distributed by AP in the United States, did not show any massacre. Instead they showed Soviet prisoners, captured tanks, and locals “cheering the German invaders.” Disclosure: In addition to serving as World War II’s news editor, Paul Wiseman is an economics writer for the Associated Press.

DISPATCHES The U.S. Department of Justice charged French historian Antonin Dehays, 32, of stealing World War II dog tags from the National Archives for “private financial gain.” Starting in October 2015 Dehays took about 30 identification tags that had been issued to American pilots later killed in action. Authorities raided Dehays’s residence in June; he had already sold some of the dog tags on eBay but they recovered six of them and related official paperwork. If convicted, the historian could face up to 10 years in prison. OCTOBER 2017

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B-25 WRECKS DISCOVERED IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC 12

WORLD WAR II

SCIENTISTS HAVE FOUND THE WRECKS of two B-25 bombers in the waters off Papua New Guinea. Divers and residents of the provincial capital Madang had been aware of one of the wreck sites in the city’s harbor, but it was documented for the first time in February by Project Recover—a partnership between the University of Delaware, the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the BentProp Project, a nonprofit organization that searches for the remains of missing American servicemen. One of the six crew members from the Madang Harbor B-25 is believed to have gone down with the aircraft; the Japanese took five prisoners, executing four of them. The fifth crewman survived. Project Recover found the second B-25 while scouring nearly four square miles of ocean floor with a sonar-equipped underwater robot. Its six crewmen are listed as missing in action. Project Recover has not released the wreck’s exact location to prevent scavengers from looting the site, and researchers are withholding information about the crew until the U.S. Government’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency can complete its own investigation and notify the men’s next of kin. “People have this mental image of an airplane resting intact on the sea floor,” Katy O’Connell, executive director of Project Recover, said in May. “But the reality is that most planes were often already damaged before crashing or broke up upon impact. And, after soaking in the sea for decades, they are often unrecognizable to the untrained eye, often covered in corals and other sea life.” Nearly 10,000 B-25 bombers carried out missions during World War II. Papua New Guinea, now an independent country but an Australian territory during the war, was the scene of fighting from January 1942 through August 1945.

PROJECT RECOVER (ALL)

Although marine life off Papua New Guinea has slowly laid claim to this B-25—including its dorsal gun turret (top, right) and interior (below)— the bomber’s structure remains largely intact and easily visible in the clear waters.

Or Recder by Tim eive Oct e fo You ober r V r B 25 eter ook to an s in D ay !

it’s not just a brick.

it’s their story.

WITH A BRICK AT THE NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM , you can create a lasting tribute to loved ones who served their country. To learn how you can honor your hero, visit ww2brick4.org. WWII Magazine

BRICK TEXT

(Please Print Clearly) 18 characters per line including spaces

Mrs. Mr. Ms. __________________________________________________________________________ Address ______________________________________________________________________________ City ___________________________________ State ________________ Zip ________________ Telephone (Day) _________________________ (Evening) _________________________ PLEASE RESERVE MY PERSONALIZED BRICK(S) Number of Victory Bricks _______ at $250 each. Add a Tribute Book at $75 each ____________ Total $__________ Please make check or money order payable to: The National WWII Museum. Card # _________________________________ Exp. ___________ Signature ________________________________ Check/Money Order

MasterCard

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FORMS MUST BE RECEIVED ON OR BEFORE 10/25/17. Fax orders to 504-527-6088 or mail to: The National WWII Museum, Road to Victory Brick Program, 945 Magazine Street, New Orleans, LA 70130.

877-813-3329 ext. 500

[email protected]

The brick program at The National W WII Museum celebrates the American Spirit as well as the shared appreciation for the Allied effort during World War II. The Museum reserves the right to refuse to engrave any messages or material it deems inappropriate, such as personal contact information, political statements, suggestive wording, and messages that might be considered offensive to those who served and sacrificed during the W WII era.

A LONG OVERDUE INTRODUCTION VERNON “BO” SIGO, A B-17 NAVIGATOR, always appreciated the fighter pilots who escorted him on 48 bombing runs over Germany and occupied Europe. He just didn’t know who they were. “After the war, I found out those P-51s were flown by the Tuskegee Airmen,” Sigo, 92, said. “It’s been my hope that one day I could thank a Tuskegee airman personally for their service.” He had to wait seven decades, but the opportunity finally came May 9. Sigo took the stage at Cambier Park in Naples, Florida, to thank George Hardy, 91, one of the African American pilots who made up the Tuskegee Airmen in a segregated wartime military. “Many of us owe their lives to these brave men,” Sigo said. Although stationed in Italy at bases only 25 miles apart, the two men had never met. “We rarely met a white pilot because we were on separate bases. And segregation was the way it was,” said Hardy, who, like Sigo, is a retired lieutenant colonel. Rick Wobbe, a Florida volunteer who helps arrange honor flights for World War II veterans to Washington, DC, arranged the meeting. Wobbe met Sigo on a 2015 honor flight and later connected with Hardy, who was living in retirement in Sarasota. From 1941 to 1946, 1,000 African American pilots trained at Alabama’s Tuskegee University, the historically black university founded by Booker T. Washington. Also known as the “Red Tails” for their fighter group’s paint scheme, they proved themselves in aerial combat, and Allied bomber groups valued their protection. President Harry S. Truman integrated the American military in 1948; Hardy went on to fly in the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

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The 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion was the only black combat unit in action on D-Day.

A SK W WII Q: My father was a Marine in the Pacific and spoke of barrage balloons on the beaches. Were they effective? Did they ever destroy enemy aircraft? —Markle Farber, Lake Charles, La. A: The Allies utilized barrage balloons to enhance air defense networks at home and overseas. In combat areas, Allied balloons floated over beachheads and supply ports in North Africa, Italy, and Normandy—their steel cables hindering low-flying enemy aircraft. Units in the Pacific Theater also used barrage balloons, but Allied air superiority there reduced the threat of Japanese air attacks against troops on the ground. On the home front, Americans used more than 400 balloons to protect key areas of the West Coast, while the British utilized a vast array of more than 2,000 balloons. They were most effective in London: during the Blitz, more than 60 German aircraft crashed or made forced landings after striking balloon cables. When V-1 flying bombs began falling on the city in 1944, the balloon curtain destroyed 231 of them (while British fighters and antiaircraft guns collectively shot down more than 3,700). As enemy air power waned by 1945, so did the wide use of barrage balloons. —Paraag Shukla SEND QUERIES TO: Ask World War II, 1919 Gallows Road, Ste 400, Vienna, VA 22182 OR EMAIL: [email protected]

TOP, LEFT: NICOLE RAUCHEISEN/NAPLES DAILY NEWS; TOP RIGHT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

B-17 navigator Vernon Sigo (left) had a lifelong wish to thank Tuskegee Airmen like George Hardy (right) for protecting bombers on missions.

Urgent: Special Summer Driving Notice

To some, sunglasses are a fashion accessory…

But When Driving, These Sunglasses May Save Your Life!

Studies by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) show that most (74%) of the crashes occurred on clear, sunny days

Drivers’ Alert: Driving can expose you to more dangerous glare than any sunny day at the beach can… do you know how to protect yourself?

T

he sun rises and sets at peak travel periods, during the early morning and afternoon rush hours and many drivers find themselves temporarily blinded while driving directly into the glare of the sun. Deadly accidents are regularly caused by such blinding glare with danger arising from reflected light off another vehicle, the pavement, or even from waxed and oily windshields that can make matters worse. Early morning dew can exacerbate this situation. Yet, motorists struggle on despite being blinded by the sun’s glare that can cause countless accidents every year. Not all sunglasses are created equal. Protecting your eyes is serious business. With all the fancy fashion frames out there it can be easy to overlook what really matters––the lenses. So we did our research and looked to the very best in optic innovation and technology. Sometimes it does take a rocket scientist. A NASA rocket scientist. Some ordinary sunglasses can obscure your vision by exposing your eyes to harmful UV rays, blue light, and reflective glare. They can also darken useful vision-enhancing light. But now, independent research conducted by scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has brought forth ground-breaking technology to help protect human eyesight from the harmful effects of solar radiation

Eagle Eyes® Lens

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MANY AMERICANS CELEBRATED Memorial Day weekend by grilling burgers and hoisting cold beers. Four veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan picked another way to remember the fallen: they walked the route of the Bataan Death March in the Philippines, consuming half rations, limiting their intake of water, and sleeping on the ground along the five-day journey. Josh Jespersen, Nick Colgin, Margaux Mange, and Brian McPherson are founders of Mission Memorial Day. The four are mountain climbers, and they decided two years ago to honor fallen veterans on Memorial Day climbs. In 2015 they planted American flags 18,000 feet up on Alaska’s 20,310-foot Denali (formerly Mount McKinley). The next year, they made it to Denali’s summit with the names of 500 fallen veterans. This year, they decided to honor those who died on the Bataan Death March. In April 1942 the Japanese forced 66,000 Filipino and 10,000 American prisoners to march 70 miles from Mariveles on

D I SPAT CHES Police evacuated a neighborhood east of Bonn, Germany, after a crate of World War II-era grenades and other munitions bought at a flea market detonated in hot weather May 29. Authorities in the town of Hennef arrived on the scene to find a garage on fire. They secured and destroyed the undetonated munitions and began investigating the 51-year-old homeowner for violations of weapons laws. No one was hurt.

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In 1942 the Japanese forced prisoners of war on a 70-mile march (inset); four veterans recently retraced the route (top).

the southern tip of the Bataan Peninsula north to a railhead in San Fernando. Viewing surrender as cowardice, Japanese soldiers brutalized the exhausted prisoners along the way: at least 3,000 are believed to have died on the march; another 27,500 perished in prison. The Mission Memorial Day team walked the full distance. “Once I developed a heat rash and blisters, along with the hunger…my strength and mental attitude went downhill,” Mange said by email. “I kept thinking, ‘How did they survive? How did not more of them not perish? What kept them going?’” On Facebook, the group posted: “Go out today and make your own tribute to Memorial Day, and make it worthy.”

TOP: JOSH SNEAD; INSET: ASSOCIATED PRESS; BOTTOM: HENNING KAISER/DPA/AP IMAGES

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On July 7, 1944, British general Bernard Montgomery decorated Philip Streczyk for valor, one of 13 medals the GI would earn.

survived the war, but not the peace. Haunted by nightmares of battle, he killed himself in 1958. He left behind a wife and four children. Somewhere along the way his medals went missing—taken by a family member. One of them popped up on eBay a few years ago, sold to someone in Florida. In 2002 his son Ron, a Vietnam veteran, launched a campaign to get the army to reissue the decorations. Although it is possible to purchase replacement medals through vendors, obtaining documentation, including the official Certificate of Award for each medal, is more difficult. Ron’s search was delayed when a fire broke out at the military’s National Personnel Record Center, which verifies if a veteran was entitled to specific medals and forwards the request to the army. Two years ago, he finally received his father’s discharge papers, including a list of decorations, and submitted them to the personnel center. “I want people to know about the sacrifices,” Ron told the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, New York. “I want the public to know about everything he did.”

IT TOOK RON STRECZYK 15 YEARS to get the military to reissue his father’s World War II medals. He finally received them in March. His father, Technical Sergeant Philip Streczyk, a truck driver before the war, earned at least 13 medals, including the Distinguished Service Cross; the Silver Star; the Bronze Star; the Purple Heart; and even the British Military Medal, which then-general Bernard Montgomery pinned on him on July 7, 1944. Philip Streczyk’s wartime feats were legendary. When enemy fire struck down his officers in Sicily in 1943, Streczyk rallied his men in the face of what the Silver Star citation called, “annihilating enemy fire.” On June 6, 1944, he led his team up a bluff on Omaha Beach, wiped out German positions, and took nearly 20 prisoners. Later that year in the Hürtgen Forest, he was shot in the neck but refused to leave his men for medical treatment. He later developed gangrene. By the time the army sent him home from Europe, Streczyk had multiple wounds, posttraumatic stress, and a sack full of medals. He

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DISPATCHES A D-Day veteran became the oldest person ever to skydive on May 14. Bryson William Verdun Hayes (in yellow, above), a British Army veteran from Devon, was 101 years, 38 days old when he jumped from 15,000 feet at an airfield in southwestern England. He broke the record held by Canadian Armand Gendreau, who jumped four years ago at age 101 years, three days. Afterward, Hayes, who skydived with three generations of his family, declared himself “over the moon.”

TOP: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; MIDDLE: COURTESY OF RON STRECZYK; RIGHT: SKYDIVE BUZZ

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A SOLDIER’S EDUCATION ALBERT J. SCHMIDT, 91, lives in Washington, DC. A retired history professor, he still publishes scholarly papers and reviews. Schmidt grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, where he and best friend Wilbert Block delivered the Courier-Journal and the Times. Besides distributing the papers, Schmidt read them closely, especially after war began in 1939. At 17, he volunteered for the U.S. Army Air Forces, figuring he would be drafted after graduating from high school in 1943. In the meantime, he applied to DePauw University. The war interrupted his college education at DePauw with experiences that put young Schmidt face-to-face with history.

How much college did you squeeze in? I expected to be called up when I turned 18 in August 1943. I decided to go to a summer session at DePauw, which was starting a navy V-12 program. The session turned into a full semester that lasted until October. I still hadn’t been called up, so I finished a second semester, which ended in February 1944. I was about to start a third semester when I got the call.

What was your progress in uniform? I spent most of 1944 at radio operator school in Scott Field, Illinois. My barracks was alongside runways where the B-29s landed and took off. Then, in 1945, I transferred to MacDill Field, Florida, until I got an overseas assignment. On the day the dignitaries met in San Francisco to formalize the United Nations, April 25, 1945, I shipped out for the South Pacific aboard the SS Lurline. I felt very humbled as I passed under the Golden Gate Bridge.

How was your voyage west? We sailed unescorted, zigzagging. We learned about V-E Day from the ship’s newspaper. The Lurline took about three weeks to reach Finschhafen, New Guinea, our first stop. We spent several days at Manila, where we were told victory in Europe had nothing to do with our getting back soon. I wandered that war-torn city, hearing artillery in the distance and seeing dead Japanese, but by and large the conflict had gone beyond the area. I was then assigned to Nadzab, New Guinea, by way of Morotai and Biak—places that a few years before had been the scenes of fighting. Finally, I arrived there at a supply and training base, where I was assigned to the Thirteenth Air Force.

to see volcanoes erupt. The Manila Harbor was so congested, we had to wait days to unload. We went to Camp Dow, a staging area, and then headed over to the huge U.S. base at Clark Field. That’s where I was when the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A big relief. Yes—and I found Will Block, my boyhood friend, who was assigned to General MacArthur’s headquarters. I knew Will was there from the grapevine. We celebrated our reunion by going to the largest post exchange in the Pacific and devouring delicious hamburgers—like nothing I had tasted for quite a long time. We saw General MacArthur outside his headquarters and when he was out of sight we kicked the tires of his limousine for luck. Will even gave me packets of photos of the Japanese emissaries who had arrived in the Philippines to arrange for the surrender aboard the battleship Missouri. We’re still friends.

What were your duties? I operated air/sea rescue, but I had lots of free time. I heard that the authorities were going to try two Japanese generals for war crimes: Masaharu Homma, who had commanded Japanese troops in the Bataan Death March, and Tomoyuki Yamashita, who had commanded Imperial troops in the Philippines in early 1945. I knew that Yamashita had won fame by conquering Singapore in 1942. The trials were to take place at the Philippine president’s palace in Manila, 60 miles away. I decided to attend.

How did you manage that? I had made sergeant, and was the ranking noncommissioned officer in radio communications at Clark. It was easy to catch a ride to Manila in a jeep or transport plane.

Set the scene. What was the mood in Nadzab? The war clearly was winding down in our favor. In July 1945 we broke camp and our huge flotilla returned to Manila by LST. On the way, I was intrigued

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The trials took place in a large hall. The defendants, staff, and prosecutors sat in front. Yamashita seemed

“The trials were to take place at the Philippine president’s palace. I decided to attend.”

MICHAEL DOLAN; INSET COURTESY OF AL SCHMIDT

You returned home in May 1946. What then?

very intent, listening to the prosecution make its case. He was emotionless yet very dignified, and in military uniform. Homma dressed in civilian clothes. He, too, was very dignified. I was impressed by both men, considering how hig h the feeling was against the Japanese. Years later, in Allan Ryan’s book about the trial, Yamashita’s Ghost, I found myself in a photo of the audience. I recognized the back of my head—which at the time still had hair on it.

What was the atmosphere? Businesslike. For Yamashita, the question was one of command responsibility. After he had assumed command of Japanese forces in Manila later in the war, there were horrible

atrocities and destruction. He was charged with failing to exercise command responsibility; in retrospect, I think it questionable whether he was as irresponsible as the charges made out, because historians feel General MacArthur was determined to wreak vengeance on him. At the trial’s conclusion, Yamashita was very polite. He read a statement thanking his defense attorneys. Then he was dishonored— his rank and decorations torn from his uniform—and sentenced to hang, instead of the more honorable death by firing squad—Homma’s fate. The Yamashita proceedings went on a month or so. Homma was tried shortly thereafter, also in a businesslike way. MacArthur seemed to have less interest in Homma than in Yamashita.

I reenrolled at DePauw. I thought I would be a big shot but instead I was a lowly sophomore. Two roommates and I lived in a cubbyhole. I majored in history, thinking I would teach high school. I took education courses but concluded this was not my calling. I wanted to be a college professor. After DePauw, I still had enough GI Bill money to take me through a doctorate program at the University of Pennsylvania. I taught until 1960, then applied for a National Defense Education Act fellowship to go to Indiana University’s Russian and Eastern European Institute. After that I became dean and vice president at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut. I concluded my academic career by attending New York University Law School, which led me into a decade of teaching topics in legal history. One of the courses I taught focused on the trial of Tomoyuki Yamashita. + OCTOBER 2017

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F RO M T H E FO OTLO C K ER

BACK IN THE SADDLE Curators at The National World War II Museum solve readers’ artifact mysteries

I recently received these spurs from a friend whose father, Curtis O. Ringold, served with the 4171 Quartermaster Depot Company during the war’s final months in Europe. The chrome pair has the word “GESCHMIEDET” on one side and on the opposite, an emblem with the letters “L” and “F” on either side of it. The black pair has only the initials ERN on one side of each spur. Any information you can provide on these artifacts would be appreciated. —Robert B. White, Germantown, Tenn. The items in question are German army

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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.

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The brutal SS Cavalry Brigade, on duty in Poland in 1941.

spurs. “Geschmiedet” is German for “forged,” indicating the manufacturing process; the “L” and “F” are likely a trademark—very possibly that of Linden & Funke in Iserlohn, a German metalware manufacturer and supplier to the German army—the Heer. The “ERN” on the darker pair is typical of the manufacturing codes the German military used to hide the identity of civilian contactors and their locations from enemy forces; the code ERN designates the W. G. Dinkelmeyer Works in Koetzling. Protecting such information was particularly important in wartime Germany, when A llied aircraft could conduct bombing raids over most of the country. Spurs may seem a quaint or ceremonial wartime item, but they were prevalent in the German army, which was heavily dependent on horses. There is a widely held belief that the Heer was highly mechanized; in fact, more than 80 percent of German divisions relied on horse-drawn transport for their logistical needs. During the war, the German army maintained an average of 1.1 million horses. As fighting continued and Germany found it increasingly difficult to maintain motorized equipment, it turned to horses all the more, by 1944 forming six cavalry divisions and two cavalry corps. Your spurs may have been unissued since they lack the leather strap to fasten them around the wearer’s boots. I can find no reference explaining the difference in finishes, but I suspect the bright finish is for dress occasions; the dark for use in circumstances when shiny objects should be avoided. These spurs may well have hailed from a warehouse or supply depot; since Curtis O. Ringold served in the Quartermaster Corps—the service responsible for supply—it is possible that the U.S. Army assigned him to inspect German supply depots for material that could be reissued to Allied forces. —Tom Czekanski, Senior Curator and Restorations Manager

THREE-MINUTE MARSHALL EVERY MINUTE COUNTS. Just ask General George C. Marshall, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army. On May 13, 1940, he is sitting through a very trying and unproductive meeting with his commander in chief, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. At issue is the army budget. War is raging in Europe—indeed, Hitler’s panzers are in the midst of their great drive to the English Channel. The French are done, the British reeling back to Dunkirk. A world hangs in the balance. Still, not everyone is feeling the urgency. The House Appropriations Committee wants to cut spending for the army. Roosevelt disagrees, but must be careful about coming on too strong: most Americans fear another overseas war, and he doesn’t want to look like a warmonger. He is inclined to go along with Congress—this time—and reduce the army’s budget. Morgenthau and Marshall have come to the Oval Office to argue the point and request that the threatened military funds be restored. But they, too, must be careful: few officials leave an argument with FDR unscathed. Morgenthau begins. The cuts are wrong. The international situation is too grave. The president listens politely at first, then less politely. Finally, he’s had enough and tells Morgenthau to stop: “I am not asking you, I am telling you.” “I still think you’re wrong,” Morgenthau counters. “Well, you filed your protest,” the president answers, coldly. Now it’s Marshall’s turn. The chief of staff has gravitas. He’s a no-nonsense, plain speaker, and he’s spent a career proving it. But even he can’t get any traction. Roosevelt just isn’t listening. “I know exactly what he will say,” the president says to Morgenthau. The meeting is over, and in Washington, when the meeting is over, you go.

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ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN TOMAC

F I R E FO R EFFEC T BY RO BERT M. CITINO

They rise to leave, when Marshall turns, as if on sudden impulse, and asks a simple question: “Mr. President, may I have three minutes?” Those next three minutes are sure to be fateful. They may decide the state of American readiness in the event of war, they may decide the fate of the Republic, but they will almost certainly decide the fate of General George C. Marshall. Roosevelt seems surprised. He’s already made his intentions clear. But Marshall holds the floor. France is collapsing; the Western world is in peril; Hitler is on the verge of victory. He cites facts and figures. All that stands between the U.S. and Hitler are a handful of weak divisions, a few hundred aircraft, and artillery units whose guns are still on the drawing board. Marshall can field only 15,000 men at a time—hopelessly inferior to Germany’s two million men and 140 divisions. “If you don’t do something, and do it right away, I don’t know what is going to happen to this country,” he concludes. Some historians describe a tirade. They have Marshall “seething,” the words pouring out of him in a “rush of frustrations,” a “machine-gun burst of facts.” Such phrases may be dramatic license, but Marshall’s little speech succeeds in hitting its target— reaching the one man who matters. Roosevelt listens in silence, then invites Marshall back the next day to discuss the army’s needs. Furthermore, Roosevelt himself will go to Congress with an appropriations bill that will eventually top out at $657 million—an extraordinary sum for a country not yet at war—with a demand to build 50,000 airplanes, a fantastic number. The arsenal of democracy is open for business. The United States was still more than 18 months from entering the war, and the fight itself would last four long years. But the pendulum might already have been swinging toward victory back in May 1940, when George Marshall made every minute count. +

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READY, AIM, SILENCE THE WHISTLE OF INCOMING SHELLS startled gunners of the 249th Coast Artillery Corps Regiment from their bunks at Fort Stevens, Oregon, in the closing minutes of Sunday, June 21, 1942. A Japanese submarine, the I-25, had surfaced about six miles out to sea and was firing on the fort that had guarded the mouth of the Columbia River since the Civil War. On a chilly February night 75 years later, I pad up a grassy slope in what is now Fort Stevens State Park, retracing the steps of the soldiers who manned Battery Russell, the sole ocean-facing gun fortification located a lonely two miles southwest of the fort’s other batteries. The constellation of Orion and his night-sky companions illuminate the sharp edges of the concrete fortress before me while a chorus of tree frogs croaks to the rhythmic accompaniment of the Pacific, just half a mile away at the northwestern tip of Oregon. On the night Fort Stevens became the first mainland U.S. military base to be attacked by a foreign power since the War of 1812, the half-dressed soldiers of the 249th’s F Battery streamed out of “Squirrelville,” a temporary tent city in the nearby swamp erected in February 1942 and named for its constant turnover of soldiers. The men filed up the thick steps of the battery honoring slain Civil War major general David A. Russell, took up battle stations, and awaited orders to load and fire the last pair of M 1900 10-inch breech-loading disappearing guns then in action in the United States. Today those gun pits are empty, but plenty of corroded clues still point to

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WORLD WAR II

the complexity of firing the guns’ 600-lb. shells. After a cozy night camping in Squirrelville’s modern descendent—the park’s village of rental yurts—I roam Russell’s rusttinged corridors by the light of day. Amid a maze of sun-bleached graffiti, I spy the shaft where the men had hoisted shells and silk powder bags from ground level, and notice the narrow speaking tubes used to relay coordinates to the 35-man crews arming and aiming each of the school bus-length barrels. The historic significance of this sandy stretch of the Oregon coast began long before the misfortunes of World War II lapped ashore. The United States acquired the land that is now Fort Stevens from the Clatsop Indians by treaty in 1851, 46 years

TOP: FORT STEVENS STATE PARK

Soldiers from Fort Stevens, Oregon, inspect the five-foot crater created by a shell fired from a Japanese submarine. The fort’s Battery Russell (opposite) was undamaged; today, visitors can tour the site and its interior (below).

after Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery staked its winter camp just a few miles south of here. In 1863 the army broke ground on a fort, named for the first governor of Washington Territory, Isaac I. Stevens, to deny unwelcome ships passage up the great Columbia River dividing Oregon and Washington. To deter would-be infiltrators, a half-dozen gun batteries were erected, including Russell in 1904. Early in the twentieth century, the Harbor Defenses of the Columbia, which comprised Fort Stevens and two sister bases across the river in Washington, added another layer of defense with a system of underwater mines; battery crews trained to target fastmoving enemy ships that might be sent to snag the mines from their moorings. By the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the 249th had won multiple awards for marksmanship. But the I-25 was not interested in making a run up the Columbia. After supporting the Japanese occupation of two of the Aleutian Islands in early June 1942, the sub was sent down the Pacific Coast to watch for Alaskabound American ships and target coastal direction-finder stations that could use radio signals to triangulate the location of Japanese vessels. One such station was located about 1,500

yards north of Battery Russell. The I-25’s first five-and-a-halfinch shell landed in a swamp about four miles south of Russell, blasting a five-foot crater a few marshy steps away from the park’s southern boundary. As the submarine’s line of fire crept steadily northward, awestruck onlookers in the nearby towns of Astoria and Seaside caught glimpses of sailors moving about the gun deck each time the guns flashed. The men looking out from Battery Russell’s command station that night could see the muzzle flashes as well. As I stand in the same dank room three-quarters of a century later, my

view of the ocean is obscured by dense patches of scrub pine and shrubbery planted shortly before the war to stabilize the ever-changing sandscape. Although the battery is silent now, it is not hard to imagine F Battery’s trepidation as the I-25’s shells drew close enough for shrapnel to pierce the red alder trees of Squirrelville. Peering down a chute in the command station’s dusty floor, I picture men huddled around maps in the plotting room below, eagerly waiting for Harbor Defenses’ commander to order the fort’s searchlights to illuminate the target and help pinpoint its range. But the order never came. At the

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Harbor Defense Command Post two miles north, the duty officer was juggling conflicting reports as to whether the I-25 was in range of any of the seven batteries spread between Fort Stevens and the two Washington forts. Despite fervent pleas from the battery crews, Colonel Carl Doney, a 1916 West Point graduate who had been transferred from San Francisco just four weeks prior, opted not to risk further exposure of his batteries’ locations. The searchlights remained off and the guns unloaded. David Lindstrom, a local historian and longtime volunteer for Friends of Old Fort Stevens, has corresponded with veterans on both sides of the I-25 attack. As we survey sun-glazed whitecaps from Fort Stevens’s south jetty, he details evidence that indicates the sub was indeed within range of Fort Stevens’s guns and describes the soldiers’ outrage at Doney’s decision. “There was great agitation to return fire. They were so close to insubordination,” he says. “They could see the target. They knew they could hit it.”

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The attack lasted less than 20 minutes and left both Battery Russell and the direction-finder station unscathed. Of the at least nine shells the I-25’s crew fired, only one claimed a casualty—the backstop of Squirrelville’s treasured baseball diamond. The submarine quietly motored away the next morning, but returned to the Oregon coast three months later to launch near the town of Brookings a floatplane that conducted the first—largely harmless—bombing of the continental United States by an enemy aircraft. The state’s wartime troubles culminated in tragedy in May 1945, when a woman and five children on a picnic near Bly stumbled upon one of the 9,000 transpacific fire balloons launched from Japan and became the only combat casualties in the lower 48 states during World War II. Battery Russell’s 10-inch guns fired their last practice shots in December 1944 and the entire fort was decommissioned three years later. Fort Stevens became a state park in 1955 and today attracts more than 1.2 million annual visitors who are encouraged to explore the concrete mysteries of Russell and its base end stations, along with the many moss-covered treasures in a designated historic area near the old Harbor Defense Command Post. There, amid remnants of the mine program and more permanent wartime dwellings that put Squirrelville’s tents to shame, Friends of Old Fort Stevens sponsors reenactments and staffs a small museum that chronicles the fort’s 84-year tenure as guardian of the Columbia—including the fateful night that put this tiny coastal stretch of Oregon in the history books. +

WHERE TO STAY AND EAT The park has superb tent camping facilities with cabins and yurts for rent. Cozier lodging options abound in Astoria, a charming fishing town just 10 miles east with an eclectic mix of canneries-turned-pubs to fuel modern-day explorers. Try the hearty seafood chowder bread bowl at the Wet Dog Cafe and Brewery (wetdogcafe.com), or the napkin-demanding bacon bleu cheeseburger at the Portway Tavern (portway-astoria.com).

WHAT ELSE TO SEE AND DO The Oregon coast is a beachcomber’s paradise. Start in the park with the steel remains of the Peter Iredale, a British ship that ran aground in 1906. Explore Fort Clatsop (nps.gov/lewi/ planyourvisit/fortclatsop. htm), the restored site of the Lewis and Clark expedition’s 1805-06 winter camp located just four miles southeast of Fort Stevens. Or check out Astoria, the oldest permanent U.S. settlement on the West Coast, known for a budding arts scene and first-rate attractions like the Columbia River Maritime Museum (crmm.org).

MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

A faux shell amid overgrown brush now marks the muchdiminished site of the crater.

Fort Stevens State Park (oregonstateparks.org) is located at 100 Peter Iredale Road in Hammond, Oregon, a two-hour forested drive northeast from Portland International Airport. The park is open year-round with a $5 day-use fee, but for the best weather and more available museum hours, visit between April and October.

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THE DARKEST VALLEY

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Scattered behind enemy lines in Italy, American paratroopers resorted to what they did best— wreaking havoc By James M. Fenelon

COURTESY OF JAMES M. FENELON

Paratroopers of the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion (below) train in the United Kingdom before deploying into combat in November 1942.

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A flare cast an eerie glow, illuminating tanks and vehicles: not what they were expecting.

ALLIED FORCES HAD LANDED on the beaches of Salerno, in southwestern Italy, before dawn on September 9, 1943, but within three days their advance ground to a halt in the face of heavy German counterattacks. Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark, the American commander of the expedition, had underestimated the Germans’ pugnacity and deft reaction. Tanks and half-tracks filled with panzergrenadiers swarmed in, terminating what little inland progress the Allies had made. By Monday, September 13, the counterattacks were dangerously close to splitting the British and American sectors. On the verge of being thrown back into the sea, Clark realized his situation was precarious enough to consider evacuating his forces. To avoid that outcome, the 82nd Airborne Division rushed reinforcements to the besieged beachhead. Two parachute infantry regiments dropped into the Allied perimeter over a period of two nights, with two more regiments arriving later by sea. Yet Clark needed more help. Even before the landings at Salerno, Allied planners had envisioned a bold mission: dropping paratroopers 15 miles behind enemy lines to seize and hold an intersection of converging highways near Avellino, a bottleneck through which southbound German traffic passed en route to the beachhead. But the developing chaos of the landings provoked a series of confused orders and cancellations. As a result, it was not until the afternoon of September 14 that Yardley’s 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion, temporarily attached to the 82nd, received orders to drop behind enemy lines that same night. The men had only six hours to get ready. Veterans of combat jumps in North Africa—a campaign defined by

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improvisation—the men of the 509th were up to the challenge; after months of inactivity they were eager to get back into the war. “One minute we were sitting, fat, dumb, and happy, on the beach,” Private Charlie H. Doyle, a teenager from Massachusetts, recalled. “The next, orders came down to prepare for action.” The troopers were briefed to expect a fluid situation as soon as they hit the ground. There was little information about the enemy’s disposition; the Americans expected to encounter rear echelon troops, but reports indicated a panzer division was inbound from Rome and expected to pass through the crossroads. If General Clark’s forces did not break through to relieve the 509th in three to five days, the paratroopers were to split into small groups and make their way back to friendly lines. As the paratroopers finalized their preparations, the reality of their potential exodus weighed heavily on them. The battalion surgeon, Captain Carlos C. “Doc” Alden, recalled thinking that “if we don’t come back, there will be thousands to take our place and win this war. I hope I make it, but I hope even more to do my duty as an American man.” The bespectacled Alden was well suited for service in the paratroops: before the war, he had been an athlete and an amateur daredevil, playing football at Princeton and roaring down Lake Placid’s bobsled run on his motorcycle. At 9:35 p.m., the first of 39 C-47 aircraft, each carrying a “stick” of 16 paratroopers, lumbered down the dirt airstrip at Comiso, Sicily, and lifted into the night sky. In the pale light of a full moon, the transports flew in pairs along the Italian coast up to Agropoli, across the Allied bridgehead to Montecorvino, and into the steep valleys of the Apennine Mountains. Except for a few moments of moderate antiaircraft fire when the C-47s flew over the frontlines, the flight was relatively quiet. With the flak behind them, the planes droned on toward the drop zone—a valley near Avellino surrounded by 4,000-foot peaks. JUMPING FROM THE LEAD AIRCRAFT, Doyle Yardley landed near Lieutenant Fred E. Perry’s 11-man pathfinder team. The pathfinders had jumped a mere 10 minutes before the main element and, with no time to relocate, set up their navigation aids—two Aldis lights and a 5G transmitter—where they landed, hoping the following aircraft would drop on their signal. Perry informed Yardley

TOP: ASSOCIATED PRESS; MIDDLE: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; BOTTOM LEFT: 509TH PIB.COM; RIGHT: 509THGERONIMO.ORG

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ieutenant Colonel Doyle R. Yardley knew the answer to the question he had just been asked, but he damn well wasn’t going to answer. The German panzer captain repeated the question. Yardley shifted slightly and stared back at his interrogator. Again, the man asked, in perfect English, “What is your mission? Are more parachutists to be dropped?” Eyeing the skull and crossbones insignia on the man’s black wool collar, Yardley said nothing. The 30-year-old commander of the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion, a 1937 graduate of Texas A&M’s ROTC program, had no intention of cooperating. Realizing the futility of repetition, the German changed tactics and gave Yardley a shot of whiskey followed by a cup of ersatz coffee. The two adversaries sipped their beverages and guardedly debated the war. While disagreeing over who would ultimately win, they both knew the latest Anglo-American assault in Italy was on the brink of disaster. Yardley’s own operation was certainly off to a disastrous start. He had been in enemy territory for less than three hours before being wounded and taken prisoner. He had no information about the fate of his men. Nor did he realize that the mission had unraveled almost immediately after take-off and that the men of the 509th, falling back on their training, were being forced to improvise.

After jumping from C-47s (as at left), the 509th faced heavily armed Germans, including the 16th Panzer Division (middle, here outside Rome). Doyle Yardley (bottom, left) faced his first combat test as the battalion commander; daredevil “Doc” Alden (bottom, right) stayed calm under fire.

that they had come down at an intersection near the village of Santa Lucia di Serino—a mile short of the actual drop zone. Still, as several C-47s buzzed overhead, Yardley believed the mission was unfolding per plan. His optimism soured over the next hour, though, as fewer than 100 of his 638 men reached the assembly point. Scattered paratroopers continued to filter in, along with an Italian civilian, who warmly greeted the Americans. The man told Yardley several German trucks were parked nearby and offered to act as a guide. It was a tempting target; Yardley organized his men to attack on their way to the crossroads. During the trek the Italian slipped away into the night. Not long after, Yardley’s lead troops engaged in a skirmish with a German sentry, whom they killed in a volley of rifle fire. As the column cautiously continued forward, German machine-gun bursts sent the paratroopers to ground. Tracer fire ripped through their ranks, killing several men where they lay. Yardley ordered the men to push through, using hand grenades to clear a path. Suddenly, a German flare popped, casting an eerie glow over the battle and illuminating several tanks and armored vehicles—not the soft target the Americans were expecting. The enemy fire continued to increase and soon became overwhelming. Yardley’s attack collapsed. The paratroopers scrambled to withdraw, with German fire chasing them the entire way. One trooper, sprinting for a tree line, saw Doc Alden calmly firing his rifle toward the German positions. Alden managed to escape the pandemonium, but many did not. Once the American attack stalled, German troops pressed forward across the killing ground, taking prisoners and searching the dead. One of them found Yardley, shot in his left hip, seeking cover in a roadside ditch. The German prodded Yardley with a bayonet before grabbing him by the collar and dragOCTOBER 2017

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THE MOONLIGHT HAD DONE LITTLE to help orient the C-47 pilots. The pale light and deep shadows cast the terrain into a monochromatic maze; it was nearly impossible to differentiate one valley from another. After 45 minutes, many of the two-plane formations drifted apart. Several pilots, realizing they were in the wrong valley, circled back to the coast to try another approach. Eleven misjudged the turn at Montecorvino and dropped their troopers 10 miles east of their intended location. Fifteen other C-47s managed to fly within five miles of the drop zone, but only four of them delivered their jumpers on target. The remaining transports were completely lost and scattered their paratroopers as far as 25 miles away. The pathfinder team’s navigation aids had been useless: the steep mountains thwarted transmitter reception and the Aldis lights required a pilot be virtually on top of them to be seen. Compounding the navigation errors was the drop altitude. Surrounding peaks forced the paratroopers to jump from nearly 2,000 feet—more than twice the ideal altitude. Despite calm winds, the unavoidable drift from that height ensured that the troopers, whose chutes allowed only rudimentary steering, would float apart as they descended. Furthermore, almost all their equipment bundles—containing mortars, bazookas, ammunition, food, and radios—were lost or hopelessly snagged in trees. Upon landing, the paratroopers groped through the darkness to

Knowing they had to hold out, scattered troopers took stock of the situation and waged their own guerilla war.

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ACROSS THE DARK VALLEY, the scattered paratroopers took stock of their situation. Knowing that they had to hold out for at least three days—awaiting General Clark’s infantry to push inland from the beaches—the clusters of men waged their own guerilla war, laying road mines, cutting telephone lines, sniping sentries, and ambushing small convoys. Captain Casper E. “Pappy” Curtis and 17 other troopers slipped into the blacked-out town of Avellino and crept down its narrow streets. In the village square, they surprised and captured 10 Germans and commandeered their truck. They decided to drive the rest of the way to the crossroads with their haul of POWs, but an armored car interrupted them

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gather whatever comrades and supplies they could. Their priority was to determine their location and how to get to the crossroads at Avellino. Little time had been available to study the terrain and few maps had been issued—and those were hard to read. Crawling under a poncho to scan a map with a flashlight or lighter revealed terrain contour lines webbed so close together that without knowing the name of a nearby village, it was impossible to determine one’s position.

DROP ZONE

OPPOSITE TOP: ©ROBERT CAPA/©INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY/MAGNUM PHOTOS; BOTTOM: DMITRI KESSEL/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

ging him into their camp, where he received rudimentary first aid. As the panzer captain questioned him, Yardley, unable to sit comfortably due to his wound, stared at his imitation coffee wondering where the mission had gone awry.

Paratroopers were at the mercy of winds and terrain; men caught in trees (like the pair above) were especially vulnerable. Those who landed safely hastily grabbed their weapons and gear (left) and set off to wage their own battles.

and the square erupted with gunfire. In the commotion, several POWs made a break for it. Hearing more incoming enemy vehicles, Curtis yelled for his paratroopers to disengage and scatter. Southeast of Avellino, in the Santo Stefano del Sole valley, Lieutenant Dan A. DeLeo and his stick of jumpers were engaged in a fighting retreat. They had landed virtually on top of a German headquarters; two of the troopers drifted inside the compound, their parachutes entangled in the trees. Before they could free themselves, German soldiers riddled them with bullets. Behind volleys of fire and hand grenades, DeLeo and the survivors withdrew into the dark, carrying their wounded. Elsewhere, Lieutenant Lloyd G. Wilson and Staff Sergeant George C. Fontanesi, uncertain of their location, led 10 men toward what they hoped was Avellino. Using a paved road as a guide, they navigated cross-country in the dark woods along the roadside. Suddenly, the lead scout tripped and fell onto a camouflage shelter tent, collapsing it as he crashed on top of its sleeping occupants. “Schwinehund!” The lost paratroopers had stumbled into the middle of a Wehrmacht bivouac site. Amid the confusion, the Americans ran forward— blundering into more tents. Before the startled enemy realized Americans were among them, the troopers scattered back into the woods, leaving the Germans bellowing at each other’s clumsiness. Wilson’s group made it to the deserted crossroads just before dawn. With the sun rising, the troopers concealed themselves in a dry streambed. A few hours later, the Americans were alarmed when two elderly Italian women, picking greens, appeared to be heading directly for them. When it became clear the women would discover them, Wilson stepped out of the underbrush, pointed to the American flag on his shoulder, and whispered, “Americano... Americano.” The women ran screaming back toward the road; the Americans scurried out of the streambed and climbed to a new vantage point. Soon after, the troopers watched a company of panzergrenadiers form a skirmish line and approach their former positions. When they were 40 yards away, the Germans opened fire with rifles and submachine guns before charging into the empty streambed. The Americans waited until nightfall OCTOBER 2017

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He was horrified to see smoke wafting out of his uniform: a bullet hit a grenade in his pocket.

bumped into a group of troopers led by the 509th’s executive officer, Major William R. Dudley. As far as Dudley could tell, they had landed off the map; although he had gathered nearly 60 men, he limited their actions to foraging patrols, opting to avoid the enemy until the Allied forces arrived from the beaches. His decision did not sit well with most of the eager troopers, who believed it their duty to attack the enemy. The staccato of distant gunfire and the crump of grenades reverberating in the valleys were constant reminders that their comrades were out there taking the fight to the enemy. Some troopers decided to disobey the major and sneak away from the group to pursue their own war.

ONE OF DUDLEY’S FORAGING patrols met an Italian who told them of the nearby Montella Bridge, which German convoys regularly crossed. The troopers made another appeal to Major Dudley; he finally agreed to attack. In the six days since the drop, the men had recovered only 25 lbs. of demolitions from supply containers—not enough to topple the bridge, but enough to damage it. That night, September 19, the men divided into several groups. First Lieutenant Justin T. McCarthy, leading the demolition team, recalled that they “waited for the moon to come up” but it was still so dark that several men held hands to keep together and avoid getting lost. After positioning troopers on each end of the bridge for security, McCarthy and his team went to work, placing their explosives in the middle of the span and tamping them with bags filled with dirt. Without warning, several bursts of .30-caliber machine-gun fire startled those on the bridge; some of the paratroopers had fired on a German Kübelwagen motoring toward them. German soldiers spilled out of the vehicle and returned fire. With the fuse set, the demolition team scrambled over the side. A minute later the charges exploded. Unaware of what was happening on the bridge, a convoy of four blacked-out German trucks came around the corner and drove straight into the melee. The lead vehicle’s front wheels slid into the crater, stalling the whole group. The paratroopers tore into them with machine guns and rifle grenades and withdrew up the steep slope of the mountain, leaving two of the vehicles in flames. “The worst part of that night’s job was the long hike uphill,” McCarthy remembered. “We were so dog-tired we just stopped and lay down where we were.” Meanwhile, as the piecemeal units from the 509th created chaos in the mountains, the situation at the Salerno beachhead was improving. Supported by air raids and naval gunfire, General Clark’s forces repelled the final German counterattacks and pushed northwest toward Naples. By that time, ragtag groups of paratroopers were filtering back to friendly lines. Some opted to stay with advancing Allied units and continue the fight. American infantry finally took Avellino on September 30, a full 16 days after the 509th dropped in. By early October, 520 of the 638 paratroopers had made it back to friendly lines. The remaining men were assumed to be killed, captured, or missing.

TOP AND BOTTOM: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; MIDDLE: OFLAG64 ASSOCIATION; INSET: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

before heading for higher ground, where they found a cave. The men decided to hide there by day and go on the warpath at night, attacking targets of opportunity until their ammunition ran out. Staff Sergeant Fontanesi, who had been born in Italy, befriended a local farmer who provided the troopers with whatever food he could scrounge: bread and moldy bacon. The scattered troopers sowed mayhem whenever they could. Still carrying their wounded, Lieutenant Dan DeLeo’s group ambushed a German motorcycle courier, stringing a telephone line across the road to “clothesline” the driver before pouncing on him with knives. Sergeant Solomon B. Weber, a radioman from New York, shot up a scout car, leaving two Germans dead in the middle of the road. Charlie Doyle and several of his comrades, who had been lounging on the beach less than 24 hours ago, raked the last troop truck in a convoy with their submachine guns as it snaked through the narrow streets of a village. A few hours after the melee in the town square, 21-year-old Private Edward M. Pawloski and four of his comrades opted to cut through Avellino in broad daylight to reach the crossroads. As they entered the village, a burst of machine-gun fire tore into the group, killing Private J. J. O’Brien and Private Walter A. Cherry. Pawloski was struck in the hip and knocked off his feet. As he examined the wound, he was horrified to see smoke wafting out of his uniform—a bullet had hit the grenade in his pocket. He grabbed the explosive and hurled it at the enemy before running back toward the woods. The group’s appearance from the north side of the village created panic among the Germans in Avellino, who thought the Americans had landed to the south. To them, it now seemed the paratroopers were everywhere; initial reports wildly exaggerated their numbers. General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, commander of the Wehrmacht’s Tenth Army, diverted troops and armored vehicles from the 16th Panzer Division to hunt the Americans. Most German patrols swept the valleys in vain, but some did stumble upon small bands of paratroopers who either fired a few rounds and ran or surrendered to the larger German forces. Doc Alden fell into both camps. After two days on the run, his luck ran out when a squad of Germans cornered the surgeon in a farmer’s field and captured him. After his scout car ambush, Sergeant Weber

After fighting around Avellino (top), paratroopers linked up with infantry moving inland. Yardley spent the rest of the war in a POW camp (middle), but the 509th soldiered on across Italy and France with a new commander, William Yarborough (at center, bottom), and a new unit emblem (inset).

Nine days after German soldiers captured him, Doc Alden managed to escape and found his way to an American patrol. His battalion commander, Doyle Yardley, was not so lucky: he spent the rest of the war in Oflag 64, a POW camp in Poland. TODAY THE 509TH’S CONTRIBUTION to the Salerno campaign remains largely overlooked. In his memoirs, General Matthew B. Ridgway, commander of the 82nd Airborne, wrote that the 509ers “caused the Germans vast annoyance, but whether they had any real effect on the Salerno operation is a matter for military historians to debate.” U.S. Air Force historian John C. Warren called the mission a failure, citing insufficient aircrew training, a difficult flight route, an obscure drop zone, inadequate pathfinder facilities, and loss of equipment. For their part, the men of the 509th believed they had fulfilled the intent of their mission by sowing pandemonium behind enemy lines. By disrupting German communications and troop movements, the 509th undoubtedly kept units of the 16th Panzer Division on antiparachute patrols, preventing them from participating in counterattacks against the Allied beachhead. Measuring the effectiveness of that pandemonium is difficult, but the tenacity of the troopers and their willingness to close with the enemy at every opportunity reflected their aggressive spirit and fostered the growing reputation of the American parachute troops. The battalion had more action ahead. In January 1944 it landed with U.S. Army Rangers further north at Anzio, acting as assault troops for the next Allied leap up the boot of Italy. A few months later, in August, the 509th conducted a combat jump into Southern France and fought through Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge. The battalion emerged from that campaign with only 7 officers and 48 enlisted troops—a total of 55—out of an original roster of 745 men. + OCTOBER 2017

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Japanese guard’s clipped command broke the dawn silence on Corregidor, the tiny pollywog-shaped island afloat in the western approach to Manila Bay. “Standing!” he barked at the 200 ragtag men sleeping fitfully alongside the crossties of a rail line threading Corregidor’s eastern tail. Like the other POWs facing their first full day of enemy captivity, Edgar Doud Whitcomb, 24, rose to his feet slowly and warily, not knowing what to expect. North across the channel, Ed could see the shores of Bataan and, beyond, the towering summit of Mount Mariveles. Having once fled Bataan with the Japanese at his heels, Ed had never imagined returning. But now he found himself instinctively gauging the dis-

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tance he would have to swim to get there— and what he would do once he reached its dubious sanctuary. It was May 8, 1942. For several months, Corregidor—“The Rock”—had held out as Japanese invaders laid siege. During the struggle, Whitcomb, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-17 navigator, had fought on foot as had so many other airmen and sailors. Immediately after the Rock capitulated to the Japanese on May 7, Ed’s captors assigned him to a work party and marched the group toward Kindley Landing Field, Corregidor’s airstrip. Now, after scant sleep and no food, the POWs began repairing Kindley’s cratered runway for Japanese use. As he labored under the broiling sun over the next two days, Ed clung to a singular imperative. Escape, somehow escape.

B-17 navigator Ed Whitcomb learned to navigate the uncharted in boyhood—and realized he had a penchant for it. That daring allowed him to evade deadly wartime traps again and again.

COURTESY OF ROGER RUDDICK VIA DAVID SEARS

American airman Edgar Whitcomb defied the odds against the Japanese—five times By David Sears

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The Japanese attack on Clark Field forced American airmen and crew (top) to regroup; days later, the Cavite navy yard burns (center). As defenders flee south, Japanese troops assault an American pillbox at Bataan (bottom). Inset: Air Cadet Whitcomb.

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TOP: CARL MYDANS/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES; CENTER AND BOTTOM: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; INSET: COURTESY OF JOHN WHITCOMB

ED HAD REACHED THE PHILIPPINES seven months before with the 19th Bombardment Group. The circuitous flight from California’s Hamilton Airfield to Luzon’s Clark Field exceeded 6,000 miles, mostly over open ocean with only celestial signposts—just the sort of bold journey that fired Ed’s imagination. At 14, Ed had left his Hayden, Indiana, home one Sunday morning determined to see the outside world. His six-week hobo odyssey along the Eastern Seaboard ended with a vagrancy charge and sentencing to a North Carolina work gang. Ed’s mother had to wire funds to bail him out, but he returned neither sha ken nor asha med. He had learned to navigate the uncharted— and realized a passion for it. The Philippines was bracing for war when the 19th touched down at Clark in October 1941. As Ed’s squadron flew reconnaissance near Japanese-held Formosa, though, he wondered how the putative enemy could presume to challenge them. “Their aircraft were vastly inferior,” he later wrote in a memoir. “Our B-17s could fly beyond the reach of the Jap’s anti-aircraft and planes, and we could pinpoint targets and destroy them with miraculous accuracy.” Japan’s riposte came from a clear afternoon sky on December 8—December 7, Hawaiian time—as dozens of enemy bombers and strafing fighters savaged Clark. Not much was left afterward. “Crews standing by their planes were destroyed along with the ships,” Ed recalled. “Four bodies beside our own ship were charred beyond recognition.” Within two weeks, Japanese troops invaded Luzon, the largest and most populous of the Philippine Islands, and pressed forward until, on December 23, the grounded remnants of the 19th Bombardment Group joined a mass retreat south to Bataan Peninsula. Conditions there worsened through weeks of artillery barrages, strafing attacks, dwindling supplies, and rampant disease. “Rations

were reduced by half and…half again,” Whitcomb wrote. “Tropical diseases took their toll until about half of our units were not able to function.” Whitcomb was one of the felled, catching malaria. Finally on April 8, defenders withdrew to Bataan’s very tip. After an allnight journey, the southbound fugitives encountered northbound vehicles trailing white bedsheets. “At first, we could not comprehend,” Whitcomb recalled. Then they realized: the bedsheets were white flags. Even as most Americans and Filipinos obediently surrendered, Ed contrived escape. He and two squadron members commandeered a vehicle, drove it east to Mariveles Harbor, and hopped aboard a motor launch bound for Corregidor, a longtime military fortress about three miles off southern Bataan. Reaching its north shore, they sprinted for the Malinta Tunnel, Corregidor’s huge, bomb-proof command center. “It was so easy,” Ed marveled. He had no way of knowing it then, but he had just escaped an infamous atrocity. Bata-

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS SERRA

MARIVELES HARBOR

an’s 70,000 captives—many suffering from wounds, malaria, and dysentery—were about to embark on a 70-mile death march. Thousands of prisoners would die en route; thousands more succumbed at Camp O’Donnell, a squalid POW compound. Weeks later, as Ed Whitcomb contemplated the swim back to Bataan, he grasped a wartime reality: full freedom required constant escape. ON MAY 10, 1942, after Ed’s POW contingent had finished repairing Kindley Landing Field, their captors marched them to a flat expanse on the south shore of Corregidor. Known as the 92nd Garage Area, it had once been the motor pool for the 92nd Coast Artillery Regiment. There, a concrete-floored, crescentshaped arena overf lowed with POWs. A partially demolished garage housed the sickest and most seriously wounded. The rest—as many as 12,000 American and Filipino airmen, soldiers, sailors, and Marines—sat

Defenders retreating to Bataan’s southern tip saw northbound vehicles trailing white flags.

B ATA A N CORREGIDOR

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exposed or under makeshift shelters. The captives received no food beyond a meager daily rice allotment. A single quarterinch pipe supplied drinking water. Open-air latrines swarmed with vermin; dysentery was rampant. The surrounding cliffs trapped and intensified the heat and the only available relief was to soak in Manila Bay’s shallows under watchful Japanese eyes. Escape seemed futile but, for his part, Ed was fortunate to encounter a like-minded U.S. Marine captain named William F. Harris. A rif le company commander in the 4th Marines on Corregidor, Bill immediately impressed Ed—not least because the tall, thin, and resourceful Kentuckian, son of a Leatherneck general, was, in Whitcomb’s words, “dead serious about escaping.” Across Manila Bay they could see the shore of Cavite, eight miles to the south. Swimming there was impossible, but if they could somehow reach Corregidor’s north shore, they might be able to swim back to Bataan. They figured they could then continue north, tra-

versing the jungle around Mount Mariveles’s flanks en route to Subic Bay, northwest of the Bataan Peninsula. There they would commandeer a boat and sail for China, more than 600 miles north. It was an audacious plan, but the two immediately started preparing. Over the next days, Ed and Bill built endurance by swimming in Manila Bay for as far and as long as suspicious guards permitted. Meanwhile, deaths in camp were rising. The two agreed to “make a move,” Whitcomb said, “while we still had the strength to do it.” Desperation and opportunity converged on May 22 during an afternoon wood-gathering detail. Outside camp, Bill and Ed dropped unnoticed into a deep foxhole where they huddled, scarcely daring to breathe, until the work party departed. Then they set out for the north shore and, at sunset, began swimming, guided by a light on Bataan’s distant shore. The two made good progress—or so it seemed until the waters grew choppy. It drizzled, then rained so hard it became impossible to see or communicate. Ed was convinced their battle for survival had been lost. Once the rain stopped and the waves subsided, Ed and Bill somehow managed to find each other. “But we had no sense of direction,” Ed recalled. They treaded water until their destination light came back into view. It seemed much closer than before, so the men swam “with new enthusiasm” toward a gut-wrenching discovery: the light was on a ship tied up at Corregidor’s north dock. They had been in the water two hours and were no more than a quarter mile from where they had started. With little choice, Ed and Bill again turned north, this time stroking

BATAAN

MANIL A B AY

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS SERRA

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Japanese guards in Bataan assemble American soldiers before the notorious forced march that killed thousands (left); the Japanese marched other prisoners taken at Corregidor to Bilibid Prison in Manila (right). Whitcomb narrowly dodged both fates.

LEFT: AP PHOTO; RIGHT: GETTY IMAGES

mechanically, “like walking, hour after hour,” Ed said. “We did not swim hard or fast but we kept a steady gait.” Near dawn they reached Bataan’s shoreline. “We dragged ourselves into a clump of bushes and collapsed, wet and exhausted.” They slept all day, and awoke with the sun low in the western sky. AS BEFORE, THIS ESCAPE—Ed’s second— had come none too soon. Within days, the Japanese herded Corregidor’s POWs into cargo vessels for transport across Manila Bay, then force-marched the captives more than five miles through Manila to Bilibid, a stonewalled prison turned POW camp. Ed and Bill, meanwhile, began an exhausting roundabout expedition by foot and boat. Ed quickly learned that getting out of prison camp had been the easy part: “We had to cope with jungle, starvation, malaria, treacherous natives and the Japanese.” To avoid Japanese soldiers, the pair tried negotiating Mount Mariveles’s steep jungle trails, only to find the going too exhausting. Risking the coastal road instead, they discovered a cache of clothes and weapons, but no food. When they chanced upon a thin, old horse, Bill, momentarily heedless of the Japanese, shot the animal. They carved it up, carrying the parts to a clearing by a stream. But as Ed and Bill struggled to kindle a fire, shots rang out. They dropped everything and ran, sheltering in the depths of the jungle. The two waited hours before trudging on, eventually finding a cashew tree ripe with fruit. Trekking in cautious stages, occasionally

succored by friendly Filipinos, Ed and Bill reached Subic Bay a week later—only to find the Japanese had confiscated or destroyed all ocean-going vessels. China looked out of reach. Sheltered in a fisherman’s hut, Ed and Bill recuperated as they plotted a new course: island-hopping south to Australia. Paying 30 Philippine pesos for their host’s coastal outrigger—a banca—Ed and Bill sailed out of Subic at night, planning to steer islandto-island until they found a craft sturdy enough to reach Australia. In three nights of sailing and rowing, the banca carried them south along Bataan’s western shore to Luzon Point. It was now June 8—just 17 days after they had escaped from Corregidor—and once again their toil had landed them within sight of their departure point. As darkness fell, they edged their outrigger into the water to begin the 18-mile leg across the mouth of Manila Bay. Blessed with a tail wind, the craft, Ed recalled, swept past “the black outline of old Corregidor [on] a fast ride across the channel.” Hard going, though, lay on the far side. The banca started taking on water; Ed and Bill unfurled the sail, bailed furiously, and made for shore on southern Luzon. A small cove eventually afforded shelter, but high seas left them stranded. After several days, with provisions depleted and waves seeming to subside, they tried again. They scarcely got underway before a big roller snapped their outrigger and heaved them on the rocks. So Ed and Bill again set out on foot, this time south into Luzon’s Batangas Province, the domain of Sixto López, a fierce patriot for

The two agreed to make a move while they still had the strength to do it.

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Philippine independence and scion of a wealthy family. Though they never met the elderly padrone, the pair, shepherded and sheltered by López’s minions, became his guests. Riding donkeys, they traveled to a remote plantation, where they encountered two more Rock escapees, both U.S. Marines: Reid C. Chamberlain and Private First Class Tremel O. Armstrong. López’s hospitality was welcome—but seductive. Reid and Tremel had already lolled about the López plantation for a month, reluctant to leave. Even when Ed’s and Bill’s Australia plans shook Reid’s and Tremel’s nonchalance, it wasn’t until late July that the quartet finally cast off from the coastal town of Balayan aboard a 24-foot outrigger López had amply provisioned. Their coast-hugging itinerary had them following Balayan Bay’s eastern shoreline south to Tingloy Island, then turning east across Batangas Bay bound for Tayabas Bay. It was slow going. Seven nights of feeble winds car-

ried Ed, Bill, Reid, and Tremel scarcely 25 miles. Daytime winds were stronger—but Ed argued that daytime travel was too risky. His companions disagreed. The next day, Bill, Reid, and Tremel cast off from Batangas Bay’s eastern shore, tacking east in broad daylight toward Tayabas Bay. Ed was stranded—but not for long. Within a few days he encountered two American mining engineers, Ralph Conrad and Frank Bacon, provisioning their own Australia-bound outrigger. The three joined forces. Under “a good northwest wind…we decided to sail directly across Tayabas Bay,” Ed said. “After sailing until dawn, the wind was still good, and there seemed little chance of being caught by the Japs. About eleven o’clock we finally pulled up on shore.” Local villagers greeted them, as they often had before. This time, though, something felt different. The people stood around silently and unwelcomingly; Ed sensed something was wrong. Indeed, as he rested in a village hut, Ed looked out to see Ralph and Frank “surrounded by a dozen Filipinos with drawn pistols.” This latest set of hosts, sympathetic to the Japanese, confined the men to a municipal jail. On August 14, Japanese authorities transported the trio to Manila’s Fort Santiago, a notorious dungeon dating to Spanish colonial times. THREE WEEKS LATER, Ed emerged battered but unbroken from Fort Santiago—his third escape. Shelley Smith Mydans, a writer and

SUBIC BAY BATAAN PENINSULA MANILA BAY CAVITE SOUTH CHINA SEA

BALAYAN

BATANGAS PROVINCE

TINGLOY ISLAND

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BATANGAS BAY

TAYABAS BAY

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS SERRA

BALAYAN BAY

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

wife of Life magazine photographer Carl Mydans, described Ed’s arrival at Manila’s Santo Tomas University, where the journalist couple—along with 3,500 American, British, and Dutch civilian internees, men, women, and children—had been imprisoned for the duration. “He was very dirty and ragged, his tan trousers in shreds over his knees,” Mydans wrote of a character inspired by Ed in The Open City, her novel of wartime Manila. “He was heavily bearded…and grinning like a fool.” Shelley and Carl Mydans had already covered the war from Europe to China when, in October 1941, they traveled from Chungking to Manila to report on Philippine defenses. When the city fell in January, Japanese soldiers delivered Caucasian expatriates to what Carl called “a great dusty compound” ringed by “concrete wall…stretches of barbed wire… and iron picket-fence.” In transiting across town to Santo Tomas, Ed had again dodged a worse fate: at Fort Santiago 600 American POWs would eventually die of suffocation or hunger in its stifling confines. Ed owed his escape from Fort Santiago to memory and persistence. Certain that revealing his identity as an American airman would mean death, Ed adopted a cover suggested by Ralph Conrad and Frank Bacon. The two knew a Baguio mine superintendent named Fred Johnson who had left the Philippines just before war began. Fred was middle-aged, but Ed could pretend to be Robert Fred Johnson, the man’s son. Caged apart from Ralph and Frank, Ed endured daily interrogations interrupted only by near-death bouts of malaria. His interrogator probed for inconsistencies in the Robert Fred Johnson backstory. It was catand-mouse, seasoned with psychological and physical torture. A passage in The Open City best captures the final session with the Japanese tormentor: “He got himself into a very bad mood…He stood there and then he drew his sword with both his hands and hit me across the back with the flat of it…I was numb while he kept on hitting me. I thought my back was broken. I asked him to please shoot me but not beat me to death.” Instead, guards dragged Ed back to his cage; several days later the presumed civilian was transferred to Santo Tomas. Having “passed the most important test of my life,” as Ed put it, he had reason to grin.

Conditions at the Japanese-run internment camp at Manila’s Santo Tomas University deteriorated during the war. The weight of these five just-liberated men averaged only 97 pounds.

BUT SANTO TOMAS, though for now a welcome haven, was also a potential trap. “Internees wore clean clothes and ate at tables— luxuries I had not enjoyed for months,” Ed observed. But he knew his masquerade was fragile. Some of his fellow internees, aside from Ralph and Frank, were from Baguio and knew he had nothing to do with mines. Ed needed a fourth escape. Surprisingly, a few days later, a gambit opened. The camp commandant unexpectedly announced he would send 130 prisoners to Shanghai. But the commandant had trouble filling his quota: as Carl Mydans recalled, “a psychosis had crept through Santo Tomas like a fog, darkening everything outside the fence…Now it was unthinkable to venture out across the sea… The more he urged his prisoners to leave, the more they suspected a trick.” Aware any additional scrutiny could blow his cover, Ed nonetheless applied for transfer. The Mydanses did as well. Remarkably, within 10 days they were on their way, first by bus to the port, then by freighter—the Maya Maru— bound for Shanghai. At first, much like Sixto López’s remote plantation, Shanghai seemed idyllic. After they arrived in mid-September, the Mydanses arranged clothes, money, and even accommodations for Ed—at Shanghai’s Palace Hotel. There were horse races, new friends, and parties. And when a bout of malaria felled Ed, an

Local villagers greeted them, as they often had before. This time, though, something felt different.

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CLARK FIELD

PACIFIC OCEAN

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MOUNT MARIVELES

ENLARGED AREA PHILIPPINES

MANILA + LUZON POINT

BATAAN PENINSULA

M A NI L A B AY

SOUTH CHINA SEA

SANTO TOMAS FORT SANTIAGO

CORREGIDOR ISLAND BALAYAN

BATANGAS PROVINCE BATANGAS

B A L AYA N B AY

B ATA NGA S B AY

TINGLOY ISLAND

TAYA B A S B AY

Whitcomb’s daring wartime adventure began at Luzon’s Clark Field, a place he returned to late in the war. In between, his series of escapes took him to China and back home to the U.S. He rejoined the fight in 1945.

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American missionary physician, Hyla S. Watters, was there to pull him through. Though still determined to escape, Ed could see a major hurdle: Nationalist Chinese forces were headquartered in distant Chungking, about a thousand miles away. And, Ed learned, six U.S. Marines attempting to escape Shanghai had been tossed into the city’s version of Fort Santiago. Knowing that leaving Shanghai for a solo journey across vast stretches of Japanese-controlled territory was beyond even his ability, he felt trapped. That sense increased when the Japanese clamped down on the free-wheeling city. At the close of 1942 came word that all Allied citizens faced internment. In February 1943 Ed, Carl, and Shelley were among hundreds herded into Chapei Internment Camp, one of seven civilian confinement sites in and around Shanghai. Over the next dolorous months, as circumstances for internees throughout the Pacific worsened, a new escape channel took shape. Early in the war, neutral intermediaries—

Sweden for the Allies, Portugal for the Japanese—had arranged a person-for-person exchange of several thousand Allied and Japanese internees, including diplomats. Now a second exchange was in the offing. Lacking a passport, Ed figured he would be among the last to go. “Robert Fred Johnson” had only a Swiss-issued photo ID card that Ed had acquired in Shanghai. But then Carl Mydans learned the U.S. State Department was pressing for the release of American civilians who had been originally interned in the Philippines. After more anxious days, “Robert Fred Johnson” joined the exchange roster. Ed was jubilant: “I was going home.” THE REPATRIATION—Ed’s fifth escape— began on September 20, 1943, when selected Shanghai internees, among them Carl and Shelley Mydans and “Robert Fred Johnson,” boarded the Teia Maru, a commandeered French passenger liner. Ahead lay internee retrieval stops in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Saigon, and Singapore; then transit through

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS SERRA

FULL CIRCLE

Clock of Life

TOP: AP PHOTO; BOTTOM: COURTESY OF SHELLEY WHITCOMB

A Swedish diplomatic exchange ship heads toward New York—a trip Whitcomb made in the alias of a civilian mine worker’s son.

the Indian Ocean to Goa, a Portuguese colony at the time, on India’s west coast. There, in a formal exchange in mid-October, the Teia Maru’s passengers simultaneously switched ships with Japanese passengers arriving aboard the Swedish liner Gripsholm. The Gripsholm voyage from Goa to New York—with stops in South Africa and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—finally freed Ed from Japanese control, only to substitute new uncertainties. Did he face consequences for imposture or desertion? An answer began to emerge on November 3, 1943, when Lieutenant Colonel George D. Dorroh of the U.S. Army’s Central Intelligence Group received secret orders from Major General George V. Strong, assistant chief of staff for army intelligence. “You will proceed to Rio de Janeiro and board the GRIPSHOLM…You will effect a complete identification of Edward (sic) Doud Whitcomb as a member of the armed forces…. You will instruct…Whitcomb that he is not…to discuss any phases of his experience with anyone.” Somehow, through army or State Department channels—perhaps both—authorities had learned of Ed’s plight and were intervening in the final stages of his fifth escape. On December 15, a week after the Gripsholm docked in New York, Colonel Dorroh outlined Ed’s postarrival disposition in a report to General Strong: “I furnished him with transportation and permitted him to proceed to Washington.” The authorities’ dilemma: would returning Ed to military duty somehow jeopardize future diplomatic exchanges? After Ed’s debriefing by officers of the Prisoner of War Branch and the Pacific Section, Intelligence Group, Dorroh concluded: “Lieutenant Whitcomb has never, since becoming a prisoner of the Japanese, revealed his true identity. [Accordingly,] “there will be very little chance of him ever being identified as a repatriate aboard the GRIPSHOLM.” Eventually, Dorroh’s judgment enabled Ed to return to the Pacific. On May 11, 1945, in his first combat flight, Captain Edgar Doud Whitcomb navigated a B-25 bombing-strafing mission from Luzon’s Clark Field to Formosa and back. He had punctuated his five-escape odyssey by circumnavigating World War II. +

After returning to combat duty, Ed Whitcomb flew several more missions in the Pacific before taking a staff operations job. Following the war, he began what would become a remarkable career in law and public service. Along the way, he caught up with the fates of the individuals instrumental in his five escapes from the Japanese. After Reid Chamberlain, Tremel Armstrong, and Bill Harris parted ways with Ed, they acquired a motor boat in an attempt to reach China. When a monsoon swept them back to the Philippines, each joined different guerilla outfits. Armstrong was killed; Chamberlain was smuggled by submarine to Australia and returned to the fighting, only to die on Iwo Jima. Bill Harris, meanwhile, was captured and imprisoned in Japan until war’s end; his ordeal there is featured in Laura Hillenbrand’s book Unbroken. After repatriation, Bill—representing American POWs—witnessed Japan’s surrender on USS Missouri (see “Altar of Peace,” page 48). Tragedy followed: in December 1950 Bill died during the Marines’ epic retreat from Korea’s Chosin Reservoir. Mining engineers Ralph Conrad and Frank Bacon—like thousands of other Santo Tomas internees excluded from the Gripsholm’s exchange roster—were liberated in 1945 when GIs stormed Manila. Fellow internee Carl Mydans continued covering global conflicts for Life, while Shelley Mydans wrote more novels. (Ed’s daughter, Shelley Whitcomb, is named for her.) Ed’s public career pinnacled in 1968 with his election as Indiana’s 43rd governor. Afterward, Ed, then 72, embarked on a 10-year solo sailing odyssey covering most of the globe. Inspiration, says his son John, lay in passages from an anonymous poem: “The clock of life is wound but once… Now is the time you own... Go cruising now my brother… It is later than you think.” Perhaps so. But it also seems possible that two long years spent escaping from the Japanese drove Ed to keep on the go. Ed Whitcomb found final haven at a simple riverside cabin in Southern Indiana; he died on February 4, 2016. —David Sears

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ALTAR OF PEACE T

he striking images of the September 2, 1945, surrender ceremony aboard USS Missouri are among the most famous of the war. But they only tell part of the story. The ceremony combined meaning and symbolism—some of it intended, but most not—to create historical and political theater of the highest quality. President Harry S. Truman ordered that the ceremony take place in public view in Tokyo Bay. What the president had not specifically factored in was that this action completed a circle begun four years earlier in another bay—Placentia Bay in Newfoundland— where on the decks of the American cruiser Augusta and the British battleship Prince of Wales, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill committed their nations to the high principles of the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration covering wartime conduct and the postwar order. Japan’s August 14, 1945, decision to surrender transpired four years to the day from the date the charter was issued. That joint declaration, moreover, had formed the template for the essential terms of Japan’s surrender: that the defeated aggressor nation would be disarmed, with the Allies seeking no territorial gains and the people of the defeated nation enjoying new freedoms. Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal proposed that the Missouri serve as the site for the surrender ceremony. Truman enthusiastically made it official—partly for prosaic reasons. The huge battleship—displacing 45,000 tons yet capable of propelling its 887-foot length at 33 knots—was named after the president’s home state; his daughter Margaret had christened it. But the Missouri, flagship of Admiral William F.

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Halsey Jr.’s Third Fleet, also represented a stellar product of the “Arsenal of Democracy”—an arsenal the United States had shared generously and, at times, at great cost with its allies. The scene at Tokyo Bay presented a staggering contrast to the German surrender at Reims, France, four months earlier. The surrender to the Anglo-American command transpired in a room in a school building, in the middle of the night. The timing and location of the surrender—not even on German soil—fit the vision of Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who did not want “a Hollywood show.” But the lack of representation of allies apart from the Soviets and the French provoked ire among other Allied nations. Individuals of high rank and prestige dominated the proceedings, while a small contingent of ordinary citizens in uniform was almost invisible in the dimly lit hall. Completely absent was Eisenhower. Still reeling from the horrific scenes he witnessed at German concentration camps, the general declined to attend, sending a representative in his stead. In daylight, the vast expanse of Tokyo Bay

GETTY IMAGES

There was much more to the surrender ceremony on Tokyo Bay than its spectacular surface indicated By Richard B. Frank

Symbolism—both deliberate and coincidental— permeated the Japanese surrender ceremony aboard USS Missouri, September 2, 1945.

The Missouri’s captain rehearsed his crew to ensure that the ceremony would run without a hitch. The nighttime German surrender in Reims, France, strikingly differed in tone from the open-air Japanese surrender four months later.

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teemed with 258 warships. Only one of them was a carrier—USS Cowpens, which owed its presence to the fact that Admiral Halsey’s daughter had christened it. The main carrier task forces stood vigil out to sea in case of Japanese treachery. Aboard the Missouri, on seemingly every available overlook, clustered “citizen sailors” in their whites, with a sprinkle of khaki-clothed Leathernecks from the ship’s Marine detachment. They were the proud representatives of all those in uniform who had overwhelmingly carried the battle to the face of the enemy and paid the highest price. They were there by right, not—as at Reims—by apparent sufferance. The presence of those sailors and Marines as witnesses were all part of the ceremony’s careful composition. Truman had selected General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, the newly named supreme commander for the Allied powers, to conduct the ceremony.

MacArthur’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Richard K. Sutherland, and—particularly—Colonel Hervey B. Whipple, a logistics officer from MacArthur’s headquarters, meticulously planned its details in consultation with naval officers. The Missouri’s captain, Stuart S. Murray, repeatedly rehearsed his crew to ensure that the ceremony would run without a hitch—even asking several young sailors to wear a mop handle strapped to one leg to better approximate the time required for Japanese foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, who had a wooden leg, to make his way from the destroyer delivering the delegation to the veranda deck, where the surrender would occur. Not everything, of course, went according to plan. The British had provided an elegant mahogany table for the signing of the instruments of surrender. It rested on the veranda deck beside the imposing structure of the forward main battery turrets, their trio of barrels raised no longer in menace but in salute. But when the documents arrived that morning, they were clearly too large for the table. Captain Murray summoned four nearby sailors, who impressed a simple mess table as a substitute, its humble origins concealed beneath a green baize cloth. The cloth was coffee-stained but, luckily, the documents covered the marks. This solution to the small crisis exemplified American talent for improvisation and a penchant for utility over ornate formality; some later

TOP: USS MISSOURI MEMORIAL ASSOCIATION/ARCHIVES & COLLECTIONS DEPARTMENT; BOTTOM: ALAMY

A diagram details positions of key officials and elements for the surrender ceremony; the final version rotated the table 90 degrees and added a press section next to it. Pivoting turret number 2’s guns starboard created extra standing room for 10 people at its base.

LEFT: U.S. NAVY; RIGHT: J. R. EYERMAN/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

Meticulous planning included estimating the time needed for the Japanese delegation’s leader—Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu (with cane, left), who had a wooden leg—to walk to the veranda deck. Large documents (right) necessitated a last-minute table-swap.

praised the use of the table and cloth as a “beautiful common touch.” As befitting the fact that the United States had not fought alone, high-ranking officers of its allies occupied a prominent position facing the table. These were representatives of China, Britain, the Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, France, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. They stood out with their formal uniforms adorned with gilt badges of rank and decorations as well as neatly disciplined ties and stiffly buttoned high collars. Scores of American officers of all services representing the joint warfare in the Pacific stood in loose ranks facing the table from the inboard side. In accordance with MacArthur’s express directive, they sported plain, open-collar khaki uniforms bearing only minimal rank insignia. MacArthur believed the officers should accept the surrender in the clothes they had worn to fight. Mounted on a bulkhead overlooking the veranda deck was a glass case. It contained the American flag Commodore Matthew Perry flew in 1853 when he sailed into Tokyo Bay to initiate formal American relations with Japan—a symbol Admiral Halsey ordered transported by courier from the U.S. Naval Academy Museum. Perry’s ship had been anchored near that spot 92 years earlier; Captain Murray hung the flag where the arriving Japanese delegation was sure to see it. Tight-lipped and glum, the formally attired delegation arrived punctually at 8:56 a.m., led by Shigemitsu, his gait wobbling. Shigemitsu lost his leg in Shanghai in 1932 to a bomb thrown by a Korean nationalist. Japan had fought the war claiming it sought the liberation of other Asian peoples, but Shigemitsu’s limp spoke otherwise. Amazingly, the foreign minister recognized among the Allied officers the physician who had saved his life in Shanghai—Colonel Lawrence M. Cosgrave, the Canadian representative. Shigemitsu almost smiled before he remembered the circumstances of his presence. Then MacArthur strode to a cluster of microphones behind the simple table. Standing near him were Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wainwright, who had surrendered Corregidor, and Lieutenant General Arthur E. Percival, who had surrendered Singapore. Both men had endured over

three years of Japanese captivity. Their obviously emaciated appearance wordlessly exemplified some of the worst facets of Japan’s war. MacArthur delivered one of the three greatest orations by an American in World War II— all connected to the Asia-Pacific War. One is Roosevelt’s immortal “Day of Infamy” speech on December 8, 1941; Roosevelt had paralleled Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address with the sublime virtue of brevity, and memorable cadence and phrasing. Another is a sermon by a Marine Corps chaplain, Rabbi Roland B. Gittelsohn, at the March 21, 1945, dedication of the 5th Marine Division Cemetery on Iwo Jima. There Gittelsohn looked down at black volcanic ash housing the remains of comrades and said: Here lie officers and men, Negroes and Whites, rich men and poor, together. Here are Protestants, Catholics, and Jews together. Here no man prefers another because of his faith or despises him because of his color. Here there are no quotas of how many from each group are admitted or allowed. Among these men there is no discrimination. No prejudices. No hatred. Theirs is the highest and purest democracy. Now MacArthur set his feet before the microphones and grasped in his slightly trembling hands a sheaf of papers that bore phrases crafted, like those of Roosevelt and GittelOCTOBER 2017

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sohn, by his mind alone. In a husky but firm voice, the general said: We are gathered here, representatives of the major warring powers, to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored. The issues, involving divergent ideals and ideologies, have been determined on the battlefields of the world and hence are not for our discussion or debate. Nor is it for us here to meet, representing as we do a majority of the people of the earth, in a spirit of distrust, malice, or hatred. But rather it is for us, both victors and vanquished, to rise to the higher dignity which alone fits the sacred purposes we are about to ser-

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vice, committing all our people unreservedly to faithful compliance with the understanding they are here formally to assume. It is my earnest hope, and indeed the hope of all mankind, that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past—a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish for freedom, tolerance, and justice. MacArthur eschewed any blunt or veiled humiliation of the Japanese participants. He spoke not of surrender or defeat, but only of restoration of peace marked by freedom, tolerance, and justice. Toshikazu Kase, a Japanese foreign ministry representative who spoke excellent English, recalled that “MacArthur’s words sailed on wings” and the “narrow quarterdeck was now transformed into an altar of peace.” MacArthur then summoned the representatives of Japan forward to sign the instrument of surrender, followed by Allied representatives. At 9:25 a.m., MacArthur declared, “Let us pray that peace now be

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: U.S. NAVY; NATIONAL ARCHIVES; JOHN FLOREA/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES

Clockwise from top left: General Douglas MacArthur addresses the masses; attendees included two former POWs, Lieutenant Generals Arthur E. Percival and Jonathan M. Wainwright (here flanking MacArthur in Yokohama, Japan, just after their release); the Missouri teems with “citizen sailors”; as the press fills newly built risers, the Japanese delegation stands at attention.

TOP: U.S. NAVY; BOTTOM: THOMAS HARTWELL/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

restored and that God will preserve it always.” Facing the Japanese delegation he intoned: “These proceedings are closed.” A massive fly-over had been choreographed to conclude the ceremony, but leaden skies seemed to prohibit it. However, the instant the ceremony ended, the clouds parted as if on divine cue. Under fresh sunlight, 462 B-29s and 450 carrier planes sounded a deafening final benediction. And a blessing was in order. By conservative counts, the Pacific War killed roughly 25 million human beings. About six million of these were combatants, including about three million Chinese and two million Japanese. That means a total of 19 million noncombatants died, a ratio of three noncombatants to one combatant. This is notably higher than the awful arithmetic for Europe, where about 1.5 noncombatants died for every one combatant. Of those 19 million, approximately one million Japanese noncombatants died from all causes. For every Japanese noncombatant who died, somewhere between 17 and 18 other noncombatants died—about twothirds of them Chinese. This immense disparity in the death toll between Japanese and other Asians is understood in general terms, if not specifics, in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, and other Asian and Pacific nations, yet it remains mostly unknown among Americans. The Pacific War arguably accomplished more to shape the twenty-first century than its European counterpart. In 1937 when continuous war began in China, the arc of Asia from India to Japan contained nearly half the world’s population but comprised just four sovereign nations: Mongolia, Thailand, China, and Japan. The tides unleashed or reinforced by the Pacific War would create, in MacArthur’s words, “a basin…of a new emancipated world.” The end of war in that region spread independence, if not always freedom, to far more people than the European struggles from 1939 to 1945, and transformed the global order of the modern era. Many minds had contributed to the lofty, symbolic design of the Tokyo Bay surrender ceremony, but it was the unintended symbolism, along with MacArthur’s capstone speech, that propelled it into a towering and enduring achievement. It proved a prologue to what would be MacArthur’s greatest role—a peacetime one—as the American tribune overseeing the occupation and transformation of Japan. +

Matthew Perry’s 1853 flag hangs on a bulkhead (top). Today a brass plaque marks the surrender spot.

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HOW DO I LOVE ‘V’? I

t’s a simple shape with a simple meaning— and myriad variations. The “V for Victory” campaign originated in Europe a year before the United States entered the war. A Belgian broadcaster started it, British radio propagandist “Colonel Britton” popularized it, and Winston Churchill endorsed it. “The V sign is the symbol of the unconquerable will of the occupied territories and a portent of the fate awaiting Nazi tyranny,” the prime minister declared in July 1941. The idea caught on in the U.S. “‘Colonel Britton’s’ radio appeal for a ‘V-for-Victory’ campaign throughout the world received an enthusiastic welcome in Hollywood,” reads the caption accompanying a photo of actress Joan Blondell (left). In its November 24, 1941, issue, Life magazine ran the results of a V-themed photo contest, saying: “These pictures represent perhaps the last gasp of the ‘V for Victory’ idea which took the Democratic world by storm last July.” Instead, the U.S. entered the war just over a month later and the campaign reignited. The pins on these pages are a small selection from the worldclass collection of Pennsylvania native Christine Lurk, who displays them at air shows and other events in the adopted persona of someone she calls, appropriately, “Miss Victory.” —Karen Jensen

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ALL ITEMS COURTESY OF CHRISTINE LURK; PHOTOS BY GUY ACETO

Let me count the ways

What started as a shape scrawled on a wall in chalk or made by raising two fingers became ever-individualized. The pins on this page include a salute to the gesture Churchill made famous (top row, far left); a handmade beadwork pin (second row; third from left); a trench-art version carved in bone (fourth row; second from left); and, in the final row, a selection of military “sweetheart” pins to wear at home in support of a loved one overseas. OCTOBER 2017

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The BBC broadcaster “Colonel Britton” devised an audible component to the “V for Victory” campaign. Dot-dotdot-dash is Morse code for “V”—and bears a rhythmic semblance to the first four notes of Beethoven’s famous Fifth Symphony. Britton opened his program with those notes and urged listeners to tap “dot-dot-dot-dash” at every opportunity: on a table to summon a waiter, for example. Morse code appears on pins throughout these pages.

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The Wake Island pin (top row) is early plastic; the MacArthur pin beneath could hold a photo of a loved one, if you preferred that to one of the general. The eagle (bottom row) and a selection on the opposite page are Native American works. So successful was the V campaign that German propagandists claimed that the plethora of V’s stood for the German word viktoria, adapted from the English word, and were statements of support for Germany. OCTOBER 2017

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W E A P O N S MANUAL I LLU S T R ATION B Y JIM LAURIER

WINTER WARRIOR Finland’s Suomi KP/-31 submachine gun LOCK AND ROLL When engaged, the safety latch kept the cocking handle locked in the forward position, reducing the chance of an accidental discharge.

CLOSE AT HAND The leather sling played a key role for assault troops—it allowed a soldier to leave the weapon slung forward while skiing, keeping it ready and within reach at a moment’s notice.

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MARTIAL DRUM The distinctive drum magazine held a plentiful 71 rounds, but was heavy—still, few soldiers opted to use smaller drums or box magazines.

SIGHT PICTURE Soldiers were impressed by the KP/-31’s accuracy, which surpassed its contemporaries. One could adjust the rear sight for shots from 100 to 300 meters.

FINNISH SUOMI KP/-31 SJR Introduced: 1931 / Caliber: 9x19 mm / Weight: 10.14 lbs. / Length: 36.4 in / Effective range: 200 m / The robust weapon was a favorite among ski troops.

THE COMPETITION Finnish units, many armed with KP/-31s, helped slow the 1944 Soviet offensive on the Karelian Isthmus.

SOVIET PPSh-41 Introduced: 1941 / Caliber: 7.62x25 mm / Weight: 8 lbs. / Length: 33.2 in / Effective range: 150 m / The weapon’s high rate of fire made it ideal for close-quarters fighting.

LIKE MOST MILITARIES EARLY IN THE WAR, the Finnish army was unsure how best to utilize submachine guns in combat units. It initially issued the KP/-31 to light machine-gun teams, but by 1940, frontline soldiers quickly recognized its ability to serve as an effective individual weapon. The KP/-31’s reliability in cold weather, good long-range accuracy, and high rate of fire made it well suited for the hit-and-run style attacks that Finnish troops often used against the Soviet forces. The Finnish army incorporated increasing numbers of KP/-31s at the infantry squad level throughout the war, which helped counter the numerical superiority of their enemy. The Soviets, impressed by the weapon’s effectiveness, even adapted much of the design for their own drum-fed PPSh-41 submachine gun. —Paraag Shukla

AMERICAN M1928 THOMPSON Introduced: 1928 / Caliber: .45-cal / Weight: 10.8 lbs. / Length: 33.5 in / Effective range: 150 m / This early design won infamy in the hands of Prohibition-era gangsters.

ITALIAN MAB-38 Introduced: 1938 / Caliber: 9x19 mm / Weight: 7 lbs. / Length: 31.5 in / Effective range: 200 m / The well-balanced weapon was popular among police and army units.

LATCH AND REPLACE Most soldiers received two barrels. When one got too hot from repeated firing, a soldier could switch out the barrel and its shroud with little effort.

PHOTO: SA-KUVA, VIA OSPREY PUBLISHING

COMPENSATOR After complaints of muzzle climb during automatic fire, models manufactured for the Finnish army after February 1942 included a muzzle break to reduce recoil. OCTOBER 2017

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MEDICS IN HELL Soldiers of the 120th Evacuation Hospital were stunned and forever haunted by what they found at Buchenwald By John C. McManus

The first dedicated medical unit to enter Buchenwald’s barbed-wire confines did so four days after its liberation.

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UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM, COURTESY OF JUDITH SAUL STIX

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Infantry Division throughout the next day. The first medical unit—soldiers of the 120th Evacuation Hospital—arrived into this hell late on April 15. Immediately they found themselves caring for people whose physical condition was among the worst that medical personnel had ever confronted. LIEUTENANT MAY M. HORTON, a nurse, wondered how the grateful survivors who greeted her could still be alive. They were “thin, bony, and terribly undernourished, a gaunt look. One man knelt down and kissed my combat boots. I can never think of this without tears,” she recalled. The commander of the 120th, Colonel William E. Williams, took one look at the awful conditions and decided Buchenwald was no place for Horton and the other 40 female nurses and ordered them transferred elsewhere. Most of the SS guards who had run the place had fled; others had been beaten and taken into custody by inmates who revolted when they heard about the imminent arrival of the Americans. But the retreating SS had pulled off one final act of brutality: blowing up the camp’s sole water main. “The devilish cruelty of this action can be more readily understood when one realizes that a large number of the inmates were seriously sick, many at the point of death, and the lack of water if only for sanitary facilities was equivalent to a death sentence,” one of the physi-

LEFT: YAD VASHEM PHOTO ARCHIVE 1495/9; RIGHT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

T

hey were well-trained medical professionals. Their job was not for the squeamish. They cleaned up and repaired the corporeal mess that modern weapons made—the terrible burns, severed limbs, perforated bowels, broken bones, entry and exit wounds, internal bleeding, collapsed lungs, flesh wounds. By its nature, the job required its practitioners to immerse themselves in the unforgettable sights and smells of human tragedy. The battle against death was grim, soul searing, neverending. The medics knew and understood this. Their professional training had instilled thick mental armor to deal with trauma and still find a way to function. But nothing could have prepared them for the job they confronted in mid-April 1945, at a place in the heart of Germany called Buchenwald—a place few of them had ever heard of and whose horrors none could have imagined. When American soldiers first arrived at the concentration camp in Weimar, Germany, they found a humanitarian disaster. Buchenwald was one of the first such camps American soldiers liberated. (The first was a Buchenwald subcamp, Ohrdruf, in Thuringia, Germany, on April 4, 1945.) Built in 1937, Buchenwald had grown into a sizable labor camp with a population of more than 21,000—about twice what its infrastructure was designed to house. By then it consisted of a main camp, with some semblance of housing, sanitation facilities, food, and a “little camp”—a barbed wire-enclosed dumping ground for transitory prisoners from all over the Nazi empire. Conditions were poor everywhere, but the little camp was especially awful. Crude tents and windowless horse stables served as shelter. Barns designed to hold 50 horses were crammed with more than 2,000 people. There was only one latrine for the entire compound. There was no running water, no heat, little food. Disease was rife. Emaciated corpses littered the ground. A recon element of the U.S. 6th Armored Division had been first to arrive, on the afternoon of April 11, followed by soldiers of the 80th

TOP: UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM, COURTESY OF JAMIE BLEI; BOTTOM: ARDEAN R. MILLER/ U.S. ARMY SIGNAL CORPS

cians, Major Ralph Wolpaw, later wrote. Many of the inmates were near starvation— a situation so desperate there was no medical protocol for dealing with it. A truck driver nicknamed Tex—“this good natured kid from Texas, friendly to everybody,” one of his buddies remembered—handed out canned C rations to the desperately hungry prisoners. But the food was like poison to their fragile systems. Several devoured the contents, passed out, and died. This terrible turn of events devastated Tex and he never fully emotionally recovered. “It has haunted him all his life,” his wife later told an interviewer; “the idea that they survived the horrors of the camp only to die there…because of what should have been an act of kindness.” The unit initially set up a buffet-style food line for the prisoners in one of the former SS barracks. The menu included “hot meat and vegetable soup, potatoes, bread and the like,” Tec 5 Jerry P. Hontas, a surgical technician, recalled. “The food was simple in itself, but too rich for the shrunken stomachs and digestive organs of the starved men.” Several more spontaneous deaths occurred. “The lesson was quickly learned,” Hontas said. “Feeding starving people in a spirit of compassion is a task that requires patience.” Unit records report that the menu soon changed to a “soft and liquid diet…soup, milk, oatmeal, and meat stew.” GI search parties appropriated German fare in nearby towns to

augment the American food. The medics spent roughly two days setting up a hospital in abandoned SS barracks, where conditions were initially wretched and unsanitary. They discarded the furniture, rugs, bedding, and drapery, scrubbed the tile floors and walls, and brought in new army cots and blankets scrounged from U.S. and German army stocks. Liberated inmates strong enough to work assisted the Americans. The soldiers of the 120th then surveyed the camp to begin the job of gathering and moving those who needed medical attention away from their squalid quarters and into a clean hospital. “I was hauling desperately

Medics scramble to treat gravely ill inmates (opposite left and above), while grateful survivors (center) prepare a meal. The sights at Buchenwald left the Americans in shock. “Everything you read about those camps is true,” said photographer Ardean R. Miller, who took the image below.

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“The sight of those near death was almost beyond belief.”

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sick and dying prisoners, or what remained of once strong and healthy men, to the hospital,” Private Hence J. Hill wrote in a letter to his wife. “The sight of those near death was almost beyond belief—thighs the size of my arm, buttocks no longer visible, pelvic bones seen at any angle, as were other human bones. You can imagine the odor.” Some of the surviving prisoners were children. About 900 inmates were below the age of 18 and had been housed in one overcrowded barracks amid deplorable conditions. Tec 5 Warren E. Priest, a German translator and medic, received orders to check their building and make sure no one was left. He ducked inside and was nearly overcome by the powerful stench of decay and rot. “I remember the litter everywhere, piled one or two feet high in places, making access to several parts of the barracks impossible,” he said. “Everything

was covered with excrement, urine, vomit— blankets, clothing, shoes, jackets, underclothes—to call the scene indescribable is inadequate.” All of these terrible odors, mixed with the residue of burned flesh still wafting from the crematorium was, in his estimation, “beyond the human capacity to forget.” He held his breath and briskly walked along the rows of rickety beds, past piles of debris and detritus, hoping to sweep through the vile building as quickly as possible. He reached the end, saw nothing, and turned to go back to the entrance. Just then, he noticed a slight movement amid a pile of clothing in one of the beds. His first thought was that a rat had found an appropriate home within the filth. No sooner had this thought flashed through his mind than he heard a whimper. He picked up a stick and poked the pile to investigate. “A small child, a girl, perhaps five or six,

ARDEAN R. MILLER/U.S. ARMY SIGNAL CORPS

A liberated prisoner eats from a soup bowl; after several deaths, medics learned to feed their patients only a soft and liquid diet.

UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM, GIFT OF TRACY MAHONEY (ALL)

[was] huddled in a fetal position…barely conscious,” he recalled. Astounded, he gently pulled her from the bed, wrapped her in his field jacket, took her in his arms, and rushed from the barracks. “I have to get her to the aid station as soon as I can!” he thought desperately. She was unbelievably light, so much so that he kept glancing down to make sure he was still holding her. She whimpered again and then he heard nothing. The young girl had died in his arms. Deeply moved, saddened beyond description, defeated and discouraged, he laid her little body down. She made such an impression on him that he gave her the name Angela, to indicate that she was an angel in the middle of hell. “She lives still in my memory, that little human form…and since then she has become a constant companion of mine,” he later wrote. “Angela lives on my shoulder and close to my heart.” BEFORE PATIENTS COULD ENTER the new wards, medics gently removed the inmates’ tattered, filthy clothing and sprayed the patients with DDT powder. In a few instances, they steam-deloused the clothes and returned them. More often they simply burned the filthy rags and scoured surrounding areas and nearby army supply depots for pajamas and other appropriate clothing. Most of the soldiers were so alarmed at the condition of their patients, they struggled to find words to describe them. “There isn’t enough flesh left to even look human,” Private Bill Whipple reported to his family in a letter. One doctor shared this sense of stunned revulsion: “At first I couldn’t believe what I saw. We were sort of horrified.” Walter C. Mason Jr., a soldier in the pharmacy section, was so staggered by the terrible state of the patients that he wondered how they could possibly have lived for a few days in such a camp, much less months or years. “Many of these patients had open sores which were covered with what appeared to me to be toilet tissue, but actually it was a type of bandage in common use there,” he later commented. “I am sure most patients were not fully aware of what was going on as each patient seemed to have that vacant stare in their eyes which made it impossible to read in their eyes any emotional reaction.” Disturbed by the plight of so many people near death, Lieutenant John O. Lafferty, a

Physician James H. Mahoney photographed Buchenwald using a Rolleiflex camera he found there. “There were children here too!” he wrote on the reverse of the top image; about the bottom: “We set up a hospital in former S.S. Barracks.” And on the reverse of the center photo, the horrified doctor added: “The only escape was through the chimney of the crematory.”

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physician, wrote to his family that “malnutrition was severe…pneumonia, scarlet fever, and every disease imaginable. There were leg ulcers, bed sores, and wounds that were not healing. Probably the average weight was not over 80 pounds.” As he indicated, diseases including typhus, dysentery, scurvy, and even tuberculosis were a significant problem. Most patients were wracked with chronic diarrhea, and this served to magnify the suffocating odor of feces, rot, and disease that seemed to engulf them like a toxic cloud. According to the 120th’s records, the unit hospitalized and treated some 5,490 patients, with only 445 surgical cases; the rest were treated for their deteriorated physical condition and a byproduct of maladies, including 330 tuberculosis cases, 208 dysentery cases, 62 typhus cases, 49 pneumonia cases, and 98 patients with “contagion.” In some cases, the doctors administered scarce reserves of penicillin to carefully selected patients in an attempt to control infections. Seventy soldiers donated blood for transfusions. The 120th’s journal recorded 51 deaths among the hospitalized patients in a six-day period, with dozens—possibly hundreds—more dying before they could receive treatment. The medics did their best to pick out the most severely ill patients and “try heroic measures such as transfusions, intravenous feeding and…supportive therapy in order to try to help these people to survive,” noted Captain Philip A. Lief, a physician. Besides feeding the survivors a liquid diet or soft, mild foods, they administered blood transfusions—though it was often difficult to find usable veins in the arms of such severely starved individuals. “Most of the inmates had signs of malnutrition,” Captain Lief recalled. “That meant very little skin on the face, sunken bones, eyes, eyeballs sunken in the eye sockets, very little muscle tissue on the legs or arms. One could see all the thoracic cage, the ribs very prominent. If the inmate took off his shirt, you could see the spinal column very, very prominently.” The Americans made extensive use of any physicians among the liberated inmates. Sources do not list an exact number; there may have been around a dozen. Some of these doctors had been incarcerated at Buchenwald for years. Although they were hardly in great shape themselves, they nonetheless were in an ideal position to provide the Americans

with information about the medical history of patients and, in general, assist them any way they could. They also were instrumental to the task of organizing the patients by nationality and categorizing them according to maladies and overall physical condition. Physician James H. Mahoney recalled working with a former prisoner who had once been a preeminent surgeon in Austria. According to some of the patients, this man, whom Mahoney did not name, was such a skilled and valuable doctor that he had at times persuaded the camp authorities to afford sick inmates the kind of food, medicine, and hospital treatment the SS men received. “This surgeon’s moral and professional courage, in the face of death…remains an inspiration to me to this day,” Mahoney later said. “He was most curious about what was going on in the field of medicine in the outside world since he had been out of touch for five years.” NURSING THE VICTIMS BACK to physical stability was one thing; healing their devastated mental and emotional state was quite another. The body could be replenished over time—especially for the young—with good food and decent medical care. The same might not be true of their minds. Some were suffering from acute neurological and psychological problems. Others were so traumatized and so dazed from dehydration and hunger that they hardly knew what was happening around them. Some were in such a fog and so crazed with thirst, that, in the recollection of one doctor, “they opened bottles of plasma and started to drink the plasma, although we told them this had to be given intravenously.” Many of the patients had experienced so many months and years of dehumanizing treatment from practically everyone around them that they found it at first difficult to trust the American medics. “The mental disturbance of the inmates was very apparent,” Captain Lief said. “It took anywhere from a week to three weeks for most of the inmates to realize the significance of the fact that they were now among friends and Americans who had liberated the camp. They were happy to see us but at first they distrusted everyone.” When Lief and his colleagues tried to ask them about what they had gone through, they found that, psychologically at least, a part of nearly every survivor was still stuck in the horror of captivity, “living like in a night-

TOP: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; BOTTOM: MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

The body could be replenished over time; the same might not be true of the mind.

It took weeks before some deeply traumatized victims realized they could trust the Americans. “And what I felt for them then nourishes me to the end of my days,” the best-known of the inmates, author Elie Wiesel, said of his saviors.

mare. A lot of them wanted to repress what they had seen.” Many had been separated from their families and loved ones. They wanted to know what had happened to them but the Americans, of course, could provide no information. This only deepened the sense of depression and helplessness for those patients. “They were afraid of anything and everything,” Captain Samuel Riezman, a physician, later said. As a Jewish American, Riezman felt a special sympathy for the survivors he met and treated. “I don’t think they were able to think. I felt that all of their humanity, all of their spirit, was gone. A lot of people in that condition did recuperate but, at the time, I did not see how it was possible.” Gradually, as the inmates’ physical condition improved and they saw how hard the Americans were working to care for them, the distrust diminished—replaced by strong bonds of gratitude and friendship. “They gave us back our lives,” author and professor Elie Wiesel, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and one of the teenaged survivors of the little camp, once said. “And what I felt for them then nourishes me to the end of my days.” For the medics, many of whom had seen heavy combat, the experiences of tending to the survivors of Buchenwald was especially haunting. In the years after the war, many could not speak of the camp. Others who tried to tell friends and family members, or show them snapshots, found an unreceptive, skeptical audience. Some former medics held a lifelong grudge against Germans, refusing to buy any German products or set foot in the country again. More commonly, the veterans were just deeply troubled by their glimpse into humanity’s terrible capability for cruelty and depravity. “For many years I put it in the deepest recesses of my mind,” Tec 5 medic Harry H. Blumenthal Jr. said. “It was like an ugly scar that I wanted to cover but knew it was there and could not forget.” Like a bedeviling specter, those memories never went away. As surgical tech Jerry Hontas put it, “The only thing that vanished was our innocence.” + OCTOBER 2017

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FORGOTTEN SACRIFICE

THE LOST ELEVEN CHRONICLES THE TERRIBLE FATE OF 11 SOLDIERS of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion, an all-black army unit. It was a story unfamiliar to me—something that didn’t come as a surprise. As a history professor specializing in African American military history, I know that black soldiers have historically served the nation with distinction and honor, but with very little recognition or appreciation. This story reflects one more example of that. A caution, though: the book’s introduction reveals that The Lost Eleven is historical fiction with “created dialogue and unrecorded history” along with real wartime facts. And it refers to its historical figures as “characters”—an unusual reference for a work of history. This may not be problematic for some readers, but those with a serious interest in history will find themselves wondering what is real and what is imagined from page to page. The book begins with a climactic scene in which a German assault in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium overwhelms the 11 GIs, who frantically retreat. The two-and-a-half-page chapter then quickly jettisons back in time eight years to Berlin, where Adolf Hitler debates whether to host the 1936 Olympic games.

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THE LOST ELEVEN The Forgotten Story of Black American Soldiers Brutally Massacred in World War II By Denise George and Robert Child. 398 pp. Caliber, 2017. $28.

GETTY IMAGES

Soldiers of the 333rd (left) lost 11 of their comrades in a German massacre that, until recently, the army ignored. The next chapter takes readers, in three pages, to Bessemer, Alabama, and the home of future GI George Davis. Then comes another two-page chapter, on Hitler’s decision to invade Eastern Europe. This back-and-forth format may make readers feel as though they are watching a movie with multiple storylines, plots, and main characters. On looking further into the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion, I discovered that The Lost Eleven is based on a 70minute movie of the same name, written and directed by coauthor Robert Child, which perhaps explains the book’s unusual format. Despite the timeline-hopping, I enjoyed several aspects of the book. The authors devote a great deal of attention to the military campaigns of Adolf Hitler and his generals from 1936 until the end of the war in Europe. Unfortunately, the book focuses more on that than it does its main subjects: the 11 black soldiers whom German forces brutally murde red i n We ret h , B e lg iu m , on December 17, 1944. Tipped off by villagers, the army’s 99th Division discovered their frozen mutilated bodies in a cow pasture almost two months later. Though the army documented the incident and removed the bodies for proper burial, the final 1949 Congressional Report on War Crimes— which included similar atrocities by Nazi troops—omitted mention of the massacre. No official reason for this was given, leaving one to wonder whether it was an oversight or intentional due to racism. For the next 50 years, the military failed to acknowledge the gruesome deaths of the men, and their nation remained unaware of their sacrifice. For all its faults, The Lost Eleven succeeds in finally giving the 11 due recognition. I wish there were more books that highlight the sacrifice, patriotism, and heroism of African American soldiers during America’s conflicts at home and abroad. It is a growing field of history that has much to teach us about America’s past and present. —Marcus S. Cox serves as Associate Dean of Graduate Programs and Professor of History at Xavier University of Louisiana.

BOMBS, SPIES, AND LIES R EVIEW S B OOKS

BEFORE WORLD WAR II, workers unearthed tons of uranium ore from the open-pit Shinkolobwe mine in the Belgian Congo. The substance’s purity was unparalleled anywhere else on earth. But until the discovery of nuclear fission in late 1938, there was little market for the radioactive ore. Then uranium, an essential ingredient in developing an atomic bomb, became a substance of intense interest. As war enveloped the world, the Allies and Germany alike aimed to control its supply—foremost of all, the ore from Shinkolobwe. Thanks to the prescient Albert Einstein, the United States got the jump on obtaining a good share of the stockpiled Congolese uranium by 1942, but hundreds of tons still awaited delivery. To safeguard the secret shipments and keep the uranium out of Nazi hands, covert intelligence agents of America’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS) landed in the Congo. This is the setup for the exhaustively researched and at times entertaining Spies in the Congo, by Susan Williams. The central figure of the book is Wilbur “Dock” Hogue, a civil engineer turned OSS station chief in the Congo. Williams describes Hogue as sixfoot-three, whip smart, handsome, brave, and boasting “the most piercing eyes”; he comes straight out of SPIES IN THE CONGO central casting in the hero department. Hogue is supAmerica’s Atomic ported and confounded by a host of fascinating indiMission in World War II viduals, including his OSS boss (a well-regarded By Susan Williams. ornithologist before the war) and one of his recruits 432 pp. PublicAffairs, (a retired, left-wing radical journalist acting as an 2016. $28.99. illicit diamond buyer for Hogue in his investigations of smuggling routes). They inhabit a Congo that makes the nest of spies in Casablanca look mild by comparison. Hogue alone survives three attempts on his life by German assassins. Williams has picked an epic of a subject. However, Spies of the Congo suffers from a lack of focus on driving forward a cohesive narrative. The rich cast of characters numbers too many, and one easily gets tangled in an affair of who’s who. The list of dramatis personae at the front of the book, for example, runs seven pages long. Further, the story never quite clearly sets out how—or if—Hogue ultimately made an impact in protecting the uranium supply and thwarting the Germans, particularly since the United States obtained the majority of the ore long before Hogue even arrived on the scene. Still, for those passionate about atomic history and OSS operations, Williams offers fresh, wellsourced new information and some compelling cloak-and-dagger activity, all within the arresting scene of the Congo. —Neal Bascomb is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Winter Fortress and forthcoming The Breakout Artists. OCTOBER 2017

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GAME CHANGER NEVER CALL ME A HERO A Legendary American DiveBomber Pilot Remembers the Battle of Midway By N. Jack “Dusty” Kleiss, with Timothy and Laura Orr. 312 pp. William Morrow, 2017. $26.99.

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IN JUNE 1942 at the pivotal Battle of Midway, Lieutenant Norman Jack Kleiss hit Japanese carriers Kaga and Hiryu and Japanese heavy cruiser Mikuma in dive-bombing attacks. Only Lieutenant Richard “Dick” Best matched the feat of hitting two Japanese carriers in one day and not even Best scored three hits in four total attacks during the battle. Thus, in terms of hits, Kleiss emerged as the single most effective American pilot at Midway. That alone would imprint this book with importance, but the meticulous attention to detail and compelling narration make it soar.

COURTESY OF NORMAN JACK KLEISS

Lieutenant Norman Jack Kleiss’s derring-do helped cripple Japanese forces during the Battle of Midway, turning the tide of the Pacific War.

Kleiss’s intensive research of his squadron, Scouting Squadron 6, on the carrier USS Enterprise (CV-6) forms the vivid heart of this work and pays tribute to his comrades, who perished at a dreadf ul rate in the si x months from Pearl Harbor to Midway. His story is enriched by the letters he exchanged with the beautiful woman who would become his life partner after the battle and by extensive interviews with Kleiss by his coauthors. The narrative climbs rapidly through sketches of the author’s upbringing in Kansas, his days at Annapolis, early obligatory surface ship service, and his initially star-crossed romance with future wife Eunice Marie “Jean” Mochon. Having earned his pilot wings, Kleiss is assigned to fly a Douglass SBD Dauntless. “Compared to learning to dive bomb, a roller coaster was a ticket to Dullsville,” reports Kleiss. His descriptions of training and combat in that demanding technique are riveting. Along the way Kleiss explains the comical episode that earned him the nickname “Dusty” (when he landed at a Marine Corps base, his plane kicked up a dust cloud so big it impeded flight operations); provides illuminating facets of Admiral William F. Halsey Jr.’s leadership (one Halsey decision probably saved Kleiss’s life); and describes sympathetically but candidly the internal dynamics and personalities within his squadron and the Enterprise Air Group. Commendably, Kleiss does not overlook the squadron’s enlisted men. Indeed, few aviation memoirs devote as much attention to the men who maintained and serviced a unit’s aircraft. Kleiss portrays several such sailors and particularly offers full honors to John W. Snowden, his faithful and skilled “rear seater.” One poignant recurrent theme is how the squadron adjusted to its tremendous loss rate and absorbed new crews. Personal accounts of Americans who fought in World War II have flourished in the past two decades just as they pass from the scene. I cannot think of any I would recommend above this work. —Richard B. Frank is a historian of the Asia-Pacific War and a member of the Board of Presidential Counselors of the U.S. National World War II Museum.

Important New Work by National Humanities Medal Recipient Lewis E. Lehrman

ALONE Britain, Churchill, Dunkirk, and Defeat into Victory

Churchill, Roosevelt & Company

By Michael Korda. 564 pp. Liveright, 2017. $29.95.

Studies in Character and Statecraft

Korda recounts military and political events during the Nazis’ rapid advances across Europe in spring 1940, culminating in the British evacuation at Dunkirk, as well as his own experiences as a six-yearold in wartime London.

BATAAN SURVIVOR A POW’s Account of Japanese Captivity in World War II By David L. Hardee; edited by Frank A. Blazich Jr. 290 pp. Missouri, 2016. $50. The author, an infantry officer, began this detailed and vivid memoir on his journey home after three excruciating years as a POW in the Philippines.

LENINGRAD 1941-42 Morality in a City Under Siege By Sergey Yarov. 392 pp. Polity, 2017. $45. This first English edition of a study originally published in Russia details the horrid lengths to which Leningrad’s starving residents were driven to survive what they called “the time of death”—the brutal winter of 1941-42.

OSS OPERATION BLACK MAIL One Woman’s Covert War Against the Imperial Japanese Army

“Lewis E. Lehrman demonstrates an almost uncanny feel for all the senior personalities around Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Second World War; he understands their characters, viewpoints, and motives … coupled with an impressively objective judiciousness …. [the book is] well-researched, well-written, and profoundly thoughtful …” - Prof. Andrew Roberts, King’s College, London, author of Masters and Commanders and Storm of War.

“Lewis E. Lehrman’s arresting and deeply researched study of the Anglo-American alliance during the Second World War brilliantly establishes how Roosevelt and Churchill … found and relied on the right people …. Rich in historical immediacy, Churchill, Roosevelt & Company demonstrates how generals, diplomats, spies, businessmen, economists, and other key figures served the needs of both Prime Minister and President in their unyielding defense of democratic government.” - Prof. Richard Carwardine, Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University

Penetrating insights into character and historic role of: Lord Beaverbrook - Industrialist and Newspaper Baron Anthony Eden - British Secretary of War, Foreign Secretary Dwight D. Eisenhower - Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force George Marshall - Chief of Staff, United States Army

and many more who forged the world in which we live today.

$18.48 Hardcover | $15.65 Kindle

A Scot at Waterloo The Reconquista Iraqi Civil Strife Louis XIV’s Gloire Camel Cavalry Khe Sanh Siege HistoryNet.com

By Ann Todd. 280 pp. U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2017. $27.95. Todd tells the story of Elizabeth McIntosh, who led a branch of the Office of Strategic Services in the China-Burma-India Theater, using fiendishly clever “black propaganda” to confuse and demoralize Japanese forces.

MAC’S DAY IN THE SUN

A CEREMONY IN TOKYO BAY BEGAN THE REIGN OF AN AMERICAN EMPEROR

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SEIZED BY THE SUN The Life and Disappearance of World War II pilot Gertrude Tompkins By James W. Ure. 194 pp. Chicago Review Press, 2017. $19.99.

ON TARGET

SNIPER ELITE IV Rebellion, $59.99. WORLD WAR II RATING +++++ THE BASICS

Sniper Elite IV is a first-person shooter that puts players in the role of fictional OSS operative Karl Fairburne, a highly trained sniper sent on mission during the Italian campaign in World War II. Fairburne will combat Germans and interact with locals in order to accomplish a variety of tasks.

THE OBJECTIVE The main objective is to prevent the Germans from deploying a new wunderwaffe. To do this Fairburne will need to snipe enemy soldiers, as well as complete additional tasks, like setting explosives at German bases, destroying propaganda cameras, and assassinating generals. This will require a combination of stealth, cunning, and, of course, marksmanship. HISTORICAL ACCURACY

Sniper Elite IV does not authentically recreate any actual sniper operations in the war. The missions and their locales are entirely fictional; also the German’s secret weapon is a radio-controlled missile, which did exist, but which the Germans developed and deployed without Allied interference. That said, some aspects of the game are historically accurate, including weapons, uniforms, and equipment.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

Sniper Elite IV falls short as an authentic sniping experience, but is still fun. Perhaps the only real criticism is the game’s enemy AI; German soldiers are not skilled in their tactics nor accurate with their fire. Also, gunfire and explosions at one place do not alert enemies in the next area. However, the ability to use tricks during missions makes the game entertaining. Players can use explosives to set traps, throw rocks to distract enemies, use ambient noise to cover gunshots, and shoot nearby objects, such as fuel drums, to get kills.

PLAYABILITY As a sniping game, much of the mechanics involves choosing the right weapon, a target, a position to shoot from, accounting for wind and distance, and even controlling Fairburne’s breathing to enhance shooting accuracy. Different difficulty settings create some variation in the game.

THE BOTTOM LINE Stripped down, Sniper Elite IV is for those who enjoy shooting games. But as a simulation, the game does not recreate reality in terms of what snipers did during actual World War II battles. —Chris Ketcherside, a former Marine, is working on a PhD in military history.

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ANATOMY OF MALICE The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals By Joel E. Dimsdale. 256 pp. Yale University Press, 2017. $30. Dimsdale reanalyzes four Nazi war criminals and the differing views of the doctors who examined them during the Nuremberg trials, shedding new light on the psychology of men driven to orchestrate such atrocities.

THE GERMAN WAR A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945: Citizens and Soldiers By Nicholas Stargardt. 704 pp. Basic Books, 2017. $22.99. A stunning work, now in paperback. Stargardt draws heavily on primary sources to explore ordinary Germans’ relationship with and continuing support for an unpopular war.

WITCHCRAFT B-24 Liberator By Kenny Kemp. 128 pp. ALTA Films Press, 2017. $20. This heavily illustrated book by a World War II contributor examines technical details and broader context of the long-range, heavy bomber’s operational history, with a look at the last airworthy B-24 in the United States.

REBELLION

R E V I E W S GAMES

Atmospheric and compelling, this young-adult biography tells the story of a “well-bred girl” who battled a stutter and joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots, only to vanish in a P-51 Mustang en route to New Jersey.

366 PAGES | H A RD CO V ER | $50.00 “This work fills a significant gap in the historiography of the US cavalry in WWII, and makes a significant contribution to understanding the cutting-edge synergy between mass and mobility that defined the US Army’s outstanding combat record in the ETO.”—Dennis Showalter, author of Hitler’s Panzers

- 1945 - 1947 - 1950 - 1974

For more, search DAILY QUIZ at HistoryNet.com. HistoryNet.com ANSWER: 1974. PRIVATE TERUO NAKAMURA, A TAIWANESE NATIONAL, ENLISTED IN THE JAPANESE ARMY IN 1943. HE HELD OUT ON MORTAI IN INDONESIA UNTIL HE WAS CAPTURED IN DECEMBER 1974. EARLIER THAT YEAR, HIRO ONODA, WHO HELD OUT IN THE PHILLIPINES, FINALLY SURRENDERED.

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THE LAST JAPANESE SOLDIER FROM WORLD WAR II SURRENDERED IN THIS YEAR

“Allen’s diary, with its blunt, scathing language and often outrageous criticism, has permanent importance as a window into how the Third US Army functioned on a daily basis during the campaigns of Northwest Europe in 1944–45.”—Carlo D’Este, author of Patton: A Genius for War

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and later in France. The result, Go for Broke!, premiered in May 1951 to wide acclaim. But despite Pirosh’s desire to emphasize race prejudice, most reviewers treated Go for Broke! as a first-rate battle film—which indeed it is—and paid only slight attention to the fact that most members of the 442nd came from the archipelago of relocation camps the U.S. Army had created for Japanese immigrants— Issei—and their American-born offspring, Nisei, who were U.S. citizens. The reviewers could be pardoned for doing so. Although Go for Broke! does highlight prejudice, it is embodied primarily in Lieutenant Michael Grayson (Van Johnson), a former Texas National Guardsman who finds himself in charge of a platoon of Nisei soldiers. The film opens as Grayson arrives in camp, plainly dismayed by his new assignment. No sooner does he report to his commanding officer than he requests a transfer to his former unit, the 36th Infantry Division, composed of the Texas National Guard. Grayson says he has nothing against leading “Japs,” but the colonel doesn’t believe him. The soldiers aren’t “Japs,” he replies. “They’re Japanese Americans— Nisei—or as they call themselves, ‘Buddhaheads’…. They’re all American citizens and they’re all volunteers. Remember that.” Grayson isn’t convinced, and when he encounters his company commander he acidly inquires whether the trainees are issued live ammunition on the rifle range. “A Jap’s a Jap, eh?” responds the captain. Grayson responds sarcastically that maybe the Japanese relocation program arose because the army had a surplus of barbed wire. This earns him a second lecture. “The army was facing an emergency at the start of the war,” the captain explains. “A possible invasion by Japanese troops. So all Japanese Americans were evacuated from the West Coast. There was no loyalty check, no screening, nothing.” As for the members of the 442nd, they’ve been “investigated, reinvestigated, and re-reinvestigated.” They are true-blue Americans. Whether Pirosh knew it or not, the perspective of Grayson’s commanding officers aligned perfectly with the Orwellian wartime propaganda films the U.S. government issued, depicting the government’s removal of thousands of mostly loyal Japanese Americans to

B AT T LE F I LMS BY MAR K GR IMSLEY

A BITTER IRONY

IN 1950 ROBERT PIROSH, fresh from the success of his Academy Award-winning screenplay for Battleground, an acclaimed film about a squad of American soldiers fending off Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, turned to a new project. He wanted to make a movie that would illuminate the lives of the 120,000 Japanese Americans “back in 1943, when the ugly flame of race prejudice was being fanned by war hysteria.” Directing the film himself, Pirosh focused on the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a highly decorated unit of Japanese Americans that fought during the Italian campaign

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While ostensibly battling wartime prejudice, the 1951 film in fact supports errant government policy.

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WAS KILLING YAMAMOTO A MISTAKE?

John C. Woods and a tool of his deadly trade

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relocation camps as regrettable but humane. Scene after scene showed evacuees cheerfully accepting their lot and actively assisting the operation. “The many loyal among them believed that this was a sacrifice they could make on behalf of America’s war effort,” a 1942 documentary assured audiences. “The evacuees are not under suspicion,” explained

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another documentary. “They are not prisoners. They are not internees. They are merely dislocated people. The unwounded casualties of war.” But whatever the government’s bland official story, pressed upon Grayson by his commanders, the film’s many scenes with the platoon offered ample scope for expressions of bitterness at the irony of fighting for a country that had imprisoned their families. By and large, though, Pirosh ignored this opportunity. A single member does speak out persistently against the injustice of internment, but his comrades treat this as a simple case of grousing and think he should be philosophical about it. Thus “the ugly flame of race prejudice” burns primarily in Grayson and, toward the end of the film, in some of his buddies in the 36th Division. The focus on the 36th is no accident. Historically, in October 1944, German forces in eastern France’s rugged Vosges Mountains cut off a battalion of the 36th, which elements of the 442nd save in a rescue that forms the film’s climax. Go for Broke! concludes with newsreel footage of President Harry S. Truman presenting the 442nd with a Presidential Unit Citation, followed by a final scene in which Grayson, now thoroughly converted from his misplaced prejudice, proudly marches at the head of his platoon. Almost four decades would intervene between the premiere of Go for Broke! and the day President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, by which the U.S. government paid $20,000 to surviving internees and admitted the relocation was the product of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Audiences and film critics who applauded the film would have had scant inkling such a reckoning was needed. Far from forcing them to confront the “war hysteria” that robbed 120,000 Americans of their civil rights, Go for Broke! neatly got the United States off the hook. +

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We altered this 1943 photograph of American pilots of the 4th Fighter Group in front of a Spitfire to create one inaccuracy. What is it?

Answer to the June Challenge: Elizabeth Taylor was not a wartime pinup. Of all the entries, only one was wrong—but amusing: “The pin-up girls have clothes on.”

Congratulations to the winners: Monique Kuo, Joel Woodcock, and Scott Johnson

Please send your answer with your name and mailing address to: October 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 August 15, will receive Never Call Me A Hero by Norman Jack Kleiss. Answers will appear in the February 2017 issue.

OCTOBER 2017

79

STARSHINE

MPTV IMAGES

Sloe-eyed actress Ann Sheridan resisted being defined by her beauty—an uphill battle. She was a beauty contest winner whose prize was being in a film about a beauty contest—Paramount Pictures’ Search for Beauty (1934). In the late 1930s she became Warner Bros.’ “Oomph Girl,” a nickname she loathed. But when good parts came along, recognition did, too. She won praise for 1942’s Kings Row, also starring Ronald Reagan. And she showed comedic talent in 1949’s I Was a Male War Bride, alongside costar Cary Grant. “That’s the only thing I ever wanted to be,” she once said. “A good actress.”

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