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OPENING ROUND
ALEXANDER HISTORICAL AUCTIONS
At 7:55 a.m. Hawaii time on December 7, 1941, a dive-bomber bearing the red symbol of the Rising Sun of Japan on its wings appeared out of the clouds above the island of Oahu. Within just a few minutes, Japanese warplanes filled the sky over Pearl Harbor, raining bombs and bullets onto the vessels moored at the U.S. naval base below. At 8:10 a.m., an 1,800-pound bomb crashed through the deck of the USS Arizona, landed in its forward ammunition magazine, and exploded. The battleship sank with more than 1,000 men trapped inside. The Imperial Japanese strike force, which would batter Pearl Harbor in two massive waves, included 353 aircraft: 131 dive-bombers, 103 level bombers, 79 fighters, and 40 torpedo bombers. The surprise attack hit all eight U.S. Navy battleships there and sank four of them, delivering a shocking and decisive blow against the U.S. Pacific Fleet. In all, more than 2,300 Americans lost their lives that day. (For stories about Pearl Harbor in this issue, see “The Pajama Pilot,” page 17; “The Making of Tora! Tora! Tora!,” page 32; and “Before Eternity,” page 54.) A civilian employee of the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor recovered the jagged piece of bomb shrapnel shown below on the day of the attack.
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Volume 34, Number 1 Autumn 2021
54
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT LIBRARY (NATIONAL ARCHIVES)
The USS Arizona burns aftter the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
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FEATURES 32 The Making of Tora! Tora! Tora!
by Wendell Jamieson Twentieth Century Fox wanted it to be “the most spectacular film ever made.” But before its worldwide premiere in 1970, the blockbuster was plagued by false starts, delays, scandals, deaths, and ruined careers.
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44 Zheng He’s Seven Voyages
by Otto Kreisher He sailed to more than 30 countries in three decades—an expansive projection of sea power that represented a unique chapter in Chinese history.
54 Before Eternity
by Roy Morris Jr. James Jones built his bestselling 1951 novel, From Here to Eternity, around his real-life experiences as a U.S. Army private in Hawaii before World War II.
32 60
82
60 War Cards
PORTFOLIO Tobacco companies and other firms once churned out a dizzying array of colorful— and collectible—trading cards to promote their products. Military subjects were especially popular.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT LIBRARY (NATIONAL ARCHIVES)
68 The Visionary
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by Patrick J. Kiger George Owen Squier, who in 1917 would become the chief signal officer of the U.S. Army, could see the future—from aviation to “multiplexing” to Muzak.
DEPARTMENTS 6 Flashback 12 Comments 15 At the Front 16 Experience The pajama pilot
20 Laws of War Crime or culture?
23 Weapons Check Porter turret rifle
24 War List “Give me...”
25 Battle Schemes Union 1, Confederacy 1
26 Behind the Lines
The trailblazing telegrapher
30 Letter From MHQ 77 Culture of War 78 Classic Dispatches “Guest” of the Gestapo
82 War Stories
The frogman who vanished
87 Big Shots
Douglas MacArthur
88 Artists
Scenes from the South Pacific
92 Reviews
Follies and fortitude
96 Drawn & Quartered On the Cover
Twentieth Century Fox commissioned artist Robert McCall to create 25 concept paintings depicting the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, including this one, to be used in posters, lobby cards, and other publicity materials for Tora! Tora! Tora! A number of McCall’s original paintings now hang in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. COVER: TORA! TORA! TORA! BY ROBERT McCALL, McCALLSTUDIOS.COM (UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA MUSEUM OF ART)
MHQ Autumn 2021
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FLASHBACK SOUTHAMPTON, ENGLAND, DECEMBER 5, 1940
King George VI (in front, wearing uniform) tours Southampton to inspect areas of the city that sustained heavy damage during a Luftwaffe raid five days earlier. TODAY: Terrified families are evacuated as police confiscate a live incendiary bomb that a metal detectorist has listed on eBay as a “genuine” munition from the Southampton Blitz.
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MHQ Autumn 2021
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FLASHBACK PARIS, MAY 14–15, 1941
French police order 6,694 Jews to report to sites across the city for a “status check”; the 3,747 who show up are arrested and sent to transit camps; most will later die at Auschwitz. TODAY: Some 98 photos of the first “green ticket roundup,” taken by a Nazi soldier and discovered years later at a flea market, go on display at the Holocaust Museum of Paris.
SCHERL (BUNDESARCHIV)
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FLASHBACK AMBER ROOM, CATHERINE PALACE, 1941
Nazi soldiers dismantle the golden, jewel-encrusted room known as the “Eighth Wonder of the World” and ship it to Königsberg, Germany, where it later disappears for good. TODAY: The discovery of a network of secret tunnels near Kaliningrad, Russia, as Königsberg is now known, raises hopes of finding the looted, long-lost Amber Room treasure.
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MHQ Autumn 2021
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SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ
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COMMENTS
FAULT LINES
I was surprised that there was no mention in Alan Green’s “Surprise!” [War List, MHQ, Spring 2021] of the latest and greatest use of operational surprise by American armed forces—namely, Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military operation in 1991 that left Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and his generals falling for General Norman Schwarzkopf Jr.’s feint, with coalition forces faking an amphibious operation and push up the coast while the main attack was actually the giant “Left Hook” from the U.S. Army’s VII and XVIII Corps. I was also surprised that in Henry J. Wisner’s 1864 dispatch for the New York
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FROM THE EDITOR: MHQ published a feature story on Camp Douglas
(“The North’s Lost POW Camp,” by David L. Keller) in its Winter 2019 issue.
Arm and the Man
I really enjoyed the article “The Time Factor” in the Summer 2021 issue of MHQ. I have doubts, however, that the German officer using a 1906 field telephone in the photograph on page 59 is really Kaiser Wilhelm II. The man is holding the telephone up to his ear with his left hand. My understanding is that Wilhelm’s withered left arm would have made this action impossible. If the man in the photograph is indeed Kaiser Wilhelm II, I will view his disability very differently. Richard Dale Ellis Sammamish, Washington
Time Out
I found “The Time Factor” [MHQ, Summer 2021] to be enlightening and informative, as I have all the articles in MHQ for years now. I wonder, however, why the author did not mention, at least in passing, that the development of a reliable and accurate chronometer was a critical development in revolutionizing marine navigation. Determining navigational longitude accurately was so critical to both commerce and military actions that Great Britain, with its international, naval-based empire, offered a large sum of money as a prize to inventors who could create a reliable, accurate, and durable timepiece. Some years ago I read about this competition in Longitude: The True Story of a
MHQ Autumn 2021
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MAXIM MARMUR/AFP (GETTY IMAGES)
More Surprises
Times, which appeared in the same issue of MHQ [Classic Dispatches], the correspondent included no mention of Camp Douglas in Chicago— the North’s version of Andersonville—where as a prisoner my great uncle died of scarlet fever and exposure. About 30,000 Union POWs died in Confederate camps, Andersonville being the worst, and some 27,000 Confederate POWs died in Union camps, Douglas being the worst. I really like MHQ and look forward to reading each issue. Keep up the high standards. Colonel Wayne E. Long (Ret.) Haverford, Pennsylvania
HISTORICAL (GETTY IMAGES)
An F-14A Tomcat flies over burning oil wells in Iraq after Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
FROM THE EDITORS: Although Wilhelm II’s left arm was small and disfigured, he could still use it, and he often held his sword in his left hand to hide his disability. (There’s even film footage on YouTube that shows him moving and adjusting his left arm.) Your doubt, however, isn’t unreasonable. There were multiple maneuvers in 1906; in some Wilhelm wore a cape, while in others he wore a trench coat like the one in the photograph we used. We relied on the caption supplied by the Imperial War Museums in London, the source of the photograph.
MAXIM MARMUR/AFP (GETTY IMAGES)
HISTORICAL (GETTY IMAGES)
Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, a best-selling book by Dava Sobel about John Harrison, the 18th-century clockmaker who created the first clock accurate enough to determine longitude at sea. D. W. Stiles Benton Harbor, Michigan CHRIS McNAB RESPONDS: Thank you so much for your appreciative words about my article and for your excellent observation about the crucial importance of the marine chronometer. You’re absolutely right: This invention transformed marine navigation by enabling the accurate determination of longitude. Although there had been earlier efforts to develop such a device, it was Harrison who mastered a reliable seagoing mechanism in the 18th century, giving the Royal Navy the ability to make precision navigation in transoceanic voyages. The invention thus played a key role in Great Britain’s imperial expansion. The focus of my article was the influence of time—as expressed in speed, tempo, and duration, rather than precision—on the outcome of battles or wars. Considering the significance of the device, however, a mention of the marine chronometer would have been warranted, at least in passing. Thanks for expanding the awareness for our readers.
Nit I’m an avid reader of MHQ. In the Summer 2021 issue I noticed a small mistake in the caption for a photograph on page 87 of “The Airman” [War Stories]. The Pfalz DIII pictured was actually a captured aircraft displayed in Paris and is not surrounded by German soldiers, as stated in the caption, but by French soldiers. (You can see the French-style helmets if you look closely.) I know it’s just an insignificant mistake, but we history buffs can be a little nitpicky sometimes. Cristián Marchant Puerto Montt, Chile
Medal Mix-Up
I enjoyed reading “Man vs. Mosquito,” Rick Britton’s well-written article about Dr. Walter Reed, in the Spring 2021 issue of MHQ, but I would like to point out a factual error in it. The article stated that Private John Kissinger was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for volunteering to be bitten by mosquitoes infected with yellow fever. This is incorrectly portrayed even on Kissinger’s tombstone. He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his actions, not the Medal of Honor, which requires heroic actions during armed conflict with an enemy. Rykar Lewis Elizabeth, Colorado
President Vladimir Putin salutes Russian officers in 2004.
ASK MHQ Vlad a Vet?
Did Russian president Vladimir Putin ever serve in the military? Wallace Tillett Summerville, South Carolina Before he became Russia’s president or prime minister, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin served in the Komitiet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnotsy (Committee for State Security). Formed March 13, 1954, the KGB was officially regarded as a Soviet military organization and governed by army laws and regulations. The KGB, however, is notorious for ignoring the official regulations. Enlisting in 1975, Putin trained in the 401st KGB school at Okhta, near his hometown of Leningrad, and was then assigned to the Second Chief Directorate (counterintelligence), followed by the First Chief
Directorate, which largely involved monitoring foreigners and consular officials in Leningrad. In 1985 he was sent to serve as a “translator” (in fact, a spy) in the East German city of Dresden, but in 1990 he left the city in the face of a crumbling Warsaw Pact. Anticipating the inevitable in a Russia undergoing its own political transition, Putin resigned from the KGB on August 20, 1991; the Russian agency was disbanded a little more than three months later. Putin has since embarked on a political career, one in which his KGB experience has undoubtedly come into play. Jon Guttman is MHQ’s research director. Have thoughts about a story in MHQ? Something about military history you’ve always wanted to know? Send your comments and questions to MHQeditor@historynet.com.
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m
MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER DAVID STEINHAFEL PUBLISHER ALEX NEILL EDITOR IN CHIEF
THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY AUTUMN 2021 VOL. 34, NO. 1
EDITOR BILL HOGAN ELIZABETH G. HOWARD CONSULTING EDITOR JON GUTTMAN RESEARCH DIRECTOR
Haller’s Men in Blue In World War I, a military dropout assembled an army that help put Poland back on the map. By Peter Zablocki
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AT THE FRONT EXPERIENCE 16
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LAWS OF WAR 20 WEAPONS CHECK 23 WAR LIST 24 BATTLE SCHEMES 25 BEHIND THE LINES 26
COMIC RELIEF
A British soldier entertains his colleagues in 1939 with an imitation of Adolf Hitler. A year later comedian Charlie Chaplin would mercilessly mock the führer in his first talking picture, The Great Dictator. MHQ Autumn 2021
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EXPERIENCE
THE PAJAMA PILOT
On December 7, 1941, Phil Rasmussen raced to his plane the moment he spotted a Japanese aircraft in the sky over Wheeler Army Airfield.
I entered into flight training in September of 1940. I completed my training [at] the end of April ’41 and then immediately was transferred to my first assignment, which was to Wheeler Field. Our mission was to defend against the airborne attack on the islands. There was no mention of another country, but I’m sure we all had various feelings about the potential that we were going to be involved in a war with Japan. In fact, in my diary, I mentioned on December 2 that I had gotten a letter from my father and he thought that we were going to have trouble with the Japanese. And on December [5] I made a comment in my diary that the diplomatic efforts between United States and the president had failed, and it looked serious. But at the same time we’re thinking: “We’re 3,000 miles from Japan. How could anything happen here?” We never had identification photos of Japanese aircraft. In fact, when we got in a fight and when a Japanese aircraft arrived, I was confused about which ones were fighters
“ We’re 3,000 miles from Japan. How could anything happen here?”
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and which ones were bombers. We had heard some rumors about the Zeroes being a very maneuverable aircraft, built very lightly and having pretty fair firepower, and that was about it. About 10 minutes to 8 [on the morning of December 7], I was in the barracks for the unmarried officers. I was standing in the latrine and looking out the window at the hangar line, which was about three, four hundred feet from where I was standing. And I noticed an aircraft dive down [at] the hangar and pull up very sharply, and an object dropped from this plane. And then I saw this huge orange explosion of smoke and orange flames. And when this airplane pulled up, I saw the two meatballs, or the two round circles identifying it as a Japanese aircraft. I knew immediately that it was a Japanese aircraft. I yelled down the hallway—I was in my pajamas—and I yelled down the hallway that we were being attacked by the Japanese. And I ran to my room and I strapped a webbed belt around my waist and, and a 45-caliber pistol in my holster that was on this belt, and put on a pair of shoes and ran for the flight line. And as I was running toward the flight line, aircraft were strafing—well, I thought they were strafing and trying to shoot me, because I could hear these bullets whistling by me and I’m sure that they had far more serious objectives than hitting this lone guy running along down toward the flight line. I wasn’t wasting any time because, as I was running down toward the flight line, I saw the airplanes were lined up wingtip to wingtip. And the Japanese had started to bomb and strafe the aircraft at the end of the line. Each airplane was exploding and igniting the one next to it because they were so close together. There were a few [Curtiss] P-36s that were closer to the hangar line, a little farther away from the other aircraft. And I ran down to one of those and jumped into that plane, got it started, and then an armorer came over with a belts of 30-caliber and 50-caliber ammunition on his shoulder, then jumped on the wing. I taxied over during, apparently, a lull there, because as I taxied over toward earthen revetments surrounding the airfield, I don’t recall being attacked. As I looked around I didn’t see any aircraft that looked like they were about to
JERRY CRANDALL, WWW.EAGLE-EDITIONS.COM
When Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, Philip M. Rasmussen was a 23-year-old second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Assigned to the 46th Pursuit Squadron at Wheeler Field on the island of Oahu, he was one of the few American pilots to get into the air while enemy planes were still in the skies over Hawaii. Rasmussen, who would be awarded a Silver Star for his actions that day, went on to fly many other combat missions in World War II, including a bombing run over Japan, for which he later received the Distinguished Flying Cross. Following assignments in the Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East, Rasmussen became the chief of operations at Eglin Air Force Base, and he retired in 1965 with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He died in 2005 at age 86 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The following narrative is adapted from an oral history interview with Rasmussen that was conducted in 1991.
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JERRY CRANDALL, WWW.EAGLE-EDITIONS.COM
Four Curtiss P-36s from the 46th Pursuit Squadron, including one piloted by Lieutenant Phil Rasmussen, scramble to intercept a Japanese strike force in the skies over Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941.
strafe me. I managed to get over to one of the earthen revetments, and the armorer and I proceeded to load the P-36 with the 30-caliber and 50-caliber ammunition. The guns on the P-36 fired synchronously through the propeller, and the 30-caliber was on the left side of the pilot and the 50-caliber was on the right side. You think of machine-gun fire as being a very rapid sound, but because you couldn’t shoot your prop, you had to shoot between the prop as the prop turned. It was sort of almost like a funeral cadence in speed. As we assembled the four aircraft, Lou Sanders, the squadron commander, and Gordon Sterling and John Backer and myself, we all had done exactly the same thing that I described myself as doing, when I taxied the aircraft over. And we took off in formation, headed toward Pearl Harbor, to make a turn to the north and we came around the field, circled around the field, climbing. We headed
north because along the whole mountain range to the east, the clouds had built up over the mountains. We were trying to remain out of the clouds, and climbed to altitude and just clawing for altitude, because that was so important, in combat, to have altitude. We had that much sense. We charged our guns at this time. In the P-36, you had a charging handle for each gun. You pull back a lever, pull it back as far as your ear, and then you let it snap forward, and that arm would snap forward and put a bullet in your chamber. Well, I did that with the 30-caliber, and then I pulled the 50-caliber back and let it slide forward, and the gun started firing by itself. So I had to pull it back and keep it cocked to keep the gun from firing. It had nothing to do with me depressing the trigger, because it was a solenoid on that gun that had gone bad on me. As we climbed we headed east. We had received instructions shortly after being airborne to go to Bellows
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XXXXXXXXXX
Clockwise from left: Rasmussen (hatless) and four of his fellow officers pose in front of a P-36; the wreckage of a U.S. plane lies in a heap at Wheeler Army Airfield; Wheeler Field in flames, as seen from a Japanese navy plane.
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There wasn’t time. Our actions were preceding our thoughts. That’s almost the way I could just describe it. Our actions were sort of programmed. It was a reaction to a situation. I think it’s the best way I can describe it. Sadly, the feeling of reality didn’t come until my airplane was hit. And then all of a sudden I realized that I was in a great deal of danger, and that’s the reason why I ducked into the clouds and tried to get out of that direction. Fear didn’t kick in. I guess it’s like an automobile accident. You suddenly crash into somebody and you have a moment’s pause before you start thinking, and then you get pretty nervous about the situation. But all the way back to the field I was so busy trying to keep that airplane in the air that I didn’t have time to think of anything else. I had my control stick way over in [the] right-hand corner of my cockpit in order to keep the airplane level, and I was using my trim tabs like mad and trying to maintain control of the aircraft.
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NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
“I gingerly reached up to see how much was left of the top of my head.”
side, which meant that I still had some aileron control and elevator control. I ducked into the clouds that were below us, and in toward the mountains, and stayed in those clouds. There were about eight to 10 cloud covers. I was popping in and out of clouds, trying to stabilize the aircraft, trying to find out whether I’d been hurt or not because I had felt this blow on the top of my head, and I had not worn a helmet. I just had a headset on, and when I had got the airplane finally straightened out a little bit, straight and level, I gingerly reached up to see how much was left of the top of my head. All I found was a bunch of shredded Plexiglas in my hair. I didn’t have a scratch anywhere.
LEFT: BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES); RIGHT: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND (2)
Field. We were climbing and then trying to get over in that direction as quickly as possible, and as soon as we topped the clouds, at between nine and 10,000 feet, we had instructions to go to Kaneohe Bay, which was more or less on the way to Bellows anyway—same general direction. [When] we got to Kaneohe Bay, we saw that it was under attack. We saw about eight aircraft that were over land, making a turn, preparing to make another attack on Kaneohe Bay. And we dove down and were going to jump these aircraft—in other words, attack them. We intercepted them at about 6,500 feet. We had all separated in the process of making our attacks, individually, and this one airplane came by from my right side to the left. I lit him with my 50-caliber and let the handle slide home, and it started firing all by itself. I could see the bullets stitching the fuselage, and from the engine aft, and he caught on fire and peeled down. Just at that same time, this other Japanese aircraft tried to ram me. I was convinced that he was trying to ram me and I pulled up very sharply to my right. And as I pulled up to my right, my airplane shuddered, and my canopy blew off and I lost control of the plane momentarily. As the plane was falling off, I managed to work the controls around, and I found out that my rudder control would not work. The rudder would just slide in and out on either
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE
LEFT: BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES); RIGHT: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND (2)
A diorama in the World War II gallery of the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, portrays Rasmussen preparing to climb into the cockpit of his Curtiss P-36A Hawk.
As I was heading back toward Wheeler, Lew Sanders picked me up. He pulled up close to me and was shaking his head and trying to find out what was wrong, and I said, “Everything is okay. I’m all right.” And so he escorted me back to Wheeler. As we came over Schofield Barracks the friendly forces [had] organized themselves pretty well and were starting to shoot at us. But fortunately, they missed us. The Wheeler Field people knew that we were friendly aircraft. There were no more Japanese around. As I turned on the base legs and put my view down, I noticed [that] my indicator showed my gear was not down. So on final I was pumping hydraulic fluid with the emergency pump to get the gear down. Just before I touched down I got the gear down, and I cut the engine and landed on the wet grass. The dew was still on the grass. We had no runway. It was just a grassy field, and we had a concrete ramp for parking the aircraft. But the aircraft just took over by itself because I had no brakes—my hydraulics had been shot out. I had no rudder. I couldn’t control the torque of the airplane, and I just spun around a couple of times till it came to a stop. And then I sat there in, benumbed, really, and I noticed some men running over from the hangar line to see if I was okay, and I finally got up out of the cockpit. I was soaking wet, and it wasn’t just from sweat. And I got on the ground and I looked at the airplane and just—I was just dazed a little bit. I think that’s the only way I can explain it. I didn’t have any coherent thoughts. I went back to the barracks and took off my pajamas and put on a flying suit and came back down the line to see
what I could do because the ammunition was still exploding in the hangars. All the planes that [were] salvageable had been salvaged in that period of time, and there were very few of them that were salvaged. This painting actually shows the time that I was hit. You can see the bullet holes in the airplane. The tail wheel is being shot off. My canopy is shattered. It was right after I had shot down one Japanese aircraft. Then [another] aircraft tried to ram me, and I had pulled up to avoid being rammed by him. You can see Kaneohe Bay under attack over here, and this is John Thacker, one of our group of four pilots, whose guns were all jammed. He couldn’t do anything. And this is Lew Sanders, who was after this [Japanese aircraft]. And this is our fourth man, Gordon Sterling, who was on fire and was shot down. This Japanese pilot is still alive. He is quite ill, but he’s in Japan and he’s described how he tried to ram me. And inside the fuselage shows the hole made by the entry of the 20 millimeter, and when it exploded, these radios absorbed the shock. I had no armor plate in back of me in these airplanes, and what saved my life was these radios that absorbed the shock. It was like the age of chivalry, almost, with the knights and the way they were fighting and the combat that we engaged in, in World War II. That’s something that disappeared, like horse cavalry. I don’t anticipate, in any future war, that we’re going to have the type of dogfighting that we had. Most of the weapons that we use today fire at targets that are out of sight and that are picked up electronically. So the likelihood of this type of combat, this is part of history. MHQ
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LAWS OF WAR
CRIME OR CULTURE?
Should European-American concepts of lawful warfare have been applied to what were long-established practices of the Dakota Indians? By John A. Haymond
Vattel had anticipated such visceral reactions to wartime atrocities.
The whole controversy over what constitutes a war crime, and whose concept of acceptable conduct in war is legally applicable, is complicated. The five officers who formed the court of the 1862 military commission trials (none of whom had any formal training in military law) believed that atroc� ities such as the killing of unarmed civilians were crimes warranting punishment. The question was whether the mil� itary commission was correct to apply European-American
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concepts of lawful warfare to what were long-established practices of warfare for the Dakota. In 1758, a full century before the Dakota War, the Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel published The Law of Nations. Vattel’s treatise was a standard text for 19th-century Amer� ican diplomats and soldiers, and his ideas had tremendous influence on the codification of the Articles of War the U.S. military used in the nation’s nascent years. In 1862 numerous American commentators believed that the Dakota were justified in going to war and that their long list of grievances against the U.S. government, which had finally driven them to war, were legitimate. But nearly all of them also insisted that the way in which the Dakota actually fought the war was not justified, not legitimate, and not acceptable. They condemned the Dakota for what they characterized as barbaric excesses of violence, and the indis� criminate killing of women and children was the primary reason why so many voices in Minnesota in 1862 called for vengeance against the Dakota, rather than justice. Vattel had anticipated precisely this sort of visceral re� action to wartime atrocities. “If you once open a door for continual accusation of outrageous excess in hostilities,” he wrote, “you will only…influence the minds of the contend� ing parties with increasing animosity: fresh injuries will be perpetually springing up; and the sword will never be sheathed till one of the parties be utterly destroyed.” So it was in the Dakota War. In discussions of American frontier history, one per� spective argues that European-American observers are not qualified to criticize indigenous native cultures. Nothing in the traditional methods of warfare among the Dakota, this view would insist, can be described by so pejorative a word as “atrocity,” and European-American conceptions of proper warfare should not apply. In many American Indian cultures, the practice of war� fare made little or no distinction between men, women, and children or between the armed and the defenseless— almost anyone could be a legitimate target. “In intertribal wars,” notes Carol Chomsky, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, “almost all members of the enemy nation—including women and children—were le� gitimate targets of attack, and captives were rarely taken.” It was precisely this aspect of Indian warfare that had such an
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n the morning of December 26, 1862, 38 men were hanged on a single gallows in Mankato, Min� nesota. It was the largest simultaneous execution in American history. The execution of these men, all Dakota Indians, closed the first chapter of the most violent American Indian war of the 19th cen� tury. It was a short war, with actual fighting lasting only six weeks, but more lives were lost in this conflict than in any other war of the American frontier period. In the aftermath of the carnage, the officer in command of U.S. Army forces in the field, Colonel Henry Hastings Sibley, convened a military commission to try Dakotas ac� cused of various atrocities. This hasty, field-expedient tribu� nal conducted 392 trials and sentenced 303 defendants to death, ultimately resulting in the 38 executions. Perhaps the worst miscarriage of justice, worse even than an innocent person being wrongly convicted of a crime, would be to convict someone of a crime that never occurred in the first place. Several lines of thought hold that this is precisely what happened to the Indians tried by Sibley’s highly controversial military commission. One contends that the violence that charac� terized the Dakota War of 1862 was completely legiti� mate for the simple reason that it was in accordance with the Dakota’s traditional, es� tablished practice of warfare. By this argument, even the deliberate, unrestricted killing of women and children was not a war crime and should not have been prosecuted under European-American codifications of lawful warfare.
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Residents of Mankato, Minnesota, gather in 1862 to watch the hanging of 38 Dakota Indians, who stand on a scaffold with nooses around their necks. It would be the largest simultaneous execution in American history. undeniable and negative influence on the military commission’s view of the defendants. “Women, children, feeble old men, and sick persons, come under the description of enemies; and we have certain rights over them, inasmuch as they belong to the nation with whom we are at war,” Vattel wrote. “But these are enemies who make no resistance; and consequently we have no right to maltreat their persons or use any violence against them, much less to take away their lives.” This was precisely how the members of Sibley’s military commission understood the matter when they sat in judgment. Vattel, of course, had never seen a Dakota. He was born and reared in central Europe, where the horrific ravages of the Thirty Years War a century earlier had laid waste to entire regions and killed hundreds of thousands of women and children and the aged and infirm. These were precisely the types of people whom the Law of Nations was envisioned to protect. In war, the victor makes the rules and writes the history, and the brutal reality of vae victis (woe to the vanquished) has applied to conflicts across the entire spectrum of human experience. But American concepts and definitions
of lawful warfare are the only ones that bear on the Dakota War because all parties involved in the conflict—American soldiers, American civilians, and, most important, the Dakotas themselves—used those concepts and definitions to frame their views of the war at the point of its conclusion. The Dakotas adopted American ideas of lawful warfare when, in one extremely important instance, it seemed in their best interest to do so: at the point of their surrender to the U.S. Army, when they expected to be treated as prisoners of war. Consequently, they inadvertently accepted that American rules of war also applied to them. At the same time, some commentators failed to acknowledge that European-American tacticians had long recognized preemptive strikes or surprise attacks—which the Dakotas certainly used in the first days of the war—as legitimate. They came with certain risks, however. “The opening of hostilities through a sudden raid,” the German tactician Herman Froetsch observed, “is politically a severe handicap which, while it may be lightly considered at the commencement of a war, is likely to have very unfortunate consequences should the war turn out badly.” What compounded the consequences for the Dakota was that they had made
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CRIME OR CULTURE? their surprise attacks not against purely military targets but rather against civilians, and in the eyes of many Americans, that utterly negated the legitimacy of such tactics. In 1862 the argument over POW status for the defeated Dakota went back and forth as autumn gave way to winter. “We cannot hang men by the hundreds,” Episcopalian bishop Henry Whipple wrote to Senator Henry Rice. “Upon our own premises we have no right to do so. We claim that they are an independent nation & as such they are prisoners of war.” But Whipple was distinctly in the minority. “I think you are in error in saying they are prisoners of war,” Rice wrote in his reply to Whipple. “In my opinion they are murderers of the deepest dye. The laws of war cannot be so far distorted as to reach this case in any respect.” One of the most complete accounts from the Dakota perspective comes from the narrative of Chief Big Eagle. He had not favored the idea of war against the Americans, but once the die was cast and war broke out, he was an active combatant. “I and others understood,” Big Eagle said, “that Sibley would treat with all of us who had only been soldiers and would surrender as prisoners of war, and that only those who had murdered people in cold blood, the settlers and others, would be punished in any way.” (In fact, Sibley initially felt that the Indians were not “entitled to be considered in the light of prisoners of war, but rather as outlaws and villains.”) More than 30 years after the war, Big Eagle was still understandably bitter about being treated like a common criminal rather than a surrendered soldier from a sovereign nation waging a legitimate war. “If I had known that I would be sent to the penitentiary I would not have surrendered,” he said. “I surrendered in good faith, knowing that many of the whites were acquainted with me and that I had not been a murderer, or present when a murder had been committed, and if I had killed or wounded a man it had been in a fair fight, open fight.” So what was the applicable definition of legitimate warfare in 1862? As is true today, it was accepted that in open war between states, soldiers on each side were entitled to protection from the normal legal prohibitions against killing and destruction. This does not mean, however, that all acts of violence in the course of war are automatically condoned. Vattel addressed exactly this question in The Law of Nations: “Even he who had justice on his side may have transgressed the bounds of justifiable self-defence, and been guilty of improper excesses in the prosecution of a war whose object was originally lawful.” While prisoners of war are entitled to humane treatment and protection, Vattel went on to argue, they are still subject to the prosecution of law when it is appropriate. “As soon as your enemy has laid down his arms and surren-
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dered his person,” he wrote, “you have no longer any right over his life, unless he should give you such right by some new attempt, or had before committed against you a crime deserving death.” This was precisely the principle that the military commission tribunal applied in its trials of the Dakotas. The incidents of murder and rape with which some defendants were charged were crimes under military law, as well as violations of civilian criminal law. In light of this, even prisoners who were otherwise protected as prisoners of war could still be charged and tried for crimes they had committed during the war. Culture, in and of itself, is not an adequate defense against charges of war crimes, especially not when the culture in question subordinates itself to the victors’ laws of war to secure the protections of those laws once the war is over. Under those circumstances, the U.S. Army had sufficient jurisdiction and legal grounds to prosecute those Dakotas who were implicated in war crimes such as rape and murder, and the utterly flawed trial process itself does not change that salient fact. There may be no historical precedent where a belligerent facing enemy actions it believed to be reprehensible and illegal subordinated its own laws, customs, and military regulations to find some way of accepting those actions. It is also undeniable that the U.S. military, though ostensibly adhering to moral and legal codes that prohibit the targeting and killing of protected noncombatants, has occasionally failed to abide by those laws. Perhaps the most egregious example was in World War II, when the U.S. military obliterated cities in Germany and Japan with saturation bombing. The civilian populations of those cities were deliberately targeted in a controversial belief that doing so would break the enemy’s will to continue the war. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, including untold numbers of women and children. In almost any other circumstance, those people would almost certainly have been classified as victims of war crimes. U.S. Army Air Corps General Curtis LeMay himself, who directed the firebombing campaign against Japan that killed more than 220,000 civilians, later said, “I suppose that if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.” The existence of a culture or doctrine that permits indiscriminate killing is indefensible whenever it occurs, and it remains the responsibility of law to confront such injustices even generations after the event. MHQ John A. Haymond is the author of Soldiers: A Global History of the Fighting Man, 1800–1945 (Stackpole Books, 2018) and The Infamous Dakota War Trials of 1862: Revenge, Military Law, and the Judgment of History (McFarland, 2016).
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WEAPONS CHECK
PORTER TURRET RIFLE By Chris McNab
JEFF HALLINAN, COLLECTORS FIREARMS
Lever The rifle’s lever was disengaged with a manual safety catch. The rifle’s second pattern also had a grip safety mechanism under the rear of the lever.
Primer feed Percussion caps were rotated one at a time with a side-mounted, spring-tensioned feeder; a cap aligned with the fire hole for each shot.
Side plate The side plate was hinged to allow easy access to the mechanism for maintenance purposes.
The Porter turret rifle was one of those weapons that brimmed with ingenious features but was critically flawed. From the 1830s, several American firearms designers strove to develop effective repeating rifles that incorporated the new percussion system of ignition. Samuel Colt led the way by applying his revolver cylinder mechanism to rifles; other designers, largely to avoid infringement of Colt’s patent, went the “turret rifle” route. Here the multiple cylinders of the weapon were arranged in a rotating disk, radiating from a central hub like the spokes of a wheel. Patented in 1851 by Perry W. Porter, the Porter turret rifle featured a nine-shot turret, each cylinder loaded with powder and ball. The turret was rotated by an underlever, which indexed the cylinders to align with the barrel one shot at a time. The hammer, mounted on the side of the weapon, hit percussion caps rotated into place from a feed mechanism.
Turret The rotating turret held nine rounds. The rifle was made in .36-, .44-, and .50-caliber versions.
Loading lever The loading lever was used to compress powder and ball in the cylinders, one cylinder at a time.
Sights Because of the vertical position of the turret, the sights had to be offset to the left.
While the Porter turret rifle was a triumph of mechanical engineering, it was fundamentally dangerous to the user. Loose-powder revolver or turret weapons occasionally suffered a “chain fire” malfunction, when the flame of one shot flashed out and fired all the other cylinders simultaneously. On Porter’s gun, two of those cylinders at all times pointed directly at the user. (Colt pointed this out in his marketing, even suggesting that Porter had been killed by his own weapon—a complete fabrication.) Potential buyers were certainly wary: Only about 1,250 of the Porter rifles, in three patterns, were manufactured, and they saw limited use in the American Civil War. MHQ Chris McNab is a military historian and author. His most recent book is A History of War: From Ancient Warfare to the Global Conflicts of the 21st Century (Arcturus Publishing, 2021).
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WAR LIST
‘GIVE ME...’
For more than two centuries, those two words have been an essential and recurring element of our wartime vocabulary.
“I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” Patrick Henry, a gifted orator and major figure in the American Revolution, in a speech on March 23, 1775, to the Second Virginia Convention at St. John’s Henrico Parish Church in Richmond, Virginia
“Please remain. You give me the pictures and I’ll give you the war.”
Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst to Frederic Remington, his artist in Cuba, in 1897 after Remington, finding no Spanish atrocities there and no scenes worth illustrating, had cabled: “There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return.”
“Hello Central! Give Me No Man’s Land...”
A 1918 song, introduced by Al Jolson in the Broadway musical Sinbad, that recounts the story of a young child attempting to call her father on the Western Front after her mother has gone to bed
“Give me five years and you will not recognize Germany again.”
A line in a speech Adolf Hitler gave during his rise to power in the early 1930s, famously memorialized in a photograph of a stenciled sign posted outside the bombed-out remains of Aachen, Germany, in 1945
“Give me a gas mask, I can’t stand the smell of Nazis.”
Signs carried by some of the 100,000 demonstrators who gathered outside Madison Square Garden in New York City on February 20, 1939, to protest a rally organized by the German American Bund, the largest pro-Nazi organization in the United States
“Dammit, Brad, just give me 400,000 gallons of gasoline and I’ll put you inside Germany in two days.”
“Give me ten thousand Filipinos and I shall conquer the world!”
General Douglas MacArthur during the U.S. liberation of Manila, the capital of the Philippines, in 1945
“Give me the horse.”
British prime minister Winston Churchill, warning of “such awful agencies as the atomic bomb” on July 10, 1951, in a speech to the Royal College of Physicians in London
“The light is at the end of the tunnel, just give me a hundred thousand more.”
General William C. Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in the Vietnam War, as quoted in 1991 by General Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., who served under Westmoreland in Vietnam
“Give me the lesser of evils.”
President Lyndon B. Johnson, instructing Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford in 1968 to reevaluate the nation’s involvement in the Vietnam War following Westmoreland’s request for 206,000 reinforcements
“Give me a few hours.”
Brigadier General Dwight D. Eisenhower on December 15, 1941, when General George Marshall, the U.S. Army’s chief of staff, summoned him to the War Department and asked him to recommend a “general line of action” in response to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor
“Give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers, and I do better with that than I do with torture.”
Retired U.S. Marine Corps general James Mattis, as quoted by President Donald Trump in 2016, when asked whether the administration should bring back the practice of waterboarding in military and CIA interrogations
“Give me $50,000—here’s some names of some people we’ve recruited.”
General George S. Patton Jr., the commander of the Third Army, angrily complaining in August 1944 to Lieutenant Former CIA officer turned KGB double agent Aldrich General Omar N. Bradley, the commander of the First Ames describing what he called “my little scam” with Army, about being sidelined by severe fuel shortages the Soviet Union in a 1999 interview
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BATTLE SCHEMES
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
UNION 1, CONFEDERACY 1
In December 1861, fresh off a victory in the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, Confederate forces advanced into Fairfax County, Virginia, within 15 miles of Washington, D.C., but Union troops drove them from the field in the Battle of Dranesville. Robert Knox Sneden, just starting out as a mapmaker for the Union army, captured the action in this drawing. MHQ
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BEHIND THE LINES
WIRED FOR SUCCESS
Anson Stager, a brilliant executive of the Western Union Telegraph Company, had a lot to do with the North’s victory in the Civil War. By Ethan S. Rafuse
W
Before long military leaders would find the telegraph to be a mixed blessing.
Born in 1825 in Ontario County, New York, Stager began his working life at age 16 as an apprentice at the Rochester
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Daily Advertiser. The newspaper’s publisher, Henry O’Reilly, was an early backer of the electric telegraph. After constructing a line in Pennsylvania that linked Philadelphia with Harrisburg, he tapped Stager to be one of its operators, and before long Stager was running the telegraph office in Lancaster. In 1848 Stager moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, to serve as chief operator of the telegraph company there, and over the next eight years he worked to consolidate the vast network of lines serving the area into a single system. In 1856 Stager moved to Cleveland to become the general superintendent of the Western Union Telegraph Company. Under his leadership, Western Union developed a close working relationship with the railroads, and by 1860 it had secured an effective monopoly over the lines connecting the Mississippi River with the cities of the Eastern Seaboard and the Ohio River to the Great Lakes. When George B. McClellan, a Cincinnati railroad executive, assumed command of the military forces Ohio raised in the aftermath of the bombardment of Fort Sumter in 1861, he wasted little time seeking out Stager. Six years earlier, McClellan had served on a commission that the U.S. War Department sent to the Crimea, where the British Army was laying an underground telegraph cable from its headquarters to the front lines at Balaklava and a submarine cable of nearly 340 miles that linked Balaklava to Varna in Bulgaria across the Black Sea. These were impressive accomplishments, but before long military leaders would find the telegraph to be a mixed blessing, as it could be both a tool for communication and a source of disruption. Its value for command and control in conducting operations was inestimable. Yet the telegraph also enabled newspapers to gather and present to a mass audience reports on how soldiers on the front lines endured unsanitary trenches and hospitals while officers were living in comfort on yachts. “The confounded telegraph,” a British general groused, “has ruined everything.” When he assumed command in Ohio, McClellan understood that the ability to manage and control the flow of information would be vital not only to conducting operations but also for maintaining a healthy connection between the military and the home front. Within a few weeks Indiana and Illinois came under his command as well. For-
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hat hath God wrought?” Those were the words that the daughter of Henry Leavitt Ellsworth famously suggested Samuel F. B. Morse send from the basement of the U.S. Capitol on May 24, 1844, to officially open the much-anticipated telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore. Ellsworth, the commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office, had traveled extensively in the West before his appointment to the post in 1835 and understood the need for better means of communications to bind Americans together. Consequently, he had taken an interest in Morse’s electric telegraph and been instrumental in getting Congress to provide financial assistance. It didn’t take long for Ellsworth’s and Morse’s efforts to pay off. By 1850, some 20 companies were operating about 12,000 miles of telegraph lines in the United States, and it was soon clear that the telegraph would have a profound effect on all aspects of human activity—not least the conduct of war. In the mid-1850s, the British and French governments relied on the telegraph to help them manage and monitor their forces in the Crimean War. British authorities also used the telegraph in responding to the Indian Rebellion of 1857, as did Napoleon III’s government in supporting the French operations in Italy that culminated in the Battle of Solferino in 1859. A few years later, to the great fortune of the Union effort in the Civil War, the U.S. government found men with the technical knowledge and administrative ability needed to manage new technologies and far-flung enterprises. While those who fought on the battlefield would be celebrated in art and literature, the many bureaucrats who also shaped the course and outcome of the war went unheralded. Among the most important of these was Anson Stager.
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XXXXXXXXXX
From left: Colonel Albert J. Myer organized the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1860; a lineman in the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps, pole climbers strapped to his boots, undertakes a repair; Anson Stager.
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tunately, their governors had taken steps to ensure that the telegraph lines in their states were secure and responsive as the North girded for war with the South. Stager soon proved that McClellan had made a wise choice in appointing him “superintendent for military purposes of all telegraph lines within the Department of Ohio.” In May 1861, McClellan ordered his forces across the Ohio River to rescue the Unionist population in western Virginia and secure control of the vital railroad junction at Grafton. Although the Union forces didn’t take telegraph equipment with them, the lines already in place got messages to McClellan more quickly, and allowed him to communicate with his commanders more quickly, than otherwise would have been the case. Consequently, thanks to Stager’s efforts, McClellan was able to effectively oversee the operations that produced the North’s victory at the Battle of Philippi on June 3, 1861. When McClellan left Cincinnati a few weeks later, Stager made sure that the telegraph came with him. McClellan was thus able to adjust his plans three times in three days as he directed operations that produced victories at Rich Mountain and Corrick’s Ford in Virginia. With the telegraph supporting his operations as well as ensuring that the Northern press was aware of them, McClellan became one of the first Union military heroes and found himself summoned to Washington to take command after the Union’s defeat at First Manassas in July. “The experi-
ment proved successful,” Thomas B. A. David, Stager’s right-hand man, crowed, giving McClellan capabilities “unparalleled in military history.” When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, the U.S. government had no office or department responsible for overseeing telegraph operations. That same month Secretary of War Simon Cameron recruited Thomas Scott, the vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, to organize a U.S. Military Telegraph Corps. Scott brought four telegraph operators from his company to Washington and stationed them at the War Department, the Navy Yard, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad depot. As these men went to work, Edward S. Sanford, the president of the American Telegraph Company, which was responsible for the lines connecting Washington with the rest of the North, out of patriotic duty effectively ran and paid for the telegraph system. (Congress reimbursed him later.) In October 1861, Scott persuaded President Abraham Lincoln and Cameron to call Stager to Washington. After hearing Stager’s ideas, Cameron made him a captain in the Quartermaster Department, and on November 25 named him general manager of the military telegraph lines. McClellan had been appointed commanding general of the entire Union army a few weeks earlier, and with his support Stager went to work implementing his plans. In February 1862, the same month Lincoln gave the government authority over commercial telegraph lines, Stager was promoted to the rank of colonel.
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ANSON STAGER
Stager devised the first cipher used by the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps.
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to maintain maximum independence for himself and his operators. Indeed, he continued to spend most of his time in Cleveland attending to his duties as Western Union’s general manager. Consequently, the man actually responsible for overseeing the operations of the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps in Washington for most of the war was Major Thomas T. Eckert. Like Stager, Eckert had worked as a telegraph operator and was in Cleveland when the war began. After offering his services to the War Department, he was assigned to McClellan’s field headquarters until September 1862, when he was ordered to Washington to be Stager’s man in the capital. Both Stager and Eckert brought to their duties wellhoned bureaucratic and political skills that the more rigid and soldierly Myer did not possess. This enabled them to cultivate a powerful ally in Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a former corporate attorney who came to view the telegraph as his “right arm.” It also didn’t hurt that Stanton developed an intense dislike for McClellan and other Regular Army officers and that Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs, in whose department Stager and his operators held their commissions, was a Stanton ally. Stager and Eckert surely boosted their cause when they cooperated with Stanton’s effort in early 1862 to relocate the military telegraph office from McClellan’s headquarters to the War Department library (which was, conveniently, next to Stanton’s own office). What’s more, President Lincoln liked spending time at the telegraph office at the War Department, finding it not only a useful place for monitoring events but also a refuge from his many other cares, where he could be at ease and, he said, “escape my persecutors.” Lincoln and Stanton especially appreciated how, in conspicuous contrast with the rigid formality of Myer and other uniformed officers, Eckert and the other telegraph operators were welcoming hosts who enjoyed sharing meals with the president, listening to his anecdotes, and indulging him when he took an interest in their work. McClellan had so many other problems to deal with that he took little interest in resolving the jurisdictional dispute between Myer and Stager. Myer turned to Henry J. Rogers, a former associate of Morse’s, to organize wagon trains to carry telegraph sets and their equipment, Thanks to the efforts of Eckert and Rogers, the telegraph admirably kept McClellan in touch with his civilian superiors in Washington throughout his 1862 campaign on the Virginia Peninsula. But the telegraph, while an effective tool for long-distance communication between Washington and various field headquarters, was too complex and delicate a machine to manage operations at the tip of the spear. This, as historian Edward Hagerman notes, should have led to a “common-sense division of authority” between Myer and
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Shortly after offering his services in Ohio, Stager, immediately realizing the need to protect the critical military information being transmitted over telegraph lines, decided to prepare a cipher. Impressed with what Stager had produced, McClellan asked him to develop one for field operations. Stager’s relatively simple but effective cipher was the first of 12 developed for the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps (though only 10 of them were actually used) and adopted by the War Department. The cipher was known only to actual telegraph operators who were strictly enjoined not to reveal it to anyone else. Stager’s efforts, however, would be complicated by McClellan’s decision in August 1861 to appoint Albert J. Myer signal officer for the Army of the Potomac. Like Stager, Myer was a native of New York who at a young age had developed a fascination with communication technologies, working as a telegrapher before attending medical school. After securing appointment as an army surgeon in 1854, Myer developed a wigwag system of communication while stationed in Texas that used signal flags during the day and lanterns or torches at night. In 1859 the War Department assembled a board headed by Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee to evaluate Myer’s innovations. In June 1860, after a series of field tests proved their value, the War Department directed Myer to organize and lead a new U.S. Army Signal Corps. Shortly after McClellan’s operations in western Virginia compellingly demonstrated the military value of Stager’s work, the Confederates did the same with Myer’s. At First Manassas, one of Myer’s former assistants, Edward Porter Alexander used Myer’s system to inform Confederate headquarters of the Union attempt to turn their left, which enabled Generals Joseph E. Johnston and Pierre G. T. Beauregard to successfully counter it and win the battle. It didn’t take long for Stager and Myer to butt heads. Myer, something of a martinet, aimed to bring Stager’s efforts under centralized direction to ensure that they were responsive to the military chain of command. Myer also thought that Stager and others with business backgrounds were motivated more by self-interest than a true spirit of public service and did not understand the workings of the military. Myer thus decided to persuade Congress to authorize a permanent, independent Signal Corps. Despite holding a commission in the army, Stager, who had only placed his talents and resources at the service of the government in response to the secession crisis, wished
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Alexander Gardner, the famous Civil War photographer, noted that this image, made in 1864 by Timothy H. O’Sullivan, showed “the Telegraph Construction Corps of the Army of the Potomac putting up the wire.”
Stager, with the former responsible for communications between tactical units in the field and the latter for communications between department and army headquarters and between them and Washington. Stager, however, wanted his division of civilian telegraphers to be independent of Myer and responsible for all communications employing the telegraph. For his part, as he worked to refine a semaphore system for use in the field, including a cipher disc that facilitated changing codes when necessary, Myer countered by supporting efforts to develop a portable telegraph, with its own alphabet and codes, that could be taken to the field. In 1862 Myer successfully pushed for the adoption of the portable Beardslee Patent Magneto-Electric Field Telegraph, which paved the way for Congress, in March 1863, to establish the Signal Corps as a permanent and independent branch of the army. Unfortunately for Myer, the Chancellorsville Campaign demonstrated that the Beardslee, for all its technical merits, was not durable or reliable enough for battlefield use. The subsequent Gettysburg Campaign, however, proved the worth of having two separate systems: The Military Telegraph Corps handling higher headquarters and the Signal Corps managing battlefield messages. On November 10, 1863, with Stanton and his allies in the telegraph corps making it plain that they had had enough of Myer, Lincoln ended the dispute by ordering Myer to turn over all telegraph equipment to Eckert. Myer was also relieved of his duties as chief signal officer and reassigned to duty in Tennessee. (Myer would return to Washington after Congress, at the behest of Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, reorganized the Signal Corps in 1866 and made him chief signal officer.)
Although it operated under the authority of the War Department, the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps, in keeping with Stager’s vision, relied on private telegraph companies to transmit messages and to establish lines on its behalf. Many of the more than 1,000 telegraph operators in the corps were not even 20 years old, and 33 of them lost their lives in the war. Another 175 were either wounded or captured. At the end of the Civil War, Stager was promoted to brevet brigadier general. His office had handled more than six million messages and directed the construction and operation of more than 15,000 miles of telegraph line. In 1862 alone, Stager reported, his operators handled some 1.2 million telegrams. By the end of 1864, the Union was spending more than $93,000 a month on telegraph services. (In comparison, an official of the Confederacy estimated that it was spending less than a tenth of that amount.) It is unfortunate, though perhaps not surprising, that Stager is rarely accorded a place of prominence among those whose efforts were critical to the North’s victory in the Civil War. Nonetheless, his contributions—and those of the men working under his direction—were immense. In concert with the railroad and steamship, the telegraph enabled the United States to undertake an exercise in military power projection from 1861 to 1865 that was unprecedented in the American experience and, like the communication revolution of which the telegraph was a major part, served to bring about a more perfect Union. MHQ Ethan J. Rafuse is professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
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FLEISCHER STUDIOS INC.
In this publicity shot from the 1930s, Max Fleischer blows a kiss to Betty Boop, his studio’s most famous cartoon character, demonstrating one of his many innovations: combining live action with animation.
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HOW INK WENT TO WAR
FLEISCHER STUDIOS INC.
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ichard Fleischer, the director of the American sequences of Tora! Tora! Tora!, the 1970 film that is the subject of Wendell Jamieson’s cover story in this issue of MHQ, was a gifted Hollywood veteran whose other credits included The Narrow Margin (1952), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), The Vikings (1958), Compulsion (1959), and Dr. Doolittle (1967). “One could say that he’d been in the movies since he was born,” Jamieson writes of Fleischer, noting that his father, Max, was one of the industry’s earliest and most creative animators, directors, and producers. While Max Fleischer is best known today for bringing such characters as Betty Boop, Popeye the Sailor, and Superman to the big screen, another important facet of his career has largely been forgotten: He was a trailblazer in the development of training films for the U.S. military. Fleischer was born in 1883 in Kraków and raised in New York City. After attending the Cooper Union School of Art and the Art Students League of New York, he landed a $2-a-week job as a copy boy at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and before long became the newspaper’s staff cartoonist. Another cartoonist there, John Randolph Bray, would open the nation’s first animation studio in 1914 and give Fleischer his start in the fledgling industry. As the United States inched closer to entering World War I, Bray decided to pitch the U.S. Army on the idea that it could train soldiers faster and better with animated shorts. After meeting with army officials at West Point, Bray secured a contract to make training films for the military. Many of the films would rely on the Rotoscope, a device Fleischer had invented that allowed animators to produce lifelike movements by tracing over individual frames of live-action footage. (Fleischer would be awarded a patent for the device in 1917.) When the army tried to draft Fleischer, Bray protested, reportedly asking, “How can I make films when you draft all my men?” Army officials evidently saw Bray’s point, and in 1917 Fleischer was relieved of regular service so that he could go to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and supervise the production of the first animated training films under Bray’s contract for the U.S. Army, among them “How to Read a Contour Map,” “How to Fire a Rifle Grenade,” “Methods of Harnessing Artillery Horses,” and “Submarine Mine Laying.”
After the war, Fleischer returned to New York City, where he rejoined Bray Studios as its production supervisor. But Fleischer yearned to establish his own animation studio, and in 1921 he and his brother Dave established Out of the Inkwell Films Inc., and, later, Fleischer Studios. In 1924 Fleischer released the first synchronized sound cartoon—a sing-along short that employed the “follow the bouncing ball” technique—though Walt Disney is often credited with that innovation for his third Mickey Mouse cartoon, “Steamboat Willie,” which was released in 1928. Fleischer was also the first to combine live action with animation—another innovation Disney would quickly copy. By 1936 Fleischer Studios employed more than 220 artists—second only in size to the Walt Disney Studios—and was churning out Betty Boop, Popeye, and Superman cartoons. In 1941 the Fleischer brothers smoothly pivoted to wartime themes. “The Mighty Navy,” for example, features Popeye’s first appearance as a sailor in the U.S. Navy—in the dress whites and black neckerchief he would wear for the rest of his onscreen career. (Popeye’s can of spinach also makes its debut in the cartoon.) Fleischer’s business relationship with Paramount Studios (his studio’s financial partner and distributor) worsened, however, and his artists were drafted by the dozens into military service. In 1941 Paramount forced Fleischer out, and he joined the Detroit-based Jam Handy Organization as head of its animation department, overseeing the firm’s production of training films for the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy. Fleischer was also involved in a top-secret military project for an aircraft bomber sighting system and in 1943, according to one newspaper account, was sent on a military mission “somewhere in an isolated part of Australia” to photograph and record the activities of a U.S. Army unit. Fleischer apparently was still involved in making top-secret training films for the U.S. Navy as late as 1956. He died at the Motion Picture Country House in Los Angeles in 1972 at age 89. Astonishingly, no biography of this industry giant appeared until 2005, when the University of Kentucky Press published Out of the Inkwell: Max Fleischer and the Animation Revolution. Its author: Richard Fleischer, who died the following year. —Bill Hogan, Editor
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THE MAKING OF TORA! TORA! TORA! Twentieth Century Fox wanted it to be “the most spectacular film ever made.” It may have been that—and more. By Wendell Jamieson
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Tora! Tora! Tora!’s special-effects crews built giant model ships— some of them 40 feet long—that could be shot in the Sersen tank at Twentieth Century Fox’s ranch in Calabasas, California.
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THE MAKING OF TORA! TORA! TORA!
Tora! Tora! Tora! was plagued by false starts, delays, deaths, scandals, and ruined careers.
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hit by a Japanese bomb during the real war and was playing a supporting role as the Akagi, the attack force’s flagship. In several days of shooting, Garrison would pilot a Zero, a Kate, and a Val. “With the Zero it was all of a sudden standing on its two wheels, tail up,” Garrison, now 81, recently recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Haiti. “With the 40 knots over the bow the thing was airborne almost immediately. It was a strange sensation. Sort of like an elevator.” The takeoff sequence is just one striking set piece in a film filled with them, from the opening credits, shot aboard a life-size mockup of a Japanese battleship, to the attack itself—a frenetic, neon-orange Götterdämmerung of explosions and smoke and burning, drowning men that created a visceral sense of being under fire perhaps unmatched until the opening Omaha Beach sequence in Saving Private Ryan in 1998. Tora! Tora! Tora! was one of the last old Hollywood blockbusters, and the story of its creation is a raucous and at times even comic tale of movie making in the days before computer-generated graphics. In industry parlance, this was a movie made “practical”—in other words, if you wanted to blow up a battleship on film, you had to blow up a battleship. But that isn’t what makes Tora! Tora! Tora! so different. This was not only a motion picture that went to extraordinary effort and expense to portray history as it was—down to using exact quotes in dialogue and, yes, modifying all those airplanes—but a film that managed to deepen two formerly warring nations’ understanding of a seminal event in their messy shared histories. It helped heal the lightly scabbed wounds of the Pacific War, then a recent memory, while also portraying the Japanese people far more honorably and through a far less racist lens than the vast majority of Hollywood films that had preceded it. And its influence has lingered in sometimes surprising ways in the decades since.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: SANTI VISALLI, RON GALELLA (GETTY IMAGES, 2); UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO; MOVIEPIX/STRINGER (GETTY)
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he USS Yorktown (CV-10) steamed gently 30 miles off the coast of San Diego on a golden December morning in 1968. As the ship turned into the wind, its silhouette left no doubt as to its pedigree: This was a World War II–vintage Essex-class aircraft carrier, though with an angled flight deck that had been added after the war. But that was only one contradiction on this ship of contradictions. Painted on the deck were the white lines that Japanese carrier pilots used to gauge wind direction at takeoff. Behind them was a raft of Japanese aircraft, or at least what appeared to be Japanese aircraft. And surrounding the aircraft were throngs of cheering sailors waving their hands and the white baseball caps favored by the Imperial Japanese Navy. These sailors, however, were American—the Yorktown’s crew. The planes hurtled down the deck, over the painted lines, and lifted into the air. Beneath the black horizon line only their glowing exhaust pipes and navigation lights were visible, but once they rose into the orange sky their ominous shapes were clearly defined. Up they went, one after another, the roar of their radial engines deafening. Panavision cameras captured it all, because the Yorktown was a movie set—a gigantic 36,000-ton movie set steaming in the Pacific—and this was the first day of shooting for a film unique in the annals of war movies: Tora! Tora! Tora! Twentieth Century Fox was making it to tell the story of the planning and execution of the bombing of Pearl Harbor from both the American and Japanese sides. It would premiere two years later, in 1970, after numerous false starts, delays, scandals, deaths, and ruined careers— even a threat of suicide—and it would be, for its day, one of the most complex, expensive, and seemingly cursed films ever made. The aircraft rolling down the Yorktown’s deck were World War II–era American and Canadian trainers modified to look like Japanese carrier planes—Zero fighters, “Kate” torpedo bombers, and “Val” dive-bombers. Lynn Garrison, a retired Canadian Air Force pilot, was one of two plane wranglers responsible for building the air fleet. His partner had died during preproduction, one of two Tora! deaths. Now Garrison was among the pilots flying off the Yorktown, which had been
Tora! Tora! Tora! was the brainchild of Darryl F. Zanuck, the legendary chairman of Fox. With his severe features, piercing blue eyes, and giant cigar clamped between his teeth, Zanuck was a cliché of an old-time Hollywood studio boss. He’d gotten his start during the Silent Era and gone on to oversee some of Fox’s greatest creations. But by the 1960s, the old ways just weren’t working anymore. Upstart “auteurs” were all the rage in cinema, while big studio epics like Fox’s bloated Cleopatra flopped one after the other. Zanuck’s son, Richard, himself a cliché of the Hollywood playboy, was Fox’s head of production. The studio needed a
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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: SANTI VISALLI, RON GALELLA (GETTY IMAGES, 2); UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO; MOVIEPIX/STRINGER (GETTY)
Clockwise from top left: Akira Kurosawa, the renowned Japanese filmmaker; Darryl F. Zanuck, the chairman of Twentieth Century Fox, thought Tora! could be just the blockbuster the studio needed; producer Elmo Williams in front of one of the modified AT-6 Texans; Richard Fleischer, the director of the film’s American sequences. blockbuster. So Zanuck and his right-hand man, producer Elmo Williams, resurrected the formula they had successfully used in The Longest Day (1962), their star-studded re-creation of D-Day. This time they would tell the story of Pearl Harbor. Williams was a gregarious studio system veteran and former editor whose credits included High Noon— for which he had won an Academy Award—and who had conceived and directed The Longest Day’s battle sequences. Now he’d been handed the challenge of his lifetime. And right away he met it with a big idea: Not only would the story of Pearl Harbor be told from both sides, but it would be told by both sides—American filmmakers would create the American sequences, and Japanese filmmakers would write and produce the Japanese sequences. Both halves would then be edited into a cohesive whole. This was an extraordinary conceit. Just 24 years earlier the two countries had been locked in the greatest conflict in human history. Most Americans saw the bombing of Pearl Harbor as a dastardly sneak attack executed by a dishonest people at a time of international tranquility. The
truth was that it was a bold military stroke by a highly competent professional navy at a time of tense relations and that it succeeded at least partially because of American errors. And it was not supposed to have been a surprise at all—it was meant to have followed an ultimatum that, to the Japanese at least, amounted to a declaration of war. While the Germans in The Longest Day spoke their native tongue and were played by notable German actors, and some scenes were shot on actual battle locations, the film still embraced some movie-making conventions, like a few too many moments of comic relief, a French starlet (Daryl Zanuck’s girlfriend) playing a sexy French resistance fighter, and John Wayne playing, well, John Wayne. None of that for Tora! Williams and the Zanucks decided, among other things, to cast noted character actors in the lead roles based on their physical resemblance to the actual people. A team of writers set to work, using two books as source material for the American sequences: Gordon W. Prange’s Tora! Tora! Tora! The Pearl Harbor Story (1963), which would later be published as At Dawn We Slept, and Ladislas
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THE MAKING OF TORA! TORA! TORA!
Fox struck public relations gold with the joint-production gimmick; the press ate it up, especially with a new war raging in Asia, in Vietnam. Even though a premiere was years away, the studio began promoting the film as “The Most Incredible Movie Ever Made.” But then Williams took the idea a step further: He hired the most famous Japanese director of them all—indeed, one of the world’s most renowned filmmakers: Akira Kurosawa. Williams would come to regret it. Kurosawa’s cinematic masterpieces included Rashomon, whose multiviewpoint storytelling was a revelation to Western audiences, and Seven Samurai, whose thrilling action changed the minds of anyone who thought Japanese films were somber and serious. A master of pacing, plot, and lightning-fast violence, he was the best-known Japanese director in the United States. Kurosawa jumped at the chance to direct Tora!, as he’d long wanted to break into Hollywood and had also toyed with the idea of making a movie about Pearl Harbor. His involvement prompted a new round of breathless headlines. “This movie will be a record of neither victory nor defeat but of misunderstandings and miscalculations,” Kurosawa said during a press conference in April 1967. “As such it will embrace the typical elements of tragedy. I want to look straight into what it might mean to be a human being at a time of war.” Just as Zanuck and Williams were interested in the character of Kimmel, Kurosawa was fascinated by the character of Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of the Combined Fleet, who first conceived the attack. Yamamoto had famously argued against going to war with the United States, insisting it was a war that could not possibly be won. In the admiral’s grand contradiction—an officer who carries out his duties to the fullest even when he does not agree with the mission—Kurosawa saw an irresistible, even Shakespearean, tragic arc. At the time, Kurosawa’s reputation in Japan was on the
Kurosawa, the most famous film director in Japan, jumped at the chance to direct Tora!
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wane. Known for running his productions with such viselike control that he had been nicknamed Tenno (“The Emperor”), Kurosawa threw himself into Tora! He and two of his longtime collaborators, sequestering in an inn to immerse themselves in the history of the Japanese side of the attack, pored over official records and produced a script that would have run six hours—without the American side. No fewer than 27 rewrites followed. They consulted numerous Japanese veterans, including Minoru Genda, the young commander Yamamoto had assigned to work out the logistics of the attack, whom Kurosawa hired as an adviser. Kurosawa also storyboarded practically every scene with his own drawings. Kurosawa conceived of the film’s opening: a massive “manning the rails” sequence on the battleship Nagato, in which thousands of sailors in their white uniforms line the decks to honor Yamamoto’s new appointment as the fleet’s commander in chief. To achieve his vision, Kurosawa soon had an army of workers creating a life-size set of the Nagato on a beach on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. At 660 feet long and 10 stories high, with a towering “pagoda” superstructure, it was the largest set ever built in Japan, an ingenious creation of plywood, concrete, and wires atop a forest of telephone poles. Its designer-architect was Tsukasa Kondo, an art director handpicked by Kurosawa (but not credited). The faux battleship sat perpendicular to the Hibiki Sea so that when filmed from a low angle, it would appear to ride the currents. A separate set of the flight deck and superstructure of the Akagi, complete with a working aircraft elevator, was built parallel to the Nagato, allowing one to be filmed from the other, giving the cinematic impression of a grand fleet at anchor. Hordes of tourists crowded the beach to admire the twin monstrosities as they were being built, and at least one snowstorm—rare in that part of Japan—delayed construction. “For my father, completing the open set of the battleship Nagato and the aircraft carrier Akagi of ‘Tora! Tora! Tora!’ was the best job of his life,” Kondo’s son, Masashi, recalled in a recent email exchange. “It was my father’s pride that he was appointed by Akira Kurosawa, designed a huge set, and led a large staff as an art director to complete it. It didn’t matter if his name was credited or not.” Kurosawa visited often, striding the teak decks, taking it all in from behind dark glasses. At 6 feet tall, the director towered over those around him. Williams’s obsession with historical accuracy went beyond the script and plot. The planes had to be just right too. This was an era in which every American boy who’d grown to adulthood knew his World War II planes by heart. So Williams brought in Garrison and his sometime partner, Jack
HERITAGE AUCTIONS (5)
Farago’s The Broken Seal: The Story of Operation Magic and the Pearl Harbor Disaster (1967), which examines the United States’s successful, but fumbled, breaking of Japanese naval codes. Darryl Zanuck and Williams had another reason to aim for accuracy. Both men felt that history had unfairly maligned Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, who’d been in charge of the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. Their film, they hoped, would set that right.
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Twentieth Century Fox commissioned artist Robert McCall to create 25 concept paintings, including those shown here, to be used in posters, lobby cards, and other publicity materials for Tora! Tora! Tora!
Canary, who would also act as the film’s safety coordinator. The pair had worked with Williams on the 1966 film The Blue Max, creating an entire air force of replica World War I fighters—Fokkers, Pfalzes, and S.E.5s—but Tora! would require even more ingenuity. Williams wanted no fewer than 70 planes of different types. He wanted some to fly off real carriers and to drop torpedoes. And he thought he knew where to get them: Why not travel around the Pacific to abandoned Japanese airfields and restore the planes that had been left behind? Canary and Garrison thought it over, talked it through, and went to the producer to disabuse him of that notion. The challenges were insurmountable. First, the airfields were inland, so any wrecks would have to be helicoptered to barges before they could be transported across the Pacific. Second, Japanese planes had not been built to last, especially in the war’s later years; the zinc-aluminum alloy used in the airframes, for exam-
ple, was especially susceptible to corrosion. Some planes in long-forgotten airfields had palm trees growing out of their cockpits. And of course the Japanese had lost the war, so most of their planes had been shot down or blown to bits on the ground. Canary and Garrison had a better idea: to modify AT-6 Texans (or their Canadian Air Force cousins, Harvards) and a second similarly designed trainer, the Vultee BT-13 Valiant, so that they looked like Japanese planes. Garrison, who was living in Ireland (where The Blue Max had been shot), set up a slide projector with his daughter’s help and used it to throw images of the Japanese planes on the wall over paper cutouts he made of the American and Canadian trainers. Then he took scissors and cut up the paper models, mixing and matching their parts so that they fit the images being projected on the wall, showing how easily these planes could be transformed: Texans and Harvards as Zeros, Valiants with their fixed
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XXXXXXXXXX
landing gear as Vals, and sections of both planes to make Kates. Fuselages would be lengthened, wing shapes altered, canopies modified. Williams was sold. Garrison and Canary would get $1,000 for every plane they brought in, plus expenses. Finding the planes, however, was easier said than done. In the years following World War II, militaries around the world had sold the trainers as surplus, often for as little as $300, and amateur pilots and collectors had snapped them up. But over the years they fell from use, and by the time Canary and Garrison started their hunt for the planes, many of them sat “lonely and unloved,” in Garrison’s words, in little airfields and even barns and backyards. With two associates, Garrison crisscrossed the country in his own Piper Comanche to look at Texan-Harvards. Quite a few were unflyable. Rubber fuel hoses had ruptured. Cables were frayed. Canopies were rusted shut. Birds had nested in the engine wells or beneath the wings. Many had bad magnetos, the magnetized devices that delivered the electrical current to start the engine. When Garrison found a good specimen, he bought it on the spot and then flew it himself across the country, barnstormer-style, back to Long Beach, California, where it would be modified at two aircraft companies, Stewart Davis Inc. and Cal-Volair, for use in the film. Garrison
Garrison and Canary would get $1,000 for every plane they brought in, plus expenses.
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used roads and railroad tracks to navigate, stopping at random airfields to fuel and use the bathroom. Canary sought out the Valiants. He found one particularly fine example in Sussex, New Jersey. Built in 1943, its shiny aluminum skin was as smooth as glass despite its years. He took off at 10:22 a.m. on August 19, 1968. It was a clear day, but clouds rolled in near Reading, Pennsylvania, followed by fog. Apparently disoriented—people on the ground heard his plane circling—Canary flew straight into the thickly wooded slope of Blue Mountain, about 20 miles from Strausstown. Burning gas and oil drenched the grievously injured flyer as he struggled to pull himself out of the shattered greenhouse cockpit. He crawled on his hands and knees to a nearby cabin. In a daze, with much of his clothing burned away, he managed to tell the first rescuers what kind of plane it was, where he’d taken off from, and the unusual reason he was en route to California. Canary suffered third-degree burns over 60 percent of his body, as well as deep cuts and internal injuries, and died three days later. Stories in the local newspapers all marveled that, in their corner of the world, a World War II–vintage plane being flown to Hollywood for use in an epic war movie had burst out of the clouds and into Blue Mountain. “Jack was impatient,” Garrison recalled. “And in aviation, impatience gets you killed.” The American sequences of Tora! Tora! Tora! were to be directed by Richard Fleischer, a respected and highly competent studio veteran with credits that included The Narrow Margin and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He was known
THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE: UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO (2)
Members of the production crew could wade—or swim underwater—in the mammoth Sersen tank; the platform accommodated a special Photosonics camera, which could shoot 360 frames a second (10 times normal speed).
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Torpedoes were simulated by a cable that pulled a compressed air nozzle and hose along under the water, leaving a trail of bubbles; small underwater charges created the water spouts that suggested detonations.
for bringing in taut productions on time and on budget. One could say that he’d been in the movies since before he was born: His father, Max Fleischer, was one of the industry’s earliest and most creative animators (he brought such characters as Betty Boop and Popeye to the screen), directors, and producers. But Richard Fleischer was hardly of the same stature as Kurosawa (who would later maintain that he was told that David Lean, who created Lawrence of Arabia among other expansive epics, would be his counterpart). And here the trouble began. Kurosawa saw Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage and hated it. He met Fleischer and Williams in Hawaii, where he was alarmed by how much ketchup the American director poured on his food; from then on, he referred to Fleischer as “Ketchup Man.” The battleship building and plane gathering paused for eight months as Fox delayed production in the face of increasing financial pressures. It wasn’t until December 1968 that shooting finally began on both sides of the Pacific— and literally on the Pacific, with the Yorktown takeoff sequence. While that footage turned out better than anyone had hoped, problems in Japan quickly multiplied. Kurosawa, it turned out, had hired business executives for major roles, including Yamamoto, on the theory that their serious demeanors would mimic those of naval admirals. (Fox executives suspected that he was lining up financiers for future films.) The director seemed agitated and exhausted and behaved oddly on the set. Losing his temper with the man who snapped “the clapper” at the start of each scene, he hit the man with the script. The man quit. Soon after that, he ordered the crew to repaint a white room with another
shade of white so similar that no one could tell the difference. When he discovered that the books in an admiral’s cabin were not ones the admiral would have read, he sent terrified crew members scouring bookstores for the correct volumes—even though they wouldn’t appear on camera. He bristled at Williams’s cost constraints and requests for updates. He wore a helmet for no apparent reason. Panicked Telexes flew back and forth between Fox liaisons in Japan and the bosses in Hollywood. But the news just got worse. After three weeks, Kurosawa had shot only six minutes of film. And not surprisingly, the business executives turned out to be terrible actors. Williams, realizing that he had to fire The Emperor, traveled to Japan to deliver the news in person. They met along with a pair of translators in a hotel room. Kurosawa, seemingly calm and cool behind his sunglasses, listened, paused, made a short statement, and then left. Williams asked what Kurosawa had just said and was mortified to learn that one of the world’s most famous directors had announced that he was going to return to his hotel and commit hara-kiri, Japanese ritual suicide. He didn’t make good the threat right away. But in 1971, with his fortunes further declining, Kurosawa did indeed try to kill himself by slitting his wrists. Kurosawa’s firing was even bigger international news than his hiring. Darryl and Richard Zanuck were both furious when they realized that none of his footage appeared to be usable. In a father-and-son rage, they ordered the whole dual-production plan scrapped, insisting that Tora! become a strictly American story. But the equal involve-
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Left: The miniatures department at Twentieth Century Fox built 29 scale-model ships for Tora! Tora! Tora! Some are shown here in front of the studio’s Sersen tank, with the mammoth “sky drop” in the background.
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With production ramping up on both sides of the Pacific, the challenging logistics of such an unwieldly, multinational project became clear. Japanese uniforms were shipped to Hawaii. An American liaison group was dispatched to Japan. New film shot on the beach in Kyushu was developed in Kyoto and then flown in reserved seats on Japan Air Lines to Hollywood. Some of the footage gave Fleischer heartburn. Japanese actors overacted, following their own theatrical traditions. And Masuda and Fukasaku didn’t “cover” the scenes with shots from multiple angles to be edited later. This quirk was a holdover from making movies in Japan during the war, when film was scarce. Fleischer and his team were used to shaping their films with a great deal of post-filming editing—Williams, after all, was a veteran editor—and this required lots of footage from different angles. They couldn’t do much with the tiny pieces of celluloid that came from
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COLLECTION CHRISTOPHEL (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, 2)
Some of the footage that arrived from Japan gave Fleischer heartburn.
The new directors brought in a new cast, including several highly regarded Japanese actors, among them So Yamamura to play Yamamoto and Eijiro Tono to play Admiral Chuichi Nagumo. They further trimmed Kurosawa’s script while keeping many of his scenes and lines as well as his sets. The directors, talented journeymen on a par with Fleischer, each spent a month working on the film; Fukasaku handled action scenes, and Masuda shot the interior sequences. Finally, they shot the magnificent opening sequence on the Nagato. Busloads of college students were brought in to line the decks of the towering set. They were all paid extra to get military-style haircuts. Up they went, up to every outcropping of the great vessel, where they stared impassively out to sea with the wind tugging at their white tunics while the cameras rolled and a trio of modified AT-6 Texans shipped from the United States roared overhead.
LEFT: UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO
ment of the Japanese, for them to own their own story, had become an obsession for Williams. He begged his bosses to reconsider; after all, he argued, the giant sets had already been built in Japan, the crews hired, the contracts signed. That meant a lot of money would be thrown away, and for movie studio heads, few thoughts are more horrifying than that. Father and son relented. But Williams had other problems. A 60 Minutes exposé revealed the involvement of Minoru Genda, the attack planner, and the fact that the filmmakers had leased the USS Yorktown and other navy ships, manned by active-duty personnel, at a cost of nearly $300,000. Protests erupted objecting to the U.S. military participating in a movie recounting a great defeat, and the anger was only exacerbated by the controversy over the nation’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Fox took out full-page ads defending itself as Williams received death threats. Genda’s name was removed from the credits, although he continued to work on the project. The script was still too long, and the navy, which had script approval, objected to entire pages that made its officers look like bumbling oafs. Williams continued to cut back the script even as filming was underway. Hiring a new director in Japan turned out to be a struggle, as no one wanted to offend Kurosawa. But with the clock ticking, Williams finally hired two: Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku. Masuda had trained as a kamikaze pilot during the waning days of World War II but was discharged, to his everlasting good fortune, for “antimilitary sentiment.”
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Center and right: Two publicity stills for the film show an American serviceman at Pearl Harbor training his antiaircraft gun on the Japanese planes overhead and sailors falling from the force of explosions on the ground.
COLLECTION CHRISTOPHEL (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, 2)
LEFT: UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO
Japan. More Telexes flew across the Pacific asking that the Japanese actors tamp down their reactions and that the directors shoot every scene from multiple angles. Giant model ships—some of them 40 feet long—were shot in cavernous tanks at the Fox ranch in Calabasas, California, using high-speed cameras to give the vessels lifelike heft. When the film was played back at the conventional 23 frames per second, the models were essentially moving in slow motion, creating the impression of realistic movements for both the vessels and the roiling ocean waves. Smaller models were used farther away from the camera to give the impression of distance, a trick called “forced perspective.” Detergent created the appearance of frothy whitecaps. Getting this effect just right involved lots of trial and error and lots and lots of detergent. Variety and the Los Angeles Times chronicled every problem facing the film with seeming relish. But this only made the senior Zanuck more determined to complete the epic and show that he could still make an old-fashioned blockbuster. Some close to Zanuck feared he was showing the first signs of dementia. The main event, of course, was filming the attack in Hawaii. To pull it off, the American production team had to treat each day as if it were fighting a real war. Fox leased a giant navy hangar on Ford Island in the middle of the harbor that still had bullet marks from the real attack. There, Garrison and his team worked on the flyable planes, as well as dozens of fiberglass replicas that would be lined up on the ground for the Japanese to strafe. Some had working engines. They purchased and restored practically every car of 1940s vintage on Oahu. At a cost of $1 million, a full-size mockup of the stern of the battleship Arizona was built atop three barges.
When shooting began, the 47 pilots of the “Fox Air Force” gathered every morning in a briefing room on Ford Island to go over the day’s assignments. Behind them, a rising sun flag adorned the wall, an airman’s joke. After the briefings the pilots would attack Pearl Harbor all over again; for weeks in the spring of 1969 Oahu rumbled with explosions and shrieking aircraft. More than 100 giant smoke pots blackened the sky both to capture the scale of the mayhem and to hide structures that had been built after 1941. The local newspapers provided daily coverage. Airplane hangars that survived the actual attack were blown to bits in the re-creation. “We were on this ship, firing machine guns, cursing and screaming,” recalled Charlie Picerni a novice stuntman who, in various scenes, was set on fire, catapulted 70 feet through the air off a burning ship into the also burning water, and chased down a runway by a careering fighter plane. “If you worked on this movie, you thought you were in World War II,” he recently recalled in a telephone interview. “This was real. There was no faking, no bullshit.” Then, as if to prove Picerni right, came another tragedy. Guy Strong, the pilot of a Val dive-bomber, stalled while practicing formation flying and sidewinded into a sugarcane field, cutting a long black groove in the bright-green terrain. He died instantly. A former navy pilot, Strong was buried at the National Cemetery in Punchbowl Crater on Oahu, near victims of the actual attack. A. D. Flowers, a legendary special effects expert, was in charge of all the explosions. Tora! was by far his broadest canvas; he would use every ounce of creativity and imagination to recreate the attack. After a decadeslong career in Hollywood that began with him working as a gardener for MGM, Flowers was known as one of Hollywood’s best “powder men” for his prowess at creating explosions. His
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THE MAKING OF TORA! TORA! TORA!
Tora! Tora! Tora! premiered in New York and Tokyo in 1970. Its final cost: $25.5 million.
Tora! Tora! Tora! premiered in New York City and Tokyo on September 23, 1970. Its final cost: $25.5 million—two
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and-a-half times the original budget, making it the second most expensive film ever produced to that point (after Cleopatra). But the initial box office results were modest, the reviews mixed. An altered and lengthened version released in Japan—with the Japanese directors getting top billing—was a smash hit. After so much media attention and anticipation and so much money spent, perhaps anything less than a huge success would have been seen as a failure. Some blame goes to the final product itself—many reviewers found the long windup to the attack tiresome—but some, too, must be laid on the times. With the Vietnam War at its height and the country riven by unrest, an epic movie about the nation’s greatest military defeat was understandably not a popular topic. Zanuck, Williams, and the others conceived the movie in one era but finished it in another. Fox never recovered from the financial hit. In the aftermath, Zanuck fired his son before he himself was removed as chairman, and the studio era finally came to a close. Fleischer, perhaps as payback for the “Ketchup Man” nickname, disparaged Kurosawa, saying in his memoir that the one scene Kurosawa shot that survived was “the worst scene in the picture.” He also claimed that the Nagato set had been pointed in the wrong direction and that Kurosawa failed to notice because he never visited the beach in Kyushu. Yet numerous photographs exist of the Japanese director stalking around the wooden battleship throughout construction. For his part, art director Tsukasa Kondo took home the Nagato steering wheel and made a coffee table out of it. Tora! won an Academy Award for Powers’s special effects but was soon relegated to late-night airings on local television stations, its 3-to-1 Panavision aspect ratio cut by two-thirds—the left and right sides—to fit the small screen, with occasional panning within the frame to capture key images. But then, slowly, the film’s reputation grew. Fox sold the footage (to Fleischer’s further annoyance), and it appeared in productions ranging from Midway in the late 1970s to The Final Countdown in 1980, even to Australia in 2008. But its influence can be seen in far more films. The scene where those Zeros descend like huge dragonflies to attack Wheeler Field, for example, has been referenced in many other films, including the Star Wars saga. To this day, film historians marvel that a project like Tora! was even undertaken; no one tried anything like it ever again. Aviation afficionados consider it one of the greatest airplane movies ever made. Videos in letterbox formats restored the film to its intended widescreen glory, followed by increasingly ambitious DVD and Blu-ray releases, complete with all manner of commentaries, documentaries, and extras.
FROM LEFT: 20TH CENTURY FOX, LMPC (GETTY IMAGES, 2)
creativity knew no limits: In time he would design a pressurized vest that would, on command, burst open with blood-spurting bullet holes, and he would capture mass human suffering in movies like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. For Tora! he and his team invented something they called an Air Ram—a box of pressurized air that when stepped on could send a stuntman like Picerni flying into the air—and timed explosions to occur at the precise moment planes flew over, often just feet above the ground. Accidents were put to good use. At one point, the landing gear of one of five B-17s used in filming got stuck in the up position. As the pilot circled to deplete his gas to eliminate the danger of a fire or explosion, cameras were set up to record the touchdown. The shrieking one-wheel belly-landing was used in the film. One of the most intricate sequences involved Zeros strafing Wheeler Field as American P-40s tried desperately to get airborne and fight back. Flowers and Fleischer timed it to the split second, but no matter how hard you plan, when you are making a movie “practical,” reality can take over. Movie people still marvel at this shot today. It was supposed to be simple: A life-size, radio-controlled mockup P-40 with a working engine would taxi down the runway and explode as it was strafed. The cameras, one of them 200 feet away, were encased in thick plywood. Just in case. It started as planned, with the motorized mockup eas ing onto the runway as the the Texans-dressed-as-Zeros zoomed in. The P-40 picked up speed as planned, racing down the flight line, until it started to take off—something for which it had not been designed and which no one on the crew thought aerodynamically possible. Flowers hit the button to blow it up but the P-40 careened into a line of dynamite-filled P-40s, and Picerni and his buddies ran for dear life. In the final cut you can see the stuntman run, fall, scramble on all fours and then get up and run some more, the flaming debris of the exploding planes literally feet away from him, heavy pieces of metal clanking to the asphalt all around. Genuine terror is evident in his every muscle movement and panicked backward glance. Fleischer used this accident in the film—three times, from three different angles.
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From left: A publicity still for Tora! Tora! Tora! showing three Japanese airmen on their way to Pearl Harbor; the poster for the film’s release in 1970, with 10 actors—five American and five Japanese—pictured along the bottom.
FROM LEFT: 20TH CENTURY FOX, LMPC (GETTY IMAGES, 2)
In time, Fox made a profit. Many of the planes still tour the country as part of airshows. Tourists at the memorial for the USS Arizona on Oahu were asked in the 1990s where they got their knowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The top answer? Tora! Tora! Tora! On first viewing, even today, the film is definitely unusual. The strict adherence to dialogue from real life creates a quasi-documentary feel. While the Japanese sequences have a staid, geometric elegance, some American sequences feel staged and wooden despite the efforts of such first-rate actors as Jason Robards (who was on Oahu on December 7, 1941), Martin Balsam, and Joseph Cotten. And despite all the effort, some historical inaccuracies crept in, like the Yorktown’s angled flight deck. But on subsequent viewings, the movie develops a fascinating power. The absence of melodrama or any romantic subplots has allowed it to age well. The characters move forward—in a sense, all blindly—toward their fate, the increasing, even excruciating tension heightened by the back-and-forth editing between the two halves and the gorgeous, slowly building score by composer Jerry Goldsmith. Kimmel is a victim; Yamamoto a tragic hero. There are screwups and missed opportunities on both sides—the Japanese, for example, fail to deliver their ultimatum on time because they don’t have a skilled typist. The “manning the rails” sequence on the Nagato is stunning—somehow all that wood looks like cold, riveted steel on film—as are the takeoff and the subsequent flight of Garrison’s and Canary’s strike force through the lush mountains of Oahu.
And then there’s the unspeakable horror of the attack itself—that smothering spectacle of death from above. The switch in mood from the buildup to the attack is jarring— but that’s how it was that morning in December 1941. But the film’s greatest accomplishment might best be appreciated outside of movie theaters. Before it was made, and especially during the war itself, the Japanese were usually portrayed in American films as evil, duplicitous, and often incompetent, plotting their schemes behind bottleglass spectacles. Tora! changed that. The Japanese were skilled, honorable military professionals here, wrestling with the horror that they were about to unleash, in charge of a skilled fighting force of awesome power—the Nagato was proof of that. And man, could they fly those planes. Subsequent war movies treated them similarly, right up to Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima in 2008. Such humanization of a modern enemy was a profound thing indeed. And perhaps that is Tora! Tora! Tora!’s enduring legacy. Though it failed in some ways as cinema, brought down careers, and led to at least two deaths, it succeeded where few other films have in putting our painful history in context and illuminating the humanity on both sides of the Pacific in World War II. MHQ Wendell Jamieson, an award-winning reporter and editor, has worked for every major New York City newspaper, including, for 18 years, the New York Times. While at the Times he wrote occasionally about film, with a focus on Japanese cinema. He is the author of New York by New York (Assouline Publishing, 2018).
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THE SEVEN VOYAGES OF ZHENG HE During China’s early Ming Dynasty, Zheng He commanded expeditionary treasure voyages to Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Western Asia, and East Africa.
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AGENCE ROGER VIOLLET (GRANGER)
Zheng He’s expansive projection of sea power represented a unique chapter in Chinese history. By Otto Kreisher
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AGENCE ROGER VIOLLET (GRANGER)
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ZHENG HE
Although Zheng He had no naval experience, the emperor made him commander of the fleet.
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meeting a similar fate, Zhu Di pretended to be insane and tricked the emperor into allowing Zhu Di’s three sons to return home to take care of him. When the emperor sent troops to arrest Zhu Di’s supporters, the prince ordered the imperial commanders killed and commenced open rebellion against the throne. After some early victories against the imperial army, the prince was trapped in Beijing for several months before breaking out of the siege in January 1402. He fought his way south to Nanjing and captured the capital, aided by the defection of the imperial commander and senior household eunuchs who were angered at the emperor’s draconian restrictions. On July 13, Zhu Di marched triumphantly into the capital. But he found the imperial palace in flames. The wreckage contained the charred bodies of the empress and her eldest son. Another body, burned beyond recognition, was believed to be the emperor. After Zhu Di ascended the throne, he quickly ordered the execution of all the officials and military officers who refused to recognize him, along with their relatives and neighbors, teachers, servants, and friends. Despite this violent beginning, Zhu took the imperial name of Yongle, meaning “perpetual happiness.” The new emperor appointed Ma He the grand director of the Directorate of Palace Servants, a powerful domestic position. He also gave him a new name, Zheng He, in honor of his key role in the fighting around Zhenglunba. Yongle then launched a series of ambitious projects to enhance the grandeur and scope of Ming China and embellish his own image after his violent ascension to the throne. These projects included invading Annan (northern Vietnam), prolonging the conflict with the Mongols, moving the imperial capital to his old stronghold of Beijing, and constructing the massive palace complex known as the Forbidden City. Even more extravagant was Yongle’s creation of a massive foreign expeditionary armada to impress other nations with the power and wealth of Ming China. Although Zheng He had no naval experience, the emperor named his trusted aide commander in chief of the fleet. As a further sign of his trust, the emperor gave Zheng He blank scrolls stamped with the imperial seal so that he could issue imperial orders of his own while at sea.
ROGER ROCHE (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES)
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hen Chinese emperor Zhu Yuanzhang and his Ming Dynasty forces conquered Yunnan Province, the last remaining Mongol bastion, in 1382, they captured a 10-year-old Muslim boy whose father had been killed in the bloody fighting. The boy, Ma He, brazenly told the victorious General Fu Youde that the Mongol leader he was looking for had jumped into a pond. Impressed by the youth’s boldness, Fu placed him in the household of Prince Zhu Di, the emperor’s fourth son, who was Fu’s aide. As was typical for new imperial servants, Ma He was soon castrated. Over years of service, the young eunuch became a devoted follower of Zhu, a talented soldier in his own right and a future admiral in the Chinese navy. Zhu Di, a competent leader like his father, was put in command of the empire’s northern region, with his headquarters in Beijing. He was charged with warding off the still aggressive Mongol forces along China’s northern frontier. Living in the prince’s household in Beijing, Ma He fought alongside his master on all his military campaigns, learning the art of war and earning his trust. He grew into an exceptionally large man, well over 6 feet tall, with glaring eyes and a powerful voice. Unusual for a lowly eunuch, he also received a good education. After his oldest son, Crown Prince Zhu Biao, suddenly became ill and died, the aged emperor had to consider who would succeed him. His advisers counseled against selecting Zhu Di, his favorite surviving son, arguing that to do so would cause a rift among the other sons and plunge the country into civil war. Instead, he was advised to choose his 14-year-old grandson, Zhu Yunwen, the traditional next in line for the throne. Before the emperor died in 1398, he ordered his sons to remain in their fiefdoms and not attend his funeral to avoid any possible challenge to his grandson’s succession. On ascending the throne, Emperor Zhu Yunwen stripped his uncles of their military forces and put them under house arrest. One of his uncles, Zhu Bo, was so angry that he burned himself and his family alive. By the summer of 1399, five of the most powerful princes had been eliminated or had died of natural causes. To forestall
China had developed extensive oceangoing merchant fleets and a strong navy earlier in its history, particularly in the 12th and early 13th centuries, when Mongol incursions forced the Song Dynasty to turn to foreign trade to offset
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ROGER ROCHE (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES)
Zheng He’s baochuan, or treasure ships, were enormous, with displacements estimated to be as high as 30,000 tons. Even the smallest of them would have been by far the largest wooden vessel ever built.
its declining agricultural economy. Later, the Yuan Dynasty, founded by Genghis Khan’s Mongol heirs, also created massive war fleets for the purpose of invading Japan and Indonesia. Before Zheng He could embark on his first epic voyage, he had to supervise construction of the fleet, which required gathering massive supplies of wood and other materials from throughout the empire and conscripting tens of thousands of craftsmen and common laborers to build the ships. Obtaining and transporting the material and workers to the Longjiang shipyard on the Yangtze River east of Nanjing imposed tremendous burdens on provinces far from the capital. Although Ming China was probably the world’s richest nation, the emperor’s grandiose endeavors ultimately drained the imperial treasury, requiring higher taxes and the printing of ruinous amounts of paper money—a novel concept at the time—to finance them. At first, the fleets varied in size from 200 to 300 ships each. The largest and most impressive were 62 enormous baochuan, or treasure ships, ranging from 385 feet long by 157 feet wide to 440 feet long by 180 feet wide, with displacements estimated to be as high as 30,000 tons.
Even the smallest of them would have been by far the largest wooden vessel ever built—five times larger than their European counterparts. The largest ships that Vasco da Gama sailed from Portugal to India and that Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain to the Caribbean were just over 60 feet long and displaced less than 300 tons. All of their ships could have been stored on the deck of just one of Zheng He’s vessels. The massive treasure ships were broad beamed and flat bottomed, with no keels and shallow drafts to allow them to traverse the Yangtze, which had an average depth of about 26 feet. European ships, by contrast, had round bottoms with considerable drafts, thick keels for longitudinal strength, and frames at right angles from their keels. The treasure ships’ structural strength was provided by external longitudinal timbering above the waterline and, most important, by transverse bulkheads spaced at regular intervals, which divided the hold into watertight compartments. The concept of watertight spaces to minimize the danger of ruptures below the water line did not emerge in Western ships until the late 18th century. The transverse bulkheads also allowed Chinese builders to place the treasure ships’ steep masts off center, while
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Western vessels had to have their masts along the center line to anchor them in the keel. The off-center arrangement allowed the treasure ships’ nine masts to be angled across their broad decks in three rows of three, exposing their 12 large sails to more wind. The yardarms hosting the large square sails were attached to the masts in a manner that allowed them to swing around as needed to better catch the wind during tacking. Men on deck could raise or lower the yards and sails with ropes threaded through pulleys at the top of the masts, so sailors didn’t have to climb the masts as they did aboard Western ships. Treasure ships were not designed to be fighting ships. Instead, they were more like floating castles, with grand cabins, windows, and antechambers sporting balconies and railings. The hulls were decorated with carved and brightly painted animal heads with glaring dragon eyes at the bow. The sterns were embellished with dragon, eagle, and phoenix patterns symbolizing auspiciousness. The ships that would carry Zheng He and other senior leaders were crammed with expensive gifts for rulers they planned to visit, including lavishly embroidered silk robes and delicate porcelain. The treasure ships were supported by 200 or more other vessels, smaller but still far larger than anything else afloat at the time. The fleet included eightmasted ships that carried gift horses, seven-masted supply ships, six-masted troop transports, water tankers, and two types of warships—five-masted 165-foot-long fuchuan (escort vessels) and smaller hand-rowed patrol ships. Under the emperor’s orders and with Zheng He’s guidance, more than 1,600 ships were built during the three- decade existence of the treasure fleets. Each fleet would carry about 28,000 men, including Zheng and his commanders, sailors, craftsmen, and thousands of soldiers. The command element was topped by 70 eunuchs, including Zheng He. Below the eunuchs were 300 military officers of various ranks, from regional commissioners to battalion and company commanders, along with judicial officers to handle military offenses at sea. On board were also 200 civilians, including doctors and pharmacologists (to collect medicinal plants), directors from the Ministry of Finance, and two protocol officers from the Court of State Ceremonial, in charge of receptions for the foreign tributary envoys. Additionally, there were astrologers and geomancers, who were responsible for making astronomical observations, forecasting the weather and interpreting natural phenomena, and 10 foreign language translators.
The ships were not designed for fighting. They were more like floating castles.
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Each ship captain was specifically appointed by the emperor and given the power of life or death to maintain discipline on board. Crews included hundreds of sailors of various ranks and skills as well as blacksmiths, caulkers, sailmakers, and others needed to maintain the vessels. The ships communicated through an elaborate system of sound and sight signals, with flags, bells, drums, and gongs in daylight and used lanterns to communicate at night. Carrier pigeons enabled long-range communications. Navigators used a compass consisting of a fish-shaped magnetized needle floating in a basin of water. They determined latitude by gauging the height above the horizon of Polaris or the Southern Cross with a simple measuring board called a qianxingban and marked time by burning graded incense sticks. They also used star charts that noted sailing directions and durations of watches. Departure and return of the fleet were governed by the seasonal monsoons that could provide favorable winds. The ships would sail from Nanjing to the mouth of the Yangtze, where the fleet would be organized. It then went down the coast 400 miles to a large harbor by the entrance to the Min River, where it waited for months for the north-
CHINA’S GREAT ARMADA, PAINTED BY HONGNIAN ZHANG
ZHENG HE
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CHINA’S GREAT ARMADA, PAINTED BY HONGNIAN ZHANG
east monsoon in late December or early January before sailing south-southwest across the South China Sea. The return trip would depend on the beginning of the southwestern monsoon in the spring a year later. In the autumn of 1405, after offering prayers to Tianfei, the “Princess of Heaven” and the patron goddess of sailors, Zheng He and his men set sail on their first voyage. Its ultimate destination was Calicut (now Kazhikode), a major trading port for spices and rare woods on the southwest coast of India, known in China as the “great country of the western ocean.” The first port of call was the friendly Vietnamese city of Champa. Then the fleet sailed on to Majapahit, on northeast Java. It turned northwest through the Strait of Malacca for stops at Aru and Samudera, on the northern coast of Sumatra, and Aceh on the western tip of the island. But it bypassed Palembang, the most important city-state on Sumatra, where a Chinese pirate, Chen Zuyi, had taken control of the city and was plundering ships passing through the narrow strait. The fleet faced a long, open-water voyage across the Indian Ocean to a port on the west coast of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Encountering a hostile reception from the Cey-
Zheng He once said that he and his sailors visited more than 30 countries over three decades “to manifest the transforming power of virtue and to treat distant people with kindness.” lonese king, the fleet left quickly and sailed around the tip of India to Calicut. Although the Chinese referred to most other non-Chinese people as barbarians, they treated the ruler of Calicut as an equal and had the utmost respect for his highly structured society with an efficient civil service, well-trained army and navy, and harsh system of justice. In the spring, when the monsoon wind shifted to the southwest, the fleet headed back across the Indian Ocean, carrying with it envoys from Calicut, Quilon (another Indian city-state), and the Sumatran states of Samudera, Deli, and Malacca, bearing tributary gifts for the emperor. Before it could reach Nanjing, the fleet had to deal with Chen Zuyi and his pirates, who now were blocking the Straits of Malacca on the eastern coast of the island. When Zheng He demanded that the pirate chief surrender, Chen Zuyi agreed, though he was secretly plotting to ambush the treasure fleet.
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voyage, Zheng He used the visible might of the fleet to ensure a friendlier reception from the empire of Majapahit, whose previous king had killed Ming envoys. The fleet largely retraced the route of the first voyage, eventually dropping anchor in Champa, Brunei, Malacca, Java, Thailand, Sumatra, India, and Ceylon. In 1409 Yongle ordered a third expedition, during which the armada used its power to punish the hostility and lack of respect shown by Alakeswara, the king of Ceylon, who had previously refused to pay tribute to the Chinese emperor. Now Alakeswara sent his son to demand gold, silver, and other precious objects from the Chinese fleet. When Zheng He refused, the king ordered 50,000 troops to seize the admiral, who had gone ashore with a small force. This occasioned a prolonged land fight—the only battle fought on land during Zheng He’s seven voyages— in which the admiral demonstrated his skill as a commander in ground warfare. When he discovered that the Sinhalese soldiers had cut down trees to block his way back to the coast, Zheng He reasoned that since most of the enemy forces were heading toward the fleet, there
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FROM TOP: PICTURES FROM HISTORY (AKG-IMAGES); UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE (GETTY IMAGES); MAP BY BRIAN WALKER
Warned of the subterfuge by a local informant, Zheng He attacked first, beginning a monthslong battle in the twisting river channels and mangrove swamps off the straits. Although China had already developed gunpowder, Zheng He’s warships had no cannons. Instead, the ships used various other types of fire weapons, including “sky flying tubes” that sprayed gunpowder and flaming bits of paper, and compact gunpowder-and-paper grenades that emitted noxious fumes and metal pellets like shrapnel. The projectiles were launched from the ships by tension-powered catapults. Zheng He also employed skilled archers who could shower enemy ships with flaming arrows. During the prolonged fighting, the imperial warships burned 10 of Chen Zuyi’s ships and captured seven others, killing more than 5,000 of the pirates and capturing Chen Zuyi and his principal lieutenants. Zheng He then installed his helpful informant as the new ruler of Palembang. Back in Nanjing, the emperor rewarded the fleet’s seamen for their victory and had the pirate leaders publicly executed. He ordered a second voyage in 1407 to sanction the installation of a new king of Calicut. On that two-year
STEPHENS & KENAU
Although Zheng He’s warships had no cannons, the weapons they used, including gunpowder grenades, catapulted projectiles, and flaming arrows, were highly effective.
FROM TOP: PICTURES FROM HISTORY (AKG-IMAGES); UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE (GETTY IMAGES); MAP BY BRIAN WALKER
STEPHENS & KENAU
ZHENG HE must be only a few left behind to defend the capital. He sent messengers to the fleet, ordering them to resist to the end. He then marshaled the forces at hand, about 2,000 men, quickly marched to the capital, stormed through its protective walls, and seized the king, his family, and his principal chieftains. The Sinhalese forces returned and surrounded the city, but Zheng He defeated them and rejoined the fleet with his prisoners. Back in China in June 1411, the emperor took pity on the Sinhalese king and his charges as “ignorant people who were without knowledge of the Mandate of Heaven” (the divine right of imperial rule). He released the king and ordered the minister of rites to pick a worthy member of the king’s family to replace him. In the following months, a stream of tribute-bearing rulers and ambassadors traveled to the Ming court from countries the treasure fleet had visited, providing the recognition that Zhu Di had been seeking. In December 1412, the emperor ordered a fourth voyage to extend the empire’s reach beyond India to the major trading port of Arabia. Departing in January 1414, the fleet followed the usual path until it reached Samudra, on the northeast coast of Sumatra, where Zheng He sought to reestablish order after seven years of internecine conflict. The son of the former king, who was engaged in a guerrilla war with the late usurper’s younger brother, Sekander, had petitioned the Ming court for recognition and support. On arriving, Zheng He ignored Sekander and showered imperial gifts on the prince. Enraged by the slight, Sekander led 10,000 men against Zheng He, who warded off the assault with his large, well-trained army and captured Sekander and his family. The fleet followed its usual route to Calicut. But instead of lingering to trade, it set off on a long open-water journey across the Arabian Sea to Hormuz, at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Hormuz was a prosperous meeting place for traders from India and farther East and those who came from Arabia, Africa, and Central Asia by sea and overland. There, Zheng He met merchants from the African citystates of Mogadishu, Brawa (present-day Somalia), and Malindi (Kenya), whom he persuaded to return with him to China and pay tribute to the emperor. While Zheng He traveled to Hormuz, the eunuch Yang Min took a squadron to Bengal and escorted the new king to China. The king presented Zhu Di with gifts, including a giraffe, which the Chinese mistook for the mythical gilin, a sacred animal in China that was believed to appear only in times of great peace and prosperity. Representatives from 30 different countries accompanied the fleet on its return to China. Among the thousands of sailors, soldiers, and court officials who accompanied Zheng He on his fourth voyage
Zheng He’s Ports of Call Hormuz
Calicut Mogadishu CEYLON SUMATRA Malindi INDIAN OCEAN
Beijing Nanjing
Champa
Majapahit
From top: Zheng He presented the emperor with exotic gifts from his travels, including an East African giraffe; a map of the world that some historians believe was Zheng He’s; Zheng He traveled more than 31,000 miles, establishing Ming China as the region’s dominant maritime power. MHQ Autumn 2021
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ZHENG HE
After Zheng He’s death, the fleet never sailed again and the massive ships rotted in port.
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construction of the Forbidden City, and command three more campaigns against Mongolia. He never returned to Nanjing. On the fifth expedition, the fleet made stops at Champa, the usual ports in Indonesia, and the Malay peninsula, and then proceeded to India and Hormuz. It traveled south to Aden on the southeastern tip of Arabia (now Yemen), the main trading port connecting the Mediterranean to India and the Far East. From Aden, the fleet sailed for the African coast, to return the ambassadors from Mogadishu, Brawa, and Malindi to their homes. The fleet returned to Nanjing in August 1419 and Zhu Di, still in Beijing, ordered a sixth voyage. The fleet left in spring of 1421 and returned to Calicut, where it divided, with elements sailing on to Hormuz, Aden, and western Africa to return visiting dignitaries and bring back new ones. While the fleet was gone, Zhu Di ordered a suspension of the voyages. He died in August 1424, as he was returning from a last futile campaign against the Mongols. His eldest son, Zhu Gaozhi, ascended the throne and ordered a permanent ban on future voyages. The ships were to remain in Nanjing, with Zheng He commanding the military garrison. When Zhu Gaozhi died nine months later, his son, Zhu Zhanji, became emperor and ordered one last voyage, supposedly out of concern that tribute-bearing ambassadors from the countries of the Indian Ocean were no longer coming to China. Because of deterioration to the ships during the long delay, however, the fleet was not able to sail from China until January 1432. The fleet divided again in Calicut; Zheng He, apparently in ill health, remained there while the main fleet sailed on to Hormuz, Aden, and the African coast. The fleet reunited on the way home. Ma Huan rejoined Zheng He on his sixth and seventh voyages. As a practicing Muslim, Ma was particularly honored to visit Mecca in 1432, leaving behind perhaps the first outside description of pilgrims on their hajj to Mecca in what Ma termed “the Country of the Heavenly Square.” At the Kaaba shrine, “each year on the tenth day of the twelfth moon, foreign Muslims come to worship,” he wrote. “The men wear long garments, the women all wear a covering over their heads and you cannot see their faces.” Some made journeys lasting a year from every corner of the earth. Before reaching China in July 1433, Zheng He died and was buried at sea with Muslim ceremonies. He was 62. The fleet never sailed again and the massive vessels rotted in port at Nanjing. When Zhu Zhanji died in 1435, control of the Ming court devolved to his mother, the grand dowager empress, ruling on behalf of her grandson, Zhu’s son, who was still a minor. She agreed with the Confucian civil officials who had always opposed the voyages because of their expense
GRANGER
was a fellow Chinese Muslim, Ma Huan, who later wrote one of the world’s first travel books, The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores, an invaluable source for the sights, sounds, and tastes encountered by the Chinese voyagers on Zheng He’s seven voyages across the Indian Ocean between 1405 and 1433. Ma Huan was apparently in his early 30s when he joined Zheng He’s fourth voyage in 1413 as a translator. A native of the coastal township of Kuaiji, within the modern borders of Shaoxing, Ma Huan was well educated. His writings show a familiarity with classic Chinese and Buddhist works, and he learned (or taught himself) Persian and Arabic in the course of his travels. He put his language skills to use in describing the exotic, fascinating, and sometimes horrifying sights he and his comrades encountered on their voyages abroad. Ma Huan described in minute detail the beguiling varieties of food, drink, and plant and animal life in the countries he visited. In Champa, his first stop, the writer dined on succulent jackfruit, with “morsels of yellow flesh as big as a hen’s egg and tasting of honey.” He documented 10 different uses for coconut, ranging from sweet syrup, wine, and oil to the production of rope fibers, thatched roofs, and shell bowls. In Java, Ma Huan was amazed by the strange birds, including cockatoos, mynahs, and parrots, “all of which can imitate human speech.” He was less impressed with the human residents, who struck him as violent and confrontational. Ma Huan observed that Javanese from the ages of 3 to 100 routinely carried knives and noted that “if a man touches their head with his hand, or if there is a misunderstanding about money at a sale, or a battle of words when they are crazy with drunkenness, they at once pull out these knifes and stab each other.” In general, Ma Huan was nonjudgmental, merely observing and pondering foreign marriage and funeral rites, domestic relationships, languages and dialects, and various local religious and political practices. He introduced to Chinese writing such words as raja for Indian prince, mahalazha for king, and sakala for sackcloth. He even appears to have described the Biblical figure Moses, whom he called “Mouxie.” After Zheng He arrived back in Nanjing in August 1415, Zhu Di ordered a fifth voyage, which would extend his reach even farther. The emperor then went north to proclaim Beijing as the new imperial capital, supervise
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GRANGER
After Zhu Di ascended the throne, taking the imperial name of Yongle, he moved the imperial capital to his old stronghold of Beijing and constructed the massive palace complex known as the Forbidden City.
and their eunuch leadership. With bans on oceangoing ships, Ming China’s maritime presence declined precipitously after 1435. By the early 1500s, Portuguese seamen in vessels a fifth the size of the treasure ships dominated Indian Ocean trade and began to conquer and occupy ports in Arabia, India, and Malacca, while Zheng He’s massive ships were allowed to rot in Chinese harbors. In the coming three centuries, the Portuguese would be followed by Dutch, British, and French fleets, which would take advantage of China’s lack of a defensive fleet and antiquated army to victimize the Manchu-dominated Qing Dynasty, claiming Macau and Hong Kong. In the mid1800s the British would wage the shameful Opium Wars, a period that modern Chinese scholars would decry as the nation’s “century of humiliation.” Nevertheless, Zheng He’s remarkable career represented an expansive projection of sea power that was unique in Chinese history. The admiral’s expeditions established Ming China as the dominant maritime power in Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, and on to Arabia and western Africa for three decades and played an important role in China’s drive to erase the memory of a century of humilia-
tion. The generally peaceable long-term effect of the Ming fleet’s deployments contrasted favorably with the brutal conquest and colonization by the European mariners. Fittingly, Zheng He had the last word on his great explorations. At the port of Changle in Fujian Province, he oversaw the installation of a giant granite pillar listing the more than 30 countries he and his sailors had visited in their efforts “to manifest the transforming power of virtue and to treat distant people with kindness.” He concluded with a poetic flourish: “We have traversed more than one hundred thousand li [40,000 miles] of immense water spaces and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising sky-high, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away hidden in a blue transparency of light vapors, while our sails loftily unfurled like clouds day and night.” Few other voyagers, then or now, could say as much. MHQ Otto Kreisher, a veteran Washington reporter and former U.S. Marine Corps and Navy Reserve officer, has covered American combat operations in Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Somalia, and Haiti and—from an aircraft carrier—during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
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BEFORE ETERNITY
James Jones built his best-selling novel, From Here to Eternity, around his real-life experiences as a U.S. Army private in Hawaii before World War II. By Roy Morris Jr.
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A view of Honolulu from Punch Bowl Crater, showing a portion of the U.S. Navy fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 29, 1940.
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n the morning of December 7, 1941, Private James Jones was enjoying a quiet Sunday breakfast in the mess hall at Schofield Barracks, 25 miles inland from the silvery beaches of Honolulu, Hawaii. Jones had enlisted in the U.S. Army almost exactly two years earlier from his hometown of Robinson, Illinois. Although weak-eyed and undersized, Jones had readily adapted to life in the Regular Army and was now serving as assistant clerk for Company F, 27th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division. He was on 24-hour guard duty that day, two hours on and four hours off, but his official status as an orderly had permitted him to continue bunking in the company barracks rather than sleep in the cramped, crowded guard house. It would prove to be a lifesaving arrangement. Jones had just polished off two fried eggs and an extra half-pint of milk when a series of dull explosions resounded from the direction of Wheeler Army Airfield, two miles away. An old-timer at Jones’s table looked up from his pancakes. “They doing some blasting?” As the explosions intensified, seeming to draw nearer, Jones and others rushed outside to see what was going on. Pressed against a barracks wall and still absentmindedly clutching his bottle of milk, Jones watched in disbelief as a Japanese fighter plane roared by, its machine guns stitching a deadly crossfire down the dusty street. Jones could see the pilot clearly, waving and grinning as he passed. “I shall never forget his face behind the goggles,” Jones remembered decades later. “A white scarf streamed out behind his neck and he wore a white ribbon around his helmet just above the goggles, with a red spot in the center of his forehead.” Three of Jones’s friends were killed in their beds when another Japanese fighter strafed the guardhouse where Jones might have been sleeping as well.
Rushing outside, Jones watched in disbelief as a Japanese fighter plane roared by.
In the developing chaos, Jones rushed to headquarters, where he was put to work running messages between overwrought officers. Later that day the entire contingent at Schofield Barracks headed out for the various beaches on Oahu, where Japanese invaders were expected to attempt a landing at any time. Riding in a convoy of camouflaged trucks from the inland plateau down to where the barracks stood, Jones could see ugly columns of black smoke billowing into the clear blue sky above Pearl Harbor. The bookish
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history buff, who had just turned 20 and aspired to be a writer someday, struggled to put the onrushing events into perspective. “I remember thinking with a sense of profoundest awe that none of our lives would ever be the same,” he would later write. “A social, even a cultural watershed had been crossed which we could never go back over, and I wondered how many of us would survive to see the end results.” The caravan wound its way south-southeast, dropping off truckloads of soldiers every 10 miles or so in an arc above and below Waikiki. Jones’s unit established a mobile command post midway between Wailupe and Hanauma Bay on the extreme south end of the island. The men were armed with nothing but their rifles and the machine guns mounted on top of each of their trucks. Behind them lay the smoldering ruins of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. In less than two hours, Japanese warplanes had sunk two American battleships—Arizona and Oklahoma—and badly damaged seven others, along with a dozen smaller vessels and 300 airplanes. More than 2,400 soldiers, sailors, and civilians were killed in the attack; another 1,000 were wounded. Fortunately for the United States, all of the Pacific Fleet’s vital aircraft carriers were out to sea at the time. Unaccountably, the Japanese didn’t hit the base’s oil storage depots, repair shops, shipyards, and submarine docks. The navy quickly rebounded from the attack, but more than two years after World War II had begun in Europe, it had arrived without warning on America’s doorstep. Jones and his fellow soldiers fully expected to be attacked within days, perhaps even hours. Jones’s group bivouacked on the beach at Wailupe beside a weekend home owned by Harry Arnold, a Honolulu physician. Soldiers stretched barbed wire along the beach between machine- gun emplacements. Jones prepared the company’s daily report and roll call and helped the first sergeant distribute food and supplies to troops patrolling the coast. As the days went by, the fear of imminent invasion diminished, and Jones spent much of his off time with Dr. Arnold and his family. One night he gave Mrs. Arnold a handful of poems he had written at Schofield Barracks. “Hang on to these,” he told her. “I’m going to be famous one day.” It would take Jones a full decade to make good that boast, with the writing and publication of his first novel, From Here to Eternity, in the autumn of 1951. The doorstop of a book drew on Jones’s two years at Schofield Barracks, culminating with the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was a valedictory account of the final days of the Regular Army, before America’s entry into World War II brought millions of draftees and volunteers pouring into the service. Like many first
PREVIOUS SPREAD: UNDERWOOD ARCHIVES (GETTY IMAGES); OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: BETTMANN (GETTY); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; U.S. NAVY (NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND)
JAMES JONES
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Clockwise from top left: Jones as he appeared on the jacket of From Here to Eternity; Schofield Barracks, as seen from the air in 1925; a view of Battleship Row after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. novels, it was partly autobiographical, and Jones also incorporated details about many of his fellow soldiers. Jones wanted it to be a ground-level view of the army—from the perspective of the common soldier, not the great generals or the famous battles. As he would explain to Maxwell Perkins, his renowned editor at Scribner’s, “I have always wanted to do a novel of the peacetime army, something I don’t remember having seen.” It would depict, he said, “the small man standing on the edge of the ocean shaking his fist.” Jones had done a fair amount of fist shaking himself. As the younger son of an alcoholic dentist and a faded society matron in southeastern Illinois, he had grown up in a poor but genteel family, largely ignored if not indeed unloved by
his distracted parents. Except for English, he did badly in school as well as on the athletic fields. He was short and unattractive, with a prominent chin and large ears that stuck out “like a car coming down the street with both doors open,” as his father said unkindly. He nursed plans to run away from home and join the French Foreign Legion. Meanwhile he lashed out, having numerous fistfights at school and once pushing another boy through a plate-glass window. On his father’s advice, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps in November 1939, three days after his 18th birthday. After basic training at Chanute Field, Illinois, and Fort Slocum, New York, Jones sailed with his unit to Hawaii,
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JAMES JONES
“I didn’t join the army to be a clerk,” Jones complained after he arrived in Hawaii.
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As war worsened in Europe and the Far East in 1940 and 1941, the Regular Army swelled from 300,000 men to more than a million. The dramatic expansion was fueled by the Selective Service Act of 1940, which drafted soldiers into the armed forces with increasing urgency. The U.S. Army’s Hawaiian Division, of which Jones’s 27th Regiment was a part, was expanded to create two units, the 24th and 25th Infantry Divisions. Jones was assigned to the 25th, nicknamed Tropic Lightning, whose members wore a shoulder patch of a Hawaiian taro leaf superimposed with a yellow lightning bolt. In the spring of 1942 Jones received permission from Blatt to enroll in part-time English classes at the University of Hawaii in the hills above Waikiki. The would-be writer worked hard on his sketches, short stories, and poems. His professors and fellow students encouraged Jones, who divided his time between campus and the base. This idyllic lifestyle, however, came to an end in September 1942, when the 25th Division went on high alert. Jones and his comrades began a crash course in advanced infantry training—jumping off barges, wading ashore, firing antiquated rifles, and crawling through mud and sand while carefully calibrated machine-gun fire zipped above their heads. “Our training was neither intensive nor complete; it was woefully inadequate, and we knew it,” Jones would remember. “But then these were the early days of the war. And perhaps it was really impossible to train a man for combat without putting him actually in it.” Actual combat would come quickly enough for Jones and his comrades. On December 6, 1942, the 25th Division sailed from Hawaii aboard three naval troop convoys. Three weeks later the ships arrived off the coast of an unimpressive little island in the Solomons chain that none of the men had ever heard of: Guadalcanal. The division hurried inland to join a massive ground attack on the remaining Japanese positions north of Henderson Airfield in the middle of the island. The 1st and 2nd Marine Corps Divisions, supported by army troops from the 161st and 182nd Divisions, had cleared the airfield and driven the enemy steadily northward in five months of brutal, murderous combat. Now it was the 25th Division’s turn. On his third day of combat, at the base of Sims Ridge near Hill 53, Jones was struck in the head by a piece of shrapnel. As he later recalled:
FROM LEFT: CORBIS, POPPERFOTO (GETTY IMAGES, 2)
arriving on the island of Oahu in early February 1940. At Hickam Field, adjacent to the massive naval port at Pearl Harbor, he was part of the 17th Army Air Corps. His weak eyesight disqualified him from pilot training, and he declined to attend mechanics school on the grounds that he was not mechanically inclined. Much to his disgust, he was assigned to clerical school. “I didn’t join the army to be a clerk,” he complained to his brother, Jeff. He soon transferred to the 27th Infantry Regiment at Schofield Barracks, though he would have to undergo basic training again as a foot soldier. He moved into Quad D, the home of F Company, one of eight three-story stone barracks arrayed around the dusty parade ground known as Sills Field. He earned $21 a month. Army life at Schofield Barracks was literally regimented: reveille at 6 a.m., roll call at 6:30, then breakfast, barracks detail, and uniform inspection, calisthenics at 9, infantry drill, 11:30 mail call, noontime lunch, afternoon work duties, 5 p.m. retreat, and the ceremonial lowering of the flag. Evenings were free, and Jones and his comrades hung around base or went into the neighboring village of Waliwa to drink and roister. They made few trips into Honolulu, since the bars there were too expensive for humble enlisted men. Schofield emphasized intramural sports, with each company fielding football, baseball, basketball, track, boxing, and softball teams. During Jones’s time at Schofield, his company won three regimental championships. Athletic mediocrity notwithstanding, he gamely took part in boxing and football, seriously hurting his ankle playing the latter—an injury that would continue to plague him for several months. Despite his transfer to the infantry, Jones found himself doing clerical work again as an assistant company clerk. “About all I do,” he told his brother, “is type orders and letters and run messages.” He worked directly under the new company commander, Captain William Blatt, a fellow Illinoisan and Northwestern University graduate who encouraged Jones’s early writing efforts. Jones’s duties also brought him into daily contact with the company’s first sergeant, communications specialist, and bugler, all of whom would appear in From Here to Eternity. He used the office typewriter for his own writing when off duty and carried a small notebook with him to jot down his thoughts, impressions, and observations. One day when he was at lunch, a jokester posted a handmade sign on Jones’s desk: genius at work. Jones took the joke good-naturedly, leaving the sign in place.
I thought I could vaguely remember somebody yelling. I blacked out for several seconds, and had a dim impression of someone stumbling to his feet with his hands to his face. It wasn’t me. Then I came to myself several yards down the slope, bleeding like a stuck pig and blood running all over my face.
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From left: Military personnel pay their last respects at the mass grave of 15 men who lost their lives in the attack on Pearl Harbor; following the attack, volunteers jammed U.S. Army recruiting stations in unprecedented numbers.
FROM LEFT: CORBIS, POPPERFOTO (GETTY IMAGES, 2)
Luckily for Jones, it was only a flesh wound. “As soon as I found I wasn’t dead or dying, I was pleased to get out of there as fast as I could,” he wrote. “It really wasn’t so bad, and hadn’t hurt at all.” He went to the rear to be treated, glad to escape further combat that day. Jones rejoined his unit 10 days later, a bandage wrapped around his head and covering an eye. He was put to work disinterring and reburying American corpses from temporary graves. It was horrific work. Another day he went into the jungle to relieve himself and was attacked by a maddened, bayonet-wielding Japanese soldier who suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Jones managed to tackle the man, beat him unconscious with his fists, and stab him in the chest with the man’s own bayonet before smashing in his head with a rifle butt. The deadly hand-to-hand combat literally sickened Jones, who bent over and vomited. Searching the dead man’s pockets, he discovered a wallet containing two snapshots of the soldier posing with his wife and child. He vowed never to kill again. Jones’s lingering ankle injury proved to be his golden ticket out of the war. Although he always wrapped the ankle tightly in yards of elastic bandages, it continued to pop out of place. Finally, after he collapsed abruptly while walking alongside his first sergeant, Frank Wendson, the noncom sent him to the rear. A surgeon examined Jones at the divisional hospital and declared him physically unfit for further infantry duty. “He looked at me and grinned,” Jones recalled. “I grinned back. If he could only have known how I was hanging on his every word and expression. But perhaps he did.” Jones was evacuated to Auckland, New Zealand, where he endured a grueling three-hour operation, the last 20 minutes spent in agony after the anesthetics wore off early. He returned to the States in May 1943 and was sent to Kennedy General Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, to
recuperate. For Jones, living among hundreds of grievously damaged men, including many multiple amputees, paralyzed and blinded soldiers, and psychologically traumatized shock victims, was emotionally grueling. “Men there did not laugh and smile about their wounds,” he wrote, “as they always seemed to do in the pictures in Yank and the civilian magazines.” Jones would unflinchingly recount his hospital experiences in Whistle, the third novel of his World War II trilogy, published a year after his death in 1977. (The Thin Red Line, about his combat experiences at Guadalcanal, was published in 1962.) Jones would enjoy a long and lucrative writing career, but it is his first novel, From Here to Eternity, detailing his prewar experiences in the Regular Army in Hawaii, for which he is best remembered today. Such real-life comrades as Private Robert Stewart, First Sergeant Frank Wendson, Sergeant William “Chubby” Curran, Private Joseph A. Maggio, and Captains Thomas Griffin and William Blatt appeared in the novel, thinly disguised as Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, First Sergeant Milton Warden, Sergeant James “Fatso” Judson, Private Angelo Maggio, and Captain Dana “Dynamite” Holmes. From Here to Eternity, both as a number-one best-selling novel and a multiple Academy Award–winning motion picture, endures as one of the frankest depictions of American life on the cusp of World War II, when, as Jones himself realized that smoke-blackened morning at Pearl Harbor, “none of our lives would ever be the same.” MHQ Roy Morris Jr., a regular contributor to MHQ, is the author of nine books, including, most recently, Gertrude Stein Has Arrived: The Homecoming of a Literary Legend (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). He received a 2020 Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award for his profile of World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle in the Autumn 2020 issue of MHQ.
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WAR CARDS
Tobacco companies and other firms once made them by the millions. Even today, collectors covet them.
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Puzzle Cards, Chocolates Jaime Boix (1921–1923). The Barcelona-based chocolatier issued die-cut trading cards with its confections throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. This 18-card set features scenes from Germany’s military campaigns in World War I and, when assembled, forms a full-length portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
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n 1887, Allen & Ginter, a tobacco company in Richmond, Virginia, hit on the idea of turning the blank pieces of cardboard used to stiffen its packs of cigarettes into colorful—and collectible—trading cards depicting top-flight baseball players and other athletes as well as such varied subjects as actors, American Indian chiefs, birds, wild animals, flags of the world, and pirates. The one-to-a-pack cards, issued in a host of different series (and nearly always in color, thanks to the advent of chromolithography), were a stroke of genius in the nascent realm of brand marketing, and Allen & Ginter’s competitors almost immediately followed suit, as did manufacturers of chocolate bars and other candies. By the early 1900s British tobacco companies were churning out a dizzying variety of cigarette cards, in series ranging from chess problems to orchids and dog breeds to Shakespearean characters. World War I provided a virtually bottomless supply of subject material, as can be seen in the following pages. After the war, however, other forms of advertising in color—magazines in particular—became more cost effective, and it was not until the 1950s that baseball and other trading cards once again surged in popularity.
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WAR CARDS
“Straight Line Caricatures,” Player’s Cigarettes (1926). Britain’s John Player & Company, a unit of the
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“World War I Scenes,” Sweet Caporal Cigarettes (1914–1915). This 250-card set, issued to promote one of the American Tobacco Company’s top brands, included (clockwise from top left) “Belgian Army Dogs Pulling Machine Gun,” “Hoisting Cavalry Horses Aboard a Transport,” “Pulling Ashore a British War Aeroplane Wrecked During a Scouting Trip Over the North Sea,” and “An Austrian Alpine Squad on Skis.”
TOP: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE (4); BOTTOM: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART (4)
Imperial Tobacco Company, hired Scottish-born artist Alexander “Alick” Penrose Forbes Ritchie to produce the distinctive caricatures for this set of 50 cards, including (from left) Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War Edward Stanley, Field Marshal Douglas Haig, and Admiral of the Fleet John Jellicoe.
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART (6)
TOP: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE (4); BOTTOM: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART (4)
“Great Generals,” Allen & Ginter’s Cigarettes (1888). This company, founded in 1865 in Richmond,
Virginia, created the first cigarette cards in the United States; this 50-card set included (clockwise from top left) U.S. Army general George Crook; Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson; Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi; Carthaginian general Hannibal; and British Army general Charles James Napier.
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HISTORYNET ARCHIVE (5)
“The Great War—Second Series,” Gallaher’s Cigarettes (1915). The first set of World War I–themed cigarette cards issued by Gallaher Ltd. proved so popular that the company almost immediately followed with a second; shown here are (clockwise from top): “Bomb-Dropping Apparatus,” “Moving One-Man Fort,” “Dropping Darts from an Aeroplane,” “Tread Mine Used by the Enemy,” and “Bridge Demolition.”
WAR CARDS
“Air-Raid Precautions,” Churchman’s Cigarettes (1938). In the runup to World War II the Imperial
Tobacco Company promoted another of its cigarette brands with this set of 48 cards. The reverse side of the cards advised : “Albums for Churchman’s picture cards can be obtained from tobacconists at one penny each.”
HISTORYNET ARCHIVE (7)
HISTORYNET ARCHIVE (5)
“Arms & Armour,” Hignett’s Cigarettes (1924). This set of
24 cards, issued to promote yet another of the Imperial Tobacco Company’s brands, included images of (from left) “A Life-Guardsman,” “A Harquebusier,” and “A Viking,” with captions about the conflict in which each fought on the obverse.
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WAR CARDS
U.S. Navy Officers, Lauer & Suter Company (1910). What better way
trading cards, made for distribution in Canada, featured significant civilian and military aircraft of the era, including (clockwise from top left): the Curtiss PW-8 (United States), the NieuportDelage NiD.29 (France), the Farman F.60 Goliath (France), and the Blackburn T.4 Cubaroo.
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“Aeroplanes,” British American Tobacco Company (1926). This series of gold-bordered
TOP: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART (4); BOTTOM: NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY (4)
for the Baltimore-based confectioner to promote its “Navy Candy” brand than a set of 24 trading cards that included portraits of (from left): Admiral Colby Mitchell Chester, Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, Admiral of the Navy George Dewey, and Rear Admiral George A. Converse.
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART (6)
TOP: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART (4); BOTTOM: NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY (4)
“Arms of All Nations,” Allen & Ginter’s Cigarettes (1887). Three years before it would
be absorbed by the American Tobacco Company, Allen & Ginter manufactured the first baseball cards intended for national distribuition (in its “World’s Champions” series, with one packed in each box of 10 cigarettes) as well as this series of 50 military-themed cigarette cards.
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THE VISIONARY Major General George Owen Squier, the U.S. Army’s chief signal officer, at work in his laboratory in Washington, D.C., in 1920.
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NATIONAL ARCHIVES
In the early 1900s, George Owen Squier saw the future better than anyone else in the U.S. Army. By Patrick J. Kiger
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NATIONAL ARCHIVES
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GEORGE OWEN SQUIER
Squier aimed to patent a device that would convert a tree into a towering radio antenna.
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something there has been somebody to stop [him], to tell him he couldn’t.” But what might seem like hero- worshipping hyperbole was, in Squier’s case, true. He had overcome a hardscrabble, traumatic early life to become the first U.S. Army officer to earn a doctorate and to win election to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. And while the idea of using trees for antennas never caught on, another of Squier’s brainstorms—“multiplexing,” which enabled the transmission of multiple simultaneous telephone calls over one wire—helped make possible the rapid growth of modern communication networks. As military aviation historian Charles Joseph Gross wrote, “He was at the forefront of those who brought science and engineering into the army.” Born in 1865 in Dryden, Michigan, about 40 miles outside Detroit, Squier came along just in time for the Second Industrial Revolution. A host of technological advances, from electric lights and steel skyscrapers to the air brakes that made trains into reliable transportation, were forging a new world. But before Squier could make his mark on that world, he had to overcome the poverty and trauma of his youth. Squier’s mother died when he was six years old. His father, a farmer and shopkeeper, was a deeply troubled man who struggled with addictions to alcohol and gambling and neglected his cornfields, according to a 2014 biography of Squier by Paul W. Clark and Laurence A. Lyons. When he succumbed to his vices and could no longer care for his children, George and his sister, Mary, were sent to live with their grandfather. Squier was a good student, particularly gifted at mathematics. Nevertheless, when he reached age 14, his grandfather and his uncle made him quit school and set him up as an apprentice with a merchant in nearby Imlay City. Over the next two years, Squier rose from doing menial chores to working as a clerk in the store’s silk and satin department. Then, taking stock of his life, he realized that he didn’t want to become a merchant. He quit his job, found work on a local farm in exchange for room and board, and began attending high school. Despite his industriousness, Squier might well have ended up as another young man whose dreams were crushed by poverty. But he made the most of a lucky break. In 1881, reading in a local newspaper about a competitive exam to get into the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Squier decided to give it a shot and ended up being the only one of 30 local applicants from Michigan to get in. According to Croy’s story in Boys’ Life, Squier’s neighbors
OPPOSITE, TOP: BOY SCOUTS OF AMERICA INC.; BELOW: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
I
n the spring of 1922, George Owen Squier, a major general in the U.S. Army, paused under a large tree in Rock Creek Park, the 1,700-acre preserve that snakes through the nation’s capital. After studying the tree for a moment, Squier pulled a coil of copper wire out of his pocket, grabbed one end of the wire, and tossed the other end into the air, snagging a lower limb. Then, reaching into the kit bag slung over his shoulder, he pulled out a device that resembled a telephone and attached it to the wire. With a hammer, he nailed the wire to the trunk of the tree. The slim, balding man in his late 50s with a reddish mustache was not only the first officer in the U.S. Army with a doctoral degree but also a technology visionary who revolutionized telephone communication, helped build the nation’s first air force, and knew such pioneering figures as Alexander Graham Bell, who had been credited with inventing and patenting the first practical telephone; Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian inventor and electrical engineer who developed wireless telegraphy; and Orville and Wilbur Wright, the American aviation pioneers. Nevertheless, his unimposing physical appearance and odd behavior that day made it easy to for the park police officer who had been scrutinizing Squier from a distance to mistake him for a run-of-the-mill vandal. “Get out of here and quit spoiling that tree!” the policeman admonished Squier, according to Homer Croy, a correspondent for Boys’ Life, who was tagging along with the general that day to write a profile of him for the popular monthly magazine. Fortunately, Squier was able to convince the policeman that he wasn’t desecrating nature but pursuing a legitimate mission: demonstrating one of his most unusual inventions. In 1919, knowing that soldiers in the field couldn’t quickly communicate with headquarters over long distances, Squier had sought to patent a device that connected a radio transmitter and receiver to a tree and converted it into a towering antenna. That day in Rock Creek Park, to prove to the young readers of Boys’ Life that his device actually worked, he carried on a conversation with another operator 10 miles away. “Thus has it ever been in his life,” Croy later wrote in his profile of Squier. “Every time he has undertaken to do
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Clockwise from top: Homer Croy’s profile of Squier made the cover of Boys’ Life in 1922; Alexander Graham Bell shared Squier’s interest in aviation; Brigadier General Adolphus W. Greely, the U.S. Army’s chief signal officer, saw great promise in Squier.
tried to convince him not to go, warning that he might not be smart enough and could suffer the humiliation of flunking out. “Then I’ll go back and try again,” he reportedly responded. Entering West Point at age 18, Squier worked hard enough to be ranked seventh in his class when he graduated in 1887. Having developed a fascination for physics along the way, he was assigned to an artillery unit at Fort McHenry in Baltimore. This new position thrilled him, partly because Johns Hopkins University—one of the nation’s elite scientific institutions—was close by. Squier
boldly asked for and eventually obtained permission to enroll in graduate school at Hopkins. By one account, Squier even convinced his superiors to excuse him from the post’s regular morning marching exercises so that he wouldn’t miss class. At Hopkins, Squier studied mathematics, physics, and ballistics, among other subjects. He received his doctorate in 1893 after writing a dissertation on the electrochemical effects of magnetization. He was the first officer in the history of the U.S. Army to have earned a doctorate while in the service, and a reporter for the Baltimore Sun would later observe that his advanced degree made him an “unusual spectacle” in the army. Squier went on to become an ordnance instructor at the U.S. Artillery School at Fort Monroe, Virginia, where he continued to pursue scientific endeavors in his spare time. He began a long collaboration with Albert Cushing Crehore, a physics professor at Dartmouth and Cornell who was regarded as one the nation’s most brilliant electrical engineers. Early on, the two men developed instruments for measuring the recoil of artillery pieces and the velocity of their projectiles. Crehore’s scientific curiosity also ranged far and wide, and he and Squier soon delved into radio and telegraph technology. An article that appeared on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner in 1897 describes one of their inventions, the synchronograph, which used alternating current in telegraphy to achieve “marvelous speed in transmission,” making it possible to send messages to many recipients at once. Squier’s interest in communications led him to transfer in 1898 to the U.S. Army Signal Corps, where he continued his research with Crehore. Brigadier General Adolphus W. Greely, the army’s chief signal officer, saw great promise in Squier and sent him to London to study wireless communication with Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the wireless telegraph. In 1900 Squier was sent to the Philippines, where he was assigned to a ship that helped lay a system of undersea communications cables between islands in the archipelago nation. But, as he often did, Squier developed a more ambitious vision. He wrote a paper that examined the feasibility of, and potential routes for, a communications cable
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that would stretch from the Philippines across the Pacific Ocean to the U.S. mainland—an idea that caught the attention of government officials back in Washington and became the basis for a U.S. Senate committee report. Squier and Crehore even tried to start an undersea cable business on the side, but the venture failed, and their long collaboration ended. After his service in the Pacific, Squier was sent to San Francisco, where he became the army’s top signal officer in California. In 1903 he was put in charge of the new U.S. Army Signal School being established at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. One of Squier’s responsibilities at the signal school was to keep tabs on advances in aeronautics, which in the conventional military thinking of the time meant lighter-than-air balloons. Squier, though, saw the early promise of another means of flight: the airplane. In January 1906, according to biographers Clark and Ly ons, Squier went to the University Club in New York City to hear a presentation by Alexander Graham Bell, who had become an early advocate of aviation. Bell and Squier discussed the results of Wilbur and Orville Wright’s experimental trials in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Squier then wrote to Greely, his superior, and told him that on his way back to Fort Leavenworth he might pay a visit to the Wrights’ workshop in Dayton, Ohio, though it’s unclear whether he actually did. The following year Squier came to Washington, D.C., to become the chief assistant to Brigadier General James Allen, who was succeeding Greely as the army’s chief signal officer. Possibly with Squier’s lobbying, Allen created a new aeronautical division within the Signal Corps, and assigned Squier to study airplanes, dirigibles, helicopters, and other flying craft. In that job, he drew up the first-ever specifications for a U.S. military airplane, which, when published in December 1907, created a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. “Up to that time,” Flying magazine noted in 1916, “the heavier-than-air machine was considered out of the question as an engine of war.”
“That was bully,” Squier said of his first ride in an airplane with Orville Wright.
On a September day in 1908, in a field at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, a crowd of 5,000 spectators gazed into the sky in wonder. The object of their rapt fascination was the Wright Military Flyer, a two-seater biplane that the U.S. War Department was looking to acquire from aviation pioneers Wilbur and Orville Wright as the nation’s first military aircraft.
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As the plane piloted by Orville Wright circled the field, Squier—his bald scalp concealed under a leather automobile drivers’ cap that he’d chosen for the occasion—sat in the passenger’s seat. He enjoyed a view that up to that point only a few men had ever experienced. After staying aloft for 10 minutes—a new world record for a two-person flight—Wright landed, and Squier was surrounded by a gaggle of reporters eager to hear about his experience. “That was bully,” Squier said. “I’d have to exhaust the list of descriptive adjectives if I started out to describe the sensations of the trip.” Fortunately for Squier, he wasn’t in the air with Wright five days later, when the aircraft malfunctioned and crashed. Wright broke a leg and some ribs, and his passenger, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, fractured his skull. Selfridge was the first person to die in an airplane crash. Despite the tragedy, U.S. Army officials were sufficiently impressed with the airplane that they allowed the Wright brothers to eventually resume their trials, and the army paid them a $5,000 bonus on their $25,000 contract after they managed to exceed the target speed of 40 miles per hour it specified. The trials were just the start of Squier’s decadelong effort to build military aviation from an experimental curiosity into an integral part of the nation’s war-fighting capacity, with thousands of pilots and planes. In December 1908, addressing the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in New York City, Squier predicted that in the future, wars would be fought in the skies as well as on the ground. As he saw it, air combat would make borders essentially obsolete because there would be no way to prevent aircraft from invading a country. “We may, therefore, regard the advent of military ships in the air as, in a measure, obliterating present national frontiers in conducting military operations,” Squier told his audience. But even as he was trying to advance military aviation, Squier was also working on a communications breakthrough. In 1910 he developed a technology called multiplexing, which enabled a telephone line to carry multiple signals of different frequencies—in a sense, radio over wires. In September of that year he demonstrated the concept to Allen by transmitting multiple messages from the Signal Corps laboratory in Washington, D.C., to another facility at the Bureau of Standards, seven miles away, on a line that was also transmitting a phone call. Squier’s invention, to which he gave the odd name “wired wireless,” made headlines. “This army scientist has shown how not only to make one wire do the work of many, but to do things no wire ever did before,” John Elfreth Watkins Jr., a civil engineer and futurist, observed in a long profile of Squier that appeared in the Washington Evening Star and other newspa-
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GEORGE OWEN SQUIER
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Clockwise from top left: Aviation pioneer Orville Wright; the inaugural flight of the Wright Military Flyer at Fort Myer, Virginia, in 1909; SC-1, the first Signal Corps airship, in 1908; Dr. Leon L. Watters and two other men tend to U.S. Army lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, the first person to die in an airplane crash.
pers in 1911. Watkins, who interviewed Squier at his desk in the War Department in Washington, marveled at how such a bland-looking, seemingly unexceptional man could turn out to be such a genius. “One could go through the building and pick out a score of hundred-dollar-amonth clerks who looked more like either the savant or the man at arms,” he wrote. When Watkins asked Squier whether it would be practical to stretch a telephone wire between Washington and San Francisco and transmit a dozen conversations simultaneously, Squier upped the ante. “Not only that,” Squier explained to Watkins, “but conversations with Cincinnati, St. Louis, Denver, and all intermediate points.”
Squier’s breakthrough also had enormous military importance, because it enabled multiple parts of an army to communicate with headquarters all at once over a telephone line, rather than having to rely on wireless communications that enemies could eavesdrop on. Allen quickly moved to take charge of the invention and supervise the patent process. As a result, Squier’s patents were all “dedicated to the public,” which enabled not only the U.S. military but anyone else to use the technology without paying Squier at all. Though Squier probably didn’t have a choice in the matter, newspaper articles of the time portrayed the opensourcing of his invention as a sign of his selflessness. “His invention is revolutionizing the existing system of tele-
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GEORGE OWEN SQUIER
In 1912 Squier was sent to London to serve as a military attaché at the U.S. embassy there. During that time, he became friends with Lord Horatio Kitchener, the British secretary of state for war, who secretly gave Squier permission to observe British forces on the Western Front, outfitting him in a British officer’s uniform. Squier sent a detailed report on the war to the U.S. War Department. One of his particular focuses was the use of airplanes by Allied and German forces—not just for reconnaissance, but for attacking the enemy. In May 1916 Secretary of War Newton D. Baker brought Squier back from London to head the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps, which had been struggling and was racked with internal conflict. It was a temporary post for Squier, whom Baker had already slated to replace Brigadier General George Scriven as the army’s chief signal officer the following year. But it gave Squier a chance to observe firsthand the woeful state of aviation in the army, which had fewer than two dozen trained pilots and not a single unit ready for action. He knew that the United States was now lagging badly behind in deploying airplanes for military purposes. Squier quickly seized the opportunity to fix the problem. In January 1917 he accompanied Scriven to an appropriations hearing held by the U.S. House Committee on Military Affairs. Scriven quickly came under sharp questioning about how airplanes were being used in the war in Europe and why the army hadn’t developed the capability to direct field artillery fire from the air, as the European combatants did. “How does it happen that we have not done any of that?” Representative Julius Kahn, a California Republican, demanded to know. After Scriven struggled to answer questions about the cost and durability of airplanes, Squier took over. He asked the committee to go into an executive session closed to the public, so he
In 1916 Squier returned from London to head the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps.
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could share with them what he had seen on his secret visits to the front. Squier then proceeded to describe British air squadrons in detail, down to the typical number of flight hours that a British aircraft engine lasted. He also explained what it would take to suitably equip a U.S. airplane and provided a vivid description of aerial combat, based on his experience flying as an observer with the British. “It would appear that what we want is not a large gun with a few number of rounds, but a small-caliber gun with a large number of rounds,” Squier told members of the House committee. “You get the upper berth and come at the opponent by gravity, shooting through the propeller, and you only have a very short time in which to shoot. You then go by him at the rate of a hundred miles an hour, and you come back again, if you are faster than he is.” The Capitol Hill lawmakers were fascinated. “How close do these machines come to each other in a fight?” one of them asked. “They have actually rammed each other,” Squier said. “It is a most thrilling thing to watch them.” Squier confidently predicted that after the war was over, nations would see airpower as so important that they would continue to build air forces in peacetime, even as their armies shrank in size. “They realize it is an asset that is going to remain,” he told the members of the committee. When the United States entered World War I several months later, it had only “a handful of fliers and very few training planes,” Squier recalled in a 1931 newspaper article. By then he was the head of the Signal Corps, and he directed his staff to develop a plan for a massive U.S. military aviation program, with thousands of planes. In promoting the buildup, he wasn’t above resorting to drama. In a June 1917 press release, for example, Squier urged Americans to support construction of what he called “an army in the air.” “Sweep the Germans from the sky, blind the Prussian cannons, and the time would be right to release an enormous flock of flying fighters to raid and destroy military cams, ammunition depots, military establishments of all kinds,” Squier proclaimed. “The firing upon troops by machine guns from airplanes is becoming commoner and more accurate. Once given an upper hand, the flying machines become frightful engines of destruction.” While he conceded that “six hundred million dollars looks like a lot of money,” he assured taxpayers that “considered in terms of winning the war, it is a positive bargain.” When War Department officials balked at financing what Squier wanted, he boldly bypassed the General Staff and took the proposal directly to Secretary of War Baker, who approved it and sent it to President Woodrow Wilson.
FROM LEFT: PHOTOQUEST, JHU SHERIDAN LIBRARIES (GETTY IMAGES (2)
phone communication,” the Washington Post noted in 1914. “He might have sold it for a vast sum, but he gave it to the world for nothing.” Years later, Squier would come to regret having given up control of his patents—and therefore their money-making opportunities. But he also took pride in the role that he’d played in improving global communications. As he told Flying magazine in 1916, he envisioned a world in which more efficient and less expensive messages would help promote “better understanding between the people of the different countries of the world.”
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Muzak operators use switchboard-like equipment to monitor background music programs and make adjustments from the company’s master control room in New York City in 1950; Squier in 1930.
Congress eventually provided $640 million—more than $13 billion in today’s dollars—to finance the massive effort. Special railroad lines were built to the Pacific Northwest to transport the spruce needed to build planes in the United States and Europe, and millions of yards of linen fabric were woven. Some 108,000 acres of castor bean seeds were planted to produce high-grade lubricant oil. Squier created a pair of military laboratories—one at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, for radio research and the other at Langley Field, Virginia, for aviation. When the war ended, the U.S. Army—aided by the acquisition of nearly 5,000 Frenchmade airplanes and almost 260 from the British, as well as more than 1,200 built in the United States—had nearly 100 aircraft squadrons in Europe. By the time Squier retired from the military as a major general in December 1923, the U.S. Army’s aviation efforts had grown under his supervision to a massive operation with 12,000 officers and 135,000 men. In retirement, the unmarried Squier wintered in Florida and split the rest of the year between Washington and his hometown in Michigan, where he started another, notfor-profit project. When he got the nostalgic urge to visit the old swimming hole in the woods that he’d enjoyed as a boy, he discovered to his dismay that the site had been turned into a dump. Squier bought the 200-acre tract, cleaned it up, and let the woods grow back to its natural state. He then founded the Dryden Community Club, a nature preserve and country club that anyone could enjoy, free of charge. “It is a haven for those who seek beauty, rest and peace, full of surprises such as woodland trails, min-
eral springs, waterfalls, lagoons and rustic retreats,” noted a 1934 article in the Detroit Free Press. (Today the recreational area is known as General Squier Memorial Park.) Squier spent much of his remaining years trying to make money from multiplex communications. But he faced a big obstacle, since the army had required him to make his patents “dedicated to the public” and American Telephone & Telegraph Company had begun using his invention in its telephone system. Squier didn’t mind the government using the technology he had created, but it irked him that private companies were profiting from it instead of him. In March 1922, as Squier was finishing his army career, he filed a lawsuit against AT&T in federal court in New York, arguing that “public” meant anyone doing government work. The giant company disagreed, also arguing that in any case, it hadn’t infringed on his patents because his invention was being used in combination with scores of other innovations the company had purchased. “By itself, it is argued,” the New York Times wrote of AT&T’s filings in the case, “General Squier’s invention would be worthless to the company.” Squier, meanwhile, moved ahead with a scheme to use his technology in an entirely new way. Instead of telephone
In March 1922, as Squier was finishing his army career, he sued AT&T in federal court.
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A recruiting poster for the U.S. Army Signal Corps produced during World War I shows three soldiers using various forms of communications and urges potential enlistees to “get in now.” conversations, he wanted to transmit live and recorded music through wires into subscribers’ homes for a few dollars a month—sort of the 1920s equivalent of modern music-streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify. Squier licensed his inventions to the North American Company, a public utility, which formed a company called Wired Radio with the idea of using its power lines as the network. Wired Radio started test-marketing the service to customers in the New York City borough of Staten Island. Wired Radio’s musical programs were transmitted into homes through a small black box that a customer plugged into an electrical socket, like any other appliance. A February 1924 wire-service feature described how a customer might use it: “To ‘tune in,’ he simply turns on his electric light switch and turns the dial until the sounds are audible. Either through headphones or a loudspeaker, he hears orchestra music, lectures, songs, news dispatches and all the other features that make up a complete radio program.” Seven months later, though, Squier’s effort to monetize
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his ingenuity suffered a major setback when a federal judge ruled that AT&T hadn’t infringed his patents because the phrase “dedicated to the public” embraced private companies. The following May, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling. “We are satisfied that the plaintiff wished to be generous in 1911,” the appellate judges wrote. “That he now regrets that generous emotion is immaterial.” Nevertheless, Squier persevered in the years following his setback in the courts, pushing his dream of making a fortune from wired radio. In an interview for a 1927 story in the New York Times, he described an expanded business plan in which music and other programming would be piped into customers’ homes through power lines and possibly telephone wires as well. He said the “monophone,” as he had taken to calling the technology, was superior to broadcast radio because signals wouldn’t be blocked or distorted by steel buildings in big cities. “I don’t believe there will ever be any trouble in collecting revenue from broadcasting of a high-standard program which is delivered by wire to the home,” Squier told the Times. But Squier never lived to see his music service become a success. When he died of pneumonia at George Washington Hospital in Washington, D.C., in 1934, his obituary in the Washington Star didn’t even mention Wired Radio or the monophone. Later that same year the company, apparently drawing inspiration from the success of Kodak, the camera and film manufacturer, officially adopted a catchier brand name: Muzak. (By some accounts, Squier himself came up with the name.) The first Muzak recording, made in 1934, was a medley of “Whispering,” “Do You Ever Think of Me?,” and “Here in My Arms” by Sam Lanin and His Orchestra. Over time, Muzak switched from the home consumer market to providing background music for hotels, restaurants, stores, and, most famously, elevators. Muzak was sold in 2011 and has been absorbed by Mood Media, a service that provides licensed music to businesses. Though Squier never made the fortune that he hoped for from his inventions, he profoundly changed the U.S. military by helping to establish science and research and development as an important part of its mission. In doing that, Squier exemplified the stubbornly iconoclastic, compulsively creative spirit displayed by so many great American inventors. “I never started anything in my life that somebody didn’t tell me it couldn’t be done,” he explained to Boys’ Life in 1922. “I’m used to it now. I’ve almost come to think it’s a healthy sign. So I listen politely—and then go ahead.” MHQ Patrick J. Kiger is an award-winning journalist who has written for GQ, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Urban Land, and other publications.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
GEORGE OWEN SQUIER
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CULTURE OF WAR CLASSIC
DISPATCHES 78 WAR STORIES 82 BIG SHOTS 87 ARTISTS 88 REVIEWS 92
NATIONAL SEPTEMBER 11 MEMORIAL & MUSEUM
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Robert Gschaar was working on the 92nd floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City when five terrorist hijackers crashed United Airlines Flight 175 into the side of the skyscraper. Just moments earlier Gschaar, who had recently joined Aon Corporation as an insurance underwriter, had told his wife in a telephone call that he was safe and awaiting evacuation instructions. “I love you and I’ll call you,” he told her. Gschaar, 55, did not make it out alive. His wedding ring was later recovered from the wreckage and now is part of a permanent exhibition of artifacts at the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City.
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CLASSIC DISPATCHES
‘GUEST’ OF THE GESTAPO Richard C. Hottelet was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1917, to German-immigrant parents who spoke no English at home. After he graduated from Brooklyn College in 1937, Hottelet, who was fluent in German but had no clear career plans, enrolled at the University of Berlin. But an encounter with a brownshirted professor led him to drop out of school, and in 1938, at age 23, he took a job in the Berlin bureau of United Press, the Associated Press’s scrappy competitor, where he, like other “Unipressers” of the era, toiled under the slogan “Get it first, but FIRST, get it RIGHT.” One morning in 1941, the Gestapo arrested Hottelet on “suspicion of espionage” for allegedly passing information to his girlfriend, an employee of the British Embassy. He was imprisoned for four months and then released as part of a U.S.-German exchange. On returning to the United States, Hottelet joined the newly created Office of War Information, but in 1944 Edward R. Murrow, the legendary broadcast journalist and war correspondent, recruited Hottelet for his team at CBS News. Hottelet would go on to broadcast the first eyewitness account of the Allied invasion of Normandy and to cover Operation Varsity, the huge Allied airborne offensive across the Rhine River, during which he was forced to parachute to safety out of a plane shot down by enemy fire. He was the first U.S. war correspondent to enter Germany and reported from the newly liberated Buchenwald death camp, which he described as “a striking catalogue of inhumanity.” In 1960 Hottelet became CBS’s correspondent for the United Nations, and for 25 years he appeared regularly on such CBS News programs as the CBS Evening News and Face the Nation. After leaving CBS he wrote commentary pieces for the Christian Science Monitor and became a guest lecturer at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He died in 2014 at age 97, the last surviving member of the “Murrow Boys.” On Sunday, August 3, 1941, dozens of newspapers across the country published the narrative that follows: Hottelet’s first-person account of his imprisonment by the Nazis earlier that year.
“Despite my repeated questions they refused to say why I was wanted.”
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NEW YORK, Aug. 2—The doorbell of my Berlin apartment rang at 7 a.m. on Saturday morning, March 15. Instead of the plumber I expected to fix a defective sink, I found seven men in the hallway. They crowded in immediately, showed their little identification tabs as members of the secret police and told me to get dressed and come with them. They watched every movement as I washed and dressed. Despite my repeated questions they refused to say why I was wanted. Several of them took me downstairs while the others started to go through my desk and personal belongings. Although my roommate, Joseph W. Grigg Jr., appeared while they were taking me out, I wasn’t supposed to speak to him. I was taken by car to the old police presidium at the Alexanderplatz in the middle of Berlin. A member of the secret police there informed me I would have to be their “guest” probably over the week-end, until certain papers arrived from another department. I was finger-printed and photographed. Then I was placed in a cell in the police prison in the same building. My first prison lunch consisted of sour cabbage. That evening I was called up for preliminary questioning. Information as to why I was being held was refused. I also was refused reading matter, and my eyeglasses were taken from me “to prevent suicide.” My first formal questioning did not take place until the following Tuesday. Those first three days were the hardest and longest I ever spent. I spent the time looking out the window, which I could just do by standing on the one stool in the cell, and reading the various inscriptions on the wall. In addition to the stool, the only furnishings were a cot with spring mattress, a small shelf and a toilet in the corner. Obviously various foreigners had occupied the cell before me. Someone, probably an Englishman, had scratched into the wall: “Home, Sweet Home, dear mother where are you?” There were also inscriptions in Russian, and someone had scratched “Vive L’Internationale” on the wall. I was not allowed to sit or lie on the cot from 6:30 in the morning until 4:30 in the evening. The weather was cold and the heating inadequate. I wore the hat, overcoat and gloves in which I had been taken to Alexanderplatz. The prison windows were not blacked out, therefore no artificial light ever was turned on.
OPPOSITE, TOP: PAUL POPPER/POPPERFOTO (GETTY IMAGES); BELOW: SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)
By Richard C. Hottelet
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From top: CBS News reporter Richard C. Hottelet was arrested by the Gestapo in March 1941 and imprisoned for four months; a 1936 aerial view of the Alexanderplatz prison in Berlin.
OPPOSITE, TOP: PAUL POPPER/POPPERFOTO (GETTY IMAGES); BELOW: SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)
When I flatly denied any espionage activity, they looked at me meanfully and said: “We want to get to the bottom of this and when we want information we get it. We are far too decent to use the brutal methods of the American police, but we can try klieg lights if we can’t get answers any other way.” I was questioned sometimes twice a day, one session lasting until after 10 o’clock at night during that first week. By the end of the week the friendliness of the secret police had changed.
In this prison the daily breakfast was a piece of dry black bread and ersatz coffee. Lunch consisted of bean, noodle or barley soup or a sour brew of dehydrated carrots. Dinner was again dry black bread and ersatz coffee, with a piece of cheese added as a special treat on Saturdays only. Occasionally jam or margarine was spread on the bread. The prison was very old and the cell was very dusty. But since it had been fumigated recently I had no vermin. Arrested on Saturday I was finally told on Tuesday, at my first formal hearing, that I was being held on “suspicion of espionage.” The secret police were very friendly and stated: “We are your friends and want to help you.”
Klieg lights were referred to more frequently and I was told once: “You won’t feel quite so confident when you are sweating under the lights and we throw questions at you.” During that first week I had a visit from a member of the American consulate in Berlin. I also received a suitcase full of clean clothes. For some unexplained reason the soap, tooth brush and tooth paste sent with the clothes were not given to me. During all the weeks I spent in Alexanderplatz I had only two books to read, sent by friends. I was alone in a five foot by ten foot cell. I had no work of any kind to do. Most prisoners had had permission to purchase daily newspapers. This permission was denied me, but I managed occasionally to obtain a newspaper. Numerous nationalities were represented in the prison. There were Russians Czechs, Poles, Japanese and at least one Italian. There also were several Catholic priests. During the first few weeks all of us were taken out of our cells half an hour weekly for exercise. This consisted of marching and countermarching in a circle around a small courtyard which measured about 15 by 40 yards. As the weather improved we were led out for two half hour periods weekly. Theoretically we were allowed to bathe every two weeks, but in the seven weeks I was there I had only one bath, two minutes under a hot shower. We could, however, occasionally, receive pails of hot water to wash ourselves in the cell. Sessions with the secret police became less and less frequent during the last few weeks in Alexanderplatz. They never mistreated me. But shortly before I was transferred to another prison I was told flatly: “You will sit until you confess. You will soften up. You’ll be soft as butter. We’ve got plenty of time.” On May 31 was transferred to the so-called investigation prison, Moabit, in another section of Berlin. It’s a four-story building housing about 2000 prisoners, including women.
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RICHARD C. HOTTELET
We were given “work” at Moabit in our cells. This consisted of pasting together paper and cellophane bags, pasting tissue paper over the windows of doll houses and twirling little throwaways for the Reich lottery. We were paid for this work, and at the end of my nine weeks at Moabit I collected my full salary of 4 1/2 marks ($1.80). Church services were held every two weeks, but those of us in solitary confinement were allowed to attend only once a month. I was allowed to hear mass in the prison chapel with only one or two other prisoners. The regular services were barred to us. The day’s routine consisted of getting up at five minutes to 7, washing, eating breakfast and then being taken out for a half hour’s exercise, every day except Sunday. Exercise was taken in a courtyard which had trees, grass, flowers and growing vegetables. Half the time we marched in circles, the other half we did calisthenics. We were given regular army marching orders, and I had to learn when the command “Forward, march” was given to goosestep the first three paces. Most of the prisoners had had military training and the goosestep went off rather well. After exercise we were marched back to our cells and locked in for the rest of the day. Lunch was at 11:30, supper at 4:30. As long as we had “work” to do in our cells we were not allowed to read until supper. Compulsory bedtime was 9 p.m., but we could retire any time after 4:30.
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The monotony of the routine was depressing. Anything out of the ordinary, unlocking of the cell door for completed paper bags to be taken out and new work brought in, was a distinctively pleasurable event. Meal time and exercise time were marked by strokes on a bell. The entire day’s routine was carried out in strict, almost military fashion. Whenever a guard unlocked the cell we had to jump to the window, close it, stand at attention, give our cell number and whether we were in jail for investigation or serving a sentence. The guards were strict, but most of them not unfriendly. The hard wood bed with its straw mattress and blanket had to be arranged in a certain way. If not made up properly more than likely upon returning from the exercise period in the morning one would find everything in wild disarray where it had been thrown by the inspecting guard. There were periodic inspections of the wash basin and bowl, cup, knife and spoon, and the zinc wash basin had to be polished with sand until it shone. Twice daily we received half gallon earthenware jugs full of water. With that we had to wash ourselves, our dishes after each meal, and flush the ancient contrivance which was the toilet. Once weekly we were given half a pail of water with which to wash the cells. Prisoners with money deposited in the prison finance office could purchase various necessities from the prison canteen—tooth paste, tooth brushes, combs, ink, writing papers, shoe polish. Shoes had to be kept polished. Prisoners were allowed to write one letter every two weeks and receive them at the same intervals. Theoretically, we were to be shaved twice weekly by prisoners who were barbers in civil life. But often the guard, seemingly in a hurry, would open the door, glance in a moment and say: “You don’t look as if you needed a shave, and, anyway, you’re not going anywhere.” He would wink and shut the door. Hair was cut at the discretion of the barber, and with little regard for the esthetic considerations. It was either clipped off almost completely or in a circle around the back and sides of the head, leaving the top completely untouched. Shortly before I was released I requested extra rations, because I had lost 15 pounds since being arrested. I was taken to the doctor, who politely but firmly refused, on the grounds that I had regained a few pounds since my transfer to Moabit. Talking with other prisoners though the window or exchanging books and newspapers were punished by periods in a special cell in the cellar where the only food was bread and water and the only cot a bare board. Nevertheless I heard a good deal of whistling and cat-calling and even extended conversations between prisoners.
LEFT: AKG-IMAGES; RIGHT: IMAGNO (GETTY IMAGES)
Here the prison routine was much stricter. There was no possibility of clandestine exchanges with other prisoners. We were not allowed to smoke. But the food was better. We occasionally received a piece of sausage and on Sundays usually a piece of salt pork weighing about two ounces and potatoes with sauce. Once or twice there was a piece of fish or an egg. Otherwise the compositions of the meals was much the same as at the Alexanderplatz. But we did have salt at Moabit, to season the soup, which needed it. The trusties who handed us our food as we stood in the doorways of our solitary cells frequently gave me large numbers of potatoes which I would save and eat over a period of several days, when I felt particularly hungry. After four weeks at Moabit I was allowed to purchase a daily newspaper and also to receive two books weekly from the prison library. The guards automatically brought me English books but the selection was not always happy. One was The Fuel Problem of Canada. Another was a volume of British verse for young women published in 1867. I received the first volume of Westward Ho, but the library lacked the second volume. Apart from that I read Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott and a volume of Robert Burns’ poetry. By far the most interesting reading, under the circumstances, was Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, which he wrote while serving a two-year prison sentence in England.
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“You will sit until you confess,” Hottelet was told before his transfer to Moabit prison in Berlin (left). “You will soften up. You’ll be soft as butter. We’ve got plenty of time.” A cell at Moabit (right), as photographed in 1936.
LEFT: AKG-IMAGES; RIGHT: IMAGNO (GETTY IMAGES)
Some prisoners took special delight in whistling tunes out of the window, and I heard the “Internationale,” which frequently was taken up by a chorus, “Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line,” and American dance tunes like “Melancholy Baby,” and “Night and Day.” American tunes were by far the most popular. We had several air raids while I was in prison. At the Alexanderplatz prison we were allowed to remain in bed during a raid. But in Moabit we were required to get up, dress and sit under the window to avoid flak (antiaircraft) splinters. One bomb fell within a few hundred yards of the Alexanderplatz prison, but it was a dud and was detonated several days later. At Moabit we were not allowed to receive any packages of food, clothing or cigarettes from the outside. But when an American vice consul visited me a few days before my release, he brought cigarettes and some chocolate. I was not allowed to take them to my cell, so I smoked furiously during the visit and munched chocolate. As a special favor, a prison official had me called from my cell two days later to eat the rest of the chocolate and smoke a few more cigarettes. But visits with consular officials, the first during my first week in Alexanderplatz, the second during my last week in Moabit, took place in the presence of German officials and we were allowed to talk nothing but German and were forbidden to discuss my “case.” The only other outsider I saw during my four months in prison was an attorney retained by the United Press and the American Embassy, who called twice. My repeated requests to see a consular official or some of my friends either were never answered or deferred indef-
initely. I was told once that the American Embassy had “dropped me.” At the Alexanderplatz none of my numerous requests to receive visits, to be allowed to receive food, cigarettes and reading matter, ever seemed to reach the authorities. The day I was transferred to Moabit one of the Gestapo casually remarked: “Just this morning we received a number of your requests which seem to have been stuck somewhere and didn’t reach us until just now. Now it’s too late to do anything about them.” My release on July 8 was a complete surprise to me. The guard unlocked the cell door and told me to pack my things. I asked whether I was being released or transferred to another prison. He said I was to be released, but I couldn’t believe it. I had been “released” from Alexanderplatz only to be transferred to Moabit, and I thought the same procedure might be followed again. I collected my belongings, was locked in a transport cell for about an hour, then given my money and valuables and handed over to a representative of the American Embassy. Only then did I begin to believe I was being released. From July 8 to 17, when I left Berlin, I lived “incognito” with a representative of the American Embassy, meantime collecting and packing my personal effects from my apartment. From the date of my release I had no more contact with the secret police or any other German officials. I crossed the Franco-Spanish border on July 23. But the real feeling of freedom came as I sighted the New York sky line. Now I know doors which I can open myself are something to be thankful for and not to be taken for granted. MHQ
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IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS
Lieutenant Lionel “Buster” Crabb, the Royal Navy’s top diver, catches a smoke at Gibraltar in April 1944.
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WAR STORIES
THE FROGMAN WHO VANISHED
Lionel “Buster” Crabb, one of the Royal Navy’s most celebrated divers, disappeared while spying on a Russian warship in 1956. By Brendan Sainsbury
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IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS
ust before 6 o’clock on the morning of April 19, 1956, Lionel Crabb, an expert British diver, quietly left the Sally Port Inn in Portsmouth, England, accompanied by his minder, a tall, slim American going by the name of Bernard Smith. The two men made their way to HMS Vernon, a red-brick dockside compound of the Royal Navy. There, in the crisp morning mist, they met up with Lieutenant George Franklin, a Royal Navy diving officer who, two nights earlier, had agreed to act as Crabb’s helper and dresser in a clandestine mission arranged by MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service. Ostensibly, the plan was for Crabb to dive beneath the Soviet gun cruiser Ordzhonikidze, which was temporarily docked in Portsmouth Harbor, to photograph its keel, propellers, and rudder. The British, then embroiled in the uneasy espionage of the Cold War, were keen to understand the underwater workings of Soviet vessels and the antisubmarine warfare equipment they carried beneath their hulls. The Ordzhonikidze had arrived in Portsmouth Harbor a day earlier amid much fanfare. On board were the two most important men in the Soviet Union: Nikolai Bulganin, the pragmatic, smartly dressed premier and minister of defense, and Nikita Khrushchev, the energetic, unkempt first secretary of the Communist Party. They had come to the UK on a goodwill mission as guests of the British government. Eager to deflect attention from a crisis that was brewing ominously with Egypt in the Suez Canal region, Anthony Eden, Britain’s prime minister, was on a Cold War charm offensive. The last thing he wanted was scandal. Both of the UK’s security agencies, MI5 and MI6, were told that spying was at least temporarily out of the question. Someone, though, clearly hadn’t gotten the message. With two policemen escorting them, Franklin and Crabb made their way to the dockside, where a small launch had been procured to get them to within easy swimming distance of the Ordzhonikidze. As Franklin adjusted Crabb’s Heinke frogman suit, the diver settled his nerves with a cigarette on the gunwale before hitting the water just before 7 o’clock and descending into the murky depths. Despite
his exemplary wartime service, Crabb, at 47, was not a fit man. A prodigious drinker and smoker, he had supposedly downed five double whiskies the night before on a boozy pub crawl in the nearby town of Havant—not exactly the ideal preparation for such a high-stakes mission. Crabb surfaced less than 20 minutes later, complaining about the cold and lack of visibility, and asked for an extra pound of ballast. Franklin obliged, attaching a weight to Crabb’s equipment. After checking Crabb’s oxygen levels, Franklin watched him resubmerge and sat down again to wait. And wait. And wait. Around 9:15 a.m., Franklin realized that something was amiss. Nearly two hours had passed since Crabb had disappeared with little more than 90 minutes of oxygen in his tank. After making a cursory search of the harbor, he aborted the mission and alerted Smith, who was waiting on the shoreline, that Crabb was missing. There was no alarm or police search. Instead, Smith, who had booked into the Sally Port Inn with Crabb two days earlier, coolly paid the bill and hastened back to London, taking the diver’s personal effects with him. Crabb was never seen again. Thus began a 65-year mystery surrounding the disappearance of Lionel “Buster” Crabb, a real-life spy story filled with intrigue and conjecture that has given birth to assorted conspiracy theories and inspired a host of books. Six decades after the events, numerous questions re main unanswered. What was Crabb doing on that fateful day? Who was he working for? What happened to him? And why has the British government still not declassified important evidence relating to the case?
Crabb had supposedly downed five double whiskies the night before.
Maverick, loose cannon, and nonconformist are all words that have been used to describe Lionel Kenneth Phillip Crabb. Born in London in 1909, Crabb had a modest and unremarkable upbringing. Diving wasn’t a natural calling.
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Even at the height of his wartime heroics, Crabb was nei ther a star athlete nor a strong swimmer. But he was brave, audacious, and adaptable in difficult situations. After train ing as a navy cadet, he became a merchant seaman, trans ferring at the beginning of World War II to the Royal Navy, where he gravitated toward the highly specialized field of bomb disposal. Crabb was based in Gibraltar in 1942, when Italian sab oteurs were causing havoc by fixing limpet mines to the hulls of British ships. It was Crabb’s job to defuse the explo sives. He took to the task with casual aplomb, learning to dive with equipment salvaged from two deceased Italian frogmen. In 1945 he transferred to northern Italy, where he was assigned to clear Venice Harbor of unexploded Ger man ordnance, and then to the Middle East, where Zionist rebels were attacking British ships. It was difficult and dan gerous work but, spurred by a vigorous sense of patriotism and duty, Crabb quickly made a name for himself. By the mid-1950s, Commander Crabb was a war hero with an Order of the British Empire and a George Medal. He had even acquired the sobriquet “Buster” after Buster Crabbe, the Hollywood actor and former Olympic swim mer. Something of an eccentric, he favored tweed suits, wore a monocle in the style of an English gent, and bran dished a silver swordstick with a crab emblazoned on its handle. Rumors swirled that he had a rubber fetish and liked to sit down to dinner in his frogman suit. Despite his dandy demeanor, Crabb battled depression, an illness he buried in drink, gambling, and womanizing. After retiring from the Royal Navy in 1947, Crabb worked as a diver for hire, exploring sunken Spanish galleons off the Scottish coast and running a rescue mission to a stricken sub marine in the Thames Estu ary in 1950. He was probably recruited by MI6 in the mid-1950s, and in 1955 the Admiralty hired him to dive beneath the Soviet cruiser Sverdlov when it was docked in Portsmouth to look at its distinctive turning mecha nism. The mission went without major incident, but next time he wouldn’t be so lucky.
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Crabb battled depression, an illness he buried in drink, gambling, and womanizing.
ning, Admiral Pavel G. Kotov, the Soviet ship’s commander, mentioned the sighting to Admiral Sir Robert Lindsay Burnett, his counterpart at the Portsmouth Naval Base. He wasn’t making an official complaint (as yet) but, puzzled by the presence of a mysterious frogman near his ship, Kotov wanted to know what was going on. Fearing repercussions while the Soviet delegation was still in Britain on its goodwill mission, MI6 went straight into damage control mode, hurriedly preparing an elabo rate coverup. On April 21, 1956, a police officer went to the reception desk of the Sally Port Inn and ripped three pages out of its guest registry, expunging any record that the diver and his handler, the mysterious Mr. Smith, had stayed there. Then, on April 27, the Admiralty put out a statement claiming that Crabb had gone missing after taking part in trials of underwater equipment in Stokes Bay, several miles west of Portsmouth’s docks. It was a thinly veiled lie. For the outside world, these details clearly weren’t adding up. Crabb’s family was anxious for information about Crabb, and journalists thought they smelled a rat. Prime Minister Anthony Eden, meanwhile, was seeth ing. Unaware of MI6’s involvement in the Crabb affair until May 4, he was forced to field awkward questions in Parlia ment while parrying inquiries from an increasingly suspi cious press. Disclosing the nature of Crabb’s disappearance was not in the public interest, he claimed: MI6’s action had transpired “without the authority or the knowledge of Her Majesty’s Ministers,” and “appropriate disciplinary steps” would be taken. While Eden’s public demeanor was mea sured, his private mood was apoplectic. The secret service had explicitly gone against his orders. Heads would roll, including that of MI6 chief John Sinclair, who was promptly forced to retire. The press had a field day. The Russians weren’t happy either. Pravda, the official Communist Party daily, called the episode “a shameful op eration of underwater espionage directed against those who come to the country on a friendly visit.” The Soviet government filed an official protest, and Britain was forced to make a humiliating apology. Eden’s Cold War bridge building had been disrupted by an earthquake.
When the dust had settled in Portsmouth Harbor on that chilly April day in 1956, it became clear that Lieutenant Franklin may not have been the last person to see Crabb alive. At around 8 o’clock the same morning, three Russian seamen allegedly spotted a diver in the water alongside the Ordzhonikidze. Over an after-dinner coffee later that eve
As time passed, relations healed. Eden resigned over the Suez debacle in January 1957, to be replaced by Harold Macmillan. Interest in the Crabb affair seemed to be on the wane when, in June 1957, a fisherman named John Randall found a headless, handless corpse in a Heinke diving suit entangled in his fishing nets in Chichester Harbor—eight miles east of Portsmouth’s dockyard. Rather than ending the debate, the incident served to intensify it. Lacking es sential body parts, the corpse proved difficult to identify. Neither Crabb’s mother nor his wartime diving partner,
PA IMAGES (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)
LIONEL CRABB
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PA IMAGES (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)
Crowds watch the Soviet gun cruiser Ordzhonikidze arrive in the harbor at Portsmouth, England, in April 1956 with Marshal Nikolai Bulganin and Communist Party chief Nikita Kruschchev on board.
Sydney Knowles, could categorically say it was Crabb. Notwithstanding, the coroner ultimately declared that there was enough evidence to suggest the body was Crabb’s. Some believed him; many didn’t. The remains were laid to rest in Milton Cemetery in Portsmouth, although Crabb’s mother still refused to say they were her son’s. While the discovery of a corpse ensured that the celebrated commander received a proper burial, it didn’t snuff out the theories about his disappearance, which were piling up like photofits on a police crime board. The simplest explanation was that Crabb’s death was an accident, the result of an unfortunate equipment mishap or possibly a heart attack. The wheezing middle-aged diver was notoriously unfit at the time of the Ordzhonikidze mission, and his affinity for drink and high-tar Turkish cigarettes was well known. This line of reasoning, however, underestimated Crabb’s ability as a frogman and ignored the fact that Portsmouth’s sheltered docks weren’t particularly difficult diving territory for someone of his experience and skill. Additionally, if Crabb had died of natural causes, why the headless corpse, the lack of a proper missing person report, and the intense government coverup?
Another regularly cited theory suggests that Crabb was assassinated by the Russians. This claim was widely propagated in the 1972 book Operation Portland, written by convicted spy Harry Houghton, who purported that Crabb had been taken on board the Ordzhonikidze and killed after being interrogated. A similar, perhaps slightly more credible scenario was advanced in 1990 by Joseph Zwerkin, a former Soviet naval intelligence agent, who maintained that a Russian sniper on the ship’s deck had spotted the frogman in the water and shot him.. In 2007, a 74-year-old retired Russian sailor named Eduard Koltsov came out of the woodwork, declaring on a television documentary that he had cut Crabb’s throat after he saw the diver attaching a mine to the hull of the Ordzhonikidze. The much-belated claim was widely dismissed as far-fetched. The idea that Crabb, with the support of MI6, was trying to blow up a Russian ship on a goodwill mission in British waters made no sense and would have been counterproductive in the extreme. Others have speculated that instead of killing Crabb, the Russians took him—voluntarily or involuntarily— back to the Soviet Union. Cold War spying was at its height in the 1950s. Two British diplomats, Guy Burgess and
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LIONEL CRABB
Donald Maclean, had defected to the Soviet Union several years earlier. It was probable that Crabb had already met others in British spy circles including Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, both of whom were later unmasked as Soviet double agents. In his 1960 book Frogman Extraordinary, J. Bernard Hutton alleged that sources in the USSR had told him that Crabb was working as a diving officer in the Russian navy and that the Russians had dropped an anonymous handless, headless corpse into Chichester Harbor as a cover. The book even included a photograph of a man it claimed was Crabb—alive. This defection story was corroborated by Patricia Rose, Crabb’s fiancée at the time of his disappearance. In a 1974 newspaper article, Rose declared that Crabb had successfully gone to the Soviet Union and was working as a double agent, training Russian frogmen in the Black Sea. She even claimed that Crabb had been in touch with her through intermediaries who had told her that he was homesick. Over time, rumors that Crabb was still alive became as frequent as stories of Elvis sightings. There were reports that
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For 65 years, the Crabb affair has filled newspapers, books, and public debate, but it has yet to deliver an adequate epilogue. Nevertheless, touched by a mixture of heroism and tragedy, it has spawned a lucrative myth. Indeed, the adventurous and sometimes louche life of Crabb, who worked under Ian Fleming in naval intelligence during World War II, is often cited as one of the inspirations for the character of James Bond. His diving exploits were subsequently fictionalized in Fleming’s 1961 novel Thunderball. The trickle of documents released by British authorities over the years has thrown some light on a raft of government blunders, high-level misunderstandings, and messy coverups, but fundamental questions linger: What happened to Crabb on April 19, 1956, and was it really his mutilated body that washed up near Chichester in 1957? The truth, however, could be a long time coming. In 1987, in a mysterious plot twist, the British government added 70 years to its standard 30-year declassification rule on files related to the Crabb affair. For the full story, the world will have to wait at least until 2056. MHQ Brendan Sainsbury, a freelance travel writer, is originally from Hampshire in the United Kingdom and now lives near Vancouver, Canada.
ULLSTEIN BILD DTL (GETTY IMAGES)
As part of his Cold War charm offensive, British prime minister Anthony Eden, flanked by Bulganin (left) and Kruschchev (right), fields questions from reporters as his guests arrive at London’s Victoria Station in April 1956.
he was languishing in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, that he had been tortured and brainwashed, that he was serving in the Soviet navy as Lieutenant Lev Lvovich Korablov. But no solid evidence was ever presented to back up the claims. In 2006, the story took the spotlight off the Russians and aimed it at the British when Crabb’s old diving partner, Sydney Knowles, contacted author Tim Binding, who had written a fictionalized account of the Crabb affair the previous year. Knowles, who had known Crabb since his Gibraltar days, claimed that the Ordzhonikidze mission had been a setup, and that a fellow frogman hired by MI5, the UK’s domestic security agency, had eliminated the diver to prevent him from defecting to the USSR. According to Knowles, Crabb had expressed bitterness about the way the navy had treated him in retirement and had subsequently begun fraternizing with the likes of Anthony Blunt and other Soviet sympathizers. Defection, he implied, had become a serious consideration. Knowles’s allegations, although shocking, were interesting in that they came from someone who was professionally close to Crabb. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to imagine how Crabb, a celebrated war hero who had put his life on the line for his country numerous times, would suddenly flip and contemplate treason. In reality, most of Britain’s Cold War spy ring had been recruited young, when they were still in school, before Joseph Stalin’s grisly crimes had become fully apparent.
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BIG SHOTS
HARRIS & EWING COLLECTION (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
By the time he was sworn in as the U.S. Army’s chief of staff in 1930, Douglas MacArthur was a man of many eccentricities. He fancied a jeweled cigarette holder, cooled himself with a Japanese fan, and often wore a kimono over his uniform while in his office at the War Department. Nearly every day he would have an army driver take him home so that he could have lunch with his ever-watchful mother. He created a public relations staff to burnish his image and took to referring to himself in the third person, as in “MacArthur thinks…” or “MacArthur has decided….” In 1934 MacArthur sued journalists Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen for defamation, demanding $750,000 in damages, but secretly paid $15,000 to settle the case out of court after their lawyers threatened to call Isabel Rosario Cooper, his mistress, as a witness.
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ARTISTS
SCENES FROM THE SOUTH PACIFIC
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n June 17, 1942, the very first edition of Yank, the weekly magazine that the U.S. military published during World War II, rolled off the presses. A gaggle of high-ranking Pentagon officials had come from Washington, D.C., for the launch party in the magazine’s New York City offices, but as the inaugural issue of Yank was passed around, their excitement quickly turned to dismay. Its cover featured a photograph of a grinning GI holding a fistful of dollars in celebration of the recent increase in U.S. Army pay, but in the confusion and haste to get the issue finished, the headline had been changed to read “Why We Fight,” the title of a letter from President Franklin D. Roosevelt that appeared inside. The 50,000 copies that had been printed were hastily removed from circulation. Despite the early hiccup, Yank would become the most widely read and most popular publication in the history of the U.S. Army. By the end of World War II, some 23 editions had been published (1,614 separate issues in all), and at its height, there were printing presses in the United States, Egypt, Japan, Italy, Trinidad, Saipan, and elsewhere. At its peak Yank, which was staffed entirely by enlisted men, had a circulation of 2.6 million and is thought to have been read by 10 million or so service members. Besides extensive news, photos, and illustrations from the battlefronts, Yank had a sports section, “News from Home,” “Mail Call,” letters, cartoons, and, of course, pinups. By the time the last issue of Yank was published in December 1945, the magazine, with a cover price of 5 cents, had generated a profit of $1 million for the War Department. The overall operation was under the command of Colonel Franklin S. Forsberg, who had been a publishing executive before the war; for most of Yank’s existence, its editor in chief was Sergeant Joe McCarthy, a former sportswriter, who introduced the wildly popular weekly pinup feature.
Yank would become the most popular publication in the history of the U.S. Army.
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Yank employed writers and artists in its New York headquarters and at the front. One such artist was Robert Greenhalgh. Born in Chicago in 1915, Greenhalgh had earned a journalism degree from the University of Missouri in 1937 and was living with his parents as he tried to make a name for himself as an illustrator, selling his work to such publications as the Chicago Tribune and Esquire magazine. Then, on July 1, 1941, he was called to service in the second draft. A little more than five months later, he was sitting on his bunk at Camp Wolters, Texas, one Sunday when a sergeant rushed into the barrack block yelling, “They bombed Pearl Harbor—we’re in the war!” Greenhalgh was sent to New York City with the rank of sergeant and assigned to the staff of Yank. Although Greenhalgh was excited to be drawing pictures for the U.S. Army, he felt guilty at times for not being in a combat role. “I felt sometimes apologetic, apologetic because other people had it tougher,” he recalled years later in an interview. “Being in the war, in a war zone, is a whole different ballgame than what we were doing. And nobody kidded themselves about that. And we were soon to find that out, when we were assigned to various places to report the war.” Greenhalgh was assigned to the Pacific theater, where he covered a carrier raid on Wake Island in 1943; U.S. Army operations on Bougainville, New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands, and Guadalcanal in 1944; and the landing on Guam by U.S. Marines the same year. Greenhalgh would spend his days making quick sketches, and in the evenings he would find a quiet spot where he could work up his drawings, in candlelight, so that they could be reproduced in the magazine. All his drawings had to be approved by the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s chief censor, who stamped each piece of paper. In early 1944, Greenhalgh found himself working alongside William Barrett McGurn, a veteran of the New York Herald Tribune, who had been assigned to Yank as its South Pacific correspondent after he was drafted into the army in September 1942. In a February 1944 letter to Art Weithas, Yank’s art director, Greenhalgh noted that the accompanying 15 drawings were for two stories by McGurn on the local indigenous people. “For Mac’s Inquiring Re-
OPPOSITE ILLUSTRATIONS: BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY (2); BOTTOM LEFT: U.S. ARMY
“I tried to reflect the life of a soldier as he was going about his work,” Robert Greenhalgh once said of his drawings for Yank in World War II. By Peter Harrington
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OPPOSITE ILLUSTRATIONS: BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY (2); BOTTOM LEFT: U.S. ARMY
Clockwise from top: Navy air crews relax in the ready room of the aircraft carrier Belleau Wood before a raid on Wake Island in 1943; the view from the corner of the flight deck; Robert Greenhalgh at work. porter type story, I have intended the picture of the two guys in a jeep interviewing the natives and the sketches of the native heads be used together in the story—that is as many of them as you choose.” He went on to point out that the main thing the locals wanted were cans of Spam. At the end of a typewritten list of the drawings Greenhalgh wrote: “Note to Censor: Scenery including a portion of skyline or
installations are not represented as in reality, but are moved about to suit the purpose of the drawing.” (For artists and photographers, making sure that the locations they depicted couldn’t be identified was a constant concern.) Several months earlier, in October 1943, Greenhalgh had been on board the aircraft carrier USS Belleau Wood when it attacked the Japanese airbase on Wake Island. His
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ROBERT GREENHALGH
When the first striking planes came back to the carrier, you could see holes in some of the wings and cowlings. But when the last strike returned, there were no bullet holes, no torn fabric, and the pilots climbed out unhurt. They said they didn’t see a living soul on the island when they flew away for the last time. Our cruisers laid off shore over there and shelled the [Japanese] positions without ceasing until the guns on Wake were silent. On another occasion, Greenhalgh witnessed a returning plane plowing into other planes on the carrier’s flight deck, causing a huge explosion and spewing gasoline all over. He later recalled seeing eight or more men running, on fire like torches. Four of Greenhalgh’s drawings show scenes from this event. Several of these pictures ran in the February 25, 1944, edition of Yank to illustrate an article by McGurn titled “Modern Living on a Beachhead in Bougainville.” Another joint effort by Greenhalgh and McGurn, which appeared in the magazine’s March 24 issue, described and depicted the work of the field artillery on the island and the various artillery spotters. Just off the northern tip of Bougainville in what is now Papua New Guinea lies Green Island, an eightmile-long atoll that the New Zealand Expeditionary Force invaded the following month. Greenhalgh and McGurn once again teamed up to report on the invasion. The cover of the April 21 issue of Yank featured Greenhalgh’s drawing of four New Zealand infantrymen advancing through the jungle, with a large hog in the foreground. (Hogs, the caption noted, “left the underbrush to give the invasion the once-over.”) McGurn was wounded shortly after the second battle of Bougainville in March 1944 when a mortar shell fragment hit him in the chest. When asked which outfit he belonged to, McGurn answered “Yank,” to which a soldier commented, “You guys got a racket.” But working for Yank wasn’t without danger: Four of its correspondents were killed in action during the war, and eight, including McGurn, were wounded.
Greenhalgh saw a returning plane plow into other planes on the carrier’s flight deck.
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The May 19, 1944, issue of Yank featured another article by McGurn, this one about the second battle of Bougainville, accompanied by Greenhalgh’s illustrations. In the fall of 1944, Greenhalgh covered the U.S. Marine Corps’ operations from its landing to the capture of Guam airstrip, and the cover of Yank’s October 6 issue bore the headline “A YANK Artist’s Front-Line Sketches from Guam” to highlight a feature that included eight of his drawings. “Slogging around in the rain and mud,” he wrote, “I got my notes soaking wet and now they are almost obliterated,” Greenhalgh wrote in the text that accompanied his drawings. “Then the transport with my art equipment pulled out. But I found some materials on a flagship, so I was in business again.” One of his sketches for Yank shows four marines searching for a Japanese sniper’s nest. During the fighting on Guam’s Orote Peninsula, Greenhalgh was working with a young Marine Corps press photographer when at one point they became separated. On returning to a safe place after making his sketches, he learned that the photographer had been killed. “It struck me that to be really fair, the war artist should draw only what he has actually seen,” Greenhalgh said years later. “Unfortunately, the war photographer has the extra perilous job of finishing his masterpiece right in the teeth of the battle, as a sort of human tripod, holding his camera in the best and worst of all places.” He also knew Sergeant John Bushemi, a Yank photographer, who was killed on February 19, 1944, while covering the fighting on Enewetak Atoll. Greenhalgh also made sketches at 10,000 feet in a Martin PBM Mariner of the Naval Air Transport Service en route from Honolulu to New Caledonia. Eight of those sketches were reproduced in Yank on November 10, 1944, including a drawing of the “CPO’s bored pooch Brownie” yawning as he looked out of a cabin window. For his efforts depicting the war in the Pacific, Greenhalgh received the Award of Distinctive Merit from the Art Directors Club of New York in 1944. One of his last jobs for Yank was to cover the funeral of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945, after which he was discharged from the army. “I felt pretty lost,” he later recalled. “I was almost afraid to get out of the Army. It seemed to me that was life.” He went on to a successful career as an advertising and editorial artist as well as a television art director for the Young and Rubicam advertising agency in New York City. As a member of the Society of Illustrators, he had several oneman shows. He died at age 102 in October 2017. Greenhalgh acknowledged that his wartime work was “sketchy and loose,” unlike that of Howard Brodie, his Yank colleague, whose artwork, he said, was “completely drawn and sketched out, which he did so beautifully.” Greenhalgh’s nerves always got the upper hand, and he was eager
ILLUSTRATIONS: BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY (4)
drawings were reproduced in Yank on November 19, 1943, with a caption that began: “A YANK staff artist with the Pacific Fleet sketches scenes on an aircraft carrier during one of the most destructive single attacks ever delivered to the [Japanese].” The caption went on to quote Greenhalgh:
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ILLUSTRATIONS: BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY (4)
Clockwise from top left: A jeep passes an MP escorting a Japanese prisoner on Bougainville in 1944; Major General Roy Geiger’s headquarters on Guam; a rainy day at the 37th Division headquarters on Bougainville; an artillery observer perched in a lookout tower high in the branches of a tree. to get away from danger. He tried to sketch a firefight between the U.S. Marines and the Japanese on Guam, but it was more scribble than anything else. “I was so occupied with nearby flying lead, and other distractions, I couldn’t possibly do a good job of drawing,” he said. Greenhalgh, who knew what it was like to sketch in the line of fire, expressed displeasure when he saw a drawing of “highly finished quality” described as “done on the spot.” Some artists did find creative ways to stay above the fray and finish their work. Greenhalgh once observed Richard Loudermilk, an official Marine Corps artist, seated on top of a telephone pole during a battle, “holding his drawing pad well out in front of him, making a drawing ‘on the spot.’ ” One thing that stuck in his mind was war as a great equalizer. “You forget about who the other person is,” he said. “That person might not be your same color or back-
ground. But you forget about that…everybody seems to be okay. [It’s] something that’s quite unique and special.” Greenhalgh was one of the many artists and correspondents who went about their business during World War II in a quiet and professional way without much fanfare. “I tried to reflect the life of a soldier as he was going about his work, either as a guy marching off to the frontlines or on the frontlines,” Greenhalgh told an interviewer in 2003. His drawings may have been “sketchy and loose” but they were immediate and easily recognizable, and their simplicity appealed to the enlisted men who devoured every issue of Yank. MHQ Peter Harrington is the curator of the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection at the Brown University Library in Providence, Rhode Island.
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FLASH POINTS President John F. Kennedy and General Curtis LeMay, the air force chief of staff, at a fireworks display in May 1962. “You are in a pretty bad fix,” LeMay would tell JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis later that year.
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By Serhii Plokhy 464 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $35. Reviewed by Paul Starobin
On May 21, 1962, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev called a meeting of the Defense Council of the USSR to present an idea that had attached to his restless imagination on a recent seaside stroll in Bulgaria: installing missiles with nuclear warheads in Fidel Castro’s Cuba to protect the Soviet satellite against a U.S. military invasion. Khrushchev’s first deputy, Anastas Mikoyan, immediately raised a practical objection to the proposal. The United States would easily detect the missile launchers, he pointed out, because there was no good place to hide them on a subtropical island notable
for its thin canopy of palm trees. And once the launchers were discovered, Mikoyan added, the U.S. military would take them out by air and likely kill Soviet soldiers in the strike. And then what would Moscow do? As internal discussions proceeded over the next few days, Mikoyan repeated his warnings of “dangerous or even catastrophic consequences” to Khrushchev’s contemplated move, but the premier stuck to his plan: “Let’s not talk about it anymore,” Khrushchev finally told Mikoyan. “We will ask Fidel Castro and then we will decide.” The missiles were installed with Castro’s grateful acceptance and the result was the 35-day confrontation that soon came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is tempting to think that, 60 years and multiple historical accounts later, there is nothing new to be learned or said about this seminal episode of the Cold War, the closest the world’s two superpowers of that tense era came to an outright nuclear exchange. But Serhii Plokhy’s authoritative new book, Nuclear Folly:
BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES)
REVIEWS
Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis
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A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, demonstrates otherwise. Primary source materials from previously untapped KGB archives help Plokhy, the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, to weave a narrative that feels fresh, especially for the light it sheds on the Soviet side of the deliberations, as in the anecdote on Mikoyan’s reservations. But most of all, his story profits from his decision to focus his lens not on what the decision makers got right, in the end, to avert nuclear war, but, as he puts it, on “the myriad situations in which they got things wrong.” This perspective yields a kind of dark comedy of miscalculations, near fiascoes, and outright blunders, and that spectacle is the true tale of the crisis by the author’s account. Mikoyan’s disregarded yet prescient warning of Cuba’s “naked” palm-trees cover is one such example: The Americans did quickly detect the missile sites through overflight photography. U-2 incursions into Cuban airspace continued, but even as Khrushchev became more cautious in his posture toward Washington, a middle-rank Soviet military officer on the ground in Cuba gave an order for a surface-toair missile strike on an American reconnaissance plane. He did so without authorization from his indisposed superior, Colonel General Issa Pliev, the nominal commander of the Group of Soviet Troops in Cuba, who was confined to his bed by a painful kidney ailment. Perhaps Soviet troops felt mutinous because, left unprepared for the humid, mosquito-plagued climate, they had been reduced to eating worm-infested borscht. The U-2 was shot down and the pilot killed, but luckily the incident did not ignite wider hostilities. The Americans also had their trigger-happy hotheads. General Cur tis LeMay, the air force chief of staff, stayed wedded to the axiom, even as diplomacy was showing promise, that
the only solution was an all-out invasion of Cuba—an air strike followed by an amphibious assault with tanks. Castro would be toppled, the Soviets would be driven out, the Cuban people would be liberated from Communist rule, and perhaps not least, the failed Bay of Pigs operation of the year before, involving U.S.-backed Cuban exiles, would be avenged. LeMay, the mastermind of the firebombing of Tokyo in World War II, evinced scant respect for his commander in chief, President John F. Kennedy, 11 years younger, whose PT boat mishap during that war was magically spun by the Kennedy clan into a fable of national heroism. “You are in a pretty bad fix,” he told JFK. “You are in there with me,” the president retorted. Unknown to Washington, the Soviets had tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba, not just longer range ones, and Moscow was prepared to use them against a U.S. invasion force: LeMay’s reckless plan could well have set off allout nuclear war. Plokhy’s grand thesis can be challenged: Folly, after all, was not the ultimate victor in the Cuban Missile Crisis. In Washington, JFK had the finesse to steer around belligerents like LeMay to negotiate through back channels with the Soviet premier, despite privately disparaging him as an “immoral gangster.” In Moscow, the excitable Khrushchev calmed down and extracted from “that viper,” as he branded Kennedy behind closed doors, a secret pledge to remove U.S. medium-range nuclear missiles from Turkey in exchange for the withdrawal of the Soviet nuclear weapons from Cuba. Castro had no say in the matter. Feeling betrayed by his putative patron, he boiled over into a fury—that “bastard” Khrushchev was an “asshole,” he exclaimed to a Cuban newspaper editor—but the cooler heads of the two principals prevailed. The true winner in the end was realism: The mutual recognition that nu-
clear war was unwinnable. Still, as this harrowing treatment of the affair persuasively shows, that triumph was only narrowly gained. Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief of Business Week and the author, most recently, of A Most Wicked Conspiracy: The Last Great Swindle of the Gilded Age (PublicAffairs, 2020).
Churchill, Master and Commander: Winston Churchill at War 1895–1945
By Anthony Tucker-Jones 384 pages. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. $30. Reviewed by Claire Barrett “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” Winston Churchill never actually said these words, which are often attributed to him, but he did, in fact, write history. And hundreds of books have been written about him— so many that one can hardly imagine the need for another. Yet Churchill, Master and Commander: Winston Churchill at War 1895–1945, by renowned historian Anthony Tucker- Jones, is certainly not to be missed. Tucker-Jones presents a balanced account of both Churchill’s heroics and his long list of follies, and the book includes a foreword by historian Andrew Roberts, whose own work on Churchill the New York Times rated the best one-volume biography of the British statesman yet written. Tucker-Jones finds his niche in examining Churchill’s record as a military commander in his formative years and exploring how those experiences ultimately shaped his leadership style as a wartime prime minister. “Churchill is widely hailed as
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REVIEWS Britain’s greatest wartime leader and politician,” he writes. “Deep down though, he was foremost a warlord.” Tucker-Jones explores how Churchill’s overconfidence and autocratic leadership style led to disastrous consequences during World War II— namely in Norway, North Africa, Greece, and Crete. Churchill’s frontline trials as a soldier in Britain’s colonial wars and as a commander in World War I made him believe that he was the right person to lead Britain through World War II. The young Churchill’s lust for adventure and for being in the thick of things led to his capture and subsequent escape during the Boer War and brushes with death in the trenches of World War I. These formative experiences gave the future prime minister a confidence that bordered on the absurd. While his decisiveness was perhaps a boon in the early years, his pigheadedness and desire to control all aspects of British strategy as World War II wore on often put him at odds with his own chiefs of staff and Britain’s closest ally, the United States. As for Churchill’s early years as a military commander, Tucker-Jones plows some often overlooked ground, especially the future prime minister’s “continual enthusiasm for mustard gas on the grounds that it was a more humane weapon than high explosive.” While his mistakes were legendary— and, as Tucker-Jones points out, in some cases quite unforgivable—Churchill’s successes came at the moment Britain needed decisive leadership. Tucker-Jones’s skillful prose and engrossing narrative are sure to ensnare the reader. Churchill, Master and Commander is not another work of iconolatry but a fascinating and wellmeasured account of the man who was voted, in a 2002 BBC poll, the “greatest Briton of all time.” Claire Barrett is MHQ’s digital editor.
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New York’s War of 1812: Politics, Society, and Combat By Richard Barbuto 350 pages. University of Oklahoma Press, 2021. $39.95. Reviewed by Thomas Zacharis
After the U.S. Congress formally declared war against a foreign power for the first time on June 18, 1812, President James Madison suggested that Canada would be the most vulnerable territory to invade while Britain was still battling Napoleon in Europe. Once committed to what it called “The American War,” however, the British strove to move their American border south to the Ohio River. Those objectives gave the state of New York a central role, which Richard Barbuto, a professor emeritus of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, examines in this book. Barbuto focuses on New York governor Daniel D. Tompkins, a man with an eye on the future, who believed that the war would continue into 1815. As part of their program to defend their state, he and the legislature passed an act authorizing the formation of two infantry regiments made up of African Americans, both free and enslaved. On occasions when the legislature was not in session, Tompkins maintained the militia out of his own pockets. As another byproduct of his efforts, a new, talented generation of militia commanders such as Jacob Brown and Alexander Macomb rose to high positions in the postwar U.S. Army. Although the British selected Washington and Baltimore as the main target of their invasion in the summer of 1814, New York’s militia played an important role in securing the nation’s northern border and pre-
venting another British invasion force from creating a buffer state between Canada and the United States, climaxing in the battles of Plattsburgh and Lake Champlain on September 11. New York’s War of 1812 ably highlights the somewhat overlooked success of New York and its governor in affecting the conflict’s final outcome. Thomas Zacharis, who lives in Thessaloniki, Greece, reviews books for MHQ and other magazines.
New & Noteworthy HER COLD WAR: Women in the U.S. Military, 1945–1980, by Tanya L. Roth. (University of North Carolina Press, $95.) The author looks at the changes wrought by the 1948 Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, which created permanent military positions for women with the promise of equal pay. ENDS OF WAR: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox, by Caroline E. Janney. (University of North Carolina Press, $30.) The author, a professor at the University of Virginia and the director of its John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History, offers a riveting account of the months following Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s surrender—and, in the telling, a birth narrative of the Lost Cause. A SENSORY HISTORY OF ANCIENT WARFARE: Reconstructing the Physical Experience of War in the Classical World, by Conor Whately. (Pen & Sword Military, $39.95.) A professor at the University of Winnipeg draws on all available evidence to reconstruct and describe the assault on all five senses that the warriors in ancient battles, sieges, and campaigns undoubtedly experienced.
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ESCAPE! The Story of the Confederacy’s Infamous Libby Prison and the Civil War’s Largest Jail Break, by Robert P. Watson. (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, $36.) A dramatic blow-by-blow account of how Union POWs tunneled out of a Confederate prison in Richmond, Virginia, in 1864. THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS: A Secret History of the War, by Craig Whitlock. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) A reporter for the Washington Post examines how three successive presidents and their military commanders deceived the public about America’s longest war. QUEEN ANNE’S WAR: The Second Contest for North America, 1702–1713, by Michael G. Laramie. (Westholme Publishing, $35.) A fresh history of the conflict that engulfed English, French, and Spanish colonists, along with their allies in North America, in a protracted war for control of the continent. INDIAN SOLDIERS IN WORLD WAR I: Race and Representation in an Imperial War, by Andrew T. Jarboe. (University of Nebraska Press, $60.) Britain deployed more than a million soldiers in the Indian Army as part of its imperial war effort in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. These sepoys, the author argues, contributed decisively to the British Empire’s final victory in World War I. HOW THE ARMY MADE BRITAIN A GLOBAL POWER: 1688–1815, by Jeremy Black. (Casemate Publishers, $65.) An esteemed historian examines the evolution of the British Army from what once was little more than a royal bodyguard to a highly disciplined, well-trained, and multipurpose standing force that helped make—and keep—Britain a global power.
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THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY
‘ERNIE WAS ONE OF US’
Journalist Ernie Pyle brought World War II home to millions of Americans—and was a hero to the ordinary soldiers he wrote about.
The Hollywood Hussar Showdown at Trevilians
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“Ernie Pyle made it his mission to cover World War II from a soldier’s-eye view. America’s fighting men and women—and millions of folks back home—devoured every word.”
MHQ is proud to announce that the Army Historical Foundation has honored
Roy Morris Jr.
with a Distinguished Writing Award for “Ernie Was One of Us,” his cover story in the magazine’s Autumn 2020 issue. MHQ’s previous winners of Distinguished Writing Awards from the Army Historical Foundation include the following:
the late Hamilton Gregory for “McNamara’s Boys” (Spring 2017) Noah Andre Trudeau for “Nathanael Greene’s Game of Posts” (Spring 2016)
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CLOBBERING THE KAISER In September 1914, in the First Battle of the Marne, French forces threw back a massive German advance that had come within 30 miles of Paris. French illustrator and caricaturist Félix Lacaille (1856–1923) portrayed the Allied victory as a “coup de massue,” or crushing blow, in this hand-colored lithograph.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
DRAWN & QUARTERED
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“What went wrong in America’s recent wars? In Zero-Sum Victory, Christopher Kolenda looks for answers in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the corridors of American power, and the annals of history. histor Read this erudite volume in order to get things right.” —Richard Fontaine, CEO, Center for a New American Security “The most thoughtful analysis yet of America's recent conflicts – and future challenges. Chris Kolenda, a veteran of both battlefield and bureaucratic combat, provides an account of Iraq and Afghanistan that is simultaneously brilliant, depressing, and deeply instructive. The best teams learn from their defeats. Hopefully, we will also. Zero-Sum Victory is a great place to start.” —General Stanley A. McChrystal (USA, Ret.), co-author Team of Teams
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Available 10/26 @kentuckypress @kentuckypress @chris_kolenda
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“DAMMIT, BRAD, JUST GIVE ME 400,000 GALLONS OF GASOLINE AND I’LL PUT YOU INSIDE GERMANY IN TWO DAYS. ” —General George S. Patton Jr., the commander of the Third Army, angrily complaining to Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley in August 1944 about being sidelined by severe fuel shortages page 24
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