Military History Quarterly Spring 2021

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY

RACE TO THE RHINE

In World War II the famed “Fighting 79th” slugged its way through Nazi strongholds

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OPENING ROUND

CENTURION AUCTIONS

In the late 1920s, the U.S. Army began to explore the idea of using mortars in its light infantry units. It turned to Edgar Brandt, whose Paris-based ironwork and armaments company, Établissements Brandt, was already finding success with its Modèle 27/31 mortar, an 81mm weapon developed from the Stokes trench mortar that British and American forces used in World War I. While the U.S. Army’s Ordnance Department would later license the Brandt design for its M1 mortar, it also wanted a smaller, more portable weapon for its frontline infantry regiments and airborne troops. The Brandt company came up with a 47mm prototype, but after concluding that it wasn’t powerful enough, the army ordered eight 60mm models, subjected them to extensive testing, and ultimately purchased a license from the Brandt company to manufacture the mortars in the United States.

In February 1938 the U.S. Army officially adopted the 60mm mortar, designating it the M2. In January 1940 it ordered 1,500 M2s and soon, with the nation’s entry into World War II, dramatically ramped up production of the mortars, which were made by Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio; Read Machinery Company (a manufacturer of equipment for commercial bakeries) in Glen Rock, Pennsylvania; and KennedyVan Saun Corporation in Danville, Pennsylvania. In 1941 the M2 appeared on the cover of Popular Science magazine as an example of “Our Infantry’s New Weapons.”

The M49A2 HE (high explosive) bomb shown here—one of several types of ammunition made for the M2 (the others fired illumination or smoke-generating rounds)—weighed about 3 pounds and proved especially effective against machine-gun nests and enemy soldiers in the open or dug into trenches, ravines, or along slopes. It was a workhorse weapon for all the U.S. infantry units in World War II. (See “Race to the Rhine,” page 32.)

By the end of the war more than 60,000 M2s had been deployed, and they again would see service in the Korean War and the Vietnam War. In 1978 the M2 was replaced by the M224.

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Volume 33, Number 3 Spring 2021

24

DICK SWANSON/LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES)

After an enemy attack on the U.S. Embassy in Saigon during the 1968 Tet Offensive, a group of American soldiers, photographed through a hole blasted in a perimeter wall, patrol the grounds of the compound.

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FEATURES 32 Race to the Rhine

50 58

by Roy Morris Jr. After landing on Utah Beach in World War II, the U.S. Army’s 79th Infantry Division—the famed “Fighting 79th”—slugged its way through one Nazi stronghold after another.

50 Tempest in Texas

by John A. Haymond A few months after the United States entered World War I, another war broke out in Houston. The result: a courtmartial billed as “the largest murder trial in the history of the United States.”

58 War in the Sky

PORTFOLIO For more than 100 years, artists have been inspired by aerial forms of fighting.

68 Man vs.

Mosquito

by Rick Britton U.S. Army doctor Walter Reed helped the world conquer yellow fever—and earned an enduring place in history.

DICK SWANSON/LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES)

32 88

DEPARTMENTS 3 Opening Round 6 Flashback 12 Comments 15 At the Front 16 Laws of War

The Goodier court-martial

20 Experience Nightmare on the Western Front

24 War List

Surprise attacks

28 Battle Schemes

The not-so-grand expedition

29 Weapons Check EM-2 Rifle

30 Letter From MHQ 75 Culture of War 76 Classic Dispatches The Andersonville survivors

81 Big Shots Julia Stimson

82 War Stories

A hep cat in Patton’s army

86 Poetry

The nightingale’s lament

88 Artists

Afghan war rugs

92 Reviews 96 Drawn & Quartered On the Cover

After landing at Utah Beach in June 1944, the U.S. Army’s 79th Infantry Division was given the crucial assignment of capturing the deepwater port city of Cherbourg, France. Its men would soon smash through the city, block by block, forcing the surrender of some 6,000 Nazi soldiers and making Cherbourg the first French city of any size or importance to be liberated by the Allies.

COVER: KEYSTONE-FRANCE (GETTY IMAGES)

68 MHQ Spring 2021

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FLASHBACK

6

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WESTERN FRONT, NORTHERN FRANCE, 1916

Countless British soldiers in World War I, like those in this captured German trench, come down with a seemingly new and debilitating disease that is soon dubbed “trench fever.”

TODAY: Researchers prove that the disease is thousands of years old when they find traces of Bartonella quintana, the pathogen that causes it, in the teeth of ancient Romans.

NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND

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FLASHBACK EASTERN SHORE OF MARYLAND, 1936

Aerial bombers fail to score a direct hit on USS R-8, towed into open water for target practice, but four near misses with 100-pound bombs are enough to sink the submarine.

TODAY: Using historical records and side-scan sonar data, a company that salvages shipwrecks finds the submerged remains of USS R-8 off the coast of Ocean City.

8

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NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

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FLASHBACK ASSEMBLY LINE, KALKASKA, MICHIGAN, 2016

For some 70 years following World War II, toy companies across the United States sell “army men”—small play figures molded from olive green plastic—by the millions.

TODAY: After seven-year-old Vivian Lord writes several toy makers to ask why they don’t make “girl army men,” a company in Pennsylvania adds them to its product line.

10

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LUKE SHARRETT/BLOOMBERG (GETTY IMAGES)

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COMMENTS

PATTON REDUX and Broadway when he doffed his famed steel helmet, smiled and waved to the cheering multitude.”

Arms and the Man

I’m writing to point out two issues with the answer to a reader who asked whether Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr. believed in re­ incarnation (“Ask MHQ,” Winter 2021). First, both the answer and the caption of the photograph that ap­ peared with it misidentify Patton as a lieutenant gen­ eral. He was promoted to general on April 14, 1945, a fact confirmed in the photo­ graph by the insignia on the front of his command car.

Second, Pat­ ton died on December 21, 1945. So if the date of 1946 in the caption is accurate, he was reincar­

12

FROM THE EDITORS: Our slipped digit triggered quite a few letters like yours.

The “welcome home” parade in Los Angeles for Patton, Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle, and 47 other war heroes was on June 9, 1945, less than two months after Patton was promoted to general. The Los Angeles Times estimated that a million people lined the parade route, noting that “storms of confetti greeted Gen. Patton at Seventh St.

Derring-Doer

Who was the world’s first female combat pilot?

Alexa Rales Arlington, Virginia

MHQ is always an informa­ tive and enjoyable read, and For decades an intrepid sep­ the Winter 2021 issue was tet of Russian women who no exception. There were, had qualified as pilots by however, a couple of errors 1914 have vied for the status in the book review section. of first female military avia­ The appraisal of Sarajevo tor, laying the groundwork 1914: Sparking the First for the multitude of women World War, states that Arch­ who would see active service duke Franz Ferdinand “as­ during World War II. Recent sumed the throne” on the studies of the records, how­ death of his father, Karl ever, have shed doubt on Ludwig. This is incorrect. their exploits. While the ven women may have Ferdinand’s uncle, Franz se­ Joseph I, who became em­ come close to the front lines, peror of the Austro-­some even serving stints in Hungarian Empire in 1848, corps detachments, none of outlived Ferdinand and re­ them ever held official mili­ mained sovereign until tary rank, being classed in a

Double Trouble II

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CANADA AVIATION AND SPACE MUSEUM (GETTY IMAGES)

Double Trouble

nated once more to partici­ pate in the parade.

Lieutenant Colonel Paul F. Conrad (Ret.) Cincinnati

ASK MHQ

MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES)

George S. Patton Jr., photographed by Margaret BourkeWhite in 1945 for Life magazine.

I commend Rick Britton for his excellent article on the Spencer rifle/carbine in the Winter 2021 issue of MHQ (“A New Kind of Fire­ power”). An item that bears mentioning is that there was a very big reason that Christopher Spencer’s com­ pany went bankrupt: The government—surprise, sur­ prise—sold a lot of Spencer arms as surplus. That forced his company to compete with itself in the market­ place—an impossible situa­ tion that ultimately resulted in its closure.

Denny Andrews Bellevue, Washington

1916. Also, the brief de­ scription of To the End of the World: Nathanael Greene, Charles Cornwallis, and the Race to the Dan refers to the contest between British and Continental forces in the Carolinas “during the winter of 1870–1871.” The num­ bers in the dates were mis­ takenly transposed and should read 1780–1781.

I very much look forward to the next splendid issue of MHQ. William Preston San Luis Obispo, California

CANADA AVIATION AND SPACE MUSEUM (GETTY IMAGES)

MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE/LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION (GETTY IMAGES)

parallel status as “volunteers.” As such they ferried in aircraft, evacuated wounded, and sometimes flew near the front, but they were never permitted to go on reconnaissance or bombing sorties over enemy lines.

One woman did go down on record with not one but two bombing sorties in her flight log. Those accomplishments, however, pale in comparison to other feats credited to one of World War I’s truly one-of-a-kind personalities.

Marie Félicie Élisabeth Marvingt was born in 1875 in Aurillac, France. After her mother died in 1889, the family moved to Nancy, and she was left in charge of the household. Her father, a postmaster, was an avid sports enthusiast, and Marie came to see every sport as a challenge to be met. In 1905 she became the first woman to swim the Seine River from one end of Paris to the other.

On learning that women were barred from the Tour de France, in 1908 she participated anyway; of 114 entrants, only 36 finished the 2,789-mile bicycle race, plus Marvingt as an unofficial 37th. In 1910 the French Academy of Sports awarded her a special gold medal for excellence in all sports.

In 1901 Marvingt earned a balloonist’s license, and she went on to become the first woman to make free balloon flights across the English

Marie Marvingt in the monoplane she piloted while competing in the Coupe Femina at Mourmelon-leGrand, France, in 1910.

Channel and the North Sea. In 1910 she began training in airplanes under Hubert Latham, the French aviation pioneer, and on November 8 she qualified for Aéro Club de France certificate No. 281, the third Frenchwoman to be licensed, after Raymonde de Laroche and Marthe Niel.

She set records for distance and one for having not crashed her airplane in some 900 flights. In 1912 Marvingt, a fully qualified surgeon, worked with Armand Deperdussin and Louis Bé­ chereau, two other French aviation pioneers, to design a flying ambulance. Deperdussin, however, folded under an embezzlement scandal before the ambulance project was completed.

During World War I Marvingt worked as a field surgeon and war correspondent,

but in 1915 she flew in two daring bombing missions over the German-held aerodrome at Metz-Fréscaty, for which she received the Croix de Guerre—along with or­ ders to never fly combat again. After her father’s death in 1916, however, she passed herself off as a man to spend 47 days in the trenches with the 47th Bataillon de Chasseurs. After being caught and expelled from the battalion, she spent the rest of the war as a surgeon for the 3rd Régiment Alpin in the Italian Dolomites.

After the war Marvingt served as a military surgeon in Morocco, where she conceived of a ski undercarriage to allow air ambulances to land on and take off from desert sand. In World War II she resumed her duties as a military surgeon and, after

France fell, worked clandestinely with the Resistance.

Marvingt’s multiple exploits received growing recognition and honors, and she was made an Officier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1949.

She died at Laxou in 1963, at age 88, and is buried at Préville Cemetery. The adventures of this true-life “Wonder Woman” have been recently chronicled by Rosalie Maggio in Marie Marvingt: Fiancée of Danger (McFarland, 2019).

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 SPRING 2021 VOL. 33, NO. 3

EDITOR BILL HOGAN

Summer of ’42 It was wartime in the nation’s

capital, and fear was everywhere.

Were Nazi submarines landing saboteurs on American beaches?

By Bill Hogan

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AT THE FRONT LAWS OF WAR 16

U.S. MARINE CORPS HISTORY DIVISION

EXPERIENCE 20 WAR LIST 24 BATTLE SCHEMES 28 WEAPONS CHECK 29

SMEDLEY AT THE PLATE

In 1924 Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, one of the nation’s most famous war heroes, took a one-year leave of absence from the Marine Corps to become Philadelphia’s director of public safety. Declaring an all-out war on crime, he aimed to boost morale in the city’s police department by playing for its baseball team. (In his first game Butler wore a catcher’s mask and chest protector but no shin guards.)

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LAWS OF WAR

REVOLT IN THE RANKS

In 1915 a group of disgruntled airmen in the U.S. Signal Corps declared war on their superiors. The consequences were far reaching.

By Dwight R. Messimer

The trial laid bare problems in the aviation division of the U.S. Army Signal Corps.

16

eral feeling of the rated pilots was that army aviation should be completely separated from the Signal Corps.

On March 16, 1915, eight disgruntled officers met in secret to talk about the problems in the Signal Corps’s aviation division. The most active participants were First Lieutenant Townsend F. Dodd and Second Lieutenants Byron Q. Jones, Walter R. Taliaferro, and Robert H. Willis. Kirtland, who had instigated the meeting, did not attend because he believed that his presence would give Cowan ammunition to discredit the entire group. After discussing their grievances—chief among them Scriven’s plan to assign nonflying officers to the new command positions, the four-year limit on assignments to aviation, and the lack of a more expansive vision for military aviation—the officers agreed that a congressional investigation of the division was needed. The best way to attract the attention of Capitol Hill lawmakers, they decided, was to file court-martial charges against Cowan on the grounds that he was fraudulently drawing flight pay.

Dodd, who chaired the meeting, directed Jones and Willis to go to Fort Rosecrans in San Diego and obtain copies of Cowan’s pay vouchers and the special orders detailing him to the school. He also directed them to draw up a list of witnesses who would testify against Cowan.

For help in obtaining legal advice, Kirtland wrote to First Lieutenant Lewis E. Goodier Jr., who was convalescing in Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco, asking him to pass on his request to his father, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis E. Goodier Sr., who was the judge advocate of the Western Department of the U.S. Army. On receiving Kirtland’s letter, the senior Goodier responded with a list of the evidence that the men would need to prevail in the case against Cowan. He also directed Kirtland to the specific army regulations governing the dissidents’ actions and provided the format for the charges. Kirtland passed along the reply to Jones, who during the next five weeks exchanged several letters with Goodier. On April 24, 1915, Jones and Taliaferro served Cowan with the charges.

In Washington, D.C., Reber immediately started pulling strings to get the case against Cowan dismissed. His first success was convincing Major General Henry Pinckney McCain, the army’s adjutant general, to have the case

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: LEN COLLECTION (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2); U.S. ARMY; SAN DIEGO AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM

T

he 1915 court-martial of Lieutenant Colonel Lewis E. Goodier Sr. is a little-known but significant chapter in the history of the U.S. Air Force.

The trial laid bare the U.S. Army Signal Corps’s mismanagement of military aviation and seriously embarrassed the army. The fallout from the scandal put Captain William “Billy” Mitchell in charge of army aviation, where he was able to promote his advanced ideas on air power—namely, that aircraft would be the key to winning future wars.

Although the Signal Corps had bought its first airplane in 1908, by 1915 it still had no coherent plan for developing aviation beyond reconnaissance. From 1908 to 1914, in fact, airplanes had been used to support ground troops on only two occasions. The Signal Corps also had serious personnel problems. Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Reber Jr. ran its aviation division as if it were his personal fiefdom; indeed, it seemed to be more of a flying club than a military force. Reber’s second in command, Captain Arthur S. Cowan, was in charge of the flight school and was drawing flight pay, even though he wasn’t a pilot and was taking only occasional flight lessons.

If Cowan disliked an officer for any reason, he simply gave the officer’s name to Reber, who drew up an order to send the officer back to his regiment. For example, after a dispute with First Lieutenant Roy C. Kirtland, a senior pilot, Cowan returned Kirtland to his regiment and handpicked First Lieutenant William Lay Patterson to replace him. Patterson had no intention of learning to fly, but Cowan nonetheless rated him a junior military aviator, which came with a promotion to captain.

Brigadier General George P. Scriven, the chief signal officer, paid little attention to the aviation division, giving Reber free rein to run it as he pleased. When Scriven let it be known that he intended to give nonflying officers command of all new squadrons as they were formed, the gen-

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: LEN COLLECTION (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2); U.S. ARMY; SAN DIEGO AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM

Clockwise from top left: Captain Arthur S. Cowan, who ran the flight school; Lieutenant Colonel Lewis E. Goodier Sr., who advised Cowan’s accusers; Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Reber Jr., Cowan’s boss; Major General Enoch H. Crowder, who sided with Cowan; First Lieutenant Townsend F. Dodd, one of the disgruntled officers.

moved from California to Washington, where Reber took it over. Next, Major General Enoch H. Crowder, the army’s judge advocate general, added his endorsement—a legal opinion that absolved Cowan of any wrongdoing and ended with, “I do not think he could be convicted of any criminal offense and I do not, therefore, think that any disciplinary action is called for under this charge.” From there the charges and all the endorsements went to Secretary of War Lindley Miller Garrison.

Although Crowder’s opinion was never tested in court, it had the effect of law in Washington. Garrison dismissed the charges against Cowan. Crowder drew up charges against the senior Goodier, accusing him of violating his duty as a judge advocate to be impartial, fomenting discord in the ranks, and seeking to induce the seven officers to take concerted action against their commanding officer. A general court-martial was then ordered to meet in San Francisco on October 1, 1915, at 10 a.m.

The trial opened on October 18, 1915. The court consisted of Brigadier General William L. Sibert, as president, and 11 field-grade officers as the jury. Captain John T. Geary, a

commander in the army’s Coast Artillery Corps, was the judge advocate, which in a military trial is the prosecutor.

The charge was “conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline,” in violation of the 62nd Article of War, with three specifications. The first alleged that Goodier was biased against Cowan. The second alleged that Goodier acted maliciously, with intent to “incite, promote, and foment discord in the official and personal relations” between Cowan and the seven named accusers. The third alleged that Goodier had “sought to induce and persuade” the seven officers to “take concerted action against” Cowan.

Geary’s strategy was to show that Goodier had taken a poorly organized group of officers and given them leadership and direction. Geary also wanted to raise the possibilities that the junior officers were ignorant of the law governing flight pay and that no crime was committed at all.

Goodier had two legal counsels: Captain Allen J. Greer, an infantry instructor at an army training camp in San Francisco, and William P. Humphreys, a civilian trial lawyer. Greer’s role was to advise Humphreys on military law and procedure. Humphreys was an experienced trial lawyer who had a reputation for capitalizing on any oppor-

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1915 GOODIER COURT-MARTIAL By the time Reber took the stand on November 2, his tunity that came his way. He knew that scandal sold newspapers and swayed juries. But this was a military trial, and image had been badly tarnished, and his testimony did Humphreys realized that he had to play it straight and nothing to improve it. He came across as an officer who focus on showing that the intent to file charges against believed that he had absolute authority, whose actions were Cowan was already well developed before the accusers unassailable, and for whom duplicity was routine. His arcontacted Goodier. He wanted the court to accept the ar- rogance was unbridled. The press had already painted him gument that Goodier was acting within his authority when as the puppeteer who pulled Cowan’s strings, and his testihe gave them legal advice. Humphreys would hammer on mony did nothing to change the picture.

Geary’s direct examination of Reber was a disaster. He the argument that his client did not solicit the contact and simply reintroduced the letters that Humphreys had placed did only what the accusers asked of him.

During the first two days of the trial, Geary showed that in evidence and asked Reber to explain some of his stateCowan’s accusers and Goodier had operated outside offi- ments in them. Reber’s answers were long winded and pepcial channels, and that the accusers had failed to take their pered with self-importance. He repeatedly admitted his complaints to the army’s inspector general. He also showed complicity in falsifying Patterson’s rating and Cowan’s eligithat the accusers had not discussed their suspicions with bility for flight pay. Reber saw no wrong being done because the aviation school’s second in the aviation section was being run the way he wanted it run.

That attitude was clear when Reber told the court, “If command, Captain Benjamin Foulois. He also showed that people on the outside would ask questions as to why [PatGoodier had urged secrecy in terson] had not any hours in the air, why, it was none of the preparation of the charges their concern.”

At 12:30 Sibert adjourned the court for the day. When it against Cowan.

Humphreys’s aggressive reconvened at 10 a.m. on November 3, Reber returned to style came into play on the the stand. Geary quickly wrapped up his direct examination first day when he cross-­ and turned the witness over to Humphreys. Reber was a examined Kirtland. He used ripe target for cross-examination, but when the time came, Kirtland to cast Cowan as an Humphreys failed to take advantage of the opportunity.

The cross-examination lasted just 15 minutes and covofficer who became progressively petty and unreasonable, causing growing dissent ered six points—only two of which were important. One among the pilots. Humphreys opened a discussion on Pat- was a letter Reber had written to Cowan that included an terson’s fraudulent rating as a junior military aviator. By instruction to destroy the letter after he had read it. The introducing the issue of Cowan’s flight pay, Humphreys other was a letter Reber had sent to Cowan that contained forced Geary to shift from making the case against Good- a cipher Cowan was to use at his discretion. Humphreys read the letter to the court and then introduced it as an ier to defending Cowan.

That afternoon, as he questioned Jones about Cowan’s exhibit, which caused Reber to haughtily interject: “I don’t flight pay, Humphreys struck gold when Jones told the court: object to it. I would be very glad to have it introduced.”

There was no reply, but many in the courtroom wondered whether Reber really believed that his authority extended I saw a letter in the official files. It was to Captain to the court. Reber stepped down from the stand and Cowan from Colonel Reber in which he states, you walked out of the room. “I have no further witnesses,” have to knock some of these youngsters in the head Geary told the court. “The prosecution rests.” once in a while, so as to keep down the rest, so that they don’t get to feeling that the Signal Corps owed Humphreys did not offer a lengthy defense. He called his them anything. first witness, First Lieutenant Townsend F. Dodd, intendIn one of the rare times that Greer addressed the court, ing to reinforce previous testimony that Cowan had mishe rose and said, “We shall ask for all the records at the managed the aviation school almost to the point of criminal aviation school at San Diego, and among these we expect negligence. But Dodd’s testimony devolved into a series of to produce this letter which has just been mentioned.” The technical explanations related to aeronautics—what causes following morning, the court directed Geary to provide the a stall, wing design, angle of attack, and so forth—which defense with the entire correspondence file. By the close of no one in the courtroom seemed to understand. Dodd was the second day, Geary had probably made his case against allowed to step down.

Humphreys then recalled another witness, Colonel Goodier, but the dynamic had changed and the trial’s focus James B. Erwin, the Western Department adjutant, to the had shifted to Cowan and Reber.

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HARRIS & EWING COLLECTION (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

By the time Reber took the stand, his image had been badly tarnished.

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new came from Goodier’s answers, and even the press corps was falling asleep.

Geary’s cross-examination questions were the type calling for yes or no answers, but almost without exception, Goodier went into tiresome legal explications.

On November 18, 1915, the court, finding Goodier guilty on all three specifications of the charges but not guilty of some parts of each specification, sentenced him to be reprimanded. The sealed verdict went to Crowder, who recommended that the sentence be “carried into execution.”

Attached to the memorandum was a two-page executive order prepared for President Woodrow Wilson’s signature.

HARRIS & EWING COLLECTION (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

Captain William “Billy” Mitchell, tapped to replace Reber, would lead the second effort to create a separate air force.

On February 13, 1916, Crowder formed a board chaired by the army’s inspector general, Brigadier General Ernest A. Garlington, to “examine the conditions respecting the administration of the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps, with special reference to the disclosures of the record of the trial of Lieutenant Colonel Lewis E. Goodier.” The board, which met from February 17 to March 29, recommended that Scriven be censured and Reber relieved. It also recommended that Cowan and Patterson be made to return the flight pay they had improperly drawn and that Patterson be relieved from aviation duty.

On April 3, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker (who had succeeded Garrison) censured Scriven and Reber. Two days later Crowder started cleaning house. He relieved Reber and tapped Colonel George Owen Squier to replace him. He selected Captain William “Billy” Mitchell to be the chief of the Aeronautical Division and appointed Colonel William A. Glassford to replace Cowan. News of the shakeup, which marked the closing of the Goodier affair, appeared in the nation’s newspapers on April 18.

With America’s entry into World War I, the removal of army aviation from the authority of the Signal Corps became inevitable. In September 1917, General John J. Pershing separated the American Expeditionary Forces Air Service from the Signal Corps, saying that “aviation was in no sense a logical branch of the Signal Corps.”

The Goodier court-martial literally created Billy Mitchell. Mitchell, who went on to lead the second effort to establish a separate air force and brought about his own court-­martial in 1925—10 years to the month after the Goodier proceedings opened in San Francisco. The Army Air Corps record in World War II was the final chapter in the movement to create an independent air force. The U.S. Air Force was established on September 18, 1947. MHQ

stand. His testimony was limited to saying that Goodier was a fine fellow and “an able judge advocate.”

At 2:30 p.m., the court adjourned for the day. The first witness scheduled for November 4 was Goodier. When the court reconvened, the room was packed with reporters, who were sure that the defendant would provide the crushing blow to the prosecution.

In questioning Goodier, Humphreys mostly covered old ground—namely, that Cowan’s accusers had contacted Goodier first and Goodier had agreed to review their evidence and give them a legal opinion on whether they had a case. All that was proper and not out of the ordinary. Humphreys now needed to show that Goodier had drawn up the charges against Cowan without malice and that they were based entirely on the evidence Dodd and Taliaferro had given him. He began by asking Goodier why he had proferred charges against Cowan for his part in Patterson’s fraudulent rating. This point had been covered during the prosecution’s presentation and Humphreys’s cross-­ examinations. When the court reconvened after lunch, Dwight R. Messimer is the author of a dozen books on Humphreys led Goodier over the whole business of how he military and naval history, including, most recently, An had become involved in the case, what he did and did not Incipient Mutiny: The Story of the U.S. Army Signal Corps do, and why he added the charges against Cowan. Nothing Pilot Revolt (Potomac Books, 2020).

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EXPERIENCE

NIGHTMARE ON THE WESTERN FRONT In 1918 E. Allen Pastelnick recounted some of his most harrowing experiences in World War I in a letter to his former history professor.

“When we reached the top of that hill, the enemy guns started shelling us.”

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After active service, Oct. 3, 1918.

Prof. A. M. Schlesinger: Received your letter while I was going thru what you mention in your letter as a “bad dream.” Truly it has been a nightmare, and thank God I am thru with it and still able to write you. Today is the third day since we were relieved, but the incidents of the battle will be no less vivid on the third year than they are now or than they were three days ago. This is one dream that I will ever remember. The preparations for the battle were made in the week preceding Sept. 25, and on that night we poured a continuous stream of shells into the German lines. At that time we were still behind the lines awaiting orders. On the 26th of Sept. our “doughboys” (among whom were many of my former associates and friends) went over the top. What these boys did, I was able to see the next day when we were ordered forward to establish a dressing station. The infantry had pushed Jerry about six kilometers to the north of this town, where we were ordered to only that morning.

We got on trucks about 9:00 A.M., although we were awakened at 4:00 A.M. that morning. The trip was most uneventful except that we were going over the battlefield of the previous day. The road had been filled up and put in good shape immediately after we pushed Jerry away, and the cars made good time until we reached _____, where a bridge had been blown up and a board road had been built around the bridge and over a shallow part of the water.

Later we came across several such temporary roads which went around deep shell holes. All along the road there [was] plenty evidence of what had happened on the 26th of September. By the time we reached _____, we had quit shuddering at the ghastly sight of the dead and the wounded. Every American soldier seen dead on that road was in a position facing the enemy. This was not true of the German soldiers. At _____ there lay an American doughboy and a Jerry facing each other. They had found each other’s Achilles’ heel. The American lad had his hand over his heart. I did not take any particular notice of the dead Jerry.

Before reaching _____, we had to pass over a hill in plain view of the enemy. When we reached the top of that hill, the enemy guns started shelling us. Two fellows were

U.S. MARINE CORPS HISTORY DIVISION

In 1918 Arthur M. Schlesinger, a young history professor at the Ohio State University, was appointed the chairman of the Historical Commission of Ohio, which Governor James M. Cox had created to collect and preserve a wide variety of records relating to the state’s role in World War I. For much of the next two years, Schlesinger, with the help of a colleague on the Ohio State faculty, sent letters to former students serving overseas with the American Expeditionary Forces, asking them to relate their experiences in the war.

One of Schlesinger’s correspondents in this effort was Private E. Allen Pastelnick, then in France with the 140th Ambulance Company of the 110th Sanitary Train.

Pastelnick, who was born in Russia in 1895, had grown up in St. Louis and attended the University of Missouri before making his way to Ohio State in 1914. He registered for the draft in St. Louis in 1917, noting that he had served three years in the Missouri National Guard but was currently a student. To help pay his way through college, every night at around 9 p.m.

Pastelnick loaded two big baskets with homemade sandwiches, pies, and cakes and began making the rounds of the fraternities on campus.

His average profit: about $12 a week—enough, he told a reporter, “to go through school comfortably.”

In a typewritten letter to Schlesinger, reprinted here in lightly edited form, Pastelnick describes the “nightmare” of being in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, a major part of the final Allied offensive of the war and the second deadliest battle in U.S. history. “This is one dream,” he told Schlesinger, “that I will ever remember.” Pastelnick used underscores instead of place names in his letters, as U.S. Army censors would have cut them out had he not.

Pastelnick survived the war, was married in St. Louis in 1921, and embarked on a career as a real estate developer in the western suburb of Kirkwood. He changed his last name to Pastel sometime in the 1920s, and in 1950 he and his family moved to New York, where he later became active in Democratic Party politics. He died in 1970 at age 76.

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U.S. MARINE CORPS HISTORY DIVISION

U.S. soldiers advance toward a wooded area during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive of World War I. The doughboys in Private E. A. Pastelnick’s unit went “over the top” on the first day of the assault.

sitting on the side of the truck on each side of me when the first shell exploded about twenty feet from us. We all fell to the bottom of the truck both because of the concussion and thru instinct. I saw the cloud of dirt uprooted by the explosion, and I saw three wounded men fall to the ground.

Then on lifting my head I saw one of these men crawl to a shell hole. Just then another shell exploded and we all scrambled off the trucks and ran from the road to neighboring dugouts—all except the drivers, who drove the cars off the crest of the hill, then joined us. When the bombardment was over, we went back to the cars.

When we got to _____ it was crowded with artillery ammunition caissons, wounded, and Red Cross workers.

We unloaded the trucks in a hurry, and in one instant a group of detail-dodging men were metamorphosed into the hardest, most uncomplaining, most self-sacrificing group of men I have ever seen.

I saw a wounded man who had gone to the officers training school with me. This man had been shot in the left hand. Somebody had put a first aid bandage over it and sent him back. He took a gassed man with him, looking after the gassed man better than he did for himself. After exchanging greetings, I asked him what I could do for him.

He asked me for a new gas mask, as a bullet had ruined the [canister] of his own mask. After I gave him the new mask, he turned the gas patient over to me and refused further medical attention because of the large number of more serious cases that were congesting the dressing station. Then began the real work. We sent the litter men forward and

started working on the patients who had walked in. We worked the rest of that day without resting a single minute for any purpose whatever. Altho we had eaten nothing all day, we took time to drink a cup of cocoa now and then— otherwise the wounded needed all our time and we gave it to them. On one occasion, one of the litter bearers brought me a cup of bouillon and two slices of bread and butter. I saw three patients who were able to eat. One slice went to each one of the patients and the soup to the third one.

Then I went back to my grim work. About 10:00 P.M. the patients quit coming in, as it was too dark for the litter bearers to find them, and all those able to walk in had come in by that time. We then drank some cocoa and grabbed a few moments’ sleep under the most adverse conditions imaginable. Our dressing station consisted of two cellar rooms that had been covered with a thick layer of earth. The rooms were about 16 ft. square, and there was only the door thru which light could come in. These rooms were part of what used to be a home. About a hundred feet from us, two batteries of artillery spat fire all day and most of the night. Thru these two rooms, and thru two similar dressing stations on each side of us, passed all the wounded in our division. We worked incessantly that day until about 10:00 P.M. when we huddled together and tried to get some sleep. Before we called it quits for the day we fixed everything so that on the morrow we would be in good shape to resume our gory task. These two rooms presented a grim appearance that night. In one corner were all the bloodied bandages that we had removed during the day. In

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NIGHTMARE ON THE WESTERN FRONT

“I got a couple of whiffs of the gas—it was mustard gas, but it did not hurt me.”

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Now to resume the narration of the events of Sept. 29th.

The division had suffered heavy losses and was pretty much played out—everybody was praying for relief—when the Dutchman let loose his counterattack. It came suddenly and was strong. For a time it seemed to succeed, but history will tell that we repulsed it and gained some additional territory doing it. The engineers had been brought up the night before to dig a line of trenches for the boys to hold onto until relieved. They dug these trenches under fire [and] then retired. About noon of the 29th, the story that our boys were retreating began to circulate. This was due to the fact that the infantry had retired to the line of trenches just dug for them. We kept on working unconcernedly, confident of the ability of our boys to hold the line. Then, about 3:00 A.M., the order came for us to evacuate the dressing station. The other ambulance companies left before we did, so that when we did leave, it seemed that we were too late.

The division had retired to a place close to where our dressing [station] was, and the enemy was pressing their strong attack. At this junction of the day’s events, many of us went thru a transformation of opinion on many subjects. Personally, here is what happened to my notions conceived thru previous pictures. In the first place I had come to the conclusion that the old time battle scene where the commanding officer stands with his arms folded, calmly ordering the men, was an impossibility in trench warfare.

Major [Norman B.] Comfort, a St. Louis acquaintance of mine, changed this conclusion. As our company was going back, I saw him standing in that picturesque pose telling the infantry what to do, stopping anybody who had no orders to go back, commanding machine guns—in fact, he seemed to be directing the whole battle. All this was done very calmly and deliberately, altogether unmindly of the shrapnel that was bursting all around him. The battle scene itself was much like what I had imagined as taking place in 1862. In back of me the American artillery was spitting fire as fast as the men could feed the guns. On both sides there was “doughboys” operating their guns under their officers’ orders. Machine guns were put-put-putting their shells at Jerry on both sides. Then in front of me—I knew that Jerry was coming. We were given the orders to move back, and we packed hastily and started what we now laughingly term “our strategic retreat.” It was no laughing matter at that time, as shrapnel and gas shells were bursting all around us, as Jerry was putting over a barrage. I took my time at the beginning, harboring my strength for the top of the hill where I intended to make a dash until I was over the crest. I had thrown my pack away as excess baggage.

Just before I reached the top of the hill, the gas alarm was given. I put on my mask, but after stumbling over some wire and running into a mule I pulled the mask from my face, deciding to run thru the gassed area. I got a couple of

LEFT: U.S. MARINE CORPS HISTORY DIVISION; RIGHT: SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

the opposite corner were a couple of medicine trunks with pile after pile of gauze and muslin bandages on them— ready to do their bit on the following day. In another corner was a pile of blankets over which three shell shock patients hovered. The rest of the floor space of the front room was covered with tired humanity.

All over the floors of both of the rooms—true democracy was in evidence. The same was true in doing our work.

A Lieut would take orders from a private just as easily as he was wont to give them before. The one ruling desire was to dress the wounds to our best ability and to get them back as soon as possible. All other considerations were put away for the time being anyway. In talking about our work there we always give credit to the other boys, although everybody could easily claim the credit for themselves.

At the very first break of day we all got up, and the day’s activities began. I went out with a litter squad, not desiring to wait until the patients were brought in, when some of the boys had laid in some wet shell hole all night suffering untold agonies. The artillery was putting on a heavy barrage fire when we went on the field.

Under this barrage fire we picked up our patients and returned to the dressing station.

It was still that dark that we had to use lanterns in doing our work. Every time the battery in back fired a volley, our lights would go out, and the shock patients would wish that they were out of their misery altogether. Well, the same story of the day before was true on this day. A lot of work under a lot of difficulties performed in a most self-­sacrificing way by everybody. The day before presented a hard problem for the evacuation officers, but this day saw a solution of this problem and the speedy evacuation of the patients. During the previous day three patients had died while waiting for evacuation, and one man had died in the dressing station before we could work on him. This man had been given a lot of morphine to relieve his pain. Then we tried to warm him up so that we could work on him, but he expired on the “shock table,” his last words being “Hello Bill.” At least he was happy when he died. One of the features of the day’s activities was the verification of the stories that the Germans did not respect the Red Cross insignia. On one occasion our ambulances—on the field—were shot at by a German aviator, two mules being killed. Later a German aviator pumped a stream of machine gun bullets into a trench where the boys had gathered a lot of the wounded.

“The unspeakable Hun” has to answer many a similar indictment.

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LEFT: U.S. MARINE CORPS HISTORY DIVISION; RIGHT: SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

From left: U.S. Marines make their way through a cratered battlefield in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive; wounded soldiers are treated in a church in Neuvilly-en-Argonne, France, being used as a field hospital.

whiffs of the gas—which was mustard gas, but it did not hurt me. When I reached the top of the hill, I started running but had run only a few yards when I heard a shell coming from one of Jerry’s guns. I jumped behind a tree and dropped to my stomach just as the shell exploded within a radius of thirty feet. This shell was gas, and all it did was to throw a lot of dirt on me and cause me to put the mask on and move. This time I got my breath under the tree before resuming the “strategic retreat.” Before I started again, the shelling had become pretty intense, so I hesitated a little longer than I had intended, hating to leave the seeming shelter of the tree. Finally I got up and ran over the longest crest I have ever been on—shrapnel falling all around. Two of our men were hit by shrapnel on this crest.

That night the division was relieved, and the new men coming in on both sides cut off a whole lot of Jerrys and captured them. It really had been a contemplated strategic retreat. We then pushed Jerry four kilos further back than he had been before his counter attack.

We camped in a field until the next morning. Tho it rained all night and I had no blankets, I slept soundly, not waking until 8:00 A.M. next morning.

We have received the news of our victories all along the line and of Bulgaria’s capitulation—you have rejoiced at the same news. Undoubtedly you have also rejoiced at the news [of the] victory of the American boys west of Verdun. What I have just written is about that victory. It was a “bad dream,” but those who wake up from it have come out far for the better for having gone thru the crucible [of] self-sacrifice, loss of all petty jealousies, a greater confidence in all people

regardless of race, color or religion—all except the Hun. How we did pray for the colored boys to come to relieve us.

How we smiled at them and encouraged them as they passed us on the road! How we decided that “Froggies” had pep when we saw them bringing their tanks and their “75’s” at the double time. How some of our boys took off their brassards and joined “a lower” branch of the service, deciding that the doughboys were the highest branch of service.

All that will never be told in press reports of the American victory west of Verdun. Many reports in the papers have been proven true in our experiences here. Yes, the doughboy smiles over his wounds and says, “I want to get well so that I can get another wallop of the [dirty] _____.”

You can believe that now. After seeing what I have seen and hearing what I have heard, I believe with most of our brave doughboys that we should take no more prisoners and that we should devastate a German city for each French, Belgian, or Serbian city they have ruined. No, it is not the Kaiser that has brought this world to this great war. It is the Prussian people. The men opposed to us were Prussian Guards, and I am firmly convinced that they are altogether in sympathy with the Kaiser’s ambition. I absolve the smaller German states as I think they have really been forced into it.

The last part of this letter was written after I came back from the funeral ceremony of one of my comrades, who died on the field, hit by that awful stuff—shrapnel. Do not feel like writing dispassionately at the present so will close with my sincere regards. Luck to your work of preserving records of this war for Ohio. MHQ

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WAR LIST

SURPRISE! The Trojan Horse

The Trojan War, believed to have been waged during the 12th or 13th century bce, was one of the most consequential events in Greek history, with a legacy of epic military subterfuge. The conflict kicked off when Queen Helen of Sparta was abducted by the Trojan prince, Paris. To secure her return, more than a thousand Greek vessels sailed for Troy, where for the next decade the two armies repeatedly squared off in battle. But one morning, the Greek forces unexpectedly abandoned camp and retreated to a nearby island, leaving behind a mammoth wooden horse that was touted as an offering to the goddess Athena. Hours after the horse was rolled into the walled city, a few dozen armed warriors emerged from a trapdoor in its hollowed-out belly and, under cover of darkness, opened the fortress gates for their comrades, who had covertly sailed back from their island hiding place. The Greek army swiftly vanquished the thoroughly surprised Trojans and left their city in ruins.

Battle of Lake Trasimene

In 218 bce, a Roman declaration of war against Carthage triggered the Second Punic War, a 17-year conflict that, like the First Punic War (and later the Third), pitted two heavyweights eager for dominance in the western Mediterranean.

Shortly thereafter, Hannibal led a massive force of Carthaginian cavalry and infantry—accompanied by more than three dozen war elephants—on a thousand-mile march that took them over the snowy Alps with the intention of attacking Rome from the north. On arriving in the Po Valley, near Turin, the Carthaginians fortified their ranks with fighters from local Gaul and Ligurian populations and then defeated the Romans in successive battles as they headed south. But it was the third battle, in 217 bce, that truly alarmed the Romans and showed off Hannibal’s legendary military acumen. This time, Hannibal lured the Roman general Gaius Flaminius into battle with a spate of attacks across the countryside and then set a deadly trap for the cocksure, yet incompetent, commander on a narrow road

beside Lake Trasimene. The Roman forces, some 30,000 strong, pursued a small contingent of Hannibal’s troops at the far end of the lake, unaware that most of the general’s 40,000 fighters were lying in wait in the forested hills beside the road. Trapped on one side by the lake and the other by the hills, the Romans were easy prey as the ambushers charged en masse from their hiding places. With nowhere to run, many fled for the lake and drowned in their armor.

In the end, 15,000 Romans died and a similar number were taken prisoner, wiping out nearly an entire army.

Battle of Medway

Following the start of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, in 1665, the Great Plague began ravaging London, and before long the epidemic had killed about a fourth of the city’s residents. In 1666, the Great Fire of London wiped out much of the beleaguered city’s housing. And in 1667, England again took it on the chin when a Dutch flotilla launched a surprise attack that produced one of the worst—and possibly most humiliating—defeats in the history of the Royal Navy. The audacious Dutch plan, masterminded by political leader Johann de Witt, was conceived to deliver a crushing blow to its adversary and gain the upper hand in treaty talks. After capturing the English seaport of Sheerness, in the mouth of the River Thames, the Dutch fleet—aided by two river pilots who were British defectors—navigated the treacherous River Medway, destroyed a protective iron chain stretched across it, and set upon battleships anchored at the presumed impenetrable ports at Gillingham and Chatham. As it turned out, deep budget cuts had left the English vessels more or less unguarded, and after sacking 13 of them, the Dutch aggressors retreated with two seafaring trophies, including HMS Royal Charles, the Royal Navy flagship.

Battle of Trenton

On Christmas night, 1776, General George Washington, the commander in chief of the Continental Army, led a detachment of some 2,400 troops across the icy Delaware

Opposite, clockwise from top: Greek soldiers emerging from the Trojan Horse; General George Washington and his men crossing the Delaware River in 1776; Union major general Joseph Hooker at Chancellorsville in 1863; the Dutch fleet at the Battle of Medway in 1667; the Battle of Lake Trasimene in 217 bce.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: HERITAGE IMAGE PARTNERSHIP LTD (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIJKSMUSEUM; UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP (GETTY IMAGES)

These memorable instances of cunning and ingenuity demonstrate that, in warfare, there’s nothing like catching the enemy off guard.

By Alan Green

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: HERITAGE IMAGE PARTNERSHIP LTD (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIJKSMUSEUM; UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP (GETTY IMAGES)

SURPRISE ATTACKS

Battle of Chancellorsville

On the morning of May 2, 1863, Confederate general Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, hastily concocted a bold plan with Lieutenant General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson that defied conventional military wisdom: divide their troops into two units and attack a Union army corps with twice as many soldiers hunkered down just west of Chancellorsville, Virginia. Jackson’s brigades of some 30,000 men—about two-thirds of his forces—moved out on a 12-mile trek along back roads and narrow trails, aiming to reach the far right flank of Union infantry troops commanded by Major General Joseph Hooker; Lee simultaneously led the remaining 14,000 troops on a mission to divert Hooker’s attention from the left. Jackson’s “foot cavalry,” which Union scouts had spotted, eventually got into position for an attack, hiding in a dense forest. When no attack was forthcoming, Hooker, figuring that Jackson’s troops had retreated, diverted his assets Lee’s way. Late that afternoon, when Jackson’s men stormed the unprepared—and outmanned—Union soldiers, many of them fled. Over the next three days, the Confederates routed their adversary, although the victory was bittersweet: Jackson was hit that first night by friendly fire, and he died a week later from complications following surgery.

Battle of Taranto

In the closing hours of November 11, 1940, five months after Italy had declared war on Great Britain, the first of 21 aging two-seater biplanes took off from the British carrier HMS Illustrious and headed across the Mediterranean Sea for the heavily fortified naval base at Taranto, a coastal city inside the heel of the Italian boot. The Fairey Swordfish torpedo

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bomber, affectionately nicknamed the “Stringbag” because it could carry a mix of loads, seemed to be the unlikeliest aircraft for a mission that aimed to put a major dent in the Italian navy’s fleet of warships: Placed into service during the mid-1930s, the Swordfish boasted a fabric skin, an open cockpit, and a lumbering top speed of just 143 miles per hour when laden with weapons. But while these aircraft may have been anachronisms, they performed admirably: The Italians were caught entirely off guard by the aerial attacks, and the Brits, using air-dropped torpedoes, laid waste to six enemy battleships stationed in Taranto harbor, along with destroyers and cruisers. The sneak attack, which resulted in the loss of two Swordfish, set the demoralized Italian navy on its heels, altering the balance of power in Mediterranean waters.

Pearl Harbor

Throughout 1941, long-simmering Japanese anger over trade embargoes imposed by a coalition of the United States and its Western allies pointed toward the likelihood of a forthcoming war. The consensus among American intelligence officials was that when Japan initiated hostilities, it would do so relatively close to its borders, overrunning territories in the South Pacific, for example, as a way to seize precious natural resources, without which its expanding empire might falter. But just before 8 a.m. on December 7, a day before Japan would issue a formal declaration of war, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander in chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, threw the American military a 4,000-mile curveball: instead of targeting such anticipated targets as the Dutch East Indies or the U.S.-­ controlled Philippines, 353 Imperial Japanese aircraft, launched in back-to-back waves from carriers, targeted the unsuspecting naval base at Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii, which at the time was a U.S. territory. The surprise invasion, which lasted just two hours, destroyed much of the U.S. Pacific fleet and killed some 2,400 Americans. The next day, before a joint session of Congress, President Franklin Roosevelt famously called December 7 “a date which will live in infamy.” Shortly thereafter, Congress voted to approve Roosevelt’s declaration of war on Japan, signaling the country’s entrance into World War II.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM; ISRAELI DEFECE FORCES; NATIONAL ARCHIVES (2)

River from their encampment in Pennsylvania and then marched nine miles south through a snowy nor’easter to Trenton, New Jersey, where about 1,400 Hessians, fighting in service to Great Britain, were garrisoned. Following a recent drubbing by British troops around New York City, patriot forces were depleted and demoralized enough to cast doubt on the American colonies’ quest for independence. But at Washington’s urging, some of those weary troops navigated their way across the treacherous Delaware (other detachments were foiled by the ice), and in columns that stretched as long as a mile, they headed for Trenton.

Thanks in part to the work of a spy Washington had recruited, the German mercenaries were led to believe that no attack was imminent and had therefore let their guard down. As a result, the colonial forces were able to parlay an element of surprise into a resounding victory on the morning of December 26. This in turn boosted their morale and further inspired a wave of new recruits to join their ranks, thereby rejuvenating their military campaign.

Operation Focus

In the spring of 1967, escalating diplomatic hostilities in the Middle East portended a looming military showdown, with Israel eyeballing a crescent-moon-shaped threat across its northern (Syrian), eastern (Jordanian), and western (Egyptian) borders. But on the morning of June 5, in an operation code-named Mivtza Moked (Operation Focus, a.k.a. the Sinai Air Strike), the Israeli Air Force caught its Egyptian counterpart napping and launched one of the most dramatic and successful surprise air attacks of all time. In the

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM; ISRAELI DEFECE FORCES; NATIONAL ARCHIVES (2)

Clockwise from top left: the British raid on Taranto in 1940; Israeli planes destroy three Egyptian MiG-21s in a 1967 air strike; South Vietnamese women and children with their salvaged belongings scurry past the bodies of Viet Cong killed in the 1968 Tet Offensive; the USS West Virginia burns at Pearl Harbor in 1941.

first wave of the preemptive strike, nearly 200 IAF aircraft headed out over the Mediterranean Sea, flying low enough to avoid both radar detection and surface-to-air missiles, then headed for Egypt, and, within just hours, destroyed its sitting-duck war planes; in addition, the Israelis deployed a novel warhead that rendered its enemy’s military airstrips entirely unusable. Two more bombing waves soon followed, in the process destroying some 500 aircraft. And in the next five days, the IAF similarly neutered Jordanian and Syrian combat aircraft, while also causing massive losses among ground troops. In short order, the Six-Day War radically altered the geopolitics of the Middle East.

Tet Offensive

By most accounts, the U.S. war effort in Vietnam was humming along according to plans in early 1967, with the public largely behind combat efforts overseen by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and, on the ground, by General William Westmoreland. But as the year progressed, the North Vietnamese and their armed Communist allies in

South Vietnam, the Viet Cong, began gaming out strategies to sabotage America’s battlefield thunder and entice the South Vietnamese people to abandon their allegiance to the country’s government. The most dramatic component of this effort was launched shortly after midnight on January 30, 1968, when the Viet Cong and their collaborators violated a well-established Vietnamese Lunar New Year (Tet) treaty with surprise mortar and rocket attacks on military installations in five provincial capitals; the next day, coordinated assaults were carried out across South Vietnam. The United States and its allies decisively beat back the insurgents, but the military victory was clouded by political upheaval: Antiwar sentiment, already escalating among the American public, accelerated dramatically after Tet, and two months later, in a televised address, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced a partial halt to the bombing in Vietnam and his thoroughly unexpected decision to not seek another term in office. MHQ Alan Green is a journalist in the Washington, D.C., area.

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BATTLE SCHEMES

SCHELDT SHOW

ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST

In 1809 the largest expeditionary force in British history—more than 600 ships and 42,000 soldiers—sailed for the island of Walcheren in the Netherlands, at the mouth of the Scheldt River, to confront the French navy and destroy Napoleon’s arsenals at Antwerp, which he saw as “a pistol held at the head of England.” But the British expedition was soon overtaken by a mysterious disease dubbed “Walcheren fever,” which was ultimately deemed responsible for all but 100 of the more than 4,000 deaths in the ill-fated military adventure. MHQ

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WEAPONS CHECK

EM-2 RIFLE

By Chris McNab

ROYAL ARMOURIES, LEEDS

Receiver. The weapon was machined precisely to seal it against dust and debris, protecting the complex action inside.

Magazine. The magazine held 20 rounds of .280 British ammunition.

Action. The EM-2 was a gas-operated weapon with a cyclical rate of fire of 600–650rpm on full-auto.

Because of the position of the ejection port near the shooter’s face, the rifle could only be fired from the right shoulder.

The EM-2 rifle, which occupies a somewhat mythological status in the history of British firearms design, was created in the late 1940s by Kazimierz-Stefan Januszewski, a Polish immigrant working for Britain’s Armament Design Establishment. (Januszewski, who’d become a naturalized British citizen after World War II, officially changed his name to Stefan Kenneth Janson in 1950.) The weapon he produced included modern features that taken together broke the mold for a standard service rifle. Its bullpup design set the action behind the trigger, retaining a full-length barrel while reducing the rifle’s overall length, and its straightline design between barrel and stock was perfect for recoil control when firing on full-automatic setting. An optical sight was standard. Its cartridge, the .280 Enfield, gave respectable performance over realistic combat ranges of 300 to 400 yards.

In 1951 Britain officially adopted the EM-2—7mm Rifle, Automatic, No. 9—as its new service rifle, replacing the bolt-action Lee-Enfield No. 4. Yet only 50 EM-2s were

Sight. The 1× fixedmagnification optical sight was set in the EM-2’s carrying handle.

Gas regulator. The operator could set the volume of gas needed to cycle the action to N, for Normal, or E, for Excess.

Barrel. To keep the weapon light, the 24.5-inch barrel was of a “pencil” design.

Bayonet. The EM-2 bayonet was of the No. 7 Mk I swiveling pommel type, as was used on some Lee-Enfield No. 4 rifles.

manufactured before British prime minister Winston Churchill canceled production, partly because the United States had rejected the .280 round during efforts to standardize NATO forces to a single cartridge but also out of his own belief that a fully automatic rifle would lead to excessive ammunition consumption. Ultimately, the next British rifle would be the semiauto-only 7.62×51mm NATO FN FAL, designated the L1A1 in British service.

To this day some see the EM-2 as one of the finest weapons of the early postwar era, attributing its failure more to politics than to its futuristic design. It was certainly good, but it wasn’t perfect—it had a poor trigger, and other, arguably better assault rifles were available. Given the subsequent performance of the redoubtable FN FAL, Churchill may have made the right decision. MHQ Chris McNab is a military historian based in the United Kingdom. His most recent book is The M4 Carbine (Osprey Publishing, 2021).

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NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM

General Dwight D. Eisenhower (far right) and Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley (far left) confer with Major General Ira T. Wyche (center) and Brigadier General Frank U. Greer at the 79th Infantry Division’s headquarters in Haunville, France, on July 4, 1944.

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THE CAN-DO COMMANDER

NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM

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uring World War II, Major General Ira T. Wyche soldiered in the shadow of such towering figures as Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George S. Patton Jr., which may help to explain why no biographer has ever told his life story and why so few histories of the conflict cast him in any kind of central role. Another reason is that Wyche never really aimed to be in the spotlight, probably because he was so busy tending to the troops he commanded and planning how the 79th Infantry Division, which he led, would take out the formidable German forces in its path.

Wyche was born in 1887 on Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, and was raised by his grandparents after his parents died. His brother entered the ministry, following in the footsteps of their father, a Methodist pastor. Ira, however, decided to make a career in the military.

Wyche entered the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, at age 19. Despite his small, wiry frame, “Billy,” as he was known by his classmates (though some dubbed him “Witch”), was more of a standout in athletics than in academics, playing football, baseball, and polo. He was also a leading member of the glee club and the cadet corps choir, and he performed in the 100th Night Show, a musical-comedy revue.

Howitzer, the West Point yearbook, gave him this writeup: “West Point has changed you, Billy. You once were a reticent little Tar-Heel with a wise head on your shoulders, and a smile of understanding that told no tales. But now, ah, now, you little cherub, every femme that sees you wants to bite your rosy cheeks.”

On graduating from West Point in 1911, Wyche was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army’s 30th Infantry Regiment. He was later detailed to the Mounted Service School at Fort Riley, Kansas, and served for two years with the cavalry on the Texas border. After joining the American Expeditionary Forces in 1917, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and sent to France, where he commanded an artillery unit on the Western Front. Later that year he returned to the United States to help train gunners, and for the next 25 years he steadily moved up the ranks.

On June 15, 1942, Wyche was appointed the commander of the 79th Infantry Division. As Roy Morris Jr. details in this issue’s cover story, which begins on the next

page, Wyche’s “Fighting 79th” spearheaded the capture of Cherbourg, fought its way across France to attack the Siegfried Line, crossed the Seine River, and then made its way to the Rhine River and the Ruhr Valley. Some said Wyche’s infantry movements resembled cavalry sweeps.

Nearly every day, Wyche made the rounds of all the command posts in his area, checking in with his men, asking questions, giving advice and encouragement, and even interviewing German prisoners. Soldiers, unaccustomed to seeing such concern on the part of commanding officers, dubbed him “Papa Wyche.” At a dinner in honor of his 57th birthday, Wyche made it a point to toast “the men who are responsible for the success of the division” and “the men in the foxholes.”

The 79th Division was such an important cog in the Allied wheel that General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander in Europe, and Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, the commander of the First Army, regularly came to confer with Wyche. So did Patton, the commander of the Third Army. In February 1945, General Jacob L. Devers observed that the 79th Division was the only one in his command that “still had power for offensive action,” and few would have disagreed with that assessment.

Wyche had a dry sense of humor and a tendency to make acerbic observations about the scenes of utter devastation they encountered. In March 1945, for example, he visited a coal mine in Wehofen, Germany, where 7,000 German civilians had holed up for three days without food, water, or medical attention. The only remark Wyche was heard to make was, “This is the price they had to pay for heiling Hitler.”

Wyche returned from the war with the Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, the Silver Star, the Bronze Star with two Oak Leaf Clusters, and a number of French and British decorations. After a stint as the army’s inspector general, he bought a cottage in Pinehurst, North Carolina (the first house he and his wife, Mary, had ever owned) and retired. In his later years Wyche told an interviewer that he aspired to launch a movement to unite the world’s religions.

Wyche died in 1981 at age 93. He chose to be buried next to his wife, who had died two years earlier, in the Fort Bragg Main Post Cemetery in North Carolina, with a single headstone that bears the word “Reunited” under their names.

—Bill Hogan, Editor

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RACE TO THE RHINE

In World War II, the U.S. Army’s 79th Infantry Division—the famed “Fighting 79th”—slugged its way through one Nazi stronghold after another.

By Roy Morris Jr.

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Soldiers in the 79th Infantry Division are transported to Utah Beach on LCVP PA13-22 on June 14, 1944. The landing craft’s mother ship, USS Joseph T. Dickman, is visible (with WC54 ambulances) in the background.

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THE 79TH DIVISION IN WORLD WAR II

“I desire each of you,” Wyche told his men, “to approach the battlefield mad as hell.”

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erating France and the rest of Europe from the Nazis, much as the first 79th Division had done at Montfaucon in 1918. It would be an unwelcome but necessary homecoming.

The 79th Division was reactivated on June 15, 1942, at Camp Pickett, a former Civilian Conservation Corps facility near Blackstone, Virginia, with a core group of Regular Army troops drawn from the 4th Division, which had served alongside the 79th at the Battle of Montfaucon.

Taking command of the division was Major General Ira T. Wyche of Okracoke Island, North Carolina, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (Class of 1911) and a career army officer. Wyche, the son of a Methodist pastor, had served on the Texas border and then gone to France as a member of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, seeing action with the 60th Field Artillery.

After the war Wyche had primarily been employed as an artillery commander and instructor before graduating from the U.S. Army and General Staff College and being promoted to major general in March 1942. Wyche, whose secondary concentrations were supply and transportation, was determined not to make the same mistake that the AEF had: throwing the 79th Division into action at Montfaucon in 1918 without proper training or unit cohesion. After the newly constituted division was activated at Camp Pickett, Wyche saw to it that his men were drilled in field operations at the Tennessee Maneuver Area, desert warfare at Camp Laguna in Arizona, and winter combat at Camp Phillips in Kansas. The training lasted for 22 months.

The first members of the 79th Division to go overseas were part of a military police platoon sent to Africa following the American landings in Tunisia during Operation Torch. The MPs were assigned to escort German prisoners from Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s vaunted Afrika Korps back to stateside prison camps. One future member of the 79th Division, Private Roy Morris of Nashville, Tennessee, got a firsthand look at some of the German POWs while he was in basic training at Fort Hood, Texas, in late 1943.

Morris had been drafted earlier that year while living in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with his wife and infant daughter. At Fort Hood, Morris and his fellow GIs watched the tall, blond, suntanned Afrika Korps prisoners doing strenuous calisthenics all day in the Texas sun. “We’re supposed to fight those guys?” they wondered aloud. Of course, it was not the Afrika Korps that the 79th Division would encounter after landing on the beaches of Normandy eight days after D-Day, but the equally battle-hardened members of the Wehrmacht, the German regular army. Either task would be daunting.

LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; RIGHT: BANGOR PUBLIC LIBRARY; INSET: FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS

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t the end of World War I, the U.S. Army directed its various divisions to pick a distinctive shoulder patch (formally known as a shoulder sleeve insignia) that reflected the unit’s history. The relatively new 79th Infantry Division chose the blue-andwhite Cross of Lorraine, a well-known twobarred cross that dates back to the 12th century in Europe.

Ever since René II, the Duke of Lorraine, had placed the cross on his flag before winning the Battle of Nancy in 1477, it had been the symbol of the often-disputed region of northeastern France. After France lost the province to Germany in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, the Cross of Lorraine became a symbol of France’s never-­ ending determination to reclaim the lost territory.

During the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in the fall of 1917, the 79th Division spearheaded the American Expeditionary Forces’ assault on the German-held strongpoint at Montfaucon (Mount Falcon), the strategic key to the vital Meuse-Argonne sector of the Western Front. So strong were Montfaucon’s defenses that the Germans boastfully called it their “Little Gibraltar.” French generals said it would take three months to break the enemy line there. It took the untried, undertrained 79th Division just two days to take Montfaucon, at a cost of 1,200 men. The new shoulder patch, a white Cross of Lorraine on a deepblue background, honored the division’s sacrifice.

A quarter of a century later, a newly reconstituted 79th Division would return to France to help that nation once again win back the territories it had lost to Germany—this time from the Nazi forces of Adolf Hitler.

And its famous shoulder patch would stand for much more than the men in the 79th Division: the Free French forces under exiled general Charles de Gaulle and the underground Resistance forces inside occupied France would adopt the Cross of Lorraine as their symbol as well. Resistance leader Jean Moulin was wearing a scarf bearing the cross when he was captured and later tortured to death by Gestapo commander Nicolas (Klaus) Barbie—the infamous “Butcher of Lyon”—in 1943.

Few if any of the American servicemen and draftees in the 79th Division were aware of Moulin’s ultimate sacrifice when they joined the division, but they were all keenly aware of the difficult task they and other Allied forces faced in lib-

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LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; RIGHT: BANGOR PUBLIC LIBRARY; INSET: FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS

From left: Soldiers of the 79th Division’s 314th Infantry Regiment reenact their assault on the German stronghold at La Haye-du-Puits, France, for an army photographer (the division’s “Cross of Lorraine” shoulder patch is inset at upper left); Major General Ira T. Wyche, the commander of the 79th Division.

As Allied planners worked through late 1943 and early 1944 on Operation Overlord, the plan to invade and liberate Nazi-held France, elements of the 79th Division from Camp Myles Standish near Staunton, Massachusetts, sailed for Great Britain aboard RMS Queen Mary, the requisitioned luxury liner turned troopship, in late March and early April 1944. The division landed separately at Glasgow, Scotland, and Liverpool, England. Billeted near Cheshire, England, the division underwent rigorous training in amphibious landing and assaulting fortified positions, both of which would soon be required in Normandy, on France’s extreme western coast.

As D-Day approached, the 79th Division moved from northern to southern England, concentrating in the area around Tiverton in Devonshire. There, Wyche and his key officers took advantage of their comprehensive experience in training, logistics, and supply to prepare the division— as much as possible—for the landings. Assisting Wyche were Brigadier Generals Frank U. Greer, George D. Wahl, and John S. Winn Jr.; Colonel Kramer Thomas, Wyche’s chief of staff; and Lieutenant Colonels Adolph C. Dohrmann, John A. Gloriod, Charles F. O’Riordan, Harry L. Sievers, and Herbert Sponholz. There was a lot to do and not much time to do it.

Shortly after D-Day, June 6, the 79th Division moved to embarkation ports at Plymouth, Falmouth, and Southampton. Wyche released a memorandum to be read aloud to every member of the division:

This division is now headed for the battlefield. After two years of training, I consider the division adequately trained for battle and feel perfectly confident it will accomplish its missions with distinction. In order to add to your effectiveness, I desire each of you to get yourself in a state of hatred against the Hun so that you will approach the battlefield mad as hell.

Your state of mind should be that of the hunter who is bent on exterminating vermin and predators. There is one resolution that I want each of you to make and that is, to so conduct yourself in the first fight that the Boche and all our Allies will be impressed with the veteran performance of the 79th Division. May each of you have good crossing. I shall be on the beach to welcome you.

Officially, the 79th Division was one of four divisions in the American VII Corps commanded by Major General J. Lawton Collins. The advance party of the division landed at Utah Beach six days after D-Day, with the main body landing two days later. As Private Morris remembered, the beach was still “hot,” with German holdouts still shelling and bombing the Americans as they landed. During one of the bombings, Technician Harry Ribiski of Morris’s own 315th Infantry Regiment was wounded by a stray piece of shrapnel while he was still aboard a landing craft, making him the division’s first casualty in World War II. True to his word, Wyche was on hand to meet his men on

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The order to the 79th Division: to spearhead a three-pronged assault on Cherbourg.

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a German counterattack in its rear. The 4th Division, operationally led by Roosevelt, moved up the beach road from Quineville toward Montebourg. The 90th Division took the 4th’s left and the 9th Division moved toward Barneville on the western shore of the peninsula. On June 18, the 9th Division captured Barneville. The American forces had essentially drawn a line across the peninsula, isolating Cherbourg from reinforcements. Hitler, bumbling as usual when he played general, overruled Rommel’s recommendation that the German forces be allowed to withdraw into the walled fortifications of Cherbourg. Instead, Hitler ordered the defenders to form a new line south of the city.

Rommel, disgusted by Hitler’s interference and looking perhaps for a scapegoat, sacked General Wilhelm Fahrmbacher, the new commander of the LXXXIV Corps, for moving too slowly into the new defenses. Fahrmbacher had held his command for only three days.

That same day, the 79th Division received orders to relieve the 90th Division in the center of the American line and spearhead a three-pronged assault on Cherbourg. It was the division’s first combat assignment—and a tough one at that. The terrain facing them was uniquely difficult: north of the Valognes–Barneville line the ground was primarily hilly, but south of the line it was flat and marshy, crisscrossed by small streams and divided into countless farm fields and orchards by centuries-old mounds of earth, stone, and underbrush that Morris remembered simply as “those damn hedgerows.” The Germans, long skilled in the art of defense, had reinforced the natural earthworks with scores of concrete pillboxes and well-placed antitank guns. They had also flooded the flatlands, forcing the attackers to splash through knee-deep water and mud on their approach.

Each hedgerow represented an individual miniature battle that the division’s official historian later likened to “a game of checkers—one square at a time.” As thoroughly as Wyche had trained his men, he had not prepared them to surmount such obstacles, and new tactics of enfilading fire and over-the-head shooting plus an improvised weapon called the tankdozer—a Sherman M4A1 medium tank modified with a flat, shovel-like bulldozer attachment to plow through the hedgerows—had to be adopted on the spot. Thrashing through French hedgerows to dislodge German defenders crouched in them like so many rodents was “decidedly un-American,” one GI complained.

The 79th Division’s initial objective was the high ground west and northwest of the village of Valognes, which commanded the Valognes–Cherbourg highway and blocked access from the feeder roads on that side of Valognes. Zero hour was set for 5 a.m. on June 19. The 313th and 315th Regiments would go over to the attack, with the 314th Regiment held in reserve. The 313th jumped off first, accompanied by tank and chemical companies and supported by the

DAVID RUMSEY HISTORICAL MAP COLLECTION

Utah Beach, an unexceptional nine-mile stretch of sand dunes and sea oats centered on the Nazi strongpoint at Les-Dunes-de-Varreville. This landing point was at the far western end of the Allied line extending southwest from Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword Beaches.

Despite heavy casualties, the Allied landings on D-Day were successful, in large part because they were made where the Germans least expected them. The beaches at Normandy were a good deal farther from England than the traditional trans-Channel crossing between Dover and Calais. Nevertheless, the landings might have been repelled had Hitler listened to Rommel, his commander at Normandy. A tank commander by profession, Rommel had wanted to station his elite panzer tank divisions in Normandy, but Hitler overruled him. The weather, too, played a large part in the D-Day successes, since a terrible storm the night before had lulled German commanders, including Rommel, into a false sense of security. Allied weather forecasters had correctly predicted a break in the storm at dawn on June 6.

Once the 79th Division had made landfall at Utah Beach, it linked up with the other three infantry divisions in VII Corps: the 4th, 9th, and 90th. VII Corps was given the crucial assignment of seizing the Cherbourg Peninsula (also called the Cotentin Peninsula) and the deepwater port city of Cherbourg. It was absolutely vital that the Allies control the port, which would be the chief resupply and reinforcement point for Allied ships crossing the Atlantic from the United States. Wyche, at the head of the 79th, linked up with the deputy divisional commander of the 4th Division, a man with a famous name and face: Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Like his legendary father, the younger Roosevelt was a hard-charging soldier. At 56, he would be the oldest Allied soldier to land on D-Day, splashing ashore at Utah Beach and personally repositioning troops that had been dropped off mistakenly 2,000 yards south of the planned landing zone. It was a vital battlefield decision, memorialized by Roosevelt’s terse directive: “We’ll start the war here.” He would later be awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions at Utah Beach on June 6.

The 79th was initially held in reserve while the 4th, 9th, and 90th divisions drove west from the beach onto the peninsula proper. The 101st Airborne Division’s seizure of the crossroads village of Carentan on June 9 allowed the Allies to form a continuous front from west to east and freed VII Corps to move onto the peninsula without fear of

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DAVID RUMSEY HISTORICAL MAP COLLECTION

“Through France” ( June 14–August 29, 1944). This map, the first in a series of four, shows the 79th Division landing at Normandy and moving across France until, in August, it crosses the Seine at Mantes-Gassicourt.

310th and 311th Field Artillery battalions. “It’s just like Tennessee maneuvers—only with live ammo,” one GI joked.

No one laughed. Enemy resistance, sporadic at first, soon swelled into fierce, concentrated fire, but by 2 p.m. the 1st Battalion had reached its objective a few miles northwest of Valognes in the heavily forested Bois de la Brique.

The going was tougher for the 315th Regiment. It made first contact with the enemy near Flottenanville. A German counterattack at 3 p.m. held up the advance for four hours before it was repelled with heavy losses. Farther to the right, at Lieusaint, enemy snipers also slowed the advance, and all three of the regiment’s battalions were brought into action to clear the area. By nightfall, all the units had reached their first-day objectives, most of them ahead of schedule. Meanwhile, Wyche rethought his decision to hold the 314th Regiment in reserve and ordered it to assemble as well. The regiment’s 2nd Battalion was motorized and sent racing toward the flyspeck village of Croix Jacob, two miles north of Negreville, which it reached at 4:15 the next morning.

At 6 o’clock the same morning the 313th Regiment left the Bois de la Brique, where it had bivouacked for the night, and began advancing in echelon north along the Valognes–Cherbourg highway. The regiment’s progress was so rapid that it overran German positions at Hau de Long and captured four tanks and an 88mm gun before the retreating enemy forces could demolish them. The regiment continued to advance until heavy artillery fire halted it at Delasse.

The 314th Regiment began advancing at the same time, moving parallel to the main highway and capturing an additional eight German tanks. By 6 p.m. the lead forces had made it all the way to Tollevast, where they ran into a string of enemy pillboxes and stopped for the night. Meanwhile, the 315th Regiment spent the day mopping up the area west of Valognes that the lead regiments had bypassed, overrunning two German strongpoints and seizing several prisoners and a number of 4-inch guns. The regiment made camp for the night at an assembly area near Hau de Long.

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THE 79TH DIVISION IN WORLD WAR II

Allied planes dive-bombed the fort before the 79th Division launched its attack.

So-called pillboxes in the first line of German defenses which the 79th Division assaulted in the attack on Cherbourg were actually inland forts with steel and reinforced concrete walls four or five feet thick.

Built into the hills of Normandy so their parapets were level with surrounding ground, the forts were heavily armed with mortars, machine guns, and 88mm rifles—this last, the Germans’ most formidable piece of artillery.

Around the forts lay a pattern of smaller defenses, pillboxes, redoubts, rifle pits, sunken well-like mortar emplacements permitting 360-degree traverse, observation posts and other works enabling the defenders to deliver deadly crossfire from all directions.

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Approaches were further protected by minefields, barbed wire and antitank ditches at least 20 feet wide at the top and 20 feet deep. Each strongpoint was connected to the other and all were linked to the mother fort by a system of deep, camouflaged trenches and underground tunnels. The forts and pillboxes were fitted with periscopes. Telephones tied in all defenses.

Entrance to these forts was from the rear, below ground level, through double doors of steel armorplate which defending garrisons clamped shut behind them. The forts were electrically lighted and automatically ventilated.

The Germans responded to the scouts’ probes with heavy small-arms and artillery fire, shelling the assembly area of the 314th Regiment and causing some casualties.

The 315th moved up through the night to the outskirts of St. Martin le Guard, with a covering force moving into place north of Le Bourg. Plans were formalized for the next day’s attack, and the troops were issued extra demolition equipment they would need when striking Cherbourg’s outer defenses. Repeated radio broadcasts were beamed into the city, urging the Germans to surrender and setting an ultimatum of noon on June 22. Schlieben again ignored all offers, and 40 minutes after the ultimatum expired the U.S. Army Air Forces began a tremendous 80-minute aerial bombardment of the enemy positions at Cherbourg. The men of the 79th had pulled back 1,000 yards or so to keep clear of the American bombing and machine-gun fire from strafing planes, but inevitably they took some friendly fire.

As soon as the aerial bombardment ended at 2 p.m., the 304th Engineer Battalion went to work under fire, blasting entrances through hedgerows and building new roads alongside existing routes.

Meanwhile, the 313th Regiment jumped off on the division’s right, but it quickly ran into active enemy pillboxes.

One battalion circled the enemy position and attacked it from the rear. A second battalion, spearheaded by a heavy machine gun platoon, advanced toward the primary objective, Crossroads 177, arriving at 2:05 a.m. On the left, the 314th Regiment advanced to the fortified village of Tollevast, while the 315th operated on the far left flank, maintaining contact with the 9th Infantry Division and eliminating enemy strongpoints as it went.

For the next two days the 79th proceeded toward Cherbourg, an exhausting stop-and-start advance that necessarily slowed each time the various regiments encountered German resistance. Even in late June the nights were cold, and the men dropped into foxholes and slept when they could, which was not often since enemy artillery incessantly split the night. Correspondent McCardell painted a vivid picture of the men:

LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHVIES; RIGHT: KEYSTONE-FRANCE (GETTY IMAGES)

In two days all three American divisions were within striking distance of Cherbourg. Lieutenant General Karl-­ Wilhelm von Schlieben, the German garrison’s new commander, had 21,000 troops on hand, but many of them were sailors hastily drafted from docked vessels or grudging conscriptees from labor units. The defenders were running out of food, fuel, and ammunition, and what few supplies the Luftwaffe was able to drop into the city were mostly useless items such as Iron Crosses intended to boost the garrison’s morale. Schlieben rejected calls to surrender and began carrying out demolitions inside the city.

By that point in the war, Schlieben had a nearly unbroken record of failures on his command résumé, having lost entire tank divisions on the Eastern Front at Stalingrad and Kursk. He had been sent to western France and given charge of the 709th Static Infantry Division, a poor-quality unit made up of previously wounded soldiers, older men with existing medical conditions, conscripted laborers, and Russian POWs who had agreed to fight for the Germans to escape the horrific conditions in eastern prison camps. The division had initially confronted American troops landing at Utah Beach and airborne forces farther west on the peninsula before withdrawing into Cherbourg. The defenders did have the advantage—and at first it was a large one—of having spent the last four months strengthening defenses around the port city.

On the night of June 20–21, Wyche ordered scouts from the 79th to make a thorough reconnaissance of the outer defenses at Cherbourg. Lee McCardell, a war correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, accompanied the troops and described what they discovered:

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From left: Captain William H. Hooper of the 314th Regiment and some of his men march a column of German prisoners out of Cherbourg, France; American infantrymen clean up the last pocket of resistance in Cherbourg.

Advancing up the slope, Kelly placed the first charge, which was ineffective. He returned with a second charge, which blew off the ends of the enemy machine guns, and then climbed the slope a third time to place a charge against the rear entrance. He then tossed hand grenades into the ruins, forcing the survivors to surrender. For his gallantry, Kelly was awarded the division’s first World War II Medal of Honor—sadly posthumously, as he was fatally wounded in France that November.

A second member of the 314th, First Lieutenant Carlos C. Ogden of Company K, 3rd Battalion, performed feats at Fort du Roule for which he also received a Medal of Honor.

The last key to the German defense before Cherbourg When the company was pinned down by an 88mm gun was Fort du Roule, situated on a ridge running northwest emplacement and its company commander wounded, to southeast in front of the city. The fort dated back to the Ogden attached a grenade launcher to his rifle and started late 18th century and had been greatly expanded by French up the slope toward the stronghold. “We were tied down emperor Napoleon III from 1853 to 1857. The French had and were going to get killed,” Ogden would later recall, strengthened the fortification before the Germans occu- “and I thought I might as well get killed going forward as pied it, and the Germans’ own crack Todt engineering or- back.” Two bullets went through his helmet, grazing his ganization had modernized it. Organisation Todt was a head and knocking him down. He was holding a grenade quasi-civilian operation led by Albert Speer, the Nazi min- with the pin pulled, and despite suffering a broken wrist in ister of armaments and munitions. It was notorious for the fall, he managed to hold the grenade handle in place. using forced labor, and along with constructing much of He knocked out the 88 with a rifle grenade and silenced Germany’s autobahn system of highways, it also undertook two machine guns with hand grenades. Despite being wounded in the leg as well as the head and suffering a conconstruction of all concentration camps during the war.

On the morning of June 25, Allied planes dive-bombed cussion and damaged eardrums from the explosions, the fort before the men of the 79th Division launched their Ogden refused medical treatment, rallied the company, attack. The 313th Regiment led the way to the outskirts of and led it forward.

Fort du Roule’s defenders surrendered at 9:48 that the city, while the 314th stormed the fort itself. Companies E and F of the 2nd Battalion attacked the eastern face of the night. Schlieben; his second in command, Rear Admiral stronghold before being pinned down by heavy machine-­ Walter Hennecke; and 800 other officers and enlisted men gun fire from the slope beneath the peak. Corporal John D. put up their hands, although the German general refused Kelly of Company E volunteered to blow the strongpoint to issue a blanket cease-fire order. His stubbornness rewith 15 pounds of TNT attached to a 10-foot pole charge. sulted in another day of unnecessary street fighting inside

LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHVIES; RIGHT: KEYSTONE-FRANCE (GETTY IMAGES)

The Joes looked like they could stand a Saturday night bath anywhere—not necessarily Cherbourg.

Those with beards looked like burlesque tramps. All were beginning to tire a little. Many a Joe hadn’t had his shoes off for a week. His feet were killing him. He would have given ten bucks for a clean pair of 10cent socks. Aside from canned rations and hand grenades which filled all the pockets of his grimy, mud-stained fatigues, he carried only what he wore plus his canteen, a shovel, an ammunition belt, an extra bandolier, a knife, bayonet and his rifle.

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THE 79TH DIVISION IN WORLD WAR II

“We took that rock pile step by step,” one GI said of the fort, “and every step was a grunt.”

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In its first battle, the 79th Division had performed superbly. Against numerically superior (if sometimes qualitatively inferior) enemy forces holding an intensely fortified city situated on commanding heights, the division had smashed through to victory, after fighting its way across the flooded countryside. It was, Wyche said, “a brilliant beginning,” but he, better than anyone, knew that it was only the beginning. Ahead lay 240 more days of combat and thousands more casualties. For the 79th, in the words of the traditional hymn, there were still literally “many rivers to cross.”

The 79th Division had taken Cherbourg, but the Germans still had forces spread across the Carentin Peninsula, from Denneville on the extreme western flank east through St. Lô to Carentan. To link up with other advancing Allied troops—and to avoid being trapped in a bottleneck on the peninsula itself—Wyche set the division in motion on July 3. Plans called for the 314th Regiment to cross a tributary of the Douve River and capture an enemy strongpoint designated Hill 121. At the same time, the 315th would attack farther west in the direction of Hill 84 near Montgardon. The 313th was held in reserve.

Once again the GIs in the division faced a tenacious, desperate enemy holding the hedgerows and contesting all the roads leading south. Ubiquitous 88mm artillery pieces were augmented by dug-in panzers and deadly snipers. At zero hour, 5:30 a.m. on July 3, the regiments set out in a cold drizzle toward their objectives. Both regiments took their initial targets by midafternoon, supported by artillery and tanks, though resistance was heavy. Hitler himself had ordered the Germans in the hedgerows, many of whom had been bypassed on the lightning drive toward Cherbourg, to fight to the last man. Not all did so, but these “suicide units” grimly contested the Americans’ progress.

By day’s end, both regiments were halfway toward their ultimate objectives. The advance was halted for a day to allow General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe, and his second in command, Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, to visit the division command post at Les Fosse while American artillery “serenaded” the enemy in a gala Fourth of July commemoration.

The next morning the two lead regiments moved forward again, with the 313th joining in. Increasingly, the attack focused on the enemy stronghold at La Haye-duPuits. The Germans fought bitterly for every inch, but Lieutenant Colonel James B. “Kannonball” Kraft’s 312th Forward Artillery Battalion unleashed what one observer called “the prettiest damned precision artillery in this man’s war,” paving the way for Lieutenant Colonel Olin E. “Tiger” Teague’s 314th Battalion to advance to the very rim of the city. Enemy observers in the bell tower of the village

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Cherbourg before the 313th and 315th Regiments, with minor last-minute assistance from the British No. 30 Commando unit in the eastern suburbs, secured the city on June 26, capturing a total of 6,000 German soldiers, along with a large amount of matériel. A British post-surrender intelligence report gave a less than flattering image of Schlieben: “With his pink complexion, round boyish face, huge bulk and lumbering gait he gives the appearance of an overgrown, mentally under-developed school-boy type who will bully his inferiors and toady to his superiors.…

Has more bluff than guts.” The British were particularly insulted that Schlieben didn’t know whether Scotland was hilly or flat. A final humiliation for the general came when a truck loaded with his personal trunks and belongings collided with another truck, and gleeful GIs helped themselves to his gold braid and decorated dress uniforms strewn along the side of the road.

“We took that rock pile step by step,” one GI said of Fort du Roule, “and every step was a grunt.” Colonel Bernard B. McMahon, the 315th’s multilingual commanding officer, took to a mobile public-address system to urge the remaining Germans to surrender. Scores did, but others, concealed in secondary underground bunkers beneath the forts, were inadvertently blown up by American engineers demolishing the structures. Meanwhile, Cherbourg’s citizens thronged the litter-strewn streets to kiss and embrace les liberateurs. Cherbourg was the first French city of any size liberated by the Allies in the war, and the overwhelming greeting extended to the men with the Cross of Lorraine shoulder patch on their campaign jackets would be repeated often as they made their way across France. But in Cherbourg the celebration was short lived. On June 27, the 4th Division moved into Cherbourg to garrison the city, and the 79th headed south. General Ted Roosevelt would become temporary military governor of the city before rejoining his division on its drive across Normandy. Roosevelt would die in his sleep of a heart attack on July 11. Two months later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt presented the general’s widow with a posthumous Medal of Honor in recognition of his service at Utah Beach.

Navy Seabees and salvage teams immediately went to work clearing and rebuilding Cherbourg’s damaged harbor.

On July 16, the first new shipment of supplies—some 17,000 tons of rations and equipment—was offloaded. By the end of the war, nearly three million tons of cargo had entered via Cherbourg, along with 130,210 fresh combat troops.

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“To Belgium and Back” (August 31–October 25, 1944). After crossing the Seine, the 79th Division embarked on a breakneck advance into Belgium and then through the rest of France, for 127 continuous days of combat.

cathedral observed for a bit too long, and Kraft’s gunners sent a burst directly through the steeple. When GIs entered the square afterward, they found the bodies of the bell tower watch sprawled across the cobblestones below.

After taking Hill 84 (and encountering for the first time the vaunted troops of the 2nd Schutzstaffel [SS] Division), the men of the 315th were joined by the 313th, which helped beat back an intense counterattack on the promontory the Germans were calling “Bloody Hill.” Meanwhile, the 28th Infantry Regiment from the 8th Division reinforced the 314th Regiment, along with two tank battalions, for a final push into La Haye-du-Puits. For nearly six hours the Americans fought house to house with the German defenders, who eventually fell back to the town’s railroad station for a last stand. GIs said the paint was still wet on numerous German-language “Off Limits” signs at the station. Finally, Teague reported that the city belonged to the 79th. Tennessee-born Lieutenant Arch B. Hoge Jr. raised a small Confederate flag in the city—the same flag his uncle

had raised over a French village in World War I and his grandfather had raised during the Civil War. The 1st Battalion of the 314th was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation for its part in the fighting.

Mopping up enemy diehards on Hill 84, the men of the 315th got a firsthand view of their division commander in action. On one of his daily visits to the front, Wyche found a platoon pinned down on the slope of the hill. Repeatedly exposing himself to enemy fire, Wyche helped regroup the men and led them through two hedgerows to knock out the German position on the crest. Wyche even managed to help evacuate a wounded infantry scout from the field.

Small, wiry, and intense, Wyche was popular with the men, who called him “Papa Wyche” for his daily inspections and his obvious attention to their well-being. His headquarters flag, two gold stars on a red background, was usually at or near the front. An accomplished horseman who had begun his career with the mounted service, Wyche now rode into combat in a jeep, his handsome,

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“We’re about to destroy an entire hostile army,” General Bradley told the men.

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torized, the division headed first to the city of Fougères and then drove on to Laval, with elements of the 313th and 314th Regiments crossing the Mayenne River by boat and helping throw up a floating Bailey bridge. The 315th followed, and the division entered Laval on the afternoon of August 6. From Laval the division advanced to the important industrial city of Le Mans. The 315th was motorized and ordered to assist in the capture of Le Mans. The city fell on August 8.

The war had entered a period of lightning advances, with the 79th and other infantry divisions following the American armored divisions as they swung northeast in an attempt to encircle the German Seventh Army near Mortain. The 79th advanced in its now-familiar three-pronged formation, converging on the village of Nogent-le-Roi on August 15. Enemy resistance was slight, with the exception of three Luftwaffe planes that attempted to dive-bomb the assembly area and were quickly shot down by the 463rd Antiaircraft Artillery Battalion. Reunited, the division moved onto the ridges overlooking Mantes-Gassicourt, where the Seine looped lazily west-northwest. With the 315th left in reserve, the 313th and 314th Regiments moved quickly north to help trap the enemy in the inland peninsula formed by the looping river.

For five days the desperate Germans counterattacked the two regiments in the vicinity of Dennemont. Lee McCardell of the Baltimore Sun described the American position as “a stubby finger, sticking into enemy territory...a sort of a Bunker Hill proposition.” McCardell said the men had placed machine-guns behind a wall in which they had made embrasures. There the veterans sat, “calmly smoking as they watched the desperate Germans advance,” he wrote.

“They held their fire until they could almost see the whites of their eyes.” The 313th and 314th had advanced so quickly that the German press misidentified their advance as an airborne landing. At one place, Colonel Sterling A. Wood, the commanding officer of the 313th, counted 39 enemy dead in a 50-square-yard area. “I’ve never seen anything like it in any other engagement in this war,” he said, “and we’ve had some pretty stiff ones.”

General Bradley pressed the men forward, declaring: “This is an opportunity that comes to a commander not more than once a century. We’re about to destroy an entire hostile army and go all the way from here to the German border.” His ever-aggressive Third Army commander, Patton, who personally visited the 79th’s bridgehead on August 19, was inspired to write a poem about the apparent inevitable tide of the battle: “So let us do real fighting, boring in and gouging, biting. / Let’s take a chance now that we have the ball. / Let’s forget those fine firm bases in the dreary shell raked spaces, / Let’s shoot the works and win! Yes, win it all!”

DAVID RUMSEY HISTORICAL MAP COLLECTION

deeply lined face familiar to all the GIs under his command. They appreciated his willingness to lead from the front, and he repaid their affection by focusing on every detail of his command. This included establishing a special pool of experienced officers, noncoms, and veteran frontline troops to train replacements before they went into action. Other divisions soon adopted Wyche’s innovative training system.

Highways south and east of La Haye-du-Puits were still infested with German defenders and heavily mined. It would take the 79th 11 days to clear the peninsula. In doing so, the division suffered 2,930 casualties. The Germans withdrew to the south bank of the Ay River, while inclement weather grounded Allied planes and allowed the enemy to reinforce positions with 88mm artillery pieces and mortars and blow strategic bridges across the river. At one dynami­ ted bridge, Private Frederick F. Richardson of Company F, 315th Regiment, personally beat back two German counterattacks over two days and nights. Setting up his Browning in a window of a stone house 300 yards from the bridge, Richardson blasted away, killing or wounding 40 attackers.

Finally, after allowing the enemy a three-hour ceasefire to remove the wounded from his field of fire, Richardson was amazed to see a German lieutenant approach with 19 men, waving a white flag of surrender. He remained at his post, where a mortar round subsequently blew off one of his legs.

Richardson’s only complaint to the medics carrying him to the rear in a stretcher was that he could not “go back and kill more Germans.” He would be awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for his actions on the Ay. The Germans abandoned their line south of the Ay River and fell back toward the stronghold of Lessay. The 79th Division joined the massive Allied effort known as Operation Cobra, which was designed to break out of the Normandy beachheads and cut off the German forces before they could withdraw to defensive lines farther north and east of the coastal regions. The operation was under the direction of Bradley, with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery leading the British and Canadian efforts to capture Caen and pin down the Germans there.

As part of the newly constituted VIII Corps, the 79th Division crossed the Ay River on July 26 and captured Lessay. American armored divisions spearheaded the advance. VIII Corps was attached to Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr.’s Third Army and given the task of protecting its left flank. Transferred to XV Corps and now mo-

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“To the Rhine” (October 25, 1944–February 14, 1945). On its way to the Rhine, the 79th Division turned Hatten and Rittershoffen into “a burial ground for many of Hitler’s best troops,” as this map’s legend put it.

As it turned out, the generals were overly optimistic.

The disciplined German army, despite suffering enormous losses from D-Day onward, managed to hold open the soon-to-be-infamous Falaise Gap, a break in the Allied lines, long enough for 50,000 soldiers to escape the jaws of defeat, death, or capture. Pushing past the valiant but outgunned 1st Polish Artillery Division at Hill 262 near Chambois, the German survivors managed to cross the Seine ahead of their pursuers. Montgomery and his surrogates complained that Patton had not swiftly blocked the German retreat—surely the only time in his career, civilian or military, that Patton had been accused of being too slow or not aggressive enough. In fact, Bradley had held him back: “Although Patton might have spun a line across the narrow neck, I doubted his ability to hold it,” Bradley later wrote. “Nineteen German divisions were now stampeding to escape the trap. Meanwhile, with four divisions George was already blocking three principal escape routes through Alencon, Sees, and Argentan. Had he stretched that line

to include Falaise, he would have extended his roadblock a distance of 40 miles. The enemy could not only have broken through, but he might have trapped Patton’s position in the onrush. I much preferred a solid shoulder at Argentan to the possibility of a broken neck at Falaise.”

Historians have long debated whether Bradley, in deciding to leave Falaise Gap open, unwittingly prolonged the war by allowing thousands of battle-tested German soldiers to live to fight another day. In any event, between D-Day and the time the Allied forces closed Falaise Gap on August 22, the Germans lost a staggering 240,000 men. In its portion of fighting around the Seine loop, the 79th alone had inflicted more than 25,000 casualties, taken 12,000 prisoners, and seized or destroyed 200 German tanks, 235 artillery pieces, and 675 armored vehicles. The division’s antiaircraft units had shot down an additional 50 Luftwaffe planes. Three days later, on August 25, Paris was liberated.

On August 28 the 79th was transferred to XIX Corps. It would bypass Paris altogether—much to the disappoint-

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THE 79TH DIVISION IN WORLD WAR II ment of the men—and head northeast into Belgium. In just 72 hours the division covered 180 miles, passing over legendary World War I battlegrounds at the Somme and becoming one of the first American divisions to cross into Belgium in World War II. Major General Charles H. Corlett, the commanding officer of XIX Corps, told Wyche it was “believed to be one of the fastest opposed advances of comparable distance by an infantry division in warfare.”

Behind the praise lay acknowledgment of the division’s superb performance, particularly in taking and rebridging various rivers and streams the Germans had destroyed as they retreated. Much of the credit went to the men of the 304th Engineer Battalion, who threw up three new bridges over the Somme alone with whatever materials they found at hand—often while under fire from enemy planes.

On September 5 the division turned south toward Reims and a reunion with Patton’s Third Army. Meanwhile, the German Nineteenth Army was in full retreat toward the wooded hills overlooking the Moselle River. Once again the division’s three regiments advanced separately, with the 313th aiming at Poussay and Ambacourt and the 314th heading for Charmes. The 315th’s objective was Neufchâteau. Although they didn’t realize it at the time, the hard-marching men in the 79th had traversed the entire front of the German 16th Infantry Division—an almost unheard-of feat against the highly trained enemy.

On September 12, in one of its fiercest attacks of the war, the 315th overran Neufchâteau. Led by Lieutenant Colonel John H. McAleer, the regimental combat team spearheaded the assault under cover of darkness at 1 a.m.

The 1st Battalion moved in from the northeast, while the 2nd Battalion took up positions south of the town to block any enemy reinforcements from that direction.

The regiment’s scouts received valuable assistance from an unlikely source: a 19-year-old British airman, Walter Farmer, whose Lancaster bomber had been shot down near Liège in March. He had joined the French underground while making his way to Switzerland. Farmer ran into the scouts on patrol and agreed to sneak into Neufchâteau to ascertain German strength and locations. He was almost captured by the Germans, but townsfolk managed to lift him onto the roof of a barn in the nick of time.

Bitter street fighting went on all day and night, with the Germans making full use of the crumbled buildings to mount a last-ditch defense. Despite the stubborn resistance, the 315th gained control of the town by midnight.

In five days the 79th Division annihilated the famed German 16th Infantry Division.

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Moving east toward Châtenois, the regiment came upon a German lieutenant carrying a flag of truce. Interrogators learned from the officer that his commander, a colonel named Wetzel, wanted to discuss terms of surrender.

The German motorized regiment, headquartered nearby in a château at Bazeilles, had found itself pinned between the 315th and the 2nd French Armored Division. Wetzel was ready to surrender to the Americans, provided they would promise not to hand him and his men over to the French forces in the vicinity, whom he described as “terrorists.” A quartet of regimental officers and a sergeant met with Wetzel, a highly decorated 30-year veteran of the German army who had lost an eye on the Russian front.

The official regimental history dryly noted that Wetzel “indicated that this was not one of the happiest moments of his life.” On the morning of September 14, Wetzel surrendered his entire regiment to the assistant 79th Division commander, Brigadier General Frank Greer. Included in the haul were 45 trucks, 29 personnel carriers, five motorcycles, three Red Cross trucks, two 88mm guns, a six-gun battery, and two half-tracks.

The 315th drove on to Châtenois, overcoming stiff resistance there, and then linked up with the 313th at Dombasle, where the two regiments formed a pocket to trap an additional 500 German prisoners. A wild night of fighting at Ramecourt resulted in the destruction of another enemy force. In five days the division captured a total of more than 2,200 prisoners and annihilated the famed German 16th Infantry Division.

On September 18 the division got a well-earned respite when Bing Crosby, the famous singer turned movie star, brought his USO company to the area for two shows.

Crosby, singer Dinah Shore, and the rest of the cast had crossed the Atlantic aboard the Queen Mary and performed at the site of the division’s singular triumph at Cherbourg and across eastern France. The troupe planned two performances for the regiments: an afternoon show at Ambacourt and an evening show at Charmes, where a large stage was built in a field and antiaircraft guns were placed at various points to safeguard against dive-bombing Luftwaffe planes. The second show had just begun when loudspeakers blared orders for the troops to return to their units and prepare to move out immediately. Crosby gamely proceeded for 15 minutes, but as the audience continued to dwindle, he finally gave up. The division was headed out for Lunéville and Morville. The men had not even gotten to hear Crosby’s signature closer, “White Christmas.”

Four more days of fighting ensued as the division drove forward to establish a bridgehead on the Meurthe River near Fraimbois. The flat, barren terrain leading to the chest-deep river and the dense woods beyond provided the Germans with a formidable defensive position. The

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3rd Battalion of the 314th Regiment would be given a Presidential Unit Citation for its performance at the Meurthe, where it suffered 31 killed and 160 wounded while capturing 46 prisoners and killing or wounding an undetermined number of enemy. “We climbed Fort du Roule, and we crossed the Meurthe River,” said 3rd Battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Ernest R. Purvis. “If we had to do one of the two over, we’d take Fort du Roule every time. Compared with this operation, Fort du Roule was a picnic.” Division veterans began referring to the Meurthe River crossing as “Little D-Day.” The battalion’s crossing was aided by an extraordinary act of heroism on the part of Private (later Sergeant) Claude K. Ramsdail of Company L, who volunteered to obtain firsthand intelligence about enemy troop strength and gun positions beyond the river. Armed with his M-1 rifle, Ramsdail started toward the river. Enemy machine-gunners and snipers opened fire as soon as they saw him, but somehow, Ramsdail later recalled, he “managed to walk between the bullets.” Reaching the river’s edge, he snapped off two quick shots at snipers firing from a nearby farmhouse and then began wading across the river with his rifle over his head.

He took cover midstream behind a stalled enemy tank destroyer and wigwagged prearranged hand signals to a friendly tank destroyer crew about a camouflaged German tank he had spotted nearby. They took it out. Ramsdail then exchanged fire with an enemy machine-gun nest, suffering .50-caliber bullet wounds to his right leg and left shoulder.

Blown off his feet, Ramsdail almost drowned before he regained his footing and dragged himself onto the riverbank.

Artillery took out the machine-gunners and the battalion stormed across the river. They found three dead snipers in the nest and two more in the farmhouse, along with 43 Germans ready to surrender.

The division reassembled around Lunéville on September 22 for a difficult new assignment. A salient had opened on the southern flank of Patton’s Third Army near the Forêt de Parroy in northeastern France. The forest, a sentimental favorite of Hitler’s because he had fought there as a corporal in World War I, had been strongly fortified by the crack 15th Panzer Grenadier Division. The Germans had been ordered to hold to the last man. Against this fanatical force of defenders the men of the 79th would have to fight hand to hand, tree to tree, and boulder to boulder. It would be a daunting task, considering the enemy’s advantages: The Germans had a commanding view of the terrain, they occupied existing French defenses, and they had implanted tanks and assault guns—difficult to knock out under the heavy covering of trees.

The 314th Regiment was held in reserve, while the 313th and 315th pushed ahead, first to Jolivet and Chanteheux and then to Crion and Sionviller. Poor weather shut

down aerial bombardments, hampering the advance for several days. Scout patrols ran into heavy resistance almost immediately. The 312th Field Artillery Battalion and XV Corps Artillery exchanged heavy fire with German batteries. Finally, on September 28, American bombers struck the forest for an hour and a half.

Following the bombing the 313th and 315th Regiments jumped off on the morning of September 29, using the main east–west road through the forest as a boundary line.

The 315th reached the edge of the woods without much opposition but later ran into heavy machine-gun and artillery fire and had to bring up tanks and tank destroyers to clear the resistance. The GIs pushed into the shadowy forest, not knowing that they would face 14 days of solid fighting—bluntly described as “hell” by division historians—before emerging from the other side. The 313th, on the right flank, crossed the Vezouze River and beat back a number of German counterattacks with the aid of several bazooka teams. The 314th went back into action at the southwestern edge of the forest and linked up with the 315th.

By October 1 the division had advanced a third of the way through the forest, on roads that had to be constructed by engineers under fire from uncomfortably close enemy gunners. An engineer sergeant recalled the action in the knee-deep mud: “One rainy, miserable day we got a call to clear a minefield. The first 100 yards of a so-called road were clear. Then we came to a knocked-out jeep and two dead medics, victims of a Regal mine. Bouncing Bettys [S-mines] were all around. We started clearing this quagmire—and somebody stepped on a Betty. There were five casualties in the space of seconds. The rest of us gave them first aid and carried them out on makeshift litters.” The next day three more engineers were similarly injured. It was impossible to get a jeep up to the front to evacuate them.

The fighting continued grimly in the medieval shadows of the forest. Heeding Hitler’s orders, the Germans threw four full divisions into the Parroy, including an old familiar opponent, the 11th Panzer Division, which the 79th had faced at Cherbourg. Each day more and more of the enemy staggered into the American lines, holding up their hands and shouting that they had had enough. Finally, on October 8, plans were set in motion for a full-scale assault the next morning to clear the forest once and for all. The 314th and 315th would attack an enemy strongpoint at a crossroads three-fourths of the way into the forest. The 313th

“Compared with this operation,” Purvis said of the crossing, “Fort du Roule was a picnic.”

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The Germans saw the 79th as “one of the best attack divisions in the United States Army.”

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of the only mountain fighting on the Western Front. The mountains changed hands four times in 1914 and 1915, with the Germans gaining control and throwing up lengthy defensive works in the eastern foothills between le-Château and Blamont in the south and Réchicourt-­ Harbouey to Baccarat in the north. The fortifications included antitank obstacles, pillboxes, fortified gun emplacements, weapons pits, and strongpoints. It was those works that the German defenders reoccupied in the fall of 1944. They considered the Vosges defenses impregnable.

In a week of heavy fighting the 79th Division drove the Germans from their supposedly impregnable positions, clearing the way for the French 2nd Armored Division to take Strasbourg on November 23. The 1st Battalion, 313th Regiment, was the only American unit to accompany the French into the city, giving the men in the division yet another distinction: They were the first Americans to catch sight of the Rhine in World War II. The retreating Germans, embarrassed by their losses, dropped pamphlets into Strasbourg warning citizens: “If General de Gaulle thinks he is now in possession of Strasbourg, he is mistaken. Even if his surprising attack for the benefit of his prestige was successful, that does not mean that there will not be a sad awakening for him very soon. Not for a moment will the German Reich consider giving up German Alsace. Always Remember: The German Army will soon be here again!”

It was a boast the Germans would not back up.

The 79th, led by its Reconnaissance Troop, patrolled the Alsace region, rounding up and interrogating captured German soldiers from the 25th Volksgrenadier Division, the 62nd and 109th Infantry Battalions, and 30 members of the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) ranging in age from 14 to 16. Meanwhile, the 315th Regiment seized Schweighausen on the Moder River, a few miles west of the major enemy supply center at Haguenau, forcing a river crossing under heavy infantry, artillery, and Luftwaffe fire. The 315th continued on toward Haguenau, while the 313th attacked Bischwiller on the right. The Germans, desperate to escape, attempted to blow bridges crossing the Moder. One effort was personally thwarted by Captain William McKean of Braintree, Massachusetts, a battalion executive officer in the 313th, who dove into the river under heavy fire and cut the wire leading from dynamite charges under the bridge to a 500-pound bomb atop the structure. “I didn’t know whether handling the wire would set off the TNT,” McKean recalled. “I felt pretty good when nothing happened.”

McKean later received a Silver Star for his actions that day.

On December 11, the 314th Regiment stormed into Haguenau. Four days later, the division united at Lauterbourg and Scheinbenhardt on the Lauter River, the boundary between France and Germany. Staff Sergeant Dewey J. White had the honor of being the first division member to

DAVID RUMSEY HISTORICAL MAP COLLECTION

would circle around and link up with the other two divisions there. As proof of the importance the American high command placed on the Parroy, General George C. Marshall, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army, and other ranking group and corps commanders, visited the division’s advance headquarters on the day of the attack and observed the final assault from high ground just behind the lines.

The final assault began at 6:30 a.m. and lasted until 3:30 p.m., when all advancing troops reported that they had cleared the woods and reached the eastern edge of the forest. Five more days of bloody fighting were needed to clear the high ground beyond the Parroy at Emberménil, two miles away. In all, the 79th Division suffered 2,016 casualties in the Battle of the Parroy Forest, and inflicted three times that many, while taking 1,249 prisoners. Elements of nine German divisions took part in the futile defense, including the elite 29th Panzer Regiment, last reported in action on the Russian front. Two companies from the 315th Regiment—A and F—received Presidential Unit Citations for their actions at Emberménil.

The division was relieved by the 44th Infantry Division on October 23, having spent 127 consecutive days in combat. The next 16 days were given over to rest and recuperation at Lunéville, where the men slept in beds for the first time in four months. Wyche, while praising his men, urged each man to perform better in the future “by intelligent rest and recreation and correcting all his deficiencies.”

The race to the Rhine was about to begin. They would need all the rest they could get.

The division reassembled near the village of Montigny and moved on to the attack in the early morning hours of November 13. As part of XV Corps, the 79th had been given the key task of seizing the town of Sarrebourg and forcing the legendary Saverne Gap through the Vosges Mountains dividing France from Germany. The ultimate objective was the strategically vital city of Strasbourg, situated just west of the Rhine River and fought over by the French and Germans for centuries. The 314th and 315th Regiments took the lead, with the 313th in reserve. The vaunted 2nd French Armored Division, which had been the first unit to enter Paris during the liberation, stood by to rush through Saverne Gap once it was cleared.

The Vosges was a comparatively low mountain range, but one that had been strategically important since 58 bce, when Julius Caesar led the Romans to victory over the Germanic tribes. In World War I, the Vosges was the site

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DAVID RUMSEY HISTORICAL MAP COLLECTION

“Over the Rhine” (February 17–May 9, 1945). The 79th Division crossed the Rhine River on March 24, 1945.

It took part in the clearing of the Ruhr Pocket the following month and assumed occupation duties after V-E Day.

set foot on German soil in the war. Two captured enemy documents were particularly illuminating. The first, an intelligence advisory from the 361st Volksgrenadier Division, noted that “the 79th Division is known to have fought particularly well in Normandy, and is considered to be one of the best attack divisions in the United States Army.”

Wyche would quote the unnamed German’s assessment in his introduction to the unit history in Stars and Stripes in 1945. The second document was an Order of the Day from the commander of the 356th Volksgrenadier Division, urging his men “to take a close grip on your rifle and hold our old border city of Haguenau for the Fuehrer.” He was not persuasive: Only a handful of snipers resisted the 314th’s entry into the city.

While the Germans launched their surprise offensive through the Ardennes—the soon to be famous Battle of the Bulge—the 79th probed the German defenses northeast of the captured cities of Lauterbourg and Scheibenhardt and then fell back to the Lauter River at Wissembourg, so that

the Third Army could detach itself for a lightning dash north to relieve the besieged city of Bastogne. For the first time since landing on Utah Beach starting six days after D-Day, the division went on the defensive. It had captured a total of 21,311 prisoners in the interim.

For the next six weeks, while the Battle of the Bulge raged to the north and west, the 79th Division held its position, which extended roughly from Cleebourg on the left flank through Ingelheim and Aschbach to Hatten, one mile east, and then through the Haguenau Forest to the Rhine River east of Sessenheim. The new year opened with a strong attack on the 79th’s brother division, the 45th Infantry, on the left flank in the vicinity of Reipertswiller. The 79th sent four battalions to counter the threat and on January 2, 1945, withdrew, under orders, to the rebuilt Maginot Line defense, first constructed by France in the 1930s in a futile effort to deter a German attack.

Three days later the Germans attacked across the Rhine north of Gambsheim, seizing that town and occasioning a

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THE 79TH DIVISION IN WORLD WAR II

In 302 days of combat, the 79th Division suffered more than 15,000 casualties.

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division’s newspaper, the Lorraine Cross, the men were eager to get underway: “One doughboy in the 315th Regiment made this statement about the proposed operation: ‘Practice, move, wait. Practice something else, move the other way, then wait some more. Then repeat the process.’ ” Others warned that the crossing could turn into a debacle, leaving the division with “its heels in the Rhine and fighting between the devil and the drink.”

The attack across the Rhine was preceded by an intense one-hour artillery barrage, the greatest of the war, with Allied artillery firing 300,000 rounds into the German lines from 1,250 guns of all sizes. Sergeant William McBride, No. 1 gun chief for Charley Battery, 311th Field Artillery Battalion, inscribed the last round “300,000” before touching it off.

Following the barrage, it took a mere 29 minutes for 2nd Battalion, 313th Regiment, to motor across the slow-flowing Rhine and seize the village of Overbruch. The 1st Battalion was next to cross, followed by the 2nd Battalion, 315th Regiment. By nightfall all assault teams were across the fabled river. The regiment suffered fewer than 30 casualties in the crossing, most of these coming from men falling overboard in the icy water or slipping on the dike beyond. Captain John E. Potts, S-3 (operations officer) of the 315th, had to be pulled from the water when his overloaded boat shipped water and swamped. Lieutenant Colonel Earl F. Holton, the battalion’s commander, fished him out of the water, joking: “Well, I’ll be damned. What’s my S-3 doing swimming out here when we have work to do?” Clinton Conyer, a United Press correspondent who made the crossing with the division, reported that it had been carried out with “ferryboat precision.”

The division faced sporadic resistance the next several days but managed to capture a factory and take control of the autobahn beyond Dinslaken. On March 28 the division attacked abreast, seizing the Neue Emscher Canal and overrunning Hamborn. By the end of the month, the 79th had achieved its primary objective: seizing the Rhine– Herne Canal.

The division’s last combat push took place April 8–16, when the 313th and 315th Regiments led the efforts to seize control of the north bank of the Ruhr River and close the “Ruhr Pocket” that had developed between the U.S. First and Ninth Armies. The bridgehead effectively cut off more than 18 enemy divisions. One of the last of the 35,466 Germans taken prisoner by the division was industrialist Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the owner of Fried­rich Krupp AG Hoesch-Krupp, a key supplier of weapons and matériel to the Nazi regime and the Wehrmacht.

On April 16, 1945, the 8th Infantry Division linked up with the 3rd Battalion, 313th Regiment, between Kettwig and Steele, relieving the 79th Division and concluding its

CLOCKWISE FROM UPPER LEFT: USIS-DITE (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES); KEYSTONE (GETTY IMAGES); HISTORYNET ARCHIVE

fierce counterattack by the 314th Regiment and the 3rd Algerian Division, which had been attached to the 79th for support. A second front opened north of Kilstett on January 7. The 79th found itself fighting on two fronts.

For 11 days the division fought fiercely against some of the enemy’s best remaining troops: the 21st Panzer Division, 25th Panzer Grenadier Division, and a full regiment of the 7th Parachute Division. Three battalions of the regiment, the 2nd and 3rd and the 310th Field Artillery, received Presidential Citations for holding off “fanatical” German tank and infantry attacks in the face of their own food, medical, and ammunition shortages. Lieutenant Morris W. Goodwin of Company F, 2nd Battalion, said his men refused an order to fall back, telling him, “We’ve run as far as we’re going to run.”

A backhanded compliment—the only kind the Germans generally handed out—came later from a former Wehrmacht battalion commander who had been captured after the fighting at Hatton. Major Wilhelm Kurz of the 125th Panzer Grenadiers, a veteran of 30 battles on both the Eastern and Western Fronts and a holder of his country’s highest honor, the Knight’s Cross, told his 79th Division captors: “I never thought much of Americans as soldiers until I fought them at Rittershoffen, but there we found an antagonist who defended bitterly and with more determination than we had previously seen Americans demonstrate.”

Under orders from the Seventh Army high command, the 79th Division fell back on January 20 to a new defensive line south of Haguenau on the Moder River. Its men were frustrated, feeling that they could have cleared Hatten and Ritters­hoffen of all remaining enemy had they been allowed to stay. Instead, for the next three weeks the division beat back repeated sorties and countersorties by more elite German troops, including the 10th SS Panzer Division. The Germans left 300 dead and another 100 captured after an aborted attempt to cross the river on pontoon boats. On February 7 the 36th and 101st Airborne Divisions relieved the 79th, after it had put in another 87 days of continuous combat. Wyche called the division’s performance “masterful.”

After extensive river-crossing training in Holland that the exhausted GIs who took part in it dubbed “the Big Sweat,” the division moved into position south of Linfort, Germany, in preparation for an all-out push across the Rhine. Underscoring the importance given to the assault, General Eisenhower himself visited 79th Division headquarters on March 24. According to a reporter from the

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CLOCKWISE FROM UPPER LEFT: USIS-DITE (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES); KEYSTONE (GETTY IMAGES); HISTORYNET ARCHIVE

Clockwise from upper left: Two soldiers from the 79th Division pass Mantes-Gassicourt’s bombed-out cathedral; American GIs receive a warm welcome from the locals after liberating Cherbourg; the sign of the Lorraine Cross.

last physical contact with the enemy after 302 days of combat from Utah Beach to the Ruhr. In the course of its service, the 79th Division suffered a total of 15,203 casualties, including 2,476 killed, 10,971 wounded, 1,186 captured, and 579 missing in action. Among those reported missing was Private Roy Morris, whose wife, Margaret, received the much-dreaded Missing in Action telegram at her parents’ home in Nashville in early January 1945.

Such MIA telegrams were known to precede Killed in Action telegrams.

In this case, Morris was missing because his platoon sergeant had been killed before completing a final report detailing Morris’s evacuation to the rear with frozen feet and a minor shrapnel wound to the hand. A follow-up telegram reported that Morris had been “slightly wounded in Germany on December 28.” By then, he had managed to send a letter home from a hospital in England, where he was recuperating and helping to organize live-­ entertainment shows in various hospitals and camps.

Morris would survive the war, return to Tennessee, and go on to a successful career in radio and television broadcasting, begun on the stages of England.

Also surviving the war was First Lieutenant Robert O. Hogan. During occupation duty with the division in Germany after the war, Hogan met a beautiful young Hungarian woman, Rozalia Maria Szarka, a stage actress who had been forced to work as a slave laborer in a German ball-bearing plant. They married and went back to Hogan’s

hometown, Oklahoma City, and then, in a few years, to Indianapolis, where Hogan became the assistant secretary treasurer of the International Typographical Union.

Morris and Hogan were two of the lucky ones, and they never forgot it. Nor did they forget their service with the 79th (Cross of Lorraine) Division, which had fought its way across Europe all the way from the beaches of Normandy to the Bavarian foothills beyond the Ruhr. My father kept his divisional shoulder patch displayed in his foldout wallet for the rest of his life. He didn’t talk much about the war, although when as a boy I asked him whether he had ever been in any big battles, he replied: “Son, when some German SOB is standing behind a tree shooting at you, it’s a big battle.” Only a true combat veteran would have put it that way. As that unnamed German intelligence officer had observed, the 79th was indeed “one of the best attack divisions in the United States Army.” 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). As a boy Morris watched countless World War II movies and television shows with his father, former private Roy Morris of the 79th Division, who counted Battleground (1949) and Patton (1970) among his favorite films. Robert O. Hogan, also referred to in this story, was the father of Bill Hogan, MHQ’s editor.

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OPPOSITE: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

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TEMPEST IN TEXAS OPPOSITE: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

A few months after the United States entered World War I, another war broke out in Houston.

By John A. Haymond

More than 75 Black soldiers in the 3rd Battalion of the U.S. Army’s 24th Infantry Regiment were charged with murder after they rioted in 1917; 19 were executed.

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THE 1917 HOUSTON UPRISING

Trouble began soon after the 3rd Battalion arrived in Houston on July 29, 1917.

In 1917 Texas had some of the most restrictive segregation laws in the country. The prospect of Black soldiers being garrisoned in Houston was regarded by some White citizens of the city as an outright insult. Owners of businesses in Houston were dismayed for more-pecuniary reasons, since the city’s Jim Crow laws meant that the Black soldiers would not be able to patronize most businesses. Nonetheless, civic leaders hastened to assure the army that the city would welcome the soldiers no matter the color of their skin. That was either a naive assumption or a deliberate falsehood.

The 3rd Battalion arrived on July 29, and trouble began almost immediately as the new arrivals’ expectations of fair treatment collided with Houston’s entrenched racial animosities, enforced by a police department the army later

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described as having “a reputation for treating negroes badly.” Matters came to a head on August 23. Two Houston policemen, Lee Sparks and Rufus Daniels, arrested Private Alonso Edwards for being disorderly; Sparks later boasted that he “beat him until his heart got right.” A short time later one of the 3rd Battalion’s noncommissioned officers, Corporal Charles Baltimore, arrived on the scene and attempted to find out what had happened to Edwards. Sparks subsequently claimed that Baltimore was insolent, but witnesses testified that Baltimore did nothing more than ask the policemen what they had done to Edwards and had crossed his arms when speaking to them.

Regardless of how Sparks chose to interpret Baltimore’s behavior, the fact was that the corporal was acting in his official capacity as one of the battalion’s provosts, or military policemen. The army’s subsequent investigation determined that the corporal, “as a part of the duty required of him, made inquiry of Officer Sparks as to the circumstances of the arrest of the soldier.” Sparks, however, was enraged that a Black man dared question his actions. He drew his pistol and fired at least three shots at Baltimore, who was unarmed, and then chased him into a nearby house, where he beat him nearly senseless before arresting him.

Back in the 3rd Battalion’s camp, word of the altercation spread quickly through the ranks, but the rumor was that Sparks had actually killed Baltimore. Major Kneeland Snow, the newly installed battalion commander, sent his adjutant to retrieve Baltimore from police custody; unfortunately, word that Baltimore was alive did not spread as quickly as had the rumor that he was dead. It may have been far too late for it to matter anyway: Many soldiers in the 3rd Battalion had already decided they had taken enough abuse from Houston’s police.

Soldiers began taking rifles from the weapon racks and filching ammunition from the company supply tents. As evening fell, Snow attempted to regain control of the rapidly deteriorating situation and ordered the battalion to muster. He tried to ameliorate the soldiers’ anger by assuring the men that Baltimore had done nothing to deserve the treatment he received from the police and promised that Sparks would be punished for his actions, but his speech failed to calm the mood. Then someone shouted: “There is a mob coming! Get your guns!”

The officers’ tenuous control of the battalion shattered completely. A shot was fired—by whom it was never determined—and that was quickly followed by a wild fusillade of gunfire directed outward from the camp’s perimeter. Several men later testified that a soldier named Frank Johnson ran down the company street yelling, “Get your rifles, boys!”

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; HOUSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY; GWEN BARTLETT ARTHUR

O

n December 11, 1917, at sunrise, 13 men were hanged on a single gallows just outside Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. Nine months later, six more men were hanged at the same spot. The condemned were all African American soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 24th Infantry Regiment; the events that brought them to that end, and the courts-martial that sent them to the rope, are a little-known episode in the history of the nation’s involvement in World War I and the experience of Black soldiers in its racially segregated army.

When the United States entered the war on April 6, 1917, the War Department began establishing temporary training camps across the country to accommodate the Regular Army’s rapid expansion. Communities eager for the economic boost the camps would provide rushed to nominate their cities as locations for the new posts. Texas was already home to several permanent army forts, and other cities in the state hoped to get their turn at the federal trough. When it was announced that Houston had been selected for a training facility to be named Camp Logan, the citizens of the city celebrated.

The jubilation was muted, however, when the army announced that it was posting the 3rd Battalion of the 24th Infantry Regiment to guard the training camp while it was being constructed. The 24th was one of four allBlack regiments in the Regular Army. It had an excellent service record, but to many of Houston’s White citizens the only thing that mattered was that the regiment’s soldiers were Black.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; HOUSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY; GWEN BARTLETT ARTHUR

Clockwise from top left: The company street in Camp Logan; three African American soldiers pose against a fence inside the camp; members of the Houston Police Department in a 1920 photograph.

The threat of an angry White mob was something with which every Black person in the South was all too familiar.

Texas had a grim reputation for mob violence against Black citizens and for the terror tactic of lynching; even the army recognized that the specter of a lynch mob would be taken seriously by every Black soldier.

Pandemonium seized the camp. Vida Henry, I Company’s first sergeant, would later be accused of having plotted mutiny, although there remains considerable doubt as to whether he did. It’s fairly certain, however, that Henry then took the fatal step of assuming leadership of the uprising. In the absence of all their company officers, about 150 soldiers marched out of camp, shouting that they would go to the police station and avenge themselves on the policemen who had persecuted them since their arrival. Henry set a rear guard on the column with orders to shoot any man who fell out of the march or who attempted to return to camp. They were all in it together now, even those who may have been reluctant participants. “If we die,” one of the soldiers declared, “we will die like men.”

Back in camp, Snow completely lost his bearing and his nerve. He telephoned Houston’s former chief of police and was frantically trying to explain what was happening when

the line went dead. The chief later testified that Snow was so hysterical that he was nearly incomprehensible. A few moments later, Snow abandoned his post and fled the camp.

Meanwhile, the soldiers were heading deeper into town.

Some Houstonians would later claim that in the hours before the riot they overheard soldiers threatening to kill all White people, but the soldiers’ actions indicated a rather different objective. They shot at the porch lights of houses as they passed, apparently to mask their movement, and fired on several vehicles they encountered in the dark. In at least two of these incidents, citizens who had no part in the trouble and no association with the police were killed, probably in error. In most cases, however, the soldiers clearly indicated that they were not interested in indiscriminate killing.

When a civilian ambulance ran into Henry’s column, the soldiers shot out its tires and ordered it to turn around, but they did not harm the crew. One Houston resident, Maude Pitts, testified that when she stumbled into the midst of the soldiers that night, one of them told her, “Get away from here, White lady, we don’t want to kill you, but we are after the White policemen who have called us names and have been beating our men up.”

A short time later Captain James Mattes, a National Guard officer whose company had been ordered to quell the

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THE 1917 HOUSTON UPRISING

From the outset it appeared that the odds were stacked against the defendants.

The first court-martial, United States v. Nesbit, convened at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio just five weeks after the mutiny. Sixty-three men of the 3rd Battalion were simulta-

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neously tried on charges of disobedience of lawful orders, mutiny, assault with intent to commit murder, and murder.

It was the largest court-martial in the U.S. Army’s history, and from the outset it appeared that the odds were stacked against the defendants. The defense was represented by just one officer, Major Harry S. Grier, who was to serve as single counsel for all defendants. The prosecution was represented by a team of experienced trial lawyers who had more than a month to prepare their case. Grier had taught law, but he was not a bar-certified attorney and had only two weeks to muster his defense; his primary qualification was that he was “available.” Further controversy developed when a key witness for the defense, Captain Bartlett James, was found dead under suspicious circumstances just days before the trial began. His death was ruled a suicide.

From the outset, serious flaws in the prosecution’s case were apparent. If some men in the 3rd Battalion had risen in arms against the orders of their officers, they were guilty of mutiny, but the government was required to prove their guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Much of the prosecution’s case hinged on the testimony of soldiers who were themselves accused of participating in the violence, which raised legitimate questions about possible self-­serving motivations for some of that testimony. Several defendants were accused of instigating the revolt or having personal culpability in several of the killings that night, but the evidence against others was much less conclusive. The army never actually proved the existence of a mutinous conspiracy.

Nonetheless, on November 30, just 29 days after the trial began, the prosecution rested its case and the officers of the court-martial retired to consider their verdict. Two days later they announced their findings: five acquittals and 58 convictions. Forty-five men were sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from two years to life, and 13 men were to hang. Corporal Baltimore was one of them.

Ruckman then made a decision that would forever stain the court-martial: He ordered the verdicts and sentences to be kept secret and set the date of execution for December 11, allowing no time for external review or appeal of the sentences. On the evening of December 10, the condemned men were moved from the Fort Sam Houston guardhouse and sequestered in one of the post’s cavalry barracks. There they were permitted to write final messages to their families and friends. Private Thomas Hawkins wrote to his parents: “Dear Mother & Father, When this letter reaches you I will be beyond the veil of sorrow….I am sentenced to be hanged for the trouble that happened in Houston Texas altho I am not guilty of the crime that I am accused of.”

Other men also swore to their innocence.

In the predawn darkness the next day, the 13 soldiers were driven to the outskirts of Fort Sam Houston, where the post engineers had erected a gallows about 100 yards

HOUSTON METROPOLITAN RESEARCH CENTER, HOUSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY

riot, ventured out ahead of his unit in a civilian automobile driven by Edwin G. Meineke, a civilian police officer. In the near total darkness, the jittery soldiers, on seeing uniforms, assumed that the men wearing them were policemen. They fired on the car and killed both Mattes and Meineke. Another National Guard officer later stated: “I am fully convinced that Captain Mattes would never have been shot if he had not been in the car with a police officer. I believe that the negroes thought he was another policeman.”

The killing of Mattes and Meineke completely undid the already shaky resolve of most of the soldiers. Fighting with racist policemen at least had an air of justifiable retribution about it, but shooting a uniformed army officer in the performance of his duty was something else entirely, and most of the infantrymen, professional soldiers as they were, wanted no part of that. The column began to dwindle as more and more men took advantage of the darkness to slip away and try to get back to camp. Henry refused to return with them, but he no longer held the leadership of the uprising. He remained alone as the soldiers, now more like a rabble, began straggling back to camp. The next day he was found dead of a gunshot wound. It was reported that he had committed suicide, but the official coroner’s inquest suggests he was murdered.

When the violence ended, the army immediately moved to gain control of the situation that Snow had mishandled so badly. Houston’s district attorney demanded the surrender of all accused mutineers for civilian prosecution, but the army refused, having quickly concluded that the Houston incident “could be characterized in only one way and that as mutiny.” Mutiny was a military crime, and as far as the War Department was concerned all other crimes committed during the riot resulted from it. The alleged mutineers would face an army court-martial, not a civilian trial.

Major General John W. Ruckman was commander of the U.S. Army’s Southern Department, which meant the mutiny and the unit involved all fell within his military jurisdiction as convening authority of courts-martial in the case. For whatever reason—a desire to quell the increasingly vitriolic rhetoric coming from Texan civil authorities or to demonstrate firm military discipline—Ruckman decided to prosecute the accused mutineers as fast as possible.

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On November 30, 1917, the officers of the first court-martial, shown here, announced their findings: five acquittals and 58 convictions. It was the largest such proceeding in the history of the U.S. Army.

HOUSTON METROPOLITAN RESEARCH CENTER, HOUSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY

from the overgrown banks of Salado Creek. Down the slope, 13 freshly dug graves waited. Surrounded by a cordon of infantry and attended by a local minister, the condemned men were led up the gallows steps. An eyewitness wrote that they remained composed and calm and conducted themselves with remarkable dignity. At one point, led by Private Johnson, they began to sing, quietly and in unison.

At 7:17 a.m., one minute before official sunrise, the trapdoor was sprung. After a mandated interval medical officers confirmed that the men were all dead, and their bodies were cut down and placed in raw wooden coffins.

Each man’s name was written on a piece of paper and placed inside a soda bottle that was sealed inside the coffin with him. After the burial the scaffold was disassembled, and all traces of the execution were removed.

Six days later, a second court-martial, United States v.

Washington, convened to try the cases of a further 15 men of the 3rd Battalion. That trial concluded after only five days and produced 10 prison sentences and five death sentences. This time, however, there would be no secretive rush to the gallows like the one Ruckman had arranged after the first court-martial. The announcement that the first 13 men had been executed without executive review or chance of appeal had caused public outrage, and African American civic leaders petitioned the government to ensure that such a thing could not happen again. The War Department directed that execution of sentences be sus-

pended pending review by President Woodrow Wilson, and two weeks after the executions the Articles of War were hastily amended by General Order No. 7, which established that no sentence of death handed down by a military court inside the territorial boundaries of the United States could be carried out until after the president had personally reviewed it.

With that stipulation in place, the second court-­ martial’s sentences were forwarded to the War Department. While the review process was underway, the third and final court-martial, U.S. v. Tillman, convened to try the remaining 40 accused mutineers. When that trial concluded on March 26, charges against one soldier were withdrawn and two men were acquitted. Twenty-six men received prison sentences, and 11 were sentenced to death.

The army’s handling of the first executions had angered major segments of the American public just when the nation needed the support of all citizens in the war effort. Black Americans were incensed at how the soldiers of the 24th Infantry had been treated, both by Houston’s police and by the army’s judicial system. African American newspapers openly questioned whether Black men should wear the uniform of a country that treated them so badly. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker warned of this in a letter he appended to the second round of sentences when he passed them on for Wilson’s review. “I presume you may already have heard it,” he wrote, “but I beg to assure you that it is true that throughout the Southland generally the masses of negroes consider the execution of the thirteen as ‘a lynching.’ ” He

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THE 1917 HOUSTON UPRISING

As years passed, the trials were increasingly condemned and criticized.

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appearance. The first round of trials was conducted under the Articles of War extant 1916, a code that allowed death sentences of military courts in time of war to be carried out without appeal or presidential review. Ruckman was therefore legally able to rush the first 13 hangings, but the revision to the Articles of War in January 1918 changed the law to ensure that could never happen again.

It was absolutely unfair that men on trial for their lives had only the services of a single officer as defense counsel, while the prosecution mustered both numbers and legal experience against them, but again, such practice was perfectly legal before it also was corrected by later changes in American military law. Because hanging was the mode of execution, some critics accused the army of carrying out a “military lynching,” but the crime for which the men were convicted, and not their race, may have determined the use of gallows. The Manual for Courts-Martial in use in 1917 stated, “Death by hanging is considered more ignominious than death by shooting and is the usual method of execution designated in the case of…persons guilty of murder in connection with mutiny.”

Still, Ruckman’s decisions are hard to defend. While the wording of the 1916 Articles of War allowed him to execute the first round of death sentences without submitting them to review, military law did not actually require that he do so.

A passage later in the same code provided that “any officer who has authority to carry into execution the sentence of death…may suspend the same until the pleasure of the President be known.” Ruckman was therefore authorized to wait until the sentences were reviewed, but he chose not to.

Overt racism is undoubtedly the single most important factor in this story, but the wording of the various articles under which these courts-martial were conducted contained no reference to race. Mutiny is a crime against military law regardless of the race of the soldier who commits it, and the legal language of the Articles of War was concerned only with the identities of the accused soldiers under the law. It is completely appropriate, however, to question whether they were actually judged without bias. One might also ask why the court chose not to exercise its full prerogative in the matter of mitigation. Military courts are rarely willing to consider any exculpation for an act of outright mutiny, but the officers of the courts-martial still had the option of extending mercy in the form of prison sentences rather than imposing the ultimate penalty of death.

Three groups can be said to share the greatest responsibility for how the Houston incident played out. First, the city of Houston, with its combination of Jim Crow laws, an abusive police force that used physical violence to enforce those laws, and the entrenched attitudes of Southern racism that upheld them, was the undeniable catalyst of all the trouble.

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then showed the president which of the condemned men were convicted of specific acts of murder and which of general participation. Wilson approved all five of the death sentences in the Washington case and commuted 10 of the death sentences in the Tillman case to imprisonment.

The army then moved to carry out the final executions.

On the morning of September 17, five men went to the gallows. After the hanging, they were interred by the creek beside the 13 soldiers hanged earlier. But there should have been six bodies to bury, not five.

Three days later an unsettling telegram from the War Department arrived at Fort Sam Houston. “Morning paper reported execution of five of the Twenty-fourth Infantry but did not report execution of Private Boone,” it read.

“Not understand why Boone was not executed with the rest.” Somehow, in all the preparations, the army had overlooked the fact that Wilson had approved the execution order on Private William Boone. Boone had believed that his death sentence was commuted to imprisonment; now he learned that he was to die after all. There was more conclusive proof of Boone’s guilt than some of the other defendants—he had shot at close range one of the civilians killed in the mutiny—but his fate was perhaps the hardest.

On September 24, a final procession took him out to the reassembled scaffold where his comrades had died, and there he faced the rope alone.

The events in Houston and the subsequent courts-­martial and executions were almost eclipsed by the closing months of the war, but the attendant controversies refused to fade away entirely. The factors that so antagonized the men of the 24th Infantry were repeated in the “Red Summer” of 1919 as Black troops returning from France were confronted by racial violence on an unprecedented national scale. African American commentators regarded the 19 soldiers executed at Fort Sam Houston as martyrs who had fought back against the demeaning conditions of Jim Crow segregation. The army viewed them as mutineers whose actions brooked no possible mitigation. Southerners who were committed to maintaining White supremacy saw them as the thing they most feared: Black men who would not “mind their place.”

As years passed, the trials that convicted the men were increasingly condemned and criticized.

The problem, common in matters of military law, is that while there is much about the 1917–1918 courts-martial and sentences that can be accurately described as unjust, the fact remains that the proceedings were legal at least by

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This photograph, taken on August 23, 1917, and captioned “Largest Murder Trial in the History of the United States,” shows nearly all of the 63 African American defendants in the first court-martial.

Second, the men of the 3rd Battalion who took up arms in an alleged act of mutiny were responsible for their decision to riot and disobey the lawful orders of their officers, even though one can sympathize with their actions as an understandable retaliation against racist abuse. The third party culpable in this sad history is the U.S. Army itself.

The army knew very well that Texas in 1917 was a hotbed of racist hostility against Black soldiers; it had been so for decades. Eleven years earlier, an officer commanding Black troops in the 25th Infantry had written, “The sentiment in Texas is so hostile against colored troops that there is always the danger of serious trouble between the citizens and soldiers whenever they are brought into contact.”

Nothing had changed in the interim, and thus the army failed in its first responsibility to its own men when it placed them in harm’s way, ignoring the racism of Houston’s Jim Crow laws. Rather than using its considerable power to insist that its soldiers be treated with the respect due U.S. servicemen, regardless of the color of their skin, the army placed the men of the 3rd Battalion in an untenable situation. Within the battalion itself, Snow’s deplorable lack of leadership was a critical factor. The inspector general’s investigation into the uprising blasted Snow for behavior that “demonstrated his unfitness to command”

and recommended that he be court-martialed for dereliction of duty, but in one more failure of justice, he never was. Ruckman was never officially censured for his decisions in the courts-martial, but in May 1918 he was quietly relieved of his command, reverted to brigadier general, and sidelined for the duration of the war.

Though the courts-martial that followed the Houston uprising are often overlooked in broad histories of World War I, they were pivotal events in the development of American military law and the history of racial segregation in the U.S. Army. These trials resulted in the largest mass executions of American soldiers in U.S. history, and they prompted lasting changes to the military judicial process.

A century later, the story continues to unfold. In October 2020 a petition was presented to the secretary of the army to overturn the results of the 1917 courts-martial. 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). His research into the 1917 Houston uprising was supported by a grant from the East Texas History Association.

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The Guardian. This painting by Nicolas Trudgian portrays a legendary incident on December 20, 1943, when 2nd Lieutenant Charles “Charlie” Brown’s Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, badly damaged by German fighters, was escorted back to the safety of the Allied lines by Franz Stigler, a Messerschmitt pilot who had seen that Brown and his crew were wounded.

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WAR IN THE SKY

For more than 100 years, artists have been inspired by aerial forms of fighting.

THE GUARDIAN, BY NICOLAS TRUDGIAN, COURTESY VALORSTUDIOS.COM

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A Convoy, North Sea, 1918. John Lavery (1856–1941), one of Britain’s official war artists in World War I, captured the scene above from an airship off the coast of Norway. DH9 Biplane. British aviation artist Tony Theobald portrays two Airco DH9 single-engine bombers, designed by Geoffrey de Havilland and deployed in large numbers by the Royal Air Force, on a mission over Italy in 1918 (opposite, top). Dog Fight, 1916. French artist Henri Farré (1871–1934) flew missions in Voisin bombers, making sketches of aerial battles as they took place. Later he used the sketches as the basis for oil paintings like the one of Nieuport 16s with Le Prieur wing-mounted rockets atta­cking German kite balloons (opposite, bottom). Once asked how he survived the war without a scratch, he said, “I was lucky, that’s all.”

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erial warfare came into being in the 20th century. In 1909, after several years of trying, Wilbur and Orville Wright managed to sell their Military Flyer biplane to the U.S. Army Signal Corps, but it was designed only as a two-seat observation aircraft. Two years later the Italians began using airplanes against the Turks in the Battle of Tripoli, but it was not until World War I that their use as instruments of war became widespread.

As John Fairley notes in his new book, Fighting in the Sky: The Story in Art (Pen & Sword Books, 2020), “It fell to the artists and airmen from the first days of war in the air to look to capture, in their pictures, the almost unimaginable experience of fighting in the skies.” In these pages we feature just a few of the memorable works showcased in Fairley’s book, which spans more than 100 years of air warfare.

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Battle of Britain, 1941. British war artist Paul Nash (1889–1946) described this epic painting—his abstract interpretation of how Britain defeated Nazi Germany in the air—as “an attempt to give the sense of an aerial battle over a wide area.”

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A Glider Pilot at the Controls, 1942. Leslie Cole (1910–1977) became an official British war artist after he was discharged from the Royal Air Force on medical grounds. One of the first oil paintings he made was a view from the rear of an Airspeed Horsa glider’s nose window (opposite). Attack on a Convoy Seen from the Air, 1941. Richard Eurich (1903–1992) produced nearly three dozen oil paintings as a war artist to the British Admiralty in World War II, including the dramatic scene above of a British convoy being attacked by German bombers as it makes its way through the English Channel. Air Gunner Prepared for Action, 1941. Charles Cundall (1890– 1971), a painter, potter, and stained-glass artist, served as an official British war artist during World War II; the painting at right depicts a gunner on a Consolidated PBY Catalina flying boat.

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The Swordfish Attack at Taranto. In the 1985 print above, Robert Taylor, one of the world’s top aviation artists, shows Fairey Swordfish biplanes from the carrier HMS Illustrious surprising and crippling the Italian fleet on November 11, 1940.

Verdun, 1917. Félix Vallatton (1865–1925) volunteered for the French army at the outbreak of World War I but was rejected because of his age.

Later, as an official war artist, he spent three weeks on the front lines and produced a series of 14 paintings, including the one at right.

A U-Boat Surrenders to a Hudson Aircraft, 1941. This painting by Charles Cundall (opposite) shows two Lockheed Hudsons circling a surfaced U-boat as its crew stands in the conning tower.

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MAN VS. MOSQUITO

Walter Reed entered the U.S. Army Medical Corps before he had even turned 20 and was commissioned as an assistant surgeon with the rank of first lieutenant.

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U.S. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE

U.S. Army doctor Walter Reed helped the world conquer yellow fever—and earned an enduring place in history.

By Rick Britton

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T

he two 14-by-20-foot experimental shacks—built under the direction of U.S. Army Major Walter Reed, MD—sat 80 yards apart on a wide, grassy plain at Camp Lazear, near the town of Quemados, Cuba. Clusters of white canvas wall tents stood on either side at a respectful distance, like hospital visitors reluctant to approach the deathly ill.

From the outside, the shacks seemed ordinary. Their specially designed interiors, however, were anything but.

Both were tightly sealed and fitted with screened double doors; visitors had to pass through tiny vestibules to reach the inner chambers. Building No. 1, heated to 95 degrees Fahrenheit, housed three beds, and, according to Reed, “three large boxes filled with sheets, pillowslips, blankets, etc., contaminated by contact” with diseased individuals.

But it was in Building No. 2, divided in two by a finemesh wire screen, that medical history was made on December 5, 1900. That day, at 2:30 p.m., Private John R. Kissinger entered one side, reclined on the only bed, and allowed himself to be bitten repeatedly by five hungry mosquitoes, each infected with the dreaded yellow fever.

The last two decades of the 1800s witnessed an astonishing succession of medical discoveries. In 1881 Brigadier General George Miller Sternberg, a physician with the U.S. Army, successfully isolated the bacterium responsible for pneumonia, and the same year Louis Pasteur, a French microbiologist and chemist, produced a vaccine that prevented anthrax. Antitoxins were discovered in 1890, and in 1892 Theobald Smith, an epidemiologist and pathologist who served as the inspector of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Animal Industry, first established that ticks spread Texas cattle fever.

But perhaps the most significant advance was made in the century’s final month by Reed, one of the greatest medical research scientists the world has ever known. It was the first momentous step in the eradication of yellow fever, a pestilence that had, over the previous century, taken the lives of 100,000 Americans. Imported to the United States from the tropics, yellow fever had ravaged port cities like New Orleans and Philadelphia—frequently killing 40 percent, or more, of those infected.

Walter Reed was born on September 13, 1851, in Belroi, Virginia, the son of a circuit-riding Methodist minister.

At 2:30 p.m. on December 5, 1900, medical history was made in Building No. 2.

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While still young he began displaying some of the traits for which he was later admired: self-control, a high sense of honor, and an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Reed’s early schooling was rather sporadic, but in 1866 the family moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he would study at the Charlottesville Institute, a one-building academy that prepared him for his next educational experience.

In 1867, at age 16, Reed matriculated at the nearby University of Virginia. Special dispensation was required because of his youth. That year, according to one of his professors, Reed studied Latin, Greek, and English literature, among other subjects.

Reed wanted to stay the entire course at Mr. Jefferson’s university, but because two of his brothers were already enrolled there and his family’s resources were limited, he decided after his first year to ask the faculty to grant him a bachelor’s degree in the subjects he had already studied. Because he was so young, however, his request was refused.

Reed next inquired, in person at a faculty meeting, if he could be granted the degree of doctor of medicine—then requiring a two-year course of study—if he was able to pass the necessary examinations the following year. Thinking this an absolute impossibility, several of the professors agreed.

“Doctor,” Reed reportedly said to 60-year-old Socrates Maupin, a chemistry professor and chairman of the faculty, “you have heard these gentlemen. Will you see that I have my degree as MD if I make the required standard?” When Maupin answered that he would, Reed bowed to the other faculty members, gamely saying, “Gentlemen, I hold you to your promise,” and then walked out of the chamber.

Reed threw himself into his studies, which included courses in chemistry; medicine, which featured legal medicine and obstetrics; physiology and surgery; anatomy; and materia medica (pharmacy). As he handed Reed his diploma nine months later, in the summer of 1869, Maupin noted that the 17-year-old student was the youngest ever to graduate from the University of Virginia Medical School.

From Charlottesville Reed traveled to New York City, where he earned a second doctor of medicine degree, at Bellevue Hospital Medical College, in 1870. Over the next five years he served his internship at various medical institutions in the city. Additionally, in 1873—at age 22—Reed was appointed one of the five inspectors on the Brooklyn Board of Health.

In 1874 Reed met his future wife, Emilie Lawrence, and made a career choice that eventually led to his world-­ changing research and the virtual eradication of yellow fever: He decided to enter the U.S. Army Medical Corps.

With his typical determination, Reed resumed his studies

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART; EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); WELLCOME COLLECTION; CLAUDE MOORE HEALTH SCIENCES LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

WALTER REED

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART; EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); WELLCOME COLLECTION; CLAUDE MOORE HEALTH SCIENCES LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

Clockwise from top left: An 1892 etching that depicts the dreaded “black vomit” brought on by yellow fever; the men’s ward of a yellow fever hospital in Havana in 1899; Cuban physician Carlos J. Finlay, who first argued that mosquitoes carry yellow fever; Camp Lazear, Reed’s experimental station near Quemados, Cuba.

and in February 1875 passed the grueling 30-hour examination to enter the medical corps. The following year Reed and Lawrence married, and Reed was commissioned assistant surgeon with the rank of first lieutenant.

Reed’s illustrious army career began with years of monotonous garrison duty. In Arizona he served at Fort Lowell and Camp Apache. At these frontier posts Reed was responsible not only for the health of the military detachment and its many dependents but also for that of the nearby Native American tribes. It was there that he first experienced the outbreak of an epidemic—smallpox in this case—and its accompanying suffering and death. In 1890, after further postings in Nebraska and Alabama, Reed was ordered to Fort McHenry in Baltimore, with the title of attending surgeon and examiner of recruits. In Baltimore, at Johns Hopkins, the first research university in the United States, Reed returned to the classroom, studying pathology and the emerging science of bacteriology in a laboratory course taught by William Henry Welch, the nation’s foremost pathologist. (Welch, who had studied under Louis

Pasteur, was one of the four founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital and the first dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. During his lifetime, he became known as “the dean of American medicine.”)

The understanding of infectious diseases had improved markedly over the preceding 10 years. On the basis of Pasteur’s early work on germ theory, and new methods for the cultivation and study of bacteria, “there had followed in rapid succession,” Welch wrote, “such important discoveries as those of the specific germs causing anthrax, tuberculosis, leprosy, glanders,…tetanus, pneumonia, typhoid fever, malaria, amoebic dysentery, cerebro-spinal meningitis, diphtheria, and a large number of animal diseases.”

In 1893, after another tour of duty out west, Reed was ordered to report to the Washington, D.C., office of U.S. Surgeon General George Sternberg, a noted bacteriologist.

Reed was appointed curator of the Army Medical Museum (which later became the National Museum of Health and Medicine) and was made professor of bacteriology and clinical microscopy at the newly organized Army Medical School in Washington. Reed also joined the faculty of the

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WALTER REED

Yellow fever and typhoid fever had been far deadlier than Spanish bullets.

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of whom had studied U.S. typhoid outbreaks, Reed visited training camps in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Virginia. By examining each camp’s water supply, waste removal, and food preparation and distribution—and tracing the disease’s transmission—they showed that typhoid is both infectious and contagious. It seeped into the water and then spread among the soldiers because of poor hygiene. Infected bedding, left behind by departing soldiers, for example, quickly infected arriving soldiers who used it. Flies, too, carried the disease through the camps.

In a massive two-volume report, Reed’s “Typhoid Board” thus showed that the disease was spread by flies, as well as by humans, drinking water, and objects contaminated by fecal bacilli. The 46-year-old major now stood on the brink of his greatest service to medicine and mankind.

In May 1900 Reed was ordered to Havana and put in charge of the newly created Yellow Fever Commission. His team was composed of U.S. Army acting assistant surgeons.

English-­born James Carroll, who had a medical degree from the University of Maryland, was in charge of bacteriology. Jesse Lazear, a bacteriologist who had graduated from the medical school at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, performed the laboratory work and soon also took over the handling of the experimental mosquitoes. Cuban-American Aristides Agramonte y Simoni, a specialist in tropical medicine who also had a medical degree from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, conducted the pathological work.

The “yellow plague,” as it was also called, had stricken many of the U.S. soldiers stationed in Cuba both during and after the war. While on the island, according to Reed, the army suffered 1,575 cases of yellow fever, causing 231 deaths. Over the years, the dreaded “Yellow Jack” had also been no stranger to cities in the United States. Reed estimated that from 1793 to 1900, the nation had been afflicted with 95 yellow fever epidemics. During that period 500,000 Americans had been infected, and 100,000 of them had died. New Orleans had been “the greatest sufferer,” Reed noted, with 41,348 deaths, followed by Philadelphia, with 10,038. Memphis, Tennessee, lost nearly 8,000 residents to four yellow fever epidemics in the 1850s and 1870s. “There were hours, especially at night,” a survivor of the city’s 1878 outbreak wrote, “when the solemn oppression of universal death bore upon the human mind, as if the day of judgment was about to dawn.”

A headache and sudden chills typically mark the onset of this viral scourge, followed by severe body pains, vomiting, and a high fever that may last for weeks. Kidney failure and liver disorder—which causes a sickly jaundice, after which the disease is named—are also common. Often these indications subside, a possible signal of recovery, but

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: SCIENCE HISTORY IMAGES (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); HARRIS & EWING COLLECTION (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS); CLAUDE MOORE HEALTH SCIENCES LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

Columbian University Medical School (later the George Washington University School of Medicine).

While performing these new assignments, Reed collaborated closely with Sternberg on a smallpox vaccine study and in 1895 observed an outbreak of malaria near the nation’s capital. The following year Reed distinguished himself as a medical researcher when yellow fever broke out among U.S. Army personnel—enlisted men, but mysteriously, not their officers—stationed along the Potomac River. Popular belief held that the soldiers had contracted the illness by drinking river water. Reed proved to local officials that the filthy Potomac was not the cause of the outbreak. Instead, he showed them that yellow fever was somehow connected to the marshy woods that lined the river: The soldiers who had gotten sick were accustomed to hiking through them at night, while their officers remained in camp.

In April 1898 the United States went to war with Spain. In Cuba, revolts against Spanish rule had been roiling the island for 30 years. By the late 1890s, partly because of reports that concentration camps were being used to control the Cuban people, public opinion in the United States favored Cuban rebellion and independence. When the armored cruiser USS Maine exploded and sank in the harbor at Havana, Cuba, on February 15, 1898, with the loss of 260 sailors, American newspapers blamed Spain. On April 20, President William McKinley signed a joint congressional resolution demanding that Spain withdraw from the island and authorizing U.S. military intervention to aid the rebels. Spain, however, refused to leave Cuba. It declared war on the United States on April 24, and a day later the United States declared war on Spain. The 10week conflict in the Caribbean and the Pacific—during which U.S. naval power proved decisive—led to Cuban independence, and the Spanish cession of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to the United States for $20 million.

Although the war was short and relatively bloodless— only 332 Americans died in combat—the camps of the U.S. volunteer units, both in Cuba and at home, were notoriously disease ridden. Almost 3,000 soldiers succumbed to the various illnesses that had swept through the encampments like the reaper’s scythe. Yellow fever and typhoid fever had been far deadlier than Spanish bullets.

After the fighting ended in August, Sternberg made Reed the head of a board of officers charged with investigating the spread of typhoid fever in the stateside camps. Along with Majors Edward O. Shakespeare and Victor C. Vaughan, both

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Clockwise from top left: Bacteriologist Jesse Lazear, after whom Reed’s experimental station was named; Walter Reed General Hospital, founded in Washington, D.C., in 1909; Private John R. Kissinger volunteered for Reed’s experiment and developed what is thought to be the first case of controlled yellow fever.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: SCIENCE HISTORY IMAGES (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); HARRIS & EWING COLLECTION (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS); CLAUDE MOORE HEALTH SCIENCES LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

usually they return with full force, bringing with them internal bleeding and the horrible black vomit that results when stomachs filled with blood are voided.

Arriving at Columbia Barracks near Quemados, Cuba, in June 1900, Reed and his fellow researchers first set out to prove the theory proposed by Giuseppe Sanarelli, an Italian bacteriologist, that Bacillus icteroides, a bacterium of the hog-cholera group, was responsible for yellow fever.

When they found no causal relationship, however, they decided to set aside the search for the specific agent and concentrate on how it was propagated.

Consequently, they turned to the hypothesis of Carlos J. Finlay, a physician in Havana who had graduated from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. For 19 years Finlay had argued that yellow fever was carried by the common house mosquito. “When the mosquito becomes contaminated,” he had written in 1881, “not only its eggs but also its salivary and venom glands may be invaded by the pathogenous germs, so that the latter may be discharged…when the insect attacks its next victim.” Because he was so far ahead of his time and because his hypothesis hadn’t been proved under laboratory conditions, the medical community spurned his work, laughingly referring to him as “the mosquito man”—the crazy Cuban who claimed that insects could carry yellow fever.

Reed’s team decided to test Finlay’s proposition with a bold experimental method: They would use human beings.

“After careful consideration,” wrote Howard Atwood Kelly, another of the founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital, “the Commission reached the conclusion that the results, if positive, would be sufficient service to humanity to justify the procedure, provided, of course, that each individual…was fully informed of the risks he ran, and gave his free consent.” Two dozen men—soldiers at nearby Columbia Barracks and a few Spanish immigrants—bravely volunteered for this potentially fatal experiment.

The members of the commission, however, agreed that it was their duty to be subjected first.

With some tiny black mosquito eggs that Finlay provided, several insects were “reared in the laboratory,” according to Carroll, and “caused to feed upon four cases of yellow fever, two of them severe.” Carroll and Lazear courageously volunteered to be bitten by the infected mosquitoes, and both men promptly came down with the disease. “Thus it happened that I was the first person to whom the mosquito was proved to convey the disease,” Carroll later wrote.

“Dr. Lazear was stricken and died in convulsions just one week later, after several days of delirium with black vomit.”

Saddened by the loss of one of his doctors, Reed was nonetheless proud to report the team’s finding to the Public Health Association at its meeting in Indianapolis on Octo-

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WALTER REED ber 23, 1900. “The mosquito,” Reed told the gathering, “acts as the intermediate host for the parasite of yellow fever.”

To prove this definitively to the world, as well as to debunk the theory that the disease was transmitted via soiled clothing, required more experiments—tests performed under strict laboratory control. “It became evident that if further experiments were to be of permanent value to humanity,” Kelly wrote, “some means must be provided by which perfect control could be exercised over the movements of the individuals subjected to experiment for some time prior to inoculation, in order to exclude every possible source of infection except the mosquito.”

On November 20, 1900, Camp Lazear, a tightly quarantined experimental station named in honor of the valiant doctor, was established one mile from Quemados, and the two experimental shacks were constructed. In Building No. 1—known as the “Infected Clothing Building”—three volunteers spent 20 consecutive nights wrapped in befouled bedclothing. In Building No. 2—the “Infected Mosquito Building”—Private Kissinger allowed himself to be bitten repeatedly by infected mosquitoes. Within days he developed what is considered to be the first case of controlled experimental yellow fever. (Kissinger recovered and returned home to Indiana, only to suffer a 13-year paralysis of his legs—a side effect of his bout with yellow fever.

Congress granted him a pension of $125 a month, supporters purchased him a home, and in 1929 he was awarded the Medal of Honor. Kissinger died in 1946.)

In the following weeks, in like manner, 20 more cases of the terrifying illness were produced. These results confirmed Finlay’s previously denounced theory. None of the volunteers who slept in the Infected Clothing Building contracted yellow fever. Exposure to contaminated fabrics posed no danger at all—a surprising conclusion because it ran contrary to longstanding popular belief. These findings, according to historian Philip Alexander Bruce, were “an epochal discovery in the history of preventive medicine.”

“It is with a great deal of pleasure that I hasten to tell you that we have succeeded in producing a case of unmistakable yellow fever by the bite of the mosquito,” Reed wrote in a letter to his wife. “Rejoice with me, sweetheart, as, aside from the antitoxin of diphtheria and [Robert] Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus [the bacterium that causes tuberculosis], it will be regarded as the most important piece of work, scientifically, during the 19th century.”

Reed’s discovery would, in time, open “a new chapter in the history of vast regions of the tropics,” as Bruce put it. By controlling the mosquitoes’ breeding places, yellow fever was subsequently swept from the island of Cuba. In like manner, the Panama Canal Zone was later freed from the ravages of the death-dealing insect.

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For his work, Reed was enthusiastically acclaimed throughout the scientific world. He now became the peer of Crawford Long, who had discovered anesthetics; Joseph Lister, who had first used antiseptics; and Edward Jenner, “the father of immunology,” the man who had pioneered the concept of vaccination.

In February 1901, Reed came back to Washington and returned to the classroom. He taught pathology and bacteriology at the Army Medical School as well as at the Columbian University Medical School. “He was a favorite with his students,” wrote biographer Ralph Nading Hill, “for he conveyed an enthusiasm for his subject that is the mark of great teachers.”

In the summer of 1902, Reed was awarded two honorary degrees: a doctor of law from the University of Michigan and a master of arts from Harvard University. The following November, Reed was made librarian of the surgeon general’s library. “Mental exertion, however,” wrote biographer L. N. Wood, “was becoming strangely painful to the alert mind that had always before approached it so buoyantly.” He continued to push himself, until finally, un­ able to conceal his waning strength from his wife, he consulted his doctor. It was already too late. On November 13 physicians diagnosed appendicitis. He underwent an appendectomy, but peritonitis had already set in. Reed died on November 23, 1902, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. He was only 51 years old.

After incorporating the mosquito-elimination measures recommended by Walter Reed’s Yellow Fever Commission, New Orleans—the American city that had lost the most citizens to Yellow Jack—suffered through only one more such epidemic in 1905. It was the last outbreak of yellow fever in the United States.

Named in his honor, Walter Reed General Hospital— founded in 1909 on 113 acres in the District of Columbia—was the U.S. Army’s premier medical facility for more than 100 years. During its time on the front line of medical service, it treated more than 150,000 active and retired military personnel. Its successor, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, operated from 1977 to 2011, when the army dedicated Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, a massive hospital complex, on the grounds of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

“When his great work was accomplished,” Mrs. Reed wrote after her husband’s death, “the happiness which filled his soul was entirely for the suffering he would spare humanity. He rejoiced that he had not lived in vain, and that God had seen fit to make him an instrument of good.” MHQ Rick Britton, a historian and cartographer, lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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CULTURE OF WAR CLASSIC

DISPATCHES 76 BIG SHOTS 81 WAR STORIES 82 POETRY 86 ARTISTS 88 REVIEWS 92

NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM, LONDON

He was Napoleon Bonaparte’s favorite war horse, carrying him safely through the Battles of Marengo (after which he was named), Austerlitz, Jena-Auerstedt, Wagram, and even France’s ill-fated invasion of Russia in 1812. But his luck ran out, with his master’s, at Waterloo, in 1815, when he was wounded on the battlefield, captured, and brought to England. After Marengo’s death in 1831, his skeleton was preserved, put on display, and later moved to the National Army Museum in London. www.nam.ac.uk/ explore/marengos-makeover

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CLASSIC DISPATCHES

‘OUR PRISONERS’

By Henry J. Winser

The atrocities, the Times said, “would make the blood of a cannibal run cold.”

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run cold.” Winser’s detailed story—reprinted here except for the excerpts from official reports included in his dispatch— undoubtedly helped cement Andersonville’s place in history as the most infamous Confederate prisoner-of-war camp.

PORT ROYAL, S.C., Monday, Nov. 21, 1864.—The past few days have been fraught with a very painful interest to everybody who has been connected in any way whatever with the exchange of our sick and wounded prisoners now in progress on the Savannah River. [Lieutenant] Col. [John E.] Mulford began to receive our poor fellows last Friday, and the delivery is to continue at the rate of from eight hundred to twelve hundred per day, until the aggregate number of the wretched suffering creatures, estimated at ten thousand, return to our welcome keeping. I shall attempt in this letter to give some idea of the outward appearance, physical condition, animating spirit and expression of opinion of these soldiers of the Republic who have escaped from unutterable misery, with the sole object of presenting facts to the country which must result in the release of their fifty thousand comrades who cannot survive the coming Winter, under the conditions in which they are kept through the unparalleled vindictiveness of the Southern authorities. This is a hard charge, but I make it deliberately. The irrefragable proof is lying before me, not alone in the ex parte testimony and wasted hungry aspect of the sufferers, whose filth and squalor and skeleton frames appeal for justice to the God of justice, but in the official papers of the rebel surgeons at Andersonville and the records of the charnel-houses, miscalled hospitals, at that terrestrial hell—records never meant to pass the limits of the Confederacy, but which a merciful Providence has brought to light, that out of their own mouths these barbarians, with whom we are at war, should be convicted.

The task before me I undertake with great reluctance.

Aside from the indignation which every man cannot help feeling at the visible effects of the cruelties that have been practiced—an indignation almost forbidding a calm recital of the facts—the task invests itself with another difficulty, as words are found incapable of expressing the revolting experiences and incredible hardships of the men who have been languishing without hope, month after month, shelterless, naked and half starved, crowded—to the number of from twenty-five to thirty thousand—like sheep in a foul

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Henry J. Winser was born in Bermuda in 1833, where his father served as an officer in the Royal Navy. After coming to New York in 1851, he found work in the printing industry and in time joined the staff of the New York Times, first as a proofreader and then as a reporter. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Winser became a first lieutenant in the 1st Regiment, New York Fire Zouaves, and the military secretary to its commander, Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth, who would become the first Union officer to die in the war when he was killed as he removed a Confederate flag from the roof of the Marshall House inn in Alexandria, Virginia.

Winser then returned to the Times as a war correspondent, writing the first description of the Battle of New Orleans to be published by a northern newspaper and going on to cover Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign. After the war Winser worked as an editor for the Times in New York.

In 1869 Winser embarked on a new career as a diplomat when he was appointed to be the U.S. consul at Sonneberg, Germany. He returned to the United States in 1882 to become the chief of the Northern Pacific Railway Company’s bureau of information, but he later returned to journalism, first as an editor at the New York Commercial Advertiser and later as the managing editor of the Newark Advertiser in New Jersey. He died in Newark in 1896.

Winser’s account of a prisoner exchange near Savannah in 1864, which filled the entire front page of an eight-page edition of the New York Times, trained a powerful spotlight on the horrific conditions at Andersonville, the Confederate military prison in Georgia. It contained not only some three dozen firsthand reports of the privations there from surgeons at the prison but also a transcript of the daily death counts from July 23 to September 5, 1864. While the account was followed only by Winser’s initials, the Times, in its lead editorial that day, gave credit to “our special correspondent, Mr. H. J. Winser,” noting that “out of their own mouths the rebels are convicted of barbarities to helpless captives that would make the blood of a cannibal

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

This bird’s-eye photograph of Andersonville, the Confederate military prison in Georgia officially known as Camp Sumter, was taken in August 1864, several months before the prisoner exchange.

pen, dying at an average of one hundred in every twenty-­ four hours. Happily, however, in addition to the daily reports, covering a period of more than a month of the rebel physicians at Andersonville, a perusal of which requires no flight of imagination to conceive of the horrors of the prison, I have before me the diaries of two of our dead soldiers, brought down to a very recent date, from which I purpose to make some extracts, which, more forcibly and eloquently than any words of mine, will come like voices from the grave, telling a truthful tale of cruel wrongs, and appealing to the people and the Government in behalf of the thousands still in captivity for prompt release.

It is a distressing fact, but one of which I have found abundant proof in many conversations with the men so far brought back, that the prisoners very generally believe that they have been abandoned by our Government. This idea is sedulously inculcated by the rebel authorities. I am convinced that many a brave heart has succumbed under the cruel aspersion that the sympathies of the people are dead to their woes. Hunger, squalor, filth, nakedness and disease may be borne, but that hope deferred which results in

heartsickness—that longing for home which superinduces mental depression, cannot long be survived. Nostalgia is the parent of physical ailments, and, under the terrible monotony and privations of the prison pens, it is more fatal than bullets on the field of battle. A very large proportion of these prisoners have been held as such for periods of from nine to sixteen months, and the exchange question between the two Governments as yet gives no promise of a speedy settlement. The rebels assure the captives that they are prepared to yield all the points at issue, and have long since announced the fact to the United States Government, whose only reason for non-acceptance is one of simple expediency, viz: that by resuming the exchanges thousands of rugged, strong men would be sent into the armies of the South from the prison camps of the North and no equivalent would be received in the broken down, emaciated wrecks of humanity that would be sent home from the pens at Andersonville, Columbus, Milan and Richmond. Is it a matter of marvel that under the influence of this monstrous belief, hundreds of the disheartened soldiers endeavor to escape the horrors of the prisons by en-

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ANDERSONVILLE

Having thus far written generalities, let me now come to particulars. Taking any single day of the four in which we have been receiving our men, I propose to give some description of the animating scene on the transfer of the prisoners from the rebel vessels to our own. As I have informed you in a former letter, the rendezvous for the exchanges is at Venus Point, on the Savannah River, a bend of the stream whence the spires and many of the houses of the City of Savannah are visible.

Our boats are invariably the first at the rendezvous, anchored in mid-river awaiting the rebel vessels, whose tardiness proceeds from the fact that it is only at the proper tide certain obstructions of the channel above can be crossed.

Finally they appear over the low marshes, belching their turgid clouds of dense black smoke, and in half an hour their uncouth, grotesque, towering shapes are puffing and wheezing near us. Col. Mulford immediately goes in a yawl boat to the Gen. Beauregard, a small steamer used by Capt.

[John P.] Hatch, the rebel agent, as the flagship of his transport squadron, and after a few moments’ consultation, during which the rolls of the prisoners are transferred, the two agents go together on board one of the floating objects laden with the released men, and she is at once laid alongside a neat Union vessel, and the poor fellows are transshipped. Those of them who are able to move without aid pass to the protection of the old flag first; then come those (alas! there are many of this class) who hobble on crutches,

“Is it not awful to contemplate what must be the woe of the remainder?”

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and last the few whose helplessness requires that they should be carried on stretchers. In all this operation the greatest formality is observed. A number of rebel civilians, with bands round their hats, labeled “Committee for the wounded,” whose position corresponds with our own Sanitary Commission, accompanying the boats from Savannah to attend on the sick, and assist in the transshipment, but seldom on either side is a word spoken except on the subject of the matter in hand. A different course is forbidden, and if on either side there happen to be a disposition to engage in conversation, watchful guards step up and ask that the conversation shall cease. It is no uncommon thing to see a man who has been so crippled by scrofula that crutches were necessary to his locomotion, under the influence of his ecstasy at again being free, spurn from him his artificial supports and walk, for a time, as erect and as instantaneously as he whom the Saviour miraculously cured by the healing waters of Bethesda.

When the rebel boat moves off and the men are huddled together on the decks of our own vessels, all fully understand that the last link which bound them to rebeldom has been severed, then rises hearty shouting and cheering, which only can be given under these circumstances. There is the music of intense gratefulness in it. Three cheers and a tiger for the old flag; three more and a tiger for Col. Mulford; then comes a burst of song, most often the words being “Rally round the flag, boys, from near and from far, down with the traitor and up with the star,” the rebels still within hearing, probably gnashing their teeth at the pointed personal allusion, but everybody else feeling that the bad taste of the happy fellows is excusable, even though exhibited under the sacred folds of a flag of truce. Then vermin-infested rags, till now highly prized as the only cover for nakedness, are rudely torn off and flung into the water or cast with glee into the flaming furnaces of the steamers, and new clothes are issued, and a general cleaning-time inaugurated. But the bathing has long been needed, and scarcely comes soon enough. Many of the men, through illness or carelessness, are so begrimed with filth, that, were it not for the dead color of the blacked epidermis, they might be taken for the sons of Ham. The steamer Eliza Hancox, one of the exchange fleet, has a spacious deck, affording room for dancing, and Terpsichore finds her votaries, even though they are tatterdemalions, who dance not ungracefully in their streaming rags.

As soon as possible, barrels of hot coffee are prepared, and hams are cooked, and boxes of hard-bread opened, for the refreshment of these men, to whom decent food has been for a long time unknown. It is a touching sight to see them, each with his quart can, file by the steaming coffee barrels, and receive the refreshing draught whose taste has long been unfamiliar. It seems scarcely possible that men should

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

listing in the rebel service? Such is the fact, and it behooves our Government to weigh it well. The exchanges are in abeyance on well-taken grounds, from which there can be no retraction without a sacrifice of national honor. But there are two sides to the question, and the national faith and honor are just as deeply plighted to the fifty thousand soldiers languishing and dying in captivity as it can possibly be in other quarters. Justice to the heroic men whom the fortune of war has placed in the hands of the enemy, demands that no effort should be relaxed to release them from a condition which will bring the majority of them to certain death during the fast approaching Winter. The resources of the North in men have scarcely been drawn upon as yet, in comparison with the resources of the South, and the question of expediency in releasing a few thousand Southern soldiers should not be entertained an instant, even if a draft in the Northern States were not able to put their equivalent in the field.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

From left: Union prisoners of war bury some of their own in a trench at Andersonville in 1864; nearly 13,000 Union prisoners at Andersonville died from disease, poor sanitation, malnutrition, and the like.

feel such childish joy as they express in once more receiving this common stimulant. And then, the eager, hungry glare which their glassy eyes cast upon the chunks of ham as they clutch and devour their allowance with a wolf-like avidity! These facts can only be understood by the spectator in remembering that for months they have been deprived of a sufficient quantity of palatable food, and that the little they have received has been rarely cooked, because in a country abounding with fuel, and gloomy with immense pine forests, their jailors forbade them the poor privilege of adequate fires. At the prison-pen near Milan, Ga., for some weeks there has been no meal or flour given to the prisoners, and the sweet potatoes issued in lieu thereof have been eaten raw, because there was no opportunity of getting fuel for cooking purposes.

Such is the condi[tion] of the men whom we are now receiving out of chivalrous Dixie. These the sons, brothers, husbands and fathers of the North. Men reduced to living skeletons; men almost naked; shoeless men, shirtless men, hatless men; men with no other garment than an overcoat; men whose skins are blackened by dirt and hang on their protruding bones loosely as bark on a tree; men whose very presence is simply disgusting, exhaling an odor so fetid that it almost stops the breath of those unaccustomed to it, and causes an involuntary brushing of the garments if with them there is accidental contact. Imagine 25,000 of such wretched creatures penned together in a space scarcely large enough to hold them, and compare their condition with the most miserable condition that can be

imagined. The suffering of the Revolutionary captives on the prison ships at Wallabout Bay will not stand the comparison, and the horrible sight in the Blackhole of Calcutta scarcely exceeds it in atrocity. Remember, too, that the men thus returned are the best specimens of the suffering.

Only those are forwarded to us whom the rebel medical authorities decide to be strong enough to bear the fatigue of transportation. If those whose wretchedness I have vainly endeavored to portray, are the best specimens of our sick and wounded, is it not awful to contemplate what must be the woe of the remainder?

Look, now, at this record of the rebel surgeons. Here is damning proof of inhumanity, scarcely to be credited among a people professing Christianity in the nineteenth century. For the period of a month, through which these reports extend, there is a constant, monotonous complaint, often assuming the language of protest, against the treatment to which the sick were subjected. Men in the last stages of emaciation from chronic diarrhoea, received no nourishment whatever, and starved to death on the coarse rations which the stomach of a strong man would reject.

Others, suffering from gangrene and ulcers, were compelled to fester in putridity without even sufficient water to cleanse their loathsome sores. Week after week the diseased and the dying were kept without shelter, and many of them without clothing, on the bare ground, exposed to a torrid sun by day and to heavy rains at all times, in total disregard of the earnest and almost despairing appeals of

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XXXXXXXXXX

kind-hearted physicians for their relief. It is very easy to understand how much of this terrible wretchedness was unavoidable, particularly that part of it which proceeded from the scarcity of medicines, but it requires a very ingenious mind to palliate in any degree the heartlessness which allowed the sufferers to remain shelterless in a country where the materials for shelter are as abundant as in the South, and where thousands of willing hands from the prisoners in the stockade would have furnished all the labor. But why dwell on these matters? The shocking inhumanity of the rebel authorities will be patent to all who read these plain unvarnished reports.

The stockade or pen in which the prisoners at Andersonville are confined, is an enclosure of fourteen acres, five of which were a morass. Here the men were without shelter, and in many instances almost naked, huddled together without room for exercise. During the hot Summer months there were scattered about in this pen an average of at least 500 prisoners, who were suffering from disease in almost every form incident to man, in a climate to which he is unaccustomed. Five acres of the surface of the ground were covered with human excrement, exhaling a morbific influence which would prove fatal even to the rice plantation laborer, accustomed from infancy to breathing the malari-

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ous atmosphere of his native savannahs. Constantly drenched by rains, receiving bad food, always poorly prepared and often raw, in many instances naked and laboring under a mental depression verging upon melancholy, feeling that their days were numbered, the prisoners were kept in their dreadful prison. Under these circumstances the mortality became frightful, and as a matter of defence from an epidemic, the rebel authorities were compelled to thin out the shambles early in September, by sending several thousand of the prisoners to a new stockade established at Savannah, where their sufferings were considerably alleviated. Subsequently these men on the breaking out of the yellow fever at Savannah were removed to another prison pen at Milan. Before the change from Andersonville was made eleven thousand victims had been buried, uncoffined, in the shallow trenches near the prison.

Of the cruelty of Capt. [Henry Wirz], the rebel officer having charge of the prison at Andersonville, all the prisoners speak in unmeasured terms. His vindictiveness is attributed to the fact that during one of the Union raids in Alabama his property was destroyed. It was a common thing for Capt. [Wirz] to place men in the chain-gang for no greater offence than attempting to escape, and in two instances the unfortunate fellows died while in their fetters.

—H. J. W. MHQ

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

After the Civil War ended, Captain Henry Wirz, the prison’s commandant, was tried and convicted of murder by a military tribunal. On November 10, 1865, Wirz was hanged in Washington, D.C.

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HARRIS & EWING COLLECTION (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

BIG SHOTS

Julia C. Stimson was born in 1881 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and earned degrees from Vassar College, the New York Hospital Training School for Nurses, and Washington University in St. Louis. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, she enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps to serve as the head nurse of Base Hospital No. 21, the first such unit mobilized for overseas service, and helped oversee a 1,300-bed British tent hospital on a racetrack near Rouen, France. In 1918 Stimson was appointed chief nurse of the American Red Cross in France, but seven months later she became the superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps—and the first woman to attain the rank of major in the U.S. Army.

In 1919 Stimson was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, and she later received medals from Great Britain, France, and the International Red Cross. After retiring from the army in 1937, she served as president of the American Nursing Association, but with the outbreak of World War II she played the lead role in organizing the Nursing Council on National Defense, was immediately elected its chairperson, and went on to recruit a new generation of women to serve as nurses. A charismatic speaker, Stimson barnstormed 23 cities across the nation in one threemonth stretch, making some 50 talks to potential recruits.

In 1948 Stimson was promoted to full colonel on the retired list.

Six weeks later she died at age 67 from complications following abdominal surgery.

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WAR STORIES

A HEP CAT IN PATTON’S ARMY

Dave Brubeck’s career as a jazz icon was powerfully shaped by his experiences as a soldier-musician in World War II.

By Patrick J. Kiger

“I wanted to be sure beforehand that I could never kill a man.”

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driver kept the headlights off. The truck rolled up to a soldier directing traffic. He flashed a dim light over the truck and waved it through.

“As we passed him, I realized that he was wearing a German helmet,” Brubeck said. Brubeck told his driver to go over the next hill, turn around, and then race back down the road at full speed before the German had a chance to discover that he’d mistakenly let an American truck through.

A few miles later at a checkpoint manned by American soldiers, the group encountered a bigger problem. As Brubeck wrote in an essay for Time magazine in 2004, the sentries didn’t believe that a truck full of musicians would be driving around in the darkness. One of the guards came up to the truck, and Brubeck noticed that he had a grenade in each hand, with the pins pulled. He tensely explained to Brubeck that his buddies had just been killed by Germans who were driving a captured American truck. “All of them could speak perfect English, just like you’re speaking,” the soldier told him.

After a few disquieting seconds, the soldier examined Brubeck’s papers and then asked him for the password for that area. “The guys in the back were all praying that I knew it,” Brubeck would later write. Fortunately, he did, and they were allowed to pass.

That brush with death would change Brubeck forever.

He realized that if he lived through the war, he couldn’t be just another musician. Someday, he explained, “I would write music about peace and the brotherhood of man.”

TOP: COURTESY THE BRUBECK FAMILY; BELOW: NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM, NEW ORLEANS

I

n December 1944, at the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge, a truck rumbled down a road in Belgium, carrying a group of soldiers who called themselves the Wolf Pack. Despite the name, they weren’t fierce fighters being sent into combat. Their mission was to make music to entertain the troops.

The band’s leader, a private named Dave Brubeck, had just turned 24. Already an accomplished pianist who reveled in experimentation, he would go on to become one of the most famous jazz musicians, bandleaders, and composers of all time.

But Brubeck’s brash, unorthodox style as a musician obscured an inner turmoil. Though he wanted to serve his country, Brubeck quietly loathed the violence of war. “I resolved never to have a cartridge in my gun if I ever landed at the front,” he told an interviewer years later. “I wanted to be sure beforehand that I could never kill a man.”

Brubeck wasn’t yet the creative genius who would produce Time Out, the first jazz album ever to sell a million copies (in 1959), but his prodigious talent had already caused an officer to pluck him from an assignment as a replacement soldier in the 140th Infantry Regiment of General George Patton’s Third Army and make him an entertainer. Even so, Brubeck couldn’t completely escape the war raging around him.

Brubeck’s commanding officer had sent the band on tour, performing for GIs as they ate their chow. At one stop, a plane flew overhead as the musicians were setting up in a clearing where GIs were waiting in line for their food. “One of the GIs shouted, ‘Hey! That’s a German plane, and he’ll be coming back,’ ” Brubeck later remembered. Everybody ran from the clearing to take cover, and Brubeck and his musicians hastily climbed into their truck and drove away. They weren’t sure where to go. “There were no maps of this section with us,” Brubeck said. “We chose the road that seemed the most traveled.” By then it was getting dark, but the

Brubeck grew up in California’s Central Valley, where his father was a rancher and his mother a piano teacher. Brubeck started to play the piano at age four, but his experimentation began almost as soon as he started touching the keys. He didn’t like taking lessons, instead preferring to improvise his own pieces. When his family moved into a ranch house near Ione, southeast of Sacramento, the ranch hands would gather in the evenings and listen to the young Brubeck play cowboy songs, sometimes with his father accompanying him on the harmonica.

Brubeck’s mother, realizing early on that her son had a unique talent, taught him differently from her other students. “She didn’t force me to practice, and she didn’t force

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Dave Brubeck poses for a photo after he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942. Brubeck was a college student in Stockton, California, when he registered for military service.

TOP: COURTESY THE BRUBECK FAMILY; BELOW: NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM, NEW ORLEANS

his roommates could jam around the clock without dis­ turbing anyone and soon began playing jazz piano in local nightclubs and on a weekly campus radio show. The broad­ cast gave him a chance to meet and court the show’s co­ director, an aspiring actress and writer named Iola Marie Whitlock, who soon became his wife.

me to play serious music, but she gave me a lot of theory, ear training, harmony,” he told the jazz magazine Downbeat in 1957. “From the time I was very small, it was im­ possible to make me play any of the classical pieces except when I’d sit down and play them by ear.”

Brubeck also learned to rope cattle and take care of other ranch chores. Aiming for a career in which he could help his father’s cattle business, he enrolled at the College of the Pacific in Stockton, intent on becoming a veterinarian.

After a year, though, Brubeck switched his major to music. He moved into a basement apartment where he and

World War II preempted Brubeck’s education and musical ambitions. In 1942 he was drafted into the U.S. Army, and though he felt incapable of firing a shot in anger, he knew that the army also might give him a chance to play music instead of fight.

Brubeck was first sent to Camp Haan, east of Los Ange­ les. It was the first time he had ever been to southern Cali­ fornia, and for a boy who’d grown up on a ranch in the Central Valley, it was probably a bit of a culture shock. But Camp Haan had several bands, filled mostly with soldiers who had been musicians in Hollywood. It was three weeks before Brubeck even got a chance to play with them. But when the 21-year-old finally did sit down at the piano, lis­ teners on the base were startled.

“All the guys in these bands were wonderful musicians and very competent, but I was shocking everyone,” Bru­ beck would tell Downbeat. “They just completely wigged over me there were so many new ideas.”

Some of his arrangements were so wild, in fact, that his fellow soldiers refused to play them. He took one bigband composition, “Prayer of the Conquered,” to Stan Kenton in Los Angeles and wangled a chance to play it for him. “Where did you ever hear chords like this?” Brubeck recalled Kenton saying. Kenton liked the piece enough to try rehearsing it with an orchestra, but he ultimately de­ cided that it was a little too avant-garde. He told Brubeck that he should bring it back to him in 10 years.

For the rest of the year and a half that Brubeck spent at Camp Haan, he switched to writing small-combo arrange­ ments, some of which presaged his postwar work with his own group. But once again, his work was a bit too avantgarde for all but “the furthest-out jazzmen in the band,” he recalled years later.

With D-Day approaching, the band had to dissolve, and Brubeck learned he would be sent overseas as a rifleman.

In his remaining time stateside, Brubeck headed back to the Presidio in San Francisco, where a friend arranged for him to audition for an army band based there. “It was my last chance, I thought, to avoid the infantry, which I was now in, and get back into a band,” he explained in a 1991

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DAVE BRUBECK

Brubeck shipped out with the infantry on the SS George Washington, and after a brief stop in England arrived in France in the fall of 1944, three months after D-Day. Carrying the rifle he had resolved not to load, he was sent as a replacement to the front near Metz, where Patton was beginning a hard-fought siege against a fortress city held by the Germans. “It was just about the worst possible place to be, because the Germans were really wiping them out,” Brubeck later told Downbeat.

At the last depot along the route, Brubeck caught what for him was an incredibly lucky break. He learned that a Red Cross–sponsored show needed a pianist, and he volunteered to play. Two officers took note of his performance. One of them, Colonel Leslie Brown, decided that somebody as talented as Brubeck shouldn’t be sent into combat. That suited one of Brown’s subordinates, Captain Leroy Pearlman, who staged shows to entertain the troops. He wanted to put together a small band and recruited Brubeck to join it.

Brubeck thought that may have saved his life, as he later told Stars & Stripes: The company in which he would have served “got pretty messed up a couple of days later.”

Pearlman had a trick for protecting Brubeck and the other 18 musician-soldiers that he recruited for the assignment, as he told the story to Studs Terkel for Terkel’s 1984 book The Good War: An Oral History of World War II. He simply pulled their paperwork, so that in the eyes of the military bureaucracy, they just disappeared. “They stayed alive, and I had a band,” Pearlman said.

Pearlman’s trick worked so well that at one point the army actually sent Brubeck’s wife a telegram, asking if she knew of his whereabouts. “If you don’t know, I’m sure I don’t,” Iola wired back. “She got a couple of letters back marked ‘deceased in action’ before it got cleared up,” Brubeck told Stars & Stripes years later.

Brubeck arrived in France in the fall of 1944, three months after D-Day.

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Meanwhile, despite being only a private first class, Brubeck served as bandleader for the Wolf Pack, a hastily assembled group that toured the war zone in a truck.

Brubeck’s band was stationed at a replacement depot, “so soldiers were coming through to be sent to the front,” Brubeck recalled in a 2006 oral-history interview. “If they’d say they were musicians, they’d send them over to me, and then that’s the way I formed the band.”

In the days when the U.S. armed forces were still segregated, the multiracial Wolf Pack stood out. With Brown’s support, Brubeck chose a Black soldier, Gil White, to serve as his master of ceremonies, and brought in Jonathan Richard “Dick” Flowers, a Black trombonist, as well.

Getting the necessary musical talent was just one of many challenges Brubeck’s ensemble faced. Brubeck had to barter for musical instruments and come up with a repertoire that would entertain the soldiers. He managed to avoid playing military music, instead doing jazz versions of popular songs and occasionally slipping in his own compositions, some even inspired by the war.

In March 1945, with the war in Europe clearly ending, Brubeck stood one day and watched trucks and tanks lumber across a pontoon bridge that the army had erected at Remagen. The sight of the bridgehead inspired him to compose a piece, “We Crossed the Rhine,” in which he tried to capture the rhythms of the vehicles.

Three days after the German surrender, Brubeck and his band rolled into Munich, where they got to play a jazz show in an actual concert hall. After that, he and his ensemble continued to tour liberated France and Germany for a few more months, joining in USO tours.

In an effort to put aside the hard feelings from the war, he sometimes recruited German musicians to play with his band. “I found then—and I’ve found since—that there’s a great friendship in musical life,” he explained to Stars & Stripes. “Musicians understand each other through their love of music. We should all be musicians.”

Discharged in 1946, Brubeck returned to the United States. He decided to use his GI Bill benefits to finish his studies at Mills College in Oakland, California, where he became a pupil of Darius Milhaud, a Jewish composer who had fled his native France in 1940, shortly after the Germans occupied it. At the time, Brubeck was feeling discouraged about the resistance that he had encountered to his musical experimentation.

“To be honest, I was going to give up jazz because of all the hassle I had had, even in the army, to get the musicians to play my stuff,” he told Downbeat. “And I recalled even Kenton thought I was too far out. So I figured jazz wouldn’t be the place to present the ideas I wanted to.” Instead, Brubeck thought of becoming a contemporary classical musi-

COURTESY THE BRUBECK FAMILY

interview. The audition didn’t go well. Asked to play some blues, Brubeck responded by playing in two different keys—“probably G in this hand and B flat in the other hand, which was a device I was using a lot, I think before anybody in jazz,” he later recalled.

He didn’t get the gig. But he did make an impression on one of the band members, saxophonist Paul Desmond, who after the war would become his friend and musical collaborator—and the composer of “Take Five,” the 1959 Dave Brubeck Quartet song that would become one of the most popular, instantly recognizable jazz pieces ever.

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COURTESY THE BRUBECK FAMILY

Even though he was only a private first class, Brubeck, a gifted jazz pianist and composer, was tapped to lead the Wolf Pack, which entertained U.S. troops in Europe during World War II.

cal composer, writing oratorios and cantatas for orchestras and vocalists. But Milhaud convinced Brubeck to stick with jazz, counseling him that every great composer had expressed the culture that he was familiar with, and that jazz was the quintessential American art form.

When Brubeck began performing again in San Francisco, he was a man possessed, more daring and experimental than ever. “My only explanation was that I was playing out the war through improvisation,” he recalled years later. “And it was pretty wild at that time, because I’d been through Europe and seen all the destruction there.”

Brubeck’s fame grew, as did his record sales. By the mid1950s, Time was championing him as “probably the most exciting new jazz artist at work today.” He achieved such renown, in fact, that in the early years of the Cold War the U.S. State Department appointed him a cultural ambassador and sent him on tours of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

And in the 1960s, millions of Americans became familiar with “Take Five” as the theme of NBC’s Today Show.

Although Brubeck achieved his greatest fame in jazz, he eventually returned to his vision of composing modern classical music with themes of peace and brotherhood, including The Light in the Wilderness and The Commandments. He also performed during the Reagan-Gorbachev summit meeting in 1988, when the two leaders grappled with how to reduce the threat of nuclear war.

But Brubeck’s wartime experience continued to affect him profoundly. Years later he still grieved for army friends who had fallen in battles that were mostly long forgotten.

Brubeck, who died in 2012 at age 91, saw his music as a way of coping with their loss. “It gives you a sense of, ‘Why am I here? Why did they get killed?’ ” he once told an interviewer. “And then also you say to yourself, ‘I’m alive and I’m gonna do as much as I can.’ ” 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.

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POETRY

THE NIGHTINGALE’S LAMENT Sarojini Naidu

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THE GIFT OF INDIA Is there aught you need that my hands withhold, Rich gifts of raiment or grain or gold?

Lo! I have flung to the East and West Priceless treasures torn from my breast, And yielded the sons of my stricken womb To the drum-beats of duty, the sabres of doom.

Gathered like pearls in their alien graves Silent they sleep by the Persian waves, Scattered like shells on Egyptian sands, They lie with pale brows and brave, broken hands, They are strewn like blossoms mown down by chance On the blood-brown meadows of Flanders and France.

Can ye measure the grief of the tears I weep Or compass the woe of the watch I keep?

Or the pride that thrills thro’ my heart’s despair And the hope that comforts the anguish of prayer?

And the far sad glorious vision I see Of the torn red banners of Victory?

When the terror and tumult of hate shall cease And life be refashioned on anvils of peace, And your love shall offer memorial thanks To the comrades who fought in your dauntless ranks, And you honour the deeds of the deathless ones, Remember the blood of my martyred sons!

SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); OPPOSITE: ADOC-PHOTOS (GETTY IMAGES)

Sarojini Naidu was born in Hyderabad, India, in 1879. Her father, a prominent educator and political activist, and her mother, a poet, would both be important influences in her life. As a child Naidu learned to speak five languages, including English, and she attracted national attention when she entered the University of Madras at age 12.

Around that time she began writing poems and plays, and at age 16 she went to England to study at King’s College in London and, later, at Girton College in Cambridge. She made a name for herself in the London literary scene as a protégée of Edmund Gosse and Arthur Symons, two influential poets and critics. Her first volume of poetry, The Golden Threshold, was published in 1905, and the second, The Bird of Time, in 1912. In 1914 she was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Years earlier, incensed by Britain’s religion-based partitioning of Bengal in 1905, Naidu had joined the Indian National Congress, and with each passing year she became more deeply involved in the Indian independence movement and in advocating for women’s rights in her homeland. (In 1925 she became the first Indian woman to serve as president of the Indian National Congress.) Naidu was drawn to Mahatma Gandhi’s Noncooperation Movement— the campaign of civil disobedience he waged against British rule in India—and in time became one of his closest associates. (She playfully called Gandhi “Mickey Mouse,” while he referred to her “the nightingale of India.”) In 1930 she accompanied Gandhi on the Salt March—an epic nonviolent protest against Britain’s control of salt production and distribution in India—and the following year accompanied him to London for the second Round Table Conference, a summit on India’s future. She was twice imprisoned for her anti-British activism in the early 1930s, and in 1942 she and Gandhi were jailed for 11 months.

After India achieved independence in 1947, Naidu became the first female governor of a state, the Upper Provinces (present-day Uttar Pradesh), a post she held until her death from a heart attack in 1949. The anniversary of her death is commemorated as Women’s Day in India.

In the poem that follows, which was originally published in 1916 in the Westminster Gazette, an influential London newspaper, Naidu pays tribute to Indian soldiers who lost their lives fighting for Britain in World War I. In all, some 1.3 million Indian soldiers fought on the Western Front as well as in Mesopotamia and Gallipoli; more than 75,000 of them died.

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SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); OPPOSITE: ADOC-PHOTOS (GETTY IMAGES)

Opposite: Sarojini Naidu and Mahatma Gandhi make their way to the second Round Table Conference in London in 1931.

This page: Indian soldiers in the British Expeditionary Forces in France in 1914.

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ARTISTS

RUGS OF WAR

Decades of armed conflict in Afghanistan have transformed the iconography of one of the country’s traditional art forms.

By Pamela D. Toler

and 15,000 Soviet soldiers. Millions of Afghan civilians fled to refugee camps in neighboring countries.

The Soviet retreat did not end the violence. Civil war between the Afghan army and the mujahideen continued through the 1990s, setting the stage not only for the Taliban’s takeover of the country in 1996 but also for a new generation of foreign invaders.

The Soviet invasion and its aftermath led to continuing political unrest and economic instability in the region, but it also inspired an unusual art form: the Afghan war rug.

The Afghan war rug is a modern adaptation of a traditional art form. Created by women working from their rural homes or in small urban workshops, traditional Afghan rugs are often described as tribal rugs, as opposed to what most people think of as Persian rugs (technically, commercial or city rugs), which are more elaborate in design, often more finely woven, and often quite large, intended to cover the floor of a room.

Afghan rug designs, unlike those of Persian rugs, are more geometric than floral and have more open space.

One or more borders surround either a field with a central medallion or a repeated geometric pattern, usually on a dark red background. Prayer rugs often include a niche at one end of the carpet, representing a mihrab—the niche in the wall of a mosque that points toward Mecca. The elements in all of these design types are symmetrically arranged around a central axis.

Modern weapons, most notably military airplanes, appeared on Afghan rugs as early as the 1930s, well before the Soviet invasion, but they were a rarity. It was not until the guerrilla warfare of the 1980s that a growing number of Afghan weavers began to create rugs that combined traditional designs with new motifs and contemporary subject matter, known in Afghanistan as Kalashnikovs, after the Soviet automatic rifles that are a common thematic element in the designs of these rugs.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: MATERIAL CULTURE; BRITISH MUSEUM; HERITAGE IMAGE PARTNERSHIP LTD (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

W

hen the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979, it brought modern weapons to a region that was already torn by civil war, transforming not only the nature of that war but the imagery of one of the country’s traditional arts.

In 1978, a faction of Afghanistan’s Communist Party had seized power after a long period of internal unrest.

Faced with armed resistance from the country’s traditional Islamic population, leaders of the new government turned to the Soviets for help. The help, however, did not take the form they expected. The Soviets, fearing loss of influence in the region, invaded Afghanistan, overthrew its homegrown Communist government, and installed the leader of a faction of the Marxist People’s Democratic Party as the head of a new government.

The Soviets and their new client state met with renewed resistance from the country’s traditional Islamic population. Islamic freedom fighters, known collectively as the mujahideen, used their familiarity with rough mountain terrain and their long tradition of guerrilla warfare against foreign invaders to successfully harass the Soviet forces, at first using weapons seized from the British in the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919 and later with weapons taken from the Soviet invaders.

The conflict settled into a stalemate that lasted until 1987, when the U.S. government surreptitiously supplied the mujahideen with FIM-92 Stinger antiaircraft missiles.

The mujahideen used these simple, shoulder-launched heat-seeking missiles to shoot down low-flying airplanes and the combat helicopters that were the Red Army’s most effective weapon against the guerrillas. The Soviets began withdrawing from Afghanistan a year later, and the last Soviet soldiers left the country on February 15, 1989.

Nine years of brutal warfare came at a high cost for both sides. An estimated one million Afghan civilians were killed, as well as 90,000 mujahideen, 18,000 Afghan troops,

Opposite: These Afghan war rugs, most likely made in the 1980s and 1990s, depict such staples of modern warfare as fighter planes, helicopters, tanks, RPGs, grenades, AK-47s, and pistols.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: MATERIAL CULTURE; BRITISH MUSEUM; HERITAGE IMAGE PARTNERSHIP LTD (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

AFGHAN WAR RUGS The makers of Afghan war rugs use the traditional methods and materials of their craft to depict the experience of modern warfare—or at least the weapons with which it is waged. (Enrico Mascelloni, an expert in Central Asian art who curated some of the first exhibitions of Afghan war rugs, describes the rugs as looking like a “weapons catalogue; the rich assortment accumulated in secret warehouses.”)

The design elements of these war rugs are mostly traditional as well. Decorative borders enclose a field of repeating patterns along a strong central axis, but within that structure tanks, helicopters, bombers, Kalashnikov rifles, and hand grenades replace or are intermingled with traditional motifs. With only slight modifications the boteh shape (the dominant element in the pattern known in the West as paisley) became a hand grenade or a helicopter. The octagonal medallions known as göls were easily turned into stylized tanks, with rows of decorative diamonds or stars as their treads. Like traditional göls, these tank-göls are often aligned in a repeated pattern running the length of the central field within a rug’s borders—a rug with two central rows of five tanks, for example, is described as a “10tank” rug. Set in the context of tanks, traditional star and flower motifs denote explosions. Automatic rifles and highly abstracted airplanes, laid end to end, serve as the rug’s borders or as a central geometric pattern.

Picture rugs, which center on simplified but recognizable images that illustrate an event, are a less common variation of war rug. They are less clearly related to traditional rugs in their imagery, though their makers use the same technique of weaving knots on a loomed foundation of warp and weft. Before the rise of the Taliban, which imposed an extreme version of Islamic law, including a strict prohibition on representing human beings in any medium, some picture rugs included highly stylized portraits of Afghan military and political leaders and images of heroic mujahideen attacking Soviet tanks. Others documented the Soviet exodus from the country by placing an abstracted map of Afghanistan in the central field of the rug, surrounded by images of weapons and vehicles.

Another variant, which is similar in style to the map rugs, features a large-scale image of a single weapon, generally an AK-47 or a Stinger missile, within a traditional border. As in the map rugs, smaller images of other weapons are arranged around the central image. Some of the most dramatic examples of picture rugs depict mosques or

What first inspired Afghan weavers to make war rugs?

No one knows for sure.

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other buildings surrounded by helicopters. These are generally described as depicting mosques under attack by Soviet combat helicopters.

The iconography of war rugs has evolved since the 1980s to reflect changes in Afghanistan’s experience of modern warfare. When Stingers became a status symbol for guerrilla units after 1986, they became a popular addition to the “weapons catalogue” depicted on the rugs.

When the United States invaded the country in 2001, F-16 fighter jets and M1 Abrams tanks replaced images associated with the Soviet invasion. Rug makers also found inspiration in propaganda leaflets dropped by U.S. military aircraft, incorporating images like the American flag and even words and phrases—often misspelled—such as “hand bom,” “rooket,” Pepsi, rout of terrorism, and U.S.A. Weavers have also produced more controversial rugs inspired by the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, which dealers describe as “War on Terror rugs,” though the imagery is at best ambiguous.

War rugs are the creation of a population that seldom has a voice in public discourse on war and power. The weavers are mostly poor, often illiterate, women, who have learned skills passed down from generations of mothers and daughters before them. (In the years when Afghan refugees poured into camps in Pakistan, some men tried to earn a living weaving rugs.) The weavers of war rugs do not celebrate victories, honor the dead, or criticize policies that plunged their country into war—all common to other forms of war-related art. Instead, working within the limits of the medium and those imposed by Islamic aniconism, their vision is necessarily abstract and geometric, and it’s generally focused on weapons rather than the soldiers who wield them.

Rug dealers and art critics are not sure what first inspired people to create such rugs. Most rugs created over the past 40 years in the home workshops of Afghan families and sold in markets, locally and in Iran and Pakistan, are traditional in every sense of the word. If they were intended for sale, rather than made as a personal statement, the first war rugs would have been a tremendous gamble for their creators, requiring a serious investment of time and money to create a rug with no guaranteed market.

Today, the main market for war rugs is outside Afghanistan, where they are part of a larger conversation about war in that country and the troubled relationships between the West and the Islamic world. They are a tangible reminder of the latest chapter in Afghanistan’s long history of resistance to foreign invaders. MHQ Pamela D. Toler writes about history and the arts. She is the author of several books, including Women Warriors: An Unexpected History (Beacon Press, 2019).

in

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From Normandy to the Bulge: The First Division’s Race Across Europe

SEPTEMBER 5-16, 2021 Visit the places where the 1st Infantry Division made history, leading the way to Allied success in WWII.

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in partnership with Academic Travel Abroad

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@fdmuseum | #FDMuseum

For an itinerary, travel details and pricing, or to reserve your place, please visit FDMuseum.org/footsteps or call Academic Travel Abroad at 1-877-298-9677.

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Please note that the First Division Museum offers this travel experience as a way to engage our audience and does not benefit financially from this trip.

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WARS, HOT AND COLD Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division evacuate a wounded comrade during the Battle of Hamburger Hill (above). The debacle led U.S. officials to keep the losses in the next big battle under wraps.

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Courage Under Fire: The 101st Airborne’s Hidden Battle at Tam Ky

By Ed Sherwood 360 pages.

Casemate, 2021. $34.95.

Reviewed by Jerry Morelock

Plenty of authors and publishers try to boost sales by larding book titles with such undeserved adjectives as “unknown,” “forgotten,” or “secret.” But Ed Sherwood is completely justified in using “hidden” in the title of this book.

Courage Under Fire accurately captures the treatment that U.S. government officials and most military histories of the Vietnam War have given the Battle of Tam Ky (also known as Operation Lamar Plain) fought from May through August 1969 by the 101st Airborne

Division (Airmobile) in Quang Tin Province south of Danang. Sherwood, a participant in the bloody battle and now, with this book, its most authoritative chronicler, documents how President Richard M. Nixon, General Creighton Abrams Jr., the commander of U.S. military operations in Vietnam, and other U.S. officials deliberately and literally “hid” the costly operation from all public scrutiny.

The reason that the valor and blood sacrifice of the men in the 1st Brigade of the “Screaming Eagles” at Tam Ky has been deliberately hidden for decades is simple. As Operation Lamar Plain got underway on May 15, headlines in the United States were dominated by the division’s “meatgrinder” Battle of Hamburger Hill (officially, Operation Apache Snow, or the Battle of Dong Ap Bia) some 100 miles northwest of Tam Ky, which left more than 620 of the 101st Division’s 3rd Brigade troops killed or wounded. The politically embattled Nixon administration

BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES)

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BETTMANN (GETTY IMAGES)

couldn’t affoapprd to publicly acknowledge that 525 additional American soldiers had been killed or wounded in the Battle of Tam Ky, coming as it did immediately on the heels of the debacle at Hamburger Hill. Nixon was elected on a promise to end the Vietnam War, not to prolong it indefinitely. Tam Ky had to remain “hidden.”

Sherwood has written one of the best, most comprehensive accounts of Vietnam War combat published to date. He masterfully places the fighting within that post-Tet ’68 stage of the war’s strategic, operational, and tactical frameworks with the knowledge and skill of a soldier-participant (and Purple Heart recipient). A platoon leader (3rd Platoon, Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry) in the Tam Ky battle, Sherwood writes from invaluable firsthand knowledge, but he has also mined official records, interviewed dozens of other veterans of the battle, and crafted a compelling narrative that readers will find engrossing from beginning to end.

Sherwood brings the combat actions of his fellow soldiers dramatically to life. Throughout the book (and in informative, helpful appendixes) he introduces readers to his fellow soldiers in D Company, “Geronimo” battalion, and we learn their names, backgrounds, and fates—we come to really know and care about the men we sent to fight and die in Vietnam.

Like most such “operations” in the Vietnam War, Tam Ky consisted of months of intense and often brutal small-unit actions. Counted day by day, the casualties may have seemed somewhat small compared to those in World War I or World War II, but the numbers of dead, wounded, and missing on both sides gradually but inexorably mounted into the hundreds or thousands. How could that have happened?

Sherwood’s detailed chronicle provides the answer—for Tam Ky and, as it stands as an example, for essentially all such engagements in the Vietnam War.

When the military objective was simply to find and kill as many of the enemy as possible, operations inevitably dragged on until one side or the other, having had enough, withdrew.

Sherwood has included many extremely useful strategic, operational, and tactical maps, as well as nine appendixes and a glossary. These additions extend this book’s usefulness and enrich any further study of the Vietnam War. If I were still teaching military service school and civilian university courses on the Vietnam War, Ed Sherwood’s Courage Under Fire is the one book I would select as required reading on how the war was fought.

Jerry Morelock, a decorated combat veteran of the Vietnam War, is a prize-winning military historian whose books include Generals of the Bulge: Leadership in the U.S Army’s Greatest Battle, The Army Times Book of Great Land Battles from the Civil War to the Gulf War, and, as a contributing editor, Pershing’s Lieutenants: American Military Leadership in World War I.

A Military History of the Cold War, 1962–1991

By Jonathan M. House.

468 pages.

University of Oklahoma Press, 2020, $39.95.

Reviewed by Thomas Zacharis With this book, Jonathan M. House, a professor emeritus at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Leavenworth, Kansas, completes his military history of the Cold War, which began with an earlier volume covering 1944 to 1962. In this second

volume House covers a series of often overlooked local conflicts and insurgencies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, including China’s attack on India in 1962 and the Sino-Soviet border hostilities along the Ussuri River in 1969. The author believes in the Clausewitzian relationship between policy and military force, explaining that, in this period of local conflicts, politicians often made military decisions and army officers often acted as de facto leaders of their governments—resulting, not surprisingly, in occasional mistakes by civilian and military officials who were out of their depth. House also supports the theory that the Soviet Union’s drive to create a powerful high seas fleet hastened the country’s path to financial collapse.

Readers interested in the geopolitical history of the Cold War period from the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 will find this volume indispensable.

Thomas Zacharis, who lives in Thessaloniki, Greece, reviews books for MHQ and other magazines.

New & Noteworthy TANK WARFARE, by Jeremy Black.

(Indiana University Press, $25.)

A prominent military historian traces the development and evolution of tanks and armored warfare in the 20th and 21st centuries.

COURAGE ABOVE ALL THINGS: General John Ellis Wool and the U.S. Military, 1812–1863, by Harwood P. Hinton and Jerry Thompson.

(University of Oklahoma Press, $45.)

Hinton, who died in 2016, devoted 50 years of his life to this monumental biography of Wool, who served as an officer in the U.S. Army during the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War; Thompson, a distinguished historian, completed and edited it. (Wool was the oldest

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REVIEWS general on either side of the Civil War until 1963, when President Abraham Lincoln ordered him retired from service after 51 years in the army.)

AN OFFICER OF THE OLD GUARD: Lewis Stevenson Craig, 1807–1852, by William Harris Bragg.

(Mercer University Press, $35.) Mining family papers, court files, military records, and other primary sources, a historian chronicles his subject’s journey through the U.S. Army’s burgeoning professional officer corps.

INTO TENNESSEE AND FAILURE: John Bell Hood, by Stephen Davis.

(Mercer University Press, $35.) In this, the second volume of his study of the Confederate general’s record in 1864, the author follows Hood and his Army of Tennessee into Georgia, Alabama, and then on to Nashville, where his forces were soundly routed in a bloody two-day battle, after which he was relieved of command.

AMBITIOUS HONOR: George Armstrong Custer’s Life of Service and Lust for Fame, by James E. Mueller. (University of Oklahoma Press, $32.95.) The author, a journalism professor at the University of North Texas, argues that Custer’s unrelenting quest for attention and recognition—he was planning a speaking tour after the U.S. Army’s 1876 campaign against the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians— both drove him to success and, ultimately, to the battlefield failure that ended up overshadowing his notable achievements.

WINNING WARS: The Enduring Nature and Changing Character of Victory from Antiquity to the 21st Century, edited by Matthias Strohn.

(Casemate Publishers, $65.) “Going to war requires of those who do it a commitment to win—and a sense of what victory would look like,” Sir Hew Strachan, the eminent British military

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historian, notes in his introduction to this volume of essays. Building on a project originally commissioned by the Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research, a think tank established by the British Army, Strachan and 17 other contributors explore the tactical, strategic, and political parameters of winning at war.

BREAKING THE BLOCKADE: The Bahamas during the Civil War,

by Charles D. Ross. (University of Mississippi Press, $99.) An engaging account of how Nassau emerged as a hotbed of illicit maritime traffic between British concerns and firms in the southern United States nearly as soon as President Abraham Lincoln imposed a blockade on the Confederate coastline in April 1861.

KOREAN SHOWDOWN: National Policy and Military Strategy in a Limited War, 1951–1952, by Bryan R. Gibby. (University of Alabama Press, $54.95.) The author, a combat veteran and professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, examines the stalemate period of the Korean War, up to and including Operation Showdown, the U.S.-led military offensive that aimed to force North Korea into concessions at the negotiation table.

GÖRING’S MAN IN PARIS: The Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer and His World, by Jonathan Petropoulos.

(Yale University Press, $37.50.)

The frightening—and fascinating— story of Bruno Lohse, who at the direction of Hermann Göring helped supervise the Nazis’ systematic theft, largely from French Jews, of more than 30,000 works of art.

TO RULE THE SKIES: General Thomas S. Power and the Rise of Strategic Air Command in the Cold War, by Brent Ziarnick.

(Naval Institute Press, $39.95.)

The author, a professor at the Air

Command and Staff College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, upends the conventional image of Power as General Curtis LeMay’s unimaginative and oafish hatchet man, portraying him instead as a highly capable commander and forgotten space visionary.

THE YORK PATROL: The Real Story of Alvin York and the Unsung Heroes Who Made Him World War I’s Most Famous Soldier, by James Carl Nelson. (William Morrow, $28.99.) A distinguished military historian tells the stories of the dozen men who fought alongside York in the Argonne Forest on October 8, 1918.

THE BEST TEAM OVER THERE: The Untold History of Grover Cleveland Alexander and the Great War, by Jim Leeke. (University of Nebraska Press, $29.95.) The author examines whether the career of one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history was damaged by his harrowing experiences in World War I. THADDEUS STEVENS: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice, by Bruce Levine. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) An authoritative biography of one of the 19th century’s most visionary statesmen.

WAR TIME: Temporality and the Decline of Western Military Power, edited by Sten Rynning, Olivier Schmitt, and Amelie Theussen.

(Brookings Institution Press/Chatham House, $48.99.) Three Danish military experts offer a critical assessment of the evolution and future of Western military power.

RADICAL SACRIFICE: The Rise and Ruin of Fitz John Porter, by William Marvel. (University of North Carolina Press, $35.) A wellresearched and insightful new biography that casts the Union army general as a respected commander

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military career was ruined by political machinations in Abraham Lincoln’s administration.

THE GERMAN WAY OF WAR: A Lesson in Tactical Management,

by Jaap Jan Brouwer. (Pen & Sword Military, $42.95.) A Dutch military historian argues that the Germans consistently outfought the bigger Allied armies that eventually defeated them in both world wars, chiefly because of their emphasis on Auftragstaktik, or mission command.

RETURN TO VICTORY: MacArthur’s Epic Liberation of the Philippines, by James P. Duffy.

(Hachette Books, $31.) A historian’s blow-by-blow account of General Douglas MacArthur’s high-stakes campaign to defeat more than a quarter million die-hard Japanese defenders in the Pacific theater.

THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916–1917, by Philip Zelikow.

(PublicAffairs, $30.) A historian and former American diplomat tells the story of a fumbled peace initiative that could have ended World War I much sooner and saved countless lives.

WHICH GROUP DETONATED A BOMB IN THE U.S. CAPITOL BUILDING ON MARCH 1, 1971?

The Black Panthers, the Youth International Party, the Irish Republican Army, or the Weather Underground?

For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ MAGAZINES/QUIZ

HISTORYNET.com ANSWER: THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND. OFTEN CALLED THE WEATHERMEN, IN 1969 THE GROUP DECIDED TO “ENGAGE IN GUERILLA WARFARE AGAINST THE U.S. GOVERNMENT” AND STARTED A BOMBING CAMPAIGN. BY 1976 THE ORGANIZATION HAD ALL BUT DISSOLVED.

THE WESTERN FRONT: A History of the Great War, 1914– 1918, by Nick Lloyd. (Liveright, $30.)

A distinguished military historian’s sweeping narrative of events in the 400-mile killing zone and the horrific fighting that changed the face of modern warfare.

THE GREEK REVOLUTION: A Critical Dictionary, edited by Paschalis M. Kitromilides and Constantinos Tsoukalas. (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, $39.95.) A wide-ranging collection of essays that explore the war the Greeks waged from 1821 to 1830 to win independence from the Ottoman Empire.

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In 1943 Walt Disney Productions scored a big hit— and sold lots of war bonds— with Der Fuehrer’s Face, an anti-Nazi propaganda short that starred Donald Duck in a nightmare world run by Adolf Hitler, his henchmen, and other Axis leaders. Even before the film was released, a version of its theme song recorded by Spike Jones and His City Slickers soared to No. 3 on the U.S. chart. Der Fuehrer’s Face won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film of 1943.

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SUB S, A GERMAN194 DEFYING ORDER . COAST IN 5 PROWLED THE U.S

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HISTORYNET is the world’s largest publisher of history magazines; to subscribe to any of our nine titles visit:

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“LET’S SHOOT THE WORKS AND WIN! YES, WIN IT ALL!” —Lieutenant

General George S. Patton Jr., in a poem he wrote after observing the 79th Infantry Division on August 19, 1944 page 32

SPRING 2021 VOLUME 33, NUMBER 3

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