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ARMS RACE In 1775 the Continental Army needed weapons— and fast
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IF THE CONFEDERATES HAD WON H WORKHORSE MODEL 1816 MUSKET H
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U.S. Army troops and armor head ashore on Angaur Island in October 1944 for the final phase of the invasion.
Y ENDLESS 11 THE SEEMINGL E 9/ ARKED BY TH CONFLICT SP —OR IS IT? ER OV ATTACKS IS
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russia’s tupolev tu-95 turboprops still send fighters scrambling “bombs away” lemay: unapologetic champion of waging total war
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Known for their swashbuckling looks, Mosby and his Rangers wreaked havoc throughout Northern Virginia.
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TODAY IN HISTORY MAY 1, 1931 THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING OFFICIALLY OPENS. IN ITS FIRST YEAR ONLY 23% OF THE AVAILABLE SPACE WAS SOLD. THE LACK OF TENANTS LED NEW YORKERS TO DISMISS THE BUILDING AS THE “EMPTY STATE BUILDING.” IN YEAR ONE THE OBSERVATION DECK HAULED IN APPROXIMATELY $2 MILLION IN REVENUE, EQUAL TO WHAT ITS OWNERS COLLECTED IN RENT. THE BUILDING FIRST TURNED A PROFIT IN THE 1950s. For more, visit
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OPENING ROUND
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
In 1898 the French army introduced the world to a fearsome new piece of artillery: the Canon de 75 modèle 1897. French soldiers quickly dubbed it the SoixanteQuinze (“Seventy-Five”) in a nod to its 75mm bore, and in time the gun would become commonly known as the French 75. The Germans who encountered the gun at the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914, however, branded it the “Black Butcher,” and little wonder: The French 75 had been specifically designed to rapidly rain time-fuzed shrapnel shells on advancing enemy troops. As the first field gun with a hydraulic recoil mechanism, it did not need to be resighted after each shot and could typically fire 15 rounds a minute at a designated target more than five miles away. An experienced crew, using progressive traversing along with small changes in elevation, could terrorize the enemy with fauchage, or “sweeping fire.” The 75mm French shrapnel shell shown here, measuring 18 3/4 inches long and 3 inches in diameter and weighing 16 pounds, contained about 290 lead balls. The balls would shoot forward when the timer on the shell’s fuze reached zero—typically high above enemy troops. A four-gun battery of French 75s could deliver some 17,000 such projectiles in a single minute, mowing down enemy soldiers in devastating fashion. But the weapon, though formidable, wasn’t indomitable: Even 60 batteries of French 75s, along with hundreds of other artillery pieces, were not enough to secure an Allied victory at the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917. (See “Bucketworthy Battlefields,” page 30.) In 1918 the U.S. Army, having entered World War I in force, adopted the French 75 for use on the battlefields of France; by then nearly all those in service were firing high-explosive shells. By the end of the war the Allies had gone through some 200 million shells.
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ÖSTERREICHISCHE NATIONALBIBLIOTHEK
Volume 34, Number 2 Winter 2022
An Austrian soldier stands on the “Bridge of Sighs” in the vast network of tunnels under Italy’s Marmolata glacier, the highest peak in the Dolomites. Austrian troops in World War I dug the tunnels—complete with barracks, kitchens, chapels, infirmaries, and stores—to gain a strategic advantage over their Italian adversaries.
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58 FEATURES 38 No Guns, No Glory
by Willard Sterne Randall To supply the Continental Army with the weapons it needed to fight the wellarmed British regulars during the American Revolution, the founders of the fledging nation turned abroad.
48 World War II’s Can-Do City
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by Roy Morris Jr. In 1941 Evansville, Indiana, faced an unemployment crisis. Then defense contracts transformed it into a hotbed of U.S. military production.
58 Our Man in Havana
by JohnVacha In 1896 Harry Scovel went to Cuba to report on the revolt against Spanish rule. Soon he was one of the world’s bestknown war correspondents.
68 Life Savers
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68
PORTFOLIO A gallery of objects that, in war, have often meant the razor-thin difference between life and death.
74 Witness to the White War
ÖSTERREICHISCHE NATIONALBIBLIOTHEK
by E. Alexander Powell During World War I an ambitious newspaper correspondent made it his mission to cover the fighting on what he called “the roof of the world.”
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DEPARTMENTS 6 Flashback 12 Comments 15 At the Front 16 Laws of War Rights of passage
20 Experience
Showdown on Lake Erie
24 Behind the Lines
West Point’s Cadet Chapel
28 Battle Schemes A 1914 bestiary
30 War List
Bucketworthy battlefields
35 Weapons Check
LeMat revolver
36 Letter From MHQ 85 Culture of War 86 Classic Dispatches The last casualty
88 War Stories A chef in Crimea
93 Poetry
Carl Sandburg
94 Reviews
Warriors and weapons
96 Drawn & Quartered On the Cover
During the Revolutionary War the French government supplied large numbers of muskets for use by the Continental Army. Several arsenals in France produced muskets, but the Charleville Model 1763 shown here was by far the most common, and soon all French muskets were referred to as “Charlevilles.” General George Washington asked that all imported firearms be stamped as U.S. property to reduce theft. COVER: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
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FLASHBACK BATTLE OF THE AEGATES, SICILY, 241 BCE
Hundreds of warships fitted with massive bronze rams meet in the final naval battle of the First Punic War, which will see the Roman Republic emerge victorious over Carthage. TODAY: A team of international maritime archaeologists recover two of the rams, along with helmets and other armor, from the bottom of the sea off the western coast of Sicily.
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VINTAGE IMAGES (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)
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FLASHBACK SIEGE OF ACRE, PALESTINE, 1191
After reaching the Holy Land, King Richard I of England (“the Lionheart”) joins King Philip II Augustus of France to force the surrender of a Muslim garrison of 20,000 men. TODAY: An amateur scuba diver exploring shallow waters off Israel’s Carmel Coast finds a 900-year-old sword thought to have belonged to one of King Richard’s crusader knights.
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CHÂTEAU DE VERSAILLES
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FLASHBACK
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WATERS OFF KEY WEST, FLORIDA, JUNE 12, 1943 Navy submarine USS R-12, originally launched in 1919 and shown here in 1942, sinks during a training exercise off the Florida Keys, claiming the lives of 42 crew members. TODAY: Ocean explorer Tim Taylor receives the navy’s highest civilian honor for his mission to find all 52 U.S. submarines—including R-12—lost in World War II.
U.S. NAVY (NATIONAL ARCHIVES)
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COMMENTS
Dept. of Justice With all due respect for John Haymond, the author of “Crime or Culture?” in the Autumn 2021 issue of MHQ, I do not consider the decision to try the Dakota tribe members as war criminals a close call. Military justice (and justice in general) serves many purposes besides the culpability of individual defendants. It is necessary to the good order and discipline of the combatant forces and imposes a framework of conduct that turns what would otherwise be an unruly mob into a military unit. I would argue that the U.S. Army command structure
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had a duty to prosecute these war crimes regardless of whether the Dakota’s culture sanctioned abject slaughter. How devastating would it be to the morale of friendly forces (and the local populace) if they knew they were being held to one standard of conduct while their enemies could murder and rape with impunity? Moreover, I would note that fewer than 10 percent of the 391 defendants in the trials were actually executed. That tells me that the tribunal chose to consider mitigating factors when dealing out justice. If the shoe had been on the other foot and the Dakota had bested the U.S. Army on the field, the execution rate
surely would have been closer to 100 percent. Rick Miller Wallingford, Pennsylvania JOHN HAYMOND RESPONDS I appreciate the reader’s letter, as he raises some very good points. Some I agree with and others I think are in error, but that’s the nature of historical study, and I welcome the exchange of perspectives. He is absolutely right to say that military justice is “necessary to the good order and discipline of combatant forces.” The point of my article, however, was to question if, and how, the judicial standards of one
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U.S. NAVY NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NAVAL AVIATION
A crowd in Mankato, Minnesota, watches the hanging of 38 Dakota Indians in 1862.
belligerent should be imposed on a former enemy. The U.S. Army’s concept of command and control was completely absent from traditional Dakota practices of warfare. But I believe the army was well within its jurisdictional rights to prosecute individual Dakota combatants for the specific crimes of massacre, murder, and rape if those charges could be proven. The problem was that the vast majority of the 391 Dakota who faced the military commission tribunal were convicted on charges of “participation in battle”; the laws of any nation would protect soldiers from prosecutions for that. That conviction was clearly an overreach by the 1862 court. As for the reader’s assertion that because “fewer than 10 percent” of the 391 defendants were executed, the tribunal must have “considered mitigating factors when dealing out justice,” the historical evidence disagrees. President Abraham Lincoln’s review of the 303 death sentences handed down by the tribunal specifically focused on the crimes of rape and massacre and completely threw out all convictions that had been based solely on participation in battle. It was the review process, not the tribunal in the field, that considered factors in mitigation. But I think the
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
MATTERS OF EXECUTION
reader might be right when he suggests that if the Dakota had won the war, the execution ratio would have been far higher.
Boom to Bust
I commend Rick Britton for his excellent article on the Spencer rifle/carbine in the Winter 2021 issue of MHQ. One additional point bears mention: A very big reason Christopher Spencer’s company went bankrupt is that the federal government sold a lot of Spencer arms as surplus, which left the company competing with itself—an impossible situation that ultimately forced its closure. Denny Andrews Bellevue, Washington
U.S. NAVY NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NAVAL AVIATION
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Medal Mix-Up
I enjoyed reading Rick Britton’s well-written article “Man vs. Mosquito” in the Spring 2021 issue of MHQ, but I would like to point out a factual error in it. It stated that Private John Kissinger was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for volunteering to be bitten by mosquitoes infected with yellow fever. This is incorrectly portrayed even on Kissinger’s tombstone. He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his actions, not the Medal of Honor, which requires heroic actions during armed conflict with an enemy. Rykar Lewis Elizabeth, Colorado
The U.S. Navy tests an ejection seat using the cockpit section of a McDonnell F-4B Phantom II in 1967.
ASK MHQ
Up, Up, and Away
When was an ejector seat used for the first time? Drew Tucker Indianapolis In an age of supersonic aircraft, the ejection seat is a pilot’s staple for survival in an extreme emergency. Little is known of the first attempt at ejecting the pilot from an airplane in 1910, except that it made use of a bungee cord, with unimpressive results. In 1916 British inventor Everard Calthrop, who had patented a parachute design in 1913, patented an ejector seat that used compressed air to hurl the pilot clear. Romanian inventors Anastase Dragomir and Tanase Dobrescu developed a “catapultable cockpit” that a French test
pilot demonstrated from a Farman at Paris-Orly Airport on August 25, 1929, and that Constantin Nicolau demonstrated from an Avia at Baneasa Airport, Bucharest, on October 29. Early in World War II Germany took the lead in ejector seat development, with at least one test involving a dummy in the rear cockpit of a Ju-87 Stuka in September 1941. It was Ernst Heinkel, however, who developed an ejector using an explosive cartridge that became operational on several of his aircraft designs. Their first test, appropriately enough, involved the first jet fighter to fly. On January 13, 1942, Helmut Schenk was test flying an He-280 when it began icing up, causing him to lose control of the plane. The airplane was lost, but the ejector worked perfectly, saving Schenk’s life.
Germany ultimately canceled production of the He-280, leaving it for the Me-262 to become the first jet fighter to see combat, but Heinkel made ejector seats standard equipment on several production fighters, including the He-219 night fighter and the He-162 jet interceptor. The Do-335 is also known to have been fitted with one, while in neutral Sweden, Bofors also developed its own ejector seat design in 1941, which was tested in a Saab 17 on July 29, 1946. 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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MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER DAVID STEINHAFEL PUBLISHER ALEX NEILL EDITOR IN CHIEF
THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY WINTER 2022 VOL. 34, NO. 2
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AT THE FRONT LAWS OF WAR 16 EXPERIENCE 20 BEHIND THE LINES 24 BATTLE SCHEMES 28 WAR LIST 30 WEAPONS CHECK 35 HAVING A GAS
WILLIAM VANDERSON/FOX PHOTOS (GETTY IMAGES)
A couple of seamen at the British Royal Navy’s Anti-Gas School in Tipnor, Portsmouth, wear gas masks as they play leapfrog so that they become acclimated to carrying out strenuous tasks in respirators.
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LAWS OF WAR
RIGHTS OF PASSAGE
Where do a nation’s territorial waters end and the high seas begin? This long-contentious question remains hotly disputed today. By John A. Haymond
The influence of Grotius’s short essay was to survive far beyond his lifetime.
The theory of a nation’s right to defend its territorial waters was problematic when long-established sea lanes fell
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within the lines of new territorial claims on maritime charts. Certain narrow passages between mainland and islands such as the Vilkitsky Straits in the Arctic Circle or the Corfu Channel off the Albania coast or constricted waters like the Gulf of Aqaba east of the Sinai Peninsula have been scenes of international dispute and outright conflict when one nation contests the passage of another nation’s ships through what it regards as its territorial waters. In a series of conferences in the 20th century, as more and more nations declared a 12-mile reach into open seas, participants fiercely debated the limit of national sovereignty in coastal waters. The 1958 Geneva Convention on the Law of the Sea established limits for territorial waters but also recognized that national sovereignty was far from absolute in those seas. Rather, it held, territorial waters “are subject to limitations imposed by the community of nations by means of international law.” One of those limitations is the doctrine of innocent passage. The concept of innocent passage holds that ships of all nations are free to sail through seas claimed as territorial waters by any other nation so long as the vessels meet certain conditions. It is not a reciprocal policy because international law and custom insist that ships of unfriendly nations are just as free to transit those lanes as are ships of allied or friendly states. Two types of vessels, however, continue to generate argument and conflict: fishing boats, because of their economic importance, and naval warships, for reasons of national security. The Geneva Convention defined “passage” as “navigation through the territorial sea for the purpose either of traversing that sea without entering internal waters, or of proceeding to internal waters, or of making for the high seas from internal waters.” It is an important distinction, because before then it was widely held that a ship in passage, just like a ship in port, was under the coastal nation’s authority. Passage was thereafter determined to be “innocent” as long as a ship’s transit was “not prejudicial to the peace, good order or security of the coastal State,” as the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea termed it. The United States interpreted this language as pertaining only to military security, but India and other nations insisted that it encompassed far more. Britain, voicing the
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS; KURT HULTON (GETTY IMAGES); IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS
The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius is most often cited for his contributions to the development of international laws of war. Before he published his magnum opus, On the Law of War and Peace, in 1625, however, he wrote a smaller work titled Mare Liberum (The Free Sea). It was not much more than a chapter excerpted from his study of the 17th-century practice of prize taking in naval conflict, but the influence of Grotius’s short essay was to survive far beyond his lifetime. It was, as the U.S. Naval War College describes it, nothing less than “the first formal statement of freedom of the seas as a general principle of international law.” It was a simple enough proposition for the world’s seagoing nations to agree, at least in theory, that unimpeded navigation of the high seas was to the benefit of all concerned. In practice, however, the question of where a nation’s territorial waters and maritime sovereignty end and the high seas begin was a contentious point that remains hotly disputed today. An early attempt at resolving the question was advanced by another Dutch jurist, Cornelius van Bynkershoek, who postulated that “the dominion of land ends where the power of arms ends,” which was understood to mean “so far as cannon balls are projected.” That, of course, was imprecise, so in 1782 an Italian scholar pinned the distance at one sea league. Since Thomas Jefferson, as U.S. secretary of state, had determined that one sea league was indeed the maximum range of cannon shot, the United States accepted one sea league, or three miles, as the reach of its territorial waters. The British government concurred, but its insistence on being allowed to engage in “hovering acts,” by which ships of the Royal Navy were empowered to overhaul and board vessels outside Britain’s territorial waters on suspicion of criminal activity, contradicted that limitation until it discontinued the practice in the late 1800s.
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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS; KURT HULTON (GETTY IMAGES); IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS
Clockwise from top: HMS Volage, its bow blown apart by a mine laid by Albania in the North Corfu Channel, is towed to harbor in 1946; the Court of International Justice in The Hague meets in 1948 to consider Britain’s dispute with Albania over the Corfu incident; British sailors drag ashore one of the mines in the Corfu Channel.
most widely held view, maintained that the manner in which the passage was conducted, rather than the transit itself, should determine whether a ship’s passage was innocent. Did the vessel have its guns raised, for example, or fail to respond to signals and communications from the coastal nation? Language discussing the unique capabilities of submarines was also included in the Convention’s final draft, which required them “to navigate on the surface and to show their flag,” thereby announcing their peaceful intentions. An incident in the North Corfu Channel in 1946 was one of the first tests of this doctrine after World War II. The British destroyers Saumarez and Volage, sailing through the channel, struck mines in an uncharted minefield moored in Albanian waters. The Royal Navy, without seeking a diplomatic resolution, proceeded to clear the waters of mines. Albania disavowed any knowledge of the minefield and insisted in the International Court of Justice that
Britain had violated its sovereignty by sending warships through waters that were a secondary passage and not an essential shipping lane between high seas. The court, holding that the strait connected two portions of the high seas that had been established as an area of international maritime navigation, rejected the Albanian argument that a body of water must be a “necessary route” to qualify for innocent passage. “The North Corfu Channel,” it ruled, “should be considered as falling under the category of international maritime thoroughfares, through which passage cannot be prohibited in time of peace by a coastal state.” In fact, Britain’s decision to send the Saumarez and Volage through the strait was a strategic one, intended to test Albania after an incident earlier that year in which Albanian coastal batteries had fired on British vessels in the channel. In the court’s view, the fact that the British ships sailed with their guns in stowage positions, not trained on the Albanian shore, was enough to indicate that their passage was innocent. What the court
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decided was not so innocent, however, was Britain’s decision to clear the minefield without first obtaining Albania’s permission—a violation of Albanian sovereignty. Nonetheless, the court did not hold the British government liable for any damages, ruling that Albania had failed to warn ships of other nations of the navigational hazard in its waters. The ability of warships to claim innocent passage continued to bedevil international jurists after the Corfu Channel incident, and the matter took on greater urgency as the Cold War heightened tension between the nations of the Warsaw Pact and NATO, and repeated Middle Eastern conflicts threatened international shipping in the waters between Africa and Arabia. The Geneva Convention attempted to clarify matters by adopting language requiring warships “to comply with the regulations of the coastal state.” In other words, if a naval vessel violated the coastal
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CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: QIN NINGZHEN (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); YHBEST1; BULLIT MARQUEZ (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
From top: An Israeli navy frigate (in background) sails through the Gulf of Aqaba, which Egypt would later close to Israeli-flagged vessels, in 1956; the Soviet frigate Bezzavetny rams the U.S. Navy cruiser Yorktown in 1988.
state’s demand for compliance, the ship could be ordered to depart the territorial waters immediately. The thorny question, of course, was how one nation could force another nation’s ships to leave its waters, should they refuse to comply, without the situation deteriorating to an exchange of gunfire? This issue was further complicated when the waters in dispute could be classified as a “closed sea,” or internal water, which was exactly what Egypt claimed when in 1967 it closed the Gulf of Aqaba to all ships “carrying strategic cargo”—and specifically all Israeli-flagged vessels. Britain and the United States, the world’s foremost maritime nations, immediately protested this action in the Security Council of the United Nations. Israel claimed the right of innocent passage on account of its possession of Elath, an ancient settlement at the northern tip of the gulf. The United Arab Republic argued that this was not a legitimate territorial claim since the town had come into Israel’s possession only after the 1949 Egypt-Israel Armistice, and it insisted that territory acquired in war could only be converted to sovereignty if a state of war was resolved by a peace treaty, which was notably lacking in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The dispute ended without any real resolution when both Egypt and Saudi Arabia extended their claimed territorial waters to 12 miles, effectively eliminating any free water in the gulf, but at the same time pledged to allow “free and innocent passage according to international law.” In 1988 a dispute over U.S. claims to innocent passage in the Black Sea resulted in an incident between American ships and Soviet naval frigates. The U.S. government insisted that innocent passage was not limited to designated sea lanes, in contradiction to the Soviet position, which held that warships were never entitled to innocent passage within its territorial waters. The dispute was so entrenched that the English and Russian-language versions of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, Article 22, Paragraph 1, interpreted the restrictions differently. The Soviet version allowed the coastal state to restrict innocent passage whenever the USSR decided that a need existed; the American version contained no such restrictions. The issue between the two nations continued to mount after the United States declared in 1983 that it would uphold “the rights and freedoms of navigation and overflight guaranteed to all nations under international law.” As a result, for several years American naval vessels regularly transited the straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean to enforce the U.S. interpretation of innocent passage for warships, particularly in “contested waters such as the Bosporus and Dardanelles.” The USSR recognized no right of innocent passage anywhere in the Black Sea and regarded the U.S. naval activity in its “closed sea”
FROM TOP: ASSOCIATED PRESS; U.S. NAVY
INNOCENT PASSAGE
Clockwise from left: China’s controversial reclamation projects in the South China Sea include a manmade road and construction yard in the Gulf of Tonkin near Quinzhou, the Yangshan Deepwater Port for container ships in Hangzhou Bay south of Shanghai, and an artificial development above the Subi Reef in the Spratly Islands.
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: QIN NINGZHEN (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); YHBEST1; BULLIT MARQUEZ (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
FROM TOP: ASSOCIATED PRESS; U.S. NAVY
as military provocation. The Soviet Union was not about to start a shooting war over these incursions, but in 1986 it decided to try other means of driving American ships out of its territorial waters. On February 12, 1988, the cruiser USS Yorktown, accompanied by the destroyer USS Caron, sailed within 10 miles of the Soviet coastline. The Soviet frigates Bezzavetny and SKR-6 sortied to contest the intrusion. As the American vessels passed through Soviet waters, the Caron received a radio message declaring that “Soviet ships have orders to prevent violation of territorial waters, extreme measure is to strike your ship with one of ours.” Caron replied: “I am engaged in innocent passage consistent with international law.” Moments later, SKR-6 turned into Caron’s path and collided with its port side. Yorktown reported receiving a similar warning before Bezzavetny bumped it. Being larger and of greater displacement than the Soviet vessels, the U.S. ships were able to maintain their intended course and two hours later sailed out of the USSR’s territorial waters, shadowed by their slightly damaged Soviet counterparts. The incident was in keeping with the U.S. interpretation of international laws on innocent passage, with one notable exception. When Caron passed into Soviet territorial waters, its main armament was oriented toward the Soviet coastline, a detail that could be understood as contrary to acceptable conduct while navigating an innocent passage. Both governments subsequently issued diplomatic pro-
tests over the other side’s actions in the confrontation, and both remained committed to their respective interpretations of the law. More recently, China’s large-scale reclamation projects in the South China Sea, which have converted submerged reefs into completely new land features, have renewed international and military disputes over the rights and limitations of innocent passage. The Third U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea, which came into force in 1994, classified such constructions as being on the “sea bed” and thus in international waters regardless of who built them. Under international law, artificial features cannot extend territorial waters. Nonetheless, China continues to insist that it has “the right to engage in monitoring in the relevant air space and waters to protect the country’s sovereignty.” This was precisely the problem recognized by a U.S. Naval War College study in 1980, which warned that “the community of nations will be subject to the arbitrary denial of passage by states which consider, subjectively, only their own parochial interests.” It was a prescient prediction, because the doctrine of innocent passage continues to be tested throughout the world’s seas. MHQ John A. Haymond is the author of Soldiers: A Global History of the Fighting Man, 1800–1945 (Stackpole Books, 2018) and The Infamous Dakota War Trials of 1862: Revenge, Military Law, and the Judgment of History (McFarland, 2016).
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SHOWDOWN ON LAKE ERIE
In 1813 Samuel R. Brown took part in a key battle in what he called “the Second War of Independence.”
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
EXPERIENCE
Samuel R. Brown has been described as a “forgotten veteran” of the War of 1812, during which he served in Captain James A. McClelland’s company of Volunteer Light Dragoons. He was an eyewitness to the Battle of Lake Erie on September 10, 1813, where an American fleet led by Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry routed a British squadron. Perry became a national hero overnight, and a month later the United States ended the campaign by defeating British and American Indian forces at the Battle of the Thames in Ontario, Canada. After the war Brown settled in Auburn, New York, where he published the Cayuga Patriot. Described by his apprentice printer as “an honest, amiable, easy, slip-shod sort of man,” Brown immediately branched out into writing books, three of which were about the conflict he called “the Second War of Independence.” He was amazingly prolific in this field but died in 1817 at age 42. “On the tented field he was a patriotic soldier,” his obituary said. “In the heat of battle, he stood a hero, undismayed by the crash of arms, unappalled by the sight of blood, and proud and fearless in the front of danger.”
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Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry would be nicknamed “the Hero of Lake Erie” for routing a British squadron in one of the biggest naval battles of the War of 1812.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The following narrative is drawn from Brown’s 1814 book, Views on Lake Erie: Comprising a Minute and Interesting Account of the Naval Conflict on Lake Erie. Commodore Perry arrived at Erie in June, with five small vessels from Black Rock. The Queen Charlotte and Lady Prevost were cruising off Long Point to intercept him—he passed them in the night unperceived. The Lawrence and Niagara were then on the stocks—every exertion was made to expedite their building and equipment, and early in August they were ready to sail. But it was necessary to pass the bar at the entrance of the harbor, over which there was but six feet water, and the brigs drew nine. The British fleet appeared off the harbor, for the purpose of preventing ours from going to lake! The means employed by our officers to take the brigs over the bar were ingenious and deserve mention. Two large scows, 50 feet long, 10 feet wide and 8 feet deep, were prepared—they were first filled with water and then floated along side one of the vessels in a parallel direc-
tion; they were then secured by means of large pieces of hewn timber placed athwart ship, with both ends projecting from the port holes across the scows: the space between these timbers and the boat, being secured by other pieces properly arranged; the water was then bailed from the scows, thereby giving them an astonishing lifting power. It was thus that the bar was passed, before the enemy had taken the proper steps to oppose it. One obstacle was surmounted, but the fleet was not in a condition to seek the enemy at Malden. There were not at this time more than half sailors enough to man the fleet. However, a number of Pennsylvania militia having volunteered their services, the commodore made a short cruize off Long Point, more perhaps, for the purpose of exercising his men than seeking an enemy. About the last of August Commodore Perry left Erie, to co-operate with General [William Henry] Harrison in the reduction of Malden. He anchored off the mouth of Sandusky River and had an interview with General Harrison, who furnished him with about 70 volunteers, principally
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BATTLE OF LAKE ERIE
On the morning of the 10th of September, at sunrise, the enemy were discovered bearing down from Malden for the evident purpose of attacking our squadron, then at anchor in Put-in-Bay. Not a moment was to be lost. Our squadron immediately got under way and stood out to meet the British fleet, which at this time had the weather gage. At 10 A.M. the wind shifted from S.W. to S.E. which brought our squadron to windward. The wind was light, the day beautiful— not a cloud obscured the horizon. The line was formed at 11, and Commodore Perry caused an elegant flag, which he had privately prepared, to be hoisted at the mast head of the Lawrence; on this flag was painted in characters, legible to the whole fleet, the dying words of the immortal [Captain James] Lawrence:—“Don’t give up the ship.” Its effect is not to be described—every heart was electrified. The crews cheered—the exhilarating can was passed. Both fleets appeared eager for the conflict, on the result of which so much depended. At 15 minutes before 12, the Detroit, the headmost ship of the enemy, opened upon the Lawrence, which for 10 minutes was obliged to sustain a well directed and heavy fire from the enemy’s two large ships, without being able to return it with carronades, at five minutes before 12 the Lawrence opened upon the enemy—the other vessels were ordered to support her, but the wind was at this time too light to enable them to come up. Every brace and bowline of the Lawrence being soon shot away, she became unmanageable, and in this situation sustained the action upwards of two hours, within canister distance, until every gun was rendered useless, and but a small part of her crew left unhurt upon deck. At half past 2 the wind increased and enabled the Niagara to come into close action—the gun-boats took a nearer position. Commodore Perry left his ship in charge of Lieutenant [John Joliffe] Yarnel and went on board the Niagara. Just as he reached that vessel, the flag of the Lawrence came down;
“Our squadron immediately got under way and stood out to meet the British fleet.”
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the crisis had arrived. Captain [John] Elliot at this moment anticipated the wishes of the commodore, by volunteering his services to bring the schooners into close action. At 45 minutes past 2, the signal was made for close action. The Niagara being very little injured, and her crew fresh, the commodore determined to pass through the enemy’s line; he accordingly bore up and passed ahead of the Detroit, Queen Charlotte, and Lady Prevost, pouring a terrible raking fire into them from the starboard guns, and on the Chippeway and Little Belt, from the larboard side, at half pistol shot distance. The small vessels at this time having got within grape and canister distance, kept up a well directed and destructive fire. The action now raged with the greatest fury—the Queen Charlotte, having lost her commander and several of her principal officers, in a moment of confusion got foul of the Detroit—in this situation the enemy in their turn had to sustain a tremendous fire without the power of returning it with much effect; the carnage was horrible—the flags of the Detroit, Queen Charlotte and Lady Prevost were struck in rapid succession. The brig Hunter and schooner Chippeway were soon compelled to follow the example. The Little Belt attempted to escape to Malden, but she was pursued by two of the gun-boats and surrendered about three miles distant from the scene of action. The writer of this account, in company with five others, arrived at the head of Put-in-Bay island on the evening of the 9th, and had a view of the action at the distance of only 10 miles. The spectacle was truly grand and awful. The firing was incessant for the space of three hours, and continued at short intervals 45 minutes longer. In less than one hour after the battle began, most of the vessels of both fleets were enveloped in a cloud of smoak, which rendered the issue of the action uncertain, till the next morning, when we visited the fleet in the harbor on the opposite side of the island. The reader will easily judge of our solicitude to learn the result. There is no sentiment more painful than suspense, when it is excited by the uncertain issue of an event like this. If the wind had continued at S.W. it was the intention of Admiral [Robert Heriot] Barclay to have boarded our squadron; for this purpose he had taken on board his fleet about 200 of the famous 41st Regiment; they acted as marines and fought bravely, but nearly two thirds of them were either killed or wounded. The carnage on board the prizes was prodigious—they must have lost 200 in killed besides wounded. The sides of the Detroit and Queen Charlotte were shattered from bow to stern; there was scarcely room to place one’s hand on their larboard sides without touching the impression of a shot—a great many balls, canister and grape, were found lodged in their bulwarks, which were too thick to be pene-
U.S. NAVY (NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND)
Kentuckians, to serve as marines on board the fleet. Captain [Daniel] Dobbin[s], in the Ohio, was ordered to return to Erie for provisions. The Amelia had been left there for want of men to man her. Exclusive of these he had nine sail, mounting in all 54 guns. The British fleet at Malden consisted of six sail and mounted 66 guns. Commodore Perry appeared before Malden, offered battle, reconnoitered the enemy and retired to Put-in-Bay, 35 miles distant from his antagonist. Both parties remained a few days inactive; but their repose was that of the lion.
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NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND, U.S. NAVY
In a dispatch to Major General William Henry Harrison after the battle, Perry, who was then 27 years old, would famously write, “We have met the enemy, and he is ours.”
The efficacy of the gun-boats was fully proved in this action, and the sterns of all the prizes bear ample testimony of the fact. They took raking positions and galled the enemy severely. The Lady Prevost lost 12 men before either of the brigs fired on her. Their fire was quick and precise. Let us hear the enemy. The general order of Adjutant General [Edward] Baynes contains the following words: “His [Perry’s] numerous gun-boats, [four] which had proved the greatest annoyance during the action, were all uninjured.” The undaunted bravery of Admiral Barclay entitled him to a better fate; to the loss of the day was superadded grievous and dangerous wounds: he had before lost an arm; it was now his hard fortune to lose the use of the other, by a shot which carried away the blade of the right shoulder; a canister shot made a violent contusion in his hip: his wounds were for some days considered mortal. Every possible attention was paid to his situation. When Commodore Perry sailed for Buffalo, he was so far recovered that he took passage on board our fleet. The fleet touched at Erie. The citizens saw the affecting spectacle of Harrison and Perry supporting the wounded British hero, still unable to walk without help, from the beach to their lodgings.
trated by our cannonades, unless within pistol shot distance. Their masts were so much shattered that they fell overboard soon after they got into the bay. The loss of the Americans was severe, particularly on board the Lawrence. When her flag was struck she had but nine men fit for duty remaining on deck. Her sides were completely riddled by the shot from the long guns of the British ships. Her deck, the morning after the conflict, when I first went on board, exhibited a scene that defies description—for it was literally covered with blood, which still adhered to the plank in clots—brains, hair and fragments of bones were still sticking to the rigging and sides. The surgeons were still busy with the wounded—enough! horror appalled my senses. Among the wounded were several brave fellows, each of whom had lost a leg or an arm—they appeared cheerful and expressed a hope that they had done their duty. Rome and Sparta would have been proud of these heroes. It would be invidious to particularize instances of individual merit, where every one so nobly performed his part. Of the nine seamen remaining unhurt at the time the Lawrence struck her flag, five were immediately promoted for their unshaken firmness in such a trying situation. The most of these had been in the actions with the Guerrière and Java. Every officer of the Lawrence, except the commodore and his little brother, a promising youth, 13 years old, were either killed or wounded.
On board of the Detroit, 24 hours after her surrender, were found snugly stowed away in the hold, two Indian Chiefs, who had the courage to go on board at Malden, for the purpose of acting as sharp shooters to kill our officers. One had the courage to ascend into the round top and discharged his piece, but the whizzing of shot, splinters, and bits of rigging, soon made the place too warm for him—he descended faster than he went up; at the moment he reached the deck, the fragments of a seaman’s head struck his comrade’s face, and covered it with blood and brains. He vociferated the savage interjection “quoh!” and both sought safety below. The British officers had domesticated a bear at Malden. Bruin accompanied his comrades to battle, was on the deck of the Detroit during the engagement, and escaped unhurt. The killed of both fleets were thrown over board as fast as they fell. Several were washed ashore upon the island and the main during the gales that succeeded the action. Commodore Perry treated the prisoners with humanity and indulgence; several Canadians, having wives at Malden, were permitted to visit their families on parole. The British were superior in the length and number of their guns, as well as in the number of men. The American fleet was manned with a motly set of beings, Europeans, Africans, Americans from every part of the United States. Full one fourth were blacks. I saw one Russian, who could not speak a word of English. They were brave—and who could be otherwise under the command of Perry? MHQ
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BEHIND THE LINES
A JEWEL IN MILITARY GOTHIC
The Cadet Chapel at West Point, with all the power and grandeur of a medieval fortress, is an architectural masterpiece inside and out. By Ron Soodalter
Ten of the nation’s most prestigious architectural firms vied for the contract.
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pose and principles of the academy and complement its existing buildings. West Point wasn’t known for architectural consistency, with its neoclassical chapel, Federal-style superintendent’s quarters, and American Renaissance– design Cullum Hall, the work of the brilliant New York architect Stanford White. To select an architectural theme for the new buildings, Mills and Larned announced an open competition. Ten of the nation’s most prestigious architectural firms presented their concepts for the academy’s new look, including McKim, Mead & White of New York (White’s firm); D. H. Burnham & Company of Chicago; Cope & Stewardson of Philadelphia; Eames & Young of St. Louis; and Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson of Boston. Each firm received a $2,000 development fee and eight months to formalize its submission. Newspapers from coast to coast avidly reported on the competition. The stellar panel of judges included Mills; Lieutenant General John M. Schofield, the former commander of the U.S. Army; and three famous architects— Walter Cook, Cass Gilbert, and George B. Post. The judges’ decision, announced in 1903, was unanimous: The massive project would be entrusted to Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson. “The style we have chosen for all the buildings,” the firm’s proposal said, “would particularly lend itself to memorials of various kinds in the Chapel; for instance, tombs, cenotaphs, wall and floor tablets, and particularly windows of stained glass, each window, perhaps, being given in memory of one of the different graduating classes at the Academy.” A neo-Gothic theme would harmonize with West Point’s existing buildings and surrounding hills, while a military theme would emphasize its primary mission: training officers for combat. The firm’s youngest partner, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, renowned for his ability to combine Gothic designs with more modern elements, would be largely responsible for overseeing the massive project. A natural artist and designer, Goodhue had quit school at age 15 to apprentice with a prominent New York architectural firm, where he rose to draftsman. His unde-
LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; RIGHT: PRINT COLLECTOR (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)
W
hen President Theodore Roosevelt attended the 1902 centennial observance of the founding of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he became so concerned about the deteriorating state of several of its buildings that he immediately began agitating for their refurbishment. West Point’s academic board, under the direction of Superintendent Colonel Albert L. Mills, responded by drawing up a list of the academy’s architectural shortcomings and making recommendations for improvements. With Roosevelt’s enthusiastic support and the approval of Congress, a vast building program was laid out, with a new chapel slated to be the dominant structure. A budget of $6.5 million was allocated for the entire project—a tremendous sum at the time. The daunting task of overseeing the massive project was assigned to two men. One was Mills; the other was Colonel Charles W. Larned, a professor of drawing at West Point. Larned, an 1870 graduate of West Point had served as a second lieutenant in Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry, participating in the Yellowstone expedition across the Montana and Dakota territories in the summer of 1873, when gold was reported in the Black Hills, the ancestral home of the Lakota Sioux. Larned took part in three skirmishes with the Lakota. Fortunately for him, after the expedition he was transferred to Washington, D.C., to serve as an aide to President Ulysses S. Grant. He had begun his teaching career at West Point when Custer and the 7th Cavalry were wiped out by the Lakota and their Native American allies at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876. Although neither Mills nor Larned was an architect, they were charged with choosing individual buildings for replacement. They also had to select an architectural firm and a style for the new buildings that would reflect the pur-
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LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; RIGHT: PRINT COLLECTOR (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)
From left: The Cadet Chapel at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, a Gothic Revival masterpiece, as seen in 1918; architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue was largely responsible for its design and construction.
niable gifts earned him a partnership, while he was still in his mid-20s, with Ralph Adams Cram. Given the scope of the West Point project, Goodhue established a New York City office to maintain an on-site presence. His design for the chapel was essentially a homage to the lofty Gothic cathedrals of the 12th century. To better emphasize its purpose and location, however, Goodhue and his colleagues introduced several martial embellishments, such as battlements, parapets, battle flags, and castellated towers. Work on the chapel began in 1908. Although it was originally slated to be built on Trophy Point, an idyllic overlook near the Hudson River, Goodhue suggested relocating the chapel to a spot higher on the hill, where it would tower over all of West Point’s other structures. The view from there of the river and the Hudson Highlands was breathtaking. Native granite, to be quarried on site, was selected as the basic building material for the project. This was also Goodhue’s idea, to better blend the buildings with their surroundings. The laborers hired to work on the chapel were mainly foreign born, and they were promised U.S. citizenship if they finished the building in five years. When it became clear that the process of hauling granite from the quarry up
to the site by mule was taking too long, they devised a steel scaffolding system that enabled them to haul up the heavy stone by hand. They finished the work on the chapel in 1910, just two and a half years from when they started. For the stonework on the outside walls of the chapel, Goodhue brought in Lee Lawrie, one of the foremost architectural sculptors in the United States. The themes he chose for the sculpture on the chapel’s north face stressed the dual martial and religious character of the building. Its various motifs included a crusader’s sword embedded in a cross above the center door and a shield embossed with a cross above the huge north window arch. A series of stone carvings line the east and west faces of the chapel, with Arthurian figures of knights, minstrels, and torchbearers illustrating the quest for the Holy Grail. The chapel’s design follows the basic “long hallway” form of ancient basilicas, with transepts added to form the shape of a cross. The interior of the main floor is 56 feet high and 35 feet wide. The 1,500-seat nave measures 210 feet from the front door to the sanctuary. Near the entrance the floor is made up of plain concrete slabs, but closer to the sanctuary it becomes more refined and elaborate, with handmade terra-cotta tiles and intricately carved wooden trim.
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THE CADET CHAPEL AT WEST POINT
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STOCKBRIDGE COLLECTION, UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY ARCHIVES (2)
In this 1945 photograph, cadets stand in parade formation Among the most extraordinary features of the chapel are its in the main quadrangle at West Point; the Cadet Chapel, stained-glass windows representing the biblical heritage of towering over other buildings, is visible in the background. Christianity and the early church. The sanctuary, or altar, window, fills the chancel apse and is the first thing a visitor sees on entering the chapel. Another competition was held The chapel’s marble-faced altar, inscribed “To the Glory to determine who would design and fashion this window, of the God of Battles,” is also made of local granite and was which would ultimately serve as the model for all the glass the gift of the cadet Class of 1910. The impressive altar installations to follow. Fourteen companies submitted descreen, a gift from the daughter-in-law of President Ulysses signs, and all were of such high quality that the Boston S. Grant, a West Point graduate, features a huge limestone Museum of Fine Arts later displayed the drawings. Ultimately, the decision came down to two studios: carving of the archangel Michael slaying a dragon, the symbol of evil. On either side of him stands a protective world-renowned Tiffany & Company of New York City, carved angel, holding a broadsword. Throughout the nave, founded by Louis Comfort Tiffany, and the lesser-known the pews are simple, uniform in design, and unadorned. Willet Stained Glass and Decorating Company of PhiladelThe only exception is the superintendents’ pew. There the phia. William Willet was a young muralist and portrait signatures of every superintendent since the opening of the painter who, in partnership with his wife, Anne Lee, had chapel in 1910 have been etched into silver plates and af- turned to the making of stained glass, founding his Philadelphia studio in 1898. A staunch traditionalist, he adhered fixed to the rail. Projecting from the walls on either side of the nave are to the 12th-century Pre-Raphaelite style of stained glass rows of battle flags dating to the early 19th century and and immediately set himself in direct apposition to Tiffany representing the nation’s involvement in the Mexican War, and other artists who used opalescent glass. In his submission, Willet promised to honor the princithe Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and the conflict in the Philippines. All the intricate ironwork, including ples that marked the highest development of the art of elaborate gates, was hand forged by master blacksmiths stained glass and to design a memorial that emphasized biblical history and “the Genius of West Point through the loaned to the project by the Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The chapel’s single tower rises from the intersection of nave and transepts. A manual console of large, wooden piano-style keys is situated in the belfry, six stories up a narrow flight of winding stone stairs; it operates the chapel’s 12 massive bells, which weigh more than 14,000 pounds apiece and play hymns as well as sacred, traditional, and popular music. In 1911 General Hugh L. Scott, the new superintendent of the academy, oversaw the installation of the chapel’s organ, which was built and installed by the M. P. Moller Pipe Organ Company of Hagerstown, Maryland, the world’s leading organ-manufacturing company. Originally boasting 2,406 all-wind pipes, the organ would eventually grow to feature more than 23,500. The organ’s horseshoe-style console, with four keyboards and 874 stops, is said to be the largest in the world. In the lower level of the chapel are two of Goodhue’s homages to the castles and cathedrals of an earlier millennium: the ecclesiastical dungeon and the crypt. The small dungeon is a confinement space in name only and was never used for punishment. The approach to the crypt is daunting. The iron-strapped door is clad in hammered copper painted black, and its door features three cut-out designs: a broken hourglass, a shattered sword, and a cross. Inside the crypt is a handsome arched temple, dubbed St. Martin’s Chapel, after St. Martin of Tours, the fourth- century soldier and militant saint.
STOCKBRIDGE COLLECTION, U.S. MILITARY ACADEMY ARCHIVES (2)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
From left: This photograph, taken before the Cadet Chapel was completed in 1910, shows its still unfinished exterior; a 1910 view of the chapel’s interior, with its 56-foot-high arched ceiling, from just left of the altar.
heroes of the Old and New Testaments.” To nearly everyone’s surprise, Willet’s design won out. The theme of the 50-foot-high window was the famous West Point motto, “Duty, Honor, Country.” The sanctuary window was the first major gift to the academy from the Association of Graduates. The donor list included such future World War II luminaries as George S. Patton Jr. and Henry H. “Hap” Arnold. The association later donated the large memorial window framed over the chapel’s north entrance, which depicts the armies of heaven triumphing over Satan and his four horsemen and is dedicated to the graduates of West Point who perished in World War I. With 172 windows yet to fill, it was decided that each class would donate a window in memory of another graduating class. In 1920 the practice was amended to direct that each class would sponsor its own window as well as one on behalf of an earlier class, thus guaranteeing that every class would be represented by 1976. The Willet Studio charged the association just $300 for the first window in 1915 and the same amount for each window thereafter, including the final one in 1976. It was the firm’s continuing gift to the academy. Today, West Point offers separate Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish places of worship, as well as an interfaith center for
Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus. The Catholic Chapel of the Most Holy Trinity is the oldest of the academy’s three ecclesiastical buildings. It was built by the Archdiocese of New York in 1899. The Archdiocese still owns the Catholic chapel but leases it to West Point for a dollar a year. The Jewish Chapel, which serves as a synagogue, was completed in 1984 after a 20-year fundraising campaign by the West Point Jewish Chapel Fund. In addition to hosting religious services, it also houses a comprehensive library and an impressive collection of Judaica. Sabbath services take place every Friday evening during the months when classes are in session. While each of the three chapels has its own distinctive style, no structure at West Point compares visually to the Protestant cadet chapel. Looking south and west across the Hudson River from the towns of Garrison and Cold Spring, the chapel remains a silent sentinel watching over the Corps of Cadets. It combines the power and grandeur of an ancient medieval fortress with the warmth and graciousness of a welcoming, if vast, sanctuary—precisely the effect its talented designers intended more than a century ago. MHQ Ron Soodalter is the author of Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader (Atria Books, 2006).
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BATTLE SCHEMES
A 1914 BESTIARY Ryozo Tanaka (1874–1946) left his hometown of Kyoto, Japan, in 1897 to move to Tokyo, where he began selling prints and books from a pushcart. He did so well that he soon opened a store in the city’s book district. With the outbreak of World War I, he produced several seriocomic war maps, including this one showing what he called “The Great European War.” Most of Tanaka’s printing plates were destroyed in an Allied bombing raid on Tokyo in 1945. MHQ
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BOATWRIGHT MEMORIAL LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND
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WAR LIST
BUCKETWORTHY BATTLEFIELDS Here are 10 hallowed grounds to visit before you die. By Brendan Sainsbury
Ypres, Belgium (1914–1918)
Simply uttering the name of this diminutive Belgian city conjures haunting images of World War I. Unlike other well-known sites of “the war to end all wars,” Ypres suffered not one but five battles—all bloody, costly affairs marked with the macabre motifs of the era: rat-infested trenches, poison gas, cratered tracts of no man’s land, and primitive tanks clawing laboriously through mud. Most of the action centered on the Ypres Salient, a semicircular dent in the front line surrounded by low hills. While the Allies occupied the salient, the Germans enjoyed strategic advantage on the ridges. Although small tracts of territory changed hands as the war wore on, the front line never advanced more than six miles in more than four years. Casualties, meanwhile, surpassed one million, the bulk of them sustained during the savage Third Battle of Ypres, better known as Passchendaele. Ypres offers plenty of poignant monuments today, including several important war cemeteries. With more than 11,000 graves (many of the dead are unknown), Tyne Cot is the largest cemetery for Commonwealth forces in the world. On the edge of the city, the Menin Gate is an arched memorial where a bugler plays “The Last Post” every evening at 8. Two local museums offer a multisensory rendering of events by using film, sounds, and exhibits. The Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917 displays a reconstructed trench (without the rats and lice) while the In Flanders Fields Museum is encased in Ypres’ 13th-century Cloth Hall, meticulously rebuilt after being largely destroyed in the war.
Normandy, France (1944)
Synonymous with Operation Overlord, or D-Day as it is widely known, the expansive beaches of Normandy bore
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witness to the largest seaborne invasion in recorded history. Beginning soon after dawn on June 6, 1944, a flood of more than 150,000 Allied troops stormed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword Beaches on the north coast of France. Of the five, the fiercest fighting took place at Omaha, the second beach from the west. “Bloody Omaha,” as it became known, is a four-mile crescent of sand between Colleville-sur-Mer and Vierville-sur-Mer. A combination of U.S. infantry divisions and ranger battalions assaulted the shores but were pummeled by a terrifying German resistance. Lunging from their amphibious landing craft, many in the first wave of soldiers were mowed down before they even reached the shore. Ultimately, the fight for control of the beach took 18 hours and cost an estimated 2,000 American and 1,200 German lives. Omaha today is overlooked by the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, a field of nearly 10,000 white marble crosses and Jewish stars, a scene that bookends the movie Saving Private Ryan. (The beach-storming scenes were filmed in Ireland.) Equally evocative are the cliffs, to the west, of Point du Hoc, an exposed promontory scaled on D-Day by daring U.S. Rangers using ropes and ladders. Huge craters from aerial and naval bombardments still deface the breezy clifftop, while sophisticated observation bunkers testify to an erstwhile German presence. It’s also worth gravitating 11 miles east of Omaha to the small seaside town of Arromanches-les-Bains that abuts Gold Beach. This seemingly innocuous stretch of sand, taken by the British on D-Day, was the site of the ingenious Mulberry Harbors—prefabricated landing ports towed across from England. Parts of the Mulberrys can still be seen both on the sand and offshore, while the beachfront Musée du Débarquement explains more about their deployment and use. Caen’s Memorial Museum (Le Mémorial—Un Musée pour la Paix), one of the best World War II museums in the world, pays special homage to the 100-day battle for Normandy, in which 20,000 French civilians were killed.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: BONANDBON, TONY WATSON, INCAMERASTOCK, CAROLINE VANCOILLIE (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, 4)
History is full of dramatic conflicts where the capricious tide of events could have turned the outcome in either direction. A mistimed cavalry charge, a careless tactical blunder, a change in the wind direction. What if Napoleon hadn’t wavered at Waterloo? How close did the Normans come to losing the Battle of Hastings? What would the United States look like today if Confederate general Robert E. Lee had routed the Union army at Gettysburg? Here are 10 well-preserved battlefields where you can ponder these and other such questions.
Waterloo, Belgium (1815)
It countered Napoleon’s short-lived comeback, ushered in a protracted era of peace, and muzzled the power of France for a generation. Stamped in fame and infamy, the Battle of Waterloo changed the course of history and became a byword
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Waterloo
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: BONANDBON, TONY WATSON, INCAMERASTOCK, CAROLINE VANCOILLIE (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, 4)
Ypres
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for defeat against a stronger opponent. Raging for 10 hours on the rain-soaked fields of central Belgium, nine miles south of Brussels, the dramatic confrontation pitched the boldly aggressive Napoleon Bonaparte against the adaptive and defensive Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington. Wellington’s victory was no foregone conclusion. After escaping incarceration on the island of Elba, Napoleon assumed command of a more experienced army, but he needed to act decisively to dent the muscle of Wellington’s Seventh Coalition awaiting Prussian reinforcements. In a rare tactical blunder, Napoleon vacillated in the wet conditions, giving Wellington time to regroup on a partially concealed “reverse slope” and hold off the French until the Prussian army arrived to support him later in the afternoon. After the battle Waterloo quickly became a pilgrimage site for grievers and gloaters alike. In 1817 a classical column was raised in honor of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Gordon, a Scottish officer who died from injuries incurred on the battlefield. Three years later, the iconic Lion’s Mound, an artificial hill fitted with 226 steps, was molded out of the surrounding soil. On its summit, a statue of a lion atop a plinth marks the spot where a musket ball felled Wellington’s young commander, Prince William of Hol-
Hastings
land, on that fateful day. (He miraculously survived.) A small rotunda at the base of the mound is decorated with a battle panorama painted by Louis Dumoulin in 1912 on 14 canvases that were then sewn together. In 2015, on the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, an $11 million underground museum was opened on the site, with uniforms, maps, and an epic 3-D film that hurls you into the middle of a cavalry charge.
Hastings, England (1066)
When it comes to crucial dates in British history, few are as immortal as 1066, the year of the Battle of Hastings, the existential face-off between England and France that marked the last time the British Isles were successfully conquered by a foreign power. Immortalized in the Bayeux Tapestry, a 77-yard-long embroidered cloth that now hangs in a museum in Normandy, the battle cast Saxon king Harold II against the ambitious prince William, “The Bastard of Normandy.” The prize was the hotly contested English throne, ultimately won by William (since known as William the Conqueror). Accounts of the battle are murky. The two most heavily touted legends claim that Harold was killed when an arrow
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Culloden Gettysburg
Gettysburg was the stage for the most important and costly battle in U.S. history. Waged over three days in July 1863, the heavyweight Civil War confrontation is as famous for President Abraham Lincoln’s laconic battlefield speech, made four months later, as the battle itself. Often considered the turning point in the American Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg cast the Confederate forces of Robert E. Lee against the Union army of George G. Meade in what was Lee’s second and boldest attempt to attack the North. It was the Confederates who seized the initiative, attacking the Union army on the first day and driving the Yankees back from ridges north and west of the town of Gettysburg to Cemetery Hill, where they re-formed in a defensive fishhook. By day two, the fighting had become more intense, with as many as 100,000 troops slugging it out with artillery barrages and bayonet charges. On day three, Lee, after unleashing a massive artillery bombardment, sent 12,000 Confederate soldiers directly at the Union line in what became known as Pickett’s Charge. The Union troops were ready. Employing a 19th-century version of Muhammad Ali’s rope-a-dope trick, they absorbed most of Lee’s shelling while conserving their own cannons. As the Confederate infantry rushed forward, they discharged their guns with devastating results. It was a turning point of the battle, and the war. Lee’s forces never recovered and ultimately retreated to Virginia.
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Culloden, Scotland (1746)
Nasty, brutish, and short, the bitterly fought Battle of Culloden took place on a bleak moor in the Scottish Highlands where, in a flurry of hail and musket fire, the Stuart dynasty’s dream of reclaiming the British Crown was snuffed out for good. The two main protagonists were rebel Jacobite leader Charles Edward Stuart (aka Bonnie Prince Charlie), and his testier, younger opponent, the callow 25-year-old Duke of Cumberland, son of the British- Hanoverian king, George II. Charles had landed in Scotland in 1745, backed by the opportunistic French in a bid to snatch the British Throne. He pieced together a fighting force from Jacobite sympathizers and marched boldly into England before his cautious advisers, worried about withering local support, urged him to make a tactical withdrawal. The Duke of Cumberland was sent in hot pursuit, finally catching up with the Jacobites at Culloden, just outside the Highland town of Inverness. The armies faced off on open ground in what would be the last pitched battle on British soil. Charles initially tried to provoke the British to attack but, changing his mind at the last minute, ordered his army forward instead. In previous encounters, the redcoats had quickly wilted in the face of the charging Highlanders, but this time they held their ground as their gunners mercilessly strafed the uncoordinated Jacobite stampede. Surprised and confused,
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FROM LEFT: LEE DALTON, HEMIS (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, 2)
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, United States (1863)
In November 1863 Lincoln visited Cemetery Hill and delivered his famous Gettysburg Address, consecrating the still-bloodstained battlefield for posterity. Few battle sites today are as well preserved and hallowed as Gettysburg. It is one of only nine U.S. national military parks run by the National Park Service. Amid a lattice of peaceful, misty fields that belie the human hell that briefly enveloped them in 1863 are memorials, lookouts, farm buildings, a museum, and more than a thousand monuments and markers. Perhaps the most interactive way to relive battle is through an annual reenactment, usually scheduled for the beginning of July.
LEFT: MELISSA A. WINN; RIGHT: MIKE PEEL, CC BY-SA 4.0
struck him in the eye and that the Normans won by feigning a retreat that drew the overzealous English into hot pursuit, thus breaking their lines. You can contemplate the theories at the pastoral battle site seven miles north of Hastings, near the aptly named town of Battle in Sussex, where in Norman times William built an abbey on the field of his victory. These days the 11th-century Battle Abbey is in ruins (courtesy of Henry VIII), while a more grandiose twin-towered gatehouse completed in 1338 rises in front of it and contains a museum and rooftop viewing platform.
Bay of Pigs
Charles’s army was ruthlessly destroyed. Those who weren’t killed fled. The injured men left on the battlefield were shown no mercy by the vengeful Cumberland, whose subsequent war crimes earned him the sobriquet “the Butcher.” The battlefield at Culloden has been meticulously preserved. Home these days to clusters of contented cows and goats, the moor is managed by Britain’s National Trust and is dotted with flags, footpaths, graves, and a memorial cairn. In 2007 the Trust added a state-of-the-art visitor center and museum, which houses archaeological finds, flared Georgian blunderbusses, and a 360-degree theater.
Dien Bien Phu
the landings. A smaller museum in an old sugar factory in the village of Australia, 38 miles to the north, marks the spot where Fidel Castro personally took command of the country’s defense in 1961. Intersecting roads are dotted with monuments to fallen Cuban combatants, and bombastic billboards declare “the first defeat of American imperialism in Latin America.”
Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam (1954)
In 1954, in a crinkled web of mountains in northwest Vietnam, the embedded French colonial forces of Colonel Christian de Castries seriously underestimated the resolve of their tenacious Vietnamese opponents, with deadly con(1961) Known as the place where the Cold War nearly got hot, the sequences. The two-month Battle of Dien Bien Phu mixed Bay of Pigs is a sheltered inlet abutting a mangrove swamp mass infantry attacks with old-fashioned siege tactics and in southern Cuba. It was here in April 1961 that a force of dogged trench warfare. Ending in a French surrender, it 1,400 Cuban exiles covertly trained by the U.S. Central In- was the beginning of the end of France’s presence in Indotelligence Agency landed on a beach called Playa Girón in china and the overture to an even bigger conflict to come. The French had moved into the mountain outpost of an attempt to topple the freshly installed regime of Fidel Dien Bien Phu in November 1953 in an attempt to cut VietCastro and inspire a counterrevolution. Given the green light on April 15, 1961, the invasion namese supply lines from Laos. Fortified with 14,000 colowas an unmitigated disaster. Aiming to destroy the Cuban nial troops, Castries assumed that his small, isolated base Air Force on the ground, U.S. airplanes piloted by Cuban propped up by regular air drops would be inaccessible to the exiles mostly missed their intended targets. Crucially, Chinese-backed Viet Minh. He was spectacularly wrong. Enlisting the help of more than a quarter of a million Castro had been told of the onslaught the previous week and had relocated his air force. When the invaders landed Vietnamese civilians, General Vo Nguyen Giap stealthily two days later, Cuban light aircraft quickly sank their U.S. ferried artillery, supplies, and 50,000 Viet Minh soldiers supply ships and left the entire exile army stranded on the into the mountains. By March 1954, the French base was beach. Meanwhile, President John F. Kennedy refused to surrounded. Initially, Giap ordered mass infantry attacks authorize U.S. air cover for the marooned soldiers. Left to on French strongpoints around the garrison but, because fend for themselves on the beach without supplies or mili- of high casualty rates, he quickly switched to trench wartary backup, defeat was inevitable. About 115 were killed in fare. A series of small probing attacks were ultimately enough to capture the airstrip and choke off the vital skirmishes; the other 1,190 were captured. These days, the Bay of Pigs is a major diving destination French supply line. A final Vietnamese assault overran the with crystal-clear water, limestone cenotes, and swim-out garrison on May 6, and Castries surrendered. Today, the expansive battlefield is scattered with relics walls. The surrounding mangroves have been turned into a national park replete with crocodiles and abundant birdlife. and memorials from the 1950s. The Dien Bien Phu In among the wildlife is a large assortment of battle para- Museum features dioramas of the conflict, along with such phernalia. The small village of Playa Girón has a well- eclectic items as Castries’s bathtub and a Vietnamese bicycurated if decidedly propagandist museum dedicated to cle that carried ordnance into the mountains. Opposite is a
FROM LEFT: LEE DALTON, HEMIS (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, 2)
LEFT: MELISSA A. WINN; RIGHT: MIKE PEEL, CC BY-SA 4.0
Bay of Pigs, Cuba
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well-tended war cemetery heavy with the aroma of burning incense, while nearby A1 Hill, a former French redoubt taken by the Vietnamese, has re-created trenches, a large bomb crater, and an old U.S. tank.
ment honoring the oft-forgotten Thespians was built alongside. On the other side of the road atop the low Kolonos Hill is the Epitaph of Simonides, an engraving laid there in 1955 to replace several earlier etchings.
Thermopylae, Greece (480 bce)
Ayacucho, Peru (1824)
It is a testament to Thermopylae’s legend that this epic clash between the Greeks and Persians that reverberated in Central Greece in 480 bce remains a cornerstone of popular folklore 2,500 years later. Contested between a loose alliance of Greek city-states, commanded by Spartan king Leonidas, and the imperial forces of Persia, led by the despotic Xerxes I, it was anything but a fair fight: The Persians allegedly outnumbered the Greeks by as many as 50 to 1. But taking up position in the “hot gates” of Thermopylae, a narrow pass shoehorned between mountains and sea, the Greeks, fronted by an elite Spartan fighting force of 300, held a vital territorial advantage. For three days the Persians threw everything they had at the iron Spartan wall but were repeatedly beaten back. In the end, they only managed to penetrate the narrow pass when a traitorous Greek, Ephialtes of Trachis, revealed a secret path over the mountains that enabled the Persians to outflank the Greeks and descend on them from behind. Despite being surrounded and outnumbered, the Greeks refused to yield. Led by the combative Spartans, they proceeded to put up history’s finest last stand, fighting to the death to defend their homeland against ridiculous odds. The bid ultimately failed, and Xerxes went on to overrun most of Greece. But a legend had been born and, for their heroic efforts, Leonidas and his Spartan army were canonized as inspirational martyrs. Innumerable battles in the centuries since have sought to emulate the brave rear-guard action of Thermopylae, from the Alamo to Stalingrad. Thermopylae would be unrecognizable to Leonidas and the Spartans today. The sea has receded a couple of miles since antiquity, making it difficult to envision the battlefield as it was in 480 bce. A roadside monument features a statue of the Spartan leader holding a shield and brandishing a spear above his head. In the 1990s, a second monu-
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Ayacucho
A key battle in the uprisings against Spanish rule in South America between 1809 and 1826, Ayacucho rubber-stamped Peruvian independence, prompted the formation of Bolivia, and brought an end to nearly 300 years of Spanish rule. The hero of the hour was Venezuelan general Antonio José de Sucre, a close confidant of Latin American liberator Simón Bolívar, who directed his patriot army against the loyalist forces of the Spanish viceroy, José de la Serna, in the thin mountain air of the Pampa de la Quinua in modern-day Peru. Conditions were harsh, the terrain was rugged, and the stakes couldn’t have been higher. De la Serna had finally caught up with Sucre’s retreating army on a high Andean plateau outside the city of Ayacucho in December 1824. After an unsuccessful attempt to encircle the patriots, he rallied his troops on the Condorcunca hill before launching a careless and disorganized assault on Sucre’s left flank. Strafing the descending cavalry, the patriots held firm before regrouping and preparing their own attack on the right flank, where a calvary countercharge successfully pushed the loyalists back. The Spanish-led army was quickly encircled and more than a dozen of its generals, including the injured de la Serna, captured. Today, a 144-foot white obelisk marks the site of the battle on the barren pampa, 10,000 feet above sea level. It was built in 1968 and the land around it has been declared a historic sanctuary. Carved scenes from the skirmish adorn the obelisk’s base while, at its foot, four antique cannons point menacingly to the northwest. In the nearby village of Quinua, a small museum contains a reproduction of a painting by Daniel Hernández Morillo that depicts the signing of the Capitulation of Ayacucho on December 9, 1824. MHQ Brendan Sainsbury, a freelance travel writer, lives near Vancouver, Canada.
LEFT: YAKOV OSKANOV (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); RIGHT: CHRISTIAN MEHLFÜHRER, CC BY-SA 3.0
Thermopylae
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WEAPONS CHECK
LEMAT REVOLVER By Chris McNab
HERITAGE AUCTIONS
Hammer The hammer held a movable striking surface. In the raised position the striker acted on the cylinder; lowered, it fired the shotgun barrel.
Cylinder Because of the width of the shotgun barrel axis, the .42-caliber (sometimes .36-caliber) cylinder was larger than most revolvers’, holding nine rounds instead of the usual five or six.
The LeMat revolver was one man’s innovative effort to give European and American soldiers the ultimate in single- handed, close-quarters firepower. Patented in 1856 by Jean Alexandre LeMat, a Frenchman living in New Orleans at that time, the revolver was a cap and ball muzzle-loader featuring a central smoothbore shotgun barrel, which also served as the axis for an enlarged revolver cylinder, typically .42-cal, that fired down a longer 6.75-inch parallel barrel. The shooter could switch between the shotgun and the revolver by adjusting a pivoting striker on the hammer. The weapon’s impressive firepower potential attracted an 8,000-unit order from Confederate forces during the American Civil War, although only about 2,500 of them were delivered, with most going to the Confederate army’s cavalry and smaller numbers to the Confederate navy. The latter also ordered 2,000 smaller “Baby LeMats,” with a shorter 4.5-inch revolver barrel in .32-caliber, though only about 100 of these were made.
Shotgun barrel The LeMat revolver featured a central short-range 18-, 20-, or 28-gauge shotgun barrel, which also served as the cylinder axis.
Rammer lever The side-mounted hinged rammer was used to load the revolver cylinder with cap and ball; a separate detachable ramrod for the shotgun was held inside the main rammer arm.
For all its ingenuity, the LeMat was an awkward and expensive weapon. Its low distribution and single-action design meant that it was soon superseded by new generations of more practical double-action revolvers. LeMat subsequently produced both pinfire and center fire cartridge versions—and even a revolving carbine—in a vain effort to find commercial success. The combat impact of the LeMat during the Civil War may have been limited, but the gun did have some famous adopters, including General P. G. T. Beauregard (who was also LeMat’s cousin and business partner), Major General J. E. B. Stuart, and Lieutenant General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. Today LeMats are therefore highly collectible, their value heightened by their rarity. 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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HERITAGE AUCTIONS
During World War II, C. G. Conn Ltd., of Elkhart, Indiana, the world’s largest manufacturer of band instruments, converted full-bore to defense production, turning out a wide array of products for the military, including this brass ship’s compass. (“Having the conn” soon became shorthand in the U.S. Navy for those controlling the movements of a ship.)
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A TALE OF TWO CITIES
HERITAGE AUCTIONS
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n July 1941, fearing that their city was facing an “unemployment catastrophe,” a group of business, labor, and political leaders from Evansville, Indiana, traveled to Washington, D.C., to ask for an economic lifeline in the form of federal defense contracts. As Roy Morris Jr. tells the story in this issue (“World War II’s Can-Do City,” page 70), the Office of Production Management—which after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would be replaced by the War Production Board—came to the city’s rescue, and almost overnight Evansville was transformed into a hotbed of military production, manufacturing P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers and LSTs (Landing Ship, Tanks) by the thousands, turning out nearly all of the .45-caliber ammunition used by American soldiers during World War II, and rebuilding and reconditioning countless tanks, trucks, and jeeps. At the other end of the Hoosier State, however, the city of Elkhart was undergoing its own transformation. Elkhart could rightly lay claim to the title “Band Instrument Capital of the World,” with more than a dozen large manufacturers, chief among them C. G. Conn Ltd., accounting for two-thirds of the world’s entire output of band instruments. Charles Gerard Conn, who had served his country during the Civil War as a soldier in the Union army (rising to the rank of colonel), had perfected a rubber-cushioned mouthpiece for the cornet in 1873 and founded the company that bore his name the same year. It would go on to produce the first American-made cornet (in 1875), the first American-made saxophone (in 1888), and the world’s first sousaphone (in 1898). Conn lured European craftsmen to work in his Indiana factories, and many employees went on to establish their own companies; by 1914, when Conn sold his company, Elkhart was home to some 50 musical instrument manufacturers. But in 1941 an ominous cloud loomed over Elkhart. “This city is alarmed at the prospects of a war economy,” a reporter for the Indianapolis Star (the state’s largest newspaper) observed, “because it has no allies to help wage a fight before the congressional committees to save its biggest industry from virtual extinction.” A. L. Smith, an executive of C. G. Conn, went so far as to predict that the entire industry would be closed by the end of the year for want of such essential raw materials as steel, nickel, copper, chromium, and other metals; rubber and neoprene; cork; and a host of different plastics.
Smith was only a few months off the mark, and the shutdown of his industry, it turned out, came directly at the hands of Uncle Sam. On May 30, 1942, the War Production Board ordered the production of virtually all musical instruments stopped after June 30 and immediately froze the stocks of 27 types of band instruments in the hands of Conn and other manufacturers as well as wholesalers, stipulating that the instruments be reserved for use by army, navy, and marine bands. From mid-1942 to 1945, with its production of musical instruments for civilian use halted, Conn turned to manufacturing various types of compasses and binnacles, altimeters, bombsights, gyro-horizon indicators, and other such instruments for the military. The company adapted its proprietary “Coprion” process—creating seamless brass bells by depositing copper on a mandrel—to manufacture silver bearing inserts for Wright Cyclone airplane engines. It also made waveguides for radar equipment. Conn’s case and drum divisions turned out trunks, boxes, and canvas bags; its piano subsidiaries made wooden gliders, furniture, shipping crates, and wooden lockers. In addition to keeping its silver and gold electroplating operations busy for items needed for wartime use, Conn produced a wide array of machine parts, including track pins for tanks and the main bearings for Allison aircraft engines. The company’s engineers would also design thermal compensators for the radios used in military planes, de-icing equipment, and ultrasensitive vibration- and amplitude- measuring devices. Although Conn’s workforce grew from 988 in 1941 to 1,850 in 1943, the company would struggle to maintain its position of dominance after the war ended. Reconverting to its old patterns of production proved to take a lot longer than conversion to wartime production had. But certainly Conn had done its part, and maybe more, during the war. On July 30, 1943, Conn was honored with an ArmyNavy “E” Award—for “Excellence in Production.” At the award ceremony that day, its president, Carl D. Greenleaf, explained how the company had done so well in producing materials for the U.S. military’s war effort. “It would not be that we performed any kind of magic,” Greenleaf said. “It would not be that we pulled any rabbits out of the hat. The answer would be the very simple one that we worked hard, we worked long hours, and we stayed on the job.” —Bill Hogan
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NO GUNS, NO GLORY In The Nation Makers, which he painted in 1903, Howard Pyle sought to memorialize the heroism of the Continental Army at the Battle of Brandywine in 1777.
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BRANDYWINE RIVER MUSEUM OF ART
To supply American patriots with the weapons needed to fight the well-armed British regulars, the founders of the fledging nation turned abroad. By Willard Sterne Randall
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THE RACE TO ARM AMERICA
In 1775 Franklin opened secret talks with British, Dutch, and French arms dealers.
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people in arms, disciplining themselves morning and evening.” Twice in earlier colonial wars with France, Franklin had armed and organized the defense of the Quaker colony against France and its allies. Franklin well knew that no cannons were produced in Pennsylvania. He immediately opened secret negotiations with British, Dutch, and French merchants for shipments of munitions through their colonies in the Caribbean. Though the governments of Europe’s monarchies avoided direct complicity with the rebellious Americans, they seldom interfered with entrepreneurs involved in contraband trade. Dutch arms makers were operating their mills at full capacity for the clandestine American market. In the summer of 1775, Maryland’s Convention dispatched commercial agents to Guadaloupe in the Caribbean to transship arms purchased in Europe by small vessels. In July 1775, a year before the vote on independence, the Second Continental Congress, in clear defiance of the British, resolved that any ship transporting munitions for “the continent” could load and export to France any produce—mostly tobacco—in exchange for credits to pay for the weapons. Two weeks later, it appropriated $50,000 (approximately $1.3 million in 2021 dollars) for selected merchants to buy gunpowder for the Continental Army— at a 5 percent commission. Two months later, in September 1775, Congress created the Committee of Secret Correspondence, empowering its members—merchants John Alsop and Philip Livingston of New York City and Thomas Willing and Robert Morris of Philadelphia—to draw on the Continental treasury to buy a million rounds of gunpowder, 10,000 muskets, and 40 field pieces. Congress would gradually put Morris in charge of the business side of the war. At first, he capitalized on Willing and Morris’s vast commercial network of contacts in virtually every British colony and in much of Europe. Morris’s activities were only known to a small inner circle of merchants, financiers, and members of Congress, though in time he would become known publicly as “the financier of the Revolution.” Morris defended his secret dealings in a letter to Connecticut merchant and Congressman Silas Deane: “It seems to me the opportunity of improving our fortunes ought not to be lost, especially as the very means of doing it will contribute to the service of our country at the same time.” Within days, Congress also created the Secret Committee on Trade. Samuel Ward of Rhode Island, a merchant,
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH; NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
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f it hadn’t been for guns and ammunition purchased through clandestine channels in Europe and the West Indies, the American Revolution would have failed. As early as October 1774, in reaction to the Boston Tea Party, Britain banned the importation of weapons to the American colonies. A brisk contraband trade immediately sprang up, centered on the Dutch-controlled island of St. Eustatius in the Caribbean. General Thomas Gage, the commander in chief of British forces in North America, warned the prime minister, Lord North, that the colonists, in addition, were “sending to Europe for all kinds of Military Stores.” In New England, an independence movement had gradually won sympathy, especially among merchants who had been buffeted for a decade by ever-harsher British trade restrictions and taxes. Men who had for decades built legitimate commercial networks doing business all over the world now became arms merchants, channeling their expertise into what the British condemned as smuggling. In 1774, after Parliament closed the port of Boston in retaliation for the Tea Party, Connecticut’s General Assembly commissioned two new independent companies of militia, each recruited, outfitted, and bankrolled by wealthy ship owners. Jonathan Trumbull, the royal governor and a leading importer, had greater allegiance to his business than to the king who had appointed him: He anonymously drafted resolutions ordering all towns to double their arsenals of powder, balls, and flint. Connecticut also mustered six new regiments of militia, more than 6,000 men in a colony of 100,000 citizens. The colony’s assembly, dominated by merchants, dispatched fast ships to the Caribbean to buy weapons and gunpowder and ordered all militia to train for 12 days, double the normal term of service, paying them six shillings a day, twice the wages of a skilled artisan. In the spring of 1775, when he returned from London after a decade as lobbyist for Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin was appointed a delegate to the Second Continental Congress and chairman of Pennsylvania’s Committee of Safety. Franklin wrote to a friend in Britain’s Parliament of finding “the commencement of a civil war with all ranks of
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Clockwise from top left: British workers fill, seal, and stack mortar bombs at London’s Woolwich arsenal; the Continental brig Andrew Doria receives a salute from the Dutch fort at St. Eustatius on November 16, 1776; Robert Morris, a wealthy Philadelphia merchant, would become known as “the financier of the Revolution.”
chaired the committee. Alsop, Livingston, and Francis Lewis of New York joined Deane, Morris, and Franklin in the committee’s secret proceedings. Augmenting his and Willing’s network, Morris chose 24-year-old William Bingham as the committee’s principal agent in the Caribbean. Bingham, the son of a prominent Philadelphia merchant, owned several ships. Assigned to sail to Martinique, he was to pose as a private merchant while cultivating diplomatic connections with the French government and to buy 10,000 muskets for the Secret Committee on Trade. He was
also to purchase a shipload of gunpowder under a private contract between Willing and Morris and the colony of Virginia and, in addition, to purchase a shipment of linens and other French finery on Morris’s private account. Morris warned Bingham that the risk of capture of these ships was high but so was the likelihood of great profit: “One arrival will pay for 2 or 3 or 4 losses.” With a British naval blockade tightening, Morris envisioned a commercial windfall. “The scarcity of goods all over this continent affords a fine opportunity to private ad-
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venturers,” he wrote to an acquaintance in France. Foreseeing handsome profits for hard-to-get everyday necessities, he ordered “woolens, linens, pins, needles, etc. suited for the consumption of this country.” By January 1776, Morris had emerged as America’s leading capitalist when the Secret Committee on Trade issued its largest contracts, requisitioning $300,000 (roughly $9 million today) in funds to buy arms, gunpowder, and cloth for uniforms, tents, and sails. While the order was divided among eight contractors, Morris’s firm received fully half. When Samuel Ward died, Congress voted unanimously to appoint Morris chairman of the Secret Committee on Trade. Asked his opinion of Morris, John Adams, a delegate to Congress from Massachusetts, confided, “He has vast designs in the mercantile way and no doubt pursues mercantile ends which are always gain, but he is an excellent member of our body.” As its Treasury began to dry up, Congress voted to allow trade with Caribbean islands. Soon, cod, lumber, tobacco, indigo, and other goods were being exchanged for arms and ammunition, and agents commissioned by Congress began to order and funnel supplies from Europe and the West Indies to the Continental Army. By December 1775, a deputation from a leading shipping firm in Nantes, France, arrived at the headquarters of George Washington, in command of the Continental Army in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to make arrangements to covertly supply his army with war matériel.
Dutch firms in St. Eustatius sold gunpowder at six times the going rate in Europe.
Americans shipped tobacco to England; British manufactured goods found their way to New England from Canada, via Nova Scotia. A loyalist merchant complained to British vice admiral Molyneux Schuldham that most American
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ports east of Boston received “daily arrivals from the West Indies, but most from Saint Eustatius; everyone brings more or less gunpowder.” Abraham Van Bibber, Maryland’s agent in the Dutch free port, reported that while the Dutch government had imposed an embargo on selling arms and ammunition to the Americans to mollify the British, “the Dutch understand quite well that the enforcement of the laws, that is, the embargo, would mean the ruin of their trade.” Statia, as St. Eustatius became known, was the first foreign port to salute the American flag. No wonder: Dutch merchants on the island were selling gunpowder to the Americans at six times the going rate in Europe. By mid-1776, arms, ammunition, cloth, and quinine were flowing through Louisiana into the Carolinas. Gunpowder smuggled in sugar hogsheads arrived in Charleston from Jamaica; from Bordeaux, 300 casks of powder and 5,000 muskets sailed for Philadelphia—on ships flying French colors—to be hauled overland to Boston. One wagon train was led by Benjamin Franklin himself. Rejecting a petition from the largely mercantile City of London asking the king to define the terms of a just and honorable peace before unleashing the full force of British arms against the colonists, George III in his annual Speech from the Throne opening Parliament in October 1775 said he regretted the miseries his subjects had “brought upon themselves by an unjustifiable resistance to the constitutional authority of this Kingdom.” Until royal authority could be reestablished and the “now existing rebellion is at an end,” he added, “there would be no peace.” For conservatives like wealthy Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris, who had been putting off a decision about independence, the king’s response “totally destroyed all hopes of reconciliation,” making “a declaration of Independency” all but inevitable. But even as Thomas Paine was calling for a war of independence in his bestselling pamphlet Common Sense, Washington remained gloomy about the prospect of equipping an army “without any money in our treasury,
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Arsenals in France turned out large numbers of muskets for the Continental Army. The Charleville Model 1763 was the most common, and soon all French-made muskets were referred to as “Charlevilles.”
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
powder in our magazines, arms in our stores…and by and by, when we shall be called upon to take the field, shall not have a tent to lie in.” As the colonies girded for war, they could only find weapons in gun shops, trading houses, and private homes—muskets, rifles, fowling pieces, pistols, blunderbusses, and so forth. Some volunteers had no firearms at all—just pikes or swords. The few iron forges that existed were in remote reaches of the colonies. In the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, bog iron was turned into cannonballs; in Salisbury, Connecticut, a forge founded by Ethan Allen to produce iron cauldrons for boiling potash was converted to produce cannons. Connecticut also set up a small musket factory at Waterbury; Pennsylvania expanded its weapons industry, centered in Lancaster County and drawing on iron mines and foundries in Carlisle, Reading, and Warwick. More commonly, gunsmiths worked alone or with one or two apprentices to make highly individualistic weapons. They could manufacture, on average, only one gun a day. The U.S.-made gun cost $12; a French musket, $6. At one point, Washington even considered sending hundreds of unarmed militiamen home before Congress decided to confiscate weapons from loyalists. In his memoirs, Major General William Moultrie of South Carolina remembered with awe that the colonists dared resist British might “without money, without arms, without ammunition, no general, no armies, no admirals and no fleets.” The residents of Charleston lacked weapons and ammunition until they broke into royal magazines and took some 1,000 muskets and then seized a British brig carrying 23,000 pounds of gunpowder. “The want of powder was a very serious consideration with us,” Moultrie wrote. “We knew there was none to be had upon the continent of America.” Indeed, there were no powder mills operating in the American colonies when the war started. Most, perhaps even all, of the gunpowder in colonial powder magazines had been stored, untested, for the dozen years since the French and Indian War, which had ended in 1763.
“Our want of powder is inconceivable,” Washington wrote on Christmas Day, 1775. At one point, no man on the 13-mile-long cordon of colonial troops around Boston had even an ounce of gunpowder. In Pennsylvania, Franklin advertised for weapons in the newspapers. The few cannons available in New York City lined the parapets of Fort George on the Battery until students at King’s College (now Columbia University), led by 20-year-old Alexander Hamilton, dragged them away under fire from the British man-of-war Asia to arm the first artillery company of the Continental Army. As Congress debated independence in the spring of 1776, Silas Deane, a member of its Secret Committee on Trade, was sailing to France, posing as a Bermudian merchant. Congress’s leading commercial agent, Deane, the Yale-educated son of a blacksmith, had amassed wealth through two marriages. Serving in the First Continental Congress, he had been defeated for reelection but decided to stay in Philadelphia to continue working with Morris and the trade committee. In May 1776, Morris supported Deane’s appointment by Congress to act as its commercial and diplomatic agent—America’s first diplomat—and, as historian John Ferling puts it, “to explore the depth of France’s friendship for the American cause.” Franklin and Morris provided Deane with lists of French contacts who could arrange access to Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, the French foreign minister. Deane ostensibly was to discuss commercial ties with France, but his top priority was to procure uniforms for an army of 25,000 men and, according to his congressional commission, “quantities of arms and ammunition,” including 100 cannons. In addition, he agreed to act as Morris’s commercial agent at the customary 5 percent commission.
“Our want of powder is inconceivable,” Washington complained in December 1775.
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By December 1776 it had become clear that the Continental Congress needed to maintain a more formal diplomatic presence in France. After meeting secretly with a French agent in Philadelphia, the Committee on Secret Correspondence selected Franklin to join Deane in Paris. Arthur Lee was to cross the Channel from England to join them to form the first American diplomatic mission. Franklin took along his grandson, William Temple Franklin, as secretary, and his nephew, Jonathan Williams, to act as the mission’s commercial agent. They joined Deane at Passy, a village overlooking Paris, taking up residence in the estate of Jaques-Donatien le Rey de Chaumont, a government contractor, and kinsman of France’s prime minister. Franklin would live there for the next nine years. Chaumont said he would charge no rent but that Congress could show its appreciation by giving him a suitable grant of land.
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Franklin and Morris also instructed Deane to determine if, in the event the united colonies formed an independent state, France would acknowledge them as such and form a military or commercial alliance—or both. Ever since France had lost Canada and much of the American West to Britain through the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the French foreign ministry had watched the developing radical movement in the British colonies with keen interest. Vergennes had already posted to London as an unofficial observer merchant Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, playwright of The Marriage of Figaro. At the home of John Wilkes, the radically pro-American lord mayor, Beaumarchais was introduced to Arthur Lee, younger brother of Richard Henry Lee, a delegate to Congress from Virginia. The younger Lee was studying law and acting as commercial agent for the Lee family’s extensive interests. He had also assisted Franklin’s colonial agencies. Beaumarchais informed Lee that on June 10, the French government had approved a gift of one million livres to aid the American revolutionaries. Beaumarchais was to manage the fund by setting up a dummy mercantile house, Rodrigue Hortalez et Cie, to mask France’s participation. Under international law, openly supplying contraband
WEBB-DEANE-STEVENS MUSEUM
In 1776 Congress appointed Silas Deane of Connecticut to act as its agent in procuring uniforms for the Continental Army as well as “quantities of arms and ammunition.”
weapons to the rebellious Americans was a clear violation of French neutrality. With King Louis XVI’s personal approval, the French government adopted the pretext that it was high time to refit its weaponry. Declaring many of its arms and ships “outmoded,” it allowed designated merchants to remove munitions from royal arsenals for a nominal sum to aid the Americans. As Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, some 90 miles away, Washington’s inexperienced militia faced the largest fleet and most powerful army Britain had ever sent from its shores. Washington had the Declaration read aloud to his troops and ordered them back to their billets. Instead, many joined a mob surging through the streets. Reaching Bowling Green, at the tip of Manhattan, they vaulted the fence surrounding the 15-foot lead equestrian statue of King George III, looped ropes around the monument, and toppled it. One man sawed off the king’s head; the rest was carted off to Litchfield, Connecticut, where a small army of women converted it into 42,088 bullets. By December 1776, Deane was able to inform Congress that he had dispatched some 200,000 pounds of gunpowder and 80,000 pounds of saltpeter from France to Martinique and 100,000 pounds of gunpowder from Amsterdam to Saint Eustatius for transshipment to the American mainland on smaller American vessels. By the end of the year, congressional agents were operating openly in all the Dutch, Spanish, and French colonies in the West Indies and in European ports. At every stop American merchants and their agents, among them Morris and Deane, were taking 5 percent of the sale price of the munitions for themselves. These wartime commissions would mount into the millions.
NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY
WEBB-DEANE-STEVENS MUSEUM
On being read the Declaration of Independence in 1776, many of George Washington’s troops joined a mob surging through Manhattan that would destroy the equestrian statue of King George III in Bowling Green.
Congress had legalized privateering in March 1775, only three weeks after learning that the British planned a blockade of all American trade. It was an important move by a fledgling government with no navy and no means to collect taxes. Congress granted investors commissions to arm their ships—at their own expense—and to raise crews of seamen, who were assured shares in the proceeds of any enemy ship they captured intact. A captured ship was sailed to port and auctioned along with its cargo. Investors divided the booty with officers and crews according to a formula approved by Congress, reserving a 10 percent cut for the commander in chief to use for the needs of the army. So profitable was privateering for all hands that the Continental Navy and the 11 state navies had difficulty recruiting crews. Many sailors deserted Continental ships, lured away by the prospect of a share of the loot. To get around the enormous expense of building a sizable navy, Congress registered some 1,697 private vessels.
Of these, 600 carried letters of marque that served as commissions from Congress. In addition, agents abroad such as Franklin and Deane commissioned some 300 private warships, bringing the total commerce-raiding vessels to 2,000. Fitted out, in all, with 18,000 guns—most captured from British ships—this mercantile armada transported contraband arms and goods from the Caribbean while hunting for lucrative prize British merchantmen. In little more than the first year of the war, according to the registry kept in Lloyd’s Coffee House in London, American privateers captured 733 British merchant vessels. By war’s end they would capture more than 500 vessels with cargoes collectively valued at an astonishing nearly $10 billion in today’s dollars. The proceeds would enrich several members of Congress, including Robert Morris. At first, Morris abjured personally investing in privateering. He had too many friends in England to take away any of their property, he explained. But as the fighting at sea intensified and the
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He and Morris, Bingham wrote, had mastered “the art of uniting war and commerce.”
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continued. Historian Peter Andreas explains that privateers offloaded goods onto French ships at sea and sold the ships they captured “just beyond the harbor, thus technically outside French waters.” “England is extremely exasperated at the favor our armed vessels have met with here,” Franklin reported to Congress in September 1777. “To us, the French court wishes success to our cause, winks at the supplies we obtain here, privately affords us every essential aid, and goes on preparing for war.” That France was considering dropping its mask of neutrality and openly forming an alliance with the American revolutionaries was such a carefully guarded secret that apparently even George Washington was unaware of it. As British armies attacked from Canada and the Chesapeake, he could find little that was redeeming in the operations of merchants like Robert Morris. Indeed, Washington was coming to suspect Morris of “engrossing”—the morally questionable practice of buying vast amounts of wheat and other scarce supplies and speculating in them by holding onto them until prices rise. After a winter of near starvation for his army at Valley Forge, Washington wrote to his former aide-de-camp, Joseph Reed, a leading radical Pennsylvania politician, that he was inclined to bring “those murderers of our cause— the Monopolizers—forestallers—& engrossers—to condign punishment.” He bemoaned the failure of several states to “hunt them down as the pests of society, and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness of America.” Washington came to detest what he called the eagerness of Morris and other merchants to profit from the war. Writing to his kinsman Brigadier General Andrew Lewis, Washington blamed “want of virtue,” which he “dreaded more than the whole force of Great Britain.” “Certain I am, that, unless extortion, forestalling and other practices which have crept in, and become exceedingly prevalent and injurious to the common cause, can meet with proper checks, we must inevitably sink under such a load of accumulated oppression,” Washington wrote. “To make and extort money in every shape that can be devised, and at the same time to decry its value, seems to have become a mere business and an epidemical disease, calling for the interposition of every good man and body of men.” In the summer of 1777, for the second time in less than a year, British expeditionary forces were sweeping south from Canada. Sir John Burgoyne had retaken Fort Ticonderoga, the munitions base of the American northern army, and was slowly marching south to link up with a British army expected to attack north from New York City. In mid-July, as the American army retreated, Major General Philip Schuyler wrote to Washington of the bleak
UNITED STATES ARCHITECT OF THE CAPITOL
British took several of his merchant ships, he wrote to his partner, William Bingham, that “I conceive myself perfectly justifiable in the eyes of God and man to seek what I have lost from those that have plundered me.” Morris joined Bingham as a silent partner in commissioning the Retaliation, which captured 13 prizes on its maiden voyage. “My scruples about privateering are all done away,” he wrote to Bingham. Together, Morris and Bingham, in the junior partner’s words, mastered “the art of uniting war and commerce.” In Philadelphia, Morris’s hauls from the captured ships were well known. When François Jean de Beauvoir, the marquis de Chastellux, visited the city, he reported that Morris was “so accustomed to the success of his privateers that when he is observed on a Sunday to be more serious than usual, the conclusion is that no prize has arrived in the preceding week.” No one tallied Morris’s and Bingham’s profits, but Morris had enlisted all the members of his Secret Committee on Trade network, sending their ships to Europe and the Caribbean and taking shares in other privateers’ cruises. In France, with Chaumont as his backer, Deane fitted out privateers and sold prizes, and in England he organized an international trading company with Chaumont, Morris, and Thomas Walpole. Charles Willing, Morris’s partner in Barbados, arranged transshipment of European goods to the American mainland. Morris’s associates in Philadelphia had agents in the West Indies and in New Orleans. In an early example of global capitalism, American merchants and their international network of agents broke the bonds of Britain’s ancient mercantile system. France’s maritime ministry appointed Chaumont, Franklin’s landlord, to take the helm of the clandestine privateering operation, allowing the American agents to work without rivals. No prizes could be sold without his approval and then only on his terms. As purchasing agents for Congress, Chaumont and Jonathan Williams, Franklin’s nephew, bought goods captured by privateers and, as prize agents, sold the booty to their associates, including Morris. Franklin would later attest that some transactions reaped profits as high as 8,000 percent. Franklin encouraged privateers to sell their captured ships in French ports, knowing that this was an act of illicit trade that violated French neutrality and infuriated the British. When British officials complained, France promised to crack down, but the flow of captured goods
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On October 17, 1777, after his demoralizing loss to the Americans at the Battle of Saratoga, British major general John Burgoyne surrenders his remaining men and hands his sword to Major General Horatio Gates.
prospect of stopping the British, who had an army “flushed with victory, plentifully provided with provisions, cannon and every warlike store” while the American army “is weak in numbers, dispirited, naked, in a manner destitute of provisions, without camp equipage, with little ammunition and not a single cannon.” Schuyler apparently was unaware that, all through that spring, a French fleet, eluding the British blockade by appearing to sail for the Caribbean, was escorting eight supply ships bearing the fruits of Silas Deane’s clandestine dealings to deliver guns and ammunition, shoes, blankets and stockings, tents, and tools to the Continental Army. Two of the French vessels, Amphitrite and Mercure, had arrived at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, their holds crammed with 20,000 muskets and 52 brass cannons, and convoys of oxen were dragging them over the Berkshires. When Burgoyne crossed the Hudson, he found the Americans entrenched in elaborate defensive works and heavily armed with French artillery. By this point, most of the Americans’ arms at Saratoga were state-of-the-art French weapons, which enabled the Americans to fight the British invaders to a bloody standstill, with British casualties double the American toll.
After weeks of waiting, Burgoyne learned that he could expect no help from Sir William Howe, who had captured Philadelphia and decided to spend the winter there in comfort. Burgoyne, surrounded by Americans outnumbering him now three to one, his retreat to Canada cut off, surrendered. While the battles of Saratoga were won by soldiers, their victory would not have been possible without the timely arrival of the guns and ammunition obtained from the French. The loss of an entire army at Saratoga proved to be the turning point of the Revolutionary War. The defeat of Burgoyne’s army was all that Benjamin Franklin in Paris needed to convince the French that, not only would the Americans stand and fight but, with the financial and military help of France, the United States could defeat Great Britain and secure its independence. MHQ Willard Sterne Randall, an award-winning journalist and historian and professor emeritus of history at Champlain College, is the author of 15 books, including the forthcoming The Founders’ Fortunes: How Money Shaped the Birth of America (Dutton, 2022), from which this article is adapted.
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WORLD WAR II’S CAN-DO CITY Almost overnight, Evansville, Indiana, found itself transformed by defense contracts into a hotbed of U.S. military production. By Roy Morris Jr.
The Chrysler Motors plant in Evansville not only produced 96 percent of all .45-caliber ammunition used by American soldiers during the war but also rebuilt and reconditioned tanks, trucks, and jeeps.
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In the 1940s Evansville found itself at the very center of the American war effort.
Hillman was as good as his word. Two months later he sent Ralph Kaul and August Wilks, two of his top aides, to Evansville to explore the city’s potential as a site for new defense industries. Their favorable report induced William S. Knudson, the chairman of the Office of Production Management, to officially certify Evansville a priority location for federal defense contracts. The head of the agency’s contract distribution division, Floyd B. Odlum, announced
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in no uncertain terms that Evansville industries would begin receiving defense contracts “or there must be some damn good reason why they don’t.” Representative John Boehne Jr. of Evansville lobbied President Roosevelt on his hometown’s behalf and reported that large defense contracts, as well as new plant facilities “for another highly important wartime weapon,” were in the offing for the city. When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, killing 2,403 American soldiers, sailors, and civilians (among them a 19-year-old Evansville native, Seaman Second Class George James Wilcox), what had been an economic issue suddenly became a matter of life and death. Overnight, American industries switched to a war footing. For Evansville, the Pearl Harbor attack, though tragic, could not have come at a more opportune time. With its historic role as the hub of the tristate region nicknamed Kentuckiana, which included southwestern Indiana, northwestern Kentucky, and southeastern Illinois, Evansville was well situated to become a leader in wartime industries. Newly renovated ports on the Ohio River, established rail links through the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, a thriving municipal airport, and the Chicago- to-Miami Dixie Bee Highway (U.S. Highway 41) connected Evansville to other American cities and towns. A skilled and committed—if currently underemployed—workforce, long trained in automobile, refrigeration, furniture, and other industrial production, stood ready to convert to military projects at a moment’s notice. Two local companies, Bootz Manufacturing and Holdsclaw Brothers, had been producing practice bombs and military tools and dies since the early 1930s. The work being done in Evansville at Bootz Manufacturing and Holdsclaw Brothers was just the tip of the iceberg: By the spring of 1944, companies in Evansville had received some $600 million in defense contracts. The city, in fact, found itself at the very center of the American war effort. The Evansville Ordnance Plant would produce 96 percent of all .45-caliber ammunition used by American soldiers during the war, while Republic Aviation turned out more than 6,500 P-47 Thunderbolt fighterbombers—almost half of all P-47s built during the war. And the Evansville Shipyard would become the nation’s largest inland producer of LSTs (Landing Ship, Tanks) which would be used in every Allied amphibious assault from Normandy to Okinawa, and especially during the joint army-navy island-hopping campaigns in the Pacific. LSTs also played vital roles in the Allied landings in the Philippines, Sicily, and mainland Italy. In February 1942, Evansville was selected as the site for a new 45-acre naval shipyard on the riverfront downtown. The shipyard would be operated by the Missouri Valley
EVANSVILLE COURIER AND PRESS PHOTO ARCHIVE, EVANSVILLE VANDERBURGH PUBLIC LIBRARY
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n July 1941, a high-powered delegation of business, labor, and political leaders from Evansville, Indiana, traveled to Washington, D.C., to call on the associate director of the Office of Production Management, the newly created federal procurement agency that would later be replaced by the War Production Board. They had come to the nation’s capital to express their concern that Evansville was facing an “unemployment catastrophe” even as the agency was channeling defense projects to companies in other American cities of comparable or smaller size. Mayor William Dress, a member of the delegation, conjured the specter of “a sixth column of wandering, confused people, more devastating to our defense efforts and to our efforts to supply the fighting democracies of the world than any fifth column that an enemy could drop out of the skies.” Unemployment, Dress said, was a direct threat to national security. The United States was not at war, but everyone at the meeting in Sidney Hillman’s office knew that it soon would be. Under the provisions of the 1940 Lend-Lease Act, American industries were already producing, selling, and shipping food, matériel, and supplies to hard-pressed Great Britain, which was standing alone against Adolf Hitler in Western Europe. By the end of the year, China and the Soviet Union would also begin receiving Americanmade weapons and supplies. It was all part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pledge that the United States would serve as the “great arsenal of democracy” in the fight against encroaching fascism and totalitarianism. The Evansville contingent, for urgent financial as well as patriotic reasons, wanted to join that effort. Their city, like much of the country, was still struggling to overcome not only the devastating effects of the Great Depression but a major flood of the Ohio River four years earlier that had covered 500 city blocks. Hillman, a lifelong union leader, promised to look into the matter carefully.
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EVANSVILLE COURIER AND PRESS PHOTO ARCHIVE, EVANSVILLE VANDERBURGH PUBLIC LIBRARY
The 5,000 workers at the Republic Aviation plant in Evansville—half of them women—turned out an average of 14 P-47 Thunderbolts every day, including the long-range P-47N models shown here.
Bridge and Iron Company of Leavenworth, Kansas, under contract with the U.S. Navy. Six other local companies were involved in the design and construction of the shipyard, including Winston Brothers, Haglin and Sons, Sollit Construction, Bechtel-McCone, W. A. Bechtel, and H. C. Price. At its peak, some 19,000 workers—men and women, Blacks and Whites—would be employed at the shipyard, working three eight-hour shifts: day, graveyard, and swing. Their work would prove vital to the Allied war effort. No less an authority than British prime minister Winston Churchill underscored the importance of the LSTs, remarking later that “the destinies of two great empires seem to be tied up in some God-damned things called LSTs.” Perhaps fittingly, the first LST built at Evansville Shipyard, LST 157, went to Great Britain for use in the Royal Navy. In time, workers in Evansville would produce 167 of the ungainly but essential transport ships, designed to land directly on beaches and disembark troops, tanks, and other military vehicles through its gigantic bow doors. Under U.S. Bureau of Ships specifications, the vessels were 328 feet long and 50 feet wide, with a minimum draft of 3.8 feet.
LSTs carried 2,100 short tons of tanks and vehicles, and a complement of 193 troops. Demonstrating their versatility in World War II, LSTs were regularly converted to repair ships, hospital ships, motor launches, and observation plane launches. During the D-Day campaign, LSTs brought 41,035 wounded men safely back across the English Channel from Normandy to England. While the LSTs acquired such unflattering nicknames as “Large Slow Target” and “Large Stationary Target,” only 26 of them were destroyed by the enemy during the war and another 13 lost to bad weather or accident. Of the 10 Evansville LSTs lost in the war, all were casualties of enemy fire; none sank from faulty construction. “This bunch of country boys,” Evansville shipyard worker Roman Ritzert would recall, “built good ships—ships that didn’t sink.” The Evansville Shipyard was soon joined by another vital weapons producer: Republic Aviation, which was chosen to build P-47 Thunderbolts. The P-47 was a rugged, dependable, easy-to-fly airplane, equally useful as an escort fighter or fighter-bomber. “In all theatres,” wrote one
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Although Republic Aviation Corporation was based in Farmingdale, New York, its president, Ralph S. Damon, had a personal connection to Evansville: Years before, he had been a St. Louis neighbor of C. Nelson Smith, vice president of the Hoosier Lamp and Stamping Corporation. Through Smith, Damon was able to arrange subcontracting for additional parts with Hoosier Lamp and Stamping Corporation and other local manufacturers. A suitable location was found near the airport, and workers toiled around the clock to build a gigantic brick office building and wooden outbuildings. Other workers were already busy fashioning airplane parts in garages, rented factories, abandoned office buildings, and other ad hoc locations. “The first Thunderbolt planes were ready for flight,” the Evansville Press reported, “almost as [soon as] the roof went on the main assembly building.” With that strong head start, Republic Aviation was remarkably productive. Its 5,000 workers—half of them women—turned out an average of 14 P-47s per day (at times, as many as 30 per day) behind the plant’s distinctive four-story rows of blue-glass windows. Republic’s workers, dubbed “the Raiders,” took pride in their name. The plant newspaper, Republic Aviation News, reported that pilots on both the Atlantic and Pacific fronts were “calling for every Thunderbolt fighter plane that leaves the hangar apron.” The first plane built in Evansville rolled off the assembly line on September 20, 1942, with Brigadier General Arthur W. Vanaman of the U.S. Army Air Forces telling the workers that their P-47s would “outfly and outfight” any other airplane—ally or enemy. And 20 months later, when the plant turned out its 1,000th plane, Colonel Alonzo M. Drake exulted: “You
During the war, Republic Aviation would produce more than 6,200 P-47 Thunderbolts.
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have sent out one thousand answers to Hitler and Tojo and I can tell you these answers have been delivered. Because of you, the flag again flies in the Aleutians; because of you our boys are now marching on Rome, and our bomber crews are giving the Nazis a terrible dose of their own medicine.” Nicknamed “the Jug” because it supposedly resembled an overturned milk jug, the P-47 was a mainstay of the U.S. Army Air Forces and was also flown by English, French, Russian, Mexican, and Brazilian pilots during the war. The plane was 36 feet long, with a 40-foot, 9-inch wingspan. It had a maximum speed of 436 miles per hour and an operational range of 1,031 miles. One of the heaviest fighters of the war, the P-47 mounted eight .50-caliber Browning guns, 10 unguided missiles, and up to 2,500 machine- pounds of bombs. American fighter ace Jim Goodson, who had flown Spitfires for the fabled British Royal Air Force before the United States entered the war, noted that his fellow U.S. pilots preferred the P-47 to all other fighters. British fliers, accustomed to the much smaller Spitfire, did not like the Thunderbolt, which they considered too large and too heavy to perform the RAF’s trademark dive attacks. During the war, P-47 pilots achieved 3,752 air-to-air kills and destroyed 8,000 railroad cars, 9,000 locomotives, 6,000 armored fighting vehicles, and 68,000 trucks—a crushing blow to Nazi transport and armament. In addition to the Evansville Shipyard and Republic Aviation, 46 other companies in the area eagerly contracted for various types of war work. The most significant of these was the Chrysler Motors plant. Before the war, the plant had produced Plymouth automobiles at the impressive rate of 275 per day. Converting primarily to munitions, the plant began producing .30-caliber and .45-caliber cartridges, specially packed rounds for use in the Pacific theater, and rebuilt and reconditioned Sherman tanks and army trucks. The plant lived up to its proud slogan, “Bullets by the Billions,” turning out nearly 3.3 million .45-caliber rounds, or 96 percent of all .45-caliber ammunition produced in the United States during the war. The plant also rebuilt and reconditioned 5,662 Sherman tanks and army trucks, repacked 1.5 billion rounds for use in the Pacific theater, and turned out 800,000 “grousers”—metal overshoes for tank treads. Other Evansville companies doing important defense work included Servel Corporation, which manufactured wing panels for the Republic Thunderbolts; Sunbeam Electric, which specialized in converting .45-caliber shell cases from brass to steel; and Hoosier Cardinal, which produced plastic domes for such iconic American bombers as the Boeing B-29. International Steel made bridges, piers, and pontoons; Briggs Indiana manufactured wings for navy planes; and Faultless Caster Company produced millions of fuzes and navy tracer rounds. But weapons and ammu-
CHRYSLER WARTIME COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN INDIANA (4)
historian, “the crippling losses in personnel and material inflicted on the Axis by Thunderbolt attack reached staggering proportions.” Bill Mullen, a pilot from Indiana who flew 72 P-47 missions during the war, attested to the plane’s durability. “It would bring a pilot home after being hit,” he told the Evansville Courier 50 years later. “Pilots were real confident with it. The people of Evansville can be thanked for making strong airplanes.” George Meyrer, Republic’s general manager, in announcing the initial arrangement, declared, “Southern Indiana will give us able hands and stout hearts and together we will do our part in backing our fighting forces.” It was an accurate prediction. During the war, Republic would produce 6,242 P-47s—almost 40 percent of all P-47s built in the United States.
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In just under five months in 1942 the Chrysler Motors plant in Evansville went from manufacturing Plymouth automobiles to full-scale war production as the Evansville Ordnance Plant. By the end of the war its workers had rebuilt, reconditioned, and tested some 5,662 Sherman tanks and military trucks.
CHRYSLER WARTIME COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN INDIANA (4)
nition weren’t the only war products being manufactured in Evansville. Mead Johnson and Company made burn and infection medication, including Amigen, the first intravenous protein injection for injured servicemen. Bootz Manufacturing made more gasoline field stoves for the military than any other company in the nation; and Shane Manufacturing made uniforms for the U.S. Army. American workers, still struggling through the Depression, flocked to Evansville from across the country for the high-paying jobs. Almost overnight, the city’s workforce more than tripled from 18,000 to 60,000—a stark contrast to the Depression years in which the city had suffered 25 percent unemployment. Collectively, the Evansville workers represented a vast home-front army. “We have done some amazing things in the 12 weeks since Pearl Harbor,” an editorial in the Sunday Courier and Press said. “Guns, boats, ammunition and planes will be leaving Evansville in a great stream along with a hundred other items so urgently needed that they mean literally the difference between life and death for our men in the Army and
Navy. A few months ago Evansville seemed to have been left out of the war industrial program. It now becomes one of the most active spots in the country. Not all of us can wear a uniform or do factory work. But all of us can and must cooperate in providing for those who can.” Providing living quarters for the new arrivals was an immediate necessity, and six large federal housing projects were envisioned. A civilian defense council was formed to help workers find suitable housing and, not incidentally, to guard against rent gouging. “Good housing for defense workers not only is our patriotic duty but it is our civic duty,” C. B. Enlow, the council’s director. The first completed housing project was Armory Apartments, with 12 eight-unit apartment buildings. Local residents of the area sued successfully to reduce the project’s size from 200 planned apartments, charging that the new housing was little more than a tenement and did not fit in with the existing neighborhood. Not everyone, it seemed, was thrilled by the defense boom’s impact on the city. Other housing projects included Fulton Square, Parkholm, Dixie Manor, Diamond Villa, and Gatewood Gar-
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dens. Gatewood was by far the largest, with 61 buildings containing 468 units. The sixth housing project, Mill Terrace, was reserved for African American workers. All the projects were made with cheap, wartime materials, with showers rather than bathtubs, gypsum-board walls, prefinished oak floors, and space heaters. The local housing authority emphasized that the buildings were intended strictly for wartime use and would be torn down afterward. (Most were indeed razed, but two of the housing projects—Diamond Villa and Fulton Square—were still intact as late as 2015, and vestiges of Diamond Villa remain today.) In addition to the housing projects, 16 licensed trailer parks sprang up in Evansville during the war, along with a number of individual trailers and unlicensed facilities scattered throughout the city. The lack of flush toilets was a common complaint from and about trailer park residents, and sanitation and safety issues were raised regularly with city officials. A deadly fire at one location, Trailer City, claimed the lives of two children on Christmas Eve 1943, and safety inspectors subsequently found that 75 percent of the site’s 103 trailers had dangerously inadequate wiring. Four-gallon fire pumps were moved to the park after the fire to prevent another such tragedy. Despite the federal housing projects, many defense workers had to scramble to find housing in furnished rooms, private homes, and apartments. In the spring of 1943, there were 1,000 applicants for 85 rooms in 16 renovated houses. Horror stories abounded of families crammed eight or nine to a room. Weary workers took turns sleeping in a single bed, according to their eight-hour shifts, in “hot sheet joints.” Two pressing problems were the lack of adequate daycare for the children of working parents—there was not a single local facility for children under age 2—and the need to find room for thousands of new students in overcrowded schools. Evansville and the surrounding Knight Township argued over which municipal body was responsible for educating the new students, and even the issue of whether it was legal to educate students who lived on tax-exempt government property. The city eventually took over the task, though Knight Township provided a handful of school buses to transport students to and from school. Working conditions at the various plants were dangerous, and the shipyard was particularly hazardous. James and Patricia Kellar, in their 1999 study, The Evansville Shipyard: Outside Any Shipbuilding Zone, vividly described the
Women made up more than a third of the workforce in Evansville’s war industries.
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day-to-day dangers of shipyard work: “The brilliant flashes emanating from hundreds of arc welding devices threatened eyesight almost continuously. Laborers worked high above ground on scaffolds and ship docks where a thoughtless step might result in a deadly fall. And those below were threatened by injury from plummeting tools and pieces of metal carelessly handled.” Posters everywhere instructed workers: “Wear your goggles.” The constant cacophony of pounding hammers, welding torches, and heavily laden trucks rattling down congested roadways to and from the shipyard heightened the danger for workers. One fatal noise-related mishap befell 46-year-old Jesse Carver, who was operating a jackhammer and did not hear the warning bell from an approaching crane that struck him and dragged him five feet, tearing one leg from the socket and one foot from an ankle. In all, 10 workers died in shipyard accidents during the war, and another 1,687 suffered disabling injuries, an average of nearly two per day for 30 months. Accidents were less frequent but not uncommon at Evansville’s other industrial plants. Adding to the hazards was a painful inflammation of the gums and mouth known as Vincent’s disease, which was transmitted through shared drinking fountains and indiscriminate spitting, was so widespread at the shipyard that it was dubbed “shipyard distemper.” Women constituted 34 percent of the workforce in Evansville’s war industries. They made up a sixth of the workforce at the shipyard, one-half at Republic Aviation, and almost two-thirds at the Chrysler ordnance plant. Their ages ranged from 21 to 70, with the “Servel Grandmothers Club” representing the top end of the range. One of the more iconic photographs of the American home front during World War II was a 1942 shot of Evansville Shipyard worker Evelyn Whitledge Cox, the first female welder, in her full welding gear. A slender 30-year-old, Cox maintained that her welding job wasn’t nearly as tiring as doing a day’s ironing. “This job is just like going to a picnic six days a week,” she told a reporter for the Sunday Courier and Press. “It never gets boring. Several times a day I get to switch from one kind of work to another, and that makes it interesting.” She said her 9-year-old son greeted her each day after work with the question, “How many ships did you build today, Mama?” A feature in the Sunday Courier and Press, by reporter Chickie Frieberg, touted “Woman’s Place in the War Plant” and detailed the full day that Chickie had spent riveting, welding, and helping construct an airplane wing. “Girl Reporter Rivets, Welds A Little, Drills, And, Lo,—An Airplane Wing Is Made,” ran the subhead. Concerted efforts were made to provide suitable after- hours recreation for the workers and servicemen. The Red Cross Canteen, across the street from the L&N Railroad
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TOP AND LEFT: EVANSVILLE SHIPYARD COLLECTION, EVANSVILLE VANDERBURGH PUBLIC LIBRARY (3); BOTTOM RIGHT: INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY
EVANSVILLE GOES TO WAR
TOP AND LEFT: EVANSVILLE SHIPYARD COLLECTION, EVANSVILLE VANDERBURGH PUBLIC LIBRARY (3); BOTTOM RIGHT: INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY
The Evansville Shipyard was the nation’s largest inland producer of LSTs (Landing Ship, Tanks), which were used in every Allied amphibious assault from Normandy to Okinawa. The shipyard employed 19,000 workers at its peak, and crowds filled the city’s waterfront area for the christening of each ship.
terminal, served free coffee and doughnuts to a staggering 1.6 million in-transit servicemen during the war. The abandoned passenger terminal of the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad was converted into a Whites-only USO facility. There were regular dances, balls, bridge parties, with volunteers from the Evansville Girls’ Service Club serving as dance partners for the GIs. Local women, both housewives and plant workers, also volunteered at the USO and the Red Cross Canteen. Evansville resident Dorothy Colbert remembered that she had personally danced with more than 200 servicemen at the club and maintained a wartime correspondence with some of them, but she said that “after a while you ran out of things to talk about be-
cause we were only together for a few hours on that one night.” She stopped corresponding altogether after one of her letters came back to her marked “deceased.” The shipyard and the defense plants fielded their own intramural baseball, softball, basketball, and bowling teams, with competition provided by other plants as well as athletes from area colleges and universities. The shipyard also sponsored a women’s baseball team and put on a gala picnic at a city park to celebrate the laying of the 100th LST keel in July 1944. An estimated 36,000 workers, their families, and soldiers from nearby Camp Breckinridge, Kentucky, attended the picnic. A separate picnic was held for the African American workers at Stockwell Woods. The
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Evansville’s 48 defense plants met very high production standards during the war.
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Smith reported having no problems with her White coworkers. “They didn’t have time to be prejudiced,” she said. Other plants were more segregated. Republic Aviation had 4.3 percent Black workers, Republic Aviation employed 1.3 percent, Briggs had 1.1 percent, and International Steel and Hoosier Lamp and Stamping had none. Evansville’s increasing prominence in the war effort brought some big-name entertainers and other celebrities to the city to headline fundraising events for war bonds. The famous comedy team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello—the most popular movie stars in the world at the time—visited in August 1942 and helped raise more than $650,000 in one day. Abbott and Costello led a 10-mile automobile caravan through the city and performed their crowd-pleasing “Who’s on First?” skit at the Evansville Coliseum. President Roosevelt himself had paid a brief unannounced visit to Republic Aviation a few months earlier. Altogether, Evansville’s residents and workers purchased a remarkable $150 million in war bonds and stamps. A longtime resident recalled later that the city had a reputation as “a wild, wide-open town.” Camp Breckinridge, 30 miles away, sent between 7,000 and 10,000 soldiers into Evansville each week on leave. Military police patrolled the city alongside local policemen, seeking to keep order. As in virtually all the world’s cities during wartime, prostitution was an around-the-clock activity in Evansville. In the city’s traditional red-light district, between North First and High Streets, 26 brothels flourished—24 for Whites and two for Blacks. Pressure from the U.S. Army forced the city to close the district in April 1942. Periodic crackdowns on prostitution at bars, city parks, and the bus station had little effect, particularly in the face of a new phenomenon: “Little Casuals”—local teenage girls who were engaging in sexual activities, paid or unpaid, with transient soldiers. Complicating matters was the influx of experienced prostitutes who drifted from town to town, using as many as eight aliases at a time to confound police. The spread of sexually transmitted diseases got so bad that the navy took to housing crews for newly completed LSTs in the hamlet of Crane, 100 miles away, and putting them aboard ship as soon as they arrived in town, without a minute of liberty in Evansville itself. Despite the housing shortages, workplace dangers, and endemic racism, the 48 defense plants in Evansville performed at a very high standard throughout the war. In all, 13 Evansville plants received the top army-navy “E” ranking, which only 5 percent of all defense plants across the nation achieved during the war. As the valedictory edition of the shipyard’s in-house newspaper, The Invader, noted in May 1945: “Evansville war plants met production quotas that brought amazing victories at Salerno, Anzio, Normandy, Leyte—on all the battle fronts. The splendid team-
TOP: GEORGE R. SKADDING (ASSOCIATED PRESS); BELOW: U.S. NAVY (EVANSVILLE VANDERBURGH PUBLIC LIBRARY)
National Guard Armory on the city’s east side offered continuing-education classes for servicemen and rooms for card playing and reading. And the ornate Grand Theater showed first-run motion pictures. The separate housing and recreation facilities for Black workers exemplified the harsh racial prejudice that still existed throughout Indiana and the rest of the nation. Evansville, a border city, was described by Hoosier historian Max Cavnes as “essentially southern in outlook.” Race relations in Evansville, as in the rest of the country, were troubled and sometimes violent. Before the war, Black residents were limited to the rundown neighborhood of Baptisttown and, after 1938, the federal housing project known as Lincoln Gardens and, later, Mill Terrace. In 1943 tensions boiled over when White soldiers from Camp Breckinridge clashed with local African American teenagers. In one altercation, two soldiers, one Black and one White, exchanged shots, and a White paratrooper lieutenant was seriously injured in a separate scuffle. A city official blamed the fighting on “the unruliness of hotheads and smart alecks on both sides.” A few relatively enlightened individuals protested the segregated conditions. Twenty White soldiers walked out of an Evansville restaurant when it refused to serve three of their African American comrades, and two White college students were arrested for disorderly conduct because they refused to leave the “colored” section of the Greyhound bus station in Evansville. A letter to the editor of the Sunday Courier and Press apologized to two Black women who had been embarrassed at a local concert when Whites seated next to them walked out in protest. For the most part, race relations were no better or worse in Evansville than the rest of the country. Although some African American workers in the defense plants were given the opportunity to work on production lines, the majority were restricted to such unskilled positions as common laborer, janitor, waiter, or plant guard. White workers frequently threatened to strike if their Black coworkers were promoted. In March 1944, an unfounded rumor that the shipyard was planning to import 300 Black welders from the South led to mass meetings and another threatened walkout. “We don’t work them with on an equal basis where we come from, and we’re not going to do it here,” a spokesman for the White workers declared. Eventually the rumor died down and work continued as before. At Chrysler, which employed by far the highest number of African American workers (11.5 percent), Black worker Lucy
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TOP: GEORGE R. SKADDING (ASSOCIATED PRESS); BELOW: U.S. NAVY (EVANSVILLE VANDERBURGH PUBLIC LIBRARY)
From top: President Franklin D. Roosevelt tours the Republic Aviation plant in Evansville in 1943; the 4:30 p.m. shift change (one of three each day) at the Evansville Shipyard.
work among civic organization, labor unions, churches, and retail businessmen is in part responsible for ‘E’ flags over Evansville plants, and battle pennants over tiny atolls in the Pacific. It is a record in which all may be justly proud.” The Evansville boom ended just as abruptly as it had begun. Hard on the heels of V-E Day, May 8, 1945, the Missouri Valley Bridge and Iron Company, which operated the Evansville Shipyard, began transferring its top supervisors and skilled workers to Hawaii, where the company had a new contract to manage a naval ship-repair operation. The number of workers at the shipyard steadily declined, and
on September 5 the last remaining government order was canceled. Three weeks later the navy officially declared the shipyard surplus property. On the night of January 26, 1946, the last of a series of fires destroyed much of the shipyard, which by then was deserted. The end was equally swift for Republic Aviation. After V-J Day, August 15, marked the surrender of all Japanese forces, the army notified the company that all further production of P-47 Thunderbolts was to cease immediately. “When we went to the plant, they told us not to report the next day, but to come back in two weeks for our separation papers and our last check,” a worker remembered later. “That was it.” International Harvest Company purchased the physical plant in early 1946. Halfway between the two main closings, the city held the last massive public celebration of the war years. On Saturday, June 23—“Evansville Day”—some 150,000 residents turned out for a parade down Main Street. Many local defense companies sponsored floats in the parade, the largest gathering in the city’s history, and groups of veterans and civilians marched behind the floats to the bright strains of martial music. That night, at a banquet in the McCurdy Hotel downtown, John W. Snyder, the federal government’s chief loan administrator, saluted the city’s war efforts in his keynote speech. “Every resident of Evansville is entitled to feel the surge of satisfaction that follows a job well done—a job that has contributed its full share to the national accomplishment,” Snyder told the crowd. “Of this, your production of aircraft, tanks, trucks, mobile equipment, ships and ordnance is adequate evidence.” If anything, Snyder was underplaying the city’s immense contribution to the national war effort. Few American cities had done more than Evansville to make the United States the “great arsenal of democracy,” as President Roosevelt had stressed in the run-up to the war. The city’s remarkable wartime production was a lasting tribute to the patriotism, pride, sense of civic duty, and sheer grit of Evansville’s longtime residents and the thousands of new workers who poured into town to wield the hammer and the blowtorch. “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job,” British prime minister Winston Churchill had promised four years earlier, and the Evansville defense plants, singly and together, had done just that. MHQ Roy Morris Jr., a prize-winning historian, is the author of nine books, including, most recently, Gertrude Stein Has Arrived: The Homecoming of a Literary Legend (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).
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OUR MAN IN HAVANA
In 1896 Harry Scovel went to Cuba to report on the revolt against Spanish rule. Soon he was one of the world’s best-known war correspondents. By John Vacha
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The battleship USS Maine was anchored in Havana Harbor on February 14, 1898, the day before a massive explosion of unknown origin sank it, precipitating the Spanish-American War.
NAWROCKI/CLASSICSTOCK (GETTY IMAGES)
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HARRY SCOVEL
Scovel was determined to report on Cuba’s resistance to Spanish oppression.
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Scovel also became a member of Troop A, an independent military company formed after the civil unrest surrounding the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Known variously as the First City Troop and the Black Horse Troop, it had become a unit of the Ohio National Guard. Its members hailed largely from the upper classes and drilled in military skills, especially horsemanship. Scovel must have fit right in, having equestrian skills previously learned at a Michigan military academy and possibly honed during stints at Western ranches. He also served as company bugler for two years. Membership in a mounted drill team was expensive, as was moving in sporting circles. Despite a good salary and free room at the Cleveland Athletic Club, Scovel found himself in serious debt. Back in Wooster, his father offered to settle his debts if he agreed to take a job with an insurance company in Pittsburgh. Harry went to Pittsburgh but was saved from an insurance career by fate. Early that year a full-fledged insurrection had broken out in Cuba, and Harry went to a rally in support of the Cubans. Scovel became an instant convert—the rebel had found his cause. Stories about Cuban resistance to Spanish oppression had begun dominating the front pages of American newspapers in the embryonic days of “yellow journalism”—the sensationalistic, scaremongering style of newspapering designed to drive up circulation at the expense of truth. Scovel was seized with the desire to help tell that story and arranged to send copy to several Western newspapers as well as to the New York Herald. With the instinct of a born reporter, he grasped the importance of getting to the sources of the news. Bypassing Key West and Havana, sources of most insurrection stories, Scovel hopped a steamer to Cienfuegos on the island’s southern coast. From there, with the aid of friendly Cubans, he made his way to the camp of Máximo Gómez. Gómez was one of the insurgency’s three top leaders, the others being Antonio Maceo and Calixto García. Elbert Hubbard, a famous American writer, would make one of them a household name with a story titled “A Message to García,” in which he related how President William McKinley dispatched “a fellow by the name of Rowan,” who secretly landed in Cuba, “disappeared into the jungle, and… traversed a hostile country on foot” to deliver McKinley’s letter to the Cuban commander. It takes nothing away from Rowan to observe that for three years before his mission, a few newspaper correspondents had routinely been making their way to the rebel camps and getting out their stories.
OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ULLSTEIN BILD DTL. (GETTY); NEW YORK WORLD; GRANGER; BETTMANN (GETTY)
I
t wasn’t the first time that Harry Scovel had found himself in a Cuban jail. In the past, however, he’d been imprisoned by the Spanish for his unauthorized coverage of the Cuban insurrection. This time it was his own side—the U.S. Army—that had clapped him in the calaboose. He was there for violating a cardinal rule of reporting by making himself part of the story. In the eyes of the army, he was there for a far more serious offense. Pondering his possible fate, he might have envied the vermin whose cell he was sharing. Not only had he struck an officer, but the officer happened to be the commanding general. Sylvester Henry Scovel had always been a rebel. Born in Pittsburgh in 1869 to Sylvester Finian Scovel, a Presbyterian minister, his middle name honored his maternal uncle, Henry Woodruff, who had evidently been a paragon of deportment. He’d so often heard “Why can’t you be more like your Uncle Henry?” from his mother that he never used his hated middle name in adulthood. For friends who may have considered “Sylvester” too stuffy, he answered to “Harry.” When Scovel was 14, his father was named president of the University (now College) of Wooster, and the family moved to Ohio. Harry entered the school’s preparatory division but scotched his father’s dream that he might become the fourth in a line of Scovel ministers. Avowing atheism and declaring for a career in engineering, he enrolled in the University of Michigan but distinguished himself more in crusading against the fraternity system than excelling in his studies. He dropped out his sophomore year. After a series of jobs around the United States that constituted a course of practical education, Scovel landed in Cleveland and achieved a measure of success as the general manager of the Cleveland Athletic Club. It’s possible that doors were open to him through a collateral branch of the family that included Philo Scovill, an entrepreneur, banker, and railroad director. Harry nonetheless made a name for himself by opening membership in the club to hitherto untapped social classes, including young Irish boxers from the working class. He even wrote the libretto to an operetta about early Cleveland that played to standingroom-only audiences for three nights.
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OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ULLSTEIN BILD DTL. (GETTY); NEW YORK WORLD; GRANGER; BETTMANN (GETTY)
Clockwise from top left: Officers in the army of General Máximo Gómez, the commander in chief of Cuba’s insurgent forces; Harry Scovel vaulted to fame as a correspondent in the Spanish-American War; Gómez on his horse; U.S. infantrymen in frontline trenches as they await orders to charge San Juan Hill on July 1, 1898.
“They are taking chances that no war correspondents ever took in any war in any part of the world,” wrote Richard Harding Davis. “For this is not a war—it is a state of lawless butchery, and the rights of correspondents…and of noncombatants are not recognized.” Among the chances they ran, he said, were “being put in prison and left to die of fever.” Davis himself was an established writer of descriptive reportage and short fiction rather than a war cor-
respondent. Sent by William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal early in 1897 to send back stories on “the Horrors of the Cuban War,” he never reached the actual field, settling instead for “a car window view of things.” Most reporters in Cuba were confined to Havana and the railroads and subject to military censorship. General Aresenio Martínez Campos, the Spanish commander, had constructed a line of fortifications along the principal rail-
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XXXXXXXXXX
General Valeriano Weyler, the Spanish commander in Cuba, had little love for war correspondents, whom he branded “meddlesome scribblers,” and barred them from accompanying forces on either side.
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Scovel returned to the United States at the end of 1895, partly to recover from an infected wound and partly to report in person to a new employer: Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, formidable rival of Hearst’s Journal. Change of a more portentous nature was taking place in Cuba, where Spain replaced General Campos with General Valeriano Weyler, known to history by the epithet “Butcher Weyler.” The new commander in chief had little love for “meddlesome scribblers” and barred journalists from accompanying either the Spanish or the insurgent forces. When Scovel returned to Cuba early in 1896, he went with the mission of ascertaining whether the stories of Spanish atrocities that had been coming out of the island were true. Ignoring Weyler’s fiat, he traveled with Maceo’s forces in Havana Province. In one of journalism’s earliest instances of investigative reporting, he began documenting deeds against noncombatants by Spanish forces that would later be considered war crimes. Maintaining that he went with a certain amount of skepticism, Scovel uncovered examples of barbarity “so beastly, so indecent no Apache could have conceived anything equal to it.” His reports began appearing in the World in May, including a gruesome description of mutilated Cuban corpses: The skulls of all were split to pieces down to the eyes. Some of these were gouged out. All the bodies had been stabbed by sword bayonets and hacked by sabers until
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LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: SOTHEBY’S
Scovel documented the barbaric acts of Spanish forces against noncombatants.
only for their reportage but for their ability to get their stories to their papers.
MINISTERIO DE DEFENSA, SPAIN
road line, bisecting the island across its narrow waist. Underbrush and jungle were cleared on both sides of the tracks, which were guarded by barbed wire barricades and blockhouses. It wasn’t entirely impenetrable; rebels occasionally crossed in force. A handful of reporters also moved freely across the line, notably George Rea of the New York Herald, Grover Flint of the Journal, and Scovel. The journalists who managed to reach the interior provided antidotes for some of the fantasy accounts coming out of Havana and Key West. Havana was never under siege; “battles” were more often skirmishes or sorties. This was classic guerrilla warfare, as Gómez and his peers had no intention of trying to capture Havana or engage superior Spanish forces in open battle. Their strategy consisted of bringing the Spanish to heel by burning the sugarcane fields and ruining the Cuban economy. Getting stories of this irregular warfare to their newspapers could be as difficult for reporters as reaching the scenes of the action. To avoid having their copy eviscerated by the Spanish censors, reporters had to smuggle their stories out. Some papers sent boats to the Cuban coast at arranged times and places to receive dispatches from their correspondents. Some reporters hired couriers to carry their reports to the coast. Scovel and Rea were valued not
Scovel tried to arrange for divers to examine the wreckage of the USS Maine (left), but Spanish authorities squelched the idea; Charles D. Sigsbee (right), the ship’s captain, also tried to keep Scovel away from the site.
LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: SOTHEBY’S
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I could not count the cuts; they were indistinguishable. The bodies had almost lost semblance of human form….Fingers and toes were missing….The Spanish soldiers habitually cut off the ears of the Cuban dead and retain them as trophies. Scovel catalogued 212 cases of Spanish brutality, backed up by 196 affidavits. His dispatches continued through June. “Extermination of the Cuban people under the cloak of civilized warfare is Spain’s settled purpose,” he wrote. The World praised its man in Cuba as having “all the great and high qualities of the war correspondent—devotion to duty, accuracy, graphic descriptive power, absolute courage and skill.” After a sojourn in New York, Scovel was back in Cuba early in 1897, in defiance of a $5,000 reward that Weyler had offered for his capture. Though he was probably traveling incognito, his luck soon ran out. Fitzhugh Lee, the U.S. consul general in Havana, reported that Scovel had been arrested on February 5 as he was trying to send out dispatches on the southern coast. He was held on a laundry list of charges, including crossing Spanish lines and communicating with the enemy. Some were capital offenses. Scovel’s capture proved to be less problematic for the prisoner than for Spain, which was eager to avoid inflaming anti-Spanish sentiment in America. Sent to a prison in Sancti Spiritus, in the middle of the island, Scovel found his accommodations a far cry from death row. Cuban sympathizers flooded his cell with flowers and food. “Señor Sylvester” had become a folk hero to many for his exploits in
getting their story out to the world. He even managed to send stories to the World from his cell, datelined “Calaboose No. 1, Prison of Sancti-Spiritus.” Pulitzer’s newspaper promptly took up the cause of its imprisoned reporter, which it presented as a matter of national honor. Illustrating its story of his arrest was a four-column drawing of Scovel on horseback, a military- style mustache over smoothly shaven jaws and chin, his eyes shaded by a rakish, wide-brimmed hat. Dozens of American newspapers joined the crusade to spring Scovel. Fourteen state legislatures and the U.S. Congress passed resolutions urging the State Department to take action. Many stressed his status as a noncombatant, with the World observing that the nearest thing to a weapon he carried was “a typewriting machine.” Spain’s ambassador in Washington informed Madrid that any injury to Scovel might fatally turn public opinion in America against Spain. Madrid in turn instructed a reluctant Weyler to release his prisoner. Scovel returned to the United States a conquering hero. He met President McKinley in the White House shortly thereafter. Days later he married Frances Cabanné, a Saint Louis socialite he had met the previous fall. The World sent its new star reporter to the Balkans to cover the Greco-Turkish War, but the war was essentially over before Scovel arrived. He went to Alaska to cover the Klondike gold rush, but the World soon summoned him back for reassignment. Spain had recalled Weyler, clearing the way for Scovel’s return to Cuba. Taking Frances with him, Scovel submitted
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HARRY SCOVEL
Scovel noted “some doubt as to whether the explosion took place ON the Maine.”
At 9:40 p.m. on February 15, 1898, Harry and Frances Scovel were dining near Havana’s Central Park with George Rea of the Herald when a terrific explosion rattled dishes and shattered most of the windows in the neighborhood. It came from the harbor, brightly illuminated against the moonless sky. After seeing Mrs. Scovel to safety, the two reporters raced to the scene of the explosion and bluffed their way through a police cordon by claiming to be officers from the blazing Maine. Havana’s police chief waved them into his boat, which set off toward the ship through exploding small-arms ammunition overhead and bodies and debris in the water. There was little left to see, other than that most of the damage had occurred in the forward end of the ship. Captain Charles Sigsbee ordered survivors to abandon what was left of the Maine as it settled slowly to the bottom of the harbor. Scovel and Rea returned to the Havana telegraph office, where only three messages were allowed to go out that night. First was Sigsbee’s terse message to the Navy Department, then a hundred-word dispatch to the Associated Press. The only exclusive report was Scovel’s dispatch to the World, written on a blank, prestamped cable form he had surreptitiously lifted from the censor’s desk that very morning. The most provocative of its five sentences stated: “There is some doubt as to whether the explosion took place ON the Maine.” That question would inspire screaming headlines in the yellow press for the next several weeks. If the explosion had taken place on the ship, the implication was that it was likely accidental in origin. If it had not taken place on the ship, the cause was assumed to be a torpedo or a mine,
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presumably of Spanish origin. (Generally ignored was the observation that Spain had less to gain from the Maine’s sinking than did the insurgents.) Scovel, on behalf of the World, tried to arrange for divers to examine the wreckage, but the Spanish squelched that idea. Instead, a U.S. naval court of inquiry came to Havana to make an official report. Spain, with Captain Sigsbee’s approbation, tried to keep American correspondents away from the investigation, but Scovel continued to visit the site without permission. “The ubiquitous American newspaper correspondent could not be denied,” Sigsbee wryly commented. By the end of March the court of inquiry had issued its finding that the cause of the Maine’s destruction had been a submarine mine of indeterminate origin. It may not have been the chief casus belli, but it stirred up more war fever than the cause of the Cubans ever had. The last of the American reporters left Havana with Consul General Lee on April 10—the eve of McKinley’s war message to Congress. Key West and Tampa became the mobilization points for the Atlantic Fleet, the Fifth Army Corps, and the war correspondents who would cover their campaigns. The reporters included old Cuba hands like Scovel and a couple hundred newcomers to the theater of war. “Amid the surging excitement of Key West, no figure moved with calmer assurance than the great Sylvester Scovel,” observed Ralph Paine, of the Philadelphia Press. “To be ignorant of Sylvester Scovel was to argue yourself unknown…. Through the daily journalism of his time this energetic young man whizzed like a detonating meteor.” Some representatives of the fourth estate were even more celebrated than Scovel, notably literary stars such as Richard Harding Davis and Stephen Crane. Davis returned to Cuba for the Journal, Crane would write for the World—two giants of letters facing off for the two giants of yellow journalism. Regular reporters, perhaps, were less impressed. The newspapers assigned veteran correspondents to both of the stars, Christopher Michaelson to Davis and Scovel to Crane—not to help with their writing, but simply to get them to the news and to get their copy while it was still news. Scovel was put in general charge of the World’s team, telling Paine that he might travel on the paper’s dispatch boat, the Triton, in return for sharing his copy with the World. When Rear Admiral William Sampson was ordered to blockade Havana with the Atlantic Fleet, the correspondents followed in a variety of chartered craft. In need of detailed information, Sampson could think of no better source than Scovel. Putting the Triton at the service of the U.S. Navy, Scovel sent reporters and a photographer ashore to obtain intelligence and pictures of Havana’s defenses. He sent messengers to make contact with Gómez, inform him
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to the formality of an arrest on the old charges and release under parole. He was permitted to resume work as a correspondent, and Ramón Blanco, the new Spanish commander, even allowed him to cross Spanish lines to visit Gómez’s camp. He was accompanied by the U.S. consul at Sancti Spiritus, who was carrying Spain’s formal offer of local autonomy for Cuba, to be guaranteed by the United States. As reported in the World, Gómez replied that Spain’s offer was too late. Scovel returned to Havana, where anti- American riots by the pro-Spanish faction broke out in January 1898. Secretary of the Navy John D. Long ordered the USS Maine to Havana harbor. Ostensibly it was a goodwill gesture; implicitly the battleship put Spain on notice that the U.S. government stood ready, if necessary, to protect American lives and property.
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From left: Major General William Rufus Shafter, in a cartoon captioned “Putting Yellow Journalism in Its Place,” seemingly prepares to drop Scovel in the ocean; Rear Admiral William Sampson, the Atlantic Fleet’s commander.
of America’s declaration of war, and discuss ideas for joint operations. Paine later complained of searching in vain for the Triton to take his dispatch because Scovel had commandeered it “to take soundings for the Admiral.” Paine’s feelings toward Scovel oscillated between hero worship and resentment. “Much as I admired Sylvester Scovel the magnificent,” he said, “it was to wish that he might have attended more strictly to the newspaper game and left the management of the war to Admiral Sampson.” Scovel didn’t always take the Triton. When Spanish forces captured two of his agents, he boarded the navy tug Uncas to help negotiate for their release. This proved to be a violation of navy regulations, leading Scovel to be officially barred from all naval vessels and stations. Sampson wrote to Secretary Long, explaining the mitigating circumstances behind Scovel’s offense. “Mr. Scovel,” he wrote, “has done such exceedingly good work among the insurgents, and given us so much valuable information at very great risk to himself, that I should feel obliged if you would enable me to act at my discretion in the matter.” Scovel appealed to both Long and McKinley to have the ban lifted, but in the meantime he simply ignored it. He hopped aboard the armed tug Tecumseh to help land two Cuban couriers on the coast, coming under fire himself in the process.
In June, however, action in the Caribbean dramatically shifted from northwest Cuba to the extreme southeastern coast. Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete had left the Cape Verde Islands with a Spanish fleet and disappeared into the Atlantic. Guesses as to his destination ranged from the West Indies to population centers along the eastern coast of the United States. New York’s World and Herald jointly sent a dispatch boat on a complete 1,500-mile circumnavigation of Cuba that turned up, Scovel wrote, “no Spanish warships in the harbor or on the high seas.” Soon a report came in that Cervera had found a harbor in Santiago, and Sampson’s fleet and its newspaper satellites weighed anchors for the other end of Cuba. Sampson proceeded to bottle up Cervera in Santiago Bay while awaiting the arrival of Major General William Rufus Shafter and the Fifth Army Corps, which would have to take the city of Santiago before Sampson could enter the harbor. Meanwhile, Sampson was in need of intelligence on this new theater of operations, and one of his primary sources again proved to be Scovel. Taking Crane with him, Scovel landed in rebel territory west of Santiago and passed through Spanish lines. After climbing a 2,000-foot mountain, they were rewarded with a bird’s-eye view of Santiago Bay, which Scovel later described in the World:
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There upon the bosom of the green-fringed harbor lay Cervera’s once dreaded squadron. There were the four big warships, easily recognized—the Cristobal Colon, Vizcaya, Almirante Oquendo, Infanta Maria Teresa, and the old Reina Mercedes…I climbed a tree and made a rough sketch of the scene before me, so that a working map could be made from it, and to fix the location of all important points firmly in my memory. It was easy to see why Sampson was willing to overlook regulations in favor of reporters; Shafter proved to be a different story. A Medal of Honor recipient for his actions in the Civil War, Shafter now cut quite a different figure. At 300 pounds he could no longer mount a horse. Colonel Theodore Roosevelt of the volunteer “Rough Riders” regiment bore him no respect, writing his friend Henry Cabot Lodge that the commanding general was “criminally incompetent” and guilty of gross mismanagement. Reporters were equally disrespectful, and with reason. Shafter’s aide de camp had called them a nuisance and threatened to expel them from the expeditionary force. When the redoubtable Davis tried to tell the general what kind of writing he did, Shafter rudely cut him off. “I do not give a damn what you are,” he told Davis. “I’ll treat you all alike.” By the end of June the Fifth Corps was in position east of Santiago. Reporters hadn’t been expelled from its lines,
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President William McKinley intervened in late 1898 to allow Scovel to once again accompany U.S. military forces.
but in the face of shortages for the troops, the commissary frequently denied their efforts to purchase rations. On the eve of the climactic battle Scovel organized the World’s coverage and set up a camp with refreshments on the height of El Pozo just behind the lines. During the battle he followed the troops to Kettle and San Juan Hills, writing his dispatch under a tree and warning other correspondents to avoid an area covered by Spanish sharpshooters. A messenger carried his story on horseback to the World’s base, announcing that Americans had carried the day and cleared the way to the very gates of Santiago. For two weeks the Fifth Corps stood before those gates, until Shafter had negotiated the surrender of not only the city’s garrison but all Spanish forces in the district. He arranged for a formal transfer of power on Sunday, July 17, and let it be known that correspondents were not invited. Some of the more enterprising ones managed to slip into the city anyway. In the plaza fronting the governor’s palace, an American regiment and its band stood at attention to witness the raising of the Stars and Stripes atop the palace. Ralph Paine described the bit of improvisational theater that followed. As three officers bearing the colors approached the flagpole, suddenly “there appeared the active, compact figure of Sylvester Scovel, Special Commissioner of the ‘New York World.’ ” What might have been seen as an unwarranted intrusion seemed to Paine a matter of course. “At this particular moment in the histories of Spain and the United States, what was more natural and to be accepted than that Scovel should be in the center of the stage?” Shafter didn’t see it that way. Livid, he bellowed, “Throw him off!” As several soldiers moved to carry out the order, Scovel beat a tactical retreat from the roof. He rushed into the square to confront Shafter. Words were exchanged; then more than words. “He [Shafter] told Sylvester Scovel to shut up or be locked up, and brushed him to one side,” Paine wrote. “Sylvester Scovel swung his good right arm and attempted to knock the head off the major-general commanding the American Army in Cuba.” Shafter ordered the reporter arrested, and Scovel was summarily hauled off to what was described as “a moss-covered calaboose” while the surrender ceremony proceeded. Scovel had been “abusive and insubordinate,” Shafter reported to the War Department, “one word leading to another, until he struck at me, but didn’t hit me. I could have tried him and had him shot…but I preferred to fire him from the island.” As Paine told it, Scovel’s swing wasn’t a complete miss: “It was a flurried blow, without much science behind it, and Scovel’s fist glanced off the general’s double chin, but it left a mark there, a red scratch visible for some days.”
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HARRY SCOVEL
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CORBIS HISTORICAL (GETTY IMAGES)
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U.S. soldiers step out of their trenches and cheer on July 17, 1898, after receiving the news that Spanish forces, led by Brigadier General José Toral y Velázquez, have surrendered the city of Santiago de Cuba.
“Never again do I want to pass a night in this hellhole with all these creeping things,” avowed a somewhat chastened Scovel on his release the morning after his incarceration. He realized, said a fellow reporter, that “he would be shot in any country with a military system.” No doubt Shafter on his part would have had second thoughts about executing a reputed acquaintance of President McKinley. Scovel later got to tell his side of the story, claiming that he had approached Shafter to apologize for disrupting his ceremony. “You son of a bitch,” he quoted Shafter as replying, “you and all your tribe are goddamned nuisances.” Scovel took exception to the general’s language, Shafter hit him, and he returned the blow. Reaction to the contretemps initially ran against Scovel. He was banned from all U.S. Army and Navy bases; even the World decided it could dispense with his services. Before long, however, even the fastidious Davis said that he had left Santiago for fear that he’d “do what Scovel did.” The World reconsidered and invited Scovel to write his own account of the affair for the paper. He appealed personally to McKinley to rescind his banishment from accompanying U.S. military forces, which the president did by the end of 1898. Scovel turned down the World’s offer of a European correspondent position in favor of returning to Cuba. He covered the early days of the American occupation until the subject faded in public interest. His war reporting
days were over after one war, but in what has been dubbed “The Correspondents’ War,” he had been the undisputed leader of the pack. “From the perspective of editors and reporters in the field,” noted media historian Mary S. Mander, “Sylvester Scovel—rather than literary star Davis or his New York World counterpart Stephen Crane—was the beau ideal.” Scovel became a consulting engineer for the U.S. occupation government before engaging in a number of business ventures, including one of Cuba’s first automobile dealerships. But his life was cut short at age 35 from complications that followed an operation in a Havana hospital to remove an abscess of the liver. Frances brought Scovel’s remains to Wooster for burial. Troop A sent a mass of roses that covered the casket. Members of the Ohio National Guard who had seen duty in Cuba served as pallbearers, fired a volley in salute, and sounded taps. The family raised a tombstone bearing the name Scovel, under which was carved Sylvester Henry, 1869–1905. Uncle Henry appears to have had the last word. MHQ John Vacha is a retired teacher of history and journalism. He is the author of four books on the history of regional theater and is completing a book on Cleveland’s Playhouse Square theater district.
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OPPOSITE: ASSOCIATED PRESS; RIGHT: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS
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LIFE SAVERS A gallery of objects that, in war, have often meant the difference between life and death.
I
n his celebrated treatise On War, Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian general and military theorist, ruminated about the role of luck—good and bad—in the prosecution of war. “Through the element of chance,” he observes in the first chapter, “guesswork and luck come to play a great part in war.” Elsewhere he writes: “In the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards.” Clausewitz, of course, was not alone. His erstwhile adversary, Napoleon Bonaparte, who crushed the Prussian army at the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt in 1806, believed that his first wife, Josephine, brought him good luck and that he was guided by a lucky star. Baron Agathon Jean François Fain, who in 1813 became Napoleon’s private secretary and whose published reminiscences and memoirs are important sources for historians, wrote that the French emperor once turned to him and remarked, “In war, luck is half of everything.” The artifacts on these pages, however, suggest that Napoleon was only half right. Sometimes, in war, luck is everything.
OPPOSITE: ASSOCIATED PRESS; RIGHT: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS
Stronger than speeding shrapnel (opposite). On March 7,
1968, at the height of the war in Vietnam, this unidentified marine at the Khe Sanh Combat Base, a U.S. outpost south of the Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone, was showered with shrapnel from enemy artillery. He was slightly wounded in the arm, but none of the fragments made it even to his helmet liner (though they did leave him with a splitting headache).
Where there’s a smoke...(right). W. S. Main, a British rifleman in World War I, was carrying this metal cigarette case when he was struck by a piece of shrapnel from enemy fire. Main survived the wound inflicted by the shell fragment, which pierced the silver-colored case below the insignia of his London Rifle Regiment, and after receiving medical treatment he returned to active service at the front. MHQ Winter 2022
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Bullet catcher (right). The Battle of Antietam, on September 17, 1862, was the bloodiest day in U.S. history.
This 10-by-4-inch section of wood from a tree on the battlefield has what appears to be a .58-caliber minié ball lodged in it. A typewritten caption reads “Rebel Bullet, Bloody Lane”—a reference to the site of the battle’s greatest carnage.
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LEFT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS; RIGHT: AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL; BOTTOM: U.S. MARINE CORPS HISTORY DIVISION
Good-luck token (left). John W. Trickett, a private in the British Army during World War I, would have been hit in the heart by a German bullet if not for the 1889 penny he kept in his breast pocket. Instead, the bullet ricocheted up his nose and out through the back of his left ear, leaving Trickett deaf on one side—but very much alive.
LEFT: SOUTH WEST NEWS SERVICE (2); RIGHT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS
LIFE SAVERS
Collision coverage (left). Collectors of militaria covet examples of rounds that have collided in midair,
presumably sparing at least one life in the process. This Civil War relic is made up of two joined carbine bullets.
Too close for comfort (right). Major Thomas Henry Darley of Australia’s 9th Light Horse Regiment was wearing this pith helmet at Gallipoli on June 12, 1915, when Turkish forces opened fire. The fuze of a shrapnel shell sailed above Darley. It “burst about 10 feet overhead, behind me,” he later recalled, and “went clean through my helmet, without touching my head, but the helmet flew about 30 yards.” The shell killed two other men and wounded four more.
LEFT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS; RIGHT: AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL; BOTTOM: U.S. MARINE CORPS HISTORY DIVISION
LEFT: SOUTH WEST NEWS SERVICE (2); RIGHT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS
The lighter side of battle.
Lance Corporal Ernst Woodruff, a machine gunner with Company H, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, in Vietnam in 1969, holds his Zippo lighter, which had been hit by a piece of shrapnel while in his pocket.
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The good book (bottom). Private Edwin C. Hall of the 10th Vermont Volunteer Infantry Regiment was fortunate to be carrying this pocket bible in the Battle of Sailor’s Creek on April 6, 1985, as it was all that stood between him and a Confederate minié ball. “I have always put my trust in the Lord,” Hall later wrote. “This prayer-book saved my life.”
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LEFT: SOUTH WEST NEWS SERVICE; RIGHT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS; BOTTOM: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS (GETTY IMAGES)
Buckle up (top right). Michael Miller fought with the 1st Pennsylvania Reserves in the Battle of Gettysburg, where a Confederate bullet hit him in the belly. “It bruised me a good deal,” Miller later recalled, “but I thank God it struck me there for had it not hit the belt plate, I would this day be in the ground for it would have went through my bowels.”
TOP LEFT: NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM, LONDON; TOP RIGHT: GETTYSBURG MUSEUM OF HISTORY; BOTTOM: HERITAGE AUCTIONS
Bulletproof penny (top left). An unidentified British infantryman is thought to have had this King George III cartwheel penny in his pocket at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. An enemy musket ball made quite an impression when it collided with the massive copper coin head-on, but the soldier presumably counted his blessings afterward.
LIFE SAVERS
The time of his life (left). Corporal Walter Davis was serving with the British Army’s North Staffordshire Regiment
in France during World War I when a German bullet hit his solid silver pocket watch and, miraculously, bounced off. The bullet shattered the watch crystal and chipped the enamel-coated dial but didn’t leave so much as a mark on Davis.
A case in point (right). An unidentified Union army conscript carried this tin-and-leather cartridge case throughout
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TOP LEFT: NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM, LONDON; TOP RIGHT: GETTYSBURG MUSEUM OF HISTORY; BOTTOM: HERITAGE AUCTIONS
Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Atlanta campaign and March to the Sea in 1864. The case saved his life by stopping the .58 caliber Confederate Gardner bullet that pierced both of its flaps and damaged one of its tin inserts.
Hole in the… A wounded British soldier shows off his steel Brodie helmet, which had been pierced by a piece of shrapnel, during fighting on the Somme front near the French village of Hamel in December 1916.
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WITNESS TO THE WHITE WAR
In Carnia, Powell wrote, “the guns are emplaced in ice caverns which can be reached only through tunnels cut through the drifts; here the men spend their days wrapped in shaggy furs, their faces smeared with grease as a protection from the stinging blasts.”
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ÖSTERREICHISCHE NATIONALBIBLIOTHEK
During World War I an ambitious newspaper correspondent made it his mission to cover the fighting on what he called “the roof of the world.” By E. Alexander Powell
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WITNESS TO THE WHITE WAR
T
he sun had scarcely shown itself above the snowy rampart of the Julian Alps when the hoarse throbbing of the big gray staff car awoke the echoes of the narrow street on which fronts the Hotel Croce di Malta in Udine. Despite a leather coat, a furlined cap, and a great fleecy muffler which swathed me to the eyes, I shivered in the damp chill of the winter dawn. We adjusted our goggles and settled down into the heavy rugs, the soldier-driver threw in his clutch, the sergeant sitting beside him let out a vicious snarl from the horn, the little group of curious onlookers scattered hastily, and the powerful car leaped forward like a racehorse that feels the spur. With the horn sounding its hoarse warning, we thundered through the narrow, tortuous, cobble-paved streets, between rows of old, old houses with faded frescoes on their plastered walls and with dim, echoing arcades. And so into the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele—there is no more charming little square in Italy—with its fountain and
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its two stone giants and the pompous statue of an incredibly ugly king astride a prancing horse and a monument to Peace set up by Napoleon to commemorate a treaty which was the cause of many wars. At the back of the piazza, like the backdrop on a stage, rises a towering sugarloaf mound, thrown up, so they say, by Attila, that from it he might conveniently watch the siege and burning of Aquileia. Perched atop this mound, and looking for all the world like one of Maxfield Parrish’s painted castles, is the Castello, once the residence of the Venetian and Austrian governors, and, rising above it, a white and slender tower. If you will take the trouble to climb to the summit of this tower you will find that the earth you left behind is now laid out at your feet like one of those putty maps you used to make in school. Below you, like a vast tessellated floor, is the Friulian plain, dotted with red-roofed villages, checkerboarded with fields of green and brown, stretching away, away to where, beyond the blue Isonzo, the Julian and Carnic Alps leap skyward in a mighty, curving, mile-high wall. You have the war before you, for amid those distant mountains snakes the Austro-Italian battle line. Just as Attila and his Hunnish warriors looked down from the summit of this very mound, fourteen hundred years ago, upon the destruction of the Italian plain-towns, so today, from the same vantage point, the Italians can see their artillery methodically pounding to pieces the defenses of the modern Huns. A strange reversal of history, is it not? Leaving on our right the Palazzo Civico, built two score years before Columbus set foot on the beach of San Salvador, we rolled through the gateway in the ancient city wall, acknowledging the salute of the steel-helmeted sentry just as the mail-clad knights who rode through that same gateway to the fighting on the plain, long centuries ago, doubtless acknowledged the salute of the steel-capped menat-arms. Down the straight white road we sped, between rows of cropped and stunted willows, which line the highway on either side like soldiers with bowed heads. It is a storied and romantic region, this Venetia, whose fertile farmlands, crisscrossed with watercourses, stretch away, flat and brown as an oaken floor, to the snowy crescent of the Alps. Scenes of past wars it still bears upon its face, in its farmhouses clustered together for common protection, in the stout walls and loopholed watchtowers of its towns, record of its warlike and eventful past. One must be prosaic indeed whose imagination remains unstirred by a journey across this historic plain, which has been invaded by Celts, Istrians, and Romans; Huns, Goths, and Lombards; Franks, Germans, and Austrians in turn. Over there, a dozen miles to the southward, lie the ruins of Aquileia, once one of the great cities of the western world, the chief outpost fortress of the Roman Empire, visited by King Herod of Judea, and the favorite residence of Augustus and Diocletian. These
GRANGER
Edward Alexander Powell was born in 1879 in Syracuse, New York. After studying at Syracuse University and Oberlin College, he began his journalism career at the Syracuse Journal. In 1903 he moved to London to work as an advertising manager for the Smith Premier Typewriter Company, which was based in Syracuse, but within a couple of years he returned to journalism as a correspondent for publications in Britain and the United States. In 1914, after a brief stint as a consular official in Lebanon and Egypt, he became a roving war correspondent, covering World War I from both sides of the battle lines for various newspapers and magazines. When the United States entered the war in 1917, Powell joined the U.S. Army and was commissioned as a captain in military intelligence. An injury took him out of action the following September, and after returning to the United States he left the army with the rank of major. Powell then switched from journalism to a highly successful career as an adventurer, lecturer, and author. Traveling widely around the world, he published more than two dozen books from 1920 to 1954, pausing briefly during World War II to work as a senior political analyst for the Office of Naval Intelligence. When Powell died in Connecticut in 1957 at age 78, the Boston Globe summed up his career in one sentence: “Held up by bandits, challenged to a duel, poking into insurrection in Crete, witnessing the eruption of Vesuvius and hobnobbing with national leaders, Mr. Powell progressed steadily around the world, surviving all disasters and busily producing copy.” The following narrative, which has been lightly edited, is excerpted from Italy at War, one of Alexander’s half-dozen books about World War I, which was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1917.
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Austrian mountain troops in the Isonzo district cling to a rock face, helping one another along with ropes, as they climb over a mountain pass in the Italian Alps to surprise an Italian detachment on the other side. fertile lowlands were devastated by Alaric and his Visigoths and by Attila and his Huns—the original Huns, I mean. Down this very high-road tramped the legions of Tiberius on their way to give battle to the Illyrians and Pannonians. Here were waged the savage conflicts of the Guelphs, the Ghibellines, and the Scaligers. Here fought the great adventurer Bartolomeo Colleoni; in the whitewashed village inn of Campo Formio, a far greater adventurer signed a treaty whereby he gave away the whole of this region as he would have given away a gold piece; half a century later Garibaldi and his ragged redshirts fought to win it back. For mile after mile we sped through a countryside which bore no suggestion of the bloody business which had brought me. So far as war was concerned, I might as well have been motoring through New England. But, though an atmosphere of tranquility and security prevailed down here amid the villages and farmsteads of the plain, I knew that up there among those snow-crowned peaks ahead of us, musketry was crackling, cannons were belching, men were dying. But as we approached the front—though still
miles and miles behind the fighting line—the signs of war became increasingly apparent: base camps, remount depots, automobile parks, aviation schools, aerodromes, hospitals, machine shops, ammunition dumps, railway sidings chocka-block with freight cars and railway platforms piled high with supplies of every description. Moving closer, we came upon endless lines of motor trucks moving ammunition and supplies to the front and other lines of motor trucks and ambulances moving injured machinery and injured men to the repair depots and hospitals at the rear. We passed Sicilian mule carts, hundreds upon hundreds of them, two wheeled, painted bright yellow or bright red and covered with gay little paintings such as one sees on ice cream vendors’ carts and hurdy-gurdies, the harness of the mules studded with brass and hung with scarlet tassels. Then long strings of donkeys, so heavily laden with wineskins, with bales of hay, with ammunition boxes, that all that could be seen of the animals themselves were their swinging tails and wagging ears. We met convoys of Austrian prisoners, guarded by cavalry or territorials, on their
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The Italian army, Powell wrote, “is as businesslike as a blued-steel revolver.”
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the Italian troops compare very favorably with any in Europe. The men are for the most part shortish, very thickset, and burned by the sun to the color of a much-used saddle. I rather expected to see bearded, unkempt fellows, but I found them clean shaven and extraordinarily neat. The Italian military authorities do not approve of the poilu. Though the men are laden like pack mules, they cover the ground at a surprisingly smart pace, while special corps, such as the bersaglieri and the Alpini, are famous for the fashion in which they take even the steepest acclivities at the double. I was told that, though the troops recruited in the north possess the most stamina and endurance, the Neapolitans and Sicilians have the most élan and make the best fighters, these sons of the south having again and again advanced to the assault through storms of fire which the colder-blooded Piedmontese refused to face. It is claimed for the Italian uniform that it is at once the ugliest and the least visible of any worn in Europe. “Its wearer doesn’t even make a shadow,” a friend of mine remarked. The Italian military authorities were among the first to make a scientific study of colors for uniforms. They did not select, for example, the “horizon blue” adopted by the French because, while this is less visible on the roads and plains of a flat, open, sunlit region, it would prove fatally distinct on the tree-clad mountain slopes where the Italians are fighting. The color is officially described as gray-green, but the best description of it is that given by a British officer: “Take some mud from the Blue Nile, carefully rub into it two pounds of ship-rat’s hair, paint a roan horse with the composition, and then you will understand why the Austrians can’t see the Italian soldiers in broad daylight at 50 yards.” Its quality of invisibility is, indeed, positively uncanny. While motoring in the war zone I have repeatedly come upon bodies of troops resting beside the road, yet, so marvelously do their uniforms merge into the landscape that, had not my attention been called to them, I should have passed them by unnoticed. The uniform of the Italian officer is of precisely the same cut and apparently of the same material as that of the men, and as the former not infrequently dispenses with the badges of rank, it is often difficult to distinguish an officer from a private. The Italian officers, particularly those of the cavalry regiments, have always been among the smartest in Europe, but the gorgeous uniforms which, in the happy, carefree days before the war, added such brilliant notes of color to the scenes on the Corso and in the Cascine, have been replaced by a dress which is as simple as it is serviceable. The Italian government has a stern objection to wasteful or unnecessary expenditure, and all the costly and superfluous trimmings so dear to the heart of the military have been ruthlessly pruned. But economy is not insisted upon at the expense of efficiency. Nothing is refused or stinted that is
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way to the rear. They looked tired and dirty and depressed, but most prisoners look that. A man who has spent days or even weeks amid the mud and blood of a trench, with no opportunity to bathe or even to wash his hands and face, with none too much food, with many of his comrades dead or wounded, with a shell storm shrieking and howling about him, and has then had to surrender, could hardly be expected to appear high spirited and optimistic. Yet it has long been the custom of the Allied correspondents and observers to base their assertions that the morale of the enemy is weakening and that the quality of his troops is deteriorating on the demeanor of prisoners fresh from the firing line. Ambulances passed us, traveling toward the hospitals at the base, and sometimes wounded men, limping along on foot. The heads of some were swathed in blood-stained bandages, some carried their arms in slings, others hobbled by with the aid of sticks, for the Italian army is none too well supplied with ambulances, and those who are able to walk must do so in order that the places in the ambulances may be taken by their more seriously wounded fellows. They were dog tired, dirty, caked with mud and blood, but they grinned at us cheerfully—for were they not beating the Austrians? Indeed, one cannot look at Italian troops without seeing that the spirit of the men is high and that they are confident of victory. Now the roads became crowded, but never blocked, with troops on the march: infantry of the line, short, sturdily built fellows wearing short capes of greenish gray and trench helmets of painted steel; Alpini, hardy and active as the goats of their own mountains, their tight-fitting breeches and their green felt hats with the slanting eagle’s feather making them look like the chorus of Robin Hood; bersaglieri, the flower of the Italian army, who have preserved the traditions of their famous corps by still clinging to the flat-brimmed, rakish hat with its huge bunch of drooping feathers; engineers, laden like donkeys with entrenching, bridging, and mining tools; motorcycle dispatch riders, leather jacketed and mud bespattered, the light horsemen of modern war; and, very occasionally, for their hour for action has not yet come, detachments of cavalry, usually armed with lances, their helmets and busbies linen covered to match the businesslike simplicity of their uniform. About the Italian army there is not much of the pomp and circumstance of war. It is as businesslike as a blued-steel revolver. In its total absence of swagger and display it is characteristic of a nation whose instincts are essentially democratic. Everything considered,
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Clockwise from left: Austrian troops haul a 24cm Mörser M 98 howitzer through a trench dug in the snow; Austrian soldiers fire on the enemy from a mountaintop; a unit of Italy’s Alpini march up Mount Adamello.
necessary to keep the soldiers in good health or that will add to the efficiency of the great fighting-machine. But the war is proving a heavy financial strain for Italy and she is determined not to waste on it a single soldo more than she can possibly help. On the French and British fronts staff officers are constantly dashing to and fro in motorcars on errands of more or less importance. But you see nothing of that sort in the Italian war zone. The Comando Supremo can, of course, have all the motorcars it wants, but it discourages their use except in cases of necessity. The officers are instructed that, whenever they can travel by railway without detriment to the interests of the service, they are expected to do so, for the trains are in operation to within a few miles of the front and with astonishing regularity, whereas tires and gasoline cost money. Returning at nightfall from the front to Udine, we were nearly always stopped by officers—majors, colonels, and once by a general—who would ask us to give them a lift into town. It has long been the fashion among foreigners to think of Italians, particularly those of the upper class, as late rising, easygoing, and not particularly in love with work—a sort of dolce far niente people. But the war has shown how unsafe are such generalizations. There is no harder worker on any front than the Italian officer. Even the highest staff officers are at their desks by 8 and frequently
by 7. Though it is easier to get from the Italian front to Milan or Florence than it is to get from Verdun to Paris, or from the Somme to London, one sees little of the weekend traveling so common on the British front. Officers in the war zone are entitled to 15 days’ leave of absence a year, and from this rule there are no deviations. Through the mud we came to the Judrio, which marked the line of the old frontier. We crossed the river by a pontoon bridge, for the Austrians had destroyed the other in their retreat. “We are in Austria now, I suppose?” I remarked. “In Italia Redenta,” my companion corrected me. “This region has always been Italian in everything but name, and now it is Italian in name also.” The occupation by the Italian troops, at the very outset of the war, of this wedge of territory between the Judrio and the Isonzo, with Monfalcone, Cervignano, Cormons, Gradisca—old Italian towns all— did much to give the Italian people confidence in the efficiency of their armies and the ability of their generals. Now the roads were filled with the enormous equipment of an army advancing. Every village swarmed with gray soldiers. We passed interminable processions of motor lorries, mule carts, trucks, and wagons piled high with hay, lumber, wine casks, flour, shells, barbed wire;
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Now we were well within the danger zone. I knew it by the screens of woven reeds and grass matting which had been erected along one side of the road in order to protect the troops and transport using that road from being seen by the Austrian observers and shelled by the Austrian guns. Practically all of the roads on the Italian side of the front are, remember, under direct observation by the Austrians. In fact, they command everything. Everywhere they are above the Italians. From the observatories which they have established on every peak, they can see through their powerful telescopes what is transpiring down on the plain as readily as though they were circling above it in an airplane. As a result of the extraordinary advantage which the Austrians enjoy in this respect, it has been found necessary to screen certain of the roads not only on both sides but above, so that in places the traffic passes for miles through literal tunnels of matting. This road masking is a simple form of the art of concealment to which the French have given the
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boxes of ammunition; pontoon trains, balloon outfits, searchlights mounted on motor trucks, wheeled blacksmith shops, wheeled post offices, field kitchens; beef and mutton on the hoof; mammoth howitzers and siege guns hauled by panting tractors; creaking, clanking field batteries, and bright-eyed, brown-skinned, green-caped infantry, battalions, regiments, brigades of them plodding along under slanting lines of steel. All the resources of Italy seemed crowding up to make good the recent gains and to make ready for the next push. One has to see a great army on the march to appreciate how stupendous is the task of supplying with food the hungry men and the hungrier guns, and how it taxes to the utmost all the industrial resources of a nation. Under all this traffic the roads remained hard and smooth, for gangs of men with scrapers and steamrollers were at work everywhere repairing the wear and tear. This work is done by peasants who are too old for the army, middle-aged, sturdily built fellows who perform their prosaic task with the resignation and inexhaustible patience of the lower-class Italian. They are organized in companies of
ARCHIVI ALINARI, FLORENCE
“By the aid of ropes and levers and pulleys,” Alexander wrote, “monster pieces have been...hoisted up walls of rock as sheer and high as those of the Flatiron Building.”
100 men each, called centurias, and the company commanders are called (shades of the Roman legions!) centurions. Italy owes much to these gray-haired soldiers of the pick and shovel who, working in heat and cold, in snow and rain, and frequently under Austrian fire, have made it possible for the armies to advance and for food to be sent forward for the men and ammunition for the guns. When this war is over, Italy will find herself with better roads, and more of them, than she ever had before. The hundreds of miles of splendid highways which have been built by the army in the Trentino, in the Carnia, and in Cadore will open up districts of extraordinary beauty which have hitherto been inaccessible to the touring motorist. The Italians have been fortunate in having an inexhaustible supply of road-building material close at hand, for the mountains are solid road metal and in the plains one has only to scratch the soil to find gravel. The work of the road builders on the Upper Isonzo resembles a vast suburban development, for the smooth white highways which zigzag in long, easy gradients up the mountain slopes are bordered on the inside by stone-paved gutters and on the outside, where the precipice falls sheer away, by cut-stone guard posts. Climbing higher, the roads become steeper and narrower and, because of the heavy rains, very highly crowned, with frequent right-angle and hairpin turns. Here a skid or a sideslip or the failure of your brakes is quite likely to bring your career to an abrupt and unpleasant termination. To motor along one of these military mountain highways when it is slippery from rain is as nerve trying as walking on a shingled roof with smoothsoled shoes. At one point on the Upper Isonzo there wasn’t enough room between our outer wheels and the edge of the precipice for a starved cat to pass.
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
ARCHIVI ALINARI, FLORENCE
Alexander pointed out in his book that the Italian front in World War I was longer than the French, British, and Belgian fronts combined and that its trenches in one line would have extended from New York to Salt Lake City. name camouflage which has been developed to an extraordinary degree on the Western Front. That the Italians have not made a greater use of it is due, no doubt, to the wholly different conditions under which they are fighting. Now the crowded road that we were following turned sharply into a narrow valley, down which a small river twisted and turned on its way to the sea. Though the Italian positions ran along the top of the hill slope just above us, and though less than a thousand yards away were the Austrian trenches, that valley, for many miles, was literally crawling with men and horses and guns. Indeed, it was difficult to make myself believe that we were within easy range of the enemy and that at any instant a shell might fall upon that teeming hillside and burst with the crash that scatters death. Despite the champagne-cork popping of the rifles and the basso profundo of the guns, it was a scene of ordered, yes, almost peaceful industry which in no way suggested war but reminded me, rather, of the Panama Canal at the busiest period of its construction, of the digging of the New York subway, of the laying of a transcontinental railway, of the building of the dam at Assuan. Trenches which had recently been captured from the Austrians were being cleared and renovated, and new trenches were being dug, roads were being repaired, a battery of monster howitzers was being moved into ingeniously concealed positions, a whole system of narrow-gauge railway was being laid down, enor-
mous quantities of stores were being unloaded from wagons and lorries and neatly stacked, soldiers were building great water tanks on stilts, like those at railway sidings, giant shells were being lowered from trucks and flatcars by means of cranes; to the accompaniment of saws and hammers a city of wooden huts was springing up on the reverse slope of the hill as though at the wave of a magician’s wand. As I watched with fascinated eyes this scene of activity, as city idlers watch the laborers at work in a cellar excavation, a shell burst on the crowded hillside, perhaps 500 yards away. There was a crash like the explosion of a giant cannon-cracker; the ground leaped into flame and dust. A few minutes afterward I saw an ambulance go tearing up the road. “Just a chance shot,” said the staff officer who accompanied me. “This valley is one of the few places on our front which is invisible to the Austrian observers. That’s why we have so many troops in here. The Austrian aviators could spot what is going on here, of course, but our fliers and our anti aircraft batteries have been making things so hot for them lately that they’re not troubling us much. That’s the great thing in this game—to keep control of the air. If the Austrian airmen were able to get over this valley and direct the fire of their guns, we wouldn’t be able to stay here an hour.” My companion had thought that it might be possible to follow the road down the valley to Monfalcone and the sea, and so it would have been had the weather continued misty
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“The Italians evidently grew tired of letting the Austrians have their way with the town.”
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from which these shells came were cunningly hidden away in nooks and glens on the other side of that distant range of hills, that the men serving the guns had little if any idea what they were firing at, and that the bombardment was being directed and controlled by an officer seated comfortably at the small end of a telescope up there on a mountain top among the clouds. Yet such is modern war. It used to be one of the artillerist’s tenets that his guns should be placed in a position with a “commanding” range of view. But nowadays guns “command” nothing. Instead they are tucked away in gullies and leafy glens and excavated gun pits, and their muzzles, instead of frowning down on the enemy from an eminence, stare blindly skyward from behind a wall of hills or mountains. The Italians evidently grew tired of letting the Austrians have their way with the town, for presently some batteries of heavy guns behind us came into action and their shells screamed over our heads. Soon a brisk exchange of compliments between the Italian and Austrian guns was going on over the shattered roofs of the town. We did not remain overlong on our hillside, and we were warned by the artillery officer who was guiding us to keep close to the ground and well apart, for, were the Austrians to see us in a group, using maps and field glasses, they probably would take us for artillery observers and would send over a violent protest cased in steel. On none of the European battle fronts is there a more beautiful and impressive journey than that from Udine up to the Italian positions in the Carnia. The Carnia sector connects the Isonzo and Trentino fronts and forms a vital link in the Italian chain of defense, for, were the Austrians to break through, they would take in flank and rear the great Italian armies operating on the two adjacent fronts. West of the Carnia, in Cadore, the Italians are campaigning in one of the world’s most famous playgrounds, for, in the days before the Great War, pleasure seekers, from every corner of Europe and America swarmed by the tens of thousands in the country round about Cortina and in the enchanted valleys of the Dolomites. But now great gray guns are emplaced in the shady glens where the honeymooners used to stroll; on the terraces of the tourist hostelries, where, on summer afternoons, men in white flannels and women in dainty frocks chattered over their tea, now lounge Italian officers in field uniforms of gray; the blare of dance music and the popping of champagne corks has been replaced by the blare of bugles and the popping of rifles. If you have ever gone, in a single day, from the sunlit orange groves of Pasadena up to the snow-crowned peaks of the Coast Range, you will have as good an idea as I can give you of the journey from the Isonzo up to the Carnia. Down on the Carso the war is being waged under a sky of molten brass, and in summer the winds which sweep that arid plateau are like blasts from an open furnace door. The
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and rainy. But the sun came out brightly just as we reached the beginning of an exposed stretch of the road; an Austrian observer, peering through a telescope set up in a monastery on top of a mountain 10 miles away, caught sight of the hurrying gray insect which was our car; he rang up on the telephone a certain battery and spoke a few words to the battery commander; and an instant later on the road along which we were traveling, Austrian shells began to fall. Shells being expensive, that little episode cost the emperor- king several hundred kronen, we figured. As for us, it merely interrupted a most interesting morning’s ride. Leaving the car in the shelter of a hill, we toiled up a steep and stony slope to a point from which I was able to get an admirable idea of the general lay of Italy’s Eastern Front. Coming toward me was the Isonzo—a bright blue stream the width of the Thames at New London—which, happy at escaping from its gloomy mountain defile, went rioting over the plain in a great westward curve. Turning, I could catch a glimpse, through a notch in the hills of the white towers and pink roofs of Monfalcone against the Adriatic’s changeless blue. To the east of Monfalcone rose the red heights of the Carso, the barren limestone plateau which stretches from the Isonzo south into Istria. And beyond the Carso I could trace the whole curve of the mountains from in front of Trieste up past Gorizia and away to the Carnia. The Italian front, I might add, divides itself into four sectors: the Isonzo, the Carnia and Cadore, the Trentino, and the Alpine. Directly below us, not more than a kilometer away, was a village which the Austrians were shelling. Through our glasses we could see the effects of the bombardment as plainly as though we had been watching a football game from the upper tier of seats in the Yale Bowl. They were using a considerable number of guns of various calibers and the crash of the bursting shells was almost incessant. A shell struck a rather pretentious building, which was evidently the town hall; there was a burst of flame, and a torrent of bricks and beams and tiles shot skyward amid a geyser of green-brown smoke. Another projectile chose as its target the tall white campanile, which suddenly slumped into the street, a heap of brick and plaster. Now and again we caught glimpses of tiny figures—Italian soldiers, most likely—scuttling for shelter. Occasionally the Austrians would vary their rain of heavy projectiles with a sort of shell that went bang and released a fleecy cloud of smoke overhead and then dropped a parcel of high explosive that burst on the ground. It was curious to think that the guns
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A four-man team of soldiers in an Austrian artillery unit ready an 8cm Feldkanone M.5, the standard field gun of the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I, that’s been hidden in the entrance to a cave. soldiers fighting in the Carnia, on the other hand, not infrequently wear coats of white fur to protect them from the cold and to render them invisible against the expanses of snow. When I was on the Italian front, they told me an incident of this mountain warfare. There was desperate fighting for the possession of a few yards of mountain trenches and a half-battalion of Austrian jagers—nearly 500 men— were enfiladed by machine-gun fire and wiped out. That night there was a heavy snowfall, and the Austrian corpses sprawled upon the mountainside were soon buried deep beneath the fleecy flakes. The long winter wore along, the war pursued its dreary course, to 500 Austrian homes the Austrian War Office sent a brief message that the husband or son or brother had been “reported missing.” Then the spring came, the snow melted from the mountainsides, and the horrified Italians looked on the 500 Austrians, frozen stiff, as meat is frozen in a refrigerator, in the same attitudes in which they had died months before. With countless hairpin, hair-raising turns, our road wound upward, bordered on one hand by the brinks of precipices, on the other by bare walls of rock. It was a smooth road, splendidly built, but steep and terrifyingly narrow—so narrow in places that it was nothing more than a shelf blasted from the sheer face of the cliff. Twice, meeting motor lorries downward bound, we had to back along that narrow shelf, with our outer wheels on the brink of
emptiness, until we came to a spot where there was room to pass. It was a ticklish business. At one point a mountain torrent leaped from the cliff into the depths below. But the water power was not permitted to go to waste; it had been skillfully harnessed and was being used to run a completely equipped machine shop where were brought for repair everything from motor trucks to machine guns. That was one of the things that impressed me most—the mechanical ability of the Italians. The railways, cableways, machine shops, bridges, roads, reservoirs, concrete works that they have built, more often than not in the face of what would appear to be insurmountable difficulties, prove them to be a nation of engineers. Up to the heights toward which we were climbing so comfortably and quickly in a motorcar, there was before the war, so I was told, nothing but a mule-path. Now there is this fine military road, so ingeniously graded and zigzagged that two-ton motor trucks can now go with ease where before a donkey had difficulty in finding a footing. When these small and handy motor trucks come to a point where it is no longer possible for them to find traction, their loads are transferred to the remarkable wire-rope railways, or telefericas, as they are called, which have made possible this campaign in cloudland. Similar systems are in use, all over the world, for conveying goods up the sides of mountains and across chasms. A wire rope running over a
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emplaced in ice caverns which can be reached only through tunnels cut through the drifts; here the men spend their days wrapped in shaggy furs, their faces smeared with grease as a protection from the stinging blasts, and their nights in holes burrowed in the snow, like the igloos of Esquimaux. On no front, not on the sun-scorched plains of Mesopotamia, nor in the frozen Mazurian marshes, nor in the blood-soaked mud of Flanders, does the fighting man lead so arduous an existence as up here on the roof of the world. I remember standing with an Italian officer in an observatory in the lower mountains. The powerful telescope was trained on the snow-covered summit of one of the higher peaks. “Do you see that little black speck on the snow at the very top?” the officer asked me. I told him that I did. “That is one of our positions,” he continued. “It is held by a lieutenant and 30 Alpini. I have just received word that, as the result of yesterday’s snowstorm, our communications with them have been cut off. We will not be able to relieve them, or get supplies to them, much before next April.” And it was then only the middle of December! In the Carnia and on the Upper Isonzo one finds the anomaly of first-line trenches which are perfectly safe from attack. I visited such a position. Through a loophole I got a little framed picture of the Austrian trenches not 500 yards away, and above them, cut in the mountainside, the square black openings within which lurked the Austrian guns. Yet we were as safe from anything save artillery fire as though we were in Mars, for between the Italian trenches and the Austrian intervened a chasm half a thousand feet deep and with walls as steep and smooth as the side of a house. The narrow strip of valley at the bottom of the chasm was a sort of no man’s land, where forays, skirmishes, and all manner of desperate adventures took place nightly between patrols of jagers and Alpini. As with my field glasses I was sweeping the turmoil of trench-scarred mountains which lay spread, below me, like a map in bas-relief, an Austrian battery quite suddenly set up a deafening clamor, and on a hillside, miles away, I could see its shells bursting in clouds of smoke shot through with flame. They looked like gigantic white peonies breaking suddenly into bloom. The racket of the guns awoke the most extraordinary echoes in the mountains. It was difficult to believe that it was not thunder. Range after range caught up the echoes of that bombardment and passed them on until it seemed as though they must have reached Vienna. For half an hour, perhaps, the cannonade continued, and then, from an Italian position somewhere above and behind us, came a mighty bellow which drowned out all other sounds. It was the angry voice of Italy bidding the Austrians be still. MHQ
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drum at each side of the chasm which has to be crossed forms a double line of overhead railway. Suspended on grooved wheels from this overhead wire are “cars” consisting of shallow iron trays about the length and width of coffins, one car going up as the other comes down. The floors of the cars are perforated so as to permit the draining off of water or blood—for men wounded in the mountain fighting are frequently brought down to the hospitals in them— and the sides are of latticework, and, I might add, quite unnecessarily low. Nor is the prospective passenger reassured by being told that there have been several cases where soldiers, suddenly overcome by vertigo, have thrown themselves out while in midair. If the cars are properly loaded, and if there is not a high wind blowing, the teleferica is about as safe as most other modes of conveyance, but should the cars have been carelessly loaded, or should a strong wind be blowing, there is considerable danger of their coming into collision as they pass. In such an event there would be a very fair chance of the passenger spattering up the rocks 1,000 feet or so below. There is still another, though a rather remote possibility: that of being shelled while in midair, for certain of the telefericas run within view of the Austrian positions. And sometimes the power which winds the drum gives out and the car and its passengers are temporarily marooned in space. Aviation, motor racing, mountain climbing, big-game hunting, all seem commonplace and tame compared with the sensation of swinging helplessly in a shallow bathtub over half a mile of emptiness while an Austrian battery endeavors to pot you with shrapnel, very much as a small boy throws stones at a scared cat clinging to a limb. Yet over these slender wires has been transported an army, with its vast quantities of food, stores, and ammunition, and by the same method of transportation have been sent back the wounded. Without this ingenious device it is doubtful if the campaign in the High Alps could ever have been fought. But the cables, strong though they are, are yet too weak to bear the weight of the heavy guns, some of them weighing 40 and 50 tons, which the Italians have put into action on the highest peaks. So by the aid of ropes and levers and pulleys and hundreds of brawny backs and straining arms, these monster pieces have been hauled up slopes as steep as that of the Great Pyramid, have been hoisted up walls of rock as sheer and high as those of the Flatiron Building. You question this? Well, there they are, great eight- and nine-inch monsters, high above the highest of the wire roads, one of them that I know of at a height of 10,000 feet above the sea. There is no doubting it, incredible as it may seem, for they speak for themselves—as the Austrians have found to their cost. The most advanced positions in the Carnia, as in the Trentino, are amid the eternal snows. Here the guns are
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CULTURE OF WAR CLASSIC
SCOTT METZLER, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY
DISPATCHES 86 WAR STORIES 88 POETRY 93 REVIEWS 94
Josiah Harmar (1753–1813) carried this silver-mounted sword with a lion’shead pommel throughout his military career, which he began as a captain in the Continental Army during Revolutionary War. He fought in the Battle of Quebec in 1775 and served at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777–1778 under General George Washington, who called him “one of the best officers in the Army.” Harmar went on to serve as the senior officer in the U.S. Army from 1784 to 1791. His sword is one of the artifacts displayed at Founding the Nation, a permanent exhibition at the National Museum of the United States Army in Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
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CLASSIC DISPATCHES
THE LAST CASUALTY By James M. Cain
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DIED TO PROVE LOYALTY HENRY N. GUNTHER FELT HE WAS UNDER A CLOUD
PROBABLY LAST MAN KILLED Went Alone To Capture Machine Gun Nest In The Last Minute of War.
This account of how Henry N. Gunther, 3011 Eastern avenue, was killed almost at the moment the “cease firing order” was given, is by Private James M. Cain, Headquarters Troop, Seventy-ninth Division, in France, who was formerly a reporter on The Sun. It corresponds in all essentials with the report brought to Gunther’s parents by Chaplain George F. Jonaitis, but gives some details that Father Jonaitis probably did not know of. BY PRIVATE JAMES M. CAIN
Souilly, France (By Mail), Feb. 22.—The last man to be killed in action in the Seventy-ninth Division, and perhaps in the whole American Army, was Henry N. Gunther, Company A, Three Hundred and Thirteenth Infantry. Gunther’s home was in Baltimore, and he was killed at one minute of 11 o’clock on November 11, trying to take a German machine gun position. Until a short time before the Three Hundred and Thirteenth finished its period of training at Camplitte, Gunther was supply sergeant of his company. A few days before the regiment left for the front he wrote a letter home complaining of certain things about army life, and as this was a violation of the censorship regulations, he was reduced to the grade of private. According to his companions, Gunther brooded a great deal over his reduction in rank, and became obsessed with a determination to make good before his officers and fellow-soldiers. Particularly he was worried because he thought himself suspected of being a German sympathizer. The regiment went into action a few days after he was reduced, and from the start he displayed the most unusual willingness to expose himself to all sorts of risks and to go on the most dangerous kind of duty. He acquitted himself splendidly in the Montfaucon fight, and on the drive east of the Meuse he was selected to act as a company runner— particularly dangerous work, for a runner is the bearer of
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: GENERAL PHOTOGRAPHIC AGENCY (GETTY IMAGES); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; CONCORD, CC BY-SA 3.0
Y
ears before James M. Cain would become one of America’s most famous writers—the author of such sensational and controversial novels as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce—he pounded the pavement as a reporter for the Baltimore American and the Baltimore Sun. His fledging career as a journalist was interrupted, however, when the United States entered World War I. Drafted into the army, Cain was soon shipped to France as a private in the headquarters troop of the 79th Infantry Division, a unit raised at Camp Meade in his home state of Maryland in 1917. In 1918, in the opening days of the General John J. Pershing’s Meuse-Argonne Offensive—a massive attack that would, it was hoped, bring an end to World War I—the 79th Division was assigned the job of capturing Montfaucon, a German stronghold and commanding observation point that towered some 300 feet above the countryside. Cain was a runner during the battle, one of the bloodiest sieges of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, and later served as the editor of the Lorraine Cross, the 79th Division’s “trench newspaper.” With the end of the war Cain returned to the Baltimore Sun, but not before he’d filed a report from Europe on the death of Henry N. Gunther, the 23-year-old son of GermanAmerican parents in Baltimore, who would soon become known as the last American killed in World War I. The U.S. Army later posthumously restored Gunther’s rank of sergeant and awarded him a Divisional Citation for Gallantry in Action and the Distinguished Service Cross. Gunther’s remains were returned to the United States in 1923 after being exhumed from a military cemetery in France and interred in his family’s plot at the Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery in Baltimore. His tombstone, inscribed with his likeness and decorations, reads “highly decorated for exceptional bravery and heroic action that resulted in his death one minute before the armistice.” As for Cain, he soon began writing short stories for the American Mercury, the celebrated magazine that H. L. Mencken, the Sun’s influential and fearless iconoclast, had founded in 1924. Cain’s first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, was published in 1934, and his second, Double Indemnity, was serialized in Liberty magazine in 1936. He continued writing until his death at age 85 in 1977. Cain’s story about Gunther’s death, reprinted here, was preceded by a short note from his editors and appeared in the March 16, 1919, edition of the Baltimore Sun.
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Clockwise from top left: A German machine gun nest in World War I; James M. Cain as a private in the 79th Infantry Division; the plaque commemorating Sergeant Henry N. Gunther at a Baltimore cemetery.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: GENERAL PHOTOGRAPHIC AGENCY (GETTY IMAGES); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; CONCORD, CC BY-SA 3.0
important messages, and must get them delivered, even if his way lies over the most exposed country. Showed Scorn of Danger. In the role of runner Gunther proved to be a man of the finest mettle. He repeatedly volunteered for duty when communication had to be established over terrain raked by machine guns and subject to heavy shelling. A few days before hostilities ceased he was carrying a message, when a German bullet passed through his wrist. He said nothing about his wound, however, when one of his officers, noticing his exhaustion, asked him what was the matter. Having already bound up his arm with a first-aid bandage, he replied that he was a little tired, and thought he would take a rest. The next day he reported for duty and went on as usual. On November 11 he was still on duty as a runner. His company had been ordered to advance on Ville-DevantChaumont, in the extreme right of the Seventy-ninth’s sector, and several parties were already in the town. Gunther, with one or two other runners and an advanced party of riflemen from his company, was just on the outskirts. The order had already come that hostilities were to cease at 11 o’clock. Directly ahead there was visible a German machine gun nest. Gunther, according to the men of Company A, must
still have been fired by a desire to demonstrate, even at the last minute, that he was courageous and all-American. At a few minutes to 11 he announced that he was going to take that machine gun nest, and though his companions remonstrated, and told him that in a few minutes the “war would be over,” he started out, armed with a Browning automatic rifle. Germans Waved Him Back. When the Germans saw him coming they waved at him and called out, in such broken English as they could, to go back, that the war was over. He paid no heed to them, however, and kept on firing a shot or two from his automatic as he went. After several vain efforts to make him turn back, the Germans turned their machine gun on him, and at one minute of 11 o’clock Gunther fell dead. The guns stopped firing at 11 o’clock—a few seconds after—and a few minutes after the German machine gun crew that had killed him came out with a stretcher and placed Gunther on it. They then carried him back to his party from Company A he had left but a short time before. They explained that they had tried to keep him from coming on, and that they had to shoot him in self-defense. They insisted on shaking hands with the Americans, after which they set Gunther down and returned to their own lines. MHQ
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WAR STORIES
A CHEF IN CRIMEA
Was Alexis Soyer the first celebrity chef? “He is the most ridiculous man,” an acquaintance observed, “but quite perfect in his way.” By Peter Snow and Ann MacMillan
Soyer offered to travel to the war zone at his own expense to feed the troops there.
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and casualties on both sides mounted rapidly. Along with incompetent military commanders, ghastly mistakes like the Charge of the Light Brigade, and appalling medical care, feeding the troops became a major issue. The British Army’s food supply authorities, known as the Commissariat, were notoriously inept and corrupt. British and French army caterers also bid against each other for local produce, pushing prices sky high. The majority of soldiers who died in Crimea perished not from war wounds but from sickness often caused by grossly substandard food provided by unscrupulous suppliers. Working closely with Nightingale, the celebrity chef from London had a profound influence not just on how food was prepared and served in the Crimean War but on the care and feeding of soldiers in future conflicts too. Soyer had moved to London from his native France in 1831. Although he was only 21, Soyer had already served as one of the French prime minister’s personal chefs. In England he rose to fame as head chef of the new Reform Club founded by leading Liberals. An energetic innovator, he introduced gas cookers, water-cooled refrigerators, and ovens with adjustable temperatures to the club’s state-ofthe-art kitchens. Soyer, a flamboyant but charming self- promoter, was easily recognizable as he strode around London buying food, doing deals, and planning new ventures. Enveloped in a weirdly shaped cloak, he wore a trademark sloping hat and carried a slanted cane. His eccentric attire gave rise to much comment. It was noted that his clothes were cut on the bias (diagonally)—something the chef described as à la zoug-zoug. Soyer loved being in the limelight and was in his element preparing outrageously elaborate dishes for his aristocratic patrons. His Chapons à la Nelson featured chickens cooked in pastry shaped like the prow of a ship, floating on a sea of mashed potato. He may have catered for the rich, but he also had a strong social conscience. Soyer set up soup kitchens in Ireland during the Great Famine (1845–1852), serving a nutritious beef and vegetable broth called “Soup for the Poor.” Punch, the satirical magazine, was not impressed and la-
BRITISH MUSEUM
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n February 2, 1855, Alexis Soyer, Britain’s most famous chef, left a London theater to join friends at a nearby restaurant. A waiter showed him to the wrong room, and while waiting in vain for his fellow diners, he picked up a copy of the London Times newspaper and read the latest distressing report from the front line of the Crimean War. The Times had sent its reporter William Howard Russell to the war-ravaged peninsula, and taking advantage of the newly invented telegraph, he sent back the first eyewitness reports from a battleground. Russell is widely regarded as the first serious war correspondent. His chronicles described the dreadful conditions facing British soldiers on the battlefield and in hospitals, which shocked the British public and forced the government to change the way it supplied and treated its fighting forces. Russell wrote about incompetent British military commanders, of soldiers dying in filthy hospitals, and of poor food supply. He described men “enfeebled by sickness” and “hungry and wet and half-famished.” Deeply moved by what he had read, the tender- hearted chef asked for a pen and paper and wrote a letter to the editor of the Times. Soyer offered to travel to the war zone at his own expense to ensure that the troops received properly prepared and nutritious food, acting, he said, “according to my knowledge and experience in such matters.” Russell’s dispatches about woefully poor medical care in Crimea had already inspired the Times’s readers to start a fund that sent Florence Nightingale and a team of nurses to the area. The Crimean War that aroused such strong feelings in Soyer and others began in 1853 when Russia attacked Turkish territories in the Balkans. Britain and France went to Turkey’s aid and their forces landed in Crimea, well behind the Russian front line. They met with some immediate success, but within months the war was bogged down
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large cauldron, which could hold enough to feed at least 50 people—eight times the volume of the tin kettles. The new stove also required far less wood than the open fires needed to heat kettles. Soyer calculated his invention could save an army of 40,000 men 90 tons of fuel a day. Soyer was asked not only to take his stove to the battlefields but also to improve the soldiers’ diets. Lord Panmure flippantly urged him to “go to Crimea and cheer up those brave fellows in the camp. See what you can do. Your joyful countenance will do them good, Soyer: try to teach them to make the best of their rations.”
BRITISH MUSEUM
Reading that British troops fighting in the Crimean War were “hungry and wet and half-famished,” Alexis Soyer aimed to ensure that they received tasty, nutritious food.
beled his concoction “Poor Soup.” Soyer also wrote cookbooks full of inexpensive but healthy recipes and offered his services free of charge to poorhouses and hospitals, making their kitchens and food production more efficient and economical. When Soyer wrote his letter to the Times offering to travel to the Crimea, the British government could not believe its good fortune. A celebrity chef, a household name, was volunteering to sort out two of its most pressing failures: filthy kitchens in military hospitals and ill-prepared food in the field. Alexis Soyer was famous not only for his cooking but for his inventions. Two of his most popular designs were a vegetable steamer and a clock that rang when food was ready. Lord Panmure, Britain’s secretary of state for war, quickly summoned Soyer to a meeting. It was agreed that he would come up with a new invention: a field stove to replace the outdated tin kettles soldiers used to cook meals. Soon to be known as Soyer’s Magic Stove, it would revolutionize the way food was prepared for British soldiers. The stove resembled a rubbish bin perched on a burner. On top of this contraption there was room for a
A month after writing his letter to the Times, Soyer was on his way to Constantinople. When he stopped at Marseille, he came face to face for the first time with the grim reality of the war. He described seeing “700 or 800” men who had just landed from Constantinople and Crimea. “Their appearance, I regret to say, was more than indescribable.... Those who were wounded looked joyful compared with those who were victims of epidemic—typhus fever, diarrhoea, dysentery, cholera or frostbite.” Another horrifying sight greeted Soyer in March 1855 when he arrived in Scutari, a suburb of Constantinople. Florence Nightingale took him on a tour of the Barracks Hospital, one of six centers that treated wounded soldiers. Nightingale was far more than “the lady with a lamp.” She transformed military hospitals by cleaning up treatment areas and introducing her own trained medical staff. But during their tour Soyer noticed that the hospital kitchen was filthy. Rats ran rampant. Cooking was done by untrained soldiers who served in rotation and could hardly wait to get back to their normal duties. Soyer wrote: “The hellishly hot and smoky conditions in the kitchens— exacerbated by the indiscriminate burning of whole trees, leaves and all, to keep the copper furnaces fired up and the water boiling fiercely—meant the job was despised.” He watched in disbelief as orderlies tied joints of meat to wooden paddles and threw them into boiling water. They identified their meat by attaching an object to it—everything from “a string of buttons, a red rag, a pair of surgical scissors or even, in one case, some ancient underwear.” When Soyer told one cook that “it was a very dirty thing to put such things in the soup,” the sweating cook answered: “How can it be dirty, sir? Sure they have been boiling this last month.” Soyer leapt into action. The kitchen was scoured clean, and metal skewers replaced the wooden paddles. Cooking fuel was used more efficiently to reduce the heat and smoke. Soyer’s clearly written recipes appeared on kitchen walls and cooks learned how to prepare simple dishes. He provided his own recipes for nutritious food for patients, such as mutton and barley soup and calves’-foot jelly,
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Soyer (in light-colored coat) demonstrates the innovative field kitchen he developed in the Crimean War to British major general Henry Montagu Rokeby and French general Aimable-Jean-Jacques Pélissier.
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Two months after his arrival in Scutari, the energetic Soyer was off again. Light Brigade lieutenant general Edward Seager wrote in a letter home: “Soyer goes to the Crimea this week and I hear Miss Nightingale accompanies him for a short visit. He is going to teach the men how to cook their rations so as to make a palatable meal. His cookery here is perfection. He is much liked for his affable and gentlemanly manners.” Soyer had hoped to take 400 of his stoves with him to Crimea, but they had not yet arrived from England, so the chef set off on May 2, 1855, with just 10. Wearing a flamboyant red and white turban and a hooded cloak on board a large troopship, the Robert Lowe, he enjoyed the company of Nightingale, whom he described as “amiable and gentle.” They arrived in Balaclava in the southwest tip of
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
“His cookery here,” an officer in the Light Brigade reported, “is perfection.”
Soyer wrote regular letters to London publications trumpeting his achievements. Queen Victoria got her own firsthand report in a letter from Lady Stratford, wife of the British ambassador in Constantinople: “M. Soyer has done much good in the kitchens. He is a most ridiculous man but quite perfect in his way.”
WELLCOME COLLECTION
which they washed down with “Soyer’s cheap Crimean lemonaid.” He taught the cooks and orderlies not to waste food. Cooking water that had previously been thrown out was now used to make soup. Fat from the water became a substitute for butter. Soyer urged the army to end the practice of using soldiers to do short-term stints in the kitchens. It took the advice and began hiring civilian cooks. He went on to clean up other British military hospitals but still managed to find time to come up with a new invention, the Scutari Teapot. Until his arrival, cooks made tea by dumping tea leaves wrapped tightly in a cloth bag into kettles that had been used for making soup. The result was more like a watery broth than tea. By putting the leaves into a coffee filter fitted in a kettle of his own design, Soyer said he found “to my astonishment it made about one-fourth more tea, perfectly clear and without the least sediment.”
ALEXIS SOYER
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
WELLCOME COLLECTION
Crimea, now securely established as the supply base for the allied siege of Sebastopol. As the duo traveled from hospital to hospital, they despaired of the uncomfortable and dirty conditions they found. Many of the kitchens were made of mud and had no roofs, so Soyer designed suitable wooden structures. He also created two new nutritious foods for soldiers in the field. The first was a vegetable cake containing dried carrots, leeks, turnips, parsnips, cabbage, celery, and onions made tasty with seasonings. Then there was a bread biscuit made from flour and peasemeal. “It will keep for months,” he said, “and then soak well in tea, coffee or soup.” Soyer’s newfangled stoves finally made it to Balaclava in August 1855. Hundreds of British and French soldiers and doctors were invited to attend a grand opening of the first field kitchen, with Soyer putting his invention through its paces. The stoves were carefully arranged around white-clothed tables laden with wines and champagne. There was even a band. The menu included (in Soyer’s words) “plain boiled salt beef; ditto, with dumplings; plain boiled salt pork; ditto, with peas-pudding; stewed salt pork and beef, with rice; French pot-au-feu; stewed fresh beef, with potatoes; mutton ditto, with haricot beans; ox-cheek and ox-feet soups; Scotch muttonbroth; common curry, made with fresh and salt beef.” One soldier wrote home that Soyer “certainly made very nice ragouts and soups, but I fear it will be a very long time before we can do it for ourselves.” Soyer did not get the chance to see his stoves being used on the front lines because shortly after his grand opening, the allies captured Sebastopol. Around 23,000 people on both sides were killed and wounded in the final assault on September 8, 1855. Soyer volunteered to help in the kitchens of the general hospital where he said he saw so many amputations that “several buckets” were filled with limbs. A week after the fall of Sebastopol Soyer was struck down by Crimean fever, a bacterial infection caused by bad meat or unpasteurized milk. It was often fatal. Nightingale had come down with the disease two months earlier and barely survived. Soyer spent weeks in bed with severe fever, heart palpitations, headaches, and insomnia. He was at last able to get up looking, he said, “so altered that scarcely anybody could recognise me,” and followed his doctor’s advice to return to Constantinople to convalesce. There he was laid low by dysentery but still decided to make one more trip to Balaclava. Fifty of his stoves had arrived in Constantinople, and even though the war was over, he wanted to make sure they reached soldiers who needed them. When he ignored medical advice not to travel, his exasperated doctor warned, “Don’t forget to take your gravestone with you.”
Soyer sailed to Crimea in 1855 with Florence Nightingale. They were shocked by the uncomfortable, filthy conditions they found as they traveled from hospital to hospital.
Once back in Balaclava, Soyer arranged for stoves to be delivered to each of the 40 regiments still in the camp. Rising at 6 each morning and often working 12-hour days, he visited every regiment and explained how to use the stoves. Soyer also handed out simple recipes in the hope that the soldiers would master them before being sent home. Unsurprisingly, he somehow found time to socialize. Not content with accepting numerous invitations, he held dinner parties of his own complete with dishes like his special Tally-ho Pie, from which a live fox leapt when the pastry was cut. A dessert called La bombe glacée à la Sebastopol was a big hit, as was Crimean Cup à la Marmara, a heady mixture of champagne, rum, lemon, and sugar. With the war over, Soyer said the camp resembled a “monster banqueting hall.” Soyer left the Crimea for Constantinople on July 10, 1856. A shameless self-promoter, he gathered testimonials
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ALEXIS SOYER
from influential people. He asked Florence Nightingale for a “candid opinion of the humble services I have been able to render to the Hospitals.” She had been critical of him in the past, calling him a “humbug,” but this time she sent a glowing report saying he had “restored order where all was unavoidable confusion” and “took soldiers’ and patients’ diets and converted them into wholesome and agreeable food.” As for his stoves, she wrote they “answer every purpose of economy and efficiency.” Soyer arrived back in London in May 1857 after several months traveling in Europe. He had not fully recovered from his Crimean fever, and doctors told him to rest. Ignoring their advice, he “ran on in a mad career of gaiety.” One day when riding to join friends for lunch, his horse bolted. Soyer’s foot got caught in the stirrup, and he was dragged down the road before the horse was stopped. Nothing was broken and in spite of feeling understandably shocked, he went on to the lunch in a hansom cab. Despite the accident and his fast-failing health, he invented a new sauce (with Turkish herbs) and wrote another
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Peter Snow, an author and broadcaster, has written several history books, including When Britain Burned the White House: The 1814 Invasion of Washington (Thomas Dunne Books, 2014). He lives in London. Ann MacMillan worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for many years after marrying Peter Snow and moving to London. They are the authors of War Stories: From the Charge of the Light Brigade to the Battle of the Bulge and Beyond (Pegasus Books, 2018), from which this article is excerpted.
IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS
Three children eat cheese sandwiches at an emergency food center in Liverpool, England, during the Blitz. Behind them a man prepares hot food with a Soyer stove.
cookbook with the ungainly title of A Culinary Campaign, being Historical Reminiscences of the late War with the Plain Art of cookery for Military and Civil Institutions, the Army, Navy, Public, etc. He gave a lecture at the United Service Institute on military and naval cookery. Ever the showman, he ended his talk by producing delicious soup and omelets on one of his Soyer stoves. Nightingale asked him to design a model military kitchen and to teach army and hospital cooks new recipes. He started work on a new stove that he said could cook “a dinner either for one man or a battalion.” By the summer of 1858, just 48 years old, Soyer was paying the penalty for his frantically full life. He was spitting blood and losing weight. He was drinking copiously, and his behavior became bizarre. He shouted at servants, and according to one witness, “he would dive into stewpans and kettles.” This extraordinary behavior was consistent with Crimean fever. The end was not long in coming. Driven as ever, he was designing a mobile cooking carriage for the army when he fell into a coma and died. London’s Morning Chronicle observed: “He saved as many lives through his kitchens as Florence Nightingale did through her wards.” The great Nightingale herself was moved to comment: “Soyer’s death is a great disaster....He has no successor.” In spite of his short life, Soyer’s legacy is immense. The Crimean War led to the Soyer stove becoming part of the English language along with the cardigan and the raglan sleeve. Soyer’s stoves were used for over a century by armed forces in Britain, Canada, and Australia. They provided hot meals and tea in British cities bombed during the Second World War. They even went to the Falklands War in 1982. Soyer’s insistence on properly trained army chefs led to the creation of the British Army’s Army Catering Corps, while his soup kitchens became a model for charities such as the Salvation Army and Oxfam. His cookbooks, with their emphasis on nutritious, tasty, and economical food, would inspire a host of future British culinary stars, including Isabella Beeton, the author of the best-selling Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, first published in 1861. His signature Lamb Cutlets Reform are still being served at the Reform Club just as they have been since 1846. MHQ
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POETRY
PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE
COURTESY GALESBURG PUBLIC LIBRARY ARCHIVES
Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1878. His Swedish immigrant parents were poor, and Sandburg left school at an early age to help support the family, working as a barbershop porter, a dishwasher, and a brickyard hand, among other odd jobs. At 17 he traveled west to Kansas as a hobo, but when the SpanishAmerican War broke out in 1898, he enlisted in the 6th Illinois Infantry. (He’s in the center of the photograph at right.) Sandburg landed at Guánica with his unit during the invasion of Puerto Rico later that year but never saw battle. After the war ended, Sandburg briefly attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. (He left after two weeks when he failed a mathematics and grammar exam.) He then enrolled in Lombard College in Galesburg, where he began writing poetry. He completed four years there but did not earn a diploma. He then moved to Milwaukee, where he worked as an advertising writer and a newspaper reporter and met and married Lillian Steichen (whom he called Paula), the sister of photographer Edward Steichen. In 1913 the couple moved to Chicago, where Sandburg became an editorial writer for the Chicago Daily News. He also made a name for himself as a poet, publishing three volumes of freeverse poems in just five years. The second volume, Cornhuskers (1918) received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He was recognized as a member of the Chicago literary renaissance, which included Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Ben Hecht, and Edgar Lee Masters. In the 1920s Sandburg began writing what would turn out to be a six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. In 1940 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history for the last four volumes of the biography, published as Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, and in 1951 he was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his Complete Poems. Sandburg died in 1967 at his farm in Flat Rock, North Carolina. “Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius,” President Lyndon B. Johnson said in observing his death. “He was America.” The poem that follows is from Sandburg’s Chicago Poems (Henry Holt & Company, 1916).
WARS In the old wars drum of hoofs and the beat of shod feet. In the new wars hum of motors and the tread of rubber tires. In the wars to come silent wheels and whirr of rods not yet dreamed out in the heads of men. In the old wars clutches of short swords and jabs into faces with spears. In the new wars long range guns and smashed walls, guns running a spit of metal and men falling in tens and twenties. In the wars to come new silent deaths, new silent hurlers not yet dreamed out in the heads of men. In the old wars kings quarreling and thousands of men following. In the new wars kings quarreling and millions of men following. In the wars to come kings kicked under the dust and millions of men following great causes not yet dreamed out in the heads of men.
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WARRIORS & WEAPONS
Cyrus and his army of more than 10,000 Greek mercenaries take on their Persian adversaries at the Battle of Cunaxa in 401 BCE .
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The Landmark Xenophon’s Anabasis
Edited by Shane Brennan and David Thomas; translated by David Thomas 672 pages. Pantheon, 2021. $49.50. Reviewed by Marc G. DeSantis The Landmark Xenophon’s Anabasis is a military history, as well as a crackling adventure story, with few equals. The Kyrou Anabasis (Cyrus’s March Upcountry) is probably better known today as The March of the Ten Thousand, or simply as the Anabasis. It tells the story of the ill-fated expedition of Xenophon of Athens and more than 10,000 Greek mercenaries to fight for the throne of Persia on behalf of Prince Cyrus. Though Cyrus was the younger son of the prior Persian king, his many supporters believed that he had the stronger claim to the kingship than did his brother, Artaxerxes, who had already been crowned. From his base, the satrapy of Lydia in western Asia Minor, Cyrus dili-
gently mounted a massive army to take on Artaxerxes. Greek hoplites, the best heavy infantry money could hire, made up the lion’s share of the prince’s force. Though his army would defeat Artaxerxes and the Persians at the Battle of Cunaxa in 401 BCE, thanks mainly to the efforts of the mercenaries, Cyrus was slain, and the objective of the expedition died with him. Worse for the Greeks was that the 10,000 mercenaries were now stranded deep inside an enemy empire. After the Persians executed the senior officers of Cyrus’s army, Xenophon stepped forward to rally the rudderless Greeks and set their feet on the hard and bloody path home—a dangerous journey across hundreds of miles of difficult terrain populated by hostile tribes. Xenophon’s account of the harrowing march exudes emotion and grit. Readers can viscerally feel the Greeks’ delight on reaching the Black Sea. “The sea, the sea!” he reports they shouted, “repeating it from one to the other like a watchword.” Before an engagement with the Kolchoi (or Colchians), a particularly bellicose tribe
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occupying lands along the coast of the Black Sea, he urges the mercenaries to “eat them raw.” The book’s many maps and illustrations, along with numerous margin annotations, are possibly its most useful features. Nearly two dozen scholarly essays appended to the text round out the offering. As with other titles in the series, this large-format volume not only brings an ancient classic back to life but amplifies it with insightful scholarship. Marc G. DeSantis is the author of Rome Seizes the Trident: The Defeat of Carthaginian Seapower and the Forging of the Roman Empire (Pen and Sword Military, 2016).
Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare
By Paul Lockhart 640 pages. Basic Books, 2021. $35. Reviewed by Claire Barrett
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“Human ingenuity is remarkably fecund when it comes to the invention of new instruments of death.” With that introduction, acclaimed historian Paul Lockhart, a professor at Wright
State University in Dayton, Ohio, sets off on an exhaustive study of just how inhumane—yet demonstrably creative—humanity can be in the business of killing. From the advent of gunpowder weapons in the 15th century to the age of mass-annihilation weapons with the dropping of the atom bomb in 1945, Lockhart takes the reader through the role and evolution of weaponry, tracing how technology has changed not only warfare but also the balance of power among the world’s best-armed nations. Lockhart’s newest book, however, isn’t simply for weapons aficionados and self-proclaimed gearheads. While he notes that the book is “by no means intended to catalog all the significant or noteworthy weapons used by Western military forces over the course of half a millennium,” Lockhart deftly explores how the evolution of weaponry has shaped the global struggle for power. “If warfare created the modern state,” he writes, “then it was firearms that created modern warfare.” Lockhart proceeds to explain how and why that happened. Despite its title, Firepower is not simply a dry description of the nuts and bolts of weaponry. The book’s greatest strength lies in Lockhart’s ability to weave technical jargon with engaging prose and poignant insights
as to how and why war and the world itself was never the same after the invention of guns. And while that might seem like stating the obvious, Lockhart’s exhaustive research and insightful analysis leave the reader with a solid understanding of advances in military hardware from the Renaissance forward. From the climax of World War II, which marked the transition from small arms warfare to mutually assured destruction (forever altering the way in which nations fight), Lockhart asserts that “massive buildups during the World Wars and the ensuing Cold War had the unintended result of generating truly gigantic quantities of military surplus, glutting the international arms market with inexpensive but effective modern weapons.” The result, he writes, has been to put “significant, modern military firepower into the hands of impoverished states, revolutionaries, and terrorists.” This may not be the book for those looking for exacting details on the design of the liquid-cooled piston engines on a Spitfire or the number of ridges on a minié ball. But those looking for historical perspective will find this work to be thoroughly researched, well paced, and thought provoking. Claire Barrett is MHQ’s digital media editor.
STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION (required by Act of August 12, 1970: Section 3685, Title 39, United States Code). 1. MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History 2. (ISSN: 1040-5992) 3. Filing date: 10/1/21. 4. Issue frequency: Quarterly. 5. Number of issues published annually: 4. 6. The annual subscription price is $74.95. 7. Complete mailing address of known office of publication: HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203. 8. Complete mailing address of headquarters or general business office of publisher: HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203. 9. Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor. Publisher, Michael A. Reinstein, HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203, Editor, Bill Hogan, HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203, Editor in Chief, Alex Neill, HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203. 10. Owner: HistoryNet; 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203. 11. Known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent of more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: None. 12. Tax status: Has Not Changed During Preceding 12 Months. 13. Publisher title: MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. 14. Issue date for circulation data below: Fall 2021. 15. The extent and nature of circulation: A. Total number of copies printed (Net press run). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 19,806. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 20,909. B. Paid circulation. 1. Mailed outside-county paid subscriptions. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 5,523. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 5,554. 2. Mailed in-county paid subscriptions. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 3. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 2,943. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 2,800. 4. Paid distribution through other classes mailed through the USPS. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. C. Total paid distribution. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 8,466. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date; 8,354. D. Free or nominal rate distribution (by mail and outside mail). 1. Free or nominal Outside-County. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 2. Free or nominal rate in-county copies. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 3. Free or nominal rate copies mailed at other Classes through the USPS. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 4. Free or nominal rate distribution outside the mail. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 543. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 573. E. Total free or nominal rate distribution. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 543. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 573. F. Total free distribution (sum of 15c and 15e). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 9,009. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 8,927. G. Copies not Distributed. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 10,797. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 11,982. H. Total (sum of 15f and 15g). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 19,806. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing: 20,909. I. Percent paid. Average percent of copies paid for the preceding 12 months: 94.0% Actual percent of copies paid for the preceding 12 months: 93.6% 16. Electronic Copy Circulation: A. Paid Electronic Copies. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. B. Total Paid Print Copies (Line 15c) + Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 8,466. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 8,354. C. Total Print Distribution (Line 15f) + Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 9,009. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 8,927. D. Percent Paid (Both Print & Electronic Copies) (16b divided by 16c x 100). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 94.0%. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 93.6%. I certify that 50% of all distributed copies (electronic and print) are paid above nominal price: Yes. Report circulation on PS Form 3526-X worksheet 17. Publication of statement of ownership will be printed in the Winter 2022 issue of the publication. 18. Signature and title of editor, publisher, business manager, or owner: Shawn G. Byers, VP, Audience Development & Circulation. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanction and civil actions.
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DRAWN & QUARTERED
NUTS!
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
In 1943 the U.S. Department of Agriculture made a drawing of “Private Peanut” introduced the previous year into this legume-promoting poster, noting that peanut oil could be made into soap, nitroglycerin, and “many other things needed by our fighting men and civilians.”
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Gina Elise’s
Tes, USAF Veteran
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“IN THE WHOLE RANGE OF HUMAN ACTIVITIES, WAR MOST CLOSELY RESEMBLES A GAME OF CARDS. ” —Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, writing in Vom Kriege ( On War), which was published a year after his death in 1831 page 68
WINTER 2022 VOLUME 34, NUMBER 2
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