World War II December 2021

DEATH TRAP

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A BLOODY ASSAULT ON A TINY PACIFIC ISLAND PROVED THE FOLLY OF “MOPPING UP” OPERATIONS

U.S. Army troops and armor head ashore on Angaur Island in October 1944 for the final phase of the invasion.

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WORLD WAR II

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DE CE M B E R 2021 ENDORSED BY THE NATIONAL WORLD WAR II MUSEUM, INC.

F E AT U R E S COVE R STO RY

32 WHAT MATTERED MOST

A forgotten battle on a tiny Pacific island dramatized the folly of “mopping up” operations JOHN C. McMANUS

42 WHAT TO MAKE OF SS GENERAL KARL WOLFF?

Could he be both a peacemaker and a mass murderer?

The unsettled legacy of a Nazi leader NICHOLAS REYNOLDS

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

52 ON THE FAST TRACK

America’s M29 Weasel armored vehicle

54 TRIGGER POINT

Horrors spawned more horrors when American troops entered Dachau concentration camp JOSEPH CONNOR

64 REBEL WITH A CAUSE

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American aviator Laura Ingalls decided to use her headlinegrabbing fame in support of the Nazis APRIL WHITE

Polish prisoners at Dachau toast their liberation from the brutal concentration camp.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES COVER: U.S. COAST GUARD/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

D E PA RT M E N T S

8 MAIL 10 WORLD WAR II TODAY 20 CONVERSATION

Andrew Biggio and the magic between old veterans and a rifle

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24 FROM THE FOOTLOCKER 26 NEED TO KNOW 28 TRAVEL

Saint-Marcel, in northwest France, bears the scars of one dark day

70 REVIEWS

Hitler’s American Gamble; SEAL history; graphic novels; more

76 BATTLE FILMS

Why 1978’s improbable The Boys from Brazil still has the power to scare

79 CHALLENGE 8O FAMILIAR FACE

DECEMBER 2021

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WWII Online WORLDWARII.com

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

VOL. 36, NO. 4 DECEMBER 2021

EDITOR

KAREN JENSEN

The semi-submersible code-named “Gimik” on a trial run.

Nicholas Reynolds, author of this issue’s “What to Make of SS General Karl Wolff?” is, as a former historian for the CIA Museum, a master of OSS history. Check out his related stories:

The Stranger-ThanFiction Career of the OSS’s Carl Eifler

The colonel headed a clandestine operations program that required brute force, innovation—and a peculiar-looking semi-submersible.

Jack Hemingway’s War As an OSS officer operating behind German lines in France in 1944, Ernest Hemingway’s eldest son, Jack, had wartime experiences admired by his famous father but overshadowed by his father’s work.

Larry Porges SENIOR EDITOR Kirstin Fawcett ASSOCIATE EDITOR Jerry Morelock, Jon Guttman HISTORIANS David T. Zabecki CHIEF MILITARY HISTORIAN Paul Wiseman NEWS EDITOR Stephen Kamifuji CREATIVE DIRECTOR Brian Walker GROUP ART DIRECTOR Melissa A. Winn DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY Guy Aceto, Uliana Bazar, Jennifer E. Berry PHOTO EDITORS ADVISORY BOARD

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WORLD WAR II

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CONTRIBUTORS JOHN C. McMANUS (“What Mattered Most”) is the Curators’ Distinguished Professor of U.S. Military History at Missouri University of Science and Technology. His article is drawn from his latest book, Island Infernos (November 2021), the second in a trilogy that sheds new light on the relatively overlooked subject of the U.S. Army in the Asia-Pacific Theater. The series is the product of more than a decade of research and writing, during which McManus became especially interested in 1944’s Battle of Angaur in the Palau Islands as a troubling microcosm for how much of the war was fought.

JOSEPH CONNOR (“Trigger Point”) studied history

at Fairleigh Dickinson University and received his law degree from Rutgers University before working for 27 years as an assistant county prosecutor in New Jersey. In that role, Connor made many tough calls on whether evidence supported a criminal prosecution; he identified with his U.S. Army counterparts who had to make an impossibly difficult decision after American soldiers fired on Germans during Dachau’s liberation.

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REYNOLDS

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NICHOLAS REYNOLDS (“What to Make of SS General Karl Wolff?”) is currently working on a book about American intelligence in World War II. “I found it hard to stop thinking about Wolff,” he says about writing his story on the enigmatic SS official. “After the war Wolff wanted to be recognized for his various good deeds and argued it was possible to be a decent SS man. Was this a cynical calculation or a delusion? Was he lying to others—or to himself, as so many Germans seem to have done? Even today it is hard to know for sure.”

APRIL WHITE (“Rebel with a Cause”) discovered that nothing is quite what it seems in the story of how famed aviator Laura Ingalls came to be convicted as a Nazi agent. White’s surprising historical narratives have also appeared in Smithsonian, the Washington Post, and The Atavist Magazine, among others. She is the author of The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier, to be published in 2022.

PORTRAITS BY JOHANNA GOODMAN

CONNOR

GAVIN MORTIMER (“One Deadly Day”), a British writer who lives in Paris, is the author of more than 20 books. His next, a history of Special Air Service operations in occupied France, took him to Brittany, where he explored the site of 1944’s Battle of SaintMarcel for this issue’s “Travel” feature.

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African American servicemen flash the “V for Victory” sign. The V-sign had a double meaning for Black troops, who fought racism at home while battling the enemy abroad.

heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis reminded everyone at the time, “Lots of things wrong with America, but Hitler ain’t going to fix them.”

Joseph H. Brown Tampa, Fla.

STILL ROLLING

THANK YOU FOR PUBLISHING the story of baseball great Jackie Robinson’s court-martial in 1944 [“Leveling the Playing Field,” August 2021]. Not only did the story reveal the bravery of one of my heroes, it also gave readers a glimpse into what Black soldiers had to endure to serve their country during World War II. Historian Stephen Ambrose noted the lamentable American irony of it, writing in his book, Citizen Soldier, “The world’s greatest democracy fought the world’s greatest racist with a segregated army.” It also made me think of my late Uncle Dewey, who died in 2006 at the age of 81. “We had to fight two wars,” he told me many times when recounting his service time. Robinson’s ordeal is a good example.

Stateside, Black America went along with the so-called “Double V” campaign—victory over fascism abroad and racial injustice at home. Many believed that full participation in the war would bring enhanced rights to America’s Black citizens after foreign enemies were defeated. That wouldn’t happen, unfortunately, until two decades later.

But my uncle never expressed any lasting bitterness about this treatment. Like most of his generation, he entered the service right out of high school and served until the war was over. He had seldom ventured outside of Chicago before spending nearly three years serving in Africa, Italy, France, and Germany. His main focus was always on what he and the rest of the G.I.s accomplished, meeting a challenge rarely presented in history. His generation made the sacrifice because there was no one else to do it, and it had to be done. And as

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Editor’s note: Come Out Fighting, directed by Steven Luke, is slated for release in 2022.

PLAYING PRETEND

Regarding James Holland’s appreciation of the P-51 Mustang [“Top of the Heap,” August 2021], I would like to switch focus to the war in the Pacific, where there was a separate collection of military fighter aircraft. I believe the U.S. Navy’s and Marines’ choice for World War II’s most “decisive” aircraft would most likely be the F4U Corsair.

As I recall, the Corsair is the fighter aircraft

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RAFAL SZCZYPEK

DOUBLE DUTY

FROM TOP: JOE SCHWARTZ/NATIONAL ARCHIVES; COURTESY OF STEVE ROERSMA

MAIL

I appreciated your story in the August issue about Jackie Robinson’s 1944 court-martial. As it states, Lieutenant Robinson was a member of the 761st Tank Battalion. Interestingly enough, I am providing an armored vehicle to a movie shoot focused on the 761st.

Filming is ongoing in Rockford, Illinois, as I type this letter in July from Michigan. Here is a photo [below]: Steve Roersma Marne, Mich.

with the longest production history of any other U.S. military [piston engine] aircraft. It remained in service well into the Korean War. And although I didn’t get to ride in a Corsair like Holland’s daughter got to fly in a Mustang, I do have my own personal emotional connection with the design: when I was four or five years old, I got to sit in the cockpit of a F4U-5N at the Vought-Sikorsky plant in Bridgeport, Connecticut. (My dad worked there as a guard.) One Sunday afternoon he snuck me into the hanger, and I got to play fighter pilot. This was the emotional event sealing my vote.

I will readily admit that the P-51 is a gorgeous aircraft, both in performance and in looks. I recall reading in one of my college engineering textbooks a discussion about the time and energy spent to develop the airfoil section of the P-51 laminar flow wing. At some time after the design’s completion, someone observed that fish, particularly trout, look like the cross-section of a laminar wing when sliced from mouth to tail—not much of a surprise to any trout fisherman who has watched a hooked fish accelerate through the water.

Leon Marasco Plainfield, Vt.

Lucas, for in the Star Wars trilogy he chose the engine noise of the P-51 to be the engine sound of the Millennium Falcon.

George A. Mitchell Blairsville, Ga.

STORM CLOUDS AHEAD

What an issue! [August 2021] I especially enjoyed Tom Yarborough’s article on the Thai Air Force. I was in Army Intelligence Collection in the 1970s, and my first duty station was the 7th Radio Research Field Station in the Thai village of Nonsung, about 12 miles south of Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base. Shortly after my arrival, I watched the last USAF Phantom fighters leave Thailand for good. Not a comforting feeling, with the Communists in charge in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. (We were just 40 miles south of Vientiane, the capital of Laos. Or just five minutes by MiG-17, as we used to say.)

It was thrilling to see the story’s visuals of U.S.-provided prewar aircraft in Thailand because some featured the very same Thai deity on their sides that adorned our front gate

RAFAL SZCZYPEK

FROM TOP: JOE SCHWARTZ/NATIONAL ARCHIVES; COURTESY OF STEVE ROERSMA

LEAGUE OF ITS OWN

Pilots flying the P-38 during World War II shot down more enemy aircraft (including the Japanese G4M “Betty” transporting Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto) than the P-51 Mustang.

The P-47 (“the Jug”) gave its pilot more protection and was better at strafing. Over Britain, the Spitfire and its almost-twin Hurricane turned back the Luftwaffe; meanwhile, the F4U Corsair and the F6F Hellcat broke the back of Imperial Japan’s air units during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Still, the P-51 Mustang was absolutely in a class by itself.

It was a personal treat for me when Wings of Freedom flew a B-17, a B-24, and a twinseat P-51 into our little town’s airport and displayed them to the public for a long weekend’s visit. The highlight came when the P-51 started its engine, rolled out onto the tarmac, throttled up, lifted off, turned, dropped down, and almost trimmed the grass between the runways with its prop before barrel-rolling into the clear blue sky.

The memory of the roar of that Merlin engine still gives me goosebumps. It must have had the same effect on director George

FROM THE EDITOR It’s impossible to study war without encountering profound questions of morality and ethics. I find stories that touch on these matters particularly gripping—and often tragic.

These are the stories where individuals must grapple with moral ambiguity and cannot rely on textbook solutions in law or doctrine. Two stories in this issue offer particularly strong takes on this theme. In one, a senior SS leader attempts to make peace with the Allies near the close of the war (“What to Make of SS General Karl Wolff?,” page 42). How should that final act of good be seen against a career in support of the Nazis? And in Joseph Connor’s “Trigger Point” (page 54), American soldiers gun down SS guards after viewing the horrors at Dachau concentration camp. Was that a war crime? Much is not clear, but one thing is: what’s legal and what isn’t does not always align with what’s right and what’s wrong. —Karen Jensen

A colorful Thai god crouches, ready to strike, on the side of a pre-World War II plane.

in Nonsung 34 years later. And—to quote the old Thai proverb referenced in Yarborough’s piece—talk about “the tree bending with the wind”: four months after my arrival, our treaty with Thailand allowing us to operate there expired, and they asked us to leave.

Eugene W. Smith Concord, N.H. Correction: The August issue’s “From the Footlocker” featuring a bowl that survived the Hiroshima blast mistakenly identifies a naval officer as a U.S. Army officer in a photo caption.

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DECEMBER 2021

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WWII TODAY

REPORTED AND WRITTEN BY PAUL WISEMAN

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The three Barber brothers of New London, Wisconsin, lost aboard the Oklahoma, were buried in their hometown on September 11, 2021.

WORLD WAR II

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FROM TOP: EPA/DPA; NATIONAL ARCHIVES

THE BARBER BROTHERS—Malcolm (22), Leroy (21), and Randolph (19)—were thrilled to be assigned as firemen aboard the USS Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Back home in New London, Wisconsin, their father wasn’t so sure about the arrangement. He wrote a letter to the navy, asking that the boys be put on separate ships as a precaution against the unthinkable.

A few weeks later the unthinkable happened. Torpedoed during Japan’s December 7, 1941, surprise attack, the Oklahoma capsized and took 429 men down with it, including the Barber boys. For decades their remains went unidentified, along with the vast majority of those lost on the battleship. But the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), using dental and DNA analysis, finally accounted for the brothers in June. They were buried on September 11 in their hometown.

Since 2015, the DPAA has made rapid progress identifying the Oklahoma remains. The agency had identified 352 sailors as of late August, including 97 over the previous year, according to the agency’s Oklahoma project director, forensic

Newly expanded databases and improved DNA testing have allowed investigators to identify most of the several hundred sailors killed when the USS Oklahoma capsized at Pearl Harbor.

FROM TOP: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; DPAA

FALLEN SAILORS FROM OKLAHOMA IDENTIFIED

FROM TOP: EPA/DPA; NATIONAL ARCHIVES

FROM TOP: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; DPAA

anthropologist Carrie LeGarde.

From December 1941 through June 1944, the navy retrieved bodies from the wreck. The military initially identified just 35 men and buried nearly 400 unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl, in the crater of an inactive volcano. In 2015, the navy allowed the military investigators to disinter all USS Oklahoma remains from the Punchbowl. They were first taken to a DPAA lab at Joint Base Pearl HarborHickham for initial processing, then transferred to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska for analysis.

The investigators first solved what LeGarde calls the “straightforward cases”—where identification could be made from dental records, military documents, and by matching DNA samples to those of likely family members. In 2019 and 2020, LeGarde says, the navy pushed hard to collect additional family DNA samples, leading to the increased identification numbers.

Improved DNA testing methods have also helped.

After a body is identified, the navy informs the family, and they discuss how to handle the burial.

If no next of kin can be found, the navy determines how to best honor the remains.

By 2020, investigators had secured all remaining DNA samples. With only 42 still unknown, LeGarde says, “We are nearing the end of the identifications we can make.” Some of the men unaccounted for might have died where the torpedoes hit, their bodies unrecoverable. The military is considering a group burial for the remaining unknowns, possibly at the Punchbowl on December 7, 2021.

LeGarde says she’s been most moved by cases involving brothers like the Barbers. In 2019, the agency identified twins Leo and Rudolph Blitz. Leo was working below decks when the Japanese attacked. Worried, Rudolph went down to find him. They were never seen alive again. Working out of Offutt Air Force Base, LeGarde rarely gets to talk with the families of the dead, but she worked with the Blitz family and attended the August 2019 funeral in nearby Lincoln. “It was just heartbreaking,” she says.

WEAPONS STASH LANDS GERMAN SENIOR IN HOT WATER THE GERMAN RETIREE made no secret of his private arsenal. One winter, in fact, he reportedly brought his 45-ton World War II-era Panther tank out of his basement to plow snow.

Still, a court in the northern German city of Kiel was unmoved by Klaus-Dieter Flick’s lack of guile. In August, it convicted the 84-yearold former financial broker of illegally possessing weapons, including the tank, a flak cannon, and other World War II relics. Flick was sentenced to 14 months of probation, ordered to pay a 250,000-euro ($295,000) fine, and instructed to sell or donate the weaponry to a museum or a fully licensed collector, as mandated by Germany’s War Weapons Control Act and other statutes, within two years.

The case goes back to 2015, when authorities uncovered the stash in a raid on the defendant’s property in Heikendorf, a Kiel suburb (above). Twenty soldiers spent nearly nine hours pulling the tank out of the man’s underground garage and onto a trailer. Authorities at the time also seized machine guns, automatic pistols, and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

Heikendorf mayor Alexander Orth said the man was a military memorabilia enthusiast. “One loves steam trains,” the mayor said of such collectors, “the other, old tanks.”

DISPATCHES Colorado is erecting a statue to honor Major General Maurice Rose, America’s highest-ranking Jewish soldier and the highest-ranking American officer killed in enemy combat in Europe during World War II. Rose, who grew up in Denver, led the 3rd Armored Division. He was killed on March 30, 1945, shot while attempting to avoid capture by Germans in Paderborn, Germany. In July, Colorado governor Jared Polis held a ceremony memorializing Rose outside the state capitol building in Denver. The statue will take about six months to make and will go up in the city’s Lincoln Veteran’s Memorial Park.

DECEMBER 2021

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LYNCHED SOLDIER REMEMBERED

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A 2016 account of the case in the Washington Post concluded that “the FBI and the War Department failed to obtain—and in some cases ignored—critical information about the crime.” More than 80 years later, the FBI continues to redact its report, citing privacy concerns for some of those mentioned.

Still, there were suspects: a White sergeant near where Hall was last seen had reportedly brandished a shotgun and threatened to kill a Black “peeping Tom” previously spotted in the area; the head of Fort Benning’s military police believed another sergeant had reason to kill Hall, but the motives have been redacted from the FBI report; and five Black soldiers told investigators that the sawmill’s White civilian foreman had threatened to kill Hall after a quarrel the day before the soldier disappeared—but White witnesses said they knew nothing about the dispute, and there is no evidence that the FBI pursued the lead.

Pressure to erect a plaque in Hall’s honor gained momentum in 2020 amid protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In August, army Lieutenant General Theodore Martin expressed hope that service members will look at the memorial to Hall and pledge: “Never again in my country, never again in my army.”

FROM TOP: THE PITTSBURGH COURIER; U.S. ARMY

On February 12, 1941, 19-year-old Private Felix Hall (above) was lynched by a person or persons unknown at Fort Benning, Georgia.

In August, the army dedicated a memorial to the soldier on the site where he was last seen alive.

THE BLACK SOLDIERS of the 24th Infantry Regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, and went on to serve at Guadalcanal and Bougainville in the Solomon Islands and the Kerama Islands southwest of Okinawa.

Private Felix Hall never made it that far. In February 1941, the rifleman was lynched in the Fort Benning woods at age 19, strung up in a ravine, a noose around his neck, his feet bound in baling wire. A low-energy investigation by the military and the FBI failed to bring anyone to justice.

In August, Hall was finally memorialized in the place where he was murdered. Fort Benning dedicated a plaque in his honor, and a separate marker is going up in the woods where he was found.

As the United States mobilized for war in 1940, Hall left Millbrook, Alabama, to volunteer. He was sent to Fort Benning and assigned to the 24th—one of four Black “Buffalo Soldier” regiments created soon after the Civil War. Hall, a prankster and ladies’ man, was put to work at a Fort Benning sawmill. He went missing on February 12, 1941, after telling friends he was headed to the segregated base PX nearby for a hot meal. His route took him through a White neighborhood.

He never made it. Six weeks later, his decomposing body was discovered by a regiment on a training exercise. In the interim, the army had labeled him a deserter. A military doctor listed Hall’s death as a homicide on the death certificate, but military investigators told the public that Hall might have killed himself.

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9/23/21 3:07 PM

ROMAN GLADIATORS FROZEN IN TIME FOR OVER 1,600 YEARS

Found: 1,600-Year-Old Roman Gladiator Coins Hold the Glory of Rome In the Palm of Your Hand

W

hen your famous father appoints you Caesar at age 7, you’re stepping into some very big sandals. But when that father is Emperor Constantine the Great, those sandals can be epic!

Constantius II, became Caesar at 7, and a Roman Emperor at age 20. Today, he is remembered for helping continue his father’s work of bringing Christianity to the Roman Empire, as well as for his valiant leadership in battle.

But for many collectors, his strongest legacy is having created one of the most fascinating and unique bronze coins in the history of the Roman Empire: the “Gladiator’s Paycheck”.

the Gladiators Paycheck

Roman bronze coins were the “silver dollars” of their day. They were the coins used for daily purchases, as well as for the payment of wages. Elite Roman Gladiators—paid to do battle before cheering crowds in the Colosseum—often received their monthly ‘paycheck’ in the form of Roman bronze coins.

But this particular Roman bronze has a gladiator pedigree like no other! Minted between 348 to 361 AD, the Emperor’s portrait appears on one side of this coin.

The other side depicts a literal clash of the gladiators. One warrior raises his spear menacingly at a second warrior on horseback. Frozen in bronze for over 1,600 years, the drama of this moment can still be felt when you hold the coin.

Surrounding this dramatic scene is a Latin inscription—a phrase you would never expect in a million years!

Happy Days are Here Again The Latin inscription surrounding the gladiators reads: “Happy Days are Here Again” (Fel Temp Reparatio). You see, at the time these coins were designed,

the Emperor had just won several important military battles against the foes of Rome. At the same time, Romans were preparing to celebrate the 1100th anniversary of the founding of Rome. To mark these momentous occasions, this new motto was added and the joyful inscription makes complete sense.

A Miracle of Survival for 1,600 Years

For more than sixteen centuries, these stunning coins have survived the rise and fall of empires, earthquakes, floods and two world wars. The relatively few Roman bronze coins that have survived to this day were often part of buried treasure hoards, hidden away centuries ago until rediscovered and brought to light.

These authentic Roman coins can be found in major museums around the world. But today, thanks to GovMint. com, you can find them a little closer to home: your home!

Claim your very own genuine Roman Gladiator Bronze Coin for less than $40 (plus s/h). Each coin is protected in a clear acrylic holder for preservation and display. A Certificate of Authenticity accompanies your coin.

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Realism was key in training the mostly bilingual “Ritchie Boys” at Fort Ritchie, Maryland. The U.S. Senate has cited the unit, whose members served mainly as interrogators and interpreters.

SENATE HONORS THE RITCHIE BOYS THEY CAME FROM ALL OVER—more than 70 countries in all— and took their name from the Maryland military installation where they trained for special operations in Europe and the Pacific.

More than 19,000 “Ritchie Boys”—including 2,800 refugees from Nazi-ruled Germany and Austria—passed through Camp Ritchie, Maryland. (See the “Conversation” with Paul Fairbrook, a surviving Ritchie Boy, in our October 2021 issue.) In August,

the Senate unanimously passed a resolution honoring their “bravery and dedication” and recognizing the “importance of their contributions” to the Allied victory.

During the war, the Ritchie Boys joined elite teams in North Africa, Italy, France, and the Pacific. They were put to work using their language skills to interrogate German, Italian, and Japanese prisoners; communicate with civilians in war zones; and translate captured and decoded enemy documents. They designed psychological operations meant to demoralize Axis fighters. Their exploits went widely unrecognized for years after the war until declassified documents began to reveal their accomplishments. Their handiwork accounted for nearly 60 percent of the actionable intelligence in the European Theater.

The Ritchie Boys fought on the Normandy beaches, on Guadalcanal and Okinawa, and in the Philippines. About 140 died, including two cut down in the initial landing at Iwo Jima. One Ritchie Boy—Private Leonard Brostrom, a former Mormon missionary from Idaho—was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor for his grenade assault on a Japanese pillbox on Leyte in the Philippines. Together, they collected more than 65 Silver Stars, 15 Bronze Stars, and six French Croix de Guerre medals. Their ranks included billionaire banker David Rockefeller and Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger.

Firefighters battling a huge fire in southern Oregon in July (left) managed to save a memorial dedicated in 1950 (far left) to the only Americans killed by direct enemy fire in the Lower 48 states.

During the war, the Japanese floated bombs attached to balloons over the Pacific Northwest, hoping they’d explode and cause forest fires. In May 1945, the Reverend Archie Mitchell, his wife, Elsie, and five children from his Sunday school found a bomb during an outing near Bly, Oregon. It exploded, killing everyone but Mitchell.

14

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; BOOTLEG FIRE INCIDENT COMMAND; COURTESY OF FOREST HISTORY SOCIETY, DURHAM, N.C.

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Sh Se

UPDATE

After a virtual meeting last year, former G.I. Martin Adler reunited in person with three Italian siblings in August.

! t u O t i k c e Ch

THIS WEEK IN

HISTORY

AN ORIGINAL VIDEO SERIES

Join hosts Claire and Alex as they explore—week by week— the people and events that have shaped the world we live in.

EMOTIONAL REUNION FOR AMERICAN VET Once again, Martin Adler brought American chocolate.

But the World War II veteran’s joyful reunion with the Naldi siblings in Bologna, Italy, in August was otherwise far different from their first meeting in the fall of 1944. Back then, he came close to shooting Bruno, age 6, and his younger sisters Mafalda and Giuliana, who were hiding in a house Adler was searching. A relieved Adler instead posed for a photo with the children—one of his few happy memories of the war.

During the pandemic, Adler’s daughter sought to cheer him up by finding the three kids, now grandparents themselves. The quest was publicized in Italy and the siblings located. Adler, 97, reunited with them by video in December 2020 (see “WWII Today,” April 2021), and then traveled to Bologna to meet in person.

Giuliana, 80, remembers savoring the chocolate that Adler handed out 77 years earlier. Six children, eight grandchildren, and two greatgrandchildren have descended from the three Naldi siblings. “Knowing that Martin could have shot and that none of my family would exist is something very big,” said Roberta Fontana, 30, Giuliana’s granddaughter. “It is very emotional.”

“Before we’re through with ‘em, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell.”

HISTORYNET.COM

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9/16/21 11:20 AM

—Admiral William Halsey after the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.

FROM TOP: ELISABETTA BARACCHI/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK; NATIONAL ARCHIVES

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HOW A RELUCTANT JAPANESE ALLYHT SECRETLY FOUG FOR AMERICA

9 Crucial Decisions

Chaos at Shiloh

USS Bunker Hill burns after two kamikaze hits on May 11, 1945

What Grant, Johnston did right...and wrong The Union’s critical Plus! Russian connection Tony HorwitZ’s final thoughts on ‘Confederates in the Attic’

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Eyes in the Sky The pilots who directed airstrikes to save the troops below

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Marvel Comics enters the war

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This man taught thousands of U.S. Army Rangers how to fight dirty in World War II.

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ASK WWII Q: I’ve heard that Winston Churchill was hosting a party for prominent Americans when news of Pearl Harbor broke and that none of the Americans knew where Pearl Harbor was.

Any truth to that story? —Harsha Muni, Santa Ana, Calif.

A: Churchill was indeed hosting prominent Americans on

American envoy Averell Harriman and his daughter Kathleen were dining with Churchill when word came of the Pearl Harbor attack.

SEND QUERIES TO: Ask World War II, 901 N. Glebe Road, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203 OR EMAIL: worldwar2@ historynet.com

December 7, 1941, but the party in question was held the previous night. All the Americans there on the seventh knew where Pearl Harbor was, but one Englishman was confused.

As cited by historian Cita Stelzer in her 2013 book, Dinner with Churchill, Roosevelt representative Averell Harriman and his daughter Kathleen were invited to Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence, for the weekend. Kathleen’s 24th birthday, on December 7, was celebrated the evening of Saturday, the sixth. Harriman, in his 1975 memoir Special Envoy (written with Elie Abel), remembered a birthday cake as well as Churchill offering a toast and presenting Kathleen with an autographed copy of his book The River War.

By Sunday, the party atmosphere had vanished, Harriman recalled: “The Prime Minister seemed tired and depressed… immersed in his thoughts, with his head in his hands part of the time.” Clementine Churchill, the prime minister’s wife, felt unwell and was absent at dinner. The diners were Churchill; his naval aide Commander Tommy Thompson; John Martin, one of his private secretaries; his military assistant General Hastings Ismay; Pamela Churchill, then his daughter-in-law; the two Harrimans; and U.S. Ambassador John Gilbert Winant.

Around 9 p.m. Churchill’s butler, Frank Sawyers, brought in a portable radio, and they heard the news of a Japanese attack on America. (The attack began at about 7:50 a.m. in Hawaii, which was 6:20 p.m. in London.) There was momentary confusion: Thompson, the British naval aide, thought the announcer had said “Pearl River.” But it soon became clear that Japan had bombed the U.S. naval base in Hawaii.

Snapping out of his lethargy, Churchill put in a call to Washington. “It’s quite true,” said President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “We are all in the same boat now.”

—Richard M. Langworth (richardlangworth.com) is senior fellow for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project (winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu), which offers subscriptions to scholarly discourse on Sir Winston’s life and times.

The commander of the Marine company that raised the first American flag over Iwo Jima on February 23, 1945, Colonel Dave Severance (left), died on August 2 in San Diego at 102. The raising of a larger second flag on Mount Suribachi, replacing Severance’s flag, was captured in an iconic Associated Press photograph by Joe Rosenthal. Severance, awarded the Silver Star for his actions on Iwo Jima, later trained as a pilot and flew fighters in the Korean War; he retired from the Marines in 1968.

18

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: KEYSTONE/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; U.S. MARINE CORPS; NATIONAL ARCHIVES

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WORLD WAR II

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9/23/21 3:08 PM

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CONVERSATION WITH ANDREW BIGGIO

BY DAVE KINDY

FIRE AWAY

On my tour in Afghanistan, I wore my great-uncle’s division patch on my vest just to honor him. He was in the 34th Infantry, the Red Bull Division. He was on my mind—an Andrew Biggio who didn’t come home from war—and I felt obligated to wear his U.S. Army patch even though I was a Marine. After my tour ended, I felt bad; I’m enjoying my life, and he didn’t even get to start his. I started to read his letters, this infantryman in Italy. He wrote home to his mom—my great-grandmother—a lot. He was close to her. It was very hard on her when he died. My uncle was her firstborn son. I was told that she never put the Christmas tree up again.

I wanted to find out what happened to my uncle. If this were the 1980s, I probably would have been more easily able to find survivors who served with my uncle in the Red Bull Division in Italy—but then I might not have met these other veterans. Instead, I kept running into these other individuals, people who served all over, whose stories were just as important to me.

20

The first guy I interviewed was my neighbor, Joe Drago. Crusty old Joe. I knew him as a kid, and he always seemed old to me. I knew he had been a Marine in World War II but didn’t know much else. I brought the rifle over to him, and he told me about his time on Okinawa. “There was no such thing as a war crime,” he told me. They had orders to shoot to kill anything that moved. Joe and the other Marines did what they had to do to survive. It was hell. He gave me a bag with what I thought were pebbles. They were gold teeth he had taken from dead Japanese soldiers. As a kid, I thought Joe was just this grouchy old man. I came away with a different view of him after that.

Did these men open up more to you because you are a veteran too?

I think so. I know so. Other people have written stories about some of the men in my book and said, “Wow! He never told me that.”

WORLD WAR II

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9/16/21 8:34 AM

DHOUSE PHOTOGRAPHY

How did this project start?

Where did you begin?

THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE, FAR RIGHT: COURTESY OF ANDREW BIGGIO

IN THE SUMMER OF 2011, Andrew Biggio, then a 23-yearold sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps, was near the end of his tour in Afghanistan when his platoon came across a group of Afghan police gathering the bodies and body parts of dead comrades—victims of a roadside bomb. As the men struggled to wrestle one corpse into a body bag on the back of a pickup truck, they lost their grip. The body hit the pavement, making, Biggio recalls, a “disturbing sound unlike any I had heard before.” He put the incident out of his mind—or so he thought. Two years later, back home in Winthrop, Massachusetts, he was in a crowded grocery store when a large melon fell from a woman’s shopping cart, making a noise just like that body in Afghanistan. The horrors of that day were suddenly before him. He abandoned his cart, bolted from the store, and headed home.

On the way, he passed a sign he’d passed many times before, “Andrew Biggio Square”—marking a place named after the man he himself was named for: a great-uncle he’d never met, killed in Italy at age 19 in 1944. This time, though, questions flooded his mind, and he felt compelled to learn more about his uncle, his war, and how he’d lost his life. He began by buying a rifle—an M1 Garand—like the one his uncle carried in the war, and took it with him when he talked to a World War II veteran neighbor. That one interview led to many more—his subjects all signing the rifle—and to a series of discoveries. The results are in his new book, The Rifle: Combat Stories from America’s Last WWII Veterans, Told through an M1 Garand.

Some vets broke down crying telling me about friends they lost 75 years ago. Some never even told their families what they went through. That’s actually what inspired me to write the book. I must have been at least 30 signatures deep into the rifle when someone commented, “I never heard Grandpa say that before.” That’s when I thought I shouldn’t be selfishly getting their signatures on my rifle— I should be telling their stories.

The M1 Garand helped the veterans open up too. You should have seen how these guys came alive holding the rifle! They just started telling me stories. In the first printing of the book, I list the 175 names then on the rifle. The second printing will have 200-plus names. I keep adding signatures to the rifle as I meet more veterans.

Did any individuals in particular stand out to you?

DHOUSE PHOTOGRAPHY

THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE, FAR RIGHT: COURTESY OF ANDREW BIGGIO

Today a police officer in Massachusetts, Andrew Biggio previously served as a Marine in Iraq and Afghanistan (right), inspiring him to learn about the World War II service of his namesake (opposite).

The vets I picked for the book all inspired me. There was one fellow— he was hard as nails: Lawson Sakai of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. I didn’t have any Japanese Americans on my rifle, so I really wanted to include him. I met him in Las Vegas at his unit reunion in 2017 or 2018. This was the last reunion before COVID-19. I got Lawson, Yoshio Nakamura, and Jerry Gustafson—all members of the 442nd— to sign my rifle. I was hanging out with Nisei veterans! Lawson has

“He was on my mind—an Andrew Biggio who didn’t come home from war.” two Bronze Stars and three Purple Hearts.

The odds were stacked against these men, and they end up becoming the most decorated infantry regiment of all time. They are damn proud of who they are. They proved the whole country wrong. They are so proud of this country even though we weren’t totally fair to them.

Lawson’s story in my book is entitled “Enemy Alien” because that is what he was told he was when he couldn’t enlist. Lawson and his White friends went to the recruiting office. The others were allowed to join and were jumping up and down with excitement.

He’s walking out of there with them, humiliated. I’ll never forget a 95-year-old Lawson reminiscing about that. He told me he said to the recruiter, “But I’m an American.” To hear his voice crack remembering that was sad. He went on to be a friggin’ badass! He’s lucky to be alive. One of his wounds—shrapnel through the ribs—should have killed him.

You discovered other injustices.

Italy is the forgotten front of World War II. We do not remember the war in Italy like we remember it in France or the Pacific. I brought two World War II vets back to Italy for the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Rome, DECEMBER 2021

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21 9/16/21 8:34 AM

and we were the only ones there. There wasn’t a wreath, a flag-raising, anything. I remember looking at these guys, and one said, “In 1994, President Clinton was here. We had ceremonies. We had marching bands. What happened?” I didn’t know what to tell them. We were in Rome on June 4, 2019—75 years after the first Nazi capital fell—and there was nothing. Two days later, it’s June 6 and there are hundreds of thousands of people in Normandy for the 75th anniversary.

The Allies were slogging through Italy in September and October 1944. It’s almost like Vietnam. Soldiers are asking, “If troops are in Holland ready to cross the Rhine, why am I in Italy climbing this hill with machine guns and artillery pointed at me?” For the first time, these vets are admitting to me they were questioning what was happening.

There are stories of mutiny, dereliction of duty, going AWOL. Guys were refusing orders by officers to go on suicide missions. I heard this from everyone who was in Italy post-Normandy. I see it even in my uncle’s letters. You can see how demotivated he is.

He wants his mother to mail him a gold cross. He says how he doesn’t want to go up this hill again. It matches what these men in their late nineties were telling me.

The Germans had the Po Valley. The Gothic Line was the last brutal assault the Americans had to make. Reading the afteraction reports and seeing the casualty lists

WW2P-211200-CONVO-1.indd 22

from that period, I’m thinking, “These poor kids. My poor uncle.”

They got the short end of the stick, but it had to be done. They had to hold 30 German divisions in Italy so the German troops could not reinforce the Russian or Western fronts.

One of the last men to sign your rifle had been in Italy with your uncle.

Ed Hess had been in the same company. September 17, 1944, was when my uncle was killed, the same day Operation Market Garden— the attempted liberation of Holland—was going on. His division started its mission to penetrate the Gothic Line about a week earlier.

TOP: COURTESY OF ANDREW BIGGIO (ALL); BOTTOM: COURTESY OF REGNERY HISTORY

Biggio asked the veterans he interviewed to sign his M1 Garand rifle. Among the many signatures—and stories he tells in his new book, The Rifle—are those of (clockwise from top left) Joe Drago, Lawson Sakai, and Ed Hess, who served in Italy in the same company as Biggio’s great-uncle.

9/16/21 8:34 AM

TOP: COURTESY OF ANDREW BIGGIO (ALL); BOTTOM: COURTESY OF REGNERY HISTORY

This German defensive line was right outside of Barberino, Italy, part of the North Apennines campaign. My uncle’s unit—B Company—was the first to trek up this hill and it was not going well: U-shaped trenches, no cover, nowhere to hide, trees cut down, snipers, machine gun nests, pillboxes.

I pushed my grandfather, in a wheelchair at age 88, up the hill where his older brother was killed. It was surreal, for sure. It was inaccessible by vehicle. The G.I.s had to use pack mules. If you got wounded, it was almost impossible to get you out of there.

They lost their platoon commander right away, killed by a sniper. They lost a platoon sergeant. There’s barbed wire and concertina wire all over the hill. When I walked up, it was all green vegetation with people picking mushrooms and riding dirt bikes. I saw a model of it at the Gothic Line Museum [in Tuscany]; it was a muddy, stumpy, barbedwired mess.

B Company had difficulty moving men up the hill to face certain death. My uncle volunteered to carry the radio. The after-action reports sent to my great-grandmother said he had taken shrapnel through his stomach and out his lower buttocks.

Ed Hess told me that a couple of days before then, he just couldn’t do it anymore.

He had been lugging a Browning Automatic Rif le [BAR] since Anzio, and he finally reached his breaking point. He went to the bottom of the hill. Ed starts to hear how hard B Company was having it. A lieutenant sees him there and sends him back up the hill with the Graves Registry Service to bring back the casualties. When Ed went up there, they found 37 bodies. To have to go

up and down with all those bodies had to be tough.

When I interviewed Ed, he broke down in tears. “So many times, I went out and everybody got hurt or killed and I never got a scratch,” he said. Ed died last year at 101. We don’t know what it’s like to survive Anzio and the Gothic Line and then continue to carry a BAR up the hill. I can’t judge him. The guy comes home, has two careers, and takes care of a disabled child for 50 years. That’s a man. I bet there are people who called him a coward that day, especially that lieutenant who made him go back up the hill. Ed came home and lived the life of a man I hope to be. I wish I could have told him that to his face.

How did you feel when you learned about your uncle’s death?

Hearing that my uncle died doing his job made me very, very proud.

Andy, only 19 years old, stayed up there. He’s got the radio, so he has to give commands of where the Germans are. There was a mortar barrage. Now when you hear mortars start to fall, you get down. The wounds he had tell me he was standing before he was hit, probably giving positions of the Germans. He wouldn’t have had the same wounds if he were ducking for cover.

What did you take away from this experience?

There’s a two-prong learning experience for me—one as a veteran and the other as an average joe. I learned you can live a successful life after combat. These men did it. Some of them saw worse things than me and came home to have careers, lives, families, and live well into their nineties. The other part was that war isn’t just black and white. They told me more stories about being scared, civilians being killed, and killing SS soldiers—just marched them into the woods and shot them—or removing gold teeth from dead soldiers. They taught me that sometimes the Greatest Generation wasn’t so great.

They did things to win that would get you in trouble today. That really made me feel like I did not have to hide in their shadow as a young veteran who served in maybe not such a popular war. They really broke it down for me with the behind-the-scenes stuff. It was total war. The stuff you see in movies—they didn’t see much of that.

World War II wasn’t black and white. It wasn’t swing dancing and big band music or good versus evil. It wasn’t. These guys were mostly scared. That was a breath of fresh air. H

“The stuff you see in the movies—they didn’t see much of that.”

DECEMBER 2021

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23 9/16/21 8:34 AM

FROM THE FOOTLOCKER

GOING NUCLEAR

Curators at The National World War II Museum solve readers’ artifact mysteries

This issue’s question comes from World War II’s associate editor, Kirstin Fawcett: My grandfather, Howard Fawcett, a chemical engineer working on contract with DuPont, was present at the University of Chicago in December 1942 when scientists initiated the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. He took analytical samples of the nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1, and somehow later obtained a tiny piece of graphite from it for posterity, leaving it in my uncle’s possession when he died in 1996.

The graphite is preserved in a plastic cylinder and is slightly radioactive.

Were mementos like this common and in accordance with safety protocols of the era?

This is a fraction of the more than 770,000 pounds of dense graphite used to slow down

24

high-velocity neutrons in one of the most important scientific experiments in human history. Though it would have world-changing implications, humanity’s first nuclear reactor was built on a dusty squash court below the crumbling stands of an abandoned football stadium at the University of Chicago.

It is fair to say that early experiments with nuclear power were shockingly reckless.

Atomic Energy Commission historians later admitted that Enrico Fermi’s success producing the world’s first manmade nuclear chain reaction on December 2, 1942, was the result of “a gamble.” Tinkering with nature’s most powerful and as-yet not fully understood forces could have ended in an explosion or a runaway reaction near the heart of one of America’s biggest cities.

However, the categorical achievement of Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1) opened the door to large-scale plutonium production, which meant that the creation of an atomic bomb was now more than just theoretical. Also, humans could use these same atomic building blocks to harness nuclear power. The world would never be the same again.

Later tests took place in more remote locations, and remnants of the original structure surrounding the historic splitting of nuclei on Chicago’s South Side became souvenirs. True to the incautious practices of the era, Luciteencased strips and blocks of graphite from CP-1 were officially presented as keepsakes by the Argonne National Laboratory, the Ameri-

COURTESY OF ALLEN FAWCETT (BOTH); OPPOSITE: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

Chemical engineer Howard Fawcett in 1941 (above), shortly before becoming involved in an experiment that changed the world— and yielded this humble souvenir.

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9/16/21 8:36 AM

The inelegantly named “Chicago Pile-1” nuclear reactor—here in a scale model—was built of wood and layers of graphite blocks, some containing lumps of uranium.

can Nuclear Society, and the University of Chicago, among others. The latter gave these little mementoes to donors, professors, and contributors to the project, like your grandfather.

Nuclear souvenirs are somewhat rare but not unheard of. Collectors pay large sums of money for a 1950s toy lab set with vials of real uranium, a commemorative coin intentionally exposed in an underground test, or a workman’s badge from the Chernobyl power plant.

Perhaps the most famous and plentiful irradiated keepsakes are Trinitite—glassy pieces of nuclear-blasted sand from the July 16, 1945, Trinity test in the New Mexico desert.

Are these artifacts from the nuclear age radioactive? Most assuredly, yes. But whether they are dangerous is a slightly different question. I’ll preface my response by saying I am no Einstein, and I am no Oppenheimer either.

These keepsakes commonly have low levels of initial exposure. This fact, combined with decades of decay time and some amount of protection offered by the Lucite blocks, goes a long way toward limiting their potency. That being said, I would resist the temptation to sleep with this nuclear souvenir under your pillow. —Cory Graff, Curator Have a World War II artifact you can’t identify?

Write to Footlocker@historynet.com with the following: — Your connection to the object and what you know about it.

— The object’s dimensions, in inches.

— Several high-resolution digital photos taken close up and from varying angles.

— Pictures should be in color, and at least 300 dpi.

Unfortunately, we can’t respond to every query, nor can we appraise value.

COURTESY OF ALLEN FAWCETT (BOTH); OPPOSITE: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

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9/16/21 8:36 AM

BY JAMES HOLLAND

GENTLEMEN’S AGREEMENT THIS PAST SUMMER—August 9, to be precise—marked the eightieth anniversary of the first official meeting between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. It took place in 1941 in Newfoundland, Canada’s Placentia Bay aboard the USS Augusta—a ship that was already a witness to history, as the cruiser had been in the mouth of the Yangtze River near Shanghai four years earlier on the very same day, August 9, when the war between China and Japan broke out in 1937.

Churchill and his entourage crossed the Atlantic in the battleship HMS Prince of Wales, a juicy target if ever there was one for a waiting enemy submarine; fortunately, there were nowhere near enough U-boats in the Atlantic to pose a threat, and they made the journey without a hitch. The facilitator of this auspicious meeting was Harry Hopkins, FDR’s great friend, right-hand man, and former chief administrator of the New Deal.

Unlike the patrician Roosevelt, Hopkins was of humble background. He had nearly died a couple of years earlier from stomach cancer, but, despite a lean and sickly appearance, was clearly made of stern stuff, and had miraculously recovered to play a vital role between allied nations as arbitrator, unofficial diplomat, and bringer-together of common goals.

FDR had first sent his friend to Britain that January, where Hopkins instantly charmed his British hosts. During a weekend in the country, Churchill had given Hopkins a stirring monologue about Britain’s lack of imperial ambitions and of wanting only to uphold man’s right to be free.

When the prime minister finished, Hopkins paused, then said, “I don’t think the president will give a damn for all that. You see, we’re only interested in seeing that that goddam sonofabitch Hitler gets licked.”

Seven months later, Hopkins was again in Britain, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union; Lend-Lease was underway by then, and the U.S. was rapidly rearming on a giant scale. Churchill, clearly remembering Hopkins’s words, asked him to tell the president that “Britain has but one

26

ILLUSTRATION BY RICHARD MIA

NEED TO KNOW

ambition today, but one desire—to crush Hitler.” Hopkins then dashed off to Moscow to see Stalin, returned to Britain, and joined Churchill for the trip across the Atlantic for the meeting he had organized.

Amidst convivial meals and getting-to-know-one-another sessions, the two leaders agreed that if the U.S. entered the war, defeating Nazi Germany would take priority over Japan and that the U.S. Navy would play a role in the Atlantic right away. They also agreed to sign a pledge of aims, which would become known as the Atlantic Charter, and which was announced to the world on August 14.

Interestingly, FDR—who earlier in the year had claimed he merely wanted to lick Hitler—was the driving force behind the charter’s list of aims. What’s more, the aims were full of the same ideals Churchill had spouted to Hopkins back in January.

The two leaders agreed that they sought “no aggrandisement, territorial or other,” and wished to respect the rights of all peoples “to choose the form of government under which they will live.” They would strive for a universal peace in which all men might “live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.” It was heady, utopian stuff, but there was no mention of Britain’s colonial empire or the United States’ Jim Crow laws of racial segregation. Perhaps, though, what really mattered in August 1941 was licking Hitler, and then ridding the world of the violent ambitions of the Imperial Japanese. And perhaps only then could the democracies start rebuilding a better world.

And what of the ships? The Prince of Wales was sunk by the Japanese off Singapore just four months later, a symbol, perhaps, that Britain’s imperial reach was drawing to a close. The Augusta went on to take part in several Allied invasions, not least D-Day, and survived the war, by which time the world was a very different place—even if to this day we’re still striving for some of those ideals of August 1941. H

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9/8/21 1:02 PM

A memorial at Brittany’s Du Bois Joly farm honors those who died there during the June 18, 1944, Battle of Saint-Marcel.

TRAVEL SAINT-MARCEL, FRANCE STORY AND PHOTOS BY GAVIN MORTIMER

SHORTLY AFTER DAWN on June 18, 1944, two Citroën Traction Avants, the executive black automobiles favored by the Gestapo, drove east along a narrow country lane toward the village of Saint-Marcel in Brittany, northwest France.

The German military policemen inside the vehicles had no idea they were approaching a vast French Resistance camp. The French fired two antitank shells at the Citroën, destroying one and killing its four occupants, and immobilizing the second. One German leaped from the damaged vehicle and escaped into the nearby woods. The Battle of Saint-Marcel had begun.

The village of Saint-Marcel itself lies half a mile from where the Germans were ambushed. Close to town is a museum—first opened in 1984 and recently renovated at the cost of $4.6 million—that commemorates the battle, but otherwise the area’s rural landscape has changed little since 1944.

I walk a few minutes west from the museum, along the same road down which the two German vehicles drove, toward a farm called La Nouette. I imagine the French fighters hiding among the cornfield to my left and hunkering down in the shallow grassy ditch to my right, their hearts pumping as the Citroën’s engines grew louder.

The Frenchman who organized this initial ambush was Captain Pierre Marienne, a member of one of the two French regiments of the British Special Air Service (SAS) Brigade. Marienne and 17 men had parachuted into Brittany shortly after midnight on D-Day, June 6, in an operation codenamed “Dingson.” Their mission was to contact the French Forces of the Interior (FFI, the name of the French Resistance after February 1944) and establish two bases from which to launch a guerrilla campaign against the Germans in Brittany. Together, they were to keep as many Nazis as possible occupied in order to help the Allies 150 miles northeast as they fought their way

28

inland from Normandy’s beaches.

Two days before their jump, on June 4, London had broadcast a coded radio message signaling the FFI to mobilize. Around 2,500 fighters reported for duty, congregating in the small farms and villages surrounding Saint-Marcel. The FFI selected a suitable drop zone, a small plateau nicknamed La Baleine (“the whale”) a few hundred yards west of La Nouette, and Allied aircraft began dropping equipment, including explosives, heavy weapons, and four Willys jeeps fitted with Vickers machine guns.

I stride over some rough meadowland to reach La Baleine. It was a good place for a drop zone, easily identifiable from the air and impossible for the Germans to approach without being seen by FFI lookouts posted among the trees and hedgerows encircling it. As I gaze south, I see a stark granite monument dominating the countryside.

Erected in 1951 to commemorate the

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9/16/21 8:41 AM

BOTTOM: FONDATION DE LA FRANCE LIBRE

ONE DEADLY DAY

BOTTOM: FONDATION DE LA FRANCE LIBRE

This grassy plain remains mostly unchanged from when it served as an Allied drop zone in the days before the battle. A nearby granite monument (right), bearing the Resistance’s Cross of Lorraine, commemorates the dead.

battle, the monument features a Cross of Lorraine—the symbol of the FFI— carved into the top of the stonework, while a large plaque at the base honors the 42 Frenchmen killed in the battle and its aftermath and records the deaths of 560 enemy troops.

I retrace my steps, heading back east toward Saint-Marcel. The evening before the battle, the FFI received a message from London informing them that the Allies’ breakout from the Normandy beachheads had been held up.

The French SAS, who had been reinforced by the arrival by parachute of 16 officers and 171 troops from their regiment, were ordered to disperse to continue their guerrilla campaign. There was a further instruction: “Avoid at all costs a pitched battle.”

The camp’s northern and eastern sectors were manned by 1,200 men, their positions encompassing a farm called Du Bois Joly and SainteGeneviève, a small hamlet a few hundred yards northeast. The remaining FFI members, including a number of female liaison staff, were garrisoned at La Nouette, where there was a field kitchen, a first-aid post, and a fleet of motor cars.

In the southern sector of the FFI camp, where I now walk, were around 750 Frenchmen manning dug-in gun pits sited at 10-yard intervals along the perimeter of the FFI base, ready to strike. Some of those pits are still visible among the trees and, although they are overgrown with leaves and nettles, remain a poignant reminder that I am walking on ground for which men fought and died.

The scene was set. Early on June 18, the two German cars drove toward the FFI camp. The policeman who escaped the ambush reached the 500strong German garrison at Malestroit, two miles east of Saint-Marcel, at 6:30 a.m. The Germans, believing the policeman’s assailants were just a well-armed local Maquis group, dispatched two companies on foot. They reached Saint-Marcel and then headed northwest toward the farm at Du Bois Joly, probably suspecting this was where the Maquis was based.

At 8:30 a.m. the Germans surprised an FFI outpost just east of Du Bois Joly, killing its four occupants, including brothers Paul and Jean Le Blavec, aged 20 and 22. In the short fight a stray bullet fatally wounded a 14-year-old girl tending her cattle in the field. The names of all five are engraved on a sixfoot-high stone obelisk 100 yards south of the house that stands at Du Bois

Joly. No longer a working farm, the house’s front door overlooks a slope that falls away to the south. Much of the countryside is wooded, and I can picture how the Germans were able to use the terrain to their advantage as they approached the outpost.

Some of the Germans fought their way inside the farmyard of Du Bois Joly, but the arrival of Captain

Pierre Marienne, captain in a French regiment of Britain’s Special Air Service, led the fight at Saint-Marcel.

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29 9/16/21 8:41 AM

After ferocious close-quarter fighting and many casualties, the Germans finally succeeded in taking Du Bois Joly in the early evening of June 18. Meanwhile, at dusk the Germans tried without success to capture the farm buildings in the tiny community of Les Hardys-Béhélec, in the southern perimeter, where the museum is now situated.

The French guessed that the Germans would bring armor to the battle the next day, so during the night they slipped away through the battlefield’s northern perimeter, which the Germans had negligently left unguarded. Captain Leblond recalled that ENGLISH La Baleine Sainte-Geneviève CHANNEL “orderliness and discipline Paris were not of the best” among Du Bois Joly BRIT TANY the FFI, but they nonetheless FRANCE Saint-Marcel La Nouette Saint-Marcel exfiltrated without incident.

AT L A N T I C The French SAS dispersed OCEAN F E E T across Brittany to continue their Les HardysN Béhélec 166 0 1600 sabotage campaign, the largest group under the command of Captain Marienne and several of his SAS troops Marienne. The Germans, however, with drove them out, and they withdrew down the aid of the French fascist paramilitarthe slope. The route of the German ies called the Milice, were on their tail. retreat forms par t of a three-mile Someone betrayed Marienne’s hideout to walking or driving tour of the sprawling the Nazis, who surprised the captain and battlefield called the “Memorial Trail,” six of his men, along with 11 FFI, at dawn officially launched in 2020. On foot, I get on July 12 in the hamlet of Kerihuel en a sense of the claustrophobic nature of Plumelec, 13 miles west of Saint-Marcel. the terrain: the hedgerows, sunken lanes, The Germans summarily executed the 18 and copses that were exploited by men; a memorial in their honor stands at the location where they were shot.

Frenchmen and Germans alike.

The Memorial Trail is well-signposted At 10 a.m. the Germans launched a fresh assault against Du Bois Joly as well with information boards, although there as nearby Sainte-Geneviève. The French are no English translations. The Trail’s SAS used their jeeps to evacuate the most affecting memorial is at Les Hardyswounded one-and-a-half miles west to Béhélec, where the names of three villagLa Nouette’s farmhouse and to carry ers are engraved on a slab of granite. It fresh FFI reinforcements on their return. was at this spot on the morning of June 19 A company of German paratroopers that the Germans, wanting revenge, shot attacked again in the afternoon, but the first French they encountered: an withering fire from the twin Vickers 83-year-old woman, a 31-year-old man, of t he S A S jeeps forc ed t hem t o and a 15-year-old boy. As the accomretire. When the Germans brought in panying board states, the memorial reinforcements, the French SAS called up honors those “who paid with their lives air support. Four U.S. Army Air Forces in the struggle to recover freedom.”

P-47 Thunderbolts arrived and strafed Photographs of the three victims adorn the German positions, which, according the board, and I look into the faces of the to one French SAS officer, Captain Pierre man, who was executed in front of his Leblond, lifted the spirits of the French wife, and the boy, slain as he cowered fighters, creating a “big morale effect on under a table. The battle of Saint-Marcel was brief, but it was brutal. H the ground.”

Saint-Marcel, June 1944

30

WHEN YOU GO Saint-Marcel is 250 miles west of Paris and 20 miles northeast of Vannes, a charming coastal town of cobbled streets and half-timbered houses about 2.5 hours from the capital by regular train service. There are several car rental companies based at Vannes station. There are also daily 75-minute flights from Paris to Brest, a port city with its own rich wartime history, 115 miles northwest of Saint-Marcel.

WHERE TO STAY AND EAT Vannes has an abundance of hotels and B & Bs, but there are also plenty of accommodations close to Saint-Marcel, including budget and more luxurious hotels in Ploërmel, 10 miles north, and Josselin, 13 miles northwest. Should you work up an appetite while walking around Saint-Marcel’s Memorial Trail, a good restaurant one mile east of the museum, Le Relais du Maquis (lerelaisdumaquis. com), serves traditional French cuisine.

WHAT ELSE TO SEE AND DO The Museum of Resistance in Brittany at Saint-Marcel (museeresistance-bretagne.com, in French) features an impressive array of wartime exhibits, including uniforms, weapons, and vehicles.

The Liberty Road (voiedelaliberte.fr/en) commemorates the route Allied forces took after D-Day and passes through several towns in the area that were liberated by the 4th Armored Division, including Vannes, Auray, Ploërmel, and Josselin.

MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

Germany exacted cruel revenge the day after the costly battle, executing three innocent civilians on this spot in the hamlet of Les Hardys-Béhélec.

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9/16/21 8:56 AM

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WHAT MATTERED MOST A forgotten battle on a tiny Pacific island dramatized the folly of “mopping up” operations

By John C. McManus

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n the fall of 1944, American strategists decided to seize a foothold in the western Pacific’s Palau Islands, where Japanese air bases were considered a threat to General Douglas MacArthur’s plans to liberate the Philippines. Although Japanese naval aviation had been almost completely destroyed in June 1944, when the Imperial Navy took on Admiral Raymond Spruance’s powerful Fifth Fleet in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, American commanders still feared that Palau-based Japanese aircraft could savage the vast armada of troopships, landing craft, and warships slated to carry MacArthur’s divisions to the Philippines. Ultimately, these concerns would lead to some of the most tragic and wasteful fighting of the entire Pacific War.

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Troops of the 81st Infantry Division steam toward Angaur Island, still smoking from pre-invasion bombardment, on September 17, 1944.

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Located about 700 miles southeast of Leyte, the Palaus stretch in a loose chain through some 100 miles of deep Pacific Ocean. Both MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz, who led rival theater commands in the war against Japan, agreed on the necessity of seizing air bases there to support MacArthur’s return to the Philippines. This remained true even when Admiral William Halsey, commander of the Third Fleet, strongly recommended bypassing the Palaus after multiple airstrikes on the islands revealed that land-based Japanese aircraft posed little threat to MacArthur’s plans. For reasons he never explained, Nimitz elected to carry on with the original strategy. For this purpose, he chose Major General Roy Geiger’s III Amphibious Corps, composed of the 1st Marine Division and the U.S. Army’s 81st Infantry Division, to carry out the invasions—an operation ominously dubbed “Stalemate.”

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Infantry Division at arm’s length during the planning phase, as he saw no meaningful role on Peleliu for the army.

Nicknamed the “Fighting Wildcats,” the 81st Division had trained for nearly two years at army posts around the U.S. and in Hawaii to prepare for its first taste of combat. Its commander was Major General Paul Mueller, 52, a Missourian who had led a battalion on the western front in World War I and earned a Silver Star for bravery. Thoughtful and glib, blessed with good writing skills, Mueller had served as editor of Infantry Journal and graduated from both the Command and General Staff College and the Army War College.

Under Geiger’s III Amphibious Corps plan, the 81st was to remain aboard ship while the entire 1st Marine Division invaded Peleliu on September 15. If the situation called for reinforcements by the next day, Mueller would send in troops from the 81st. Otherwise, the plan called for him to land his 321st and 322nd Infantry Regiments on Angaur, while his 323rd Infantry Regiment remained afloat in reserve.

From the first moment of the Peleliu invasion, the Marines encountered powerful resistance. The Japanese commander on the island, 46-year-old Colonel Kunio Nakagawa, devoted his garrison of nearly 11,000 troops to a brilliantly conceived layered defense. He held no illusions about the mortal seriousness of his mission. Before deploying to the Palaus, he told his wife, “I am training for eternity.”

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Marines of the 1st Division storm ashore on Peleliu Island. They suffered 1,300 casualties on the first day, yet poor planning denied them reinforcements when they were most needed.

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THE AMERICANS CHOSE to bypass the two largest and most heavily defended islands in the Palau archipelago, Babelthaup and Koror.

Instead, they targeted Peleliu, home to a well-developed airfield the Japanese had built to accommodate fighters and medium bombers.

American planners also selected Angaur, a diminutive limestone and coral island six miles to the south, as a secondary objective, where they hoped to develop an airfield capable of accommodating B-24 bombers.

Geiger’s priority, then, was to take Peleliu. If need be, he intended to deploy both divisions for that purpose. Ideally, though, he hoped to use one division to capture Peleliu and the other to seize Angaur.

For the Peleliu assault, Geiger chose the 1st Marine Division, one of the finest combat units in the entire American armed forces. Nicknamed the “Old Breed,” the division had earned legendary status by fighting the Japanese to a standstill at Guadalcanal and subsequently enduring terrible conditions at Cape Gloucester on New Britain to secure an airfield that helped strangle Rabaul. Regretfully, though, they could not escape the harmful byproducts of poor senior leadership.

The division commander, 54-year-old Major General William Rupertus, had performed well enough in the numbertwo job at Guadalcanal, but he possessed Major General William Rupertus few qualities necessary to succeed in left much to be desired as the command. Taciturn, aloof, moody, close1st Marine Division’s commander. minded, fiercely contemptuous of the army, and prone to bouts of melancholy, Rupertus hardly fit the high standard of leadership that such outstanding combat troops deserved. “[He] was a very opinionated, difficult man to serve with and for,” his personnel officer, Lieutenant Colonel Harold Deakin, later commented.

Before the invasion, Rupertus made the terrible mistake of predicting in a division-wide pronouncement that the capture of Peleliu would take only three days. During a training exercise, he broke his ankle, severely restricting his mobility, but concealed the injury from Geiger, who upon finding out later, said he would have relieved Rupertus of command for medical reasons had he known. Rupertus did not see himself as a member of a larger inter-service team. He kept the 81st

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On the day of the invasion, Nakagawa’s defenders fiercely resisted, attempting in three unsuccessful counterattacks to push the Marines into the sea. Though the 1st Marine Division prevailed and seized a beachhead about 3,000 yards deep, it suffered 1,300 casualties on that day alone.

The toll was so terrible that the Wildcats, waiting aboard their ships for news, saw grim evidence of the battle the Marines were fighting. “Looking out, we could see bodies floating,” Private First Class Ed Frazer, an artilleryman, sadly recounted years later: “bodies of dead Marines.”

Despite these ominous undertones, a curious mood of triumphant inevitability prevailed, at least among the ships’ crewmen, who that evening prepared meals of steak and chicken followed by frozen strawberries as a special invasion-eve treat before an anticipated Angaur landing on the morrow.

But the next day, September 16, nothing happened. With the costly Peleliu fighting continuing unabated and the intensity of the violence swelling by the hour, Geiger decided to play wait-and-see for a day. But Rupertus never considered asking for reinforcements— in effect implying that the situation ashore was in hand, with victory imminent.

In fact, the Marines were about to run into Nakagawa’s most difficult defenses, amid the high ground of seemingly endless ridges and caves overlooking the airfield. Nevertheless,

The body of a Marine floats off Peleliu. Such sights greeted men of the 81st Division preparing to take Angaur.

taking his cue from Rupertus, Geiger authorized Mueller to invade Angaur on September 17—a fateful decision that deprived the Marines of air cover, naval gunfire, and reinforcements just when they would most need this support.

WITH THE 81ST DIVISION now nearing its combat baptism, the loquacious Mueller circulated a rapturous message to his men: “We are on the eve of seizing an important strategic area from the Japanese. On our shoulders rest grave responsibilities. What we do in this battle will be no small contribution to the glory of our country. To do the job we must cast off sentiment and restraint. To win this fight we must kill every Jap on the island except the ones we are sure are surrendering.

That is the job! We are ready!”

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PHOSPHATE PLANT

SAIPAN TOWN

BLUE BEACH

Tiny Angaur (in an August 1944 map, top) measures just three square miles.

Major General Paul Mueller (standing, in dark uniform, above) surveys a landing beach there with Major General Roy Geiger (standing, right).

lighthouse like a heap of children’s blocks. Underwater Demolition Team 10, operating daily from the morning of September 14 on, reconnoitered Angaur’s coastline and found, in the stilted recollection of the unit after-action report, “no signs of underwater obstacles of any sort… in the area.” Beaches were sprinkled with a few obstacles consisting, according to one post-battle report, “of light angle iron or ½" steel cable from tree to tree.” On September 17, under cloudless skies, a powerful group of surface vessels, including one battleship, three cruisers, and four destroyers, bludgeoned the little island one last time.

“We hear the blast of the big guns and the ripping-silk sound of the heavy shells sailing to their targets,” war correspondent John Walker reported in Time magazine. “We see the warships with halos of yellow

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ANGAUR ISLAND

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RED BEACH

smoke and the bursts of fire and black smoke back of the beach.” Standing next to Walker, a baby-faced ensign muttered, “If I was a Jap in there and I wasn’t scared, I’d get scared now.”

In the recollection of Private First Class William Somma, watching from aboard a landing craft heading inexorably ashore, “the island became a mass of smoke and fire.” Airstrikes from carrier planes and rocket salvos from specially equipped LCI gunboats, plus moreconcentrated fire on the landing beaches from the cruisers and destroyers, topped off the bombardment. But the pre-invasion explosive bark was worse than its bite. “It seems probable it had little other effect beyond a small degree of confusing and limiting Japanese movement,” Major Nelson Drummond, a combat historian attached to the 81st Division, wrote a few months later.

The Japanese commander, Major Ushio Goto, had at his disposal only one reinforced infantry battalion, totaling about 1,600 men, to defend this three-square-mile island.

Home to little more than a phosphate mine and teeming with jungle, hills, and caves, Angaur had no roads and no airfield. Goto’s troops hailed from the Imperial Army’s 59th Infantry Regiment, a hardened combat unit redeployed from Manchuria to the Palaus only a few months earlier. A coterie of a couple dozen artillery and antiaircraft guns, ranging in size from 37- to 75mm, plus 150mm mortars, mines, explosives, and barbed wire, augmented this light infantry force.

With limited manpower, Goto had no other option but to guess at the American landing site and fortify accordingly. He reasoned that the Americans would invade in the southeast, location of the most spacious, inviting beaches, and he invested the critical mass of his strength to hold them. Indeed, that part of Angaur teemed with such a vexing array of pillboxes, fortified bunkers, antitank guns, trench lines, rifle pits, and the like that General Mueller and his commanders noticed the buildup as they studied aerial reconnaissance photographs and chose to land on more constricted beaches to the north.

Mueller earmarked the 322nd to land at Red Beach on Angaur’s northeast coast while the 321st hit Blue Beach on the east coast, in a kind of pincer formation. At the same time, landing craft bearing soldiers from the 323rd feigned a landing on the island’s western expanse. The combination of firepower,

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amphibious power, and an intelligently planned flanking invasion negated any possibility of the Japanese halting the American landings, and both the 321st and 322nd got ashore against minimal opposition. Indeed, the Wildcats initially found themselves restricted more by the thick terrain and cratering from the naval bombardment than from Japanese resistance.

Having guessed incorrectly about American intentions, Goto recovered as best he could. He left a token force in southern Angaur and moved as many troops as possible to the north to counter the push inland, launching two feckless counterattacks that accomplished little besides costing him soldiers he could not replace.

By September 18, the two American beachheads had joined hands and, with armored support from the 710th Tank Battalion, begun moving westward. Inland from Blue Beach, bulldozers from the 1884th and 1887th Aviation Engineer Battalions were already clearing brush in preparation for constructing the airfield. With few Japanese in their way, the Americans knifed across the central portion of the island and secured the demolished phosphate plant, as well as the confusingly named village of Saipan Town, the only settlement of any size. The division historian vividly described a shattered landscape marked by “scattered machinery, narrow-gauge railroad cars, and steam and diesel locomotives. Most of the buildings were shambles.

Debris was scattered throughout the area that had once provided a quiet, tropical life for Japanese overseers and natives engaged in the production of phosphate, the vital fertilizer product which was very essential for Japanese food production.”

In some instances, as the Americans picked through the ruins, they discovered die-hard Japanese soldiers determined to fight to the finish. Near the lighthouse and a splotch of high ground the Americans called Shrine Hill, Lieutenant Bob Guitteau’s platoon discovered

The 81st had largely secured Angaur in four days, and by October 4 (above) they were sending tanks and antitank guns in pursuit of a retreating enemy.

a log-and-earth bunker. When his platoon sergeant tossed a white phosphorous grenade inside, the Japanese responded with desperation. “Out they came. The first guy was swinging a samurai sword.” The platoon sergeant parried the sword with his rifle, suffering a cut to the ear, as Guitteau opened fire. “I shot the sword bearer and then…went to a squatting position and fired away as the Japs came out of the bunker. My guys behind me were also firing.” They killed at least eight enemy soldiers. Others remained inside the bunker. A bulldozer drove up and sealed the bunker with mounds of dirt. Demolition teams exploded charges in an attempt to collapse the bunker or kill the Japanese by concussion. Still, the Americans heard grenade explosions as the trapped soldiers committed suicide. “This was pretty grim stuff the likes of which I had never come close to experiencing before,” Guitteau later reflected.

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BY LATE MORNING on September 20, the Americans had taken all but the hilly, cave-pocked northwest sliver of the island. Mueller radioed corps headquarters: “All organized resistance ceased on Angaur at 1034. Island secured.” The general’s statement contained a curious mixture of falsehood and truth. It reflected an American ten-

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dency to shape a battle narrative—like some sort of martial three-act play—that later marked American operations in Vietnam and even survived into the 21st century.

Major Goto had lost about half of his command, but he remained alive and in full control of the sur v ivors, whom he w isely hunkered into that sector’s ideal defensive terrain. Almost all of his men were united in their determination to fight to the death, so the Japanese major would have been surprised to hear Mueller’s contention that he and his charges were not organized.

The 81st Division commander was absolutely correct, though, that his troops had secured everything that actually mattered on Angaur. With the habitable part of the island under control, the engineers busily constructing an airfield for B-24s, and the Japanese powerless to reverse this, the Americans already had what they needed. In that sense, Mueller would have done well to believe his own message. Angaur was secure, at least in the ways that mattered most. Cornered into a

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engagements amid a baffling network of coral-reinforced pillboxes, bunkers, and trench lines inland from Red Beach. Uneven ground and thick jungle restricted mobility and provided hiding places for the Japanese, as enemy artillery and mortar fire inflicted casualties. With visibility severely limited, American machine gunners wielded their weapons from the hip and fired generous quantities of ammunition ahead of cautious riflemen, demolition teams, and flamethrower operators, who paced forward through thickets and bushes. “They encountered many pillboxes and dugouts,” Major Drummond wrote. “Each was attacked with flamethrowers and satchel charges on the general principle of shooting first and questioning Japanese presence later.”

Infantrymen sprinted or low-crawled forward as best they could, sometimes even stumbling intimately into the remnants of their enemies. “A Japanese soldier had been blown in half, legs to the right of me, torso and head on the left,” Private First Class Keith Axelson later said. “His body and head appeared to be standing in a foxhole. I was lying on his viscera, still connected to both body parts. Moving forward I saw another Japanese to my right lying face-up with flies in his eyes.”

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A Japanese ammunition dump bursts into flames as U.S. soldiers (one barely visible at left) move toward the enemy.

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remote area, confined largely to caves, the Japanese now posed little threat to the American presence beyond their capability of harassing them with small-caliber mortar, artillery, and small arms fire of limited range. American artillery, airstrikes, and patrols could easily contain these holdouts, while they grew inevitably weaker from starvation, thirst, and diminished morale. If they grew restive and decided to attack, then American firepower would destroy them. Far better to let them waste away in their fortified lairs than spend lives and time rooting them out one by one.

Instead, Mueller bought into the prevailing notion among American leaders that he must capture every last inch of ground and eradicate every last enemy soldier on a small island.

“Initiate measures to make sure that not a single Jap is left unattended in your zone,” he instructed his regimental commanders.

“Active steps will be taken to investigate all caves, dugouts, trees and other possible hiding places.”

American commanders favored the trite term “mopping up” to describe this pointlessness, as if soldiers were performing janitorial duties rather than engaging in deadly combat identical to what they had experienced in landing on and securing Angaur—the previous two acts of this self-structured play. Just as wasteful Japanese banzai attacks played into American strengths, so, too, did purposeless mopping up attacks in ideal defensive terrain negate those strengths, especially in relation to firepower. Instead of stepping back and rethinking the wisdom of venturing into the enemy’s daunting den, Mueller ordered the 322nd Infantry to clear the area, with his other two regiments in reserve.

In response, the 322nd’s popular commander, bald-headed Colonel Benjamin W. Venable, a graduate of Hampden Sydney College who had once befriended author F. Scott Fitzgerald when the two served together in the same regiment during World War I, raised a verbal caution flag: “The place is so honeycombed, I don’t see how we will ever get it cleaned out. Too many crevices, caves, protected passageways…some underground. [We will] never get all the snipers out.”

Heedless of Venable’s concerns, the attacks proceeded. Predictably, the Americans soon found themselves enmeshed in a bloody, tortuously slow death struggle amid an endless bramble of crags, caves, and ridges. Major Drummond, the combat historian, referred to the area as “a nightmare of deep fissures and vertical jagged crags, no five square feet on the same level.” The Japanese had already run low on food and water. Most understood that they were doomed, with no hope of relief.

But no matter how desperate, dispirited, or hungry, they proved themselves deadly adversaries in defending such ideal terrain. Spread among the numerous caves, and armed with little more than machine guns, rifles, grenades, knee mortars, and a few antitank guns, they held their fire until attackers came into close range, then inflicted maximum damage upon them. Visibility was generally limited to only a few yards. “The underbrush made it practically impossible to recognize caves until troops were actually upon them,” the division afteraction report lamented. “Even after the foliage had been stripped

Troops on Angaur gather around a captured flag. Although doomed, the Japanese were nonetheless a deadly enemy to the end.

away, it was not easy to distinguish between the opening of a cave and shadow cast by a ground projection upon…white coral rock.”

The Americans often blundered into their adversaries rather than spotting them. In one instance, a sergeant was attempting to cross a tangle of undergrowth on the trunk of a fallen tree when the trunk collapsed into a fighting hole occupied by a Japanese soldier. The frightened sergeant scrambled away. “He heard an explosion close behind but felt no ill effects,” one witness later recalled. “After considerable breathing space he cautiously investigated and found the Japanese had killed himself with a grenade.” Lieutenant Guitteau nearly had his head blown off as he directed the fire of a Sherman tank. As he stood talking with the tank commander on a phone affixed to the outside of the vehicle, “an armor piercing round hit the tank not more than 10 inches from my head. It carved a groove in the tank’s armor. I suspect the Jap gunner had me boresighted and when I dropped to the ground, he figured he got his man. I was scared half to death.”

Most Americans were not so lucky. The Japanese could hardly miss their targets at such close quarters. Snipers reaped a grisly harvest. “Since American soldiers are large in stature, it is easier for the sniper to get a good aim and inflict heavy losses,” a Japanese survivor told his American interrogators.

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several antitank rounds exploded, killing his radioman. Fragments tore into the colonel’s chest and left arm, nearly severing it. “I had ordered the troops into the attack in a dangerous location,” he later wrote. “My purpose in going forward was to let the troops see me.

Unfortunately, the Japs saw me too.” Medics saved his arm and evacuated him off the island. Major Drummond called the loss of Colonel Venable a “heavy blow to the attack force. [He] was a deeply respected and warmly liked leader, who was close to his troops and in whom they had the greatest confidence.”

Venable’s lesser esteemed executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Wilson, assumed command of the regiment.

Heavy firepower had little effect on the well-ensconced enemy soldiers. The Americans pounded the area with airstrikes, naval gunfire, and artillery. The division’s artillery battalions hurled at the enemy over 20,000 rounds of 105mm high-explosive shells and nearly 5,000 rounds of 155mm artillery fire, to little purpose. “Artillery lost its effect against the type of terrain encountered in the

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see. “It was almost impossible to detect the firing position of the Jap sniper,” Captain Jerry Keaveney, a company commander, later wrote. “Even from close range, detection of the fire was seldom made.” Sergeant Lyle McCann arrived at one embattled spot only to find “one of my best friends dead, shot in the head.” Another sniper spotted Lieutenant James Rodgers and shot him through a lung. Though medics evacuated him, he died aboard ship. Company E of the 322nd Infantry lost at least four men, including two squad leaders, killed by sniper fire, most from head shots—an indication that all too often the Japanese enjoyed unhindered visibility and fields of fire. In a single day’s fighting, the regiment’s I Company lost every one of its officers, including the commander, Captain Gerard Marnell, who took a bullet to the chest and, just before dying, looked at his soldiers and said, “That’s all for me boys, so long.”

American fatalities piled up relentlessly. Private First Class Frederick Burtch walked up to a perfectly concealed machine gun that sprayed him at close range, killing him instantly. Private First Class John Bradshaw got hit as he attempted to negotiate his way forward over a rocky patch of nearly impassable jungle. Medics evacuated him to an aid station where he soon died. Private First Class Bird Walker went forward as a litter bearer and simply disappeared, never to be seen again.

Colonel Venable himself became a casualty as he observed the frontline action and directed an attack. As he took cover near a Sherman,

U.S. Navy Seabees set about building a base on the battered American prize.

The island came at a cost of 2,559 U.S. casualties.

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northwest part of the island,” Brigadier General Rex Beasley, the division artillery commander, wrote in the unit after-action report.

“The innumerable deep caves and crevices, usually facing away from the direction of the attack, afforded excellent protection from artillery fire. About all artillery could do was increase visibility by stripping foliage, keeping enemy personnel under cover, and affording great morale value to the infantry.”

The close-range fighting conformed almost precisely to the Japanese vision of inflicting maximum damage on the Americans. A Japanese battle status document sent to Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo by Lieutenant General Sadae Inoue, the Imperial Army’s commander in the Palaus, claimed the defenders had “repulsed and [driven] back with heavy casualties” the American attacks. “The closequarters combat carried out by our forces each night kept the enemy restless and on edge.”

Major Drummond, the historian who observed this fighting firsthand, later commented that it occurred “so close and under such terrain conditions that the division’s great superiority in heavy support fire was of little use. Automatic weapons and, above all, the individual infantryman with rifle and grenade carried the battle.”

It took weeks of brutal fighting for the 81st Division to subdue the entire area. By the first week of October, with the Japanese cordoned into a space a few hundred yards in width and depth, General Mueller finally scaled down the pace of the attacks, though he did not end them altogether. Engineers strung barbed wire around the cordon to prevent the Japanese from escaping. Patrols and demolition teams carefully scouted caves and fought intimate battles to the death with anyone they found inside. The Americans wisely began to bait the Japanese from their hideouts with booby trapped food and water or they simply lay in wait to ambush anyone who walked into the kill zone.

On the evening of October 19-20, Major Goto collected his few remaining survivors and attempted to slip through the American lines to the shore, where he hoped to build a raft that might get them to an island controlled by friendly forces.

All were either killed or captured. Goto was killed by a burst of machine gun bullets fired by Private Joe Abreu. The

rounds disintegrated the major’s fingers and peppered his torso.

Abreu did not know the identity of his victim until he saw the body in the morning light.

On the corpse, Abreu and his buddies found sketches of the area, good luck charms, a farewell note from Goto’s wife, photographs, a pocket notebook, and a saber—the latter by far the most prized item.

As the trigger puller, Abreu had dibs on the sword. When Abreu’s battalion commander offered him one thousand dollars for it, the machine gunner replied unambiguously, “Sir, this sword is not for sale and it never will be.”

THE AMERICANS snuffed out the last resistance three days after Goto’s death. The major and his men had more than done their job of costing the Americans time and lives. Only 45 Japanese survived to become prisoners of war. In the course of the battle, the Wildcats counted 1,338 enemy dead. In exchange, the 81st Division lost 264 men killed and 1,355 wounded. The 322nd Infantry suffered about 80 percent of the battle casualties—most of which were incurred during the mopping up phase. Even soldiers not hit by enemy fire on Angaur became casualties; the 81st Division lost 244 men to combat fatigue and another 696 to sickness. Of the total 2,559 American casualties on Angaur, about 54 percent eventually returned to duty. The rest could never fight again.

These experiences should have served as a cautionary tale that going after marginalized enemy soldiers in remote, defensible areas was self-defeating. But few American commanders took this lesson to heart. The mop-ups continued for the rest of the war at many spots, including on Peleliu, where two of Mueller’s regiments joined the Marines in late September. It took them two full months of bitter fighting to finish off the Japanese. As a strategic objective, Angaur proved small compensation for the 81st Division’s losses. By October 19 the aviation engineers had completed a pair of The goal of the invasion— 6,000-foot runways that proved modestly the new B-24 airbase on useful as a minor B-24 base for the 494th Angaur—is shown here on Bomb Group. Otherwise, American control December 9, 1944, by then fully staffed and in operation. of Angaur had little impact on the war. H

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Karl Wolff, here in 1937, rose high in the Nazi Party, yet was instrumental in brokering a successful peace agreement with the Allies near the war’s end.

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WHAT TO MAKE OF SS GENERAL KARL WOLFF?

Could he be both peacemaker and mass murderer?

The unsettled legacy of a Nazi leader

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running prisons and a handful of labor and concentration camps.

Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess made the most notorious outreach for peace—one that failed to spare him a lifetime in prison.

words, he was ready as early as mid-1944 “to do whatever was in [his] power” to end the war “should an honorable opportunity present itself.” When he saw that opportunity, he decided to act: late in February 1945 Wolff approved a proposal by two officers under his command, Colonel Eugen Dollmann and Captain Guido Zimmer, both of whom wore the black uniform of the SS but had a soft spot for Italy and its culture. Directed at Swiss military intelligence through intermediaries, they asked the Swiss—who, being neutral, could talk to both sides—to extend peace feelers to the Western Allies on their behalf.

The Swiss knew who to turn to: Allen W. Dulles, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) base in the Swiss capital, Bern. The 52-year-old one-time diplomat was a Wall Street lawyer on extended leave from one of the great white-shoe law firms, Sullivan & Cromwell, where his older brother, John Foster, was a senior partner. Dulles was find-

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BY FEBRUARY 1945, the Allies had driven the Wehrmacht about four-fifths of the way up the Italian boot. The Germans were holding—just barely—south of Bologna in northern Italy. Elsewhere the picture was far worse for the Germans. Their last great offensive, the Battle of the Bulge, had failed, grinding to a halt well short of its objectives and seriously depleting Hitler’s few remaining reserves.

Allied forces were now advancing relentlessly from the west, on their way to breach the Rhine in early March. In the east, the Russians had two huge daggers pointed at the heart of the Reich—one from across the River Oder, only about 50 miles from Berlin.

Wolff had some experience as a very junior army officer during World War I but was not a professional soldier. Still, he grasped that it was just a matter of time before the Allies would win. Further resistance would serve no purpose, resulting in needless loss of life and property. In his HEINRICH HOFFMANN/ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES; PREVIOUS PAGES: BUNDESARCHIV BILD 146-1969-171-29 PHOTO FRANZ FRIEDRICH BAUER

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uring World War II, direct contact between Nazi and Allied leaders was vanishingly rare. Two particularly dramatic exceptions occurred just before turning points in the war, both aimed at brokering a peace agreement. Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess made the best-known such contact, a year and a half into the fighting. The second, coming near the war’s end and far less remembered, was the work of an SS general named Karl Wolff, who invoked Hess, and left a host of troubling— and still-unsettled—questions in his wake.

In May 1941, as Germany was preparing to invade Russia, Hess secretly strapped himself into a Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighterbomber, flew fast and low under the radar from Germany to Scotland, and parachuted very near his target, the estate of the Duke of Hamilton. His plan was for the duke—whom Hess claimed to have met at the 1936 Olympics—to put him in touch with the king, who in turn would arrange peace between Britain and Germany, allowing Hitler to focus on the East.

No one appreciated Hess’s sincere but delusional gesture. The duke claimed he did not remember meeting Hess. Even if they did meet, hardly anyone in England, the duke and king included, was willing to make peace with Hitler—who himself was unwilling to let anyone else make foreign policy. When told about Hess’s venture, Hitler let out a cry of surprise and rage, and came close to living up to his reputation as a “Teppichfresser”—a madman who gnawed on carpets. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was initially nonplussed—Was this really the Deputy Führer? Was he acting on his own?—ordered Hess locked up.

Somewhat sy mpathetic to Hess for trying to make peace, the prime minister directed that he spend the rest of the war in isolation but relative comfort; Hess went from the Tower of London to a fortified mansion in the countryside and then to a hospital in Wales, where he spent three years.

Wolff’s turn at peacemaking came in the last weeks of the war. Since late 1943 he had been the senior SS commander in Italy—essentially the Reich’s chief enforcer in that theater. His title was fearsome: SSObergruppenführer and General of the Waffen SS, Highest SS and Police Leader and Military Plenipotentiary of the German Armed Forces. He did not have as much military power as his Wehrmacht counterpart, who commanded more than three quarters of a million soldiers, sailors, and airmen—but he embodied Nazi political power.

Wolff had a variety of forces under his command. To fight partisans behind the front lines, he relied on some 160,000 troops, including foreign “volunteers.” This irregular war was not as brutal as that on the Eastern Front, but was marked by occasional excesses. Wolff also commanded some 65,000 Germans who were part of the police apparatus that searched out and arrested the Reich’s enemies, along with

ing intelligence work far more interesting than the lucrative but dreary practice of corporate law; he actually enjoyed the thrill of operating on Hitler’s doorstep surrounded by enemy territory for much of the war. Besides, he was good at his job, cultivating productive relationships with everyone from Swiss bureaucrats to German walk-ins—one of whom, a midlevel official named Fritz Kolbe, carried briefcases bulging with secret documents and became one of the Allies’ most valuable German spies.

Dulles reacted to Wolff’s initiative by sending intermediaries to meet Zimmer and Dollmann on Swiss soil, where the two sides probed each other’s positions. To prove Wolff was serious, Dulles demanded that he release a senior member of the Italian resistance named Ferruccio Parri, one of Wolff’s most prominent prisoners and a highvalue bargaining chip. Dulles was surprised by the quick, unconditional turnaround: by March 8, Parri and one other former prisoner appeared at the Swiss border—followed by Wolff himself. He wanted to see Dulles.

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Allen W. Dulles, head of the OSS’s office in Bern, Switzerland, fielded Wolff’s peace feeler and demanded he release SS prisoner Ferruccio Parri (below). Dulles later became director of the CIA; Parri went on to head Italy’s postwar government.

the pope in May 1944 to discuss the prospects for peace. Wolff noted that at the pope’s request, he had released an Italian prisoner, and that the pope “stands by to intercede, if desired, at any time.” Complementing the references were letters recording instances of Wolff’s clemency and his role in protecting priceless art. He claimed hundreds of irreplaceable Italian paintings from the worldfamous Uffizi Gallery in Florence had been moved to safety on his orders.

The Americans were not entirely sure what to make of Wolff. OSS files in Washington contained little more than a paragraph or two of information about him: born in 1900 near Frankfurt, service in a paramilitary corps after World War I, member of Reichsführer SS Himmler’s personal staff, regular visitor to Hitler’s headquarters. (Those last details were a major understatement: Wolff was at Himmler’s side from 1933 to 1943, rising to head his personal staff as well as to serve as his liaison to the Führer.) One file gave Wolff’s address in Berlin as Prinz Albrechstrasse 8, which was actually the headquarters of the SS, a combination of office space for executives and cellblock for prisoners being interrogated and tortured. There was no mention

THROUGH A SWISS INTERMEDIARY Wolff forwarded what amounted to his peacemaking credentials. On top was his calling card—much like a business card today, bearing his official title. Attached was a long list of names of references, including Hess and Pope Pius XII, marked with short notes. Wolff included Hess presumably because the Allies could ask him about Wolff; the two men had known each other in Berlin when Wolff had been a member of Hitler’s inner circle. And Wolff, although not Catholic, had had an audience with DECEMBER 2021

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of his moderately successful work in advertising between the wars.

Dulles’s assistant, the well-connected German American Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz, had heard of Wolff. The two even had some mutual acquaintances, and Gaevernitz knew that Wolff had interceded on behalf of a Catholic philosopher the Gestapo had threatened in 1939.

Dulles decided to see for himself what Wolff was like, and arranged to meet him shortly after he presented himself that March 8, at an apartment Dulles kept in Zurich for what he called “meetings of the touchiest nature.” It was located at the end of a quiet street and looked out on Lake Zurich. Dulles set the stage for the late-night meeting by starting a fire in the fireplace, his theory being that crackling flames helped visitors relax. Since American officials were uncomfortable shaking hands with Nazis, Dulles just nodded in greeting when Wolff arrived but offered his guest, who seemed ill at ease, a

THE BASIC IDEA—a local surrender in northern Italy—was straightforward. But the devil was in the details, and there was one complication after another. Wolff had repeatedly discussed the matter with the multi-talented Kesselring, a Luftwaffe general equally at home commanding air forces and ground troops. But just when Kesselring seemed on the point of yielding to Wolff’s arguments, Hitler transferred Kesselring to another command. Wolff had to instead work on his successor, General Heinrich von Vietinghoff—a more traditional army officer who was uncomfortable with the idea.

The regional friendly military command, Allied Forces Headquarters (AFHQ), wanted to form its own impressions of Wolff, and dispatched two of its most senior officers: the British Major General Terence Airey, responsible for intelligence, and the American Major General Lyman Lemnitzer, the assistant chief of staff at AFHQ. They met with Wolff in Switzerland on March 19.

Somehow Hitler and Himmler got wind of Wolff’s activities, without learning their full extent, and summoned him to Berlin for not one but two rounds of consultations. Wolff survived the hair-raising trips thanks to his good relationship with Hitler and his quick wits. He did take one precaution, which offers a clue as to what he expected, although not explicitly requested, from Dulles. Preparing a note to be delivered to the American in case Hitler or Himmler ordered his arrest, or if he died for any other reason, he asked that “Mr. Dulles… rehabilitate my name, publicizing my true, humane intentions; to make known that I acted not out of egotism…, but solely out of the con-

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General Heinrich von Vietinghoff (above) was Wolff’s Wehrmacht counterpart in Italy after Hitler transferred Field Marshal Albert Kesselring (right).

glass of scotch. He noted that Wolff was “a handsome man and well aware of it”: Nordic, well-built, with graying dark blond hair, pleasing features, and—especially for a Nazi—good manners. He had blue eyes and spoke High German without a regional accent, unlike Hitler, who never shed the Bavarian twang he’d picked up as a child and did not worry overmuch about his manners.

Wolff relaxed enough to tell Dulles what he could and could not do.

Germany had lost the war, and the only sensible course of action was to surrender. He wanted the best for his country, and was prepared to act on his own to surrender the forces under his command. But the result would be far better if he, Wolff, could persuade the Wehrmacht commander in Italy, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, to surrender the hundreds of thousands of troops under his command as well.

Wolff had a good relationship with Kesselring and, so long as no one betrayed his plans to Hitler, he just might succeed. Wolff did not ask for any kind of special treatment for himself.

Dulles reported his favorable impressions to Washington, especially that Wolff represented a “more moderate element in [the] Waffen SS, with a mixture of Romanticism”—an apparent reference to the Teutonic never-never land that Wolff believed in. This was where the men were cultured Aryans like himself, the women fertile like his two wives, the children with folkish names like his sons Widukind and Thorisman. The 44-year-old general was, Dulles summed up, “probably the most dynamic personality in North Italy and most powerful after Kesselring.” Dulles was eager to proceed, as was OSS Director William J. Donovan. Others in Washington were guardedly optimistic—so long as Wolff understood that the only possible terms were unconditional surrender.

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Wolff had a comfortable place in upper echelons of the Nazi Party and the SS: attending a 1936 film premiere with SS bigwigs Heinrich Himmler (center) and Reinhard Heydrich (right), and studying a map with Hitler (left), circa 1940.

viction and hope of saving, as far as possible, the German people.” He also asked, “if this is possible,” that Dulles protect his two families, meaning his first and second wives and their children.

CHURCHILL AND American president Franklin D. Roosevelt were both briefed about Operation Sunrise, as Dulles had labeled the surrender negotiations. Churchill paid more attention to the matter than Roosevelt, who was seriously ill by that time. When Churchill insisted that the Soviets be informed, Stalin exploded in paranoid rage, accusing the British and Americans of maneuvering behind his back. (Non-

sense, of course, since they had just told him what they were up to.) Roosevelt’s death on April 12 was yet another major complication, one that led Wolff to handwrite a letter of condolence to Dulles—the only one from an SS general officer to a senior American official.

The prose was stiff, but the message was thoughtful: “…the passing of the President with whom you were so close must have been painful to you in equal measure as a man and a member of the government.” (Dulles was not actually close to Roosevelt but he was known in Switzerland as his personal representative.)

By April 20—coincidentally Hitler’s birthday—there had been so many complications that the British and American chiefs of staff ordered Dulles to break the link to Wolff and let their armies get on with the war. They were tired of waiting for the Germans in Italy to agree among themselves, and they did not DECEMBER 2021

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surrender, Washington and London, at Dulles’s and AFHQ’s urging, withdrew their opposition to accepting Wolff’s offer. Two plenipotentiaries—one for Wolff and the SS, one for Vietinghoff and the Wehrmacht—made their way to AFHQ at Caserta, Italy, to sign an instrument of surrender on April 29. It was the day before Hitler’s death by suicide at his bunker in Berlin, which Soviet troops were about to overrun.

The instrument provided for the ceasefire to occur on May 2, which turned out to be several days before the general surrender on May 8.

This meant that the capitulation in Italy was not as momentous as it might have been a month or two earlier, but it did prevent six days of bloodshed, and exposed Germany’s southern flank, hastening the final collapse. It also enabled the Western Allies to occupy the city of Trieste, preempting the communist forces of Yugoslavia’s Marshal

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want any more arguments with Stalin. They also knew that their military position in Italy was growing stronger by the day.

Despite the obstacles, Wolff stayed the course, continuing to work on Vietinghoff.

When Vietinghoff finally—and reluctantly— agreed to go along with the surrender, Wolff renewed his offer to the Allies. A few days later Italian partisans surrounded Wolff and a few of his men at a villa in northern Italy.

The partisans appeared intent on capturing or killing him, which would have ended Operation Sunrise. A tense standoff ensued. Dulles sanctioned a multinational rescue team—two carloads of Swiss officials, OSS men, and even two SS border guards—who drove through the surrounding cordon and freed the SS general.

When Wolff happened to encounter Dulles’s man Gaevernitz at a border crossing, Wolff fervently thanked him and insisted on shaking hands. One report has Wolff proceeding to hug Gaevernitz—which, if true, would have been another one-off event.

Since the Germans had agreed among themselves to proceed with the regional

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An American and a German general in Italy discuss executing the surrender; Vietinghoff’s representative, Victor von Schweinitz, is at far right. Another plus from Wolff: hundreds of Italian paintings were kept out of German hands, avoiding the fate of those at right.

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Tito, then advancing from the southeast, from expanding their sphere of control. Not least, the surrender saved the great paintings from the Uffizi and other artwork—secreted in the mountains of Italy on Wolff’s orders—from being destroyed or shipped to Germany.

During and after the surrender, Wolff remained at his headquarters in a splendid Renaissance palace in the northern Italian town of Bolzano. The Wehrmacht set up nearby in a less grand but more secure complex of caves built into a mountainside. Like Vietinghoff, Wolff remained in command of his forces while the surrender was being implemented—a not uncommon phenomenon since transfers of power on such a vast scale could not happen overnight. During this period, which lasted some 10 days, the atmosphere for Wolff was like that of a welldeserved vacation after the extreme stress of the past months. The fighting had stopped, Hitler and Himmler could no longer threaten anyone, and Wolff was able to send for his family. The springtime weather in the mountains was glorious, and the ample stocks of food and wine made for good living. Gaevernitz even dropped by on May 9, and appears in a photo that seems to depict a relaxed, happy gathering of friends.

A sea change came on May 13—Wolff’s 45th birthday. The SS officers donned their dress uniforms—Wolff favored an elegant off-white tunic that looked far less threatening than the standard black SS outfit—and opened many bottles of champagne for themselves and Vietinghoff’s staff. Then, unexpectedly, U.S. Army trucks rumbled up to the palace. MPs in white helmets arrested Wolff and his entourage—part of a routine roundup of Germans in uniform. They even took Wolff’s wife and their children to a rudimentary camp, which distressed Wolff greatly. He would come to see it as the first of many times when the Americans let him down.

extent, Dulles. No one was sure what to do with him. Should he stand trial as a war criminal—or serve as a witness? Wolff was willing to do either. He made himself available for endless interrogations, and later claimed that he wanted “to vindicate the decent part of the SS”—meaning that he wanted to counter the argument that the SS was a criminal organization, an increasingly untenable proposition as the damning evidence mounted.

The Americans decided that he was mentally unstable and opted for a third alternative, locking him up in two mental hospitals in Germany for a few months in 1946. Word came that Wolff believed that Jewish demons were after him; in the absence of any medical files, however, all claims of mental instability are hard to substantiate. Wolff later explained that the Americans interpreted his offer to defend the SS as “suicidal mania” and implied that they just wanted him out of circulation for a few months.

When he emerged from confinement, supposedly sound in mind and body, Wolff still did not fit into any category and began to be treated more like a prisoner of war. The Americans shifted him to British custody and, in 1949, he went through “denazification” in the British zone of occupation. Intended to purge Germany of Nazi influence, denazification was a quasi-judicial process instituted by the Allies but mostly run by German laymen who gathered evidence and presided over hearings.

No one was sure what to do with Wolff.

Should he stand trial as a war criminal—or serve as a witness?

Relieved smiles abound as Dulles’s assistant, Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz (second from left), meets with German officers who cooperated with the surrender. Vietinghoff is at center, Wolff at right.

WOLFF NOW BEGAN a unique period of confinement. Following Himmler’s death by suicide on May 23, Wolff became one of the senior-most surviving members of the SS. But he had also arranged the surrender in Italy, and was on friendly terms with Americans like Gaevernitz and, to a more limited DECEMBER 2021

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WHERE, THEN, SHOULD HISTORY place Wolff? Was he like the delusional Rudolf Hess? Kept secluded during the war in England, but prosecuted at Nuremberg postwar as a member of the Nazi elite, Hess claimed amnesia and sulked in the dock. Found guilty of crimes against peace and conspiracy—two of the more general charges levied—he spent the rest of his life in Berlin’s Spandau Prison.

Or was Wolff more like the calculating Himmler, who committed a range of war crimes and crimes against humanity? Or, finally, was Wolff mostly a conservative German patriot who attached himself to a charismatic leader who deceived his follow-

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The charges against Wolff related more to his status as a senior SS officer than to any specific war crimes or the crimes against humanity associated with the SS; there was still little evidence against him.

There was a good deal of mitigating testimony, however. Generals Lemnitzer and Airey submitted affidavits describing Wolff’s role in Operation Sunrise, as did Allen Dulles. Dulles’s one-page affidavit affirmed the facts, concluding in lawyerly fashion that “General Wolff’s action…materially contributed to bringing about the end of the war in Italy….” Gaevernitz appeared in person and enthusiastically defended him. The presiding judge was favorably impressed, crediting Wolff with time served and declaring that he would walk out of the courtroom with his honor “clean and unstained”—which he did, beaming, almost as elegant in a tan civilian suit as he had been in a Nazi uniform.

Wolff spent the next 13 years as a free man in West Germany, returning to advertising and becoming a prosperous executive. In

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By 1955, the former SS general was living the good life, with a comfortable home in the Bavarian town of Starnberg and a career as an advertising executive.

1961, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who organized much of the Holocaust, generated renewed interest in Nazi war crimes and led German authorities to take another look at Wolff’s case. Individual documents had by now risen to the surface of the sea of captured Nazi records showing that he had known of specific crimes and had urged German rail officials to make railcars available for the transportation of some 300,000 Polish Jews to Belzec and Treblinka, two of the main death camps.

Tried by a German court in 1964 for his role in the Holocaust, the aging Obergruppenführer had no end of explanations and excuses, chief among them that he was unaware of the Holocaust itself until March 1945. Given his position at Himmler’s side, this claim strained—and still strains—credulity, despite Wolff’s insistence that it was possible to be a decent SS officer. Erich von dem BachZelewski, Wolff’s former SS comrade and friend who oversaw mass killings in the East during the war, testified that it was highly unlikely that Wolff did not know of the murderous “final solution”—especially after Wolff visited him in 1942 at an SS hospital where von dem Bach was recovering from a nervous breakdown that his SS physician attributed to his role in “the shootings of Jews, as well as [his] other difficult experiences in the east.”

This time Wolff did not charm the judge, who sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

Even though he did not acknowledge his guilt, he was a model prisoner and enjoyed privileges that the Third Reich seldom granted to its detainees: furloughs to visit family and indefinite sick leave after he suffered a heart attack in 1971.

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At his 1964 war crimes trial, Wolff, then 64, was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years in prison. The judge called him “Himmler’s bureaucrat of death.”

ers and led the country into a ruinous war?

Wolff remains hard to categorize. But we can narrow the range considerably. Wolff’s own narrative—that of the conservative patriot—is easy to reject. The Nazi program was, from start to finish, not a conservative but a radical phenomenon, with its over-thetop racism and expansionist drive. Wolff never claimed to have been unaware of the Nazis’ anti-Semitism. He may not have proposed or planned the Holocaust. But, given his position in the SS—the most zealous instrument of Hitler’s policies—he was at least complicit. Moreover, he did not complain about Hitler’s wars of aggression—especially against Bolshevism— as much as about the fact that Hitler lost them.

On the other hand, it was to his credit that he acted on his own to preserve life and property when he realized that the war was lost.

All told, then, Wolff is most like Hess. While the fit is not perfect, they were both Nazi true believers who wanted to make peace with the West, especially Britain and the United States. The difference was that Wolff was better at it, and—like a good advertising exec-

utive—far better at promoting his image.

A twist in the story came after Wolff’s daughter Helga converted to Islam in 1961 and changed her name to Fatima. She explained that she was looking for a way to come to terms with her family’s fraught history, and went on to become one of Germany’s leading Islamic public figures. In print, in person, and on the air, she shared her new worldview with the good manners that she had learned from her father. In 1984, Wolff reportedly followed her lead and professed the Muslim faith.

When he died a few weeks later at age 84, Fatima recited graveside Muslim prayers. But unanswered questions remain: Did he finally understand and acknowledge his role in the Third Reich? Was he, like Fatima, trying to move beyond his past? The piece of roughhewn rock over his grave is neither Christian nor Muslim, and tells us little. The simple plaque with his name and birth and death dates gives his title as “General, Retired,” as if Wolff wanted to be remembered as an officer who served his country instead of the Nazi killing machine he actually served. H

Wolff remains hard to categorize.

But we can narrow the range considerably.

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WEAPONS MANUAL AMERICA’S M29 WEASEL ARMORED VEHICLE ILLUSTRATION BY JIM LAURIER

ON THE FAST TRACK ENGINE ROOM Shifting the engine from the back of the early Weasel prototype to the front gave the M29 a climbing ability of up to 60 degrees and provided room for interior seats and equipment.

LIGHT FOOTPRINT Twenty-inch tracks distributed the Weasel’s modest two-ton weight to a ground pressure of just 1.7 pounds per square inch—less than that of a man’s footstep—making it ideal for crossing minefields.

SWIMMING LESSONS Properly plugged, the M29 was partly amphibious. The later M29C “Water Weasel” variant came equipped with bow and stern float compartments and twin rudders, greatly improving its ability to swim.

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Driver Morris Fugit in Lieutenant Colonel Carl Isley’s M29 in 1944. The vehicle landed in France on D-Day; Isley supervised obstacle demolition at Omaha Beach.

IN 1941, THE ALLIES, planning raids on German heavy water facilities in Norway, needed a fast, maneuverable all-purpose vehicle that could scamper quickly over snow. Soon the Studebaker Company in Indiana was producing the M29 Weasel—but not before the Norway plan was scrapped.

Luckily, the tracked Weasel could navigate not only snow, but also swamps, mud, and sand, catching the eye of U.S. military brass, who quickly pressed the M29 into action as a frontline cargo carrier, ambulance, mobile command center, and cable layer for Signal Corps units. Along with its drivability on winter battlefields, the Weasel’s semiamphibious abilities served it well crossing Europe’s rivers and marshes, as well as in the landings at Sicily and Normandy— though the spry vehicle, designed for arctic conditions, often overheated in more temperate battle zones. All the same, the M29’s adeptness at negotiating sandy beaches made it a critical U.S. asset in the Pacific invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

After the war, most M29s were sold off as surplus, often to winter sports resorts. —Larry Porges

AMERICAN M29 WEASEL

Crew: 4 / Number produced: 15,123 / Length: 10 ft. 6 in. / Range: 165 mi. / Max. speed: 36 mph / Allied military planners initially intended the M29 to be delivered to Norway’s Nazi-occupied battlefields via parachute drop from specially designed bomb bays in Avro Lancaster heavy bombers.

THE COMPETITION U.K. UNIVERSAL CARRIER

Crew: 3 / Number produced: 113,000 / Length: 12 ft. / Range: 150 mi. / Max. speed: 30 mph / Also called the Bren Gun Carrier for its light machine gun, Commonwealth forces hauled troops and equipment in all the war’s theaters in this mass-produced armored vehicle.

POLISH C2P TRACTOR

Crew: 1 / Number produced: 315 / Length: 9 ft. 4 in. / Range: 93 mi. / Max. speed: 25 mph / Designed for field artillery use, the Polish C2P light artillery tractor primarily served an antiaircraft role in Poland’s short-lived 1939 defense against Germany and the USSR.

BACK TO BASICS Shovels and axes were stored in various easy-to-reach locations and could serve as makeshift weapons in an emergency.

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GERMAN RSO TRACTOR

Crew: 2 / Number produced: 27,000 / Length: 14 ft. 6 in. / Range: 190 mi. / Max. speed: 19 mph / Variants of Germany’s reliable Raupenschlepper Ost (Caterpillar Tractor East), or RSO, included an antitank version armed with the powerful 75mm PaK 40 gun.

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TRIGGER POINT Horrors spawned more horrors when American troops entered a Nazi concentration camp

By Joseph Connor

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A grim sight greeted American troops sent to liberate Dachau concentration camp: emaciated and abused bodies, piled by the hundreds into railcars.

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closer, they saw that the soiled laundry was actually the corpses of hundreds of concentration camp inmates—2,310 of them, as it turned out. Some had been shot or beaten, but most had died of starvation. The emaciated bodies shocked these battle-hardened veterans. “Honest,” Lieutenant Cowling wrote to his parents, “their legs and arms were only a couple of inches around and they had no buttocks at all.” Colonel Fellenz, a 28-year-old 42nd Division battalion commander, estimated the bodies weighed only 50-60 pounds each. What haunted these soldiers most, however, were the eyes of the dead. To Private John P. Lee, their death stares seemed to ask the G.I.s: “What took you so long?”

The instantaneous reaction was rage, and incensed soldiers swept through the camp,

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n April 29, 1945, just as the U.S. Army’s 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions were poised to capture Munich, birthplace of the Nazi Party, men from each outfit were ordered to split off and secure a concentration camp 10 miles from the city. Neither the camp’s name—Dachau—nor the term “concentration camp” meant much to these soldiers. The Nazis had hidden the full magnitude of the Holocaust, and rumors of the mistreatment of Jews and political dissidents were so incredible that “when I heard such stories back in the States I never believed them,” Lieutenant William J. Cowling III explained. Lieutenant William P. Walsh expected Dachau to be akin to an American POW camp he had seen in upstate New York, and from a distance, the compound looked benign—neat and orderly. It reminded Lieutenant Colonel Walter J. Fellenz of “a wealthy girls finishing school in the suburbs.”

When a 45th Division company under the command of 25-year-old Lieutenant Walsh approached the camp, the men spotted 39 railcars, mostly boxcars and gondolas, parked on a siding. At first glance, the cars appeared to contain piles of dirty clothing, but as the men drew

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“Work makes you free,” the notorious slogan on a Dachau gate reads. For many of its inmates, the camp mostly meant death.

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exacting revenge against the German guards they held responsible. In the months to come, an embarrassed U.S. Army was forced to decide if this retribution was a war crime, an excusable if regrettable response to horrors beyond human comprehension, or welldeserved vigilante justice.

DACHAU WAS THE NAZIS’ FIRST concentration camp, established in March 1933, only weeks after Hitler came to power. Originally intended to house political prisoners, it became an integral part of the Nazis’ attempt to use as slave labor and exterminate Jews and others Hitler deemed undesirable. Since then, 228,930 inmates had passed through its gates, which bore the slogan, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (work makes you free). The fanatical SS ran the camp, and the compound contained an SS training center. In the first four months of 1945 alone, 14,700 inmates had died there.

On April 14, 1945, SS commander Heinrich Himmler ordered Dachau’s inmates evacuated to other camps as he tried to hide the human evidence of Nazi depravity from the approaching Allied armies. That month, thousands were removed on foot or by rail, dropping the camp’s population from 67,665 to 31,432, but the Americans reached the camp before the evacuation could be completed. Those who remained hailed from 40 nations, with the majority being Poles (9,082),

Russians (4,258), and French (3,918). The precise number of SS guards and other German soldiers in the camp when the Americans arrived is unknown, with estimates ranging from 100 to 300. Many Germans had fled Dachau in the preceding days to avoid capture.

At the rail siding, Lieutenant Walsh fumed, admittedly “worked up” at the sight of the corpses. When four Germans approached with their hands raised, Walsh motioned them into a boxcar. He ordered Private Harry Crouse to bring over his Browning Automatic Rifle, but before Crouse got there, Walsh shot the prisoners with his pistol. Private Albert C. Pruitt, 23, finished them off with his rifle, claiming, “I never like to see anybody suffer.” Moments later, an SS man wearing a Red Cross armband surrendered to Walsh. Walsh had the German lead Walsh’s men toward the camp, but Walsh claimed the man tried to escape and was shot.

At about the same time, Brigadier General Henning Linden of the 42nd Division and Lieutenant Cowling, his aide, neared the camp entrance. Both men were on edge because they had seen what the railcars held.

Under a flag of truce, the camp commandant, Heinrich Wicker, walked toward them. Cowling hoped the commandant “would make a funny move so I could hit the trigger of my tommy gun,” but Wicker simply surrendered

The camp commandant, SS Lieutenant Heinrich Wicker (second from right, top), surrendered the camp and its guards to 42nd Division assistant commander Brigadier General Henning Linden (inset, and far left, top).

Despite the seemingly peaceful transfer, G.I.s reacted with violence at what they saw there.

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the camp. He told Linden that there were about 100 guards inside and that he had ordered them not to fire on the Americans.

The surrender unleashed pandemonium among inmates, and after-action reports and news stories paint a vivid picture of the emotional liberation. General Linden described “a wave of joyous enthusiasm to the extent that the whole fence was lined with a yelling, seething mass of prisoners.” To Colonel Fellenz, “The noise was beyond comprehension!... Our hearts wept as we saw the tears of

happiness fall from [the inmates’] cheeks.”

Hundreds broke through fences to embrace their liberators. “There is nothing you can do when a lot of hysterical, unshaven, lice-bitten, half-drunk, typhus-infected men want to kiss you. Nothing at all,” Time correspondent Sid Olson reported.

Reality tempered joy, and the inmates’ physical condition stunned the Americans.

“Gandhi, after a thirty-day fast, would still look like Hercules when compared with some of these men,” Private Harold Porter wrote to

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American troops gun down SS men in the camp’s coal yard.

Seventeen Germans were killed there, with others wounded.

through the camp, they found a crematorium and a gas chamber.

Fellenz entered a warehouse containing thousands of corpses “thrown one on top of the other like sacks of potatoes.” The sight and odor made him vomit uncontrollably. In a letter home, Cowling summarized the men’s emotions. Liberating Dachau, he wrote, was the “most…exciting, horrible and at the same time wonderful experience I have ever or probably ever will have.”

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INSIDE THE CAMP, Lieutenant Walsh rounded up about 100 German prisoners. He segregated the SS men from the other Germans and herded them into the camp’s coal yard, an open area surrounded on three sides by 10-foot-high masonry walls. Walsh lined up 50 to 60 SS prisoners against the back wall, and ordered Private William C. Curtin, 22, to cover them with his light machine gun. Weapons at the ready, other G.I.s also kept a close eye on the Germans. Abruptly, Curtin opened up, firing three long bursts, and the prisoners dropped to the ground. Other soldiers also fired, including 25-year-old First Lieutenant Jack Busheyhead, Walsh’s second in command.

Walsh’s battalion commander, 28-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Felix L. Sparks, heard the shots and rushed to the coal yard. He fired his pistol into the air to get the men’s attention, ordered them to cease fire, and booted Curtin away from his machine gun. “What the hell are you doing?” Sparks asked Curtin, who was crying hysterically.

Seventeen SS men were dead; other badly wounded Germans lay on the ground, but the doctor in Sparks’s battalion, First Lieutenant Howard Buechner, refused to treat them. Sparks rounded up German medics to render aid.

his parents. Some inmates were too weak to greet their liberators. “So many men were sick and possibly dying of starvation and beatings,” Olson reported, “that they merely lay or leaned or sat shoulder to shoulder, too weak to do more than grin glassily.”

Several inmates were killed when they brushed against an electrified fence, and the sight of one such death horrified Fellenz. “It was heart-breaking to see the poor fellow electrocuted when freedom was within his grasp,” he wrote. As the soldiers advanced

Lieutenant Colonel Felix L. Sparks raises his pistol in an effort to stop the shooting. His sympathies, though, remained with the troops: “Dante’s Inferno seemed pale compared to the real hell of Dachau,” he later wrote.

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The soldiers disagreed on what had prompted the shooting. Curtin insisted Walsh had ordered him to shoot, yelling, “Let them have it,” and Lieutenant Daniel F. Drain confirmed this. Walsh denied it. Walsh asserted that he had told Curtin to fire only if the Germans rushed the Americans and that Curtin had opened fire only when the Germans prepared to advance on the G.I.s. Other G.I.s said no order was given or needed. “It was the general feeling among all of the troops…that no prisoners would be taken,” Busheyhead said. Private William L. Competielle agreed. “The word just got around that they were going to shoot all the SS’ers.”

A short distance away, inmates pointed to a guard tower adorned with a white flag and told Sergeant Henry J. Wells that SS men were hiding inside. Wells, who spoke German,

fired a burst from his submachine gun through the tower door and ordered the guards to come out. About a dozen exited, with Wells forcibly removing one German. The prisoners were lined up by the tower.

About 10 G.I.s guarded these prisoners. One American opened fire, and “after somebody commenced firing, everybody started firing,” Wells said. Seven SS guards were killed. A G.I. walked among the fallen Germans, shooting his pistol into their bodies. One Polish inmate, Marion Okrutnik, contended that the Americans fired only after a German had reached toward his left armpit as if going for a concealed pistol. Once the first shot was fired, the other G.I.s fired because they “felt that something on the part of the enemy must have gone wrong which was observed by friendly soldiers,” said Wells, who admitted joining in the shooting.

Throughout the camp, inmates sought out guards, beating and bludgeoning an unknown number, and U.S. soldiers turned a blind eye. “We watched with less feeling than if a dog were being beaten,” wrote David Max Eichorn, an army chaplain. An inmate shot two Germans with a rifle issued to 24-year-old Private Peter J. DeMarzo.

DeMarzo denied lending his weapon to the inmate and claimed two Russian inmates had snatched it from him.

Few tears were shed for the slain guards. “God forgive me if I say I saw it done without a single disturbed emotion BECAUSE THEY SO HAD-IT-COMING,” Captain David Wilsey wrote to his wife. In a letter to his parents, Lieutenant Cowling asked, “How can they expect

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Fallen SS guards lie outside a camp guard tower after one American started firing and others followed. Eyewitness accounts differed on whether the Germans had made any threatening gestures.

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to do what they have done and simply say I quit and go scot free?” It was the corpses in the railcars that had incited the soldiers, Lieutenant Harold T. Moyer explained: “Every man in the outfit who saw those boxcars…felt and was justified in meting out death as a punishment to the Germans who were responsible.”

Some G.I.s, however, had misgivings. “We came over here to stop this bullshit,” Corporal Henry Mills thought, “and now here we got somebody doing the same thing.” Executing prisoners was not, Lieutenant Drain believed, “the American way of fighting.”

LATER THAT APRIL 29, Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower announced Dachau’s liberation, noting that an estimated “300 SS camp guards were quickly neutralized.” In a story run in newspapers across the United States, Associated Press correspondent Howard Cowan reported how “dozens of Nazi guards fell under withering blasts of rifle and carbine fire as the soldiers, catching glimpses of the horrors within the camp, raged through its barracks for a quick cleanup.” Military censorship of the press was still the rule, and news that G.I.s had shot German guards under questionable circumstances was never reported or even suggested.

Two Signal Corps photographers, Arland B. Musser and Henry Gerzen, captured the coal yard episode on film. These graphic photos quickly made their way up the chain of command, raising disturbing questions and placing the army in an awkward position.

The Allies had postwar plans to try Axis war criminals, including German soldiers who had murdered A merica n prisoners. Under the Geneva Convention, prisoners “must at all times be humanely treated and protected, particularly against acts of violence,” and the unjustified killing of prisoners constituted a war crime. The Allied prosecutions would smack of hypocrisy if American soldiers were allowed to get away with similar misconduct. “America’s moral position will be undermined and her reputation for fair dealing debased if criminal conduct of a like nature by her own armed forces is condoned and unpunished…,” Eisenhower told his subordinate commanders.

On May 2, 1945, Major General Arthur White, Seventh Army chief of staff, ordered a “formal investigation of alleged mistreatment of German guards at the Concentration Camp at Dachau”; the assignment went to Lieutenant Colonel Joseph M. Whitaker, a 41-year-old lawyer. Whitaker arrived at Dachau the next day, conducted a forensic examination of the coal yard, and took sworn statements from nearly two dozen soldiers who had witnessed the killings or might have knowledge of them, ranging from General Linden to privates.

The interviews gave Whitaker the contours of what the American soldiers had done, but the men showed a poor recall of crucial details. Perhaps the chaos of April 29 overwhelmed them, or maybe some were covering for themselves or their buddies. In the coal yard, for example, Whitaker found 15 .45-caliber shell casings on the ground and “a number of 45 cal. slugs, some of which had blood on them,” embedded in the rear wall. Many G.I.s carried .45-caliber pistols or submachine guns, but no one seemed to know who had fired a .45-caliber weapon in the coal yard.

Whitaker’s investigation listed 28 killings that were potential war crimes: four in the boxcar, 17 in the coal yard, and seven near the guard tower. By June 8, 1945, Whitaker thought he had a viable case against Lieutenant Walsh, Private Pruitt, Lieutenant Busheyhead, and Sergeant Wells.

He concluded that Walsh and Pruitt had

“It was the general feeling among all of the troops…that no prisoners would be taken,” one G.I. explained.

Liberated prisoners beat a camp guard. Soldiers made no move to stop such actions because, as one captain wrote, “THEY SO HAD-IT-COMING.”

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Whitaker’s findings drew a sharp response from Lieutenant General Wade H. Haislip, whose command included both the 42nd and 45th divisions. Prosecuting these men would be ill-advised, Haislip argued, because it would ignore “the unbalancing effects of the horrors and shock of Dachau on combat troops already fatigued with more than 30 days continuous combat action.” Specifically, he said, “the famous train with its cars of dead bodies” and the camp’s other atrocities “would naturally produce strong mental reaction on the part of both officers and men.”

What Haislip described was temporary insanity, a potential legal defense. Under military law, a soldier was not responsible for his actions if he suffered from a mental “derangement” that impaired his ability “to distinguish right from wrong and to adhere to the right.” The impact of what these men saw on April 29 might have qualified.

After seeing the corpses in the railcars, Walsh told Whitaker, he and his men were in “a high state of excitement.” Another soldier

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Lieutenant General Wade H. Haislip (above), whose command included the G.I.s at Dachau, pushed against prosecuting the men, arguing that the atrocities they had witnessed provoked their actions.

“summarily shot and killed” the four men in the boxcar. He accepted Curtin’s account and found that the 17 Germans in the coal yard had been “summarily executed under the personal supervision and orders of Lt. Walsh” and that Busheyhead had fired at these Germans. Whitaker didn’t believe the SS men had tried to rush the Americans, because the Signal Corps photos showed the Germans lying on the ground near the rear wall, with no indication any had moved toward the G.I.s. The killing of the seven by the guard tower, he determined, was an “entirely unwarranted…execution” because the Germans made “no threatening gesture or act.” He blamed Wells, who wasn’t the only soldier who had fired but the only one who admitted he had. The killing of the German wearing a Red Cross armband went unmentioned, and no attempt was made to identify the G.I.s who had stood by while inmates beat and killed guards.

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described Walsh as “quite angry and upset,” and yet another believed Walsh’s “mind probably wasn’t clear.” Almost every afteraction report and contemporaneous account describes the abominations these soldiers witnessed, especially in the railcars, and the emotions these sights stirred—predominantly rage. The shootings followed only minutes later.

These combat veterans, all too familiar with death and destruction, were completely unprepared for what they witnessed. “It is easy to read about atrocities, but they must be seen before they can be believed,” Private Porter wrote to his parents, admitting, “I even find myself trying to deny what I am looking at with my own eyes.” Sergeant James W. Creasman, a reporter for the 42nd Division newspaper, insisted “no human imagination fed with the most fantastic tales that have leaked out…could have been preparation for what they did see there.”

Even Eisenhower was unprepared. He had toured the Ohrdruf concentration camp just two weeks before the liberation of Dachau.

Afterward, he wrote to Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall that “the things I saw beggar description.” The “starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick,” he told Marshall, and he believed that “whatever has been printed on [the camps] to date has been understatement.” Like the G.I.s at Dachau, Eisenhower felt rage. “I think I never was so angry in my life,” he told reporters.

W hitaker’s investigation showed that something had gone terribly wrong on April 29, but proving war-crimes charges at a courtmartial trial was another matter. Even putting aside the mental state of these soldiers, key facts remained in dispute. The witnesses sharply disagreed on what had prompted the shootings in the coal yard and by the guard tower. Claims that the Germans along the wall had started to rush the Americans and that one at the tower had appeared to reach for a hidden pistol suggested the G.I.s may have acted in self-defense. It was not even clear who—other than Wells—had fired by the guard tower, shot at the fallen Germans, or watched inmates kill Germans.

On December 31, 1945, Colonel Charles L. Decker, deputy judge advocate for the European Theater, closed the file without charges.

“It appears that there was a violation of the

letter of international law in that the SS General Eisenhower was so guards seem to have been shot without trial,” disgusted by what he saw at he admitted, but found extenuating circum- one camp (opposite) that he stances. “In the light of the conditions which felt other leaders should see the “indescribable horror” greeted the eyes of the first combat troops to (above) for themselves. reach Dachau,” he wrote, “it is not believed that justice or equity demand that the difficult and perhaps impossible task of fixing individual responsibility now be undertaken.”

In the ensuing decades, revisionists and Nazi apologists have seized on the dark side of Dachau’s liberation. The former claim the U.S. Army orchestrated a massive cover-up to hide American war crimes, and the latter try to minimize Nazi atrocities by using the G.I.s’ actions to argue that both sides fought an equally dirty war.

Howard Buechner, the army doctor who had refused to treat the wounded Germans in the coal yard, fanned the flames in 1986 when he published a book claiming American soldiers had massacred nearly 500 Germans during the liberation, a figure few historians accept.

Buechner’s credibility took a hit with the declassification of Whitaker’s investigative file, which had remained classified until 1987. That file showed that Buechner had given a sworn statement in May 1945 claiming he saw only “15 or 16” Germans who had been shot by G.I.s.

Colonel Sparks insisted that the 45th Division had sent an estimated several hundred Germans safely to prisoner of war camps that day, with only 30-50 killed.

For the rest of his life, Walsh offered no apologies for what he had done. “I don’t think there was any SS guy that was shot or killed in the defense of Dachau that wondered why he was killed…or couldn’t figure it out,” he said in a 1990 interview, adding, “When I get to hell, I’ll check it out and find out whether they really understood.”

The behavior of American soldiers at Dachau is not a proud moment in U.S. Army history. In Europe, these troops usually followed the rules, as attested to by the more than 400,000 German soldiers who were sent to the United States as prisoners of war, but the liberation of Dachau tarnished that record, as Nazi atrocities provoked in the G.I.s a thirst for instantaneous revenge. “To such depths does human nature sink,” army chaplain Eichorn concluded, “in the presence of human depravity.” H DECEMBER 2021

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As war neared, celebrated American aviator Laura Ingalls took to the skies in the name of U.S. isolationism—and in support of Nazi Germany

By April White

aura Ingalls was planning her most daring aviation stunt yet. The famous pilot intended to reveal her ambitions to her friend Sylvia Comfort over dinner at a Los Angeles restaurant in July 1941. But first, Ingalls swore the young woman to secrecy. “I have all the confidence in the world in you,” Ingalls told Comfort that night. “I know if I told this to the wrong person, I would get into trouble.”

It would take a lot to top Ingalls’s previous exploits. Through the 1930s, she had made a name for herself as a fearless flier who had little regard for the restrictions that society and gravity placed upon a woman pilot. At the start of the decade, she had set the women’s record for consecutive loops in an airplane, turning 344 cartwheels over St. Louis, and then, three weeks later, broke her own record with 980 loop-the-loops in the Oklahoma skies. She continued her dizzying rise to fame in 1930 with a record-setting 714 barrel rolls and the first round-trip transcontinental flight by a woman. Over the next several years, she and Amelia Earhart battled for the distinction of being the fastest woman pilot to fly from coast to coast, but Ingalls’s solo flight to South America in 1934 remained unrivaled.

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Aviator Laura Ingalls first caught the American public’s eye in the 1930s, when her aerobatic feats and record-breaking flights made headlines.

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She f lew 17,000 miles from New York to Santiago, Chile, and back again, skimming over the Andes at 18,000 feet. The feat earned her an aviation trophy for outstanding flying that year by an American pilot.

It seemed nothing could ground Laura Ingalls—until war broke out. “Since the Army, Navy and Airlines have recently so absorbed aviation activity, there is literally no chance for a woman to secure a job in flying,” Ingalls wrote in 1939. “I need such a job if I wish to continue to fly—which I do.” Her love of piloting had nearly bankrupted her, and she had to find financial backing to stay in the air.

Ingalls addressed her plea to J. Edgar Hoover at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“Could you by any chance use in your organization the services of a woman flyer?,” she asked. “It occurred to me that in some way I

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As part of her audacious mission to keep the United States out of the war, Laura Ingalls planned to join the Nazis.

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In 1939, Ingalls offered her services as a pilot to the FBI. Rebuffed, she instead used her skills to publicize the isolationist cause.

might be able to work for you through the medium of my airplane and perhaps serve my country as well—something I love to do;—even though I am a woman.” When her first offer was refused, Ingalls wrote again: “It seems inconceivable there is nothing which a woman of intelligence, education and background could do to help safeguard the interests of this country in the present crisis.” To this, the FBI director responded bluntly, “Appointment is limited to male applicants.”

But Ingalls paid no more heed to Hoover than she had to the flight instructors she encountered who, she recalled, would “jolly a girl along instead of taking her work seriously.” By the time Hoover’s letter arrived, Ingalls had already flown her way into the debate over U.S. intervention in the war. On September 26, 1939, Ingalls buzzed through the restricted airspace over the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to the White House, dropping 5,000 pamphlets in her wake.

The message: “Never before in history have American women been so aroused and determined to keep their country out of war.”

Ingalls, who had entered f light school during the Lindbergh boom—that heady moment in the aviation industry between Charles Lindbergh’s solo transatlantic flight in 1927 and the stock market crash of 1929— was again following the famous pilot’s flight path, refashioning herself as a face of the isolationist movement.

The petite pilot, now 47 years old, who had so craved the attention she earned for her aerial derring-do, was no longer a fixture on the country’s front pages. It was unlikely that anyone at Carl’s restaurant on L.A.’s Crenshaw Boulevard, where she dined with Comfort that July 1941 night, would have recognized her without her dark curls constrained by a leather f lying helmet and oversized aviator goggles. But among a small and fervent group advocating against intervention in the growing wars in Europe and Asia, Ingalls’s fame was again soaring.

Ingalls’s stage presence, described by an observer as “sarcastic, flippant, fluent and dramatic,” made her an in-demand speaker at events hosted by Lindbergh’s America First Committee and antiwar women’s groups.

After their dinner, Ingalls and Comfort would be attending a party hosted by one such group, Mothers of Los Angeles, to raise $450 for Ingalls’s next protest flight to Washington,

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D.C., the following month. Her earlier trip to scatter petitions over the W hite House grounds had nearly cost Ingalls her pilot’s license. This time she pledged to hand them directly to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But that was not the plan Ingalls wanted to share with Comfort. After her trip to Washington, Ingalls confided, she would fly over London and then over Berlin dropping messages of peace. She asked Comfort to accompany her to the warring capitals, but she advised there would be no return trip. “There is much work to be done by Americans over there,” Ingalls said of Germany. “Especially by people who know how to type and have a good command of English.”

As part of her audacious mission to keep the United States out of the war—her “peace mission,” as she called it—the American aviator planned to join the Nazis.

“I FELT IT BEST to play along with her,” Sylvia Comfort wrote the day after her July 1941 dinner with Laura Ingalls. Comfort was not who she had seemed to be when Ingalls met her at an America First Committee meeting the previous month. The devoted isolationist with the open, friendly face who professed sy mpathy for Adolf Hitler ’s leadership and “efficiency” was a spy of sorts.

The 27-year-old part-time secretar y worked for the Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation Council, an innocuous-sounding civilian organization founded in 1933 to rout out Nazi influence in Los Angeles. Comfort had joined the effort in 1940 when she realized that William P. Williams, the man with whom she had taken a temporary typing job, was not just an isolationist but a vicious anti-Semite who was organizing secret groups in California to take what he called “drastic” action against the country’s Jewish population. Comfort, who was not Jewish, was disgusted by the man, but her continued employment with Williams gave her unique entry into the United States’ most prominent isolationist organizations and access to those within the movement who were motivated by their support for Hitler and his worldview.

Laura Ingalls was among this group, Comfort now reported to her handler at the Community Relations Committee: “She said, in that many words, that she admires Hitler.”

Comfort had already seen the distinctive

America First Committee leaders Charles Lindbergh (right) and Senator Burton Wheeler salute the American flag at a 1941 rally in New York. Ingalls followed in Lindbergh’s footsteps both as an air pioneer and an ardent isolationist.

swastika bracelet Ingalls wore—it was an Indian symbol, Ingalls explained—and she had watched Ingalls, standing before an America First Committee meeting, extend her hand into the air in a straightarmed salute. “ We ought to adopt an A merican salute—the outstretched left arm,” Comfort, a stenographer by training, had recorded Ingalls as saying. Ingalls claimed this gesture was “purely American,” taken from the continent’s indigenous people. “And no one can accuse us of being Nazis, for the Nazis use the right arm.”

But over dinner at Carl’s, Ingalls had been more honest about her allegiance. Comfort related all the details of their conversation to her handler. “I am pro-German,” Ingalls had said. By way of explanation, she added that she had been raised by a German nurse and that her mother was German. The latter statement may have been true, but Ingalls would have had to reach back centuries to find a relative who had been born in that country. (Among the relations on that family tree was the popular writer with whom Laura shared a name; Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House on the Prairie books, was a distant cousin.) Still, Ingalls seemed determined to fly back to her ancestral homeland.

Comfort’s handler made a note on her report. Agent S3—Comfort’s codename—“was instructed to play along with Ingalls as if informant were ready to accompany her on this very adventurous proposition.”

Then the Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation Council forwarded Comfort’s intelligence to the FBI. Ingalls seemed to believe Comfort’s feigned enthusiasm for “the PLAN!,” as Ingalls referred to it. Through the summer of 1941, the two frequently spoke about the trip and Ingalls’s efforts to secure funding and safe passage to Europe. Ingalls was preparing to sell her home in Los Angeles and encouraged Comfort to get a passport for the journey, DECEMBER 2021

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several days, she was stuck in New Mexico, unable to rent another plane. Finally, she purchased a commercial airline ticket to complete her trip, but she never made it to the steps of the White House.

Ingalls was even rebuffed by the one group she felt sure would support her grandiose gesture: the Germans. Ingalls often boasted to Comfort about her connections at the German Embassy, and she sent them coded messages signed with the pseudonyms “Ellen” or “Sagittarius.” Comfort knew Ingalls had used her visit to Washington as a cover to meet with a German contact, but the embassy had refused to support her peace flight.

Instead, Ingalls was told, “the best thing you can do for our cause is to continue to promote the America First Committee.”

The FBI kept tabs on Ingalls through the fall as she rallied isolationists at America First meetings, quoting from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and they tailed her through Washington, D.C., when she arrived in the city on December 11, 1941—the day the United States declared war on Germany.

Ingalls was on an urgent mission to see Ulrich von Gienanth, the second secretary Ingalls’s contact at the German of the German Embassy and the Embassy in Washington, D.C., was country’s chief of propaganda Ulrich von Gienanth, the Reich’s in the United States. She wanted propaganda chief in the U.S. the names of those “who can continue our work in this country,” an informant reported.

On December 17, 1941, believing that the woman J. Edgar Hoover now called “among the most active and dangerous pro-Nazis in the Los Angeles district” was finally ready to make her flight to Berlin, the FBI arrested Ingalls on charges that she was working for the Germans.

IN A WASHINGTON, D.C., courtroom on February 12, 1942, Laura Ingalls took the stand, the only witness for the defense. Over the previ-

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which could take them through Brazil or Argentina and Italy, as commercial travel was restricted from the United States.

Though Comfort did not see in Ingalls the same deep vitriol toward the Jewish community she had witnessed in others in her orbit, Ingalls was certainly aware of the horrors taking place in Germany. It did not deter her. “She told me that I must realize that if I go along with her to Germany, many people will call me a Nazi,” Comfort wrote in another July report. Ingalls offered a simple reassurance to the woman she still believed to be a friend. Comfort reported that Ingalls advised her, “if I am convinced that the Nazis are doing the right thing and have no reservations whatsoever about them, I wouldn’t mind being called a Nazi.”

Comfort made a record of each interaction with Ingalls for her handler and the FBI. By early September, Laura Ingalls’s name was again in front of the FBI director. This time Hoover was much more interested in the flier.

“It is believed that an immediate, thorough and discreet investigation [should] be made into the activities of Laura Ingalls,” he wrote.

Through Comfort’s reporting, the FBI watched as Ingalls grew increasingly frustrated by her slow progress toward Berlin. She w a s s t i l l a g g r av at e d t h at the United States government had turned down her offers of assistance, and now the isolationist movement, too, seemed uninterested in supporting her grand vision. “I continue to be convinced that the medium of flying should be introduced into our campaign—in any possible way. It holds the color, action and appeal which nothing else does—but America First hasn’t lifted a finger to help,” she wrote to Comfort in October 1941.

Ingalls’s second flight to Washington had looked like a failure to those in the movement.

She had taken off from Los Angeles that past August with little fanfare, in a plane she had painted with the slogan “No A.E.F.,” an objection to reestablishing the American Expeditionary Forces of the Great War. Soon after, Ingalls crash-landed at the Albuquerque Airport, the first accident of her 11 years in the air. She privately claimed sabotage. For

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Ingalls is fingerprinted after her arrest on December 17, 1941. Prosecutors charged the flier with working for Germany without registering as a foreign agent.

TIMOTHY HUGHES RARE AND EARLY NEWSPAPERS

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ous three days, the prosecution had made the case that Ingalls had violated the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act. As the FBI discovered upon her arrest, not only had Ingalls undertaken the work of the German government for nearly a year, she had, for a portion of that time, been secretly paid for her services, all without filing the necessary paperwork with the U.S. government.

Ingalls freely admitted to accepting money from the Germans. She had even negotiated a raise—$300 a month instead of the offered $250; the extra cash came directly out of Ulrich von Gienanth’s pocket, according to a prosecution witness. But, Ingalls argued, she was not what she seemed. Ingalls claimed that she—like Sylvia Comfort, whose role in her arrest Ingalls likely never knew—was a selfappointed spy.

At her arraignment in December, Ingalls declined to enter a plea, instead surprising the court with an impromptu defense: “I don’t take orders from the German government; I was carrying out my own investigation.” She added, “I guess I overstepped.”

At her trial, Ingalls told the jury, “I saw myself as a sort of Mata Hari, an international super spy,” adding, “and I wanted to serve my country.” According to Ingalls, she was a patriot who had espoused pro-Nazi views to ingratiate herself with the enemy. She intended to inform on the employees of the German Embassy and “possibly their superiors in Germany.”

It was, her lawyer said, a “one-woman campaign of counterespionage against the Nazis.” He charged that the U.S. government was on a “witch hunt,” eager to smear the isolationists and embarrass the powerful America First Committee. The defense was difficult to square with the impassioned proGerman sentiments Ingalls had expressed at America First rallies, but her lawyer also willingly acknowledged to the court that Ingalls was “a fanatic” and “a bit of a crackpot…with a burning desire to make the front pages.” And she had. Throughout the trial, the flier’s face, now framed in a graying bob, again graced newsstands.

It took the jury less than 90 minutes to find Ingalls guilty of spreading Nazi propaganda through her isolationist speeches at the direction of the German government. A few days later, the judge sentenced Ingalls to eight months to two years in prison for her crime.

In her statement to the court, Ingalls made one last impassioned isolationist speech on behalf of a movement now distressed by its association with her.

When it had been to her benefit during her trial, Ingalls eagerly disavowed months of pro-Nazi sentiments, expressed both publicly and privately, but she did not abandon the anti-intervention views that had brief ly restored her fame. She now thought those views made her a martyr. “One of the great fundamentals implicit in the Constitution is liberty of conscience. I felt that I had a right to follow the dictates of my conscience. I felt that I had as much right to oppose America’s participation in the war as those who were trying to push America into war,” she said. In the isolationists’ battle, she concluded, “sacrifice is necessary. I am willing to make it.” H

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called Ingalls “among the most active and dangerous pro-Nazis” in Los Angeles.

During her trial, Ingalls presented herself as a self-appointed counterespionage agent, duping the Germans with her shows of Nazi support. It took the jury less than 90 minutes to convict her.

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REVIEWS BOOKS

ROLL OF THE DICE

By Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman. 528 pp.

Basic Books, 2021. $35.

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assuring Japan’s ambassador that Germany would intervene in any war against the United States. “The question,” Simms and Laderman reflect, “was whether this verbal commitment from the Führer was worth the paper it wasn’t written on.”

The answer played out as news reached Berlin of the Japanese attack and America’s declaration of war against the Empire of Japan. Simms and Laderman parse through the words and decisions of Hitler, Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill, Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, and Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo, shedding light on their evolving perspectives day by day, hour by hour, as the war’s direction hung in the balance. Hitler’s unbridled faith in his soldaten fighting in Russia, his resolve to isolate and defeat America, and his political judgment weave through a thoughtful chronology.

By focusing on such a short timeframe, Hitler’s American Gamble offers fine, wellresearched insights into the psyches of lead-

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HITLER’S AMERICAN GAMBLE Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War

WHY DID HITLER DECLARE WAR on the United States four days after Pearl Harbor?

Was his decision a calculated risk that came up short? An unrealistic reliance on U-boats to contain America to the ocean? The product of an unhinged mind? In Hitler’s American Gamble, British professors Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman comb through five fateful days—December 7-11, 1941—to explore one of history’s greatest strategic blunders.

The United States and Germany had been edging toward war since early 1940, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt began supplying the British Commonwealth and, later, the Soviet Union with weapons and supplies to fight Nazism. But as U.S. battleships lay burning in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, Germany was not obliged to enter its Axis partner Japan’s war with the United States.

Hitler viewed Japan’s war in the Pacific as a way of tying down U.S. forces and diverting Anglo-American resources from combat in Europe. Yet by April 1941, Hitler had begun

KEYSTONE-FRANCE/GAMMA-KEYSTONE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Hitler, in a speech to the Reichstag, declares war against the United States on December 11, 1941.

ers who made decisions that changed the course of world history. Hitler’s disastrous American gamble, like his decision to invade the Soviet Union, was ultimately a political calculation rather than a military wager set against the backdrop of an enemy on the rise.

“Both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had thus reached the same turning point—not so much in hubris, but in fear,” Simms and Laderman conclude. “Neither expected to defeat their enemy outright, but at best to seize the resources and a perimeter line behind which they could defend themselves until a compromise peace had been reached.”

For readers seeking a deeper understanding of the realpolitik that drove Germany to war against America, Hitler’s American Gamble offers an outstanding narrative. —Jonathan W. Jordan is the author of American Warlords: How Roosevelt’s High Command Led America to Victory in World War II (2015).

REVIEWS FILMS

MISHA AND THE WOLVES

Directed by Sam Hobkinson, 89 minutes. An Arts Alliance, Met Film, Bright Yellow Films production, 2021. Now streaming on Netflix.

Reality serves up as many twists and turns as fiction in this investigation into the life and work of author Misha Defonseca, whose fantastical 1997 Holocaust memoir claimed she lived among wolves in the forest as a child after the Nazis arrested her Jewish parents in occupied Belgium in 1941.

REVIEWS GRAPHIC NOVELS

COMIC BOOK HEROES MEDAL OF HONOR SERIES

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The Association of the United States Army.

Available for free download at ausa.org/ medal-honor-graphic-novels Colorfully illustrated and action-packed, the “Medal of Honor” graphic novel series tells tales of bravery drawn from real life: each issue celebrates a recipient of the Medal of Honor, the nation’s top military decoration. The Association of the United States Army publishes four digital installments per year, collaborating with artists from comic titles like Avengers, Deadpool, and G.I. Joe to profile figures both iconic (Audie Murphy) and barrier-breaking (Daniel Inouye, a veteran of the 442nd Infantry Regiment). All 12 titles can be viewed for free online; print volumes are available to AUSA members upon request.

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REVIEWS BOOKS

FROM SEA TO LAND

BY WATER BENEATH THE WALLS The Rise of the Navy SEALs

By Benjamin H. Milligan. 640 pp.

Bantam, 2021. $30.

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AUTHOR BENJAMIN H. MILLIGAN introduces By Water Beneath the Walls, his awkwardly titled but engaging study of U.S. Navy SEAL origins, with an intriguing premise: from the first days of World War II into the Vietnam War era, each step the navy took toward creating its storied “Sea Air Land” warriors was preceded by “a failure by one of the Navy’s sister services to seize an obvious opportunity to permanently establish its own commando units.” Ground units such as the Marine Corps Raiders and U.S. Army Rangers were either disbanded after missions or misused as traditional infantry—but elite navy units, beginning with World War II’s Underwater Demolition Teams, survived, and evolved into units uniquely capable of executing high-risk missions at sea, on land, and from the air.

To back this idea, Milligan, himself a SEAL veteran, describes By Water Beneath the Walls (the title a poetic nod to an eighth-century waterborne raid on Constantinople) as “not simply a history of the early SEAL teams, but a prequel…that has never been told” of

early commando units in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Their successes, failures, and lessons learned paved the way for the current SEAL paradigm. While fragments of these tales, in fact, have been told elsewhere, never have they been assembled in such an appealing, integrated form.

I agree with Milligan’s frank admission that the public’s “disproportionate interest in SEALs” has generated “too many ghostauthored books, too many movies, too many big heads.” Yet while history buffs have ample reason to be suspect of yet another SEAL book, they should embrace By Water Beneath the Walls.

Milligan is a natural storyteller. His voice is authoritative, but his style is colloquial and his narrative pace lively and chock-full of vivid imagery. His concise bios of key World War II figures—such as Evans Carlson, whose Marine Raiders (“Carlson’s Raiders”) assaulted Makin Atoll in the Gilbert Islands in 1943, and William Darby, whose Army Rangers stormed Algeria’s Fort du Nord the same year—are crisp and incisive, as are his accounts of commando derring-do in massive amphibious campaigns such as Operation Overlord, the June 1944 invasion of Normandy.

As he moves beyond World War II (which comprises roughly half the book’s narrative), Milligan confronts the stalemates, missteps, and controversies of Korea and Vietnam. He also wades into a welter of arcane military acronyms, some devised to mask military history’s shadier and more ignoble escapades. It is in Vietnam’s jungles and swamps, however, that the official Navy SEAL concept finally gels, with special operations missions unfolding efficiently, expertly, and with minimal casualties. By one key measure, SEALs serving in Vietnam received 20 percent of the navy’s medals while suffering just 2 percent of its fatalities.

By Water Beneath the Walls establishes Milligan as a go-to expert on U.S. commando and guerrilla actions (now more commonly called asymmetric warfare). Still, when it comes to World War II history, occasional miscues arise. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, was not a “former secretary of the Navy” but (continued on page 75)

COURTESY OF OFFICE OF THE COMMAND HISTORIAN, U.S. ARMY SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND

Led by a lieutenant seasoned during World War II, members of Underwater Demolition Team 3 prepare for a 1950 sabotage raid in Korea.

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BOOK BRIEFS LIGHTNING DOWN A World War II Story of Survival

By Tom Clavin. 320 pp. St. Martin’s Press, 2021. $29.99.

Tom Clavin recounts in terrible detail the story of Joe Moser, an American farmboy turned P-38 pilot who was shot down and captured by the Germans in 1944 before enduring the horrors of Buchenwald death camp. A gripping tale of survival.

WATCHING DARKNESS FALL FDR, His Ambassadors, and the Rise of Adolf Hitler

By David McKean.

416 pp. St. Martin’s Press, 2021. $29.99.

Former American ambassador David McKean knows of what he speaks in this compelling account of four U.S. diplomats who were FDR’s eyes and ears in Europe during Hitler’s rise to power— and whose often-imperfect council helped inform America’s path to war.

COURTESY OF OFFICE OF THE COMMAND HISTORIAN, U.S. ARMY SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND

GENIUSES AT WAR Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age

By David A. Price.

256 pp. Knopf, 2021. $28.

Historian David Price, whose college major was computer science, is particularly wellsuited to write a book on the masterminds at Bletchley Park who, according to Price, didn’t just crack Nazi codes but also paved the way for the world’s first computers.

REVIEWS GAMES

FIGHT TO THE FINISH PANZERS LAST STAND: BATTLES FOR BUDAPEST, 1945

Multi-Man Publishing. $166. Available for purchase at mmpgamers.com.

WORLD WAR II RATING

HHHHH

THE BASICS Panzers Last Stand is a two-player board game that covers the German army’s last offensives near Budapest in the spring of 1945. It recreates battles at the tactical level, with most units being regimental in size.

THE OBJECTIVE Players command either the German army as it attempts to stem the Soviet onslaught and recapture Budapest or the Soviet forces, which must blunt German counteroffensives and continue their drive into the Third Reich.

HISTORICAL ACCURACY This game is about as accurate as it can get: the map precisely depicts the region of Hungary in which the campaigns were fought, as well as the correct order of battle as originally experienced in the campaign. Several scenarios replay various German counteroffensives (Konrad I, II, III, and Spring Awakening) with fantastic detail and realism.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY Panzers Last Stand is a great

game for players who want to fight Germany and Russia’s 1945 campaigns in Hungary at the tactical level, commanding battalions of panzers and T-34s along with support units. But its gameplay is also quite complex. For example, to activate any given unit to use in a turn, players must take into account the morale, leadership, and supply level of that unit, along with weather and terrain conditions, before rolling the dice to see if they’re able to carry out its mission; only then will they be able to move and fight.

PLAYABILITY

Panzers Last Stand is not for beginners: while its rules are clear and well-explained, they are numerous and complex, totaling nearly 80 pages. It might take a few plays to get the hang of it; until then, online forums and video tutorials are helpful.

THE BOTTOM LINE Panzers Last Stand might seem intimidating to some players, but for what it lacks in ease it makes up for in realism. Playing this game provides a great World War II-era operational warfare experience, simulating real-life challenges dealing with supplies, morale, leadership, terrain, firepower, and more.

—Chris Ketcherside is a retired Marine, a lifelong wargamer, and a PhD candidate in American history.

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REVIEWS BOOKS

SECRET WEAPON

SLEEPER AGENT The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away

By Ann Hagedorn.

272 pp. Simon & Schuster, 2021. $28.

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“IT TAKES A SPY TO CATCH A SPY,” said Tennent Bagley, the legendary CIA spymaster who led counterintelligence efforts against the Soviets during the Cold War. So what happens when spies aren’t unmasked by fellow agents? They typically stay hidden.

Such was the case of George Koval, a Soviet spy who infiltrated the Manhattan Project and is the subject of journalist and author Ann Hagedorn’s new book, Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away.

The story begins in 1910, when Koval’s parents—Socialist-leaning Russian Jews—emigrated to rural Sioux City, Iowa, in search of a better life. That hope vanished when the United States plunged into the Great Depression and financial depravation and economic competition exposed the family to bigotry and anti-Semitism.

By 1932 the Koval family had had enough and took a steamer back to their homeland.

Their 18-year-old son, George, who had joined the Young Communist League in America and espoused a utopian vision of the Soviet Union, saw education as a way to get ahead and began studying chemistry in Moscow. He excelled academically and drew the attention of the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, whose

ranks had been thinned by Stalin’s purges.

One Russian scholar quoted Koval as reminiscing, “I was twenty-six, energetic and obedient. I was what they wanted.”

Koval, codenamed “Delmar,” was trained as a spy in 1939 and ordered to recruit agents in U.S. labs with knowledge of chemical weapons. Once in place in the States he reassumed his American identity, allowing him to fly under the radar at Manhattan Project labs in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Dayton, Ohio, where he ostensibly worked as a physicist monitoring the health of atomic lab workers.

Koval received a top-secret clearance during a time when the demand for trained scientists overwhelmed the atomic labs’ nascent security organization and protocols.

At this point, Hagedorn’s story hits evidentiary roadblocks; qualifiers like “could have,” “may have,” and “possibly” appear frequently to fill in the major gaps of Koval’s career in espionage. Clearly Koval, a physicist operating in a support role, reported observations back through his GRU handlers to senior leaders in the Soviet Union. But records detailing Koval’s recruitments, his access to sensitive documents, and his reporting history—all critical to his legacy as an important Soviet atomic spy— are either circumstantial or nonexistent.

Authors writing about espionage frequently hit such roadblocks because their subjects—and the organizations they work for—are expert at obscuring their affiliations and accomplishments. It wasn’t for lack of trying that Hagedorn came up short. FBI documents detailing the search for Koval, released through Freedom of Information Act requests, provide important context but no specifics on what information was stolen.

KGB and GRU communications intercepted by a U.S. counterintelligence project known as “Verona” exposed other atomic spies, like the Rosenbergs, but were silent on Koval.

Hagedorn also accessed Russian historians’ research on Koval, but even they could not illuminate his role in hijacking atomic secrets.

The significance of Koval’s espionage remains an open question. W hen Koval returned to Russia in 1948, one year before the Soviets detonated their atomic bomb, he arrived as a private in the GRU. Hagedorn

KOVAL FAMILY ARCHIVE

George Koval, pictured here as a chemistry professor at Moscow’s Mendeleev Institute in the 1950s, led a double life as a nuclear spy.

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KOVAL FAMILY ARCHIVE

claims that being a Jew limited Koval from “receiving a high GRU post or even minor recognition” for his efforts. Perhaps, but Ursula Kuczynski, a Jew and a woman, served as the handler for atomic spy Klaus Fuchs during World War II, returned from Europe to the Soviet Union with honors, and was promoted by the GRU to the rank of colonel.

Still, it’s hard not to be tantalized by an award that Koval, who died in 2006, received posthumously from Soviet President Vladimir Putin highlighting his unique status as the “only Soviet intelligence officer to penetrate the US secret atomic facilities…used to create the atomic bomb.” All this makes for intriguing supposition as to what Koval provided his GRU masters—and to her credit, Hagedorn acknowledges the story’s gaps. Still, a lack of evidence hinders a deeper understanding of this enigmatic “Sleeper Agent.”

—Craig Gralley is a former senior intelligence officer with the CIA and the author of Hall of Mirrors: Virginia Hall—America’s Greatest Spy of World War II (2019). ( Navy SEALs, continued from page 72) an assistant secretary. The USS Los Angeles was a World War II heavy cruiser, not a battleship. A nd while then-Capta in Arleigh A. Burke was indeed nicknamed “31-Knot Burke,” it was not because of his “boiler bursting pace.” Instead, it began as a teasing jibe earned when his combatbound flotilla was slowed by a destroyer’s fouled boiler en route to November 1943’s Battle of Cape St. George.

Minor hiccups aside, Milligan convincingly demonstrates how World War II events and personalities shaped today’s Navy SEALs. After all, it was that same Arleigh A. Burke who, as a four-star admiral and chief of naval operations, later insisted that “our people [in Vietnam] will have to know…how to fight and live under guerrilla conditions.” In fostering the SEAL concept, Milligan concludes, “Burke stretched the Navy’s combat reach from the floors of the ocean to the edges of the atmosphere.” —David Sears, a frequent World War II contributor, is currently at work on Duel in the Deep, a forthcoming book about a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Battle of the Atlantic.

REVIEWS PODCASTS

WE HAVE WAYS OF MAKING YOU TALK

Hosted by British comedian Al Murray (right) and historian (and World War II columnist) James Holland, this show feels like listening to your two brainiest friends debate all aspects of World War II—from firepower to fashion—and offers a healthy dose of across-the-pond perspective.

BAND OF BROTHERS PODCAST

It’s been 20 years since the debut of HBO’s Band of Brothers miniseries. This commemorative podcast offers equal doses of nostalgia and nuance, revisiting Easy Company’s exploits through conversations with cast members, writers, directors, and producer Tom Hanks.

Al Murray, James Holland. Biweekly.

Available on Apple Podcasts.

HBO Max. 12 episodes.

Available on Apple Podcasts.

TRUE WAR STORIES: MISSION REPORT

Voyage Media. Weekly.

Available on Apple Podcasts.

Veterans’ formative experiences, recounted in their own words, are at the heart of this series featuring candid accounts from service members ranging from a World War II POW to a female Gulf War vet.

DECEMBER 2021

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BATTLE FILMS

BY MARK GRIMSLEY

MENGELE’S BABIES

THE NAME ADOLF HITLER is synonymous with absolute evil, so much so that Jewish theologian Emil Fackenheim once called him “an eruption of demonism into history.” The success of The Boys from Brazil depends upon the audience’s willingness to go along with this assessment—and enough of them did to make the film a box office hit when it reached theaters in 1978.

Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and adapted from author Ira Levin’s 1976 novel of the same name, The Boys from Brazil takes

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place three decades after Hitler’s 1945 bunker suicide beneath the Nazi Chancellery. A “Comrades Organization,” a cabal of surviving SS officers based in South America, is intent upon creating a Fourth Reich. To do so, they must assassinate 94 middle-aged men— all of them minor civil servants—and these killings must fall within a day or two of certain dates. The assassins themselves are ignorant of the reasoning behind the scheme.

Only those at the very top of the Comrades Organization know the true plan, and among them all, perhaps the only one who fully believes in it is Dr. Josef Mengele (played by Gregory Peck), notorious for his fiendish experiments on Auschwitz inmates. He seeks nothing less than to create a duplicate of Hitler, with the fanatical certainty that this Hitler will save the Aryan race in the latter years of the twentieth century.

Mengele has produced 94 Hitler clones, made from DNA collected from the dictator in May 1943, and placed the infants with adoptive parents, in which the fathers are all precisely 52 years old and the mothers are 29, replicating the age of Hitler’s parents at his birth. Between the age difference and the fact that the fathers of the cloned Hitlers are all minor civil servants—Hitler’s father was a customs official—Mengele believes that this will suffice to replicate Hitler’s family environment: a domineering father, a doting mother. He estimates that with 94 such attempts, this combination of nature and nurture will produce at least several boys identical to the Nazi leader. The chief complication is that Hitler’s father died at age 65, shortly before Adolf’s 14th birthday. Thus, if the experiment is to succeed, his death, too, must be replicated; hence the mandatory killings.

Early in the film, Jewish Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman (played by Laurence Olivier) discovers that Mengele has ordered the assassinations of 94 men in countries across northern Europe and in North America. He doggedly pursues this mysterious clue without knowing where it will lead. But while visiting several of the murdered men’s widows, he makes a startling discovery: each has a 13-year-old boy (all played by Jeremy Black) with similar features: pale skin, piercing blue

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The Boys from Brazil (1978) stars Gregory Peck as Dr. Josef Mengele, biding his time in South America with plans to clone Hitler and launch a Fourth Reich.

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eyes, and a spoiled, disagreeable manner. Eventually, with the help of a geneticist, Lieberman discovers that they must be clones—clones of the Nazi dictator, he deduces—which leads to a climactic confrontation with Mengele in the home of one of these budding Hitlers.

Before he wrote The Boys from Brazil, Levin produced a similar novel: Rosemary’s Baby, published in 1967 and adapted to film by director Roman Polanski a year later. Considered one of the top five horror movies of all time, Rosemary’s Baby centers on a young wife who is unwittingly impregnated with Satan’s son. The Boys from Brazil shares much of the same theme: Hitler is commonly perceived as humanity’s closest answer to the devil incarnate, and, according to the movie, recreating that evil would be as simple as placing a biological carbon-copy of the dictator in a likewise duplicated family.

This concept ought to be laughable. Logically, Hitler was a product of his time, place, and culture: he rose from a minor political party gestated by a Germany mortified by its loss to the Allies in 1918 and achieved political power through a single-minded attempt to dismantle the humiliating Versailles settlement. Neither Mengele nor anyone else could recreate these conditions, nor the dozens of other factors necessary to concoct the Hitler who conquered Europe and launched the Holocaust. All Mengele and his minions could possibly have accomplished would be to create a failed, narcissistic artist—which is all Hitler would have been but for the titanic historical forces that made him infamous.

And yet, when Hitler is concerned, we are not logical. For most of

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Because each Perfect Sleep Chair is a made-to-order bedding product it cannot be returned, but if it arrives damaged or defective, at our option we will repair it or replace it. © 2021 firstSTREET for Boomers and Beyond, Inc.

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46571

Footrest may vary by model

9/8/21 1:05 PM

CHALLENGE

LOCK AND LOAD

IWM/GETTY IMAGES; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN WALKER

We altered this 1939 photo of aircrew feeding ammo into a British fighter to create one error. What is it?

Answer to the August Challenge: Ninety of you

correctly deduced that we removed the pom-poms—the “toories”— from the Scottish soldiers’ tam-o’shanters. No, we did not add actor Sean Connery to the photo, as several of you guessed (though we wish we’d thought of that), and we did not unbutton one man’s shirt.

Congratulations to the winners: Dave Buehler, Robb

Dolence, and Nick Meekins

Please send your answer with your name

and mailing address to: December 2021 Challenge, World War II, 901 N. Glebe Road, 5th Fl., Arlington, VA 22203; or email: challenge@historynet. com. Three winners, chosen at random from all correct entries submitted by December 15, 2021, will receive Hitler’s American Gamble by Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman.

Answer will appear in the April 2022 issue.

DECEMBER 2021

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FAMILIAR FACE

BOSTON RED SOX left fielder Ted Williams’s 19-year Hall of Fame career was one of the most remarkable in baseball history—and might have been unrivaled had it not been interrupted twice for war. Williams had just won 1942’s American League Triple Crown when he joined the Naval Reserves as a Marine pilot, where the same lightning-quick reflexes that served him so well in the batter’s box helped him conquer the cockpit. Flying the Vought F4U Corsair fighter, Williams trained Marine and U.S. Navy pilots at Florida’s Naval Air Station Pensacola during the war before returning to baseball in 1946. He continued to rack up hitting records until being called to active duty for a second time in 1952-53 to fight in Korea.

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AP PHOTO; INSET: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

ALL-STAR AVIATOR

WORLD WAR II

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9/22/21 1:41 PM

We’re Bringing Flexy Back

The Stauer Flex gives you vintage style with a throwback price of only $79.

J

ust like a good wristwatch movement, fashion is cyclical. And there’s a certain wristwatch trend that was huge in the 1960s and then again in the 1980s, and is ready for its third time in the spotlight. We’re talking, of course, about the flexible stretch watch band.

To purchase a vintage 60s or 80s classic flex watch would stretch anyone’s budget, but you can get ahead of the crowd and secure a brand new version for a much lower price.

We’re rolling back the years AND the numbers by pricing the Stauer Flex like this, so you can put some bend in your band without making a dent in your wallet.

The Stauer Flex combines 1960s vintage cool with 1980s boardroom style. The stainless steel flex band ensures minimal fuss and the sleek midnight blue face keeps you on track with date and day subdials.

Your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed.

Experience the Stauer Flex for 30 days. If you’re not convinced you got excellence for less, send it back for a refund of the item price. Your satisfaction is our top priority.

Time is running out. As our top selling watch, we can’t guarantee the Flex will stick around long. Don’t overpay to be êêêêê underwhelmed. “The quality of their watches Flex your is equal to many that can go right to put for ten times the price or more.” a precision — Jeff from McKinney, TX timepiece on your wrist for just $79. Call today!

The Looks of a Classic Flex Band Watch for

only $79!

TAKE 74% OFF INSTANTLY! When you use your OFFER CODE

Stauer Flex Men’s Watch $299† Offer Code Price

$79 + S&P Save $220

You must use the offer code to get our special price.

1-800-333-2045 Your Offer Code: FMW174-01

Please use this code when you order to receive your discount.

Stauer

14101 Southcross Drive W.,

® Ste 155, Dept. FMW174-01

Burnsville, Minnesota 55337

Flexible Stretch Watch Bracelets in the News: “The bracelets are comfortable, they last forever, and they exhibit just the right balance of simplicity and over-engineering” – Bloomberg.com, 2017

www.stauer.com

† Special price only for customers using the offer code versus the price on Stauer.com without your offer code.

Rating of A+

• Precision movement • Stainless steel crown, caseback & bracelet • Date window at 6 o’clock; day window at 10 o’clock • Water resistant to 3 ATM • Stretches to fit wrists up to 8 ½"

Stauer… Afford the Extraordinary.®

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9/8/21 11:35 PM

IAN W. TOLL’S MASTERFUL

PACIFIC WAR TRILOGY “No one has told the story of World War II in the Pacific, from beginning to bitter end, better than Ian W. Toll.”

— A LE X K ER SH AW

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RILOGY I F I C WA R T O F T H E PA C

VOLU M E

L I A N W. T O L VOLU M E

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LL I A N W. T O

nd prov e s y a nd pro s e a blen d of h i s tor r n a r rat ive.”

“A b e aut i f u l t he n ava l-wa l’s m a s ter y of JOU R NA L a g a i n M r. Tol LL STR EET WA N, DA N W. JOR —JO NAT H A

LL I A N W. T O

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NOW I N PA PE R BAC K ALSO AVAILABLE AS A HARDCOVER BOXED SET

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W. N IA L L TO

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WW2-211200-004 WW Norton Twilight of the Gods.indd 1

In Stores Nov. 2

ISBN: 978-1-324-02089-9

Available Wherever Books Are Sold

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wwnorton.com

9/8/21 11:37 PM