World War II February 2022 by HistoryNet

DEATH U-BOAT

HISTORYNET.COM

OF A

HOW A CAPTAIN’S RECKLESS DECISION DOOMED U-352 Today U-352 rests some 26 miles south of North Carolina’s Morehead City.

PluTsAUGHT

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WORLD WAR II

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FE B RUA RY 2022 ENDORSED BY THE NATIONAL WORLD WAR II MUSEUM, INC.

F E AT U R E S COVE R STO RY

30 DEATH OF A U-BOAT

German submarine U-352 became notorious for all the wrong reasons ERIK A. PETKOVIC SR.

38 OH LORD, HOW I WANT TO GO HOME

An American soldier and poet documents life in Japan’s hellish Cabanatuan prison camp BILL YENNE

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

48 TANK BUSTER

Germany’s Henschel Hs-129 attack airplane

50 ALL TOGETHER NOW

Singing provided soldiers with an essential release—provided they got to sing the songs their way JOSEPH CONNOR

American soldiers celebrate the March 1945 capture of Saarbrücken, Germany, with an impromptu tune. HORACE ABRAHAMS/KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES COVER: TANYA GRIFFIN HOUPPERMANS

P O RT F O L I O

58 MAN ON A MISSION

Carl Chamberlain went to war with a camera and came back with hundreds of photos. Now his son needs your help DAVE KINDY

64 TOM LANDRY’S TOUCHDOWN

The Dallas Cowboys’ famous coach first showed his unflappable ways in a cockpit high over Europe MARK ORISTANO

D E PA RT M E N T S

8 MAIL 10 WORLD WAR II TODAY 18 CONVERSATION

A young medic’s introduction to combat—on Omaha Beach

22 FROM THE FOOTLOCKER 24 NEED TO KNOW 26 TRAVEL

Whittier, Alaska: the tiny city born of war

70 REVIEWS

Latest Call of Duty game; Island Infernos; kids’ books; more!

76 BATTLE FILMS

A Holocaust denier sues a historian in 2016’s Denial

79 CHALLENGE 8O FAMILIAR FACE

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FEBRUARY 2022

3 11/18/21 12:48 PM

WWII Online WORLDWARII.com

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

VOL. 36, NO. 5 FEBRUARY 2022

EDITOR

KAREN JENSEN

U-564 makes a triumphant return to the harbor at Brest, France, after its summer 1942 patrol.

In this issue’s “Death of a U-boat,” U-352 captain Hellmut Rathke steers his men to a deadly encounter. For the wide-ranging destinies of other U-boat captains, check out these great stories:

The Final Mission of a U-boat Rebel

By Ronald H. Bailey U-564 captain Teddy Suhren was already a legend at age 26 when a photographer documented his last—and successful—mission.

How a U-boat Captain’s Criticism of the Nazi Regime Sealed his Fate By Jeremy Gray Skilled U-boat commander Oskar Kusch dared to speak out against Hitler, and paid for it with his life.

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

Ed Drea, David Glantz, Keith Huxen, John C. McManus, Williamson Murray CORPORATE

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CONTRIBUTORS ERIK A. PETKOVIC SR. (“Death of a U-boat”) is an explorer, author, maritime historian, and shipwreck researcher. He became fascinated with the story of U-352, the first U-boat sunk by the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II, while investigating forgotten tales of death and survival at sea. Petkovic’s articles have appeared in publications worldwide. He is also the author of four books, a frequent consultant on maritime and shipwreck matters, and, thanks to his distinctive storytelling, a sought-after presenter on these subjects. JOSEPH CONNOR (“All Together Now”) graduated

from Fairleigh Dickinson University with a degree in history, studied law at Rutgers University, and went on to work for 27 years as an assistant county prosecutor in New Jersey. An amateur musician, he believes that folk songs and parodies provide invaluable insight into the mindset of those who compose and sing them.

MARK ORISTANO (“Tom Landry’s Touchdown”)

COVER STORY PETKOVIC

covered the Dallas Cowboys for most of his 30-year career as a sportscaster, calling more than 300 NFL games for the Cowboys and the Houston Oilers. He is the coauthor of Surgeon’s Story: Kids, Transplants, the Red Sox, and the Glass Ceiling (2018). Oristano is a resident of Dallas, Texas.

BRENDAN SAINSBURY (“Made to Order”), a British

SAINSBURY

ORISTANO

YENNE

BILL YENNE (“Oh Lord, How I Want to Go Home”) is the award-winning author of more than three dozen nonfiction books, mainly on military and historical topics, and a regular contributor to this magazine. One of his books from many years ago, about the West Point class of 1941, led him to write his article about a member of that class, Lieutenant Hector Polla. Polla’s nephew and wife saw the book and brought the soldier’s wartime journals to Yenne’s attention. They also provided the family photos that illustrate his story.

PORTRAITS BY JOHANNA GOODMAN

CONNOR

writer based in Canada, is the author of two Lonely Planet guidebooks on Alaska. He’s traveled to every corner of the state, from Ketchikan in the Alaskan Panhandle to Deadhorse near the Arctic Ocean to Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands. He returned to the city of Whittier, Alaska, in June 2021 to research this issue’s travel story.

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QUITE THE TAIL

RIDE OF A LIFETIME IN THE OCTOBER ISSUE’S “Weapons Manual,” which featured Japan’s Rikuo Type 97, I noticed a serious omission in its comparisons of motorcycles in World War II. While Germany’s BMW R75 was listed, there was no mention of its famous Zündapp KS 750, which in many ways equaled it. In fact, more Zündapps were produced than BMW R75s (18,695 vs. 16,500), and they were preferred by the troops. As a teen, I was the lucky German youngster who was able to purchase a 1943 Zündapp KS 750 from the local police department. After overhauling it, I toured southern Europe with friends. The picture [above] shows me with my Zündapp in 1955. Unfortunately, I sold it before emigrating to the United States in 1959. Herman Pfauter Santa Barbara, Calif. I love your magazine’s “Weapons Manual” feature. In your October issue you covered the Japanese Rikuo Type 97 motorcycle and sidecar. Instead of the BMW R75 I believe a better comparison would have been the Zündapp KS 750. Its key features included driving the rear tire and side car wheel via a common axle, a super-low first gear to pace it with walking troops, and a reverse gear. Bob Weiss Marysville, Wash.

With so few World War II veterans still alive, I think it’s important that their stories be shared by those who still can. Your magazine prov ides a forum. For this reason, I’d like to tell you a bit about my father, Thaddeus “Ted” Tragasz. My father trained at Camp Carson, Colorado, before shipping out to war as an infantryman on a Liberty ship. Aboard ship the merchant and U.S. Navy Armed Guard crews had separate sleeping and eating quarters. Part of the navy crew had their quarters amidships, divided between port and starboard, or in the stern. Those in the aft quarters had to contend w ith the constant vibration and noise from the ship’s engine and propeller shaft. In heavy seas, the bow went down, and the stern would come out of the water and shiver violently as the exposed prop chopped up at the air. My father’s antitank training got him a berth amidships when crossing the Atlantic; they were short a man on the deck gun crew. “That was a hell of a lot better than F-deck,” he once recalled. My father survived Omaha Beach and five major battles, but the M3A1 antitank gun he’s manning in the photo [at top, opposite] did not fare as well: while training at Camp Carson, a jeep driver towing the gun up a steep mountainside in the Rockies got just a little too close to the shoulder of a mountain road. The driver and the other three G.I.s riding in the jeep (my father included) jumped off just in time. The jeep and the antitank gun went down over a cliff—way down. Now you might suspect that the jeep driver was appropriately reprimanded, and you would be right, but he was also promoted in rank. Why? Well, the army was going to make the driver pay for the jeep—and for the gun,

WORLD WAR II

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FROM TOP: COURTESY OF RON TRAGASZ; LAURIE SOBOL

MAIL

KEEPER OF MEMORIES

COURTESY OF HERMAN PFAUTER

In summer 1955, reader Herman Pfauter toured southern Europe astride a German Zündapp KS 750 motorcycle.

Thanks for the wonderful article “Dog Days of War” in the October issue, featuring Judy the English Pointer—World War II’s only canine POW. It proved again that truth is stranger than fiction. Keep up the great work! Sam Puckett Gadsden, Ala.

FROM THE EDITOR

Infantryman Ted Tragasz (center, back row) survived a jeep accident during training; his gun wasn’t so fortunate.

too. Promoted, he earned enough to make it worthwhile for Uncle Sam to confiscate his pay each month (supposedly) until the debt was settled. Ron Tragasz Palatine, Ill.

FROM TOP: COURTESY OF RON TRAGASZ; LAURIE SOBOL

COURTESY OF HERMAN PFAUTER

WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE

I was reading Bill Livingstone’s “My SixMonth Furlough” [October 2021] when I stopped short at his mention of Stalag Luft IV, the prisoner of war camp near the Baltic Sea, where Livingstone was interned from late 1944 through May 1945. I was a recent college graduate teaching English in Poznan, Poland, in the early 1990s when I was contacted by a World War II veteran named Bill Cupp from my hometown of Northfield, Minnesota. He and his wife Penny were traveling to Poland to find his old POW camp. Would I be interested in joining them? Of course! Bill, a retired sociology professor who’d taught at St. Olaf College, had been a ball turret gunner on a B-24 shot down over Belgium in 1944. He spent 10 weeks hiding on a farm before being captured and ending up at Stalag Luft IV. (He recounted the story in his 2002 book, A Wartime Journey: Bail-Out Over Belgium.) While he had kept in touch with the Belgian farmers who had hidden him, this would be his first trip back to the POW camp since he was marched away from the advancing Russians in 1945. He had no idea what we would find. Our journey included a visit to a technical

school in the area that yielded some artifacts and information (and maxed out my Polish language skills). After some more driving and a few wrong turns, we exited the car in what looked to be a promising spot. Walking among a few ruined building foundations, we found some large—and readily recognizable by Bill— sunken concrete cisterns. This was the spot. It was an emotional day. Although I wish now that I had better documentation of our little adventure, I do remember that our visit inspired Bill to work toward getting a memorial erected at Stalag Luft IV.

Historians come to their subjects in different ways. Author Erik A. Petkovic Sr. found his beneath 110 feet of Atlantic Ocean. Located off the coast of North Carolina, German submarine U-352 has long been a popular dive site. But Petkovic, an avid diver, felt compelled to look deeper, and found a human story of determination and loss. Petkovic credits the job he had at the time, as a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service—someone charged with protecting his country’s leaders— for fueling his sense of curiosity and history. “It is difficult to work at the White House and not be affected by it,” he says. You’ll find the remarkable sum of those parts on page 30, in his story “Death of a U-boat.” Enjoy. —Karen Jensen

Once a POW camp for Allied airmen, Stalag Luft IV in present-day Tychowo, Poland, is now home to a memorial erected in 1992 at the bequest of former inmates.

His efforts and those of whoever helped him were successful, and today you can find some images of the memorial online. Bill died over a decade ago, and after finishing Livingstone’s story last fall I was disappointed to learn that Penny had died earlier in the year at age 97. I know she, too, would have enjoyed reading it. David Gonnerman Birmingham, Ala.

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WWII TODAY

REPORTED AND WRITTEN BY PAUL WISEMAN

WORLD WAR II

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11/17/21 10:16 AM

FROM TOP: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; AP PHOTO

THREE HAND-HEWN wooden crosses bearing the names of the dead arrived at the National Museum of the Marine Corps bundled in ribbon, still carrying sand from Tarawa. They’d been left behind, forgotten, after the slaughter on the Gilbert Islands atoll November 20-23, 1943. Salvaged three years ago, the makeshift memorials came to the museum, in Triangle, Virginia, just south of Washington, D.C., in August along with Japanese and American helmets and canteens and other detritus from the Tarawa battlefield. Curator Owen Conner hopes that the crosses, believed to be unique for a museum collection, will soon go on display. More than 1,000 Marines

FROM TOP: KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST; AP PHOTO

ABANDONED BATTLEFIELD CROSSES SAVED

FROM TOP: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; AP PHOTO

FROM TOP: KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST; AP PHOTO

In August, curators at the National Museum of the Marine Corps received fragile burial crosses recovered from Tarawa cemeteries (opposite, bottom). died in the assault on the atoll. The bloodiest combat occurred on Tarawa’s Betio Island, which was defended by 4,500 wellequipped Japanese troops who fought almost to the last man. Conner said it’s “tragic” that because many of the fallen men’s parents are long gone, and they were too young to have children of their own, their stories were lost. “You just sort of have these dead ends in their lives,” he told the Washington Post, adding, “When I see those crosses, I think how sad their ending is.” Stenciled on the crosses in fading black type are the names of three of the fallen Marines: Robert W. Hillard, Clarence S. Hodgson, and Bernard A. Marble. Researchers at the museum are also scrutinizing the remnants of two other crosses that arrived in the same August delivery, hoping to link them to other Marines who perished on Tarawa. Hillard, an Arkansas native who at age 17 had needed his mother’s consent to enlist in 1941, was shot in the head as he tried to land on a particularly well-defended beach on November 20, 1943. His body was never recovered. Hodgson, who was from Iowa, was shot in both legs on November 21. He was taken to the troopship USS Sheridan, where his right leg was amputated. He did not respond to treatment, died the next day, and was buried at sea. Marble was killed on November 21. His body was eventually identified and sent back for burial in his hometown of Somerset, Massachusetts. The crosses were recovered and given to the museum by History Flight, Inc., a Fredericksburg, Virginia, nonprofit organization that has been recovering remains on Tarawa for more than a decade.

DISPATCHES The Air Force posthumously honored Dick Cole (second from right, above)—who’d been the last surviving member of the Doolittle Raiders— by promoting him to colonel September 7 on what would have been his 106th birthday. Cole served as copilot to Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle on the audacious April 18, 1942, mission to bomb Tokyo, avenge Pearl Harbor, and boost American morale. After clearing Japan, their B-25B Mitchell bomber ran out of gas, and they had to crash-land in China, where they were rescued by Chinese troops. Cole retired in 1966 as a lieutenant colonel and died in San Antonio, Texas, at age 103 in 2019.

WORD FOR WORD “All I want to hear from you is yes or no.” —Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita to British general Arthur Percival, demanding—and receiving—the surrender of Singapore, February 15, 1942.

FEBRUARY 2022

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UPDATE

STORYTELLERS PICK UP STEAM The quest of Don Milne (left) to tell the stories of the more than 400,000 Americans who fell in World War II (see “WWII Today,” December 2020) is picking up momentum. The retiree’s band of volunteer writers has swelled to more than 1,500 from all 50 states and more than a dozen countries. Together, they have written more than 13,000 mini-obituaries. Working with

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TOP: © PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART, 2021; RIGHT: LIBOR SVACEK/NATIONAL HERITAGE INSTITUTE (NPÚ), CZECH REPUBLIC

WARSAW JEWS BURY GHETTO VICTIM

WARSAW’S JEWISH COMMUNITY came together on September 14 to bury an unidentified Holocaust victim found in what had been the wartime Warsaw Ghetto. The bones were piled onto a wooden cart, pulled by four men to the grave in the Polish capital’s Jewish Cemetery, and buried with a sprinkling of soil from Israel. Jewish leaders chanted the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. “We are here as the family for a person we don’t know,” said Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich. The remains were found over the summer in a building in Muranów, a prewar Jewish district that became the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940 under German occupation. An occupant of the building and a plumber discovered them while searching the basement for the source of a water leak. They alerted the police and the Jewish community. In April 1943, Ghetto residents rose up to resist Nazi attempts to deport them to concentration camps. They held on for nearly a month before the Germans crushed the rebellion and razed the Ghetto. Seven thousand Jews died in the fighting. Another 7,000 were captured by SS and the police, sent to the Treblinka death camp, and murdered there. The area was rebuilt after the war. The person whose bones were found, gender undetermined, is believed to have died while hiding during the uprising. “After nearly 80 years, this unknown person got his dignity back,” said Lesław Piszewski, chairman of Warsaw’s Jewish Community. “This is very important. This is the only thing that we can do for the unknown victim.”

FROM TOP: AP PHOTO/VANESSA GERA; CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; ISAAC HALE, DAILY HERALD

Poland’s chief rabbi prays over a recently discovered Warsaw Ghetto victim (left); the Germans liquidated the Ghetto in 1943, killing or deporting its Jewish occupants (lower left).

TOP: © PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART, 2021; RIGHT: LIBOR SVACEK/NATIONAL HERITAGE INSTITUTE (NPÚ), CZECH REPUBLIC

FROM TOP: AP PHOTO/VANESSA GERA; CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; ISAAC HALE, DAILY HERALD

PRIZED RENAISSANCE ARTIFACT RETURNING HOME THE CEREMONIAL SHIELD has been a witness to centuries of often-painful European history. Made by an Italian artist during the Renaissance, it found its way to the Austrian prince whose assassination set off the First World War. Later, it was pilfered by the Nazis. Since 1976, it has been on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Now it is headed home. The Philadelphia museum announced on September 13 it would be returning the shield to the Czech Republic in an arrangement worked out with that country’s National Heritage Institute. “We are delighted,” said Naděžda Goryczková, head of the Heritage Institute. For five years, the museum has worked with Czech historians to establish the shield’s provenance and history. The story as they understand it: the shield was made in about 1535 by the Italian artist Girolamo di Tommaso da Treviso, probably to mark the return of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V from campaigns against pirates in North Africa. Made of wood, linen, gold, and other materials, it is 24 inches in diameter and depicts ancient Romans attacking what is now Cartagena, Spain—a comparison apparently meant to flatter Charles. The shield later belonged to Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose 1914 murder in Sarajevo helped spark World War I. After the war, ownership of the archduke’s extensive collection of weaponry and armor at Konopiště Castle, near Prague, was transferred to the Czech government. In 1943, the occupying Germans confiscated the Konopiště collection, including the shield. The Wehrmacht took the artifacts to Prague, intending to house them

organizations such as Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com, and FamilySearch.org, they have completed the stories of all 2,502 who fell at Normandy on D-Day and are on track to complete the 2,335 stories of those killed at Pearl Harbor by December 7. Arlington National Cemetery has provided a list of the 7,700 World War II fallen buried there, and Milne’s team project— Stories Behind the Stars—hopes to have their narratives written up by Memorial Day 2022. A smartphone app that allows readers to check out the stories at gravesites and memorials was set to go live on December 1. Still, the work is daunting: they have 408,000 mini-biographies to go. You can read the stories or join the volunteer ranks at storiesbehindthestars.org.

A Renaissance-era decorative shield (top) stolen by the Nazis in 1943 from a castle near Prague (above) is being returned to the Czech Republic by the Philadelphia museum that has owned it since 1976.

in a new military museum. But Hitler’s arms and armor curator, Leopold Ruprecht, “skimmed off the cream of the collection,” the Philadelphia museum said, and sent the shield to Vienna for inclusion in the Führer’s “planned mega-museum in Linz, Austria.” After the war, the Allies returned many of the stolen works to Czech authorities, but 15 pieces had gone missing. What happened to the shield after the war remains a mystery, despite the five-year investigation. Somehow it wound up in the hands of an obscure collector, Theodore Wollner. In 1954, Wollner sold it to New York tobacco magnate Carl Otto Kretzschmar von Kienbusch, who donated it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art two decades later. Now, said museum chief executive Timothy Rub, “a work that had been lost during the turmoil of World War II is being happily restituted.” FEBRUARY 2022

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THE WHOLE THING STARTED with a weird dream. Lost in sleep, Brian McKinney saw himself playing miniature golf with his wife Rachel and kids in an Arizona boneyard, filled with the junked remains of World War II aircraft. Back in the waking world, he wanted to turn the dream into reality. But salvaging old planes for a miniature golf course proved too costly. So McKinney sold his business and, with the assistance of a small business loan, worked out a Plan B: create a miniature golf course and museum around a World War II theme. Three years in the

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FROM TOP: KEYSTONE/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; REUTERS/REMO CASILLI; © BOURNEMOUTH UNIVERSITY

THEMED MINIGOLF COURSE TEES OFF

making, the $1.4-million Memorial Miniature Golf and WWII Museum held its grand opening in Buda, Texas, south of Austin, on Veterans Day, November 11 (though it has operated on a limited basis since summer). The golf course takes players through the war chronologically with hole-side placards telling the story: the first hole is devoted to Nazi Germany ’s early Blitzkrieg across Europe, the second to the Dunkirk withdrawal, and so on. McKinney has checked his displays for accuracy against the local school curriculum, and his only full-time employee, the curator of the museum, is an honors history graduate from the University of Texas. The course is incorporated into the larger 1.5-acre museum, which is stocked with U.S. Army surplus relics and replicas. The highlight is a reproduced P-51 Mustang in which kids can man the controls. For the grand opening, McKinney brought in World War II veterans, including U.S. Army Air Forces fighter pilot Huie Lamb (see “Conversation,” February 2021), who shot down a German Me 262 jetfighter in 1944.

TOP: J R GONZALES, BUDA CHAMBER OF COMMERCE; BOTTOM LEFT & RIGHT: MEMORIALMINIGOLF.COM, COURTESY OF BRIAN MCKINNEY, OWNER

A World War II-themed mini-golf course and museum opened in Buda, Texas, on Veterans Day. Among the guests joining owners Brian and Rachel McKinney (above, front left and center) for the ribbon cutting was WWII fighter pilot Huie Lamb (front right).

FROM TOP: KEYSTONE/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; REUTERS/REMO CASILLI; © BOURNEMOUTH UNIVERSITY

TOP: J R GONZALES, BUDA CHAMBER OF COMMERCE; BOTTOM LEFT & RIGHT: MEMORIALMINIGOLF.COM, COURTESY OF BRIAN MCKINNEY, OWNER

SLOVAKS EXPRESS REGRET FOR WARTIME BIGOTRY SLOVAKIA HAS APOLOGIZED for imposing harsh World War II laws that stripped Jews of their rights. On September 9—the 80th anniversary of the adoption of the “Jewish Code,” which largely excluded Jews from economic and social life—the Slovak government issued a statement acknowledging its “moral obligation today to publicly express sorrow over the crimes committed by the past regime.” The laws, enacted by a Nazi puppet regime, barred Jews from schools and encouraged the transfer of Jewish property to non-Jews. The code was considered one of Europe’s toughest anti-Jewish laws. The apology came days before a visit from Pope Francis, who spoke at a Bratislava memorial honoring the Slovak Jews killed in the Holocaust. Francis decried people who claimed to believe in God—but proved willing to commit or allow “unspeakable acts of inhumanity.” Slovakia deported 70,000 Jews to Nazi death camps, where up to 60,000 were murdered. Slovakia’s pro-German wartime government was led by a Catholic priest, Jozef Tiso, who was executed for war crimes in 1947. Tiso is still venerated by some in Slovakia. Slovakia apologized for anti-Jewish laws imposed by the wartime regime of Jozef Tiso (top), days before Pope Francis visited a Jewish memorial (left) in Bratislava, the Slovak capital.

DISPATCHES

Researchers from Bournemouth University in England and Bangor University in Wales identified the sunken minesweeper HMS Mercury in the Irish Sea. The skeletal wreck had long been thought to be a submarine. Announcing the find in September, Bournemouth University said that maritime records and sonar data proved the shipwreck to be the paddle-wheeled Mercury. Built in 1934 as a passenger steamer, the ship had been pressed into wartime service. On Christmas 1940, it was damaged when a mine it was attempting to clear exploded under the stern. As the Mercury was being towed to port, the cables broke under the strain of inrushing water, sending the ship straight down into the sea. The entire crew was rescued. FEBRUARY 2022

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ASK WWII

Q: What’s the origin of the Nazi swastika, and why is it sometimes rendered in a level, horizontal position and sometimes rotated at 45 degrees? —T. Lambert, San Francisco, Calif. A: The swastika, an ancient symbol found in Native American and

numerous other cultures, is sacred to the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist faiths. However, it is perhaps best known as the symbol of Hitler’s Nazi Party. The Nazi adoption of the swastika owed much to Adolf Hitler himself. According to the account he gave in Mein Kampf, Hitler personally designed the Nazi flag in 1920, with its “strikingly harmonious” combination of red, black, and white, which recalled the German Imperial colors, and with the swastika at its center, rotated 45 degrees from horizontal. It was this design that was adopted as

the national flag of Germany in 1935. In addition to this, the state arms of the Third Reich—the Hoheitsabzeichen, which displayed a wreathed swastika clutched in the talons of the Nazi eagle—always showed the symbol rotated at 45 degrees. This, then, is the swastika’s most typical depiction in Nazi usage. When the swastika was adapted for a banner, however, or incorporated into a standard—for military and paramilitary units—it could be rendered horizontally. Indeed, Hitler’s own official standard as Reich chancellor and Führer showed the swastika displayed in this way. These differing representations in official Nazi usage were aesthetically determined and did not denote any deeper significance. Due to its association with Nazism, the swastika has been banned in Germany and Austria since 1945. —Roger Moorhouse is a British historian specializing in modern German and central European history and is the author of The Third Reich in 100 Objects. SEND QUERIES TO: Ask World War II, 901 N. Glebe Road, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203 OR EMAIL: worldwar2@historynet.com

FROM TOP: PICTURE POST/GETTY IMAGES; HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

The Nazi swastika was most often depicted rotated at 45 degrees, as above, but was also rendered horizontally, as on standards at a 1934 festival in Bückeberg (left).

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CONVERSATION WITH CHARLES NORMAN SHAY BY GAVIN MORTIMER

A LUCKY STAR BORN IN 1924 in Bristol, Connecticut, Charles Norman Shay is a tribal elder with the Penobscot Nation and grew up on the reservation on Indian Island, Maine. Drafted as a medic into the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, in 1943, Shay’s introduction to combat came when he landed in the first wave at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. He was awarded a Silver Star for his courage that day in rescuing wounded men from drowning and went on to see action at the Battle of Hürtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge. He remained in the military after the war; served with distinction in Korea, earning three Bronze Stars; and has spent decades living in Europe. Since 2018 Shay, now 97, has made Normandy his home, living 20 miles from Omaha Beach. At 6:30 a.m. each June 6 he performs a traditional Penobscot ceremony by the sea to honor his comrades who never returned home.

You were born in 1924—the year Congress enacted the Indian Citizenship Act, which granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States.

Yes. I was the only one of the four to serve in the army. I was drafted in Boston and sent to Camp Pickett, Virginia, for basic training. Once I got into military service, the White men knew that I was a Native American and accepted me as such. I was told at that time that I was going to be a medic. I did not choose myself; they told me what I was going to do.

How did you come to join the 1st Infantry Division—the Big Red One?

I arrived in England in November 1943, and I was sent to Bridport [on the south coast], where the 1st Infantry Division’s 16th Regiment was stationed. I was selected to be a combat medic with the regiment’s F Company, 2nd Battalion.

You participated in Operation Tiger in April 1944,

I was there, but my ship was not involved with what happened that day. We were all told not to talk about it or discuss it with anybody. The U.S. military did not want the American public to know about it.

Were you apprehensive that your nerve might falter when under fire for the first time?

No: I was told what my job was. I was there to treat the wounded and do what I could do to save them. This kept my mind occupied. I had no fear. I knew I could do my job because I had been trained for it.

How was the weather on the voyage across the Channel?

Very bad. The landing craft were on the side of our troopship, the USS Henrico, and they

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COURTESY OF MARIE-PASCALE LEGRAND

But you and your brothers all served.

when German E-boats attacked a D-Day rehearsal in the English Channel, killing 750 Americans.

COURTESY OF CHARLES NORMAN SHAY

Yet the right to vote was governed by state law—and Maine refused to give us that right [until 1954]. My mother was an activist who campaigned throughout her life for more rights for Native Americans; this was one of the things she was fighting for. She had four sons, but she did not think they should serve in the U.S. military if they could not vote.

landing craft I landed in water about up to my chest. I made my way to the obstacles the Germans had put up. I was using these for protection. Most of the men who had landed were doing the same thing. I was able to make a dash for the beach, got there, and started treating the wounded.

One of whom was your best friend.

Yes: another medic, Private Edward Morozewicz. He received a stomach wound and had a

“I had no fear. I knew I could do my job because I had been trained for it.” large opening in his abdomen. It was a wound I could not treat. I knew he was dying, and he knew he was dying. I stayed with him and tried to console him and prepare him for his departure into the future world. While I was talking with him, he died.

Were you surprised at your composure given your age and inexperience? Charles Norman Shay, at his home last June (above), and in 1944 (opposite) as a young army medic. The G.I., a Native American, got his introduction to combat on D-Day, in the first wave at Omaha Beach.

were going up and down with the waves. Crewmen threw rope ladders over the side, and we had to crawl down. The men who had made it into the craft gave advice to those coming afterward, telling us when to jump because there was the danger that if you landed at the wrong time you’d break your legs, or you could miss the landing craft and be drowned or crushed to death.

COURTESY OF MARIE-PASCALE LEGRAND

COURTESY OF CHARLES NORMAN SHAY

What was it like exiting the landing craft at Omaha Beach?

The Germans had put up underwater obstacles in the sea. The coxswain in charge of our landing craft announced over his intercom system: “Prepare to disembark because I am marooned on an underwater obstacle, and I cannot move.” He dropped the ramp, and of course we were under constant machine gun, rifle, artillery, and mortar fire. Of the men standing at the front of the craft when the ramp went down, many were hit immediately, and some were killed. Others were overloaded, and when they jumped into the sea they drowned because they were weighed down with machine guns, bazookas, and ammunition. As a medic I had only my two satchels and a life vest. When I left the

Yes, because I had never been in such situations before. I was able to treat the wounded and see men die. I don’t know how I was able to do it, but I was.

How did you cope with all the wounded?

I was not concerned with the degree of the wound; I just did all I could. Some of the men, of course, there was no help for them, but I treated them anyway and bandaged their wounds. Perhaps later they died, but I did not stay around.

Describe the action for which you were awarded a Silver Star.

When I landed, I found an area far up the beach where the seas had come up over a couple of hundred years and washed up all this debris. I selected that spot to treat the wounded because it was protected. I happened to glance back out to the sea and saw there were many wounded men lying near the shore. The tide was coming in very fast. I dropped what I was doing and ran to help them. Many of the wounded were much bigger FEBRUARY 2022

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“I looked around and there was nothing but dead Americans and Germans.”

Funded by a group of Normandy residents, a bronze bust honoring Shay was installed on a bluff overlooking Omaha Beach on July 4, 2020.

was completely exhausted, laid down behind a bush, and went to sleep. When I woke, it was very early in the morning. I looked around where I was sleeping and there was nothing but dead Americans and Germans.

Did you find your company?

Yes—but my company had taken heavy casualties and was not a combat unit anymore. We had to stay and get replacements so we could be an effective unit again.

You faced another blow at the Battle of Hürtgen Forest in fall 1944.

I lost another friend there: an artillery shell exploded in the top of a tree and shrapnel showered down and hit him. He called for me. I saw that he was seriously wounded and was going to die. Back at the command post, I broke down. I started crying and could not stop. I was sent to the battalion medical aid station to recuperate. A few days later I returned to F Company.

How did your war end?

I was captured in March 1945 near the German village of Auel not long after I’d crossed the river Sieg—a tributary of the Rhine—as part of a reconnaissance squad. I was held in Stalag VI-G, close to Bonn. The Germans treated us good. They knew they had lost the war, and I was liberated in April.

Have you watched Saving Private Ryan?

This man in bunker WN 62 [Heinrich Severloh, who claimed to have killed hundreds of Americans from his perch overlooking Omaha Beach]—he saw me. He started shooting and I could see the bullets hitting the sand around my feet, but he did not hit me.

How did the rest of D-Day pan out?

In treating the wounded, I became separated from my company. So I attached myself to the 26th Infantry Regiment [which had landed at 7:30 p.m.] and followed them inland toward Colleville-sur-Mer. I

You came through the war without a scratch, as you did the Korean War. Were you born under a lucky star?

I could never understand why I was never wounded either from shrapnel or machine gun fire. I have always said that I survived only through my mother’s prayers. H

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Did you come to the attention of the Germans?

No. I never watched any of those type of films. My parents invited me to the movies one evening not long after I’d come home [in the summer of 1945]. The news came up and the first item was about the war. I got up and walked out. It continues to this day. But I read a lot of books, particularly about the 1st Infantry Division.

GAVIN MORTIMER

than I was, so I rolled them onto their backs so they could breathe; I reached under the arms of the others and pulled them to the highwater mark and left them there. I did this until I became exhausted and had to take a break. Then I continued.

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These simple manila tags document the story of one B-29 tail gunner’s war—and contain a mystery.

FROM THE FOOTLOCKER

Needless to say, readying high explosives for flight was deadly serious business. These simple cotter pins, attached to manila tags, fit into a hole in every bomb fuze, physically blocking the firing plunger from inadvertently striking the detonator. Just before flight, ground crewmen rigged another safety device into the system—an arming wire— which disabled the spinning vanes of the fuze until the moment the bomb was dropped. Once the arming wire was installed, the cotter pin could be safely removed from the fuze. As a result, discarded fuze tags commonly littered the bomb bays of American aircraft. Fliers in both Europe and the Pacific picked up the wayward tags and scribbled the date and target on them, creating a souvenir from

each of their bombing missions. These pocketsized curios became a sort of fragmented diary of a crewman’s combat career. The National WWII Museum and other institutions exhibit sets of tags quite similar to the ones penned by your father. Once the shooting war ended in the Pacific, B-29 bombers kept flying. But instead of hauling bombs, the aircraft now lugged chow and supplies to 158 prisoner of war camps in Japan and enemy-occupied territories. These airdrops delivered 4,470 tons of lifesaving material urgently needed by men who had undergone years of brutal captivity. The aircraft of Operation Swift Mercy hefted wooden boxes strapped into bundles and rigged to descend to earth under cargo parachutes. No fuzes, detonators, or bombs were involved. So why the extra fuze pin in your father’s collection? By this time—what would be his 12th trip to Japan—your father was invested in tradition. If he didn’t find a way to commemorate this final operation, he’d always be one tag short. There was another reason, too; your father’s humanitarian flight to the Tokyo area on August 30, 1945, was still, technically, a combat mission. Even with little chance of encountering enemy flak or fighters, every

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

My father, Sherman Oxendine, was a B-29 tail gunner flying missions over Japan in the last months of the war. He kept a collection of bomb-arming pins, all labeled with the target, date, and bomb load—but there’s one I’m especially curious about. One of his tags indicates a supply drop for prisoners. Why would there have been a bomb pin for that kind of drop? —David Oxendine, Huntsville, Ala.

GUY ACETO

BOMBS AWAY

! t u O t i k c e Ch

A tag dangles from the fuze Private First Class Linvel J. Putty is inserting into a bomb aboard a B-24 Liberator before a mission; he’ll next insert an arming wire and remove the pin attached to the tag.

grueling and dangerous Superfortress flight over thousands of miles of water flirted with calamity. As a result, up until the moment the surrender documents were signed a few days later, on September 2, every B-29 crewman who made the flight got credit for a “combat mission”—even if they were delivering clothes, medicine, and meals instead of TNT and napalm. Your father most likely picked up a discarded tag from an earlier offensive operation and inscribed it with all the pertinent data for his August 30 mission of mercy, thus telling the story of each and every one of his precarious assignments, including the last. —Cory Graff, Curator

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Bearing instructions on one side, the tags proved ready souvenirs for airmen.

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.

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BY JAMES HOLLAND

THE LONG VIEW

I’VE BEEN PORING OVER General George S. Patton’s diaries recently and discovered how fascinating they are when read at a gallop. His worries, his bouts of anger and frustration, are all part of the mix along with his braggadocio and boasting. Yet reading his words, what struck me most was Patton’s understanding of the operational art of war. War is fought on three levels: strategic, tactical, and operational. The strategic level refers to the overall aims—the cross-Channel invasion, smashing the Luftwaffe, and so on—while the tactical level relates to the kinetic: the actual fighting. The operational level is the glue that binds the two: supplies, factories, shipping, and organization. I’ve long maintained that this latter, less glamorous, level is too often left out of the narrative. In most books or documentaries, we get lots about what it was like at Eisenhower’s headquarters or what Roosevelt was thinking, and we get a great deal about what it was like jumping out of a landing craft or being a ball turret gunner in a B-17. Of the nuts and bolts of war, however, there is a lot less. This extends to how we view Patton. He has been widely lauded for his tactical genius: the hard-driver of men and an armor expert with more swagger than any other Allied general. Sometimes, though, it’s good to pause and take a step backward. Let’s think about where this reputation comes from. In southern Tunisia he commanded II Corps for a very short time and was kept on a tight leash by the commander of the Allied forces there, Britain’s General Harold Alexander. In Sicily, Patton’s forces swept westward at lightning speed against very weak, almost non-existent Italian opposition. Later in the campaign, when confronting the Germans in the northeast of the island, his troops were no quicker than the British and Canadians (well, perhaps an hour quicker). In France, the tough work had already been done by the First Army, which also achieved the decisive breakthrough. Thereafter, Patton’s Third Army was able to clean up because, once again, the opposition was very weak. He came to a halt at the Moselle River as German defenses stiffened and his supply lines became overstretched.

ILLUSTRATION BY RICHARD MIA

NEED TO KNOW

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not for a moment disputing Patton’s tactical acumen, but I would suggest that what lay behind the sweeping gains in Sicily and then France was operational brilliance. In Sicily, the Seventh Army was the first field army the U.S. had put into action in the war—yet within a week of landing, Patton had created a new corps, an all-arms mechanized force, that was able to advance more than 100 miles in a matter of days. That doesn’t just happen with a click of the fingers. That requires deep understanding and sublimely good staff work—by a team that Patton put together. The same was true of the Third Army’s drive through Brittany and their turn east to the Moselle, some 350 miles away. By the second week of September 1944, all Allied armies in the West had made similarly large strides through France and into Belgium. At that point they ran out of steam. Patton lobbied for the Third Army to be given priority for diminishing supplies in order to cross the Moselle a nd smash the Germa n border defenses at the Siegfried Line, but was overruled. This prompted him to go on the defensive and focus all the more on preparation. Patton very sensibly did not consider launching a major offensive unless he had overwhelming amounts of men and supplies to guarantee success. So he began bringing up bridging equipment and large numbers of engineers, and instigated intensive training. This was not tactical chutzpah, but methodical and painstaking operational planning. And the subsequent capture of the northeastern French city of Metz, the help his forces provided in the Ardennes, and the later crossing of the mighty Rhine were as much to do with planning and preparation—the operational art—as with tactical dash. Patton’s tactical flair, in fact, was only possible because of his operational skill. It’s time, I think, to reconsider Patton afresh. H

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11/18/21 8:19 AM

TODAY IN HISTORY DECEMBER 18, 1934 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT VISITED BEAR RUN IN SOUTHWESTERN PENNSYLVANIA AND REQUESTED A SURVEY OF THE AREA AROUND A PARTICULAR WATERFALL. PITTSBURGH BUSINESSMAN EDGAR J. KAUFMANN HAD COMMISSIONED WRIGHT TO BUILD A COUNTRY HOME WITH A VIEW OF THE WATERFALL. THE FAMOUS ARCHITECT SURPRISED HIS CLIENT BY INSTEAD DESIGNING THE HOME OVER THE WATERFALL. FALLINGWATER COST $155,000 TO COMPLETE IN 1941. THE HOME WAS MADE AVAILABLE TO VISITORS IN 1964. For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ TODAY-IN-HISTORY

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12/14/20 10:52 AM

TRAVEL WHITTIER, ALASKA

STORY AND PHOTOS BY BRENDAN SAINSBURY

MADE TO ORDER

IT’S RAINING THE DAY MY TRAIN RATTLES through the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel and comes to a halt in front of a rail yard in Whittier, Alaska. I disembark beside a small harbor crowded with fishing vessels and pleasure yachts and absorb the view. In the foreground, I see railway tracks, port facilities, and a small cluster of shops and eating joints. In the background lurk two humongous buildings—one practically a ruin, the other looking like a displaced New York condominium—rising incongruously in front of a beautiful backdrop of glaciers and mountains. I had boarded the Glacier Discovery in Anchorage in glorious sunshine. Now, two hours later, I’m standing dockside in Whittier under a gray cover of sloppy clouds and incessant drizzle. It’s hardly surprising. If it wasn’t for the foul weather, this peculiar little Alaskan port would never have existed in the first place. Shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., the American general in charge of Alaska’s nascent Defense Command, began looking for a location for a secret military installation to ferry troops and cargo to the growing hubs of Anchorage and Fairbanks in the Alaskan interior, where strategically important airfields and army facilities were being built. Buckner’s proposed base had three provisos: access to an ice-free deep-water port, natural protection from airstrikes, and radar-unfriendly topography. The rugged nodule of land on which I am now standing at the head of Passage Canal, with its seemingly omnipresent clouds and impassable mountains, fit the bill perfectly. Indeed, the mountains around what would become Whittier were so

impassable, the military first had to blast a hole through them to link the proposed port by rail to Anchorage, 60 miles away. Although there was already a rail link from Anchorage to Seward, 58 miles to Whittier’s south, the existing line was in poor condition and subject to avalanches, sabotage, and winter closures. The genius behind the tunneling operation was Anton Anderson, a New Zealander who came to the U.S. in 1914 as a surveyor before graduating from Seattle University with a degree in civil engineering. By 1916, Anderson had installed himself in the U.S. territory of Alaska, where he played a key role in the development of the burgeoning Alaska Railroad. The Whittier project was a trickier proposition. Two successive tunnel segments were needed to connect the planned military facility to the main Seward–Anchorage railroad along a 14-mile spur. Tunnel digging began in November 1941 and, despite two-story snow drifts and subzero temperatures, was completed a year later, six months ahead of schedule. The project had taken on a new urgency in June 1942 when the Imperial Japanese Navy took aim at the Aleutian Islands—bombing Dutch Harbor on Unalaska and invading the outlying

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INSET: B1979.2.1806, ALASKA RAILROAD COLLECTION, ATWOOD RESOURCE CENTER, ANCHORAGE MUSEUM AT RASMUSON CENTER, ANCHORAGE, AK

Tiny Whittier, Alaska, situated on Prince William Sound’s scenic Passage Canal, was designed and built as a U.S. Army base during World War II.

INSET: B1979.2.1806, ALASKA RAILROAD COLLECTION, ATWOOD RESOURCE CENTER, ANCHORAGE MUSEUM AT RASMUSON CENTER, ANCHORAGE, AK

islands of Attu and Kiska—and turned Alaska into an active theater of war. The volume of traffic on the Alaska Railroad quickly tripled as defenses were shored up to prevent a full-scale Japanese attack of mainland Alaska, with fortifications taking shape at Fort McGilvray near Seward, Fort Richardson close to Anchorage, and Ladd Field outside Fairbanks. Curious to see the tunnel more closely, I walk back a half-mile beside the train tracks to examine the distinctive triangular portal where the tunnel exits 4,137-foot Maynard Mountain. Vegetation clings to the peak’s steep lower slopes and a precipitous waterfall plunges from its misty heights. With a combined length of 3.5 miles, the tunnel was originally built purely for trains, its inaugural locomotive running through in June 1943. The first of many troopships docked a week later and a nascent settlement and supply center quickly took root to bolster Alaska’s war effort. The military “town” was codenamed H-12 and sheltered over 1,200 personnel. To suit the needs of wartime security, its existence was officially kept secret: no civilians were permitted to enter and photography was strictly banned. Colloquially, the site was known as Camp Sullivan. It was only after the war that it adopted the name Whittier for the 19th-century American poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Most of the original buildings, including the barracks, mess hall, theater, and chapel, were made of wood. More heavy-duty infrastructure was built to service the railroad and port, which were overseen by the 714th Railway Operating Battalion. Marching briskly back to the dockside, I cross underneath the railroad tracks via a cylindrical tunnel and come out next to a stone memorial erected in 1943 to mark the completion of the railway cut-through. Across the road, a map-board advertises a walking tour that zigzags around eight buildings dating from Whittier’s years as a military installation between 1943 and 1960. Due to fires, Cold War restructuring, and the catastrophic 1964 Alaska earthquake, only one World War II structure remains intact: the former Army Communication Systems Building dating from 1943, now converted into a no-frills hotel called the Anchor Inn. The longer the day progresses, the more I am drawn

General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. (above, center right) oversaw the 1941–42 rail line construction that still carries trains today to Whittier (top).

to the two jarring structures that dominate the skyline to the south. When the war ended in 1945, Whittier’s days as a military installation seemed numbered. However, as the Cold War with the Soviet Union started brewing, the U.S. military ultimately decided to bolster the garrison rather than abandon it. Plans were hatched to accommodate over 1,000 army personnel in a socalled “city under one roof.” The result was the Buckner Building, named for the general who built Whittier, constructed between 1949 and 1953 as a multi-functional militar y installation. Incorporating 275,000 square feet over six floors, it contained everything from a bowling alley to a jail. In 1957, it was complemented by another concrete behemoth, the 14-story Hodge Building, FEBRUARY 2022

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ground floor exhibiting some rare blackand-white photos of H-12 during World War II. I decide to crown my day out by hiking a mile or so up the Horsetail Falls Trail that emerges from behind the Buckner Building. Meandering over boardwalks to a point just above the tree line, I’m designed to accommodate an additional confronted with a misty eagle’s-eye view of the erstwhile industrial-military cominflux of military personnel. Next to the Anchor Inn, in the 1946 plex juxtaposed against the ethereal Army Headquarters Building, the Prince beauty of Prince William Sound. For years, Whittier was accessible William Sound Museum offers a detailed overview of Whittier’s wartime genesis only by train or boat, but in 2000, the and subsequent transition into a Cold main segment of the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel was upgraded to War citadel. Pondering the wellaccommodate road vehicles— curated glass cases, I examine Anchorage with directional flow in the old f lying suits, military single-lane tunnel changephemer a , a nd r ich ly ing every 30 minutes— detailed stories of life in Whittier and the town began showwartime A laska spent ing up on travelers’ radar. under the threat of a JapALASKA M I L E S Cruise ships started callanese invasion. Seward 0 25 ing at the deep-water port, However, changing Cold and trains to and from AnWar strategies meant that the chorage carried tourists rather military started pulling out of Whittier after 1960. The withdrawal was than troops. Thanks to its unique geoaccelerated in 1964 when the Alaska graphical position and under-the-radar earthquake—the second largest in human wartime history, Whittier has become history—caused significant damage to something of a tourist destination known the port and railway. While the Hodge for its excellent kayaking waters and boat building (renamed Begich Towers) trips into Prince William Sound, which is remained functional, the Buckner was home to an astounding array of marine life and glaciers. soon abandoned and fell into disrepair. After my walk, I descend to the conAs I brave the drizzle to get a closer look at t he Buck ner ’s hopelessly crete dock, grab a halibut burger at the neglected façade, I can’t help but shudder Swiftwater Seafood Café, and settle at its grim Soviet-esque appearance. down next to the boat harbor for a snack. Why would anyone build something so Filling time before the arrival of my train ugly in the middle of the Alaskan wilder- back to Anchorage, I can’t help but feel a ness? Danger signs warn of lingering sneaking affection for this unconvenasbestos, and unstable walls are covered tional small port that quietly contributed with lurid graffiti. Today, it stands as the so much to America’s war effort. It ultimate white elephant, too expensive to appeals to my love of the bizarre: beautirenovate but too “historic” to pull down. ful but ugly; industrial yet surrounded by Begich Towers has enjoyed a happier nature; classified as a city since 1969, but fate. Updated for modern usage, it is home to barely 200 inhabitants today— today an apartment building that accom- most of whom live in the same building. modates 99 percent of Whittier’s 200-ish Even in the wild and sometimes weird permanent residents. I slip inside the extremities of 21st-century Alaska, lobby and find a mini-gallery on the there’s nowhere else remotely like it. H

WHEN YOU GO The Alaska Railroad’s Glacier Discovery Train (alaskarailroad.com) runs between Anchorage and Whittier daily from Memorial Day to Labor Day. It arrives in Whittier at 12:05 p.m. and departs on the return leg at 6:45 p.m., leaving plenty of time to explore the city’s sights. The train has a dining car, a dome car, and an onboard guide. Many big cruise companies such as Princess Cruises (princess.com) and Holland America Line (hollandamerica.com) include Whittier in their itineraries.

WHERE TO STAY AND EAT There are two main accommodation options in Whittier: the Anchor Inn (anchorinnwhittier.com) or the more upscale Inn at Whittier (innatwhittier.com). Half a dozen eating establishments—most open seasonally—ring the harbor, including Swiftwater Seafood Café (swiftwaterseafoodcafe.com), which serves locally caught fish and shrimp in a classic Alaskan dive bar ambience. Nearby, the Lazy Otter (lazyottercharters.com) is good for coffee and snacks.

WHAT ELSE TO SEE AND DO Whittier’s World War II and Cold War history is fabulously displayed in the Prince William Sound Museum (pwsmuseum.org). There’s also a photo gallery in the lobby of Begich Towers and a selfguided historic walking tour. Lazy Otter rents kayaks and runs guided trips, while Phillips Cruises (phillipscruises.com) offers a 5.5hour “26 Glacier Cruise” out of Whittier.

MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

Since 1980, the last remaining building from Whittier’s wartime U.S. Army base has been a hotel, the Anchor Inn.

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11/12/21 1:31 PM

DEATH OF A U-BOAT German submarine U-352 became notorious for all the wrong reasons By Erik A. Petkovic Sr.

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A depth charge from the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Icarus explodes over U-352 on May 9, 1942, condemning the sub to the depths of the Atlantic.

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THE EVOLUTION of World War II U-boat design was rooted in the successes of earlier models from the Great War, when Germans had perfected methods of submarine warfare that were a substantial threat to Great Britain. Now Nazi Germany required a boat with a more effective range to reach American shores. Nazi Germany needed an efficient and proficient killing machine. Enter the Type VII U-boat. Prior to 1940, a Type VII U-boat variant first launched in 1938—the Type VIIB—ruled the sea. This latest in U-boat design and engineering was a marvel: the introduction of a second rudder gave it an improved

turning radius and a repositioned aft torpedo tube allowed it to carry a greater number of torpedoes. Those attributes, when combined with an extended range, increased speed, and more expeditious dive time, made for a formidable variant—one vastly superior to previous U-boat designs. The improvements kept coming. The advent of a form of active sonar—the Sondergerät Für Aktive Schallortung or S-Gerät— allowed for the detection of both ships and mines. But its installation required 24 inches of space not available in the Type VIIB. As a result, a new German U-boat was introduced in 1940: the Type VIIC. In an engineered environment where every square inch of space has purpose, fractions of inches matter. In order to create the space the S-Gerät required, German engineers had to design and fabricate a new hull section, install additional framing, enlarge the conning tower, lengthen the fuel tanks, lengthen the saddle tanks, and install a new filter system throughout the U-boat. Quite an engineering undertaking for an additional—albeit necessary—two feet of space. The Type VIIC went on to become the most produced U-boat throughout the war and the workhorse of the U-boat fleet. Type VIICs un-

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FROM TOP: UBOAT.NET; INTERPHOTO/ALAMY

hroughout Nazi Germany, the exploits of U-boat commanders and their crewmen were glorified during the early years of the Battle of the Atlantic. U-boatmen were hailed as heroes; U-boat commanders became legendary figures draped with Iron Crosses. And the successes of this “Happy Time”—as the Germans called the period from January to July 1942, when U-boats obliterated Allied shipping along the U.S. East Coast—propelled the desire of future U-boat commanders to attain the same high level of achievement. U-352’s commander, Hellmut Rathke, was no exception. By all accounts, though, U-352 was essentially a failure. U-352 did not sink any ships. U-352 did not account for any Allied tonnage loss. None of U-352’s torpedoes hit their intended targets. U-352 gained no notoriety—except for being the first U-boat the U.S. Coast Guard sank in World War II after Rathke ordered a brazen attack in broad daylight. Despite the latest in U-boat design and marine engineering, and despite all the technological advances made to the predators of the deep, avarice and errant human decision-making in this case ultimately proved to be the more destructive weapon.

ALL IMAGES: NATIONAL ARCHIVES, EXCEPT WHERE NOTED

U-352 was a state-of-the-art Type VIIC like this vessel, emerging from the shipbuilding facility at Kiel, Germany—also a large U-boat base.

FROM TOP: UBOAT.NET; INTERPHOTO/ALAMY

ALL IMAGES: NATIONAL ARCHIVES, EXCEPT WHERE NOTED

leashed vicious attacks in the North Atlantic and ravaged Allied shipping. The significance of this effort should not be underestimated. In January 1942, when U-boats first arrived along the American shores, a British Admiralty Report succinctly declared: “Although we shall not win the war by defeating U-boats, we shall assuredly lose the war if we do not defeat them.” Both sides knew the stakes. Success in the North Atlantic—by cutting off war supplies to Britain from the West and thereby putting a stranglehold on the British—meant Germany had a chance to win the war. The loss of thousands of Allied sailors and soldiers, the destruction of hundreds of thousands of tonnage, and significant damage to the American psyche were largely the work of the Type VIIC silent hunter-killers. Type VIIC U-boats were constructed at 15 shipyards throughout Germany. Flensburg, Germany’s largest northernmost city, with a seafaring history dating back to the 1500s, was home to the fabled shipbuilder Flensburger Schiffbau-Gesellschaft (FSG). It was here that 28 U-boats were built for the Kriegsmarine, including 20 Type VIICs. Situated close to the Danish border at the extreme west of the Flensburg Fjord, the shipbuilder had easy access to the Baltic Sea. U-352, the second Type VIIC U-boat FSG constructed, was launched on May 7, 1941. U-352’s new crew had been ordered to Flensburg that month, prior to launching, and lived on the U-boat while final construction and outfitting were completed. The additional 24 inches of length notwithstanding, accommodations aboard U-352 were cramped: a complement of 46 crewmen—three officers, one midshipman, 18 petty officers, and 24 seamen—would make U-352 home. CHOSEN TO LEAD U-352’s new crew was 31-year-old Kapitanleutnant Hellmut Rathke, a Flensburg resident. Rathke was an interesting choice as commander since he had only six years of naval experience—none of which was below the surface and none of which involved submarines. Clearly, the graduate of the naval class of 1930 was not chosen for his submarine acumen—but he may have been chosen because he was a strict disciplinarian. His methods were effective. The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) later reported that Rathke “inflicted a martinet’s discipline” on his men. Such measures may have been seen

as necessary, as 13 of U-352’s crew members were younger than 21, which ONI characterized as “extreme youth.” On top of that, Rathke was an ardent Nazi. A declassified ONI document noted that “[Rathke] professes unqualified admiration for Hitler and National Socialism.” He considered Hitler knowledgeable in all aspects of life, calling the Führer “a genius in everything,” not just military matters, and a leader who “unified all the German peoples in Europe.” During the final stages of construction, Rathke was often seen at the Flensburg shipyard in a wheelchair; he had been injured in a skiing accident sometime before taking command of the U-boat. Still, Rathke had the respect of his men— or, at a minimum, instilled fear in them. He even punished one of his sailors for getting drunk while on leave by canceling the remaining leave and detaining him onboard U-352. When construction was complete, U-352 headed to the U-boat base at Kiel, Germany, for five weeks of sea trials, culminating in the boat’s commissioning on August 28, 1941. Afterward it made stops in Danzig and Flensburg for tactical sorties and minor repairs, then returned to Kiel for provisions that included 14 torpedoes and thousands of rounds of ammunition for the 88mm deck gun and 20mm antiaircraft gun. U-352 was ready for war. ON JANUARY 15, 1942, U-352 departed Kiel. The mission for the U-boat’s first patrol was simple, if not broad: disrupt Allied shipping off the southern coast of Iceland, where British, American, and Canadian troops held a presence to deter a German invasion. Icelandic waters were important for troop transport and the ferrying of military goods and fuel. Rathke and his men were excited to do their part for the Fatherland by continuing the destruction of Allied vessels by those in the U-boat force who had come before. Rathke had higher aspirations still. Heinz Karl Richter, a fireman aboard U-352 who served under Rathke, said in a postwar interview that Rathke was “obsessed with receiving a Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.” It was

U-352’s captain, Hellmut Rathke (top), had no experience with subs but was an ardent Nazi and a strict disciplinarian. A crewman reported that he was also determined to earn a Knight’s Cross (above)—a top German military award.

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Icarus slides into the port at Charleston, South Carolina (left), with a distinctive cargo: the survivors of the sunken U-352. Below: two U.S. Navy officers and a British officer question Rathke (in shorts) and an executive officer in Charleston’s navy yard. There’s no misreading Rathke’s expression.

the epitome of Germany’s Iron Cross awards and, along with its several variants, the highest award in Germany—issued to U-boat commanders for sinking 100,000 tons of enemy ships. But their first three weeks at sea passed with no action. The crew must have had a severe case of langweiligkeit—boredom—when a merchant vessel finally appeared on the horizon. A spark of energy pulsed through the U-boat as the men aboard raced to their battle stations. U-352’s moment had arrived. Just as the crew prepared to fire on the

unsuspecting vessel, however, four British escort corvettes—small warships—appeared. U-352 had been spotted, and was forced to abandon the attack and immediately descend. The British convoy escorts dropped depth charges and, according to intelligence reports, a crewman aboard U-352 remembered “some very respectable explosions.” None, however, caused any damage. U-352 slunk away into the darkness and lived to fight another day. For the nex t t wo weeks, the U-boat patrolled Icelandic waters without sighting another vessel. Low on fuel and full of torpedoes, it started a return course to the U-boat base at Saint-Nazaire, France. While en route, the submarine spotted a distant enemy destroyer. Rathke fired a fan of four torpedoes. All four missed. Yet, despite a failed first war patrol, three sailors aboard U-352 were awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class—Rathke included—when they reached their new home port on February 26, 1942. It is not known specifically why Rathke or his men— likely the two other officers—were recipients. The award was given out relatively freely, even more so as the war progressed. It may have been intended as a motivator, rather than in recognition of a job well done. And in the case of U-352, there would have been good reason to motivate the crew. Nazi Germany was asking the 46 men aboard U-352 to go back to sea after an unsuccessful mission. This time, U-352 was going to go much farther than Iceland: U-352 was going to go to America’s shore. If Rathke had felt the pressure to earn an Iron Cross prior to the first war cruise, now that he had essentially been given one, the pressure surely mounted to prove he deserved it. After an engine overhaul in St. Nazaire, U-352 was ready for its second war patrol. The U-boat departed the pens at St. Nazaire on April 7, 1942, for the three-week trek across

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the Atlantic. It was ordered to patrol off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, in waters referred to as the Diamond Shoals. These rich hunting grounds had already been dubbed “Torpedo Alley” by the Allied forces. Surely a U-boat captain could find a kill in these bountiful waters. On the long cruise to Carolina, the men were permitted to sunbathe on deck. The tight, cramped quarters of nearly 50 men was stifling; any intake of fresh air was welcome. According to ONI documents, the U-352 crew enjoyed meals composed of “meat, potatoes, canned vegetables, and fruit.” A supply of gin was stored onboard as well. U-352 arrived at Diamond Shoals on May 2, 1942. There, the Americans provided U-352 with a not-so-warm welcome. The men aboard had been listening to American jazz radio programs when the U-boat had to crash dive to avoid bombing by a twinengine aircraft flying coastal surveillance. Three days later, a U.S. Army Air Forces plane spotted U-352 and dropped two bombs. Although the pilot claimed a kill, U-352 escaped with no damage. However, U-352’s luck was about to run out. Between the bombings and crash dives to avoid the coastal convoy protections now in place in American waters, U-352 spotted numerous Allied vessels. In the days immediately after arriving near the American shore, the U-boat fired eight torpedoes at various Allied vessels. All eight missed. ON MAY 8, 1942, at 9 a.m., the U.S. Coast Guard Thetis-class cutter Icarus was ordered from Staten Island, New York, to Key West, Florida, to escort ships along the Eastern Sea Frontier—the U.S. Navy operational command that extended from Canada to Florida. Originally built as a Prohibition enforcement vessel for chasing rumrunners, Icarus was well suited for its new duties protecting Allied ships in coastal convoys. Armament aboard Icarus included depth-charge racks, .30and .50-caliber machine guns, and a large, three-inch deck gun. By the next day, Icarus was transiting off North Carolina. The trip so far had proven uneventful besides the regularly scheduled zig-zag pattern steering movements. With the captain retired to his quarters, there was no sign that Icarus would soon make history. The cutter was cruising at 14 knots. According to U.S. Coast Guard records: “The sea was calm. There was a slight swell. Visibility was about 9 miles.” At about 4:25 p.m., Icarus’s sonar operator reported a “rather mushy” contact off the port bow. Although it was an indefinite contact, he made the wise choice to track it nonetheless, and Icarus’s executive officer summoned its commanding officer, Lieutenant Maurice D. Jester, to the bridge. At about the same time, aboard U-352, Rathke sighted the silhouette of a lonely ship on the horizon some 1,900 yards away. Rathke must have been desperate for a win. He looked through the attack periscope, quickly ordered everyone to battle stations, and fired a single torpedo. But he did not fire on an unsuspecting cargo ship; he fired on a fully armed U.S. Coast Guard vessel while in shallow water, which limited the U-boat’s ability to hide—in broad daylight. The torpedo exploded 200 yards off Icarus’s port quarter. And the hunter quickly became the hunted. In a deadly game of cat-and-mouse, Rathke—thinking he was in even shallower water than he actually was and, thus, in a still more

U.S. Coastguardsman Steve M. Kalata displays a lifejacket and swastika taken from their catch—the first U-boat of the war sunk by the Coast Guard.

desperate position—ordered U-352 to hide in Icarus’s wake to mask the U-boat’s propeller noise. But the men aboard Icarus proved the more proficient hunters. Icarus dropped five depth charges. Aboard the U-boat, a radioman shouted: “Achtung! Wasserbomben!” U-352 shook violently as Icarus unleashed hell from above. U-352’s executive officer was killed. Its attack periscope was destroyed. Gauges exploded. Crockery shattered. The men inside were tossed around like dolls. Icarus dropped three more depth charges. Large air bubbles rose to the surface; U-352’s propulsion and electrical systems were destroyed. The U-boat was crippled—literally dead in the water. Rathke, who knew his U-boat was damaged so severely that escape in it was impossible, ordered the crew to don lifejackets and breathing apparatuses. He then ordered the saddle tanks on the side of the vessel to be filled with air so the submarine could rise, and gave the order to abandon ship. Like a whale breaching the surface, U-352 suddenly appeared from the deep. Rathke shouted for all men to leave the U-boat. As the men poured into the sea, Icarus’s three-inch deck gun blanketed the conning tower and FEBRUARY 2022

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perforated the steel hull with piercing rounds, and its machine guns came to life, also raking the conning tower. The continuous fire was so intense that the U-boatmen did not utilize any of U-352’s weapons. The U-boat remained on the surface for five minutes before descending into the blue abyss. Fireman Heinz Karl Richter insisted it was Rathke’s obsession w ith getting a Knight’s Cross that “led to recklessness, ultimately resulting in the U-boat’s sinking.” Icarus circled the spot and, for good measure, dropped an additional depth charge to ensure the U-boat would not hunt again. Thirty-three men from U-352 had made it out before the sinking, but 13 sailors went down with it. The men who escaped, Rathke among

OPPOSITE: TANYA GRIFFIN HOUPPERMANS; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

Following Rathke, U-352 prisoners show discipline as they march into Fort Bragg. For their captain— getting his mug shot, above—the war’s outcome was far different from what he had hoped for.

them, swam away from the stricken sub as quickly as they could. As they floated on the surface like flotsam awaiting their fate, the commander shouted out one last order— telling them not to give the Americans any information of military value. The situation was especially dire for four wounded men, including Machinist Mate Gerd Reussel, whose leg had been severed by gunfire from the Icarus. While in the water, Rathke removed his own belt and made an impromptu tourniquet around Reussel’s stump. Icarus was ordered to pick up all survivors and transport them to the naval shipyard at Charleston, South Carolina. The wounded men were brought aboard first; Reussel died four hours later, and the U.S. Coast Guard went on to treat him with dignity, burying him with full military honors at Beaufort National Cemetery in South Carolina, some 70 miles farther south. Now prisoners of war, the men of U-352 were photographed, fingerprinted, and interrogated. But the Coast Guard did not separate Rathke from his men once aboard Icarus, as would have been the norm—most likely because all this was a first for them: their first sunken U-boat of the war and first time taking prisoners. That allowed Rathke to be, according to a later U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence report, “twice able to lecture his men.” He repeated the orders he gave while in the water—not to divulge any information to the Americans. And he made it abundantly clear it would be disrespectful to their fallen brethren if anyone spoke to their interrogators. Rathke may not have been tactically sound, but he was security conscious. And it paid off: a report issued by the U.S. Atlantic Fleet Anti-Submarine Warfare Unit dated May 18, 1942, explicitly stated: “the captives were allowed to mingle with each other to the extent that the U-boat captain warned and instructed his crew on matters concerning security. This undoubtedly vitiated to a large extent efforts to obtain information which might otherwise have been of extreme value.”

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After the POWs were transferred to a detention camp at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, a special interrogation unit composed of American and British officers had their turn with the men. But, again, they divulged no information of significance. Rathke himself reported very little. Staying true to his belief in Nazi principles, Rathke, an intelligence report noted, “refused to believe that Germans inflicted outrages upon Poland and Poles.” The survivors from U-352 would now sit out the rest of the war on land, Rathke included. They were transferred to multiple camps throughout the United States before reaching their permanent POW camp in Papago Park, Arizona, which held an abundance of U-boat prisoners. There, Rathke maintained his iron fist and rigid discipline over his men. According to ONI reporting, he disciplined seamen for mundane things such as failure “to police lavatory” and listening to a “distant conversation at officers table.” Even the cook caught the wrath of Rathke, and was confined to his quarters for three days for allowing “bread leavings to be thrown into the drain.” At the

end of the war, Rathke returned to Flensburg; he lived there until his death in 2001. U-352 TODAY REMAINS at the bottom of the Atlantic at a depth of 110 feet, and is one of the most popular sport dives along the U.S. East Coast. I have dived the sunken submarine multiple times over the past two decades, and it’s always a haunting sight. As I descend into history through the blue water, wearing more than 100 pounds of dive gear, the hazy outline of the conning tower—listing sharply to starboard—comes into view from about 40 feet above the wreck. U-352 is remarkably intact for having sustained multiple depth charges, with most of its deterioration due to nearly 80 years spent in salt water. Pockets of the U-boat’s outer skin have withered away, exposing skeletal remains of the steel ribs and frames that strengthened the pressure hull— the circular watertight compartment in which submariners live and work. Having peered through several of the U-boat’s open hatches, I can attest to the claustrophobia and confines of the steel coffin in which, due to Rathke’s fatal error, 13 men are forever entombed. H

NORTH CAROLINA

OUTER BANKS

ATL ANTI C OCEAN CAPE LOOKOUT

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U-352 WRECKAGE

OPPOSITE: TANYA GRIFFIN HOUPPERMANS; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

The sunken U-boat—off the North Carolina coast—is both a popular dive site and a war grave for 13 men.

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A soldier and poet documents life in Japan’s Cabanatuan prison camp By Bill Yenne

Hector John Polla is pictured (opposite) shortly after the young officer’s prewar arrival in the Philippines, when it was considered an exotic and prized post. For Polla, events swiftly changed for the worse.

Hector John Polla, c.1942

first read these words in one of a dozen remarkable notebooks that came to me in a large envelope some years ago. I had been aware of their author, a lieutenant in the 57th Infantry Regiment named Hector John Polla, as I’d written about him in my book, Black ’41: The West Point Class of 1941 and the American Triumph in World War II, which told the story of the class that had graduated literally into World War II. Among those 424 men, I had been especially captivated by the stories of Polla and two others who had been the first to face the enemy in ground combat. Polla, along with Californian Ira B. Cheaney and Floridian Alexander R. Nininger, were soldiers who had fought and been decorated in desperate battles on the front lines of the Philippines’ Bataan Peninsula long before most of their classmates had gone overseas. With those notebooks in hand, Hector Polla now seemed much more real to me. They contained the words—prose, poetry, and meticulous checklists—he had penciled in the months after he was captured by the Japanese on Bataan in April 1942. Polla’s nephew, John Giorza, and his wife Jane had read my book and wanted to share with me the journals Polla had kept while in the infamous Japanese prison camp at Cabanatuan in the Philippines. I copied them and returned the originals to the family. Some of the notebooks were tiny, vestpocket ones, the kind that are easy to conceal—which almost certainly was what he did while imprisoned. Others were regular-sized school notebooks with the logo of the Philippine Commonwealth Bureau of Education on the front that the Japanese had probably pilfered and then sold to prisoners at the camp commissary. Polla used them to record the rules of card games in great detail and to jot notes in the Japanese language classes he

COURTESY OF THE GIORZA FAMILY

OH LORD, HOW I WANT TO GO HOME

Green grows the jungle, bright is the dew Sorry I am that I can’t get to you Until our next meeting, here’s what we’ll do We’ll change that red Sun, to the Red, White and Blue!

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HECTOR POLLA grew up in Pulaski County, Missouri. His parents, Lodovico “Vico” and

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BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

took, probably voluntarily. He also recorded most of his poetry in the larger notebooks. A few months ago, I ran across my copies of the notebooks. I looked again at the 1941 Howitzer—West Point’s yearbook—and at the photo of an earnest young man well-liked for having “lightened many tasks with his cheerful manner.” I reread the citation for his action on February 9, 1942, that earned him a Silver Star. It told of the lives he saved and the position that would not have been held without his bravery. Looking back, this citation is all the more poignant, for we know that the strategic situation for those troops in that place was hopeless, and that their short-term future held defeat, the hellish Bataan Death March, and imprisonment.

COURTESY OF THE GIORZA FAMILY (BOTH)

The son of Italian immigrants, Polla stands with his parents Vico and Maddelina (front row) in 1938; his brotherin-law, Ceno Giorza, and sister Iris are behind them. By summer 1941 (top right), Polla was a freshly minted U.S. Army lieutenant.

Maddelina, were Italian immigrants; Vico worked as a gardener. Hector was an average kid: He had a paper route and liked to go fishing. In high school, he went out for basketball and football, and played clarinet in the band. After high school, Hector spent two years at the Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri, before earning an appointment to West Point. Marcellus Hartman, a high school classmate of Hector’s, later told John Giorza: “I think it went through Vico’s mind that here I am a gardener…and my son is graduating from the U.S. Military Academy.” After Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, Polla, along with Cheaney and Nininger, arrived in the Philippines and joined the 57th Infantry Regiment on November 20, 1941. With its tropical setting and low-cost off-base living, the Philippines had been a prize assignment during the prewar years. Shortly after arriving, Polla dropped off a few dress uniform items at the Sanitary Steam Laundry in Manila to be cleaned and pressed, and settled in to savor the life of a young officer in the exotic Orient. But he and his two classmates had little time for this. On December 8, as the attack on Pearl Harbor was underway across the International Dateline, the Japanese struck the Philippines. Two days later, the invasion began. Filipino and American defenders were

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

COURTESY OF THE GIORZA FAMILY (BOTH)

Prisoners of the Japanese as of April 9, 1942, American soldiers gather at the beginning of what would become the Bataan Death March.

knocked reeling, and within a few weeks the trio was among the outnumbered troops cornered in doomed Bataan. Cheaney and Nininger both lost their lives in January 1942. Cheaney was awarded a posthumous Distinguished Service Cross, and Nininger’s posthumous Medal of Honor was the first to be awarded to a U.S. Army soldier in a ground action during World War II. For Polla—promoted to first lieutenant on January 16—the Battle of Bataan continued. On April 9, two months to the day after he had risked his life to hold the American line, time finally ran out, and the last line could no longer be held. The American and Filipino defenders of Bataan surrendered, and Polla became one of some 60,000 men to face the 60-mile Bataan Death March, enduring unspeakable atrocities along the way. Men were beaten or shot for stopping to get a drink of water or aiding failing comrades. Finally reaching Cabanatuan on June 2, 1942, Polla and the others faced an uncertain future, with no idea of how long they’d be confined. Polla’s earliest notations in the small

notebooks—generally undated—include lists of names and addresses of fellow inmates, the food they received from their captors, quotes from radio news reports listened to surreptitiously, and random thoughts: “Be sure roll calls are accurate”; “Camp Comdr. objects to assembles (illegal)”; “Excess rice in garbage pits to be reduced. Noticed by Nips.” His more systematic, day-by-day diary entries would not begin until the first day of 1943—by which time he knew he was in for a long haul. POLLA’S EARLY ENTRIES paint a mundane picture of camp life, at odds with virtually all postwar accounts of survivors who told of conditions at Cabanatuan as being miserable beyond measure, with brutal treatment by its guards. On January 5, for example, Polla wrote: “Bridge. One banana issued. One pack American cigarettes. Traded Old Golds for Camels.” February 18 was marked by bridge and a “Jap inspection of clothing…worse than at school.” But it all turned out okay: he was issued “two new shirts and a pair of pants.” He ended his day by listening to the radio.

Two months to the day after Polla had risked his life to hold the American line, time finally ran out.

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COURTESY OF THE GIORZA FAMILY

On March 17, the Japanese passed out fish oil for shoeshining and a ration of tooth powder “for every three men.” Polla goes on to say that there was “a drawing for drawers and towel. I got the towel.” The next day, between the bridge game and an afternoon nap, Polla notes being “issued three limes.” That evening, there was a “Musical Show” of the sort that alternated with movie nights several times a week through 1943 and, with less frequency, into 1944. Looking at what he wrote—and where he wrote it—raises questions that will never be answered. Were Polla’s bland descriptions of bridge, entertainment, and citrus fruit toned down for fear of what punishment might ensue if his diaries were discovered? If so, one wonders why he penned his poetry, some

FROM LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

Almost two months after Bataan fell to the Japanese (above), Hector Polla and other POWs reached the camp at Cabanatuan, where the Japanese searched soldiers (top right) upon entry.

of which contained descriptions of cruelty and abuse, in the larger, harder-to-hide notebooks. Were his bland descriptions simply factual details recited by a benumbed man who had accepted his circumstances? Was the man who “lightened many tasks with his cheerful manner” just trying to maintain his own sanity? John Giorza suggests that Hector undertook his writing projects and diary-keeping as a means of maintaining his mental acuity. Polla’s diary entries rarely ebbed on the darker side. On April 6, 1943, though, he mentioned that he had learned from a guard that two men had escaped, but noted nothing of their fate. One rare graphic description of his captors’ strong arm came just a few days later, on April 14, when he wrote tersely about a man who had been caught attempting an escape. He “was supposed to be shot — Head shaved — spared,” Polla wrote. To this, he added: “Rat crawled on my head.” Is Polla perhaps telling us that he was the man whose head was shaved? However, he pulled no punches as he wrote in verse about 10 men executed for the transgressions of one. “The ten they knew that they must die, altho’ for truth they knew not why,” Polla wrote. “Their life had run its brief short span. They were paying the debt of another man.”

COURTESY OF THE GIORZA FAMILY

FROM LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

POLLA’S POETRY is often wistful in tone— such as when he wrote, “They write of the East as enthralling, and that’s why I started to roam. But now I hear the Occident calling. Oh Lord, how I want to go home.” The theme of abandonment also crops up. In his poem “Scuttlebutt,” probably dating from the summer of 1942, Polla borrowed a line from popular culture when he wrote that a “friend of a friend of a pal of mine” told of a confidential report that “the Yanks and the tanks are coming. In fact they are almost here.” Indeed, since January 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the U.S. Army chain of command had repeatedly promised the POWs that help was on the way. Those making the promises knew it was impossible, but those in Cabanatuan at first thought that their incarceration might be short. Polla ended “Scuttlebutt” by writing that the gossip of “old maids…couldn’t keep up with the rumors in Cabanatuan.” Polla w rote often of food, a fixation common to people on greatly reduced diets. Steamed rice was the staple, and the prisoners were also often served lugao, the rice porridge common to the Philippines. In their early days of confinement, they ate creamed corn and canned salmon, probably from captured American food supplies. As the men of Cabanatuan neared their first Christmas in captivity, captured canned goods ran out, but the Japanese allowed gifts to reach the prisoners. Polla recalled that a delegation of “Manila Women” came to the camp with such treats as cigars, cigarettes, and candy. He does not say who these women were— although had they been from the Red Cross, he would have mentioned this, because he notes on the same page that International Red Cross packages with candy bars, soap, and canned goods also reached Cabanatuan ahead of Christmas 1942. Through the early months of 1943, Polla wrote of eggs being served frequently for breakfast, and of oranges, limes, and Red Cross sugar often being distributed. On May 10, he savored “the first mango of the season.” Into 1944, Spam, jam, and canned corned beef arrived in

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Red Cross parcels. The men also maintained a farm outside the main prison compound. In his diary, Polla recalled raking cornstalks and being in charge of the camote (sweet potato) planting detail in the spring of 1943. Polla’s weight, as an indication of his level of nourishment, declined from 163 pounds in October 1942 to 156 in February 1943 and stabilized in the low 150s through July 1944, the last time he noted it. There was a hospital of sorts at Cabanatuan, overseen by a U.S. Army doctor, Colonel James Gillespie. Army Medical Department historian George Cressman has written that it “lacked the supplies and drugs to effectively treat patients.” However, Polla wrote at length about an early 1943 malaria affliction and that he received quinine routinely. He also often mentions other medications, including an antibiotic, sulfanilamide. In April 1944, he received a cholera vaccination and a month later he was back on quinine for another bout of malaria. Aspirin was available, and circulated among the prisoners. “Valentine’s Day but no Valentine,” Polla wrote on February 14, 1943. “Stayed in the sack most of the day. Got 2 aspirins from Knopping.” This was his first mention of War- Polla’s early journal entries tended toward rant Officer Joseph Knopping, an aviation engineer mostly mundane lists: from Palisades Park, New Jersey, who would play the gifts he and an important part in Polla’s story two years later. others received at their THE JAPANESE regularly paid the prisoners small sums in Philippine pesos, which had a prewar value of about two cents in American dollars. The funds were kept in Japanese Postal Savings accounts. According

first Christmas, for example, or the rations of food he was given.

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CABANATUAN PRISON CAMP

LUZON MANILA BATAAN

SOUTH CHINA SEA

to Polla’s running total—which reached 470 pesos by October 1944—he started out receiving five pesos monthly, but in October 1943, company grade officers like himself got a raise to 40 pesos. With their money, the prisoners were able to shop at the camp commissary, buying fresh fruit, canned coffee, toiletries, tobacco, and even fresh eggs. Polla was a regular consumer of sugared peanuts, which sold for 15 to 18 centavos a bag. Eggs fluctuated at a little less than one peso a dozen, about the same as the cost of a notebook. Polla documented holiday celebrations. On Thanksgiving 1943, he reported having “had a very good supper.” Both Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve in 1943 passed congenially with “cake and coffee.” On April 29, 1943, the men were served hotcakes for breakfast in celebration of Emperor Hirohito’s birthday. The same day one year later, however, was what he called a “Usual day.” Polla did not mention his own birthday in

1943, but on September 30, 1944, as he turned 28, he reported eating cornbread and peanut butter. Easter 1943 was celebrated with a cup of sugar in the ration allotment, while on Easter 1944, he “attended sunrise services” and “broke out my new uniform.” By his account, the Cabanatuan inmates stayed entertained. Performances by the camp theater companies and glee club occurred regularly in 1943, and he reviewed them. He deemed the glee club show on February 21 “very good,” while the variety program on March 6 was merely “pretty good,” and the film Tobacco Road on March 30 was “not too good.” Movies, from the Marx Brothers to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs—probably 16mm prints captured from American bases—were shown several times a week, often interspersed with Japanese newsreels. On September 12, 1943, Polla wrote “Movie — Judy Canova in Puddin’ Head enjoyed by all even

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COURTESY OF THE GIORZA FAMILY

MILES

FROM TOP: BEN STEELE/COURTESY OF JIM OPOLONY; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

Like Polla, artist Ben Steele survived the Bataan Death March, only to suffer still more abuse in prison camp, which he documented in artwork. He felt an obligation, he later explained, to “illustrate what went on over there.”

COURTESY OF THE GIORZA FAMILY

FROM TOP: BEN STEELE/COURTESY OF JIM OPOLONY; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

though it was a second rate movie.” Ten days later, the 1931 Charlie Chaplin film City Lights earned a “very silly” from Polla. On October 21, he wrote: “Movie all in Japanese except a cartoon, ‘Looney Tunes.’ Cartoon only thing worthwhile.” Reading Polla’s many movie reviews, like reading page upon page of a “bridge and citrus” lifestyle, is perplexing: it’s hard to square his journals’ account with the unanimously hellish stories of treatment at Cabanatuan that have emerged since the war. Was he trying to focus on the few glimmers of a bright side? Perhaps an answer to this question can be found in his penmanship and his language. By the summer of 1943, Polla’s handwriting had become more careless, as though he was running out of steam. His entries grew shorter, now usually being just one line. Indeed, for most of August, and occasionally into October, the phrase “Usual day” was repeated, with no further comment, day after day. Letters from home reached the prisoners at Cabanatuan only sporadically at first, with a Christmas letter from Polla’s mother finally arriving in February 1943. Nearly a year later, in his January 1944 entries, he mentioned mail several times, noting that he received two letters in a day—one from his parents and another from a friend named Kay, from whom he received several letters. By June, it was a “Usual day” when 250 letters arrived at camp. In reply, inmates were permitted to mail postcards with a 50-word message limit. Among those to his mother that survived the war, his card of July 22, 1944, said: “Don’t worry about me…send sunglasses when you can.” Perhaps his sanguine descriptions of Cabanatuan were in part designed to shield his mother from the anguish she would feel if she were ever to see his notebooks. MEANWHILE, EVEN AS THE MAIL for the men started flooding in, the prisoners themselves began flowing out. The Japanese started pulling men out of Cabanatuan to be sent to Japan in “work details.” The most able-bodied of the men were, in fact, being conscripted as slave laborers, and were transported on vessels aboard which the conditions were so cruel and unsanitary that they came to be known as “hell ships.” Polla first mentioned a detail leaving for Japan on March 6, 1944. By the summer, the departing work details became more frequent, with the men often rousted around midnight to leave in the wee hours of the morning. Because they never returned, those left behind had no idea what they’d undergone. Indeed, there was reason for optimism. By September 1944, as the prisoners marked 27 months of imprisonment, the fortunes of the once-invincible Imperial Japanese Army had ebbed and turned. Japan had been defeated from the Solomons to the Marianas, and General Douglas MacArthur’s promise of a return to the Philippines loomed large as an imminent reality. For Hector Polla, this was best recalled in his September 21 entry. After writing “Usual day” dozens of times, he was able to write “Unusual day.” “American planes flew over,” he explained. “One Jap plane shot down — Excitement running wild…two planes flew low overhead at a high rate of speed. They seem to fly unmolested and at will… [I’m] Confident of early freedom.” He optimistically added “Probably have birthday dinner in Manila,” but that was not to be. On September 30,

Later in Polla’s imprisonment, his handwriting grew more harried-looking, with his entries often a brief “Usual day”—until he noted (visible midway above) an “Unusual day” that gave him hope.

as he celebrated his 28th birthday, freedom was not his to grasp. On October 15, it was Hector Polla’s turn to join a departing detail. His diary entry for that day, in the form of a note to his mother, was his last. “Leave tonight at midnight. Giving [my notebooks] to Knopping to send on to you,” he told her, referencing Joseph Knopping, the man whose name had first appeared in his diary 20 months earlier. “I am in good health…. I don’t believe that we will leave the islands, but if we do you may rest assured that I will get along all right. I have been able to so far and I will continue to do so.” Five days later, General MacArthur waded ashore on the island of Leyte at the head of his Sixth Army and the liberation of the Philippines began. Based on eyewitness accounts later compiled by the U.S. Army, a reasonably accurate picture of Polla’s subsequent experiences can FEBRUARY 2022

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On January 21, his luck ran out. His own undated poem, “Requiem,” provides a somber epitaph: “God rest ye dead and rest ye well; T’is best ye be free’d from hell.” IN JULY 1945, Vico and Maddelina Polla received a letter from Major General Edward F. Witsell, the U.S. Army’s soon-to-be adjutant general, who wrote that their son had died in the sinking of the Oryoku Maru in December. In October 1946, Witsell wrote again, amending his earlier report to tell them that Hector had survived the December sinking, only to die on January 9, 1945. But this was not to be the end of the Pollas’ emotional roller coaster ride. Official documents and letters to Vico and Maddelina, which John Giorza shared with me, show that the army had a difficult time

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FROM TOP: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; COURTESY OF THE GIORZA FAMILY

be pieced together. After two months at Manila’s Bilibid Prison, Polla was crammed into the filthy hold of the Oryoku Maru in Manila Harbor, along with 1,555 other Americans and 64 prisoners of war of other nationalities. On December 13, 1944, the ship departed for Japan. Two days later, though, like many Japanese ships in Philippine waters, the Oryoku Maru, unmarked as a POW transport, became a target of American aircraft. As it sank, 270 prisoners died. Polla was among the survivors who were reloaded aboard the Enoura Maru on December 27. The ship reached Takao, Formosa (now Kaohsiung, Taiwan), on New Year’s Day 1945, and was still docked in port on January 9 when American bombers attacked it, heavily damaging—although not disabling—the ship and killing more than 400 POWs. But Hector Polla once again beat the odds.

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

U.S. Army Rangers freed more than 500 Americans from Cabanatuan on January 30, 1945. Hector Polla was not among them—but the man who safeguarded Polla’s journals was.

FROM TOP: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; COURTESY OF THE GIORZA FAMILY

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

tinctive journey home. Late in 1944 Joseph Knopping learned Two large Japanese that he was about to be transcargo ships smoke after a bombing by ferred to Bilibid Prison, where American aircraft on many more able-bodied prisonJanuary 9, 1945. Polla ers were being consolidated was on one of them. ahead of the imminent American landings on Luzon. Before departing, he handed the dozen va rious-sized notebooks to artilleryman Private Arthur Hilshorst. Both men avoided Polla’s fate: the U.S. Army freed Knopping from Bilibid in February 1945, and Hilshorst was one of those liberated by U.S. Army Rangers in the “Great Raid” rescue mission at Cabanatuan on January 30, 1945, that released the last of the camp’s inmates. Hilshorst reached the U.S. Army’s Letterman Hospital in sorting out the details of the men who died San Francisco in March 1945, and on April 2 aboard the hell ships. The date of Hector’s he mailed the journals in a large single envedeath was amended several times in the lope to Polla’s home in Missouri. As the enveyears after the war as more and more eyewit- lope arrived, Vico and Maddelina were still nesses were located and interviewed, and as holding on to hope about the fate of their son. more Japanese records were located and The parents later placed this envelope, cross-checked with other information. The along with General Witsell’s letters and Polfinal determination finally came on March la’s dry-cleaning, into the footlocker their 28, 1951. It was concluded that Hector had son had brought home from West Point in died in an attack on the Enoura Maru in port June 1941. There they would remain for more on January 21, 1945, that killed some 400 than half a century. John Giorza told me that additional POWs and permanently crippled after his mother passed away in 1995, he and the ship. However, it was noted that his Jane opened the footlocker. They found remains “could not have been recovered.” A Hilshorst’s envelope there, still sealed. H grisly handwritten note added that after the disabling of the Enoura Maru, the “remains recovered at Takao, Formosa, [were] impossible to segregate satisfactorily.” In the midst of all this, the uniform items that Hector had left to be cleaned at the Sanitary Steam Laundry in Manila in 1941 were picked up by the U.S. Army’s “Effects Quartermaster” and delivered to his parents. Maddelina Polla had taken her son’s death terribly. John Giorza was only four when she died in 1954, but he recalled that with Hector gone, “her life was over. She never left the house.” As for Hector’s father, John told me that “Hector was his hero.” Vico Polla carried the weight of his son’s loss until his own death in 1978. Hector Polla’s journals had their own dis-

After two months at Manila’s Bilibid Prison, Polla was crammed into the filthy hold of the Oryoku Maru.

Contained in this envelope, Polla’s journals made it home. Inside was a poem expressing his longing to do the same: “They write of the East as enthralling, and that’s why I started to roam. But now I hear the Occident calling. Oh Lord, how I want to go home.”

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WEAPONS MANUAL GERMANY’S HENSCHEL HS-129 ILLUSTRATION BY JIM LAURIER

TANK BUSTER IN THE LATE 1930s, Germany—taking lessons from its participation in the Spanish Civil War—began developing a groundattack airplane to take on well-defended troops and armor, bucking the post-WWI prevailing wisdom that low-flying attack aircraft were especially susceptible to enemy machine gun and rifle fire. Heavily armored around the nose and cockpit, the Henschel Hs-129 made its first appearance in 1942 and was deployed to the Eastern Front. The airplane proved itself particularly effective at destroying Soviet tanks, even though its extensive armor and armament made the Hs-129 heavy for its engines, producing a slow and clumsy ride. As the war progressed, and the Soviets applied heavier armor to its tanks, the Hs129’s firepower was upped, culminating in the B-3 model of June 1944 (below), which featured the massive 75mm BK 7,5 cannon,

The Henschel Hs-129 attack airplane was adept at destroying enemy armor. Pilots often tallied their tank kills with marks on the rudder.

World War II’s most powerful forward-firing aircraft weapon. The cannon could knock out any tank then in production, but this was a case of too little, too late—only 25 B-3s were delivered to the field, and they were unable to swing the balance of power toward the faltering German war machine. The rest, as they say, is history. —Larry Porges

SPIN CONTROL To reduce torque and create a stable, balanced firing platform, the engines counter-rotated: the propeller to the pilot’s right rotated counter-clockwise from his vantage point, while the port propeller spun clockwise.

TIGHT SPOT To protect the pilot during his straight-on strafing runs, the Hs-129’s front fuselage armor was angled inward to help deflect incoming bullets. This created an exceptionally tight cockpit, forcing several instruments to be moved outside—including the gunsight, which was mounted on the airplane’s nose.

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PHOTO: BUNDESARCHIV BILD 101I-636-4076-39

11/17/21 10:18 AM

GERMAN HENSCHEL HS-129

Crew: 1 / Length: 32 ft. / Height: 10 ft. 8 in. / Wingspan: 46 ft. 7 in. / Max. weight: 11,500 lbs. / Max. speed: 253 mph / Range: 429 mi. / Complete specification figures for the Hs-129 B-3 are unavailable; statistics above are for the B-2, the mostproduced Hs-129 model. Germany built approximately 840 B-2s between late 1942 and mid-1944.

THE COMPETITION SOVIET ILYUSHIN IL-2

Crew: 2 / Length: 38 ft. 2 in. / Height: 12 ft. 8 in. / Wingspan: 47 ft. 11 in. / Max. weight: 14,000 lbs. / Max. speed: 255 mph / Range: 475 mi. / Defensive armor on the mass-produced ground-attack Ilyushin Il-2 was limited to the nose and cockpit; due to the Soviets’ wartime aluminum shortage, the Il-2’s wings and rear fuselage were made of wood until late 1944.

LOAD UP SAFETY FIRST A steel canopy and 75mm-thick armored windscreen glass helped protect the cockpit.

The 75mm BK 7,5 cannon was capable of holding only 12 shells. An additional 12 rounds were stored behind the cockpit and fed to the cannon via an autoloader.

RULES OF THE GAME

CANNON LAW The Germans adapted their semiautomatic PaK 40 antitank gun to produce the Hs-129’s 75mm BK 7,5 cannon. Although it added 2,600 pounds to an already-heavy aircraft, the huge, fully automatic gun, mounted in a dorsal pod, was unstoppable against Soviet armor.

The Reich Air Ministry initially decreed that any new groundattack airplane be designed with engines that weren’t required for other airplane types. Early Hs-129 protoypes were therefore equipped with woefully underpowered 459-hp Argus As 410s before more powerful—but still inadequate— 690-hp Gnome-Rhône 14M engines became available after the fall of France.

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ALL TOGETH

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ETHER NOW

Singing provided soldiers with an essential release—provided they got to sing the songs their way By Joseph Connor

Recently freed POWs celebrate around a piano. The U.S. Army recognized the vital outlet that singing provided—but G.I.s preferred songs of their own invention to those the army pushed (right).

inging has long been part of military life, and the U.S. Army wanted to keep this heritage alive as it mobilized and trained more than eight million soldiers to fight in Europe and the Pacific. The army believed that group singing was important for “morale building through soldier participation” and “emotional stability through self-entertainment,” explained Captain M. Claude Rosenberry, who helped set up the army music program. Wanting things done its way, the army adopted a regimented approach to music. In 1941, it published its official Army Song Book, containing 67 patriotic, folk, and service songs like “The StarSpangled Banner,” “America the Beautiful,” and “Pop! Goes the Weasel,” and it expected soldiers to learn all 67 songs. The Quartermaster Corps even wrapped pamphlets of religious tunes around rations to make sure wholesome material reached the front. The army organized officially sanctioned sing-alongs and envisioned every platoon with a barbershop quartet and a “camp-fire instrumentalist (guitar, ukulele, etc.)” and each company with a song leader and “accordionist,” Captain Rosenberry wrote. These by-the-book efforts fell flat. The army could tell men what to do, but G.I.s dug in their heels at being told what to sing and when to sing it. Soldiers, a New York Herald Tribune editorial noted, “follow only one rule in their choice of songs. They do not sing what is expected of them by their elders.” They snubbed army-organized song sessions, too. Their attitude was “spontaneous or nothing,” noted Sergeant Mack Morriss, a South Pacific correspondent for Yank magazine. In place of songs with the army’s imprimatur, the men invented their own, making up countless verses for current hits, patriotic anthems, and

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THE FATHERS OF THESE G.I.s had marched to France in 1918 belting out “Over There,” “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” and “Mademoiselle from Armentières,” and their sons carried on this tradition. They lifted their voices “at beer parties and such get-togethers…on long boat trips where there is not much else to do,” and while riding on open trucks, wrote Corporal Pete Seeger, a folksinger who served in the Pacific and whose musical career spanned more than 50 years. Collective singing made it possible for servicemen “to feel comradeship, to be happy together without being emotional, or not visibly, and thus unmanly,” said Samuel Hynes, a Marine flier in the Pacific and later a professor of literature at Princeton University. The men’s parodies were more than a way

ACROSS THE GLOBE, the song American servicemen most liked to sing and parody was “Bless ’em All,” a British waltz to which they added their own lyrics. In 1917, a 37-year-old Englishman, Fred Godfrey, wrote the tune to amuse his pals in the Royal Naval Flying Service, and it became an underground favorite with British troops. In 1940, English songwriters Jimmy Hughes and Frank Lake polished it up, and it soon enjoyed wide public popularity in Great Britain. It crossed the Atlantic and was featured in American wartime films like A Yank in the R.A.F, Captains of the Clouds, and Guadalcanal Diary, and on recordings by artists like Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians. Its rollicking chorus begged for group singing—“Bless ’em all/Bless ’em all/The long and the short and the tall”—and its lyrics were already charmingly irreverent toward military life: “There’ll be no promotions/This side of the ocean/So cheer up, my lads/Bless ’em all.” It was tailor-made for parodies because “any words chosen at random seem to fit,” naval intelligence officer Otis Cary explained, but its intangible appeal was what endeared it to the troops. “The song isn’t a fighting song—it doesn’t yell blood & thunder, but people sing it,” Sergeant Morriss noted: “It has guts.” The elimination of “bless” was the first change the G.I.s made. “It shouldn’t require much imagination for even the most shy and sheltered person to know what word replaced it,” infantryman Dick Stodghill said. The four-letter substitute, unspeakable in polite circles, was a staple of the G.I. lexicon. Servicemen would have been “virtually speechless” without it, Private Raymond Gantter recalled, and Robert Leckie, a Marine who served in the Pacific, said he heard it “from chaplains and captains, from Pfc.’s and Ph.D.’s.” Its use was so automatic that many servicemen home on leave slipped up at the dinner table and asked “a younger sister or sweet old grandmother to ‘pass the f--king butter,’” mortarman John B. Babcock recalled with a

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FROM TOP: U.S. NAVY/HENNEPIN COUNTY LIBRARY; BLESS ‘EM ALL, 1941. ELLA DOT MARTIN BLAKE COLLECTION (RB 015)/ SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST LIBRARIES

well-known folk songs. Their improvised lyrics, or parodies, were often sarcastic, sometimes bawdy but always brutally honest. Their verses stretched the limits of poetic license and sometimes obliterated the boundaries of good taste, but they carried a power professional songwriters would envy and provide a glimpse, available nowhere else, into what it was like to be young, in the service, and fighting the biggest war in history.

JOSEPH A. HORNE/OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; PREVIOUS PAGES: PHOTO BY POPPERFOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES; SHEET MUSIC: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES; BOOK: GUY ACETO COLLECTION

Folksinger Pete Seeger leads the crowd in “When We March into Berlin” in 1944. Music helped fill the void, he said, when “there is not much else to do.”

of amusing themselves and passing the time. They served as a vital outlet to relieve wartime anxiety and the frustrations of military life. A soldier will endure almost anything “as long as he is permitted to grumble, protest and joke about his fate, to ridicule his leaders and to assert his essential autonomy and personal dignity,” noted folklorist Les Cleveland, a New Zealander who fought in the Pacific and in Italy. In fact, irreverent songs were often “the only means at their disposal for the expression of their subversive fears and frustrations,” Cleveland explained. The men considered the offerings in the official army songbook to be lame—more appropriate for grammar-school children than for soldiers. Stateside composers churned out dozens of patriotic songs like “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” “Goodbye Mama (I’m Off to Yokohama),” and “You’re a Sap, Mister Jap,” but the G.I.s dismissed these anthems as “a lot of drivel…about as shallow as a coat of paint,” Sergeant Morriss wrote. None was “a good, honest, acceptable war song,” army cartoonist Bill Mauldin concluded. Parodies filled the void.

JOSEPH A. HORNE/OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; PREVIOUS PAGES: PHOTO BY POPPERFOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES; SHEET MUSIC: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES; BOOK: GUY ACETO COLLECTION

Military men—like this group of Minnesotans in the navy— favored pairing well-known melodies with concocted, and typically irreverent, lyrics.

chuckle. This word—and others like it—permeated the G.I. songs, which Life magazine called “mass vocal scatology.” It would be a mistake, however, to see this language as simply the product of an all-male environment free from civilian restraints. Like the parodies themselves, the forbidden words served as safety valves, “precious as a way for millions of conscripts to note, in a licensed way, their bitterness and anger,” said Lieutenant Paul Fussell, later a professor of literature at the University of Pennsylvania. By singing “f--k ’em all,” the men could blow off steam, and the “’em” could denote whoever or whatever was aggravating them. Among those who agreed was General George S. Patton, who believed “an army without profanity couldn’t fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag.” Pilots used “Bless ’em All” to voice their anxiety about death, more easily acknowledged under the guise of humor: “No lilies or violets/For dead fighter pilots/So cheer up, my lads” and “No future in flying/Unless you like dying/So cheer up, my lads.” With there-butfor-the-grace-of-God-go-I humor, rear-echelon troops poked fun at their frontline brethren—“They sit in their trenches/And think of their wenches/So cheer up, my lads”—and Marines showed macho pride: “So what if we suffer?/Marines have it tougher/So cheer up,

my lads.” Sailors mocked the indignity of the periodic examination of their genitalia for venereal disease— “You’ll get no erection/At ‘short-arm inspection’/So cheer up, my lads”— and glider troops derided their aircraft: “We are lucky fellows/We’ve got no propellers/So cheer up, my lads.” Married men sang of the fear that their wives in the States might be doing more than keeping the home fires burning—“Our future’s a problem we can’t figure out/Hope that our wives are alone in their beds”—and sailors ridiculed the officious and annoying junior officers arriving from the States: “They’re salty as hell/And stupid as well/Be sure and salute them, my mates.” Soldiers and Marines mocked the arrival of the U.S. Navy—“In 10,000 sections/From 18 directions/Oh Lord, what a f--ed-up stampede”—and Marines bemoaned the sore subject of inaccurate tactical air support: “They bombed out two donkeys/Five horses, three monkeys/And seven platoons of Marines.” One version, crafted by crewmen of B-17 Flying Fortresses to describe returning from a tough mission, embodied the grimmest of humor: “They say there’s a Fortress just leaving Calais/ Bound for the Limey shore/It’s heavily laden

The 1940 version of a 1917 tune was popular in Great Britain. It also was the song American G.I.s most parodied— adapting it to an extraordinary variety of themes.

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ANY TUNE WITH A well-known melody was fair game, and making up new lyrics for old songs was another army tradition. In the First World War, for example, doughboys had modified “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” a popular marching tune, to “That’s the Wrong Way to Tickle Mary” and had improvised dozens of bawdy verses for “Mademoiselle from Armentières,” one of the best-known songs from the earlier war. The parody process was Darwinian, and only the best versions gained traction. Explained Pete Seeger: “a parody, unless it is a good song in its own right, will not catch on and last.” He estimated that most of these ditties were “sung for a laugh once or twice…and then forgotten.” They were rarely written down, but the good ones were spread by word of mouth in “a genuine oral tradition, like folk ballads,” Samuel Hynes noted. The usual inspirations, Seeger said, were “disgust for war, and the army (or navy),” and Hynes listed the most common topics as being military life, senior officers, sex, and death. Whatever the subject, all were “comic, or were intended to be,” Hynes said, and the men sang them

“humorously, half cynically, never mournfully,” folklorist A. S. Limouze explained. There’s no “official” version of any of these songs because the men adapted each to fit local circumstances and were constantly modifying the lyrics. Soldiers weren’t trained singers, and many had trouble carrying a tune, but they substituted enthusiasm for lack of vocal talent. “When the average group of soldiers burst forth in song, it makes a chorus of tree frogs sound like grand opera,” Stodghill remembered. Listening to one sing-along, Morriss noted in his diary that “those guys can’t sing sober and even with a guitar they can’t sing drunk. But they sure are trying.” Sometimes, however, things clicked. Seeger, whose musical career took him to concert halls and recording studios, recalled a song session in 1943 at Keesler Field, Mississippi, during which nearly 40 men crowded into the tilewalled barracks latrine. The acoustics were perfect, Seeger said, and the result was “some of the best music I ever made in my life.” Another favorite song for the creative process was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a Civil War anthem that appeared in the official army songbook—but not in the way the G.I.s sang it. Airborne troops whistled past the graveyard about a paratrooper whose chute failed to open—“Gory, gory/What a hell of a way to die/And he ain’t gonna jump no more”— and sailors griped about shipboard life—“Holy Jesus/What a hell of a way to live/Then we ain’t going to sea no more.”

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HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

with petrified men/And stiffs who are laid on the floor.” The variations of “Bless ’em All” were as endless as the men’s limitless ingenuity.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: STOCKTREK IMAGES, INC./ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; SOME WONDERFUL OLD THINGS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; GUY ACETO COLLECTION

Pilots sing in their ready room aboard the USS Ranger before the 1942 invasion of Morocco. Judging by the smiles, this was not a sanctioned song—although the army and navy tried their best to inspire by dispensing official lyrics on “Hit Kit” fliers and music on V-discs.

HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: STOCKTREK IMAGES, INC./ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; SOME WONDERFUL OLD THINGS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; GUY ACETO COLLECTION

Soldiers ridiculed General Douglas MacArthur’s perceived penchant for pompous pronouncements—“Mine eyes have seen MacArthur/With a Bible on his knee/He is pounding out communiques/For guys like you and me”— and airmen groused about their branch of the service —“Ain’t the air force f--cking awful?” The best-known “Battle Hymn” parody, popular in all theaters and among all branches of the service, reflected the sarcasm of men itching to return to civilian life: “When the war is over/We will all enlist again.” Another popular number was “Down in the Valley,” a well-known folk song recently recorded by the Andrews Sisters, a prominent vocal group. Bomber crews lamented dangerous missions over Germany—“Down the Ruhr Valley/Valley so low/Some chair-borne bastard/ Said we must go”—and joked about their fear of being shot down and taken prisoner: “Write me a letter/Send it to me/Send it in care of/Stalag Luft III.” Transport pilots sang of the extreme danger of flying fuel and other supplies over the Hump, as they called the Himalaya Mountains: “This is the story/Of a Hump pilot’s life/For a gallon of gas, boys/He gave up his life.” The men dusted off “Mademoiselle from Armentières” to mock the publicity given to female soldiers (WACs) and sailors (WAVES)— “The WACs and WAVES will win the war/So what the hell are we here for?/Hinky, dinky, parlez-vous”—and to grouse about any state where they had trained: “----- is a hell of a state/Asshole of the 48/Hinky, dinky, parlez-vous.” Some parodies poked fun at the men’s own courage. Portraying themselves “as a band of ignominious, selfseeking cowards rather than as valiant, battlefield heroes” was good for a laugh, folklorist Les Cleveland explained, and acted as “a comic demolition of the entire military enterprise.” B-17 crewmen sang of their wish for a mechanical problem to send them back to their base before they met the enemy—“F--k the Flying Fortress/And pray that she’ll abort/We’d rather be at home/Than in the f--king Flying Fort”—and of another inglorious way to end a mission: “We dropped our bombs in the ocean/Which nobody can deny.” In “I Wanted Wings (’Til I Got the Goddamn Things),” a song concocted by Chicago Sun correspondent Jack Dowling, airmen urged discretion over valor: “You can save those goddamn Zeros/For those other goddamn heroes” and “I’d rather be a bellhop/Than a flier on a flattop.” They realized, they sang, that “there’s one thing you can’t laugh off/And that’s when they shoot your ass off.” THE ARMY MADE VALIANT EFFORTS to bring the music currently popular on the home front to the troops overseas. It distributed thousands of “Hit Kits,” monthly bulletins of the lyrics for popular songs, and “V-discs,” recordings of what it called “current and favorite songs and marches.” It even shipped wind-up

Miss Popularity In the summer of 1943, the surprise hit song among G.I.s in the Mediterranean Theater was “Dirty Gertie from Bizerte,” which Life magazine called the saga of a “mischievous siren [who] lured her boy friends to their undoing.” Among the diabolical tricks recounted in the song’s lyrics, Gertie “hid a mousetrap ’neath her skirtie.” Bizerte was a city in North Africa that the Allies had liberated earlier that year, and everyone assumed “Dirty Gertie” had originated there. Some G.I.s even claimed to have met the real Gertie, and another rumor spread that the song was really a tongue-in-cheek tribute to a mannequin—the only female companionship soldiers had been able to find in the war-torn city. But the truth was far stranger. “Gertie” was actually the brainchild of Private William L. Russell, who had never set foot in North Africa. In November 1942, Russell, who had dabbled in poetry as a student at Cornell University, had dashed off the verse while nursing a hangover at Camp Lee, Virginia. He had seen Bizerte in the news and thought the name had a nice ring to it. Russell sent A cleaned-up version of “Dirty his eight-line poem to Yank Gertie from Bizerte,” in which magazine, which published a G.I. woos a lovely lady, lacked it in its column of G.I. poetry. the raunchier version’s appeal. Over in North Africa, Sergeant Paul Reif, a composer in civilian life, saw Russell’s published poem. He set it to a simple fox-trot melody, and Sergeant Jack Goldstein added a few verses. Soon, Josephine Baker, an African American singer who had gained fame in the cabarets of prewar Paris, was singing “Dirty Gertie” to entertain the troops. The men loved it and, soldiers being soldiers, they quickly cooked up their own scandalous verses. Back in the States, Russell, now stationed at Camp Edwards, Massachusetts, was flabbergasted that his poem had become a hit song because, he admitted, he himself couldn’t carry a tune or even whistle one. As for the racy lyrics, all he would say was, “Mother isn’t very proud of Gertie.” Nevertheless, Russell smelled opportunity and traveled to New York City to pitch his song. Music publishers were interested, hoping the ditty would become as popular at home as it was with G.I.s. The salty lyrics, however, would never pass muster on American airwaves, so they had to be cleaned up. “Dirty Gertie” became “Flirty Gertie,” and instead of hiding a “mousetrap ’neath her skirtie,” she was simply “purty, purty, purty as can be.” Alas, the spic-and-span Gertie lacked the allure of the saucy one, and the song never became a big hit back home. —Joseph Connor FEBRUARY 2022

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phonographs overseas to enable the troops to play the V-discs. The men quickly went to work on the new tunes. Airmen doctored up “As Time Goes By,” featured in the 1942 film Casablanca. They sang about the danger of antiaircraft fire—“You must remember this/The flak can’t always miss”—and the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy mocked the Eighth Air Force in England as publicity hounds: “It’s still the same old story/The Eighth gets all the glory.” G.I.s used “Don’t Fence Me In,” popularized by cowboy star Roy Rogers, to ridicule paper-pushers happy to spend the war safely in the States—“Let me rest at my desk/With the pencil that I love/Don’t ship me out”—and servicewomen converted “Pretty Baby,” a ragtime era hit, into an ode to the surefire ticket home: “If you’re nervous in the service/ And you don’t know what to do/Have a baby, have a baby.” For infantrymen, “Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine,” a popular standard, became a tribute to buddies lost to German 88mm artillery shells—“Eighty-Eights Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine”—and fliers used it to eulogize comrades shot down by German Me 109 fighter planes: “Those Messerschmitts Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine.” A parody of “White Christmas,” a signature song of crooner Bing Crosby, targeted the men’s longing for female company: “I’m dreaming of a white mistress….” Even the service songs were fair game. “The Air Force Song,” for example, was used to mock military bureaucrats—“Here we go/Into the file case yonder/Diving deep into the drawer”—and Marines used their anthem to note a dubious achievement: “We have the highest VD rate/ We’re United States Marines.” Another genre of soldier songs extolled the virtue (or lack thereof) of exotic women in faraway places. Two favorites were “Dirty Gertie from Bizerte” (who “hid a mousetrap ’neath her skirtie”—see “Miss Popularity,” page 55), and “Filthy Annie from Trapani” (who “stashed a razor up her fanny”). Rival temptresses were “Stella, the Belle of Fedala,” “Luscious Lena from Messina,” and “Venal Vera from Gezira.” These titles were often more intriguing than the actual songs.

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LIEUTENANT B. GALLAGHER/U.S. NAVY/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

About to board landing craft prior to D-Day, G.I.s bolster morale with a song. Collective singing encouraged comradery and helped stanch fear.

MOST COMMANDERS tolerated the parodies. They understood the need to gripe, grouse, and blow off steam, and older officers undoubtedly recalled with fondness the irreverent tunes they had sung back in 1918. One outlier was by-the-book Colonel Eugene R. Householder, a 59-year-old West Point graduate who commanded an air force training center in Atlantic City, New Jersey. In 1943, he banned nearly a dozen of the soldiers’ songs because, he said, they impugned the men’s courage and encouraged drinking. Among the tunes he outlawed were “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” and “The Beer Barrel Polka.” The men rolled their eyes, and Householder’s edict soon became the target of parodies, the New York Times reported. The U.S. Post Office also disapproved. In 1943, an author named Eric Posselt published a book entitled Give Out!, containing what he called authentic soldier songs and what Time magazine described as “the salty songs roared by men away from women.” Postal authorities took one look, labeled the book “lewd and obscene,” and banned it from the U.S. mail. An anonymous reviewer from Yank magazine shook his head in disbelief, saying many of Posselt’s songs sounded as if they’d been written by public-relations officers or Sunday school teachers. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI saw one ditty—“Gee, But I Want to Go Home”—as part of a subversive plot to make soldiers homesick. In reality, it was nothing more than good-natured griping about army chow: “The coffee that they give you/They say is mighty fine/It’s good for cuts and bruises/And tastes like iodine.” On occasion, a song reflected true bitterness. In 1944, Lady Astor, a sharp-tongued member of the British Parliament, reportedly called Allied troops in Italy “D-Day dodgers” because they hadn’t taken part in the Nor-

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Oddly, few songs showed hatred for the enemy. In fact, these verses directed more venom and humor at their own officers than the Germans or Japanese. One exception was a takeoff on the “Colonel Bogey March,” a British tune later immortalized in the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai. It mocked the alleged anatomical peculiarities of the Nazi leaders: “Hitler has only got one ball/Göring has got none at all.”

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PHOTO 12/GETTY IMAGES

Enlisted men aboard the USS Ticonderoga celebrate news of the Japanese surrender. After the war, the song parodies that had been so enjoyed were largely forgotten.

mandy landings. It’s uncertain if Lady Astor actually did say this, but British, American, and Canadian soldiers in Italy believed she had. They were irate because they had suffered greatly and endured heavy losses in the Italian campaign, which lasted more than a year and cost more than 300,000 Allied casualties. British troops used “Lili Marlene,” a German love song as popular with Allied troops as with the enemy, to skewer the viscountess, and this parody caught on with G.I.s, too. The troops bluntly told Lady Astor what they thought of her: “You’re England’s sweetheart and her pride/We think your mouth’s too bloody wide.” They described, with biting sarcasm, their living conditions—“Sleeping ’til noon and playing games/We live in Rome with lots of dames”—and the fighting in Italy: “We

landed at Salerno, a holiday with pay.” But to them, the enduring image was the crosses over the graves of their fallen comrades: “Heartbreak and toil and suffering gone/The boys beneath them slumber on/They are the D-Day Dodgers/who’ll stay in Italy.” After the war, the G.I.s’ lyrics for “Bless ’em All” and other tunes were largely forgotten, as veterans seemed reluctant to disclose to their friends and families the verses they had sung overseas. Maybe the rough language embarrassed them, or perhaps they feared civilians would misunderstand their sardonic wartime humor. There was no reason, of course, to worry either way, for these songs stand as a testament to the wit, resilience, and spunk of those who carried the day at a pivotal moment in history. H

Most commanders tolerated the parodies. They understood the need to gripe, grouse, and blow off steam.

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MAN ON A MISSION

A soldier’s photos document the Allies’ grueling march north through Italy and France By Dave Kindy

Carl Chamberlain went to war with a camera as a paratrooper with the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment (above) and later with the 334th Quartermaster Supply Depot Company—and returned with hundreds of photos. His son, Michael, hopes readers can help him fill in missing pieces of information.

t was some of the war’s most hellish fighting. On September 13, 1943, with just a few hours’ notice, the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division jumped near the front line to support the Allied landings at Salerno, Italy. Two battalions dug in on the commanding high ground around the town of Altavilla Silentina and withstood withering German counterattacks. With casualties mounting, a superior officer suggested that the unit withdraw. The 504th PIR commander, Colonel Reuben H. Tucker, barked back: “Hell no! We’ve got this hill and we are going to keep it.” That was typical of the action endured by the 504th PIR—which later adopted the nickname “Devils in Baggy Pants.” The aftermath of these moments are captured in photos taken by then-paratrooper Carl Chamberlain. The sergeant from Schenevus, New York, was in the thick of the fighting at Altavilla, which helped secure the beachhead at Salerno and allowed American and British soldiers to move inland. He also made a combat jump in Sicily in 1943 and took part in an amphibious landing at Anzio in 1944, where he was injured, before being transfered to an aerial resupply unit, the 334th Quartermaster Supply Depot Company. When the fighting had ceased, Chamberlain took photos of the carnage around him with a Kodak camera he had bought just before jump school. The young soldier snapped images of devastated landscapes, destroyed equipment, downed warplanes, and roadsides lined with graves of the fallen across Italy and France, where he saw action with the 334th. His photos also depict American soldiers at rest, villagers celebrating liberation, and Allied tanks rolling through Italian and French hamlets. All told, the photos offer a fresh and personal view of Europe at war.

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WE SALUTE YOU Sicilian children stand in celebration with American soldiers atop a destroyed German tank (above). The photo was taken in Sicily, likely in March 1944, after Chamberlain returned there by convoy to pack up the 504th’s left-behind gear and belongings.

GROUNDED Chamberlain’s image of a skeletal German Heinkel He 111 bomber missing its mid- and tail sections is probably also from Sicily in March 1944. The damage was likely the result of an airfield bombing.

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MAN ON A MISSION Chamberlain, who died in 1993, left his 900-plus wartime photos to his son, Michael, who recently donated them to the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. Those images are now being conserved and cataloged so they can eventually be posted online. For information about the Veterans History Project, visit www.loc.gov/vets. Michael Chamberlain hopes to learn more about the photos shown here, including the names of soldiers and details about the locations. If you recognize someone or someplace, contact him at: Carl.Chamberlain.WW2@gmail.com. With the 504th in Sicily and Italy and the 334th in France, Carl Chamberlain, like so many others, did his part to ensure victory—and left behind the photos that prove it.

TREASURE LOST… Forlorn-looking English grave markers dot a hillside in Italy near Monte Cassino (above).

…AND FOUND Civilians clamber on a dead German tank (left) at an unknown location in France in fall 1944. By then, Chamberlain had been transferred to the 334th Quartermaster Depot Supply Company.

DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME Two unidentified G.I.s pose with an unexploded bomb in front of a damaged German airplane in Sicily (opposite, top).

A vehicle emerges from the hold of LST-994 on August 16, 1944—the day after the invasion of southern France began (opposite, bottom).

PATCH (OPPOSITE): HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

BIG MOUTH

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The 504th’s nickname originated with the diary entry of a German officer killed at Anzio, who wrote: “American parachutists—devils in baggy pants—are less than 100 meters from my outpost line. I can’t sleep at night.”

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FROM THE SHADOWS Members of the French Resistance—by then known as the French Forces of the Interior— assemble on a street in Nice, France, after the city’s August 28, 1944, liberation.

PILING ON An American reconnaissance vehicle from an as-yet unidentified army unit receives a raucous welcome in Dole, France, in September 1944.

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MAN ON A MISSION FOR THE FRONT Men of the 334th—from left to right: Sergeant Robert Hall (standing), Corporal Cyrus R. Peters, Corporal Pisky, and Private O. P. Peter (full names unknown)—pack .30-caliber ammunition at their base in Dole in February or March 1945 in support of the Seventh Army’s advance across Germany’s Rhine River.

HOMEWARD Chamberlain (right) and technical sergeants Price and Hale wait to board a train in eastern France. Their destination: the port at Marseille—and home.

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TOM LANDRY’S TOUCHDOWN Long before he molded the Dallas Cowboys into Super Bowl champions, the legendary NFL coach honed his fighting instincts in the flak-filled skies above Europe By Mark Oristano

A fresh-faced Tom Landry, aged 19, left college in 1943 after one semester to join the U.S. Army Air Forces.

o you remember how smartly the man dressed? That customtailored jacket, the perfectly knotted tie and, always, that trademark fedora perched at just the right angle? Do you remember Dallas Cowboys head coach Tom Landry, watching from the sidelines on any given NFL Sunday from 1960 to 1988? If you do, then you might also remember the man’s classic demeanor: calm, stoic, concentrating. His players might be celebrating the go-ahead touchdown, but Landry was all business. Getting ready for the next series, focusing four plays ahead, the football grandmaster who led America’s Team to two Super Bowl championships in the 1970s. But you would have had no reason to suspect then that the veteran NFL player and coach was also a veteran of 30 combat bomber missions in World War II, or to have envisioned the unflappable, iron-jawed head coach as a stunned young pilot in the cockpit of a B-17 bomber. “I think the thing that sticks out the most is that I was not prepared for all of it,” Landry told me in a 1981 interview I conducted with him for a documentary on the B-17. “I’d been one semester at the University of Texas. I was called up in February of ’44, when I was 19 years old. And, boy, to go from there—from Mission, Texas—to Europe to fly a bomber… I just really didn’t know what was going on. I just flew my missions, did my job, and came home.” That was four decades ago, but I find I still think of his story often—all the more so after the recent death of my own father, who had served as a naval intelligence officer in World War II. Many who fought in the war have memories they speak of modestly—if they can be coaxed to tell their stories at all. For some these recollections are just too

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THE WAR WAS PERSONAL for Landry in a very painful way. His older brother Robert, whom he idolized, was killed when a B-17 he was ferrying to England exploded over the North Atlantic in September 1942. Robert Landry and his crew were listed as MIA for several weeks; the wait must have been unbearable for his family. Not long after they

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vivid, coming back to them at night in terrible dreams or, when spoken aloud, told through tears with halting voices. They won a global war, came home, went to college on the G.I. Bill, and built a country. And whether they speak of their experiences or maintain a dignified silence, their lives were shaped by the things they saw and did at war—the things they lived through, which so many of their comrades did not.

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Landry trained stateside as a pilot (top, middle row, second from left) before shipping out for England in 1944 to fly for the Eighth Air Force (above). He spent the remainder of the war flying bombing missions over Europe.

received the fateful telegram around Thanksgiving 1943, Landry was called up and sent through basic and pilot training, which had him hopscotching from base to base around the country: Wichita Falls, San Antonio, and Lubbock, Texas; Wilburton, Oklahoma; and finally Sioux City, Iowa, where Landry trained to fly the B-17 Flying Fortress. The training transformed him from University of Texas-Austin football player Tommie Landry into Second Lieutenant Thomas Wade Landry, 860th Bombardment Squadron, 493rd Bombardment Group, Eighth Air Force. From his days learning to fly the four-engine B-17 over America’s heartland to his experiences in the unfriendly skies of Europe, Landry grew to appreciate the Fortress’s legendary toughness. “The B-17 was a great airplane,” Landry said. “It had a tremendous wingspan, and you could get a couple of engines shot out and still make it back on just two engines. The B-17 really saved a lot of American boys’ lives. It could get shot up pretty good before it would go down.” After shipping out to England on the refitted luxury liner Queen Mary, Landry barely had time to learn his way around his airbase near Ipswich, northeast of London on the River Orwell. He took the right seat on November 21, 1944, flying copilot out of Ipswich to bomb the Leuna Werke synthetic oil refinery at Merseburg, in central Germany. Leuna Werke was a vital producer of fuel for the Nazi war machine, and as such, was heavily defended by more than 600 antiaircraft batteries. Bomber crews had nicknamed the region “Murdersburg.” “I never saw anything like that,” Landry recalled. “When we got there, it was just a cloud of black smoke from flak as you headed into the target. And the flak would pound you around pretty good. It was like flying inside a thundercloud. You’d just make the run, drop your bombs, and get out of the target area as quickly as you could.” He made it sound so simple: just drop the bombs and leave the target area. But so much more went into the job. Like Landry’s jaunts to the oil fields in Czechoslovakia—six hours out, six hours back, just to make a two-minute bomb run in a bumpy, bitterly cold aircraft that could turn into a coffin at a moment’s notice. From a vantage point some 40 years

U.S. AIR FORCE/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Struck by enemy fire, a crippled B-17 of the Eighth Air Force lists downward amid a 1944 bombing raid on Merseburg, Germany.

later, Landry spoke of those days like just another one at the office. As we sat in his actual office, where I had interviewed him numerous times over the decade I covered the Cowboys as a sportscaster, I saw a different side of Landry. With a sterling silver Super Bowl trophy gleaming in one corner, he vividly recalled one story after another. We wound up spending nearly an hour and a half discussing his personal war memories. “We tore up one ’17 pretty good when we ran out of gas,” Landry noted, describing an eventful bombing mission over Kolin, Czechoslovakia, on April 18, 1945. “Our alternative airfield was in France, because at the time we didn’t have enough gas left in the tank to make it across the Channel to England. So we went to our alternate, and when we got there it was zero visibility—just totally fogged in. I don’t know how many hundreds of planes might have gone down that day trying to find their alternate field. We were skimming the treetops and the roofs of the houses, trying to find

an airfield. We’d know about where it was from our navigator; he’d tell where it was, and then we’d have to drop down through the fog to find the field. Well, finally we just ran out of gas. We moved everybody to the back of the plane, cut the motors, and looked for a field to land in. But fields over there are lined with trees, not fences. We overshot the field we picked and went right into the trees. The trees knocked the wings off, and when the plane stopped, there was a tree trunk sitting about a foot in front of us where we sat as pilots. Everybody just got up and walked off the plane. Nobody got hurt because there was no gas to explode.” M AY BE NOW YOU R EMEMBER Tom Landry of the Dallas Cowboys just a little better. Maybe you remember rooting for, or against, his team. Either way, maybe you could never understand how the man could remain so calm as 70,000 fans screamed at the top of their lungs and his players tried to execute his complex Flex defense, the big men

“The B-17 really saved a lot of boys’ lives,” Landry said. “It could get shot up pretty good before it would go down.”

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“Goodness gracious, everybody just went to war. Whether you came back or not was not the important thing.”

up front moving to fill the gaps in the line instead of chasing the ball—the exact opposite of what their instincts told them to do. In a time long ago, under much more pressure, Landry had to fight his own instincts during the return from another bombing run over the Netherlands. As he did for nearly all his 30 missions, Landry flew as copilot. (When his aircraft was designated to lead the mission, the group commander took the right seat, relegating Landry to the top turret gun.) But this time, the engines shut down, and Landry and his command pilot issued orders to their crewmates to bail out. The crew prepared to jump, and the hatch was opened. But just before he left the cockpit, the quick-thinking Landry tried one last-ditch maneuver: he reached down and flipped a fuel mixture switch, which instantly brought the engines back to life. The flight back to Ipswich resumed with everybody still on board. So really…how tense do you get on thirdand-two? On mission days the pilots crowded into the briefing room at Ipswich, a Quonset hut where large maps at the front displayed the day’s chosen target area. Landry and his crew leader, Captain Kenneth Sainz, were briefed on the plan of attack along with the 860th Bomb Squadron’s other crews. Before the briefing began, the pilots bantered back and forth. It may have seemed lighthearted, but many of those in the briefing room on any given morning might not be there the next day, nor any day thereafter. That thought was never far from the pilots’ minds, the 19, 20,

21-year-old boys rapidly turning into men. More than once, the wait to get up into the skies was worse than the flying itself. In December 1944 the Battle of the Bulge raged in and around Bastogne, Belgium, where German forces had surrounded the city. The dreadful winter weather—the worst in decades—prevented Allied aircraft from striking. Lieutenant General George S. Patton, there with his Third Army, ordered his chaplain to write a prayer asking for good weather. Landry may not have known about the prayer, but the bad weather was all too familiar to him. “During the Battle of the Bulge I’ll bet we briefed as many as 20 days in a row, but we couldn’t get off the ground. You’d go out, you’d warm up your ship, taxi out, and then they’d scrub the mission. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Too much fog. We just kept going through the same thing over and over, until we finally got up to bomb. And even then, we were bombing through clouds at targets. But that memory, of all those mornings we got up early and hoped we could get up to help the Allies who were surrounded, and we couldn’t even get off the ground.” Landry’s quiet voice went silent, and he looked off into the distance. In football terms it could be said that Tom Landry got into the fight pretty late in the game. And in one sense, that late entry made the job of a bomber pilot in Europe a lot easier: at this point the dreaded Luftwaffe was all but vanquished. “By the time I got there, we’d see a few German fighters, but we pretty much had the Luftwaffe under control by then,” Landry added. “We were battling flak more than the Luftwaffe. We were never really attacked by fighter planes during our missions.” But even in its final months, World War II was still a young man’s war. Young men have that sense of invulnerability: “It can’t happen to me.” Four decades past the war’s end, well into his football career, I asked Landry if he ever thought at the time how dangerous every takeoff, every mission, every landing they made could be. Did this scare him? Did he ever have second thoughts? “Not at all. I could see myself doing it all again, sure. If our country was threatened the way it was at that time—goodness gracious, everybody just went to war. Whether you came back or not was not the important thing. So I could see myself doing it all again.”

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Landry resumed football after the war’s end, playing fullback for the University of Texas-Austin (left) and joining the New York Giants (below) as a defensive back in 1950.

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A MUCH-CHANGED Tom Landry came home after flying 30 missions, returning to his two great loves: Texas and football. He continued his education at the University of Texas-Austin, graduating in 1949 with a degree in electrical engineering. He also celebrated two bowl victories with the Longhorns, including the 1949 Orange Bowl. Not long after that game, he married his college sweetheart, Alicia Wiggs. Landry’s football career began in earnest in 1950, when he joined the New York Giants as a defensive back; four years later, he became an assistant coach. When a new NFL franchise was granted to Dallas in 1960, Landry nabbed the head coaching job. It was a struggle from the start: there were lean losing seasons, not to mention a winless debut year. But with his engineer’s thoroughness and football genius, Tom improved the Cowboys season after season. In 1972’s Super Bowl VI, when Landry’s team beat the Miami Dolphins 24-3, the Dallas Cowboys finally shrugged off the sarcastic title of “Next Year’s Champions”—a nickname hung on them in the mid-’60s by a not-always-kind press corps. Five out of 10 Super Bowls in the 1970s featured the Dallas Cowboys, and in 1978 they beat the Denver Broncos 27-10 to win their second title under Landry in Super Bowl XII. Of course, nothing lasts forever. After 29 years as the only head coach the Cowboys ever had—and following 20 consecutive winning seasons, an NFL record that still stands— Landry was fired when new ownership took over the team. He entered the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1990; in 1999 he was diagnosed with leukemia, and he died in 2000. Arguably, a large portion of the football success of Tom Landry, and the Dallas Cowboys, was born in the cramped cockpit of a B-17—braving the skies over Nazi Germany, flying through deadly flak to bomb an oil field, living to fly another day. Toward the end of my 1981 interview with Landry, I asked him if all his wartime experiences accounted for why he never lost control of his emotions when his team faced a tough situation late in a game. He laughed and said, “Yeah, I guess it is.” After his coaching days were over, Landry decided to obtain his private pilot’s license and return to the cockpit. He bought a singleengine Cessna so he could travel between Dallas and Austin, where he had a second home. In 1995 Tom and Alicia were en route to

Austin in their Cessna when the engine failed just after takeoff. It’s tempting to wonder what ran through Landry’s mind during those dangerous minutes. Did his days in a B-17 cockpit flash before his eyes? Did he feel the same catch in his throat? Or did his engineer’s mind run down a mental checklist to try and solve the problem? We will never know what he was thinking. What we do know is that private pilot Tom Landry, cool, calm, and unflappable, landed his powerless Cessna in an open area in the city of Ennis, Texas. He put it down right next to the high school’s football field. H

When Landry was the Cowboys’ coach (top, in 1980), his fedora became an ever-present signature. Following his death from leukemia in 2000, Cowboys players including quarterback Troy Aikman (bottom) donned jerseys emblazoned with miniature hats in Landry’s memory.

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REVIEWS BOOKS

By John C. McManus. 656 pp. Dutton Caliber, 2021. $35.

amphibious combat assaults, it was the army that furnished more than 20 divisions and conducted many dozens more such landings. McManus’s well-written and superbly researched account does much to restore the historical balance. McManus describes more than just the terrible ordeals of combat in steaming jungles and incessant rain: he covers the often-horrifying trials of American prisoners of war, the harmful impact of racism on African American soldiers and so-called “native” people, and the essential intelligence roles performed

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ISLAND INFERNOS The U.S. Army’s Pacific War Odyssey, 1944

ISLAND INFERNOS is one of those rare books where the hype on the book jacket is understated. Author John C. McManus continues his trilogy of the U.S. Army in the AsiaPacific War against Japan, which kicked off with Fire and Fortitude (2019), spanning 194143. This second installment covers the tumultuous year of 1944, focusing on battles in New Guinea, Burma, the Marianas, the Philippines, and numerous other islands. McManus notes that while Pacific War coverage tends to be dominated by the exploits of the Marines, who fielded six divisions and mounted 15

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BOOTS ON THE GROUND

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1st Cavalry Division troopers show off their weapons (and captured Japanese souvenirs) at the end of a two-week patrol on Leyte in 1944.

by Japanese American soldiers as interrogators and interpreters. He does not shy away from the presence of rampant pilfering and souvenirhunting by soldiers, nor other army vices, even revealing a G.I. recipe for making potent “jungle juice.” He also provides graphic descriptions of the massive logistical requirements to conduct operations in the Pacific Theater, and how both the army and navy conducted the war across vast distances and awful terrain. But the heart of his book deals with the on-the-ground realities of Pacific War battles and the men who fought them, from privates to generals. McManus provides firsthand accounts from both sides of the conflict, illustrating a war without quarter, where enemy wounded were usually shot and prisoners were rarely taken. Each important wartime leader receives a detailed character sketch to clarify their motivations and actions: not just top army brass like Generals Douglas MacArthur and Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, but also non-army figures including Marine Corps generals like Roy Geiger and Holland Smith and admirals like Chester W. Nimitz and Daniel E. Barbey. McManus also reveals surprising details about Japan’s wartime commanders, and their thoughts and strategies as they attempted to stem the American onslaught. The book ends with MacArthur poised to invade Luzon, and his foes increasingly desperate and resorting even more to suicidal resistance such as the kamikaze. Students of World War II should eagerly await the publication of his trilogy’s next volume, covering 1945. —Conrad Crane is a historian at the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center and serves on the National WWII Museum’s President’s Council.

Vernon Baker, 77, a former platoon leader with the 370th Infantry Regiment, receives the Medal of Honor from President Bill Clinton in 1997.

REVIEWS BOOKS

A DISTINCTION DEFERRED W ITH SUPER B SCHOL A RSHIP and incisive prose, Immortal Valor, Robert Child’s new book on the seven African American soldiers of World War II who received the Medal of Honor, offers a compelling addition to our understanding of military culture and race relations. Throughout American history, the U.S. military has depended heavily on the manpower and fighting prowess provided by people of color. Black soldiers and sailors have shown exceptional patriotism and courage in combat, largely in a quest to gain the respect and gratitude to justify full equality, civil rights, and opportunity. That quest proved challenging during World War II, as Child, a prolific author of military history, demonstrates. Although the Medal of Honor (MOH), the IMMORTAL VALOR nation’s highest military distinction, was granted The Black Medal of to Black servicemen who fought in the Civil War, Honor Winners of the so-called “American Indian Wars,” and the World War II Spanish-American War, none were awarded to By Robert Child. 288 pp. African Americans during World War I. And, Osprey Publishing, while 473 MOHs have been awarded in total for actions during World War II, none were awarded 2022. $30. contemporaneously to any Black men, even though approximately 1.2 million African American servicemen fought in the war, and some were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and other honors for valor. This egregious neglect, according to Child, clearly resulted from stubborn White animosity, discrimination, persecution, and systemic racism against African Americans. Such prejudice was reinforced by the longstanding practice of restricting Blacks to segregated units and mostly inferior positions. (continued on page 73) FEBRUARY 2022

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BRANDNEW RIDE

BROTHERS IN ARMS One Legendary Tank Regiment’s Bloody War from D-Day to V-E Day

By James Holland. 592 pp. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2021. $32.

“I HOPE TO BE LAUGHING AT LIFE with you again before so many months,” English lieutenant Bill Wharton wrote to his pregnant wife Marion, “[and I’m] looking forward with so much anticipation to seeing that smile of yours when we next meet.” This reads like a typical soldier’s wartime letter, but the dateline is particularly poignant: it was written on June 1, 1944. Five days later, on D-Day, Wharton’s tank regiment, the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, made an assault landing on the coast of Normandy. The vast bulk of the British Army of World War II consisted of men like Wharton, who had worked in his father’s printing business before the war. They were not professional but temporary solders, who wanted nothing more than to see the job through to the end, be “demobbed,” and go home to their families. In Brothers in Arms James Holland skillfully tells the story of a quintessential British regiment of civilians in uniform. Prewar, the Sherwood Rangers had been a Territorial Army unit of part-time “Saturday Night Soldiers,” the British equivalent of the National Guard. But as Holland makes clear in

this engrossing book, the Rangers evolved into a highly effective instrument of combat. Originally horse-mounted cavalry, the regiment converted to tanks and learned the hard way how to fight in the desert; it suffered badly at the Battle of El Alamein in 1942 but emerged as a tough and tested unit. Its 194445 campaign, which began on Normandy’s beaches and ended deep inside Germany, was bloody, but successful. Holland’s story concentrates on D-Day onward, recounting the Sherwood Rangers’ battles in Normandy; their drive into Belgium and the Netherlands, with a particularly tough fight at Geel, Belgium, in September 1944; and then, in early 1945, the invasion of Germany itself: Operation Veritable and the Rhine crossing. He follows a group of characters including the Rangers’ commanding officer, Stanley Christopherson; their chaplain, Leslie Skinner; and troopers and lieutenants such as Wharton. In doing so he gives a human face to a complex story. Holland, author of this magazine’s “Need to Know” column, is a historian at the height of his powers with an enviable mastery of his subject. For this book he conducted deep archival research and interviewed the regiment’s veterans and their families, gleaning a wealth of new information and anecdotes. For me, his greatest insight is how the Sherwood Rangers developed from a mere military unit into a community—even a family. Readers also learn much about tank warfare, the British Army, and the bitter fighting in northwest Europe during World War II. And Bill Wharton? On D-Day he narrowly escaped death when his amphibious Sherman capsized in the rough sea off Gold Beach. Later in the campaign he was wounded, but he survived the war, came home to Marion, and died in 1986. Brothers in Arms is a wonderfully readable tribute to him and his comrades and, by extension, to all the citizen soldiers of the Allied armies. —Gary Sheffield is a military historian at England’s University of Wolverhampton. He is currently writing Civilian Armies, a comparative history of the experience of soldiers from Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa in World War I and World War II.

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS B15299

Initially a cavalry unit, by D-Day the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry had become one of Britain’s most battle-hardened tank regiments.

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( Immortal Valor, continued from page 71)

In 1992, the army asked researchers at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, to conduct a rigorous investigation to determine which soldiers deserved the MOH. Ten men were recommended; the army selected seven, the World War II total to date. In 1997, President Bill Clinton awarded the MOH to these individuals in a White House ceremony. Child provides brief biographies of each— some who survived the war, others who did not—with dramatic details and keen analysis. Edward A. Carter Jr. (1916-63), a staff sergeant in the 56th Armored Infantry Battalion, began his military career in Shanghai fighting the invading Japanese at the age of 15. Later serving in the army in Europe, he came under fire and was wounded five times after escaping a German antitank rocket in March 1945. Eight Germans soldiers tried to capture him; he killed six and took the other two as prisoners, using them as human shields to escape. MOH recipients killed in action include Lieutenant John R. Fox (1915-1944), who served with the 598th Artillery Battalion. Part of a small group of forward observers in the Italian campaign in 1944, Fox saw his battalion withdraw from a village in the face of a German assault. Fox remained behind and radioed for American artillery to fire on his position. Private George Watson (1914-43) of the 2nd Battalion, 29th Quartermaster Regiment, was the only MOH recipient whose heroics occurred in the Pacific Theater. Ordered to abandon ship after Japanese bombers attacked his troop transport off New Guinea in 1943, Watson helped scores of sailors into life rafts instead of saving himself. Working relentlessly, an exhausted Watson was pulled under the water by the suction of the sinking vessel. Lieutenant Vernon Baker (1919-2010) was the only figure in Child’s book who lived to receive the MOH personally from President Clinton. Enlisting in June 1941, Baker became a platoon leader in the 370th Infantry Regiment, 92nd Infantry Division. In 1945, he participated in an assault on a German stronghold in Italy. Operating against hellish enemy firepower for an astonishing 19 hours, Baker and his men eliminated several fortified machine gun nests and other positions at the top of a hill. When informed in 1997 that he would be granted the MOH, Baker said candidly that “it was something I felt should have been done long ago.” Despite the substantial delay in granting the MOH to African American heroes, World War II was the first American war that made a positive difference in overcoming the steep hill of racial inequality: President Harry S. Truman’s 1948 executive order desegregating all U.S. forces accelerated the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, a pivotal part of a long and unfinished struggle that Black servicemen and servicewomen and their allies continue to this day. Child’s book is an effective and admirable contribution to that struggle. —T. Michael Parrish is the Bowers Professor of American History at Baylor University. His latest book, coauthored with Thomas W. Cutrer, is Doris Miller, Pearl Harbor, and the Birth of the Civil Rights Movement (2017).

REVIEWS BOOKS

TOTAL WAR A People’s History of World War II

By Kate Clements, Paul Cornish, Vikki Hawkins. 288 pp. Thames & Hudson, 2021. $50. Curators at the Imperial War Museums in London wrote this display-worthy tome featuring photos, maps, infographics, and artifacts to tell a global history of World War II, from the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 to the new geopolitical order that rose from the war’s ashes post-1945. A total overview of total war.

REVIEWS FILMS CAMP CONFIDENTIAL: America’s Secret Nazis Directed by Daniel Sivan, Mor Loushy. 35 minutes. Netflix, 2021.

Short yet shocking, this mini-documentary— a mix of filmed interviews, audio recordings, and animated flashbacks—relies on the accounts of former “Ritchie Boys.” Joining the U.S. Army as young German Jewish refugees, the men first interrogated Nazis at Maryland’s Camp Ritchie—then, as the Cold War loomed, were ordered to woo their top scientists.

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YOUNG READERS

Fresh titles for budding World War II buffs ages 9 through 15+

EYEWITNESS WORLD WAR II

DK Children. 72 pp. 2021. $16.99. Ages 9-12.

REVIEWS GAMES

FROM THE ASHES CALL OF DUTY: VANGUARD

Sledgehammer Games/Activision. $59.99 to $69.99. Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, PC.

WORLD WAR II RATING

HHHHH

THE BASICS Call of Duty: Vanguard is a first-person shooter

game set throughout World War II’s many global fronts, from North Africa to the Pacific. It features a single-player campaign as well as competitive multiplayer modes and the return of a surreal Call of Duty staple: “Zombies” cooperative multiplayer.

THE OBJECTIVE As the Third Reich begins to crumble, an elite Special Operations Executive team attempts to disrupt the secretive Nazi “Project Phoenix”—a plot to regroup and continue the war following Hitler’s death. Vanguard follows characters as they travel and fight around the globe; a multiplayer mode pits them against each other in arena combat or offers them the chance to team up and fight hordes of Nazi zombies. HISTORICAL ACCURACY Zombies aside, Vanguard isn’t histori-

cally accurate. For one, the story itself is fictional, featuring madeup conspiracies and no specific real-life figures. Even though it revisits famous battles, the episodes at each are only loosely inspired by true events. Perhaps the most glaring issue for purists is its weaponry: for example, both German and Japanese troops carry German-made Becker revolving shotguns; in reality, only 100 were ever produced.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY Call of Duty: Vanguard’s

clear strengths are its characters and gunplay, and gorgeous visuals. The combat is tense and impactful, and its band of fighters are well-written, if slightly clichéd. Yet the story itself doesn’t feel fresh and original, especially for those familiar with World War II-related games.

PLAYABILITY

The controls for Vanguard should feel familiar to anyone who’s played first-person shooter games.

THE BOTTOM LINE Call of Duty: Vanguard provides a fun and

hectic shooter experience—but if you’re looking for a realistic, gritty World War II game, this is not it. —Dominic Geppi is a high school history teacher and a lifetime consumer of historybased video games.

From Pearl Harbor to codebreaking successes and new technologies, kids learn the basics of World War II warfare and history from this colorful, easy-to-read picture book produced in collaboration with London’s Imperial War Museums.

A REBEL IN AUSCHWITZ The True Story of the Resistance Hero who Fought the Nazis from Inside the Camp By Jack Fairweather. 352 pp. Scholastic Focus, 2021. $18.99. Ages 12 and up. This adaptation of English journalist Jack Fairweather’s 2019 book for adults, The Volunteer, recounts the courageous story of Witold Pilecki, the Polish army officer who voluntarily infiltrated Auschwitz as a prisoner to expose its atrocities.

WHEN CAN WE GO BACK TO AMERICA? Voices of Japanese American Incarceration During WWII By Susan H. Kamei. 736 pp. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2021. $22.99. Ages 15 and up. Teens learn about the U.S. detention of Japanese American citizens through the eyes of adolescents: more than 130 individuals, many themselves young adults during World War II, recall their lives pre- and post-incarceration in this somber book.

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HISTORYNET.COM

s PHluWHEN

HEMINGWAY WENT FROM WRITER TO FIGHTER H HOW U.S. CRYPTOLOGISTS BROKE JAPAN’S PURPLE CODE

Japanese airman Nobuo Fujita

I BOMBED AMERICA THE ONLY PILOT TO STRIKE THE MAINLAND FACED AN UNLIKELY RECKONING

JUNE 2020

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EXC LU S I V E

TORPEDOED! AMERICAN SUBS IN THE PACIFIC KILLED FAR MORE ENEMY THAN PREVIOUSLY KNOWN — page 28

Plus

E THE CLEVER RUS AIN’S THAT SNARED BRIT WOULD-BE NAZIS SAVED LIE HOW A RUSSIAN EN DOWNED U.S. AIRM

Japanese transport Teiko Maru succumbs to a torpedo from the USS Puffer on February 22, 1944.

APRIL 2021

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HISTORYNET.COM

D-DAY 75 TH ANNIVERSARY

OMAHA

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ALLIED TROOPS HAD ONLY ONE CHANCE TO MAKE A FLAWED PLAN WORK — page 38

THE LAST JAPANESE HOW MANY TIMES SOLDIER HAS THEFROM DESIGN WORLD OF THE WAR U.S.IIFLAG SURRENDERED CHANGED? IN THIS YEAR 27, 31, 36 or 40?

- 1945 - 1947 - 1950 - 1974 For more,search visitDAILY QUIZ For more,

WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ at HistoryNet.com. MAGAZINES/QUIZ HistoryNet.com

ANSWER: 1974. PRIVATE TERUO NAKAMURA, A TAIWANESE NATIONAL,27. ENLISTED IN THE JAPANESE ARMY IN 1943. ANSWER: THE CURRENT DESIGN HAS BEEN IN HE HELD OUT ON 1960 MORTAI IN INDONESIA HE WAS CAPTURED PLACE SINCE WHEN THE FLAGUNTIL WAS MODIFIED IN DECEMBER 1974. EARLIER THAT YEAR, HIRO ONODA, WHO TO INCLUDE HAWAII, THE 50th STATE. HELD OUT IN THE PHILLIPINES, FINALLY SURRENDERED.

JUNE 2019

H I STORMED ASHORE WITH ROBERT CAPA H WHY A FAMED MYSTIC SPOOKED THE ROYAL NAVY H PRE-INVASION MADNESS IN ENGLAND

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BATTLE FILMS BY MARK GRIMSLEY

PASSION

WHEN WE THINK OF PASSION, we think of something akin to ardent conviction. That’s the kind of passion exemplified by Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt, a historian of the Holocaust whose book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, made waves when published in 1993. It also brought a lawsuit for libel from David Irving, a once-respected historian turned Holocaust denier singled out in the book. Directed by Mick Jackson and released in 2016, Denial tells the story of the remarkable courtroom battle that followed. In the film, as in life, Irving (portrayed by English actor Timothy Spall) files suit against Penguin Books, the London-based parent company of Lipstadt’s book publisher, the New York-based Free

Press. It’s a shrewd move by Irving, for British libel laws differ from those in the United States: in the States, the plaintiff must prove that the defendant’s claims are not just inaccurate, but malicious. In Britain, the onus is on the defendant to demonstrate that their claims are both accurate and that the plaintiff knowingly distorted the facts. This requires Lipstadt’s attorneys—or more precisely, those employed by Penguin Books—to prove two things: first, that the Holocaust occurred; and second, that Irving deliberately distorted evidence in an attempt to prove that it didn’t. Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) flies to London to meet with her extensive legal team. In many respects, they are an impressive lot, led by Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott), the solicitor chiefly responsible for preparing the case, and Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson), the barrister who will present the case in court. In one respect, however, they arouse Lipstadt’s ire: they won’t let her testify. They also won’t let Holocaust survivors testify. In both cases, the legal team fears that they would simply give Irving—who, arrogantly, is representing himself—the opportunity to grandstand and, in the bargain, humiliate victims who have suffered enough. Lipstadt can scarcely believe it. Nor can she fathom the dangerous possibility that without exceptional care in presenting their evidence, Irving stands a good chance of making his case that mass murders at Auschwitz—and by easy extension, the Holocaust—did not happen. For one thing, the Nazis permitted no photographs of the killings at Auschwitz (or at any other death camp). For another, they dynamited its gas chambers in 1944, and again in 1945. Such quibbles don’t matter to Lipstadt; the truth of the Holocaust is so obvious that no serious person could deny it. Yet any person, Holocaust denier or not, is entitled to equal justice under law. Her attorneys grasp this, even if she can’t. Thus, when Lipstadt and some legal staff, including Rampton, visit Auschwitz, Rampton’s attitude is seemingly the polar opposite of hers. He arrives late for the rendezvous outside Auschwitz, an act of disrespect that offends Lipstadt, and cuts short a museum

PICTURELUX/THE HOLLYWOOD ARCHIVE/ALAMY (BOTH)

Mick Jackson’s Denial (2016) dramatizes the reallife courtroom clash between a Holocaust Studies professor and a contentious revisionist historian.

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Any person, Holocaust denier or not, is entitled to equal justice under law. scarcely lay eyes on him. In the end, Irving not only loses his case but is utterly discredited. Denial demonstrates that there is more than one kind of passion: there is the passion of Lipstadt, all afire with fierce certainties; and the passion of attorneys, devoted to the law and what the law, when properly used, can accomplish. Indeed, there are all sorts of passions in the world. And we need them all. H

PICTURELUX/THE HOLLYWOOD ARCHIVE/ALAMY (BOTH)

guide who describes Auschwitz as the “most efficient killing machine in human history.” “Yes, we know what it is,” Rampton snaps. “It’s how we prove what it is. We’re not here on a pilgrimage. We’re preparing a case.” Later, in the trial’s early stages, Lipstadt encounters a Holocaust survivor who says that she and other survivors must be allowed to testify on behalf of the millions of dead who cannot speak. Lipstadt assures her that “the voice of suffering will be heard.” But when she tells Julius, the case’s solicitor, that she has made this promise, he is implacable. “A trial, I’m afraid, is not therapy,” he retorts. And as for her promise: “You had better go back out there and break your promise.” Not until the trial nears its climax does Lipstadt begin seeing what is really going on. Julius and the staff, in preparing the case, have armed Rampton with all he needs to demolish Irving. Again and again, Rampton invalidates Irving’s deliberate inaccuracies, his sophistries, his contentions that Zyklon B, an insecticide used to slaughter over a million victims, was really used only to treat the lice-infested corpses—never mind that the corpses were immediately cremated— and that evidence showing that humans had occupied the gas chambers merely reflected that the chambers did double-duty as air raid shelters for SS personnel. Here the reason for Rampton’s tardy arrival at their Auschwitz rendezvous becomes clear: he was pacing the distance from the SS barracks to the gas chambers, over two miles, to show the absurdity of Irving’s explanation. And throughout, as he thunders away, Rampton deliberately avoids looking straight at Irving, as if Irving were so loathsome that one could

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STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION (required by Act of August 12, 1970: Section 3685, Title 39, United States Code). 1. World War II 2. (ISSN: 0898-4204) 3. Filing date: 10/1/21. 4. Issue frequency: Bi Monthly. 5. Number of issues published annually: 6. 6. The annual subscription price is $39.95. 7. Complete mailing address of known office of publication: HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203. 8. Complete mailing address of headquarters or general business office of publisher: HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203. 9. Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor. Publisher, Michael A. Reinstein, HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203, Editor, Karen Jensen, HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203, Editor in Chief, Alex Neill, HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203. 10. Owner: HistoryNet; 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203. 11. Known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent of more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: None. 12. Tax status: Has Not Changed During Preceding 12 Months. 13. Publisher title: World War II. 14. Issue date for circulation data below: October 2021. 15. The extent and nature of circulation: A. Total number of copies printed (Net press run). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 61,533. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 62,895. B. Paid circulation. 1. Mailed outside-county paid subscriptions. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 42,420. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 41,689. 2. Mailed in-county paid subscriptions. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 3. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 5,381. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 6,382. 4. Paid distribution through other classes mailed through the USPS. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. C. Total paid distribution. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 47,801. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date; 48,071. D. Free or nominal rate distribution (by mail and outside mail). 1. Free or nominal Outside-County. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 2. Free or nominal rate in-county copies. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 3. Free or nominal rate copies mailed at other Classes through the USPS. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 4. Free or nominal rate distribution outside the mail. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 617. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 607. E. Total free or nominal rate distribution. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 617. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 607. F. Total free distribution (sum of 15c and 15e). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 48,418. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 48,678. G. Copies not Distributed. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 13,115. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 14,217. H. Total (sum of 15f and 15g). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 61,533. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing: 62,895. I. Percent paid. Average percent of copies paid for the preceding 12 months: 98.7% Actual percent of copies paid for the preceding 12 months: 98.8% 16. Electronic Copy Circulation: A. Paid Electronic Copies. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. B. Total Paid Print Copies (Line 15c) + Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 47,801. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 48,071. C. Total Print Distribution (Line 15f) + Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 48,418. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 48,678. D. Percent Paid (Both Print & Electronic Copies) (16b divided by 16c x 100). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 98.7%. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 98.8%. I certify that 50% of all distributed copies (electronic and print) are paid above nominal price: Yes. Report circulation on PS Form 3526-X worksheet 17. Publication of statement of ownership will be printed in the February 2022 issue of the publication. 18. Signature and title of editor, publisher, business manager, or owner: Shawn G. Byers, VP, Audience Development & Circula11/12/21 1:50 PM tion. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanction and civil actions.

CHALLENGE

DON’T LOOK NOW

HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN WALKER

We altered this photo of British soldiers undergoing machine gun training to create one inaccuracy. What is it?

Answer to the October Challenge: We tampered with this

technical sergeant’s patch, replacing its “T” with an “A.” There were many correct answers this time—and some interesting incorrect ones. No, we did not black out the tooth of the man on the right, nor add George H. W. Bush’s face to the soldier on the far left. Intriguing ideas, though. Thanks, all.

Congratulations to the winners: Joseph T. Budzyn, Owen

Sauer, and John Vargas

Please send your answer with

your name and mailing address to: February 2022 Challenge,World War II, 901 N. Glebe Rd., 5th Fl., Arlington, VA 22203; or email: challenge@historynet. com. Three winners, chosen at random from all correct entries submitted by February 15, will receive Island Infernos by John C. McManus. The answer will appear in the June 2022 issue.

FEBRUARY 2022

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FAMILIAR FACE

COWBOY CODE

PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY; INSET: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Gene Autry—the “Singing Cowboy”—was a staple of American culture during his multi-decade show business career, recording nearly 650 songs and appearing in close to 100 films beginning in the 1930s. In 1942, duty called. On July 26, Autry enlisted in the U.S. Army—live on his Melody Ranch radio show. Bypassing the USO circuit popular with wartime entertainers, Autry earned his wings at Love Field, Texas, with the Army Air Forces in June 1944 and flew cargo planes with Air Transport Command, including a C-109 trip over the notorious Himalayan “Hump.” After the war, Autry developed 10 “Cowboy Codes” as moral guidelines for his film characters. Rule number 10? “The cowboy is a patriot.” American icon Gene Autry brought his roles to life.

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Lives Remembered are never Lost

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