WW2 October 2021 by HistoryNet

CONVICTED OF TREASON AND BEHEADED ON HITLER’S ORDER, she was an American at the center of the resistance. So why is her story little known? —page 30

PlAuDVsENTURES OF THE WAR’SW INE PO ONLY OFFICIAL CAN A FFE THE SECRET LUUFLTDWHAVE TOOL THAT CORITAIN DESTROYED B

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The only official canine POW of the war, Judy, here in 1948, saved lives and inspired her human companions, giving new meaning to the term “good dog.” TOPFOTO COVER: COURTESY OF THE DONNER FAMILY; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN WALKER

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O CTO B E R 2021 ENDORSED BY THE NATIONAL WORLD WAR II MUSEUM, INC.

F E AT U R E S COVE R STO RY

30 MILDRED’S STORY

An American in Germany’s anti-Nazi resistance, she lost her life to Hitler—and her legacy to the Cold War REBECCA DONNER

38 BATTLE OF THE BEAMS

Germany devised an invisible weapon that could devastate Britain; one young physicist led the charge against it ROBERT HUTTON

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

48 RIDING SHOTGUN

Japan’s Rikuo Type 97 motorcycle

50 MY SIX-MONTH FURLOUGH

He jumped out of a burning B-17—and into the hands of the Germans. A former POW remembers BILL LIVINGSTONE

P O RT F O L I O

58 TRASH INTO TREASURE

Trench art was a product of idle hands, spare materials—and a desire to create rather than destroy KIRSTIN FAWCETT

64 DOG DAYS OF WAR

An English Pointer survived Japanese prison camps, proving that resilience isn’t just for humans STEVEN TRENT SMITH

D E PA RT M E N T S

8 MAIL 10 WORLD WAR II TODAY 18 CONVERSATION

One of the U.S. Army’s “Ritchie Boys” on the tricks of his trade

22 FROM THE FOOTLOCKER 24 NEED TO KNOW 26 TRAVEL

Haunting reminders of the past persist in Szczecin, Poland

70 REVIEWS

Hitler’s war on art and the disabled; new Medal of Honor game; more

76 BATTLE FILMS

Das Boot’s deep dive into the degradations of service in a sub

79 CHALLENGE 8O FAMILIAR FACE OCTOBER 2021

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The Luftwaffe’s Hanns Scharff Michael A. Reinstein CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER David Steinhafel PUBLISHER Alex Neill EDITOR IN CHIEF

VOL. 36, NO. 3 OCTOBER 2021

WORLDWARII.com

In Bill Livingstone’s “My Six-Month Furlough” (page 50), the former B-17 gunner relays his experiences with a Luftwaffe interrogator. Intrigued? Check out these related stories:

Secrets of the Nazi Interrogators

By James S. Corum The Luftwaffe developed masterful techniques for milking Allied airmen for information. Genial Hanns Scharff (above) was so skilled, airmen often didn’t realize they’d been questioned.

For You the War is Over

By Richard A. Gray Interrogators “named my group commander, squadron commander, operations officer, and even my supply officer,” the author, a P-51 pilot, recalls. “I must have shown no recognition of that last man for they quickly responded, ‘You probably don’t know him since he is very new.’”

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CONTRIBUTORS REBECCA DONNER (“Mildred’s Story”) is the author of three critically acclaimed books, most recently All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days (2021), a work of nonfiction about her great-great-aunt Mildred Harnack. Born in Vancouver, Donner studied at the University of California-Berkeley and Columbia University. Her essays, reportage, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times and Bookforum. JEREMY GRAY (“Power Trip”) first visited the

Polish city of Szczecin in 2019 and loved it so much he decided to become a part-time resident. He has written on finance for Bloomberg News, the Financial Times, and Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper and has contributed to numerous travel guidebooks for National Geographic, Lonely Planet, and Dorling Kindersley (DK). He divides his time between Szczecin and Potsdam, Germany.

ROBERT HUTTON (“Battle of the Beams”) is a British journalist and author who writes about intelligence history. He became interested in the story of physicist and intelligence expert R. V. Jones while researching his 2019 book, Agent Jack, which touched on one of Jones’s wartime adventures. His article features not just spies but also science and airplanes, making it utterly compelling to Hutton’s inner schoolboy.

COVER STORY DONNER

BILL LIVINGSTONE (“My Six-Month Furlough”)

LIVINGSTONE

HUTTON

SMITH

STEVEN TRENT SMITH (“Dog Days of War”) first wrote about war dogs in the April 2014 issue of World War II (“A Few Good Marines”). While researching that article he came across the story of Judy, the English Pointer who saved numerous Allied lives during the war; he recently reckoned it was time to get reacquainted with her heroics. Smith is an Emmy-award-winning TV photojournalist who lives in northwest Montana, in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains.

PORTRAITS BY JOHANNA GOODMAN

GRAY

was discharged from the U.S. Army in 1945 shortly after being liberated as a POW in Germany. He received his architecture degree from the University of Southern California in 1950; then, after spending a year in the air force during the Korean War, he returned to California and worked as an urban planner in Riverside, Irvine, and Santa Barbara before retiring in 1994. Livingstone is the author of the book Remembering World War II: Recollections of a POW in Germany.

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I asked her what she was doing in England: “I can’t tell you. It’s confidential.” Without being able to discuss her military experiences, I asked if she liked music during the war. Without hesitation, she said, “Why, of course.” Like that was a silly question. I asked her if she preferred Benny Goodman or Tommy Dorsey: “Tommy Dorsey, of course.” She then told me that there were several places where she could go dancing every night. I asked her if she had a favorite dance partner. She said that she liked to dance with lots of guys. With kind of a far-off look, she said that the soldiers were fun to party with, but they couldn’t hold a candle to the guys who flew planes on missions over Europe. The soldiers were confident they were going to be back the next night for more dancing and fun, but the “flyboys” never knew when they’d be back, or if they’d ever be back again. The flyboys would dance with her until the dance hall closed, or when her legs gave out— whichever came first. This secretive veteran couldn’t talk about her job, but when her day of work was over, she and her young girlfriends certainly knew how to party. Jerry Conner Winnetka, Ill.

PARTY AT THE END OF THE WORLD YOUR JUNE “CONVERSATION” with World War II codebreaker Delores Burdett [“Code of Silence”] reminded me of a woman I met a dozen years ago at the Veterans Home in Nebraska. She was sitting in a wheelchair, holding a small American flag, and wearing a pin signifying she was a World War II vet. I sat down next to her and asked where she had been stationed. She said England; I asked her where in England, and she said, “I can’t tell you.” Not knowing why,

My father, Robert Miller Sherrard, was a first lieutenant in the 2nd Marine Division. He hitched a ride into combat in May 1944 on the USS Cavalier, an attack transport heading to Saipan. During the voyage, my father got to know the subject of June’s “Familiar Face,” actor Cesar Romero. Following the war, when Cesar Romero was touring, he stayed in contact with my father when he would be putting on a show in Dallas, Texas. When there was a show at Fair Park Musical Auditorium, Romero would call my father and let him know that he had four willcall tickets and stage passes. My father would take me backstage after the show to meet him and the other singers and dancers. It was a rare occasion that I heard my father talk about the war and what he did. Romero was a very gracious man who provided my father an opportunity to remember

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; GUY ACETO COLLECTION; CBS VIA GETTY IMAGES

Men of the 101st Airborne Division dance the night away at a paratrooper-themed officers’ ball held at Greenham Lodge in Berkshire, England.

Cesar Romero, on shore leave from the Coast Guard in 1943.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; GUY ACETO COLLECTION; CBS VIA GETTY IMAGES

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

the good times during a very dark and bleak period for the United States. It was one of the few times my father spoke about the four years in his life that are missing. James H. Sherrard Plano, Texas

THE PRIVILEGE OF PEACE

James Holland’s June column [“Leading on the Fly”] focused on the hardships faced by World War II troops, noting, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” I had a similar thought years ago when I exited the theater in Madison, Wisconsin, during the opening weekend of Saving Private Ryan. Fiction though it is, it still reflected the experience of fighting for one’s life in the face of so many challenges.

Saving Private Ryan’s depiction of war serves as a potent reminder of sacrifice.

From the darkened theater, I stepped out onto the sun-filled sidewalk of a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Young people strolled together, enjoying it all. And my first thought was that they had no idea of the experience that people their age had faced in World War II. But then my second thought was that that is exactly what the war was fought for—so that these young people could stroll blissfully in peace. The lessons of history must be consciously learned. Even if the events of history seem distant and like they “can’t happen here,” the reality is that the same human problems persist, and the best tool for dealing with them is to learn from the past. And that must be done consciously, with a will to seek out the true lessons of history and not some glorified or distorted version. These lessons only work when the occasionally brutal reality—not fantasy—is what is studied. Wesley Johnston Indio, Calif.

FROM THE EDITOR In fiction, the trope of the unreliable narrator has been used to great effect in recent works of suspense. It ramps up the mystery and potential for stunning plot twists; Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl is a prime example. But what if an unreliable narrator is behind a work of nonfiction? That’s what Rebecca Donner found when she began researching the life of a distant relative, Mildred Harnack—an American resistance leader in Germany executed on Hitler’s direct order. For years Mildred’s story was colored by former Nazis and by the Cold War era; now Donner’s deep research and access to unique documents has revealed a much more complicated and nuanced story. She tells it brilliantly beginning on page 30—a “gone girl” tale of dedication and commitment. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I do. —Karen Jensen

HEAVY HITTERS

In James Holland’s column in the June issue, he mentions the 84th Infantry Division, which battled in November 1944 alongside the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry in Geilenkirchen, Germany. My late father was a combat infantryman who was with the 84th in France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany, right up to the Elbe, where they had to stop. The 84th was on the tip of the spear when the Germans pushed into the “Bulge.” My dad said the Germans drove them back 20-plus miles on Christmas Eve 1944 and that artillery was firing 360 degrees. He went a week or more without sleep. My father lived to be 102 ½ years old. He was so proud of his World War II service, he had both his Railsplitters patch and “CIB” (combat infantryman badge) engraved on his headstone. Robert Nash Ridgeville, Ind.

A reader shares his father’s formative experiences serving with the Railsplitters, a.k.a. the U.S. Army’s 84th Infantry Division; members sported this aptly designed patch.

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WWII TODAY

A university researcher has discovered documents (above) revealing the ultimate fate of Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo (right).

WORLD WAR II

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FROM TOP: ANDIA/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES; LE TÉLÉGRAMME/CÉLINE LE STRAT

MYSTERY OF TOJO’S REMAINS SOLVED

FROM TOP: AP PHOTO/KOJI SASAHARA; KYODO VIA AP IMAGES

REPORTED AND WRITTEN BY PAUL WISEMAN

FROM TOP: ANDIA/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES; LE TÉLÉGRAMME/CÉLINE LE STRAT

FROM TOP: AP PHOTO/KOJI SASAHARA; KYODO VIA AP IMAGES

HIDETOSHI TOJO always thought that his notorious great-grandfather’s remains— some of them, anyway—were buried in the family plot in the Ikebukuro district of northwestern Tokyo. But their real location remained unknown until June, when a Japanese researcher revealed that the Allies had cremated wartime prime minister Hideki Tojo in secret and scattered his ashes in the Pacific Ocean after hanging him as a war criminal on December 23, 1948. The revelation resolves one of World War II’s lingering mysteries. The answer came “by chance” as Hiroaki Takazawa of Nihon University, while researching the war crimes trials that followed Japan’s 1945 surrender, happened upon declassified documents at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland. They showed that Tojo’s remains were disposed of in a top-secret operation meant to keep them from falling into the hands of right-wing Japanese nationalists. The fear was that they would use Tojo’s memory to destabilize Japan’s postwar democracy. Takazawa found the papers in 2018, spent years verifying them, and then announced his findings to Japanese media. In one of the documents, U.S. Army major Luther Frierson writes that he witnessed the execution of Tojo and six other Japanese generals and politicians convicted of war crimes, and “received the remains, supervised cremation and personally scattered the ashes” of the seven in the ocean about 30 miles east of Yokohama, Japan’s second-biggest city. Frierson said that the Allies cleaned the ovens used for the cremation in Yokohama “to preclude overlooking even the smallest particles of remains.” Tojo was a general in the Japanese Imperial Army who served as prime minister from 1941 to 1944. He oversaw the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 but lost favor with Emperor Hirohito and resigned in July 1944 as it became clear that Japan was losing the war. After Japan surrendered in September 1945, Tojo attempted suicide by shooting himself in the chest. He was restored to health by American doctors and later put on trial for war crimes. Despite the secret cremation, Tojo was venerated by ardent Japanese nationalists. He is one of 14 Class-A war criminals enshrined at the Yasukuni memorial in Tokyo. Great-grandson Hidetoshi Tojo said that Professor Takazawa’s discovery was a relief to the family. He is happy, he said, that his great-grandfather had been “returned to nature.”

A one-time German U-boat base in Lorient, France, is now saving lives as a Covid vaccination center.

FORMER U-BOAT BASE NOW A VAX CENTER AN OLD GERMAN U-BOAT base has found a new purpose as a Covid-19 vaccination center. In the port city of Lorient in northwestern France, authorities have converted K2, one of three bays at the decommissioned Keroman submarine base, pitching tents, putting out tables and chairs, and overhauling the heating system to stop airborne virus transmission. They even set up an art exhibit to give visitors something to enjoy while awaiting their jabs. Built in 1941, a year after France surrendered to Nazi Germany, the Keroman base was largely undamaged as Allied bombers leveled much of Lorient. After the war, the French navy used the compound until 1997 as a base for its own submarines. It has since been used as a venue for concerts and a location for films. Currently occupied by bars and restaurants, it is doing brisk business as a temporary vaccine center. One of the first arrivals was a man in his nineties, who had been forced to labor in the submarine bays repairing U-boats for the Germans. This was his first time back. “He told us it was a beautiful symbol of resilience,” Jean-Michel Pasquet, chief of the vaccination center, told the New York Times. “This bunker that used to build warships to kill people now embodies a comeback to life.” OCTOBER 2021

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Divers in April confirmed that a shipwreck discovered in 2019 off the coast of Malta is HMS Urge, lost when it struck a German mine in 1942.

DIVERS CONFIRMED that a sunken wreck six miles off the coast of Malta is the HMS Urge, closing a controversy over the British submarine’s fate. A team led by University of Malta maritime archaeologist Timmy Gambin captured underwater footage in late April showing the name “Urge” stamped on the sub. The vessel vanished in late April 1942 after being ordered to abandon Malta for Egypt to escape relentless German and Italian bombing. About 40 crew members and passengers were lost when the Urge struck a German mine. Led by Lieutenant Commander Edward Tomkinson, the submarine had compiled an impressive wartime record, having torpedoed and damaged the Italian battleship Vittorio Veneto in December 1941 and sunk the Italian cruiser Giovanni della Bande Nere on April 1, 1942. In 2015, Belgian diver JeanPierre Mission said he’d found the Urge in waters off the coast of Libya and that it had been sunk by Italian warplanes. His claim was controversial because it suggested that Tomkinson had disobeyed orders and gone off course. The actual Urge was discovered off Malta in 2019. But doubts over its identity remained because only an unmanned underwater vehicle had surveyed the wreck until Gambin and five other divers spent 20 minutes taking photographs and videos. “It is now 100 percent confirmed,” Gambin told Live Science. “We got some good images of the name that will hopefully do away with the absurd claim that she was lost off North Africa.”

Germany in June opened a controversial museum dedicated to the 14 million German civilians pushed out of Central and Eastern Europe from 1944 to 1950. At least 600,000 died—many of starvation, exposure, or in Soviet forced labor camps—after being ousted by officials in Poland, Russia, and other states. The civilians included those who followed Nazi advances east as well as the descendants of ethnic Germans who had lived in Central and Eastern Europe for centuries. The $77 million Documentation Center for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation in Berlin, 13 years in the making, tries to strike a balance between the suffering Germans endured and the suffering the country inflicted.

FROM TOP: TIMMY GAMBIN/UNIVERSITY OF MALTA; JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

DISPATCHES

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FROM TOP: KYODO; JAPAN-AMERICA SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON DC/KYODO; ANDREW PRICE/VIEW FINDER PICTURES

FATE OF LOST SUB FINALLY KNOWN

FROM TOP: KYODO; JAPAN-AMERICA SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON DC/KYODO; ANDREW PRICE/VIEW FINDER PICTURES

FROM TOP: TIMMY GAMBIN/UNIVERSITY OF MALTA; JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

WARTIME RELIC RETURNED TO JAPANESE FAMILY ABOUT 18,000 JAPANESE SOLDIERS fell defending the volcanic island of Iwo Jima in February and March 1945. One of them was a skinny kid named Chojiro Hibi from Yokohama. His remains have never been found. But last summer one of his possessions was returned to his family: an old bankbook, taken as a war souvenir by an American soldier. About 10 years ago, after the old vet died, his son took the bankbook to the Japan-America Society of Washington, D.C., hoping it could be returned to Hibi’s family. There it sat until Ryan Shaffer, who became head of the society in 2019, noticed a bunch of wartime relics left in his office and set about returning some of them. Identifying the bankbook’s owner was complicated by Hibi’s decision to alter one of the Japanese characters in his name. But a family member—a son of Hibi’s younger brother—read a Kyodo News account of the Japan-America Society’s wartime relics. The family got in touch with the society and, in early July, the booklet was on its way back to Japan. “The American man that brought these to us did so out of basic human empathy and compassion for the fallen Japanese soldier and his family.… I hope it brings them some comfort and perhaps joy,” society president Shaffer said. The society has sent the remaining relics—about 20 items, including letters and photographs—to the Obon Society in Astoria, Oregon, which promotes U.S.-Japan relations by returning wartime souvenirs to Japanese families. A bankbook belonging to a young Japanese soldier killed at Iwo Jima was recently repatriated with the man’s family in Japan.

DISPATCHES A Welsh couple bought a World War II ship on eBay for more than $9,000 to keep it from being scrapped. Simon and Gemma Robins plan to restore the 72-foot ship, originally ML1392 but renamed Sarinda after the war, and perhaps take it on a cruise, CNN reported in May. The ship, which participated in D-Day, is one of the few Harbor Defense Motor Launches (HDML) that remain. Designed to aid the defense of Britain’s coastal waters, the role of the 400 HDMLs built soon expanded to war fronts far beyond home shores. OCTOBER 2021

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The Pentagon awarded D-Day veteran Osceola “Ozzie” Fletcher a long-overdue Purple Heart in June.

BELATED MEDAL FOR 99-YEAR-OLD THE AMERICAN MILITARY handed out one million Purple Hearts to those wounded in World War II. Osceola “Ozzie” Fletcher had to wait 77 years to get his. On D-Day, Fletcher was delivering supplies on Omaha Beach when his truck was hit by German fire and flipped over, killing the driver and leaving the 22-year-old private with bloody leg wounds and a head gash that would scar him for life. “Something, a missile, hit [our] tractor,” Fletcher told the New York Post. “That was an awful day.” But Fletcher, 99, a Black crane operator in a segregated army, did not receive a Purple Heart. “Black soldiers didn’t get the Purple Heart,” he told New York media in 2020. “They got injured,

damaged, hurt. But they never got wounded.” Although some Black combatants did receive Purple Hearts during the war, including more than 60 “Tuskegee Airmen”—the renowned African American pilots—they were indeed often overlooked for medals. After the war, Fletcher served as a New York police officer, high school teacher, and staffer with the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. Jacqueline Streets, Fletcher’s daughter, spent years seeking verifiable evidence that he’d been wounded while serving with the 254th Port Battalion. But his medical records were lost in a 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center at St. Louis. In 2019, filmmakers Rylan Soref and Harry Roosevelt read a New York Daily News story about Fletcher’s wartime experiences and interviewed him for their D-Day documentary, Sixth of June. They screened an early cut of the film for General Mark Milley, later chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and made the case for Fletcher’s Purple Heart. “The Pentagon went in and was able to piece together his story,” Roosevelt said. The Pentagon announced in April that Fletcher would be getting a Purple Heart. At a ceremony on June 18 at the Fort Hamilton (New York) Community Club, the U.S. Army chief of staff, General James McConville, said: “Today we have the opportunity to pay Ozzie a long-overdue tribute for the sacrifices he made to our nation.” The Pentagon also awarded a belated Purple Heart in June to Chief Warrant Officer Johnnie Jones of Louisiana, another Black veteran, wounded by a German sniper at Normandy. Jones, 101, a postwar civil rights leader, received his medal at the Old State Capitol in Baton Rouge.

“This is a sad day for all of us, and to none is it sadder than to me. Everything I have worked for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins.” —British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, September 3, 1939, in a speech to the House of Commons announcing war with Germany.

FROM TOP: CONNIE DILLON; FOX PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES

WORD FOR WORD

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ASK WWII Q: How did top turret and side gunners on B-17s and other bombers avoid shooting holes in their own planes’ tail assemblies and wings in the heat of battle? —Paul Minault, San Rafael, Calif. A: In fact, there was nothing to pre-

DISPATCHES

eling mounts typically had to be trusted to spare their own stabilizers. Since airplanes such as the U.S. Navy’s Douglas Dauntless were occasionally used to give combat rides to squadron VIPs with no gunnery training, more than a few came home bearing the marks of self-abuse. —Stephan Wilkinson, Contributing Editor, Aviation History magazine SEND QUERIES TO: Ask World War II, 901 N. Glebe Road, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203 OR EMAIL: worldwar2@historynet.com

A B-17 waist gunner—careful to avoid shooting up his own airplane or those of nearby squadron mates— takes aim in a 1942 drawing by war artist Howard Brodie.

The USS Cod, a submarine that sank 36,000 tons of Japanese shipping on seven wartime patrols in the South Pacific and conducted the only international sub-to-sub rescue in history, arrived in Erie, Pennsylvania, in June for hull repairs. After a 14-hour voyage from Cleveland, where it functions as a floating memorial, the Cod was scheduled to be in dry-dock for six to eight weeks. In 1945, it rescued the crew of a Dutch submarine that hit a reef in the South China Sea.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: HOWARD BRODIE/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; USS COD SUBMARINE MEMORIAL

vent a B-17 waist gunner from hitting parts of his own airplane, were he incompetent enough to do so. But far from the Hollywood image of gunners wielding their .50-caliber guns like garden hoses, these shooters were trained to carefully track targets, calculate leads, and then fire only in short bursts, since anything else would have quickly overheated the gun barrels, ruined the rifling, and terminally affected accuracy. A greater problem would have been a gunner inadvertently firing directly at a nearby bomber taking its place in formation, so waist gunners were taught to always be aware of where they were aiming. One B-24 bomb group even stenciled “Shoot Here Lose Pay” on their Consolidated Liberators’ big twin vertical stabilizers. Top turrets were a different matter. With a powered mechanism—some electric, some hydraulic—to move the twin guns in both elevation and azimuth, the weapons bumped against a metal ramp that cut power to their firing mechanism whenever they approached a danger zone. Back-seat gunners in dive-bombers and attack aircraft operating rearward-facing guns on swiv-

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CONVERSATION WITH PAUL FAIRBROOK BY BILL YENNE

INTERROGATION BY THE BOOK

The army didn’t have a unit specifically assigned to study captured German documents. The idea was to look at these to help with the tactical aspect of the war, starting with documents that came from North Africa in 1942. I was able to read the documents, German army bulletins, the German military newspapers—the equivalents of Stars and Stripes—anything at all. Our work was specifically to

How was the “Red Book” useful to American interrogators in the field?

They could use it as a weapon to interrogate successfully. Before they even started questioning a man, the interrogator could give him the impression that he already knew even more about his subject than the prisoner knew about himself. Using the Red Book, an interrogator could tell a prisoner in German: “I know all about you; I know who your general is; where you’ve been in

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GENEVIEVE SHIFFRAR

Describe the work that you did at MIRS.

improve books that were already in existence. The U.S. Army had a Wehrmacht order of battle book in 1942, but it was nothing compared to what we came up with. Of course, we didn’t use computers then. That would have made my job so much easier. We put everything on three-by-five-inch cards.

COURTESY OF PAUL FAIRBROOK

IT’S BEEN SAID that any well-prepared interrogator, whether in a courtroom or on a battlefield, will strive to ask questions for which he already knows the answers. When it came to the interrogators of the U.S. Military Intelligence Service in World War II, Paul Fairbrook was someone who provided those answers. He was one of the “Ritchie Boys”: mostly young, German-speaking men—many of them Jewish refugees, like Fairbrook—who joined the U.S. Army early in the war and passed through the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Maryland, north of Washington, D.C. Thanks to their native fluency in German, they proved to be ideal interrogators and intelligence analysts. Fairbrook was one of the latter. After his four-week course at Camp Ritchie in 1943, Fairbrook was assigned to the War Department’s Military Intelligence Research Section (MIRS) at Fort Hunt, Virginia, about 10 miles south of the Pentagon. Because the activity there was classified, the installation was known only as “P.O. Box 1142.” The job of Fairbrook’s 21-man group was to sort through stacks of captured German documents and create updated editions of a manual, Order of Battle of the German Army—essentially an encyclopedia of the Wehrmacht, detailing specific units, their commanders, their weapons, and their history in combat. There were a series of these color-coded books, each more comprehensive than the last, culminating in the “Red Book” of March 1945. Distributed to U.S. Army units in the field, they provided invaluable information to intelligence officers and prisoner interrogators. Born Paul Schönbach in Berlin in 1923, Fairbrook arrived in the United States with his family in 1938, after a three-year sojourn in Palestine and a harrowing exit from Europe. Upon his discharge from the army in 1946, he returned to work in the hospitality industry, settling into a two-decade career as food service director at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, where, at the age of 97, he still resides.

Paul Fairbrook in summer 2021, and in summer 1943 (opposite): he was one of the “Ritchie Boys”—a U.S. Army intelligence unit composed of native German speakers.

Russia.” Then the prisoner started talking. That’s where this book came in handy.

What was one of your most important discoveries?

Beverley Driver Eddy, the author of the recent book Ritchie Boy Secrets, wrote that your discovery was “central to recognizing that the morale of the German soldier had reached a new low, and used to great advantage by Allied interrogators and psych warriors in the field.” GENEVIEVE SHIFFRAR

COURTESY OF PAUL FAIRBROOK

In the fall of 1944, I started running across references in German documents to something called the Nationalsozialistischer Führungsstab (NSF)—the National Socialistic Guidance Staff. It had suddenly become part of the organizational structure of German units. If you look at the Wehrmacht’s organizational structure from the spring of 1944 or before, the NSF is not there. After the failed assassination attempt against Hitler on July 20, 1944, they added the NSF to keep tabs on the loyalty of German officers and troops. Hitler had ordered that at every higher echelon in the Wehrmacht, all the way down to the division level, there would be a loyal Nazi watching the generals. Most of these were probably SS.

I told the Pentagon something that they didn’t know. Once I knew about the NSF, I looked for references to it in the German newspapers and the paybooks [the soldbucher, or military identity books] of the German soldiers. I summarized this specific discovery in a 20-page study called “Political Indoctrination and Morale-Building in the

“I told the Pentagon something that they didn’t know.” German Army.” We got this information out by December 1944, and that was early enough to do some good for the interrogators.

What incoming material surprised you the most?

I was amazed by the foolish German insistence on documenting everything a soldier did. I always joked that if he sneezed, they put it in his soldbuch. Every German soldier had a soldbuch that he carried everywhere he went. The soldbucher were marked with all the units where a soldier had been assigned. They were excellent sources of information.

That sounds very straightforward.

I read in one soldier’s soldbuch that he had gotten the Iron Cross, First Class. There was a stamp bearing the letters and numbers of the unit that had given it to him, and I wrote them down. The next time I had a soldier OCTOBER 2021

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In a National Park Service painting, soldiers at the installation known as “P.O. Box 1142” pore through captured German documents; Fairbrook is depicted at the typewriter at far left. The March 1945 “Red Book” (below) was the culmination of their work.

How did it feel to be working against the country of your birth?

It felt wonderful. I was 20 years old. I found out shortly later than I had lost part of my family: I’d lost an aunt. I’d lost two lovely young cousins. Once I completed my fourweek course at Camp Ritchie, I was automatically made an American citizen. To become a German Jewish American was a feeling I can barely describe.

Did everyone in the Pentagon appreciate your work?

Some of the officers later complained that those of us from Camp Ritchie were a terrible unit because we didn’t have good discipline, that we weren’t really soldiers. But those officers didn’t understand what we were able to do. When you are depending on someone to do research, you can’t force him to stand [at attention], you can’t force him to do research; you have to depend on his intellectual capacity to find things you need to know.

Was it a tight-knit group?

We were really close. When you work on the same things from when

I started in September 1943 until V-E Day in May 1945 you become very close. I still remember them all.

What happened to MIRS after the war?

Shortly after V-E Day we were transferred back to Camp Ritchie to become part of a new intelligence unit, the German Military Documents Section. Our job there was to organize all the captured documents. My twin brother Uri, who had earlier broken his leg at Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, had joined our outfit by then, and we spent the remaining time of our military service together. I was discharged on April 21, 1946.

What’s the Ritchie Boys’ legacy?

I think the idea of creating a military intelligence training center to take advantage of anyone who speaks fluent German and to use them for the interrogation of prisoners was a brilliant one. It was a crucial part of the success we had in winning the war, because we had a system that didn’t exist before. It contributed significantly to the Allied success in World War II in Europe. H

PAINTING BY MARK CHURMS/NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; COURTESY OF PAUL FAIRBROOK (BOTH)

with an Iron Cross, his soldbuch had the same numbers. At that point I knew that this was the office that gives out the medals. That is one small example of how we connected this information.

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FROM THE FOOTLOCKER

LINKS TO THE PAST

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

There’s an untold story behind this non-military-issue bracelet: how did it make its way from a sailor to a soldier stationed on the other side of the world?

Forging connections between artifacts and uncovering the stories behind them—as with this bracelet inscribed with “Benedict G. W.,” and Paul Balkin, who had it in his possession— is a large part of my job as a curator at the National WWII Museum. Unfortunately, it is difficult to uncover a story lacking paperwork to support it, and harder still to reunite an artifact with its original owner. Without a personal account, diary, or interview, research into items like this is typically based on documents that create only a timeline of a soldier’s or sailor’s service. To guide readers on similar searches, I’ll share my process with you. Balkin’s son-in-law mentioned that he was in the 36th Infantry Division, so I located a postwar division history with a roster. In this case there was one in the museum’s collection, but they can often be found online. It confirmed that a man named Paul Balkin served in Company M, 141st Infantry Regiment, 36th Infantry Division. It also gave me an address in New York. Using that information, I ran a search on a publicly accessible, subscriptionbased genealogical website and found a Veterans Administration BIRLS (Beneficiary Identification Records Locator Subsystem) file confirming that he enlisted in the army on January 3, 1944, and was discharged on January 30, 1946. The next step was to look into the history of the 141st Infantry Regiment: I learned it served in France and Germany

Have a World War II artifact you can’t identify? Write to Footlocker@historynet.com with the following: — Your connection to the object and what you know about it. — The object’s dimensions, in inches. — Several high-resolution digital photos taken close up and from varying angles. — Pictures should be in color, and at least 300 dpi. Unfortunately, we can’t respond to every query, nor can we appraise value.

COURTESY OF HENRY KLIMAN

My late father-in-law, Paul Balkin of the Texas “T-Patchers” 36th Infantry Division, had this bracelet among his keepsakes from the war. I don’t know how he came by it and would like to try to return it to its rightful family. —Henry Kliman, Plano, Texas

beginning in August 1944. Getting an initial identification on G. W. Benedict was easier since the bracelet bears his service number. Using the same genealogical website, I accessed U.S. Navy muster rolls—quarterly accountings of sailors assigned to a ship or shore station. Benedict was listed as a passenger on the USS Chaumont (AP-5) in October 1942, when he and the rest of the 21st Naval Construction Battalion were transported to the Territory of Alaska. I then checked the Naval History and Heritage Command website and found a battalion history confirming that a Gould W. Benedict had served with the battalion, and that it was based in the Aleutian Islands and, later, on Tinian in the Pacific Theater. Unfortunately, I could not establish a connection or crossover point between these two men. As research often does, it created the even bigger question of how Balkin came to possess the bracelet of someone who literally served on the other side of the world. To reunite this artifact with the Benedict family, solid research into the past is the best way to start. Given Benedict’s year of birth (1912) in his U.S. Navy paperwork, I searched the “Find a Grave” website. There I found the headstone for G. W. Benedict in Duncan, Oklahoma—and in the middle of the stone was a Freemason symbol like the one on the bracelet. But how to reunite the bracelet with its owner marks the moment when the past becomes the present and I cannot publish any contact information. His final resting place, though, provides a good start for locating any current family through an obituary or local records. —Josh Schick, Curator

WORLD WAR II

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BY JAMES HOLLAND

DEADLY REMAINS

PELELIU IS TINY. Just seven by two miles, but the scene of one of the more bitter island battles fought between the United States and Japan in World War II. It was supposed to take the Americans four days to clear the island of 14,000-strong Japanese; instead it took 73 days in the fall of 1944 because although the U.S. quickly captured the airfield, the Japanese fell back into prepared tunnel complexes in Umurbrogol Mountain. In those 10 weeks of battle, U.S. troops fired some 15 million bullets and 150,000 mortar rounds, hurled 118,262 grenades, and dropped 2,300 tons of bombs. All on this pinprick in the Pacific. And when the fighting was over, the debris, many of the dead, and a vast amount of unexploded ordnance was left there. The other day I caught up with an old friend, Steve Ballinger, a former engineer in the British Army who, for the past 20 years, has been running Cleared Ground Demining with his wife, Cassandra McKeown. Not only was World War II the biggest war ever, it inevitably involved the most ordnance; but while most of Europe was cleared pretty quickly after 1945, the same could not be said for developing nations or remote battlefields. Steve and Cassandra have worked all around the world; beginning in 2004 they spent a decade clearing a staggering 66,000 pieces of unexploded ordnance from Peleliu. It wasn’t until 70 years after the battle that the island was cleared, and its population of several hundred was finally safe. The work of Steve and his team was incredible. Extensive study of period fire plans, combat reports, and maps was their first task. Then they worked in 50-square-meter (538-square-foot) grids, painstakingly detecting ordnance, then clearing it. Incredibly, the Palauans had been putting a lot of the unexploded ordnance to use. “Shells were being used as doorstops in the school,” Steve told me, “and live hand grenades were paperweights on desks.” He pointed out that over time, unexploded ordnance becomes more, not less, dangerous. The explosive inside is unaffected; it’s the metal around it that deteriorates. “Once you start moving it,” Steve said, “it’s extremely danger-

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NEED TO KNOW

ous.” He’s seen firsthand what this detritus of war can do. It’s not pretty. Every part of clearing Peleliu was challenging and, at times, as dangerous as trying to survive the battle back in 1944. The humidity there is 100 percent every day. It’s also above 85 degrees every day. There was ordnance in the sea that needed clearing but couldn’t be detonated nearby because of the damage it would cause to the local marine ecosystem. On White Beach, Steve uncovered a cave in which a 75mm gun, one Japanese officer, and five other men were entombed. All the bodies were repatriated and the bunker cleared, then resealed. On Umurbrogol Mountain, coral ridges tore his boots to shreds. He and his team found vast H-shaped tunnel complexes that could hold 1,000 men. Everything was as it had been left: empty beer bottles, radios, ration packs, guns, ammunition, personal effects—and, of course, bodies. Steve reckoned they found in the high hundreds, mostly Japanese but a number of Americans, too. Peleliu remains probably the bestpreserved wartime battlefield in the world, because when the team finished, they left it just as they had found it—a memorial to the terrible battle fought there. Yet, as Steve pointed out, there is a lot of work to be done elsewhere: Guadalcanal, for example. It seems incredible that the war is still claiming victims after all this time, but it is sadly true. In Egypt alone, where the fighting was over by November 1942, there have been 8,313 casualties from World War II ordnance since 1982, with 696 fatalities. Cleared Ground is a charity, and like many charities, getting funding is the biggest obstacle in the path, not an unexploded 500-pound bomb. As Steve told me, the hardest task is that of his wife, Cassandra, who has the challenge of raising funds. I can’t help thinking, though, that it should be the responsibility of the combatant nations to pay for this vital, but often-forgotten work. And without further delay. H

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TRAVEL SZCZECIN, POLAND STORY AND PHOTOS BY JEREMY GRAY

POWER TRIP THE FIRST TIME I RECALL hearing about Stettin, or Szczecin as it is called in Polish, was in the famous speech Winston Churchill gave at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, when he sounded an early alarm in the Cold War. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the continent,” declared the former British prime minister. My mind’s-eye view of Stettin became even grimmer when I learned that much of the city had been reduced to ashes in World War II. So imagine my surprise, 75 years after Churchill’s address, when I discover how stunning parts of this riverport in northwest Poland are today. Its handsome old Paris Quarter, laid out by German architect James Hobrecht in the 1880s according to a French blueprint, is replete with beautiful fin-desiècle apartment buildings. The new Philharmonic concert hall is a glowing marvel of modern architecture. But the real showpiece is a raised, tree-lined escarpment known as Wały Chrobrego (Chrobry Embankment), home to a striking ensemble of historic structures overlooking the Oder River. Nearly a third of a mile long, this gem, along with the Paris Quarter, amazingly escaped serious damage during the war, which obliterated 60 percent of the city’s buildings and 95 percent of its Old Town. Few places evoke the city’s National Socialist past more than the observation platform on the embankment, where Adolf Hitler addressed the masses during a carefully choreographed visit on June 12, 1938, when Szczecin was still the German city of Stettin. I discover there are enough surviving roads and buildings from the era to reconstruct much of Hitler’s route through town, which can be experienced on an easy 90-minute walk. Planned months in advance, the Führer’s visit was reported in an extremely lively manner by the Pommersche Zeitung, then a propaganda organ of the German province of Pomerania’s Nazi Party. The newspaper assumed a messianic tone, emphasizing the inhabitants’ joy at the arrival of their awaited

“savior.” Photos from the day give an idea of the enormous crowds, with people waving at the dictator from apartment windows, streetlamps, and even the roofs of houses. On the big day, an estimated 100,000 spectators swelled the streets of Stettin, all eager to get a glimpse of the Führer. The capital city of Pomerania, Stettin was a stronghold of the Nazi movement and crucial to Germany’s political and economic aspirations, according to Wojciech Wichert, a historian at Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance. Much of Hitler’s local support stemmed from new investment and job creation programs he introduced after 1933, including several public housing developments, a gigantic grain elevator, and a brand-new autobahn to Berlin—all still in use today—plus Nazi cash infusions to key industries such as shipbuilding and, increasingly, armaments. During World War II, Stettin was the base for the German 2nd Motorized Infantry Division, which helped lead the invasion of Poland in 1939 and acted as a launch point for Operation Weserübung, Germany’s attack on Denmark and Norway. All German street signs here were recast in Polish once Germany ceded the region after the war, so I keep a list of both versions as I begin retrac-

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TOP RIGHT AND BOTTOM LEFT: SEDINA.PL

The waterfront embankment in Szczecin, Poland, was the focal point of Adolf Hitler’s June 1938 visit to the then-German city.

TOP RIGHT AND BOTTOM LEFT: SEDINA.PL

ing Hitler’s movements from Stettin’s main railway station. The dictator’s private train from Berlin arrived precisely at 1:30 p.m., at which time he was greeted by top Nazi brass including his deputy, Rudolf Hess, and SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Based on historical photos of the event, I can make out the exact spot in the station where the Führer reviewed military formations against a backdrop of festively decorated ships on the Oder, which were part of the welcoming ceremony. Then Hitler and the Gauleiter—the Nazi local district leader—took their places in a government Mercedes, where the dictator would remain standing while giving ecstatic crowds the Nazi salute. During my visit to the station, I stop by the Szczecin Underground Routes museum. This extensive tunnel network, opened in 1941, remains the biggest civic air-raid shelter in Poland, built to accommodate 5,000 people. It’s chilly down here, and I wonder how the masses must have felt during a wartime bombing raid after such unbridled optimism only a few years earlier. “The Germans converted underground corridors from the 18th century,” explains Agnieszka Fader, a group tour guide at the facility, referring to fortifications built by King Frederick William I of Prussia. Original signage in German is still visible on the walls, such as “Ruhe bewahren” (Stay calm). The bunker had innovative features such as special washrooms for mothers with children, cork linings to muffle footfalls on the steps and floors, and red floors to mask any bloodstains in order to prevent panic spreading among the thousands in the shelter. From the rail terminal, Hitler’s entourage drove northwest through Grüne Schanze—today’s Dworcowa Street—passing the gorgeous redbrick Old City Hall from the 19th century along the way—then north through busy Paradeplatz (now Niepodległości) thoroughfare and up the grand avenue Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse (now Papieża Jana Pawła II) to arrive at the spinach-green Landeshaus, then seat of the Pomeranian provincial government and the present-day city hall. Like other landmark

Comparing present-day and historical photos reveals echoes of Hitler’s tour, from Chrobry Embankment’s observation platform (above, and left) to the Landeshaus (below), today’s city hall.

buildings, the Landeshaus was festooned with Nazi regalia back in 1938, an image I find particularly chilling when compared with today’s edifice, which, minus the swastika banners, appears little changed. After another ritual review of military formations, the Führer addressed a Nazi Party congress and met with Stettin’s mayor, Werner Faber, who

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presented him with an honorary citizenship of the city. Oddly, the present city council says it cannot strip Hitler of this distinction because it was awarded by the previous (German) administration and current Polish laws do not provide them a means to BALTIC SEA address the issue—a controversial matter that, f rom time to time, MILES Szczecin draws fierce protests 0 40 among the locals. POLAND Berlin According to Hitler’s schedule, he lef t the Landeshaus at exactly 2:27 p.m. to visit the City Museum— today’s imposing National Museum—on Wały Chrobrego, which was then called Hakenterrasse. The culmination of his visit came at 3 p.m.: an address by Hitler to the huge crowd followed by a grand parade of nearly 47,000 members of party organizations including the SS, SA, and Hitler Youth. The Nazi leader surveyed the proceedings from the embankment ’s observation platform before descending to his open limousine at the foot of Hakenterrasse. I’m able to find the exact location of Hitler’s car as I gaze over the former steamboat dock, where a throng of onlookers fed the Führer’s insatiable cult of personality. The many Nazi officials Hitler saw that day likely included the governors of a synthetic fuel manufacturing plant in Police, a one-time Stettin suburb. The

WHEN YOU GO May through September is the best time to visit Szczecin. The city has a small airport, Goleniów, but many visitors fly into Berlin and take a twohour train ride. The entrance for the Szczecin Underground Routes museum (schron.szczecin.pl) is just behind the rail terminal on Platform 1. To reach the factory ruins in Police (skarb. police.pl, in Polish), take bus no. 107 from Szczecin’s Plac Rodla, change to bus no. 102, and get off at Tanowska Szkoła 11 (one hour).

WHERE TO STAY AND EAT Great deals for lodging abound in Szczecin, starting at around $40 a night for apartments through Airbnb. The leafy, historic Park Hotel (parkhotel.szczecin.pl) boasts a celebrated restaurant, while the Radisson Blu (radissonhotels.com) offers dreamy views over the Oder. Traditional Polish specialties such as stuffed pierogi with sauerkraut or roast duck can be sampled at rustic Karczma Polska (karczmapodkogutem.pl).

WHAT ELSE TO SEE AND DO Szczecin is a paradise for watersports. Across the Oder from Wały Chrobrego, you can rent motorboats (boatandfun.pl) to explore the commercial harbor and the charming old waterfront district. The redeveloped port area at Łasztownia, lorded over by neon-lit antique cranes, makes a pleasant way to view the amazing architecture on the Oder’s west bank. Dotted with bars and cafes, the pedestrian boulevard here teems with merrymakers on balmy evenings.

MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

The ruins of a synthetic gasoline factory tower over a Nazi-era hydrogenation plant near Szczecin.

Hydrierwerke Pölitz (Hydrogenation Plant Police) converted powdered lignite coal into liquid fuels, including highgrade gasoline. Opened in 1937, the facility was built to boost the war effort, producing as much as 15 percent of Germany’s fuel needs at its peak. The plant also acted as a satellite camp for the Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück concentration camps, whose prisoners made up the bulk of the plant’s workforce. About 30,000 laborers, mostly Poles, were forced to work there from 1939 to 1945; around 13,000 died. From May 1944, the plant became the target of frequent Allied air raids. After the war, the site fell into disrepair, hastened by the Red Army’s removal of any useful materials, which it sent to the Soviet Union. My personal highlight is the evillooking synthetic gasoline factory, with vertical slits like gills in its roof cladding. I manage to navigate this vast site despite precious little signage, exercising care among the rickety concrete ruins being reclaimed by nature, before peeking into the plant’s small museum of history, weaponry, and items found here. When the waterfront parade in Stettin ended, the Führer took a half-hour motorboat cruise on the Oder in the company of the mayor and Franz SchwedeCobu rg , president of Pomera n ia n Province, to see the port area and the former Vulcan company shipyard, which was reopened at Hitler’s request in 1939. Finally, shortly after 6 p.m., Hitler bid his beloved followers goodbye from the window of his private train carriage and sped back to Berlin. It would be the Führer’s final visit to Stettin before it was handed over to Polish authorities in July 1945 in a de facto recognition of Poland’s postwar border with Germany. Most of that frontier would be confirmed at the Allies’ Potsdam Conference later that summer. In September 1945, the Polish-Soviet Schwerin border treaty sealed the remaining bit of border near the Baltic Sea—allowing German Stettin to become Polish Szczecin. With roots in both Poland and Germany, I find it fascinating to compare the city’s dual history and marvel at its remarkable ascent from the ashes of war. H

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MILDRED’S STORY An American resistance leader in Germany, she lost her life to Hitler—and her legacy to the Cold War By Rebecca Donner

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A weary yet resolute Mildred Harnack peers from photos taken in 1942 after her arrest; the images were destined for an album the Gestapo kept of antiNazi resistance fighters.

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MORE THAN A DECADE earlier, Mildred Harnack was a 29-year-old graduate student lecturing about American novels at the University of Berlin while pursuing her PhD dissertation. She didn’t hide her political opinions. Capitalism, in her view, was broken. The Great Depression was devastating the lives of so many Americans, and Germans seemed similarly doomed; every day she encountered Berliners dressed in rags, begging for food, stirring her sympathy. Her university lectures moved fluidly from William

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to discuss how best to oppose the Nazi Mildred and her Party. What began as a small, scrappy clus- new husband, Arvid ter of students, friends, and friends-of- Harnack, rest on a hillside in Germany in friends grew over the course of the decade, 1930 shortly after her intersecting with other resistance circles. move to that country. Their strategies of opposition were various. Some of them produced and distributed leaflets that denounced the Nazi regime and called for revolution. Some helped Jews escape Germany by securing immigration visas through diplomatic channels or by forging identity cards and exit papers. Some plotted acts of sabotage. Some obtained top-secret information about Germany’s political, economic, and military developments, and some passed this intelligence to Hitler’s enemies. Mildred Harnack was familiar with all these strategies and had participated in most. Now she was charged with treason, the only American woman in a secret mass trial at the

Reichskriegsgericht that would involve more than 17 court proceedings and 76 defendants between 1942 and 1943. She sat in a wooden chair at the back of the courtroom. One by one, 11 of her German coconspirators, including her husband, entered and took their seats. Across the Atlantic, Mildred’s family knew nothing about the trial or even her arrest. Two of her siblings lived in Wisconsin, another in Maryland. The last letter she’d sent to them was dated August 14, 1942, enclosed in an envelope with a Swiss postmark. It was a carefully worded, enigmatic missive. “Despite our being separated,” Mildred wrote, “let’s not be worried and anxious.” Five judges sat on a raised platform, peering down at the defendants. The prosecutor stepped forward. He’d been handpicked for the job by Hitler’s right-hand man, Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring. The prosecutor—who’d earned the sobriquet “Hitler’s Bloodhound”—aimed to convince the judges that Mildred Harnack and her German co-conspirators were spies in a sprawling Soviet espionage network that encompassed seasoned operatives and agents in Moscow, Paris, Geneva, and Brussels. He had a name for them: the Rote Kapelle—Red Orchestra. Mildred had never heard of this name, nor had anyone else in her resistance group. Under German criminal law, there were two types of treason: treason against the government (Hochverrat) a nd treason aga inst the countr y (Landesverrat). The former was punished with a prison sentence of three to five years; the latter was punished with death. Mildred Harnack stood up from her chair and approached the stand, hoping for mercy.

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hortly before 9 a.m. on December 15, 1942, Mildred Harnack entered a courtroom in Berlin. She wore a gray wool suit jacket and skirt. Her long, wheat-colored hair was pulled back in a bun. She had spent the last three and a half months locked in a dank prison cell, and despite her best efforts to make herself presentable she was unmistakably ill. A persistent cough racked her lungs, ravaged by tuberculosis she’d contracted in prison. Her body bore evidence of torture. She cut an unusual figure here at the Reichskriegsgericht—or Reich Court-Martial, an organ of the Wehrmacht High Command. Usually, the defendants brought to this courtroom were German military men—soldiers charged with desertion, or officers charged with insubordination. Mildred Harnack was an American civilian. Born and raised in Milwaukee, she had attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, where she met her German husband, Arvid, also a graduate student. She followed him back to Germany in June 1929 and enrolled in a German PhD program shortly before Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Alarmed by Hitler’s popularity, the couple began holding clandestine meetings in their Berlin apartment

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Faulkner’s novels to the prevalence of the poor in Germany and the worrisome ascent of the Nazi Party. “It thinks itself highly moral,” she wrote in 1932, “and like the Ku Klux Klan makes a campaign of hatred against the Jews.” At the University of Berlin, she kept an eye out for German students who appeared to oppose the Nazis. By studying her students’ reactions to her lectures, which included pointed questions about Germany’s political climate, she could get a sense of who might be receptive to joining the underground resistance. It was a recruitment technique that required tremendous patience and shrewd intuition. In the summer of 1932, Mildred was fired from the University of Berlin. It was clear to her that encouraging students to express their political beliefs would not be tolerated by the university’s administration. That fall she started teaching at the Berliner Städtisches Abendgymnasium für Erwachsene—the Berlin Night School for Adults, nicknamed the BAG. The BAG admitted working-class and unemployed Germans, a segment of the population that the Nazi Party relentlessly targeted with propaganda. She continued to use the classroom as a forum for political discussion and a source for recruitment. In fact, several of Mildred’s recruits from the BAG were among the most dedicated members of their resistance group, which she privately referred to as “the Circle.” The Circle intersected with three other resistance circles—Tat Kreis, Rittmeister Kreis, and Gegner Kreis—forming an interlocking chain.

The popularity of Germany’s new chancellor was frightening to those opposed to his policies—and motivation for organizing a resistance movement.

They included factory workers and office workers, students and professors, journalists and artists. They were Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, atheist. Initially, their weapon of choice was anti-Nazi leaflets. They slipped the leaflets into mailboxes, left them in piles in factories and U-Bahn stations. But leaflets were a poor weapon against a fascist dictatorship, and easily exposed them to arrest. Mildred hoped to form a more effective resistance network, one that extended across Germany’s borders. She got hired as a literary scout for the Berlin-based publishing company Rütten & Loening. The job was her cover—a sly way for her to journey to other countries and meet with contacts in the resistance. Her American passport was valuable, enabling her to travel more freely than her German co-conspirators. She went to France, England, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway. In 1935, Arvid Harnack OCTOBER 2021

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ONE OF THOSE SURVIVORS, an American, was a boy at the time. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Don Heath helped Mildred Harnack pass intelligence to the United States. He was the son of Donald R. Heath Sr., a diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin known to his State Department colleagues as “Morgenthau’s Man.” Several years earlier, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. had decided that the reports that diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin cabled to Washington were of little use to him—often not much more than digests of newspaper articles or gossip gleaned from foreign diplomats at embassy functions. Morgenthau wanted facts, figures,

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got a job at the Ministry of Economics to gain access to classified documents about Hitler’s operational and military strategies. Mildred and Arvid both participated in passing this intelligence to other countries. That Mildred and the others were part of an espionage network run by the NKVD—the Soviet secret police—and the GRU, or Red Army intelligence, is well documented in British, U.S., and Soviet intelligence files. Nowhere in these files is there any mention that she also passed intelligence to the United States. But Mildred was in fact an informant for the U.S.— something we know from primary source documents housed at the Hoover Institution and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library archives, and from interviews with survivors of the resistance.

and feet-on-the-ground intelligence about Germany’s Reichsbank and Ministry of Economics. He wanted to know whether Germany planned to pay its formidable debts to American creditors. He also wanted to know whether Hitler was indeed preparing to wage war in Europe and how he planned to finance it. So, at a time when the United States lacked a centralized intelligence agency, he dispatched Donald R. Heath to Berlin as an ad-hoc agent. On a cold December morning in 1939, young Don dashed out the front door of his home at Innsbrücker Strasse 44. He was a freckle-faced 11-year-old, swift on his feet. He ran to the U-Bahn station at Rathaus Schöneberg, a blue knapsack stuffed with books on his back, and leapt onto the train. He was on his way to Woyrschstrasse 16, where the Harnacks lived. Don had previously attended the American School on Platanenallee in Berlin, but it was shuttered now that war had broken out. Most American diplomats sent their children to boarding schools in Switzerland or back in the States, but Donald R. Heath and his wife, Louise, decided to keep their son in Berlin. They wanted to help the resistance and had made a clandestine arrangement with Mildred Harnack to meet with their son twice a week. Once Don arrived at the building, he raced up the stairs to the fourth floor. Mildred appeared at the door wearing a modest dress favored by women in the Nazi teacher’s union. She was leading a double life, masquerading as an American wife who was as devoted to the

DONALD R. HEATH PAPERS, HOOVER INSTITUTION ARCHIVES (ALL)

Don Heath plays with an air rifle, a gift from someone at the American Embassy in Berlin, where his dad, Donald R. Heath (left), worked. The boy passed intelligence from Mildred Harnack to his father.

MILITÄRHISTORISCHES ARCHIV, PRAG

DONALD R. HEATH PAPERS, HOOVER INSTITUTION ARCHIVES (ALL)

Nazi Party as her German husband. Mildred invited Don into the apartment, where he remained for an hour or so, seated beside her on a sofa with wooden armrests, a book in his lap. The ostensible purpose of these twice-aweek meetings was for Mildred to give Don lessons in English and American literature, but there was another purpose as well. Between the ages of 11 and 13, Don Heath was Mildred’s courier, his book-crammed knapsack a receptacle for carrying information to his father. Donald R. Heath instructed his son to take a different route to her apartment building each time he visited her. Sometimes Don entered the Kaufhaus des Westens department store through one door and exited through another, sometimes he climbed the stairs to the steeple of the American Church near Nollendorfplatz, and sometimes he took a long detour through the Berlin Zoo. On Sundays, the Harnacks and the Heaths went on walks in the Spreewald, a forested region 60 miles southeast of Berlin, where they felt reasonably safe exchanging information. Don Heath played the role of lookout, running along tree-lined paths, keeping an eye out for passers-by. On September 10, 1940, a British bomb exploded near the U.S. Embassy. In his book Berlin Diary, American journalist William Shirer estimated it was roughly 150 yards from the Brandenburg Gate. A splinter from the bomb “crashed through the double window of the office of Donald Heath…,” Shirer wrote, “cut a neat hole in the two windows, continued directly over Don’s desk, and penetrated four inches into the wall on the far side of the room.” Another bomb detonated near the Heath’s residence on Innsbrücker Strasse, shattering the windows. Don Heath, then 12, was deeply shaken. As he recalled decades later, in a 2016 interview, “I was blown off the bed.” THE HEATH FAMILY LEFT Berlin in June 1941 after Donald R. Heath was abruptly transferred to Santiago, Chile. Available archival records don’t elaborate on the reason for the transfer. With Mildred Harnack’s primary connection to the U.S. Embassy severed, she deepened her involvement in Soviet espionage. Over the previous six months, Arvid Harnack and co-conspirator Harro Schulze-Boysen, a senior lieutenant in the Luftwaffe, had del-

uged Moscow with detailed reports about A court document lists the Hitler’s plans to invade the Soviet Union— 12 defendants in Mildred’s warnings that Stalin ignored, as he did those trial, with notations detailing their sentences. Mildred that came in from sources in Britain and the was initially sentenced to six United States and from a Tokyo-based Soviet years at a prison camp. agent named Richard Sorge. Mildred enciphered reports sent by shortwave radio transmitters to Moscow Center, and others in the Circle operated the radio transmitters. They were hastily trained, and mistakes were many. Four days after the launch of Operation Barbarossa on June 22, German agents in the Funkabwehr—the signals-intelligence branch of the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr—intercepted an enciphered message sent by a radio transmitter. A year later, the Funkabwehr cracked the cipher wide open. The Gestapo arrested Harro Schulze-Boysen on August 31, 1942. Mildred and Arvid Harnack fled Germany, planning to escape to Sweden. A high-ranking SS officer named Horst Kopkow drove 500 miles in pursuit of them, tracking them down in Nazi-occupied Lithuania on September 7, 1942. Mildred and Arvid were led in shackles to the basement prison at Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Over the ensuing weeks, the prison would fill with men and women in the resistance. Many Mildred had never met face-to-face; she knew them by their deeds alone: the one who was a courier, the one who stashed a radio transmitter in her apartment, the one who wrote leaflets, the one who distributed them. The basement prison soon overflowed with prisoners, and arrangements were made for other prisons to accept the spillover. The men were sent to men’s prisons, the women to women’s prisons. Mildred was locked in a solitary cell at the Charlottenburg women’s prison, a redbrick building concealed behind a walled courtyard on Kantstrasse. Every morning she was transported in a police wagon to Gestapo headquarters to be interrogated by Walter Habecker, a sadistic Nazi with a black smudge of a moustache that matched Hitler’s. Habecker had an affection for thumbscrews, calf clamps, and other, more severe, instruments of torture. Confessions extracted during interrogations OCTOBER 2021

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IN 1946, THE U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) opened an investigation into the execution. “Mildred Harnack’s actions are laudable,” a war crimes liaison

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COURTESY OF THE DONNER FAMILY

were admitted as evidence for the mass trial. Mildred Harnack’s trial lasted four days. On December 19, 1942, the panel of five judges convicted her of being an accessory to treason against the country and sentenced her to six years at a prison camp. Arvid and all but one of the others were convicted of treason against the country and variously sentenced to death by hanging, firing squad, or guillotine. But Hitler, who received daily reports of the trial, overruled Mildred’s sentence and ordered her execution. On February 16, 1943, at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin, she was strapped to a guillotine and beheaded.

Hitler himself overruled the sentence handed to Mildred (seen in 1938, top). On February 16, 1943, she was beheaded at Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison (above)—the site of nearly 3,000 executions during Nazi rule.

officer wrote in a top-secret memo dated November 21, 1946, noting the “rather extensive file” they had on her. In another top-secret memo, he observed: “Mildred Harnack was in fact deeply involved in underground activities aimed to overthrow the government of Germany.” A higher-ranking colleague reprimanded him: “This case is classified S/R [secret/restricted] and should not have been referred for investigation. Withdraw case from Detachment ‘D’ and do not continue the investigation.” The CIC buried her case. Still, news about her execution leaked out. On December 1, 1947, the New York Times ran a story: “With comprehensive knowledge of the German underground movement, Mildred Harnack stood up courageously under Gestapo torture and revealed nothing.” A few days later, the Washington Post observed that she was “one of the leaders in the underground against the Nazis.” Immediately after the war, American and British intelligence agencies had recruited high-ranking Nazis, regarding them as valuable sources of information about Soviet tradecraft. Two of these Germans were directly involved in arresting, prosecuting, torturing, and executing Mildred Harnack, and played a large role in altering for decades how she would be remembered. Hitler’s Bloodhound—the Reichskriegsgericht prosecutor otherwise known as Manfred Roeder—was on the verge of being indicted as a war criminal at Nuremberg in 1947 when the CIC whisked him away to a secret location and disguised his identity with the code name “Othello.” It believed that he possessed “a wealth of information” that could be valuable to the United States. Roeder fed them the fiction that Mildred Harnack and her co-conspirators had been members of a massive Communist espionage ring that was “still alive and active” in the United States. British intelligence was likewise duped by the Nazi who personally arrested Mildred Harnack and oversaw her torture. In 1945, Horst Kopkow told his British captors that he could provide valuable information about this sprawling Communist espionage ring, including “Russian plots against British interests.” MI6 agents faked Kopkow’s death and gave the former SS officer a new identity

as the manager of a textile factory in West Germany, “Peter Cordes.” Neither man faced trial at Nuremberg. By May 1948, the CIC had dropped Manfred Roeder as a source. Benno Selke, the deputy director of the Evidence Division at Nuremberg, castigated the CIC for recruiting Roeder, “one of the most hated men in Germany,” a “notorious, unscrupulous, opportunistic Nazi.” Roeder went on to become the deputy mayor of his hometown of Glashütten and died at the age of 71. Exactly how long Horst Kopkow remained as a source for MI6 remains unknown; Kopkow spent the rest of his life in the city of Gelsenkirchen, dying at age 85. In 1998, under a mandate from the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, the CIA, FBI, and U.S. Army began releasing records once classified as top-secret, a process that continues to this day. This information provides conclusive evidence that Mildred Harnack’s involvement in the underground German resistance was viewed through a Cold War lens. As early as 1946, a CIC officer evaluating Mildred Harnack’s case concluded that her execution by guillotine was “justified.” Nearly 80 years after her death, we now have both the perspective and documentation to regard Mildred Harnack with more nuance and depth. According to all available records, she was the only American in the leadership of the German underground resistance during the Nazi regime. She had numerous opportunities to return to the United States, but chose to remain in Germany. At a time when Hitler ruled with the consent of so many Germans, an American woman risked—and lost— her life fighting him. In Wisconsin, the state legislature has instituted a “Mildred Harnack Observance Day,” a school bears her name, and in 2019 the city of Madison erected a monument to commemorate her as a “WWII Resistance Fighter.” Still, few people know of her, and the smattering of books and articles produced since her execution in 1943 are replete with errors that over time have calcified into fact.

In a 1932 letter to her mother, Mildred expresses joy at “seeing a young revolutionary people working out their victorious way.” A trove of such letters informed the author’s account.

COURTESY OF THE DONNER FAMILY

I WAS ABOUT NINE when I first heard Mildred Harnack’s name. It was during a visit with my great-grandmother, who lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland. I remember gazing at a long line of horizontal pen marks on the kitchen wall. My great-grandmother instructed me to stand against the wall, placed a ruler on my head, and measured my height. I looked at my mark, and I looked at the other marks. Some were fairly recent, some were faint. I pointed to a faint mark and asked, Who’s that? My great-grandmother—her name was Harriette—stiffened. That’s your great-great-aunt Mildred, she said, and left it at that. Harriette and Mildred were sisters; I didn’t understand why Harriette

didn’t want to talk about her and why she seemed abruptly annoyed, even angry. Later, I explored the attic. It was filled with musty old clothes and children’s board games and rubber-banded stacks of playing cards. I discovered a large jar of buttons of various shapes and colors—round, square, hexagonal, ebony, mother-of-pearl. Harriette let me keep the jar. I took it home, and placed it on a shelf in my bedroom. I wondered if any of the buttons had been Mildred’s. The mystery of her remained with me. Many years later I found out that Harriette had been furious at Mildred. Furious at her for moving to Germany, for getting involved in the resistance, for getting herself executed. The idea that Mildred had been implicated with what the Milwaukee Journal called “a Communist conspiracy” was deeply embarrassing to Harriette, whose husband, a lawyer, worked for the government in Washington. Harriette urged her siblings and other members of the family to incinerate every trace of Mildred. Her nephew remembers her saying that it was imperative that “any documentation relative to that particular era be destroyed in its entirety since the sooner that sad episode be put behind us and forgotten once and for all, the better for all concerned.” Harriette died at the age of 94, blissfully unaware that 50 years earlier, her own mother had hidden a bundle of Mildred’s letters in the attic. My grandmother found the letters while cleaning out the attic. Shortly before she died, she gave me the letters and urged me to tell Mildred Harnack’s story. H

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BATTLE OF THE BEAMS A British physicist took on an invisible enemy—one that could have left England at the Luftwaffe’s mercy By Robert Hutton

A German Heinkel He 111 bomber flies over daytime London during the Blitz. Night bombing would have left Britain with far fewer defenses.

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rades thereafter as “Baron Von Warren.”) In the summer of 1940, with Germany occupying mainland Europe and Britain cornered, the difficulty of finding targets in the dark worked in the defenders’ favor. German bombers flew most of their missions during the day, making them vulnerable to the RAF’s Spitfire and Hurricane fighters. But bombers that could find their way at night would be safe from the fighters, which had no way of locating them. Jones’s job was to stop that from happening. He worked for Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, as a scientific analyst. Since the start of the year, he had been playing detective, trying to piece together clues about a secret German air weapon. What was it—and could it be stopped? WHEN JONES HAD BEEN recruited at age 27, just as war broke out in 1939, he had been handed an anonymous report sent to the British Embassy in Oslo by someone claiming to be a German anti-Nazi. It described various technologies the Nazis were working on,

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n the night of August 23, 1940, a young British scientist sat with his wife watching German bombers attack the English city of Birmingham, about 20 miles from the village where the couple was taking a brief vacation. Reginald V. Jones was not so much interested in what he could see as in something he couldn’t. He knew that German pilots were using a secret weapon—a new technology that allowed them to find their targets in the dark. The weapon had the potential to give the Luftwaffe a decisive advantage. Pilots in those days navigated by what they could see: the ground in daylight and the stars at night. This made accurate bombing in darkness impossible. It wasn’t a matter of finding the right buildings; aircrews struggled to find the right city or even the right country. In May 1940, a Royal Air Force bomber on a mission to attack an airfield in Holland got lost in a storm and instead bombed an RAF base in southern England. (The unlucky pilot, a Captain Warren, was known to com-

STAFF/MIRRORPIX/GETTY IMAGES; PREVIOUS PAGES: IWM C5422

The bombing of Birmingham, which began in August 1940, was doubly devastating: it caused massive damage (above) and was conducted in part at night, indicating an alarming German advantage.

COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF R. V. JONES

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including one for using a radio signal to measure a friendly airplane’s distance from a transmitter. With nothing else to go on, Jones had filed it away and moved his attention to reports from the interrogations of downed German aircrews. The prisoners didn’t realize that their cells had been bugged and that Denys Felkin, the intelligence officer in charge of questioning them, was most interested in what the men said when they thought they were alone. One captured pilot had discussed a Luftwaffe secret known as the “X-Device,” telling a colleague: “It has to do with dropping bombs on an unseen target.” Jones set out to figure out what this X-Device might be. A bomber guidance system, he realized, was likely to involve the revolutionary technology that had attracted him to science as a teenager: radio. The period between the wars had been an exciting time for amateur physicists, building their own crystal sets and seeing who could pick up the most distant signals. In Germany, another young man had been similarly inspired. Born in 1900, Johannes “Hans” Plendl, the son of a Munich grocer, had been just old enough to serve as a naval wireless operator at the end of World War I. While at university he had become interested in radio propagation—how radio waves travel. The Nazis’ rise proved a boost for Plendl: they saw an air force as crucial to Germany’s future, and provided ample funding for research. In the late 1930s, Plendl turned to the question of whether radio signals could be used to guide a bomber. Radio beacons were already used for airplane navigation. Because the beacon’s locations were known, an airplane’s navigator could take a bearing on them to determine the plane’s position. Plendl had a different idea, and when Germany invaded Poland, some of its bombers were carrying the X-Device he had designed. Jones was unaware of that, though. In early 1940 he continued to collect clues. In April a Spitfire shot down a German airman carrying a scrap of paper that read: “Radio Beacon Knickebein from 0600 hours on 315 degrees.” That seemed odd. Three hundred fifteen degrees would be northwest, but a plane flying from Germany to Britain would look south or east for a navigational beacon. And a navigational beacon wouldn’t have a fixed bearing, as this note seemed to suggest.

Could it be that the beacon codenamed “Knickebein” was sending a signal in a single direction—a radio beam? That, Jones reasoned, would make sense. A plane would fly along one beam and then drop its bombs when it crossed another one. Perhaps that was the “X” in “X-Device.” Depending on how wide the beams were, a system like that would deliver far greater precision than anything the RAF had. It would work at night and in any weather conditions. But at this point it was just a theory. Jones’s masters were unimpressed. The RAF insisted, in the face of their own experience, that such navigational aids were unnecessary for bombing. He needed more clues. HE WOULD GET ONE IN JUNE. A baffled RAF officer consulted him about a decrypted Luftwaffe message that read: “Cleves Knickebein is confirmed at position 53 degrees, 24 minutes north and 1 degree west.” Those were the coordinates of Retford, a town in central England. On reading the message the previous day, an energized RAF team had rushed up there, hoping to find a team of German spies. Having come back empty-handed, they hoped Jones might be able to help. He could. The town of Cleves was one of the closest places in Germany to Britain. Jones guessed that a broadcast from a transmitter there must have been picked up by a Luftwaffe plane over Retford, probably as the Germans tested their signal. He went back to Denys Felkin, who drew his attention to something a captured mechanic had said months earlier after being questioned about the X-Device. Back in his room, the man had laughed to another airman: “They’ll never find it out. They can try it out and examine it as much as they like. It is a sort of apparatus that they will never find out.” Here, Jones and Felkin would enjoy two extraordinary strokes of luck, both based on misunderstandings. First, they misinterpreted the airman’s meaning. Jones, retelling the story years later, would describe the mechanic saying: “They’ll never find it! They’ll never find it!” He took that to mean that the equipment was hidden in German

Jones knew that German pilots were using a secret weapon—one that allowed them to find targets in the dark.

Reginald V. Jones, here in 1937 as a young government scientist, was charged with learning what the Germans had up their sleeves and figuring out how to counter it.

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SHORT TONES

LONG TONES

RUNWAY BOUND

The prewar “Lorenz beam” blind-landing system formed the basis for the Luftwaffe’s wartime innovations: two radio transmitters broadcast alternately, with different signals. When the pilot heard a constant tone, he knew he was on track.

SOLID TONE

planes in a way that meant the British wouldn’t be able to spot it. But the airman hadn’t meant that: he’d meant that no one looking at Plendl’s X-Device would be able to figure out what it was for. Second, Jones assumed that Knickebein and the X-Device were the same thing. In fact, the Luftwaffe was operating two beam navigation systems: Plendl’s X-Device and a cruder system, Knickebein. Such misunderstandings, whether in science or intelligence, are usually bad news. This time, however, they would help Jones to a breakthrough. He concluded that the

X-Device was somewhere on the German planes but disguised as something else. He loved puzzles and challenges, and now the Luftwaffe had provided him one. A few months earlier, the British had captured a largely intact German Heinkel He 111 bomber. Jones pulled out the report on it and looked at the list of radio equipment found onboard. It included a blind-landing receiver— designed to guide pilots to the runway in darkness or bad weather. Blind-landing was a short-range technology that used two transmitters, on either side of the runway, to broadcast alternately on the same frequency (see diagram at left). A pilot would hear short tones from one transmitter if he were to the left of the runway, and long tones from the other if he were to the right. If he were lined up with the runway, he heard a solid tone. Effectively, a blind-landing system created a radio beam. What if the Germans had found a way to extend the range? Jones called the engineer who had examined the Heinkel. Had there been anything

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RADIO TRANSMITTERS

NATIONAL ARCHIVES; DIAGRAM BY BRIAN WALKER

A cutaway view of an He 111, circa 1940: Jones suspected a secret device was hidden somewhere on the plane—but where?

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NATIONAL ARCHVIES; DIAGRAM BY BRIAN WALKER

unusual about the blind-landing gear? he asked. “Now you mention it,” came the reply, “it is much more sensitive than you would ever need.” That was Jones’s eureka moment. More sensitive receivers, combined with more powerful transmitters, meant a signal could be picked up much farther away than anyone in Britain thought possible: a blind-landing beam was usually about 30 miles long, but Retford was 300 miles from Cleves. Toward the end of June, Jones was summoned to 10 Downing Street to brief Winston Churchill. The prime minister later described hearing the news that Luftwaffe pilots could navigate in the dark as “one of the blackest moments of the war.” Britain faced the prospect of accurate bombing, night after night, until it was defeated. What could be done?, Churchill asked. Jones replied that if the radio beams could be found, it might be possible to jam them. The mission now was to find them.

sit there all night, listening for the Knickebein signals, while RAF aircraft searched for the signals overhead. Once a signal was found, the jammers could be turned on. And then, abruptly, the beams disappeared. Throughout July, no signals could be found. The only night alarm in London that month was caused by an RAF plane searching for Knickebein signals. Senior officers, who found the young Jones arrogant and quite lacking in respect, questioned whether the whole excitement over beams had been a nine-day wonder. In fact the Luftwaffe, content that its Knickebein system worked, had turned it off until they were ready to use it. This gave Cockburn badly needed time to get his countermeasures systems working. By the time the Luftwaffe was ready to attack Britain in force, in mid-August 1940, Cockburn’s Aspirins were waiting. He had other tricks up his

Winston Churchill was shocked when Jones briefed him in June 1940 on the Germans’ accomplishment, calling it “one of the blackest moments of the war.”

THAT NIGHT AN RAF PILOT, sent up to hunt for the beams Jones had described, found them quickly. They were aimed at the factory in central England where Rolls-Royce made its Merlin engines for Spitfires and Hurricanes. “Good, clear signals,” he reported—a beam that was just 500 yards across. Jones reflected later that one of the Luftwaffe’s mistakes was transmitting test signals like this before they were ready to start using them. Had they waited until the start of their bombing campaign against Britain to turn them on, Jones and his colleagues might never have had time to develop countermeasures. The R AF gave the beams a codename, “Headache,” and another young physicist, Robert Cockburn, was given the job of finding how to jam them. He built transmitters— aptly codenamed “Aspirin”—to mimic the beam signal and be activated when beams were detected. To do that detection—and warn of coming attacks—the British built a network of monitoring stations. Given the situation’s seriousness, these stations had a comic feel to them. Tiny wooden sheds were lashed to the top of the 300-foot radar masts that already lined the coast. Inside were radio receivers manned by former amateur radio hobbyists, who knew how to make the most of their equipment, rigging antennae using broomsticks. They would OCTOBER 2021

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: © IWM D 12100; © NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON; PHOTOGRAPH BY IAIN DUNCAN, © RAF MUSEUM

A British search for German beams found test signals aimed at the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine plant (top). Physicist Robert Cockburn (top right) took steps to block the system. But an elite German bombing unit called the “Vikings” (insignia, above) seemed undaunted.

sleeve, too: receivers nicknamed “meacons” picked up broadcasts from Germany’s ordinary navigationa l beacons a nd t hen retransmitted them on the same frequency, confusing the Luftwaffe’s wayfinding equipment. German aircrews discovered that they began to have trouble finding their navigation beacons’ signals as they crossed the Channel each night. Sometimes the signals were strong, but coming from the wrong direction, and other times the beacons seemed to be moving around, as the German radio equipment confused the genuine beacon with the British “meacon.” As for Knickebein, it simply wasn’t working. Sometimes the aircrews couldn’t pick the signal up. Sometimes they found it, but it wasn’t taking them where it was supposed to. A rumor began spreading that the British had found a way of bending the Knickebein beams—something that, though theoretically possible, was beyond the capability of British technicians. But despite the British success in countering Knickebein, the scientific battle wasn’t all going one way. Jones believed that Knickebein

and X-Device were parts of the same system. In reality, only the first was being countered. The second, more sophisticated, system was working very well, completely untroubled by the British. Jones didn’t know it, but he watched it in action as the Germans attacked Birmingham that August night. Whereas Knickebein relied on a soupedup version of blind-landing equipment that pilots were already familiar with, the X-Device needed to be separately installed in the airplanes and crews had to be trained to use it. An elite bomber unit, Kampfgruppe 100 (KGr 100), had been working with the system since the start of the war, and had now set up a base in northern France. They called themselves Vikings and, like their namesakes, they were going to set England on fire. KGr 100 targeted British factories at night. It was safe work: the squadron dropped 156 tons of bombs that August, and just two members of the unit were injured. Only one plane reported damage from enemy fire. Realizing that the X-Device was still working, the Luftwaffe decided to switch strategies. The Vikings were now ordered to become the first-ever “pathfinder” unit, flying ahead of the main attacking force and marking targets with incendiaries for their comrades to then hit. Some RAF officers, continuing to misread the situation, thought that in dropping incendiaries, Luftwaffe aircraft must be navigating by sight and attempting to illuminate targets.

FOX PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES; DIAGRAM BY BRIAN WALKER

But Jones was worried. At the end of August, Britain’s radio listening service had reported picking up signals on a wavelength previously unused by the Luftwaffe. And intercepted messages referred to “installing” the X-Device on airplanes in a way that told him he had been wrong to conflate it with Knickebein. Throughout September, he pieced together more clues. The RAF assigned the X-Device its own codename, “Ruffian,” and told Cockburn to come up with a more powerful “Aspirin”: he called it “Bromide.” But by the end of the month, Jones had reached a dispiriting conclusion, one that he told his superiors “appeared scarcely credible”: The X-Device could place a bomber within 20 yards over London. If German radio technology was that good, Jones feared the British might not be capable of defeating it. In October Cockburn’s Bromides began operating, and Jones’s fears initially seemed confirmed. Decrypted Luftwaffe messages showed no complaints from pilots that the

X MARKS THE SPOT

COVENTRY

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The city of Coventry smolders after a November 1940 bombing. It was a terrible clue that Jones still needed more information. It was soon to come his way.

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The sophisticated German “X-Device” used four beams, all named for rivers. The pilot flew along one, crossing three intersecting signals as he approached the target.

BOULOGNE

ENGLISH CHANNEL CHERBOURG

FRANCE X-Device was malfunctioning. Jones was, at least, clearer on how it worked. Knickebein involved flying along one beam and dropping a bomb when the plane crossed an intersecting beam. Plendl’s X-Device used three crossbeams (see diagram, above). The OCTOBER 2021

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pilot would fly at a fixed altitude; crossing the first beam served as an alert. When the plane crossed the second beam, the person monitoring the device pressed a button on it to start a clock; and when the plane crossed the third beam, pushing another button started a countdown to the moment of bomb release. Plendl had designed what was effectively an onboard computer that used the travel time between the beams to determine the plane’s speed and then factored in the altitude to calculate the best moment to drop the payload. On top of that, the X-Device was no longer at the cutting edge of radio-guided bombing. In mid-October 1940, the Luftwaffe tested Plendl’s newest system, the “Y-Device,” in action for the first time. It was a one-beam system: when the pilot found the beam and engaged the autopilot, it kept him on course. An operator on the ground tracking the plane transmitted a signal to release the bombs when it reached the target. The system would,

FIRST, THOUGH, the Vikings of KGr 100 would have their moment to shine. On the evening of November 14, its crews clambered into their Heinkels. The night was so clear that the observers could easily see the countryside below by the moonlight. Just after 7 p.m., after 90 minutes’ flying, they dropped their bombs on the city of Coventry and turned for home. Nearly 500 German bombers followed, using the fires started by KGr 100 as their guide. Crossing the Channel in the middle of the night, a Luftwaffe crew saw what looked like a flashlight ahead of them. They wondered if it was some new British defense. Getting closer, they realized it was their target, burning so brightly it could be seen from 100 miles away. As they approached, they could smell the fire and feel the heat from the flames. Jones was appalled by the destruction, but also baffled. He’d had enough intelligence to guess which frequency Cockburn’s Bromides should be jamming, and the Luftwaffe’s pathfinder force had passed within a few miles of two of the transmitters, which ought to have pulled them off course. But it seemed to have made no difference. He would find out the problem thanks to one of Cockburn’s other devices. A KGr 100 bomber, its crew hopelessly confused by British jamming of German navigational beacons, ran out of fuel and landed on what they thought was a French beach, only to discover that they were still in England. The intact plane was badly damaged as the tide came in while Britain’s army and navy were arguing over who had the right to capture something that was on a beach, but eventually Jones got his hands on a waterdamaged X-Device. German radio technology was more advanced than Britain’s, he found, and Cockburn’s jamming signals had been filtered out because they had been using the wrong tone. It was a problem that could be fixed. Around this point, Jones claimed victory. Although Plendl’s Y-Device was sophisti-

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The Battle of the Beams helped the careers of the leading men on both sides.

Plendl assured his masters, eclipse even the X-Device for accuracy. It was ironic that, despite the Y-Device’s sophistication, this was the system Jones was most prepared for: it used the distance-measuring technique set out in the Oslo memo.

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The BBC television transmitter, inactivated since the start of the war, became an effective weapon in jamming German navigation beams.

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cated, the British believed it was relatively easy to confuse because it worked on the same frequency as the BBC’s television signal, which had been switched off at the start of the war. Cockburn commandeered the BBC transmitter and began broadcasting his own Y-Device signals. Jones was triumphant. By February 1941, as he later wrote, the Battle of the Beams was “as good as won.” This was an exaggeration. For all that the British understood about the workings of the beams, countering them remained a technical challenge. Some beams were successfully sabotaged some of the time, but German pathfinder units were, in the early months of 1941, still able to find their targets and lead others to them. In April, during another attack on Coventry, five of KGr 100’s 12 pathfinders were unable to find the X-Device beams. The following month, in a raid on nearby Derby, none of the Vikings could pick up the beam signal, suggesting the British were getting better at jamming. And night-bombing of Britain was no longer a safe job. The RAF now had airborne radar. At the start of May 1941, KGr 100 was losing around one plane a night. It was also clear that Britain wouldn’t be bombed out of the war. That Coventry was a target again five months after it had become a byword for bombing destruction showed the limits of such a strategy. Adolf Hitler’s attention, in any case, was turning east. In July 1941, KGr 100 was moved to Poland. R A F Bomber Command continued to insist that navigational aids were unnecessary. That complacency was shaken in mid1941 when a study found that of British bombers claiming to have reached their target, only a third had dropped bombs within five miles of it. By the following year, the RAF, partly inspired by the Germans, had adopted radio navigation and pathfinders to locate its targets. ONE OF THE UNUSUAL FEATURES of the Battle of the Beams was that it helped the careers of the leading men on both sides. Both Jones and Plendl talked up their successes and may not have realized the extent of their opponent’s achievements. Jones’s triumph was the early identification of Knickebein. His work there, and the realization that German navigation beacons were a threat, ensured that most of the Luft-

waffe struggled to navigate over Britain. It is hard to know how things might have been different if every German bomber, rather than just a few elite pilots, had been able to find any city they wanted at a time when Britain had no night defenses at all. Jones had become, to Churchill, “the man who broke the bloody beam,” and he enjoyed the prime minister’s ear for the rest of the war. Plendl wasn’t blamed for the Luftwaffe’s failure to break the RAF or to bomb Britain out of the war. He kept his senior role in the German scientific establishment. After the war he was among the Germans scooped up in the U.S. intelligence’s “Operation Paperclip,” which selected scientists to take their knowledge to America in the hope that they would assist in the coming technological race with the Soviet Union. Though some of those had been senior Nazis, the Americans noted that during the war Plendl had used his position to save Jewish scientists and engineers from the death camps by insisting he needed their help with his research. Among those he had protected was a fellow scientist, Hans Mayer, who had been arrested in 1943 for criticizing Hitler. What neither the Nazis nor Plendl knew was that Mayer was the author of the Oslo memo that had helped Jones crack Plendl’s beam. H

“Operation Paperclip” is remembered for importing German scientists to boost the U.S. space program (top). But one had been the source of a vital clue that aided Jones—best known today as R. V. Jones. Said Churchill of the physicist (in 1955, above): “He did more to save us from disaster than many who are glittering with trinkets.”

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WEAPONS MANUAL JAPAN’S RIKUO TYPE 97 MOTORCYCLE ILLUSTRATION BY JIM LAURIER

RIDING SHOTGUN Japanese naval landing forces man a Rikuo Type 97 motorcycle, armed with a Type 11 light machine gun, in Shanghai during their 1937 invasion of China.

AMPED UP Japan modified HarleyDavidson’s brawny twincylinder, V-shape, 1,200 cc engine, increasing its capacity to nearly 1,300 cc—more than enough displacement to power both the motorcycle and sidecar.

IN THE EARLY 1930s, Harley-Davidson was in trouble. The rising popularity of Ford’s Model T automobile, the Depression, and protectionist tariffs overseas had significantly hurt Harley’s motorcycle sales. So when Japan’s Sankyo company approached in 1932 with an offer to license Harley’s signature Flathead engine, the Milwaukee company jumped at the chance—unaware that Sankyo was acting in concert with the Japanese army and that they were selling top technology to a country with whom the U.S. would soon be at war. Sankyo dismantled an entire Harley engine plant and rebuilt it near Tokyo. The resulting motorcycle was the sturdy, maneuverable Type 97. Japan used the bike, branded under the Rikuo name and capable of transporting three fully-equipped soldiers, at home and overseas throughout the war. Its significant ground clearance served it especially well in the muddy, undeveloped terrains of Manchuria and Southeast Asia. Although Japan built more than 18,000 Type 97s, few survive today. —Larry Porges

TREAD ON ME The Type 97’s narrow tires featured thick, bumpy treads to give them maximum traction in the rain and mud. The treads also helped distribute the motorcycle’s hefty 1,100-pound weight across the tires’ entire surface area.

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WEAPON OF CHOICE

JAPANESE RIKUO TYPE 97

Although not standard equipment, machine guns were often mounted by the Japanese military onto the motorcycle sidecar. Type 11 light machine guns were typically used until the more reliable Type 97, shown here, was introduced in 1937.

THE COMPETITION

Number produced: 18,000 / Engine displacement: 1,200–1,300 cc / Maximum speed: 60 mph / The “Rikuo” name with which Sankyo branded its Type 97 translates to “King of the Road.”

AMERICAN HARLEY-DAVIDSON WLA

Number produced: 90,000 / Engine displacement: 740 cc / Maximum speed: 65 mph / Tens of thousands of fast, single-rider Harley-Davidson WLA “Liberators”—based on Harley’s civilian WL model— were shipped overseas as part of Lend-Lease.

BRITISH BSA M-20

Number produced: 126,300 / Engine displacement: 496 cc / Maximum speed: 60 mph / After failing initial engine tests in the 1930s, a revised model of the M-20 became the British Army’s standard motorcycle and was widely used throughout the war.

GERMAN BMW R75

Number produced: 16,500 / Engine displacement: 745 cc / Maximum speed: 60 mph / Equipped with a sidecar, Germany’s rugged and maneuverable R75 was deployed by the Wehrmacht from North Africa’s deserts to the expanses of the Eastern Front.

SIDE ACTION Steel leaf-spring suspension on both sides of the sidecar gave the passenger a smoother ride than the driver.

PHOTO: WW2DB

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t was the most miserable night of my life. Hours earlier I’d bailed out of a burning B-17 somewhere over Germany. One member of Ole Worrybird’s Worrybird ’s crew was dead, another had jumped out before the rest and vanished, and our copilot had broken his leg upon landing and been hauled off by German soldiers. Now the remaining six of us sat cold and shivering in a horse stall, exchanging frightened glances. Sleep was almost impossible. German guards outside the door made sure we stayed there through the night. We cursed our bad luck, thinking about the rest of the 95th Bomb Group flying home to England and warm barracks. Ole Worrybird was the bomb group’s only casualty that November 2, 1944, damaged by flak and then downed by a Focke-Wulf 190 fighter after bombing one of Germany’s most dreaded targets: the heavily protected Leuna

Author Bill Livingstone (inset) spent the last six months of the war as a prisoner of the Germans.

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MY SIX-MONTH

FURLOUGH He jumped out of a burning bomber— and into the hands of the Germans. A former B-17 crewman looks back By Bill Livingstone

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from inside said, “Herein!” (enter). My guard opened the door and directed me in. There, a large desk stood in front of a curtained w indow w it h wa r m su nsh ine f low ing through. Behind the desk sat a smiling Luftwaffe officer dressed in an immaculate uniform. He was a well-built fellow, rather good looking, and appeared to be about 50. His light brown hair was combed straight back. Compared to muddy, unwashed me, the man was a movie star—an actor in a Nazi uniform. As I entered his office, he stepped around his desk, walked up to me with his hand extended, and in excellent English said, “Ah, Sergeant Livingstone, please sit down.” He shook my hand firmly and gave me a fatherly pat on the shoulder. Then he walked back around his desk again and sat down, all the while with a warm smile on his face. After offering me a cigarette, he reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a printed form of some sort and picked up a fountain pen. He asked me for my name, rank, and army serial number. All that information, except for my rank, was on my extra dog tag, lying right there on his desk. But I suppose he needed to confirm I was that tag’s owner. ON THE FOURTH DAY OF SOLITARY, the guard opened my cell door Then he went out of bounds: he asked me and directed me to follow him to an adjoining office building. what bomb group and squadron I was with. We passed a few closed doors before the guard knocked on one. A voice I told him I could only give him my name,

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oil refinery near Merseburg, Germany. The German soldiers who encircled us on the ground had us gather our parachutes and march down a country road to a small garrison. There, our captors first relieved us of anything valuable, including the watch my mom and dad had given me as a high school graduation present. They also took away our fleece-lined flying suits, leaving us with only flight boots and our regular olive-drab wool uniforms. And they removed one of the two dog tags we wore around our necks. Then we had a meal of cabbage soup—cabbage would become a mainstay for the next six months— and spent the night in the horse stall from which the horse (and only some of his droppings) had been recently removed. The next morning, with two armed guards, we departed on what turned out to be a five-day tour of wartime Germany, traveling by an exhausting mixture of bus, train, streetcar, and on foot, before arriving at our destination: the Luftwaffe interrogation center—or Auswertestelle West (Evaluation Center West)—near Frankfurt. Here we were placed in solitary confinement cells to await questioning. Just before a guard pushed me into my cell, I asked him if I could have something to eat, but he acted as if he didn’t understand English. I learned later that the guards understood English very well but were instructed not to communicate with prisoners—just to listen and report any information of value. The purpose of solitary confinement, of course, was to break us down, to get us to tell everything we knew about the 95th Bomb Group. Then I thought: Well, this will be a good chance to just sit and think about things. And I did plenty of that.

IWM EA 10750; PREVIOUS PAGES: UNITED STATES AIR FORCE ACADEMY/MCDERMOTT LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS; INSET: COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

B-17s of the 95th Bomb Group—here near Wilhelmshaven, Germany—were easily identified by the large “B” on the tail.

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rank, and serial number. He smiled again, this time with a little expression of superiority: “That’s all right, we know you were in the 95th Bomb Group.” Of course they did. The block letter “B”—the 95th Bomb Group’s emblem—was eight feet tall on the tail of our B-17. The Fw 190 pilot who shot us down couldn’t have helped seeing it. “What was your target the day your airplane was shot down, please?” he asked next, still smiling. Again, I said, “I can only tell you my name, rank….” “Sergeant Livingstone”—he cut me off as sternly as my own commanding officer would have—“without your cooperation I don’t know how long you will have to remain here in solitary confinement, and you won’t be able to go to the nice camp.” He was frowning now. So was I. He proceeded to ask other questions related to the military strength of the 95th Bomb Group, and to warn me that I was going to have to stay in that six-by-ten cell until I told him what he needed to know. Finally, after about 15 minutes, he pushed a buzzer on his desk and the guard came back into the room. The officer said something to him in German and offhandedly gestured for me to follow the guard out and back to my cell. Two days later I was escorted back to the same officer. This time he was quite curt. He asked me all the questions for which he had no answers and again warned me that I wouldn’t be transferred to the “nice camp” until I helped him fill out his form. This interview lasted only about five minutes, and he gained no more information. Nonetheless, that afternoon, after five full days in solitary confinement, my crewmates and I were shipped out to the promised camp, about 45 miles north. It was a transit camp run by the International Red Cross—with no German guards on the inside, but under the watchful eye of Luftwaffe guards on the outside. Here, after what turned out to be the last shower I would have for almost six months, we changed from our dirty uniforms, some of them ragged and bloodstained, into new olive-drab winter uniforms, new G.I. shoes, new underwear, knit fatigue caps, heavy overcoats, and wool scarves knitted by some dear ladies back in the States. That brown wool scarf and I became close friends for the next few months, through one of Europe’s coldest winters. We stayed there just six days, leaving on

Surrounded by guards, captured Allied airmen await intake at the Luftwaffe interrogation center (top) outside Frankfurt. To encourage cooperation, they would be placed in solitary confinement cells; the painting above is by a B-24 navigator, Second Lieutenant Paul Canin. OCTOBER 2021

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FROM TOP: BUNDESARCHIV N 1578 BILD-013-08 FOTO: BERG, ERIK; BUNDESARCHIV N 1578 BILD-018-22 FOTO: BERG, ERIK; UNITED STATES AIR FORCE ACADEMY/MCDERMOTT LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

Red Cross-provided soap was favored more as a source of paper than cleanliness. Above, the author noted popular songs of the day at the request of prisoners who’d been locked up long before him.

ON THE FOURTH DAY, our train finally stopped at a tiny station at Kiefheide, near Gross Tychow (now Tychowo, Poland). My fellow POWs and I marched two miles to our new camp, built just six months before. Stalag Luft IV—a camp for American and British airmen NCOs—was composed of four double barbed-wire fenced compounds, or lagers, A through D, with guard towers located about 200 feet apart along the fence lines. About 20 feet inside the barbed-wire fence was a warning wire, mounted on stakes about two feet above the ground. Crossing the warning wire made you fair game to get shot when guards spotted you. The camp was home to nearly 8,000 U.S. Army Air Forces POWs and another 900 from the British Royal Air Force. In each lager (I was in Lager B), 10 large barracks stood in military array; in each barrack were 10 20-foot square rooms. Each room housed 25 men—men whose part in the war was complete and who could only await its end. During the day, we were allowed to roam free in the compound, but our guards locked us in our barrack at night while they patrolled the area with guard dogs. The double-deck bunks held straw-filled mattresses that lay flat and hard on the boards shortly after being fluffed up. My room—Room 10—had knotty pine walls that resembled what were later in the den in my Santa Barbara home. There was one casement window with outside shutters, which the guards closed and locked at night. Outside the shuttered windows, bright lights flooded the compounds. Anyone found outside at night would be shot on sight. Near the door was a potbellied stove in which we burned pressed wood and coal dust pellets about the size of golf balls. Because we were given only a limited amount, we carefully rationed this fuel and used it only during the daytime, to keep the place semi-warm in that frigid winter. The floors were always cold then because they were built about four feet above the ground. This was to allow the guards and their dogs to look under the building to see if anyone was trying to tunnel out of the place. At night we went to bed fully clothed under a single German army blanket. We received two kinds of food in the camp: Red Cross parcels and

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR (BOTH)

November 19 by train for what turned out to be Stalag Luft IV, near the Baltic Sea in what is now northern Poland. At one point on the four-day trip, our train stopped rather suddenly, and we saw the crew leap from the engine and dart into the adjoining woods. About half the guards fled there as well. At the same time, we heard the roar of aircraft above the tracks. We could see them—American P-47 fighters—when they zoomed up to make an attack on the nearby town. The train had a large “POW” insignia on the top of one of the cars and so was not strafed, but we could hear the boom of antiaircraft guns firing nearby. Sometime later, while I was gazing out the window on the south side of the train, we crossed an at-grade roadway. Beside the road I saw a little sign with an arrow pointing north. It read, “Merseburg — 10km.” That’s about six miles. Merseburg was our target that fateful day, almost three weeks before, when the Worrybird was shot down. I glanced out the north side of our coach and in the distance, across a flat plain, I could see the outline of the oil refinery. Beside the road I could also see bomb craters. I wondered if any of them had been created by the bombs I toggled out of our B-17. (I was the nose gunner and what we called the “togglier,” meaning I operated the toggle switch that dropped the bombs.) Whose ever they were, they missed by a lot.

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COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR (BOTH)

German food—usually some kind of soup— cooked in the camp’s central kitchen. The Red Cross food came in corrugated boxes about one foot long and six inches high. The 10-pound parcels provided minimum nourishment for one man for one week; we each received about a third of a parcel a week. All the Red Cross food could be eaten as is, or cooked, if heat was available. There were cans of good old Spam, beef stew, and something called “reconstituted butter,” along with cheese, powdered milk, dried fruit, crackers or cookies, and that all-time favorite, a quarter-pound bar of Hershey’s chocolate. The parcels also included small bars of Swan soap, useful for “spit baths” in our rooms and still more useful because of their wrappers—our only source of writing paper. Thanks to the Salvation Army, we also received nourishment for our minds: the well-used library in our compound contained several hundred books that had been donated by people in the U.S. and Great Britain. Without them, there would have been nothing to read except an occasional German newspaper—impenetrable to most. The other main time filler was playing cards. A game called “Red Dog” was a favorite, and the POWs gambled with cigarettes provided in the Red Cross parcels. Christmas at Stalag Luft IV was special. In Room 10, we melted down our chocolate bars and mixed them with crumbled graham crackers to make a sort of Christmas cake. We ate it while singing Christmas carols and thinking about our loved ones at home. It was a strange, ethereal moment when we all took a bite of our cake and realized, this was it. This was it for the Christmas of 1944. This was the opening of Christmas gifts at home. This was our Christmas turkey, goose, or ham dinner with family gathered round. This was the moment of thoughts of love for our moms, dads, sisters, brothers, and sweethearts. We all felt sure we would be with them the following Christmas, but we also knew that this bittersweet moment would live in our memories forever. NEAR THE END OF JANUARY 1945, we began hearing artillery bursts from the east as the Soviet army pushed the Wehrmacht back into Germany. On January 30, word came that we would be evacuated the following day to another prison camp. The Germans always did their best to keep any of their POWs from

being liberated; in the end, Hitler wanted to use us for bargaining power. Early the next morning, our guards issued each of us a full Red Cross food parcel. To the crunch of frozen snow under our feet, the entire complement of Lager B— about 1,800 men—marched out of Stalag Luft IV to the nearby railroad siding at Gross Tychow, where we climbed into rickety old boxcars. A thin layer of straw covered the rough wooden floor of our boxcar, doing little to make us comfortable or warm. A five-gallon bucket served as our toilet. The Germans locked 25 of us in each narrow car. Then we all sat down with our backs against the sidewalls and our legs extended—our feet meeting in the center, sole to sole. To use the bucket we had to step over and between a floor full of legs and feet. As uncomfortable as it was, I found out later we were the lucky ones: Lager B had been the only one to evacuate by train; more than 6,000 men from the other lagers were made to march 500 miles in one of Europe’s cruelest winters. It became known as the “Black March.” Two days later, at dusk on February 2, our

Prisoners play cards at Stalag XVIII-A (top); the Red Cross packages that arrived at camp (also at Stalag XVIII-A, middle) helped supplement the POWs’ meager German food rations and provided currency for betting on card games, in the form of cigarettes.

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train pulled into the Berlin railroad marshalling yard and stopped. I don’t know why—possibly to rest the crew. We were all asleep when, at 10 p.m., the scream of air raid sirens jolted us awake. My heart pounded; I knew that in that railroad yard at night we were sitting ducks for the Royal Air Force. We heard the drone of aircraft and the explosion of many bombs, and shook in our boots awaiting a direct hit. With the acrid smell of smoke and dust in the air, the raid seemed to last forever. But after half an hour the bombs’ thunder stopped, the bombers quieted, and an “all-clear” siren sounded. Our train pulled out of the station at dawn the next morning. One event on that trip is burned into my memory. After we passed through Berlin, one of the prisoners in the boxcar ahead of ours developed a fever and became quite ill. The one medic on the train had nothing to give him but aspirin. We heard he died that night with an aspirin still undissolved in his mouth. The following morning the train stopped in a peaceful countryside area, and the man was carried on a makeshift stretcher to the top of a grassy hill about 100 yards from the train track. Under a cold overcast sky, a half dozen of his buddies buried him while the rest of us watched through the cracks in the side of our boxcars. It was a very sad time for us, with a lot of frustration and anger. After eight miserable days, our train arrived at the barbed-wire enclosed Stalag XIII-D, near Nuremberg, Germany, almost 300 miles southwest of Berlin. While we marched from the train toward the camp on a sunny, springlike February 8, we passed a column of about 500 American G.I.s, marching out. We shouted hellos, and they begged us for food and cigarettes. By talking back and forth as we passed each other, we learned they had been captured in what’s now known as the Battle of the Bulge—a battle we knew nothing about because we had no, or little, access to war news. Stalag XIII-D was a camp for ground forces, rather than air forces, like our last. It had no recreation facilities, no library, and no athletic equipment. The airmen of the German Luftwaffe had superior facilities and pay compared to Wehrmacht soldiers; that difference was

MUSEUM OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE/COURTESY OF BEN VAN DROGENBROEK; OPPOSITE: BUNDESARCHIV N 1578 BILD-0106 FOTO: BERG, ERIK

Prisoners at Stalag VII-A gather around an improvised stove. The huge camp, in southern Bavaria, contained POWs from many Allied nations.

reflected in the treatment of their respective POWs. It mattered little though; the spring weather was delightful. And two months later, we were on the move again. With the sound of American artillery coming from the west, my group of about 500 men walked out of Stalag XIII-D on April 4 and headed for Stalag VII-A, 75 miles to the south. We marched during the day and spent the nights in barns our guards had commandeered along the way. As I sat on a barn floor in a small town in west-central Germany one morning, eating a piece of hard brown bread, one of my buddies walked up to me and asked, “Hey Livingstone, you heard the latest rumor?” “What now?” “President Roosevelt died.” “Oh sure, and we’re going to be liberated this afternoon.” It seemed too far-fetched to be true. “I doubt that, but someone said a Jerry [German] guard told him the president died yesterday.” We marched out that morning, in a drizzling rain. There was little talk among my fellow prisoners as we slogged along the muddy country road. We were all thinking about the president and our loved ones back at home. At noon my group came to a halt where the road curved around a low hill. I remember seeing the backs of two POWs as they trudged up the hill, through the knee-deep spring grass that made the Bavarian countryside so beautiful. One of them carried a bugle. The rain had stopped by then, but the sky was still slate-gray. The chilled air was heavy with the smell of damp earth and grass. Finally the two men stopped and turned toward us. One of them, an officer, said in a voice loud enough for all to hear: “I have been told, and I have no reason to doubt, that President Roosevelt died yesterday, April 12. The sergeant will play taps now, and then we will have a few moments of silence.” The sergeant raised his horn and played the saddest song I’ve ever heard. The sound was clear and pure, and I’m sure it could be heard for miles around that little hillock. I wasn’t the only one with tears running down my cheeks. After the sergeant finished we all stood silently with our heads bowed, and I heard the unabashed weeping of a soldier somewhere among us. Then we marched on.

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WHEN WE FINALLY ENTERED huge, forlorn-looking Stalag VII-A on a drizzly April 16 afternoon, we were tired and relieved. This would be the end of the marching, and we’d no longer spend nights in the small-town barns of Bavaria. At first glance the 85-acre camp didn’t look too bad, but upon closer inspection I could see the place was rundown and way overpopulated. My group unrolled our bedding in huge tents. The camp—near Moosburg, about 30 miles northeast of Munich—had been originally established as a Polish POW camp for 10,000 prisoners. But as the war neared its end, the Germans moved more and more POWs from all over Germany there to prevent them from being liberated by the oncoming A llied armies. By some estimates, as many as 110,000 POWs, including 30,000 American soldiers, sailors, and airmen, were there. By the war’s end it was by far Germany’s largest prison camp. Liberation came on April 29, 1945, when tanks of Combat Command A, 14th U.S. Armored Division entered the camp. We’d been hearing artillery for a week before and most guards had already departed, leaving just a skeleton crew behind, so we knew our

life as prisoners was nearly over. POWs swarmed all over the first American tank to enter—but when a m a l nou r i shed but determined-looking POW shimmied up the flagpole, tore down the Nazi swastika, and replaced it with the old Stars and Stripes, the camp really went nuts. We weren’t going anywhere for a while, though. My diary entry for May 6 says, “Expect to be here all summer, ha. ha.” Finally, on May 8, we were up at 4 a.m., piled into the back of U.S. Army trucks, and rolled off toward Landshut, 10 miles to the northeast. About 10 miles beyond Landshut was a Luftwaffe base with a huge airport. For two and a half long hours, my group of 30 men waited, as thousands of American and British ex-POWs were shuttled out of Germany to Le Havre, France, in stalwart old C-47s. Finally our turn came. Bucking headwinds, the fourand-a-half-hour flight was the roughest I’d ever made—strictly white-knuckle time for all of us. After we landed at Le Havre, we learned that Germany had surrendered while we were in the air. What a great feeling. Now truly liberated, we were free at last. Freedom is more than being able to leave home; it’s also being able to go home. H

THE PREQUEL

Bill Livingstone told the first part of his war story, “Worry Aboard Ole Worrybird,” in the October 2020 issue. It’s available online as “The Day a B-17 Gunner’s First Mission Became His Last.”

We all stood silently with our heads bowed, and I heard the unabashed weeping of a soldier among us.

Stalag VII-A was the author’s last POW camp, although he had to wait more than a week beyond its April 29, 1945, liberation to depart.

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WINGING IT First Lieutenant Gilbert Alonzo Blackwell lost his right leg, his freedom, and his pair of wings when his P-47 was shot down in February 1944. Blackwell, a pilot with the 86th Fighter-Bomber Group, spent seven months as a POW; his own regalia in tatters, he donned the uniform jacket of a deceased Canadian prisoner and carved new wings for himself from wood.

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TRASH INTO TREASURE With time on their hands, servicemen put both to good use

ostcards fade. Uniforms fray. Flags disintegrate. Too often, pieces of prized World War II memorabilia survive combat only to lose the fight against time. What do frequently remain, popping up years later at flea markets and yard sales, are hand-hewn relics made from trash—scraps of metal, wood, and plastic, transformed by servicemen into objects playful and practical. Loosely categorized as “trench art,” more than 150 examples of these artworks, keepsakes, and tools are on display at The National WWII Museum through January 2, 2022. Coined during World War I, the phrase “trench art” refers to the tradition of amateur craftsmen making objects “out of things that would otherwise be considered just the wastes of war,” explains Tom Czekanski, senior curator at the museum and organizer of its latest special exhibit, SOLDIER | ARTIST: Trench Art in World War II. Revolutionary War prisoners built ship models out of meat bones; Civil War soldiers carved talismans from lead bullets. By World War I, brass gun cartridges were being recycled into durable trinkets, and World War II brought about materials like Plexiglass and aluminum, mostly used in airplanes. Thanks to these technological advances, objects cobbled together out of necessity or ennui were more inclined to last. Infantrymen engaged in fighting were the least likely combatants to make or keep trench art; as Czekanski points out, they were too busy “staying alive.” As for sailors on ships, soldiers at camps, and prisoners of war, idle hands and plentiful materials likely triggered the itch to create. But, as Czekanski says, “there’s probably something there in the notion that in the midst of destroying the world, they wanted to make something—even if it was just an ashtray.” —Kirstin Fawcett

Photographer Julian W. Moody of the 273rd Field Artillery Battalion snapped this photo of soldiers in Europe in 1944-45. The one at right brandishes a prized possession: an ornately decorated vase made from a humble shell casing.

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TRASH INTO TREASURE KNOW HIS NAME Staff Sergeant Milton S. Miller’s scrap-metal ID bracelet prominently features his eight-digit army serial number. Miller, an engine mechanic with the Fifth Air Force in New Guinea, died in a 1944 plane crash; in 2001, his remains were recovered and buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

STICKING TOGETHER Swagger sticks weren’t commonly carried by American officers, but a group of German POWs in Château-Thierry, France, overseen by John D. Sweitzer of the 551st Ordnance Heavy Maintenance Company, felt that their supervisor’s appearance needed an upgrade. In 1945, the prisoners bestowed upon Sweitzer this intricate accessory; likely carved from packing-crate parts, it’s adorned with commemorative engravings and tipped with metal from a .50-caliber bullet.

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LIGHTNING-QUICK “To Lt. R.L. Smith, USNR, Gunnery Officer, USS President Adams, From the Gunnery Gang,” reads the plaque on this Lockheed P-38 Lightning figurine—a gift to Robert Lee Smith of Latham, Alabama, from his men. The plane is forged from cartridges and assorted shells; according to curator Tom Czekanski, the P-38 was a popular subject for models.

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM

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BREAKING BREAD Trench art was frequently made from aluminum cut from downed aircraft. Staff Sergeant Leon Peacock made this ciborium (left), or container for communion wafers, in Burma in 1943, using aluminum sliced off the hub of a Japanese plane’s propeller.

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LET THE MUSIC SET YOU FREE First Lieutenant Clair Cline of the 448th Bombardment Group wasn’t a professional instrument-maker, but he was a musician—and a handy woodworker with time to kill. During his time as a POW in Germany’s Stalag Luft I in 1944, Cline built a working violin from planks harvested from bed slats, aid crates, and table legs. His tools: broken glass, table knives, and glue scraped from underneath mess hall tables. The project took him just four months; pieces including a plastic chinrest were added after the war.

HANDLE WITH CARE

SMOKE ON THE WATER

According to Czekanski, many American knives (left) came with handles made of leather. They didn’t last long in the Pacific Theater thanks to salt exposure, so servicemen would craft new ones from metal and colorful pieces of Plexiglass.

Ashtrays were a universally popular form of trench art: “Everybody smoked,” Czekanski says. Typically made from artillery shells, few repositories were as skillfully crafted as the one below, by Technician Fifth Grade Andrew Church of the 26th Infantry Division. Constructed to resemble an amphibious jeep, it features two cigarette rests and realistic detailing.

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NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; OPPOSITE: TOPFOTO

A purebred English Pointer born in Shanghai, Judy (here with her longtime companion, Frank Williams of the Royal Air Force) survived ship sinkings, crocodile attacks, and Japanese POW camps to earn Britain’s top medal for animals.

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DOG DAYS OF WAR

An English Pointer used her canine instincts to survive several brutal Japanese prison camps, proving to those around her that resilience isn’t only a human trait By Steven Trent Smith

NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; OPPOSITE: TOPFOTO

mong the tens of thousands of dogs that served in the Allied military during World War II, a few stand above all others for their acts of heroism. Chips was a German Shepherd mix who attacked an Italian machine gun nest on Sicily and helped capture 10 enemy soldiers. Caesar, a Marine Corps messenger dog, carried dispatches from HQ to the front lines and was seriously wounded by a Japanese sniper’s bullets. Gander was a Canadian Army dog who carried away a live grenade, saving a squad of soldiers at the cost of his own life. At the apex of this elite group sits Judy, a white-and-brown English Pointer. She was a courageous and faithful companion, and the only official canine POW of the war. Given credit for saving the lives of many Allied soldiers and sailors, she proved to be the ultimate survivor under conditions that could only be described as horrific, imbuing the men around her with the hope and will to endure as well. JUDY OF SUSSEX was born in February 1936 at the posh Shanghai Dog Kennels in that city’s International Settlement. She showed her proclivity for independence when, at just three

months old, she burrowed under the compound’s chainlink fence and went feral, wandering about and foraging in one of Asia’s most frenzied cities. After a few weeks, one of the kennel workers discovered Judy and returned her home. Shortly afterward the men of HMS Gnat, a Royal Navy gunboat that patrolled the length of the great Yangtze River to keep the peace and control river pirates, adopted Judy as their official mascot. Judy immediately took to the crew, and they to her. Cared for by a succession of Royal Navy sailors, she reveled in the companionship they afforded. In the days before ship-borne radar, Gnat

Sailors of the Royal Navy gunboat HMS Gnat, charged with keeping the peace on prewar China’s Yangtze River, adopted Judy as one of their own. The dog pulled her weight, alerting the crew to unseen dangers with her “uncanny instinct for detecting threats.”

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It wasn’t long before Judy noticed the lack of drinking water. She sniffed all around the ocean’s edge before settling on a small patch of sand, then began digging furiously, barking all the while. White went to investigate and as he approached, her paws exposed a bubbling spring of fresh water. “Water! Judy’s found water!” the sailor screamed. After five days the ship’s captain was able to make contact with the residents of a nearby island. With their help, he secured a fishing boat with a Chinese crew to carry the party across to the east coast of Sumatra, where they were expecting British Army trucks to carry them to the port at Padang on the west coast—their only chance at escaping Japan’s inexorable advance as it approached through the Dutch East Indies. But when they arrived on Sumatra, they were told there were no trucks and, with Padang as their intended destination, they’d have to walk 170 miles through dense jungle to get there. In mid-February 1942 the group commenced its trek. Judy seemed to take command of the march through the wilderness. As one of her minders, Les Searle, recalled, “She felt like the group ‘belonged to her.’ The way she acted was as though she was singlehandedly responsible for their safe transit.” She adroitly guided them around marshes and over huge tree roots, all the while fighting off snakes and other menaces. On the second day the dog discovered a crocodile by the river’s edge. She moved in and started to bark. The croc took a swipe at her with his claw, opening a deep gash on her shoulder. Her bark immediately turned to a pained yelp as she backed away. Yet

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FROM TOP: STATE LIBRARY VICTORIA; STATE LIBRARY VICTORIA, GIFT OF MR R. J. FRENCH, 1979

Judy responds to commands from a Royal Navy sailor on HMS Grasshopper during her second tour of duty.

was fortunate to have its own early warning device. Judy’s acute senses of smell, sight, and hearing, coupled with what one of her minders, Chief Petty Officer Charles Jefferey, called her “uncanny instinct for detecting threats,” would serve her and her shipmates well over the course of the coming war. This was amply demonstrated one night when pirates attacked the ship. The lookouts saw nothing, but Judy started barking loudly in the direction of oncoming boats. Rousted from their slumber, the British sailors defeated the raiders following a fierce gun battle. After that Judy became adept at sensing approaching enemy aircraft long before her human mates could, her noisy barks warning the crew of impending danger. In June 1939 the Royal Navy transferred Judy and many of her shipmates to another gunboat, the newly built HMS Grasshopper, which soon joined the British fleet at Singapore. There the Grasshopper spent the next two years patrolling the seas between the great city-state and Hong Kong. Once war broke out in December 1941, the gunboats were ordered to Batavia, Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia). Grasshopper left Singapore with 200-some refugees, among them soldiers, nurses, and civilian mothers and their children. During the voyage Judy romped on the deck and played hide-and-goseek with the kids, helping to keep spirits high. On February 14, 1942, the gunboat was steaming past the Lingga Islands, 140 miles south of Singapore, when Japanese planes attacked it. A pair of bombs paralyzed the vessel, and its captain steered the ship toward uninhabited Posik Island, grounding it 100 yards off the beach. All crew and passengers safely reached land, but Judy was nowhere to be found. Her shipmates feared she had died below decks during the bombing. The survivors soon realized the acute peril they were in—they had precious little food and no source of drinking water. Petty Officer George White volunteered to swim out to the still-smoldering Grasshopper to recover any food, water, and medical supplies he could find. As he moved around the boat, he heard an “unhuman sound, part whine, part moan.” He tracked the noise to a compartment amidships, and there he saw Judy trapped under a large steel locker. He freed the dog, and when she got to the beach she scampered around, greeting her many friends.

FROM TOP: STATE LIBRARY VICTORIA; STATE LIBRARY VICTORIA, GIFT OF MR R. J. FRENCH, 1979

a few days later, Searle believed, Judy chased away a tiger that had been stalking the party. It took a month for the refugees to reach Padang on March 16, 1942. Immediately looking for a ship to take them to safety, they were crushed to learn that the last one had left the port just the day before. The next day the roar of motorcycles announced the arrival of the Japanese army. The group had no choice but to surrender. Their new home was an old Dutch army barracks on the outskirts of town that the Japanese had turned into a POW camp. Without enough food to go around, Judy took to hunting her own meals by crawling under the perimeter fence, much as she had done when escaping the kennels back in 1936. She became adept at catching rodents, birds, and reptiles, taking great risks with her nightly excursions as both her captors and the local natives had a predilection for dog meat. After a few months the Japanese moved half of the Allied POWs to Gloegoer prisoner camp at Medan, 330 miles northwest of Padang in northern Sumatra. Judy’s minders wrapped her in a gunnysack and smuggled her aboard one of the trucks. WHILE JUDY HAD ALWAYS been completely dedicated to the many Royal Navy sailors on both Gnat and Grasshopper who had looked after her, she always seemed to be searching for a single human companion she could trust implicitly. In Medan she found such a fellow—Leading Aircraftman Frank Williams, a 22-year-old electronics technician with the Royal Air Force. A lanky, gentle man with wavy brown hair and a kind face, he had wanted to be a pilot but was too tall, so he settled on becoming a radar expert. His journey from Padang to Medan paralleled Judy’s, though the two had never met. That changed one day when Williams was eating his daily rice ration and noticed a dog staring at him. Judy eyed the newcomer warily, then began walking toward him. She stopped a few feet away, sat, sniffed the air, cocked her head, and watched him closely. Williams scooped out a handful of rice and offered it to her. Still, she remained seated. He then offered her his entire ration. She moved closer, and as he “scritched” her ears she ate hungrily. She then curled up at his feet. “I remember thinking what on earth is a beautiful English Pointer like this doing here with no one to care for her,” he recalled. “I realized

Brutal Japanese POW camps took their toll on men and beasts alike (above). Both Judy and Williams survived the 1944 torpedoing of SS Van Waerwijck.

that she was a survivor.” After that the two were inseparable. The POWs fell into a new routine at Medan. Working parties were sent out each day to finish the disassembly of a local industrial plant. Judy often went along until her run-ins with the Korean guards reached a dangerous level. She hated her captors and let them know it in no uncertain terms. Her snarling provoked them into trying to attack her with the butts of their rifles. More than once their blows hit home. Finally, Williams decided to lock her up at the camp to keep her safe. It was then, early in 1943, that Williams hit upon an idea to help shield his companion from overaggressive guards: he decided to have her officially added to the list of POWs. With trepidation he approached the camp commandant, Colonel Hirateru Banno, intent upon getting him drunk and plying him with

POW Williams wondered, “What on earth is this beautiful English Pointer doing here with no one to care for her?”

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The Japanese had converted the vessel to carry prisoners by building racks of bamboo sleeping platforms in the dank, smelly hold. Just two days after sailing, a pair of torpedoes, fired by the British submarine HMS Truculent, slammed into the side of Van Waerwijck, tearing a huge hole that quickly flooded the below-decks compartments. Williams pushed Judy out through a porthole and into the churning sea. He followed, but in the chaos quickly lost track of her. Williams was pulled from the water by a Japanese tanker and sent with other POWs to a prison camp near Singapore. Along the way he started hearing stories about a dog that had rescued survivors of the attack, and he knew that dog was Judy. Les Searle recalled that Judy had pushed floating debris toward men in the water and even let a few hang onto her back while she dog-paddled toward a local fishing boat picking up men. He remembered think-

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the presentation of a puppy from Judy’s recent litter. To Williams’s surprise the colonel was amenable and wrote an order declaring the dog as “prisoner number 81A GloegoerMedan.” And thus Judy of Sussex became World War II’s first and only official canine prisoner of war. In June 1944 the Japanese announced that all POWs were to be shipped to Singapore. All but Judy. When the new commandant, Captain Nissi, first met the dog, he took an instant dislike to her. As the time approached to board the ship, he made it clear that Judy had to stay behind. So Williams devised a scheme to circumvent the officer’s order—he would carry her aboard in an empty rice bag. He spent hours training her to lay silent and stock-still in the bag. The ruse worked, and when the old Dutch freighter SS Van Waerwijck steamed out of Medan’s port carrying 700 POWs, dog and man were still together.

TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

The British media reported on Judy’s wartime heroics even as the freed POWs were sailing home to England. Soon after, a veterinary charity awarded the dog its highest honor, the Dickin Medal (opposite, top). Frank Williams stands immediately to the right of Judy during the presentation ceremony (above).

TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

ing, “Why didn’t the poor bitch shake [them] off, save herself ?” Searle carried the oil-covered heroine ashore and hid her in one of the trucks headed to the prison camp, arriving a couple of days before Williams. When they got there, Judy went looking for Williams, combing every corner of the camp but turning up nothing. So she waited at the main gate for him to come. When he did, she knocked him to the ground and licked his face while he hugged her madly. In late summer 1944 the Japanese army moved the Allied prisoners for the last time, assigning them to join in the effort to complete a 300mile railway line through central Sumatra. Camp facilities were next to nonexistent, with food rations cut below subsistence level. Incidences of tropical diseases, like malaria and beriberi, rose at an alarming rate. Men began to die—sometimes as many as 10 a day. Like most of his compatriots, Frank Williams was no more than a skeleton. And Judy was not much better off. Writing after the war, Williams said, “She wasn’t that tame, obedient dog anymore. She was a skinny animal that kept herself alive through cunning and instinct.” Through it all the pair remained inseparable. “All I had to do was look at her and into those weary, bloodshot eyes, and I would ask myself: ‘What would happen to her if I died?’” Her survival became the driving force in his life. After Japan surrendered in August 1945, British Army paratroopers went into the camps to liberate all the POWs. And then the long journey home began, though not without a major hitch: Judy was denied passage aboard the homebound troopship. But, once again, her friends smuggled her aboard and kept her well-hidden. Her survival story began circulating around the ship, and even before the POWs landed, the English media was onto the story. This caught the attention of a British veterinary charity, the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA). When the POWs arrived at Liverpool, health authorities quarantined Judy for six months. It was the first extended period Frank and Judy had been apart since they met, and neither took it well. On April 29, 1946, Judy was finally released from quarantine, and the PDSA awarded her the Dickin Medal, the animal equivalent of Britain’s highest military honor, the Victoria Cross (equivalent to the U.S. Medal of Honor). Her citation reads: “For magnificent courage and endurance in Japanese prison camps, which helped to maintain morale among her fellow prisoners and also saving many lives through her intelligence and watchfulness.” Judy became a media hit. “Gunboat Judy Saves Lives—Wins Medal and Life Pension,” a headline in the Daily Mirror blared. She and Frank Williams were feted around the nation, making tours of children’s hospitals and rehabilitation centers. During these events Judy wore a specially tailored RAF jacket with her campaign ribbons adorning her collar. STIFLED BY the constrictions of life in postwar England, in 1948 Williams took a job in East Africa, both he and Judy settling down in south-

ern Tanzania. It was a wonderful experience for the pair. Judy went on safari in the scrublands, battling with snakes and other wild critters just as she had done in Sumatra. In early 1950 she went missing for nine days. When Williams found her, she was seriously ill, and a doctor at the local hospital diagnosed a tumor. He operated right away, but an infection overwhelmed her body. On February 17, Williams was forced to euthanize Judy. She was buried in her RAF jacket underneath a marble memorial Williams built near his home. Down the mighty Yangtze, around the verdant Lingga Islands, across the dense jungles of Sumatra, Judy of Sussex, POW 81A Gloegoer-Medan, loyally, and often at great risk to herself, saved lives and inspired the belief among her fellow prisoners that survival, though difficult, was indeed possible—as she had proved time and again throughout her resilient life. Now, eight decades on, the enduring memory of her exploits is kept alive in books, magazines, and online articles. And every year a few hearty souls make the long trek to Judy’s gravesite in Nachingwea, Tanzania, to pay tribute to one of the most storied dogs of her generation. H

Williams had one more adventure in store for Judy. Here they pose before relocating from England to Tanzania in 1948. OCTOBER 2021

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REVIEWS BOOKS

By Charlie English. 336 pp. Random House, 2021. $28.

called degenerate artists themselves. English focuses much of his story on Hans Prinzhorn, a German physician with a PhD in art history who began working for the Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic in 1919. According to Prinzhorn’s own description, he was an “unstable psychopath with hysterical traits.” Perhaps because he saw himself in such terms, Prinzhorn became obsessed with collecting the remarkable art produced by some of the mentally ill patients in Heidelberg, and he soon cast a wider net to encompass the output of the gifted in other asylums throughout Germany. In 1922, his collection was published in a now-seminal volume, Artistry of the Mentally Ill. This “monumental achievement,” as English describes it, quickly won the admiration of avant-garde artists such as Paul Klee and Salvador Dali. Once Hitler took power in 1933, he declared war on “the last elements of our cul-

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THE GALLERY OF MIRACLES AND MADNESS Insanity, Modernism, and Hitler’s War on Art

IN THE AFTERMATH of World War I, the world seemed to have gone mad. Little wonder that this was when Freud’s psychoanalysis was all the rage or that artists were quick to reflect the zeitgeist. “The schizophrenic postwar age required a schizophrenic postwar art,” British author Charlie English writes. “Madness had never been so much in vogue.” It was equally in vogue in the political arena, where a failed artist by the name of Adolf Hitler was on the rise. English, a former journalist with London’s The Guardian, weaves the themes of “mad art” and “mad politics” together in his highly engaging new book, The Gallery of Miracles and Madness. As he convincingly demonstrates, Hitler’s resolve to eliminate “degenerate art” was intimately linked with his resolve to eliminate “life unworthy of life”— first of all, those who were deemed mentally or physically unfit, including many of the so-

FROM LEFT: NEUES VOLK MAGAZINE, COURTESY OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE; PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF STADTARCHIV OFFENBURG

INSANITY ON A GRAND SCALE

REVIEWS BOOKS

PARTNERS IN CRIME

FROM LEFT: NEUES VOLK MAGAZINE, COURTESY OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE; PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF STADTARCHIV OFFENBURG

The Nazis saw the chronically ill as a social burden; one propaganda piece (far left) informed readers that it cost 60,000 reichsmarks to look after patients like Franz Karl Bühler (middle). The artist created this eerie self-portrait (right) while hospitalized for schizophrenia; the Nazis killed him in 1940. tural decomposition”—all the modern art attributed to Jews, Bolsheviks, and the “insane.” Soon, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels organized huge exhibitions of “degenerate art,” including parts of Prinzhorn’s collection. They drew millions of visitors, many of whom presumably came to admire the art they were supposed to vilify. After briefly flirting with Nazism, Prinzhorn died of typhus in June 1933 at the age of 47. For that reason, he never learned that some of his star artists, along with their fellow patients in the country’s asylums, perished in the first improvised gas chambers. The methods used in the war against those categorized as mentally or physically “defective” would soon be applied to Jews in the Holocaust. This meant that even more grandiose insanity was yet to come. —Andrew Nagorski is the author of 1941: The Year Germany Lost the War (2019).

WHEN HITLER CAME TO POWER in 1933, Germany—its military strictly limited by the Treaty of Versailles—had a 100,000man army and a few dozen tanks and combat aircraft that had been covertly produced and hidden in Soviet Russia. Six years later, the Wehrmacht had over three million men, 4,000 planes, and nearly 3,500 tanks. Faustian Bargain, written by Ian Ona Johnson, a military history professor at the University of Notre Dame, addresses the question of how Germany created the world’s most powerful and technologically advanced military so quickly. The broad outlines of the answer are well-known among historians: a secret German-Soviet partnership launched in 1922 enabled Germany to clandestinely build testing, training, and production facilities for aircraft and tanks in Soviet Russia. Faustian Bargain adds much new detail to our understanding of how that partnership worked and which weapons were designed, tested, modified, and produced—where, and by whom. We see, step-bystep, progress made by Junkers designers and engineers based in Fili, outside Moscow, and the southern city of Lipetsk; their efforts culminated in the Ju 87 “Stuka” dive-bomber. Meanwhile, a team from the Krupp arms manufacturer worked at a secret armored warfare site near Kazan, along the Volga, where their FAUSTIAN BARGAIN primitive “grosstraktor” medium tank proto- The Soviet-German type gave way to designs for Panzers I and II. Partnership and the Hitler ended Germany’s secret partnership Origins of the Second with Russia within months of taking com- World War mand. But after 10 years of work at these clan- By Ian Ona Johnson. destine sites, Johnson explains, German 384 pp. Oxford industry possessed blueprints for dozens of University Press, the most technologically advanced weapons 2021. $29.95. and was ready for simultaneous mass production. When Hitler began rearming Germany in late 1933, the nation’s military industrial floodgates were thrown open: in two years, the number of aviation industry workers soared from 4,000 to 54,000. Forty-two percent of German fighter and bomber production ordered in 1934 had been aircraft-tested and developed at Lipetsk. Panzers I and II went into mass production in 1934. While Johnson focuses primarily on the rebirth of Germany’s military might, he notes—almost in passing—that the GermanSoviet partnership was a two-way street. In return for providing facilities and labor, Soviet engineers worked side by side with their German counterparts, inspecting and studying all German prototypes and copying or reverse-engineering (continued on page 73) OCTOBER 2021

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CRASH LANDING

FALLEN TIGERS The Fate of America’s Missing Airmen in China during World War II

By Daniel Jackson. 310 pp. The University Press of Kentucky, 2021. $29.95.

AMONG THE VOLUMINOUS archives the U.S. Army Air Forces generated during World War II are thousands of Missing Air Crew Reports (MACR). Carefully drafted and updated at various command levels, these MACRs represented a concerted effort to ascertain the fate of every airman who failed to return from a combat mission. In his unique new book, Fallen Tigers, accomplished U.S. Air Force pilot and historian Daniel Jackson uses MACRs filed on the 1,832 American airmen lost in combat over China as a window into the under-examined China-Burma-India Theater. MACRs contained important information about the causes of combat losses and the experiences of airmen evading capture, their interaction with Chinese military and civilian personnel, and their ultimate fates. Jackson notes that in China, “every place was enemy territory, and yet no place was enemy territory.” American airmen depended on Chinese citizens—Nationalists, Communists, and ordinary peasants—to navigate this bewildering landscape. Jackson connects these micro-narratives with the larger story, which focuses on the air war in China proper, mainly fought by the First American Volunteer Group (Claire Chennault’s famed Flying Tigers) and the Fourteenth Air Force. Important insights emerge from his carefully reconstructed

stories of missions gone wrong and isolated pilots struggling to survive. A strength of the work is its coverage of both high-level decision-making and the experiences of combat. Jackson succinctly assesses senior leadership, taking a dim view of CBI Theater Commander General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, whom he sees as inattentive to the demands of his sprawling area of operations and ill-suited to leading a multinational coalition. Nor does the colorful Chennault come off unscathed; Jackson faults him for overselling the potential of his under-resourced air force to inflict crippling damage on the Japanese. Jackson also highlights the unique nature of air combat in China. At a time when the USAAF was launching 1,000-bomber raids over Germany, a 60-plane strike in equipment-starved China represented a major effort. Meanwhile, the P-51 Mustang fighter, a game-changer in the high-altitude air battles over Europe, was less successful in China; its liquid-cooled engine made it vulnerable to ground fire during the predominantly lowlevel missions. Yet tactical innovations in the CBI abounded; for example, USA AF units conducted “aerial guerrilla warfare” out of rough-hewn bases located behind enemy lines. Jackson provides a measured analysis of loss rates and combat claims, topics that sometimes prove controversial when reputations and organizational pride are on the line. Fallen Tigers supports recent scholarship that stresses the importance of the CBI Theater in overall Allied strategy and the contribution of air power to its success. But Jackson also gives important weight to smaller stories. He begins and ends the book with the tale of Lieutenant Glen Beneda, a young P-51 pilot shot down in May 1944. In the company of another U.S. airman, Beneda endured a lengthy odyssey evading capture behind enemy lines, aided by both Chinese civilians and Communist guerrillas. Many decades after the war, he returned to China for several emotional visits. Notwithstanding its statistical and analytical rigor, Fallen Tigers remains a very human story at heart. —Richard R. Muller teaches military history at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Captain Everett Holstrom (far right), commander of the China-based 11th Bomb Squadron, poses with the crew of his B-25 Tokyo Jo in 1943.

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NATIONAL ARCHIVES

( Partners, continued from page 71) many of them. Stalin’s Five-Year Plans for rapid industrialization also relied heavily on German technology. Moscow signed hundreds of contracts with Ger ma n industr y; ma nu fact urers Krupp and Rheinmetall provided technical assistance and machine-tools for some of the Soviet Union’s largest weapons factories. An entire generation of Soviet aircraft was powered by BMW engines, built under license in Russia. By 1934, Johnson notes, the Red Army possessed nearly 5,000 aircraft and 10,000 armored vehicles—including the BT-5 “fast tank,” superior to Panzers I and II—and had nearly 1,000,000 activeduty soldiers, making them the most numerically powerful army in Europe. Unfortunately, the book’s treatment of the approach of the war is superficial and sometimes misses the mark altogether. Discussion of the 1939 German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact that triggered Hitler’s invasion of Poland overlooks the fact that both Hitler and Stalin were trying to avoid a two-front war. Britain and France sought to draw Stalin into an anti-German military alliance. At the same time, the Red Army was locked in a virtual undeclared war with Japan, while Tokyo sought to draw Germany into an anti-Soviet military alliance. The Nonaggression Pact solved these problems. Also, the book’s handling of Hitler’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union ignores altogether the debate among historians over whether Operation Barbarossa may have forestalled an imminent Soviet attack on Germany, as some claim. Nevertheless, Johnson’s detailed account of the German-Soviet partnership makes Faustian Bargain a fascinating read. His conclusion is memorable: never in history have two opponents so diligently prepared each other for a war that would precipitate a life-or-death struggle for both, soaking Europe in the blood of tens of millions. —Stuart D. Goldman, a former professor of Russian history and a regular World War II contributor, is the author of Nomonhan, 1939: The Red Army’s Victory That Shaped World War II (2012).

REVIEWS GAMES

BEHIND ENEMY LINES MEDAL OF HONOR: ABOVE AND BEYOND Respawn Entertainment. $59.99. Available for PC through Oculus Rift VR . WORLD WAR II RATING

HHHHH

THE BASICS Above and Beyond, the latest entry in the popular

Medal of Honor series, is a virtual-reality (VR) first-person shooter set in the European Theater that offers a single-player campaign and five multiplayer modes.

THE OBJECTIVE The game puts players in the shoes of an American lieutenant working for the OSS as the lieutenant collaborates with the French Resistance, storms the beaches at Normandy, skis in Norway, and even sabotages Germany’s V-2 rockets. HISTORICAL ACCURACY Above and Beyond shows years of care-

ful historical research. Every weapon used, from the M1 Garand to the German P38, is period-accurate, and each offers specific reloading sequences (nothing is more stressful than fumbling with a Kar98k’s bolt action as machine-gun fire rains around you). The scenery is filled with detail as well: German bunkers are stocked with authentic supplies, devices, and equipment; soldiers’ barracks contain personal effects like booze and books.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY Above and Beyond’s immersive environments and heart-pumping combat provide history buffs with an incredible opportunity to “travel” back in time. For a release from a major studio, however, the game’s graphics leave much to be desired. Interactions with enemy characters can also prove frustrating: they’re controlled via artificial intelligence, but their awkward movements aren’t very lifelike. Meanwhile, players spend lots of time learning specific skillsets—like planning an ambush against a Nazi caravan—only to deploy them just once.

PLAYABILITY Since Above and Beyond is a VR title, players will need to be able to physically stand, crouch, and walk. Exercise caution if you are photosensitive or have epilepsy, as the VR headset occasionally displays flashing lights. Accessibility options are provided for those with VR-induced sickness. THE BOTTOM LINE Above and Beyond is a portal into the past. If

you want a game that will put you both physically and emotionally amid the action of World War II, this is it—so long as you can look past some technical shortcomings. —Dominic Geppi is a high school history teacher and a lifetime consumer of history-based video games.

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REVIEWS BOOKS

WILD WEST

CHECKMATE IN BERLIN The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World

By Giles Milton. 400 pp. Henry Holt, 2021. $29.99.

GILES MILTON’S NEW BOOK, Checkmate in Berlin, opens in February 1945 with “a snaking column of jeeps and trucks that stretched for more than a dozen miles,” led by limousines carrying Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill through the Crimean Mountains to Yalta. It ends four years later, as West Berliners erupt in joy as a column of cars and trucks appear on the highway from western Germany, signaling the end of the Soviet blockade that had isolated the city since June 1948. Between these scenes, Milton tells an engaging tale about the tumultuous years when four victorious Allied nations— the “Four Powers” of the U.S., U.K., U.S.S.R, and France—occupied Berlin, repaired the city, and tried to cooperate in governing it— only to end up at odds as the Cold War began. Giles Milton, a bestselling narrative historian, is the author of works including Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2017). Not surprisingly, Checkmate in Berlin, his 12th title, reads like a novel, one narrated by ordinary people who lived through amazing events: not presidents, prime ministers, or senior generals, but the lower-ranking officers, local officials, political activists, journalists, and everyday citizens on the ground in Berlin from 1945 to 1949. People like Colonel Frank Howley, the brash leader of the detach-

ment that ran American Military Government operations in Berlin, who never missed a chance to clash with the Soviets. Or Wolfgang Leonhard, an idealistic German who came to Berlin to help establish a Communist government but grew disillusioned as he saw the Soviets trying to impose Stalinism on the city. Or Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, the resistance activist who watched her fellow Berliners struggle to survive as the Americans and Soviets wrestled for control. Miles searched archives in Great Britain and the U.S. for old books, interview transcripts, and unpublished manuscripts produced by those who did the often-dirty work of policing, governing, and rebuilding Berlin. His efforts paid off. We get to see a senior Soviet propaganda officer the way an American occupation official saw him: with a head that “was totally neckless, like an oversize billiard ball.” We learn that a Russian defector in Canada tried to tell journalists about Soviet espionage activities; they rebuffed him because “Nobody wants to say anything but nice things about Stalin these days.” When the Soviets cut electricity to Berlin during the blockade, a West Berlin dentist drilled his patients’ teeth with a drill powered by his wife pedaling a bicycle. The Soviets needed proof that Hitler was really dead, so they found an employee of the Führer’s dentist. She led officials to Hitler’s dental records, used X-rays to identify teeth from a jawbone chunk—and then afterward, she disappeared to Siberia. Milton’s fast-paced narrative skims over some postwar specifics—for example, how the Kommandatura, the command agency the Four Powers set up to run Berlin, got organized and went into operation. Readers who want deep-dive analysis will probably want to go elsewhere. But before jumping into a tragic, grand, and rich subject like early Cold War Berlin, it’s good to get a broad overview first, and Checkmate in Berlin does just that. —Don Smith is a retired army reservist who spent over 20 years with the U.S. intelligence community.

EVERETT COLLECTION INC/ALAMY; OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; COURTESY OF THE PRITZKER MILITARY MUSEUM & LIBRARY; COURTESY OF KENT RAMSEY, © DISNEY

A multilingual sign marking the border of Berlin’s occupied American sector serves as a symbol of a city divided.

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EVERETT COLLECTION INC/ALAMY; OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; COURTESY OF THE PRITZKER MILITARY MUSEUM & LIBRARY; COURTESY OF KENT RAMSEY, © DISNEY

Clockwise: General Eisenhower inspects artworks stolen by the Nazis; several are now on display in Cincinnati. Meanwhile, Willie and Joe get their due in a new Bill Mauldin exhibition; and a Disney museum revisits World War II.

AT THE MUSEUM From Bill Mauldin to a Botticelli found in a German salt mine, there’s plenty to admire—and lots to learn—at these new art shows.

PAINTING, POLITICS AND THE MONUMENTS MEN: The Berlin Masterpieces in America

DRAWN TO COMBAT: Bill Mauldin and the Art of War

THE WALT DISNEY STUDIOS AND WORLD WAR II

Cincinnati Art Museum. Closes Oct. 3, 2021. $10.

Pritzker Military Museum & Library, Chicago. Closes spring 2022. $10.

Walt Disney Family Museum, San Francisco. Closes Jan. 10, 2022. $15.

In 1945 Allied forces in Germany discovered hoards of famous artworks stolen by the Nazis. But the U.S. would soon face similar accusations of cultural theft after importing 202 of these works for a landmark touring exhibition—charges examined in a new show in Cincinnati featuring four of the plundered paintings.

Bill Mauldin, the famed cartoonist and creator of characters Willie and Joe, is celebrated in a careerspanning retrospective at the Pritzker Military Museum & Library. On display are 150 military-themed drawings and cartoons, along with personal items like letters and the Purple Heart Mauldin received for wounds in Italy.

Walt Disney Studios jumped headfirst into the war effort following Pearl Harbor, with more than 90 percent of its production devoted to training films, military insignia, government posters, and other initiatives. Check out 550 Disney-branded objects and film clips in a special exhibition at the Walt Disney Family Museum.

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BATTLE FILMS BY MARK GRIMSLEY

ORDEAL BY DEGRADATION PRAISED AS ONE OF THE BEST war movies of all time, Das Boot is certainly the most realistic depiction of life aboard a U-boat during the Battle of the Atlantic, which claimed the lives of 75 percent of 40,000 German submariners. Directed by Wolfgang Petersen, the German film was first conceived as a five-hour television miniseries (ultimately broadcast in 1984-85) but initially abridged for theatrical release in 1981. Das Boot features plenty of action, from torpedo runs to depthcharge attacks. These scenes are unusually well-done but nonethe-

less familiar to anyone who has seen a movie about submarines. So for me, the movie’s most compelling element is its emphasis on the physical discomfort and debasements of life aboard a submarine: 50 men crammed into a narrow iron tube, its stale air rancid with engine oil and body odor. By extension, the film conjures something that every veteran knows about military service but of which most civilians can scarcely guess: it sucks. It sucks to find yourself soaked to the skin by a pitiless downpour—“If it ain’t raining, you ain’t training,” goes a familiar adage. It sucks to be subjected to obscene, tedious, and interminable monologues about sex by the idiot in the bunk next to you. It sucks to be bereft of privacy, for weeks or even months. Every bodily function is public, including those where privacy is urgently needed. An Iraq War veteran once told me a story, indelicate but pointed, about a young soldier on patrol in the broiling desert heat, without even a chemical toilet available within miles for a moment alone, who announced to his comrades that he could deny his libido no longer: he was going to masturbate, and they could watch or turn away; he didn’t care. Das Boot introduces filmgoers to this degrading world through the observations of a war correspondent—a proxy for the audience—as he accompanies the U-boat on an extended Atlantic patrol. Given an initial tour of the vessel, he is shown its only functioning “head” (navy-speak for “toilet”). The other head, his guide informs him, is being used to store food: “More space for eating, less to shit.” Directly next to the reeking functional head are the crewmen’s bunks. “Most bunks are shared by two guys,” the guide continues. “One sleeps while the other’s on duty. That means when one man comes off watch he climbs into the other man’s stink.” Mercifully, the correspondent is given a bunk to himself, but otherwise he sees, hears, tastes, feels, and smells everything the crewmen do. Among the sights: an inspection in which a luckless seaman drops his trousers so a medic can examine his genitals with a magnifying glass. “Crabs,” the medic announces before turning to inform a crowd of onlookers, “A whole army of them.” To the humiliated

PICTURELUX/THE HOLLYWOOD ARCHIVE/ALAMY; OPPOSITE: MOVIESTORE COLLECTION LTD/ALAMY

Wolfgang Petersen’s 1981 film, Das Boot, provides an unvarnished look at the Battle of the Atlantic through the eyes of a disillusioned U-boat crew.

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seaman, he adds, “A winkie like yours, they’ll eat it to the bone.” The onlookers howl with laughter. Among the sounds: a sailor who leeringly explains how to improvise a sex toy from “a cork with a nail stuck in it and a violin string attached on the side of it.” He goes on to explain exactly how the contraption works but trust me; you don’t want to know. As for taste, the correspondent dines on the same chow as the crewmen, who debate whether the food can be likened most accurately to “old shit,” “baby poop,” or “fresh horse droppings.” Then there’s the U-boat’s inability to remain dry. When it runs on the surface in heavy seas, gallons of cold saltwater plunge through the main hatch, drenching everyone in the control room and leaving their clothing sopping wet for hours. Sooner or later, every crewman shares this experience. But it is the stench that dominates everything, and it only gets worse over time. Sweaty feet. Bad breath. Oil fumes. A seaman in his bunk who farts fragrantly, loudly, and abundantly, explaining to a disgusted bunkmate, “It’s gas, you know. These Brussels sprouts.” Most overwhelmingly, the collective body odor of 50 men clings to everything since crewmen go for weeks wearing the same clothes without room or fresh water aboard the U-boat to bathe. The ceaseless misery is made still worse by the fact that for nearly two months, it is unredeemed by the sighting, much less the sinking, of a single British merchant ship. In Iraq and Afghanistan, a saying emerged among American troops: “Embrace the Suck,” meaning “The situation is bad, but deal with it.”

Das Boot captures the debasements of life aboard a submarine. The crew of Das Boot would have understood the sentiment. Yet this grim acceptance has its limits. “Spirits are abysmal,” the film’s correspondent writes after spending 50 days at sea. “The ordeal is putting human endurance to the test. It’s an experiment to sound out the limits of our ability to suffer.” It’s an experiment with which most veterans are all too familiar. H

HISTORYNET.COM

s PHluWHEN

PICTURELUX/THE HOLLYWOOD ARCHIVE/ALAMY; OPPOSITE: MOVIESTORE COLLECTION LTD/ALAMY

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

Japanese airman Nobuo Fujita

I BOMBED AMERICA JUNE 2020

THE ONLY PILOT TO STRIKE THE MAINLAND FACED AN UNLIKELY RECKONING

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TODAY IN HISTORY AUGUST 8, 1974 PRESIDENT RICHARD M. NIXON ANNOUNCED HIS RESIGNATION. UNDER SUBPOENA THE NIXON WHITE HOUSE RELEASED TAPES OF PHONE CONVERSATIONS TO THE HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE ON AUGUST 5, 1974. THE MOST DAMNING PIECE OF EVIDENCE OBTAINED WAS THE INFAMOUS “SMOKING GUN” TAPE, WHICH DOCUMENTED THE EARLY STAGES OF THE WATERGATE COVERUP. NIXON ACCEPTED BLAME FOR HIS ROLE IN THE COVERUP, CITING A MEMORY LAPSE REGARDING WHITE HOUSE INVOLVEMENT. For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ TODAY-IN-HISTORY

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CHALLENGE

ORDER OF THE DAY

PHOTO12/UIG/GETTY IMAGES; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN WALKER

We altered this photo of G.I.s waiting to board landing craft headed for Normandy to create one inaccuracy inaccuracy. What is it it ?

Answer to the June Challenge: “This time you’ve

hidden the photo’s alteration in plain sight!” says reader Lanny Smith. Or you could say “plane” sight: we eliminated the trim tab (top left) on the F6F Hellcat’s tail. An amazing 131 of you got that right. No, we didn’t mess with any of the goggles or antennae.

Congratulations to the winners: Al Schmidt, Phillip

Von Ville, and Brett A. Wyrick

Please send your answer with your name

and mailing address to: October 2021 Challenge, World War II, 901 N. Glebe Road, 5th Fl., Arlington, VA 22203; or email: challenge@ historynet.com. Three winners, chosen at random from all correct entries submitted by October 15, 2021, will receive The Gallery of Miracles and Madness by Charlie English. The answer will appear in the February 2022 issue.

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FAMILIAR FACE

TRUE BLUE

U.S. NAVY/NATIONAL ARCHIVES AT ST. LOUIS; INSET: ALAMY

Those eyes. Turns out they were colorblind, dashing young Paul Newman’s hope of becoming a navy pilot during the war. Instead, Newman—who had enlisted in the navy at age 18 in 1943—became a radioman and gunner in a series of Pacific-based torpedo bomber squadrons. “I was a pretty good radioman,” he recalled,“but a terrible gunner.” No matter. He didn’t see any significant action and had a measure of good luck. In May 1945, the pilot of his plane had an earache: this spared the crew from doing practice landings on the USS Bunker Hill,, the target of kamikaze Hill attacks that killed hundreds, including those from Newman’s squadron. Discharged in 1946, he went on to pursue acting, in a career as legendary as those eyes.

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