MHQ Winter 2022-2023

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY

SURVIVING NAPOLEON’S WARS

How infantrymen proved their mettle in an era of conquest

TODAY IN HISTORY

FEBRUARY 14, 1929

KNOWN AS THE ST. VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE, SEVEN MEN WERE SLAIN DURING A FAUX POLICE RAID LIKELY STAGED BY AL CAPONE’S CHICAGO OUTFIT. THE VICTIMS, MEMBERS AND ASSOCIATES OF THE RIVAL “NORTH SIDE GANG,” WERE LINED UP AGAINST A BRICK WALL INSIDE A COMMERCIAL TRUCKING GARAGE AND SHOT. BRICKS FROM THE INFAMOUS WALL WERE LATER PURCHASED BY COLLECTORS. MANY ARE ON DISPLAY AT THE MOB MUSEUM IN LAS VEGAS.

For more, visit HISTORYNET.COM/ TODAY-IN-HISTORY

OPENING ROUND

East meets West in this innovative Japanese fire arrow known as the bo-hiya. The fire arrow is a basic projectile that found use across the globe for many centuries. Japanese warriors are recorded as loosing them from their bows (yumi) since at least the fifth century of the common era. Gunpowder began to appear in Chinese armies in the 10th century and Japanese contact with the outside world—most tellingly, being invaded twice by the Mongols in the late 13th century—exposed them to new technology and the motivation to develop it for their own defense. Among the weapon concepts this exposure advanced was that of the fire arrow.

Japanese military technology got a fresh jump start in 1543, when the Portuguese established trade relations with Japan. Consequently the Japanese acquired European-style matchlock muskets or arquebuses, more advanced than the Chinese firearms they had previously used up until that point. Besides reverse engineering muskets that gradually transformed their approach to warfare, the Japanese used Portuguese gunpowder technology to put a new spin on the flaming arrow—literally.

Arrows, with wooden shafts for carrying flame and deadly tips of metal to pierce foes, were given fins and repurposed to be launched from gunpowder weapons. Hemp rope, coated with an oxidizer such as potassium nitrate to render it waterproof but flammable, was wrapped around the shaft to form a fuze. These powerful fiery arrows became known as bo-hiya. Some could be launched from cannons called hiya taihu while others, like this example, were fired from a type of tanegashima hand-held firearm called the hiya zutsu.

A multifaceted projectile, the bo-hiya was used on land by samurai gunners as well as at sea, where its ability to set wooden vessels aflame led to it becoming a standard shipboard weapon—used by both the pirates ( kaizuku or wako) that preyed on maritime commerce and by the seagoing imperial samurai who hunted them down.

The Victoria Cross (VC) is made of bronze and in the shape of a cross pattée. It bears the symbols of a royal crown and a lion, with the motto: “For Valour.”`

FLASHBACK

THE BATTLE OF BOSWORTH FIELD, AUGUST 1485

Two men fight to the death for England’s crown in the final decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses, resulting in King Richard III killed and Henry Tudor ascending the throne.

TODAY: A new 2022 film called “The Lost King” about the true story of an amateur historian’s search for, and role in the discovery of, Richard III’s remains is released and raises controversy.

THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO, JUNE 18, 1815

An Anglo-Allied force led by the Duke of Wellington inflicts a shattering defeat on French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops, ending 23 years of war and Bonaparte’s dreams of French imperial domination in Europe.

TODAY: A team of archaeologists, students and combat veterans with the archaeological charity Waterloo Uncovered make a rare discovery of skeletal human remains and the remains of three horses near the Mont-Saint-Jean farm.

FLASHBACK

WORLD WAR II BEGINS AT WESTERPLATTE, 1939

Adolf Hitler tours the Westerplatte peninsula after its brave garrison of Polish soldiers were forced to surrender during the Nazi invasion in September 1939, which marked the start of World War II in Europe.

TODAY: Archaeologists constructing a new military cemetery for Polish soldiers at the peninsula find the personal items of Polish soldiers from the siege, including a map template, mess kits and a saint medal.

COMMENTS FINDING THE FACTS

cervical nerves, the main (but not sole) components of the phrenic nerves, which operate the diaphragm, the main breathing muscle (hence his difficulty breathing).

As the article describes, his immobility caused the embolus—bed compression of the calf veins would slow blood flow through them, allowing it to clot. Some of the clot broke off, traveled through the circulatory system, and lodged in the arteries going to the lung, causing damage to the lungs (not the brain). This, in addition to near-respiratory failure caused by the diaphragm problem, proved fatal.

Thomas Beach, MD Gaylord, Mich.

Real Rare Reads

U.S. to the threat posed by Nazi Germany at the time when the America First movement was still dominant…

The article in question mentioned without naming Steinbeck’s Bombs Away, commissioned by the USAAF to portray and record aircrew training, which pairs well with the movie Winged Victory, which my father—an air cadet from 1943-44, commissioned in 1945—said was the best, most realistic portrayal of cadet life he’d ever seen. It might have made your “War List” if it wasn’t so little-known and hard to find.

True Island View

The death of famed World War II general George S. Patton has become the focus of baseless conspiracy theories.

Medical Ammo

Some more ammo against the Patton Murder Conspiracy (from a doctor). Cyanide, refined or not, does not kill by “appear(ing) to cause embolisms, heart failure, and things like that.” It kills by preventing the body from using oxygen, and it kills in minutes. It can’t be refined to “kill in a given period such as 18-48 hours.”

You would have to coat it in a pill case that would take 18 hours to dissolve, and such technology was not available then. It would also

create a suspiciously large capsule, hard to sneak into someone without being noticed. Mixing it into food would cause instant death, causing an immediate investigation into who had access to the food beforehand.

Patton’s head-on collision with the steel frame or clock caused an “axial loading” (“down-the-spine”) shock that broke his third cervical (neck) vertebra and dislodged the fourth and fifth ones, crushing the spinal cord at that level. That not only caused quadriplegia; it would destroy the fourth

The article “Piece de Resistance” by Timothy Boyce in the Summer 2022 issue of MHQ brings to mind two other books of the era. The first, still widely available, is Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, the fictional account of the fascist takeover of the U.S. by a demagogue senator, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip. The second, more rare, is Invasion: An Eyewitness Account of the Nazi Invasion of America by Henrik Willem van Loon (1940) published by Grosset & Dunlap, New York… Apparently the author used accounts from friends in the Netherlands and Norway to develop a scenario for a Nazi invasion of the U.S. from areas in and offshore of Canada and in the Caribbean and Mexico. The book was apparently a 1940 effort to awaken the

I enjoyed all the features in the latest issue of MHQ, Autumn 2022, but the “Ask MHQ” feature caught my eye. I can testify from firsthand, living experience to the Palauns’ experiences before, during, and after World War II.

I lived on both Peleliu & Babelthaup (Aimeliik Municipality), Palau Islands— Western Carolinas/Micronesia as a peace corps volunteer in 1975-76. I toured all the battlefield sites on Peleliu and on the adjacent island of Anguar. I also regularly visited Koror Island which was where the Japanese maintained their district headquarters. Our training camp on Meyeungs Island was adjacent to the seaplane ramp used by the Japanese scout planes.

Most of the Palauns had a relative who was directly impacted by the war, either

wounded or killed. Many current Palauns are Palaun-Japanese and the Palauns incorporated a number of Japanese words, adverbs, verbs etc. into their language. Many Palauns, mostly on Peleliu, had damages to their property which the U.S. Government compensated them for: garden plots, coconut trees, boats, houses.

Interesting article that brought back memories from almost 50 years ago.

Rolfe L. Hillman III RPCV–Micro ’77

ASK MHQ Militia Captain

Who was the first Black American to receive an officer’s commission?

Edmund Shelton Nyack, New York

Unique circumstances gave an African slave a shot at freedom and a precedent-setting commission in a European army. A Mandinka living along the Gambia River, he was captured and sold into slavery in the British Carolina colonies sometime between 1709 and 1711. Soon afterward he managed to escape and made his way south to a land he’d heard of that offered freedom to African and Native American refugees: the Spanish colony of Florida. Spain gradually changed its policy toward slavery throughout the 17th century, which was officially ratified by King Carlos II in 1693. In Florida, Governor Manuel de Montiano offered citizenship to any escaped slave who converted to Catholicism and swore fealty to the Spanish Crown.

The Mandinka readily agreed to those conditions, adopted the name Francisco Menéndez and enlisted in a Black militia unit formed to help defend the colonial capital of Saint Augustine.

Spain and Britain had been intermittently at war since 1585 and so were their colonies, with raids and outright invasions across the borders of Florida and South Carolina. By 1726 Menéndez had demonstrated not only his loyalty and courage, but leadership qualities that led Gov. Montiano to commission him a captain.

In 1738 Montiano established a small adjunct to Saint Augustine’s defenses, guarding the approaches two miles to the north. Officially called Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, but more commonly known as Fort Mose, it encompassed a Black community as well as a 100-man militia force commanded by Menéndez, who continued to distin-

guish himself against British invasions in that year and 1740, when Georgia-based British forces under James Oglethorpe overran the fort. Though the fort was retaken by the counterattacking Spanish army along with Black and Native American militia, the British destroyed it before they withdrew.

While the fort underwent repair in 1741, Menéndez served aboard a Spanish privateer vessel, attacking British merchant shipping until his ship was outfought and captured by the British privateer ship Revenge later that same year. Menéndez spent the next 18 years as a slave in the Bahamas until he either escaped or was ransomed for a British captive. How he regained his freedom remains obscure. In any case, he reassumed his duties as a militia officer.

At the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, a stipulation in the Treaty of Paris returned the British-captured cities of Manila, Phil-

ippines, and Havana, Cuba, in exchange for Florida. Saint Augustine was evacuated, its Black populace choosing to start over in Cuba rather than face slavery in Florida. Menéndez founded Cuba’s first Black community, named San Augustin de la Nueva Florida. Nothing more is known of Francisco Menéndez, but what is known is that he had adventures enough for any man and was the first African American to hold a captain’s commission half a century before there was a United States.

Jon Guttman is MHQ’s Senior Editor.

Have thoughts about a story in MHQ? Something about military history you’ve always wanted to know? Send your comments and questions to MHQeditor@historynet.com.

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THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY

WINTER 2023 VOL. 35, NO.2

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PROUDLY

MADE IN THE USA

SHOT AT DAWN

A memorial to 307 British soldiers who were shot at dawn for alleged cowardice during the First World War stands in Britain’s National Memorial Arboretum located in Staffordshire, England. The stakes represent those which men were tied to while being shot during executions and the stone figure was modeled after the likeness of Pvt. Herbert Burden, executed for desertion in July 1915 at age 17.

LAWS OF WAR KILLED BY THEIR OWN COUNTRY

World War I’s major belligerent countries had at least one thing in common: shooting their own soldiers for alleged acts of cowardice or desertion.

In his First World War memoir Good-Bye to All That, the British poet and former infantry officer Robert Graves wrote, “I had my first experience of official lying when I arrived at Le Havre in May 1915 and read the back-files of army orders at the rest camp. They contained something like twenty reports of men shot for cowardice or desertion. Yet a few days later the responsible minister in the House of Commons, answering a question from a pacifist, denied that sentence of death for a military offence had been carried out in France on any member of His Majesty’s forces.”

It was indeed a lie. Between the beginning of the war in 1914 and the Armistice in 1918, 307 British and Commonwealth soldiers were executed by firing squad after courts-martial convicted them of cowardice or desertion, the latter charge described in very military language as “fleeing in the face of the enemy.” Included in that tally were 25 Canadian soldiers, 22 Irish servicemen, and five New Zealanders. How many Indian soldiers in British service were executed on the same charges is uncertain, but if their names were added to that grim tally the numbers would certainly be even larger.

Numerous histories of the First World War have told how several of the belligerent nations executed men who were mentally and emotionally broken by the strain of frontline conditions, and who could endure the horrors of war no longer. Whether because of an unwillingness to recognize the very real debilitating effects of shellshock and combat stress, or because the sheer scale and duration of that war overwhelmed military justice systems designed for shorter, smaller conflicts, the results were clear—some soldiers died not under the enemy’s guns, but in front of firing squads formed of their own comrades. It would be too great a generalization to declare that every soldier executed on charges of desertion or cowardice was a traumatized combat casualty rather than a malingerer, but

an examination of existing records suggests that at least as far as the British were concerned, it was true in a majority of cases.

The frequency with which the British Army applied the death penalty to accused deserters has garnered a great deal of literary attention since 1918, but it was never a uniquely British problem. Nor was the British Army unusually draconian in its use of capital punishment, when we compare its record to that of other nations fighting in the same war. In purely statistical terms, British soldiers who were convicted by courts-martial on charges of desertion or cowardice were actually at less risk of being executed than were soldiers of other armies. A comparison of military executions carried out by the British, French, Italian, Austro-Hungarian, and German armies reveals that the British shot 12% of men who were condemned to death, whereas the Italians shot 750 men out of the 4,028 who were condemned by their courts-martial, an execution rate of 19%. The French sentenced 2,500 men to death and shot 650 of them, or 26%. The Austro-Hungarians far exceeded every other combatant nation of that war. Out of 1,175 military death sentences, the Austro-Hungarians executed 1,148 men, a staggering 98% of those condemned.

In some armies the application of the death penalty was strictly a matter of military justice—harsh and punitive in nature, but at least enforced within the structure of law. Other nations executed men in a much more capricious fashion. Drumhead courts-martial were the most cursory form of military justice, but some commanders believed that even those headlong rushes to the ultimate punishment were an unnecessary indulgence. As some historians have noted, the Italian army of the First World War was marked by a “regime of unremitting harshness,” a culture which owed everything to the attitude of its commander-in-chief, Gen. Luigi Cadorna.

Cadorna held a very poor opinion of his army’s conscripted soldiers, and he believed that only the frequent use of the harshest punishment could enforce discipline in their ranks. Italian courts-martial were already encouraged to use the death penalty with great frequency, but for Cadorna even that was too lenient. He preferred summary executions without trial. In a 1917 report to his govern-

In some armies applying the death penalty was a matter of military justice.

ment in which he laid out his efforts to correct morale problems among frontline units, he wrote, “It has been necessary to resort to immediate executions, on a vast scale, and to renounce forms of judicial proceedings, because it is vital to cut off evil at its roots, and it is to be hoped that we have done so in time.”

In 1916, Cadorna went so far as to implement the ancient Roman practice of decimation, applying it to Italian regiments that gave up ground or failed to press their attacks vigorously enough. First described by the Roman historian Polybius in the 3rd century bce, and used to brutal effect by Marcus Licinius Crassus during the Third Servile War in 71 bce, decimation was the horrific practice of disciplining a disgraced unit by having one man out of ten executed, usually by his comrades. Drawing on that historic example, Cadorna ordered that soldiers be selected at random and immediately shot as a cautionary example to their comrades. As one might expect, this exacerbated the Italian army’s morale problems rather than fixed them. “It never seemed to occur to Cadorna,” one historian notes, “that such executions had a profoundly demoralizing effect on the junior officers and men ordered to arrange and perform them, and that the apparent absence of justice or reason in such affairs shook men’s faith in their superiors.” This state of affairs continued to bedevil the Italians until Cadorna was finally relieved of command in late 1917 and belated reforms finally overhauled that army’s attitudes toward military discipline. By

then, hundreds of men had been shot in Cadorna’s unremitting campaign of draconian injustice.

The French also resorted to decimation on rare occasions in that war, most notably in an incident involving colonial troops from North Africa. When the German offensive drove the Allied armies back at the beginning of the war, 10e Compagnie of 8 Battalion, a battered unit of French-African soldiers from Algeria, disobeyed an order to counterattack the Germans in their sector of the lines. In punishment, one man in ten was selected at random and executed by firing squad on Dec. 15, 1914.

Except for the instances noted above, and those that followed the widespread mutinies of French units in 1917, the application of military justice in the armies of France, Germany, and the United States was usually not as severe as those of Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Great Britain. Of all nations in that conflict, the Germans attempted perhaps the most deliberate form of wartime courts-martial. In 1918, barely 17% of German military tribunals—363 trials out of a total of 2,138—actually completed their proceedings and returned a verdict. By comparison British tribunals advanced at a much quicker pace, averaging two to three weeks between conviction and execution in those cases when the death sentence was approved by the commander-in-chief, a role held first by Field Marshal Sir John French until he was replaced by Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig at the end of 1915. But military justice was never more precipitous and hurried than it was in the

DESERTION IN WWI

Austro-Hungarian army. Austrian military regulations required their drumhead courts-martial to return a verdict within seventy-two hours, and the only choices allowed were a complete acquittal or the death sentence. If an Austrian soldier was sentenced to death, the execution was to be carried out within two hours. There was no possibility of appeal.

Differences between the legal codes also played a part in how each army prosecuted and punished soldiers accused of desertion. In the German army, the death penalty was limited to repeat offenders, and German military law required proof of a soldier’s actual intent to desert. Italian prosecutors, in contrast, only had to prove that a soldier was absent from his regiment to convict him of desertion. The French distinguished between desertion to the enemy and desertion to the interior of their own lines in their determination of whether or not the death penalty was applicable.

The passage of time has resulted in nations reconsidering these cases.

Every examination of historical events should pause long enough to ask the question: “Why was this so?” In the matter of soldiers shot for desertion in the First World War, the answer to that question is simple enough, if ultimately unsatisfactory. Military doctrine in most armies of that era insisted that capital punishment was an effective deterrent to the problems of desertion and poor discipline. Taking that view, senior commanders of the British, French, Italian, and Austro-Hungarian armies were among the most ardent believers in the use of the death penalty as an indispensable element of military justice. Approximately two-thirds of death sentences handed down by British tribunals were for the charge of desertion, and most of the men shot by British firing squads were condemned for that offense. It was no coincidence that the British carried out more executions on the eve of major offensives, in an apparent effort to shore up the resolve of other troops about to climb out of their trenches into the fire of German machineguns. As one historian describes it, this almost amounted to a “bureaucratic decimation,” and that “the execution of one in ten was regarded as a ‘safe’ level politically speaking, satisfying both military and judicial concerns.”

Other armies were much more reluctant to execute men who failed in the clinch, particularly when those men were volunteers and not reluctant conscripts. No Australian troops of that war were executed for desertion or cowardice, because even though 129 Australian soldiers were sentenced to death (all but 10 of them for desertion) the

Australian government refused to countenance the British Army’s use of firing squads on its personnel. As the official historian of Australian forces noted, “there was an abhorrence to the seeming injustice of shooting a man who had volunteered to fight in a distant land in a quarrel not particularly Australian.” American courts-martial in the First World War sentenced 24 U.S. Army soldiers to death for desertion, but none of those men were actually executed. The only American soldiers put to death in France were convicted of other capital crimes such as simple murder. The Germans, who would execute at least 10,000 men for desertion during the Second World War, shot no more than 18 soldiers for that crime during the First World War, even though nearly 150,000 German soldiers deserted their units between 1914 and 1918.

The human toll of military insensitivity to combat stress of that war impacted more than just the men who faced firing squads at dawn. The men ordered to form those firing squads carried the trauma of those moments for the rest of their lives, as is clear in the recollections of men such as Victor Silvester, a British soldier who recounted his experience when he was ordered to serve on a firing squad to execute a fellow soldier condemned for desertion: “The victim was brought out from a shed and led struggling to a chair to which he was then bound and a white handkerchief placed over his heart as our target area,” Silvester remembered. “He was said to have fled in the face of the enemy. Mortified by the sight of the poor wretch tugging at his bonds, twelve of us, on the order raised our rifles unsteadily. Some of the men, unable to face the ordeal, had got themselves drunk overnight. They could not have aimed straight if they tried, and, contrary to popular belief, all twelve rifles were loaded. The condemned man had also been plied with whisky during the night, but I remained sober through fear.” Silvester carried the weight of that moment to his death in 1978.

The passage of time has permitted a reconsideration of these cases, and most of the nations that executed men during that war have since taken a more informed view of their cases. In 2000 the New Zealand government issued a pardon for its five soldiers executed during the war, and in 2001 the Canadian government offered an “expression of regret” for its soldiers who were shot for desertion. In August 2006 the British government issued a conditional pardon to all British soldiers shot for desertion in the First World War. MHQ

John A. Haymond is the author of Soldiers: A Global History of the Fighting Man, 1800-1945 (Stackpole Books, 2018) and The Infamous Dakota War Trials of 1862: Revenge, Military Law, and the Judgment of History (McFarland, 2016).

WAR LIST DEATH AND THE ADMIRALS

Even flag officer rank was no protection from the Grim Reaper in WWII Pacific combat.

Rear Adm. Isaac Campbell Kidd

KIA Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941

Isaac Campbell Kidd was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on March 26, 1884, graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1906 and taking part in the Great White Fleet’s globegirdling “show of the flag” in 1907-1909. During World War I he served aboard the battleship USS New Mexico.

Kidd had attained the rank of rear admiral, commander of Battleship Division 1 and chief of staff and aide to the commander of the Battleship Battle Force at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by Dec. 7, 1941. He was ashore when a force of six Japanese aircraft carriers attacked Pearl Harbor that morning. Hastening aboard his flagship, the battleship USS Arizona, he directed its defense until bombs penetrated its bridge and magazine, destroying the ship and killing 1,177 of its crew. Although Kidd’s body was never found, his Academy ring was found fused to the bridge’s bulkhead, as was a trunk containing his personal effects, which were returned to his widow. The first U.S. flag officer killed by a foreign enemy, Kidd was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

Adm. Sir Tom Phillips

KIA Kuantan, Dec. 10, 1941

Born in Pendennis Castle, Falmouth, Cornwall on February 19, 1888, Sir Thomas Spencer Vaughn Phillips was nicknamed “Tom Thumb” due to his stature. He came from a long line of military figures and chose the Royal Navy in 1903. During World War I he led destroyers in the Mediterranean Sea and Asia. From 1920 to 1922 he was a military adviser on the Permanent Advisory Commission for Naval, Military and Air Questions Board at the League of Nations. On Jan. 10, 1939 he was made rear admiral and naval adviser to King George VI. In May 1941 he was given command of the Far Eastern Fleet with the rank of acting admiral. It was not until Dec. 2, however, that he boarded the battleship HMS Prince of Wales, which became the flagship of Force Z, along with battlecruiser HMS Repulse and four destroyers.

On Dec. 8 (simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor, across the International Dateline), Japanese forces landed at Kota Bharu, British Malaya. On Dec. 9 Adm. Phillips led Force Z out of Singapore to disrupt another Japanese landing at Kuantan, but was spotted and reported

Kidd

by Japanese submarine I-65. Japanese naval support, including battleships Kongo and Haruna, was dispatched to intercept, but failed to make contact. The next day, 86 Mitsubishi G3M2 and G4M1 bombers of the Saigon-based Genzan, Kanoya and Mihoro kokutais (air groups) attacked the force, which had no air cover of its own. The result was the first victory of air over naval power on the open sea, with both capital ships torpedoed and sunk. Repulse took 426 crewmen down with it, while Prince of Wales’ 327 fatalities included its captain, John C. Leach, and Phillips, who chose to go down with their ship.

Karel Doorman

KIA Java Sea, Feb. 28, 1942

Karel Willem Frederik Marie Doorman was born in Utrecht on April 23, 1889 and in 1906 he and his brother enlisted in the Royal Netherlands Navy as midshipmen. In 1910 Karel received his officer’s commission and was first assigned to the Dutch East Indies. In March 1914 he re-

quested transfer to aviation and from 1915 to 1921 he served as a flight instructor. As commander of Naval Air Station De Kooy at Den Helder, his outstanding organization and running of the base led to his being awarded the Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau. In 1934 he went back to the Indies and in 1938 was placed in command of aviation there.

De Ruyter, Haguro torpedoed light cruiser Java and the Allied formation disintegrated—and with it, Allied hopes of saving Java. Doorman chose to go down with his flagship. He was posthumously made a Knight 3rd Class of the Military William Order.

Rear Adm. Tamon Yamaguchi

KIA Midway, June 5, 1942

Doorman

After the Netherlands was overrun by the Germans in May 1940, the Netherlands maintained a governmentin-exile in Britain and held on to their Far Eastern colonies. On May 16 Doorman was made a rear admiral and on June 13 was given command of the naval squadron there, flying his pennant from the light cruiser De Ruyter. When Japan entered World War II and sent invasion forces to the Netherlands East Indies, Doorman was put in command of ABDA Command, a polyglot collection of available American, British, Dutch and Australian warships. Japanese aircraft foiled an attempt to stop them at Makassar on Feb. 4.

Another attack against Japanese landings on Bali ended in failure in the Bandung Strait on Feb. 19, with destroyer Piet Hein sunk by Japanese destroyer Asashio

When an invasion force moved on Java, Doorman led ABDA force to oppose it on Feb. 27, only to be engaged by the Japanese escort force, including heavy cruisers Nachi and Haguro and light cruisers Jintsu and Naka. The two sides were fairly evenly matched, but Doorman had the handicap of trying to coordinate efforts of commanders of four different nationalities. He held his own for seven hours, but on the 28th Nachi managed to torpedo

Born Aug. 17, 1892 in Koishikawa Tokyo, Tamon Yamaguchi came from a samurai family and was given the childhood name of a legendary 14th century samurai, Kusunoki Masashige. In 1912 he graduated 21st out of 144 cadets from the Naval Academy. July 1918 saw him aboard Kashi, part of a squadron based at Malta. From 1921 to 1923 he attended Princeton University, N.J. and in 1927 he served on the General Staff. During the war in China, he commanded the light cruiser Isuzu, battleship Ise and the 1st Combined Air Group, rising to rear admiral on Nov. 15, 1938.

By Dec. 7, 1941, Yamaguchi was in command of the 2nd Koku Sentai (air division) of Vice Adm. Chuichi Nagumo’s 1st Kido Butai (air fleet), consisting of aircraft carriers Soryu and Hiryu, which attacked Pearl Harbor and supported the invasions of Wake and Ambon islands, a bombing strike on Darwin, Australia and carrier raids on Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

By the Battle of Midway on June 4, 1942, Yamaguchi had shifted his pennant from Soryu to Hiryu. When reconnaissance planes spotted the carrier USS Yorktown in the vicinity, he urged Adm. Nagumo to launch all his Nakajima B5N2s against the American ships with the bombs they held, rather than wait to replace them with torpedoes. Nagumo overruled him, resulting in the Americans arriving just in time for Douglas SBD-2 dive bombers from carriers Enterprise and Yorktown to inflict fatal damage to carriers Akagi, Kaga and Soryu. They failed to find and de-

chose to go down with his flagship after seven hours of hard fighting.

stroy Hiryu. Its B5N torpedo planes and Aichi D3A1 dive bombers struck back, crippling carrier Yorktown before Hiryu was disabled by Enterprise’s SBDs. On June 5, Yamaguchi ordered his crew to abandon ship. He and Captain Tomeo Kaku chose to go down with the doomed vessel.

Rear Adm. Aritomo Goto

KIA Cape Esperance, Oct. 12, 1942 Born in Ibaraki Prefecture on Jan. 23, 1888, Aritomo Goto graduated from the Naval Academy in 1910 and served aboard a wide variety of ships. In World War I he manned a radio outpost in the South Pacific. On Nov. 15, 1939 he was made rear admiral and given command of the 2nd Cruiser Division.

On Sept. 10, 1941, Goto was put in command of the 6th Cruiser Division, consisting of heavy cruisers Aoba, Furutaka, Kinugasa and Kako. His cruisers played supporting roles in the second assault on Wake on Dec. 23, 1941, and in the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942. August 1942 saw the 6th Cruiser Division based at Kavieng and Rabaul, New Britain, when U.S. Marines landed on Guadalcanal. Goto joined Vice Adm. Gunichi Mikawa for the nocturnal Battle of Savo, and the sinking of heavy cruisers USS Astoria, Quincy and Vincennes, and RANS Canberra. While returning to Kavieng, however, Kako was waylaid and sunk by the U.S. submarine S.44

The tables were turned on the night of Oct. 11. Goto, leading a mission to bombard Henderson Field while Japanese army reinforcements were being shipped to Guadalcanal, ran into an ambush of U.S. Navy cruisers and destroyers under Rear Adm. Norman Scott off Cape Esperance. The Americans lost the destroyer USS Duncan, but sank Furutaka and badly damaged Aoba, whose casualties included Goto, who died of his wounds the next day.

Rear Adms. Daniel J. Callaghan and Norman Scott

KIA Guadalcanal, Nov. 12-13, 1942

Daniel Judson Callaghan was born in San Francisco, California on July 26, 1890 and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1911. After commanding the cruiser New Orleans during World War I, he served as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s naval aide from July 1938 to May 1941, when he was given command of the heavy cruiser San Francisco In April 1942 he was made a rear admiral and chief of staff to Vice Adm. Robert L. Ghormley.

Born in Indianapolis, Indiana on Aug. 10, 1889, Norman Scott graduated from the Naval Academy in 1911. He was executive officer on the destroyer USS Jacob Jones when it was torpedoed between Brest, France and Queenstown, Ireland by the German submarine U-53 on Dec. 6, 1917. With 66 sailors killed and two captured by U-53 (which then radioed its victim’s coordinates to Queenstown), Jacob Jones was the first American warship sunk in action during World War I. Scott later served as naval aide to President Woodrow Wilson and commanded Eagle boats in 1919.

Scott’s career continued through World War II, when he made rear admiral in May 1942. He commanded the light cruiser USS San Juan in August and in September was given command of cruiser and destroyer equipped Task Force 64, whose personnel he trained to realize his aggressive approach to combat, including night fighting. This paid off at Cape Esperance on the night of Oct. 11-12, when Scott “crossed the T” on Japanese Cruiser Division 6, killing Rear Adm. Aritomo Goto, damaging his flagship Aoba, and sinking heavy cruiser Furutaka.

Callaghan was in command of Task Group 67.4 when the Japanese sent two battleships and other warships under Vice Adm. Hiroake Abe to bombard Henderson Field at

Guadalcanal on the night of Nov. 12-13, 1942. An aggressive officer who trained his men in gunnery, Callaghan was posthumously criticized for failing to issue a battle plan to his scratch force and not taking advantage of his newest radar. Scott was present aboard light cruiser Atlanta. At the time, many naval officers believed the battle would have turned out differently had Scott been in overall command. Both forces advanced to point blank range before they became aware of each other, resulting in the wildest, most violent surface encounter of the war. Atlanta demolished the Japanese destroyer Akatsuki and damaged Ikazuchi but took a torpedo from either Ikazuchi or Inazuma. Nearby, San Francisco battled the battleship Kirishima, light cruiser Nagara and a destroyer, also landing 19 8-inch shells on Atlanta, striking its bridge and killing Scott. Badly damaged, Atlanta was scuttled three miles east of Lunga Point. San Francisco survived the carnage with 77 crewmen dead, including Callaghan. The Japanese, whose losses included the battleship Hiei, withdrew, leaving the Americans victorious. Both Callaghan and Scott were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto

KIA Bougainville, April 18, 1943

Born in Nagaoka, Niigata on April 4, 1884, Isoroku Takano was adopted by another Nagaoka samurai family, Yamamoto, in 1916. Serving aboard the armored cruiser Nisshin during the Battle of Tsushima on May 27, 1905, he lost two fingers of his left hand. Yamamoto attended Harvard University from 1919 to 1921, and served two postings as naval attaché to Washington, D.C., which left him fluent in English and convinced that Japan should avoid war with the United States. Despite his entreaties, Japanese war advocates prevailed. Yamamoto dutifully worked out a naval strategy toward defeating the U.S. centered on a sudden

aircraft carrier-launched strike, followed by a decisive battle to force the Americans to a negotiated capitulation.

The Dec. 7, 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was a partial success, but the intended decisive battle at Midway in June 1942 was a costly fiasco. With the conclusion of the six-month Guadalcanal campaign in February 1943, the Americans held the initiative and kept it through I Operation, a naval air offensive in the Solomon launched by Yamamoto in early April. On April 18, 1943, Yamamoto departed Ballale in one of two Mitsubishi G4M1 bombers, escorted by six Mitsubishi A6M3 Zeros to inspect the situation on Buin...unaware that the Americans had cracked the Japanese Purple Code and, knowing the admiral’s schedule, dispatched 16 Lockheed P-38G Lightnings of the 339th Fighter Squadron on a 600-mile interception. The aerial ambush was a success, both bombers being shot down for the loss of one P-38. Credited to 1st Lt. Rex T. Barber, Yamamoto’s plane crashed on southern Bougainville, where his body was found, cremated and brought home for burial. The Japanese posthumously promoted Yamamoto to the rank of Marshal Admiral, while the Germans awarded him the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords.

Rear Adm. Henry Mullinnix

KIA off Makin, Nov. 24, 1943

Born in Spencer, Indiana on the Fourth of July 1892, Henry Maston Mullinnix graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy first in his class in 1916. Studying aeronautical aviation, Mullinnix qualified as an aviator on Jan. 11, 1923, going on to advance the use of air-cooled engines in naval aircraft.

On Nov. 13, 1942, Mullinnix was promoted to rear admiral and commanded the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga from April to August 22, 1943. After some shore duty with a carrier division, Mullinnix was sent to the Central

WWII PACIFIC ADMIRALS

Pacific in command of Task Group 52.3—Air Support Group of Northern Attack Force (Makin), Task Force 52—with the escort carrier USS Liscome Bay as his flagship. On Nov. 20, U.S. Army soldiers of the 165th Infantry Regiment landed on Makin in the Gilbert Islands and the island was secured by the 24th. That day, however, Japanese submarine I-175 slipped into the task group and fired a spread of three torpedoes at the aircraft carrier. At least one struck home, penetrating to the magazine and blowing the ship apart. Only 272 of its crew survived; the 644 killed included Adm. Mullinnix, Captain Irving D. Wiltsie and Cook 3rd Class Doris Miller, who earned the Navy Cross for his efforts to defend his ship during the Pearl Harbor raid. Mullinnix was posthumously awarded the Legion of Merit with Combat “V.”

Vice Adm. Shoji Nishimura

KIA Surigao Strait, Oct. 25, 1944

Born on Nov. 30, 1889, Shoji Nishimura graduated from the Naval Academy in 1911 and was widely characterized as a “sea dog” who abhorred onshore assignments. In November 1941 he got his first command, Destroyer Squadron 4. The death of his only son in an air accident on Dec. 23 left him with a fatalistic streak. His performance in battle was mixed at best. Near Bali on Jan. 24, 1942, his squadron chased a Dutch submarine while four U.S. Navy destroyers savaged the convoy he was supposed to escort. At the Java Sea on Feb. 27, his squadron failed to score a single torpedo hit (including the eight launched from his flagship, light cruiser Naka). During the Second Battle of Guadalcanal on Nov. 14-15, 1942, Nishimura’s destroyers failed to land a single torpedo hit.

In spite of that poor record, Nishimura was promoted to vice admiral in September 1944 and put in command of Battleship Division 2. On the night of Oct. 24-25, 1944, he led his unit in attacking the American beachhead on Leyte from the south, only to run into most of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, including six battleships, at Surigao Strait. It was clearly a suicide mission. Nishimura lost battleship Fuso and three destroyers to American destroyers’ torpedoes before he even reached the enemy battle line. He engaged the battleships until he went down with his flagship, Yamashiro, under an avalanche of shells and possibly four torpedoes. Of the seven warships he led up the strait, only the destroyer Shigure escaped intact.

Vice Adm. Seiichi Ito

KIA East China Sea, April 7, 1945

Born on July 26, 1890 in Miike County (now Miyama City, Fukuoka Prefecture), Seiichi Ito graduated from the Naval Academy in 1911 and rose rapidly though the Japanese naval staff. Like Isoroku Yamamoto, he was a

staunch proponent of maintaining good relations with the United States. He rose to vice chief of staff of the Imperial Navy General Staff and on Oct. 1, 1941 was made a vice admiral. In December 1944 he commanded the 2nd Fleet in the Inland Sea.

After the Americans landed on Okinawa on April 1, 1945, Ito was ordered to lead an operation in which the colossal battleship Yamato would force its way to Okinawa, run itself aground and shell the American beachhead until it ran out of ammunition. Ito protested that this would be a waste of resources. However, when told that the Emperor expected the High Seas Fleet to do something, he obeyed and personally led Yamato, escorted by the light cruiser Yahagi and eight destroyers. The unit was spotted and came under attack on April 7, 1945 by hundreds of U.S. Navy carrier planes.

Hit by at least 11 torpedoes and six bombs, Yamato was sunk, along with Yahagi and four of the destroyers. Ito’s last order was to cancel the operation and have the remaining destroyers rescue whoever they could before he joined the 3,055 of 3,332 crewmen who went down with Yamato. Ito was posthumously promoted to full admiral. His only son was killed 10 days after his death flying a kamikaze plane to Okinawa. MHQ

BEHIND THE LINES ANIMAL HEALERS

The Royal Army Veterinary Corps proved to be a key element to maintaining the battlefield “horse” power mobility of British forces in World War I.

The tales of wounded soldiers of the First World War, such as those injured during the grim battles of the Western Front, are closely bound with those of medical professionals who came to their assistance—brave people including stretcher bearers, ambulance drivers, doctors, and nurses who sought to save human lives. It is all too easy to forget that humans were not alone in the fight. More than 16 million animals played key roles in the conflict, facing the same risks, the same brutal environments, and in many cases the same types of severe injuries. Almost more overlooked than the animals themselves are the heroic medical professionals who dedicated themselves to rescuing and rehabilitating these creatures in wartime.

Britain’s Army Veterinary Corps—today known as the Royal Army Veterinary Corps—achieved distinction in its successful treatment of sick and wounded animals during the First World War. The AVC was founded in 1906 as a result of evolving attitudes over time towards care for military service animals, particularly horses. Horses and mules were used as pack animals and pulled field artillery guns and ammunition, while specially bred horses were also used as cavalry mounts.

As of the 1790s the British Army had veterinary officers serving in cavalry regiments, but animals were still in many cases regarded as expendable and there was no unified command structure or standard of care for them. “The veterinary officer was simply a member of the regimental staff, completely under the thumb of his commanding officer who permitted him to treat only the animals of his own unit. He wore the regiment’s uniform and badge,” according to an article by Brig.

J. Clabby for the Royal Society of Medicine, adding that veterinary officers rarely met to discuss cases and had no unified plan for treatment, especially for contagious diseases. An attitude of carelessness toward horses persisted throughout the Crimean War and, despite the formation of

the centralized Army Veterinary Department in the 1870s, reached a climax during the 1899-1902 Second Boer War, in which the British Army lost an estimated 326,000 horses and 51,000 mules mostly due to negligence. In response to a public and political outcry, reforms such as the 1911 passage of the Protection of Animals Act were implemented, and the AVC came into being.

Horses and mules would again see service during World War I, although conditions faced by these animals were arguably more horrifying than those their predecessors had endured in the past, particularly on the Western Front. Cavalry horses were bred and trained for agility and quick movement, but these spirited animals were unable to perform what they were bred and trained to do because of the increasingly static and mechanized nature of the war—machine guns, mortars, barbed wire, trenches and mines ushered in the death of the cavalry as Europe had known it. Consequently, cavalry mounts were made to carry heavy loads as pack animals. Horses and mules were used for pulling carts, transporting ammunition, moving artillery guns, pulling ambulances, working to pull down and transport felled trees, and transporting a wide variety of supplies.

In addition to equines, other animals including pigeons, camels, canaries (often used to detect poison gas) and dogs saw service during the war on various fronts, in addition to a variety of animals who served as mascots. On the Western Front especially, these creatures had not only to survive but to perform critical duties in ghastly conditions which saw the natural world obliterated daily—grass was virtually nonexistent, trees were blown to pieces or harvested into oblivion for wood, the air was rife with poisonous gases in addition to the sounds and shell fragments of explosions, water was contaminated with heavy metals, decomposing bodies were omnipresent and the earth’s surface tended to be wildernesses of bomb craters or oceans of mud.

In addition to facing these environmental stressors, animals were also targeted by the enemy. The Germans routinely trained machine guns on pigeons and also deliberately sought opportunities to kill horses. During skirmishes that took place early in the war, German cavalrymen on the Western Front used lances to target their opponents’ horses; the Germans are also alleged to have made attempts to

From left: A horse burdened with trench boots slogs through mud beside a soldier on the Somme Front. An artillery driver and his horse rest together, showing the bond that men often developed with their service animals. A dog trains to recover a “wounded” soldier in 1917. A horse is discharged from an AVC hospital in France after making a full recovery.

poison horses’ food. During the war, Britain alone would lose nearly half a million horses, with an average of one horse killed for every two men. In 1916, a total of 7,000 horses were lost in one day at the Battle of Verdun.

In the face of these horrors, the dedicated veterinarians of the AVC made an enormous difference in the lives of animals in wartime. In fact, the AVC had an overall recovery rate of 80% for all animals who received treatment during the conflict—something never before seen in wartime.

The AVC had a high standard of animal care that was reflected throughout the British Army as a result of earlier animal welfare reforms. British cavalrymen were trained to provide basic care for their horses, such as first aid, grooming, nutrition, and load balancing, which involved walking alongside their mounts to avoid overtiring them. Soldiers were also taught how to avoid causing injuries to their horses’ and mules’ feet. This was a stark contrast to the Germans and the French, whose sheer destruction of equines through neglect caused national shortages; in Germany, government requisitioning of any and every available horse impacted local farms and contributed to the

famine subsequently known as the “Turnip Winter.” France lost more than 700,000 horses during the war, while the German and Russian armies are estimated to have lost a combined total of 3.25 million. By taking better care of their horses, the British ensured that the horses were not killed needlessly and were able to continue performing their duties for longer periods.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) worked jointly with the AVC to provide care for war horses. In 1914, the RSPCA created the Fund for Sick and Wounded Horses, which helped the army create 13 animal hospitals, including four large field hospitals which were outfitted with state-of-the-art medical technology and could each hold 2,000 equines at a time. In addition, the fund supplied both horse-drawn and motorized animal ambulances, food, medicine, and educational materials for veterinarians, including 50,000 books on lameness and animal first aid. The fund also supplied 11 motorized ambulances to the U.S. Army, which established its own Veterinary Corps in 1916. The RSPCA also provided training to members of the AVC as well as to forces of allied nations interested in learning more about veteri-

ROYAL ARMY VETERINARY CORPS

artillery bombardments. Horses often got stuck in mud and became filthy. Aside from battle wounds and the effects of gas, they also suffered from the mange and physical weakness. A single horse could take up to 12 hours to be bathed and groomed. The AVC treated more than 2,500,000 horses in France alone during the war.

The AVC also developed hospitals for carrier pigeons. One photograph taken in France circa 1917 shows three pigeons, all of whom had lost one leg due to battle injuries while successfully delivering their messages, at one such hospital. Rescued and rehabilitated carrier pigeons continued to serve in the British war effort for breeding.

nary care. Altogether, the hospitals set up by the RSPCA treated 2.5 million animals during the war.

Although it had started off as a fairly tiny force in 1914 with less than 1,000 men at its core, the AVC grew rapidly during the war years with more than 15,000 members by 1916 and over 41,000 by the war’s end in 1918. A vast majority of veterinary surgeons in the United Kingdom served in the AVC during the war. On the Western Front alone, the AVC managed a total of 20 hospitals and four convalescent depots for horses. In Egypt, the AVC ran specialized camel hospitals.

The veterinarians’ work was far from simple. An average horse hospital could house over 1,000 animals needing treatment at any given time, and each horse required specialized care. On the Western Front, horses were exposed to gas which caused blistering and injuries to their eyes; mustard gas caused open lesions on their skin which were difficult to heal. Horses typically suffered from sheer physical exhaustion, dehydration and malnourishment from inevitable fodder shortages. Horses which became caught in barbed wire would often struggle to get free and thus cause themselves further painful injuries, which if not treated and cleaned would become infected and result in the horse having to be euthanized. Additionally horses, as highly intelligent animals, were often traumatized from war experiences such as the explosions of mortars and mines. Veterinarians of the AVC noted that horses with more cultivated breeding and higher intelligence levels— like ex-cavalry horses, for example—suffered more acute psychological distress than sturdy pack horses who could be trained more easily to lie down and take cover during

The destinies of animals and the people who worked with them in wartime often became intertwined; one British soldier reported having his life saved by a wary mule who sensed an incoming German shell. A war horse who became famous for his numerous near-death experiences was Warrior, owned by Maj. Gen. John Edward Bernard “Jack” Seely. Warrior served on the Western Front from 1914 throughout the duration of the war, returning home after Christmas in 1918 to a long and peaceful life. The horse survived machine gun attacks, shelling, being buried under wreckage and escaped twice from being trapped in burning stables. “His escapes were quite wonderful. Again and again he survived when death seemed certain and indeed, befell all his neighbors,” said Seely. “It was not all hazard; sometimes it was due to his intelligence.”

Not all horses were as fortunate as Warrior. Many other men stated that their own sufferings increased at having to witness the sufferings of the animals around them. The presence of the AVC at the battlefields gave the men a recourse to get lifesaving treatment for their animals whenever possible.

The veterinarians’ exemplary performance during World War I brought about a sea change in best practices in medicine for military service animals. The high success rate in the rehabilitation and redeployment of service animals was unprecedented. At the end of the war, the AVC was awarded the prefix “royal” to its name, becoming the Royal Army Veterinary Corps, by King George V in November 1918 in honor of its wartime achievements. The Quartermaster General, expressing congratulations about this honor, wrote that the Corps’ “high standard” had “at home and throughout all theatres…resulted in a reduction of animal wastage, an increased mobility of mounted units and a mitigation of animal suffering unapproached in any previous military operation.”

The Royal Army Veterinary Corps continues to exist today. Although it is one of the smallest corps in the British Army, it continues its tradition of providing important care for working military animals in action around the world today. MHQ

BATTLE SCHEMES A HOLY ROMAN SIEGE

EXPERIENCE NIGHT JUMP INTO NORMANDY

Lt. Col. Gerhard Bolland, an 82nd Airborne Division officer on the night of June 6, 1944, describes what it was really like to parachute behind German lines and take part in the Allied D-Day landings during the invasion of France.

Lt. Col. Gerhard L. Bolland was a proud Norwegian American from the farming town of Madison, Minnesota. He started his military career in 1926 in the Minnesota National Guard and was eventually accepted into West Point. An excellent soldier who excelled both physically and intellectually, Bolland graduated from West Point with a B.S. degree and a curricula heavy in military engineering subjects and became a qualified parachutist on July 4, 1942 after training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Versatile and unconventional, Bolland’s energy and drive would serve him well both as a paratrooper and later as an officer in the Special Operations Branch of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services).

Attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel on May 17, 1943, Bolland served as the Regiment Executive Officer of the 507th Parachute Infantry from May 28, 1944 to Nov. 24 of that year. He would jump behind enemy lines on D-Day from the 82nd Airborne Division’s lead aircraft along with Brig. Gen. James M. Gavin, known as “The Jumping General,” and fought in Normandy continuously for 33 days.

Bolland later felt called to serve in the Scandinavian Section of the OSS’s Special Operations Branch, as he had strong feelings about his ancestral land of Norway languishing under Nazi occupation. He worked enthusiastically alongside the Norwegian Resistance. “When Germany invaded Norway, it is hard to describe the level of grief that remained not only in my heart but, I’m sure, in the hearts of every Norwegian in the homeland or abroad,” he later wrote, “a pain that would endure until Norway once again tasted freedom from the tyranny of the Third Reich.”

Bolland retired from active service in 1951 due to a disability and, with Norway on his mind, penned his memoirs in 1966. He later entrusted his papers and wartime recollections to his son Matthew. The following account of his D-Day experience alongside the 82nd

Airborne is excerpted from the book derived from those memoirs and published by Casemate Publishers, entitled: “Among the Firsts: Lieutenant Colonel Gerhard L. Bolland’s Unconventional War.”

On our way [flying inside our cargo aircraft] to the drop zone, most of the [82nd Airborne Division] paratroopers did a lot of smoking, some squirmed quite a bit, checking and re-checking their equipment. Others sang quietly to themselves. Each man dealt with the high tension and jittery nerves in his own way. Although many paratroopers jumped into Normandy with their Garand rifles disassembled and stored in a padded case, known as a Griswald bag, my own regiment, the 507th, did not. Instead, we jumped with the rifle assembled and slung over our shoulders with the belly band of the parachute over it, securing it in place. Also, in addition to the bayonet and trench knife, a backup switchblade was carried into battle, partially inserted into the placket pocket of the M2 jump jacket. There was an assortment of these knives the soldier could choose from. I selected a 7-1/4” Presto M2 with textured grips. All in all, the average paratrooper was loaded down with about 85 pounds of equipment.

About 20 minutes before we were to hit the drop zone, the plane’s door was removed. The cool air that billowed in felt good. Our first glimpse of France was filled with flak flashes and tracer lines streaking across the darkened sky. Seven-and-a-half minutes before we were to drop, the red light flashed on and we stood up and hooked up. This was [Brigadier] General [James M.] Gavin’s standard operational procedure. As soon as we crossed into enemy territory, he had his men ready to jump. That way, if our plane was hit by enemy fire, we could bale out [sic] at a rapid pace. Since I was in the back of the plane, I started the sound off for equipment check. “Nineteen OK,” then slapped the next man in front of me on the shoulder, “Eighteen OK,” and so forth. Bullets were hitting the plane at this point and I’m sure each man wondered whether he would get hit even before he reached the ground? An entire lifetime of thoughts can pass through your mind between the time the red light flashes until the green jump light comes on.

(2)

Suddenly, we entered a dense cloudbank that was so thick you could not see the wing tips of the plane. The aircraft were flying in close formation, so this became a dangerous situation. Gavin thought it may have been a smoke cloud put up by the Germans. One always attributes anything unexpected in combat to the cleverness and guile of the enemy.

In an instant, the command was given by the jumpmaster, “Go!,” followed by Gavin yelling “Let’s Go!” as he jumped out the door. The men bailed out rapidly. Into the night sky, jumping straight down Hitler’s chimney. Because of the pilot’s apprehension with the density of flak around us, and the sight of burning planes going down, he was flying at a much higher speed and the initial prop blast shock was much more violent. Actually, exiting the plane was quite dangerous since each paratrooper was weighed down quite heavily with equipment. We carried a loaded M-1 rifle, 156 more rounds of ammunition, a pistol with three loaded clips, an entrenching shovel, a knife, a water canteen, a first aid packet, four grenades, reserve rations,

maps, and a raincoat. There was little time to worry about the dangers of the undertaking, however.

The red, green and white pencil lines of tracer bullets were visible everywhere. The Germans were throwing everything at us. Search[light] beams crisscrossed the sky looking for flak targets. Burning planes lit the countryside. The Germans were trying to kill us as we floated to the ground. You could hear the bullets whizzing by. I pulled down on the front risers of my ‘chute to collapse it a bit, also called a ‘chute slip, a common practice we were taught in paratrooper school. This allowed me to drop at a greater rate of speed. I held this until I feared I was getting too close to the ground. Easing back on the risers, I slowed my descent to a normal rate. In the dark it is hard to estimate how close you actually are to the ground. I unfastened my reserve ‘chute and let it drop since the main chute had deployed successfully and it was no longer needed. Within about five seconds after that, splash! I hit water and went completely under. After the initial shock, the struggle to reach the sur-

NIGHT JUMP INTO NORMANDY

face took every ounce of strength I had because of the sheer weight of my equipment. The wind and the current pulled the collapsed ‘chute and dragged me forward, face down. The water was too deep to stand. Still in a state of shock, I instantly recognized the seriousness of my situation. I struggled to get out of my ‘chute right away by grabbing my M3 trench knife and cutting away the harness. That was a mistake. Desperation started to set in. My lungs felt like they were going to burst. I felt myself becoming lightheaded and was to the point of going unconscious. I had a few quick words with the Lord and, despite what atheists may claim, I heard, in a very audible voice, “Roll over onto your back.” As soon as I did, the ‘chute that was drowning me by dragging me face down, was now planing me along the top of the water, keeping my head up so I could breathe. My heart was pounding, but I was alive! Half gasping and half choking, I coughed up some of the water that had gotten into my lungs. Once I realized my head would remain above water, I slowly began to retain [sic] my composure. I paddled and kicked my way towards the shoreline until I could feel my feet touch. Once able to stand, on very shaky legs no less, I dragged my soaked and tired, but very grateful, body to the river’s edge and unlatched my ‘chute.

Sitting there alone catching my breath, I could hear the artillery and gunshots going off all around me. For the first time in my life I offered a sincere prayer of thanks to the Lord for sparing my life. At one point, a piece of shrapnel hit the ground and rolled within arm’s reach. “Well,” I thought, “that would make for a nice little souvenir to remember my first night into battle.” “Ouch!” The shrapnel lasted only about a millisecond in my hand. Today’s lesson learned. Shrapnel fresh from an explosion is still very hot!

I removed my equipment and began to get out as much water as I could to lessen the weight. I poured out my boots and squeezed as much water as I could out of the clothing. When I got to my mess kit, there was a minnow swimming around inside the container.

I learned afterwards I had landed in the Merderet River...To make matters worse, portions of land surrounding the river had been flooded by the Germans to hinder airborne operations. Much of the surrounding area had been hidden from aerial reconnaissance because of high grass. It was disguised as solid ground. What should have been a smaller shallow river was now much deeper and turned into a thousand-yard-wide lake. Many other para-

troopers were not so lucky. They drowned under the weight of their equipment when they hit the flooded waters in the dark....

As is well known, the 507th was spread out over a greater area than any other parachute infantry regiment, from Cherbourg to Carentan, over 60 square miles by some estimates.

Much as other units had suffered from disorganization and dislocation, we paratroopers of the 82nd dealt with our problems and proceeded to accomplish our missions to the best of our abilities. The feeling was the Germans had their chance while the paratroopers were on their way down. Now it was the Americans’ turn….

When the 82nd Airborne Division finally pulled out of the front lines to return to England, 16 of its 21 regimental and battalion commanders had been killed, captured or wounded. The Allied paratroopers landing in the dead of night did not have the advantage of a gigantic supporting cast just enumerated, nor the thousands of ships and aircraft spewing fire. They were on their own; small groups of courageous men, armed with little more than their rifles, dropping directly onto German defenses.

In Normandy, I had the privilege of serving under the proud banners of the 82nd Airborne Division. It gave richly of its strength and fought hard against the enemy. We fought for 33 days straight without let up or reinforcements. In fact, from D-Day until D+33, it had ground up two German divisions which were never to fight as units again. The price was high. I can still see the morning report figures of those that remained and were present for duty from my own regiment, the 507th [Parachute Infantry Regiment] PIR. We dropped into Normandy 15 percent over strength (more than 2,500 men). Only 733 remained the day we went out.

Severe losses like these have paralyzed many divisions, but throughout the Normandy campaign, the 82nd never lost combat effectiveness. The division’s infantry companies did most of the bleeding during desperate night actions and bloody slogs through hedgerows. Their dead lay strewn from Sainte-Mere-Eglise to Amfreville to La Hayedu-Puits. Their deeds and bravery captured the hearts of Americans as their D-Day assault, at the time, was one of the nation’s greatest successes. General Gavin had long been known to High Command, but now the press took to him and he became a public figure.

The 507th was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation for its assault crossing the Merderet River, holding positions on the west side and stymieing large German forces. We knew the fighting forces of the Third Reich were not the supermen they thought they were. They could be beaten. MHQ

I paddled and kicked my way towards the shoreline until I could feel my feet touch.

WEAPONS CHECK FRENCH 75MM M1897 FIELD GUN

Barrel

The 8ft 10 in barrel could deliver fire to an effective range of 9,300 yards for high-explosive and 7,400 yards for shrapnel. The gun could also fire gas shells.

Elevation and traverse

The barrel had a fairly shallow elevation range (−11° to +18°), reflecting the gun’s direct-fire trajectory. The gun could be traversed 3° to either side on the threaded wheel axle.

Recoil mechanism

It squeezed oil from an upper to lower cylinder containing oil and compressed air separated by a piston. Air slowed the recoil and equalized pressure returned the gun to firing position.

The Matériel de 75mm Mle 1897—aka the “French 75” or Soixante-Quinze—was a revolution in field artillery. In 1890, Gen. Charles Mathieu, Director of Artillery at the French Ministry of War, commissioned Lt. Col. Joseph-Albert Deport, director of the Atelier de Construction de Puteaux (APX) state arsenal, to develop a new French artillery recoil system in response to intelligence about similar German efforts.

The result was the 75mm Mle 1897, officially adopted for French Army service in 1898. It utilized a hydro-pneumatic recoil system that allowed the barrel to recoil fully then return to its original position while the carriage stayed perfectly still. This mechanism, combined with a fast-action screw breech and unitary shell, enabled a well-trained crew to fire 15–30 shrapnel or high-explosive shells every minute—previous guns fired about two shells per minute. It required no repositioning and resighting after every shot, a key problem with contemporary field artillery.

Breech

The breech was a Nordenfelt rotating eccentric-screw type, which allowed fast opening and closing by rotating the breech handle through just a quarter turn.

Trail

The original M1897 had a box trail carriage, replaced in the interwar period by a more flexible split-trail carriage.

The defining French field artillery piece of World War I, it fired more than 16 million shells at the 1916 Battle of Verdun alone. The gun was such a compelling package that it was adopted and manufactured in large numbers by the U.S. Army—the first American shell fired in World War I came on Oct. 23, 1917 from a 75 mm Gun M1897 (the U.S. designation) nicknamed “Bridget” in Battery C, 6th Field Artillery. Many other countries, including Britain, Romania, Poland and Germany, adopted the gun in the interwar period and also in early World War II, in various mounts and adaptations (including the US M3 Gun Motor Carriage, an early tank destroyer). By the time it started to show its obsolescence in the early 1940s, it had already transformed the design of field artillery. MHQ

Chris McNab is a military historian based in the United Kingdom. His most recent book is U.S. Soldier vs. Chinese Soldier, Korea 1951-53 (Osprey Publishing, 2022).

This scene from a wooded area near Ypres in Belgium, photographed in 2013, shows lingering damage left in the environment from World War I, such as shell holes and trenches. Natural environments remain scarred long after wars end.

NATURE’S SILENT WAR

Dear readers, I would like to introduce myself as the new editor of MHQ. I’ve had the honor and joy of working on MHQ as Senior Editor and am now stepping up to helm the magazine. I’m thankful for the support of my team who are passionate about all things history, and we look forward to sharing more stories with you from the history of warfare throughout the ages and across the globe.

In this issue, we’ve focused on the emerging role of veterinarians for military service animals during World War I. This subject touches on the larger issue of warfare’s impact on nature and the environment. This topic is not often discussed in military history circles, even in this age of increased environmental awareness. Sadly, it’s a topic that will remain painfully relevant to humanity not only from the after-effects of wars long past, but from war that continues raging in the world even today. It can be easy to overlook the toll of war on nature because nature doesn’t have its own voice—at least not one that can be heard easily by humans unless we go out of our way to listen. Popular movies and TV shows may give us distressing but relatively simplistic impressions of destruction caused by battles and war. Historic photos and archival films present contemporary visuals, but these don’t show us the full picture. War has a much more drastic impact on ecosystems than we can imagine, continuing to cause harm even centuries after the din of battle falls silent across former frontlines.

France, for example, is still coping with poisons left in local environments from World War I. Areas near former battlefields have absorbed heavy metals, chemicals and even arsenic. In some places, toxins in the soil prevent anything growing from it. In other areas where trees and animals have returned, toxins remain present in flora, fauna and ground water. In 2012, the French government prohibited citizens in more than 500 municipalities from drinking locally sourced water due to contamination from perchlorate, which derives from World War I ammunition. A “red zone” of more than 42,000 acres where it is impossible for humans to live exists today in France due to vast amounts of unexploded ordnance—including deadly gas shells—and chemical pollution. Chemicals used during the war included phosgene, sulfur mustard to cause blistering, and diphenylchlorarsine—the latter a “vomiting agent” used by the Germans in September 1917 in combination with lethal gases to cause Allied soldiers to become sick, remove their gas masks, and be killed by toxic fumes. These poisons continue to lurk in shells beneath the soil, to

leak and to spread. Their effects are still deadly. The French continue to extract about 900 tons of unexploded ordnance from the soil of their country per year. They have a long road ahead in terms of bringing healing to the land. Experts say it will take literally several centuries before those areas are clean again.

War unleashes a Pandora’s box of hurt. The Second World War also saw large-scale damage to nature. Globally, unexploded bombs and land mines remain a deadly problem; sunken ships spread heavy metals and toxins into the ocean as they deteriorate, wounding marine life. The impact of radioactive particles from the testing and use of nuclear weapons remains—as have the far-reaching effects of chemical defoliants used during the Vietnam War, which have had long-lasting harmful effects on men exposed to them, as well as their families and citizens living in affected areas. I have already written about some of the effects war has had on animals, and this distressing topic is not something I will dwell on again here. We can well imagine the suffering of animals in times of war, from pets and livestock to birds of the air and sea creatures in the deepest oceans. When humans fight to destroy one another, the whole world suffers.

All of this is certainly very grim to think about—but it ought not to leave us feeling depressed or hopeless. The effects of war on nature deserve more research and public attention, especially in these times when, in addition to the ongoing need to clean up after wars past, war has yet again erupted in Europe and international tensions are high.

While it’s true that war creates worlds of hurt, studying war gives us opportunities to appreciate what is good in the world around us and to reflect, with amazement and reverence, on the resilience of human beings, animals and the environment. More than harmful substances are expended in war—what is also spent is courage, endurance, and a desire to uphold human dignity and freedom, which no brutal force has ever been able to destroy. War does not only leave us with an inheritance of poisons and contaminations in our world. What also remains with us are echoes of the greatness of the human spirit, and the memory of those whose bravery makes them immortal to us who hold them in our hearts and in our admiration. This legacy, alongside the sufferings that remain, can and should encourage us to seek ways to honor the sacrifices that have been made, to educate others and to do what we can to help the world heal.

SURVIVING NAPOLEON’S WARS

Impractical gear, inaccurate firearms and artillery fire made life as a foot soldier truly hellish.

What was life like for infantrymen during the Napoleonic Wars? Imagine, if you will, two different soldiers of those days: a British fusilier in 1808 and a French light infantryman in 1812. Their uniforms, equipment and weapons differ, as do their languages and personal appearances. Yet there are still some things that they have in common. The summer heat is a factor for each of them: the fusilier in Spain as well as the light infantryman in Russia as he marches toward the Battle of Borodino. Each man is sweating profusely. The straps of his pack are too thin, or the pack is too heavy for the straps, or the load improperly adjusted. Whatever the reason, weight is a constant physical presence that alternates between causing stabbing pain in the shoulders and a crushing ache in the lower back. Their individual weapons are muzzle-heavy and imbalanced, adding more weight to their already overladen shoulders.

These men are chafed, blistered, filthy, exhausted, and smell very bad considering that they haven’t bathed in weeks. Each is tired, but that doesn’t even begin to describe the level of their exhaustion. Both are so dehydrated that pounding headaches hammer behind their eyes, and they feel sick—either because they are just recovering from a bout of dysenteric diarrhea, or because they are coming down with one. They don’t know if their illness is caused by bad food, bad water, or both—and knowing wouldn’t make any difference. Their feet hurt

due to poorly fitted shoes which are heavy and inflexible if not literally falling apart. These infantrymen on the march put one weary foot in front of the other for mile after seemingly endless mile—but they were the toughest men of their day, and this was just part and parcel of soldiering.

Terrain, weather, and distance have always contributed to the exhausting misery that is part of infantry life in every era and war, but the things with which soldiers are laden also play a part. In the Napoleonic era, just as today, infantrymen of most armies were overloaded with a staggering amount of military equipment. Some gear was necessary and some not, at least in the opinions of the men who had to carry it.

Rfn. Benjamin Harris, who survived the grueling winter retreat to Coruna in 1809, described the British infantryman’s load as being almost more than a man could manage

in those conditions. Some men could not manage and perished as a result. “The weight I toiled under was tremendous…,” he wrote, “indeed, I am convinced that many of our infantry sank and died under the weight of their knapsacks alone. For my own part… I marched under a weight sufficient to impede the free motions of a donkey…” By his own admission, Harris was no imposing physical specimen. “Altogether the quantity of things I had on my shoulders was enough and more than enough for my wants, sufficient, indeed, to sink a little fellow of five feet seven inches into the earth.”

It was not only the sheer weight involved that proved a problem. In those times, long before the concept of ergonomics was ever applied to the design of military loadbearing equipment, infantrymen suffered from poorly arranged loads. “Nay, so awkwardly was the load our men bore in those days placed upon their backs,” Harris wrote, “that the free motion of the body was impeded, the head held down from the pile at the back of the neck, and the soldier half beaten before he came to the scratch.”

Additionally, the most battle-tested armies of that era went into action dressed in a manner completely unsuited to the hard job of soldiering in the field. Yet the impracticality of military uniforms was not the result of a lack of experience in the physical demands of soldiering. Tradition mattered more than soldiers’ comfort, and fashion usually won over function. Blaze de Blury was a lieutenant in the Grande Armee that marched into Russia in 1812. After the horrific retreat that destroyed most of that army and Napoleon’s ambitions with it, de Blury was lucky to still be alive to record his experience.

“I have never understood,” he later wrote, “why under Napoleon, when we were constantly at war, the soldier should have been forced to wear the ghastly breeches, which, by pressing on the hams at the back of the knee, prevented him from walking easily. On top of that, the knee, which was covered by a long buttoned-up gaiter, was further strangled…” This was the uniform of an infantry that walked everywhere across Europe. “It was, all in all,” de Blury concluded, “a conspiracy by three thicknesses of cloth, two rows of buttons one on top of the other, and three garters to paralyze the efforts of the bravest of marchers.” Impractical uniforms were not a problem for the French alone. To varying degrees every army of the period outfitted their infantry in clothing that ranged from the poorly designed to the downright absurd.

At least one ungainly piece of the infantryman’s combat load was indispensable, and that was his weapon. It might be tempting to dismiss the Napoleonic soldier’s musket as a rather simplistic weapon. After all, it was a single-shot,

Tradition mattered more than comfort, and fashion usually won over function.

(2)

Depicted here at the Battle of Jena, also known as the Battle of Jena-Auerstädt, fought in October 1806, Napoleon I was known to wield his infantry in powerful columns with light artillery pieces brought up to blast holes in the enemy lines.

smooth-bore, muzzle-loading black powder firearm with incredibly primitive sights. Using it effectively was as much a matter of discipline acquired from experience as understanding how to best shoot within its limitations. It was essentially a heavy and crude point-and-shoot weapon. If firing it was a simple matter, the loading and reloading sequences were not. For French infantrymen in 1815, the musketry drill consisted of eight basic steps in loading their pieces. The British drill of the same period required 10 steps. This had a predictable effect on rates of fire. In the chaos and smoke of massed infantry combat, a veteran unit of well-trained infantry might be able to achieve a sustained rate of fire of only three to four rounds a minute. The British—one of the only armies in the world to regularly train their infantry with live ammunition—could consistently put out rates of fire slightly better than that, but were also limited by the inefficiency of their weapons.

The image one sometimes encounters in film and fiction of a Napoleonic-era soldier biting open a paper cartridge and holding a ball in his mouth before pouring in the powder and spitting it down the barrel is probably inaccurate. After firing just a few rounds, the muzzle of the musket was hot enough to blister skin on contact.

Accuracy with these weapons was notable for its almost complete absence. When it came to infantry firepower, all Napoleonic armies stressed quantity over quality—that is, as much massed fire as possible.

This was where discipline came into play. To maximize the effect of musketry, it was necessary for infantry to stand firm and wait until the enemy advanced perilously close before unleashing the critical first volley. In 1814, the noted British ordnance expert Maj. George Hanger wrote, “A soldier’s musket, if not exceedingly ill-bored (as many are), will strike a figure of a man at 80 yards; it may even at a hundred; but a soldier must be very unfortunate indeed who shall be wounded by a common musket at 150 yards, providing his antagonist aims at him; and as to firing at a man at 200 yards with a common musket, you may as well fire at the moon and have the same hope of hitting him.”

Hanger was an absolute realist about the standard musket’s problems with accuracy. “I do maintain and will prove,” he wrote, “that no man was ever killed at 200 yards, by a common musket, by the person who aimed at him.” Marksmanship doctrine of the day could be summed up simply: level your piece in the general direction of the enemy’s ranks, let fly, and hope for the best.

There were a few exceptions. The riflemen of the British Army’s 95th Rifles were consistently able to hit targets out to much greater ranges as the result of both better training and their specialized weapon, the Baker rifle. Aside from the obvious advantage of having a rifled bore, the Baker also benefited from using spherical, leather-patched ball ammunition that fit tightly in the barrel to give the ball a ballistic spin when fired. This greater accuracy came at the cost of a lower rate of fire—the Baker rifle took considerably longer to reload than a standard-issue smooth-bore musket. Thus rifle companies usually filled the skirmisher role.

The Baker rifle had a bladed sword bayonet, but the British Brown Bess and the French Charleville muskets used socket bayonets when closing with the enemy battle line. Mass firing by opposing forces ranks was merely a prelude to the bayonet attack. Firing volleys was to soften up one’s opponent. This remained the standard infantry attack tactic until the American Civil War when the new, rifled musket essentially reduced the bayonet to a “cooking utensil.”

This reduced rate of fire ironically prompted Napoleon Bonaparte to decide against issuing rifled muskets to the voltigeurs, the light skirmishers of the French army—a decision which put them at a considerable disadvantage

when they faced British riflemen. Another factor in the French decision to arm all infantry with standard muskets may have been a desire to retain a measure of flexibility in their combat role. All French infantry trained as skirmishers. Under French doctrine, a battalion of conventional infantry was expected to be able to deploy as skirmishers on command, then regroup into a column or line of battle as the tactical situation required. As one historian notes, “only the French can lay claim to the universal employment of their line infantry as skirmishers.”

Depending on the army in which they served, regular infantry in the line and grenadier regiments of the Napoleonic Wars were armed with the British Land Pattern Tower musket (the famous Brown Bess), or the French Model 1777 musket, the New Prussian Model 1809, or the Austrian Model 1798. Accuracy was not an option for any of these weapons. There were no aiming sights to speak of— just a small rectangular bayonet lug on top of the barrel near the muzzle which served as a primitive front sight. Unlike the Baker rifle, standard infantry muskets were loaded with balls that were loose in the barrel and which would rattle around if not rammed down with wadding (the paper “cartridge” containing loose powder and the musket ball).

Ammunition was the other integral part of the weapons system. A soldier could have the finest firearm ever designed, but once he ran out of ammunition it was little better than a club or a spear with the bayonet. The amount of ammunition soldiers carried varied considerably depending on the army and the soldier’s individual role, but those small, lethal cartridges of gunpowder and lead were crucial to his ability to stand and fight. No matter what else a soldier might throw away to lighten his load, the basic load of ammunition was not casually discarded. Skirmishers, operating independently, often used ammunition at a faster rate than battalions firing in command volleys.

For armies of the Napoleonic Wars, individual rounds of ammunition were issued in cartridge form, made of paper (tough, but not waterproof) which contained a lead ball and about 150 grains of loose black powder. The quality of the powder varied greatly, depending on the manufacturer. In the 95th Rifles, where individual marksmanship mattered as a professional skill, soldiers used a higher grade of powder for their rifles. When they had to settle for inferior stocks of standard-issue gunpowder, they ground down the grains to a finer strain themselves in order to improve the ballistic performance of their shots.

Other skills were essential to a soldier of that era, and most required more than just the physical conditioning of route marching or the repetition of parade-ground drilling. The fulfillment of the infantry’s role as the sharp end of the army’s spear always came down to the individual soldier’s skill in musketry—in other words, his ability to put rounds downrange as rapidly as possible, usually while under fire. Marksmanship training, as rudimentary as it was, received lesser or greater emphasis in different armies and sometimes came perilously close to being neglected altogether. When the marching stopped and the fighting started, musketry was always the infantry’s essential technical skill. Resilience, discipline, and courage could make all the difference in the fight. An ability to stand firm while torn by the enemy’s fire, waiting for the crucial moment, sometimes without being able to return fire, was the factor that determined the outcome on battlefields from Austerlitz to Salamanca.

The British fielded what were probably the best-trained infantry formations in their day, at least in terms of their battle drill in musketry. Forming double lines of infantrymen firing in alternating volleys gave them a huge advantage in the amount of firepower they could bring to bear

NAPOLEON’S WARS

across their linear front. To achieve this in battle, the British drilled their infantry regiments with a single-minded intensity. All armies of the day used multiple ranks of alternating fire in their linear formations, but what made British musketry so effective was the fact that British infantry fired live ball ammunition in training. Remarkably, few other armies of that era did so. That may have had something to do with economic realities—“a single round,” as one historian notes, “cost at that time almost as much as food for a full day…” Other armies recognized the combat value of British training but could not hope to equal it. The Prussians, known for having a first-rate army in most respects, “pointed out that their own troops, even in three-deep lines, did not have the discipline, training and individual stability to hold such formations and didn’t try to use them.”

In contrast, the French army usually advanced its infantry in massed columns, bringing the physical force of the columns to bear on an enemy’s static position which was seldom as deep, front to back. Napoleon used a “combined arms” approach—infantry and artillery—with the infantry advancing in powerful columns and then light artillery pieces brought up to literally blast holes in the enemy line. Infantry advancing in line were more apt to be thrown into disorder by terrain or obstacles, particularly if they were inexperienced or poorly trained.

For French brigades, advancing in column was often simply the best option. Gen. Antoine-Henri Jomini, drawing on a wealth of experience in his observations, once remarked, “The French, particularly, have never been able to march steadily in deployed lines,” so the column was the standard formation in the assault. It was the principle of the battering ram against the wall. As a tactic it worked for the French time and again against armies all over Europe.

It did not always work well against the fearsome musketry of well-led British infantry. In battle after battle in the Peninsular War, the British demonstrated that a wide front of highly trained, well-disciplined infantrymen standing their ground while firing one crashing volley after another in quick succession almost always trumped the more visually intimidating bulk of a brigade in column.

Sustained infantry combat was hard on both men and weapons. The anonymous British narrator from the 71st Regiment, remembering the savage fighting at Fuentes de Oñoro in 1811 in the Peninsular War, said that by the time that day’s battle was ended, “My shoulder was as black as coal, from the recoil of my musket…”. He had fired 107

rounds of ball cartridge that day—nearly all the ammunition he had. French soldiers also found the experience of toe-to-toe infantry combat exhausting. Jean-Roch Coignet, fighting the Austrians in 1800, later wrote, “Their columns were constantly reinforced; no one came to our support. Our musket-barrels were so hot that it became impossible to load for fear of igniting the cartridges. There was nothing for it but to piss into the barrels to cool them, and then to dry them by pouring in loose powder and setting it alight unrammed.”

Nineteenth century infantry battle was a comparatively short-range affair, but even so an individual soldier’s view of the fight was often limited. More than one soldier commented that, in the hottest part of the brawl, dense clouds of white smoke made it all but impossible for infantrymen to see ahead or nearby. Seeing action across the field was even less likely.

As a British veteran wrote in his account of the fighting at Waterloo, “The noise and smoke were dreadful. At this time I could see but a very little way from me, but all around the wounded and slain lay very thick.”

Harris described much the same experience. “I myself was very soon so hotly engaged,” he wrote, “loading and firing away, enveloped in the smoke that I created, and the cloud which hung about me from the continued fire of my comrades that I could see nothing for a few minutes but the red flash of my own piece amongst the white vapour clinging to my very clothes…” A soldier’s world narrowed around him in those conditions. “Until some friendly breeze of wind clears the space around,” he wrote, “a soldier knows no more of his position and what is about to happen to his front, or what has happened (even amongst his own comrades) than the very dead lying around.”

The Battle of Waterloo was a ferocious test of military discipline for the British soldiers holding their positions. French cannon fire ripped bloody swaths through their ranks. Time and time again the British regulars obeyed the orders of their officers and NCOs to close the gaps over the bodies of their fallen comrades. They had to stand fast, firing volley after volley into the French that came up against them, maintaining the massed formations that were necessary to ward off the French cavalry that repeatedly tried and failed to break their squares. As the day wore on and their casualties mounted, even that iron discipline began to waver.

Infantry in square presented splendid targets for artillery, and every time the French cavalry fell back, the supporting French batteries blasted killing sweeps of round shot (and canister, when the range was short enough) through the British formations. Had it not been for Wellington’s reverse-slope position sheltering his infantry

Infantry in square presented splendid targets for artillery.

Scottish war hero Cornet Charles Ewart is shown capturing a French standard during the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The battle, a fierce test of British troops’ discipline, was viewed by hardened war veterans as one of their toughest fights.

from the worst effects of the French gunnery, it is fair to wonder if the British infantry could have held their ground under such sustained, direct artillery fire.

The British ability to stand firm owed to discipline and personal leadership. Thomas Morris, who fought at Waterloo with the 73rd Regiment, described a moment where an officer’s personal example was the vital antidote to the fear spreading through his regiment.

“Once, and only once, during the dreadful carnage at Waterloo,” Morris wrote, “did the stern Seventy-Third hesitate to fill up a gap which the relentless iron had torn in their square; their Lieut.-Colonel (Brevet Colonel Harris) at once pushing his horse lengthwise across the space, said with a smile, ‘Well, my lads, if you won’t, I must;’ it is almost needless to add that immediately he was led back to his proper place, and the ranks closed up by men still more devoted than before.”

Wellington famously remarked that Waterloo was “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.” He was not a man given to exaggeration or hyperbole. Even some of the hardened veterans in the British ranks thought it was one of the toughest fights they had seen. Morris wrote that his sergeant-major was “a brave soldier, and had been through

the whole of the engagements in the Peninsula,” but Waterloo proved beyond even his considerable experience. In the worst part of the day at Waterloo, as casualties mounted and the British ranks were being torn apart, the sergeant-major told his colonel, “We had nothing like this in Spain, sir.” The sergeant major was deathly pale when he said it, and his use of profanity increased as the battle went on in a sure sign of his stress.

All these factors—hard marching in impractical uniforms, cumbersome weapons and repetitious drill, as well as the chaos and carnage of battle—comprised an infantryman’s life during the 12-year span of the Napoleonic Wars. Whether fighting for the British, French, or any of the other nations that made up the shifting alliances of the day, soldiers of all armies on battlefields from Spain to Russia shared the same grim view from the infantry’s ranks. MHQ

John A. Haymond is the author of Soldiers: A Global History of the Fighting Man, 1800-1945 (Stackpole Books, 2018) and The Infamous Dakota War Trials of 1862: Revenge, Military Law, and the Judgment of History (McFarland, 2016).

Capt. Francis Grenfell was awarded Britain’s first Victoria Cross in World War I, but he and others would have gone unrecognized if not for a campaign by Prince Albert in 1855 to recognize valor among all.

‘FOR VALOUR!’

The Victoria Cross is one of the highest military honors a British soldier can be awarded—but it was no easy feat to create.

On June 24, 1854, eight months into the Crimean War, Vice Adm. Sir Charles Napier, commander of Britain’s Baltic Fleet, sent three ships including the wooden paddleboat HMS Hecla to reconnoiter the channels and straits around the Russian fortress at Bomarsund in the Gulf of Bothnia. As the three vessels worked their way through the Aland Islands toward the fort, they came under fire from ground forces and then from the fort itself. Shots came closer and closer to the ships until one well-aimed shell, its fuze still burning, landed on the eight-gun Hecla’s quarterdeck. The heroic action by Hecla’s Midshipman and Acting Mate, Charles Davis Lucas, that happened next prompted the creation in 1856 of one of the world’s most famous and coveted valor medals—Great Britain and the Commonwealth’s revered Victoria Cross.

Two days after Lucas’ bravery saved his ship and presumably many of his shipmates, he was promoted to full lieutenant, but notably was not then given any military decoration or other award. The reason was that there was no suitable award available at that time for recognizing conspicuous bravery displayed by the British fighting man—especially those of lower rank. The only available military recognitions for their gallant deeds were a promotion or a Mention in Dispatches.

Yet, because of new 19th century technology, such as the telegraph and concurrent burgeoning proliferation of numbers and circulation copies of newspapers, news of the war and Lucas’ actions reached more public readership than ever before. Capturing widespread public attention, news of Lucas’ exploits—and soon of other Crimean War British heroes—unleashed a clamor demanding more honor be given to the average fighting man.

Medals, military and otherwise, were not a new thing. A half-century before the Crimean War and long before Lucas’ act of courage, Napoleon himself noted that “a soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.”

Ancient Egypt honored prowess at arms not with “bits of colored ribbon” but with membership in military orders, while Roman legionaries were honored with various crowns such as a naval crown awarded to the first man to board an enemy ship during battle. For centuries there were chivalric awards of knighthood and membership in

various aristocratic military orders with their attendant sashes, stars, and badges. Britain’s Most Noble Order of the Garter was established in 1348 by Edward III, and King George I created the Most Honourable Order of the Bath in 1725; both are knighthood orders.

The first award that could truly be called “a medal” was the medal that John VIII Palaeologus created in Italy in 1438 and presented to court officials in Milan, Ferrara, Naples, Mantua, and Rimini. France also produced medals in the 15th century, and the Netherlands awarded a medal in 1519. In Britain, Queen Elizabeth I issued a commemorative medal in 1588 to mark the defeat of the Spanish Armada that year. Commemorative medals were also awarded to veterans of Napoleon’s 1798 Battle of the Nile. Prussia’s Frederick William III created a precursor of the Allgemeines Ehrenzeichen in 1793 for peacetime merit.

Gen. George Washington, commander-in-chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolution, created the Badge for Military Merit in 1782. Awarded to three men, it was forgotten until 1932 when U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Douglas MacArthur created its rededication as the Purple Heart medal. America’s Medal of Honor, its highest valor decoration, was established by the War Department in July 1862 (December 1861 by the Navy Department) during the American Civil War.

France’s Napoleon III established the green and yellow Medaille Militaire award in 1852, one of the first awards made available to noncommissioned officers. The French even presented these medals to British soldiers during the Crimean War.

However, Britain lagged in the creation of an individual medal for valor. The Crimean War changed that. The war started in October 1853 between Russia and Turkey (the Ottoman Empire then). By March 1854, Britain and France had been swept into the conflict on Turkey’s side. That summer, the British Admiralty sent Napier and his Baltic Fleet into the Baltic Sea. In June, Lucas’ act of heroism was prompted by Napier’s dispatch of the warships Hecla, Odin, and Valorous under Capt. William H. Hall to reconnoiter the scattered islands and approaches to the 80-gun Russian fortress at Bomarsund. As the three vessels worked a narrow channel near the 1832 fortress and came under fire, Hall, in an action some in the Admiralty later called “foolish,” returned fire and eventually attacked the fortress itself. Lucas was then in charge of the paddleboat’s eight guns. When evening arrived, the three ships, joined by the 46-gun HMS Arrogant, dropped anchor within range of the fortress and launched a bombardment that lasted into the early hours of the following morning.

News of heroes sparked clamor for more honor to be given to the average fighting man.

From left: Top distinctions in the British honors system include chivalric orders with medieval roots such as the Order of the Garter and the Order of the Bath, both knighthoods that can be conferred for military as well as

During the height of this bombardment, a live shell landed on the Hecla’s upper deck—it’s timed fuze still burning its way to ignite the shell’s inner explosive charge. Officers scrambled and shouted for their men to hit the deck. Ignoring the shouts, Lucas grabbed the hissing, sputtering shell with both hands, carried it to the rail, and threw it overboard. Before the shell reached the water, it exploded “with a tremendous roar.” That action, Capt. Hall of the Hecla later reported, saved “dozens of lives if not the whole ship’s company.” Lucas’ heroics had saved the Hecla’s crew, although the ship suffered minor damage and two crewmen were wounded. Historian Glanfield explains in his book about the Victoria Cross, Bravest of the Brave, that at the time “explosive shells were essentially hollowed cannon balls powder-filled and primitively fuzed” with fuzes “cut to length by its gunners according to range to ensure it exploded close on impact.” Lucas was himself a gunner, Glanfield wrote, and thus knew the risks. He “was gambling on a miscalculation.” It was a gamble he fortunately won. British and French forces would finally take the Bomarsund fortress and demolish it in August.

Lucas, then age 20, was already a navy veteran. He was born in 1834 in Poyntzpass, County Armagh, in today’s Northern Ireland and at age 13 joined the Royal Navy. He

was praised by Hall for “a remarkable instance of coolness and presence of mind in action,” in Hall’s letter to Napier.

By 1854, newspapers had proliferated. Samuel F. B. Morse had sent the first telegraph message a decade earlier, on May 24, 1842. Consequently, the Crimean War was the first major conflict covered by war correspondents who brought the British public into almost daily contact with the war via telegraph. Correspondents such as William Howard Russell of The Times included coverage of common soldiers and sailors. The people back home read in their newspapers of the suffering of their husbands, sons, and brothers, the inadequacies of the medical care they were receiving, poor sanitation, and heroics. They devoured war reports including news of the Bomarsund fighting and of Lucas’ gallantry on the Hecla. Both became topics of public conversation in pubs and on city street corners throughout the kingdom.

“The war reports of Russell and other journalists,” history professor Orlando Figes wrote in 2010, “had brought to the attention of the British public the many acts of bravery by ordinary troops; [and] they had portrayed the suffering of the soldiers in heroic terms giving rise to a widespread feeling that a new reward was needed to recognize their deeds.”

The Distinguished Conduct Medal for army enlisted men and the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal for seamen were quickly established but, Glanfield wrote, “failed to meet the demand for a single supreme award embracing all ranks and all arms.”

Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, aware of these news reports and of the public clamor they aroused—and perhaps embarrassed by British soldiers receiving the French Medaille Militaire began drawing up specifications in 1855 for a gallantry award he proposed to call the Military Order of Victoria (changed to Victoria Cross by the Queen). His proposal included five points: that a small cross of merit for personal deeds of valor be established; that it be open to all ranks; that it be unlimited in number; that an annuity (he suggested £5) be attached to each cross; and that it could be claimed by an individual who established his right to the distinction before a jury of his peers, subject to confirmation by the Crown.

When word leaked out, the proposed award was celebrated by Parliament and the British public. However, some entrenched elements of the military opposed it, argu-

ing that courage was expected of all soldiers and that an award should not be established honoring someone for doing what was expected.

Yet such scruples could not hold against Albert’s idea, backed by his sizeable prestige and championed by Queen Victoria herself. The House of Commons joined the movement for the Victoria Cross in December, when retired naval officer and MP Capt. George Treweeke Scobell urged the Queen to create “an order of merit for distinguished and prominent personal gallantry to which every grade and individual from the highest to the lowest may be admissible” and proposing the medal carry a yearly annuity of £10, rather than Prince Albert’s originally proposed £5.

The medal was instituted in 1856 when the Queen signed its warrant on Jan. 29. It was made retroactive to 1854 available “to a person of any rank in any service and to any civilians under military command.” The medal was first created by the gold and silver smiths of Hancocks & Co. of London, which still manufactures the medals today. It was most likely designed by the sculptor Henry Armstead, then age 27.

The bronze medal is described as being in the shape of a Maltese cross (actually, a cross pattée is used), slightly more than one-and-a-half inches high and the same in width. The front bears an imprint of St. Edward’s crown with a British lion above and the slogan “For Valour”

Scruples could not hold against Prince Albert’s idea, backed by Queen Victoria.

VICTORIA CROSS ORIGINS

The Victoria Cross awarded to Lucas, shown here, featured a dark blue ribbon that was given to navy honorees after Queen Victoria instituted the medal in 1856. A crimson ribbon was awarded to army honorees. In 1918, the blue ribbons were eliminated and both army and navy honorees have been awarded Victoria Crosses with crimson ribbons ever since.

below. The slogan originally considered for the medal was “For The Brave,” but that was changed to “For Valour” on Victoria’s suggestion, noting that the original slogan seemed to imply that not all men were brave in battle. The cross hangs from a gold bar on the obverse. On the reverse is inscribed the recipient’s name, rank, number, and unit. The date on which the act for which the award is being presented is engraved on the back of the bronze cross. The cross in turn hangs from the gold bar and a crimson ribbon about one-and-a-half inches wide.

Originally a Victoria Cross with a crimson ribbon (officially prescribed as “red” but which has always been “crimson” or “wine-red” in color) was awarded to army honorees while one with a dark blue ribbon was given to navy honorees until all subsequent Victoria Cross medals were issued in crimson after 1918. Since 1917 a miniature of the cross can be seen in the center of the bar. In the few cases (three to date) in which two VCs have been awarded to a single individual, a second miniature cross is placed next

to the first. The three double-winners are: Surgeon Capt. Arthur Martin-Leake, who won one VC in the Boer War and one in World War I; Capt. Noel Godfrey Chavasse, who won two in World War I; and New Zealander Capt. Charles Hazlitt Upham, who won two in World War II.

To date, the Victoria Cross has been awarded 1,358 times to 1,355 individuals with almost half, 628, awarded for actions taken during World War I and 181 in World War II. Since the end of World War II, 15 VCs have been awarded: four in the Korean War; one for Malaya; four (to Australians) in the Vietnam War; two in the Falklands War; one in the Iraq War; and three in the War in Afghanistan. All 15 medals have been awarded to military personnel. No British civilian has received the award since 1879.

Women became eligible for the Victoria Cross in 1921. However, no woman has yet been awarded one, although Elizabeth Webber Harris, a colonel’s wife serving with her husband in India, was awarded an “honorary” VC for heroic efforts treating victims of an 1869 cholera epidemic.

VICTORIA CROSS ORIGINS

make 80 to 85 more Victoria Crosses. The metal is kept in a vault controlled by the Royal Logistics Corps at Donnington, Shropshire and can be removed from the vault only in the presence of an officer and armed guards.

Normally, a recommendation for the awarding of a Victoria Cross is issued by an officer at the regimental level with a minimum of three witnesses swearing to the accuracy of the claims of heroism for which it is intended. The recommendation must then work its way up the chain of command until it reaches, first, the Secretary of State for Defense and then the reigning monarch for approval.

In 1867, the award also was made available to colonial troops. After World War II, most Commonwealth countries created their own system of military awards, which often include a Victoria Cross medal created by that country and no longer directly take part in Great Britain’s medals system. However the UK government can recommend Commonwealth citizens for UK honors, and the British monarch is also the sovereign of certain Commonwealth honors systems, such as those of Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Initial official policy was that posthumous VC awards should not be made. Between 1897 and 1901, as British soldiers fought in colonial wars and in China’s Boxer Rebellion, the London Gazette listed soldiers who would have been awarded VCs had they survived. In 1902, six of those soldiers mentioned in the Gazette were “unofficially” granted VCs and later awarded medals after the policy prohibiting posthumous VCs was officially reversed in 1920.

The new valor award came about due to the teamwork of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria. Although the VC was Albert’s idea, Victoria introduced modifications to it and lent her full support to its creation, overcoming opposition.

By comparison, the United States’ highest military honor, the Medal of Honor, first awarded during the American Civil War, has been presented 3,511 times, including 19 medals to individuals who have received two. It was also awarded to one woman, Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, a Civil War physician.

It was claimed that Victoria Crosses have all been made from the metal of Russian cannon captured at the siege of Sevastopol in the Crimean War, but historian Glanfield, after studying a metallurgical examination of VCs in the custody of the Australian War Memorial, authoritatively established that Victoria Crosses—at least those made since December 1914—come from the metal of two Chinese cannons. Enough metal from that source is still available to

The Victoria Cross warrant does not specify who should present the actual medals to the honorees. Queen Victoria liked to present them herself and presented the first 62 awarded. That presentation took place on a hot June 26, 1857 in London’s Hyde Park before massed British troops, including dragoons, hussars, a troop of Royal Horse Artillery with two field batteries, Royal Engineers, three battalions of Foot Guards, and others. A large crowd gathered and cheered loudly as the troops formed and the 62 men about to be awarded the VC marched and stood in a single line facing the troops and a table holding the medals. Lucas was fourth in the line that had been formed by rank. Just before 10 a.m., the field batteries sounded, and the Queen approached on horseback accompanied by Albert, who that very day had received the title of Queen’s Consort. Also present on horseback were the Prince of Wales, who would become Edward VII, and his brother Alfred. Sir John Smyth has called the scene “poignant and impressive.”

Among the honorees were 26 men from the lower ranks: 16 army privates; four gunners; one sapper; two seaman; and three boatswains. Besides Lucas, two other

The first 62 Victoria Crosses were presented to honorees personally by the queen in London’s Hyde Park during a ceremony on June 26, 1857. Lucas was the first to receive the medal.

men from the Hecla also received VCs that day, Lt. John Bythesea and Stoker William Johnstone. The first man to receive his medal was the redoubtable Charles David Lucas.

The medals appear to have been awarded chronologically by the date of the action for which they were being awarded. Lord Panmure, Secretary of State for War, called the name of each man and handed the proper individually-inscribed medal to the Queen. The man then stepped forward, bowed to the Queen, and Victoria leaned from her saddle and pinned the medal to the man’s chest.

After the ceremony Lucas remained in the Royal Navy, was promoted in 1862 and for a time commanded the experimental armored gunboat HMS Vixen. He was promoted to captain in 1867, retired in October 1873, and was named a rear admiral after his retirement.

Five years later, in 1878, he was summoned to the deathbed of his former captain, Adm. Sir William Hutcheson Hall, who asked Lucas to take care of his wife Hilaire after he was gone and to marry his only daughter, Frances Russell Hall.

Always loyal, Lucas complied, marrying Frances in 1879. The couple went on to have three daughters before Lucas died at Great Culverden, Kent on Aug. 7, 1914. He is buried at St. Lawrence’s Church, Mereworth, Maidstone, Kent.

Since its first en masse award in 1857, the Victoria Cross has become not only Great Britain’s highest military honor, but one of the world’s most prestigious valor medals. The late author Sir John Smyth, who won a Victoria Cross in France during World War I, has called it “the most famous award for gallantry in the world” while historian Glanfield has called it “Britain’s supreme decoration.”

The award also changed perceptions about ordinary soldiers. “Before the war,” Prof. Orlando Figes wrote, “the respectable middle and upper classes had viewed the rank and file of the British Army as little more than a dissolute rabble—heavy-drinking and ill-disciplined, brutal and profane.” But no longer. The Victoria Cross “marked a new reverence for war and warriors.” MHQ

Chuck Lyons is a retired newspaper editor and a freelance writer who has written extensively on historical subjects. His work has appeared in numerous national and international periodicals.

The Victoria Cross medal changed perceptions about ordinary soldiers.

THE OTHER KOREAN WAR

South Korea’s air force flaunts military might with a demonstration for the Armed Forces Day parade in Seoul in 1968. That year, communist infiltrators came perilously close to killing the South Korean president.

On the night of Jan. 17, 1968, 31 commandos from the North Korean Peoples’ Army (KPA) cut holes in the chain-link fence running along the southern edge of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) and crawled past sleeping U.S. soldiers. Their mission was to infiltrate Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea (ROK), and kill President Park Chung-hee.

It was the most audacious act the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea (DPRK) had initiated since the 1950 invasion of the ROK. The death of Park was intended to spark a popular uprising and allow communist sympathizers to take control of the government. This endeavor was the defining event of the little-known Second Korean Conflict from November 1966 to December 1969.

Except for the Americans who served in it and the families of 75 military personnel killed in action, details of the assassination attempt and the three-year struggle against North Korean aggression were lost in the turbulence of the 1960s. The Vietnam War relegated U.S. military operations in Korea to a holding action, underfunded by the Department of Defense, downplayed by Washington bureaucrats and out of the sight of the American people.

A soldier standing on a hill bordering the DMZ between North and South Korea keeps an eye out for suspicious activity in 1968. Border security was decidedly lax in some areas, allowing communist assassins to sneak past on a mission to kill South Korea’s strongman leader Park Chung-hee.

For South Koreans, the Second Korean Conflict was a war of national survival. It cost the lives of 270 soldiers and 75 civilians. Memories of the fallen, particularly of those who died thwarting the attempt on President Park’s life, are still revered.

Known as the Blue House Raid, this blow came close to fracturing the ROK-U.S. alliance and was a grave embarrassment for the United States.

The Korean Armistice Agreement, signed July 27, 1953, ended three years of fighting that killed thousands of soldiers and civilians. The agreement established a Military Demarcation Line (MDL) with a two-kilometer buffer area, a demilitarized zone (DMZ), on either side. The 151mile MDL became the de facto border between North and South Korea.

Armistice rules limited the number of troops and types of weapons allowed in the DMZ. The intent was for small constabulary formations to be there. From the outset, the KPA flouted those provisions and built fortified outposts manned by heavily armed troops who regularly fired across the MDL. In the decade following the armistice, seven G.I.s, 13 ROK soldiers and eight KPA fighters were killed

Following the end of the Korean War, many assumed the conflict was over. Yet North Korea persisted in its campaign to try to seize control of the South, taking a covert approach. This tunnel, shown here in 1983, was one of several dug under the DMZ line by communist forces hoping to use them to deploy troops across the border for a full-scale invasion.

in DMZ-related skirmishes. Authorities in Washington were not overly concerned and attributed the casualties to lingering animosity from the Korean War.

North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung was obsessed with uniting the two Koreas under communist rule. By the mid1960s he faced a formidable opponent. The ROK Army rivaled the KPA in quality and numbers. South Korea’s economy had grown to double the size of its northern adversary. ROK defenses were augmented by 50,000 U.S. troops, including the 2nd and 7th Infantry divisions, whose units were responsible for 18.5 miles of the DMZ. Against such strength, Kim turned to unconventional warfare to destabilize South Korea, initially setting 1968 as the campaign start date.

Kim Il-sung knew hit-and-run engagements would not overwhelm the ROK government. His opponent was an autocratic strongman, President Park Chung-hee, a former general who led a military coup in 1961, had a firm grip on power and used draconian measures to curb opposition. However, during his presidency, quality of life for average citizens vastly improved due to the growing economy. Hence, conditions for a viable insurgency did not exist. Kim concluded that only Park Chung-hee’s violent death would create a political vacuum and lead to an uprising to ultimately allow him to rule the Korean peninsula. But planning and training for such a dangerous act would take time. World events accelerated Kim’s plans. By late 1966, the

United States was immersed in Vietnam where its military commitment exceeded 300,000 and was increasing. For the first time, South Korea diverted forces from homeland defense and sent 50,000 men to assist the U.S. in Southeast Asia.

North Korea’s dictator believed the time was right to strike. The opening salvo of the Second Korean Conflict was fired on Nov. 2, 1966, during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s visit to Seoul. A U.S. Army patrol from the 2nd Infantry Division was ambushed by the KPA. Seven men were killed while one played dead and escaped with multiple wounds. Further east, an ROK squad was surprised by North Koreans and suffered two killed. This was frontpage news for a day. Yet once Johnson returned to Washington, Vietnam again dominated U.S. headlines.

Gen. Charles H. Bonesteel III, the commander of all United Nations forces in Korea, believed this aggression was part of a new strategy aimed at undermining the ROK government and eroding U.S. will. A Rhodes scholar from West Point’s class of 1931, Bonesteel was a brilliant officer who analyzed Kim’s oratory plus intelligence reports. His options to counter the new threat were limited because most resources, including experienced leaders, new equipment, spare parts and dollars, were earmarked for Vietnam. When he took command on Sept. 1, 1966, his charter from the Secretary of Defense contained explicit instructions not to adversely affect the Vietnam effort.

The theater was in a poor state of readiness. Most helicopters had been sent to Vietnam and modernization plans were on hold. American troops still carried the 7.62mm M14 rifle instead of the lighter M16. Facilities, especially the Quonset huts erected after the Korean War, suffered due to lack of maintenance money for basic repairs or upgrades. Shortages of spare parts left many vehicles non-operational.

U.S. Army personnel issues exacerbated the logistical problems. To expand the nation’s manpower pool, enlistment and induction standards were lowered, forcing the Selective Service to draft men who should never have been in the armed forces. Lack of experienced leaders had the biggest impact on combat effectiveness.

On the DMZ, a single lieutenant colonel and lieutenants manned infantry battalions. As captains completed their tours in Korea in 1966, they were replaced by second lieutenants. The personnel pipeline had barely enough infantry captains to fill the requisitions for Vietnam and Korea took the shortfall. As a result, young officers on their first assignments were commanding companies—positions normally held by captains. Rookie leaders made mistakes inevitable.

Clashes with unidentified infiltrators, called UIs, had not abated since President Johnson’s visit. Bonesteel proposed building a barrier and obstacles to impede enemy infiltration, and to enhance surveillance. He emphasized “impede” since no obstacle would stop determined infiltrators. The concept centered on a series of platoon guard posts inside the DMZ and a 10-foot-high chain link fence along the southern trace of the zone. Watchtowers were to be constructed along the fence. Patrols would be increased. Improved bunkers and firing positions would be emplaced

so the entire fence was under observation. Sensors, mines and mechanized quick reaction units were part of the mix. The general ordered two more U.S. infantry battalions to the DMZ, bringing the total to five. But money was required and there was nothing in the budget to cover the $30 million ($274 million today) needed to start the project. The proposal was derided inside the Department of Defense and in the press as “Bonesteel’s Folly.” Yet snide comments did not dissuade the general. Knowing how to work the bureaucracy, Bonesteel obtained research and development funds for a “DMZ Barrier Test.” He knew if the enterprise started in the U.S. sector, “getting a foot under the tent flap” he called it, the concept could ultimately expand to encompass the entire DMZ.

Construction began in summer 1967. Immediately GIs named it “The Barrier.” While work was in progress, 11 more U.S. soldiers were killed. Exasperated by the shortage of seasoned infantry company commanders, Bonesteel went directly to the Chief of Staff of the Army, Gen. Harold K. Johnson, and asked for 40 infantry captains with Vietnam combat service to fill the void. Johnson was convinced and told the personnel people to make it happen. Captains returning from Vietnam in the summer and fall of 1966 began arriving in Korea in November 1967 as the first stage of the Barrier was completed.

These company commanders were sorely needed. The year 1967 saw a sevenfold increase in firefights, with 150 occurring in the U.S. sector alone. Sixteen GIs were killed and 51 seriously wounded. The ROK Army suffered more grievously with 115 KIA and 243 wounded. Unlike Vietnam, where body counts were liberally estimated, the corpses of 228 North Korean soldiers killed were dragged to central locations for verification.

On Jan. 17, 1968, 31 communist commandos crossed over the border, dramatically changing the tenor of operations. They were headed for the Blue House, South Korea’s presi-

In January 1968, 31 communist commandos crossed over the border.

From left, South Korea’s Park Chung-hee was known for his dictatorial leadership style yet despite ruthless crackdowns on opposition remained popular for boosting the country’s economy. One of the communist

Shin-jo, is brought to a police station after being captured during a gun fight in Seoul.

dential residence distinguished by its bright roof tiles. The North Korean general who oversaw their six months of training gave the final briefing, exhorting them to “cut off the head of Park Chung-hee.” Notwithstanding fiery rhetoric, the team’s primary weapon for the assassination was the obsolete Soviet submachine gun, the PPSh-43, instead of the more modern AK-47.

North Korean scouts reconnoitered the route through the DMZ and chose rugged terrain in the eastern portion of the 2nd Infantry Division’s area of responsibility. Their approach to the barrier fence was along brush-covered ground where U.S. soldiers were lackadaisical and rarely checked by leaders. The GIs from B Company, 2nd Battalion, 38th Infantry were more concerned with staying warm during the sub-zero winter nights than being observant.

Weeks of careful planning paid off. The team was undetected as it moved up to the fence and cut several holes in it, allowing all 31 men to slip through. There was no report the following morning citing the breach. Failure to raise an alarm allowed the infiltrators to cross the partially frozen Imjin River and follow isolated mountain trails to Seoul, located 35 miles away.

The plan unraveled on the afternoon of Jan. 19 when four South Korean woodcutters stumbled on the raiders’ mountain “hide” position. The bewildered woodsmen were held at gunpoint and lectured on the virtues of Kim Il-sung’s communist “utopia,” and then were released with the admonishment to tell no one what they had seen. This was a fatal error. It was also astonishing behavior for ruthless fighters trained to kill without provocation. The woodcutters immediately went to the police and apprised them there were “many” North Koreans in the mountains. A nationwide alarm was sounded. No one knew President Park was the target. Throughout South Korea, all police and military forces were placed on high alert.

The North Korean team assumed the woodcutters did as they were told and pressed onward, thinking their presence was still secret. In the early evening of Jan. 20, two and three-man cells slipped into Seoul and rendezvoused at a safe house. They were alarmed by the amount of security around government facilities and the number of soldiers and policemen patrolling the streets. Even though the odds were against them, they decided to continue the mission, posing as a returning patrol and moving to the Blue House.

THE OTHER KOREAN WAR

them up. If leaders had checked their men and the fence in accord with the division’s standard operating procedure, this would not have happened. South Korean officials were infuriated by this dereliction of duty and threatened to withdraw Korean forces from Vietnam, claiming U.S. soldiers were incapable of defending Korea.

News of the fiasco spread through the 2nd Infantry Division. Retired Col. William A. “Bud” Henry, then a captain and a company commander in an adjacent infantry battalion, recalled: “It was a terrible screw-up…bad enough troops were sleeping on duty but far worse when they found the holes in the fence, fixed them and did not report it. The troops pretended nothing happened and probably hoped the whole thing would go away...We assumed somebody was going to jail over it.”

An inquisitive police contingent stopped them at a checkpoint 800 meters from their goal. Their faltering answers to questions were suspicious. The police captain drew his pistol and was killed instantly as a major firefight erupted. The raiders scattered, trying to escape, leaving behind two dead.

Shooting continued throughout the night as the police and soldiers pursed groups of fleeing commandos. Twodozen innocent civilians caught in crossfire while riding on a municipal bus were among the casualties.

At first light, South Korean and U.S. soldiers began scouring the mountains surrounding the capital. Clerks, cooks and mechanics were formed into provisional platoons on the DMZ to beef up surveillance and stop any escapees.

Within days, 29 raiders were killed, one escaped to North Korea and one was captured. Yet it was a costly victory—68 South Koreans (military, police and civilians) and three Americans were killed. Scores more were wounded.

The captive’s debriefing created a crisis in confidence between the Republic of Korea and the United States. The KPA lieutenant, Kim Shin-jo, was brought to the DMZ where he identified the exact location they cut the Barrier fence. Not only had the guards been sleeping, but the chain-link fence was crudely repaired, indicating that the holes had been discovered and someone had tried to cover

One bad thing followed another. On Jan. 23, as details about the Blue House Raid were being sorted, North Korea’s navy seized the USS Pueblo, an intelligence ship sailing in the Sea of Japan. One U.S. sailor was killed and 82 crewmen were taken hostage. No one in South Korea knew of the ship’s presence, negating the possibility of mounting a rescue. Again the United States appeared impotent and incompetent.

A week later, the Tet Offensive engulfed Vietnam. On Jan. 30-31, nationwide attacks struck 42 cities and the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. The allies quickly gained the upper hand, but fighting in the ancient capital of Hue dragged on for a month. American TV audiences were saturated with combat footage. Tet was a watershed event because the military success blunting the war’s largest offensive failed to dampen negative political fallout. Previous supporters of the war now viewed it as unwinnable.

To Park Chung-hee and his generals, the Tet Offensive was a sideshow. They deemed the Blue House Raid and the Pueblo hijacking as acts of war and the lack of American retaliation as inexcusable. Their inflammatory statements denigrating the United States brought the relationship between the countries to a new low.

Johnson had his hands full in Vietnam and was in no position to start another war with North Korea. He sent his personal emissary, Cyrus Vance, to placate Park with a $100M military aid package ($850M in today’s dollars). Showing his disdain, Park initially refused to see Vance but ultimately relented. After several days of contentious discussions, relations between the two countries were patched up. Yet the alliance remained badly frayed.

Tet and the Pueblo diverted the attention of journalists who might have dug into rumors of a DMZ cover-up and published the story in New York Times headlines. Yet the current big story was in Vietnam. Talk of the DMZ breach died a natural death and U.S. authorities were glad to see potential scrutiny go away.

Two-dozen civilians were caught in a crossfire while riding on a municipal bus.

American soldiers patrol the southern edge of the DMZ in late 1969. The U.S.-South Korea alliance was shaken by American failure to prevent the deadly Blue House Raid from happening.

There were no reliefs or courts-martial in the 2nd Infantry Division. Bonesteel used transfers and tour curtailments to hasten the departure of weak officers in the 2nd Battalion. He believed the acrimony between the United States and the Republic of Korea did not need further incitement by airing more dirty laundry with public punishments. Soon there were new leaders in the battalion and the cover-up was not mentioned in official postmortems.

Kim Il-sung suffered no consequences for his actions. Emboldened, he stepped up pressure on South Korea. On April 21, an outnumbered U.S. patrol fought 50 North Koreans. Five KPA soldiers were killed while the U.S. sustained one KIA and three wounded. It was one of 236 DMZ firefights in 1968 that resulted in 17 more Americans and 145 South Korean soldiers killed. Yet momentum had shifted in favor of the allies; 321 KPA fighters were killed and all enemy forays across the MDL were repelled.

Despite failures, North Korea’s dictator would not give up. Now he faced a new U.S. president, Richard M. Nixon, who ordered fighter aircraft and a large contingent from the 82nd Airborne Division to South Korea for a March 1969 joint training exercise. This show of the alliance’s strength unsettled Kim, who believed it was a precursor to an all-out invasion of North Korea.

He rolled the dice one more time with a premeditated attack on the United States. On April 15, Kim Il-sung’s birthday, two MiG-21 fighters shot down a U.S. Navy intelligence aircraft 95 miles off the coast of the DPRK. Thirty-one U.S. servicemen died.

President Nixon was irate but opted for a show of force versus bombing North Korea. He immediately resumed

intelligence flights but they were escorted by heavily armed jet fighters. Nixon ordered a naval task force of two carrier battle groups into the Sea of Japan. Kim declined to test his enemy further.

In fall 1969, the communist dictator ordered a decrease in offensive activity and purged KPA leadership. Failure had dire consequences in Kim’s hermit kingdom. Many high-ranking military officers were executed or condemned to life in prison.

The general who planned the Blue House Raid was the first to face torture and the firing squad. At the time, no one realized United Nations troops had defeated the DPRK’s unconventional warfare campaign…except Kim Il-sung.

The Blue House Raid and that period of violence are described in Maj. Daniel Bolger’s 1991 study, “Scenes from an Unfinished War: Low Intensity Conflict in Korea, 19661969.” Even in his account, there is no mention of deception on the DMZ. Misguided efforts of a few U.S. soldiers were swept away, overshadowed by the Pueblo and 3600 Americans killed during the Tet Offensive. In his summary, Bolger stated, “the Second Korean Conflict has drifted into obscurity, a curious episode, a footnote to the Vietnam era.” MHQ

John D. Howard served as an infantryman in the U.S. Army for 28-plus years, retiring as a brigadier general. Between two tours in Vietnam, he was a rifle company commander and battalion operations officer on the Korean DMZ in 1967-1968. In 2005, the South Korean government honored him for his DMZ service by naming him a “Defender of Korea.”

In light of the many and varied amazing spy “gadgets” that have appeared in popular films and television shows about espionage—cue Oddjob’s razor-edged hat in the 1964 James Bond movie Goldfinger anyone can be forgiven for thinking that such over-the-top contraptions are merely the brainchildren of imaginative screenwriters. The truth might surprise you. The International Spy Museum (SPY) in Washington, D.C. provides visitors with a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the dark world of global espionage. Boasting a vast array of incredible artifacts in its collection which shed light on “spycraft,” the museum has shared a selection of the most devious devices in its collection with Military History Quarterly which span decades of the Cold War—the complex global political struggle between the Soviet Union, the United States, and nations allied with both. This underhanded “war” had peaks and valleys as tensions between East and West waxed and waned. The Cold War nominally ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. However, some historians argue that the conflict never truly ended.

From top: Ostensibly the Great Seal of the United States, this is a modern replica of a so-called 1945 “gift” in the style of the Trojan Horse from Soviet children to the U.S. ambassador in Moscow which contained a sophisticated eavesdropping device. Known as “The Thing” to American intelligence operatives, the transmitter, which had no batteries or circuits, was eventually removed from the ambassador’s office in 1952; during the Cold War, gutted dead rats, similar to this 2016 reproduction from France, were used as “dead drops” by the CIA to pass hidden messages, money and film to other agents. According to the museum, the rats were doused with pepper sauce to deter scavenging cats—demonstrating that even animals were caught up in spy games during the secretive struggle.

DEVICES OF DECEPTION

Spies in the Cold War fought in a clandestine conflict with the aid of gear primed for stealth and trickery.

DEVICES OF DECEPTION

A This rectal tool kit was issued to CIA agents during the 1960s at the height of the Cold War. The pill-shaped container was designed to be neatly stored in the body cavity where it could remain undetected during searches and possibly prove useful to agents needing to escape. The tools inside included saws, drill bits and knives. B This unusual mechanical insect was created by Russian intelligence operatives in the 1990s as a replica of a so-called “insectothopter” originally created by the CIA in 1976. Lack of advanced technology prevented this little drone from being able to conduct remote surveillance, but times have changed! C These scent jars, dating from the 1970s-1980s, were used by the Stasi secret police of East Germany and stored in the thousands. The Stasi collected the scents of “suspicious” people to allow trained dogs to track them down. D This is no ordinary coin. This KGB device was used to conceal microfilm and microdots, and could be opened by inserting a needle into a tiny hole on the face of the coin. Soviet agents used these devices from the 1950s to the 1990s. E In 1978, Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov was assassinated in London by a communist agent wielding an umbrella gun, like this replica, which fired a poison capsule into his leg. F Although it might remind you of the 1960s TV show “Get Smart,” this shoe transmitter is real, having been planted in the heel of an American diplomat’s shoe by local secret police when he sent his shoes out to be repaired in an Eastern European country. G This silver bar, given by the Soviets to infamous spy John Walker, embodies a different type of espionage tool used for centuries to deadly effect to steal state secrets and corrupt those in positions of power or responsibility—the lure of money.

DEVICES OF DECEPTION

H This lipstick pistol, dating from 1960, was used by the KGB. A small but deadly 4.5 mm weapon, it could fire a single shot when its user pressed the “lipstick” barrel into an intended victim. Disguised as a cosmetic, it was unlikely to attract attention. I Women’s fashion throughout the Cold War didn’t exactly lend itself well to surveillance gadgets, especially not if the said lady spies were wearing summer dresses. So four female Stasi operatives came up with this solution in 1985. Codenamed “Meadow,” this “wonder bra” contains a mini camera that could be controlled by a pocket-held remote. J Hiding Minox cameras in ordinary accessories was a trend in the Cold War among Soviet and East German spies during the 1960s and 1970s. This particular camera is concealed in a humble hairbrush. K What about designing a spying device that nobody wanted to touch? The so-called “tiger dung transmitter” would do the trick. This 1970 CIA transmitter was used to direct airstrikes in Vietnam. L The Steineck wristwatch produced in Germany in 1945 was sophisticated for its time in its ability to snap secret photos and contained a film disk with eight exposures. M This is a piece of the U-2 “Dragon Lady” spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers when he was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960, resulting in an international scandal. This piece of the wreckage is marked with small rivets, which were added by the Soviets when they attempted to reassemble the fragments of the downed plane.

THE ‘BLEEDING KANSAS’ MYTH

How politics and sensationalist reporting created a long-enduring “bloody” image of the Civil War’s most notorious prequel.

Two well-armed men, called Border Ruffians, sit for a studio photo. Pro-slavery Missouri agitators, Border Ruffians crossed into Kansas Territory, fighting Abolitionistbacked anti-slavery settlers to decide Kansas’ slave- or free-state status.

From 1854 to 1860, America’s newspaper headlines screamed bloody murder. Sensationalist headlines read: “Bleeding Kansas!” “Sack of Lawrence!” “Pottawatomie Massacre!” “Battle of Osawatomie!” “Marais De Cygnes Massacre!” “Much Blood Spilt!” “Murder and Cold-Blooded Assassination!” Purportedly they were relaying news of an incredibly bloody and deadly clash of anti- and pro-slavery forces fought along the Kansas-Missouri border.

No single event in the nation’s drift toward Southern secession and the armed conflict that would inevitably follow paved the road to war more than the hyped-up strife that took place for six years from 1854-1860 in eastern Kansas and western Missouri along the border between the state and the new territory. Dramatic headlines would deepen the nation’s rapidly developing North-South rift, dividing those who fervently opposed further extension of what they realized was the country’s “original sin”—the curse of slavery—and those who stubbornly supported maintaining African Americans in chattel bondage as both constitutionally legal and essential to clinging to their wealth, livelihood and way of life. No rational person today can argue against the fact that slavery was an evil that had to be eradicated from the United States, nor can anyone deny that pro-slavery forces were fighting on the wrong side of history. The duty of historians is to investigate, determine the historical facts and accurately report those facts—in particular, historians must not perpetuate myths.

The overblown headlines, created and promoted by partisan newspaper reporting on both sides, misrepresented what was actually happening west of the Mississippi River along Kansas territory’s eastern border. Newspapers championing both sides of the deeply-entwined “slavery-states’ rights” issue filled their papers with fabricated “atrocities” and overly-sanguine accounts of “pitched battles” in which casualties were actually either miniscule in number or often completely nonexistent. This apparently horrific partisan struggle pushed the nation into its bloodiest war more than any pre-Civil War conflict, but was simply a fabrication created by the burgeoning national newspaper industry and capitalized upon by the ambitious new Republican political party to help it rally a nationwide electorate to win the White House in the 1860 U.S. presidential election.

The historical irony of so-called “Bleeding Kansas” is that over 10 times more Americans were murdered in the streets of San Francisco, California, in one year—1855— than were ever killed for their political beliefs during the 1854-1860 Border War. Simply put, “Bleeding Kansas” is an easily-disprovable albeit long-enduring myth.

The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act was a patched-together compromise hammered out by Illinois Democrat Senator

Stephen A. Douglas and then-President Franklin Pierce, a “northern Democrat” opposed to Abolitionism but willing to compromise to dampen northern and southern firebrands. The act ostensibly promoted construction of a transcontinental railroad and the accompanying economic benefit of opening millions of acres of land to new settlement. However, it included the “popular sovereignty” concept (introduced in the 1850 Compromise but as yet untested), permitting Kansas and Nebraska territory settlers to decide by popular vote whether they would enter the Union as “free” or “slave” states. Well-meaning—but not well-considered—“popular sovereignty” essentially made obsolete previous Congressional attempts (1820 Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850) to alleviate rising North-South sectional tensions regarding slavery’s spread.

In hindsight, the 1854 act inevitably created the political conditions in Kansas territory that, predictably, devolved into violence as pro- and anti-slavery factions clashed to influence the “popular sovereignty” vote’s outcome regarding statehood. Although initially assumed that Nebraska would become a “free state” and Kansas would enter as a “slave” state, once the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed all bets were off. “Popular sovereignty” made Kansas territory a free-for-all for anti- and pro-slavery factions. Henceforth, whichever side of the slavery question wanted to prevail in Kansas would have to fight for it.

Inevitably, violence erupted along the Kansas-Missouri border in 1854, and nationwide newspapers consciously and deliberately propelled what were in fact relatively minor border clashes into a major, national political issue. The term “Bleeding Kansas” itself originally appeared in 1856 in abolitionist editor Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune to falsely describe the struggle as being one of “innocent” Free-state settlers unjustly harassed by evil pro-slavery Missouri “Bushwhackers,” thereby deliberately stoking the fires of North-South sectional passions.

Yet, the truth is that despite the amplified claims of partisan newspaper editors, neither side in the Border War held a monopoly on ruthlessness and violence in pursuit of their opposing political causes.

Between 1840 and 1860, printed newspapers—daily, weekly, quarterly and periodically—underwent an explosion of overall numbers and the amount of copies printed annually. While the U.S. population then rose 180%, newspaper numbers increased 250% with total annual printed copies expanding nearly 500%.

Propelling this phenomenon were ground-breaking (labor-saving and cost-cutting) advances in printing technology. Truly “industrial scale” printing resulted from the Fourdrinier paper-making machine (U.S. introduction in

From top: Abolitionists held a rally on the day of John Brown’s execution. In 1856 John Brown and his sons murdered proslavery settlers using swords. Newsman Horace Greeley hyped the Bleeding Kansas conflict. Slave-holders, fearing that escaped enslaved people would flee to a “free” Kansas, spread racist pamphlets. Fiery articles roused supporters to action.

1827), which created continuous rolled paper in massive quantities and the steam-powered, continuous-feed, rotary printing press (invented in 1843 by American Richard M. Hoe). No longer limited by laboriously printing single sheets, countless copies of a page could be produced daily. By the 1850s, illustrations were prominently featured, enhancing visual appeal, while increased staffing (typically, 1-2 in the 1820-30s; 30 in the 1840s; and 100 by the 1850s in larger papers) made it possible to fill more pages with more stories of national, regional and local interest. Advances in railroad transportation sped distribution. Improved communications (telegraph) meant widespread “breaking news.” The resulting “media blitz” was a newspaper revolution.

That era’s most influential newspaperman, New York Tribune’s Horace Greeley (editor from 1841-72), explained in 1851 how the phenomenon’s nationwide spread mirrored the country’s growth: “[T]he general rule…was for each town to have a newspaper, and, in the free states, each county of 20,000 or more usually had two papers—one for each [political] party. A county of 50,000 usually had five journals…and when a town reached 15,000 inhabitants… it usually had a daily paper and at 20,000 it had two.”

Citizens today would expect media sources to strive diligently to present the news as straightforward facts and allow the public to draw its own conclusions. However, in the mid-19th century, political partisanship in newspapers was the norm, not the exception. The “Bleeding Kansas” myth resulted from unashamedly biased newspaper reporting—each paper aggressively politically partisan and firmly committed to championing its favored side in that conflict. Editors blatantly chose sides, some aligning with the new, anti-slavery Republican Party, while others backed the then pro-slavery Democratic Party. Partisan editors graphically described the “Border War” as a war of annihilation waged by pro- and anti-slavery factions to determine Kansas territory’s future statehood status as a “free” or “slave” state.

Readers nationwide became morbidly mesmerized by the “terrible casualties” reported and impatiently stood by to purchase “hot off the press” papers recounting the latest atrocities. Right was irrevocably on the side the competing newspaper editors supported, while the opposing side was accused of incredible acts of violence.

These attention-getting headlines sent circulation soaring. The atrocities described were either exaggerated or fabricated to stoke the flames of political hatred and animosity. This “spin,” in contemporary parlance, favored a particular cause or political party. A century-and-a-half

ago, political parties and their media allies ignored the truth and outrageously manipulated facts. Editors profited by exaggerating the trans-Mississippi border conflict. Both sides developed derogatory names for each other; anti-slavery newspapers condemned pro-slavery forces—primarily from Missouri—as “Border Ruffians,” “Bushwhackers” and “Pukes,” while the Kansas partisans were known as “Redlegs” and “Jayhawkers.”

Created in 1854, the new Republican Party—formed of former Whigs, Free Staters and anti-slavery activists—finished a surprising second in 1856 with its first presidential candidate, John C. Frémont. In the 1860 presidential election, the party made maximum advantage of the headline-gathering Border War to expand its mainly regional electorate into a party with widespread national appeal. The new political party was eager to capitalize on the Border War to create a national voter base to promote the party’s 1860 presidential ambitions.

When the Kansas-Nebraska Act was signed in 1854, 15 states (and three territories west of the Mississippi) still permitted slavery, while the abominable practice was illegal in 17 states and five territories. With the handwriting on the wall regarding slavery’s ultimate survival, Southern states’ slave power block was desperate that Kansas become a slave state. Correspondingly, Northern anti-slavery forces, led by committed Abolitionists and anti-slavery activists, were equally determined that Kansas become free.

Frantically, residents of Kansas territory’s neighboring slave state, Missouri, fearful that a “free state” Kansas on its western border, combined with the established free states of Illinois on its eastern border and Iowa on its northern border, would surround the border slave state on three sides—becoming a runaway slave magnet—rushed “settlers” across Missouri’s western border into contiguous eastern Kansas to “vote-pack” Kansas into the Union as a slave state. Although the statewide population of Missouri was then split between pro- and anti-slavery adherents, the pro-slavery faction firmly held state power in Missouri’s capital, Jefferson City.

Adamantly opposed to slavery, the Boston-based Abolitionist, New England Emigrant Aid Company—generously financed by wealthy northeastern businessmen such as Eli Thayer, Alexander H. Bullock and Edward Everett Hale—quickly organized an anti-slavery settler movement.

The Emigrant Aid Company funded the settlement of eastern Kansas, rapidly packing it with heavily recruited, anti-slavery settlers, and well-armed them with numerous Sharps .52-cal breech-loading rifles. Both sides therefore— not just pro-slavery Missourians as is often claimed today—raced to populate Kansas territory with their ideological followers. Both sides unconscionably “packed” Kansas with adherents who obediently “stuffed” ballot boxes with votes to control the election. Anti- and pro-slavery adherents were equally guilty of vote tampering, voter intimidation, ballot-box stuffing and election malfeasance.

The stage was thus set for a bitter fight for Kansas’ statehood status: two well-armed opposing factions holding unwavering political positions faced off in what, according to the era’s terminology, was dubbed a “War to the Knife, and the Knife to the Hilt!” Yet the truth of the 1854-1860 “Bleeding Kansas” Border War is much different than what we accept today as “conventional wisdom.”

Conventional wisdom only holds up until someone actually does the math. That someone is historian Dale Watts in his ground-breaking article “How Bloody Was Bleeding Kansas?” published in the Summer 1995 edition of Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains. Watts’ exhaustively-researched article discovered “Bleeding Kansas” produced only a small fraction of the politically-motivated deaths of anti- and pro-slavery forces both sides widely claimed.

Using historical documents and meticulously examining 1854-1860 death records, Watts determined which deaths were “political killings” (i.e., murders by a pro- or anti-slavery partisan because of the victim’s opposing political stance) or due to apolitical motivations (e.g., land disputes, personal animosity, or common criminality, robbery or homicides). Contemporary accounts nearly always overestimated the conflict’s deaths. For example, the Hoogland Claims Commission 1859 report outlandishly claimed “the number of lives sacrificed in Kansas during [1854-1855] probably exceeded rather than fell short of two hundred.” However, Watts’s research verified the casualty record generally confirmed by Robert W. Richmond’s 1974 conclusion that “approximately fifty persons died violently [for political reasons] during [Kansas’] territorial period [1854-1860].”

Watts’s independent research revealed that of 157 documented violent deaths from 1854-1860 in Kansas territory, only 56 were attributed to the Kansas-Missouri political struggle. For historical comparison, Watts noted that in the contemporary “gold rush-era” California alone, a total of 583 people died violently in 1855, and at least 1,200 people were murdered in San Francisco between 1850 and 1853. This violent death comparison makes Kansas Territory

Contemporary accounts nearly always overestimated the conflict’s deaths.

Violent and incendiary newspaper cartoons were used commonly on both sides during the Bleeding Kansas conflict to incite public emotion. This cartoon illustrates Kansas being pillaged by Border Ruffians. Casualties, however, were low.

seem almost calm given its small number of political killings recorded during the much-hyped Border War.

Significantly, Watts shows that of those 56 murders, 30 were “pro-slavery” advocates, including the only woman slain, Sarah Carver, whose husband merely professed to be pro-slavery while there were 24 anti-slavery proponents killed. One victim was an ostensibly neutral U.S. Army soldier while one was an officer whom both sides tried to claim. Moreover, some allegedly “bloody battles” (called “wars” and “massacres” at the time) were essentially bloodless or resulted in single-digit casualties. For example, in the June 1856 “Battle” of Black Jack not one person was killed.

No “Bleeding Kansas” engagement produced more than five deaths. Anti-slavery radical John Brown and his sons killed five allegedly pro-slavery settlers during his notorious “Pottawatomie Massacre” from May 24-25, 1856 along Pottawatomie Creek. The attackers used broadswords to hack their neighbors to death in retaliation for the nearly bloodless “sack” of Lawrence three days prior.

Even the inaptly-named May 21, 1856 “Sack of Lawrence” produced only two casualties—one on each side. This incident is not to be confused with the later Lawrence Massacre during the Civil War in August 1863 by Confederate guerrilla William Quantrill’s raid that killed over 160, mostly civilians. The 1856 incident essentially consisted of

Douglas County Sheriff Samuel J. Jones leading a force of about 800 citizens to Lawrence to enforce a legal warrant, and the damage to property consisted of the razing of the Free State Hotel (then used as headquarters of Kansas’ anti-slavery forces) along with the residence of anti-slavery firebrand, Massachusetts-born Charles L. Robinson who was elected Kansas’ first state governor in 1861 and in 1862 became the first U.S. state governor—and only Kansas governor—to be impeached. A single pro-slavery man was killed by being crushed in a collapsing building and a single anti-slavery man suffered a non-fatal injury.

Watts’s research proves conclusively that “Bleeding Kansas” was a myth that grew from fabrications in biased newspapers and fueled by political parties seeking to promote partisan interests. Nearly a million Americans would die making war on each other in the subsequent Civil War, which was in large part precipitated by the 1854-1860 “Bleeding Kansas” Border War. MHQ

Jerry Morelock is MHQ Senior Editor/Senior Historian. In his final U.S. Army assignment, Fort Leavenworth, KS, Col. Morelock lived on-post in “The Rookery,” constructed 1827-1832—during the Border War it was the residence of Kansas’ first territorial governor, Andrew H. Reeder, 1854-1855.

HANDCRAFTING HISTORY— FOR 130 YEARS

MHQ goes behind the scenes with W.Britain Model Figures to learn how they create collectible soldiers.

A household name in the United Kingdom, W.Britain became famous for its glossy toy soldiers sold in red boxes. Now a small family-owned company based in the United States, it continues its long tradition of crafting high-quality figurines for history enthusiasts and collectors.

As time marches onward, some people might be tempted to think that military history lives increasingly in the world of books and old photographs. Yet the ingenuity of W.Britain Model Figures allows people to literally grasp history in three-dimensional form.

“For us at the creative end, it’s the research for evidence, accuracy, and when it’s about historical items, use,” said Ken Osen, company president. “What technology brought it about? How was it made? How often was it used? What color was it? How heavy was it?”

Together with his wife Ericka, company co-owner and manager of sales and marketing, Ken gave MHQ an inside look at the magic that has been transporting military history into people’s homes for 130 years.

“Ericka and I both have had a long history since our teenage years with historic sites and a lot of our friends are museum professionals,” said Ken. “Seeing real things, handling real items, working with museums and private collectors, even doing a little collecting ourselves, making reconstructions for living history or museum exhibits— we’ve had a lot of hands-on experience.”

“Some people like to look at what we do as being almost anachronistic, but it’s amazing—we have incredibly young collectors. Some of them start with their grandparents giving or buying something for them,” he said. “Our collectors range from age 8 to 80 plus.”

A household name in the military figure industry and arguably the most wellknown toy company in the history of the United Kingdom, the company became famous after William Britain Sr., a former brass clock maker, began producing hollowcast soldier figures in London, England in 1893. Using the hollowcasting technique, W. Britain created military figures with hollow centers as opposed to ones completely made of lead, which made the toys less expensive to produce and gave W.Britain an advantage over German toymakers who dominated the industry at the time.

The small family-owned business persisted despite two World Wars and, after changing hands a few times, is now a small family-owned business based in the United States. “Things have changed,” said Ken, an admirer of W.Britain figures since he was young. “I never dreamt as a little boy that I would actually have some ownership in the brand.”

The company still has close ties with the United Kingdom and continues to produce figures reflecting British military regiments and traditions. The figures are sold in many British museums and historical institutions, and the Osens travel to England every year. Ericka herself, who grew up in Canada, appreciates the British tradition—one of her favorite figures produced by the company is a glossy figure of King George III on horseback in 1798. “It’s the only figure that sits on my desk,” she said.

However, having gained an American perspective, the company has created a harmonious blend of military history across the Atlantic. “We’re recognizing things beyond the British colonial experience,” said Ken. “We start our own British colonial experience in the 18th century when this was British North America, but we fast forward all the way up to into the Vietnam period and will probably go beyond.”

Toy soldiers have been a common thread throughout both of their lives. Ken was a longtime hobbyist and military history enthusiast and Ericka was a longtime museum professional. “We met because of toy soldiers,” Ericka said. “I first met Ken when I was 16 years old working at a historic fort in downtown Detroit. My boss was Ken’s best friend, and Ken met him through toy soldiers.” After running into each other again after many years had passed, they got married and now work as a team to make history come alive in colorful miniature figures. They have mastered the extremely ambitious goal of recreating world-famous battles and commanders in miniature form.

“Although we’re moving into the digital age, even in our own designs, most of what we do is still in a very traditional way that would be familiar to an 18th or 19th century craftsman sitting on a bench,” said Ken.

The company was known for over a century for its classic glossy toy soldiers sold in red boxes. “When the company was still in England, they still did the traditional technique of engraving directly into a steel mold, which was great for a stylized toy,” said Ken. “Metal is durable. It allows a lot of figures to balance and stand up on surfaces that may not be perfectly flat like glass. It’s a traditional material.”

Plastic toys overtook metal in the mid-1960s, but 30 years later, new stylized metal figures were released—no longer toys for children, but aimed at adult collectors. “For a collectible, versus a toy, it’s a mixed media,” said Ken. Materials like photo-etched brass, stainless steel, injectionmolded plastic, and hand-cast resins can be used in combination to create figures and objects to accompany them. Although W.Britain offers a selection of plastic safety-tested toys today, the majority of miniatures are made primarily of metal and designed for collectors.

The company was known for over a century for its classic glossy soldiers in red boxes.

left: Ericka and Ken Osen are the driving creative force behind W.Britain’s

Creating each figure is a complex process which requires in-depth research and painstaking attention to detail. “It starts with the books, looking at real things, miniaturizing everything, then of course producing it,” said Ken. “A good research library or feeling comfortable going to an institution to do a little bit of digging in primary sources is probably most important.”

He and Ericka noted that the creative process is a team effort. “We’re blessed with a very creative staff,” said Ken. “We have long relationships with most of the people we work with.”

Their research work brings them into contact with a vast array of historical experts across different cultures and continents, such as archaeologists, anthropologists, Native American tribes, artists, museum curators, historical reenactors, and other researchers. It is time-consuming, but essential.

“Research equals respect,” said Ericka. “We do the research because we respect the work that the soldiers themselves did. Every figure we do, be it a soldier or civilian, reflects someone who lived their life, and we’re trying to show that and be respectful of that.” Historical accuracy also requires a lot of books—the couple has a combined li-

brary of about 6,500 reference books, and counting. But, as with most history lovers, books are not a problem for them. “We’re museum junkies and bookaholics!” said Ericka.

Artifacts prove very useful in studying historical time periods, especially from eras when photography was nonexistent. They examine artifacts from both public and private collections whenever possible. Sometimes artifacts are nonexistent or inaccessible, which makes research more arduous.

“In some cases, either original or reprinted manuals need to be referenced to understand basic infantry drill and tactics to properly pose figures in 18th and 19th century collections,” according to Ken. “Although it can be fairly dry reading, it often removes any mystery and dissolves misconceptions about why things were done the way they were in the past.”

After research is done, the next step is to create the figure. Sometimes reenactors in period clothing assist with modeling. In other cases, historical photographs, such as from World War II, provide inspiration. “The more dynamic a pose is, the more we need to think about how it will be molded in production,” said Ken. He also improvises based on his own creative vision.

HANDCRAFTING HISTORY

you know what an impression is where they take a mold of your teeth. We use the same material to make a mold of our figures,” explained Ken. “Once we have that mold, we pour some resin into it, which is like a plastic. Once that cures, we can take exact duplicates of each one of those parts out of the mold, clean it up, put it together, and then we’ll paint it exactly the way we want.”

Each figure comes to life with the touch of a human hand. “We still hand-paint, and not just the control pieces. Every single piece that a collector acquires has been hand-painted by an artist at some level, whether in a factory level, studio level or individually here if it’s one of a kind,” said Ken.

The silicone molds allow for duplicates to be made for engineering into smaller components for manufacturing. “One set is usually painted by one of our artists to use as a paint master for production,” said Ken.

“It’s a real tactile hobby. Most of what we design is either sculpted in wax or epoxy putty over a little armature of wire,” said Ken. “I’ve been using that for 30-plus years. It was originally developed for repairs in industry and it’s a really great material.”

Layers of two-part, self-curing epoxy putty are applied over substructures of wire or shaped plastic. Sometimes clay is also used. At times, parts of figures from earlier projects are used and adapted when possible to speed up the process. “Each layer can be built up with dental tools as the first layer hardens creating crisp and durable details,” said Ken, who usually works on several figures at a time as various layers harden.

“Ken never works on just one figure alone. He usually has a group of about seven. Because the epoxy putty hardens over time, and he usually has a 45-minute window where he can work with the epoxy putty, he will have a little assembly line of soldiers in front of him,” said Ericka.

Heads and faces are a special art form unto themselves. Many hours are needed to capture an individual likeness, especially of famous personalities. “These small personality heads take almost as long to sculpt as a complete figure,” said Ken. Sometimes the figures turn out differently than planned as a result of creativity and imagination. “It is not unusual to have a figure take on a personality,” he said, “and that often means that the finished item is a bit different than originally envisioned.”

After completing a sculpted figure, the next step is to engineer it—meaning to cut it up into small parts to prepare it for the molding process. Afterwards they create molds from silicone. “If you’ve had dental work done, then

After more copies are made, the soldiers are transformed into metal. This process requires a different kind of mold made of vulcanized rubber. “The reason we use material like that is to withstand the heat of the metal being cast into it over and over a few hundred times,” said Ken. “The hard rubber mold is then used to make metal copies of all the same parts. They are again cleaned up, assembled—often by soldering—and then those are primed and hand-painted.”

A clear protective coating is applied after the figures are hand-painted. The team also designs boxes and informational cards, and the newly created figures are captured through photography. Figures can be produced from a few hundred up to many thousands. After being manufactured offshore, they are returned for quality control before being distributed to wholesalers and directly to collectors.

Vast improvements with vulcanized rubber molding beginning in the 1980s revolutionized the way the metal figures were made. “We were able to do much better detail in the figures,” Ericka said. It also opened doors for a new look for the soldiers. “The more realistic sculpt required a more realistic paint, and that’s where the matte ranges have come in.”

However, the shiny figures that W. Britain originally became famous for have not gone out of vogue—they are still extremely popular and in demand today. “We’ve made our ceremonial figures, diecast in metal molds, for decades now. Those are predominately a souvenir. They

Opposite, from top: W.Britain started out with glossy figures of British soldiers, which remain popular. Historical scenes and photographs can serve as inspiration for particular figures, such as these recreations of Waffen-SS troopers during the Ardennes offensive of 1944 and French villagers welcoming American doughboys in 1918. The doughboy figures are planned for release in early 2023.

HANDCRAFTING HISTORY

can be bought in London at royal palaces and souvenir shops,” said Ericka. “The next most traditional type is our regiment range. These are metal figures with a gloss finish. All early toy soldiers were glossy because they used an enamel paint, and enamel is usually high gloss paint.”

The soldiers continue to capture the hearts of collectors, from history lovers looking for representations of a certain person or time period to those who want to recreate or reimagine specific battles or scenes in time.

In addition to soldiers, more civilian figures are being offered to appeal to new types of collectors—including women—and to enrich existing collections with realism and diversity.

“We’ve added a female reservist for the U.S. Marines in World War II, Rosie the Riveter, and Civil War nurses. We’ll continue on that trajectory and add more females, because they are relevant, in every part of history, and not just in a civilian capacity,” said Ken.

There are also endless opportunities to recreate famous figures from all across history. “I could go down a list of superstars,” said Ken, noting that George Washington, Winston Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt, Napoleon Bonaparte and Civil War leaders are among the most highly popular historical figures. “We recently licensed a likeness of George S. Patton from the family, so we’re doing Patton.”

Another extremely popular figure is Queen Elizabeth II. “Sadly, the day that we heard the news that Queen Elizabeth II had passed, we had just finished painting the master [figure] of her as Princess Elizabeth in her Army Territorial Service (ATS) uniform as a young woman in World War II,” said Ken. “That figure will be introduced really soon. We’re going to go back and respectfully visit her at later points in her reign, too. There’ll be more Queen Elizabeths cropping up.”

As to how they get ideas for new figures and sets? “We sometimes have collector requests. Sometimes popular culture will drive interest. A good example would be when the movie Gettysburg came out, a whole lot of people were interested in the battle of Gettysburg,” said Ken. “When Saving Private Ryan came out, there were a lot of young people that were really introduced to World War II in Europe. Same thing with the great HBO miniseries The Pacific, or Band of Brothers. Those films and shows really resonate. It passes the torch visually and through personal stories to a younger generation versus the firsthand accounts that were often related to us by veterans.”

One highly rewarding part of their work, according to the couple, is positive feedback from military veterans— especially those who have served in conflicts represented. “We had a pretty touching letter from a recipient of a figure a few years ago. It was unexpected,” said Ken. “It was a former Marine who had served in Chosin Reservoir in Korea from 1950-51. His granddaughter had bought him one of our Marine figures dressed in the parka and with the heavy boots and such. He admitted he would never have bought it for himself. When he opened it up and took the figure out of the package, he said he looked at those boots and that they were exactly right, and he remembered how much he hated them—and that he looked at the shelter half and backpack and could hear it frozen and flapping in the wind above his foxhole. I thought, ‘Wow! There is a vote of confidence in our research and why we do it.’”

Ken said that the lovingly crafted miniatures, each touched by a human hand, can do much to educate people about the human experience in wartime and at different points in history. “The most important lesson we would project to anyone is that history is just us in a different time. People felt the same. They had the same needs and desires,” he said. “They may have emotionally or psychologically processed things differently, for religious, cultural reasons or lack of understanding—but someone was cold at some far-flung outpost. Hunger is hunger, and so is a desire to do better, or be happy, or comfortable or safe. All that’s the same. History is just us over time with different technologies and in different places.”

In keeping with their long tradition, W.Britain hopes to pass on their passion for history to future generations as collectors continue to pursue their interests in history and share them with others in their lives.

“It’s an incredibly small group of people, really, in the world that still have the hand skills and desire to invest the time, and have the passion to do this kind of work as far as fulltime careers,” said Ken. He noted that young people are being drawn into the world of creating figures through models for fantasy and wargaming. “There are some people that are moving into it. We’re always looking for young people to embrace this sort of thing, and they’re out there.”

Although he imagines that technology will change the process of creating model soldiers in the future, Ken believes that it will always require a human touch—whether through research, design, or decoration. “At the end of the day, the end user will pick it up and hold it,” he said. “The experience at the end will always be the same—someone opening a box, or whatever it may be in the future, holding this thing in their hand, turning it around, looking at the colors, shapes and tiny elements, and trying to imagine what it was like.” MHQ

“We had a pretty touching letter from a recipient of a figure a few years ago.”

The Museum of the American Revolution located in Philadelphia, Pa. is home to an artifact with perhaps the proudest legacy in the history of America’s War of Independence: the tent of Gen. George Washington. The original tent, currently on display at the museum, was used by Washington as his sleeping quarters as well as his office during the war. It saw Washington through the war’s hardest seasons and was the scene of some of his most difficult and triumphant moments. Following Washington’s death, the tent was preserved by the Custis and Lee families and was purchased by Rev. W. Herbert Burk in 1909, who kept it at a history museum he created at Valley Forge. Today, visitors to Philadelphia have the opportunity to see firsthand the tent that served as both the decision-making center and wartime home of America’s first commander-in-chief. Learn more about the exhibit at: www. amrevmuseum.org/collection/washington-swar-tent

WAR STORIES MAORI SKY HERO

New Zealand air ace Bert Wipiti fought both the Japanese and the Germans in World War II.

Since the last of a series of wars between British colonists and native Maoris ended in 1872, white residents of New Zealand came to respect their fierce warrior neighbors as better to have fighting alongside them than against them. It was perhaps inevitable that a Maori would overcome British prejudice to qualify as a pilot, but Bert Wipiti stood out during World War II as the conflict’s only Maori fighter ace.

Born in New Plymouth on the North Island on Jan. 16, 1922, Herbert Samuel Wipiti graduated from New Plymouth Boys High School and became a refrigerator service man until war broke out. On Jan. 18, 1941, two days after his 19th birthday, he enlisted in the Royal New Zealand Air Force. Enlisting on the same day was Charles Thomas “Charlie” Kronk. During training the two young Kiwis quickly became best friends in spite of (or perhaps because of) their striking differences. A clerk before the war, Kronk had been born in Kohwrakahi, Taranaki on the other side of North Island on July 28, 1918. Tall, fairhaired, and blue-eyed, Kronk was a star athlete in school and had graduated at the top of his class.

Bert and Charlie underwent flight instruction at Levin, Bell Block and Ohakea airfield. By the time they qualified as flight sergeants the two were inseparable. Both were extremely pleased when they were assigned to the same unit, No. 243 Squadron at Kallang airfield outside of Singapore. Wipiti also found a fellow Maori, Pilot Officer Terrence Bernard Marra, on the squadron roster.

Organized on March 12, 1941, 243 Squadron was officially a Royal Air Force unit, but its pilots were New Zealanders and its equipment was the Brewster B-339B Buffalo, an export version of the F2A-2. The F2A was the U.S. Navy’s first monoplane fighter with retractable landing gear and an enclosed cockpit, but the British found its performance inferior to that of German fighters and sent most of the 170 planes they purchased to the Far East,

where they expected them (wrongly, it turned out) to have little trouble handling their likely Japanese opponents.

Wipiti and Kronk made an early impression on the new squadron with their keenness to master anything with wings, as Sgt. Rex A. Weber recounted:

“Bert Wipiti was a born leader, his standard of conduct was impeccable. Bert and Charlie were sent up to do aerobatics—maybe they had ten flying hours on the Buffalo to their credit. Yet that day, in the blue skies over the airport, they gave us one of the great aerobatic displays. Seasoned aces from the Battle of Britain came out from the crew room to watch, the show was so good.”

The Japanese invasion of Malaya on Dec. 8, 1941 (December 7, Hawaii time) was accompanied by an onslaught by modern warplanes that shocked British Commonwealth airmen as it swept away their air power. By January 1942 No. 243 Squadron was broken up and its Buffalos distributed among other squadrons. The young Maori was about to pit his warrior spirit against that of an armada of flying samurai.

On Jan. 10 Wipiti and Kronk, both sergeants, were on patrol when Wipiti spotted a Mitsubishi Ki.46 high speed reconnaissance plane from the 81st Koku Sentai (air regiment) photographing Singapore’s defenses. “I slipped down from above and gave him a burst in his motor,” Wipiti laconically told a reporter afterward. The damage he inflicted slowed the enemy plane down enough for Kronk to dive down and then come up under it. “I kept firing until all my ammunition was gone,” Kronk said. “She was burning all the way to the ground, but the [Japanese] seemed to think that they could land her. But just as she flattened out she seemed to burst into flames all over and an enormous sheet of flame shot up and she disappeared into the treetops.” The two friends shared credit on 243 Squadron’s first aerial victory of the war.

The next few weeks saw the Allies driven back under relentless enemy pressure. Marra was credited with a Nakajima Ki.27 fighter on Jan. 16 and Kronk downed a Kawasaki Ki.48 bomber on the 20th. On the morning of the 21st six patrolling Buffalos of 243 Squadron were jumped by Nakajima Ki.43 fighters of the 64th Sentai and the formation leader, Flt. Lt. Mowbray Garden, suffered damage to his left wing. Wipiti, flying Sgt. Geoffrey B. Fisken’s Buf-

“Bert Wipiti was a born leader. His standard of conduct was impeccable.”

falo W1847 WP-O, fired into a Ki.43’s wing root and saw it go into a dive when its wings came off. Sgt. Maj. Hideo Tatsumi was killed.

The next day the Japanese navy made an appearance as Mitsubishi G3M2s of the Genzan and Kanoya kokutais (naval air groups) bombed Kallang. A few Buffalos got into the air, only to be engaged by escorting Mitsubishi A6M2 Zeros of the 22nd Air Flotilla Command, killing sergeants Victor Arthur (who was flying W1847 at the time) and Mervyn J. F. Baldwin. The only Allied success in the raid came when Wipiti shot down one of the Genzan Kokutai bombers.

The next four days saw the Commonwealth units struggling to support the ground troops being outmaneuvered and driven inexorably back on Singapore. On Jan. 26, the Japanese 96th Airfield Battalion and its equipment landed at Endau on the east coast of Malaya, aiming to restore the airfields at Kahang and Kluang to operational status. The British responded by scraping together an attack force from what was available: Vickers Vildebeests and three Fairey Albacore torpedo bombers of Nos. 36 and 100 squadrons and a few RAAF Lockheed Hudsons. As the first wave of hopelessly obsolescent Vildebeests sallied

forth at 2:00 p.m. Flt. Lt. Garden led 243 Squadron’s Buffalos up to escort them, while surviving Buffalos from Nos. 21 and 453 Squadrons covered the Hudsons.

An hour later the Allies reached the beachhead in clear weather—and were met by Nakajima Ki.27s of the 1st and 11th sentais. Garden’s Buffalo was hit, but he claimed one of the “Type 96 fighters” and nursed his plane back to Kallang while his wingmen tried to strafe the enemy barges. Plt. Off. James M. Cranstone claimed a “Zero.” Wipiti was credited with a third fighter destroyed. Marra claimed to have “probably” downed a “Messerschmitt Me 109,” but he had more likely been shooting at either a Hawker Hurricane or at a Nakajima Ki.44, a brand-new type that was still under evaluation when Capt. Yasuhiko Kuroe reconnoitered the scene of the air battle in it and returned undamaged.

Despite the fighters’ efforts, the Allied bombers were slaughtered and the 11th Sentai’s claims for the day came to two Hudsons, two biplanes, five Buffalos and two Hurricanes shot down for one of its Ki.27s returning damaged, while the 1st Sentai claimed six biplanes for the loss of 1st Lt. Toshiro Mizotani’s Ki.27, from which he parachuted safely.

Buffalo pilots of No.488 (New Zealand) Squadron, based at Kallang, display the tail fin of a Mitsubishi Ki.46 of the 3rd Chutai (squadron), 81st Koku Sentai (air regiment) shot down over Malaya in January 1942. Bert Wipiti and Charlie Kronk scored their first victory over an identical aircraft that same month.

Early the next morning Wipiti and Kronk flew an uneventful reconnaissance flight, their last with the decimated 243 Squadron before it was disbanded and its surviving aircraft and pilots passed on to No. 453 Squadron. As their situation became untenable, Kronk flew one of the few flyable Buffalos to Palembang, Sumatra on Feb. 7.

Wipiti took a boat to the island a few days later, but his vessel was sunk. He was in the sea half a day before making it to shore. Kronk contemplated commandeering a plane, flying back to Singapore and trying to find Wipiti, only to see the plane he’d had in mind destroyed in a Japanese air raid. Kronk returned to his tent close to tears and found Wipiti there, resting in his cot. Singapore surrendered to the Japanese on Feb. 15.

Still eager to fly and fight, Wipiti and Kronk volunteered and were accepted to fly in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Air Force, which had its own supply of Buffalos, but which was no more successful than the British in preventing Japanese landings in Sumatra and then Java. Taking a train to the southern coast of Java, Wipiti and Kronk boarded a ship for Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). From there they traveled to Calcutta and joined No. 67 Squadron RAF at Alipore, which since its retreat from Malaya had replaced its Buffalos with Hurricanes.

On March 27 Wipiti was gazetted for the Distinguished Flying Medal for his outstanding service in Singapore. As the Japanese advanced through Burma, however, his stint

with 67 Squadron was anything but auspicious. On May 29, 1942, Kronk was returning from a routine patrol when he performed a roll over the airfield, but his Hurricane stalled and crashed. Wipiti wrote Charlie’s parents of his tragic death and how much their friendship had meant to him. He was also in contact with a girlfriend back in New Plymouth, writing that she would be very much a part of his postwar plans if he survived it.

With his fellow Kiwi gone, Wipiti found himself subjected to incessant degradation from his British colonial squadron mates over his skin color. It got to the point that his superiors at 67 Squadron decided that he needed a change of venue and transferred him to Britain.

Arriving in England in late March 1943, Wipiti served in several units and was promoted to warrant officer before finally being assigned to No. 485 Squadron, RNZAF at Biggin Hill in August, and found himself among friends and countrymen. In fact, 485 Squadron’s emblem included a Maori holding a taiaha—a traditional quarterstaff— and the unit motto was “Ka Whawai Tonu,” Maori for “We will fight on.”

Wipiti was now flying the most coveted fighter in the British Commonwealth—Supermarine Spitfire Mark VC JK769, upgraded to LF Mark IX standard with the replacement of its 1,415-hp Rolls-Royce Merlin 46 engine with a supercharged 1,720-hp Merlin 66. He would need such a flying thoroughbred for the opposition he faced across the English Channel: Messerschmitt Me 109Gs and Focke-Wulf Fw 190As of the Luftwaffe’s battle-seasoned Jagdgeschwader (fighter wing) 2 “Richthofen” and JG 26 “Schlageter.”

Wipiti’s dogfighting success resumed on September 16 during Ramrod 223, RAF code for a short-range bombing attack. In this case, 485 Squadron was escorting six Martin

No. 485

Squadron’s motto was “Ka Whawai Tonu,” Maori for “We will fight on.”

Twelve Brewster Buffalo Mark Is of No. 243 Squadron RAF fly over the Malayan jungle. Organized in March 1941, this squadron was officially a Royal Air Force unit, but its pilots were New Zealanders, one of whom was Bert Wipiti.

B-26B Marauders of the U.S. Ninth Air Force against the airfield at Beaumont-le Roger when Me 109s and Fw 190s tried to get at the bombers. No Marauders were lost in the ensuing fight, but it was another matter for the fighters. Plt. Off. John A. Houlton, in Spitfire MH350 OU-V “Butch II,” teamed up with Wipiti to drive down an Me 109 25 miles southwest of Beaumont, returning with a favorable impression of his partner: “Bert was a bundle of energy intent on getting to grips with the enemy under any or every circumstance.” Flt. Lt. Bruce E. Gibbs claimed another Messerschmitt. F/O Murray Metcalfe was credited with an Fw 190 at 5:45 p.m. but was hit by another Fw 190 about 15 minutes later and crashed in a cow pasture near La Ferté Fresnel. He was buried at Ecorsei cemetery on the 18th. The only German claim in the fight was a Spitfire 15 miles northeast of Lisieux by Unteroffizier Dominik Kraigher of the 4th Staffel (squadron) of JG 2, which reported no casualties of its own.

Oct. 3, 1943 saw 485 Squadron on escort duty again, this time for Ramrod 258, a strike by Douglas Boston IIIs on enemy installations at Crèvecoeur-en-Auge. They were met over the Somme Estuary by Fw 190A-6s of 5th Staffel, JG 26 and in the ensuing low-level melée Wipiti was again credited with an enemy fighter in a team effort, this time alongside Sgt. George C. Couper, “borrowing” Johnny Houlton’s Spitfire MH350.

The Kiwis did not return unscathed. F/O James E. Mortimer damaged an Fw 190 but as he made for home at 500 meters altitude west of Haincourt his Spitfire, MH490 OU-P, was struck by anti-aircraft fire from the 14 SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment. Mortimer’s plane gave out. He crashed off the coast and in the course of the night the tide drove his dinghy up the Somme estuary in enemy territory.

Over the next 11 months he evaded capture with the help of the French Resistance until rejoining the Allies on Sept. 2, 1944.

Somewhat more fortunate was Sgt. Neville E. Frehner, whose engine cut out as he returned over the Channel. He bailed out 15 miles south of Dungeness, Kent and after bobbing in his dinghy for 45 minutes he was picked up by a Supermarine Walrus rescue plane. Soon after his shared victory, George Couper became separated from Wipiti and was jumped by an Fw 190 that badly shot up his plane—he barely managed to nurse it back to base.

Bert Wipiti’s Spitfire JK769 was last seen going down off Cayeux-sur-Mer during the fight. The Focke-Wulf pilots of 5./JG 26 claimed three Spitfires in that area, two being credited to Leutnant Helmut Hoppe at 3:47 and 3:50 p.m. and one by Oberfeldwebel Adolf Glunz at 4:00 p.m. Hoppe reported one of his victims going down 10 to 15 kilometers west of Cayeux, most closely matching the location of Wipiti’s demise. The other German claims might have applied to Couper and Frehner, though both made it back. Hoppe was eventually credited with 25 victories when he was killed during a raid on his airfield at Epinoy by Spitfires of No. 411 Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force on December 1.

If one counts aerial victories by fractions the way most did during World War II, Wipiti’s tally would have totaled four and a half. By World War I standards, in which shared victories were most commonly counted as one for each participant, he would have had a hand in the destruction of six, making him an ace. In any case, Bert Wipiti had lived and died in the highest Maori traditions. His remains were never found, but a street near the New Plymouth airport bears his name. MHQ

CLASSIC DISPATCHES TO CATCH THE ‘GRAY GHOST’

Dubbed “The Gray Ghost,” Col. John Singleton Mosby became a formidable Confederate partisan leader—arguably, next to William Quantrill, the most famous Rebel guerrilla— during the American Civil War. Underestimated in his youth for his small, thin stature, Mosby was a scrappy lad who got expelled from the University of Virginia at age 19 for shooting a bully. He was also highly intelligent, running his own law practice after his release from prison in 1854. Both Mosby’s aggressive spirit and his cold, calculating mind would serve him well during the war, which he began in a company of mounted infantry. His skills at gathering intelligence were appreciated by famed cavalry commander J.E.B. Stuart, under whose auspices he was promoted to the rank of major and put in command of the 43rd Virginia Cavalry Battalion in 1863.

Under Mosby’s leadership, this partisan outfit became known as “Mosby’s Rangers,” and earned a widespread reputation as a stealthy—and highly dangerous—strike force. They ambushed Union forces in raids far behind enemy lines, disrupted enemy supplies and communications, and committed acts of sabotage in support of Confederate army operations. Some historians acknowledge that Mosby was an early pioneer of unconventional tactics later adopted by U.S. Special Forces. Mosby survived the war, although he became a target for reprisals following Union victory. Eventually given protection by Ulysses S. Grant, he later became one of Grant’s campaign managers, served as a diplomat and worked as assistant U.S. Attorney General.

Mosby himself was a somewhat flamboyant character known not only for guile but also for his roguish sense of humor, which is manifest in the following excerpt from his 1917 autobiography, The Memoirs of Col. John Singleton Mosby. Drawn from a chapter entitled “First Exploits As A Partisan,” Mosby’s anecdote relates a series of incongruous events in which a Union cavalry force seeking him picks up

more civilians than it can handle, Mosby himself, mounted on a strong-willed, runaway horse, accidentally leads a charge, and Union forces flee from their own cavalry. Apart from Mosby’s sarcastic sense of humor, the narrative also reveals his hardnosed common sense as a soldier in his criticisms of what Union forces did wrong.

From our rendezvous along the base of the Blue Ridge [Mountains in western Virginia] we continued to make night attacks on the outposts near Washington [D.C.]. So it was determined in Washington to put a stop to what were called our depredations, and an expedition was sent against us into Loudoun. Middleburg, a village, was supposed to be our headquarters, and it was thought that by surrounding it at night the marauders could be caught… Strategy is only another name for deception and can be practiced by any commander. The enemy complained that we did not fight fair; the same complaint was made by the Austrians against Napoleon.

A Major Gilmer was sent with 200 men in expectation of extirpating my gang—as they called us. He might have done more if he had taken less whiskey along. But the weather was cold! Before daybreak he had invested the town and made his headquarters in the hotel where he had learned that I slept. I had never been in the village except to pass through. The orders were to arrest every man that could be found, and when his searching parties reported to him, they had a lot of old men whom they had pulled out of bed. Gilmer pretended to think these were the parties that had captured his pickets and patrols and stampeded his camps. If so, when he saw the old cripples on crutches, he ought to have been ashamed. He made free use of his bottle and ordered a soldier to drill the old men and make them mark time just to keep warm. As he had made a night march of twenty-five miles, he concluded to carry the prisoners to his camp as prizes of war. So each

Col. John Singleton Mosby, also known as the Gray Ghost, spent his gray years reflecting on and writing about his Civil War exploits as a daring leader of Confederate cavalry raiders. In his memoirs, Mosby reveals both an astute sense of observation and also a very practical understanding of the nature of warfare.

He made free use of his bottle and ordered a soldier to drill the old men...

graybeard had to ride double with a trooper. There were also a number of colored women whom he invited, or who asked, to go with him. They had children, but the major was a good-natured man. So each woman was mounted behind a trooper—and the trooper took her baby in his arms. With such encumbrances, sabres and pistols would be of little use, if an attack was made. When they started, the column looked more like a procession of Canterbury Pilgrims than cavalry.

News came to me that the enemy were at Middleburg, so, with seventeen men, I started that way, hoping to catch some stragglers. But when we got to the village, we heard that they had gone, and we entered at a gallop. Women and children came out to greet us—the men had all been carried off as prisoners. The tears and lamentations of the scene aroused all our sentiments of chivalry, and we went in pursuit. With five or six men I rode in advance at a gallop and directed the others to follow more slowly. I had expected that Major Gilmer might halt at Aldie, a village about five miles ahead, but when we got there a citizen told us that he passed on through. Just as we were ascending to the top of a hill on the outskirts of the village, two cavalrymen suddenly met us. We captured them and sent them to the rear, supposing they were videttes [mounted sentries] of Gilmer’s command. Orders were sent to the men behind to hurry up.

Just then I saw two cavalrymen in blue on the pike. No others were visible, so with my squad I started at a gallop to capture them. But when we got halfway down the hill we discovered a considerable body—it turned out to be a squadron—of cavalry that had dismounted. Their horses were hitched to a fence, and they were feeding at a mill.

I tried to stop, but my horse was high-mettled and ran at full speed, entirely beyond my control. But the cavalry at the mill were taken absolutely by surprise by the irruption; their videttes had not fired, and they were as much shocked as if we had dropped from the sky. They never waited to see how many of us there were. A panic seized them. Without stopping to bridle their horses or to fight on foot, they scattered in all directions. Some hid in the mill; others ran to Bull Run Mountain nearby.

Just as we got to the mill, I saw another body of cavalry ahead of me on the pike, gazing in bewildered astonishment at the sight. To save myself, I jumped off my horse and my men stopped, but fortunately the mounted party in front of me saw those I had left behind coming to my

relief, so they wheeled and started full speed down the pike. We then went back to the mill and went to work. Many had hidden like rats, and as the mill was running, they came near being ground up. The first man that was pulled out was covered with flour; we thought he was the miller. I still believed that the force was Major Gilmer’s rearguard. All the prisoners were sent back, and with one man I rode down the pike to look for my horse. But I never got him—he chased the Yankees twenty-five miles to their camp.

I have said that in this affair I got the reputation of a hero; really I never claimed it, but gave my horse all the credit for the stampede. Now comes the funniest part of the story. Major Gilmer had left camp about midnight. The next morning a squadron of the First Vermont Cavalry [a Union force], which was in camp a few miles away from him, was sent up the pike on Gilmer’s track. Major Gilmer did not know they were coming. When he got a mile below Aldie, he saw in front a body of cavalry coming to meet him. He thought they were my men who had cut him off from his camp. He happened to be at the point where the historic Braddock road, along which young George Washington marched to the Monongahela, crossed the turnpike.

As Major Gilmer was in search of us, it is hard to see why he was seized with a panic when he thought he saw us. He made no effort to find out whether the force in front was friend or foe, but wheeled and turned off full speed from the pike. He seemed to think the chances were all against him. There had been a snow and a thaw, and his horses sank to their knees in mud at every jump. But the panic grew, the farther he went, and he soon saw that he had to leave some of his horses sticking in the road. He concluded now that he would do like the mariner in a storm—jettison his cargo. So the old men were dropped first; next the negro women, and the troopers were told to leave the babies in the arms of their mothers….

I had not gone far before I met the old men coming back, and they told me of their ludicrous adventure and thanked me for their rescue. They did not know that the Vermont cavalry was entitled to all the glory for getting up the stampede, and that they owed me nothing. In the hurry to find my horse, I had asked the prisoners no questions and thought we had caught a rearguard. Among the prisoners were two captains. One was exchanged in time to be at Gettysburg, where he was killed. Major Gilmer was tried for cowardice and drunkenness and was dismissed from the army. Colonel Johnstone, who put him under arrest when he got back, said in his report, “The horses returned exhausted by from being run at full speed for miles.” They were running from the Vermont cavalry. MHQ

No others were visible, so with my squad

I started at a gallop to capture them.

BIG SHOTS

Emiliano Charmorro Vargas, the “Lion of Nicaragua,” was born on May 11, 1871. Involvement in a failed revolution in 1893 and a coup in 1909 left Chamorro as Chairman of the Constituent Assembly and leader of the Conservative Party. Minister to the United States in 1914, Chamorro helped forge the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty to allow construction of a canal across Nicaragua from the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans, although the project was never seen through. In 1916 Chamorro returned home to serve as president until 1923, when he was defeated by Carlos Jóse Solórzano. In 1926 Chamorro led a coup that toppled Solórzano, only to be himself ousted later that same year. He went on to serve as minister to several European countries and died in Managua on Feb. 26, 1966.

POETRY THE SIKHS AT WAR

Thousands of Sikh soldiers fought and died for the Allied cause during World War I, yet their sacrifices have been sadly overlooked in written histories. In his book, Thousands of Heroes Have Arisen: Sikh Voices of the Great War 1914— 1918, published by Helion & Company, author Sukwinder Singh Bassi sheds light on the courageous warrior spirit of the Sikhs as well as the struggles and hardships they faced.

“Bravery and heroism became synonymous with the Sikh name,” writes Bassi, who spent more than five years researching the book. The book includes a collection of Sikh letters and poetry from World War I, as well as thoughtful and enlightening insights into Sikh history and culture.

The Sikhs made up 20 percent of the British Indian Army’s strength when war broke out in 1914 and had fielded more than 100,000 men across global frontlines by the time the war ended. The story of their war is complex; many were enthusiastic to fight and, despite the hardships they faced, persisted in their loyalty to the British Empire, while others became disillusioned not only with the war itself but with the conditions their people faced under British colonial rule.

Sikhs fighting on the Western Front sometimes penned poetry which they sent to family and friends in addition to letters. In other cases, war poetry was published in local Sikh newspapers in India. Although Sikhs ostensibly managed these publications, they were still overseen by

A group of British and Indian officers of the 15th Ludhiana Sikhs stand in a French farmyard in July 1915. The Sikhs’ contributions to the First World War have been sadly overlooked in most written histories.

British colonial authorities. Thus most of the poems that appeared in local Sikh newspapers had pro-war tones.

The following poem was published anonymously in The Khalsa Advocate, a leading Sikh newspaper, on Saturday, May 8, 1915. It tells the story of a Sikh fighting on the Western Front. The poem references the main character’s wish to live up to the martial achievements of his ancestors who fought alongside the British, in this instance Sir Hugh Henry Gough, who was supported by Sikh fighters during the Indian Mutiny. The narrator is ultimately portrayed as finding fulfillment in battle; this theme recurs in Sikh writings throughout the book. The poem also draws attention to hardships faced by the narrator’s family—it relates that his wife dies in childbirth while he is away at war. Could this detail have been included as a subtle reference to distressing living conditions that soldiers’ families faced in India? Or was the portrayal of a slain soldier reuniting with deceased relatives perhaps included to focus readers’ minds on the promise of the afterlife? In either case, the poem leaves much room for interpretation, and is an interesting example of literature circulated among Sikh readers during World War I.

Ram Singh In The Trenches

This new-fangled manner of fighting, Goes sorely against my grain;

I loathe being down in these trenches, Like a bandicoot-rat in a drain.

Not thus were the ways of my fathers, When they fought for their country with Gough, It was “Charge!” and a thousand brave fellows, With a scream of defiance, were off. I hate all this peeping and peering, For a shot now and then at a head; For me the fierce fight to a finish, With thousands of wounded and dead.

The shells are screaming above me, Like demons at odds for my soul; I’m made for a rush at the gunners, But I’m buried alive in this hole.

Yet amid all the roar and confusion, The moon shines as sweetly on high; As it shone that last evening in Jhelum, When Mothi bade me good-bye.

Mothi, my beautiful Mothi!

I remember her pitiful face, With the glistening tears in the moonlight, As she held me in loving embrace.

I shrank from the journey before me, I was held to the spot by her charms; The Bugle! I summoned my courage, And tore myself out of her arms.

A letter has reached me from Jhelum, And the light has gone out of my life; My Mothi’s dark hour was luckless, And now I’ve neither babe nor wife. I see her out there in the moonlight, Down there by the temple tank— What is this in my hand? It’s a rifle! Where am I? My mind seems a blank. What’s that? It’s a shell? I’ve been dreaming, Another Lall Singh lies dumb!

But Mothi’s out there in the moonlight, She’s calling me! Mothi, I come.

I leap with a scream from the trenches; Like a fiend through the bullets I go. Mothi!!! They think I am a devil, As I leap in the midst of the foe.

Ah, this is real war—to be stabbing, And screaming, and panting for breath; The seventh! My Mothi, I’m coming!

Ah, this is real fighting; it’s…(death).

Truth

ARTISTS SOUNDTRACK FOR A SIEGE

Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich mobilized his artistic genius to inspire fellow citizens to defeat Hitler’s invasion.

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich is one of the most famous Russian composers in history. He was, like many great artists, a harmony of contradictions. A musical genius, Shostakovich had a passionate personality yet is perhaps best known for his sweeping, solemn classical compositions. He is most closely associated with St. Petersburg, which became known as Leningrad (from 1924 to 1991), where he was born on Sept. 25, 1906 and where he would not only survive a 900-day Nazi siege during World War II but would also create a composition in lasting memory of it.

Shostakovich is well-known for his at times tempestuous relationship with Soviet authorities. An extremely versatile composer, he flirted with avant-garde and edgy musical productions in his early career but started hammering out solemn scores following a Soviet crackdown on modern art and music and public denunciations in Communist newspapers. Listeners can get a sense of Shostakovich’s captivating combination of solemnity and spunk listening to Waltz. No. 2 of his 1938 Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 2, which remains popular many years after his death.

During World War II, Shostakovich was present in his embattled home city of Leningrad as Adolf Hitler’s and his Finnish ally’s troops attempted to seize it in the war’s longest siege. Before German troops had even invaded Soviet soil, the Nazis had already developed a “starvation plan” to destroy Russians and eradicate the inhabitants of Leningrad. On May 2, 1941, Nazi ministers of Economic Command Staff East wrote in a memorandum: “The war can only continue to be waged if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia ... if what is necessary is extracted from the land, tens of millions of people will doubtlessly starve to death.” Formal guidelines for the “starvation policy” were issued to military forces on May 23: “The population of these territories, in particular the population of the cities, will have to face the most terrible famine … Many tens of millions of people in this territory

will become superfluous and will have to die or migrate to Siberia.” As the people of Leningrad, including Shostakovich and his family, innocently went about their daily lives, the Nazis calculated how many of them would starve. In July 1941, Franz Alfred Six, leader of Advance Commando Moscow of Einsatzgruppe B, told German military officials: “Hitler intends to extend the eastern border of the Reich as far as the line Baku-Stalingrad-Moscow-Leningrad … a ‘blazing strip’ will emerge in which all life is to be erased,” he said, adding. “It is intended to decimate about 30 million Russians living in this strip through starvation, by removing all foodstuffs.” Six told the men that Leningrad was to be razed to the ground and that all Germans were “forbidden on pain of death to give a Russian even a piece of bread.”

The suffering endured by the starving civilians of Leningrad is impossible to describe. However, they did not capitulate.

Braving the German siege alongside his neighbors, Shostakovich wrote a symphony that he hoped would inspire their bravery. Although Shostakovich would write many more famous compositions up until his death in 1975, this wartime symphony remains one of his best-known works.

By summer 1942 Russia had been in World War Il for one year, and America for six months. Time magazine covers displayed portraits of statesmen and soldiers such as Chiang Kai-shek, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Gen. “Hap” Arnold, and Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. The magazine’s July 20 issue, however, depicted a volunteer Russian fireman on a rooftop in besieged Leningrad. Peering through thick spectacles from under a helmet, the “fireman” might have been taken for a first-year conservatory student. This was Dmitri Shostakovich—one of the world’s most eminent classical composers.

Shostakovich wrote a symphony dedicated to the people of his city, Leningrad, as it endured encirclement by the German Wehrmacht and forces of their Finnish ally. On the longest day of Leningrad’s Arctic “White Nights,” he planned to take a break and purchased a ticket for a soccer game the following day. On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler invaded Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union by launching Operation Barbarossa along a 1,000-mile front.

The invasion disrupted Shostakovich’s life and shaped the development of his music. Within a month he set down the notes of his Symphony No. 7, becoming appropriately known as Leningrad

Hitler’s blitzkrieg swept eastward, swamping Red Army units. Barely 500 miles across the flat buffer zone of the USSR’s recently annexed Baltic littoral, Leningrad was to be taken by the northernmost of three German invasion axes (the center axis targeted Moscow while the southern axis aimed at Kiev). Hardly a week after the invasion began, city authorities called for volunteers to defend a last-ditch line along the Luga River, only about 80 miles from Leningrad’s outskirts. Shostakovich, then age 34, declared that peaceful pursuits must yield to the need to take up arms and answered the call. Yet he was turned away for defective eyesight and sent back to the city for air raid duty. Many of the other Luga volunteers would never return.

The Luga line broke under pressure. On Aug. 20 Andrei Zhdanov, the Communist Party secretary in Leningrad, ominously announced: “The enemy is at the gates.” It was

barely nine weeks since the Germans had crossed the Soviet border. Ten days later the Nazis cut the last railroad between Leningrad and the rest of Russia, putting the city under siege. Defensive works appeared around and within the city. Trenches were excavated across the lawns of parks. Massive concrete “dragon’s teeth” were strewn across streets to impede German tanks. Leningrad’s most iconic landmark, the “bronze horseman” statue of Peter the Great, disappeared behind protective sandbags.

By the time Leningrad experienced its first artillery and air attacks early in September, Shostakovich had completed his symphony’s first movement. Writing by day, he served as a fire warden at night, climbing to the roof of his fifthfloor flat in the Petrograd section north of the Neva River to perform his duty. As the Germans tightened their noose around Leningrad, he finished the second movement and reported his progress on the symphony over the radio. “I tell you this so that those Leningraders who are now listening to me shall know that the life of our city is going on

As German artillery bombarded Leningrad, composer Shostakovich devised music to bolster Soviet spirits. His creativity nearly failed due to the horrors he witnessed, but he found strength to go on as the Germans were halted outside Moscow.

normally,” he stated. “Remember that our art is threatened with great danger. We will defend our music.”

He invited several musicians to his apartment to hear his work. As he pounded out the piano score, sirens announced the imminence of another air raid. Sending his wife and children to a shelter, he continued playing to Luftwaffe bombs and anti-aircraft fire. As the Red Army defenders stabilized the lines around the city at the end of September, Shostakovich finished the third of his symphony’s four movements.

As the Germans transferred their invasion’s main effort south for the drive on Moscow, Shostakovich was also airlifted by the Russians to Moscow. As their DC-3 flew over the Leningrad lines, Shostakovich with his wife Nina and children Galina and Maxim left behind a city of more than two million, many of whom were restricted to a diet of 5 1/2 pounds of food a month. Mass starvation took a ghastly toll, especially throughout the winter when home heating was nearly impossible. Workers stepped over the frozen bodies of people in doorways who had died of starvation.

Shostakovich initially resisted being evacuated from Leningrad, but Stalin was determined to protect the most renowned assets of Soviet culture. With Moscow itself

under threat, Russian artists as well as industries were transplanted eastward. Two weeks after their arrival, Shostakovich and his family boarded a train, along with composers Aram Khachaturian and Dmitri Kabalevsky and members of the Bolshoi Theatre. Their destination was Kuibyshev (today known as Samara on the Volga) over 600 miles east of Moscow. The family settled into a three-room suite with a grand piano.

Depressed by the devastation he had witnessed in Leningrad and the peril facing Moscow, Shostakovich could not immediately complete his symphony and was unable to think creatively for several weeks. After the Germans were stopped before Moscow in early December, however, he experienced a renewed burst of energy and finished the composition in two weeks. By early 1942, he had performed the complete piano score before an intimate group of fellow refugees. Two more months of revision and orchestration preceded the first public performance of the “Leningrad’ Symphony in Kuibyshev by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra under Samuil Samosud.

The “Leningrad” Symphony was not “battle music” in the mold of Tchaikovsky’s “1812” Overture or Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Wellington’s Victory.” “I wanted to convey the

SHOSTAKOVICH SYMPHONY

content of grim events,” explained Shostakovich. He originally supplied the following titles for the symphony’s movements: “War,” “Memories,” “Our Country’s Wide Spaces,” and “Victory” (although at some point he stopped using the titles and simply referred to the movements by their tempo markings—Allegretto, Adagio, etc.).

Crowded into the expansive opening movement were depictions of Leningrad in peace, followed by the German invasion, and finally a requiem for the fallen. At half an hour, it was almost a symphony in itself. The ensuing three movements might have seemed short only by comparison with the first: after a brief moderato—a gentle allegretto— is followed by an adagio seen as a further lament for the costs of war, with martial hints of the coming Soviet counteroffensive near the end. Victory is predicted in the final movement with a triumphant recapitulation of the solemn theme that had opened the symphony.

As epic in scope as the events inspiring it, the “Leningrad” symphony called for a huge orchestra and ran for an hour and a quarter—making it the longest symphony since those of the late-Romanticist Austrian composers, Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler.

In the middle of the first movement, Shostakovich created a segment that became known as the “invasion” theme. It begins almost imperceptibly with a soft march in the strings that picks up heavier instrumentation, including an insistent snare drum, through a dozen repetitions. It grows louder and more ominous over a period of 10 minutes, culminating in a goose-stepping crescendo. To one who heard it as played by Shostakovich in Kuibyshev, the theme, “initially just playful, primitive,” was “gradually transformed into something terrifying, acquiring a force capable of obliterating everything in its path.” Russian sculptor Vera Mukhina was reminded of a “form of torture when drops of water fell on a person’s head, and he would go mad.” The composer of the Soviet national anthem, Alexander Alexandrov, said the symphony had “shaken him to the core.”

Musicologists have since identified the invasion tune as Shostakovich borrowing from Hitler’s favorite operetta, Franz Lehár’s “The Merry Widow,” where Count Danilo Danilovitsch sings, “Then I go to Maxim’s, they know me there.” Shostakovich himself characterized his “invasion” theme as epitomizing “the banality of evil itself.” For the moment it was an anti-Hitler theme. Later he told intimates the symphony as a whole was “not just about fascism but about. . . any form of totalitarian regime.”

Fortunately, Stalin didn’t bother to analyze the “invasion” theme or the Seventh Symphony as a whole. He saw the work as a magnificent propaganda opportunity—an expression of the unconquerable spirit of the Soviet people. On March 29 the Seventh had its formal premiere in Mos-

Shostakovich served during the war as a fire warden, climbing to the roof of his fifth-floor apartment by night. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in July 1942.

cow’s Hall of Columns. During a subsequent performance the audience remained rapt in their seats through an air raid alarm. In April Shostakovich’s symphony was awarded the Stalin Prize First Class in Music.

Stalin was eager to show it to Russia’s Western allies, Great Britain and the United States. A microfilm copy of the score was flown to Tehran, transferred by car to Cairo, then by plane across Africa and on to London and New York. On the first anniversary of the German invasion in June, Sir Henry Wood gave the work its English premiere in a BBC broadcast performance from London’s Royal Albert Hall. In New York photographers labored 10 days to transform a 100-foot roll of microfilm into 252 pages of orchestral score.

First performance rights for the Western Hemisphere were secured by the National Broadcasting Company, which maintained the NBC Symphony as its house orchestra. It had been formed expressly for Arturo Toscanini, but Leopold Stokowski, of recent Fantasia Walt Disney film fame, was also under contract to conduct it in the Maestro’s absence. Since Stokowski, a champion of Shostakovich, lobbied NBC to pursue the rights to the Seventh’s premiere

SHOSTAKOVICH SYMPHONY

in the first place, he wrote Toscanini requesting that he yield the broadcast to himself. It was Toscanini’s orchestra, however, and he exercised his right of first refusal. He studied the score and pronounced it “magnificent.”

Having been beaten by fascist thugs in Bologna in 1935 for refusing to play the fascist anthem at his concerts, he had never conducted thereafter in his native Italy. “Don’t you think, my dear Stokowski,” he wrote back, “it would be very interesting for everybody, and yourself, too, to hear the old Italian conductor (one of the first artists who strenuously fought against Fascism) to play this work of a young Russian anti-Nazi composer.”

Toscanini set to work on the daunting 252-page score (which with separate orchestral parts was multiplied tenfold to some 2,500 pages). Nearsighted, but too vain to wear glasses while conducting, he committed the entire work to memory. NBC increased his orchestra from its normal 94 to 110 instruments. On Sunday, July 19, announcer Ben Grauer introduced the broadcast by reading a radiogram from Shostakovich to Toscanini: “You will convey to the public of democratic America the concepts I have endeavored to embody in the work.” Edward C. Carter, president of Russian War Relief, told listeners they were about to hear “a symphony written within range of gunfire.”

Toscanini mounted the podium in NBC’s Studio 8-H to give the Shostakovich Seventh a brisk reading of 72 minutes. The studio audience “jumped up and cheered,” said Time magazine, and Toscanini “Iooked as if he had come through the siege of Leningrad.” Critics in general were respectful towards the massive composition. “lt does thunder,” wrote Oscar Thompson in the New York Sun, “and for a particular time of war it thunders very well.” While judging it “far from a work of sustained greatness, Olin Downes in the New York Times allowed that the work “has its great moments.”

Hearing the performance, however, Shostakovich evidently felt it to be a betrayal of his previous confidence. “Everything is wrong,” the composer told a biographer. “It’s a lousy, sloppy hack job.”

During the 1942-43 concert season, the Shostakovich Seventh was repeated more than 60 times in the United States. Serge Koussevitzky led the first American concert performance with the Berkshire Music Center Orchestra at Tanglewood on Aug. 14. Stokowski’s turn finally came in December with the NBC Symphony. “The rich colors, the

many passages for singing string choirs, the surging pulse of the music, the enormous climaxes all seemed made for Mr. Stokowski’s particular genius,” wrote Downes in the Times, “and he made the most of them. The performance was gorgeous.”

The most gripping premiere occurred between the Toscanini and Koussevitzky performances. On Aug. 9, nearly a year since the beginning of the siege, the “Leningrad” Symphony was performed in the city to which it was dedicated. It was hardly the same city: after an estimated 620,000 deaths and the evacuation of some 400,000 people via a precarious ice road over Lake Ladoga, barely a million human beings remained within the German siege lines.

Zhdanov and other municipal officials, probably with the encouragement of Stalin, saw the value of music as a morale booster. Using the 14 surviving members of the Radio Leningrad Orchestra as a nucleus, a symphony orchestra was cobbled together from retired musicians and army bandsmen.

Under conductor Karl Eliasberg, their ultimate goal was to work up to the Shostakovich Seventh. Six weeks of rehearsal pushed the musicians to the brink of rebellion, which Eliasberg quelled with a threat to withhold their extra rations.

All was ready for the local premiere, which would take place in Philharmonic Hall and be broadcast over Radio Leningrad. German plans to disrupt the concert with artillery fire were foiled by a counter-barrage from Leningrad’s guns. A full house showed up, with many people dressed in their best, long-unworn finery. The performance was prefaced by the brief announcement that “Dmitri Shostakovich has written a symphony that calls for struggle and affirms faith in victory.”

The Leningraders, many in tears, stood up during the symphony’s finale—an honor generally reserved for Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.” Another year-and-a-half would pass before the Red Army broke the 900-day siege.

Of Shostakovich’s 15 symphonies, the Seventh is one of the less-performed today. Its length and occasional bombast probably count against it, though it is dusted off from time to time, often for commemorative purposes.

Valery Gergiev, for instance, incongruously programmed the Seventh for a battlefield concert in South Ossetia during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2008 campaign to detach that province from the Georgian Republic. Listeners may have been confused as to which side was the invader; in the Ukrainian conflict of 2022 there can be no doubt about which side the evil “invasion” theme represents. MHQ

A full house showed up, with many people dressed in their longunworn finery.

REVIEWS THE IRON COMMANDER

anity. So today we have something standing in the way of the peace of this world and the enjoyment of freedom. The Nazis. When you come face to face with him, don’t think of him as a person or a human being, but as something in the way of this peace and freedom and eliminate him at once.”

No, that was not Gen. George S. Patton Jr. speaking. However it is a reminder to us that “Old Blood and Guts” had his share of disciples and kindred spirits. In this case, it was Col. John W. O’Daniel, who would become famously known as “Iron Mike” to his men, addressing Task Force 168 before unleashing that unit on Vichy French costal defenses west of Algiers in November 1942. On the 22nd he was promoted to brigadier general. On June 25, 1943 he went from Invasion Training for the upcoming landings on Sicily to deputy commander of the unit with which his name is most associated, the 3rd Infantry Division.

Captured at Singapore: A Diary of a Far East Prisoner of War

Pen and Sword, 246 pages, 2022, $42.95

Reviewed

A Biography

of Lieutenant General John Wilson

Through much of Sharpen Your Bayonets!, author Timothy R. Stoy apologetically confesses the limits of his source material and how it leaves much of his biography of this hitherto overlooked commander to speculation.

Readers will find in this carefully researched and assembled book the incredible story of an ordinary man who endured extraordinary hardships as a far east prisoner of war (FEPOW) taken captive by Imperial Japanese forces at Singapore during World War II. Stan Moore’s daughter, Jill Robertson, has made brilliant use of her father’s wartime diary and an audio recording he made during his lifetime to create a clear picture of the suffering endured by POWs at Changi prison camp and also the resilient spirit of these men. The book is well-written; the blending of diary entries with statements given by Stan, in addition to detailed historical research, blends together seamlessly in a way that makes it easy to read.

(Foreword), Casemate Publishers, 2022, $37.95

Reviewed by Jon Guttman

“You are about to embark on a crusade, a crusade as important to the world as was the great crusade years ago when it became necessary to eliminate certain people, the Barbarians, who stood in the way of Christi-

Still, he presents enough—including plenty from the general himself— to present a classic career of a topnotch administrator, a strict disciplinarian, an equally strict believer in Russian general Aleksandr Suvorov’s philosophy of “train hard, fight easy,” and an aggressive combat commander, all elements in a lifetime of successful leadership.

Overcoming his fears on his first day of battle at the start of the St. Mihiel offensive on Sept. 12, 1918, he went on to distinction in World War II and as I Corps commander in Korea.

The author does note, however, that his transfer of hatred from Nazism to communism gave him a “one-size-fitsall” approach that fell short when advising the French army and training the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. In sum, however, O’Daniel’s life and times were consistently Pattonesque.

The 1942 Fall of Singapore has been overlooked in popular historiography of the Pacific War. Details of the lives and tragic deaths of those taken prisoner there have tended to fade into the background in comparison to famous naval battles and fighting at places like Okinawa and even, to some degree, in Burma, although Britain’s Fourteenth Army in Burma has been called “The Forgotten Army” for similar reasons. The stories of POWs such as Stan should never be overlooked nor the bravery they displayed in the face of their enemies underestimated. These men defied their captors just by surviving, and the more of their stories that are told to the world, the better.

The book is at times a grim read but readers will likely be impressed by Stan’s sense of humor and also the dedication of his family in preserving and publishing his war memoirs. The book is a valuable resource of information for those interested in the his-

“Iron Mike” O’Daniel, Commander, 3rd Infantry Division in World War II

REVIEWS

tory of the Pacific theatre of the war, particularly the fall of Singapore, the British military history in the Far East and war crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese Army.

R.B. Brighton is a postgraduate war studies scholar, amateur snooker player and military antiques collector.

Tanks in the Battle of Germany 1945: Western Front

48 pages, 2022, $19.00

Ah, tanks—who can resist their charms? This well-written and handy little book is the first in a two-part series focusing on tanks used in the desperate final conquest of Germany in 1945. This volume focuses on the Western Front, while the second part will focus on the Eastern Front.

As one might expect, the book provides many technical details and specifications of the various tanks used in action from the combatant nations represented; these details won’t be lost on those seeking to understand more about the relative strengths and weaknesses of various tanks in battle. It also provides numerical reference points about how many tanks were used by whom and where, including the U.S. Army, British and Canadian forces (including Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s 21st Army Group) and the German Wehrmacht. The book also describes succinctly and chronologically the operations that took place during that period of the war.

However, what this reviewer most appreciated about the book is the author’s birds-eye emphasis on how the tanks were actually used. Taking a

close look at the different approaches of the various nations to tank warfare doctrine and organization, in addition to the unique characteristics of tanks used by various armies, Zaloga successfully provides a “bigger picture” focus on tank warfare during this time period which is lacking in many technical books about armored vehicles, and which readers will likely find very informative and interesting. Additionally, for those of us who like to admire images of tanks and armored vehicles, the book is richly illustrated with many good photographs as well as some fine color artwork showing camouflage paint variations, plus some digitally recreated scenes of tanks in action. If you like tanks or want to study the use of armor on World War II battlefields in closer detail, then this is one you can’t miss.

New & Noteworthy

GAVIN AT WAR: The World War II Diary of Lieutenant General James M. Gavin, edited by Lewis Sorley (Casemate, $34.95) The previously unpublished wartime diary of “The Jumping General,” found by his family after his death, details Gavin’s war in his own words.

OPERATION TAILWIND: Memoirs of a Secret Battle in a Secret War, by Barry D. Pencek (Independent Publishers, $17.95) A CNN documentary in 1998 alleging that war crimes occurred during a September 1970 operation by U.S. Special Forces and Montagnard fighters sparked a huge controversy.

MARLBOROUGH’S WAR

MACHINE 1702-1711, by James Falkner (Pen and Sword, $29.95) Examines the Duke of Marlborough’s victories in the War of the Spanish Succession in light of logistics, engineering, weapons, and administration that provided support.

ROBERT THE BRUCE: Scotland’s True Braveheart, by Phil Carradice (Pen & Sword, $34.95) Emphasizes the famous Scot’s personality and relationships with leaders to reveal him as a ruthless warrior and a king worthy of remembrance.

RAIDING ON THE WESTERN FRONT, by Anthony Saunders (Pen & Sword, $29.95) A study of aggressive trench raids conducted during World War I chronicles how raids were carried out, examples of successes and failures, morale and examples of heroism.

BLOOD AND BROKEN GLASS: Northern Ireland’s Violent Countdown Towards Peace 1991-1993, by Ken M. Wharton (Helion & Company, $45.00) A detailed account of three years of bitter sectarian violence preceding the 1993 Downing Street Declaration.

STRATEGIC ADVANTAGE: How to Win in War, Business, and Life, by William J. Bahr (Ibex Systems, $10.44) West Point graduate and successful business executive Bahr explains how to leverage the principles of classic strategy to succeed in all aspects of life, including politics, sports, and martial arts.

CELTIC WARFARE: From the Fifth Century BC to the First Century AD, by Gioal Canestrelli (Pen & Sword, $42.95) Archaeology and literature show the evolution of Celtic warfare and military tactics as Celtic groups were driven into contact with other diverse cultures.

CORPORAL CANNON: A Female Marine in Afghanistan, by Savannah Cannon (Casemate, $34.95) A hard-hitting personal account from a former Marine sheds light on her adversities and journey to healing.

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MAC ON HIS WAY BACK