World War II Autumn 2022 by HistoryNet

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THE ‘OLD BREED’ FINDING FRESH TRUTH IN E. B. SLEDGE’S PACIFIC WAR CLASSIC Men of the 1st Marine Division on Okinawa. The title of Sledge’s famous book, With the Old Breed, references the division’s nickname.

T OF H s G I F u L A l N I F P ER ACE ‘WAR DADDY’

AUTUMN 2022

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Remembering Unsung Heroes RATED #1 Trip Advisor FREDERICKSBURG

Millions served in WWII in the Pacific. We have preserved thousands of their stories. In the face of enemy capture, three soldiers were ordered to burn the American flag that flew over a base on Mindanao in 1942. Before destroying the flag, the men removed the 48 stars and hid them for 3 1/2 years through several prisoners of war camps. When the soldiers received notice of their liberation, they sewed a new flag using a rusty nail, an old sewing machine, parachute material, and stars they had so carefully saved. The new flag flew over the camp to greet American troops on 7 September 1945. See this remarkable flag on display at the Museum.

311 E Austin Street | Fredericksburg, Texas PacificWarMuseum.org Scan for a virtual tour

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AUTUMN 2022 ENDORSED BY THE NATIONAL WORLD WAR II MUSEUM, INC.

FEATURES COVER STORY

32 WHEN THINGS GET TOUGH

Previously unpublished portions of E. B. Sledge’s acclaimed Pacific War memoir offer a fresh look at U.S. Army/ Marine Corps relations HENRY SLEDGE

PORTFOLIO

40 INTO THE ABYSS

A rarely seen collection of Sledge’s personal artifacts from what he called the “abyss of war” in Peleliu and Okinawa

46 ALWAYS FORWARD

Known as “War Daddy” to his crew, this tanker ace invariably wanted to lead the charge STEPHEN L. MOORE

WEAPONS MANUAL

56 FLYING EYES

Dancers pose for a photo in the enlisted men’s recreation hall at Cut Bank Army Airfield in Montana. COURTESY OF GLACIER COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY COVER: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN WALKER

Japan’s Yokosuka E14Y floatplane

58 DANGER ZONE

An airborne operation called “Giant II” appeared to be a giant mistake. Could one general stop it in time? JOSEPH CONNOR

66 4,415 SOULS AND COUNTING

How many Allied combatants gave their lives on D-Day? Answering that is more complicated than you’d think JOHN D. LONG

DEPARTMENTS

8 MAIL 12 WORLD WAR II TODAY 20 CONVERSATION

He served as a teen in New York and as an artilleryman in Germany

24 FROM THE FOOTLOCKER 26 NEED TO KNOW 28 TRAVEL

Hints of the past remain at Montana’s Cut Bank International Airport

72 REVIEWS

Sniper Elite 5 game; superb Nimitz bio; The Pope at War; more

76 BATTLE FILMS

South Pacific’s once-revolutionary message is still important today

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78 CHALLENGE 80 FAMILIAR FACE

AUTUMN 2022

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WWII Online WORLDWARII.com

Michael A. Reinstein CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER

VOL. 37, NO. 2 AUTUMN 2022

EDITOR

KAREN JENSEN

General mayhem: Holland M. Smith (left) and Ralph C. Smith

Want more background to Henry Sledge’s “When Things Get Tough” on page 32, about how the Marine Corps and U.S. Army fought together in the Pacific? Check out these stories, both by top historians:

Smith vs. Smith

By Sharon Tosi Lacey When a Marine general, Holland M. Smith, fired a U.S. Army general on Saipan, Ralph C. Smith, all hell broke loose. Read the story online at historynet.com/holland-smith-vsralph-smith/

What Mattered Most

By John C. McManus A forgotten battle on the tiny Pacific island of Angaur dramatized the folly of “mopping up” operations. Go to historynet.com/angaur-island-assault/

Larry Porges SENIOR EDITOR Kirstin Fawcett ASSOCIATE EDITOR Jerry Morelock, Jon Guttman HISTORIANS David T. Zabecki CHIEF MILITARY HISTORIAN Paul Wiseman NEWS EDITOR Brian Walker GROUP DESIGN DIRECTOR Melissa A. Winn DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY Guy Aceto PHOTO EDITOR Dana B. Shoaf MANAGING EDITOR, PRINT Michael Y. Park MANAGING EDITOR, DIGITAL Claire Barrett NEWS AND SOCIAL EDITOR ADVISORY BOARD

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CONTRIBUTORS HENRY SLEDGE (“When Things Get Tough”) is the

son of E. B. Sledge, author of the books With the Old Breed and China Marine. Passionate about all aspects of World War II history, especially the Pacific Theater, Sledge has worked as a consultant for Valor Studios and had articles published in Valor and Naval History magazines. He is a co-host of “What’s The Scuttlebutt Podcast” and has appeared as a guest on many other podcasts, radio shows, and documentaries. Sledge is currently working on a book involving his father’s unpublished writings, which he mined for our cover story on U.S. Army and Marine Corps relations. He is also collaborating on a documentary film, Cowboy Down, about World War II’s Marine Fighter Squadron VMF-114.

JESSICA WAMBACH BROWN (“Bombers in the Big

Sky”) is a history and travel writer who grew up among the central Montana wheat fields that served as B-17 practice bombing ranges during World War II. From her current home in Kalispell, Montana, it was a beautiful, if snowy, two-and-a-half-hour drive east to explore what remains of the Cut Bank Army Airfield.

COVER STORY SLEDGE

JOSEPH CONNOR (“Danger Zone”), who studied his-

tory at Fairleigh Dickinson University and earned his JD from Rutgers University, worked for 27 years as an assistant county prosecutor in New Jersey. While reading published accounts on the negotiations for Italy’s 1943 surrender, he always suspected there was much more to the story. He was right, and he recounts his findings on Giant II—a fatally flawed Allied airdrop planned to support the Salerno landings—in this issue.

JOHN D. LONG (“4,415 Souls and Counting”) is the

LONG

CONNOR

MOORE

STEPHEN L. MOORE (“Always Forward”), a sixthgeneration Texan, is the author of 23 books on World War II and Texas history. His article is drawn from his book Blood and Fury, available in August 2022, which relates the European Theater accomplishments of Staff Sergeant Lafayette “War Daddy” Pool, a Sherman tank commander who was the United States’ topscoring ace against German Panzers.

PORTRAITS BY JOHANNA GOODMAN

BROWN

director of education at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia, which maintains a comprehensive list of Allied combatants who gave their lives on D-Day. An alumnus of Roanoke College and the University of Virginia, he has taught history at Roanoke College, Radford University, and Virginia Western Community College, and is a contributing columnist for the Roanoke Times.

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MAIL

PRIDE OF PLACE

As a longtime subscriber to your magazine, I read with dismay the visibility you gave to Elizabeth D. Samet and her revisionist nonsense in the review of her recent book, Looking for the Good War. She is another example of those in today’s society who look to tear down rather than build a sense of identity within the most successful, free, and inclusive society ever seen on this tottering planet of ours. Their approach is to paint the glass almost empty by unimaginable spin and outright subversion of the facts.

I am probably one of your few readers who can vividly remember the World War II years. I was five years old on December 7, 1941. I watched my uncles and the young men in my neighborhood gladly volunteer to make the world safe again from the tyranny of the Axis powers. We planted Victory Gardens; I took my little red wagon around the neighborhood to collect rubber scraps for the war effort. My father was a foreman in a factory making war supplies and was more valuable on the home front even though he tried to enlist. He became an air raid warden instead. I later became a naval aviator and served during the Vietnam conflict. What a travesty to the memory of all those who gave so much to keep the fat politicians safe in their ivory towers. Believe me, none of the current corruption has anything to do with the Greatest Generation. Vincent S. Mazzola Reston, Va.

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FROM TOP: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; COURTESY OF FRANCIS MCKEON

ONE OF PAUL WISEMAN’S “World War II Today” dispatches in your April issue described how underwater volcanic activity had recently raised Iwo Jima’s sunken Japanese vessels, scuttled off the coast by the U.S. Navy in 1945 following the island’s capture. This wasn’t the first time I’ve seen these “Ghost Ships” ascend from the sea. They were at the island’s so-called “Shipwreck Beach” when I reported aboard the U.S. Coast Guard LORAN [Long Range Aid to Navigation] station on Iwo Jima as a boot in 1982. As a World War II buff, Iwo was a dream assignment—plenty of caves to explore, and even in 1982, lots of war relics. George Lohr Dorothy, N.J.

Reader George Lohr took this haunting photo from Iwo Jima’s “Shipwreck Beach” during a typhoon in 1982.

COURTESY OF GEORGE LOHR

BACK FROM THE DEEP

A navy officer loads a Mark 14 torpedo onto a submarine.

played a major role in an effective campaign against Japanese warships and merchant ships—under a new slate of extremely aggressive commanders.

A SIGNIFICANT LOSS

NO-GO BLOW

FROM TOP: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; COURTESY OF FRANCIS MCKEON

COURTESY OF GEORGE LOHR

At the beginning of April’s article about submarine commander Howard Gilmore’s heroic selfsacrifice aboard the USS Growler, author Steven Trent Smith reported that several sub commanders were replaced for lack of aggressiveness early in the war. The real problem to me was our consistently crappy torpedoes. They’d notoriously run too deep, surface, bonk against the side of a Japanese ship, and fail to detonate—or they’d make things really exciting by circling back to the sub that launched them. Can anyone blame a commander for being cautious when he has such junk for a weapon? (Of course, the ordnance nabobs invariably blamed the skippers.) It seems to me that we unjustly cashiered many capable officers. Don O’Connor Kreamer, Penn. Editor’s note: Mr. O’Connor makes good points regarding the navy’s standard Mark 14 torpedo. Yet U.S. sub commanders’ lack of aggressiveness was an issue long before serious concerns about our torpedoes became widely known. Some sub commanders during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, for example, refused to engage the vulnerable Japanese transports landing troops in Lingayen Gulf. Problems with the Mark 14 were largely fixed by November 1943, after which the torpedoes

John D. Long’s response to the “Ask WWII” question raised in your June issue addressed whether the Kriegsmarine attacked the Allied fleet on D-Day and concluded that German submarines and E-boats were “at best inconsequential” during the invasion. I disagree. My uncle, Seaman Second Class Joseph McKeon, was assigned to USS LST-314. On the night of June 9, 1944, while LST-314 was making its second run from England with men and materiel, three torpedoes from four German E-boats struck and sunk the tank landing ship. According to one source, 120 sailors and 100 soldiers were on board, and only 22 of them survived. My uncle was at his battle station when the torpedoes struck. He was knocked into the English Channel and died of exposure. A seaman from the SS Walcott, Richard Freed, thinking my uncle was still alive, picked up his lifeless body. Uncle Joseph was transferred to a Coast Guard cutter

McKeon

FROM THE EDITOR

A bit of trivia to begin with: on my first date years ago with the man who would become my husband, I brought a copy of World War II magazine to show him. He still thinks that’s strange, and I still don’t. The magazine was—and is—that important to me and reflects a big chunk of who I am. I mention this now because this will be my last issue as editor, and World War II will be in new hands going forward. After 15 years with the magazine, I’ve been fortunate to have colleagues who feel like family, and contributors I think of as friends. Best of all have been you, the readers, reliably quick to right the magazine when we are wrong, and always making my efforts, and those of my team here, feel thoroughly appreciated. For that, and for all the irreplaceable experiences and wisdom I’ve gained, I am deeply grateful. —Karen Jensen

Freed

and returned for burial in England. After the war he was reburied in the Normandy American Cemetery next to his brother, Technician Fifth Grade James McKeon, who was killed on August 1, 1944, near Saint-Lô, France. Francis McKeon Oxford, Mass.

PLEASE SEND LETTERS TO:

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I particularly enjoyed Lee Kamlet’s story “Brother in Arms.” Remembering our World War II veterans and commemorating their

World War II 901 N. Glebe Road, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203 worldwar2@historynet.com Please include your name, address, and daytime telephone number. AUTUMN 2022

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DEAR WORLD WAR II READERS: Beginning with this issue, World War II magazine is moving to a quarterly publication schedule. But worry not: existing subscriptions will be extended, so you’ll get all the issues you paid for. We’ve made some exciting improvements, with plenty more in the works—all in the aim of giving our valued readers even more than before:

service and sacrifice is why I got involved with an organization called Stories Behind the Stars [see “World War II Today,” December 2021]. They aim to write a story about every American serviceperson lost during World War II and make them publicly available by scanning names on grave markers with a smartphone. My uncle, Roman “Ray” Mierzejewski, was a 19-year-old pilot with the 325th Fighter Group when he was lost on June 28, 1943, while protecting bombers over Sardinia. I have given myself the mission of telling the stories of members of the “Checkertail Clan”—a nickname given to the 325th by radio propagandist Axis Sally—who did not come home; so far, I have written about 80 men. It is my honor to research and produce these memorials for those who served with my Uncle Ray and the dozens of Checkertail veterans I have met over the years. If you’d like to get involved, please visit the official webpage, storiesbehindthestars. org, for more information. You can write about members of a particular unit like I am, or ones from your hometown, family, etc.— the choice is yours. It is such a satisfying feeling to give a voice to our fallen. John B. Mier Belleville, Ill.

KNOW HIS NAME

The article “Brother in Arms” by Lee Kamlet in your June issue chronicling his father’s friendship with Technical Sergeant

Lee Gordon Allen Jr. was perhaps the perfect Memorial Day read. The tale of sacrifice and remembrance really registered with me, as I am sure it did with so many other readers who are the children of World War II veterans. The imagery was vivid, and every sentence built toward the powerful “twist” at the end of the story. Perhaps Sergeant Allen’s hometown of Franklin, Tennessee, will someday further honor his service, but if not, Kamlet has kept faith with his father by reminding all of us what the war required of such men. Benjamin H. Odom Norman, Okla.

THE TIE THAT BINDS

I found my April 2022 issue of World War II to be exceptionally entertaining. I enjoyed Mel Brooks’s account of his army service; the “Footlocker” column on perfumer Marc Fael’s “My Jerrycan” scent; and items in “World War II Today” about newly published G.I. wartime surveys, Australia’s now-identified “Unknown Sailor,” and the return of an American soldier’s bracelet decades after its loss in the Czech Republic. While considering the scale of World War II they might seem trivial, the common thread in these stories was that they are about people and they tied the past to the present. When I was a boy (I was born in 1947), my dad, every one of my 11 uncles, and every adult male around me was a veteran of World War II. Now they are rare. Hope we don’t forget them. To me they really were the “Greatest Generation.” Tom Mullen Stafford, Va.

• We’ve redesigned our website to make it more compelling and active, and easier to search. Two million users visit every month: check it out at historynet.com. • And we’re offering a subscribers-only email newsletter, World War II Monthly Dispatch, which includes fresh material not available elsewhere. Soon subscribers will also have exclusive access to special content on the website with the insight, excitement, and quality you expect of World War II. • Plus, we’re going to digitize all back issues of World War II, going back to 1986. This tremendous and unprecedented resource will soon be available to subscribers. We’ll keep you up to date. If you aren’t a subscriber, go to shop. historynet.com and sign up today so you don’t miss a thing! If you are a subscriber— thank you—and stand by for great things to come. Please reference the terms and conditions of your subscription for additional details on magazine delivery each year.

FROM LEFT: COURTESY OF JOHN B. MIER; NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Roman Mierzejewski of the 325th Fighter Group (the “Checkertail Clan”) was shot down in 1943. His nephew wants the world to know his story.

WORLD WAR II

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Shi Se

WWII TODAY

REPORTED AND WRITTEN BY PAUL WISEMAN

Through the efforts of strangers, a wartimeera bracelet (left) has been returned to the family of its original owner. Lynn Benedict (above) sports the keepsake that once belonged to his father, G. W. (top left).

a genealogical website, Schick found that a man named Paul Balkin served in Company M, 141st Infantry Regiment, 36th Infantry Division, active in France and Germany starting in August 1944. Next Schick started looking for “Benedict G. W.” The search was made easier because

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XXXXXXXXXXXXX LARRY PORGES

THANKS TO SOME SLEUTHING by a man who is a funeral director and a World War II subscriber, a wartime-era bracelet has found its way home. The journey began when Henry Kliman of Plano, Texas, decided to clear out some keepsakes, including a few that had belonged to his late father-in-law, Paul Balkin, an infantryman in Europe during the war. Among them was a bracelet inscribed with the name “Benedict G. W.” and a Freemason symbol. Kliman turned to World War II magazine for help, and Josh Schick, a curator at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans and a contributor to the magazine’s “From the Footlocker” column, took it from there. Studying a roster in the museum’s collection and

TOP LEFT AND RIGHT: COURTESY OF LYNN BENEDICT; XXXXXXXXXXXXX LOWER LEFT: COURTESY OF HENRY KLIMAN

WORLD WAR II READER HELPS SOLVE A MYSTERY

XXXXXXXXXXXXX LARRY PORGES

TOP LEFT AND RIGHT: COURTESY OF LYNN BENEDICT; XXXXXXXXXXXXX LOWER LEFT: COURTESY OF HENRY KLIMAN

Benedict’s service number is etched on the bracelet. Using the same ancestry website, the curator got into the U.S. Navy’s muster rolls— quarterly accounts of where sailors were stationed, on ship or shore—and found that a G. W. Benedict had served as a Seabee with the 21st Naval Construction Battalion in the Aleutians and, later, on the Pacific island of Tinian. Then, searching the “Find a Grave” website, Schick located the grave of a G. W. Benedict in Duncan, Oklahoma, about 80 miles south of Oklahoma City; the headstone offered another promising clue—a Freemason symbol that matched the one on the bracelet. After the magazine published these findings in the October 2021 issue, reader Babe Grissom, a funeral director in Kissimmee, Florida, took up the hunt. Grissom says veterans of the burial business are used to tracing the whereabouts of the dead. “Being funeral directors—we know who to call,” he said. “We just keep checking and getting a clue here or there.” After contacting the cemetery in Oklahoma, Grissom confirmed the identity of the man buried there and found his son, Bene “Lynn” Benedict, living in Alto, Michigan. Lynn Benedict said he was teaching a class at Muskegon Community College when the office called and said a funeral director was on the line. Hearing that his father’s bracelet had re-emerged after eight decades was “like hitting me across the side of the head,” he said. It’s still not clear how a bracelet belonging to a navy Seabee who served in the Pacific wound up alongside the belongings of an army infantryman who served in Europe, though Lynn Benedict did clear up one detail: the “G” in “G. W.” did not stand for Gould, as the magazine’s piece said, but “Golden,” as in “Golden Willis”—a name he says his father never liked. The errant name came from inaccurate information on a Naval History and Heritage Command website. G. W. Benedict, who worked before and after the war in manufacturing for the oil services company Halliburton and died in 1982, never talked much about the war—though he did enjoy reunions with his fellow Seabees. “They were solid as a rock,” Benedict said. “It was a brotherhood.” World War II next put Benedict in touch with Kliman, who mailed him the bracelet in May. “You cry at first,” Benedict said. “To know my dad had it, and he wore it. It’s family. It’s history. It’s your dad.”

BATTLE SCARS ST. DUNSTAN-IN-THE-EAST, LONDON, ENGLAND

Tucked away on a sleepy London side street are the quiet remains of St. Dunstan-in-the-East. First built in about AD 1100, the church was mostly destroyed by German bombs in 1941, though the old tower and steeple, designed by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of 1666, remain intact, along with the north and south walls. The Church of England deconsecrated the ruins after the war, and the City of London converted St. Dunstan’s nave into a public garden in 1970. It remains a tranquil oasis amid the nearby bustle of city life, as tree branches, vines, and other greenery adorn the old church’s stone walls and curved window arches (above), and benches dot walkways around a pocket-sized lawn. If you come midday, you might share the space with workers from nearby office buildings eating lunch, but the temperature rarely rises above “peaceful”—especially on weekends, when you may have the garden all to yourself. AUTUMN 2022

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A NEW WAR MEMORIAL is going up in Gettysburg. But this one won’t retell the stories of heroism at Devil’s Den, Seminary Ridge, or Little Round Top during perhaps the most decisive battle of the American Civil War. The nonprofit World War II American Experience Museum aims instead to get visitors to recall the valor of those who served in faraway places like Normandy, Guadalcanal, and Kas-

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CHARLES PHELPS CUSHING/GETTY IMAGES

NEW MUSEUM TO OPEN IN GETTYSBURG

serine Pass. Behind the project are Frank Buck, a retired Peterbilt truck dealer and long-time collector of World War II memorabilia, and his wife, Loni. Frank worries that young Americans have forgotten the sacrifices of the World War II generation. He was dismayed that the 80th anniversary of the fall of Bataan—the largest surrender of American forces in history— came and went this year with little attention. “We want to wake them up,” he said. To do that, the Bucks have invested $7 million to put up three 12,000-square-foot buildings on 30 acres of farmland near their home about five miles northwest of Gettysburg. That sum does not include what Frank has spent over long decades collecting nearly 80

GETTYSBURG BATTLEFIELD BUS TOURS, COURTESY OF ED SHEAHIN (ALL)

Featuring military vehicles and an array of authentic artifacts, the World War II American Experience Museum held a June soft opening in advance of the start of full-time operations in October 2022.

ON THE HOMEFRONT

CHARLES PHELPS CUSHING/GETTY IMAGES

GETTYSBURG BATTLEFIELD BUS TOURS, COURTESY OF ED SHEAHIN (ALL)

A group of boys tend to their Victory Garden on Ludlow Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The very urban setting was not uncommon—of the 20 million Victory Gardens the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates were maintained in the United States during the war, about two-thirds were located in cities. Besides raising morale and saving commercially grown produce for troops overseas, the gardens provided a real economic benefit to these farmers of opportunity—a third to a half of all vegetables harvested in the lean war years were homegrown.

World War II vehicles. In the museum’s garage and exhibition hall are everything from Sherman tanks to a yellow-and-black checked “Follow Me” jeep meant to be eye-catching enough to guide bombers returning from runs over Nazi-occupied Europe safely across landing strips in England. Some of these instruments of war served specific practical purposes—a motorized shop truck packed full of tools, for example, and armored recovery vehicles that pulled hobbled tanks out of the muck. And there are occasionally intriguing stories behind the machines: a jeep, for instance, that was stolen from an army base on land by the crew of the USS Hancock and given as a gift to the aircraft carrier’s captain. The Bucks also have a massive collection of World War II uniforms, helmets, and weapons that will be on display. The museum, which had a June 18 soft opening and is scheduled to open full-time in October, will have a gift shop and a pub, plus the Bucks plan to have an 18-piece band reenact USO shows at various events throughout the year. They are also restoring and plan to display a “Clubmobile”—from which female Red Cross volunteers (nicknamed Donut Dollies) served coffee and doughnuts. Frank, 80, has been collecting World War II memorabilia almost all his life. His collection includes a German knife he obtained in

his teens. Loni has family ties to the war: her father was a medic in the Pacific, and her uncle was a bomber pilot lost when his B-24 was shot down over Germany in January 1945. The Bucks chose Gettysburg for reasons other than convenience. The town has a long list of World War II ties: president and D-Day commander Dwight D. Eisenhower maintained a home there. It was also the site of a secret U.S. Navy mapmaking office, an army psychological warfare training camp, and a POW camp on the Civil War battlefield where German prisoners worked picking fruits and vegetables. The town has, in fact, applied for American World War II Heritage City status from the National Park Service. Tickets to the museum will run $14 with discounts for veterans, seniors, children, and groups. Donations to the World War II American Experience can be made at the nonprofit’s website: visitww2.org. AUTUMN 2022

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NEW STUDY OF A GRIM MISSION ON OCTOBER 10, 1947, the U.S. Army funeral ship Honda Knot docked in Oakland, California, delivering 3,027 caskets as a military band played “Taps” and Verdi’s “Requiem.” Inside were the remains of Americans who had died in the Pacific—the first to be repatriated from the battlefields of World War II. On the 75th anniversary of that first mission, the massive logistical campaign to bring 171,000 fallen Americans home has gone unremembered. Kim Clarke, a writer in Michigan, is working to change that. For 15 years, Clarke, who is at work on a book about the program, has been poring over the records of the American Graves Registration Service, letters from distraught families, military personnel records, and oral histories. “I believe it’s a largely unknown chapter of the war,” she told World War II. Her mission began when she started researching her own grandfather, Corporal Delbert Trueman, killed at age 27 when his B-24 bomber was shot down over Vienna on October 17, 1944. Clarke became fascinated by the process that brought the fallen home. “I’ve made it a point,” she said, “to learn about the work of the embalmers,

chaplains, army transport crews, casket manufacturers, military escorts, elected leaders— all those who were involved with returning the dead.” Her grandfather is now buried in a cemetery in Marion, Indiana. During the war, the American military was unable to ship home the remains of those who fell overseas; the money and transport ships couldn’t be spared from the fight. The dead were buried in temporary military cemeteries in Europe and the Pacific. Once the war ended, families could choose to bring the fallen home for reburial or leave them undisturbed overseas. Some thought that moving the bodies amounted to desecration. But many wanted their loved ones brought home. First Lieutenant Leonard T. Mojica, 21, was the pilot of the B-24 in which Clarke’s grandfather died. Mojica, too, was killed when the plane went down. He was the only child of a divorced mother, Juanita Harding, and she was desperate for his body to come home. In pleas to military officials, she offered to sell her trailer home to pay for his return. “She was literally willing to give up everything she owned,” Clarke says. “Her letters are so incredibly sad but also filled with such love for her son.” “The strain of waiting is rather hard to put into words,” Harding wrote in a May 1, 1948, letter to the army’s quartermaster general. “I lost him in October 1944 and I’ve been waiting for what [seems] like a thousand years to bring him home to rest.” She got her wish. Mojica’s remains were repatriated in December 1948 and buried in Los Angeles’s Holy Cross Cemetery in February 1949. The government paid to bring the body home and allocated $75 for funeral expenses. The $163 million repatriation program lasted from 1947, with the arrival of the Honda Knot, until 1951. More than 171,000 bodies— 60 percent of America’s World War II combat dead—were brought back from 86 countries on six continents. The remainder were laid to rest in permanent overseas cemeteries such as the Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery in Belgium. “For many families, the war did not end in 1945,” Clarke says. “Thousands of people, military and civilian, dedicated themselves, during the war and afterward, to plan for the repatriation and see that the dead were recovered and returned with honor.”

AP PHOTO/CLARENCE HAMM

The Cardinal O’Connell, one of several ships that repatriated American war dead, arrives in Oakland, California, on February 12, 1948.

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Q: What happened to all the radioactive debris from the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? —Leonard Morris, Harvest, Ala. A: The short answer is that there was very little radioactive debris. The radiation from the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki lost its toxicity very quickly. Within weeks the cities were safe to enter. When an atomic bomb detonates, two kinds of radiation are released. “Immediate neutron and gamma saturation” is an intense wave of radiation released in the fireball within the first minute of nuclear fission that will kill anyone within a radius of about one to two miles—though, as was the case at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bomb’s primary heat and blast waves will have Hiroshima begins to killed most people before any immediate radiarecover soon after the tion reaches them. In any event, the threat from August 6, 1945, atomic immediate radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki blast. Despite the was smaller than if the bombs had exploded bomb’s massive close to the ground: by design the bombs detodestructive force, its nated in midair, so much of the immediate radiaradiation dissipated tion was carried away by the wind. within a few weeks. The second type of radiation, “residual radiation,” is likely what Mr. Morris is referencing in his letter. Residual radiation is radioactive debris and contaminated ground soil that, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, lingered for a few days but quickly dissipated. (Remember these were single blasts, not the regurgitative fallout of a stricken power plant, as was the case at Chernobyl.) Thus, the risk from residual radiation declined very rapidly and was back to normal levels within weeks. That said, for those exposed to it, residual radiation proved toxic over the long term and contributed to the spike in leukemia in the two cities in the 1950s. Soon after the armistice, Tokyo sent experts to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to study the blasts’ impact on nature and skeletal remains. They found that 60 days after the atomic explosions, grasses were already sprouting under the detonation points, insects were plentiful, flowers were pushing up through the ash,

WORD FOR WORD “This fleet will be utterly crushed with one blow at the very beginning of hostilities.… The success of our surprise attack on Pearl Harbor will prove to be the Waterloo of the war to follow.” —Japanese rear admiral Matome Ugaki, in a statement to flag officers on November 11, 1941 and the oleander—the beautiful symbol of Hiroshima—had made a surprisingly quick return. The bombs did not create nuclear wastelands, as many had feared. —Paul Ham is the author of the international bestseller Hiroshima Nagasaki (Macmillan), which is being made into a six-part television series by Thoroughbred Studios, an AngloAustralian production company. SEND QUERIES TO: Ask World War II, 901 N. Glebe Road, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203 OR EMAIL: worldwar2@historynet.com

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t was a perfect late autumn day in the northern Rockies. Not a cloud in the sky, and just enough cool in the air to stir up nostalgic memories of my trip into the backwoods. This year, though, was different. I was going it solo. My two buddies, pleading work responsibilities, backed out at the last minute. So, armed with my trusty knife, I set out for adventure. Well, what I found was a whole lot of trouble. As in 8 feet and 800-pounds of trouble in the form of a grizzly bear. Seems this grumpy fella was out looking for some adventure too. Mr. Grizzly saw me, stood up to his entire 8 feet of ferocity and let out a roar that made my blood turn to ice and my hair stand up. Unsnapping my leather sheath, I felt for my hefty, trusty knife and felt emboldened. I then showed the massive grizzly over 6 inches of 420 surgical grade stainless steel, raised my hands and yelled, “Whoa bear! Whoa bear!” I must have made my point, as he gave me an almost admiring grunt before turning tail and heading back into the woods.

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CONVERSATION WITH RALPH OSTERHOUDT BY DAVID SEARS

FAR AWAY AND UP CLOSE

My town of Staatsburg was very small—500 people. The dirt road we lived on didn’t have electricity or telephone. The first 18 years of my life weren’t anything to brag about. Our 20-acre farm was for our survival. There was very little money. Mostly we bartered. But we ate well—we didn’t eat garbage. My father also worked for Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a gardener. Everybody worked. I had six sisters and five brothers. [Ralph and two sisters survive.] I went to work on our farm at 4:30 a.m. on school days. I milked 10 cows by hand. I’d come home at three in the afternoon and milk the cows again.

You also worked for the Roosevelts.

I used to mow the lawn and plant trees during the summer. One time I was on the mowing tractor when Eleanor came out with a metal pitcher of iced water. She gave me a drink, and we chatted.

In what ways did the war change things?

We were one nation. Everybody was in the war effort. My brother Irving was on the [battleship] Missouri for three years. My brother Richard went into the army for six months but was medically discharged. While I was still in high school, I did the Ground Observer lookout tower.

How did you get involved in that?

The government built this small place overlooking the Hudson River. It wasn’t much bigger than an outhouse, with a roof, a door, and a very small window. Maybe 20 students volunteered to be lookouts. Someone from the government came to the school and told us our responsibilities. You weren’t allowed to have newspapers or bring your homework, because when you’re reading, you’re not watching. Maybe they showed us sketches of what to look for, but we didn’t have to know what enemy aircraft looked like. If something was moving in the air or on the Hudson River, it wasn’t supposed to be there.

What did the work require?

Girls with good grades got permission to stand watch in the daytime. The younger boys—high school freshmen and sophomores—went from after school until dark. My hours were from eight p.m. to midnight, five nights a week. I lived four miles from the observation post. I rode my bicycle there on gravel roads in the rain, snow, whatever. Sometimes it got so cold I wore most of the clothes I had. The post had a telephone, a Coleman lantern, a straight-back chair, a tiny table, and a kerosene stove for heat. We didn’t use binoculars. All the nearby homes had blackout curtains,

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PATRICK OEHLER/POUGHKEEPSIE JOURNAL/USA TODAY NETWORK

Describe your life before World War II.

As a volunteer in high school (left), Osterhoudt was charged with scanning the sky and water near Hyde Park, New York, for threats.

COURTESY OF RALPH OSTERHOUDT

RALPH J. OSTERHOUDT, now 96, was 15 when World War II began. His family’s Hudson Valley, New York, farm was just a bicycle ride north of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Hyde Park estate, where Osterhoudt worked summers. Though a schoolboy, he stepped up to serve, first as a volunteer in the Ground Observer Corps, organized to alert military authorities should enemy aircraft penetrate American skies. Later— as a U.S. Army replacement rushed to Europe’s frontlines—Osterhoudt got a much more intimate view of the war when he fought through France and into Germany.

so visibility at night was almost 100 percent. When you spotted something all you did was pick up the phone. No dialing or nothing. I forget the name of the unit stationed in Roosevelt’s house [the 240th Military Police Battalion, according to the National Park Service], but someone from the unit picked up the phone. And they said to report and not worry if it’s a false alarm. Thank goodness they were all false alarms.

PATRICK OEHLER/POUGHKEEPSIE JOURNAL/USA TODAY NETWORK

COURTESY OF RALPH OSTERHOUDT

Did you serve throughout high school?

The Ground Observer Corps was deactivated in May 1944—and on May 29, 1944, I got my induction notice. Two weeks later I would have graduated. They did not let me graduate with my class, but that was okay.

Sounds like you wanted a change.

I could have been deferred—farm work was considered essential—but I didn’t like the farm at all. I went to school every single day and did well. But I used to get on the bus and watch my classmates playing football, baseball, while I had to go home. Everybody was eager to go. Plus, if you

were a male 18 years old and healthy, you couldn’t be seen walking the streets. I went from Fort Dix to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I was in the artillery—240mm M1 howitzers. We trained with the 82nd Division, but we were going to Europe as replacements for soldiers killed or wounded.

Osterhoudt (at home, more recently) became a soldier before graduating from high school (foreground), arriving in Europe as an artilleryman in early 1945.

When did you deploy?

Everybody was eager to go. Plus, if you were a male 18 years old and healthy, you couldn’t be seen walking the streets.

Six thousand guys left on the Aquitania [a former British cruise liner] that December. We went across in five days, landed in Glasgow, Scotland, then went by train to Southampton. We boarded amphibious craft, each of us carrying two gigantic duffel bags. It was snowing and cold crossing the Channel. We got dumped out in two feet of water on the coast near Le Havre in Normandy on New Year’s Day 1945. First, we stayed overnight in a brick building with no heat. All of us were freezing wet from the waist down. Finally, somebody located some laundry tubs, filled them with gasoline, and lit the fumes for heat. Guys stood around the tubs stripped from the waist down, trying to get their clothes dry. At about three o’clock the next morning, we

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road. The Germans must have been watching us: they put out a mine. We hit the tripwire when driving back. The blast blew the jeep 20 feet in the air, and when it came down, three of the guys were crushed underneath. The driver and I were thrown clear and survived.

That might have been your ticket home.

hiked two or three miles to board a train of cattle cars. The cars had been used for livestock—you can imagine the smell. Someone threw in bales of hay before closing the doors. To keep the snow out, we picked the bales apart and stuffed straw into the big cracks in the floorboards and sides. We received our orders when we reached a replacement depot just outside Paris. I got assigned to the 575th Field Artillery Battalion down in what was called the Colmar Pocket, in Alsace. Most people have never even heard of it: the French part of the Battle of the Bulge. The French were getting murdered; they didn’t have a piece of artillery. On January 3, 10 of us got off a train on the outskirts of the Pocket. They took us in at night. The battalion had only been there a couple days before I arrived. They hadn’t even set up the guns. First, I was assigned to headquarters. I was pretty good at typing from high school; I knew Morse code, and I had trained on the German decoding machine at Fort Bragg. The soldier doing those things had been killed, so I got busy with that until I got wounded.

When did that happen?

A couple weeks after I got there. Five of us in a jeep were on reconnaissance, looking for a place to set up a gun. We went down a wooded

Once across the Rhine, where did your unit go?

We just went on to German cities like Mannheim, Stuttgart, Munich. Sometimes we were shelling cathedrals and churches— which I’m not proud of—but the Germans were using church towers for observation. War is war.

How long before you finally went home?

I was overseas a year and a half. When the war was over, General George S. Patton wanted a headquarters in Heidelberg, Germany; I was in his headquarters in late 1945 when he got killed. I came back home, exactly to the day, two years from the time I was inducted. I hadn’t realized it, but they were holding a rural letter carrier job for me at the Staatsburg post office. I got home, I think, on a Friday. And Monday morning I went to work at the post office. H

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A gun crew from Osterhoudt’s unit, the 575th Field Artillery Battalion, loads their M1 8-inch gun near Berstheim, France.

I was in a field hospital for two weeks. After that, I went fulltime on the guns. I guess I did well because I wasn’t sent back to headquarters. Every two or three days, we moved to a different location, always traveling at night. Half the time you didn’t know where you were. In February we started to get into mud. We had more trouble in the mud than we did in the snow. We had gigantic tracked vehicles called prime movers that we used for towing heavy artillery. Each gun weighed more than 20 tons. The vehicles were so heavy that when we eventually crossed the Rhine, we went across a pontoon bridge, driving between flags in two feet of water. We didn’t know where the pontoons were.

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German prisoners of the Soviets were treated with notorious harshness—so how rare is this letter home from one imprisoned Wehrmacht soldier?

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE Curators at The National World War II Museum solve readers’ artifact mysteries

My German grandmother gave me this document. Her two younger brothers served in the Wehrmacht. The older brother was killed fighting in Yugoslavia; the younger brother, Johann, was captured on the Russian Front. The family didn’t know what had happened to him until they received this postcard, dated August 14, 1947; he returned to Germany several years later. I’ve always wondered: was it a common practice for the USSR to allow prisoners to write home? —Michael O’Donnell, Huntington Station, N.Y. Your great-uncle Johann Schulze was one of nearly 2.4 million Germans the Soviet Union captured during the war. Research by historian Mark Edele, a specialist in Soviet history, has found that 356,687 of them died in captiv-

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

COURTESY OF MICHAEL O’DONNELL (BOTH)

FROM THE FOOTLOCKER

ity. Tens of thousands of others remain unaccounted for, the causes of death unknown. The harsh climate and postwar deprivations made life difficult for the prisoners—as did vengeance for the boundless destruction and devastation the Nazis had caused. At the war’s end, many in German uniform did all they could to surrender to the forces of the Western Allies, not wanting to be captured by the Soviets. Yet Soviet prisoners of the Germans fared even worse, with an estimated 43 to 63 percent perishing while captive—many murdered alongside civilians in concentration and death camps. In the years following the war, the Soviet Union used German POWs as forced laborers; the last prisoner was released from captivity in 1955 following petitions by West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. It’s difficult to know for certain how many German prisoners were able to complete a note like Johann’s. Research into the Soviets’ treatment of German POWs has been complicated by closed archives and an ongoing politicization of the issue; Edele states that “sources are a problem.” The United States held roughly as many German POWs as the Soviets—under much different circumstances. The National WWII Museum’s archive contains letters from Germans held in Louisiana as well as in the American Zone of Occupation in Germany. As it did with your uncle, the International Red Cross facilitated this contact with the outside world. The letters home bear messages strikingly similar to that of Johann, who wrote: “Dear parents, your Johann sends you a couple of short sentences from prison. Hoping that all is going well for you all? I hope to see you again soon. With greetings to you all, Johann.” Comparatively, Johann was spared the worst. He was one of the lucky ones, returning to grow old with his family. —Kim Guise, Senior Curator and Director for Curatorial Affairs

WORLD WAR II

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BY JAMES HOLLAND

RETURN TO THE BEACHES I’M WRITING THIS FRESH FROM NORMANDY, where I attended a street-naming ceremony for the Sherwood Rangers, a British armored regiment that had gone to war on horseback—posted to Palestine in early 1940— been mechanized two years later, and, by May 1945, had accrued more battle honors than any other single unit in the British Army. They landed on Gold Beach on D-Day, supporting the infantry of the 231st “Malta” Brigade, part of the first wave. I’ve done a lot of research on the Sherwood Rangers, who, with their Sherman tanks, were a fabulous bunch of misfits, eccentrics, charmers, and larger-than-life characters. Many people might think there’s little left to write about D-Day, but that is far from the case. Debates still rage, for example, about who exactly landed where and when on Gold Beach, to the east of Omaha, in the British sector. One can read half a dozen accounts and each one will tell you a different story. My challenge has been to try to unravel what really happened once and for all on the western half of Gold Beach—code-named “Jig” sector. The challenge is that eyewitness testimonies are unreliable sources of detailed information about timing—not least because assault troops had better things to worry about than checking their wristwatches. Unit war diaries are also questionable because they were usually written several days after the event and by headquarters officers who had not landed in the first wave. Then there is the difference between where and when the troops were supposed to land, and where they ended up—thanks to the tides, currents, and howling westerly winds that hit the landing craft broadside. Imagine those shallow draft vessels, their flat sides acting like sails, being bucked and rolled while under heavy fire. It’s a wonder they landed at all. I’ve nonetheless been reading personal testimonies and poring over unit war diaries and the logs and reports of the Royal Navy, which delivered the troops to the beaches. Naval records tend to be more reliable since ships’ logs have to be maintained all the time. I have, however, been using an additional—and watertight—source: aerial photographs taken by American

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airmen of the Ninth Air Force in their F-5s, photo-reconnaissance versions of the P-38 Lightning. The four sorties flown over Gold Beach on D-Day—the first between 10:30 and 11 a.m., the last between 1 and 2 p.m.—and the resulting photographs have proved revelatory: we see the Sherwood Rangers’ tanks snaking through inland villages far earlier than they were supposed to have been there; others knocked out on the beaches; columns of vehicles coming off the beaches much farther east than planned; and roads empty during the first sortie but full of traffic a half-hour later. Cross-referencing these aerial photos with Google Maps—surprisingly easy to do—meant I could measure distances and work out locations precisely to a matter of tens of yards. The infantry had arrived 800 yards east of where they should have been. The Sherwood Rangers’ C Squadron landed on their eastern flank, while its B Squadron arrived as planned, by German bunker WN37 at Le Hamel; the idea was that in tandem with the infantry, they would swiftly knock out that strongpoint. Unfortunately for B Squadron, however, since the infantry was far to the east, the Shermans landed on their own. The F-5 photos show a lone Sherman bereft on the beach, knocked-out by the antitank gun facing dow n the shore from Le Hamel. Some time ago, I interviewed the crew’s only survivor, Bert Jenkins. “I never saw any infantry,” Bert told me. “Not a soul.” Because they weren’t there. Matching the D-Day photos to today’s satellite map showed that the tank stood about 250 yards from the embrasure of the German antitank gun. On D-Day’s 78th anniversary, I measured the distance, walked to the spot, and paused, thinking of Bert; his commander, Lieutenant Monty Horley; and the other crew—four men who gave their lives on D-Day. It was a profoundly moving moment, but an enlightening one too. H

WORLD WAR II

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STORY AND PHOTOS BY JESSICA WAMBACH BROWN

BOMBERS IN THE BIG SKY

THE B-17’S FOUR ENGINES hummed in Sergeant Elmer Ruschman’s ears on the morning of June 6, 1944, as he wondered whether the ominous clouds concealing the English Channel below would lift in time for the 429th Bomb Squadron’s assault on German pillboxes lining the Normandy coast. The 23-year-old radio operator had grown accustomed to flying in volatile weather the previous summer as the Flying Fortress crew practiced bombing runs over the wheat and mustard fields of northern Montana. My eyes are also fixed on the sky as U.S. Highway 2 winds east down from the Rocky Mountains, fewer than 50 miles south of the Canadian border, and drops me in the rolling plains of the 1.5-million-acre Blackfeet Indian Reservation. On a clear day, a driver approaching Cut Bank International Airport— where Ruschman’s squadron trained—can spot the 60-foot-tall octogenarian airplane hangar from at least five miles out. Today, mid-April flurries obscure the view, and I miss my turn to the airport. I turn around at Cut Bank Creek, named by Meriwether Lewis, who admired the 150-foot cliffs etched by the elements above the riverbanks when he passed through here in 1806 to confirm the northern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase. Forty-nine years later, this Missouri River tributary became the eastern border of the Blackfeet Reservation. After the Great Northern Railway laid tracks over the creek in 1890, a small town sprang up on the east side as a commercial hub for regional farming and ranching. The community of Cut Bank thrived through the Great Depression due to an oil and gas boom and, in June 1941, opened Montana’s first international airport, three miles southwest of town, on private land within the reservation boundaries.

I pull into a gravel stall marked “long-term parking.” Roy Nollkamper, retired airport manager and cofounder of the Cut Bank Airmen’s Memorial Museum, welcomes me inside the modest terminal. Built in 1949 during the airport’s passenger service heyday, today it serves daily United Parcel Service runs and occasional private or medical flights. A young pilot with time to kill browses the impressive collection of artifacts that volunteers have amassed in the terminal’s tiny diner-turnedmuseum. A pair of Norden bombsights, practice bomb casings, and a B-17 cockpit window narrate the story of a far busier season. When the United States entered World War II, the heavily armed and notoriously sturdy Boeing B-17 was the long-range aircraft of choice to bomb enemy supply lines and support Allied ground forces. While Boeing began churning out more than 12,000 of the heavy bombers, the army looked for sparsely populated places to train the 10-man crews who would fly them. Northern Montana fit the bill nicely. On July 6, 1942, the U.S. 2nd Air Force approved plans to construct an air base at Great Falls, Montana, with satellite airfields in Cut Bank and the fellow small towns of Lewistown and

WORLD WAR II

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6/29/22 7:15 PM

INSET: COURTESY OF AIRMEN’S MEMORIAL MUSEUM

TRAVEL CUT BANK, MONTANA

COURTESY OF AIRMEN’S MEMORIAL MUSEUM

The military built Montana’s Cut Bank Army Airfield as a training base for B-17 bomber crews on land within the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Here a Flying Fortress comes in low on a practice flight.

INSET: COURTESY OF AIRMEN’S MEMORIAL MUSEUM

COURTESY OF AIRMEN’S MEMORIAL MUSEUM

Once the repair shop for wartime B-17s, the airfield’s original 60-foot-tall hangar now provides storage for a handful of small private planes. Inset: The base nears completion in the fall of 1942.

Glasgow, forming a rough triangle with a 300-mile hypotenuse. Four-squadron B-17 groups would be assigned to Great Falls, with one squadron from each group based there and the other three distributed among the satellite bases. Pilots, bombardiers, radio operators, engineers, and gunners would arrive at their assigned airfields fully trained in their specialties and learn to fly as crews, practicing long-range navigation and bombing in the landmark-less prairie before crossing the Atlantic for combat. Construction of all four bases began immediately. By late October, Cut Bank, like its sister airfields, had three paved runways and wood-frame barracks, mess halls, administration buildings, and other structures intended to last just five to seven years. With the 352nd Air Base Squadron in place to manage operations, Cut Bank Army Airfield officially opened on November 11, 1942. The 260-some men of the 2nd Bombardment Group’s 429th Bomb Squadron arrived for training later that month. Then, as now, the most prominent structure was the colossal 160-by120-foot hangar—one of few remaining original buildings, along with the enlisted men’s recreation hall, the armament building, and a shed for storing flammable liquids. On the short walk from the terminal, I notice that the paint job on the hangar’s asbestos-sided western façade, completed eight years ago, has taken a beating from the incessant gusts that plague this part of Montana. “The wind vibrates the nails right out of this stuff,” Nollkamper’s voice echoes as we step inside the cavernous building. The scent of oil overwhelms me as I admire how tiny the eight private Cessnas and Pipers parked along the sides seem in a space designed to barely hold a pair of B-17s. When the original mechanical doors—replaced by smaller sliders in 1962—folded open to welcome a Flying Fortress, the sound thundered all the way into town. Despite the noise, the community was proud to host the base. Cut Bank Pioneer Press articles of the day tell of soldiers joining locals for holiday meals, ring-necked pheasant hunts, and 50-mile Sunday drives to Glacier National Park. The Blackfeet tribe adopted dozens of airmen in elaborate cultural celebrations. Even when temperatures dropped well below zero, off-duty airmen would load into canvas-backed army trucks for the bumpy

ride into town to catch a high school basketball game or patronize the USO in the basement of the yellow stucco Masonic temple that still stands on Main Street. Cut Bankers donated phonographs, furniture, games, and books to fill the enlisted men’s recreation hall. A dozen years ago, not long after the airport had rehabilitated the 40-by-132-foot building from a postwar stint as a rabbit-breeding facility, a tornado-strength microburst blew the western two-thirds of it across the nearby highway. The airport used Army Corps of Engineers blueprints to reconstruct it to original specifications. Nollkamper credits the rabbit waste with preserving the blue lines of a wartimeera shuffleboard court on the slick cement floor. Grubby past aside, it’s not a stretch to imagine romances budding beneath streamer-adorned rafters there—at least 20 visiting airmen married local women. AUTUMN 2022

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WHEN YOU GO

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Local hospitality prompted the 429th to pen a letter of superlative gratitude to the town in December 1942. “Perhaps someday, in the not-too-distant future,” the anonymous author wrote in the Pioneer Press, “you will read your paper and say, ‘I remember that squadron—they were part of us for a while.’” Indeed, these airmen made an indelible mark on the war. The 429th, together with the other three squadrons that trained here—the 385th Bombardment Group’s 550th Bomb Squadron, the 390th’s 569th Bomb Squadron, and the 401st’s 613th Bomb Squadron—would fly more than 1,200 missions in North Africa and Europe, including Elmer Ruschman and crew’s D-Day run. Collectively, the squadrons dropped 71,000 tons of bombs, shot down more than 1,000 enemy aircraft, and earned six presidential unit citations. The most widely publicized veteran was probably Skippy, the pit bull a Cut Bank high schooler gifted to a 429th pilot. Equipped with a homemade oxygen mask, the dog flew more than 200 hours over Tunisia and Sicily. The snow has retreated, so Nollkamper and I explore the crumbling concrete hardstands where squadrons tethered their B-17s each night. We cruise the primary southwest-bound runway in his

Honda, stopping where the modern pavement ends at just over a mile. I poke through the bunchgrass and consider whether the reddish gravel beneath could be debris from the army’s original runway, which was 50 feet wider and extended another 2,800 feet. The heavy B-17s needed plenty of room when they took off to rendezvous with sister squadrons and pummel the prairie with sandfilled practice bombs. Nollkamper still gets calls from farmers who find old shells in their fields. He hopes to add some to the museum when funding allows for a move to the armament building where the B-17s’ machine guns were stored each night. The expanding collection includes the blue-and-yellow Link Trainer flight simulator in which dozens of pilots who trained at the airfield polished their flying skills. For years after the base closed, Cut Bank High School aeronautics students, including Nollkamper, used the trainer to get a feel for the thrill of flight. Like today’s snow flurries, the army withdrew from Cut Bank and the other satellite airfields rather suddenly in October 1943, and without explanation. In 1948, the land was turned over to the city and Glacier County, which repurposed a few buildings and parceled out the rest to locals for home and commercial construction projects. I end my day in town, walking the cliffs above Cut Bank Creek as the rosy hues of sunset disappear behind the jagged outline of the Rockies. On the drive out, I scan the rows of houses in vain for evidence of the scrapped army buildings. The physical relics, like the memory of the airfield’s wartime past, have blended discretely into Cut Bank’s quiet streets. H

WHERE TO STAY AND EAT Cut Bank has a few modest hotels, and the Glacier County Historical Museum (glaciermuseum.org) offers overnight experiences in early 20th-century bunkhouses. It’s just an hour’s drive west to the finer accommodations of Glacier National Park, like the St. Mary Village (facebook. com/StMaryVillage) and the Cottages at Glacier (thecottagesatglacier.com). Fuel up with all-day breakfasts at Cut Bank’s Big Sky Café (tel: 406-873-0688) or bold regional appetizers like Rocky Mountain oysters—the pleasantly distracting name for fried bull testes—at The Village Dining & Lounge (tel: 406-873-5005).

WHAT ELSE TO SEE AND DO Be sure to take in Glacier Park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road, an engineering marvel and exceptionally scenic mountain road surrounded by waterfalls and wildlife; check the seasonal opening times at nps.gov/glac. Try to time your visit with early July’s three-day North American Indian Days (facebook.com/ NDNDAYS) celebration in Browning—about 30 miles west of Cut Bank—featuring traditional Blackfeet drumming, dancing, games, and horse relays.

MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

From the scenic bluffs on the east side of Cut Bank Creek, locals watched airplanes come and go from the airfield three miles distant.

The Cut Bank International Airport and Airmen’s Memorial Museum (cutbankairport.org/airmensmuseum) is a 100-mile drive northwest along the B-17s’ flight path from the nearest commercial airport in Great Falls. Fly into Kalispell to add 25 miles and stunning views of the south side of Glacier National Park (nps.gov/ glac).

WORLD WAR II

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WHEN THINGS GET TOUGH A common misperception has the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps battling each other throughout the Pacific War. The truth was far different By Henry Sledge

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7/11/22 10:17 AM

A soldier of the U.S. Army’s 81st Infantry Division (opposite, center) joins 1st Division Marines in carrying a wounded comrade down from the ridges on Peleliu Island.

AUTUMN 2022

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original, unedited manuscript contained a wealth of material not included in the published book. The manuscript resides in a collection of papers and artifacts he had donated to Alabama’s Auburn University shortly before his death in 2001. I contacted the archivists there, who gave me a copy of it. Then I sat down with the published book in one hand and a highlighter in the other and, line by line, went through the entire manuscript. What I found after going through all 820 pages was an untold story: not of battlefield horrors, but respect and admiration. —Henry Sledge

IN SEPTEMBER 1944, just before three regiments—the 1st, 5th, and 7th Marines—of the 1st Marine Division were to invade tiny Peleliu in the western Pacific’s Palau Islands on the 15th, news correspondents were issued a sealed letter from the division commander, Major General William Rupertus, predicting a rough but fast fight of three days. “His forecast colored the tactical thinking ashore for much of the next month,” Sledge wrote in With the Old Breed. “Because of his optimism, many of the 36 news correspondents never went ashore; of those who did, only six stayed through the early critical stages of the

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FROM TOP: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

Author Henry Sledge with his father, Eugene B. Sledge, in 1969.

n May 1945, during the battle of Okinawa, Corporal Eugene B. Sledge and his comrades in K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division, were advancing across some muddy hills just past the southern highlands of Shuri when they came across a group of about 20 Japanese prisoners. An army language officer ordered the prisoners to make way for the filthy, weary column of Marines as they trudged toward the sound of distant firing. Then one defiant prisoner blocked the Marines’ path, and things heated up quickly. Sledge’s buddy, a fellow rifleman, shoved the prisoner and “sent him sprawling into the mud,” as Sledge wrote in his 1981 classic With the Old Breed. Sledge—known as “Sledgehammer” to his fellow Marines—described how the prisoner sprang up quickly to again block the path. “What’s that crazy bastard doing?” Sledge yelled, dropping his mortar ammo bag and reflexively reaching for his .45 pistol. Sledge described his buddy as “the picture of bearded ferocity” as he faced down the prisoner. The army officer, a lieutenant Sledge remembered as “spotless except for some muddy combat boots,” hurried forward to assess the problem. As he lectured the Marines about mistreating prisoners, a K Company officer intervened to tell the lieutenant that he’d better get his prisoners out of the way. He did. “There was a flurry of cursing and grumbling from the column of raggedy-ass Marines as we had to double time to catch up with the rest of K Company,” Sledge recalled. In that small moment, amid the obvious enmity between two groups of enemies, was an undercurrent of friction between two groups on the same side. Interservice rivalry during the war was not uncommon. Certainly there were a plethora of examples of such behavior between the Marine Corps and the U.S. Army. The most notable was the infamous “Smith vs. Smith” clash on Saipan in June 1944, when the senior officer ashore, Marine Lieutenant General Holland M. Smith—believing the army troops there had moved too slowly on an important attack— abruptly relieved the commander of the army’s 27th Infantry Division, Major General Ralph C. Smith, and ordered him off the island. A bitter Marine Corps-U.S. Army dispute developed, lingering even beyond the war and coloring our collective understanding of the fighting in the Pacific to this day. Yet—at least if Sledge’s experiences serve as any barometer—those instances were exceptions. While a certain amount of interservice rivalry is to be expected and probably even encouraged in organizations where unit pride and cohesion are essential, events during the battles of Peleliu and Okinawa that Sledge recounted both in With the Old Breed and in unpublished sections of the manuscript show that under that rivalrous veneer, there was a consistent layer of mutual respect and willingness to work together to achieve a greater goal.

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SOME OF MY EARLIEST MEMORIES of growing up in Montevallo, Alabama, in the 1970s are of seeing my father, Eugene B. Sledge, sitting up late at night in front of the fireplace writing on yellow legal pads. He seemed lost in thought— as if in a faraway place—and kept a small brown Bible close by, holding pieces of paper that he referred to repeatedly. As I got older, I realized he was writing the manuscript for what would become his memoir of serving in the Marines in the Pacific during World War II. I was a teenager in 1981 when With the Old Breed was published. Acclaimed for its honesty and humility in depicting the vicious fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa, the book inspired in me a keen interest in his World War II service, and in World War II history in general. In a conversation with my mother last fall, she reminded me that dad’s

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Heavy fire pins down 1st Division Marines as they come ashore Peleliu’s Orange Beach 3 on September 15, 1944. Sledge’s unit had landed earlier that day to their left.

battle.” Thus, he concludes, the reporters— and the rest of the world—saw little of what actually happened. What happened was a protracted slaughter-fest. On Peleliu the Japanese took full advantage of the island’s coral ridges, canyons, and ravines to construct a vast, interconnected network of caves and tunnels. They deeply fortified these positions and made the Americans pay dearly for every yard of the island. It was defense in depth. It was brutally effective, well executed, and a harbinger for what lay ahead in the Pacific. In a series of ridges on the western side of Peleliu, known collectively as the Umurbrogol, the Japanese defenders exacted horrific casualties. Yet, disdainful of his 81st Infantry Division colleagues on the same task force, the III Amphibious Corps, and convinced the army troops were not needed, Rupertus refused to ask for reinforcements. The men of the 81st went on to a tough fight of their own on an island six miles to the south, Angaur, securing it on September 20. At the same time, after a little more than a week on Peleliu, more than half the Marines there—1,749 of them—became casualties. The overall commander of the task force, the Marine Corps’ Major General Roy Geiger, overruled Rupertus, ordering the army in for help. Soldiers, having already fought at Angaur, landed on Peleliu on September 23.

Some two days later, Sledge and his comrades of the 5th Marines were shocked as they walked along a narrow road and saw the shattered remnants of the 1st Marines—who had been the first to go into the ridges—filing past them to return to Pavuvu Island, some 2,000 miles to the southeast. The 5th Marines, having set up defensive positions on a southern beach, were about to board trucks that would take them up to a new position along the ridges’ western side. As they arrived onsite shortly thereafter, Sledge saw the 1st Marines’ replacements—the army veterans of Angaur—digging into their positions. “As I exchanged a few remarks with some of these men, I felt a deep comradeship and respect for them,” he wrote in With the Old Breed. “Reporters and historians like to write about interservice Eugene Sledge’s rivalry among military men; it certainly exists, acclaimed account of but I found that front-line combatants in all the fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa was first branches of the service showed a sincere mutual published in 1981. For respect when they faced the same danger and a rare view of Sledge’s misery. Combat soldiers and sailors might call us war, see “Into the ‘gyrenes,’ and we called them ‘dogfaces’ and ‘swab- Abyss” on page 40. bies,’ but we respected each other completely.” By October 5, the 7th Marines were finished as an effective fighting force after taking their turn in the ridges of the Umurbrogol—and suffered still more casualties as they moved out of their positions the following day. It was now the 5th Marines’ turn to relieve them. Two days later, the 5th Marines assaulted up a large draw on the east side called Horseshoe Valley. Since the 1st Marine Tank Battalion had been relieved a week earlier, six tanks of the army’s 710th Tank Battalion supported them. Sledge reflected on the symbiotic relationship between the army AUTUMN 2022

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tankers and his fellow Marines: “In the estimation of the Marines, the army tankers did a good job. Here the tanks operated with our riflemen attached. It was a case of mutual support. The tanks pulled up to the caves and fired into them point-blank with their 75mm cannon— wham bam. Their machine guns never seemed to stop. A tank unattended by riflemen was doomed to certain destruction from enemy suicide crews carrying mines. And the riflemen got a lot of protection from the tanks.” The battle wore on, with the 7th and 5th Marines ultimately suffering nearly as many casualties as the 1st Marines, as the regiments tried to eliminate Japanese resistance in the ridges. At last, after the overall battle had been underway for 30 days, soldiers of the 81st Division moved in to take over for the 5th Marines. During the morning of October 15, men of the 2nd Battalion, 321st Infantry Regiment, began moving single-file into Sledge’s location. “I couldn’t believe it! We were being relieved at last!,” he rejoiced in With the Old Breed. “As the soldiers filed by us into position, a buddy squatting on his helmet eyed them critically and remarked, ‘Sledgehammer, I don’t know about them dogfaces. Look at how many of ’em wearin’ glasses, and they look old enough to be my daddy. Besides, them pockets on their dungaree pants sure do look baggy.’” “They look fine to me,” Sledge responded. “They’re our replace-

As our convoy neared our objective, we began to hear Japanese propaganda messages in English over the radio loudspea ker in the galley (aboard USS McCracken). There were threats that Kamikaze aircraft would cripple our f leet. There would also be massive attacks against our ships by suicide torpedo boats driven by men dedicated to their emperor. Knowing the Japanese willingness to die, we didn’t take the threats lightly—although we acted as though we did.

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Brought in to relieve men of the 1st Marine Division, soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 81st Infantry Division advance up a sleep slope on Peleliu. “I couldn’t believe it! We’re being relieved at last!” a grateful Sledge wrote.

IN APRIL 1945, the war in the Pacific came closer to the Japanese home islands when U.S. forces invaded Okinawa. This island— many times larger than Peleliu and only 350 miles from Japan—was defended by approximately 110,000 troops of the Japanese Thirty-Second Army under Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima. The commander of all U.S. ground forces at Okinawa, Lieutenant General Simon B. Buckner, had more than 500,000 men at his disposal. Yet the Japanese had a distinct advantage in the terrain, and the defense-in-depth strategy that had been so costly to U.S. forces at Peleliu would be practiced to an even higher degree within the topographical opportunities Okinawa’s mountains and ridges offered. Marines and soldiers would be working together in this epic battle to a larger degree than ever before. While Japanese infantrymen were no longer sacrificing themselves in banzai charges, suicide tactics were still very much a part of their overall strategy. In a section of Eugene Sledge’s unpublished writing, he noted:

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ments!” And then to one of the soldiers he added, “We sure are glad to see you guys.” Despite suffering horrifying casualties all the while, the three regiments of the 1st Marine Division had compressed the enemy holdouts in a particularly rugged section of the central ridges—the Umurbrogol Pocket— into an area of about 400 by 500 yards. Even so, and with the soldiers of the 81st Division now applying constant pressure and inflicting incessant attrition on the Japanese as they advanced, the fighting for Peleliu would not end for another six weeks—on November 27, 1944—and the U.S. Army would pay its own steep price in blood.

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Early on, the U.S. Army’s 77th Infantry Division took a significant step toward reining that menace in. The day before the invasion, the 77th raided a group of small islands off Okinawa and destroyed hundreds of Japanese “Shinyo” kamikaze boats hidden there. Sledge praised the 77th for erasing a major threat to the invasion fleet. The campaign’s early stages called for Marine and army forces to come ashore at the mid-section of Okinawa’s west coast. Two Marine divisions from General Geiger’s reorganized III Amphibious Corps, the 1st and 6th, would advance to the north, and two army divisions, the 7th and 96th of the XXIV Corps, would advance to the south until they cut the island in two, at which point the Marines would turn left and move north, and the army forces would turn right and move south. A third army division, the 27th Infantry Division, would be held in floating reserve until needed; backing up the XXIV Corps was the 77th Infantry Division. The landing on Okinawa went virtually unchallenged, a pleasant surprise for Marines after what had happened on Peleliu. “The amtrac crewman and his driver filled us in on what they had seen—there was practically no Japanese opposition!” Sledge recorded. “When we overcame our astonishment, everybody started laughing and joking.” As they dug in the first night ashore, every Marine and soldier who had experienced the enervating heat of earlier campaigns like Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester, Bougainville, and Peleliu delighted in the cooler weather. Sledge had to put on his wool-lined field jacket. “Temperatures in the sixties seemed cold to us who had been in the tropics for months and months,” he noted in another unpublished section of his manuscript. “Several men commented that they felt pity for the army infantrymen fighting in cold weather in Europe. We realized that regardless of how hot it was (with the possible exception of Peleliu’s 115-degree temperatures) living conditions would be even more miserable in colder climates. The field jacket felt mighty good.” The reprieve would not last long. Shortly after the men learned of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death on April 12—as the 1st Marine Division secured central Okinawa and the Eastern Islands on the edge

The fight turned even more vicious at Okinawa. Above left: 27th Infantry Division soldiers use grenades to flush doomed enemy troops out of a pillbox. Above: Sledge, in his tent at Okinawa. His experiences would haunt him for decades.

of Chimu Wan Bay—the 6th Marine Division moved north to secure the upper part of the island. It was on this terrain that they encountered strongly fortified enemy positions on the high ground of the Motobu Peninsula. It was a costly seven-day campaign. To the south the three army divisions, including the 27th Infantry Division, were also having a tough fight. They had all they could handle and were making little progress. Around the middle of April, the 1st Marine Division’s artillery regiment, the 11th Marines, moved south to assist the army offensive. Sledge noted that the “Japanese defenses were so strong that all available artillery was needed to support the infantry.” When 30 U.S. Army tanks, along with the 27th Infantry Division, attacked one of the main Japanese defensive lines on southern Okinawa, Ka kazu R idge, they suffered extremely heavy losses. As the tanks separated from their infantry, 22 of them were destroyed. This would turn out to directly affect the 1st Marine Division. Said Sledge: “It drew us into the abyss.” It became necessary to commit the 1st Marine Tank Battalion to assist the 27th Infantry Division. Naturally, this invited sardonic comments from Marine infantrymen AUTUMN 2022

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I sat on my helmet near the rear of the tank. He put aside his helmet and stripped to the waist. As he stood behind the turret, we talked while he began various maintenance chores on his tank. He was a friendly sort of fellow and said they had just come back from up front where they had been supporting Marines. He said the Japanese opposition up there was as rough as ever. His tanks now had orders to leave and return to an army infantry division for its support. “I guess you’ll be glad of that,” I said. “Why, no I won’t,” he said. “Well, I’ve heard that Marines have a bad reputation for being too aggressive and trying to push too hard on an attack.” The soldier stopped his work, straightened up, and looked at me, and said, “Buddy, you guys got a great outfit and I like working with Marines. When things get tough with you guys and anybody has to haul ass, everybody hauls ass together. It ain’t none of this crap of infantry getting separated and every man for himself.” The combined might of the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Army went on to carry the day on Okinawa—which, by the time the bloody fight ended on June 22, 1945, had become the costliest battle in the Pacific. For Sledge and his company, though, the horrors were not yet over:

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who did not want to see their fellow tankers employed piecemeal after such disastrous losses. Both the overall force commander, General Geiger, and the ground force commander, General Buckner, believed that Marine tanks and infantry should be deployed intact, so the entire 1st Marine Division was to relieve the 27th Infantry Division. “We were not elated at this,” Sledge noted, “but it meant that our division would fight as a unit and not as a battalion put into the line here or there. I heard some remarks from my buddies that amounted to strenuous and bitter objection to sending our Marine tankers to join an Army division that had lost so many of its own.” As the Marines moved along a road bordered by shell-pocked potato fields toward what Sledge called the “crash and thunder of Japanese mortar and artillery shells, the rattle of machine guns, and the popping of rifles,” they saw the weary men of the 27th Infantry Division they would be replacing coming toward them. “These men,” he wrote, “were obviously dead beat.” The dismal cycle of every Pacific battle fought against the Japanese thus far repeated itself in the ridges and mud fields of southern

Okinawa: fighting strongly emplaced Japanese troops and rooting them out in attritional fighting—only on Okinawa this took place in torrential rains and muddy conditions that Sledge reckoned were much like the trenches of Flanders in World War I. One day in early May, not long after a failed Japanese offensive in the approaches to Shuri, three or four Shermans from an army tank unit halted near Sledge’s foxhole, and he had a revealing conversation with one of the tankers. In another unpublished section of his manuscript, Sledge recorded what happened:

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An M4 Sherman with the army’s 763rd Tank Battalion—accompanied by troops from the 96th Infantry Division—blasts its way through an Okinawa minefield on April 6, 1945.

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expressed great interest, interrupting the general with, “Mr. they were ordered to bury enemy dead and Sledge was in the 1st Marine Division on Okinawa.” salvage equipment from the battlefield. When “Oh, your division relieved mine on Okinawa,” General Griner they got word of the dropping of the first said. atomic bomb on Japan and, finally, on August My wife told him she had heard it was always the other way 15, news of Japan’s surrender, he and his comaround, with the army relieving the Marines. He laughed at that. rades reacted with a mixture of disbelief and extreme relief. Sledge did a short spell of The conversation turned to the Pacific War and the Smith vs. Smith occupation duty in China and, in early 1946, matter—a subject the two men, who formed a friendship, would repeatreturned home. edly revisit over the years. General Griner had been particularly ON HIS WAY HOME, Eugene Sledge came impacted, as he was the officer assigned to replace Major General Ralph C. Smith as 27th Division commander. But there was no trace of anithrough the Atlanta railway station. “Shortly after I stepped off the car for a mosity in him toward the Marine Corps. “I was always impressed with stroll, a young army infantryman walked up his fairmindedness regarding the matter,” Sledge remembered. “He to me and shook hands,” he recalled. “He said told me he had great admiration for the Marine Corps, and I believe he he had noticed my 1st Marine Division patch held absolutely no bitterness toward Marines at all. However, he told and the campaign ribbons on my chest and me he felt General Holland Smith was prejudiced against the army.” The general also took pains to mention his high regard for the 1st wondered if I had fought at Peleliu. When I said I had, he told me he just wanted to express Marine Division troops who relieved the 27th on southern Okinawa. his undying admiration for men of the 1st Sledge quotes the army commander as saying: “I told a member of my staff that’s the finest bunch of young men I have ever seen in uniform.” Marine Division.” He explained that he had fought with the 81st Infantry Division, which had come in to WHILE CERTAINLY THE RELATIONSHIP between the U.S. support the Marines on the island. A machine Marines and the U.S. Army was not perfect, on both Peleliu and Okigunner, he had been hit by Japanese fire in the nawa the dedication, training, and bravery of these fighting forces ridges and became separated from his army united them in their common goal of defeating the Japanese. Sledge’s comrades. He knew that when darkness fell, experiences belie the common misconception that most Marines in either his wound or the Japanese would kill World War II looked down upon soldiers and vice versa. In truth, him. Then some Marines, risking their own Marines like Sledge and his comrades forged a strong partnership lives, moved in and carried him to safety. with their U.S. Army cohorts based on mutual respect, and occasionWrote Sledge: “The soldier said he was so ally admiration. With great frequency, they ate together, drank impressed by the bravery, efficiency, and esprit together, fought together, and sometimes even died together. H of the Marines he saw on Peleliu that he swore to thank every veteran of the 1st Marine Division he ever ran across.” Sledge noted similar sentiments when, several years after the war, he was introduced to Major General George W. Griner Jr., the commanding officer of the 27th Infantry Division during the Okinawa campaign. In an unpublished a necdote, Sledge described a dinner he and his wife, Jeanne, had with Horace and Mabry Spotswood, some friends in Mobile, Having just replaced Alabama. They were introduced to the 27th Infantry Mabry’s mother and her father—GenDivision on the eral Griner. Sledge remembered: frontlines, men of Mrs. Griner and I were chatting pleasantly together, and the conversation drifted to the war, a subject then still very much on everyone’s mind. She asked me what unit I had served with. I told her, and she

the 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division, already evidence the steep cost of battle.

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INTO THE ABYSS Relics of War with the Old Breed

Eugene B. Sledge (front row, right) and men of Company K, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, fought together through some of the Pacific War’s most savage battles. The 1st Marine Division—the Marine Corps’ oldest infantry division—was known as the “Old Breed.”

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ime had no meaning; life had no meaning,” Eugene B. Sledge wrote in his 1981 masterwork, With the Old Breed, describing some of the brutal, dehuma nizing f ig hting he and others faced in the Pacific at Peleliu in late 1944 and at Okinawa in spring 1945. “We existed in an environment totally incomprehensible to men behind the lines.” His book was an effort decades after the war to make the incomprehensible comprehensible, first to his family and then—at the urging of his wife, Jeanne, who ty ped the manuscript—to the greater public, which led to its publication. The resulting work was swiftly recognized as a classic. British military historian John Keegan described himself as “haunted” by the book, which he called “one of the most arresting documents in war literature.” Historian and World War II veteran Paul Fussell termed it “one of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war.” Documentarian Ken Burns drew on it for his 2007 film, The War, and it was an inspiration for the 2010 HBO miniseries The Pacific, with actor Joseph Mazzello playing Sledge. Yet for most of his life, Sledge—who died in 2001—was known not as a combat Marine but as a quiet and thoughtful family man, a lover of nature and music who taught biology at Alabama’s University of Montevallo. “My Pacific war experiences have haunted me, and it has been a burden to retain this story,” Sledge explained in the book’s preface. “But time heals, and the nightmares no longer wake me in a cold sweat with a pounding heart and racing pulse. Now I can write this story, painful though it is to do so.” On the following pages is a look at a rarely seen collection: Sledge’s personal artifacts from what he called the “abyss of war.” —Karen Jensen WORLD WAR II

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IN THE BEGINNING

Since men in combat weren’t permitted to keep diaries for security reasons, Sledge jotted notes about his experiences at Peleliu and Okinawa in a pocket New Testament he had received during basic training at Camp Elliott, near San Diego. The notes would form the basis of his book With the Old Breed, which he started working on in 1944 while at rest camp on Pavuvu Island. He drew up an outline shortly after returning home, and completed the book in the late 1970s.

ID CHECK

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Sledge’s dog tag. When he asked a recruiting sergeant why he had inquired about any scars, birthmarks, or unusual features, the man told him: “So they can identify you on some Pacific beach after the Japs blast off your dog tags.” Added Sledge: “This was my introduction to the stark realism that characterized the Marine Corps I later came to know.”

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INTO THE ABYSS

TOP IT OFF

Marked with the Marines’ “Eagle, Globe, and Anchor” insignia, this utility cover (visible in the photo on page 40) accompanied Sledge throughout the war—and on yardwork projects at home in the years after.

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Durable and workmanlike by design, this herringbone twill jacket—with Sledge’s initials written inside the collar—was part of the Marines’ utility uniform. Sledge referred to it as his “dungaree” jacket—a common Marine term that neatly avoided the army’s nomenclature for similar apparel: “fatigues.”

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THE LONG HAUL

Sledge’s combat pack carried a pair of socks, K-rations, hand grenades, writing paper and a small bottle of ink, a toothbrush, family photos, and more. Coveting it in his childhood years, Sledge’s youngest son, Henry, asked if he could use it to carry his schoolbooks “because my friends would think it was cool.” Adds Henry: “As I recall, he smiled and said, ‘I don’t think so, Big Shot.’”

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TOOL OF THE TRADE

The Marines’ Ka-Bar fighting knife, which Sledge praised for its quality and balance, makes repeated appearances in his book. He remembers his drill instructor saying, “Sure, you’ll probably open more cans of C-rations than Japs with this knife, but if a Jap ever jumps in your hole, you’re better off with a Ka-Bar than any other knife. It’s the very best and it’s rugged, too.”

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ANCHOR AWAY

A cap that came ashore at Peleliu with an infantryman of the Japanese Naval Landing Forces went home with Sledge. Souvenirs from enemy dead were highly sought after, and during lulls in fighting, Marines and soldiers gathered them from the fallen.

TO THE VICTOR

American combatants took to extracting gold teeth from Japanese dead. When Sledge made a move to follow suit, a comrade stopped him. “He was a good friend and a fine, genuine person whose sensitivity hadn’t been crushed out by the war,” a grateful Sledge recalled. “He was merely trying to help me retain some of mine.” Instead, Sledge removed and saved these Japanese Army enlisted soldier collar insignia.

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INTO THE ABYSS

LAST ACT

Among the most coveted battlefield prizes were hara-kiri knives, used in seppuku, ritual Japanese suicide. Sledge removed this one from a bunker on an island, Ngesebus, a few hundred yards north of Peleliu. “The men gloated over, compared, and often swapped their prizes,” Sledge wrote. “It was uncivilized, as is all war, and was carried out with that particular savagery that characterized the struggle between the Marines and the Japanese.”

TARGET ACHIEVED

This M1911 .45-caliber pistol had belonged to Sledge’s father, a doctor who’d been in the army in World War I and shipped it to Sledge once he was overseas. Since men weren’t supposed to return home with their issued weapons, Sledge carried paperwork establishing that the pistol was his. Henry Sledge remembers his dad saying of that final voyage, “When I got down to the bottom of the gangplank I had to show the lieutenant something that proved the .45 was mine. I did, and I said, ‘Sir, this is my personal property,’ and he just waved me through.”

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Known as “War Daddy” to his crew, this tanker ace invariably wanted to lead the charge By Stephen L. Moore

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ALWAYS FORWARD

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Lafayette G. “War Daddy” Pool—all six foot two of him (top left)—straddles the commander’s hatch atop his M4A1 Sherman tank, In The Mood, as it crosses a pontoon bridge in Belgium on September 12, 1944.

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Pool, here in 1949, was a Texan with a talent for boxing, an affinity for cowboy boots, and—as a tank commander with the 32nd Armored Regiment of the 3rd Armored Division—a drive to lead the way in any attack.

large size and nicknamed the “Spearhead” Division, the 3rd Armored would see extensive action throughout Europe. Plans had been drawn up to ship In the Mood’s crew back home around the first of October to conduct a war bonds tour and give speeches to rally American support for the war in Europe. Before heading home, though, Pool and his unit were to finish the push through Aachen, deeper into the heartland of Germany. It was an important drive that day, one that Pool’s crew would never forget. THE CELEBRATED TEXAN TANKER came from humble beginnings. Lafayette Green Pool was born on July 23, 1919, just five minutes after the birth of his twin brother, John Thomas Pool. The boys were raised in the small farming community of Odem, Texas, 20 miles from Corpus Christi and the southern Texas coast. As they grew older, the twins were sometimes called “L. G.” and “J. T.,” but Lafayette often went by “Lafe.” Upon graduation from high school in 1937, where Lafe was a star football player, he and John decided to enlist in the U.S. Navy. The older brother was accepted, but an eye injury Lafe had sustained at age five got him turned away. Instead, he enrolled in an all-boys Catholic prep school in Corpus Christi, graduated as class valedictorian in 1938, and began pursuing an engineering degree at the Texas College of Arts and Industries in Kingsville. To help pay for his education, Lafe Pool worked as a foreman on his father’s farm and took up boxing, earning cash prizes for winning matches. He continued to hone his skills in the Golden Gloves amateur league, but never lost sight of the military. When the national draft was instituted in September 1940, Pool enlisted in the U.S. Army, faking his way through the required vision test by memorizing the eye chart before his exam. In January 1942, Pool joined the 32nd Armored Regiment’s I Company and quickly worked his way up to tank commander with the rank of sergeant. He continued boxing, his nose crooked from his many bouts, becoming regional champ in his weight class and winning all 41 of his matches. A victory in a FebThe 32nd Armored’s war started when the regiment came ashore at Normandy on June 23, 1944 (top). Pool and crew swiftly began racking up victories against German vehicles, like this destroyed half-track.

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he directive took Staff Sergeant Lafayette G. Pool aback. For weeks, his olive-drab Sherman M4A1 medium tank, its sides painted in white block letters with the name In the Mood, had been in the lead position—the spearheader—for the 3rd Armored Division. But orders were orders. They came from a fellow Texan, an equally bold man whom Pool respected, Lieutenant Colonel Walter B. Richardson, the commander of the 3rd Armored Division task force to which Pool’s battalion belonged. “No spearheading today, Pool,” Richardson announced. It was September 19, 1944. The first rays of sunlight began to illuminate the silhouettes of dozens of tanks clustered in his bivouac area near Aachen, in western Germany. “You guys are heroes, and I want you going home to mama safe and sound. You take the flank.” Pool, a powerful man of six foot two with dark brown hair and sloping shoulders, looked hurt. Since his 32nd Armored Regiment had come ashore on the beaches of Normandy in late June, his tank crew had proven themselves time and again. By late that year the U.S. Army would conservatively credit In the Mood’s crew with the destruction of at least 275 enemy vehicles (including at least six German tanks), 250 enemy soldiers captured, and some 1,000 enemy soldiers killed or captured. In the three-day span of August 29 to 31 alone, they had been credited with the destruction of four German tanks, three antitank guns, and approximately 50 armored vehicles. Senior officers were already in the process of writing up Pool for the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest military honor. Pool wondered momentarily what compelled his superior to hold them back now as they pushed into Germany. Then Richardson explained. America needed heroes back home to support the war effort. Pool and his four-man crew fit the bill. He was a bona fide tanker ace, and his crew’s reign of destruction exceeded that of any other five-man group in the 3rd Armored. Classified as a “heavy” division because of its

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THE MEN EXPECTED the push deeper into Germany that September 19 to be contested. Between July 26 and September 2, the 3rd Armored Division had covered nearly 300 miles, fighting across France and Belgium. Roughly two-thirds of the division’s 232 M4 Shermans had been disabled at least once and replaced or repaired along the way. The Spearhead Division had then pushed forward another 110 miles toward the historic German city of Aachen and Germany’s fortified “West Wall”—a defensive line of bunkers and concrete barriers along its western border known to the Allies as the Siegfried Line. During that time, crowds of cheering Belgian citizens had handed out chocolates, flowers, and bottles of booze to the first American soldiers they had seen. “I believe that I tasted every drink concocted coming through France and Belgium,” Bert Close wrote to his parents. En route to the town of Stolberg, six miles east of Aachen, In the Mood and other tanks penetrated the rows of concrete barriers called “Dragon’s Teeth.” During a three-day span, some 79 other Shermans, plus many more scout cars and half-tracks, had been hit and burned out while busting through the West Wall. Lieutenant Colonel Richardson, the task

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POOL’S CREW WAS SOLID, having regularly outscored other division crews in gunnery efficiency. That teamwork paid off against German armored forces in the 21 drives In the Mood led in August and early September. His driver was red-haired, 24-year-old Technician Fifth Grade Wilbert Richards, whose baby-faced looks earned him the nicknames “Bunny” and “Baby.” Behind the wheel of his Sherman, Richards was all business. “He could have parallel-parked that big Sherman

in downtown New York in rush hour traffic,” Pool remembered. His bow gunner and assistant driver, Corporal Bert Close, 19, was vicious in combat with his .30-caliber machine gun. Sporting wire-frame glasses, Close had been dubbed “School Boy” by Pool. In the Mood’s 76mm gunner was a 29-year-old from Illinois, Corporal Willis “Groundhog” Oller, whose perfectly placed shots had knocked out one German Panzer V Panther and Mark IV tank after another. Through each of their fights, Oller had been assisted by skinny-but-strong shell handler Technician Fifth Grade Delbert Boggs, 22, from West Virginia. Although Lafe Pool was younger than two of his crew men, they called him “ War Daddy”—a nod to a man burning with desire to be in the forwardmost position when engaging enemy forces. “He was confident of himself, and his attitude was good for us all,” Close recalled. They were stunned along with Pool when Lieutenant Colonel Richardson passed his orders to the team that they would soon be heading home on a war bonds tour.

FROM TOP: U.S. ARMY; SHARON LAYNE; WILLIS H. OLLER

Pool’s tight-knit and well-coordinated crew included (from top) bow gunner Bert Close, whom Pool called “School Boy”; loader Delbert Boggs; and gunner Willis “Groundhog” Oller.

ruary 1942 match earned Pool a spot at the Golden Gloves championship in Chicago, but he declined in order to master the latest M3 tank variant his division had just received. Duty clearly came first. After extensive training, Pool and his 32nd Armored Regiment boarded troopships in New York and, in September 1943, began the journey toward the European Theater. The 3rd Armored Division staged and trained in England, where Pool even managed to jump in the ring in spring 1944 for an exhibition match with the world heavyweight boxing champion, Joe Louis. Against the “Brown Bomber,” Pool suffered his first loss. Although not knocked out, he later admitted that Louis turned him “every which way but loose.” Less than two months later, on June 23, 1944, Pool and his regiment went ashore at Normandy to experience a different style of fighting. His first In the Mood Sherman—the name coming from a popular Glenn Miller Orchestra release—was knocked out six days later by a German Panzerfaust rocket that killed one of his crewmen. Pool then became the first tank commander in his regiment to be assigned the new M4A1(76)W Sherman variant, which sported a more lethal 76mm main gun. In late July his crew knocked out their first German Panther tank—the beginning of their string of successes. That In the Mood survived until August 17, when it was disabled by bombs dropped by an American Lockheed P-38 Lightning as Pool’s platoon was clearing German forces near the village of Fromental, France. Equipped with another M4A1(76)W in late August, the In the Mood crew was called on to assume the role of spearheading—taking the dangerous, most-forward position—as the 3rd Armored Division, on September 1, 1944, began advancing through Belgium and toward the German homeland.

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Belgian citizens hail an American tank on the streets of Mons on September 3, 1944 (top). The tankers pushed through Belgium and into Germany, first penetrating its “Dragon’s Teeth” barrier (left)— part of Germany’s Siegfried Line defensive wall.

force commander, was slated to oversee the push into Stolberg. The 1st Battalion of the 36th Armored Infantry Regiment would move out at 6:30 that morning to attack Münsterbusch, a western district of Stolberg, with the 3rd Battalion of the 32nd Armored Regiment, Richardson’s usual command, operating in direct support of the infantry. Not only was In the Mood not in the lead that day, but Pool’s loader, Del Boggs, was not with them. In preparation for the coming war bonds tour, he had been ordered to the medical station for a hearing test and dental work prior to shipping home. Although it wasn’t AUTUMN 2022

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stated directly, some thought he was being pulled for his own safety; his brother Charlie, who’d been in the same company as Del, had been killed in action two months prior, and Richardson certainly did not want to explain to Mrs. Boggs how he had lost both of her sons just before the second was to return home. That meant Pool was without the full-time loader who normally would have kept Groundhog Oller’s 76mm cannon firing without a pause. His bow gunner, Bert Close, had often helped pass ready ammunition to Boggs and Oller; now he’d have to serve as the primary loader. As Baby Richards maneuvered In the Mood behind several other Shermans, Close crawled out of his assistant driver’s seat in the tank’s right front and took a seat below Oller. At 3 p.m., Richardson ordered the task force to attack enemy forces at Münsterbusch. The Germans were heavily fortified with antitank guns, heavy artillery, and mortar platoons. On top that that, word arrived shortly later from the 83rd Armored Reconnaissance Battalion that four Panther tanks were moving about the area. At any time during the prior month, Lafe Pool would have ordered Richards to push their tank forward toward

the heart of the enemy’s position. Instead Pool reluctantly watched two other I Company Shermans advance toward Stolberg to sniff out the Panthers ahead of him. As Pool and the 3rd Platoon moved forward, they came under intense enemy fire. The forwardmost Sherman, in the spearhead position—an H Company tank—was struck by a German shell that killed or wounded four of the crew. Tank and artillery fire quickly suppressed this opposition, and by 4:30 the task force had broken through and continued into Stolberg. They advanced into the Münsterbusch area by 6:15 with a force from the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, that had been positioned just outside Aachen. Just before they reached Stolberg, a set of natural and manmade obstacles halted forward movement. Ahead lay a deep gully, with a set of railroad tracks along its side. It reminded Bert Close of a similar draw back home in Portland, Oregon. With the 3rd Platoon held up, First Lieutenant Edward Mangan, who had assumed command of I Company when its previous commander had been killed in late August, ordered the leading tank crew to reconnoiter the terrain for the safest point to cross. Then an I Company jeep came racing up from the rear. It screeched to a halt near Pool’s tank. As the dust settled, a young soldier hopped out and walked up to In the Mood. Private First Class Paul Kenneth King, 20, from Anderson County, Tennessee, told Pool, “I’m your loader for the day.” Pool invited the young man to climb aboard and assume the position as Oller’s shell loader. A relieved Close scrambled back into his usual assistant driver’s seat alongside Richards. As King was introduced to the crew, Mangan received word from his scout team that a crossing point through the ravine had been located. “Okay, Bunny, move out!” Pool called to Richards. Richards put In the Mood in gear and followed the procession of Shermans across the gorge. Back in his bow gunner’s seat, Close closed his upper hatch and raised his periscope; with word that four

BUNDESARCHIV BILD 101I-301-1955-31 PHOTO: B. KURTH

Camouflaged Panzer V “Panther” tanks lie in wait—here in northern France in summer 1944. That September, an intelligence alert about roaming Panthers had Pool’s crew on high alert.

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German Panthers were roaming about Stolberg, he decided that discretion was the better part of valor. Pool and Oller, standing in the turrets and peering through open hatches, chose otherwise as they scanned the terrain ahead. Trailing the procession with his light tank company of M3 Stuarts, Captain Olin Brewster spotted Lafe Pool in his typical command position—hatch open, standing half exposed as they drove forward. War Daddy was primed for action. As I Company ’s leading elements advanced through the ravine, Pool’s platoon came under fire from a well-hidden enemy on their right. In the heat of the action, no one was certain whether the incoming 88mm shells had come from a German tank or an antitank gun. It didn’t matter. Pool’s tank and those ahead of him were caught without warning in the German gunners’ crosshairs. The first barrage struck a nearby H Company tank. Pool shouted at Oller to take a shot. In the Mood’s regular loader, Del Boggs, had never missed a beat, but his replacement struggled to quickly load his next shell. Pool sensed that his gunner was unable to fire as quickly as needed. He wasn’t about to wait for the Germans to unleash another round. “Back her up, Baby!” he hollered. Richards shifted In the Mood into reverse, but before he could back up, the German antitank crew found its mark. A shell slammed into the front of the tank’s turret near where Pool and Oller were standing. To Pool, it sounded like a cathedral bell as the round passed through the turret and out the back side as if it were constructed of tissue paper. The path of destruction was devastating. The shell and shrapnel from the explosion hit the ammo racks, and a scrap of shell hit King in the head. It also sliced through Oller’s left leg and, behind him, through Pool’s right leg. The force of the explosion blew Pool out of the hatch. He hit the ground and tried to get to his feet, but his leg was nearly severed. He collapsed as the limb gave way under his weight. When Oller came to, he was on the ground about 20 yards behind the tank, having bailed out or been blown out of his hatch by the explosion; in the fog of pain and shock, the previous seconds were little more than a blur. He felt warm blood on his leg and looked

down. His left leg was ripped open just above the knee, with bone and tissue exposed as blood spurted from the wound. Inside In the Mood, two of his comrades were still alive. Richards and Close slammed their hatches open, ready to evacuate if the Sherman went up in flames and threatened to detonate the ready 76mm ammunition. Close turned around and saw his new loader slumped on the floor. King wasn’t moving. The round that caught him in the head had killed him instantly. Without Pool or Oller’s vision above to guide him, Richards drove In the Mood straight backward, hoping to get out of range of the weapon locked onto them. But the tank reversed just a few yards before another round rocked it. The shell ripped through the M4A1 in almost the same place—although once again the lives of Close and Richards were spared. Since their tank was not yet ablaze, Richards kept moving swiftly backward. Oller looked up to see the Sherman surging toward him and somehow

Pool’s tank and those ahead of him were caught without warning in the German gunners’ crosshairs.

managed to roll his body out of the path of its churning tracks. Baby Richards’s blind retreat was shortlived. At the edge of the ravine, In the Mood lurched as its treads encountered a large crater. Richards and Close were slammed against the tank’s steel interior as it rolled onto its side and flipped upside down, coming to rest three-quarters overturned. There was just enough space for Richards and Close to crawl out of their escape hatches. As the German gun continued to fire and other Sher-

A 3rd Armored Division M3 half-track burns after being hit by German fire.

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THERE WOULD, of course, be no war bonds tour for the In the Mood crew. Richards and Close continued with the 3rd Armored Division. Del Boggs also remained in service and was reassigned to the 474th Air Service Group, 9th Air Corps, and rose to the rank of corporal before departing the European Theater in July 1945. Willis Oller spent 14 months in various hospitals before he was discharged from the army’s O’Reilly Hospital in Mis-

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mans issued high explosives in return, the pair scurried underneath their vehicle to take cover. Earth and vegetation blasted skyward as a heavy German artillery barrage chewed up the area around three shattered American tanks. In the midst of the pounding, Richards and Close crawled back into In the Mood. Together, they wrestled King’s body through one of the hatches and laid him on the ground underneath their Sherman. Richards eventually escaped toward the rear of the carnage; Close remained huddled under In the Mood. For more than 45 minutes, gunfire and artillery exchanges continued, some of the blasts close enough to keep him in place. Nearby, Oller and Pool lay badly wounded, bleeding profusely from their mangled legs. Pool managed to give himself a shot of morphine for the pain, then tried to cut away the ruined portion of his right leg with his own pocketknife. He gave up as Lieutenant Colonel Richardson jumped from his tank and ran to him. Richardson administered a second shot of morphine and shouted for medics. Two corpsmen braved the enemy fire to reach Pool. They quickly wrapped his leg, then one of them gave him a third shot of morphine, unaware that Pool had already given himself a dose. He was drifting

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On September 19, 1949—five years after being knocked out of his tank and losing his leg—Pool was honored at a ceremony at Fort Knox, Kentucky. He had returned to the army the previous year and served until 1960.

off into unconsciousness as they strapped him to a litter. Before his eyes closed, Pool muttered, “Somebody take care of my tank.” Other medics made their way to Oller, pulled him from the firefight, administered morphine, and began working on his left leg. He and Pool were then hustled toward the rear lines to an aid station. When Bert Close finally emerged from under the tank, I Company and their opponents were still exchanging rounds. Steeling himself, he sprinted back several hundred yards to the task force’s forward command post. As he arrived, he heard several officers speaking to a group of war correspondents. “Sorry we don’t have much news up here for you,” one said. Close was incensed. I could gladly show them a place where they can get some news! he thought. As evening approached, he moved back a few miles to the bivouac position where his company headquarters had been that morning. He then discovered that the only wound he had suffered during the loss of In the Mood was a cut lip, sliced open by a shard of shrapnel from the second shell. It would serve as his only physical reminder of the losses his crew had endured on September 19. All of the meaningful keepsakes Close chose to carry with him in battle—and those of Pool, Oller, and Richards—had been destroyed by the explosions. Close would later mourn the loss of the gold signet ring that had once belonged to his grandfather and a small leather cigar case another ancestor had carried through the Crimean War. But he and Richards counted their blessings. The second direct hit to their tank could have been their last. Both men would return to the European battlefields. But for War Daddy Pool and Groundhog Oller, their only fight for the time being was to remain alive.

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Pool’s story inspired a 1951 film (above), while the main character in the gritty 2014 film Fury (right) shares Pool’s “War Daddy” nickname.

souri. Six surgeries helped save his left leg, and he left service on February 15, 1946, wearing a special brace and shoe. In the two years following his final battle in Germany, Lafe Pool—who would eventually be pinned with numerous campaign service medals and personal valor medals, including four Bronze Stars, the Legion of Merit, the French Croix du Guerre, and the Distinguished Service Cross—was treated in a series of hospitals. His right leg was eventually amputated eight inches above the knee, but the resilient Golden Gloves fighter was fitted with a prosthesis and returned to the army in 1948 for three more years as a tank park supply and dispatch sergeant in the 3rd Armored Division’s Combat Command B. He rose to the rank of Chief Warrant Officer Second Class, and retired from service in 1960. Pool’s character was roughly translated to film in Warner Brothers’ The Tanks are

Coming in 1951. Decades later, actor Brad Pitt played the role of World War II Sherman tank commander “War Daddy” Collier in the 2014 film Fury. Although the movie was fictional, the name of Pitt’s aggressive character was an obvious reference to the army’s most famous tanker. “There were no heroes, no Rambos. We were a team,” Pool remarked during a 1988 visit to Fort Hood, Texas. “Every medal I received, it wasn’t me. It was my team.” Asked for his advice to modern soldiers, he added, “Learn to survive. Shoot to kill and always go forward. Never retreat.” Two years after his death on May 30, 1991, a new tank driver training simulator hall at Fort Knox was named in Pool’s honor. At the dedication, Lieutenant Colonel Olin M. Brewster, who served in the 3rd Armored Division with Pool and remained his friend until Pool’s death, gave a speech honoring him. Lafayette G. Pool was, he said, the “ace of tankers.” H

Pool gave himself a shot of morphine, then tried to cut away the ruined portion of his right leg.

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WEAPONS MANUAL JAPAN’S YOKOSUKA E14Y FLOATPLANE ILLUSTRATION BY JIM LAURIER

FLYING EYES AMONG THE TOOLS the Imperial Japanese Navy developed for its Type B-1 class of oversized cruiser submarines were small, stowable reconnaissance floatplanes to act as long-range eyes and ears. The Yokosuka E14Y was stored dismantled in watertight mini-hangars at the base of the Type B-1’s conning tower and, once assembled, launched from the front of the sub. The airplane’s slow speed made it an easy target if spotted by Allied ships or fighters, so its missions were usually conducted at night. The E14Y carried out recon flights over Pearl Harbor (nine days after the main attack), Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and the Aleutians, but its most famous mission was an expanded one on September 9, 1942, when IJN pilot Nobuo Fujita’s E14Y became the only enemy aircraft to bomb the mainland U.S. during the war. Fujita dropped two 168-pound incendiary bombs into Oregon’s Klamath Mountains in the hope it would ignite both a forest fire and widespread panic. It did neither. The Japanese built 126 E14Ys from 1941-43. As the number of host subs in Japan’s fleet dwindled through wartime attrition, so did the E14Y’s opportunities. —Larry Porges

BACK FIRING The E14Y’s only standard armament was a rear-facing 7.7mm Type 92 machine gun. As a reconnaissance airplane, the E14Y’s gun was rarely used except as a defensive weapon against pursuing enemy aircraft.

JAPANESE YOKOSUKA E14Y

Crew: 2 / Length: 28 ft. / Wingspan: 36 ft. 1 in. / Gross weight: 3,197 lbs. / Max. speed: 153 mph / Range: 547 mi. / Ceiling: 17,190 ft. / For the famed 1942 mission over the forests of Oregon, the IJN mounted special incendiary bombs under the wings of Nobuo Fujita’s E14Y.

THE COMPETITION FRENCH BESSON MB.411

Crew: 2 / Length: 27 ft. / Wingspan: 39 ft. 4 in. / Gross weight: 2,513 lbs. / Max. speed: 118 mph / Range: 249 mi. / Ceiling: 16,406 ft. / France built two MB.411 submarine-based recon planes—one ended up in German hands and the other, based in England, flew for the Allies.

GERMAN ARADO AR-231

Crew: 1 / Length: 25 ft. 7 in. / Wingspan: 33 ft. 5 in. / Gross weight: 2,315 lbs. / Max. speed: 110 mph / Range: 310 mi. / Ceiling: 9,800 ft. / The Ar-231 scout plane, designed with folding wings for storage on U-boats, proved unreliable in flight. Only six prototypes were ever built.

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An E14Y launches off a Japanese Type B-1 submarine in the Pacific. After it was assembled and positioned, crewmen would catapult the floatplane from a 66-foot inclined steel track positioned on the forward deck.

TWO’S COMPANY The two-man crew sat in tandem under a framed canopy. The pilot sat in front, with the rear cockpit reserved for a multipurpose navigator/observer/gunner.

POWER FAILURE Though the nine-cylinder Hitachi Tempu 12 engine’s modest 340-horsepower output afforded a maximum speed of 153 mph, the floatplane’s standard cruising speed was only a little more than 100 mph.

KNOW WHEN TO FOLD To fit into the submarine’s compact hangar, the E14Y had several detachable parts, including the foldable wings, its struts, the pontoon floats, and the fins. A seven-man crew could assemble the airplane’s 12 parts in 10-15 minutes.

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on i t a r e p o d A plan ne “Giant II” called iant g a e b o t appeared— yet had the mistake of top A llied support . Could one leaders p it in time? to general seph Con nor By Jos

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er of ommand (inset), c y oorly a p w a g d id B. R ion, feare ome and is iv Matthew D e ring R Airborn the 82nd rop aimed at captu his men (here r d ir fo a th d a e ell de plann 3). s would sp ily on July 10, 194 ld e fi ir a ic its S to in dropping

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Italian soldiers surrender during the July 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily. The Allies’ next goal was mainland Italy, with landings at Salerno.

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AFTER THE ALLIES INVADED Sicily in July 1943, the next target was mainland Italy. The Allies coveted Italian airbases, which would give their bombers the range to pummel targets in central Europe. The campaign would also tie down German troops who might otherwise be used to strengthen the Atlantic Wall in France or join the fight in Russia. Eisenhower, however, had limited resources. The Allies were saving troops for the invasion of France planned for 1944. That would be the war’s decisive campaign, and the high command refused to siphon off men for the Italian venture. The Germans had an estimated 18 divisions in Italy—35 if Italian troops were counted—while the

Allies would have only four divisions for their initial landings. Those landings, codenamed Avalanche, were planned for Salerno, just southeast of Naples, on September 9, 1943. On July 25, 1943, as Allied planners worked on the Avalanche plan, events in Italy took a dramatic turn when its king, Victor Emmanuel III, ousted Prime Minister Benito Mussolini and replaced him with Pietro Badoglio, a 71-year-old marshal and an opponent of his country’s alliance with Germany. Within days, the Italian government began sending secret peace feelers to the Allies. Eisenhower desperately wanted an Italian surrender. The limited resources made Avalanche a risky operation—perhaps even foolhardy, Eisenhower thought—but the danger “will be minimized to a large extent if we are able to secure Italian assistance just prior to and during the critical period of the actual landing,” he told the Allied High Command. He hoped the Italians would fight against the Germans, he said, but “even passive assistance will greatly increase our chances of success.” Removing Italian troops from German control alone would help. Eisenhower stressed that he needed “every possible atom of [Italian] support.” The stakes were high. General Alexander and Harold Macmillan, a British diplomat assigned to the Mediterranean Theater, believed that if Avalanche failed, it could cause the fall of Churchill’s government and a lessening of British resolve to see the war through. That, in turn, would put more pressure on the United States, already stretched thin fighting a war on both sides of the world. Eisenhower pursued the peace feelers. On August 19, 1943, he sent his chief of staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith, and British brigadier Kenneth W. D. Strong to secretly meet with an Italian emissary in neutral Portugal. To avoid drawing attention, Smith and Strong masqueraded as civilian travelers. Smith came ready for anything. He carried two pistols hidden in shoulder holsters and two more secreted in his hip pockets. “If we were cornered,” Strong later joked, “I envisaged a desperate gunfight in the best Western manner.”

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ajor General Matthew B. Ridgway knew what he had to do. In less than a week—on September 9, 1943—American and British troops would hit the beaches at Salerno, the Allies’ first major landing on the Italian mainland. Hours before the Salerno assault, Ridgway’s 82nd Airborne Division was slated to execute Giant II, an airdrop far behind German lines near Rome designed to support the landings. But the Giant II plan had been cobbled together, and as Ridgway studied it, he concluded it was “exceptionally unsound,” he later wrote—maybe even “hare-brained.” He was sure far stronger German forces near Rome would decimate the 82nd, resulting in “death or capture for most of us.” Ridgway knew he couldn’t stay silent and acquiesce to a plan that would end in the sacrifice of his troops. As the division commander, he felt duty-bound to his men to “carry my protests right up to the top.” Stopping Giant II, however, wouldn’t be easy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill backed the plan. So did Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower and British general Harold R. L. G. Alexander, who would command all Allied troops in Italy. The brass’s blessing gave Giant II a seemingly unstoppable momentum—but that didn’t deter Ridgway, who hoped he could somehow change minds already made up and stop this runaway train before it was too late. He knew that the fate of his men depended on it.

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The Italian emissary was Brigadier General Giuseppe Castellano, traveling under the assumed name of Signor Raimondi. Castellano told Smith and Strong that Italy wanted to switch sides and join the Allies, but Smith demanded an unconditional surrender. To show good faith, Castellano handed Smith a map showing German troop dispositions in Italy. Although they did not reach an agreement, Smith gave Castellano a radio transmitter hidden in a small suitcase and ciphers to take to Rome so the Italian government could communicate securely with Eisenhower’s headquarters. On August 31, Castellano met again with Smith and other Allied representatives, this time in Allied-held Sicily. The Germans occupied Italy, and the Italians knew an Allied invasion was coming, although not when or where. This put them in a tough spot. “They are literally between the hammer and the anvil,” unsure “whether we or their German allies will work the most damage and destruction in Italy,” said Robert D. Murphy, President Roosevelt’s representa-

tive in the Mediterranean Theater. Murphy and Harold Macmillan tried to convince Castellano that Italy had more to fear from the Allies. As Murphy recounted in a memorandum to Roosevelt, they told Castellano that if Italy refused to surrender, the United States and Britain would “incite disorder and anarchy throughout Italy” and “relentlessly” bomb Italian cities, including Rome, until they were “reduced to ashes and piles of rubble.” Castellano assured them his government was willing to capitulate as long as the Allies sent troops to protect Rome. The Germans had not yet occupied the capital, but the Italians knew they would once Italy surrendered. To the Italian government, Murphy noted, a German occupation of Rome would be “too awful to contemplate.” Smith suggested having the 82nd Airborne Division make a drop near Rome to help protect the capital. Castellano quickly pledged Italian troops to secure the drop zones and assist the 82nd. Eisenhower approved the

Roman citizens scramble to get the latest news (top) after the Italian king replaced ousted Fascist leader Benito Mussolini with a prime minister more amenable to surrender: Marshal Pietro Badoglio (above). Italian support was vital for the Allies’ plan.

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operation as the price of surrender. “The Ital- General Maxwell D. Taylor, the 82nd’s artillery chief. The 82nd’s mission, in the words of the operational plan, was to ian government will not pluck up courage to sign…an armistice unless they are assured of “secure the city of Rome and adjacent airfields and prevent their occuAllied troops being landed in the Rome area,” pation by German forces.” On the night of September 8, a few hours he told the Allied High Command. Roosevelt before the Salerno landings, the 82nd would fly from Sicily and drop and Churchill, meeting in Washington, gave onto Furbara and Cerveteri, two small airfields 25 miles northwest of Rome. Since only 135 transport planes were available, no their blessing to the airborne mission. more than about 2,000 men could jump the first Three days later, on September 3, night. The next night, September 9, a like number 1943, the Badoglio government ROME would parachute onto three other airfields: Guiagreed to capitulate, and CastelI TA LY donia, Littorio, and Centocelle. More troops lano signed the surrender docuNAPLES GAETA would be dropped on subsequent nights, “proment that afternoon. To catch TYRRHENIAN SEA SALERNO viding situation permits,” the plan noted. The the Germans by surprise, the MILES U.S. Navy agreed to try to send ammunition, Allies agreed to keep the news 0 10 0 heavy equipment, and supplies up the Tiber under wraps until the evening of PALERMO River to Rome. September 8, when Eisenhower S I C I LY The Giant II plan couldn’t succeed without Italand the Italian government would ian support. Rome was 150 miles from Salerno, so the announce it just hours before the 82nd would be out on a limb, but the Italian government Salerno landings. The Allies had begun planning the air- promised to provide the help needed to make the operation work. In drop around Rome, codenamed Giant II, addition to supplying troops, Italy guaranteed that the antiaircraft batshortly before the Italian surrender. After teries along the route the 82nd’s transports would fly would hold their an all-night conference, they finalized the fire. It promised to secure the airfields that were the paratroopers’ plan on the morning of September 4. In drop zones and to defend the Tiber’s banks so ships could sail up the addition to securing the surrender, the plan- river unmolested. It also agreed to give the 82nd the materiel it needed: ners hoped the operation would hamper 355 trucks, 23,000 rations, 120 tons of gasoline and oil, 100 miles of German efforts to reinforce Salerno and barbed wire, 50 miles of field wire, 200 shovels, and 100 picks. inspire the Italian people to revolt against the Germans. The mission also had a certain THE 48-YEAR-OLD RIDGWAY, described by a friend as a man “full of allure. “ W hat more glorious task could intensity, almost grinding his teeth from intensity,” disapproved of the fighting men receive than to liberate and plan. Rome was out of range of Allied fighter planes, so the 82nd would defend the Eternal City?” thought Brigadier be without air support. There were six crack German divisions near

BUNDESARCHIV BILD 183-J15460; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

A German propaganda photo shows troops manning an antitank gun near Salerno; the wartime caption emphasizes the Allies’ “severe and bloody casualties” and “high losses in war materiel.”

BUNDESARCHIV BILD 183-J15460; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

Rome, Ridgway believed, and he doubted the Allied troops could fight their way from Salerno to Rome quickly enough “to save us from being chewed up by these divisions.” Ridgway’s greatest doubts centered on Italian support. He spoke with Castellano at length and sensed the Italian emissary was promising more than his country’s military could possibly deliver. Colonel James M. Gavin, a regimental commander in the 82nd, agreed, thinking the Italians had pledged “about ten times as much” as they could do. Unless Italy provided what Castellano had promised, Giant II could become a suicide mission. For example, if the Italians didn’t silence the antiaircraft batteries and secure the drop zones, the 82nd might be slaughtered before reaching the ground. All too fresh in Ridgway’s mind was a catastrophe in Sicily two months earlier when friendly antiaircraft and ground fire shot down 23 transport planes, killing 81 paratroopers and wounding 132. Ridgway brought his objections to Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, and pulled no punches. Smith took him to General Alexander—who gave Ridgway a cavalier brush-off. “Don’t give this another thought, Ridgway,” Alexander said, and promised that the troops from Salerno would reach Rome “in three days—five at the most.” Alexander’s breezy confidence provided no comfort, and Ridgway suggested sending two officers on a behind-the-lines mission to Rome to hear directly from the Italian leaders whether they could do what they had promised. Too dangerous, Alexander said. This puzzled Ridgway, who wondered why Alexander wouldn’t risk two officers when he was willing to bet the lives of the entire 82nd on a mission that Ridgway saw as a “shot-in-the-dark.” AFTER “ABOUT TWENTY-FOUR hours of brooding” and “a lot of searching of my own soul,” Ridgway gave it one more try. Again, he forcefully presented his objections to Smith. Smith met with Alexander. With Eisenhower’s blessing, and maybe at his urging, Alexander relented and agreed to send Taylor, Ridgway’s artillery commander, and another officer, Colonel William T. Gardiner, through German lines to Rome. Eisenhower later called this trip the most dangerous mission he ever asked emissaries to undertake. The 42-year-old Taylor, whom a reporter called the “perfect type of the young,

alert, aggressive professional military man,” and Gardiner, a former governor of Maine, weren’t “under any illusions about the kind of treatment we’d get if the Germans did nab us,” Taylor said. At 2 a.m. on September 7, 1943, Taylor and Gardiner boarded a British patrol boat at Palermo, Sicily, and rendezvoused with an Italian corvette off the coast of Italy. From there, the corvette took them to Gaeta, Italy. They wore uniforms so they wouldn’t be shot as spies if caught. Their cover story was that they were downed U.S. airmen the Italians had captured, and they made themselves look as disheveled as possible to play the role. In Gaeta, the Italians took them to a waiting military ambulance with clunky springs for a bumpy 75-mile trip along the Appian Way to Rome. They arrived in the Italian capital at dusk that same day, only 24 hours before the 82nd’s transports were scheduled to take off for Rome. Taylor was anxious to get down to business, but his hosts wanted to socialize, and they served the Americans a lavish meal. Taylor was amazed that the Italians were “so casual

When the 82nd’s General Maxwell D. Taylor (top) met with General Giacomo Carboni (above) on a risky secret mission, the Italian confirmed Ridgway’s fears: German forces near Rome were strong, and Carboni saw the airdrop as hopeless.

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at such a critical moment when every minute counted.” At 9:30 p.m., Taylor and Gardiner finally met with the commander of Italian troops in Rome, General Giacomo Carboni. Giant II was hopeless, Carboni said: the Germans had recently beefed up their forces near Rome and starved the Italian army of supplies. His men, he said, didn’t have enough ammunition or fuel to fight for more than a few hours and couldn’t defend Rome. He couldn’t even guarantee the security of the airfields where the 82nd would drop. Carboni’s message was starkly different from what Castellano had told the Allies, but the explanation was simple. Throughout the negotiations, the Italians had balanced whom they feared more, the Allies or the Germans. At the eleventh hour, their fear of the Germans prevailed. Despite Allied secrecy, the Italian high command had figured out the Allies would land at Salerno and thought the landings likely to fail. In a September 6 memorandum, they noted that if the landings failed, Giant II wouldn’t “give any great support to the defense of the Capital” and would “bring about immediate conflict with the Germans in such conditions as to render failure most certain.” Not fully trusting Carboni, Taylor demanded to see Badoglio, the prime minister. At midnight, Carboni drove Taylor and Gardiner through the blacked-out city to Badoglio’s villa, where Badoglio echoed Carboni’s gloomy outlook. In fact, he said, he planned to renege on his agreement to announce the surrender. If Italy capitulated now, he said, “the Germans will be in here and cut my throat by tomorrow night.” Trying to mollify Taylor and Gardiner, he made “frequent expressions of his friendship for the Allies,” Taylor recalled, and claimed he was simply waiting for “the right moment” to surrender.

JOHN FROST NEWSPAPERS/ALAMY; INSET: U.S. ARMY; OPPOSITE: EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL/ALAMY

Eisenhower sent a courier, Lyman L. Lemnitzer (right), to scrub the airdrop at the last minute, then strong-armed a surrender out of Italy— which feared the Germans more than the Allies.

Without Italian help, Giant II was doomed. At 1:21 a.m. on September 8, Taylor radioed an urgent message to Eisenhower: “GIANT TWO is impossible.” Badoglio sent his own message: “Owing to changes in the situation… it is no longer possible to accept immediate armistice.” After a few hours of sleep, Taylor awoke to learn that Allied headquarters hadn’t acknowledged his message. Worried about a misunderstanding, he sent another at 11:35 a.m.: “Situation innocuous.” This was a code he had worked out with Eisenhower’s headquarters. Any message containing “innocuous” meant that Giant II must be canceled immediately. Taylor’s initial message actually had gotten through, but for unknown reasons it wasn’t decoded until 8 a.m.—by which time Eisenhower had left his headquarters in Algiers and was en route to Bizerte, Tunisia, to confer with Alexander. He didn’t receive Taylor’s message until shortly before noon—only six hours before the 82nd was scheduled to leave for Rome. Taylor’s message confirmed Ridgway’s worst fears, and Eisenhower had no choice but to scrub Giant II. He sent a cancelation order to Ridgway at his headquarters in Licata, Sicily, and asked Ridgway to acknowledge receipt. Hours passed with no acknowledgment, and time was running out. Eisenhower and Alexander knew the only way to ensure the message got through to Ridgway was to send a courier. They picked Brigadier General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, an American assigned to Alexander’s staff. The 82nd was set to take off at 5:45 p.m., so Lemnitzer had no time to waste. He sped to the nearest airfield, a British base, and commandeered the only available plane, a two-engine British Bristol Beaufighter. The Beaufighter was built to hold only a pilot and navigator, but Lemnitzer wedged himself into the cockpit behind the pilot. The flight almost ended before it began. As the Beaufighter taxied down the runway, it swerved, nearly hitting a row of parked planes. On the second try, it got aloft for the 220-mile flight to Licata. When the plane reached Sicily, the navigator couldn’t find Licata. Lemnitzer spotted Mount Etna, a 10,000-foot-high volcano on Sicily’s eastern coast. From that landmark, he pointed the pilot in the right direction. At about 4:30 p.m., the plane reached

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Licata, but it looked as if Lemnitzer might be too late. Sixty-two transports filled with paratroopers were already in the air, circling the field and preparing to fly to Rome. Below, transports were taking off at the rate of one per minute. With Licata’s single runway jammed, Lemnitzer couldn’t land to deliver his crucial message. Thinking quickly, he shot flares from the plane, a signal that it was in distress and needed to make an emergency landing. The runway was cleared, and Lemnitzer’s plane touched down. He hopped out and found Ridgway, in full gear and about to board a plane. “Didn’t you get our message?” Lemnitzer shouted over the din of the airplane motors. “What message?” a puzzled Ridgway replied. The circling planes were recalled, and the men went back to their quarters. Ridgway’s chief of staff, Colonel Ralph P. Eaton, knew how close the 82nd had come to disaster, and he sat on his cot trembling. Ridgway stopped by with a bottle of whiskey, and they had a drink. Knowing the lengths Ridgway had gone to oppose Giant II, Eaton said, “I sat there thinking that I owed him my life.”

JOHN FROST NEWSPAPERS/ALAMY; INSET: U.S. ARMY; OPPOSITE: EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL/ALAMY

WITH GIANT II CANCELED, Eisenhower dealt with Badoglio. The prime minister’s about-face didn’t shock him. He saw the Italian leadership as “merely frightened individuals that are trying to get out of a bad mess in the best possible way.” Nevertheless, he refused to accept Badoglio’s new position. Via radiogram, he vowed to Badoglio that if he reneged on the surrender, it would have “most serious consequences for your Country,” including “the dissolution of your Government.” At 6:30 p.m. on September 9, Eisenhower announced Italy’s surrender in a radio address from Algiers. This forced Badoglio’s hand. He confirmed the surrender in his own radio address an hour later. Italy was out of the war. After the surrender announcement, the Germans disarmed the already-undersupplied Italian army and, as predicted, occupied Rome. They went looking for Badoglio, but he was gone. He had fled at 5 a.m. on September 9 to Brindisi, a city in southern Italy not under German control.

The Allies landed at Salerno that same day. It was touch and go, but after nearly 10 days of bitter fighting, they established a firm foothold in Italy. The 82nd did its part, with an airdrop on September 13 to bring desperately needed reinforcements to the imperiled beachhead. Alexander’s prediction that his troops would reach Rome in three to five days proved wildly optimistic. The Allies didn’t liberate the city until June 4, 1944, nearly nine months after the Salerno landings. Eisenhower was an astute judge of talent, and his subordinates in the Giant II operation were a veritable all-star team, all destined for high office after the war. Walter Bedell Smith later served as ambassador to the Soviet Union and director of the CIA. Ridgway succeeded Douglas MacArthur as commander of United Nations forces in Korea and later became army chief of staff. Taylor and Lemnitzer each served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Taylor later became ambassador to South Vietnam. It was Ridgway’s persistence that led to the cancelation of Giant II, and for the rest of his life he saw it as one of his greatest achievements. When “the time comes that I must meet my Maker, the source of most humble pride to me” will be “the fact that I was guided to make the decision to oppose this thing, at the risk of my career, right up to the top,” he wrote in 1957. “I deeply and sincerely believe that by taking the stand I took we saved the lives of thousands of brave men.” H

As planned, Allied soldiers (here from the U.S. 143rd Infantry Regiment) invaded Salerno on September 9, 1943. Spared crippling losses, the 82nd dropped in reinforcements four days later.

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S L U O S 5 1 4 , 4 G N I T N U O C AND l i st l a n i m e s a , mak ing e h t n i s ds of r a e T wenty y e to each of the thousan g ives a nam emen lost on D-Day A llied ser vicong By Joh n D. L

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American troops pass the body of a dead comrade on Omaha Beach on D-Day. A multiyear effort to name every Allied fighter who perished in the June 6, 1944, invasion of Normandy continues to this day.

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American cavalrymen Sergeant John Onken (top) and Private Anton Elvesaeter (above) were the first Allied soldiers to die in the seaborne phase of Operation Overlord. Both men were killed by German landmines on the uninhabited Saint-Marcouf Islands a few miles off the Normandy coast.

borne invasion of Hitler’s Fortress Europe. Their deaths made a difference, but their stories are little known, their sacrifices virtually forgotten. Yet the names of both men, along with some 4,400 other brothers-inarms who would die that day, can be found today in a place neither could have ever expected: on somber brass plaques on a curved wall in a small Virginia town. THE NATIONAL D-DAY MEMORIAL is not found in Washington, D.C., or on a military base somewhere. Instead, it is located in Bedford, Virginia, 200 miles southwest of the nation’s capital, because that community had the highest-known per capita loss of American lives on D-Day—20 men from the surrounding rural county died that day. The Memorial features panoramic views of the Blue Ridge Mountains, evocative sculpture, and a soaring arch commemorating the events of June 6, 1944. But it has another important distinction: at the Memorial, preserved on hundreds of plaques and an everevolving computer database, is the most comprehensive roster of the D-Day fallen anywhere in the world. The effort to give names to all of the D-Day dead began in 2000, before the Bedford site had even opened. The board of the Memorial’s governing foundation had adopted a laudable but challenging ambition: to identify every Allied soldier, sailor, airman, and coastguardsman who died on D-Day. Such a list of the dead from a single event is termed a “necrology”; hence the research endeavor became known at the Memorial as the Necrology Project. It asked what seemingly was a simple question—surely there was a roster somewhere? But finding an incontrovertible answer proved perplexing. Heading up the project in its infancy was the redoubtable Carol Tuckwiller. A retired librarian from Roanoke, Virginia, she had applied for a retirement job with the National D-Day Memorial Foundation, unsure of what exactly would be involved. But recognizing her tenacious research skills, her bosses quickly tasked her with finding the answer to the question of how many died on D-Day. Surprisingly, as Tuckwiller discovered, no one had thoroughly looked into the question before. Estimates of the D-Day fallen ranged widely but were no more than guesses. Cornelius Ryan’s seminal 1959 history of D-Day, The Longest Day, noted that “over the years a vari-

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL D-DAY MEMORIAL FOUNDATION, EXCEPT PREVIOUS PAGES: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

une 6, 1944, approximately 4 a.m.: Sergeant John Onken of the U.S. Army’s 4th Cavalry Group peered into the darkness from his landing craft at the indistinct chunk of land barely visible ahead. It was one of the Saint-Marcouf Islands, a few miles off a beach that only a few that morning already knew as Utah. The unremarkable islands once boasted a Napoleonic fortress; no one in Allied leadership quite knew what was there now. Finding out was part of Onken’s mission. On another American landing craft nearby, Private Anton Elvesaeter also shivered in the chilly sea air, wondering what lay ahead. It’s doubtful the two cavalrymen knew each other, but they had much in common. Neither had been born in the nation whose uniform they wore. Elvesaeter was Norwegian by birth; his native country had fallen to Germany in 1940. Onken had actually been born in Germany—his mother and sisters still lived there under Nazi rule. If neither soldier could claim birth in America, they certainly knew why they were fighting, why Hitler had to be stopped. Furthermore, John Onken may have felt some additional angst. He was heading to France, where his father had died—as a German soldier in the previous world war. Both men were ready to do their duty. Their units had been chosen for this special mission late in the planning for the invasion of France, Operation Overlord. Reconnaissance had revealed some German presence on the otherwise uninhabited Saint-Marcouf Islands. If there were Wehrmacht men stationed there, they could conceivably spot the invasion fleet heading to Utah Beach and radio a warning to the mainland, robbing the Allies of the element of surprise. A force was hastily assembled to land in darkness and clear the islands, two hours before the main assault began at dawn. Tragically, neither Onken nor Elvesaeter would get far into French territory. It turned out that German soldiers were no longer on the islands, but landmines were. It’s impossible to know which man fell first, but both Onken and Elvesaeter died on the beaches of SaintMarcouf. While airmen and paratroopers had already paid the ultimate sacrifice that morning, the two cavalrymen were almost certainly the first Allied personnel to perish in the sea-

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ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL D-DAY MEMORIAL FOUNDATION, EXCEPT PREVIOUS PAGES: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

ety of vague and contradictory figures have been given on the losses sustained by Allied troops during the twenty-four-hour period of the assault.” Still, he cited initial reports of fatalities from the U.S. First Army—the American invasion force—as 1,465. Former president Dwight D. Eisenhower himself mentioned 2,000 casualties in his famous 1964 interview with CBS newsman Walter Cronkite to mark the invasion’s 20th anniversary. Stephen Ambrose’s epic 1994 history, D-Day, cited 4,900 casualties, but with a footnote baldly stating, “No exact figures are possible…for D-Day alone.” It’s worth noting here that the term “casualties” includes wounded, missing, and captured soldiers as well as those killed in action. So it’s not surprising that from the beginning Tuckwiller discovered that compiling a list of D-Day fatalities was a daunting task. She wasn’t even entirely sure where to begin to look for the information. She started with what seemed to be a logical person: a deputy director of mortuary affairs at nearby Fort Lee in Virginia. As she would later tell the story: A fter explaining to him that I was researching the names of all members of the Allied Expeditionary Force [the Allies’ multinational military in northwest Europe] who lost their lives on D-Day, June 6, 1944, his initial response was “You can’t do that!” “Why not?” I asked, thinking there must be a security problem with accessing the records. “Because it’s never been done before!” he continued. “I know it hasn’t; that’s why I’m doing it,” I replied. “No, you don’t understand,” he said. “There is no single place where you can find a list of names of people who died on a particular day.” Indeed, Tuckwiller would soon discover that there was no single place to look. The Normandy American Cemetery—the iconic cemetery above Omaha Beach so vividly portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s 1998 film, Saving Private Ryan—was a natural place to begin her research and, in fact, burial lists and grave markers there yielded some of the first names. But not all D-Day fatalities lie there, so other sources had to be scoured. With Dr. William

Former librarian Carol Tuckwiller spearheaded the effort to compile the list of D-Day’s fallen. She is honored here by Dr. William McIntosh, then the D-Day Memorial Foundation’s president, near the time of her 2006 retirement.

McIntosh, the Memorial Foundation’s education director and later president, championing and advising her effort, Tuckwiller painstakingly hunted down unit after-action reports, ship logs, headstone applications, hometown obituaries, Missing Air Crew Reports (MACRs), and other primary sources. Morning Reports—daily accountings of men killed, wounded, or missing at the company level—were especially fruitful. Along the way Tuckwiller realized that according to military protocol of the day, missing men were not officially declared dead until a year and a day after their disappearances. So June 7, 1945, became another date she had to pursue. U.S. Army (and Army Air Forces) records were her primary sources, but the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard lost men that day as well in the English Channel and on the Normandy beaches. Boundaries had to be set for inclusion on Tuckwiller’s list, and the most important was a 24-hour one. Although the scenario was certainly common, men wounded on D-Day but dying later were not put on the roster. For airmen, MACRs were essential, although it wasn’t always initially known if a man or crew shot down had survived or been captured. So POW records also had to be compared. Also highly informative—if often heart-rending—were IDPFs: Individual Deceased Personnel Files. In contrast to service records (so many of which were lost in the catastrophic 1973 fire at the National Archives repository in St. Louis), IDPFs deal exclusively with the disposition of a serviceman’s remains after his death. In addition to describing a man’s initial burial on the battlefield, the means by which his remains had been identified, and of course the all-important date of his death, IDPFs often included correspondence with the serviceman’s family as they sought confirmation of his identity or further information. Such correspondence often reveals the tragedy endured by family at home. Private First Class Thomas Saccone, 21, of New York City fell on D-Day serving with the 82nd Airborne Division—by one account the AUTUMN 2022

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The names of 2,502 Americans grace a remembrance wall at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia. D-Day’s 1,913 Allied dead are listed nearby.

paratrooper drowned after landing in a flood zone. But for most of the following year, his mother, Angela, refused to believe it, hoping against hope that her son was alive somewhere. “I have no definite proof that my son was killed…. I wasn’t told if his body was found, if he was buried properly, and I also have not gotten any of his personal belongings,” Mrs. Saccone wrote in letters to various officials for months after he fell. “I haven’t received anything giving me definite proof.… In fact, I as a mother do not believe my son is dead.” Patiently but firmly, military officials responded to her queries with somber assurance: no mistake had been made. Thomas was dead. Over time Mrs. Saccone came to accept her loss, but her example is a telling one. Thomas Saccone likely suffered only briefly. His mother’s anguish was much more prolonged. It’s a reminder that for every name on the Memorial’s Necrology Wall, there was also deep pain for the family left behind. Endless complications materialized during Tuckwiller’s research. Men had the same or similar names, spellings varied in records, copies of documents were smudged or otherwise inscrutable. Then there were the dates.

Tuckwiller’s whole project hinged on what happened—or could be confirmed as having happened—on a single day. But a lack of precision in recording death dates proved endlessly frustrating. Often definite dates could not be known—if a trooper’s remains were discovered days or even weeks later, who was to say on what day he gave his life? Other times dates seemed to have been almost arbitrarily assigned. The Naval Beach Battalion records list a surprising number of men killed not on June 6 but on June 8. How many of those men actually died on D-Day? To be fair, the U.S. military was as scrupulous in record-keeping as the chaos of war would allow. Graves Registration companies—those tasked with locating, identifying, and burying the dead—went about their macabre tasks with impressive diligence. On the home front, military officials were determined to notify next of kin of a fallen serviceman as quickly and accurately as possible, although in this pre-internet era more than a month usually passed between a man’s death in battle and his loved ones receiving the telegram every American dreaded. Amid these laudable priorities, determining an indisputable death date took lower precedence. Yet decades later Tuckwiller and her small team—other museum staff who lent support, as well as a faithful volunteer—were looking exactly for that, an indisputable death date of June 6, 1944. Thousands of names were found. But many others who almost certainly, but not provably, died on D-Day had to be excluded. Location was another complication. Just because a man’s death date was June 6, 1944, it didn’t mean he died in the Normandy invasion. Men died on that date on many other battlefields. The name Edwin Boehme, a New York airman, was listed on the Necrology roster for many years, until it was determined that while he died on June 6, 1944, his plane was lost over the Adriatic after a raid on the German oil fields at Ploesti, Romania. His name was removed from the roster of D-Day fallen but honored with an inscribed brick in the Memorial’s Gold Star Garden. As if combing through the morass of American records wasn’t chal-

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GREAT BRITAIN: 1,449

UNITED STATES: 2,502

Known D-Day Losses by Nation

NORWAY: 38 FRANCE: 19 AUSTRALIA: 13 NEW ZEALAND: 2 BELGIUM: 1

THE ROSTER of American D-Day heroes is an interesting study in demographics. Men from every state in the union in 1944, plus Washington, D.C., gave their lives on D-Day. Their names represent the American melting pot: Italian, Polish, Hispanic, Czech, Russian, Jewish, and Irish surnames all appear. There is one general—Don Pratt—and two Medal of Honor recipients (1st Lieutenant Jimmie Monteith and Technician 5th Grade John J. Pinder Jr., both of the 1st Infantry Division’s 16th Infantry Regiment). Digging through the

records one will find a private named Captain, a lieutenant named Sargent, a tech sergeant named Major, and a navy coxswain named General. Between the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, there are 56 Smiths. The Necrology Project of the National D-Day Memorial is not, and likely never will be, considered a finished assignment. (And new information about D-Day will continue to be revealed. See this issue’s “Need to Know” on page 26.) Names are periodically added. On Memorial Day 2021 paratrooper Captain Clarence Tolle and Ensign Frederick Nye Moses, U.S. Navy Reserve, were honored and eulogized as their names were added to plaque W-33 at the Memorial. Initially, the death dates of both men had been confused in the record, but research uncovered new evidence— including eyewitness accounts—that pointed incontrovertibly to their loss on June 6. The names of American dead, incidentally, are found on the west side of the wall; Allies on the east. No other distinction is made. All of the names appear randomly, not alphabetically—just as death was random on D-Day. Even now, the Memorial staff is researching more than a dozen names for possible future inclusion. While contradictions in death dates are still difficult to reconcile, the internet today provides sources Tuckwiller and the initial researchers could only have imagined. Detailed records, such as headstone applications or Missing Air Crew Reports—that Tuckwiller once had to travel cross-country to explore—now are available with a few mouse clicks. To date, there are 4,415 names on the Memorial’s Necrology Wall: 2,502 Americans and 1,913 Allies. If we could have perfect knowledge, there would be more. But even so, for visitors, the sheer quantity of names inspires awe and reflection as the true cost of D-Day is revealed in tangible human form. Part of the Memorial’s mission is to publicize the results of this project so that every man who fell is counted and honored. These 4,415 men didn’t want their names at a memorial, but they did their part in one of the most consequential days of the war all the same. They were no more heroic than men who fell on June 5 or 7; nor were they greater heroes than those who died at Okinawa or Inchon or Da Nang or Fallujah. But they were heroes nonetheless; their lives and their deaths mattered. So their names must be remembered. H

CANADA: 391

lenging enough, Tuckwiller didn’t stop with the Yanks. The goal was to identify every Allied D-Day fatality. Men from Britain, Canada, France, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and Belgium also fell in battle on that momentous day. (Poland, Greece, Czechoslovakia, and Holland, all occupied nations, supplied men for Overlord but suffered no known fatalities.) Tuckwiller turned to military attachés and the various embassies to supply rosters. Britain and Canada suffered many hundreds of fatalities; the others fewer. Norway proudly offered a list of several dozen sailors killed aboa rd the HNoMS Svenner, a British destroyer turned over to the Norwegian navyin-exile that was sunk by a German torpedo boat off Sword Beach, as well as a few airmen killed alongside the British RAF. Norway was a nation occupied by Nazi Germany. These men knew exactly why they were asked to fight. Ironically, few French soldiers were lost liberating their nation on D-Day; most of the dead were part of a small commando unit attached to a British division. But the French embassy also requested that names of some personnel with the French Forces of the Interior—the organized resistance—be included among the battlefield dead. Some who had been imprisoned were executed by their German captors that morning when it became clear that the invasion had begun. Sadly, these heroes may well have died without knowing that the liberation of France was underway. Despite the complications, contradictions, and gaping holes in the records, Tuckwiller persevered. After one year, she had confirmed some 400 names. And by her 2006 retirement, after six years on the job, the roster had increased almost elevenfold: in total, she had identified 4,390 Allied names. Since then, other Memorial staff have picked up where she left off and continue the work.

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AMERICAN THEATER COMMANDERS in World War II included Admiral Chester Nimitz and Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, and Joseph Stilwell. Among them Nimitz stands out, for he alone won great battles like Midway while outnumbered and Guadalcanal while merely at parity. And unlike his peers, Nimitz made but one serious error—when he permitted the costly 1944 attack on Peleliu to proceed despite Admiral William F. Halsey’s urging to cancel the operation. NIMITZ AT WAR Nimitz at War, the first major biography Command of the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander published Leadership from in nearly 50 years, represents not just a stellar Pearl Harbor to achievement for author Craig Symonds but Tokyo Bay also closes an elegant circle. (Here I must disBy Craig L. close that I am a friend of Symonds and Symonds. 474 pp. Oxford University reviewed his original manuscript.) Late U.S. Press, 2022. $29.95. Naval Academy professor E. B. Potter, who

produced his own excellent Nimitz biography in 1976, served as Symonds’s colleague and mentor when the latter, now a professor emeritus, began his career as a historian at the Naval Academy. In the following decades, fresh archival documentation on Nimitz’s performance has come to the forefront, notably code-breaking material far beyond the disclosures that Potter had accessed about the Battle of Midway and vital documents previously unavailable to Potter that unveiled code-breaking’s per vasive inf luence on American operations. This includes the single-most important document on naval operations in the Pacific, known as the “Graybook” (after its original cover)—effectively Nimitz’s war diary. Access to these records alone soars Nimitz at War to first-rank importance. But Symonds also took the bold path of confining his account to Nimitz’s most important

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SURVIVING THE STORM

NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

REVIEWS BOOKS

Admiral Chester Nimitz celebrates the Iwo Jima campaign’s completion aboard command ship USS Eldorado.

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NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

career role as commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean areas between 1941 and 1945. (Readers looking to learn more about Nimitz’s life in its entirety can reference Potter.) This concentrated focus illuminates Nimitz’s wartime performance at multiple levels. After taking command in December 1941, Nimitz displayed acute judgment and moral courage during his extremely stressful shakedown cruise, completed in the buildup to June 1942’s Battle of Midway. He faced daunting odds against the formidable Japanese Imperial Navy while his boss, Admiral Ernest J. King, bluntly dismissed him as a paper-pushing personnel specialist unfit for his command. Then there is the Nimitz that’s an adroit manager of people, marked by his handling of his doubtful superior, King; his egocentric Pacific Theater rival, General MacArthur; and his temperamentally opposite fleet commanders, the cerebral and deliberate Raymond A. Spruance and the mercurial and hyper-aggressive Halsey. Nimitz’s sound—and often daring—vision in strateg y (for example, rejecting advice from major subordinates to attack the inner Marshall Islands, not the well-defended outer islands), as well as his forceful leadership, also propelled his sailors to adopt challenging new technology, like radar, and operational methods, such as the Combat Information Center—an invaluable new tactical facility Nimitz pushed on ever y major warship. But the transcendent qua lit y Nimitz exhibited to secure his stature as one of America’s greatest admirals is character: in this instance, defined as always doing what he deemed to be right regardless of immediate or long-term personal interests. This is the timeless message conveyed throughout a powerfully compelling narrative. —Richard B. Frank’s most recent work is Tower of Skulls (2020), the first volume of a trilogy on the Asia-Pacific War.

Bent on protecting the Catholic church, Pope Pius XII remained passive amid Hitler’s reign, welcoming Wehrmacht officers into the Vatican in 1941.

REVIEWS BOOKS

HIGHER POWER EARLY IN HIS REIGN, Pope Pius XI cooperated with Italy’s Fascist regime. But he grew increasingly alarmed by Benito Mussolini’s embrace of Adolf Hitler, “a man he despised as an enemy of the Church and a proponent of a pagan ideology,” writes Brown University professor and biographer David I. Kertzer in his latest book, The Pope at War. When Pius XI’s secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli, succeeded him, the new pope paid tribute to his predecessor by taking the name Pius XII. But, as Kertzer demonstrates, the two men could not have been more different. Historians have long debated Pius XII’s record during World War II and the Holocaust, but the THE POPE AT WAR relevant documents in the Vatican archives were The Secret History of not made available to researchers until 2020. Drawing upon these new materials and a broad Pius XII, Mussolini, array of other sources, Kertzer, the Pulitzer Prizeand Hitler winning author of 2014’s The Pope and Mussolini: By David I. Kertzer. The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism 672 pp. Random in Europe, has produced the most authoritative House, 2022. $37.50. study yet—a highly damning one. While the pope’s detractors castigate him for his silence during the Holocaust, his defenders point to his 1942 Christmas Eve radio broadcast as evidence to the contrary. Buried on page 24 of his script, he did mention “the hundreds of thousands of people who, through no fault of their own and solely because of their nation or their race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction,” notes Kertzer. But Pius XII never mentioned Jews or Nazis by name or apportioned blame, although the Vatican received numerous reports about the genocide in progress. Pius XII also remained silent about the murder and repression of Catholics, including clergy, in Poland, France, and other occupied countries. As Vladimir d’Ormesson, the French ambassador to the Holy See, put it, “the Holy Father is a little too easily resigned to playing only a passive role in the drama that is ravaging Christianity.” Similarly, he ignored the bombings of (continued on page 75) AUTUMN 2022

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END OF DAYS

FIRE AND STEEL The End of World War Two in the West

By Peter CaddickAdams. Oxford University Press, 2022. $34.95.

THE BLOODY BATTLES directly leading up to the end of World War II in Europe are often overshadowed by earlier events. For Americans it’s all about D-Day and then the Battle of the Bulge. For Brits it’s the same, but with the 1944 Battle of Arnhem substituting for the Bulge. The Allies’ grueling war on Europe’s Western Front in the spring of 1945 has somehow fallen into a historical black hole. That’s surprising, as this final campaign does not lack for drama, whether it be the Allied crossing of the Rhine or FDR’s death on the eve of victory. Powerful personalities were also at play—Eisenhower, Montgomery, Patton, and, of course, Hitler and Churchill. In short, the war’s last hundred days in the West are a prime subject for a military historian, and Peter Caddick-Adams’s Fire and Steel does them justice. Caddick-Adams is not the first writer to tackle this stretch. Still, this final installment of his lauded trilogy on the war’s final year on the Western Front (preceded by 2019’s Sand and Steel, which chronicles the Allied invasion of France, and 2014’s Snow and Steel on the Bulge) provides a fresh and highly readable account. He covers everything from high strategy to the infantryman’s view from his foxhole, with a firm emphasis on the Allies’ ground forces. Caddick-Adams is a British historian, but

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THE MONUMENTS MEN FOUNDATION

REVIEWS BOOKS

he can’t be accused of nationalistic bias. Jacob L. Devers’s 6th Army Group, consisting of the U.S. Seventh and French First Armies, is typically the forgotten formation of 1944-45, its advance from the south of France to Strasbourg and into Germany neglected in public memory. Caddick-Adams gives it proper attention alongside better-known army groups such as General Omar Bradley’s U.S. 12th Army Group and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s 21st. He also grants equal weight to all seven armies (as opposed to Bradley and Monty’s “Big Two”) involved in the Rhine crossings and their push deep into the Reich. The role of the French Army in liberating its own country and defeating Germany is little appreciated in English-speaking countries, and Fire and Steel pays tribute to General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s troops. Canadian forces, often downplayed in AngloAmerican accounts, receive their share, too: Caddick-Adams details how General Harry Crerar’s First Canadian Army played a vital role in clearing the Allies’ left flank, a long, hard slog up the English Channel’s coast. However, Fire and Steel’s true gems are its plentiful accounts of the Western Front’s lowly soldiers and officers, who didn’t sugarcoat their experiences. Corporal Ted Chapman earned the Victoria Cross, Britain’s supreme award for gallantry, after rescuing his company commander in battle and firing his Bren gun “in a one-man island of khaki amidst an ocean of field grey.” In the bombedout German city of Würzburg, Corporal Don Carner, a Pearl Harbor survivor and machinegun squad leader in the 232nd Infantry Regiment, witnessed men from another squad shooting German POWs in cold blood. Some of 1945’s worst sights weren’t found on the battlefields. A s Caddick-Adams observes, “most of Eisenhower’s people stumbled over the Holocaust in some form,” whether by liberating concentration camps or encountering slave laborers. Their growing awareness provides one of the book’s major threads. It’s not easy reading, but is a stark reminder of why this war was necessary. Written with eloquence and passion, Fire and Steel is a page-turner whose author combines deep research, analysis, and knowledge with the ability to tell a story. Like Ike’s armies, these elements yield a winning combination. —Gary Sheffield is an emeritus professor at the University of Wolverhampton, U.K.

HORACE ABRAHAMS/KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES

American troops march through the bombed-out city of Nuremberg, Germany, in April 1945.

(Pope, continued from page 73) London and other British cities, which accounted for Winston Churchill’s brusque dismissal of the pope’s appeals to the Allies to spare Rome later in the war—the only time he made a public protest. What accounted for this passivity? Kertzer argues the pope was intent on protecting the institutional church above all, and he was clearly intimidated by Hitler and Mussolini. He encouraged efforts to save Jews who had been baptized, but he could hardly claim credit for the courageous Catholics who saved Jews with no ties to the Church. “As a moral leader, Pius XII must be judged a failure,” Kertzer concludes. His book amounts to a searing indictment. —Andrew Nagorski is the author, most recently, of Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom (2022).

REVIEWS GAMES

LOOKING DOWN THE SCOPE SNIPER ELITE 5 Rebellion Developments. $49.99. PC, Xbox One/ Xbox Series X and Series S, PlayStation WORLD WAR II RATING

HHHHH

THE BASICS Sniper Elite 5 is a third-person stealth-based shooter set in France in 1944-45, featuring a single-player campaign and multiplayer modes that allow you to compete with or against others.

THE OBJECTIVE Players assume the role of the series’ dogged pro-

tagonist, Karl Fairburne, a British Special Operations Executive sniper sent ahead of the D-Day invasion of Normandy to sabotage and snipe his way across occupied France. The discovery of a secret Nazi plan to halt the Allied advance complicates his mission.

HISTORICAL ACCURACY Sniper Elite 5 makes no claims to historical

accuracy, as its characters and plot are invented wholesale. While its weapons are real (starting gear consists of a M1903 Springfield and a British Welrod pistol), players can artificially modify guns’ speed and power. That said, the game’s French setting—replete with villages, Atlantic Wall fortifications, vineyards, and chateaus—shows an exceptional attention to detail. Worthy of mention is the return of a series classic: the “Kill Hitler” mission, this time seeing players assassinate the Führer in his Alpine compound.

THE MONUMENTS MEN FOUNDATION

HORACE ABRAHAMS/KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES

Raising the Stakes With this deck of cards, you might not need a winning hand to walk away with a full wallet. Produced by the Monuments Men Foundation, a nonprofit looking for still-missing artwork from World War II, each card bears the image of a lost cultural treasure. Tipsters with proven knowledge of a specific work’s whereabouts will be rewarded up to $25,000. To order your own deck, visit monumentsmenandwomenfnd.org/ wwii-most-wanted. $14.95.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY Sniper Elite 5’s standout feature is its complexity. Each mission plops players into a new scenario with a relatively simple objective—most often, to locate a particular Nazi and shoot him—but unique side missions and target intel appear along the way. Perhaps you’ve discovered members of the French Resistance who need rescuing, or a radio tower to destroy. Suddenly, your once-simple mission has you sidetracked to deal as much damage to the Nazi war machine as possible. PLAYABILITY Sniper Elite 5 plays comfortably on traditional game

controllers and computers; more violent aspects can be disabled via control settings.

THE BOTTOM LINE Sniper Elite 5 is a great installment in a great

series, its predictable storyline offset by exceptional interactive missions and intricate stealth and sniping mechanics. Come for the slowmotion head-shots, stay for the picturesque French countryside. —Dominic Geppi is a high school history teacher and a lifetime consumer of history-based video games. AUTUMN 2022

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BATTLE FILMS BY MARK GRIMSLEY

AN ENDURING IRONY

RICHARD RODGERS and Oscar Hammerstein’s South Pacific opened on Broadway in 1949 to immediate acclaim and racked up 1,925 sold-out performances before closing in January 1954. A film adaptation by director Joshua Logan in 1958 brought the show to an even larger audience, cementing South Pacific’s status as one of the greatest musicals ever. Many of its songs have become instantly familiar classics: the bawdy “There is Nothing Like a Dame,” the giddy “I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy,” and the passionate “Some Enchanted Evening.” But the weakest of its tunes, artistically, is also the most politically powerful, and points toward one of the notable ironies of the Amer-

ican experience during World War II. Rodgers and Hammerstein based their production on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific (1947) by James A. Michener. Structured as a collection of looselyrelated short stories, the book serves as a reflection of the U.S. Navy veteran’s travels throughout the South Pacific as what he called “a kind of superclerk for the naval air forces” during World War II. While it does not possess a uniting theme, a recurrent motif is the way its characters are wrenched from their everyday lives, forcing them to confront inner struggles and limitations they likely could have avoided but for the war. Rodgers and Hammerstein were drawn to two stories in Tales of the South Pacific and turned them into intertwining plotlines. In one, a Marine lieutenant, Joe Cable (played by John Kerr in the film), falls desperately in love with a Polynesian woman, Liat (France Nuyen), but discovers he cannot bring himself to marry her due to her race; in another, Nellie Forbush (Mitzi Gaynor), a navy nurse from Arkansas, falls in love with a French planter, Emile de Becque (Rossano Brazzi), but is then shocked and repelled to discover Emile has a number of mixed-race adult children by Polynesian women. (Both the Broadway and film versions soften Emile’s status to that of a widower with two offspring, both irresistibly cute little tykes.) Michener’s book explores Joe’s story much more deeply than Nellie’s; Rodgers a nd Ha m merstein reverse t he emphasis. It nonetheless falls to Joe to explain the roots of their shared racism in a song called “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.” “ You’ve Got to Be Ca ref ully Taught” is melodically undistinguished; lyrically it is simplistic and didactic. Several friends of Rodgers and Hammerstein urged that the

LMPC VIA GETTY IMAGES

The 1958 film version of South Pacific, like the earlier stage show, delivers potent social criticism via song.

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song be cut—but for its explosive political content, not its artistic limitations. American children, Joe tells the French planter, aren’t born harboring prejudice; prejudice is instilled in them by parents and relatives who teach them to hate and fear “people whose eyes are oddly made” and “people whose skin is a diff’rent shade.” Today elements of South Pacific itself appear racist, particularly its one-dimensional characterizations of Polynesian individuals as “primitive” and “exotic.” But at the time the show packed a powerful punch, taking direct aim at an American culture in which racism was still undisguised and racial segregation—legal, social, and economic— very much the norm. In 1953, soon after a road show version of the play completed a successful two-week run in Atlanta, two outraged Georgia state legislators denounced it as propaganda and vowed to introduce bills outlawing the showing of “movies, plays, musicals or other theatricals which have an underlying philosophy inspired by Moscow.” One of them pointed directly to the lyrics of “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.” In his eyes it was an endorsement of interracial marriage, which, until the Supreme Court’s landmark Loving v. Virginia decision in 1967, was illegal in several southern states. “To us that is very offensive,” he said. “Intermarriage produces halfbreeds, and half-breeds are not conducive to the higher type of society…. In the South we have pure blood lines and we intend to keep it that way.” Asked to comment, Oscar Hammerstein replied that the legislators had it right: the song was indeed a protest against racial prejudice.

DR® Chipper Shredders

“It’s no undercover propaganda,” he added. “If they don’t like it, that’s too bad.” In the film (although not in Michener’s book), Joe and Emile undertake a dangerous coast-watching mission together. Joe is killed in action. Nellie’s anguished uncertainty

South Pacific’s weakest tune is also its most politically powerful. about Emile’s fate leads her to the realization that love must conquer prejudice, and when he returns alive she marries him and forms a beautiful family with him and his children. It would be nice to suppose that Americans have learned South Pacific’s central message in the decades since it hit the silver screen. Sadly, that is not the case. And so South Pacific continues to underscore, as theater critic Jim Lovensheimer noted in 2010, “the irony of Americans fighting a war against racist enemies while their own racism remains unresolved.” H

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CHALLENGE

ABOVE IT ALL

PHOTOQUEST/GETTY IMAGES; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN WALKER

We altered this photo of crewmen prepping a P-47 for its next ground-support mission to create one inaccuracy. What is it?

Please send your answer with your name and mailing address to: Autumn 2022 Challenge, World War II, 901 N. Glebe Rd. 5th Fl., Arlington, VA 22203; or email: challenge@historynet.com. Three winners, chosen at random from all correct entries submitted by September 16, 2022, will receive Nimitz at War by Craig L. Symonds. The answer will appear in the next issue.

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Answer to the April Challenge: We made an artistic

sleight of hand when we added a 1949 painting (above: Figures and Dog in Front of the Sun by Joan MirÓ) to the stash the generals are inspecting; 126 of you got that right. No, we did not touch Eisenhower’s belt buckle, dirty Patton’s helmet, or mess with Bradley’s stars. We wouldn’t!

Congratulations to the winners: Rayne F. Meade-Kaul,

PHOTOQUEST/GETTY IMAGES; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN WALKER

Stephan G. Kravitz, Edward Ireland

Answer to the June Challenge: We moved the mirror from the windscreen of Royal Air Force fighter pilot Eric S. Lock’s Spitfire (top) to the canopy, as 124 of you figured out. No, we didn’t remove the emergency release handle on the plane’s door—although it is missing in the original image.

Congratulations to the winners: Rich Muller, Ron

White, and Roger Wolczek

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HOW DID THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON REFER TO HIS SOLDIERS AFTER THE BATTLE OF VITORIA?

Pigeon-livered half-wits, a dirty pack of dogs, a sickening disgrace, or the scum of the earth? For more, visit HISTORYNET.COM/MAGAZINES/QUIZ

ANSWER: “WE HAVE IN THE SERVICE THE SCUM OF THE EARTH AS COMMON SOLDIERS,” WROTE AN EXASPERATED WELLINGTON IN AN 1813 DISPATCH TO HENRY, THIRD EARL BATHURST, BRITAIN’S SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WAR. TWO YEARS LATER, HE WOULD EXPRESS A MUCH HIGHER OPINION OF HIS MEN AFTER HIS VICTORY OVER NAPOLEON AT WATERLOO.

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7/2

FAMILIAR FACE

HELL IN THE PACIFIC

NATIONAL ARCHIVES AT ST. LOUIS; INSET: GETTY IMAGES/TERRY FINCHER

When actor Lee Marvin began snagging his first movie roles in the early 1950s, they tended to be small tough-guy parts in war films. His ease in handling weapons and familiarity with military demeanor made him stand out—for good reason. Marvin had enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps at age 18 in 1942. He served in the Pacific as a scoutsniper with the 4th Marine Division, where he was seriously wounded on Saipan in June 1944—“I was shot in the ass” was his blunt description—in an assault on Mount Tapochau that killed most of the men in his company. His last major film role, an acclaimed one, brought him back to the war as “The Sergeant” in 1980’s The Big Red One, about a 1st Infantry Division rifle squad’s tour through the European Theater. Said Marvin: “I claim the Marine Corps taught me how to act.”

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