World War II June 2022 by HistoryNet

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E G D E S ’ N PATTO

N IO L A T T A B R E G T N S A R 1 IS H THE MEN OF Y A D E H T D E V A S Y E H T ENRAGED HIM—UNTIL ER OF BATAAN E BUTCH

H JUDGMENT COMES FOR TH UGHT A PROXY H THE STAR BOXERS WHOAFO AND GERMANY

WAR BETWEEN AMERIC

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Looking like tourists, Wehrmacht soldiers stand before Athens’s Erechtheion at the Acropolis in May 1941. BUNDESARCHIV BILD 101I-164-0368-14A COVER, MAIN IMAGE: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; BACKGROUND: AP PHOTO; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN WALKER

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

F E AT U R E S COVE R STO RY

28 THE CHOSEN FEW

An elite special operations force, the 1st Ranger Battalion, infuriated Patton—until he saw what they had to offer STEPHEN L. MOORE

38 BUTCHER OF BATAAN

Allied troops gave the Japanese general a grisly nickname; a warcrimes trial explored whether he deserved it JOSEPH CONNOR

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

48 BATTERING RAM

Canada’s Ram II medium tank

50 GLOVES OFF

As war loomed, a boxing match termed the “Fight of the Century” took on potent symbolism ALEX KERSHAW

P O RT F O L I O

58 A STITCH IN TIME

A Portsmouth, England, museum showcases a striking visual retelling of the D-Day saga

64 BROTHER IN ARMS

One soldier’s bond with his platoon sergeant resonates across generations LEE KAMLET

D E PA RT M E N T S

8 MAIL 10 WORLD WAR II TODAY 20 FROM THE FOOTLOCKER 22 NEED TO KNOW 24 TRAVEL

Athens offers a striking view of Greece’s wartime history

70 REVIEWS

Graphic naval history; Nazi Billionaires; no “good war”?

76 BATTLE FILMS

The simple, hard choices in 2004’s Ike: Countdown to D-Day

79 CHALLENGE 8O FAMILIAR FACE JUNE 2022

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WWII Online WORLDWARII.com

Michael A. Reinstein CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER

VOL. 37, NO. 1 JUNE 2022

EDITOR

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

First things first: if you haven’t recently seen the magazine group’s website at historynet.com, take a look. It’s newly redesigned, easier to use, and loaded with special features. Readers interested in our cover story, “The Chosen Few,” will want to check out this article, essentially its sequel:

Showdown at Death Valley

By Leo Barron In a short but intense battle at the Tunisian village of El Guettar, George S. Patton (above) and his II Corps cut through the myth of German invincibility.

Dana B. Shoaf MANAGING EDITOR, PRINT Claire Barrett NEWS AND SOCIAL EDITOR ADVISORY BOARD

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Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr. scans the battlefield at El Guettar, Tunisia, in March 1943.

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CONTRIBUTORS STEPHEN L. MOORE (“The Chosen Few”), a sixth-

generation Texan, is the author of 22 books on World War II and Texas history. Inspired by the style of late historian Walter Lord, he strives to bring the human element into his stories, allowing readers to view each conflict through the eyes of common individuals. For his latest book, Patton’s Payback (2022), from which this issue’s cover article is drawn, Moore interviewed some of the last living veterans of the 1943 North Africa campaign in which Lieutenant General George S. Patton secured his first victory against the German Afrika Corps. His sources included Lester Cook, the final surviving Darby’s Ranger Battalion veteran from its original 1942 muster roll.

JOSEPH CONNOR (“Butcher of Bataan”) graduated

from Fairleigh Dickinson University with a degree in history and from Rutgers Law School. After a sevenyear stint as a newspaper reporter and editor in New Jersey, Connor worked for 27 years there as an assistant county prosecutor and was involved in numerous homicide cases. He became inspired to look into the war-crimes trial of Japanese general Masaharu Homma, recounted in this issue, after noticing how harshly historians have judged its outcome.

COVER STORY MOORE

JAMES M. FENELON (“True Colors”) is a former U.S. Army paratrooper and the author of Four Hours of Fury (2019), the story of the 17th Airborne Division’s 1945 combat jump into Germany. Fenelon’s interest in World War II history has led him to explore historically relevant sites such as airfields in the UK; battlefields in North Africa, France, Italy, and Germany; and the formerly Nazi-occupied city of Athens, Greece, featured in this issue’s Travel department. LEE KAMLET (“Brother in Arms”), a graduate of ColoCONNOR

FENELON

rado State University, worked as a producer at ABC News and NBC News in Denver, Washington, D.C., and New York before serving as dean of Quinnipiac University’s School of Communications. He is retired and lives in Fairfield, Connecticut.

KAMLET

KERSHAW

author of several books on World War II, including The Bedford Boys, The Longest Winter, The Liberator (now a Netflix series), and Against All Odds, published in March 2022. He interviewed his article’s protagonist, German boxing champ Max Schmeling, in Hamburg in 1991—one of the highlights of his career. He is currently working on a book about the Battle of the Bulge, Patton’s Prayer.

PORTRAITS BY JOHANNA GOODMAN

ALEX KERSHAW (“Gloves Off”) is a journalist and the

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NOT FIT FOR POLITE CONVERSATION… JOSEPH CONNOR’S ARTICLE on soldiers’ songs in the February issue (“All Together Now”) brought back memories of my time with the Navy Command Choir in 1972. The Pensacola-based choir at the Naval Air Station consisted of flight students, instructors, and officers from the surrounding commands. (At the time I was one of the student naval aviators going through basic prop training in the T-28.) The choir provided entertainment for the “Hail” and “Farewell” parties that followed change-of-command ceremonies and other squadron and command social functions at the Mustin Beach Officers Club. We had the usual repertoire of patriotic and service songs, sung a cappella by around 35 men. But following the conclusion of formal ceremonies, we would “retire to the bar area,” which is where the songs detailed in Connor’s piece came forth. I recognize many tunes sung by the men in World War II; in some cases, we duplicated the words. We did, however, make changes

…NOR KIDS’ MOUTHS

I got a kick out of the piece about soldiers’ songs during the war. I’m a Baby Boomer, born in 1952. In the mid-to-late 1950s, World War II was still fresh, and much of my play with friends had to do with “fighting battles” against imaginary German and Japanese enemies. Not only that, but we sang our own wartime ditties. One of them was: “Whistle while you work/Hitler is a jerk/Mussolini bit his weenie/Now it doesn’t work!” I doubt you’ll be able to print this, but perhaps it will bring a smile to those there on staff. Rich Bourque Etters, Penn.

…NOR WIVES’ EARS

I enjoyed Joseph Connor’s “All Together Now.” I had never thought about this topic, but I was not surprised at all: in college during the early 1960s, the lacrosse team would sing the raunchiest songs on the bus after an away

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FROM TOP: GAVIN MORTIMER; COURTESY OF STEVE ROERSMA

MAIL

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

Marines gather around a piano salvaged from the ruins of the town of Agat on recaptured Guam.

to “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Our own 1970s version of “Battle Hymn” included the following verses, all aviation-themed: “He was headed on the downwind leg of runway number four/He was sure his gear was down and locked for he had checked before/Now all that’s left of him is just a little blood and gore/ And he’ll never f ly home again.” Next verse: “He should have added power, but he pulled back on the stick/He should have flown it like a bird instead of like a brick/ Now all that’s left of him is just a little oil slick/And he’ll never fly home again.” The chorus grew more boisterous as the song continued: “Gory, gory, what a helluva way to die/And he’ll never fly home again.” The other song that garnered appreciative laughter, especially since the Vietnam War remained active, was the “Draft Dodger Rag” [1965] by folksinger Phil Ochs. Considered by some to be a pushback against the antiwar movement, it’s likely the only song ever occasioned to have had a senior officer yell out, “Sing it again!” (He had flown missions over North Vietnam.) I dare say if that song were sung in today’s military, every group member would receive a Letter of Reprimand. The times, they sure have changed. Paul Butterworth Newnan, Ga.

be interesting to learn how he came to live in Europe for several decades and eventually settle near Omaha Beach. Brian O’Mara Gilroy, Calif.

Charles Norman Shay

FROM TOP: GAVIN MORTIMER; COURTESY OF STEVE ROERSMA

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

game. These types of songs die out because reunions usually involve wives—or, more importantly, because what we shared is history, and the moment is gone, so to speak. A question: Did German soldiers also sing such songs, aside from Nazi national songs? Steve Vanek Ninilchik, Alaska Joseph Connor responds: Yes, German soldiers, too, wrote and sang parodies. One tune popular with German soldiers was “Lili Marlene.” Folklore scholar and New Zealand Army veteran Les Cleveland found an Afrika Korps version describing a soldier’s tryst with Lili in terms bawdy enough to make even lacrosse players blush. Cleveland also discovered a parody from the Eastern Front mocking Hitler’s dream of conquering Russia. Given Nazi attitudes, it’s a safe bet that German soldiers had to be more circumspect than their Allied counterparts in mocking their leaders.

CONTINENTAL MAN

I found Gavin Mortimer’s February interview (“A Lucky Star”) with Charles Norman Shay— retired combat medic, D-Day veteran, Penobscot Nation elder, and resident of Normandy, France—to be a good read; Shay has apparently made a very positive impression on his French neighbors. It would

Gavin Mortimer responds: While stationed in Austria after World War II, Charles Norman Shay met his future wife, Lilli, and they married in March 1950. On his leaving the military after the Korean War, the two settled in Austria, and Shay worked for many years with the International Atomic Energy Agency, returning each summer to holiday on the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation in Maine. The couple retired to Maine in 2003, but Lilli died that year, and it was only after her death that Shay began revisiting his wartime experiences. He became a regular attendee at D-Day commemorative events in France, and in 2018 he decided to relocate to Normandy.

WILDEST DREAMS

Thank you for publishing Brendan Sainsbury’s travel piece on Whittier, Alaska (“Made to Order”). My father, Gerald C. Roersma, served in Whittier with the 568th Transportation Company during the Korean War, validating manifests at the docks of incoming and outgoing ships. After I told my mother about this article, she showed me images of Whittier that Dad had sent home: pictures of the mountains, life on the docks, and 8mm film of soldiers catching trout from the river with their bare hands. My parents went back to Whittier after Dad retired from General Motors in 1991. He was crushed that the barracks described in your article had fallen into such disrepair; he told my mom they were the lifeblood of those stationed there. In the winter, when up to 70 feet of snow fell on Whittier, soldiers did not leave the barracks except to go to the docks for duty—and even then, they were often tethered together on 10-foot connection lines to avoid getting lost. My Dad is gone now. I appreciate you bringing him back to me for a few minutes while reading this article. Steve Roersma Marne, Mich.

FROM THE EDITOR We often mistakenly believe that sports are a refuge from politics. Yet time and again we’re proven wrong. Russian president Vladimir Putin even seems to have factored the 2022 Winter Olympics—already heavily laden with politics—into his timetable for the invasion of Ukraine, sending troops into eastern Ukraine the day after the closing ceremony and engaging in a full-scale invasion just three days after that. In the buildup to World War II, a striking example of sports fusing with politics occurred when a single 1938 boxing match became a symbol of something much bigger. Bestselling author Alex Kershaw recounts this story in “Gloves Off” (page 50). The two rivals at the heart of the story? They navigated their way to friendship. —Karen Jensen

Gerald C. Roersma

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WWII TODAY

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JOHN MCCARTHY

C-46 WRECKAGE DISCOVERED IN HIMALAYAS

An expedition to the Himalayas has discovered the wreckage of a C-46 (top) lost on the mountain range in 1945. The crash killed U.S. Army Air Forces first lieutenant William K. Scherer (above, right), whose son initiated the search.

TOP AND INSET: COURTESY OF MIA RECOVERIES, INC.; BOTTOM: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

REPORTED AND WRITTEN BY PAUL WISEMAN

JOHN MCCARTHY

TOP AND INSET: COURTESY OF MIA RECOVERIES, INC.; BOTTOM: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

AN EXPEDITION LED BY American adventurer Clayton Kuhles found the wartime wreck of a C-46 cargo plane high up in the Himalayas late last year—bringing a measure of closure to a retired New York police detective who grew up without his father. But it was a costly discovery: three guides perished during the arduous trek. After unloading cargo in the Chinese city of Kunming on January 6, 1945, the American C-46, nicknamed Stork, began a return flight to its base in Chabua, India. It never made it, vanishing over the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh in bad weather. Lost were four crew members and nine passengers, including First Lieutenant William K. Scherer. The loss haunted Scherer’s son, retired detective Bill Scherer. Five years ago, he sought the help of Kuhles—who through his nonprofit MIA Recoveries has been searching for and finding wrecks in the Himalayas for decades. The United States lost hundreds of aircraft flying the “Hump,” flyers’ nickname for the perilous route Allied planes took from India over the Himalayas to supply the embattled Chinese government. The search for Stork was brutal. Led by local guides from the Lisu ethnic group, who had spotted unidentified airplane wreckage on previous treks, Kuhles’s expedition crossed rivers in chestdeep water and camped out in freezing temperatures. Three guides, caught in a September snowstorm, died of hypothermia. In December, the expedition found the wreck atop a snow-covered mountain, identifying the Stork by its tail number. They could see no human remains, but Kuhles said his guides had reported seeing remains and personal effects on earlier visits. Still, Bill Scherer told Agence France-Presse that he was “overjoyed” by the discovery. “It is sad but joyous,” he said. “All I can think of is my poor mother, getting a telegram and finding out her husband is missing and she is left with me, a 13-monthold baby boy.”

A virtual dive experience to a protected Japanese war grave in Australia is viewable on YouTube.

TAKE A VIRTUAL DIVE TO SUNKEN SUB CASUAL DIVERS AREN’T ALLOWED to explore the Japanese submarine I-124, resting on the seafloor 150 feet below the Indian Ocean’s surface in waters northwest of Darwin, Australia. Designated a war grave, the wreck is off-limits. Now maritime enthusiasts, history buffs, and the just-plain curious can get a good look anyway—thanks to virtual reality technology. Anticipating the 80th anniversary of the sinking of I-124 in January 2022, the government of Australia’s Northern Territory and the Australian Institute of Marine Science in October 2021 mapped the wreck using sophisticated remote sonar sensing equipment. Maritime archeologist John McCarthy of Australia’s Flinders University in Adelaide was then commissioned to create a virtual dive experience. The resulting video, available in English and Japanese language versions on YouTube—search “I-124”—“takes you down into the deep, to experience the wreck firsthand,” McCarthy said. The crisp high-resolution graphics reveal intricate details as the virtual camera skims over and around the sub on the ocean floor. If you watch on your computer, you can click and drag your mouse to rotate the view and look around—though the video is best viewed with a VR headset. Launched in 1927 and based on the design of a World War I German U-boat, I-124 was laying mines and raiding Allied shipping off Darwin in early 1942. After Allied codebreakers intercepted the sub’s radio transmissions back to Japan, Australian and American warships and planes hunted it down and sank it with depth charges and bombs on January 20, 1942. The entire crew of 80 was lost. After the war, the Japanese convinced Australian authorities to declare the site a war grave. The submarine’s resting place has not always been peaceful. In 1977, a frustrated salvager detonated explosives and damaged the conning tower in a bizarre and unsuccessful effort to pressure the Japanese government into letting him recover scrap metal and mercury from the wreck. JUNE 2022

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ANNE FRANK MYSTERY SOLVED?

THEY CAME TO CRACK A COLD CASE: who turned Anne Frank and her Jewish family over to the Gestapo? They wound up creating a bitter controversy. After sifting through the evidence for five years, a team led by retired FBI agent Vincent Pankoke reached a shocking conclusion: the “likely suspect,” responsible for sending the Frank family to Nazi death camps, was Jewish himself—a Dutch notary named Arnold van den Bergh. The team’s findings, revealed in January with the publication of a book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Canadian writer Rosemary Sullivan, drew immediate fire. Critics called the evidence circumstantial and speculative. Amid the uproar, the book’s Dutch publisher, Ambo Anthos, suspended further printing until questions could be resolved. Likewise, HarperCollins Germany said it wants to review the book more closely before publishing it. During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, the Frank family hid for two years in an Amsterdam attic. In 1944, 15-year-old Anne, older sister Margot, father Otto, and mother Edith were rounded up by the Nazi secret police. Anne, Margot, and Edith died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Only Otto survived. After the war, he found Anne’s diary and arranged for its publication. The book became a worldwide sensation, beloved for teenage Anne’s optimism and good humor in the face of horror. But a question has always lingered: who betrayed the Franks? Among the suspects who emerged over the years were the manager

of a warehouse next to the Franks’ sanctuary and a woman from the family that helped conceal them. But historians weren’t convinced. There were even suggestions that the family was just rounded up randomly in a police raid. Dutch filmmaker Thijs Bayens and journalist Pieter van Twisk recruited Pankoke to solve the mystery. They teamed up with a bigdata company to crunch vast amounts of information, including lists of informers, reports on police raids, and the names of Nazis living near the Franks’ hideout. A documentary film is in the works—working title: Cold Case Diary—but no distributor or release date has been announced, according to Variety. The team ended up focusing on van den Bergh, who may have cooperated with the Germans to protect himself and his family. Critics charge that their conclusion was based on one circumstantial bit of evidence—a note sent anonymously to Otto Frank in 1945 exposing the notary—and speculation that van den Bergh possessed a list of places Jews were hiding. In a lengthy rebuttal at the team’s website, coldcasediary.com, Pankoke argues that the investigators relied on other evidence, too, including reports that Otto had said in the late 1940s that “we were betrayed by Jews.” Officials at the Anne Frank House, an Amsterdam museum, issued a statement saying they were “impressed by the cold case team’s detective work” and calling “remarkable” the discovery of the anonymous letter accusing van den Bergh. Still, the museum said, the new theory “is based on a number of assumptions, and no conclusive evidence has been found. More research is needed.”

AP PHOTO/PETER DEJONG (BOTH)

Filmmaker Thijs Bayens (left) launched an investigation into who betrayed the Frank family; officials at the Anne Frank House (above), however, question the findings.

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Spike Lee (left), director of a 2008 film about Black “Buffalo Soldiers” (in Italy in 1945, below), recently discovered that a cousin fought and died with the division.

IN 2008, SPIKE LEE MADE A MOVIE about American “Buffalo Soldiers” in Europe—Black troops of the 92nd Infantry Division involved in ferocious fighting on the Gothic Line in northern Italy’s Apennine mountains. What the director (Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X) didn’t know during the making of Miracle at St. Anna was that he had a family connection to the soldiers whose story he was telling. Private Maceo Walker—Lee’s first cousin once removed—was killed on February 10, 1945, in fighting near Cinquale Canal. His remains were never found. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) has been reaching out to relatives of missing soldiers in hopes of obtaining DNA and other evidence that would help identify the 50 Buffalo Soldiers (out of about 700 killed in the war) who are still unaccounted for. In early 2021, Lee received a letter from the army informing him about Walker, the son of Lee’s grandfather’s sister. Lee was flabbergasted: no one had told him about his G.I. relative— or even that his grandfather had siblings. Lee turned out to be Walker’s oldest surviving relative. “I had no idea till I got the letter!” Lee said. The DPAA revealed the story in February. The 92nd comprised White senior officers and Black junior offi-

cers and enlisted men. When the Pentagon started trying to identify MIA Buffalo Soldiers in 2004, 53 were unaccounted for. Since then, only three cases have been closed. Six sets of remains are at a DPAA lab at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, awaiting identification. Most of the rest are likely buried as unknowns at American Battle Monuments Commission cemeteries in Italy. Walker may be one. “To be in Italy, to do this film, to honor the 92nd Division and be in the area where this battle took place and my cousin, Maceo A. Walker, died at 20 years old, that’s the spirits there,” Lee said. Walker, he added, “reached out to me and said, ‘Spike, I want you to know I existed, and I want you to spread the word and let the world know that I existed. I was 20 years old, enlisted, and died in Italy, World War II, fighting for democracy. The red, white, and blue.’”

DISPATCHES British archeologists excavating an old prisoner-of-war camp in Shropshire have made some surprising finds. Along with handmade toys and uniform bars (left), researchers discovered beer bottles and ceramic tableware—which, on top of previous evidence showing the prisoners enjoyed musical performances, sports fields, and hot showers, “paints a civilized and rather unexpected picture of a POW camp,” John Winfer, project manager at Wessex Archaeology, told the Shropshire Star newspaper in February.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES; GALERIE BILDERWELT/GETTY IMAGES; WESSEX ARCHAEOLOGY (BOTH)

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A Legend Takes Flight B-17 FLYING FORTRESS

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The B-17 Bomber Flies Before Your Eyes! The B-17 Flying Fortress became a treasured symbol of America’s strength and resilience during World War II. Now this trailblazing aircraft inspires a uniquely levitating collectible that conveys power in flight! The sculpture is authentically crafted and features innovative technology with hidden electro magnets, so the plane levitates above the base. The aircraft literally flies in mid-air! It is hand-painted and features a wood-finished base with a silvery title plaque and trim.

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THEY WEREN’T YOUR TYPICAL SOLDIERS. They were actors, artists, stagehands, and advertising men. Most of all, they were tricksters who used inflatable tanks, fake radio transmissions, and bombastic music to mislead and misdirect the Germans about the strength and whereabouts of Allied forces. On February 1, President Joe Biden signed a long-delayed bipartisan bill that awards the legendary “Ghost Army” the Congressional Gold Medal, the equivalent of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “The top-secret Ghost Army outmaneuvered and Inflatable tanks deceived the Nazis, saving thousands of (above) and other Allied lives during World War II,” said Conwartime ruses gresswoman Annie Kuster (D-NY), who have earned the “Ghost Army” a sponsored the legislation. Congressional After D-Day, they landed at Omaha Beach Gold Medal. in Normandy and set up bogus gun emplacements to draw German fire. During the Battle of the Bulge, they used fake radio traffic to draw attention from Lieutenant General George S. Patton’s Third Army as it raced to relieve the 101st Airborne at Bastogne, Belgium. In their final performance, the Ghost Army impersonated two American divisions—using blow-up vehicles and soundtracks of construction activity—in a ruse that allowed real combat troops to cross the Rhine River east into Germany. Three Ghost Army men were killed during the war. Several unit veterans went on to postwar fame, including fashion designer Bill Blass and screenwriter Ed Haas, who helped create the television series The Munsters.

Vowing “never again,” President Joe Biden marked the 80th anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s February 19, 1942, presidential order that ended up consigning 120,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II, even though twothirds of them were born in America. Biden said that “great nations do not ignore their most painful moments—they confront them with honesty.” The incarceration of Japanese Americans is a reminder, he said, of the “tragic consequences we invite when we allow racism, fear, and xenophobia to fester.”

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ROGER VIOLLET VIA GETTY IMAGES; ALAIN JOCARD/POOL PHOTO VIA AP; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/DOROTHEA LANGE

CONGRESSIONAL MEDAL FOR “GHOST ARMY”

The French Senate on February 15 authorized the return of 15 works of art stolen from Jews during World War II—a move the country’s culture minister, Roselyne Bachelot (above), called “historic.” The lower House of Parliament approved the legislation in January. Many paintings, stolen or coercively acquired from Jewish collectors during the war, are held by public museums. Four years ago, the French government set up a unit to find the original owners’ heirs. The 15 paintings include Rose Bushes Under the Trees by Gustav Klimt, acquired in 1980 and held by the Musée d’Orsay. In 1938, shortly after the German annexation of her native Austria, art collector Eleonore Stiasny was forced to sell it at a low price; she was later killed in the Holocaust.

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

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German naval defenses against the Allied armada on D-Day were weak, but an E-boat like this scored one victory.

Q: With the large number of Allied ships during D-Day, did the German navy attack the fleet using submarines or E-boats or other means? —Wes Chan, Westminster, Md. A: The easy answer is that the hopelessly outmatched German Kriegsmarine had no chance of stopping the massive Allied fleet of nearly 7,000 vessels supporting the Normandy landings. That isn’t to say they didn’t try, but their few successes were at best inconsequential and came at great cost to Nazi Germany. A primary reason is that the German navy was caught entirely by surprise on D-Day. The storm the day before convinced many German leaders that the invasion couldn’t possibly happen on June 6, 1944. Even when reports from Normandy began to reach German leaders, it was assumed the landings there were merely a feint and that the real invasion would begin elsewhere in subsequent days. Hence German submarines were still in their pens when the landings commenced at dawn; no commander wanted to launch at that point, in broad daylight and vulnerable to aerial attack, especially if the real invasion was yet to come. U-boats had some few successes in the following days but also suffered irreplaceable losses. By 1944, after all, the Allied fleets had gained impressive experience in detecting and attacking German subs. Spotter planes, destroyers, and destroyer escorts—small, fast patrol boats armed with torpedoes—were all vigilantly looking for

German vessels in the Channel. Small German surface vessels like E-boats did get into the fight, but in such small numbers that they hardly qualified as pinpricks. One exception, and probably the Kriegsmarine’s biggest triumph on D-Day, was the sinking off Sword Beach of the Norwegian destroyer Svenner by an E-boat, with the loss of 33 sailors out of a crew of 219. While the boat crew may well have bragged, in fact the most effective weapon the Germans had against the Allied ships were not manned vessels at all, but naval mines. While it wasn’t always clear if the losses were inflicted by mines or torpedoes, it’s nonetheless estimated that at least three dozen American ships were damaged or destroyed by mines on D-Day and in the days that immediately followed. —John D. Long is the director of education at the National D-Day Memorial Foundation in Bedford, Va. SEND QUERIES TO: Ask World War II, 901 N. Glebe Road, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203 OR EMAIL: worldwar2@historynet.com

WORD FOR WORD

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“The Battle of however France over. I expect whenis best ready seen best yes that the Battle of Britain iswas about to zoning very is dummy begin. Upon this battlewhen depends the copy however best ready seen best yes was. survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our empire.” —British prime minister Winston Churchill in his “Finest Hour” speech to Parliament, June 18, 1940.

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Emblazoned with the name “Rocky,” this footlocker details an astonishing range of victories at sea. What’s its story?

BOLT FROM THE BLUE Curators at The National World War II Museum solve readers’ artifact mysteries

I spotted this footlocker at a yard sale in Pahrump, Nevada. My dad, now 98, is a World War II vet and my wife is a Vietnam vet, so we spent a lot of time talking about the footlocker and wondered if Rocky was still alive or what his story was. I’d like to return it to him or his family if possible; can you help me interpret its insignia? —Phillip Berendsen, Pahrump, Nevada This footlocker carries a startlingly impressive pan-ocean victory tally that includes both German and Japanese vessels. Not only were these enemy warships separated geographically, but they also ranged widely in type and size, from leviathan aircraft carriers and battlewagons to comparatively smaller destroyers and submarines. Could one man have had a hand in sending them all to the bottom? Rocky, the presumed owner of the footlocker, was a U.S. Navy man. The lightning bolts above his name are nearly identical to those seen on the rating badges of sailors who specialized in radio and radar. These unseen electromagnetic waves passing through the sky were critical to fighting at sea, giving ships and aircraft “eyes and ears” that extended far beyond the horizon. Radar could reveal an enemy submarine the moment

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 PHILLIP BERENDSEN

FROM THE FOOTLOCKER

it surfaced to recharge its batteries or uncover a gaggle of kamikaze aircraft headed toward the fleet. At that critical moment of discovery, navy communications specialists swung into action to put counterforces at the scene. Particularly late in the war, few enemies went unnoticed when they were within a battle fleet’s electronic reach. The symbol “T” crossed by the bolts of lightning, though, is somewhat mysterious. There is no official specialty mark combining the icon and the letter. The “T” may stand for “technician” or “telegrapher”—perhaps a way Rocky unofficially separated himself from the more standard navy radioman. In the U.S. Navy’s alphabetical range of specialist letters, “T” also stands for “teacher.” Could Rocky have had a hand in instructing a generation of sailors how to detect and destroy seaborne threats? It seems likely that the notable score affixed to this footlocker represents the work of more than one man, ship, or squadron. No single U.S. Navy unit can lay claim to assisting in the elimination of multiple Japanese carriers in the Pacific along with a number of German submarines in the Atlantic or Mediterranean. Even if our subject had the ability to transfer from ocean to ocean and somehow worked with aerial, surface, and undersea forces, the tally is astonishing for an individual. It makes more sense if it stands for the combined effort of many navy men plying their trade all over the globe. And just who was Rocky, exactly? It is difficult to say. The name was quite rare in the 1920s, when our subject was most likely born. There is a better than average chance that Rocky was a nickname. His given name, the one that appeared on his draft card and navy enlistment papers, was probably something different. —Cory Graff, Curator

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BY JAMES HOLLAND

OFF TRACK

ONE OF THE THINGS I’VE REALIZED when it comes to studying the war is that once a narrative becomes entrenched, it’s difficult to get people to see it any other way. Take U.S. Fifth Army commander Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark, for example, and the fall of Rome on June 4, 1944. In the decades since, historians, commentators, and writers have repeatedly criticized the victorious Clark for disobeying an order of 15th Army Group commander General Harold Alexander. Instead of conducting an “all-out” drive on the town of Valmontone, some 20 miles southeast of Rome, as Alexander had ordered, Clark sent his VI Corps in a different direction, thereby, they say, letting the German Tenth Army escape—all in a vain effort to reach Rome first. I remember traveling across this route some years ago and gazing up at the Alban Hills just south of Rome. Back in late May 1944, that’s where another German army, the Fourteenth, had moved south and was lined up on a defensive position called the Caesar Line. As I drove along, I thought, “I don’t blame Clark for turning the bulk of his forces to face them rather than exposing his flanks.” It prompted me to delve into this controversy in detail, traveling over the ground and scouring contemporary sources. What I discovered was very interesting. In the pre-battle plan for Operation Diadem—General Alexander’s strategy for smashing through German positions at Cassino and capturing Rome—it had been expected that the British Eighth Army would lead the charge to Rome through the Liri Valley. On their left flank, in the mountains, would be Fifth Army’s French Expeditionary Corps and II Corps. At a key moment, VI Corps would then charge northeast from Anzio toward Valmontone—which lay astride the main road to Rome from the southeast, the Via Casilina—and so cut the path of the retreating German Tenth Army, which would then be effectively encircled. As everyone knows, the first thing to go astray in a battle is the plan, and Diadem was no exception. Eighth Army got bogged down in the Liri Valley while the French and II Corps steamed ahead of them on their flank. This pushed Tenth Army eastward; they retreated north through parallel valleys beyond the Via Casilina. Not one German soldier escaped down the Via Casilina. Not one! That meant that even if VI Corps had gone all out for

ILLUSTRATION BY RICHARD MIA

NEED TO KNOW

Valmontone, they wouldn’t have cut off Tenth Army’s retreat. Behind Valmontone were more mountains that barred any chance of VI Corps pushing farther east. Instead, Clark’s troops turned to ta ke on Germa ny ’s Four teenth Army, lined up along the Caesar Line. They went for Valmontone, too, but not “all-out.” Clark’s men got bogged down in the Alban Hills, but then the 36th “Texas” Division made a breakthrough; the gap was swiftly exploited with impressive tactica l f lexibilit y, Four teenth Army was hammered, and Rome taken. The scattered remains of Tenth A rmy got away—but not because of Clark’s refusal to go “all out” to Valmontone. Nowhere in their journals, letters, or diaries do any of the leading players criticize Clark for his decision. The only contemporaneous voice of dissent comes from VI Corps commander Major General Lucian Truscott, who couldn’t fathom why Clark was turning into the Alban Hills when he might have used the Via Casilina as the prime axis into Rome. So where did this maligning come from? Raleigh Trevelyan, that ’s who. He was a junior officer in the British Eighth Army who had heard a rumor attributed to Clark that any Eighth Army soldier seen in Rome would be shot. This was complete nonsense but spread quickly. In the 1960s Trevelyan wrote an account of the battle and cited Harold Macmillan, the leading British politician in Italy during the war, claiming Alexander was “furious” when he discovered Clark had “disobeyed” his orders over Valmontone. Really? Alexander was famous for never losing his temper and there is no mention of this supposed fury in Macmillan’s diaries of the time. Nor was the quote footnoted in Trevelyan’s book. For me it’s an open-andshut case of injustice against Clark, who deserves much better. No doubt, though: it’s a myth that will remain trapped in its particular foxhole. H

WORLD WAR II

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3/28/22 4:51 PM

Shi Se

TRAVEL ATHENS, GREECE BY JAMES M. FENELON

TRUE COLORS ATHENS, ONE OF THE WORLD’S OLDEST and most fabled cities, has earned its reputation as the cradle of Western civilization over its 3,400-year history. Today a modern metropolis of 3.5 million residents, Athens’s rich heritage is visible at a glance: dotted within the urban sprawl are ancient pillared relics, a marble stadium, Byzantine churches, mosques, and arguably the capital city’s most famous landmark, the Acropolis—translated as “high point.” It is here that I start my self-guided tour—ascending the summit not only for the view but also in search of a storied past that sheds light on Greece’s often-overlooked role in World War II. The rocky promontory, rising almost 500 feet above the city’s sea of concrete, is home to several ancient temples and is the site of one of the most recognizable ruins in the world, the Parthenon. The Doric-columned temple, dedicated to the goddess Athena, was completed in 432 bc and stood largely untouched until pirates sacked it in 276 ad. It was converted to a Christian church in the sixth century, and the Ottomans later used it as a mosque. The Venetians shelled it in 1687, archeologists raided it in 1799—and, on its grounds in 1941, German invaders raised a massive red-and-white flag adorned with a black swastika. Greece was a reluctant World War II belligerent, its attempt to remain neutral ending at 3 a.m. on Monday, October 28, 1940. When Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini demanded the Greeks submit to occupation, Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas is said to have replied with one word—“No!”— which became a rallying cry throughout the country. Two and a half hours later, the Italians invaded from Albania with six divisions. The dogged Greek defense, with British air support, held the Italians at bay. In January 1941, the Hellenic Army’s counterattack pushed the invad-

ers back over the border, giving the Allies one of their few early victories, but at the cost of several thousand casualties. With the arrival of the British Expeditionary Force and Greece now firmly committed to the Allied cause, the Germans invaded in April. Three weeks later, they reached Athens. Atop the Acropolis, I wander the grounds, winding my way around visitors mingling in front of the 45-foot-tall marble Parthenon, some marveling at its magnificence, others posing for selfies. There is no shade at the summit, so arriving before the heat of the day was prudent—but even so, I feel the sun beating down on me as I pass the Erechtheion, an asymmetrical temple, also dedicated to Athena, to the north of the Parthenon. Period photographs reveal that its decorative wall of six sculpted female figures was a popular tourist destination for occupying Wehrmacht soldiers. Finally, I make my way to the observation deck on the east side of the rocky outcrop. Here an enormous blue-and-white Greek flag flutters in the breeze. It was near this site on April 27, 1941, the day the Germans rolled into the capital, where Konstantinos Koukidis, a soldier of the

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OPPOSITE: GIANNIS ALEXOPOULOS/NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES; FROM TOP: BUNDESARCHIV BILD 101I-165-0419-19A PHOTO: BAUER; LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

The Acropolis, for millennia the focal point of the Athens skyline, was the site of a fabled first act of Greek resistance in World War II.

OPPOSITE: GIANNIS ALEXOPOULOS/NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES; FROM TOP: BUNDESARCHIV BILD 101I-165-0419-19A PHOTO: BAUER; LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

elite Evzones light infantry, was on guard duty. As the story goes, the Germans ascended the Acropolis, intent on raising their flag over the city. An officer hailed Koukidis, commanding he lower the national colors to hoist the swastika in its place. Koukidis did as he was told, but rather than surrendering the Greek flag, he wrapped it around his body and leapt off the cliff to his death. A small plaque commemorates the event, which has generated its share of skepticism. In 2000, the mayor of Athens declared that no documentary evidence had been found to confirm the act, despite multiple claims by eyewitnesses. My informal survey of tour guides, docents, and locals are unanimous in their support of the story’s validity. Koukidis’s unit of Evzones was disbanded during the occupation, with many of the troops forming the ranks of resistance groups. Today the Evzone traditions and battle honors are carried on by the Presidential Guard, a distinctively garbed infantry unit that performs ceremonial duties. To get more insight into their history, I hike back down the hill and head to the National Parliament building. My route takes me through the Plaka, the city’s oldest neighborhood, and it feels almost criminal to use my phone’s GPS to help me thread my way through the ancient, twisty streets. Not much has changed here since the late 1800s, and the wrought-iron balconies, neoclassical architecture, and narrow alleys make it easy to imagine the neighborhood in the 1940s. What is harder to imagine is the Third Reich’s shadow dimming these cozy labyrinthine streets, many teeming with hibiscus and olive trees. The Parliament building, a commanding three-story edifice tucked into the northwest corner of the 38-acre National Garden, was built in 1842 as a palace for Greece’s first king after independence from the Ottomans. In 1926, it was gutted for renovation into a single-chamber parliamentary council. At the base of the building, below its columned facade, is Greece’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Flanking the tomb are two blue-roofed guard shacks, manned by Evzones standing at attention, with bayonet-tipped M1

Occupying Germans hoist a war flag over the Acropolis in 1941 (top). Today, Evzones of the ceremonial Presidential Guard unit raise the Greek colors every Sunday morning (above).

Garand rifles at their sides. They are unmoving, reminding me of the redcoated British soldiers posted in front of Buckingham Palace. The guards wear their traditional uniform, with its origins in the 1800s: a small red fez with a long black tassel, a knee-length, button-up tunic with a black leather cartridge belt, white leggings with black garters, and hobnailed clogs topped with black pompoms. I watch the two guards begin their measured, ceremonial march toward the tomb, which is dominated by a JUNE 2022

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parachute assault was a Pyrrhic victory for the Germans, who suffered more than 26 percent casualties, but it completed the Axis occupation of Greece and began a multi-year reign of terror: tens of thousands of civ ilia ns died f rom marble relief of a prostrate Spartan. famine, torture, and executions, while an Inscribed on either side of the fallen war- estimated 60,000 Jews were deported rior are the names of battlefields dating from Greece to German death camps. In the same month that Crete fell, two back to the early 1900s. Included are more than a dozen from World War II, Greek students, Manolis Glezos and such as Pindus, Crete, Hill 731, and El Apostolos Santas, crept through the Alamein, all serving as reminders of the dark to scale the Acropolis and make off with the Germans’ swastika35,000 Greek soldiers who met emblazoned war flag. It was their deaths during the war. eventually replaced, and The guards, with rif les the occupiers sentenced shouldered, move painG REECE Glezos a nd Sa nt a s to stakingly slowly with a death in absentia. But reg imented high k ick the brazen act further on each step. Juxtaposed Athens inspired a fledgling Greek against the noise of passresistance movement, which ing buses and cars on the by 1944 had grown to over a nearby multilane boulevard, million men a nd women. The the solemn ritual is made more underground harassed the Germans poignant by the Evzones’ silent focus. Across the street from the Parliament until October 1944, when the invaders building is the Hotel Grande Bretagne, withdrew after the Soviet Red Army my last stop. The luxury hotel over- seized the vital Ploesti oil fields in Romalooking both the Parliament building nia, reducing Greece’s strategic signifiand Athens’s central plaza—Syntagma cance as a deterrent to Allied air raids. Square—is another example of the city’s Fittingly, period newsreel footage shows layered and hidden past. Built in 1842 a German soldier scurrying from the as a private mansion, it was renovated Acropolis with the Nazi flag bunched in 1874 into a hotel. In 1930, the hotel over his shoulder. With the occupation in mind, I head up expanded with the addition of a new wing. During the war, the Greek General to the hotel’s rooftop patio, from where I Headquarters established itself in the can see the Unknown Soldier’s tomb to hotel until the German occupation, when the left and the Greek flag flying high it served as Wehrmacht headquarters. above the Acropolis to my right. The The hotel’s well-appointed lobby and sweeping view of modern buildings, ornate tapestry in the atrium’s Alex- public parks, ancient ruins, and distant ander’s Lounge would make the staff mountains reminds me that Athens is a city of celebrated legends. And at the end officers of any army feel comfortable. It was here in May 1941 that General- of the day, I don’t know if Koukidis really leutnant Kurt Student planned Operation leapt to his death or not, but I do know Mercury, the airborne invasion of the Athens’s history of sacrifice and resisGreek island of Crete. The glider and tance makes it easy to believe he did. H

WHEN YOU GO Athens is easily accessible by air or sea. The international airport is serviced by all major and regional airlines, and nearby Piraeus is Europe’s largest cruise ship port. Getting around the city is easy by Metro, bus, tram, ridesharing, or foot.

WHERE TO STAY AND EAT Athens has a myriad of hotels, B & Bs, and vacation rentals to meet any traveler’s budget. Those seeking a historical luxury experience would be hard-pressed to beat the centrally located Hotel Grande Bretagne (marriott.com), where the bartenders serve some of the city’s best cocktails. For fresh fish and a view of the well-lit Acropolis, try dinner atop The Old Tavern of Psaras (psaras-taverna.gr).

WHAT ELSE TO SEE AND DO With Athens’s numerous world-renowned museums, it would be easy to overlook the War Museum (warmuseum.gr/en), covering Hellenic martial history from antiquity to the present day. On display are rare weapons, uniforms, art, and battlefield relics. Six miles south from the city center and accessible via a tram ride from Syntagma Square is the Phaleron War Cemetery (cwgc.org). Within its wellcurated grounds stands the Athens Memorial, which commemorates the thousands of Commonwealth troops who died during World War II campaigns in mainland Greece, Crete, Yugoslavia, and the Dodecanese islands.

JAMES FENELON; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

Evzones guard the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which has honored the country’s war dead for more than a century.

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3/28/22 5:21 PM

THE CHOSEN FEW An elite special operations force, the 1st Ranger Battalion, rubbed Patton the wrong way—until he saw what they had to offer By Stephen L. Moore

U.S. ARMY SIGNAL CORPS

taff Sergeant Les Kness, 23, glanced at his buddy as their U.S. Army troop truck lurched and banged over the rugged terrain from the dusty airfield. Sergeant Les Cook, a fellow Iowan, was fully engaged with packing his pipe full of Prince Albert tobacco as he jostled back and forth against his fellow Rangers. Cook, 21, seemed as content as usual. While most smokers in his company preferred cigarettes, Cook found being in the minority paid dividends: he The 500-some always had a barracks bag full of red-tin smoking tobacco for his pipe. soldiers of the 1st Kness’s thoughts turned to the mission at hand. It was February 7, 1943, and his Ranger Battalion unit had just landed on the Allied airfield of Youks-les-Bains in northern Algeria. march across the hills Located just 17 miles from the army’s II Corps headquarters in Tébessa, the air- of Algeria in early strip had seen dozens of C-47 troop transport planes touch down, carrying thou- 1943. Special ops missions against Axis sands of tons of special equipment and nearly 500 elite warriors. forces in Tunisia It had been three months since Allied forces had successfully landed in Vichy- were soon to come. held French North Africa as part of Operation Torch, a three-pronged attack on the cities of Casablanca in Morocco and Oran and Algiers in Algeria. While British forces pushed west from Egypt, American ground forces drove south from the coast against territories aligned with Nazi Germany. Since then, the Germans and Italians focused on building up their forces in Tunisia; an upcoming Allied thrust into that country was to include special operations work conducted by Kness, Cook, and their comrades.

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DARBY’S BATTALION had formed in June 1942 in Northern Ireland, where American troops were preparing for Operation Torch, culling recruits from more than 2,000 soldiers who had volunteered from various Fifth Army divisions. Within two weeks, Darby and his senior officers had weeded out nearly three-quarters of these men; those 481 officers and enlisted men selected were from all types of military specialties, but were required to be of exceptional physical ability, possess sound judgment, and be able to work autonomously in small groups to employ hit-and-run commando tactics. Somewhere in this process—and for reasons not recorded—Kness had failed to make the cut. Hailing from Audubon, Iowa, Lester Elwood Kness was the dark-haired, blue-eyed fourth of six children Adapted from PATTON’S PAYBACK by Stephen L. Moore, to be published on May 17, 2022, by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Stephen L. Moore.

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COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR (BOTH)

They were handpicked members of the army’s 1st Ranger Battalion, under the command of William Orlando Darby, 32, from Fort Smith, Arkansas. A 1933 West Point graduate, he had been more than pleased to leave his staff position to take command of a new, bare-boned irregular unit that would certainly see combat. The so-called “Darby’s Rangers” were a commando outfit whose name referenced a similar force under Major Robert Rogers that had fought on the French and Indian War frontiers in the 18th century. Rogers’s Rangers had been popularized in American literature and, most recently, in the 1940 film Northwest Passage, starring Spencer Tracy and Robert Young. Now Darby ’s Rangers were about to embark on their own film-worthy exploits in

North Africa, complete with triumphs and tragedies. Their adventures would include a run-in with their new corps commander, George S. Patton Jr.—a man initially much opposed to the Rangers’ rough-cut appearance and cocky swagger. In due time, Patton would learn to tolerate some of their unorthodox behavior—and would benefit significantly from the bravery of Darby’s men.

AP/SHUTTERSTOCK

The newly formed Rangers, their faces darkened as if for a nighttime raid, train at the British Commando Center in Scotland in summer 1942.

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR (BOTH)

AP/SHUTTERSTOCK

raised by a high school custodian father after the death of their mother in 1923. Les and his younger brother, Marvin “Mike” Eugene Kness, had enlisted in the U.S. Army in early 1942 and shipped to Northern Ireland that year for further training. Weary of the monotonous drills, both brothers jumped at the chance to join Darby’s outfit. Mike had been quickly accepted, but Les was crestfallen to learn that he was among those cut in the weeding-out process. In his new role as a clerk for Darby’s Rangers, Corporal Mike Kness remedied the situation by typing his brother’s name and serial number into the newly formed company rosters as part of his own E Company. The sleight of hand was never discovered. The battalion was divided into six companies, A through F. By the time the Rangers moved to Scotland in Aug ust 1942 for amphibious training operations with the British Royal Navy, Staff Sergeant Les Kness had become a section leader for First Lieutenant Max Schneider’s E Company. As such, he was soon in charge of 11 men: an assistant section leader, a Browning automatic rifleman, 7 riflemen, and 2 scouts. Kness tapped Corporal Lester Cook to be the automatic rifleman. Having both served in the National Guard in Iowa, the pair quickly became inseparable. With a boyish face and weighing just 97 pounds right out of high school, Cook had enlisted in the army in February 1941, at age 18. When he learned of a posting for Rangers recruitment, he was quick to act. “I was bored to tears,” Cook explained. “I didn’t know what a Ranger was, but I volunteered.” Both men pushed through the rigors of training without much problem. Les Kness’s skills drew attention, and he became one of 7 officers and 12 sergeants tapped for temporary duty to observe the Second Canadian Division prepare to take part in a BritishCanadian raid set for July on the Germanoccupied port of Dieppe in France. Planners knew from the outset that the intended capture of the port and destruction of German coastal defenses would have an only temporary effect, and was intended mainly to boost Allied morale and demonstrate the UK’s commitment to reopen the Western Front. Learning of the planned attack from British prime minister Winston Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that American

troops be included. Lieutenant Colonel Darby called the small group of Rangers slated to observe and participate “the chosen few.” Originally planned for July 4, 1942, the Dieppe operation was postponed because of unfavorable weather and damage from a German fighterbomber attack to two of the landing ships slated for use. By August 1, the 1st Ra nger Batta lion moved to Argyll, Scotland, for their amphibious training, then on to Dundee for practice attacking pillboxes and coastal defenses. It was at a training base in central Scotland that Kness struck up a friendship with another E Company Ranger, First Sergeant Warren Evans, a powerfully built six-foot-three-inch native of South Dakota. A former South Dakota State football star and an impressive baritone singer, Evans was known as “Bing” after popular singer Bing Crosby. Evans and Kness enjoyed boxing during their downtime. Evans found that although Kness was some six inches shorter than him, “he had arms that hung down to his knees. He kept me out there with his long arms and would give me a pretty good beating.” Kness had been a skilled fighter long before joining the Rangers. He was not overly imposing at five foot ten, but he was broad-shouldered and powerfully built, with strong legs well suited for the forced marches the Rangers endured in training. Added to his rugged frame was an innate quickness, an ability to strike like lightning with both his hands and feet. Growing up dirt poor in rural Iowa, Kness had been ashamed to admit that at times he had been forced to scrounge for burnt toast and spoiled oranges in the waste bins behind restaurants. He had lost some of his permanent teeth at an early age, and he had been quick to react to any teasing about his smile with his fists. During their free time in the summer of 1942, Kness and Evans frequented the pubs in the Scottish town of Fort William, near their central Scotland base. “Les and I enjoyed ourselves and fought anybody,” Evans recalled. “Every place we went, Les would start a fight and then leave me with it.” Kness insulted British soldiers, or anyone feisty enough to

Les Cook (top) and Les Kness (above) had more in common than their first names: both had served in the Iowa National Guard before moving on to the U.S. Army and the 1st Ranger Battalion’s E Company. “I didn’t know what a Ranger was, but I volunteered,” Cook recalled.

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join the fight, 15 of Kness’s fellow Rangers did participate in the raid, becoming the first American ground soldiers to see action against the Germans in occupied Europe. Several were killed and another three were captured during the raid, which was considered a failure overall. But in taking a German battery, the Rangers had executed a model commando assault. And all, Kness felt, had gained valuable experience and enhanced stature among their peers. Their new-won confidence showed in November 1942 when, as part of Operation Torch in North Africa, Darby and his special forces battalion were tasked with capturing two coastal defense batteries dominating the landing beaches at Arzew, a port town near Oran. By 4 a.m. on November 8—just hours after the landings had commenced—both enemy batteries were in Ranger hands. NOW, AS NEW ARRIVALS in northern Algeria, Kness, Cook, and their fellow Rangers began setting up camp in the picturesque

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U.S. ARMY SIGNAL CORPS; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

strike back, and Evans would quickly find himself in the middle of a first-class brawl. The rough-and-tumble life of being a Ranger fit the pair well. Weeks into the training in Scotland, however, their tight bond was challenged when Evans was promoted as the battalion’s sergeant major. Because of his promotion, Evans was not allowed to participate in the Dieppe Raid when it was finally put into motion later in August. In his place was Kness, freshly promoted to E Company’s first sergeant. Kness and 50 other Rangers accompanied British commandos and Canadian infantrymen when they embarked for Dieppe the night of August 18, 1942. The landing flotilla carrying other commandos, including some of the Rangers, came under assault by German “E-boats,” similar to American PT boats. “Shells that looked like little yellow balls were floating through the air, just beautiful,” Kness said. “It was like the Fourth of July.” Although his boat never made it ashore to

U.S. ARMY SIGNAL CORPS

The Rangers came to be known as “Darby’s Rangers” after their charismatic leader, Lieutenant Colonel William Orlando Darby, here relaxing outside Arzew, Algeria.

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U.S. ARMY SIGNAL CORPS; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

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TESTED IN TUNISIA town of Tébessa. Bill Darby, meanwhile, went to the headquarters of Major General Lloyd Fredendall, 59—the sandy-haired, blue-eyed, commander of the U.S. Army’s II Corps—for a briefing. There, his force was given a special mission—conducting darting, pinpricking nighttime raids to give their Axis enemy the impression that Allied strength in central Tunisia was greater than it actually was. Tasked with capturing prisoners and inflicting heavy losses on the enemy with fewer than 500 men under his command, Darby believed that if they accomplished this mission, his men had the chance to stand out to the army’s high command. The first raid would be against Sened Station, a railway junction and Axis supply depot located near Sened Pass in Tunisia—one reportedly occupied by Italian soldiers of the Centauro Division of the Bersaglieri, an armored division of the Italian Army. The morning after he talked to Fredendall, Darby led a small patrol there on a reconnaissance mission to gather intelligence. Three companies of Darby’s Rangers, Kness and Cook’s E Company included, would participate in the assault on Sened Station. “We’re gonna throw the commando book at them—bayonets, knives, grenades—the works!” Captain Roy A. Murray told his F Company in a pre-raid briefing. “They’ve got to know they’ve been worked over by Rangers.” Early on the morning of February 11, 1943, 200 Rangers advanced over eight miles of rugged desert terrain to reach their objective by dawn. Kness and the Rangers in his company completed the hike without event—although Cook took his share of teasing during the advance. With a reputation for getting tangled in barbed wire during previous night marches, he was razzed that if there was barbed wire within 100 miles of the Rangers in North Africa, he’d be the only man to get tangled in it. The Rangers concealed themselves during daylight, studying their enemy’s movements four miles away with field glasses. Around midnight, they were on the move again, employing stealth and silence to ease in on the Axis strongpoint. They had camouflaged themselves by smearing their faces and hands with dirt, their dog tags taped together to prevent any clinking sounds. “We would jump up and down in front

Two Rangers cover Arzew Harbor on November 8, 1942. Charged with seizing two coastal defense batteries there, the Rangers accomplished their goal in the early morning, just hours after their landings.

of the guys beside us, so we could check one another for any loose rattle of equipment and quieten it,” Cook said. “We turned our wristwatches over to hide the glow of the face and made sure our shirt sleeves covered them.” Kness had the men of his platoon don brimless knit caps instead of steel battle helmets, as the men in the other companies had done. Each man’s back bore a piece of white tape marked with an X, Y, or Z, depending on the company, to help them maintain formation. They’d been ordered to kill anyone without tape on his back, or anyone wearing a helmet. Darby’s men advanced swiftly over rocks, ravines, and boulders to reach a point about 600 yards from the Italian post at Sened Station. At 1:20 a.m. on February 12, Darby ordered the charge. When the sergeant of E Company’s first platoon yelled, his men began to run. But the second platoon, led by two newer officers, was sluggish. Kness jumped into action, hollering at the men until they took off at a dead charge, with Kness running right alongside them over the hill. During the charge, the Rangers faced Italian machine guns and a 47mm cannon. Within 20 minutes of fighting—some of it hand to hand—Darby’s men killed at least 50 opponents, wounded many more, and took 11 prisoners. One Ranger was killed and another 18 were wounded by the time they fell back JUNE 2022

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ELEVEN DAYS LATER, the U.S. Army was in a bad state, having suffered heavy losses in battles at Sidi Bou Zid and Kasserine Pass near the western border of Tunisia—combat

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U.S. ARMY SIGNAL CORPS

toward their origination point. During the day, Sergeant Kness’s platoon assisted their most severely injured men back to Tébessa. In the afternoon of the next day, February 13, Major General Fredendall arrived to pin decorations on the brave Rangers. Fourteen officers and men received the Silver Star, and four other men were given battlefield commissions. Among them was Les Kness, advanced to the officer’s rank of second lieutenant. Nine months after his brother Mike had employed muster-roll trickery to get Les into Darby’s elite battalion, he had become one of only 22 Rangers who had participated in both the Dieppe and Sened Station raids.

CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES

George S. Patton, here a major general, surveys a beach in Morocco in November 1942, during the first days of the U.S. campaign in North Africa. He assumed command of the army’s II Corps—and got his third star—the following March.

that hadn’t involved the Rangers in any significant way. Fredendall was relieved of the command of II Corps, replaced by a fiery former tank commander, George Patton. Upon arriving at his new headquarters on March 6, 1943, Patton, then a major general, set to work implementing stronger discipline within his corps. He started with the most basic rules, including how to salute and how to dress. During the next week, “Old Blood and Guts”—who learned he had been promoted to lieutenant general on March 12—railed at soldiers he found without neckties or the muchdisliked gaiters, which covered boots from the ankle up to keep out rocks and mud. On March 13, Lieutenant Kness and some of his fellow Rangers were among those fined for not being in proper uniform. Darby’s battalion—now operating with the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division—had been preparing for another raid against a German position in Tunisia when the new commander arrived on the scene. Kness had taken 14 Rangers into the town of Le Kef to store their barracks bags for the assault. All were dressed in work-detail clothing and soft skull caps. Brigadier General Hugh Gaffey, Patton’s corps chief of staff, chewed out Kness for the sloppy appearance of his men and marched them back to Patton’s headquarters. Kness was hauled in before Patton to address charges that his men were out of proper uniform and had shown no respect to Gaffey. Patton, in his characteristic high-pitched voice, asked Kness: “Is this true?” Kness’s fighting instincts kicked in; his exchange with the new commander became heated, bringing a threat from Patton to ship Kness back to the States and separate him from service. The general hammered his fist on his desk, his face aflame and angry. The lieutenant tried to explain how he was newly commissioned and that no proper officer uniforms were available to him, but Patton berated him for not wearing his necktie. “Sir, we are in the process of moving out this evening to attack an enemy artillery position,” Kness remembered saying. “We had permission to remove our neckties for the fight.” “No one can rescind one of my orders!” Patton yelled. “Do you understand?” The general handed down orders that each Ranger be fined $25 and held in the stockade overnight. Once Patton and Gaffey had

U.S. ARMY SIGNAL CORPS

CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES

departed, Kness was summoned back into the office to pay his fine. Irritated, he muttered “armchair commando” toward one of Patton’s staffers seated behind the desk. “He raised up and, to my surprise, was a full bird colonel,” Kness recalled. “I found out what a master at reaming was really like.” ONE WEEK AFTER his crude introduction to George Patton, Lieutenant Kness and his Rangers were preparing for another important overnight raid. It was March 20, 1943; three days prior, the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division had taken the Tunisian city of Gafsa for use as a forward supply base. The following day, March 18, the Rangers had occupied the oasis of El Guettar with very little opposition. Now Darby’s 1st Ranger Battalion had orders to occupy an observation post on a distinct knob labeled “Djebel Orbata” on North African maps. East of Gafsa, the Orbata mountain rose sharply to a height of 3,800 feet and roughly paralleled the course of the main road from Gafsa through the town of El Guettar. Two of Darby’s patrols had reconnoitered the slopes the previous night. They found its ridge infested with Italian soldiers who had fired upon them. To make the assault, Darby employed his entire battalion. The nearly 500 Rangers had rifles, grenades, knives, and two 60mm M2 mortars per company, and the battalion also had 12 .30-caliber M1919-A4 machine guns. Moving with them was a company of the 1st Engineer Battalion, who called themselves “hell squads,” each unit towing 37mm antiaircraft guns and pairs of 81mm mortars.

Patton later fined some of his new charges—here commandeering a French coastal gun—for not showing enough spit and polish in camp, an act that created lingering resentment among the Rangers.

The trek began at 11 p.m. The terrain was wicked in the darkness, filled with knife-like ridges, boulder-strewn hills, and precipitous dry ravines known as wadis. Toggle ropes were often necessary to help move men and equipment up and down cliffs and over ravines. They stumbled and cursed silently, groping through difficult gorges, breathing hard as they lugged their heavy gear and helped to pull other men up steep draws. Kness was up for the challenge. He considered the rough climb to be just the thing his unit had been training for. Five hours into their journey, the Rangers reached a sharp drop that required men to climb hand-over-hand down the cliff, silently passing equipment to each other. Daylight was fast approaching on Djebel Orbata as Darby directed his companies toward their final positions. As Kness’s men came up over the JUNE 2022

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Patton could now boast that his troops had reclaimed more than 2,000 square miles of territory in a mere five days.

mountain rim to confront the enemy, they were closest to the center of assault. His Second Platoon moved out to go over the rim toward the enemy positions. Leading a squad from E Company, Sergeant Les Cook was sweating from the exertion. For his Tommy gun, Cook was carrying 10 magazines with 20 rounds each, 5 on each side of his belt. At 5 a.m. on the 21st, a bugle call signaled the attack against Djebel Orbata. Surprise was complete at first, but the Rangers were soon faced with silencing a German artillery piece and an Italian machine gun nest. Rangers, their faces darkened, surged forward, firing their guns and bayonetting Italian soldiers who resisted. In short order, dozens of Italians were waving white flags of surrender. The next half hour deteriorated into a series of scattered assaults. Small pockets of resistance remained to be cleared, while other Italians gave up the fight in groups. Two hours after the assault commenced, a straggling mortar squad arrived and quickly knocked out another Italian machine gun nest. By the time two battalions of the 26th Infantry reached the pass, the Rangers had the situation well in hand, their only organized resistance being other dug-in machine g un positions south of the road. All six Ranger companies fought through the morning hours and, by 12:20 p.m., Darby was able to report by radio that the inner portions of the pass had been cleared. By late afternoon, some 1,400 Axis prisoners had been rounded up and marched down from the hills. The Rangers returned to their bivouac

U.S. ARMY SIGNAL CORPS; OPPOSITE: BOB LANDRY/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/SHUTTERSTOCK

A German soldier lies dead after the Rangers’ successful raid on Tunisia’s Sened Station in early February 1943. More accomplishments followed, creating groundwork for the U.S. Army’s—and Patton’s— first significant victory over Nazi Germany.

area at El Guettar by late afternoon, turning over their prisoners for processing. Compared to the bloody combat the Rangers had endured in the Dieppe and Sened Station raids, Kness considered the surprise assault on Djebel Orbata to be “a cakewalk.” Darby’s men had conquered the coveted high ground with only six men wounded. The weary 1st Ranger Battalion was happy to accept hot stew, ladled into their helmets, and canteen cups from kitchen truck cooks, while infantry regiments of the 1st Division pushed southeast of El Guettar before digging in for the evening. Lieutenant General Patton could now boast that his troops had reclaimed more than 2,000 square miles of territory—capturing Sened Station, Gafsa, and El Guettar—in a mere five days. Proudly sporting his new three stars, Patton went to the front lines to watch the show on March 21. During the afternoon, his command group left its division post and headed east toward a point where the 18th Infantry Regiment was fighting. “The soldiers told me to get back, which, of course, prevented me from doing so,” wrote Patton, who hoped to instill courage in his men. The fight that became known as the Battle of El Guettar was in its opening stages, and would consume more days before the outcome was decided early in April 1943. It was the U.S. Army’s first major victory against Axis troops in the European Theater of Operations—a real morale booster that would flush the soldiers with great confidence for the long road to ultimate victory that lay ahead. But things never moved fast enough to please Patton. The very men Patton had railed against in mid-March, Rangers like Les Kness and Les Cook, had played a key role in helping secure that victory. By the end of the El Guettar campaign, Bill Darby considered his men to be “battle-tested veterans, experienced in mountain and hit-and-run warfare.” A year later, his battalion—a forerunner to today’s U.S. Army Special Forces—would be honored with a Presidential Unit Citation for its valor in North Africa. Patton later declared Darby to be “the bravest man I ever knew.” His first impressions of the unconventional 1st Ranger Battalion had not been kind or gratifying, and some of them would forever resent the general. But Patton would not look down on these warriors again. H

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U.S. ARMY SIGNAL CORPS; OPPOSITE: BOB LANDRY/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/SHUTTERSTOCK

From North Africa, Darby’s Rangers moved on to Sicily, where, in August 1943, Patton congratulated Darby on taking the port town of Gela.

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BUTCHER OF BATAAN Masaharu Homma’s troops committed countless atrocities in the Philippines. The pivotal question during the Japanese general’s war-crimes trial: had he known? By Joseph Connor

ames Baldassarre’s long-awaited chance for payback was at hand. The 51-year-old sergeant, whom a reporter called the “perfect prototype…of the hard-bitten, sardonic ‘old Army regular,’” had watched Japanese guards torture and murder his fellow prisoners during the Bataan Death March in April 1942, and he had endured more than three brutal years as a prisoner of war, swearing to stay alive to see his captors get what they deserved. Now, on January 9, 1946, he was in the Philippine capital of Manila to testify at the war-crimes trial of Masaharu Homma, the Japanese general who commanded the soldiers who had brutalized thousands of helpless American and Filipino prisoners during the march four years earlier. There was no doubt where Baldassarre stood. “They should hang the man. He is a no-good son of a bitch. I should pull the rope…. Send him to me. I’ll fix him up,” he told reporters outside the courtroom. Homma’s defense attorneys portrayed their client as an out-of-touch commander, kept in the dark about the atrocities his troops were committing. The prosecutors, however, believed Homma knew about his men’s barbarity and had chosen to ignore it. Dozens of survivors were lined up to testify against Homma, so prosecutors would have little trouble proving the horrors of the march—but more was needed. The case hinged on a cloudier issue: could Baldassarre and other witnesses link Homma to the atrocities of the march by showing Homma likely knew what his men were doing and had turned a blind eye to it? The answer could determine whether Homma lived or died. AT THE START OF THE WAR, Japan targeted the Philippine islands, an American possession since 1898. Tokyo assigned Lieutenant General Homma and his 14th Army to capture the islands, and expected the campaign to take no more than 50 days. Homma’s opponent was General Douglas MacArthur, who commanded the American and Filipino troops in the Philippines.

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The commander of Japanese forces in the first battles in the Philippines, Masaharu Homma stares from behind jail bars at a prison in Yokohama, Japan, following his September 1945 arrest on war-crimes charges.

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M I L E S

CAMP O’DONNELL 0

TRAVEL BY RAIL

L U Z O N SAN FERNANDO TRAVEL BY FOOT

SOUTH CHINA SEA

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MANILA MANILA B AY

CORREGIDOR

Born in 1888, Homma was a career soldier and a man of eclectic interests. A tall, sternlooking man, he had graduated from Japan’s military academy in 1907 and from its army staff college in 1916, and had served as military attaché to London from 1930-32. He spoke fluent English, enjoyed Western literature, wrote poetry, and was an avid tennis player. On December 10, 1941, the first Japanese infantry troops invaded the Philippines when a small force of Homma’s men landed on northern Luzon, the main island. They quickly showed how brutal they could be. His soldiers entered the office of Buenaventura Bello, 51, an administrator at Northern College in Vigan. They ordered him to remove the American and Philippine flags from his office, but

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FROM TOP: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; U.S. AIR FORCE

A tall and striking figure, Homma (center) appears on January 20, 1942, with Jorge B. Vargas, a Filipino politician who later served as an administrator during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. Japan’s invasion had begun the prior month.

he refused. “These hands are made to defend them and never to pull them down,” he said. A soldier shot him in the groin. (Bello survived.) Homma’s main landings were at Lingayen Gulf, north of Manila, on December 22 and, two days later, at Lamon Bay, to the south. MacArthur abandoned Manila on December 26, declaring it an open city to spare civilians from attack, and withdrew his forces into the 25-mile-long Bataan Peninsula, across Manila Bay from the capital. Homma misread the retreat as the disorganized flight of defeated troops, but it was a planned withdrawal by soldiers ready to fight. MacArthur had anticipated making a stand on Bataan if his men couldn’t stop the Japanese on the invasion beaches; mountainous Bataan was well-suited for defense, and MacArthur intended to hold it. From January 1942 onward, MacArthur’s American and Filipino troops maintained their grip on Bataan, withstanding repeated Japanese attacks, and by early February, Homma realized he needed more men. Tokyo was already impatient with him for the campaign’s slow progress, and Homma was ashamed to need reinforcements. While MacArthur’s troops continued to stymie the enemy, their situation was growing dire. A Japanese blockade of the Philippines meant the men had to make do with what they had. Food was in short supply. Rations were cut to 2,000 calories per day in January, about half of what a soldier needed; by March, they were down to 1,000 calories per day—“just about enough to keep a man alive if he stays in bed,” army doctors said.

NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER; PREVIOUS PAGES: AP PHOTO/MAX DESFOR

Bataan Death March

FROM TOP: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; U.S. AIR FORCE

NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER; PREVIOUS PAGES: AP PHOTO/MAX DESFOR

Japanese troops advance to the front in Bataan in preparation for Homma’s massive April 3, 1942, offensive; defenders surrendered days later. Despite assurances of “kindly” treatment (right), throngs of POWs were then subjected to the horrors of the Bataan Death March.

Medicines began to run low, and malaria and dysentery took their toll. Once Homma had his reinforcements in hand, he planned a final offensive for early April. Confident of victory, he had his staff devise a plan to transport the American and Filipino soldiers he expected to capture on Bataan to prison camp. Under the plan, prisoners would assemble at Balanga, about 19 miles north of the southern tip of Bataan. From Balanga, they would march about 35 miles north to San Fernando. From there, they would travel by rail to a prison camp in central Luzon. On paper, the plan prepared by Homma’s staff called for humane treatment of the prisoners, a staff officer insisted. The U.S. War Department, too, knew the end was near, and in March 1942 had ordered MacArthur to evacuate to Australia to avoid his capture by the Japanese. Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wainwright replaced MacArthur, and Major General Edward P. King Jr. was put in command on Bataan. On April 3, 1942, Homma launched his offensive, and his troops sliced through Allied lines. The American and Filipino defenders no longer had the strength to fight. Almost every man suffered from the effects of prolonged starvation as well as from malaria or dysentery, the chief medical officer, Colonel Wibb Cooper, recounted. Most had lost 20 to 30 pounds, and commanders estimated that many weren’t fit enough to walk 100 yards without resting. JUNE 2022

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THE PLIGHT OF THE BATAAN PRISONERS quickly degenerated into chaos. The Japanese had expected no more than 40,000 prisoners, but the number was nearly double that, and they hadn’t anticipated just how malnourished and sick the men were. The main problem, however, was that Japanese soldiers viewed their captives with contempt. As Homma himself admitted, the Japanese army treated surrender as the ultimate disgrace, and its soldiers were taught to die rather than capitulate. Contempt led to harsh treatment. According to historian Charles

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On April 9, 1942, General King surrendered the approximately 75,000 troops on Bataan, the largest surrender in American history. He set aside U.S. Army trucks and cars to transport his men to prison camp, but the Japanese refused to use them. When King sought assurances that the Japanese would treat his men humanely, an officer replied, “We are not barbarians.” Nevertheless, King had reason to worry because Homma’s men had already shown that they often played by their own rules. They had continued to bomb Manila after MacArthur had abandoned it. Prisoners of war had been executed, and Japanese planes had targeted an army hospital marked with a red cross.

A. Stenger, during the war, 40.4 percent of the American servicemen held by the Japanese died in captivity, while the death rate for those held by Germany was 1.2 percent. Homma had other matters on his mind, and “interest and consideration for Prisoners of War was ‘thin’ from Homma on down,” said Colonel Toshimitsu Takatsu, one of Homma’s staff officers. Homma’s job wouldn’t be done until he seized Corregidor, the island fortress in the mouth of Manila Bay. As long as Allied forces held Corregidor, the Japanese couldn’t use Manila Bay, one of the finest harbors in Asia. Because of mounting pressure from Tokyo, Homma became preoccupied with Corregidor. Prisoners had to be removed from Bataan quickly so that he could bring troops and supplies to southern Bataan for an amphibious assault on the island. Guards treated prisoners and civilians with savage fury. Sergeant Michael Bruaw heard a group of 25 prisoners scream as guards used

U.S. MARINE CORPS/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Japanese guards force Filipinos to view dead POWs. Treatment of prisoners was brutal from the start, with the Death March claiming thousands of lives.

FROM TOP: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; U.S. AIR FORCE

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them for bayonet practice. Major Richard Kadel saw a terrified Filipino family of eight flee when shells from Corregidor exploded nearby. A patrol caught them, and an officer held a baby by the legs as he sliced off the infant’s head with his sword. His men forced the other seven to kneel as they beheaded them one by one. American and Filipino prisoners marched in groups of 100 up Bataan’s two-lane Old National Road toward Balanga and San Fernando. Men struggled to keep up, but they had no choice because the alternative was death. Guards, whom the prisoners called “buzzard squads,” finished off those who couldn’t go on. Sergeant Baldassarre saw a colonel stagger off the road, muttering, “I can’t make the hike anymore.” Before he went six feet, a guard shot him. The same fate befell a lieutenant who stumbled off the route murmuring, “I am all in.” Sergeant Horace Clark watched a soldier he knew as Big Smitty drop from exhaustion. Big Smitty’s friends tried to pick him up, but guards chased them away as another guard beheaded the helpless soldier. Major Bertram Bank helped carry a weakened lieutenant colonel; a guard forced Bank to drop the man, and then drove a bayonet through the colonel. The side of the road along the route soon became littered with corpses that remained unburied for days. In the 18-mile stretch between Balanga and Lubao, for example, Sergeant Baldassarre saw hundreds of American and Filipino bodies. If a corpse stayed on the roadway, passing trucks flattened it. Guards tormented the exhausted men by speeding up the march to double-time pace. As Japanese trucks passed by, soldiers in them reached out with clubs to hit prisoners. Major Fred Castro saw guards throw exhausted men into a pit. One begged for mercy as the guards forced prisoners to fill the pit with dirt, burying them alive. Near the Pantingan River, guards tied several hundred Filipino prisoners together and attacked them with swords and bayonets. Only a handful survived. The heat drove prisoners mad with thirst. Artesian wells dotted the route, but guards beat or killed prisoners who tried to drink from them. Men became so parched that they drank from streams filled with rotting corpses. Even rest breaks had a sadistic twist. Guards forced prisoners to sit under the blistering sun without shade, food, or water. To Lieutenant William E. Dyess, a fighter

pilot captured on Bataan, “we ceased to be men—more like filthy, starving rabble.” Filipino civilians took pity on the prisoners. “They could hardly walk. Some of them, they were carried by their companions,” said Fernando Ocampo, an American-educated Filipino architect. Ocampo and his sister brought baskets of bananas, rice cakes, and hard-boiled eggs to give to the prisoners, but a guard kicked the food into a ditch. When the captives scrambled to retrieve it, guards hit them with rifle butts. Prisoners saw guards beat or kill other Filipino Good Samaritans. For most prisoners, the march to San Fernando took nearly a week. The Japanese provided food sparingly, if at all. Lieutenant Dyess, for example, was fed only one mess kit of rice the entire time. At San Fernando, the prisoners were crammed into steel boxcars for the four-hour train ride to Camp O’Donnell, a former Philippine army base and now a prison camp. Dyess counted 115 men in one car. Many suffered from dysentery, and the boxcar floors were covered

Deaths continued after the POWs arrived at their prison at Camp O’Donnell, where, later in the war (top), a U.S. soldier and a war correspondent uncovered crude grave markers. The atrocities remained unknown until Lieutenant William E. Dyess (above) escaped in 1943.

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THE U.S. GOVERNMENT and the American public didn’t learn of the Death March for more than a year. They got the news after Lieutenant Dyess escaped from Davao prison camp, on the Philippine island of Mindanao, in April 1943, made his way to Australia, and gave the first eyewitness account of the march. When his story hit newsstands on January 28, 1944, it sparked a level of anger not seen since the Pearl Harbor attack. President Franklin D. Roosevelt vowed that those responsible would

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt vowed that those responsible for the march would pay.

with human waste. Guards kept the doors locked, and men struggled to breathe the hot, fetid air. They arrived at Camp O’Donnell “dehydrated, starved and in the merest rags of clothing,” Brigadier General James R. N. Weaver reported. No one will ever know the exact number of men who perished on the march and the trip to Camp O’Donnell; historians estimate the death toll at 10,000. At Camp O’Donnell, the suffering continued. The men were inadequately fed, and disease ran rampant. Relief agencies brought food and medicines to the camp, but the Japanese kept these items for themselves. By June 2, 1942, more than 25,000 American and Filipino prisoners had died at Camp O’Donnell. Homma ended the campaign by capturing Corregidor on May 6, 1942. He had taken nearly five months to finish a task expected to take no more than 50 days, and he paid with his job. On August 5, 1942, he was relieved and sent home to Japan, where he spent the rest of the war in retirement.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

General Douglas MacArthur arrives at Japan’s Atsugi Air Base on August 30, 1945—several days before the formal surrender—to oversee the occupation as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. His authority included oversight of all Japanese war-crimes trials.

pay. Congressmen vowed vengeance. The public spoke with its wallet, and war-bond sales nearly doubled. Homma had become a marked man. As Japan’s formal September 2, 1945, surrender approached, MacArthur was sent to Japan as the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, and part of his job was to oversee the trials of Japanese war criminals. On September 11, he ordered the arrest of 40 suspects, Homma included. When Homma turned himself in four days later, he told reporters he was surprised to be on MacArthur’s list. As for the Death March, he said, “I don’t think it was such a tough march.” On November 4, 1945, the United States charged Homma with a war crime for failing to “control the operations of the members of his command, permitting them to commit brutal atrocities and other high crimes” against Filipino and American soldiers and A llied civilians. The charges specified 47 separate acts of barbarity that included not only the Death March but also the mistreatment of civilians interned in Manila, neglect of prisoners at Camp O’Donnell, and the widespread abuse of Filipino civilians. If convicted, Homma could be sentenced to death. On December 15, five generals—four Americans and one Filipino—were selected as judges for Homma’s trial. One—Philippine Major General Basilio J. Valdes—had an axe to grind against the Japanese. They had murdered his brother, Alejo, when they mistook him for Basilio. An experienced litigator, 53-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Frank E. Meek, was named the lead prosecutor, heading a team of one Filipino and five American officers. Major John H. Skeen Jr. was selected to head the defense team of six junior U.S. Army officers. Skeen, a 27-year-old attorney who had never tried a criminal case, had expected to rotate home and wasn’t thrilled to be defending Homma. In a letter to his wife, however, he promised to “give the S.O.B. everything possible in the way of defense.” All the judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys served under MacArthur’s command. In pretrial motions, Homma’s attorneys attacked the proceedings for numerous reasons, including the rules of evidence MacArthur’s headquarters had put in place. These

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

At Homma’s trial, Buenaventura Bello (standing, center) displays the American flag Japanese invaders ripped from a wall after shooting him when he refused to move it.

rules, for example, allowed the prosecutor to present affidavits in lieu of live testimony— something impermissible in American courts because it violated the accused’s right to confront the witnesses against him. The issues Homma’s attorneys raised were already before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who had been sentenced on December 7, 1945, to hang for the brutal acts his men committed when Allied forces retook Manila earlier that year. Homma’s lawyers also challenged MacArthur’s pervasive role in the proceedings: not only had he ordered the trial, with the judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys all serving under him, but if a death sentence were imposed, MacArthur would decide if it would be carried out. Since Homma had beaten MacArthur on Bataan, they argued, MacArthur’s role in the proceedings created the appearance that the trial was about revenge for that defeat, not justice. The judges denied these motions and ordered the case to proceed.

THE TRIAL BEGAN on January 3, 1946, in Manila’s high commissioner’s residence, still pockmarked with damage from the fighting to recapture Manila. To Lieutenant Robert L. Pelz, one of the defense attorneys, the 57-year-old Homma looked like “a tired-out grandfather who has girded his loins for a last battle.” No one contended that Homma had ordered any atrocities or participated in any. He was charged because he commanded the men who had committed these crimes and had done nothing to stop them. While a commander’s duty to control his troops was well-established, the breadth of command responsibility was a murky issue. The uncertainty was whether a commander was automatically liable for his men’s misconduct or whether he was criminally responsible only if he knew, or should have known, what his troops were doing. In his opening statement, prosecutor Meek promised to prove that Homma had had actual knowledge of his men’s misdeeds. Their brutality was “so widespread and so broad in pattern and design and so continuous,” he argued, that Homma had to have known. Next, Meek moved to back up his words with evidence. He showed that Homma’s headquarters at Balanga were 500 yards from the march route: so close, Meek asserted, that if he “cared to listen he could have heard the screams of the wounded and the dying.” But Meek wanted something more direct to prove Homma’s knowledge, and Sergeant Baldassarre and a Filipino captain provided it. JUNE 2022

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Baldassarre recalled numerous Japanese officers in staff cars passing the prisoners during the march and described seeing one high-ranking officer on the march route near San Fernando. A Japanese soldier told him it was Homma. When asked at trial if the highranking officer he had seen was in the courtroom, Baldassarre pointed at Homma and said, “He is right there now, sir.” Captain Alberto Abeleda described a similar incident. On the route near Lubao, Abeleda saw a “big, flashy car” stop in front of a warehouse. Japanese soldiers snapped to attention as an officer got out of the car, spoke to one of them, and then left. Abeleda described the officer as a big man, and Homma stood just over six feet tall. Abeleda told the judges he later saw Homma’s photo in a Manila newspaper and recognized him as the officer he had seen. This testimony hurt Homma’s cause badly. Numerous witnesses had described how the march route was strewn with corpses, implying that no one who traveled that road could have missed seeing them. If Homma had seen those corpses, he knew his men were running amok and had a legal duty to stop the carnage. ON JANUARY 21 the prosecution rested. It was now the defense’s turn, and Homma’s attorneys sought to establish that Homma had been ignorant of what his men were doing. Surprisingly, the defense also called several of

AP PHOTO/MAX DESFOR; OPPOSITE: AP PHOTO/CDES

Homma’s wife, Fujiko—here at her husband’s side— testified on his behalf and later made a direct appeal to MacArthur to spare his life.

Homma’s underlings to try to show that the march wasn’t all that bad—an impossible position in light of the harsh conditions that numerous survivors had already described. Major Moriya Wada swore that fewer than 30 prisoners perished on the march and that they had died from disease, not mistreatment. Colonel Yoshio Nakajima insisted he saw prisoners near Balanga resting in the shade and eating Japanese rations while other prisoners swam in a nearby stream. Colonel Seiichi Ohta maintained that guards gave the men ample food and water and allowed them to rest as needed. Homma’s chief of staff, Takeji Wachi, went further, insisting that guards helped tired prisoners to the side of the road to rest or onto trucks to ride to San Fernando. These witnesses all had a motive to lie to avoid being charged with war crimes themselves. One month into the trial—on February 4—Homma took the stand to insist he hadn’t learned of the march’s horrors until hearing the survivors’ testimony. He portrayed himself as a figurehead with limited authority over his subordinates. Preoccupied with Corregidor, he had relied on these subordinates, he claimed, and they hadn’t reported any mistreatment to him. “I am ashamed of myself should these atrocities have happened,” he said. He admitted traveling on the march route on several occasions but claimed, “My memory on the point is somewhat obscure.” He denied seeing any corpses. “I was not looking for them particularly,” he explained. The same day Homma took the stand, the defense got bad news when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene in the Yamashita case. Since that case raised the same issues as Homma’s, it was now unlikely the high court would hear his lawyers’ motions. As the trial neared its end, the defense tried to humanize its client by calling Homma’s 42-year-old wife, Fujiko, to testify that her husband wasn’t the kind of person to countenance atrocities. “I am proud of the fact that I am the wife of General Homma,” she said, as Homma wept at counsel table. Mrs. Homma, described by a reporter as a tiny kimonoclad woman who spoke “animatedly and earnestly,” was such a sympathetic figure, prosecutor Meek later remarked, that he was “never so glad in all my experiences in court to have a witness get off the stand.” February 11 was decision day. Homma stood as the chief judge, Major General Leo Donovan, solemnly announced that they found him guilty and sentenced him to be “shot to death with musketry.” That same day, the Supreme Court refused to hear Homma’s case, which removed the last legal obstacle to Homma being punished by military judges operating under the rules set by MacArthur’s headquarters. Two justices, Frank Murphy and Wiley Rutledge, disagreed and condemned the proceedings. “Hasty, revengeful action is not the American way,” they stated, and compared the trials of Homma and other Japanese officers to “blood purges” and “judicial lynchings.” Homma’s fate now rested with MacArthur. As supreme commander, he would decide if Homma would be executed or spared. Fujiko Homma traveled to Tokyo to plead her husband’s case, and MacArthur met with her on March 11. She was a “cultured woman of great per-

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sonal charm,” he said, and he called the meeting “one of the most trying hours of my life.” He promised to give “the gravest consideration” to what she had said. Notwithstanding Mrs. Homma’s pleas, MacArthur affirmed the conviction and death sentence 10 days later. “If this defendant does not deserve his judicial fate, none in jurisdictional history ever did,” he stated. “There can be no greater, more heinous or more dangerous crime than the mass destruction, under guise of military authority…of helpless men.” As for the proceedings themselves, “no trial could have been fairer than this one,” MacArthur said. The sentence was carried out at 1 a.m. on April 3, 1946, at Los Baños, a former internment camp south of Manila. MPs led Homma, hands bound behind his back, into the yard and tied him to a post. He was “calm and stoical,” a reporter noted, and refused to make a final statement. A black hood was placed over his head, and an army doctor put a four-inch round target over his heart. On command, 12 soldiers standing 15 paces away fired. “Army precision marked the grim, nearly silent drama,” the Associated Press reported.

Standing with his lead American attorney, Major John H. Skeen Jr., at left, Homma learns that he has been sentenced to be “shot to death with musketry.”

AP PHOTO/MAX DESFOR; OPPOSITE: AP PHOTO/CDES

SINCE 1946, HISTORIANS and legal commentators have had harsh words for Homma’s trial. The evidence was strong enough to allow the judges to find that Homma knew what his troops were doing, so the outcome might have been the same regardless of the circumstances. MacArthur’s pervasive role, however, created an unsettling appearance of unfairness and bias, leading to a preordained result. Homma had beaten MacArthur on Bataan, the only time the Japanese had defeated the U.S. Army in a major campaign and the only

battlefield loss MacArthur had ever suffered. The judges answered to MacArthur, and MacArthur’s rules of evidence wouldn’t have passed muster in an American court. An experienced prosecutor was pitted against a courtroom novice, and just one person—MacArthur—had the power to spare Homma’s life. The deck appeared to be stacked. D. Clayton James, a respected biographer of MacArthur, called the trial a miscarriage of justice, and William Manchester, another prominent MacArthur biographer, went so far as to conclude that Homma was convicted by a kangaroo court “which flouted justice with the Supreme Commander’s approval and probably at his urging.” Sergeant Baldassarre, however, shed no tears. In fact, he didn’t understand why Homma deserved a trial at all. The Japanese “never trialed us. They killed people like flies” and gave the prisoners “nothing but bullets and bayonets,” he told reporters during the trial. To the crusty sergeant, a score had been settled. H

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WEAPONS MANUAL CANADA’S RAM II MEDIUM TANK ILLUSTRATION BY JIM LAURIER

BATTERING RAM SOMETIMES LOST in the celebratory telling of the 1940 rescue of British forces from Dunkirk’s beaches is the devastating amount of war materiel the British Expeditionary Force had to leave behind in France. Along with artillery, guns, and vehicles of all sorts, the British lost about half of all the tanks in their inventory to the Germans. Canadians, wanting to both resupply the British and meet their own defense needs, began plans to produce a domestically built tank. They at first considered licensing the new American M3 Lee medium tank, but in March 1941 settled on a hybrid design, combining the M3’s chassis, engine, and drivetrain with a redesigned cast-iron hull. Just as production was ramping up, the Allies chose the American M4 Sherman as their principal frontline tank, and the Ram was consigned to a training role. Canadian and other Allied troops in England trained extensively in Rams from 1942 to 1944. But the Ram contributed in other ways as well. Several variants saw action in Europe as gun mounts, flamethrowers, and armored personnel carriers. The best-known variant was the Sexton, a self-propelled 25-pound gun built on a Ram chassis. —Larry Porges

CANADIAN RAM II

Crew: 5 / Weight: 65,000 lbs. / Length: 19 ft. / Width: 9 ft. 10 in. / Range: 144 mi. / Max. speed: 25 mph / More than 2,000 Rams, the only tank ever designed and built in Canada, were produced from 1941 to 1943.

THE COMPETITION AMERICAN M4A1 SHERMAN

Crew: 5 / Weight: 66,800 lbs. / Length: 19 ft. 2 in. / Width: 8 ft. 7 in. / Range: 120 mi. / Max. speed: 24 mph / The M4A1 was the first of numerous Sherman types; the U.S. eventually made 50,000 M4s—the Western Allies’ primary tank of the war.

GERMAN PANZER IV

Crew: 5 / Weight: 55,200 lbs. / Length: 19 ft. 5 in. / Width: 9 ft. 5 in. / Range: 200 mi. / Max. speed: 26 mph / Serving on every German front, the ubiquitous Panzer IV was the only German tank to stay in production throughout the entire war.

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OPEN-AND-SHUT CASE Early Rams included a side hatch door, which offered access to the crew compartment and provided an easy way out in case of fire or other emergencies. But it also compromised the strength of the hull, and so was eliminated in late-production Ram IIs.

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SWIVEL ACTION The Ram’s main gun, positioned in the cast-iron turret, could rotate a full 360 degrees. This was a major improvement over the American M3 Lee, on which the Ram was based, which had its main armament mounted on the front hull and had a limited left-right traverse of only 30 degrees.

RIGHT-HAND MAN Designed with British conventions in mind, the driver’s seat was situated on the right-hand side of the tank.

Soldiers of the 5th Canadian Armoured Division train on a Ram tank in England in 1942. The 5th saw action with adapted Ram flamethrowers in Holland in 1945.

SHELL GAME The first Rams’ main armament was a tiny but readily available 40mm gun shooting 2-pound shells. This was soon upgraded to a 57mm gun, shown here, that fired 6-pound shells.

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American heavyweight boxer Joe Louis (left) and Germany’s Max Schmeling square off for cameras before their 1938 match.

GLOVES OFF

As war loomed, a boxing ring became a political battleground By Alex Kershaw

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nly a lone Black man stood between Max Schmeling and world domination. The German boxer was 30 years old and a veteran of some 60 bruising fights when he saw American heavyweight champion Joe Louis pulverize Spain’s Paulino Uzcudun in December 1935 at New York’s Madison Square Garden. There was no way, insisted reporters, that Schmeling could beat Louis—at 21, the most awesome boxer in living memory. Didn’t Schmeling know Uzcudun had collapsed in his dressing room after the fight? Sure, said Schmeling, he knew all right. “[But] I saw something which made me think I had a chance,” he later recalled. “Joe had a wonderful straight hand, but he’d punch and then sometimes drop it.” With a fight against Louis scheduled for six months later, in June 1936, Schmeling returned to Berlin armed with films of Louis in action and obsessively played them over and over. While a confident Louis womanized in Hollywood and skipped training to play golf, Schmeling prepared diligently; the German was considered easy pickings for Louis as he punched his way into contention

for the world heavyweight title. Schmeling broke his strict training regime on one notable occasion, when invited to lunch with Adolf Hitler in Munich. Hitler was worried that Schmeling was going to lose to a member of an inferior race. Schmeling was, after all, taking on a formidable adversary, tagged as the “Brown Bomber” or the “Sepia Slugger,” who’d finished off five top boxers, including Uzcudun, Primo Carnera (Mussolini’s favorite), “Kingfish” Levinsky, Max Baer, and Charley Retzlaff in a total of just 16 rounds. Hadn’t Schmeling already been humiliated in 1933 by Baer—of all things a Jew? On June 19, 1936, Schmeling entered the ring in Yankee Stadium first, his glisDark glasses hiding tening hair greased back above evidence of the bushy brows. Within minutes, punches he took, Schmeling showed that he had, Schmeling revels in his June 19, 1936, after all, found Louis’s weakvictory over Louis ness. In the fourth round, sure at New York’s enough, Louis dropped his Yankee Stadium. g uard. Schmeling hit him smack in the face. A split second later, Louis hit the canvas for the first time in his professional career. Eight rounds later, Schmeling again caught Louis with a roundhouse right. Louis sagged to his knees and fell backward. The newsreels showed Schmeling leaping into the air in victory before a crowd of 45,000. Louis, the left side of his jaw badly swollen, didn’t leave his Harlem apartment for three days after his defeat, too humiliated to appear in public. “This stuff about Louis [being] the ‘dead-pan killer’ is so much bunk,” one smug reporter scoffed. “This 22-year-old Negro is made of much the same stuff as any other boy of his age. He proved it in the dressing room when he wept unashamed.” Black America grieved too. Their idol had fallen, defeated by “Hitler’s Heavyweight,” a member of the so-called master race. Some commentators even saw Louis’s defeat as a blow to the nascent civil rights movement. Schmeling later recalled the “hysteria and depression” he saw in Harlem as he was driven to his hotel after the fight. Back in Nazi Germany, Hitler was so delighted he sent a telegram: “Most cordial felicitations on your splendid victory.” Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels gushed: “I know that you have fought for Germany. Your victory is a German victory. We are proud of you. Heil Hitler and hearty greetings.” When Schmeling arrived back in Germany, Hitler requested his presence. This time, the triumphant Schmeling brought his wife and mother to lunch with the Führer in Berlin. Hitler insisted on replaying Schmeling’s victory on film and slapped his thigh whenever Louis caught a punch. “Hitler was very interested in boxing,” Schmeling later recalled. “When we met, we did not speak about politics, only about the fight and the sporting situation. You have to remember the Berlin Olympic Games were due to start three weeks later. Of course, he was a devil. No question about it. And the whole system was rotten. But I couldn’t say Hitler was a beast when I met him. He was polite, charming.” Yet, as with every other sports star in Nazi Germany, it was impos-

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sible for Schmeling to escape the shadow of National Socialism. Every matchup between a German and a rival from a democratic nation was increasingly politicized. Boxing in particular provided an ideal arena for opponents cast as representatives of rival ideologies. In knocking out Louis in 1936, Schmeling appeared to have added grist to Hitler’s fantasies of Aryan superiority. It was an association that would affect Schmeling— and Louis—for decades to come. A REMATCH BETWEEN Louis and Schmeling for the world heavyweight title was scheduled for June 22, 1938. Schmeling would be 32, Louis still only 24. But far more than age difference was now in play. Since the pair had last fought, the political climate had utterly changed. Nazi persecution of the Jews had increased, and Austria had been annexed. Europe teetered on the brink of war. Judging by the American press, Schmeling was now Nazism personified. W hen he arrived in New York, a city he loved, police had to escort him to his hotel, where demonstrators shouted, “Boycott Nazi Schmeling.” As he walked along Fifth Avenue, passers-by gave him the Nazi salute. Throughout his stay in Manhattan, he received hate mail. Four days before the fight, 18 American citizens were indicted on charges of spying for the Nazis—by which time President Franklin D. Roosevelt had already invited Joe Louis to the White House. “The politicization of sport which was pushed so hard by the Third Reich found a sort of echo on the other side of the Atlantic,” Schmeling recalled. “The one group came to emulate the other one, and this was bad for sport. At the time I was a young man with only the thought of a title fight in my head.” Unlike many of his peers, Schmeling never joined the Nazi Party. He had no interest in politics. A proud German, he protested that he was, nonetheless, “no superman in any way.” He later added: “The unfortunate thing during the Thirties was that every German was seen as a Nazi. Even the people who were against Hitler.” Schmeling had refused to turn his back on Jewish friends in Germany, even after the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which stripped Jews of German citizenship. Those friends included Dr. Kurt Schindler, who had accompanied him to New York for his first fight against Louis, and Paul

Damski, a boxing promoter who had introduced Schmeling to the Czech film star Anny Ondra, whom Schmeling had married in 1933. THE DAY OF THE REMATCH was a humid Wednesday in New York. With a towel over his head, protected by a huddle of policemen, Schmeling was pelted with cigarette packs and paper cups as he made his way to the ring in the center of Yankee Stadium’s baseball field. Over a hundred million people around the world were listening to radio coverage. Among the 70,000 at the stadium, all seemingly on Louis’s side, were movie stars such as Clark Gable and Gary Cooper, eager to watch what promoters had termed the “Fight of the Century.”

Schmeling makes a hero’s return home to Nazi Germany, where adoring throngs greet him in Berlin (top). There—in the company of his mother and wife, Czech actress Anny Ondra—he joined Hitler for a celebratory lunch (above). The period caption reads: “Germany’s Men of the Hour Meet.”

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BOTH SCHMELING AND LOUIS, whose rivalry had foreshadowed the supreme contest of World War II, would go on to do their duty in uniform, serving their countries. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Schmeling had to undergo a physical examination for the Wehrmacht. Despite his boxing injuries and being nearly 34, beyond draft age, he was called up. He felt as if he was being singled out for punishment. It was rumored that Goebbels and Hitler hoped Schmeling would “die a hero’s death,” thus atoning for his defeat to Louis. Schmeling later maintained that his induction had been arranged with “Hitler’s support and approval.” In summer 1940, Schmeling was ordered to join a Luftwaffe Fallschirmjaeger parachute unit. He still didn’t believe he would see action—he was too well-known, too valuable surely, to waste in battle. He was wrong. On May 20, 1941, he boarded a Junkers Ju-52 bound for Crete. It was just after dawn the next day when he lined up with soldiers far younger, heard the sound of antiaircraft fire, and then jumped at about 500 feet above the ground: “I could see how some parachutes didn’t open and bodies smashed to the ground; other chutes were torn to shreds by machine gun fire,” he recalled. Schmeling landed badly in a vineyard, aggravating the injury to his vertebra that Louis had inflicted in 1938. He came under heavy fire before blacking out and was eventually taken to a German hospital in Athens to recover. He had spent just two days at the front.

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Schmeling had entered the lion’s den. The crowd was so intimidating that “Doc” Casey, Schmeling’s American cornerman, dared not step into the ring. Yet Joe Louis faced perhaps even greater pressures. He had lost once to Schmeling. Defeat a second time was unimaginable to him. “Here I was, a Black man,” he later remembered. “I had the burden of representing all America. They tell me I was responsible for a lot of change in race relations in America…. White Americans—even while some of them were still lynching Black people in the South—were depending on me to K.O. Germany.” Louis, who took up boxing as a teen in Detroit, where he also worked at the Ford Motor Company, had learned the lesson of his 1936 defeat and opted to throw everything into the first rounds in the hope of outpunching Schmeling before the German’s technical skill could tell. His game plan worked. He had Schmeling on the ropes only a minute into the fight. Louis then jabbed to find his range and hit Schmeling with a right

SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO/ALAMY

Anti-Nazi protesters urge that Schmeling be banned from future fights in the U.S.—an effort that failed to sideline a 1938 rematch with Louis.

hook before smashing his fist into Schmeling’s left side, damaging a vertebra. Crying out in agony, the German went down but somehow got back on his feet, only for Louis to knock him down again. The referee began to count. By the time he reached “eight,” it was all over. Schmeling had lasted just 124 seconds of the first round. Louis’s victory set off delirious street parties in Black neighborhoods from Harlem to Oakland. It was as if Hitler himself had been laid out before a baying crowd. Heywood Broun, a journalist from the New York World-Telegram, wrote: “One hundred years from now, some historian may theorize, in a footnote at least, that the decline of Nazi prestige began with a left hook delivered by a former unskilled automotive worker.” Schmeling’s name disappeared from the sports pages upon his return to Germany. There was no invite to sip tea with Hitler. Schmeling had, it seemed, discredited the master race. Only much later would he realize how the loss to Louis had a silver lining: “A victory over Joe Louis would have made me forever the ‘Aryan Show Horse’ of the Third Reich.” Schmeling was protected to an extent by his celebrity and enormous popularity among ordinary Germans, and he used his fame cannily and at times honorably, refusing to drop his U.S.-based manager, Joe Jacobs, who was Jewish, much to Goebbels’s annoyance. During Kristallnacht, on November 9, 1938, as synagogues blazed and pogroms raged throughout Germany, Schmeling is even said to have secretly provided refuge to two Jewish boys, Werner and Henri Lewin—sons of an acquaintance—in his apartment in the Excelsior Hotel in Berlin. “Max Schmeling risked everything he had for us,” Henri told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. He told me that what he’d done for me and my brother Werner in 1938 was ‘doing the duty of a man.’”

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On May 30, the Times of London reported: “SCHMELING KILLED IN CRETE.” They ran a correction the next day. Reporters in the U.S. made sure to inform Joe Louis that his old rival had in fact survived. “Smellin’ said some bad things about me and my people,” claimed Louis, but then added: “I’m glad he’s not dead.” Louis spoke to the press again as the United States plunged into the abyss after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941: “I was mad, I was furious, you name it. Hell, this is my country. Don’t come around sneaking up and attacking it. If a fighter had done that to me, I would have smashed him. I’m strictly for fair deals and open fighting.” On January 10, 1942, Louis enlisted in the U.S. Army. “Joe has a date for a return engagement with Max Schmeling,” trumpeted the Chicago Tribune. Louis was soon busy raising morale across the United States, appearing in exhibition bouts and even risking his world title to raise funds for the war effort. “There’s a lot wrong with our country,” he said, “but nothin’ Hitler could fix.” In March 1942, he declared in New York: “I have only done what any red-blooded American would do. We gonna do our part, and we’ll win, because we’re on God’s side.” “On God’s side” were words to inspire, and they were soon emblazoned on propaganda posters. President Roosevelt sent an appreciative telegram. “A n aroused American,” Liberty magazine proclaimed, “like an aroused Joe Louis, can be a fearful thing to a hated enemy. A lot of other Max Schmelings in Berlin— and their yellow counterparts in Tokyo— are learning what one Max Schmeling learned in a New York ring.” Corporal Joe Louis was on God’s side— but he was not blind to his own country’s failings and did not remain silent, protesting the ill treatment of his fellow Black soldiers, especially in the South. In one encounter in 1942 in Alabama, Louis was with future world middleweight champion Sugar Ray Robinson when an MP told him to leave a “Whites Only” waiting area: “Soldier, your color belongs in the other bus station.” “What’s my color got to do with it?” an angry Louis asked. “I’m wearing a uniform the same as you.” “Down here, you do as you’re told.”

The MP was about to club Louis when Robinson intervened, pulling the MP to the ground. Other MPs approached but then one called out: “Hey, that’s Joe Louis.” Louis and Robinson were hauled away to face justice but Louis, protesting that he had been threatened, asked a provost marshal if he could “call Washington,” and the incident was smoothed over. “If I was just an average

Their June 22, 1938, rematch came to a swift end (top), as Louis—enjoying his own celebratory headlines (above)—prevailed just minutes into the first round.

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ment of the enemy in a war that was going increasingly badly.” Sometimes accompanied by senior Wehrmacht officers, Schmeling was said to have tried to improve conditions in some camps. He himself maintained that he’d intervened with authorities to spare the life of an American colonel, P-51 pilot Henry R. Spicer, who had been sentenced to death for “attempting an armed escape.” Some prisoners asked for his autograph; others shunned him, urinating on photographs that “Hitler’s Heavyweight” had handed out. On one occasion, when a Black POW approached the boxer, another prisoner cried out: “Here comes Joe!” Schmeling couldn’t help but laugh out loud. In April 1945, the Red Army fought relentlessly toward the heart of Berlin. Schmeling managed to escape before the Soviets encircled the city and made his way to Hamburg in the last days of the war. Much of the city, including his own house, lay in ruins, a frequent target of Allied bombers since 1939. Schmeling did his best to rise from the ashes of Nazi Germany, like millions of his countrymen, and tried to set up a publishing

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A 1944 documentary aimed at encouraging Black Americans to enlist featured Louis “training for the fight of his life.”

Black G.I.,” Louis recalled, “I would have wound up in the stockades.” In March 1943, the month after the German defeat at Stalingrad, Schmeling was discharged from the Wehrmacht with the lowly rank of corporal. Even so, there were reports that he had been lost in combat—with some G.I.s even searching for his grave. An American officer in command of a Graves Registration unit complained: “We are thinking of putting up a sign at the [cemetery] gate saying, ‘Max Schmeling positively isn’t buried here.’” As German defeat became ever more likely, Schmeling appeared before troops to raise morale, receiving ecstatic applause. But he also worked with the Red Cross, “with permission from the Wehrmacht,” he said, “helping with prisoners of war. I was to visit Stalags from time to time and talk to prisoners, find out how they were doing, and add a little diversion to the monotonous life of the POW.” Schmeling added that his role was “a kind of gesture by the Wehrmacht to try to demonstrate humane treat-

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With the onset of war, both men donned uniforms, Louis touring the country to fight exhibition matches before troops and Schmeling (right) serving as a paratrooper.

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company in Hamburg in the summer of 1945. His first publication would be Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which the Nazis had ludicrously banned. But the venture failed when the occupying British Military Government refused to issue a publishing license: Schmeling was regarded as a tarnished figure, a tool of the Nazis. He needed a home but, while working on enlarging a small house, was arrested for failing to get planning permission and jailed for three months. Joe Louis was discharged in October 1945. He had appeared before some five million servicemen and had given 96 exhibition bouts, traveling more than 70,000 miles in service to his country, for which he was awarded the Legion of Merit medal. He appeared in nine more exhibition bouts in as many weeks at the end of 1945, and retained his world title in two fights in 1946. Schmeling, meanwhile, was at an all-time low, depressed and living “hand to mouth.” To obtain a boxing license so he, too, could return to the ring, he had to go through a formal process and answer a “denazification questionnaire.” Finally, a British military tribunal cleared him in 1947 of being a Nazi and he was given what was known as a “Persilschein”—a “Persil certificate,” named after a laundry detergent. And so Schmeling put on his gloves once more and in September 1947 won his first fight since 1939. He was victorious again that December. But he could no longer defy age and his old injuries. In October 1948, aged 43, he lost a brutal 10-round fight and decided to retire. Joe Louis retired three years later at age 37 after losing to Rocky Marciano in 1951. In 69 professional fights, he had lost just three times. Schmeling went on to find work with Coca-Cola, eventually running his own bottling plant and amassing a considerable fortune in the German economy’s postwar boom. When he died in February 2005 at age 99, he was celebrated as Germany’s best-loved boxer. Fate was not so kind to Joe Louis. His last decades were darkened by demeaning comebacks, a broken marriage, booze, drugs, and mental illness. Louis had somehow blown the millions of dollars he had made since turning professional in 1934 ( his generosity was

legendary in Harlem), and had failed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes. Had Las Vegas high-rollers not stepped in, finding him a $50,000-a-year job in 1971 greeting guests at Caesar’s Palace, Louis might have spent his last decade standing in welfare queues before his death in 1981. ONE OF JOE LOUIS’S COMFORTS in his last years was his friendship with Max Schmeling. In 1954, haunted by memories of the animosity the press had whipped up in 1938, Schmeling tracked Louis down to Chicago. Louis was stunned to see Schmeling, but after a few seconds he exclaimed: “Max! How good to see you again.” Schmeling vividly recalled how embracing Louis for the first time outside a boxing ring meant far more to him than would a third bout against the fighter even Muhammad Ali had once called “the greatest.” The two boxers reminisced over coffee. There were no hard feelings—far from it. Schmeling realized just how much “the hatreds of the times” had conspired to separate them. “From that day, our friendship really started,” remembered Schmeling. “We had never really been enemies.” H

Schmeling did his best to rise from the ashes of Nazi Germany, like millions of his countrymen.

Adversaries no more, the two champs engage in a playful arm wrestle for photographers in Miami in 1961.

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A STITCH IN TIME

Panel by panel, the Overlord Embroidery in Portsmouth, England, illustrates the saga of D-Day

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n 1066, William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel from Normandy and secured his royal title of king of England following his victory at the Battle of Hastings. Centuries later, Allied troops made the journey in reverse, sailing to the sandy shores of northern France in June 1944 to liberate Western Europe from Nazi Germany. This parallel did not go unnoticed by England’s Lord Dulverton, a tobacco magnate who had trained British Army sharpshooters during World War II. Seeking to immortalize D-Day’s fallen Allied soldiers, Lord Dulverton commissioned and bankrolled his own 20th-century version of the Bayeux Tapestry— the famed medieval embroidery depicting the Norman conquest of England—in 1968. Dubbed the Overlord Embroidery, the work consists of 34 panels, appliquéd and embroidered with chronological scenes ranging from England’s descent into the Battle of Britain to the heroic events and aftermath of June 6, 1944. Based on designs by English artist Sandra Lawrence, who drew inspiration from period photography for added realism, the visual narrative took a team of 20 artisans from the Royal School of Needlework five years to complete. A sampling of the embroidery’s panels appears on the following pages; the 272-foot artwork is on permanent display at the D-Day Story museum in Portsmouth, England, and additional images are online at theddaystory.com. —Kirstin Fawcett

IN GOOD HANDS Royal School of Needlework embroiderers (above, at work on a panel) created scenes like the one at top—British troops awaiting departure aboard their landing craft—by piecing and layering together more than 50 types of fabric atop a linen base.

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THIS IS DUMMY

ALL IN THE DETAILS

ABOVE AND BEYOND

Top brass from England and the United States paid separate visits to Normandy in June 1944, but space considerations prompted artist Sandra Lawrence to draft a panel showing Allied leaders surveying the landing beaches together. Appearing above, from left to right: King George VI, Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and Bernard Montgomery, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Although this specific meeting was fictional, Lord Dulverton and his advisers insisted on getting every detail correct, from the crook of Brooke’s nose and the Mulberry Harbors offshore to the correct sequence of Monty’s ribbons (far right).

Most of the artwork’s panels feature short vignettes. When it came to recreating D-Day’s Channel crossing, however, Lawrence was urged to expand the scene and capture its scale “in panoramic form.” Lawrence heeded this advice and devoted multiple panels to Allied naval and air forces mid-voyage to France; the segment below shows Spitfires providing air cover for a bevy of troopships.

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ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE D-DAY STORY, PORTSMOUTH, EXCEPT PAGE TK, BOTTOM: COURTESY OF THE ROYAL SCHOOL OF NEEDLEWORK

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ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE D-DAY STORY, PORTSMOUTH, EXCEPT PAGE 59, BOTTOM: COURTESY OF THE ROYAL SCHOOL OF NEEDLEWORK

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A STITCH IN TIME

LUCK OF THE LAND

SEARCH PARTY

The G.I.s at left in the panel below, shown charging onto Utah Beach, suffered fewer casualties (just 197 out of the 23,000-odd men who landed there) than troops coming ashore elsewhere. Juxtaposed against a scene set at Omaha Beach, the waves dense with corpses, the contrasting vignettes emphasize how luck wasn’t always distributed equally on D-Day. One aspect that is uniform here: the soldiers’ battle dress, sewn in portions from genuine World War II army fatigues and bearing authentic regimental patches. Other panels depict British, Canadian, and American troops likewise wearing combat gear partly fashioned from real-life war garb.

Allied troops who survived storming the beaches faced additional dangers once they reached the Cotentin Peninsula. At right, an American soldier guards several Wehrmacht POWs. The prisoner at the forefront, arms held aloft as he waits to be searched, wears an Iron Cross for bravery—but in the photo the artist used as a reference, he looks far more frightened than he does courageous.

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WHAT REMAINS The scene below, which depicts Allied bombers and tanks driving German forces from the ravaged port city of Caen, composes one of the artwork’s final panels. It was, in fact, the very last to be commissioned by Lord Dulverton: while inspecting the nearly completed tableau in March 1973, he thought it still needed to illustrate the invasion’s toll on Norman towns and villages. The Caen panel was completed in early 1974; to ensure viewers recognized the scene as French, Lawrence added a painted ad for Byrrh, a French apéritif, on one of the city’s still-standing buildings.

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Allied troops who survived the beaches faced fresh dangers on the Cotentin Peninsula.

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ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR, UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED. OPPOSITE: COURTESY OF WILLIAMSON COUNTY ARCHIVES

Technical Sergeant Lee Gordon Allen Jr.’s 103rd Infantry platoon had only been in France a few weeks before his bravery and sacrifice in battle earned him a Silver Star.

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BROTHER IN ARMS ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR, UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED. OPPOSITE: COURTESY OF WILLIAMSON COUNTY ARCHIVES

A soldier’s bond with his platoon sergeant resonates across generations By Lee Kamlet

he train pulled into the station in Franklin, Tennessee, on December 16, 1948. It was 9:13 in the morning on a gray, overcast day. The temperature was in the 60s, warm for that time of year. On board were the remains of Technical Sergeant Lee Gordon Allen Jr.—“L. G.,” as he was known to his family and friends. The article announcing his return was on page six of the afternoon edition of the Franklin Review-Appeal, tucked between Christmas ads for McClure’s department store and Tohrner’s Shop for Ladies. Were it not for the brief four-paragraph item in the local paper, his homecoming likely would have gone unnoticed by anyone outside of his family. Sergeant Allen’s return home came exactly four years and two weeks after he was killed in a firefight with German soldiers in the French town of Sélestat. It was not unusual for so much time to pass between a soldier’s death and the return of his remains. A fter World Wa r II, w it h 3 59,0 0 0 A mer ic a n de ad scattered across both hemispheres, the military mounted a six-year recovery effort that yielded the remains of 281,000 fallen servicemen. The low-key nature of his homecoming seemed a reflection of how L. G. appears to have lived his life: quietly, unassumingly, without fanfare. Still, if it is true that actions speak louder than words, Sergeant Allen’s actions on December 2, 1944, for which he was awarded the Silver Star, speak volumes about his bravery, his dedication to his troops, and his character. My father, a private in Sergeant Allen’s unit, saw him not only as a

Allen developed close relationships with many of the troops in his platoon, including the author’s father, Sam Kamlet, who called Allen “as fine a man as I ever want to know.”

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leader but also as a mentor and, yes, as a good friend. And, it turned out, someone he was determined to remember in a special and very personal way. L. G. ALLEN WAS BORN on July 7, 1918, outside of Franklin, in a rural area of Williamson County. He was one of four children born to Lee Gordon and Minnie Allen. Allen enlisted in the army on December 6, 1939, at age 21. He had only an elementary school education. He served two years in Panama, re-enlisted, and was then stationed in Iceland for 18 months. In the spring of 1944,

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MISSISSIPPI/103RD INFANTRY DIVISION ASSOCIATION; INSET: GUY ACETO COLLECTION

In eastern France, soldiers of the 103rd Infantry—the “Cactus Division” (patch, inset) —drove the Germans back in late 1944. Action in Alsace led to the liberation of the town of Sélestat (below), where Allen lost his life.

he was assigned to Camp Howze, outside Gainesville, Texas. It was there that my father, Sam Kamlet, would have met L. G. Dad enlisted in the army on June 17, 1943, a day after graduating high school in Denver. He was 18 years old. He reported first to Camp Fannin, near Tyler, Texas, where he received his initial training. He was eventually enrolled in the Army Specialized Training Program—a course to train army personnel in technical fields such as engineering, dentistry, and medicine—and attended classes at Texas A&M in College Station. He had high hopes of becoming an engineer. Though he did well in his classes, the army abruptly ended the program. Dad found himself assigned in March 1944 to Company A, 409th Regiment of the 103rd Infantry, the “Cactus Division.” He packed his duffel bag for Camp Howze. Like many veterans, Dad rarely spoke about his war experience. Whenever he was asked about it, he mostly deflected the question, saying it all seemed like a dream. Like it wasn’t real. He didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. However, toward the end of his life, Dad agreed to discuss his experience in some detail, creating something of a memoir based on four different sources: a recorded conversation with my siblings and me; an interview conducted for the Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project; a brief, handwritten autobiography he produced at my insistence; and hundreds of letters he wrote home during the war. One thing that stands out is a singularly focused and consistent recollection of, and fondness for, Sergeant Allen. Whenever he spoke aloud about Allen, he would break down in tears, struggling to compose himself. It bordered on reverence. “One of the most remarkable people I met in the Army was my platoon sergeant whose name was ‘Dog’ Allen,” he wrote. “He was really tough on the outside but at heart a very feeling person. He was regular Army. He was a short, stocky guy and hard as nails.” I cannot say for certain why the two men became friends. I regret never asking Dad before he died in 2008, but I have my theories. Dad was someone who respected authority and believed in the chain of command, so it was natural that he would respect his sergeant. Beyond that, it may be that because Allen was six years older, Dad saw him as something of a big brother.

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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MISSISSIPPI/103RD INFANTRY DIVISION ASSOCIATION; INSET: GUY ACETO COLLECTION

Or perhaps the clue is in L. G.’s nickname: “Dog.” Maybe it wasn’t a casual choice, but rather reflected Allen’s true nature: steadfast, fiercely loyal, and protective. “You build relationships on trust,” Dad said. “And people like that, you think are invincible. And it’s not true.” I HAVE SPENT MANY HOURS poring through the hundreds of letters that my father wrote during his year and a half in the army. Most were to my mother before they were married. Many of his interactions with Allen that he wrote about were routine: requests for a pass into town; working hard to get through inspection; overnight hikes. And yet, by November 1944, it seemed that something of a brotherhood had been formed. On November 12, as their unit made preparations for shipping off to Europe, Dad wrote that he, Sergeant Allen, and the assistant squad leader had vowed “not to shave until we get our first German. I hardly expect to grow a very long beard,” he mused. Their bravado was soon replaced by uncertainty. In that conversation with my siblings and me, Dad told us about the regiment’s arrival in Marseille, France: “When we first landed, before we went to the line, [Allen] went around with a little notebook [and got] our home addresses, and you know, who our next of kin were.” Dad went on to say, “And we were real dummies, [asking] ‘What are you doing that for, Dog?’” Allen answered, “Well, after this war is over, I’m going to come and sponge off of all of you guys.” Dad paused for a moment and added, “Well, that’s not what happened.” The 409th had been in France only weeks when the soldiers were

Allen’s death hit Kamlet hard. He wrote to his future wife, Bette (top left with Sam before he enlisted), whom he called “Krum,” that when a platoon mate “told me the news I got sick.”

engaged in a battle to liberate the town of Sélestat in Alsace at the foot of the Vosges Mountains. The town was strategically important. Located just 11 miles from the German border, it sat at the junction of several major roads, including the Strasbourg-toColmar highway. The Germans had heavily fortified the town, placing machine gun nests to form an outer defensive ring. Roadblocks had been mined and were protected by snipers in nearby buildings. Early on the morning of December 2, 1944, members of B Company had taken cover in a house in Sélestat when they came under heavy shelling from German tanks firing directly into the house, followed by concussion JUNE 2022

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One of Kamlet’s heartfelt letters home after Allen’s death noted that “G.I.’s here are going through a hell they will never be able to forget.” Sam and Bette married after the war and had four children, including the author (top, back).

grenades. The Americans inside were trapped, their condition unknown. The official citation issued in recognition of Sergeant Allen’s Silver Star explains what happened next: “Without further orders, [Allen] organized a squad for an advance on this enemy held position. He successfully located the house and finding three wounded soldiers, calmly prepared them for evacuation. Sergeant Allen then returned to his platoon and organized an assault on the enemy position. With utter disregard for his life he led his platoon forward, knowing that no communications were available to contact support in the rear. When pinned down by strong enemy fire, he placed his men in comparative safety. Then showing great devotion to duty, he fearlessly exposed himself to enemy fire in order that the source of the fire could be ascertained. Sergeant Allen was last seen gallantly carrying out this valiant task.” The citation concludes, “Throughout this action his conduct was in accordance with the highest traditions of military service.” Sélestat was liberated two days later. It’s possible my father would have been in that firefight, were it not for the fact that two days earlier he had suffered an ankle injury and was in a rear field hospital being treated. It was there he learned what had happened. In letters home to my grandparents and to my mother, my father wrote of his anguish. “I found a guy from my outfit here and he told me some very bad news. In one day, we lost four of our best men. The company commander, platoon leader, executive officer and my platoon sergeant. The sarge was really a swell guy…. It really hurt me to hear he was killed. He was the best soldier I ever knew and as fine a man as I ever want to know. There wasn’t a man in the entire company that wouldn’t go to hell for ‘Dog.’ I’ll miss him terribly and I’ll always remember him as a true friend and a real soldier.” Dad’s sorrow then turned to anger. “After hearing something like that and then reading about the ridiculous things people back home are doing, it just makes a guy feel nauseated. Remember when I wrote you and said people back home were too optimistic? Well they still are. If they could only see the things I’ve seen in the little while I’ve been here, they would realize that this war isn’t a picnic and the G.I.’s here are going through a hell they will never be able to forget. But what’s the use of talking—America will still keep on dancing, wasting and having a big time and G.I.’s will still keep on going through hell. Gee honey, when I get started on something like that, I forget myself. I’m sorry but the sergeant’s death really hit me pretty hard.” My father’s emotions were apparent once more when, on December 20, 1944, he wrote again to my mother from the hospital. “They had a retreat parade today to present the purple heart to some of

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the guys. I think it will be a long time before I feel the way I did today. Retreat is supposed to be a tribute to fallen comrades. Well, at this retreat I really had someone to pay tribute to and that was my platoon sergeant. When the bugler played The Star Spangled Banner I felt a chill run through me. Believe me a man gets to appreciate our flag and country after he’s away from it.” Not long after, my father returned to his platoon, which was soon engaged in the Battle of the Bulge. He wrote more letters home, with mentions about guarding German POWs, helping a fellow soldier who had been partially paralyzed by enemy fire, and later being wounded himself. The bullet in his left shoulder ultimately led to his own return home, and his discharge. He was awarded a Purple Heart with an oak leaf cluster, a Combat and Expert Infantry Badge, and a European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with three bronze campaign stars. Years later, we took Dad to see the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. He was overwhelmed with emotion. He stood by himself for the longest time, lost in his thoughts. In something of a symbolic reunion, both he and Sergeant Allen have been honored by having their names entered into the memorial registry. RECENTLY I TOOK A TRIP to Franklin to meet Sergeant Allen’s niece, Corinne Aiken. She was a two-year-old toddler when Allen enlisted in the army, and only seven when he was killed. She has no recollection of him. Corinne’s sister Carolyn, who is 18 months older, told me in a phone interview of her vague memories of the funeral service at the family home on Main Street in Franklin, and of going to the cemetery for the burial. Both women remember the gun salute, the playing of taps, and the flag that was taken from Allen’s casket, folded by the honor guard, and given to his mother, Minnie. Corinne took me to visit his gravesite. For me it was an important milestone in my journey to learn more about him. His grave is marked by a simple headstone. As I expected, it is engraved with the name he preferred, “L G Allen.” It does not mention his Silver Star. Corinne recalled that her grandmother, Allen’s mother Minnie, was overcome with grief after his death, as well as by the accidental drowning death of Allen’s sister in

Franklin just six months after he was killed. Both Corinne and Carolyn remember their grandmother, whom they called Mama, singing songs she had written about the deaths of her two children. The song about L. G. is sad and beautiful, expressing the love of a broken heart. Come let’s go down by the ocean and sit in the moonlight I’ve got a sad story to tell you and it must be told right. I’ve got to go and serve my country, it is Uncle Sam’s demand. I want to make a good soldier and do the best that I can. We used to sit by the ocean and watch the tide come and go Never dreamed our hearts would be broken, our morale so sad and low. Will you promise me my darling before I bid you adieu, That you will always be faithful and find nobody new. Just as Mama continued to mourn the loss of her son, so, too, did my father for his friend. In one of his last letters sent to my mother before he returned to the States, Dad wrote again about the man he admired. “I received a letter from you yesterday and you mentioned how pessimistic one of my letters had made you feel. That’s not what I intended to do but I guess my heart was full and I needed to pour some of it out somehow. Still, it is not often that one meets a man as fine as Sergeant Allen was. Frankly, I’d like to name one of our kids for him.” I am that kid. Lee Gordon Kamlet. Among my most treasured possessions are the flag that draped my father’s casket and a framed copy of Sergeant Allen’s Silver Star citation. They are priceless gifts from two men who played central roles in my life: one whom I love and admire, and one whom I admire and whose namesake I am privileged to be. Each has taught me the meaning of strength, courage, humility, and honor. H

L. G. Allen’s body returned home to Franklin, Tennessee, in 1948 and was buried with full military honors. JUNE 2022

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Volkswagen designer Ferdinand Porsche exhibits a model of the car to a delighted Adolf Hitler.

REVIEWS BOOKS

NAZI BILLIONAIRES The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties By David de Jong. 400 pp. Mariner, 2022. $28.99.

WHAT IS LEFT TO SAY about the Nazis? They lost World War II some 77 years ago, their country occupied and their leaders either dead or in prison camps, waiting to be tried and judged. The Germany that emerged from the ruins has generally led the way in reckoning with its past, atoning for the Third Reich’s epic crimes through measures that include paying reparations to Jewish survivors. Three generations of historians have weighed the country’s guilt. What aspects of Germany’s dark history still need to be illuminated, and why now? Investigative financial journalist David de Jong provides a clear answer in Nazi Billionaires, a fast-paced, eminently readable, and well-researched book on the German business dynasties that have flourished since Hitler’s reign without ever fully accounting for their misdeeds. A 1985 work, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler by late Yale University professor Henry Ashby Turner Jr., has long been the standard text on Hitler’s early relationships with captains of German industry. According to Turner, these men did not do much to help Hitler become chancellor in January 1933.

This quickly changed, however, once Hitler and Hermann Göring personally convoked the business elite and extorted massive campaign contributions for the March 1933 election that cemented the Führer’s power. In Nazi Billionaires, De Jong carries the story from that time onward, investigating wellknown German companies like the automaker Porsche and food manufacturer Dr. Oetker and how they profited from the ensuing war, becoming “Nazi billionaires.” He believes that too many existing companies still qualify for that title, something that bothers him personally due to his Dutch upbringing and Jewish heritage. De Jong tells tales of greed, opportunism, and denial. One businessman whom Hitler and Göring summoned in February 1933 was Günther Quandt; described by De Jong as “a textile producer turned arms-and-battery tycoon,” Quandt made no end of money supplying uniforms to the German army in World War I. In the 1920s he married a younger woman, Magda Ritschel. Their union lasted eight years and produced one son— after which Magda married chief Nazi prop-

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agandist Joseph Goebbels, with Hitler serving as best man. For Quandt, this made for an ambivalent relationship with Germany’s new leaders. But business was all-important to him, and he accommodated himself by joining the Nazi Party. He added to his wealth during the war by gobbling up Jewish-owned companies, as well as captive Belgian, Polish, Croatian, and Greek industries, and benefited from Nazi forced labor. Quandt’s heirs today are vastly wealthy, controlling, among other holdings, 47 percent of BMW. Postwar, Quandt successfully portrayed himself as a victim, forced to collaborate with Goebbels due to family ties. He escaped punishment, and his fortune remained largely intact. At Quandt’s funeral in 1954, a Deutsche Bank executive praised him for “never submitting servilely to the overbearing state.” In 1941, the same man had praised him for becoming a Wehrwirtschaftsführer—a leading supplier of munitions who believed in Germany and Hitler. Perhaps the best-known of De Jong’s subjects is Ferdinand Porsche, the brilliant self-taught engineer born in 1875 who truly was a pioneer in the auto world. In 1933 Porsche sent Hitler a fawning telegram that led to enthusiastic cooperation between the two. Both Porsche and his son Ferry willingly became members of the SS, as well as the Nazi Party. They championed the idea of a people’s car, or “Volkswagen,” which Porsche would go on to build. In 1938 Hitler presided over the groundbreaking for a giant factory at Wolfsburg that is, even today, home to the Volkswagen Group. The need for military production intervened before many VWs could be produced, and Porsche switched to making jeeps and tanks for Hitler—both enormously profitable undertakings, in part thanks to slave labor from SS concentration camps. Along the way Porsche shed the firm’s Jewish cofounder, racecar driver and entrepreneur Adolf Rosenberger, buying out his shares at a fraction of their worth. Porsche and son were both arrested for war crimes after World War II ended. Released within six months, Ferry was able to dedicate himself to saving the company’s assets (and securing his father’s release after just 20 months). He created the modern

Porsche brand in 1948, which today is interlocked with the Volkswagen Group. Bringing these stories, and others, up to date, De Jong reflects on his subjects’ attempts at addressing the past. Following a series of German exposés, beginning with the documentary film The Silence of the Quandts (2007), the Quandt, Oetker, and Porsche families all commissioned historical studies of their firms. But, as De Jong points out, the Quandts sidestepped tough questions and instead created a foundation dedicated to the anodyne goal of “good business leadership.” The Porsche factory in Stuttgart today sports a plaque acknowledging the contributions of slave labor. But the firm has never fully addressed its “Aryanization” in the 1930s. Even worse, De Jong implies, are the Fincks, secretive descendants of wartime bankers who have made substantial contributions to conservative and far-right causes like Alternative für Deutschland, a rapidly growing anti-immigrant political party that’s been labeled neo-Nazi. He laments that “as the…memory of the Third Reich fades, an increasingly mainstream and brazen reactionary right is brutalizing the progressive ideals of postwar Germany.” One way to slow the trend, De Jong believes, is to air the misdeeds of Nazi billionaires, as he has done in this worthy book. —Historian Nicholas Reynolds began his writing career with Treason Was No Crime (1976), a book about the German resistance to Hitler.

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REVIEWS BOOKS

LOOKING BACK— AND GAZING SIDEWAYS

LOOKING FOR THE GOOD WAR American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness By Elizabeth D. Samet. 368 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. $28.

MOST AMERICANS EMBRACE a feel-good image of World War II, one in which the United States and its “Greatest Generation” fought a global war for human freedom that destroyed three indisputably evil totalitarian regimes and paved the way for the establishment of a better world. This notion contains much truth, enough to endure all these decades later, and appeals to our tendency to fixate on the positive aspects of this seminal conflict. But, perhaps inevitably and understandably, some— like Elizabeth D. Samet, author of Looking for the Good War—have pushed back against the mainstream narrative. Carrying on in the iconoclastic tradition of revisionist historians such as Michael C. C. Adams and Paul Fussell, Samet, a professor of English at the United States Military Academy, wields a relentless literary sledgehammer against the gauzy “good war” myths that have long prevailed in American popular culture. Moreover, she argues that American misinterpretations of World War II have contributed to dysfunctional postwar domestic, foreign, and military policies. These misapprehensions, in turn, have played a key role in numerous military missteps from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Samet contends that our cultural mythology about World War II matters a great deal, as it fosters a misbegotten sense of American exceptionalism that remains problematic in the 21st century. Its tendency to sanitize the war’s ugliness has led to a fundamental misunderstanding of war itself, and thus a strong propensity to solve problems through violence—almost in a conscious imitation of what ostensibly worked so well in World War II. Samet is a literary critic, not a military historian. As such, to make her case, she focuses her argument on the cultural milieu of novels, movies, and, occasionally, works of history: “Myths grant life and take it away, give birth to nations and tear them apart,” she reflects in a thoughtful prologue. Five sizable chapters follow, each of which eviscerates some aspect of America’s triumphalist World War II-

based popular culture in favor of the seamy, unappealing underside of distorted propaganda, moral dilemmas, misogyny, wanton misbehavior, Jim Crow racism, and veterans’ postwar struggles. The book ends with an annotated bibliographical discussion of relevant films and books. (Oddly, there is no index, an omission that detracts from the book’s use as a reference source.) She avoids the nuts and bolts of statecraft, strategic decision-making, operations, and the like. Samet unapologetically skewers anyone whom she feels has played a role in promoting a distorted, sentimental view of World War II. Her list even includes such luminaries as filmmaker Steven Spielberg, though he has arguably done more than any other individual to enhance viewers’ cinematic understanding of World War II combat and the Holocaust. Nonetheless Samet sees him as a sentimental moralist for his supposedly simplistic pro-Allied outlook. Her greatest barbs are reserved for Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw: the former due to his unambiguous promotion of an American good warrior “citizen soldier image,” the latter for creating the “Greatest Generation” milieu that predominates in American culture. Quite understandably, fans of Spielberg, Ambrose, and Brokaw might be put off by Samet’s relentless attacks on their work. But make no mistake, Looking for the Good War is a polemic, and unapologetic opprobrium is a coin of the realm for this kind of scathing critique. Like Adams and Fussell before her, Samet’s perspective is valuable, its overdue myth-busting making the book an important contribution to our understanding of America in World War II. By their very nature, though, polemics tends to be myopic and sometimes overly vituperative, and Looking for the Good War is no different. Some readers may view it as a cheap shot at the World War II generation; others will take its provocative arguments to heart. That said, it will probably appeal more to scholars than general readers. If so, this would be ironic because—if Samet’s arguments are to be believed—the latter are precisely the audience that she’d argue could most benefit from reading her work. —John C. McManus is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of U.S. Military History at Missouri University of Science and Technology. His most recent book is Island Infernos: The U.S. Army’s Pacific War Odyssey, 1944 (2021).

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BATTLE FILMS BY MARK GRIMSLEY

SIMPLE, HARD CHOICES DIRECTED BY ROBERT HARMON and starring Tom Selleck in the title role, the 2004 made-for-TV film Ike: Countdown to D-Day reminds me that life presents us two kinds of choices: complex yet easy, and simple but hard. The former is composed of numerous variables that might take considerable time to solve. Once these issues are resolved, however, the decision itself will become obvious. The second involves being tugged between two stark options. A few days before my father’s death from cancer, for example, his oncologist gave him a choice about whether or not to get a blood transfusion. It remains shocking to directly speak of death in our society, and she phrased it too

delicately for my father to understand. Bewildered, he turned to me. “Dad,” I said, “you’re going to die. If you get the transfusion, you’ll live a day or two longer, but you will die in more pain. If you don’t, you will die sooner but in less pain.” He asked me what to do. “I would get the transfusion,” I responded without a trace of emotion. “It will give you time to say goodbye to those you love.” Everyone present, including the oncologist, was vaguely aghast, although my father was so addled on morphine that only the bluntest explanation, bereft of pathos, would have gotten through. I remember thinking of Admiral Ernest J. King, who served as U.S. chief of naval operations during World War II. He is said to have once remarked, “When the going gets tough, they call for the sons of bitches.” In my family, I was the designated son of a bitch. General Dwight D. Eisenhower was, in his own way and on an incomparably greater scale, a designated son of a bitch. We seldom think of him that way, whereas the phrase springs readily to mind with regard to General George S. Patton or Ernie King—so stern he was once characterized as someone who “shaves every morning with a blowtorch.” Not Ike, whose affable manner and famous grin made him seem like everyone’s favorite uncle. True, Eisenhower had unmatched people skills, which helped make him an unparalleled military diplomat. But his main gift was the ability to make the simple, hard choices— an insight that lies at the heart of Ike: Countdown to D-Day. The film dispenses with the illusion of an amiable Ike right away, opening with a closeup shot of the general exhaling smoke from one of his ubiquitous cigarettes and speaking to someone offscreen in a slow, testy voice: “Let me put it another way,” he emphasizes. “If I am not given complete and unfettered command of this situation, you can, if I may put it politely, sir, take this job and shove it where you choose because I’ll have damn well quit.” It’s December 1943, and the “situation” in question is the D-Day invasion, of which Ike dema nds supreme com ma nd. The “someone” offscreen turns out to be Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who spars with

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Ike: Countdown to D-Day (2004) stars Tom Selleck as the titular general who must wrestle with live-ordie decisions in the months prior to the invasion.

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Eisenhower in his office about the arrogance of demanding such power while ultimately agreeing that there must be, as Ike insists, “one conductor of the orchestra.” As the film progresses through 1944, we witness hundreds of staff officers at Eisenhower’s headquarters hard at work on invasion planning details. A key “complex yet easy” problem hinges on whether Normandy’s beaches will support the weight of a tank. (The data says it will, reassures General Omar Bradley.) An agonizing “simple but hard” choice concerns the deployment of 30,000 airborne troops. Eisenhower is told that if dropped immediately behind German beach defenses, 70 percent may become casualties. Eisenhower hopes this estimate is extreme, but it doesn’t matter if not; it is vital to give the seaborne troops a chance to gain a secure toehold. Everything depends on that—and 21,000 dead, wounded, or captured paratroopers is not too high a price to pay. When Eisenhower makes his famous visit to members of the 101st Airborne Division in the hours before their jump—one of the few times Selleck portrays his character as relaxed and avuncular— the audience realizes that D-Day’s supreme commander believes he is sending most of them to their deaths. The film’s most pivotal “simple yet hard” choice, however, is the stark “go-no-go” decision of whether to launch the D-Day invasion itself. Eisenhower receives assurances that the weather during the mission’s best window—June 5-6, 1944—will be mild. It isn’t, and a storm rushing across the North Atlantic wrecks the chance of a June 5 invasion. A Royal Air Force - 1945 meteorologist then forecasts a 24-hour - 1947 lull in which the landings stand a - 1950 WW2-220600-003 America's History LLC 1-3Sq.indd 1 strong chance of success. That’s good - 1974 news, but only an educated guess. A For more,search visitDAILY QUIZ For more, fallback option is available in midWWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ at HistoryNet.com. July, but with no promise that condiMAGAZINES/QUIZ tions will be better. “I’m quite positive the order must be given,” Ike says quiHistoryNet.com etly, firmly, and without a trace of ANSWER: 1974. PRIVATE TERUO NAKAMURA, A TAIWANESE NATIONAL,27. ENLISTED IN THE JAPANESE ARMY IN 1943. ANSWER: THE CURRENT DESIGN HAS BEEN IN HE drama. The simple, hard choices need HELD OUT ON 1960 MORTAI IN INDONESIA HE WAS CAPTURED PLACE SINCE WHEN THE FLAGUNTIL WAS MODIFIED IN DECEMBER 1974. EARLIER THAT YEAR, HIRO ONODA, WHO TO INCLUDE HAWAII, THE 50th STATE. no drama. H HELD OUT IN THE PHILLIPINES, FINALLY SURRENDERED.

THE LAST JAPANESE HOW MANY TIMES SOLDIER HAS THEFROM DESIGN WORLD OF THE WAR U.S.IIFLAG SURRENDERED CHANGED? IN THIS YEAR

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27, 31, 36 or 40?

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CHALLENGE

VICTORY COUNT

We altered this photo of a proud Royal Air Force fighter pilot to create one inaccuracy inaccuracy. What is itit ?

HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN WALKER

Answer to the February Challenge: We moved the

machine gun’s barrel muzzle from its actual position at the end of the cooling jacket (far left) to the jacket’s center. About two-thirds of our entrants got that right. No, we didn’t add the British soldier’s blindfold, nor mess with any of the patches, pins, or uniforms.

Congratulations to the winners: Jon Glasscock, Harry

Johnson, and Vern Weed

Please send your answer with your

name and mailing address to: June 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 June 15, 2022, will receive Nazi Billionaires by David de Jong. The answer will appear in the next issue.

JUNE 2022

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FAMILIAR FACE

In 1940, Heisman Trophy winner Tom Harmon, who gained national recognition as a halfback for the University of Michigan, had what looked like a brilliant career as a pro football player ahead of him. “Old 98” had even seen a feature film made about his young life: Harmon of Michigan, in which Harmon played himself, and which was released on September 11, 1941. Less than a month later, he instead enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces. Harmon would spend the war as a pilot, twice leaping from a crippled plane—the second time landing, his legs severely burned, in Japanese-occupied China, where friendly locals aided in his escape. After the war, he played for the Los Angeles Rams for two seasons (above), but his legs weren’t what they used to be, and he turned to a long career in sports broadcasting—and a role as proud father of actor Mark Harmon, who, like his dad, was also a standout college football player.

BENTLEY HISTORICAL LIBRARY/UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN; INSET: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

ONE FOR THE TEAM

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