HISTORYNET.

COM

ON JULY 30, 1945, THE HEAVY CRUISER

SANK IN SHARK-INFESTED WATERS,
KILLING NEARLY 900. BUT THE
LOSSES DID NOT END THERE
Plus OSS OFFICER JACK
HEMINGWAY WAS HIS
FATHER’S SON—
AND HIS OWN MAN
HORROR AND INSIGHT
AT THE SIEGE OF
BUDAPEST
OCTOBER 2018
54
A destroyed German Panzer IV lies on the
outskirts of Budapest, Hungary, in early 1945.
TASS VIA GETTY IMAGES; BOTTOM LEFT: AF ARCHIVE/ALAMY; INSET: HISTORYNET
ARCHIVES; COVER: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND/HADELPRODUCTIONS,
ISTOCK; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN WALKER

42

76 64
 O C TOBE R 2 0 1 8
ENDORSED BY
THE NATIONAL WORLD WAR II MUSEUM, INC.

F E ATUR E S
COVE R STO RY
32 INDIANAPOLIS
When the heavy cruiser sank in shark-infested waters, the navy
unjustly held its captain responsible. It took more than 50 years to
clear his name LYNN VINCENT AND SARA VLADIC

42 HEMINGWAY’S WAR
OSS officer Jack Hemingway was his father’s son—and
his own man NICHOLAS REYNOLDS

P O RT F O L I O
50 FORGOTTEN ARMY
Britain’s “Bevin Boys” spent their war in the mines

54 NO-WIN SITUATION
A German general battled Waffen-SS leaders along with the
Soviets in 1945 Budapest DAVID T. ZABECKI

W E A P O N S M A N UA L
62 FIRE AT WILL
America’s M2-2 flamethrower

64 A CALL TO ARMS
Two brothers in the Philippines made a name for themselves as
guerrillas fighting the Japanese STEVEN TRENT SMITH

DE PA RT M E N T S
8 MAIL
12 WORLD WAR II TODAY
22 CONVERSATION
A childhood in Nazi Germany

24 FROM THE FOOTLOCKER

26 FIRE FOR EFFECT
28 TRAVEL
Louisiana’s World War II training grounds

72 REVIEWS
Americans and the Holocaust; “Dorie” Miller’s heroism

76 BATTLE FILMS
Why The Caine Mutiny almost wasn’t made

79 CHALLENGE
80 PINUP

50 OCTOBER 2018
3
WWII Online WORLDWARII.COM
Lieutenant General
Frederick E. Morgan
spent most of 1943
planning the Allied
invasion of Normandy.
If you enjoyed this issue’s “No-Win
Situation” you will want to check
out these other features on little-
remembered generals worthy of
attention—both by Major General
David T. Zabecki, U.S. Army (Ret.):
Overlooked Overseer
A forgotten British general (above)
built the plan that brought
Operation Overlord to fruition
Mentor to the Stars
One of the most influential leaders
of World War II, Major General Fox
Conner, did not fight in it
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4 WORLD WAR II
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VOL. 33, NO. 3 OCTOBER 2018
EDITOR
KAREN JENSEN
Larry Porges SENIOR EDITOR
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Jerry Morelock, Jon Guttman HISTORIANS
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VINCENT and VLADIC
CONTRIBUTORS
NICHOLAS REYNOLDS (“Heming-
way’s War”) is a lifelong Hemingway
and World War II aficionado. His
recent study of Ernest Hemingway’s
wartime relationships with Soviet
and American intelligence, Writer,
Sailor, Soldier, Spy (2017), was an
instant bestseller. Before becoming
a fulltime writer, Reynolds held two
of the best niche jobs in the U.S. gov-
ernment: officer in charge of field
history for the Marine Corps and
museum historian for the CIA.
STEVEN TRENT SMITH (“A Call to
Arms”) is an award-winning televi-
sion photojournalist and the author
of two books on sub warfare in the
Pacific: Wolf Pack (2003) and The
Rescue (2008). While researching
the latter, about American mission-
aries who went into hiding rather
than surrender to invading Japa-
nese forces, he discovered the amaz-
ing story of the Cushing brothers.
6 WORLD WAR II
REYNOLDS
ZABECKI
MARK D. VAN ELLS (“Travel”) is a
professor of history at Queensbor-
ough Community College in New
York City and the author of America
and World War I: A Traveler’s Guide
(2014). Van Ells is currently at work
on a history of the 32nd “Red Arrow”
Infantry Division, which partici-
pated in the 1941 Louisiana Maneu-
vers and inspired his travel piece.
LYNN VINCENT (“Out of the Deep”)
is a U.S. Navy veteran and the author
or coauthor of 11 nonfiction books,
including the just-published Indian-
apolis: The True Story of the Worst
Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History
and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate
an Innocent Man (2018), cowritten
with Sara Vladic, from which our
cover story is adapted.
SARA VLADIC (“Out of the Deep”)
is one of the world’s leading experts
on the USS Indianapolis, having
VAN ELLS
SMITH
become obsessed with the story at
age 13. Over nearly two decades,
Vladic interviewed more than 100 of
the ship’s survivors and rescue crew
members. In 2016 she released an
award-winning documentary, USS
Indianapolis: The Legacy. She is the
coauthor, with Lynn Vincent, of
Indianapolis: The True Story of the
Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval His-
tory and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exon-
erate an Innocent Man.
DAVID T. ZABECKI (“No-Win
Situation”) is World War II’s chief
military historian. A retired two-
star general, he started his military
career as an infantry rifleman in the
Vietnam War. He has a longstanding
PORTRAITS BY JOHANNA GOODMAN
interest in lecturing and writing on
senior-level leadership, and is the
editor and translator—with Dieter J.
Biedekarken—of the English edition
of German general Hermann Balck’s
memoirs, Order in Chaos (2015).
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MAIL
UNLOVELY,
BUT LOVED
Your June 2018 article by Craig L. Symonds (“Unloved, Unlovely,
Indispensable”) was a welcome read made more enjoyable with
photos of LSTs launching. The lead wartime LST shipbuilder was
Dravo Corporation. They operated west and east yards on Neville
Island located just outside Pittsburgh and another yard in Wilming-
ton, Delaware, which primarily built Landing Ships, Medium
(LSMs) and destroyer escorts.
Eight miles downriver from Neville’s shipyards stood the U.S.
Steel Company’s American Bridge Company in Ambridge, Pennsyl-
vania. A photo of their yard [above] appears on your contents page.
A quarter of the more than 1,000 LSTs built during the war came
from this area, close to the massive supply of steel the war demanded
from the region’s furnaces. In tribute to the builders and particu-
larly those who serviced the ships, the Interstate 79 bridge crossing
the Ohio River between the Neville and Ambridge yards is dedicated
as the Pittsburgh Naval and Shipbuilders Memorial Bridge.
Denis Galterio
Pittsburgh, Pa.
8 WORLD WAR II
Shortages of LSTs, like the one above,
threatened to upend D-Day operations.
The story about LSTs in the June 2018 issue
was of particular interest to me, as my uncle
served on them. Of most interest was the pic-
ture on the contents page of LST 662 being
launched on April 5, 1944, from American
Bridge Company in Ambridge, Pennsylvania.
Not quite two weeks later, the ship on which
my uncle served, LST 665, was also launched
from there. On April 25, 1944, my uncle was
commissioned executive officer and received
orders to report to Ambridge as part of the first
crew of LST 665. LST 662 was commissioned
on May 2, 1944, and LST 665 on May 12, 1944.
My uncle eventually took command of
LST 704 and went to Sasebo, Japan, immedi-
ately after the war ended. There is so much
history out there. Thanks for keeping it alive.
Norman Marten
Bainbridge Island, Wash.
SHORTAGE
SHORTCOMINGS
U.S. NAVY/NATIONAL ARCHIVES
I was very impressed with Craig L. Symonds’s
article about LST shortages for the D-Day
invasion. This is the first good article I’ve read
that shows how important the LST was during
the war. However, two important occurrences
 also contributed to the shortages: Exercise BIG WAR, SMALL WORLD FROM THE
Tiger and the West Loch disaster in Hawaii. While reading the June 2018 issue of your EDITOR
Exercise Tiger was secretly conducted in excellent magazine, I happened across the “Now came the most
difficult of all leadership
England on April 28, 1944, where the U.S. and letter submitted by James Owens of Eastham, challenges in war,”
Britain were rehearsing off the coast of Devon Massachusetts, who had served in Italy after German general Hermann
at Lyme Bay for the invasion of Normandy. World War II as a military police officer (MP) Balck wrote of the fighting
The exercise included 21 LSTs, 28 LCIs, 65 in the Gorizia/Trieste region of Italy (“Mail”). in 1945 Budapest—
“ending it without bigger
LCTs, and hundreds of small craft. In it, he relates the troubles and disputes that catastrophes.” When
German E-boats arrived there and torpe- arose over the contested region between Italy military leaders confront
doed and sunk two LSTs and badly damaged and Yugoslavia after the war. The accompany- loss, how they react to it
is a measure of their
another. The death toll was 198 sailors and 441 ing photo shows Owens in his MP uniform; humanity rather than
soldiers, mostly from drowning. the patch of the 88th Infantry Division on his of their generalship or
In the West Loch incident, six LSTs were helmet looked somewhat familiar. professionalism. Balck
chose to save as many of
destroyed and two were damaged at Pearl Sure enough, upon checking my mother’s his men as he could and
Harbor on May 21, 1944, from a mysterious old photo albums, I found that my father, find a dignified way out.
explosion. The tragedy ended the lives of 163 Cosimo C. Petrosino, was in that same unit Author David T. Zabecki,
himself a retired U.S. Army
men and injured 360. Many LSTs had to around the same time. With a little research,
major general, tells the
quickly be built to replace those lost in West I discovered the divisional patch, that of the story of Balck’s dilemma
Loch for the next island invasion in the Pacific. “Fighting Blue Devils” or “Cloverleaf” Divi- well in “No-Win Situation”
Joseph Panicello sion, is a cloverleaf design superimposed (page 54). Balck’s aim of
creating a foundation for
North Hill, Calif. with the coat of arms of the city of Trieste, Germany’s survival and
featuring a red shield with a white halberd. long-term recovery stood
Editor’s note: Readers interested in learning Another patch with the word “TRUST” (TRi- him apart from some other
generals. As Zabecki
more about the Exercise Tiger attack can check este US Troops) is sewn above it. told me: “Many of the SS
out Craig L. Symonds’s “Exercise in Tragedy” I was born in Trieste—at the time a free generals in particular
in our June 2014 issue, or on our website at territory of Italy—in 1951 and my father’s rec- believed with Hitler that if
Germany didn’t win, then it
www.worldwarII.com. ollections of the area after the border disputes didn’t deserve to survive.”
were settled were very fond ones. —Karen Jensen
SAFE BET Thanks to Mr. Owens and World War II
Kudos to Paul Starobin for reaching into the for a surprise trip down memory lane.
political and diplomatic ramifications sur- Keep up the great work.
rounding World War II (“Fake News–1940s Nick Petrosino
Style,” June 2018). However, the story begs for San Marcos, Calif.
a different perspective on the salient issues
regarding isolationists and isolationism.
Cosimo C.
Isolationists have historically been viewed Petrosino of the
as those wishing to totally distance themselves 88th Division
from European affairs. To the contrary, isola- (right) settled
tionists were well informed and advocated for down postwar
open trade—even trade with Germany. Brit- in Trieste, Italy.
ain’s intelligence and propaganda efforts came
to win the day, thereby controlling the flow of
goods into Germany, while the United States
quietly exacted trade opportunities with Brit-
COURTESY OF NICK PETROSINO; INSET: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

ain, gained long-term leased British property,

and acquired Britain’s promised payback on
American financial and materiel loans. Brit- PLEASE SEND
ain’s inside track for sending intel to FDR was LETTERS TO:
World War II
directed through the Office of Strategic Ser- 1919 Gallows Road, Suite 400,
vices’ director, Bill Donovan. Regarding intel- Vienna, VA 22182-4038
ligence, Britain gave little but gained much. It all
came down to who could most likely pay their OR E-MAIL:
worldwar2@historynet.com
bills in the future. Roosevelt bet on Britain. Please include your name,
Charlie Weymouth address, and daytime
Wilmington, Del. telephone number.
(continued on next page)
OCTOBER 2018
9

PAYING RESPECTS
The U.S. Submarine Veterans WWII National Memorial West is
located just a few miles away from me on Seal Beach at the Naval
Weapons Station. There is a monument to each of the 52 submarines
that were lost during World War II with the names of all of the crew
members who died on them. I took the issue with Commander John
P. Cromwell’s story (“Captain Cromwell’s Decision,” June 2018) on
the cover to the USS Sculpin memorial [above] to pay homage to him
and the rest of the crew who were lost.
Jim Woods
Long Beach, Calif.
AN AVOIDABLE TRAGEDY?
I read Steven Trent Smith’s story about the exemplary courage,
dedication, and selflessness of Captain John P. Cromwell, who
chose to die with USS Sculpin rather than risk revealing to his cap-
tors the navy’s top-secret ability to read Japanese coded messages.
I have read good things about Captain Cromwell’s boss, Rear Admi-
ral Charles A. Lockwood; however, in this case Lockwood was
disastrously wrong!
Cromwell should never have been permitted to board the Scul-
pin. Even General Dwight D. Eisenhower famously demoted a
major general, Henry J. F. Miller, for nearly exposing the secret
date of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Perhaps Lockwood was
10 WORLD WAR II
too valuable to relieve, but I believe Captain
Cromwell’s heroic death was Lockwood’s
fault. In many other cases, officers with
knowledge of code-breaking programs such
as “Ultra” or “Enigma” were refused permis-
sion to deploy in case of capture by either the
Germans or the Japanese.
This policy even extended to my days as a
Judge Advocate General junior officer in the
Pentagon during the 1970s. I had a top-secret
clearance and, even though I knew no state
secrets, I was not permitted to leave the
United States until my top-secret clearance
was removed after I had changed jobs.
John B. Adams
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
NEVER TOO LATHE
LEFT: COURTESY OF JIM WOODS; RIGHT: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
I read your June 2018 issue with great inter-
est. However, on page 10 (“WWII Today”), you
have a picture of Naomi Parker [above] operat-
ing what the caption calls a lathe.
The machine is actually a Pratt & Whitney
vertical shaper, most likely a Model B, and a
much different type of machine than a lathe.
I collect antique American metal working
machinery as a hobby and repair modern
machinery for a living.
Ralph Hauschild
Burlington, Ky.
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 WWII TODAY
REPORTED AND WRITTEN BY PAUL WISEMAN
FAMILY’S HARD WORK
PAYS OFF WITH
BOMBER’S DISCOVERY
SECOND LIEUTENANT THOMAS V. KELLY JR., newly 21, tried
to sound optimistic in a letter he sent home from the South Pacific
on February 1, 1944. “If we are lucky we might get home by next
Christmas,” he wrote.
Kelly didn’t make it. He was one of 11 men lost when the Japanese
shot down the B-24 D-1 bomber Heaven Can Wait during a March 11,
1944, mission over Hansa Bay, off what is now Papua New Guinea.
His body was never recovered. His grief-stricken family put up a
tombstone in a Livermore, California, cemetery with an etching of
the B-24 and the inscription, “In Loving Memory.”
Five years ago, Kelly’s descendants began a campaign to locate
the wreckage of Heaven Can Wait, named for a 1943 movie. The
12 WORLD WAR II
effort may have paid off: in May, Project
Recover, a team of marine scientists, archae-
ologists, and volunteers who seek aircraft lost
in World War II, announced that it had
located wreckage of the bomber in 213 feet of
water in Hansa Bay.
COURTESY OF THE KELLY FAMILY
Kelly’s niece Diane Christie got the call as
she left a grocery store in Folsom, Calif. “I
burst into tears,” she told the New York Times.
“And I’m like, where did this come from? I
didn’t even know my uncle.”
The investigation started in May 2013

Legwork by Diane Christie (above)
and her family helped identify the
crash site of her uncle, Second
Lieutenant Thomas Kelly (opposite,
circled), and the rest of the Heaven
Can Wait crew.
when Christie’s cousin—Scott Althaus,
a University of Illinois political scientist—
started searching online to learn more
about Kelly. He later dispatched Christie
and other family members to the Univer-
sity of Memphis, home of an archive of the
90th Bombardment Group, known as the
“Jolly Rogers,” which included Heaven Can
TOP: TALIA HERMAN/THE NEW YORK TIMES; BOTTOM: PHILIPPE CHARLIER VIA TWITTER; INSET: DANIEL FOURAY/OUEST-FRANCE
Wait. There they photographed hundreds
of documents about the plane and its crew.
Althaus himself interviewed a Belgian
scuba diver who had lived near Hansa Bay,
probing for possible locations of the wreck.
The information they gathered helped
Project Recover narrow down possible
crash sites. Team members spent 11 days
scouring more than 10 square miles of sea-
floor, using sonars and underwater robots.
Eventually, they found the debris of Heaven
Can Wait. They have sent the documenta-
tion to the Pentagon’s POW/MIA Account-
ing Agency, which will decide whether to
try to recover and identify the remains of
the bomber’s crew.
One ceremony has already taken place.
On Memorial Day weekend, a B-24 flew
three times over the cemetery containing
Kelly ’s headstone. He also received a
21-gun salute and a flag ceremony. “It was
wonderful,” Christie said.
OPEN-AND-
SHUT CASE
A PROMINENT FRENCH RESEARCHER has some bad news for con-
spiracy theorists: “Hitler died in 1945,” forensic scientist Philippe
Charlier told the news agency Agence France-Presse. “He did not flee
to Argentina in a submarine. He is not in a hidden base in Antarctica or
on the dark side of the moon.”
Charlier and other researchers last year persuaded the Russians to
let them examine the only remaining fragments of Adolf Hitler’s body:
some skull and a jawbone containing mostly false teeth. They found the
skull fragment “totally comparable” to x-ray images of Hitler’s head
taken a year before his death. The dentures matched Hitler’s dental
records and showed no meat fibers—consistent with his vegetarianism.
The skull fragment had a hole likely caused by a bullet. Bluish
deposits on his false teeth suggest a chemical reaction to cyanide. “We
don’t know if he used an ampule of cyanide to kill himself or whether
it was a bullet in the head,” Charlier said. “It’s in all probability both.”
Charlier, nicknamed “France’s Forensic Sleuth” by the New York
Times, is known for his historical detective work; in 2013 he analyzed
the mummified heart of Britain’s King Richard I, the “Lionheart.”
The Hitler findings were published in May in the peer-reviewed
European Journal of Internal Medicine and are consistent with the
mainstream belief that Hitler committed suicide with Eva Braun as
Soviet forces closed in on Berlin on April 30, 1945.
The Russians have been secretive about Hitler’s fate. Historian
Anthony Beevor has argued that Stalin deliberately hid the fact
the Soviets had found Hitler’s body, apparently to sow speculation
that the Americans had spirited him away. Partly as a result, the
Führer’s fate has been the subject of wild speculative theories. In the
mid-1950s, the CIA investigated
whether Hitler was living in South
America under the name “Adolf
Schüttelmayer.” (See “Alive and
Living in Argentina?,” April 2018.)
French forensic scientist
Philippe Charlier (inset)
studied skull and denture
fragments (below) and
FRQÞUPHGWKDW+LWOHU
died in 1945.
OCTOBER 2018
13
 Germany has
made plans to sell
the Remagen
bridge’s eastern
towers (left). The
span collapsed in
March 1945 (inset).

FOR SALE: A MASSIVE PIECE

OF WARTIME HISTORY
GERMAN RAILWAY AUTHORITIES are selling a portion of the
famed Remagen bridge, where Allied forces first crossed the Rhine
River into Germany’s industrial heartland—a turning point in the
final months of the war. But the property is definitely a fixer-upper.
Two towers in the town of Erpel on the eastern end of the bridge—
made famous in the 1969 movie The Bridge at Remagen—are up for
“remains of a monumental bridge construc-
tion of national significance to war history,”
but concedes that the ruins are “in serious
need of renovations.” The buyer is forbidden
from converting the dilapidated towers into a
home or hotel, but the fund believes the prop-

sale to the highest bidder. The towers on the west side, in the town of
Remagen, are already a museum. The span is officially named
Ludendorff Bridge after German general Erich Ludendorff, a World
War I hero famed for his victories against the Russians.
“There are already several interested parties,” Jürgen Rothe,
spokesman for the Federal Railway Property Fund, told the German
news agency DPA.
In a property listing, the fund describes the structure as the
TOP: DPICS/ALAMY; INSET: KEYSTONE VIA GETTY IMAGES; BOTTOM: HORACIO VILLALOBOS VIA GETTY IMAGES
erty may interest artists or historical societies.
On March 7, 1945, soldiers from the advanc-
ing U.S. 9th Armored Division were surprised
to find the bridge intact; despite concerted
efforts, the Germans had not been able to
destroy it in time before retreating. For that
failure, the Nazis court-martialed and exe-
cuted four junior German officers.

DISPATCHES
Sister Agnès-Marie Valois, the “Angel of Dieppe,” died April 19 at a
French monastery at 103. The Augustinian nun was one of 10 nurses
who treated the Allied wounded—most of them Canadian—left behind
after a disastrous August 19, 1942, assault on Dieppe in German-
occupied France. She refused orders to treat the German wounded
first and is said to have positioned herself in front of an injured
Canadian when a Nazi officer attempted to execute him. Her bravery
and compassion made her a legend in Canada. After the war, she
continued to work as a nurse in France.

14 WORLD WAR II
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 The German
warship Tirpitz
lurks in a
Norwegian fjord.
The ship pumped
out toxic vapors

GERMAN POISON to help it hide.

CLOUD LEFT ITS MARK

THE NAZIS LEFT A TOXIC LEGACY in the trees of Arctic Norway.
Desperate to conceal their massive battleship Tirpitz from unre-
lenting Allied search-and-destroy missions, the Germans moved the
ship from fjord to fjord and sometimes shrouded it in a chemical fog.
Researchers have found nearby trees badly damaged by the smoke
screen of chlorosulfuric acid the ship produced. Claudia Hartl, a sci-
entist from Germany’s Johannes Gutenberg University, made the
discovery after examining trees at Kåfjord village in Norway’s far
north in an effort to better understand the region’s historical cli-
mate. She was puzzled to find that, through 1945, some of the pine
and birch trees were missing the rings that mark a year’s growth.
Missing tree rings are rare. When they are found, it is usually the
result of severe weather or insect infestations. But neither of those
possibilities adequately explained the missing tree rings at Kåfjord.
A colleague speculated that the phenomenon might have had some-
thing to do with the toxic camouflage of the Tirpitz, which was
anchored in the area in 1944.
“We think this artificial smoke damaged
the needles on the trees,” Hartl told BBC
News. “If trees don’t have needles, they can’t
photosynthesize, and they can’t produce bio-
mass.” The farther from Kåfjord, the less
damage to the trees; at two and a half miles
away, the damage disappeared altogether.
Hartl and her colleagues unveiled their
findings in April at the general assembly of the
European Geosciences Union in Vienna.
The Tirpitz, sister ship of the Bismarck, was
stationed in Norway to help prevent an Allied
invasion there, to harass convoys bound for
the Soviet Union, and to keep the British navy
occupied. But it spent a lot of time hiding.
British bombers finally found and sank Tir-
pitz on November 12, 1944.
TOP: GRÖNER/ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES; BOTTOM: IAN DAGNALL/ALAMY

WORD FOR WORD

“Good night, then: sleep to gather strength for
the morning. For the morning will come.
Brightly it will shine on the brave and true,
kindly upon those who suffer for the cause,
glorious upon the tombs of heroes. Thus
will shine the dawn.”
—British prime minister Winston Churchill, in a radio broadcast to the
French people, October 21, 1940

16 WORLD WAR II
 ★ BIG GUNS OF GETTYSBURG ★ FREEDOM BY HATCHET ★ American Sieges
India vs. Pakistan
Crimean Images
Antony’s Intrigues
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 The Orduña was one of several refugee
ships to set sail for Cuba in May 1939.

able to legally find refuge. Eventu-

ally, with the help of several U.S.-
based refugee aid groups, the final
55 passengers were allowed to
enter the United States.
Also on May 27, the St. Louis’s
sister ship, the Orinoco, and its 200
passengers left Germany for Cuba.
(Until May 1939, Cuba was one of
the few places in the world—along
with Shanghai—willing to take in
Jewish refugees in large numbers.)
Once radioed about the St. Louis’s
predicament, the Orinoco
anchored in waters just off France,
where it remained for several
days. Neither the British, French, nor U.S.
governments accepted the Orinoco’s refu-
ASK WWII gees and they were forced to return to Ger-
Q: The troubling story of the St. Louis is fairly well many. Their fate remains unknown.
known. But surely there were other ships that sailed Another ship, the French Flandre, sailed
from Nazi territory with refugees around that time? to Cuba with Jewish refugees in May 1939,
What happened to the people on those ships? Did
but the 104 passengers were again denied
anyone take them in? —Rose Lictro, Blauvelt, NY
entry by the Cuban government. The pas-
A: As you say, the plight of the German transatlantic liner St. Louis sengers then sailed for Mexico, where their
has been related many times. The ship, carrying 937 people—mostly requests to disembark at various ports were
Jews fleeing Nazi oppression—arrived in Cuba’s Havana Harbor from turned down. The Flandre was soon forced
Germany on May 27, 1939. Cuba would not accept the vast majority of to return to France, where the refugees
the refugees, and neither did the United States, so the St. Louis was were interned by the French govern-
forced to sail back to Europe. Many of the refugees survived the war, ment. Their fate, too, is a mystery.
though 254 had been murdered in the Holocaust. —Diane F. Afoumado, PhD, Chief, Research
Less well known is that the same day the St. Louis arrived in Cuba, and Reference Branch, United States Holo-
the British ship Orduña docked in Havana with 120 Jewish refugees. caust Memorial Museum
Forty-eight passengers had landing permits and were allowed to dis-
SEND QUERIES TO: Ask World War II,
embark. The ship, with the remaining 72 passengers, left two days 1919 Gallows Road, Suite 400, Vienna,
later with no certain destination. During numerous stops in South VA 22182 OR EMAIL: worldwar2@
American and Panama Canal Zone ports, several passengers were historynet.com

DISPATCHES
TOP: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES; BOTTOM: ARGUS/SAX ROHMER LTD

Construction workers discovered bundles of decay-

ing cash—worth about $2.5 million in today’s
money—beneath the rotted tiles, carpet, and floor-
boards of a Brighton, England, shop that once housed
a tailor favored by British prime minister Winston
Churchill, his wife, and celebrities such as Brigitte
Bardot. The partly Jewish owners of Bradleys Gowns
apparently hid the money for safekeeping when a
Nazi invasion of Britain seemed imminent. The police
are holding the stash while they try to locate the right-
ful owner. The Bank of England will exchange the
money at full market value.

18 WORLD WAR II
 Authentic Historical
Reproductions

We found our most important

watch in a soldier’s pocket
I
t’s the summer of harrowing flights in a B-24 bomber accuracy to only seconds a day. The
1944 and a weath- and somehow made it back to the movement displays the day and date
ered U.S. sergeant is U.S. Besides the Purple Heart and on the antique satin finished face
walking in Rome only the Bronze Star, my father cherished and the sweep second hand lets any
days after the Allied this watch because it was a reminder watch expert know that it has a fine
Liberation. There is a of the best part of the war for any automatic movement, not a mass-
joyous mood in the streets and this soldier—the homecoming. produced quartz movement. If you
tough soldier wants to remember enjoy the rare, the classic, and the
He nicknamed the watch Ritorno for
this day. He’s only weeks away from museum quality, we have a limited
homecoming, and the rare heirloom
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is now valued at $42,000 according
esting timepiece in a store just off hope that it will remind you to
to The Complete Guide to Watches. But
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 DISPATCHES

Members of Japan’s Unit 731 assemble

in Jilin, northeast China, in 1940.

WORKERS AT
NOTORIOUS
MEDICAL
RESEARCH UNIT U-boat commander Reinhard Hardegen,
who died in June at 105, left an audacious
mark. In two war patrols along the American

IDENTIFIED East Coast in winter and spring 1942, he rev-

JAPAN’S NATIONAL ARCHIVES has turned over the names of
3,607 people who worked in the infamous Unit 731, which con-
ducted gruesome experiments on Chinese and Allied prisoners.
Katsuo Nishiyama, professor emeritus at Japan’s Shiga Univer-
sity of Medical Science, requested the information several years
ago. His team plans to confirm the accuracy of the names before
publishing the list, which includes surgeons, engineers, nurses,
eled in seeing the lights of Manhattan from
New York Harbor and in terrorizing spectators
on Florida’s Jacksonville Beach when he sur-
faced to destroy an American oil tanker. “All
the vacationers had seen an impressive spe-
cial performance at Roosevelt’s expense,” he
wrote in his log. Credited with sinking or
crippling at least 19 ships, Hardegan died in
Bremen, Germany—his birthplace.

TOP LEFT: XINHUA NEWS AGENCY/REDUX; TOP RIGHT: UBOAT.NET; BOTTOM: NATIONAL WORLD WAR II MUSEUM
and combat medics. He hopes to encourage more study of the unit,
which was set up in Japanese-occupied Manchuria.
“This is the first time that an official document showing the
real names of almost all members of Unit 731 has been disclosed,”
Nishiyama told the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper. “The list is
important evidence that supports testimony by those involved. Its
discovery will be a major step toward unveiling concealed facts.”
In the name of medical research, Unit 731—officially the Japa-
nese Imperial Army’s Epidemic Prevention and Water Purifica-
The National World War II Museum in New
tion Department—exposed victims to frostbite, deprived them of
Orleans is hosting an exhibit about Bob
sleep, injected them with plague, typhus, and cholera, and cut Hope through February 10, 2019. On display
them open without anesthesia. are wartime correspondence between Hope
The Japanese government denied Unit 731’s existence until 1998 and troops, relics, photos, and films from
and has never revealed its activities. Information has emerged from his travels. During the war, Hope broadcast
documents, photographs, and the testimony of former members. most of his radio shows from military bases
around the world. The exhibit, “So Ready for
At war’s end, the United States—in a burgeoning arms race with
Laughter,” takes its name from a passage in
the Soviet Union—granted immunity to Unit 731 researchers in Hope’s 1990 memoir: the troops were “so
exchange for access to their biological warfare findings. Some unit ready for laughter,” he wrote, it made “what
veterans went on to enjoy successful medical carrers. we did for a living seem like stealing money.”

20 WORLD WAR II
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 CONVERSATION WITH BRIGITTE SCHREIBER HAYWARD
BY ROGER MOORHOUSE
A CHILDHOOD IN
NAZI GERMANY
BRIGITTE SCHREIBER WAS BORN IN 1927 and grew up in Nazi
Germany, living in the city of Paderborn with her parents and three
siblings until late in the war. Life during the war, she learned,
required constantly mastering new skills, including learning to not
speak your mind, keeping watch for low-flying Spitfires, and whip-
ping up breakfast for hungry American tankers. After the war, Bri-
gitte met and married a British soldier, Jack Hayward, himself a
veteran of Dunkirk and D-Day, and moved to England. Now 91, she
lives in Maidstone, Kent.
Was there talk about politics at home when you
were a child?
No, not very much. My father was a furniture maker and worked for
a firm in Paderborn, but when that went bust he was unemployed
from 1926 to 1933. He did his best to try to make ends meet, but we
had to survive on very, very little.
Did your parents vote for Hitler?
Everybody did in 1933, because Germany was down and he promised
to get people back into work. My father got a job as a coachbuilder for
German railways, so things were a little easier, and he was enthusias-
tic about Hitler at the beginning. But in about 1936 he realized that
things weren’t right. My father wasn’t left-wing, but he didn’t like
Hitler. He used to call him “Grossmaul” (big mouth).
What was it like growing up in Nazi Germany?
It was all rather normal for us. We weren’t really restricted and we
never felt threatened directly, but I think my parents knew there was
a danger there. They always told us to be quiet; don’t speak out.
Did they oppose Hitler?
Not really. But I remember coming home from school—like many
families, we had a Volksempfänger radio set—and my mother was
standing there in the living room, with her ear nearly inside it. When
I asked what she was doing, she said “I’m listening to the British
news, it’s the only way to get the truth. But don’t you dare say any-
thing! Or they’ll take me away!” We never mentioned it again.
Also, my father said that “If we lose the war, it is bad, but if we win
the war, it’ll be worse.” Of course, he didn’t dare say anything like
that outside of our home, he just said it to the family.
Did your family have Nazi friends or neighbors?
We had a neighbor who was in the SA—a “Brownshirt”—and when we
22 WORLD WAR II
would greet him in the morning, he would
reply with “Heil Hitler!” My sister and I
could never say that; we could never get it
out, somehow. So we tried our best to avoid it.
What do you recall of the
persecution of Paderborn’s Jews?
I remember Kristallnacht in 1938, when the
Nazis set the synagogue on fire. I was 11. My
sister and I went to see. We had never wit-
nessed such a thing before; it was horrible.
Also we had two Jewish boys in our school,
and one day they just disappeared and we
didn’t know what had happened to them. It
was 1942, I think. They were lovely boys. We
wondered where they had gone, but as chil-
dren we didn’t ask questions. My parents said
they had probably gone abroad; that they had
gotten away. We knew that Hitler didn’t like
the Jews, but we didn’t know what he was
doing with them. It was never talked about.
Did you hear of any opposition
to the Nazis?
Only indirectly. In the summer of 1944, there
was a greengrocer who used to come around
with his horse and cart, and my mother went
down with another couple of ladies, includ-
ing the wife of our Nazi neighbor. And one of
them said that she had just heard on the
radio that they had tried to kill Hitler, to
which the greengrocer asked, “Did they get
him?” She said, “No, they didn’t” and he
replied, “What a shame.” And that was it.
We never saw him again. Later on we
heard he had died. We never heard anything
about concentration camps, or what hap-
pened to people in them—but maybe we
didn’t want to know.
What were your experiences
of the bombing war?
We didn’t have much bombing in Paderborn

until late in the war, 1944–45. Once when the bombers came, we were
in the cellar of our house, and—I remember it to this day—my little
brother, he was five then, stood beside me, tugged on my skirt, and
said, “Do we have to die now?” It broke my heart.
Afterward we saw that the house opposite ours had taken a direct
hit; the woman living there was killed. It was horrible. The next bomb
missed us and exploded in our back garden, but still the house was
completely destroyed. We lost everything.
How did the war end for you?
Well, it nearly ended that spring! I was cycling along the road, just out-
side Paderborn, when I heard planes approaching very low. I thought,
“They can’t be German”; German planes were long gone from the skies.
All of a sudden, I heard shooting. I dropped my bike and threw myself
into the ditch at the side of the road, just as this plane flew over me
firing away: rat-a-tat-a-tat…. It was a Spitfire, I think, shooting at any-
OSCAR MOORHOUSE; INSET COURTESY OF PETER HAYWARD
thing he could find. Naughty so-and-so!
Did you stay in Paderborn?
By 1945 I was 18; I was working in a factory making ammunition boxes
and my sister, Ursula, was working in a uniform factory. My father
wanted to get us all out of the town. He said that the war would be fin-
ished soon; it couldn’t go on much longer, but he didn’t want us to be
killed in Paderborn. So he sent my sister to Bad Driburg—with my
mother and the two boys—and I went by bicycle to a little village called
Ebbinghausen, 18 miles away, where I used to spend my holidays.
Brigitte Schreiber Hayward
in her garden last spring,
and (inset) as an 18-year-old
at the war’s end.
What happened
there?
That was in March and
the Americans arrived
in April. The village was
in a valley and we could
hear the fighting going
on around us. We had 16-year-old boys fight-
ing against them. We met one. He came down
into the village, crying, as he didn’t know
what to do, and he asked what the Americans
were like. And I said, “Just throw your gun
away, and go up the road and you’ll find them
and they won’t do anything to you.”
Did the fighting continue?
No; we waited downstairs in a cellar, and
when we heard heavy footsteps on the stairs,
we were frightened stiff, clutching little white
handkerchiefs as a symbol of surrender! And
then an American soldier appeared and
asked—in German—if there were any soldiers
there, and shone a torch [flashlight] into
everyone’s faces.
Did it feel like defeat?
I felt like it was more of a liberation. We didn’t
feel threatened; we were pleased to see them,
as the war would then be over. I think it was
“My little brother tugged
on my skirt and said, ‘Do
we have to die now?’”
that day that I saw an American tank for the
first time. It had a black soldier riding on top
of it. I had never seen a black man before! I
could just see his teeth! He was waving; they
were all ever so friendly.
The Americans stayed in our village for
about a week. My cousin used to make pan-
cakes for them; I used to make butter, and
another cousin had bees, so we had lovely
things to eat. And the Americans loved it:
pancakes, thick butter, and honey. We had a
good time then. For us the war was finished. +
OCTOBER 2018
23
 FROM THE FOOTLOCKER

DIRTY JOB I was a truck driver for an antiaircraft
artillery unit, the 776th AAA AW [Au-
tomatic Weapons] Battalion, 49th AAA
Group, Third Army. When not towing
guns, we would often be stationary for
a week or two and take on other jobs.
Curators at We were in Germany after the libera-
The National tion of Dachau concentration camp
when I was asked to help transport
World War II survivors for rehabilitation. Inside the
Museum camp I found this object. The handle
solve readers’ is about 12 inches long; the strips of
artifact leather, about 16 inches. I don’t know
mysteries what it is for certain. Can you help?
—Athanace “Joe” Landry, Shirley,
Massachusetts
IN SPITE OF ITS SINISTER LOOK, this is a
clothes beater—or Klopfsteg in German army
slang—which was standard issue to German
service members. The Germans’ thick wool
quantities of dust and caked mud, and the
Klopfsteg was simply a tool issued to soldiers
for beating them clean. Could it have been
used for other purposes? Of course it could.
However, it was designed and manufactured
as a fabric cleaner, not as a weapon.
Most examples I’ve seen are marked with
the initials “RAD,” for Reichsarbeitsdienst, or
Reich Labor Service—a counterpart to the
Works Progress Administration in the United
States at the time. Like the WPA, the RAD was
established to mitigate the effects of unem-
ployment during the Depression. The Third
Reich leadership also used the Labor Service
to clandestinely train soldiers to rebuild its
military, which during the 1930s was strictly
prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles.
Once hostilities began in September 1939,
the RAD functioned more like engineers, sup-
porting the German army by building fortifi-
cations, roads, and bridges. In the closing days

PHOTOS COURTESY OF ATHANACE “JOE” LANDRY AND HIS DAUGHTER, SHARON

uniforms and blankets tended to collect large of the war, RAD members were trained as
Private First Class
antiaircraft gun crews and, in several isolated
Joe Landry (left), incidents, used as infantry. It makes sense
with his two-and-a- that many a Klopfsteg was RAD marked, con-
half-ton truck and sidering the dirty nature of the work its mem-
buddy Bob Maynard bers performed. —Larry Decuers, Curator
in 1945. That year,
he picked up the Have a World War II artifact you can’t identify?
mysterious object Write to Footlocker@historynet.com with the following:
below at Dachau. — 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.

24 WORLD WAR II
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 you hit a man, do it as if you mean it!”
Private Shigeru Mizuki was a
young man during World War II, and
he wasn’t in the army two days before
the beatings began. Wandering into
the officer’s bath (off-limits to
enlisted men), accidentally standing
on a newspaper bearing a photo of
the emperor, failing to brace himself
as he addressed a superior officer:
each incident ended with Mizuki
dazed and bleeding. He was a bit of a
sad sack, not really cut out for sol-
diering, and so he usually bore the
brunt. Looking back, he remembers
“getting beaten up every day.” Some
days were worse than others. When
his rifle sight failed inspection, for
example, he got it bad from his com-
pany commander: “The worst beat-
ing I had ever received,” he recalled
FIRE FOR EFFECT later. “I thought it would never end.”
BY ROBERT M. CITINO Mizuki went on to become a world-
famous artist and author of several

BEAT IT
WHEN YOU BOIL IT DOWN to its essentials, the reason you form, train,
Japanese “manga” graphic novels,
along with Showa: A History of
Japan (four volumes, 2013–2015), an
unforgettable epic of Japan during
the war and a meticulous record of
life in the enlisted ranks.
and equip an army is to beat your enemy in battle. It’s hard to make a case for any of
But if you happened to be a soldier or sailor in the Imperial Japanese mil- this. Men have been training for war
itary during World War II, you might think differently. Given your daily since the beginning of time, and it
experience—from induction through training camp and finally to opera- does require a certain process of
tions in the field—sometimes it might have seemed as if the real purpose of toughening the recruit to let him
the country’s fighting force was not so much to beat the enemy as to beat you. know he’s not at home with his
This was a military that raised corporal punishment—physical beatings— mother anymore, that he’s entered a
to the status of a doctrine. You could be pummeled nearly to death for almost new and dangerous world. In the
any reason: failing to salute smartly enough, missing a button on your shirt, Soviet army, for example, beating
a lackadaisical attitude. Failure to snap to attention at the mention of the new recruits was a long-standing
emperor’s name was a serious offense in this world, and some particularly tradition. But the Japanese example
sadistic officers seemed to delight in mentioning the emperor solely to catch is so extreme, so pervasive, that it’s
their men napping. difficult to see the point of it, partic-
Whatever your offense, the result was the same: fists or clubs, or any ularly the severe beatings to veteran
good, solid piece of wood within your superior’s reach, would start to fly. The soldiers in the field.
aftermath was a grisly parade of smashed teeth, broken noses, and shattered During the Asia-Pacific War, the
ribs—along with all the predictable internal injuries. Imperial Japanese Army gained a
It was all hierarchical, of course: noncommissioned officers and lieuten- reputation for atrocious behavior,
ants beat their men, captains struck their lieutenants, generals clobbered especially toward helpless victims:
their colonels, and onward up the line. Even warlord Hideki Tojo himself, the comfort women, Allied POWs, Chi-
ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN TOMAC

prime minister and minister of war, was known to cuff around his subordi- nese civilians. Studying the way it
nates during staff meetings. Sometimes the men beat each other. One ser- treated its own men gives us a pretty
geant famously disliked bruising his own hands by punching offenders, so he good explanation for these horrors.
had his men do it. When they failed to show the proper devotion to their task, As so often in life, cruelty begins in
he screamed at them: “You are soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army! When the home. +

26 WORLD WAR II
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 Nearly half a million troops par-
TRAVEL LOUISIANA MANEUVERS ticipated. In light of Hitler’s blitz-
STORY AND PHOTOS BY MARK D. VAN ELLS krieg across Europe, McNair was

HOMEGROWN especially keen to test America’s

armored forces, with the army’s M2
and M3 tanks playing the lead roles.
Infantry, artillery, air forces, para-

WAR GAMES
IN SEPTEMBER 1941, as German troops raced toward Moscow and Japan
troopers, and even cavalry troopers
on horseback took part as well—not
to mention critical support troops.
McNair trucked in mountains of
blank rounds and even played re-
extended its reach across the East, the United States was still playing war corded battle noises to add authen-
games. Throughout that month, the U.S. Army staged the Louisiana Maneu- ticity. Obviously, some actions had to
vers, the most extensive field exercises in its history. Thousands of nascent be simulated, such as airstrikes and
GIs in World War I–style helmets fought sham battles across central Louisi- the destruction of bridges. Equip-
ana’s prairies, cotton fields, and pine-covered hills. Today travelers come to ment shortages also hindered real-
the region to see antebellum plantations and Civil War sites, but for me it was ism. Antitank guns, to give just one
the Second World War that beckoned. Seventy-six Septembers after the 1941 example, were often made of logs.
maneuvers, I rented a car and explored the “battlefields” of Louisiana. Just as the first exercise was about
The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 forced preparedness on America, to begin, on September 15, a tropical
and in 1940 the army selected central Louisiana as a training ground. The storm soaked the troops in the field.
warm climate allowed year-round operations, and the remote woodlands of But the training went on: General
Kisatchie National Forest offered plenty of space. Camp Beauregard, a moth- Lear, based north of the Red River,
balled World War I camp just north of Alexandria, sprang back to life. In attacked Krueger’s forces to the
1940–41 the army carved three more facilities out of national forest lands: south, camped on the flat prairies
Camp Livingston, 10 miles north of Alexandria; Camp Claiborne, 18 miles between Lake Charles and Lafayette.
south of Alexandria; and Camp Polk, eight miles southeast of Leesville. Lear planned an armored sweep
The maneuver area was vast, ranging from East Texas to Louisiana’s east- around Krueger’s left flank, but his
ern border, with the Red River bisecting it. The action occurred in two slow advance allowed Krueger to
phases, pitting Lieutenant General Benjamin Lear’s Second Army against blunt the attack, reposition his
Lieutenant General Walter Krueger’s Third Army. Participants included a forces, and grab the initiative.
veritable who’s who of future World War II commanders. Colonel Dwight D. The second exercise, nicknamed
Eisenhower was Krueger’s chief of staff. Major General George S. Patton led the “Battle of the Bridges,” com-
the 2nd Armored Division. General Headquarters Chief of Staff Lesley menced on September 24 w ith
McNair, known as the “brains of the army,” supervised the exercises. All were another drenching storm. In this
under the watchful eye of U.S. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall. scenario, Lear defended Shreveport

28 WORLD WAR II
 1941’s Louisiana Maneuvers tested a variety of U.S. Army forces, revealing a military
in transition. Opposite: A long-neglected road leads through old Camp Claiborne.

from Krueger’s forces attacking from the south. Lear traded space for time, Everything is covered with pine nee-
destroying bridges (in simulated fashion, of course) as he retreated northwest- dles, except for a narrow path down
erly up Red River Valley, forcing Krueger’s engineers to construct hundreds of the main road where a few vehicles
pontoon bridges—right alongside those already declared destroyed. The most occasionally pass. The war feels dis-
dramatic event was Patton’s armored sweep through East Texas, getting tant; it is hard to imagine these streets
behind Lear and approaching Shreveport from the north. crammed with soldiers and trucks or
Though the fighting may have been simulated, the casualties sometimes the sound of “Reveille” in the morning.
were real. A pilot died in a midair collision on the first day. In another inci- Among the spots Richard shows
dent, two soldiers drowned trying to cross the rain-swollen Cane River near me is the old camp recreation area.
Natchitoches. But there were moments of levity, too. According to one oft-told The swimming pool is overgrown
story, maneuver umpires declared a bridge wrecked, only to see soldiers with brush, the deep end filled with
walking across it. “Can’t you see that bridge is destroyed?,” yelled the umpire. stagnant green water. Nearby stand
“Of course,” one soldier responded. “Can’t you see we’re swimming?” pillars that once supported the gym-
By the time the maneuvers ended on September 28, the soldiers
had gained some insight into the rigors of a war campaign. Com-
manders got experience, too—and many who were found lacking
the necessary skills lost their jobs.
Louisiana remained an important training ground once the U.S.
entered the war. The famed 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions,
for example, were reactivated at Camp Claiborne in 1942. After
the war, Polk and Beauregard remained in army hands. Claiborne
and Livingston were abandoned, and the Kisatchie National Forest
swallowed them up.
Tourists today will find most maneuver-related sites within an
hour’s drive of Alexandria. Perhaps the best place to begin your
explorations is the Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum at
Camp Beauregard, which houses artifacts from the war years,
including uniforms, equipment, weapons, and maps.
But for me, the ruins of the abandoned camps held greater allure.
My first stop is Camp Livingston. There is no interpretive signage
at the site, but fortunately the director of the Louisiana Maneuvers Major General
TOP AND RIGHT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

George S. Patton
museum, Richard Moran, offers to show me around. He takes me
inspects 2nd
down a nondescript rural road and, before long, broken concrete Armored Division
slabs and crumbling vestiges of warehouses and loading docks field exercises during
begin to appear among the tall, fragrant pines and tangled under- the war games.
brush. The shady streets have not been maintained since Roos-
evelt was in office and are riddled with heaves and potholes.

OCTOBER 2018
29

Shreveport
M I L E S
K IS ATCHIE
0 50
Natchitoches NATIONAL
FO REST MIS SIS SIPPI
Florien
Alexandria
Leesville
LOUISIANA
TE X A S
Lafayette
Lake Charles
nasium walls, rising ghost-like from the
forest floor. Graffiti artists have tagged
the ruins, while discarded clothing, beer
cans, and multicolored shotgun shells lay
on the ground among the pinecones.
Next I visit Camp Claiborne, the ruins
of which stretch a couple of miles along
State Highway 112. A few information
panels mark the site of the old camp
headquarters, where the 82nd and 101st
Divisions were rebranded as airborne
units. As at Camp Livingston, enigmatic
concrete ruins dot the forest. Weathered
sidewalks lead to nowhere. The woods
are eerily quiet, sounds muffled by 70
years of accumulated pine needles.
One sunny morning I drive along the
south bank of the Red River from Alexan-
dria toward Natchitoches, about 50 miles
northwest. Several tributary rivers and
streams cross my path, most notably the
Cane River, which meanders through
snow-white cotton fields that seem ready
30 WORLD WAR II
Nature has swallowed most of Camp
Livingston, but concrete pillars
from the old gymnasium remain.
to burst. The river runs slow and lazy—
not like the storm-swollen torrent of
1941—but I nonetheless think about the
two soldiers who died trying to cross it,
and the hard work of the engineers
during the “Battle of the Bridges.”
I then turn west ward and drive
through the wooded uplands, sharing the
road with rumbling trucks hauling
timber stacked like giant matchsticks. A
portion of State Highway 118 between
Florien and Kisatchie, an area that saw
considerable action in the first maneuver,
is now designated the Louisiana Maneu-
vers Highway. A historical marker along
the road at Peason Ridge highlights the
impact of the war on that rural commu-
nity. In 1941 the army forced its 25 resi-
dent families off their lands to create
a permanent training ground. Small
weather-beaten display cases poignantly
exhibit memorabilia about life there
before the war. There are numerous pho-
tographs—smiling families, proud cou-
ples, a bearded Confederate veteran, and
a local boxer, fists up, ready to fight. Sol-
diers still train at Peason Ridge today.
As the hazy orange sun sinks into the
west, I head toward New Orleans, where
the next day I pay a visit to the impressive
National World War II Museum. I walk
through its exhibits—numerous and
marvelous—but my mind drifts back to
the countryside, just a few hours to the
north, where the woods and fields have
their own stories to tell. +
WHEN
YOU GO
Alexandria is the best base
for exploring the maneuvers
area. Alexandria Interna-
tional Airport is served by
American, Delta, and United
airlines. In addition to Camp
Beauregard’s Louisiana
Maneuvers and Military
Museum (geauxguardmu-
seums.com), the Fort Polk
Museum (jrtc-polk.army.
mil/museum.html) and Long
Leaf’s Southern Forest
Heritage Museum (long-
leaf.la) also have exhibits
about the maneuvers.
WHERE TO
STAY AND EAT
Alexandria’s Hotel Bentley
(hotelbentleyandcondos.
com) offers the area’s most
elegant lodging option. The
likes of Eisenhower and
Patton once walked its fine
mosaic floors and marbled
hallways. Inside is a small
exhibit of the war years.
Louisiana is noted for its
unique Cajun cuisine. The
southern edge of the maneu-
vers area between Lake
Charles and Lafayette offers
the best options for tasty
boudin, crawfish, and gumbo.
WHAT ELSE TO
SEE AND DO
Camp or hike Kisatchie
National Forest (fs.usda.
gov/kisatchie), but bring your
bug spray. The maneuvers
passed through what is today
the Cane River Creole
National Heritage Area
(nps.gov/crha), south of
Natchitoches, which pre-
serves the area’s multicultural
history. During the Civil War,
real battles raged in Red
River Valley: 0DQVÞHOG
EDWWOHÞHOGand Forts
MAP BY BRIAN WALKER
Randolph and Buhlow are
both maintained by Louisiana
State Parks (crt.state.la.us/
Louisiana-state-parks).
 OUT OF
THE DEEP
When the USS Indianapolis sank in
shark-infested waters, the navy unjustly
held its captain responsible. It took
more than 50 years to clear his name
By Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic
32 WORLD WAR II
 One of Indianapolis’s five-inch
guns bristles underwater more
than seven decades after
the ship met a horrible end.

COURTESY OF THE PAUL G. ALLEN PROJECT

OCTOBER 2018
33
 Monday, July 30, 1945
The Philippine Sea
Just after midnight
The first torpedo slammed into the heavy
cruiser USS Indianapolis’s starboard bow,
killing dozens of men in an instant. The vio-
lent explosion ejected Captain Charles B.
McVay III, 47, from his bunk in the emergency
cabin just aft of the bridge. The ship
whipped beneath him and set up a rat-
tling vibration that took him back to
Okinawa four months earlier.
Had they been hit by another suicider?
No, McVay thought. Impossible.
Another shattering concussion rocked
Indy amidships. Acrid white smoke
immediately filled McVay’s cabin. He
picked himself up off the deck, felt his
way to the cabin door, swung around the
bulkhead, and appeared on the lightless
bridge, stark naked. At that moment,
there were 13 men on the bridge; only
three would survive. For the captain
and many others, a nightmare that would span
Captain Charles B. decades was just beginning.
McVay III helped Fifteen hundred yards from Indianapolis,
see his ship through aboard the Imperial Japanese submarine
a devastating
I-58, Lieutenant Commander Mochitsura
kamikaze attack in
late March 1945. Hashimoto peered through his night peri-
scope at the scene of destruction unfolding
quickly before him.
“A hit! A hit!” he shouted. His elated crew
improvised a victory dance.
To ensure he struck the American cruiser
even if it had zigzagged—a maneuver for evad-
ing torpedoes the ship was almost sure to
make—Hashimoto had fired six Type 95
From the oxygen torpedoes in a fanwise spread. His
sea, McVay tactic had worked. Now, on the target’s main
and after-turrets, skyscrapers of silver water
saw his ship shot toward the moon. Red tongues of flame
followed immediately after, tasting the night.
standing Hashimoto had watched the enemy send
on end, many of his fellow submarine commanders
down to salty underwater graves and feared
its stern that he would fail to take a prize for Japan
towering before the war was lost. Filled with joy,
Hashimoto prepared to send a message to his
over him. commander in chief: I-58 had torpedoed a
large American warship.
Aboard Indianapolis, Captain McVay was
trying to verify that a distress signal had been
transmitted when a wall of water swept him
from the ship along with hundreds of his men.
From the sea, they saw the flagship of the
34 WORLD WAR II
Pacific Fleet standing on end, its stern tower-
ing over them. McVay and his men stared
spellbound as Indy’s massive screws kept up a
lazy turning, while all around them the phos-
phorescent water glowed like green fire.
Only 12 minutes had passed since the tor-
pedo blasts. Now, amid a roar like waves
pounding the beach in a storm, Indianapolis
plunged straight down. McVay looked up to
see men still leaping from the stern and the
giant silhouettes of Indy’s port screws falling
directly toward his head. As he pivoted and
began to swim, hot fuel oil slid up the back of
his neck, and soon he heard a loud churning
sound behind him. When McVay looked again,
his ship was gone.
Of the 1,195 men aboard Indianapolis, some
300 had gone down with the ship, including
McVay’s executive officer, Commander Joseph
Flynn, and the ship’s dentist, Lieutenant Com-
mander Earl Henry Sr., whose wife had just
had a baby boy. Now in the ink-black center of
the Philippine Sea, 280 miles from the nearest
land, McVay swiveled his head in the liquid
darkness. He could hear men calling out as he
floated alone in a thick layer of fuel oil, which
rocked on the surface in a gooey slab, its tarry
stench climbing down his throat like the caus-
tic fumes of road construction. McVay found a
pair of emergency rafts and soon after heard
his quartermaster, Vince Allard, calling out in
the dark. The last time McVay had seen Quar-
termaster Third Class Vincent Allard was on
the deck, when Allard logged the captain’s
order to cease zigzagging and return the ship
to base course. Allard was struggling to sup-
port two young sailors who were in such bad
shape that McVay thought they were dead.
Both men, in fact, survived.
North of McVay’s position and far out of
sight, Seaman Second Class L. D. Cox swam
into another young sailor, Seaman Second
Class Clifford Josey, who was covered in flash
burns. In the dim moonlight, it looked to Cox
as if Josey’s face was melting off. Cox stayed
with Josey, held him, and soothed him with
talk about what it was going to be like when
they both got home to Texas. Within an hour,
Josey was dead.
Over the next five nights and four days,
BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
many such quiet heroics—along with acts of
cruelty and cowardice—would spin out across
the survivor groups. Roughly 300 of the 880
men in the ocean coalesced into a single large
mass. Some of these men only had life jackets;
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; COURTESY OF THE HASHIMOTO FAMILY; U.S. MARINE CORPS/NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND
others, nothing at all. Other survivors were
fortunate enough to find floater nets and rafts
equipped with meager rations, flares, fishing
supplies, and flashlights.
At first, the men held out hope for rescue.
But hours turned into days because the navy
did not even realize the ship was missing.
After delivering components to Tinian for the
atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima,
Indianapolis regrouped at the nearby base at
Guam before departing for Leyte, Philip-
pines—an 1,100-mile straight shot across the
Philippine Sea. Afterward, officers at Guam
had done nothing other than move Indy west-
ward on a plotting board according to her
planned speed of advance—this despite con-
firmed reports of an enemy sub chase dead
ahead of the heavy cruiser’s track. At Leyte,
meanwhile, when Indy’s estimated time of
arrival came and went, naval personnel USS Indianapolis (top)
noticed her absence, but also did nothing. sails into Pearl Harbor
Furthermore, intelligence personnel had in 1937, six years
before a major
intercepted the message Hashimoto sent refitting; Japanese
about sinking a large warship and had trans- submarine I-58
mitted it to high-ranking officers at Guam (bottom left), helmed
and Pearl Harbor, along with intelligence offi- by Lieutenant
cers working for Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King. Commander
The message was missing the location and Mochitsura Hashimoto
(bottom right),
type of ship sunk, but previous intel had launched the
placed Hashimoto’s boat, I-58, in the same torpedoes that sank
area where Indy and her men were known to the heavy cruiser.
be. Again, no one took action.
As the days passed, hundreds of men died of
their wounds or gave up hope and drowned
themselves. Many sailors were taken by
sharks. One moment, these predators behaved
like gentle and curious giants, nosing up close
to inspect the men with black, unblinking
OCTOBER 2018
35
 “I deeply Jane Henry, wife of
Indianapolis dentist Earl
regret to Henry Sr., cradles son
Earl Jr. Little Earl was six
inform you weeks old when his
father was lost at sea.

that your
husband …
is missing
in action.”

eyes. The next, they attacked, their steel-trap
jaws snuffing out a man’s life before he could
draw a breath to scream.
Thursday, August 2, 1945
Over the Philippine Sea
By the morning of Thursday, August 2, the
men had been in the water for four nights and
three days. Wilbur “Chuck” Gwinn, a navy
pilot, was flying over the Philippine Sea in his
Lockheed PV-1 Ventura bomber. It was just
after 11 a.m., and Gwinn was 350 miles north
of Palau, cruising at 3,000 feet. At this alti-
tude, he could see 20 square miles at a glance,
and the sea below appeared as smooth and
reflective as a foil sheet.
His crew was testing a new trailing antenna
that had become tangled for the third time.
Frustrated, Gwinn turned the controls over to
his copilot and ducked into the Ventura’s belly
to help. Gwinn bent to take a look through a
the controls. When Marks reached the survivors, he saw that many
would not last until a ship could arrive to fish them out of the sea. Then
his crew saw a shark take another man; Marks, against regulations,
decided to make an open-sea landing.
Shortly after 5 p.m., against a lowering sun, Marks executed a power
stall into the wind and slammed his airplane belly-first into the back of
a huge swell. The Dumbo’s hull screeched in fury, emitting all the
sounds of a crash. The crew pitched forward, safety harnesses crushing
their chests. The sea rejected the plane, batting it 15 feet back into the
air. Fighting physics, Marks gripped the control column with both
hands. The Dumbo’s belly again smashed into a wave and again
bounced—but not as high this time. Marks wrestled the controls, willing
the plane to obey. Finally, the Dumbo breached the swell’s shining skin.
Marks and his crew saved 53 men. Near midnight of the men’s fifth
night in the water, rescue ships finally arrived and hauled aboard 263
more, though men continued to die even after rescue operations began.
The ships transported survivors to base hospitals around the Philippine
Sea before eventually bringing them all to Guam. While the navy encour-
aged the men to write letters home, it prohibited them from mentioning
their whereabouts, the fact that Indianapolis had sunk, their nurses or
doctors, or to refer in any way to the ordeal they had just survived. COURTESY OF EARL O’DELL HENRY JR, WWW.EARLHENRYBIRDPRINTS.COM

window in the deck—and almost as quickly

leapt to his feet and dashed for the cockpit.
“What’s the matter?” his aviation ord-
nanceman shouted over the propeller noise.
Gwinn shouted back, “Look down and
you’ll see!”
He had spotted an oil slick, which he took for
the telltale trail of an enemy submarine. When
he descended for his attack run, though, Gwinn
saw the last the thing he expected—people.
The pilot alerted his squadron commander
at Peleliu, who dispatched a PBY-5A Catalina,
or “Dumbo,” with Lieutenant Adrian Marks at
August 13, 1945
Mayfield, Kentucky
Eleven days had passed since the rescue when Jane Henry, the wife of
Indianapolis’s dentist, hurried to the upstairs phone to answer it before
the ringing woke up the baby. Jane and two-month-old Little Earl were
staying with her parents, George and Bessie Covington. In his last
letter, Earl Sr. had gushed about the photos of the son he had yet to
meet. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, he wrote, if the war was over by the
time Indianapolis returned to the States?
Jane snatched up the phone and heard voices already on the extension.
“George, we are so sorry to hear the news.”
“What news?” Jane heard her father say.

36 WORLD WAR II
TOP: JOHN FROST NEWSPAPERS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; BOTTOM: U.S. NAVY/ NATIONAL ARCHIVES (BOTH)

The other voice paused. “Horace and Arletta lieutenant commander usnr, is The end of the war
just got a telegram today from the navy,” he missing in action 30 july 1945 in overshadowed
said, referring to Earl’s parents. “It says Earl’s the service of his country. your delayed news of
Indy’s sinking (top);
missing in action.” great anxiety is appreciated and injured sailors arrive
Jane’s insides went cold. She raised a hand you will be furnished with details on Peleliu (bottom
to brace herself against the wall. when received. left); survivors
The next day, Jane received her own ver- included Willie
sion of the dreaded telegram, which she read Later that morning, a town church bell Hatfield and Cozell
Smith, whose left
through a curtain of tears: began ringing, its insistent peal floating down
arm was bandaged
the street in joyous song. Another bell joined, from a shark bite.
i deeply regret to inform you that and another, until it seemed every church
your husband, earl o’dell henry, tower in Mayfield had joined in some kind of

OCTOBER 2018
37
 rapturous chorus. George opened the door to officers conducting it did not hesitate to
The primary see people spilling out of their homes, laugh- report facts that might expose the navy’s fail-
charge ing and crying and embracing. Even inside the
house, Jane could hear their words: “Japan
ures in Indy’s sinking. These men sent regular
updates to King. One of these updates may
against surrendered! The war is over!” She looked have sealed McVay’s doom.
McVay was down at the wrinkled telegram still clutched
in her hand and wept.
On November 9, King’s inspector general,
Admiral Charles Snyder, said McVay felt the
that he had December 3, 1945
new investigation might produce evidence
favorable to his case and suggested the court-
endangered Washington Navy Yard martial be delayed until that investigation
his ship by Washington, DC
Four months after being pulled from the sea,
was complete. That would be sometime in
mid-December. King first agreed to the delay,
failing to Captain Charles McVay walked into the but quickly reversed himself after learning
courtroom in Building 57 at Washington that the men conducting the investigation
zigzag. Navy Yard. wished to interrogate the leading lights of the
A week-long naval court of inquiry had rec- Pacific War—including admirals so senior
ommended that McVay be tried by court- they had personally accepted the Japanese
martial, the primary charge being he had surrender. On November 12, King ordered the
endangered his ship by failing to zigzag— court-martial to proceed at once. In doing so,
In a highly unusual despite the fact that, with no known subma- he would ensure that the admirals’ testi-
move, the navy rine threat, it was standard procedure to mony—and accounts of the navy’s inaction—
called Hashimoto, cease zigzagging at night when visibility was would not reach the public ear.
a defeated enemy poor. On September 25, Admiral Ernest King
commander,
from Japan to concurred. King also ordered what would December 10, 1945
testify at McVay’s come to be called a “supplemental investiga- Washington, DC
court-martial. tion.” This probe roved far and deep, and the Sub commander Mochitsura Hashimoto
stood atop a run of aircraft loading stairs and
looked out at a foreign land: Washington, DC.
The victor had summoned the vanquished:
the U.S. Navy had called Hashimoto to testify
at McVay’s court-martial. Already, a proces-
sion of witnesses had testified about such
topics as visibility, moonlight, abandoning
ship, and whether the Indianapolis crew knew
of the protracted submarine chase ahead of its
track, while reporters scribbled furiously. But
when Hashimoto arrived, American newspa-
pers began calling him a “star witness.”
McVay’s attorney and his supporters ob-
jected vigorously to an enemy commander tes-
tifying against an American officer. But
Hashimoto ended up testifying that zigzag-
ging would not have saved Indianapolis. Or he
tried to: fatefully, an interpreter mistranslated
his words, giving the opposite impression.
Defense witness Captain Glynn Robert
Donaho, a 15-year submarine veteran, did
testify, initially, that zigzagging would not
save a target from a torpedo strike. With this,
moment um seemed to have sw ung in
McVay’s favor. But after enduring more than
50 sometimes-condescending questions from
prosecutor Captain Thomas J. Ryan, Donaho
AP PHOTO

undercut all he had said by admitting that

when a target ship zigzags, it can be “discon-

38 WORLD WAR II

certing” for a submarine commander, as it throws off his calculations.
With that, a wrecking ball smashed into the defense. The military
court found McVay guilty of hazarding Indy by failing to zigzag. He was
sentenced to lose 200 numbers toward his advancement to commo-
dore—meaning 200 men of McVay’s rank would move ahead of him for
promotion—with a recommendation for clemency.
McVay knew his career was over and carried his fate with stoic res-
ignation. But grief did not fade for the families of the lost, and many
undertook a campaign to never let McVay forget it. While their son or
brother or father or husband had disappeared into the deep, McVay, in
their view, had received a slap on the wrist and a lifetime pension.
For 23 years, letters from the families of those lost, like the Joseys
and the Flynns, arrived in his mailbox in envelopes that seemed sealed
with venom.
If it weren’t for you, my son would be 25 years old today!
BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
If it weren’t for you, I’d be celebrating Christmas with my husband!
If it weren’t for you, my girls would have a father!
At first these rants came weekly. Then they tapered down and
came mainly around Christmas and other milestone dates. But they
never stopped.
During his court-martial, McVay detailed his
whereabouts directly after the initial explosion
on the night Indianapolis went down.
McVay bore silently the torture of those
879 Indianapolis deaths, his sense of guilt and
grief swelling in that eternal river of hateful
letters. Finally, it was too much. On Novem-
ber 6, 1968, he dressed in his usual navy uni-
form of a pressed khaki shirt and matching
pants. At 12:30 p.m., he walked out the front
door of his home in Litchfield, Connecticut,
sat down on a stone step, put a .38 revolver to
his temple, and pulled the trigger.
McVay was not the only Indianapolis survi-
vor to end his own life. At least a dozen more
committed suicide within a few years after the
sinking. Even among those who lived, no man
who went into the water came out the same.
June 1999
Offices of Senator Bob Smith
Washington, DC
When salvation came, it came 31 years later,
and from an improbable source.
“Look, Bob, I respect you, I’m on the com-
mittee with you, but come on,” Senator John
Warner of Virginia was saying. “This is some
kid’s school project. Is this really worth a
hearing before the Senate Armed Services
Committee?”
Warner’s response was typical of the uphill
battle New Hampshire senator Bob Smith
had been fighting for a year. That’s how long
it had been since he had first spied a line item
on his daily agenda that stopped him cold.
“What’s this?” Smith had said, shooting a
quizzical look at his legislative assistant, John
Luddy. “‘USS Indianapolis and Hunter Scott?’”
“It’s a meeting with the survivors of USS
Indianapolis, sir,” Luddy said.
“Hunter Scott is an eighth grader,” Luddy
added. “He’s a constituent of Joe Scarbor-
ough,” a congressman representing Florida’s
1st Congressional District.
From all the material the 14-year-old had
collected, one theme emerged. To a man, the
survivors were still outraged over the treat-
ment of their captain. Hunter Scott rallied to
their cause.
Also outraged was U.S. Navy Commander
Bill Toti, the last captain of a nuclear attack
submarine—also named USS Indianapolis—
decommissioned the year before. Having
extensively studied the navy’s position, Toti
OCTOBER 2018
39
 Robert Shaw’s
famous speech in
the 1975 film Jaws
(above) introduced
Indianapolis to a
new generation—

LEFT: SUNSET BOULEVARD/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT: PENSACOLA NEWS JOURNAL, AUG. 29, 2017 © 2017 GANNETT-COMMUNITY PUBLISHING; OPPOSITE: COURTESY OF THE PAUL G. ALLEN PROJECT; MAP BY BRIAN WALKER
including young
Hunter Scott (right),
whose eighth-grade
school project was
the catalyst for
McVay’s exoneration.

found their treatment of the captain offen-
sive. At the Pentagon, he worked tirelessly on
the survivors’ behalf. He published a new
analysis of McVay’s role in the Indy disaster in
the prestigious journal, Proceedings. As both a
friend to the survivors and an aide to the vice
chief of naval operations, Toti found him-
self uniquely positioned to inf luence the
navy’s final word on McVay’s culpability for
the disaster.
To secure the Senate hearing, there was
only one man Smith needed to convince:
Warner, the committee chair. But Warner was
opposed to reopening the issue.
“The navy’s already decided this,” Warner
said. “We’re going to stir up a hornet’s nest
that doesn’t need to be stirred up.”
“We’re going to listen,” Smith said. “That’s
all we’re going to do. Exoneration comes later,
if you agree with it. If you don’t agree with it,
we won’t do it.”
After months of wrangling, Smith finally
secured his hearing.
Adapted from
INDIANAPOLIS by
Lynn Vincent and September 14, 1999
Sara Vladic. Copyright Senate Armed Services Committee
© 2018 by Lynn Washington, DC
Vincent and Sara
Vladic. Reprinted by Three months later Senator Warner brought
permission of Simon & the hearing to order. He praised the courage of
Schuster, Inc. the men aboard Indianapolis “that fateful
night” 54 years earlier, particularly those sur-
vivors present in the hearing room.
Among the witnesses were the young
Hunter Scott; survivor Paul Murphy, who
argued that the navy had blamed McVay to
avoid admitting its own mistakes; and jour-
nalist Dan Kurzman, who spotlighted his dis-
covery of a “smoking gun.” Kurzman had
found a memorandum buried deep in the
National Archives. From the former special
assistant to the navy secretary in 1945, it read:
“The causal nexus between the failure to
zigzag and the loss of the ship appears not to
have a solid foundation.”
In the end, however, the man who finally
persuaded Warner was the same one who sank
Indianapolis. In November 1999 Japanese
commander Mochitsura Hashimoto of subma-
rine I-58, then 90 years old, wrote a letter to
the senator expressing his dismay over the fact
that McVay was ever tried in court:
i have met many of your brave men
w ho s u rv i v e d t h e si n k i ng of
indianapolis. i would like to join
them in urging that your national
legislature clear their captain’s
name. our peoples have forgiven
each other for that terrible war
and its consequences. perhaps it is

40 WORLD WAR II
 time your peoples forgave captain
mcvay for the humiliation of his
unjust conviction.
For Warner, it was the final weight on the
scale. He decided to take the exoneration reso-
lution to the Senate floor. On October 12,
2000, the measure passed.
House Joint Resolution 48 also passed, and
with stronger exoneration language: that the
“American people should now recognize Cap-
tain McVay’s lack of culpability for the tragic
loss of USS Indianapolis and the lives of the
men who died as a result of the sinking of that
vessel”; and that “Captain McVay’s military
record should now reflect that he is exoner-
ated for the loss of USS Indianapolis and so
many of her crew.”
Finally, Captain Charles McVay’s record
reflected his innocence.
August 19, 2017
The Philippine Sea
But Indy’s story still had one final chapter. In
2017—17 years after McVay’s exoneration—a
remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, whirred
across the seafloor 18,000 feet down. Its
camera resolved an object that had been
shrouded in darkness for 72 years. The
Under a remotely
operated vehicle’s
lights, the Indy
emerges from the
ocean’s depths. An
exploration team
discovered the ship
in August 2017.
number 35 popped out of the inky black, as
The sub crisp as the day it was painted.
commander “That’s it, Paul, we’ve got it. The Indy!”
“Paul” is Microsoft cofounder Paul G.
wrote a Allen, whose team had found what many
letter argue is the most important American mili-
tary shipwreck to be discovered in a genera-
expressing tion: USS Indianapolis.
Calls rang out across the country to survi-
dismay that vors and family members of those lost at sea.
McVay was Their reactions, although varied, had the
same tone—amazement followed by rever-
ever tried. ence. For Earl Henry Jr., the 72-year-old son
of lost-at-sea dentist Lieutenant Commander
Earl Henry Sr., emotions unexpectedly broke
through. After a lifetime of uncertain longing,
he finally knew where his father was.
Back in the Philippine Sea, after many
dives to the wreck, the ROV’s thrusters rotate
it away from the wreck for the last time.
Recalled to its mothership on the surface, the
vehicle takes its host of lights, camera, and
sensors with it. Once again, darkness envelops
APPROXIMATE the ship’s proud lines. Leaning just slightly to
SINKING AREA
starboard, it’s as if the ship is cresting a wave,
shrugging off another swell on her way to an
important mission. Guns trained toward the
sky, Indianapolis is ready for all who might
challenge her, forever on patrol. +
OCTOBER 2018
41
HEMING
 ressed in plain khaki, with an Ameri-
D
can flag patch on his right shoulder
and no insignia on his left, the young
officer stood knee-deep in the stream,
enjoying the cool water that offset the
heat of the midsummer day. Thrilled
to have a chance to fish, he had almost
forgotten he was behind German lines in
France and that the year was 1944. Soon he
was fully absorbed in placing his flies, casting
from right to left and letting each fly float
downstream past the trout he could see dart-
ing this way and that below the surface.
He heard little apart from the sound of rif-
fles running over the rocks—that is, until
marching boots were about 40 yards away,
behind him to his left. His heart beat faster
when he saw that they belonged to members of
a German patrol who were now looking down
at him as they marched along a set of railroad
tracks above the limestone bank. Without
raising their voices or addressing him directly,
the soldiers seemed to be bantering, probably
about his skill as a fisherman. He prayed that
he would not hook a fish before the enemy
moved on; they would almost certainly stay
for the spectacle and notice the flag on his
shoulder as he worked his catch.
Mercifully, the fish ignored the lures and,
after what seemed like an eternity but proba-
WAY’S WARThe father created the legend.
The son lived it
By Nicholas Reynolds
ERNEST HEMINGWAY PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION/JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM, BOSTON
bly was only a minute or two, the Germans
Jack Hemingway
continued on their way. The officer was again entered the army as an
alone. Trembling, he forced himself to collect officer with the military
police (opposite); the
his gear and make his way onto the right bank,
eldest son of writer
quickly putting as much distance as he could Ernest Hemingway, he
between himself and the railroad tracks. spent most of his war
assigned to the CIA
THE SCENE COULD BE FROM one of Ernest precursor, the OSS.
Hemingway’s many novels or short stories
that mixed war and outdoor pursuits, espe-
cially hunting and fishing. In “Big Two-
Hearted River,” to name but one example,
Nick Adams retreats to a river on Michigan’s
Upper Peninsula to overcome wartime
trauma by fishing methodically—just as the
young officer takes leave from war by fishing.
But this episode is not fiction. It is taken from
the memoirs of Heming way ’s son, John
Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, known as “Jack,”
and bolstered by his father’s wartime letters
and once-secret official files.
These sources show how Jack proved him-
self, again and again, under great pressure on
the battlefield. Yet he has been overshadowed
by his father’s tumultuous life and the charac-
ters he created: Adams; Frederic Henry, an
American in the Italian army in 1917 trying to
escape to neutral Switzerland in A Farewell to
Arms; Robert Jordan of For Whom the Bell
Tolls, an American guerrilla in a lonely war
OCTOBER 2018
43
 against Fascism in Spain in the 1930s. But
Jack, as a member of the special operations
branch of the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), lived a wartime life of danger, excite-
ment, and duty as fully as Henry or Jordan—
and arguably more fully than his father, who
Like his hunted U-boats from his cabin cruiser off the
coast of Cuba in the war’s early days, and was
father, Jack a cross between a freebooter and a war corre-
spondent in France after D-Day.
was an Born in 1923 to Ernest and the first of his
outdoorsman, four wives, Hadley, Jack is familiar to most
Hemingway aficionados as the easygoing
with a strong
infant “Mr. Bumby” from his father’s memoir
of life in Paris in the 1920s, A Moveable Feast.
interest in Young Jack was equally at home “in his tall
hunting and, cage bed with his big, wonderful cat named
F. Puss” and on sleigh rides in the company of
above all, “a very dark-haired beautiful girl” named
fishing. Tiddy at the Schruns, Austria, ski resort the
family visited in 1926.
After Ernest and Hadley separated, Jack
continued to live in Paris with his mother,
becoming something of a Francophile with a
firm grasp of the language and a fondness for
the country. As Ernest’s son, Jack could not
help also becoming an outdoorsman, with
strong interests in hunting and, above all,
fishing. He was a fit young man, with the best
of his attractive parents’ good looks. Heming-
way’s third wife, novelist and journalist
Martha Gellhorn, wrote that at 16, the fair-
haired Jack had “a body like something the
Greeks wished for, and to make you cry it is so
lovely.” He never has any problems, she con-
tinued, “because he never thinks about him-
self, but only about trout fishing.”
WHEN THE JAPANESE ATTACKED Pearl
Harbor on December 7, 1941, Jack, then 18,
was living in Chicago with Hadley and her
second husband, journalist Paul Mowrer.
Wanting to live up to his father’s expectations,
Jack decided to enlist in the Marine Corps.
But both the senior Hemingway and the Mow-
rers counseled him against that. The war was
likely to last for some time, they told him; if he
had some college, he might become an officer
and, with luck, help liberate the country he
loved almost as much as his own. Jack entered
Dartmouth College, where he took a course in
military French, but dropped out a year later
to join the army. Inducted in February 1943,
he received no special treatment as the son of
a famous author. The luck of the draw put him
44 WORLD WAR II
on track to become a second lieutenant in the
military police (MP) branch.
Once commissioned, he set sail with his
platoon of African American MPs for North
Africa, arriving in Algeria in early 1944 and
settling into a less-than-glamorous routine of
guarding American installations well away
from the front. Not long after, Gellhorn passed
through on her way to report on the war in
Europe. She arranged for Jack to meet her at
the temporary home of her friends Duff and
Diana Cooper, glamorous members of the
British ruling class overseas on diplomatic
ISTOCK/BARBOL88; OPPOSITE, TOP AND BOTTOM LEFT: ERNEST HEMINGWAY PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION/JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM, BOSTON; BOTTOM RIGHT: CENTRAL PRESS/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
assignment. Among the other guests was
Winston Churchill’s often-troublesome son
Randolph, 33, who had managed to work him-
self deep into the world of British special
operations, roaming the deserts of North
Africa and parachuting into occupied Yugo-
slavia. Jack listened to Randolph’s stories of
derring-do with awe, and resolved to find the
American equivalent of British special forces.
He stumbled upon it by following his nose.
He discovered a nearby camp known for the
remarkable food served in its mess, which was
run by a French chef rather than a U.S. Army
cook. Jack jokingly asked what he had to do to
get into the unit. The answer was: if you can
teach tactics in French and are willing to
accept hazardous assignments, all you have to
do is volunteer. And so Jack found himself
requesting a transfer to this mysterious unit,
the 2677th OSS Regiment (Provisional). Only
after he had begun the process of joining did
he learn what the regiment’s initials stood for.
On July 5, 1944, Jack was officially seconded
to the Office of Special Services, the home of
American special operations.
BY THEN D-DAY, the invasion of Normandy,
was past. It was one of the key turning points
in a long war and put Eisenhower’s forces on
the road to Paris. But Normandy was hun-
dreds of miles to the north; it was the looming
invasion of southern France, code-named
“Dragoon,” that was personal to soldiers in
North Africa. Conventional units, many of
them from bases in Algeria and Tunisia,
would make the landings on the Mediterra-
nean coast of France and fight their way
north. OSS detachments from Algeria would
support Dragoon by operating behind German
lines even before the landings.
Jack learned this in a roundabout way when
he was asked to replace an officer on a team
Young Jack (center, top) with
half brothers Patrick and Gregory
in Key West, Florida; and at age
three with his father at a Schruns,
Austria, ski resort (bottom, left).
The son of another famous father,
Randolph Churchill (with his
parents, bottom, right), sparked
Jack’s interest in special ops.
 of four—two American officers and two
On a clear, French radio operators—that would para-
moonless chute a few miles inland from the southern
coast in Hérault with two overlapping mis-
August sions: scout a possible invasion route west of
night, a B-17 the Rhône River, and work with the French
Resistance. The other officer, a down-to-
crew opened earth man named Jim Russell, already had
three combat missions to his credit. Jack, on
a hole in the the other hand, had not ever used a parachute.
floor and But he did speak French.
Given Jack’s eagerness, the 2677th decided
pushed that he would forgo jump training before the
mission. Why risk an injury in training? His
Jack out first jump would be a combat jump—some-
into his war. thing well-nigh unimaginable in today’s
safety-conscious military. Jack added an
unofficial Hemingway touch: he would jump
into France with a fly-fishing rod in
his right hand, along with gold Louis
d’or coins sewn into his clothing, a
compass and map case filled with
trout flies, and an impressive assort-
ment of weapons—a pistol, knife,
and Thompson submachine gun.
It was on a clear, moonless night
in mid-August 1944 that the crew of
a B-17 bomber opened a hole in the
floor and pushed Jack out into his
war. Floating toward the ground, he
had never felt “a greater sense of
jubilation.” The experience was so
exhilarating he shouted “God
damn,” and earned an instant rep-
rimand from Russell.
In the coming weeks, Jack proved to be
Jack, center, sits his father’s son but also his own man. In addi-
between a downed tion to fishing behind the Germans’ backs, he
U.S. airman and swiftly developed good combat skills. He was
fellow OSS officer
Jim Russell in brave, practical, and level-headed. Like his
Le Bousquet, France; comrade and role model Russell, he seemed
behind them are two to actually enjoy fighting. Unlike his father,
French civilians who was not always a good team player, the
recruited as spies. younger Hemingway worked well with others,
The two OSS men whatever their rank or nationality.
improvised their
way through Jack’s After landing in Hérault, Russell and
first mission after it Hemingway quickly faced and dealt with
went awry. challenges that read like problems for junior
officers in training. The team’s radios did not
survive the landing, leaving the men out of
touch with their parent command. By the
time Operation Dragoon got underway on
August 15, they had yet to collect any useful
information about the region. This elimi-
nated the need for their most important mis-
46 WORLD WAR II
sion—scouting for the invasion route. They
were now on their own to find ways to accom-
plish their second mission: work with the
Resistance to fight the Germans.
THE TWO YOUNG OFFICERS considered
their options and decided to arm any resisters
ready to fight and—not unlike Robert Jordan
in For Whom The Bell Tolls—proceeded to
direct small-scale guerrilla operations,
including an ambush in which Hemingway
drew his first blood. Firing his Thompson, he
mortally wounded a young German soldier
(and then arranged for his care until he died
the next day). Wise enough to steer clear of
the large German formations withdrawing to
the northeast, Hemingway and Russell were
probably the first uniformed Allied soldiers
to enter the small city of Montpellier from the
southwest after the Germans had left. On
the morning in late August when tanks from
the French II Corps rolled in, its soldiers
standing in the turrets and waving to the
crowds as if they had gotten there first, Hem-
ingway and Russell were sitting in a café on
the town square, nursing hangovers and
watching the spectacle.
By early September, the pair had reported
to the Strategic Services Section of the Sev-
enth Army, the senior U.S. command in the
area. They became part of a larger cohort
responsible for a variety of ad hoc OSS mis-
sions. One of those missions was to recruit,
train, and infiltrate line-crossers—innocent-
looking locals who could report on what they
saw on the German side of the front while
they went about their daily business.
There was art and science to studying the
terrain, reaching out to friendly units, and
finding just the right time and place to slip an
agent across. Hemingway was a quick study,
learning on the job as summer turned to fall.
But, on October 28, 1944, one such mission
near a place called Hérival in the Vosges
Mountains went very wrong when Heming-
way, along with two others, stumbled on
German mountain troops digging foxholes in
COURTESY OF ANGELA HEMINGWAY CHARLES
a patch of dense forest. Three rounds to his
right arm and shoulder brought him down
before he could bring his submachine gun to
bear. To keep from being shot again, he
shouted, “Kamerad!”: “Comrade!” in German,
meaning “I give up” to every infantryman on
both sides. He was now a prisoner of war.
Perhaps because he was still wearing his
 Newly liberated residents of Montpellier, France,
welcome M10 tank destroyers of the French 2nd
Dragoon Regiment in late August 1944.

MP branch insignia and did not appear to be
part of the OSS, or perhaps because he was
named Hemingway, Jack was at first “very
well treated and cared for,” in the words of an
official report he wrote after his liberation in
1945: “The Germans were lacking in medical
supplies but did everything they could for us.”
Years later, he would add that when he first
gave his name, rank, and serial number, his
captor asked if he had ever been at a ski resort
in Schruns, Austria. The answer was yes.
When asked the name of his nursemaid, Jack
answered that it had been the beautiful
“Tiddy,” whereupon the German broke into
a grin, saying she was his girlfriend and pro-
TOP: © ROBERT AUCLAIRE/ECPAD/DEFENSE; BOTTOM: KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES
The raiders—a 300-man task force of tanks and infantry from the
4th Armored Division—punched through German lines and traveled
across some 40 miles of enemy territory to reach the camp late on the
afternoon of March 27, 1945, crashing through the fence and routing
a handful of overage defenders. Jack and his fellow prisoners now had
three choices: stay put and wait for liberation, hitch a ride with the
task force, or strike out on their own for U.S. lines. Like Frederic
Henry in A Farewell to Arms, the young Hemingway and another
officer opted for the last.
For the next few days, they lived rough while moving west, trying to

ducing a bottle of schnapps to drink a toast

to better times.
Jack eventually wound up in Oflag XIII-B, a
camp for officers near Hammelburg in the
heart of western Germany. There, he settled
into the misery of late-war camp life: a 900-
calorie daily diet of bread and rutabaga soup;
shabby, overcrowded barracks; and the threat
of accidental Allied air attack. Perhaps the
greatest danger to the prisoners came when A U.S. 14th Armored Division tank crashes
Third Army commander Lieutenant General into Oflag XIII-B two weeks after Jack had
George S. Patton launched an ill-advised and fled; the 14th later liberated Jack and other
costly raid in late March 1945 to rescue his officers from a different POW camp.
son-in-law, also being held in XIII-B.

OCTOBER 2018
47
 avoid other prisoners (who might attract
unwanted attention) and German patrols.
Sleeping in the open, they were, in the words
of Jack’s 1986 memoir, “famished, thirsty,
cold, and stiff” most of the time—digging up
root cellars and even killing an enemy’s pet
rabbit to survive.
A patrol of nervous, underage German sol-
diers eventually surprised them. One pointed
a Schmeisser machine pistol at Jack’s stom-
ach, his finger trembling on the trigger, and
could have ended young Hemingway’s life
with a twitch. Jack stood as still as he could,
keeping his hands in the air. Speaking softly,
he asked in broken German to speak to a non-
commissioned officer—that is, an adult who
could take charge and get the Americans
safely behind wire with other prisoners of
war. This is exactly what happened after a
German sergeant appeared and took charge of
the prisoners, who were shunted to two mas-
sive camps holding thousands of captured
48 WORLD WAR II
officers. The first was near Nuremberg and the second, Stalag VII-A, at
Moosburg, on the Isar River in Bavaria. Jack spent the remaining
weeks of the war at the latter, returning to Allied control on April 29,
1945, when the U.S. 14th Armored Division liberated the camp. By then
his weight had dropped from around 200 to under 150 pounds.
JACK HEMINGWAY would eventually receive both the Bronze Star
and the French Croix de Guerre. A May 1945 award recommendation
in Jack’s file notes the “minor acts of heroism” Lieutenant Hemingway
performed several times. His record in captivity also came in for
praise. “This officer has weathered experiences in combat…been
wounded and [taken] prisoner…all without untoward emotional reac-
tions,” an OSS evaluation of his fitness for duty in July 1945 found. “He
is quite mature despite his youth. His motivation for service in the
field is of the highest. His social relations are good; he is frank and
engaging in manner. He is not particularly reflective and…will work
most effectively under direction, but he is resourceful, courageous and
sufficiently self-assured to be an excellent operations officer.”
When he and his father were reunited late in the spring of 1945,
Ernest, too, was impressed by the ways that Jack had grown up during
the war. After spending time with Jack and his two half brothers in
Cuba, the senior Hemingway wrote approvingly of his son’s exploits:
In the Shadow of Fame
TOP: ERNEST HEMINGWAY PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION/JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM, BOSTON; BOTTOM: BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
Ernest Hemingway’s younger brother, Leicester, tried but mostly
failed to follow in Ernest’s and Jack’s footsteps. Born in 1915, Leicester
applied in 1941 to join the office of the Coordinator of Information, a
forerunner of the OSS. He was discouraged—perhaps sabotaged—by
Ernest, who told Leicester, then 26, that he was too old for active ser-
vice, besides having a wife and children. (Ernest did not believe
that his own age—42 in the summer of 1941—and a wife and three
children disqualified him from adventures on the battlefield.)
Leicester instead spent much of the war in Washington, DC, with
the Federal Communications Commission before enlisting in the
Army Signal Corps as a filmmaker. When Jack fell into German hands
in 1944, Leicester volunteered to replace his nephew in the OSS, but,
not unlike Ernest, was turned down as unqualified. (In 1943, OSS
headquarters had turned down a recommendation to enlist Ernest,
believing him too independent to submit to military discipline.)
Leicester nevertheless made his way to the front, serving in France
with the 4th Infantry Division—the unit to which Ernest was accredit-
ed as a war correspondent. Ernest had to admit, somewhat grudging-
ly, that the brother he had “always considered a violently useless
character” might have “some decent blood” after all.
A few years later, Leicester wrote a book closely based on his
wartime experiences; The Sound of the Trumpet was not well received
when it appeared in 1953, the year before Ernest won the Nobel Prize
for Literature. After an imaginative but disastrous attempt to create an
independent country, “New Atlantis,” on a coral reef off Jamaica, and
years of suffering from diabetes, Leicester committed suicide in 1982
at the age of 67, joining a sad procession of Hemingways who died at
their own hands—principal among them his father Clarence and
brother Ernest. —Nicholas Reynolds
Ernest Hemingway (top, in 1944) was a tough act to
follow. His younger brother, Leicester—showing the
location of “New Atlantis” at left—tried, to little avail.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION/JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM, BOSTON
how Jack had had “some good fights” organiz-
ing resistance behind German enemy lines;
how he had refused to allow the German doc-
tors to amputate his wounded arm; how he
was ready and willing to deploy again, this
time to the Pacific, where the war against the
Japanese was still raging.
As Jack’s luck would have it, that war would
end before he could redeploy and, through the
fall of 1945, he stayed on the East Coast, serv-
ing first in Washington, DC, at OSS headquar-
ters, and then in Virginia, helping to guard
German prisoners of war.
Jack Hemingway’s OSS experience marked
him for years. After the war, he found himself
again in uniform, serving in U.S. Army intel-
ligence assignments in Germany, a natural
follow-on to his wartime service. When he
married, at Hadley’s Paris apartment in 1949,
the guests would include two former OSS
members destined for greatness. One was Jack and his father,
Ernest’s friend, David K. E. Bruce, the former with Patrick and
commander of the OSS in Europe, already an Gregory, in Cuba
after the war. Ernest
ambassador. Standing up for Jack’s bride was
Hemingway praised
Hadley’s friend, the future chef Julia Child. Jack’s wartime
She had served with the OSS in Washington experience, noting
and Asia and happened to be living in the approvingly the
French capital, where she was absorbing the “good fights” his son
lessons of French cuisine, and was tall enough had had behind
enemy lines.
to serve as matron of honor for the tall and
lovely bride, Byra Whittlesey.
With Byra, Jack would raise three daugh-
ters, two of them, Mariel and Margaux, des-
tined for Hollywood. Jack himself would
comment with bittersweet pride that he was
not himself famous but had a famous father
and famous daughters. He could also have
said, despite the lack of fame, that he had more
than measured up to the Hemingway code
in World War II. +
OCTOBER 2018
49
 Ted Holloway, a British
wartime coal miner,
created this image he
titled simply Bevin
Boys. Holloway and
other Bevin Boy artists
were recently featured
in an exhibition at
the Mining Art
Gallery in Bishop
Auckland, England.

FORGOTTEN
ARMY Britain’s “Bevin Boys” spent
their war in the mines

50 WORLD WAR II
 y late 1943, Great Britain was facing a

B
critical coal shortage. Since the onset
of World War II, coal mining had been
inexplicably left off the government’s list
of “reserved occupations,” a designation
that sheltered tagged workers from
serving in the armed forces. As a result,
TED HOLLOWAY, COURTESY OF THE AUCKLAND PROJECT

36,000 of the nation’s miners had shipped off to

join the military and, by December, Britain had
only a three-week supply of coal remaining.
Labour Minister Ernest Bevin devised a plan
to fill this void. Thousands of randomly selected
conscripts were ordered underground—toiling in
dirty, dangerous conditions—to extract coal for
the war effort as well as to heat British homes.
Among these “Bevin Boys” were several talented
artists who illustrated their experiences deep in
the mine pits. —Larry Porges

OCTOBER 2018
51
 HELP WANTED
Holloway created this sketch (The

TOP: TED HOLLOWAY, COURTESY OF THE AUCKLAND PROJECT; BOTTOM: AP PHOTO; OPPOSITE, TOP: GETTY IMAGES;
Bad Gannen, above), of a miner
struggling with a stuck coal tub, in
1984. Holloway was one of 48,000
18- to 24-year-old men conscripted
to work in Britain’s coal mines—
regardless of their backgrounds or
work experience—from 1943 to 1948
after Labour Minister Ernest Bevin’s
initial appeal for volunteers went
largely unanswered.

OPPOSITE, BOTTOM: DAVID MCCLURE, COURTESY OF THE AUCKLAND PROJECT

DISRESPECTED DUTY
Right: Conscripts get schooled in
coal mining basics during their first
training session in 1944. Bevin Boys
were sometimes looked down upon
by the British general public, who
tended to unfairly associate them
with the conscientious objectors
also assigned mine duty. Bevin Boy
service was extremely unpopular—
40 percent of the mining conscripts
protested the assignment, most
preferring active military service,
and several opted to go to prison
rather than comply.

52 WORLD WAR II
 BEVIN BOYS
LUCK OF THE DRAW
Left: Bevin Boys ready for their
shift at Yorkshire’s Prince of Wales
Colliery in 1944. A weekly drawing
out of a hat determined who served
in the mines. If the final digit of a
call-up’s National Service number
matched the number drawn, that man
was assigned coal mining duty. The
drawings continued for 20 months.

FINAL RESPECTS
Bevin Boy David McClure’s 1947
Tunnel End with Miner (below)
depicts the coal miners’ cramped
conditions. Overlooked for decades,
the Bevin Boys’ wartime service was
officially recognized in 2008, when
Britain’s Ministry of Defence began
awarding Veterans Badges to former
miners or their widows, eventually
presenting more than 5,000 medals.
 Highly decorated
German general
Hermann Balck,
here in mid-1944,
sought to prevent
“bigger catastrophes”
while seeing a losing
war to its end.

54 WORLD WAR II
 eneral of Panzer Troops Hermann Balck was
G
sitting down to dinner at his headquarters in the
northeastern French city of Molsheim on
December 23, 1944, when he got word that he
had been fired. Balck, 51, had not been relieved of
command because of any battlefield failure: the
commander of Army Group G, then fighting
the advancing Allies in Alsace, he had spent most
of the war battling the Soviets on the Eastern Front,
where he made his reputation as one of Germany’s most
dynamic and aggressive panzer commanders.
Rather, Balck had run politically afoul of Heinrich
Himmler, Nazi Germany’s all-powerful Reichsführer-SS.
The brain behind the Third Reich’s police state and the
concentration and death camps of its “Final Solution to
the Jewish Problem,” Himmler commanded the SS’s
armed force, the Waffen-SS. And Balck had a long record
of contentious relationships with Waffen-SS units and
their politically motivated commanders.
Earlier that month, Hitler had appointed Himmler
commander of the newly created Oberkommando Ober-
rhein—the Upper Rhine High Command. Although
Himmler lacked military expertise—or any military com-
ULLSTEIN BILD/THE GRANGER COLLECTION
petence at all—he was now in a position to deal Balck
some payback. One of Himmler’s missions was to orga-
nize and command Operation Nordwind (“north wind”),
a large-scale attack scheduled for January 1, 1945, as a
follow-on counteroffensive to the already failing
Ardennes Offensive. To start with, Himmler detached the
German Nineteenth Army—the southernmost of Balck’s
NO-WIN
SITUATION
As the German war effort collapsed in 1945,
a seasoned Wehrmacht commander in Budapest
battled Waffen-SS leaders as well as the Soviets
By David T. Zabecki
two field armies and the closest to the sector now under
Himmler’s control—from Army Group G and placed it
under Oberkommando Oberrhein, which initially had no
troops of its own. Himmler did not want to share any anti-
cipated glory with a Wehrmacht officer of Balck’s stand-
ing, so he next moved to get Balck out of the way.
Balck wasn’t in limbo for long, though. Nor was he free
of conflicts with Waffen-SS leaders. His longtime friend
and mentor, Colonel General Heinz Guderian, was then
the chief of the general staff of the German army. With
Germany in the final throes of the fight for its life, Gude-
rian could not afford to have one of his most talented
battlefield commanders sitting idle. Less than 12 hours
after being relieved of command, Balck met with Gude-
rian at the army’s high command headquarters at Zossen,
just south of Berlin, to be briefed on his next assignment:
assuming command of the Sixth Army and relieving one
of its units, the IX SS Mountain Corps, then in Budapest
and encircled by Soviet troops.
THE WAR ON THE EASTERN FRONT had been deterio-
rating steadily for Germany ever since summer 1944,
when the Red Army’s Operation Bagration completely
caved in Germany’s Army Group Center and the German
frontline in the East. As the Germans fell back all along
the line, Soviet forces entered Hungary from Romania
that September.
Hungary had been a member of the Axis powers since
late 1940, but was now looking for a way out of the war. On
October 11, 1944, the Hungarian government of Regent
OCTOBER 2018
55

Miklós Horthy signed a preliminary
armistice agreement with the Soviets in
Moscow. In response the German army,
along with Hungarian troops of a just-
formed breakaway government of loyal-
ists to Germany, occupied the capital of
Germany’s wayward ally.
Budapest, which stretches along both
sides of the Danube River, originated
from the 1873 merger of the cities of
Buda, on the steeply hilly west bank, and
Balck’s nemesis, Pest, on the flat east bank. Hitler ordered the
Heinrich Himmler Wehrmacht to hold Budapest and Hungary at
(top), addresses all costs; Germany desperately needed Hun-
Waffen-SS troops. gary’s agriculture and industry, and the
During the Red Führer wanted to use Budapest as the base for
Army’s Siege of a future counterattack against the Red Army.
Budapest, an SS unit
under the command The commander of German forces in Buda-
of Karl Pfeffer- pest was SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Pfeffer-
Wildenbruch (above) Wildenbruch, 56, who previously had com-
became trapped manded the SS’s police division. His IX SS
there; Balck led the Mountain Corps was holding Budapest with
relief operation.
the weak 8th and 22nd SS Cavalry divisions
Opposite: Hungarian
civilians attempt to and elements of the 13th Panzer Division, the
go about daily 60th Panzergrenadier Division, and the 271st
activities as the Volksgrenadier Division. The Hungarian I
formerly beautiful Corps, under the command of a former
capital city burns. instructor of German at Hungary’s Ludovika
Military Academy, General Iván Hindy, 54,
fought alongside them. Altogether, the Axis
had some 79,000 troops defending the city.
Joseph Stalin’s objective was to keep Hun-
gary split from the Axis alliance so he could
expand the Soviets’ sphere of influence by
imposing a Communist–style sociopolitical
system on the country. Hungary had tactical
advantages as well; holding it would short-
circuit British contingency plans to deploy
forces to the Adriatic in late 1944, which
56 WORLD WAR II
would interfere with the Soviet premier’s
vision for the postwar order in Eastern
Europe.
On October 28, Stalin ordered the Red
Army to capture Budapest without delay. The
Soviet 2nd Ukrainian Front, along with the
First and Fourth Romanian armies, con-
verged on Budapest from the east, while the
3rd Ukrainian Front and First Bulgarian
Army enveloped it from the south. The two
Soviet fronts had 54 rifle divisions, five mech-
anized corps, and three tank corps. The total
strength was more than 719,000 troops, with
170,000 committed to the initial assault
against the city.
Red Army troops reached the outskirts of
Pest on November 3. Momentum faltered
after that, but by December 25, 1944, the Sovi-
ets had Budapest—and the Axis troops there—
completely surrounded.
THAT WAS THE DAY Balck arrived in Hun-
gary to assume his new command—just two
days after having been relieved of his previous
position. Virtually all of Budapest’s civilian
population of more than one million was
trapped in the city. During the first days of
the siege, the city’s gas, water, and electric-
ity supply systems failed. Left with only the
barest means of sustenance, its residents were
forced to shelter in cellars against the effects
of air and artillery attacks. Medical services
were almost nonexistent.
The IX SS Mountain Corps’ Pfeffer-Wild-
enbruch planned a breakout for December
28, before the Soviet encirclement had a
chance to harden. Hitler, however, ordered the
TOP: BUNDESARCHIV BILD 183-J27809 PHOTO HERMANN EGE; BOTTOM: ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES
German garrison to stand fast.
To Balck, this sounded all too familiar. The
army he now commanded, Sixth Army, had
been completely reformed after having been
annihilated at Stalingrad in early 1943. Sur-
rounded and cut off by the Soviets in late 1942,
Sixth Army might have had a chance to escape
destruction by breaking out to the west, where
it could have linked up with other German
forces. However, Hitler refused to authorize
the move, sealing Sixth Army’s fate.
Balck likened the situation he had just
inherited to a “new Stalingrad.” He was in an
ironic position. In December 1942, as the com-
mander of the 11th Panzer Division, he had
played a key role in the failed attempt to break
through to Stalingrad and relieve Sixth Army.
Now a little more than two years later, as
 commander of Sixth Army, he was once more
leading a near-impossible relief operation.
Balck also assumed operational control of
the Hungarian Third Army, making him the
commander of a provisional army group.
Including the 79,000 Axis forces encircled in
the city, Balck’s initial force consisted of four
German and four Hungarian infantry divi-
sions and seven German panzer divisions.
Deployed along a front ranging 50 miles
southwest of Budapest to 50 miles northwest
of it in present-day Slovakia, Balck had some
180,000 troops, about 102,000 of which were
committed to the attempted breakthrough of
the Soviet encirclement.
Balck had reviewed the situation map
during his meeting with Guderian and
noticed that the 3rd and 6th Panzer divisions
were deployed illogically—with all their
armored elements south of the Danube,
facing Budapest, and their infantry and non-
motorized elements north of the river. “This
TASS/PHOTO BY YEVGENY KHALDEI
must have been done by a real armor expert,”
he sarcastically remarked at the time. Once
in Hungary, he issued orders to regroup the
two divisions. When the Sixth Army chief of
staff told Balck the existing deployment was
the result of a direct Führer order, Balck
simply told his staff to do it without asking
permission from anyone—least of all Hitler. Virtually
Balck knew he was facing a no-win situa-
tion. “Looking at the big picture, I understood
all of
completely at this point that after our Budapest’s
Ardennes Offensive failed, the war was lost,”
he later wrote. “Now came the most difficult
civilian
of all leadership challenges in war—ending it
without bigger catastrophes.”
population of
Balck’s first objective was to stabilize his more than
frontlines. Not only was Budapest completely
surrounded, the Sixth Army’s LVII Panzer
one million
Corps, northwest of the city, was almost com- was trapped
pletely encircled by the 2nd Ukrainian Front.
By December 31, Balck had managed to with-
in the city.
draw the corps back to the west with very few
losses and into more defensible positions.
With his front stabilized, he was ready to try
to relieve Budapest itself.
BALCK LAUNCHED the relief effort, Opera-
tion Konrad, on January 1, 1945. The 96th
Infantry Division crossed the ice-choked
Danube and advanced some 15 miles east
along the north bank, almost as far as the
city of Esztergom, northwest of Budapest.
That secured the German left flank for the
main attack toward Budapest along the Dan-
OCTOBER 2018
57
 Red Army troops fight their way to Budapest
(top). In the city, German SS troops aim a 75mm
Pak 40 antitank gun at the invaders (center). At
Székesfehérvár (bottom), a Soviet tank—a Lend-
Lease U.S. M4 Sherman—and its crew lie dead.

ube’s south bank. The following day, the

IV SS Panzer Corps—consisting of the
3rd SS Panzer Division (“Totenkopf”), the 5th
SS Panzer Division (“Wiking”), and the 1st
and 3rd Panzer divisions—launched an attack
from the area around Komárom, approxi-
mately 50 miles west of where the Danube
makes its great 90-degree bend north of the
Hungarian capital.
The corps’ commander, SS-Obergruppen-
führer Herbert Gille, 47, was—like Balck—one
of only 27 recipients of Nazi Germany’s high-
est military award: the Knight’s Cross of the
Iron Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords, and Dia-
monds. A devoted Nazi, Gille was undoubtedly
a courageous and aggressive leader but, as
Balck later wrote, “He was the type of Waffen-
SS commander who as a matter of principle
always resisted orders from any army officer.”
He was also, in Balck’s opinion, a “strong, ego-
centric type who had no understanding of
operational context and possibilities.”
The IV SS Panzer Corps caught the Soviets
by surprise, and the advance went well at
first. Northwest of Budapest, advancing
against the Soviet Forty-sixth Shock Army
(an army trained and organized as an assault
unit), the panzer corps succeeded in reliev-
ing a number of German field hospitals
and evacuating thousands of wounded.
Following behind the panzer corps, the 711th
Infantry Division secured Esztergom. On the
IV SS Panzer Corps’ right, the III Panzer
Corps conducted a supporting attack to pin
down the Soviet Fourth Guards Army south-
west of Budapest.
By January 5, however, the Soviets had
managed to mass two shock corps in front of
the German main effort, while another shock
corps threatened Gille’s exposed right flank.
The German attack stalled near Bicske, some
18 miles directly west of Budapest. The fol-
lowing day, the Second Ukrainian Front’s
Sixth Guards Tank Army attacked north of
the Danube and drove into the lines of the
LVII Panzer Corps.
Guderian was visiting Balck’s headquarters
at the time and ordered the 20th Panzer Divi-
sion to deploy from Slovakia to reinforce Balck

58 WORLD WAR II
 north of the Danube. Hitler tried to interfere
by issuing direct orders on how the division
should attack, but Guderian and Balck largely
ignored him. By January 12, the situation
north of the Danube was again stabilized.
WHILE THE FIGHTING continued there, on
January 7, the Germans launched a second
relief attempt, Operation Konrad II, to exploit
the gains from the first effort. Group Breith,
under the command of General of Panzer
Troops Hermann Breith and consisting of the
I Cavalry Corps and III Panzer Corps, attacked
the Soviets 40 miles southwest of Budapest at
the city of Székesfehérvár to relieve the pres-
sure against IV SS Panzer Corps’ right flank.
On January 9, I Cavalry Corps’ panzer units
knocked out 74 Soviet tanks in a battle a few
SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO/ALAMY; MAPS BY BRIAN WALKER; OPPOSITE FROM TOP: TASS/GETTY IMAGES; INSTITUTE AND MUSEUM OF MILITARY HISTORY, BUDA CASTLE; SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO/ALAMY
miles north of the city. That allowed Gille to
shift his main effort to his left flank farther
north, for a renewed attack through the posi-
tions of the 711th Infantry Division, southeast
of Esztergom. Two days later, lead elements of
his IV SS Panzer Corps reached Pilisszent-
kereszt, a village 10 miles southeast of Eszter-
gom, en route to Budapest.
Hitler, however, had lost faith in Konrad II.
With considerable justification, he feared that
IV SS Panzer Corps was vulnerable to encir-
clement by the Soviet 5th Guards Cavalry
Corps, assembled just northwest of Budapest.
The Führer ordered the redeployment of
Gille’s corps to the northern end of Lake Bala-
ton—an enormous freshwater lake 60 miles
southwest of Budapest—in preparation for
what would become Operation Konrad III.
KONRAD I
SOVIET COUNTERATTACK
DANUBE RIVER
ESZTERGOM
KOMÁROM
BUDAPEST
GERMAN
ATTACK
BICSKE
H U N G A R Y GERMAN
LAKE VELENCE
SOVIET OCCUPIED TERRITORY
LAKE BALATON
The SS commander wanted to continue
pressing the Konrad II attack. But as
Balck later noted: “In this case, Hitler’s
intervention was appropriate.”
After taking five days to redeploy
over mountain roads and through snow-
drifts, IV SS Panzer Corps reached its
assembly areas near Lake Balaton. The
ambitious Konrad III started on Janu-
ary 18: IV SS Panzer Corps made the
main attack directly toward the east,
supported on its left flank by the III
Panzer Corps and on its right by the
Hungarian Third Army. The Germans,
rather than simply breaking through to
Budapest, intended to surround and
destroy 10 Soviet divisions in the vicinity of
Herbert Gille, here
Székesfehérvár. They had a slight advantage,
in 1943, commanded
with 376 armored fighting vehicles to the the IV SS Panzer
Soviet Fourth Guards Army’s 250. Corps, which led the
The Soviets were caught completely by sur- German attack. Gille
prise. Attacking on the left, the 1st Panzer was as decorated
as Balck, but Balck
Division thrust south around Székesfehérvár,
considered him “a
then pivoted north toward Budapest. In the strong egocentric
center, the 3rd and 5th SS Panzer divisions type” and the two
advanced 40 miles in 48 hours, reaching the leaders clashed.
Danube south of Budapest by nightfall on the
19th. The panzers then turned north along the
river, reporting to Sixth Army headquarters
the destruction of 60 Soviet tanks and self-
propelled guns. There was, however, no evi-
dence to support the claim and, immediately
after the battle, Balck was unable to locate any
trace of the destroyed tanks and guns. Much
later, a Luftwaffe liaison officer to the IV SS
Panzer Corps confirmed to Balck that the
KONRAD II OCCUPIED
TERRITORY
H U N G A R Y
ESZTERGOM
DANUBE RIVER GERMAN
PILISSZENTKERESZT
ATTACK
BUDAPEST
LAKE
VELENCE
ATTACK
SZÉKESFEHÉRVÁR
LAKE BALATON
OCTOBER 2018
59
 report had been a complete lie: an effort to
inflate the Waffen-SS’s combat record.
The situation in Budapest, meanwhile,
had continued to deteriorate. On January 17,
Pfeffer-Wildenbruch started evacuating Pest,
crossing to the hilly Buda side of the river. Sol-
diers and civilians were slaughtered and all
manner of carts and vehicles were destroyed
as they crossed the Danube bridges under con-
tinuous raking fire from the Soviets. By the
halfway from Székesfehérvár to the Danube—on January 22. In just
five days of operations, the Germans had taken more than 150 square
miles of territory. But the Soviet 1st Guards Mechanized Corps threat-
ened the left flank of the IV SS Panzer Corps’ northward thrust.
BALCK WAS FACED with a difficult decision. The IV SS Panzer Corps’
Gille wanted to keep driving straight toward Budapest—a plausible
scenario, with little to his immediate front. But while penetrating to
Budapest was one thing, holding open an evacuation corridor was
another entirely. Without sufficient infantry forces, Balck knew that

FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO/ALAMY; INSTITUTE AND MUSEUM OF MILITARY HISTORY, BUDA CASTLE (LAST TWO); MAP BY BRIAN WALKER
next day, the Soviets had control of Pest; just Gille’s corps would be marching into a trap unless the strong Soviet
before dawn, the Axis defenders blew up all of force on his left was eliminated first. Otherwise, the Germans would
Budapest’s bridges, leaving many Germans run a high risk of having not just one but two SS corps entrapped in the
and Hungarians still stranded on the Pest side. city. But, as Balck put it, “Gille was incapable of understanding this.”
For the next three days, Balck’s forces Balck prohibited the narrow thrust, but the clash over tactics
advanced toward Budapest, taking Székes- between Black and an outraged Gille cost the Germans a full day. By the
fehérvár and reaching Lake Velence—about time the attack resumed on a broader front on January 25, the Soviets
had brought up their 5th Guards Cavalry Corps—with 100 tanks and
360 artillery pieces—against the IV SS Panzer Corps’ right flank.
KONRAD III TERRITORY Meanwhile, Soviet forces that had been pushed to the south during
the initial German assault regrouped, attacking and virtually destroy-
ing the Hungarian Third Army and exposing Balck’s entire right flank.
H U N G A R Y On January 27, the 3rd Ukrainian Front joined the fray, with three
BUDAPEST mechanized and one rifle corps. Despite the Soviets’ overwhelming
force superiority, their attack was poorly coordinated and they suf-
GERMAN
ATTACK SOVIET fered huge losses at the hands of the Germans. In the end, though, the
COUNTERATTACK weight of numbers proved decisive, as the Soviet Fifty-seventh Shock
LAKE VELENCE
Army also attacked the German right flank from south of Lake Bala-
SZÉKESFEHÉRVÁR ton. By February 1, the Soviets had retaken almost all the ground the
GERMAN Germans gained during Konrad III.
ATTACK That day, Hitler awarded Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch the Oak Leaves
LAKE
FARTHEST to the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross in the hope it would encourage
BALATON GERMAN him to hold out in Budapest, where savage fighting continued. The
ADVANCE
German and Hungarian defenders were by then compressed into little
more than a square mile, centered on Buda’s Castle Hill. However,
DANUBE
RIVER Pfeffer-Wildenbruch at last had had enough and on February 11 defied
SOVIET
COUNTERATTACK the Führer by attempting to break out with his 28,000 surviving
troops, moving in three waves. The lead echelon achieved some

60 WORLD WAR II
element of surprise and about 800 broke
through and escaped. But the Red Army
crushed the two follow-on echelons and cap-
tured Pfeffer-Wildenbruch and the Hungar-
ian I Corps’ Iván Hindy. (The Hungarian
Communist government executed Hindy for
trea son in 1946; P fef fer-Wildenbr uch
remained a prisoner in the Soviet Union until
1955 and died in a traffic accident in 1971.)
THE SIEGE OF BUDAPEST lasted 108 days,
with the city completely surrounded for 51 of
them. The Soviets won the battle, but at a high
cost, sustaining half of all casualties they suf-
fered during the entire Hungarian Campaign.
Casualty figures vary widely, but between
November 3, 1944, and February 11, 1945, Soviet
and Romanian casualties—including those
fighting inside the city—most likely totaled
about 280,000, with 70,000 killed. German and
Hungarian casualties came to 137,000, with
47,000 of those killed. Approximately 105,000
Hungarian civilians also died in Budapest.
Balck was bitter about the loss. As he later
commented, “Our operations were made
much more difficult by the fact that each
major Waffen-SS unit had a direct telephone
line to Himmler, who routinely interfered in
everything and who probably wanted to make
Gille the savior of Budapest.”
One more desperate offensive was to come,
though. Operation Spring Awakening was the
last major attack the Wehrmacht conducted
during World War II—and the most hopeless
crapshoot of all Germany’s final offensives.
Conducted from March 6–16, 1945, Spring
Awakening’s objective was to secure oil fields
southwest of Lake Balaton. Balck opposed it
strenuously, arguing that it could not possibly As the Soviets gained
succeed and would only further grind down control of the city,
the remaining German forces in the East. Axis defenders
destroyed its bridges
Herbert Gille and all six Waffen-SS divisional (opposite, far left). By
commanders supported it. February 14, 1945,
The main attacking force was the weak the battle was over;
and gutted Sixth SS Panzer Army, led by SS- captured German
Oberstgruppenführer Josef “Sepp” Dietrich— vehicles line a
an officer whose main claim to high command Budapest street
(center) and German
was that he had once been Hitler’s chauffeur soldiers surrender
and bodyguard. Balck’s Sixth Army received (above). Yet for
orders to support Dietrich on his right flank. Budapest, the situation
And, as Balck predicted, Spring Awakening grew still more dire,
failed miserably. “When six Waffen-SS divi- as Soviet troops
brutalized the city
sions were committed as an integrated whole,
and its population.
it was a catastrophe waiting to happen,” Balck
wrote, “especially when so many of the SS
senior leaders had so little understanding of
operational issues and the bigger picture.”
The last German forces were pushed out of
Hungary on April 4, 1945, with Balck’s Sixth
Army retreating west toward Vienna and
Balck was
beyond. His primary objective then became bitter about
evading the Soviets and surrendering to the
American forces approaching from the west.
the loss.
On May 9, 1945, Balck surrendered the bulk
of his Sixth Army in Kirchdorf, Austria, to the
One more
commander of the U.S. 80th Infantry Divi- desperate
sion. A POW until 1947, Balck in later years
wrote a memoir of his war experience, which
offensive
was published in Germany in the early 1980s was to come,
and resounds with bile over the conduct of the
final campaigns and the harmful influence of
though.
political leaders in military matters. The
skilled field commander, who died in 1982 just
shy of his 89th birthday, summed up his role
in one sentence: “I just had to straighten out
the consequences.” +
OCTOBER 2018
61
 WEAPONS MANUAL AMERICA’S M2-2 FLAMETHROWER
ILLUSTRATION BY JIM LAURIER

FIRE AT WILL
TWIN TANKS
The M2-2’s dual tanks,
positioned on either
side of a pressure tank,
merged into a single fuel
reservoir that contained
four gallons of either
liquid fuel—most
effective at point-blank
range—or a thickened
fuel (napalm) that
doubled the weapon’s
firing range from about
20 to 40 yards.

LEFT TO LOOSEN
Turning the pressure
tank valve handle caused
the tank to release
compressed air (or
nitrogen) into the fuel
reservoir, which forced
fuel through the hose and
into the firing wand. This
process emitted a telltale
hissing noise—operators
were warned to turn the
propellant on well before
approaching their target.

62
 AMERICAN M2-2
FLAMETHROWER
Weight (when full): 70 lb /
Fuel capacity: 4 gal / Range:
20–40 yd / Firing duration:
7–10 secs / The M2-2 proved
doubly effective against
dug-in Japanese troops, as
the gun produced lethal CO
fumes that seeped through
the enemy bunkers.

THE COMPETITION
BRITISH PORTABLE,
NO. 2 “LIFEBUOY”
FLAMETHROWER
Flamethrower in Okinawa, 1945 Weight (when full): 68 lb /
Fuel capacity: 4.8 gal / Range:
Up to 40 yd / Firing duration:
FEW WEAPONS EVOKE A MORE VISCERAL REACTION than the 7–10 secs / The nickname
flamethrower, which manages to retain an aura of coolness while derived from its round fuel
tank, the British “Lifebuoy”
simultaneously eliciting almost primal terror. The first flamethrow- was used in the European
ers, developed by Germany early in the 20th century, targeted French Theater from D-Day until the
and British trench fighters during World War I. The United States end of the war.
came up with its own version at the beginning of World War II, but GERMAN
the first model, the M1, was notoriously unreliable—operators often FLAMMENWERFER41
resorted to carrying backup ignition sources like cigarette lighters to FLAMETHROWER
Weight (when full): 45 lb /
ensure the flame actually lit. After modifications, in 1943 the army
Fuel capacity: 1.8 gal / Range:
rolled out the M2-2, which became the standard flamethrower for Up to 35 yd / Firing duration:
the rest of the war. It was used to great effect in the Pacific against 4–6 secs / Germany’s M41,
dug-in Japanese defensive positions. Flamethrowing tanks devel- the lightest World War II
flamethrower, proved
oped in 1944–45 soon became the preferred weapon in the class, unreliable during the Eastern
and the prevalence of the portable versions faded. —Larry Porges Front‘s cold winters.

CARRY THAT WEIGHT

Shoulder and body straps kept the tanks secured to the
flamethrower operator’s back. Because of the backpack’s
70-pound weight and position on the body, operators had
to stand upright, exposing themselves to enemy fire.
Battle commanders soon realized that flamethrowers
needed full small-arms coverage in order to be effective.

CREATIVE SPARK
The flamethrower’s
SAFETY CHECK nozzle contained five
To shoot, the operator had to fuel-igniting incendiary
first pull the trigger and then cartridges that rotated
simultaneously squeeze both with each trigger pull, like
the safety and valve lever the cylinder in a revolver.
located on either side of the The cartridges were a
lower grip. Despite this built-in major upgrade from the
safety system, the M2-2 M1’s spark-plug ignition
training manual wisely advised system that often failed
operators to “keep the gun in the field.
pointed away from friendly
personnel at all times.”

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES OCTOBER 2018

63
A CALL
TO ARMS
Hoping to strike it big mining in
the Philippines, brothers Walt
and Jim Cushing instead made a
name for themselves as guerrilla
leaders fighting the Japanese
By Steven Trent Smith
 As young men, the two Cushing
brothers were a study in contrasts:
Walt (top) was full of “L.A. fight,” as
his high school yearbook put it; Jim
(above) had a more laid-back mien.
Then came life in the Philippines—
and the Japanese invasion.

ANDREY DANILOVICH/ISTOCK PHOTO; TOP INSET COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR; BOTTOM INSET: COURTESY OF MONICA YAMAMOTO
 im Cushing was tearing up the town
J
again. The 30-year-old Mexican
American miner and his friend had
drunkenly stumbled up to a cart
driver in northern Mindanao in the
Philippines and offered him a huge
tip if he could deliver them to their
rooms on the second floor of the Surigao City
Hotel. Despite loud cries of encouragement
from the two drunks in English, Spanish, and
a local Filipino dialect, the horse and driver’s
attempts to climb the steps failed. Fearing
they would be held responsible if the animal
broke a leg, the men called a halt to the spec-
tacle. It was the dawn of 1940 and Jim’s intem-
perate lifestyle suited him just fine. As he later
wrote, “I was not setting the world on fire.”
About the same time, 700 miles to the north,
Jim’s older brother Walt, 33, was busy working
the small gold mine he and two partners open-
ed in Abra, a province in northern Luzon. Walt
had gone through his own wild period after his
wife left him 1937. Deep in despair, he blew all
his savings on a nine-month bender, and in one
dark moment signed up for the French Foreign
Legion. Friends finally dissuaded his dissolu-
tion, got him back on his feet, and back into
mining. Once again he felt settled and looked
forward to a bright future.
The Japanese invasion of the Philippines
the following year changed everything for the
brothers. Always aggressive, Walt jumped
right into the fray, while Jim took on a wait-
and-see attitude. But destiny had something
altogether different in store for each of them.
Over the next four years, the guerrilla exploits
of Walt and Jim Cushing would become the
stuff of legend.
THE BOYS WERE AMONG the 10 children
born in Mexico to silver miner George Cush-
ing and his Spanish Mexican wife, Simona.
They inherited the light brown complexion of
their mother, the broad grin of their father,
and grew up fluent in English and Spanish. In
1910 the Mexican Revolution tore apart the
Cushing family’s prosperous life, forcing
them to move to the safety of El Paso, Texas.
Walt was the runt, which may explain his
drive to succeed. At only five foot six and 125
pounds, he was a star gymnast, football quar-
terback, soccer forward, and an Eagle Scout.
Though offered a place at Notre Dame, Walt
decided he wanted to see the world. He kicked
66 WORLD WAR II
around the U.S. for a few years, picking up odd
The lives
jobs—barnstorming parachutist, skyscraper
riveter, commercial diver. Then in 1932 he
sailed for the Philippines to try his luck at the
of both
family business—mining. brothers
Jim was tall and husky, and reticent as a
youth. He was always proud of being the “sev-
got a lot
enth son of a seventh son,” which he believed more
meant he would be lucky in life. But things
started off slowly for him. He muddled along in serious on
school, was a middling athlete, and, after grad-
uating, went to work making tires for the Good-
December
year company. In 1934 Jim tired of rubber and 8, 1941.
decided to seek his fortune in the Philippines,
too. He soon found work as a mining mechanic
for Mambulao Consolidated in southern
Luzon, where he proved adept at handling
explosives. In late 1940 he met a girl from
Leyte, fell in love, and married her, settling
down and seeming to take life more seriously.
THE LIVES OF BOTH BROTHERS got a lot
more serious on December 8, 1941. While Jim
first reacted to the Japanese attack by con-
templating an escape to Australia, Walt was
determined to defend his island home of the
last 10 years. When he got word two days later
that 2,000 Japanese troops had landed on
Luzon at nearby Vigan, Walt eagerly headed to
the coast to reconnoiter. There, he tried to
persuade a local unit of the Philippine Army to
help him repel the Japanese invaders. Instead,
they denounced him as a “fifth columnist”—a
foreigner working secretly with the enemy for
his own gain—and sent him away.
Undeterred, Walt soon inspired 200 Filipi-
nos to join him in fighting the Japanese. On
January 18, 1942, he undertook his first big
operation, leading his volunteers on an am-
bush against a 10-truck convoy. During the
four-hour firefight that followed, Walt ran up OPPOSITE TOP: GETTY IMAGES; BOTTOM: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
and down the highway, a .45-caliber pistol in
each hand, sticks of dynamite bulging from
his pockets, shouting, “Give it to ’em boys!”
When it was over, more than 60 enemy sol-
diers lay dead. He led more than 15 ambushes
that spring, blowing bridges as he went.
But ultimately Walt’s efforts proved futile.
The Japanese quickly overran northern
Luzon, then turned their attention to Bataan
and Corregidor. While the battles raged, Presi-
dent Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered General
Douglas MacArthur, commander in chief of
the U.S. Army Forces in the Far East, to evacu-
In 1942 Japanese soldiers storm through
Philippine oil fields set ablaze by retreating
American troops (top), and haul down an
American flag on Corregidor (bottom).

ate to Australia. “I shall return,” he famously

vowed. On May 7, 1942, American forces in the
Philippines surrendered unconditionally. The
Japanese consigned tens of thousands of sol-
diers, and thousands of American civilians, to
POW and internment camps.
In June, after sending his fighters home,
Walt set out on a 300-mile journey from Abra
down to Manila to raise money for his guerril-
las. It was a fraught odyssey. One evening, he
stopped at a sugar mill to seek assistance from
the manager. While he was having tea, a dozen
young Filipinas came to serenade their visitor.
Just as the group broke into God Bless Amer-
ica, four Japanese officers appeared, forcing
Walt to hide. When the girls finished, the
enemy soldiers happily applauded their per-
formance, unaware of the song’s significance.
On another evening, Walt stopped by a
nightclub in Manila to fetch some intel from
the owner. He was immediately recognized by
a Japanese man who knew him from the
mining business. Rather than run, Walt saun-
tered over to the table and shook hands with
the man, who then asked why Walt hadn’t been
locked up with all the other Americans. Walt
said that he had been released for the day to
visit the hospital and was returning to the
lockup the next morning. As he left the club, he
hoped he had not aroused suspicion, but when
he returned to his hotel room, he found that it
had been turned over, probably by the Japa-
nese secret police—the dreaded Kempeitai.
These close calls did not divert the rebel
leader from his fundraising mission; he per-
suaded several wealthy families to donate
freely. He finally arrived back at his headquar-
ters at the end of August 1942, exhausted but
jubilant from his success.
Two weeks later, Walt set off with a three-
man security detail to visit the camp of
another American guerrilla commander. He
had been warned that the people along his
route were pro-Japanese, but felt his mission
was too important to turn back. On Septem-
ber 19, Walt stopped at a farmhouse for dinner.
After the meal, he stepped out on the veranda
for a smoke. Suddenly, from the cover of the
bush, a fusillade of shots rang out, instantly

OCTOBER 2018
67

Filipino guerrillas scour
houses in Leyte for signs of
the enemy. On Luzon, 200
such volunteers joined a
guerrilla force (below) led
by Walt Cushing.
killing two of his bodyguards and mortally wounding him. As the
enemy closed in, Walt killed six of them, then with his last bullet,
turned his .45 on himself.
After nine months of fire and fury, Walt Cushing was dead. The
Japanese were so impressed with his willingness to choose death over
capture—which appealed to their samurai-inspired Bushido code—
they gave him a proper funeral and burial at a churchyard.
IT’S NOT CLEAR WHEN JIM LEARNED of his brother’s death; they
probably hadn’t seen each other for a year or more. But by the time
Walt died on Luzon, Jim had become deeply entangled in his own guer-
rilla resistance movement on the nearby island of Cebu. The shooting
war didn’t arrive there until April 10, 1942, when 12,000 Japanese
troops stormed ashore at three separate beaches. As the enemy pushed
toward Cebu City, besieged American commanders knew they had
68 WORLD WAR II
VIGAN
SEA
LUZON
PHILIPPINES
MANILA
CEBU
LEYTE
TABUNAN
CEBU
NEGROS CITY
TOLEDO
MILES MINDANAO
0 100
little time to destroy the island’s sprawling
port. What they needed was an explosives
expert, and Jim, with his mining background,
fit the bill. The army commissioned him a tem-
porary captain and turned him loose.
His first target was a quintet of oil storage
tanks arrayed along the waterfront. He plant-
ed his dynamite, then waited until night-
fall before pushing the plunger, knowing that
the darkness would make the explosions more
spectacular. “It turned night into day,” he
recalled proudly. He then moved on to more
mundane objectives—wharves, causeways,
warehouses. In mid-May, when the Japanese
began their final drive into the city, Jim and
thousands of Cebuanos melted away into the
jungles to continue the fight.
Something seemed to have snapped inside
Jim after he obliterated Cebu’s port. He sud-
denly became a man obsessed with driving out
the occupiers rampaging through towns and
villages, brutally repressing any Cebuanos
NATIONAL ARCHIVES(BOTH); MAP BY BRIAN WALKER
who dared resist. After the Japanese took
Cebu, resistance movements began springing
up across the island. Some had 50 men. Some
had 200. Each was a distinct entity. But in
order to be a truly effective guerrilla force,
unity was a necessity. So local civic leaders in
southern Cebu approached Jim about bring-
ing order out of chaos by assuming the role of
overall commander. They liked his manner,
 his fortitude, and hoped he could bring the dis-
parate players together. After mulling it over, in
late August 1942, Jim accepted the challenge.
While Jim gathered his men, another Amer-
ican, 35-year-old Harry Fenton—the prewar
host of a popular local radio amateur hour who
mixed music with virulent anti-Japanese
harangues—was also building up a force in
northern Cebu. In October 1942 Fenton
invited Cushing to join him as co-commander
of the Cebu Area Command (CAC). “I took
over the combat and tactics,” Cushing wrote.
“Harry took the job of organization.” They
located their headquarters near the tiny barrio
of Tabunan—an isolated, verdant valley barely
11 air miles from the center of Cebu City, and
surrounded by steep, rocky mountains.
That November, Jim led his guerrillas on
the first of a series of attacks on enemy out-
posts. During the raid on a garrison in the
coastal city of Toledo, he was commanding
the furious action when he abruptly arose to
move in for a clearer view. Moments later a
mortar round made a direct hit on the foxhole
he had just vacated, killing two men. It seemed
the “luck of the seventh son” was with him
that morning. Cebuanos, buoyed by the
attacks, rained praise upon Jim Cushing.
The CAC’s co-command structure worked
fine at first, but trouble was brewing. While
Jim was generally well liked and respected by
the people of Cebu, Fenton was secretive, sus-
picious, and feared by his own men. That fear
stemmed from his paranoid campaign to rid
the country of “spies” and “traitors.” His diary
contains many entries like these: “3 spies exe-
cuted yesterday,” “Two executions today,”
“Lucy Miller executed today.” His behavior
did not sit well with the guerrillas, who were
sometimes the target of his conspiracies.
In mid-1943, with the enemy in pursuit,
Jim disguised himself as a priest and went
over to neighboring Negros Island to meet
with Major Jesus Villamor, a Philippine Air
Force officer sent in by General MacArthur to
assess the resistance movements in the
Visayas. When he arrived, the major, a nation-
al hero in his own right, did not know what
to make of Jim. “From the shadows there
emerged a man dressed curiously in the flow-
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
ing black robes of a priest,” he later wrote. “He
looked so frail. I almost felt a surge of disap-
pointment. Was this the great Cushing?” Still
Villamor listened patiently to Jim’s pleas for
official recognition from MacArthur in Bris-
bane, Australia, which would give
the CAC direct contact with General
Headquarters (GHQ), as well as
access to much-needed supplies.
Returning to Cebu in November,
Jim learned that his men had exe-
cuted Fenton, whose increasing
paranoia and erratic violent behav-
ior had sparked a mutiny. Furious
and shaken, sick in body and spirit,
Jim retreated to his hut for several
weeks. He came out of his depres-
sion in late December 1943, and
firmly retook control of the CAC.
The long-sought recognition
from MacArthur came on January
22, 1944. Jim Cushing was pro-
moted to lieutenant colonel and
appointed sole commander of the
CAC, 8th Military District, U.S.
Army Forces in the Far East. The following Walt, here circa
month, a U.S. Navy submarine delivered to 1940, proved a fierce
Jim’s guerrilla unit its first load of supplies— fighter—one willing
guns, ammunition, medicine, and a long- to make the kind of
sacrifices that
range radio capable of reaching Brisbane. Jim
brought him the
felt his luck was holding steady. admiration of even
the Japanese.
ON APRIL 8, 1944, Jim got word that one of
his volunteer units would soon arrive at his
camp with 10 Japanese prisoners who had
survived a seaplane crash just off the coast.
He immediately transmitted the news to Bris-
bane, adding that “Constant enemy pressure
makes this situation very precarious.” That
was putting it mildly.
As the
One of the captives turned out to be a rear enemy
admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy,
Shigeru Fukudome, chief of staff to Combined
closed in,
Fleet’s commander in chief, Admiral Mineichi
Koga. The two officers were en route from
Walt killed
Palau to Mindanao on separate aircraft; Koga’s six of them—
plane also went down when both planes ran
into a tropical storm. Koga did not survive.
then turned
Jim had a real dilemma on his hands. He his last
knew that GHQ was anxious to get the prison-
ers to Australia for interrogation. But the Jap- bullet on
anese army knew that Jim’s men were holding
Fukudome and began a frantic search. They
himself.
swept through barrios, burning huts and kill-
ing men, women, and children in an effort to
force Jim to release the admiral. On April 9, as
troops neared Tabunan, Jim moved his head-
quarters and prisoners deeper into the jungle.
Along the way, an enemy plane spotted and
strafed his group, killing three rebels. In a
OCTOBER 2018
69
 running gun battle across Tupas Ridge, the remaining guerrillas made
their escape. That night, Jim made a momentous decision to protect his
people—his “Cebu patriots,” he called them—and hand over Fukudome.
He sent a message to the Japanese commander, Lieutenant Colonel
Seiiti Ohnisi, saying he would release his prisoners only “on condition
that your soldiers will stop the killing of innocent civilians.” In a return
note, Ohnisi agreed—adding “the measure taken by you is a warrior like
and admirable action. I expect to see you again in the battlefield some-
day.” Like his brother Walt, Jim had won the admiration of his adver-
sary. The next morning, the admiral and his party were freed.
ALTHOUGH JIM HAD GIVEN UP valuable prisoners, his luck would
reward him yet again. In the midst of the chaotic exchange, a native
shopkeeper delivered to Jim a red leather portfolio that had been float-
ing in the sea not far from Fukudome’s plane crash site. Inside were
official-looking documents. Guessing they might be important, Jim
informed GHQ that he still had “papers and field orders.” That caught
their attention. On his own initiative Jim sealed the papers in empty
mortar shells and sent them to the guerrilla commander on Negros.
On May 11, 1944, the submarine USS Crevalle was diverted from its
regular war patrol to pick up the cache. The vessel surfaced off the
southwest coast of Negros and took aboard the mortar shells, as well as
41 Americans who had been stuck on the island since the start of the
war. On May 21 the documents reached Allied translators in Brisbane.
What emerged was Admiral Koga’s secret Combined Fleet orders—
70 WORLD WAR II
“Ops No. 73.” Called the “Z Plan,” it revealed a
detailed blueprint for the Japanese defense of
the Mariana Islands, by bringing “to bear the
combined maximum strength of all our forces
to meet and destroy the enemy.” That meant
all land- and sea-based aircraft would be de-
ployed to seek out and crush the American
fleet. The force available to the Japanese was
formidable: 1,100 planes and 88 warships.
Using this insight into Japanese strategy,
Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, commander
of the Fifth Fleet, successfully derailed their
plan during the Allied invasion of Saipan, on
June 15, and the epic Battle of the Philippine
Sea, four days later. The enemy lost three car-
riers, two oilers, and, in what came to be
known as the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,”
nearly 700 aircraft along with their well-
trained pilots, effectively ending Japan’s abil-
ity to wage offensive air operations. Writing
about the effect the Z Plan had on the outcome
of the war, National Archives archivist Greg
Bradsher said, “the exploitation of the Z Plan
was one of the greatest single intelligence
feats of the war in the Southwest Pacific Area.”
A native
shopkeeper
delivered
to Jim a
red leather
portfolio that
had been
floating in
the sea.
Jim’s discovery of the
“Z Plan” outlining
Japan’s defense of
the Marianas helped
U.S. forces crush the
enemy in the
southwest Pacific.
 ON OCTOBER 20, 1944, General MacArthur
fulfilled his promise to return to the Philip-
pines when he stepped ashore on Leyte. His
arrival boosted the spirits of Cebuanos hoping
for a quick end to their suffering. While they
waited, Jim continued his fight, inflicting
heavy casualties on the enemy. In March 1945,
23rd “Americal” Infantry Division troops
finally liberated the island.
In the course of the war, CAC’s 8,700 guer-
rillas chalked up quite a record. In 218 orga-
nized encounters, they killed more than
10,000 Japanese and tied down thousands
more in occupation duties. In 1945 the army
awarded Jim Cushing the Distinguished Ser-
vice Cross, the United States’ second-highest
valor medal. His citation noted that his “cour-
age and resourcefulness enabled him to
inspire in the people of Cebu a will to resist.”
The next year, he also received a Silver Star
and a Bronze Star. The Philippine govern-
ment, too, awarded Jim, with the Distin-
guished Ser vice Star. His brother Walt
posthumously received the Distinguished
Service Cross, as well as a Silver Star.
WALT CUSHING WAS BORN to greatness. In
his short life, he achieved an impressive string
of accomplishments. When war came he tran-
sitioned from successful gold miner to legend-
ary resistance leader almost overnight. The
admiration and loyalty his guerrillas felt for
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR (ALL)
their commander was boundless. His long-
time friend, Captain M. B. Ordun, said Walt
was “utterly fearless and bold to the point of
foolhardiness. His sense of fair play and his
daring exploits against the enemy won for him
the almost godlike devotion of his followers.”
In 1949 Walt ’s remains were
moved from their Philippines
burial site to the Fort Rosecrans
National Cemetery in San Diego,
where family members still visit
his grave.
Jim Cushing had greatness thrust upon After the war, Jim
him. Before the war he was just another mid- faded into obscurity.
dling mining engineer with a fondness for But Filipinos honored
him upon his death
drink. When war came he, like his brother, with a military sendoff
transitioned into a guerrilla leader of extraor- and burial at the
dinary repute. Descriptions of the seventh Heroes Cemetery
brother’s deeds echo those of the fifth—that in Manila.
he was, according to his fellow guerrillas,
“worshipped by his soldiers, and too brave for
his own good.”
With the war won, Jim’s greatness quickly
faded. In about 1950 he moved down to Pala-
wan, in the southwest Philippines, in an
attempt to restart his moribund mining
career, but it didn’t work out. He ended up
living in poverty and obscurity, dependent
upon handouts from old friends.
On August 26, 1963, Jim suffered a fatal
heart attack aboard an interisland ferry. He
was only 53. Though he was eligible for inter-
ment at the Manila American Cemetery, Jim
had been adamant about being buried at
nearby Libingan ng mga Bayani—the Philip-
pines’ “Heroes Cemetery.” The Filipino
people accorded him a full military funeral,
his flag-covered coffin borne on a horse-
drawn caisson, followed by a solemn proces-
sion of Filipino war veterans. As a three-volley
rifle salute rang through the still air, Jim
Cushing was laid to rest among the guerrilla
patriots with whom he had fought side by side
in the struggle to free their homeland. +
OCTOBER 2018
71
 America has not always given refugees a
picture-perfect welcome, especially during
the Holocaust. It wasn’t until 1944 that the U.S.
took steps to help save Europe’s Jews and to
support those, like Swedish diplomat Raoul
Wallenberg (opposite), doing the same.

REVIEWS BOOKS

SALVAGING
RESCUE BOARD:
HOPE
FROM APRIL 1933—when Hitler’s govern- news of the Holocaust, President Franklin D.
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM, GIFT OF JULIUS WALD

The Untold Story ment issued its first anti-Jewish law—until
of America’s early 1944, the United States government did
Efforts to Save virtually nothing to aid those persecuted by
the Jews of the Nazis. An anti-immigration majority in
Europe Congress in the 1930s and a need to devote all
By Rebecca available funds and materiel to pursuing the
Erbelding. 384 pp. war once the U.S. had entered arguably made
Doubleday, 2018.
American silence defensible.
$30.
But on January 22, 1944, after a Treasury
Department report showed that the State
Department had been actively suppressing
Roosevelt set up the War Refugee Board
(WRB). Many dismissed the board’s efforts as
“too little and too late,” and the WRB worked
in such shadowy ways that its impact is hard to
measure. However, within its 21 months of
existence, the board helped save hundreds of
thousands of those targeted for Nazi extermi-
nation. With a broad mandate and the freedom
to function independently, it was an effort that
has never been tried before or since then.
It is also an effort that some historians have

72 WORLD WAR II

highlighted as a subject in need of scholarly
attention. Rebecca Erbelding, an archivist
at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and
co-curator of its latest exhibit, “Americans and
the Holocaust” (reviewed at right), heeded
their call, and chose the WRB as the topic of
her doctoral research. Rescue Board is a read-
able version of her dissertation.
Erbelding quotes historian Yehuda Bauer’s
assessment that what made the WRB unique
was that it was “officially permitted to break
practically every important law of a nation at
war in the name of outraged humanity.” The
board worked on a number of fronts, from con-
TOP LEFT: UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM COLLECTION, GIFT OF MALWINA “INKA” GERSON ALLEN, 2007.45.5;
ducting psychological warfare on those who
took part in the exterminations, warning of
dire consequences, to funneling money to
anti-Nazi allies in Europe—among them,
Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who
TOP RIGHT: UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM; BOTTOM: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
helped thousands of Jews escape occupied
Hungary. It also helped falsify papers for those
in danger of deportation, transport escapees
to safe havens, and set up top-secret ransom
negotiations with Kurt Becher, the Nazi com-
missar of all concentration camps.
Erbelding has mined storehouses of public
and private records, and tells the stories of the
WRB’s exploits—its successes and failures—in
a clear and compelling way. While some read-
ers might find the book too painstakingly
detailed, it is a must-read for those looking for
answers in the renewed debate over whether
the U.S. should have taken stronger steps to
stem the Holocaust. —Washington, DC-based
writer Daniel B. Moskowitz is a frequent con-
tributor to World War II.
REVIEWS
MUSEUM EXHIBIT
THE LONG VIEW
AMERICANS AND THE HOLOCAUST
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,
Washington, DC. Open through 2021;
no tickets required; ages 11 and up.
COULD THE UNITED STATES have stopped the Holocaust?
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum attempts to answer this
question with a major exhibit, “Americans and the Holocaust,”
that explores the country’s response to Nazism.
Following the rise of Hitler, many Jews in Germany
attempted to seek refuge in the States. But when they arrived
by ship at American ports (see “Ask WWII,” page 18), restric-
tive immigration policies implemented by Assistant Secretary
of State Breckinridge Long turned them away.
Long, who supervised the State Department’s visa division,
cited national security concerns in actively seeking to reduce
the number of Jewish refugees
immigrating to the States.
Long—and many Americans—
believed the fleeing refugees
could include spies or sabo-
teurs. To suppress aid and
rescue efforts, he deliberately
misrepresented records of
U.S. refugee acceptance num-
bers and even stifled incom-
ing reports to Washington
about the mass murder of
Jews in Europe.
Beyond Long’s sabotage,
“Americans and the Holo-
caust” highlights evidence
of American apathy and
racism toward not only Jews
but African and Asian Amer-
icans within its own borders—including
Breckinridge Long of
legalized segregation, Jim Crow laws, and
Japanese American internment—as well as the State Department
indifference to news reports of the Nazis’ limited visas to Jewish
increasingly violent anti-Semitic rule. refugees, fearing
Through interconnecting rooms, visitors saboteurs among them.
can explore a timeline of historical displays
featuring coverage of Nazism through American newpapers,
newsreels, and film that evidence the mounting pressure for
Washington to respond as Hitler’s bloody campaign peaked.
Each section contains interactive displays, photos, videos,
documents, and short documentaries on (continued on page 75)
OCTOBER 2018
73
 Pearl Harbor hero “Dorie” Miller (in Michigan,
left, on a war bond tour ) came to resent his
fame and treatment from fellow navy men.

moment in American history, Dorie Miller

represents the inefficiency and irrationality of
racial segregation in the U.S. Armed Forces.
For most individuals, this is where Miller’s
story ends, but for authors Cutrer and Parrish,
this is where it begins. The authors success-
fully highlight just how much Miller reflects
the average African American serviceman
in World War II. He was an improbable hero
from a rural community in Texas, whose par-
ents were farmers and grandparents were
former slaves, much like my grandfa-
ther, and many others’. Miller joins the
navy at 19 to help support his family
and escape the poverty, racism, and
disenfranchisement typical of the Afri-
can American experience. His race and
lack of education relegate him to the
position of a messman, charged with
making beds and shining shoes for
white sailors and officers.
After Pearl Harbor, a war bond tour
thrusts Miller into the national scene,
where his newfound celebrity becomes
a burden and a source of anxiety for
him and he grows increasingly depressed
about his chances to live a prosperous life
postwar. After receiving the Navy Cross, he
tells his brother, “my life is a holy hell. The
white folks never did like me because I’m col-
REVIEWS BOOKS ored. Now the colored guys aboard ship do not

TRAGIC like me because they say I think I’m somebody

special.” Miller convinces himself that his
next active duty assignment will be a “suicide

HEROISM
DORIS MILLER, THE AVERAGE MILITARY ENTHUSIAST
mission.” And, sure enough, when he returns
to duty, a Japanese submarine sinks his ship.
Two years to the day of his heroism, on Dec-
ember 7, 1943, the Navy Department notifies
his parents that he is missing in action and
PEARL HARBOR, or student of African American history knows presumed dead.
AND THE little about the life and struggles of the first While the book is thoroughly researched
BIRTH OF THE black national hero of World War II, Doris and well written, the authors fall short in their
CIVIL RIGHTS “Dorie” Miller. The popular depiction of Miller desire to demonstrate that Miller’s entrance
MOVEMENT is that of a cook aboard a battleship anchored on the national scene reflects the “birth of the
By Thomas W. at Pearl Harbor who leaps into action to save civil rights movement.” In fact, the civil rights
Cutrer and T. his mortally wounded captain during the Jap- movement and its connection to African
U.S. NAVY/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Michael Parrish. anese attack. Miller then mans a .50-caliber
140pp. Texas A&M machine gun and, although he has had no
University Press,
formal training, shoots down enemy aircraft.
2017. $24.95.
For his bravery, he is awarded the Navy Cross
and receives national recognition. At that
American military bravery and service pre-
date the American Revolution.
The authors also share the romantic notion
that Miller and others like him had a moral or
ethical impact on Washington and the U.S.

74 WORLD WAR II

Armed Forces that led to “greater
awareness and sensitivity to the
talents and loyalties of black men
and women.” But changes in equal
opportunity for blacks in the ser-
vice were motivated by the need
for military efficiency and to
ser ve the political interest of
national leaders. The fact remains
that despite countless examples of
African American sacrifice and
heroism for the first 300 years of
our nation’s history, blacks were
denied civil liberties and experi-
enced racial violence without
judicial recourse until relatively
recently. —Marcus S. Cox is the
associate dean of graduate pro-
grams and professor of history at

Xavier University of Louisiana.

(Museum, continued from page 73)
wartime views of Nazism.
As news headlines spotlighted
Nazi Germany’s ill treatment of its
own citizens throughout the 1930s,
the Roosevelt administration
stayed uncomfortably silent. One
possible reason for that is shown
in a display of a 1938 poll reveal-
ing that two-thirds of Americans
believed that German Jews were
either “entirely” or “partly” to
blame for their own persecution.
While the museum unmasks
the reasons for Washington’s
silence, it also provokes questions
about why Roosevelt, despite
early knowledge of Germany’s
atrocities, took no action, and why
Americans remained skeptical
even when confronted with
reports of the death camps. Can
America be held responsible?
“The United States alone could not
have prevented the Holocaust,”
the museum’s website explains,
“but more could have been done
to save some of the six million
Jews who were killed.”
In trying to provide an over-
view of complex answers to com-
plex questions, “Americans and
the Holocaust” uncovers the
unpleasant truth of what happens
when those with the power to help
fail to reach out to the most vul-
nerable of our earthly population.
—Rasheeda Smith is associate
editor of World War II.
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BATTLE FILMS
BY MARK GRIMSLEY
A CLASSIC
THAT ALMOST
WASN’T
THROUGHOUT ITS HISTORY, Hollywood has had a symbiotic
relationship with the U.S. Armed Forces. The film industry has
drawn heavily from the military for authenticity, particularly the
use of ships, aircraft, and other equipment—and often of actual ser-
vice personnel as movie extras. The military, in turn, has benefited
from Hollywood as a major public relations vehicle to place it in a
positive light. Some film projects have been so promilitary that sup-
port from the armed forces has been unstinting. Others have been
so fundamentally antiwar that support has been out of the question.
Still other movies have been problematic—one major example being
76 WORLD WAR II
The 1954 film’s sensitive subject matter
at first made the U.S. Navy pull its
support—but cooler heads prevailed.
1954’s The Caine Mutiny, based upon Herman
Wouk’s 1951 bestselling novel.
The film tells the story of a World War II
destroyer-minesweeper and its crew, who
gradually become convinced that the ship’s
captain, Lieutenant Commander Philip
Queeg, is dangerously unstable. His executive
officer, Lieutenant Steve Maryk, decides to
relieve Queeg—a decision backed by the other
officers—when the captain appears to become
unglued during a typhoon. Maryk is subse-
quently court-martialed and charged with
“conduct to the prejudice of good order and
discipline,” but he is acquitted after his
defense attorney, Lieutenant Barney Green-
wald, exposes Queeg’s mental instability
when the captain takes the witness stand.
According to Lawrence H. Suid’s Guts and
Glory: The Making of the American Military
Image in Film (2002), when film producer
Stanley Kramer sought the navy’s assistance
in bringing the novel to life, the navy had any
number of concerns, starting with the film’s
title: couldn’t it be The Caine Incident instead?
The navy was also suspicious of Kramer, who
had a reputation as a maverick. Kramer could
have dodged the need for the navy’s help by
focusing on the court-martial itself—Wouk
had already written and produced a play, The
Caine Mutiny Court-Martial—or by utilizing
ship models. But Kramer insisted that the
production required the scale and realism
that only actual warships could provide.
When Wouk appeared to back away from the
project after the navy balked, Kramer accused
the writer of being “some sort of jellyfish.”
The film might never have been made but
for the intervention of Admiral William M.
Fechteler, the navy chief of operations, who
overrode the objections of his subordinates—
including the admiral who served as chief of
information—and ordered full cooperation for
the project. Ultimately this included, among
other things, the loan of an aircraft carrier
and two destroyer-minesweepers to repre-
sent the Caine. Why did Fechteler do this?
To start, Fechteler seemed not at all con-
HISTORYNET ARCHIVES
cerned that the film might cast the navy in a
negative light. He wondered only how Wouk,
a naval reservist who had served during the
war aboard two minesweepers, could have
encountered “all the screwballs I
have known in my thirty years in
the navy.” But Fechteler also
intuited that the navy’s support
would influence the filmmakers
to portray the service positively.
Ultimately the movie, released
in June 1954 with Humphrey
Bogart in the role of Queeg—one
of Bogart’s most memorable per-
formances—underscored the
fact that the Caine was atypical
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Kramer also argued, correctly,
that film audiences would under-
stand that the navy was basically
competent—how else could it
have won World War II?—and
that the Caine was therefore
an aberration. And, inevitably,
he dedicated the film to the
U.S. Navy and included the dis-
claimer that there had never been
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USS Somers). It remains the case, in the jungles of the Philippines during World War II.
however, that without Fechteler’s
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RMY
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OF A
HISTORYNET.COM

HITLER’S
DID THIS MAN
DELIBERATELY
BOTCH NAZI MONSTER HATED
a Mark 18 torpedo
aboard their vessel
EXECUTIONS?

TANKS
in July 1945.
“If the tanks

MAN
succeed, then
victory follows.” A broken Japanese

MAUS
code allowed the U.S.
—German tank to target Admiral
warfare strategist Isoroku Yamamoto.

RATTE ER
Heinz Guderian, 1937
O
LS
MONST
WAS KILLING
Hitler had big hopes
for a proposed big tank
with an inglorious
YAMAMOTO
name: the Ratte
A MISTAKE?
HANGMAN OF
John C. Woods
and a tool of MACARTHUR’S WALK
his deadly trade INTO PHOTO FAME
TRUE FICTION ON

UREMBERG THREE MISBEGOTTEN BEHEMOTHS

PROVE BIGGER ISN’T ALWAYS BETTER
WHO WAS TO BLAME FOR
GUADALCANAL

PRIVATE SLOVIK’S EXECUTION?

HOLLYWOOD SWASHBUCKLER’S
SECRET WAR AUGUST 2018
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LLEY OF DEATH MUCH’
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ED A BRUTAL PANZER ONSLAUGHT CHOSE TO GO
E
DOWN WITH
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THIRD REICH IN 10 OBJECTS
HOW A SHORTAGE OF ALLIED
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E
WHY JAPFAENLLESFLAT
a Mark 18 torpedo
aboard their vessel
in July 1945.

ARMOR

IN HELL IWO JIMA

THE FIRST FIGHT
WASN’T ON
THE BEACH
 CHALLENGE
FLAG BEARER
We altered this photo of General Eisenhower’s driver and secretary,
Kay Summersby, to create one inaccuracy. What is it?
Answer to the
June Challenge:
TOP: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION
Many of you—104 to be exact—
correctly deduced that we moved
the turret mounts on the left-
hand row of M3 tanks. The most
common wrong answer was that
we reversed the flag. We didn’t!
Congratulations
BY BRIAN WALKER
to the winners: James
Cherub, Doug Doucette,
and George Gray Jr.
Please send your
answer with your name
and mailing address to:
October 2018 Challenge, World
War II, 1919 Gallows Road,
Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182; or
e-mail: challenge@historynet.
com. Three winners, chosen
at random from all correct
entries submitted by October
15, will receive Indianapolis by
Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic.
Answers will appear in the
February 2019 issue.
OCTOBER 2018
79
 PINUP
REFLECTIVE
MOOD
Why is dancer/singer/actress
Adele Mara wearing a tin foil
bikini? Alas we can’t tell you.
The photo stems from her years
at Columbia Pictures, which
signed the teenage dancer as an
actress in 1942. “At Columbia I
was a little unhappy because
I wasn’t doing things I really
wanted to do,” like dance, Mara
said. She went on to sign with
Republic Pictures and make two
films starring John Wayne,
including Sands of Iwo Jima
(1949). In 1944 she even—
improbably—taught him a new
skill. “They needed a girl to dance
with John Wayne,” she said.
“He didn’t know how to dance,
so I taught him to jitterbug in
The Fighting Seabees.” In a
charming scene, she takes the
lead and he follows.

HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

80 WORLD WAR II
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