America in WWII 2013-04

April 2013

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The Enemy Within?Feds Round Up GermanAnd Italian Immigrants

NOT-SO-GREAT ESCAPEPOWs Tunnel Out of Prison—But Can They Get Away?

Presidential PoochFala, FDR’s Canine AmbassadorThe Skinny on Fats Waller A Beauty Queen Quackenbush

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The War • The Home Fro

STEP INTO IKE’S 1945 WAR ROOM A BABE’S LAST HOME RUN

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PREDATORSIN THE

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Lieutenant CommanderDudley Morton,

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The War • The Home Front • The PeopleApril 2013, Volume Eight, Number Six

F E A T U R E S14 PREDATORS IN THE PACIFIC

US sub skippers were overcautious at the war’s start, and their torpedoes were junk.Three years later, they had taken down half of Japan’s shipping. By Drew Ames

24 THE NOT-SO-GREAT ESCAPELong before it became a movie, the so-called Great Escape was 76 real POWs tunneling out

of Stalag Luft III—and Germans excecuting 50 of them. By Tom Huntington

32 ENEMIES IN OUR MIDST?As GIs battled Nazi and Fascist forces overseas, the US government put 15,000 German and Italian

immigrants in prison to keep an eye on them. By Melissa Amateis Marsh

40 ALPHA DOGEvery morning, FDR received a breakfast tray with eggs and toast—and a treat

for his most trusted and faithful friend, America’s most highly placed canine. By David A. Norris

d e p a r t m e n t s2 KILROY 4 V-MAIL 6 PINUP: Wanda McKay 7, 47, 51 FLASHBACKS 8 HOME FRONT: Babe’s Last Blast 10 THE FUNNIES:Jungle Jim 12 LANDINGS: Victory’s Schoolhouse 46 I WAS THERE: Unsung Sailor 54 WAR STORIES 58 BOOKS AND MEDIA

60 THEATER OF WAR: Slaughterhouse-Five 62 78 RPM: Fats Waller 63 WWII EVENTS 64 GIs: Airman Down

COVER SHOT: Lieutenant Commander Dudley “Mush” Morton, skipper of the sub USS Wahoo (SS-238), looks like a movie star in hiscirca-1943 portrait by Hollywood photographer Bert Longworth. Morton’s nickname was short for Mushmouth, a Moon Mullins comic

character. Under Morton, Wahoo sank 17–19 Japanese ships before disappearing north of Japan in October 1943. NATIONAL ARCHIVES

40 2414

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KILROYWAS HERE

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March–April 2013Volume Eight • Number Sixwww.AmericaInWWII.com

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I WAS TALKING WITH A FRIEND RECENTLY after she looked over our February 2013 issue.She mentioned that she thought my writing was good, but that I shouldn’t expect her toread it because she didn’t care much for the subject matter. After applying a tourniquetto stop my pride from spilling from the wound and ruining the carpet, I thought aboutwhy people might not be especially interested in the story of the four years that ourparents, grandparents, or great-grandparents spent changing the world.

I recalled years ago reading a column the late political commentator Jeane Kirkpatrickwrote about interest in politics. She explained that she couldn’t understand how somepeople would not closely monitor events that affected their lives and required aninformed vote from them on Election Day. There they sat at the breakfast table, flippingpast the newspaper’s meatiest pages, merely glancing at the headlines on the way to thecomics and sports sections. One day it dawned on her that she didn’t deserve specialcommendation for reading every jot and tittle of political news and analysis that camewithin arm’s reach. She did so because she had an insatiable interest in the material.She invested her time and effort the way someone else might with tying intricate fliesfor trout fishing or following the twists and turns of Taylor Swift’s love life.

The same goes for history. We can make ourselves feel a little more important by speak-ing about how we learn lessons for the present and future by inquiring into the past. Butwe can learn valuable lessons from the dedicated study of anything that has some depthto it. History does hold out more hope of rewarding us with wisdom than most othersubjects do, but whether or not we study it still comes down mostly to personal interest.

My dad began subscribing to this magazine back when we started publishing it in 2005.A 12-year-old at the war’s start who watched his brothers ship out to fight overseas,he sat on the couch in the 2000s and read each of our issues more or less cover to cover.He’d insert a bookmark when he took a break, so he could make sure he didn’t acciden-tally miss anything when he picked it back up later. He usually didn’t say much aboutwhat he’d taken in, but on occasion he’d suddenly enthuse about, say, a favorite songof his that I’d written about in 78 RPM, or talk sadly about something more seriousthat bothered him, like the rounding up of immigrants from Axis nations here in theStates (see page 32 for coverage of the internment of German and Italian aliens).

My dad’s experience is what we hope for all readers. Assuming he didn’t read themagazine only out of a sense of obligation to his son (but if he did, I’m OK with that!),he must have found the stories, and our particular treatment of them, interesting andenjoyable. I’d like to think he even learned something of value.

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4 AMERICA IN WWII A P R I L 2 0 1 3

Send us your comments and reactions—especially the favorable ones! Mail them toV-Mail, America in WWII, 4711 Queen Avenue,Suite 202, Harrisburg, PA 17109, or e-mailthem to [email protected].

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V-MAIL

THE MAD GASSER’S NOXIOUS GASI WAS DRAWN BY the sight of a friend ofmine on your February 2013 cover: AlexVraciu. Being a forensic toxicologist, I wasalso drawn to “The Mad Gasser” article. Iwas a little taken back by the spokesmanfor Atlas claiming “trichloroethylene wasodorless and did not produce ill effects inhumans.”

In the early 1970s, my first job out ofcollege was for a construction testing com-pany. We routinely used Trisolve (liquidtrichloroethylene) to wash asphalt fromcore samples when testing mix samplesfrom bad sections of highways. Let me tellyou, that stuff is not odorless, especiallywhen poured over hot asphalt samples.This action alone probably produced agood quantity of phosgene, a WWI poisongas. One day, we heard that one of the guyshad collapsed over the weekend and was inthe hospital. His kidneys were failing.After two weeks in the hospital, he wasback on his feet, but didn’t return to workfor months.

During this time, I saw a report ofextreme body shutdown caused bytrichloroethylene and the consumption ofalcohol. The subject of the report wastiling a large shower and washed down thewalls with trichloroethylene. Following theday’s work, he went to his local bar for afew beers. He became weak and violentlyill, throwing up blood, and developed kid-ney failure.

MARK W. MAXWELL

forensic toxicologist, retired

New Jersey State Police Office of Forensic Sciences

received via e-mail

MORE GOOD-WAR GOTHAMITESI ENJOYED Tom Huntington’s article “Go-tham and the Good War” in the February2013 issue. He listed several prominentNew Yorkers who figured in the war, buthe left out two: former New York Gover-nor Hugh L. Carey and former New YorkCity Mayor Ed Koch.

Carey and Koch were members of the104th Infantry Division, serving underGeneral Terry de La Mesa Allen fromBelgium through Holland and into

Germany to the end of the war in Europe.Carey served in the headquarters of the415th Infantry Regiment and on Allen’sstaff. Following the war and his time asgovernor, he served on the BattlefieldMonuments Commission and was one ofthose who planned the World War IIMemorial in Washington, DC. Koch servedas an enlisted man in F Company, 415thInfantry Regiment.

WILLIAM S. JACKSON

Hummelstown, Pennsylvania

ERROL FLYNN SCANDAL EPILOGUEOVER THE YEARS I heard of the Errol Flynnrape scandal [“Scandal in Hollywood,”February 2013]. After the war, attorneyJerry Geisler would go on to defend actorRobert Mitchum in the Marijuana Trial.As for Betty Hansen and Peggy Satterlee,musical trivia offers that one of them,probably Satterlee, portrays a chorus girlwhile Mitzi Gaynor performs “HoneyBun” in the 1958 movie production ofSouth Pacific.

JOHN ORR

Orlando, Florida

BRITS ON THE USS CARMICK?THE PHOTO ON PAGE 32 [“D-Day at 900Yards,” February 2013] does not showcrew members on the Carmick, unless thedestroyer had a British crew. The guys inthe photo are wearing Royal Navysquare-cut T-shirts and sailor hats, not theDixie cup–style white hats as seen on theAmerican gun crew on page 33. The USwhite hat was occasionally dyed dark bluefor camouflage purposes, but the cut dif-fers from the hats worn by the RoyalNavy sailors.

BOB TAYLOR

Painesville, Ohio

received via e-mail

JAPANESE AMERICAN HONORI SINCERELY APPRECIATED your column in theFebruary 2013 issue [Kilroy, “A ThousandWords”]. Members of the 100/442 [the

mostly Japanese American 442nd Regi-mental Combat Team and the 100th Infan-try Battalion] were awarded the highesthonors by the free nation of France and theState of Texas for their battlefield heroism,even though many were not welcome toreturn to their hometowns. Nisei in theMilitary Intelligence Service served crucialroles as interpreters and translators, butcouldn’t receive the thanks of a gratefulnation because the government didn’tacknowledge their existence for over 40years. Nisei soldiers were involved in theliberation of Dachau, but the army coveredit up. All of this while their families wereillegally incarcerated.

DAVID UNRUHE

Auburn, California

received via e-mail

TALKING WWII, THINKING VIETNAM?IN THE V-MAIL SECTION [February 2013issue] Fred Davis’s letter “What’s a DoorGunner?” was interesting because there issuch a person as a door gunner. During theVietnam War, the men who manned M-60defensive machine guns on assault helicop-ters sat in the door area and were referredto as door gunners, which probably trig-gered the confusion in the original article.

JOSEPH RACHINSKY

West Chester, Pennsylvania

received via e-mail

GREMLINSFebruary 2013: “Hell on Wings”—TrukLagoon was not the crash location of theJapanese Zero Robert Duncan shot downon October 5, 1943; the Brewster Buffalowas model F2A, not F2B; and Jiro Hori-koshi was not a Japanese navy officer butthe designer of the Zero.

“D-Day at 900 Yards”—The USSCarmick was named for Daniel Carmick,not John Carmick, as the bottom captionon page 34 states.

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First, the name had to go—a girl couldhardly become a star with “D-o-r-o-t-h-yQ-u-a-c-k-e-n-b-u-s-h” promoting her onmovie theater marquees. The daughter ofGuy and Ethel Quackenbush of Portland,

Oregon, became Wanda McKay.

McKay took her first high-heeled stepstoward starletdom as Miss American

Aviation in 1938. The following year, NewYork photographers voted her among the10 most beautiful models in the country.Soon she signed with Paramount Pictures.

The 24-year-old McKay was a hit inSouthern California and earned renown as“the most kissed girl in Hollywood.” In thelatter half of 1941, after months of gossiphad linked her with actor John Howard, shemarried actor Ben Roscoe. Three days afterthe Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, she

gave birth to their son, Richard.

By now, the photogenic face and figure ofthe former Dorothy Quackenbush wasappearing everywhere: blown up on bill-boards, shilling for Chesterfield cigarettes,prettying magazine covers that decorated

GIs’ barracks walls. Through the war years,she appeared in a couple dozen movies,none of which has stood the test of time.

McKay continued acting into the 1950s,transitioning from silver screen to smallscreen with appearances in The Lone

Ranger and other series. In 1977, longdivorced, she married songwriter HoagyCarmichael. She was widowed four yearslater and succumbed to cancer in 1996.

PHOTO COURTESY OF WWW.DOCTORMACRO.COM

Wanda McKay

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A P R I L 2 0 1 3 AMERICA IN WWII 7

L I G G E T T & M Y E R S T O B A C C O C O . • 1 9 4 2

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8 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2013

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HOMEFRONT

THE MAN STANDING AT home plate inYankee Stadium was a little rounderabove the belt than most fans remem-

bered him from the last time they saw himin that spot. Middle age will do that. ButGeorge Herman Ruth wasn’t the slimmestfigure even in his playing days. In fact, youcould argue that the extra girth was some-thing the most famous player in baseballhad leveraged to the fullest as he ham-mered 714 pitched balls out of parksacross the United States, setting a homerun record that would stand until HankAaron broke it four decades later.

For the thrill of watching the Babe swingthe bat for the first time in seven years,69,136 people turned out on August 23,1942. These fans would also get to seeWalter Johnson for their money. The 55-year-old was in the Hall of Fame alongwith Ruth, having racked up 417 wins in aWashington Senators uniform, a recordstill bested only by the iconic turn-of-the-century right-hander Cy Young, who hadlogged 511.

It was between the games of a double-header pitting Ruth’s old New York Yan-kees against Johnson’s former WashingtonSenators that the two legendary playerstrotted onto the empty field along withcatcher Benny Bengough and umpire BillyEvans. After the official announcement ofthe names of the exhibition participants,thunderous applause from the fans of theBabe’s former team, and some slapstickgoofing around with Babe’s cap, the old-timers took their respective places at theplate and on the pitching mound. The cur-rent Yankees and Senators players stood atthe edge of their dugouts to watch historybeing made.

The Babe was nervous. “The Babe wasworried and fretted far, far more than heever worried on the eve of a deciding

World Series game,” his wife, Clair,recalled of the day before the event.“Tomorrow he was going back to hisStadium, before his fans. Would he rise tothe occasion as he always had?”

Johnson had a tough start. His first cou-ple of pitches hit the ground in front ofhome plate. Gone was the 90 mph fastballthat he had slung sidearm past so manymajor league batters. The third pitch was agood one. And a good pitch in this case, asfar as Johnson and the tens of thousands offans gathered in the seats of the House thatRuth Built were concerned, was one thatthe lefty-batting Babe could pull over theright-field wall. That’s exactly what the 47-year-old living legend did.

On the far end of this line-drive homerun was 15-year-old Bob Balthazar. Twohours of train rides had delivered Balthazarto the park along with his dad and his dad’sfriend Russ O’Brien, an advertising execu-

tive. It was O’Brien who got the tickets forthe game, specifically ordering seats in theright-field stands, a section known as Ruth-ville for all the home run balls Ruth hadsent there. He was hoping the Babe woulddeliver a priceless souvenir over the inter-vening 300-some feet and into their hands.Ruth’s homer was whistling its way straightfor the trio. “It bounced just before us, overus, and rattled around,” Balthazar recalled.“Everybody was scrambling for the ball,and my dad came up with it.”

The Ruth and Johnson exhibition soonended, and the all-time greats left the fieldto let the doubleheader continue. Five anda half innings into the second matchup, thehome-plate umpire called the game onaccount of darkness. But the day in base-ball history was not done for O’Brien. Hehad a press pass and decided to use it to getsignatures on the ball while the Balthazarsfiled out with the crowd and waitedbeyond the stadium gates.

O’Brien reunited with the Balhazars toshow off the autographs of Ruth, Johnson,and Evans that were scribbled on the ball’scurved surface. He handed the day’s trophyto the teen to keep. The ball remainedBalthazar’s for 53 years before he gave it tohis grandson on the boy’s 12th birthday. In2006, the souvenir brought $86,000 atauction.

That sum was almost exactly what theRuth and Johnson exhibition raised to aidwar veterans and their families that mid-summer’s day in 1942—just about a buckfor each fan in attendance to witness thelast home run ever by baseball’s greatestslugger. “…There was a kind of sadness inboth of us,” Ruth said later. “Walter hadbeen the greatest pitcher in the league; Ihad been the greatest slugger. But he wasno longer a part of the game, and the samewas true for me.”A

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A middle-aged Babe Ruth assumes the posehe refined while watching 714 career

homers leave the park.

Babe’s Last Blastby Carl Zebrowski

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ON JANUARY 7, 1934—five years to the day after BuckRogers and Tarzan made their 1929 debut—a new sci-fiand jungle comic strip duo stepped onto the pages of

America’s newspapers. Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon would soarto fame for his futuristic exploits, just like Buck Rogers. AndJungle Jim…well, he would never swing as high as the bellowingape-man Tarzan. But he would hang on, even when war broughtother strips crashing down.

Jungle Jim was a Sunday-only “topper” strip that ran aboveFlash Gordon. It featured hunter Jim Bradley in tales illustratedby Raymond and scripted by Don Moore. Unlike other jungle sto-ries, Jungle Jim was set in Southeast Asia, not Africa.Attended by native sidekick Kolu and femme fatale Lilli

DeVrille, the fully clothed Jim tackled pirates and slavers. But asWorld War II came his way, he found himself fighting the Japanese.Many topper strips vanished thanks to wartime paper shortages,but Jungle Jim earned its own Sunday slot. When Raymond joined

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THEFUNNIES

the marines in 1944, replacement artists took over.Jim stayed on the hunt until 1954, but by then he had made

inroads in other media, appearing in Ace Comics, Big LittleBooks, a weekly radio series starting in 1935, and a 1936Universal movie serial.In 1948 former Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller began starring in a

Columbia series of Jungle Jim films that ran until 1956 andspawned a short-lived 1955–56 TV show. The Weissmuller incar-nation moved the action to more familiar territory: Africa.More comic book reprints from Standard, Dell, and Charlton ran

until 1970, and “Jungle Jim” was a nickname used by the 4400thCombat Crew Training Squadron (1st Air Commando Group) inthe 1960s. Jim was no ape man, but he was a survivor. A

DR. ARNOLD T. BLUMBERG is an educator and the author ofbooks on comic books and other pop culture topics. He resides inBaltimore, Maryland.

Above: Jungle Jim ran in Sunday newspapers across the county. This strip went to print two weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack.Opposite: Popular in the 1930s, Big Little Books like this 1936 adaptation of Jungle Jim were small and fat: 3.5 inches wide, 4.5 inches

high, and 1.5 inches thick. They were heavily illustrated inside; for every page filled with text, there was one filled with artwork.

Hang On, Jim!by Arnold T. Blumberg

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5, German Admiral Hans-Georg von Frie-deburg appeared in Reims authorized tosurrender to the Western powers, but not tothe Soviet Union. Reiterating a demand forunconditional surrender, the Allies refusedthe offer. The following day, General AlfredGustav Jodl, chief of staff of the Germanarmed forces, arrived to make anotherattempt at partial surrender. That too wasturned down. The Germans assessed theirsituation and, after midnight on May 7,agreed to give up unconditionally.Signing the official surrender took less

than 15 minutes. At 2:30 A.M., Allied mili-

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LANDINGS

Victory’s Schoolhouseby Mark D.Van Ells

tary officers sat down at one side of a largewooden table in Eisenhower’s war room.No larger than an ordinary classroom, thiswas where Eisenhower directed the Alliedeffort. Ike himself refused to meet with theGermans and delegated General WalterBedell Smith to lead the proceedings.British, French, and Soviet representativeswere also there. Jodl, Friedeburg, and Jodl’saide Major Wilhelm Oxenius then enteredthe room, clicked their heels, and sat downfacing the Allied leaders. After a readingaloud of the surrender terms, Jodlannounced that he accepted them andsigned the document at 2:41 A.M. Resis-tance was to cease the next day.Afterward, Smith told reporters, “Fini la

guerre” (“The war is over”), but it wasn’tquite true. The Soviets raised questionsabout the proceedings, and another signingtook place in Berlin. In any event, theEuropean conflict ended on May 8.After the war, Ike’s headquarters was

returned to educational use and is todaythe Lycée Franklin Roosevelt. But the warroom was sealed off and left virtuallyuntouched.Today, the Musée de la Reddition takes

up the school’s western corner. A visit herebegins with a 10-minute film exploring theoccupation and liberation of Reims and theGerman surrender. The war room isupstairs, and adjacent to it are exhibits thatadd context to the events of May 7.Naturally, much of the museum focuses

on the French experience. On display is asmall flag stolen from a German officer’scar by a young local boy. Also here is theornate kepi (military cap) of General Fran-çois Sevez, France’s sole representative atthe surrender.

IN THE EARLY MORNING darkness of May7, 1945, a small party of German offi-cers entered a nondescript redbrickschoolhouse in Reims, France. Despiteappearances, this modest building was theheadquarters of the supreme Allied com-mander in Europe, General Dwight D.Eisenhower. Here, the moment millionswere hoping and praying for was about toarrive: the Germans had come to surrender.This humble place with a big role in his-

tory is preserved today as the Musée de laReddition (“Surrender Museum”), and it’sjust one of many reasons to visit Reims, oneof France’s most important cities. Perhapsbest known for its magnificent cathedral,Reims is famous also for its champagne,which can be sampled in great abundancehere. The city suffered terribly during theFirst World War, and the surrounding coun-tryside still bears scars. American dough-boys fought in 1918 at Belleau Wood, asacred place in the annals of the US MarineCorps that’s just a 30-minute drive to thewest. In 1940 the Germans captured Reims,and the US Third Army under LieutenantGeneral George S. Patton, Jr., liberated iton August 30, 1944. The Voie de la Liberté(“Liberty Road”), which traces Patton’spath from Normandy to Bastogne, Belgium,passes through.Eisenhower established a forward head-

quarters in Reims in September 1944 to becloser to the front, first working out of alocal chateau. He moved into the redbricktechnical school near the city’s main rail sta-tion in February 1945. By May, Germanywas in ruins and Adolf Hitler was dead.Admiral Karl Dönitz, who’d become führerafter Hitler’s suicide in April, sought an endto the war. On the rainy afternoon of May

Outside Reims, France, a marker indicatesthe Voie de la Liberté, which lets visitorsfollow the path of liberating US tanks.


war’s end. The map of Central Europe,with a stark red line indicating the battle-front deep inside Germany, dominates theroom. In front of this map are 15 chairs ata long table. This is where the signing tookplace. A photograph taken at the historicevent is on display, along with a key iden-tifying each participant. Each chair alsohas a brass plaque indicating who satwhere. British General K.W.D. Strong didnot actually sit in his assigned place, butstood behind the Germans as a translator.This one small room vividly conveys the

gravity and finality of the surrender. Onecan easily imagine Jodl’s frame of mind. Hefaced an assemblage of grim but triumphantAllied officers. Behind them loomed a mas-sive map showing the utter evisceration ofhis country, and he was surrounded by evi-dence of overwhelming Allied might. Therein Eisenhower’s war room, Jodl could notescape the decisiveness of Germany’s defeatas he signed his name and put an end to theThird Reich.A

MARK D. VAN ELLS teaches at the City Uni-versity of New York and is currently writ-ing a traveler’s guide to First World Warhistoric sites.

raphers, and journalists.The museum’s main attraction is the war

room. Except for glass panels and railingto prevent visitors from pulling up a chairat the surrender table, the room looksfrozen in time. The walls are almost entire-ly covered with maps and charts left just asthey were in May 1945. One huge mapshows the Allied rail network in Europe.Nearby is an even bigger map of supplybases. They stretch from floor to ceilingand are remarkably detailed. Lookingclosely, one can see the staples used to fas-ten them to the wall—along with theinevitable wrinkling, discoloration, andother signs of age.There are battle maps, too. One near the

entrance shows the pockets of Germanresistance that still remained around St.Nazaire and Lorient in western France at

The Americans were a major presence inwartime Reims, and the museum devotesmuch attention to them. There is a man-nequin of a 101st Airborne Division para-trooper in full battle gear, for example. TheScreaming Eagles made their headquartersin the Reims schoolhouse when the Battleof the Bulge broke out in December 1944.It was from this very building that BrigadierGeneral Anthony McAuliffe organized the101st’s movement to Bastogne, Belgium,where it would famously refuse to crackunder a week of intense siege. Also on dis-play is the program for a football gameplanned for Christmas Day 1944 betweentwo elements of the 101st that was dubbedthe Champagne Bowl. The deployment toBastogne canceled the game. Other exhibitsexplore the lives of American WACs (mem-bers of the Women’s Army Corps), photog-

Above, bottom left: In Reims, a humble school was the center of Allied operations in Europe. It became the site of Nazi Germany’s surrenderin 1945. Today, a portion of the school is set aside as the Musée de la Reddition (“Surrender Museum”). Above, top left: Exhibits like this

headquarters scene document the US military presence in Reims. Above, right: The war room, where the surrender took place.

IN A NUTSHELL

WHAT Musée de le Reddition (“Surrender Museum”)

WHERE 12 Rue Franklin Roosevelt, Reims, France

WHY The site of Nazi Germany’s surrender • General Dwight Eisenhower’s headquar-ters from February to May 1945 • Eisenhower’s war room as it was preserved in May 1945

For more information visit www.ville-reims.fr/index.php?id=899

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O R S in the PacificUS sub skippers were overcautious at the war’s star t,

and their torpedoes were junk.

Three years later, they had taken down

half of Japan’s shipping.

by Drew Ames

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PREDATORS in the Pacific by Drew Ames


Just one night earlier, October 24, 1944,Kane and his crew had sunk three Japanesefreighters not far from where the Tang wasnow—in the shallow waters between theisland of Formosa (now Taiwan) and thecoast of China. And despite frantic effortsby the Japanese convoy’s protective escortsto locate his prowling sub, O’Kane againhad the Tang in position to wreak havoc.Earlier in the war, things had been very

different for US subs in the Pacific. Rarelywas one in position to wreak havoc. Thebattle tactics of that time made skippersovercautious, and understandably, becausethey had no effective weaponry; the US tor-pedoes they had were notoriously unreliable.But as the Tang was now demonstrating,there had been a change in the sea that sep-arated America and Japan. O’Kane’s huntof the Japanese tankers and transports inlate October 1944 was but one moment in asustained effort to dominate the Pacific from its briny depths, aneffort that would not end until US subs had taken down half ofJapan’s shipping.Five minutes into October 25, O’Kane yelled “Fire!” He yelled

the order a half-dozen times, and six bow torpedoes struck theirmarks 900 to 1,400 yards away. O’Kane then maneuvered his subparallel to the convoy and loosed three stern torpedoes as enemyshells splashed nearby. The first of the Tang’s stern-fired torpedoesstruck a tanker, which blew up in a tremendous fireball. The sec-ond slammed into a transport, crippling but not sinking it.

O’Kane then got a dose of good fortunewhen a Japanese destroyer that had beenbearing down on the Tang exploded after itwas hit by either the Tang’s third torpedo orfriendly fire from other Japanese destroyers.Powering away from the area at her bestspeed, Tang withdrew about 10,000 yards.Down to just two torpedoes (of the sub’s

original 24), O’Kane and his crew took anhour to check and reload them. Then theTang headed back to the firelit scene to fin-ish off the damaged transport, now a sittingduck. To avoid the circling Japanesedestroyers, O’Kane brought his boat aboutin a wide circle. Then Tang fired her lasttwo torpedoes. The first darted straight tothe target. The second malfunctioned, brokefrom its path, and whirled back towardTang. O’Kane had scarcely had time to shiftcourse when the torpedo slammed into hissubmarine’s port side near the stern, causing

a tremendous explosion and destroying the aft torpedo room andthe two compartments forward of it.Motor Machinist’s Mate Clay Decker was sitting in the sub’s

control room at the time of the explosion. “The hatch above mewas open and water was gushing in,” he said later. “Those lads inthe conning tower fell into the control room, a drop of eight orten feet. I heard them falling and hitting the steel deck.” O’Kanelater reported, “Our ship sank by the stern in seconds, the way apendulum might swing down in a viscous liquid. The seas rolledin from aft, washing us from the bridge and shears [the above-

Previous spread: USS Puffer (SS-268) sails off California’s Mare Island after a November 1944 overhaul. The sub’s crew went througha terrible ordeal a year earlier, when Puffer remained submerged without ventilation or cooling for 37 hours to escape Japanese warships.

Top: A submarine service recruiting poster emphasizes adventure. But with the adventure came risk, complicated by faulty weapons.Above: USS Tang (SS-306) slides down the ways on August 17, 1943. After a successful run, she would sink by her own torpedo.

STANDING CALMLY ON THE BRIDGE OF THE USS TANG (SS-306), Lieutenant Commander Richard “Dick” O’Kane peeredthrough binoculars into the darkness that blanketed the Formosa Strait. O’Kane’s Balao-class submarine had spent thelast hour knifing carefully through a gauntlet of Japanese destroyers to get at the soft prey they protected—some two

dozen vulnerable oil tankers and transport ships bulging with supplies. Conveniently lit up by the enemy’s nervous searchlights,the guarded vessels were a startling sight and a rare opportunity, even for such an accomplished hunter as O’Kane.

deck platform that housed the periscopes], and of small consola-tion now was the detonation of our 23d torpedo as it hit home inthe transport.” O’Kane and three other men who were forced intothe sea with him managed to stay afloat long enough to be pickedup by a Japanese ship.The Tang’s devastated aft compartments quickly filled with

water, dropping the submarine’s tail to the ocean floor 180 feetdown. With her exposed bow still protruding defiantly up throughthe surface, the creaking 312-foot sub lolled precariously in the oil-slicked surf. In a flash, perhaps a third of the vessel’s 87-man crewhad died. Others soon succumbed to smoke inhalation. The sur-vivors, meanwhile, were thrust into a desperate struggle to survive.

To that end, the men first flooded the main ballast tank in orderto level the Tang on the ocean floor. Then they moved into the for-ward torpedo room, above which sat the sub’s tiny forwardescape trunk. As Japanese depth charges exploded outside theship’s hull, a fire in the forward battery compartment generatedadditional heat and smoke that soon made it difficult to breathe.After taking some time to burn sensitive documents, which gener-


ated additional smoke, 30–45 remaining men halted escape prepa-rations to wait out the bombardment.After about three hours, the first of these anxious crewmen

climbed into the escape trunk, an uncomfortable cylinder largeenough for just five men. It was a tricky contraption, normally keptflooded with just enough air space at the top to allow its tempo-rary tenants to breathe. The trunk was designed to allow men toslip out through a door located on its side when the water pressureinside and outside the vessel was equalized. They could then ascendto the surface. But the conditions on the Tang made a difficultprocess nearly impossible. “The compression of the air as the waterflooded the trunk caused a great amount of heat,” one survivorlater reported. “When the water was above the door, it left a verysmall air space and everyone had difficulty in getting their breath.The pressure made the voices very high and almost inaudible. Allthese combined to create a certain amount of panic in everyone.”Most of the men had strapped on a Momsen lung, a curious rub-

ber breathing apparatus that essentially recycled exhaled air. “I feltat ease using the ‘lung’ and knew it would work after I tested it

Tang’s future commander, Lieutenant Richard “Dick” O’Kane (left), chats with Lieutenant Commander Dudley “Mush” Morton on the bridge ofUSS Wahoo (SS-238). Morton’s success as a sub commander gave him credibility when he complained of the Mark 14 torpedo’s flawed detonators.

under the water before leaving the trunk,” one survivor testfied later. “I had made a one hundred-foot escape before.”Nevertheless, rather than risk the watery ascent, some decid-ed against joining their mates in several escape attempts. Ofthe 13 who did ultimately strike out for the sea’s surface,just 5 survived the ordeal, becoming the first men of the warto successfully escape a fully submerged vessel. The balanceeither drifted off into the black abyss or drowned.Those that made it were also “rescued

Japanese, who expressed their anger in th tiest of terms. The destroyer escort that picup the survivors “was one of the fouwhich were rescuing Japanese troops andpersonnel,” O’Kane wrote later. “Whenwe realized that our clubbings and kick-ings were being administered by theburned, mutilated survivors of our ownhandiwork, we found we could take itwith less prejudice.” The men finished outthe war in a prison camp. O’Kane was lateawarded the Medal of Honor.If Tang’s fifth and final war patrol had

tragically, its overall results had been st just two weeks of work, it had sunk at least seven ships,roughly 21,000 tons of Japanese shipping.Such impressive results reflected everything that had finally

begun to go right for the US submarine force in the Pacific after a

trying year and a half of mostly fruitless com-bat. Ironically, considering the Tang’s fate, thebiggest improvement had come with thedevelopment of better torpedoes. The old

he steam-driven Mark 14 eatured either a magnetic sen- esigned to detonate when thepedo passed beneath the keel its target, or a physical triggerhat detonated on contact. TheUS Navy Bureau of Ordnancehad tested the magnetic deto-nator just once, and it did notwork well in battle conditions.he Mark 14 had two otheroblems: the contact exploder jammed, resulting in a dud;

often failed to run at the depth t was set, resulting in a miss.

p blems proved difficult to pin-point. As a result, complaints about the torpe-does were initially sketchy, and poor combatresults were too often attributed to the perform-ance of sub skippers and their crews. Answersid not begin to appear until May 1943, afterieutenant Commander Dudley W. “Mush”orton and the crew of the USS Wahoo (SS-238)red an exasperating series of torpedo malfunc-

ring operations off the Kurile Islands between Japan. After watching one torpedo strike but

merely dent a freighter, Morton wrote, “The target course andspeed had been most accurately determined and it is inconceivablethan any normal dispersion could cause it to miss.” During eightdays of superbly conducted patrolling, Wahoo sank three ships,


Brisbane4/42

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Above, bottom: Seen through the periscope of Morton’s USS Wahoo, an Asashio-class Japanese destroyer burns and sinks off New Guinea’snorthern coast on January 24, 1943. Wahoo’s torpedo had cut the destroyer in two. Above, middle: Another Wahoo victim—a Japanese

freighter—sinks on April 21, 1943. Top right: After a refit, Wahoo undergoes sea trials off Mare Island in July 1943. She had completed herfifth patrol, sinking more than 90,000 tons of Japanese shipping. But half of the torpedoes she fired had been duds.

but faulty torpedoes cost her three others.Morton was the submarine service’s best-known commander at

that time and had the credibility to draw serious attention to thetorpedo issue. Rear Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, commander ofSubmarines, Pacific Fleet, ordered the magnetic exploder for Mark14 torpedoes deactivated in late June 1943. But Rear AdmiralRalph W. Christie, who ran the largely independent SouthwestPacific submarine command out of Fremantle, Australia, was notconvinced that the much-discussed defects were legitimate andkept the device in use. Finally, in November, Vice Admiral ThomasC. Kinkaid, the new head of Allied naval forces in the SouthwestPacific, ended the controversy definitively by ordering the magnet-ic exploder deactivated in all submarine commands. Meanwhile, asomewhat more reliable torpedo, the Mark 18, entered service.The torpedo problem was never completely solved, as the cir-

cular run that brought down the Tang demonstrated, but thechanges vastly improved an American submarine’s odds of suc-cess. During O’Kane’s October 24–25 attack, for instance, onlyone of his torpedoes, the fateful 24th, failed him.

THE DEMISE OF TANG HIGHLIGHTED not just the torpedoproblem, but also the inherent dangers of life as a sub-mariner, the most obvious of which was living and working

underwater in a high-pressure environment. If trapped, a subma-rine could quickly run out of options. The crew of USS Perch (SS-176), for instance, spent March 2, 1942, stuck at the bottom ofthe Java Sea as Japanese destroyers took turns dropping depthcharges on her. The sub survived the teeth-jarring assault and sur-faced. The next morning, Captain David Hurt ordered a test dive,which revealed nearly wrecked propulsion and electrical systemsin addition to massive leaks and inoperable torpedo tubes. “So wehad to resurface,” Electrician’s Mate Ernest Plantz said later, “andwhen we did, there was three Jap tin cans [destroyers] and twocruisers about three thousand, thirty-five hundred yards out aheadof us, and they started to fire. The first salvo went over us, the sec-ond one fell short of us, and the Skipper alerted us that we prob-ably have to scuttle ship if we couldn’t dive.” Soon Hurt did givethe order to scuttle, and the steaming, exhaust-filled Perch driftedto the sea bottom, while Hurt and his crew were picked up by an

1941DECEMBER 7 • After Pearl Harbor attack,

US Navy orders all-out sub warfare against Japan

1942MARCH 3 • US sub base at Fremantle, AustraliaAPRIL 15 • US sub base at Brisbane, Australia

MAY 31 • USS Silversides sinks Shunset Maru No. 5off Cape Muroto

JULY 15 • Sub base at Midway

1942 STATS: 350 patrols, 7 subs lost, 180 ships sunk

1943FEBRUARY 16 • USS Amberjack (SS-219)

lost in action off New BritainJUNE • US Rear Admiral Charles Lockwood orders mag-netic exploders on Mark 14 sub torpedoes deactivated

JULY 7 • First US sub raid in Sea of JapanJULY 24–25 • USS Tinosa (SS-283) fires 15 torpedoesat a Japanese oiler and destroyer; 14 are duds

SEPTEMBER • US Navy introduces Mark 18 electric torpedoOCTOBER 8–10 • USS Skate (SS-305) loses crewmanwhile rescuing six downed airmen off Wake Island

OCTOBER 11 • Commander Mush Morton’s USS Wahoolost in La Pérouse Strait between Russian and Japan


1944FEBRUARY 29 • USS Trout sinks Japanese transportSakito Maru and then is sunk herself by Japanese

destroyers in East China SeaJUNE 19 • During Battle of the Philippine Sea,USS Albacore sinks Japanese carrier Taiho

AUGUST 24 • Patrol Boat No. 102, a captured Americandestroyer rebuilt by Japan, sinks USS Harder off Luzon

SEPTEMBER 17 • On way to rescue Allied POWsset adrift when a Japanese transport sank,

USS Barb sinks carrier UnyoOCTOBER 25 • Struck by its own faulty torpedo,

USS Tang sinks in Formosa Strait


1945FEBRUARY 9–12 • USS Batfish sinks three Japanese subs

MAY 3 • USS Lagarto sunk in South China Sea,probably by Japanese minesweeper Hatsutaka

MAY 15 • USS Hawkbill sinks HatsutakaJUNE 22 • Commander Eugene Fluckey’s USS Barbmakes history by shelling Japanese port Shari

with deck-mounted rocketsAUGUST 15 • US receives official word of Japan’s surrender


T IME L INEUS Sub Action in the Pacific

enemy ship and then dispatched to a prison camp.Life aboard a submarine included numerous other challenges.

“It’s very boring at sea, during the 40–50-day patrols,” saysRichard Deconcini, who served as a ship’s cook, 2nd class, on USSHake (SS -256), USS Burrfish (SS-312), and USS Conger (SS-477).O’Kane’s success was indeed an exception. During a patrol of oneto two months, an American submarine typically sank no morethan three enemy ships. When not at battle stations or on routineduty, seamen sought ways to pass the time. Deconcini remembersthree seamen walking into the mess one time carrying a needle,pliers, and soap and offering to pierce ears for earrings.Then there was the heat generated by 70 to 90 men packed into

a tube with very little open space. Temperatures in submergedboats could become unbearable when air conditioning was turnedoff for silent running, which was often required during stressfulcombat situations. The crew of USS Puffer (SS-268) sufferedthrough one such nightmare on October 9–10, 1943. With hisvessel’s sonar heads damaged from a grounding a few days earli-er, Lieutenant Commander M.J. Jensen was trying to sink a largemerchantman in the Makassar Strait, between the Indonesian

islands of Borneo and Sulawesi. After blasting the ship with twotorpedoes, Jensen swung his boat around to finish off his preywith stern torpedoes. But one proved to be a dud, and the otherexploded prematurely. “At this time [11:19 A.M. on October 9]noted that Chidori Type destroyer previously sighted was closingthe scene fast,” read the ship’s patrol report. “Ship commencedfiring small caliber guns in our direction. Ship still seemed to beswinging very slowly. Commenced maneuvering for another sternshot and favorable track.” Then, at 11:28: “Heard pinging andfast screws getting closer. Commenced clearing scene, still hopingfor another shot.”

A T 11:45, THE REPORT CONTINUED, a series of depthcharges “rocked the boat like a sailboat in a typhoon,let water in hatches and Conning Tower door, backed

sea valves off seats, blew out plug in casting for sea valve toManeuvering Room water closet…allowing considerable water toenter…. Apparently sprung rudder and stern planes as evidencedby increased noise and overloading of motors. Starboard soundhead thrown out of alignment. Blew gaskets out of engine air

Sailors man Wahoo’s controls on January 27, 1943, keeping the sub at 300 feet to avoid depth charges from a persistent enemy destroyerescort. Morton reported the situation with the message “Another running gun battle today. Destroyer gunning, Wahoo running.”


induction and ship’s ventilation supply outboard valves.Miscellaneous glass and cork flew around.” Ordering Puffer downto about 400 feet, Jensen decided to wait out the lingering escort.It was a long wait. Determined to sink the American sub, the

Japanese destroyer stayed around to drop depth charges everyhour or two. Puffer went still deeper, to a risky 530 feet. After 12hours, a second Japanese ship joined the first. Their depth chargescaused the Puffer no additional damage, but kept it from surfac-ing for ventilation and repairs. The psychological effect of doingnothing but absorbing punishment began to weigh on thecrew. More difficult was the heat. In order noise and conserve power, Jensen shut down conditioning and ventilation systems. The tperature rose from around 80 degrees to ahigh as 130, and the men could not cooldown because the humidity got so bad thattheir perspiration would not evaporate.Jensen and his executive officer lost con-

trol of the crew about halfway into the sub’s37-hour ordeal. The men did not mutiny;they simply stopped doing their duty, eitherbecause they were physically incapacitated omentally worn-out. Anger and frustration

taken over, much of it directed at themselves for what they nowsaw as their own foolish decisions to join the sub service.The heat was oppressive and the air was going bad. “Both CO2

absorbent and oxygen were used but despite that the air was veryfoul toward the end of the dive,” read the sub’s official history.“Breathing was very difficult and headache was severe. An officermaking the rounds from control room to after torpedo room hadto stop and rest several times on the journey. A good many of themen were in a state of physical collapse. From the stupor in whichthey sank, it became impossible to arouse them to go on watch.Toward the end, stations were manned by volunteers, and by men

who had the stamina and the will to move and think. Many of theothers were past the stage of caring what happened.”The last depth charge fell at 1:15 A.M. on October 10, but the

enemy ships continued to lurk until 12:25 P.M. As soon as his antag-onists steamed off, Jensen ordered the Puffer’s ballast tanks emp-tied. The sub surfaced, and within an hour, the flooding caused bythe initial depth-charge attack was fixed, the hatches were open, theengines were running, and the crew was starting to revive. Jensentook Puffer back to base in Fremantle. Though he was praised for

keeping order during the emergency and getting Puffer and her he was reassigned to a staff position. About

crew was transferred to other boats. Puffer’s experience illustrated the vitalportance of modern systems such as air con-itioning, other wartime developments provedno less vital. These included air- and surface-search radar and, eventually, short-range FMsonar for minesweeping. Perhaps the mostsignificant of all the new technologies washe Ultra code-breaking system, whichlowed the decryption of Japanese radio traf- Decoded Ultra messages were used to directrican subs to intercept Japanese convoys,

warships, and submarines. The intelligence spurred the submarineservice’s devastating hunting of 1944 and 1945.The US submarine service’s trial-and-error improvements from

1942 to 1945 had made killers of already excellent boats.American subs offered solid diving performance, engines, andoptics. But their livability really set them apart. The Tambor,Gato,Balao, and Tench classes—all nearly identical from the outside, buteach incrementally better than its predecessor—featured air condi-tioning and freshwater distillation. Both technologies served dualpurposes. Freshwater was necessary to maintain the electrolytemixture in a sub’s batteries, but also allowed the men to shower



Above, left: Submariners went to sea well trained, and that saved many from death. These recruits at the Submarine Training School in NewLondon, Connecticut, in June 1942 are learning to adjust the bow and stern plane wheels to keep their sub level. Above, right: For US fliersshot down over the sea, subs were salvation. Here, Tang crewmen help rescued pilots aboard their sub in April 1944. Top: Subs could go

where surface ships dared not. This is Japan’s Mount Fuji, seen through a periscope on April 22, 1943.

once or twice a week and do laundry. Theair conditioning dehumidified the subs’interior, preventing heat exhaustionamong the crew but also averting electri-cal problems such as short circuits.Besides their role as hunters of enemy

shipping, submarines performed a vari-ety of special missions including bom-bardment of targets on shore, landingof troops and supplies, mine-laying,photo reconnaissance, and even minedetection. Particularly valuable was life-guard duty—the task of picking updowned aviators. Eighty-six Americansubmarines spent a total of 3,272 daysat this work and rescued 504 strandedairmen.By mid-1945, US subs were regularly

operating in Japanese home waters andthe number of enemy targets was rapid-ly decreasing. But success came with a cost. Of the 16,000 sub-mariners who served on war patrols, 375 officers and 3,131 mendied—a loss rate of 22 percent, the highest of any American serv-ice. Fifty-two of 288 boats were lost.

DESPITE THEIR SLOW START, US submarines ultimatelyenjoyed great success. The 263 boats sent into combatmade a total of 1,588 war patrols. The vast majority of

these, 1,474, took place in the Pacific Ocean; in the Atlantic, 114

patrols produced no confirmed kills. Inall, US submarines sank about 200Imperial Japanese Navy ships totalingsome 540,000 tons of shipping. Bycomparison, US carrier planes sank 161Japanese naval ships for 711,236 tons.More impressive was the devastating

toll the Pacific subs took on theJapanese merchant fleet: about 1,110vessels for some 4,800,000 tons of ship-ping. Crewed and supported by roughly50,000 servicemen—just 1.6 percent oftotal navy personnel—submarines sank54.6 percent of all Japanese vessels lostin the war. By early 1944, US subs weresinking more Japanese tankers than theisland nation could replace. A year later,Japan was virtually unable to importoil, the need for which had helped driveher into war to begin with.

For postwar chroniclers, the numbers hint at what might havebeen. “After the war, when the full impact of the submarine block-ade became known,” wrote historian Clair Blair, Jr., “manyexperts concluded that the invasions of the Palaus, the Philippines,Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, and the dropping of fire bombs andatomic bombs on Japanese cities, was unnecessary.”A

DREW AMES of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, regularly reviews booksfor America in WWII.



Opposite: Wahoo returns to Pearl Harbor inFebruary 1943 after a successful patrol (indicated bythe “clean sweep” broom atop her tower). Mortonis on the bridge. The pennant says “Shoot the sunzabitches!” Eight Japanese flags beneath it indicateenemy ships sunk. Above: Tang displayed her killson her battle flag, featuring a panther bursting

through a rising sun. Small Japanese flags indicateships sunk (those with rays indicate warships).Top: A sub ties up at Pearl Harbor after a longpatrol, her paint worn by saltwater and weather.

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Long before it became a movie, the so-called Great Escape was 76 real POWs

tunneling out of Stalag Luft III—and Germans excecuting 50 of them.

by Tom Huntington


the age of 17, he felt that “something went sour” in him. As a stu-dent at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Harsh was callow andarrogant and indulged a taste for booze and high jinks. Anacquaintance later told a reporter that Harsh was often “disgrace-fully drunk” and that when in such a state he was “mean andnasty instead of foolish or high-spirited.” Harsh also happened to be easily bored, a trait he shared with

friend Richard Gallogly, whose well-to-do family owned theAtlanta Journal. Restless at school and fueled on Prohibition-era

Harsh was lucky just to be alive at this point, having been sen-tenced to hang for murder in Georgia in the late 1920s. But hewas a long way from what might have been. “Life started out forme with great expectations,” he wrote in his 1971 autobiographyLonesome Road. Born in 1909, Harsh was the son of a wealthy shoe manufac-

turer in Milwaukee. His father died young, at age 53, but he left 12-year-old Harsh with a substantial trust fund and a hefty annualallowance. The money did not keep Harsh happy, however, and at

THE NOT-SO-GREAT ESCAPE by Tom Huntington

GEORGE HARSH, JR., SAT IN A NAZI PRISON CAMP surrounded by barbed-wire fencing, observation towers, and rifle-toting guards. But the Milwaukee native was hardly unnerved. He had been in prison before, doing hard time formurder. Now, in November 1942, he was a prisoner of war in Germany’s Stalag Luft III, and his long experience

behind bars put him in the thick of secret preparations for what would become the most famous Allied prison break.

Previous spread: Through this tunnel carved some 30 feet below ground, 76 Allied POWs escaped from Stalag Luft III in March 1944.Above, top: Flashy promos like this one hyped the July 4, 1963, release of The Great Escape. The star-studded film immortalized the escapees,

two-thirds of whom were not alive to see it. Above, left: Atlanta college student George Harsh faced a murder rap and a death sentencein 1928, but fate eventually landed him in Stalag Luft III. Above, center: A typical Stalag Luft III room is crammed with triple-deck bunks.

Above, right: Leader of the Royal Air Force’s 92 Squadron, Roger Joyce Bushell, was shot down in May 1940. He spent the next44 months working to escape prison camps.

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liquor, Gallogly, Harsh, and a few other students began dis-cussing the possibility of committing the perfect crime. In earlyOctober 1928, the gang began robbing small businesses for thethrill of it, often with Gallogly and Harsh alternating betweendriving the getaway car and doing the dirty work with a Colt .45automatic pistol. During one of the gang’s first jobs, guns were fired and a stray

bullet killed grocery clerk E.H. Meeks. Then, on the rainy night ofOctober 16, Harsh entered a store and encountered a pair of waryemployees. “This is a holdup!” Harsh yelled, drawing his gun.“Don’t move!” One of the clerks, a newlywed named Willard Smith, pulled his

own gun from under the counter and opened fire. Harsh firedback and Smith fell dead. Harsh staggered out of the store andback to the car with a bullet wound in his groin. Gallogly hit thegas and roared off through the rain to the home of a Harsh familyfriend to lie low. Harsh’s wound was not serious, and he resumed his spotty

classroom attendance. But his luck ran out. A housekeeper haddiscovered his bloody clothes, which bore his name, and sent themto a local dry cleaner, who was startled and called the police. Harsh was arrested and tried for Smith’s murder, as was


Gallogly. Harsh’s lawyer offered a plea of temporary insanity, buta jury quickly found Harsh guilty. A judge sentenced him to death.After Gallogly pled guilty and received a life sentence, however,Harsh’s sentence was reduced to life, too.

HARSH WAS SUBSEQUENTLY SENT OFF to spend the rest of hisdays doing hard labor on chain gangs. Weighed down byheavy steel leg shackles, Harsh and his new companions

worked daily under the hot sun shoveling dirt and gravel for roadsunder the glare of guards who welcomed opportunities to admin-ister beatings. At the end of each torturous day, Harsh collapsedon his bunk inside his wooden camp cage with nothing to lookforward to but more of the same. “This was a brutal, harsh lifewe lived, and we were surrounded on all sides by violence, sadism,and horror,” he wrote. He admitted stabbing another prisoner todeath for stealing his soap. He escaped punishment for that crimewhen his fellow inmates claimed they had seen nothing. Six years passed. Harsh’s life took a turn for the better when a

violent camp escape revealed the prison’s inhumane living condi-tions. Harsh testified in the investigation that followed andreceived a transfer to a prison system closer to Atlanta, where lifeproved easier. His leg shackles were removed, and he gradually

Allied “kriegies” (short for kriegesgefangenen, the German word for prisoner of war) exercised and killed time by walking what theycalled “the circuit,” a path beaten into the ground along the rail that warned prisoners of the barbed-wire fencing 10 yards beyond.

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nel began hitting us, and it sounded like wet gravel being hurledagainst sheet metal,” Harsh remembered. “Then we started takingdirect hits, and the aircraft jumped and bucked and thrashed, andpieces of it were being blown off, and I could see them whippingpast me.” As the pummeled aircraft began its fatal plunge toearth, an explosion propelled Harsh out its rear turret. Saved byhis parachute, he woke up on the ground—in the hands ofGerman soldiers.

A FTER PROCESSING, HARSH WAS SENT to Stalag Luft III, aprison camp for Allied airman run by the Luftwaffe (“AirForce”) and located 100 miles southeast of Berlin in Sagan

(now part of Poland). Rechristened Kriegsgefangener (“Prisonerof War”) 10522, Harsh had little trouble adapting to the loss ofhis briefly held freedom. “I had been through all this before,” herecalled. “I don’t believe I had fully made the adjustment to oncemore being ‘free’ when I found myself again imprisoned. It wasalmost as though I had traded one set of guards in black Stetsonsfor another set in steel helmets.” Stalag Luft III , which would eventually stretch across 60 acres

and hold 10,000 prisoners, heldnumerous long-suffering Britishairmen who, after countlessattempts to escape myriad otherprison camps, were expert tunnel-diggers. Their leader was WingCommander Harry “Wings” Day,who regularly reminded his chargesthat it was a soldier’s duty toattempt escape. If nothing else,Allied escapees could aid the wareffort by forcing German troopswho were needed elsewhere tochase them across the countryside. Day’s second-in-command in the

camp’s X Organization, the select group that handled the escapeplans, was fellow RAF officer Roger “Big X” Bushell, a squadronleader. As Australian flier Paul Brickhill would note in his 1950chronicle The Great Escape (on which the 1963 film of the samename would be based), “The British had a head start on theAmericans because they were there first. Then the Yanks joined usand took to the escape business like ducks to water.”One day in early 1943, Wally Floody, a tall Canadian whom

Brickhill characterized as having a “strong-minded, overpoweringpersonality,” took Harsh for a walk around the camp’s perimeterand briefed him about brewing escape plans. Stalag Luft III wasgrowing, and hundreds of Allied airmen would soon be movedinto its new North Compound. Once settled in the drab new quar-ters, the prisoners would dig three tunnels codenamed Tom, Dick,and Harry. Bushell reasoned that while the Germans might discover

earned responsibilities and a measure of freedom as an aide at aprison hospital. One day the doctor handed him a copy of Grey’sAnatomy and suggested he study it. “Over the months I almostlearned that tome by heart,” Harsh wrote later, “and I went onthen to other medical books, to the study of syndromes and symp-toms, to the procedures of diagnosis and treatment.” On one winter’s day in October 1940, according to Harsh, a

guard rushed a prisoner with appendicitis to the infirmary. A howl-ing ice storm prevented the doctor from reaching the prison, soHarsh performed emergency surgery himself. Impressed by Harsh’slife-saving work, the doctor wrote to Georgia Governor E.D.Rivers to recommend a pardon. On November 21, Rivers grantedit, and after 12 years in captivity, Harsh walked out of prison.Bewildered by life as a free man, Harsh boarded a train for

Canada—after declining an opportunity to work as a hired gunfor a numbers racket. He soon found himself drinking in aMontreal bar with a motley mix of Canadians and Americansbound for war duty, some with the Black Watch (Canada’s famedRoyal Highland Regiment) and others with the Royal CanadianAir Force (RCAF). The United States was still a year from enteringthe war, but the Canadian armedforces needed men badly enough tooverlook a potential soldier’sadvanced age or checkered past. Encouraged to volunteer, Harsh

signed up, trading his American cit-izenship for an RCAF uniform. “Iwas trying to prove that ‘they’ werewrong when ‘they’ sentenced me tohang,” he later wrote; “I was tryingto prove that ‘they’ were wrongwhen ‘they’ passed a law barring ex-convicts from the armed services;but most of all, I was trying to provemyself, trying to prove to my ownsatisfaction, that I really belonged in this world as a full memberof a society that had once expelled me.”After three months of training and gunnery school, Harsh the

ex-con-turned-aerial-gunner received an officer’s commission inthe Royal Air Force (RAF). Shipped to England, he was soon serv-ing as a squadron gunnery officer during bombing runs overGermany. “It seems rather useless now, useless and repetitious, towrite of my experiences during the months I was an operationalairman flying combat missions,” he wrote. “The whole period,looking back on it, is one strung-together mishmash of times dur-ing which I was either half-drunk or half-terrified, and sometimesI was both together.” In the overnight darkness of October 5, 1942, Harsh’s Handley

Page Halifax heavy bomber was part of a raid on Cologne whenit ran into a funnel of German anti-aircraft fire. “Pieces of shrap-

Opposite: This aerial view shows Stalag Luft III’s tidy plot outside Sagan, Germany. Above: The prisoners’ escape committee quietly identifiedand studied each camp overseer and his daily routine. Such secretive work included luring Germans to spots where concealed kriegies couldsnap their pictures. Here is a photo of five of the camp’s “ferrets,” enlisted men whose sole duty was to sniff out escape plans. The ferrets’

sneakiness and the authority they had to enter and search huts without warning made them the special objects of kriegie animosity.


THE NOT-SO-GREAT ESCAPE by Tom HuntingtonO

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one or even two of the passages, they would hardly suspect theprisoners were digging three. While the men carved their way through the earth, a security

team would keep tabs on all Germans, especially the “ferrets”who wandered around camp poking their noses into every nookand cranny. Bushell already had an American, Lieutenant ColonelAlbert P. “Big S” Clark, in charge of security. Clark was a futureUS Air Force general whose quiet cunning had earned him theadmiration of senior British officers. But the Germans werereportedly planning to separate the Yanks from the Brits, andBushell needed someone to safeguard what was sure to be a long-term project. Floody, with whom Harsh had shared details of hissordid past, believed that the experience peculiar to an ex-con

would prove useful, so he asked Harsh totake the job. “You crazy bastards aregoing to get the whole lot of us shot!”Harsh protested. “It’s as stupid as a liontamer sticking his head in a lion’s mouthand then kicking the lion in the balls!”Floody brushed off his objections, andHarsh eventually joined the effort. He andthe 200 men of his security detail begansharpening an elaborate series of signals—opening a window, closing a book, coughing,and so forth—to serve as alarms whenever ferretsapproached.On April 1, 1943, Harsh and some 600 other men moved into

the North Compound, and Bushell immediately put them to work.Prisoners began digging tunnels in three separate barracks, plungingeach one 30 feet straight down before turning to run parallel to theground—deep enough so the surveillance microphones Germanshad inserted in the soil around the camp would not pick up sound.The tunnel entrances were cleverly disguised according to designsby a Polish officer known simply as Minskewitz. Tom’s invisibletrap door lay unassumingly alongside a chimney; Dick’s entrance

was hidden beneath a large shower drain; and Harry extended frombeneath a wood-burning stove that was continuously lit. Floody, who had worked in Canadian gold mines, oversaw the

digging. Working in shifts, prisoners hauled dirt up from the tun-nels in water jugs and dumped it into blankets. “Penguins,” sonamed for their waddling, disposed of the dirt by spilling it bit bybit around the camp from bags suspended beneath their coats orunder their pants. Improvisation and ingenuity became operational hallmarks for

the complex operation, as prisoners did everything from manufac-turing compasses and forging official travel documents to tailor-ing civilian clothing and German uniforms. “For over a year thework progressed on the tunnels, and whenever possible we worked

around the clock,” Harsh wrote.“Looking back on that period of my life,I seemed to have spent most of the timewith my heart in my mouth.”

The digging was hard, made more dif-ficult by the sandy soil, which tended tocollapse. Yet the tunnels steadilyadvanced. Tom had stretched a good260 feet—still short of the surrounding

forest, but an impressive 140 feet outside theprison’s barbed wire—by the time Germans discovered it

during a surprise inspection. It was a crushing blow, but Bushell’searlier reasoning proved correct: the Germans did not suspectmore than one tunnel. The prisoners now shifted their full attention to Harry, limit-

ing Dick’s use to storage. Shored up by wood liberated frombunks and building frames, Harry stretched for 336 feet. A coilof wire swiped by a prisoner kept it well lighted, while a jury-rigged pump filled it with fresh air through a pipe fashioned fromdiscarded milk tins. To ease access to the tunnel’s increasinglength, the men managed to lay wooden tracks for wheeled trol-leys manipulated by ropes.

THE NOT-SO-GREAT ESCAPE by Tom Huntington

Above, left: These forged papers helped Dutch airman Bram Van der Stok slip out of Germany after the Great Escape. Above, upper middle:One kriegie crafted this crude but effective compass. Above, right: The air pipe that ventilated the tunnel known as Harry was largely

fashioned from empty cans of Klim brand powdered milk. Above, bottom: This Red Cross box greeted Lieutenant Colonel Albert Clark whenhe returned to the States. Rather than its original food parcels, it contained two of Clark’s scrapbooks and a bound volume of the Luftwaffe

magazine Der Adler (“The Eagle”). Clark had been transferred out of the Stalag Luft III North Compound shortly before the escape.

As the spring of 1944 approached, Harry inched closer andcloser to the sheltering forest. Then, on March 1, the always-sus-picious Germans singled out 19 men they assumed would beinvolved in any escape attempt and transferred them to a camp inBelaria, a few miles to the west. Among them was George Harsh,who, after supporting the tunnel work for nearly a year, had sud-denly lost his chance to escape.The prisoners finally made their break 23 days later, on the

night of March 24, 1944. Things did not go smoothly. When pris-oner Johnny Bull peered cautiously out of the hole, he got theshock of his life: Harry was a good 10 feet short of the forest, soalert guards would be able to spotthe men as they popped out of theground. The prisoners quicklyimprovised a plan to have a manhiding in the woods tug on a rope toalert the next man in the tunnelwhen it was safe to emerge. But thatmeant each prisoner’s exit had to betimed with the guards’ movements,limiting the number of men whocould get out. Amid the tense opera-tion, portions of the tunnel’s roofcollapsed, and precious time tickedaway as the men frantically clearedout the debris. Making matters stillworse, the Germans cut off thecamp’s electricity in response to aBritish air raid, plunging Harry intototal darkness. Despite the obstacles, anxious air-

men continued to emerge from theground and crawl into the woodsuntil about 4:55 A.M., when the pitchnight turned to gray morning. Whena guard wandered in the direction ofthe escape hole, he noticed steam ris-ing from the warm tunnel into thecold morning air and became suspi-cious. He lowered the rifle from hisshoulder. One last prisoner poppedfrom the tunnel and broke for thewoods. To protect him, two othershiding nearby jumped in front of the guard with their hands up.“Nicht schiessen!” (“Don’t shoot!”), they shouted.

Eighty men had emerged from Harry. The guards captured fourof them at the exit, and 76 others escaped into the night. Word ofthe breakout quickly reached Berlin, where Heinrich Himmler,commander of the elite Nazi SS, grumbled about having to send60,000 to 70,000 troops hunting for a handful of Allied miscre-ants. Only three of the escapees ever reached the safety of Alliedlines. Two of them, disguised as Norwegian electricians, hoppedtrains to the port town of Stettin, where sympathetic Swedishsailors smuggled them aboard their vessel. A third made his waythrough Holland, Paris, neutral Spain, and finally British

Gibraltar. Casting a wide net, Germans captured another 23escapees and sent them back to prison.

THE OTHER ESCAPEES WERE LESS FORTUNATE. In an effort todiscourage future escape attempts, Adolf Hitler ordered anumber of Stalag Luft III’s escapees shot. A total of 50 were

executed, although official reports stated that the men had beenshot trying to escape. Among the dead was Roger Bushell. Afterthe war, the RAF Special Investigations Branch tracked down 18members of the Gestapo (secret police) and Kriminalpolizei(“Criminal Police”) and tried and convicted them of murder.

Fourteen received death sentences. Harsh remained in the Belaria

stockade until January 1945, whenthe German captors rounded up thefamished, rag-clad prisoners thereand marched them west. “My lifeappeared to be one long black jokeperpetrated by the gods, and thismarch was the culminating piece ofblack humor,” he wrote. Herdedalong by a handful of guards, he andperhaps a hundred other prisonershad reached Luckenwalde, just southof Berlin, when Soviet Red Armyforces swept into the area and tookpossession of them. The Soviets sentthe POWs across the Elbe River toAmerican forces, who responded inkind with Soviet prisoners whom theyhad liberated. Once again, Harshwas free. His frustrating but timelytransfer shortly before the StalagLuft III breakout had probably savedhis life.When Brickhill penned his narra-

tive of the escape, he asked Harsh towrite the introduction. “It is thestory of achievement against impos-sible odds,” Harsh wrote. “And itproves something that I believed thenand know now—there is nothingthat can stop a group of men, regard-

less of race, creed, color or nationality, from achieving a goal oncethey agree as to what that goal is.” By the time he wroteLonesome Road, his viewpoint had changed. “At this date, afterthe passage of all these years and because of the events that havetranspired during these years,” he wrote, “I consider the GreatEscape to have been an act of typical military madness, a futile,empty gesture and a needless sacrifice of fifty lives.”A

TOM HUNTINGTON, a contributing editor of America in WWII, isthe author of the newly released Searching for George GordonMeade: The Forgotten Victor of Gettysburg from StackpoleBooks.


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The Great Escape angered Germans all the way up thecommand chain to Adolf Hitler, who ordered a crackdownin all prison camps. A copy of this warning poster was

hung in each Stalag Luft III compound.

Enemies

in Our Midst?

As GIs battled Nazi

and Fascist forces overseas,

the US government put

15,000 German and Italian immigrants

in prison to keep an eye on them.

by Melissa Amateis Marsh

Previous spread: German-born Gertrude Schneider (left), the wife of a US citizen, was arrested hours after the Pearl Harbor attack. NativeItalian Filippo Molinari (right) had fought alongside Americans in World War I before moving to the United States. His job with the Italian-language newspaper L’Italia caught the attention of federal lawmen. Opposite: Schneider’s immigrant record classified her as an “Alien Enemy orPrisoner of War.” Above, top: This government-produced poster featuring a German soldier reminded American industrial workers that enemiescould be in their midst. Above, bottom: Internee sports teams and band members pose in the Seagoville, Texas, internment camp in 1943.

Enemies in Our Midst? by Melissa Amateis Marsh


GERTRUDE ANNA SCHNEIDER was in her home inSouthern California on the night of December 7,1941, just hours after the Japanese attack onPearl Harbor, when she heard a knock on thedoor. It was FBI agents. Schneider, a 33-year-old

native of Backnang, Germany, let them in and then let them searchher house. They discovered a box of letters from Schneider’s rela-tives overseas. One postcard featured a picture of Adolf Hitler.That was enough, it turned out, to place Schneider under arrest.

Bewildered and scared, Schneider said little during the ride tothe police station until one of the agents asked her why she neverbecame an American citizen. “I told him that my folks were citi-zens, my husband was a citizen, and that I had two American-bornchildren,” she recalled later. “I felt like an American and just hadn’tbegun the application for the citizenship papers themselves.”

Separated from her husband and two daughters, Schneiderspent the next year at the Camp Seagoville internment camp, a

converted women’s prison southeast of Dallas. She was just one ofthousands of German and Italian immigrants and American citi-zens who suffered this sort of treatment. While American fightingmen faced the enemy overseas, the American government trackeddown, uprooted, and funneled 10,905 Germans and 3,278Italians into detention camps. If those numbers paled in compari-son to the masses of Japanese and Japanese American citizensinterned for the war’s duration, the experiences of the individualswere much the same.

By the mid 1930s, the continuing, oppressive effects of theGreat Depression, the rise of Fascism and Nazism overseas, andthe increasing aggression of Japan, Germany, and Italy hadAmerican government officials on edge. Rumors of Nazi spy ringswere splashed across newspaper front pages. In some cities, rabidmembers of the German American Bund, an alliance of perhaps25,000 sympathetic to the Nazi cause, attended robust rallies,while pro-Fascist Italian American newspapers sang the praises of

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Italian Premier Benito Mussolini. In Washington, DC, PresidentFranklin Roosevelt contemplated the frightening potential of agrowing so-called Fifth Column of subversive elements within theUnited States as Hollywood films warned of Nazi and Fascistcharacters bent on destroying America. In September 1936, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, with Roose-

velt’s blessing, began compiling lists of people considered poten-tial threats to the United States. Every FBI office received a memoinstructing it to gather information about individuals or organiza-tions with Nazi, Fascist, or Communist connections. German andItalian immigrants who were not American citizens were especial-ly suspect. Many, like Gertrude Schneider, had been residents foryears but had never taken the time to go through the citizenshipprocess. Some still identified too strongly with their native coun-


tries to give up their existing citizenship. Others mistakenly thoughtthat bearing children in America automatically made the parentscitizens. Whatever the reason an immigrant was not an Americancitizen, the fact caught the wary eyes of War Department andDepartment of Justice officials who suspected that some foreignnationals refused to apply for citizenship because they were underthe ideological spell of Nazism and Fascism. By the spring of1939, Hoover, with help from the US Army’s military division andthe US Navy Office of Naval Intelligence, had gathered 10 millionnames. Most of these belonged to entirely loyal residents. Somewere German or Italian WWI veterans, members of heritage-basedsocial clubs, or unknowing victims of excessive scrutiny. As pockets of anti-German and -Italian sentiment grew, Hoover

added to jangled nerves by announcing “that there is a Fifth

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Column which has already started to march is an acknowledgedreality. That it menaces America is an established fact. That itmust be met is the common resolve of every red-blooded citizen.”Roosevelt, Hoover, and Martin Dies, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, considered the Fifth Columnthreat genuine and urged Americans to be vigilant. They got theirwish. Reports of suspected espionage and other suspicious activi-ty skyrocketed. In 1938 the FBI had received a total of 250 suchcomplaints; during a single day in May 1940, Hoover’s men wereoverwhelmed by 2,871. The FBI was indeed tracking a number offoreign spies operating on American soil. But the lines betweenNazi and Fascist and ordinary German and Italian immigrantswere becoming blurred.

WITH FEARS OF INTERNAL SUBVERSION increasing, thegovernment debated what would be done with poten-tial troublemakers in the time between their arrest

and possible deportation. In 1939, US Representative Sam Hobbsof Alabama introduced legislation thatwould legalize the detention of“enemy aliens” (a misleading termultimately applied to all aliens fromAxis countries) in camps under thejurisdiction of the US Department ofLabor. Scorned by its opposition as the“Concentration Camp Bill,” the Hobbsbill (House Resolution 3) drew heatedopposition from the likes of the radicalCongressman Vito Marcantonio fromEast Harlem. “Nowhere in this bill is anyprovision found for due process; in otherwords, for any kind of a trial, with orwithout a jury,” Marcantonio fumed.After months of acrimonious debate andnumerous revisions, the Hobbs bill wasdefeated in November 1941. By then, how-ever, Roosevelt had authorized an emer-gency program that allowed the JusticeDepartment “to arrest and detain those per-sons deemed dangerous in the event of war,invasion, or insurrection in and of a foreignenemy.” Out came the FBI’s expanding list of names of thosebelieved to be threats to national security.Inclusion on the list didn’t always require hard evidence. In the

tense prewar environment, a wronged spouse, a jealous neighbor,or a vengeful employee could file a complaint and send the FBIscurrying after the accused. One German alien was added to theroll after his neighbors heard him listening to German music. The Justice Department organized the growing roster into three

categories. Category A was for those considered dangerous andsubject to immediate arrest if America entered the war, B was forpotentially dangerous people, and C was for those who meritedclose observation. Thus was born the ABC List. According to aDecember 8, 1941, memorandum from Hoover to an Immigrationand Naturalization Service official, the majority of those on theABC list were naturalized or native-born American citizens.Following the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939,

the US government stepped up its domestic security efforts. TheAlien Registration Act of 1940 required all immigrant residentsover the age of 14 to report to be fingerprinted, photographed,and registered. Each was assigned a number and given a registra-tion card that he or she was required to carry at all times. Theprocess ultimately established that some 4.9 million aliens lived inthe United States, the largest group of which was Italians, at695,000. Germans ranked second and Japanese third. Upon sign-ing the act, Roosevelt stated that it “should be interpreted and

administered as a program designed not onlyfor the protection of the country but also forthe protection of the loyal aliens who are itsguests…. The only effective system of con-trol over aliens in this country must comefrom the Federal Government alone.”

Department of Justice officials concludedthat enemy aliens “should be treated as pris-oners of war rather than as criminals.”Plans for selecting internment camp sitesmoved forward, as did a case-by-case eval-uation process. Hearing boards were creat-ed. Arrested aliens would appear beforethese three-man panels along with option-al counsel, who could not address theboard or examine witnesses. Witnessescould testify on the behalf of the accused.After completing an evaluation, theboard would send its report to theJustice Department’s Enemy AlienControl Unit, which could decide onone of three courses of action: condi-

tional or unconditional release, supervisedparole with or without bond, or internment for the rest of the war. Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on the morning of

December 7, 1941, Roosevelt issued Presidential Proclamations2525, 2526, and 2527, which instantly certified Japanese,German, and Italian immigrants as “enemy aliens.” Like the con-troversial Enemy Alien Act of 1798, the declarations technicallypertained only to citizens not born in the United States. Arrestsbegan that night, though Congress had not yet issued declarationsof war against Germany and Italy.


Above: This poster was a tool in the German American Bund effort to recruit Americans sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Opposite: A 60-footportrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas dominates a massive bund rally in New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Washington’sBirthday in 1939. Opposite, inset: Fritz Kuhn leaves Ellis Island after the government ordered him deported in 1946. Kuhn, a chemist who hadserved in the German army during World War I before migrating to Mexico and then the United States, was a Ford Motor Company employee

who became head of the bund in 1935. In 1939 he was convicted of embezzlement and sent to jail, where he remained through the war.


closed. German or Italian social groups andgatherings drew close scrutiny. By February1942, 2,192 Japanese, 1,243 Germans, and 264Italians had been interned. On February 19, Roosevelt, under intense

pressure from the War Department, issued thecontroversial Executive Order 9066, which estab-lished restricted “military areas”—wide swaths ofland near vulnerable coastlines, power plants, andmilitary outposts—from which enemy aliens couldlegally be removed. This harsh measure that eventhe infamously zealous Hoover called “wholly

unnecessary” littered areas from Washington State to SouthernArizona with public proclamations that read: “The United StatesGovernment requires all aliens of German, Italian, or Japanesenationality to vacate this area.”The order also led to the mass relocation of some 110,000

Japanese Americans from the West Coast. A scattering of militarycommanders that included the outspoken General John L.DeWitt, commander of the Ninth Corps Area headquartered inSan Francisco, called for a similar withdrawal of all Italians andGermans. But the calls went unheeded, mostly because the sheernumbers and widespread nature of those stateside populationswould have guaranteed a challenging roundup operation thatmight have disrupted the war effort. But roughly 10,000 wereforced to move, which, along with government-imposed curfewsand travel restrictions, cost many of them their jobs. This was

Filippo Molinari was among the first to beapprehended in San Jose, California. “At 11P.M. three policemen came to the front doorand two at the back,” he later wrote to a rela-tive. “They told me that, by order of PresidentRoosevelt, I must go with them. They didn’teven give me time to go to my room and puton my shoes. I was wearing slippers.”German immigrant Peter Joseph Greis

endured a similar ordeal in Milwaukee onDecember 9. “Everyone in the house wasasleep when the FBI agents pounded on our door,” his son Guentherlater testified. “My father went to the door, half-asleep. The FBIagents demanded that he come with them. He was not allowed tobring anything. My mother was horrified and begged them not totake him. That was the last we knew of Dad for 6 weeks.” During the fear-fueled days following the attack on Pearl

Harbor, government officials arrested 857 Germans and 147Italians in 35 states. On December 17, Hoover instructed agents tofurnish the FBI with “the names concerning persons of Americancitizenship, either by birth or naturalization, who you believeshould be considered for custodial detention.” Those on the listwho were not immediately arrested had to deal with restrictionson travel and property ownership and surprise visits by FBIagents. Items the bureau deemed contraband under the circum-stances—short-wave radios, cameras, weapons, and even flash-lights—were regularly confiscated. Italian-language schools were


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especially true for Italian fishermen, since wharves from whichthey operated were now closed to them. Aliens who were arrested were dispatched to camps scattered

across the nation. Their numbers included German and Italianaliens the United States had accepted from Peru and other LatinAmerican countries in the interest of security in the hemisphere.Spouses and other loved ones often went along voluntarily withthose arrested to avoid being separated. The camp sites where theywere held included converted former Civilian Conservation Corpscampuses, parts of existing military bases, and even churches. Mostof the enemy aliens arrested on the East Coast were processed at theEllis Island Reception Center, known typically as the gateway intoAmerica. Those to be deported or repatriated to their native coun-

tries were dispatched directly from there. Eventually, some 2,650internees were exchanged for Americans held in Germany.The internment camps varied in condition. Some were pleasant.

Others, like Texas’s Crystal City Internment Camp, were not.Home to a substantial Japanese contingent, Crystal City also heldGermans and a smaller number of Italians. It sat close to the bor-der with Mexico, and its scalding desert environment was harshand unforgiving. Guard towers, attack dogs, and barbed wire con-stantly reminded those inside of their circumstances.In July 1943, 17-year-old German immigrant Eberhard Fuhr

and his older brother were reunited with their younger brother andtheir parents at Crystal City. “The camp was filled with insects andscorpions,” Fuhr remembered. “We received letters from friends


Above: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover entered the national spotlight as an assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in 1918. Amid post-WWI fears of communism’s spread, Hoover worked on the Palmer Raids, which resulted in the deportation of hundreds of immigrants suspectedof anarchist leanings. Opposite: Beginning in 1940, the federal government kept special records on immigrants from Axis countries. The next stepfor thousands of those aliens was internment camp. San Jose resident Filippo Molinari (left) and Cincinnati teenager Eberhard Fuhr (right) were among them.

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and relatives, but these were heavily censored with much informa-tion cut out. Living conditions were tolerable at best.” At Gertrude Schneider’s destination of Camp Seagoville, Texas,

families resided in second-hand, prefabricated houses that hadbeen dubbed “victory huts.” Others stayed in dormitories.Conditions at Seagoville were vacation-like compared to CrystalCity, as Alfred Plaschke discovered after being transferred fromSeagoville to Crystal City. “We thought we’d been brought to theend of the world…,” he recalled. “Suddenly we saw nothing butdry, hot, flat desert, with rows and rows of plasterboard andtarpaper shacks.” Seagoville’s population hovered at around 700.Crystal City’s was four times that.Treatment of internees was based on the Geneva Conventions,

the series of international agreements on the treatment of prison-ers of war. Detainees were provided food, clothing, and basic san-itation. They had access to exercise and religious and medicalservices, and there were social activities such as theatre, singinggroups, orchestras, and athletics. Men and women worked, andchildren went to school. Camp residents were supplied with plas-tic tokens, which they redeemed for food and clothing at a gener-al store. Most camps turned out their own newspapers. Someinternees made the best of things. Exasperated troublemakersstarted fights or stole from others.Nationally, the treatment of supposed enemy aliens, particular-

ly Germans and Italians, sparked considerable debate. AttorneyGeneral Francis Biddle, a newer addition to Roosevelt’s cabinetand a counterweight to unyielding War Department officials, laterdescribed the government’s security measures as “protective andnegative.” Amid a series of government hearings held in lateFebruary and early March 1942, US Representative John H. Tolanof Northern California testified that it was wrong “to treat alienmothers of soldiers…in the same way as dangerous enemy aliens.”By the fall, such sentiment, along with more practical consider-

ations, had gained some traction, and on Columbus Day, October12, Biddle announced, “Italian nationals in the US would no

longer be classified as ‘enemies.’” It was a decision made with atleast some political and military considerations in mind. The inva-sion of North Africa was imminent and a follow-up step into Italywas increasingly likely, and Roosevelt needed the political supportof Italian Americans, some 500,000 of whom were serving in thearmed forces. “I don’t care so much about Italians,” Rooseveltonce said. “They’re a lot of opera singers.” Still, half of theinterned Italians were not paroled until Italy’s surrender to Alliedforces in September 1943.

GERMAN INTERNEES FARED WORSE. Roosevelt was moreleery of Germans than he was Italians. “They may bedangerous,” he said. Following Germany’s surrender in

May 1945, Germans considered a threat were notified that theywere being expelled from the country. Others were paroled,exchanged, or transferred to other camps as their own transienthomes were boarded up. Shipped to Ellis Island, Eberhard Fuhrremained there with his family until September 1947, more thantwo years after the war ended.Gertrude Anna Schneider had walked out of Camp Seagoville

in January 1943, after numerous hearings and a year of confine-ment. By then, two of her brothers were serving in the US Navy.Meanwhile, her husband, Paul, had been forced out of numerousjobs and had lost the family home, despite his being an Americancitizen. In desperation, the Schneiders briefly relocated to Wis-consin, where they remained until Paul finally managed to con-vince FBI agents of his loyalty. As frustrated as Gertrude remained over her own treatment, she

felt worse for Paul: “The injustice of my internment, and knowingthat his citizenship meant nothing during wartime—since he was‘just a German’—was something he never got over.”A

MELISSA AMATEIS MARSH has a master’s degree in history from theUniversity of Nebraska. Her most recent article for America inWWII was “Charlie Brown’s War” in the December 2012 issue.



ALPHADOG

Every morning, FDR received a breakfast tray with

eggs and toast—and a treat for his most trusted and

faithful friend, America’s most highly placed canine.

by David A. Norris

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Previous spread: There is no better goodwill ambassador than a loveable dog—the White House press photographers could vouch for that.Here they pose for Fala, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Scottish terrier, on the White House lawn in 1942. Top: As the president’s constantcompanion, Fala naturally enjoyed certain distinctions and privileges, including a dog tag engraved with his famous address. Above: But

Fala also had to do his part for the war effort. In June 1942, that meant giving up his toys to an emergency scrap rubber drive.


None of this shocked anyone in the room. Being friends withthe president had its perks, and for Fala, President Franklin D.Roosevelt’s friendly Scottish terrier, sleeping in White House fire-places was just one of many. The little dog was FDR’s constantcompanion throughout the war years, even on the road, oftenoverseas, and on the president’s final journey.

Originally named Big Boy, Fala was born to Scottish terriersnamed Peter and Wendy on April 7, 1940, in the home ofKatharine Kellog of Westport, Connecticut. Kelloggave the shaggy black puppy to a friend, Roose-velt’s cousin Margaret “Daisy” Suckley. Shein turn taught the dog a few tricks anddelivered him to the White House as apresent on November 10, 1940. BigBoy soon became Murray the Outlawof Falahill, in honor of a swashbuck-ling 15th-century Scottish ancestor ofFDR—Fala for short.

Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor,had owned other dogs, and some hadcaused trouble at 1600 PennsylvaniaAvenue. In 1933, when the Rooseveltsmoved into the White House, Eleanor’seight-year-old Scottish terrier Meggie bit areporter and made headlines. Winks, theRoosevelts’ English setter puppy, got news cover-age for wolfing down several plates of bacon and eggsthat had been laid out in the servants’ dining room one morn-ing in 1934. And Major the German shepherd made an even big-ger story in 1935 by biting America’s first elected female senator,Hattie Caraway of Arkansas. Winks got chuckles for his offense;not so Meggie and Major, who were exiled to new homes.

Unlike those delinquent dogs of the 1930s, Fala adjusted wellto White House life and formed a special bond with Roosevelt. Inthe early 1940s, the stress of the presidency and the war erodedFDR’s health. It is impossible to measure the positive effect thatFala’s affection had on the Allied war effort by revivingRoosevelt’s spirits.

For some time, as “first dog,” Fala wore the District of Colum-bia’s dog license tag No. 1. Unfortunately, wartime metal

shortages induced the district to issue new plastictags in 1943, and numbers 1 and 2 went to

other dogs whose owners worked at theWhite House. FBI director J. Edgar Hoo-ver’s dog got tag No. 3.

Even without license tag No. 1, Falagot top treatment at the White House.There was always a treat for Falawith FDR’s breakfast tray—thoughthe presidential pet did have to waitto get his main dinner at suppertime.In between, there were orders forbid-ding anyone but the president himselfto feed Fala. Otherwise, White House

employees and visitors just couldn’tresist giving treats and snacks to the friend-

ly little dog. At night, Fala curled up and sleptin a chair near the foot of the president’s bed.

Much of FDR’s personal care was handled by hisvalet, Arthur Prettyman. A retired navy chief steward, Pretty-

man helped the president with bathing, dressing, and other per-sonal tasks. His duties also included taking Fala for walks, and hewas often photographed walking the dog at railroad stations duringhalts on trips. Prettyman was the only person allowed to bathe Fala.

ALATE ARRIVAL JOINED THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS CONFERENCE on September 20, 1943. Instead of taking a seat, hewandered among the more than 100 radio and newspaper journalists in the room. He occasionally sniffed an ankle

or shoe. When he lost interest, he wandered outside for a bit, then trotted back in. Parading nonchalantly past the presi-dent of the United States, he jumped into an empty fireplace, curled up, and took a nap.

ALPHA DOG by David A. Norris

Fala was a natural for the media. Cute andwell behaved, perky and friendly, the pupappeared in numerous press photos. One hadhim posing by a camera, as if he were goingto take a picture of the photographers at apress conference. In 1942, he appeared withhis master on the cover of the magazineLiberty. That same year, Suckley and AliceDalgliesh co-wrote a “biography” of thepresident’s dog, The True Story of Fala. In1943 Fala starred in a newspaper cartoonseries, Mr. Fala of the White House, drawnby Alan Foster. A prominent illustrator of thetime, Foster boasted a resume that includedseveral covers for the Saturday Evening Post.

FROM THE FUNNY PAPERS, Fala went toHollywood—well, sort of. The White

House pooch was a character in the 1943movie comedy Princess O’Rourke, starringOlivia de Havilland and Robert Cummings.Alas for Fala, his scenes were filmed with astand-in named Whiskers.

Later that year, Fala did get his momenton the silver screen, in MGM’s Fala: The President’s Dog. About10 minutes long, the film was part of the popular Pete SmithSpecialties series of comical short features. Gunther von Fritsch,who directed the film, would handle another MGM short titledFala at Hyde Park in 1946. (Quirky fact: Between those two


movies, in 1944, von Fritsch directed theclassic horror film Curse of the Cat People.)

So popular was Fala that he received sev-eral thousand letters, notes, birthday cards,and presents. White House staffers answeredall of Fala’s fan mail. Quite a few letters camefrom dog owners who sent proposals of,well, “marriage.” Fala eventually fatheredtwo female puppies named Meggy and Peggyin early 1945. The mother was Buttons, aScottish terrier owned by Suckley. Accordingto some reports, Fala and Buttons did not getalong. They quarreled so violently that theysent each other to the veterinarian.

Like America’s non-canine celebrities, Falahelped with the war effort. He posed for pub-licity photos for bond drives and served as thehonorary president of Barkers for Britain.The organization was an offshoot of Bundlesfor Britain, a charity that collected clothing,blankets, and other non-military supplies forBritish civilians. Dog owners bought member-ships in Barkers for Britain for their pets,receiving metal collar tags for their donations.

As president of the United States, FDR traveled widely duringthe war years, making inspection and campaign trips aroundAmerica and taking longer journeys to Canada and overseas toconfer with Allied leaders. Most of the time, Fala was with him,traveling many miles by train and ship.

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Top: Each morning, the president’s breakfasttray came with something for Fala—a dog

biscuit in this case. Above: Everyone wantedto give Fala treats, but that wasn’t good for

him. So FDR laid down the law: only hecould feed Fala, as he is about to do (aftersome teasing) in this March 1943 photo.

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On August 3, 1941, FDR left Washington by train,supposedly to board the presidential yacht Potomac fora few days’ vacation. Fala went along. But the vacationwas actually a ruse to hide a secret meeting with BritishPrime Minister Winston Churchill. Roosevelt transferred tothe heavy cruiser USS Augusta (CA-31). With a flotilla ofother US Navy vessels, the Augusta rendezvoused withChurchill in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, on August9–10, 1941. The president and prime minister discussedthe growing war and, looking ahead, drew up theAtlantic Charter with aims for a better postwar world.Fala was aboard Augusta and was photographed aboardChurchill’s ship, HMS Prince of Wales.

IN 1943, WHEN FDR TRAVELED by rail to the FirstQuebec Conference, Fala was part of his

entourage. Details of the president’s trips awayfrom Washington were often kept secret until hisreturn, for security reasons. And althoughRoosevelt used an armor-plated railroad car withbulletproof windows, the Ferdinand Magellan, thecar looked much like an ordinary Pullman from the

outside. What gave it away was Fala. From so manynewsreel clips and newspaper photos, the famous dogwas instantly recognized whenever he was taken out-side the train for a walk. The popular pet tipped off thepresident’s whereabouts so often that the Secret Serviceagents nicknamed Fala “The Informer.”

So it was on the trip to the Quebec Conference.FDR’s train made a quick stop at Montreal on August17, 1943, en route to Quebec City. Strict precautionsmade people at the station curious about the newlyarrived train, but no one was told that it carried thepresident of the United States. The sight of the shaggyblack Scottie immediately gave away the secret.

On July 21, 1944, Fala accompanied Rooseveltaboard the heavy cruiser USS Baltimore (CA-68)for a tour of Hawaii and the Aleutian Islands.The visit to Hawaii wasn’t much fun for Fala.Regulations required all dogs to be quarantinedfor four months before setting foot on Hawaiiansoil. So the Scottie had to stay aboard the cruis-er for several days until the president returned.

They then spent a few days off the Alaskan coast


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Top: Fala’s visits to the White House pantry left him disappointed. But the public loved this scene when they saw it in MGM’s 1943 shortFala: The President’s Dog. Artifacts: Fala’s fame made him a natural for promoting the war effort. He was honorary president of Barkers

for Britain (top tag), which raised money for war-torn England. And though Fala wasn’t cut out to be a war dog, he joined Dogs for Defense(laminated tag), which recruited dogs, trainers, and funds. Such roles were perfect for Fala, who was, as his dish testified (bottom), a dog.

leash, the Scottie “rolled on the warm grass” not far from FDR’sgrave, reported the Associated Press. When West Point cadetsfired three rifle volleys in salute at the end of the burial service,Fala barked after each volley’s crashing echo.

Eleanor Roosevelt recalled a touching moment after the funer-al, when a special motorcade brought General Dwight Eisenhowerto place a wreath on her husband’s grave. Upon hearing the com-motion of the sirens and engines, Fala perked up. He seemed toexpect it would be his missing master returning at last.

When the family of FDR’s successor, President HarryTruman, moved into the White House, Fala’s

“replacement” was a six-month-oldIrish setter named Mike. The new dogwas a present to Truman’s daughter,Margaret, from Robert E. Hannegan,the newly appointed postmaster gener-al. The Trumans soon gave Mike away,however. One of the reasons was that thepoor dog constantly got sick from beingfed too many treats by the staff.FDR had arranged for Suckley to take

Fala after he was gone, perhaps thinkingthat Eleanor would be too busy with herown work to take care of a dog. ButEleanor missed Fala so much that sheasked to have him back with her.

After 1945, Eleanor lived at Val-Kill,the house that had been her getaway fromthe large Roosevelt mansion at HydePark. Fala spent his time there, oftenplaying with the Roosevelt grandchil-dren, and making occasional visits toEleanor’s New York City apartment.

NEWSPAPERS ACROSS America ran obi-tuaries for Fala when he died on

April 5, 1952. It was seven days short ofseven years since his master had died.Fala was buried in the Rose Garden atHyde Park, near the graves of Franklinand, later, Eleanor Roosevelt (who lived

until November 7, 1962).Today, Fala holds a unique honor

among White House pets. Among thestatues in the Franklin D. RooseveltMemorial in Washington, DC, is a life-size bronze sculpture by Neil Estern thatdepicts Fala seated near his master. Intribute to Fala’s memorable wartime

friendship with FDR, he is the only dog included in a memorial toan American president.A

DAVID A. NORRIS has written frequently for America in WWII,about everything from stamps and money to airplane recognitionmodels and V-mail.

before returning home aboard the destroyer USS Cummings(DD-365).

For some of the most distant presidential trips, such as theAllied summit conferences in Casablanca (Morocco), Tehran(Iran), and Yalta (Soviet Crimea), Fala remained behind, usuallyin Suckley’s care.

So fond of travel was Fala that he apparently tried to arrangesome trips on his own. In 1941, he invited himself to his master’sthird inauguration. Roosevelt was waiting todepart for the ceremony when his dog jumpedinto the car and sat down next to him. Thepresident had a guard take the disappointedFala back inside the White House. A shorttime after the festivities, Fala escaped fromthe White House grounds. Searchers foundhim several blocks away, sitting in front ofa movie theater. Newspapers joked that hewanted to see the newsreels of the inaugu-ral ceremonies he’d missed.

Fala’s travels with his master once puthim at the center of a political scandal.After the trip to Hawaii and theAleutians in the summer of 1944, falserumors appeared in the press that Falahad been left behind accidentally in theAleutians. With FDR running for anunprecedented fourth term, some of hisRepublican opponents amplified therumors. They claimed that several milliondollars and considerable effort by the navywere wasted by diverting a destroyer toAlaska to bring back the presidential pet.

FDR closed the matter with a flourish ata Teamsters union campaign dinner onSeptember 23, 1944. His remarks that nightbecame known as “the Fala Speech.” Hestated that it was routine to hear “maliciousfalsehoods” about himself. But “not contentwith that, they now include my little dog,Fala.” Even worse, he continued, Fala’sthrifty “Scotch soul was furious” at beingaccused of frittering away millions of dol-lars needed for the war effort. “He has notbeen the same dog since,” FDR added. Theradio carried the laughter of the audienceacross the country, and the attempted polit-ical storm was over. (Footage of the Falaspeech is available on YouTube.)

On FDR’s final trip, Fala was by hismaster’s side. They left Washington on March 29, 1945, for atrain ride to Roosevelt’s summer home at Warm Springs, Georgia.There, Roosevelt died from a stroke on April 12.

At the president’s funeral, Suckley looked after Fala. Themourning of FDR’s inner circle and the whole nation contrastedwith the innocent behavior of the little dog. At the end of his


ALPHA DOG by David A. Norris

Above: It wasn’t surprising for Liberty magazineto put FDR on its cover on August 22, 1942. Butthat Fala was beside him was an indicator of justhow often the dog appeared with the president—even at high-level meetings and historic events.Top: Fala has a place of honor in the Franklin

Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC.

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Unsung Sailorby Don Ellwood

Above, left: At the end of his active and reserve service, Senior Chief Quartermaster Don Ellwood wears a slew of ribbons. The bottom roware (from left) WWII US Merchant Marine Victory, Pacific War Zone, and Atlantic War Zone medals. Above, right: Wartime recruiting.

AS SOON AS HE WAS OLD ENOUGH, Don Ellwood joined the USMerchant Marine to move troops and supplies for America’s wareffort. He and his fellow mariners didn’t often fire guns, but theyfelt the shock of enemy fire just like any other sailor.

IWAS 13 YRS OLD when I was sitting in my high school classroomin Toledo, Ohio, the morning after Pearl Harbor was attackedand President Roosevelt’s voice came on our speakers to

announce that war was declared. Every boy that was 18 jumpedup and yelled that he was going to enlist and ran out of school.

So for the next three years, I volunteered to work on the farmsto help out [after farm workers went off to war], and we eventrained with the American Legion in military drills so that weknew what to do when we were old enough to enlist. The legiongave us a wooden rifle, a cap of tan color, and a name badge. I feltso grown up by being in this group of fellow students and woremy cap with badge even when I was not drilling. We all thoughtthat the marching in formation and learning the manual drill forthe rifle would be essential to us.

When I was old enough to get a Social Security card, I got a job

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at the Chevrolet parts division as a part-time machinist trainee (drill-press opera-tor) during the summer of 1944. It was inSeptember of 1944, after becoming a sen-ior in high school, that I saw an advertise-ment in the Toledo Blade newspaper thatthe US Maritime Service was looking forboys 161/2 and 17 years of age to be trainedas merchant marine seamen. My father hadserved in the navy reserve and as an ordi-nary seaman on the Great Lakes when hewas younger, so it didn’t take too much topersuade him to support my enlisting.After passing my physical exam, I was sentby train from Detroit, with other boys myage, to Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, NewYork, where for three months I was trainedto stand lookout watches, steer a ship,learn the nomenclature of the ship, shoot a20mm cannon, and launch a lifeboat.

Everything was so new to all of ustrainees. We were given the chance toshoot a simulated 20mm cannon on a hugescreen, where we could see the tracersmoving in red dots just as though theywere real. Can you imagine the thrill ofseeing that from the standpoint of a youngboy if it was real, if my ship was beingattacked by an enemy fighter aircraft, andseeing it hit and diving into the ocean?

Launching a lifeboat while training isreally a comical set of numerous errors,even though the instructors demonstratedhow to do it before we trainees were giventhe opportunity. It never caused any of usinjuries, but we got a lot of yelling from theinstructors. This was extremely important

mess hall for lunch when our ship’s hullvibrated suddenly and—I didn’t know whathappened to our ship. But then one of myshipmates told me that the navy escort shipshad shot depth charges and it was theirexplosions whose shock hit our ship. Sofrom then on, I was never worried about it.

Finally, for the first time in my younglife, I was in a ship in a convoy that wasactually being attacked by enemy subs.Now I knew what war actually was like, asit could have been our ship that the enemysubmarine was torpedoing. I was notfrightened because I had confidence in myfellow shipmates and the ship.

After 15 days, we arrived safely and mypassport was stamped and I went intotown to experience what war had done toa city. I met several girls and a boy my agewho took me home to meet his parents. It

was a fascinating experience for a 16-year-old boy to step ashore in a nation that wasin the news back home with stories aboutits bombing by German aircraft and buzzbombs [V-1 flying bombs] and its peopleliving by rationing of food, clothing, andother necessities of life. I remember ourAmerican dollars having to be convertedinto English currency. Not knowing howmuch things cost, I would depend upon thehonesty of the seller, as I could neverunderstand shilling, pence, and the papercurrency in relation to our US money.

I remember going to the movie theaterand there were one or two girls standingoutside. I was wearing my US maritimeuniform and peacoat, as it was January

to learn, as one day, if our ship was to beabandoned, not only our life but also ourfellow shipmates’ lives could depend upona successful launching of the lifeboat. Onething I always remembered about thelifeboats was that we had to memorize thecontents stored in each boat—such as howmany cans of water, how many cans offood, etc.—as that meant life or slow deathif you were not rescued for a long time.

In mid-December 1944 I received myseaman’s passport and documents and,after reporting to the Sailors’ Union of thePacific [a labor union] for a ship, I wasassigned to the SS James Whitcomb Riley,

a Liberty ship, for duty as an ordinary sea-man. I was assigned to the 4-to-8 [o’clock]watch section, which had two older profes-sional seamen in it who didn’t exactly likemy wearing a navy type of uniform when Iwent ashore on liberty. But after a while, Iwas accepted, as by January 1945 hun-dreds of ships had young boys like me serv-ing on board, wearing navy-type uniforms.I guess that as long as we did our jobs andwere not a hindrance, we were accepted.The thing is, if we were not filling out thevacancies shipboard, who else were theygoing to get?

Our first voyage to Liverpool, England,was in a convoy that was attacked byGerman submarines. I was sitting in the

Above, left: Ellwood took this photo of quartermasters on the deck of the destroyer USS Stormes (DD-780) during his naval service in theKorean War. He sailed aboard six destroyers and an aircraft carrier in his nine years of active duty. It was this—not his dangerous merchantmarine service in World War II—that officially made him a veteran. Above, right: Officers photographed by Ellwood aboard the Stormes.

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1945, so with boldness I never had before,and with my uniform giving me that, Iwent up to the girls of my age and askedone if she’d like to see the movie with me,and she said yes. In the theater, all I didwas hold her hand rather than putting myarm around her shoulders. From the movietheater, we had lunch at a restaurant andthen parted after I thanked her for beingwith me. Everyone was very friendly to me.I always remembered those days. It was myfirst time having the famous fish and chipssnack in a rolled-up newspaper.

It was sometime in this period that weheard that President Roosevelt died. Wewere about midway across the Atlantic onour way back to New York City; a one-way trip took 15 days. As I rememberhearing that, it had as much effect upon meand most of my fellow deck seaman as if awell-known movie star had died. It’sbecause it didn’t affect us personally like itwould if our wife, parent, or child haddied. Nothing was observed as a specialevent by the ship’s officers in that regard.

After arriving back in New York, I wenthome to visit my parents and two youngerbrothers. I felt so much older, and I visitedmy high school and some of my teachers.

When I arrived back aboard ship, I noticedthat our No. 2 hatch was fitted out withtroop-type bunks and two large steam ket-tles, yet when we got underway forSwansea, Wales, we didn’t take on anytroops. Upon arriving in Swansea and off-loading some of our cargo, I went ashoreand while in a small department store, Inoted that there was a wireless stationthere where I could send a message back tomy parents in Toledo. So I sent the messagethat I was alive and well.

A FTER GETTING UNDERWAY for Cher-bourg, France, not too long afterthe D-Day invasion [of Normandy,

June 6, 1944], we tied up at the large, rein-forced-concrete former German submarinepens. An hour or so later, our soldiersmarched 500 German POWs to our ship tobe loaded aboard. I really can’t say thatthey were actually Germans, only that theywere wearing German uniforms. But theseprisoners were boys ages 12 and 13 andmen old enough to be grandfathers. Afterhaving to leave everything in their posses-sions on the dock, they were taken aboardand we got underway with the army sol-diers as guards. This now meant that we

had the entire ship’s crew, a Navy ArmedGuard gunners unit, and now 500 prison-ers and guards aboard.

While we were at sea coming back toNew York City, the army soldiers that wereto guard the POWs let 100 of them out onthe main forward deck for air and exercise.We sailors used them to chip rust away andpaint over the bare spots. I, being about thesame age as the young POWs, talked withone of them, although we were told not totalk. I managed to exchange a packet ofcigarettes for his German belt buckle. I lostit many months later.

Instead of taking a northern route toNew York City, we took a southern routethat took us just north of the Azores islands.When we were there, we encountered a hur-ricane. It was my first experience to see howhigh the seas can get, and with not muchballast to keep our hull in the water.

Having no cargo in our holds, the shiponly had its fuel as ballast; so, essentially, wewere like a floating cork. The sky all aroundus on the horizon was as though it had aheavy fog, and each hour the seas were get-ting bigger in height. I was on the ship’ssteering wheel and looking straight ahead, itlooked like a solid wall of water, deep green


Ellwood first went to sea—and war—aboard the Liberty ship SS James Whitcomb Riley. He went aboard in December 1944, bound for Liverpool.

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in color, higher than the bridge of the ship.So I could watch the bow of the ship actual-ly seeming to rise up the huge wall, and asthe sea would pass under the ship, it left thepropeller spinning in the open space beforedigging into the sea again. Our ship’s safetydepended upon the bow always headingdirectly into the sea and never to be broad-sided to it, as then we’d capsize.

One would think a young boy on a shipin the middle of the hurricane’s mountain-ous seas would be scared out of his wits,but I really wasn’t. It was thrilling to watchour ship rising and falling, and feeling thatthe ship would always come through itokay. So enjoy the ride!

Even with the shrieking high soundof the winds, I could hear the screams ofterror from the prisoners that we hadpadlocked in the hold. There were notenough lifeboats and life rafts to accom-modate the prisoners and our crew.Fortunately, after five days of riding thestorm out, we came through safely andentered New York City harbor to off-load the prisoners and guards onto anarmy ferry boat. I felt sorry for them.

I had previously heard stories fromthe older merchant marine seamenaboard about the trips to Murmansk,Russia, and how few ships made it toRussia and back. So when I saw in theNew York City warehouses what I thoughtwas cargo that had the stamps for Russia,I signed off the SS James Whitcomb Riley.After going home to Toledo for a week, Ireturned to New York, and the Union halldispatcher assigned me to a tanker thatwas loaded with P-38 Lockheed Lightningfighter aircraft on the main deck and leav-ing for Texas and then the far Pacific. Thistime, there was no navy ship escort goingwith us.

We sailed to the Panama Canal, wherewe had to tie up at a pier until the next day.So I and a shipmate, both of us being 17years old, went into Panama City, wherethere were servicemen everywhere. We sawa whorehouse where army MPs [militarypolice] were standing outside to keep armysoldiers from going in. My shipmate and Idared one another about going in and get-ting our second time in our lives lying witha woman.

The first time was when our ship, the SS

Royal Oak, was loading avgas [aviationgasoline] in Texas City, Texas, at night. Myshipmates took me into the general area,where at 11 P.M., we found a house wherethree women in outfits like swimming suitswere sitting outside on the porch with theporch light on. My two fellow shipmatestold the women that I had never had sexu-al intercourse, and one took me by thehand and took me into a bedroom whereshe undressed. I was so nervous that I kept

buttoning and unbuttoning my pants. Myshipmates were watching from outside thebedroom windows and were laughing atmy attempts. It was over as fast as it start-ed. So when our ship arrived in Panama, Iwanted to try it again.

NEXT MORNING, we went throughthe canal, and for the next 15days, we had good weather. We

arrived at Guam and unloaded our cargoand planes. About midway back to thePanama Canal, our ship’s radio heard theradio broadcast about atomic bombs beingdropped on Nagasaki, Japan [actually, thefirst atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima onAugust 6, 1945]. And while transiting thePanama Canal a second bomb wasdropped [the Nagasaki bomb, on August9]. It was when we were in the Gulf of

Mexico heading for Mobile, Alabama, thatwe heard World War II was over.

It was sort of a letdown in a way—gladthat the war was over, but the reason wewere all hyped up, doing our bit to win thewar, was now gone. Everything would goback to business as usual. In other words,the patriotism, the motivation that peoplehad to win the war, would be greatly less-ened, and with so many soldiers cominghome, how would the civilians react tothis influx of soldiers looking for their oldjobs back?

I signed off the ship and decided to takea train to Los Angeles to meet my mother,my stepfather, and my half sister who lived

there. It was there in Los Angeles thatI joined the Army Transport Service andwas assigned as an ordinary seaman onan army hospital ship, the USAHSShamrock.

By this time our government issued aplea to all merchant marine seamen tostay on the job because we had to bringhome our troops and to continue to sup-ply the troops remaining overseas andour Allies. So I listened to our govern-ment’s pleas and stayed on the job. (Boy,did we ever get shafted by our so called“grateful” government, which deniedveteran status to us merchant marines.)I reported aboard Shamrock in the San

Pedro, California, harbor. This ship wasbuilt in the early 1920s, and when we deck-hands were to chip the hull of its rust, I hadto stop chipping in one area, as I could havegone right through the hull and sprung aleak. We were to off-load all of the casketsand other items as the ship was going to bedecommissioned. After a few weeks, I wastransferred to the army hospital shipUSAHS Emily H.M. Weder, also there inSan Pedro. It, too, was off-loading caskets,but this time the red cross was to be paint-ed out, and it was to be renamed as thearmy troop ship USAT President Buchanan.

While changing some halyard lines tothe mast, one line had to be taken up byhand and put through one of the signalblocks. A seaman could get up abouthalfway on the mast easily, but not theupper half. When none of us seamen waswilling to risk the danger of falling off themast, the second mate said he would. Hewas nearly at the top when he suddenly fell

When World War II drew to a close,Ellwood went to work as a seaman for theUS Army Transport Service, sailing aboard

the hospital ship USAHS Shamrock.

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way waiting to pick up our pay, when theship lurched to one side. There was a tidalwave that hit Honolulu and all of thewater in the harbor went out to the sea. Wehad to rush up on deck and put out newlines to moor with, as all of the existingmooring lines snapped.

ISIGNED OFF THAT SHIP and had to workin a meat-packing plant for a few daysbefore a ship en route to Long Beach,

California, needed a seaman to sign on, sothat is how I got back to the States. I stayedwith my mother for a short while beforesigning on a Victory ship going to Oregonto load large, trimmed tree trunks forpaper mill plants in California. Then forthe next several months, I worked on twoor three oil tankers on the West Coast untilabout late September 1946, when I leftCalifornia on a train bound for Toledo.

My brothers and parents were glad to seeme, as I them, for it had been a long time. Inearly October 1946, two years after leavinghigh school to become a merchant marineseaman, I re-enrolled at Libbey High Schoolto finish my senior year. To say that I was anoddity in my class rooms is mild. One day Ihad to go to the coast guard headquarters indowntown Toledo to upgrade my seaman’sticket to “able-bodied” seaman, as I hadenough time at sea to do so. The next morn-ing, the dean passed the word over the loud-speakers for me to report to his office.When I reported, he asked me if I wasabsent yesterday and, if so, where was myexcuse slip written by my parents? Needlessto say, I was dumbfounded. I told him thatI was a veteran and that I had business toconduct with the coast guard, and I onlycame back to high school to finish my edu-cation and didn’t feel that I needed anexcuse slip. He said he understood andwould take care of the paperwork.

I was now the same age as the rest of theseniors in school, and I re-applied at theChevrolet company for a job as a machin-

and bounced off the lower structure andthen onto the main deck. He died there andI ran to tell the captain. The body was sentashore for examination and to be preparedfor burial at sea after we got underway ina week.

Since we were now a troopship, we tookaboard troops that were discharged andtheir dependents for the trip to Honolulu.When we got underway and were outsidethe five-mile boundary, we stopped theengines to hold a burial at sea ceremonyfor the second mate. As the body slippedover the side, there was a great many flashcameras of the passengers going off. I for-got to say that this ship also was a very oldship, because two days off Honolulu theship’s freshwater evaporators broke downand we seamen were told to collect all ofthe freshwater cans from the lifeboats todistribute to the passengers. The followingday, the engines broke down and we had toradio for a tow from the army in Hawaii.

It was about a month later, while wewere tied up alongside the pier on April 1,1946, and we seamen were in the passage-


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bons on my chest. Upon graduation, Iserved on one aircraft carrier and sixdestroyers in nine years of active duty as aquartermaster and signalman during theKorean War. Being honorably discharged,after one year, I enlisted in the Navy ReadyReserve in January 1958 and served honor-ably for 25 years and retired as a senior

chief quartermaster. I had served as areserve all during and after the VietnamWar, which included duty on threeminesweeper vessels, an amphibiousassault ship, a destroyer escort, a frigate,and several reserve units.

This is the end of my story. I retired inMay 1983 when the navy decided that any-one having over 34 years of service mustretire. I have nine gold hash marks on mydress uniform coat sleeve, each represent-ing four years of good conduct. My serviceribbons consist of the Merchant MarineAtlantic and Pacific War Zone and Victoryribbon, the Navy Good Conduct medal,Korean Service medal, United Nationsmedal, China Service medal, KoreanPresidential ribbon, Europe Occupationmedal, Naval Reserve ribbon, CombatAction medal, and the medal that everyonegot by being in the service [World War IIVictory Medal].A

DON ELLWOOD, who lives in Pendleton,Indiana, wrote a short version of thisaccount for www.justinmuseum.com.


ist trainee until I graduated in June 1947.Then I took an able seaman’s position onone of the Great Lakes ore carriers, the SSJames Thompson. But in August 1947,after learning that my younger brotherenlisted in the navy, I decided to do thesame. I was the only recruit in my compa-ny that wore merchant marine battle rib-

On USAHS Emily H.M. Weder, Ellwood unloaded war dead. Then Weder becameUSAT President Buchanan (above), and Ellwood finished his merchant marine service

by bringing living GIs home.

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HE SAW ERNIE PYLE DIE

MY FATHER ENLISTED in the army afterPearl Harbor, when he was 31 years

old. He was a sergeant in Company B,305th Regiment, in the 77th InfantryDivision. He rarely spoke of the war.One day I was talking with my dad

about Ernie Pyle [the Pulitzer Prize–win-ning American news correspondent killed

on Ie Shima on April 18, 1945]. “I was 20yards from Pyle when the Japs got him,”said my dad.“Did they ever get the sniper that shot

him?” I asked. My dad looked down andshook his head. “That’s not what happened.My rifle squad was advancing up a roadwhen the Japs opened on us. Trained on theroad they had an anti-aircraft machine gun

they had salvaged out of one of our downedplanes. We were pinned down when weheard a vehicle approaching from our rear.It was a jeep driven by a colonel, and Pylewas in the passenger seat. We all yelled andwaved our arms trying to warn them not tocome any closer. The colonel just kept righton, and the Japs opened up on the jeep withthe anti-aircraft machine gun. Pyle was

Ernie Pyle, the most famous American journalist of World War II, reportedly predicted that he would die within a year of the April 1945landings on Okinawa. Tim Landis’s father was on the scene when Japanese machine-gun fire killed Pyle on Ie Shima weeks later.

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submarine stoves, which were in thedugouts when we arrived. My friend in theadjacent dugout was fussing because hecouldn’t find any dry Stars and Stripesnewspapers or dry wood to start his fire.Hey, guy, I called—try some of theCalvados on the fire. He did, and whoosh!Hey, who moved one of our 81mm mor-tars back here? My friend emerged fromhis dugout with slightly burned eyelashesand a blistered ego.

John F. Simonwartime army medic

Mason, Ohio

MAKING THE CUT

IT WAS A COLD, gray winter day inSoutheast Missouri as I waited for the

Greyhound bus and wondered what layahead of me at army boot camp. My folkswere being quiet, and I knew they wereupset. My wife, Margie, was holding thebaby and holding back tears. As the buscame in I kissed a tearful mother and wifegoodbye, then boarded the bus.The bus ride lasted two hours, but it

seemed much longer as we traveledthrough the Ozark Mountains. The trainstation we stopped at was full of soldiers,sailors, and marines coming and going. As

APRIL 2013 AMERICA IN WWII 55

“Go Greyhound” could have been a rallying cry for GIs. Most, like these at a terminalnear Georgia’s Fort Benning—and air cadet Richard Lewis—spent time cramped in a bus.

WWIIAMERICA IN

Lingo!1940s GI and civilian patterdevils in baggy pants: what someGerman troops called US 82nd

Airborne Division paratroopers, whotucked their pants into their boots

baby: a plane’s detachableextra fuel tank; this baby couldbe dropped in tight situations

to reduce weight

cooking a grenade: pullinga grenade’s pin, then hesitatinga few gutsy seconds before

throwing the bomb, for detonationon arrival

blown right out of the jeep. He was deadbefore he hit the ground.”Dad died in 1992 and is buried in

Arlington National Cemetery.Tim Landis

New York, New York

Editor’s note: Despite an official telegramsent to Pyle’s father stating that the jour-nalist was killed by a sniper, the generallyaccepted account of Pyle’s death puts himunder enemy machine-gun fire in a jeepwith a lieutenant colonel and three others.The accepted account differs from Landis’sperception of the killing only in that it hasPyle and the others leaving the jeep to seekcover, with Pyle being killed as he lifted hishead to look around.

CIDER WITH A PUNCH

OUR OUTFIT WAS sometimes given R &R [rest and recreation] when our bat-

talion was rotated to a so-called rest area.Sometimes we were trucked off to smallFrench villages for an evening of recre-ation. If we were in luck, we might spendthe evening with a fine dinner of Spam andwhatever our company could share, com-plete with fine table linens, including nap-kins, no less.

On one such visit to the town ofQuimper, my medic dugout partner and Iwent wandering around, ripe for adven-ture. In our meanderings we passed a longentrance walkway that led to the front doorof a French residence. Along this walk wasa case of what we determined to be cider,right there for the taking. Occasionally inthe past we had been able to purchase sweetcider from French farmers for cigarettes(we didn’t smoke much back then). So bothof us appropriated a bottle for each of ourgreatcoat pockets and ambled down thestreet, innocent as you please.With no music, dancing, or anything

else to be found in the town, we ren-dezvoused with our truck to travel back tocamp. On the way, my medic friend and Igot thirsty, so we opened a bottle of ciderand took a swig. Dear Lord, that wasn’tcider! It had to be that stuff we werewarned against: Calvados, a strong Frenchapple brandy that to us seemed to be atleast 177 percent alcohol. We were goingto throw it out, but then we decided itmight come in handy somehow.Back at camp, we got into our dugouts

for the night. The following morning, awet snow was on the ground, and we triedto get fires started in what we called our

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That’s where I came down with denguefever. I was in the hospital for better than30 days. When I got back to camp, wewere getting ready to hit Luzon in thePhilippines. There, I ran into another set-back, thanks to some Japanese shrapnel.In the midst of a battle around 8 A.M.

one day, I was wounded, so I yelled for amedic. He dressed the wounds in my back,but he didn’t see the one under my arm. Ilay on the beach until about 4 P.M., atwhich time another medic spotted my otherwound. He gave me a shot of morphine tokill the pain and, 12 hours after I was hit, Iwas finally loaded onto a landing craft thattook me out to the ship I came in on.The shipboard doctor operated to take

the shrapnel out of my chest. I asked whyhe didn’t take all the pieces out, and he saidthey were too close to my heart to remove,and it might do more harm than good todig them out. I was then transported byseveral ships and a C-47 to a station hospi-tal, where I stayed for three months. Buteven that stay off the lines wasn’t peaceful,for one night a ship exploded in a nearbyharbor, and we thought the Japs wereattacking. While I was in the hospital, ageneral gave me a Purple Heart.Once I was well enough, I was sent from

the hospital to Leyte. But on the trip there,I came down with malaria, and when welanded I was put in the 4th StationHospital for more than 30 days. When Irecovered I went to a replacement depot,and while waiting for a ride back to myoutfit, I became a cook.My wartime service was coming to an

end. On December 31, 1945, my home-bound ship sailed under the Golden GateBridge. We landed on Angel Island in SanFrancisco Bay, and on January 6, 1946, Iwas discharged at Fort Logan, where mytravels had begun.

Montra Eugene Joneswartime marine

Kensington, Kansas

NORWEGIAN GIs IN MALMEDY

THE 99TH Infantry Battalion (Separate)was a US Army unit made up entirely

of Norwegians by birth or descent. Wewere billeted near Liège, Belgium, whenthe Battle of the Bulge began. We wereordered into combat, and as we moved for-

ple of weeks I was finally notified I would beaccepted into flight training as a pilot.

Richard B. “Dick” Lewiswartime lieutenant colonel,

493rd Bomb Group, Eighth Army Air ForceJacksonville, Florida

A CASUALTY CHRONICLE

IGRADUATED FROM HIGH SCHOOL in Mayof 1943. The following month, I was on

a train to Denver from Fort Logan,Colorado, to take my marine physical. ByJuly 1 I was headed for Camp Roberts,California, for four months of training.And by December 24 I was in NewZealand, where I got the worst sunburn ofmy life on Christmas Day. It was just thebeginning of my wartime ailments.From New Zealand we were shipped to

Guadalcanal and finished the campaignthere. A few months later we were sent tothe mosquito-filled jungles of New Guinea.

I waited for my troop train, I watched sev-eral tearful separations and wondered howmany of the guys would not come back.Once I boarded the train it took three daysto arrive at our destination. It was 10:30P.M. when we finally disembarked.A sergeant met us at the station and

lined us up for roll call, but all we wantedwas a bed. After roll call we were notallowed to leave or even go to the men’sroom. We waited and waited. After 45minutes a guy walked up and whisperedsomething to the sergeant. We were told tomarch as near like soldiers as we could andproceed outside to waiting buses. We final-ly arrived at boot camp about midnightand were issued bedding. We marched toour barracks, and it must have been 1:00A.M. before I collapsed into bed and imme-diately fell asleep.Fifteen minutes later—or so it seemed—

a bugle blew and the barracks lights cameon. We were informed that we were in thearmy now, and it was time to rise and shineas, I was amazed to discover, it was 6:30A.M. Before all of us had a chance to shave,we were rousted outside and lined up tomarch off to breakfast.Our first day was spent getting our

clothing, being lectured, being shown howto salute, being told who to salute (every-one), and being informed that we—the avi-ation cadets—were the lowest form of lifeallowed in the army. Our last lesson thatday was how to make a bed so neat andtaut that a quarter could bounce into theair off of it and flip over.Finally, once supper was over, we were

left alone to try to digest all that we hadbeen exposed to that day. On the morningof the second day, we were taken to thepost barbershop and told we were all get-ting haircuts—and that we would be pay-ing for them.After that, our days all seemed to run

together. Our activities included marching,school, and physical training. There wasalso a series of tests to pass, both mentaland physical, interspersed with occasionalstints of KP [kitchen patrol] and guardduty day or night, and 20-mile hikes withjeeps driving by to spray smoke or tear gason weary GIs.Nonetheless, I seemed to be getting into

better condition all the time, and after a cou-

The Purple Heart, earned by Montra Jonesand others the hard way—by getting wounded.


Send your War Stories submission, witha relevant photo if possible, to WARSTORIES, America in WWII, 4711 QueenAvenue, Suite 202, Harrisburg, PA 17109,or to [email protected].

By sending stories and photos, you give uspermission to publish and republish them.

ward, we saw members of the 10th Infan-try Division marching back from the front.Afterward, we ended up in Malmedy,

Belgium, and its immediate area for about31 days. During our time there we werebombed by our own air force twice and hada P-47 [a Thunderbolt fighter, an Americanplane] drop a few personnel bombs to get

our attention, after which he dropped sur-render leaflets in German!One late afternoon, we were strafed by

Bed Check Charlie [GI slang for a loneenemy plane that shows up at night tobedevil ground troops]. On another occa-sion two German soldiers visited one of ourcompany’s kitchens to see their girlfriends.They left in a hurry when they saw our men.We had no route out of Malmedy that

was not under German fire. Only when ourtroops began the counterattack were wefinally relieved of duty.The 99th was a great outfit. We finished

our duties by shipping out to Norway toaccept the German surrender.

Fredric M. Zingerwartime technician fifth grade,

99th Infantry Battalion (Separate)Zephyrhills, Florida

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The result is something oddly fascinating,frankly instructive, and vaguely distressing.There they are in Garson’s collection,

uncles, aunts, and sweethearts, Nazis ingood times: Nazis at weddings, Nazissinging and dancing, Nazis showing off newuniforms, marching Nazis, baby Nazis, uni-formed pre-school Nazis, teenage Nazis,beer-swilling Nazis, smiling Nazis, happyNazis. Most of the people in the images areunnamed or unknown. But with Garson’snotes, their pictures illustrate the near-com-plete penetration of Nazism into dailyGerman life and culture.Garson interprets everything from sign-

age to uniform insignia to home decoration.He explains the exploitive propagandavalue of German sports stars such as boxinggreat Max Schmeling and movie actors likeOscar-winner Emil Jannings. His photosand notes also remind readers of Nazism’sconnections with the broader world—thatrenowned fashion designer Hugo Boss cre-ated Hitler’s uniforms and those of his clos-est Reich associates, that the Standard Oiland Shell Oil companies helped give Hitler’sprewar economy a boost, that Coca-Colawas everywhere even then.This collection of photographic memo-

rabilia is another frightening example of

the phenomenal success of the Big Lie inpolitical science, of repeating grand andoutrageous falsehoods so loudly and solong that they overwhelm any real dialogueor debate and become the truth of choicefor the targeted demographic. In the inter-net era, these same techniques have beenused to isolate and energize conspiracybuffs and believers in crank theories, aswell as influence political campaigns. Themethods used are often credited to the vilegenius Joseph Goebbels, Reich minister ofpropaganda, a political ally of Hitler’s dat-ing back to the 1920s.Goebbels used sophisticated media tech-

niques to create a brand that reached outto every speaker of German, validatingevery angry suspicion about those whowere not German or “Aryan,” reinforcingevery positive belief Germans held aboutthemselves and their nation and tying it allto one man and one party, Hitler and theNazis. Garson’s photographs demonstratehow the Nazis’ swastika symbol and theFührer’s image were attached to every pos-sible civic and commercial item, how anamazing number of Nazi organizationsand uniforms were created for varied seg-ments of the German population, howadding a Nazi touch to any public or pri-

New Images of Nazi Germany:A Photographic Collection, compiledand with captions by Paul Garson,McFarland, 496 pages, $55.

W ITH THE WAR OVER in 1945, Ger-man families turned Adolf Hit-ler’s portrait to the wall and got

on with the job of surviving in a new sociallandscape. Souvenirs and pictures from theNazi era were tossed into the backs of clos-ets and purposely forgotten. Denial becamethe national coping strategy; if asked, manypeople would say that they hadn’t under-stood what the Führer was talking aboutand that they hadn’t done anything, seenanything, or known anything.But, of course, it had all been real. And

for more than a dozen years, countlessGermans had been proud members of theNazi party and followers of the Führer. Formany of them, the 1930s, the time beforethe fighting, would be remembered silentlyand fondly as the “good old days.”Collector of historical photographs Paul

Garson has gathered private photo imagesof Germany in those years, the items hiddenor lost since the end of World War II, andoffered them up in a peculiar book with thesimple title New Images of Nazi Germany.

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marvelous Merlin engine, to the navalcommanders and airmen who tried out andfield-engineered their own solutions. Inthis connection, Kennedy also makes alarger point, albeit briefly. He notes thathistorians of great-power politics and theprimacy of economic and cultural forcescould never anticipate, let alone explain,the rise of the P-51, which relied so muchon good luck and serendipity.The section on the end of the Blitzkrieg

is the least strong, though it possesses greatnarrative interest, covering the spectacularGerman successes early in the war and theirsubsequent irreversible failures at Stalin-grad, Kursk, and elsewhere. In terms ofengineering, much of the focus is on theSoviet T-34 medium tank, which hereemerges as not nearly so invincible as gen-erally described. Kennedy gives good exam-ples of its strengths and considerable weak-nesses, including a fascinating review byAmerican engineers. Engineering, however,seems to have been less crucial than theSoviets’ emerging strength in productionand improvements in strategic manage-ment. Even so, Kennedy makes many inter-esting points about the Eastern front, andreminds us that much essential backgroundmaterial remains inaccessible to scholars.This is one of the best high-level books

on the war I have read since John Ellis’sBrute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics inthe Second World War (1990). The onlything I would have added would have beenan emphasis not merely on hardware engi-neering, but process engineering as well.Curtis Lemay’s re-engineering of the bomb-ing campaign over Japan is one of the bestexamples of this, where alterations inmethods turned a lackadaisical campaigninto a barnburner. Similarly, the Americanpractice of rotating aircrews out after 25missions meant that the best pilots eventu-ally went on to teach their secrets to subse-quent generations of airmen, whereas theirGerman and Japanese counterparts flewuntil they died or the war ended.Yet this is not to denigrate; it is only to

wish for even more. As it is, Kennedy’sanalysis teems with insights into the warand its historians. Even his footnotes makefor good reading. Engineers of Victory isnot for devotees of memoirs and battle nar-

appeared. He presents five long, fascinatingcase studies: the Battle of the Atlantic, theair war over Europe, the reversal of theBlitzkrieg, the evolution of beach invasions,and the struggle to cope with vast distancesin the Pacific. He views this period as a piv-otal inflection point, where the course ofthe war was indelibly altered. Few wouldbe surprised by this. Kennedy’s contribu-tion is seeing each case study not as a singlecause and effect (hence the paucity of set-piece battle narratives), but as a cumulativeeffect of several factors. This inevitablybrings to the foreground elements andactors seldom showcased, and we find our-selves on delightfully unfamiliar ground.Take for instance Kennedy’s second case

study, the fight to control the air overEurope. Rather than dwelling on the devel-opment of US and British strategy,Kennedy asserts that the pivotal factors inemerging Allied supremacy were the P-51Mustang fighter’s airframe, Merlin engine,and addition of wing tanks. These permit-ted the thousand-plane armadas to travelto and from their distant targets with effec-tive fighter protection and thereby wage asustainable air war. That spelled the end ofthe line for the Luftwaffe. And that, inturn, allowed the success of OperationOverlord (the Western Allies’ invasion ofGerman-occupied France)—and, lookingeast, eased the task of the Soviets in theirremorseless drive to Berlin.Yet there was nothing inevitable in the

Mustang’s apotheosis, and Kennedy showshow much luck and individual insight mar-ried the P-51 airframe with the Merlinengine. Beyond that, even after astonishingflight tests, it was vehemently opposed bystaunch advocates of the P-39, P-40, P-47,and other models and was adopted onlyafter intervention by Churchill and well-connected Brits. Clearly, the battle overEurope could have gone quite differentlyhad some other test pilot been assigned tothe new P-51, or had there been less-effec-tive back-channels.With such an emphasis on engineering

and mechanics, it is surprising thatKennedy has time and interest for the per-sonalities involved. Yet they are memo-rably presented, from the Edison-likeHenry Royce, the guiding spirit behind the


vate occasion became expected or fashion-able, and how all of these elements helpedtie peacetime Nazi Germany together.The collection does cover a bit more

than the prewar 1930s. There are also sou-venir photographs from conquered Franceand Poland, pictures of anti-Semitic litera-ture and Axis postage, trophy photographsof Allied prisoners of war, and special sec-tions devoted to horses and to the Germanlove of amateur photography. It is an inter-esting but odd anthropologic mix.Unfortunately, however, the whole of

the book is hard to read because the slip-shod design breaks up the type and theflow of information. The photo captionsand main text intermingle, and there arecopyediting errors. This book was pub-lished by McFarland, whose website statesit is “especially known for…going to greatlengths to manufacture our books to thehighest standards and library specifica-tions.” But does the publisher not see theneed for an active editor or co-author, or apractical book designer or art director? Asit stands, Garson’s effort is made to lookmore like a roughed-out photo book pro-posal than a finished publication. I can’trecommend it.

—John E. StanchakPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania

Engineers of Victory: The ProblemSolvers Who Turned the Tide in theSecond World War, by Paul Kennedy,Random House, 464 pages, $30.

P AUL KENNEDY, KNOWN FOR The Riseand Fall of the Great Powers, hasmade a career of chronicling global

strategic dimensions of war and diplomacy.In his latest effort, Engineers of Victory, hewrites very differently, focusing not on thegrand strategies of Franklin Roosevelt,Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, buton the engineers, inventors, and industrial-ists whose innovations in technology andtechniques greatly accelerated Allied victo-ry. Few of these names will be familiar toyou, yet their influence was vast.Kennedy explores the mid-war period

from January 1943 through D-Day in June1944, before technologies such as atomicweapons and the B-29 bomber had

A THEATER OF WAR


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BOOKSAND MEDIAratives, but for anyone wishing for a deep-

er understanding of the hidden life of thewar, Kennedy has produced an absolutelyriveting book.

—Thomas MullenFlemington, New Jersey

Dog Company: The Boys of Pointe duHoc, the Rangers Who AccomplishedD-Day’s Toughest Mission and Led theWay Across Europe, by Patrick K. O’Don-nell, Da Capo Press, 320 pages, $26.

PATRICK O’DONNELL IS the author of anumber of books focusing on specialoperations during World War II,

including Beyond Valor: World War II’sRanger and Airborne Veterans Reveal theHeart of Combat (2001), for which he wonthe William E. Colby Award for Out-standing Military History. In his latest

release, Dog Company, he again centers ona special forces unit, this time D (Dog)Company of the US Army’s 2nd RangerBattalion.Faced with writing a history of an organ-

ization with many members, O’Donnelluses a familiar method: he focuses on aselect group of soldiers and follows themthrough to the end of the war. He draws onhis long-time work with veterans ofAmerica’s wars, collecting large numbers oforal histories and even establishing thewebsite www.dropzone.org to store them.He also brings the experience he gained ina real combat environment while serving asa reporter attached to marines during the2004 battles of Fallujah, Iraq.

O’Donnell relies heavily on his collec-tion of oral histories. He conducted mostof the interviews himself, but he also usesthe official histories complied by the army,weaving them all together in a complemen-tary fashion. The relationships among theRangers from training through combatpropel the narrative. It is here thatO’Donnell effectively captures the story ofthese Dog Company Rangers in combat.Building around his core group of

Rangers, O’Donnell subdivides his bookinto four basic sections chronicling the

Slaughterhouse-Five. Directed byGeorge Roy Hill, written by StephenGeller, based on the book by KurtVonnegut, Jr., starring Michael Sacks,Ron Leibman, Eugene Roche, ValeriePerrine, 1972, 104 minutes, color,rated R.

FOR DECADES Kurt Vonnegut struggledto write about the firebombing of

Dresden. In February 1945, Alliedbombers had unleashed a flaming mael-strom that reduced the beautiful Ger-man city to ruins and killed, by officialtallies, 18,000–25,000 civilians.Vonnegut (whose own estimate ran to

more than 100,000 dead) had a uniquevantage point on the event: as anAmerican POW he had been taken toDresden on a work crew. He and his fel-low prisoners had been herded into anunderground slaughterhouse—Schlacht-hof-Funf or “Slaughterhouse-Five”—which protected them from the infernoraging above. “After that we were put towork carrying corpses from Air-Raidshelters; women, children, old men;dead from concussion, fire or suffoca-

tion,” Vonnegut wrote in a letter home.“Civilians cursed us and threw rocks aswe carried bodies to huge funeral pyresin the city.”Vonnegut remained haunted by what

he had witnessed. In 1969 he publishedSlaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’sCrusade, a Duty-Dance with Death.The movie that followed is a reasonablyfaithful adaptation of the novel. Bothtell the story of Billy Pilgrim, an Amer-ican POW who, like Vonnegut, survivedthe firebombing. Unlike Vonnegut,Pilgrim later becomes “unstuck in time”and bounces from one period of life toanother, with stops in childhood, WorldWar II, suburban postwar life as anoptometrist and family man, and a spec-imen under the eyes of beings from theplanet Tralfamadore, who pluck himfrom Earth and place him in a dome ona planet billions of miles away with sexyactress Montana Wildhack (ValeriePerrine) for company.Yes, it’s safe to say Slaughterhouse-

Five isn’t your typical WWII movie. YetPilgrim’s war experiences, especiallyDresden, provide the film’s emotionaland dramatic core. The film opens withPilgrim (Michael Sacks) fleeing through

snow to escape German soldiers. Hefinds shelter in a foxhole with psycho-pathic GI Paul Lazzaro (Ron Leibman).After the two men are taken prisoner,Lazzaro develops an irrational hatred ofPilgrim and vows to kill him someday.In a stalag Pilgrim encounters kindlyEdgar Derby (Eugene Roche), who takesthe hapless young man under his wing.But in Dresden, Germans soldiers exe-cute Derby after he pockets a smallchina figurine. As Vonnegut might havesaid in the book, “And so it goes.”The film manages to weave its tangled

chronology, but its weakness is Pilgrim’s


most intensive actions of this elite group.The first, of course, is the assault on Pointedu Hoc during the Normandy invasion onJune 6, 1944. This is a tale told many timesover, but O’Donnell’s work with theRanger veterans, many of whom are nowfriends of his, produces a riveting accountof the assault. We learn that two Rangers,Len Lomell and Jack Kuhn, found thePointe’s guns—which had been pulled fromthe Pointe to a nearby wooded area to pro-tect them from Allied air attack—and pro-ceeded to destroy the guns’ optics by bash-ing them with their rifle butts and thenfused the gears together with thermitegrenades. This hard-fought action contin-ued in the days following the assault,because the Rangers’ mission was notmerely to take out the guns, but also tohold the position until they were relieved.Dog Company’s next mission took place

near Brest, on the English Channel. TheGerman defenders of Cherbourg, thelargest port nearest the Normandy beach-head, had destroyed its port facilities, cre-ating a serious problem for Allied logistics.The Rangers were tasked with helpingeliminate a powerful German fort guardingthe important port of Brest, which they didin spectacular fashion. O’Donnell’s tale ofthe audacious capture of this installationdeserves inclusion in American militaryhistory.That autumn, the 2nd Ranger Battalion

faced what was arguably its most difficultmission: to take and hold Hill 400, part ofthe bloody struggle to control the HürtgenForest, a conflict that saw several entire USdivisions mauled. The strategic Hill 400provided the Germans with a commandingview of the surrounding countryside. Afteran armored task force failed to capture thehill, the Rangers moved past the burned-out hulks of American tanks and vehiclesto approach the position. A reconnaissanceby the Rangers led to one of the most com-pelling moments in US Army history in theEuropean theater of World War II. TheRangers were ordered to fix bayonets andtake the hill. With bloodcurdling yells theycharged the German defenders, throwingthem off enough to secure most of the hill.The assault was a costly one, though, andthe Rangers found themselves in a meatgrinder for several days as Dog Companyand the other Rangers withstood repeatedfierce German counterattacks.The eruption of the Battle of the Bulge,

however, would push the story of DogCompany’s valor on Hill 400 to the backpages of its history. In the Bulge, theRangers were used to fill a gap in the hard-pressed American lines. Long, cold nightsof watching, waiting, and patrolling tooktheir toll on the soldiers. After the defeat ofthe German offensive, the Rangers movedforward into Germany.O’Donnell provides notes, several pages

of photographs, and—essential to anybook on operational military history—maps. The book is a fast-paced personalstory of many of the men of DogCompany. It blows away the dust of histo-ry to reveal that the mission of the Rangersin the European theater did not end with

the assault on Pointe du Hoc, but contin-ued all the way to VE Day.

—Michael EdwardsNew Orleans, Louisiana

Nick Cardy: The Artist at War,by Nick Cardy and Renée Witterstaetter,128 pages, $24.95.

N ICK CARDY BEGAN his comic bookcareer illustrating stories assembledby the Eisner and Iger packaging

shop for various publishers. But althoughhe played a role in forming the comics’Golden Age, Cardy’s exploits were cutshort on April Fools’ Day 1943, when hewas drafted into military service. He laterreturned to comics and became one of themost influential DC Comics artists, shapingthe Silver Age look of the publisher’s uni-verse in titles such as Tomahawk, Aqua-man, and The Teen Titans. Cardy craftedmost of DC’s covers for much of the 1970sand later went on to a successful career inadvertising and movie poster art.But this man who helped shape some of

the most memorable superhero adventureswas himself a hero in World War II, receiv-ing two Purple Hearts while serving as atank driver with the 3rd Armored“Spearhead” Division in Europe anddesigning the patch for his former unit, the66th Infantry “Black Panther” Division.Like so many other artists who served inthe military during that time, Cardy notonly experienced the war, but also docu-mented it in ink on paper, delineating thedetails of his journey through a landscapeforever transformed by bloody conflict.From the global and grotesque grandeur

of the era to the intimate and humorousconnections between human beings,Cardy’s WWII line work is so evocativethat all these decades later it seems to cap-ture even more of the true emotionalimpact of the war than photography does.The sketchiness of shading, the waningthick and thin lines, and the varying bluishtones of his “spit drawings” (created bydrawing in ink, then wetting his finger withspit to spread and dilute the color) thattrace the shapes of people, places, andthings forever lost to time are renderedwith such passion that they seem desperate

lack of personality, which makes himless-than-compelling as a protagonist.Through all periods of his life, Pilgrimremains a passive observer. And whynot? The Tralfamadorians teach himthat everything that has happened willalways happen, and that includes theeventual end of the universe, caused acci-dentally when a Tralfamadorian pushesthe wrong button. “He has alwayspressed it, and he always will,” anunseen alien explains. “We have alwayslet him, and we always will let him. Themoment is structured that way.” PerhapsVonnegut is saying that the only way wecan face horrors like Dresden is bybelieving we can do nothing about them.“The Dresden atrocity, tremendously

expensive and meticulously planned,was so meaningless, finally, that only oneperson on the entire planet got any ben-efit from it,” Vonnegut wrote later. “I amthat person. I wrote this book, whichearned a lot of money and made my rep-utation, such as it is. One way or anoth-er, I got two or three dollars for everyperson killed. Some business I’m in.”

And so it goes.—Tom Huntington

Camp Hill, Pennsylvania

A 78 RPM


chance they can get, and collapsing fromsun stroke on the rifle range. His water-colors and sepia-toned drawings bring hisknack for lighting to life, showcasing themuddy, earthen world of war, occasional-ly lit by explosive activity. Mingled in with all the artwork in this

book are Cardy’s own tales of war, includ-ing chilling encounters with liberated con-centration camp prisoners and blood-soaked friends. A section of actual photo-graphs concludes the volume, but as inother such books, the photos are wiselyheld back until the end so they don’t clashwith the artwork or shatter the illusion ofthe world as created by the pen. Finally, weare treated to some of the more elaborate

paintings that Cardy completed at the endof the war while he was in Paris.The book itself is a beautiful, glossy,

hardcover production with a landscapedesign that allows Cardy’s art and memoriesto breathe across every page. The artwork isdisplayed chronologically, as Cardy drew itin his original sketchbooks. Titan Books iswell known for producing stunning volumesof this quality, and this is another excellentaddition to those ranks (produced in associ-ation with Eva Ink Publishing).Cardy leaves us with a reminder that

although he is in his nineties, he still recallsthe faces of fear that revealed the true costof war. He went on to great success as anartist, but perhaps some of his most mean-ingful work was produced with a brokenbrush and a wetted finger in the confines ofa tank, as the world outside went mad.

—Arnold T. BlumbergBaltimore, Maryland

to leap off the page. As both an escape forthe young soldier that he once was and alegacy for the aging artist who now turnsthis personal work over to the world, thisis a unique glimpse of how war and artintertwine with memory.Cardy’s role as an assistant tank driver

meant a lot of down time, and it was thenthat he committed what he saw to paper.The story of World War II is a story of somany people, so many viewpoints, andCardy’s view is a seemingly instant nostal-gia—scenes caught at the very momentthey happened with a wash of wistfulwatercolors dabbed out of a jury-riggedSucrets cough drop box. When drawn inWaterman pen (one he still owns) or pen-cil, his figures are usually mere sugges-tions of people—combinations of sharplines and blobs of shading that catch sol-diers shaving and brushing teeth withwater in their helmets, sleeping every

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BOOKSAND MEDIA

The One and Only Fats

Thomas Wright Waller’s life was justabout over by the time the United Statesjoined the Second World War. That’s

saying a lot more than it should: when theJapanese attacked, the wise-cracking, piano-pounding rock-and-roll forefather known tothe world as Fats was only 37.Fortunately, Fats came to music young,

fooling around on the pump organ in hisfamily’s home in Harlem. He took classicallessons and played hymns—and got intotrouble with his church-going parents by slipping jazz stylingsinto the arrangements. In 1924 Fats made his first recording—the first of more than 500. Then came writing his first song—thefirst of more than 400. Within three years he pronounced “I amnow the greatest jazz organist alive.” He was being more cleverthan cocky: Fats was the only jazz organist alive.Fats was well on his way to stardom, accompanying vocalist

Bessie Smith and other blues giants through the thirties, mostlyon piano, though organ always remained his preference. Whenwar came to America, the self-described “285 pounds of jam,jive, and everythin’” jumped right in to aid the cause. Just 19days after Pearl Harbor, his recording of “(Get Some) Cash forYour Trash” was airing on radios across the country, encourag-ing Americans to turn in metal and other materials to be recy-cled for war use. A few weeks after that came a forgettable debut

as bandleader at Carnegie Hall. Fats turnedto the bottle to wash away his nervousnessabout performing in the grand old temple ofclassical music, and his playing abilitywashed away right along with it. That Julyhe rebounded from the embarrassment witha rousing rendition on 78 RPM of the celebra-tory war tune “Swing Out to Victory.”Fats helped make some history in 1943,

writing songs for the first all-black moviemusical, Stormy Weather. And he played “ICan’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby”and his own classic “Ain’t Misbehavin’” on

screen. Later that year, he copyrighted his last song, “When theNylons Bloom Again,” a light-hearted lament about the disap-pearance of women’s stockings after parachutes and other mili-tary goods drained the nylon supply. From afar, things were looking good for Fats in 1943. He was

on movie screens across the nation in Stormy Weather while his1929 musical Hot Chocolates was enjoying a successful revivalon Broadway. Late in the year, he was touring West Coast mili-tary bases to entertain troops before he boarded a train to headhome for a New York City Christmas. Exhaustion from the per-formance schedule, along with lingering symptoms of pneumo-nia, had taken their toll. Halfway home, on December 15, Fatsdied in his Pullman bunk.

—Carl Zebrowskieditor of America in WWII


CALIFORNIA • Apr. 6, Chino: Monthly living history day. Panel discussion and flightexhibition of the Fork-Tailed Devil, the Lockheed P-38 Lightning airplane. 10 A.M.Planes of Fame Air Museum, 7000 Merrill Avenue. 909-597-3722. planesoffame.orgApr. 13, Palm Springs: “The Doolittle Raid: America’s First Strike on the Japanese

Homeland.” Commemorative program with flight exhibition. 1 P.M. Palm Springs AirMuseum, 745 North Gene Autry Trail. 760-778-6262. palmspringsairmuseum.org

GEORGIA • Apr. 27 and 28, Peachtree City: WWII Heritage Days. Program re-cre-ates sights and sounds of the war with vintage aircraft and equipment, demonstrations,reenactors, and canteen show. 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. Commemorative Air Force Dixie WingHistorical Airpower Facility, 1200 Echo Court. 678-364-1100. wwiidays.org

MASSACHUSETTS • Mar. 16 and 17, Fall River: St. Patrick’s Day Weekend at theCove. Destroyer USS Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., open for Irish celebration with scavengerhunts and prizes. 9 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. Battleship Cove, 5 Water Street. 508-678-1100.battleshipcove.orgApr. 13, Fall River: The Pearl Harbor Experience. Newest exhibit re-creates the sights,

sounds, and feel of the surprise attack on the island. Every hour from 11 A.M. to 3 P.M.Battleship Cove, 5 Water Street. 508-678-1100. battleshipcove.orgApr. 19, Fall River: Family Nautical Night. Stay overnight in crew quarters aboard

USS Massachusetts (BB-59), eat in the officers’ wardroom, participate in shipboardactivities. Battleship Cove, 5 Water Street. 508-678-1100. battleshipcove.org

NEW HAMPSHIRE • Mar. 10, Wolfeboro: “African American Submariners of WWIIand Beyond.” Lecture. 2 P.M. Wright Museum of WWII History, 77 Center Street. 603-569-1212. wrightmuseum.orgApr. 7, Wolfeboro: Japanese Weapons of WWII. Presentation and exhibition of

weapons, including pistols, swords, and rifles. 2 P.M. Wright Museum of WWII History,77 Center Street. 603-569-1212. wrightmuseum.org

NEW JERSEY • Through Mar. 29, Camden: Overnight Aboard the Battleship. Dine inthe USS New Jersey’s mess, sleep in crew bunks, tour the ship. Battleship New JerseyMuseum and Memorial, 62 Battleship Place, 100 Clinton Street. 866-877-6262. battle-shipnewjersey.org

NEW MEXICO • Mar. 17, White Sands Missile Range: 24th Annual BataanMemorial Death March. Challenging 14.2- or 26.2-mile march across desert terrain inhonor of those who experienced the WWII march. Online registration closes March 6.Opening ceremony 6:35 A.M. bataanmarch.com

NORTH CAROLINA • Apr. 12, Durham: Public lecture on “Gender, War, and Culture:Music in the United States during World War II.” Delivered by Annegret Fauser of theUniversity of North Carolina–Chapel Hill Department of Music. 4 P.M. DukeUniversity’s Carr Building. gwc.web.unc.edu

TEXAS • Mar. 9 and 10, Fredericksburg: Pacific combat living history reenactment.Reenactors demonstrate weapons and discuss tactics. 10:30 A.M., 1 P.M., and 3:30 P.M.Pacific War Museum Combat Zone, East Austin Street, two blocks from the museum,which is at 340 East Main Street. 830-997-8220. pacificwarmuseum.org

VIRGINIA • Mar. 26, Bedford: Lunchbox Lecture: “Fly Girls and Aviation in WWII.”Noon. National D-Day Memorial, 3 Overlord Circle. 800-351-DDAY. dday.org

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would say he was coming home,” recalled Francisca, Eiken’s sis-ter. “But [it] stated that he had been killed.”

The 12 crewmen were buried in the US Armed Forces Cemeteryin Yokohama, Japan. In 1949 Eiken’s remains were returned to hisfamily and reinterred in the parish cemetery of St. Francis Xavierin Taos.

A museum display in Takachiho, Japan, honors the crewmen, andthe curator there sent the Eiken family pieces of the plane that werefound nearby in the Kyushu Mountains. The local community com-memorates the men with a memorial site and an annual ceremony.

Eiken’s niece, Donna Boyd, said, “It is nice to know that thishas led to a promotion of goodwill and peace between our twonations while helping us share memories of a family member whonever came home.”A

Submitted by JEREMY AMICK, public affairs officer for Silver StarFamilies of America, a nonprofit organization headquartered inClever, Missouri, that assists wounded and ill veterans and theirfamilies.

A LFRED EIKEN KEPT HIS THOUGHTS about joining the militaryquiet. Then, after graduating from St. Francis Xavier School

in Taos, Missouri, in 1941 and working for a year in St. Louis, heannounced that he had enlisted in the US Army Air Forces. “Hedidn’t talk much about it,” remembered his eldest sister, Frances.“He just went and did it.”

Eiken completed his initial training at Jefferson Barracks,Missouri, and then went on to finish bombardier school in Texasin 1943. After additional training in locations throughout theUnited States, he was transferred to India in November 1944.

In 1945 Eiken was assigned to a B-29 bomber on Tinian in theMariana Islands, and he and his crew flew 28 successful missions.On the 29th, a run to deliver prisoner-of-war supplies on August30 ended when one of the plane’s wings clipped a mountain andthe plane crashed. The air forces could not find the wreckage andsent telegrams to the crew’s families to inform them that the menwere classified “missing.”

A few months later, the Eikens received another message fromthe army. “When the second telegram came, we thought that it

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Right: Alfred Eiken is dressed for success at Missouri’s capitol. Left: In the Pacific, things went well at first.Eiken (the tallest man standing) completed 28 missions before things went terribly wrong (not in this plane).


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