O n the evening of June 5, 1944, Louis Leroux, his wife, and their six children scrambled atop an embankment near their farm to investigate the sounds of distant explosions. Three miles south, Allied fighter-bombers were attacking bridges over the Douve River on France’s Cotentin Peninsula. In the fading twilight the family watched silhouetted warplanes peel away from the glowing tracers of German anti-aircraft fire that stabbed skyward. When the excitement ended, the Lerouxs returned home to bed, unaware that their farm would play a vital role in the Allied liberation of France. 

Their slumber was disturbed a few hours later by the droning of low-flying aircraft. Gazing out their windows, they were startled to see descending parachutes. “They looked like big falling mushrooms,” recalled Madame Leroux. “We didn’t know what they were but could see that they were landing in the marshes.” When shrapnel from German flak shells pelted the roof, Madame Leroux and her husband gathered their children to take shelter in the stone stairwell. 

The farmstead sat on the east bank of the Merderet River, which bisected the Cotentin Peninsula north to south. The farm overlooked one of just two crossing points: the La Fière Bridge on the road to the village of Sainte-Mère-Église. While on the high ground, the family home was closer to the riverbank than originally intended thanks to the German occupiers who, recognizing the defensive potential of the landscape, had manipulated locks to flood the area with seawater. Rivers and streams had overflowed their banks to turn wide swaths of bucolic fields into swampland and a shallow lake.

At dawn on June 6, a platoon of Germans arrived at the Leroux’s farm. They searched the stables and occupied the house while the family retreated upstairs to the main bedroom. When gunfire erupted outside, the Lerouxs again scrambled for cover. Bullets cracked through windows, splintering shutters and ricocheting off interior stone walls. The staccato of German Mausers, MP40s, and MG42s echoed through the house as the occupiers fired back at the attackers.

During a pause in the shooting, the family rushed downstairs, past wounded Germans sprawled in the kitchen, and into the wine cellar. Wanting to flee, they nudged open the external cellar door. Spotting a soldier—who they thought was British—they yelled, “Français! Français!”

He replied in French: “Stay where you are and close the door!” 

Several hours later the door opened, and the same soldier commanded them, again in French, “Get out!” 

The Lerouxs now realized the soldiers were American paratroopers. They questioned the French family to learn how many Germans were inside, and then the shooting resumed as the French family sought cover. “The noise took our breath away,” admitted Madame Leroux. The Americans were peppering the house with rifles and machine guns. The skirmish ended after a bazooka round exploded into the house and paratroopers sprinted in to herd the surrendering Germans out. In the lull that followed, the Lerouxs celebrated their violent liberation by gifting a bottle of Calvados brandy to the Americans. “They asked us to drink some first,” recalled Madame Leroux, “which we did. Then they all drank some.”

The paratroopers, there to seize the bridge and expecting a German counterattack, told the Lerouxs it was too dangerous for them to stay. The family packed food and blankets before walking to a neighbor’s home. During their exodus, they passed more American troopers heading to the bridge.

The La Fière bridge was the D-Day objective of the 82nd Airborne Division’s 1st Battalion of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment. Capturing the bridge intact was critical to the Allies’ plans: first, they needed to prevent the Germans from using it to move reinforcements against the landings at Utah Beach and second, they wanted the bridge to serve later as an artery for armor and infantry to break out from the beachhead toward the ultimate objective: the port of Cherbourg.

A member of the 505th later described the nighttime parachute drop they had made into Normandy as “a model of precision flying and perfect execution.” Pilots of the 315th Troop Carrier Group—veterans of missions in Sicily and Italy—had dropped their passengers right on target. Under the command of Lieutenant John “Red Dog” Dolan, Able Company assembled 98 percent of its troopers within an hour. The 505th’s sister regiment, the 507th, was supposed to land on the opposite side of the Merderet, but it was not as fortunate. Weather, anti-aircraft fire, and hopelessly lost pilots scattered them across 60 square miles. 

With their drop zone just a half-mile from their objective, Dolan’s lead platoon pushed through the graying light of dawn and reached the Leroux’s farm in 30 minutes. The troopers immediately searched the bridge for demolition charges and put the German occupiers under siege. By mid-morning, with the help of paratroopers from the 508th PIR, the east side of the bridge was secure, but the scattered state of the 507th left the defense of the west side in a weakened state.

Major Frederick C.A. Kellam, the 1st Battalion commander, organized his men as well as troopers from other scattered units into a perimeter. The troopers of the 505th, most of whom had seen combat in Sicily and Italy, provided the backbone of his defense. As one of the veterans recalled, “We knew exactly what to expect on the upcoming mission: incoming mortar rounds, the terrifying German 88s, machine pistols, and one-on-one attacks against machinegun nests.” 

The road past the bridge cut across the swampy marshland via an elevated, tree-lined causeway almost 700 yards long. Kellam’s men dug in on a gentle slope facing the river. The position was less than ideal as it left them in the open and in view of any Germans on the far side, but defending from the protected reverse slope wasn’t an option. One positive, though, was that any attack from the opposite side could only come across the narrow causeway. 

“Red Dog” Dolan positioned Able Company closest to the bridge: a platoon on each side, plus another in reserve 400 yards to the rear. Dolan’s heavy firepower consisted of three .30-caliber belt-fed machine gun crews and two bazooka teams dug in to the left and right of the bridge. He also positioned a 57mm anti-tank gun 500 feet back, at a bend in the road where it had a direct line of fire down the causeway. A platoon of combat engineers stood by to blow the bridge in the event of an enemy breakthrough. To prevent that, troopers blocked the far side of the bridge with Hawkins mines. “We placed our anti-tank mines right on the top of the road where the Germans could see them,” recounted Sergeant William D. Owens, “but could not miss them with their tanks.” 

The troopers created an additional roadblock by pushing a German flatbed truck—disabled during the earlier firefight for the farmhouse—into the middle of the bridge. 

A reconnaissance of the far bank revealed it was occupied by only a handful of 507th troopers rather than the expected battalion. Without radio contact and the planned-for support, the men led by Kellam and Dolan were on their own.

The first sign of trouble came at 4:00 p.m. when scout Francis C. Buck came hightailing it back across the long causeway. He’d heard spurts of gunfire followed by the unmistakable clanking of tanks. Close behind him were a few men from the west bank who were fleeing the German advance. Buck paused briefly at the two bazooka positions to give them a heads-up before sprinting to Kellam’s command post. 

The enemy heralded their attack with an artillery barrage, which lifted as four tanks rolled across the causeway. Following them were an estimated 200 infantrymen. The Americans held their fire—the fleeting glimpses of field gray uniforms darting between the trees wasn’t yet worth wasting ammunition.

The first tank—a Panzer Mk III—paused 40 yards short of the bridge. The commander, apparently spotting the mines, opened his hatch and stood up for a better look. One of Dolan’s machine gun crews squeezed off a burst at the tempting target and killed him instantly. With that, the American line erupted with rifle and machine gun fire.

The two bazooka teams went to work. Gunners Lenold Peterson and Marcus Heim abandoned their foxhole so they could aim around a concrete telephone pole. To their right, Privates John D. Bolderson and Gordon C. Pryne did the same. Just a few hours earlier, Pryne had been a rifleman, “But on the jump, one of the guys on the bazooka team broke his ankle,” he said. “They gave that job to me. I didn’t want it, really, but they said, ‘You got it.’” 

The two teams pummeled the lead tank, which in turn fired a round at Peterson and Heim. It flew high, shattering the telephone pole. Dolan later admitted, “To this day, I’ll never be able to explain why all four of them were not killed. They fired and reloaded with the precision of well-oiled machinery.” 

The lead tank was hit by several 2.36-inch high-explosive rockets, one of which disabled a track while another briefly set it alight. Peterson and Heim advanced to get a better shot at the second tank—a captured French Renault R-35 painted Wehrmacht gray—which was some 20 yards behind the first. Heim later recalled, “We moved forward toward the second tank and fired at it as fast as I could load the rockets into the bazooka. We kept firing at the second tank, and we hit it in the turret where the body joins it, also in the tracks, and with another hit it also went up in flames.”

The 57mm gun fired as well and was subjected to heavy enemy retaliation. In the melee, two tank rounds punched through the glacis shield, and seven men were killed keeping it in operation.

A third tank now lumbered toward the bridge as German mortar shells pounded the American line. Although the first tank was disabled, the main gun and machine gun were still barking out shells. Rushing out from his foxhole, Private Joseph C. Fitt scrambled atop the first tank to toss a hand grenade into the open hatch and finish off the crew.

While the tank battle raged, the German infantry struggled to advance against the weight of American firepower. One paratrooper observed that the bunched-up enemy, seeking cover along the treelined causeway, “made a real nice target.”

With the German attack stalling, the two bazooka teams yelled for more ammo. Three men, including Major Kellam, scrambled forward with satchels of rockets. The trio was 15 yards from the bridge when another mortar and artillery barrage crashed in. Kellam was killed, and the other two men badly wounded, one mortally. Kellam’s death made Dolan the senior officer. His first action after taking command was to dispatch a runner to the regiment’s command post to advise them what happened.

Artillery continued to rain in. “They really clobbered us,” admitted Owens. “I don’t know how it was possible to live through it.”

Owens’ platoon was out front. When his radioman with the walkie-talkie took a direct shell hit, they lost contact with Dolan. “So, from then on, as far as we were concerned, we were a lost platoon,” said Owens. Anticipating another attack, Owens slithered from foxhole to foxhole collecting grenades and ammunition from the dead to redistribute to his men. “I knew we would need every round we could get our hands on.”

The enemy infantry rushed forward again, passing the knocked-out tanks and getting closer to Owens’ platoon, which poured fire into their ranks. “The machine gun I had was so hot it quit firing,” said Owens. He shouldered a dead man’s BAR, firing it until he ran out of ammo, then he switched to a second machine gun of a knocked-out crew. 

Owens could hear another machine gun stitching the German flank and the plonking belch of a 60mm mortar lobbing shells along the causeway. Riflemen squeezed off shot after shot. It was getting desperate. “We stopped them,” Owens recounted, “but they had gotten within twenty-five yards of us.” 

Just as the German attack failed, Colonel Mark J. Alexander, the regimental executive officer, arrived with 40-odd paratroopers he had managed to collect along the way. His inspection of the defenses confirmed they were set as well as could be expected. Shortly thereafter, the division’s second-in-command, Brigadier General James M. Gavin, arrived with men from the 507th. Gavin concurred with Alexander’s assessment, later recounting that Dolan’s troopers holding the bridge were “well organized and had the situation in hand.”

Alexander asked Gavin, “Do you want me on this side, the other side, or both sides of the river?” 

After glancing at the far bank, Gavin replied, “You better stay on this side because it looks like the Germans are getting pretty strong over there.” The two officers agreed that attacking across the bridge would divide their manpower and might cost them the bridge in the face of a strong counterattack.

German shells continued to pummel the American positions. One shell exploded on the edge of a foxhole, burying the two occupants. Alexander helped dig them out and then sent them back to the medics.

First Sergeant Robert M. Matterson, who was directing the wounded to the aid station, said they were coming back in such numbers that he “felt like a policeman directing traffic.” Indeed, as the day ended, dozens of men flowed past while dozens more of their comrades lay dead, strewn across the battlefield. 

Sunset gave way to darkness, with a bright moon that was occasionally obscured by scudding clouds. Throughout the night, the Germans periodically lobbed artillery shells at the Americans, while Alexander dispatched supply parties to scour the division’s drop zone for more ammunition.

At dawn, the rising sun released mist from the surrounding swamps and heralded the arrival of a squad of airborne engineers along with two more machine gun crews. Colonel Alexander warmly welcomed the men and directed them to dig in. 

The additional firepower was much needed, but Alexander was still concerned about his available arsenal: “We had no long-range firepower other than machine guns. Well, we had one 57mm gun with six rounds of ammunition and a limited supply of mortar rounds, but this all had to be held in reserve for any serious effort the Germans might make to cross the bridge.” 

Alexander’s mental inventory was interrupted when a group of paratroopers on the far side of the Merderet River attempted to wade across. He watched helplessly as German fire cut into the men sloshing through the water. A handful made it to safety, but most were killed and several of the wounded drowned.

The Germans preceded their next attack with intensified shelling, including tree bursts. Two more captured French Renault tanks were in the vanguard. Dolan’s 57mm crew held their fire—with only six rounds left they wanted a clear shot. But when the lead tank boldly geared onto the bridge, the 57mm crew cracked off a round. The shell struck the tank, sending it and its partner into retreat. Nestled in front of the anti-tank gun was Corporal Felix Ferrazzi, a radioman serving as a machine gunner. With a clear view down the causeway, he added to the mayhem with repeated bursts of fire into the advancing Germans. The gunners implored him to move due to the 57mm’s muzzle blast, but despite being wounded, Ferrazzi stayed put—until a mortar shell mangled his .30-caliber. The other Americans added to the wall of lead, especially Sergeant Oscar Queen, who estimated he fired 5,000 rounds from his belt-fed machine gun. 

Thirty minutes into their attack, the Germans floundered. They began their withdrawal as the paratroopers neared their breaking point. Dolan’s 1st Platoon was down to 15 men; one squad had just three troopers still standing. Owens sent a runner to report to Dolan: they were almost out of ammo and unable to repel the next attack; could they pull back? Dolan replied, “No, stay where you are.” He then scribbled a short message for the runner to relay to Owens: “We stay. There is no better place to die.” With his orders in hand, Owens organized what was left of his platoon.

But the Germans had had enough. They waved a Red Cross flag and requested a 30-minute truce to recover their wounded. Owens and his comrades used the time to bring up more ammo and determine who was still alive. Able Company had suffered 17 killed and 49 wounded; the battalion was down to 176 men. The exhausted Owens then sought a better view of the causeway. “I estimated I could see at least 200 dead or wounded Germans scattered about. I don’t know how many were in the river,” he said, “Then I sat down and cried.”

But the battle for La Fière Bridge wasn’t over. For the Allies to break out of the beachhead, the stalemate had to be broken. Later that evening, General Gavin relieved the battered 505th paratroopers with elements of the 325th Glider Infantry Regiment. In a charge rivaling the Light Brigade, the glider men made a daylight assault across the causeway on June 9. Pushing through the pall of friendly artillery and withering enemy fire, they successfully occupied the far bank, while another group of 100 paratroopers swarmed in behind them to help secure the foothold. The road to Cherbourg was now open for Major General J. Lawton Collins’ VII Corps, but it came at a heavy cost. The 82nd Airborne had suffered 254 men killed and more than 500 wounded to seize, hold, and secure the vital bridge at La Fière. 

The Leroux family returned to find their home in ruins and most of their livestock victims of the crossfire. They lived in the stable—as it had suffered the least damage—rebuilding their farm over the next five years. They moved back into their home in time for Christmas 1949. 

“Our family celebrated,” recalled Madame Leroux, “happy, in spite of our misery, to all be back together without having suffered any dead or wounded, thanks to the American soldiers who fought to liberate and save us.”

The motor launch tied up at the small-boat pier in Seeadler Harbor in New Guinea to disembark a dozen men from the ammunition carrier USS Mount Hood. The date was November 10, 1944. Led by the ship’s communications officer, Lieutenant Lester Hull Wallace, the group had several errands to run on shore before returning to the ship. Wallace planned to take a couple of men with him to the fleet post office to pick up mail. Others were headed to headquarters to obtain charts and manuals. Two had dental appointments and two were on their way to the brig. The sailors were just splitting up when a tremendous blast knocked them off their feet. When they looked out into the harbor, they were stunned to realize that their ship was being wracked by explosion after explosion.

Seeadler Harbor was off the northeast coast of Manus Island, 250 miles north of mainland New Guinea. It was one of the finest anchorages in the Southwest Pacific Theater, measuring 15 miles long and four wide, with ample depth for capital ships. The army had taken the island from the Japanese in early March 1944 and within days U.S. Navy Seabees had begun to build a major advanced operating base capable of supplying and repairing the ships of Admiral William F. Halsey’s Third Fleet as it supported General Douglas MacArthur’s leap-frogging drive along New Guinea’s north coast to retake the Philippines. That same month a survey ship marked out more than 600 moorage sites throughout the vast harbor. The Manus base grew over the summer and became dotted with hundreds of buildings—mostly Quonset huts used as barracks for thousands of sailors and as warehouses for the vast amounts of materiel necessary to carry on the war.

On the morning of Friday, November 10, Mount Hood was one of some 200-odd ships in the harbor. The vessels ran the gamut from patrol boats to escort carriers and also included landing ships, tanks (LSTs), destroyers, and civilian-crewed freighters. Mount Hood was anchored at berth 380, near the harbor’s center, four miles from the entrance and 2½ miles from land. It was the first of eight AE class ammunition ships that had been converted for the U.S. Navy, with a length of 460 feet, a displacement of 14,000 tons, and a cargo capacity of 7,800 tons. Mount Hood’s keel was laid down in September 1943 and it began service as a cargo vessel named the SS Marco Polo. Once the navy took over, it converted the ship into an ammunition carrier. Commissioned in July 1944, the vessel was renamed after the dormant volcano that provides Oregon with its highest point. Its captain was Commander Harold A. Turner. 

Turner struggled to find qualified seamen for his crew and many of those he received were raw recruits with no experience at sea. After an unusually short fitting out and a shakedown cruise in the Chesapeake Bay, Mount Hood stopped at Norfolk, Virginia, to load 5,000 tons of explosives and ammunition. On August 5, 1944, with its hold filled, Mount Hood departed Norfolk bound for the Admiralty Islands via the Panama Canal. The ship reached its final destination, Seeadler Harbor, on September 22. Its mission was two-fold: to dispense its cargo to other warships, and to take on any unused munitions from homeward-bound vessels.

On November 10 Mount Hood was ringed by nine landing ship, mechanized (LCM) boats and was the center of a humming hive of loading and unloading activity. The small-engine repair ship USS Mindanao was anchored off the ship’s port side just 350 yards away. USS Argonne, another repair ship that also served as the task force commander’s flagship, was 1,100 yards off.

Wallace and his going-ashore party piled aboard the captain’s 40-foot gig and at 8:25 a.m. they shoved off toward the beach. As he headed toward shore Wallace noted that aerial depth charges were being loaded aboard the Mount Hood from the landing craft moored alongside.

A lanky, bespectacled 29-year-old native of Georgia, Wallace had graduated from Atlanta Tech High School and earned his law degree from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in 1941. Afterward he married Mildred Virginia French and went straight into the service of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, working in the estate and gift tax branch—but not before registering as an officer in the Naval Reserve. In 1942 the navy called him up and assigned him a place in the Bureau of Naval Personnel. After a year there the navy sent Wallace to its communications school at Harvard University, and then to the Sub Chaser Training Center at Miami, Florida. In the summer of 1944 the lieutenant was transferred to USS Mount Hood—his first at-sea deployment. He put his Ivy League training to good use when setting up the ship’s communications department.

Wallace and his crew landed at the pier and disembarked to carry out their various chores. Just as they were separating, one of the sailors loudly exclaimed, “Look!” The boat crew turned to see an eruption of smoke and fire rising above Mount Hood. In seconds a powerful explosive concussion threw them to the ground. It took a full 12 seconds for the horrible sound of the exploding ship to reach them. Even from two miles away they could see dark shapes being ejected from the explosion and curving high into the sky. The lieutenant reacted immediately. “Back to the boat!” he yelled. He told the coxswain to make all speed to return to the scene. It took more than a quarter of an hour for the motor launch to reach berth 380. They found no ship, no bodies. “There was nothing but debris all around,” Wallace later wrote. Mount Hood and her crew of 350 had simply vanished.

Wallace directed the boat to the nearest vessel, the Mindanao. He was shocked by what he saw—the port side had been pummeled by flying steel that punched 33 irregularly shaped holes into the hull, some as large as three by four feet. He later learned that everyone on the port deck—26 sailors—had been killed instantly by the blast. In all, 82 men died on Mindanao. There seemed nothing more Wallace and his men could do, so the lieutenant had the launch head back to the pier to await further orders. There he was told to stick around and that he’d be required as a witness for an about-to-be-convened official board of inquiry. He did not know then that he was the only surviving officer from Mount Hood. 

Out in the harbor ships were assessing the damage from the explosion. After the sky ceased raining metal fragments, the crew of the Argonne counted 221 pieces of the Mount Hood strewn across the deck. Said the ship’s captain, Commander T.H. Escott, “By the time we had recovered from the force of the explosion, Mount Hood was completely shrouded in a pall of dense black smoke. It was not possible to see anything worth reporting.”

Ships as far as 2,200 yards distant sustained various degrees of damage, among them the escort carriers USS Petrof Bay and Saginaw Bay, the destroyer USS Young, four destroyer escorts, and several cargo and repair vessels. Small boats like landing craft took the brunt of the blast. Many were sunk and more were damaged beyond repair. Many crewmen died. Fortunately, there were no major combat ships in the harbor that morning. 

When divers entered the harbor waters to inspect Mount Hood’s wreckage, they found none to speak of—only a few stray pieces of the hull, nothing bigger than 16 by 10 feet. They were astonished to see a trench in the sand 50 feet wide and 300 feet long that the explosion had excavated to a depth of 40 feet. USS Mount Hood had literally ceased to exist.

Within days the navy organized a board of investigation to discover the cause of a catastrophe that killed 432 men and wounded an additional 371 from surrounding ships. The members, headed by a captain and two commanders, were to review all the facts, study images taken at the scene, and interview personnel who, in some way, witnessed the events of November 10, 1944. The hearings took place aboard the destroyer tender USS Sierra. 

The first order of business was to define the scene at Seeadler Harbor and the role Mount Hood had played in activities there. It was noted that the ship was “the primary source for the issue of all types of ammunition,” and was taking on munitions from homebound vessels. The board noted that the harbor had four delineated anchorages for ammunition ships in the harbor’s western portion. But they were not used. After shifting the ship’s allocated place twice, the harbormaster settled it into berth 380, in the generally placid waters at the harbor’s center. That central location was more convenient for the landing craft and lighters that had to carry the ammunition back and forth. The ship was anchored in about 120 feet. At the time of the explosion Mount Hood was carrying about 3,800 tons of high explosives, including “quite a bit of damaged ammunition,” Lieutenant Wallace told the board. “Some of it was corroded and I myself remember seeing some pyrotechnics with dates as far back as 1915.”

Seaman First Class Lawrence Gaschler told the board that he should have been aboard Mount Hood that morning unloading side-by-side with his fellow crewmates from the amphibious boat pool. But he had been chosen to pilot a boat that carried an officer from the escort carrier USS Ommaney Bay to another ship in the harbor. “In my mind, we’d just passed the Hood when it blew up,” he testified. “There was this bright flash and I could feel the heat, then just a second later the concussion hit us. It knocked the officer down and knocked me out. When I came to, debris was falling in the water around.”

Motor Machinist’s Mate Lew Cowden was aboard the destroyer escort USS Whitehurst. He recalled that “we were headed toward the open sea when it exploded. They tell me we were much closer when taking on supplies and went right past [Mount Hood] on our way out. I had just started up the ladder to the fantail when the blast pushed me back. I ran forward and came up on deck amidships. The air was full of smoke and fine dust. I was told that we were far enough away to avoid damage from the blast and yet near enough that major debris blew over us.” 

Not all eyewitness testimony was credible. Aviation ordnanceman Edward L. Ponichtera, who was working on the beach near the Mount Hood, asserted that he saw a twin-engine Japanese bomber drop two bombs—“each a direct hit”—on the ship. “I clearly observed the Rising Sun painted on the plane,” he said. Carl Hughes, a sailor on the Liberty ship SS William H. McGuffey, averred that he saw an enemy midget submarine broach the water near Mount Hood and fire two torpedoes.

With help from the Mount Hood survivors on Wallace’s boat, the board’s investigators pieced together an accounting of the types of cargo aboard at the time of the explosion. Munitions included .30-caliber machine gun rounds, 14-inch shells for battleships, and everything in-between. There were dozens of 100-pound bombs stored away in the holds, or in the case of the 1,000-pound blockbusters, kept in a small shack on the main deck. Hold #5 contained rocket bodies and rocket motors, most of them damaged. The total was nearly 4,000 tons of munitions. 

The investigators then moved over to assess Mount Hood’s crew and their role in the inferno. They felt the sailors had an overall “lack of experience” and, perhaps even more crucial, a “lack of leadership among the twenty-two officers,” which led to poor discipline onboard. “This was reflected in the rough and careless handling of ammunition,” the board noted. 

In all, 133 witnesses gave testimony, supported by dozens of exhibits. Wallace was twice called to give evidence. It took the board a month to gather all of its evidence. 

On December 14, 1944, the board issued its findings. “The following unsafe conditions and practices were revealed in the investigation: ammunition was being roughly handled in all parts of the ship; boosters, fuzes and detonators were stowed together in one hold in a manner contrary to regulations governing transportation of military explosives; safety regulations for handling ammunition were not posted in conspicuous places and there was a general lack of instruction to the crew in safety measures; there was a lack of enforcing the prohibitions of smoking; there was evidence that ammunition was accepted on board which was definitely defective and should have been destroyed by dumping in deep water.”

The board’s final conclusion was that “The explosion was caused by a force or agency within the USS Mount Hood itself.” Had Captain Turner survived he and his senior officers would have been held responsible. The board had to admit that they had no clear idea of the exact cause of the disaster—they could only guess—which was frustrating for the three members.

Regarding the statements about a Japanese bomber or midget submarine, the board firmly stated there was no evidence that either of these attacks took place, and so discounted the accounts. 

In his endorsement of the report, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander of Pacific Ocean Areas and Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, wrote, “The question of negligence is not involved but rather that the technical mistakes made by the above named officers [Turner and others] were errors in judgement resulting from a keen desire to meet necessary military commitments and move on with the progress of the war.” The admiral noted, “The exigencies of war will always require the acceptance of certain operational hazards.”

While working on its conclusions the board took note of two other incidents involving explosions on ammunition-carrying vessels, one in May 1944 and the other in July. 

On May 21 an LST tied up at Pearl Harbor’s West Loch was loading mortar rounds for the upcoming invasion of the Mariana Islands when it was blown up after an errant shell fell into a stack of munitions in the hold. The resulting conflagration quickly spread to other nearby LSTs. Six of the craft were sunk and 160 men killed.

And on July 17 a blast at the naval magazine ammunition loading facility in Port Chicago, California, flipped and sank the freighter SS Quinault Victory and vaporized the Liberty ship SS E.A. Bryan. Three-hundred-twenty men died, two-thirds of them African American stevedores. Both ships were tied up at a finger pier loading ammunition from a string of railway boxcars. The official finding of facts produced by the board of inquiry noted that “no intent, fault, negligence, or inefficiency of any person in the naval service caused the explosions.” Among shortcomings that led to the disaster, the board wrote, “The officers had little stevedoring experience, none with handling enlisted personnel, and none with explosives.” They went on to describe the situation with the enlisted men, and the racism in the conclusions was only thinly veiled: “They were unreliable, and lacked capacity to understand instructions.” (When loading was ordered to resume weeks later, many of the sailors involved refused, leading to a mass court-martial. Those convicted of mutiny and sentenced to hard labor became known as the Port Chicago 50 and gained their release after the war and only following a public outcry.) 

So, in the space of seven months three eerily similar accidents wreaked havoc on the navy’s explosives supply lines. Nine ships were lost and more than 900 men died.

In March 1945 the navy’s Bureau of Ordnance issued a “circular” letter to relevant commands that emphasized how easy it was to explode “bomb type” ammunition accidentally “by impacts not severe enough to cause even slight rupture to container walls. Any idea that hazards due to ‘mere denting’ of containers must be thoroughly dispelled.” The letter went on to outline a series of revised loading practices intended to cut down on the risks of explosions, in particular how dangerous materials should be handled. After tightening up the rules the navy suffered no further cataclysms. 

Following his testimony to the board of investigation, Lieutenant Wallace returned to Arlington, Virginia, to reunite with his wife and son. For his next tour the navy sent him for duty in the communications unit of a carrier—exactly what he had sought all along. He spent the next ten months on station in the Pacific Theater, where he was promoted to commander. Wallace was discharged in late 1945 and when he returned home, he reclaimed his old post at the Bureau of Revenue (later renamed the Internal Revenue Service). He retired in 1974 and died in 2012 at the age of 97.

Mount Hood was not forgotten. In July 1968 a second ship named for the Oregon volcano was launched at Sparrows Point, Maryland. Designated AE-29, it was the fourth Kilauea-class ammunition ship to enter navy service. The second Mount Hood served in Vietnam in 1972, earning a campaign star, and served in the Gulf War in 1991. The ship was decommissioned in August 1999 and was sold for scrap in September 2013.

Rounding the bend past the guard gate, I catch my breath when I spy the Greenbrier resort’s main building. The Georgian-style structure, wedding-cake white and six stories high, looms above flower-speckled grounds that cover 7,000 acres and include cottages, five golf courses, tennis courts, and hiking and bridle trails. This posh estate was established in 1778 in White Sulphur Springs, Virginia (now West Virginia), around a natural hot spring (though the main building wasn’t built until 1858 and since has been expanded). Five presidents stayed here before the Civil War and famous guests since then have included President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, and a whole roster of industrial barons—including Vanderbilts, Fords, and du Ponts—who regularly spent their summers here.

But one chapter of this majestic hotel’s history is lesser known—during World War II, diplomats from enemy Axis countries were interned here. And after they left, the hotel became an active wartime military hospital. There aren’t tons of artifacts left behind from those years, but you can discover traces of this fascinating history and hear some interesting stories. I’m here to learn about it from Dr. Robert S. Conte, who served as the Greenbrier’s historian for nearly 40 years. 

“Remember, Pearl Harbor was a big surprise,” Conte says as we sit at a big wooden desk in the Victorian Writing Room off the dramatic main lobby. I study the room’s gleaming wood trim, ornate mantel, and red carpeting, wondering what’s original and what’s not (only the wood trim, I later learn). “So, on December 7, there were pretty much fully functioning embassies in Washington,” which included those of Japan, Germany, and Italy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt demanded that these now-hostile diplomats and their families leave Washington within 48 hours for security reasons. The Greenbrier soon became a leading candidate to house the new adversaries. 

“The Greenbrier had several things going for it,” Conte explains. “It was on the railroad line—so get on a train in [D.C.’s] Union Station and you’re there within a few hours. It was isolated, and so could easily be guarded. And it was first-class,” which was imperative to ensure the reciprocal treatment of American diplomats being held overseas.

The State Department approached the Greenbrier’s management—it was owned by the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad—on December 17, 1941, to propose a leasing plan. Within two days the resort closed to the public and the first group of 159 German and Hungarian diplomats and their families arrived on a secretly scheduled Pullman train from Washington. “They pulled up in the same train station that still exists across the street,” Conte says. Eventually 1,697 people from five different countries were interned here.

The plan was to keep the diplomats at the Greenbrier for up to eight weeks while prisoner negotiations between Washington and the enemy countries ensued. From the start, all internees were treated as regular guests (other than the presence of 50 U.S. Border Control guards keeping an eye on them), with the staff  of several hundred and quality of the resort’s service remaining unchanged. General Manager Loren Johnston ensured this, even though some employees may have wrestled with the idea of serving the enemy. “You may rest assured,” Johnston wrote his staff, “that our Government has a very good reason for everything they request us to do.… It is our duty to serve these people for the duration of their stay in the best possible manner.”

While the golf course and riding trails were off-limits for security reasons, the internees could roam the building and grounds, use the indoor swimming pool, play ping-pong in the main lobby, and shop in the lower-level stores. The Germans bought so much they needed two extra railcars when they left.

For the most part, the imprisoned guests were well-mannered, though one night the Germans celebrated Hitler’s birthday in the main dining room. “It got a little boisterous,” Conte says. “One of the staff said, ‘It’s a hell of a hail of heils.’” 

The Germans and Italians notoriously didn’t get along. “Of course, the Germans thought everyone was inferior,” Conte says. “There was tension.” So around April 1942, the Italians were moved to the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina, and Japanese diplomats, who had been interned at the nearby Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia, were transferred to the Greenbrier.

But the Germans and Japanese got along even worse, leading to conflicts that tested the staff’s patience. In another note, GM Johnston appealed to his employees once again: “It must be remembered that this country is in a grievous war…and in order that we may properly perform our service we must…do our full duty.”

At long last, behind-the-scenes negotiations in Washington paid off with a prisoner exchange involving neutral countries, including Mozambique, Portugal, and Sweden. The last diplomat left the Greenbrier on July 9, 1942, and the resort reopened to the public.

Even before the last internee left, however, management was in negotiations for the Greenbrier’s next wartime duty. The U.S. Army wanted to use the main building as a hospital, and soon purchased the property for $3.3 million, well below the market value at the time. And so, on August 31, 1942, after a short, six-week summer season, the resort closed its heavy glass doors once again and began the challenging task of transforming itself from a resort–cum–internment–camp into a military hospital, to the tune of $2.2 million in renovation costs.

“This hospital is a major story,” Conte says. Originally, army officials planned to knock down all the interior walls, but former Greenbrier managers hired by the army reminded them that someday it would be a hotel again. “They figured out a plan where they could use the existing 500 guest rooms, converting them to hold 2,000 beds,” Conte says, though some walls needed to be razed to make room for a surgical area. The elegant lobby level remained more or less the same, except for an elevator shaft added off the ballroom for wheelchairs and gurneys.

Conte leads me through the richly decorated lobby-level rooms (courtesy of New York designer Dorothy Draper after the war), pointing out pieces of centuries-old furniture and vintage lithographs. The North Parlor was converted into a chapel, he says; the enormous crystal chandelier is original—and, according to one story, one of the Japanese internees left behind the gigantic Chinese screens that grace one wall. We walk onto the balcony just outside, overlooking the back of the hotel. A guard tower once rose above the fields in the distance.

The hospital’s first soldiers arrived on November 14, 1942, and over the next three years, more casualties came from Europe, North Africa, the Aleutian Islands, the Philippines, and elsewhere in the Pacific Theater. “For a lot of G.I.s, it was like, ‘Holy mackerel,’” Conte says of the soldiers’ response to their first view of the refined setting. “Clearly, when you see the building, you know it’s no army hospital. When you walked in, there was carpeting and wallpaper and, at the beginning, white tablecloths on the dining tables.” 

The hospital wasn’t formally dedicated until October 16, 1943, when it was given the official name Ashford General Hospital—after U.S. Army doctor Colonel Bailey K. Ashford, known for his early 20th-century malaria research. The press, however, dubbed it the “Shangri-La for Wounded Soldiers,” given the fact that G.I.s could use the resort’s championship golf course and other facilities. 

Between 1942 and 1946, 24,148 soldiers were admitted, and 11,346 operations performed. “They did vascular and neurosurgery here,” Conte says, “as well as rehabilitation.” General Dwight D. Eisenhower stayed twice at Ashford mid-war for some R&R, and was admitted as a patient once in late 1945 (for pneumonia, Conte believes). 

One big issue the military confronted was how to run such an enormous operation during a national labor shortage. Their solution? Build a prisoner-of-war camp at a nearby former Civilian Conservation Corps camp. Seventy-two Quonset huts housed 1,000 POWs, first Italians and then Germans, who had been captured overseas. They cooked meals, took care of the grounds, did laundry, and ran errands, among other tasks.

The last patients left in 1946, and so did the POWs. With the free labor gone, the military sold the Greenbrier back to the C&O. That, however, wasn’t the end of the Greenbrier’s military duties. Ten years later, the government was looking for a site for an emergency relocation center for the U.S. Congress in case of nuclear war.  “Another interesting story!” Dr. Conte says—but not one for today. 

Once Italy surrendered to the Allies in September 1943, the Germans moved into the vacuum. Rome was declared an “open city” by the Italian government, meaning it was unoccupied and off limits to attack, but Germany rushed in troops for an occupation that lasted for nine months and subjected the citizens to the brutality of Nazi rule for the first time in the war. The Nazis rounded up Jews and sent them to their deaths in concentration camps, violently enforced curfews, and attempted to crush any opposition.

A story about Italian resistance to German occupation, Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 film Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) is recognized as the first classic film of what has become known as the neorealist movement. Shot in the city after the Germans had left but before the war was over, the stark black-and-white film remains powerful even as it nears  its 80th anniversary. Wrote novelist Virginia Baily for The Guardian newspaper in 2015, “It was one of the most visceral, gut-wrenching cinematic experiences of my life and I have carried images and sounds from it—the old ladies stalling the Gestapo while the resistance hero escapes across the roofs, the martial music playing as the German regiment marches down a deserted street, the tortured hero slumped in a chair, the priest in his black robes—with me ever since.” 

The film opens as those German soldiers march through Rome to make a nighttime raid on a downtrodden apartment building. They seek Giorgio Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero), a communist and a central figure in the resistance. The apartment dwellers do what they can to divert the soldiers, and Manfredi escapes across the rooftops. While the Germans search, they intercept a call on the communal telephone from Manfredi’s sometime mistress, Marina (Maria Michi), an actress who quickly hangs up when she realizes something is amiss.

One of the building’s residents is Pina (Anna Magnani), a plain-speaking widow with a son, Marcello. She is pregnant, and on the night the Germans arrive she is planning to get married the next day to Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet), a soft-spoken printer. Her spiritual adviser is the priest Don Pietro Pellegrini (Aldo Fabrizi), who also serves as a central figure in the resistance.

In the meantime, the German Major Bergmann (Harry Feist) plots with the manipulative Ingrid (Giovanna Galletti) to stamp out the resistance and capture Manfredi. On Bergmann’s orders the Germans conduct another raid on the apartment building. This time they herd all the residents outside. When Don Pietro hears that one of the children from the building has a hidden stash of bombs and guns, he bluffs his way inside under the guise of giving last rites to a bedridden old man. He manages to hide the weapons before the Germans find them. 

Outside, Pina sees the Germans taking away Francesco. Frantic, she breaks free, and dashes down the street in pursuit of the truck carrying away her fiancé. The merciless Germans gun her down as her son watches. She dies in the street, cradled by Don Pietro. Partisans attack the truck convoy with the prisoners and Francesco manages to escape.

Bergmann and Ingrid have another tool they can use to find Manfredi: Marina. The cynical actress, angry with Manfredi and addicted to her creature comforts—which include drugs that Ingrid provides her—tells the Germans where they can find the resistance leader. The Germans descend as Manfredi and Don Pietro are bringing an Austrian deserter to safety and arrest the three men on the street. Bergmann forces the priest to watch as he has Manfredi brutally tortured, but neither the communist nor the Catholic priest divulge any information. Manfredi dies during his ordeal and Bergmann has the priest executed. Tied to a chair and praying for God to forgive his executioners, Don Pietro is murdered while the children from the apartment look on, horrified, before they trudge back into town, damaged in ways we can only imagine.

Rome, Open City was something of a change of direction for director Rossellini, who earlier in the war had made films for producer Vittorio Mussolini, the son of Il Duce. Even before the Germans had been forced out of Rome, Rossellini had begun thinking about making a movie about the resistance. He wanted “to show things exactly as they were,” he said. One of his collaborators on the story was another up-and-coming Italian filmmaker named Federico Fellini. Rossellini shot the film with little money, on location, and with film stock he scrounged—or even stole—from whatever sources were at hand, including cast-off snippets from other photographers. (The director said he stole stock from the offices of the U.S. Army’s Stars and Stripes news organization.) Most of the actors he used (with the notable exceptions of Magnani and Fabrizi) were nonprofessionals. He even used German prisoners-of-war as extras, including the soldier Pina slaps before making her ill-fated break. The result was a fiction film that looked and felt more like a documentary—in fact, the distributor Rossellini had obtained reneged on the deal, saying Rome, Open City wasn’t a “real movie.” But the film found a distributor in the United States and became a success, launching Rossellini’s international career and putting Italian neorealism—a genre embraced by other directors like Luchino Visconti and Vittorio de Sica—on the cinematic map. 

If Hollywood ever gets around to making a movie about “Scrappy” Blumer, the plot won’t need any embellishment. In fact, scriptwriters might have to tone down Blumer’s extraordinary achievements and full-throttle shenanigans during World War II to make them appear more believable. But such is the true-life story of a tougher-than-a-coffin-nail fighter pilot who came to be known as “The Fastest Ace in the West.”

Laurence Elroy Blumer was born May 31, 1917, to Paul and Geoline Blumer in Walcott, North Dakota. Like many immigrants who settled in the area, his maternal ancestors hailed from Norway, and undoubtedly passed down an adventurous Viking spirit to young Larry (his first of many nicknames). Growing up in the rural Midwest, he learned to hunt and fish while developing sharp hand-eye coordination that would later serve him well 5,000 miles from home. He was a student at Kindred High School (naturally, the “Vikings”), where he excelled in basketball and track. After graduating in 1936, he spent a couple of years working in carpentry and construction before enrolling at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota.      

America’s entry into World War II saw the Blumers relocate to the Pacific Northwest, where Paul found work at a munitions plant in Puyallup, Washington. Meanwhile, Larry enlisted in the Army Air Corps in March 1942 and learned to fly at Mira Loma in Oxnard, California. Next, he earned his wings at Luke Field, near Phoenix, and then reported to Marysville Cantonment, a large military garrison in Yuba County in northern California. Although his time there was brief, the repercussions would last a lifetime. 

Blumer posted to the 393rd Squadron of the 367th Fighter Group, an assignment that punched his ticket to the European Theater of Operations and an eventual showdown with the Luftwaffe. But before shipping off to Europe, he received an indelible nickname befitting his fiery demeanor. As the story goes, he had been at a party on the base when he got into a fight with several Marines. The next morning, his commanding officer, who had witnessed the brawl, summoned the North Dakotan to his office. But instead of reprimanding him, the C.O. praised Blumer for holding his own against two of the Marines in the dustup, thus forever branding him “Scrappy.”

The 367th FG had three squadrons—the 392nd, 393rd, and 394th—and they trained in Bell P-39D Airacobras at bases in the San Francisco Bay area. Additionally, they had bombing and gunnery instruction in Tonopah, Nevada, where Blumer decided to expand target practice to the nearby town of Mina. “We were taking a bead on everything—it didn’t make no difference,” Blumer recalled. “I was about 20 feet off the ground coming through town, pulled the trigger, and had about seven shells left. Right through the water tower!” After hightailing it back to the base, he grabbed a bucket of paint and altered the nose and tail of his airplane to cover his tracks.

As the war dragged on, it created an increasing demand for replacement pilots, including those of the 367th.

The group finally departed for Europe from New York Harbor on March 26, 1944, for an 11-day convoy to Britain. The 367th shipped aboard the transport ship SS Duchess of Bedford, a former Canadian Pacific liner drafted into wartime service and dubbed the “Drunken Duchess” for the way it wallowed through heavy seas. The fighter group, now under Lieutenant Colonel Charles M. Young, eventually arrived at USAAF Station AAF-452 on England’s southern coast. The build-up for the D-Day invasion of Normandy was in full swing and security prevented the pilots from providing people back home with the base’s geographical location at a place called Stoney Cross. Once they arrived, the pilots, having trained exclusively on single-engine airplanes, expected to find North American P-51 Mustangs waiting for them. Instead, they were greeted by rows of twin-engine Lockheed P-38 Lightnings. The curveball required several weeks of training and familiarization before the men could finally take a whack at the enemy in their new airplanes.

In an August 1943 issue, Life magazine reported that the Germans called the P-38 “der Gabelschwanz Teufel” (“Fork-tailed Devil”), and for good reason. The fast, versatile Lightning had been designed primarily as a fighter but could also carry two 2,000-pound bombs. Although mostly remembered for its role in the Pacific (where P-38 pilots ambushed and shot down Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto on April 18, 1943, and was the aircraft flown by America’s highest-scoring ace of World War II, Major Richard Bong, for all of his 40 victories), the unique aircraft saw extensive action throughout the war in ground attacks, photo reconnaissance missions, and as a long-range escort. It was powered by a pair of turbo-supercharged 1,600-horsepower engines with counter-rotating propellers. A central pod between its twin booms contained the cockpit and nose-mounted armament of four 50-caliber M2 Browning machine guns and a 20mm Hispano cannon. The technologically advanced fighter did suffer from various teething issues, but its potent arsenal made sure the Lightning packed more punch than most other fighters—and it was especially lethal in the hands of a crack shot like Blumer. 

As part of the Ninth Air Force, commanded by Lieutenant General Lewis Brereton, the 367th entered combat for the first time on May 9, 1944. The group initially carried out fighter sweeps over western France before serving as bomber escorts on D-Day, June 6. These “air umbrella” missions continued into the second week of June, followed by fighter-bomber campaigns in response to the enemy reinforcements scrambling to reach Normandy. On June 22, the unit took part in a large-scale attack on the Cotentin Peninsula, where German ground forces maintained a perimeter defense around the fortress city of Cherbourg. The deep-water port had become critically important to the Allies due to recent storm damage to the invasion beachheads. Capturing the ancient harbor would come at a steep price. By the end of the first day, the 367th lost seven pilots and suffered extensive damage to most of its airplanes, grounding all three squadrons for several days.

The airmen adopted the moniker “Dynamite Gang”—a tribute to an air traffic controller named “Dynamite Donovan” who guided scores of wounded warplanes safely back home. After a brief move from Stoney Cross to nearby RAF Ibsley, the fighter group relocated to the advanced landing grounds (ALGs) in France. Their makeshift air base, located next to the small village of Cretteville (ALG-14), featured steel plank runways, Spartan accommodations, and a steady diet of C and K rations. If choking down ham and lima beans wasn’t bad enough, the men also frequently endured assaults by pesky yellow jackets during chowtime.

Appropriately, Blumer christened all of his mounts Scrapiron. (And also added a painting of a naked woman with the word “censored” bannered across her.) He lost three P-38s during his first four months of combat, which included a particularly harrowing bombing mission over German-occupied territory near Caen. Blumer recalled the incident in an army press release: “I was flying at about 6,000 feet when I began to notice the rest of my flight taking evasive action to avoid the flak,” he said. “I began to veer my plane around when a machine gun bullet passed through the cockpit floor, passed through my outstretched legs, and went right through the canopy. I decided to get the Hell out of there in a hurry.” After bailing out of the burning Scrapiron III, Blumer tried to dodge machine gun fire while helplessly dangling from his parachute. He then spent the next eight hours evading capture in No Man’s Land before he finally stumbled onto a friendly patrol. “I was picked up by the British, who gave me a drink of Scotch, and each time I arrived at another station, I received another drink,” he said. “When I finally got back I was pretty plastered.” His report, however, fails to mention how he not only completed the bombing run but waited until his squadron reached safety before ditching the crippled aircraft. His exploits earned him a Distinguished Flying Cross, Purple Heart, and membership into the Caterpillar Club, reserved for people who had to bail out of a damaged aircraft. He also picked a “Winged Boot” for walking back from a mission. More decorations followed.  

By late summer 1944, German forces, despite being given plenty of chances, had failed to kill the plucky American called Scrappy, who would soon spearhead one of the greatest dogfights in U.S. military history—an action that earned him the Distinguished Service Cross—and cemented his improbable legacy. On August 25, 1944, the recently promoted Captain Blumer was returning to base after leading a dive-bombing mission on three Luftwaffe airfields in northern France when he received a distress call from Major Grover Gardner, Squadron 394’s leader. His flight had been jumped by more than 40 Focke Wulf Fw-190s approximately 25 miles away. With Lieutenant William Awtrey on his wing, Blumer quickly changed course and radioed back, “Okay, let’s pour on the coal.” After climbing to 10,000 feet, he plunged his P-38 straight into the German swarm, scoring his first kill with a 40-degree deflection shot. The hard-charging American continued to employ the same strategy of climbing and diving as more P-38s joined the fray. In the span of 15 minutes—about the same amount of time it takes for an oil change—Blumer shot down five enemy planes, making him an ace in a single mission.

Awtrey, a soft-spoken South Carolinian, had a ringside seat to the wild melee as he watched what seemed like scores of aircraft explode and drop out of the sky from all directions. He later recounted Blumer’s fifth scalp: “By this time, I was holding my breath,” said Awtrey. “My mouth was dry, and I couldn’t keep my head still. I remember jerking my head around in every direction, waiting for someone to jump Scrappy. As the Nazis began to scatter, looking for safety in flight, Scrappy picked out the last remaining Jerry and dove on him like a hawk. It was so fast I could hardly see it myself. He peppered him with bullets, and the pilot went into a roll, and later I saw him bail out. When I look back on it now, it was like watching a movie.” Remarkably, Scrapiron IV returned to base without a scratch. “It was a pilot’s holiday,” said Blumer. “It was the sort of a day a pilot dreams about and probably gets once in a lifetime.” 

Accounts from the Germans illustrate the carnage from the battle’s losing side. Feldwebel Fritz Bucholz of II. Gruppe Jagdgeschwader 6 had logged only a handful of hours in the Fw-190 when he encountered “der Gabelschwanz Teufel” for the first time. “It was utter chaos, with Focke Wulfs chasing ‘Lightnings’ chasing Focke Wulfs,” said Bucholz. “Our initial attack hit the Americans hard, and I saw some Lightnings go down. We might have been new to the business of dogfighting, but with the advantage of the sun and numbers, we held the initiative. Then, suddenly, there seemed to be ‘Lightnings’ diving on us from all directions; now it was our turn to become the hunted.” 

For their efforts, the 367th Fighter Group received the Presidential Unit Citation, the highest possible award for a unit in combat. Of the 33 P-38s engaged, the Americans lost two pilots and had four others bail out over enemy territory. The Germans lost 16 airplanes, with 14 pilots killed, disastrous losses for the unit. 

With the U.S. First and Third Armies penetrating deeper into France, the P-38s conducted relentless sorties, attacking trains, destroying railroad tracks, and menacing Nazi airfields. The 367th provided crucial cover during Operation Market-Garden in September 1944, and fought both the Germans and freezing cold weather during the Battle of Bulge that December. American aviators also received high praise from Lieutenant General George S. Patton, who hailed the joint effort as “the best example of the combined use of air and ground troops that I have ever witnessed.” As a token of his appreciation, “Ol’ Blood and Guts” had cases of captured German booze distributed among the fighter groups. 

The start of the new year brought several new changes to the 367th, including the transition to the single-engine Republic P-47 Thunderbolts. But after completing more than 100 combat missions and scoring six victories, Blumer—who had been promoted to commander of the squadron on November 10, 1944—ended his tour in mid-January 1945. He then returned to Marysville (renamed Camp Beale) as a major, lending his expertise as a flight instructor. Along the way, he made a pit stop in North Dakota, where the hometown hero visited family and friends. For most returning soldiers, especially those who had repeatedly cheated death, a weekend furlough typically called for rest and relaxation. Unless your name is Scrappy Blumer. Upon arrival at Hector Airport in Fargo, the restless fighter jock noticed a fleet of P-63 King Cobras sitting on the field, designated for a Lend-Lease program with the Soviet Union. Blumer, however, had other plans. He “requisitioned” one of the planes for the remaining 25 miles to Kindred and proceeded to buzz the main street at treetop level, pulling up just in time over his old high school. Not surprisingly, military brass wasn’t the slightest bit amused and severely reprimanded the now famous pilot.

Blumer eventually eased into civilian life and started up a contracting business on the West Coast. But his love of flying never diminished. He bought an old P-38 that had once belonged to the Honduran Air Force and had it fully restored, replete with his trademark “Scrapiron IV” and “Censored” nose art. He flew the celebrated fighter at air shows around the country and, per his custom, could usually be found chomping on a cigar with five more in his shirt pocket. As the years marched on, members of the 367th would occasionally gather at reunions, where conversation invariably turned to stories involving Scrappy. Such as the time he clipped a telephone pole after strafing a train and returned to base with communication lines wrapped around the wings. Or the one about a French gal he took for a ride during a bombing run. Or was she English? No matter. Regardless of the fuzzy details or seemingly impossible odds, they could always agree on one undeniable truth: anything was possible with the man once dubbed “The Scourge of the Luftwaffe.” 

Records show that Blumer received 28 decorations for his actions in World War II. The wide range of awards includes a Silver Star, Air Medal with 22 Oak Leaf Clusters, Belgian Croix de Guerre, and a .45 Pistol Expert badge. In 1996, U.S. Representative Peter DeFazio of Oregon presented Blumer with a collection of his medals that had been previously lost or stolen over the years. When asked by a reporter about his thoughts on the ceremony, he tearfully replied, “I think of all my buddies we lost getting them.”

At age 80, having lived a full life—and a sometimes tumultuous personal one that included four marriages—Blumer passed away from leukemia in Springfield, Oregon, on October 23, 1997. He was buried with military honors at Woodbine Cemetery in Puyallup, Washington.

Not so long ago, I had an extraordinary experience. I sat in the pilot’s seat of an Avro Lancaster, a British four-engine heavy bomber from World War II, gazing through the windshield at RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire, England. The four Merlin engines were whirring and, when I felt ready, I allowed my right hand to drop down to the four throttles, pushed them forward, and then, feeling the metal of the control column in my hands and breathing in deeply that curious smell of oil, metal, and rubber, I watched as the big bomber started to thunder down the runway.

I was there because of an email that pinged into my inbox one day. Had I met Andy Sturgess, the writer wanted to know? If not, I really should, because Andy had created an actual Lancaster cockpit and fuselage on his farm and turned it into a simulator. I simply had to see it to believe it, my correspondent said. Well, truth be told, I was busy writing a book at the time and, although the suggestion piqued my interest, I didn’t get around to following up on it until a few months later.

Andy and his family live on a small farm only a dozen miles from me here in southwest England. As I turned off the main road and down a narrow track to the farm, I started wondering if I were in the right place. I was, though, and after a chat and a mug of tea, Andy led me out of the back of the farmhouse and toward an unremarkable modern barn. The moment he opened the door, however, I was transported into a different world. Steps led up to a briefing room—an office in which every artifact, from desk to telephone to maps, radios, paint, and a hundred other items, was historically perfect for an office on a wartime RAF base. Next door was another room in which there was a fully functioning Link Trainer, a primitive but still surprisingly effective wartime RAF simulator for pilot training. 

These two rooms were remarkable enough, but nothing had quite prepared me for what followed as Andy took me out into the corridor and opened another door. This led straight into the fuselage of an actual Lancaster. I saw the wireless operator’s desk, then the navigator’s desk. Everything was perfect, down to the low red light over the navigator’s desk, as well as the map, instruments, and flashlight. Beyond was the flight engineer’s dickey seat and the cockpit, and beyond that the curved windshield, a screen so large that all one could see out of it is what a pilot would have seen. Incredibly, every one of the controls in the cockpit was linked to a computer and the screen in front. That included throttles, control column, and all the dials and switches. For a moment, I just sat, open-mouthed, in a state of complete wonderment. Of course, I’d known Andy had created some kind of Lancaster simulator but not in my wildest imaginings had I expected the Aladdin’s cave in which I now found myself. 

It has taken Andy some 20 years to create this. Almost every part of the Lancaster is original and the few things he could not source he has made himself. His simulation is 100 percent accurate and laid out as a wartime Lancaster, whereas the Lanc owned by Battle of Britain Memorial Flight (BBMF), the only one flying in the United Kingdom, is actually post-war. On the night of May 16-17, 2023, Andy, with the help of a former BBMF navigator, used his simulator to refly the Dam Buster’s Raid along the same timeline as the actual Operation Chastise from exactly 80 years earlier. “We got there to within two minutes of the original lead crews,” Andy told me. “It was a very special but humbling experience.” It was a very special and humbling experience for me, too, to sit at the controls of a real Lancaster. What an absolutely extraordinary thing Andy has created. It is, in the truest sense of the word, awesome.

What he has created allows anyone to get as close as humanly possible to experiencing what it was like to actually fly a wartime Lancaster, and that’s quite something. Half closing my eyes, I really was transported back to 1943. I think Andy Sturgess is something of a heritage hero. 

Thousands of Frenchmen served the Vichy government as part of the paramilitary Milice, which earned a terrible reputation for brutality, torturing and killing many French citizens in the Resistance. After the country’s liberation, were there reprisals against these men?  —Mark Peters, New York, N.Y.

Following the liberation there was what was called in France an “epuration,” or purge, of those who had worked for or collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. Some of these purges were unofficial, in other words people who had served in the Milice or otherwise collaborated were summarily executed, while women who had conducted relationships with Germans had their heads shaved and were ostracized from their communities.

In his 1997 seminal work, Occupation: The Ordeal of France, 1940-1944, British historian Ian Ousby says the most accurate number of such deaths was around 10,000. Most were members of the Milice, whose ranks were filled with young men of varying motivations: some were anti-Semites, others anti-capitalists or fascists. There was also a criminal element, along with a sizeable number who joined to avoid the STO (Compulsory Work Service) that sent French citizens to Germany to work in industries supporting the Nazi war effort. 

In September 1944 a special court was established to judge collaborators; among those convicted and executed for treason was the Milice’s leader, Joseph Darnand. These trials lasted until 1949 and although thousands were sentenced to varying punishments, many Miliciens escaped justice. One of the last high-profile figures of the Milice to appear in the dock was Paul Touvier, who, after decades of hiding from the authorities for his role in the execution of seven Jewish hostages in 1944, was convicted in 1994 of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment—but he died of cancer two years later.

For years, scientists have been poring over old ship logs, scouring weather reports for clues about changes in the Earth’s climate. But there was a World War II-sized hole in their research: the hostilities disrupted commercial shipping and reduced the number of weather reports sailors were producing. Trade between the United States and Asia, in particular, ground to a halt.

Of course, there were plenty of naval ships patrolling the Pacific from 1941-1945. And they were under orders to log their whereabouts and record the weather conditions every hour and to do so in a standardized way. However, the military classified this meteorological motherlode and made it off-limits to climate researchers. A breakthrough finally came in 2017 when the National Archives declassified 192,500 pages of U.S. Navy Command files, mostly from the Pacific and mostly from 1941 to 1946.  

Now researchers faced another hurdle. Since the records were mostly on paper, they needed to be scanned, photographed, and transcribed before scientists worldwide could analyze them—a labor-intensive project indeed. Fortunately, there already existed a group of citizen-researchers, working under the name Old Weather, who had years of experience crowdsourcing the work of transcribing old ship logs to help climate scientists.

So a team led by Praveen Teleti, a climate modeler at Britain’s University of Reading, started the Old Weather-WW2 project and asked the public for help. For a year and a half, 4,050 volunteers helped digitize 630,000 records from 19 ships—three battleships, an aircraft carrier, eight destroyers, six cruisers, and a gunboat. Teleti said the project was sped along by the COVID-19 pandemic, which kept people at home with time on their hands. 
 

The project doubled the number of weather observations available in some parts of the Pacific. The results were published in Geoscience Data Journal in September 2023. Now scientists can begin to use the data the citizen-researchers compiled to get a better understanding of changes in the climate.

Among other things, they hope to learn more about a mysterious uptick in wartime sea surface temperatures—the so-called “World War II warm anomaly”—that may, in fact, have more to do with the way sailors collected the data. And they hope to expand their understanding of Typhoon Cobra, a cyclone that hit the U.S. Pacific Fleet in December 1944, sinking three destroyers and killing nearly 800 men.

As Allan W. Ostar approaches his 100th birthday, he can look back with pride on a career as an academic administrator and education consultant. For many years, Allan was president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. But, as a teenager in 1944, he joined the U.S. Army’s storied 42nd “Rainbow” Infantry Division, which landed in Southern France in December 1944. Moving north through bitter winter conditions, the 42nd repulsed Nazi Germany’s “Operation Northwind” offensive, then attacked through the Hardt Forest, pierced the Siegfried Line, and crossed the Rhine River. In late April 1945, after battling hand-to-hand to conquer Schweinfurt, Rainbow G.I.s arrived at the gates of Dachau concentration camp.

You were born in East Orange, New Jersey, in 1924 and were still in high school when World War II started. When did you graduate?

1942. After I graduated, I went to Penn State, a land-grant university where everybody took ROTC. I was in the ROTC band, on the saxophone. During World War I, my father was an army musician playing the cornet. He was in the band that toured with President Wilson when Wilson did war bond speeches.

How long did you stay at Penn State?

One year. I had joined the Enlisted Reserve Corps. I didn’t want to wait until I was drafted. There was an electrical engineering professor who said, “It’s going to be very helpful to you to take my course in radio.” I took his course and got the certificate. So, when I went on active duty, they sent me to Camp Crowder, Missouri, to become a radio operator. I learned to climb poles and operate switchboards, telephones, and radios.

Then they told me, “You’re going to have to be driving a communications jeep.” But, I said, “I never drove, my parents never had a car.” They said, “Ah, you’re just the guy we’re looking for. We’re going to teach you the army way.” So, I got an army driver’s license for the jeep. Learned how to drive on a 45-degree angle. Then one day they said, “We’re going to put you in the ASTP—Army Specialized Training Program—at the University of Denver to study engineering.”

So, you were back in college through 1943.

Until General [George C.] Marshall decided that they needed infantry much more than they needed college educations. They closed almost all the ASTP units and assigned us to combat divisions.

Where did you get assigned? 

The 42nd, the Rainbow Division, Camp Gruber, Oklahoma. Our division commander’s name was [Major General] Harry Collins. I was training as an infantryman, assigned to K company, a rifle company, when the personnel office discovered that I had this radio operator qualification. So, they reassigned me to communications in Headquarters Company, 242nd Infantry Regiment.

When and how did you travel overseas? 

Late November ’44 on a troop ship, a converted freighter. They needed troops in Europe, so they didn’t wait to send the whole division. They sent our three infantry regiments, without our artillery, support services, Signal Corps. Crossing the Atlantic was pretty bad. Three of us had to share the same bunk. So, we took turns sleeping, took turns eating. Almost everybody got seasick. Disembarked in Marseille. 

Where did you go then?

We had to go through the Vosges Mountains because they needed troops north. It was very icy. I’m driving along the side of a mountain with a big drop-off on the right. I went into a spin. I wouldn’t be talking today if the spin had taken me over the side. I’ll never forget this: The motor pool sergeant came roaring up. He just chewed me up and down because I had banged up his beautiful brand-new jeep.

The 42nd was part of Task Force Linden (under Brigadier General Henning Linden, the Rainbow’s assistant division commander), which entered combat in the vicinity of Strasbourg, France. What was your involvement in the fighting? 

Close-in artillery support. Within sight of German troops. The forward observers are right at the front lines or in front of the front lines calling in the artillery support. At first, I had a backpack radio which was not very reliable. So, we relied more on wire connections. I had a rack on the back of a jeep to hold the spool of wire. I would also carry a sound-powered phone plus the radio so we could communicate firing orders on troop concentrations, artillery positions, machine gun nests. We were almost always under fire.

What were weather conditions like?

Very, very bad. It was reported later that it was one of the worst winters they’d ever experienced in Europe. It was cold, wet snow, sleet. We were not well equipped. We had field jackets and a sweater and gloves. That was all you had in terms of the cold. Some of our heaviest casualties came from what they call trench foot. 

Did you ever have trench foot?

One reason I did not was a sergeant in our section who had been stationed in Alaska. He told us how to avoid trench foot. Always carry an extra pair of socks and, when they get wet, put ’em under your armpits to help dry them out. If you could change your socks, you could avoid trench foot.

In February 1945, Task Force Linden came under attack during the German “Operation Northwind” offensive.

My little piece of that was a railroad station in a little town called Rittershoffen. My buddy Kenneth Schultz and I were in the upper floor of the station to set up communications when the Germans attacked. We had a bird’s-eye view. We see these big Panthers [German tanks] coming at us. Kenny Schultz and I had to stay, relaying orders to direct fire to stop the tanks.

We finally got the order that we could leave. We grabbed the crystals out of our radio, ran downstairs, and jumped in the jeep. There were holes in the jeep, but it ran. It didn’t look like we were going to get away, but a platoon of tank destroyers saved our lives. I’ll never forget those Black soldiers who stayed at their posts in those tank destroyers and allowed us to escape. If they hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t be here. 

After rest and refit, the Rainbow Division continued north. Describe what that was like for you. 

On almost the very first day we went back into combat, our company commander, Captain Kohler, was killed. He was out in front setting up observer posts. A German mortar managed to kill him. And that was a blow to our morale. He was a heck of a good guy. So, Dobson, our first sergeant, got a battlefield commission. Dobson helped me. In the [Vosges] mountains you could only go so far with the jeep. You had to carry everything. I’m a little guy carrying the radio, the wire, the phone. I may have even had an M-1. I got to the point where I just couldn’t move, and he grabbed some of the stuff I was carrying. One time there were mules, carrying supplies and equipment. And that helped a great deal.  

Tell me how your unit got across Rhine. 

On boats. We heard these trucks coming down the road and they were gray-painted navy trucks pulling trailers with landing boats on ’em. What the hell is the navy doing here? 

What was the going like once you crossed? 

Well, there were firefights, but we were moving pretty fast. At this point, the Germans were retreating. We were all headed for Munich. But before you get to Munich, there’s an airfield. I remember some of the soldiers were jumping on top of the Messerschmitts to get souvenirs. But I headed for the headquarters building in my jeep. I get to the building, and here is the base commandant. He was in no mood for fighting. He surrendered to me, a private first class. I don’t think I was a corporal yet. 

I know that it can be difficult to talk about, but what do you remember about reaching Dachau concentration camp?

Bodies stacked up like cordwood outside the gate. I saw these boxcars with all these bodies, and it was just horrible. You see these emaciated [bodies] not much more than a skeleton. I found a dead German soldier; it might have been one of the guards. He had a belt buckle [inscribed in German] “God is with us.” How could anybody who believed in a God believe they could treat human beings the way these people had been treated? 

Improved and expanded DNA testing and other analyses have allowed the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) to identify some of the 71,180 service members still unaccounted for from World War II. Recent identifications include:

Navy Mess Attendant First Class Ralph M. Boudreaux, 20, of New Orleans. Boudreaux died December 7, 1941, when the USS Oklahoma capsized during the attack on Pearl Harbor. In 2015, Pentagon researchers exhumed unidentified remains from the Oklahoma that had been interred in Honolulu’s National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl. Boudreaux was identified in July 2021, but the results were not announced until November 2023 after his family was briefed. He was scheduled to be buried in Slidell, Louisiana.

Second Lieutenant Gene F. Walker, 27, of Richmond, Indiana. Assigned to the 32nd Armored Regiment of the 3rd Armored Division, Walker was killed near Hücheln, Germany, in November 1944 when the M4 Sherman tank he commanded was hit by an 88mm anti-tank round. He was scheduled to be buried in San Diego. 

U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sergeant Robert J. Ferris Jr., 20, of Long Island, New York. Assigned to the 91st Bombardment Group, Eighth Air Force, Ferris was aboard the B-17F Danellen on December 20, 1942, when it was hit by antiaircraft fire after a raid on a German aircraft factory at Romilly-sur-Seine, France. Only one airman was able to parachute out. The rest, including Ferris, were lost. Identified with the help of DNA evidence, Ferris was scheduled to be buried in New Bern, North Carolina.

Private First Class Clinton E. Smith Jr., 19, of Wichita Falls, Texas. Assigned to the 157th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division, Smith was killed in an artillery strike on January 14, 1945, in Reipertswiller, France. Pentagon researchers found that remains at the Lorraine American Cemetery in St. Avold, France, might be connected to Smith and used DNA and other evidence to identify him. Smith was scheduled to be buried in San Antonio, Texas.

Private First Class Henry J. McConnell, 28, of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Assigned to the 2nd Observation Squadron in the Philippines, McConnell died July 26, 1942, in the Japanese prison camp at Cabanatuan, Philippines. He had been taken prisoner after the American forces on Bataan surrendered to the Japanese April 9. He was scheduled to be buried in Pawtucket.

The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress has found itself back in the spotlight after the January 26 debut of the AppleTV+ miniseries Masters of the Air. Produced by Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman—who were also behind the series Band of Brothers and The Pacific—and based on the book by Donald L. Miller, the nine-part series tells the story of the 100th Bombardment Group—the “Bloody 100th”—during World War II. The group flew the B-17 , and the big four-engine Boeings should share top billing with human stars Austin Butler, Callum Turner and Barry Keoghan, even if most of the airplanes are the product of computer-generated imagery (CGI), along with three modern replicas. (The series should include a disclaimer that state, “No real B-17s were harmed during the making of this series.”)

The United States produced nearly 13,000 B-17s during the war. Today only 45 remain and only a handful of those are in flying condition. Two have crashed in recent years, the Commemorative Air Force’s Texas Raiders destroyed after an inflight collision with a P-63 Kingcobra at an airshow in 2022 and “Nine-o-Nine,” owned and operated by the Collings Foundation, in 2019.

The B-17 flights in MOTA, as it’s known, are brutal, violent and intense. That’s not at all the experience I had when I got to fly in a B-17 some years ago. I flew in Yankee Lady, the B-17G operated by the Yankee Air Museum of Belleville, Michigan. This B-17 was one of the last built, too late to see combat. It flew for the Coast Guard for a while after the war and then was converted for fire-fighting. The museum received it in 1986, when it needed a complete nine-year restoration before it could return to the air. It was briefly grounded in the spring of 2023 when the Federal Aviation Administration issued an airworthiness directive regarding an issue with wing spars but has resumed flying.

My flight went off without incident. There was no flak, no fighters, no blood, no worries about hypoxia or frostbite, no spent shell casings littering the fuselage interior. But I did experience the ear-pounding noise generated by the four Wright R-1820-97 engines. On the runway they idled with a loud throaty purr, but when the pilot pushed the throttles forward and Yankee Lady began its takeoff run, the entire airplane vibrated to the roar of the engines. I was sitting in the bombardier’s station in the nose of the bomber, watching as the trees as the end of the runway got closer and closer…and then we lifted up and soared over them.

It was a thrill to fly in the venerable Boeing. Maybe I didn’t get a sense of air combat, but I did get a sense of the airplane, which was not nearly as big—at least from the inside—as I expected. I’m sure it felt even more cramped for aircrew wearing bulky heated suits to protect them from the subzero temperatures at altitude.

I’m glad I got my chance to fly in a B-17 but I’m even happier that I didn’t have to experience what their crews did during the war.

Ludwig August Theodor Beck was the Third Reich’s most enigmatic and tragic senior general. As the first chief of the resurrected German Army General Staff in 1935, he played a leading role in building the post-World War I rump-Reichswehr into the Wehrmacht of World War II. He was a brilliant military thinker and the primary author of the 1933 operations manual Truppenführung (Unit Command), which remained the foundation of Germany’s war-fighting doctrine until 1945—and beyond. Yet Beck became a staunch anti-Nazi who opposed the politicization of the army and many of Hitler’s plans for large-scale wars of conquest. After retiring in protest in 1938, Beck became one of the leaders of the Widerstand—the German resistance. 

He was born in a suburb of Wiesbaden, Germany, on June 29, 1880, a descendent from an old Hessian officer family. In 1898 he joined a Prussian field artillery regiment based in Strasbourg as anofficer candidate and received his commission as a 2nd lieutenant the following year. From 1908 to 1911 he attended the highly selective Kriegsakademie (War College), where General Carl von Clausewitz once served as the director. In 1913 he became a full-fledged member of the General Staff. During World War I he served as the General Staff Officer Ia (operations officer) of two different divisions. From 1916 to 1918 he was assigned to the General Staff of Army Group German Crown Prince on the Western Front. When the Armistice went into effect in November 1918, Beck was responsible for planning the orderly and controlled withdrawal of some 90 German divisions back across the Rhine. It was an overwhelming responsibility for a 38-year-old major.

Beck was a cultured man with an intellectual bent. He spoke French and English; he played the violin; and he was an expert equestrian. But he did not have very much of a private life. He married in 1916; but he had to return to the front after the briefest of honeymoons. His daughter was born the following year; but then his wife died late in 1917. Much like Britain’s Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, whose wife also died young, Beck withdrew into his profession. The introverted officer also remained increasingly aloof from the bonhomie social life of the traditional officers’ messes. 

Following the war, Beck was one of the only 3,718 officers out of 227,081 selected for retention in the 100,000-man Reichswehr that Germany was allowed under the draconian terms of the Versailles Treaty. The treaty restrictions also prohibited Germany from having a General Staff. The Germans circumvented that restriction by camouflaging the Reichswehr’s General Staff as an innocuous-sounding organization called the Truppenamt (Troop Office). The treaty also forbade Germany from even training General Staff officers, forcing the closing of the Kriegs-akademie. The Reichswehr circumvented that by conducting decentralized leadership training in the military districts. The successful graduates were designated a Führerstabsoffizier (Leader Staff Officer), the cover term for a General Staff officer. 

During the 1920s Beck rotated between troop commands as an artillery officer and assignments in the Truppenamt. From 1919 to 1922 he was assigned to special duties, working personally for Colonel General Hans von Seeckt, the first chief of the Truppenamt and later the Chief of the Army Command. Seeckt was the key architect of the small Reichswehr as an elite Führerheer (Leaders’ Army), the foundation for the army’s rapid expansion at some point in the future.

Of the many wide-ranging reforms carried out under Seeckt, one of the most important was a new manual for tactical doctrine published in 1922. H.Dv.487 Führung und Gefecht der verbundenen Waffen (Command and Combat of the Combined Arms), was widely called “Das FuG.” Unlike the post-World War I operational manuals of almost every other Western army, Das FuG abandoned the concept of trench warfare. Instead, it emphasized mobile warfare while also adopting many of the offensive and defensive technical and tactical innovations that evolved during the First World War. Das FuG stressed the primacy of the offensive, with encirclement combined with a frontal or flank holding action as the preferred tactical maneuver in most cases. The defensive was purely a temporary economy of force measure in preparation for going on the offensive.

In 1931 and 1932, Beck had been the lead author of a revision of Das FuG to bring the doctrine up to date with the rapidly emerging potentials of motorized warfare, aviation, and electronic communications. His editorial assistants were Generals Werner von Fritsch and Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel. Published in 1933, H.Dv.300 Truppenführung (Unit Command), continued Das FuG’s focus on mobile and offensive operations, with entire paragraphs from Das FuG carried over verbatim into Truppenführung. One very significant addition to the new manual, however, was the introduction. In 15 elegantly phrased and highly philosophical paragraphs, Beck set the manual’s tone. Among his observations were that the conduct of war is subject to continual development, with new weapons dictating new forms of warfare; regulations alone aren’t enough to fight a war and such principles must conform to the situation at hand; military command requires leaders capable of judgment, with clear vision and foresight, and the ability to make independent decisions, and to carry them out unwaveringly and positively; and that every man, from the youngest soldier upward, must commit his whole mental, spiritual, and physical strength to his unit.

Truppenführung is the key to understanding the psychology, philosophy, and social values of the Wehrmacht at the start of World War II. Tragically, too many of those principles were perverted by the Nazism of the Third Reich as the war progressed. Nonetheless, Truppenführung remains essential to understanding German military operations until the end of the war. In many of its passages Truppenführung was a like a modern version of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. According to historian Williamson Murray, Truppenführung “remains the most influential doctrinal manual ever written” as well as “one of the most thoughtful examinations of the conduct of operations and leadership.” Murray did not exaggerate. The primary operations manual of the German Bundeswehr today is still called Truppenführung, and it is heavily influenced by many of the concepts in the original 1933 edition. Likewise, when the U.S. Army introduced its AirLand Battle doctrine during the 1980s, the authors of the 1986 edition of Field Manual 100-5, Operations studied the original Truppenführung closely.

Another important principle that emerged from the pages of Truppenführung is what is now called Auftragstaktik (Mission Command Tactics), the idea that senior commanders should tell their subordinate commanders what needs to be done, why it needs to be done, and when it needs to be done—but then give the junior commanders the flexibility to figure out the best way possible to achieve the senior commander’s intent. Although traditional German deference to higher authority and close adherence to established procedures would seem to be the very antithesis of Auftragstaktik, the Wehrmacht made it work to a degree unsurpassed by any other army in history to that point. Oddly enough, the term itself never appears in print in Truppenführung; but the concept comes through clearly in the pages of the manual.

German tactical thinking, however, continued to evolve after the publication of Truppenführung. As General Friedrich-Wilhelm von Mellenthin noted in his classic 1956 book Panzer Battles, the Army General Staff had a series of very intense internal debates between 1935 and 1937 over the use of tanks. Beck at that point tended to subscribe to the then-current French doctrine of committing tanks to close support of the infantry. Generals Werner von Fritsch and Heinz Guderian were among those who argued instead for independent Panzer operations. In his post-war memoirs, Guderian painted Beck—who by then was dead and unable to defend himself—as a narrow-minded defeatist with no operational understanding who even opposed the formation of the Panzer divisions. Various passages in Truppenführung do cover infantry and armor actions that are coordinated, but not combined. The true integration of infantry and armor tactics in the German Army did not take place until after the 1940 campaign in France, when Colonel Hermann Balck recommended the formation of combined infantry-armor teams.

As early as 1934 Beck, in fact, wrote a lengthy cover memo to an extensive report on British Army armored maneuvers, stressing the need for continued evaluation and assessment of evolving armored warfare. And as historian Robert Citino pointed out, the first Panzer divisions started forming in 1935, less than two years after Beck became the chief of the Truppenamt. General Staff exercises that Beck planned that year included notional Panzer divisions and even corps, well before Germany had hardly any tanks at all. Thus, Guderian’s claim to have waged a “long, drawn-out fight” with Beck over the creation of the Panzer divisions can only be overstatement at best.

Hitler’s National Socialist movement gained traction during the late 1920s and early 1930s, but Beck never became a member of the Nazi Party, although he continued his rise in the military. He assumed command of the 1st Cavalry Division in Frankfurt an der Oder in 1932 with a promotion to lieutenant general (two stars) and became chief of the Truppenamt on October 1, 1933. Like Hitler, he supported the repudiation of the Versailles Treaty because he believed that Germany had both the need and the right to rearm. In early 1933 Beck naively wrote of Nazism; “I have wished for years for the political revolution, and now my wishes have come true. It is the first ray of hope since 1918.” His optimism, however, did not last long.

After President Paul von Hindenburg died in office on August 2, 1934, Hitler grabbed total power in Germany by combining the offices of president and chancellor, styling himself as the new Führer. Eighteen days later, all German officers were required to swear an oath of fealty to Hitler personally. Beck had serious misgivings, but he failed to raise objections because he believed that Hitler could provide the strong government that Germany needed, while the army’s traditional elements could keep him under reasonable control. It was a Hobson’s Choice, preferable to the paramilitary thugs of the Sturmabteilungen (SA) and Schutzstaffel (SS) becoming the dominant power force in the country. Tragically, that is exactly what happened.

Once Hitler had all the reins of power in hand, he progressively threw off the Versailles Treaty restrictions, first clandestinely, and then openly. On March 16, 1935, he had the Reichswehr renamed the Wehrmacht. Simultaneously, the Truppenamt was re-designated the General Staff of the Army (Generalstab des Heeres), with Beck as its first chief. The so-called “Leader Staff Officers” were redesignated General Staff Officers and authorized to append the traditional “i.G.” (im Generalstab) after their rank titles. That May, Beck was promoted to General of Artillery (three stars). He set to work managing the expansion of the resurrected General Staff. One of his first acts was to re-open the Kriegsakademie as the central point for General Staff Officer training.

Beck adhered to a traditional German militarist worldview. He believed that German military power had to be restored to its pre-1919 levels, and he advocated increasingly greater levels of military spending. His war plans for Germany were initially based on a defensive strategy. He clearly understood that any future large-scale war could all too easily become another multi-front conflict that Germany could not win. Once Germany was sufficiently rearmed, Beck thought that the Reich should conduct a progressive series of limited wars that would establish Germany as Europe’s foremost power and place all of Central and Eastern Europe within the German sphere of influence. Nonetheless, in 1936 he fully supported Hitler during the remilitarization of the German Rhineland—as opposed to many of the other generals who feared the possible French reaction.

Beck’s close ally was General Werner von Fritsch, the commander-in-chief of the German Army. The two saw their primary task as one of rebuilding the army on the old apolitical traditional model, rather than as an appendage of the Nazi Party. This ultimately put them on a collision course with War Minister General Werner von Blomberg, who intended to remake the army as a mirror of National Socialist ideology. Fritsch and Beck continued to resist the politicization of the army, but Hitler and his key henchmen progressively tightened the political cordon. In January 1938 Blomberg was forced out of office when it was revealed that his new second wife had a lengthy criminal record. Hitler then personally assumed the War Ministry portfolio, making him the commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht. The following month Fritsch was forced to resign after he was falsely accused of being a homosexual. Fritsch was replaced as army commander-in-chief by the more pliable Colonel General Walther von Brauchitsch. Beck was now politically isolated. 

In May 1937, Beck initially resisted issuing the orders for the German invasion of Austria. He apparently had no deep-seated moral objection to the idea of a war of aggression, but he believed that such a move might trigger a world war before Germany had rearmed enough for a major conflict. He believed that the earliest date Germany could risk a war was 1940. Most of the generals also believed that starting a war in 1938 was highly risky; but none of them dared to confront Hitler directly on the issue. Beck issued the orders for the Wehrmacht to march into Austria in March 1938, an invasion that was unopposed.

Beck continued to cling to the belief that the German officer corps could keep the National Socialists under control. But as Hitler pushed to invade Czechoslovakia in 1938, Beck began to oppose him openly, writing a series of memoranda describing the inherent dangers in a premature major military operation. Beck attempted to mobilize other generals to resist what he saw as Hitler’s strategic crapshoot; but he failed to gain the backing of army commander-in-chief Brauchitsch. Increasingly frustrated over Germany’s course, Beck established his own personal intelligence network of German military attachés, which he used both to collect and to leak information. He also reached out to key civilians for his network, with the most notable being Carl Goerdeler, an anti-Nazi and former mayor of Leipzig.

In August 1938, Beck retired from the army in protest. He was promoted to colonel general (four stars) on the retired list. In retirement, Beck organized a covert opposition group of active and retired officers and other conservatives, including Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the anti-Nazi head of German Military Intelligence (Abwehr).

By the start of 1940, before the German invasion of France and the Low Countries, Beck had reached the conclusion that the only plausible way to overthrow the Nazi regime was to remove Hitler from power. Beck’s group even went so far as to reach out to the Vatican to request help in mediating with the Western Allies. At that point, however, the plotters naively believed that they could negotiate a peace settlement with Britain and France that would allow Germany to keep most of its recent conquests—including Austria, western Poland, and the occupied Czechoslovakian provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. A skeptical Britain remained noncommittal. Shortly before the 1940 invasion of Belgium and France, Beck’s group tried to warn the Belgians of the imminent attack.

By 1943, Beck had become convinced that the only way to save Germany was to assassinate Hitler. His group tried several times, culminating in Colonel i.G. Claus von Stauffenberg’s attempt to kill Hitler with a bomb on July 20, 1944. Stauffenberg managed to place the explosive, hidden in a briefcase, beneath a table in a room where Hitler was leading a military conference. The bomb exploded, but another officer had unwittingly pushed the briefcase behind a heavy table leg, shielding Hitler from the full blast and saving his life.

Had Stauffenberg succeeded, the conspirators planned to establish martial law, seize radio stations, and arrest key Nazi and SS leaders. (Beck did refuse to approve their summary execution.) Pending free elections, Beck would have become the acting head of state of the interim government, with Carl Goerdeler as chancellor.

When the conspirators learned that Stauffenberg had failed, Beck insisted on continuing the putsch, called Operation Valkyrie. He believed that Germany deserved the attempt. But the effort failed. Arrested with other key conspirators and taken into custody at the army’s headquarters on Bendler Strasse in Berlin, Beck was offered the privilege of shooting himself to avoid death by torture by the Gestapo. On the night of July 20-21, Beck managed to wound himself. A sergeant then shot the unconscious Beck in the neck, killing him. Having started out in a somewhat loose league with the devil, Colonel General Ludwig Beck died on the right side of history—a German patriot, but one with a clouded legacy.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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Lieutenant Commander Lawrence Randall “Dan” Daspit, captain of the U.S. submarine USS Tinosa (SS-283), was astounded at his luck. Framed in the periscope eyepiece was a 19,250-ton Japanese tanker, and it had no escort. The Tonan Maru No. 3 was making only 10 knots. It was a sitting duck.

Tinosa was on its second war patrol, having departed from Midway on July 7, 1943, to prowl the Japanese sea lanes between Truk and Borneo. On the afternoon of July 24 Daspit, having been alerted by his surface-search radar, spotted a thin trail of gray funnel smoke on the horizon. He submerged and headed for the target. Once in range, he fired four Mark 14 torpedoes at the tanker. All four torpedoes ran true. Thirty seconds later, the sonarman heard four distinct “thumps” of the torpedoes striking the hull, but no explosions. The tanker turned away and increased speed.

Daspit surfaced and began the pursuit with his diesel engines. After a long nighttime chase, he was finally in position to try again. His torpedomen checked every fish to make sure they were working perfectly. Then, coming at the tanker from the starboard quarter, Daspit fired two more torpedoes. Both hit and detonated. The muted rumble echoed through Tinosa’s hull, eliciting cheers from her crew

They had hit the tanker’s engine room. The vessel slowed to a stop.

Daspit took his time approaching the ship’s port side. He planned to fire one torpedo at a time from 1,000 yards, aimed to strike the tanker at the perfect 90-degree angle. The 680 pounds of high explosive in a Mark 14 would tear a huge hole in the hull. Two or three fish would send the vessel to the bottom. It appeared that the Tonan Maru was doomed.

At 9:30 a.m., Tinosa fired the first torpedo. It ran straight and true, its wake a long, white trail aimed at the helpless ship. But the torpedo failed to explode. Daspit fired again. Another dud. Daspit fired again. And again. Six deadly Mark 14 torpedoes, the most advanced anti-ship weapon in the U.S. arsenal, failed to explode. The fifth one appeared to raise a tall plume of white water as a muted “Whanng!” noise came through the hull. The sixth torpedo broached after striking the enemy’s hull, then sank.   

Then the tables turned as a Japanese destroyer approached. Daspit fired two more torpedoes from his stern tubes as the sub turned away. The sonarman reported two hits but no explosions. As Tinosa raced eastward, Daspit wrote in the patrol log. “I find it hard to convince myself that I saw this.” Out of fifteen fish fired, only two had detonated, and those had been fired from an oblique angle. The others were so carefully set up as to be right out of the textbook. Not one of them had exploded.

Upon his return to Pearl Harbor, Daspit was met at the sub pier by Rear Admiral Charles Lockwood, Commander, Submarines, Pacific (COMSUBPAC). A career submarine officer, Lockwood was determined and meticulous and had the reputation for giving full support to his crews. He led Daspit up to his office where the infuriated sub skipper related what happened with the Tonan Maru.                   Lockwood later wrote, “I expected a torrent of cuss words, damning me, the Bureau of Ordnance, the Newport Torpedo Station and the base torpedo shop. I couldn’t have blamed him. Twenty thousand-ton tankers don’t grow on trees. I think Dan was so furious as to be practically speechless.”

But when the only torpedo Tinosa brought back to Pearl Harbor was examined at the torpedo shop, it was found to be in perfect working order.

The United States submarine fleet ended World War II as one of the most effective forces of the Pacific War. By August 1945, the U.S. sank 2,728 Japanese merchant and naval vessels, for a total of 9,736,068 tons. Of those, 55 percent were sent to the bottom by American submarines.

But there was a period when U.S. submarines were virtually useless, even unarmed, in the savage Darwinian world of undersea warfare. That time was from December 1941 to October 1943, a total of 22 months. While there were an increasing number of excellent submarines, well-trained and motivated crews, and superb skippers, they lacked one all-important tool: good torpedoes.

When Daspit and Tinosa had left Midway, the submarine carried 24 of the best torpedoes in the navy, the powerful Mark 14. The Mark 14 had been in service since 1931. Designed in 1926 at a cost of $143,000 by engineers at the navy’s Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd), the Mark 14s were built at the Naval Torpedo Station (NTS) in Newport. They were complex weapons that required meticulous machining and assembly. Each Mark 14 was powered by contra-rotating bronze propellers driven by a “wet heater” motor that used ethanol steam and compressed air to propel the weapon to up to 46 knots for 4,500 yards and up to 9,000 yards at 31.5 knots. It was armed with a 668-pound Torpex warhead. By 1940 each torpedo cost $10,000, five times as much as a new automobile. When the war began, nearly every U.S. sub carried the Mark 14 and its crews had full confidence in its reliability, but that confidence appeared misplaced by 1943. 

Tinosa’s patrol was the most recent and extreme case of what had been a growing problem within the submarine force since the beginning of the war. From the first patrols after the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, submarine commanders complained of torpedoes that failed to work properly. On December 14 the USS Seawolf (SS-197) encountered a Japanese freighter near the Philippines and fired eight torpedoes at it. Seven missed. The one that hit failed to explode. In the first three months of war, American subs fired 97 torpedoes at enemy shipping but sank only three ships. Some torpedoes failed to explode, while others, aimed with care, seemed to run beneath their targets. Most exasperating of all, several had blown up long before hitting the side of a Japanese ship.

The torpedo’s most important component was the Mark 6 exploder. The surest way to sink a ship was to break its back at the keel, and to do that the torpedo had to explode directly under the hull. With that in mind, BuOrd designed a new exploder based on successful British Duplex and German magnetic mines. Its most important feature was the magnetic influence exploder, Project G53, which was such a closely guarded secret that even though a maintenance and operating manual had been written, it was never distributed to the submarine bases. The exploder was triggered by magnetic influence as it passed directly beneath a ship, where there was no armor. This was why the first Mark 14s carried a relatively light warhead.

The Mark 6 also came with a contact exploder, which was a backup in case the magnetic exploder failed. It consisted of a trigger, firing pin, and detonator. The device was not much different from that of a gun, in which a firing pin hits the primer in a cartridge to cause a detonation. When a torpedo struck a ship’s hull, the collision rammed the head backward, driving the firing pin into the detonator over the warhead.

BuOrd was under a tight budget and saw no reason to spend money to test the expensive torpedoes. It conducted only one test of the Mark 6, in May 1926. Ironically, the target was a derelict submarine. Two Mark 14s armed with the magnetic exploder were fired at the sub. One ran under the target and failed to detonate. The second one exploded and sank the sub. No further testing was done. 

That meant the United States submarine force entered World War II with a torpedo that had a 50 percent failure rate.

By mid-1942 submarines had fired more than 800 torpedoes in the Pacific war. Eighty percent had failed. In one instance, Lieutenant Commander Tyrell D. Jacobs of the submarine USS Sargo (SS-188) fired eight Mark 14s at a Japanese transport near the Philippines on Christmas Eve, 1941. Not one exploded.

Charles Lockwood, at that time COMSUBSOWESPAC in Australia, was listening to his own submarine skippers. He conducted an unofficial test of the torpedoes in June 1942, the first real test of the Mark 14 since 1926. Lockwood had torpedoes set to specific depths fired through a submerged net. The holes the torpedoes left in the net showed that they were running far below the depth to which they had been set, sometimes as much as 10 to 15 feet deeper. This was conclusive proof of a problem, but BuOrd dismissed the findings and blamed the submarine commanders for not setting the torpedoes properly. At Pearl Harbor, the then-COMSUBPAC Admiral Robert H. English sided with BuOrd and blamed his sub skippers for what he called their “lack of initiative.”  

Finally, under pressure from Admiral Chester Nimitz, himself a former submariner, BuOrd conducted its own tests in August 1942, which determined that blame for the depth-setting problem lay with BuOrd. It had increased the size of the warhead but failed to make changes in the mechanism that controlled depth. The pressure sensor had been moved from the nose of the torpedo to near the tail, where water pressure became lower as the torpedo sped through the water. The lower pressure indicated that the depth was too shallow so the torpedo automatically went deeper, guaranteeing it would pass too far beneath the target. This should have been recognized long before the war, but due to BuOrd obstinacy and budget restrictions, it became an issue that sub skippers had to discover during combat.

The problems continued as late as April 1943; when Commander John A. Scott’s USS Tunny (SS-282) fired 10 torpedoes at three Japanese light carriers that month the crew heard seven explosions, but they all proved to be premature and caused no damage.

Dozens of torpedoes exploded well before reaching the target. The cause was the hyper-sensitive magnetic exploder, which was being triggered by a combination of the Earth’s magnetic field and the approach to a ship’s hull. These problems should also have been discovered and fixed long before the war began.

Nonetheless, BuOrd maintained there was nothing wrong with the torpedoes and blamed the issues on bad approaches and poor maintenance. Such obtuse stubbornness naturally started a furor among the submarine fleet. U.S. sub crews were risking their lives for nothing. Japanese transports and warships sailed on, unmolested.

After Tinosa’s cruise, Lockwood requested permission to disconnect the magnetic exploder, but BuOrd wouldn’t allow it. The submarine crews were forbidden to do anything beyond performing regular maintenance. To prevent any unauthorized tampering, BuOrd ordered that the torpedo shop at the submarine base apply dabs of paint to the screws that held the exploder mechanism to the torpedo body. Any attempt to remove or tamper with it would mar the paint. With the zeal American military men take when going against orders, some torpedomen obtained small cans of matching paint so they could retouch the screw heads after they had personally worked on the exploders.

However, no matter how carefully torpedomen inspected and overhauled the Mark 14s, their efforts were useless. The problem was in design and materials, issues beyond the skills of even the most experienced torpedomen.

Making matters worse, politics became involved. Rhode Island, traditionally a state with strong bonds between the electorate and legislature, looked upon Newport’s NTS with overprotective eyes. One naval officer stated that “If I had the temerity to fire an incompetent or insubordinate worker, the Secretary of the Navy would be visited by both Rhode Island senators and at least one congressman, demanding the man be reinstated.” This virtually guaranteed American torpedoes would be poorly manufactured. 

By 1943, the navy was building 70 Mark 14s per day, all carrying the flawed Mark 6 exploder. One of the manufacturers was the American Can Company, the primary producer of tin cans for food products. Later International Harvester and Pontiac became producers as well.

In the early summer of 1943 Lockwood, now COMSUBPAC in Pearl Harbor, flew to Washington and demanded action. This time someone was listening. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest J. King issued an order to disconnect the magnetic exploder from all the torpedoes. But Tinosa’s failure to sink the Tonan Maru in July proved the so-called fix had not solved all the problems. The complaints continued to mount. Some torpedomen told of torpedoes they had set to run at a depth of two feet that still passed under a ship.

Lockwood took personal action. In order to convince BuOrd the problem was with the torpedoes, not with his subs, skippers, or crews, he called in Commander Charles B. “Swede” Momsen, the commander of Submarine Squadron (SubRon) 2 at Pearl. In 1939 Momsen had overseen the rescue of the crew of the USS Squalus (SS-192) after it sank off Portsmouth, New Hampshire, but his habit of speaking his mind had earned him few friends in the Pentagon. Still, he was one of the most innovative submarine engineers in the navy and he began to apply his talent to the torpedo problem.

Momsen set out to determine if the flaw lay with the contact exploder. He studied charts of the waters around the Hawaiian Islands to find a spot where sheer vertical cliffs descended to deep water and a sandy bottom. An area on the coast of the small island of Kahoolawe was perfect. Momsen, along with COMSUBPAC’s gunnery and torpedo officer, Commander Art Taylor, began supervising live firings from the submarine USS Muskallunge (SS-262) at the cliffs beginning on August 31. The first two exploded. The third one did not. Momsen himself went into the water to examine the torpedo. It had broken in two, with the warhead split. Taking extreme care, the crew hoisted the unexploded torpedo onto a barge and returned it to Pearl Harbor.

Momsen and his team also took torpedo warheads filled with sand and a live exploder and slid them down a cable from a 90-foot tower onto a steel plate to simulate different angles and impact speeds. Seventy percent failed to explode. This confirmed something that Momsen suspected. The general belief was that the best angle to fire a torpedo at a target was from exactly 90 degrees, or broadside. But, as Tinosa’s experience demonstrated, this was not true. By studying the unexploded torpedo from the Muskallunge test and the results from the tower, Momsen and Taylor realized that a head-on impact distorted the contact exploder’s firing pin, and the forces of sudden deceleration when the torpedo hit a target slowed the pin’s motion in its track. Examination of the primers showed dents from the pin were not nearly enough to ignite the warhead. The Mark 14 seemed to be more reliable when traveling at its lower, 31-knot speed. When fired at the faster 47 knots, the firing pin was almost always damaged. The drop tests also demonstrated that a glancing impact allowed the firing pin to act properly. In other words, the best angle to fire was anything other than dead on.

Interestingly, BuOrd had made a small attempt to find the root of the problem by consulting famed physicist Albert Einstein at Princeton University. Einstein examined the Mark 6 blueprints and concluded that the firing pins were being distorted by the impact. He recommended adding a void between the outer shell and the firing mechanism. But BuOrd did not follow his suggestion.

Momsen showed his test results to Lockwood, who then took them to Washington. He returned a few days later, as he said in his official war diary, “madder than hell.” BuOrd finally admitted the exploder was at fault and agreed to design a new one. But that would take a year or more. Momsen advised Lockwood it should be possible to rebuild the contact exploder with different materials. Because the exploder had to be both light and strong, the key proved to be the adoption of exotic alloys. The machine shop at the sub base obtained light alloys from, ironically, the melted-down engine of a Japanese fighter shot down during the Pearl Harbor attack and used the metal to machine and assemble new firing pins, springs, and guide tracks. The new designs performed exactly as hoped. The project needed a lot more metal than one engine could provide, but the team found the perfect source nearby at the Army Air Forces’ Hickam Field—airplane propellers. One Army Air Forces officer reportedly said after being asked for as many damaged propellers as he could provide, “A better use for a busted prop couldn’t be found anywhere.”

Momsen was promoted to captain and awarded the Legion of Merit for his work on finding and solving the torpedo problem. He had played a significant but little-remembered role in assuring that every U.S. submarine was able to go to war against Japan with reliable torpedoes. 

With every machine shop at the sub base working on the problem, by the fall of 1943 the Pacific Fleet’s submarines were finally armed with reliable weapons. “From that moment on, all major exploder problems suddenly disappeared,” said Lockwood.

Underruns were still a concern, though. Taylor and Momsen again had torpedoes fired through a series of evenly spaced nets. The tests showed that not only were the Mark 14s running well below their set depth, they were not even running flat. They ran alternately deep and shallow, like a sine wave through the water. It was sheer luck if the weapon was at the right depth when it reached its target. This was not something that could be fixed at Pearl Harbor. It would have to go right to BuOrd and the NTS. But at least Lockwood’s skippers could make allowances for the erratic depth settings. Knowing that the sine wave had a cycle of about five hundred yards, crews could set a torpedo so it was on the high point of the curve at impact.

By the time the first reliable torpedoes went to sea, the war had been going on for 21 months. Dozens of patrols had been wasted, hundreds of American lives lost, and important enemy targets missed. Now aggressive, skilled, and innovative submarine commanders—men like Dudley “Mush” Morton of USS Wahoo (SS-238), Richard O’Kane of Tang (SS-306), and Eugene Fluckey of Barb (SS-220)—had the torpedoes they needed and were adopting the tactics to use them. They patrolled on the surface by day, keeping a sharp lookout for planes and scanning the seas with radar. This doubled the area they could patrol. With the reliable torpedoes virtually guaranteeing a kill, the men under Lockwood’s command began sweeping the Pacific Ocean of Japanese ships. All they needed was good intelligence, initiative—and luck. As Lockwood told one new sub skipper, “If you’re not lucky, I can’t use you.” It was still a dangerous game of cat and mouse, but now the fleet’s subs were no longer unarmed. They were deadly sharks hunting for prey. 

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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A talented young officer in the Imperial Japanese Naval Air Service, Mitsuo Fuchida was chosen by Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo to coordinate and lead the attack on Pearl Harbor. From his place in the center seat of a Nakajima B5N2 “Kate,” Fuchida would be able to see the state of the harbor’s defenses and command his waves of attacking aircraft.

The model company Hasegawa initially released its 1/48-scale Kate in 2001 and has offered it in a number of guises—as a torpedo plane, in a version with folding wings and in one with a single armored piercing bomb. That kit, its first version, includes markings that are not for the more popular torpedo plane, but for Fuchida’s command aircraft, the “tip of the spear” of the Pearl Harbor attack.

THE KIT
Typical for Hasegawa, the detail is accurate to a fault. Begin with the cockpit, paying close attention to the many small parts that make up the aircrew’s “office.” It was common for different manufacturers to have their own particular color of interior paint. Nakajima’s greenish gray (often called Nakajima Interior Green) is different from the greenish blue that was typical for Mitsubishi’s aircraft. Paint the cockpit parts and get started.

The control panels have nicely raised detail, but decals are provided for those of us lacking the talent for painting tiny dials and switches. The only extras needed are seat belts for the three crew positions.

Once completed, the cockpit assembly forms a tub that fits neatly between the fuselage halves. The fit is very good, but it pays to dry-fit parts first. Once everything is together, set aside the completed fuselage.

Next assemble the bomber’s engine and paint it black. Cement the engine to the firewall and drybrush an aluminum color over the engine’s cylinders to make the detail pop. Paint the main crankcase a medium gray. Paint the cowling and the forward firewall flat black. On many Japanese aircraft a flat black color extends from the cowling to the pilot’s windscreen to act as an anti-glare panel. Paint the cowling and glue it in place and then set the completed assembly aside.

It’s time to attach the large broad wing to the fuselage. Again, the fit is very good and requires minimal filler and sanding.

The modeler can pose with the flaps dropped, as they would be upon landing, or up, creating a cleaner profile. Moveable surfaces like the rudder, ailerons and the horizontal stabilizer were fabric covered on the real airplane and should be painted on the model with the same color as the bomber’s interior. The rest of the airplane was left natural metal. Paint your upper surfaces a dark green.

Photos from the time show that many carrier-based aircraft had a fair amount of chipping and wear. Images of what is purported to be Fuchida’s Kate show the camouflage, hastily applied without primer, flaking off from exposure to the harsh weather at sea. There are a couple of ways to replicate the chipped effect. One is to spray common hairspray over the natural metal color, let it dry, and then paint the dark green color over it. There are also a number of “chipping fluids” on the market that you can brush or spray on in much the same way. Once you’ve applied the chipping solution and dark green camouflage, use a toothpick and an old toothbrush to chip away at the camouflage color. Wet the toothbrush and start scrubbing the various seams and panels to remove the green paint in much the same way as the harsh weather did to the real thing.

Take your time and experiment first before going all in on the model. It is a bit of an artistic technique. Once you’re satisfied with the look, set aside the aircraft to dry thoroughly.

Next, spray a light gloss varnish to prepare the model for the decals. Markings are a very simple affair. A large Hinomaru (the classic large red disc) appears in six positions: on the top and bottom of the wings and on both sides of the fuselage. Paint the tail red with three broad yellow stripes on the rudder along with the code “AI-103,” which signifies that this is the commander’s airplane from the wing aboard the aircraft carrier Akagi. A coat of a dull varnish seals the decals.

Assemble the landing gear next and paint the tires a black rubber color. The gear struts and landing gear doors should be a natural metal aluminum. Add some mild weathering and oil and fuel stains. Keep the weathering to a minimum; mechanics would have taken excellent care of their aircraft on the long voyage across the Pacific.

The kit gives the modeler a choice of a one-piece canopy that can be closed or kept open to show off that detailed interior. The clear pieces are thin, so be careful not to crack the plastic. Invest in a set of precut adhesive masks for the canopy. You can find a number of brands at reasonable prices. Pick one that is designed specifically to be used with a Hasegawa kit. Mask off the different canopy pieces and paint them the same dark green as the rest of the aircraft. Let the pieces dry thoroughly before removing the masks. Pay close attention to the four canopy pieces at the rear of the cockpit and how they will fit together when slid open to expose the rear-firing machine gun. Finally, attach the propeller, which should be painted natural aluminum; the pitot tube on the leading edge of the port wing; and the antenna that sits on the top of the canopy.

With everything in place, Commander Fuchida’s Kate is ready to take its spot on the display shelf along with the rest of your collection of aircraft from that fateful December morning.

Leanne Blinzler Noe was eight years old and living in the Philippines with her family when the Japanese attacked the islands on the day after Pearl Harbor. She and her sister, Ginny, hid out with German nuns at a convent in Manila for several years during the war. Then, in March 1944, the Japanese forced them to enter Santo Tomas Internment Camp, where they joined thousands of already imprisoned Allied civilians, including their dad, Lee Blinzler.

Noe, now 90, endured near starvation and her fear of the Japanese guards, even though adults in the camp tried to instill a state of normalcy with school (not her favorite thing) and entertainment evenings (very fun). On February 3, 1945, the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division liberated the camp. To this day, General Douglas MacArthur remains Noe’s hero. 

How did you end up in the Philippines in the 1930s?

My father was a gold engineer working at the Dewey Mine near Yreka, California. This was during the Great Depression and the mine closed. He heard from a friend there was a boom going on in the Philippines, so in the fall of 1936, he moved our young family—my mother, my younger sister, Ginny, and me—to Marinduque. I was three years old.

But then my mother died soon after we arrived; we believe it was TB. Our father moved my sister and me to Holy Ghost College in Manila, where a German order of nuns ran a school, while he stayed in Marinduque.

In November 1939, milling operations in Marinduque stopped, and my dad found work at Balatoc Mine outside the mountain retreat of Baguio, in northern Luzon. He lived at the mine, while Ginny and I resided at Holy Ghost Hill, the nuns’ summer home, where we were the only two boarders.

Do you remember when the Japanese first attacked the Philippines?

It was December 8, 1941. Ginny and I went to church that morning at the cathedral in Baguio. In the middle of the consecration, we heard loud thumping sounds. The priest put down the chalice and told everyone to go home. He advised that we hide in ditches if we heard planes again. We returned to the convent, where everything was quiet. Some Igorots [indigenous Filipinos] came to the door to sell strawberries and sugarcane. While I was washing the fruit in the kitchen, I heard the same loud pounding that we had heard while at church—the Japanese were attacking Baguio! The bombs terrified me, but Ginny and one of the nuns ran outside and watched the attacking planes.                     

How did you escape from Baguio?

After the Japanese attack, my dad arranged a ride for my sister and me in a company car to the safety of Manila, promising he would follow soon. Two men from the mine, armed with pistols, drove us down the mountain. As we approached the flatlands, the men surveyed the landscape, very alert, looking for enemy soldiers who had reportedly landed on nearby beachheads at Lingayen Gulf. Later we learned the car’s trunk contained the mine’s gold bullion, which was whisked away by submarine to Australia and then the U.S.

In Manila, we tried to return to Holy Ghost, but they couldn’t take us. So the men dropped us off at a European orphanage, until conditions permitted us to return to Holy Ghost at the end of January. It’s possible the U.S. Army was using part of Holy Ghost as a hospital.

How did you end up in the prison camp?

In January 1944, the Americans began to win the war in the Pacific. The Japanese Military Police took control of the camp, and life became more miserable for the prisoners. On March 10, the enemy, who knew about us by then, decided Ginny and I should be brought into Santo Tomas. We traveled there by calesa [a horse-drawn carriage], were inspected by the Japanese at the front gate, and moved our few belongings to Room 55A in the Main Building, which was packed with 26 women and children.        

Tell us a little bit about the camp.

Santo Tomas is Asia’s oldest university. It was founded in 1611. A high wall surrounds its cluster of buildings on all sides. That’s where we were interned.

Our days were organized into activities, beginning with roll call. Sometimes we stood for hours outside our room, while the Japanese soldiers inspected us.

We all had responsibilities. I washed our sheets in an outside tub once a week and left them to dry in the sun to chase away bedbugs. Among the day’s most important events was chow time when, about an hour before food was ladled out, I would stand with our dad’s and my meal tickets and our tin cans, waiting for the line to open. (Ginny ate in the children’s line.) Breakfast and dinner were often a watery rice stew called lugao.

In our free time, Ginny and I and our friends climbed on a bamboo jungle gym at the playground. As food became scarce, the playground was converted into a vegetable garden. We played Monopoly and, believe it or not, War. One day I found a tired rubber dolly in the trash. I took it, washed it, and hand-sewed clothes for it from scraps.

Dave Harvey, a Shanghai entertainer and professional comedian, established “theater under the stars,” with a screen and wooden stage. There were movies, acts, quizzes, singing, and Harvey’s comedy routines. We had lots of fun on those evenings.

Did you have to go to school?

Yes! Even in prison, we attended school, five days a week. One advantage of imprisoning Manila’s expats was the high caliber of professional teachers available to teach classes. I remember studying ancient history, Tagalog, and Japanese.

Why did MacArthur move so quickly to liberate Santo Tomas?

Supposedly, American intelligence received a message from a clandestine radio in Santo Tomas stating the Japanese were preparing to execute us. Upon landing at Lingayen Gulf in January 1945, MacArthur demanded that the 1st Cavalry move onto Manila as quickly as possible. After liberating the military POW camp of Cabanatuan, a “flying column” charged south.

What do you remember about your liberation?

On February 3, 1945, planes were flying low overhead—not typical bombers but tiny Piper Cubs with blue stars on silver backgrounds…Americans! The planes left, and we had a 6:00 p.m. roll call and early bedtime. I heard low rumblings, gunfire in the distance, and the black sky lit up like the northern lights with tracer bullets.

Then someone said an American tank was striking through the wall outside camp. Ginny and I rushed down to the front hall of the Main Building and watched from the crowded steps. Soon, a tank came into view. Oh my gosh, we were so excited. The vehicle came to a halt, and several tall and healthy-looking men emerged, looking like good-natured giants.

Was that the end of it?

No. The Battle of Manila raged all around us, so even though we were liberated, we had to stay at Santo Tomas.

A few days after liberation, Ginny and I snuck out to the front of the Main Building during nap time to meet two soldiers who had promised to give us Hershey bars. All of a sudden, shells rained on the building. Ginny and I were hit, and soldier James Smith carried us both inside. We later learned that the other soldier, Steve Bodo, was killed.

We were transported by army ambulance to a government building in Quezon City that was being used as an evacuation hospital. I didn’t know it then, but I had a piece of shrapnel lodged in my jaw. My mouth was so swollen, I could hardly eat. Ginny’s lower arm was so damaged by shrapnel that it later required 90 stitches. Her wound was packed with Vaseline gauze and the pain was so excruciating she had to be put out to change it.

One night the enemy shelled the evacuation hospital. Some of us sought shelter in the hallway and prayed the rosary, our voices rising up when the shells were closer and louder. An army nurse named Nancy joined us. I was surprised to see someone in the army so frightened. The next morning, we saw that one of the shells had lodged in the building, but without exploding.

How did you return to the United States?

I think because of our injuries we were on the first trip out, around March 13. We were flown in a military plane to Leyte, where we slept in tents on the beach. We swam in the water; one day I saw a torso—gruesome—but for the most part we had a grand time.

They gave us immunizations and put us on the [transport ship] USS Admiral W.L. Capps. We slept on triple-deck bunks and enjoyed lots of food, including candy and oranges. The ship zigzagged in a convoy and, 18 days after leaving Leyte, we approached the Golden Gate Bridge. I thought our ship was so tall it might hit the bridge!

Where did you go then?

Our mother’s sister, Jerry Edwards, who lived in Berkeley, greeted us at the dock. She had agreed to take Ginny and me into her care as we forged ahead into our new American life. Two years later, we headed back to the Philippines to be with our dad, who had returned to the mine, but that’s another story!

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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Austria was the first country to fall to Nazi Germany, but it functioned less like an occupied nation and more like a loyal vassal state. When the German Army crossed the border into Austria in the early hours of March 12, 1938, its progress turned into a victory parade. Austrians filled the streets of their towns and threw their arms up in salute. Some even handed flowers to the passing soldiers or tossed swastika confetti. A British tourist wrote in her journal that the chants of “Sieg Heil” and “One people—one empire—one Leader” were “so repeated that it sounded like a giant pulse beating in your ear.” At Linz, not far from Adolf Hitler’s hometown of Braunau am Inn, “even the trees and streetlamps were full of screaming, shouting people,” one resident remembered.

In CBS Radio’s inaugural “World News Roundup” broadcast on March 13, Edward R. Murrow reported from Vienna. “They lift the right arm a little higher here than in Berlin and the ‘Heil Hitler’ is said a little bit louder,” he noted. With a language and culture shared with Germany, Austrians became fully amalgamated within the Third Reich; in fact, Austrians were the only non-Germans who could become officers in the German armed forces, the Wehrmacht.

Because of the high degree of support for Germany, the fragile pockets of Austrian resistance against the Nazis during the war had to operate differently from those in occupied countries like France or Norway, which had well-armed and wide-ranging networks. Austria’s resistance was not only smaller and more precarious than that of other countries, but it also originated from a more motley collection of motivations. Resistors included politically organized Communists, devout Catholics, apolitical pacifists, and Austrian Legitimists who sought to restore the monarchy under Otto von Habsburg, a prominent voice of Nazi resistance and heir apparent of the Habsburg family dynasty.

As time went on, though, several of these disparate groups began to coalesce around two men. The first, Franz Josef Messner, was the successful general director and chairman of Semperit, a major tire manufacturer. The second was a young and outgoing Catholic chaplain named Heinrich Maier, who served as a priest in an upscale Vienna suburb and had leftist leanings that originated from his humble childhood. The two formed a group whose appellations were as varied as its members. At times it was referred to as O5, Arcel, CASSIA, or eventually the Maier-Messner Group. Despite all odds and with no background in espionage, the Maier-Messner Group began to accumulate information it could use against the Nazis and remained operating until nearly the end of the war.

The collapse of the 600-year-old Habsburg Empire and the end of World War I in 1918 led to runaway inflation, instability, and unemployment in Austria and created a political vacuum. Unification with Germany appealed to many struggling Austrian citizens during the worldwide Depression of the 1930s because it promised economic stability and an echo of the time when the Habsburg Empire sprawled across the continent. Hitler promised to spread in Austria what he called the “flourishing new life of Germany.”

“Austria’s own legacy of German Nationalism was hugely important for the Nazis,” explains Dr. Meyer Weinshel of the Center for Austrian Studies at the University of Minnesota, “and it meant that resistance to the Nazi regime was pretty muted.” The majority of Austrians supported the new regime, at least passively. “Aryan Austrians served in every level of Nazi bureaucracy,” Weinshel points out, with 1.2 million Austrians serving in the Wehrmacht (out of a total wartime population of 6.5 million). Austria provided nearly half of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and staff who served at concentration camps. Before entering the country later in the war, American spies were warned, “You can expect ninety percent of [western Austrians] to be pro-Nazi.”

The annexation of Austria with Nazi Germany became known as the Anschluss, which literally translates as “connection.” It was not a conquest by Germany—it was a seamless reunion. The nationwide support of the Third Reich within Austria made it extremely difficult for resistors to establish and expand cells and avoid betrayal by coworkers, friends, and even family members who were more than willing to inform on anyone less than devoted to the new regime. An Austrian resident turned refugee recalled, “People looked on the Anschluss, first and foremost, as an opportunity to get involved in the witch hunt.”

Yet even while celebratory chants still rang through the streets of Vienna, an unlikely resistance cell was already forming, spearheaded by two contrasting personalities. The silver-haired businessman Franz Josef Messner, born in 1896, was worldly and confident where Heinrich Maier, more than 11 years younger, was modest and friendly, but the two had bonded two years before, in 1936, over their concerns about the future of Austria and wider Europe. They became even more worried following the disturbing events of the Anschluss. A later report claimed that “Maier found in Dr. Messner a comrade. He shared with Messner all of his political endeavours and asked Messner, because of his many business trips abroad, to acquire information.” Messner’s connections included officials from Semperit in Austria, Hungary, and Turkey who had exclusive industrial and economic knowledge about Germany.

Because of its circumscribed and perilous position, the Maier-Messner Group initially focused on nonconfrontational measures, such as collecting intelligence, engaging in anti-Nazi propaganda work (leaflets described Hitler as the “greatest curse-laden criminal of all time”), and helping to excuse conscientious objectors from frontline service. The group had early stumbles but quickly learned and recalibrated.

By the end of 1940, less than two years after the Anschluss, the Gestapo had infiltrated and destroyed most Communist, Legitimist, and Catholic resistance cells while building a powerful and expansive informer network. However, the Maier-Messner Group—small, nimble, and with a mélange of motivations—not only persisted but expanded, eventually totaling about 20 members, despite operating in one of the most hostile environments for any wartime spies.

Maier did have allies within the church. Conservative Catholics had long been suspicious of a too-close connection to Germany and its Protestant majority, and the Nazi regime didn’t trust the power of the church in an Austria that was 90 percent Catholic. Hitler once wrote, “Every national idea was sabotaged by Austria throughout history; and indeed, all this sabotage was the chief activity of the Habsburgs and the Catholic Church.” Post-Anschluss, the government began to reduce the power of the church by allowing divorcées to remarry, closing parochial schools, and confiscating church-owned lands. After a sermon in which he called Jesus Christ “the one Führer,” the Archbishop of Vienna had his residence stormed by furious Nazi devotees, who destroyed furniture and set his papers on fire. With memories of past clerical overreach still fresh, many Austrians welcomed the limits on church power.

This was the climate within which the liberal and intellectual Maier operated. Since 1935 the energetic priest had served as the curate of the redbrick Gersthof Parish Church in Vienna’s 18th district. The church’s soaring bell tower was visible from Messner’s landscaped villa a few blocks away. According to Christopher Turner in The CASSIA Spy Ring in World War II Austria, Messner had the business connections, but Maier was “equally as—if not more—important than Messner, for his unwavering morality and beliefs had defined the group’s common purpose and had demanded loyalty among its sundry members.” He had built up a broad social network across all rungs of the ladder of Viennese society and his Neo-Gothic church likely served as a meeting spot where conspirators could pass unobserved, or at least unremarked upon. 

Maier also had connections to a small but strategically useful arm of resistance within the Austrian military through a longtime friendship with the family of Heinrich Stümpfl, a general staff officer whose traditional military beliefs conflicted with Nazi ideology. Maier confessed his resistance activities to Stümpfl, who then helped to pass on intelligence about the Wehrmacht’s numbers and positions in Austria. Germany had set up much of its military infrastructure in Austria, since it was out of range of Allied bombers in the early part of the war.

The members of the Maier-Messner Group bided their time and conserved their limited resources, both material and personnel, as they painstakingly built a trove of information. In the summer of 1942, Maier composed a memo on behalf of the group for the British and Soviet foreign ministers, delivered in Switzerland through a Catholic theologian, Maier’s only contact on neutral soil. The man delivered the message, but it was ignored by both countries. For its part, the British foreign intelligence agency MI6 believed the group was too good to be true and feared that the overtures were part of a German disinformation campaign. But Maier and Messner remained undaunted.

Maier had befriended and then recruited Barbara Issakides, a classical pianist who wasn’t especially political but was disgusted enough with Hitler to take on the risks of resistance. While in Switzerland for a concert at the end of 1942, she established contact with Allen Dulles, the director of the Swiss branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the U.S. intelligence agency. Dulles, who would go on to head the Central Intelligence Agency after the war, had heard rumors of the group but wondered if it even existed. After Issakides made contact, Messner signed a contract with the OSS. His resistance cell would soon become the most effective spy ring the Allies had within Austria.

Among the most important pieces of intelligence the Maier-Messner Group provided the Allies was the design of the V-2 rocket, the first long-range ballistic missile, in late June 1943. Dulles cited a report in which he credited an “Austrian source” with providing “much of the technical information on the rockets.” Messner may have received his information from his Semperit contacts. After he pinpointed the locations where V-2 rockets were assembled and tested in Germany, American and British bombers carried out precision air strikes.

The Maier-Messner Group also shared with the OSS the first intelligence on Germany’s formulation of synthetic rubber, a vital substance for the Third Reich since it had no sources for natural rubber. The intelligence included the coordinates and production estimates for three rubber factories. Messner’s role in the tire industry also allowed him to uncover plans to enhance German U-boats with sonar-resistant rubber panels. In addition, the group provided accurate drawings of the Tiger I, a heavy tank Germany used in the Soviet Union and North Africa. In some cases, Maier learned of developments from parishioners on leave from the front.

The group’s most shocking revelation was the existence of concentration camps and Germany’s mass extermination of Jews, intelligence that at first seemed absurd to the Americans. Messner gained the first evidence of this from his sources within a Semperit plant 200 miles north of the concentration camp at Auschwitz. 

In the meantime, the Austrian government was cracking down on the Catholic resistance. The Nazis executed Sister Maria Restituta Kafka in 1943 as “effective intimidation” so others wouldn’t be emboldened by her vocal disagreement with Hitler or her refusal to remove crucifixes from the hospital where she worked. Catholic conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter was also executed that same year. A police informer exposed the Austrian Liberation Movement—about one hundred Catholic Legitimists organized by another priest—and its collaborators were sentenced to death. 

Violence was of course not limited to Catholics. Among the common chants heard on the streets was “Jew—perish.” Austrian radio announcers provided a gleeful play-by-play of the burning of the largest synagogue in Vienna during Kristallnacht, and resident Sigmund Freud fled his longtime practice for sanctuary in England shortly after the Anschluss. Before the war, Vienna had been home to a thriving Jewish community of nearly 200,000. More than 65,000 of them were murdered in the Holocaust.           

The Maier-Messner Group continued with their work despite the growing danger. In the late summer of 1943, Issakides traveled with Messner to Switzerland under the pretext of a business trip so they could deliver high-level intelligence that would help Allied bombing missions target war-related factories and other military targets, thereby also sparing civilians.

Sometime in the winter of 1942-1943, Maier met a student at the University of Agriculture, a school only 15 minutes from his church. The young man, Walter Caldonazzi, was a devout Catholic and a fellow member of Maier’s old student fraternity of Legitimists. Despite physical limitations from a childhood injury that left him with a limp and using a cane, Caldonazzi collected intelligence on some of Germany’s crucial armament factories, particularly those that produced the brass used by the Nazi war machine for shell casings, gear wheels, and ball bearings. The Maier-Messner Group’s couriers transmitted these materials to the OSS, which in turn passed this on to Allied bombing commands.       

Dulles trusted the intelligence he received from what he referred to as his “well placed but non-technical source.” As the Allies began coordinating military operations within Austria, the Maier-Messner Group pledged its on-the-ground support. In March 1944, the OSS began devising an operation to infiltrate Austria via parachutists, who would then be received by members of the spy network once they landed.

However, the group’s luck was about to run out. The head of the Semperit plant in Istanbul, a member of the Maier-Messner Group, was looking for an Allied agent in neutral Turkey to pass along his cache of information. The agent he found was operating a ponderous and unchecked espionage network that had been infiltrated by German double agents. They were able to trace the source of the intelligence provided by the Maier-Messner member to uncover the identities of the group’s collaborators.

On January 15, 1944, the Gestapo arrested Walter Caldonazzi for interrogation at the secret police’s Vienna headquarters in the once stylish Hotel Metropole, now the largest Gestapo office outside of Berlin. The formerly luxurious hotel rooms had been reconfigured into dark, soundproof cells where approximately 50,000 prisoners were interrogated and tortured; several died there, either from injuries or suicide. Future Chancellor of Austria Bruno Kreisky recalled his experience at the Hotel Metropole after an arrest for socialist political activity: “I underwent a very unpleasant and harsh interrogation,” he said. “Half unconscious and covered in blood, I came back into the cell. With an Überschwung—that’s how the wide military belt was called—they knocked out two of my teeth.” In a jailhouse letter, Caldonazzi stated, “I was threatened during my second twelve-hour interrogation that, if I continued my denials, [the Gestapo] would arrest my bride, parents, and others.” 

The OSS lost all contact with the resistance group. Within six months, the Gestapo had completely dismantled the network and arrested nearly all the leading members. Messner and Maier were both arrested at the end of March 1944— two Gestapo agents seized the priest at his church immediately after he had conducted mass and they took him to the Hotel Metropole. 

It is likely that the Gestapo tortured all the members of the Maier-Messner Group they arrested. Over the next month, the prisoners began to divulge some of the group’s activities and the names of co-conspirators. Maier had the most comprehensive understanding of the group’s membership and activities, and the most incriminating testimony surfaced when the priest confessed that Messner had established contact with the Allies and accepted money from them to fund the group’s activities.

Maier spent the rest of his time in prison learning languages, praying, and writing to friends and family. In one of his last letters, Maier wrote, “I die happy. I am now well prepared for death. What I did, I cannot regret. I did it for Austria.”

On October 27, 1944, the Gestapo presented its evidence in a trial against 10 of the group’s conspirators, including Maier, Messner, and Caldonazzi. Issakides may have attended as a witness. (Maier had denied any knowledge of her complicity, thereby saving her from being charged.) All three men were found guilty of “preparation for treason” and “participating in a separatist union” and sentenced to death. The Nazis dispatched them to Mauthausen, the only Austrian concentration camp, where slave laborers quarried granite and performed munitions work. 

Caldonazzi was beheaded at the Vienna Regional Court in January 1945. After his conviction, Maier spent months at Mauthausen, where he was tortured and humiliated. He was brought back to the Vienna Regional Court and beheaded on the evening of March 22. His last words were “Long live Christ, the king! Long live Austria!”

Messner was executed at Mauthausen a month later. “On 23 April 1945 at 1500 hours, Commander SS-Standartenführer Franz Ziereis personally came to the bunker and ordered me to take forty prisoners, among them Dr. Franz Messner, to the gas chamber,” a senior squad leader reported. “While leaving his cell, Messner wanted to tell me something, but the commander’s presence prevented that…. The commander himself initiated the flow of poison gas.” 

Messner died only days from rescue. Twelve days after his death, the U.S. 11th Armored Division liberated Mauthausen. By then the Soviets had captured Vienna and the Hotel Metropole had been reduced to bombed-out ruins.

In the Moscow Declarations issued in October 1943, U.S. and Soviet foreign ministers agreed that Austria was “the first free country to fall victim to Hitlerite aggression.” However, they also noted that the country “has a responsibility which she cannot evade, for participation in the war at the side of Hitlerite Germany.” For decades afterward, the Austrian government emphasized its victimhood, rather than its responsibility. Many Austrians continued to view resistance fighters as draft dodgers, if not traitors. By the 1990s, the Austrian government finally admitted that the country bore “co-responsibility” for Nazi atrocities. Yet, while the total number of murdered Austrian resistance fighters lies between four to five thousand, there is little tangible trace of their memory today, even for those from the country’s most successful intelligence-gathering operation.

One of the few memorials to those who took on the fight against the Third Reich in what was the mouth of the beast is near a busy U-Bahn station in Vienna, across from what was once the site of the foreboding Hotel Metropole. Today all that remains is a green square with a scattering of trees. In one corner of the square stands a small and easily overlooked monument. Made from blocks of Mauthausen granite, the memorial’s weather-streaked walls shelter the sculpture of a defiant prisoner. Inscribed in one stone is a dedication in German:

Here stood the House of the Gestapo. 

To those who believed in Austria it was hell.           

To many it was the gates to death.                      

It sank into ruins just like the Thousand Year Reich.          

But Austria was resurrected and with

her our dead, the immortal victims.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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The Hastings & Prince Edward Regiment—a Canadian unit known as the Hasty Ps—were ordered to relieve the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers—the Faughs—on the afternoon of December 5, 1943. As part of the British Eighth Army under Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, the two units had been fighting their way up Italy since crossing over from Sicily in September and were now approaching the Adriatic coast somewhat less than halfway up the Italian boot. Lieutenant Farley Mowat, the Hasty Ps’ intelligence officer, had gone forward with the intelligence officer from the Faughs. Rain pelted down. Files of Faughs were coming out of the line. “Their faces were as colourless as paper pulp,” noted Mowat with mounting dread, “and they were so exhausted they hardly seemed to notice the intense shelling the coastal road was getting as they straggled down it.”

The Faughs might not have been noticing, but Mowat was. He had been leading a platoon when the Hasty Ps landed in Sicily in July and he felt like the ensuing months of combat had brought him near the breaking point. As he watched the Faughs, the pervading and rancid smell of cordite hung in the air. His heart pounded and jolted in his chest without rhythm. He began to shiver, although he was not cold. Everything told him to stop, turn round, and run. Pulling out a cigarette, he offered one to the Irish lieutenant, who lit a match in cupped hands. But Mowat turned away. “For in that instant,” he wrote, “I realised what was happening to me. I was sickening with the most virulent and deadly of all apprehensions…the fear of fear itself.”

They walked on, reached a ridge, and lay on their stomachs among some sodden bushes. Low cloud obliterated the view. This was a strange landscape: a series of plateaus, gently undulating but rather flat, on which stood villages, farmsteads, and endless vineyards, olive groves, and meadows. Scoring these plateaus, one after the other, was a series of gullies, most quite narrow and verdant—covered with acacia, baby oaks, and low-growing bushes. Mowat could see little but ahead lay the Moro Valley, plunging steeply perhaps 200 feet from the edge of a plateau to the river. Tracks wove their way down past more vineyards and olive groves to cross the Moro itself, no more than 10–15 yards wide, but below deep, steep banks, and then climbed back up to a series of villages—Villa Rogatti, the hamlet of La Torre, and San Leonardo, which on a fine day could be seen very clearly, a collection of white and stone houses sleepily huddled together. The valley itself was only two-thirds of a mile wide. From Mowat’s position the coast was a mile distant, if that. The fishing village of Ortona, their initial objective, could be clearly seen, perched on the edge of the sea, a little way to the north. So close one could almost touch it.

Yet, as was so often the case in this ancient land, the landscape favored the defender. Crossing the valley, already zeroed by German artillery and mortars and teams of machine-gunners, would be brutally tough. The gullies—narrow gashes into the plateau covered with trees and vegetation—were ideal for placing mortar teams. Each of these gullies, some long, some quite short, ran towards the sea and against the flow of the Allied advance. And for all the support of the artillery behind them and even tanks, taking this ground was really a job for the infantry: men who would have to thread their way off the plateau, down into the valley and up the far side, and hope there would be enough of them still standing to prise the enemy from their positions.

Also now up on the southern side of the Moro were the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada. Major Roy Durnford, the padre, had been shocked by the scenes of desolation as they’d neared the Sangro River to the south two days earlier. “The river and banks are profuse with battered remains of war and a completely ruined bridge,” he noted. “Dead strewn about—all German. God help our lads.” For those entering this war-torn landscape there was a terrible, gnawing sense of approaching hell. On both sides of the Bailey bridges over the Sangro were immense furrows of mud as well as battle debris. Durnford crossed the river on December 3 and immediately saw large numbers of new crosses. A barrage was in full swing, and ahead stood the village of San Vito. Durnford thought the remains of the hamlet and the surrounding landscape were worse than anything he’d seen in terms of absolute devastation.

The changeover was complete on the evening of December 5 and, as Farley Mowat discovered when he reported back to Major Bert Kennedy, the Hasty Ps’ acting commander, they were due to attack straight away, that night, and silently too, without any artillery softening up the enemy first. Major General Chris Vokes, the 1st Division commander, believed that a silent, stealthy attack was their best chance of success. Vokes, who had only taken command at the end of September, was a professional soldier, taciturn and with a reputation for pushing his men particularly hard.

Kennedy, frantic at the speed with which they were expected to be ready to launch this assault, now ordered Mowat to head back again and find a suitable crossing point over the river. The thought of such a patrol was making Mowat sick to his core; he knew that four months earlier he’d have been eager for the chance and that even two months ago he would have undertaken it without too much thought. But not now. Orders, though, were orders. Collecting some scouts, he willed his way forward and together, scrambling down the vine-covered slopes, they safely reached the Moro, waded along its overflowing banks until they found a fordable spot, then scampered back up again. Not a shot had been fired, not a single enemy soldier had been heard. Mowat had survived.

Vokes’s plan was to launch three battalion assaults. The Hasty Ps would be on the right, near the mouth of the Moro, close to the sea and the main Highway 16 heading north. In the middle would be the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada aiming for the village of San Leonardo, perched on the plateau on the far side of the valley; and then on the left, the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry—the PPCLI—would attack the next settlement along on the north side, Villa Rogatti. Three crossing points, three bridgeheads, and from there they could push forward across the plateau and take Ortona. Vokes had identified a crossroads that stood above the southwest end of a particularly long gully just to the south of the town as a key objective. Here, the track north from the plateaus and gullies crossed the main lateral road—and, immediately parallel to the road, the railway line—that wound its way towards the village of Orsogna, 12 miles southwest of Ortona. Vokes code-named this objective “Cider.”

Behind the Canadians, back on the Sangro, the torrential rains that had accompanied them on their journey north had caused the river to flood and all three Bailey bridges had been swept away. The engineers would have to start all over again, but a more immediate concern was the halt in supplies this caused. The 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade hadn’t even reached the Moro front yet.

Nonetheless, at midnight the attacks began. Mowat watched Able Company head off, his old platoon from Sicily leading the way. Down they went, into the valley, and then silence. No artillery, no firing. The rain continued; it could be heard beating a drum on the leaves and on the track. Then suddenly, starkly, cutting across the night, the buzz saw of machine guns, flares crackling overhead and fire from the enemy artillery, shells screeching and sucking their way across the valley. The battle for Ortona had begun. 

The fight turned into a proper meat grinder for both sides. Over 36 hours between December 9 and 10, the Germans launched no fewer than 11 counterattacks on the Hasty Ps’ fragile bridgehead on the ridge by the coast road, on the north side of the Moro and to the east of the battered village of San Leonardo, all of which had cost considerable blood to the German 200 Regiment, but which had also chipped away at the Canadians. Somehow, the Hasty Ps had held on.

Then, on Saturday, December 11, new orders arrived for them to break out of their bridgehead and attack north. The assault was to be launched at 4 p.m. that afternoon, while it was still just about light, and despite the suicidal nature of the order it was merely a diversion from the main event, which was an attack by 3rd Brigade from the ruins of San Leonardo. “Once again,” noted Farley Mowat, “we were to be the goat in the tiger hunt.” He was at Battalion HQ on the ridge, a collapsed shed, peering out over the sea of mud, blasted farm buildings, burned-out tanks, and the flotsam of battle and shattered vines. A scene of utter desolation, made worse by the gray of a winter afternoon sky. Suddenly, something moving caught his eye, and training his field glasses he spotted two huge pigs eating the bloated corpse of a mule. He knew they would be just as happy to gorge on dead soldiers.

A squadron of Sherman tanks arrived at 3 p.m. and to Mowat’s horror Kennedy ordered him to accompany them on foot and to be the point of liaison with the infantry. It wasn’t until 5 p.m., though, that the attack finally went in and, just as the Hasty Ps had expected, there was no sign from the Germans to suggest they thought this was a diversion. Artillery and mortars came crashing down; the raucous din was so immense that Mowat could hardly hear the engine of the Sherman behind which he was crouching. Meanwhile, Baker and Charley Companies, up ahead, disappeared, enveloped by the smoke and fog of war.

In fact, the attack went better than Mowat, for one, had feared, because the German infantry had already pulled back in their sector; and because of the mud, the shelling and mortar fire were less lethal than normal. Even so, when a salvo of shells whooshed in and crashed nearby, Mowat fell on his face in the mud and at that moment something snapped within him. Getting to his feet, he turned and hurried back, past the ruined shed where the newly promoted Lieutenant-Colonel Bert Kennedy was sheltering and on to the pockmarked coast road heading south. He’d not gone far, however, when Franky Hammond, commander of their anti-tank platoon, speeding forward with a jeep and a 6-pounder, stopped and grabbed him by the arm.

“Drink this!” he told Mowat, thrusting a rum-laced bottle of water in his hand. Mowat drank. “Get in the jeep,” Hammond then ordered. “Now show me the way to BHQ.” 

This seemed to snap Mowat out of his fear-induced stupor. He did not desert that evening after all.

Vokes still aimed to reach the crossroads code-named “Cider,” and while the Hasty Ps were launching their diversionary attack along the coast road he sent 2nd Brigade and the newly arrived 3rd Brigade into the fray. To reach the “Cider” crossroads they had to cross another of the strange, narrow, wooded gullies that so marked this landscape, although this particular one, stretching far to the southwest of Ortona, was named simply The Gully. They tried to attack directly across it, but the Germans, hidden until this point, appeared from the depths of The Gully as the leading Canadian infantry approached and stopped them in their tracks. Four counterattacks followed the next day as the rain came down once again. It was the turn of the Canadians to attack once more on December 13, and again they got nowhere. Nor were these men from 90 Panzergrenadier–Division anymore but paratroopers of 3 Fallschirmjäger-Regiment, who, like the 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade, had been moved up from the Castel di Sangro sector of the upper Sangro.

To the northwest, the brutal fighting for Ortona continued as the Canadians inched towards the “Cider” crossroads on the far side of The Gully. All along this ridgeline, separate battles were playing out as the landscape, thick with smoke, often low cloud, rain, and fog, made orientation very difficult. The southern slopes of The Gully were steep and made of thick, soft clay: banks that were easy to dig into but also almost impossible to hit by shellfire because of the angle of the shell’s arc. Even mortars, which had a steeper plunge, struggled to hit the southern bank. Farther west, at the extremity of The Gully, German artillery had the ground liberally mined and zeroed, while on the ridge beyond to the north further troops were dug in with machine guns. These fired over the top of The Gully at any approaching attack. It wasn’t until evening on the 20th that at long last the “Cider” crossroads, halfway along The Gully on the northern bank, was in Canadian hands.

The struggle for Ortona was becoming one of the most brutal fights of the entire Italian campaign to date. The fighting for the town itself was underway by December 23, as the defending Germans attempted to corral the Canadians into carefully prepared killing zones. The piles of rubble were laced with booby traps, while the paratroopers were able to use their machine guns very effectively; each Fallschirmjäger-Gruppe of ten was issued with two MG 42s rather than the single one that was standard for all other infantry. It meant that buildings on either side of the narrow streets were used as MG positions, and placed on different floors, too. Within Ortona’s narrow streets the raucous din of battle was terrible, the whine, whump, and crash of shells and almost never-ending chatter of small arms, sharp and jarring. More tanks inched forward, the infantry crouching behind. The turret swiveled then the gun fired, the shell crashing into the building. Smoke, dust, bricks, stone, and masonry tumbling. Room by room, house by house, Germans were forced back. Only when it grew dark did a bit of calm return.

There was little sense of confidence, hope, or Christmas cheer at Ortona, which had descended into a bitter street battle. The Canadians had not been trained in urban operations and the number of snipers and hidden machine guns had taught the tank men of the Three Rivers Regiment to simply pummel every building. Pushing behind and alongside them were the Loyal Edmontons—the Eddies—and the Seaforth Highlanders, the battalion that had first tried to storm San Leonardo a lifetime ago at the start of the battle. Liberal use of Brens, Tommy guns, and grenades was the only way in fighting that had been floor by floor, not just house to house. Rather than risk tripwires and booby traps on the ground floor, they were soon discovering that it was better to knock down walls that hadn’t already been blasted, lob in grenades and clear each house like that. At no point, though, did the Fallschirmjäger show any sign of throwing in the towel; men of the Seaforths came across one Fallschirmjäger who had been blinded by shrapnel but was still waving his weapon. “I wish I could see you,” he yelled in English, “I’d kill every one of you.” They were starting to call Ortona the “Stalingrad of the Adriatic.”

“Jerry sending shells over,” jotted Roy Durnford on Christmas morning. “Deathly chatter of machine-guns. Rumbling of falling buildings, roar of guns.” He had headed to the church of Santa Maria di Costantinopoli at the southern end of the town. Tables had been set for the companies to sit at and have a Christmas meal, and roses and violets placed in small cups of water to add a little cheer. “Shells whine and explode,” he scribbled. “Holy Night. The meal for C Company. Brigadier and Colonel cheered. The faces of new recruits…Orders to leave for the front—a few hundred yards forward. A Coy [company] returns from front. Weary, strained, dirty.” He collected them for carols in the cloisters, which he was careful to make voluntary, then they repeated the meal again. And the entire occasion was repeated another time when B Company came in, and finally again when it was D Company’s turn. The fighting in Ortona, Durnford reckoned, followed a quickly established routine: “We shave same house, exchange grenades and shoot at his head if out of window and he at ours.”

On Christmas, Farley Mowat was in a farmhouse in a salient west of Ortona that was now the Hasty Ps’ Battalion HQ. Early that morning a wounded sergeant arrived with the news that Major Alex Campbell, Mowat’s former company commander, had been killed charging at the enemy, his body riddled with bullets and falling into the mud and jerking until the life was drained from him. Mowat was still struggling to take in what the sergeant was telling him when the blanket screening the cellar doorway was pulled back and two stretcher-bearers pushed in carrying his friend Al Park, alive, but only just; he had a bullet wound to his head. As Mowat looked at his pale, ghostly face and the blood-stained bandages around his friend’s head, he felt tears well and then stream down his face. It was Christmas Day, 1943.

There had not been a lull all day, nor on the day after. Inside the town, on the morning of the 27th, Siegfried Bähr of the German 2 Bataillon learned that his unit had just sixty men left. Once again he heard the rumble of tanks, the clatter and squeak of tracks, then the pause, followed by the shot of the main gun and the explosion and rumble of masonry that followed. Canadians were crawling over the roofs, through the upper floors. He could hear machine guns crackling, hand grenades bursting. “The battle rages on,” noted Bähr. “Leutnant Heidorn stands in the archway of a gate and secures a clear path with his machine gun. Suddenly a hand grenade falls in front of his feet and he quickly retreats. The Tommies are already in the same house on the upper floors. The Leutnant runs up a half-destroyed staircase. We hear gunshots, hand grenades explode…We have to leave the house, the Leutnant has fallen.” No, not fallen, Bähr then thought, that was a stupid word to describe it; after all, someone who fell over could get up again, but Heidorn wouldn’t. He was dead, no more, lying in a growing pool of blood amid the dust and debris of yet another shattered house, in a nondescript street in a small coastal town halfway up the leg of Italy.

They scuttled to a new building, Bähr holding the radio link by a blasted window, the rest of the men looking at him and wanting to know what they should do, and when reinforcements might come. “Absolutely resist!” was the instruction, repeated yet again. But how? And what with? Leutnant Ewald Pick, whose best friend had just been killed by a grenade, looked dejected. He asked Bähr for a cigarette, then lit it with a trembling hand. Suddenly, without saying a further word, he dropped his machine gun and stepped out of the house and into the piazza outside. Bähr and the others watched, aghast. At the fountain, Pick stopped and crouched, smoking his cigarette, then pointed at a Canadian on the second floor of a building across the square. “All weapons,” Pick shouted, “fire at will.”

From their building, Bähr and the others yelled at him to come back, but then a shot rang out and Pick collapsed. He had been the last standing officer in 5 Kompanie. Only once darkness had fallen did Bähr and another man scamper out to fetch him. He’d been shot in the lung, but was still alive. What a waste. Carefully, they took him to the aid post, but he died there soon after, in the early hours of December 28. Bähr hurried back and then a radio message arrived that, at last, they were to fall back. “In the middle of the night, in single file,” noted Bähr, “we leave Ortona, heading north, stumbling on the slope of a vineyard, almost in the direction of the homeland.”

The Battle of Ortona was over. 

James Holland  writes World War II’s “Need to Know” column and is the author of Brothers in Arms, Sicily ’43, Normandy ’44, Big Week, and other books. This article is excerpted from The Savage Storm © 2023 by James Holland. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.  

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With its gently rolling forests, World Heritage Sites like the monumental Wartburg Castle, and cultural icons that include Bach, Goethe, and Luther, Thuringia holds a special place in German hearts. People rave about the ethereal gorges along its popular Rennsteig hiking trail, so I decided to combine the state’s natural wonders with a personal investigation into a remarkable chapter of World War II.

Recreation was not at the forefront of Nazi minds in early 1945 when the Allies marched into Germany during the final stages of the war. As the bombing of Berlin intensified, officials from the Reichsbank, the Third Reich’s central bank, scrambled to hide the untold riches they had stolen from countries Germany had conquered. Nearly 80 years later, I am going to the Nazis’ secret gold vault at the Merkers salt mine to get a sense of those last frenetic months of hide-and-seek and the startling discovery that awaited the Americans.

Decommissioned from mining operations since 1993, the Merkers “adventure mine” boasts an underground concert hall with laser light shows, a simulated controlled blast of a salt-rock face, a dazzling crystal cave—and the original Nazi gold vault from 1945. A standard group tour of the mine, including an exhilarating ride between attractions on open flat-bed trucks, lasts three hours. My guide, Sven Grauel, takes me on a private tour of the Gold Room, the sole World War II exhibit in the complex. In keeping with regulations, I don a hard hat and join him in the staff elevator, my ears popping as we descend through the shaft at a brisk 26 feet per second.

The elevator doors open at a depth of 1,600 feet. I’m surprised how warm it is down here—around 82°F, thanks to fresh air being pumped from the surface—and by how tiny I feel in these cavernous surroundings. The facility contains roughly 2,900 miles of tunnels, embracing an area bigger than the German city of Leipzig (population 625,000). No wonder the Nazis were confident that the Americans would never find the gold’s exact location, even if they were lucky enough to stumble onto the mine. Herr Grauel and I climb into a jeep and zip through the dark, lonely underground tunnels. Before I know it, we pull up outside the Gold Room, at the exact spot where the Americans blew open the Nazis’ treasure chamber in April 1945.

Throughout much of the war, Germany held the bulk of its gold reserves at the Reichsbank in Berlin. During late 1944 and early 1945, as the Allies closed in from the east and west, the Nazis deposited more and more gold at Reichsbank branches in central and southern Germany. This policy went into overdrive after February 3, 1945, when the U.S. Eighth Air Force dropped nearly 2,300 tons of bombs on Berlin, severely damaging the Reichsbank and its currency presses. Bank president Walther Funk decided to relocate Berlin’s gold and monetary reserves for safekeeping. To shield armaments production from the bombings, Germany had already requisitioned space in its many salt and potassium mines, including a salt mine at Merkers, a village about 200 miles southwest of Berlin. It provided a perfect stronghold for the Reichsbank, with its controlled temperature, low humidity, and thick mantle of protective rock.

On February 11, the Reichsbank spirited the first load of the Reich’s currency reserves, a billion Reichsmarks stuffed into 1,000-mark bags and a huge number of foreign banknotes, to Merkers and deposited it in the vault, then known as Room 8. The Schutzstaffel (SS) was quick to follow and sent dozens of deliveries of ill-gotten property seized from concentration camp victims. Next came Germany’s considerable stores of art, including thousands of pilfered works of all eras and genres. Between March 20 and March 31, the Germans transported one-quarter of their major collections of 14 museums to Merkers.

In the meantime, U.S. forces were closing in on the mine. On March 22, Lieutenant General George S. Patton’s Third Army crossed the Rhine and barreled into the heart of Germany. Moving northeast from Frankfurt, Patton’s troops forged into the future Soviet zone of administration, which included Thuringia.

Concerned Reichsbank officials had not expected the American advance to be so swift, so they pivoted and decided to return all the Merkers treasures to Berlin. But the officials had also failed to realize that German rail service would be curtailed due to the Easter holidays (for me, an amusing footnote. Such an important mission, and the trains weren’t running?). By April 1, bank officials were resigned to leaving the gold and artwork in Merkers and focused on shifting the Reichsmarks, which were in short supply at the end of the war.

On April 2, the Germans enlisted some 20 Polish slave laborers to move the currency out of the mine. They took a considerable sum to the train station at Bad Salzungen, 6 miles from Merkers, and loaded it into a railway car. The next day, upon news of the Americans’ impending arrival, loading was stopped and the currency returned to Merkers. Early the next morning, the Germans and Polish POWs started taking the currency back down into the mine. The Reichsbank official who held the key to Room 8 had already made his escape,so the laborers left the currency at the bottom of the shaft near the elevator door.

Later that day, Merkers fell to the Third Army. On April 6, U.S. military police on a foot patrol questioned two women, displaced French citizens brought in by the Nazis for forced labor, who told how truckloads of precious metals had disappeared into the mine. The MPs relayed this information to their high command. Shortly thereafter, Werner Veick—the Reichsbank cashier in charge of foreign notes—confirmed to U.S. officers that the Reich’s entire gold reserves were behind the door of an underground vault.

On April 10, with the key to the vault still missing, the Americans, fearing the entrance might be booby-trapped, blasted a hole in the brick masonry next to the door of Room 8. Later that day, Generals Patton, Dwight Eisenhower, and Omar Bradley arrived and were stunned by what they found. In a space measuring 75 by 150 feet, there lay no less than 7,000 bags of gold bars and coins—sealed, numbered, and neatly arranged in knee-high rows reaching to the rear wall. The contents weighed 250 tons. 

In the exhibit at the Gold Room, I stop to inspect hand-operated mining carts laden with props of precious cargo on the rail track, conjuring up images of the desperate unloading of treasures as the clock ticked. A detailed 1945 sketch of the “Ploor Plan” [sic] is on display in the vault, alongside stacks of mocked-up gold bars, burlap bags marked “Deutsche Reichsbank,” cartons of fake Reichsmark notes (souvenirs for visitors), a real wartime jeep, and larger-than-life photos of U.S. military personnel guarding and cataloging the loot.

Eisenhower could hardly believe his eyes. “Crammed into suitcases and trunks and other containers was a great amount of gold and silver plate and ornament obviously looted from private dwellings throughout Europe,” the Allies’ Supreme Commander in Europe wrote in his 1948 memoir, Crusade in Europe. “All the articles had been flattened by hammer blows, obviously to save storage space, and then merely thrown into the receptacle, apparently pending an opportunity to melt them down into gold or silver bars.” A German official said the cash reserves were badly needed to pay German soldiers. “I doubt the German army will be meeting payrolls much longer,” quipped General Bradley, as he related in his 1951 account of the war, A Soldier’s Story.

In addition, the Americans recovered some 400 tons of precious artworks from 30-odd miles of makeshift galleries in the mine. The finds included the bust of ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti (a small copy can be seen in the Gold Room) and thousands of classic paintings such as Édouard Manet’s 1879 “In the Winter Garden.” The latter was displayed by the U.S. military for a press photo, reminiscent of the 2014 Hollywood movie TheMonuments Men.

On April 15, U.S. forces began trans-porting the gold and currency to a Reichsbank building under American control in Frankfurt. It took a convoy of 30 heavily guarded 10-ton U.S. Army trucks to handle the load, and a similar procedure followed for the artworks. There may have been a further twist en route to Frankfurt: unconfirmed reports surfaced that one or two truckloads of gold remained unaccounted for, fueling stories of “lost Nazi gold” ever since.

As the elevator whisks me back to the surface, I find myself speculating an alternative outcome: if these treasures had gone undiscovered by the Allies and continued to stoke the Nazi war machine, could the conflict in Europe have lasted even longer?

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It’s probably fair to say that most of us spend a lot more time thinking about the folks leaping from landing craft than we do about the landing craft themselves, yet back in August this year, at the extraordinary D-Day Ohio event at Conneaut, Ohio, on the shores of Lake Erie, I finally got to ride in a Higgins boat. Perched next to the coxswain, I looked down and watched the wires moving back and forth as they pulled the rudder this way and that and was struck by how incredibly rudimentary it all was. Such a simple design and really with just one purpose: to deliver a small vehicle or assault platoon directly onto a beach. It was 36 feet long, 11 wide, and could do about 12 knots on a calm sea.

Incredibly, the Allies had no landing craft at all when the war broke out in September 1939, and although Andrew Higgins in New Orleans delivered a “landing craft, personnel (large)”—LCP—to the British at the back end of 1940, it wasn’t until May 1941 that the first Higgins boat received its trials. By this time, it was clear that Britain would have to launch any future assault on Europe from the sea, and that if the United States entered the war it would be in the same position. As things turned out, landing craft became one of the most vital items in the Allied arsenal, essential for operations in the Pacific as well as in the Mediterranean and, of course, Normandy.

Nor were the Higgins boats the only landing craft. Rather, a huge array was developed and produced, not least the incredible LST—landing ship, tank—which was 382 feet long, had a draft under the ship’s forward bow of just four feet, and could deliver 18 Sherman tanks or more than 200 troops directly onto a beach. This meant the Allies no longer needed a port and quaysides for an amphibious attack; as both the November 1942 Torch landings in Northwest Africa and then the July 1943 assault on Sicily showed, the LSTs and slightly smaller LCTs (landing craft, tank) were game changers for the Allies. Much of the Sicilian campaign, for example, was supplied by these landing craft, even as some ports became available.

The U.S. Navy had, in fact, woken up a little late to the urgent need to build huge numbers of landing craft, but between April 1942 and May 1943 shipyards across the States produced a staggering 8,719 of all types, including the truly revolutionary DUKW—pronounced “duck”—a remarkable wheeled, amphibious craft that could drive straight off the beaches.

These were still not enough, however, as the U.S. accelerated its efforts in the Pacific and put Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, as its priority for the war against Germany. It meant that after Sicily, when General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army landed at Salerno, south of Naples, on September 9, 1943, he had nothing like enough assault craft. For Sicily, the Allies had 1,743, but for Avalanche, the codename for the Salerno landings, just 359. Clark could land only a meager three divisions and a handful of special forces in the initial attack. So, despite vast forces in the Mediterranean, the Allies’ assault was far smaller than ideal. Avalanche was an incredibly high-risk enterprise as a result, albeit one that fortunately prevailed.

Nor were there enough landing craft for D-Day. Although 4,127 were involved, General Bernard Law Montgomery, the land force commander, wanted more; a sixth beach, Band, had to be abandoned because of the shortage. Outflanking operations in Italy and Burma were discarded for lack of assault craft, while the landings at Anzio in Italy, in January 1944, also lacked sufficient strength for want of these vital vessels.

As the Higgins craft rumbled across the water on Lake Erie, I was struck by how incredibly simple this box-like craft was, but also how valuable. Assault craft were key to the entire western Allies’ way of war and yet had there been even more of them, what a difference that would have made. Perhaps the war really would have been over earlier.

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He was not yet the iconic children’s book author we all know and love—he wouldn’t become that until after The Cat in the Hat became a bestseller in 1957—but Theodor Seuss Geisel made his voice heard in the months before the United States entered World War II. As an editorial cartoonist for the left-leaning daily newspaper PM, the man the world came to know as Dr. Seuss used his skills to alert America about the growing threat of world war. He wielded his pen to flay notable figures like Germany’s Adolf Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, and Japan’s Hideki Tojo but also took aim at American isolationists, most notably Charles Lindbergh, the famed aviator and a key member of the America First Committee. Once the U.S. was in the war, Geisel added Americans who weren’t doing their part for the war effort to his list of targets and attacked anti-Semitism  and racism (although his protrayals of the Japanese can seem uncomfortably racist themselves today). As graphic artist Art Spiegelman says in his introduction to the book Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel, “the cartoons let us know what happens when Horton hears a heil.”

Horton the elephant was, of course, one of the beloved creations of the man who called himself Dr. Seuss. Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1904, Geisel became known for his advertisements for Flit, a bug spray manufactured by Standard Oil. (Flit makes an appearance in some of his PM cartoons.) By World War II he had also published a few children’s books, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937), The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins (1938), The King’s Stilts (1939), and Horton Hatches the Egg (1940). None of them enjoyed the success of his postwar work.

Increasingly concerned about the rise of fascism, Geisel penned an attack on the Italian editor and fascist supporter Virginio Gayda. A friend of Geisel’s showed the cartoon to Ralph Ingersoll, the founder and publisher of PM, who printed it in the January 30, 1941, edition. Geisel was off and running. Over the next two years he drew more than 400 cartoons for PM and heaped comical scorn on his subjects. “Ted’s cartoons grew savagely eloquent and often very funny, displaying his gift for derision,” wrote biographers Judith and Neil Morgan. The last cartoon Geisel drew for PM ran on January 5, 1943. Two days later Geisel joined the army and went to work for the Signal Corps unit under Hollywood director Frank Capra.

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