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FIRST IN O N D - DAY

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+ COMIC BOOK AUTHOR RECREATES
D-DAY’S FORGOTTEN BATTLE AUGUST 2019
 A L O O K AT L E A D E R S H I P,
V I C TO RY, A N D D E S T I N Y

THE ALLIES
Best-selling author Winston Groom
tells the complex story of how Franklin
Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and
Joseph Stalin aligned to win World War
II and changed the course of history.

N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C
AT L A S O F WO R L D WA R I I
This is the most comprehensive
atlas of World War II ever made and
features array of vintage and newly
created maps, rare photographs,
covert documents and eyewitness
accounts that illuminate the world’s
greatest conflict.

AVA I L A B L E W H E R E V E R B O O K S A R E S O L D
and at NationalGeographic.com/Books
NatGeoBooks @NatGeoBooks © 2019 National Geographic Partners, LLC
 62
A crashed Waco glider, here in Holland, adds a
reminder of warfare to an otherwise pastoral scene.
Similar gliders conveyed infantrymen into combat
in Nazi Germany as part of Operation Varsity.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
COVER: CIA; COLORIZATION BY BRIAN WALKER

30
18 26
 AUGUST 2 0 1 9
ENDORSED BY
THE NATIONAL WORLD WAR II MUSEUM, INC.

F EAT U R E S
C OV E R S TO RY
30 MISSIONS IMPOSSIBLE
The stranger-than-fiction career of OSS guerrilla chief Carl Eifler
NICHOLAS REYNOLDS

40 FIRST IN D-DAY 75
101st Airborne Division pathfinders and their headstrong
leader set foot in a dark Normandy just 15 minutes
into D-Day ALEX KERSHAW

48 A BET ON THE BRITISH

An American military attaché in London voiced unwavering
support—while holding private doubts ANDREW NAGORSKI

WEAPONS MANUAL
56 ABOVE AND BEYOND
Japan’s Ohka Type 11 suicide plane

PO RTF O LI O
58 MORALE BY MAIL
The outsized impact of humorous postcards from home

62 ‘NOW IS WHEN YOU PRAY’

Infantrymen ferried into Nazi Germany via glider fought to seize
10 key bridges during Operation Varsity JAMES M. FENELON

DEPA RT M E N T S
8 MAIL
10 WORLD WAR II TODAY
18 CONVERSATION D-DAY 75
Robert Venditti’s colorful—and very personal—Battle of Graignes

22 FROM THE FOOTLOCKER

24 FIRE FOR EFFECT D-DAY 75
26 TRAVEL
Rocky Mountain High at Camp Hale, Colorado

70 REVIEWS
Catch-22 on Hulu; Desert Fox; Madame Fourcade—and more

76 BATTLE FILMS
Audie Murphy’s trip To Hell and Back
79 CHALLENGE

70
80 FAMILIAR FACE
AUGUST 2019
3
WWII Online
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VOL. 34, NO. 2 AUGUST 2019

EDITOR
KAREN JENSEN

Larry Porges SENIOR EDITOR

Kirstin Fawcett ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Jerry Morelock, Jon Guttman HISTORIANS
David T. Zabecki CHIEF MILITARY HISTORIAN
Paul Wiseman NEWS EDITOR

Stephen Kamifuji CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Brian Walker GROUP ART DIRECTOR
As the USS Tang’s forward torpedo room
Melissa A. Winn DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
floods, the crew readies for escape.
Guy Aceto, Jennifer E. Berry PHOTO EDITORS

ADVISORY BOARD
If you enjoyed Alex Kershaw’s
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“First In” (page 40), you’ll want John McManus, Williamson Murray, Dennis Showalter
to check out some of the master
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4 WORLD WAR II
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REYNOLDS
CONTRIBUTORS
JESSICA WAMBACH BROWN (“Fire
on the Mountain”) writes about his-
tory and the outdoors from Kalispell,
Montana. While drafting a story
about the first climber to ascend
Mount Rainier, she learned of the
10th Mountain Division’s brief train-
ing stint there and was inspired to
explore the ski-clad soldiers’ longer-
term home at Camp Hale, high in the
Colorado Rockies.
JAMES M. FENELON (“Now Is When
You Pray”) is a former U.S. para-
trooper who developed an avid inter-
est in World War II Airborne history
during his military service. He is the
author of the book Four Hours of
Fury, which chronicles the experi-
ences of the American 17th Airborne
Division’s role in Operation Varsity,
the war’s largest single-day air-
drop. Four Hours of Fury was
released by Scribner in May.
6 WORLD WAR II
FENELON
KERSHAW
ALEX KERSHAW (“First In”) is a jour-
nalist and New York Times bestsell-
ing author of books on World War
II. Born in York, England, he is a
graduate of Oxford University and
lives in Savannah, Georgia. His criti-
cally acclaimed books include The
Bedford Boys, The Longest Winter,
and Escape from the Deep. His 2012
book, The Liberator, is being made
into a Netflix drama series, available
in 2020. He was inspired to write his
latest book, The First Wave, having
spent many years visiting the Nor-
mandy battlefields and wondering
who fought first when the stakes
were highest and odds longest.
ANDREW NAGORSKI (“A Bet on the
British”) was born in Scotland to
Polish parents, moved to the United
States as an infant, and has rarely
stopped moving since. He is an
award-winning journalist and author
NAGORSKI
BROWN
who spent more than three decades
as a foreign correspondent and editor
for Newsweek; he is also a frequent
contributor to this magazine. His
new book, 1941: The Year Germany
Lost the War, tells the stories of U.S.
military attaché General Raymond
E. Lee and others who played key
roles during that pivotal year.
NICHOLAS REYNOLDS (“Missions
Impossible”) is a lifelong World War
II buff who has held two of the best
niche jobs in the U.S. government:
officer in charge of field history for
the U.S. Marine Corps and historian
for the CIA Museum. His story for
this issue—at a little-known intersec-
PORTRAITS BY JOHANNA GOODMAN
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tary history—was irresistible to him.
Reynolds’s most recent book is the
New York Times bestseller Writer,
Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Heming-
way’s Secret Adventures, 1935-1961.
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 USS Pennsylvania crew pump out
water over the ship’s quarterdeck
after a torpedo attack off Okinawa.
MAIL
IN GOOD
COMPANY
This last issue was a winner for our family, with Johnny Carson
(“Familiar Face,” April 2019) being on the USS Pennsylvania at the
same time as my darling husband, Jack, when the ship was torpe-
doed and all those dear men were killed. Of course, Carson and my
Jack didn’t know each other—but just like Carson, Jack was sent to
the hole in the stern to pick up the dead and their belongings. My
Jack only spoke of this maybe twice in our life together, and he
would say, “Eth, I said a lot of ‘Our Fathers’ and ‘Hail Marys.’” By the
way, he is in heaven now—maybe he and Johnny will meet!
Ethel Selters
Maitland, Fla.
ANCHORED IN TRUTH
I am a first-time reader and couldn’t help but take notice of your arti-
cle on Typhoon Cobra in December 1944 (“Into the Storm,” April
2019). Your recounting of the experience of the crews of USS Tabberer
8 WORLD WAR II
and, specifically, USS Hull brought to mind
Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny. The erratic
behavior of Hull’s commanding officer before
and during the typhoon was remarkably simi-
lar to Wouk’s portrayal of the infamous Lieu-
tenant Commander Queeg in the novel. The
only thing missing was Queeg’s stainless silver
balls, which he constantly rolled in his hand
during stressful times. Since I read that Wouk
served with the U.S. Navy in the Pacific in
World War II, is it likely he knew of the travails
of the destroyers’ crews?
Gene Szatkowski
South Burlington, VT
Editor’s note: David T. Zabecki, World War II’s
chief military historian and author of the June
2013 story “True Fiction: The Caine Mutiny”
U.S. NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND
(available on our website), responds:
This is an easy one. Herman Wouk was
writing from direct experience: during the
war he was an officer on two destroyer-mine-
sweepers like the Caine, the USS Zane (sound
familiar?) and the USS Southard. He ended up
as the executive officer of the latter, partici-
pating in eight invasions. Wouk is 103; in his

Bolos like this one made
for useful fighting tools—
and exotic souvenirs.
most recent book, 2016’s Sailor and Fiddler:
Ref lections of a 100-Year Old Author, he
recounts his World War II naval experience.
In it, he mentions nothing about the USS
Hull’s travails, but he does say that he was
working on his “crazy captain” book while
serving at sea. I am almost certain he would
have heard about the Hull, at least second-
hand. Fleets are tightly-wired social organi-
zations; scuttlebutt spreads like lightning.
SHARP INSIGHT
Your article “Good Point” (“From the Foot-
locker”) in the April 2019 issue allowed me to
close a historical gap that existed since I
inherited what I assume to be a bolo from my
dad. A member of the Fifth Air Force, he was
stationed in the Philippines and New Guinea
from 1943 through the war’s end. The machete
[above] is 19 inches long from its tip to the
handle’s end. The craftsmanship has always
impressed me—the engraved spelling not so
much: “SOUBENIR 1945”.
Thank you for enlightening me and com-
pleting a story on one of my dad’s artifacts
TOP: COURTESY OF BOB WARREN; BOTTOM LEFT: WARBOOK.RU; BOTTOM RIGHT: ARTWORK BY JIM LAURIER
from the war.
Bob Warren
Germantown, Wisc.
OFF THE MARK
In the article “Old Soldier” (“ Weapons
Manual,” April 2019), the main illustration
does not depict the 12.7mm DShk heavy
Our April 2019
“Weapons Manual”
featured the gun
on the right
instead of the
correct version
on the left.
FROM THE
EDITOR
What an amazing cast of
characters we have this
issue. To be clear, I’m
talking about our writers.
See our “Contributors”
page for a rundown on
their credentials. In sum,
these are top writers and
machine gun, but instead shows a 7.62mm historians in the field, at
SG-43 medium machine gun. The “Dushka” the top of their game.
And they in turn bring to
had a finned barrel, a doughnut-shaped muzzle World War II magazine
brake, and a humped receiver; the SG-43 had the kind of incredible
a barrel with longitudinal grooves, a conical stories—and amazing
characters—we pride
flash hider, and a straight top to its receiver. ourselves on. In this issue
Robert E. Naborney alone, we’ve got the
via e-mail colorful Carl Eifler (page
30); the irrepressable
Captain Frank Lillyman
Editor’s note: Mr. Naborney is right. Instead of (page 40); the resolute
the DShk heavy machine gun, our illustration General Raymond E. Lee
featured its “baby brother”; see below. (page 48); and Private Jim
Lauria and the rest of the
staggeringly brave men of
PARATROOPER PRIDE the 194th Glider Infantry
I was very pleased to see James M. Fenelon’s Regiment (page 62)—all
alive and compelling on
piece on the 551st GOYAs (“Against All Odds,” these pages, thanks to the
April 2019). Like Mr. Fenelon, I am a former talents of our fine writers.
U.S. Army paratrooper with a particular inter- As ever, I thank you for
joining us, and hope you
est in Airborne history. The 82nd and 101st enjoy this issue.
Airborne Divisions are the best-known and —Karen Jensen
most-written about, but there is far less out
there about the 11th and 17th Airborne Divi-
sions—both combat-bloodied units. And, as
Mr. Fenelon points out, the 551st is not even
mentioned in most World War II history
books. The 509th Parachute Infantry Battal-
ion and the 550th Airborne Battalion (glider)
are two other separate airborne battalions that
get little attention. I thank Mr. Fenelon and
look forward to reading his new book, Four
Hours of Fury. Airborne, All the Way, Sir!
Homer Hodge
Fairfax, Va.
Correction: On page 27
Editor’s note: For more on the 17th Airborne Divi- of the April 2019 issue,
sion, check out James M. Fenelon’s piece, “Now is Eglin Field is misspelled
When Your Pray,” on page 62 of this issue. as “Elgin.”
PLEASE SEND
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World War II
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AUGUST 2019
9

WWII TODAY
REPORTED AND WRITTEN BY PAUL WISEMAN
JEWISH GHETTO
MASSACRE VICTIMS
DISCOVERED
CONSTRUCTION WORKERS CLEARING GROUND in February
for a luxury apartment building in Brest, Belarus, uncovered a mass
grave in what was once a Jewish ghetto.
Buried in a 130-foot-long pit were the remains of 1,214 men,
women, and children. Bones were found in six-foot-deep piles. The
find wasn’t exactly a surprise: the Germans had executed 16,000 of
the city’s Jews in a forest outside the city and were believed to have
killed others within the ghetto.
But the mass grave was still shocking.
“The site was horrific,” Belarusian major Pavel Galetsky, com-
mander of the search battalion exhuming the site, told the Belarus
press, according to ABC News. “I felt like weeping when I saw so
many remains of women and children, a female skeleton cradling
10 WORLD WAR II
The Belarus military works to
recover the remains of more
than a thousand Jewish victims
of a German massacre in Brest.
a baby. Victims had bullets in the back of their
skulls, small children’s skulls, or those of
teenagers.” The city plans to rebury the
remains in a nearby Jewish cemetery.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center joined other
activist groups in calling for developers to halt
construction of the apartment project. “We
SERGEI GAPON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
firmly believe that the mass murder sites of
the Holocaust should not be tampered with,”
wrote Efraim Zuroff, the center’s director.
The builders offered to erect the apartment
building next door and to transform the
gravesite into a memorial park.
 Englishman Tony Foulds (below)
celebrates the long-awaited flyover
honoring the American crew of B-17
Mi Amigo (below right), killed in 1944.

FALLEN B-17 CREW

HONORED IN ENGLAND
TONY FOULDS REMEMBERS watching the B-17G Flying Fortress near-certain death rather than endangering
TOP (ALL): DANNY LAWSON/PA VIA AP IMAGES; BOTTOM: PATRICK RAYCRAFT/HARTFORD COURANT/MCT VIA GETTY IMAGES

approach the group of children gathered in Endcliffe Park in the Eng-
lish city of Sheffield on February 22, 1944.
The pilot was gesturing from the cockpit. Foulds, then seven years
old, and his friends waved back. He couldn’t see that Lieutenant John
G. Krieghauser, returning from an abortive bombing run over Nazi-
occupied Denmark, was trying to get the children to clear out so he
could make a crash landing.
Instead, after making three passes, Krieghauser crashed the
bomber, nicknamed Mi Amigo, into the woods nearby, killing himself
and the other nine men aboard.
Only years later did Foulds, now 82 and a retired engineer, come to
understand what had happened: Krieghauser and the crew had chosen
those on the ground. “They could have saved
themselves,” Foulds said.
On February 22, 2019—exactly 75 years
later—10 British and American military
planes flew over the park to commemorate the
fallen fliers as a U.S. Air Force band played
and onlookers clapped and cheered. Foulds
had hoped for the flyover—a “flyby” in British
parlance—for years.
“I can’t see anyone else ever doing what
these lads did—giving their own lives for a for-
eigner,” Foulds said.

DISPATCHES
George Mendonsa, believed to be the sailor photographed
joyfully kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day, died
February 17 in a Middletown, Rhode Island, nursing home at
age 95. Many men have claimed to be the sailor captured by
Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt on August 14,
1945, but modern technology—including 3-D facial mapping—
pointed to Mendonsa, who had served as a quartermaster in the
Pacific, as the man in the iconic image.

AUGUST 2019
11
 ‘GREAT ESCAPE’
DIARY SELLS
A DIARY WRITTEN by one of the British prisoners who plotted the
real-life “Great Escape” sold at auction for nearly $18,000 on March
22, three days before the audacious getaway’s 75th anniversary.
Royal Air Force flight lieutenant Vivian Phillips kept a journal
filled with drawings, photos, and poems from 1943 to 1945. It docu-
mented his capture after bailing out of a downed bomber and his
experiences at Stalag Luft III in Sagan, Poland. At the prison camp,
Phillips joined the escape effort planned by Royal Air Force pilot
Roger Bushell, who had slipped away from German prison camps
twice before.
Phillips dug tunnels and performed tasks like helping to dis-
perse the excavated dirt. As he wrote in his journal, “It was our job
to ‘work in’ the light-coloured sand from underground to the drab
coloured sand of the surface…. All this was done under the very
noses of the guards.” The prisoners worked beneath a stove kept lit
to discourage curious guards. They gradually managed to burrow
beneath the range of microphones the Germans had planted nine
feet underground, working unclothed to avoid telltale dirt stains.
When the tunnel was complete, prisoners drew names from a hat
to decide who got to join the escape. Luckily for him, Phillips’s
name didn’t come up: Just three of the 76 escapees made it to free-
dom. The Germans executed 50 of the recaptured prisoners, includ-
ing Bushell. Phillips’s diary includes a list of the dead under the title
“In Memoriam.”
12 WORLD WAR II
Among Vivian Phillips’s wartime possessions
sold at auction were the airman’s medals and
journal (top left). The diary included photos,
sketches (bottom left), and, most poignantly,
a page commemorating the 50 men executed
for their part in the “Great Escape” (above).
After the war, Phillips ran a shop in Man-
chester, England. He died in 1997. Britain’s
ALL: COURTESY OF HANSONS AUCTIONEEERS AND VALUERS LTD
Hansons Auctioneers sold the journal for Phil-
lips’s nephew, a retiree who said there was no
one left to inherit the artifact.
The so-called Great Escape was the subject
of the eponymous 1963 blockbuster starring
Steve McQueen.
In related news, Richard Churchill, the
escape’s last survivor, died February 12 in
Devon, England, at age 99. Churchill made it
out of the prison camp, but the Germans found
him hiding in a hayloft. He later speculated
that his life was spared because his captors
wrongly thought he was related to British
prime minister Winston Churchill.
 GERMAN FIRM
CONFRONTS
ITS NAZI PAST

WHEN MEMBERS of Germany’s second-richest family learned what Albert Reimann Sr. (above) and his son, head of
their ancestors had done during World War II, they turned “white as a what is now JAB Holdings (left), used slave labor
wall” and decided to donate more than $11 million to charity as penance. during the war (top). The company will contribute
$11 million to charity as a self-imposed penance.
According to Peter Harf, one of two managing directors of Rei-
mann-owned JAB Holdings—whose brands include Krispy Kreme
TOP (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT): SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG/ALAMY; PA PHOTO; SIMON HOFMANN/GETTY IMAGES; BOTTOM: AP PHOTO

Doughnuts, Einstein Bros. Bagels, Pret A Manger, and Panera Bread—
the family was “speechless” and “ashamed” to learn that Albert Rei-
mann Sr. and Albert Reimann Jr. were Nazi supporters and committed
anti-Semites who used slave labor during the war.
A March report in the German newspaper Bild disclosed that the
Reimann family had hired Munich University historian Paul Erker in
2014 to research the family’s ties to Adolf Hitler’s regime after discov-
ering incriminating papers belonging to Reimann Sr.
Erker’s initial findings were explosive: Reimann Sr. had given
money to Hitler’s SS as early as 1933. In a 1937
letter to SS leader Heinrich Himmler, Rei-
mann Jr. wrote that “we are a purely Aryan
family business” and “unconditional follow-
ers of race theory.”
The family, which made its initial fortune
in chemicals in the 19th century, used Russian
civilians and French POWs as slave laborers
in their factories and homes. “It’s all correct,”
Harf told Bild. Reimann Sr. died in 1954 and

DISPATCHES Reimann Jr. followed 30 years later. “They

actually belonged in prison,” Harf added.
Pope Francis is opening the Eastern European women were sexually
Vatican archives on Pope Pius XII abused if they refused to stand at attention
(right), the wartime pontiff long
naked in their factory barracks, the New York
criticized for remaining silent in
the face of the Holocaust. The Times reported. Reimann Jr. once complained
Church had been under pressure that his prisoners didn’t work hard enough.
to open the archive while some Believed to be worth $37 billion, the family
Holocaust survivors are still plans to donate 10 million euros—about $11.3
alive. Announcing the move on million—to a still-unnamed charity.
March 4, the pope declared that
Many well-known German companies have
the Church “isn’t afraid of history.”
Researchers will be able to rum- been implicated in collaboration with the
mage through the Vatican records Third Reich, including Hugo Boss, Mercedes-
beginning on March 2, 2020. Benz, BMW, and Deutsche Bank.

AUGUST 2019
13
 The sale of M1 rifles
contributes to a nonprofit
marksmanship and gun
safety program.

SURPLUS M1s
FUND GUN
PROGRAM
THE RIFLE CREDITED with helping win World War II is still lending
a hand to Uncle Sam: by bringing in big bucks to a federally chartered
program established to teach gun safety.
A February report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office
(GAO) found that the sale of rifles—mostly surplus M1 Garand rifles—
fetched $197 million for the Civilian Marksmanship Program from
WORD FOR WORD
2008 to 2017. That’s 61 percent of the program’s $323 million in financ- “Defend Paris to
ing; the remaining bulk comes from the sale of military memorabilia the last, destroy
and surplus handguns.
Run by the U.S. Army until 1996, the nonprofit program teaches
all bridges over
American citizens marksmanship and gun safety, and gives them a place the Seine and
to buy army surplus weaponry. devastate the city.”
Designer John Garand, who spent his career at Massachusetts’s –Adolf Hitler, August 1944.

TOP LEFT: U.S. MARINE CORPS; RIGHT: PICTORAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY; BOTTOM: U.S. AIR FORCE
famed Springfield Armory, patented the M1 in 1932. The U.S. Army German commander
approved it in 1936 and pushed it into mass production four years later. General Dietrich von
The weapon earned praise for its reliability and accuracy; General Choltitz disobeyed the
George S. Patton called it the “greatest battle implement ever devised,” order to raze the French
and it was also used in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Garand, who capital as the Allies
retired in 1953 and died in 1974, earned no royalties for his invention. approached.

DISPATCHES
The last surviving member of the Doolittle Raiders, retired Lieutenant
Colonel Richard Cole (left, second from right), died in Texas on April 9 at age 103.
Led by Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, the 80 Raiders staged the April 18,
1942, bombing raid on Japan to avenge Pearl Harbor and boost American morale.
Following the bombing run, Doolittle and Cole—his copilot—couldn’t find a place
to land in China and bailed out with the rest of the B-25 crew. Cole landed in a tree
and spent the night there. Eventually, Chinese students found him and took him to
Doolittle, who said: “Boy, am I glad to see you.”

14 WORLD WAR II
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risk. GovMint.com reserves the right to decline to consummate any sale, within its discretion, including due to pricing errors. Prices, facts, figures and populations deemed accurate as of
the date of publication but may change significantly over time. All purchases are expressly conditioned upon your acceptance of GovMint.com’s Terms and Conditions (www.govmint.
com/terms-conditions or call 1-800-721-0320); to decline, return your purchase pursuant to GovMint.com’s Return Policy. © 2019 GovMint.com. All rights reserved.

ASK WWII
Q: Regarding your answer in June 2019’s “Ask
WWII” that the “D” in “D-Day” stands for “day”:
I believe it actually stands for “disembarkation,”
or the day troops arrive and leave the ship or
landing craft (and that “embarkation day” is the
day troops get on the ship and leave).
–Gary Killean, Butler, Pennsylvania
Several readers sent in comments like reader Gary Killean’s
suggesting that the “D” in “D-Day” stood for something other than
“day.” We asked Tom Czekanski, our expert at The National World
War II Museum (formerly The National D-Day Museum) in New
Orleans, to expand upon his original answer:
A: In truth, there are many opinions on what the “D” in “D-Day”
stands for. It is difficult to prove that it does not stand for
“disembarkation,” as reader Killean suggests, and there is no
smoking-gun document that definitively states its meaning. That
said, let us have a look at what has been written on the subject.
In his book D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of
World War II, historian Stephen Ambrose writes that Time
magazine reported on June 12, 1944: “As far as the U.S. Army
can determine, the first use of ‘D’ for ‘Day,’ ‘H’ for ‘Hour’ was in
Field Order No. 8, of the First Army, A.E.F., issued on September
20, 1918, which read, ‘The First Army will attack at H-Hour on
16 WORLD WAR II
Allied forces land on Okinawa in 1945 on what
was known as “L-Day,” raising further questions
into the meaning of the “D” in “D-Day.”
D-Day with the object of forcing the evacuation
of the St. Mihiel salient.’” As the World War I
attack on the salient was not an amphibious
operation, this does not strongly support a case
for “disembarkation.”
Robert Hendrickson’s Encyclopedia of Word
and Phrase Origins repeats this theory, but also
adds, “Many explanations have been given for
the meaning of D-Day…. The Army has said that
it is ‘simply an alliteration, as in H-Hour.’ The
French maintain the ‘D’ means ‘disembarka-
tion,’ still others say ‘debarkation,’ and the more
poetic insist D-Day is short for ‘day of decision.’
When someone wrote to General Eisenhower in
1964 asking for an explanation, his executive
assistant Brigadier General Robert Schultz
answered: ‘General Eisenhower asked me to
respond to your letter. Be advised that any
amphibious operation has a ‘departed date’;
therefore the shortened term ‘D-Day’ is used.’”
Unfortunately, this explanation raises more
questions than answers. If D-Day does mean
“departed date,” then which date would that
be? In the case of Normandy, soldiers on ship
left several days before the airborne forces
did—and if Pacific actions are considered, then
the departure day could be weeks before the
disembarkation day.
Further complicating matters, not all
amphibious landings in World War II were des-
ignated as D-Day. For example, the landings at
Leyte were designated as A-Day; the invasion
of Okinawa was labeled L-Day (for “landing
day”); X-Day designated the planned invasion
of Kyushu; Y-Day the invasion of Honshu; and
Z-Day for the Australian landing at Brunei Bay.
None of these lend support to either “day” or
“disembarkation”—however, since the terms
originated in World War I, one theory proposes
that the initials indeed first meant “day” and
“hour,” but that during the wide-ranging con-
flict that was World War II it was necessary to
expand the letters used to avoid too many repe-
titions and therefore possible confusion.
No matter the exact meaning of the term, it is
enough to know that when most people say
“D-Day” they mean the landings at Normandy
on June 6, 1944, when thousands forfeited their
tomorrows so that we might have today.
—Tom Czekanski, senior curator and restoration
manager, The National WWII Museum
SEND QUERIES TO: Ask World War II, 1919
U.S. NAVY
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OR EMAIL: worldwar2@historynet.com
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 D-DAY 75
CONVERSATION WITH ROBERT VENDITTI
DRAWING ON
BY AMY KURZWEIL
HISTORY ROBERT VENDITTI, 45, is the bestselling author of popular comics
series including The Surrogates, Hawkman, Freedom Fighters, and
many others. He ventures into a fact-based tale with his latest work,
Six Days: The Incredible True Story of D-Day’s Lost Chapter—cowrit-
ten with Kevin Maurer, with art by Andrea Mutti—which tells the
story of American paratroopers badly misdropped on D-Day who
fought in the June 10-12, 1944, Battle of Graignes alongside French
civilians. Venditti’s great-uncle, Thomas J. Travers, died in the fight.
Six Days was released by publisher DC Vertigo in mid-May to coin-
cide with D-Day’s 75th anniversary. For this interview, we paired
Venditti with a graphic memoirist whose recent work, Flying Couch,
also sprang from a personal tie to the war.
You’ve set many stories in fantasy worlds.
What made you want to tell this realistic story?
This is my first nonfiction project, and it came about in a strange
way. My grandmother had always discussed my uncle Tommy—her
18 WORLD WAR II
brother—and his involvement in World War
II. He’d been part of the D-Day invasion, and
no one had ever seen him again. The family
had never known anything beyond this tele-
gram saying that he was killed in action on
June 11, 1944, somewhere in France.
My grandmother passed away close to 25
years ago, and I’d been given a box of things
that had belonged to her. One of them was a
letter that had been written to her mother
from one of Tommy’s friends in the war. It
explained the events of his death and how he
was killed. I wasn’t aware of the letter for a
long time, though.
Why not?
I was very close to my grandmother. I sus-
 Robert Venditti’s new book is
built around the true story of
the June 10-12, 1944, Battle of
Graignes, France, in which
his great-uncle died.

pect that I just didn’t want to dwell on losing her. And so—that box of
things—I just didn’t go through it. “All of a sudden there
It was actually on one of the D-Day anniversaries when I finally did.
My children were old enough that I was going to find that telegram and were things I could know
tell them about this great-uncle I had who had been killed in the war.
That was when I found the letter. So I started Googling. I found refer-
about my uncle’s life.”
ences to this battle, and it seemed so extraordinary. Eventually, I came
across an image of a plaque at the back of the church in Graignes with He writes: “I would have written
my uncle’s name on it, along with the rest of the soldiers and civilians to all the moms and dads of the
who were killed. All of sudden there were things I could know about my fellows I once knew.” But
uncle’s life. It just felt like a story that I had to tell. regulations prevented it. For so
many reasons, it’s hard for those
You felt like you had a mission. who experienced these losses
I felt like I owed it to him and I owed it to my family. The contents of firsthand to write about them,
ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF DC VERTIGO EXCEPT WHERE NOTED

the letter are actually rendered into the final pages of Six Days.
That letter is my favorite part, and I had a sense
that it was real. I wrote a graphic memoir about
my grandmother, who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto,
and I incorporated a transcription of testimony she
had given to a historian. I wanted to preserve her
voice. You had a similar impulse.
The pain and the sadness that’s in that letter. The writer says to my
great-grandmother that she must be wondering: why couldn’t her son
have been him—the one who made it home?
so the burden of that falls on the
people who come after.
We’re left to fill in those gaps as best we can.
My grandfather passed away a little over a
year ago—he was in the Philippines, the
Pacific Theater—and it wasn’t until late in his
life that he started to tell some stories. I think
there’s a guilt sometimes. I’m sure you
encountered this in your project. You know,
why am I the one who got to come home?
I had always heard about World War II

AUGUST 2019
19
 Thomas J.
Travers, a
paratrooper,
was Venditti’s
great-uncle.
from the perspective of those who survived.
It wasn’t until I got into Uncle Tommy’s
story that I ever thought about World War II
from the perspective of someone who didn’t
come home.
Tell us more about him.
He enlisted on May 14, 1942, and became a
private in Headquarters Company, 3rd Bat-
talion, 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment,
82nd Airborne Division. Before the war, he’d
been an elevator operator in New York City.
How did his troop end up in
Graignes?
The nine C-47 Skytrains carrying the major-
ity of the paratroopers who ended up in
Graignes strayed off course when they
encountered antiaircraft f lak along the
coast of Normandy. This resulted in the
paratroopers missing their intended Drop
Zone T near Amfreville—inland of Utah
Beach—by 15 miles. They were the worst
m i s d r opp e d p a r at r o op er s on a l l of
D-Day. They landed in flooded marshland so
far behind enemy lines the war hadn’t
caught up to them yet. So the paratroop-
ers—182 in all—had a span of relative peace
to become a part of the French community
in Graignes, which took great risk in decid-
ing to feed and shelter them.
20 WORLD WAR II
What about the battle?
The Germans who attacked Graignes were from the 17th SS Panzer-
grenadier Division. They’d been far to the south and had been
ordered to reinforce the French city of Carentan, just north of
Graignes. With its position on high ground in the surrounding marsh
area, Graignes was in their path of advance. I don’t believe the Ger-
mans were aware that the paratroopers were in Graignes until recon
elements from the German division encountered the Americans,
leading up to the climactic battle.
What stands out as unique to me about the events in Graignes isn’t
that battle—though that in itself is marked by tremendous heroism,
sacrifice, and loss. It’s the days leading up to the battle. The American
soldiers had decided to hold the town and dug defensive positions
around it. During that time the soldiers and citizens—groups from
different backgrounds and cultures—lived together and became a
single community. The Americans were in that town for six days:
they ate together, got to know each other, and even attended Mass
together at the village’s 12th-century Catholic church.
When the main battle occurred on June 11—the day my uncle
died—the villagers continued to aid the paratroopers by distributing
food and supplies, and using the church as a field hospital. For all of
this, the people and the community paid a heavy price. After the Ger-
mans took the village, they executed the church priests and caretak-
ers and burned the village’s buildings. Thirty-two civilians were
FAR LEFT: COURTESY OF ROBERT VENDITTI
killed in all, along with 49 Americans (and one Australian soldier).
Not knowing your uncle, how did you recreate his
character and his experience for the book?
From speaking with my father’s cousin, Joni, who remembers him
from when she was young, I learned little things: He was Catholic.
He was in Mass every Sunday. He doted on Joni and his other nieces.
He wasn’t afraid to be seen pushing a baby
stroller. Joni said that she would walk around
in his boots. I took moments like that and
folded them into the story.
My collaborators and I tried to allude to
the life that these soldiers would have had
if they had come back home. One of the
moments is Uncle Tommy seeing a young
French girl and saying, “You remind me
of my niece Joni,” and then he dances with
her in the way that every father, myself
included—I have a daughter—has danced
with his daughter.
Those were the most difficult moments of
the story. There’s a weight there. But it’s that
uncomfortable place that, as a writer, I feel
like you need to run toward.
Did you give explicit direction
to the artist about rendering
characters and battles?
While I have photos of Uncle Tommy, we
didn’t ask Andrea to draw him as Uncle
Tommy. In a lot of ways, the characters are
fictional representations.
With comic books, the most important
part is the emotion. Andrea got it right away.
He understood that the story was not super-
heroism and explosions and Holly wood
extravaganza. He understood that less can
be more.
The characters in the village Dropped far behind
are a compelling contrast to the enemy lines, the
paratroopers—
soldiers.
aided by French
There are things we know from the historical villagers—lived
record. We know the French citizens helped briefly in a world the
pull the paratroopers’ supplies out of the war hadn’t yet
marsh. We know that the men in town con- reached. Then all
vened in the church to vote on what they came under fire
from advancing
were going to do. When I read that I was like,
Germans.
well, I’ve got a mom and I’ve got a wife, and
they wouldn’t be standing around [laughs].
We had the name of the woman who ran the
café who oversaw this massive undertaking.
So the idea was—before the men even voted—
all the women had decided that they were
going to start feeding people. I don’t know “They were
that that happened, but it feels honest. the worst
Throughout there’s the theme misdropped
of community across identities.
What do you think made the paratroopers
citizens in Graignes so willing to
include the Americans in theirs?
on all of
It would just be supposition, but I would say
it’s similar to the impetus that led people like
D-Day.”
my uncle and my grandfathers to volunteer.
In the darkest times, I think the good pres-
ents itself. I’m a hopeful person by nature. I
just think that people are good, and they are
drawn to a common cause. That’s ultimately
what the book is about. +
AUGUST 2019
21

FROM THE FOOTLOCKER
RATIONAL
THINKING
These are my ration books from
1943, when I was four years old.
I would like to know what we were
able to buy with these coupons; I
don’t remember my mother telling
me. Where did people go to pick up
Curators at rations? Did children have to go with
The National parents? Was money exchanged?
World War II —Rose Lictro, Blauvelt, New York
Museum Rationing was one of the signature wartime
solve readers’ home-front experiences. It was also a giant
artifact administrative effort, and an oft-baffling
mysteries practice for American shoppers. Some form of
consumer rationing was in effect in the
United States from December 1941 to 1947.
This affected many kinds of products that
were considered essential to the war effort
or were in short supply, with sugar being the
first and last item to be conserved. Other
rationed products included fuel, rubber,
shoes, coffee, meat, fats, and canned goods.
The Office of Price Administration (OPA),
established in August 1941, spearheaded the
program. The OPA’s structure was complex,
with local, district, and regional offices report-
ing to a national office. Imagine trying to dis-
tribute ration books to 130 million Americans.
22 WORLD WAR II
When war arrived so, too,
did rationing; the coupons
in ration books (left)
helped instill fairness in
the sale of affected items.
That’s what the OPA did, in one of the
largest printing jobs ever undertaken
in the U.S. In a single year, the OPA
used 40 million pounds of paper to
create five billion forms and coupons.
Every person in the country
(excepting those in service, in psy-
chiatric institutions and hospitals,
or in prisons) needed to register with the OPA
for a War Ration Book—the backbone of civil-
ian rationing. The ration books contained
coupons the consumer would present to gro-
cers or vendors along with regular payment.
The books were assigned to individuals,
although infants and the elderly or infirm did
not need to be present during the transaction.
The coupon simply allowed the customer the
right to purchase a particular item.
Initially, a coupon was exchanged for a
single product; later a “point rationing”
system was introduced, in which items
required varying amounts of ration points.
Tokens in a similar color scheme as the
stamps—red for meat or blue for canned goods
and processed foods, for example—allowed
the customer to receive “change.”
The local boards were responsible for citi-
zen registration for ration books, and for
seeing that these were equitably distributed.
There were nea rly 5,600 loca l boa rds
throughout the country, staffed by 60,000
employees and 200,000 volunteers. Addi-
tional volunteers served as “ration explain-
ers,” helpi ng t he public nav igate t he
ever-cha ng ing, a lways complex ration
schemes. Learning how to use the ration book
and how to adjust to cooking under rationing
was a huge headache for many—but one the
public was willing to temporarily support
because of the war. —Kim Guise, Assistant
COURTESY OF ROSE LICTRO; PHOTOS BY GUY ACETO
Director for Curatorial Services
Have a World War II artifact you can’t identify?
Write to Footlocker@historynet.com with the following:
— Your connection to the object and what you know about it.
— The object’s dimensions, in inches.
— Several high-resolution digital photos taken close up and
from varying angles.
— Pictures should be in color, and at least 300 dpi.
Unfortunately, we can’t respond to every query, nor can
we appraise value.
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 D-DAY 75
American forces—the 4th Infantry
Division, armor, heavy artillery, and
equipment—have landed on Utah
Beach, and they need to roll forward.
If the Germans hold the bridge, the
Americans will be penned up on
Utah. The entire schedule—includ-
ing the crucial drive on the big port
of Cherbourg—will be thrown off. In
this business, timing is everything,
and wasting time almost always
increases the death toll.
And that’s why 82nd Airborne’s
assistant division commander, Brig-
adier General James M. Gavin, comes
to a decision. Grabbing every man he
can find from the 325th Glider Infan-
try and 507th Parachute Infantry

FIRE FOR EFFECT

Regiments, he orders them to charge
across the bridge and causeway—an
BY ROBERT M. CITINO

UP THE
up-the-middle thrust into the teeth
of the German defenses. No dancing,
no fancy footwork. Gavin senses it’s
time for action, and he knows that

MIDDLE
fancy won’t cut it.
With a great yell, U.S. troops
charge the bridge. It’s mass on mass:
American soldiers vs. German bullets
and mortar rounds. It’s bloody, it’s
raw, it’s primal. It’s the very reason
LIKE MANY MILITARY HISTORY BUFFS, I am an aficionado of maneu- they invented the word “carnage.”
ver. I love to see one side in battle surprise the other, showing up unexpect- It also works. Perhaps it’s the
edly on a flank, or both flanks, or even bursting into the rear areas, moral effect on the German defend-
overrunning headquarters and supply dumps and map depots. The ability to ers as they suddenly come face-to-
surprise, to confound, to shock: this is the art of true generalship. face with the possibility that these
The problem is, the more I study World War II, the more I see the other crazy-seeming Americans will stop
side of this coin. The war featured repeated moments when maneuver was at nothing. German fire slackens as
impossible or ineffective, or when the overall situation called for something the defenders begin to slip away from
much more drastic. their positions. American troops
For Exhibit A, let us wander back in time to June 6, 1944. When we recall take the bridge and charge over the
D-Day, we usually think of amphibious landings on the coast, but that’s not causeway, braving enemy fire, with
what we’re looking at here. We are inland, in a tiny hamlet in the Norman Gavin right there in their midst.
countryside named La Fière. It’s not much: a handful of buildings, a manor The victory comes at a steep price.
house, a watchtower, a church. As Gavin later described the scene,
Location is everything, however, and La Fière happens to command a key “I looked back down the causeway. It
bridge over the Merderet River. Even prior to the coastal landings on D-Day, was covered from the church to as
the town is the scene of fighting. The Allies have landed paratroopers in the far as I could see with bodies. I could
sector, units of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division. The nighttime drop is a have walked back to the bridge and
mess, with men scattered all over the place. Some drop to their death directly never stepped on pavement.” But it’s
onto German defenders; others into the flooded plain on both sides of the a remarkable win, and a crucial one.
ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN TOMAC

Merderet, where they drown. There’s a time for maneuver, sure:

As a result, a simple mission—to “seize and secure” the bridge at La Fière— misdirection, double reverses, end-
turns into a days-long slugfest. The fighting is at close quarters and extremely arounds. But as the charge at La Fière
bloody. After three days of fighting, the bridge is neither seized nor secure. reminds us, never underestimate the
The little bridge is crucial to the success of Operation Overlord. Heavy power of running up the middle. +

24 WORLD WAR II
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 In 1942,
This army engineers
is dummy copy used straightened
when best the Eagle
River (left) to create solid
year therefore pointed read ground for building
seen being
Camptherfore
joined Hale. The is camp’s 646-bed
moreover hospital once
point rest,
stood at the corner of D Street.

TRAVEL CAMP HALE, COLORADO the first trainees arrived at the camp,
named for Spanish–American War
STORY AND PHOTOS BY JESSICA WAMBACH BROWN

FIRE ON THE
veteran and Veterans of Foreign
Wars cofounder Brigadier General
Irving Hale.

MOUNTAIN
The 87th quartered in barracks,
but I check into the U.S. Forest Ser-
vice-managed Camp Hale Memorial
Campground in the southwest corner
of the valley, where soldiers once
practiced bayonet maneuvers. Amid
IN THE EARLY EVENING SHADOWS of Colorado’s Sawatch Range, I pull a sea of motor homes, I pitch the only
off the stretch of U.S. Route 24 known as the 10th Mountain Division Memo- tent in sight and am soon lulled to
rial Highway and step out to survey a mountain valley a half-mile wide by sleep by the hum of RV generators.
five miles long. Flat and seemingly empty save a few lonely roads and one In the brisk morning, I walk north
suspiciously straight river, this was once Camp Hale, the highest-elevation along B Street, once the main north-
U.S. Army post, where 15,000 adventurous young men were sculpted into the south drag and now the only one.
only American military division dedicated to mountain warfare. Between frequent present-day signs
As World War II raged in Europe, reports of ski-clad Finnish troops ward- warning of unexploded munitions
ing off Soviet invaders in late 1939 led U.S. officials to consider fielding their and asbestos should one stray from
own specialized mountain warriors. The War Department activated the 87th the roads, the climbing sun illumi-
Mountain Infantry Regiment at Fort Lewis, Washington, in November 1941 nates lines of swollen earth and
and contracted the civilian National Ski Patrol as its official recruiter. Skiing crumbling concrete pads, tiny hints
was then a fledgling sport in the States; most of the initial volunteers were Ivy of this sleepy valley’s livelier past.
League athletes, wealthy sportsmen, or expatriate European professionals. Across the Eagle’s brushy banks I
That first winter, the 87th trained on the steep slopes of Mount Rainier, 70 spot the shabby remnants of livery
road miles east of Fort Lewis. In April 1942, the army broke ground on a stables that sheltered the 5,000 pack
camp in Colorado that could support a 15,000-strong division year-round for mules used to haul artillery into the
ski training as well as summer mountaineering. Nestled 9,200 feet above sea backcountry; it took a team of six to
level in the Eagle River Valley, the site promised deep snow and easy access ferry a single 75mm pack howitzer.
to the challenging terrain of the Southern Rockies. To make space and firm Between the mules and the nearby
ground for the camp’s 900-plus buildings, engineers hacked away thousands rifle range and grenade court, I’m
of willows and straightened the Eagle’s curves. Seven months and $31 million sure wartime B Street strolls were
later, via a freshly laid spur of the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad, far less serene.

26 WORLD WAR II
 Members of the 10th Mountain Division
arrive at Camp Hale; one of the trainees,
ski champion Friedl Pfeifer (statue below),
later helped develop the Aspen resort.

In addition to traditional army training, mountain troops learned to build from visiting until February 1943,
snow caves, fight forest fires, drive dogsleds, and climb the sheer cliffs that when the army agreed it had suffi-
form the eastern wall of the valley. On the self-guided driving tour around the ciently dimmed its red-light district.
Camp Hale National Historic Site, I stop at each of 10 interpretive signs that Fresh paint and tourism have further
piece together the mountain troops’ story and point out the dusty scars of the transformed Leadville’s streets,
camp hospital, service club, and other structures. which on this Saturday night are hop-
In solidarity with the soldiers, I decide to hike what is now the Colorado Trail ping with locals and visitors basking
six miles from Camp Hale to Cooper Hill, a training spot atop the Continental in the last few days of fall weather.
Divide at Tennessee Pass. It’s late September, that brief, glorious time in the The Leadville ban didn’t bother
Rockies when turning deciduous trees mingle with evergreens to create sherbet most soldiers, who happily occupied
stripes along the mountainsides. My head throbs with the low humidity and their free time fishing, hunting,
high altitude—about 7,500 feet higher than my northwest Montana home, and hiking, and, naturally, skiing. On a
well above the maximum elevation the troops would reach in combat. Diz-
ziness and fatigue were common problems for the trainees, who carried 82
pounds of gear on this hike, not including their skis and M1 rifles.
When the National Ski Patrol recruiters had exhausted the pool of ser-
vice-eligible skiers, they leveraged extensive media coverage and War
Department-sponsored films to lure other outdoorsmen into the Colorado
wilderness. Fishermen, lumberjacks, rodeo clowns, and more came to
Camp Hale to don the baggy white canvas camouflage of the 85th, 86th,
and 87th Infantry Regiments that formed the 10th Light Division (Alpine).
Unfortunately, some 80 percent of them had never skied. The army opened
Cooper Hill to provide Nordic and alpine training, installing the country’s
longest T-bar ski lift. This cheaper, higher-capacity alternative to today’s
TOP: ASPEN HISTORICAL SOCIETY; RIGHT: ASH MONTAGU

more ubiquitous chair lift could pull 200 pairs of wobbly skiers at a time
more than a mile to the top.
At the modest resort now known as Ski Cooper, the T-bar was replaced
by a chair lift dubbed the “10th Mountain Double” in 1973. I stand beneath
a chair that’s creaking slightly in the wind and imagine rough formations
of novice skiers bumbling down the three bald lines that descend the
densely forested hill before me.
Needing sustenance after the return hike to camp, I drive 17 miles to
Leadville, established in the 1860s to serve unruly lode miners. Although
this was the closest town of any size, Camp Hale recruits were banned

AUGUST 2019
27

Camp Hale’s old ammunition
bunkers are among the base’s
few visible wartime remains.
Camp Hale
Denver
Aspen
COLORADO
0 10 0
long training march in 1942, troops dis-
covered a struggling mining-turned-ski
town called Aspen. “I looked across here
and I thought, this is it,” recalled Friedl
Pfeifer, a pre-war Austrian slalom champ
who served in the 1st Battalion, 85th
Infantry Regiment. “From then on I was
here every weekend.”
The 87th briefly deployed to the Aleu-
tians in the summer of 1943, just in time
to storm the island of Kiska and find that
the Japanese had already withdrawn. By
March 1944, the entire 10th Light was
back at Camp Hale, eager to test its hard-
earned skills in combat. It got a taste
during D-Series, division-level maneu-
vers in which more than 12,000 men
camped above 13,000 feet for three weeks
to cut off a mock enemy battalion. A
brutal cold snap proved their most daunt-
ing foe. When nightly temperatures
plunged to 30 degrees below zero, men
slept on their skis to keep their parkas
from freezing to the deep snow.
D -Series was the div ision’s last
encounter with extreme weather. On
June 20, 1944, the 10th Light was trans-
28 WORLD WAR II
ferred to Camp Swift, Texas, for final
infantry training before being assigned
to Lieutenant General Lucian K. Trus-
cott’s Fifth Army as the 10th Mountain
Division in January 1945. Although they
did patrol Italy’s Northern Apennine
range on skis, mountaineering would
prove their most useful skill as they
famously scaled 1,500-foot Riva Ridge in
February 1945 to lead the Allied break
through the Gothic Line. More than 950
were killed and nearly 4,000 wounded
during their long-awaited deployment.
The 10th Mountain Division never
returned to Camp Hale. The army held
occasional cold-weather war games here,
and the CIA briefly trained Tibetan Free-
dom Fighters before turning the facilities
over to the General Services Administra-
tion in 1965. Buildings were pieced out,
the land was granted to the U.S. Forest
Service, and all but the sturdiest concrete
remains—ammunition bunkers, a guard
shack, and the field house’s pillars—slowly
succumbed to erosion and bunchgrass.
The modern 10th Mountain Division is
based in Fort Drum, New York, but the
legacy of its pioneers echoes strongly
through the Rockies and today’s thriving
U.S. ski culture. Veterans of the division
came home from Italy to dominate the
1948 and 1952 U.S. Olympic ski teams and
design, found, or direct 62 ski resorts,
including nearby Vail, Breckenridge, and
Aspen, where Friedl Pfeifer returned
in 1945. As I motor back toward Denver,
kicking up flurries of golden leaves, a
final glance at those towering peaks in
the rearview mirror tells me why. +
WHEN
YOU GO
The Camp Hale National
Historic Site is a two-and-a-
half hour drive southwest
and way up from Denver
International Airport. While
skiers may be tempted to
make Camp Hale a winter
getaway, deep snow and
treacherous travel conditions
make May through October
the best time to visit.
WHERE TO
STAY AND EAT
No lodging will get you
closer than a $21/night tent or
RV site at the Camp Hale
Memorial Campground
(recreation.gov/camping/
campgrounds/232274).
Nearby Leadville and Red
Cliff offer standard accom-
modations and such camp-
fire-besting fare as The
Leadville Grill’s signature
white chili-stuffed sopapillas
(leadvillegrill.com). Finer bil-
leting and dining is found in
the ski towns. In Aspen, try
the Gulf Coast Style Fish
Sandwich at The White
House Tavern, a cozy
pine-paneled miner’s cottage
built in 1883 (aspenwhite-
house.com).
WHAT ELSE TO
SEE AND DO
The Southern Rockies are a
hiker’s and mountain biker’s
paradise. For less arduous
adventures, celebrate the
10th Mountain Division at
the Colorado Snowsports
Museum and Hall of
Fame in Vail (snowsports-
museum.org); take a color-
fully narrated ride on the
Leadville, Colorado &
Southern Railroad (lead-
ville-train.com); or play
the highest-altitude nine
MAP BY BRIAN WALKER
holes in the United States at
Leadville’s affordable Mt.
Massive Golf Course
(mtmassivegolf.com).
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30 WORLD WAR II
A semi-submersible known as “Gimik” cuts a
sleek but slow profile through the water. A key
component of the secret Project Napko, headed by
Colonel Carl F. Eifler (inset), its air intake pipes were
wrapped in steel wool to help it hide from radar.
 P
erhaps the most peculiar craft ever to ease its way into the Port of Los Angeles was “Gimik.” The
19-foot-long, 3,650-pound vessel looked like a design failure—something that had started as a
closed lifeboat before the designer lost his mind. Gimik (a code name) had odd pipes sticking out
of its foredeck and aft of a small plexiglass cube just big enough for one man’s head and shoulders.
Made of plywood to reduce its signature on radar, it could run half-submerged, decks awash with
little more than a foot of its “superstructure”—the cubular cockpit—showing above water. Gimik
made little noise and created almost no wake; its 16-horsepower inboard gasoline engine could
push it along at a top speed of about 4.5 knots.
Now, on a warm night during the fourth year of America’s great Pacific War, water lapped gently
along the craft’s hull as it chugged through L.A.’s expansive harbor. No one—not a lookout on one of the
many ships alongside the quays, or a mobile patrol boat, or even one of the so-called “tattletale” buoys
designed to detect an intruder—reported Gimik on its test run. This victory led its patron, an army offi-
cer named Carl F. Eifler, to assert that the vessel was ready for its mission: to secretly transport men and
equipment to enemy shores and wreak havoc on the Japanese Empire.

CARL EIFLER WAS one of
the most colorful and char-
ismatic members of the
Office of Strategic Services
(OSS)—America’s first cen-
tral intelligence agency—cre-
ated in 1942 to meet wartime
needs. Even in an organiza-
tion that had more than its
share of swashbuckling origi-
nals, Eifler stood out.
He is typically remembered
as the first commanding offi-
cer of OSS Detachment 101
(Det 101) in the China/Burma/
tor, then-Colonel William J. “Wild Bill” Dono-
van, created what would become Det 101 on
April 22, 1942, for service under the senior
American officer in the CBI Theater, Lieuten-
ant General Joseph W. Stilwell. Stilwell was
officially chief of staff to the Chinese Nation-
alist Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, but the
two repeatedly clashed and Stilwell often
wound up taking action on his own. Known
behind his back as “Vinegar Joe” for his
demanding nature and unforgiving words,
Stilwell was willing to consider adding a
largely independent military unit to his rolls—
so long as it was commanded by an officer of
his choosing, like then-Captain Eifler, a U.S.

India (CBI) Theater, where
British, American, and Chi-
nese forces fought the Imperial
Japanese Army. But Eifler also
played a leading role in two
Eifler, who made his other high-risk, behind-enemy-lines opera-
reputation in Burma tions that planners believed could affect the
as the fearless war’s outcome. The first, an initiative to
commander of OSS
kidnap a prominent German atomic scientist
Detachment 101,
goes eye-to-eye with in 1944, did not bear fruit. The second, Proj-
a cobra in mid-1943. ect Napko, was an ambitious plan to set up
agent networks in occupied Korea in 1945.
Long-secret information regarding the Korea
project has surfaced from vaults over the last
few years, but historians have yet to piece
together the whole story. Was it the product of
Eif ler’s fevered mind, a desperate move
against an implacable enemy, or a calculated
risk worth taking?
A good way to understand Napko is as a
follow-on to Eifler’s work in Japanese-occu-
pied Burma, where his mission was to harass
invaders, collect intelligence, and rescue
downed Allied pilots. The future OSS direc-
FROM BEHIND JAPANESE LINES: WITH THE OSS IN BURMA BY RICHARD DUNLOP, REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF SKYHORSE PUBLISHING
Army reservist on active duty in Hawaii.
The plainspoken Stilwell and Eifler were
kindred spirits, having trained together in Cal-
ifornia in the 1930s. There, Stilwell had noted
Eifler’s toughness and professionalism—per-
haps even his finger-crushing handshake.
Having received the nod from Stilwell, Dono-
van’s office drafted a set of mysterious orders
directing Eifler to proceed to Washington.
After a very general orientation and some
training in irregular warfare, Eifler headed for
India to report to Stilwell, who seemed sur-
prised to find the captain at his doorstep.
According to one account, the general thought
that his talks with the OSS had been prelimi-
nary, even theoretical. Still, he was willing to
let Eifler run his own private war so long as he
stayed out of the way. Stilwell said he did not
want to hear from Eifler again until he had
made his first “boom”—the sound of sabotage.
Though few in number, the men in Eifler’s
unit leveraged the advantages that the dense
jungle and its anti-Japanese Kachin tribes-
men offered. By early 1943, Detachment 101

32 WORLD WAR II
 was on its way to organizing thousands of
Kachin to fight a modern enemy from hidden
bases. It would be rough, primitive work—far
from a gentleman’s war. Eifler biographer
Tom Moon would refer to it as “this grim and
savage game;” at the same time, it was, in the
words of Ronald Spector’s landmark history
Eagle Against the Sun, “the beginning of one of
the most successful guerrilla operations of
the war.” Stilwell was pleased, and so was the
OSS. Without question, Eif ler’s star was
rising, and he quickly vaulted to the rank of
lieutenant colonel.

EIFLER’S LUCK CHANGED on the night of

March 7-8, 1943. Never one to hang back, the
occasionally overweight yet always-strong
37-year-old—who stood about six foot two
and weighed in at around 250 pounds—used
his brawn to save a guerrilla operation from
disaster on a stretch of Japanese-held coast-
line near Sandoway, Burma. After a 200-mile
trip from British territory on three Royal
Indian Navy motor launches, Eifler and his
commandoes transitioned to small boats and
paddled toward shore. They faced choppy
seas; waves as high as 15 feet churned
over and among some of what
Eifler later described as the
“nastiest” rocks he had ever
had “the pleasure to behold,”
to say nothing of the plumes of
sludge—“mud volc a noes ”—
belching from the seafloor along
the coast. Eifler ordered his scout
FROM TOP: RECORDS OF THE OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES; NATIONAL ARCHIVES; INSET: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

to find a way to shore; when he

balked, Eifler unclipped his gun belt
and jumped into the water himself. In Burma, Eifler’s OSS team
He swam through the rocks and walked on trained the Kachin people as
coral, then secured a long tow line to four guerrilla fighers against the
Japanese; the term “Jingpaw”
rubber boats full of men and about 1,000 in the unofficial Det 101 patch
pounds of equipment and manhandled the (inset) is a term for Kachin.
load toward the beach. Forming a human Above: another of the unit’s
chain from the water’s edge, Eifler and the successes noted.
five or six commandoes quickly unloaded the
gear. When they were ready to move inland,
Eifler shook hands with each man and told
him not to be captured alive.
By now dawn was not far off; Eifler and the
boats needed to be gone before a Japanese
patrol spotted the telltale signs of a landing.
But getting out was as hard as getting in. Once
again Eifler manned the ropes, gathering
together a fistful of bow lines, then headed out
to sea, only to have two of the lines slip from

AUGUST 2019
33

Before long, his grasp. Once, twice, three times he jumped
into the water—first to round the boats up
even Eifler’s before the powerful current carried them
away, then to free his own craft, a small dinghy,
supporters from the rocks that lay between the shore and
had to admit the open ocean. He regained control but from
start to finish was battered against the rocks,
that his hitting his head hard and often enough to leave
him dazed and bleeding. That he made it back
behavior was to the motor launches in the dark with all of
becoming the small boats is a testimony to his strength
and determination.
increasingly The incident marked a turning point for
erratic. Eifler; he did not bounce back. Headaches, sei-
zures, and blackouts would plague him the rest
of his life. Still, there was never a sign of weak-
ness in his wide-set blue eyes or in his voice,
said to have been louder than a circus barker’s
yell. Having by now advanced to the rank of
full colonel, he did not want to go on sick leave,
let alone relinquish command. Treating him-
self with morphine and bourbon, Eif ler
remained at the helm. Before long, even his
supporters had to admit that his behavior was
becoming increasingly erratic; in December
1943 Donovan flew out to India to assess the
34 WORLD WAR II
Werner Heisenberg, recipient of the 1932 Nobel
Prize in physics, was central to Hitler’s quest for
an atom bomb—and to a mission under Eifler.
situation for himself. As Donovan told Stil-
well, he had decided that Eifler would be going
to Washington for a “brief refresher course in
our work”—a face-saving way of saying that
Eifler was being relieved of command.
DONOVAN SOON SOFTENED the blow by
making Eifler a special projects officer, even-
tually giving him the title of commander of
the Field Experimental Unit (FEU)—charged
with exploring missions impossible out of OSS
Headquarters. Early on came a query about
kidnapping Werner Heisenberg, the Third
Reich’s leading atomic scientist, at the behest
of the Manhattan Project behind America’s
own quest for the atom bomb. The dutiful and
humorless Eifler accepted the mission with-
out hesitation and was willing to undertake it
himself, even though he was a wildly inappro-
priate choice for the job. Eifler was an intelli-
gent man, but one with an authoritarian
streak whose last resort was often brute force.
This operation called for a lighter touch; it was
likely to play out in a city in neutral Switzer-
land, not on a jungle battlefield.
This fact was not lost on Donovan. The gen-
eral loved conflict, but not when it came to
running the OSS. He found it hard to say no
to a fellow combat veteran, especially one who
was willing to do what others were not. So
throughout the last days of winter and most of
spring in 1944, Eifler found himself weighing
possible courses of action. One option had him
seizing Heisenberg and manhandling him
onto an American plane that would land
© CORBIS/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; OPPOSITE: OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES/U.S. ARMY
secretly in a quiet alpine valley. The plane
would then spirit captive and captor out of the
country—reportedly to parachute into the
Mediterranean Sea, where an American war-
ship would pick up the two men.
Eifler remained on the Heisenberg opera-
tion until OSS management had had enough of
his strong-armed approach. In March 1944 he
caused a stir at an airbase in Africa. In the
words of an official report, he was guilty of
“impatience and improper language toward
military personnel,” who were angry enough to
refer the matter to the OSS inspector general.
It was hardly the right sort of behavior for a
man on a secret mission in Europe. To make
matters worse, Donovan learned in June that a
Reluctant to shelve
Eifler after he suffered
a serious head injury,
“Wild Bill” Donovan
(right) steered him
toward new and
challenging missions,
culminating in Project
Napko and an effort
to insert Korean
agents into Japan.

AUGUST 2019
35
 British officer had filed would run paramilitary operations in Korea—
a formal complaint rec- a country that had been a de facto Japanese
ommending that the colony since 1910 and was, like Japan itself,
OSS discipline Eifler largely a closed book to American planners

CIA; INSET: JANET SIMMONS COLLECTION/NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

for talking too freely
about his work.
Eifler’s personnel file shows that Donovan
Gimik (top)—its hull
made of plywood to formally reprimanded the colonel but let him
resist detection by down gently. The two met in person at least
radar—was likely once, but probably twice: in Algiers between
built by John Trumpy June 19 and 25, 1944, and then a few days later
and Sons, creators of in Washington. First, Donovan told Eifler that
the presidential the mission was off. Then, almost as if he
yacht USS Sequoia.
(above). feared the consequences of idling Eifler, Dono-
van allowed the colonel to choose his next mis-
sion and, from the summer of 1944 on, channel
his prodigious energy in another direction the
OSS had briefly considered earlier in the war.
This was Project Napko, in which the FEU
even after more than three years of war. In a
comprehensive memorandum that he would
forward to Donovan on March 7, 1945, Eifler
laid out the many details he and his men had
considered. He began with an ambitious, even
grandiose, statement of purpose that envi-
sioned the possibility of revolution growing
from this small-scale operation:
This is a plan…for the immediate pene-
tration of Korea and ultimately of Japan
by a small group of agents…for the pur-
pose of espionage, organization, and,
finally, sabotage and armed resistance…
which w ill eventually, if directed,

36 WORLD WAR II
 embody the support of twenty-three mil-
lion [Korean] people for an active revolu-
tionary movement.
Though disappointed to be pulled from the
Heisenberg operation, Eifler threw his heart
into Napko. The concept, after all, was not
unlike that for Detachment 101. The OSS
would recruit, train, and infiltrate a small
number of agents of Korean origin into Korea,
much as Det 101 had worked with the Kachins
in Burma. Leveraging the population’s sup-
posed hatred for their Japanese overlords, the
agents would recruit sub-agents and meld
them into networks. With luck, these net-
works would spread to the Japanese home
islands, where communities of Korean labor-
ers could—at least in theory—harbor agents of
Korean origin without drawing notice.
Though the exact origin of the term is no
longer part of the record, “Napko” may have
been an acronym for “Naval Penetration of
Korea.” The operation certainly did have a
naval aspect, one remarkable enough to attract
the attention of two scholars writing for the
CIA in-house journal Studies in Intelligence in
2014: how did the agents plan to get in and out
of Korea? There were two options, each of
which started with transportation by a full-
sized U.S. Navy submarine into Korean waters.
The first called for the agents to exit the
submarine while submerged at a shallow
depth. Each would have an uninflated nylon
boat strapped to his back; after floating to the
surface, he would inflate the boat while tread-
ing water and trying to keep his gear from
drifting away, then get inside and paddle
ashore. This was the low-tech plan.
The high-tech option was Gimik, the
wooden semi-submersible. The record is silent
on the name of the individual to come up with
the idea, but Eifler’s subordinates and biogra-
pher regarded him as the project’s sponsor. By
February 1945, it was under development at a
boatyard on the East Coast—almost certainly
John Trumpy and Sons of New Jersey, builders
of many esteemed wooden vessels including
the presidential yacht, USS Sequoia. By June
SMITH COLLECTION/GADO/GETTY IMAGES
1945 the boatyard delivered two Gimiks to
the OSS, which had recruited two young
ensigns, George McCullough and Robert
Mullen, to serve as operators.
The first step in a combat deployment
would be to carry the boat in a kind of hangar
on the deck of the full-size submarine. After
surfacing at night as far as 50 miles from the target coast, the crew
would load Gimik with about 100 pounds of equipment and up to three
men—two agents and an operator—then release it to chug to shore.
Upon landing, the agents would unload the gear and proceed inland,
leaving the operator to get back out to sea and, with luck, to rendezvous
with the submarine.
Eifler wrote that one of the landing sites under consideration was so
secluded he would not hesitate to accompany the commandoes ashore,
as he had in Burma. He envisioned shoehorning his bulk into Gimik’s
tiny cargo space. This was not a good idea. Picture the oversized Eifler,
subject to occasional seizures and blackouts, along with two heavily
armed men, equipment, and machinery in a dark space about the size
of a broom closet—one filled with gasoline fumes—all pitching and
rolling in the open ocean, possibly for hours on end.
Gimik was ingenious by World War II standards but would not pass
muster by today’s safety-conscious and well-equipped military. On
friendly shores and in good weather, Gimik was challenging enough to
operate. Especially when running with decks awash, the operator
could barely see over the bow to steer. On at least one test run of a
Trumpy boat nearly identical to Gimik, the gasoline fumes ignited,
shooting the operator out the (mercifully) open front hatch like a
rocket. Now factor in the need to operate at night, in cold or rough
water, off an enemy coast. The average man’s hands might tremble
from the strain; it would take a superhuman effort to stay focused and
perform the plan’s many tasks. And if something went wrong and
Gimik washed up on a beach, its presence would betray the mission.
Years after the war one of the operators, Ensign McCullough, admitted
that piloting the boat was a high-risk proposition but added lightly
that, at 19, he had been too young to be afraid.
All of this presumes that Korea was enough like Burma for it to
make sense for Eifler to try to replicate the success he had enjoyed
there. But Korea was not Burma, where Japan had had just a few
months to consolidate its control. Generally more open, the Korean
countryside did not offer the protection of the Burmese jungle, and the
Japanese had had more than 30 years to modernize the country.
A 1945 postcard evokes the glamorous side of California’s Catalina
Island; at that time, Catalina also held several OSS training camps.
AUGUST 2019
37

The Japanese had superimposed an infrastructure—including roads
and communication nets—on the peninsula. There was a large and effi-
cient police force, estimated to be 60,000-strong, in addition to 86,000
soldiers. While many Koreans resented their Japanese overlords—
there is no doubt that they were second-class citizens—many others had
made peace with their occupiers. It would be difficult to know who
would, or would not, report any newcomer, especially a large Caucasian.
The intelligence behind the plan was as thorough as circumstances
allowed. Eifler began by inserting an American master sergeant of
Korean origin into the POW compound at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin,
which housed a number of Koreans captured while serving with the
Japanese army. The master sergeant posed as a prisoner himself, and
for 40 days he simply listened to what the Koreans were saying about
conditions at home. This intelligence was folded into the plan along
with information from the OSS’s Research and Analysis Branch.
Next came the selection of agents, a more difficult process than
anticipated. Though Eifler hoped to recruit about 50 agents, the initial
cohort numbered only eight. Most of them had found their way to the
United States well before the war. One came from the ranks of the
POWs at McCoy, five were in their 40s, and one volunteer was even 50—
well past the age of the average Allied commando. Apart from the POW,
38 WORLD WAR II
Gimik at the time
of an early sea trial
in 1945, likely near
the builder’s yard
in New Jersey. The
vessel was intended
to hold three men:
an operator and two
agents.
most had little to no military experience.
Once recruited for Eifler’s operation, the
agents shipped off for training at small OSS
camps on rugged Catalina Island, 20 miles
offshore of greater Los Angeles. The OSS had
begun leasing parcels there in late 1943;
Eifler’s FEU occupied two isolated locations
and a boat ramp.
The training was comprehensive. Starting
in February 1945, it covered some 50 topics
including standard military subjects (fire-
arms, map reading, tactics, radio procedures)
as well as unconventional warfare (invisible
inks, boat-handling, dealing with locals), to
say nothing of a great deal of physical condi-
tioning. Eifler deemed the teams ready to
deploy by early August 1945, and the Joint
Chiefs of Staff approved the Napko plan for
transmission to Admiral Chester W. Nimitz,
the commander of the Pacific Ocean Areas,
CIA
where the operation would unfold.
 Nimitz’s staff was lukewarm about the idea.
But their attitude made no difference after
then, many years later, shipped back to the U.S.
East Coast as curiosities. One is still the star of
Eifler
the United States dropped atom bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan surren-
a small display at Battleship Cove in Fall River,
Massachusetts. Its sister was said to have made
deemed the
dered in mid-August. The Napko teams were it to the U.S. Naval Station in Newport, Rhode teams of
disbanded—and so, too, was the OSS by the
end of September 1945.
Island, where it has since been lost to history.
But American spies would not forget Eifler’s
agents ready
concept. Early in the Cold War, the CIA would to deploy by
WOULD PROJECT NAPKO have succeeded?
The prospect seems unlikely. In World War II,
ask Trumpy to make two slightly modernized
Gimik-like craft, to be known this time around early August
no combatants had much success in covertly
penetrating an enemy homeland. Sending in
by the code name “Skiff.” Like their predeces-
sors, the semi-submersibles were tested but
1945.
the occasional spy was one thing, but a group never deployed on a mission overseas. The CIA
of armed spies charged with sabotage and has not explained why, leaving the historian to
revolution was quite another matter. Most speculate that this project, too, was either
Allied commandoes who succeeded did so in overtaken by events or superseded by better
occupied territory—in North Africa, for exam- technology. Like the Gimik in Fall River, the
ple, where the British emerged from the track- remaining Skiff’s current mission is to serve
less desert to strike at the Afrika Korps, and in as a display, this one in the CIA Museum—
France, where British and American teams another testament to ingenuity and initiative
took on the German occupiers alongside the but not, perhaps, to sound judgment. +
French Resistance.
When it came to trying to penetrate Ger-
many in late 1944 and early 1945, British
intelligence took a step back, declaring the
task too risky. The OSS accepted the challenge
and had mixed results after parachuting
teams into Germany and, notably, Austria—
then part of the Reich. Korea was not unlike
Austria: it was part of Japan’s so-called “Inner
Zone,” but still distinct from the home islands. Gimik operator George
McCullough with Gimik in
So Napko might have enjoyed some success.
Okinawa in summer 1945,
But given the project’s small size and immense and in Massachusetts
challenges, any triumphs would likely have more recently, below.
been offset by failures, as well as the deaths of
Eifler’s aging commandoes.
Instead, everyone involved survived the
war. Eifler continued to struggle with sei-
zures and memory loss, enduring long periods
TOP: COURTESY OF MICHAEL MCCULLOUGH; BOTTOM: HERALD NEWS PHOTO/DAVE SOUZA

of hospitalization in 1945 and 1946. Perhaps

to atone for wartime guilt (he commented
more than once that members of Det 101 had
committed war crimes), he eventua lly
received degrees in divinity and psychology
from Jackson College, a small missionary
school in Hawaii. In the 1950s Eifler went on
to earn a PhD in clinical psychology at Chica-
go’s Illinois Institute of Technology, and then
worked for the Department of Health in Mon-
terey County, California, where he developed
a reputation for compassion and engagement.
He died in April 2002 at the age of 95.
As for Eifler’s Gimiks, they traveled across
the Pacific in the summer of 1945 only to be
abandoned on a U.S. Navy base in Okinawa and

AUGUST 2019
39
D-DAY 75

His signature cigar between

his lips, 101st Airborne
Division pathfinder Frank
Lillyman became the first
American to set foot in
Normandy on D-Day.

40 WORLD WAR II
 FIRST IN
When American troops entered
Normandy on D-Day, the invasion began
with one C-47, a team of 101st Airborne
Division pathfinders, and their headstrong
leader, Captain Frank Lillyman
By Alex Kershaw

The pathfinders
set to accompany
Lillyman on the lead
plane, their faces
camouflaged for the
night drop, gather
before their C-47.
COURTESY OF ALEX KERSHAW; OPPOSITE: MICHEL DE TREZ/D-DAY PUBLISHING/ COLORIZED BY BRIAN WALKER

T
he shadows were lengthening at England’s North Witham airfield on June 5,
1944, when an officer stepped down from a C-47 transport plane, a small case
attached to his right wrist. Armed guards, who usually patrolled the airfield
that lay 100 miles north of London, accompanied the officer into a building
where he was met by 28-year-old Captain Frank Lillyman, a slightly-built New
Yorker who often could be found with a wry smile and impish glint in his eye.
Now he was all business.
The officer opened the case, pulled out a message, and handed it to Lillyman. Since
December 1943 Lillyman had commanded the 101st Airborne Division’s pathfinders—
paratroopers who jump in before the main assault force to mark drop zones. At last, after
weeks of growing tension and restless anticipation, the top-secret orders from the divi-
sion commander, Major General Maxwell D. Taylor, had arrived: D-Day was on. The drop

AUGUST 2019
41
 In film shot the evening of June 5,
1944, the lead C-47 taxis into view
bearing hastily painted invasion
stripes. At right: its copilot and pilot,
Vito Pedone and Joel Crouch.
Once was a go. “Get the men ready,” Lillyman told a
sergeant; then the message was burned.
airborne, Out of nowhere, it seemed, there appeared
grinning Red Cross girls with hot coffee, a
Lillyman gaggle of cooing press photographers, a Signal
and his men Corps cameraman using rare color film, and
several members of the 101st Airborne’s top
would be brass, all present to witness the departure of
the very first Americans to fight on D-Day—
all on their the spearhead of the Allied invasion.
own. There was playacting for the cameras, fol-
lowed by nonchalant waves and friendly
punches to buddies’ shoulders. A paratrooper
did circles before a plane on a tiny motorized
bike to much laughter. Then a medic gave Lil-
lyman’s chain-smoking pathfinders “puke”
pills in small cardboard boxes to combat air-
sickness, and bags in which to vomit. Some
threw the pills away, not trusting them, want-
ing to be sharp, clearheaded, the moment they
touched the ground in France.
With a guttural roar of engines, the C-47s
that would carry them to the drop zones
started warming up and the horsing around
came to an end. Lillyman’s men—some carry-
ing their body weight in equipment—clam-
bered or were helped aboard the twin-propped
aircraft, hastily daubed with black-and-white
invasion stripes to distinguish them from
enemy aircraft. Brown masking paper still
covered some areas of the fuselage to protect
them from the rush paint job.
Captain Lillyman, weighing in at all of 140
pounds, took his place beside the door of one
of the C-47s, his customary stogie between his
lips, wearing white leather gloves and a
Tommy gun strapped to his left leg just above
42 WORLD WAR II
the M-3 trench knife, useful for slitting
throats, attached to his shin. He would be the
first American to leap into the darkness over
Normandy—if they made it to the drop zone.
None of the pathfinder aircraft were armed,
none had any protection against antiaircraft
fire, and there would be no escort to defend
against enemy fighters. Once airborne, Lilly-
man and his men would be all on their own.
IN THE PLANE’S COCKPIT was lead pilot
Lieutenant Colonel Joel Crouch, known to all
as “Colonel Joe.” The commander of the IX
Troop Carrier Command’s pathfinder unit,
Crouch, 33, was considered the best in his
business, having previously been the lead
pathfinder pilot for the invasion of Sicily in
July 1943 and of mainland Italy a few months
later. To his right was copilot Captain Vito
Pedone, 22, who, like Crouch, had plenty of
game. Behind them was navigator Captain
William Culp, 25; one report called him “a
square-jawed, thoughtful sort of man.”
It was 9:50 p.m. and the light was fading
fast as Crouch’s C-47 lifted into the air, carry-
ing the 18 men who would be the first Ameri-
cans to drop into enemy-occupied France. In
radio silence and bad weather, Crouch would
lead two other planes in his flight in a “V” for-
mation at low level. More flights, carrying 200
additional pathfinders, would follow. They
would then set up radar and lights to guide a
sky-train delivering an entire division of air-
© CRITICAL PAST (ALL)
borne troops. Any failure would jeopardize
the entire invasion.
Exactly four minutes after takeoff, Crouch
reported to ground control that he was on his
 A paratrooper on a small
motorized bike clowns
for the camera (left);
the lens also captured
a soon-to-be-famous
Lillyman, his face painted
as departure time nears.

way to France, making for the English Chan- ing, belting out drinking songs. The pathfinders sounded like they
nel at 3,000 feet. A former pilot for United Air were headed to London for a wild weekend with some saucy “Piccadilly
Lines who’d mostly flown along the West commandos,” not toward enemy territory. Bound to be among the
Coast before the war, he would soon be fol- loudest was their commanding officer—the fast-talking Captain Lilly-
lowed by scores of other planes carrying 6,600 man, who hailed from Skaneateles in upstate New York. Once
men from the soon-to-become-legendary described by a superior as an “arrogant smart-ass,” he was standing
“Screaming Eagles.” He was now what one with a black cigar still clenched between his teeth in an open door at
reporter called “the spearhead of the spear- the rear of the shuddering plane. The cigar was, in his words, a “pet
head of the spearhead” of the D-Day invasion. superstition.” Uncle Sam had thoughtfully issued him 12 a week, and
It was around 11:30 p.m. when Crouch saw he’d never jumped without one stuck between his lips.
the English Channel below—the cue, copilot Tonight, this night of nights, Lillyman and the other pathfinders
Pedone recalled, to turn off the plane’s lights; aboard the C-47 would mark out Drop Zone A—one of six landing zones
they would stay dark until the pathfinders had for American airborne troops—inland of Utah Beach. Seven amber
hit the drop zones and the C-47 was headed lights, placed in a “T” shape and turned on when Lillyman gave the
back over England. It was a sobering moment. order, would indicate to later waves of pilots when to turn on the green
Crouch knew that he and three-quarters of jump light, in this case for arriving paratroopers of the 502nd Para-
his fellow flyers could be killed or wounded chute Infantry Regiment. Others in Lillyman’s group carried Eureka
over the next 60 minutes. That had been the radar sets, which would send out signals to be picked up by the aircraft
prediction in planning. bringing in the main body of 101st Airborne.
The C-47 swooped toward the gray waves
and leveled out in radio silence below 100 feet,
engines throbbing as it flew undetected toward
France, soon passing above a vast armada, Finally, at 9:50 p.m., the plane takes off,
flying so low it seemed to sailors below that it the pathfinders aboard destined for
might actually clip the masts of some ships. France and an uncertain future.
Crouch’s only guides were two Royal Navy
boats, positioned at prearranged spots in the
Channel, shining green lights. After passing
the second boat, Crouch turned his C-47 90
degrees to the left. The two other planes in his
flight followed. France was now 60 miles away.
Crouch spotted German searchlights stabbing
the stormy skies from two of the Channel
Islands, the sole British territory occupied,
since 1940, by the Germans.
In the cargo hold behind Crouch, hunched
up on folding seats, his passengers began sing-

AUGUST 2019
43
 Paratroopers en route to Normandy shield
their eyes from a photographer’s flash; dropping
into the dark required acute night vision.
Lillyman was in pain, having torn leg liga-
ments in a training jump four days earlier. Not
wanting to miss D-Day, he’d tried his best to
hide the injury. He looked down again at the
whitecapped waves of the English Channel.
A coastline appeared, and then the plane
entered thick clouds.
They were over enemy territory.
Before long, Lillyman was staring at a
patchwork of Norman fields, hedgerows, and
old stone farm buildings bathed in the moon-
light. Then Crouch began to follow a narrow
road Lillyman could also see below, heading
for Drop Zone A.
A red light flashed on.
Lillyman stood up straight and ordered his
men to get to their feet. To shed weight, many
had dispensed with their reserve chutes, leav-
ing them stuffed under their seats.
“Snap up!” called Lillyman.
In the cockpit, navigator Culp told Crouch
that they were close to the village of Saint-
Germain-de-Varreville. Dark fields rushed
past below. Crouch pulled back on the throt-
44 WORLD WAR II
tle, slowing the plane, cutting prop blast.
A green light flashed a few seconds later.
“Let’s go!” shouted Lillyman at the open door.
He then stepped out into the prop blast, followed by 17 others.
Crouch noted the time as he dived low, heading back toward the Eng-
lish Channel. It was 12:15 on the morning of June 6, 1944—the most
important day of the 20th century.
The first Americans had arrived in France.
UNLIT CIGAR BETWEEN HIS LIPS, Lillyman drifted down from 450
feet at 16 feet per second, trying to spot a clearing as the earth rushed
up to meet him. He pulled on his forward risers and a few seconds later
touched down in a small field. After freeing himself of his parachute,
Lillyman took off across the field. He thought he could see something
moving in the shadows cast in the moonlight by tall poplar trees. Ger-
mans? He loaded a clip in his Tommy gun. There were shapes moving.
Friend or foe? He used his “cricket,” a small metal signaling clacker.
Click, clack….
Click, clack….
He was about to open fire when he heard one of the shapes make a
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
sound—a loud “moo.” The shapes were cows, and he laughed to himself
and felt a little less nervous.
Click, clack.…
Click, clack….
 Some men replied with their crickets, and drone of hundreds of planes to the north—and ordered his men to turn
within minutes Lillyman had connected with on the drop zone’s lights. “Those lights never looked so bright in train-
seven of his group. Silently they examined ing,” he recalled, “but that night they looked like searchlights. One
maps and scouted the immediate vicinity in light went out, and we had to rig an emergency connection. We were
pairs. Lillyman soon realized he had been silhouetted against it for a few minutes.”
dropped more than a mile north of where he The first aircraft flew over the “T” that Lillyman’s men had placed
should be, but there was no time to get to the on the ground. It was 12:57 a.m. The main body of American airborne
planned position for setting up lights. They troops had arrived.
had fewer than 30 minutes before the main
body of troops would arrive, so Lillyman BY 2 A.M. CROUCH AND PEDONE had returned to England, crossing
decided to use the nearest suitable fields. the Channel in darkness, the flame-damper on their C-47’s exhaust
Machine-gun fire suddenly broke the silence helping to conceal their path through the moonlit clouds. They had
and Lillyman took cover as Germans, hidden in been ordered, according to one report, to provide a detailed account to
a hedgerow, fired several more bursts. He sent D-Day commander in chief General Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower, who
two men to “convince these Krauts of the had wanted “a first-hand assessment.” Pedone later remembered: “We
errors of their ways,” as he put it, and soon reported to Eisenhower and told him the pathfinders did their job and
heard a grenade go off with a “whumf,” and then explained what we saw.”
everything was “lovely and quiet.” The pathfinders had indeed done their job, but it could hardly be
Lillyman could make out a church, less than described as a smashing success. It would later emerge that less than
100 yards away, at the center of Saint-Germain- a third of the pathfinders had landed on their drop zones. In some
de-Varreville, and soon he and his men had cases, pilots had panicked under heavy flak and dived too low and too
gathered in its graveyard. The church steeple
would be an excellent spot for a Eureka set.
A priest came to the heavy wooden door at
the main entrance. He looked afraid. One of
Lillyman’s men, a young lieutenant, could
speak French.
“Bonsoir, padre,” he said. “You’ve just been
liberated.”
The lieutenant explained what they were
doing, and a Eureka set was soon in the stee-
ple, as well as three others along a hedgerow
near the church. The pathfinders laid out
lights forming the “T” 200 yards to the east of
the church, in a field beside a narrow lane.
Then two men climbed a tree and put another
Eureka set in the branches.
All they could do now was wait. But then
TOP: MICHEL DE TREZ/D-DAY PUBLISHING; BOTTOM: THE INTERNATIONAL MUSEUM OF WORLD WAR II

Lillyman learned from a scout that there was

a large farmhouse, seemingly occupied by Thanks to the paratroopers’ “cricket” device (below),
Lillyman and his men located each other in the
Germans, close to a 20mm antiaircraft gun darkness; by mid-June, when the photo above
position that could wreak considerable havoc. was taken, Lillyman (center) was famous.
“Two others and myself went to the house
where we met a Frenchman smoking a pipe,”
Lillyman remembered. “He was standing in
the doorway. He jerked his thumb toward the
stairs and said, ‘Boche.’ We caught one
German, in a nice pair of white pajamas, in
bed. We disposed of him and expropriated the
bottle of champagne beside the bed.”
Lillyman made his way back to the church
and waited anxiously for the sounds of
engines. Time passed slowly, making for what
he called the “longest minutes” of his life. At
12:40 a.m., he finally heard it—the steady

AUGUST 2019
45

fast and released their human cargo too soon.
The pathfinder operation had, however, been less chaotic than the
main drops that followed. Dozens of men had landed in flooded fields
and drowned. Thousands were now enduring a long, lonely night of
confusion and sometimes terror, snapping their “crickets,” hearts
thumping, wondering if the sudden rustle in a bush had been made by
a comrade or a teenage Nazi pumped up on amphetamine with dagger
drawn. Lillyman’s own 502nd Regiment had been scattered far and
wide, some men landing with a sound, recalled one paratrooper, “like
large ripe pumpkins being thrown down to burst.”
Among the marshes and hedgerows of Normandy, Ike’s paratroop-
ers were displaying plenty of bravery and devotion to duty. But it would
be days before the 101st Airborne Division, or their fellow paratroopers
in the 82nd Airborne, gained any semblance of unit cohesion.
BY THE TIME THE SHADOWS were lengthening on June 6, the three
101st Airborne regiments had been in France for more than 18 hours
and were in urgent need of resupply. As part of an operation called
Keokuk to provide personnel, heavy equipment, and supplies to the
101st, tow-planes lifted 32 British Horsa gliders from an airfield south-
west of London. It was up to Lillyman and his pathfinders to mark the
gliders’ landing zone.
Near a village called Hiesville, south of that morning’s position and
still inland of Utah Beach, Lillyman located a field that had been
cleared of defensive obstacles and was large enough to fit the gliders.
As he and his men positioned Eureka sets, lights, and pots exuding
green smoke that would guide the Horsa pilots, heavily camouflaged
German troops infiltrated into neighboring fields. At just before 9 p.m.
the Horsa gliders crossed Utah Beach, cut loose from their tow-planes,
and aimed for Lillyman’s landing zone.
The Germans opened fire as the gliders swooped in toward land.
Some pilots panicked and crashed into trees. Lillyman was running
46 WORLD WAR II
German paratroopers
in Normandy prepare for
a fight by the body of a
fallen American soldier.
toward a smashed glider to help men get out
when a bullet hit his arm. Someone shouted
his name, and he looked at his sleeve and saw
blood flowing. Then he collapsed as a piece of
mortar shrapnel sliced his face.
Operation Keokuk was a success, boosting
the morale of the troops on the ground. But
Lillyman wasn’t around to see that. A medic
treated him, and he was taken to an aid sta-
tion and, after that, evacuated to a hospital in
England. His wounds were far from life-
threatening, but for Captain Frank Lillyman,
D-Day was finally over.
Lillyman, though, wasn’t prepared to wait
on the wrong side of the English Channel. A
few days later, the captain went absent with-
out permission from the hospital, determined
to rejoin his men in Normandy. He wrangled
his way onto a supply ship on June 14 and
reported for duty back in France. News foot-
age of the 101st Airborne in Normandy
showed an ever-cocky Lillyman, already feted
by the American press as the first American
BUNDESARCHIV BILD 101I-586-2215-25A BILD REICH
to land in France on D-Day, surrounded by
his fellow Screaming Eagles, Tommy gun in
hand, nonchalantly answering questions.
The 101st commanding general, Maxwell
Taylor, having just encountered savage
German resistance at Carentan, was appar-
ently far from pleased to see his wayward,
now-famous pathfinder. According to one
report he “waved the papers for promotion
 under Lillyman’s nose and then ripped them
up.” A few weeks later Lillyman paid the price
for going AWOL and was ordered to change
units, moving to the 502nd Parachute Infan-
try Regiment’s 3rd Battalion. His days as a
swashbuckling pathfinder were over.
The 3rd Battalion was the right unit for
someone eager to see action. He and his fellow
Screaming Eagles in the 502nd Parachute
Infantry were in the thick of it at Operation
Market Garden—the Allied operation that fall
intended to shorten the war by dropping a
large force across the lower Rhine in Hol-
land—and again at the Battle of the Bulge.
When supplies ran desperately low for the ill-
equipped defenders at Bastogne, none other
than Lieutenant Colonel Joel Crouch, seated
beside Captain Vito Pedone, piloted the lead
plane on December 23 carrying pathfinders to
mark the drop zones for ammunition and
medical supplies.
By the end of that bitterly cold January
1945, the Allies had regained lost ground, and
the Battle of the Bulge came to an end. As
spring beckoned and the winter snows began
to melt, advanced Allied armored units rolled
toward the banks of Germany’s swollen Rhine
River, the last major obstacle on the road to
Berlin. On March 24, Colonel Crouch was
back at the controls of a C-47, this time as the
lead pilot for the 17th Airborne Division
during Operation Varsity, an Allied assault
across the Rhine—the largest airborne opera-
tion in history carried out in one place on one
day (see “Now is When You Pray,” page 62).
Crouch would go on to enjoy a long and suc-
cessful postwar career in the air, dying in
Hawaii in 1997 at age 86.
brewed in the room so I can smell it cook-
ing…. No military title…“Mister” will be music
Lillyman
to my ears….”
Lillyman also wanted a “grey-haired moth-
wasn’t
erly maid” to look after his daughter while he prepared to
ate lobster à la Newberg and filet mignon.
“Can you do it?” he challenged.
wait on the
They sure could. A few weeks later, in wrong side
November 1945, a concierge greeted Lillyman
and his wife and Susan, then four, and assured of the
them “everything was set.” Lillyman had
turned up wearing his 12 wartime decora-
English
tions—including the Distinguished Service Channel.
Cross—and was soon enjoying a five-room
suite, complete with a sideboard full of booze
and a sunken bathtub. He was even photo-
graphed by the press lying in bed with a
cooked breakfast, feted by Life magazine as
the cheeky combat veteran cocky enough to
ask for and receive the perfect homecoming. In a photo that
Lillyman would stay in the army, retiring in originally ran in Life
1968 as a lieutenant colonel. He died of a magazine, Lillyman
stroke in 1971 at Walter Reed Hospital at age basks in a wish come
55 and was remembered in a New York Times true. Luxuriating at
New York’s Hotel
obituary as a “dreamer” who had been “much Pennsylvania, he,
honored as the first American paratrooper to the caption informs
drop behind German lines during the Nor- us, “considers getting
mandy invasion in WWII.” + out of bed.”

CAPTAIN FRANK LILLYMAN also survived

the war and, in true Lillyman fashion, devised
a headline-worthy homecoming. When not in
combat, he had killed time scribbling letters,
sketching, and fantasizing about a dream vaca-
tion he would take with his wife and young
YALE JOEL/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

daughter Susan. After Lillyman returned to

Skaneateles in the fall of 1945, he had a few
drinks one night and wrote a letter to the Hotel
Pennsylvania in New York City after reading
an advertisement promising special treatment
for guests who were veterans.
“I’d like a suite that will face east,” jotted
Lillyman, “and English-made tea that will be
served to me in bed…. For breakfast, a fried
egg with yolk pink and the white firm, coffee

AUGUST 2019
47
48 WORLD WAR II
 A BET
ON THE
BRITISH
A U.S. military attaché in
London battles a faction
of American doomsayers
during the darkest year
of England’s war
By Andrew Nagorski
BECKER/FOX PHOTOS/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; OPPOSITE: H. F. DAVIS/GETTY IMAGES
Londoners dig out from
the Blitz in 1941 (opposite),
while a government banner
works to keep up morale.
U.S. embassy military
attaché General Raymond
E. Lee (above) labored
tirelessly to counter
pessimism on Britain’s fate.
W
hen General Raymond E. Lee, the
former U.S. military attaché in
wartime London, died in 1958 at
age 72, his obituary in the New
York Times pointed out that no
one “was ever more popular in
that post both with the American
residents in the British capital and with British
Government officials.” The reason: throughout
the Blitz—the German bombing campaign in
1940 and 1941—“he retained absolute faith
that the Royal Air Force would be successful
in the defense of the British Isles.”
The dapper attaché, who wore Savile Row
suits and sported a jaunty straw hat instead of
the more typical bowler, not only sounded
convinced of his belief in victory but also
sought to imbue that faith in others. At a time
when the United States was still officially on
the sidelines, Lee was increasingly irritated by
the alarming reports filed by American jour-
nalists based in London, which he feared
would undercut support for Britain. After the
Luftwaffe pounded London for 57 straight
nights, James Reston of the New York Times
admitted that he and his colleagues “wrote
some end-of-the-world stuff about all this.”
Lee decided to intervene directly, inviting
the American correspondents to his office,
where there was a pile of dictionaries on his
desk. Noting that their dispatches frequently
described London as “devastated,” he read
them the definition of the word. Lee then
asked them to look out the window, observing
that the scene did not match that definition.
“London is not devastated, gentlemen, and if
you want one soldier’s opinion, it will not be
devastated,” he said.
As well-known as he was to other Ameri-
cans in London and top British officials at the
time, Lee is largely forgotten today. He is over-
shadowed by the towering figures of Presi-
dent Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister
Winston Churchill, and a host of their more
prominent aides. But Lee played a critical
behind-the-scenes role in cementing the ties
between their countries at the moment when
Hitler’s drive for world domination nearly
succeeded, preparing the way for America’s
entry into the war after Pearl Harbor.
According to Dean Acheson, whose early
work in the State Department included imple-
menting the Lend-Lease program in 1941 that
provided essential military supplies to Brit-
ain, “Raymond Lee became the indispensable
AUGUST 2019
49
 guide and comforter, smoothing irritations,
untangling confusions, interpreting visitors
to their hosts and vice versa, trying to harmo-
nize the flow of information and requests
from London to Washington and the often
uncoordinated flow that came back.”
Acheson, who later served as secretary of
state, wrote an effusive foreword to The
London Journal of General Raymond E. Lee:
1940–1941 (edited by historian James Leutze).
Published in 1971, the hefty volume featured
extensive excerpts from Lee’s diary and letters
to his wife, Jeanette, back home. Lee’s writ-
ings demonstrated his unwavering determina-
tion to bolster the British cause and combat
isolationist sentiment in the United States.
But they also revealed that he was not nearly
Lee, here an army colonel in 1919, earned the
Distinguished Service Medal for his leadership
in France during World War I.
as sanguine about the outcome of the war as he
always professed to be in his daily encounters.
He, too, was not immune to moments of doubt
when the fate of the world hung in the balance.
BORN IN ST. LOUIS IN 1886, Lee studied
civil engineering at the University of Missouri
but soon embarked on a military career.
During World War I, he served as commander
of the 15th Field Artillery Regiment at Verdun
and earned the Army Distinguished Service
Medal. After the war, Lee’s assignments
included further studies at the General Staff
College and the National War College, service
50 WORLD WAR II
in the Philippines, and even command of the Bonus Army Civilian
Conservation Corps Camps for the jobless in Vermont.
In 1935, Lee was posted to the London embassy as its military atta-
ché, which initiated the defining chapter of his life—one that played to
his Anglophile predispositions. As his brother Colin later recalled,
even though their ancestors had all arrived in the United States by the
mid-19th century, the family’s roots were strictly British. “You could
not find anywhere in England a more typical English type than my
father,” he said. Their mother, he added, was more “typical an English-
woman” than Queen Victoria.
Raymond Lee found it easy to adjust to life in London, carrying on
an active social life, enjoying elegant dining and intellectual conversa-
tions. After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Lee was
called home to train American troops. But when Hitler’s forces swept
across Western Europe in spring 1940, he was sent back to London,
where he already had an unrivaled network of contacts.
Major General Sir Frederick Beaumont-Nesbitt, who was in charge
of British Military Intelligence, considered Lee a “trusted friend”
and a “trusted professional soldier” who would never betray his
confidence. Unlike other military attachés, Lee had full access to
Beaumont-Nesbitt’s room in the War Office. “He could walk right
in without a pass—just like a British officer,” Beaumont-Nesbitt
recalled. But the British intelligence chief recognized the “sensi-
tivity of his job,” since the United States was still debating how
far it should engage in the war effort. “I tried never to ask too
much of him,” Beaumont-Nesbitt added.
AS FRANCE COLLAPSED in the face of the German blitzkrieg,
Hitler’s forces looked to be unstoppable. On May 20, 1940, Joseph
P. Kennedy, the patriarch of the Kennedy clan who was serving as
U.S. ambassador in London, reported to Roosevelt: “Democracy
in Britain is finished.” On his flight back to the British capital in
June, Lee was appalled by the “amount of defeatist talk, the
almost pathological assumption that it is all over but the shout-
ing,” as he noted in his diary. Based on that assumption, Ken-
nedy made it clear to Lee that he was “against the United States
intervening,” since it was too late to stop Hitler.
Lee was intent on proving the doomsayers wrong, although he was
far from Pollyannaish. “The indications are that it will not be long
before Hitler has a go at this country,” he wrote to Jeanette on June 24,
as fears of a German invasion grew in Britain. But he tried to play down
the personal danger. “You must not worry about me,” he added. “I have
a gas mask and a helmet, and there are plenty of air raid shelters.”
As the bombings began, Lee deliberately conveyed an air of confi-
dence, resorting to the kind of stiff-upper-lip demeanor that came nat-
urally given his Anglophile leanings. He moved into a luxurious corner
suite at Claridge’s but walked freely about the city to survey the bomb
damage both during the day and at night. “If there ever was a time when
SGT POLK/U.S. ARMY/NATIONAL ARCHIVES
one should wear life like a loose garment, this is it,” Lee noted. He
expressed special admiration for the “little tarts who wander about the
streets of Mayfair every afternoon and evening in their finery,” not
bothering to scurry into shelters during bombing raids.
Lee’s bravado was buttressed by his grasp of the rapidly changing
balance of power. He quickly realized that Hitler was already demon-
strating his weaknesses as a military leader. “I can’t for the life of me
 puzzle out what the Germans are up to,” he
wrote on September 15. “They have great air-
power and yet are dissipating it in fruitless and
aimless attacks all over England.” Many of
those attacks were missing their targets, while
TOP: NEW YORK TIMES CO./GETTY IMAGES; BOTTOM: KEYSTONE-FRANCE/GAMMA-KEYSTONE VIA GETTY IMAGES
lini.” He applauded the fact that Roosevelt had Joseph P. Kennedy
established a direct line of communication (above), the U.S.
with Churchill, bypassing Kennedy with a ambassador to the
United Kingdom at
stream of private letters and cables. When
the outbreak of war,
Roosevelt, not trusting Kennedy’s judgment,

felt the British

still spreading destruction and death. “At the dispatched Colonel William “Wild Bill” Dono- were doomed to
end of a month of this blitzkrieg, the British van for a quick evaluation of Britain’s situation defeat. The English
are stronger and in a better position than they that summer, Lee eagerly helped the visitor didn’t share that
were at its beginning,” Lee concluded. out. Not surprisingly, Donovan—who would view (below).
Lee also felt immensely encouraged by soon head the spy agency known as the Office
Winston Churchill, who had taken over as of Strategic Services (OSS)—concluded that
prime minister on the day the Germans “Britain under Churchill would not surrender
invaded France. After attending a dinner at 10
Downing Street in August, he jotted down his
impressions in his pocket diary: “Churchill
knows people better than [his predecessor
Neville] Chamberlain. Tells them facts: trou-
ble, work, anguish. After nothing but defeat
they are in better spirit.”
Lee viewed Churchill as an “extraordinary
individual, of aristocratic lineage but an
unscrupulously rough-and-tumble fighter.”
He added that the British leader “is perfectly at
home in his dealings with Hitler and Musso-

AUGUST 2019
51
 During a either to ruthless air raids or to an invasion.”
Recognizing he was out of favor with Wash-
stopover in ington, Kennedy requested home leave and
left Britain in October 1940. Lee may have
Lisbon, Lee been relieved—but he was also scathing in his
suffered a verdict. “From a soldier’s point of view he is
deserting his post at a critical time,” he wrote.
near-panic Lee also complained that the ambassador
attack over gave a “perfectly damn fool interview” to the
Boston Globe in November, continuing to
the secret spread his pessimistic, barely concealed anti-
British views at every opportunity.
documents This confirmed Lee’s longstanding assess-
he was ment of Kennedy as someone who possessed a
“facile [his italics] insensitivity to the great
carrying. forces which are now playing like heat light-
ning over the map of the world.” Support for
England was more critical than ever, Lee
believed. “If this country is knocked out, we
will have to stand alone and will have a hard
time doing it,” he warned.
As for the man who wanted to knock Britain
out, Lee was alternately disdainful and infuri-
Residents of Lisbon, ated. Writing about the “aimless, random
Portugal, seek the bombing” on September 17, he concluded: “To
latest war news. Hell with Hitler, I say.” On November 23, he
Information was
valuable currency in confided in his diary: “When I look at all the
Lisbon, known to be a crowds going along the streets here, shopping
hotbed of espionage and following their normal activities, and real-
during the war. ize that out of them a certain number are going
52 WORLD WAR II
to be blasted into oblivion every night, it
makes me wild with anger to think that a few
scoundrels can put the world in such a fix.”
WHILE ROOSEVELT and his political advis-
ers geared up to win Congressional approval
for the ambitious Lend-Lease program in
early 1941, Lee flew to Washington to act as an
adviser to the ABC-1 Conference, the first
American-British-Canadian military staff
planning meeting, which lasted from late Jan-
uary to the end of March. The conference laid
the groundwork for extensive military coop-
eration between the three countries, based on
the implicit assumption that the Americans
were likely to enter the war.
Given Washington’s official position as a
nonbelligerent, the proceedings were strictly
secret, limited to a small group of participants.
Calling themselves “technical advisers to the
British Purchasing Commission,” the British
delegates took the precaution of wearing civil-
ian clothes. According to Roosevelt aide Robert
Sherwood, the staff talks “provided the highest
degree of strategic preparedness that the United
States or probably any other non-aggressor
nation has ever had before entry into war.”
The extreme secrecy of those talks was not
because Germany or Japan might learn about
them. The real reason, Sherwood noted, was
© IWM (D 1103)
 that they could provide ammunition to the
isolationists at home who were already charg-
ing that Roosevelt was dragging the country
into the war. If those plans had fallen into the
hands of Congress or the press, he added,
“American preparation for war might have
been well-nigh wrecked and ruined.”
On his way back to London in early April,
Lee should have felt relieved about the success
of the meeting—and the fact that nothing had
leaked about it. But during a stopover in
Lisbon, he suffered a near-panic attack about
the secret documents he was carrying with
him. They contained the results of the delib-
erations, including the operational and
deployment plans for U.S. and British troops
in case his country entered the war. He was
also carrying a secret letter from Roosevelt to
Churchill. The loss of those documents, Lee
noted, would be “completely irreparable.”
Since he was staying at a hotel until his
flight to England, Lee entrusted those docu-
ments to members of the U.S. legation in
Lisbon for safekeeping. After a late dinner, he
went to sleep—only to wake up at 2:30 a.m. “in
the midst of a most tremendous nightmare.” In After 1941’s top-secret ABC-1 Conference, General Lee hand-carried a
his dream Lee had given the documents to briefcase of classified documents from Washington, DC, back to London.
“American representatives who were not
Americans at all,” one of whom had driven
straight for the border to hand them over to the interview I had first with Kennedy, who was crude, blatant, and
the Germans. Only half-awake, he remem- ignorant in everything he did or said,” Lee wrote. Winant left no doubt
bered that Lisbon was indeed teeming with he was as passionate about aiding Britain as Lee was. “It is evident that
Nazi agents and, in the morning, Lee rushed to Winant and Churchill are already on the best of terms, and I am sure
the legation to confirm he had only imagined that they will remain so,” the general noted.
all of this—but then, just to be sure, he took
back the documents, locking himself into his NONETHELESS, LEE’S first week back in London left him in a dour
hotel room until his departure. mood. He noticed a “considerable deterioration in many directions,”
Lee’s plane landed in Poole on England’s he wrote. The food situation had worsened, and people looked “more
southern coast late in the evening of April 10, solemn.” At the movies, audiences were subjected to the kind of blatant
and he went to spend the night in the neigh- propaganda the authorities had shied away from before. Lee watched a
boring town of Bournemouth before catching film with British troops in training shouting “Kill! Kill! Kill!”
the morning train to London. He had barely “Mr. Black,” probably an alias for one of his intelligence sources, told
gone to sleep when his landlady roused all the Lee that the Germans “are convinced that [Lend-Lease] assistance
guests, insisting they go downstairs as from the United States can never reach England soon enough to affect
German bombers attacked, hitting the local the final issue.” And while Churchill continued to project an unwaver-
Woolworth store only half a block away. ing sense of confidence, some of his top officials conveyed a sense of
GEORGE KARGER/CONDE NAST VIA GETTY IMAGES

Finally arriving in London, Lee felt a tremen-
dous sense of relief once he handed over Roos-
evelt’s letter for transmission to Churchill and
locked up the other documents.
Another source of relief for Lee was his first
meeting with John Gilbert Winant, the former
Republican governor of New Hampshire who
had arrived during his absence to replace
Kennedy as ambassador. “What a contrast to
desperation in their dealings with emissaries from Washington.
Lord Beaverbrook, the minister for aircraft production, asked Gen-
eral Henry “Hap” Arnold, who had been busy expanding the U.S. Army
Air Corps: “What would you do if Churchill were hung, and the rest of
us [were] hiding in Scotland or being run over by the Germans?”
According to Lee, Arnold concluded that his hosts “were putting on a
show to impress him” about the urgency of the situation.
Many Americans, including Lee, were suitably impressed—although
the attaché kept up appearances to the contrary. His mood had become

AUGUST 2019
53
 London recovers
from a German air
attack. More than
40,000 civilians
died from bombing
during the war,
testing the storied
British resolve and
“stiff upper lip” in
the face of adversity.

54 WORLD WAR II
 so glum that on April 16, 1941, he wrote in his
diary that “it is a question whether our sup-
port will arrive soon enough to bolster up
what is a gradually failing cause.”
It wasn’t just the Blitz that fueled such wor-
ries. In the three months ending with May,
German U-boats sank 142 ships, 99 of them
British, all part of their effort to isolate Britain
further. In response, Roosevelt extended his
country’s security zone and patrol areas much
farther into the North Atlantic, effectively
taking responsibility for monitoring all ship-
ping in the Western hemisphere. Churchill
was quick to express his gratitude for this new
sign of growing American support.
In the run-up to Operation Barbarossa, the
Germa n invasion of the Sov iet Union
launched on June 22, the pressure on Britain
eased somewhat. The Blitz largely ended in
May, as many Luftwaffe squadrons were rede-
ployed to the East. Britain had paid a heavy
price up to that point, with approximately
43,000 killed and three times that number
injured. But Hitler had failed to bomb Britain
into submission. In fact, as Lee noted in his
diary, the popular mood was accurately
reflected by a film called Britain Can Take It!
While welcoming the news that the Ger-
mans would now have to focus on the Eastern
Front, top officials in London and Washington
were decidedly pessimistic about the Red
Army’s chances against the invaders. Stalin
had refused to believe that Hitler was about to
abandon the Nazi-Soviet Pact, leaving his
troops unprepared for the German onslaught.
Lee did not go along with the prevailing
view that the Wehrmacht’s early string of vic-
tories meant that Hitler’s gamble on delivering
a swift knockout blow had paid off already. He
was encouraged by the signs later in the
summer of stiffening resistance by Red Army
© IWM (COI 944); OPPOSITE: WILLIAM VANDERSON/FOX PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES
units. “They are bleeding,” he wrote on August
30, “but the Germans are, too, and the latter
can ill afford to lose all this blood, material, oil,
and time.” Lee understood that Stalin had a far
bigger pool of manpower to draw on, and Hit-
ler’s forces risked major overextension.
Still, Lee was acutely aware that both Brit-
ain and the Soviet Union would need massive
assistance from the United States to keep fight-
ing back. On September 4, he compared notes
with Winant over dinner. According to Lee, the
ambassador declared that Britain had “no
chance of winning” without full U.S. support.
Lee agreed, but he was frustrated by the
continuing ambivalence of his countrymen. “War is edging nearer to
the United States, a nation which prefers to be unconscious of events,”
he wrote on September 9, alluding to a U-boat attack on the USS Greer
a few days earlier. The German torpedoes had missed the American
destroyer, but soon other torpedoes would hit their marks.
While grateful for Lend-Lease and other forms of support, British
officials were also betraying growing nervousness about Washington’s
intentions. In a telegram to Churchill on November 4, Field Marshal
Jan Smuts declared: “I am struck by the growth of the impression here
and elsewhere that the war is going to end in a stalemate and thus
fatally for us.” To avert such an outcome, the United States needed to
enter the war, he concluded, urging the prime minister to appeal to
Roosevelt for that outcome.
Churchill explained that FDR was constrained by “his constitu-
tional difficulties”—in other words, only Congress could declare war.
“We must have patience and trust to the tide which is flowing our way
and to events.” To his War Cabinet, he added that he did not want to
pressure Roosevelt “in advance of American opinion.”
As the pivotal year 1941 was drawing to a close, the War Department
ordered Lee, who was visibly tired, to return home. But before he
reported to Washington, he arranged to meet Jeanette in New York for
what he billed as a second honeymoon. She greeted him at LaGuardia
Field on December 7, right after hearing the announcement that Japa-
nese planes had attacked Pearl Harbor. “Events,” as Churchill had put
it, were taking charge, overshadowing all personal plans.
In a special joint session of Congress the next day, Roosevelt asked
for a declaration of war against Japan, which passed the Senate 82-0
and the House 388-1. On December 11, Germany declared war on the
United States. The debate about the extent of American involvement
was decisively over.
Lee would go on to serve in military intelligence and to command
artillery troops at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Fort Sill, Okla-
homa, before retiring in 1946. But his most indisputable accomplish-
ment was the magnificent role he had played in wartime London. +
With the Blitz all but over by May 1941, Britain’s information ministry
began producing films that reflected the country’s bullish spirit.
AUGUST 2019
55
 WEAPONS MANUAL JAPAN’S OHKA TYPE 11 SUICIDE PLANE
ILLUSTRATION BY JIM LAURIER

ABOVE AND BEYOND

AS JAPAN’S FORTUNES IN THE PACIFIC ARENA went from bad to worse, and with an American invasion of the
home islands on the horizon, Japanese High Command began considering drastic defensive strategies. By 1944, they
approved a program of suicide warfare called Tokko, or “special attack,” that included submarine-launched Kaiten
human torpedos, hand-delivered antitank “mines,” and—most famously—kamikaze (“divine wind”) aircraft. Though
not the first deployed, the Ohka was the only custom-designed, purpose-built kamikaze plane to see action.
Engineless Ohkas—basically massive piloted bombs—were ferried to within 23 miles of Allied shipping by Mitsubi-
shi G4M “Betty” bombers, many of which were shot down before they could deliver their load. Ohka pilots—mostly
inexperienced flyers groomed for kamikaze warfare—who made it through American defenses would glide toward
target ships before igniting three solid-fuel rocket boosters, and dive, increasing their speed to more than 600 mph
before impact. Kamikazes were most effective at Okinawa, though overall the suicide planes produced tactically neg-
ligible results, with at most seven American ships being struck by the manned flying bombs.
Ohka variants that were self-powered and capable of being launched from farther afield were in development later
in 1945, but the war ended before they could be perfected or deployed. —Larry Porges

PACKING A PUNCH FLOWER POWER

Ohka’s bombs were huge, 2,650-pound
affairs. Contained within an armor-piercing
steel case, they accounted for nearly a third
of the length of the diminutive aircraft.
The Ohka took its name and logo from the cherry
blossom, a Japanese symbol of rebirth. Meanwhile a
floating chrysanthemum—the emblem of a 14th-century
Japanese warrior who took his own life rather than
surrender to his enemies—became the symbol for the
overall Tokko suicide campaign.

SHORT FUZE
The Ohka’s A-3 nose fuze detonated the base impact fuze
located behind the warhead. Kamikaze pilots were trained to
release their bombs just before impact in an effort to maximize

56 WORLD WAR II
damage from both the bomb explosion and the airplane crash.
 JAPANESE OHKA TYPE 11
Crew: One / Length: 20 ft. / Wingspan: 16.5 ft. /
Warhead: One 2,650-lb. bomb / Maximum speed:
500–600 mph / Propulsion: Three solid-fuel
rocket boosters / Japan produced more than 850
Ohkas by war’s end.

THE COMPETITION

GERMAN FIESELER FI 103R

Recovered at Yontan airfield on Okinawa in April 1945, this Ohka’s 2,650-
pound warhead (foreground) is unattached and without its steel casing.
Crew: One / Length: 26.25 ft. / Wingspan: 18.75 ft. /
Warhead: One 1,870-lb. V-1 bomb / Maximum speed:
500 mph / Propulsion: Argus pulsejet engine /
Germany converted its V-1 rocket into a manned bomb
by adding a cockpit directly in front of the pulsejet’s
intake, making pilot ejection virtually impossible.

ROCKET BOOST
The Ohka initially included three solid-fuel rockets in the rear
fuselage and two more under the wings. The wing rockets’
varying thrust caused uneven flying and were later removed;
the three remaining rockets still produced a total of 1,764
pounds of thrust over 10 seconds.

WOOD THAT IT COULD

The disposable nature of the Ohka, along with
the need to produce a lightweight glider, led to
wings crafted of wood over aluminum frames.
This had the added advantage of conserving
scarce war materials.

PHOTO: NATIONAL ARCHIVES AUGUST 2019

57
 MORALE
BY MAIL
In war, a little humor can go a long way

58 WORLD WAR II
T
he most devastating war ever to afflict the world
isn’t often associated with humor, but judging from
the postcard collection reader James Woodall—a
retired U.S. Army colonel from Texas—shared with
us, perhaps it should be. Today found at flea mar-
kets and antique shops, the illustrated cards were
once sold at drugstores and on newsstands; for just a
penny or less, they helped members of the armed forces
and their loved ones “stay in touch by ignoring the horrors
of war,” says Thomas Garnhart, author of Comic Post-
cards of World War II. Companies like Tichnor Brothers
and Curt Teich produced mass quantities of war-themed
humor cards, from niche offerings for single infantry
divisions to series for military branches like the Women’s
Army Corps. Their appeal, though, seems universal—and
judging from how they can make us laugh, timeless too.
AUGUST 2019
59
 MORALE BY MAIL

ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF JAMES WOODALL

The postcards express recurring themes: they laugh at the travails of superior officers, focus on romantic opportunities
for draftees, and ignore deadly combat hazards in favor of trivial concerns like seasickness. The depiction of soldiers
as children, like the bare-bottomed fellow at top left, is common as well—for the simple reason that “to their parents,
that’s exactly who they were,” Garnhart says. “This was important social commentary since most draftees were young.”

60 WORLD WAR II
Some of Woodall’s postcards bear messages from servicemen; common sentiments include pleas for letters from home and
reassurances that the sender is fine. Others contain travel observations, shameless requests for baked goods, and references
to potential paramours. One wry card mailed by a civilian—a sister to her brother—takes a cue from the front illustration
(bottom right) in its signature: “I have changed my name to ‘Pearl’ Harbor—please don’t forget that.”

AUGUST 2019
61
‘NOW IS WHEN
YOU PRAY’
It was March 1945 in Germany, and
troops of the U.S. 194th Glider Infantry
Regiment were invading—not liberating
By James M. Fenelon
The view from the cockpit
of a CG-4A glider shows the
tow rope and C-47 transport
hauling the fragile aircraft
into battle as part of the
Allies’ Operation Varsity.

AUGUST 2019
63
 O
Seen over a glider n the morning of March 24, 1945, an
pilot’s shoulder, Allied armada of more than 1,500
two other gliders powered aircraft and 1,300 gliders
are being towed
converged over the central Belgian
by a single C-47
as they approach town of Wavre. The aircraft had
the landing zone departed from 23 airfields in Eng-
near Wesel,
land and France; for their pilots,
Germany. Wavre served as the command assembly point
over which all aircraft formations changed
course for their approach to drop zones on the
east side of the Rhine River.
Drawn outside by the reverberating sound of
droning engines, its residents gazed skyward
as the air columns came together in a cloudless
blue sky to form the war’s largest single-day
airborne armada. It was about 9 a.m.; close to
500 British and American fighter escorts, dart-
ing about like angry hornets on all flanks,
added to the mighty display. Anyone wanting
to watch the entire spectacle would have to
64 WORLD WAR II
wait more than three hours for the fleet to pass.
Onlookers were witnessing the voyage of
two Allied airborne divisions—the American
17th and the British 6th—on their way into
Germany to participate in an operation code-
named “Varsity.” Following a nine-month
PREVIOUS PAGES AND THIS PAGE: NATIONAL WWII GLIDER PILOTS ASSOCIATION
campaign that had begun on the beaches of
Normandy, the Allies were now on the thresh-
old of kicking in the door to the Third Reich.
But first, they had to cross the Rhine.
Preparation for the crossing—given the
overall code name “Plunder”—had been so
monumental that it was impossible for the
enemy not to notice. The stockpiling of bridg-
ing equipment, the increasing bombing cam-
paigns, the movement of troops, the Allied
airfields in France overcrowded with C-47
transports and olive-drab gliders—all had
served to put the Germans on high alert. Nazi
propaganda broadcasts made it clear that
 any element of surprise was long gone.
The two airborne divisions were to drop into
enemy territory on the east bank of the Rhine,
outside the town of Wesel in western Germany.
There they were to secure a perimeter some
five miles wide to shield the British, Canadian,
and American ground troops of Field Marshall
Bernard Montgomery’s assault river crossing,
underway since 10 p.m. the previous evening.
The paratroopers were expected to hold their
positions for 24 hours until the ground troops
swarming across the 400-yard-wide river
could arrive and reinforce them.
Meanwhile, the enemy was waiting.
THE BRITISH AIRBORNE TROOPS were
responsible for the western f lank of the
perimeter, while the 17th Airborne would land
farther east. Leading the American column,
in 298 aircraft, were paratroopers of the
507th and 513th Regimental Combat Teams.
Their mission was to secure the high ground
overlooking the Rhine and establish the
perimeter’s northern boundary.
The paratroopers were followed by 906
gliders being towed to their landing zones.
Nearly two-thirds of the boxy, canvas-covered
aircraft carried the U.S. 194th Combat Team,
which consisted of the 194th Glider Infantry
Regiment plus supporting medics, engineers,
artillery, and antitank guns. Their destination
was Landing Zone S on the eastern edge of the
perimeter. The glider-borne infantry, or
“glider riders,” arguably had the most vital
task: blocking German counterattacks from
the eastern flank by seizing bridges over the
Issel River and Issel Canal, north of the Rhine
(see map, page 67). Several of those bridges
could support the weight of armored vehicles;
the Allies needed to take them intact so they
could use them to break out of the perimeter
and continue the offensive into Germany.
Planners had numbered the bridges for
easy reference. Starting in Wesel and moving
counterclockwise, the bridges over the canal
were numbered 1 through 4 and were to be
seized by the 194th’s 2nd Battalion. Bridges 5
through 10—over the river—were the 1st Bat-
talion’s goal. The 3rd Battalion, plus support-
ing artillery and antitank guns, would land
after the two assault battalions.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
The gliders—Waco CG-4As—gave the 194th
the advantage of bringing in heavier weapons,
and of landing squads intact as fighting ele-
ments. In their cargo holds the gliders could
carry 13 men, or a jeep and three men, or a 75mm howitzer (or, if posi-
tioned just right, an M3 105mm howitzer) along with up to three men.
The troopers had packed the gliders to capacity to squeeze as many men
and as much materiel into the perimeter as possible. Many of the C-47s
were also lugging in two gliders instead of the customary one.
For three hours the gliders had pitched and yawed behind the tow
planes as their pilots strained to keep them steady against the turbu-
lence. Despite the pilots’ efforts, the fully loaded—and in some cases,
overloaded—aircraft were buffeted about in the armada’s agitated
prop wash. It was exhausting work, with pilots and copilots swapping
turns at the controls to reduce fatigue. Many veteran pilots com-
plained it was the worst turbulence they’d ever experienced.
In the back, passengers braced themselves against unpredictable
updrafts and downdrafts. Private Jim Lauria had secured a rope along
the length of the cargo area to give himself a handhold as he periodi-
cally maneuvered around his 75mm howitzer to inspect its tie-downs
during the bumpy flight.
Another gun crew hadn’t been so diligent, and their M3 105mm
howitzer worked itself loose. Staff Sergeant Jimmie Taylor screamed
over the racket of the wind slapping at the canvas fuselage to get his
crew into action. As the 2,400-pound gun threatened to upset their
center of gravity, Taylor and another trooper muscled it back into
place. Vomit all over the plywood floor made their work more precari-
ous, as they kept slipping in it.
Just before 10:30 a.m. the first American glider, still under tow,
crossed the Rhine. As they passed over, Lieutenant Colonel John Pad-
dock, a passenger and commander of the 17th Airborne’s antitank bat-
talion, made a ceremony of tossing an empty champagne bottle into the
river as they officially crossed into Nazi Germany. He’d popped the cork
earlier, passing the bottle around during their flight. “I figured the dice
were cast, might as well enjoy ourselves,” he later recalled.
Down below, Montgomery’s Allied troops darted across the river in
Below the aerial armada, ground troops—here, ducking from enemy
fire—cross the Rhine River in assault boats. “We all tried to crawl under
each other because the lead was flying around like hail,” one recalled.
AUGUST 2019
65
 their amphibious assault craft. German artil-
lery shattered the water’s surface with
exploding geysers. Enemy antiaircraft fire, or
f lak, targeted the Allied aircraft as they
approached the river. The Germans’ heavier
guns—the big 88s and 105s—got the range
first. The coal-black clouds of bursting flak
drifted past as the gliders were towed relent-
lessly onward. In their cockpits, the glider
pilots could smell the rotten-egg stench of
exploding ack-ack shells.
They were six miles from the landing zone;
red lights flashed from the C-47 navigators’
glass domes, signaling to the glider pilots that
they were almost there. Stand by.

SOME DIDN’T MAKE IT. The two lead air-

craft were shot down a mile short of Landing
Zone S; pilots of the towed gliders cut loose to
avoid being pulled into the ground. Out of the
first 40 tow aircraft, 36 were hit. In the next
hour, German gunners would down 10 more
C-47s and damage another 140.
As the formation reached the edge of the
landing zone, green lights replaced the red
standby signal. Release when ready. The first
glider pilot did so at 10:36 a.m., sending the tow
rope snapping forward and his glider into
A day after the landings, an aerial reconnaissance shot of the
descent. For the next hour, more gliders did landing zone (top) shows medical aid tents in place. Operating
the same roughly once every six seconds. gliders over enemy territory was a risky proposition. A body lies
In one glider, Associated Press reporter beside the downed glider above; note the cut fabric on the nose
Howard S. Cowan had his eyes glued on his of the craft, where the pilot appears to have sliced himself out.
pilot. Cowan wanted to cast off as soon as pos-
sible; the flak was loud and close. The fabric-
covered gliders offered virtually no protection. back over its wing held to a steady course, determined to get its two
After what seemed like hours, the pilot gliders to the [landing zone].”
shouted over his shoulder, “Going down!” With
a flick of the release toggle, the glider pitched DOWN BELOW, Peter Emmerich, a private—or Kanonier—in a three-
forward into a steep dive. No longer being gun battery of the Luftwaffe’s 883rd Antiaircraft Battalion, had been
towed, the passengers heard the howl of the finishing his breakfast when the unmistakable rumbling of Allied air-
wind decrease, only to be replaced by the dis- craft filled the sky. There appeared to be no end to the staggered for-
tinct sounds of bursting flak and the rattle of mations; they stretched as far back to the horizon as Emmerich could
German machine guns. Seconds later, Cowan see. As he stared at the spectacle for a few dread-filled moments, the
was startled by the POP-POP of shrapnel gunners swiveled their 20mm Flakvierling-38s into action.
puncturing the taut canvas skin of the glider The rapid booming of the guns snapped Emmerich back to reality.
on one side and slicing its way out the other. He followed the trajectory of tracer fire as the rounds chewed through
Advised the sergeant sitting across from the wing of a C-47, vaporizing its left engine.
him: “Now is when you pray.” The crews hustled. At the gunner’s command of “Laden!” they
COURTESY OF JAMES M. FENELON (BOTH)

Glider pilot George Buckley, who at age 19
was already a veteran of multiple combat
operations, said the flak was the heaviest he’d
seen yet. But the aircraft formations bore
straight through it without taking evasive
action. He recalled: “A C-47 in front of us with
one engine out and with flames streaming
swapped out the empty magazines for four fresh 20-rounders. Emm-
erich’s battery commander liked to stagger types of ammunition for
maximum damage: armor-piercing, incendiary, high-explosive. Repeat.
When the gliders released overhead, Emmerich’s section chief
ordered the gunners to ignore the C-47s: “Aim for the gliders!”
As the first glider neared Emmerich’s position, the gunner gave it a
full burst, emptying all four barrels into it. The right side of the glider

66 WORLD WAR II
 shattered, losing the wing and rear stabilizer. ADDITIONAL WAVES OF GLIDERS brought in more men and heavier
It crumpled into the ground. So many aircraft firepower: 57mm antitank guns and the howitzers of the 680th and
were overhead, “We did not have to aim any- 681st Glider Field Artillery Battalions.
more,” Emmerich recalled, “just point our A 680th artillery crew unloaded their M3 105mm howitzer and
guns in the air and fire. We would have always lugged it out into the field to duel with the enemy guns. They fired first
hit something.” but missed. The German crew didn’t. A second group of Americans
All three guns in the battery were firing at wheeled their howitzer into position, splattering the enemy battery
their full rate of 1,000 rounds a minute; soon with flanking fire. This move was enough to take out several of the
the surrounding field was littered with heaps guns and bag 25 prisoners. The troopers gave better than they got, but
of twisted metal-framed gliders on fire. Two their efforts cost them dearly: two battery commanders were killed
dead bodies lay nearby, and the air was heavy within 100 yards of each other, as were 17 troopers, with more than 50
with a sick burning smell. wounded in the melee.
Private Jim Lauria’s 75mm howitzer—one of 12 brought in by the
ABOARD THE DESCENDING GLIDERS, 681st—was trapped inside the glider: the aircraft had hit a wire fence
squad and platoon leaders leaned between on landing, and the collision had fouled the nose so badly the men
their two pilots to peer out the cockpit win- couldn’t open it.
dows, scanning the terrain below for land- After enlisting the help of some glider riders with wire cutters,
marks. Smoke from the river assault had Lauria finally extracted the howitzer from the glider’s cargo hold. At
drifted over nearby farmland, blanketing the same time, one of the troopers spotted muzzle flashes coming from
everything. As they got lower, ground details a hayloft, where a German machine gunner was methodically spraying
emerged. Some leaders, like Lieutenant Frank the landing zone. Lauria and crew manhandled the howitzer into align-
Dillon, were able to spot his platoon’s assem- ment and sighted down its tube like it was a rifle. When satisfied, Lauria
bly point: a triangular patch of woods bor- jerked the lanyard. The 75mm shell whined across the field and flashed
dered by a dirt road. Dillon called out the into the barn. The explosion lifted the roof off, destroying the hayloft.
distance and direction to his men as they In little more than an hour, the gliders had delivered 3,492 troops
braced themselves for a rough landing. and 637 tons of cargo—including 202 jeeps and 78 mortars and artil-
Out of the fog, a power line loomed. The lery pieces—into Landing Zone S. The glider riders struck out toward
pilot pulled up, but the glider’s tail struck the
wire, pitching them forward until he could
level the craft. The maneuver kept them from
crashing but increased their speed, OPERATION WESEL 10 TARGETED
prompting the glider to slam into the
ground and skid across the field. Trees
VARSITY
FLIGHT
ROUTES
9
8
BRIDGES
ripped off both wings, but the fuselage
continued forward, mowing down a WAVRE 7
ENGLISH
CHANNEL
row of fence posts before a large tree 6
brought them to a bone-jarring halt. 5
Its trunk creased the cockpit between PARIS IS S EL RIV ER
the two pilots, but neither was injured.
FR AN CE 4
Gliders plunged in from every direc-
tion, plowing into the open fields, knocking IS S EL
down telephone poles, bowling through CAN AL
3
fences, and toppling trees. Germans firing at a
MILES 2
glider were often surprised by another land-
ing directly behind them. Several gliders ran 0 1/2
1
over foxholes; in at least one case, a copilot
fired his Tommy gun through the nose of his
glider, scattering an enemy machine-gun RHINE
crew as the CG-4A crashed into them. RIVER WESEL
Small battles erupted across the landing
zone as troopers ran from their gliders and
MAP BY BRIAN WALKER

the chaos shifted from sky to ground. It was a

360-degree battlefield of barking sergeants, Operation Varsity’s perhaps most vital task fell to the glider-borne
cracking guns, snapping bullets, coughing infantry, charged with seizing bridges over a river and canal; taking
mortars, and screaming wounded. them intact would allow Allied forces to plunge deeper into Germany.

AUGUST 2019
67

the 10 bridges over the Issel Canal and River.
Members of 2nd Battalion’s George Company fought their way
across the landing zone, dodging gliders and bullets to attack bridges 1
and 2. Their destination was the far side of the canal, where they were
to set up a perimeter and block any German counterattacks.
The troopers went to ground in an open field 600 yards short of
Bridge 1. Squads of well-armed Germans had barricaded themselves
inside a cluster of industrial buildings, and they quickly pinned down
the Americans. Repeated Allied bombings had left the buildings in
Wesel little more than shells of heaped bricks, but the defenders made
the most of the crumpled urban redoubt. Squads of glider riders
scratched forward block by block to reach the bridge.
Two German Mk V Panther tanks clanked toward the Americans,
trying to sweep them off their objective. The city’s rubble and splin-
tered beams were a tank hunter’s playground. Private Robert Geist let
the first panzer approach within 50 feet before firing a high-explosive
rocket from his bazooka into the metal monster. The round impacted
with an orange flash and a tremendous shock wave, and Private Wil-
liam Paliwoda took out the second tank from close range as well. The
enemy’s first counterattack ground to a halt.
It didn’t take long for German infantry—led by two more Panthers—
to make another attack, this time against the troopers digging in at
Bridge 2. The situation was precarious. The glider riders’ antitank guns
weren’t yet in position, and they were on the verge of being overrun.
In a desperate “ends justify the means” decision, the troopers prod-
ded several of their POWs up onto the road at gunpoint, using them as
human shields. The German attack stalled, allowing one of the anti-
tank crews to wheel their 57mm gun into position.
The German tanks spotted it and cranked their turrets around for a
shot. Shells shrieked back and forth in a race for the first hit. The
troopers scored first, knocking out one of the 44-ton Panthers. They
reloaded and ricocheted a round off the second panzer. The other Pan-
ther’s muzzle barked, and the round slammed into the antitank gun
with a devastating crash, wounding all four crewmembers. The surviv-
ing tank and German infantry fell back.
Farther up the 60-foot-wide canal, troopers of 2nd Battalion’s Fox
Company were, by 11:45 a.m., en route to bridges 3 and 4. The company
already had two coups to their credit, having separately bagged, within
30 minutes of landing, two regimental command posts and vital intel-
ligence, including maps marked with gun positions surrounding Wesel.
68 WORLD WAR II
German soldiers captured by American
paratroopers on March 24, 1945, crouch in
an improvised POW enclosure in Wesel.
Now, the vast American troop formations
cutting across the open terrain proved a
tempting target for another Mk V Panther. It
opened fire with its main gun from 500 yards.
Private Rober t Weber unlimbered his
bazooka for a Hail Mary—at that distance the
tank would have been difficult to hit, let alone
scratch. But with what would later be consid-
ered a “miraculous hit,” the round either
ignited ammunition carelessly stored on the
tank’s exterior or, if some witnesses are to be
believed, arched into an open hatch. Beyond
dispute was the result: the tank all but disin-
tegrated, bursting into flames and engulfing
the trapped crew in an inferno.
After knocking out several German out-
posts at bridges 3 and 4, Fox Company cap-
tured the overpasses intact. With heaving
shovels and flying dirt, they dug defensive posi-
© ROBERT CAPA © INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY/MAGNUM PHOTOS; OPPOSITE: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; 17TH AIRBORNE DIVISION PATCH COURTESY OF JAMES M. FENELON
tions to fortify their perimeter on the far side.
Farther northwest, along the river at
bridges 5 and 6, elements of the 1st Battalion
had seized control within 15 minutes of land-
ing. Still, they were having trouble keeping
their perimeter secure—they’d clear a house
only to have it later reoccupied by lone snip-
ers. After chasing them out a few times, the
troopers simply blasted away with bazookas
to burn the houses down.
The troopers tasked with seizing bridges
7 through 10 found them well-protected by
dug-in German infantry armed with prodi-
gious numbers of machine guns and automatic
weapons. Particularly stubborn defenders
held Bridge 7, firing volley after volley of
devastating mortar and artillery barrages.
BY MIDDAY, as more men trickled in, the
glider riders entrenched along the canal were
strengthening their positions. By then they
had secured all of their objectives except
Bridge 1, which was still contested by an
undaunted German battle group.
To break the Americans’ hold, German
units outside the airborne perimeter needed
at least one bridge capable of bearing the
weight of armored vehicles. German battle
groups prowled the banks across from bridges
1 through 4, probing the glider riders’ defenses
for a weakness.
At 4 p.m. the Germans launched a con-
certed counterattack against bridges 1, 2, and
3. Determined to keep a route open, they
pounded the American positions with show-
ers of mortar and artillery shells. The glider
riders dug their foxholes deeper and waited.
Their attached forward observer, Lieuten-
ant Herman Lemberger, moved toward the
attack as panzers lurched toward the bridges.
Lemberger needed a better view, so he climbed
to the top of the canal bank and radioed
instructions to British artillery batteries back
across the Rhine. One of the panzer crews
must have spotted his radio. The bark of their
main gun rocked the tank, and Lemberger dis-
appeared in the explosion of a direct hit. But he
had sent the coordinates, and the British gun-
ners had the range. They dropped shell after
shell into the enemy formation, chopping the
attackers to pieces with salvos of high explo-
sive rounds. It was close. One of the panzers
clanked within 10 yards of the main line before
glider rider Andrew Adams knocked it out
with a shattering shot from his bazooka.
Simultaneously, German infantry attacking
Bridge 3 with two Mk IV panzers in the lead
threatened to overrun Fox Company. Again,
“Glider riders” of the 194th Glider
Infantry Regiment prepare to move
out. When March 24 came to an end
they were still holding strong, but
success wan’t assured.
British artillery from the far bank dis-
rupted the attack. The shells splashed
viciously into the German columns; their
fragments whizzed through the ranks of
infantry and sent the tanks scurrying in
retreat. The artillery had come to the
rescue—but the troopers’ relief was tem-
porary. It was just a question of time
before the Germans would try again. After
the dust settled, both George and Fox Compa-
nies radioed 2nd Battalion’s command post to
report they had lost contact with their for-
ward squads at bridges 1, 2, and 3. It was just
As the sun dipped below the horizon on
that long day and a light mist formed over the
a question of
canal, the glider riders braced for a sleepless time before
night. They had fought ferociously since land-
ing that morning and had successfully seized the Germans
their objectives, but their grip on bridges 1, 2,
and 3 was tenuous. It would be at least another
would try
10 hours before Allied tanks, crossing the again.
Rhine on barges and pontoon bridges, arrived
to reinforce their perimeter. For the 17th Air-
borne Division’s troopers, March 24, 1945,
was almost over, but they would still have to
hold the line until relieved. +
 Catch-22’s protagonist, Captain John
Yossarian (Christopher Abbott), is a B-25
bombardier faced with an impossible dilemma:
refuse to fly, and he’s considered too sane to
be grounded; fly more missions, he’ll die.

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70 WORLD WAR II

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orchestrating a German air raid on his
own base. The performances are
exceptional throughout; lead actor
Christopher Abbott’s Yossarian carries
the story, while directors Clooney and
Heslov themselves ably portray the
close order drill-obsessed General
Scheisskopf and morose flight surgeon
Doc Daneeka, respectively.
Aircraft enthusiasts might feel a bit
shortchanged: while the 1970 feature
film mustered 16 flyable B-25s, this
new version makes do with only two,
filling in gaps in the formations with
computer-generated imagery and
skillful editing. But Hulu’s series, made
on location in Sardinia, is magnifi-
cently shot: the beautiful Mediterra-
nean vistas provide a jarring contrast
with the story’s recurring dark
moments, plus it’s accompanied by an
PHILIPE ANTONELLO /HULU (BOTH)
excellent soundtrack of 1940s music.
All told, the series is a worthy small-
screen reinterpretation of a classic.
—Richard R. Muller is a professor of
military history at the School of
Advanced Air and Space Studies,
Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama.
REVIEWS BOOKS
OPERATION
OVERLOOKED
WITH JUST THE MEREST WHIFF of hyperbole, this peculiarly titled
volume by British author Giles Milton promises a “unique new history”
of the first day of the Allied landings, incorporating “little-known
voices” in a “vast canvas of human bravado.” Bold claims, indeed.
Milton’s approach is conventional enough, framing his narrative of
June 6, 1944, by focusing on the myriad individual stories on all sides
connected to it. It is this wealth of material that
brings freshness to a familiar story. Among the sub-
jects are bewildered French housewives, resistance
fighters attempting to deceive the Germans, Ameri-
can paratroopers fighting in the dawn of Sainte-
Mère-Église, and—of course—the unfortunates
battling their way across the bloodied beaches.
Many of the voices that Milton employs are unfa-
miliar, while others are well-known, like the local
German commander Field Marshal Erwin Rommel—
who spent the day agonizing over the landings from
afar, as he had travelled to Germany for his wife’s
birthday—or Royal Air Force meteorologist James SOLDIER, SAILOR,
Stagg, who, unlike Rommel’s weatherman, had pro- FROGMAN, SPY,
vided an optimistic forecast for the operation. Woven AIRMAN, GANGSTER,
together, they retell the momentous story of D-Day. KILL OR DIE
Milton—the author of Churchill’s Ministry of How the Allies
Ungentlemanly Warfare, among other bestselling his- Won on D-Day
By Giles Milton. 486 pp.
tory titles—is an adept storyteller, and his subjects
Henry Holt, 2019. $30.
are vividly reimagined from snippets of diaries and
interviews. Such is his cinematic eye and his feel for the telling vignette
that it is not difficult to feel subjects’ pain, to smell their fear, or to
share in their victory. Some of the most harrowing accounts are those
of the war’s often-unsung heroes, like the battlefield medics working
by candlelight to save young men who have been hideously maimed and
disfigured in combat. This is a history filled with human emotion.
While the book is engaging and well-written, it has shortcomings.
Milton imaginatively recreates D-Day’s “on the ground” experience,
but the operational overview is sometimes lost amid the tumult of
events. This leaves the reader with a partial understanding of how they
coalesce into a coherent whole. And Allied voices dominate. History, as
they say, is written by the victors but it is disappointing to encounter
only a handful of German-language archival sources.
So what of the grand claims made for Milton’s book? All history
books today promise novelty, and this volume is to some extent a
repackaging of an already-familiar subject. But beyond that gripe there
is much to admire. Milton writes with fluency and immediacy, and con-
tributes numerous previously unseen accounts to the historical record.
For once, it seems, the hyperbole is justified. —Roger Moorhouse wrote
“The Man Who Started the War” in World War II’s February 2019 issue,
and is the author of the 2017 book The Third Reich in 100 Objects.
AUGUST 2019
71

REVIEWS BOOKS
NOT JUST
ANY WOMAN
IN JULY 1944, the Gestapo pushed in Marie-
Madeleine Fourcade’s door while hunting for
French Resistance spies. They shoved her
aside, ransacking her apartment for informa-
tion about an important member of the Resis-
tance cell known as “Alliance.” Little did they
know its ringleader was Fourcade herself. The
inability to recognize—let alone even imag-
ine—a woman spy master wasn’t just a
German shortcoming: throughout Madame
Fourcade’s Secret War, the same proves true of
men on all sides of World War II. And until
MADAME recently, suggests author Lynne Olson, true of
FOURCADE’S the rest of us as well.
SECRET WAR Olson’s book is part of a recent wave of works
The Daring Young that highlight the women of World War II espi-
Woman Who Led onage (see “Book Briefs,” opposite). But Four-
France’s Largest cade’s story stands out: from 1941 to 1945, she
Spy Network led the largest and longest-lived spy network in
Against Hitler occupied France. Despite her outsized contri-
By Lynne Olson. bution to the French Resistance, Fourcade was
464 pp. Random not among those honored at World War II’s
House, 2019. $30. end; a longstanding political rivalry between
Charles de Gaulle and Alliance’s founder,
former intelligence officer Georges Loustau-
nau-Lacau, made the network politically poi-
sonous. She lived until 1989, even publishing a
memoir about her heroics, but received little
72 WORLD WAR II
One of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade’s
false identity cards claimed she was
Marie-Suzanne Imbert, a secretary.
fanfare until Olson’s new book.
Not that Olson glorifies her subject;
she shows Fourcade as a star in a
broad constellation of resistance as
the 3,000-member-strong Alliance
refuses to comply with the Vichy
government. Under Fourcade, they
intercept communications, steal doc-
uments, and assist Allied intelligence.
They even provide a 55-foot-long map
of Normandy’s beaches that details
its German fortifications, a docu-
ment crucial for D-Day strategy.
Fourcade, who was raised wealthy and had
long lived a life of casual glamor, wasn’t
exactly born a rebel. But she was shocked by
the complacency of her peers, many of whom
associated with the Nazis and assisted the
Vichy government. Fourcade’s willingness to
put herself in mortal danger for her principles
sets her on the road to spydom—and to leader-
ship, after the Vichy police capture Loustau-
nau-Lacau and he taps her as his successor.
Tense and absorbing, Madame Fourcade’s
Secret War is filled with betrayals, quick
escapes, and secret identities: she dons dis-
guises, doles out animal code names (Four-
cade, herself, is the unassuming yet tough
“Hedgehog”), and at one point even escapes
the Nazis by shimmying naked through the
bars of a prison window. Though Olson’s cast
of characters is almost too large—readers will
thank her for including mini-summaries of
Alliance’s key agents at the very start—the
book still feels intensely personal. It’s a pains-
takingly researched portrait of a spy network
and a leader whose own agents were often
reluctant to serve beneath a woman.
Not that naysayers had the last word: Four-
cade’s levelheadedness, self-sacrifice, and
authoritative decision-making tended to win
over even her most dismissive skeptics. Olson
ensures that readers respect her, too. Don’t be
surprised if you find yourself nodding along
GRANGER; OPPOSITE: PERISCOPE GAMES
with one male agent as he enthuses over his
boss: “A woman,” he gushes to a doubtful
would-be spy. “But not just any woman! She’s
an indisputable and undisputed leader.”
—Erin Blakemore is a journalist from Boulder,
Colorado. Her book The Heroine’s Bookshelf
won the Colorado Book Award for nonfiction.
BOOK BRIEFS
A micro-trend of the moment is
women spies of World War II.
D-DAY GIRLS
The Spies Who
Armed the Resistance,
Sabotaged the Nazis,
and Helped Win
World War II
By Sarah Rose. 400 pp.
Crown, 2019. $28.
From a treasure trove of
firsthand sources, Rose
deftly chronicles the
dramatic stories of three
bold Allied spies who put
themselves in harm’s way
fighting with resistance
forces in France, harrass-
ing the Nazi occupation,
and laying the ground-
work for D-Day.
A WOMAN OF NO
IMPORTANCE
The Untold Story
of the American Spy
Who Helped Win
World War II
By Sonia Purnell. 368
pp. Viking, 2019. $28.
Known to the Gestapo
as the Limping Lady,
Virginia Hall battled
sexism and disability
(she had a prosthetic leg)
while helping to spark the
French Resistance. Purnell
tells her tale using inter-
views with family, newly
unearthed documents,
and a heady mixture of
realism and suspense.
CODE NAME: LISE
The True Story of the
Woman Who Became
WWII’s Most Highly
Decorated Spy
By Larry Loftis. 360 pp.
Gallery Books, 2019. $27.
Combining novelistic flair
and meticulous research,
author Larry Loftis tells
how a self-described
“very simple, ordinary
woman,” Odette Sansom,
became an agent for
Britain’s Special Opera-
tions Executive, and even-
tually, the most highly
decorated spy—male or
female—of the war.
REVIEWS GAMES
SERIOUS SIMULATION
POST SCRIPTUM Periscope Games, $30.
WORLD WAR II RATING ++++
THE BASICS Post Scriptum is an ambitious and detailed first-person
shooter computer game. It emphasizes accurate depictions of infantry and
armored combat, complete with real-life limitations and difficulties.
THE OBJECTIVE Set against the backdrop of the European Theater, Allied
and Axis teams compete to eliminate each other or to control specific zones
on a map that represent where both the Normandy invasion and Operation
Market Garden occurred. To accomplish this, team members must commu-
nicate enemy positions and strategically monitor their own locations.
HISTORICAL ACCURACY Uniforms, helmets, and other field gear are re-
created at a level of detail seldom seen in World War II shooters, with visi-
ble seam lines and raised “3D” details. The weapons—including guns like
Germany’s MG 42 machine gun and MP 40 submachine gun; Britain’s Lee-
Enfield No.4 rifle; and America’s M1 Garand rifle—are photorealistic, with
firing and reloading sounds as vivid as their appearances.
THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY Graphics and modeling are strong
suits, with breathtaking scenery, characters, and explosions. Tank combat
is close to true armored warfare simulation, requiring teamwork and criti-
cal thinking for effective battle. Some players might dislike gameplay sim-
plifications—quick revives for fallen players, for example—along with the
occasional sluggish movement of characters inside buildings or of vehi-
cles driving over uneven terrain. My only true gripe, though, is the lack of
fully destructible terrain and structures, which would add elements of
unpredictability to the fighting.
PLAYABILITY Players must quickly adapt to complex key controls and in-
game menus as they cycle through weapons, tools, medical kits, and other
specialized gear. They’ll also have to get used to an unevenly paced style
of combat that could be best described as “periods of boredom with
spurts of panic.” Matches can last for up to an hour, with clashes occurring
at random spots or intervals. Those who favor scenarios similar to real-life
battles over simplistic and faced-paced gaming will appreciate what this
game is trying to accomplish.
THE BOTTOM LINE Some players might get discouraged by Post Scrip-
tum’s complex controls, clunky character movement, and inconsistent
combat, but those hunting for a period-authentic World War II shooter
with a mostly unscripted multi-player experience should give it a spin.
—Hayden A. Foster is the assistant curator at the Institute of Military Tech-
nology and a writer for American Rifleman
AUGUST 2019
73

REVIEWS BOOKS
OLD FOX,
SAME TRICKS
BIOGR A PHIES OF ERW IN ROMMEL
abound, and any new addition to the tribe
must begin with a justification for its own
existence. This might be the precise problem
with military historian Samuel W. Mitcham
Jr.’s latest book, Desert Fox. It has consider-
able virtues: smooth prose, clear descriptions
of some of World War II’s most complex bat-
tles, and a high level of excitement. Mitcham,
a scholar of the German war effort, has honed
his skills producing works similar to this one
for decades; no one should be surprised that
DESERT FOX Desert Fox is a page-turner.
The Storied What you’re learning as you turn those
Military Career of pages may be another matter. Mitcham gives
Erwin Rommel readers a taste of the early Rommel years: his
By Samuel W. hair-raising adventures as a company com-
Mitcham Jr. mander of mountain troops in World War I;
436 pp. Regnery the heroism that earned him the Pour le
History, 2019. Mérite medal at World War I’s pivotal Battle of
$29.99. Caporetto in 1917; his time as commander of
the 7th Panzer Division in France in 1940. But
the general’s thrilling campaigns in the West-
ern Desert form Mitcham’s real raison d’être,
spanning well over half the book.
74 WORLD WAR II
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, in
Libya during Germany’s North
African campaign, addresses
Afrika Corps troops from a tank.
And therein lies a problem,
because it is precisely these
campaigns that are the best
known in what we might call
the “Rommel canon.” Buffs can
recite this narrative by heart:
the helter-skelter to-ing and
fro-ing across North Africa—
from El Agheila to Tobruk to
El Agheila again and on to El
Alamein—with Rommel often
in the lead tank. He’s an excit-
ing, hard-driven character,
one of the most aggressive
field commanders of all time,
and readers love retracing his
adventures. But while the narrative is superfi-
cially exciting, very rarely does Mitcham
engage with a question that plenty of histori-
ans have been asking themselves in years of
late: did any of it really matter? Is a lead tank
the place for the commander of an entire field
army—in this case Panzerarmee Afrika? Isn’t
Rommel neglecting important administrative
issues in the realm of supply, command, and
control? Is he completely blameless for the
Axis disaster in North Africa?
On a more personal level, Mitcham wants
the reader to know that Rommel was a good
man. We hear of Rommel’s refusal to massa-
cre prisoners, his rejection of overt anti-
Semitism, and how he disobeys Hitler’s par-
ticularly senseless orders. All to the good! But
isn’t it fair to point out that Rommel could get
away with some of these things because he
was commanding in a secondary theater, liter-
ally separated from Führer HQ by a great sea?
It’s difficult to imagine Rommel’s record
being quite so spotless had he commanded an
army in the Soviet Union, in the heartland of
Nazi mass murder. Actually, it’s impossible.
Desert Fox has its strengths, but it doesn’t
HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
have much new to tell us about Rommel; the
book could have been written 30 years ago. In
this case, a skilled writer and an interesting
subject have added up to less than the sum of
their parts. —Robert M. Citino, World War II’s
“Fire for Effect” columnist, is The National
World War II Museum’s Samuel Zemurray
Stone Senior Historian.
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BATTLE FILMS
BY MARK GRIMSLEY
SOLDIER ON THE
SILVER SCREEN
MIDWAY THROUGH Platoon (1986), Oliver Stone’s classic film
about the Vietnam War, a brash private reassures a squad mate
assigned to share his foxhole, “Don’t you worry, Junior. You’re hang-
ing with Audie Murphy here, my man!” He doesn’t have to explain
the name—or the reputation—he’s evoking. The squad mate knows.
The audience knows. Audie Murphy was well-known as the most
highly decorated American soldier of World War II—indeed, in the
entire military history of the United States. He was practically a
household name before the war’s end, and his fame skyrocketed
76 WORLD WAR II
War hero-turned-actor Audie Murphy’s most
memorable film role was as himself in the
deeply personal To Hell and Back (1955).
after the debut of To Hell and Back, the 1955
film based on Murphy’s 1949 memoir. To Hell
and Back was autobiographical in a different
sense as well, for in it Murphy played himself.
Contrary to common belief, To Hell and
Back was not the soldier-turned-actor’s first
film. Soon after the war, he had been discov-
ered by James Cagney, who perceived a star
quality in the slightly-built 20-year-old with
a demeanor at once soft-spoken and uncom-
promising. It took time, but parts came Mur-
phy’s way; To Hell and Back was actually his
16th onscreen appearance.
It was also his most personal film, and he
approached it very differently from his previ-
ous productions, like the Western films in
which he frequently appeared. Murphy had a
reputation for being easygoing, but with To
Hell and Back he was much more hands-on,
serving as an uncredited technical adviser and
making crucial casting decisions. He insisted
that the script reflect the experience of all
infantrymen, not just his own. “I’ve always felt
their story should be told,” said Murphy. “I just
play a part in it.” He knew that the audience
would include thousands of veterans, noting,
“There’s going to be one hell of a jury looking at
this film and reviewing it out front.”
To Hell and Back was shot in 1954, primarily
at the U.S. Army base at Fort Lewis, Washing-
ton, which provided lavish assistance in the
form of tanks, trucks, and other vehicles. None-
theless, the battle sequences made Murphy
uneasy. They seemed like pale imitations of
reality—“powder-puff battle,” he observed.
The scenes made him uneasy for another
reason as well because they sometimes caused
his actual combat experiences to come flood-
ing back. “Your mind plays back something
that you don’t want to hear or see or feel again,”
he said. Director Jesse Hibbs noted in combat
scenes that Murphy “didn’t seem to think
about acting. There was a primitive alertness
about him…. He reacted to every explosion and
HERITAGE AUCTIONS; OPPOSITE: ALAMY
every sound of machine-gun fire instinctively.”
Although Murphy displayed heroism on
many battlefields, two incidents did more
than any others to make him America’s most
decorated soldier. In one of them, Murphy
seized a captured German machine gun and
used it to wipe out 22 enemies. He did this
partially in reaction to the death of
his best friend, Lattie Tipton, called
“Brandon” in the film. Brandon was
played by Charles Drake, whom
Murphy selected because they had
been in previous films together and
Drake reminded him of Tipton.
Murphy had trouble nerving himself
to relive the death of his friend, and
Hibbs had to delay shooting the scene
until Murphy could handle it. When
filming began, Hibbs felt as though
“Audie wasn’t doing much acting in it.
He played it as he felt it. His lips were
quivering and his eyes filled…. When
Charles Drake was hit and cried out
‘Murphy’—Audie wasn’t acting from
there on.”
Murphy’s other great battlefield
feat occurred in the Colmar Pocket in
France, when he climbed aboard a
blazing tank destroyer, manned its
machine gun, and singlehandedly
fought off two reinforced companies
of German infantry. In the film, the
THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL
OF MILITARY HISTORY
Superiors branded
him “difficult.” Yet
Percy Hobart was
the genius the Allies
D-DAY’S
desperately needed.
UNSUNG
HERO Asleep at the Gap
Siege of Saint-Malo
SUMMER 2019
MHQP-190700-COVER-DIGITAL.indd 1 4/4/19 10:02 AM
scene is so incredible that it would
have come across as outlandish if the
audience did not already know that
Murphy had experienced it in real
life. Even then, it had moments that
seemed more like Hollywood than
reality. At one point Murphy calls in
artillery fire, and the Fire Direction
Center asks just how close the Ger-
mans are to his position. “Hold the
phone, and I’ll let you talk to them!”
he replies. Yet during the battle,
Murphy had made that very retort.
To Hell and Back’s final scene
shows Murphy receiving the Medal of
Honor. Murphy hated the scene and
wanted to kill it. Most viewers would
be aware of that outcome, he rea-
soned. “And for the others, the events
will speak for themselves.” It took two
whole days for director Hibbs to per- Murphy hated the final
suade Murphy that a film about Amer-
ica’s most decorated hero could only Medal of Honor scene
end with his being awarded the great-
est honor his country had to give. +
and wanted to kill it.
HOW MUCH TIME
DID IT TAKE FOR
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
TO DELIVER HIS
GETTYSBURG
ADDRESS?
14 minutes, 2-3 minutes,
16-17 minutes or 7 minutes?
For more, visit
WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/
MAGAZINES/QUIZ
HISTORYNET.com
ANSWER: 2-3 MINUTES. DELIVERED FOUR AND A HALF MONTHS
AFTER THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG, LINCOLN’S ICONIC ADDRESS
FRAMED THE CIVIL WAR AS NOT A STRUGGLE FOR THE UNION, BUT
A STRUGGLE TO PRESERVE THE PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN EQUALITY,
AS OUTLINED IN THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.
Clarksville, Tennessee Honors Veterans with
5-Day Celebration in September
Clarksville, Tenn. is a community that appreci-
ates veterans. The city borders the Fort Camp-
bell Army Post, so appreciating military service
is simply the way of life for both residents and
businesses. Beyond the ingrained respect, the
community publicly honors its heroes with an
annual five-day Welcome Home Veterans Cel-
ebration. This year, during September 18-22,
the community will host multiple activities to
celebrate and honor veterans.
New activities on tap for 2019 include:
• 9/11 Never Forget Mobile Exhibit, a tribute
to all those who lost their lives on Septem-
ber 11, 2001. The memorial provides interac-
tive education; including artifacts such as
steel beams from the towers, documentary
videos, and recordings of first responder
radio transmissions. Interactive guided
tours are carried out by FDNY firefighters
who provide firsthand accounts of the day
and its aftermath.
• Traveling Korean War Memorial, consists
of 19 soldiers walking through a Korean
rice paddy and three soldiers off to the side
setting up a campfire.
Returning activities for the Celebration Week
include:
• Lee Greenwood Concert. Enjoy this
American music legend in a free outdoor
concert.
• American Traveling Tribute Wall is an
80-percent scale version of the Vietnam
Memorial Wall in Washington, DC and
contains every name that is etched on the
original monument.
• Field of Honor – Veterans Tribute flag
display is part of a nationally recognized
community program that demonstrates
the strength and unity of Americans
• A Wreath Laying and Massing of the
Colors will take place at the Wall.
• A Valor Luncheon features a key-note
speaker and presentation from Quilts of
Valor.
• Welcome Home Parade in historic down-
town on Saturday. (Veterans, please regis-
ter on the event website to participate.)
See all exhibits and the Lee Greenwood
concert at Beachaven Vineyards & Winery,
1100 Dunlop Lane. Keep up to date with all
activities or register for events online at
welcomehomeveteranscelebration.com or
contact contact Frances Manzitto by email
at frances@visitclarksvilletn.com or phone at
931-245-4345.
AARP is the premier sponsor for all event activi-
ties. Clarksville is located 40 miles northwest of
Nashville near the Tennessee/Kentucky border
on I-24.

Frances Manzitto, CTIS

Sept. 19-22, 2019 frances@visitclarksvilletn.com
Sept. 16-20. 2020 1-800-530-2487 ext 231 | 931-245-4345
welcomehomeveteranscelebration.com
 CHALLENGE
THUMBS UP
We altered this image of a British soldier in the cockpit of a downed
German Me-109 fighter to create one inaccuracy. What is it?
© HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN WALKER
Answer to the
April Challenge:
We removed the M8 Grey-
hound’s machine gun and
sight; 54 of you got that
right. Many suspected we
added the fuel tanks on the
front—a danger in combat.
We didn’t; armored vehicle
expert Steven Zaloga says
he suspects these jerricans
held water.
Congratulations to
the winners: Jim Carr,
Ronald Fronckowiak, and
Robert Reese
Please send
your answer with
your name and mailing
address to: August 2019
Challenge, World War
II, 1919 Gallows Road,
Suite 400, Vienna,
VA 22182; or e-mail:
challenge@historynet.
com. Three winners,
chosen at random
from all correct entries
submitted by August 15,
will receive Four Hours
of Fury by James M.
Fenelon. Answers will
appear in the December
2019 issue.
AUGUST 2019
79
 FAMILIAR FACE
ONE TOUGH ACT
U.S. MARINE CORPS/NATIONAL ARCHIVES;

Five days after the U.S. Marine Corps announced it would begin
accepting female recruits, Bernice Frankel, 20, enlisted. It was
INSET: ABC VIA GETTY IMAGES

February 20, 1943; she’d been set to begin work at Sperry Corporation when she heard the news and
“decided the only thing to do was to join,” she explained in a letter in her military personnel file. She
spent the remainder of the war stateside, mainly as a truck driver. Frankel would later be known by her
screen name, Bea Arthur, and for her role as the tough and sarcastic Dorothy Zbornak (inset, on right)
on the TV series Golden Girls—a character foreshadowed in a personality appraisal conducted as part
of the enlistment process: “Officious—but probably a good worker if she has her own way!”

80 WORLD WAR II
 OUR MISSION
Chartered by Congress, The Purple Heart serves all combat wounded
veterans and their families who stand alongside us in uniform by fostering
an environment of goodwill and camaraderie, supporting necessary
legislative initiatives and providing services through our various programs.

JOIN
BECOME A MEMBER
Currently comprised of over 650 chapters
and 45,000 members, The Purple Heart
encourages all persons of good moral
character who are awarded the Purple
Heart Medal by the United States AND are
Active Duty or have Honorable or General
discharge to apply.
CONNECT
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF OUR
SERVICES AND PROGRAMS
The Purple Heart has numerous programs that
serve ALL veterans. These vital services include
processing VA benefit claims, advocating
for legislation on Capitol Hill, awareness for
veteran suicide and homelessness, applying for
scholarships and more.

DONATE
MAKE A GIFT TO SUPPORT VETERANS TODAY
The Purple Heart receives no government funding and relies solely on the support of
individuals like you. Please consider making a gift today in honor of all the veterans
who have fought for our country and need our help.

To learn more, visit: purpleheart.org