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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Curtiss-Wright Corporation came into being in 1929 through the merger of companies started by pioneering aviators Glenn Curtiss and the Wright brothers. Within the new company, the Curtiss-Wright airplane division made airplanes while the Wright Aeronautical Corporation focused on engines. By the time of World War II, Curtiss-Wright held more defense contracts than any organization other than vastly larger General Motors and had become something of a bully. It used lobbyists, legislators, friends in high places and its own overzealous salesmen to get what it wanted. It made some adequate but unspectacular airplanes and some big radial engines, but why Curtiss-Wright could punch so far above its weight remains something of a mystery. 

Trouble arrived for Curtiss-Wright in 1943 when its engines became the focus of a congressional investigation led by a senator named Harry S. Truman. The inquiry, launched back in March 1941, was formally known as the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program and it helped propel the obscure politician from Missouri into the vice presidency and eventually the White House. Strangely enough, it also impacted the life of actress Marilyn Monroe—but more about that later.

At the time, the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk was the company’s go-to product. The design was essentially a 1933 radial-engine Curtiss P-36 Hawk fitted with an inline Allison V-12 engine. While not a bad airplane, the P-40 was obsolete by the time the United States entered World War II. Still, it was the best America had at the time. Messerschmitt Me-109s and Mitsubishi A6M Zeros ran rings around it at altitude—the P-40 had just a single-stage supercharger—but it remained an effective ground-attack machine.         

Yet the obsolete P-40 stayed in full production until the end of 1944. Why not ramp up manufacture of the North American P-51 Mustang and Republic P-47 Thunderbolt instead, Truman’s investigative committee asked? But Curtiss liked the easy profit it derived from the simple, proven, utilitarian design, and its attempts to create a successor—the XP-46, XP-60 and XP-62—were uninspired. All were canceled. Curtiss had no aeronautical geniuses like Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson, North American’s Ed Schmued or Republic’s Alexander Kartveli to push it to the forefront. Its best talent was an engineer named Don Berlin, who was held in high regard but never really rose beyond his singular success with the P-40. It is notable that when the British asked North American Aviation to license-build P-40s for the Royal Air Force, the California company said, “Hell, give us three months and the back of an envelope and we’ll design a real fighter for you.” That fighter became the Mustang. 

One new airplane the company had to offer was the SB2C Curtiss Helldiver, but it was an ill-handling, poorly manufactured, aerodynamically misshapen beast loathed by pilots, back seaters and maintainers. It was not a Don Berlin design but was credited to Curtiss engineer Raymond C. Blaylock, who seemed to have stepped out of obscurity long enough to head the Helldiver program and then disappear. (In fact, he ultimately became the vice-president of engineering of Chance Vought. He specialized in missiles and was not involved in the design of the remarkable F8 Crusader.) 

To be fair, it wasn’t all Curtiss’s fault. The Navy ordered the SB2C to succeed the Douglas SBD and demanded that a pair of the Curtiss dive bombers had to fit on a fleet carrier’s elevators while at the same time requiring that the SB2C be faster and longer-ranged than the SBD and carry a heavier load of ordnance. This led to the Helldiver receiving an awkwardly short aft fuselage, a huge vertical tail that nonetheless failed to keep the short-coupled airplane longitudinally stable, and a monster wing to lift all that weight at carrier-approach speeds. When Curtiss put a prototype SB2C model into the MIT wind tunnel in 1939, aerodynamicist Otto Koppen said, “If they built more than one of these, they are crazy.” 

The Helldiver’s poor handling characteristics, structural weaknesses—it tended to shed the aft fuselage and empennage under the stress of arrested carrier landings—and lousy stall characteristics at final-approach speeds caught the Truman Committee’s attention. It didn’t help that Helldiver production had been delayed by nine months while the Navy demanded more than 800 modifications. For many months thereafter, Curtiss failed to produce a single SB2C that the Navy considered usable as a combat aircraft. What particularly griped the Truman Committee was that Curtiss had been spending tens of thousands of government dollars advertising the SB2C to the public as “the world’s deadliest dive bomber,” despite the fact that it had not produced a single usable Helldiver.

There was even a song about the SB2C. It went, “Oh mother, dear mother/Take down the blue star/Replace it with one that is gold/Your son is a Helldiver driver/He’ll never be 30 years old.” The Australians and the British were smart enough to cancel their large orders for the SB2C before more than a few were built.

Initially, Curtiss was to construct the SB2C at a huge new government-funded factory in Buffalo, New York. Then production was shifted to Columbus, Ohio. For months, nothing happened, and rumors began circulating among the sidelined workers in Columbus that their efforts were being literally sabotaged. Nobody realized that the problem was the fact that Curtiss hadn’t been able to produce a single successful airplane in Buffalo. 

Nevertheless, the U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) ordered thousands of Helldivers as a variant called the A-25 Shrike dive bomber. Big mistake. The Germans had already learned, with the Junkers Ju-87 Stuka, that terrestrial dive bombing worked only if the bombers had total air superiority and were attacking targets undefended by anti-aircraft guns. That kind of situation was rare enough that Allied air forces had abandoned the concept of dedicated dive bombers by the time the A-25 was ready for delivery.   

Things were bad enough with Curtiss airplanes. They were even worse for the engines being produced by the Wright Aeronautical Corporation. Several Army inspectors stationed at Wright’s engine factory at Lockland, Ohio, told Truman that they were being encouraged to ignore proper inspection procedures and to approve faulty materials and even entire engines being delivered to the government for use in the Helldiver and various other aircraft. That engine was the 1,600-hp Wright R-2600 Twin Cyclone. 

The R-2600 was the engine that goaded Pratt & Whitney into designing and producing the R-2800, the best radial of World War II, but the big Wright was an excellent engine itself—when it was built right. It powered thousands of North American B-25 Mitchell medium bombers, including those that flew America’s first offensive strike against Japan—the April 1942 Doolittle Raid. 

A preliminary investigation by Truman’s staff revealed that there were ample grounds for the whistleblowers’ claims, and that the inspection failings were obvious enough that company execs and Army inspectors should have been aware of the problems.

Well, let’s not be hasty here, the Army said. We’ll look into this and report back. Brig. Gen. Bennett Meyers and his staff did so, and Meyers announced that the Army could find nothing amiss. Meyers either lied or had been duped by his own inspectors, whom the Truman Committee later found to be actively obstructing the investigation. 

The engine division blamed the snitching on “petty bickering over privileges, authority and rights.” The Truman Committee, however, soon uncovered evidence of false tests of R-2600s and the materials that went into them, destruction of records, improper reporting of test results, forged inspection reports, off-the-cuff oral alteration of the tolerances allowed for parts, outright skipping of inspections and, in general, letting Wright’s engine-production needs override the recommendations of both company and Army inspectors. 

There almost certainly had been crashes and deaths caused by the failure of faulty Wright R-2600s, but nobody could identify any specific examples outside the mass of wartime catastrophes attributable to everything from thunderstorms to pilot error. Truman himself said, “The facts are that [Wright was] turning out phony engines, and I have no doubt that a lot of kids in training planes were killed as a result.” The fact that no 1,600-hp Wright Twin Cyclone had ever powered a trainer escaped his attention, but never mind.

As is often the case in such relationships, a culture had grown that encouraged Army inspectors to believe their primary duty was toward Wright rather than the AAF, and that keeping their jobs depended on keeping the company happy. If an Army inspector refused to accept material that he knew was faulty, he got a reputation as a knucklehead who failed to “get along.” Failing to get along meant you risked anything from an inconvenient job transfer to outright losing that job. When one Army inspector produced an honest report on conditions at the Lockland factory, he was immediately prohibited from entering any Wright plant. 

Testimony to the Truman Committee revealed that whenever an Army inspector tried to reject suspect engine material, a Wright exec would insist that the material was “important to the company.” If Wright appealed an inspector’s decision—to the inspector’s supervisor, to an AAF technical advisor, to the Army’s Wright Field itself—the appeal was invariably allowed. Inevitably, Army inspectors came to realize that objections were futile if Wright Aero disagreed.

Wright denied Army inspectors access to the company’s own precision instruments for their inspections, meaning they were limited to purely visual examinations. If they couldn’t see a crack, it didn’t exist. Wright’s excuse was that the Army inspectors weren’t properly trained in the use of the equipment. This was particularly true, the company said, for a device used to test the hardness of the gears in the R-2600’s drivetrain. It became an open secret that Wright was faking the hardness testing of these gears. The military inspectors were also denied the use of rejection stamps or embossing warnings to identify failed parts or engines, since Wright wanted to sell those wares to unsuspecting commercial and export operators. 

More than a quarter of the R-2600s built at Lockland failed a basic three-hour test run. Randomly selected engines were also put through a 150-hour quality test, but the Truman Committee found that since 1941 not a single engine had completed the test. One of them failed at 28 hours. 

Truman claimed to have personally rejected 400 ready-to-ship Lockland engines. “They were putting defective motors in planes, and the generals couldn’t seem to find anything wrong [with them],” he said. “So we went down, myself and a couple of senators, and we condemned 400 or 500 of those engines. And I sent a couple of generals who had been approving those engines to Leavenworth.” (Fort Leavenworth was the Army stockade in Kansas.)

Wright company inspectors often weren’t the problem. The AAF’s own people too often wanted to go along to get along. Chief Inspector Lt. Col. Frank Greulich tried to intimidate and discredit witnesses who gave negative testimony to the Truman Committee, and Greulich himself lied to the committee a number of times. As one observer put it, “The Committee witnessed the unpleasant spectacle of a lieutenant colonel, a major and several high civilian officials all telling entirely contradictory stories.”     

Once the Truman people had finished their investigation, the AAF insisted on repeating their work, inevitably making the same negative findings. But those faults led the AAF to a different conclusion: that the record of engines built at Lockland compared favorably with the record of other types of engines built elsewhere. The best they could say of Curtiss-Wright’s products was that “they were not always the best [but] have been usable.” 

One thing became readily apparent. The Lockland scandal was a prime example of what happened when a huge government-built, spare-no-expense factory tried to turn out an enormous quantity of material with inexperienced management and impossible production schedules while maintaining quality in the face of constant changes in tolerances and specifications.

Middle management was so overextended by the sudden wartime demands that a lot of the execs were simply incompetent, the workers inadequately trained and experienced engineers and supervisors too few. The more plants the government built for Curtiss-Wright, the more diluted the cadre of qualified and talented managerial personnel became. Only two percent of the first batch of applicants for jobs at Curtiss-Wright’s new plant in Columbus, Ohio, had any experience in aircraft production, yet they would soon be building Curtiss SB2C Helldivers, which had been described as the most complex single-engine design of its time. The Lockland plant was the biggest single-story industrial facility in the world, but its inept management soon turned the sleek new factory into a cluttered, crowded, ill-lit dump. One AAF report called it “a disgrace to the company and to the Air Forces.” 

It was thought at the time, at least by some, that Curtiss-Wright was untouchable because its president, Guy Vaughn, was a big-time player on Capitol Hill. Vaughn was a former automobile racer and speed-record holder who had come up through the ranks at Wright Aero. He was responsible, at least in part, for the development of one of the most important aircraft engines ever built, the Wright J-series Whirlwind. Particularly in its nine-cylinder J-5 form, the Whirlwind was the first reliable, bulletproof aircraft engine available. It was so reliable, in fact, that Charles Lindbergh chose it for his 1927 transatlantic flight, and it never missed a beat. (In truth, though, engineer Charles Lawrance did the heavy lifting and designing for the Whirlwind.)

Vaughn griped that the problems the Truman Committee claimed to be finding were simply “standard and recognized manufacturing and inspection procedures.” During his cross-examination by the committee, Vaughn demanded to know exactly what was wrong with three specific R-2600s that had been crated and ready to ship before being rejected by inspectors. It turned out that one of them lacked a lockwire on a gear, another had corroded cylinders, and the third had a driveshaft gear with a broken tooth and an inoperative magneto—defects that could have led to crashes. Vaughn huffed that he didn’t consider these engines to be defective. 

In the end, the Truman Committee toned down its report and Curtiss-Wright ended up suffering no penalty. This despite the fact that the Lockland plant had plainly turned out defective engines with the cooperation of dishonest AAF and company inspectors, and that some of those engines almost certainly went on to kill pilots and crewmen. The Justice Department did sue Wright and eight of its executives for selling the government known defective aircraft and engines, but the suit was never pursued. Three Army Air Force officers, including Greulich, did end up at Leavenworth, however, after being court-martialed for neglect of duty. (Despite Truman’s claim, none of them were generals.)         

The Truman Committee also concluded that Curtiss-Wright had received “far more contracts from the Army and Navy than warranted by the quality of its products or its ability to produce them.” The committee recommended that all Curtiss-Wright contracts be renegotiated, but this never happened either. 

However, the committee’s investigation marked the beginning of the end for Curtiss-Wright, a company that had once manufactured and sold more different aircraft, engines, propellers, accessories and parts than anybody else in the industry. Curtiss-Wright had become good at cranking out quantity, but less adept at creating quality. It continued to build second-best P-40s, concentrating on increasing the production rate, lowering costs and maximizing the profit. 

By 1947, with war profiteering a distant memory, Curtiss-Wright shut down 16 of its 19 plants. The company’s only possible moneymaking program was an attempt to turn the Curtiss C-46 Commando cargo plane into a pressurized airliner. But C-46s were so cheaply available as surplus that operators were buying and refitting the airplanes themselves. (And none saw the need for pressurization.)           

The CW-32 was to be a four-engine airliner with military airlift capability, but the project was canceled in 1948. The company was testing an all-weather jet interceptor, the XP-87, but when an expensive wing modification appeared necessary, the U.S. Air Force insisted that Curtiss pay a major part of the expense. CEO Guy Vaughn refused, and the Air Force retaliated by canceling the project. 

After 40 years, Curtiss was out of the airplane business.

Chaos took over the company’s front office as the focus shifted to profit-taking at the expense of R&D. As the excellent book Curtiss-Wright: Greatness and Decline puts it, “A vigorous and well-planned course of action was desperately needed. This, in turn, required a high degree of managerial skill and perhaps a bit of luck. Curtiss-Wright, it seemed, lacked both.” The leadership that took over Curtiss-Wright “came from the world of corporate finance and investment banking,” the book notes, “and had almost no direct connection with, or understanding of, the aviation industry.” By the mid-1950s, Curtiss-Wright “no longer had a distinct identity. The company had no viable product to develop and sell, and overdiversification was dissipating its resources.” 

Today the Curtiss-Wright Corporation has its headquarters in North Carolina and manufactures components for aircraft, but the days when the company dominated the U.S. aviation industry ended long ago. 

In 1944, Harry Truman became Franklin D. Roosevelt’s running mate and advanced to the vice presidency after FDR’s reelection to a fourth term. Some say he was chosen to shut him up, others that it was a reward for years of chasing down fraud, waste and abuse in the defense industry. (This part of Truman’s career is detailed in Steve Drummond’s excellent new book The Watchdog: How the Truman Committee Battled Corruption and Helped Win World War Two.) Truman became president only months later, when Roosevelt died  suddenly  in April 1945. 

Marilyn Monroe is perhaps the most unlikely person to have had her life changed by the Curtiss-Wright catastrophe. That’s due to a young American playwright, Arthur Miller, who would later write Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and other classics. But in 1944 he had written a play that flopped after only three performances on Broadway. He decided that if that was the best he could do, he’d take up accounting, or selling insurance. Fortunately, he decided to give playwriting one more try. 

In January 1947, Miller’s play All My Sons opened on Broadway, became a huge success and launched his career. Based directly on the Curtiss-Wright scandal, the play told the story of a man who knowingly produced bogus aircraft parts. One batch of his parts—badly cast cylinder heads—resulted in the crashes of 21 P-40s, including one that killed his own son.

In an odd but fascinating mismatch, the now-celebrated Miller fell for actress and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe. Monroe herself sought escape from her dumb-blonde image, and marriage to a successful playwright and intellectual like Miller, she felt, was her ticket to legitimacy. They wed in 1956 but the marriage, like Curtiss-Wright’s dominance of the U.S. aviation industry, soon came to an end.

But for Curtiss-Wright’s fall from grace, it never would have happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commandos on Wings” ran the headline of the article in Washington’s Evening Star on November 1, 1942. The subhead read, “They are Uncle Sam’s glider troops, who drop silently out of the sky, seize airfields, blow up bridges and ammunition dumps.” The article included a quote from Brig. Gen. James Doolittle, hero of his eponymous air raid on Japan the previous April. “Don’t forget the boys without motors,” he said. “They will be the spearhead of future Airborne attacks.” 

Yet a decade later the U.S. Army removed gliders from its arsenal. They had been rendered obsolete by the evolution of the helicopter. Helicopters, not gliders, were the spearhead of future airborne attacks.  

The combat life of the military glider was a short but adventurous one. Germany pioneered the use of gliders in warfare and was the first to deploy them in combat, using 41 gliders to capture Belgium’s Eben-Emael fortress on May 10, 1940, along with three bridges over the Albert Canal the fort protected. The Allies were impressed enough to initiate their own glider program. In the ensuing five years the Allies used gliders in some of the most famous operations of the war, including the invasions of Sicily, France and Germany. The engineless craft also served in the challenging terrain of the Burmese jungle.

However, their contributions, as well as the bravery of the men who piloted the craft and those who trained as glider infantry, have not received the recognition they deserve. “It has just been overlooked,” reflected Flight Officer George E. Buckley of the 434th Troop Carrier Group, 74th Troop Carrier Squadron, in a 2007 documentary entitled Silent Wings. “People never heard of them. People to this day, that were old enough during World War II to know about things, say, ‘Gliders? I didn’t know they used gliders.’”     

America came late to the concept of airborne warfare. It wasn’t until May 1, 1939, that the U.S. chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, sent a memo to Maj. Gen. George Lynch, his chief of infantry, entitled “Air Infantry.” Lynch’s instructions were “to make a study for the purpose of determining the desirability of organizing, training, and conducting tests of a small detachment of air infantry with a view to ascertaining whether or not our Army should contain a unit or units of this nature.” 

Lynch replied swiftly and positively, concluding that air infantry had practicable uses, but other priorities sidelined the project until after war in Europe erupted in September 1939. In January 1940 Marshall made the development of an air infantry a priority, and to lead its formation and development he assigned Major William C. Lee, a veteran of World War I. Today Lee is referred to as the “Father of the American Airborne,” and it is said that when the 101st Airborne Division jumped into Normandy in the early hours of June 6, 1944, they did so with a yell of “Bill Lee.” But Lee was also influential in the evolution of America’s military glider.

In his seminal book Paratrooper!, Gerard Devlin—an airborne veteran of Korea and Vietnam—wrote that for Lee the glider “represented a means of delivering troop reinforcements and supplies to his parachute troops once they had landed in remote areas. Equally important, the glider was an aerial vehicle for the delivery of large caliber weapons and light wheeled vehicles.” 

The first step toward reaching that goal was to select a manufacturer from the several prototypes that were being tested at Wright Field in Ohio. The model chosen was the Waco CG-4A  glider, which was 49 feet in length and had a wingspan of 84 feet. Its load-carrying capacity was 4,000 pounds, which equated to two pilots and 13 combat soldiers.

Actual gliders weren’t available until October 1942, so in the interim the recruits in the glider training program had to improvise. Larry Kubale was a newly qualified flight officer when he volunteered for gliders in the middle of 1942. “At that point they didn’t have anything other than sail planes,” he recalled. “Cargo gliders weren’t even invented at that point. After about seven weeks of that stuff, I was an instructor in sail planes, and had about sixteen students in four classes.” 

The pilots underwent glider training at one of three centers in Missouri, Nebraska and North Carolina, and by the end of the war 10,000 of them had qualified. The 88th Infantry Airborne Battalion became the United States’ first glider infantry unit in May 1942. Later designated the 88th Glider Infantry Regiment, it was the first of 11 such regiments that served in the war. It wasn’t a volunteer system. Soldiers were assigned to glider regiments and, to their chagrin, they didn’t get the $50 dollars a month extra pay that paratroopers received on account of their hazardous duty. There were other resentments. “We weren’t even allowed jump boots,” recalled Ernest Platz of the 327th Glider Infantry, 101st Airborne Division. “It was a point of honor that the glider men could not use parachute jump boots.” 

The glider men finally received their jump boots when they were shipped overseas, and in time they earned the respect of the paratroopers as well. “I talked with the paratroopers,” said Platz. “They would never go into combat under the gliders because if there’s a plane that was hit, they had a chance to get out by their parachute. But if we were hit, that was it. You had no way, except to crash land. So we got a little respect from them.” Eventually, in July 1944, after representations had been made to Congress, the glider men began receiving the same pay as the  paratroopers did. 

By that time the glider men had proved their courage and effectiveness.

The Allies’ first major glider operation of the war was codenamed Ladbroke. It was an Anglo-American mission launched on the night of July 9-10, 1943. The destination was the eastern coast of Sicily, where 1,600 men of the 1st Airlanding Brigade were to land ahead of the main invasion force and seize several key objectives, including the Ponte Grande bridge just outside Syracuse.

A total of 144 gliders, 136 of them CG-4As, took off from Tunisia, towed by C-47 Dakota tug planes of the American 51st Troop Carrier Wing as well a handful of RAF Albemarle bombers.

The glider pilots were all British. One of them was Staff Sgt. Alec Waldron of the 1st Battalion Glider Pilot Regiment. To his consternation, Waldron found himself behind the controls of an American Waco CG-4A, known to the British as the CG-4 Hadrian. Waldron had trained on a British Airspeed Horsa. “The Hadrian glider was quite a different aircraft to the Horsa,” he reflected. “It had a lower wing loading, carried about half the load—15 people—had a flat angle of approach, lift spoilers, small flaps and was certainly not ideal from a military point of view.” For the Ladbroke operation, the gliders would cast off at pre-determined heights and simply “glide in more or less dead stick to the landing zones.”

Waldron feared the operation “would be a disaster,” and he was right. In many respects it was doomed from the outset. The crews of the C-47s were inadequately trained and, in some cases, of inferior quality to the airmen assigned to bomber and fighter squadrons. It was a similar story for British glider pilots with virtually no experience of night flying and little opportunity to familiarize themselves with the CG-4A glider. 

As the aerial armada sighted Sicily, the glider tugs began ascending to 6,000 feet, the release altitude for the gliders. Simultaneously vessels of the Allied invasion force spotted them and opened fire in the belief they were Axis aircraft. Confusion, panic and inexperience resulted in most of the glider pilots cutting themselves loose prematurely. Ninety of the 144 gliders crashed into the sea south of Sicily, and hundreds of men drowned.

Waldron’s glider came down in the sea about 400 yards from the shore, enabling the soldiers inside his craft to swim to the beach. “I couldn’t swim,” he said. “I floated on a wing…they were machine-gunning us down a searchlight beam and I got a ricochet through my thigh.” 

After Waldron spent about seven hours in the water an Allied vessel picked him up and transported him to a hospital in Malta.  

Paul Gale from Brooklyn was a navigator in one of the C-47s and recalled that none of the crews had been trained properly for such a hazardous night mission. Their instructions were to release the gliders 3,000 yards from the shore but, he reflected, “How the devil do you know when you are 3,000 yards from shore at night without any instrumentation?” Nor were there Pathfinders ashore to light up the landing zones. “There is no fixed point of reference,” he said. “You can see the shoreline maybe, but we had never had any practice.” 

Nonetheless 12 gliders did land close to the target, with 83 British soldiers, enough to seize the Ponte Grande bridge.

Overall, however, and certainly in terms of lives lost, the Sicilian operation was a failure, a result of inexperience and a poor chain of command. But in March 1944 another Anglo-American glider operation provided an audacious example of how gliders could transport special forces behind enemy lines. 

The Chindits were a British unit raised in 1942 by the unorthodox general Orde Wingate. His second-in-command was Michael Calvert, nicknamed “Mad Mike.” The first Chindits operation was a long-range reconnaissance patrol behind Japanese lines in Burma in early 1943. A year later their task was to carry out guerrilla raids against the enemy in Northern Burma to support General Joseph Stilwell’s major offensive there. The Chindits would use CG-4A gliders towed by C-47s of Colonel Phil Cochran’s 1st Air Commando Group to penetrate deep into the Burmese jungle. Sixty-two gliders took off from Lalaghat on March 5 and 35 of them covered the 400 miles to the target. Calvert was aboard one of the gliders and recalled the moment the tow line was cut. “The Dakota’s engines faded away and a tremendous silence enveloped us, weird and frightening after the sound of the familiar and comforting machinery that had carried us through the air,” he wrote. He glanced at the glider pilot, a gum-chewing American named Lees, “who sat relaxed as if driving a Cadillac on a wide American motorway.” 

Three hundred and fifty Chindits landed safely, along with a bulldozer brought in to clear the landing strip of glider detritus. Over the next few days Dakota troop carriers made scores of landings, bringing in 9,000 men, 1,500 mules and 250 tons of equipment. Wingate issued an order of the day in which he declared the Chindits “are inside the enemy’s guts.” Calvert concurred. “Thanks to the Air Force boys we were, indeed, inside the enemy’s guts and it was now up to us to start giving him a stomach-ache.” 

The British and Americans heeded the costly errors of Operation Ladbroke in Sicily as they planned for Operation Overlord, the invasion of northern France in early 1944. Tug and glider pilots received more thorough training, and the wings and fuselage of the gliders were painted in black and white stripes so Allied naval gunners could identify them.

In addition to the nearly 300 CG-4A gliders available for Overlord, there were more than 500 British Horsa gliders, which could carry two pilots and 30 fully equipped troops. The plywood Horsa was also considered more maneuverable on account of its large “barn-door” flaps that made it easier for pilots to execute steep descents onto smaller landing zones. The Horsa had a tricycle undercarriage for takeoff. Once airborne, the pilot would jettison the wheels and use a sprung skid under the fuselage for landing. It had a hinged nose to make loading and unloading of cargo easier, as well as a reinforced floor and double nose wheels to support vehicle weight. Despite the improvements over the CG-4As, the British gave their Horsa a nickname: the “silent coffin.” 

The landing precision of the Horsa was brilliantly demonstrated at 16 minutes past midnight on June 6 when Major John Howard and 180 men of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry glided to earth beside two small bridges over the River Orne (Ranville Bridge) and Caen Canal (Bénouville Bridge) in Normandy. The operation was codenamed “Deadstick” and beforehand its pilots had practiced landings in southern England. One thing they concluded was that 28—not 30—soldiers was the correct payload capacity based on each fully-equipped man weighing 240 pounds.

One factor was left to luck: the number and location of the Nazis’ anti-glider obstacles, dubbed “Rommel’s Asparagus.” These were thick poles sunk into the ground at intervals of 15 to 40 feet and intended to spear unfortunate gliders.

Howard was in the lead glider, which was piloted by Staff Sgt. Jim Wallwork. At seven minutes past midnight, Wallwork released the nylon towline from the tug aircraft. For the next seven minutes he piloted the glider down from 6,000 feet to just over 500, reducing the airspeed as he did so from 160 mph to 110 mph. As he approached the landing zone, Wallwork shouted over his shoulder to the men sitting in rows along both sides of the fuselage. “Brace!” The 28 soldiers linked arms and raised their legs to reduce the risk of breaking them during the landing. “The look on his face was one that one could never forget,” said Howard of Wallwork as the glider came in to land. “I could see those damn great footballs of sweat across his forehead and all over his face.” 

When the glider hit French soil it was more a crash than a landing. The soldiers crawled out of the glider just 30 yards from Bénouville Bridge. Lieutenant Den Brotheridge was shot dead at the head of his men, the first Allied fatality of D-Day, but within 10 minutes the target had been secured.  

Late on D-Day, after tens of thousands of Allied soldiers had landed in Normandy by parachute or landing craft, gliders were used en masse to resupply the troops fighting to secure the beachhead. Nearly 250 gliders came down on two landing zones near Caen to reinforce the British Airborne Division, while to the west 176 gliders, part of Operation Elmira, descended inland from Utah Beach, a couple of miles south of the village of Sainte-Mère-Église, onto a landing zone just over a mile in length and 500 meters wide that covered both the 82nd and 101st Airborne sectors. 

Most of the gliders—140—were Horsas and one of the pilots was Larry Kubale. In his glider was a jeep, a trailer loaded with munitions and ten men. “They figured that fifty percent of us wouldn’t make France, and of the fifty that made it half of them would be coming back after it was over,” he recalled.

Kubale’s glider came down in a field but careered on until it hit some trees. The impact sheared off the wings and catapulted the copilot out of the aircraft. “The guy flying with us, he went right through the nose of the glider,” remembered Kubale. “He had the control in his hands…and he went right through the nose, the steering column in his hands and foot still on the rudder.” The copilot suffered a broken leg.

Kubale’s work was far from over. Having helped bring in the reinforcements, he now became one of them in the field. “The guys that I had with me, they were actually paratroopers, with the 101st Airborne, so I was with them for about four or five days,” he said. By the time it was over, Operation Elmira resupplied the American Airborne with 1,190 troops, 67 jeeps and 24 howitzers. Casualties, compared to the Sicily operation, were light, with 157 troops killed or wounded, and 26 of the 352 pilots killed or injured. 

There were other significant Allied glider operations in 1944, in southern France and in the Netherlands. In France, more than 400 Horsa and CG-4A gliders were used for Operation Dragoon on August 15, landing some 20 miles inland to prevent the Germans from disrupting the landings. The Holland action was part of Operation Market Garden, intended to establish a bridgehead over the lower Rhine at Arnhem and open a pathway into Northern Germany. Despite the support by gliders, which transported more than 14,000 troops as well as weapons and supplies, the operation failed. The last mass use of gliders was for Operation Varsity on March 24, 1945, when the American 17th Airborne Division and the British 6th used more than 900 gliders to pass over the Rhine into Germany. Overall, 21,680 paratroopers and glider men landed on a total of 10 zones in 1,696 jump planes and 1,346 gliders.

Among the U.S. regiments participating in Varsity was the 194th Glider Infantry Regiment, whose instructions were to land just north of Wesel and seize the crossing over the Issel River. The ground fire was murderous as they approached the landing zones; twelve C-47 tug aircraft were shot down just after releasing their gliders and another 140 were damaged to varying degrees. Nineteen-year-old John J. Schumacher was in one of the gliders. He was in a double tow—two gliders  behind a single C-47—with his jeep and his passenger. He remembered terrible turbulence cause by four traffic lines of aircraft, and something else. “There was an unusual sound as you went along that it took a little while to figure out what it was, but it sounded like popcorn,” he remembered. “It was bullets and shrapnel going through the wings of the glider…pop, pop, pop.” 

As they neared the landing zone the glider pilots were presented with a new problem—poor visibility caused by crashed and burning aircraft plus a smoke screen laid down by the British. Nonetheless, Schumacher’s glider pilots managed to get the craft down in one piece and then helped him lift up the tail and get the nose lowered enough so they could open it and release the jeep.

Another glider used in Operation Varsity was the General Aircraft GL.49 Hamilcar. Intro-duced on D-Day, it was the biggest craft of its kind that the Allies deployed during the war. It had a wingspan of 110 feet and a length of 68 feet and could carry a payload of 36,000 pounds, which meant it could carry either two Bren Gun Carriers or one small Tetrarch tank. The Hamilcar was never again used in combat after Operation Varsity.

In 1946 gliders began to be phased out of the American military. Their contribution to the war effort faded from memory, unlike that of the more glamorous and gung-ho paratroopers. “It’s aggravating,” admitted George Buckley in the Silent Wings documentary. “And that is another reason I like to collect glider stuff and let people know about it.” 

Glider pilots were a small and skilled band of brothers, whose perilous existence cultivated not only a camaraderie but also a sardonic humor, encapsulated by one of their favorite songs, “The Glider Riders.” Sung to the tune of “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” one of its verses ran:             

We glide through the air in a tactical state,

Jumping is useless, it’s always too late,

No ’chute for the soldier who rides in a crate,

And the pay is exactly the same.

If you ask me, World War II’s coolest airplane is the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. It looks like something a kid might have doodled in a notebook while daydreaming in class. I became enthralled with the airplane in junior high when I read a book by Martin Caidin called Fork-tailed Devil: The P-38. I also made the Revell model kit of the Lightning flown by Richard Bong, America’s highest-scoring ace with 40 victories. I believed then that the P-38 was the war’s greatest fighter, but the more I read, the more I realized that the North American P-51 Mustang probably made a bigger impact. The P-38 was a much more complicated beast, and it experienced all sorts of mechanical issues in both theaters of the war, while the single-engine Mustang proved to be a relatively trouble-free “Big Friend” to American bombers over Europe.

In the Spring 2024 issue of World War II we told the story of a P-38 pilot, Laurence Elroy “Scrappy” Blumer, who flew in the European Theater. While the Lightning did perform valuable service there, it really made its reputation in the Pacific, where, among other things, P-38 pilots flew one of the most amazing missions of the war. On April 18, 1943, 16 Lightnings of the 339th Fighter Squadron under the command of Major John W. Mitchell flew out of Guadalcanal to shoot down Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind behind the Pearl Harbor attack. They knew where to find the admiral because the United States had cracked a coded Japanese message that detailed his plans. And find him they did, after Mitchell led them on a circuitous 600-mile course over the ocean, guided only by his wristwatch, a newly installed navy compass, and dead reckoning. Amazingly, they arrived just as Yamamoto was descending over Bougainville Island to land in his Mitsubishi G4M1 “Betty” bomber on an adjoining island. (The deteriorating wreckage of the admiral’s Betty still lies in the jungle on Bougainville.)

Two pilots, Tom Lanphier and his wingman, Rex Barber, were later awarded a half credit each for the admiral’s Betty, but Lanphier publicly claimed he was the pilot who alone shot down Yamamoto’s airplane. Barber later came to believe that he deserved sole credit. When Barber contested the credit allocation in 1991 before a U.S. Air Force board, I wrote a magazine article about the mission and the ensuing controversy. I got to meet and interview Barber and Mitchell (Lanphier had died in 1987) and I did phone interviews with all the other surviving members of the mission, known as Operation Vengeance. It was quite a thrill to talk to these men and hear their personal recollections of this historic incident. I came to believe that Barber was probably correct, but the board decreed that there just wasn’t enough evidence to change anything after the passage of so many years. To this day Barber and Lanphier share the credit for shooting down Yamamoto.

I still treasure the memories of interacting with these men who had become part of history. I also treasure P-38 Lightning, a book I own by writer Jeffrey L. Ethell and illustrator Rikyu Watanabe. It’s a beautiful volume, with lots of foldout illustrations of the airplane, but my copy is special because it includes an inscription and signature by John Mitchell himself. I think that’s pretty cool—just like the P-38. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those who study warfare will inevitably run into the so-called “great man theory” of history. Simply put, it denotes the study of individual leaders and their abilities. In earlier times, scholars adhered to this school of thought as explaining the entirety of military history to the myopic exclusion of all other factors.

Over time the “great man theory” became less in vogue, and in the present day is looked upon by many scholars as nonsense; they choose to interpret military history purely through the lenses of more abstract factors such as society, technology, gender or economy, for example.

Give the ‘Great Men’ A Chance

While it goes without saying that military leaders can neither exist nor function in a void of social, technological or economic factors, I feel it is worth pointing out that the “great men of history”—notable male leaders, that is—deserve a fairer hearing.

Today, historical focus on notable men tends to be regarded in a dismissive manner, like something old-fashioned or awkward. It seems to me that this is partly due to the fact that the leaders being studied are men, and mostly because many people have apparently lost belief in the potency of individual human achievement. New trends in scholarship suggest that there has been too much focus on men in war history altogether. That is a gross oversimplification. While it is true that the roles of women have been overlooked, that does not make the achievements of men in military history any less deserving of attention.

Importance of Leadership

What is manifest in the lives of the “great men” is a quality universal to all human beings: the power of the individual to change world events. Social factors and technology make for interesting studies but these arenas do not shape themselves. People need leaders, and leaders don’t simply materialize out of nowhere. They come from among us. It is worth looking at who they were, what they did and how, and above all, whether we consider them to have been effective or not. Only by doing so can we educate ourselves.

Why is such an education important? The world is suffering from an acute leadership crisis. I believe there is currently a dearth of good male role models for young people. This deficit is real and troubling. However, there is another critical factor producing this discord. There is a complete lack of focus and discussion in society on the qualities that make good leaders and on the true potential of individuals.

Political and popular culture today encourage us to think in terms of groups with rigidly codified principles of belonging that seem to predestine our behavior, instead of encouraging us to recognize our individual ability to choose our own destiny and change the world around us. 

Need For Future Leaders

This magazine contains a diverse array of military leaders. They were and remain controversial. Whether we decide to admire or dislike them, their actions are worth studying. We at Military History Quarterly (MHQ) invest time in evaluating leadership. In my book “Bernard Montgomery’s Art of War,” and series about Erwin Rommel, I analyze these two battlefield captains. My colleague Jerry Morelock has delivered a masterful study of military leadership in his excellent book, “Generals of the Bulge: Leadership in the U.S. Army’s Greatest Battle,” which tackles competent and incompetent leadership in one of the U.S. Army’s most complex battles. We believe these studies will be of use to future leaders.

It is a fallacy to think that the destinies of “great men” of military history, or leaders of any kind, are written in the stars and that we who read about them are mere mortals who have no hope of ever changing the world for the better. I close with an excerpt from the poem, “The Man From the Crowd,” by Sam Walter Foss. The poem is worth reading in whole; in it, Foss illustrates how people tend to fall into set patterns of behavior, while a leader will show willingness to break the mold and stand out to meet a challenge or fulfill a call to action.

He reminds us that the world needs great men. So let us not hesitate to continue to study and reflect on the lives, strengths, weaknesses and decisions of notable men in military history. 

                     
“Men seem as alike as the leaves on the trees,
As alike as the bees in a swarming of bees;
And we look at the millions that make up the state
All equally little and equally great,
And the pride of our courage is cowed.
Then Fate calls for a man who is larger than men—
There’s a surge in the crowd—there’s a movement—and then
There arises a man that is larger than men—
And the man comes up from the crowd.…

And where is the man who comes up from the throng
Who does the new deed and who sings the new song,
And makes the old world as a world that is new?
And who is the man? It is you! It is you!” 

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How long did you stay at Penn State?

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

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

So, you were back in college through 1943.

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

Where did you get assigned? 

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

When and how did you travel overseas? 

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

Where did you go then?

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

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

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

What were weather conditions like?

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

Did you ever have trench foot?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell me how your unit got across Rhine. 

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

What was the going like once you crossed? 

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

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

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

One of the most iconic paintings to depict the horrors of war is Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808, which depicts an incident during the Peninsular War against Napoleon in Spain.The nighttime scene of a group of Spanish civilians facing execution by a French firing squad was remarkable for its time, being utterly devoid of the patriotic glorification of war that characterized most contemporary war art. Goya based the painting on reprisals the French army carried out against citizens of Madrid in the wake of the Dos de Mayo Uprising against Napoleon’s occupation forces.

When French troops were attacked by supporters of the deposed Spanish royal family, the French commander Marshal Joachim Murat posted broadsides around the city proclaiming: “The population of Madrid, led astray, has given itself to revolt and murder. French blood has flowed. It demands vengeance. All those arrested in the uprising, arms in hand, will be shot.” Because “arms in hand” was interpreted to mean any person found with scissors, pocketknives, or shears, numerous innocent civilians were summarily shot without trial in the roundups that the French carried out in reprisal after the uprising. As many as 700 Spanish citizens were killed in the revolt and its aftermath.

Vengeance in War

Military reprisals against civilian populations have occurred throughout thousands of years of recorded history. Genghis Khan’s Mongols are said to have massacred the entire population of the Persian city of Nishapur in 1221 in reprisal for the killing of the Khan’s son-in-law during the siege. The death toll, according to contemporary chroniclers, may have been more than 1.5 million men, women, and children.

During the Peasants’ Revolt against Egyptian conscription policies in Palestine in 1834, Egyptian troops committed mass rapes and killed nearly 500 civilians when they captured the town of Hebron in their campaign to put down the uprising. When imperial Qing forces recaptured Guangdong province during the Taiping Rebellion in 1853, they massacred nearly 30,000 civilians a day. According to some histories, the total death toll from unrestrained reprisals in that province alone amounted to approximately a million people.

After the Prussian army invaded France during the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, territory under Prussian occupation quickly felt the harsh hand of military rule, and reprisals against the local population were part of the Germanic policy of military domination. When the regular formations of the French army went down in defeat, local citizen militias organized as francs-tireurs initiated a low-intensity guerrilla war against Prussian forces. In retaliation, the Prussians not only summarily executed any captured francs-tireurs, but also rounded up and executed numbers of civilians unfortunate enough to reside in the vicinity of those attacks.

20th Century Conflicts

With this experience in mind, at the onset of the First World War the German army was predisposed to harsh treatment of civilians in its area of operations. In 1914, German infantry burned the Belgian town of Leuven and shot 250 civilians of all ages in retaliation for attacks on German soldiers. Hundreds more Belgian citizens in the towns of Dinant, Tamines, Aarschot, and Andenne were killed in of the reprisals.

In military history of the 20th century, Nazi reprisal operations against civilians during the Second World War are frequently cited as extreme examples of reprisal as a war crime, to the point that the very word “reprisal” is almost inextricably linked to the German military in that conflict. However, it remains an undeniable fact that even nations usually regarded as being outspoken champions of lawful warfare have stubbornly resisted the idea of completely giving up the option of carrying out reprisals, even if they did not often resort to such action in practice.

Reprisal was long regarded as an indispensable weapon in the arsenal of a nation’s ability to wage and win wars; near universal condemnation of military reprisals as a legitimate tactic is a relatively recent development in international laws of war. Looking back at Nazi war crimes during the Second World War, it is important to distinguish between the types of war crimes. The Nazi effort to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population was perhaps the most horrific example of state-sponsored genocide. On the other hand, Nazi policies such as the Commissar Order of June 6, 1941, and the Commando Order issued a year later on Oct. 18, 1942, both ordered the summary execution of all enemy combatants of certain specific type and were criminal under international laws of war because they were illegal orders. When it came to reprisals, the German military took a longstanding concept of warfare accepted by most nations and transformed it into something that far transgressed the original idea of mutual restraint articulated in extant laws of war. The way in which German forces conducted military reprisals graphically illustrate the danger that faced any nation that clung to the idea that reprisal was a legitimate tactic of war.

Defining War Crimes

The reasons why reprisals continued to be defended in laws of war as long as they did, even if most nations were careful to describe them as a measure of last resort, was because they were believed to be necessary in two particular tactical situations: to respond to an enemy’s violation of the laws of war, a response in kind in order to force one’s foe back into lawful belligerency; and to retaliate against an elusive, irregular enemy who could not otherwise be engaged by conventional means of combat.       

These were exactly the arguments made in both American and British concepts of laws of war well into the 20th century. As the American Rules of Land Warfare on the eve of the Second World War stated “…commanding officers must assume responsibility for retaliative measures when an unscrupulous enemy leaves no other recourse against the repetition of barbarous outrages.” The British Manual of Military Law of the same era declared that reprisals “are by custom admissible as an indispensable means of securing legitimate warfare.”

What neither code stipulated, however, was any measure of proportionate response. As the German military demonstrated all too often between 1939 and 1945, any doctrine that allowed reprisal without explicitly linking its implementation to limited, proportionate response was a recipe for the worst kinds of atrocity. In 1948 the United Nations War Crimes Commission suggested that one reason why the Second World War saw such flagrant violations of previously existing laws of war was perhaps because “the institution of reprisals which, though designed to ensure the observance of rules of war, have systematically been used as a convenient cloak for disregarding the laws of war…” That accurately described the German use of reprisals during the Second World War. Almost immediately from the beginning of Nazi occupation of conquered territories during the war, it was clear that reasonable restraint and proportionate response would be completely ignored. In German reprisal operations, regardless of whether the action was carried out by the SS or Wehrmacht units, restraint was never in evidence.

When French Resistance operatives assassinated a German naval cadet in Paris in 1941, Nazi occupational authorities put up posters all over the city declaring an official policy stating that 10 French citizens would be executed for every German soldier killed. Even that arbitrary limit was meaningless, because when a senior German officer was killed a short time later, the Germans seized 50 French civilians at random and shot them all, warning that if the assassins were not identified another 50 Frenchmen would be executed. When the deadline passed, the Germans shot another 50 civilians. In that instance, regardless of the stated reprisal policy of ten to one, the ratio of lives destroyed was 100 to one, each an innocent civilian who had no connection to the act that precipitated the reprisal.

Reprisal on the notional scale of 10 to one occurred in other Third Reich reprisals. The same calculation was used after a partisan bomb in Rome on March 23, 1944 killed thirty-two people, most of them members of the SS Police Regiment Bozen. The local German commander, Luftwaffe Generalmajor Kurt Mälzer, ordered that 330 Italians were to be executed in reprisal for the attack, a number that represented 10 victims for every person killed in the bombing (even though five people killed in the incident were themselves Italian civilians). The day after the partisan attack, in an incident remembered as the Ardeatine Massacre, 335 Italian citizens were shot in groups of five by SS officers in the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome. The youngest victim was 15; the oldest was 74. The disparity between Mälzer’s chosen number and the additional five people murdered in the operation was because when five prisoners in excess of the expected count were mistakenly delivered to the massacre site, the Germans simply shot them along with the others.

The International Military Tribunal

In an earlier incident that underscored the degree to which the German military could disregard even notional concepts of proportionality, the Germans perpetrated a more savage act of reprisal at Kragujevac, Serbia, in October 1941. After a partisan attack killed 10 German soldiers and wounded 26 others, soldiers of the 717th Infantry Division summarily shot 300 random civilians. Over the following five days a district-wide retaliation resulted in the executions of another 1,755 people, including 19 women. This brutality was possibly prompted by the issuance of the “Communist Armed Resistance Movements in the Occupied Areas” decree, signed a month earlier by Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, who was later tried for war crimes by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. That order specified that on the Eastern Front, 100 hostages were to be shot for every German soldier killed and 50 were to be shot for every soldier wounded. The resulting Kragujevac massacre caused the deaths of nearly 2,800 Serbs, Macedonians, Slovenes, Romani, Jews, and Muslims. When the initial roundup of hostages did not turn up enough adult males, 144 high school students were seized and shot. German troops had carried out reprisals in earlier wars, but never occured on such a homicidal scale as under the Nazi regime. After 1914 the German word “Schrecklichkeit,” which can be understood as “terror,” entered the lexicon to describe these actions against civilians. The massacres of Lidice in Czechoslovakia, Oradour-sur-Glane and Maillé in France, Wola in Poland, and Sant’Anna di Stazzema in Italy, are only five on a long list of atrocities the Nazis carried out in the name of military reprisals.

The International Military Tribunal and other war crimes tribunals that took place following the Second World War represented a seismic shift in how reprisals were considered under international laws of war. Reprisal continued as an option in lawful warfare, but in much more carefully delineated form. As the Practical Guide to Humanitarian Law explains, “It is important to distinguish between reprisals, acts of revenge, and retaliation. Acts of revenge are never authorized under international law, while retaliation and reprisals are foreseen by humanitarian law.”

The essential distinction in that statement is that reprisals against civilians are now considered to be in the nature of revenge, and therefore never legal. “In times of conflict,” as current legal opinion holds, “reprisals are considered legal under certain conditions: they must be carried out in response to a previous attack, they must be proportionate to that attack, and they must be aimed only at combatants and military objectives.” Limited reprisals against soldiers, however, still remain in the realm of extreme possibility.

The U.S. Civil War

This is not a new idea. During the American Civil War, when the Confederate States threatened to not treat captured Union soldiers as legitimate combatants if they happened to be Black men, the United States issued the Retaliation Order of 1863. “The government of the United States will give the same protection to all its soldiers, and if the enemy shall sell or enslave anyone because of his color, the offense shall be punished by retaliation upon the enemy’s prisoners in our possession,” the Order stated. “It is therefore ordered that for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed; and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery, a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor on the public works and continued at such labor until the other shall be released and receive the treatment due to a prisoner of war.” The fact that the Retaliation Order specifically provided for reprisals against enemy prisoners, rather than enemy soldiers on the field of combat, is the only part of that order that would violate modern restrictions on military-vs.-military reprisals.

The U.S. Civil War was also the conflict during which the German American jurist Franz Lieber transformed American military law with his revolutionary work General Order 100. As Article 27 of Lieber’s Code stated, “The law of war can no more wholly dispense with retaliation than can the law of nations, of which it is a branch. Yet civilized nations acknowledge retaliation as the sternest feature of war. A reckless enemy often leaves to his opponent no other means of securing himself against the repetition of barbarous outrage.” The point of Lieber’s position was that retaliation was sometimes necessary to prevent greater violations of lawful warfare, but also that careful restraint was indispensable. “Unnecessary or revengeful destruction of life is not lawful,” Article 68 stated, a declaration that 80 years later could have been applied to Nazi practices of military reprisals. In the interim, the U.S. Army used General Order 100 to justify reprisals on the Island of Samar during the Philippine-American War. Brig. Gen. Jacob Smith ordered his troops to “kill everyone over the age of ten [and make the island] a howling wilderness.”  

Civilians and International Laws

A detailed examination of military history shows that reprisals against civilians always exacerbates conflict and heightens resistance rather than eliminating it. The German military never managed to stamp out resistance to its occupation forces during WWII, no matter how savage the reprisals it unleashed against civilian populations. Reprisals also present the risk of an unending cycle of violence as each opposing side responds to the hostile acts. In the words of the U.S. Naval Handbook, “there is always a risk that [reprisal] will trigger retaliatory escalation (counter-reprisals) by the enemy. The United States has historically been reluctant to resort to reprisal for just this reason.”  

Of course, reluctance to engage in an act is not nearly the same thing as an outright policy prohibiting it. As the International Committee of the Red Cross observes, although “favour of a specific ban on the use of reprisals against all civilians is widespread and representative, it is not yet uniform.” Even today, with all of the advances in international conventions on lawful warfare, the United States and Great Britain still have not unreservedly committed themselves to a total ban on the use of reprisals in war.   

The United States “has indicated on several occasions that it does not accept such a total ban, even though it voted in favour of Article 51 of Additional Protocol I and ratified Protocol II to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons without making a reservation to the prohibition on reprisals against civilians contained therein.” Great Britain, for its part, “made a reservation to Article 51 which reproduces a list of stringent conditions for resorting to reprisals against an adversary’s civilians.” Both nations have preferred to hedge their bets and retain the option of a military tactic they might use only in the extreme but are not willing to completely forego.

Current conventions on international laws of war have made great strides in restricting the use of reprisals in war but have never succeeded in eliminating it in practice. It is doubtful that the practice will ever completely disappear from the world’s battlefields, though it is to be hoped that such actions will increasingly be regarded as war crimes rather than legitimate combat.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Boeing B-17—or its computer-generated likeness—appears front and center in the AppleTV+ series Masters of the Air. The story of the 100th Bombardment Group of the Eighth Air Force in World War II, MOTA is based on the book by Donald L. Miller. The 100th flew the B-17 Flying Fortress and some of its missions over Europe provide harrowing sequences in the series.

Here are a few classic films that feature the B-17 and are worth searching out.

Air Force (1943). Directed by Howard Hawks. Starring John Ridgely, Gig Young, Arthur Kennedy, Charles Drake, Harry Carey, George Tobias and John Garfield.
While B-17s are known primarily for their role in the European Theater, they flew in the Pacific as well. Howard Hawks’ Air Force tells the story of one such Fort, Mary Ann. After flying into the attack on Pearl Harbor, the airplane and its crew proceed to Wake Island and then on to the Philippines to take action against the Japanese. The production used real B-17B, C and D models, supplemented by model work when necessary.

The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944). Directed by William Wyler.
Director William Wyler left Hollywood to document the war for the U.S. and received permission to film an account of a B-17 crew on a mission over Germany. He ended up flying five missions with pilot Robert Morgan of the 91st Bombardment Group, two of them in Morgan’s regular plane, Memphis Belle. Wyler used his footage to create a composite twenty-fifth mission for Morgan and the crew of Memphis Belle. (While not the first bomber to complete 25 missions, Memphis Belle was the first to return to America after having done so and earned much public attention as a result.) Released on April 15, 1944, the New York Times called the film “a perfect example of what can be properly done by competent film reporters to visualize the war for people back home.” (The real Memphis Belle is on display at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.)

Memphis Belle (1990). Directed by Michael Caton-Jones. Starring Matthew Modine, Eric Stoltz,
Tate Donovan, D.B. Sweeney, Billy Zane, Sean Astin, Harry Connick Jr., John Lithgow and David Strathairn.
The fictionalized film based on Wyler’s (and co-produced by his daughter) also tells the story of the titular B-17’s 25th mission but suffers from a willingness to embrace cliché as the crew faces a familiar litany of threats (bandits, flak, cloud cover, engine loss).

Command Decision (1948).Directed by Sam Wood. Starring Clark Gable, Walter Pidgeon, Van Johnson, Brian Donlevy, Charles Bickford, John Hodiak and Edward Arnold.
Where MOTA focuses on what the B-17 crews endured during the war, Command Decision focuses on the commanders who sent them on their missions in what Brigadier General “Casey” Dennis (Gable, who actually flew some missions over Europe) calls “the weirdest kind of war on earth.” Watching B-17s and their crews head out on a mission, he says, “In a few hours from now they’ll be fighting on oxygen five miles above Germany. Tonight some of them will be dancing at the Savoy. Some of them will still be in Germany.” The film can’t escape its roots as a Broadway play (adapted from a novel) and remains mostly set-bound. A scene where Dennis has to talk down a B-17 bombardier flying for his wounded pilot suffers from some obvious model work that stands out in comparison to the actual combat footage used elsewhere.

Twelve O’Clock High (1949). Directed by Henry King. Starring Gregory Peck, Hugh Marlowe, Gary Merrill and Dean Jagger.
Twelve O’Clock High covers some of the same ground as Command Decision but does it much better. The focal point is General Frank Savage (Peck) who takes command of the snakebitten 918th Bombardment Group after its previous commander got too close to his men and efficiency suffered. Savage plans to whip the unit into shape even if it means the crews will hate him. The 918th does improve, but the stresses of command eventually take their toll on Savage. B-17 fans will especially enjoy a legendary stunt sequence when stunt pilot Paul Mantz performs a belly landing in a real Fortress. The film later inspired a television series.

The War Lover (1962). Directed by Philip Leacock. Starring Steve McQueen, Robert Wagner, Shirley Ann Field, Gary Cockrell and Michael Crawford.
This adaptation of John Hersey’s novel tells the story of a pilot (McQueen) and co-pilot (Wagner) of a Flying Fortress and the woman one of them loves (Field). The pilot, “Buzz” Rickson, is the war lover of the tile, a man who treads the “fine line between the hero and the psychopath” in the words of the squadron doctor. Filmed with three actual B-17s (and footage, including Mantz’s belly landing, borrowed from Twelve O’Clock High), the film boasts a strong performance by McQueen but is weakened by the romance in which Field’s character is used to explain the movie’s themes. “You are on the side of life,” she tells Wagner’s character; to Buzz she explains, “You can’t make love.… You can only make hate.”

Target for Today (1944) is also of interest. This wartime documentary provides a detailed nuts-and-bolts look at what it took to plan and fly B-17 missions over Europe. Cast with real military personnel and filmed largely on location, it will provide viewers with some key background for the events of MOTA.

In the darkness, despite having lost the fingers of his right hand and suffered severe shrapnel wounds, Gurkha Rifleman Lachhiman Gurung kept working his bolt-action rifle with his left hand as Japanese repeatedly attacked his position. When morning dawned, the area around his post was littered with the bodies of enemy combatants.  

Against all odds Gurung had held his ground and survived.  

“I had to fight,” the determined Gurkha later said. “I felt I was going to die anyway, so I might as well die standing on my feet.”  

Born on Dec. 30, 1917, in Dahakhani, Nepal, 4-foot-11-inch Gurung joined the British Indian army in December 1940. The 23-year-old was assigned as a rifleman to the 4th Battalion, 8th Gurkha Rifle Regiment. Dating from 1815, the vaunted Gurkha Rifles was initially part of Britain’s East India Co. and still exists today, comprising young men from the hills of Nepal chosen after a grueling selection process.  

In May 1945 the British crossed the Irrawaddy River in Burma (present-day Myanmar) and hit a Japanese force north of the Prome-Taungup road. By May 9 the Japanese were withdrawing, so the British positioned companies of Gurung’s 4th Battalion to block the enemy retreat. When the combatants collided, the Japanese quickly surrounded two companies of the 4th Gurkhas. Among those cut off were Gurung and two fellow Gurkhas in a trench 100 yards ahead of the main British line.  

At 1:20 a.m. on May 13 more than 200 Japanese attacked their position.  

Within moments an enemy grenade fell on the edge of the trench. Without hesitation Gurung hurled it back. When another grenade landed amid the trio, the diminutive Gurkha also tossed it back. He then reached for a third grenade just outside the trench. But before he could get rid of it, the grenade exploded, blowing off his fingers, shattering his right arm and inflicting shrapnel wounds to his face, torso and right leg.  

By then his trench mates were also badly wounded and lay helpless.  

Gurung was on his own.

Screaming at top volume, the Japanese rushed the position in waves. Loading and firing his rifle with his left hand, the wounded Gurung held them off, shouting back in defiance, “Come and fight a Gurkha!”  

When the firing ceased, those sent to check on Gurung and his companions counted 87 enemy dead in the vicinity, 31 of whom lay directly in front of the lone Gurkha’s firing position. Had Gurung failed that night, his commanding officer noted, the battalion’s position “would have been completely dominated and turned.”  

Only when the 4th Gurkhas were relieved on May 15 was Gurung evacuated to a hospital. That December, at the historic Red Fort in Delhi, Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, the viceroy and governor-general of India, personally awarded Gurung the Victoria Cross. Nepalese villagers from the Gurkha’s hometown bore his elderly father aloft for the 11-day journey to Delhi so he could attend the presentation ceremony.  

Gurung had lost his right hand in the action as well as the use of his right eye. Regardless, he remained in the British Indian army and then the Indian army when that country gained independence in 1947. He eventually retired with the rank of havildar (sergeant) and returned to his village to work a small farm. In 2008, on appeal to the U.K. government as a veteran, he moved to England and settled in Hounslow, southwest of London. In November 2010, suffering from pneumonia, Gurung was admitted to London’s Charing Cross Hospital, where he died that December 12 at the venerable age of 92.  

His actions a half century earlier had embodied the motto of the 4th Gurkhas: “Better to die than live as a coward.”

This story appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Military History magazine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donald L. Miller’s massive book Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany came out in 2007 and provided the basis for the new series on AppleTV+. In 2019 Aviation History had contributing editor Stephan Wilkinson look back at the then 12-year-old book in light of the announcement that HBO was going to turn it into a series. Now that the series has begun (but not on HBO), we thought it would be interesting to revisit a review of a book we had already agreed was a classic.

The epic of the Eighth Air Force during World War II is fertile ground thoroughly plowed by aviation historians. A search of Amazon’s e-shelves elicits nearly 200 such books, and several writers have made entire careers of covering the Mighty Eighth.

The best of them all is Donald Miller’s Masters of the Air. Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg apparently agree, as they are basing their proposed 10-part HBO project, “The Mighty Eighth,” on this book. If—and that’s a big if—the miniseries comes to fruition, it will be the third in the trio that includes “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific.” No release date has been specified, and filming has not begun.

The Eighth’s bombing campaign has been called the Children’s Crusade, for the crews were made up of young men in their early 20s, even teenagers. The horrors they suffered are incomprehensible to anybody (like me) who hasn’t gone to war.

Some of the most gripping chapters of Miller’s book are those that describe the conditions into which bomber crews were thrust in 1943 and ’44, when B-17s and B-24s were sent into stratospheric winds and temperatures minimally understood by the aeromedical professionals of the time—ill-equipped flight surgeons whose resources dated back to the 1920s. Nor did the vaunted Norden bombsight come anywhere near living up to its PR-stoked reputation, and the minimally trained gunners who supposedly made their aircraft “flying fortresses” might just as well have been firing .50-caliber garden hoses.

Miller’s book is not without minor faults. He believes that contrails are created by an aircraft’s propellers and repeats the myth of the crushed ball-turret gunner who died when his B-17 had to land gear up—a tale traced back to famously creative reporter Andy Rooney. Most are irrelevant except to rivet-counters. The comprehensiveness and well-written grace of this book vastly outweigh them and simply make it plain that nobody knows everything.

The Mitsubishi A6M Zero came as a shock to many in the west. Quick and incredibly maneuverable, it could outfly nearly everything in the sky. The fighter dominated its opponents in China and Burma early in World War II. It’s “introduction” to American airmen came on December 7, 1941, over Pearl Harbor. 

Petty Officer 1st Class Takeshi Hirano was part of the first wave of the Japanese attack, flying in an element of three fighters from the carrier Akagi. After strafing Hickam Field and attacking some of the B-17s trying desperately to land there, Hirano’s Zero was peppered by machine gun fire from the ground.

The pilot struggled to bring his damaged fighter down but clipped a number of trees and crashed into the entrance of Fort Kamehameha’s ordinance machine shop, killing Hirano. His was one of only 29 aircraft brought down during the attack.

This particular Zero would become the object of intense scrutiny by U.S. intelligence officers looking for kinks in the vaunted fighter’s reputation.

The Kit
Tamiya, Inc., produces one of the most accurate scale models of the Mitsubishi A6M2 Type 21. First released in 1973, the 1/48th scale kit still holds up well against some of the higher priced models. It’s an ideal kit for the beginner—simple, well-engineered and easy to build. The more experienced modeler will be tempted to add some extra detail.

Construction starts with building and painting the multipart cockpit, which comes with an optional pilot figure. Using Tamiya cockpit green (XF-71) takes the guesswork out of what to paint the floor, sidewalls and instrument panel. A decal does a good job of reproducing the dials and indicators. The seat is flat aluminum; a belt harness from an aftermarket detail set is a nice touch. (Note: Japanese naval fighters used a single diagonal shoulder strap with a standard lap belt.)

With the cockpit complete, paint the 940-hp Nakajima Sakae Type 12 engine flat aluminum, then use a black wash to bring out the details. Next, glue together the two-piece cowling and paint it with a mixture of semigloss black (FS-27031) and a few drops of cobalt blue to duplicate the cowling color reportedly seen on many WWII Japanese carrier planes. Glue the completed engine into the cowling and set it aside to dry.

Next, join the fuselage parts together. Slip the finished cockpit through the fuselage’s underside, making sure it is seated correctly before applying dabs of glue to hold it in place. Now you can add the completed wing. The fit here is very good, but there is still a small gap at the wing root that will need attention.

For this model we’ll add an extra detail. The type 21 Zero was the first version to have folding wings (more accurately, folding wingtips). It was a new addition meant to help maximize space aboard the carrier. The Czech company Eduard makes a great resin detail set of the folded wingtips. Designed for their own A6M2 Zero kit, it can easily be made to fit the Tamiya kit with a little extra surgery and sanding. It’s a great addition to the model. Cement the horizontal stabilizers in place and set the assembly aside. 

Now that the basic construction is complete, it’s time to check over your work and fill and sand any seams. Most imperfections can be smoothed over with an application of Tamiya’s surface primer.

Camouflage
The A6M2 Zeros that took part in the Pearl Harbor raid were painted Imperial Japanese Navy gray-green overall. This color is available in both a spray can (Tamiya AS-29) or bottle (XF-76). Before painting, stuff facial tissue into the cockpit and wheel wells to protect them from overspray.

The wheel wells and the insides of the main landing gear doors should be painted the same interior metallic blue-green as the cockpit. The landing gear legs are semigloss black, with dark brown “rubber” colored tires and aluminum hubs. The propellers on Pearl Harbor Zeros were unpainted aluminum, with red warning stripes near the tips. The back of the propeller was painted a flat deep brown to reduce glare for the pilot.

The fabric-covered moveable surfaces—ailerons, rudder and horizontal stabilizers—were painted a gray primer. It was thought that the weight of an additional layer of paint would alter the delicate weight and balance and effect performance. Mask off these sections and paint them a slightly darker gray.

After all the painting is complete, apply a coat of gloss varnish to provide a smooth surface for the decals to adhere to.

Bringing the Zero to Life
Hirano’s aircraft had simple, standard markings. The kit markings work well and settle into the nooks and crannies with a little decal softener. The tail number, AI-154, was cobbled together from other Zero decals that were in the “stash.” Add a mild amount of weathering, some soot from the exhaust ports and a bit of fuel and oil staining. That’s all you need. Once the decals are complete, give the fighter a light coat of a clear flat varnish and put it aside.

On to the canopy. There is an option for an enclosed one-piece canopy, but you’ll want to show off that cockpit detail so opt for the three-piece open version. Painting the cockpit canopy frames will be easier if you mask and paint the horizontal ribs first, then the vertical frames. Attach the clear parts with white glue and finish off your model by gluing the landing gear, gear doors, arresting hook and tail wheel into place. Don’t forget the pitot tube and small weights on the top and bottom of each of the ailerons. Last but not least, add that folding wingtip. Takeshi Hirano’s Mitsubishi A6M2 is now ready for its sortie into history.